Dustin Bolander from Clear Guidance: Navigating Partnerships, Growth, and Cyber Insurance
Title: Dustin Bolander from Clear Guidance: Navigating Partnerships, Growth, and Cyber Insurance
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Dustin Bolander's journey through the IT landscape is a remarkable testament to the evolution of an entrepreneur. Starting from humble beginnings in a family-run dog training business, Dustin transitioned into the world of technology as a teenager, where he discovered his knack for IT. After working his way up through various roles, he became co-owner of Technology Point, an MSP that he helped grow substantially before selling it. His insights into the challenges of managing a growing business, especially in a partnership with differing visions, offer invaluable lessons for current and aspiring MSP owners. Dustin’s narrative not only underscores the importance of having a clear operational plan but also highlights the pitfalls of partnership dynamics that can derail progress.
Takeaways:
- Dustin Bolander's entrepreneurial journey began in a family business, leading him to the MSP industry.
- He emphasizes the importance of having a clear business plan and aligning partners' goals.
- Dustin's experience taught him that having multiple owners with different visions can lead to conflicts.
- He successfully transitioned his MSP to a managed service model, focusing on recurring revenue.
- Dustin's new venture, Beltex Insurance, offers unique cyber insurance policies tailored for MSPs.
- He advises aspiring entrepreneurs to overcome planning paralysis and take calculated risks.
Clear Guidance website: https://www.clear-guidance.com/
Dustin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dbolander/
Transcript
Foreign.
Ben:Welcome to the MSP Owner Podcast.
Ben:We're sharing a podcast about entrepreneurs building their IT companies.
Ben:Today I've got the pleasure of speaking with Dustin Bolander.
Ben:Dustin is the founder of Clear Guidance Partners, a law firm focused MSP and Belltex Insurance, the first channel friendly cyber insurance policy that's been created specifically for MSPs.
Ben:Dustin's journey in the IT industry is both impressive and inspiring to me.
Ben:He began his career as a technician and worked his way up into owning a MSP, which he sold.
Ben: And then in: Ben:And you know, he's a lot of other related cyber security and insurance businesses started in the last few years.
Ben:So I want to like dive into those and, and what exactly they mean and how he ended up developing them in the first place.
Ben:So what's really unique about Dustin's story is he currently owns an MSP and he also owns a few businesses that serve MSPs as clients.
Ben:So he really understands what it means to be an msp and then he also understands what it means to, to, to sell into the msps, like almost as a vendor.
Ben:So excited to dig into it more.
Ben:So, Dustin, welcome to the show.
Ben:Super pumped to have you on.
Dustin:Yeah, thanks for putting this together, man.
Dustin:This is.
Dustin:I'm excited.
Ben:Nice.
Ben:So why don't we start by going back to the beginning.
Ben:How did you get into the IT world in the first place?
Dustin:Yeah, so we had a family business growing up.
Dustin:It was called Man's Best Friend.
Dustin:It was dog training and boarding.
Dustin: My dad started it back in: Dustin:And so growing up, I was, I started working weekends there.
Dustin:Like at 12 years old, we had our assistant maintenance guy quit.
Dustin:So my dad said, you know, hey, the manager's gonna come pick you up on Saturdays and Sundays from now on.
Dustin:So I was sitting there, you know, scrubbing baseboards, doing just super basic repairs.
Dustin:And then as we started rolling out computers that, you know, I ended up being the teenager that new computers, how they work, that kind of thing.
Dustin:So started learning that stuff, put in a.
Dustin:Do you remember ISDN lines?
Ben:No.
Ben:No clue.
Dustin:Yeah, for those, for those that know, we got a ISDN line.
Dustin:It was dual 128k whenever 56k modems were the big thing.
Dustin:So that was pretty awesome.
Dustin:So yeah, just started doing that.
Dustin:And then whenever I went off to college, I ended up taking a night shift job working help desk.
Dustin:And I was working it.
Dustin:I actually was owning an MSP, but still at 30 years old, saying I'm not going to be an IT guy the rest of my life.
Dustin:And then kind of at that point kind of came to the terms with it that I'm an IT guy.
Dustin:So yeah, we.
Dustin:Weird winding way to get into it.
Ben:So the first company, the first MSP you worked for was Technology Point, right?
Ben:Or was that a different company?
Dustin:Yep, Technology Point.
Ben:And then you started out as an employee and then you ultimately became an owner after some.
Ben:Some time, right?
Dustin:Yeah, I think employee number six.
Dustin:There's.
Dustin:We had a two person help desk, so me and the other guy's name was Jason.
Dustin:We would get in at 6 or 7am, get all the stuff from the night before knocked out, check all the backups, roll into help desk.
Dustin:Help Desk would shut down about 6pm every day.
Dustin:There was a bar down the street.
Dustin:So him and I would go.
Dustin:He was single at the time.
Dustin:I was dating my girlfriend now wife.
Dustin:We'd go to the bar down the street, grab dinner, have a couple beers, go back to the office and then knock out projects overnight.
Dustin:So it was interesting couple of years doing that.
Dustin:But then Marty was the founder.
Dustin:He decided to start stepping out of the business.
Dustin:So me and two of the other guys ended up buying him out.
Dustin: I think it was: Ben:So was it, was it a natural Marty wanted to leave the business?
Ben:And then the three.
Ben:Who were the three folks who ended up becoming the new owners?
Dustin:The guy who was doing the finances and then kind of the coo.
Dustin:So we had a.
Dustin:It naturally started going that way.
Dustin:Marty was working less and less.
Dustin:Um, I had pretty much taken over the sales and client relations.
Dustin:So he, he had a good gig.
Dustin:He had a ranch, he had a bunch of jet skis and stuff.
Dustin:So he wasn't having to work that hard.
Dustin:And we were right about a million dollars in revenue at the time.
Dustin:So it was also one of those of.
Dustin:I think a lot of MSP owners don't realize that, you know, that may be their limits on where they can take a business.
Dustin:And I'm going to say he sort of did.
Dustin:We never said that out loud, but I think he would agree with that.
Dustin:It was, you know, we'd been installed there for a couple of years, so I think it was one of those like, now's a good time to do it.
Dustin:So no, it ended up being pretty organic that it was not a big shift in the business or anything.
Dustin:But it, it was from his standpoint, I think the right time and an easy decision.
Ben:And then how did that deal end up coming together?
Ben:Did you End up.
Ben:How did you end up structuring that deal in the first place?
Ben:Was it an all cash buyout?
Ben:Did you have to do seller financing?
Dustin:We did a note.
Dustin:So we did.
Dustin:I honestly don't remember the numbers exactly on it.
Dustin:I know we substantially overpaid because you've probably seen this.
Dustin:Every owner thinks it's worth a lot more than it actually is.
Dustin:But at that point, you know, we were all chomping at the bit.
Dustin:We're like, we're gonna own our own business.
Dustin:So we ended up paying a pretty substantial premium on that.
Dustin:Luckily, the dollar figure itself, the total wasn't that much, but no, he ended up doing a note.
