Operational Maturity

 you can lead your business to operate at 2.6 times the bottom line revenue.  Harry meets with Craig Fulton to chat about Operational Maturity with MSP’s. 

Video Transcription

Harry Brelsford 

Hey nation nation, Harry here, and I'm with Craig Fulton the chief customer officer. Did I get that? Right?That's your latest title

First of all, tell us a little bit about yourself. How, what have you done to Connectwise? I understand you, you moved up the ladder?

Craig Fulton 

Yeah. So I came into ConnectWise, as a field engineer with the MSP in Tampa. Wow. I've gotten into tech and 94 in the Marines, and went to Accenture and landed at connect wise. And so since my time there, I worked in support, help build education and consulting teams, moved to the product team, worked in product development and management for eight years, became the product officer. And then shifted focus more to customer oriented support, customer success. I just wanted to make sure that our partners were leveraging the most of the software. Yeah, well,

Harry Brelsford 

let's talk about the keynote the other day. So you talked about operational maturity. So if you don't mind, let's kind of walk through that both with the MSPs and ConnectWise. itself.

Craig Fulton 

Yeah, yeah. So with the MSPs, when we talk about maturity, what I've been witnessed in the community is, in the beginning, very focused on a getting technology infrastructure out there korkis, on delivering technology, supporting technology. You know, I'd say I'm describing a number, but it's pretty close about an average size of one of our partners in the beginning was about 12 employees, and the owner was very techie. Yeah, the maturity we've seen is the probably because of managed services, and what it is, and you're delivering an outcome to a customer of uptime and productivity. And then you're starting to see people say, Whoa, I need to add value in my business, this is my retirement plan. You're seeing this maturity happen. Now we're seeing partners in a 25 employee arrangement. Importantly, the owner is more strategic driven, more focused on a customer experience now, because the technology is now there, now they're focused on how can the customer leverage this technology to grow their business to meet their goals, instead of just fixing computers, when they break or I'm just putting a computer here, they're more focused on, you know, using technology to drive business forward and being more consultative. So that's the maturity we've seen on MSP side. Now, ConnectWise, I've had a unique view on it for so long, and and I really did grow up in that company, I would say, I matured myself, we've seen a maturity of Small Business Startup thinking of, okay, just just run, just go work at the speed of thought, like, you know, do things and see if they land and, and, and we did a lot of that, right, we built a university, we built this community, based on our feeling like this feels right, do it, you know, and having Arne as a mentor was a was a great thing, because he really understood the pulse and what people wanted and how to pull that off. But as you start to grow a business, right, scaling that magic, it's hard, right? Because then, you know, I, I liken it to like a brewery, right? It's like, if you get a brewery in your town, it's small, and you go there, and you know him. And he's like, great, this is awesome. And this is such a great thing. But then, when you travel across the country, and you see that beer in a can in a grocery store, kind of like wait a minute, what? Why are they here, that's my thing back in my town, click away started to kind of go through that. It was like, Wait, now everybody wants it. And we grew. And then you know, some of the original partners like, hey, but this was our thing. And you knew my name. And it was Norman as cheers and yeah, and this is the maturity calculator not going through, like, how do we deliver that at scale? And we've had, we have to be more intentional. We can say, well, this feels right, let's do it. It's, it's about measuring to what looks good. But what good looks like managing to an outcome. Because we want to make sure that we continue to deliver a great experience to our partners, and we have to mature to do that. So it's really the only way you can scale. We don't have 30 people anymore. We have over 2600 And we now have 40,000 plus partners. Yeah, that's amazing. That's the maturity though. Excuse me, that we're talking about?

Harry Brelsford 

What's next. What's next. And as we go forward in 2022, you've been on a rampage with mergers and acquisitions. I know you normally can't comment on that, but at a high level of what's next,

Craig Fulton 

our platform. Okay, so we launched our ASIO platform here. It was

Harry Brelsford 

ASIO stand for.

