AI, Cybersecurity, and IT Innovation with Open Tier Systems

Are you looking to optimize your business IT and cybersecurity strategy? In this episode, we sit down with Rick Carpenter and Brian McCarthy of OpenTier Systems, an IT managed service provider that's been transforming businesses since 2006. We discuss their partnership, the unique IT solutions they provide, and how they help small businesses scale and stay secure in an ever-evolving tech landscape. Plus, we dive into trending topics like AI, automation, and cybersecurity. Tune in to learn how OpenTier Systems is empowering companies across the nation to thrive in a digital world!

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🎙️ Welcome to the Shoemaker Lab podcast, your go-to source for insights, inspiration, and actionable tips in the world of business, entrepreneurship, and creativity!  This podcast explores stories of local businesses, entrepreneurs, and creatives, while also offering solo shows where I share valuable knowledge and advice on video marketing, social media, and navigating the digital landscape.

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Creators & Guests

Host

Dane Shoemaker

Founder and Owner of Shoemaker Films, Dane Shoemaker is an entrepreneur and filmmaker who interviews business owners, creatives, and brand-builders across the Greater Philadelphia region and beyond.

What is The Shoemaker Films Podcast?

The official podcast of Shoemaker Films. We share wide-ranging content that includes compelling interviews with creatives and entrepreneurs across the globe, as well as "double-clicks" on trends across the digital marketing landscape, from social media, technology, filmmaking, and more. Tune in to gain some practical wisdom and hear captivating stories from some of the world's top minds.

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Dane Shoemaker: 00:03

Alrighty. Well, welcome to the Shoemaker Films podcast. I'm here today with Rick and Brian of OpenTier Systems. How are you guys doing today?

Brian McCarthy: 00:10

Doing alright. Thanks for having us.

Dane Shoemaker: 00:12

Yeah. Thanks for thanks for being a guest on here. Tell me a little bit about OpenTier Systems.

Brian McCarthy: 00:19

Well, I'll I guess I'll take the lead on that one. Yeah. OpenTier, we've been around since 2006.

Dane Shoemaker: 00:24

K.

Brian McCarthy: 00:24

We're an IT managed service provider. We work with businesses mostly in this Philadelphia, Delaware Valley area.

Dane Shoemaker: 00:32

Okay.

Brian McCarthy: 00:32

We have some national clients, and we focus on IT, networking, cybersecurity, voice over IP. Okay. Building those solutions out for small businesses that are usually too small to, have their own internal

Dane Shoemaker: 00:48

We have some fans.

Brian McCarthy: 00:48

Yeah. We have we have fans over there.

Rick Carpenter: 00:50

Josh holding up our mission

Brian McCarthy: 00:51

vision. Nice.

Rick Carpenter: 00:52

He's like, don't forget.

Brian McCarthy: 00:53

Don't forget.

Dane Shoemaker: 00:54

Nice. Right. That's great.

Dane Shoemaker: 00:56

And partners, co owners? Partners, co owners. Yep.

Brian McCarthy: 00:59

We actually came together about a year and a half ago, a little over a year and a half ago at this point. Okay. Rick had his own entity at the for number of years, and I'll let him talk about that. And

Rick Carpenter: 01:10

Yeah. Same thing.

Dane Shoemaker: 01:11

I was

Rick Carpenter: 01:11

running a company called Beyond Development since 2004. Brian and I, met through Josh, our sales manager. We did a couple projects together, consulted, talked, and then as this industry is growing and there's going to be more regulatory concerns and the ability need to scale and have more resources because you can't do IT just 9 to 5. Yeah. You have to have the ability to do 247 resources.

Rick Carpenter: 01:35

So we combined forces, and it's been great. It's really improved our product, I think, and given us the kept the small feel that our customers liked.

Dane Shoemaker: 01:44

Yeah. Do you guys do you feel like you brought different skills or different capabilities to the table? Yeah. Is it more just about scale?

Brian McCarthy: 01:53

You know, it's about both. It's about scale. I mean, we both have a a pretty similar skill set Okay. From what we're doing, but we figured when we were joining forces that I I would focus more on the business development, business aspect and and Rick focusing more on the technical service side.

Dane Shoemaker: 02:08

Okay.

Brian McCarthy: 02:08

Yeah. So Got it. The ability to divide and conquer a little bit.

Rick Carpenter: 02:11

Sure.

