What Is Your Goal?

What Is Your Goal?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a Revenue Acceleration Series interview where we talk to seven-figure B2B business owners and their growth-focused executives who are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing It 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 Rudy Ordaz from Datawise Networks with me today. Rudy, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Rudy Ordaz
Hey, Tim. Thanks for having me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes. I'm excited to dig into all your experience. You got a wealth of business experience that I know folks can learn from. Before we jump into that, I want to just ask you a few rapid fire questions if you're ready to jump in with both feet.

Rudy Ordaz
Yeah, sure. Let's do it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay, man. So really quickly, what do you do and how long have you been doing it?

Rudy Ordaz
So I'm the CEO of Dataways Networks, a MSP, MSSP, located in Southern California. I've been in the IT field since 1999. So Y2K was... I was a product of the shortage of IT professionals and technology professionals. So that's how I got my start working at a help desk. And I didn't realize it at the time, but I was working for one of the biggest consulting companies, which was EDS at the time, out of Texas. And I had a chance to apply for one of these entry-level help desk jobs, and it worked out for me. And that's how I got my start in technology.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. And now, before DataWise, you had a few other companies. Tell us a little bit about that experience.

Rudy Ordaz
Sure. So prior to DataWise, I was working at Exigent Technologies out of New Jersey. And Exigent purchased my MSP that I had started. It was called RealTime Technologies. And I started it a little bit before the pandemic. And RealTime was the product of me coming back into the MSP space, learning about how to set up a business to scale, and then taking the steps to create a company that would be attractive for both growth and acquisition.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it. So first MSP you started was acquired. You then worked for Exigen for a while. Now you've shifted, and you're at Datawise.

Rudy Ordaz
That's correct.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. So you've had a lot of different things go on. What's one of the most important lessons you've learned in running any of your businesses?

Rudy Ordaz
I think what I've learned, what's been the most important has been setting a goal of what the business is going to set out to do. So there's quite a few business goals when setting up the business and growing it, picking the right team. And something I learned when I was working with my partners at Exigent was setting up the structure. For example, we were running on EOS to plan out goals, set metrics on what the executive team is trying to do either yearly basis, three years, 10 years, but then also chunk it down per quarter. So that was a really eye-opening stage that then I can apply now at Datawise, now that I'm the CEO of Datawise. And prior to that, prior another epiphany that I had was that I can't do it all myself. So it was really about setting up real-time technologies to scale. That was my first goal, my first plan. And even though I had a technology consulting company prior, where I was a one-man band, and I would bring in contractors and consultants when I needed them, once I set up, again, a company, I knew, Okay, let me do the sales and managing of the business, and I'll have partners and employees delivering the service. That was another really important stage in my entrepreneurial journey.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, we all have strengths and weaknesses, right? And we try to do it all. We end up doing things that we don't enjoy doing.

Rudy Ordaz
Or sometimes it's just about admitting what I'm not great at. So I noticed that I'm really good at some parts of the business, and especially having the vision and setting goals. But the delivery of the service wasn't always something I personally enjoy it as much as the other parts. So a lot of times when people ask me, How do I set up a business to scale? A book that I read was the E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. And that really was eye-opening, where if you can set yourself up with the right team, whether it's employees or the right partners, or you take on the roles of either entrepreneur, manager, or technician, then you should have a higher than the normal success rate for a new small business.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. You know your point too, Rudy, about knowing what you want. Man, it's so simple, but a lot of us overlook it, right? And when we overlook something like that, we end up building a business that takes us to a place that we may not want to go.

Rudy Ordaz
Totally. No, totally. I connect with a lot of IT professionals that have a small business, and they ask me, Oh, how did you know you wanted to sell your first business, and how did you go about that? And a lot of times I'll say, Well, that was my goal. So you should pick what your goal is. And neither way is wrong. But if you want to have a small business that's you, a few employees, and you make a nice six-figure salary, and you don't have the headaches of running a large payroll and worrying about capital and trying to go down that road, It's totally nothing wrong with it, but it's two separate goals, where if you want to build a multimillion dollar exit, that's a whole different animal.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes, it is. Yeah, I love it. So when we all run into challenging times in growing our businesses. Do you have any mantra or something motivational that you say to help yourself and your team push through those times?

