Max: 00:08 Hi. I’m Max Clark. I’m the founder of itbroker.com. We’re an IT advisory and brokerage firm or put really simple. We help our clients identify and buy IT services for their business.
Max: 00:17 Okay? As of our last count, we had 597 providers in our portfolio. These are service providers globally that we’ve helped clients with. And, you know, whether that’s a network provider or connectivity provider bringing fiber into a building data center, cybersecurity, you know, cloud services. I mean, it runs the gamut.
Max: 00:36 There’s a lot of things in here. And when you take a step back and you look at and you say, okay, there’s 597 providers and you know, what services do they actually offer? It becomes an overwhelming amount of permutations really quickly. And a lot of times there’s a lot of duplication within this portfolio. Right.
Max: 00:51 So there might be over a 100 companies offering voice services in different versions right it could be you know what we would call hosted PBX once upon a time it could be fully featured UCaaS systems unified communication systems it could be somewhere in between they could have a CCaaS overlay on top of that and over the years the work we’ve done is really around separating table stakes from the actual unique advantages and differentiations between these providers. So what I mean by that. Right? We’ll just keep with the voice. If you need to make a voice call, you need to pick up the phone and make a call or you need to use your cell phone and you make a phone call right so that’s just table stakes like yes every voice provider that you talk to should be able to make and receive phone calls you know data center company data center company should have you know generators and air conditioners and security right now oh boy that’s gonna put up a can of worms there’s different architectures we can talk about pod versus not we can talk about what the size of the floor plate is we can talk about you know is the ATS on the floor does it switch between the generator and the UPS system as UPS in line do they use race floor probably the point is is these are generalities not nuanced statements okay so cybersecurity all you know all this stuff right there becomes nuance don’t come for me too hard anyway so the point is is over the years we’ve taken and built out an internal database around what the actual subtle advantages and differentiations are between these providers now the reason why you do that is when we work with a new company we can take that company profile and loosely group them based on industry segment geography size you know really what other technology that currently have integrations you know where they are in their maturity and their journey and help line up there’s little things like you know if you are a large enterprise and you are equipped and used to working with large service providers like that might be a good fit for you versus dealing with a service provider that is you know geared towards a medium to large SMB or vice versa I mean technically SMB runs to a 1000 employees if you’re a 200 person SMB you have real IT needs but trying to deal with an organization that’s got 50,000 employees and really geared towards large enterprise like that creates complications just up and down the stack right so understanding those sorts of things go into our evaluation and a selection process and really the point with all this is it creates blueprints for us and the reason why we create these blueprints is it helps us quickly match a client you know their company with their needs with a provider right so we’re not going through and we’re not creating RFPs and going out and testing you know and interrogating 30 service providers every time we’ve already done that work like you should not be paying investing time and money in doing broad searching RFP and RFP and RFI’s against the market.
Max: 03:27 Like, you should be asking specific questions for validation based on your specific needs not like, hey, does your phone system work kind of questions. So if you’re in an RFP process and you’re just trying to identify, you know, you’re at Google probably like or or looking at Gartner. Hey, who offers this service like you’re so far behind the process here in the 8 ball send me an email give us a call we’ll help you accelerate this process anyways okay from here you know so we have a quick blueprint right and now we get into the real like let’s call meeting potatoes we’re gonna confirm your present state what problem are you dealing with as a company? What future state do you need to be? What is the actual impact to your business?
Max: 03:59 What provider actually matches up against this and can give you the desired outcome and evolution? And we use this isn’t just like theoretical, like we’re reading their website. This is experience based knowledge around doing these projects for other companies. So, you know, who actually can perform, who doesn’t, what kind of benchmarking data related to performance implementation service teams cost. Right?
Max: 04:21 And this is where our recommendation comes from. Our recommendations, it’s very common for our clients to have a procurement and sourcing process. It says they have to have 2 to 3 providers in any process for bidding. So that way they can, you know, say that they’ve actually properly evaluated and get competitive bidding. Of course, no problem with that.
Max: 04:37 The point there that is our deliverable is to make sure that the 2 to 3 providers that you’re actually gonna go deep into the weeds with are all good providers for you. You’re not gonna find a situation where it’s like, oh, we went out and quoted 15 different companies And, you know, we narrowed it down to a short list of 3 and then the process of evaluation or post implementation, which is even worse. We found out that one of them didn’t actually do what we needed to do because it was missing this feature. You know, like, oh, we were looking for a call center platform and we don’t run Salesforce and Einstein AI, but we picked a contact center platform that requires Salesforce and Einstein AI, and that wasn’t clear to us in the demos evaluation, etcetera, because at nowhere did it say all of our AI tooling is actually Einstein AI from Salesforce, you know, like, whoops, true stories. So our deliverable to our clients is to provide them with the 2 to 3 providers that are good matches for them.
