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The BrightGauge Blog

Amanda McCluney

[Podcast] Episode 19 with Shann Bosnell of CareWorx

As a true Power User of the BrightGauge platform, Shann Bosnell has joined us on multiple occasions to share some of the tools and best practices that helped TUC Managed IT Solutions (now CareWorx) ...
As a true Power User of the BrightGauge platform, Shann Bosnell has joined us on multiple occasions to share some of the tools and best practices that helped TUC Managed IT Solutions (now CareWorx) grow exponentially over the last 10 years. This time we take a closer look specifically at the benefits of data-driven sales and service, results using client dashboards, the decision to operate in a vertical instead of a horizontal, and more. The Results of Utilizing Client Dashboards, and Data Driven Sales & Service: Episode Highlights Shann’s intro and a closer look at the evolution of TUC Managed IT Solutions (0:54) The business benefits of operating in a vertical instead of a horizontal (9:03) Advice on mergers and acquisitions: things to consider about your team in the due diligence phase (12:02) Roles and responsibilities as VP of Technology (15:35) Shann’s insights on where the industry is going & what service providers will be facing soon (19:52) Seeing huge growth by focusing on the right customers & MRR (23:32) Where did TUC’s data driven focus come from?... “Project Tangible” (24:10) Getting buy-in from the team on being data driven (27:47) How Shann uses his 3 key dashboards for customers, service, and sales {see them in the BrightGauge webinar on Customer Best Practices} (29:18) How to decide which customers get a dashboard (35:22) Using BrightGauge to uncover sales opportunities (38:39) Wrap up questions: best source of business knowledge, parting advice, how to reach Shann (40:31) Want to find out more about The BrightGauge Podcast? Check out all the episodes here.
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New Dashboard UI Product Announcement

There’s nothing quite as exciting for us as an announcement about product updates, and this is a monstrous one! Last week we introduced several changes at once, so here’s the scoop on the new look and new abilities now found in BrightGauge: New dashboard settings menu New dashboard switching experience New feature of CLONING dashboards New feature of FAVORITING dashboards. New editing of dashboard names First, a quick video overview to demonstrate the new changes and then you can find more details about each below: Three Dot Menu - New Settings Menu Where there was previously a Dashboard gear icon and a “builder” state of a dashboard, we consolidated consolidated all dashboard functionality into a settings menu to the left of the dashboard name. The new look features a three dot menu. This three dot menu style has become very usable and popular within our community and we will be rolling this out throughout the rest of the pages when they get refreshed (and they will all get refreshed). Note: For our customers, when you press Add Gauges the same drawer pops out as before, but to close you can just press “X” Switching Dashboards Switching Dashboards got a major overhaul in this release. Instead of having a simple dropdown, we created a modal that has a search bar at the top. When you press “Switch Dashboards” from the new dashboard menu (or by pressing “s” key in the dashboard) the cursor will already be in the search bar so you can start typing and just hit the arrow key down to find your dashboard... Super fast and efficient way to change dashboards. The modal is organized by favorited dashboards first (new feature!!!) and then rest of dashboards in alphabetical order. Favoriting Dashboard As described above, the switch dashboard modal is organized by favorited dashboards first so those are easiest to find when looking for dashboards. You can favorite a dashboard by going into the settings menu of the dashboard and clicking favorite! Very easy, very functional. And these are personal favorites so they are only visible to you. Cloning a Dashboard A big feature request from our users was to more easily create multiple dashboards similar to each other. So we decided to add in the ability to CLONE a dashboard from the dashboard settings menu. It works just as you would think, click to Clone, give it a name and the new dashboard is created with the same gauges as before. Editing Dashboard Name In-Line Lastly, when creating a dashboard you will be first prompted to give your dashboard a name. Not to worry though if you want to change the name later, you just hover over the name of the dashboard and and click to edit (very similar to the Report Builder). The dashboard name will save once you press the enter key or just click on any part of the app. That’s a wrap, lots of new features and consolidation of features in one release. Stay tuned for more changes coming soon to the dashboard!

