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380- Beyond Your ISP Chaos w/ Chris Soucie (New Horizon Communications) · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: Welcome everyone. Back to dissecting popular IT nerds. Today we have Chris. I mean, I'd like to say the Seuss, but Seussy here. And we're speaking with a vendor today. This is, this is a breakout from what we normally do. And the reason why we're speaking with a vendor today is because I like to put together these things called special teams. I think when it comes to, to vendors and vendors in the industry, there's this really horrible saying that goes around when you ask someone why they're good and they say, well, we're, we're better because we suck less than everybody else. And a lot of times it's about picking who sucks less. And I just don't believe that that's a very good way of going about picking your vendors. So I have a special philosophy or, but what do you want to call it, a strategy or way of being, which is to put together special teams inside each company. And I think when you pick a vendor, you should have a very special team of people that help support you. And I have been working with New Horizons Communications, NHC for years and I can tell you that it really, it feels like a family over there and it feels like a special team. And we've put together a special team for anyone that ever wants to work with an Internet aggregator plus along with a lot more. So let's. Chris, why don't you just do a general introduction of like, you know, who is nhc? You know, why are you guys special? And kind of just to the point of everything that I just said.
• 1:41
  Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Phil. So. So New Horizon Communications, we started in 2002. We're privately held. We don't have any PE or VC backing. We're completely organic. We have about 300 employees and rapidly growing about 80% of what we is network aggregation coast to coast, as well as in Canada and some in the Caribbean. I will probably expand into Europe in the next two years, but for right now we're, we're in North America, you know, sans Mexico. We are channel driven. The probably the largest differentiators that I can throw out there are really the three. Right. So we're channel focused only. We don't have a direct sales team. We have a channel management group that is that they're professional relationship managers. Right. So, and that's. It's guerrilla marketing. And they do a really, really good job making sure that all of our partners, Most of the TsCs that we market through, have what they need and know where to go and they can get Quick turnaround time on any of the pre sales support that they need. So that's a big differentiator. They're, we're not, you know, our partnerships.
• 2:43
  Speaker A: Now before you go on that this is kind of like a double edged sword because you're going to have a lot of listeners out there that are going to say what? Like, well I've never heard of you before, why would I use you? And you're like, well isn't that what you want anyways? Like, aren't you sick of people showing up in your LinkedIn inbox and trying to offer you a 50 gift card to bribe you to get on a call with them for 15 minutes? Like that's actually, like that's actually a good thing, you know what I mean? And again, you know about them because someone cared about you and brought NHC to you to begin with. Now for those out there listening, believe it or not, I'm shocked at how often I find CTOs or CIOs, even VP level IT directors that really don't know what an Internet Internet aggregator is. Of course they understand aggregation, they understand aggregating Internet. But from your world, what does that mean to you? Or like how would you describe that to someone, hey, we're an Internet aggregator to, to, you know, a fifth grader or someone at the family reunion.
• 3:39
  Speaker B: Yeah. So basically when there are, when there are end users that have multiple locations, right? Maybe in different regions, say let's say Boston, New York, LA, Chicago. Right. And CTOs are trying to manage infrastructure throughout the entire organization and aggregator is super important because they can go ahead and deliver network connected services at each of those branch locations, deliver it through one support source or one support office on all on one invoice, regardless of who the network's provided. So for instance, in Chicago we might deliver an ATT network component, right? So network connectivity and other services that are layered on top of that. In Boston we might deliver a Verizon or a Comcast, and then in la we might deliver a former GTE or something like that. Right? So we can deliver all of these different network components because we're buying it on the wholesale side upstream from these various network providers, deploying it to the customer. We're managing it 24 by 7 for the customer, communicating automatically with the customer, using automation and AI behind the scenes, and then delivering the services on one invoice that they can view all their services through. This provides a standard for these CTOs and their organizations to go ahead and scale their businesses with. And it provides future proofing for other services that might be available that they can't necessarily get across all markets. And an example of that would be in one market there might be a very specific manufacturer with an SD WAN play that is kind of cloud, kind of not. But in another market that maybe hinges on some global access, there might be another provider. So we can go ahead and bridge all those gaps into one central support chain and then one, one invoice, one throat to choke, so to say, without sounding cheesy. So that's, that's the big aha.
