Jeremy Weisz 4:08
Talk about that for a second.
Orrin Klopper 4:11
Great. You know, I always look at the dynamic of all I can ask myself is, are we really making a difference in the lives of our customers? And I think you do when you deliver a great support service, making sure that their email is, is working or making sure that their their onboarding is happening seamlessly. We definitely are making a difference. But are you really achieving the level of impact that a technology environment in a business can and so we built the service called innovate, which has an ROI guarantees if you’re spending $2,000 a month and that accrues to $24,000 in the year we will find a $24,000 ROI for you based on a few pillars automation. adaption and change management, a direct cost savings, and leveraging the existing technology that you’ve already invested in. Because what we find so much, Jeremy is, businesses have have invested in in a whole lot of technology and the users and the people haven’t yet really embraced it to make a difference. So this is this is the offering I’m very excited about. And we’re just getting unbelievable feedback from our customers on this.
Jeremy Weisz 5:31
Yeah, so true. It’s kind of I picture like the human brain, whatever they I don’t know what the stats are, we use whatever it is 15%. But I know there’s stuff that we have, that I feel like we are using 3% of this and that it does so much more. But we just don’t have the time to even I mean, we’re using it for its core function, and not exploring all the other ways we can you know, benefit from it. I’d love to hear why do people come to you? Because I know people come to you for certain things. And then when they come to you they realize you do so much more like you mentioned with with innovate.
Orrin Klopper 6:05
Yeah,
Jeremy Weisz 6:06
What makes people first come to you?
Orrin Klopper 6:08
Yeah, look at often it’s a breach. They’ve had a had a security breach is one reason that customers come to another their, their current service provider, in the case of an outsourced relationship is just not delivering and really leaving them down. The other is fast growth. So what we’ve seen with organizations that are growing quickly, they are they realize how technology can have an impact on their ability to scale. And they know that’s not their core business, and how do they find a partner that can help them embrace and make the most of that technology and scale quickly? Those who just be three examples?
Jeremy Weisz 6:54
I’d love to hear a… I think there should I don’t know if there is a book about it. But I always picture the good books are like one words, the years of the breach, and the probably some crazy stories about what’s happened. I know you probably can’t share the names of the companies. Are there any that stick out to you, just from a higher level perspective? What have you seen when someone gets breached?
Orrin Klopper 7:16
No, it’s, it’s, it literally can bring a business to its knees. So we give you one example, we had a customer, a customer that was breached. Long story short, we’d made a recommendation, they had various offices around the VPN technology that they use, they didn’t have it in their budget now. So we’ve got a rental option to bad time. And without getting too technical. Those those second hand devices provided an opportunity for the hackers to get in. And they got in leveraging ransomware. And Jimmy, I cannot tell you how professional they were. They told us that had like fully documented letters, were going to turn this into an opportunity for you to learn from this, et cetera, et cetera. And so anyway, we went through a long process, obviously, it made huge changes. But this this literally bought this business to its knees for a very short period of time. Another example was…
Jeremy Weisz 8:25
Really quickly on that on where the threats asking for money what what was there? What were they asking for?
Orrin Klopper 8:32
They were asking for Bitcoin Yeah,
Jeremy Weisz 8:37
You know, I think each Bitcoin now I don’t know, when someone’s listening to this, like you’re probably hovering around $20,000. So I don’t know how many they’re asking for. Not a cheap ask.
Orrin Klopper 8:48
No. No. And it just it what blew me away, Jimmy was just happen. I mean, it’s not professional to do anything illegal, but they were run, it was run like a bit. They were you could see they were very broad, very well thought out. Very, you know, structured. I mean, it was, it was yes, that’s the most sophisticated one. But the simplest examples are simply a user clicking on an email, and we’re someone masquerades. So give you an example customer of ours is has has a customer, the customers due to pay them 2 million euros, right? The hackers masquerade as, as someone, someone from our customer, saying he’s paired into this account. And so there’s no, all it is, is it’s just a user that has been potentially fooled. Because you can have all the security in the world but if your users are not actually understanding that you need to really be circumspect of any email that’s asking for those types of details. And the 2 million euros or She was transferred, but they ended up having a relationship with one of the large banks and they were able to get it reversed. So fortunately, it didn’t have to have the impact that that it could have. But it’s yeah, it can happen to anybody. And probably the biggest category of awareness are taught about hygiene and fundamental core core security elements is us educating your users. And there are various ways of doing that.
