92. The Automation That Pays for Itself in a Week (And Why Security Can't Be DIY)

Justin Shelley (00:10.194) Okay, so you noticed, did you not? Mario Zaki (00:12.782) We noticed. Joshua Holloway (00:14.693) Hey, it's no longer sent dance. Justin Shelley (00:18.732) my Liana's gonna be so proud of me for fixing. No, it's her work. You know that, right? Like she went in and fixed it. I just never took the time to go in and cut the new video. And for our listening audience versus our watching audience, who knows no I has no idea what we're talking about. our intro music is it has it's like a slideshow. It's got like three different slides. and it has the word sentence in it. And I've finally fixed it to the proper English spelling sentence. Mario Zaki (00:19.102) I Mario Zaki (00:47.276) And she fixed it, but he's taking credit for it. Justin Shelley (00:50.022) I'm not taking any credit. She did the work and then I sat on it for like, I don't know, ten episodes or some shit. I mean it's it not quite probably, but it's been a while. And every week she's like, Did you fix that? Nope. I did not. It's becoming the running joke and I'm probably never gonna fix it. That's what I said. Mario Zaki (01:01.294) Yeah. Joshua Holloway (01:06.043) You're gonna have to play with it back and forth, back and forth every once in a while. Just just throw in the old one just to see if any Justin Shelley (01:08.242) hell no. I deleted the old one. It's not there. I can't do it. but that was a good idea. You just should have told me before I deleted stuff. Anyways. I mean, I saw both I was watching both your faces, and you're like, my god. congratulations, Justin. You fixed a letter. like guys, welcome to episode 92 of Unhacked. let's do some quick introductions and then we're gonna jump in because we've got some cool shit going on here. Joshua Holloway (01:17.895) Well, we didn't know you fixed it. Justin Shelley (01:37.635) In the laboratory. I'm Justin Shelley, CEO of Phoenix IT Advisors. And guys, I've been saying it forever. I feel like I'm finally doing a better job of delivering on it. I like to help my clients use technology to make more money. And I've got the numbers to back it up today. And then, of course, we got to protect that money from the hackers, the government, the law firms, everybody that's gonna try to come steal our money, if God forbid we do something wrong. I mean, and that that's really what it comes down to. We used to actually the fun fact, I'm gonna get on a tangent real quick. you guys should be familiar with the marketing campaign called Stupid or Irresponsible. Josh, were you were you around for that? So we're all part of the same marketing group. And that was a a letter, direct mail that would go out. when you get breached, are they gonna call you stupid or just irresponsible? it it caused a lot of division. how how crass, I guess. I don't know. Mario Zaki (02:16.802) Yes. Justin Shelley (02:36.134) that that opening was and it it went on to anyways anyways I digress. I had the the podcast was originally called stupider irresponsible. It's still up on my website if you guys want to go back and listen to that. I did, yeah, I still own that. Stupid or irresponsible dot com. I know, right Joshua Holloway (02:40.038) Snowball. Mario Zaki (02:47.086) You purchased the domain, right? Mario Zaki (02:53.144) Mm. Joshua Holloway (02:53.562) We should have a game show like that on on on here every once in a while. Is it stupid or is it just irresponsible? Mario Zaki (02:56.106) Well. Justin Shelley (02:59.12) Yeah, so anyways, I d I don't know where I'm going with that. That's my introduction. Mario, tell everybody who you are, what you do and who you do it for, and then Josh, you're gonna come right up on his heels. Mario Zaki (03:10.434) Yeah, Mario Zacki, CEO of Mastec IT, located in New Jersey, right outside of Manhattan, been in business for twenty years, helping small to medium sized businesses stay in business, you know, using security and help grow their business with the IT, cybersecurity, and AI. Justin Shelley (03:31.122) Stuff. All right, Josh. Joshua Holloway (03:32.371) And I'm Joshua Holloway, CEO for 70i Technologies here out of the Sacramento area with an office in Reno, Nevada as well. But we help clients coast to coast in about 27 other states. but we're an IT company that primarily focuses on businesses who have compliances, that they try and integrate the compliance into their technology and make their technology work. Cause the only way to be 100% compliant is just turn it all off and everybody go home, because that's the only way you're ever gonna get there. Justin Shelley (03:57.596) Mm-hmm. Joshua Holloway (03:59.471) No, seriously though, we're we're here to help businesses figure out how their technology won't hinder their ability to make money, but how to make it all work and at the same time still hit their compliance, their compliances and their requirements. Mario Zaki (04:11.874) You think people will pay us just to go there and turn off shit? They're all their stuff. Done. Justin Shelley (04:15.186) And and sign it off. Compliant Joshua Holloway (04:15.728) Probably. Compliant. I if they're still making money, they'll do it. Mario Zaki (04:22.742) Yeah. Justin Shelley (04:24.508) Have okay, I'm I'm I'm just being dumb today, but do you guys remember the movie from like the eighties, I think, maybe late eighties, called Flight of the Navigator? Flight of the Navigator? Anybody anybody? You do? Do you remember the little AI slash robot navigator? And every time the kid said something to him and the navigator understood and was ready to move forward, what did it say? Joshua Holloway (04:34.778) Mannequin. No, just kidding. Which one? Flat on the Nive Getter? Yeah. Yes, yeah. Joshua Holloway (04:44.827) Yep. Joshua Holloway (04:52.654) so I'm I'm locking up on that one though. Was it Roger? No. compliance. Yes. And then it would do it all kind of sassy like sometimes too. Yeah. Justin Shelley (04:53.5) God, it's your whole world. Compliance Justin Shelley (05:02.386) Stupid Dramatically. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I I haven't I haven't Mario Zaki (05:08.898) Yeah. way over my head. I never watched it. Joshua Holloway (05:10.586) Yeah. He never watched the T V never watched T V in the eighties. Justin Shelley (05:14.578) Were you even around in the 80s? That's what I'm saying. we're old. Okay, guys, let's get down to business here. we've kind of had this running theme where we end the episode either giving a homework assignment to the audience or to ourselves or both, and then coming back the next week having done jack shit. Right? Pretty much. Mario Zaki (05:15.304) I well I was born in seventy n I was born in seventy nine, so Mario Zaki (05:41.39) Sounds about right. Justin Shelley (05:43.101) To keep the theme going, I believe last week we were Brian talked, and by the way, Brian's missing. We miss we miss you, Brian. you better be here next week. Brian did his financial integration, right? Has anybody done anything as far as tying their finances into AI? I'll be honest, that one made me nervous. I'm just like, nope, not there yet. I'm not doing that yet. Mario Zaki (06:04.75) I I started the integration with my AI agent to pull not only some financials from my PSA tool, but you know, tickets and stuff like that as well. So the financial part is still pending, but the tickets part is is is working because I'm trying to isolate we're using the same agent, but I didn't want any of my technicians to be able to just ask, you know, financial stuff. So Everybody's gonna ask about tickets. So we did that. That was the easier part. Now we're putting some safeguards and stuff like that in place. Justin Shelley (06:44.848) And Josh, I think it was your idea to to go that route. Instead of integrating your your financial pac you know, QuickBooks, zero, I think is what Brian uses. I've looked into it, to be fair. I can do it, I probably will. But I think Josh, you came up with the idea of like, hey, we should probably just integrate our PSA because there's a lot of financial information in there, right? Wasn't wasn't that you? Joshua Holloway (07:06.724) Yeah, that was that was the direction that I went into. we have talked about integrating QuickBooks and I actually built a CFO GPT. and we didn't get as far as that that integration because I wanted to test the waters a little bit. So instead of it giving giving it direct access to QuickBooks, and I I believe QuickBooks is read only anyways. I left that alone. I went with my PSA, which is different than I think Mario's using but I had integrated RPSA. Our agent is only between me and the agent and and the PSA. So I don't have to worry about anybody trying to data mine on that one right now. And I was able to pull cont contractual information, license counts, costs, earnings, and that and pretty much almost build out a full dashboard. All of my data is raw data, but it I can get it. And I and I can run analytics against it. And the goal ultimately was to feed the information weekly to the CFO bot. And so it could just watch our numbers on a weekly basis to a to a monthly basis to a quarterly basis to really see how healthy we felt that we are. I mean, we we look at our PL, we meet on it, I wanna say we meet on it every other week. every month we have a financial meeting amongst us humans and we wanted to see where we could automate a little bit better and get more. information as the month was going on and ha through an automation automation. Justin Shelley (08:33.348) Okay. And and to be clear for our non technical audience, PSA stands for professional service automation. it's it's the equivalent of a a EHR practice management software in the healthcare world. it's how we we manage tickets, we schedule ourselves, and we do track of yeah, yeah, kind of. Right, right. So Joshua Holloway (08:49.2) C R Yeah, project it's our project manager, our CRM. There's some financials in there, or at least that's the start of our financials. I I mean I don't know about you guys, but for me the PSA is kind of where it starts because con contractual information is in there. I don't know of any other MSP does it differently. Justin Shelley (08:58.533) Yeah. Justin Shelley (09:02.448) Yep. Yep. Mario Zaki (09:04.866) Yeah. Yeah, we we put Yeah, no, we put like our our invoices and and stuff like that through there, it automatically will send to QuickBooks for like the actual processing. But we can do a a lot of things on there because if if a customer is not on like an unlimited plan and we have to build them, you know, prepay or anything like that, it's easier to do it through our our PSA system. Joshua Holloway (09:15.845) Mm-hmm. Justin Shelley (09:31.046) Yeah. So Joshua Holloway (09:31.941) Yeah, and since we got that homework, just an add-on to that, there's a tool that we use, and I don't want to name names, but I hear the their company's not doing so so hot. So f this past week, we collectively decided how can we recreate what we're getting from them? Because if they if they shut their doors, we would be stuck on a a quite a f quite a a bit of information, especially analytical information, financial side as well as Justin Shelley (09:49.756) Okay. Joshua Holloway (10:02.199) ticketing side. It's not our PSA. So again, not naming names, but it it's analytics. Justin Shelley (10:05.66) So without naming names, can you can you talk about what what it does? Joshua Holloway (10:11.34) It feeds a lot of dashboards for us now and a lot of a lot of dashboarding information. and because that came up and we were already analyzing this stuff through that tool for our financial analytics, that our homework that we got from from Brian was like an easy thrust because it's like, wait, here's a possible problem and we're just gonna build our own because if they shut their doors, we won't be scrambling for a fix. We will already have a fix in place. Justin Shelley (10:39.642) And I think I've mentioned this before, but I do think that's where things are going. The off the shelf box software or even the software as a service, a SAS, SAS, however you say it, that we buy or that we rent, that world is changing. I'm not gonna say it's going away, but a lot of these things that used to require specialty programming and and hundreds of hours, hundreds of thousands of hours to code can now be built in days. Right. And so, yeah, I I it's an interesting point. I think there's going to be a huge consolidation in software and tools. And I mean, this landscape's changing. So on that note, I kind of want to pivot to just, you know, we're we're wrapping up, we're getting close to the end of this segment of this mini-series where we're talking about integrations. Brian Brian's not here and Mario, I meant you. When you know, before we started recording, you know, just Just briefly mention some of the thing because and I'm bringing this up because this was just a few days ago. I don't think you had any integrations. And now I I expected that and you're like, no, I've I've got one, I can talk about it if you want. So, you know, just give me your elevator pitch on on what integration you have and then I'll you'll deep dive on that later. But tell us what you've been working on. Mario Zaki (11:59.322) So just to kind of like build on what I said a few minutes ago, so I we have an i an AI agent that we have it integrated inside Teams, so we're able to com communicate with it using Teams. not only just myself but my entire team. He actually is in the tech support chat. So any of the guys can just mention like hey, you know, we call Marcus. so I have a couple agents His name is Marcus. I have another one, Maximus. I'm going with the whole theme. Yeah. The gladiator theme, so Justin Shelley (12:32.732) Nice. The Stoics. Joshua Holloway (12:33.978) The the theme? Justin Shelley (12:38.524) The gladiators, okay. Marcus