MSP Chat Episode 04: The Mighty Microsoft Cloud, the Q4 Home Stretch, and EOS Success Tips

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Erick and Rich discuss the expanding dominance of the Microsoft cloud and how to ready yourself in Q4 for a triumphant new year. Then they’re joined by MSP guru James Kernan, Channel Mastered’s chief leadership strategist and channel growth expert, for an expert exploration of EOS best practices.

And finally, one last thing: A story about an indignity even the coolest smartphone isn’t worth enduring.

Discussed in this episode:

• ConnectWise Announces Integrations with Microsoft in Collaboration to Benefit Managed Service Providers, Worldwide
• Egnyte Announces Industry-Specific Artificial Intelligence Solutions
• Woman rescued from outhouse toilet after climbing in to retrieve Apple Watch, Michigan police say

[00:00:00] And three, two, one, blast off! Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of the MSP Chat Podcast, your weekly visit with two talking heads, talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need To make it big and manage services. I am Rich Freeman. I am chief content officer at Channel Master, the organization responsible for this fine show.

I am joined this week as I am every week by your other co host, Erick Simpson. He is our chief strategist at Channel Master, also a long time friend of mine. And Erick, how are you doing this week? I’m feeling strong this week. Rich strong is the operative word. Yes, I’m ready and excited and I’m juggling more fireballs this week than I have been the last few weeks.

If we’re folks that, our regular listeners to our podcast, no, I’ve been under the weather a little bit, but probably 85 percent now. I’m glad to hear you’re feeling strong. And yeah, so you’ve traded off feeling a little bit under the weather with a cold or what have you for singed hands from all that fireball juggling going on.

But it’s a better situation all around. So that is progress. And Erick, we’re going to dive right into our story of the week here. And it’s actually, it’s two different stories. With a common theme that will become apparent right away. And both of these news stories broke last week as we record this, the first one came from ConnectWise, and they announced that they have forged an alliance relationship with Microsoft that’s going to allow ConnectWise to offer Microsoft Defender for Business as a managed security service through the ConnectWise NDR, Managed Detection and Response Service.

Obviously they’ve been doing managed security at ConnectWise. They have an NDR offering. They also have an EDR component of that they’ve been doing and continue to do in alliance with Sentinel 1. But there was so much demand among MSPs and their clients for Microsoft Defender for Business because, of course, as we know, while you can buy that standalone, Erick it comes with the business premium license in Microsoft 365.

Lots of SMBs out there are already paying for it. Product has a great reputation. So there are a lot of people who want to use it. A lot of MSPs who want to offer it, but not necessarily manage it. So now you can do that via ConnectWise. They will manage it for you. Story number one, within 48 hours of that story breaking, I get another Announcement from Ignite, a content collaboration and government governance platform and they’re announcing that their platform now integrates with Microsoft Teams.

So if people want to collaborate on a document that’s stored in the Ignite platform within Teams, they can do that. They can save documents back out to the Ignite platform via Microsoft Teams. Similar sort of thing. Obviously everybody’s using teams these days. If you’re ignite and you want people using your solution as well.

And people are collaborating on content inside teams. You really need to integrate the platform. With Microsoft Teams, and it was just striking to me, Erick, because it really seemed to call attention to the fact that Microsoft 365, the Microsoft cloud have become so ubiquitous and so dominant in the SMB world in the cloud computing world.

That vendors out there are getting a lot of demand for integration with the solutions from their partners, and they practically have no choice, really, but to accommodate that demand. And I went out, I, asked both ConnectWise and Ignite. Obviously, this is a great Business opportunity for you.

But to what extent do you feel like you’ve got to do that these days if you want to remain competitive with MSPs and SMBs? And they both said, Yeah, absolutely. We’ve gotten to that point where you’ve got to integrate with. You’ve got to build alongside and around those Microsoft offerings.

Or you’re going to be less and less relevant to a sizable portion of the audience. So I don’t know how surprising, noteworthy that strikes you, Erick. It struck me as interesting, and that is our story of the week. I got to tell you, that long game is certainly starting to pay off for Microsoft.

This I remember Satya Nadella came in and said we’re all in on cloud, we’re all in on platform, we’re all in on security [00:05:00] and holy cow, I’m going to be bold and say that the Microsoft platform now looks to me like it is becoming another, one of those required platforms. Or MSPs to adopt and to sell and to manage for their clients.

We always talk about. What are the required platforms? We see tons and tons of surveys, Rich, you and I, we, we pour over every industry report, every survey. We even write those ourselves. And when asked what the top platforms are of MSPs that they feel they need to run their businesses, they include PSA, RMM, IT documentation.

Making this big push, but I’m going to add Microsoft to the mix now, because this is huge news. It’s great for Microsoft. And it sounds like somebody over at Microsoft is seeing this opportunity and making these deals now that I’m, I am a little bit surprised as a different kind of a move, but what a big win for ConnectWise and Ignite to integrate like this.

