Why You Should Get Fired for Buying Microsoft Support with Michael Jones, VP at US Cloud

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Mike Jones, VP at US Cloud, about why you should get fired for buying Microsoft support, how to assemble a world-class support team, and the biggest takeaways Mike and Joel had from a shared mentor. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:23) I was reading the blog, and Josh sent me all your blog articles, and he's like, "Pick your favorite one." And I said, okay, my favorite one, and this is me paraphrasing, this is how it came across in my mind: you should get fired for buying support from Microsoft. You've gotta unravel that.

(Mike Jones at 00:00:42) Okay. So really, the article was, you know, the old adage, no one ever got fired for buying IBM, right? And the premise of that article was, from a CIO's perspective or an organizational leader's perspective, back in the day, pressure was never put on you for staying with the OEM or staying with a direct support model. So it was less risk, inherently, for leaders to just stay with what they know. And it was, you know, kind of the mindset of if it ain't broke, don't fix it kind of mentality. But the article really kind of goes into, well, but it is broke. And the mindset needs to shift. Now this doesn't necessarily translate to every enterprise customer that uses Microsoft. And by no means am I saying that Microsoft is completely broken. But for a lot of customers, the model doesn't support where their organizational needs are and where their strategy is. So really the article is around, you might get fired because there are things you need to look at now as a leader of tech that maybe weren't accessible to you five to ten years ago. And, you know, one of those things is, are you really stuck on the philosophy or the, I call it the mirage of direct support perfection, where you default to the direct support offering based on brand recognition, right? Who hasn't heard of Microsoft? I really don't know many people that haven't. They're a household name. There's a perceived capability, right, on their products. They develop the product, so logically, support for those products from them makes the most sense. Okay. I could argue that in ways, but I get that perception. And then there's that belief of less risk, right? Like, they are the best at resolving their issues because it's their products. And what I was trying to say in the article is it doesn't always consistently hold up when you scrutinize it. And as leaders, you should scrutinize providers and partner support vendors that you utilize around their offerings, not just give them a pass because of their brand, quote unquote.

(Mike Jones at 00:03:37) You know, in the article, I think I referenced, I wrote this back in January, so forgive me. But I think I referenced the support and integration with Microsoft. So, yes, Microsoft support team has access to product documentation and updates. But third-party providers like us, US Cloud, and others develop deeper expertise in particular Microsoft technologies because they're just focused on the support and services rather than all of the other things that Microsoft is focused on, like sales and product development and marketing and all their other avenues of business, like their gaming industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:25) They're huge.

(Mike Jones at 00:04:26) They're just a behemoth. Right? And if you look at it, you know, a fun factoid I like to throw out every once in a while. I'm a numbers guy. Right? So if you look at Microsoft's revenue, and I'm referencing, and I'm paraphrasing, so don't quote me on it. But at the end of 2024, I read the Microsoft shareholder letter around the revenue numbers. And in there, in that data kind of hidden in the weeds, there were numbers around their support services. So we're just gonna zoom in just on what we offer, which is the support aspect and services. It's $7.5 billion of revenue Microsoft earned last year just in support services. And when I say support services, that is direct to customers, selling them support contracts, and direct to partners who are then providing support to their end customers. And both of those are kind of included in this bundle of revenue. And of that, you have to look back and zoom out. Microsoft made $275 billion in revenue last year. If only $7.5 billion is in support, which represents around 3% of their total revenue, you see where their focus is. And it's not on support services. It's on product development and software products. Right? Like AI and other aspects of their business, licensing, Azure, you know, the big tag words.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:06) As a business owner, you would even consider cutting that if it wasn't essential to your life cycle of a customer. It's something they have to do. It's not necessarily something that they wanna do and wanna get good at. If you're selling these products and services, you have to. And if it's not the main thing that you're waking up trying to do every day, then you're just not gonna be as good at it as someone else who is waking up, and that's their main thing.

