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Tahl Jenkins runs Mt Warning IT, an owner-operated MSP and professional services business in Australia. After paying $7,000 for a Halo PSA implementation he never completed, Tahl found Gorelo, bought it within a day of trialling it, and was fully operational the following week. He has since replaced three separate platforms with one, cut his…
About Mt Warning IT
Tahl Jenkins spent over a decade in IT, mostly as a senior technician for local government, before launching Mt Warning IT — an owner-operated practice combining managed services for SMB clients with professional services work for larger organisations including local councils. It is a lean operation, which is exactly why the tools running it have to work.
Before Gorelo, Tahl had no PSA at all. Support requests came in by email, and while that worked when he was a one-man show, it was breaking down fast…
The Problem: A $7,000 Bill for a System He Could Never Use
Before Gorelo, Tahl had no PSA at all. Support requests came in by email, and while that worked when he was a one-man show, it was breaking down fast. Emails were getting lost. Jobs were slipping through. He needed something structured.
On the recommendation of his RMM vendor, NinjaOne, he started the onboarding process for Halo PSA. He paid $7,000 for the implementation engagement upfront.
Three months later, he still could not run his business through it.
“I put a system in to save time, and it was costing me more time. Just logging a ticket was slower than actually doing the ticket and then writing up my own notes the way I had been doing it.” – Tahl Jenkins
The breaking point came when a support request arrived in the wrong inbox — the sales side of the PSA rather than the technical queue. There was no way to convert it. Tahl had to manually recreate the ticket from scratch, then delete the original. That was the moment he decided Halo was not fixable.
He abandoned the implementation halfway through, eating the cost, and went looking for something else.
The Switch: Trial on Monday, Live by the Following Week
A contact pointed Tahl toward Gorelo. He started a trial.
It took me maybe three hours to set up and figure it out. Mikel jumped on a call with me the next day, showed me a few things, and within the week I was operational. – Tahl jenkins
He bought Gorelo within one day of starting the trial. Within three days, it was already saving him time.
The contrast with Halo was not subtle. Three months of onboarding on one side, three hours on the other. After three months with Halo, Tahl had not reached the point where he could raise a ticket and invoice from the same system. With Gorelo, he was doing both within his first week.
Mikel, Gorelo’s founder, was directly involved in that early setup — something Tahl credits as making the transition faster than it might otherwise have been.
What Changed then?
Billing stopped being a memory exercise
Before Gorelo, billing at Mt Warning IT depended on Tahl remembering to log the work. For managed contracts it was manageable. For the smaller jobs — a client call here, a 30-minute fix there — it was not.
I went through one month wondering how I’d only logged about 40 hours when I’d worked every weekend. I hadn’t logged time for all these 30-minute jobs where people just rang up and I’d do it and move on.
The problem compounded on the contract side. Checking how many EDR licences a client needed meant logging into Huntress. Checking Microsoft 365 seat counts meant going elsewhere. Half the time, when things got busy, it did not get checked at all.
Three months later I’d realise I’d missed $300 because I hadn’t updated the quantities and I’d been paying for those licences myself.
Gorelo’s auto time tracking changed the billing process at the point of work, not at the end of the month. Tahl opens a ticket, the clock starts. He can pause it, switch to another job, come back. The time is captured without a separate step. Dynamic quantities handle the licence reconciliation automatically — EDR counts, Microsoft 365 seats, asset-based billing — without Tahl having to check anything manually.
I used to miss things constantly. Now it’s all happening automatically. I don’t have to think about it, and I’m not losing money anymore.
Contracts went from a headache to a starting point
Moving clients from break-fix to fully managed contracts was something Tahl wanted to do but had no clean system to manage it in. Gorelo’s contracts module changed that.
There is no way I could have done contracts without Gorelo. I didn’t know where to get started, and it made it so easy. Just being able to create contracts, set start and end dates, and apply whether they’re limited hours — it’s also been a big time saver on billing, purely through dynamic quantities.
For an owner-operator trying to shift the shape of their business while running it at the same time, having contracts, billing, and time tracking connected in the same platform removed a layer of admin that had previously required separate tools and manual reconciliation.
RMM that matches how Tahl already thinks
Beyond the consolidation, Tahl notes that Gorelo’s approach to Windows update management is better suited to how he works than NinjaOne’s was. Coming from ten years in enterprise IT and local government, he is used to Intune-style management. Gorelo’s handling of updates aligns with that instinct in a way his previous RMM did not.
Three platforms became one
When Tahl left Halo, he was still running NinjaOne for RMM and Hudu for documentation alongside it. That was three separate tools, three separate monthly costs, and three places where information lived that should have been in one.
Halo’s documentation capability was limited enough that he had kept Hudu specifically to compensate for it. Gorelo’s native documentation was good enough that he no longer needed it.
Irish moved everything over from Hudu into Gorelo, and neither of us has looked back.
The cost saving created more than just a lower monthly bill. With $1,320 freed up each month, Tahl had budget room to add iQuote — an Australian quoting tool that searches local suppliers for product pricing — and still come in under what he had been paying before.
The client-facing result was something Tahl had not expected to get so quickly. Clients can now access their tickets, invoices, and documentation through a single portal. Several have commented on it directly.
NinjaOne was the last to go. When Tahl told them he was cancelling Halo, they responded by increasing his rate — from a pricing arrangement that had remained unchanged despite his endpoint count growing well past his licensed limit, to a new monthly figure that made staying no longer viable. He cancelled the same day.
Read More: The cost of MSP tool Sprawl
Automation that a solo operator can actually build
One of the specific capabilities Tahl kept returning to throughout the interview was the ability to build his own automations without needing to call anyone for help or pay for a separate integration.