Dustin:I'd known him for several years at that point.
Dustin:One of the.
Dustin:Or no, actually both.
Dustin:The other guys had been there for a long time.
Dustin:At that time, the company was, you know, 10 years old and they were employees number two and three.
Dustin:So it was from his standpoint, I think it was pretty easy to trust.
Dustin:We'd been running the business already.
Dustin:You know, the numbers are there, that sort of thing.
Dustin:But no, we did actually end up getting a note from him.
Ben:That's awesome.
Dustin:Over several years.
Ben:And had you guys already had made the transition to a managed service recurring model or was it mostly break fix?
Dustin:Yeah, no, we transitioned right about that time.
Dustin:I remember the exact dates, but we can go look them up if we wanted to because we bought Lab Tech and it was literally the next week that they announced they'd been acquired Connectwise.
Dustin:So that was actually kind of good because we had picked ConnectWise as our PSA.
Dustin:So we were in the thick of the transition and that might have been it also, I mean, we were.
Dustin:We were getting pretty good at hourly in the sense of we weren't doing very much write downs.
Dustin:We were doing a lot of block hours getting paid in advance.
Dustin:As mature as you can be as an hourly shop.
Dustin:Right.
Dustin:We were pretty good at that.
Dustin:So that might have been another thing that kind of affected that timing of him being ready to step out.
Dustin:Was the.
Dustin:The new scary world of managed services.
Ben: You were an owner from: Ben:Ish.
Dustin: Yeah,: Dustin:There was five of us at one point, ownership group.
Dustin:So my big thing, everybody's like, what do you learn?
Dustin:Sorry if I'm stealing your next question.
Dustin:You know, what did you learn from that?
Dustin:Is having a bunch of owners that are on different pages at different stages in their life without a very clear plan was kind of where the issue was.
Dustin:So it ended up being a bunch of, you know, Equity moved around this, that, and the other, and then two people at the end.
Dustin:Whenever I was the last large sellout on that side of it that we had kind of stalled out, ready for.
Dustin:I'm gonna say I.
Dustin:I thought we can do a lot more.
Dustin:The rest of the guys, not as much.
Dustin:So we kind of started having people step out, that sort of thing, and then they ended up turning around and selling to the purple guys pretty quickly after that and just got out completely.
Dustin:So.
Ben:So you.
Ben:You ended up selling your ownership to another.
Ben:Another partner, or you were the last one.
Dustin:I ended up selling to another one of the partners.
Dustin:Yeah, we got to.
Dustin:We had sold out right around three and a half million, four million for a couple of years, to me.
Ben:Of revenue.
Dustin:Yeah, revenue.
Dustin:Yep.
Dustin:To me, at least, it was one of those of like, here's where the problems are, and I only want to push that boulder uphill so much.
Dustin:So at that point, it was like, all right, guys, let's go.
Dustin:I'm ready to go in a different direction on it.
Dustin:So after we sat down and talked, there was again, that whole thing, have a plan.
Dustin:Right.
Dustin:Clear guidance, which I'm sure we'll get to in a minute.
Dustin:We have a very black and white plan.
Dustin:We're all on the same page.
Dustin:We're pulling in the same direction on it.
Dustin:Having multiple people that want different things out of the business as, you know, equal business partners, not a good recipe for success.
Ben:So the nature of Technology Point, though, is you are a locally focused msp, Right?
Ben:Can you talk a little bit about the model there that you did at Technology Point?
Dustin:Yeah, so we did managed services with a.
Dustin:Whenever I say focus on recurring revenue, I know everybody's like, oh, yeah, of course.
Dustin:That is.
Dustin:There's more nuances to it.
Dustin:Right.
Dustin:Do I want to have managed network services?
Dustin:Do I want to be in certain verticals, that kind of thing?
Dustin:Our focus was pretty much just managed services.
Dustin:You know, hey, Ben, we can sell you this for 75amonth on a recurring basis.
Dustin:Like, awesome.
Dustin:Sign you up.
Dustin:Okay.
Dustin:All recurring revenue was good recurring revenue.
Dustin:So we had.
Dustin:We had a huge wing chain.
Dustin:We had a bunch of CPA firms, some manufacturers.
Dustin:One of our biggest anchor clients was a software company at one point.
Dustin:So it's basically just as long as we can get some kind of recurring out of it, whether that is, managed backups at the time were actually one of our biggest profit centers.
Dustin:And then we also had a data center that we had about 100 companies running in it.
Dustin:But, you know, if you look at the revenue numbers.
Dustin:Somebody on here is doing the math already.
Dustin:We had some pretty small hosted customers.
Dustin:Right here's like a $45 WordPress engine, DM, stuff like that.
Ben:All.
Dustin:All recurring revenue was good recurring revenue, but yeah, it was super focused.
Dustin:We're a local company.
Dustin:We have advanced guidance available should you need it.
Dustin:But really the goal was what makes a good customer fit.
Dustin:You know, the ideal client profile kind of stuff was just recurring revenue, full stop.
Ben:And by local, what city did you focus in?
Dustin:Austin and Dallas.
Ben:Austin and Dallas.
Ben:Okay.
Dustin:Yeah, we had a.
Dustin:The Dallas was an interesting one.
Dustin:I always love telling people this story because, you know, most MSPs, it's like, I got to go to a new market, be ready.
Dustin:Because if the new market sucks operationally, that's going to be a lot of time out of your personal life.
Dustin:I spent.
Dustin:I'm still.
Dustin:There's a Best Western right next door to our office that I could walk to the office.
Dustin:So I'm still like, it's double platinum, I think is the top tier for Best Western.
Dustin:This is seven years later.
Dustin:I still have my top tier Best Western status because I was driving up to Dallas literally every other week just to kind of keep that office going.
Dustin:We ended up having some good clients, but just bad management, bad staff, lots of operational headaches on that side of it.
Dustin:So we were, if I remember right, probably 80% Austin, 20% Dallas.
Ben:So can you, can you dive into that?
Ben:You said you had.
Ben:In the Dallas branch, you had bad operations, bad staff, bad, bad management.
Ben:I mean, you were management, right?
Dustin:I was managing.
Dustin:I learned a ton of lessons.
Dustin:So the doing another MSP is if you're familiar in video games, you know what new game pluses I don't.
Dustin:You basically get to start over again.
Dustin:Like, you beat the game, you get to start over again, but with all your stuff.
Dustin:So, you know, you're just super overpowered.
Dustin:Second MSP is, I would say is new game plus, not because of all this successful stuff you're going to catch on of.
Dustin:A lot of my stuff I talk about is I screwed up this way.
Dustin:Don't do that, don't do that.
Dustin:You know, not to make these mistakes.
Dustin:So, yeah, I was absolutely a significant part of the problem on the management of that.
Dustin:So on that Dallas office was accountability with the text was one of the big pieces.
Dustin:We had one person that we finally started tracking.
Dustin:I can't remember exactly how we did it, but they were sitting there saying, you know, oh, I got to start off the day at this client.
