The world came to a sudden stop with the Covid-19 pandemic. With many businesses (nonessential) closing its doors, thousands of small businesses were fighting to stay alive. After a year of being shut down, we are starting to see the benefits of reopening. Many businesses who had deferred projects and purchasing during the pandemic are getting back into the office, and they’re spending money. Which is great for the economy and the MSP. Luis Alvarez joins us to share how the economy reopening is effecting his business.
Video Transcription
Luis Alvarez 0:17
Well, I mean, I think we’re seeing all the benefits of an economy that’s reopening. Now, a lot of our clients had deferred many, many projects during the pandemic, just thinking, hey, there’s no reason to spend the money right. Now, let’s see where this all ends up. And now that they’re getting back into the office, bringing their employees back to, you know, to the workplace, they’re spending money, and that’s good for us. And it’s good for the economy. So we’re as busy as we’ve ever been.
Harry Brelsford 0:47
Yeah. Next topic. Congratulations. And the next topic I want to bring up is something I’ve actually been involved in, I did a recent product review for Clear One out of Salt Lake City best known for speaker phones. But they pivoted a little overused word, to also include videos. And so I’m going to clear one camera with a fisheye lens. So I’ve upped my game to look better on camera, and I put the old Wooton desk behind me and that’s real, that’s not a, that’s not an image. You’re finding an uptick in the professionalism, the level of professionalism being raised in conference rooms for SMBs. Getting back to work in a hybrid fashion go,
Luis Alvarez 1:31
yeah, we’re seeing a lot of our clients who are going to keep either some workforce or some element of their business working remotely saying, we need to redesign our conference rooms, so that we can better accommodate more seamlessly accommodate hybrid meetings where we have some people in the room but some people remoting in and it doesn’t feel awkward or, or, you know, just strange. So a lot of high end cameras, we’re working with the folks at owl, they make a really cool camera that, you know, lets you see who’s speaking and at the same time, see the entire conference room. those are those are, they’re expensive, but they’re popular and so reengineering these conference rooms and these workspaces to allow for hybrid meetings. And you know, it’s doing things with teams and with zoom, it’s, it’s a lot of fun. We’re having a good time with it and learning a lot about the technology.
Harry Brelsford 2:25
Well, absolutely. And it takes us down a pathway that I’ve certainly promoted for years, I’ve written about it in my pocket MBA book about taking the geek in me, okay, we all came up as technicians and engineers loved it, loved it loved it until I didn’t and, and, and, you know, now another overused term, the trust of business advisor, right, but that’s kind of what you’re doing is you’re taking the conversation from geek to business. Is that fair?
Luis Alvarez 2:54
Yeah, absolutely. You know, we’re, we’re actually starting that conversation with clients. Because we see it as a need rather than waiting for them to ask us, we’re saying, Hey, how are you going to handle this? And they, you know, they stop and think about and go, hey, yeah, you’re right, we really need to, you know, think about how we’re going to make this work. Right. And we have multiple offices, multiple locations, let’s come up with a solution that we can implement across our entire firm that, you know, that makes us look professional and makes us look like we know what we’re doing.
Harry Brelsford 3:27
Perfect. final topic. You’re working with one of our logos, Deep Sentinel, on the the the 420 ecosystem stack in cannabis tech. What’s going on?
Luis Alvarez 4:12
Well, deep Sentinel provides a unique service. Think of it as a doorbell ring technology with live guards being able to intercept vagrants, criminals, anything that’s going on in the areas that they monitor, in our cannabis companies, you know, there’s a requirement to have guards posted as seven by 24. And that’s an expensive proposition for a lot of these companies. And sometimes they’re paying up to 12 to $15,000 per guard per shift of every month. So with a cheaper solution to accomplish the same thing and meet regulatory requirements. They’re all in and so we’ve been working with deep Sentinel to really develop the technology and the software piece and some of the processes and procedures that they use to be able to replace these guards. And be able to do what what they normally pay, you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars for for under $5,000 a month. So we’ve seen a lot of interest. We have a couple of beta sites out there with some of our cannabis clients. And we think that’s going to take off we expect to that to be a big revenue source for us this year.
Harry Brelsford 5:20
Yeah, absolutely. Before I let you go, we’re gonna see on the road in some of the technology conferences, and now that we’re all getting back to it, I
Luis Alvarez 5:29
hope you’re starting, you know, I did my first live gig last week at a local Chamber of Commerce event. It was kind of weird after a year and some months of not seeing people in a in a conference room. It was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed it, and I look forward to doing more of it this year.
Harry Brelsford 5:45
All right, keep up the good work. We’ll talk to you next month. Thanks here.
