Jeff Heather, Founder and Principal of North Light IT

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicitor implies shall be extended to W four CY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. Churchill said, those who failed to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Kevin Helenan believes that certainly applies to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com and now your host, Kevin Helena.

0:52 Thanks everyone for joining in today. I'm Kevin Hallanan and welcome back to Winning Business TV and Radio on W four cy dot We are streaming live on talkfotv dot com. That's the number four, and of course we're streaming live on Facebook and that's at Winning Business. Radio, and we will be available as we always. Are, in podcast form after the live show on whatever platform you go to YouTube iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple Again. Wherever you go, we are there. The mission of Winning Business radio and TV, as regular listeners and viewers know, is to offer insights and advice to help people avoid the mistakes of others. Right you hear the intro to learn best practices, the how tos, the what toos, the what not tos, to be challenged and hopefully to be.

1:37 Inspired by the successes of others. Who are those others. They're consultants and coaches, advisors, authors, founders and owners and entrepreneurs. They're people with expertise. But you know, virtually every successful person I've ever talked to has had some form of failure in their lives and careers. So while we all have to get our knees skinned once in a while, I'm driven to keep those scrapes from needing major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history so we don't repeat it. I've spent the better part of my career equipping businesses to grow from solopreneurs to small and medium sized companies all the way up to the Fortune fifty. I've seen some of those companies win, and to varying degrees, I've seen some of them fail I've had the opportunity to rub elbows with some of the highest performing people around and with some who probably should have found other professions.

2:22 And in my own businesses, I've had lots of success, but some failures too, and I like to think I've learned a lot from those experiences. So, yeah, you'll hear some of my opinions, but really you're going to hear from guests, and today is no exception. My guest is friend and Fellow Provisors member Jeff Heather, founder and principle of north Light It. Here's his bio. Jeff Heather founded north Light It in two thousand as a boutique managed services provider in the Boston area that hill's IT and cybersecurity for law firms and professional services firms with thirty or fewer employees, where every hour counts and downtime is just not just inconvenient, it's expensive. Jeff and his team managed the IT so clients can handle the work that actually pays. He built the practice around a conviction IT done right shouldn't belong exclusively to big firms.

3:10 Smaller firms deserve the same quality of IT partnership that large organizations take for granted support, strategy and security, and yet they rarely get it. A systems thinker by instinct, Jeff favors repeatable playbooks over one off fixes, and he spent his entire career turning the messy or excuse me, his career turning the messy high stakes part of running a firm's technology into something predictable. He's seen what happens when firms put it in the back burner. Client data is at risk, ransomware attacks hit with nothing to recover, billible hours disappear into a breach no one saw coming. He's also seen what happens when firms get it right, Fewer headaches, stronger security posture and technology. I love this statement, Jeff that gets or stays out of the way. With twenty five years across enterprise and small bit business environments, Jeff is spent his career at the intersection of technology and business strategy, and I love his tagline north light it an IT partner you can swear by, not at.

4:10 Jeff hearn earned his BS get ready for this in Aeronautics, Aviation, Aerospace Science and Technology from Bridgewater State University. It's not like a rocket science dot dot dot Jeff's married to Tracy since nineteen ninety five. They have three adult children, Kennedy who's twenty nine, Mackenzie twenty seven, Matthews twenty four. They have a three year old grandson named Beckett, and Isla is their Australian labradoodle. I'm going to try to say this one right. Alice is a shop adoodle and Ted's a tabbycap. Jeff grew up in Eastern mass and now lives in Freetown. Jeff, welcome to Business Winning excuse me, Business TV and Radio, and thanks for coming. Thank you, Kevin. I'm thrilled to be here. I've known about your show and been jealous of all of the amazing guests that you've had on over the years, and I am honored to have finally made the made the invite list.

