John Corcoran 13:34
And, were you thinking I need to leave this sinking ship, or were you just thinking, this is too risky, if they lose that client then I would be out of a job.
Michael Moore 13:42
Well, I mean, my first thought was, I make this as a salary, and they keep talking about how they might have to start shifting salaries, you know, to, you know, they weren’t making it clear what was happening, but I could feel something’s about to happen. They’re going to lose the client, or they can’t find other clients, but I’m definitely going to lose employment. And I talked to my wife, who’s been, you know, my biggest support in all that we have done. And she’s like, you’re really good at business. Maybe you should start a business. So I started what is now m3 networks, and we came up with the name in like, a real quick 32nd conversation, because I was, well, we got to come up with marketing schemes.
We got to do this. And whatever it was, she said, Well, there’s me, Stephanie, Michael and Henry, and we’re Moore’s. So there’s three M’s, so just call it m3 and he was like, You do networks. So m3 networks. And then the m3 network was born, done. And then we were off and running, making phone calls on the telephone or sending emails to people we knew, to try to, you know, people call it, acquire a client. I was just trying to make friends in the community and say, Hey, I do it work. Is there anything I can do for you?
John Corcoran 14:56
And you have said that the first six or seven. Years, you really felt like it wasn’t a full business. You weren’t hiring employees. It was really kind of just you doing consulting. It wasn’t until you kind of realized that you didn’t want a job, you wanted to actually build a business. I’m not sure if this was lining up with your experience of going to a Robin Robbins event, which she is, kind of the guru for IT services companies, helping them to build more of a full fledged business.
Michael Moore 15:26
Yeah, so the timing lined up almost exactly where I started to get, you know, anxious and stressed about we’re clearly not growing. Why not? And I didn’t know that marketing and sales were really even a thing. I thought, I know a certain number of people. Well, helping those people, Shouldn’t those people just tell more people, because we’re doing good work. And we hired a couple of engineers, and they were doing a great job, and I wanted to make sure that they had more opportunities in the future. And right about that time, I was probably getting letters and things like that and emails from Robin Robbins all along, but my mind was ready to see that information, and I went to a Robin Robins boot camp in Nashville, Tennessee.
And not only did I enjoy the show and enjoy learning all the things I learned, I met a few people that were in the same place. Like, I don’t know what marketing or sales is, but clearly she does. And when I was there, I wasn’t even certain that I was going to join her full program, but the guys that ended up having lunch and dinner with every day, they jumped in the line to join her full program. And I was like, Well, I’m not going to be left out. I jumped in the line too. And it’s been learning ever since about what sales and marketing is and how to build an audience and how to really do bigger and better things for your clients and for your employees and for all of your team.
John Corcoran 16:57
And was this one of these programs where it’s 25,000 or 50,000 or something. And, you know, it was a huge commitment. Oftentimes, I’ve heard stories like that where people are like, I couldn’t imagine it was way more expensive than I’d ever invested in something like this before. And, you know, somehow I just went and did it anyway.
Michael Moore 17:16
Yeah, I can’t remember the exact number, but it was like, $1,500 a month or something like that. And that was, I mean, that was more than anything that I was spending on. It was more than my house payment. It was more than our biggest customer. You could throw any amount of things that we’re doing in our personal or business life, and it was bigger than all of them. But I, I kind of had to lean out on, you know, faith and encouragement from others, and just take that first leap. And one of the people I called my wife was like, are you okay with this?
She’s like, it sounds like you’re energetic. It sounds like this will be great for you. And so we went off and did that, and it’s been exceptionally impactful ever since. But what I’d say more importantly is the next lesson I learned is, just because I’m learning these things at a conference doesn’t mean your employees are because now we’re getting 678-910-1520, employees, and I’m coming back with excitement, but I don’t really have the strategies to enable them to have the same information or the same level of excitement.
John Corcoran 18:18
And that’s how you do that? Because I went there, I’ve been participating in this three year program. You and I are both in an EO called the entrepreneurial master’s program, and one of the challenges as owner is, when you come back to your business, you have a bunch of ideas, and you come back and you flood your team with them. So what was, what has been, or what’s become, your strategy for sharing those ideas with the team.