With the platforms that they know that MSP’s clients, the majority of them are running their businesses on Holy cow. And it is a big win. And it’s also in a sense, a necessary win. If you want to to an increasing extent, if you want to remain relevant to your partners, it’s the kind of thing that you need to do.

And I love that idea of thinking of M three 65, five. As part of that core essential stack is an m. S. P. that you can’t really go to market without. Now that’s not necessarily going to be thrilling news to everybody in the audience because people tend not to think of Microsoft 3 65 as a high profit offering which comes to mind because earlier today I moderated a webinar That was actually about the opportunities to add a lot of margin to that Microsoft 365 offering.

We don’t have time to get into that, but you really can make money doing it. And there really is a growth opportunity for MSPs around that. So to the extent that you’ve got to do it, this is not something that you need to think of as an unfortunate obligation. It can be a really important part of your business.

Oh, I agree. And, Microsoft continues to evolve and improve its offerings, even from a cybersecurity perspective. When I work with partners to help them bundle and price their portfolios, I like the good, better, best kind of positioning, right? For lots of different reasons, but. I’m working now with more mature MSPs or MSPs that have been doing this for a while now and bundling and pricing these solutions and the mix of the different vendors and the different services that, we call vendor sprawl or solution sprawl platform sprawl.

We, you and I talk a lot about. All the different dashboards that, that technicians and engineers, are now forced to use because, we think that’s what these clients need to support their businesses more and more of those services and solutions and vendors are being supplanted by the offerings from Microsoft as they continue to add more.

To their portfolio of services, especially on the cyber security side. I worked with a a client an MSP partner a few months ago, and we were able to replace, I believe eight or nine individual services slash vendors in their stack, just by adding an additional license or two. From a Microsoft subscription that they already had or just activating features that were already included in some subscriptions that their clients were already paying for.

So Microsoft is definitely. Very focused on gaining this market. All right. Folks are, take a look at the show notes. You can get some more information about that. Microsoft defender for business connection to connect wise MDR and the ignite teams integration as well.

Erick, it is time for your tip of the week. That it is rich. And you know what time it is rich. It’s Q4 2023. So the tip of the week is getting prepared for Q4. Rich, every year, Q4 kind of sneaks up on a lot of us. And I know as a former MSP myself, that’s the time when you’re scrambling, trying to close all the deals that are out there, maybe find a couple of other opportunities and close those [00:10:00] opportunities.

It’s time to review your agreements with your clients. So you’re looking at renewals, you’re looking at internal evaluations, because as an MSP, you’re also subscribing to services and platforms and vendors relationships. Like we already talked about, and you’re reviewing what you’re going to do and get done in, and it’s not three months Q4, because we have two big, probably three big holidays to deal with.

Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. So just subtract a few weeks out of that and it really it really lights a fire under us that are keeping track of just how much needs to get done. In such a short period of time to be prepared to kick off 2024 with a bang now mature MSPs proven operators, solution providers channel pros They’ve been going through this and they probably have a very structured process on what they do All the weeks leading up to, when everybody starts taking vacation and time off, nobody’s really buying things at the end of the year, save for some of those clients that just have extra budget and rather than give it to uncle Sam, they want to do some capital expenses expenditures right away.

So there are some opportunities to market some of those tax benefits. And try to get last minute budgets that, clients may still have, that they may want to invest back in the business moving forward. But really this is a time to, strategize, prioritize the things that absolutely positively have to get done before Thanksgiving, because again, this is when people start checking out in business.

And making sure that we’re ready to go on, on January 1, 2024, especially looking at our agreements, reviewing our pricing. It’s, I always say there’s never a bad time to raise your prices. Just don’t do it super often, right? Forecast ahead of time. Make sure that you have a price increase that goes out.

That is a mandatory price increase. For the next year. I’m a fan of, asking forgiveness later, not permission first, and make sure that you’re keeping up with the unpredictable cost of doing business as we keep seeing inflation creep up. We keep seeing the Fed here in the US, raising interest rates and things like that.

So think ahead and take this opportunity to make sure that you kick off Q1 properly. You’ve evaluated your internal services and solutions. You’ve reviewed your true cost of doing business. You’ve reviewed all of the agreements that are coming up for renewal and you’ve increased those costs appropriately.

Before, you have to have a difficult discussion with some of your clients next year. Because you’re trying to catch back up from not raising your rates. And a lot of partners, rich haven’t raised their rates in a couple of years. So take action now and try to get ahead for 2024. It, it really is a brutal mix when you think about it, Q4, because you’ve got to close out your goals for this year while setting yourself up for next year.

And as you pointed out, there are holidays that make it a, the shortest Quarter, arguably of the year. There are a lot of factors that make it difficult to get all those things done. I’m curious. We’re talking about this as we enter into Q4. What? That doesn’t necessarily mean this is the optimal time.

To be having some of the conversations, going through some of the thought processes you just described. And is there a perfect or a better time, basically, to start thinking about next year? Or in general, do you tell people, as long as you get that kicked off at the beginning of Q4, you’ll probably be okay?