Craig Fulton 

It's a genus of owl. No. So yeah. That's where that's coming from our new. Our chief marketing officer, really Got the team together? And yeah, I love the name. And I love the new brand too. So it was we talked about going in, you know, we've, we've launched a new logo, new brand to kind of signify that, you know, this is the next generation of Connect wise, but we're really focused on the platform, because we have over 20 products. We can't continue to like duplicate efforts across products. You can't say, Okay, we got 10 of these products have ticketing, let's build 10 ticketing engines, you have to build one ticketing engine that they point. Yeah,

Harry Brelsford 

I could see that with your acquisitions. Yeah. So that's the

Craig Fulton 

future and then really continuing to invest in partner growth the it nation, we're here now. We're doing a lot more next year and into the future. And then if you saw the keynote this morning, you know, we've we've acquired service leadership, and the future is taking all of that great content, all those great assets, the sleek the benchmarking, and bringing it to this community because we know the future is growth and adding value to business.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, you know, it's interesting, because I've, I've swapped sir, I know, I've known already since the late 90s.

Craig Fulton 

I used to see you guys in the videos. Yeah, exactly. And

Harry Brelsford 

I watched when you interacted with SMB Nation. And again, there's life cycles. And so for about a decade, we helped you recruit partners in growth, right, that that was our job is to help you recruit MSPs, then you had them. And what I'm hearing you say, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but it may be less about recruiting 1000s and 1000s of partners, but working with your 40,000 existing partners and helping them grow through service leadership and so on to get that right. I mean, you're probably never turned down a sign up.

Craig Fulton 

No, we want to continue to grow. True, Mr. Airy. I'm honored to be here. Because, you know, like I said, I Oh, that's Harry Brelsford. And so I finally get to sit down with you. So I'm a little starstruck, but it's like, we want to continue partners. But we feel we've matured, now we understand it. We understand how to scale it. We launched this modes concept on stage a couple

Harry Brelsford 

go into the lecture this afternoon. Yeah, you

Craig Fulton 

know, are you a start up? Are you a value builder? Are you an empire builder? We're doing things like that

Harry Brelsford 

of the lifestyle guy. Yeah. And there's nothing

Craig Fulton 

wrong with that, like, some people will feel like, Oh, I'm just a lifestyle business. Like, that's great. That's the majority. There's nothing wrong with that. But let's, let's work together, let's figure out your mode. Let's figure out what your operational maturity level is, and then deliver the right content the right place, we want to scale the magic to the 40,000 that we currently have. But we want to continue to bring partners in to our community, the IT nation, and help as well.

Harry Brelsford 

Now, and that's really important, because, and I wasn't being facetious. But there's a lot of companies now embracing the term, you know, platform and ecosystem and all that. And we're not seeing is much activity on the recruiting side. And here's my concern, is that, you know, we're trying to attract younger people into this profession. Yeah. Right. And we need to recruit them. And you know, my my two sons, with all due respect, what nothing to do with the MSP come in once over an enterprise healthcare technology, the others in aerospace. So we somehow have to have a better conversation with the next generation, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Craig Fulton 

And you're right. And yesterday, I was telling the crowd, like, that's the that's the group I'm most excited to meet, because we have done a good job of hitting like that is, you know, Arne would call it the gen one. It provided

Harry Brelsford 

we're not getting any younger. And it's like,

Craig Fulton 

where is the gen two? How do you reach them? How do you draw them in? What are what are they looking for? We're bringing gen two in, I see them. But I think it's a completely different way to

Harry Brelsford 

differentiate conversation.

Craig Fulton 

Yeah, a completely different conversation because they're not thinking leading legacy when they're out there. They're thinking and they're growing their business different. They're not as techie Cory. More sales and marketing driven and growing a business through acquisition not organically growing

Harry Brelsford 

Correct. Yep. Well, let's do this. Let's check in next quarter. Why do we plan on quarterly reviews? That quarterly business reviews? Let's do that. Yeah. Craig, thank you. Good job on the show. I'm impressed. 2700 attendees. Well over 100 booths. Nice. Nice. Come back after you're off. My congratulations. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Craig Fulton 

Thank you. Thanks.