Michael Moore 18:41
Well, number one, I learned that for me, I take paper notes, right? It’s not going to be on a computer, because if it’s going to be on a computer, I’m going to send it in an email. The email is going to be too long, and it’s going to quickly set people off on, oh, my God, he’s gone to a conference, you know, get ready. Yeah, that kind of thing. So if I take paper notes, I can typically circle or highlight two or three really impactful nuggets that when I get back to the team, I can go, here are the most powerful, impactful things that I’ve learned. And let me ask an open question, how do you feel about these things? And most importantly, if you feel good about these things, how can I help you? Because I’m a resource for the company. I’m a steward for the company, how can I help you impact and deliver these things to our clients, or to yourself, or whatever it is.
And if you got two or three, one of those initiatives, might, you know, go off with a 10 out of 10. One of them might be two out of 10. Another one might be a six out of 10, but at least it’s better than the first time I came back from a conference and it was like I have 40 new ideas, and we’re doing them all this week, and then they just look at me like you’re insane. We’re not doing any of this because we have things to do for our current customers. Mm. I mean, and then at this, at this point in time, after being in that program and some others for a number of years, I’m involving them in the training. So I’m sending them to Nashville, or I’m sending them to Vegas, or I’m sending them, and they get the training in person themselves. They get to take notes themselves, and then I become a sounding board for some of the things that I’ve learned and can help with those things.
John Corcoran 20:26
Now, one of the things you’ve implemented, which I teased at the beginning, was a strategy for getting five star Google reviews, online reviews. Yeah, for sure, you have kind of a process around that. Talk, talk a little bit about how you dealt with that.
Michael Moore 20:41
So we use Slack internally, and slack is a big thing for us, and that everybody on our team works remotely, so we’re in constant conversation, in Slack conversation. So it was just a few years ago, three years ago now, that we looked up and we said we’d like more Google reviews. We’re doing a good job for our clients, but we don’t really have a process to make that happen. And we started sending emails to clients being like, please give us more Google reviews. And that didn’t work. I think at the time, we’re at like, seven or eight Google reviews. And I said to my, you know, sort of second and third in command. At the time, I’d like to be at 100 Google reviews by the end of the year, and this was, like, in June, and they’re like, Okay, you’re crazy.
We have six or seven. We’re not getting to 100 so it was clear that they weren’t jumping on board and like, we’re really gonna dive in and create a process for this initiative. So it was one of those things that I had to take the bull by the horns. And I said, Okay, here’s how we’re gonna do it. And I think it was something only I could do, because it involved using money in the company and doing things like that. And what we did is we use a system, our ticketing system, that every time a ticket is done with a customer, they have an opportunity to say, you guys did a good job or a bad job, or some level of job. We embedded a code in there that says, you know, if you can give us a Google review, we will ultimately, if you say x, y, z, employee did that, like Bob did a great job on this ticket, and you include his name, we’re going to give a monetary donation to a charity.
The charity we’re supporting right now is Meals on Wheels, and we’re going to buy that technician lunch. So you’ll see through our hundreds of Google reviews, a lot of them say Bob or Jacob or Ovi. They’re naming the technician in that we link that with Zapier to Slack, so that every time we google you, it populates in a channel we call praise. And all throughout the day, you’ll see a review come in from a client, and you’ll see employees saying, attaboy, Jacob attaboy, Obie attaboy, Bob attaboy, and sending gifts in there and things like that. So there’s the system, and the last piece we added to it is, every time we get to the 100 mark, we have a party, you know, a culture party. We go to dinner, we’ll go to a stars game, we’ll go to horse races, whatever it is.
And I personally give that dollar amount to every single employee. So our next number is 400 and I’ll hand $400 in cash to every single employee. And what it’s created for us is not just the opportunity to have that picture and be excited about getting Google reviews, but culturally, one of our core values is service first and taking care of the person on the other end of the line. And so people are constantly talking about that, like, we got 60 more to go. And they’re talking about like, how can, how did you do such a good job with that customer? And that’s really the exciting thing for me, because that can be a difficult thing to do when you move to the remote, which we did in 2020.
John Corcoran 23:47
And well, I definitely want to get to that. One other tidbit I wanted to add to ask you about is when you hire employees, you ask them, if I was a customer at your restaurant, how would you serve me? Well, talk a little bit about that.
