Podcast: Automation, Efficiency and Quality — with Brian and Heather Johnson, Gozynta Mobius

Russell Benaroya: Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Stride 2 Freedom podcast. My name is Russell Benaroya. I am your host. What do we do on the Stride 2 Freedom podcast? We help business leaders get and stay in their genius zone. What’s your genius zone? Your genius zone is that thing that you do that feels effortless for you, where you are uniquely qualified and consistently get recognized and excel. It’s that thing you do where you lose track of time, and for many business leaders they find themselves spending far too less time or far too little time in their genius zone than they could.

Our goal at Stride is to bring people to the party, to bring people to the table that are also in the business of helping business leaders get and stay in their genius zone. The podcast today is sponsored by Stride Services. Stride Services is a back office, bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO advisory services firm serving professional service companies like outsourced IT services agencies and consulting firms.

What’s our genius zone? Our genius zone is helping our clients use data for better business decision making. But enough about the podcast, enough about me. Let’s jump into today and today’s topic. I am super excited to welcome Brian and Heather Johnson to the show. Hi, all.

Heather Johnson: Hello, thanks for having us here. Really excited.

Russell Benaroya: Well, it’s a treat to have a podcast trio. I don’t typically get a podcast trio. And so we’ll have a lot of fun. A little bit of background, Brian and Heather are the owners of a company called Gozynta. They have a software called Mobius.

So it’s important that I make this distinction: company Gozynta, product Mobius. What this product does is it helps connect a very popular workflow management software in the outsourced IT services industry with a very well-known financial ledger software called QuickBooks Online. You may be asking, well, that sounds cool. But why would I want Brian and Heather on the show? That’s a good question.

These are two super interesting people with fascinating backgrounds. Professionally, Gozynta really represents this theme of automation, efficiency, and quality that many business leaders think about how to invest in and approve upon and are looking for answers and solutions. So I think they’ll help there. They solve a mission critical problem for business owners through technology on a process that historically has been fraught with a lot of inefficiency and quality breakdowns.

We’ll go deeper into that. Brian and Heather, you guys will be able to tell us everything. But I do want to challenge folks that are listening to think about where some of your most inefficient processes exist and where they can be improved through automation. So why don’t we dive in?

Heather Johnson: Yeah.

Russell Benaroya: Okay. I understand that you two like riding motorcycles and even vintage BMW motorcycles maybe. Where did this come from?

Brian Johnson: I grew up, my dad had a BMW motorcycle that was two years older than I was. I wish I knew this was going to come up. I would have had the picture ready of myself as a toddler with my cowboy boots stretched out over the gas tank with my hands on the handlebars, and you can see my lips making motorcycle engine noises. Now I have that same motorcycle, and we like to do some touring on it.

Russell Benaroya: One of the coolest tours.

Heather Johnson: Oh. Well, I can answer that one for sure. On our honeymoon, we went to Greece and got on a motorcycle. Now, I’ve been on a motorcycle before but never with Brian. In the very busy streets of Athens, we got a motorcycle that maybe was a little too big for us and put all of our luggage for two weeks of traveling and then took off around very crowded, congested Athens streets. I have blocked out the moment or I would tell you more details. Because that part was a little scary, but the rest of it was amazing.

We went through mountains because we stayed in the mountains in Greece. To be able to be that close to the smells, to the people, it’s so much different than being in a car. It was exhilarating. A little terrifying when I’d look at the end of a cliff. It was an actual cliff, not a cliff. We were in a motorcycle. Some of the roads, there was a truck coming on a hairpin turn and we were like, “Eee!” But amazing, exhilarating, so awesome. Yeah.

Russell Benaroya: Riding on a motorcycle and doing some of that touring, what does it represent for you? What’s the metaphor?

Brian Johnson: Freedom, that excitement, experiencing new places. You’re a lot more connected with what’s around you on a motorcycle than you are in a car, so you’re experiencing a place in a different way. You can cover a whole lot more ground on a motorcycle than you can on foot.

Heather Johnson: True. Yeah. It’s a lot of exploring. Let me tell you, sitting on the back of the motorcycle, there’s a big trust factor. So it definitely represents trust.

Russell Benaroya: Trust, exploration, freedom. Okay, perfect segue into being an entrepreneur, the journey of entrepreneurship and the problem that you all set out to solve at Gozynta. So great segue into helping us understand.