Sooner is better, right? Earlier is better to prepare. But I’ll foreshadow something that we’re all going to enjoy here in a minute, our spotlight interview guest today, James Kernan talks about building an operating system to run your company by. And when you adopt an operating system that allows you to forecast what happens or what you should be working on and make sure that you’re completing from a priority.

Perspective quarter over quarter. Q4 just becomes the next quarter. And can you’ve already taken into account that, shorter timeframe to get some of these things done and you’ve adjusted some of these goals. So hopefully you’ve maybe taken care of the most critical ones sooner than waiting until Q4.

But I look forward. to our next segment, Rich. Yeah you’ve set it up wonderfully, Erick. So let’s go ahead and get right [00:15:00] into that. We’re going to take a break, folks. When we come back out on the other side, we will be joined by our channel mastered colleague, James Kernan. He is our chief leadership strategist.

James, welcome to the show. Thanks, Rich. Good to be here. So for folks who don’t know you, aren’t familiar with what you do today and what you’ve done before, give us the quick background on who you are and what you do. Like many, I’m a recovering MSP, but been in the channel for over 30 years. So first half of my career, bought sold owner ran seven different tech companies.

The largest one, I think we grew from about 30 million to 315 million. So big shop, a national company based out of San Diego. And then the last one was a small company I bought in San Diego called networks plus, grew that three employees and there were about 375, 000 in revenue.

When I bought them and we grew to over 12 million in less than three years. So that was exciting. I had an exit in 2006 and then just stumbled into being a business coach and consultant. I spoke at a conference. People liked what I had to say about what I did to grow my business and sell it.

And so that really started Kernan Consulting part two, which was the coaching and consulting and what we’ve grown into today is, executive one on one coaching where it’s really focused on leadership sales and marketing, revenue generating plans and a lot around EOS. And then also, I run the Millionaire Mastermind Peer Groups in North America, so peer group facilitator, and then take on some ad hoc projects as well, but that’s a quick background.

Yeah, it’s really interesting to me, because given the background you described and your enormous success growing revenue. At MSPs in the past, it’s no surprise that sales and marketing are a big part of your consulting practice. But a lot of the work you do, and most of what we’re going to be talking about here is truly around leadership.

There is more to growing a company the way you did multiple times than getting the sales and marketing. So that’s why you’re our chief leadership strategist at channel master. Tell folks a little bit about that role and some of the work you do. And channel mastered and current and consulting just around leadership coaching.

Yeah. So let me go back in time a little bit. And I’m a numbers person. So I was a finance major in college, a double major, finance, cause I liked the numbers, but also management was another one on the business side and my entire career really was First started with management, but it moved quickly into sales and marketing.

I’m an extrovert, high energy guy. I like speaking, networking and helping people achieve their dreams. And so I was a natural salesperson, all those positions with every company I had mentioned. Evolved into a leadership position. So for me, the first half of my career, growing, I had great people that worked with me just was a lot of fun.

It was a little different at that time versus now the last 15 years working with business owners, because everybody just wants to grow. It’s Hey, I need more first time appointments. I want more MRR. I just need more accounts. I go, okay that’s the easy part. So let’s start with that. But the whole time I’ll coach and work with someone, I’m looking at the big picture of their business.

I take really a holistic approach because there’s so many other things, Rich, that goes into just being able to to take on more accounts to, outside of sales and marketing culture. People compensation plans, keeping them motivated, how often do I have meetings and how do I hold them accountable?

Do I yell at them? Do I say good things, bad things? I’ve seen so many tech companies really struggle with all of that. So the coaching that I’ll just say, and it was a very, Astute comment that you made. The sales and marketing is just part of it, but your business is going to change and you need to know that in advance and just be prepared to, to do these other things that you have to do in order to sustain that type of growth.

So I hope that made sense. Yeah, it sure does James. And, working with you at channel mastered, what I really appreciate is, You your bedside manner, if you will, right? There’s a lot of different ways to lead. Some would [00:20:00] argue, some ways are better than other ways. And some would, agree that, wow, we should never lead teams that way.

Through your career, this is just a curiosity of mine, how have you come to have such a calm and welcoming collaborative and embracing demeanor and how important is it to develop that when you’re trying to lead teams? Boy so I guess first and foremost, I’ve played team sports my entire life, being an athlete growing up in the Midwest.

I think I started team sports when I was in third grade all the way through high school, and then all the way through college. And so team sports were really important. I liked the individual sports too, but the team sports. And it didn’t all click really until college of how powerful good leadership can be in when you have a common mission and you keep people encouraged around you and you motivate them, they become better.

And I remember a quote my head coach made after I won some award. I remember reading his quote in the newspaper and it was so flattering, but not to toot my own horn, but this helps explain it. He would just saying that, I was hurt. Two of the three games that we lost my senior year in college, and we still won our conference championship.

But it just said our team is very different when he wasn’t on the field. And I remember taking that to heart and that I carried into the business world, moving forward. It took me a couple of years to figure out you can’t sprint down the hallway and tackle people right in the office without getting in trouble, but my point is I was always very.

high spirited super competitive, but that collaboration, backwards again in some other training that I’ve had, a woman’s number one desire or need in the world is security. And for a man, which our industry is very male dominated, it’s respect. So I’ve always learned to treat people with respect.