5:04 Another amazing guest. That's how I'll view it. So let's talk about the important stuff. Tell us about Tracy. That is, that's the important stuff, right, yeah, well yeah, after thirty what one years or so? Now it is you know, still still the love of my life. I still when I see her car pull into the driveway at the end of the day on the way home. My heart still bitter, patters with excitement. Tail wags. That's right, tail wags. So I love that I'm a lucky man, was able to marry well above my weight. Same same. How'd you guys meet? Well, I'll tell you what. If you ever meet her, she'll tell you the story. So I'm going to short circuit it. Yeah, take the bite out of it. We met in college, and what happened was I was in a class with her best friend, and I wanted to date the best friend. The best friend was involved with somebody already and said, you know what, I think you really get along well with my friend and they she introduced us in that's you know, as they say.

6:17 Is history. So you got to referral. Really, I got to I've. Been I've been doing the networking thing for a long time. That's right. We have a little controversial story, but it's fun controversial, not like race or anything like that, which I won't share, but it's just fun. I love to know the story of how we met. We met in church, basically, So tell us about your kids. So kids, thankfully, my kids all take after their mom, so they're all smart. Good. And my oldest we're really excited. She Kennedy. She just moved back from Georgia and she spent eight years down there as an officer in Army Cyber Command.

7:00 Thank you for that, teller, please, yeah, I will thank you. And so they're going from you know, fifteen hours away to four minutes. And the really important part about that is that my grandson will now be four minutes away. So that's the important thing. My my middle daughter has decided in some ways to follow I guess in my entrepreneurial footsteps and has decided to throw away all of the expensive education that we buy and you know, the degrees and a great job at Harvard and decided to follow.

7:47 Her dream and open a bookstore. Oh yes, so that soft one Salem right to have been last weekend? How did it go up in. Salem, Mass? Yes? And it it was fantastic. There was aligned ten deep for several hours long waiting. To get into the store. So well, off to a great start. Yeah. I was going to say bookstores dying greed, So she can she can do it. People want still, you know, lots of people still like to go and touch books and hold them in their hand. Yeah. Well, and in fact, she did come up with a you know a business plan that you know, I read through and I made her show to a couple other provisor folks to vet. And it does turn out that the niche bookstore and this is a niche fantasy.

8:35 Horror bookstore Salem. After all, the niche bookstore thing is really becoming a thriving business. People are longing for bookstores again, but not necessarily the big box stores. I have an author that I may want to connect her with. She would love that. All right, I'm making a note right now, look at this. We're not working on live. So before we get into the nuts and bolt, tell us about your background. I know you grew up in shovel City. That's an inside choke Easton, Massachusetts. Tell us about the town and let people know what it was like to grow up there. Sure, sure, yeah, you know, Before I do that, in case I get in trouble, I need to mention my son.

9:20 I got him, and so, yeah. Matthew twenty four, he's out of school, he's got a you know, he's got a big boy job. He's working for Travelers Insurance and liking it nice. He's on month I think twenty five of thirty six that we've given him to save up enough money to get out. Of my house. Beat it. So we remind him every month that the clock is ticking. Is Ian Hartford or is he up up here? No, he's here. He's in the Bridgewater off local Bridgewater office. So was he at the tournament over the weekend? No? No, In fact, he was with me over the weekend. We were at a couple of car. Shows because Brent Middleton I used to have a client right there. They would all close that day and go to the Hartford.

10:06 Yeah. Yeah, he was down there for the big you know, the big onboarding training and all that. Yeah. Yeah, So Easton, Yeah, Easton was a great place to grow up. I was I was born. I was born in Cleveland. Thankfully my parents got us out of there. I'm gonna say sorry, but yeah, and no offense to Cleveland. It's just a joke. I'm allowed to say because I was born there. Yeah, and moved to Brompton, mass and then moved to Easton shortly after that. And it's I mean. Easton is a wonderful place for people to grow grow up.

