Smb Community Podcast By Karl W. Palachuk

I always love to catch up with Chip Reaves from Bigger Brains. This interview is no exception. Bigger Brains is an educational service that you can resell to your clients. They have more than one hundred e-learning modules for everything from Office 365 to Microsoft Teams, QuickBooks, and more. The way their service works is that MSPs buy end user licenses in bulk and then sell them to their clients. You can sell one user or ten at a time. You can also include the e-learning classes into your service bundles. It’s up to you whether you sell the classes separately, include them at no charge, or bundle them with other services. After the interview, Chip offered a “Karl” discount to anyone who requests it. Simply use the code KarlSentMe and you’ll receive a 10% discount on all licenses. One cool new tool Bigger Brains developed is called BrainBot. BrainBot is an app that sends you tidbits of class highlights as well as questions to students after the class is finished. This is based on a well-established educa

I interviewed Pete Langas from Nerdio – GetNerdio.com. Pete is the Sr. Director of Strategic Partnership and Distribution at Nerdio. Nerdio empowers managed service providers to build and/or rapidly grow their cloud IT practices through what Pete calls a “ridiculously simple IT management platform” for public and private cloud. Nerdio for Azure is the first IT automation technology that delivers easy packaging, pricing, provisioning, ongoing management, and cost-optimization to complete IT environments in the Microsoft cloud. Nerdio Private Cloud is a fully integrated platform that delivers a comprehensive IT environment at your fingertips – including virtual hardware, software, security, backup and disaster recovery, and 24/7 tech-nerd support. Pete Langas Without Nerdio for Azure, an unoptimized IT environment running in Azure is higher cost than on-premises. You also need expensive engineers to onboard and manage customers in Azure. With Nerdio, you can automatically deploy a complete IT environment in Azu

Many people know Len DiCostanzo from his years at Autotask and Datto. Now he’s out on his own, helping IT consultants under the moniker MSP Toolkit. Len is a huge fan of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and best practices. He’s also dedicated to models that focus on recurring revenue. I ran into Len at the NexGen Conference and Expo in December. We sat in on each others’ sessions and took notes about each others’ advice. We mostly agree on best practices! A mainstay of the channel community, Len provides thought leadership and best practice guidance to technology channel vendors, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and other Business Technology Service Providers (BTSPs). Most recently, Len was SVP of Channel Development at Datto where he focused on helping partners drive recurring revenue with Datto’s cloud-based solution portfolio. Len was with Autotask for a decade prior to Autotask being acquired by Vista Equity Partners for the second time, and merging with Datto in December 2017. You ca

Erick Simpson is my long-time friend and fellow coach. My good friend Erick Simpson, formerly the Co-Founder, Senior Vice President, and CIO of SPC International, is now out doing consulting on his own. This is his first interview in his new role as an IT Business Transformation and Channel Growth Expert. Erick is an author and consultant, a former MSP, a great coach, and one of the pioneers of the Managed Services business model. In this interview, Erick talks about how he recommends filtering which prospects should become your clients. I love the discussion of how to determine whether a client has a strategic approach to business. Hint: Ask them. Along the way, we tell a few stories and Erick throws out some good book recommendations (besides his own). Erick’s new web site is at http://www.ericksimpson.com – and you can sign up for his newsletter there. I did. Watch the Podcast: This interview is about 30 minutes long. Listen to the audio podcast

This SMB Community Podcast is the sixth in a six-part series entitled Go To Market with Remote Support Service, with Dave Sobel, Senior Director of MSP Evangelism at SolarWinds MSP. Dave starts out this episode focusing on using the Take Control tool as a way to differentiate yourself from other service providers. More specifically, he has a great analogy about the place of Take Control in your offering. Rather than “selling” this tool, bundle it with everything you do and sell the total service. Reporting is a huge component in that differentiation. You can generate a lot of information per-client and per-user. These are great for showing clients what they’re getting for their money. Plus you can access recordings of all sessions, track time, and provide the client with regular tracking information. Even if they never look at these reports, they’ll think it’s cool that you offer them. The recording option is particularly nice. You can record to the cloud. You can share these recordings with clients. You can

