 Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Welcome everybody to our podcast series, Data Movers. I'm your host, Jamie Scott-Okataya, founder and CEO of JSA. And alongside me today, my fabulous co-host, top B2B social influencer, Mr. Evan Christel. Hey Evan. Hey, Jamie. Hey everyone, and welcome to Data Movers, where we sit down with the most influential men and women of today's leading telco and data center world, supporting the network infrastructure requirements of this new modern world. Jamie, how are you? Great, great. It's a fabulous day here in Southern California, and we just- Every day is a fabulous day in Southern California. Come on, you're living in paradise. But we have a great guest in the cybersecurity space on today. I'm really keen to speak with them. But before that, you're a bit of a cybersecurity guru yourself. What do you do to protect yourself and your network at home? Any tips or tricks? Yeah. Um. All right. We are like 99% of Americans basically. Yeah, it's so sad. I know, it is very sad. And that's part of the problem we're facing. I have a couple of tips and tricks I'll share just for folks. One is, personally, it's all two-factor authentication, multi-factor authentication all the time. Like on every account, every service, every device, it's a pain. And even, you know, authenticating with your mobile number really isn't that safe anymore unless you have that locked down. So that's what I recommend on doing right away. And also, I don't click on anything. What about you, like links and text messages? Do you click to open like weird files that people sign in? No, no, no. And I don't even answer calls. I don't know. Like I'm in total lockdown. I don't want to answer. I don't want to hear from it. I don't want to link. I don't want to click. Awesome. Well, that's 90% of the hassle or the challenge for individuals. But let's get on with our guests because they have a lot more interesting strategies and initiatives than that. Yes, for sure, for sure. And I am so thrilled, so excited. Of course, as you know, here at Data Movers, we like to really just dive in to our guests' background stories, their careers, their highs and lows, their unique perspectives on the future of our industry. And so we are so excited today to welcome Andy Fisher, CEO and founder of Myriad 360 as well as the company's head of marketing, Kevin Ford, on the topic of customer experience, best practices. Welcome, Andy and Kevin. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Yeah, good to hear you. Good to see you. And Andy, let's start with you. An introduction is in order. Tell us a bit about yourself and the company you founded, Myriad 360. Sure. And I'll start by saying, don't forget that password keeper. You want to have a unique login and password to every website that you use. I do. It's one, two, three, four, five, six. It's so unique to me. You're ahead of everyone. Well, it's great to be here with you today. Thank you so much for having us on. My name's Andy Fisher, founder and CEO of Myriad 360. I graduated from Yale in 2000, which is now about two decades ago. I spent a couple of years in strategy consulting. And I started Myriad at the beginning of 2003. It was an interesting time. It was just after the dot-com bubble burst. And there was a sea of used equipment floating around and trading hands on eBay and other platforms. And Myriad really started as a used technology reseller. Way back then. And now we've got direct partnerships with every major manufacturer and software provider out there, more than 200 in total. So we've come a long way from the early days in 2003. Today, Myriad 360 offers advisory services, systems integration, warehousing, global logistics and hands-on in the field support for data center migrations, cloud networking and cybersecurity solutions across the globe. In short, we help our clients, well, we advise our clients on technology and we help them implement and optimize it. Our clients, our ideal clients have dozens or hundreds of global offices, facilities and points of presence, a minimum of $10 million of technology budget, many of them with significantly more than that. And we are fortunate enough to work with some of the most technically savvy and innovative companies in the world, many of which are household names, folks that you've certainly interacted with and heard of. But really, when I think about it from the 50,000th of you, our job is simple. We need to save our clients time, we need to save the money, we need to reduce risk and we need to reduce anxiety among the very busy and stressed people that we work with every day. I love that, I love that. And that is definitely something that's at the core, I would say that your core DNA of Myriad, that customer centric support and love, delight that you provide. So Kevin, can you introduce yourself as well and what drew you to Myriad 360? Sure, and thanks again for having us on, happy to be here. So my name is Kevin Ford, I lead marketing and partner development here at Myriad 360. What drew me to Myriad? So I've been at Myriad seven years now, I found out about the opportunity from a friend, right