What is the problem that you’re solving today? And why did you feel it was important to solve for this industry that some people may know about on the call but not everybody will know about?

Brian Johnson: Yeah. We sell the leading sync tool, as you mentioned, between ConnectWise Manage and QuickBooks Online. So simply we serve any MSP that uses those two pieces of software. This company has its origins in the MSP business. I was a partner and–

Russell Benaroya: Managed service provider, for everybody’s information.

Brian Johnson: Thank you.

Russell Benaroya: Yes. If you’re a managed service provider, that means you are doing what?

Brian Johnson: Essentially, you’re an IT support company that instead of billing for hours directly, you’re billing on a recurring basis. So it’s very much the model that Stride uses for offering accounting services applied to IT support. Yeah.

Russell Benaroya: Most companies have a IT support partner that’s helping keep their network up, that’s securing the endpoints. Obviously, cyber hacking is a big issue today. MSPs come in as a partner to be that outsource provider to make sure the network is stabled up and that employees can operate safely and efficiently. Yeah. How many of them are there, do you think, in the United States? Thousands?

Heather Johnson: Yeah, there’s a lot of different numbers. I’ve heard ConnectWise had quoted at one point, there were 40,000. But there are conflicting numbers on how many.

Russell Benaroya: No problem. I just wanted to give everybody a sense for… Okay, big industry.

Heather Johnson: It is a big industry.

Russell Benaroya: Solving a big problem for companies that are trying, especially in an environment of remote work, to maintain the integrity of their networks and operate securely. Brian, please continue. Sorry for the segue.

Brian Johnson: No, that’s actually good. On that point, the beginning of 2020 was a chance for MSPs to shine. They worked really hard in the beginning of 2020, but they were heroes that made it possible for their customers, the companies that they serve, to move to remote work situation. Yeah, it was an interesting time to be a part of this business. I believe it–

Heather Johnson: Yeah, it–

Brian Johnson: Oh, go ahead.

Heather Johnson: I’m sorry. MSP is doing well. When everything’s going well for an MSP, the customer doesn’t even realize. So a lot of people said, “Oh, we transferred easily to remote work.” There’s probably a really good MSP behind that making that happen for them.

Russell Benaroya: You help power a piece of making an MSP effective and successful, so talk about the problem that you’re solving at Gozynta.

Brian Johnson: Yes. Our tool is an automation tool. So it’s removing that rote task of transferring data between these two software systems that have an overlap in the data that they have. Both need the entry, so you’re not entering all of this information twice. So it’s a pretty basic thing. But it’s a key part of the billing process in these businesses.

Heather Johnson: We get the financial data to Gozynta the places it needs to.

Russell Benaroya: There you go. I was curious about that. Okay. Okay. It gets Gozynta to the right location.

Heather Johnson: Right.

Russell Benaroya: Got it. Got it. When it goes into the right location accurately and timely, what does that afford for the business owner? What does it give them?

Brian Johnson: I’m sure you could talk about this more than I can. Accuracy in your financial data is key to being able to make good business decisions off of that financial data.

Russell Benaroya: Does it also give business owners a faster path to collecting cash because they are able to bill more efficiently, more timely?

Brian Johnson: It does. A lot of our customers both use our tool and a tool called ConnectBooster where we automate the transfer of the invoices, and then ConnectBooster automates the billing side. We’re also working to bring more tools and more automation to our product to help eliminate some of those tasks and make it easier for MSPs to collect on their invoices more quickly.

Russell Benaroya: Is your product something that without it or maybe you have a competitor, but without it your clients are stuck doing a lot of manual work? I imagine you have some clients that aren’t using you or a competitor, what are they dealing with?

Heather Johnson: Yeah. Without us, there would be somebody that would get an invoice and manage and then would have to take that invoice and manually enter it into QuickBooks Online. Then if there was a payment received, would have to put it back again. They would have to, if they got a new customer, add that into QuickBooks Online.

And just constantly, all the time. It’s hours and hours and hours and hours of doing things that that time could be used in a bazillion different ways. No one likes data entry just for the sake of data entry.