Michael Moore 24:01
So when we were in the office, we asked two questions. The first question was, how was the drive in today? And we always knew from that first question that we’re probably not going to hire you if you said the drive was terrible, traffic sucked and just really a complainer’s mentality. And he’s like, Okay, we’re going to do the rest of the interview, because we want to be, you know, respectful of your time and ours, but we’re going to condense this and the second question we started asking, because we know not a lot of people have maybe had an experience in the service industry, but in it, you got to use your brain and think, what are the different ways I can troubleshoot this?
So we ask, if I was a customer at your five star restaurant, how would you take care of me? And so then the technician, or the engineer, or whomever it is that’s interviewing might say, I first get to know you by your name, and I tell you my name. My name is Michael. Thanks for coming to our restaurant. Can I get your name? My name is Michael. Great. You know our specials tonight, and you could see they start to think it out. Yeah. And the people that are not going to be a fit, they almost always will just quit right there. They say, I’ve never been to a five star restaurant, okay?
John Corcoran 25:06
And they’ll just like, not be able to answer it at all,
Michael Moore 25:10
yeah. So if you were a waiter at a five star restaurant, how would you handle it? I’m not interested in going to a five star restaurant. So can you give me the rest of the interview? And it tells you right there, like, when you get put in a difficult situation, you’re just going to fold. And the people that, well, they might not even say, like, what kind of a restaurant? It’s just like, you know, I’m going to tell you the specials, I’m going to get to know your name, and then they’ll say something like, I’m going to ask you if you’re at this restaurant for any special occasion, like your anniversary or birthday. And you can see they’re putting in the thought process it takes to take care of a person. Because ultimately, when you’re in a service business, that’s what it’s all about.
John Corcoran 25:50
That’s great. I want to ask you about you actually, after you put these pieces in place so you’ve grown, you’ve you’ve gotten employees, and you got a client that was acquiring aerospace companies, and eventually this particular client for you got to about 50% of your revenue. I think we can all see what direction this is going in.
Michael Moore 26:15
I didn’t see what direction it was going.
John Corcoran 26:17
Well in retrospect now it seems apparent. You know, that often doesn’t go so well. And also, I mean, it was 2016 which, of course, ended up being a tough economy, so they hired it. You hired a new CFO who said, yeah, I gotta cut your bills in half, right? So that’s half.
Michael Moore 26:36
By a minimum of half, to be perfectly clear, the first interaction I had with this person, I I said I’d love to meet you for lunch. I thought I was going there to provide great value and talk about how we can help. Are there any initiatives he needs help with? And I go to shake his hand at the first lunch, and he’s like, I don’t need to shake your hand. I don’t really even need to know who you are or what you’re about. I just need to know how you can cut your bill at least in half. And I was like, wow, this is going to be one of those really great lunches, just like the last one. And then I asked him, you know, you know, what do you do? You know, you play sports with your kids.
Because I knew he had, you know, like, five or six kids. And he’s like, you know, my kids are really a pain in the ass. Why don’t we talk about something else? And I was like, wow, this is, this is not going to be a fun relationship. I knew right off the bat. And then he just, he would, he’s like, he called me that day. He’s like, Do you know the answer to how you’re going to cut your bill by 50% or more? And it became an everyday thing, which was just a whole way to stress. And it lasted about six months until he was like, the rubber has met the road. Just give me an out clause.
So I gave him an out clause. They paid a percentage of their contract out, and it was like a weight was lifted off of my shoulders and of all of my employees, like I was just covered in anxiety over that relationship. And what’s crazy is once I had to wait for that relationship, I replaced all that revenue, and my team did as well. We got to work in about a three month period, amazing. Wow. And then at six months leading up to it, we were completely stagnant because we were just thinking about the weight of that relationship the whole time.
John Corcoran 28:29
Yeah, it can be debilitating for a business sometimes to have a client that large. Now, around the same time, you had a sales and use tax audit as well. So you go through the stream.
Michael Moore 28:40
What a horrible time. Yeah, so I remember it vividly. We got the letter from the sales and use tax for the state of Texas, and it said, we estimate that you owe it was something like a half a million dollars. I called them, and they’re like, Yeah, we believe you actually the numbers 327 and I could, I knew enough about direct response marketing to know like this is sort of an illicit response letter that we’re getting from the state. This isn’t an actual number. They’re just throwing out stuff that doesn’t even have anything to do with actuarial tables. So I thought I just called them and talked to them like humans, and they’d go, oh, sorry, we sent the letter to the wrong person or something, and that was not the case.