10:51 I mean we had Borderland State Park. I spent countless hours at Borderland State Park growing up. Still go back there, you know, just for you know, a walk or or whatever. And the architecture hard to be A J. Richardson is amazing, you know, the Oaksange's Hall and the library. If you've never been to the library in Easton, it's it's worth a visit because it's beautiful, stunning. And Oliver Ames is the guy, right. All yeah, Oliver Aimes. He sold a lot of shovels during the early Wars and I think it was what World War two is where he made all of his fortunes and uh, therefore shovel Town. And yeah, the Borderland State Park has that's that was his home, his his estate and they still have a big house. A really neat thing they do every year at this estate. At least I think they still do it. They did it for a long, long long time, really neat old Stone Mansion. And on Halloween you can go in and they do like a candlelight reading of Edgar Allan Poe and it's it's really great.

12:12 That's cool. We'll have to try that, all right. What were your early interests and I want you to combine that with rocket science? Well, my early interests, I uh, you know, I have to admit that this this stems from, you know, a really intellectual place. But I grew up watching Tom Cruise fly around in fighter jets, and so I desperately wanted to be a top gun. In high school. That was that was my deal. And so, uh here's the interesting thing. Not a lot of people know, but I was not a great student in high school. I tended to want to have fun more than study. And uh the only reason that I ended up graduating high school was that I had two teachers who gave me d's.

13:18 To pass me. Because they said they didn't want to put up with me again next year. And uh so I, uh my, my very humble beginnings were were actually Massasoia Community College. Uh and my you know, my dad, My dad would always like to say that I was the biggest turnaround. He said, since Lazarus. That's a high bark. Yeah right, So I you know, I I mature. I guess got my head on straight and you know, finished with with high honors and all of that. From Massasoya went on to Bridgewater. Really between because I was aviation.

14:01 I was really between every brittle and Bridgewater. Okay, yeah, I wasn't quite. Ready to go away. Yet I was still maturing a bit, and at least I was smart enough to know that if I went away and away from you know, parents in church and all of that it, you know, I might. Have gone astray. So I stayed local, went to Bridgewater, did the aviation thing. And it was interesting because right around the time when I was going to be graduating, I knew that I couldn't be a top gun because I had talked to all of the military people and they had said, because of my past, my colorful past, let's say, and which potentially included some run ins with the law, that nobody was going to let me fly around in thirty million dollar airplanes.

15:00 And so I figured, well, maybe I'll do you know, private aviation. And that was around the time when Bill Clinton was taking office and military cutbacks were happening. Getting flight seats, flight slots was getting harder and harder to get, and so I said, you know, I'm going to make a pivot here, and I went into aviation management instead. So, you know, I came out with all of the flight skills and all that, but a management degree, and my first.

15:40 Little bit of a career. Was in airport management and I was in Midlando, Dexa, Odessa, Texas. And then I was up in one of my favorite places in the whole world, up in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Oh yeah, right over the highway, right, yeah, yeah. And it's just such a beautiful place up there. But it was it was between those two things that were you know, it was a fairly short lived career. I decided that aviation is a much better hobby than career. And so, you know, I called my dad. I said, hey, you know, Dad, I don't think this is really working out.

16:25 Can I come home for a little while? And you know, thankfully said yeah, I mean, of course, you know, come on home for a little while. Yeah, And so, you know, we we we talked through some things about what directions I might want to take. And my dad was also an entrepreneur war so he had his own company. He started out working for IBM, and then he went on to the jet propulsion labs were there for a little bit, and then went out and started his own business that is at least related. To what I do in it.

17:07 And you know, I was thinking about all the things that I did and loved, and really the technology is the thing that I always loved about aviation. I really loved all the technology around it. And it's where I learned that I had what turns out to be a fairly unique skill, which is I can easily understand technology and relate it to people in a way that humans can understand, not just technology people. And you know, that was, I guess natural to me, and I didn't understand that it was, you know, a really nice combination of skills. And so you know, uh, my dad had some contacts again networking. He had some contacts got me in touch with one of the managers at my very first corporate job with International Data Group.

