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DaZZee IT Services is an MSP based in southern Missouri, with offices in Branson, Springfield, and Kansas City, MO. Led by president and engineer Shane Naugher, DaZZee has provided outsourced IT services for city governments and small businesses in Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas for over twenty years.
MSP case study: How integrations build EOS® culture with DaZZee
At the end of 2023, Shane took a hard look at his technology stack and decided to make some big changes: from a large legacy PSA to HaloPSA, and from Ninety.io to Strety.
We caught up with Shane to talk about the transition, the differences that integrations make, and how EOS® has changed his company culture.
What made you make the switch from these large, established tools to newer tools in the market?
What we really were struggling and frustrated with was that as a developer, neither one of those tools were really open to working with us to connect and collaborate between the applications we use on a daily basis. Both of them had a very closed API, very closed approach to working with any other vendors. And any simple request we had was difficult, if not impossible to get fulfilled.
There was just no flexibility, which is something we need in our tools if we want to grow and evolve. So we made the determination in Q3 of last year to move off our PSA, and while we were at it, took a hard look at other tools in our stack. We realized that Ninety.io as a platform had gaps we couldn’t get coverage on. So we thought, “If we're gonna be making a change, let's make some changes!” And kicked off the transition from there.
Why are integrations so important to you?
Because we are in the technology space, we want to help bring new technologies to our clients. And for us to do that with confidence, we've got to know the ins and outs, the advantages, and ask, “What are the gotchas in that process?”
If there's not a simple way to connect and collaborate between applications and to document that work through any of the inevitable challenges, then it inhibits our ability to do that for our customers as well. We're focusing a lot on AI and automation internally as well as for our client base, and without being able to connect tools together, you're pretty hamstrung.
We've been a big EOS® fan for years, and we talk to our clients about EOS®. And it's great to be able to talk through how our process works today, within the EOS® framework and now we can say that Strety, the tool that we use for EOS®, also ties to all of our other tools and processes.
Other than a lack of integrations, was there anything else that you found unsatisfying in your experience with Ninety.io?
With Ninety.io it was almost like a whiteboard, where you go write something down in the conference room and then go back to your desk and forget about it until you had another meeting in the conference room.
From a communication perspective, when we were leveraging Ninety.io, we found that the data lived there exclusively. So we would have our Level 10 meetings each week, go through the agendas, put in all the notes and the to do items and update the rocks. When we would go back the next week for another Level 10, no one had looked at or updated any of that information. We'd go into those meetings and everyone would say, “Oh, crap, I was supposed to do that.” But nothing had been done because it was not on our daily radar or process.
With Strety, it got us back to a point where we were putting the framework into action and communicating around it.
How was the transition?
We made the move to Strety ahead of our PSA switch. One of the things that was nice with Strety is that your team worked with us to import our data. There were some issues getting the data out of Ninety.io and into the format for Strety. This was expected.
Through this, the Strety team was incredible. They dove right in, asked us what we needed, and allowed us to talk directly to the developer, who said, “Here's what I can pull in — does this look right?” It was an awesome, easy transition.
And that's the beauty of working with organizations like Strety that have an active development cycle: they're looking to build something, as opposed to just having an offering that's static and doesn’t evolve with their clients’ usage.
How did using these integrated tools change the way your business runs?
One of the biggest things was from an organizational perspective — because we live inside the PSA on a daily basis, every department has some type of interactivity there. The ability to create that To Do in Strety and put that in as a ticket inside the PSA eliminates this option of “Hey, oh, we forgot about doing that.”
It’s also completely transformed the way my employees interact with EOS®. When I first started with implementation, it was like, “Hey, everybody, I want you to use this framework.” It was just a directive, really.
Since we've been running EOS® on Strety, the team gets tangible results out of EOS®. They're actually running their own meetings and asking, “Well, can we build an agenda and use Strety to do this or that for us?” And of course the answer is yes. Now they're taking it and they're running with it. Instead of being a directive from me, it's an enablement tool for them as a department.
What are the features in Strety that you think your team is using the most or that are the most helpful?
It varies based upon the team. Some of them are really good about creating Headlines because they want to make sure other teams know about things going on, and cascading messages across those teams. We have others that love breaking down their quarterly rocks into detailed action items that they can assign to each other. Each department is a little different, but most important is having that flexibility on a centralized tool that everyone's working together on.
We were on Ninety.io for two or three years, and half of my team never even logged in, even though they were signed up for it. They didn't use it as much as I wanted them to. And it was a pain to have to ask them to go use it. So it's nice to see people taking advantage of Strety and finding new ways to leverage it for productivity.
Taking a step back to the beginning of your EOS® journey — how did you first come across EOS®?
One of the mentors in our peer group had suggested we go through Traction as a group, so we went through reading the book and then the implementation. We all committed to using this framework, not just for our own companies, but also as an accountability group. It’s how we report to each other when we come together, and when we have our quarterly meetings.
I was definitely interested, because before I got my company on EOS®, we would have meetings just to have meetings, because you need communication, right? But it wasn’t always easy to recognize the outcome of a meeting or whether it's productive. You just knew you needed to be communicating somehow. EOS® seemed like a great framework even if it was just to have better meetings.
How did you implement EOS®?
As most people experience, it is an overwhelming task in the beginning, especially for someone like me who decides to do it the hard way and self-implement. We were trying to follow the EOS framework for about two years without a dedicated tool, using spreadsheets. And then getting on Ninety.io was another step, but still not quite as far as we wanted to go with it. Since we’ve gotten on Strety, it’s taken another turn for the better.
Since we’ve implemented Strety, EOS® has become built into the culture of our organization. Everyone just knows that that's just part of how we operate at this point.
What changes have you noticed in your business since implementing EOS®?
With EOS®, the meetings have goals, outcomes, responsibilities, and accountability. From a planning perspective, we can look at not just what are we doing today, but what are we looking toward in our three to five year vision? We have the framework to look at what we’re doing and ask if we’re building each quarter towards the annual goal and beyond to the three and five year goals. Everything that we're doing — from a company level down to the department level — is tied to that long term vision. And everyone has a better idea of how they fit into that vision.
What advice would you give another MSP or SMB thinking about implementing EOS®?
The biggest thing I would say is that you just have got to start. It's an incredible framework. If you follow it, and commit to it, it will provide results. It'll improve communication and help your business run better.
But also know that it is a journey, it's not something that's going to happen overnight. It takes time to build the culture around, it takes time to learn how to leverage the tools around it. But you have to start somewhere, and you have to commit to it. We're always looking for ways we can leverage the framework and Strety as a tool to improve things going forward as well.