Max: 05:26 And what I mean by this again is any one of those 3 that end up being selected are gonna work and you’re gonna be happy they’re gonna deploy there’s gonna be subtle nuances if you’ve had a conversation with me about this in person I like to use the fight club reference at some point it just turns into what color is the logo and do you like it you know what’s your interaction with the team did you have a good fit with them when you met with the s e did you you know like did you vibe like there becomes certain intangibles in these processes that are actually very valuable and valid intangibles as an evaluation on a service provider that’s perfect there’s nothing wrong with that we want you in the position that when it actually comes down to figuring out who you’re signing a contract with, we want you picking based on just which one you felt more comfortable with and which one you like better. That is a great place to be selecting a service provider from. Not from a do they support this feature? Will they solve this problem is the pricing appropriate like that is all the work that we’re offloading from our clients here’s the shocking part about this this all happens really quickly you know one workshop you know within an hour 2 hours we work through a process from start to finish and in some cases it does not feel and it can feel like too good to be true maybe that’s the word I’d use and the reason for that is because we have done this work for decades I’ve been doing this for 25 years effectively.
Max: 06:40 Right? So when you take a 100 and 100 and 100 of evaluation cycles and projects with other clients and you come into that and you say, hey, I’m looking for a fill in the blank piece of technology. I need an EDR. I need a phone system. I need fiber optic circuit.
Max: 06:53 I need a data center. I need a professional services company. I need a temp platform. I need, you know, like, whatever. That list goes on and on and on.
Max: 06:59 You’re not starting from scratch. You’re starting from, like, oh, we’ve done this project 345 times in the last 5 years. Years right so of course it runs really quickly you shouldn’t be surprised that it happens really fast from initial contact to you can sign a contract happens really quickly now where we get slowed down honestly is legal review and we spend a lot of time working with our clients counsel to help them what the actual contract language means for them and why some things matter and some things don’t matter in a contract. If you have a legal review process and you’re evaluating a contract that you’ve never seen before, you negotiate within the contract. You don’t know what’s missing from the contract.
Max: 07:29 And so what we’re doing in those cases is we’re helping fill in the blanks of what’s missing in that contract, what needs to be added to the contract, what’s standard language we’ve seen already a bunch of times that we can just know we can just say, hey, give us addendum 5 for this contract to get it inserted. You know, what triggered this is I was in a conversation. They’re asking me, like, what do you do? And, like, how do you explain this simply? Right like what’s your 32nd elevator pitch well I mean our 32nd elevator pitch is we represent companies acquiring IT services like we make the process of identifying selecting negotiating and implementing IT services easy for our clients okay great which ones do you do I mean does it have electricity in the application running on it and managed you know and can it be managed by a service provider I mean yes okay great that’s what we do oh you know can you do I did my list to put in you know part of connectivity fiber DAS distributed to tenant systems, you know, project going on for a hospital right now with 6,000,000 square feet of 6,000,000 square feet of hospital and treatment space and parking lots, etcetera, that they have patients and family coming in and out of that is being completely gutted in overhauled.
Max: 08:32 So that way cell phones work perfectly everywhere. So that way they can deliver a digital experience and just, you know, quality of experience while people are at the hospital. You know, and why is this important? Well, you want to be able to go through patient and check-in I’m not even talking about like the hospital side of things where you know what tooling infrastructure they need I’m just talking about like if you’re a patient or if you’re a family member of a patient and you’re sitting in a waiting room for for for 3 hours waiting for procedure to happen you know you want to be chances are you’re on your cell phone and you want to be on YouTube or you want to be on social media or you want to be you know on your email or you want to be doing work or whatever those different things are so providing good experience with quality of connectivity is massively important. Anyways, I I completely digress and and got sidetracked there.
Max: 09:15 It’s very easy for me to do. The point with all this is if you’re in a evaluation cycle and you’re trying to figure out, like, are we talking to the right companies? Do we even know who the right companies are? Are we getting the right pricing do we have the right contract terms have we missed anything chances are the answer is yes you know chances are the answer is yes and what you should do is give us a call and we’ll walk you through the process and the point there is to make it as a confusing complex sometimes aggravating process as simple as we possibly can make it for you so that way you walk away and you say wow that was really easy that was great and that’s you know brings a smile on my face like that’s the best call anyways I’m Max Clark I hope this helps. If you have any comments, questions, you can comment below.
Max: 09:57 Send me an email. Give us a call. Love to talk to you. Have a great day. Feeling