I want to collaborate and get everybody’s ideas because when you take everybody’s ideas and they see that it’s part of their plan too, They’re going to be 10 times more motivated to help implement things. So that collaboration is critical. And, let’s pivot a little bit and talk about EOS and the, one of the many things that you do for clients and what you’re helping us work through at channel mastered and what we will also be delivering to our clients.

Is the EOS methodology. So for those of us that, have never heard of EOS and have no idea what it is, James, what the heck is EOS and why should companies use it? Gina Wickman wrote a book. called Traction back probably 12 years ago. And I remember getting the book as a gift. I started reading it.

It was dry in the beginning to be truthful. And I remember putting it down and I didn’t read the rest of it. And I kept hearing more and more chatter about EOS. And that’s what the book Traction was all about. There was another version of the book that came out that I ended up picking up, read it, loved it.

And it was the cliff note version of Traction, but it had a little bit more stories to it. It just was a simpler read. And it was called what the heck is EOS. I had been using that methodology for years with my own coaching practice, it was numbers driven, over communicate to your team, you have regular weekly meetings.

And I remember I’ve gone through all the EOS training. I’ve been through multiple implementations and then I made my own program. So I’ll call it, it’s an EOS like program, but it’s a business blueprint where I took the 12 of the core exercises that they would have you do in an all weekend leadership workshop.

And I broke it down into bite sized chunks and put my own spin on it. Some of those would be, how to run a leadership meeting on a regular basis. What does your, what should we be measuring? And and then, KPIs goals, not just for the company, but for the department and then all the way down to the individual, the team.

Really analyzing the team, getting everybody on the same sheet of music. And then there’s fundamental things that all of us probably have, or maybe had, 10, 20 years ago, we need to dust them off, but go back to that original business plan. And what’s our why? Why do we really do what we do?

What’s the purpose of the business. So I help people understand that and tap back into that passion that they have, but it’s not just the owner. It’s the leadership team. That’s going through these exercises, core values. But when you pull these things together and then what I found by spreading it out and going through these [00:25:00] weekly meetings, You really build this camaraderie and you build momentum.

It’s like a, to me, it’s like a jet going down the runway. And you get down to the 12th meeting that we have, which is my finale, that the jets going full speed, everybody’s fired up and you’re taken off. And that’s when, I hand the keys back over to the leaders. And it’s Hey, you need to start running your weekly leadership meetings.

And we do an all hands company presentation in front of the whole company. And it’s, Hey, here’s what we’ve come up with. Here’s where the business is going, the next three to 10 years. And more importantly, here’s where you fit in. That’s the big piece guys that I think a lot of business owners miss.

They’ll come up with goals, but they don’t do a very good job of bringing it down to the employee level. So they can feel like they’re part of the big picture. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. James. And like yourself, I’ve I’ve been influenced by EOS. I’ve gone through all the training as you have.

And I do use a lot of those methodologies, when I’m working with our clients as well. And what I love about EOS is it, if I were to boil it down it, when you go through all the exercises and everyone is bought in I think what it does is it allows everyone, no matter what their position is in an organization, is to focus on what the most important things they need to do in that quarter, no matter what else is happening.

We, in any lesson, they call it rocks, right? You sit down and you go, what are every quarter? We sit down and we figure out what are the most important things that the organization has to accomplish this quarter, no matter what, and we’re always pulled and, and influenced by these distractions, right?

We always have these great ideas, all the time. And what he allows us to do is to say, okay, we’ll put all that stuff on a list. And we will consider that for our next quarterly meeting to see what the next set of rocks are. But right now, these are the things that we have to accomplish. And this is what everyone’s role is in helping accomplish that goal.

And that’s what I think really is the to me, the essence of gaining that, that traction, the name of Gina Wickman’s first book is it gets everybody. As you said, James, on the same sheet of music, right? Playing right. Playing the song correctly and focusing on getting through that piece of music and then moving on to the next thing.

That’s what I love so much about it. What how hard is it for companies to adopt this and stick with it? I know I’ve worked with many companies that, immediately get it and some companies struggle with it. So can you share what, a business owner considering engaging in an EOS, consultation and engagement, has to think about and what they must be ready to commit to along with their team to, to actually.

Gain the benefits of engaging in an EOS methodology. Yeah. So it seems half the people that I’ve worked with historically have been self implementers where they think they know what they’re doing. Maybe they read the book or they. Had some exercises and they tried to take them the team through themselves and they failed.

And then a lot of other people maybe read the book or realize that they’re growing and they need to get these things in place. They’re struggling. So I just tried to understand the pain points and then, point out that, Hey, these are all fixable things. Once we put this business blueprint in place, create this culture of accountability and culture of success.

Because the whole spin I put on it, it’s all encouraging. You praise in public and scold in private. And another word to call it is gamification, but it’s just transparency where you’re putting all the goals out in front of everybody. And everybody knows how everybody else is doing.