Dane Shoemaker: 02:11

And so you're the business. He's the technical

Rick Carpenter: 02:13

Yeah. The ability to Dip

Dane Shoemaker: 02:15

your toes into both a little bit.

Rick Carpenter: 02:16

Stats was great. Yeah. And also having someone else who trusts as an authority where if you previously, if I could not find the answer, there was no other option.

Dane Shoemaker: 02:26

Yeah.

Rick Carpenter: 02:26

And now just having a second person of equal skill being able to say, hey. Can you take a look at that? It's been an invaluable resource.

Brian McCarthy: 02:33

Mhmm. That's

Dane Shoemaker: 02:34

great. What about your careers? What you know, Brian, how about you? What did you start out? Were you always in IT?

Dane Shoemaker: 02:39

Or

Brian McCarthy: 02:39

Yes. Do you want the long or the short version?

Dane Shoemaker: 02:42

Do you know? The

Brian McCarthy: 02:43

Yeah. Back to being a kid. You know? My dad was a software developer.

Dane Shoemaker: 02:47

Okay.

Brian McCarthy: 02:48

And I ended up always just fixing his computers

Dane Shoemaker: 02:51

growing up. Really?

Brian McCarthy: 02:52

Yeah. So it was kind of a natural progression. Worked at CompUSA, worked at Merck, went into consulting right out of high school, and then just kinda built this up organically. So

Dane Shoemaker: 03:03

Nice. Yeah. Okay. Merck, how are you?

Rick Carpenter: 03:06

My dad was in finance, and so growing up, my mom always made fun of accountants for being boring. So I picked the equally boring profession to accounting. I worked for William and Mary right out of college. I grad I I worked for William and Mary while I was there as a student tech.

Dane Shoemaker: 03:21

Yeah.

Rick Carpenter: 03:22

When I graduated, that was the first big computer worm. So they were turning off ports 30, 40 computers a day, and they had to be patched and fixed. That was my first mass upgrade to that. I stayed there. My cousin had actually started an IT company.

Rick Carpenter: 03:37

Said at his wedding, actually said, hey. As soon as you wanna move to Pennsylvania, we've got work for you. And then I moved up. He and his partner both split their halves of the business, said we're never gonna get rich doing IT. I ended up taking over the whole thing for him, ran it by myself without a without a life raft for several years and learned on the job doing it that way.

Dane Shoemaker: 03:57

Yeah. Nice. You mentioned CompUSA. One of my earliest memories growing up, our family I I'm from Harrisburg area, and we drove to Philly to buy our first computer. It was a Windows Okay.

Dane Shoemaker: 04:09

I think 3 dot 1 or something like that in 94 or 93 or something like that. Yeah. And it was like it was like a magical moment bringing that thing home and setting it up.

Brian McCarthy: 04:18

I probably didn't sell it to you, but I I I worked there in high school. I was 15. It was, like, one of my first real jobs. Nice. So kinda just being around computers my whole life.

Dane Shoemaker: 04:28

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So you you guys serve the Greater Philadelphia, Delaware Valley areas. Do you have a typical type of client that you guys serve, company size, industry?

Brian McCarthy: 04:41

Yeah. That's a good question. So we actually have national clients.

Dane Shoemaker: 04:44

Oh, you do? Okay.

Brian McCarthy: 04:45

Yep. But the bulk of them are here. And from a profile, we look at construction vertical as as our primary vertical. Okay. And then engineering and kind of supporting professional services.

Brian McCarthy: 04:57

And then, companies that actually have internal IT departments, we'd like to work with them as well. You

Dane Shoemaker: 05:01

do. Okay.

Brian McCarthy: 05:02

Yep. Size wise, anywhere from, like, 10 to 200 employees Okay. Or office staff who have computer systems. Up you know, larger if they have field people who are not necessarily in front of a computer all day. Mhmm.

Dane Shoemaker: 05:16

Yeah. So, just what does a typical engagement look like? I mean, you know, the types of services you're offering, technology you're supporting, is there a typical or is it kind of all?

Brian McCarthy: 05:27

Yeah. It's you know, I always tell people, we try to keep it, like, 75% the same across our whole client base, and then there's always that nuance across clients where things are a little bit different. Yeah. We're mainly Microsoft shop. So we focus a lot on Windows on the desktop, Windows servers, Azure 365 type things.

Brian McCarthy: 05:47

Mhmm. Why do clients usually come to us? I mean, the real answer is because they're dissatisfied with their current provider, and they're looking to improve their their tech, which, you know, isn't a great great way to always get them, you know, but sometimes we get new new business clients as well. But, yeah. So, I mean, that that part's been great.