Dustin:They're Walking in the door.
Dustin:That's what it was.
Dustin:The client had a badge system, like a fob system.
Dustin:So we track that text, you know, badge in, badge out time consistently after 10 o'clock every day.
Dustin:So they were basically just, oh, I'm on site, but not getting to the client until 10 every day.
Dustin:Just lots of little things like that, which the manager at the office was not managing that part of it.
Dustin:But the other part was the manager there was, let's say, a aspiring owner to where it's like, I know how to run this thing.
Dustin:It was the kind of person that would be like, I built this.
Dustin:It's like, you've worked here for six months, dude.
Dustin:Like, no, you didn't.
Dustin:So just not hammering that earlier of this is the way we do things.
Dustin:This is the culture of things.
Dustin:This is, you know, you got to do things our way.
Dustin:We can have a discussion around doing it different.
Dustin:We can, you know, maybe get it in place and then look at doing it different.
Dustin:But I just never really drilled down on that of this is the way things have to be.
Dustin:I'm.
Dustin:One of my biggest flaws on management leadership is I'm pretty soft.
Dustin:I'm a people pleaser.
Dustin:There's to my knowledge, and I've had a bunch of people say this, like, there's very few people out there that hate me because I'm just generally accommodating.
Dustin:But that's a terrible trait to have as a manager leader.
Dustin:So I've been working on that.
Dustin:But I think that was a big part of the struggle for that office was just, I.
Ben:So how did you.
Ben:How did you transition from, hey, there's this problem, I'm beating my head against the wall to actually coming to a solution.
Ben:Or did.
Ben:Did you.
Ben:Did you not.
Ben:You just kind of stumbled through for.
Dustin:A long time with that Dallas office.
Dustin:We lucked out at the end.
Dustin:So it was a revolving door of staff and people.
Dustin:And there was one dude before I decided to sell.
Dustin:And that was the thing that probably pissed me off the most about just the timing on getting out of there was we finally got a guy who was actually really good.
Dustin:He was a.
Dustin:I'll call him a professional manager.
Dustin:I think he'd been like a help desk manager at another MSP before that who actually did a great job and was, you know, very operational.
Dustin:He was more corporate in a good way versus, you know, we started off originally.
Dustin:It was like a handful of guys in the same room and just never grew out of that culture.
Dustin:So I, I get zero credit for making that office work, um, it was just got lucky on a good hire and kind of stayed that whole lead, follow or get out of the way sort of thing is I got out of the way of that manager and he did a great job.
Ben:Nice.
Ben:So people selection was, was big.
Ben:And it sounds like you, you lucked into making a good choice.
Dustin:I, I can take zero credit for that.
Dustin:That was entirely luck.
Dustin:No skill on my part involved.
Ben:Hi, I'm Ben Tigelar, the host of MSP Owner podcast and the CEO of Datatel, an IT managed service provider with 35 employees.
Ben:The mission of this podcast is simple, to have authentic conversations with IT owners about their journey, how it started, the challenges they faced, and where they're going next.
Ben:Every episode, I personally walk away with a new actionable item to strengthen my own business.
Ben:But a quick word about my company, Datatel.
Ben:We are actively acquiring MSPs who align with our service and culture.
Ben:So if your company is generating between 1 and $10 million of revenue, I want to talk to you.
Ben:But wait, you're probably thinking, why me and why Datatel?
Ben:First is, I get you.
Ben:I understand the challenges MSP owners face.
Ben:Being one myself, feeling overworked, overwhelmed, constantly being on call, struggling to bring in new business.
Ben:I have the solutions and people in place to address these pain points.
Ben:Second is culture.
Ben:We run our business on eos entrepreneurial operating system, which has been transformative for our employees and clients alike.
Ben:I believe that building a great company comes down to finding and retaining great people who are in the right seats.
Ben:Everything else is noise.
Ben:If any of this resonates, it probably means we're a fit and we should be having a conversation.
Ben:Until then, let's get back to the show.
Ben:Where do you, at least during your time at Technology Point, where do you think your, your uniqueness came into play?
Ben:Like, what did you specifically do really well during that time period?
Dustin:Like, client management is absolutely.
Dustin:And that's kind of where I'd said with clear guidance, I was just going to go into the, you know, virtual CIO consulting.
Dustin:I am really good at picking up kind of systems and concepts quickly so I could walk into, you know, a business.
Dustin:We had one that was.
Dustin:They manufactured restaurant.
Dustin:Like, you know, whenever you go into a restaurant, you get those little buzzers that say, your table's ready.
Dustin:Oh, yeah, a client that did that.
Dustin:So they manufactured it, they had the software stack.
Dustin:So I remember that with onboarding of those guys that I went and spent like three weeks in their office, literally just sitting there, understood how everything was there.
Dustin:And I could sit there and whiteboard the entire thing out to the team.
Dustin:So just immediately we were able to start going in and saying, ooh, what if we change this, what if we change that?
Dustin:You know how there's that concept of the tsp, right?
Dustin:The technology services provider.
Dustin:You're going to do more than just the help desk sort of thing.
Dustin:I got pretty good at that side of it, that actual strategic guidance of not just how can we fix your printers more efficiently, but how can we make your business run better?
Dustin:And so that piece of it was where.
Dustin:And I still love doing that.
Dustin:That's one of my favorite things to do is just sitting down, learning the business, how can we make it run better?
Dustin:I don't care about the tickets, that sort of piece, but digging in on that.
Dustin:So as we jumped across that was the now new msp, very vertical focused, but before that, just generalist that we had maybe two clients that look the same.
Dustin:I actually love that personally.
Dustin:I'm not saying it's a good business model, but it was cool for me being able to go in.
Dustin:I'm dealing with manufacturing company one week, CPA, the next, software company the next week, stuff like that.
Dustin:So just that, learning the business and being able to find solutions on it.
Ben:Cool.
Ben:So you work and run Technology Point with a group of partners for eight years.
Ben:You sell to the.
Ben:You ultimately sell to a partner who ultimately sells to the purple guys.
Ben:And then you.
Ben:What do you do next?
Ben:It looks like you've got a flurry of ideas and involvement in various different types of businesses after that.
Ben:So, like, how did that.
Ben:Those all come to fruition and what was like, what was the order of operations there?
Dustin:Yeah, so the, the last ownership group standing was.
Dustin:I was substantially the younger guy.
Dustin:So it was good at the time.
Dustin:I probably still need this in my life sometimes.
Dustin:But they would always kind of say, why are you putting your effort into that?
Dustin:You know, focus on one thing.
Dustin:No, we need you to focus that sort of piece.
Dustin:So whenever I ended up going fully 100% on my own, I didn't have that, that check anymore.
Dustin:So I was able to, I mentioned earlier, grew up in a family entrepreneurs.
Dustin:So I was able to kind of just be fully unleashed on that, choose if that's a good or a bad thing.
Dustin:But from that perspective, just, okay, this sounds great.
Dustin:I'm gonna go and do this.
Dustin:This is interesting.
