What Most MSPs Are Missing When It Comes To Finding Great People

What Most MSPs Are Missing When It Comes To Finding Great People

Tim Fitzpatrick
Right now, MSPs are being squeezed from both sides. Clients expect more, margins are tight, talent's expensive, and AI is changing the rules. The real question is not whether AI will impact labor. It's how prepared you are for what comes next. Today, we're talking about the convergence of AI and labor, what it means for MSP specifically, and why so many are still hesitant to use offshore talent, even when the options are wide open. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult, and it definitely shouldn't be guesswork. I am super excited to have Alex Joy with Ibex Staffing Solutions with me today. Alex, welcome and thanks for being here.

Alexander Joy
Thank you so much, Tim. It's a pleasure.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes. So we got all kinds of good stuff we're going to talk about today. Before we jump into that, I want to ask a few rapid fire questions to help us get to know you a little bit.

Alexander Joy
Sounds good.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Are you ready to jump in?

Alexander Joy
I am. Attack me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes, let's do it. So when you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Alexander Joy
Well, I have two young children. I have twins, a boy and a girl who are 17 months old. So while my life used to be filled with partying and gambling and all sorts of other things like that, these days I'm mostly spending time in the playroom with them and reading them books and teaching them new words and things like that. So that's a big part of what I spend my time doing these days.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it, man. Yeah, life changes, especially when you have two that are the same age. Mine are 18-part, so not exactly twins, but close enough where you were going through a lot of the same things at the same time.

Alexander Joy
Oh, yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So are you getting sleep?

Alexander Joy
Oh, yeah. I get some sleep. I get a little bit more than my wife does. She's a saint. She usually gets up when there's a cry in the middle of the night, and she knows that I have work the next day. So we're very fortunate in that sense. We're a good team.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. What's your hidden talent?

Alexander Joy
Well, I guess this was a hard one for me to think about, but I can sing. I wouldn't say that I'm a great singer, but I've been singing in the shower and around the house since I was six years old, and I can carry a tune pretty well.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Any favorites or just whatever comes top of mind?

Alexander Joy
I'm a huge grunge fan. I've probably sang Nervana and Soundgarden and Allison Chains, more times than I can count. But actually, I got my start figuring out that I could sing by singing Elvis songs when I was a kid. I can actually do a decent Elvis impression. You're not going to get it on this podcast, but I can do a decent Elvis.

Tim Fitzpatrick
All right. Yeah, I was going to say, I'm not going to put you on the spot. What's the best piece of advice you've been given?

Alexander Joy
Well, so I used to be a real victim of the whole thing of, Comparison is the thief of joy. And I think growing up as a millennial, I guess you could call me, I was born in '86. And so I guess I'm the start of the millennials, right? Social media was a big part of my life once I got to college. As I started developing my professional life, I was always comparing myself to other people and comparing what I had and what they had and what I was doing. I remember I read a quote, and unfortunately, I don't remember who I read it from, so I can't properly attribute it. But the quote was, If you focus on what you have, you gain what you lack. If you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. I try to think of that all the time whenever I'm thinking about, Am I doing enough to propel my life forward? Am I doing enough to be where I'm supposed to be in this life? And honestly, am I doing enough to achieve my goals? And I try to remember, think about all I have today. I think about everything I have, everything I've already gained. And whenever I am able to focus on that, it gives me peace.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Comparison, the Thief of joy is one of my favorites. I go back to that all the time.

Alexander Joy
It's so true.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Oh, It's so true. And it's even more relevant now with all the social media. It's just so easy to look at highlight reels on social media and think that you're behind or you're lacking or whatever. Whatever limiting belief slips in there.

Alexander Joy
You're right. Those are highlight reels. You said it correctly. No one's looking at the bloopers of everyone else's life, right?

Tim Fitzpatrick
No. What's one thing about that surprises people?

