Video: How To Achieve Operational Maturity With A Fractional CTO

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 Kyle Wentworth founder and CEO of Wentworth Consulting Group Kyle took his four plus decades in it and security nearly three of which he spent operating his own MSP and became a provider of fractional technology expertise Kyle and his team not only fill the position of CTO CIO or ceso for clients but they also act as translators between business leadership and it or MSP teams which helps improve clients operational efficiency security and even saves some companies hundreds of thousands of dollars a year welcome Kyle thanks Katie thanks for having me thank you so much for being here I'm so excited to talk to you today because what you do I think is so important for not only the channel but the tech space in general you've been described to me as a a tech translator so why don't we jump into it first by talking about you your background uh first of all I know that you're a US Army vet and I just want to thank you for your service so much for what you've done for this country thank you you I also know that you have spent 40 plus years in it and security and prior to whenw worth Consulting you ran uh an MSP for nearly 30 years so when it comes to experience I I think I'm talking to the right guy so with that said tell me what your Endeavor is now wedworth Consulting Group started in 2019 talk to me about your core Mission as a company as as a as a consultant so during my tenure in the MSP space one of the things that I always ran into like literally always we' come into clients offices and we were constantly having to explain technology to the person who was responsible for making the decisions on the proposals or the or the the choices that we were bringing to them for their business they didn't understand the technology dialogue it was like a completely foreign language to them so the struggle with that for the technologist is it's like a brain surgeon trying to tell you all the intricacies of the brain in order for you to understand what you're going to have to approve and pay for after the doctor's done with your brain surgery we don't understand brain surgery unless we're a brain surgeon business owners most commonly don't understand technology they hear all the terminologies they hear all the discussions that come up in in Threads Online and their emails they read about it but it doesn't just click they need a translator that translator's position in business is the CTO the purpose of the CTO is to take on 100% of the dialogue related to technology and communicate with all the technology vendors and and participants in ensuring that technology is deployed and and administered correctly in a business it's not the position of the CEO of the business the CEO's position is to drive their business I'm heavy into my mallwitz's pumpkin plan perspective so staying focused on on growing your biggest pumpkin is important in business when business Executives would have to dialogue with us it was a distraction to them and distraction comes at a cost so Wentworth Consulting Group was created out of that lack of communication businesses of all sizes regardless of the size need a CTO on staff whether they be a fractional CTO as a contractor or whether they be permanent full-time they need someone who can translate the technology discussion with business owners on their behalf as part of their company not as an entity inside of the managed service provider who's providing a for-profit solution to the client they need somebody who's on their side but the managed service provider also needs somebody that they can communicate with to effectively provide a tech technology solution to that client and without this interpreter in the middle both sides lose so Wentworth Consulting Group provides fractional CTO and operational maturity Consulting to business Executives today to help them take these hats off that they're not responsible for handling and to help mature the the quality of their business for the audience members that may be new to this space to the channel or if you're a a c Custer essentially looking to learn more I do want to make sure that I Define fractional for you essentially in short terms part-time but highly skilled I I am curious to know when it comes to that ability to be able to take you on as as a consultant contractually how has has that opened the door for so many of your clients to be able to say this is a service that one I didn't know existed and two I really need they understand it pretty quickly when you bring into the dialogue that you hire a CPA to do your taxes you don't bring a CPA on staff to do your taxes once they get the perspective that it frees up all this time it's only a part-time cost and realistically for the majority of businesses and I'm talking like in the very high percentages you don't need a full-time CTO person on staff once your technology infastructure is in place and the mentalities of good technology are in place and you have qualif ified managed service providers providing the solutions you don't need somebody full-time on staff to do CTO related work where do you see the most operational immaturity or challenges at companies when they come to you is it something you can see right away uh with your expertise and knowledge or is it something you really have to dig into to find we we have a select group of questions we ask business Executives to determine whether or not they've made their their mindset is making less wise decisions we all have our our desires and goals uh with our business but a lot of times uh we think that we can do certain things that we really shouldn't we can buy certain things as write offs that we