Driving org. excellence: IT Insights with Temco

Marco: Sure, yeah. Hi, my name is Marco Gozun. I’m the senior IT manager at Tempco Logistics. I’ve been with the company for about three years now, and it’s been a really fun story. When I came into the company, we had about 12 sites, and now we’re pushing 80. So, I’ve got to experience a lot of growth with this company and experienced a lot of growth in myself and my career. So, yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. We’re gonna dig into that a whole lot more. 

Yoav: To introduce myself, my name is Yoav. I’m the general manager for Atera here in North America. I sit in New York, which, as you know, the East Coast is obviously the best coast. Lovely to meet everyone. In terms of a few housekeeping rules, we’re recording this webinar. Everybody who is on here or who has registered is going to get a copy of this webinar to be able to view again later. I’m sure that we’re going to have such interesting things to say that watching it once is just not going to be enough. You also have your Q&A area here on the top right, probably of your screen. Feel free to ask any questions because we are going to dedicate a portion of this webinar to answering your questions. Really, our goal is to make this session as hands-on as possible. We don’t want this to be theoretical discussions in the sky but really kind of hands-on things you can take and apply in your businesses right after we end this webinar in an hour or so. 

In terms of the agenda, there are four rough parts to it. The first one, we’re going to be talking about the IT landscape. We’re going to try and take kind of a 10,000-foot view of what’s happening in the world of IT. We’re going to talk a little bit about the challenges, the opportunities, the risks, and how things are changing. Then we’re going to take it a level down and talk about key strategies. We’re going to talk about what are the best practices, what are the things that Marco is seeing success with at Tempco. From there, we’re going to dive into very tactical topics—what does a day in the life look like, how do you stay on top of what’s going on in the industry, what are you doing with the different kinds of IT tech stack that you’re using, Atera of course included. And then we’re going to get to that Q&A. So that’s roughly what we’re going to be talking about today. 

To kick us off and as we think about this evolving IT landscape, Marco, you just mentioned you’ve been in the world of IT for a while. Can you tell us a little bit, when you take a step back and want to see the forest for the trees, where are we? What are the biggest trends, threats, and opportunities that you’re seeing in the IT space generally? 

Marco: Yeah, I mean, like you were saying, the tech world is just constantly evolving. You’ve got Wi-Fi 7 coming out now; I heard they’re already developing Wi-Fi 8. The amount of threats that are involved in this landscape—I was reading somewhere that the amount of money that companies have paid towards ransomware has exceeded like a hundred billion dollars already this year. So, it’s just kind of crazy. I think it’s really important, with all that being said, to just kind of stay on top, always read articles, be aware of what’s out there, and stay up to date as much as you can. 

Yoav: How would you say, kind of, the biggest challenges maybe that have changed over the last, let’s call it three to five years? You mentioned ransomware, and I’m guessing that that’s a number that continues to grow. But as you look at the state of IT, where it was three to five years ago compared to where it is today, what are those biggest changes when you think about it from a technology perspective, from a threat perspective? I mean, I’m sure AI, which we’re going to be talking about a lot, is a big change, but what else has changed over these last few years? 

Marco: I think it’s just the approach that people are taking towards IT. Especially with a lot of these threats, there are still people who don’t really understand. They get an email and think, “Oh, I won a free coffee, let me click this link,” right? Not a lot of people can really read into suspicious emails or anything like that, and that’s really all that they need—just one little loophole to get in. Before you know it, they’re attacking your network. So, you just kind of have to be aware and make sure that your people are aware. Make sure that your company is enforcing training. We have a KnowBe4 training program, and it ensures that once a month, all of our employees are taking these classes that keep it in their heads every month. So, they’re just aware. 

Yoav: I’m guessing there’s only so much we can do with technology, right? You mentioned that it’s very much about the people involved. Even the finest net is going to let some things through, and ultimately, educating our end users about the threats out there is crucial. You mentioned that at Tempco, once a month, everyone is getting trained. Is that something that your team is doing? Are you expected to also educate people today about the threats of cyber attacks or everything else that’s going on out there? 

Marco: Yes, we have monthly cybersecurity training for any employee that has access to email, and that’s really just to protect ourselves. We had to start enforcing a policy where if you’re not doing your training, your access will be blocked temporarily until you get that done. 

Yoav: How effective has that been? I’m sure there were some very unhappy people who gave you constant excuses about why they couldn’t come to that specific event because their child’s dog’s homework was eaten by their cat. But has that had a material impact, having those sanctions? 