after starting, I could see the company was very forward-thinking, transparent, really cared about its employees and customers, so definitely say culture and atmosphere. Also we have a diverse customer base, portfolio solution. So for me in being focused on our marketing, this definitely always keeps things fresh, interesting, I'm always taking on new projects and meeting with new people, so. Awesome, well good to meet you. So Myriad 360 is known for having a client or customer first mentality in the company, but frankly everyone is saying that these days and how do you actually walk the walk and not just talk the talk of customer centricity? Yeah, that's a really good question. The very first thing, even before we start down the path of customer centricity, the first thing that we're very intentional about is who we work with in the first place. So I've always said that we need to select our next five clients as carefully and intentionally as we select our next five employees, is that important? I can't overstate how important as it's true with any long-term relationship that you select the right partner. And that goes both ways. And so once we've found a client that has similar core values, similar goals, works at a similar speed and who's a really good fit for the things that we're really good at, then we go deep around the discovery phase. And so we endeavor to know our customers, in many cases, better than they know themselves or we try to know them better than they know themselves. And you've been hearing about the great resignation or the great migration for some time now. And with all that turnover occurring within our clients' technology teams, we've got an opportunity to be a crucial point of continuity in a world of increasing discontinuity. So that's a big piece of it. In addition, we endeavor to be the most flexible partner that our clients have. At our size, which is 110 employees plus 40 to 50 contractors, we have the ability to be far more nimble than a lot of folks that we come up against in the field. And we've got to leverage that as a key differentiator. It's something that our clients really appreciate as they're trying to drive greater operational flexibility into their businesses and deal with increasing uncertainty in their marketplaces. And then when you combine deep customer knowledge with flexibility, what you've achieved is what's called customer intimacy. And here's what Harvard Business School has to say about customer intimacy. Quote, companies that excel in customer intimacy combine detailed customer knowledge with operational flexibility so they can respond quickly to almost any need from customizing a product to fulfilling special requests. And as a consequence, these companies engender tremendous customer loyalty. And that's really what we're trying to do. We wanna be seen as critical members of our clients' teams. That's why we live in Slack with them, Microsoft Teams with them. We work where they work to ensure that we are truly the easy button for them. And then finally, for all of us, time is our most valuable resource. And so we've got to create value in every interaction and we've got to give them a very favorable return on the time that they've spent with us. So those are the things that we really focus on that we teach and preach internally to try and ensure that we are not just talking the talk but very much walking the walk when it comes to a customer experience. Ash, I just love that you're singing to my heart. I am such a big believer in that business philosophy and I do, I see it with your myriad team as well. And guys, can you share any examples of how knowing your client better has really translated into additional business and any case studies perhaps? Sure, sure, thank you, Jamie. So we have an established security practice, as Andy mentioned with both pre and post sale architects. They help with all different types of security services ranging from discovery assessments, hands-on workshops, vendor brokerage and procurement support all the way through deployment. I think a great story that highlights our security capabilities and focus on understanding our customers really well. And as Andy mentioned before, getting on that level of customer intimacy with them is work that we did with a global service provider headquartered in New York, Miri 360 was engaged to assist with the deployment of an XDR solution, really complex environment over 20,000 devices, locations all over the globe with no central asset management system or administrative platform. Every business unit had their own way of doing things and this really impacted their response plan. They were flooded with support tickets. Their failure rates were really high and the issues were ultimately impacting their customers and creating delays for them. So the work was initially forecasted as developing workflows and installation packages for all of their corporate systems in scope. And in a short amount of time through our discovery work with them, we noticed numerous issues with their plans and we worked with them to redefine the engagement into a more open customer facing effort. As part