Brian McCarthy: 06:09

You know, it just stinks that you have to take it for somebody else. And so

Rick Carpenter: 06:13

I would say just gonna to back to your question, there's 2 types of engagements. There's the co managed where they have internal staff and where they're providing the tools and the level one resources where they have, like, a CIO in place or the opposite where they have the low level people doing the printer resets and we're doing the virtual CIO versions of them. We're setting the security plans. We're creating the disaster recovery plans, meeting with the management, and then letting them do the day to day hours, and we're giving them the tools and the resources they need. So we have that for the co managed situations for the larger companies, and then we are the outsourced IT for the smaller companies where we set the goals.

Rick Carpenter: 06:47

We say, here's your security policy. Here's your compliances. We're gonna help you meet them Yeah. And let you guys focus on what you do best to make yourselves the most money.

Dane Shoemaker: 06:54

Mhmm. Do you have a preferred method, or do you like either one or they're just they're just different?

Rick Carpenter: 07:01

As long as the client views us as a partner, like a strategic partner and not a cost, I think those are the best engagements where we wanna make sure that their company has as much uptime as possible, that they can focus on what's generating them the revenue Yeah. Versus IT as a cost. I always joke there's 3 levels of IT spending. There's the first level, which is return on investment. Everyone's really excited about that, better, faster, stronger.

Rick Carpenter: 07:22

Then there's the second layer, which is, basically insurance where we're gonna put a bunch of stuff in. Hopefully, you're never gonna see why. And then there's the 3rd level, which is compliance. We're gonna set money on fire, and hopefully, it's less fast than the government will set it on fire for you. So

Dane Shoemaker: 07:38

Yeah. You mentioned you know,

Dane Shoemaker: 07:39

I mean, IT is is often looked at as a as a cost, like, as

Dane Shoemaker: 07:43

an expense on the on the bottom line. Right? But how how are you positioning your company and IT, you know, technology as a strategic, you know, kind of revenue driver? Is that is that a conversation you guys have with with clients?

Brian McCarthy: 07:55

Yeah. It's a it's a conversation, and and we look at it as either you're you're trying to enhance productivity and efficiency Mhmm. Or cut cost, one way or the other. And it's an expense. And, you know, they're trying to find that balance of minimizing the expense, but also having the best possible systems to be as productive as you can.

Brian McCarthy: 08:17

Yeah. So it's a juggling act. You know, you have clients who are yeah. Sure. Whatever you wanna do, go ahead and do it.

Brian McCarthy: 08:23

Yeah. You know? And then also clients who are kind of the opposite. You know? They they view it as a necessary evil.

Brian McCarthy: 08:26

Mhmm. You know? So it's it's Yeah. I have to use this computer. I'd rather do it on pen and paper, but everybody else is on computers.

Brian McCarthy: 08:44

So

Dane Shoemaker: 08:45

Right. Yeah. What about, you know, how how would you say you guys differ from other, you know, MSPs or IT providers in the area?

Brian McCarthy: 08:54

It's a good question. There's a lot of MSPs in

Dane Shoemaker: 08:57

the area.

Brian McCarthy: 08:57

You know, one thing that we constantly hear from our clients and people who have come to us from other MSPs, is the rapid response. You know, we're we're there when they need us. Things go wrong. You know, we can't predict everything. We can't get ahead of everything.

Brian McCarthy: 09:11

And when things happen, you know, we're there. And very, you know, quickly is is our goal. Yeah. So it's it. Is that a sexy differentiator?

Brian McCarthy: 09:21

Probably not. You know? But it's important. You know? Well, just

Dane Shoemaker: 09:25

yeah. Just be in there when people need you is critical.

Brian McCarthy: 09:28

Yeah. I mean, and I don't think people realize, like, how reliant they are on these systems now every day. Yeah. You know? If you can't work on your computer system, you're just not working.

Brian McCarthy: 09:37

Yeah. You know? And, you wanna get back up and running as quickly as possible. It's more about the owners wanting things done quickly. Yeah.

Brian McCarthy: 09:45

And the employees, you know, sometimes say they're okay with

Rick Carpenter: 09:50

it. Yeah. It's funny. We were at an IT conference. Like, how many of you will tell everyone that you respond faster and you do things more secure?