(Mike Jones at 00:06:32) I agree completely, and that's why we're in business and what we do. Right? You can tell that Microsoft's focus isn't on support. You're exactly right. They do it because the OEM has to provide some kind of level of support on the products that they develop, and I get that. You can see the writing on the wall the last several years, and I tell customers this all the time. To me, and this is just my opinion, I feel like Microsoft's trying to get out of the support game without telling customers directly, we don't wanna support you. And what I mean by that is if you look at the trends, you know, if you look at six, seven years ago, CSP was a big thing, so Cloud Solution Provider. So where they're essentially outsourcing to the partners in their community to sell direct licensing to the customer, own that relationship, provide that base interaction and support for the products that they're selling, and then escalate to Microsoft any complex issues that are product-related or code-related. And that CSP market has exploded. There are fifty, sixty thousand some CSPs in the world today and growing by the day. And you can just tell that they're really reliant on that partner ecosystem to own the relationship with the client because they understand what their needs are from a more personal basis and provide them with that direct relationship and support firsthand, and then send to us if you need to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:14) So if I'm a CTO and I'm like, alright, look, you guys have on your website all the money that you save and that you provide higher quality support, and you've got testimonials and all sorts of data. But at the end of the day, if I'm the CTO and I'm going to my counterparts, my C-level counterparts, and I'm like, hey, we're gonna make this move away from Microsoft's support system into this US Cloud, what are, like, the two or three things that make them comfortable with having that conversation?

(Mike Jones at 00:08:45) So the first thing that usually gets us in the door is pricing. Right? Discount. Show us significant savings. And, you know, we claim on our website and we do follow through with this. It's not just a claim. It's a promise. We guarantee a 30 to 50% reduction based on the Unified Support costs. That usually gets people's attention. Right? You definitely capture the procurement and IT asset management side of the house at any tech company, any organization, not just tech, where that captures their attention. Well, maybe it's something we should look at. Because we even tell customers, even if you're not serious about us at first, just get a competitive quote. If you're negotiating with Microsoft, why let them be the only one in the door? You're not doing competitive analysis, and that's where it goes back to the article again, where as a leader of an organization, you've gotta do diligence with what are my options out there, at least understanding the landscape. What is a SWOT? You know, doing a SWOT analysis on what's out there and what capabilities do these third parties have. And price is number one. Second, quality. Right? You've gotta have a quality product. So, you know, I would use the claim, we wanna be as good or better than Microsoft Unified Support as it is today from a quality standpoint. So that includes responsiveness. Right? Our initial responsiveness. How are we engaging with them? Are we doing it faster than Microsoft is? When you have a critical issue, time is of the essence. Right? Everything's on fire. I need someone now, and you need that accountability and that timely response. So that's part of the quality play. The other is ultimately comes down to what I call TTR, time to resolution. Right? So how quickly can you engage resources and then how quickly can you solve them without putting us through an exercise of, alright, let me get back to you. Let me get back to you. Alright, have you tried this? Have you tried that? Right? And that's all part of troubleshooting Microsoft because every environment is different. But, ultimately, quality comes down to timeliness, responsiveness, and ultimately engineering skill sets. Do you have, are you giving me your best and final right away? Or are you putting me through the typical support structure of I start with tier one, go to tier two, tier three? Oh, we're starting to get to my problem now. I got a guy that can actually possibly fix it. So it's quality, obviously it's pricing. I also think that, from, you know, kind of a third avenue, it's really, are you willing to work with a partner that will adapt and adjust to your needs, to your organization's needs? And I mean, unfortunately, with just the sheer size of Microsoft and some other OEMs, they're too big for their britches. Right? So they're unmovable. They're unwavering when it comes to, this is how our support works. You either like it or you don't. Right? And we're a little bit more nimble and a little agile. Obviously, we're not the size of Microsoft. So it provides some flexibility customer by customer, because we actually dig into what kind of areas of need of support do you have and how can we best help you accomplish the outcomes that you're looking to achieve? And that's really where I think we shine in that area versus some of the bigs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:43) And one of the other things that stood out to me was, and I wanna say this correctly. So I'm gonna say it the way I interpret it, and you can correct me with the appropriate words to use. Something along the lines of the way that they charge is very, it's a very simplistic way that they charge, and they do not use a usage-based charge model. Whereas you use a usage-based, so I'm paying for the support that I'm using versus paying just like this blanket cost if I use it or not.