of this, we developed formal PM controls including communication plans, a racy matrix and FAQs. And this really helped to create an environment that showed all the stakeholders. We heard their concerns, we were committed to providing and we were committed to providing quality deliverable. So within just a few months, we were working with all of their business unit locations including all leadership, IT departments as well as their international stakeholders to really better understand their existing workflows. The solution was that we ended with was a centrally governed tool, a single security dashboard. We showed the customer that the adoption of this platform did not need to be as disruptive as they thought it was going to be and could really help them with enforcing global policy and get the granularity that they needed to have a strong security response plan around campuses and silos. So after that, we scoped out, we determined what the solution was, we followed through and we went and helped them to launch POCs to prove their solution could overcome all of their company's concerns. All this effort was run in coordination with our internal project management team, our technical teams really making sure that the customer had all the necessary documentation that was needed for the response plan along the way and the project deployed successfully. We're now engaged with the customer, we're helping them to track and report on the ROI and have really become an extension of their team, helping them to make improvements to their security stack. So hopefully that did a good job at covering how we're able to provide value around our security services from, with this customer end to end. That was amazing. Anything, Andy, you may wanna add in there or? Yeah, I mean, just to add, that was a very large multifaceted project that ultimately took different turns over the course of the engagement and that's just part of the flexibility that we bring to the table. What was ultimately delivered at customer request was significantly different from what was originally scoped. But ultimately, we came in on budget and on track time-wise and that's really what matters. I mean, it's all about delivering a great experience along the way to a great outcome. But things that we look at, as I sort of take the high level view of kind of how we're doing out there, certainly we look at net promoter score, we look at the percentage of clients that come back on a rolling three month basis. So we work with pretty large accounts and if they don't spend money with us for three months, we know something is wrong. And so we go after that pretty quickly to understand what may have taken place, whether there's a changing of the guard or whether we dropped the ball somewhere. And I personally take a lot of ownership over making sure that our clients are happy and understanding if they're not, what we need to do to get them in the right place. We look at client referrals and particularly, I mentioned earlier, the Great Migration. When a decision maker leaves, do they take us with them to their new company? And more often than not, it takes them six or nine months to get it in place. And then they say, hey, I'm ready to start getting the band back together, which is always a resounding positive review for us when somebody takes us along to their new company. And then finally, I look very closely at retention rate and growth of our own employees because they are the most important drivers of customer success, and I'll mention it later. But I think that having very low turnover is really important because there's so much tribal knowledge that gets built up over time. And despite every effort to document things, when you lose somebody, you do lose a big chunk of knowledge and an important piece of the connective tissue between ourselves and our clients. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And with this age of resignation upon us, it's a core differentiator now too. When you have a team that stands by you through thick and thin and there's something magical about your culture, what you're doing there at Myriad. And it seems so straightforward. I mean, business is pretty simple at a high level. The partnerships, the meaningful relationships you're building with clients equate to more business opportunity. And yet when I look around the landscape, there's just so much hype, where vendor hype and marketing hype, why don't we see more of this sort of traditional approach to partnering out there in the industry, do you think? I think a couple of things. I mean, number one, it's just really expensive, right? It's expensive to take the time to do the necessary discovery work to bring relevant and valuable recommendations to your clients. And so it's been an interesting process for us. If you look at the trailing 12 months, we've served about 300 unique accounts, customer accounts. And if you looked at that same data point five years ago, it would have been more like 600. And so we've been going through this very intentional process of parting ways with accounts that are not a good fit for us and doubling down on ones that are. And that's