We Either Win Or We Learn

We Either Win Or We Learn

Tim Fitzpatrick
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a Revenue Accélération Series interview where we talk to seven-figure B2B business owners and their growth-focused executives who are actively trying to grow their businesses and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you can learn from their experiences. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult, and it definitely shouldn't be guesswork. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Mike Nastick with R3 with me today. Mike, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Mike Nastick
Thanks, Tim. I really appreciate the time. Looking forward to the conversation.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, me too, man. I'm looking forward to digging into this with you. Before we do that, I want to jump into some rapid fire questions. You ready to rock and roll?

Mike Nastick
Yeah, let's do it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. So very quickly, what do you do? How long have you been doing it?

Mike Nastick
So my role here at R3 is I head up the commercial sales team. We have a commercial and a federal arm. We're primarily commercial now, trying to get into the federal side. I head up the commercial side, focused on growth and acquisition and new clients and new business, new logos, if you will. So been here at R3 for going on seven years, been in the MSP world for over a decade now and have seen and been a part of the smaller one that we were before when I first started here at R3. And I've been a part of the big one. So I have a wide breadth of experience across the MSP space.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Love it. What's the most important lesson you've learned in your time at R3?

Mike Nastick
Sometimes you got to slow down to speed up, and sometimes you've got to look inward and adjust things accordingly. And it's about the people at the end of the day, and it's about the clients. We're a growing business, and we always say we're building the airplane while we're flying. So that comes with a lot of challenges. But when you work together and you've got the right people around you, it's pretty incredible what you can do. And as long as the culture focuses on the people and your customers, you can be pretty successful in this industry.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Thank you for saying that, because I talk a lot about slowing down to speed up with where we focus in the marketing space because we focus on building the engine. And the three components of building that engine are strategy, planning, and leadership. And especially in the MSP space, we just want to jump in and take action, right? We want to pick the parts and start assembling the engine. And with strategy, we're slowing down so that we can speed up later. Because when we skip it, we end up wasting all kinds of time and money, and we get six months, 12 months down the road, and we got to go back to it anyway. So guys, whoever's watching, listening. I did not pay Mike to say that, but thank you for saying it. It is very much in alignment with what I say a lot of times.

Mike Nastick
Love it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Man, you know with your time at R3 that, grow in a business can be... Man, We take two steps forward, one step back. It can be challenging. Do you have any mantra or something motivational that you say to yourself or share with your team to help push through those times?

Mike Nastick
There's two things that I always say. One is zoom out. Sometimes you forget what you've accomplished because you're bogged down with the day to day or you're fighting fires for a week or what have you. And it's very easy for a negative mindset to set in. And so really just want to zoom out, take a breath, and look at all that we have accomplished. Yeah, it's a little rocky right now, but think about what we've done. And the other one is, I heard Jolly Roll say this at an award show, and it's There's a reason that the windshield is bigger than the rear view mirror, and we always want to be looking out the windshield. Just stay looking forward and don't look behind. You learn from your mistakes, you learn from your failures, and that's our mantra. We either win or we learn. We don't really lose. So there's a couple of things, like I said, zoom out and always looking forward. And the windshield is bigger than the rear view mirror for a reason.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I really like win or we learn. That's such a great way to think about it. And it's such a slight shift. It's a very subtle shift, but a really important shift because it on a positive mindset, which I really like.

Focusing on Simplicity is Important

Tim Fitzpatrick

So Mike, looking back at your time on R3 and the growth journey that you guys have had, what would you say are the key turning points that helped you guys really scale and grow. And were there any pivotal decisions or strategies that made the difference, would you say?

Mike Nastick
Yeah, I think in the MSP world, obviously, technology plays a big part, right? And so there's a lot of MSPs that have a very, I don't want to say complex, but a large tech stack that they use to support their customer base, where our CTO, Kyle and Rob, our CEO, Rob, came together and made a decision that we're going to streamline our tech stack, and we're going to simplify it a little bit, but it's going to have a big impact, not only to our customer base, but also to our staff. There's less for them to have to learn how to use to support our staff, so it makes them more efficient from a support standpoint, but also getting away from some of the tools that are our vulnerabilities, not only to our clients, but to us, if anybody were to breach and have the keys to the kingdom, if you will. So we made a couple of technology changes and consolidated our tech stack and really helped streamline our support and make it more repeatable and make our team more efficient. There's a lot we could probably talk for another 30 minutes about that, but at a high level, that's probably something that's really had a really big impact across the board for us.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Do you remember how many tools you had in the tech stack before and about where it is now? Do you remember?