The clearest example came from work Tahl does on the professional services side — a task that required pulling data through Intune via PowerShell and pushing an application based on the result. In Intune it had taken him 40 hours of scripting to build. He reproduced the same outcome in Gorelo using a custom variable. It took five minutes. He has shown this directly to the council clients who commissioned the original work.
You just paid me ten grand to do this in Intune, and it took me an hour in this system. I show them how I’d have to pull data via a PowerShell script, then push an application based on that — and how that took me 40 hours of scripting. In Gorelo I can create a custom variable that does the same thing in five minutes.
For clients, it is a demonstration of what modern tooling makes possible. For Tahl, it is billable time he can now redirect elsewhere.
The native Huntress integration is another example of the platform doing more than Tahl expected. He had built a custom install script ahead of time, assuming he would need it. He did not. Gorelo’s integration handled the deployment automatically.
I built an install script because I thought I needed one, but Gorelo does it automatically. I didn’t even need it because the integration is so good.
The same pattern repeats across integrations. With Tailscale, Tahl generates a key, drops it into a client variable in Gorelo, and runs it. With NinjaOne or Halo, building that kind of lightweight integration required either a workaround or a paid add-on. In Gorelo, it takes a few hours of figuring it out independently.
I was looking in the Alerts section and realised I could probably create a webhook integration that would send me something when certain things happened. There’s no way I could have done that through NinjaOne or Halo without paying money for it. In Gorelo, I just need a few hours to figure it out.
The practical result: a backlog of automations Tahl had been putting off because they were too painful to build in his previous tools has steadily been cleared.
Projects that actually tracked time
The professional services side of Tahl’s business created a problem that most PSA tools are not built to solve. He was running projects for large organisations — billed by block of money rather than fixed hours, with different rates depending on when the work happened — and needed to track time directly against individual tasks within those projects.
He had tried Monday.com. He had tried Harvest. Neither integrated with Xero in a way that worked for him. Halo’s project module was so complicated to configure that the admin overhead outweighed the benefit of using it.
Gorelo’s project module resolved it. Tahl adds tasks, logs time directly against them, sets dates, and moves on. The time flows through to billing without a separate reconciliation step.
New techs are operational the same day
When asked what he would tell MSPs who are hesitant to switch because of what it will cost them in disruption, Tahl’s answer was specific.
He had spoken to the team at a larger MSP elsewhere in Australia. Their onboarding process for every new technician involves sending them for dedicated Halo training before they can function inside the business.
You could literally put someone into Gorelo and they’d be operational that day.
It was not just his own experience he drew on. Irish, his Level 1 technician, had used both platforms extensively. When Tahl asked her to compare them directly, her answer was clear: Gorelo is significantly easier. In Halo, she had been manually editing HTML to get templates working the way they needed. In Gorelo, she built out all the client portal templates herself in a single day.
The Support and the Pace of Improvement
One thing Tahl comes back to unprompted is support. Every issue he has raised has been answered quickly — and in most cases, the issue turned out to be user error rather than a platform problem. He is candid about that.
He has been recommending Gorelo to every MSP he encounters since making the switch. Not because he was asked to, but because he spent $7,000 finding out what a bad platform actually costs — and wants other MSPs to skip that part.
They move so fast that sometimes I don’t even realize something’s been added until I find it later. That’s not a complaint. That’s just me being busy.
Results at a Glance
| Metric | Before Gorelo | With Gorelo |
| Annual software spend | ~$17,400 | ~$1,560 |
| Annual saving | — | ~$15,800 |
| Platforms in use | 3 (Halo, NinjaOne, Hudu) | 1 (Gorelo) |
| Time to operational | 3+ months (incomplete) | 1 week |
| Setup time | 3 months, never finished | ~3 hours |
| Billing reconciliation | Manual — EDR, M365, assets | Fully automated |
| Missed billable work | Regular — 30-min jobs unlogged | Captured automatically |
| 40-hr scripting task | 40 hours | ~5 minutes |
In Tahl’s own Words
“The product is superior to anything else I’ve used. It integrates a lot better than any other product, and the time it takes to get onboarded and operational is significantly quicker.“
“I realized I was doing all this work and not tracking it. My revenue increased significantly once I started using Gorelo because I was finally capturing the work I was already doing.“
“It didn’t just save me time. It actually fixed how I run my business.“
“There’s nothing I wanted to do that I couldn’t do in Gorelo. It’s just easier to do.”
— Tahl Jenkins, Owner, Mt Warning IT
What Tahl Would Tell Other MSPs Considering the Switch
Tahl’s advice is grounded in his own experience of hesitating too long and paying for it.
The upfront disruption of switching — particularly for larger operations — is real but short. Any time lost in the first few weeks is recovered in the first months of not having to train every new hire on a platform that requires dedicated courses before someone can function inside it.
For MSPs going into a Gorelo trial, Tahl is specific about where to start: contracts, dynamic quantities, and asset management. These are the three capabilities he credits most directly with changing how his business runs. Getting those working early is what makes the value of the platform immediately clear.
When he comes across MSPs online — in community threads, Reddit, or in person — he does not hold back.
“I rave about it to every single person I talk to. I hope I can stay with the product and that you don’t get too big for me to afford.“
| ABOUT GORELO Gorelo is an all-in-one PSA and RMM platform built by MSP operators for MSPs with 2–30 employees. It brings together ticketing, remote monitoring and management, documentation, billing, and client management in a single platform — designed to be operational from day one, without implementation fees or dedicated training.Start your free 30-day trial at gorelo.io |
