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Valiant Technology is a New York-based managed service provider that helps creative firms bolster their technology operations with innovation and security at the top of mind. Specializing in mixed Mac and PC environments, the award-winning Valiant team takes pride in empowering NYC’s creative powerhouses.
We spoke with Georg Dauterman, president of Valiant, about his team’s journey from accidental entrepreneurship to implementing EOS® as their business operating system. He shared with us how Strety wove their framework into their every day, transforming their culture for the better.
When you first started with EOS®, what tools did you use for implementation?
When we first started, we used Ninety.io and we only did it at the leadership team level. The challenge with Ninety.io was that it was so standalone away from our other tools. Every tool we have that doesn't integrate to our other tools becomes another place we have to go do double entry. So we're constantly spending time cutting and pasting from one to the other.
Every time we can avoid having to manually enter something, we're getting back seconds and minutes. MSPs, like most businesses, especially service businesses, are games of inches. You're not hitting home runs every day. On your best days, you're hitting singles constantly. It’s hard to focus on the small wins sometimes — with a very entrepreneurial mindset you want to do big things. But the best businesses really focus on the little things, too, like 10 minutes back here and 7 minutes back there. When the small daily wins are compounded over the year, you're making some massive changes in the business.
How did you come across Strety and why did you decide to make the switch?
What drove our decision to check out Strety was that we were wanting to extend the EOS® platform and methodology to our entire organization. I was about to pull the trigger on buying seats for everyone on Ninety.io when Larry Garcia, one of Strety’s cofounders, reached out to ask me to check out the improvements they’d made to Strety since I had last seen it.
What I found was that: A, Strety is a cool-looking product. I think it looks better than Ninety.io. B, it integrates into Microsoft Teams. C, it integrates into AutoTask, which is our primary hub. Any MSP that doesn't live in its PSA is probably not a really good MSP.
Another thing I liked about Strety was I feel that there's a lot more connection to the Strety team as the MSP/small business owner. They lived in our world a lot longer. Ninety.io is more of a classic venture-backed company with an enterprise mindset.
You can see the way Strety’s built that it was built for business owners by people who got what we did, and that is really powerful.
How was the rollout of Strety to your team?
When we moved onto Strety, it was the first time we introduced the team at large to using the EOS® framework. Prior to that, it had just been the leadership team.
Moving the whole team from a less structured environment to EOS® was definitely a change, with a bit of pushback from some people who didn’t understand why each of the pieces of the framework were important. But that was more of an EOS® challenge.
Strety helped a lot by making our framework front and center to everyone on the team. You can’t ignore it, because you can't ignore your scorecard. You can't ignore your review. That was a big change.
I think we’ve all had the experience, especially earlier in our careers, where you’re more of a passive observer in a meeting, sitting there thinking, “Man, I don't know why we're even having this meeting.” Now we're driving the engagement in Strety. And if there's no need for the meeting, we end it early. Our goal is to try to finish, and if we don't use the full meeting time, we're like, “Cool, we get back 10 minutes” — again, getting those small wins that add up. The idea is to be efficient and have enough structure to do it repeatedly.
What tools within Strety are the most helpful for your team?
The scorecard is a big one — having those metrics out in the open that anyone can view is really powerful. From a leadership perspective, having some of our scorecards be so public has helped us be more accountable. And you know, you have to face the music every week if you didn't do your work. If you properly set the accountability up, I think that people tend to just do their work better and then the expectations are clearer.
I read a lot about employee engagement, and one of the problems that I see quite a bit is that people just don't know what to do.
We've gotten to a point where we're clear what we want to do. It’s the first step in improving the culture around accountability. With Strety, we're better than we've ever been with accountability.
Now that we’ve rolled out Strety to our entire company we're using it as the core of our sort of business, sort of our human resources and culture hub. We're doing reviews in Strety now. We're doing L10 meetings every week with our leadership, account management, sales and service teams. We are also in the process of creating and publishing scorecard data for everyone on the team, so everyone knows where they are at all times.
We also really like the org chart functionality. We think that's been very helpful. We use another product around payroll and PEO, and it has an org chart, but it doesn't really reflect the organization's and roles responsibilities really as neatly as the Strety one does.
We’ve been making a point of being better about doing our 1:1s, and having them in one place and keeping to a schedule really gives them a lot of power and consistency. Something else we really liked was the 360 review component, where the people can come, come back around and give you some feedback.
Overall, it's a massive change in terms of the way we work. In the past, everything was the mystery meat of: “Did I do my job well or not?” Using the idea of setting the bar and doing all the EOS® methodology and making it very open to everyone in Strety has been a huge change.
When we look back at this year, I can say our best accomplishment was implementing Strety as a tool in our business to deliver a better experience for our customers, employees, and management team. It's taken our business framework to the next level.