(Mike Jones at 00:13:16) Yeah. So that's a great point. Our models are inherently different by purpose, and we did that on purpose because, little history session. So back in 2016, late 2016, Microsoft announced to their partner community at the time, it was the Microsoft Partner Network or what they call the MPN, which is now known as the Cloud AI Partner Network. So you can tell they're very focused on cloud and AI. They announced to the partner ecosystem that they were changing their consumption-based support model, which was called Premier Support. And coming out, it was known at the time as Project Volta, which is a super cool name. I always think of Voltron when I hear it, but it was a code name for what is now known as Unified Support. And this Unified Support model was transitioning from a needs-based model to an unlimited model based on your licensing spend only. So what that means to a customer is I'm no longer going to scope or discover your areas and needs for support and then build an offering around those needs and then give you those support over that year or multi-year deal. Now I'm just going to look at what you're spending based on three buckets of spending. I'm going to look at your user licensing, so your user count and user cals. I'm gonna look at your server, which is basically your perpetual licensing, your on-premise server licensing. And then I'm gonna look at your cloud Azure Office 365 spend. And I'm gonna take those in, essentially, it's a percentage of each of those. And they're what's called a tiered discount where the more you have, the deeper the discount. Right? So it starts at, you know, like 3%, goes to 5%, goes to 7% based on the sheer number. And then I'm gonna take that together, and then I'm gonna go to you, Mr. Customer, and say, your cost for support is X based on just what you spend. I don't care how deep your bench is, how smart your IT teams are. I don't care that you don't utilize these different services and offerings that we offer in our catalog. You're gonna pay this amount. Oh, and by the way, as you adopt more of our software technologies, that cost is gonna continue to go up. So the more you adopt Azure, the more you adopt 365, the more you adopt Copilot AI, it's gonna go up. So based on that, obviously, in the ecosystem, customers, it didn't sit well with a lot of customers. That model is not a one-size-fits-all. It tailors itself more to the Fortune 50, the Fortune 500 customers and less towards the SMB, the small to midsize customers. And that was not well received. Fortunately, at the time, our founder and owner, we're a privately held company, saw an opportunity as a Microsoft partner. We were, essentially, we started off as a SharePoint hosting company. We were actually originally in '96 when our company opened, it was called FP Web. We actually designed front pages, which everyone knows is that pretty ugly precursor to SharePoint, very buggy. We started off in that space, and we evolved into SharePoint hosting. And at one point, we were Microsoft's largest SharePoint partner where we hosted SharePoint in the cloud for customers. We kind of evolved from there. At that time, several years later, we had become a managed services provider, so multiple Microsoft technologies for our customer base. And this is when that announcement popped in, and our owner and CEO at the time said, there's an opportunity here. There's a big opportunity. The customers are not gonna adopt this. There's gonna be some pushback. So he had the foresight at the time to look at the market and say, there's a hole here, and we need to fill it. So I came in right at that beginning stages. And that's when I left AVI and came over to US Cloud. My responsibility was build our product, build our portfolio, build our services line. And I've had twenty-something plus years in Microsoft. I mean, that was my role at AVI, was very centered around Microsoft in the practice. I made a career out of it. I know it's not the most exciting thing in the world, but at that point, I was all in. Right? Microsoft was it for me. And, you know, we came in and said, let's do this. Let's be the pioneers. Let's be the trailblazers. We came out with an offering that was similar to the old Premier classic model where it's a needs-based model where we're really scoping based on your actual need for support over a given twelve-month period. And we're analyzing data that the customer provides and said, this is how many hours, essentially, we believe you will need for support in those Microsoft areas over the next twelve months. And that provided customers with, essentially, an opportunity in this space that didn't exist because no one, I mean, to be honest, it's been a difficult road. No one's wanted to go up against Microsoft directly. It's a competition.

(Mike Jones at 00:19:18) Right? And Microsoft was the only player in the game. It's very unlike the other third-party industries. If you're familiar with IBM, there's Origina. SAP, there's Rimini Street. And Oracle, there's Spinnaker, right? There's all these third parties that have kind of established themselves over the last dozen and a half years where it's common in those tech areas for a third party.