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Ivan Rezvoy joins BrightGauge as Director of Finance

Born in Russia, Ivan was raised in Moscow until age 12 when his family moved to the States. Settling in wine country, Ivan attended middle and high school in Santa Rosa, California, before hitting the road to Portland, Oregon, at 19. Before BrightGauge In Portland, Ivan started college with a focus on Political Science while also working in the construction industry until he packed his bags for Boston at 23. There he worked for a startup that imported roofing tile products from Italy, and he also decided to change his major to Business. After a couple of years in Boston, Ivan relocated to Miami because it’s one of the main markets for the roofing tile industry… although he ultimately decided that Accounting would be his career. After earning his degree with honors at FIU, Ivan left the startup to join Compuquip Technologies, an enterprise IT security provider (and BrightGauge’s sister company), as a Staff Accountant. Ivan continued working on his degree, earning his Masters in Accounting and eventually his CPA license in 2015, while at the same time climbing the ranks at Compuquip with a move to Accounting Manager and then Director of Finance. Joining Team BrightGauge Ivan’s Director of Finance role with BrightGauge is unique, because he also still fills the same role at Compuquip. And although the two companies share some of the same leadership team, just about everything else is different. When it comes to his work for BrightGauge, Ivan explains that that he’s “excited to work for a company that puts real time data analytics at the heart of its product offering and its business model, and utilizes software that’s 100% cloud based”. He goes on to explain that “working within the cloud based environment has allowed for our teams to seamlessly integrate various operating, expense tracking and accounting systems together, which automated interdepartmental information flow, made record keeping easier, and improved the quality and integrity of the data in the systems”. As for our team culture and fun stuff, Ivan’s excited to “be part of a team that sets its sights on achieving big dreams, solving complex challenges and creating a positive and exciting work environment where everyone involved can thrive”... we couldn’t have said it any better ourselves! Outside the Office When he’s not keeping our books in order, Ivan enjoys trying new restaurants, dancing salsa, riding bicycles, and traveling with his wife. He’s also passionate about continuously learning and he often listens to business, science, and technology-themed podcasts and audiobooks. Please join us in welcoming Ivan to the BrightGauge team!

BrightGauge Announces New Integration with Datto

Managing your data is about to get even better, with the addition of Datto in your BrightGauge! Datto offers comprehensive backup, recovery, and business continuity solutions to thousands of managed service providers worldwide, and we’re thrilled to make it easier than ever for our customers to access that data. Our Datto integration gives you the ability to seamlessly track your backups and manage the amount of data you are storing for your clients, in real time. Add that to your PSA, RMM, and QuickBooks data (plus tons of other sources), for a single view of all the metrics that help run your business - without the pain of logging into all those separate sources. Here are a few Datto metrics you need to know: One of our favorite gauges shows you how much of each device is in use, which could lead to a device upgrade, or at least alert your team that an agent needs to be moved: By default, Datto devices should check in automatically every so often, but if those devices are out of communication, how fast will your team know about it? If you’re utilizing our new gauge, it’s as simple as adding a color-changing threshold for an easy-to-spot update that will show on your dashboard in real time: We’ve also included a place for screenshot images, so backup monitoring and verification can be tracked right in your dashboard: See what our Datto customers are saying:

Fresh Feature: Leaderboard Gauge with Team Photos

Over the last year, our Product Manager and co-Founder, Brian Dosal, spent a lot of time making customer calls. His goal was to better understand what our community finds most useful about BrightGauge, and to also take some notes about ideas that would help our customers even more when it comes to their daily business operations. One of the most common themes Brian found during those calls was the idea of introducing or increasing some healthy team competition. So with the demand in place, Brian and our Product Team set out to make a special gauge type that we’re calling the Leaderboard Gauge. Not only does it give you the ability to rank your team based on their performance, but we’ve also given you the ability to amp up the fun factor too with images and badges: How to Get Started with Leaderboard Gauges The images are customizable, meaning you can show the shining faces of your team members, or use any icon/symbol of your choosing. After clicking on the image placeholder you’ll see a modal that pops open with the ability to upload an image and select it for that dimension value you clicked on. We’ve talked before about how gamification helps companies such as Microsoft and Nike to significantly improve employee performance on routine tasks, so we’re thrilled to bring this feature to the BrightGauge community. You can get the full scoop on how to build and navigate leaderboard gauges in our Product Updates page where you’ll find a step by step guide to get started. As always, let us know what you think about our latest feature update and tell us about your team’s results too!