So I love that again, as a competitive athlete grown up, I love that because it’s like yeah I’m going to make more calls than you. And I’m going to go on more meetings than you. And that’s the area maybe where I have a lot of fun. Doing that, but Erick, I will tell you, it’s a game changer.

And every single time I’ll take someone through this process. And then we do the all hands company meeting. It changes the environment. Everybody’s fired up. Their employees get connected to the big picture of where the business is going. And I love seeing that. So I’ve taken businesses over 500 million through this process.

And I’ve taken startups through the process before. And honestly. They’ve all worked really well and I believe it’s because we spread it out and it’s about a 12 week program, but we do one exercise a week. It depends on the size of the team, but normally it could be anywhere from 60 minutes to 90 minutes.

But it just gives people time with your already [00:30:00] busy day, your already busy week. People are traveling. I like spreading it out like that. And then everybody we’ll get through that within 12 weeks. Tell us a little more about the impact that you’ve seen EOS have on companies, either companies you’ve run or companies you’ve consulted with.

You and Erick both have talked about alignment around goals and clarity around goals as, something that the makes the EOS discipline effective, but talk a little bit about the impact you’ve seen EOS have and what it is about EOS. That’s directly responsible for that change in the business.

Our industry in general, very male dominated. Okay. And it’s also dominated by introverts, right? When you think about it most MSP business owners are highly intelligent. But they’re not very outgoing, inside themselves. And a perfect example would be one local business owner.

I met in the Midwest. I’m walking through the process and we’re talking in the assessment, like the beginning stages. And he’s James, I’m. I’m not really a big fan of putting numbers out and setting goals and having all my technicians hit a number of tickets per week or, a revenue number per week.

I just want them to do the best they can do. And it’s how do you know that might be what you want, but what do you think they want? How do they know that they’re doing good every day? What’s their scorecard, and then jokingly, this is a Vince Lombardi quote, but if winning isn’t everything, why do they have scoreboards?

Every, every sporting event has a scoreboard and there’s a winner and there’s a loser. So I love the idea of putting a scoreboard in the office and letting everybody measure their success by what they contribute and what they do. Day in day out, week over week, month over month, quarter over quarter.

and contribute. And when I’ve seen that happen, one of the first times that I remember rolling this out, it was one on one with someone and I’m not going to name any names because it was embarrassing, but he started crying. And he’s I, there’s no way that I can hit these goals that you guys have come up with.

And he would just confiding in me. I said, I tell you what, just give me three months. And I bet you’re going to hit these goals because what’s measured improves. And when you, the business owner are telling all your employees that, Hey, I’m tracking all these key metrics. And here’s why I share this information with you.

I’m going to train you to make you better, more efficient. And then. Another important piece of this when they meet and exceed the goals that you’ve set for them. There should be some kind of recognition program, maybe a bonus program, maybe some kind of verbal recognition or something.

But we rolled this program out. I remember this. It was a grown man and you remember him crying and it was like, Hey, let’s work through this. That very first month. His productivity doubled. So rolling this type of program out, I see people’s productivity goes up. People’s morale goes up.

Compensation plans go up. Profitability goes up. So it again, I keep using this bud word buzzword, but it gets everybody on that same sheet of music. And Another way of looking at it, Rich, is it gets everybody to act like a business owner. Imagine working in an environment like that where everybody was acting like a business owner.

And I know you business owners out there are like, Ooh, I like what you just said, because it it is a game changer. You mentioned that you’ve come in to help M. S. P. S. Sort of clean up any O. S. Implementation that they tried on their own. I imagine you’ve also encountered M. S. P. S. Who at some point after going through that 12 lesson process with you, maybe slipped off the path a little bit.

What are the most common mistakes that you see companies make around E. O. S. Great question. Normally it’s at the handoff stage. Early on when I was doing this type of consulting, I’d hand the keys off to them and away they go. And I would check back in a quarter later. That was the way I was trained initially.

And I don’t do that anymore because a lot of people struggle right from the get go. And it’s Hey, Let me, as your coach, let me run the first meeting or two, and I’m going to show you how it’s done. And then you’re going to show me how it’s done. I’m going to stay on those calls and I’m going to let you guys run them.

And then we’re good. So normally it’s that handoff. What right when that business owner is starting to run their weekly leadership meetings and sharing the dashboards and, there’s a very set agenda that’s fast paced. A lot of people struggle. And then when those meetings get less effective, [00:35:00] they give up and they stop holding them.

The other thing I’ll see is sometimes they become chatty Sally’s and please forgive me if your name is Sally, but you got to stay on task and I’m a strong type A personality. I like starting meetings on time. I like ending meetings on time. And if I’m in a meeting and someone says it’s supposed to be 60 minutes and it’s two hours and 10 minutes into the meeting and we’re halfway through the agenda I go crazy.

It’s respecting everybody’s time. And a lot of times people fall off the agenda and that’s another area where people really struggle. And then when that happens, again, they give up, they stop holding the meetings because they’re not effective. So there’s a couple of the big things. Yeah, James, you mentioned a lot about acting like a business owner.