a really scary thing to do, especially when you think about the sales team in the field, you're telling them, hey, you sold to 45 accounts last year, I want you to sell the 30 accounts this year. That's a really scary proposition, but I believe really strongly in quality over quantity and a smaller number of very high quality relationships with the right accounts is gonna deliver a lot more success and happy clients than trying to spread yourself too thin. And so we've done some of the hard things, some of the counterintuitive things there. We limit the number of accounts that an account executive can support. And we really try to overindex on that discovery process and really building both the business knowledge, the technical knowledge and the understanding of, perhaps there's the politics and people that drive our clients, we need to understand how all that works. And we're actually, we're developing a new sort of, we're codifying all of that into a new methodology called the 360 degree view of me, and that's really gonna bring together all of the work that we've been doing over the years to try and understand exactly what clients need as part of our drive towards customer intimacy. So really excited that we're developing this new tool and assessment and codifying a lot of what we've learned over the years in terms of how to gather that information, read it back and make sure that we're approaching things in a really customized way. Well, I love that, I love that. Ooh, can't wait to learn more there. So looking forward, what advice do you have for other entrepreneurs like yourself and other organizations out there who really have an interest in doubling down on customer focus? Like Evan was saying, it's just so rare in the marketplace. So how can other companies emulate your success? I would say two things. One is, figure out how to build flexibility into the DNA of the organization without breaking all the systems that you've worked so hard to build efficiency into your business, right? And that's the hard thing because flexibility sometimes feels diametrically opposed to running your business efficiently. And so how can you build that into the processes and systems? Because I think more and more as we look forward, clients are gonna value that agility and flexibility which in turn allows them to have greater agility and operational flexibility. And then the second thing is, be really honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses and focus solely on acquiring customers that will appreciate what you're good at and also whose core values align with yours because fit is everything. Amazing. I'm gonna go off script a little bit, Andy, because I was looking at your LinkedIn bio as we chatted. And you're a member of a couple of really interesting boards. And I'd love just to hear a little bit more of TheaterWorks USA, which sounds fascinating and LIDA, Leadership Enterprise for Diverse America. What are those all about? So I'll give you the elevator pitch for both. So TheaterWorks is an amazing organization that's been around for a number of decades and we bring educational, almost Broadway quality theater to underserved communities across the country. We do free summer theater in New York and we believe that getting folks away from screens as I'm talking into a screen, getting folks, especially kids away from screens and seeing live productions, there's just nothing like it. And if you can spark curiosity and if you can spark excitement, then more people will experiment with theater, more people will go to theater and that is a good thing for everybody. So that's TheaterWorks. LIDA is at its core, the flagship offering within LIDA is a college access program where we bring a hundred scholars again from underserved public high schools across the country. And we endeavor to get at least one student from every state together. They do a seven week program on the campus of Princeton University every summer, which is actually happening right now as we speak. And we give them leadership education, we help them with standardized test prep, with essay writing, and they spend a lot of great time together getting to know one another and they form these amazing bonds. And essentially we help them get into top tier colleges because again, we believe that if we can take somebody from an under-resourced public high school in a very rural part of Arkansas and we get them into a top college, they spend four years there, get a great education, their whole community realizes this is possible and they're able to sort of get out of that generational wealth challenge that we are seeing more and more in the country. So doing amazing work there and very proud of both of those organizations and very happy to be working closely with them. Wow, fantastic. That's so inspiring. Thanks for sharing, sure. Just love that, just love that. And that leads us into our really kind of fun, rapid fire questions section where we just ask a quick question and you just answer first thing that comes to mind. So I'll get started here. What is an upcoming purchase you're thinking about? And Kevin, I'll start with