Alexander Joy
I think once people get to know me, the thing that surprises them is that I'm actually a little bit introverted. I think oftentimes when I'm meeting people, I'm in a public setting. I'm pretty I'm going. I can be almost loud. Sometimes I like to express myself through humor and at levity situations. And I think it's surprising sometimes when people discover that I would often be rather laying in my hammock reading a book than in those environments, right? And that's the introvert in me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Dude, I'm an introvert, too. And one of the things that somebody shared with me a while ago that really resonated with me is people immediately think that introverts can't have a hard time being out in the open, but that's really not it. It's we recharge our batteries.

Alexander Joy
Exactly.

Tim Fitzpatrick
In solitude, right? Or being alone or in smaller groups. And that really did resonate with me because it's like, Hey, look, we're doing a podcast interview. We both put ourselves out there all the time. But when I really want to just recharge, it's quiet.

Alexander Joy
Exactly.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What success mean to you?

Alexander Joy
It used to mean a different thing. It used to mean having a skyscraper with my name on it. That's when I was 12. These days, it means having security for my family, really. It's about making sure my kids have nutrition, have education, have a warm home to sleep in, and that no matter what decision I make or any mistake that I make, can rob them of that. That's success. If I can achieve If I can achieve that, everything else is not important. I could have to sell everything else in my life. But as long as they have those core things and they're good, I've been successful.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's interesting how our definition of success changes as we go through life. What used to be important isn't nearly as important anymore. Because of that, our definitions of what success is evolve with it. Where's your happy place?

Alexander Joy
Ego dissolves, right?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes. Sorry. Where's your happy place?

Alexander Joy
I alluded to it earlier. I'm certainly very happy in a hammock with a book. That's always a good time when the weather's nice. I can spend hours in there when the time allows. But I also very much enjoy cars. I'm big into car culture. I love going to a good cars and coffee on a weekend. Find a nice cars and coffee on a Sunday, drive your car there, shake hands and meet other people that are car enthusiasts, look at other people's cool cars and their builds and things like that. So I've been a car guy since I was a kid, and I really, really enjoy that. So the first cars and coffee up here where I live in New Hampshire starts next month. And so I've already started the countdown for when I get to go enjoy that first one.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Any cars in particular?

Alexander Joy
I'm huge into British cars. I own a Lotus. I love Aston Martens. I love McLaren's. I'm really big into British.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Awesome. What qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?

Alexander Joy
I definitely value a sense of humor. I don't think anyone should take anything that they do too seriously. It honestly bothers me. It is like corrosive to me when I'm interacting with someone that just has zero sense of humor or zero levity allowed in what they're doing. It's like, no matter what you're doing, you could be doing heart surgery. It's still acceptable to crack a joke. You know what I mean? It's still acceptable to just enjoy it a little bit. But I think probably more important than that, and that's really more of a pet peeve of mine, but I think more important is I really value people that are true to their word. When you say you're going to do something and you really do it and you really go through it, even if it's not beneficial to you or convenient for you, that , to me, is a quality person.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I would say that when it's not convenient for them is really the true test, right? I think it's easy to do it in other cases, but with When that happens, it's a lot more challenging to do it. Alex, tell us more about what you're doing at Ibex.

Alexander Joy
Absolutely. My background is in the MSP world. I used to be CEO of an MSP called Network Coverage. I helped grow that business to nearly nine figures in revenue. And as part of that, I built out a really big offshore team, and we had a hybrid onshore/offshore workforce. We were doing a lot of really bleeding edge things with AI before it was the buzzword that it is today. And so I learned a lot, obviously, about what really moves the needle in the MSP space, especially when it comes to labor, labor cost, and how that can influence so many things, including the sales process, your employee and customer retention, and really all those things. So I decided to start Ibex after I left my MSP, and really it was because I just saw a massive of gap in quality offshore providers for the MSP space. There are certainly companies that I think do a pretty good job and focus on MSPs, but I still hear, and this is from clients of mine, that it's never as precise or as efficient as I know it can be. There's still a very much a shotgun approach to positioning talent to MSPs where it's like, Hey, here's 10 resumes. You tell me which of these 10 is going to be the fit, as opposed to saying, Here's two. They're both great. They're both going to be successful for you. You pick the one that you want. I think we can save people a lot of time in that approach. I just saw that there was an opportunity to do it better and to take a more prescriptive approach to implementing talent for an MSP from the way that I had done it when I was hiring people for mine.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Are you focusing on building offshore teams in specific areas locations, or is it all over? Tell us more about that.