Marco: It was kind of a rough start, but I would say that we’ve been doing it for about a year now. Now we have regional managers and general managers reaching out to us, asking for the exceptions list so that they can approach those people and tell them, “Hey, you need to get this done before the month ends.” 

Yoav: Has that been most effective, getting the managers involved and making sure that they’re holding their teams accountable? You’re basically educating but having somebody else enforce it. For those listening to us right now in the webinar and thinking about how they do this in their business, can you tell us a little bit about how that went on? How did you get that buy-in from those managers? 

Marco: One, they want their people to be able to work, right? And two, I think a lot of IT departments are traditionally very introverted. They don’t really care to talk to people; they prefer to be behind the scenes. Whereas I kind of have this approach where I have no problem talking to these managers and explaining to all of them why it’s important and why we do this kind of stuff, the potential risk that we could be putting our company in. At that point, it was easy buy-in from everybody. 

Yoav: I think that’s a key point. Enforcing through sanctions is one part of it, and it obviously works. If you’re locking people out of their computers, then obviously they’re going to do what they need to get back in so that they can keep their jobs. But really getting that buy-in from managers so that they understand what’s at risk here and how this could impact their teams, the company at large, is crucial. That leads me to a question of how are you seeing roles on your team evolve? When you think about your team, are there roles that you have today that you didn’t have two or three years ago? Where is the emphasis right now inside your team, and how has that changed? 

Marco: Yeah, and this kind of goes hand in hand with the amount of growth that our company has been experiencing over the last few years. When I started, it was me and two other guys, and to date, we have about six technicians, a director above myself, a CIO, and a CISO that we recently hired. We have to make sure that we’re able to scale, and we’ve built a solid team where everybody has their own niche of what they specialize in, and that’s continuing to expand. My cloud specialist has now become probably one of our better security experts on the team. So, whereas probably in the next year, he’s probably going to take on both sides or possibly hand the cloud specialist title off to somebody else. But yeah, we do prefer to promote from within. We’ve seen our telecom analyst is very close to becoming our network administrator. We like to foster our people. I just want to have this environment where we all work together on projects, but at the same time, we’re making sure that we develop people for their future roles, whatever they want to pursue in their careers. And that’s really what I’m trying to get out with this team, and it’s worked out phenomenally. 

Yoav: That’s wonderful. It sounds like you’ve opted to take a path of specialization. You mentioned a cloud specialist. Was that always the case? What we see is there are teams where there are generalists, and everybody’s kind of doing everything. You’ve got teams where there’s a little bit of a deeper specialization. Can you share a little bit about why you guys decided to go the route that you did, and have you seen good impact from that? 

Marco: That had a lot to do with the fact that we were so small when we started out. Our cloud specialist was probably the fourth guy to join our team, and he was already in the middle of going through his certifications for Google and Microsoft. He just ended up being the best guy for that job, so it was something that kind of fell onto him, and it worked out great. But that is kind of how we start a lot of people off. They either already have a specific knowledge base that we’re in need of, and then from there, if they want to pursue something else, we’ll absolutely help them work towards that goal. Or, we start most people off in a general aspect at the support desk, just handling tickets. That gives them an opportunity to learn the landscape of our company and a lot of ins and outs of networking that they didn’t know before. They gain a lot of knowledge doing the support tickets because they just want to find a resolution. A lot of times, they’re reaching out to the cloud specialist like, “Hey, I’m having this issue, can you help me with that?” They gain a lot of knowledge in that process, and it’s a good developmental way to start out in this industry.

Yoav: Does everyone go through that? Meaning, do you have everyone go through a stint on the service desk? Is that something that you guys do continually? What does that look like? Because you talked a lot about developing your team, and I think that’s one of the things that is very unique and special at Tempco, the emphasis that you’re putting on developing the team. How does that work? Give us a little bit of insight. If I’m thinking about how to develop my IT team, what have you done that’s worked? 

Marco: Yeah, so I have one technician, and he was hired earlier this year. He left his previous company—it was kind of a friend of a friend referral, right? He wanted to be in cybersecurity, and I told him, “We don’t really have a full-on job for that yet just because of our size and everything, but you’re going to get some experience in it. And if you’re willing to kind of grind it out and spend some time doing support desk, I can absolutely help you get to where you want to be.” That worked out. Actually, the guy before him aspired to be a developer. He spent probably a year and a half doing support tickets before a position opened up in our business intelligence department. At that point, they were reaching out, already kind of testing him, giving him homework assignments, and this guy grinded, and now he’s there. It’s really just understanding what your employees want because I just want to keep our employees as happy as possible so we can have some level of retention. 