Jeremy Weisz 10:30
It’s not on a…I told you, so a conversation you want to have with someone who’s most on the budget now, and then it gets breached. And it’s like, well, you don’t want to say I told you so. But at that point, it’s kind of appear.
Orrin Klopper 10:46
Now and what and what does happen, unfortunately, is that the customer so overwhelmed and stressed, they can tend to take it out on their their managed services or their IT partner, but we throw the Cavalier, and we don’t even get into that we do every single thing we can to mitigate the impact, and to learn from it. And to close those, close those gaps. And we’ve, we’ve not lost a single customer that has had a breach because, you know, in any service industry, any b2b business, that those difficult times are when you build the deepest and strongest relationships. And yeah, we’ve managed to come out of those much stronger.
Jeremy Weisz 11:28
Yeah, from, from my perspective, the person who had that threat, and they were really professional, what is best practice to respond to that threat, because I’m sure that they were completely overwhelmed up in arms, and in some people may just think this is going to go away, also.
Orrin Klopper 11:48
Yeah. So, so to share some of the sort of learnings that we’ve and approaches that we’ve taken, number one, don’t pay. Which is controversial. And people, you know, after all, auto pay, because we think that’s a slippery slope. Because you can’t pay and then, you know, it depends on what they have been able to get access to. Number two is, is is to everything you practically can in the short term, to close the gap between what allowed them to get in and, and how you can show that as soon as possible. And a big piece of that we’ve seen is also user education. Those probably be the two key, the two key key points.
Jeremy Weisz 12:44
Talk about you know, with growing the company, the landscape when you first started, okay, for a second, what was it like first started and then I want to talk about when what point did you Institute kind of a growth through acquisition
Orrin Klopper 13:00
strategy? Okay, great. So when we first started, there, it was y2k as that was kind of the, I mean, we first started the business officially in 1997 entrepreneurially, in 95. But leading up to 1999. Most SMB businesses, small and medium enterprises were being absolutely exploited by IT service providers. And so there was a huge opportunity to go in there, be honest, be transparent. This is really what you need to find new customers at their time, and probably from let’s call it 9899, around about until, well past 2010. And even up to let’s call it 2015. It wasn’t a commoditized insanely competitive space. It was relatively easy to get customers because SMEs and entrepreneurs, businesses who are adopting technology, that adoption was growing, the number of companies that were seeing the importance of technology was growing. So that was very, very a fun growth period when
Jeremy Weisz 14:12
they didn’t have websites, right? I mean, yeah,
Orrin Klopper 14:15
or no. And their security approach was the machine that they had the accounting system on, it was off the network. You laugh at it now, you know, but you think it’s like it probably wasn’t a bad idea back in those days. So. So it was it was it was easy to get customers but much easier than it is to now to get
Jeremy Weisz 14:39
clientele people because technology was ever changing. It was new. Some people may I mean, that was I mean, maybe it wasn’t as there wasn’t many providers, but people it may be a harder explanation at that point.
Orrin Klopper 14:57
Yeah, sure. I mean, we weren’t have anywhere near as sophisticated from a marketing perspective as we are now. And we we probably the one marketing outreach we leveraged in those days, we actually did a research survey. And we gave those results to everybody that participated. And we would serve anywhere between two to 4000. Small and Medium Enterprises, entrepreneurial businesses, and we ran that program for about six to seven years. So that was one way that we engaged as we were able to share that impact that information back with them. And one of the key pieces, or sort of areas we were trying to discuss was how can entrepreneurs SME businesses, leverage technology to have a positive impact on their competitiveness? So that was the one way we reached out that was sort of the theme. And then the other was, you know, really, from a skills perspective, because we’ve always had unbelievable marks of skills, we were able to make sure that organizations could adopt the technology and use it in the best way in their in their businesses. But we were we were not very sophisticated and a lot came from relationships. So when you look at many growing small and medium enterprise businesses, the relationship comes from the Jeremie from the RN and the other leadership team and for the first time from an organic growth perspective, probably in the last, I would say three years, our growth is as coming 90% of our leads are coming from marketing, role marketing activities that are outside of our relationships.