Dustin:I get a lot of vendors calling and I'll take these calls for free.
Dustin:Just talk about advisory stuff, you know, hey, we're looking to bring this product to the MSP market I' like, awesome, let's sit down and talk about it.
Dustin:Just that shiny object syndrome, embracing that a little bit more.
Dustin:I try to keep it generally adjacent to stuff that I know like I'm not going to run off and start a mining operation or anything like that, but things to where it's like, I know enough about this to quickly get up to speed to actually provide value on it.
Dustin:So that's where I've really embraced it.
Dustin:The good thing, ClearGround Partners MSP just talking revenue a little bit.
Dustin:We did a million dollars in revenue our first year so it's been very successful.
Dustin:I got a great team, did a lot better on hiring this time.
Dustin:And then also myself personally, right is I've learned from all those mistakes.
Dustin:It's new game plus so I'm, I'm screwing up a lot less than I used to.
Dustin:So we were able to get in about four years back to that kind of same size, roughly same operational maturity and I gave me time to step out and you know, go chase adventures other places.
Ben:So do you have partners and clear guidance partners?
Dustin:Yeah, it's right in the name.
Dustin:But one of the pieces I talked before about, you know, having a clear plan and it doesn't have to be.
Dustin:Everybody thinks whenever you say that, that it's, you know, okay, I'm going to grow for five years and I'm going to go sell to Ben kind of thing.
Dustin:No, it can be, hey, I'm going to buy and hold this forever.
Dustin:I'm going to pass it on to my kids.
Dustin:So specifically with CGP is we're set up as an actual limited partnership and so I want to be able to get down to 20% ownership.
Dustin:At one point I'm still not there, but to get down to 20% ownership and basically I want to be that old guy that comes in the office once a week where they kind of, you know, laugh at him and here's his office and okay, don't worry about it and just collect that check.
Dustin:And then there's other the up and coming partners that are actually running the business, making a bunch of money.
Dustin:So yeah, I have a handful of partners.
Dustin:We acquired a business a couple of years ago.
Dustin:She stayed on to operate it for a couple more, more years.
Dustin:She is actually living in Europe for most of the time now because that was kind of a structured plan, slow retirement, things like that.
Dustin:So we have a 10 year plan.
Dustin:We are starting year six of that now.
Dustin:But the intention from day one was to have a handful of partners.
Dustin:Almost like a law firm model.
Dustin:Right.
Dustin:Or a CPA where it's I don't want to sit here at the head of IT and do this forever.
Dustin:I want to get it up and running and then just add value where I'm actually useful.
Ben:You wanted to structure it that way.
Ben:It sounds like because of your shiny object syndrome that's inherent in you, right?
Ben:As a leader.
Dustin:Yeah.
Dustin:And I know we're at the point now to where, you know, on the, the help desk, the IT operation side of it, day to day, I'm not any help.
Dustin:I'm even probably a distraction or a detriment to a degree.
Dustin:I'm still at heart IT cowboy.
Dustin:I am not the process oriented guy.
Dustin:I am not the one that needs to be sitting there designing SOPs and following them, that sort of thing.
Dustin:So that was the other part, was that really having that plan of okay, how do we do that?
Dustin:Like right now we have 22 employees.
Dustin:We're building processes that how will this run at 50 people technology point?
Dustin:We weren't doing that.
Dustin:It was just constantly seat of the pants kind of thing.
Dustin:So that business gave me the ability to really think ahead on that.
Dustin:And also like he's just said, right.
Dustin:Knowing what I want, I don't want to sit here and build.
Dustin:I have zero ego.
Dustin:To sit and you know, run 100 person company.
Dustin:That actually kind of sounds terrible to me.
Dustin:So I want to participate.
Dustin:I want to be sitting on the board and helping out and whenever the CEO says, hey Dustin, what do you think about this?
Dustin:Like, yeah, I'll absolutely dive in.
Dustin:But sitting there and kind of operationalizing that running that day to day is not, I'm not good at it.
Dustin:I don't want to do it.
Dustin:So built around that from day one.
Ben:That is really cool.
Ben:I love the intentionality that you've done with you, yourself and your own career.
Ben:Because I think a lot of people kind of, they don't realize that they have that power.
Ben:And you've really made it intentional to be able to do it.
Ben:To align what you want to do on a daily basis with your business is right.
Ben:Like you want to, you want to align your best so that you can be your best self in your work.
Ben:And I feel like you're on the surface, it feels like you're, you've got.
Dustin:Zero to 1 million.
Dustin:Kind of my sweet spot that I have fun.
Dustin:I'm, I'm going to say I'm really good at.
Dustin:I've done it multiple times now.
Dustin:And even if it, you know, Sometimes it's like a product line within another company sort of thing.
Dustin:But past that, again, I don't like it that much, and I'm not that good at it.
Dustin:You don't.
Dustin:Don't want Dustin sitting in the driver's seat of a $10 million company.
Ben:See, that's cool, because I'm like.
Ben:I'm like the opposite of you, where I wouldn't touch something if it's under 2 or $3 million.
Ben:Like, the 0 to 1 is, like, horrible for me.
Ben:I'm like, I would much rather take something from a.
Ben:From a three to eight or a nine and, like, do that meaty part.
Ben:We need to get.
Ben:Yeah, I know, right?
Ben:Just after you get to the point where you're like, at 3 or 4 million, sell it to me, and I'll bring it to the 10 to 20 million dollars range.
Ben:Right.
Ben:Like, that's where.
Ben:That's where I sit.
Ben:So it's really interesting to hear you and what you're good at and aligning with your businesses, because I think it does match really well.
Ben:And I'm.
Ben:I'm on my seat.
Ben:I'm like, more.
Ben:I'm.
Ben:I'm like an opportunity identifier.
Ben:Like, I love identifying opportunities, acting on them, integrating them, doing it, learning something new, and then going to the next thing.
Ben:So I'm kind of in a similar way, kind of jump around similar to you, but you kind of play in the smaller space because you want to build things from scratch.
Ben:I'm like, I don't want to build things from scratch.
Ben:I want to take something that has had some decent success, and I want to make it into a great success.
Ben:Yeah, that's cool.
Dustin:Yeah, I think that's important for a lot of people.
Dustin:And that's.
Dustin:The other thing, is you're going to be happier.
Dustin:I know so many people that are sitting there like, they.
Dustin:They spent 20 years, they got this MSP to $5 million, but they're just not happy.
Dustin:And it's because that's not the, you know, at heart, they're a tech.
Dustin:They want to be sitting there working on it, not managing the team, not holding them accountable.
Dustin:It drives me nuts on a lot of.
Dustin:So you'll see, like, the coaches and stuff where they're like, you have to do this, that, and the other, you know, or, you know, Ben, you have to get up on stage and speak.
Dustin:You have to post on social media.
Dustin:Like, that's not for everybody.
Dustin:Right?
Dustin:Do.
Dustin:Do what makes you happy.
Dustin:Do what you're good at.
Dustin:Don't necessarily Try to shoehorn yourself and there's usually an alternative path rather than trying to shoehorn yourself into that traditional 100%.