• 5:35
  Speaker A: Yes. And I mean, honestly, As a most IT directors, again, VP's, CTOS I see out there, I know you have this metaphorical spreadsheet of sorts with all kinds of providers and applications on it, all with different end dates and different billing codes that you've got to match up to get over to the cfo. And this is, this is where an aggregator can really clean up your life and, and make it easier. You can, you can move to, you can work to this kind of gold standard, which would be, how do we have all of our, how do we have all of our circuits in our network on one coterminous contract date? Right? So some of you out there, I know you have. Well, I'm, I'm really good at doing this. I'm good at, you know, negotiating with Comcast and AT and AT and T and Spectrum and Verizon and. What do you mean? I've never heard, or, you know, Lumen or X Century Link or whatever it is. But then you might have some locations in, in Canada, in Mexico. And you're like, well, I don't even know what to use down there. So I'm kind of calling around and trying to figure it out. Now you've got all these different contract dates and then the bills come in at different times at the month. And it's like, okay, now I've got to send this over to my CFO and he's asking me, can you, can you get the codec or can you get the billing code or what do we call those again? The, the billing codes? Yes, thank you. Can we get these, can we get these geocodes all set up? Right? And this is where an aggregator, especially nhc, is very, very good at coding your bills how you want them coded so that it's at the, at the end of the month or the billing cycle, whatever it is, you just send it over the CFO and he's, he loves you because it's all there. And then parent, child, parent, child billing. So Maybe you've got locations that still need to receive their own bill, but you want to get one bill all divided up correctly or nicely in a nice clean package over to the cfo. And it sounds like a little thing, but it's actually kind of a big deal and really cleans things up nice. And then one of the things I really noticed with you guys that you did well and we did kind of a big deal. You did really good with Birkenstock. Birkenstock of America. So for all of you X gen guys like myself that wore burks around forever as like, kind of like a.
• 7:46
  Speaker B: It's coming back. That trend's coming back. By the way, I have a teenage daughter. She's, she's 12. It's coming back.
• 7:51
  Speaker A: So you guys have done beautiful for, for Birkenstock and I love you. And I think one of the main things is that it's just, there's no real worry anymore. It's like, oh, we're opening up a new store here. And Birkenstock's got a really big push with, you know, opening up new retail stores and, and, and really just making sure that things are delivered on time. Because a lot of times when you open up a new store, there's, I don't know, there's, you know, it might be new construction and you've got to call in if you're calling a normal Internet provider where they're like, what's the address? Well, we don't have the address yet. Or here's the address. Well, it's not showing up in our system. You need to do something. So NHC kind of like takes care of all of that. You guys have been great with them just allowing their, you know, allowing them to just be able to call and just say, hey, we need something here and you're able to provide, okay, here's all the availabilities. Here's how we can deliver it. Maybe just speak to that for a second. The other thing would be, is what if someone really wants diversity? What does diversity mean in the Internet world?
• 8:48
  Speaker B: Yeah. So from a project management perspective, though, we are e bonded with all the providers upstream that we're buying network components from. Right. So what that means basically is that their tools are our tools. So our OSS integrates with their back office. So anytime that there's a change on a delivery or a project or anything like that, we're leveraging the automation from their tools into ours and we're communicating that to the customer to go ahead and create the best possible experience for the end customer. So the moment that something's changed or has advanced or moved along or stalled, we're communicating that to the customer. We're kind of leading that. And every single customer of ours, especially a larger customer like Versionstock, I mean they're receiving not just one project management, but they're receiving a project management team to go ahead and communicate with and kind of pave, pave the deployment path with them. So that's a, that's a big deal. As it relates to, you know, we're seguing into the, to the diversification conversation. Another key component of NHC is the fact that we're not limited by, because we're an aggregator, we're not limited by, you know, one provider, one provider network. So if we have a location that has a wired access by, let's say Comcast and we're deploying that, but they require diversification off of the Comcast network, maybe just in a different type of delivery system like satellite or line of sight or something like that, or 5G, we can deploy that from different providers as well. So we can provide not just a secondary diverse route, but we can supply tertiary and redundant routes for that customer location because of the basis of being an aggregator. Right. Because we're not tied to just one network.
• 10:34
  Speaker A: Right.
• 10:35
  Speaker B: And again, these components are all managed by one support team or one support organization within an NHC to, to support the customer.
• 10:43
  Speaker A: I, I mean, I know there's, yeah, there's many instances too and it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be wireless or anything, but I know there's many circumstances where we've needed in the past, let's say a 1 gig fiber connect coming from the south. We wanted to come down, I needed to come down from coming up north from Main Street, I need a 1 gig fiber connection and coming into this end of the building and then I need, coming from the south, I need a completely different provider with another 1 gig fiber backup. And I need those, I need to know that they're both path diverse. So there's, there's diversity in providers, right? And then there's diversity in path diversity. And I've seen, and this is laughable and I've seen, you know, unknowingly to the IT director before, he's, he's asked for, you know, diversity and, or he thought he was getting diversity because he ordered from Lumen and then he ordered from, say, I don't know, Windstream, something like that, right. And Windstream ended up delivering A a wholesale lumen circuit. So they actually ended up no diversity. They had two different providers but they had diversity on the Internet. That's just stupid thing that's. That's happened before. How about like just managing and monitoring and, and maybe speak a little bit. I know you guys have a. Another one of the reasons why I've loved you and a lot of the the IT directors and partners that have been that have been on the podcast in the past. Love you guys is your, your network operating center. And I've always said you know why call 1-800-GO-PAND for support? Like why not call someone that actually knows what a stab IP address is? You know what I mean? So like maybe just a little bit about what can you guys do as far as managing and monitoring of circuits and I guess mainly speak to. You can tell I've had a lot of coffee had a lot of coffee this morning. What are the main maybe like the top five problems that you guys eliminate that, that you eliminate for IT leader or cto if they are normally doing this on their own in their normal procurement process.
