On The Road E07 - Avitus Technology Services: Cole Halpin

Key takeaways: 

Clients who want a high level of technology expertise but can’t afford to hire a staff of specialists internally will get it through our managed service offering
Technology is powerful tool that can change a business and save a business
We work with clients whose recurring fees are as little as $300 a month to those spending nearly $30,000 a month
Business owners are demanding more flexibility from their tech, and we help them achieve agility while still keeping their systems secure

Eli Johnson:

Welcome to another episode of On the Road. Today, we have guests Cole Halpin, director of Avitus Technology Services. We're going to be talking about all things COVID and virtual office related, managed services, Pac-12 football cancellation and this is On the Road. Let's go.

Eli Johnson:

You started with Altitude Technologies.

Cole Halpin:

That's correct.

Eli Johnson:

Which became Avitus Technology Services by way of an acquisition and you started as a help desk guy, moved into a service team engineer, then became a project manager and now you're the director of the entire department, which has been so fun to watch unfold. Tell us about your story. Tell us about your department. Tell us a little bit about Avitus Technology Services.

Cole Halpin:

Sure. Yeah. When you put it all like that, I always forget kind of the whole journey myself. Again, starting as a help desk, tier one, you're fielding all the calls from all the clients. That was really fun. You get a lot of personal relationship with your clients. I feel like that's where I almost started to care so much about customer experience and it just carried with me through the years.

Cole Halpin:

And then obviously when we came in through the acquisition with Avitus Group and became Avitus Technology Services, that was incredibly exciting because we had access to a lot of resources we never had when we were a super small company. And then, for my journey from there, I always just found a way to fill the gaps. Every single business outside of technology, if it's marketing, it's for our clients, every business has a need. I was always able to identify that and be, our weakness right now is we don't have a strong service team engineer, so I can be that guy, so I go be that guy. And then I'm like, we need a project manager, so I can go be that guy. And then obviously, I always had ambitious goals, but director was an interesting one that kind of opened up. And I was like, that's definitely one where there's an obvious need there. And I knew that because I'd been with a company up at that point for eight years dating back to Altitude Technologies.

Cole Halpin:

It was really exciting. It's been a whirlwind of a challenge. I've really enjoyed every moment of it, of course. Leading a few acquisitions or finishing up acquisitions and part of that same process for the ones that we've had internally, just for ATS. Again, it's just been a wild ride. I really can't put it any other way.

Eli Johnson:

Yeah. Well, the fun part about listening to your journey is that it relates to everybody who is listening right now, whether you're an Avitus Group business development rep or you are an appointed consultant from a given division within the Vensure family, because all of these are really great acquisitions that have happened and they're evolving into something entirely new. You started with Altitude Technologies, which looks very different compared to what ATS is today, Avitus Technology Services. And that version of ATS is going to look very different here, even in a couple of months with where your team is trending. We're going to run through some questions today that is going to help our audience by the end, understand what you want our group, our audience, to know, what to feel and what to do with regard to ATS. With that, technology is one of those things that we all use, but not all of us are just extremely well versed in it. Tell us why you love technology.

Cole Halpin:

Man, that's a loaded question, but if I had to put it very simple, it's probably the reason I love technology so much is because it literally changes the world because it empowers everything that we do. Every single thing that we do from a business perspective, from our personal lives, is impacted and empowered by technology. If you think about it, everybody goes around with our smartphone. We have access to the infinite world of information at our fingertips at all times, which is really cool. But one of the neat things I don't think a lot of people realize is, people had to design and cater that phone to an experience so that you could use it. Yeah, you have access to all this information, but how do you use it? And then people come up with things like Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and all these cool ideas and Uber and all of these ways that without technology we living in the golden age, if you will, of having to hail a taxi and wait for them to show up at the airport.

Eli Johnson:

Hail a taxi.

Cole Halpin:

Man, who loved that?

Eli Johnson:

You've never done that by the way.

Cole Halpin:

I did it once and it was absolutely terrible. But that's the point is technology allows you to just do things that we were so preordained in like, oh, that's just how things are, and just think about it differently and do things differently. And when I look at it from our client's perspective, we have the ability to do that all the time. Our clients get stuck in that mindset of, well, we just do it this way because we've always done it. Not realizing that there's a technical way to do that way better, way easier, way faster.

