UnHacked - Cybersecurity Made Simple for Small Businesses

Justin Shelley (00:11.542)
Welcome everybody to episode 93 of Unhacked. Guys, technology's hard. I I tried to do the outro music for the intro, and then I froze up and I didn't start it on time. And not just technology, but we're gonna start a little where Where's Waldo game. We had the word sentence, sentence, sent, I don't know, was misspelled for God, I think like a year. Finally got that fixed. You both picked up on it immediately, and I've already given you the answer to this today's pop quiz. But what's wrong now with?

Joshua Holloway (00:30.832)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (00:39.746)
This episode like with my recording, my setup, my studio. Anybody? anybody? Jesus.

Joshua Holloway (00:45.135)
I love that you called recording, so you just gave it away.

Mario Zaki (00:47.999)
Ha

Justin Shelley (00:48.31)
Yeah, yeah. So I'm I'm we're we're prepping and by the way, you're both pissing me off. It's fine. I look up in on the on the window, you know, where I'm looking at my own recording screen and I see my goddamn recording sign hanging upside down and backwards. And I'm like, I I need to r mirror my camera. You know how you can do that, right? That's a setting. So that when you raise your right hand, you see your right hand on the screen. No, I've I hung the damn thing upside down.

Joshua Holloway (01:09.639)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (01:17.27)
Whatever. And I'm not even going to fix it. I don't even care. And every every week I think I'm going to introduce something new that I screwed up, intentional or otherwise. And then we're just going to see who picks up on it. Anyways, guys, let's do some very quick introductions. And then I'm going to bring all the energy and the anger and the passion and the rage that you built up in me before we hit recording. record. And see, I can't even talk. You guys have me so flustered. Anyways, Justin Shelley here, CEO of Phoenix IT Advisors. Angry.

Full of rage and ready to s what there was a phrase I heard one time that I really love. Spittin' facts. We're here spitting facts about AI, cybersecurity, what it all means, and ultimately how to help you, the listening audience, my clients, your clients, everybody's clients, make more money using technology and then protect that money from the Russian hackers, the goddamn government who's gonna come and and investigate and fine your ass if you do it wrong. And then if that's not enough, the attorneys are gonna come and sue you.

so like this is this is serious stuff, and I'm kind of being weird and joking around, but like this is serious, serious stuff. So let's introduce a little Zen, see if we can finish the introductions without my head exploding. I'm gonna do my box box breathing episode exercise. I can't I can't talk, guys. You know how you're supposed to go in for eight seconds, hold for eight seconds, and that's when you feel like you're gonna pass out. Yeah. And then you exhale for like 24 seconds, and then you hold that with no air in your lungs.

Mario Zaki (02:25.901)
Breathe. Breathe.

Joshua Holloway (02:36.487)
You're gonna pass out.

Justin Shelley (02:43.403)
Yeah, that doesn't work. It makes me more angry. Josh, tell everybody who you are, what you do and who you do it for.

Joshua Holloway (02:48.327)
Yeah, I want to be a little bit more mellow, but my name is Joshua Holloway. I'm the CEO for 70i Technologies, and we're an MSP that specializes in businesses trying to operate inside of compliance. we're also helping people navigate the seas of AI and figure out which direction they should go. So we're kind of like a a beacon in the fog, if you will, with AI. And lastly, I wanna add to the list. You end with attorneys, but the other thing that we need to add to the list is insurance companies.

Justin Shelley (03:15.328)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (03:16.535)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Justin Shelley (03:18.411)
I mean you're just gonna leave it there. Cliffhanger is it is is that our next AI or I'm sorry, our next mini series is on insurance. It might need to be.

Joshua Holloway (03:18.681)
Even though the attorneys get involved, we still have to follow those policies of the insurance companies.

Joshua Holloway (03:29.627)
We might yeah, might need to be.

Mario Zaki (03:30.189)
We'll lose all our listeners.

Justin Shelley (03:32.255)
I was just gonna say watch the metrics just tank. I I

Joshua Holloway (03:36.293)
It should just be a like a thirty minute podcast on insurance.

Justin Shelley (03:39.41)
Like thirty seconds. It's like, guys, get insurance, do what they say, or you're screwed. Mario, what do you have for us?

Mario Zaki (03:46.265)
Yeah, Mario Zaki, CEO of Mastek IT located in New Jersey. We specialize in helping small to medium sized businesses, again, navigate through the IT and AI world. And my specialty today is giving Justin a heart attack with the stuff that we talked about earlier.

Joshua Holloway (04:03.963)
You c you did a good job.

Justin Shelley (04:06.057)
It worked. It worked. And I guess I I guess I should close that loop. it just I I swear to God, and I said this a while back, you know, AI it should be making our lives easier and simpler and and we should have more time because that's the fear is we're gonna we're gonna take everybody's job, enter South Park saying here. because AI is doing so much work that now the us humans have nothing left to do. I wish.

I wish that was my experience. I I'm I'm upset today because I think I've got it all figured out. I'm like, I'm killing it. I'm I've got yeah, I've got a hundred projects going at any given time, but I'm keeping track of them for the most part. I'm overwhelmed, but I use AI to bring me back in. but then like I swear to God, every time I talk to somebody who's doing anything with AI, they're like a hundred miles ahead of me. And I'm just like, I can't keep up with this. And now Mario, you introduced

And we're gonna I'm not gonna say what it is yet, because this is this is your presentation today. We're gonna get into this. But I mean, you've teased it, you talked about it last week, maybe even on previous episodes of of kind of what you've been doing. And and we're gonna deep dive on it today. But as I started actually listening to you, sorry, I'm like, my God, this is a whole new thing. I have to, I just have to learn. I don't know, guys. I I'll be honest. I'm when I'm hosting the show and I'm directing traffic.