Rick Carpenter: 09:57

So there's really no way to prove it other than the testimonials from your clients. Mhmm. But from the stories we get when we talk to people, I know you had Dave Wyman on your podcast last year and or last week. Sorry. Yeah.

Rick Carpenter: 10:10

And he was telling when he switched over to be a client of ours. He's saying, yes. My IT provider is here, but sometimes it takes a week to get back to me or sometimes Yeah. I have to tell them about a problem whereas we are have the option to be more proactive and more policy based and say, this is what's in the market. This is what we're seeing.

Rick Carpenter: 10:30

This is the threat landscape. Go to them and say, this is what we think you need to do in order to ensure your business is up and running. And the the partnership part and the combination of the efficiencies of being a large company and having access to the best tools, but also the small business field where we know other small businesses what the pain points are because we are one too.

Dane Shoemaker: 10:49

Yeah. Yeah. David had good things to

Dane Shoemaker: 10:52

say about open tier also. I don't think he said it on in the podcast, unfortunately, but he we did talk about it a little bit, and he said you guys were were great. So so where what are you talking to like, what are clients asking you about right now? What are kind of the hot topics in IT?

Brian McCarthy: 11:09

A lot of questions around AI Okay. Which, you know, I think everybody's been talking about for the last 12, 18 months. Sure. The the cybersecurity questions have kind of tailed off in favor of the AI questions. Okay.

Brian McCarthy: 11:24

A lot of AI. I mean, people just it's so new. People don't quite understand how it works, how can it benefit them, what are the risks, things like that. Mhmm. So

Dane Shoemaker: 11:35

What are what are your thoughts on you know, I know that AI kind of covers a lot, you know, but, I mean, are there specific things that you're coaching your clients on? Is there things that you're advising around?

Brian McCarthy: 11:47

Yeah. I think we're still trying to figure it out for ourselves. Yeah. In addition to trying to figure it out for clients. Yeah.

Brian McCarthy: 11:53

You know, I could give you all my crazy thoughts. You know? I Yeah. And I talk about it a lot of, you know, where's where's this AI thing going? It's not going anywhere.

Brian McCarthy: 12:02

It's gonna it's going to be, more ubiquitous. And and and really, I look at it as a force multiplier for for businesses.

Dane Shoemaker: 12:09

Mhmm. Yeah.

Brian McCarthy: 12:11

You're not gonna replace people with it. You know, maybe eventually, but really you're just gonna make those people that much more productive, yeah, and make them better versions of themselves.

Rick Carpenter: 12:21

Yeah. So The current versions of that AI and the tools that are accessible to the small business are more of the automation tasks. It's a lot of note taking, a lot of summarization. You can get those easy to use for users, gen generative AI as far as creating new things. If you need to write a PowerShell script, AI can do that pretty well.

Rick Carpenter: 12:41

If you need to write a form letter, at, my wife always goes brain dumping, she'll say, I need these 9 points in my email. She'll put it in Google Gemini, and it'll give her 3 versions of it. We use Copilot. I generate a lot of the first drafts of our training slides through that. I'll give it make a slide on this just to get the background images, and then I'll put the I'll adjust the text to say what I want.

Rick Carpenter: 13:04

Mhmm. That's where we're seeing a lot of the use now. The so the marketing of AI versus the practical use AI that's successful to the small business is a little bit different right now.

Dane Shoemaker: 13:14

Yeah.

Rick Carpenter: 13:14

But eventually, what you're gonna start seeing is your products are gonna have the AI back end. But, really, it's just automation still because your spam filter from 20 years ago was just a small dataset, and now it's just built on a large dataset. So it's more likely the spam that's being generated is being generated by AI, and the spam that's being caught is being caught by AI. So it's just a it's a circular system that one's one's gonna get ahead of the other and keep going that way.

Dane Shoemaker: 13:39

Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, some of the I mean, we use chat gpt quite a bit just for writing out scripts or, you know, you know, any kind of document we need to write, you know, email, stuff like that. The Copilot stuff from Microsoft, I mean, it's pretty cool.

Dane Shoemaker: 13:55

You can just create a PowerPoint from nothing in a couple of minutes. I mean, that's amazing. So I definitely think that, you know, you know, if you leverage it right, you're never gonna take away human input. Right? You're always gonna have to be feeding it with with with what you need.

Dane Shoemaker: 14:12

So it's interesting landscape that we're in right now for sure.