Ben:That's, that's where most of my acquisition and partnership opportunities have come up is because I'm meeting owners who are stuck in some way in their life, right?
Ben:In their business or life, and they've run into a wall and they can't get past it without doing something different.
Ben:And I can help them along that path by partnering or buying out their company and then putting them in the spot that will make them happy.
Ben:So, yeah, that's the cool thing about that.
Ben:Right.
Ben:Is like identifying that and, and seeing like, oh, gosh, your life is terrible.
Ben:Like, like that really stinks how you're running your business.
Ben:It doesn't have to be like that.
Ben:It could look like this.
Ben:Right, Right.
Ben:And that's, you know, when people see that, they're like, oh, wow, that's, that's amazing.
Ben:Like, let's, let's see what we can do there.
Dustin:Yeah.
Dustin:And I mean, it's, you know, we're, we didn't sell, but I got a great virtual CIO that she's taken 99% of the work off of other people's plates, and a great CEO.
Dustin:So I kind of get to stay with that shiny object stuff in the business.
Dustin:And I'll tell you what, it keeps me way happier doing that than, you know, two years ago where it was like, all right, let's try to move this entire 20 person team at once.
Ben:It's awesome.
Ben:And so you have clear guidance partners.
Ben:And then I did see you have risk gauge.
Ben:What was that?
Ben:Was that like a product?
Dustin:So this is an interesting.
Dustin:Because it was a completely failed concept.
Dustin:So coming into the insurance business, coming from cyber security, you and I both know, right?
Dustin:It's like there's these tools in place.
Dustin:Are they configured correctly?
Dustin:Do we have the right endpoints?
Dustin:Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Dustin:Cyber insurance right now just kind of drives by the house and looks at it, right?
Dustin:External scans, that sort of thing.
Dustin:So my thought process was, why don't we do behind the firewall scans?
Dustin:We're going to go in, we're going to look at how things are actually configured, what's deployed on the endpoints, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Dustin:The general objection to that which still exists is, you know, companies aren't going to want to have insurance looking at their stuff.
Dustin:Okay, that's somewhat true.
Dustin:There's carriers out there that are doing it a little bit.
Dustin:Or if you think like progressive, the save and Drive you can plug in like as a concept.
Dustin:There are people that will buy that.
Ben:Tesla has their, their insurance associated with their car where you, it'll look, look and track your miles, right?
Dustin:Yeah, exactly.
Dustin:So that is not the, that's the typical objection.
Dustin:People say this isn't going to work because of that part of it that ended up not being true.
Dustin:The bigger struggle was on the insurance carriers.
Dustin:They are scared to death of having that data because at that point they know how bad things actually are.
Dustin:They may or may not have to act on that data.
Dustin:And then it also makes it harder to sell insurance.
Dustin:So we had this platform built up, we had integrations to 30 something MSP tools.
Dustin:But over two and a half years we sat down, we pitched, you know, probably 40 or 50 reinsurance companies, carriers, all that fun stuff and there was just never a way.
Dustin:We had one of the largest carriers in the world actually was getting ready to deploy a pilot.
Dustin:But their thing was we don't want to see the data until the policy has ended.
Dustin:Like, why not?
Dustin:Like this is super valuable.
Dustin:And they said, yeah, it can be to compare against the policy rates, but during the life of the policy we don't want to see that.
Dustin:That's liability having that much data.
Dustin:So that was, we actually ended up selling that company back in August and it was just one of those things of you can't, I don't think, at least we were not able to get that really deployed inside the insurance industry.
Ben:I mean, it sounds like you were solving a pain point that wasn't actually a pain point for the client.
Dustin:Yep.
Dustin:Yeah.
Dustin:With the client being the insurance carriers.
Dustin:Yep.
Dustin:Yep.
Dustin:Again, seems super obvious to me and that even the carriers kind of said is that yeah, we could do a lot better underwriting with this, but they're looking at more.
Dustin:How can I make it easier to sell insurance?
Dustin:Which plugging in a bunch of connectors absolutely doesn't.
Dustin:Then the liability of that data just makes it, you know, could, could make it more expensive, more difficult on claims.
Dustin:That was a fun one that didn't really work out.
Ben:Well.
Ben:The, the upside is you got to learn a lot about the insurance industry.
Ben:Right.
Ben:And how it works and how it's structured.
Ben:So did that ultimately lead into you coming on it as, as, as an advisor at Fifth Wall and then you started your business.
Ben:What was the relationship between those two?
Dustin:That in a weird.
Dustin:We don't have enough time to go into that today, but let's just say it was all associated.
Dustin:The other part of that was I actually had I was a silent partner with a buddy of mine that he actually worked with me at technology point, decided to go out and get his insurance license.
Dustin: So back in: Dustin:And then we had a couple buddy msps that we were going in selling cyber insurance to also.
Dustin:And so that plus with Belltex is the current insurance company.
Dustin:What we looked at over the last couple years was, you know, there's going back to, you know, insurance needs to be easy.
Dustin:The, the difficulty, the all these universal apps, the 20 page applications and stuff, it's just obscene.
Dustin:So with Beltech, the risk gauge flowed into this, right?
Dustin:We learned the lessons.
Dustin:I told you I was going to talk a lot about the negatives of.
Dustin:I learned what not to do.
Dustin:So I said okay.
Dustin:Complexity, difficulty of getting insurance is a really bad thing in it.
Dustin:We want to make it easy.
Dustin:So Belltex, we took it the opposite direction.
Dustin:That came out of Fifth Wall as well.
Dustin:Fully independent company at this point.
Dustin:It's owned by myself and Michael Riggs who was the CTO at Perch Security.
Dustin:So we got, we actually have our own policy that ended up, we said what are we going to do to make it easy?
Dustin:You can go online, you can answer 20 questions, you can get an instant quote, you can E sign.
Dustin:Like how often can you do that with cyber insurance, it's not a bunch of PDFs to pass back and forth, stuff like that.
Dustin:Simple controls too.
Dustin:Do you have 24 by 7 MDR on all endpoints?
Dustin:Again, very black and white, very simple.
Dustin:And then the final piece of that ended up being as an msp.
Dustin:I don't.
Dustin:Have you ever had to go kind of hands on with a claim from the MSP side of the house?
Ben:Not personally.
Ben:People on my team have though historically.
Dustin:So it's.
Dustin:You've probably heard them cussing the insurance company.
Dustin:It's difficult.
Dustin:They generally hate msps.
Dustin:A lot of them now we're seeing try to sell security services.
Dustin:So you know your msp, my MSP has a client, they have an insurance policy.
Dustin:Those guys are coming in saying, you know, Dustin and Ben can't do security as good as us by our MDR service.
Dustin:Even the agencies, we're seeing a ton of agencies starting to do that too.
Dustin:They're either reselling stuff like that.
Dustin:So with our Bell tax policy, there's zero security, sales or marketplace or any of that stuff.
Dustin:It's a.
Dustin:We're going to recognize the great tools that the MSB already uses.