Joshua Holloway (05:24.305)
This just started last week.

Justin Shelley (05:31.766)
I try to get you guys talking so I can think about what the fuck we're gonna say next. All right. There's the big secret. So I don't always hear what you say. God, sorry for my language today. No, I'm not. so we are, I I think we're technically in the seventh episode of our AI series. We should be at the eighth, but we skipped one because we were so efficient with the first three. and then we introduced introductions and integrations, and we start actually doing work and we're like, my God.

Mario Zaki (05:54.414)
With the help of AI.

Justin Shelley (06:00.821)
we could probably do twenty more episodes on on this. But today is kind of a transitional episode. We're gonna wrap up the integrations and then next week we're moving into the stuff we build with AI. Not just taking a chat bot, but actually coding, actually creating websites, applications, whatever you wanna call it. And that is what really has kind of blown my brain. I just I I I don't know. I'm

I'm a mess. So this week, Mario, you have talked generically-ish, at least as far as I know, because I don't listen, about this $40,000 that you've saved. We're going to get in, we're going to talk about what it is. We're going to do the math behind it. And then what I really want to, I'm going to, I'm going to say my key takeaway before we even get to the end of the of this episode. Because this is what I hope.

Mario Zaki (06:40.001)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (07:00.737)
that the audience gets out of out of being here is the fact that I just completely drew a blank and I have no idea what I was gonna say. So we're gonna save it for key takeaways at the end. good God.

Joshua Holloway (07:12.655)
This is the part w where you're not listening and you totally lost yourself.

Mario Zaki (07:15.268)
Yeah

Justin Shelley (07:15.295)
I'm not listening to myself. I'm just like, I told you guys I'm a hot mess coming into this one. I I really had something important. but it's gone. It it I'll I'll I I'm sure I will. Mario, tell us. I I I do want to start with the technical stuff. And business owners who don't care about technology, just stick with us because we're gonna talk about the money, which is really the most important thing. but Mario, just briefly and and

Joshua Holloway (07:24.731)
Just blurted out while Mario's giving his explanation.

Justin Shelley (07:45.527)
try to keep this brief and out of the weeds as possible. What is it that you have built in in in generic terms, how did you do it?

Mario Zaki (07:56.696)
So one of the couple things that we built was an onboarding and offboarding platform, where one of our end users, like our customers, can log into a portal using their Microsoft account so we don't have to create them any new accounts. They just log in and they're able to set up, fill out the person's name that's starting, the hire date, what computer they're going to be using.

what licenses that they want to apply to, any of that stuff that usually they will send into a, using a form that gets sent to the technician in the form of a ticket, or they'll just send us an email saying, I have John Doe starting on Monday, can you guys please give him this email address and set up? So what I did is I created a form right onto our platform, you know, our platform and

they go in there and fill out the information that they're doing anyway. They hit submit. It goes to my technicians and my technicians will review it and approve it. It will automatically get automated. It will go and purchase the license from our Microsoft vendor. It will go and set up the user. It will configure everything and even assign them that computer.

So while we're doing this, while we were doing the integration to go in by the Microsoft licenses, just like everything we do with AI, once you start working with something, you're like, well, great if we could also do this. And then I had it go in there and say, well, why don't you tell me if you could automatically reduce and check licenses.

Justin Shelley (09:35.009)
Don't piss me off again, Mario.

Joshua Holloway (09:37.105)
Mm-hmm.

Mario Zaki (09:49.069)
you know, for all our customers. And it said, yeah, no problem. All we need to do is set up this integration. Now, what Microsoft has done, it's called NCE, it forces you to sign a one-year commit to licenses. So for example, most of ours are renewed in February. So if we have a customer that has 10 employees and they have 10 licenses, if they let one of them go,

they have to stay with that 10 licenses until February. So what we end up doing come January, we have, I have one of my technicians go into every tenants Microsoft environment and sees and check how many they're actually using. So he'll see, well, we actually are only using nine. So we have to go into the platform and reduce it. All right.

That process takes them pretty much the entire month of January. So I automated that. Now it automatically checks on a daily basis every customer, were they reduced by anything or increased by anything, mostly reduced by anything, and will automatically adjust the renewal that is supposed to take place in February. It automatically does that. So I was able to save my technician

the entire month of January from having to spend about six hours a day, you know, for, I think it was 22 days in January. So that entire month now his time is dedicated elsewhere. And with the onboarding that I mentioned earlier, that would usually take about 45 minutes to go in there, the license, set up the user, probably.

go back to the owner or the admin that submitted it, ask them some questions that they may have forgotten to give us. That process usually on average takes about 45 minutes. So now that process takes only about a minute because all they have to do is approve it with one click of a mouse and the other one, the license is automated. So nobody needs to do anything with it. So.

Justin Shelley (12:03.745)
Mario, real quick, and I'm I you've probably said this, but as I mentioned, I don't always pay attention. I I have heard you talking all about what it does in your Microsoft portal. Then it also reconciles to your billing system as well, correct? Okay.