Rudy Ordaz
Yeah, so the big one is always watch your churn. Make sure that you're not losing customers. Make sure you're delivering on the service that you're promising, because even if there's issues with the economy or something local where you are, another pandemic, and you have to switch gears, then at least you're holding on to the clients that you already have. If you're pushing, let's say, your Salesforce to bring in certain amount of closed deals, but your service delivery is then churning all your clients, it's going to be an ongoing circle of not making any progress. That's the one thing is always watch the churn, make sure that we're also pitching to the right clients, that we're aware of our ICP. Who are our clients? Who do we want to keep selling to? And then any efforts we make are focused on those types of clients.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, it's certainly... I love that first one because it is so much cheaper to keep your existing clients than to try and find other ones. But a lot of people also miss the fact that if you have high churn, there are problems in operationally or in your actual products or services that needs to be-Right. And And so, yeah, that's such a great thing to keep in mind.

The Challenges of Merging Companies

Tim Fitzpatrick
So let's jump back to real-time. When you merged real-time tech with Exigen, you went from being a small team to being part of a 40 person plus company across multiple cities. What were some of the biggest learning lessons going from that small company environment to a larger company?

Rudy Ordaz
That's a good question because I think a lot of people don't think about the challenges of merging companies. And even if you do one or two throughout your career, you might forget of those challenges that come up. And I think the biggest one is culture. A lot of times you have, especially if you're the CEO, you're the owner, you run the business how you want. And when you now join a team of either partners or you work for somebody, you have to be okay with adjusting or shifting your culture to match whatever the bigger entity or whatever the plan is. Every once in a while, small companies might apply their culture to a bigger entity if it makes sense for them. But you just have to be aware that there is going to be some adjustment, some change.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I see it. There's a lot of merger and acquisition activity in the MSP space, and it's a lot more common than I think people might think that people are just... They're acquiring to drive top-line revenue, but they lack really solid plans of how they're going to integrate these acquisitions into their existing business. And man, if you're not prepared, it can cause a lot of problems.

Rudy Ordaz
Yeah, totally. And I've seen and we've experienced a few M&A deals that didn't go through at the last minute because once you start getting into the details of, Well, this is how it's going to work. Here's how we acquire clients, and here's what we expect from our clients, and here's how we do our billing, and that's different how you are doing it. So this can be a night and day change for a business owner, especially you. You had your own business for 20 plus years, and you're used to doing certain things. So there is definitely, again, you want to set the goal and say, what do we want to do with acquisitions? Do we want to grow in a certain geographical space, or we just want to have more endpoints? Is that really the goal? And then just make sure that these entrepreneurs or these owners that are then going to merge or be acquired, that they're in line with it. You One of the things that I tell my partners now is M&A is another sales channel. So you have to have another sales process as you do with your direct clients. So you've got to vet them. You got to make sure that they're a good fit. And then ongoing, you want to make sure the expectations are set. So you want to be able to say, okay, here's what it's going to look like after the deal. And then you, ideally, are on the same page, both parties.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, it's not an easy thing, but there's a lot of activity in the space, a lot of opportunity.

Embracing Sales and Marketing in the IT Space

Tim Fitzpatrick

So can you walk us through? So with datawise now, right? You got a new thing going on. Can you walk us through what channels you are using, evaluating to grow datawise? What's working? What's not? What are you learning along the way?

Rudy Ordaz
So IT, I would say we haven't fully embraced or many many IT companies look at sales and marketing a lot of times like an afterthought. And you work with, you work with IT companies, so I probably don't have to tell you that. But I've seen it in multiple companies, and a lot of times it's an afterthought, but it's an investment to grow the business and pick your channels that are working for you. Referrals is what IT companies typically say, Oh, I don't have to advertise, or I don't have to go networking or do anything else because my current clients will refer business to me. Am I pretty close to what you hear often?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You totally hit a nail on the head there. That's how most MSPs are growing. Most of them are doing it passively, so they're just letting referrals happen rather than having a system and a referral program in place to try and drive more. The reality is, and this, again, this goes back to your point of goals. Most MSPs hit a ceiling with referrals, and if they want to grow past that ceiling, they have to look at doing other things. Some people never hit that ceiling. They're just happy with where they're at, and that's totally okay. But most MSPs that have larger growth goals hit a ceiling at some point. Now, I've seen that ceiling pretty low, and I've seen it much higher than most would expect, but you're going to hit a ceiling. So you hit the nail on that. A hundred % agree. Yeah. So please continue. So thank you. Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz
So with that in mind, the way I set sales goals is what resources do we have, whether it's money or time, and how do we pick our battles for the type of company we are? So at Exigent, we were able to set different sales goals than I did at real-time. And now that I'm at Datawise, I have data... Sorry, I have different sales goals and strategies. I personally spend a lot of my time now going to networking events. So I've researched and and networking is an art in and of itself. You know, you have to find the right B2B groups that actually accept people that are from technology and and that they're open to give out referrals. And I did a lot of that research since my real time days when I was looking at Or how do I meet more people? How do I get my brand in front of more customers? Because the more you stay top of mind, that's why it works with your clients to get referrals, is now you want your network connections to think of you as the IT provider or the technology provider that comes to mind. So networking is one of my strategies. SEO is also another strategy we've had success with, and we invested in it quite a bit at Exigen as well. So these are strategies that you can use if you don't have a big marketing budget, because a lot of times I know that's the bottleneck for a lot of these small companies where they say, Well, I can't take 5% of my revenue and put it into marketing right now. And maybe I don't want to. But you can't expect to have the same success that a company that does put that investment towards their marketing and sales as you when you're not doing those same investments.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Really, there's a few things I want to pull out of what you just shared because I think there's some really good stuff in there. One is a lot of, and this is not just MSPs, any of the B2B clients that we've worked with. There's so many different marketing channels and tactics within those channels. People often fall into the trap of, Gosh, I have to be doing all of these things. And the reality is you don't. I mean, you're focused on a couple of different things right now. That's good. I always recommend that folks go deep in fewer marketing channels and tactics than trying to go wide. Because there's plenty of businesses that are incredibly successful with two to four prime marketing tactics and channels. So I love the fact that you're like, Hey, I'm going to focus. And you got to give it time because these things take time. I also find that most people have unrealistic expectations. And this is really this is partly marketing's fault for over-promising and under-delivering. But marketing takes time.