Jeremy Weisz 16:36
I love the research, sir. I mean, that’s sophisticated, I would think even on today’s standards, actually, I love that. what point did you decide acquisition, if you’re going to implement acquisition as a strategy for growth?
Orrin Klopper 16:54
So we we have used it in an ad hoc way, for quite a few years, we decided on it being our primary growth lever in 2019. And when we were going into 2020, a couple of things. So we have quite a mature strategic planning process. So at the end of 2019, so many ways, September, October, we kicked off strategic planning, we could see our organic growth was in a hole. It was, it was bad, like really bad. And then we saw the pandemic coming as we went into 2020. So now we’ve got organic growth and a whole with the pandemic coming. And we don’t know how what impact this is going to have. So so we just aggressively attack, we went through the most vicious cost cutting we’ve ever done by nothing. And we did two things with those, that cost cutting. Fifty percent we put back into into profits and cash flow and the other 50%, we put into something called a growth and innovation fund. So for the first time ever, I had a whole lot of budget. And we retained a buy side advisory firm from an acquisitive growth perspective. Over that period over the last two of the last three years. We’ve increased our organic bartering spent five times, we spend five times more now than we did three years ago. And we invested heavily in in acquisitive growth. And in 2020, we were able to 2021 we were able to complete three deals. And might made some mistakes, some serious learnings. And we have two other other deals with three other deals in the pipeline right now. And this is one of our primary growth years.
Jeremy Weisz 18:55
What do you look for? Let’s say someone’s listening or like sure, actually we feel perfectly or we should contact Orrin. Yes, talk about a deal. What do you look for?
Orrin Klopper 19:05
So we’re I mean, in the space anywhere between, let’s say, three to eight million dollars in revenue, we’re looking for organizations MSPs that have 60% or more recurring revenue, at least a 15% EBITA. And we’re looking for, for entrepreneurs that deeply value their people, deeply value the relationships they’ve built to their customers over the years, and are looking for another chapter in their entrepreneurial journey. Because our approach is we want to keep the key leaders it might be two or three key leaders and one wants to execute. We want to keep the key leaders because the greatest limitation to rapid growth is access to highly talented leaders. And we know that part of the acquisitive growth is for us to bring those leaders along with us on on this journey,
Jeremy Weisz 20:05
I mentioned there’s five locations around the world. Do you have a preference of geographical location?
Orrin Klopper 20:11
Yes. Primarily primarily in the US.
Jeremy Weisz 20:16
Got it. That’s great. And then how long do they take? Typically? I know they may vary, but from when you discover a company to finalizing a deal, is there an average?
Orrin Klopper 20:29
So maybe just to highlight a couple of steps in the process, just to give clarity. So initially, initially, it’s a relationship building, we were very few numbers are exchanged, and get to know each other, is there actually a man at some point in that process? So let’s, let’s call that, I mean, I’ve done that as long as three months or a short as a month, where the chemistry is just right. And the timing seems right. Then the next phase is, we will agree. Okay, can we can we do an initial financial diligence to understand all in initial diligence when we build a financial model that can take anywhere from three to four weeks, depending on how readily available that information is? Then we draft an LOI, letter of interest. And the way we’ve redo the LOI is it’s actually exactly what the purchase agreement would look like. So that there are no surprises in that space, from sign to LOI to the purchase agreement. And typically, so that that process that we might have, might be entering this call it three to six weeks to do that initial financial model, agree that Lor can be another two to four weeks, and then from LOI to close can be anywhere from two months to four months.
Jeremy Weisz 21:47
What’s one learning? Because I’m sure in this process, do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. You bring your learnings to the next scenario, what’s one, one learning that you wish you knew in the first couple deals?
Orrin Klopper 22:04
That’s a great, that’s a great guy, a great question. And in the beginning, we don’t want to talk about numbers. But also we want to be respectful of each other’s time. And at some point in that initial kind of connecting and relationship building, just to get a high level view of our our you roughly realistic from a valuation perspective. So that’s one thing, there have been a few times where I’ve just had such amazing chemistry and we loving chatting to each other and feeling inspired from sharing learnings. And then we kind of get to the numbers discussion, they literally expecting three times what is what is realistic price on the market? So I’ve wasted their time.