Yoav: That’s exactly what I was going to ask. You mentioned something really interesting, Marco. Sorry, go ahead. 

Marco: Go ahead. 

Yoav: I was just going to say, you mentioned something really interesting here. On the one hand, you’re putting this emphasis on retention, and we all know that the current state of IT is very difficult. Keeping people in IT roles is challenging; hiring for IT roles is challenging. On the one hand, you’re talking about retention, and on the other hand, you’re talking about investing in your team members even when you know that it may actually mean that they end up leaving the team to do something else, and I think that’s a really interesting insight. You know, come here because, hey, we’re going to help you grow and develop, and that might be here or it might be elsewhere, but you’re getting really good people to join and stay. I think that’s definitely a great tip which I hope everyone’s listening to. Let’s switch gears a little bit. I want to move on to the next topic that we’re here to talk about today, and that’s getting deeper into strategies for IT excellence. So, to start with the most general question, what are your best practices for managing this team and looking at IT management operations generally? What are the best practices that you would recommend to anybody who’s running a team? 

Marco: Definitely, to my last point, focus on the people. If you can build a team that you’re fostering, developing, and have trust in, then it’s going to make your life a lot easier. Another thing is definitely to implement systems that promote standardization and efficiency. If your tech stack is solid, you have a good RMM, a good SIM platform, network monitoring—all that stuff. Just automate everything. It’s great; all you have to do is just go through and make sure that everybody’s operational and making money for the business.

Yoav: Before we dive into software, I wanted to ask you about the growth of your team. You said that you were the third person on the team, and today it sounds like there’s close to six or seven people. Can you also give us an idea of how many endpoints you were monitoring back in the day compared to where you are today? Has the team grown linearly as the company has grown? Have you been able to reach economies of scale through automation and tools? What does that actually look like for you guys? 

Marco: We’ve actually been able to keep the team extremely lean, all things considered. Not to say that we’re not stretched thin because that’s definitely the case, but I do expect to have a big year of growth next year. As far as growing with the company and having a specific tech-to-end-user ratio, we really haven’t done that. It’s all been reaching out to leadership, like, “Hey, we’re dying; we need more people.” We’re trying to plan things out a little better and standardize that kind of stuff better on our end. 

Yoav: When you look at IT budgets, you often hear IT saying, “Hey, guys, you’re expecting a lot from us. There’s more happening, more devices, more risk, and more threats.” Usually, the budgets are not necessarily growing at the same pace as the types of things your organization is expected to cover and cover excellently. You talked about two main components: the team, which we’ve discussed, and then the software side. Now, we are on an Atera webinar, so I’m going to guess that you’re a fan of Atera. I’d love to hear about both Atera and generally what your IT software stack looks like. What are your recommendations? You touched on a few of them, but if you’re willing to get into a little more detail, that would be wonderful for everybody on the webinar who’s looking to build that ideal tech stack to make them the most efficient. 

Marco: Sure. Since most of our team is based out of a building in Pomona, California, we’ve set up ways for us to have as little touch to our devices as we deploy them. We’re basically purchasing them from Dell, shipping them to a warehouse, and then sending that warehouse the shipping addresses so they get everything out. We have our tech stack currently set up to automatically log into the domain using Autopilot. Users are ready to go from there. The first thing that Autopilot installs is the Atera agent, which kicks things off with all the scripts and everything, making sure the configuration is up to date as soon as possible. After some updating and a couple of reboots, they’re usually ready to fly in a matter of 30 to 60 minutes. We get network monitoring through Atera, which is a great tool. We have a screen that’s up and also Slack notifications to let us know if anything goes wrong. That’s a really good one to have. I like Firewalla because it provides a failover option. We have a cell backup in every building now, which is a pretty nice feature to have. We’re still working through the NAC and SIM options right now; we’re still shopping around, but I think we’re pretty close to narrowing that down. 

Yoav: When we think about a day in your life, specifically a day in your life with Atera, can you talk to us about how you use Atera? Demos are great and the website is great, but when you use Atera, what are the things you’re using, how are you utilizing it, and what’s the real value you’re seeing from using Atera? 