you. Weedwacker. Oh, interesting. Hi, Heather. Come on, put that one. Are you going gas, electric or what's the deal? You know, it's a good question. I'm looking into gas and electric, I'm not sure. Hybrid, okay, we're gonna go hybrid weedwacker. The Tesla of weedwackers, fantastic. Exactly. I am looking to make an investment in outdoor sofa. We moved to a new house last spring and still haven't gotten our backyard fully outfitted for the summer. Oh, I need one of those. So let me know what you discover because it's hard to buy anything now, especially with the supply chain. Next question you guys are in, you know, the New York metro area, the center of the food universe. What are your favorite foods that would surprise us? I don't think it's very surprising, but I love a good cheeseburger. I'm gonna go cheeseburger. That is so disappointing. He went from weedwacker, which is like, oh, it's setting the level high to cheeseburger. Not surprised, not surprised. So yeah, I mean, I like a lot of the, I'd love a good cheeseburger. Probably we'll have one this weekend, but I will say any tin of sardines and a loafer and a French baguette would make me very, very happy. Oh, that's a good one. My father's 91, he's had a can of sardines every day. For breakfast. There's Omega-3s. Yeah. There's something in there, but that's working. Yeah, I always pull them out of my salad, but now I'm maybe more impressed. Those might be anchovies, and I do not like anchovies at all, so make sure you don't mix those up. Oh, but it's the can thing, right? You're like, we'll back the can, and they're all lying there. Yeah, they're lying there. You flip them onto a plate, it's magic. I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna keep my mind to it. Jamie's a sushi kind of gal, you know? It's gotta be sushi. I've moved from a place because they didn't have access to good sushi. Oh, that's totally reasonable. All right, and then if you could watch one movie on repeat for 24 hours straight, I'm not sure why you would do this, but what movie would that be? And again, we'll kick it off with you, Kevin. You know, 24 hours straight is tough. It'd have to be something funny, easy. I'm gonna just get over wedding crashers. It's a funny, it's hilarious, it's classic. Just roll on repeat, so, yep. And how would people describe you both? How would, what's one word that people might use to describe you? Oh, wait, you didn't get our movie pick. Wait, wait, wait, I wanna hear it. Oh, I was gonna, well, listen, I was actually hoping you'd skip me because mine was dumb and dumber, and I didn't want that getting out there. But similar line of thinking, Kevin, to you, is just like something that I could sort of zone out to and just, you know, chuckle every few minutes. 24 hours is a long time to do anything. Yeah, we'll edit that out, don't worry. Yeah, perfect, thank you. What's one word people would describe you? I already can think of a few words that are pretty positive, but what would you say? Do we start with Kevin or me? We'll do Kevin. Yeah, go ahead. Got reliable, trustworthy. Nice. I'm on board for that. Yeah, I like those. Those are good for him. Thank you, what it was. You can't say me too. Boy scouts, there we go. I'm not gonna say me too. So I would say, look, I think people think that I have high standards, which I do. I have high standards for them and myself. So maybe the word would be exacting. Awesome. I would say entrepreneurial and innovative too. I'll take that, absolutely, changing my answer. All right, and then last question before we let you guys go. I know we're rocking your time here, but favorite holiday to celebrate. We're gonna go with Christmas and Hanukkah. We celebrate both. Always good to get the family together, see friends, so. You mean it wasn't Amazon Prime Day, but it just was the day that I was on my favorite holiday. Everything's landing on the door tomorrow from everything I bought on earlier this week, right? Amazing. For me, I'm gonna say Halloween. So I've got a four-year-old and a three-year-old and so seeing Halloween through their eyes, they love getting dressed up. They like staying up late. They like eating candy. And so that's become my number one over the last couple of years. I love that. It's a good one. I live near Salem, Massachusetts. So we know how to do Halloween out of here. Seriously. It's quite an event. But thank you for joining us, guys. Really great chatting with you and seeing there's still companies like yourselves out there with doing business the old school way through relationships and trust. Congratulations. Yeah. Thank you very much. And great to be here. And guys, if you enjoyed today's Data Movers podcast as much as we did here, go ahead and check us out, jsa.net slash podcast for upcoming Data Movers episodes releasing every other week on Wednesday mornings, as well as of course our other JSA podcast series. And, you know, follow and tweet at us at Evan Kerstel and Jay Scott-O and we do reply back. So thanks very much. And thank you guys again. Your time, your insight, your love. We appreciate you. And as always, family and community out there, stay safe and happy networking.