About Georg Dauterman:
Georg believes in the fusion of technology and creativity. With a background in both fields, he started his career in IT departments of publishing and advertising agencies, realizing the critical need for tech aligned with business goals. Joining Valiant in 2004, Georg's expertise and passion for efficiency brought industry recognition. He holds a history degree from Queens College and serves on Datto's Global Partner Advisory Board. Beyond his leadership role, Georg enjoys exploring culinary skills, fitness, and outdoor adventures with his family.
About Megan Quick:
Megan is a member of the Valiant Marketing & Sales team, assisting in demonstrating the value of our services and ensuring positive experiences for prospective clients. When not working with technology, she is a theater production manager and performer, producing her own comedy shows, and is an avid writer. Megan has a B.A. in Theater from Sewanee: The University of The South.
Megan Quick: Hello and welcome back. Happy Fourth to all of our listeners — it's past, but I wanted to acknowledge it. And welcome back to The Creative Stack, our show about the intersection of creativity and information technology. I am your host, Megan Quick, and I am joined as always by Georg. Hello, Georg, how are you?
Georg Dauterman: Hey Megan, what's up?
Megan Quick: President of Valiant Technology, if anyone forgot — Georg Dauterman. And we never forget. And Georg, I'm so happy to talk today — it's one of those great just-you-and-me conversations. We came up with this topic just a few days ago, and we're really excited about it, because I feel like you think about this a lot — we're going to talk about earning certifications in the IT world and the MSP world, right?
Georg Dauterman: Yep, yep. It's an interesting topic, and one that's sort of contentious at times in the field. There's a lot to it — it's a big business actually, the certification industry. It has a lot of negative aspects, but there's a lot of positives, and I tend to focus on the positives — where it really helps people perform better and build confidence. So I have a lot of thoughts on this, I could probably talk longer than you want to hear me go over it.
Megan Quick: No — hey, no, no, no, I wanna hear it. And also, so the audience knows, I have dipped my toes in the certification world. I got the fundamentals done when I started working at Valiant, and they're no joke. And to your point of it being sort of like an industry, for lack of a better word, I feel like it's education — there are some not-great aspects sometimes, but I'm also always a believer that continuing education is just good for yourself as an individual. And when I took that test, I did actually feel my brain grow. I was just like, my gosh.
Georg Dauterman: Yeah, it was net-new information — stuff you'd never seen before. It's contextualized to the space you're in, because you're actually applying it in the real world. If you just took it out of nowhere it wouldn't mean very much, but when you're working directly in the field it really helps you, and it also helps you see down the road a little bit — what you should be thinking about or learning about, or maybe be able to help customers more. There's a lot there where certification is really helpful. So I'm a big believer in them.
Megan Quick: Yeah, I think we talk a lot about the Sisyphean nature of IT, and I feel like certifications are part of it — but we both have loved ones in the medical field, and they are constantly studying. I have a family member who has to take a test every few years. And I think in IT — well, maybe the stakes are different — but that mindset is really important, because it's always changing.
Georg Dauterman: Correct. Well — we'll talk about this a bit more later in the podcast — but all professions have a bar that needs to be met. And it's not just a base level of understanding and competency — every one of those professional designations, whether it's an attorney, a doctor, a CPA, an HR specialist with SHRM, there's continuous education. There are CPE credits, there are requirements to maintain, and while some of those are loose and some are hard depending on the organization, it's forcing practitioners to stay current, which is really critical. But we can get there in a second — I have a lot more thoughts on that.
Megan Quick: Yeah, no, no — and I think that's such a good jumping-off point, and shows broadly why this is something Valiant also believes in. So Georg, let's start — since these topics are most interesting when we make them personal — I have a hard-hitting question for you: how many certifications do you have?