Cole Halpin:

And that's really just impactful from an end user’s perspective because again, maybe that was that really monotonous tasks that they came in every Monday, they spent four hours and they just hated it. It was the worst part of their week. And then through conversations, we're able to implement a technical solution that instead of four hours takes 15 minutes. Just potentially changed their life and way that they approach work. Just technology in and of itself is extremely powerful in the way that it can impact all of our lives from both our clients, to my personal life. I think that's why I've always come to appreciate it so much.

Eli Johnson:

Yeah. Well, so in the new world with venture and pointing consultants and divisions that are all looking to be as successful as we possibly can on the PEO space, we've now got additional tools in our tool belt with marketing and IT and recruiting. Tell us about managed services. You're talking about what you love about technology. How do we impact that client that's using us for PEO and maybe now tax as well? We're doing their year-end return for the husband and wife and also a couple staff members and their corporate return. That could be something that's happening as we speak, but then tell us how we get in there with managed services? What is that? What do we need to know? Why is it important?

Cole Halpin:

Yeah, definitely. Managed services in kind of at a high level is simply taking their IT experience and outsourcing it to us. Every single business has technology and IT needs, that does not change for any business out there. Every single one has it. It's like your electricity. It's like a utility. If you don't have it, your business isn't operating.

Eli Johnson:

Is it reasonable to say they're there utilizing some sort of outsource something that most companies don't have somebody sitting doing their IT, do they?

Cole Halpin:

Most businesses are going to be outsourcing. And if they're not, we'll call it insourcing, but that's really like, they have maybe an administrative assistant around the office that maybe he or she is pretty good with tech and they're doing a few things, so they could have somebody who's doing it in house, but at the end of the day, they're not doing it correct, is probably the best way that I would frame it. And they're not doing it efficiently. Usually what you'll see in that if they have an in-house person is just that they're handling the day to day, but technology isn't intended to just be band-aid. It's not patched. It's supposed to empower the business, make it more productive. A lot of businesses when they're doing that, they're not taking advantage even of the technology they already have. They're already paying for it. They're not just not using it because they don't have that expert who knows how to, that spends the time, week in, week out learning all the things that you need to know so you can drive that value.

Cole Halpin:

Managed services is really a service where clients who want that level of expertise, but they can't hire a full team staff of a security specialist, a phone specialist, a server specialist, application support. There's a lot that goes into running an operational IT and doing it well, but small to midsize businesses can't afford that. It's just not economically feasible. Managed services is the ability to engage with us, to get that level of experience and service that would otherwise not be accessible to them.

Eli Johnson:

I had the chance to attend the global leadership summit last week, which is something I love doing every year. And one of the speakers talked about the decision funnel and within the decision funnel, everything should fall into three categories, what can be eliminated, what can be automated and what can be delegated. And I think that plays really well into what the ATS space does for our clients. How does our pricing work? How do we help a client get all of these corporate style IT benefits to them when they only have 10 work desks?

Cole Halpin:

Our pricing model is defined essentially by how many workstations and servers and things that they have out there, but on a very high level, most industries there's a pretty easy correlation that even if you don't know that, or even if the business owner or the prospect doesn't know it, a lot of business owners or business operations, I should say, have a pretty close to a one to one ratio, which means if you have 10 employees, you probably have 10 workstations. Maybe there's another one hidden around the office somewhere and maybe a server on the back. A 10% ratio for how many servers to workstations. Again, not to turn this into a math formula, but our pricing model essentially works on how many devices they have, impacts our labor and how much we need to support them because outside of just delivering IT services and IT support, which every business needs, security is a huge thing with every business owner.

Cole Halpin:

Nobody wants to build this awesome business and then have all their proprietary information taken for ransom and have to close their doors and pay this ransom at the same time. That's a kill shot for a lot of businesses. Every single one of our clients gets a defined security stack to make sure that they're protected, they have the best practices in place and we don't compromise on our client's security because that's at the end of the day, that's that piece of mind that they're looking for when they look for a managed services provider, like we are, is they want to know that they're trusted, they have somebody they can call when they need the help but that also that we're taking care of the things that they don't see and they shouldn't have to see it. That's our job.

Eli Johnson:

Yeah. And I think on another episode of On the Road for technology specifically, we'll talk about some of the ransom stories you've shared with me because we could spend the entire episode talking about that. It's a world that I've never even understood or come across until I met you. And it's a real thing with our clients and you guys do a great job getting in front of that. Tell us, so I guess before we get into what is a good client, what's not a good client, give us the range of what you currently work with in terms of size. Do we have a $300 client and a $20,000 client? Do we have an average size? Some of the team listening, that's such helpful context when you're dealing with a given prospect.

