Video: How To Do Hard Things And Measure Perfection With VXIT CXO

you're in an airplane what do they always tell you to do first put your own mask on if they come down so I have to put my own mask on first in order to have a good day at work so I have to get my things done and I I feel it when I don't hey Channel insiders welcome back to channel Insider partner poov 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 today I'm interviewing Paul veter Chief experience officer of vxit an MSP he's helped lead for a decade if you know Paul you may know him for his transparent and outspoken approach to the channel and the IT industry as a whole today we'll dig into what he's learned about leadership 10 years on and how he defines Perfection as a managed service provider Paul welcome it's great to see you good to see you thank you for having me thank you so much for being here and making this work today I know you were doing some much more exciting things earlier today with your girls so I appreciate you coming to this one this isn't as exciting as your science Olympics at the girls school but I hope to make it maybe your second coolest thing that happened to you today so we'll try it we'll try for that so Paul I actually have to congratulate you because LinkedIn never lies and you have just crossed your 10y year Markus the chief experienced officer of vxit congratulations thank you I appreciate that it's been a long long road what sticks out to you now where you looked 10 years ago and you may have had like a mantra or a thought that would go through your mind of how you wanted to be as a leader that now makes you cringe is there anything like that oh man yeah I mean it's crazy I I have learned a lot over the last 10 years and the more I learn the more I realize I don't know anything so I I think it's funny because I think back to that time and man I thought I knew a lot and I the reality was that was that I didn't and I was completely not prepared for this journey so I'm I'm constantly asking myself like what is that now uh what is that for me now where I'll look back in another 10 years and go oh my gosh I should have done you know XYZ different but you know I think just getting up and executing on what's going to move our business farther and and concentrating on those things is is what we're focused on now but yeah it's been I've learned a lot it's been a long road like I said it's been a great great one and I wouldn't wouldn't change anything oh that's great to hear you mentioned like doing the next thing for your business that is going to move you farther is that a day-to-day approach a week to week approach or even more just like a quarter to quarter one how often are you thinking about what's the next incremental thing I can do for my business the answer to that is yes it's it's all it's it's actually all of it so we run on EOS and it is a framework that essentially helps us run the business or work on the business instead of working uh in the business so all business owners employees we all get kind of busy with the day-to-day thing and we realize that like the work that we're doing you know we we're doing the actual work we're doing it but we're also running a business those are two separate things and they're very very different because we run on EOS it kind of helps keep our focus on what do we need to do today that will stack up to make a good week that'll stack up to make a good month that'll stack up to make a good quarter that'll stack up to make a good year so it's all kind of flows out from executing daily on you know and focusing on the right things and know that we can't solve everything all at once and that is such my personality like I'm a type A I want all of the solutions right now and I want them changed immediately and you know it's just not reality what's a good day for you like what is a good day defined as is it where everybody comes and says something really good to you or is where nobody talks to you at all like you don't hear anything yeah I mean a good day is is you know when I don't hear complaints from customers or employees of Staff you know quite frankly a good day for me is when I get up when I say I'm going to get up when I get my workout in when I'm eating the proper nutrition you know do I do my cold plunges and sauna and stuff like that like reading all of that actually makes a good day in my business because I talk about this often but you're in an airplane what do they always tell you to do first put your own mask on if they come down so I have to put my own mask on first in order to have a good day at work so I have to get my things done and I I feel it when I don't but outside of that when I get to work you know again sitting down going okay what do I have to do today that's going to push me forward I make this thing called a power list it was developed by this guy named Andy forcella and it's just five critical tasks and I usually write them down on a piece of paper next to my keyboard and I'm like all right what are the five major things that I need to accomplish today that are going to push me the farthest in the business U personally whatever it is and I just focus on those and there's distractions and things that come up and that I have to deal with and that it is what it is but I don't let or I try not to let other things get in the way of my priorities I took two things away from that that one of them I was excited about one of them I'm a little like exhausted about hearing the first one is you make lists and that makes me feel really good because I too have to write out a physical list of my most important tasks of the day and I have to make sure that I'm delegating just between like three and five for that day otherwise I'll want to list out everything hour by hour and then none of it will get done none of the important stuff the second thing is I'm determined that 2024 is trying to tell me that if I start cold plunging all of my problems will go away because every driven person I've spoken to this year seems to cold plunge I got to tell you I can't do it I don't think it's going to happen for me I just don't think think so Paul I didn't like it first and and I'll be honest with you there are days when I stand in front of the cold plunge and I I usually do it right when I get out of bed