• 12:36
  Speaker B: Yeah, well the biggest one is just we take the guesswork out of it, right. So the customer shouldn't be the first one to really realize that there's a problem. Right. In Today's world it's 20, 25 and a half. There's technology that exists that providers should be using. I know we're using that goes ahead and detects that there's a problem on the network whether it's a latency issue or a hard down in automagically I use the word automatic the term automagically communicating to the end customer to say oh hey you're having an issue. Let's do these following things. Blah, blah blah blah. So we have a product called Stat Guard, right that we that comes in multiple flavors, multiple layers or there's a progression, right. A tiered system. But stack guard1SG1 is the minimum product that we're. That we're applying on all of our circuit sales regardless of who the network is with that'll that accommodates for automated detection and communication down to the end customer on whether whether we even own the circuit or not. Right. Whether we're billing for it or if it's an, you know, part of a package where we're, you know customer has an agreement with somebody else and it's under term. So we throw Stack Guard on that circuit as well as the circuits that we deliver. It detects latency as well as hard down issues. On a circuit, really before the customer is even communicating that, oh wait, I have a problem on the circuit, or I'm, you know, my video is kind of choppy on my, my video calls and we've automated communication down to the customers, you know, IT staff or whomever's receiving. And then we have a, we have a, basically a digital electronic dialogue with them and we can get on the phone with them if need be and talk through issues and so on. And then last resort, and I say last resort, it's just because typically we can, we can resolve a lot of these issues remotely. We'll roll a truck and get a, get a technician out there within a couple hours. It depends on, you know, what the SLO is. Of course, on the, on the circuit it's really, really popular. We launched it in 2023 and we've seen a tremendous drop in the amount of trouble tickets that we're actually creating on, on circuits, again, regardless of the network because of the automation on the, on the tool. And it's providing really quick resolution and nothing else. A transparent path for the customer IT staff to know that, okay, this circuit, even though it's cable broadband or maybe it's dedicated fiber, whatever it is, I have people, a team that's monitoring and communicating and trying to resolve any sort of issues on it. So it's a big deal.
• 15:04
  Speaker A: Yeah. So everyone listening to this right now, you may be thinking, well, this all sounds like, you know, great. But as far as 2025 has been concerned, is concerned, you know, from the top down, our entire goal is, you know, get tight on the budget cut where we can be really, really tight. This sounds very expensive. And what I've, what I've noticed is that if you've got three locations or more upwards of, I mean, I work with people that have a hundred locations, 100, you know, 100 locations retail or whatever. When an aggregator gets involved and we look at the entire thing, it's rare that I'm, that I'm not seeing a 20 savings or more. So, you know, let's say you've got all your circuits. You've been trying to manage for years. You might have a hundred locations, 50 locations to do a lot of healthcare. Rural healthc. We did one not too long ago where it was like 43 locations. And when we looked at all the circuits, there was, I think it was $1.3 million in savings that we had at the end of it, when we, when we looked at them all, we brought them all in into an aggregator from a From a aggregators management standpoint. And then on top of that you get, you're able to layer in that additional, you know, monitoring and proactive support now. So some, so many of you, what the problem is is like how do you do this when you have all of these different contract dates? You've got, you know, if I, if I looked at all my contracts right now, Phil, you know, I've got a bunch that are, you know, they're gonna, it's 100% buyout or it's, you know, they're just gonna kill me on the, on the install. That's fine because you couldn't install 100 locations anyways in one day. So you look at it all, take a look at what the savings would be overall on all these different locations. And the beauty of an aggregator is, is that they can start managing and monitoring it like Seuss and, and you know, we, we, you can start managing, you can get all the managing and monitoring right now. And then as those contracts start to come up then an aggregator is very proactive along with, and you talk about probably how you do rollouts and project management and all that ahead of time. But you know, kind of like okay, 60 days ahead of time, 90, 120 days depending on how long it takes to get a fiber, a new fiber circuit in there. We can be prepared over the next three years to roll each one of your circuits into one bill, one contract save you money over the lifetime. And clean, it's really a two year project is what I've normally found is because most contracts, most of your contracts are going to be up within about two years. If it's three years, great, you've got a few stragglers out there. But I've noticed that as you do this at the end of two, three years, whatever, you've really got everything cleaned up very nice. And the beauty of an aggregator again is it's, it's kind of a wholesale, I call it a wholesale play. You're really buying your Internet's, you're leveraging, you know, NHC's ability to buy wholesale and then really pull it all together. And then when you have everything in one spot it gives you significant buying power. So you end up saving money and getting so much more you don't have.