Jeremy Weisz 22:45
They wanted… their expectation was higher as far as evaluation goes?
Orrin Klopper 22:49
Yes. Yes.
Jeremy Weisz 22:52
That’s hard to know, without that conversation, though?
Orrin Klopper 22:55
For sure. It’s hard to know. But I mean, just to give you context, it, I mean, depending who you talk to there between 20 to 40,000, MSPs, just in the US alone, and there’s been enough deals done, and enough understanding to be able to say this is really kind of what a fearful part looks like. And then the other the other learning that is difficult to balance is how do you get a deep insight into the culture of the organization without alarming the people of their organization. So I’m an entrepreneur, and, and nature is approached to buy my business. Now, I don’t want to go and just tell all my people that we’re considering selling the business. And next thing, nature comes in all sorts of questions, and then the deal’s off. So balancing that dynamic, because what we have found is without being able to speak to more than just who we’re dealing with, it’s hard to ascertain from a cultural perspective. So we’ve worked out some ways of learning from that. But I think the one thing that any entrepreneur can do is just to be able to say to their people, look, you know, might not happen now, it could happen in three years or four years. But I am at some point in a look on bringing a partner to take us to the next chapter of our journey. So that when there is a topic of discussion, you can go a little bit deeper. And then, yeah, I think the other piece that we’ve seen again and again, is really, for me, is a growth mindset. And it’s a challenging dynamic to be able to measure that because it’s being able to put ego aside as a leader and adopt a growth mindset to be able to say, You know what, I used to do things like this, and now I’m gonna think like one business and we’re going to do things in this way and be able to put the ego aside, because, for us, any business we acquire leaders that adopt a growth mindset in that business, they will end up with more opportunities. And they can say yes to it just might look different to what you’re doing today.
Jeremy Weisz 25:12
Yeah, and I love it. I love the verbiage what you said there, which is bring on a partner, it just sounds less, I’m going to lose my job. Right? Like, if you say, we’re going to be purchased, there is a acquisition, you know, brand partner, which is, you know, it just is for the leadership team, and one of the I love the podcast, Built to Sell. And he talks a lot about this, how do you tell your team it? Because you have to tell them at some point, when do you tell them and that kind of thing. So there’s some good episodes there on that.
Orrin Klopper 25:47
And maybe to talk from my own example. So I used to see the private equity space, Jeremy as the axis of evil, they’re gonna come in, they’re gonna fire everybody, they’re going to ruin the culture, etc, etc. So, but there are almost 60 private equity firms that are focused on the MSP space in the US. Sixty! So that is a huge economic force. So to ignore that would just be absolutely crazy as an MSP. So we’re privately held, we have no private equity partner. But at some point, we are going to bring on a private equity partner, but what I have done is made sure I DPM standards of all the books and articles and things I’ve read probably the one, the one that kind of started me sort of saying, okay, private equity isn’t all that bad as a book, but it was more like an SL 120 paper, Orit Gadiesh. I think it’s called Lessons For CEOs From Private Equity. And then that kind of made me think, okay, there’s something here. And then I read Adam Coffey’s book, Private Equity Playbook. So Adam has done 58 acquisitions, he was the CEO of three private equity backed businesses. And he was never ever from a private equity firm. But he literally laid those businesses with multiple private equity owners. And so what we’ve done is we’ve retained him as an advisor. And we are saying to our people now, and we have no private equity deals that we’re considering. And it’s not yet the timing for us, we say, this is going to happen. At some point, we’re going to bring on a growth partner, who’s going to be able to help us execute on our growth strategy.
Jeremy Weisz 27:23
I love that. So the who is the author, again?
Orrin Klopper 27:26
Adam, Coffey. COFFEY. He’s also done another book, both of them are Amazon bestsellers, The Exit Playbook. Check down to earth guy, and he makes it simple and easy to understand.
Jeremy Weisz 27:42
Love it. How do you protect culture? You bring on these other companies, you have a lot of people, you know, integrating into Netsurit? How do you protect culture?
