Unlike that of most solutions, the story of Time Scripts begins in tragedy before arriving at triumph.
The product, a collection of PowerShell scripts for automating dozens of processes channel pros perform every day, first reached market last month. But its origins go back to 2015, when Alan Helbush, owner of Where To Start, an MSP in the Silicon Valley area, learned that his wife Gwen had been diagnosed with her third recurrence of breast cancer.
Helbush was determined to be her primary caregiver, a task that consumed increasing amounts of his time. “My wife progressively got worse, and so it became very clear that she was going to need more help,” he says.
Supporting both her and his clients, at least using traditional management techniques, gradually became impossible. To make matters worse, competing with the likes of Google and Facebook for qualified techs was growing harder too. “They wanted a starting salary of $120,000 per year, if you could find them,” says Helbush.
Both issues eventually led him to guide most of his clients to other MSPs, help his three employees find new jobs, and go back to being a sole proprietor, like he was when he founded Where To Start in 2001.
Serving even a slimmed down customer base, however, required more time than he could spare. The only path forward he could see was relentless automation of his work.
“Basically, if I wanted to keep the clients that I had, I had to come up with a mechanism to service them with somewhat of an unpredictable schedule,” Helbush says. “I just started developing a set of tools that would give me enough information to do whatever I need to do and get a result quicker.”
He began writing scripts for his RMM system, eventually building a library of more than 500. “If I was going to do it more than once, I tried to figure out an automated way to do it,” Helbush says. Some scripts collected information he could use to make informed decisions about next steps. Others took those next steps for him. Collectively, they enabled him to do almost everything he needed to for his clients outside of standard business hours.
“My day consisted of getting up in the 5:30, 6:00 timeframe and doing what I need to do in a few hours,” Helbush recalls. He did additional work late at night, and spent nearly every minute in between with Gwen.
“It was kind of the classic case of using automation to get an end result, and this end result was that I could spend time with my wife,” Helbush says.
She, in turn, soon began wondering how many other channel pros might appreciate freeing up dozens of hours a week too. “She also realized that I’d given up a lot to take care of her, and so she wanted to see if some of that could come back to me,” Helbush says.
She began encouraging him to turn his scripts into a product, yet something always got in the way. So early in 2020, she “hijacked” one of Helbush’s monthly coaching sessions with managed services consultant Manuel Palachuk and issued marching orders.
“You need to help him figure out how we’re going to do this,” she told Palachuk.
Helbush found juggling that project with the burdens he was already shouldering difficult, though. Last year with her condition deteriorating, he says, his wife began giving the people in her life “assignments,” tasks they must do after she was gone.
“She assigned Manny the task of making sure this gets launched,” Helbush says. “He’s been pressuring me ever since to do this.”
Helbush got feedback and encouragement from his peer group too. “They did a lot of the early testing,” Helbush says. “They knew what my wife was going through, and they supported me all the way through.”
The product was still in development last November when Gwen died. Palachuk immediately took up his assignment.
“When she passed, he said, ‘you’ve got to do this now,'” Helbush remembers. “This is what she wanted.”
And with that as inspiration, Helbush completed version 1.0 of the product now known as Time Scripts in July. It includes over 100 scripts that users can run on any RMM system that supports PowerShell to streamline a huge range of endpoint, network, security, and internet management processes, plus a variety of cloud monitoring activities. Fully documented, everything in the package is designed to be tailored to each user’s specific needs.
“You can run them as is, but they’re really meant as a starting point to take and tweak and make them yours,” Helbush says. “If you understand PowerShell, it’s very straightforward.” A set of “building block” scripts, he adds, let you assemble totally new scripts out of ready-made piece parts.
A launch event webinar about Time Scripts is scheduled for September 13th., at 2:00pm EST. Perpetual licenses for the product, which cost $499, come with access to a community forum where users can trade tips and share scripts with one another. Helbush plans to make some of that home-grown code part of the solution’s official catalog, and add new scripts of his own as well at no additional charge.
“Time Scripts will never be complete and is constantly updated as new applications and situations arise,” he says. “These scripts represent a massive opportunity for MSPs and internal IT departments to provide consistent service.”