• 17:58
  Speaker B: To call for sure.
• 17:59
  Speaker A: You know, AT&T is always a 1800 and you gotta like literally put on your little metaphorical spreadsheet option 1, 3, 5 ask for Dan if he's available at 2 o' clock in the morning. So with you guys.
• 18:12
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean that's a huge point to be honest with you, because with AT&T, with Comcast, with Lumen, with all of these large, with a B large network providers, their services are, their technology is great, all of them. Right. What's not great, and everyone will agree, probably even employees at att, Blooming, Comcast, et cetera, is their customer experience is not a standard. It's not consistent across the board. Right. The aggregator space, particularly nhc, right. We accommodate for that gap, we fill that gap. We make certain that we're still using the same network components. So the quality of the technology is still there. Right. Typically it's a lower cost just because we're buying at a wholesale price, which is lower than street retail. But we're supplying that customer experience, that consistent customer experience model. So that way the customers, they have a standard, they know what they're going to get and it's good, it's a good experience. Right? So that's number One and number two is, look, you mentioned, you know, typical 20% savings, plus or minus, that's just across the board average. When we start talking about other services beyond just the network connectivity stuff like POTS services, POTS replacement services, that's really where, that's where things start to ratchet.
• 19:36
  Speaker A: Up in terms of you got a little copper lines out there running fax machines or. Well, I guess it's really more elevators now.
• 19:43
  Speaker B: Elevators, fire alarms, security access, you know.
• 19:46
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 19:47
  Speaker B: You're going to very little voice. Yeah, crush it. We absolutely, we crush it. I mean a customer is going to experience a tremendous value in using NHC as their aggregator because you know, our POTS replacement suite is very simple like migration, migrate as is. Even if it's $1,000 pots line we migrated over so we can have control of the line and view the customer service record and then we then optimize those lines to a replacement. An alternative, whether it's a wireless pods or something from our voice network, a SIP based product or we position it and transition over to a cable provider that we're going to go ahead and bill for. So all of those services we our compliance in fire and life safety services and it dramatically drops the cost of those pod services for the customer. Customer can keep the telephone number, et cetera. It's a major, major win for businesses.
• 20:44
  Speaker A: So yeah, so as we start to reveal more of the benefits of an aggregator. So NHC also is a voice provider. So we call that, I think voiceover IP ucas. What do we call it? Ccas like what else, you know what other CAS is, Can we, can we layer into this? And you know, I mean, here's another big name that we do with you guys. So we do five guys with you. You've been really good with five guys. Every time they do a construction build out, here's the, here's the benefit of a retail standpoint, right? Like what does the five guys really need? They need Internet and they need like one, maybe two phones sitting up front to answer the phone. If people are even calling five guys to order. I mean, I know I have to call and when I go to Biddeford Main, I know I have to call the five guys there because for whatever reason their app can't. I've got, I've got eight kids. So we've got all kinds of weird little special like things. When you order five guys, it's a hundred dollar minimum order. And I've always got to call the store and does, hey guys, yeah, yeah, I gotta call the store. I'm like, guys, okay, there's an order that came in just from the app. I need you to make sure this, this and this. Otherwise my kid's gonna be like with the ketchup only burger now. What do you mean ketchup only? I know it's crazy but so anyhow, so you do really good from like that standpoint, from a retail standpoint. But you alluded to another thing as you layer in other services which I found to be really, really awesome for, for IT people, IT leadership, CTOs, CIOs getting what they want without having to go make this big sale to the executive roundtable. So there's a lot of, a lot of you out there. I know right now you've got, you've got coming to end of life or you've got all these Meraki switches, or you've got Fortinet out there or you're on Meraki and you want to go to Fortinet or you want some firewall, whatever it is. A lot of you are out there and you've got old, you want to do a network upgrade on your firewalls and you've got the Fortinet sales rep, he's coming into you and he's giving you a PDF long list with all the different SKUs on it, all the different prices of your firewall and now you've got this big capex that you've got to go sell to executive management and nhc. New Horizons Communications has a wonderful solution so that you do not have to do that. And what I've found is that when we look at, say, all the Internet connections and we save you something like 20% there and you just happen to be also wanting to do a firewall upgrade at the same time to say Fortinet or whatever. NAC is a very strong. I mean, how many firewall providers do you guys sell? What are your main flavors of the day?
• 23:07
  Speaker B: Well, so our most strategic right now is we're partnered with Fortinet and check point. And the reason why we've done coordinate checkpoint is one is more. One is more kind of locally based still with a. With a great, you know, cloud presence, if you will. I'm. I'm thumbing this down. And then checkpoint is more of the opposite. Checkpoint is more cloud first, edge second. And the two are. I mean, their two are Gartner leaders. I mean, they, they.