Rick Carpenter: 14:17

It's funny. It is also an interesting threat landscape it's creating as well Yeah. Because just internal, if your AI is learning on your entire internal SharePoint dataset and you have your payroll information in there and you haven't walled that off or you have documents that you haven't put the correct controls on, you can ask the AI. And because it's learned from everything, what did our, CEO make last year? And it can come up with a reasonable guess based on the document has it available to it.

Rick Carpenter: 14:42

Or we've discussed our meeting all of our meetings, we have a bot in there that transcribes, records, and gives action items, which is incredibly helpful. But then legal discovery is everything you say in that meeting all of a sudden legally discoverable because it's stored on a server and the notes are accessible so, thus, they could theoretically be subpoenaed? What can you do on the record versus off the record? All of those questions about the ease of use versus we always joke with the Jurassic Park meme, the just because you could doesn't mean you should. Right.

Dane Shoemaker: 15:12

Right. What other what other trends are you guys following in the in the IT world, tech world?

Brian McCarthy: 15:19

Yeah. Automation is is pretty big. We're trying to, again, figure out how to tie in AI with automation and really, again, be a force multiplier for our staff. Yeah. Make them more effective and having to, normally say learn less.

Brian McCarthy: 15:36

That's not quite right, but be augmented. Yeah. Automation is is also gonna be the next, I wanna say, big thing, but is is a lot of repetitive tasks, robotic process automation. Mhmm. You get a client who comes on to our website.

Brian McCarthy: 15:53

They wanna open a ticket, and they hit a virtual agent. Virtual agent can help them out, help them set up a new account, all in automated fashion where they don't actually have to talk to a person and they can get instant service as opposed to having to put the ticket in, wait for a tech to look at it, ask them a bunch of questions, do a bunch of manual tasks. So automation, I think, is the next big thing for us and then by extension clients.

Dane Shoemaker: 16:19

Yeah. Okay.

Rick Carpenter: 16:21

Another big thing we're hearing about and we've been hearing about the last 4 or 5 years is cyber insurance because all of your employees are your top threat vector. They're the ones who have access to things. They're the ones that they're gonna try and be tricked. The information that's out about every single employee in your company, your structure, like, your CFO, new hires, it's all on LinkedIn. LinkedIn's been breached a dozen times now.

Rick Carpenter: 16:47

At least 4 known ones. So all that information's available, who reports to who, so you'll get the the SMS text, the, hey. I'm in a meeting. Can you send 5 gift cards here? Or we had we're talking to a church, and their member directory got compromised.

Rick Carpenter: 17:00

So they were Oh, wow. Soliciting for a cancer patient via so that's really that's incredibly effective. So they had

Brian McCarthy: 17:09

to send pretty smart. I mean, the way they did it, there's They

Rick Carpenter: 17:12

just sent out

Brian McCarthy: 17:12

a little bit.

Rick Carpenter: 17:13

Like, hey. Don't do this. And we've had a ton of clients where the man in the middle attacked a person in accounts payable gets their account compromised from our client's vendor. They'll then make a fake domain with a one instead of an I. So it looks the same.

Rick Carpenter: 17:30

Submit say, hey. We didn't get that check, or can you FedEx it here? We'll send you the prepaid envelope. Try and get a check-in the way. So there's a lot more schemes and threats and then making sure your insurance policies cover that because a lot of the times when they fill out their own insurance policy, they're asking specific questions.

Rick Carpenter: 17:47

And if you're just checking yes, then when you try and get paid on a breach and when you can't document that you had those processes in place. So a lot of what we're doing with clients is making sure, like, if you're saying yes on this, here's how to document it, here's how to prove it's in place to make sure you get paid if you do have to have an insurance claim.

Dane Shoemaker: 18:02

Yeah. Do you do you guys get into, I mean, offering insurance or or it's that's more of an

Dane Shoemaker: 18:08

insurance company. You guys are more on

Dane Shoemaker: 18:09

the IT operation side, security side.

Brian McCarthy: 18:12

It's a good question. We don't actually offer insurance policies, but a lot of the things we do are insurance for systems, not necessarily on paper, you know, getting paid out. But, EDR, antivirus, a lot of the systems that we put in place are insurance Yeah. In their own way. They're very preventative, and I mean, disaster recovery.

Brian McCarthy: 18:35

Yeah. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And, you know, god forbid something does happen, you have that policy from a large national carrier to fall back on.

Brian McCarthy: 18:43

Yeah. So

Dane Shoemaker: 18:45

Okay. Yeah.