Marco: One of the biggest things about the industry these days is that we are in an age of AI. It’s so advanced these days. That was something that really turned me on to Atera—the fact that it’s AI integrated. Probably the most valuable part of that is not only do we have it integrated for ourselves as the IT team, but the end users also have an AI chatbot, an AI assistant that can help them. For example, if my computer’s slow, the bot is already giving them remedies or something to try and help fix their issue. A lot of times, that can end up being another technician to answer the really easy questions, whether it’s hardware related. I try to make it a point to keep our knowledge base as up-to-date as possible because as soon as the AI picks up on those keywords, it says, “Oh, I think you’re talking about your TC75 scanner; here’s what I know about it.” That can also provide a lot of value for our end users because if we’re backed up on tickets and they’re going through the chatbot to get a resolution to their issue, they could potentially be saving themselves a lot of time. Being in a small team, we can’t always help users right away, and a lot of them really expect that assistance right away. 

Yoav: Absolutely. It’s interesting because one of the things we often talk about with AI and autopilot and copilot is this idea of being able to liberate both sides of the ticket. For the end user, as you said, they want it right away. If their computer’s running slowly, they can’t connect to a printer, they’re locked out, or they need a piece of software they don’t have, they typically need it now or they needed it five minutes ago when they realized they had a problem. Being able to solve that problem for them provides a ton of value for the end user but also for the technician. You’ve talked a lot about your team and developing them and giving them the skills they need. I’ve never met an IT professional who wished they could reset more passwords or spend more time helping people restart their computers after they told them they had but really hadn’t. What we’re seeing is that somewhere between 20 to 30% of tier one tickets can actually be completely solved by AI. The value there is quicker response times and quicker resolution times, but also for the IT teams, giving the technicians the ability to work on higher-value projects. That’s part of our mission—to empower them and make them superheroes, especially as we think about budgets that aren’t growing at the same rate as the needs coming from the IT team. Marco, what are your tips for somebody managing a team right now? What should they be keeping top of mind? 

Marco: Well, again, people, people, people. Building a diverse team that meshes well is important. Diversity is crucial because if everyone is an AWS expert, they’re not necessarily going to help build each other up since they have the same knowledge. Team development is probably the most important part of managing one. If you keep them happy and give them the ability to grow with the company and within the company, it’s only going to pay dividends later. That’s the biggest thing I would say. Help guide them to reach their goals. If I know someone wants to become a cybersecurity expert, maybe we can help get them a certification to give them extra background knowledge and see if it’s something they really want to pursue on a day-to-day basis. In my opinion, it really comes down to team building and development. 

Yoav: Marco, how do you stay on top of things? We talked about this at the very beginning, but what are your recommendations for staying ahead of the game? Are there any specific newsletters you’re reading, any publications you find particularly useful? What would you recommend to everyone on this webinar? 

Marco: Easy ones are subscribing to any IT newsletter. A lot of people like IT Brew. I personally use TLDR and Bleeping Computer. We actually have a Slack channel within our group that posts Bleeping Computer articles as they go up. That’s pretty cool because while we’re working, we’re getting notifications. Most of the time, I’m just reading the headlines like, “Oh, that’s pretty crazy.” I also like to follow tech pages on social media. There are a lot out there. There’s one page I follow called NPR. This guy posts a lot of gaming stuff but also a lot of AI-related stuff. It’s really mind-blowing because he’s always posting the latest and greatest, some of the craziest stuff you’ll see out there. There was one video I saw recently where the videos are so realistic, and they’re just generating videos of celebrities. It legitimately looks like Morgan Freeman speaking to you. It actually sounds like Morgan Freeman, and he cuts over and says, “No, this is AI.” In that regard, it could be used for good or scary stuff, but yeah, it’s pretty nuts. 

Yoav: It really calls into question the whole nature of what is truth, what are we even seeing, how do we know we can trust what we’re looking at? I don’t know if you saw, but there was an article this morning about some of the new models that OpenAI seems to be on the verge of releasing. Strawberry apparently is one of them, and Orion. There are a lot of rumors floating around about what they can and can’t do, but it sounds like in our world particularly, they’re going to be releasing some very interesting capabilities when it comes to things like coding and creative coding. At least that’s what I’ve read. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to see anything or if there was anything that jumped out to you, what jumped out to me this morning was—I think it was OpenAI—and I think they’re trying to source additional investment from their investors. I think they’re pushing a net worth of like $150 billion. It’s crazy. 