And I spent about the next 13 months going back and forth with the state of Texas, and ultimately they said you owe $12,000 is what we can find in some sales and use tax, and that was through a lot of effort. Of, hey, we found one customer five years ago that they missed a percentage of tax on invoice four or five times. I’m like, man, we did 13 months of effort to find, like, a couple of invoices. Couldn’t we have started with this? But it was 13 months ago. 25 hours a week of effort from a part time accountant that I hired to be in my in house, part time accountant. And at the time, MSPs were still relatively new, and their belief in the state of Texas at that time was anything that touched a computer should be taxed.
And a lot of MSPs at that time believed, if it was service work, ie labor only, like I’m just consulting to you on the phone, almost like a therapist, it’s not taxable. And the state said absolutely not. Because did you virtually touch their computer? Had you physically touched it the same day? And they wanted to correlate a lot of different things, and you had to learn the lesson for me if we had to get our systems a lot more clear. How many minutes did we touch the computer on site, physically? How many minutes did we touch it off site? Just all those kinds of really minute details.
Because when you get it as state sales and use a tax audit, that auditor wants to know everything. And I remember the final meeting with the state in my account, and my part time accountant, we all sat there and they said, you know, here’s the final number. And it was, it was very little at this point. And I was like, here’s a check. Please leave me alone.
John Corcoran 31:20
Such a relief, I’m sure to be done with that. Now you said that this was the most stress you’ve ever experienced in your life, and I think this is probably a relevant moment to mention that you had suffered from depression and anxiety going back to, you know, early teenage years, right? And one of the things you’ve credited in your business to big advances in your businesses, is actually confronting that head on and doing something about it. And it’s kind of helped with the growth of the business. So you want to talk a little bit about how you’ve tackled that as a business owner.
Michael Moore 31:56
Yeah. So at all for depression, for me, whether it was something that was biological, genetic, whatever it started to present itself after a horrific car accident that I was in. We were in a motorhome that was stopped, that was hit by an 18 wheeler, smashed into another 18 weather. There were nine of us in that accident, and I was 13 years old, and my whole world just started spinning. There were a lot of things. We ended up in a courtroom case that lasted a long time because the trucking company was responsible, and the state of Texas didn’t have signs on that street and all kinds of stuff. But ultimately, that’s the first time for me that depression really started to present, because it put a lot of injuries into the family, a lot of trauma, a lot of going to see people near their death and stuff like that as a small child. And for me, I had a couple attempts at suicide at that young age.
And I look at it back now, and I was like, I’m going to use a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And the temporary problem was I didn’t have control over my emotions in that space, because I was too young to understand all the goings on of it. And as it relates to current day and all these iterations of in business, you’re just going to get bombarded with stress. I mean, it’s just a fact of life, whether it be the state of Texas saying, Hey, you owe this money that you may or may not owe, or a difficult customer or an employee in a difficult situation, you’re just going to get them bombarded with stress. And there are a lot of things you can do about that stress and that I do like I work out, I pray, I meditate, all these things, but sometimes depression is just going to present itself period, and people handle it in different ways.
And for me, what happens for me in my depression is it kind of hides a bit. I’m like, I just can’t deal with things, and I disappear into my own self, which is the opposite of what I really need to do. So over the last few years, through therapy and, you know, developing a deeper relationship with God that I did not have, I have started to learn that these storms are just one raindrop, right? They’re not the entire storm. And that helps me understand that, you know, life is a big, long story, and there’s gonna be really good stuff that happens and really bad stuff that happens.
And like my grandfather always said, he’s like this too, will pass Life ain’t always a bowl of ice cream on a wonderful summer day. Sometimes it’s a really difficult situation. And somebody you love, you know, has cancer or dies or whatever, and it’s not about the situations that I’ve learned that have hit me, like these things or other things. It’s about how you respond to them, and I think that’s what creates the character in us, and I think that’s what makes me a decent teacher as an employer. I, you know, like I didn’t know that you’re not supposed to surprise employees at Salt grass until I had that experience, right? And then once I had that experience, I thought it needs to be clear if I’m letting somebody go, not surprising them over a really nice meal.