Alexander Joy
I do furnish talent from the Philippines almost exclusively at this point. We do have the ability to source talent in other geographies, such as Mexico, for example, or Croatia being another. Honestly, the demand hasn't been there, and a lot of it has to do with if you can get great talent and it's at the lowest cost basis, which tends to be either the Philippines or if you want lower cost, you can go to India and whatnot. But basically, it's about that perfect mixture of I need great communication. I need super, super adept skill in whatever it is the role is that I'm trying to hire for. And then it has to be at the right price. And so if you can meet all of those goals without having to leave the lowest cost areas, then yeah, that's what you're going to do every time. And so Whenever I furnish multiple options to a client, I say, Well, look, here's a couple of candidates from the Philippines. Here's a candidate from Mexico. And the candidate from Mexico is 20 % more expensive, but just as good as the candidate from the Philippines. It tends to be a no brainer why they can continue to select the Philippines.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. There's a lot of good people. There's a lot of good people everywhere, but there's a lot of good people in the Philippines. And the other thing I found, too, is there work ethic tends to be really strong.

Alexander Joy
Very much so.

The Convergence of AI and Labor

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's a great place to be outsourcing from. So let's start this conversation off with AI. It's hard not to talk about it, right? Let's talk about the convergence of AI and labor right now. How do you see this playing out and evolving? Break out the crystal ball.

Alexander Joy
Sure. Yeah. So several years ago, I had, SEO of my MSP, I had started an initiative to build out basically a generative AI solution, like a chatbot type thing that tapped into our documentation, knowledge base, our ticketing system. And it was meant to act as an escalation resource for every technician in the company. And I knew that the future was going to be essentially giving superhuman recall and superhuman knowledge to your people in your company. And I think we're already there. Whether people are using, again, just a ChatGPT or a Claude or things like that, or various other types of solutions that are really specific to the MSP environment, where now there's insights in the ticketing systems and insights in the documentation platforms. That's really the first evolution, right, of what traditional support is in our space. And I think that's the first area that we've seen the impact. What we're starting to see more is now there's the agentic layer of artificial intelligence, where tickets are being solved automatically. Things are being automated, and not just automated in a traditional RPA sense. They're being automated in a selfhealing, self-improving manner. So now a move add change, that type of thing that normally would have been a process that would have had to been scripted and engineered is now built built by an artificial intelligence that learns the process. And then if something changes in that process at some point, it automatically adjusts and fixes it so that a human doesn't even have to intervene. So what does this mean? What this means, I think, is that the typical entry-level role on the help desk, a lot of times what was typically offshored for where someone wanted someone to check backups or someone to clear alerts or someone to push buttons and do move that changes, that whole role is disappearing, really. And that's okay, because in my opinion, that role was never really something that a human should have been doing in the first place. That role was very menial, very boring, but not and honestly not something that anyone was really learning from and growing out of. It was like you're stuck there forever until a piece of software replaces you. What I think is happening here is the tiers of help desk, tier one, for example, tier two, tier three, these aren't going away. They're just changing. The definition of this is changing. A tier one is just going to continue to be someone that delivers exceptional customer service and is really a guiding presence for the client. It's someone to help make the client know that there is a human on the other end of the phone or on the other end of the chat that's there to help them and that's there to respond if there's a bigger issue or a bigger emergency, whether it be a technical emergency or an emotional emergency. There's no one there. There's a human there. But the AI might be doing a lot of the work. As we continue to move forward, I'm sure you've seen things like OpenClaw, where now the AI is directly interacting with the computer itself. We're not too far away from that. We're not too far from there being an RMM agent that essentially is actually doing the clicks and actually doing the work on the system. The tier one or the tier two or what have you is really just a supervisory layer and a customer service enhancer for that role. So that's my crystal ball. It might be foggy, it might be cloudy, but I think to me, that's where things are moving.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So you see, at least at the entry level, that that's going to be handled by AI, and then there will be human interaction or intervention when it escalates to a certain threshold.