Aurelius was the one of the OG stoics though. Anyways, go on, go on. Joshua Holloway (12:38.79) There you go. Mario Zaki (12:43.703) Yeah, yeah, exactly. So so I have integrated into our PSA and I can ask him like, Hey, how many open tickets do we have right now? And he'll just say, Okay, yeah, you have about fifty open tickets or whatever open tickets. I could ask him how how long is the average ticket open for? who took the last ticket? So i we have it integrated with our PSA and of course you could run Joshua Holloway (12:44.196) Yeah. Mario Zaki (13:11.617) you know, get a lot of this stuff right from the PSA through like a report. But you know, Justin, you use the same system as as me. You know running some reports out of Halo requires, you know, some some programming and digging in and you know and stuff like that. Where yeah, and prayer. And so I feel like this is so much easier. I can literally just Justin Shelley (13:30.67) And good luck and magic. Yeah. Yeah. Mario Zaki (13:40.356) conversate with him and say, you know, you know, how many how many tickets were closed by, you know, the lead tech today or whatever. And they're instead of building these reports, I literally can just conversate because he has a a a read only connection right into our our system. Justin Shelley (13:59.623) Yeah. Okay. I I had somewhere I was gonna go. I've been doing this a lot lately. I think I'm getting old guys. I might be losing my mind. Let's let Mario Zaki (14:08.727) Well, we still don't know what's in that cup you keep drinking from. Justin Shelley (14:11.866) This one's labeled and I'll give a little plug to the BlackBerry Zero Sugar Dr. Pepper. Amazing. I love this stuff. I've been turned on to this. This Liana's drink of choice. And yeah, well, I'll I'll I'll send them an invoice. I'm a I'm a Coke Zero guy if we're really gonna do this. I mean, we did a fit check a while back. Now we should do a beverage check. I don't know. I'll tell you though, in my early days of podcasting, when I really got started, I was not drinking. Mario Zaki (14:13.487) Okay. Joshua Holloway (14:24.591) Not today's sponsor. Justin Shelley (14:41.23) soda pop. I was I was drinking a lot of adult beverages beverages. and I I didn't remember the last half of most podcasts. So I don't I don't I don't do that anymore. for now. Anyways guys, so I as we've started doing integrations and I think I I ratted myself out on day one. I went in and and started doing what Josh taught us. And we've actually got the five-page PDF downloadable on what is that, episode 91, I think. No, because that was last time. 90. Anyways, to integrate AI into your Outlook, to your email. And it was great stuff, but I immediately had security concerns. And and I'm going to make this disclaimer right now that, you know, to everybody listening, before you get into doing these integrations, please hire Mario Zaki (15:12.728) Ninety. Joshua Holloway (15:13.701) Ninety, I think. Justin Shelley (15:33.199) I mean, if it's this is your wheelhouse, great. Otherwise, hire a professional to come in and make sure that this stuff is locked down and secure. and and I'm lazy, Josh, so I didn't want to go in and do all the the stuff you did to lock your stuff down. And so I have moved to a secure platform. that's easy. There there are some limitations to it, I'm not gonna lie, but there's some stuff that I really like and I've that's where I've been bringing my integrations in and and I'm gonna talk about one here in a bit, but Mario Zaki (15:59.192) I could have swore you were about to say you hired a professional. Justin Shelley (16:02.586) Listen. Joshua Holloway (16:03.258) Yeah. Justin Shelley (16:05.724) We're not going to talk about that on the air. no, what I'm trying to gently do is is plug our services, right? Like, this is this is the world we live in and it is dangerous and scary. So it it's I've been saying this about podcasting forever since I started doing security podcasting. One of the main reasons I do it is to keep myself sharp. I won't let myself fall behind on this because it's too dangerous. so find somebody who knows their stuff. Mario Zaki (16:07.383) Yeah. Justin Shelley (16:35.024) You got three of them right here. One who will be here next week and has been here before. all you've got to do is go to unhacked unhackmybusiness.com. And by the way, no ed, unhackmybusiness.com. I got called out for that one. And go to any episode and there's there's a little spot right there where you can either ask us a question. None of these have any strings attached, but that's more of a casual conversation. And then there's another box where you can click on it to ask for a a free consultation and all of us have that standing offer. Mario Zaki (16:48.631) Mm-hmm. Justin Shelley (17:05.126) to to just have an initial conversation and at least get you pointed in the right direction. So before I go into what I'm gonna talk about this week, I want that disclaimer. I I want it to be very clear that we are playing with fire. Last week I talked about, you know, having a lit match inches away from a fuel soaked pile of hay. A hay pile I called it, which shows you what a country guy I am not because I listen to that later. I'm like, my God. I think haystack is probably a better term for that, but hay pile. I don't know. I don't know. I I am an IT guy who's been thrust into country living. and we're adapting. All right. Enough of the nonsense. Let's talk about integration. So as I said, I I moved to a secure platform. I'm much more comfortable with that. And then as Mario and Josh have both talked about, I'm using it to talk to my PSA. I'm using it. To automate and augment the information or the processes that we all have in our ticketing systems. So integrations have been around forever for us is our RMM tied into our PSA, right? So RMM is remote monitoring and management. That's the stuff, that's the little program that goes on everybody's computer that runs constant diagnostics. How much memory are you chewing up? How much hard drive space do you have left? Has your computer been restarted recently? All the stuff that causes problems, it goes out and finds that information, gives us proactive alerts that go into our ticketing system usually as noise. Correct or no? How many, how many RMM alerts do you guys think are generated in your business on a given day? Mario Zaki (18:48.208) Correct. Joshua Holloway (18:49.187) Absolutely. Mario Zaki (18:57.37) As of this morning. Joshua Holloway (18:57.42) Actionable or non-actionable? n noise? probably. total. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we sit around that when we first come in. Noise wise, I've seen it be up to the thousand up a thousand. Just depend it just depends on like what people were doing on their systems the day before, or was it a patch Tuesday that we moved to a Wednesday or a Thursday? Justin Shelley (19:00.611) Noise total. Just total tickets. Mario Zaki (19:05.688) I had three hundred and one this morning. Justin Shelley (19:08.228) Okay. Okay. Justin Shelley (19:16.85) Crazy, right? I mean it's just Justin Shelley (19:25.692) Some of them are actionable. And I'm not going to pop quiz anybody or put you on the spot, but I am going to talk about what I'm doing right now. And it's still in development. Full disclosure, I just started this. I feel like everything we're doing with AI is brand new and we're we're learning and we're improving. But one of my pain points in my business is we we are a little understaffed right now. And so if we're not careful, this stuff can slip through the cracks. And so And here is how I used AI to use AI in prepping for this episode, talking about integrations. First thing I did is I tied well, on I've been talking about the dashboard we're making for unhackmybusiness.com where we got your security journey, and you can go in there and check things off and right and and and validate that you're secure. as I built that, I just keep tying more and more stuff into it. I recently built an MCP server. Does anybody remember the episode where we had our Anybody, it's just you, Mario, because Josh wasn't here for it. We had our Microsoft engineer who talked about MCP and and we're all just like, what's that? What this is cool. so I now have an MCP server stood up I can't pronounce it even if I knew it. on on the podcast. So it it it pulls archives in its own database and then makes available through this integration all of the episode titles. Mario Zaki (20:28.174) Mm. Yeah. Don't ask me his name though. Justin Shelley (20:51.794) Transcripts, the full transcript, the key takeaways, the whole show. I tied that into hats because my main pain point at that time was I forget like like this. I don't know who who that guy was. I wonder if AI can tell me while while we're doing this, who was the Microsoft engineer talking about MCP servers? Okay. I'm gonna just gonna run that. and and see what it pulls. But this was a problem that I couldn't remember what episode we'd talked about various things. And and I'd done things like train AI to go out and find the website, you know, our website, because the transcript is there, and pull that and search it and whatever. And it was just it was a pain in the ass. It and it was slow and it wasn't good at all. and I've just gone through iterations until finally I just pulled it all into a database that I have control over. And I set up this MCCP server and I just realized I'm not sharing my screen. I know most people listen on audio, so they wouldn't see this anyways. But let me see if I can share this out real quick. I'm really not super fond of the sharing feature on here. You you you do that while I'm trying to get my screen shared. How's that sound? Mario Zaki (22:00.145) Do you want to explain to them like what an MCP server is? Mario Zaki (22:07.268) Yeah. So Justin Shelley (22:09.68) I love that. Mario Zaki (22:12.25) So an MCP server is pretty much like a and correct me if I'm wrong, Josh, it's it's just a middleware middle server that's pretty much gathering doing the work, gathering the information and keeping everything in a secure manner before it disperses it, correct? Joshua Holloway (22:27.982) Yeah, so when your agent hits it, it's read only, it's not direct access to the data. You've added a a security bridge between the two so that if the agent goes goes crazy or you're not deleting a database. And if you are deleting a database, you're deleting the database in the MCP server, but not production data. Mario Zaki (22:37.188) Firewall, right? Justin Shelley (22:47.356) So here's stands for by the way model context protocol. It it yeah, it's just a way for AI to connect to data sources in a in a safe way, right? In in its highest level. So I typed in the query after having this integration set up. Who was the Microsoft engineer talking about MCP servers? And it pulls up FIS Gau Gori Gowry, I don't know, G-O-U-R-I. Episode 73, Microsoft Engineer reveals how AI can read your entire database in plain English. Now, this is kind of fun because down at the bottom it says, Want me to pull the full episode summary? Given what we've been building today, because I was prepping for today's episode, FIS's episode might be worth referencing in episode 92. And hey, coincidentally, I am. that was unplanned, but AI got a match to be on it. All right, so this is where I started with you know some of my early integrations. were tied to the vibe coding that we're gonna come back to you know in in future episodes. so today I got started planning the episode and you know we were talking about integrations and you guys had had mentioned bringing your PSAs into it. So I'm like, okay, let's tie Halo into, because that's my PSA, let's bring that into my hats program so that I can query Halo. I'm not gonna do that live. I was gonna I was gonna have it pull up the most recent ticket. Joshua Holloway (24:13.158) No, you're gonna get bit by the demo bug. Justin Shelley (24:15.128) I I I know and I'm not gonna do it. Well, I just don't want it to give out information for for clients, right? So and I'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing my screen if I can figure out. Joshua Holloway (24:19.601) That too. Yeah, that that too. Joshua Holloway (24:24.858) Well I just I think the one of the major points we're making right now, i everybody who's listening, you'll notice that we're we're going s not necessarily slow about it, but we're we're being intentional about everything that we do next to give access to. Because if you don't do it right, you can delete and destroy data. You can inadvertently give access Justin Shelley (24:46.406) Yes. Joshua Holloway (24:49.48) to a system that may be compromised and it has full access to the system. So I think the one one of the biggest points as we're talking about these integrations is, you know, be meaningful, talk to somebody who knows what they're doing and and and make sure that whatever you're setting up is as secure as possible so that we don't inadvertently give away data we didn't want to, or or we're starting very simple where it's one integration, not 12 integrations at once, and then we're looping all this data together. It's one integration, Justin Shelley (25:16.006) Yeah. Right. Joshua Holloway (25:18.712) Is it secure? Is it read-only? Can I destroy the data? No. Okay, great. Now let's code around it and let and let's do something. Because you know, we've talked about our RPSA, we've talked about our RMM or the area other things that we could we could generate integrations into, but at any time in any one of those, if we weren't intentional and we left a door wide open, that that's a really bad day. And I think there was a phrase we were talking about earlier. Because what are we what are they gonna call us? Are they gonna call us stupid or or irresponsible? Right. So we're we're trying not to call that to ourselves and and