Kevin Clune is the Founder of MSP Growth Hacks, Co-Founder of Zest, and a Growth Advisor for MSPs. After growing and exiting an MSP business in 2018, he went on to publish his first book “The MSP Growth Funnel” to help others do the same. This spawned his career as a serial entrepreneur and vocal figure in the IT industry, as he continues to deliver valuable research and actionable advice to MSPs of all sizes.

Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn:

NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.

More recently, I think we’re getting more into software and solutions that can directly benefit in a far more scalable way. But over the years, like you said, we pretty much have stayed on the forefront of just like what’s new, what’s different, and what changes around the corner that maybe people aren’t paying attention to yet.

It’s clever, it’s AI, so it listens to what you say. So if it asks you a question and you go off track, or you say, sorry, what was that? It picks that up and it reacts like a human does, it’ll say, oh, I’m sorry I asked you, and it’s really scarily good. So I’ve tested it on a number of people and said, oh, I’ve got a new telesalesperson. Can I get them to call you? And haven’t told them it was AI. And apart from there being a kind of a slight gap in the conversation, the conversation doesn’t quite flow so well. It’s really good. And the day it all changed and the day that we committed was the day they integrated it with calendly. So when they first launched their first version, where basically the agent with whatever voice or saying whatever you wanted, she would say, oh, I’m going to get you booked in. I’m going to text you, I’m going to send you over a live calendar, which as we all know, very few people ever then actually booked in. But as we’re recording this here in mid February, like a week ago, they finally got calendar integration, and that’s been a complete game changer. So we are in very early days testing this right now. I really hope it works. I’m not going to talk about pricing because that’s not unfair to them because they’re trying to find out their pricing model. But it’s not cheap, it’s not expensive, it’s kind of somewhere in the middle. And as I say, fingers crossed, if this works for us, this could actually be a really good solution for MSPs because it’s exactly the use case. The use case for us is the same as it is for MSPs, which is calling people to find out if now is a good time to talk and if it is booking a 15 minutes appointment with a human. So that’s my cool AI marketing tool. What’s something cool that you’ve come across recently?

And this is the problem, right, with AI is the advancements are huge and abundant, but then everybody’s scrambling on the back end to sort of clean up the messes that it’s creating. So you can also burn a lot of time. I’ve been experimenting with all kinds of tools that I’m finding, but I guess recently I keep coming back to sort of just the basics of chat, GPT, copilot, custom gpts, and what I’ve been doing recently, I published an article last week on essentially like creating a case study, right? And so in that article, we walked through the process of, okay, let’s publish a questionnaire that you can fill out for a case study and then a prompt that you can use to generate the case study and then a design brief that you can then take once you have your case study and get it designed. And so what that really is, is it’s a turnkey process that regardless of whether you want to use chat GBT, you want to use copilot, you want to use Gemini, whatever, something else, you can just kind of apply that. And so this is what I’ve, after all these kind of experiments, and what I keep coming back to is how can we really build more so, like, processes around this to where I can repeat a result over and over?

And it’s not going to just all come crumbling down in the next few weeks or months when a tool changes.

Maybe that’s not the popular tool this is, or they lost funding, you know what I mean? It’s going to start to really be a rat race as things pick up. And I think most of these things will fail, and not because they’re not incredible, but just because the race is on and things will change over time. So I think that’s what, as exciting as it all has been, I think what’s exciting to me now more recently is being able to repeat results just using the know. And so that’s kind of what our focus has been on recently.

And now, since the data set is limited, you can have conversations with it and you know that you’re getting answers that are sourced from genuine experience, right? So this is sort of the problem with chat GBT, sort of proper, I guess, or in general, is that when you ask it a question related to a very specific topic, you’re going to get like a million different ideas and this and that, like every possible outcome. But every possible outcome isn’t always that useful. Sometimes you just need to know, like, okay, this is the outcome that’s most likely based on a limited amount of ideas and sort of execution steps. So that’s, I think, difference right now for us. So we encourage all of our readers to use MSP growthpot when they’re trying to kind of ask questions related to growing their business. Because essentially what it does is it looks at our content, it formulates responses, and it really does a great job of stitching these things together. It might be some knowledge from three different articles, which at their surface have very little relevance to each other, but it’s able to give you whole answers that really kind of COVID it in a way that personally we never could. And so currently you can visit the GPT store and on Chat GPT, and you can see all of these different GPTs that are now really useful. And so essentially, to boil it down, it’s just a Chat GPT. That’s for a very specific use case.

Well, let’s be honest, any data safety, if there’s any hint of your data not being safe, you’ve obviously got to err on the side of caution. I think that’s a default for absolutely everyone right now. It’s really exciting, and we’re going to wrap up talking about AI and just briefly talk about your new PSA. It’s really exciting for me at this stage to see how Chat GPT is evolving so quickly, and then we’re starting to get. And you’ll tell me what this is called, because I can’t remember, but I’ve preordered a rabbit r one, which is the gadget that will actually do things for you. So Chat GPT is just organizing information. Can you remember what that’s called?

The overall descriptor of action?

Everybody’s trying to push out the ten and under crowd, meaning like ten technicians or fewer. There’s a ton of barriers for that right now is like onboarding fees, there’s minimum license counts, there’s giant contracts, you name it. And so what if we just had a PSA that was ready to go out of the box? It was built for an MSP specifically. It required very little customization, and you could use it with essentially like no contract and no minimum seat requirements. So from the beginning, I sort of helped them through a wireframe, just sort of thinking around what they had, but they really didn’t need much of my help at all. They went out and built this thing. And then once I saw it, I’d say a year and a half ago, I was really excited to see how I could get involved. So I became an advisor and a shareholder and now I’ve sort of been helping in more capacity as a co founder. And so it’s called Zest. Zestmsp.com. And the point of this PSA is know it’s simple, it’s simplicity. It’s about just getting up and running as fast as possible.

If you have a huge team and you require all these automations and complexities and whatever, there’s far better tools for you. But if you’re just looking for a simple way to operate your cervix desk ready to go, you don’t want to spend a ton of time tinkering because it’s already built for you and how you should be running an MSP, then I think zest is the way to go.