Dustin:For that customer.
Dustin:And then on the claim side, too, is rather than coming in, trying to sell, you know, this, that and the other, we're actually inviting the MSP into the process.
Dustin:Because why pay an incident response firm to restore from backup whenever Ben's MSP already has all the backups?
Dustin:They know this client really well.
Dustin:And then there's usually a savings from that too.
Dustin:The IR firms are ludicrously expensive, which makes sense for forensics, not so much for, you know, downloading logs or restoring from backups.
Dustin:So that was kind of the ultimate.
Dustin:All that knowledge, all the.
Dustin:All the lessons learned.
Dustin:Right.
Dustin:Led to this Belltex policy was the.
Ben:Hardest part about starting Beltex was that.
Ben:Was it about creating that initial policy that seems like the real meat of it?
Ben:Like, yes, you need to have it.
Ben:So how did you go about figuring out what that needed to look like?
Ben:What carriers did you partner with?
Ben:Like, how does.
Ben:I'm sure that took a while.
Dustin:Yeah, that was two or three years of meetings.
Dustin:It was also interesting because we were kind of going through that, you remember, whenever rates kept doubling every year.
Dustin:Right.
Dustin:That makes it really hard to bring anything new to market because they are just trying to not lose their shirts on all these insurance claims that are happening.
Dustin: le to get this set up October: Dustin:So we found a carrier partner.
Dustin:Finally, after we pitched probably 30 of them, we found one that said, yeah, this looks great.
Dustin:It's an interesting.
Dustin:We don't need to go total, total insurance nerd here.
Dustin:But it's basically a white label policy that's exclusive to us.
Dustin:So they kind of said, hey, we got this thing sitting on the shelf already.
Dustin:It's in all 50 states.
Dustin:You know, let's bolt on your changes to it, we'll make some adjustments where we need to, and then ready to go.
Dustin:So that part, finally finding the ones that got it, was the hardest piece of that.
Dustin:I don't mean from the sense of pitching.
Dustin:When I mentioned earlier, you know, there's a lot of carriers that don't want to work with MSPs that are selling security products.
Dustin:Right.
Dustin:You're seeing kind of that hybrid.
Dustin:I've joked it's the worst acronym ever.
Dustin:I hope it doesn't catch on.
Dustin:But Managed Insurance, Security services provider, that misbe.
Dustin:You're starting to see that come up a lot more now where it's, hey, Ben, I can tell your insurance and the security to make sure you get the best rates.
Dustin:You're seeing a ton of those come to market.
Dustin:Both selling the security directly, trying to sell against msds, trying to sell to their policyholders, that sort of thing.
Dustin:So that was actually a big part of what we got pushed back on, was, no, we're not interested.
Dustin:Why would we work with MSPS when we're trying to take their security business already?
Dustin:We're trying to get them out of the picture.
Ben:Huh.
Ben:It sounds like you had two different paths you could choose.
Ben:It was like you could go and find a policy.
Ben:One specific carrier and policy or the competition.
Ben:Right.
Ben:Now, I think they act just as insurance brokers.
Ben:Right.
Ben:They're going out to market, they're getting seven different quotes.
Dustin:Yeah.
Ben:Maybe picking one carrier that they like.
Ben:So why.
Ben:Why your model versus the broker model?
Dustin:Our model is the uniqueness.
Dustin:And I mean, this is.
Dustin:I mentioned earlier that, you know, we're fully independent company as a couple of months ago.
Dustin:So maybe you and I do part two of this conversation in a year and ask me how it's going.
Dustin:Nice.
Ben:Okay.
Dustin:My thought process was, okay, there's the.
Dustin:So we say we have, you know, we're the one MSB should work with.
Dustin:We have six, seven legitimate competitors in the MSP channel.
Dustin:There's one or two of them, like Tech Rug and Seedpod.
Dustin:I'll mention they each have their own policies.
Dustin:Right.
Dustin:So there is a uniqueness there.
Dustin:All the rest of these guys are selling the same stuff.
Dustin:It's like, why would I go to PAX8 versus Ingram kind of thing?
Dustin:Right?
Dustin:It's.
Dustin:I'm getting the same products.
Dustin:Maybe the support's better.
Dustin:But you're not really calling their support that much.
Ben:It's all price.
Dustin:I wanted to be.
Dustin:Yeah, I wanted to be differentiated from that standpoint.
Dustin:What do we have that's unique?
Dustin:So first of all, that was the business thesis.
Dustin:We gotta be unique.
Dustin:We're not gonna go out there and sell the same as everybody else.
Dustin:I told you already, I'm not an operator.
Dustin:I can't build.
Dustin:I could never build a distributor because that level of efficiency, repeatability is just not in my head.
Dustin:So we gotta have something unique.
Dustin:And then on top of that is like, what is good?
Dustin:What's good?
Dustin:Unique.
Dustin:To work with MSPs.
Dustin:They already have.
Dustin:I mentioned earlier, I'm working the claims.
Dustin:One that just drove me nuts.
Dustin:This was not a Bell tax policy.
Dustin:But prior to that, I was working on a claim.
Dustin:Huntress was actually in place, had shut down part of the network because there was a hacker in the system already.
Dustin:The insurance claims team was saying, let's turn it all back on the entire network and we're going to install Sentinel One, our tool to see.
Dustin:And it's like, no, guys, it's here already.
Dustin:If you do that, you're just going to have an even worse ransomware attack.
Dustin:Like, let's start right here.
Dustin:But they didn't want to have the MSP involved at all.
Dustin:So looking at stuff like that, how often do you get to say it's a win, win, win?
Dustin:So with the Belltex model now that kind of thing happens that it's, oh, great, the msp, hey, come help give us the data.
Dustin:So now you get reduced claims cost, carrier wins, you get faster restoration, the client wins, and then the MSP is getting pulled in and getting paid for that work.
Dustin:Like it's, It's a cool.
Dustin:It's a cool model.
Ben:That's awesome.
Ben:So it sounds like you're focused on selling policies to MSPs exclusively.
Ben:Right.
Ben:You're not selling to the ultimately the end client.
Dustin:Right.
Dustin:Cyber policy is buying it.
Dustin:But ideally, I would say 95% of our policyholders have an MSP.
Dustin:So that's who we're really looking for is a 20 million and under revenue business that has an MSP.
Dustin:That's our ideal customer.
Ben:Got it.
Ben:So you're selling to ultimately the end user and client, not the msp.
Dustin:Yeah, we do MSP insurance, which actually this year has been a bit of a mess.
Dustin:We'll probably do more of it next year.
Dustin:But our big focus being on the policy that we created is for the customers of the msp.
Ben:Got it.
Ben:Okay.
Dustin:And so what's the msp?
Ben:Okay, and then is there an economic model for the MSP itself?
Ben:Like are they making money off of.
Ben:Of policy sold or not?
Dustin:No, there is no way to.
Dustin:So I always.
Dustin:There's one or two companies in the channel that'll kind of pay.