really can't afford um or we're processing things in our business improperly uh because of a lack of education and understanding it's amazing how many how many little things for long periods of time businesses have done repeatedly because one person has been in a position doing that same thing over and over and over and over with no real guidance on how it should be done so if you don't have Auditors coming in to it to audit on certain areas of your business to ensure your staff are doing the things that they're supposed to be doing and they're doing them the proper way you could be losing tons of money or you could be ending up in financial Devastation situations because you were improperly handling something that was supposed to be handled in a different way and that's very common inexperienced internal it people are devastating to large companies and business Executives just don't understand that it's not it's not necessarily their fault it's a foundational education issue if you don't have the experience and knowledge just because I can get a computer to work and somebody can open up their email and get to their email doesn't mean that the rest of the technology environment is being handled in an in an intellectually mature way related to technology and it's important that somebody external provides wisdom and knowledge and guidance most commonly it's a seasoned MSP to the internal IT staff and co-managed it is a very common thing these days managed service providers are good at performing that function where you have boots on the ground who are internal and most of your msps are remote it's it's not uncommon for you to have a co-managed Technologic technology department the struggle is when you don't allow the managed service provider to be the wisdom in your organization and you rely on your internal it Department to make uneducated decisions so foundation in technology is extremely important the age of wisdom is retiring and so it's very important that the education of younger individuals in the technology space gets to a point where they understand that you don't build a 20 a 20 story skyscraper without digging deep into the ground first it requires foundational support to support the structure as it builds up companies are the same way you need to have foundational knowledge in your technology department it is the part of your business that runs your business if you don't believe it just take the technology out you'll be more grass for a living it's the one thing in business that Executives need to change their mind set that it is a profit Center for your company and not an expense structure and if you don't put money into that part of your business it will take your money away and crowd strike is a great example if you don't have Solutions in place where your internal teams are proving an auditing and measuring Solutions as they're changed in your organization you allow externally automated things like updates and things to happen that shut down your company for days and good seasoned managed service providers don't allow external automatic updates to happen they vet everything before it gets applied into the network it's the shoot from the hip technology companies that are just trying to get the jobs done that allow automation of everything in the business and that can be a painful struggle for companies to have as well as the stress it puts on the MSP when situations like that happen I can only imagine the amount of stress all of the managed service providers who have crowd strike as a product incorporated into their client space the client sees the MSP as the provider of all solutions as well as the creator of all Solutions in most cases and the MSP takes the the brunt of the abuse when a problem like that and downtime and issues occur it's a a very important position to be in as the managed service provider for your client and the client needs to understand that the wisdom of the managed service provider is critical in their business so the selection of of experienced seasoned aged technologists in a company is an important decision for the business executive in order to be able to remove the technology decision hat from their head and put it on someone else the one of the things I see frequently is free tools we see free Tools in client networks where end users are allowed to download free resources that they've used at home to do specific things not realizing that the intellectual property of your business is putting in being put into a cloud storage solution in order to produce a graphic or a widget or a gizmo some marketing thing or or whatnot and you're not realizing that you just lost the intellectual control the control of the property that you just put into that cloud storage base on that free account and this kind of thing happens all the time business owners are losing intellectual property not only when employees leave their business because they didn't document how tasks were performed by that employee before the employee left but they're losing intellectual property as St uses cloud-based services to store and Implement solutions that run their business there isn't somebody with wisdom who understands when to say no thinking about that though Kyle how do we overcome that internal policy and governance the most important documentation in a client's in in a company's business is their business process model essentially it's the documentation of how all of the processes for their business are required to function it comes from the inventor's brain who is the inventor the business owner who created that entity they had an idea when they first created that entity of how they wanted the business to run and perform so taking that knowledge and documenting