Marco: Crazy, crazy. I remember when Instagram was acquired for a billion dollars, and we all thought that that was a lot of money, and that wasn’t all that long ago. 

Yoav: Oh my gosh, yeah. It definitely looks like the opportunity is so massive. When we think about the AI hype cycle, we’re reaching a point where we’re starting to see real applications. You just talked about things that you’re doing today with AI that you couldn’t do a year ago or two years ago. It’s exciting, it’s scary, and it shows that the future is going to be very different, probably in ways that we couldn’t imagine. If I would have told you a couple of years ago that your end users would be able to solve the fact that their computers are running slowly on their own without having a one-to-one ratio between tickets and technicians, would you have believed me?

Marco: No, wild stuff. 

Yoav: I want to shift to the third segment before we open it up for Q&A. Just as a reminder, if you do have any questions for Marco or myself, feel free to drop them in the Q&A. I see that Josh has already added one question, so please throw more questions in there. Marco, can you tell us a little bit about what a day in your life actually looks like? You talked a lot about the team and specialization, but if you had to give me a typical day in your life, what does it look like? What are you doing when you come in in the morning? 

Marco: A typical day, being on the West Coast, I wake up and check on the East Coast. I have one technician over there, so as long as he’s good, sometimes I’ll jump in if he’s having a busy morning. If he’s got it under control, I’ll run some errands before getting into the office. A lot of times, it really varies because there are so many different projects and so many things going on. From the senior manager seat, I’m just trying to make sure that all of the projects are going to be completed on time. If I need to step in and support in any way that I can, I mean, I’m still jumping in and doing tickets every day just to help keep it at a manageable level. 

Yoav: To stay fighting fit, right? Also to keep yourself sharp. 

Marco: Yeah, that as well. I’ve got two technicians dedicated to tickets, so just helping them make sure that it doesn’t get out of hand to where things are falling through the cracks. I definitely assist with that, but I try to keep my focus on forward thinking, ensuring that any projects in the future are planned out. What’s the roadmap? What’s the timeline? It’s important to have at least somebody on the team, whether it’s the director or the CIO, looking at it from that perspective, focusing on the big picture, and ensuring that everybody’s on the same page. 

Yoav: Absolutely. So, Marco, as we think about Tempco and Atera, you talked a little bit earlier about some of the things that you guys are doing with AI and getting that Atera agent installed. Do you have any specific use cases or success stories of things that you guys have done inside Tempco using Atera to provide better outcomes for the team? 

Marco: I think I spoke a little bit about it earlier, but the deployment of the customer portal was probably the biggest help for our team. It was kind of like gaining an additional technician. The end users have the AI assistant, but they also have a self-service portal where they can go in and download and install any approved software that we, as the IT team, have put in there. They can monitor their own tickets, so it’s easy for them to follow up. The AI assistant is probably my favorite because it doesn’t necessarily create a ticket right away, but if it’s out of the AI’s control, it will escalate to my team. I prefer that our end users use the AI assistant. Adoption is going pretty well. We’re really getting our deployment team, when we open new buildings, to insist that they try that out before just sending an email to IT support because it could save them and ourselves a lot of time. So, it’s kind of a win-win. 

Yoav: I think that’s probably the biggest adoption concern that we hear: people aren’t going to use this. People are so used to emailing us or calling us or, in the worst cases, walking up to our desk demanding a solution. I’m just curious, you mentioned when you open a new building, but what are some of the things that you did to get people to adopt Atera’s AI to solve their own problems? Was it about talking to them about the benefits? Was it in the same way that you guys are enforcing the training, saying, “Hey, no access to your laptops if you’re not using the assistant,” which we would of course endorse? What’s worked for you? 

Marco: What helped us the most was starting with the executive level and regional manager level. We started with them and did a little demo for them. From there, we sent out a company-wide email that went through the benefits of utilizing it. It was actually right after we had a workshop with some of our friends over at Atera. They had prepared this really nice sheet with an embedded video and everything to make it real easy because some users don’t like to read. So, they have that embedded video that shows them how to use this, and they liked that. That helped the adoption rate a lot. 

Yoav: I’m not going to put you on the spot and ask you for specific numbers, but is that something that you guys have been able to see a change in? The number of tickets that get to a technician or the average resolution time? How are you monitoring and making sure that this is making an impact? 