Brian Johnson: A few years ago, I thought we had saturated this market. I assumed that anybody who was using these two products had to be using a sync tool like ours because there’s no way you’re going to do this manually. I keep being surprised when we end up selling to somebody who has been using these two tools for some years and isn’t automatically syncing them. You started this out talking about automation. Prior to starting Gozynta I, as part of our MSP company, spent 10 years doing consulting for manufacturing companies.

We were doing custom software development and helping them automate some of their internal procedures. We developed Mobius as part of that. A lot of times, I ended up talking companies out of doing automation because they were doing it as custom development projects. Those custom development projects are very expensive, and people don’t look at the long tail of it. You don’t just have to pay to develop the software, you have to pay to maintain it or it gets stale and you start having problems down the road.

It’s nice to be able to offer this as a software, as a service where it is just a fixed monthly fee and it’s an easy decision to make and it’s a good business decision. Whereas, those custom development projects can be a good business decision if they are strategically aligned for the business but often are made too hastily and in the wrong areas.

Russell Benaroya: I love these points. You and Heather brought up a few things that came to mind for me. One is this concept of TCO or total cost of ownership. Total cost of ownership of developing software on your own, oftentimes, the real cost is not fully understood. The maintenance, the updating, the personnel, the overhead required to support it can get very expensive, number one.

Number two, what I heard from Heather is, in the absence of Gozynta you have a human being. I love humans. We love humans, but they are inherently variable individuals. So even the best humans is going to make mistakes.

One is you’ve got some cost as a business owner. But two, and maybe this ties back to the whole reason we operate this podcast on genius zone, is when you’re worried about things falling through the cracks, that puts a bit of a brain load on the business leader, puts a cognitive load on the leader. And it makes it hard to get and stay in your zone of genius.

If my zone of genius is being out in the market developing business relationships, selling new business only that I can uniquely do maybe at this stage of the business, but I’m worrying about, “Oh my gosh, did our invoicing get out? Was it accurate?” Even if it’s a light load, it’s still a load. And if that takes 10% off of my genius zone capacity, that might be two, three deals a year. It matters.

Heather Johnson: It matters.

Russell Benaroya: Gozynta is so much more. Your software, because it’s very mission critical for invoicing, is so much more than just a utility. It also maps to why you ride motorcycles which is freedom.

Brian Johnson: Yeah.

Heather Johnson: It does, it does. It gives back freedom to do the things that are more important and needed in the business. A lot of MSPs, the business owner is also inputting invoices. I’ve talked to so many that are like, “What, I don’t have to do this?” And it’s like, “Yeah, get your time back. Do all the things that you need to do.” It’s exciting for them to know, “I get three hours a week, four hours a week, maybe more, back to my life.” Then this just happens. It automatically happens.

Brian Johnson: It’s the same value proposition that the MSP offers to their customer, stop focusing on something that isn’t part of your core value. Get somebody else to focus on that piece for you so you can focus on your core business. It’s the same value proposition that Stride offers to your customers. Gozynta and Stride are in the same place.

We’re both helping with the accounting piece. But, obviously, we work together because we automate some of that. So Stride doesn’t have to do as much work and even charge more than you have to charge now to offer a good service. We’re all in the same business. We’re just in different pieces of it.

Russell Benaroya: It feels like this is a very… I’ll call it a relatively unsexy part of the entire service chain but a mission critical one. As leaders, we often get smitten by the shiny objects. For example, “Oh, let’s automate our quoting tool or a proposal tool.” Which is awesome. Yeah, that could be automated. That’s shiny. And, “Oh my gosh, look at what the customer is going to experience and that’s amazing.” Maybe. But in stack order priority, sometimes it seems like the least sexy areas of opportunity in automation are the most important.

Heather Johnson: That’s very true. We have something we do internally where we have all of our employees put what tasks they’re working on in a time tracking thing that we use. It’s called Toggl. It gets us to see, “Wow, this person’s spending three hours cross posting, marketing messages on Facebook. Is there something we can do to make the social media posting process a bit less cumbersome so we can use that marketing person’s time for other things?”

Because if things just go and they seem to be working fine, but you can automate and get so much more out of your employees by just taking that time and saying, “Tell me what you’re doing and how long these things are taking.” Then they’re like, “Okay, that’s fine. I’m spending six hours inputting invoices.” But that’s six hours that could go to something else. Cross posting social media posts, that could be going to something else. So taking that time to have all of the employees track how long they’re taking on those menial tasks, it’s a great way to be able to take the resources you currently have and focus them on getting to your goal.

