 This is Think Tech Hawai'i. Community matters here. Okay, we're on. This is Think Tech. It's a two o'clock block. Business in Hawai'i, and I'm standing in as the host today. I'm Jay Fidel, and we have two guests. Tim Arnes, Arnes. Ames. Ames, sorry, my handwriting. And John Stranberg. Tim is the CTO of Hawai'i Tech Support with the Profit Corporation. Correct. And John Stranberg is the sales director of that same company. Correct. But the interesting thing is this is not necessarily limited to that company. It involves nonprofit products, services, computer management issues on a sort of parallel basis, related basis with an entity called non-profit tech. Yeah. Okay, so first tell me how you guys got involved in tech. What did you do for training? How did you get into the business, so to speak? You want to start, John? I have the easiest story. Back in 2000, I walked into a General Motors dealership with a laptop on my left hand. And within six months, I said, you're a new IT director because you own your laptop. But that was my start in tech and just kind of ballooned with it ever since. Okay. So you got a guy there that knew how to log into a computer. Pretty much. That made him the number one. Very important DJ. Okay. And Tim, how about you? Myself, I got started back when I was young in teenage years. So I got started with radio communications. Ham radio? Ham radio. I'm a ham radio operator. I graduated high school, went straight into the Marine Corps, did 10 years active duty Marine Corps, communications, technology. Learned a lot that way. Learned a lot more, probably quicker than I should have in times. And got out of the Marine Corps, was a DOD civilian, also working still with technology on some of the bigger Navy Marine Corps contracts. Retired from the Hawaii Army National Guard as a chief warrant officer. And just, I've just been doing technology. Great fun. Yeah. Great time to do it. And talking to my friends about this, you know, managed services is so important to people. And, you know, you can say we got all these products and everything lives on the cloud and everything, but you still have to make it work. You do. Yeah. A lot of people pull their hair out trying to make it work. So you helped them. We helped them. Because essentially you are a managed support, managed services organization Hawaii Tech support. Yeah. So we provide managed services for small, medium-sized businesses. That's our big wheelhouse right there is the folks that don't have an IT department or they may have an IT department, but they don't have the deep bench strength. So smaller companies. Right. You know, when you get up to about 50 folks, then you start having an IT dedicated IT staff. But, you know, that dedicated IT staff becomes more of a logistics position than anything else. And we help fill in the bench strengths for security, cloud computing. It's a big one. General strategy. General strategy. Yeah. Being that virtual CIO to take the vision of the organization and turn it into, you know, something that transforms IT from a cost center into something that helps with production. Well, you can make them or break them, really. I mean, you give them the secrets to the kingdom and then they find that they can be profitable where they would not be otherwise. Absolutely. Yeah. So you become critical for them. Right. We were having a conversation with actually a director of a national nonprofit, but the local branch here, and he was telling us when he was insurance, he was the one guy that learned how to do the sequel database. You know, that they had all their customers on and he learned how to do the secret sequel queries. This is back in the day. This is 20, 25 years ago. And that was his secret sauce, you know, just just being able to quickly generate reports. He would tell his customers, you know, yeah, I could, I could do that for you. Oh, it sounds really tough. And then he, he spit it out in a, you know, an hour and he delivered it to the customers. And that was their secret sauce. Yeah. That was pretty cool. It wouldn't work today. Yeah. Everybody knows a secret house. Yes. So, okay, how old are you? I mean, the company. The company is going to be 15 years and just turn 15, actually. Wow. Okay. 15, yeah. Now somewhere along the line, you got the idea that there are a lot of nonprofit products out there. You should have a sort of parallel company. Well, it started off because we started working with more and more nonprofits in the last five years. We support some of the larger nonprofits here in Hawaii now. And it's just, oh, they didn't hear about half the products that we're bringing into them. Like TechSoup, a couple of nonprofits we worked with from the beginning had never heard of it. So with TechSoup, you get reduced price for software, in a lot of cases, hardware as well. And they just never heard of it. And here we are showing them this manna from heaven because you get everything pennies on a dollar. Yeah. For instance, Microsoft products, two bucks. And the thing is for an ordinary nonprofit, smaller is probably more accentuated, for an ordinary nonprofit, you don't know. You have no idea. And if you said to somebody in the staff, go find out to me where the pennies are, where I can get special deals from organizations that support nonprofits. That's a major research effort. You'd have to go scouring the net all over the place to find out that stuff. But even then, what you find on the Internet is not true. Or it's not available in Hawaii. So here we are. We came in and said, let's go find how we can help. Because we support a lot of nonprofits from a business standpoint. And as individuals, we're both belonging to various boards and organizations are like, how can we help? And this became nonprofit. So this is why we're here today to discuss the nonprofit end of what you do. Yeah. And like John said, we identified a problem. And the problem wasn't that these