Cole Halpin:

Sure. From a monthly, looking at it only on the monthly revenue side of things, our smallest clients are right now, there are about 300 to $400 a month. On our highest end, in terms of total recurring services that we do, we have one account that's about $28,000 a month. But on top of that, technology is, we have a lot of transactional is basically what I always term it. Is every client needs hardware, they need services, they need servers, they need projects. There's a lot of things outside of that $28,000 that that client does for us. In total, they probably do about $750,000 with us in terms of all of their needs because they're about a 500-user rental property management company in this case, but all across the nation.

Cole Halpin:

Again, we had to figure out our service model, how do we service everybody across the nation? Because that's a need. Every business at some point wants to get to a point where they're not just in Billings, Montana or Denver, Colorado. They want to grow that brand or that business and in a lot of cases to be national. They want to be all over the place.

Eli Johnson:

If I'm a rep for Matrix and I'm in South Florida and I have a managed service client prospect that I want to bring on, could our team handle it?

Cole Halpin:

Absolutely. One of our biggest prospects right now is one of our reps is working is in California and we don't physically have an office in California, but I also don't need one. We vetted and built subcontractor partnerships on the national level. Technology at the end of the day, it's virtual. Again, if you have an internet connection I can get to you and I can service everything. And even if your internet service goes down, I can use an app that's almost like a FaceTime. You can show me what's going on, we can get you back up and running. And even in the case of that doesn't work again, I have access to the subcontractors. They will go onsite and they'll be our remote hands. Our clients still don't have to worry about anything. They work with us. We manage the whole thing, like a project management team. And then the client gets the service that they need. And they're not paying the inflated rates. When you talk about Florida and California, a lot of times just from payroll dollars to have the same level of IT experience.

Eli Johnson:

Right, that's a great point.

Cole Halpin:

It's a huge cost. They charge a huge amount. And again, we operate out of Billings, Montana and Springfield, Missouri is very competitive from a labor market perspective. We offer extremely competitive pricing, especially if you're looking at local markets or even if you're just trying to bring it in house.

Eli Johnson:

Yeah. That's a phenomenal segue into one of our last two questions. Where is technology heading with the statement you made of everything's going virtual? Where is technology heading, especially in lieu of COVID? And we're probably going into another wave. I just saw the Pac-12 and the Big Ten just canceled their football seasons. What the heck? This is the beginning of a new normal for all of us. Where are we heading with technology?

Cole Halpin:

Yeah. You had to blow my mind on the football right before this podcast. I thank you for that.

Cole Halpin:

Yeah. Where is technology going? The reality again is it's all going virtual or is going as virtual as possible. We have a personal project goal of getting all of our client server lists within the next two years. That's our goal. At very least 50%. At the end of the day, the reality is, businesses are becoming way more flexible and they're demanding more flexibility and agility. And what that means is that no longer means you have a server and some workstations and you have this office you go into all the time and everything sits there and nothing ever leaves. That's just not the business model that businesses operate in these days. All the major players already speaking to COVID or Google and Twitter and Facebook, all those guys are letting their staff work from home pretty much forever.

Cole Halpin:

But the reality is that's where things are going is people want to be able to travel, go from Duluth, Georgia, to Denver, Colorado, and still be able to do everything that they wanted to do. Doesn't matter if they're in a hotel, at a coffee shop, they want to be able to do everything that they need to do. Technology is moving in that direction. And the challenge that a lot of businesses are facing obviously now, but are only going to increase is that that's, in some cases, that can be a very complicated process if you don't know what you're doing and if you don't have a trusted advisor or a resource that you can leverage to get there, you're going to stumble a lot and it's going to be very expensive. You're going to have to have a lot of painful downtime or learning experiences or there's a lot of pain points that will come with somebody who doesn't know what they're doing properly.

Cole Halpin:

But again, essentially, we've started the migration to the cloud dating back to ATS days about three years ago, is when we started moving as much infrastructure as we could to clients that they would allow us to. Back then the cloud was very, I guess it was very young so it was a newish idea even just three years ago from a business perspective. You had to get a lot of buy in and have a lot of conversations, but one of the things I always like to highlight is, when COVID happened, at that point we were supporting about 4,000 users and we had to spin up 2,000 of those users to be work from home in the course of about 24 hours, because pretty much the nation shut down pretty much in a day.