18:14 So I d G. They're the folks in. Framing him who do the for example, the Four Dummies books, and back in the day they did the Macworld show and the E three Expo, all of those. So I started my very first job in technology and it was very glamorous. I literally changed the paper feeders for the big accounting. You know, the big accounting paper feed printers that were going four seven, And I changed the back when backup tapes were like the Hollywood looking reel to reel tapes for a deck vax way back in the digital days, and then slowly started to work my way up, work my way up, work my way up until I got up to a you know, a pretty good level over seven years up in the corporate IT structure and loved IDG, loved all of the people, loved my job, felt like my soul was being sucked away slowly by.

19:30 Okay, all right, pause on that. We're going to come back to that thought in a minute. We need to take our first commercial. We'll be back in one minute with Jeff Heather. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. Bestian Wealth man Management is family owned for two generations. They take pride in thoughtful financial planning and wealth management with a family feel for your closely held family business. Best in Wealth Management focuses on deep planning. Integrating your business planning with personal tay will help put your money to work and your mind at ease. Go to Bestinwealthmanagement dot com for more information.

20:22 Advisory service is offered through. Commonwealth Financial Network, a registered investment advisor. Join the best family and let our family advise your family that's Bestinwealthmanagement dot com for your complementary initial consultation. Have you ever dreamt of being on the radio, Well, now is your chance. Be a radio show guest on the number one ranked internet radio station and promote you and your business for free. Yes, you heard it, free business advertising right here on W four cy dot com. Call five six to one five zero six four zero three one now to get booked on one of our shows. That's five six one five zero six four zero three one.

21:05 Get you're free advertising now. And now back to winning business radio with Kevin Helenan presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again is Kevin Helenett. We're back with Jeff Heather. He is your guy you can swear by and not at. Jeff tell us more about your soul being sucked. No, the situation at IDG, of course. Yeah, yeah, you know it was. It was really I don't know what it was.

21:51 I think it was the mind numbing sameness of and all every day, regardless of how much I love the people in the place. You know, the same every Monday morning coming in and saying hello to the same people and talking about the football game the same way. And you know, just day after day after day it and I think it was, you know, the bureaucracy of big corporate life just it was so. You know, opposed to my nature. And eventually it just got. To the point where, you know, when one day I told my my wife we had my oldest I don't think was a year yet to round a year, I said, I think I'm going to quit my job.

22:45 It was the news, yeah, and go start something on my own. Well, and you know, the amazing thing, and I will I still give her credit to this day. I'll give her credit to the day I die. She didn't flinch. She said, now's the time to do it. If you want to do it, that's great. Wow. And so you know I did and and took that, you know, with what you hear over and over again from people who have left corporate life to start something new. Took the big, big first year pay cut because I went from you know, reasonable income, steady paycheck to.

23:29 Nothing. And it it really helped me appreciate. Rom and pride, noodles and hamburger helper a lot. Uh. We did. We did a lot of that for a year. But the nice thing is that there was a little bit of a soft landing because at the time I d G let all of the different publication run as what they call different business units and they can make their choices on you know, whatever, and so they didn't have centralized it either. The corporate it T was all to support the corporate functions of the accounting and you.

24:10 Know, all of that. And so all of the people I had spent building relationships, It's almost like relationships matter, Kevin, I. Don't know, all right, all. The all the people that I had spent all that time building relationships with, said oh, well, we still want to deal with you for our I T. Can we hire you to be the I T for our business unit outstanding? And of course I. Said yes please, And so it was really nice because I had sort of an immediate client base that at least helped put foot on food on the table. So did that for you know, A couple of years brought on more and more of the business units started to take over a lot of the local I d G world for clients, and then you know, well and behold people would leave and then they'd say, Hey, I'm in a new place, would you be interested in talking to us.

