Ben Tiggelaar 🟠

PPP Data is a goldmine for a small business buyer - I shouldn't be telling you this... In less than 10 minutes, I found 95 'Flooring Contractors' in Texas, estimated their revenue & EBITDA based on their PPP loan data 6 steps: 1. Get PPP Payroll data for the specific NAICS industry code & geography into a spreadsheet 2. Calculate annual payroll (PPP loan is 2.5 months of payroll) 3. Estimate what payroll is as a % of revenue (this will be industry and biz) 4. Estimate annual revenue 5. Get estimated EBITDA (using your estimate of EBITDA margins typical for this biz) 6. Refine your list further by filtering by your minimum EBITDA threshold

@maxclark @tryramp I got it fixed by providing P&L not reliant on cash balance. Much better.

@bentigg @tryramp I didn’t want to keep the float that ramp required. Moved onto Meow.

Anyone use Ramp (@tryramp) for CCs and AP? Our cash balances required linked has increased 3x overnight after 2 years of being a client. 4 support tickers, some ignored, still no answers. Terrible communication. Can’t get to a knowledgeable support person Or is this just us?

@thomasince @lpfirstcapital @FastestLabs That is so cool!!

This was done at a @lpfirstcapital platform....@FastestLabs ....right near my house ..small world

@BigJohn043 Why? Dry powder (demand) is driving this increase. Nowhere for $ to go, so it goes to PEnin the form of dry powder. This should support prices for years to come no?

This is a fascinating chart. At some level a bit misleading starting in the middle of the GFC. But there is no doubt that valuations have risen significantly over the last two decades. My guess is valuations will come down a bit as B & C assets start to trade...

@SMBTelecomGuy You wait. Should they BK you go on a creditor list ans may get paid out if there is any $ left

I have a customer with an outstanding invoice from December. We did an install project in their office and collected 50% up front and then sent an invoice after completion for the remaining 50% balance. This was their response to my latest follow-up e-mail. How should I respond?

@TheNolanGore This seems unusual. What is this solving? This seems like it’ll put enormous pressure on you to basically do two jobs (which is what most small businesses do today)

Switching up some roles in our leadership. Moving my partner out of the integrator role and into a CFO+ role. This leaves me with Visionary and Integrator (some might just call this "the boss"). I am honestly 60% intimidated and 40% excited. But I think it is best for the org...time will tell.

@DallasAptGP As an IT service / MSP company, we pay our front line engineers a $20 tip should they be named in a review

You can’t buy a 5-star review (for a lot of reasons). But you can structure contests that get your team asking for them It got me thinking... How much is a 5-star review worth to your business? Restaurants, Airbnbs, apartments — all different Curious what it’s worth to you.

Will be some great insights shared by Chris if you are interested in the home services space

On the naming convention, I’d focus it around what your ideal buyer is searching for and align with that. Ex: CEO searching for fractional CFO, I’d focus on what the biggest lead in is and offering and name it around that?. Ex: enterprise just describes the type of company you want to serve

In IT services, we have ‘fully managed’ (what we call Managed IT Department) with 10-250 employees where we own the entire system and workflows end to end. Then we have ‘co-managed’ where we provide specific more narrow service lines (ex: security, hosting, projects) to mid sized companies with IT groups 250-5000 employees. Account management is different, go to market is different, operational delivery is pretty similar but has some nuances

Launching a new division next month! We've learned (somewhat b/c of mistakes - got to learn from them!) that we need a diff service/motion for our most complicated clients $10M+ in rev. Full GAAP. Faster close deadlines. More availability. CFO, etc What should we name it?

Most SMBs don’t value the problems we solve due to lack of understanding what risk they have OR they have deemed risk reduction is not worth the cost ROI (which is 100% valid for many businesses). It’s the ones that do have big risk but don’t understand the potential downside is where we can make a difference.

@bentigg @WilsonCompanies and this thread is exactly why providing services for small businesses is a mugs game….

Can someone explain wtf a managed IT company even does? It seems like an absolute racket and I genuinely don’t understand the value prop. Just like - restart the computer.

Let’s take a step back. Value depends on your situation and what you care about. 5 person cleaning company - you can use barebones systems to operate and probably see no value in protecting what you have. 100 person manufacturing company that does $1M of production per day has a strong incentive to protect their business, ensure their business is operational and downtime is limited. There is a strong ROI in later situation

So basically someone you can blame if/when a hack happens. Everything is cloud based and the vendor holds the sensitive data, so customer data and systems access isn’t really a threat. Your 365 tenant is an issue. We’ve lost access to that and it’s crippling. But IT can’t make Microsoft move more quickly. So you’re down there a few days no matter who your support company is. You threaten us with the boogie man. But the boogie man is doing the same damage with or without you. You just give us a layer of legal finger pointing. That’s the real answer. Everything else we can do ourselves without even having a dedicated person for it.