Mario Zaki (12:16.108)
Yes, yes, yeah. So it will automatically go into our Halo system and it will adjust it. So if we want from 10 to nine, we're only billing them for nine starting in February. So the billing is...

Justin Shelley (12:30.091)
Yeah. So you're saving yourself money, but honestly, you're saving your clients money a lot of times too. Because I know that this is a problem in my business with my clients, is their license creep, you know, if it doesn't hit their radar and it doesn't hit mine or my technician's radar, they can be paying Microsoft a whole lot more money than Microsoft deserves, right?

Mario Zaki (12:36.705)
Exactly.

Mario Zaki (12:50.946)
Yeah. And we've onboarded like some, some customers that we go into their Microsoft environment and we're like, well, you told us you only have like, you know, 15 computers, but why do you have like 28 Microsoft licenses? And then they'll go in there and they're like, well that user, that employee hasn't been there, been here in like five years. This one, you know, doesn't exist anymore or whatever. So, but the problem is they probably already committed to that one year commit.

Justin Shelley (13:04.727)
Yeah.

Joshua Holloway (13:05.788)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (13:19.15)
So now they're paying for those extra licenses that they didn't know about for, I don't know how many months. And now we're able to save them money and be able to, and if anything changes in the meantime, we're automatically on top of it, you know, and not have to dedicate a human being to something so repetitive and mind numbing, to be honest with you. You know, so do you want me to share my screen and go over those numbers, Justin?

Justin Shelley (13:47.128)
Well, I've gotta put some fine print out there first. I was chastised this week by our lovely editor, Miss Liana. she does not like it when we share our screens, but if we do it, keep it brief. I don't know why. So yeah, no, share your screen.

Mario Zaki (14:01.08)
Okay.

Joshua Holloway (14:02.181)
Right, 'cause we always end up with the inevit you know, death of infinity.

Justin Shelley (14:06.145)
I know. I just had to say that. She'll she'll she'll punch me now for saying that. But anyways, yes, share your screen. yeah, show us what you got.

Mario Zaki (14:15.502)
All right, perfect. Let me make it bigger again.

Justin Shelley (14:21.815)
Yeah, some of us are old. And also guys, if you're listening on just audio only, there there are definitely reasons to get on YouTube. But all right, go ahead.

Mario Zaki (14:31.31)
So like I mentioned earlier, on average about non-boarding or off-boarding will take about 45 minutes of technician time. And we have about maybe eight a week or so that we do. The average time we've saved is about 305 hours for the entire year, which was $15,250. And the license automation that has saved us the entire month of January for one technician.

is about $6,600. So in total, it's almost $22,000 in labor time that I am now able to dedicate elsewhere. Not only am I able to dedicate this elsewhere, but I've minimized, if not completely eliminated any errors that could happen along the way.

Justin Shelley (15:22.241)
That's huge, by the way, which is I've I've gotta just throw this out there. It's a security issue because we are really a security podcast. When you leave licenses active, that's a problem. That's a big problem.

Joshua Holloway (15:35.075)
absolutely. Well it it's also an issue in in compliance as well, because if you didn't term people properly or they got left on and you're you're up for like your SOC 2 audit, that's a big ding, especially especially if it gets caught. Like it is a security issue and it's also a compliance and security issue.

Justin Shelley (15:43.468)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (15:56.976)
So in addition to, since I already set up a lot of this automation, we have an in-house AI server that we're running Hermes on. We were able to, now with the same integration that we have into our PSA system and to our RMM system, we were able to get him to go through because July 1st,

If your IT guy hasn't told you this already, July 1st, Microsoft is increasing prices for a lot of their Microsoft 365 licenses, like standard E3, a lot of this stuff is being increased. So we have to manually update everybody, all our customers' bills that they're getting starting July 1st.

So I had my AI agent go in there and pull a list of all our licenses. And I told it to increase the business standard, for example, $1.50 because that's what they're increasing it. The E3 is about $3. So I had them go in there and automatically increase my costs and my customers costs. And it took about six minutes to do that, to do that along, you

bunch of customers and I had it give me an Excel sheet with all the adjustments. Once I went through and I did it, I uploaded it to him. I had him verify it and then he says, okay, I've confirmed everything. Let me know if you want to commit. So I replied with commit. It took him about another six minutes and he updated all our recurring invoices for all our customers using Microsoft 365.

Now, since we have this integration, I was able to ask him some stuff like, how many computers are for this customer? And it told me they have five computers and all five of them are offline right now. They're overseas. So that's why they're off right now. And then I asked him like, who, what was the last ticket and who worked on it? Okay. This is all stuff that owners or managers, you know, can easily find going through.

Mario Zaki (18:20.579)
you know, several clicks through the automated system, but we have them integrated right into Teams. And then he was able to tell us that this person, that this was an off boarding for an employee. Joe, the technician worked on it when it was, and it was closed. So I'm able to pull so much of this information just with a simple integration that we have between.

know, chat GPT, our RMM system, our ticketing system, and we've integrated them into Teams.

Justin Shelley (18:56.589)
This is wild. So I I want to go back to these numbers because this was kind of my big promise and it has been since we started. We're talking about 10 to 50 XR output. you basically got twenty one thousand dollars a year in free payroll money, right? Because it's not like you you didn't save it. You didn't you didn't like it it's still going out. You're still paying people, you didn't for fire anybody or or let anybody go.