(Mike Jones at 00:19:45) In Microsoft, it did not exist. So we really took the leap of faith, right? And again, it wasn't without its trials and tribulations for sure, but it was an opportunity for us to really focus on what customers really wanted and what they needed, not necessarily what Microsoft deemed they were gonna have to live with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:07) Yeah. It's funny that you bring up Rimini Street. I did an interview with them a couple years ago, and the way that they came up with their name is he was sitting there filling out the corporate docs, and he needed a name for the company. He had no idea what it should be, and he just looked up, looked out the window, and saw Rimini Street. And he was like, I'll just name it that. So that's the origin story behind their name.

(Mike Jones at 00:20:31) Oh, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:31) Yeah.

(Mike Jones at 00:20:32) Yeah. See, it doesn't always have all the glamour to it. Sometimes it's just a simple, yeah, all right, that looks good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:41) And you're able to provide support to them, or hold on, let me say that differently. How can you guys provide support in the account if you're not Microsoft?

(Mike Jones at 00:20:52) So to kind of go back and reference one of my earlier comments, sometimes the partners have a deeper expertise in these product stacks because, again, they're 100% focused just on the support aspect of those products. We're not developing the product. We're not selling the product to the customer. We are very hyper-focused. And which makes us unique in this space in the eyes of the analysts like Gartner and Info-Tech and Directions on Microsoft, some of the three big analysts in this space. What makes us kind of the leader and really truly separates us from other players that are doing this, because there are other players that are providing this to some extent, is this is all we do. We don't have any other avenues of business. We don't have any—this is it. Our product is our engineering services, and that is our only revenue stream. We're not selling licensing. We're not selling hardware. We're not supporting other OEM products. Our game is built around Microsoft. So we need Microsoft to continue to develop products and services to their customers, and then we want to support it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:11) So we get a lot of people listening that they're either at startups or scale-ups, whether they're founders or leads of engineering or whatever it may be. And inevitably, as an executive at a growing company, support is a question that the entire executive team is aware of in general, even if they're supporting their own product, right? Like, I'm a SaaS company and I've got to support my SaaS tools. I'm hoping we can bring them some value today by you sharing what is the best way to hire a world-class support team, because that's ultimately what your entire business is. So you must know how to do that.

(Mike Jones at 00:22:47) It's a tough landscape. I will say that. It's not for the faint of heart. One, personally, from our organization standpoint, we went and got a world-class recruiting team. We went and found some of the best headhunters, recruiters out there in the tech industry, tech space, and wooed them over to us and convinced them of our story. And they bought in, and we've got some great talent in our talent acquisition team. So that's kind of a foundational block you need. Second is company culture. It's all around the company culture. And, you know, not to beat a dead horse, but to go back to kind of how Avi's culture was, it was very people-centric. You know, they were an employee-owned company, so it was very, wherever your level is, you're playing a part in the overall success of the company. And that's what we're trying to build here as well, and we've been fairly successful to this point doing so. So it's about the culture and building a culture that is centered around that human, as Brad Souza would say, around that human impact. And being able to believe in the story is also very important to a lot of the resources, whether they're administrative or they're technical engineers or consultants that we bring in. You've got to have a good story to tell. You have to have the people behind you believe in not only your mission statement or your core values, but also the product. They have to believe in what you're doing, and you have to be able to clearly define what that story and what that tell is going to look like as you move forward. And we've done a really good job, I think, of that. Our leadership team has done an exceptional job of kind of painting what that picture looks like and focusing on, again, not just pushing a product, because that's not what we do. Our people are our product, right? So it's helping people and creating choices. We're creating a choice in a space that didn't exist, and we're helping people as we do it. And that's what our focus is, is around the customer and helping them solve their problems and creating them an alternative choice in the space that is there now, but wasn't there when we started it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:25) And then I've read that you guys were doing something innovative and interesting where you were bringing it into Microsoft Teams or Slack or something where the people were actually able to interact with support from the places that they're already working. Is that correct?