nonprofits didn't have the resources available. It's one, they didn't know how to locate those resources. Or two, it's kind of like, there's a lot of organizations that will take old laptops and old computers, refurbish them, and then make them available to nonprofit organizations. But I kind of liken it to in some of the developing nations where they'll get hundreds of thousands of cast-off Super Bowl shirts because they were printed up for both teams. Well, one team didn't win the Super Bowl. So those shirts get shipped off. And now you've got an entire nation running around with old Super Bowl shirts, but they just don't know what to do with this stuff, right? Same thing with nonprofit companies. They'll get a bunch of technology. How do you use it? What good is it? Is it causing more of a burden to the company to get this stuff? Then it's actually work. And so what we're trying to do is tell companies, you know, give us your business. Tell us what your business is. Let us align a strategy, an IT strategy that coincides with what you're trying to do as an organization. What's awesome about nonprofits is I don't care if I'm a huge supporter of the cause or what, everybody in nonprofits trying to help, right? So if we can give back and help them do their mission, hey, that's what it's all about. You know, we help them do it right. We help develop a strategy. And then we look at these cleaning houses like TechSoup. You know, we're a lot of non-profit, we're a lot of organizations like Microsoft, Amazon, CISL. They're giving things away. They're giving things away. And we say, look, here's all the stuff they're giving away. You don't need 90% of this, but the 10% you need is available. Here's how you get it. And here's how you don't waste your money. Even if it's just a little bit of money, you know, pennies on the dollar, you still don't want to waste it. You know, you have a mission or support or your time. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, this is really a matching arrangement. You have to find out what they need. Yeah. Even if they don't know, you find out what they need. And then you find out what's available as freebies out there by organizations that like to give freebies to non-profits. And then you put them together. Yes. And now you have magic because nobody's wasted time and they have a much better system than they had a little while ago. Well, I'd like to examine though where this fits with you guys. In other words, you have two parts to the business. One is the regular managed services part, which doesn't necessarily involve non-profit companies or non-profit products. And then you have the non-profit organization. So how do you work with each other? So the two-headed kind of thing? You talk to each other and you talk to yourselves. Sometimes way too much. We talk to each other. But it's more of we see the need for the non-profits. So we have the non-profit arm to support, get them up and running, use the services that are available. But then the for-profit and we step in after, now that you have everything set up and in place, now you have to be concerned about cybersecurity, updated training, managing your actual systems that you have. So that's where the for-profit steps in and says, we can do all this or we marry you somebody else. When you get some kind of non-profit benefit or some kind of special arrangement, say for Microsoft, you don't get it for the profit company. You get it for the non-profit company. And am I right? And you pass it through to the other non-profits. When it comes to the non-profits up, we want to keep that very separate. We want to keep our governance and compliance on the up and up. We're not trying to create any conflict of interest. In Hawaii, it's unique because we started the non-profit foundation. We're also a for-profit managed service provider. We don't want to be the only person in the game helping out the non-profits in Hawaii. We would love for other managed service providers to get in contact with us and we're working on making that happen. We want to vet other service providers, whether they're one or two person shops or bigger entities like ourselves with 20 folks on staff that can provide 24-7 help desk support. We want to get other entities involved so that folks have a choice of who they use as a managed service provider. We also want to take this nationwide and eventually globally to where we're vetting the service providers and we're saying, look, deal through us. Let us refer you these folks because we've already checked your services out. We know you're up on the up and up. You're going to be around for a while. We're doing due diligence. But yeah, we don't want to be the only ones in game. The non-profits that we're talking about, the non-profit entity, is actually a non-profit corporation, right? Correct, yeah. We deal with not only you as Hawaii tech support, but other tech support companies in Hawaii. Am I right about that? Oh, for sure. Yeah, very much so. So if I drew it out, the non-profit would be in the middle of a lot of managed service organizations. Yeah, ideally that's where we want to be. Yeah, and we're just going to give advice to the non-profit organizations to say, look, we'll get you up and running for practically free. As close to free as you can, based on what you'll have to pay in the end, $16 for a Windows server license versus $1,200, for example. So there's a little cost on some of this stuff, but we'll get you up and running. How you keep up and running, you can hire an IT person, you can come to us or go through our referral program. So you're not really competing with the other? Well, you're not changing the model of competition. You'd be in the field of managed support services, so would other people. Yes. The only thing that's common is you have this non-profit organization which is really in a good place to find the non-profit benefits to share them. So