Mike Nastick
It was probably a good, 12 to 15 that we were leveraging, and now it's probably six or seven. I think we've cut it in half. Some are required, some are necessary, but the other ones were like, Let's try this, let's try that, let's try this, let's try that. And what phrase that Kyle uses is you get into technical debt, right? Now you have all these tools. Some are doing the same things and some are just stagnant, but some customers had it, some customers didn't, whatever the case may be. There was a maturation process around that and just understanding what works, what we're good at, and what we want to focus on. We've been able to consolidate that down. To The support staff loves it. They're almost experts in every single one because it's not that many that they have to leverage on a day to day basis.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. There's so many efficiencies that you gain there. Obviously, it's really important you make the right decision because you're hitching your wagons to these vendors, which is really... It's not a light decision, but God, We see this in marketing all the time, too, and I talk about this a lot. It's so important to focus on simplicity because it's very easy to overcomplicate things. But simplicity, one, it makes implementation and execution much easier and more efficient, which is what you guys are seeing. Your staff can do a better job because they don't have to know a broad swath of tools. They deep, they know them really well. You're not reinventing the wheel on different projects, or you're not bringing in tools that you use part of it sometimes, but you're not super familiar with. So many good things there. And the other thing, too, in the MSP space that a lot of people don't think about is depending on the vendor and how they're licensing the tools, you may have to commit to a certain number of licenses. And there's all kinds of intricacies there, too, that you just eliminated, right?

Mike Nastick
Yeah. I mean, you're spot on. There's certainly technology out there that's like, Hey, I need it for five people. Well, our base is 20 licenses, right? That's where you start. So you're stuck doing that. But yeah, everything you touched on is absolutely accurate. You become more cost-effective, too, right? Now you can adjust your pricing accordingly to, A, be more competitive and, B, be more profitable if you're not paying all these different tools and technology that are out there. It's really made a difference for us just being able to change that mindset and then be able to bolt on different solutions along the way. But that was a big turning point for us from a technology and support standpoint that really helped change how we operate.

Tim Fitzpatrick
How long ago did you guys do that? Do you remember?

Mike Nastick
It was right before or shortly after COVID. It was like early 2020. I'm not just exact timing. I'm not 100 % sure.

Tim Fitzpatrick
But yeah, somewhere around there.

Mike Nastick
Yeah, exactly. And it's crazy. That's five years ago.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I know.

Mike Nastick
It's so right around there, about five years ago, I would say, we made a shift. We started to consolidate things and re-architect it. And then we went all in on Microsoft and some other stuff. And so it's been, like I said, the last five years or so, probably three and a half, four after making all the changes, really operating like that. And we've seen the impact. Our customers have, too, which is good.

Tim Fitzpatrick
The other benefit, too, in that, which we talk about a lot, but it allows you to consolidate and build greater volume with the vendors that you're supporting, which in the MSP space, it's not uncommon to have marketing development funds or co-op funds that vendors are offering. And so rather than spreading that across and not being able to maximize that by narrowing down your toolset Maybe you're doing more business with Microsoft now than you were before, which allows you to take advantage of more MDF funds. So that's a small benefit from it. I think the big ones we've touched on.

Sales and Marketing Go Hand in Hand

Tim Fitzpatrick
So I want to focus on sales and marketing for a little bit, which we obviously have to since I'm a marketer. How has your approach to marketing and sales evolved as you've grown? Were any of the tactics that worked surprisingly well or didn't work well? What are your thoughts there?