Russell Benaroya: With a market that might be as large as yours, call it 40,000 or maybe even half that, with the penetration that you have in the market today, there must be so much room for opportunity. Are you guys just sitting back on easy street and letting all the business come in? Yeah, everybody needs this. They know it. and no problem. We’re just here for you. Or am I spinning a utopia? Because we’re all entrepreneurs, it’s never that easy.

Brian Johnson: Well, I’m–

Heather Johnson: Yeah, I don’t… Go ahead, Brian.

Brian Johnson: Long term, that would be death for our company. The MSP industry has that issue as well. We have to continue to be evolving and improving what we have. We could take a lot bigger salaries if we didn’t have as many developers on our staff to improve the software and make the next generation and make it better. But that’d be very short sighted because our business will eventually whittle away and die if we’re not continuing to innovate.

Heather Johnson: Yeah. One of our things that we work on from everything… The reason why Brian and I wanted to do this business was to have something with empathy at its core, and that’s looking at our users’ experience and making that as easy as possible for them and trying to incorporate as much of their suggestions and what’s not working for them and trying to get that in there.

Yes, we have become a very well-known part of this industry and we’re so happy about that. But it’s also financial data. As you know, you have to build trust with every single person that comes to use us. So it is really important that we have that relationship, and I pride myself on that I think we have 1300 customers. I know most of their families, and I can tell you when they had somebody graduate and their birthdays. Because it’s important to have that relationship.

This isn’t just a tool where you get a different customer success team manager assigned to you every two weeks. This is a relationship. We’re family, and we need to trust each other especially with financial stuff, which you very much well know.

Russell Benaroya: Turning a tool into a true personality and building a real brand around something that’s very utility-driven or utilitarian is powerful. We love being associated with brands that have stories, and what it sounds like is Gozynta is a story brand.

Heather Johnson: It is. It is. Yeah. When Brian and I first met, Brian was at Mobius Works, the MSP that he was at before. I was finishing my MBA, and online dating brought us together. We had our first date—nervous, how’s the weather kind of stuff. Then we started talking about business. And whoa, they shut down the restaurant. We didn’t even know. They had to ask us to leave.

Our conversation after that, it had to do with payroll companies, MRR. We just never stopped talking for, I think it was like 30 days. It was really the longest phone conversation I ever had. I was completing my MBA at the time. We would go on dates, and we’d help other entrepreneurs with ideas and their business plan, “How are you going to make money with this?” We’re helping college students with great ideas but maybe not fully thinking it through.

That’s how we connected. When Brian suggested that we start Gozynta, it was like, “This is what we want to do.” Because we want to make the world a better place, not because we want to be rich. That’s never been our goal at all. It’s about getting a group of people that we care about and we can nurture and help bring up in the world, helping our customers, helping the MSP industry.

I went to IT Nation which is a conference that MSPs go to every year, and I just fell in love with the community. They were just so open to hearing ideas and business strategies. They were ready to learn, and I had the greatest conversations there. Starting Gozynta was about helping this community, and we’ve continued on with it. I’m the vice president of the National Society of IT Service Providers, and that’s helping to get legislation for MSPs.

We’re not sitting on the sidelines and having a bunch of politicians decide what an MSP is and what legislation and what rules should be imposed on them. We’re getting in front of that and making something so that it works for the MSP to keep this industry really healthy. That doesn’t have anything to do with how many subscriptions we sell. That’s something we’re doing because we love this community.

We’re helping other vendors as they start out because there’s other small vendors that have an idea and then don’t know about marketing, so they do the build it and they will come strategy. We’re trying to help them as well come up with ways to be really successful because we just want this industry to be healthy. So I think our story brand comes around with we really care, and we’re always looking for new ways to help.

Russell Benaroya: Thinking of one of the ways that you have helped, you lead an engagement, a presentation at IT Nation which was titled something like having difficult conversations before they become impossible conversation. As owner of a IT connection tool, what are they doing leading a conversation like that? So that’s a great example of being part of the industry, part of the brand, and part of the personality. Tell us a little bit about that presentation. Because I think all business owners are curious.