Georg Dauterman: I have a lot — many, many. I've been working in IT since the nineties, which is — yes, you remember those. So I have a lot of different certifications over the years: Microsoft, Apple, specific vendor ones like SonicWall, I have the CISSP, which is cybersecurity. And they change, right? When I started my career I was pretty hot on certifications, particularly because I'd studied this in school and then did some continuing education and learned it formally that way, and certifications were a good way to validate the training and the education.
But then there were many years I didn't get certifications — I have a huge gap in the twenty-teens where I wasn't really pursuing them. I was running ops here at Valiant, and the job didn't have as much certification focus, or it wasn't what I was actually working on. And the company didn't have quite as much focus on certifications at that time either — we weren't as serious about it, we didn't tie advancement to it the way we do now. And I think we suffered because of it — we weren't quite as mature a company, and we changed our approach over the last four years or so to be much more serious about it.
So the answer is: I have a lot of certifications. Some of them are for technology that people who work here weren't even born yet when it came out — some of it's really dated. But a lot of times when you take these certifications, there's a fundamental aspect to it, especially the earlier ones you take in your career, and they really help you understand and frame the way you think.
I'll give you a perfect example. The first certification I took was a very basic Apple certification in 1999, which sounds crazy to say out loud. And the one thing it talked about was a troubleshooting methodology called split-half searches, where you break down the problem into halves, again and again, until you identify the issue. I still use that split-half search methodology today. It's basic stuff, but if you weren't taught it, you wouldn't know it — unless someone tells you, or you observe it, or you learn it in training, you wouldn't do it. There are hundreds of little things like that — the way you set up networks, the way you configure a UPS, setting the time on a server. These things matter.
Megan Quick: What was it called — split-half? I feel like that could be a self-help book. Split-half searches, and like, Georg's...
Georg Dauterman: Split-half searches. It really is — when you say it out loud, it makes perfect sense. You take a problem, you have a set of things, you notice something broken inside of it, so you break the problem down into smaller and smaller chunks until you can identify the issue. It's talk therapy — I mean, you could apply it to automotive, or HVAC, or electrical. It's a fundamental troubleshooting method, but it's probably not something you're taught until you work in the field, or you're trained to do it. So that's just a good example.
Megan Quick: I love that — I feel like I'm going to carry that with me after this conversation. And you kind of already touched on it, Georg — the fundamentals and the mindset that continuing to get certifications gives you. And also, Valiant — our company — we went away from it and came back to it. I know now it's a real focal point for our techs.
Could you speak to — you've already touched on it a bit — but could you tie together, in the world of managed service providers, how certifications benefit everyone, from the staff to the owners to our clients?
Georg Dauterman: Sure. I mean, any business is like a three-legged stool, basically — if you visualize it, there's the clients and customers, there's the staff, and then there's the company and the leadership. Certification benefits all three. To me, primarily for the customer, it sets a level of professional expertise and another component of the trust factor. Basically, MSPs are trust-based businesses. People have to trust us with some of their most delicate and critical systems. Regardless of the size of the company, or what they do — obviously in medicine it's life and death — but every company needs these systems to function the majority of the time, securely, safely, and just be there.
What the certification does is it says to the customer: hey, we trained people formally on this. They have a floor of knowledge, and they passed a test to prove they know it, and that they're not just amateurs. Being an autodidact, learning on the job, is a critical step in working in any field, IT or otherwise — but for people's confidence in what you're doing, it really helps to say, I'm certified in this, I was trained on this, the company has a product and process and we learned how to do it. So that's for the customer.
For the staff — here at Valiant, and at many other MSPs — it's a path for advancement. It's how you learn to do the next level and get better at your job. It also lets you expand what you're working on directly, get more experience. Getting a certification doesn't instantaneously mean you're going to start working on something more complex, but it opens a doorway, because now you're speaking the same language as the person who's done it before. I know plenty of people who have certifications and are terrible IT people, and people with no certifications who are great IT people. But there's a really healthy middle ground where you can say: I have these certificates, I have this training, I actually did these things, and I have some paperwork to back it up.