25:18 About doing it? T uh. And so we started to get some non IDG clients, and it got to the point where you know that that every starting entrepreneur hopes to be burden slash blessed with, which is that I was too busy. I had no time to sleep, I had no time to eat, I had no time to do anything but work. And so got to the point where I had to make you know, one of the scariest decisions of my life, which wasinging on help. Absolutely a terrifying proposition, because I mean I was an it guy.

26:10 I was not. A manager, really, you know, I wasn't. I didn't think of myself as a business owner at the time, and so really, really, you know, I did some handbringing over that for what turns out a lot longer than I. Should have and probably a lesson than that, right. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I tell every every entrepreneur now, you know, everybody who's starting out that is in that same cheese. I just I can't get everything done, but I just don't. I don't know if it's time to hire someone, and you know, it's that and when you fire somebody. I always tell people the time when it's right is when you first asked yourself.

27:01 Is now the time that's good? That's good? Right? That That means yes, do it for both of those situations. So I'm guessing that hire was a technical person. It was yes, yep, technical person to help go out and you know, crawl under desks and plug things in and you know, fixed servers and so that went amazingly well. You know it was I you know, I guess I got lucky that I hired somebody great because I didn't know how to hire someone at that point in my career. And they turned to that he's still with us.

27:42 Wow, Uh, he is our understanding. That is so unusual. He's our CFO now and he's amazing, absolutely amazing. And you know, because I stumbled upon this amazing hire, things went amazingly well. And soon after that we were able to hire again and then hire again, and before I knew it, I was at the point where I could actually. Take a vacation. Oh. I love that. It was amazing. I will never forget that first time I was able to go away, you know, with my own own business and know that the world wasn't going to end because I wasn't there.

28:32 I saw my father not do that, and that's one of the decisions I made, was I don't now there have been seasons, right yeah, sure where I am right now, it will be a few month season of that. But we're still going to go away. I just gotta take some work with me. But I watched my father do that, and I said, nope, not doing that. Yeah, yeah, it's hard, hard than everybody. It is. It is, and I didn't know it at the time, but that was you know, I wasn't nearly mature enough. Not that I'm very mature now, but I wasn't nearly mature enough from a business perspective to understand. What that meant at the time was that I was slowly shifting away from being a lifestyle company and becoming more of a process oriented company that in fact, could at some point in time become sellable. And you know, I understand now that it's very important that I'm not the limiting factor to the company and I'm not the important component for a sale, not that I'm in the market at the moment, but my business partner and I, which is part of the journey my business partner and I both agree that we never wanted to have a lifestyle company.

29:58 We want something. That should we ever choose to sell, it is going to be sellable. Therefore, and I'm going to get into this. The quote was you figured out your natural systems thinker, right, you think in terms of systems, which is critical for selling a business. I mean, I'm in the mode where it's probably a ten year run for this practice that I've had that I've been in, sorry for twenty five years. I just as you know, it just bought and I've probably got an eight to ten year run. I'm going to scale and it's not going to depend on me. I know, I'm the bottleneck. And that's why I said this next few months is there's a little little bottleneck at the moment.

30:40 But that's fine. That's what it has to be. Yeah, So tell us what it. Means to be a systems thinker and how that happened. Maybe you don't even know. Yeah, I think you know it. I think thankfully I was blessed with a little bit of it being inherent and just who I am. And you know there's I still to this day we come across countless other IT companies, especially you know one man shops who are just freelancing, and maybe that's a good way to frame it, to just oppose it is. We get these freelancers that we run into every once in a while, and it usually is because somebody calls us and says, we think we've both grown our I T and we want to look at something professional. It's almost always one of these freelancers who when somebody needs something, they just put something in place.

31:46 When somebody needs a new computer, they look on you know whatever best Buy to see what's on saying right, and they will get that if they need a component here or they need a component there, they just plug holes and things run until they don't. And the way that we approach things now and sort of that system oriented, process oriented mindset, is there is no just hole plugging. Everything is part of a whole. So when you need a new computer, you don't go when you look at best Buy to see what the latest thing is on sale and end up with eighty seven different makes and models of things that then become impossible to support. You want everything to be vanilla. That is our goal with all of our clients is to have their IT as dead, boring as possible.