That’s the accountability component that EOS brings because when everyone is bought in and in my experience, we are. Excited. You get that, I felt that as well, the company is now, and sometimes you hear from from some of the staff as you’re interviewing them, individually or having hallway conversations is we have been waiting for a plan, a strategy.

We’ve been waiting for this. When the business owner themselves thinks that the team isn’t going to buy in. I’ve had those conversations of you, James, where, the business owner is like, yeah, I want to do it, but I don’t know if the team is up for it. And it’s actually the opposite. The team is, has, I don’t know how the business owner has missed it, but they’ve been craving structure.

They’ve been craving, accountability and a way to measure performance and let’s not forget. The better the company does, the better we’re able to reward our team. So we also see morale, increase as well. And it’s just an amazing thing to see. And I think it helps the business owners or the team leads, or, the folks that are managing teams become better leaders because of it, because now they feel empowered and they know that the team is responding.

And so that, that term and that concept of leadership and working every day on becoming a better leader, it’s something that is not easy to do. I struggle with it, every day, some days is tougher than other days because we’re all human beings, right? In general, if we said that, a lot of folks really don’t intentionally work on being a better leader every day.

You’ve written three books about leadership. How do you define leadership for an MSP? And why is it so important to not only themselves and their business, but their staff and by extension, all of those families that it impacts and clients, et cetera, and vendor relationships. Yeah. Leadership is much more than I can put into words, and I’ll try to give you a couple quick examples, but it’s getting everybody on the same sheet of music. Everybody’s fighting for that common goal, but doing it enthusiastically. Okay. Doing it with reckless, abandon it and enthusiastic. And you said something so important, Erick, about employees want to be led.

Okay. I know it’s going to sound crazy, but trust me, employees want to be led. The more and more leadership training that we’re providing in the channel, the more and more clearer, I saw that, like you said, the employees are craving. It’s I just want to know what’s expected of me every day. I want to know how I can make more money.

I want to know how I can contribute and help the company get to that next level. And most people don’t have a strong plan or blueprint in place. Okay. That’s just the nature of the beast and this type of program that will actually do that for you. But the leadership part, I’ve always also taken more of a servant heart leadership approach where it’s my responsibility to make you better.

But I want you to tell me, what do you want out of life? What do you want out of your career? What do you want out of this job right here? So I want to know about it because I’m going to help you get there. And when you have that kind of relationship with people that you work with and they know that you really care, they’ll do anything for you.

They’ll go above and beyond. And those were the environments that I always tried to create with my customers. And those were the environments that I created with businesses that I ran. And it, it was fun. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I think, not only staff and employees crave leadership.

They’ll follow good leaders, but, business owners need good leaders as well to follow. You always hear about well. Tiger Woods, he’s got a coach, a leader that helps him get better. All these, high performing athletes or [00:40:00] business owners, they all have someone that kind of can guide them and hold them accountable.

And, it’s lonely at the top. Sometimes you need someone to bounce things off. You don’t want to bring it home and talk about your business problems with your family. And the other thing that I’ll mention is, And I found this to be true. I heard it a long time ago, but I found it to be true.

It’s like employees don’t quit companies. They quit their bad leaders. They quit, they quit the absence of leadership. That’s what frustrates them. Like you can have a great company, but, and I’ve seen it happen where good leaders get replaced by someone else. It’s happened to me back in, the before four times when I used to work.

For other people where someone would come in and just, and I have, I myself have left positions because of someone that had come in and basically destroyed everything that great leader had built with the team.

Great. A hundred percent. Yeah. Leadership is it’s the missing skill and our industry. And there’s a lot of good ones out there, but I think all of us want to be better leaders, right? Three tips for MSPs aspiring to become better leaders, like three things that come to the top of mind for you that you could share with folks that want to, begin this journey or maybe improve the journey that they’re on as becoming better leaders.

What would those be? Number one, I would just say, set goals and expectations with your team in writing. Number two, train them to meet and exceed those goals and expectations in writing, and then hold them accountable. And accountability to me is a positive thing. It’s just communication.

And I do it through positivity. And I’m the one clapping. I’m the one high fiving them. I’m the one filling up their coffee cup when they’re making that extra cold you know, so be encouraging. Keep people motivated. You know that and be the light in the workplace. People want to work with people like that.

Not not someone yelling and screaming and kicking the chairs over. Those days are gone. We’re just about out of time, James, but I can’t help myself. I’ve got to sneak in one last question because I was on LinkedIn earlier today. I saw a post you put up there that just said, before you can be a great leader, you must first be a great communicator.

And I thought I’ve got to ask him about that today when when we’re recording the podcast. So give us 90 seconds on why you cannot be a great leader until you’re also a great communicator. Yeah, this is I don’t know if I can squeeze it in 90 minutes. I’ll tell you how well I could communicate.

All right. That was supposed to be a joke. Speaking in small groups, one on one, gosh, it was always so easy for me. And then early in my career I catapulted up the org chart really fast. And, truth be told, I had a hard time speaking in big groups. A huge anxiety challenge with that first big public session.