Mike Nastick
Yeah. I mean, what I've seen work well. The MSP space is very relationship-driven. It's a service industry, right? It's word of mouth, it's networking, it's current client referrals, things along those lines. So for me, being at events, getting in front of folks, meeting with clients, hosting roundtable dinners or networking dinners, if you will, have been really, really strong for us. We've got a strong partner that we work with that started us down that journey. They were bringing us into their dinners. We were like, Hey, let's try it on our end. We've done a couple, and it's been great. You get a very intimate setting. You get a good conversation going. You've got either strategic partners or industry leaders or whatever the case may be, prospects. Just get a bunch of people in the room having a conversation, no hard selling, just food and chat. It really does go well. For me, building relationships and getting out in front of folks. Now, if you talk to our director of marketing, he's big on LinkedIn ad campaigns and SEO work and website, driving traffic to the website. That works well, too. Don't get me wrong. It's just when you're with an MSP, typically you're with them for multiple years, if not a decade plus. And so making a change based off of a cold call or an email or what have you is a lot harder. It just takes longer. The sales cycles are already long in MSP space. But building relationships and, Tim, who do you know that can use R3 or vice versa? And building those strategic partnerships and referral partners is really what we've seen work really, really well, coupled with the marketing efforts as well. Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
In your role, how are you interfacing with your director of marketing?

Mike Nastick
So right now, I meet with them once a week, just talking about what are we seeing that's working and not working, I'm sorry. What's the hot topic? In our conversation with prospects, what are the pain points that they're explaining to us? Why are they talking to us? What is it that they're not getting. We could start building some messaging around that. Then there's also just strategic partnership discussions, like the partners that we have, how can we be more strategic with them? How can we market with them? To your point, MDF funds and do joint ventures. It's a weekly thing, and sometimes it's just a check-in, and sometimes it's a pretty good strategy session. It just depends. But they go hand-to-hand. You're going to have to be on the same page and make sure that what we're saying on the sales side is matching what marketing is saying and vice versa. So, yeah, we talk often and we try to stay on the same page and meet as regularly as possible.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, good. As it should be, you said a lot of really good stuff there. When I answered that question, I want to pull a few things out that I think are really important. One, you said sales and marketing go hand in hand. I totally agree. And it's because you guys are sharing information that helps both of you, right? On the sales side, you're having conversations, you're hearing direct from the prospect's mouth, What problems are they having? What are the pain points? Why did they reach out to you? And that's all stuff that can help drive marketing and vice versa. So that two-way sharing of information is helping both departments. And I always like to say they're not silos, right? They can't operate independently of each other if they're going to be effective, which I think is so, so important. So thank you for I'm saying that, because I think a lot of people miss that. And in some organizations, it's like sales isn't talking to marketing at all. And I just don't understand that at all. It's a huge mistake.

Mike Nastick
I agree. I've seen marketing departments be more internal-focused. I don't want to say party planners, but they're planning internal events, right? Rather than meeting with sales and understanding what's going on on the ground and what prospects are saying and what are the latest and greatest crazes and tools and buzzwords that are out there that we can leverage to try to draw some traffic to the website.

Tim Fitzpatrick
The last thing you want to hear from marketing is like, well, hey, we're generating leads for you. Why aren't you closing them? Well, there's all kinds of things it could be, right? It's not necessarily a sales issue. It could still be a marketing issue where we're just not attracting the right leads.

Mike Nastick
Correct.

Tim Fitzpatrick
And you also touched on, too, that that message that they're hearing in sales needs to be the same as it is in marketing, right? Because if they're hearing one message on the front-end with marketing, and then they go to a sales conversation and it's different, it's injecting confusion, doubt into the prospect's mind. And then what happens, right? The breaks are going up and things start prospects start dropping off. So there's got to be consistency from marketing to sales and then on the back end to customer service. That message needs to be consistent throughout.

Mike Nastick
Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Using a Compliance Team as a Differentiator

Tim Fitzpatrick
You touched on this a little bit. I want to dig into this, especially in the B2B space and in the MSP space, man, MSP struggle with differentiation. What kinds of things are you focusing on to help stand out in the market? Anything come to mind there?