70+ Metrics for MSPs

Key metrics and accompanying formulas to help MSPs skyrocket growth and success!

Get your KPIs

Christian Toivola joins BrightGauge as Senior Web Developer

Some of our community may recognize Christian’s name, as he played an integral part of our team during the time that we were building out our current platform in late 2014/early 2015. We were sad to see him return to his native Sweden in early 2015, but when the tables turned a year later we were so excited to welcome him back to our Product Team! The Early Years Christian, who is originally from Sweden, decided to study abroad after high school and joined Johnson & Wales University in his hometown Göteborg where they had an international campus. After spending a year at the main campus in Rhode Island working as assistant webmaster, he and his roommates decided to transfer to the Miami campus, where he completed his bachelors in International Business Management. As part of his internship, he convinced his career counselor to do an IT internship, which landed him at Burger King corporation in 2002. This was the start of his career in programming, and for the next 8-9 years he worked as a .NET consultant for various companies while simultaneously completing a MBA in Entrepreneurship Finance from Nova Southeastern University. While working at a travel company in 2007, one of his co-workers introduced him to Ruby on Rails, and from that point onward, he knew he wanted to start working with open source. A few years later, a good friend encouraged him to start a Python/Django meetup group in Miami, which eventually provided him with a ticket out of the enterprise world into the startup realm. Christian then spent a few years as a tech lead building products for startups, which involved a lot of client-side JavaScript frameworks and botanizing exotic backend technologies. Team BrightGauge Based on his experience in building highly scalable, front-end heavy web applications, Christian was originally recruited to the team to help rewrite the core BrightGauge platform. He joined in 2013 and he and the team helped write and design most of the app as it exists today. Christian enjoys building products and tinkering with frontend stuff. The thing that attracted him most to BrightGauge was that it’s a fun and challenging product to scale both UX-wise, as well as technically. Up Close & Personal Christian enjoys playing guitar in his spare time and has an ever growing collection of instruments, to his wife's great dismay. Among his prized possessions are a Martin HD-28 and a cherry Gibson ES-335, which he uses to create music of the old masters such as Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, Elmore James, Albert King, Little Milton, Howlin Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins and a whole slew of other weird artists that your parents/grandparents might have listened to 50 years ago. In addition to his music hobby, Christian also enjoys hanging out with his family and drawing or building Lego creations with his daughter.

[Podcast] Episode 18 with Richard Trivedi of CadreNet

We sat down with Richard Trivedi, Owner of CadreNet, to talk about his business evolution after being the IT industry for over 20 years. As one of the first customers to use the BrightGauge + Tigerpaw integration, Richard knows a thing or two about making a business more efficient, but also how to increase MRR at the same time. How CadreNet Increased Operational Efficiency and Drove MRR with BrightGauge + Tigerpaw: Episode Highlights Richard’s Introduction & background (0:52) How CadreNet has found success with the majority of their work being remote (3:35) A day in the life as Owner of CadreNet (pre and post-BrightGauge) (4:35) How Richard became data-driven (6:39) Getting the team to buy into data (7:48) Manage to zero vs. watching numbers (9:15) Results with Tigerpaw + BrightGauge (10:47) The gauge that is key to Richard’s profitability by increasing MRR (11:09) Executive Summary Reports for Clients (14:11) Current priorities and focus for CadreNet (15:38) Learning how to be a better business owner and service provider (16:47) Focusing on a specific technology instead of a vertical (18:39) Advice from someone in the IT business for over 20 years (19:22) Parting thoughts and how to reach Richard (21:59) Want to find out more about The BrightGauge Podcast? Check out all the episodes here.