Brian McCarthy: 18:46

No. That's not a world we we wanna be in. Yeah.

Dane Shoemaker: 18:49

Yeah. That sounds like a lot of headaches. Yeah.

Rick Carpenter: 18:51

It's not a world they wanna be in because premiums have doubled and tripled the last couple years.

Dane Shoemaker: 18:56

Right.

Brian McCarthy: 18:56

They are getting smarter, though, the the questions they're asking on their their policies. Mhmm. So it's good.

Dane Shoemaker: 19:04

So do do you guys do implementations or, like, system integration, or is it mostly just kind of a the managed services, like, post management side of

Brian McCarthy: 19:15

the house. Good question. So, kind of rolling back to your original question, I guess, about the typical engagement. A lot of times we'll come in. We will take over the support for an existing environment.

Brian McCarthy: 19:27

We'll do our assessment, and we'll figure out, okay, you need to upgrade this. This thing's fine. This thing needs to go away. Mhmm. And then we will put a big plan in place and, implement new servers, new email system, new applications, and then ultimately support that.

Dane Shoemaker: 19:45

Mhmm.

Brian McCarthy: 19:46

So, yeah, we just did one, this week. We just wrapped up a big email migration project from a for a a large home builder in the area.

Dane Shoemaker: 19:55

Okay. Nice.

Brian McCarthy: 19:57

Yeah. It's pretty cool. Ricky and his team did a great job. So I swear.

Rick Carpenter: 20:01

We always joke the every vendor we talk to will tell you what's wrong, but no one will fix it. So we're we're always the one stuck fixing it, implementing it, making it actually work, and being that last mile.

Dane Shoemaker: 20:12

Yeah. Let me just double check here.

Rick Carpenter: 20:21

While you're looking at that, I will I'll throw it back to you. Yeah.

Dane Shoemaker: 20:24

Because

Rick Carpenter: 20:24

I know you've talked about how you're using AI for your things to schedule, and do you wanna just highlight that now since it is your podcast? And I

Dane Shoemaker: 20:32

mean, yeah, I mean, you know, we use project management software called ClickUp that has something called ClickUp Brain in it. I think it has it might be ChatGPT on the back end. I have no idea. But that's just a lot of the like, we'll take this podcast, for instance, it'll take the transcript, and then we can take the transcript and kind of

Brian McCarthy: 20:55

repurpose that into emails,

Dane Shoemaker: 20:55

you know, copy for, you know, Twitter or or thing things like that. So

Brian McCarthy: 20:59

Is that like Clippy?

Dane Shoemaker: 21:02

It's like Clippy 2.0. Yeah. I would say Clippy 2.0 is probably more like Copilot. Right? Yeah.

Rick Carpenter: 21:08

Microsoft does have new shirts that say, we used to have Clippy, now we have Copilot.

Dane Shoemaker: 21:11

I know. Right? Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I think everyone's just kinda dabbling in, you know, AI and some of the video generation stuff though, kind of freaks me out a little bit. It's pretty wild.

Dane Shoemaker: 21:23

Yeah. But, you know, I think, you know, I think what we do is a lot of podcasts, kind of docu style, I think like journalism, like that type of stuff is not going to go away per se, right? I think if you're in the business of creating, you know, stock footage or, you know, stock images or things like that, you might be in trouble, but, you know, I think there's always going to be a place for, you know, business leaders getting in front of a camera and talking about their business. I hope so. You know?

Dane Shoemaker: 21:54

Certainly, there's gonna be I don't know.

Brian McCarthy: 21:56

I've been trying to figure out how to make a a virtual avatar of myself. I

Dane Shoemaker: 22:01

think we're not that far from there. I think we're not that far from there. You know, you can record this, you get 3 60 camera and, you know, feed some scripts in there. And, you know, we're probably a couple of years away from that, if not next year. And who knows?

Dane Shoemaker: 22:12

But, yeah, we'll see. You know, we're optimistic. I did one,

Brian McCarthy: 22:17

I think this was 2 or 3 months ago. It's just you make a video of yourself, kind of like a selfie. You read a script and then it converts you into a virtual avatar. Yeah. And does it in your voice.

Brian McCarthy: 22:32

It's it's pretty scary.

Dane Shoemaker: 22:33

Yeah. I mean and and, again, in in a year or 2, you're not even gonna be able to tell the difference probably. And I I look at these all like tools. So, I mean, you know, we're gonna be able to just scale up, you know, I hope, you know, rather than just being replaced by by AI, but, yeah, it's a it's an interesting time we're in right now.

