Video: CEO Reflects On Two Years With AVATAR MSP

hey Channel insiders welcome back to channel Insider partner POV your source for untapped opportunities and unfiltered opinions in the it Channel all to help you make Better Business decisions I'm your host Katie boso my guest today is Jason Wright CEO of Houston Texas based Avatar MSP Jason is a longtime player in the channel but he bought Avatar back in 2022 with the mission of bringing a true proactive perspective back to the manage services industry and as you'll learn there's virtually nothing Jason won't do for Avatar's customers welcome Jason thanks for having me Katie always uh so good to see you so good to see you too we were just talking about prior to the recording that I was there when you announced you becoming a part of Avatar and purchasing the compy so I just think this is such a full circle moment and it's just really great to see you doing so well and having so much success over there in Houston yeah thank you so much for having us it's uh been sort of a whirlwind experience you know you mentioned we're in Houston right so we're just uh coming out of the last couple of days a huge uh flood event one of a series of natural disasters that we're pretty prone to here in the city which makes our business model that much more Paramount right in the lives of small to medium business business owners number of our clients were down or um struggling to to continue to run their businesses and so forth so I say all that to say it's been a very busy week for us but yes uh two years since we bought the business or I bought the business and it's been no small task getting to where we're at today but uh it's by the grace of God that we're here it's been an amazing journey we've more than quadruple the growth of the business when I bought it I think we had four employees and we just crossed over 20 employees and we've grown our our revenue and our um service offerings quite a bit first of all talking about the natural disaster events and Jason I hope everybody on your team is safe and I'm so sorry to hear about that but I got to tell you I think that for many parts of the country and maybe just for many people who don't experience something like that it can very much be affected by Nature we don't always think about it think about Bad actors and threats and people who are intentionally coming to to harm us cyber cyberwise but we don't often think about how nature impacts our infrastructure so I think you bring up such a great point there you know we saw it with the pandemic right it was really the the first or maybe the greatest Black Swan event that we've had in years of my lifetime and really that idea that we embodi this uh and it's in our tagline this idea of corporate first responder so when trouble arise is as it did in the pandemic they needed to continue to operate their businesses everybody was set home uh essentially overnight and they were able to go home and plug their computers into the internet and have be able to continue working and operate their businesses the world continued to operate and so on a more Regional scale yeah we deal with that here in Houston we had uh leading up to the pandemic we had four years of historic flooding even back then when hurricane Harvey hit you know we were trekking servers and network equipment down 19 sets of stairs and buildings that had no power no elevator access we were pulling equipment out of you know by boat out of certain buildings for our customers and we were going to do whatever it took to get their businesses back up and running and we did that and those customers became very endear to us and they were customers for life and so we have brought that same Spirit over to Avatar man Services Jason there's support and then there's running up and down flights of stairs during a flood in a building with no power support So hats off to you my friend and everybody that helped make that happen and get you all through that event I want to make sure I take a step back here so that we can get to know Avatar a little bit more just as a business and and obviously you're an MSP it is it is so in intrinsic in everything that you do and every message that you put out out there but like you said you really like to be that corporate first responder you're you're making sure that you're running a proactive approach with your business can you expand on that a little bit for me I think we've all heard proactive within the the channel but how do you think we've kind of fallen short of that really truly being proactive in this space uh up until this point and can you elaborate for me on how exactly you're defining being proactive as a company yeah I think what's lost on msps is they really don't document the journey enough with their clients what are they going to expect what are the touch points on what cadences are we meeting and what are the outcomes we should expect right the market for a decade now a decade and a half has gone in and sort of said look we're going to give you unlimited support at a fixed costs we're going to bundle all the tools but they don't appropriately build an effective Road map or a strategy in terms of how they're going to service the client through the life cycle of that engagement right and I think we have really captured the essence of that at Avatar maned services so with us what it looks like is we're our customers guide on their journey to maturity and and everything we do is done in the interest of moving them along that chasm in that uh journey to maturity life cycle so initially it starts with onboarding where we get our tools deployed and we get their environments documented so we have the tribal knowledge of what we're working with and then we very quickly move into an optimization or really a stabilization period