and not get ourselves in trouble. And I think for the people who are listening who want to learn about this, like you can charge ahead. Like, trust me, I've worked with and I'm talking to people who are charging ahead, especially even in the in the compliance world and then Justin Shelley (25:49.072) A phrase, you're gonna have to jog my memory there. Justin Shelley (25:56.065) stupid or irresponsible? Yeah. Right, right. Okay. Mario Zaki (25:56.645) Mm-hmm. Mario Zaki (26:02.576) Exactly. Justin Shelley (26:02.578) Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Joshua Holloway (26:17.818) They charge so far ahead that I ruin several days of their lives because we have to sit in a meeting and figure out, you know, what did you do? Why did you do it? How did you break that compliance or that regulation? Or are you sharing too much information? Or what's the the project plan? Because now we have to write everything down and track it. And then and then they're having to gather all this information because they got so excited, they just leapt forward, right? It just kind of goes back to being intentional, being being safe and being secure. Justin Shelley (26:47.74) Which it yeah. Mario Zaki (26:47.842) Yeah, I mean I I mean no matter if and sorry to cut you off, Justin, no matter whatever phase you're in, you know, if you're you're talking about like we you know, when we started we were talking about chatting, now we're talking about integrations, and next we're gonna be talking about vibe coding, which is just building onto everything we talked about. the first thing that you need to do with your agent it but yourself as well is the planning. You have to kind of play every end like what what's the worst case scenario with what I if something bad happens with what I'm building what's the worst case scenario you know and and that's that's very important because if the worst case scenario is all my data is deleted like there was a company not too long ago I think what about a month or two ago some somebody was vibecoding and wasn't cautious enough and The AI agent on its own went and deleted the entire database and they even had their backups on the same network and it deleted all that too. So th for them, their waste case the worst case scenario was lose everything we own. You know, so you know, so Justin Shelley (27:59.293) Gone. Yeah. Joshua Holloway (28:00.804) When you think about it too, like that was an accident, but also a hacker could have gotten control of that computer and did the same thing. Justin Shelley (28:05.54) Exactly. Yes. Yep. So again, this is, you know, why when I when I start talking about this, I'm I throw that disclaimer in there first. guys, we want to teach you what can be done. We don't really have the I don't know, the the time, the capacity, the attention span on this podcast. It's not the point of it. It's out of scope to talk about how to be secure other than giving you the things to watch for. Get a professional involved in this. This is not Mario Zaki (28:06.766) Exactly. Justin Shelley (28:35.482) This is I've said for a long time, security is not DIY. Get somebody to help you with that. and and again, restating this as soon as I started doing these integrations, I'm like, well, I'm not I'm not gonna keep doing it that way. I'm not even gonna trust myself, and this is the world I live in, to go in and and check all the boxes and make sure I give it to the right things. I'm going to a secure platform. So you know, as I started building this episode, I'm like, I didn't have an integration. I'm I'm telling on myself. I'm like, I've got a demo and integration today and I don't know what I'm gonna talk about. So I've got this integration already into the the podcast, and I just started chatting with it and I said, Hey, I'm gonna tie Halo, my PSA, into hats and I want you to tell me look at the past transcripts for the past few episodes and tell me, you know, give me some ideas on what we should talk about today. And you know, it did. And it we had to go back and forth a bunch of times. And, you know, skipping the boring stuff. By the time I got done, I had built something that coming back to all that noise that our RMM generates and dumps into our PSA that a lot of times doesn't get actioned on. I built a utility in there that I'm gonna go ahead and show off. So let me I have to be careful where I put stuff because I get this stupid. windows within windows within windows into eternity and beyond. do you guys ever see those eternity mirrors? A mirror on both sides of a room? That's that's kinda what I get. Anyways, I'm gonna share my screen. I've got it on the other side now so it doesn't do that. And then we're going to talk about let's see Joshua Holloway (30:08.592) Mm-hmm. Mario Zaki (30:08.73) Yeah. Mario Zaki (30:18.49) Kinda was enjoying seeing myself like three hundred times. Justin Shelley (30:21.04) Or yeah, I mean I could I could go back to it, I guess, Mario. Let me bring that to full screen window. Justin Shelley (30:31.142) Here it is. Make sure I share the right stuff. Watch that 'cause we don't need that. Okay. I think it's now safe to share my screen. Mario Zaki (30:42.255) So Justin Shelley (30:42.458) So you can see the very first thing I so I I did all this, I I got my demo ready, and then I had to give these instructions. Make a redacted copy of this report. Remove any client names, usernames, or computer names that have identity identifying information. So and then I gave it an example. So here we have the redacted report. And basically what this does is it ingests all of those noisy tickets. And now guys, tell me if you have this problem. when you're meeting with a client and you're saying, Hey, you got a bunch of old equipment and you need to replace it, how often do they just go, cool, here's a blank check? Mario Zaki (31:20.233) zero point zero times percent. Justin Shelley (31:22.756) Okay. Cause why? Like w what what's in it for them? we haven't even identified a problem except we show a report with red on it. And humans are programmed to not like red. We want to get it green or at least yellow. like that's the best case. Most of these reports, when we go out and talk to a client about what they need to do and why, and by the way, it's a huge investment. we aren't really giving them a good reason. And so this is what I built. And we've got a summary at the top. Joshua Holloway (31:22.896) Yeah. once? Justin Shelley (31:53.532) Hardware opportunity proposal. So I'm just gonna pick one. Justin Shelley (32:02.258) I'm on section two, there we go. Proposal one. No, this is right. Disk performance, because I redacted so much, I've got to make sure I'm looking at the right thing. disc performance failure. so we've got one of the alerts that our RMMs will give off is if a hard drive is working too hard, it generates an alert, right? so we pulled the industry out of this, but I do use the industry in the calculations that I'm gonna