Marco: That kind of goes into some analysis we did with Eli, one of your engineers. He went through the stats of how many tickets are being opened with the AI, how many are being escalated to technicians, and how many are actually being resolved by the AI. I really love that. We’re constantly trying to improve the performance of it on a team level. We’re purchasing a service from Atera, but we’re also acting as it’s like a partnership. I like that community aspect. It’s really nice. I have bi-weekly meetings with Eli, and we just go through that stuff. He’ll have specific requests, and we’ll provide any feedback that we get on it. It’s a constant work in progress, and I have a pretty good feeling that we have a bright future. 

Yoav: Wonderful to hear, Marco. We’re going to take some questions that people have put here in the Q&A. Let me start off by asking you one. The most important thing Travis is asking is, can we see the rest of your sweatshirt? That’s a very cool sweatshirt. I’m going to turn off the screen share just so everybody can get a real look at that. 

Marco: There you go. 

Yoav: That’s a cool sweatshirt. We’re actually selling the sweatshirt in the swag shop. I’m joking, we’re not. We’re not selling the sweatshirt, but maybe we can. In any case, Marco, Josh T. is asking, what’s the biggest pain in being a manager at your company? 

Marco: Non-tech-savvy users. We’ve had some occurrences with tech-savvy users, and one of them would get into a weekly fight with the AI chatbot. I think it was mostly because he didn’t really understand the capabilities or maybe even that he was talking to a chatbot. He would tell the chatbot, “Hey, I need this,” and he’d get a response, “I need this right now. Don’t you know who I am?” That kind of attitude. We’ll go back and read through it, put it into our group chat like, “Hey, I think this guy’s having some issues.” We need to escalate this to a human. 

Yoav: For sure. I see a question here from Mark who’s asking, for somebody who’s coming up through the ranks in the world of IT, how different is it to be a manager versus a technician? 

Marco: Well, you get some additional responsibilities. If one of your technicians messes something up, you have to have that conversation. Tough conversations aren’t easy to have. I’ve never liked them personally, but they have to happen. That’s probably what I struggled with most coming up through the ranks. The other thing is just understanding, especially in a corporate landscape, how to navigate through politics. As much as we like or dislike it, it’s just part of it. 

Yoav: I think I was just having this conversation the other day. Being a manager is essentially getting the credit for nothing and being at fault for everything. When things are going well, it’s because whoever did a fantastic job. When things are going badly, it’s your responsibility for not putting in the infrastructure. It’s true of being a manager in any role. You need to care about the success of others, be willing to make their problems your problems, make their successes your successes. That shift is always challenging, both in technical and non-technical roles. You also lose control of your success. When you’re an individual contributor, if you do a good job, that’s good enough. But as a manager, you can do a great job, but if people on your team are not doing a great job, ultimately, the responsibility stops with you. That’s true across any type of management. I see we have a comment that Josh loves fighting with AI, which we definitely endorse. As we think about the next question here, which we got from—I’m guessing it’s Jean or maybe Jean, but I don’t know. I’ll guess it’s one of those two. The question was, how does one expand with more clientele? Where does one start? I’m not sure I understand the question, Marco. Do you? 

Marco: Clientele, like from an MSP perspective? Yoav: Jean or Jean, if you’re still on the call, please drop more context, and we’re happy to answer your question. We’re going to move on to Travis’s question and come back to you. Travis asks, how did you handle onboarding end users and familiarizing them with the service because they haven’t opened up by AI to their users? 

Right. The easiest thing we could do was install a desktop icon on everybody’s computer. It’s gold, so it really stands out compared to everything else. We call it Tempco IT AI, so I think it’s pretty hard to miss when that comes up on your computer. Most people take it from there; they’ll see that and go, “Oh, hey, what’s this?” 

Yoav: Have you had luck in using different strategies to motivate people to adopt it? Because you’re right, people will notice it, but getting them to adopt it and adoption is typically the hardest part. How do you get buy-in? You talked before about going to the executive team, but did you do anything particular with the end users as well to try to get them engaged? 

Marco: We’ll throw suggestions in. If somebody’s manually opening a ticket by sending an IT support email, like, “Hey, I need the Dialpad application installed,” especially if we’re busy at the moment, we’ll instruct them, “Hey, go ahead and open up the Tempco IT AI desktop icon, and under self-service, you can install it right from there.” Usually, it’s the managers of the end user who are opening these tickets because they already have some sort of established relationship with our team. That’s how it ends up picking up traction and moving along. 