where we're setting up preventive maintenance proactive monitoring establishing knock and then even moving into sort of optimization we're building uh or deploying telemetries and scripting in the environment automa what we can we're establishing Baseline core processes for them and having already self assessed where they are at on that capability maturity uh Spectrum uh then using that as a Baseline and in terms of measuring productivity along that Journey right again we spoke already about hi touch high response so just being there that corporate first responder answering the phone quickly within one or two rings always Al live body 247 support uh that's really the the foundation of any good support engagement that any MSP should employing is part of their goto Market strategy so you have high touch high response you onboard the customer you stabilize the customer and then usually 91 or 120 days within the engagement is where that engagement will shift from a reactive scope to more of a proactive scope and we come in and that's where we're doing more of what we call tech technology alignment mapping alignment to best practices so the client is somewhere down here in best P practices up here so how do we map that Journey or or alignment to best practice over time and so we have a series of schedule cadences some might call them quarterly business reviews or strategic business reviews leading up to that will will run uh compliance Frameworks typically a CIS controls or a nist maybe even a sock 2 type 2 framework which essentially flushes out or materializes as a gap assessment and says this is where you have risk Mr customer this is how we rank that risk in terms of major moderate and minor and from that we build a strategic road map and effectively build a punch list of action items on what needs to be addressed what's high priority in their environment and so uh that's really mapping the journey and from that you can do some uh asset uh management asset tracking for them you can help them with budget and planning initiative so that they know when to plan for certain expenditures whether capital or operational expenditures so that's really the essence of I think the Next Generation MSP and and Jason I have to wonder how that all is impacted by the hybrid work environment that we're seeing today we're distributed we can work anywhere at any time but for you when you purchased avatar you went in there in 2022 at the height of us figuring out what exactly hybrid work was so how does all of this get impacted by the model that we're working under right now with the anywhere anytime Workforce I think the business isn't any more or less Lex and it was 10 years ago but the priorities have shifted right so our focus is pivoted away from infrastructure and Hardware more towards managing workloads in the cloud and depending on uh Partnerships with our vendors to secure those environments right so when you think about the hybrid workplace if I go back a decade ago and in our last MSP we had twice as many maybe three times as many system admin admin ministrators in that business because they were managing on premise data centers the number of servers within client environments was was a lot greater in terms of quantity right now you fast forward to today those workloads live in the cloud whether it's AWS or Azure or thirdparty SAS applications so from an MSP standpoint it's less Hands-On deck required to manage those environments but at the same time in terms of responsibility uh assessing risk posture and overall the responsibility or liability placed on the MSP has certainly grown right because of the ever evolving cyber threat landscape right so if you know again thinking back 10 years ago you really needed a antivirus malware you needed remote access uh whatever you enabled on the firewall and that was your security program now fast forward today you need uh IDs and IPS and deack and inspection on the router and then you've got to have email security platform and MFA you need a complex EDR or mxd solution you need a good security awareness and training program you have to do some complex things with backups and then you sort of if you're looking at defense in depth you're now layering in more advanced Security Services like Sim and security orchestration um vulnerability management uh sassy zero trust network access you name it right and so helping customers be able to navigate what's required based on industry mandates or just in terms of how they do business and and and let me dispel another myth there too everybody talks about compliance compliance compliance right most of our businesses small or mid still don't fall under any particular compliance mandate but still in term terms of best practice and overall responsibility to the client that's what our technology alignment uh mapping process does is it uses those Frameworks even though they don't have to attest to a certain framework we use it as a means to make them a more mature safer environment right it's this idea of um left of boom right of boom right right of Boom obviously being what happens post uh incident and how are you responding and mitigating the consequences of the the breach but what about left of boom right what are we doing to establish a good security policy to make sure that there's uh a defined incident response plan in place that there's a good Disaster Recovery plan in place and then what sort of vulnerabilities are we monitoring and managing for to prevent an attack from ever happening in the first place because uh the expense and reputational damage is far greater if if you're talking right of boo you specialize in those SMB and mid-market customers and I really want to talk about them for a minute first of all let's get to know them what do they typically do Jason