And where I think it really benefits the company, for us, is that it proves to our vendors and partners that we're serious about that product. It also gives us a focal point for training our staff on our stack. The more expertise we have in our stack, the better we can serve our customers, and the healthier our company can be. Overall, it benefits the company to have a level of professionalism and professional people working here — not just a bunch of guys with computers. These are professionals.
Megan Quick: It once was, but —
Georg Dauterman: There was definitely a bit of a scrappy gang vibe going on here at one point — maybe a mafia, we're not sure yet, depending who you ask and when — but the reality is, going back to trust, the customer can trust that what we're doing is to the standard of the vendors we work with, and to our own standards. So once again, training and certification is just one part of the overall process, but it's an important one, especially as a person advances through their career. There's a lot of ways you can go depending on your pathway, but generally speaking, certifications can be a decent use of your time, for sure.
Megan Quick: I think — and this is a slightly leading question, Georg — you were speaking about the three-legged stool and the client-facing part of it. When I was still partnered with you in sales, I would talk about the certifications our staff had, and as I worked here I noticed more of our clients who aren't in IT were educated on what certifications to look for, what we need as a company — they're getting audits from their own clients and things like that. So — going a bit roundabout — I know I watched you pursue more certifications yourself. Can you talk about that, even as president of Valiant? You're not on the phones. Why was that important to you?
Georg Dauterman: Sure. Well — philosophically speaking — the field, technology, IT change, has almost like a technological turn every five to ten years. It really changes — if you think back to when we started the company, or even before, working in enterprise, there were so many different systems, tools, and methodologies. And most people who work in this field don't mind staying up to date on those things.
But when you do it in a more formal manner, you really learn to understand it better. Right now there's so much — we'll talk about AI in a second — but there's so much to learn, and honestly no one really knows it all, that's the big joke of it. I think back to say fifteen years ago when cloud emerged — it was really a whole new way of working, and it's no less complicated or time-consuming or difficult, it's just different. Now it has some inherent advantages — it's more stable, uptime's great, you have a shared responsibility model with the big hyperscalers — but you had to learn how to use it. It wasn't instinctive. And the people who didn't make the effort to learn it were kind of left behind, or weren't servicing their customers very well. We see that in the field all the time, where people get stuck and don't want to move ahead and learn these things.
So certifications are a great way to stay current, and that's our job — to stay current for our customers. Going back to that trust factor, they trust that we're staying current and bringing them solutions. We're never the latest and greatest, because MSPs aren't great at latest-and-greatest — that's not what we do. What we're good at is: as a technology matures and starts edging toward wide adoption, we're really good at rolling it across our entire stack and getting our customers up to that standard, once it's being demanded of them or it's what they want to achieve. So it's a really good way of just keeping yourself in the game, if you want to call it that.
Megan Quick: Yeah, and to your point about latest-and-greatest — it's funny, because when I talk about what I do, I'm always like, we are the plumbing, we are the infrastructure — and I say that with immense respect. There's that building in Manhattan that's been collapsing, and I'm like — that's sort of a metaphor for what happens when you don't plan, when you don't have the proper foundation for anything.
Georg Dauterman: Hundred percent. Yeah, it's interesting — the MSP space as a whole is a strange job, in that we're a trusted advisor on one hand, helping people make decisions about where they're taking their company, but we're also doing plumbing too. It's a strange gig. But if you look at any profession, it has that. If you have an outsourced CFO who's a trusted advisor, there's usually a bookkeeper somewhere helping them — because you really don't want your CFO, someone with a strategic mindset, doing journal entries and P&L work.
So we're a bit of a combination — and I don't want to get too far into it — but certifications are a great way to address that. And one of the things I think is really important for IT in particular is that it's a fairly young industry.
Megan Quick: I was about to ask that. Even when you were talking about the journey of Valiant, we didn't focus on it as much. When I started working here — there's a wall, folks, if you ever visit us, please do — there's a wall of certifications where we display them, Georg, yours are up there, I think mine's up there too, and our whole staff's, so you can see that people are continuing to learn. And I think about our industry — it's about thirty years old, in its current iteration, if we could trace the evolution.