(Mike Jones at 00:25:40) Yeah. So collaboration with your customers really has to be looked at as a partnership. So that partnership is bidirectional. And the way that we approach any new customer coming in is from a relationship standpoint. We're looking at this as a long-term partnership. We are not looking at this as a short-term rental where you're just going to stay here for a little bit and then go play the field again. So from that perspective, you know, integrating that, what I call creating stickiness, right? You've got to create stickiness in your customer's environment from a partnership perspective. And that goes in many different ways. That's from an administrative standpoint, account management, right? Giving them a point of contact that they can reach out to for all things of the service. And we have TAMs that facilitate that role here at US Cloud. It's integrating support operations on the back end, like understanding what are your areas of support need? What is your infrastructure from the nth detail look like inside and out and educating us to be that extension of your IT team. We're there to help you. We're here to pick you guys up and support you. We're not there to take over. We're not an outsourced IT. We work with your IT teams to accomplish the goals that they're trying to do. So that's important. And establishing that interwoven connectivity is super important. So one of those things that we do to your question is we try to integrate and federate with our customers very clearly. So Teams is a perfect example of that. So integrating Teams with their IT teams and giving them the ability to send a chat, send an instant message to their consultants, to their support teams that they work with. We're giving them that openness and availability that they can reach out in maybe slightly unorthodox methods, right? The typical, all right, you got to go into the portal, submit a ticket, then it gets a response. That's normal, right? All people do that, and we do as well. But we try to give our customers a little bit more of an open relationship and true partnership by giving them accessibility to their resources real-time in the way that they communicate. That's important. You don't have to follow our process all the time. How do you best communicate with your teams? And in a lot of ways, that's, I'm going to send a quick instant message through Teams. So you can reach out to our resources. We're an extension of your IT, and we'll work with you through Teams. So that is kind of a way we integrate from a tools and collaboration standpoint.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:40) I think you guys should write a support book, like a book on how to provide great support.

(Mike Jones at 00:28:44) If I could make it science fiction, I'm in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:47) You definitely should.

(Mike Jones at 00:28:49) I never took myself as I'm going to be one of those people, right? I'm going to be one of those people that's providing direction to other leaders out there around the Microsoft support space. And then here I am five years later and I'm doing it, and it's just like, this is weird. This is very unusual. This is not—I did not expect this to happen. I didn't think I would be here, right? I'm a nerd at heart. I'm an ex-engineer. So I've always, you know, I like to call myself a propeller head. So I always thought I would stay in that space, but I found myself gravitating kind of slowly towards the more thought leadership aspect of "what if." Like, the Marvel show "What If?" I love that show. Like, just yeah. What are the possibilities in this multiverse of Microsoft tech support? What are all the different areas that could evolve from all these different chains and decisions that people make and products that they release? And I think we're at one of those inflection points right now with AI. And it's going to be huge, right? Like, I don't think anyone really, really, truly, truly knows what's going to happen in the next three to five years with AI. I think everybody has this little inkling. I think it's going to have some of this impact and some of that impact. And, you know, people like Bill Gates will get out there and talk about how he feels it's going to change kind of the working landscape and career landscape and different industries like healthcare and hospitality. I just don't think anyone truly knows. No one has that crystal ball, which is kind of exciting and kind of scary at the same time, because people like us, we really like to know what that roadmap looks like, what that end story is going to look like, and no one really knows.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:52) Well, because there's two—the reason why it's hard to get some sort of consensus about it is because it's a technology that's impacting every single area of every single part of our lives.

(Mike Jones at 00:31:03) I'm sure you've had a lot of people on in discussions around AI and that type of stuff. And I don't claim to be an AI expert. You know, my expertise is more kind of focused on Copilot from a Microsoft aspect, right? A little bit of OpenAI, you know, from a product standpoint. We're right there. I mean, we're developing AI-driven knowledge base tools on the back end. We're integrating AI as part of our support offering. We're looking at, on our roadmap, providing customers with a self-service AI-driven support tool as part of our product, right? So they can kind of do some of the self-service and search a knowledge base with AI back-end integration and hooks in there. Yeah, we're doing it, right? I mean, you have to evolve into that, and adaptability is super important in the tech space. And I'm sure you and all of your listeners know that as well, but you always have to be relevant. You can't just be adaptable. You have to be relevant, and you have to stay relevant. So, you know, you need some traction with your vision, right, to quote my EOS model that I learned several years ago. You know, you've got to have some traction with that vision. You can't just have a vision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:27) Absolutely. And then you have to also be adaptable because you can just get punched in the face by a government regulation tomorrow. And, like, you know, everyone can be like, oh, we're trending here, this is what humanity—this is how the markets are moving. And then the military can just say no.