Mario Zaki (19:12.931)
Almost 22.

Justin Shelley (19:23.597)
so you've been given twenty, almost twenty-two thousand dollars to pay employees. Now, generally speaking, an employee should generate three to four times their wages in value, in gross revenue for a business. All right. So you in effect have given yourself eighty thousand dollars in top line revenue opportunity that you didn't have before you started doing all this. Right? Cause you were doing it's not this is not even hypothetical.

You now have time back with your current team that you can throw and and here's a pop quiz for all the MSP owners in the business. How many times do you sit around in the morning wondering what the hell you should have your employees do? Because there's no work. Does that ever happen? Anybody? Anybody? Anybody? No. No, we've got a ticket board that's out of control. We've got projects that are late. We've got angry clients and and we don't have the money, honestly.

Joshua Holloway (20:08.593)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (20:09.591)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (20:21.133)
To hire enough people to do everything that we're supposed to do to do it right. Because the market's competitive. Correct? I mean, tell me where I'm wrong here.

Joshua Holloway (20:28.807)
Well, it's competitive and it's commoditized. Like people think that IT can be fixed with twenty one dollars per seat or per computer.

Justin Shelley (20:31.447)
Correct. Yeah.

Justin Shelley (20:37.009)
don't don't get me started with the fight I'm having right now with a client. it it's crazy how much we are expected to do and how limited our resources are, even though people look at the amount we charge and think, my God, this is horrifically expensive. it really is one of the biggest problems that we have. Now, Mario, you've just you just added $80,000 to your top line with a simple tool that costs you what? And and forget about the debt.

Mario Zaki (20:41.583)
Ha

Justin Shelley (21:05.099)
development cost for a minute. How much time do you think it spent you and or your team to set up this automation?

Mario Zaki (21:12.335)
A few hours, nothing crazy, probably 5 to 7 hours maybe.

Justin Shelley (21:15.691)
Five, ten, a hundred?

Justin Shelley (21:20.415)
Let's be stupid and call it 10 hours. You spent 10 hours and we just did the math on that. and let's let's even go full like retail value of an MSP. 10 hours, you know, if you had to hire somebody to and pay them, you know, we'll go with averages again, 150 to 250 probably is a good range for what it costs to hire an IT consultant per hour, right? So let's say on the high end,

Somebody paid $2,500 for the setup you just laid out, right? $2,500 goes to an $80,000 value. Real value that you can add. Like you can use your technicians now and bill them out and do work that they couldn't do before, right? Somebody check my math here. Okay. does anybody that's not on the spot want to do the math on the return on investment? Like how what's the return? $2,500 to $80,000.

Joshua Holloway (21:51.367)
Mm-hmm.

Mario Zaki (22:06.445)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joshua Holloway (22:08.421)
No York.

Justin Shelley (22:17.961)
Or if we just wanna keep it like hard numbers, twenty one, twenty two thousand. What's twenty five hundred dollars? a ten X, right? Roughly.

So when you when you factor it out on what you can actually bring in on top line, you're now talking 40x. Like this formula works. What what I promised at the beginning, this formula with 10x to 50x is a real number. This is not hype.

Mario Zaki (22:44.729)
Actually, one other thing that I forgot to mention that we actually implemented this week was we had an agent that we install on all our technicians' And once they go on site to any of our customers, once they check in with the agent, the agent not only will have full access to the network, but it will tell them any open tickets that we have for that customer or any

issues that was recently raised at that customer. So we can tell them go and check, you know, we still have a ticket for Betty, you know, that she couldn't print, even if he was there for something else, go check, you know, check with Betty because she couldn't print, you know, two days ago. And he will go and check with her like, Hey, Betty, are you still able to print everything working? You know, it will give them like a list of just like, you know,

Justin Shelley (23:18.592)
my god.

Mario Zaki (23:41.218)
checkpoints that he will go and customers, I mean, again, we just implemented this week and we're anticipating customers to be really happy with something like that because, you know, let's face it, our technicians will sometimes go on site to install like a new computer, but somebody that's sitting in the other room may have had a problem like a day or two ago and then he leaves and they're like, why didn't you walk in there and ask her?

Justin Shelley (24:04.821)
Listen, Mario, I'm I'm gonna cut you off right now. And I'm just gonna say you've got happy customers, but you now have pissed off technicians because it's already a problem when a tech goes on site and you get swarmed, right? By the people who do know you're there. You've added to that all the ones who didn't know you were there. my God, you just pissed off your technicians. But

Joshua Holloway (24:07.685)
That's your honeygoo lift, man.

Joshua Holloway (24:25.359)
Yeah, it's the honeydew list, man. The moment you walk through the door, they're like, we've been meaning to talk to you about this, this, this, this.

Mario Zaki (24:25.708)
No, but you're...

Justin Shelley (24:29.185)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (24:31.723)
Well, first of all, let me just say that my technicians were the ones that thought of this. So they were the ones that wanted this. Okay. And, and they, they hate, they hate it more. And I hate it more when one of the other technicians calls them and says, Hey, did you already leave the site? Because this other issue still hasn't resolved. And then they have to pop a U-turn and go back. They hate that worse, you know, a lot more.

Justin Shelley (24:37.705)
It's brilliant. No, it really is. I'm I'm yeah.

