#180: Outsourcing IT: 5X Your Revenue
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Welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast! Today, we're chatting with Shane Mishler, COO of SD Tech, reveals how outsourcing IT quadrupled his revenue in just 5 years. Learn how to supercharge your business, boost efficiency, and unlock massive growth. Plus, get insider tips on building a thriving tech business, delivering top-notch customer service, and expanding your MSP reach.
In this episode, we’re discussing…
Outsourcing IT Can Quadruple Revenue: Shane Mishler, COO of SD Tech, shares his experience of how outsourcing their IT team led to a 4x increase in revenue within 5 years.
Focus on Customer Service: Customer service is a core value at SD Tech. They believe in building strong relationships with their clients and prioritize addressing their emotional needs alongside technical problems.
Managed Service Provider (MSP): SD Tech is an MSP that offers IT support to small and medium-sized businesses. They handle everything from network management to cloud migration and troubleshooting technical issues.
SD Tech Franchise Opportunity: SD Tech recently launched a franchise program. This allows individuals to leverage their existing business development skills and SD Tech's proven model to establish their own IT support business.
No Prior Tech Experience Required: While some technical knowledge is helpful, SD Tech franchisees don't need to be experts. The ideal candidate is someone with strong sales experience and the ability to build relationships. Training and support are provided by SD Tech.
Resources from Shane
LinkedIn | SD Tech | 6 Tech Traps That Can Stop Your Start-up
Resources from Mike and Nichole
+ Read the transcript
Mike Stohler
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by REI Words, your go to SEO agency for increasing traffic to your website, check it out at reiwords.com. Today's episode we bring in Shane Mishler. He's the Chief Operating Officer for SD Tech. He oversees the daily operations of the company and partners with the owner to design and implement business strategies, plans and processes. Shane actively involved in all the company's investments, clients, and strategic franchise partners and expansion activities. How're you doing?
Shane Mishler
Doing pretty good, Mike. Just got back from Vegas. Nice and refreshed and getting back into the swing of things this week.
Mike Stohler
There we go. It's always good to take some time off and kind of decompress a little bit, have some fun.
Shane Mishler
It really is.
Mike Stohler
It is. Tell me a little bit about who you are as a person, where you came from and how you got involved in SD Tech.
Shane Mishler
Fantastic. Yeah. To explain how I got involved in SD Tech. My background, the important parts, actually began when I was a teenager. I'm the oldest of eight kids, my youngest brother and sister. They're twins. They're only 12 years younger than I am. So there were eight kids, 3 years old to 15 years old, by the time I was 15. When I was 15, I tried to be a pretty normal 15 year old. I was learning guitar, doing a lot with music and art, and trying to manage a very chaotic household. My mom was a single mother working three part time jobs trying to make ends meet. Which meant that more often than not, I was left to be the head of the household. When I was 15-17, I didn't realize how much that would actually influence a lot of my growth in my professional career, but it definitely did. I've worked for a handful of different organizations, started off my professional career as a dishwasher for a restaurant and end up spending five years there. And when I left, I was running the entirety of the restaurant from top to bottom and I learned quite a bit. I switched. I went into oil and gas. I was a roughneck for five years. The majority of people that know me close, have a hard time picturing that that's not really up my alley. It doesn't fit with who I am. But I did it. It was incredible money. And I learned a lot about what it was that I did not like about a variety of cultures that stuck with me and has really made a big impact on where I'm at now. After working in an oil rig for five years, I took a year off. And I reset. I spent a lot of time with my wife, her and I just celebrated our 11th year wedding anniversary over this last weekend. I cashed out my 401(k) when I was 26-27. And I was like you know what I need to reset, I need to figure out what it is I want to do because I know what I don't want to be doing. And I got back into art and music. But I've always had a background in technology. I love computers. I love the way technology enhances life. And so I found some things that enhanced my music, my ability to write times had changed between when I was 15. And now I'm in my late 20s. And when I was 15, trying to write music, you had a four track recorder. And unless you had 1000s of dollars, and a local studio to go to you played for yourself. And that was about it and outside of the four tracks. And now in my late 20s. Now then, in my late 20s I realized that there was a ton of software that was out there. I really enjoyed it. I got reconnected with a lot of who I was, and I decided that I wanted to