• 23:33
  Speaker A: I gotcha. So if you guys. So if you guys are like, you know, hardcore, I'm not going with any of those wicked, wicked mothers. And I'm only talking like that because. Yeah, because Susan's from Boston and I'm originally from Worcester. Yeah, yeah, no there's any Yankee fans on here.
• 23:49
  Speaker B: We don't want you as well. Hold on.
• 23:51
  Speaker A: Oh, wait, are you kidding me? So the point is like, look, if you're a Fortinet shop and you want to go fortinet or checkpoint, okay. And you want to get off Meraki, and I'm not saying I'm anti. I'm not saying Meraki sucks or I'm not saying that we didn't do a show on, you know, Meraki, I love you because. Okay, but let's just say you do want to go forward. NHC is going to be a great option for you. And the reason why is they can put all the firewalls in. They can give you a hybrid management option if you want. If you need some help, if you want to. If you want to leverage their Fortinet bench of certified. Yeah, guys. Or you say, heck no, I don't want anyone touching my firewalls. It's going to be 100% fine. No problem. Or hey, I don't want to do it at all. I want you guys to manage it all. I don't want to do anything. I want to act as the. The. The CTO and just let you guys manage it. And you know, my team's actually at the round table, so whichever way you want to manage your firewalls, great. But here's the thing. They can put that all on a no capex. So You've got literally, hey, we're gonna do a firewall upgrade roundtable and guess what, it's not gonna cost us a dime. You could literally make that sale and you could take the savings that you saved from looking at all of your Internet connections together and that might pay for it. I've seen this happen numerous times. Again, I did this in a rural healthcare piece where we did, you know, 45 locations, we saved them 1.3 million and gave them an entire Fortinet that upgrade at the same time and gave them a hybrid management so that when you're on the beach, hopefully sometime this summer, and you need to make firewall change or something, you can do it by with maybe the help of manufacturers, maybe just speak about that for a few things, like what are the benefits of going through, you know, Fortinet through you guys versus Fortinet, you know, calling and having a guy show up in your inbox on LinkedIn, he's like, hey, let's meet and talk about Fortinet.
• 25:39
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's weird. So, so, so we have, so first of all, we have Security Operations center. Right. That's in tandem with our network operations center. So we have security licensed or security certified individuals that are supporting everything. Day two, we have, all of our solution engineers are certified with Fortinet and Checkpoint and you know, VMware and all these other manufacturers that we're, we're selling and deploying of the engine of error VMware circuits. So all of the support is NHC. Right. So we're selling Fortinet, we're selling Broadcom, then VMware, VeloCloud, like whatever, Checkpoint, Big Leaf is another one. Big Leaf is a one to one play that we sell transactionally. All of that support is through NHC and by nhc, of course we're leveraging the upstream manufacturer on like a, like a, like a tier 5 or level 5, level 4. 5 if you know the flux capacitor in it breaks, like what do we do? Type of thing. Yep. But everything customer all the way up to L3, L4, I mean that is NHC. And that's the beauty of why you'd be buying it through nhc. Not just the cost comparison and the price reduction and bonding that technology or that deployment with a savings to help subsidize like that project. There's a variety of reasons. And again, it's that transparency, that customer experience, customer management model that NHC brings. I mean that's that truly. Phil, that is our ip, right? That is our, that is Our true asset, intellectual property, of course not public IP like that is ours. So delivering the service that was created elsewhere. Right. We're designing a solution for the customer, with the customer. That is our IP right from start all the way through. We've been a business since 2002. The average customer length is 13 years. Right. Our competitive turn is less than three quarters of 1%. Customers just don't, they simply don't lead. Now you might have a customer that is, they're only focused on price. They don't really care about the larger kind of support structure. That's fine. We, you know, those customers come and go for everybody. But the customers that require a sophisticated, you know, a holistic design and that something that can, they can grow with and scale their business with. They're not leaving nhc. I mean Spotify has been a customer of ours for years. Years and years and years. Just, I mean there's, there's a number of big name customers that we have.