Oh, by the way, yeah, and so I don’t let things like depression anxiety surprise me if they come. You know, there’s certain things you need to do about it. And the first thing you do is you need to start talking to somebody that you love and trust and can kind of guide you out of your own mind. And then there’s a lot of a lot of next steps, you know, whether it be talking to a therapist or stuff like that. But ultimately, for me, the first step is, don’t hide. It’s not going to help.
John Corcoran 35:45
Yeah, yeah. Building a routine that works for you seems to be a real game changer for you as well. Speaking of surprises, let’s jump to 2020, now at this point, you’re running an MSP, doing IT services for companies, and you start to see this covid pandemic developing in Asia, and if I recall correctly, you felt that you needed to get ahead of it, because it was going to be affecting all of your customers. So take us through what that moment in time was like.
Michael Moore 36:13
So March of 2020, my wife and I and two children, we were actually on vacation in California, and we were doing the entirety of the PCH, starting in San Diego up to San Francisco, and we could start to see on the news. That was the week that the NBA, you know, said, Hey, we’re going to stop the game in the middle of a game and shut down. I remember watching that on TV, seeing Mark Cuban kind of walk back and forth being surprised himself, like, ” Why are you stopping a game? Yeah, and I called my staff the next morning and said, We’re going to work from home. It was about two or three weeks later that Texas started to be impacted in the same way that California and others were starting to be impacted by full shutdowns and the like.
But, you know, they were kind of argumentative on that first phone call. They were like, we don’t need to go. It’s not even happening in Texas. Not that big of a deal. And I was like, you’re working from home. Start figuring out what virtual solutions we’re going to use for our clients. And then I think the most important thing I said in that moment was, we’re going to give it to them for free, like, I don’t want to have the barrier of we call the client and they’re not taking it seriously, and they say, well, we don’t want to work from home because it’s $6 a month, or whatever the solution is that they believe wasn’t going to be that useful. So we went to work from home immediately.
We finished two more days of our trip, and I flew home, and there were clients that were like, we took our copier home, we took our computer, but we didn’t take our cables. What do we do? And so all our techs were running around town, literally, you forgot your network cable, you forgot your power cable, you forgot your monitor.
John Corcoran 37:58
And giving them probably in a plastic bag or something. The kind of the things that we did in those early days, the whole nine yards.
Michael Moore 38:05
Mask and gloves and plastic bags, and, you know, had all kinds of different experiences in Texas. And some people were like, This doesn’t exist. Just come get, like, overly aggressive, like, I want to hug you right now, just to prove this doesn’t exist. And then other people are like, I just leave it in my mailbox. I don’t want to touch any of it. So there was a lot of nuance in that time that we sort of had to take care of ourselves and our own employees, but also understand what are the needs of our clients. You know, are they going to work from home? Are they fighting working from home? And I think ultimately, 100% went to work from home in about a 30 day period. Wow. And at this point, we’ve got a lot of clients and a lot of people to take care of, and it was quite an experience.
John Corcoran 38:51
Wow, wow. And, and how did it affect the business? Because there were, you know, many businesses where, like, they lost clients, or, you know, no, no new clients. We signed up for a period of time, and then eventually it got busier.
Michael Moore 39:06
Sounds like it was fairly stable for you. It was not only stable, but in the first week that I was back home, we had six new clients. I mean, our phone was ringing off the wall saying, hey, how do I do work from home? How do I get a laptop? There are no laptops in stock, so we were trying to stalk as many devices as we could, you know, power cables, laptops, because the world was shutting down, and so the phone was ringing off the wall. Of who do you have? Anything, you know, like, just, just the same as people started to run out of bread or toilet paper, certainly, they were running out of computer so we were, we were very lucky in that we were in high demand at that time, and we started being of assistance to people in the way that we could.
And then also, I started to get a lot of calls from television stations. So it was the first time that I started doing a lot of media. I remember one of the first media. Like tours I did. I did it with a gentleman from the FBI named Brett Leatherman, who was at that time working in the Dallas office of the FBI. And they wanted to pair a local IT company with an FBI guy, so you had two parts of the story. And we did songs and dances on TV. We did it in webinars. We were just trying to make people aware of really basic things at that time, like, what Zoom is, what two factor authentication is.