pursue tech and leadership as a profession. I started off with this company, entry level busted my ass. And over the course of five years, I worked my way up into middle management. And then I left there and spent another five years with a retail giant working in their corporate office. And then I was ready. Another decade had passed. And my wife and I were looking at it. I was like what I want to do with the rest of my life. I don't want to be working in a corporate environment anymore. So I was really debating about opening up my own business. And around that same time I met the owner of SD Tech, and Wes and I had a spark between us that I had never really experienced before. We shared a lot of the same vision, same goals, aspirations, I was looking to start a business. And he had been running one for 20 years, local MSP and he was looking to take it to the next level. And he offered me a job. And along with that job, he was like, "Hey, I can't pay you a whole lot of money. And I don't know what you're going to do for me." I said, "You know what? I really like you, I like your company. I don't know what I could do for you either." And five years later, we've quadrupled our revenue, tripled our staff, and we franchise our organization. So my journey is in some ways you know it's reached. There's been a lot of turns, a lot of twists, but I feel like I'm truly just getting started now in my early 40s. And I know what it is I want to be doing and we're making some really big impacts and it's been amazing.
Mike Stohler
For listeners who have never heard of SD Tech, what is SD Tech?
Shane Mishler
SD Tech is an MSP. And if you're anything like myself, five years ago, I had never heard of that combination of letters. And it didn't mean much to me five years into it, MSP still doesn't actually mean a lot to me. It's a managed service provider, a better way of explaining things. We're an outsourced technology organization for small to medium sized businesses that need help with technology, which is everybody, but they haven't reached a point where they're able to build out their own internal IT team. So you can either get your, you know, one of your employees who has a little bit of tech background to help you out with your network, or you can reach out to a professional so we provide consultation services, we help implement or plan for the tech strategy. We implement it, and then we manage it afterwards.
Mike Stohler
We partner with certain larger groups, do you partner with Cisco or AWS? Are you any of those types of things? Or do you concentrate on anything and everything?
Shane Mishler
That's a good question. So for the majority of our clients, what they see is that we support anything and everything. Because if we're going to be their internal outsource technology group, then they expect us to be able to know how to handle everything from Windows, like Word, the actual Office issues, they expect us to know how to troubleshoot a mouse that's not functioning on a computer that won't turn on, they want us to know how to expand their WiFi network, how to get them from a local server to a cloud, we take care of everything. But we do work with a handful of very specific hardware. That's what allows for my team to be very good at knowing how to manage their network. So we actually don't use Cisco, we use Ubiquiti products, UniFi for all of our network stack. And then we work with a lot of different software from the software side.
Mike Stohler
Okay. I was asking, because there's a lot of our listeners, a lot of people in my family that are in tech, also, what gives you an edge over your competitors? Why would someone say, "You know what? Let's give SD Tech a shot."
Shane Mishler
That's a fair question. The company was founded in 2000. We've been around for 24ish years. We support we're local to San Antonio, Texas, but we have clients from California to Florida, and I have 11 clients in Canada, and then I have people spread out everywhere in between. I'm working with about 300 active clients right now. The benefit of working with a company that is able to support you no matter where you are, while still being small enough to where you get to know everybody that's on our team. That is what really is the biggest differentiator between us and our competitors is we're local, you get the southern hospitality, we're all from San Antonio. And we believe in customer service before anything else. My background was customer service, right? Food services, it was where I started, all of my team, with the exception of our founder, everybody else has had a background in customer service before, that's really important to building up my team because I believe that it's really easy for techies to get focused on fixing the technical aspect of a problem and forgetting that along with any technical problem, there's an emotional problem that comes with it. If you're working with somebody that doesn't know what's causing their computer or network to act up, they get frustrated, understandably, but they get frustrated. Oftentimes we find ourselves just fixing the problem. Then moving past it, when in reality, we have to take care of our clients emotional needs, and that's what really separates us out from other people.