come back to. The device role, this is a workstation, use probably a front desk or back office system. Alert type critical. Anyways, let's get to what it means to the end user versus what it means to us technical people. Sustained 90% disk active time indicates the OS is waiting on storage for extended periods, causing system-wide sluggishness and increasing risk of failure. So instead of just saying, hey, your your disk is always working, like, okay, it's supposed to. It's a computer. This tells them why this matters. Then it gives an ROI calculation. Most likely this is going to cost about $554 a year in lost productivity based on, you know, this type of position, what they probably get paid in that particular industry. AI does all those calculations. And then a projection projected out over a 24-month case. you're probably losing about $1,385 by not acting on this one particular RMM alert. Justin Shelley (33:32.708) And if we go down, their cost is about 220, 250, right? So now we've taken it's gonna cost you 200 bucks, 250 bucks, but over 24 months, you're going to make 1385 back. These are numbers that can actually mean something to a business owner, especially to CFOs. They they like this kind of stuff. and I'm gonna skip down because like this this gets pretty lengthy. Justin Shelley (34:02.226) For the dead air, guys. because I I wanted to here we go. I wanted to see if I do this every week, and I only fed this like five tickets, by the way. if I do this, how much A does it improve my my income? Because yes, I'm in business to make money. And I think I was making like a thousand dollars a week if I if I did this and everybody acted on it. But then more importantly, I wanted to know how much value was delivered back to the end user, the the company and it's four times that. So if I am charging them a thousand, I'm delivering four thousand in value. Not I'd like to see more like 10x, but at least it's it's a a real value that's being given back to them. And so now over a 24 month period, if I do this or sorry, over if I do this every single week, then Total net value delivered. Sorry, I'm I'm like way off because I know I did these numbers. here it is. I have the potential to bring in an extra $50,000 a year, and the client has a potential to get $205,000 in delivered value. If I if I run through this process and, you know, I'm getting about the same. Like I said, this is five tickets. This is very small. I just wanted something that I could use. So we're taking something that runs in 10 seconds and delivers. Four thousand dollars of value to me every week and delivers what was it? Joshua Holloway (35:35.45) thirteen hundred. Justin Shelley (35:36.592) No, I did it wrong. $1,000 of value to me, $4,000 to the client in in a week, every single week. But if we if we exp Joshua Holloway (35:39.91) There you Joshua Holloway (35:43.377) Yeah, but I think you have I was just gonna say, I think you have ten X dip because how often do they just buy one computer at a time? Usually they're buying the same computer, they're picking up at a deal where they're getting, you know, three, five, ten, however, right? That hard drive is going to be typically experiencing the same issues, especially as they age over time. So when you look at it, that's one computer that you're analyzing. But that you may have five of the same computer in in the fleet. So Mario Zaki (35:43.917) And and for the f sorry, go ahead. Justin Shelley (35:57.072) Right. Justin Shelley (36:10.93) Correct, yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Joshua Holloway (36:14.062) You know, that there's twenty grand. Mario Zaki (36:16.774) And and and let's face it, the hard drive will not last too long if it's running at ninety percent for a long period of time. So what's the ratio or or what's the value when that computer completely crashes, either just the employee sitting there doing nothing or the data that could be lost that's on that data that the hard drive as well. Justin Shelley (36:22.448) It's it's gonna die. Joshua Holloway (36:22.807) Absolutely. Justin Shelley (36:41.592) You brought that up, but I'm gonna see if I can go find that because that is included in in these calculations. this was number two. Joshua Holloway (36:51.158) And just out of curiosity with your calculations, is it their hourly plus a burn rate? Because to business owners, you're not just paying twenty bucks an hour for that employee. You're not paying them twenty bucks an hour. You're you're paying, you know, that plus a burn rate. Every state's different, but like most of them are around 35 to 38, 38%. So a twenty dollar an hour employee is gonna cost you twenty nine bucks or or or something around there on quick quick math, right? so it's e it's even more for the overall cost of all the things that and burden that we pay for for an employee. Justin Shelley (37:21.808) Right. And and we're talking about their actual labor costs, fully load fully burdened or however you want to call that. But what we're also not calculating really is what is the opportunity cost of not doing it. So what what value is this client not able to deliver to their clients or customers because of it as a result? So you know, you can do this math a lot of different ways. The the story I like to tell is I years and years ago when I was employed. not self-employed. I you know, I worked for another company. The CEO of this multi million dollar company had a laptop so old that it took 45 minutes for it to boot up. So every single day he would walk into his office, he would turn on his laptop, and then he would spend 45 minutes walking around the office talking to people. Now that was fine. He wanted the FaceTime and whatever, but like let's calculate the value of a CEO wasting forty five minutes a day because his computer won't work against the cost of a new computer. Like it's just stupid. The Joshua Holloway (38:24.08) Yeah, you bought you bought a new computer in like three days. Justin Shelley (38:26.97) Yeah. Or five minutes. Like depending on what he's got going on. It's just it's insane. you know, and I get it. If you want FaceTime, fine. Engineer that into your day, but don't do it because your goddamn laptop won't turn on. As the CEO of a multi-million dollar company, are you kidding me? So that's what I was trying to do here. And and this is very like I have got a lot to work a lot of work to do here till it spits out the report that I really want. And I'm gonna actually have it took go back into the ticket. Joshua Holloway (38:28.986) Yeah, yeah. Justin Shelley (38:55.32) and make these entries and then put them in a staging place where I can go review and and send that out to the client. But I want to show value. If I'm gonna go to a client and say, hey, you need to spend a thousand dollars on this problem, I want to show them what they're gonna get back in turn, not just say, you gotta spend money with me. I hate that and they hate that. I had