Joshua Holloway (24:40.635)
We want to update in three months.

Mario Zaki (25:01.035)
My technicians know that we're in the problem business. We're not in necessarily the IT business. We're in the problem business. So if our customers are happy because they have no problems, then their lives are happy because I'm happy. If I'm happy, then everybody will be happy.

Justin Shelley (25:06.38)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (25:18.903)
Yeah. Good stuff. No, this is this is crazy good stuff. Josh, you've been unusually quiet over there. Let's let's get your take on this whole thing.

Joshua Holloway (25:30.011)
No, I actually think the the information that you get from the agent when you come on board on the site and be like, is there anything else going on before they leave? That's way better than the message, hey, have you left yet? Or can you go back? plus it it shows a little bit more forward thinking of, hey, we noticed you had a ticket that was open, it looks like you were working with so and so, but they haven't called you back today. Do you have time for me to work on it now? That's improved customer service. I like that idea. I I think that idea is great.

Security-wise, I don't know, it was like some of the agent stuff I think about, but I'm sure Marl, you're probably double checking your code and and auditing all that and making sure that it doesn't have inappropriate accesses and things like that.

Mario Zaki (26:12.954)
So it has, right now it has read only to everything. Only I have, like it knows that if one of my technicians and I could even share my screen, I could ask it like a question, like go in and adjust an invoice or even tell me how much we're billing for a customer. It will say only Mario has access to this information. Okay. I have higher privileges.

And I'll be honest with you, I only wanted that higher privileges to update the Microsoft license increase. Once I've confirmed that everything has been updated, I'll probably remove that because I don't need it on a regular basis. I don't need it to update a right to that system at all. for my, and the biggest security is really our RMM, our Ninja One platform where, you know, in the wrong.

Justin Shelley (26:53.996)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (27:06.946)
That even me, it's read only, you know, completely. And what I love about Ninja is they have their own safeguards in place. So if you're integrating with it, you know, we integrated where it can off board a computer. They asked me how many computer deletions will you be doing on a given like day? And we tell them and they actually...

have it hard coded in there, cannot delete more than three computers per day. You know, across all my customers, you know, we don't really do a lot of computer off boardings too much. So I think three per day is a good safeguard. we have, 90 % of our stuff is read only. And that's really what we want it for, because we want more information, faster information. So that way it can provide that information to me or my...

Justin Shelley (28:01.111)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (28:05.817)
that mission.

Joshua Holloway (28:08.251)
No, that's good. The other other thing I wanted to go back to is that $80,000. you know, obviously that's going back to your bottom line where essentially those employees' time you're gonna use on tickets. You're going to use on addressing the media issues, which means you're actually able to provide better customer service, better response time, and overall better experience for the customer themselves. Things are happening a lot faster than what most other MSPs are gonna be able

to do. And I think for the listeners, it's gonna, if you stop and think about it, it can transpose into your your everyday business. What is something that you're having a difficulty of time, you know, accomplishing for your clients? Where is it where you sit back and you say, I wish I had more hours that I could accomplish this? Well, when when you're saying that, there's probably something off to the side that's sucking up time to where you could get that time back and give it to the clients, which

inevitably will come back in in dividends. It'll come back in dollars, right? Your PL will look a lot better because you're going to be getting more services or you're gonna be selling that widget more of those widgets because you can get to the delivery faster and things like that. So as I would say as we're talking about this, be thinking about what is that one thing in your your business if you could automate or you could improve, think about how much money you could potentially save or redirect the money is better.

Not necessarily a savings, it's a redirect. I'm now smartly spending my money because I've I've taken the time to automate something that should have been automated a long time ago, but everybody just kept doing it because Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Justin Shelley (29:43.362)
Let me give you a different word, Josh. I'm gonna cut you off and give you a different word right there. It's leverage because we're we're reclaiming money that was largely being wasted based on what we have available now. And now we can apply it and actually make more like same exact payroll costs, eighty thousand dollars a year of additional top line revenue capacity.

Right. So it's not even redirected. It's, I mean, it is, but it's not like we're taking one of the same value and putting it somewhere else in the same value. It's we're taking something away from here, leaving the productivity there or better, actually a lot better, and then taking that money and and four Xing it. Right. We've already got this 10X leverage point that we're now four X, which turns it to 40X. I mean, it's it's better than just redirecting. We're leveraging this stuff in a way that was never possible before.

Joshua Holloway (30:22.631)
Hopefully better, yeah.

Mario Zaki (30:37.018)
Yeah, and the thing is, honestly, with that money or with this time that I'm saving, it's not that I'm looking to get rid of one of my technicians. I actually told this to one of my technicians the other day. I'm like, I'm not looking to fire anybody. Now with this, am now being able to automate a lot of it so I can dedicate your time elsewhere. And it can help me, and we can make sure that this is done without human mistakes, know, something missed, you know.

people make mistakes and it's understandable. And so I'm not necessarily trying to fire anybody. Now, what may end up happening is I may hire a little slower now. I may not need that extra technician in the future, but that's, I guess in a way you could say that's taking away jobs, but I'm just not firing anybody.