32:51 As you said, keep it out of the way. Keep it out of the way. I always say we should be like your It should be like an NFL official. If you don't know we're there, we're doing our jobs. Things are running smooth. How come we didn't say w NBA. There's a lot of good memes going around doing right. I think you can do the point Caitlin Clark getting beat up every night. I know. Sorry, sorry, left turn, left turn. No, I know what you mean though. Yeah, it should stay out of the way. It should be vanilla. I love the word vanilla for that person. Yeah, vanilla and boring.

33:31 And you know, we tell all of our clients what we want you to have is something that should you decide that, for whatever reason, you don't want to partner with us anymore, or we decide, you know, we don't want to partner with you anymore. Any other professional it firm off the street can step in and say, yep, see it all, I know exactly what's going on. Let's do this, because you know, if it's so complex that another firm would come in and say, I don't have any idea what these people did. This is this is crazy. Then it's it's not right.

34:14 It needs to be as you know, as dead simple as possible, totally process oriented. You know you have a new client or a new employee, You send us the request, We have the forms we need to know. You know all of their important information, what they're going to be doing, you know their role, the start date, all of these things. It starts the process. We know we're purchasing exactly this model of system. We don't care if the price fluctuates month to month, because you shouldn't care about that as a business owner, whether it's three hundred dollars more or two hundred dollars less on this any given month. What you care about is that you are equipping your employees to have an absolutely flawless environment where where everyone knows that it's going to work, because that you know, two hundred dollars savings getting a deal at best Buy is going to go away in the first fifteen minutes that you lose in billable hours because your person's not working, because your computer's not working.

35:18 So we buy licenses. We know we're going to do this. We know that the onboarding is going to happen this way, and even more importantly. Using that example, when an employee leaves, the offboarding happens according to a very precise workflow, because the worst thing, I mean, it would make us go away very quickly, like end your business. If we'd missed something and we didn't turn something off and then it led to a bad thing happening, we would rightfully get in big trouble for that. So it's I mean, it's those little things. It doesn't have to be you know, really exciting workflows and processes. You know, something is mundane is user onboard and off board is a great example of something so vanilla but so important that it needs to be done right.

36:16 And that's why the system marks. All right, let's pause on that. We're going to take our second commercial. We will be back in another minute. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene on W four cy Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. Best in Wealth Management is family owned for two generations. They take pride in thoughtful financial planning and wealth management with a family feel for your closely held family business. Best in Wealth Management focuses on deep planning. Integrating your business planning with personal table help put your money to work and your mind at ease. Go to Bestinwealthmanagement dot com for more information.

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37:55 And Now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helenan presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again is Kevin Helenett. We are back with Jeff Heather, founder and principle of north light It. Jeff, you mentioned, and you know, I'm aware, but you mentioned that you like to work with smaller law firms and professional services firms. What was behind the decision to smoke to focus to smoke? What were you smoking to focus on smaller firms? Sorry about that, it's been a long time, Kevin about the US.

38:41 Yeah, well really, what made us focus on the small law firms is. My you know, I personally and my business partner. You know, we've spent most of our adult lives building and running a small firm. We hear it all the time. These it firms that will say hell, yeah, we're gonna we can support anybody from five to five thousand. Those are very different animals, very very different. You know, if somebody is a shop that's going to support five hundred or five thousand employees, they're not going to be terribly interested in the amount of money they're getting from you to support five. So I always find that, I mean, there are some great shops out there, don't get me wrong, but I always find that to be such a weird thing to say we support the small because we you know, we understand it. We we get being a small firm.

39:41 We understand the limitations, the challenges, the opportunities, great opportunities. You know, we we can shift very quickly and over and over and over again. Throughout my career, I've seen these small firms, the that just can't get the help they need. They need the help. You know, a CPA firm or a law firm is a CPA firm or a law firm. The information is just as confidential whether you have five employees or you have five hundred. But with these smaller firms, because you know, everybody's looking for the big whale clients.