their intent for that knowledge and then going to their staff and saying how can we implement this perspective or this idea and then having the staff develop plans and processes and steps and procedures to perform those functions and then document those steps and procedures and then prove them and then adjust and edit and prove them again and adjust and edit and prove them again until you get a good well baked process I want to come back to when worth Consulting and making sure that I'm talking about the successes that you're having with your clients could you walk me through a success story in which you were contacted you came in you diagnosed the issue and you were able to start setting up uh those those steps towards operational maturity we have a lot of those kinds of success stories one of them that I enjoy the most is uh client years ago that was processing use tax incorrectly if you don't know what used Tax is not to get an extreme detail if I pay sales tax on something I have to deduct it from the sales tax that I eventually pay the state when I charge the client sales tax when they buy my product and if you're process cing that incorrectly you probably have a lot of loss or are going to have a lot of loss and if you do have a lot of loss because you process sales tax incorrectly sales tax and use tax incorrectly you might be owed money back from the state and that was the case with our client and there was no statute of limitations on how far you could go back and it was it was hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in impressed in improperly processed used Tax from a person who had been doing the finances that portion of the finances for 20 plus years for the business this goes back into the auditing process if you have a process in your business and you don't have an external auditor come in and prove that process that process could be extremely inefficient and costing you money being done incorrectly in a positive way might give you a big check at the end which it did for this client and now there's a statute of limitation in the state because we went back almost 20 years um did you did you force that change in the statute of limitations I I would suspect that that that that event that one event probably made somebody in in leadership think twice about how far that they could go back on the inverse uh we have a client that was doing something very incorrectly with data they were deleting data that they should be retaining related to employees and they have a lot of employees like a lot of employees yeah and the fines for that deletion of data are extensive this was because of immature internal it and extremely old hardware and extremely old systems that weren't kept kept up to date but because email and websites and everything worked from a leadership perspective no one wanted to spend the money on improving old technology as a result operational maturity and uneducated internal technology failed that company and it's billions of dollars of cost because of the deletion of that data my last question for you today before we find out how we can reach out to you would just be I see a lot of work that you're doing on LinkedIn uh with disabled veterans and really standing up for the men and women of this country who have defended it I really want to make sure that I give you an opportunity to talk about the philanthropic and charitable work that you're doing and that Wentworth is doing can you talk to me a little bit about that if you'd like to so we have a couple of organizations that we work with that are directly impacting veterans the primary one is the Veterans Ranch they're an equin therapy PTSD uh support nonprofit that helps prior active duty and even some current um um active duty military uh soldiers and and Marines they help them through the use of horses um to cope with their PTSD issues it's amazing the relationship that a horse can create with a person when that horse chooses that person the horses just inherently have that capability of reaching that person it's amazing the experience that they go through in the transition that they go through once they get engaged with Equine Therapy the veterans Ranch could really use some help and support right now and you can go to the veterans ranch.org and donate thank you so much for talking to me and our audience about that I think it's so important to remember the people behind the technology and the people behind those people so thank you very much for all that you do to support uh this wonderful organization and Kyle if we want to reach out to you if I'm an end user company and I need help how do I reach out to you and get in contact to leverage your fractional technology expertise you can reach out to me directly through my LinkedIn um so if you look for Kyle Wentworth in the in LinkedIn you'll find me right off the bat and there's a booking link uh on the top of my profile that allows you to just book a meeting right there otherwise you can go to Wentworth Consulting group.com thank you again Kyle for joining me today it's been a pleasure speaking with you and I wish you the best of luck through the rest of 2024 Katie it's been great I appreciate the time thank you so much to Kyle for joining me today and thank you for watching or listening you can check out all episodes of Channel Insider partner POV on Channel insider.com or watch on our YouTube page at Channel inssider newws and Trends you can also listen to the podcast of this interview and every interview wherever you listen to podcasts don't forget to like subscribe and follow wherever possible so you never miss an episode once again I'm Katie boso and I will see you next time

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