Orrin Klopper 27:46
So the one the one book we read, called Scaling Up Excellence. And there was a concept they they spoke about in their excuse the religious terms. It’s Buddhism versus Catholicism. It’s almost and and the idea of, what do you want to prescribe in the business that you buy, and as non-negotiable and dictates in almost an authoritarian way. And what do you is less prescriptive, and more this is the core philosophy and concept, these are the values and the rest will be flexible. So we’ve, we we’ve been thinking a lot about this. And actually, when we look at an acquisition, we make a list of things and we say, what are we going to be Buddhist on? What are we going to be Catholic on, and literally taking that, so we want to protect the soul of that organization. We want to protect the magic that has attracted us to that organization and that business. And culture is actually not something that can be performance measured, it’s not something that can be disciplined, unless you get to a value side where it becomes pretty black and white, it’s more of a community dynamic. And that community dynamic is so sensitive. So we employ various tactics to protect that but probably the primary one is keep the great managers and leaders wherever we can do that, because I think a whole lot of good culture lives in those great managers and leaders and then our dreams program we bring our dreams program in but that’s another discussion where that can you I believe it sometimes it’s perceived negatively as like a cult and well I think some organizations Jeremy has the view that and the people in those organizations my work life is my work life. My personal life is my personal life. Those two shall never meet. I think he’s he’s exact opposite. We say that inextricably linked, you spend more of your waking hours at work or engaging in work, then you do anything else in your working life? How could they be, how could they be not inextricably linked. So so that dynamic is a direct conflict. And we encourage, you know, we’re both members of EO and you’re in a forum. So in a forum, you’re encouraged to share openly and be vulnerable. In our, in our dreams program in a dream group, it’s formals. It’s, it’s highly confidential, you can share what’s going on in your life, what you’re struggling with is experience sharing, obviously, in a good style talk way. So sometimes where the where there isn’t that thinking in the organization, it is seen as a negative thing. And the truth is, it’s not for everybody, right? Not everybody wants to be in a workplace where they’re asking you to engage. So openly and transparently, we definitely respect that idea. So we don’t force it, anybody you don’t have to. But it’s difficult if you’re not going to be part of this in our culture.
Jeremy Weisz 31:08
To talk about the dreams program, it was one of the things I was excited about this interview to just researching you in your company. And what you do, you do have this globally award, you know, award award of dreams program, which is a key part of culture. And what I love is people share goals, from their personal if they want to achieve something if they want to do something. So just talk about the dreams program.
Orrin Klopper 31:36
Yeah, sure. So to give you a little bit of context in history in 2004, one of our top engineers, I mean, back in 2004, there were very little cloud servers were in a server room, which was not really a server with no air conditioning. And in summer, the service would crash because it would be so hot, one of our engineers goes out one of our top guys, he’s actually in a, in our team in New York today, just one of the most amazing humans. And I get a call from one of our teams saying he’s sitting in front of the server. He’s not typing, he’s not talking. He’s just sitting. He had a full on burn. We realized I realized at that point, as I thought about this, if we’re going to build something significant, we need a culture where people can be balanced. And they can and they can do their their ultimate passion, which is the technology industry, because a lot of these guys go home and do it on the weekend anyway, because I love it so much. And how do we actually proactively manage that balance. And then in 2007, our 10 year EMP program, and Cameron Herold mentioned a book called The Dream Manager. So I read that book. And then I read Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr book, The Power of Full Engagement. And then I read Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness, actually read that. Read that after we launched the program. And essentially, we launched the program in 2008. And the sum, just to explain to you what it is, what is at the beginning of the year, the calendar year, we all create what’s called a dream book, which is your top 10 personal goals and dreams visualized, which in our businesses, the way we do it is it’s a PowerPoint deck with 10 images. And so now we have this for I mean, hundreds of people in others, you get put down into a dream group, which is like for him in a year, which can be anywhere between six to 10 people. And you meet once a month, and you support each other in a way to achieve your personal goals and dreams. We have a section in our performance view line manager meetings, which we do every six months where the line manager has a discussion with his team member around. How are you doing? We have in our expo once a month, we’ve got red, green, yellow, How are you coping, from a purpose perspective supporting the gyms and the doers. And each exco leader puts red, green or yellow. And then we also have a week in advance a dynamic where, at the beginning of the week, on a Monday before 12 o’clock, you capture the three to five actions that are going to take you towards achieving your goals and dreams. And that gets circulated to your to your dream coach. And that’s really how far we go. You know, there’s so much to goal setting and achieving the mind micro details. But we just want to light the fire and nurture it and create a safe space in our culture for people to talk about what they really want in their lives and to open the pursuit. We’ve had people resign because of the Dreams Program because they realized this is not what they wanted to do. And that’s amazing. And then three years later, I get like text or something. The one guy will be in a picture of him on the Wall of China, you know, because it was in his dream book and it’s just like upon tell you how much joy and meaning and purpose that brings to life.