Mike Stohler
And something else that is you know, ladies and gentleman, www.sd-tech.net. That is the website. Go check it out. You guys franchise now. So you know, for the...
Shane Mishler
We do.
Mike Stohler
Who's out there that are in the tech world? If they can, you know, I'd like to start my own business. How does that work? How can you buy a franchise or get involved in SD Tech?
Shane Mishler
Good question. So are the franchise side of things. If you're already in, then you have a leg up over a lot of other people, the majority of individuals know that the tech space is a great space to get into. It's one of the fastest growing alongside the medical field, guaranteed work for decades to come. But it's a really difficult barrier to get to because you have to be good at all aspects of technology. If you're going to be an MSP, you have to know how to support it, how to build it, and how to take care of it when it's messing up. You also have to handle sales and business development and accounting and administrative stuff. And it's I mean it's running a business there's a lot that goes into it. So when we talked about franchising our our model, one of the things that we looked at was how do we remove the barrier of entry from a titan class so if you're interested in a franchise, you don't want to do everything from top to bottom day in and day out and you want to focus on making money or adoption for the first year of, of working with us as a franchisee our local team and the reason for that is is that allows for the strategic partner for the franchisee to focus on doing sales and business development.
And then, as they're growing that out, they don't have to spin whatever amount of time taking care of troubleshooting the help desk issues that come back from those clients that they onboard. So it gives them a chance to actually build things out. And then they can make a decision of whether they want to hire technicians, or if they want to just continue focusing on the sales and business development.
Mike Stohler
And growth potential. Do you see SD Tech or even IT support? What kind of growth, it's something I think is going to be around forever, unless we have some type of bot that can fix themselves or something like that. But what are you seeing five years out?
Shane Mishler
I see for established businesses five years out, I see nothing but growth and opportunities of our, our world expands so quickly, and is changing so fast that even if there was a AI powered robot that could grow, develop, implement, and like self heal and take care of things, as it was, was failing. Businesses still need somebody that's going to be there alongside them, recommending which of those robots is right for me, and then assisting them in implementing it and helping them make the right decisions. So as long as you're focused on building relationships, and building partnerships, we're never going to be without work, the work might change. I don't think it's ever going to change that drastically. Not while I'm still alive, but it might change but it's still going to be work, it's still going to be something that business owners are going to need our assistance in helping them stay alongside the cutting edge.
Mike Stohler
Correct me if I'm wrong, you're basically like the helpdesk support, because that's basically what it is, something's wrong, I don't know how to do this, I don't know how to load something, they kicked it a few times and it still does work. So the core idea is kind of like calling the helpdesk, right?
Shane Mishler
Exactly like calling your help desk. If you've ever worked for a large company, where you have an internal help desk that says exactly what it is for the majority of their frontline employees. It's just a help desk but then further upper management for the business owners. That's where the more consulting side comes into play and saying, "Hey, look, where are we at with our infrastructure? Where are we at with our architecture? What do we need to prep for over the next year to five years?" So that way, we know how to budget our money, because alongside your internal help desk with a bigger company, the upper management of that help desk, they're going to be helping make those types of decisions. And we want for SD Tech to be exactly the same as if you had an internal team. The only difference is that we're offsite.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, so it's so convenient for the business owner, I own hotels, and the internet goes down, if the cable TV goes down if something goes down. We actually have a number, and it's basically a company like yours, it's like because I'm not going to fix it, the front desk isn't going to fix it. Call this number, they walk them through it, and it gets fixed. It's so convenient to have that type of option available to us. Now...
Shane Mishler
It is and you're typically looking at about 25 to 30% of what it would cost to have that internally.
Mike Stohler
Oh yeah, it's great. It's a monthly fee, and they may not get any phone calls, or they may get 10 a day. I mean, it just depends, but it's worth less than my headache.
Shane Mishler
I hope so. If your team is good, then it should be worth the cost. It absolutely should be.
Mike Stohler
It is. Now, let's say, I was going to open up a franchise. Is it necessary for me to have an office or an existing client base? How does that work for a new franchisee?
