In this episode, I speak with George Bardissi, CEO of Bardissi Enterprises and BVoIP and discuss the opportunities for MSPs in Voice-over-IP (VoIP).
An Interview with George Bardissi
I’ve written before about Why your MSP should be using a VoIP solution to handle your calls.
In this episode, George Bardissi talks about how his BVoIP solution can make Voice-Over-IP easier for MSPs to manage and sell.
George started his first company, MSP Bardissi Enterprises, while still at school. Starting out as providing break/fix solutions, this evolved into offering service and maintenance plans and today it’s an opt-in service, with a full range of support provided to each customer.
Bardissi Enterprises is based in Philadelphia, with most of its 150 clients within the tri-state area. Their focus is on larger businesses, with between 50 and 100 employees, although George admits:
“We grew the hard way within the industry and needed to come up with a more long-term strategy. We started offering different tiers of our support plans (bronze, silver, gold), but everyone chose the cheapest option. The customers were motivated by price and then complained when the lower package didn’t fix all of their problems.
Finally, we concluded that not every customer is the right customer, and we needed to find the people who understood the value of not simply fire-fighting but actually working to grow their business and were looking for a cost-effective and efficient service.
Four years ago, George created BVoIP, a telephony solutions company which is a separate entity to his MSP. He explains his reasons for setting it up:
“We identified early on (in the MSP) that telephony was a real challenge, and after a few years, we decided to evaluate where we were wasting time on things that weren’t bringing in much revenue.
“We had 38 different phone system solutions or manufacturers that we were managing, and it was hard to keep track of all of these. In one year, we spent around 38% of our time on phone system vendor management, most of which was wasted.”
This led to the introduction of a single, standardised system which they installed everywhere, a move which drastically cut wasted time. BVoIP was developed for MSPs to be profitable, scalable and would eliminate time burn – a better solution than being a reseller.
BVoIP’s focus is entirely on the MSP, designed to provide them with an easily deployable system and management system, and they can choose whichever provider or phone type they like. The idea is that the MSPs are able to standardise the offering themselves and build it out to make good money from it.
George says that many MSPs fail when trying to introduce VoIP services because they’re too quick to choose cheap options from overseas. They also struggle to scale and manage multiple vendors, as well as providing services across a number of sites.
They also think they can do everything themselves, and trying to buy, finance and maintain goods as well as install them and create the service that each customer needs is time-consuming and hard to manage.
George credits the success of BVoIP to being able to employ a global workforce, rather than trying to find people locally – for many MSPs in the Philadelphia area, the bigger companies secure the top people before they’ve even left school.
He also advocates going cloud-based as soon as possible, to have only the minimum on-site. This makes things easier to manage, saves time as you don’t have to transport equipment, and allows companies to grow faster.
He’s honest about the challenges companies like his face. MSPs are at risk of the vendors trying to get into the same space, as competing with well-known brands such as Dell is difficult. It’s also important for staff to be up to date with current changes, especially with cloud competencies, and smaller firms will struggle to be able to lose man-hours while staff are out being trained.
For BVoIP and other VoIP providers, there’s always a new company popping up, and people only need some coding skills and internet access to join the marketplace. He believes that the ability to disrupt the SaaS world is unprecedented, but urges companies to concentrate on what they can control, and not worry about things they can’t.
George hopes to continue to grow BVoIP steadily to make it a global solution for MSPs to offer their customers.
Mentioned in this episode
- Bardissi Enterprises – www.bardissi.net
- BVoIP – www.bvoip.com
- Rackspace – www.rackspace.com
- Autotask – www.autotask.com
- ConnectWise – www.connectwise.com
- Salesforce – www.salesforce.com
- ZenDesk – www.zendesk.com
- FreshDesk – www.freshdesk.com
- Tigerpaw – www.tigerpaw.com
- OpenStack – www.openstack.org
- A full list of BVoIP integrations – www.bvoip.com/integrations
- George Bardissi on LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/georgebardissi/
- George Bardissi on Twitter – twitter.com/gbardissi
Interview Transcription
Transcript – TubbTalk 14 with George Bardissi and Richard Tubb
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Richard Tubb is one of the best-known experts within the global IT Managed Service Provider (MSP) community. He launched and sold his own MSP business before creating a leading MSP media and consultancy practice. Richard helps IT business owner’s take back control by freeing up their time and building a business that can run without them. He’s the author of the book “The IT Business Owner’s Survival Guide” and writer of the award-winning blog www.tubblog.co.uk
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