(Mike Jones at 00:32:41) Yeah. Boom. I mean, who are we kidding? We're a Microsoft support provider. Microsoft does that day in, day out, not only to their customers, but to their partners. Like, oh, we're making a change, and it's going to impact you tremendously, right? And it's like, oh yeah, we're making this change, it's coming up. Just so you're aware. We're like, uh, okay. Yeah. Pivot. I feel like Ross in Friends. Pivot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:08) You've got to get that couch around the corner. Yeah. You knew Brad Souza?

(Mike Jones at 00:33:14) Brad Souza. Yeah, he hired me at Avi Systems. When I went to work there, I worked underneath him for almost three years. Yeah. So I got some stories and definitely one, probably one of the largest influencers in my life, both professionally. He really helped me grow into the professional that I am today, but also just as a quality human being. Doesn't get much better than that. So, yeah, I'd love to share some stories. I'm sure you got some of your own as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:53) Um, yeah, I met Brad through a cold email when I was looking for technology leaders. I was flying out to California, and I was going to be in San Diego. And so I said, let's just message every technology leader in San Diego and see if they want to meet for lunch or something. So Brad responded back, and that was our first meeting. We met in San Diego, had lunch, and that was, I don't know, maybe seven years ago or so. And then he ended up buying a house in Nashville where I live, and we had, we hung out with him like Christmas dinner type stuff and got to meet his family. And then he's got a—his daughter, Brittany, her husband's John, and he's like a video guy and he's about my age. And so John and I have gotten along and now we're family friends because him and Brittany have kids that are our kids' ages and they're about forty-five minutes to an hour from us. And so we got connected in with their family. And then, yeah, of course, Brad passed, I think it was about a year and a couple months ago.

(Mike Jones at 00:34:49) November '23. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:52) Yep. Yep. And so obviously, I think the world lost a super great man there. But aside from just like me describing that dynamic on how I knew him and his family, I joined his men's group, and I was a part of that for about a year and a half. And we met like every, like the third Wednesday of every month or something like that online. And man, the life change that happened and what I've learned from spiritually mature men and how they run their families and how they make decisions in business, that was, when I'm looking back at my deathbed, that was like the single most impactful experience that I've had on how to become the person that I want to be intentionally.

(Mike Jones at 00:35:34) Mm-hmm. He had such an ability to, without even trying, just influence people in sometimes the smallest of ways, but it had such an impact on them later. Like, I am a use case for that. Like, I didn't realize at the time, you know, going in to start at Avi. So he interviewed me. He hired me, kind of told me what they were trying to do, right? And the story kind of is like, hey, I'm looking for a Microsoft expert to come in that has new ideas, has had experience both on the partner aspect of Microsoft, but also Microsoft proper. We're looking to build out our Microsoft practice. It's nonexistent today at Avi. I mean, given they were a traditional AV company and they were trying to evolve and adapt into that. And I was like, wow, this sounds like a great opportunity. Unbeknownst to me, I had no idea who Brad Souza was. I had no idea how known and respected he was in not only the AV space, but the tech space, right? And it was so impactful not realizing that at the time. I'm just, you know, dumb going in. All right. Yeah. That sounds great. Let's do this, right? And the first week I started, he's like, I want to bring you out to San Diego. This was in 2017 when he was still out there. He's like, I'm going to bring you into San Diego, and I want you to spend your first week with me.

(Mike Jones at 00:37:10) You know, we'll go to lunch. We'll go to dinner. Hotel nearby. I'll pick you up every day for work, take you into the office. I'll meet with you the first couple of days.