so right out of bed I go outside and I stand in front of that damn cold plunge and go what the am I doing with my life and I've been doing it for over a year like there's still times where I'm like I don't want to do this but there's science behind it like if you listen to Andrew huberman or any of the guys like doing hard things Works a muscle or part of your brain that enables you to just conquer other things like it's it's just such a crazy thing so you know there was one day that I had to let somebody go and it was it was it was going to be tough and I that's like that is one of the worst Parts ever of my job or anything that I've ever done is having to fire somebody like whether they quote unquote deserve it or not it doesn't matter but firing somebody if you've not done it is is the worst thing in the world it's it's horrific so all that to say I standing in front of my coal plunge and I'm like all right I have a hard thing to do today but this is also a hard so it's I'm purposefully putting myself into you know it's it's hard to work out it's also hard to be overweight like choose your hard life is hard no matter what you but you can choose what hard you go through when you condition your mind you become almost like callous to the hard things and you're like yep I got this it boosts whatever is in your brain I don't know the the scientific term but it's it's a part of your brain that just enjoys doing that yeah I'm always like serotonin I mean either one of those give them to me how do I get them whichever one it is I want more of that well I definitely want to dig more into what you talk about choosing your heart building your lifestyle and designing your life the way that you want it to be and being intentional but I'm going to back up real quick to talk a little bit more about vxit obviously you're an IT consulting and services company like I said you just crossed 10 years with them so you're very familiar with I hope at this point with what you do as a company so why don't you tell me what is vxit in your own words and where do you folks shine at a very high level we're an MSP we're a managed service provider and we're not an MSP pretending to do a lot of different things like we know what we do we stay in our lane I'll say even to prospects or clients at the at the sales table listen I'm not going to sell you both I and I I'll literally tell people that I'm not going to sell you something that we can't deliver on with Excellence so you know we focus on certain industries we have clients in about 12 different Industries right now just because the way we grew was kind of organic Word of Mouth referrals and things like that so all of our larger clients are involved with the PE world uh to some degree so we've had a lot of organic growth there so when they acquire companies you know when they grow we grow sort of a thing so we service about a dozen Industries we have around 60 clients under management now and uh across probably about 10 states I think so we're based in South Florida but we we have clients all over the place and we have some people that we support that are overseas as well just within the last year we've really focused or I've really focused on building out our sales engine you know to kind of push us towards the goals that we've set through EOS that I was talking about earlier so we have a 10-year Target of we want to get to 15 million you know we're like we're going to be at 6 and a half million this year so we're about three years into that plan so I think that it's totally attainable um but again I'm not looking for necessarily hyper growth I want to do things the right way I really care about quality you know and that's one of the things that uh stands out you know as far as we're concerned we're really good at what we do and I think the whole staying in your lane thing and High having a high standard like we set a high standard are we perfect not in any way shape or form are we perfect we make mistakes constantly we have enough equity with our clients when we make a mistake we're able to talk about it deal with it and and move on most times and and that's that's fine you know I think that that's really what stands out you know as far as vxit is concerned just through our high standards and again we we have human beings working at our company and you know we make mistakes nobody's perfect um but we just we strive to always do the right thing to communicate well to hustle to live and work and move with intention to have empathy for people all while having fun and I those are all all of our core values if you didn't catch on to that so that's what we focus on talk to me a little bit more about your your approach to those Industries and verticals you mentioned private Equity you mentioned doing things the right way and not just spreading yourselves too thin like doing everything tell me more about where those Specialties are is it in the offerings that you provide or specifically the the industries and vertical that you serve and when you refer to not doing too many things is that something you're seeing in the industry in the manag services world where people are like catchalls I kind of threw that out there a little bit because I you know people are like oh I want to buy a piece of software now we're in mssp and we're like uh no and actually that came up internally two weeks ago at our company one of our vcio basically he's like hey you know do we have any plans to becoming an mssp I think this would be great for I'm like no because that's a whole different Lane like we don't have the right people we don't have the right skill set so again it's something that I'm not going to sell people because I'm not wholly confident that we can deliver on it with Excellence so I think that there's a lot of people out there that try to do too much companies they don't focus enough on Just what they do well and the vendors are just as guilty of of that um there's some specific vendors out there that come to mind and they have this thing that they that they have and it's it was kind of what got them to where they are now and they're like we love this thing but this thing needs Improvement and they're like well we're not going to improve this thing how about a new thing and we're like we don't want a new thing we want you to