Shane Mishler
For our new franchisee, it's not necessary for you to have an office for our first 20 years of doing business. We our home office was out of the the owners home, we used his downstairs living room, a guest bedroom as we started to grow out when we got about 10 employees is when Wes his wife was like, "Hey, guys, it's been lovely having you here, but you need to get the hell out." But we did that for 22 years. The great thing about supporting technology for businesses is that we're helping them find the right technology to bring their teams together, right, we want to make sure that whether they work in a small office or a large office, or if they have remote employees, we want to find the right technology to bring those people together. That same technology allows for us to begin our relationship with prospective clients remotely, the majority of people have adjusted to using Zoom meetings or Zoom podcasts or whatever it may be. When you're first starting up, it's going to be a lot of phone calls and emails, just like you do in any other type of sales. And then when you get closer to landing a deal with your first client or 100th client, it's gonna be coffee or lunch.
And then realistically, you should be going to visit their office to do site surveys and get to know their team versus expecting them to come to you. So it makes sense that if a person wants to do it out of their home, they're more than welcome to if you want to get a small office because that's where your working environment is better suited and you need to be away from the house and away from your guitars. So you're not distracted then you're welcome to have a small office but it's not necessary. And then we take you through training and we introduce you to the building blocks that make up SD Tech. And then we come in, we visit you for the first initial week when you're ready to launch and we assist you, whether it's with email campaigns, or the cold calling, or if you already have a couple of people that are interested in, you want us to go alongside with you to do site surveys, we're going to be there with you to assist you in in figuring out what's going on.
Mike Stohler
Now, of course, it always comes up with franchises. Does a franchisee have, like an area that's protected from competition? Or is it just a free for all nationally just start calling?
Shane Mishler
This was one of the questions that we struggled with for a while because for us, we're based out of San Antonio. But like I said, we have clients everywhere. So that felt like a foreign concept. That's something that belongs to the Subway and McDonald's, where you're fighting over a couple blocks. But ultimately, it made sense that you would still want protected territory, even when you're opening up a local MSP. So if you're opening up one in Denver, Colorado, or LA, we are still going to have protected territory, we came up with some great ways of working that in so that it's easiest to sell in your local market, it's not necessary, but it is the easiest. So we want to make sure that we're our strategic partners, our franchisees that they're going to spread out first. And of course, our hope is that we continuously grow and get bigger and bigger. In the event that we have two people who are looking at the same territory, we're definitely going to make sure that the owners have some protected elements to that, where we're nobody's gonna be trying to snipe clients from inside of it.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, and that's a good point, because you just don't know, because you'd like to call around the world you'd like to do. But I think it would be kind of tough with a business like that, because it's not a brick and mortar protected area, we're blind, a five square mile radius, like we have, possibly with hotels and things like that.
Do you have any, like success stories, or tell me about someone who's, who's opened up a franchise and kind of how that worked. And what's kind of some of the success that they're having?
Shane Mishler
Well, I would love to be able to tell you about some of that, but we actually just boarded our first franchisee. He signed the paperwork two weeks ago. I would love to revisit this with you in six months or a year, it's so far, it's going great for him. He already has. He's nearby. We're in San Antonio, Texas, and he's about 45 minutes away. And he's working in a smaller town. But it's really fast growing for tech, it's in between San Antonio and Austin. And there's a lot in between, and he already has a good relationship with a lot of local businesses. So I'm expecting a really good success story from him. But I'm not positive yet. It's not proven. Another six months or so I would love to tell you, it's going great. And I have these wonderful success stories, but it would be all BS right now.
Mike Stohler
And we don't want that. So someone goes on to www.sd-tech.net. Everyone, it is again, sd-tech.net. We go to the website, basically says franchising opportunity, what are the actual starting steps by clicking on franchise opportunity?