John Corcoran 40:27
This sounds like the makings of a great 80s buddy comedy, right? It was an FBI agent.
Michael Moore 40:33
Yeah, it was. It was just an interesting time because, you know, so many people were like, I don’t know what Zoom is. I just keep hearing people say zoom on TV. So we’re literally having to educate like, you can do a meeting online. You don’t have to just do it in person. You know really basic things and a lot of things that are common languages now that people say, Oh yeah, I’ve got two factor authentication, or I use Zoom, or I’d say 90% of the people in 2020 were like, I don’t know what any of that stuff is.
John Corcoran 41:07
You, techie guy, is quite a journey for you. And what was it like, too? Because, you know, I think when we talked before, you said that it and cybersecurity is like the road system, and people don’t want to deal with repairs. They just want the road to work, but you were basically like a hero to them. You allowed these businesses, many of which were probably really petrified that they might go under or not be able to work at all. You allowed them to continue to work through this global pandemic.
Michael Moore 41:33
Yeah. I mean, they were, they were all in that time, very grateful, and it was just a really good time for us as the people who preach the gospel every day of cybersecurity. It was like, oh, us. Its people are valued. And it wasn’t. It didn’t know anything about ego. It was like, we love to get this information in your hands, and we’re excited that you want to accept this information. So it was really good for us, and our business has grown ever since. And I think the most important part, sort of culturally, when we start to talk about cybersecurity, like cybersecurity in 2019 was like, I don’t even know what that word means, and it just sounds like you’re talking about technobabble, and now people understand there are basic disciplines that you need to do.
It doesn’t mean they understand what they are, but they typically understand that I need to go find a resource to help me with this. And unfortunately, we’re still in a space that people forget very fast once something bad has happened to them. It doesn’t take very long for the human mind to say, let’s erase it. It’s probably not going to happen to me again. Yeah, I was in one car accident. It’s never going to happen again. I’m not going to wear my seat belt. It’s like, okay, maybe just wear the seat belt. So with cybersecurity, you know, we get a call almost every week from somebody who’s had a horrific experience, like we got a call recently of a prospective client that had an IT company they were working with, they weren’t doing a really great job, and they had $4 million stolen out of their business.
Wow, that was the beginning of the hack. And so when we got in we started taking a look. It was like, We need to stop this hack. Do we have your permission? And even then, they were still like, well, I don’t know. Is this real? The money’s gone. It’s very material at this point. And unfortunately, a lot of people have to experience these painful events before they truly stick to the consistent cybersecurity discipline so they don’t have those terrible events that happen to them.
John Corcoran 43:48
Yeah. Yeah. Good advice, Michael, this has been great. I want to wrap up with my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of gratitude, especially expressing gratitude to those who’ve helped you along the way. And a lot of times, people will kind of default to mentioning their family, their team, which, of course, are important. But I also love to hear stories about peers, contemporaries, and others in your field. However you want to define that, who you would want to thank for just helping you in your journey.
Michael Moore 44:15
Well, I want to give a lot of gratitude and thanks to two people. The first one’s a contemporary. He’s a gentleman named Steven Taylor, and he owns it , so technically a competitor, but I met him at that Robin Robbins event all those years ago. And Steven, you know, he’s had his own set of difficulties in life, like we all do, but Steven’s advice and love for me has been constant. If you know, keep pushing forward, man, we got this. And so Steven Taylor. And then number two, I’ve got a lot of gratitude for one of my mentors, Mark Moses, who has written the book to make big things happen, and is constantly reminding me of somebody I work with.
Him directly, and we support their organization, CEO Coaching International, and the whole audience that he works with . You have to know what you want first, and then you have to know what you need to do about it, right? These make big questions, and I’ve never had a conversation with him that I didn’t learn something from. And he’s such a laser focused guy that it’s so inspiring to be around. Michael, this has been great.
John Corcoran 45:24
Where can people go to learn more about you and M3 Networks, yeah, so just go.
Michael Moore 45:30
M3 Networks.com take a look at our company, and I’m also on LinkedIn and Facebook and all the socials, but you can find them there on M3 Networks.com
John Corcoran 45:41
Excellent. Michael, thanks so much. Thank you.
Outro 45:45
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.