Rudy Ordaz
Yeah, Tim. I mean, you've been working on our marketing for 30 days. How come I don't have new clients yet.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, exactly. It doesn't work that way. You're networking. You can't just go to one networking event and be like, I didn't get any leads. Relationships take time, right? As much as we want to skip those steps and get the relationship from, I just met you to, let's get married, it doesn't work that way. And I think we love it when it's a linear process, but a lot of marketing is not a linear process. Building relationships, you can take people through steps, but each relationship is a little bit different. And so we have that flexibility.

Rudy Ordaz
Yeah, and each person is different. Even one tactic that works for one salesperson doesn't work for the next person as well. I have colleagues that love pressing our vendors for the, what leads are you going to bring us? I want to take advantage of the marketing material. So vendors and partners, that's one channel that we are utilizing. Networking is another one. And eventually M&A is another one that we're working on. So you have to have these channels that you spend your time and money on and then do the work, cultivate your relationships, and get in front of as many people as possible so that you then become that trusted advisor, or you become that referral partner. And we want referrals to flow both ways. So we want our vendors to say, Hey, these guys are good. They not only use our product or service, but they've referred other people to us. So it keeps that flywheel going of referrals. So even those people that say, Oh, I only rely on referrals. And it's like, well, are you doing everything you could with referrals?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Correct. There's always gaps.

Rudy Ordaz
At your channel. There could always be gaps in what you're doing.

Tim Fitzpatrick
There's always gaps. So when we look for quick win opportunities, we're always looking for what's already working and where are the gaps in that particular process? Because there always are gaps. And if we can fill those gaps, we can get quicker revenue wins while we're working on longer term initiatives. But I always tell people, have impatience with action and patience with results. We got to get out to take action fast, get out there and learn, but you have to have patience with the results because the results take time. And nobody wants to hear that.

Rudy Ordaz
I totally agree.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Nobody wants to hear that.

Rudy Ordaz
Well, yeah. I mean, the reality of it is on the client side, being the client of marketing products, you want instant gratification, right? You want to say, okay, so if I do a couple of posts, then people should know who I am now, right? And now getting started with video, it's like, Oh, if I post a couple of videos, should I People trust me now because now they're seeing who I am and what my story is. But you have to hunker down for the long haul. It's going to take six months to a year, even for you to get good at what you're trying to do. So you want to invest in it with your time and money. And then ideally, you're putting the right team together, whether it's outsourced to a marketing company or you're hiring somebody in-house or a partnership to help you achieve that goal.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. That's one of the toughest things I think about sales and marketing is we have to shift. As humans, we're wired for that short term gratification. But marketing doesn't work that way. We have to look at it. It's not an expense. It is an investment, and it's something that we're going to do for the long term. If you can't shift that mindset, you're always going to give up on sales and marketing efforts long before you've given them enough time to work.

Rudy Ordaz
Yeah. I don't hold it against anybody. Everybody runs their business how they want to. That's why I back to the first question, what's your goal?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, what's your goal? That's right.

Rudy Ordaz
I want to build a huge company. Are you ready to invest in sales and marketing?