Joshua Holloway (31:08.423)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Shelley (31:29.089)
Let me know if that happens because I'm still predicting the opposite. I'm still predicting that as we get better, we get more efficient, we start doing things we weren't able to deliver on before, the demand goes up, the opportunities go up, and and we're still going to need people and maybe even more people than we had before. I can tell you right now, my I've said it before, my workload is three or four times what it used to be just a few months ago. And I need more people. And I'm now able to offer more services because we're not even talking about cybersecurity, which is our core offering. We're talking about

AI, which we're using in our own businesses, and we're giving this as a model or as an example of what you guys, you audience, you clients can do in your businesses, and you need somebody to help you do it. So now we've got this whole new revenue stream that wasn't there before in the MSP industry, which is building out these secure platforms that our clients can use to leverage their whole system.

Joshua Holloway (32:21.799)
I think you're right, Justin. And I I'm also starting to see the need for different job roles too in the AI side of things, like doing the AI security portion of it, setting up a secure environment, auditing the code that the clients are self-writing because you don't want to take it to production until somebody's at least gone through it. You know, helping people learn how to prompt properly, or how is the prompting getting them in trouble? And when I say trouble, maybe erroneous or bad data, right? So

Justin Shelley (32:30.869)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Holloway (32:48.773)
We're having to be more available and be more human led so that they have more access to us because they're trying to be more AI driven and and be more AI responsive. So I'm already starting to see that uptick or that need. I agree with you.

Justin Shelley (33:03.521)
Yeah. Yeah. So we're gonna kind of start wrapping this up, guys. We've done the the first segment, which was letting your AI chat get more intelligent and understand the context and and what it is that you want it to spit back out at you, right? But it we're just talking about chat. Now we moved into integrations and Mario you you you did a brilliant job of bridging us from

Strictly integrations into the vibe coding, which is what we're going to start talking about next week. Because with this integration, you're like, forgot to mention we actually custom built a an agent that sits on our employee and you're like, This you talk about burying the lead, right? Like you've got this tool that solves and creates a huge problem for your technicians all in one. generates

Mario Zaki (33:46.284)
the

Justin Shelley (33:54.392)
Probably potentially more revenue if you're billing by the hour. If not, your customer satisfaction is gonna go through the roof. Like you're no longer a guy who's just showing up if somebody calls because our building's burning down. You're walking in and saying, Hey, see that spark over there that's about to light your building on fire, but I'm here and I'm gonna fix that while I'm here. I mean, this is this is huge. So we're we're moving out of just the integrations. And this is what I found by the way, as I started trying to figure out integrations. I'm like, my integrations are integrated into the stuff I'm coding.

Mario Zaki (34:24.667)
Yeah.

Joshua Holloway (34:24.688)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Shelley (34:24.805)
because the integrations that are already out there, they don't always work right. I've I've got I've found a lot of limitations on that. So I'm now having to build my own applications or MCP servers or whatever that then I can integrate either my own code, you know, a different application to or an off the shelf one. So God, talk about opening Pandora's box. Here we go. we're we're we're eight episodes in, seven episodes in, depending on how you're counting, and

Mario Zaki (34:46.929)
You

Justin Shelley (34:53.025)
feels like we're just scratching the surface. So guys, let's go ahead. and we're gonna just kind of go around the room. Key takeaways, final thoughts, anything that we missed, anywhere else you want to go, with the understanding that we're moving away from strictly integrations and we are moving into the world of vibe coding. Josh, you want to go first?

Joshua Holloway (35:10.919)
Sure, I'll go first. Yeah. As we go into this world of vibe coding, I do want to be an air of caution, right? Whatever you're coding, you can't just let it out to the world. You can't just let everybody just get access to it because it's a it's a a pretty website. You need to be double checking your work or having somebody like an IT professional come through, audit the code, audit your setup, audit the security. Cause the last thing we want to have is a spill of client data, client information. vibe coding's fun.

Mario and I talked about it a long time ago when he was on the verge of like giving up and he's like, I hate this. And I was like, just give it a day. And then the next day he told me to fuck off. because I don't think he slept the the the day before. yeah, yeah. Well, so and neither have I. I I work seven days a week because I spend more time talking to to AI to do different things and I have all these various projects. it will suck you in, it will suck up a lot of time. So, so be mindful of that.

Justin Shelley (35:49.613)
Exactly. Exactly.

Mario Zaki (35:54.371)
I still haven't slept since.

Joshua Holloway (36:09.221)
Be mindful of where your time is going and just be purposeful, right? Be secure, be purposeful, leverage the technologies. And at the end of it, as long as we're doing it correct, it will equate to dollars. It will equate to a better business environment, a more, more stable, more accurate, more nimble. Maybe you need more people to be more human led. I mean, we could all use that, right? How many large corporations have gone to full automated call centers and nobody ever talks to a human?

That pisses you off, right? But if we can do a lot of things in the background that make it so that the humans can be on the foreground to give you better customer service and better interactions, that's a good business model. That's a good way to conduct yourselves because you're being human-led and people want that now. And I think they're going to want it even more than ever because of how much we're doing with AI. So don't use AI to replace the forward-facing side of customer service.

Use it to augment so that the people that you entrust to be the face of your business can be more forward facing and provide the best customer service possible. And and that could be in any industry.

Justin Shelley (37:15.597)
And I would just add to that, Josh, like AI is what the internet or really what computers were if we just rewind time. We had jobs to do, we got a tool that allowed us to do more and we didn't lose jobs. Right. We just did more stuff. We have a better life. We have a better economy. So Mario, final thoughts, key takeaways.