This SMB Community Podcast is the fifth in a six-part series entitled Take Control and the Customer Experience, with Dave Sobel, Senior Director of MSP Evangelism at SolarWinds MSP. In this episode, we touch on many features of the Take Control tool designed to help you improve and manage the Customer Experience with your technology consulting business. Some of these features are built in (and configurable/customizable). Others come into play as a result of agreements or policy decisions you make with the client. Offline options = Create business-focused policies. e.g., what is “privacy” at each client? Work with the client to help them to create their employee-facing policy regarding monitoring and privacy. And of course you can agree on the level of reporting that clients will receive. In fact, you can use this to help the client set policies about which software you are authorized to uninstall and what kind of reporting they expect regarding their employees’ computing habits. Dave mentions that you can se

This SMB Community Podcast is the fourth in a six-part series entitled Episode IV: A New Hope for Security, with Dave Sobel, Senior Director of MSP Evangelism at SolarWinds MSP. As you might imaging, the Take Control application from SolarWinds MSP has lots of security built in. In particular, we talk about all the little security-related details that many people don’t worry about. This includes securing endpoint connections, clipboard access, passwords, and more. Dave gives some good information on the two-factor authentication you’ll experience within Take Control. All that is paired with an authenitcator app that uses unique one-time-use passwords that are managed automatically. If you think about it, a remote control tool gives your staff total access to all client secure data. And with multiple sessions into multiple clients, someone has to make sure that all those sessions are independently secured – and secured from each other. Take Control builds all that security in from the start. We also talked to

This SMB Community Podcast is the third in a six-part series entitled Successfully Implement Your Cloud Service Bundle, with Dave Sobel, Senior Director of MSP Evangelism at SolarWinds MSP. For six episodes, we’re talking about how to get the most out of your remote control tools – and make more money. I really wanted to include this discussion of implementing cloud services in this podcast series. As you may know, I am a huge advocate of bundling your cloud service offering in order to maximize profit and client stickiness. So, we start off with a discussion of setting up the agent and creating default configurations. Here’s the bundle we are discussing:   After that, Dave walks us through mass deployment. This is a very cool feature, and one that you might expect from a remote management tool. Dave also goes into detail about customizing your “terms of service” within the app and protecting yourself legally. After all, remove control of client systems is a very serious undertaking. You need to agree with c

This SMB Community Podcast is the second in a six-part series entitled Break-Fix vs. Managed Services, with Dave Sobel, Senior Director of MSP Evangelism at SolarWinds MSP. For six weeks, we’ll be talking about how to get the most out of your remote control tools – and make more money. Right off the bat, you might think that Dave and I would wave our hands and dismiss Break/Fix as a business model. But the truth is, there are still lots of people making money with “on demand” or “as needed” tech support. It is the right solution for some clients. It’s also a great way to get started as an IT solution provider. So we start out with our definitions of both break/fix and managed service. The next question is, how do you maximize revenue with the break/fix model? As Dave says, you have to figure out how to use your time as wisely as possible and bill for as much of your time as possible. And even though tools like Take Control were developed to help MSPs make more money by leveraging their time better, they also

This SMB Community Podcast is the first in a six-part series entitled Remote Control Deep Dive: Build and Grow Your Business, with Dave Sobel, Senior Director of MSP Evangelism at SolarWinds MSP. For the next six weeks, we’ll be talking about how to get the most out of your remote control tools – and make more money. Here, Dave talks about the core features of the SolarWinds MSP’s Take Control tool. These include one-to-many scripting and recording the control session. Take Control was built specifically for the SMB market. As Dave says, this is not an “enterprise” product watered down for SMB or a home product stretching to be the right solution. Dave gives us a long list of questions to ask when you go shopping for a remote control tool. And, finally, Dave covers billing. After all, the bottom line is the bottom line. He covers some of the key elements of squeezing as much money as possible with the right remote control tool. And of course he touches on the questions of security, performance, and managing