my question before the break is, how is the non-profit entity compensated for its contribution to this formula? If an organization at MSP goes through the vetting process and they seem like a good fit and somebody that's going to support our non-profit communities, there will be a referral. We'd expect a referral fee to be in place to support the non-profit on NP technology because non-profits is not our only, it's not our only mission. In addition to that mission, we also want to support STEM education for our white youth. You guys are really very LMOs in there, common good, altruistic. Yeah, the funny thing is when we support STEM technology, we want to be able to build labs that kids can actually get into and just be regular IT folks doing their day to day. And we're going to build that in those places like Amazon Web Services in Microsoft Azure to give these kids a real-world experience of managing real services. So the way that non-profit is compensated because it needs to have some income in order to stay alive, any entity non-profit or a profit has to have some income to stay alive, whether it's a contribution, tax-free charitable contribution or otherwise. It sounds like to me, just from what you said, that it's a referral fee. It's a referral fee by the organization, whether it's you or somebody else, like Hawaii Tech Support, the managed service provider, is going to pay a referral fee back to the non-profit for its assistance in arranging these non-profit benefits. Correct. Yeah. Okay. I figure it's a win-win. Yeah. It's just one model. The other one is contributions from viewers like you. It's a referral fee. Which we will also do that. We would be starting out as well. Tim and I both have a lot of board experiences. We're good at asking for money. Grants are available out there for what we're going to be doing. And it's not just from a Hawaii grantor yourself. Okay. We did our due diligence and did some research. Okay. I want to take a break now, but when we come back, I'd like to get more specific about exactly what benefits are out there and exactly what kind of clientele are interested in those benefits. Perfect. We'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Compassionate and humane world for all of us. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate, empower, and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4 p.m., and we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. Yeah. I'm thinking about what you guys were saying before and that's Tim Ames and John Strandberg of Hawaii Tech Support and also non-profit tech, too, related companies that do non-profits, non-profit benefits for non-profit companies. You know, non-profits are hard because, you know, you don't make it up in volume. You lose it in volume. Unless you have some kind of cash flow, you can't continue. And really, there are some sad stories out there about very high-minded non-profits that went out of business. And I think that one of the threads about that phenomenon here in Hawaii is that they never got their administrative act together. They weren't able to write a letter. You know, you got to write a letter. You got to keep files. You got to be able to communicate with, you know, your organizational components. And if you can't do that, you're not going to succeed either as a profit or a non-profit. As you said in the break shot, non-profits are businesses, too. And, you know, you've got to do all the things you've got to do for a profit business. It's like running a business, exactly. It's going to be a non-profit business. So you guys are enabling, you know, elementary organizations to actually continue in business. This is a great gift to them and to the community because, by definition, they're helping the community. There's a lot of volunteers out there. This is a great contribution as a community, you know, effort. So I guess my question is, you alluded to this earlier. What kinds of products and benefits are available that this hypothetical small non-profit doesn't know about, which it could use? Just, you don't have to give away the secrets. Oh, I don't mind. No, this is why I'm here. I want to give away the secrets. I want folks to know about it. Now, the challenge isn't so much as what's available. It's almost like what's not available in the technologies sector that technology companies don't offer. So Adobe is a good example. Adobe Creative Cloud with the, you know, the Photoshop and all that can be quite expensive. Very powerful, important program. Very powerful, very important. This subscription model makes it very expensive. It does. So if you go through TechSoup, for example, and you purchase a license in Adobe Creative Cloud license with all of the apps enabled, it's $5 a year. How much? $5 a year. For one seat. For one seat. Oh, one seat that can handle up to two concurrent questions. We have to talk after the show. That's a good example. Another great example is web services. So every organization is going to have a website now with some kind of landing page with the donate button, you know, especially around the holiday seasons because this is the big drive. This is the big push for nonprofits to get their message out there. People are in the giving mode. It's also end of year. Slicing, contribution, doing fundraising. And get that last charitable contribution in before the tax season ends. Well, how do you get the message out there? Google offers $120,000 a year in matching ads credits. Okay, so what that means is you're able to get your message out there. Amazon Web Services offers $2,000 a year in free web hosting. Azure, Microsoft Azure does something similar, about $3,500 a year. And Microsoft has also made it their mission to bring on board. I believe they said 8,000 new nonprofits in this model, right? Because they want that. They want that. They want to become what Google and Amazon are, you know, to nonprofits. And I think