Phoenix IT Advisors Pushed an Installer From a Plane With Mingo

Justin Shelley owns Phoenix IT Advisors, an MSP with about 20 clients, a lot of them in healthcare. His main client base is in the Dallas area, with a few more clients around Elko, Nevada. He's back on the tools himself after about 10 years away from hands-on work, and he credits AI for that: "Without AI in general, I wouldn't be doing it, period."

At the interview in July 2026, he was running OpenFrame in beta on his clients' machines. His story is a run of small, specific jobs. He went live in minutes. On a flight, he had Mingo, OpenFrame's technician copilot, put an installer on client machines while he watched a show. He runs scripts through Mingo because it tells him straight away what worked and what didn't. And Fae, OpenFrame's end-user assistant, walked him through cloning a hard drive.

OpenFrame doesn't cover everything he needs yet. He still runs a separate PSA and a third-party tool for client remote access, and he has a short list of what he wants next. He's a fan anyway: "I love the product. I love the AI first."

Justin does much of the technical work himself, and he's open about being out of practice. Jobs a full-time tech handles every day, like picking a drive-cloning tool or checking VM licensing, meant research for him. In his words: "I would be researching a lot of it."

His tools added work of their own. Another RMM he'd signed up for took five or six days to get running after he paid. On his previous RMM, every script meant a string of manual steps: build it in the automation library, name it, set parameters, find the right computers and push it out. Then, as he put it, "I just have to sit there and wonder if it worked." The other option was opening each device's detail pane, one at a time, to read the log.

The move to OpenFrame had bumps too. Some agent installs failed during the rollout, with PowerShell on the wrong version and scripts that needed a line forcing TLS 1.2. The beta's ticketing was thin, so he kept his PSA. And OpenFrame couldn't yet give his clients' staff remote access to their own work computers from home. He calls that a big thing, and it still runs through a third-party tool.

Justin joined the OpenFrame beta and was live within minutes. He brought in his clients, about 20 of them, from his PSA through the OpenFrame API. When agent installs failed, he pointed Mingo at them. Diagnosing those failures is most of what he's used Mingo for, and he says it does an incredible job. It fixed a lot of them, not all. One older server still wouldn't take the agent, and it's due for replacement anyway.

Scripts now run mostly through Mingo. What he likes is the loop: "I'm getting instant feedback on it and auto correction." If a run fails, Mingo says so and tries something else. When a push finishes, it tells him which devices worked, which didn't and what to try next. He uses it for one-off jobs too. On a flight, he shared an installer on SharePoint, gave Mingo the link and asked it to create a folder on the C drive of his client machines and put the file there, so he could remote in later and install it.

Mingo also saves him research. When an old VM needed replacing, he asked Mingo about licensing. It confirmed he was licensed to build a new VM, then offered to download the ISO and build it for him. He stopped there, since he didn't want to risk the current VM. For a hard drive swap, he turned to Fae. The first cloning tool it suggested wasn't free, so it found another and guided him through the clone, with a few approvals from him. His part was the screwdriver. He also pulls up Fae when he's at a client's computer or remoted in, and has it do things locally.

The first result is the start. Another RMM took five or six days to get running. OpenFrame took minutes: "I was up and running and live in minutes. So I was just like, that's a whole lot better."

The second is time back on one-off jobs. He staged that installer from a plane: "Drinking a Coke, watching a show and letting this thing work, that was phenomenal." The VM licensing check took minutes, not the hours of Googling he'd have needed: "It would have taken me at least hours for what I was able to do in minutes. So I love that."

The third is knowing what happened. Mingo's report replaced the device-by-device log check. On one push, 15 of 16 devices worked, and Mingo flagged the one that didn't: "This one's not. Here's some reason, things we can try." He thinks this kind of help could lift junior techs too: "You can take level ones and turn them into level two and three." That's his view, not something he's measured. He's already been mentioning OpenFrame in his MSP peer group, and when peers worry about end users having AI access, he points them to the audit trail.

What he still wants: remote access for his clients' staff to their own work computers, fuller ticketing and API access, escalation alerts when a request is stuck waiting for tech approval, client users imported through the API showing up in the UI, sortable client columns and a backup integration. Most of it is polish, and he calls the sorting "just a small thing." Remote access is the big one, and it's why a third-party tool stays in his stack for now.