3 Reasons Why it's Critical to Track KPIs in Real Time

Key Performance Indicators seem to be the center of attention in the SMB world, and for good reason. The idea is that by tracking the numbers that matter most to your business, you’ll be able to determine what’s working well for your operations and more importantly, fix those areas that are not working well. It sounds easy enough in concept, but we hear regularly from people who tell us they are tracking KPIs but still haven’t seen much improvement to their business operations. To which our next question is “how often are you tracking your KPIs?” Plenty of SMB leaders today are still trying to run their business on the old, monthly P&L statements and struggling to make effective calls that will aid their business as needed. When we get some of these leaders on a call to talk about how they can better manage their data to get the results that they want, our first order of business is to explain why it’s critical to constantly track KPIs. Sure, there are some that can be tracked daily or weekly, but if you can track KPIs throughout the day, it’s so much easier to see when a particular number starts to slip and that means you can get started immediately on a fix. No need to wait until days or weeks later when the issue has no doubt started to snowball into a fix that will take more time and effort to amend. On a similar note, our friends at ChannelE2E recently shared some stats about best-performing SMBs and why they have made the decision to monitor KPIs in real time: 50% of companies that track metrics in real-time met all their goals in the last 12 months compared to only 24% of companies that did not track in real-time. 92% of companies that tracked their metrics in real-time met some or all their goals in the last 12 months – compared to 64% of companies that did not track in real-time. But here’s the most telling stat of all: Only 14 percent of SMBs are monitoring their KPIs in real-time. Now here’s some food for thought: if you know where your business operations stand with your current method of checking KPIs sporadically, why not increase your tracking and monitor the results you see? In a worst-case scenario, you’ll see small improvements by keeping a more vigilant tab on your metrics, although we’re willing to bet that there are significant achievements waiting for you once you take the right steps! Ready to learn more about the 6 key areas that all companies should track in order to monitor the health of their business? Download our free guide to KPI Best Practices:

Get to Know the Team: Our Favorite Apps

When you ask a software team about their favorite app, it’s easy to assume the answer may involve the brand they work on every day. But for the purposes of Part 8 in our ongoing series titled The People Behind the Product, we asked our team to think outside of BrightGauge. Here’s what they had to say: Brian: Outside of BrightGauge? Trello. It's simple, fast, and you can tell they've poured tons of thoughts into the details of the application. It's got detail and elegance like I've never seen before in an application. Adam: Pocket. It lets me save articles for reading later. It is actually feeding an article reading addiction so it might be a bad thing, but it is great at what it does. Francisco: Now for Reddit (Android). My main source of all news, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't at least open the app and read the first five entries. It's like a personal, curated list of news that I can quickly glance over and read in more detail if they truly catch my attention. David: Twitter - cool for finding out about events in real-time around the world. Kristian: Both of my favorite apps tie in with my hobbies. One is SoundCloud, a music platform where many dj’s and producers post tracks and mixes. The other is Untappd, which is a social media app for craft beer that allows you to check in and track the different beers you drink. I listen to SoundCloud on a daily basis while at work and it has pretty much replaced radio stations in my car. Untappd is great not only to track beers once you’ve drank them, but also great to read reviews on beers before you buy them. Both are very handy apps that I depend on greatly. Orlando: Slack. Productivity enhancer and waster. Really changed how I communicate with the team both in and out of the office. Larry: Duolingo. Makes language learning very mobile and quick. Randall: Wink. I use it to control my home's lights. I also have an Amazon Echo which integrates with the app so that I can control the lights with my voice. Rick: All Time: Reddit Sync… Honorable Mention: Alien Blue (Sorry iPhone) Reddit keeps me up to date with everything I enjoy. And without Reddit I wouldn't be part of this fantastic team. Kind of hard to top that. Christian: There’s a Swedish app that I really liked called Swish that lets you transfer money to anybody who has the app just via their phone number. It's very well designed and I wish there was a similar US alternative to make it easier to split bills or send payments. Amanda: I like a lot of the apps mentioned by my teammates, and use them often… but I stopped to think the other day how much easier my life is because of apps like MapQuest and Waze. As one of only a few BrightGaugers not originally from the Miami area, I find myself using them all the time to get myself around town. I don't know what people did before GPS! Eric: Feedly which is where I get all my favorite blogs delivered so I can read them all in one place. I use it everyday, actually multiple times per day. Stephen: Recently it’s been Snapchat and mostly because of the newly added filters - always a good laugh. Steve: Spotify is great. Their new Discover Weekly playlist is the best curated music experience I've ever experienced. Every week I get a new playlist that has some stuff I've heard and a lot of great stuff I haven't. When I was younger I had all the time in the world to look for new music and I was listening to great stuff. Now that I don't have as much time I felt I was just listening to the same old things I had heard before. But now with Discover Weekly it's like I have my teenage self digging in the crates for music I'm going to love. Ryan: Twitter: I get news, stay current on what friends are up to, and keep up-to-date on industry knowledge and best practices. Human: It is an activity tracker. Designing on a computer all day, it's important to take a break every now and then. It makes sure I stay active. Do you have a favorite app that’s not on our list? Tell us about it so we can check it out!