Mike Nastick
Yeah. One of our biggest differentiators is we have a compliance team. We have a full governance risk and compliance team in-house, and that's because of several things. One, like I mentioned, we're getting into the federal space or trying to get into the federal space. There's a lot of compliance requirements there. We work with a a lot of government contracting firms or folks that work with three-letter agencies, so there's a lot of compliance there. We do a lot of work with Microsoft, as I mentioned, not only in the commercial space, but we're also an AOSG partner of Microsoft, which means we can sell and migrate folks into the government community cloud, which is a very secure environment within Microsoft. So there's a lot of security and compliance that goes into the folks that we're working with. So having that compliance team and having a compliance leader with the wealth of experience that our COO has really sets us apart. And we don't just tell you or help you get compliant. We practice what we preach, right? We're certified across three standards of ISO. We're SOC 2 Type 2. We're doing all the CMMC stuff. While we help organizations along that journey, we're also doing it ourselves. Compliance has been a big differentiator. There's not a lot of MSPs that know compliance as well as we do let alone get compliant themselves. So holding ourselves to that standard and being able to talk to it as well as we can with the team that we have has been something that's really, really separated us from the other providers in the area.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Are you guys leading with that in marketing? And do you highlight it pretty consistently in your sales process? How do you do that?

Mike Nastick
Yeah, we do. And in the right conversation, right? So I'm... My whole discussion point is I'm always stating that we're cloud first. We leverage the cloud. We're security focused and we're compliance driven. And so those are the three things that really are how we look at and how we support our customer base and how we present. Those are three very important things because the cloud is just, it's here, you got to be there. Security is always needed. Being standardized and compliance-driven and having repeatable processes and helping organizations get compliant themselves, which help them be more efficient. Just being able to articulate that and show that and show the impacts that it's had on us gets the customer base excited about it and wanting to move forward. And plus they have to, depending on what they're doing from a business standpoint.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, depending on what industry they're in. But I can see because do most MSPs, are they Do they have maybe one or two people in-house that are doing compliance? Are they outsourcing some of it?

Mike Nastick
I would say most don't want to deal with it. And there's only a few, and most of them are in the federal space. And if they do dabble in it, they get a compliance partner, to your point. They outsource, right? There's not a lot of MSPs that, A, understand and nor want to, and that's okay, right? There's still a lot of MSPs that want to have infrastructure and data centers and on-prem servers. It's just how they operate. It's the methodology that they're comfortable with. That's why having a compliance arm has helped us in a lot of conversations and helped us develop some partnerships with some pretty strong players in the gov con and federal space and compliance space. I would say most don't get involved in because it because unless you have folks that are from the compliance space or from the federal space, it's a big undertaking to try to learn along the way.

Standardizing Your Sales Process

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I love it. So what are some key growth milestones you guys are working towards to help hit your goals?

Mike Nastick
I mean, for us, it's trying to... We're focusing on increasing and stepping up the clients we're engaging with, trying to get more into that enterprise space, touching above our weight class, if you will. You know, a big milestone for us just as a company was moving into the office that I'm in now. Going from two separate office spaces and consolidating into one bigger 10,000-square-foot space that we're in now and building out podcast rooms and security operation centers and having a space for everybody to come to, that's a big one. But as far as growth, we certainly have revenue targets. We're trying to shorten our sales cycles and increase contract values and things like that. But it's also getting into newer markets. We made an acquisition in '21 up in Beverly, Massachusetts to tap into the Boston Jersey, New York market. We're trying to tap into that a little bit more. We're trying to Rob has an initiative to get more into the sports and entertainment and family office world. Really getting in front of high wealth individuals and well-known sports teams. We're now the official IT provider for the Washington Commanders, which is a pretty cool thing for folks that are from this area. It's things like that. We're not taking our eyes off of where we're trying to go, but we're doing some cool and helping us get there. It's been a lot of fun.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Mike, you touched on your shortening the sales cycle. I know one of the things that you mentioned in the pre-interview was that you guys have been working on standardizing your sales process. Walk me through that. What have you learned in doing that and how is it impacting your sales?