(Mike Jones at 00:37:21) I'll kind of be in and out as I go along throughout the week, but I really want to bring you in and kind of introduce you to, you know, my culture and get to know me. And it's such an open book. And it was just refreshing. I'm like, this is the kind of person I could definitely work for. And then, you know, now looking back, I don't realize I have to catch myself sometimes because I find myself saying things that he instilled in me one time.

(Mike Jones at 00:37:50) He said at one time and somehow that stuff just stuck with me. And it was just so impactful and it was just so, I would say, serendipitous, if you will, when Josh, your producer, brought up, you know, hey, I saw you worked at AVI Systems. Do you know Brad Sousa? And I almost finished the sentence.

(Mike Jones at 00:38:14) I'm like, yeah. In fact, the story I would, you asked me to kind of put together or possibly tell because you guys like to tell stories was about him. So it's like, wow. This is insanely crazy how that just kind of...

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:31) How life works. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:33) So I want to know. What's the Brad story that we want to talk about?

(Mike Jones at 00:38:37) So, you know, I'm sure you guys, I knew he did your show several times. I don't know, three or four times. Right. And it sounds like you guys had a really personal connection. So I'll tell you a story. You probably know some of them, but I'll start with one that you may not know.

(Mike Jones at 00:38:52) And it was more about that starting week. So I started that week with him, right, and spent the entire week in San Diego. You would have thought the guy had all the time in the world because he really, really made you feel like his time was dedicated towards you. He gave you all of his attention. And it was just really, really insightful and educational for me.

(Mike Jones at 00:39:14) I was growing into a leadership role. Didn't know I was being kind of groomed and mentored at the time, but, you know, it was all good in the end. So go back weekends. I come back to St. Louis where I live. I fly back to St. Louis.

(Mike Jones at 00:39:32) And, you know, he calls me up on the Monday, and he says, hey. I want you to travel to Eden Prairie, and I want you to come to the corporate headquarters in Minneapolis where AVI's headquarters is. And I'd like you to spend three days with our executive leadership team, and we're going to do an executive summit where basically all of the top execs at AVI get together and kind of meet and do this two, three day planning session on the business and tech areas that they want to grow and kind of spitball and brain share. And I was like, this is odd. Why?

(Mike Jones at 00:40:16) I'm a sales engineer. Right? You hired me as kind of your, to help grow your Microsoft practice. I was the first person you hired in there, but I'm just a sales engineer. Right?

(Mike Jones at 00:40:25) It's like, you know, I'm small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. He's like, no. I really want you to be there. So I was like, okay. That sounds great.

(Mike Jones at 00:40:35) You know, sounds like an opportunity for me to at least get some face time with some of the top leaders and meet the team at AVI. So I said, okay. I'll do it. So I showed up, and he picks me up from my hotel and drives me over to the AVI headquarters. And he's like, okay.

(Mike Jones at 00:40:54) Okay. Are you ready for this? And I was like, I don't even know what I'm ready for, Brad. And he goes, I knew when I hired you that you had the type of leadership, albeit unpolished raw, natural leadership abilities that I'm looking for. And there's no better time to throw you in than right away.

(Mike Jones at 00:41:15) So he's like, my plan for you is to subject you to the challenges and the leadership team here at AVI and really give you an opening in the door. And from there, it's up to you what you do. And I was like, oh, I'm a little nervous, but okay, this is going to be, you know, and it was just long story short, it was just so open how his leadership management skill is. And it was right away. I felt very at ease.

(Mike Jones at 00:41:48) I felt very comfortable. I felt like I mattered as a new employee, regardless of my title. The guy brought me in and says, I'm going to make a leader out of you. And this is what I want you to do. And he gave me the tools and the skill set to really kind of grow, and it was just, it was off to the distance from there. It was off to the races.

(Mike Jones at 00:42:12) Right? So that's one story that I didn't expect to happen. And, you know, starting a role, I'm like, okay. I'm a sales engineer. I'll work with the sales team.