This SMB Community Podcast features my brother Manuel, discussing his new Agile Service Delivery philosophy and training. Basically, Agile Service Delivery applies the principles of “agile” to the industry of managed services. As Manuel says, we stop managing people and start managing the work. One of the big weaknesses of old-school service delivery is that MSPs are taught to schedule, schedule, schedule until the schedule is full. The problem with that is, the schedule turns out to be a huge line of dominoes, stacked and ready to fall. When the schedule is packed so tight that it squeaks, it only takes one small problem to mess up the whole day – and potentially the week. Agile Service Delivery takes a different approach, based on priorities rather than schedules. The best news, according to Manuel, is that you don’t need a new PSA or other tools. You already have the tools you’ll use. It’s your processes that need to change! Check out all the details in the interview below. Manuel also announced his new Ag

This SMB Community Podcast features Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe. Topics include his community, crazy selling prices for MSPs, and a great discussion about building culture within your IT business. I always enjoy talking to Nigel. I met him just over ten years ago and am happy to still be doing things together. Of course a person can only take so many trips across the ocean in a year, so we do most of our collaboration online. In this interview, we talk about our respective communities (The Tech Tribe for Nigel and Small Biz Thoughts Community for me). After that, we talk about several aspects of selling a business and the crazy valuations we’re seeing for MSP businesses in the U.S. At last we get to the topic we were scheduled to talk about: Building culture in your business. The rambling and spontaneous nature of this interview is exactly why I love working with Nigel. He’s super smart and talented. He’s one of those few “coaches” who can speak on any topic and give some great advice off the cuff. NOTE:

Jennifer Fields of Astek Marketing has been helping out with my SMB Roadshows this year. She implements marketing programs for managed service providers. Jennifer has been helping MSPs for more than five years. She’ll help you build a list, clean it, pre-approve it, and “warm” it so that people know who you are when you contact them. If you’ve purchased a marketing program such as Robin Robins’ Technology Marketing Toolkit, Jennifer’s team can implement it for you. When you buy a program like that, you know it’s awesome and amazing. But YOU don’t want to build the list, print the postcards, send the mailing, and make the followup phone calls. Jen wants to do that! Listen to the interview. If you have questions, contact her!   Web Site: www.astekmarketing.com   Watch the video podcast: This interview is 30 minutes. Audio Listen to the Podcast.  

I had a great interview with Josh Peterson of Bering McKinley (https://beringmckinley.com) about the state of our industry and what small IT consultants need to be paying attention to. Our first topic was actually unplanned. We just started talking about what we’re seeing as we travel around the country and meet MSPs. What we’re both seeing is a frenzy of M&A (mergers and acquisitions), fueled by an influx of investor capital. In fact, Josh has a couple of great stories about crazy (high) valuations. I make the point point that YOU can take advantage of the mergers as a time to get new clients. When companies are in the throes of gobbling, combining, and figuring out what to do next, there’s a period of chaos in which their service delivery plummets. And you might be able to come in and say you’ll give these clients the attention they deserve. This 30 minute interview touches on the Managed Services in a Month Peer Teams, the different challenges of small IT companies and large, weeding your client garden

Stephanie Chandler is a long-time friend and mastermind partner. We are happy to announce our first book project together – The Nonfiction Book Publishing Plan. Between us, we have almost thirty books. But Stephanie also runs Authority Publishing, so she has experience publishing many more books, focused on almost any audience you can think of. You can learn more about Stephanie on her Speaker Page or Wikipedia. She has been a driving force in the writing community worldwide, and particularly in Northern California. She is the founder of the Nonfiction Authors Association, with chapters all over the globe. On top of all that, Stephanie runs the Nonfiction Writers Conference. The Fall Conference will be held online November 8-9. More details at https://nonfictionwritersconference.com/. (I am honored to be a speaker at this event.) So, with all that going, I don’t know how she found time to talk to me on the SMB Community Podcast, but she did! After helping each other with thousands of business ideas and projec