• 28:14
  Speaker A: I'm getting ready to migrate everything to Spotify and I think you might have just closed the deal for that. Like, should I do that? Because when you got a podcast and you've got, it's been, you know, you kind of bootstrap when you first start a podcast and when you get to 360 episodes, it starts to become like, oh gosh, I need to actually have an IT team now to manage all stuff. But Spotify just, just put everything there and call it a day. What you said is really important. So right now there's all kinds of stuff going on and just the general, I don't know if we want to call it like the temperature check of the industry when it comes to IT leadership, CTO, CIOs, CFOs, what they're being pressured to do. A lot of people are being pressured to cut costs. They might be sitting under the shadow of like, could I be replaced by an MSP type of thing. And by being proactive and you know, cutting costs and being, put it this way, NHC is going to help you make a significant, measurable difference in KPIs that you can deliver in a report to the, the board or the executive roundtable. Okay. And if you are being pressured to also consolidate, as hard as it may be like, you know, as a CTO's job or CIO's job, your team is the executive roundtable. Your team shouldn't be like, you know, the help desk and thing. And this is kind of the big, this is what a lot of IT leaders have A hard time doing is that when they trans, when they transition to a high C level executive role, they still think that their team is the help desk and everything. They don't see their team as the executive roundtable team. We found that 93% of CTOs fail at making that, what do we say? Strategic jump in their, in their leadership. Okay, so how does that apply to nhc? What do you guys call yourself?
• 30:04
  Speaker B: Trademarked? The Communication Stack Provider.
• 30:07
  Speaker A: Okay, so the, the Communication Stack Provider. Okay, so what does that do? It makes you more irreplaceable. More irreplaceable as a, as a C level executive because it's like you're providing a structure that MSPs really can't touch. Like what is an MSP going to come in and do for you now? Like they're going to run your help desk. Like, you know what I mean? Like you're really creating more of a, you're really being more strategic as a IT leader by using, by picking the right vendors that are going to partner with you and give you that extra layer of human capital at really no additional cost.
• 30:43
  Speaker B: Right.
• 30:44
  Speaker A: And help you really do kind of a lot more for less. I mean, maybe just speak a little bit about what your bench of human capital looks like behind the scenes and what people can leverage.
• 30:54
  Speaker B: Yeah. So we have just floating around 300 employees we might have a tick over. And most of those employees are operational support employees. Whether it's pre sale, solution, design, deployment, project management, day two support, SOC1, SOC2 certified engineers, et cetera. I mean, that's it. I mean we have a very small roster of people that are on the finance side and then on the business management side and so on that are managing our business. Majority of the customer of our employee of our personnel are here and adding. I just was talking to Phil earlier this morning about, you know, we just added in July alone, It's only the 14th of the month and we've already added eight people to an operations deployment team. So we're constantly adding more and more bodies just as we scale. We're trying to scale properly but. But majority.
• 31:46
  Speaker A: Know what the point I was going to ask you to anyone in Manila or the Philippines or anything like that, do we have any outsourced contact center stuff?
• 31:54
  Speaker B: No, we don't. It's all stateside support. It's all stateside support.
• 31:57
  Speaker A: Nothing against Manila. Nothing against Manila. They may have an accent though. You might hear some guys talk to them. I see this guy when you call him.
• 32:04
  Speaker B: Yeah, you know, it's funny. So still in all seriousness, I mean we, we, we do have some employees that are United States, you know, citizens that maybe during the pandemic, ISH 2021, they moved to their house in Brazil or wherever and maybe, maybe Morocco.
• 32:20
  Speaker A: Everyone knows I was, I was in Morocco since August, so I just been back for a month.
• 32:25
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's kind of so. But all of our, all of our customer facing, meaning communicative, you know, whether it's digitally or over the phone or whatever, it's all stateside support, 100% W2NHC. We're committed to scaling that way. And it works. It works because, you know, while it might be less costly for us to invest in a call center overseas, we found that we're able to, you know, retain our customers and jump to our customers needs and adapt by having a stateside support team. It just is what it is.
• 33:01
  Speaker A: It's just great to call someone that is familiar with who you are and knows what a static IP address is right off the bat. Sure. Okay.
• 33:10
  Speaker B: So.
• 33:11
  Speaker A: So all that aside, we. We've sold enough. We've been doing enough selling for like the last half an hour. I want a piece of advice from you. You've been in this business long enough. I want some actual piece of leadership advice or, or some aha moment, some big failure that you had, whatever it was. Was there ever some point in your career where you just figured something out and it was like this big strategic hard reboot in your leadership style or something? I don't know. Is it give us some piece of leadership advice that we can take that will make us all better?
• 33:41
  Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So first of all, I've been with NHC for 20 years. Celebrated 20 years in June, which is great. I got the steak knife. Just one though. I just got one steak knife. I get the big one. It was in the butcher. Blah. The butcher knife. So I've been with NHC for a long time and I've transitioned through a variety of different organizations within nhc. Everything from sales ops to operations solutions done, et cetera. And back around 2017, I started doing some product development for NHC and started leading the product development to try and onboard new technologies which at that time was technologies like SD wan. Right. Things like that. And I found myself swimming constantly against this large massive wave or current that was what is SD wan? Why do we need it? It. Even though the field was telling us we need it, the marketing research was telling us we need to get in line with it, et cetera. So after about six months of just kind of like not making any ground. I decided to flip it and put it onto my team and say, okay, we're being told that we need SD Wan. We're not having any movement because nobody upstairs is. There's no buy in.
• 34:56
  Speaker A: There's no buy in.