(Mike Jones at 00:42:20) Right? And it was, no. I'm going to bring you in this first week to meet me. And then the next week, you're going to meet the CEO, Jeff Stahmer, and all the executive leaders of the team, and we're going to bring you into the fold to help you grow as a leader and really help build and understand our culture as you're building out this practice. So it was a story that, I don't know, meant a lot to me, just from, again, Brad's leadership qualities and how he approaches his kind of servant leadership mode that he always kind of followed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:58) And that's also what I picked up on when I first met with Craig, who put this all together. And he was super, super cool guy and very calm, clear, easy to interact with. And then he had mentioned that, you know, you would be one of the guests that we'd have on the show, and we saw the connection to, you know, AVI and all of that. And one thing that I've learned about doing all of these interviews is that typically, when you have a company that you know has a good culture, and then one of those seniors goes to another company and stays there a minute, then that other company they moved to has a good culture. So it literally like, there was some brand equity there by me seeing that you had moved over from AVI to US Cloud and that, you know, you're still there and you're still succeeding as an executive because that means that, like, it's good there. Right? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but...

(Mike Jones at 00:43:51) No. I get it. Yeah. And, again, it just kind of goes back to my original point. I didn't realize the impact that Brad specifically would have on my personal and professional career.

(Mike Jones at 00:44:05) Right. It just, I wish instead of three years, I wish I had thirty working underneath him. Because he was just, I would have been nothing but a sponge. He just, it was a wealth of knowledge and just a quality human being. And, yeah, I really found myself taking some of the best components of AVI's culture and a lot of the mentorship I received directly under Brad and several others at AVI.

(Mike Jones at 00:44:33) I mean, it was a great group of people. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:35) Jeff. There's a bunch of cool guys over there.

(Mike Jones at 00:44:36) Yeah. Jeff Stahmer was great guy. Yeah. Craig Frankenstein and...

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:43) Oh, I know. Robert. Yeah.

(Mike Jones at 00:44:43) He works under Brad. Yeah. I worked right alongside those guys back in the day. So it was, taking a lot of what their philosophies are and kind of looking at it from my purview and saying, these are the things I want to move forward in my next venture. And, you know, I had the opportunity.

(Mike Jones at 00:45:04) I hated to go, but I had the opportunity here at US Cloud to kind of come in from the ground floor, similar to what I was doing at AVI, but way less structured and way more entrepreneurial from its very beginning stages of it. And there's just too good of an opportunity to pass up. But, yes, I definitely carry forward a lot of the mindset and the practices that were instilled in me in this organization, along with the other senior leadership here. It's been a blessing for me because they're all of like mind. We're all very different on the executive team.

(Mike Jones at 00:45:45) We're all very different personalities and come from different backgrounds. But the team here is very cohesive because we're all trying to accomplish the same goal, essentially, which is to provide a quality product and an alternative choice in this market.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:04) I want to make sure that we respect your time here. As we wrap up, what's the one action people should be taking to learn more about US Cloud?

(Mike Jones at 00:46:12) So I always encourage customers go to uscloud.com. It's, we have a ton of information on our website. You can access our articles and case studies. Myself and others contribute to that. It has a lot of valuable information to customers that are looking at Microsoft support and seeing what the other options are.

(Mike Jones at 00:46:36) It's more educational, I would say, in certain aspects than it is us trying to push our brand and our product. Right? I live by that code where I just want to connect with others and educate them. I love that. I love that aspect of this job.

(Mike Jones at 00:46:53) Trying to understand people and what their needs are more. So, yeah, go to uscloud.com. There's a request info link at the top right. You can definitely ask and have a conversation with us. And that's, you know, talk to your analysts, your trusted relationships.

(Mike Jones at 00:47:12) Right? The Gartners, the Infotechs, the Directions on Microsoft. Those guys you have a relationship with in some form of capacity, they're there to provide you with insight on all your options for third party support. But most importantly, just remember, there are options. You are not locked into one provider when it comes to support.

(Mike Jones at 00:47:35) Just look at that. Educate yourselves on what's out there, and if it is best for your organization, or maybe it's not the right time to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:43) I love it. Well, there's some time between now and singularity. So during that time, go ahead and check out uscloud.com.

(Mike Jones at 00:47:50) Yeah. Do it while you can, you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:53) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.