I had I had to speak in front of 400 customers. I was so nervous. I was doing shots in the parking lot just to cool myself down. I did say a little prayer and just because I was so jittery, practice makes perfect. And my point is learn to be the best public speaker that you can be.

Okay, if you want to be a better salesperson, go to Toastmasters, join a Toastmasters group and become a great public speaker. If you want to be a better leader, go to Toastmasters. Go to leadership training and become a better public speaker because that, that one to many dimension is so critical when you’re communicating to big teams.

So public speaking is key. Great advice, James. Every time we speak, I come away with some great advice. No surprise that it’s true here as well. Where can folks get in touch with you, learn more about you if they want to follow up on anything we talked about here? Sure. Just up on the Kernan Consulting website.

K E R N E N consulting. com is a good place to start. Follow me on social media. I love social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, I’m all over the place and love sharing knowledge and tips with people out there. So those are probably the two best places to track me down. Okay, fantastic.

I encourage folks to do that, to track you down. Thank you again very much, James. We’re going to take a break now, folks. When we come back on the other side, we’ll wrap up the show, maybe have a laugh or two. Stick around. We’re going to be right back.

Hey, and we’re back for the final part of this episode of the NSP Chat Podcast. Always a pleasure. Speaking with James Erick one thing that we did not mention at the end of that segment that I want to emphasize now is, he and our mutual friend, Amy Babinchak co hosts the [00:45:00] SMB Community Podcast.

And I very much encourage you, if you enjoyed hearing from James, you want to hear from him on a weekly basis check that out. The SMB Community Podcast, James Kernan, Amy Babinchak, you can get it wherever you get your podcasts. And. It’s a good listen. I recommend it to you. But before I get your thoughts on that conversation, Erick, I’ll just say, I love, all of the the content about EOS.

But I particularly enjoy talking with James about leadership. I, I think a lot of MSPs, especially earlier on in their maturity cycle, think of themselves as business owners. They think of themselves as entrepreneurs. They understand that they’re employers. They don’t necessarily right away think of themselves as leaders.

It’s something that they can or end up discovering on the job. That there is something, a skill called leadership, that is going to make an organization gel and function effectively. And James has all sorts of Really great insights about what it is that makes a great leader.

Great. He’s been one himself and he’s sharing that knowledge with people now through channel mastered. Yeah. A tremendous amount of experience under his belt and successes and all of the organizations. That he’s built up and exited from and helping others along the way. And, when I think of a leadership, rich, it’s something that, I used to, I joke about this all the time, right?

I say, when I first started my career, just basically a technician, a lowly technician on the service desk and work my way up, as an engineer, and I worked in the enterprise and all that. And I always joke and say, look, I used to be that people hating engineer. The engineers think that everybody should think and behave like we do, like why are they doing it that way?

Why aren’t they doing it the way they should be doing it? Why aren’t they doing it the way I do it? And I realized after a bit that really wasn’t going to get me far, in my career or, in interpersonal relationships with anybody. And I started to realize, Holy cow, I’m going to have to work on myself and really understand what it takes.

To be a good leader. So I put myself through a bunch of leadership training myself and, behavioral analysis training. I, I’m certified in this behavioral assessments and things like that, to really understand, that you can become a great leader. We always hear this. Adage great leaders are born.

They’re not made. That’s completely false. You may have, accidental leadership skills, right? That make it easier for you to become a good leader. But leadership is something that’s learned and worked on and, perfected over time. I don’t think you can ever be a perfect leader, but it’s something that you apply yourself to.

So I, I like. We seen accidental leaders where it’s someone on the team that really hasn’t been put through a lot of leadership training, but they rise to the challenge, like they’re natural, that accidental natural leader that with a little bit of coaching and encouragement can really become super awesome.

And then we have so they’re accidental leaders. And I think then there’s intentional leaders like folks that know, Hey, I’m not really as naturally inclined to be. A motivator, a coach, a leader, but I’m going to work on it. I’m intentionally. Going to work on being a leader, unintentional and intentional.

And sometimes we’re thrown into the fire where we have to, become what we’re not, some of the best lessons I’ve ever learned, rich have been when somebody has pushed me way outside of my comfort zone and said, no, you’re going to do that thing now. And I thought, man, I don’t like doing it.

I’m not going to do it fast. It’s going to take me a long time, but after I did it, I thought, Oh, okay. Not so bad. And you just add that to your repertoire. So I love, the different facets of the tips that James gave about, where do you start to become, how do you start becoming a leader and things like that?

And at the end of the day I’ll recommend, not only James’s books, he’s written three books on leadership, one of my favorite books on leadership is the five levels of leadership by John Maxwell. And John talks about, these different levels of leadership. And I’ll just say, the second level of leadership is probably the one That a lot of people naturally figure out, but some people just don’t even think about it.

And so the first level is basically title leadership. Like you’re going to do and leadership, really the definition of it in its most basic terms for me is influencing someone to take action, right? There’s lots of bad ways to lead people and there’s some really good ways, right? So we’ve all seen bad leaders and we’ve seen great leaders.