Yoav: Makes sense. There’s a comment here that 95% of our users send emails for tickets. That’s our struggle point for sure. I’d say that’s very common. There’s a famous saying, “Everybody wants change, but nobody wants to change.” Theoretically, people like the idea of AI, but when it comes down to it, they don’t want to use it. They’re used to doing things a certain way. What we’ve found to be successful in helping organizations adopt practices like this is being very focused on the value for them. It’s not, “Hey, we don’t want to deal with your ticket,” but, “If you use the AI, you don’t need to wait, and you’re going to get a resolution immediately.” If you don’t send an email but go into the portal, we can solve your problem immediately. One of the things you talked about before is using the knowledge base to build the intelligence of the AI but also using the AI to build the intelligence. For example, if you resolve a ticket inside Atera today, you can hit “Create Knowledge Base Article,” and it automatically summarizes the ticket, looks at the resolution, and puts that into the knowledge base. The advantage there is that if this comes up again, the AI knows how to reference that. The idea is to make it easier for the end user so that everything is being done as much as possible autonomously, particularly with straightforward things. We want to make it as easy as possible so they get their resolution as quickly as possible.

Great, thank you for that. Jean mentioned the question was about MSPs. How does one expand with more clientele, and where does one start?

So, Marco, do you have any insights on that? 

Marco: You know, I don’t. We are an internal IT team. I was speaking with a friend of a friend who had noticed the post on LinkedIn about this webinar. He sent it to his friend, and his friend sent it to me. He ended up putting us in contact because this guy was basically in a similar situation where he’s starting up his own MSP right now and just trying to gain some clientele and business. But as far as insight, I mean, I’ve got nothing. I would say networking your way through it. 

Yoav: I think what we see, and we’ve got a few thousand MSPs using Atera, what’s been successful for a lot of people is having a niche. You would be surprised how niche things can get. As long as there’s a market in that niche, then there’s a lot of value. We’ve seen MSPs that are super focused on dental practices. We’ve seen MSPs that specialize in sports teams. We’ve seen MSPs that specialize in auditoriums and places that have shows. I think that niche and really specializing, as long as that niche has enough in it to sustain a real business, that’s what we’ve seen works really well. 

There’s a super loaded question here, which I’m going to throw at you, Marco. What’s the better job down the line in five years’ time? Do I go internal IT department in an enterprise company, or do I start my own business as an MSP? 

Marco: Oh, a lot of responsibility here. Tough one. 

Yoav: Yeah, tough one. 

Marco: I do like the internal IT department route just because I’m within a company where I see a lot of opportunity and growth. So, at this point, I’m sticking to my guns and sticking around. But I think it’s all circumstantial, based on your preferences and how you like to work with people. Personally, I love talking to people. That’s something I think I do well. So, with that, it’s kind of a tough one. 

Yoav: It’s a tough one. Personal preference, definitely. They are very different environments. One of the things that we see with an MSP is that your revenue generation is it. It’s a revenue center. Ultimately, that’s how you make money. Whereas an internal IT department, for better or worse, you’re a cost center. You’re making things more efficient, and it’s all true, but ultimately, you’re not bringing in dollars. By the way, great cameo of the dog just behind you over there. That was great. But, you know, an internal IT department is more of a cost center. It’s just a very different mindset. In the world of MSPs, different models like break-fix, whatever it is, but ultimately, you’re generating dollars for every minute you’re spending. IT departments are a little bit different, more strategic. There’s a lot of changeover. When you look at MSPs, their shelf life 

is typically not particularly long. There are advantages and disadvantages to each one with five minutes before the end, I don’t see any other questions. If anybody has questions for Marco, this is your last chance. Marco, do you have any parting thoughts for the kind people who spent their breakfast, lunch, or dinner with us? 

Marco: Well, I would just say, put in the work. Get in good with your people, stay true to your guns, and things will work out. And use AI. Yoav: Marco, it’s always a pleasure chatting with you. This has been really insightful, and hopefully, it’s given everybody that spent an hour with us—whether it’s breakfast on the West Coast, lunch on the East Coast, or dinner in Europe—something valuable. Thank you, everybody, for spending time with us today. We really appreciate you being here. Please do feel free to reach out to us. I’m not sure if I have a slide with our emails on it. I do not, but we will be sharing our details with you afterward. Thank you for the time. Have a wonderful day. Marco, thank you again, and we’ll see you all very soon.