that's a very important message. So when you use these cloud, when you leverage these cloud credits and you're able to host somebody's website for free, you know, if you're able to host somebody's desktop environment for free, a remote desktop environment. What's the catch? Whenever something sounds too good to be true, you have to look carefully. Well, the catch is it's usually these multi-billion dollar organizations that are doing this. So you're not going to find a lot of the one-off software companies that do very specialized stuff. You're not going to often find them doing charitable donations. So there may be some software out there or some specialized hardware that you just can't get through this, these types of programs. The other catch is, like I say, it's going to be dumped on your desk. If you go directly through Microsoft or you go directly through Amazon, you're going to get the products, but then you're stuck with the problem. How do you set it up? How do you make it work? So it sounds to me like one of the golden rule here is you really can't take advantage of these opportunities in any, you know, coordinated, cohesive way unless you have a managed service provider of some kind who helps you find them and also helps you use them. Otherwise, you're spinning your wheels and killing your time. Think of it this way, it's like having a carpenter with a box of tools that doesn't use those tools. You have them all. You carry around with you. Yeah. But until you actually use that hammer and that saw, it's carried around with you. You've got that in your belt. Yeah. So this is really important to have this connection. Right. So do you ever refer clients to other managed service providers so you let them find their own? How does that work? You're in a kind of galaxy of managed service providers. Well, as Hawaii tech support, there's certain things that we do not do. So we don't, for example, we don't do website development. We partner with other, we have partners to send those referrals to and for no cost. We just, we like the work that some of these folks do. We refer them on that basis. There's some other things that we don't do because, you know, how it is, IT is very specialized and to be very good at something, you have to not focus on other things. So yeah, there's cases where that would happen. There's other, for example, if somebody comes to us from California, we're going to have a difficult time supporting them remotely if there's the need for somebody to be on site. Not say it can't happen through the use of smart hands, but we prefer that they make a partnership or a relationship with a local provider in that area. And that's where we come in to say, let's look at your strategy. Let's look at what you need to survive as a, as an organization, as a nonprofit organization. And let's find the, let's find that provider. So you, that's very nice of you to do that. Yeah, so you're full service in a way. So I was going to ask you, John, about who are the people, the companies, the nonprofits, essentially, that you're serving? What is the landscape about nonprofits out now? What are they doing? How are they doing? What kinds of activities are they engaging in? Who's the market you're appealing to? Right now we're, as a company, we're appealing to like that mid-level market where it's, they're at, they're beyond a startup as a nonprofit because nonprofits grow through a life cycle. There's the national companies, then there's the local nonprofits, but these are more of the, getting to be the mature stage. And they're realizing, oh, the technology we received 15 years ago is still being used, and we're not keeping up. So we're engaging those types of nonprofits. Because they don't, they don't have the inside expertise. Right, so they, You can bring that to them. So usually what happens is, you start off with five person office, a volunteer comes in, has all the expertise, sets them up 10 years ago. And a lot of these nonprofits are still operating at 10 year mode. The computers are still there. I came across one recently where they're still running Windows XP because that's what was set up for them and they never changed. It just continued to work. And their, their model is very set in stone because they've never adapted to the new technologies. Well, that's, that's true because when you get in there and you consult and when you offer them these benefits, especially when they're stuck in something, you know, they, they're using old technology, they haven't really stepped up. You're going to change the way they do business. Absolutely. It's not just computers, it's everything, isn't it? It's to the point where I've come across a lot of nonprofits where they're operating as if it's early 2000. And technologies leapfrogged them by decades almost. And they're just starting to come through and go, we need to actually move our emails off of this free stuff from Yahoo or whatever it was back in the day. Someone used Hotmail as their primary email or a business one. That scared me. Yeah. And if I, if I'm clicking, if I'm clicking on a link that's going to donate money to JoshMo at Hotmail.com, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to think twice about whether, you know, continue your savvy donor. That's what we want them. Big issue for these companies. Big. It is. And I'm sure you find a lot of them that are not handling it very well. And Jay, what would you say if I said that if a 25 or less, you know, 25 person or less office should not be paying anything for their email? And that includes having a professional domain name. So for example, instead of JoshMo at Hotmail.com, it's JoshMo at, you know, hotnonprofit.com or whatever it is, you know, that should be something that, that, you know, fits into their, their marketing, their, their image, their, you know, their persona of who they are. So that when I'm thinking of this person, I'm thinking of the, the