40:26 They want those. Those big, big recurring numbers. Nobody ever really wanted to touch them. But that's those are the people that I resonate with. I love, I mean, that's my you know why I get out of bed in the morning is because I'm excited to work with other firm owners like myself that you know, just from a business to business perspective, I actually don't really care that much anymore at this point in my career about technology. You know, technology doesn't the excite me. Business excites me. And helping other business owners, other firm owners be successful excites me. It's just that I have a particular expertise in technology that I can help apply to them, and so working with them is you know, we always say we don't want to. We're really friendly and we play well with others, but we don't want to We don't want to work with your I T people. We want to be your I T people because a huge part of the value that I think we bring is the ability to talk firm owner to firm owner about business in a way that we actually understand what we're both talking about. You know, I talk to our clients and other firm owners all the time about non technology things like how is EOS implementation going for you right? And

41:57 you know, all these different things that only owner would understand. And because we understand from that perspective, it. Gives us the ability to. Much more successfully sort of apply the solutions to them that are right, because the solutions themselves for a five thousand person firm are different than a five person firm, and you need to understand the difference. You mentioned the messy high stakes part. What does that look like. What's messy high stakes part of running a firm? Yeah, well, it's.

42:38 Running a firm's technology. Sorry, well yeah, I mean well, running a firm in general is messy, and you know, from a firm owner perspective, every day is high stakes because you know, this is your this is your life, this is your abe, you know, and especially it's it's only getting worse from the high stakes perspective when you start thinking about all of the cybersecurity things. You know, it's it's one of the areas that I both love and hate to talk about because they never want to scare anybody into doing anything. But at the same time, some people need to be scared into doing some things because just not seeing it. And you know, these days, one person doing one wrong thing one time can mean the end of your business that you have spent you know, your life building. And so there's really high stakes when it comes to that kind of a thing.

43:45 But you know, just in general, you layer that on top of just I mean, you know, Kevin, what it's like. You own a small business and you know every day, every day you're fighting for that thing to get a little bit better, and you know, you know that there are all these messes out there. You know, we're we're stepping around hr. Issues and it issues, and you know, all sorts of things that that we understand, and you know we we, at least from the I T perspective, we want to make that part of your life not messy.

44:29 And as you said, boring and vanilla, boring and vanilla. If you you it's not because of your technology. I love that. Are you doing much with AI yourself? Are and are you helping clients use AI? Yes? Yes, and yes, using AI a lot. It's very much a part of my every day. Some examples other I mean we all do research, right maybe sure, yeah, yeah. Some research some things like that I do. I you know, I personally use it because my role is not technical anymore. My role is business development, and so I use the technology to do all sorts of things like.

45:24 Take my meeting notes. So everybody's got a meeting note taker these days, we use a meeting note taker that's super high security and that's why we use it. Uh. And we are standardized on. Claude necessarily because it's the best, because they all have their place, UH. And I have Claude do things. That I don't like to do that are very boring for me, which means they don't usually get done or they get done poorly. So to take my meeting notes, import them into my CRM, you know, update the CRM notes, help me formulate. Next steps, keep track of next steps. Hey what you know?

46:05 Hey, you're a week late on a follow up email to this person running weekly reports for me to look at, for my business partner to look at, for the operations team to look at, so they can see what new potential onboardings are on the horizon. I hate doing those things. And that is a very appropriate use to me of AI is taking the mundane things that you don't require any kind of human thinking to do. They're just busy work and making those better.

46:49 And are you helping clients do the same. Yeah, we are a real majority of what we're doing right now with clients is still talking to them about the security ramifications of AI. Say, I mean you hear all the time. AI never sleeps, right, So. Yeah, it never sleeps. And for example, you know, when when cloud Cowork came out, all of our clients were saying, hey, can we you know, can we just was the thing we kept hearing, Can we just turn that on? Uh? And so we would have to point out that doesn't mean what you think it means, you know, if you look through, look look through, look through all the notes of what cloud cowork is telling you. If you enable this, you're giving it administrative privilege to all of your data.