what verticals do you typically find your customers serving and how does that impact your your day-to-day as a company when you're considering the uh the services that they provide to their own customers so we really segment our demographic or our ideal client in a number of key areas so firstly we're in Houston right so energy oil and gas is still King here um we live in the biotech healthc care Mecca of the world in terms of patient care we're the largest biotech Center in the world right everybody comes here for cancer treatment and and so forth but some of the same verticals are still strong for us here as they would be in any other vertical industrial manufacturing other Professional Services firms like Legal Financial uh accounting firms construction Professional Service firms so we sort of check the boxes on all those but then we also look at some of the uh intangible qualifiers uh so do they have drowning man issues right is there uh pain or some sort of impending event that's driving an IT decision and for us personally we're not the cheapest guys on the Block we're looking for clients who appreciate value at right so we're looking for customers have sort of suffered through one or two bad Partnerships they're in a bad marriage so to speak and so um they're they're looking for somebody who's going to come in and be that that sort of guide to maturity for them and help them along in ways that previous companies have in fact um over my shoulder here you can't see off camera but we actually have a dboard here in our office with a list of all the competitors that we've taken clients from and the guys occasionally go in there and throw darts and the dart board just keeps filling up and up and up a third thing we do is we segment in terms of customer size or employee size and we really have simplified our product strategy we have two offerings we have Avatar Advantage which is sort of our fully baked offering everything in the kitchen sink and that's traditionally designed for say the sub 100 employee sub 75 employee marketplace where they're not going to have any it resource is our it leadership uh but where we really see the future and where we have seen uh a large share of our growth is in that sort of Middle Market space uh north of 100 users up to a thousand users and that's primarily because those it leaders the cios the CTO the VPS of it that operate within those companies have the same problems I have as an IT leader and that is trying to keep Pace with the evolving threat landscape as it relates to cyber threats and also keeping Pace with uh vendor management right there's been an absolute explosion or proliferation of tools going back to the point I made a few minutes ago there were you know maybe four five six tools we needed to run our MSP business 10 years ago now I think the latest average is somewhere between 20 and 24 tools because we're at the intersection of so many uh evolving um Tech trads so it's a great time to be in it and it will be forever because of the way uh I think Wars will be fought in the future is going to be done on a cyber warfare Spectrum so anyways the Middle Market we really took a Gamble and and proof of concept and offering and brought it out about 12 to 18 months ago and I've just had tremendous success in selling into those companies because again they have the same problems I have the only difference is I've already built a platform in muscle memory around how to solve those problems and so let me make this one final point right when you think about the it budget spend right it typically falls into three buckets you have sort of down here is the Run side of the it budget keeping the day-to-day going the lights on then you have the grow side of it budgets typically related to new technologies and applications and then you have the trans form size of it which you know if you break that down transformative Tech usually gets maybe 10% or it's even a discretional uh budget line item and it gets ignored largely because you spend so much time in the run in the grow side of managing and maintaining your it operations and so what we've effectively done is brought a offering to Market that establishes credibility and says to these midmarket it leaders hey look we we've already done this we've got all these tools we we've built uh posture and muscle memory around these tools we can deliver that to you as a platform and then we run our technology alignment Management program to help you with the future State planning budget and so forth and so you as the it leader can now focus on what are those New Horizons we haven't been able to address in the business or what are those transformative technology IES uh that we can bring into the business that are going to be Revenue generating right and even the it spectrum is change right because the it leaders are no longer coming from necessarily technical backgrounds they're business people they're coming from the business in different lines of the business and so they think differently right these are people who grew up with technology they didn't need to go to school to learn it so that's how we're impacting the market but the midm market for us is really the future Avatar we're just getting warmed up come back on Tuesday for part two of my interview with Jason Wright thanks to Jason for joining me and thank you for watching or listening check out all episodes of Channel Insider partner POV on Channel insider.com or watch on YouTube at Channel inssider newws and Trends you can also check us out as a podcast on your preferred podcast listening platform come on over to X or LinkedIn and connect with Channel Insider there or with me at Katie boso once again I'm your host Katie boso and I'll see you next time

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