Leveraging Past Experience and Starting Fresh

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, exactly. So I want You have experience outside of other industries. Custom Cycling Apparel was one of them. Before coming back to IT, what lessons from outside the MSP and IT world have shaped how you approach growth today?

Rudy Ordaz
Yeah, that's a good question because it made a huge difference that I wasn't aware of at the time in the the trajectory of my career. Because like I said, I started in 1999 working for a big company, very corporate IT assignments. And that's what I really thought IT was. At one point, I did work for a small boutique consulting company on the west side of LA, catering to high networth and high touch white glove service. That really taught me about just upping your customer service game and really being Johnny on the spot when it comes to a service delivery aspect. But when I was training for triathlons and cycling in the early 2000s, I was still working corporate IT jobs, and I was going to these events on the weekends and training all the time. And my entrepreneurial mindset said, Well, can I make money while I'm at these events or when I'm out at these races? And that's when I saw the clothing and the custom apparel market. And so I made I made a decision to learn that business. I went to work for a manufacturer for a couple of years and learned how to be a rep. And then I started my own brand. And so that was about a five-year stint where I was working for somebody, started my own brand. And then when I started to wind that down and made a decision that I was going to go back into IT, I thought I was just going to go back to being a technician again. And so when I got back into IT, I took a job working for a school district and taking care of a handful of networks up and down California. Then I joined my first MSP, and the owners from these MSPs that I had been talking to, and eventually I went to work for one, they said, Well, you have some sales skills also. And I said, Well, I don't really consider myself a salesperson or a sales guy. In fact, my brother, who is a very good salesperson and thrived in the mobile phone and telco, more on that side. I always just thought of myself as like, I'm a tech. I know how to fix problems. I'm very patient. That's why I'm good at the tech side. But then when I got back into work in the MSPs, I noticed that I did have these skills. I became a little bit more assertive with what I asked for. I learned how to frame what a customer was looking for. I could then put it into words and build a quote out of it. And that made a big difference because then that opened up the idea to me that, well, maybe I could start another company and focus on growing that company versus focusing on doing the work for that company. And that was huge for me. Then I started thinking, well, if I could set up with a partner, I can grow a business. Then I could add more resources and actually grow something bigger than just myself. Because I had a little bit of a small mindset or limiting mindset where I thought, oh, if I have a business, it's me, and I have to do the business myself, as opposed to I have to build the right team for the goal. And at the time, it was definitely I wanted to build something bigger than just myself.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. It's interesting because I think sometimes it's easy for us to overlook the past experience we have and how we can leverage that in our current situation. But we always can. There's always things that we can pull from that. And there's always things that if we're looking for it, we can learn from other industries and apply to ours. And all of a sudden, it seems new because nobody's applying it in your industry, but there's so many opportunities like that if we're looking for it. It's like your reticular activating system, right? You buy a Tesla and all of a sudden, you see Teslas all over the freaking road every day, where you didn't notice them before, right? So what we focus on, we will see more of.

Rudy Ordaz
Totally. 100 % agree.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, all kinds of opportunities there. So, Rudy, this has been great, man. I want to ask you one last question as we wrap things up. You've had all kinds of different experience on your journey. Knowing what you know now, is there anything that you would do differently?

Rudy Ordaz
Anything I would do differently? It's hard to pick one thing because if I could correct all my mistakes, I guess I would. But I think a better way to look at it, or the way I look at it, is I like to learn from my mistakes, and I like to be aware of my own shortcomings. And that's why I love the idea of getting up every day, building a business with the right team. So if I have shortcomings in a certain part of the business, I'm grateful that I can bring in a partner or an employee that can then make up for those shortcomings. And the lessons learned from the past are how then I make decisions going forward. I try to not make the same mistake twice, or at least not too many times. So it doesn't cost me more. But as I'm growing a business, I really think you're correct putting the correct team place is really going to make a difference for you to hit those goals.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I love it. Rudy, thank you so much for taking the time, man. Where can people connect with you?

Rudy Ordaz
You can search for me on LinkedIn. That's probably the easiest, fastest, or you can go to datawisenetworks.com, and our social media links are there, and you can connect to me through any of those links as well.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. Awesome. We'll make sure that that info is in the show notes, and just search for Rudy Ordaz, O-R-D-A-Z on LinkedIn. Go connect with him over there. Thank you for taking the time, man. I really appreciate it. It's been a great conversation. Those of you that are watching or listening, appreciate you as well. If 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, if you feel like you are stuck in the marketing maze, you're not sure what to do, how to get out of it, go to marketingenginescorecard.com. In less than two minutes, we will help you identify which of the nine key elements of a marketing engine are holding your business back. So thank you again. Until next time. Take care.