 So this is my last video of 2018 because eventually I got to go home and do stuff. I've been here, I published a video earlier, updated servers, got a lot of things prepared because I have to be back here tomorrow to have a few more things I want to take care of. But I want to give a quick recap of the year and, you know, last video of the year seems like a good time to do that. I had trouble figuring out exactly how many, but it looks like I uploaded several hundred videos this year, which was a lot of fun. I plan to try to outdo that next year. In those of you who are wondering, I've watched my channel previously, it's just me uploading the videos. I'm pretty much the one who shoots them, edits them, process them, does everything in between. Of course, occasionally I have guests and things like that on there. But that's like 99.9% of the videos on there done by me. But I do have some specific stats that YouTube does tell you besides not telling me exactly how many I uploaded and I didn't feel like trying to count all several hundred that I uploaded. But they did let me know I gained 31,000 subscribers. So thank you if you're one of those 31,000. 21,000 people shared my videos, actually 21,048 to be exact. I got 78,137 likes and 1,822 dislikes. So the likes are beating the dislikes, but cool haters, you get some work to do. I certainly am not discouraged by that because, you know, that's life. That's part of YouTube. 27,947,504 minutes watched and that's actually going up all the time. That's the actual watch minutes before I sat down to make this video here. And the views, 4.2 million views and rising. So that's pretty awesome too. I mean, it's nothing for some of the large mainstream YouTubers to get that many views per video. But it's kind of exciting because my videos are a little bit more targeted towards firewalls and tech videos and things like that for more of the business or networking tech and a lot of, you know, educational content as I like to put it. Now it's been a lot of fun because building this audience, I wasn't sure how many people are interested. So every time I see more subscribers, I get excited. And of course that led to the forums. It's the next thing I want to talk about with only launching them, I don't know about a week ago now, not even a couple days ago, right after Christmas. So less than a week of launching the forums, I think it was a 20, a 26, I launched them in today's 29th and only a few days, I've racked up 16,000 paid views and there's just about 200 people subscribed to the forums and signed up. So that's pretty awesome for just getting started. So it's got me really encouraged. And once again, I'm always looking for feedback on both my videos and in the forums because I want to be able to engage with people more so I can focus my content towards what the audience is looking for. A lot of times my content is driven by something I know that I'm looking for and if I can't find it, I put it out there. And that doesn't just based on things I can't find now. It's things historically I had to look up before. And that's just kind of a driving force behind my channel. How do I do this? How do I do that? Well, no one's on a video on it. So after I get the thing done and figure it out, I will follow up and do a video on it. That has actually led me to a longer list than I could possibly accomplish. But that's OK. That always means I have something to do. I never run out of ideas because working in the industry gives me a lot of insight and going, hey, you probably want to see a video on this. So I have a few big ones coming. One of them is the large deployment we just did of access points. So I want to talk a lot about planning and a lot about deployment, especially when you start talking about deploying 300 access points at a time. You just are working at a slightly different scale. So you have to think about how you're going to handle that. And in wonderful news, and I'm apologizing a little bit to my friends over at Cabinium Networks, new friends we made, there's a bunch of boxes from Cabinium Networks. Now, we've already unboxed a few things and started testing it. I was really hoping to get a couple reviews done before Christmas. I didn't really have time. Good news is everything we've tested has gone really well, so we're excited to start doing some videos on that. I've been preoccupied with a few other things, including a giant hole in my backyard for those of you that follow me on the vlog where I talked about that. So a few things took away some of my free time outside of work that I spend creating a lot of these videos. But if you notice in the background, that does say disk station if you're going to read it. We are working with Synology. They want to start having us do some reviews. So we received that the other day. Once again, I didn't get to it before the end of the year, but it's on the table because it's one of the first things that hopefully if everything goes well, I'll be reviewing tomorrow morning. So my first New Year's video will be some of the details on that. I don't know if I'll get the review completely done. Just my flow and process is generally test things, work on them for a little while, use them a little bit. That way my reviews are not just another unboxing video. I try to give you some insights from using it. And we have had a few clients and we have used Synology before. That's one of the reasons we wanted to work with them is we have it in the field. So there's a lot of things we know about them, but I'm going to talk more specifically about the hardware and then we'll set up some scenarios inside of our office, inside of our lab to share with you. Now, there has been a lack of hot sauce videos. A few people asked about it. It just comes down to kind of being busy. This year, my company's seen a lot of growth partly from YouTube. Thank you very much for everyone who hired us for things and met us on YouTube. That's been wonderful. It's also been in part just because we've gotten busier. Word of mouth is still the absolute best seller for any business. In terms of your referral base is still amazing as long as you're doing a good job and people refer people that they like or that they would want to refer. And I've talked about this in some of my business talk videos, which I'm going to have some more of. But that's still the number one lead generation for us is all the referrals we get and we got referred quite a few clients, a lot of new MSPs. And as anyone who has followed my channel, we do both a hybrid approach because we still do breakfix and we still do MSP. Some people, it's a fit to just call us when they need us. Other people, it's a fit for them to switch to a managed service. And so that hybrid approach is what's worked for us. I have a whole series on MSP