Dustin:My thing is like, we can do some co marketing together.
Dustin:I will teach you how to use insurance to upsell on security.
Dustin:But there's been the Louisiana State Commissioner, I think for insurance said you can pay like a couple dollars per referral.
Dustin:You can't do These hundred dollars, $250 underwriting fee.
Dustin:There's all sorts of weird gray areas that people try to play in, but as soon as they get reported, it gets shut down.
Dustin:So I'm not even going to.
Dustin:The MSP is the one that gets in trouble.
Dustin:I don't want to be that guy with that on my record.
Dustin:Um, yeah, with us, we're not giving you a dollar, teach you how to sell more security with it.
Ben:So how have you liked going into a higher regulatory type business?
Ben:Because it sounds like you've got some, some big roadblocks and fences and I'm sure that's.
Ben:I could probably guess that's pretty annoying for you.
Dustin:Yeah, not my favorite from that standpoint.
Dustin:I like the.
Dustin:You're not supposed to.
Dustin:I was told very early on don't use the word creativity in insurance.
Dustin:But I'm going to say, you know, some of the more the.
Dustin:There's different ways to solve things rather than the traditional.
Dustin:That part has been a little bit nice.
Dustin:Is that everybody?
Dustin:The answer you hear the most in insurance is that's how we've always done it.
Dustin:That's why.
Dustin:Why are we emailing PDFs back and forth?
Dustin:Well, that's how we've always done it.
Dustin:You know, why are we not using APIs?
Dustin:Well, we don't know what APIs are and that's how we've always done it.
Dustin:So from that perspective, it is a very dated industry that there's stuff to.
Dustin:We.
Dustin:We are one of the two companies in the channel that use E Signs or insurance applications and we get comments on that.
Dustin:Which just blows my mind, man.
Dustin:Right?
Dustin:It's like why this has been around.
Dustin:DocuSign has been around like 20 years, you guys.
Dustin:It's like, yeah, my other agent just would email to me these PDFs or this clunky web form kind of thing.
Dustin:So from that perspective, it's great.
Dustin:But yeah, a lot of the stuff with the compliance, the regulatory, like, why can't we just do it this way?
Dustin:And you know, note that's not going to work.
Dustin:I was talking to somebody yesterday in compliance and they were telling me like a letter of engagement that's kind of, no, you have to work with us.
Dustin:Can't do that.
Dustin:On insurance.
Dustin:There's really strict pieces around that.
Dustin:If they want to take your quote and hand it to another agent, there's not really anything you can do to stop that.
Dustin:So yeah, it's, it's frustrating a lot of days.
Dustin:But on the other side, if it was more modern, I don't know that I would be an insurance at all.
Dustin:But a lot of it's so out of date.
Dustin:And again, still coming into the MSP channel where these guys are like, here's a PDF and all of us are sitting around.
Dustin:You said earlier about the MSP ownership, I don't know that I'll ever get out of MSP ownership because I feel like it gives me a good advantage of I can actually speak the language and I know how these things work.
Dustin:Not just hypothetically, but where it's like, why can't we just send a DocuSign, right?
Dustin:I get, as an MSP, I get DocuSigns from all my other vendors.
Dustin:Insurance, dude, why are you sending me PDF?
Ben:How do you feel like on the marketing side you've done for Beltech specifically because sounds like it might be challenging to get MSPs to, to care and advocate and say, hey, I need to get this, my client, this policy, right.
Ben:Or is it how have you seen that flow out?
Ben:How are you generating leads and opportunities for that business?
Dustin:Yeah, so that goes back to the, you know, we just kind of got to where Beltex is a standalone business last couple months.
Dustin:So my thing has been we're working with a lot of vendors on they need to understand how insurance works and then also access.
Dustin:I'm helping one of the larger cybersecurity vendors right now got removed from one of the carrier apps.
Dustin:So I'm helping them, trying to kind of bring that back to where it's supposed to be, I'm going to call it.
Dustin:And so we're getting them, you know, referring some of the MSPs over.
Dustin:I don't think insurance makes any sense to be sitting there doing for working with msps, to be doing cold calls and emails.
Dustin:I'm not going to hire a bunch of sales guys and put them on quota, stuff like that.
Dustin:It's really just that community led aspect.
Dustin:And so again, I think that the, even though there's hilariously there's a Reddit thread this morning that was like, no, you can't own an MSB and another business.
Dustin:That's a conflict of interest.
Dustin:So there's probably a bunch of Reddit guys sitting here not wanting to work with me ever as I'm playing this.
Dustin:But I feel like most part, I.
Ben:Mean that's what I love about your background is like you've done, you've done the MSP and you are doing other businesses too.
Ben:I feel like with my background, right.
Ben:I, I came into the MSP world a year and a half ago, I knew nothing before that and so I operated completely different businesses, I ran different types of businesses and now I've got a very unique perspective that others don't have.
Ben:And so I think that's an advantage, honestly, same as you, you have these different experiences that are going to help drive the innovation of your business way faster than all these group think people, right.
Ben:They're all sitting in the room pointing at each other, saying, oh, I think this is how it should be done is this is the industry best practice.
Ben:And then here you come completely going around them, right?
Dustin:Yeah.
Dustin:From that perspective is like, I don't think it makes sense to do cold calls or put a bunch of sales guys on quotas.
Dustin:You have, I'm hoping you don't have an MBA as I'm saying this, but a bunch of MBA guys running spreadsheets and sitting there going, this is the way to do it kind of thing.
Dustin:I don't know on going into this type of business because it's a commodity, right.
Dustin:Let's be honest, on the insurance, 90% of these guys are sitting there writing the same policies.
Dustin:It's kind of the same process.
Dustin:So I don't think for me, at least where I'm putting my money and my time in, I don't think that makes sense.
Dustin:I don't need to build this huge sales engine kind of community led.
Dustin:Hey guys, I know what I'm talking about because I'm in the trenches same as you.
Dustin:I can talk about the warts on my MSP and you know, the same kind of stuff.
Dustin:Just that level of understanding, that level of relationships on it.
Dustin:And then the vendors, Absolutely, I can tell you confidently, the vendors recognize that where it's like, oh, you actually speak our language whenever you say mdr, oh, you know what that means and you know the struggles in deploying it, what it looks like for selling it.
Dustin:So that's kind of been, our strategy has been we're not, we're not hockey sticking.
Dustin:I don't think we're going to hockey stick at any point, but just that steady reputation, that sort of thing going back to.
Dustin:On the MSP side, we're month to month contracts.
Dustin:We have gone over three years now without losing a single client.
Dustin:And we're, we're not a big msp, but we're also not, you know, three man shop or anything like that.
Dustin:I'm envisioning sort of the same thing on Beltex where it's steady growth.
Dustin:The guys that work with us, they get it.
Dustin:You know, they're referring their friends, the vendors already reaching out, you know, saying, hey, you guys do have something unique and just really riding on that.
Ben:Nice.
Ben:So, so where are you trying to, you got these businesses that now you have ownership in, you've sold some products and services, you now started, you know, new companies.