Alexander Joy
Yeah, I think for that. But I think there's also... I mean, I'm sure you've called your credit card company recently, maybe, or maybe a bank or something like that, a business that's already utilizing AI for their phone system because that's really common these days. I don't know about you, but to me, it's eerie. Even if it sounds exactly like a person and it seems like you're talking to a real person, if you do a little test and you say, Are you a real person? And you find out that they're not, it's creepy, right? So as much as I think people do want AI to make things more efficient for them and to, again, automate fixes, I just don't think humans are ready to replace the interaction side of things with robots, really. And maybe that's going to take five years for us to get to that comfort level where we maybe will get to that point. But yeah, I just think that there's always going to have to be a person that understands humans and human emotions and human urgency somewhere in that in that formula.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I agree. The thing that I keep hearing about and I see on the marketing side is people are now using AI to do a lot of these entry-level things. And if that's replacing people that used to be doing those, how do people that are just coming into the workforce actually get these higher-tier jobs? I don't have an answer to that. I haven't heard anybody that's actually offered up an answer that makes any sense. But I see it happening, and that is going to be something that we're going to have to address.

Alexander Joy
You're 100% right. People use law firms as a great example of that. Kids used to come out of law school and they would clerk for a little while or what have you. There used to be hundreds of them for for law firms that would have 10 attorneys. Now there might be five of them for a law firm with 10 attorneys because the rest of it is going to be handled by AI. What happens to the rest of those law students in terms of now trying to get their skills up to a certain level? It's a really interesting thing because I also think this is creating, and I want to digress on this, but I do think it's creating a little bit of an entrepreneur economy now where people are going to be learning that, you know what? Maybe I can't intern somewhere or I can't start in the ground level of company. And so what I actually have to try to do is leverage artificial intelligence myself to fill in my own gaps where I don't know certain things and actually find my entrepreneurial spirit and maybe start something directly on my own because otherwise There's just nowhere for me to get started.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's going to be interesting. We'll see how it plays out. How does labor and talent play into organic growth in selling in the in the MSP space? Organic growth is a really challenging thing in the space. But I don't think a lot of people think about labor and talent when they think about organic growth. It's not the first thing that comes to mind, right? It's down for us a little bit.

Alexander Joy
Yeah. I'm an organic growth junkie. If there were a clinic for organic growth addiction, I would probably be in it. At my MSP, my team and I were able to grow our company to just shy of 40 million completely organically before we transacted with private equity and started doing acquisitions. We were very much a unicorn in that space. We had just some eye-watering years of growth. We did that in part by having a low cost labor pool that we could leverage for so many reasons. Number one, too often MSPs, especially smaller MSPs, are offering a commodity service and expecting a price point that is not in line with that service. They think that they can just differentiate themselves by saying that they're special, as opposed to actually delivering something that's special. And so how do you deliver something special? Well, one, you need to own your service factory. I've talked to small MSPs many times where they're outsourcing their entire help desk, and they really don't have any control over what makes it unique. And so that right there is, in my opinion, a nonstarter. I understand doing that to a certain point, but even once you get to a couple of hundred endpoints under management, you should probably try to now build out your own service factory and really put your fingerprints all over it so that it is delivering the message that you're trying to convey to your market. What makes my service better? What makes my service special? Why should someone work for me rather than some other MSP? That's one thing. The other is adding talent to allow you to expand your service offerings. So not just offering the same things that everyone's offering. If you're an MSP that isn't currently providing some type of service for your customers in the form of AI enablement or automation, you're behind. You should be doing that. That should be part of your portfolio. And the excuse often is, well, I'm not doing it internally, which is a good excuse. I'm not doing enough of it myself. I don't understand it well enough, or it's too expensive. The labor for that is too costly. I can't go hire someone that needs 120 or $150,000 a year to be my AI lead for this team. How am I going to do this? Again, that's where offshore really comes in, because you can staff these things up while doing it within your budget makes it so much easier now to go to market with these types of initiatives. And so differentiating by controlling your service factory, differentiating by expanding your service offerings are really two areas this year that are then going to lead to you winning more deals and ultimately growing faster. But the third aspect of it is now you can actually go up market. So traditionally, MSPs are going after SMB. That's their market. If you talk to companies that are in the mid-market or enterprise space, they're going to laugh because they're going to say, Why would I hire you for anything when you're maybe even more expensive? Because you have to layer in your margin, you're maybe more expensive than what I can just hire for on the street. I've already built out the service factory. I already have all of these tools I've invested in. I don't want any of your stuff. But if you have an offshore workforce, a low-cost workforce, you can offer a very compelling staff augmentation play where you can say to an enterprise customer or mid-market, Hey, Mr. IT Director, let me take your tier one. Let me take your knock. Let me take your after-hours, your weekend work. Let me take these things off of the plate of your internal team. Now you can repurpose your internal team to do more meaningful things, projects, acquisition integrations, automation activities, whatever the case may be, let them attack their do more list internally while you take all of these other things off their plates that aren't sexy and that they don't even really want to be doing anyway. But that's great high margin work for you to be able to take over if you have a low cost workforce.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, the other thing, too, is if you can't find the people you need to grow, you can't grow. So you hit a capacity ceiling, right? And so with what you're doing at Ibex, Alex, you can help them do that faster, right? You can help them staff much, much quicker than if they were hiring internally or trying to hire somebody stateside. Which to me is a huge, huge advantage.