Heather Johnson: Yes, absolutely. I had five years as a director of HR before coming to Gozynta and had a lot of difficult conversations. You know what? I had a lot of difficult conversations where I totally crashed and burned. So a lot of this was learning from my own mistakes of, “Yeah, that didn’t work. That was a mess.” Or, “I should have said this earlier. I could have saved this.”

You’re off at night trying to figure out, “What were the steps I could have done differently?” It really is just being honest at that first moment. Say, you have an employee that really isn’t reaching the goals that you think they should instead of just grumbling and saying, “Ah, that guy. What are we going to do?” He might have no idea. So having those conversations early on, making expectations clear.

Avoiding difficult conversations was part of that conversation. Then when that point of, yes, we have to have a difficult conversation that this isn’t working out, having goals that they can easily reach to possibly be able to stay. “If you hit these targets, this is what success is defined as.” Because we all have different definitions of that, and so many people coming into jobs aren’t really sure. They’re feeling like, “I’m so successful. Wow, I closed all these tickets.”

If you need to get a certain positivity rating, they need to know that. If you feel like them being successful is to close tickets with a 90% success rating, they need to know that right up front and the plan to get there.

Russell Benaroya: Did you feel that presentation was well received with the MSP community?

Heather Johnson: It really was well received. I was so excited because this is the first time that I did this live. I’ve been on some podcasts and done some webinars, otherwise, on mental health for business owners and taking time for yourself even just five minutes. But this was the first time doing it live.

I had a line of about 18 people that had questions and were excited and wanted to talk more. We had some white papers that we sent out to help people as well to take that information home and structure things like that. So it was great feedback. It also included when you have difficult conversations to give yourself a break.

Because, as business owners, you have some painful conversations. Then you have a meeting scheduled five minutes later, and your eye’s twitching. And it’s like, “Oh, what am I doing here?” But you need to schedule time for mental health because that is a huge part of having a successful business is to be able to have time for yourself.

Russell Benaroya: We live in a world of stories. Sometimes those stories serve us well. Very often the stories we tell ourselves don’t serve us particularly well. So I really try to focus on grounding stories with facts. Because when you look at like, “Hey, what are the facts?” The facts are usually very simple, tend to be unemotional. The story is what gets a spin up. The story is what twitches our eye.

What I appreciate, I’ll bring it back to Gozynta a little bit, is you’re really about facts. You’re really about data, integrity of data, quality of information. Then what you do with that information is where your storytelling begins to come into play, “Oh, should I invest? And what would happen if I did?”

But you’re really at the beginning of the storyline for a lot of business owners that want to grow a successful business. How about bringing that back to business, turn that one right back? Speaking of turning things inside and out, how does somebody with a bachelor of arts and music apply their expertise, their curiosity, their talent to running a software company?

Heather Johnson: Huh. My story is very unique. Buckle up. I was a music and journalism major, I played the harp. I did that for a while and then put it aside to have children and ended up as a single mom. That was cool, but we weren’t living our best. We were on food stamps. We were, I think I had four jobs at that time, really struggling.

I read a book, The E Myth. Because I’m always trying to better myself constantly, I also wrote a novel during that time. But on another day, I did read The E Myth. And it was like Neo in The Matrix for me. All of a sudden, I was looking around and I’m like, “Why do they have things set up this way? They could sell some more, much more if it was this way.”

I started talking to small businesses just with helpful advice, and they started hiring me as a business consultant which I didn’t even know what it was. I was like, “Sure, you can pay me $100 an hour to talk to me.” So I started helping businesses go along. I then worked as a director of HR from there and organized some events at the White House.

That was, for me, literally reading any information I could get my hands on. I locked myself into an office in the first two weeks and read all of the documents that the university had from 1860 to present day to become an expert on the university and then got so many opportunities out of it. I got to work at the White House for a couple years and got my MBA during that time, went back to school.

Then I met Brian at that point. It was like, “What am I going to do with all of this experience and knowledge that I now have about a lot of things?” And it seemed like, yeah, he had an answer. Me needing to know everything that I need to know, took some little basics of coding and what it’s like to be an IT service provider and tried to learn as much as I could. So here I am.

Russell Benaroya: Wow, you never know where these podcasts are going to go. It’s so cool. What a great story. What a great story. What is something that people don’t often ask you about you or your business that you wish they would or something that you’d like people to know about you or the business?