Mike Nastick
What I've learned is that it's okay to have a different way of doing it. Because right now, if I were to hire somebody, I would say, Hey, go sit with me for a week and learn how I sell. Now go sit with Joe and do the same thing with Rob. Now you've got this person going, Okay, I don't know which one I like the best, but I'm going to try Joe's way this time. I'm going to try mine. It's okay to have that, but it's even better to have a standardized process and a standardized messaging, back to the marketing and sales and consistency. It helps with onboarding of new staff. It helps just with consistent messaging across the board. If Joe is in a sales process and has to take a vacation or wants to take a vacation, I can jump in and nothing changes except the voice. It's really helped with just having a nice flow and having a better strategy in the calls, making sure you get an appointment set before you hang up, making sure you review proposals on a call. There's just a lot of little things that have strengthened our and have helped them be more confident in these calls and just having better metrics and reporting. So across the board, it's just really been super, super helpful. We have a great consultant from the outside that's helping us do that. And it's got me excited about building the team now because now I can say, okay, here's the playbook. Here's how you're going to shadow some folks, and then let's rock and roll. So it shortens the time of onboarding for new The MSP world, unfortunately, still has long sales cycles, as I mentioned before, they have strong relationships. And so making a change requires a lot of key stakeholders, and there's a lot of discussions that go on. So there's certainly something there that out of our control.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, there's always things beyond our control there, right? But the more your sales process can instill trust and credibility, right? And that feeling of safe That's where I think you can shorten that cycle. A hundred %. And by creating that consistency, I love... Tell me if I'm wrong, but what I heard you say here is like, Hey, we've got this playbook so people know what's expected, but there's flexibility within those steps for your individual salespeople to be themselves, right? So they have the structure. But it's like saying to somebody, Here's a script, and you got to use the script. That never works well, right? Because it just comes across as natural because it's not the way they do it. But they've got the structure, and they know the steps they need to follow, and then they've got that flexibility of, How am I going to do this my way at this step? Did I hear that right?

Mike Nastick
Yeah. You're right. You're spot on. We don't want to be too robotic. We want personality, and we want people to be themselves and sell the way that they would sell and show up to events as themselves. Having the framework of a process and a standardized way of selling helps just, again, it's one less thing to think about. Now you're just having conversations and you've been trained on how to say things or what to say rather than how to say. You just get to be yourself. The whole point of this in a sales process, as you know, is building trust and rapport and not instilling doubt. We want people to know that what you see is what you get. You can trust that we're here looking out for you and trying to solve your issues. That's why we're on this conversation. But there's a process on the back end, and they don't need to know all that, but it helps the sales team just having that formality and having that training. So it's really strengthened not only the sales team, but he also, our works with our client success team, and there's been a lot of improvements in helping them as well. So across the board, it's been impactful, positive.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, very cool. I love it. Mike, this has been awesome, man. I want to ask you one last question before we wrap things up. Knowing what you know now, anything you would do differently based on what you've learned from your experience at R3?

Mike Nastick
The only thing that I would I would potentially do differently is when I first got into the MSP space or technology industry is probably go right to sales. But then again, I have to pause because having the technical background that I had for the early part of my career has helped me be a hybrid. Being able to hold conversations at a certain level with technical folks has helped me to move things forward in a sales process and really build that trust we were just talking about, where if you jump right into sales, you don't have the in-depth technical know-how, but you can learn from the people that you work with. I don't think I would. I really appreciate the fact that I got the opportunity to be a CIS admin first and then get into the sales because that's just who I am. I love meeting folks and talking and telling them how we can help. I don't I don't know if I would change anything, but if I had to say, I would probably just jump right into sales because it's a fun little gig and you get to meet a lot of great people. That would probably be the only thing, but it's been good to me so far.

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's interesting. So you almost have... Because not all MSPs do this, but I know in some technical spaces, you've got salespeople, and then behind them, you have sales engineers. In your case, you got a mix of both, which I could see that being a really strong benefit.

Mike Nastick
And that's exactly what I did. I was technical, then I was a sales engineer, and then I went full sales. So having that breadth of experience has been really helpful.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. It gives you a different perspective because you've got visibility to things that others just haven't had visibility to. Yeah, Absolutely. I love it. Mike, where can people learn more about you if they want to connect?

Mike Nastick
On LinkedIn. Happy to connect on LinkedIn. Our website is www. R3-it. Com. We are going through a brand overhaul and a website overhaul. So it may not look like it does today when you do go there, but happy to chat on LinkedIn, and we can hopefully connect there and start conversating. Love to meet people.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. We'll make sure that those links are in the show notes as well. Mike, thank you again for taking the time. Really appreciate it. Those of you that are watching, listening, appreciate you as well. You want to connect with us, you can do that over at rialtomarketing.com. That's rialtomarketing.com The other resource we've got for you is at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. We help clients build their marketing engine, we focus on nine key areas. And if you want to know which of the nine are slowing down your growth, you can do it there. So go check that out. Thank you. And till next time. Take care.