What AI Enablement Means for MSPs

Tim Fitzpatrick
Let's talk about AI enablement just a little bit because I hear a... There are a lot of people talking about this in the space. Msps need to be offering AI solutions and this and that. I'm curious what your thoughts are on this or how you think MSP should be looking at this And I'm going to share how I view this as a jumping off point. But because I see this on the... We all see it, right? There's a general, Hey, I'm an AI consultant, right? Okay, great. How do you help? I think MSPs are positioned to handle IT and do a lot of things within AI. However, you can't expect somebody to implement AI across a business if they're not experienced in that area of it. If you don't know marketing, how the hell are you going to implement AI tools in the marketing department or in finance? So I think that you have to have experience to be able to implement the AI tools in that specific area of the business. How do you see this playing out for MSPs?

Alexander Joy
Yeah, for sure. It's very similar, I think, to the traditional support ecosystem when it comes to, say, for example, supporting financial tools and software for finance teams or marketing solutions or estimating solutions in different verticals. If you're working for attorneys, if you're working for dentists, if you're working for people in construction, there's all sorts of different specialty software and tools and terminology and things that you can't possibly claim to know as well as they do, right? Yeah. But you have to be able to know how to implement them safely and effectively, and then how to be able to enable their use of those solutions, right? And so it's really about guiding them to the right partners, right? So guiding them to the right AI-enabled or AI-centric platform that's going to be the right tool for them. It's then about implementing it for them efficiently, cost-effectively, but also, and most importantly, safely. Being the guide for them to say, You really shouldn't be allowing this to access this data, or, You really shouldn't have this system talking to all these other systems, or Maybe we should, but we're going to do that for you, and we're going to make sure that's done in a security-first manner, right? So that's really, I think, the main role of the MSP is doing that thing. And then there's the, I guess, more generic aspect of it. Again, if we're talking about providing access to Claude in a domain environment or access to copilot, right? That's not hard stuff, right? They have the software. They have the subscriptions already in those solutions that say, okay, look, we'll make sure your data is secure and it doesn't leave this environment and all these other things. So they're solving a lot of those concerns for you. Really, in those scenarios, it's about making sure that it's the right tool for what your client is doing on a day to day basis across the organization, and then making sure that there's actual buy-in for it. There's nothing worse than getting your client all set to go with this new solution. We're like, Hey, you know what? We're going to deploy Copilot across 500 users here, and this is going to be awesome. We're going to notice all these different efficiency improvements. And then you do it, and then you do an audit, and you find out six months later that 20 people have used it. That doesn't do anyone any good. Being the educator as well as being the chaperone for all of these things, that's a huge part of the role. The MSPs have to become the experts in as many of these things as possible. But it's really no different, in my opinion, than how we've had to act for decades when it comes to being experts in software that we don't use.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, what you're saying makes a lot of sense to me because the AI tools that they're using are integrating with IT. It's the MSP's responsibility to make sure that that's being used safely, that data is being protected. They are, I think, in the best position to make sure that as these things are being launched, that people are being trained, at least to a certain level, right? And if there's specifics in each department, well, then those departments, I think, need to then take the wheel from that. I see this with my friends that work for larger companies right now, where a lot of them, their companies are launching Copilot because they're Microsoft clients, and it's exactly what you described. They're failing because the companies aren't training. They're just like, Okay, you have Copilot, go use it. It's like, okay, well, what am I supposed to do with it? So, yeah, there's a lot of opportunities there.