Heather Johnson: I think the biggest thing is that people assume that because we have a business, we’re just in it for the money. Our motivation for being in business is helping people. Business is people if it’s done right. It’s lifting other people up. It’s your customers, it’s your employees, it’s the people that you partner with.

“How can we all support each other? Doesn’t that feel good and hopeful?” And spreading that to others that it’s so much easier to come to work every day when you’re not worried about the bottom line constantly. That comes because people like to see and like to be a part of a company that really cares at every single level. So I think that’s the thing that I would like people to know the most.

Russell Benaroya: How about you, Brian?

Brian Johnson: Yeah, it’s the same. What don’t people usually ask you? They ask about the product, they ask about the business. Unfortunately, as you said, our product isn’t sexy. It’s boring. But what’s interesting is these things that motivate us and where we want to go with our business and how we want to help other people.

Russell Benaroya: Speaking of helping other people, how are you a guide for your clients or prospective clients in this environment where there has been some uncertainty or there may be some fear? You obviously work with a lot of MSPs, so you have good perspective. What are you sharing? What are fears and anxieties that prospective clients are bringing to you? What are you sharing? And how are you guiding them?

Brian Johnson: Yes, so the MSP industry is facing a lot of challenges today although that’s not different. It’s always faced a lot of challenges before it existed as an MSP industry. We’re in tech, tech is constantly changing. So right now, the MSP industry, some of their biggest challenges is an increasing security threat landscape and the move to SAS because a lot of businesses are based around managing on-premise computer infrastructure, servers and workstations that are in an office somewhere.

As companies are moving to remote and moving to SAAS in the cloud software, it’s making MSPs adapt. For as many years as I’ve been going into conferences in this industry, every year I always end up talking to somebody who’s saying, “Oh yeah, this industry is dying. In five years, it’s not going to be here anymore.”

On the other side, people are always going to need help with their computers. You give people a bunch of Chromebooks that, okay, it’s not working, you Powerwash it, there’s not the same antivirus in maintenance and so forth as there is with a Windows machine, they’re still going to need support. “What monitor can I plug into this? How does this work with it? Can I use this piece of hardware with it? Can I use that piece of hardware with it?

That technical support level is never going to go away. We’re also working on some stuff that we can offer to MSPs to help them elevate themselves from the nuts and bolts of IT to start having those higher level business strategy conversations with their clients. Because that’s where the value is. As the technical nuts and bolts piece becomes more commoditized, there’s less value there. There’s less earnings potential there. So we’re looking at ways to help MSPs also elevate themselves up that management chain and become that trusted sea level voice within their customers’ organizations.

Heather Johnson: And completely indispensable.

Russell Benaroya: How do people find you? That’s how I want to leave this podcast. How can people learn more about Gozynta? Why you exist, what you offer, how to be a customer.

Brian Johnson: Our website’s the best place to start, gozynta.com. We have a chat feature on there which plugs into our company’s Slack. There’s a contact form if you’d rather send us an email, and then we can both be found on LinkedIn and all the other places as well.

Heather Johnson: Yeah, all the other places. Yeah, we’re everywhere.

Brian Johnson: Fortunately, Gozynta is easy to search for.

Heather Johnson: Yeah, yeah.

Russell Benaroya: Yes, definitely. Definitely. Well, Heather and Brian, it was so great having you on today. I wanted to talk specifically about your business. I also wanted to go to a slightly higher altitude and talk more holistically about the importance and value of automation and efficiency and quality as it relates to helping business leaders create the clarity to spend more time in their genius zone so they’re not worried about processes that are still highly manual in their organization that even if they’re not spending a lot of time in it, they are wondering, “How’s it working? How’s it going?”

You’ve really helped plug that gap or plugged the dike to make sure that when information transfers from one system to another, it does so with integrity and it’s so mission critical that the information that you create is the foundation for some really good smart business decision making for MSPs that want to build something meaningful and sustainable themselves. So thank you for giving us the opportunity to learn more about you and sending a really strong message.

Brian Johnson: Thanks so much, bro.

Heather Johnson: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Russell Benaroya: All right. Well, listen. Thanks, everybody. Have a great week. See you on the next Stride 2 Freedom podcast. Take care. Bye.