nonprofit technology and that fits into their, their strategy. So nonprofits are a brand if they don't brand themselves online properly, they're going to lose donors. They're going to lose volunteers. Yeah. So without the proper branding that we can support them with, they could fail. And we don't want to see nonprofits fail. No, it's bad for everybody. It is. And you want to encourage them. We should all encourage them. One other thing is, you know, so nonprofits always looking for money, always trying to find fundraising. I can tell you about that. What, what is your favorite kind of computer software to do that? Managing fundraising. So I'm, I'm pretty, we're, we're very vendor agnostic, but a lot of folks have had success going straight with things like Razor's Edge. That's a pretty popular line. There's, if you're just going with like the donation buttons and if you, if you actually use, you know, a nuts to bolts productivity system like Microsoft's office with Power BI and all of that stuff with the Dynamics 365 CRM. So if you're actually incorporating all this, it's really sky's limit on what you want to do as far. Biggest thing though is getting that, you know, getting that donate button on your website. Or, you know, making sure that when you send out the emails that you're able to point them to a landing page like ours, for example, nptechnology.org. It's a, it's, it's set up using a, you know, our nonprofit subscription and it's set up as a landing page using all free stuff, but it's, it's well done. You know, it's, it's using WordPress. It's using all the latest stuff. And if a nonprofit could just get to that point where they could just have a donate button, I think that's fine. Now the CRM, the customer relationship management, that, that's a whole, you know, that, that's a whole. There's lots of companies out there do that. So you, you make a strategy. You put a nonprofit in, in contact with, you know, Microsoft say it's going to offer them a CRM or whatever kind of software at a good rate or for free. It's, it doesn't end there though. That's what I wanted to ask you. It doesn't end there because a lot, a lot of these small companies, it won't end there for them. They, they're going to have a, they're going to, it's like the guppy swallowing the whale. They got to, they got to be taught. They got to be trained. All their people have to be taught and trained. They have to build, renew their whole operation around the new software. It's definitely a culture shift with a lot of nonprofits. So are you going to participate in that? We actually, we're going to go down there and show them the way. We facilitate change and show them this is how things are being done today based on these technologies. This is how it correlates back to what you've been doing. And this is the steps you get there. We can't change culture. We can't change people overnight, but enough interaction will get us to that point. Yeah. And let me talk about our secondary mission as NP technology. Our secondary mission on, you know, in addition to helping the nonprofits with their technology needs is to train our next generation of technologists. So Non-profit and otherwise. Non-profit and otherwise. But you know, it's folks like us that, you know, are doing this full time as technology experts that have the time or the wherewithal to go help the nonprofits in a very quick and effective fashion. If we can train up the next level of folks to do that, get to the high schools, get to the colleges, make sure that they have the wherewithal to provide services, then as they become successful, as we, you know, as they can intern with these nonprofits to support them or, you know, and they become successful in their own careers, they can go back and help them. Oh, this is very noble and very important. It's actually, you know, I'm giving a talk in the next few weeks about this very subject. Oh, great. So we have to talk some more. So as a company, every chance we get to help with a STEM project at a school, we're there. Yeah. A couple eight weeks out, we're out there. It's about making people literate, making kids literate. So, okay. Have we covered the future? Because if not, then I have to ask you my last question. What's in the future for you guys? What do you see? You can give me the keys to the kingdom now. What are you planning to do? Well, we want to go from, we want to get a really good base of supported Hawaii non-profits. And then we want to take this nationally and then eventually globally because it doesn't, you know, Hawaii's great. Hawaii has a lot of non-profit needs. As you go across the nation, across the world, the needs shift, but the needs are always there. There's always a need for folks to help each other out. So that's where we want to get to. It's a great model for other MSPs like us to follow or assist in a non-profit as their own community. Great. We want to start that here and have it just grow with all the spirit as we are. And it'll always be relevant. You know, the circumstances that you've described are going to stay that way and increase. Technology's not going away. No, not going away. It's getting more complicated. Non-profits aren't going away. Freebies, big companies, and people who need training, they're not going away. In fact, they're growing. In fact, in other continents, who knows where they are growing as we speak. Yeah, and I really feel like there's this big surge over the last decade or so, especially as the younger kids, what we refer to as millennials, but we'll refer to them as people that are grown up with the idea that it's good to help people. And so as these people are getting into the workforce and they're starting their own organizations, I want to make sure that the helpers are getting the help that they need. Tim Ames, Sean Strandberg. Thank you. Thank you very much, you guys. Thank you. All the best on this great venture. Terrific. Bye-bye.