Shane Mishler
So the starting steps, you click on the franchise opportunity, fill out a little bit of information, realistically, I wouldn't even fill out information upfront. If I'm being fully transparent, and I was the one looking for this opportunity, I would probably skip the franchise page first. And I would look at the rest of the website, get a feel for what our clients recognize us for, see what it is we do and see if that's something that interests you. And if it's something that interests you, then you can fill out a little form and set up some time to speak with the owner of SD Tech or with myself. And we can go from there. It's not a quick process. It's a minimum of about six weeks now, about six to eight weeks. And a big piece of that is I mean, you're investing a fair amount of money to start up a business and you're looking at, as you know, joining our team and being a part of that team. And it's a long commitment, right? I believe in building strong relationships. I have been married twice, divorced once and I tried to learn a lot from divorce. That's a lot of what we bring to the table with the franchising opportunity. We want to get to know you, we want you to get to know us, we want you to have an opportunity to get to know you know, what did our couple of decades of work look like? How did we spend time building up the relationships with our clients, and then make sure that you're a good fit for us and that we're a good fit for you. I would like to find out more about who you are if you have somebody that's assisting you with investment, whether that's a spouse, or maybe you have a secondary business partner, I want to know them. And I want for them to have an opportunity to get to know us because it's going to be a long relationship. And we needed to make sure that we're going to be able to work well together. After all of that if somebody's still on board, then six, eight weeks later, then we start you know, working through the finer details.
Mike Stohler
So good. How much tech experience do you need? I mean, you're doing MSP work, you're doing IT construction, ransomware, backups. Are you involved in that?
Shane Mishler
Yeah, so it's all high level. I will tell you that we really put this together with four different personalities in mind, the majority of people expect that you need to be highly technical, you need to be able to support all of the things you just mentioned. The reality is the person that I look forward to talking to the most, our high end sales executives, right? So whether you did executive sales, or you're a sales manager, or you're just a sales rep for an extended period of time, and you realize that you could be making more money, if it were your company, that is the person I like talking to because those people are typically highly motivated. They're good at building relationships. And since all you're doing is selling it, you need to learn enough to be able to speak some of the lingo. And then we have sales engineers on our team, that once you start getting closer to nailing that sell, and you need somebody that can come in and explain a little bit more about the hardware stack, or the software stack, or the more complicated issues with like, how are we going to integrate you into our business? We'll support you there. Or you can be somebody who has a lot of experience in tech, but needs that lift to how do I get started in the business world? Or I just want to fast track building the business. And you know, there's there's so much research and development that goes into determining what type of hardware you're going to use, what type of software you're going to use, what type of RMM am I going to use, like there's so many elements, and we've got two and a half decades worth of research and development that you don't have to worry about. It's a lot of weight off your back.
Mike Stohler
And that's really good, to have that kind of support. And everybody is talking about tech traps that can stop your startup. Shane, on a website, smallbusinesstechtips.net. Go to there and they will download "6 Tech Traps That Can Stop Your Start-up". That's kind of hard to say if you say that fast.
Shane Mishler
It is hard to say I tried to.
Mike Stohler
But it's a lot of fun. Now Shane, before we leave, how can people find you? Other than going to...
Shane Mishler
Yeah, so www.sd-tech.net is a great way to learn more about SD Tech as a whole. And if there's been something that we've talked about a little bit that might pique your interest for your own business. That's a wonderful place to start. If you want to connect with me personally, or get to know a little bit about myself through there. LinkedIn is a wonderful way. Shane Mishler, LinkedIn, those are the two best ways to get a hold of me.
Mike Stohler
Fantastic. Shane, it's been a pleasure having you on The Richer Geek. If there are any geeks out there that want to go into business, or yourself in the IT world. Check it out, www.sd-tech.net. Shane, it has been a pleasure. Take care.
Shane Mishler
Thank you so much, Mike.
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ABOUT SHANE MISHLER
Shane Mishler is the Chief Operating Officer for SD Tech. Shane oversees the daily operations of the company. He partners with the owner to design and implement business strategies, plans, and processes. Shane is actively involved in all of the company’s investments, clients, strategic franchise partners, and expansion activities. During his tenure, the company’s revenue has more than tripled, and their active client list includes over 200 companies.