a client that said to my one of my employees, every time Justin comes around, he's just asking for more money. That is not the relationship that I want with my clients. And so that's the problem I was trying to solve here and using Mario Zaki (39:19.642) Mm. Justin Shelley (39:24.71) Just a very small sample set. I went from I I mean I don't have a before picture, but just looking at this, if let's call it zero, let's say I didn't do it at all, and I've added now, I've caught, you know, four or five cases a week that were slipping through the cracks. I've increased my revenue by fifty thousand dollars a year, and I've increased the value I deliver to my clients by two hundred thousand dollars a year with a 10-minute automation. Or not even a 10 seconds. It takes 10 seconds and a If you look at how this thing runs, I don't know that I can show that right now on the air. It you don't have to do anything except say generate report and it goes back and pulls the previous seven days of alerts. so some tweaking is needed, but I'm super excited about this because you know we we're trying to show how we can 10x or 50x the our output using AI. And I keep saying a lot of times it's more than that because what we're doing is we're catching things that just weren't happening. And this is a good example of where things can very easily slide through the cracks and not get addressed at all. Thoughts. Mario Zaki (40:29.843) Yeah, I mean l let's face it with as a as business owners, we we want our employees to work twenty-four seven, which obviously is impossible. You know, but at least but at least the time, you know, the the the nine to five that they're in, with the exception of lunch, we want them to be working. You know, we don't want them to sit there and be waiting for the we can't have Joshua Holloway (40:41.712) Slightly illegal. Mario Zaki (40:57.177) the employees sitting there waiting for the computer. The computer has to be sitting there waiting for the for the user. And you know, and and this is why like know including myself, every employee that I have, no matter if if they're an intern or whatever, that everybody needs two monitors because I feel like they're so much more productive with at least two monitors. You know? So it's all about Justin Shelley (41:17.286) Yes. Mario Zaki (41:23.229) Providing your employees with the right tools to succeed and do their jobs, you know, to the to the max that they can possibly do without obviously burning them out and you know, cracking whips. But it if you know, I it pisses me off. One time I I had somebody I'm like, guys, you know, what are why is the why are you on your cell phone? And they're like, I'm waiting for this thing to to load or do whatever. It pisses me off. It just rubs me the wrong way. It's not his fault. I get it. Justin Shelley (41:47.73) Right. Mario Zaki (41:53.288) But we shouldn't be waiting for anything, you know, and that's why we are, you know, obviously we're nerds, but we love AI because we can program nerds to do stuff for not nerds, we can program AI to do stuff to do nerdy stuff for us twenty four seven. That is true. Justin Shelley (42:04.793) Ha ha. Joshua Holloway (42:06.64) To do nerdy stuff. Justin Shelley (42:10.598) Freudian slip because I think AI is programming me to do work. I don't know. Joshua Holloway (42:14.486) Yeah. But it's a toss up, right? But you also you can also look at something that maybe somebody's hand jamming Excel information into Excel, right? Or moving data from You know, you take those hours. Let's say you're paying somebody fifty thousand dollars a year and part of what they do for a number of hours a week is they are copying and pasting and moving and taking data and putting it into one Excel spreadsheet. That's hours, right? So do the calculations on that one. and if you just sit down and analyze that, the the value add is the fact that they no longer have to do that and they've freed up hours of of time so that they could Do more meaningful tasks, the business gets that information faster, which maybe it allows for them to act upon other unknowns or unknown variables, or maybe it helps them to deliver a better widget or a better product to a client. And then overall, you know, you're you're starting to 5x, 10x that information that task and the and the money that you're getting back in that. So just don't look at it as like integrations where we're having. our systems talk to our PSA, right? Think of it as like how do we get an integration where we just saved an employee eight hours a week just from copying and pasting or moving. case in point, I had a I have an inventory employee, you know, and I didn't I didn't realize I hadn't given her access to Claude and she came to me and she's like, I'm good in Excel. I'm not that I'm not that great in Excel, but can I please use Claude To to help me do this aspect of my job. And I was like, absolutely. I didn't even hesitate because I didn't even have to know how many time how much time she was putting into it. The the 20 bucks a month outweighs my savings, right? Like I will save so much more by making her more efficient that that 20 bucks it's it's a huge game changer for us, you know, just to find out that she was struggling with self. Justin Shelley (43:59.955) Yeah. Justin Shelley (44:17.584) Yeah, I mean she's gotta she's gotta recoup an hour a month. Right. Assuming she's fully burdened, make you know, twenty bucks an hour, which probably i is understated. She's probab yeah, yeah. Yeah. Joshua Holloway (44:26.726) It's little bit more than that, but yeah. But yeah, it's it's an hour of savings when I know I'm gonna get an hour a week at least without even analysing. Justin Shelley (44:34.384) Well and Josh, and this is what honestly I learned this from you and it it's part of your offer that's kind of translated into what I what I'm putting out as my AI offer right now. Is the first step is just figuring out what needs to be automated and improved on. And you know, where where we came into this series of podcast episodes talking about AI. Let's just build our chat engine so that it it understands us right and a little give it some context. Segment two, let's talk about integrations. Segment three, let's talk about vibe coding. We're still going about it the wrong way. This is still not the way you should do this in your business because what you should do is sit down and say, what do I need to fix? And then we'll figure out how to fix it. and and when I I knew I just needed to talk about an integration, I'm like, I don't know what to talk about. So I get on AI and I'm like, hey, here's my situation. Here are my tools What do you recommend I do to make my life better? It gave me about four or five things and I'm like, that one right there, a hundred percent. not something I would have Joshua Holloway (45:41.434) Four out of the five were not appropriate for on air talk. Justin Shelley (45:44.605) Correct. It's like Justin, you