• 34:57
  Speaker B: Exactly. Exactly. How do we, how do we go ahead and push this up to make them? You know, so once we, I guess once, once we made that determination that we're not going to try to get. We're not going to swim against this wave anymore, this current, we're going to put it into the field and make them tell us precisely, like who it is that we need to acquire or adopt and why that rapidly changed, right? So it was pretty much like the business, the bi. We force the business to tell us.
• 35:28
  Speaker A: So how do you do?
• 35:29
  Speaker B: Why.
• 35:30
  Speaker A: Yeah, so how do you do that? And this could be used as any example like, hey, we need an ERP or we need this or we need that. Right now it's like AI and that's a whole nother. I don't even know. Okay, so how do you put. How do you plant that seed is basically what you're saying, how do you plant that seed to get them to start telling you, hey, we need it versus you telling them we need it?
• 35:51
  Speaker B: It. Well, it was really financially based, right? It was looking at growth model and determining like, okay, you know, for the past four years we've been selling all these services. Now we're going to be asked to sell these services with an extended edge and management of these. Like, are we going to continue to. Are we going to basically planted the seed to say, are we going to continue to. To experience the same growth right in margins and revenue while this new technology is going to be added that other people are going to be able to go ahead and sell the circuits to while selling this technology so that planting that seed got a lot of people to market.
• 36:29
  Speaker A: In other words, are we able to continue or can. Can we continue to. Can we continue to. It's not experience. Can. Whatever it is, can, can we continue to experience our, our level of growth by not adopting. This is really what you were. And so people had to think like, people had to think like, like, wait a second, no, T1s aren't fast enough anymore. We need cable. I'm trying to think of like, what's another basic. Can you see if we do our backup on tape backups, can we continue to. To backup our files on backup or should we maybe consider these other options? No, no one's going to buy Take tape backup anymore. No one's going to buy just straight circuits if you don't offer any value added network monitoring and services on top of it. And you're going to start losing your.
• 37:14
  Speaker B: What do you lose? Right? The question, the question ultimately is what do we lose by not adopting this technology or not adopting this process or, you know, I mean, like, what do we lose, right? It's not so much what do we gain? Because there's a ton that you're going to gain. But what you don't know through the process of understanding what you gain is that cost, right? The cost is ultimately going to be a factor and it's a variable as you gain more stuff, more things. But what you lose is the ultimate question. That's the, that's the ask why, right? What do we lose? So once I asked that and I started pushing that, not just up, right, but also down to my team and so on, things started happening really, really, really, really fast. Good conversations were occurring.
• 37:57
  Speaker A: I think the hardest thing that our listeners have to sell is security. I think that might be one of the hardest things, right? Like, what do we stand to lose if we don't do this? What do we stand to lose if we do this? Oh, we can lose a whole company. What do we stand to lose if we don't adopt this? Here's, you know, I'm just, I'm asking the questions. I don't know, guys, I don't care. We. I know you want to sell it, but stop selling. Start, ask. Yes. Selling is not pushing, it's not presenting. Selling is asking. And I think that selling is a, is a beautiful skill to have. It's a wonderful. It's how America was built. No farmer's beans get to the market without someone selling something. And CTOs and CIOs and IT leaders need to embrace this aspect of learning how to sell. And they need to learn how to sell to executive management. And selling is asking. It's not telling. It's not telling you. So I think it was really beautiful what you just said there. What do we, what do we stand to lose if we do not do this? So that's beautiful, man. It's kind of mind blowing, but simple at the same time. And yes, that's how things should be. So for anyone that's been a part of our community and been a part of the podcast, and we have a secret community. We have a secret community where no vendors are allowed. They're kind of allowed. They're kind of allowed. Like they can have a spot in the community where you can reach out and ask them, but they're not allowed to kind of lurk in the corner, so to speak.
• 39:10
  Speaker B: Isn't there a secret handshake for the community too?
• 39:12
  Speaker A: We do have to figure that out.
• 39:14
  Speaker B: We talk about. But yeah.
• 39:17
  Speaker A: So, so, so NHC is, is one of our sponsors, okay. They've sponsored us. They. And, and not everyone gets to sponsor they. You have to be a special team player to begin with for me to even reach out to you and ask you to even sponsor us. But they are a special sponsor of, of the community, of the podcast and our entire platform here. We do have a secret platform that's getting. Getting ready to be revealed in September, which I'm super excited about. And in order to do that, you have to give away something. You have to give away something for free that's special that you don't give away to anybody else. So what do you got for us for the people that are. That have the secret handshake? If they do the secret handshake with you, what do they get that nobody else ever gets?
• 39:54
  Speaker B: So I don't know if other people get it or not. I see like, less and less. But. So we're giving away two things. One, fancy swag. Obviously we have some great hats, but we're also giving away Amazon gift cards. And they tier from 20, 50 and $100. So the better the handshake and the better the conversation, the higher the card.