Rick Carpenter: 22:53

Yeah. And it'd probably be nice when you're looking for, like, what episode was it that we talked about AI? And, like, oh, I can just search through all of my previous podcasts because they're all transcribed. Pull the 5 segments, make a supercut. Yep.

Rick Carpenter: 23:03

Then you have all your information there ready at hand.

Dane Shoemaker: 23:05

Yeah. Absolutely. What about what's, you know, for the future? Anything any plans for the future, or what does the open tier look like in a couple years? Growth.

Dane Shoemaker: 23:16

Growth.

Brian McCarthy: 23:16

Lot lot of like, goal the goal's growth. Yep. We are trying to add add clients, add staff, just grow our foot footprint so that we can better serve our clients. We, you know, we find that there's, like, this happy medium of being too small, but also being too large. And we're trying to find to get to that point.

Brian McCarthy: 23:35

We think that's probably around 40 to 50 team members here.

Dane Shoemaker: 23:40

Okay.

Brian McCarthy: 23:41

So that's the 6 year plan.

Dane Shoemaker: 23:43

Okay.

Brian McCarthy: 23:44

After this I haven't really thought past the 6 years. We're just trying to get get to that, and then, you know, we'll see what happens after that. Yeah.

Rick Carpenter: 23:52

You know, we're creating some strategic partnerships. There's some Okay. Types of lines of business that were very successful 10, 15 years ago that are starting to go away. So we're trying to see if we can integrate in with them, pull them in, voice over IP companies or, security data wiring, trying to add those, strategic partnerships. So that way we can be kind of our goal is to everyone be everyone's first call.

Rick Carpenter: 24:18

So that way we can bring that in and offer these services as well. And really, there's gonna be more and more regulation coming out, whether it's insurance driven or whether it's government driven. Just being able to have that compliance, be able to dot the i's, cross the t's for our clients so they can sleep well at night and know that their stuff is under control.

Dane Shoemaker: 24:38

Yeah. And and how many how many employees do you have today? 12 right now. 12. Okay.

Dane Shoemaker: 24:43

Yep.

Brian McCarthy: 24:44

Hopefully, 14 by the end of the year. So we got one starting on Monday. So Yeah.

Dane Shoemaker: 24:50

Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Anything anything else you guys wanna talk about?

Brian McCarthy: 24:57

Jeez. We could go on. We could go on for a while with stories and things like that.

Dane Shoemaker: 25:01

Yeah. Yeah. What's a success, successful client, you know, story you might wanna share for the last year or so?

Brian McCarthy: 25:09

Yeah. You know, a lot of our clients we

Rick Carpenter: 25:13

look

Brian McCarthy: 25:13

at their growth. Their growth is a success for us. Yeah. Being able to support them from when when they come to us being, like, 3, 4, 5 people. We have some some clients that started like that, and now they're, like, 50, 60, 70.

Dane Shoemaker: 25:26

Okay.

Brian McCarthy: 25:27

And that kinda look at that as a feather in our cap.

Rick Carpenter: 25:30

Yeah. You

Brian McCarthy: 25:30

know, we've supported them through that and and helped them get to that point. Yep. So we have a a number of those. I mean, if you wanna talk about any more appointed success stories as far as implementations.

Rick Carpenter: 25:43

Yeah. We had a I'm trying to think of my favorite example. We had one client that just sold last year, 2 years ago. They grew from 3 partners to 45 employees, then they all cashed out and retired. Their systems were easy to integrate with their buyer.

Rick Carpenter: 26:00

We were able to say, here's all your documentation. Here's your information. So they were in a good setup, so we felt pretty proud. Sad to lose them because we like them all.

Dane Shoemaker: 26:07

But Yeah. Yeah.

Rick Carpenter: 26:08

Very excited for them to have achieved their goals. We have another client now. It's completed a national rollout. We started with them. They were 10 users, and they now have full infrastructure and a full national setup, so they we have that down pretty well with them.

Rick Carpenter: 26:26

They're creating a lot of their automations internally. They're heavy into, Power Automate, Azure, and a lot of the cutting edge technologies, so being able to partner with them as they kind of figure out those technologies have been have been really exciting for us. But just general, the the local small businesses where it's just a, hey. You've been our client for 15 years. Yeah.

Rick Carpenter: 26:46

Talk to them, they're like I joke the, one client we have who is our direct contact now as a partner is the son of the original owner.