Jeremy Weisz 34:59
you know, why 10? I’m curious.
Orrin Klopper 35:02
So we took a process that we took a, a methodology from a guy called Glen muck work that you take the spoke of eight spokes of the wheel of life. Brainstorm first spoke as if there were no limits, narrowed down to your top 25 And then narrowed down to your top 10. And then he’s the methodology actually talks to a top three. But some people only do six. Some people do four. I’ve actually got 11 This year in mind. So it’s, it’s up to you doesn’t have to be 10.
Jeremy Weisz 35:42
What are some examples? You mentioned the someone visiting you know, the Great Wall, what are ya
Orrin Klopper 35:49
No, for sure was excellent. It was so simple. Like the one you saw this woman coming out of a pool. And it’s the guy’s grandmother, and she didn’t have enough money to repair her pool. He’s got it in his dream book, he wants to save up so he can repair his grandmother’s pool. So she can so she can swim in a pool again. A lot of them have financial goals. Achieving savings, a lot of them have traveled goals. You know, we’ve we’ve, we’ve had team members in in Ho Chi Minh City, we’ve got team members in in Poland, in Peru, in you know, because we have a lot of remote workers. And the funny thing is, everybody wants some of the things in their life, like similar things both more time with their family more that they health, you know, so we always prioritizing them thinking about what’s really going to make them the best version of themselves. In Jim’s Loehr, Tony Schwartz book, the powerful engagement, they spoke about the idea that an eight hour day, if you’re balanced and engaged, you can get better results and productivity out of a person then a 16 hour day, it’s actually been proved proven now that that is the truth.
Jeremy Weisz 37:08
That’s amazing. No, I wrote down all those books. I appreciate it. And I did I think two episodes of Cameron Herold on the podcast, you can check that out. He always has great advice on that. Do you speak to the EO group in South Africa? Or where do you hear him?
Orrin Klopper 37:25
No, I was at the MIT. I was at MIT, the EMP, the EMP program.
Jeremy Weisz 37:32
Got it. One things you mentioned before, which is your innovate service and automation. And everyone loves saving time and tasks and that and when we do that we save money. And we reduce mistakes, too. And so there’s a few examples, one of which was a nonprofit and economical development. Can you talk about what you did there?
Orrin Klopper 38:00
Yeah, sure. So really, they were struggling with manual processing of high volume of supplier invoices. And spending about 180 hours on on this talk. And the two sides per month one it? Yeah, the two sides this, the one is the people doing that work. It is not going to be inspirational, engaging work. And then the other side is just the raw waste of time. So we were we were literally able to automate that process entirely. Live leveraging the marks of power automate platform, and some optical character recognition. And essentially 180 hours has been saved. And that didn’t result in someone being being let go or anything like that. Now they can do other work that has higher value more engaging and more stimulate.
Jeremy Weisz 38:53
You talking about Orrin, if there’s some of the process of identifying these automation opportunities?
Orrin Klopper 39:01
So yeah, so. So this can be a lot of fun. And so initially, how we do it is we actually are for in the start of an engagement with a with a potential customers, we offer a business automation assessment assessment, which is about an hour. And there’s no cost to that. And we actually will provide key recommendations. It’s quite simple. It’s a one page summary. And then that will be what we understood about your business, from an from a technology adoption, digital transformation and an automation perspective, what we’ve heard as far as the key priorities, and then what we believe to be some of the key opportunities. The other way that we the other way that we do it is we’ve got an ideation platform called N Spark, where we will get maybe, let’s say this is an account there are five people In finance, it’s just three people, we’ll take two of those people, put them on the platform, and literally ask them the question, what are the highest value activities, okay, that you’re performing, and how automated are there. And then that goes into a list of ideas, and we literally vote on them to have the ones that potentially can create their greatest value rather than the top. And then you start getting granular and saying, Okay, how much time is it taking currently? And what would it look like if it was automated, so then you could start leveraging an ROI. And then from there you can do you can make a decision to implement, and then you can help let that fund what you do next.