really shouldn't admit this in public, but you need this, this, this, and this. But here's one you can put on the air. and that and that's the one I grabbed. So use AI to use AI. I'll I'll keep saying that. yes, we're talking about the technology behind it, but but figure out the problem you need to solve first, then figure out how to do it. And that's what we can do with our free initial console. Go to unhackmybusiness.com and and book one of those calls. So guys, that's pretty much what I've got. Final thoughts, key takeaways, signature sign-offs. Let's let's be done with this for the day because we got more to come back next week and talk about. Mario, I'm gonna throw this to you first and then Josh, and then we're gonna go ahead and close out. Mario Zaki (46:32.262) Yeah. so Mario Zacki, CEO of Mastech. like I said, we specialize in helping small to medium sized businesses you know, stay secure, get better sleep knowing that their business will be there the next day. And we help them grow their company with technology. And you know, my biggest takeaway is really, besides doing everything securely, is to kind of just Make sure as an owner you have the responsibility to to have your employees have the right tools and and and to be happy, you know, like nobody wants to go into work and just feel like, this is such a drag. Today is you know, this day is just moving so slowly, I didn't get anything done. You know, if you provide them with new tools, shiny tools, you know, and stuff that they're able to now achieve a lot more than they would have normally. Either e even if it's you know, no matter if it's a new hard drive and the computer doesn't take forty five minutes to turn on or just providing them with an account that's twenty bucks a month, it it y you know, the the investment just in your people and and your work environment becomes, you know, unmeasurable. You know, like in nobody wants to re you know, regret getting out of bed in the morning because they have to go to work. You know, if that happens, then you know it's only a matter of time they're gonna they're gonna look elsewhere. You know, so you want your employees to be kind of like getting up before the alarm, you know, wanting to come in there, loving to you know would love to work twenty four seven for you. You know, I know it's illegal, but you know, it it's y you it's having old Justin Shelley (48:15.708) Yeah. Mario Zaki (48:22.138) equipment and old stuff just makes people drag and not want to do their work, no matter if they're waiting on the machine or not. That's my that's my takeaway. Justin Shelley (48:32.55) All right. Josh, what do you got? Joshua Holloway (48:35.344) Yeah, you know, my takeaway from this one is exactly like what we've been talking about. If you don't know where to get started, talk to the AI. You can turn on the voice talk recognition and and verbally talk back and forth. You could type it in there, but just ask a question to where it maybe asks you five questions about what your problems are, what you're trying to fix. integrations will help you see your data, it might help you manipulate it and get it into a location to where you can better see your numbers, process things faster, but just Go about it slow, go about it intentional, and make sure you have a plan. Because when you when you're out there just kind of wading around in the waters, you you're you know the potentiality of getting drowned is super high. Like all these different AI tools are just gonna pile on top of all of us. And if we don't have a plan, we're just gonna drown in all the options, right? And then everybody's gonna go from one shiny new toy to the to the next. And you know, on that note, I'm Joshua Holloway, CEO for Seventh EI Technologies. And we're here helping you navigate through the ocean of different AI possibilities and we're your AI beacon to solutions. Justin Shelley (49:44.211) All right, guys, I genuinely appreciate it. You know, I've said this before, I'm gonna keep saying it. I know that you guys are given your time, you got lots to do. we all do, but thank you for being here and contributing, giving back to the community. my takeaway for today is and and I'm just I I came up with at first, but you stole it from me, Josh. Use AI to use AI. it's one of my favorite things to do. I was prepping for a podcast and I'm just like, I don't know what to talk about. And then I came out of that with something that my business desperately needs and has real demonstrable value to both my company and my clients. That's an example of using AI to use AI. so guys, that's what I've got. again, thanks for being here. And we're gonna go ahead and wrap up. Remember, listen in, take action, and keep your businesses unhacked. Mario Zaki (50:34.396) Unhacked. What the heck? I actually I I do have one thing I want to add and I use I use Chat GPT to to kind of calculate for me. so we've been you know, obviously we've talked about vibe coding and stuff like that. I've put together like a system that helps us with like onboarding and offboarding, you know, helps my technicians just, you know, supervise everything instead of something that would have taken about forty five minutes at least. Joshua Holloway (50:36.424) unhacked. Justin Shelley (50:36.603) No but in okay. Mario Zaki (51:03.368) can they could now do it in about a minute. that was one thing that we you know, and then as we programmed it, I decided, hey, why don't I have it work on licensing? because we used to have one technician spend an entire month of January before our February renewals to go through and see what licenses were not being used and stuff like that. And I did the calculations by just spending about maybe four weeks of Not the whole four weeks, but just here and there. I saved almost forty thousand dollars over the course of a year just by the automations that that I've put together. And now I'm not gonna fire anybody, but you know, now I can dedicate his time to something else. But this system is not gonna do so much more in such a short period of time and save me at least forty thousand dollars in salary. Justin Shelley (51:41.362) Yeah. Mario Zaki (52:01.918) Just because now I'm having AI take care. That's pretty crazy. Justin Shelley (52:07.568) It is. It's wild. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Something. Joshua Holloway (52:08.05) No, it's a good savings. You can buy a new shiny tool with it. Mario Zaki (52:11.164) Yeah. Or or a down payment on another car. Joshua Holloway (52:13.806) Or if I code another one. Hey, there you go. Justin Shelley (52:17.33) Yeah, down payment these days. Jesus. All right, guys. it any any other like last minute. Sorry you just did the outro, Justin, but we're gonna keep talking moments. No? Okay. Just just checking because you never know around here. I already muted you. Too late. Joshua Holloway (52:28.026) Now I'll do that to you. Joshua Holloway (52:32.009) wait, no, I'm just kidding.