Joshua Holloway (37:21.307)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (37:28.422)
Mm-hmm.

Mario Zaki (37:35.974)
Yeah, to add on to that just Justin so I have a cousin that works for Amazon and another cousin that works for Shopify They're both developers and stuff like that and I'm like are you guys seeing like are you guys letting people go? He's like no, he's like they're actually hiring a lot more now Because there's these every employee they hire now is so much more productive so

Joshua Holloway (37:59.026)
Jeff Bezos just talked about that yesterday or the day before, two days ago, as we're recording this. So yeah, he talked about needing to hire more more humans and more bodies.

Mario Zaki (38:04.785)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (38:09.937)
Yeah. But to also build onto what Josh said, going into VibeCoding, you have to be very cautious. mean, I think it was just two days ago, yeah, July, yesterday, a report came out that says that Anthropic had to turn off their latest systems of, what's it called, Methos?

Mythos and Fable 5. Because they, so they released two different versions. The no-hold-bar one and then the guardrail one, the Fable 5. People were able to jailbreak or remove those guardrails from the one that they originally released. And it was able to, it was able to breach the NSA.

Joshua Holloway (38:38.729)
yeah, but it went by fable, fable five. Yeah.

Justin Shelley (38:41.111)
Mm-hmm.

Mario Zaki (39:06.957)
and cyber command systems in a matter of hours. Where normally human beings can take weeks, months to try to get it to penetrate a system, this was able to penetrate their system within a matter of hours. And it said that when they did test it, they found other systems in the wild that had so many different vulnerabilities that people did not know about for years.

Joshua Holloway (39:10.343)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (39:36.73)
So it is going to be a matter of time that this stuff is released again. So when you're doing it, you have to put in the safeguards with the cybersecurity mentality in the forefront, consulting with professionals like Justin and Josh and Brian, I guess me, that you have...

Justin Shelley (39:59.982)
I guess me. I'm so I'm so humble.

Joshua Holloway (40:00.901)
Yeah, don't sell yourself shorts here.

Mario Zaki (40:05.797)
You know, so when you're putting stuff in place, you know, online on a website, in a server, you have to have security in mind. And, you know, if you're not sure, you gotta make sure you ask somebody because it can end up being very lethal and devastating if you don't do it right. It is very, it is like, what was the expression you used a few weeks ago with the match and the gas and the hay?

Justin Shelley (40:26.743)
Good at

Justin Shelley (40:33.397)
A a hay pile. A hay pile. A a haystack soaked in fuel and you've got a match three inches away from it. be careful, be careful.

Joshua Holloway (40:33.941)
next to the the the hay, yeah. Pile high pile.

Mario Zaki (40:36.343)
Yeah, hey, pile.

Mario Zaki (40:42.306)
Exactly.

Joshua Holloway (40:43.195)
So should that be our new doomsday clock for us IT guys where y it's it's like we're three inches away from the this the haystack and then we just keep edging closer to like two so when mythos comes out we're at like two, maybe one inch away. Yeah.

Justin Shelley (40:47.393)
Match.

Justin Shelley (40:54.965)
Yeah.

Well on the tr

Mario Zaki (40:58.201)
Yeah, let's have AI create us a new logo with that.

Joshua Holloway (41:01.519)
there you go.

Justin Shelley (41:01.611)
I I mean f for those who don't know, the bigger point there is that if you got a a great big old pile of hay soaked with fuel, the fumes are coming off of that thing and your three inches isn't doing shit. so let me I w I wanna spin this a different direction. I hesitate to do so, but I will add one of the things that doesn't get talked about much is while AI can in fact find vulnerabilities in the hands of bad guys.

Joshua Holloway (41:14.321)
Yeah, you're done.

Justin Shelley (41:30.451)
It can also find vulnerabilities in the hands of us good guys to protect our applications in the first place. So it it's a double edged sword, it it's pros and cons, it's cat and mouse, it's everything cybersecurity has always been. The bad guys find something, the good guys fix it, right? And and that's just the cycle where this is not new. It's scary, it's different, it's fast, but it's not new.

Joshua Holloway (41:52.776)
Well, I think the other thing is the good guys find things and close the doors before they're exploited also. Like it's not always the bad guys find the hole and then we just plug it. There are times that we find the holes before anybody's exploited it or found it. It it's it is definitely a good c good good game at cat and mouse.

Justin Shelley (42:05.227)
That's what I'm saying. Yeah. A

As we code, we can now find these things before they're ever released. But it has to be done right. And that's what this always comes back to. You this you've you go ahead, Mario.

Mario Zaki (42:15.665)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (42:20.745)
No, sorry, sorry, go ahead. Go ahead, I need to cut you off.

Justin Shelley (42:23.705)
no, I'm I'm wrapping up. So if you got something to say, say it.

Mario Zaki (42:25.106)
What I was saying is I don't remember the episode and I think your AI agent should probably listen to this and pull up the episode where we had a guest on that hires these ethical hackers to try to break into software and find the bugs before it's completely released. I see the gerbil working, Justin. You're looking it up as we speak.

Justin Shelley (42:32.471)
Ha ha.