So the first level of leadership is positional leadership. And that means I’m your boss, right? There’s a difference in me saying, Rich, I need you to knock that thing out for me. And no matter what, before you go home today, and sometimes, saying that to an employee who may not even be getting paid to work [00:50:00] over time is being asked to do something extra.

Or maybe coming in on weekend, like we’ve seen that movie. Yeah, I’m going to need to have you come in on the weekend and knock out those TPS reports. We haven’t gotten to the second level of leadership with that person, it’s going to be a tough sell. They’re not going to like it. They’re going to think, bad things about you, man.

Why are you making me work? I’m a, the second level of leadership is when we build. An emotional and relational connection with someone by showing them that we care about them. We care about them. We care about their family. We talked to them. We learn about them. And when someone feels like Oh, they care about me and they’re looking out for me.

They’re more apt to say, oh yeah I’ll, do that extra time and make sure I knock that out because Erick really cares about me. He’s got my back. I appreciate him. And so I’m going to go the extra mile that way. So there’s a difference there and there’s three more levels beyond that, but I won’t give those away, but I love like you, the conversation around leadership and it’s something that.

I try to work on every single day and it’s challenging rich, sometimes, you know I’ve got a bad day going on and I may you know I may not be in my best form trying to be a leader for you know My kids my family my wife my colleagues like you our clients, of course, you know with our clients, Got it Got to bring it in a little bit, but again, it’s like when we’re exhausted, when we’re tired, when we’re sick, we get a little bit more emotional.

And being that intentional leader sometimes suffers when we’re going through that, but a great leader that wants to continue working on their leadership and build great relationships, rich, thinks about it every day and assesses. And reflects on things like, Oh, I had a conversation with my son, last week that probably, I should have handled a little bit differently.

So I’m going to make sure I learn from that and, talk to him about that and we’re going to get square and we’re going to, continue moving forward. So it’s that kind of intentional awareness that people recognize. And they’re attracted to people want to be led by great leaders.

No matter if you’re, at the top of your game, if you’ve got, if you admire somebody for their leadership skills you’re attracted to those people. And people shy away from poor leaders. Like we talked about on the on the interview with James, rich people don’t typically quit company, right?

They don’t quit a company cause they don’t like the company. They typically quit. Because of poor leadership, right? Yeah. And it’s interesting because as James was talking about that, I was thinking back to, earlier in my career when I worked at Microsoft and if you leave that company, like I, at a lot of businesses, they do an exit interview.

What, why are you leaving? And the number one reason was always. a bad manager basically. So I think for the vast majority of people in our audience, you are going to be, to the extent that you are a high quality leader, it’s going to be intentional leadership. You’re going to have to acquire that, there are a few of us who get lucky to just have those skills built in already, but you really do need to make that a priority.

Cause there is going to be a hard cap to how far you can take your company until you begin to understand. What it is that makes for a great leader and cultivate those qualities in yourself. It’s a process. It’s going to take a while, but understanding that it’s something that you need to focus on is an important part of your success and managed services.

And this conversation, Erick, it leaves us with time for just one last thing this week and comes to us from Bagley Township, Michigan. Now I will say for, folks who are watching on video, you can you can see that I am wearing my Apple Watch and I, I really do love mine. You too, Erick. Yeah, we both have one.

A lot of folks in our industry do. Great piece of technology. I really do use it in all sorts of different ways every day, but I don’t know that I love it quite this much. Just within the last few days, a woman in Bagley Township, Michigan was rescued from an outhouse toilet. After she climbed in to retrieve her Apple Watch and then became trapped.

There’s just nothing good about that situation there. And I know these devices aren’t cheap, but you might not need, want to go climbing into the outhouse to get it back. Especially if there’s even a slight risk of being trapped in the process. In an understatement, the state police said in a release about this, if you lose an item in an outhouse toilet, do not attempt to venture inside the containment area.

Serious injury may occur. [00:55:00] Yeah, the containment area. Nobody wants to be in the containment area. Yeah, that’s a tough one. I get it, but holy cow. There’s got to be other options than climbing yourself into a confined area. Full of delightful things. Yes. Yes, indeed. Talk about a bad day.

Folks, that is all the time we have for you this week on MSP chat. We thank you so much for joining us. We’re going to be back again in a week with another episode for you until then. Just keep in mind you can find us on video on YouTube, you can listen to the audio only version of the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts, you’re gonna find us.

When you do find us there please rate, review, it’s gonna help the show get noticed and other people just like you discover it. And benefit from it as well. Our producer on this show is the great Russ Johns. He is also part of the Channel Master team actually, and he produces podcasts for our customers.

You can learn more about him at russjohns. com. You can learn more about Channel Mastered at channelmastered. com. You can check out my blog if you’re interested too. It’s called Channelholic, and you will find that Channelholic. news. So once again, we thank you for joining us. We’re going to see you again in a week.

Until then, folks, please remember, you can’t spell channel without M S P.