improve the thing that made you you know who you are and that we originally liked about you but you've not improved this thing and it's and it's causing us pain so and that's tough on us because we're much smaller than than these vendors they're big organizations driven by private Equity money and they're a sales machine and and they're good sales people and that's actually that's a whole another you know topic that we can talk about a lot of us within the MSP Industries we're nerds ended up starting companies and most of us some of us are not like businessmen at heart I happen to lean more towards the business side I like that the people the process the business I am good at sales so that's what I think has made us successful and gotten us to where we are now my business partner he's the brains behind what we do so I sell the thing and you know my team does the thing but I think that there's a lot of MSP owners out there that are you know again and I was a nerd I was I'm an IT guy that's how I started I started as an in-house it guy I started in the MSP industry I think around 2009 but I started as an in-house it guy so I saw both both worlds and and they are very different the MSP world is like the Navy Seals of it like it's insane the pace everything that comes at us because we're managing so many different environments like when I was an in-house it guy I played a lot of ping pong because there wasn't a lot of like fires and things like that and we had a couple projects a year that we focused on but it wasn't like it's on fire every day at an MSP I mean go on Redding there's people posting constantly like this IND sucks it's the worst like just burn out and and stuff like that because it's it's high paac it's it's and that's the Consulting world you can't get away from that so is that was that was I get on a soap box a little bit I'm gonna shut up now no I'm making you you're gonna live on that so Soap Box throughout the that's my goal that's my goal just to have you on an apple crate the whole time kind of going down that same Avenue I I really want to hear a success story that sort of paints a picture as far is when you say this is how I view success or when a client is really happy this is what happens can you give me a success story from vxit and where you said this is what our Banner should look like every single time when we're evangelizing how great we are let me think and I don't know that I have a single success story necessarily but here's I've been kind of formulating kind of what does success and and what is perfection because that's that's kind of what I was actually trying to Define we always want to strive for Perfection but how do you measure perfect and one of the things and I'll kind of talk about a specific process within an organization or specific offering so uh when when we first started we didn't charge for new user onboarding so when when a company one of our clients has uh they onboard an employee we were not charging an extra fee for that and if you go out to the industry you probably get mixed like half do and half don't charge we realized that we wanted to charge for it and we wanted to charge for it because we wanted to dedicate specific resources and we wanted to make it actually like a really awesome experience so we decided we're like okay we're going to start to roll this out to our client base and we're you know we're charging basically an onboarding fee for a new and I'm talking like if a new employee starts we have to purchase a laptop you know set it up there's there's a lot of work and the folks and other msps that are listening to this will understand it can be an hour or four five hours depending on everything you need to install and set up like it's it's a lot and then there's some training to it so all that to say we were trying to Define like what does success look like for that process and what I think I found was that at the end or throughout that entire process if a client or a person doesn't have have to ask a question on where where they stand within that process and you get to the end and there are no additional questions they're like yeah I'm onboarded I've got everything I need I can do my job there's zero questions like you know I didn't have to reach out and go Hey where's my laptop hey where is this software like if there are no questions during the process or at the end of the process I think that that's like Perfection and we have a we have a money back guarantee as well with the onboarding so if they don't go smoothly like if we miss a deadline or something like that we don't charge for it or we refund the money for so we have a we have a total money back guarantee for our clients because it it was something that was important but we realized the level of care that we wanted to put towards those on boardings we had to charge for it because we're running a business like I have to pay the right people and and get them in the right position to do the job right you know that's kind of what we've been formulating around success and Perfection is when when somebody doesn't have to ask a question or question where they stand with the whole with the whole process I think that that's that that's very much so and I appreciate how you break that down because I think everybody defines Perfection differently and some people just don't believe in the word at all so they try to steer into a different goal as far as what success looks like for them so I appreciate that you take it head on and say this is what perfect looks like to me and it might be different from how somebody else defines it but I think it's a great goal to reach be sure to come back on Tuesday when we dig into Paul's new book thanks to Paul for joining me and thank you for watching or listening you can check out all episodes of Channel Insider partner POV on Channel insider.com or on our YouTube page at youtube.com/ Chanel inssider newws and Trends you can also listen to this and every episode as a podcast on your favorite podcast listening platform go ahead and like subscribe and follow wherever possible so you never miss an episode come connect with Channel Insider on LinkedIn or X or connect with me Katie boso once again I'm your host Katie boso and I'll see you next time

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