Frank Bravata is a technology expert, serial entrepreneur, public speaker, best-selling author, podcaster and Veterans’ supporter. He works as a business technology coach assisting companies all over the country to fuel their explosive growth through technology and digital marketing. He is also the president of MSP Speakers, a training firm dedicated to assisting MSPs to become the authority in their marketplaces and to leverage public speaking and group-based selling to massively grow their companies. In this SMB Community Podcast, I talk to Frank about how you can get started as a speaker – promoting your business services from the front of the room. In the video, Frank mentions a free report you can get at https://mspspeakers.com/. He also has a webinar coming up. You can learn more about that at https://mspspeakers.com/webinar. Frank is also member of the CompTIA (www.comptia.org) Committees on IT Support and Cyber Security, helping to develop policies and standards to protect companies worldwide. He has

Gil Cargill is a sales trainer and coach. In this interview he talks about the importance of business-focused communication during sales calls. Too many technicians thing clients care about technology. They don’t. They care about how you can improve their profit, improve their productivity, or help with cashflow. Gil gives some great tips on how to get the conversation started, and to get the prospect to buy in to a productivity audit. His approach is very conversational and is totally focused on the client rather than the technology. Gil gives his email in the video. I’ll just list his web site and phone number below.   Links Mentioned: Web Site: http://www.gilcargill.com Phone: 310-447-4102 Check out the interview here:  This interview is 30 minutes. Listen to the Podcast  

James Kernan is a business, “success,” and sales coach. He has owned and built some very successful managed service companies. This SMB Community Podcast with James Kernan covers “Gamification” within Your MSP. How do you motivate employees, make their job fun, and improve your success? Coach James Kernan gives you his best tips. This includes his five points to keep in mind as you look to “gamify” goal setting within your team. Note: The handout mentioned is linked from the SMB Community Podcast blog post is HERE in PDF format. That handout is on financial goals and KPIs.   Links Mentioned: Web Site: http://www.kernanconsulting.com Check out the interview here: This interview is 30 minutes. Listen to the Podcast  

Doug Hazelman is the VP of Technical Marketing at Cloudberry. We talked about Cloudberry’s cloud backup options as well as their managed service reseller program. (I didn’t know their cloud agents could be deployed with many RMM tools.).   About Doug Hazelman: Doug is a software industry veteran with over 20 years experience including 9.5 years at Veeam Software. He was on the executive team at Veeam and also helped spearhead Veeam’s community and technical evangelists efforts as well as provided insight into product strategy. Doug has held various management positions at other software companies throughout his career. He graduated with a BS in Computer Science from Western Illinois University with a minor in marketing..   Links Mentioned: Forum: https://forum.cloudberrylab.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/cloudberrylab Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CloudBerryLab/ Blog: https://www.cloudberrylab.com/blog/   Check out the interview here:   This interview is 30 minutes. Listen to the Podcast  

I interviewed Ramey Bell from Tech Reputation – www.techreputation.com. Tech Reputation automates the process of getting reviews posted on the major review sites. They also have a process to alert you to potentially bad reviews and help you intercept those reviews so you can potentially turn them around. Tech Reputation was founded in 2017 by Ramey Bell, an IT professional with over twenty years of experience in marketing. Ramey has owned and operated a computer repair shop in Oak Harbor, Washington for the last six years, using those marketing skills to grow his business. He found that having an automated system in place to capture positive reviews led to improved word-of-mouth referrals and increased revenue. Fully understanding the time limitations all IT owners face, he decided to offer an automated service and marketing system that enables owners to quickly understand their current reputation and manage all of it from a single place. Google pays attention to about fifty sites that publish reviews. Tech R