A Trip Down Memory Lane: The History of Advanced Global:
It is Christmas. A time for family, food, giving, gratitude, and reminiscing. I was born on September 17th, 1956. On that day, President Dwight Eisenhower was driving thru the streets of New York in an open convertible with his grandson David, campaigning for reelection. I was born into a family of Engineers, and yes, calculus equations were discussed around the Christmas Day Dinner Table.
In high school, I mainly took electronic classes, and my Senior Year Chemistry Paper was on the chemical properties of a guitar amplifier tube (you know, before transistors and chips) and how the audio was amplified from a chemical property perspective. I do not remember my grade on the paper, but I graduated 101st out of 500 or so (my sister graduated 3rd a year later).
After High School, I toured around the US with various bands, mixing audio and fixing amplifiers for a living. Then one day, the band I worked with went into a studio to cut an album, and that was it.
I headed for New York City the next day and got a job working in Park South Studios with Joe Venneri of the Tokens fame (Think Lion Sleeps Tonight). At the time, I was planning on building a mobile recording studio, focusing on recording live albums for the local Jersey scene.
I did engineer a single that made it on the Bubbling Under Billboard Charts called Love Me into a Coma by Street Rize. While I have never worked with a celebrity, I have worked with several celebrity backup bands, including the Asbury Jukes, the horn section behind Diana Ross and Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul.
But it was not my rock-n-roll years that caused me to go deaf. The reason I am deaf is a disease that I inherited from my mother called otosclerosis. Yep, I am still blaming my parents for everything that is wrong with me.
In the fall of 1984, several personal events led me to move back to Ohio for the second time. The first time I lived in Ohio, I worked as an overnight disc jockey at a radio station. The radio station manager had moved on to managing a television station, and when our paths crossed, he offered me a job.
I started out as a bench tech and, over the next 22 years, rose thru the ranks to Regional Director of Engineering for ION Media, with stops working for independents, NBC, and Paxson Communications on the way.
Traveling down memory lane, some of my favorite highlights of my Television Broadcasting career include:
building a 7MM USD tele-production facility (I was the lead design engineer and project manager)
lobbying on Capital Hill against the 1996 Telecommunications ACT (so you can see my love for politics)
managing two regions across 11 states while ION Media filled a position, traveled a lot (in 2003, I flew 100K miles and drove another 60K – while spending 180 nights in a Hilton hotel, not to mention the other chains)
and ushering in the Analog to Digital transition (rebuilding 11 transmitter sites and 15 production studios)
Along the way, I have climbed 1200’ towers, been on top of the Sears, Hancock, and Aon towers in Chicago, and was scheduled to visit the top of the Twin Towers the week after 9/11 (both of the Engineers I know who worked in the Twin Towers took that day off – FYI: CBS lost more Engineers than the other networks on that day).
During this period of time, I decided to go back to college and get a degree. Not having a degree was holding me back from getting higher-paying jobs. I called my brother and asked him if I should go into Management or continue my Engineering education.
Turns out, my brother gave me bad advice. I graduated from Indiana University with a bachelor’s in Business Administration and a minor in Marketing. Sensing that this was not enough, and an MBA was not the best path forward, I enrolled at Purdue University and graduated 4 years later with a bachelor’s in Computer Science with a minor in Radio Frequency (RF) Communications. Now I was set to move on up into the executive suites, which I did.
Needless to say, by 2006, I was tired of Television. I was working harder on Holidays than any other day of the year. From the time I was 16, I had worked every New Year’s Eve. I remember going to bed at 10 pm on December 31st, 2006, because I could. Now I cannot stay up past 8 pm. Maybe you can relate…
I moved around a little bit (by this time, I had visited all 50 states and 7 of the 12 Canadian Providences – I thought there were only 11, where did Nunavut come from?). In 2010 I took a job for a fairly large, well-established MSP – System Engineering in Portland, Maine. I thought I knew something about IT. I mean, after all, in broadcasting, we were using Cisco routers to move video and audio around the country. But I was wrong. I could not hold a candle to a level 1 Technician’s knowledge, and that was before the cloud.
However, they needed me. They had a reactive, Break/Fix Service Delivery operation, and I was asked to reengineer their processes into a proactive, Data-Driven Service Delivery operation. Which I did over the next 7 years, improving the profit margins by 10% year over year.
At the end of the first year, my supervisor called me to the office (something that happened regularly) and informed me that they had not yet seen any process improvements. My response was that I was working on fixing the foundation. You see, they were still using Autotask in default mode, the way the software had been delivered to them.