Ben:Do you have a overarching ambition or goal for like where you want to take your businesses or you personally?
Ben:Like, do you have a number in your head that you're trying to get to?
Ben:Are you trying to get to?
Ben:Like, what are you doing this for?
Dustin:Good question.
Dustin:I got a couple of answers for you on it.
Dustin:I have thought about this and I do have an answer on it.
Dustin:So I guess the, the first part of it is I don't want to be bored is the ultimate thing.
Dustin:So I absolutely know and you know, three years from now, I'm going to be doing something different.
Dustin:I'm hoping BellTechs will still be sitting there trimming long and it'll work out kind of like the last thing did.
Dustin:But I know me, I know myself.
Dustin:I know what I like to do is.
Dustin:So the, the example all my friends always use is I'm a car guy.
Dustin:I got five cars sitting in my driveway right now for just me and my wife.
Dustin:And I got three motorcycles in the garage.
Dustin:But my thing historically has been I'll buy project car.
Dustin:As soon as I get it fixed up, I turn around and sell it.
Dustin:Because I'm like, ooh, I want to get a new something to work on.
Dustin:So I think it's been kind of that same thing with the business side of it.
Dustin:So from that perspective.
Dustin:Yeah.
Dustin:Making sure each thing I do with Beltech, we are very intentionally building it right now to where the sooner I can step out of the day to day, the better.
Dustin:So I mentioned before on clear guidance, we're trying to build, you know, processes for a 50 person company.
Dustin:Now Belltechs, we're trying to build processes for a 50 person company day one.
Dustin:Right.
Dustin:The minute that I get a good leader in there, that everything's kind of going in the right direction, I'm going to want to move on to the next shiny object sort of thing.
Dustin:And then the other part, to the point of I'm not super money motivated actually, which is like where we're at today.
Dustin:I'm pretty comfortable.
Dustin:I got three kids, which that's not a cheap thing.
Dustin:But it's.
Dustin:Everybody would like more money.
Dustin:But I'm not sitting here going, oh my God, I need to double my money sort of thing.
Dustin:So from that perspective, just a steady, steady income, not having to worry about money, I guess I'll say, right.
Dustin:So probably a little bit more.
Dustin:But to where I just know all the businesses are in such great shape that I don't need to worry about it.
Dustin:That money's going to keep coming is a big one.
Dustin:And then I also just really like seeing people succeed that being able to promote others to run the businesses, getting it to where it's, you know, talking.
Dustin:Going back to Fifth Wall, Will Brooks, who's one of the most awesome people that I've ever been able to work with, I worked with him a ton, getting him into the channel chief role, teaching him the industry, teaching him cyber security.
Dustin:Like that.
Dustin:Out of the whole Fifth Wall thing where everybody's like, what was your biggest.
Dustin:Like, that's probably it because Will is a legend in the channel now.
Dustin:Like, everybody knows him, loves him, that kind of thing, like being able to help people out, things like that, that just makes me happy.
Dustin:So I got a guy already on the Belltech side that is going to be coming into the business, learning all that stuff.
Dustin:He has a long term equity offer, so that sort of thing.
Dustin:Okay, let's go figure out this next business.
Dustin:Hey, Ben, I'm going to get it to a million dollars and I want you to take over.
Dustin:I want you to run this business and build it into something great.
Ben:Cool.
Ben:Well, how are we going to work together then?
Dustin:I know this is giving me all sorts of ideas.
Ben:Uh, man, it's, I, I love the model that you're doing.
Ben:It's just like it fits you and your personality and I can totally see the things you're working on and that you're going to create some really, really cool things and maybe you'll have a few that don't work out, but you got a lot of them going on and man, it's, it's, it's going to be cool to see what you do over the next couple of years.
Ben:So I'm cool you've given the time to, to dive into those with us.
Dustin:Yeah, absolutely.
Ben:Anything else you want to, you want to dive into or want to talk about specifically that we haven't covered?
Dustin:Man, I think that's about it.
Dustin:My, my biggest thing that I've told people is if you're looking at starting a business like don't be afraid to fail, going back to the.
Dustin:Everybody gives advice in this industry, right, where it's like, oh, get six months of savings, this, that and the other.
Dustin:Like, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you how much risk to take.
Dustin:But I think a lot of people just get almost that planning paralysis is like just dive in and do it.
Dustin:You know, have an exit plan in six months.
Dustin:Maybe you're gonna be back to work in a corporate job.
Dustin:But it's fun and it's not as hard as I think a lot of People make it out to be.
Dustin:There's almost like a little bit of that.
Dustin:What do they say?
Dustin:Gatekeeping with entrepreneurs.
Dustin:Right?
Dustin:Where it's like, oh, Ben, you don't understand.
Dustin:Starting a business, like I, I don't think it's that big of a.
Dustin:To make it successful, yeah, absolutely.
Dustin:But just to start it where you get maybe you and one employee, like, I don't think that's as scary as a lot of people make it out to be.
Dustin:I think more people should take that, take that jump if they're thinking about it.
Dustin:My wife, on the other hand, just wants that 9 to 5 job.
Dustin:She has zero interest.
Dustin:Like I stopped pressuring her to start a business years ago.
Dustin:Or stopped rather.
Dustin:Sorry.
Dustin:But the people were like, oh, maybe I should go do my own thing.
Dustin:Like hell yeah, go do it.
Dustin:It's fun.
Dustin:You only live once, so go try it.
Dustin:If it doesn't work out, you can go back to a corporate job.
Dustin:That's okay.
Ben:Are you involved in any like entrepreneurial or industry specific peer groups?
Dustin:Industry specific?
Dustin:No, not anymore.
Dustin:I had a local business owners group through.
Dustin:It was the altern board that I was in and that one was an.
Dustin:Interestingly, we joked that the group was cursed because I think everybody except me and one other guy ended up either getting divorced or having to go through like a bad business sale.
Dustin:So that was eight years straight and then the group kind of fell, slowly fell apart.
Dustin:So no, right now I'm not in anything.
Dustin:I'd love to get back into it, but with again my shiny object syndrome, it kind of makes it tough on it.
Dustin:I'd love to find a group of like minded, just psychos that.
Dustin:Let's go in and talk about our three different, you know, things that we're going to try to start this next year.
Dustin:But at the moment I'm not in one.
Dustin:Even though I really did enjoy whenever I've been doing it in the past.
Ben:Nice.
Ben:Well, if you ever want to talk about entrepreneurs, organization, eo, I'd be happy to chat with you.
Ben:It's, it's an awesome group and our chapter here in Austin is awesome.
Ben:Is awesome.
Ben:Yeah.
Ben:Cool.
Ben:Well, thanks for your time.
Ben:And if folks want to reach out to you, how best could they do that?
Dustin:LinkedIn's always great.
Dustin:I'm constantly, that's my only social media scrolling through on LinkedIn on my phone and email works too.
Ben:All right.
Ben:Thanks Dustin for coming on.
Ben:Talk to you soon.
Dustin:Appreciate it.