How do you use Strety in your day-to-day?
As a business owner, my day is always persistently changing. I use Strety to keep up to date with all my scorecard items. I look at it to remind myself of my rocks that I have to do. I find myself, at times, hyper focused on the wrong things, and looking at my rocks in Strety brings me back into what I have to do. I check my To Dos, and I check the other team scorecards to see how everything is going.
I also use it to get a bird’s eye view of the business that allows me to see specific things. As I said, we use it really heavily for keeping track of our incentive programs. A good example — our account managers have a requirement to touch every customer every month with a phone call. They have a QBR goal that they have to hit for every customer, or they don't qualify for their incentive pay. In Strety, I can see someone falling behind and help them course-correct. Let's say I ask an account manager about why they’re not hitting their goals, and they say, “Well, I can't get in touch with so and so.” Then I can text the owner of the other business, and ask, “Hey, can you give my account manager the time of day?” And that gives the account manager the help they need to hit that goal.
What makes it easy for you and your team to use Strety and engage with your framework every day?
Strety is integrated with our tools, and it's also in Microsoft Teams, so it can do alerts, and it allows you to not have to stop what you're doing to open the web page. The other big piece of it is the Microsoft SSO (single sign-on) integration, allowing your credentials to flow. I can't tell you how different it is to get people to track time in the PSA since we've integrated the SSO.
Instead of having to run our passwords and MFA, and stop what we’re doing, Strety makes everything go much quicker and easier, just as-is out of the box.
The other piece that I think is so important is the reaffirmation of our goals every week in the L10 meeting. That really is one of the most important things, because it's so easy to get off track and start working on other stuff. Like a lot of entrepreneurs I know, I have horrible ADHD, I've had it my whole life. It's a blessing and a curse. One one hand, I’m more comfortable taking risks and trying new things that end up really helping our business. On the other hand, I can be a pretty degenerate shiny object guy, and it’s harder to maintain the focus I need to accomplish my bigger goals.
Using Strety and EOS® is really great for someone like myself. It reminds me: you really need to work on this rock this week. I block time just to work on my rocks because I know it's so important. So as I said, we use it daily.
How has using EOS® as your business operating system transformed your business?
I come from the very typical accidental entrepreneur background. Like the vast majority of MSP owners, I knew nothing about running a business. I was a really good engineer, but I ended up running a business, and did it poorly for many years, which I think is a common thread in our industry. For a long time, we were not very profitable.
We had a very different culture prior to EOS® — not performance driven. Putting in place metrics, KPIs, and standards really made us into a better company. We were able to really build the company into a more profitable organization. We have a lot more strategic focus than we ever had. The idea of the one, three and five year plan, better defined roles responsibilities have overall made the company much better.
It's a delicate balance, because you're trying to drive success and results, and you also want people to be really happy and engaged. You want them to be feeling that they're moving forward in their career, in their life, as opposed to just like a job. We’re working to create a good culture where people are able to have impact, and learn a lot. And thanks to EOS® and Strety, our people know how they’re doing, and where they can go from here.
What advice do you have for other business owners who are considering running a business operating system?
I would 100% recommend making the investment of hiring an implementer for your business. You need that objectivity, and you need to be able to create the space for your staff to be critical and give you feedback that you may not want to hear. Many business owners wrap our identity into our businesses, and that's a very dangerous thing, because we take it way too personally. Having that outside voice can help mediate a lot of the pain.
We work with the awesome Paul Cissel, who helps a lot of other MSPs. Paul is an industry expert who has started and operated three technology service providers. In his last venture, he used EOS® to build a great company that delivered best in class metrics. Bringing Paul’s body of experience to our EOS® implementation really helps us drive meaningful results
Also, if you're going to do it, be committed to the process. It could be more than a year or two years before it really starts making big impacts. It's so easy to say at three months or six months, or even a year, “This is not working.” But then when you stick to it and have that minute to celebrate the win, you look back and realize, “Hey, our EBITDA increased by x, or our revenue increased by y.” You just have to commit the time to doing it.
Think about it like a diet and exercise program. It doesn't matter what diet or exercise program you do, as long as you do one and you’re consistent with it. There are a lot of other business operating systems out there besides EOS®, and maybe they could work just as well. Fundamentally speaking, what matters is the consistency, and being course corrected on a regular basis. Consistency is really what I think most businesses need, and it's one of the hardest things to both learn and to continually improve.
Thanks, Georg! To learn more about Valiant and their services, check out the Valiant Technology website. It's a beauty!
If you want to see how operating your business in Strety can bring a new level of accountability to your team, start your free trial here. If you want to learn more about how Strety can bring your B.O.S. to life, book time with our team so we can answer your questions and give you a VIP tour of Strety!