@SMBTelecomGuy @WilsonCompanies Haha. Yeah.

@bentigg @WilsonCompanies After having thousands of these conversations over my career I estimate the number of SMBs following even the minimum cybersecurity best practices is in the single digits.

For these same reasons, even mid sized and enterprise clients partner with MSPs like us....even if you have 1-10 IT people: there are still operational, technical, and project gaps that need to be filled and is better suited towards 'outsourcing' or finding a strategic IT partner. A 4 person IT team doesn't have a budget to hire a CISO, thankfully we have one and an entire dedicated security department.

This is exactly why attackers LOVE small businesses, so you're not alone in this thinking. To state the obvious, most use MSPs for an obvious reason: using a managed IT provider is cheaper than doing it yourself in-house assuming you are comparing apples to apples service & environment (we have scale, expertise, and bench). Let's for a moment just ignore all the operational business efficiencies, keeping your business secure, compliant, resilient, and operational, resolving support requests, hardware provisioning, automating onboarding/offboarding, having a cybersecurity team actively preventing threats, compliance if you operate in an industry that requires it, managing tens of IT/network/security tools that are tablestakes with threat actors these days... Let's turn this towards YOU and think threat based actors (ignoring operational use cases) since these are simpler to see. If you think "just restart it" is IT, I'm guessing your infrastructure is already an easy target. Here's how a basic multi-pronged attack would destroy you (and you're opening yourself up to more attacks by publicly outlining your situation/posture so I hope your IT guy has his stuff in order): 1) Without managed email security and dns filtering, a spoofed CEO request gets your accounting team to wire money 2) No endpoint protection? No backups tested? One phishing email and your whole network locks up. Pay or go bankrupt. Ransom ware 3) Flat network? No segmentation? Once inside, attackers move across devices and servers in minutes, stealing everything. 4) No proactive monitoring? Attackers install hidden backdoors so they can come back whenever they want — months later, years later. 5) Customer data, financials, private emails — all dumped on the dark web. Probably compliance fines, bad reputation. Think of that weird twitter guy who was trying to take down people for the fun of it...but imagine someone who has a financial incentive to destroy you, your reputation, and business 6) How long could your business function should attackers gain access to your Google/M365 tenant? Serious question, and should be something to consider. 7) Cyber insurance are starting to require more and more. Can't get insured if you don't have the basics in place.

@stephenolmon @WilsonCompanies Replied above :-)

@WilsonCompanies @bentigg

@jerephil Yes people have some interesting stories…I’m not surprised at how Elmo has scaled. He really was sales first and took himself out very quick. It shows in how he did stuff faster and found a better market than his peers.

@bentigg Yeah, it really is interesting to hear how folks end up in the business and how they handle operations.

🔥 MSP owners: Still stuck in technician or fire fighting mode? Like the idea of delegating but it never actually happens? In this week’s MSP Owner Podcast, I sit down with Elmo Taddeo, owner and CEO of Parachute Technology — a $11.5M revenue MSP with 70+ team members. Elmo breaks down the real shift that happens when you stop doing the work and start building the machine. We're talking about process & people, and most importantly LETTING GO. 👊 Delegation isn’t just about offloading tasks — it’s about building trust and creating freedom. We talk about a lot of other stuff too: EOS, marketing, how to target & find larger clients 50+ users 🎧 Listen here → mspowner.com/episode/elmo-t… 🎧 Youtube: youtu.be/u9Ok_sqpIR8 🎧 Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/0NskmBkVi… 👇 Was there a moment when you truly started to delegate? Mine: I acquired a company years ago where it was too big (16) for me to do all the things myself, I HAD to rely on others from the start. Some small MSPs who start as 1 man bands, never get over that hump.

@jerephil Yesss I love it. Appreciate the feedback Jeremy. I really liked Elmo, his mid market focus is pretty differentiated

@bentigg Just finished listening to that episode this morning and enjoyed it greatly.

@guessworkinvest Have any good examples of best ray to do this? I’m doing it in a poor way right way it seems exactly at this point is where I’m failing

@bentigg I have a translation template where I put in the raw export and it turns it clean for the given month. And then I copy paste that into my full reporting excel.

Someday will be the last day I open QuickBooks Online. Today is not that day. But I cannot wait.