47:38 It needs that in order to do it do its thing. You know, it needs to see everything to do what it's doing. You know, are you accounting for the fact that you have just released this thing in your environment that can run autonomously or from somebody's phone. They can set things to run on your office systems or in the cloud overnight while you're all sleeping. Do you want this beast churning through all of your client information and your information without somebody watching it and even taking a step back something like a copilot, You know, if we're going to deplay copilot, you know which we are helping people do internally, so within your guardrails, you're not really all that worried about getting out. But what happens when somebody goes into copilot and says, hey, what are all the firm principles earning every year? What is my coworker earning every year? Can I see all of the HR reviews for all of my coworkers? If that stuff is not all secured internally properly. AI is going to do its job and find every gosh darn thing that it can find in reports.

48:58 So that goes to again, it goes systems and processes and thinking through all that up front. Right, you have to. Do all of the important base work before you open that Pandora's box. And so. It's it's almost frustrating, but it's good. It's also good because I know that people aren't seeing it, and so yeah, it makes me feel good that I'm helping them see it. That you know, nobody wants to understand the foundation. Before you know, buying. The shiny toy, and we're helping people see the foundation and put the proper foundation in place so that the shiny toy isn't a shiny toy, it's an actual dull vanilla productivity tool to help you move forward.

49:48 All right, last question, we are out of time, unbelievably. Who in the listening audiences and viewing audiences should reach out to you and why? Well, the folks that we really most enjoy. Are law firms and professional services firms with fewer than thirty employees. We do have clients that are outside of that. Those are the people. If you find yourself there the people we hear from most. And if anybody in the audience, if this resonates with you, please feel free to reach out. Anybody who has a guy that they think they've all grown, please feel free to give us a call. We find we have found without fail, if you have a guy that you've worked with for a decade plus, you probably have.

50:41 Most things not right in your environment. If there's a huge consolidation going in the IT world, if you have a provider that's loved for years and they just got bought and you don't love them anymore, you can give us a call. You're starting a new firm. So here's the number. Seven eight one, listen carefully. Seven eight one two nine seven seven five nine zero. It's Jeff at north light dot com. It's that simple, uh, Jeff at northlight dot com. You can visit his website phone number on more time. Seven eight one two nine seven seven five nine zero. Jeff, Thank you very much.

51:24 This has been fun. Thank you for having me Kevin. I'd really really enjoyed it. You got it. I will see you soon, and thanks everybody for watching and listening. As you know, this is a show about business, both successes and challenges. If you've got concerns about the sales effectiveness of your company, whether your sales team is you, or it's small, or it's large, and you're in Massachusetts, or you were referred by one of our clients, and you'd like to learn more about implementing Sandler in your business, contact me at go dot Sandler dot com, slash KJH or you can email me Kevin dot Hallanan at Sandler dot com. Otherwise, please visit a Sandlord. Please visit Sandler dot com to find a Sandler Training center that serves your area. At Sandler Training, we developed sales teams into high achievers and sales leaders into true coaches and mentors.

52:10 We're not right for everybody, but maybe we should have a conversation. Thank you always to producer and engineer Onan. Thanks Wan. Be sure to join us next week Monday, July sixth. I'll have another great conversation. Until then, this is Kevin Haleanan. You've been listening to Winning Business Radio with your host, Kevin Helena. If you missed any part of this episode, The podcast is available on top for podcasting and iHeartRadio for more information, and questions go to Winning Business Radio dot com or check us out on social media. Tune in again next week and every Monday at four pm Eastern Time to listen live to Winning Business Radio on W four CY Radio w four cy dot com.

52:52 Until then, let's succeed. Where others have failed and win in business with Kevin Helenan and Winning Business Radio. Yeah