Dane Shoemaker: 26:56

Okay.

Brian McCarthy: 26:56

And I'm

Rick Carpenter: 26:56

like, I remember when you were getting in trouble in middle school, and I had to tell your dad that,

Dane Shoemaker: 27:00

I don't know why

Rick Carpenter: 27:01

his machine's all messed up. And now he's, now he's running the company.

Dane Shoemaker: 27:05

So That's pretty cool. Yeah. It's a lot of clients you've had for a long time watching them grow.

Brian McCarthy: 27:11

Yeah. You know, I always tell people, you know, it's kind of our lead sales pitch is, like, our first, second, and third clients are still clients from 2006. Nice. Yeah. So that's that's pretty awesome.

Dane Shoemaker: 27:24

Yeah. Testament to your your service and yeah. That's that's great. Anything else?

Rick Carpenter: 27:33

That's it. Appreciate it. We're we're excited about this the work you're doing, the podcast and the

Dane Shoemaker: 27:37

Yeah. Absolutely.

Rick Carpenter: 27:38

So always any opportunities to have more content, we recommend you.

Dane Shoemaker: 27:44

Yeah. Of course. Yeah. I appreciate that.

Brian McCarthy: 27:45

Sorry I didn't shave today. Same, I mean,

Dane Shoemaker: 27:51

I usually have a little gruff going anyway. So yeah. Nice. Yeah. How can, how can people find you?

Brian McCarthy: 27:58

I think the website is is the best avenue, open tier systems dot com. K. Phone is also easy. We have a nice easy phone number. 48453536100.

Brian McCarthy: 28:07

You can ask for Josh over there in the in the sales office. And, yeah, we're looking looking forward to that. You know, we always tell people let me just back up real quick. 95% of the the clients we get are from referrals.

Dane Shoemaker: 28:22

Okay.

Brian McCarthy: 28:23

So to get a client from our website kind of cold, that's always one of our goals.

Dane Shoemaker: 28:29

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it

Brian McCarthy: 28:31

seems to elude us, but that's fine because we have a lot of clients and, you know, they're great and Yeah.

Rick Carpenter: 28:36

They keep coming from the referrals. So, and it's hard to IT is really a trust industry. We have the keys to the kingdom. As I was joking on that implementation, they're like, are you gonna read all my mail? Like, I could read all your mail a week ago.

Rick Carpenter: 28:48

Like, I've had access to everything once I got set up. Yeah. Like, it's a we need they need to trust that we are doing what's in their best interest, and that takes a lot of time and a lot. So we really enjoy conversations. We enjoy speaking engagements, chambers of commerce.

Rick Carpenter: 29:04

We're very involved in mainline Chamber of Commerce and the Monaco Chamber of Commerce, being able to get out to events, meet people, talk to them because people always have there's always a new technology. The news does a lot of marketing for us in the sense that Right. You hear the scary stories, and so a lot of times is saying, like, oh, yes. That's a thing, but don't worry about that. You're protected because of x y z.

Rick Carpenter: 29:26

Being able to have those conversations with people, you know, while we try to avoid home users, we're happy to tell you, like, if you do x y z, you're gonna be

Dane Shoemaker: 29:37

okay. So Yeah. Yeah. I mean, trust is the big thing. I mean, it's so you know, it's very easy now to go sign up for, you know, an Office 365 account by yourself.

Dane Shoemaker: 29:45

You're a one man shop or 2, you know, 2 person company or something like that. But, you know, you you put a lot of trust into your in your IT and, you know, as you grow and having having a partner like you guys in place is critical. So Absolutely. And technology touches everything anymore. So not just IT.

Dane Shoemaker: 30:01

It's everybody's business. Or worse. Yeah. So Yeah. Cool.

Dane Shoemaker: 30:04

Well, it's great talking with you guys today. Good talking to you all soon. Yeah. Wish you all the success, and

Rick Carpenter: 30:09

yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks, dude.

Dane Shoemaker: 30:10

Yeah. Thank you. Got a little wrapped up there. Thanks, guys. Thank you.

Dane Shoemaker: 30:16

Thanks for listening today. Shoemaker Lab is an original production by Shoemaker Films LLC. If you enjoyed today's content, please consider subscribing on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your content. Follow us on Instagram at at shoemaker.films. And if you're a business that's either interested in our video production services or would like to be a guest on the show, get in touch by using the contact form on our website, shoemakerfilms.com.