I'm going to be doing. Part of before I wanted to do those videos was the forums. I felt were a necessary part of that. So before I started that series of videos, I want to, after I do the video, engage with the audience better. And YouTube is just a difficult platform in terms of the way their forum works of having good discussion. So those videos are coming. More business talk videos. And what I want is that more engagement, more in depth engagement. And it's a public discussion of how we do things. And we're very open and honest about how we do all of our work here. I don't believe there's any secrets to business at all. And I don't like when people think you're holding a secret from them. Sometimes people are looking for shortcuts, not secrets. But for the most part, there's not really any secrets. I almost dropped my phone. Whoops. And so this is just a quick recap of of 2018. Like I said, it's been great for us. We're hoping and excited for a lot of new announcements we'll have in 2019. And we're going to be sharing, like I said, more things top to bottom. And of course, as we engage more with people in the forums and build more knowledge bases around that, we're just real excited to have that more engagement with people so we know what you want. And, you know, I'll focus on creating more of that content. So more and more plans are coming. Not that they're secrets. They're just not well thought out yet. So until I get all my thoughts together, all we're going to be doing for 2018. No, I don't plan as much. I don't really set exact budget goals. Our number one priority is always customer service. I joke that when you call our phone, number one is tech support. Number two is sales. And then we kind of run the company that way a little bit. But it's always to me about having a product, you know, we're a service company. I look at what we do as a product of number one, you know, loyalty to our current clients, making sure that they're very happy before we run out and get new of them. Before I try to pursue any new revenue models, I always try to make sure that everything we have is nice and tight, that we're doing things properly, securely and with the absolute great customer service that our clients are used to receiving because that's more important to me than the money about this company. So, hey, I got to make money to pay the bills, but the long term is what I'm looking for. I've been in business. This is my 15th year in business 2018. You know, I was looking at it going, wow, I've now had my company much longer than I had any job, even all my jobs together now. So, you know, I was at start of my company when I was only like 26 years old. So having it 15 years later, yeah, I got a few years ahead of me. But I want to make sure the integrity is everything to me and making sure that my company is representative of how I think it should be, not just a place to make me money. Anyways, a quick babbling about that. Thank you for everyone that's been hanging out for 2018. Watching all the videos and all the feedback, especially all of you that have joined the forums, if you're not among them. Even if you just want to go there and lurk, feel free to join up. It doesn't cost anything. I'm not harvesting any email addresses or anything. I don't even have a mailing list and maybe I'll get one. But it'd be very, very opt-in because I myself don't follow mailing lists very well. So I'm horrible about ever trying to someone out. That's why we don't have one and I don't like a lot of junk mail. The last thing I'm going to do here is my friend Pascal. He sent me some chocolates that I haven't opened yet. I'm guessing they're chocolates. I'm taking them to have in the dark. Also, I got a new lens. It lets me do macro focus really well. So that's exciting. And many of you sent me hot sauces. I tried to give a shout out whenever we got a new hot sauce on a vlog Thursdays and I just figured, hey, I'm here. I'm going to open this one. I don't know. I guess I'm guessing that he put chocolates on there. So he's from Belgium and we're going to open it real quick. And that's the last of the video. And then I'll say goodbye. And then I got to go to prepare for a New Year's party and fun stuff like that. So what did Pascal send to Belgium? He's on the forums too. You can find them. He posts under that name. I don't reveal anyone's name that doesn't tell me. I don't even know his name is Pascal. He says his name is. I don't know his last name and keeping privacy. So we got some. Ooh, says I was right. It's chocolates. Oh, yes, there's chocolates in here. These look good. All right, I'm going to continue to eat chocolates. And thank you again, everyone. That's if you've made it this far in a video and you haven't just said, Tom, shut up, you're babbling. But yeah, I'm looking forward to 2018. Come keep posts on the forums. I love video suggestion ideas, things I may want to cover. And if I won't cover them, I give you feedback on that, too. Some people ask for things. There's maybe reasons I don't want to cover them. But jump into forums. Feel free to engage with us. And if you're interested in hiring us, I'm not going to leave my end screen on this particular video. But if you want to hire us for something, go ahead and hire us. Subscribe to us if you want to see more videos. Probably not like this one. This one only comes once a year. So I'll be doing maybe how many more subscribers I had next year. I'm also looking for collaboration. So if you are a fellow tech YouTuber and we have an alignment of, you know, things that may be interested, I have a few people on my list I may be reaching out to. And we're also looking at, we may get a couple of channel sponsors because unfortunately, I mean, YouTube's great, but it doesn't pay as much money as people think unless you're doing mainstream videos, the ad revenue is not amazing or anything. So we may get a couple of sponsorships. But I've been very, very careful about that. Anybody who sponsors me, it's going to be something aligned with us and not just random. I've heard enough mattress commercials, I'm sorry. And some of the other ones out there, it's going to be something more tech audience related, but it's, it'll have to be a product I believe in because I get reached out to all the time by companies that are not products I believe in, which is why they don't sponsor. Once again, integrity means a whole lot to me. All right, thanks and a happy new year to everyone. Also, I'm not sure what this is. I don't even know what all these are, but these are amazing. Like this is really good chocolate. Thanks. Thanks, Pascal. This was, if you're, if you want to send us some boxed up seal candy from your neck of the woods or something from Amazon and ship it to our office, our address is on our website. Thanks.