Alexander Joy
And we really shouldn't be surprised because for years, we've been installing the Microsoft Office Suite for, what, 30 years? And how many people at every company can say that they actually know how to use Excel to its fullest extent, or know how to use PowerPoint to its fullest extent? Most of the people using these suites, they're basically using Word occasionally, and they're using Outlook. And every now and then, they build the most basic of basic spreadsheets for something or open something. But people typically don't really know how to use the tools that they're given. And it's very wasteful. It's very wasteful. It's very inefficient. You're not really enabling the most out of your I think AI is going to change that a lot. I really do.

Why So Many MSPs Are Not Using Offshore Talent

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I think it is, too. So last question before we wrap things up, why are so many MSPs not using offshore despite people? It's nothing new. Why are they not jumping into it?

Alexander Joy
Yeah. I think, and this is both from experience as well as just my perception of it. It's a combination of the two and things that I hear. It's intimidating, number one. For whatever reason, people have, even now in 2026, people have a strong aversion to trusting someone halfway across the world. They just do. I've been building teams since I was 13 years old. I ran a team of about 50 people around the globe when I was 15. Running websites and things like that. I learned to trust people in great distances very early on. I think I'm the minority in that, clearly. But I think that's a big part of it. People just have trouble trusting people, and they don't realize that, frankly, if I were hiring someone in Florida or New York City, and my office was in Boston, it's no different than if I were now hiring someone in Manila or or Bombay or wherever. It just isn't different in this day and age. I can secure their endpoint. They're the same. I can lock down their access. It's exactly the same, all those things. I think the other aspect of it is that people don't truly understand the talent that's available outside in the rest of the world. So they make all of these assumptions. And honestly, whether it's movies and commercials and things like that, that have warped our perception or just the terrible experience that so many of us had with outsource labor back in the '90s and early 2000s, where you'd be on the phone with somebody and all of a sudden you get transferred, and you would hear the difference in your phone. Suddenly, the noise level, the floor was just risen, and you were like, Okay, I'm talking to someone in Bangladesh right now. You just knew it before they even said anything. Then the experience would be terrible. Everyone got a bad taste in their mouth because of how poorly executed that was back in the day. The reality is, I can hire pretty much anywhere in the world these days. Their Internet connection is likely going to be strong. The voice is going to sound great. Depending on what geo that you're looking to hire in, you can absolutely find people with very minimal to almost no accents. The experience is dramatically improved. But the talent is really what's so amazing about it. People just still assume that, Oh, okay, you hire in the Philippines? That must mean you do only tier ones, or you only do NOC resources. No, I can literally find anything in the Philippines. I can find someone that could be your director of IT if that's what you want. I can find data scientists. I can find cloud engineers. Any type of role, I can find someone for that role that's that's exceptional. And again, they're going to be a third, maybe a fourth of the cost, depending on what their experience is and whatnot. So I just think that that's the reason why so many MSPs, especially MSPs, aren't doing it these days. They just have they have outdated data on what's available out there, and they have outdated, inaccurate perceptions on what it's really like. And so they've talked themselves out of it before they've ever even explored.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I think there's a lot of fear there. But once you do it and you get the experience, you realize exactly what you said. I have three people on my team that are all overseas, and one of them is in the Philippines. And if you talk to him on the phone, if you didn't know that he was from the Philippines, you would have no idea. He speaks perfect English. There's no accent. So if you are placing people that need to be in positions where they're going to be on the phone, interacting with clients, you can find people, right? Man, I've talked to people. I've talked to tech support departments for very large companies. And I'm like, dude, are you in a boiler room situation here? I can hear people talking in the background. This is so freaking unprofessional. It's not even funny. And these are large companies. So don't worry about it. They're not even doing it great. You can do a better job. You know how unnerving that is, too? When you're on a tech support call and you're like, Dude, there's five people talking in the background behind you. What the hell is going on? So Any MSPs that are watching or listening to this, get over it. If you need to help, do it. Because I know that you guys can do it better than most situations that a lot of us have had with larger companies that just don't care.