As Aaron Kennedy from Cognition 360 says, “No PSA comes pre-configured.” You need to figure out (or hire a guide) to fully leverage the PSA software, and that was what I was working on. Even though there was no significant process improvement, just improving the foundation improved profit margins by more than 10%.
The next year and the six years after that brought significant process improvements, including:
1) Segmenting Requests into 11 different Service Delivery Workflows
2) Leveraging the SLA Automation
3) Building a Better Client Experience
4) Holding the Teams accountable via Advanced Live Report writing
5) Streamlining Invoicing via Cascading Contract Automation
6) Completing Projects on time and on budget
7) Managing a Project Portfolio of over 150 in-progress projects at a time
8) Resource Planning to maximize Resource Utilization
9) Mapping Preventative Network Administration visits to reduce scheduling conflicts
10) Mapping Dispatch Calendars to the Intranet and color coding them so everyone in the building could see what all 25 field and project Engineers were working on for the next 8 weeks in a single glance
And the list goes on.
In 2017, my mother-in-law came across a book by Danny Iny called Teach and Grow Rich. The book is about how to start and grow a coaching business. I still think she had an ulterior motive as my wife is looking to retire, and at the time, my 401K was not going to allow me to retire for another 12 years.
After reading the book, the concept of coaching a few hours in retirement, which would allow me to continue earning a decent paycheck, was a no-brainer. We launched the business on August 28th, 2017, with the blessing of System Engineering. I stayed working for them for another 2 years while building the business. In 2019, I left System Engineering and hired Carol H. as an associate coach. We have never looked back.
Today we have worked for over 200 MSPs. We are proud to offer 23 different programs. Delivered by 4 coaches and a support staff of 8. Most of us have worked for an MSP as Executives, Service Managers, Service Coordinators, Techs, Inventory Managers, Sales, and/or Project Managers, with a combined 42+ years of MSP experience. We have a library of over 60 SOPs, 100’s of other documents, a video library with 82 “How to” videos, 100’s of Live Report Mock-Ups, and a wealth of information stored in our heads. The bottom line: we know what we know because we have sat in the Service Delivery seat and worked hard to know everything about Autotask that is worth knowing.
We continue to grow, improve and deliver a richer transformational education experience. Of the 200 MSPs we have worked for, over half have gone thru the Service Delivery Foundational Improvement program, which resulted in more than a 10% improvement in Service Delivery efficiency. Some have gone thru the advanced Service Delivery Performance Improvement and optimized their Service Delivery Operation.
Next week, we will talk about an MSP that graduated from our programs and has an average Tech Balanced Scorecard score of 96, and another MSP who has a Tech that has scored 100 for the last (maybe by next week, three months).
We are very proud to help MSPs to thrive, guiding them to:
1) Fully leverage the Autotask software
2) Improve their operating processes and procedures
3) Being able to hold the Team accountable thru Advanced Live Reports
Are you looking to be the best in class by the end of 2023? Schedule a call for the first week of the New Year, as we are off until then.
The elephant in the room:
How do we know what we know? Because we are not philosophers! We are hands-on “How To” coaches that everyday guide MSPs on how to thrive by:
1) Fully leveraging the Autotask software
2) Providing the “Best in Class” Standard Operating Procedures
3) Leveraging Autotask Live Reports to hold everyone accountable
We are Thinkers and Doers with 49+ years of working for MSPs, bringing real Bottom-Line Improvements, change, profitability, and Best in Class performance.
Here are a few bullet points to let anyone interested know who we are and what we do:
1) We Are – the Autotask Global Service Delivery Authority
2) We Help – MSPs thrive
3) We Solve – Service Delivery issues, inefficiencies, and challenges by making sure that:
a. MSPs know what they don’t know
b. Techs know what to work on next
c. Someone is managing all open tickets and driving them to completion
d. The Client has a great client experience
e. Real-Time Time Entry is a cultural habit
f. Projects are completed On-Time and On-Budget
g. Profit is maximized
h. Autotask is being fully leveraged
i. The staffing levels are correct, and the workload is balanced
j. The historical data that is in the Autotask software is accessible to benchmark, track & USE effectively
k. The Service Delivery operations can scale
l. The Company can grow
4) Our Tools:
a. Autotask “Best in Class” standard build
b. Our MSP robust Service Delivery SOP library
c. Advanced Live Reports
d. Expertise in providing a transformational experience
Note: We are not philosophers; we are doers with 31+ years of Service Delivery experience, bringing real Service Delivery Improvement change, profitability, and Best in Class performance.
We start by offering a FREE No-Obligation PSA Configuration Evaluation.
Steve & Co
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