Georg Dauterman: Yeah — in the version it's in now. If you look at it overall, between the eighties and nineties it was a different field. It changed a lot, it became much more professionalized, and even now it's continuing to professionalize. It really comes down to: any high-level profession has educational and certification barriers. You're not allowed to practice law, medicine, dentistry, or tax audit as a CPA without passing those tests. A professional engineer has to pass a PE test. An architect has to pass a test. There are barriers to keep an incompetent, or at least a less-than-competent, person from doing damage or potentially disrupting your business.
So I think part of the problem with IT as a whole is that there isn't a good gauge for whether a person is good or not — you have to sort of trust them at face value, and certification helps with that. It's not the end-all-be-all, because you can have people who are great test-takers but not good at the actual work. So as a customer, you want to combine certification with case studies, references, examples, alignment — and, going back to core values, whether the company is aligned with how you approach things. But fundamentally, I think it's really good for an MSP, or any IT provider, to have a level of certification, just to prove they've put some skin in the game to learn it.
Megan Quick: That's a really good way to put it — it shows some mutual investment and commitment to growth as a company. And I love what you outlined there — a combination of certification, case studies, and references, almost like applying for college — a whole, holistic package.
Georg Dauterman: A package, right — you want to package it up for them so they understand. And look, I'm the first to say we're not the fit for every customer, and they're not the fit for us. There has to be alignment. There has to be — I hate to use the word "aesthetic," but there has to be a mindset that's aligned, and that's important. And when it works, it's amazing. We watch it happen. We see the difference at customers — how much more productive their staff becomes, how their security goes from an unsecured, dumpster-fire situation, where if something happened they'd be in real trouble, to a place where if something does happen, we have a plan and know what we're going to do. We can't plan for every single eventuality, that would be insane, but you have the basics down, and you have the operational and mental flexibility to work through it with the customer. That's what people should look for. But once again, going back to certifications — it's the basic core of saying, okay, I know how to do this.
Megan Quick: It should be part of the package — you should be able to detect it. And I guess you kind of touched on AI already, but in your professional opinion, as someone who's been in this industry almost as long as it's existed, which is a really valuable perspective, Georg — what do you see, in the next five or ten years? What certifications do you think companies and MSPs should be pursuing? What do you think will grow, or get more specialized?
Georg Dauterman: That's a great question. I think there are technologies we don't know exist yet, and roles and jobs that haven't even been conceived. But there are fundamentals that don't change — humans are humans, that's not changing. Physical infrastructure still needs to be installed correctly, in a way that functions for the customer — those things don't change.
What I think is going to happen — if I had a crystal ball — is that for many SMBs, small and medium businesses, your sub-two-hundred-fifty-person company, sub-a-hundred, that sort of size — what MSPs should be angling towards is helping customers make AI governance decisions, helping them set up systems securely, in a way that's not dissimilar to how we manage their cloud environment or their workstation fleet. AI is just another tool — this uber-tool that can do a lot of really cool stuff, but it's a tool, and it needs to be managed and needs some level of control, audit, transparency, and accountability. Right now that's not really in place. And I think that's where we can be very helpful.
On the MSP side, directly supporting customers, I think we're going to use AI a lot. Anyone who's not using it is probably going to miss out — but we have to use it intelligently. This may create new jobs — someone wrangling agents, an agent manager or creator, a problem solver — and I think AI is going to let us offer more customization for customers, in a much simpler way for us to be bespoke, but within the parameters of our stack.
I think it'll allow us better self-service too. People like self-service — people like putting the milk in their own coffee, they want to know exactly how much milk they want. So we want to give them that option. We're also going to need more security around it, to make sure it's secured for the customer, and when they have issues, we can help them understand what it did and what we know, so it's not just a true black box, which is what we're dealing with now.