Alexander Joy
Oh, without question. Yeah. Again, I personally screen every candidate that we furnish. That's one of my promises. It takes a lot of time out of my week. I probably spend 30 hours a week screening candidates, even though I'm CEO and I'm I'm obviously doing a lot of other things as well. But it's my product, right? So I don't want to dilute it. We let all of our candidates work from home, which is a huge boon to their quality of life, but it also helps prevent that thing that you were just talking about, right? We're not jamming people like sardines into a call center, right? So that's just really huge. But yeah. Another thing I hear sometimes is people will say, Well, I'm a Canadian company, and I prefer to just hire Canadians, or I'm an American company, I prefer to hire Americans, that thing. I respect that if that's what you want to do. But again, I was CEO of an American company. My job was to do what was going to make that company as profitable and as successful as possible. That meant I had to give the best quality of life to my staff, whether they be onshore or offshore, and I had to give the best experience to my customers.

Alexander Joy
The best and easiest way to do that is to have more talent for the same dollars. There's really no other way around it. More talent for the same dollars means that you're doing the most that you can as the owner or CEO of your company.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love it. Awesome stuff, man. Any last minute thoughts you want to share with us before we wrap it up?

Alexander Joy
Yeah. Just one other thing I would say is that I have conversations sometimes. I actually made a LinkedIn post about this the other day. I'll be talking to a small MSP owner, and he'll be saying, Oh, man, I really need some help. He's like, But this all sounds great. I just need two months to get my house in order, and then I'll be good to go. I just need two months to get my house in order, and then I'll be ready to start this onboarding thing. What I try to tell these MSP owners all the time is, take action. Nothing's ever going to be perfect. Your documentation is never going to be perfect. Your onboarding is never going to be perfect. The situation with your current customers or what's happening with this project or that project, nothing is ever going to be perfect. You are constantly in a state of motion. So don't wait to do something that can have an immediate impact, a positive impact on your organization. Take action, do it now, start moving in the direction that you need to fix your problems. And that might be adding someone to help you make appointments. It might be helping someone kill your ticket backlog or kill some projects, wherever the case may be. Take action and start doing it. And I'm more of a shoot first, aim later type of person. So I realized that that's easier for me and it's harder for other people, but I can't say that enough.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, we learn by the actions we take, right? If you never take them, you miss out on all kinds of learning opportunities and growth opportunities. Where's the best place for people to connect with you, Alex?

Alexander Joy
You can definitely find us at goibex.it. And you can also find me on my LinkedIn. I'm under Alex Joy. And yeah, I welcome connections, messages. Always happy to help and provide feedback or guidance to MSPs. I love talking about organic growth. I love talking about service delivery. These are things I just enjoy. So if you ever want to have a conversation or share a coffee virtually, feel free to reach out.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. We'll make sure that those links go in the show notes. Reach out. If you're growing, you're thinking about hiring, at least reach out to Alex and have a conversation to learn more. My interactions with you so far have been fantastic, and I appreciate connecting with you, and I appreciate you taking the time. Those of you that are watching or listening, if you want to connect with us, you can do that at rialtomarketing.com. It's rialtomarketing.com. The other tool we've got for you is at marketingenginescorecard.com. If you want to know which of the nine key core components of your marketing engine are slowing down your growth, that's where you can do it. Takes less than two minutes. So take advantage of that, marketingenginescorecard.com. And until next time, take care.