Cole Halpin:

Luckily, most of our infrastructure, we'd been talking and designing client infrastructures for years to kind of support this endeavor. We were able to get that spun up relatively quickly. Obviously that 24 hours, I was really proud of my team, but at the end of the day, that's the new norm. As everybody has working from home or working in a variance of in the office and in home, they're more flexible schedules. Businesses are looking at that. We're talking to businesses about not renewing lease space. The reality is technology is going to be more virtual, more cloud oriented, more modern workplace.

Eli Johnson:

Yeah. I think what I'm hearing is your department, just technology in general, but what your department allows for our clients is for us to be more secure. We didn't talk enough about that today. We're running out of time, but we need to get back to that. Just the basics of what you do on the technology front is security, but then also the agility. You make our clients very agile to be able to be nimble and move around, just like what we've done now with our staff that's working from home and that self-imposed glass ceiling of limitations on thinking and how work should be. And what hours you work, that's all been changed. And that's probably going to be with us for a long time.

Eli Johnson:

I love this statement. We're going to end on this question. This comes from Craig Rochelle. And so I want you to think about answering this from you being at the front lines with our clients. The farther away you are from a situation, the more ignorant you become. You're in the battle line. You're right there at the front, dealing with our clients' heartburn and headaches with IT. You can speak to this really well. To the ACs, the appointed consultants, and to the BDs, with context around companies, what do you want us to know about IT for them? What do you want us to feel that's their kind of their heartburn that they experience? And then what do you want us to do? What are your expectations from this group listening to bring new activity and new opportunities? Because ultimately we're out there to be a blessing and a support to our clients, no matter recruiting, IT, marketing, whatever. What do you want us to know? What do you want us to feel? What do you want us to do?

Cole Halpin:

Well, if it comes to what I would like everyone to know is again, technology is just so critical when it comes to what we deliver and what we do for our clients. Again, I kind of made the reference, technology in a lot of ways like electricity or water to their building. If your electricity goes out, it's critical, you can't do anything. Technology is the same way. If it goes down, you can't do anything and you're frustrated and we can work with our clients to make sure that that's just not something that they need to experience and make sure that we know for a lot of the appointed consultants, especially that don't know about technology and what we can do, that it's a completely different lever or pain release, if you will, that we can alleviate for those clients outside of just the PEO relationship that we used to do in the past.

Cole Halpin:

And when it comes to what I could encourage everybody to make them feel is I wish I could get across through a podcast, but man technology is powerful. There are so many things that it allows us to do, that it allows business owners to do, completely change business models, completely save a business. An application install or a migration to something new can save a business. They could be nonoperational, that could be losing money, they could be trying to keep a door open and through a technology implementation, they could be excelling.

Eli Johnson:

Yeah, that's powerful.

Cole Halpin:

They could be growing that business. And then what I would like to do is just or I would ask everyone to try and do is just understand, obviously, that technology can be so impactful and that we have the team of experts and I never ask or want any of the appointed consultants or BDs to feel like they have to be technology experts. Of course, that's our job. And that's what we're going to do. But when you can get that relationship and get us engaged and get us introduced, we can help close those deals but we can also just help alleviate those pain points that every business is seeing, because I talk to all of our clients all the time and those are the pain points and where we see so much success is where they don't feel like they had somebody who had their best interests at heart from a technology perspective.

Cole Halpin:

And at the end of the day, our entire model from the IT side is delivering that best in class customer experience that we can so that they just feel good about everything that's happening. Not just that they have somebody to call when they fix it, but they've got someone to call when they want to plan for the future. When they want to open that new location, they want to open into a new state. What does that look like? How do they source material? All of those sort of things.

Eli Johnson:

Yeah. Yeah. That's very well said. And what I'm hearing on the what do you want us to do? At-bats, at-bats, at-bats. We've got to bring opportunities. And so, for those listening, this is Eli Johnson, speaking myself, Alex Mozota, and Sarah Staus, we are all very well prepared to help be the conduit between your prospect's need and in this instance, Cole, helping in his Avitus Technology Services. We want to be a blessing to clients. We want to help them get unstuck and get to where they're ultimately wanting to get to with one location, seven locations, or just a really well automated machine. This has been very helpful.

Eli Johnson:

I love getting you in the room because you're such a passionate guy about your product and you know it inside and out. We're going to bring you at-bats. We're going to bring more opportunities like the one that Mikey Ryder has right now, $4,000 a month residual and it's already a great PEO client. How many of those are out there? And we just get to be a better support to somebody who's already in the family of services. This has been ATS, another episode of On the Road. Have a great week. We will see you all next time.

Cole Halpin:

Thanks guys.