So there's a lot of opportunity, a lot of change coming, and we're right in the middle of a turn — all industries are turning right now. Is it going to be a smooth, linear process? No. AI was adopted more rapidly than any other technology, but even so, it's going to take five to ten years. I think it's exciting and super interesting — I'm glad we're part of it, and can help customers learn to use it and be better at their business. And I think the flip side is that the human trust factor is going to get even more important — knowing who you're actually working with, and why. Again, nothing to do with certifications specifically, but you want to know those people actually know what they're doing. So yes, there's a lot there — I was maybe rambling a little, but there's a lot to unpack.
Megan Quick: No — even though I've only earned one certification myself, I remember the confidence it gave me, even though I'm not the one helping our customers directly with their computers. The personal confidence it gave me to build my skill set was incredible, and I see that with our staff too, every time they earn a new certification.
So Georg, we're getting close to the end — I have two more questions for you. Earlier you talked about AI as a tool, and how MSPs are a good partner as companies pursue it, because it's still a black box right now and we need to develop cybersecurity around it. I do think we have a lot in place, and best practices we can train customers on — which is funny, because like you said, there are always these fundamentals. I hear about people putting their financials into AI, and I'm like, I would never put my financials into anything that wasn't very secure. People aren't adjusting their perspective to it. Could you speak to that a little?
Georg Dauterman: This is a training question, not really a certification one — but what people need to understand is: if you're not paying for something, you're the product. Simply put. And you always have to ask yourself: if I put this in here, would I be okay with it being public data? That gets tricky. So for us, it's training both our staff on how to use AI, and training our customers on how to safely use it — we're adding it to our cyber curriculum, in our annual cyber training. Some of the training-partner platforms we use have it built in.
Megan Quick: Could you talk — sorry, Georg — I just want to highlight, our annual cyber training is something we do for clients where we check in and retrain their staff, right?
Georg Dauterman: Correct. We roll out an automated, computer-based training video to all of our customers. But I really believe personal training matters a lot — having a human being on the other side, talking through it, able to answer questions in real time. We try to make it more interesting than just clicking through a training video, and we update it every year — sooner if something big emerges. Our goal is for every customer to get that live training every year, usually delivered by a senior person here at Valiant. It's honestly not the most exciting topic, but it's a really important one, and we try to make it as interesting as we can. AI is a big piece of that now, and it's no different from any other system in that you always have to ask yourself: are you okay with this data being public? Would you be okay with this being printed in a newspaper? Would you want all your friends and family to know about it? That's the question to ask.
Obviously, with paid AI products or secured systems, you can be a bit more open — financials, HR data, PII — but you need to make the effort to know where it's going and how. So it's important.
Megan Quick: Yeah, and I wanted to highlight that, because with this topic of certifications, it kind of goes back to core values — the Valiant I joined and have watched evolve and grow. It's funny, because we're IT, but a lot of this is about continuing to educate ourselves and educate our customers. That's a big role of the MSP — keeping you up to date, since we're the experts giving you that expertise.
Georg Dauterman: Right. Our whole mission, honestly, is training and development — for our staff and our customers. It's a core component of all IT service companies, because it's an ever-evolving field. If it's not part of what you do day in and day out, you're probably not servicing your customers, your staff, or your company well.
Megan Quick: Yeah — and if your MSP is super quiet and doesn't check in about this stuff — sorry to be a little judgmental here, but MSPs, if you're listening, look at this part of your business — because I see a lot of real, renewed confidence with our clients. Sometimes you roll your eyes at these trainings, but the fact is, remembering not to click that one email has saved millions of dollars.
Georg Dauterman: It could save you from a really bad day. That's part of our whole approach to risk management — to save you from a really bad day. And that's why we spend our time certifying people on this stuff, at the end of the day.
Megan Quick: At the risk of this being a good place to end — I want to ask one more question. One thing I'd always mention when talking to prospects: you earned a certification called the CISSP. We've been talking about security and cybersecurity — can you talk a little about that certification and your journey, Georg?