• 40:16
  Speaker A: So everyone knows my feelings about Amazon gift cards anyways. I don't think any provider should ever have to bribe you to get in front of you, which you don't if you don't. But with nhc, it's a nice little. It's a nice little gesture of, you know, Phil said I should meet with you and talk with you, at least have a conversation. If anyone out there is just pissed off at their, their ISP or even, even just mediocrity, I feel like the name of the game lately is just mediocrity, okay. And if anyone else else out there feels like, yeah, my guys are all right, you know, they just. They suck less than everybody else. And you've got a ton of Internet circuits out there and you want to just, even just go through the exercise of just sitting down with someone and helping see what they could do for you, whether it be from a. A telecom or voice perspective. Do you guys do any teams integration? I'm just curious. I forgot about that. Do you do any stuff teams?
• 41:03
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
• 41:04
  Speaker A: So you have a direct routing Partner.
• 41:07
  Speaker B: Yes, yes, we do. I don't know what that looks like behind the scenes, but we, we do. I mean we. So from our own voice network. Our, our, our UCAS unified communications service. So that integrates with teams for team dialing and so on and so forth.
• 41:19
  Speaker A: So. Okay, so, so what, what does nhc, what can they do for you first, clean up all of your circuits and insanity and give you a nice, you know, parent child billing in one bill and send that over to the CFO and the right codes you give give you a 1-800number to call. That's not calling 1-800-gold pound sand to a family and friends network that has remember though, Boston accent. They. Yeah, seriously. And then so they can help you with the voice also they can help you with your firewall upgrade. They can help you with maybe you now loved VMware, but Broadcom just is so bad and we'd love to just kick them in the teeth. You know, they can help you make that transition or just manage it even better or however it is. There's, there's really a lot that the entire. What am I forgetting? What else do you guys do? Is there any POTS replacement guys? You got some old spots you got crazy, stupid, stupid bills coming in from. I'm getting this bill from Verizon and AT T Alumin or whatever. They're charging me 75 for a phone line. Guess what? Make that go away overnight. They can make that get over away with just literally a flip of a switch. You can literally make that just go away.
• 42:19
  Speaker B: One thing that we didn't talk about real quick, 10 seconds. We have a service called Carrier Access Management. Short, it's abbreviated as cam. C A M. It would cam. When we're deploying circuits for a customer of our own that may still have other circuits upstream that are under contract, we can convert the billing of those already contracted circuits to nhc and we operate on behalf of the customer. So that way we're managing all our services.
• 42:46
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.
• 42:48
  Speaker B: It's a huge, huge deal. Huge, huge deal. And then, and then as you talked like, as they come up to term, we're going ahead 90 days out, 180 days out. We're communicating with the customer and he's going to come up, let's go ahead and install new flip over, like whatever.
• 43:01
  Speaker A: Guys, the reason why that's wicked awesome, okay? So the reason why that's wicked awesome is because, okay, for all those. Maybe you're a construction company and you've got little trailers out everywhere. And you're managing all this stuff and you just want someone to just like, can I please, can you guys just manage this for me? Can you just be in charge for me? Can you call? Can you make changes on my behalf? Can you do all this?
• 43:19
  Speaker B: That's what that helps you open trouble tickets? Can you open Trouble tickets with them directly for me on my behalf?
• 43:24
  Speaker A: Like, yeah, exactly. How many of you guys have someone right now where they can't? Like. Well, first just give me the trouble ticket and then I'll escalate.
• 43:30
  Speaker B: No. Yes.
• 43:31
  Speaker A: This is going. Yeah, this is going beyond. I used to work for cb.
• 43:34
  Speaker B: One more thing. So when we're throwing, we're throwing stack guard or SG1 on a damn circuit, meaning a circuit we don't own. That's automating. That's automating the communication of the customer. Oh hey, we have a trouble ticket with your circuit. Blah blah, blah, you know, all that stuff.
• 43:50
  Speaker A: So here's what's to come, here's what's coming. We're going to be doing a special webinar only for the secret handshake people. So everyone out there in the public, if you, if you actually want to see the secret webinar that's going to be coming up September, October, maybe, I don't know, know, third or fourth quarter on the road map where we're going to demonstrate all this. We're going to show the. The, I hate to say it, single pane of glass because it's such a cliche term. I it just so many people say. We're going to say. We're going to call it the gooey. We got to call it what the people. We really should call it. We're going to the gooey guy.
• 44:21
  Speaker B: And if you just want a cool.
• 44:23
  Speaker A: Company, honestly, like if you want just good people. New Horizons Communications. So, so yeah, man. Seuss, thank you so much for being on the show. It's been a pleasure and we look forward to building the relationships and bringing the family closer on the inside.
• 44:37
  Speaker B: Thank you, Phil. Appreciate it.