Service Management Best Practices: A Dashboard Tour

When it comes to finding the perfect balance between keeping your MSP business running efficiently, and also making sure your customers are happy, it’s easy to feel like you’re running in circles. It can be a hard goal to accomplish. That’s why we’re so excited to introduce our next customer-led webinar on Service Management Best Practices with Nick Olerud, Director of Technology at Netrix IT. Nick will join us on Wednesday, 1st June, 2016, to share some of the dashboards and management techniques that helped his team improve and now maintain their best-in-class performance. Some of the topics Nick will cover: how to hold your team accountable with metrics and scorecards how he uses dashboards to manage projects and ensure his team is delivering on time using dashboards to manage escalation tickets leveraging BrightGauge to provide transparency to customers via dashboards and so much more! Save your seat now for our next dashboard tour! Everyone who RSVPs will also receive the webinar recording so you can go back and reference at any time:

How To Use Dropbox for SaaS Management

Running an MSP (or any SMB for that matter) can sometimes feel like a juggling act. You’ve got clients to keep satisfied, team members who need guidance on their day-to-day responsibilities, metrics to track, decisions to make, and probably a hundred other things going on simultaneously. We know, we’ve been there too. In the middle of the madness, one of the things that seems to snowball from a small effort into an avalanche of updates is trying to keep up with all of the SaaS products you have in use. From managing a master list of all the products in your collection, tracking which product is being used by which team member, who needs to be onboarded, or who needs to be offboarded, you can quickly find yourself in a mess of records. Luckily, there’s a really simple solution to manage your SaaS products by using a dashboard. Utilizing Dropbox to Manage your Subscriptions One of our cool features that sometimes seems under-utilized by our community is the Dropbox integration we offer. While it’s easy for people to overlook initially, the Dropbox feature is a great option to have when it comes to data sources that are not native integrations at this time. So whether we’re talking about tracking SaaS products, managing your phone system data, analyzing customer survey results, or anything else, Dropbox can easily be a key player in achieving a well-rounded business intelligence view. Besides giving users a ton of versatility when it comes to the data they monitor, our Dropbox integration is also incredibly easy to use. By leveraging a simple CSV file, you can quickly get the data you need displayed on your dashboard. You’ll first get started by connecting Dropbox to your BrightGauge (see the step-by-step instructions here). Once you have that completed, then you can get to work on creating a dataset from your CSV (see instructions here). We've even created a SaaS Management Template so that you can get started now! Thinking outside the business lines with Dropbox On another note, our Dropbox integration isn't just for operational numbers; we have also used it to put together some fun dashboards, like the one that tracks our love for coffee, a Fitbit dashboard, or even Brian’s wine inventory. The possibilities are endless with Dropbox + BrightGauge… so tell us, how will you use the integration?

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