Georg Dauterman: Yeah, sure. CISSP is basically a core foundational certification — the way I like to describe it, it's an inch deep and a mile wide. It covers a lot of what are called data domains, everything from data governance all the way through development best practices. It stands for Certified Information Security Professional — I always get the acronym slightly wrong — it's from a nonprofit organization called ISC². It's really improved the cybersecurity landscape and the industry overall.
What I think it really helped me with was that it let me put together, with the unbelievable team we have here, a good cybersecurity program for the customers we service — one that stands up to scrutiny from compliance and other people who validate it. It's always evolving, obviously, because the threat landscape keeps changing. So again, it's not the end-all-be-all, it's just a good place to build fundamentals, and fundamentals are what you build on. I don't think everyone needs that specific certification, but it's a good one to have if you're talking to people about these things, because it gives you breadth.
Megan Quick: Yeah, and I wanted to end on that, because you can imagine our junior techs — they're all doing incredibly important work, but their certifications tend to be in more specialized areas. I love this example of you earning a certification that helps steer the ship for the entire company, top to bottom.
Georg Dauterman: Right, exactly — that's what it's for, top to bottom.
Megan Quick: And you're willing to study and say, hey guys, I'm putting the time in too.
Georg Dauterman: Yeah, it's important — it's hard to ask someone to do something you're not willing to do yourself. Certification especially can be time-consuming, depending on the cert. One of the downsides is that, depending on what technology is deployed in the stack, you might study something, learn it, and never actually use it — which is pretty common. There's certain Microsoft, Apple, or Cisco material we don't touch day to day here. But knowing about it can still help — when we onboard new customers, or run into a particular situation, it's good to know what's out there. And obviously you have to know our own stack really well — that's the promise of a tight stack, that we know it and have it dialed in.
We're always going to encounter stuff that's outside the stack — that's just the nature of the beast. Over time, as we onboard customers, we get them stack-aligned and get more of their environment under control, but it takes time. So there's a period where you're working on things you don't touch every day, and we have great people here who handle that really well. But it's good to be able to say, I learned about this in a certification, I know how to fix this.
Megan Quick: Also, like you said, when we get new customers there's always a bit of the unknown. And to tie this up in a neat bow — when you first talked about the certification you earned in 1999, and how you still use some of those fundamentals — that's part of this whole idea of continuing education. It's a reaffirming of the fundamentals, and it keeps you grounded in problem-solving.
Georg Dauterman: Yeah, the saying is: the best do the basics better. And the basics don't fundamentally change — that's why they're called basics, or fundamentals. That's why they carry over, whether it's a physical server in a data center, a cloud server, or a completely abstract SaaS application. Where the data goes, who manages it, who owns it, the encryption — all those fundamentals — you have to apply them across the board. It's good that our whole team knows that. That's our goal.
Megan Quick: Yeah. It's a value. Alright, I think those were all my questions, Georg. Is there anything you want to make sure we leave the listener with on this topic?
Georg Dauterman: I do. I'm going to be a little corny and tie it back to two of our core values — knowledge and confidence — because that's where certifications really help: they expand your knowledge, and they build your confidence to do a great job and deliver a great result for the customer. We really want to encourage both our staff and our customers to ask about this. And obviously, when we work with our vendors and partners, we want them to know we're dedicated to our mutual success. Tied back to core values — when you work with people who appreciate your values, and you appreciate theirs, the job's a lot easier.
Megan Quick: I love that, because it goes back to what you said — industries can change, but people kind of don't. Humans are humans — that's the one thing we know for sure. Well, Georg, this was great, I really enjoyed this conversation, and I love how it veered into Valiant's philosophies on business while also talking about certifications. Listeners — thank you so much for joining us as always, and keep an eye out for our next episode. We appreciate you. Alright — bye, Georg, great to see you.
Georg Dauterman: Thanks a lot. Alright, have a great day. Bye now.