Jeremy Weisz 40:43
And that’s huge value, if you can automate some of the highest value activities. I feel like it’s a mindset shift for some people, because they feel like some of those highest value activities can’t or shouldn’t be automated, you run up against that?
Orrin Klopper 41:01
For sure. Without a doubt. And it’s it’s is a deep change management exercise that has to take place. So that those those team members and potentially leaders in the business feel comfortable. The tough reality is the opportunity that digital transformation in a business represents. It’s you never arrived here, it’s actual, it’s perpetual. You need to be thinking like this as a business leader in an organization all the time, because it will always change and there will always be new opportunities. And the way to deal with some of that resistance is if the key leaders are adopting and embracing it, then it almost becomes ingrained in your culture. And it almost becomes an embracing of a growth mindset. And what you’re doing is you’re leveraging technology to achieve it. And the bottom line is that a lot of SMB SME entrepreneur organizations are paying for that technology already. And this additional 20, 30, 40, 50% of value can be realized without even spending any more. They literally just need to adopt any price. What the heck.
Jeremy Weisz 42:13
Because I can see you, Orrin, you’re like, oh, you know what, you have this 180 hours a month that can be automated with these invoices like, Orrin, that can’t be automated? I mean, we’ve been doing it like this for seven year, whatever. 10 years, right. And it’s a mindset shift, as well. There was another company, you worked with a financial services company, what did you do there?
Orrin Klopper 42:36
That’s right. So yeah, again, it was some really highly skilled team members were just manually capturing and transferring tax return records. From cloud based tax and accounting solution, cch access to SharePoint Online, and it was just waiting this, this end up being about 40 hours a month, 40 to 50 hours a month. And just leveraging the technology that they had. We were literally able to automate that entire that entire process. Amazing.
Jeremy Weisz 43:12
I have one last question or and before I ask it, I want to point people towards Netsurit.com. To learn more about what you do, NETSURIT.com. Learn more about their company and what they’re doing there. And check out more episodes of Inspired Insider. Last question or an you know, you mentioned mentioned already some treasure trove of resources, books, people. So I want to do just a quick recap of that. And then any others that you want to mention. You mentioned. Adam Coffey. You mentioned Cameron Herold, you mentioned Delivering Happiness. You mentioned the Power of Full Engagement. What are some of The Dream Manager? What are some other ones that people should check out? People or books?
Orrin Klopper 44:01
For sure. And an iconic piece that still I always think about when we look for for differentiation as entrepreneurs, I think we have to ask ourselves this question is the Blue Ocean Strategy, I still believe is one of the most powerful strategy books I’ve ever read. And just one of gallops really most powerful books that still today, I believe stands the test of time, which is First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham. And they literally surveyed 80,000 I mean, it’s it’s 80,000 companies and over a million staff. I went and actually looked at this and it’s over 2 million now. And deduction that can choose one thing, the relationship and loyalty organization lives in your line manager who your manager is not the company and then they came up with 12 questions that just talk about engagement and, and then just some iconic ones it just taught to do our opera existing values built to last good today by, by Jim Collins. And probably the last space just a couple in here that are just so so powerful. You know, when you look at successful organizations and successful people, you’ve you’ve managed to harness habits. Because habits are the flat route the bedrock that results in us achieving what we want in our lives and in our careers. And two of the best pieces of work. There are Atomic Habits for me. And then Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit. Those are just phenomenally Interesting, interesting books that I’ve learned so so so much.
Jeremy Weisz 45:45
I love it. Orrin, I want to be the first one to thank you. I remember listening to that Marcus Buckingham book on audio cassette in my car numerous times, so that that is one of my favorites as well. So yeah, for people listening don’t know an audio cassette tape is the square thing. Anyway, but everyone, check out Netsurit.com. Check out more episodes Inspired Insider, and Orrin, thank you so much.
Orrin Klopper 46:10
Thank you, Jeremy.
Outro 46:12
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