Justin Shelley (42:53.341)
listen. No, I'm gonna we're we're live demoing this thing. So hopefully it's here. Let the live demo work. So this is the new portal that I've been building, right? I don't know why it's putting all that weird stuff on top there. it it's fine. It's fine. okay, so one of the things I needed was a search engine for this very reason because everything else I'd tried didn't work. I've got AI embedded in the back end code so that we can do a a

Joshua Holloway (42:59.874)
man, please let the live demo gods not bite us.

Justin Shelley (43:23.091)
actual search. boy, I don't know what hopefully I haven't searched for anything nefarious there in my history that just popped up. it doesn't show on the screen share. Nice. So Mario, we had somebody who I know listen, I'm a good boy. What what was it that you said I should search for?

Joshua Holloway (43:33.553)
That's so dangerous.

Mario Zaki (43:40.914)
I think he was talking about ethical hacking.

Justin Shelley (43:46.913)
Let's just see what comes up in our little nifty AI search for ethical hacking.

Justin Shelley (43:54.113)
Wasn't that one was it Grant McCracken?

Mario Zaki (43:59.53)
may have yet i think it was correct

Joshua Holloway (44:02.385)
Yeah, I mean that's a good point right there. Turn hackers into your security team. Yep.

Justin Shelley (44:05.655)
Bug bounty programs. That's the one, right? So my my search feature is working like a charm. And before I tied AI into my search, it sucked. It was terrible. okay, everybody done? Because I'm gonna wrap up with a a demo of like this is my call to action, is my key takeaway. Everything we've talked about, you have to be careful. We will show you, all of us on here will show you how to do it. We'll go in, we'll look at what you need to do, we'll give you use cases if you can't come up with them yourself.

Mario Zaki (44:07.12)
Yep, that's it. Bug bounty, yep.

Justin Shelley (44:35.063)
We'll really teach you how to use AI to use AI to come up with your own use cases. And then we'll give you the integrations. well, the first consult, we all offer it for free, right? We'll we'll have a conversation with you about what we think we can do. I will add to mine. You guys can say this if you want. If I can't 10X your productivity in one way or another, I won't charge you. I'll still help you with it, but I won't charge you because I'm I'm that sure we can do it. and then so we're gonna give you the a secure platform, a secure setup.

With the integrations that you want to need. And then the next step, as we've talked about, and what we're moving into, is we will custom develop applications for you. Or if you want to do it yourself, we'll give you a way to do that safely and securely and with some oversight. If that's what you would like to do, get on our website, pick any episode, it doesn't matter which one, and go to request a consult. Or if you just want to talk to us or or poke fun at us, go ahead and ask a question to the host. but this is where we really want you to go, of course.

This is free. Yes, we hope to charge you money down the road, but you're gonna come up like if we charge you $2,500, you better come out with about $80,000 of increased output. That's what we're demoing, that's what we're promising. This is not a joke. guys, with that, I'm gonna stop sharing my screen. I'm gonna try to go back into my box breathing, bring down my energy level, and just say, go check out the site, unhackmybusiness.com, interact with us, give us some feedback.

And as I try to sign off, of course, somebody wants to say something. I can see it in your face, Josh. What is it?

Joshua Holloway (46:04.035)
I was just gonna say, you know, for how often we've raised your blood pressure, we should have a blood pressure gauge. No no, but have it stream. So as we're talking to you about various things and you're thinking about all you're doing, you just see your blood pressure rising and save yourself.

Mario Zaki (46:13.136)
Ha!

Justin Shelley (46:13.257)
Ha.

tie it in just is shit. shit.

Mario Zaki (46:20.562)
that would actually be great. As another box is his blood pressure meter.

Joshua Holloway (46:26.951)
Yep. It's like how how how how bad did we get Justed this time? Did he get up over, you know, one twenty? Sh should we call for an ambulance?

Justin Shelley (46:28.141)
Just

Mario Zaki (46:33.962)
Ha

Justin Shelley (46:34.845)
One twenty, that's when I'm asleep. What are you talking about? God. I do have a little l slightly elevated blood pressure. That's HIPAA violation. All right, guys. I I'm gonna give you one last chance, but this is it. And if I play the music and you start talking, Mario again, so help me God.

Mario Zaki (46:53.146)
All I want to say is, to this day, 90 what episodes, that guy's name is still the coolest name that we've had, McCracken. I can't even pronounce it. Grant McCracken. Still coolest name that we have. That's it. That was my piece.

Joshua Holloway (47:02.833)
Yeah. Yeah.

Justin Shelley (47:03.351)
Grant McCracken. Grant McCracken. Yeah. Alright. I love it. Josh, Josh, final say, final sign off. Anything else?

Joshua Holloway (47:12.625)
Yeah, for closing, my name is Joshua Holloway. I'm the CEO for Seventh EI Technologies out of the Sacramento and Reno region. we're here to help you navigate through the sea of AI, help you maintain your compliances, and make sure all your systems are working. So thank you so much.

Justin Shelley (47:27.521)
Josh, Mario, both of you. Thank you for being here. And guys, if you don't know who I am, I don't know how to help you. Go to unhackmybusiness.com. I'll meet you face to face or or zoom or whatever. Or maybe I'll probably just hand you over to one of these jokers over here. that's it, guys. We're gonna wrap up next week. Come back to learn how to vibe code and what you can do to continue to 80x your business I I broke the rule. 50x your business. We'll see you next week.

Mario Zaki (47:54.268)
Bye guys.

Joshua Holloway (47:55.111)
So yeah.