Episode 37: The Cash Faucet
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Erick and Rich discuss why MSPs shouldn’t let generative AI’s recent slide toward Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment stop them from investing in what will still—eventually—be a big potential money maker for them, as well as critical best practices for nailing the all-important new client onboarding process. Then they’re joined by Dave Sobel, host of the Business of Tech podcast, for a free-ranging conversation about benchmarking MSP performance, the future of SaaS management, vendor consolidation, and more. And finally, one last thing: Perfume for dogs.
Discussed in this episode:
Dave Sobel’s Business of Tech podcast
Silicon Valley’s Trillion-Dollar Leap of Faith
Canalys analyst Jay McBain on channel attitudes toward AI
‘Delicate, authentic, charismatic’: Dolce & Gabbana launches €99 dog perfume
Transcript:
Rich: [00:00:00] talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need. To make it big and manage services. My name is Rich Freeman. I am Chief Content Officer and Channel Analyst at Channelmaster, the company responsible for this show. I am joined virtually this time, unlike our last episode, by our Chief Strategist at Channelmaster, your co host, Erick Simpson.
Erick, you back home?
Erick: I am back home, Rich, and I’m glad to be back home after a whirlwind of a couple of weeks of traveling. A little bit for fun and pleasure, and A little bit for work but I’m glad to be home. How about you?
Rich: Yeah, I’m I’m glad to be home, too. And I was only on the road that one week, last week, when we were at the CompTIA ChannelCon show together, and it was a great trip and a great show.
Very glad that I went, but it is nice to be back home, enjoying Summer in Seattle
Erick: and a little bit cooler than it had been before you were traveling. I understand.
Rich: See now folks If we record this Erick and I last spoke yesterday when it was like in the 60s here in Seattle You know a hundred degrees and humid everywhere else in America.
It was Gloomy and 64 or something here yesterday. But shortly after we spoke a heat advisor, he came through from the national weather service. It’s picking up as we speak. So the next few days actually are going to be quite warm. But that’s okay. You know what? Summer does not last all that long here in Seattle.
And I’ll take what we get, even if it’s hot. Let’s pray that it isn’t super, super hot. We will, we’ll catch people up in our next episode. And until then. Speaking about hot and cold, let’s dive into our story of the week, Erick. And the topic this time is guess, guess, wait for it, artificial intelligence.
As we are recording this show, we are just a few days after a pretty serious sell off in the stock market. There were a number of different issues that triggered that. Including a higher than expected unemployment report and some concerns among investors that maybe the Federal Reserve has waited too long before cutting interest rates.
But one of the contributors was some concern out in the investing world that maybe we’re getting out in front of ourselves, out in front of the skis a little bit on this whole artificial intelligence thing. Are we possibly over investing and therefore setting ourselves up for Disappointment.
And it got me to to thinking, Erick, I’m going to quickly call this up here while I can, but it got me to thinking about the good old Gartner hype cycle which sort of predicts exactly what I think we’re going through now. And I want to get into that. And so just for people who are, have heard the term, but don’t necessarily know exactly what the hype cycle is, it’s this phenomenon Five phase series of steps that Gartner identified many years ago that tend to bear out in reality whenever there is a new technology like artificial intelligence.
You start out with what they call the innovation trigger. In this case, it’s AI. Then you work your way up, very steep curve to the peak of inflated expectations. And the curve plummets down into the trough of disillusionment. And then you get back up into the slope of enlightenment and plateau of productivity.
And at that point the expectations and the market performance are back in alignment. And you’re talking about more realistic numbers there. I think we are headed into, we’re somewhere in between that peak and the trough of disillusionment right now. And maybe not all the way down to the trough.
But that’s where we’re headed right now, and I’m looking here at some numbers that I got recently for a story that appeared in the Atlantic, it’s called Silicon Valley’s Trillion Dollar Leap of Faith. We’ll link to it in the show notes. It notes that there was a prediction from the CEO of Anthropic, one of the big LLM makers that a single AI model along the lines of OpenAI’s GPT 6 could cost a hundred billion dollars to train by 2027.
Moody’s Ratings thinks we’re looking at trillions of dollars of investment from tech companies, utilities, and others in order to build all of the infrastructure required. To support and run those LLMs. Barclays recently calculated tech companies are on a path. If you look at the investments, they say they’re going to make the AI vendors out there are on a path to put in enough infrastructure to power 12, 000.
Chat GPTs. And as the the researchers at Barclays noted dryly, we’re probably going to get more than a few chat GPTs between now and the plateau of an enlightenment. On artificial intelligence, 12, 000 are we really going to generate? So we might [00:05:00] actually be over investing in artificial intelligence.
Gartner recently predicted. 30 percent of generative AI projects will be abandoned after the proof of concept stage by the end of next year, 2025. So by all means, let’s not maybe over invest too early in artificial intelligence. But I wanted to bring this up, Erick, just to make sure that there’s nobody out there who’s thinking the whole thing is hype.
And this AI phenomenon is just going to go away again. We’re in a stage of the hype cycle where we’re deflating some of that bubble in terms of expectations, but I still very much believe there’s a enormous opportunity out there longer term for the channel. Now, the good news is there’s some data from Canalys indicating, and this is admittedly before.
The stock market sell off and some of these other things I’m talking about, but there is actually a fair amount of optimism in the channel, according Canalys around artificial intelligence. This is good. There’s recent data Delauro, an analyst organization. Is, they’re talking about a trillion dollars of infrastructure spending on a I in the next five years.
S and P is looking at just the software market alone for generative AI being worth 52. 2 billion dollars. Going forward and these are over longer term time horizons. So don’t give up, don’t dismiss some of what you’re seeing short term don’t walk away from this market and this opportunity.
Either is what I we were talking on last week show about blockchain and about IOT and the concern I think we both had that a lot of MSPs out there might be disregarding underinvesting in those innovations. I still personally, I’m a believer in AI is an important innovation for MSPs and the SMB channel going forward.
So I am getting realistic and sliding into the trough of disillusionment, maybe with everybody else, but I am encouraging our audience not to bail out because I do think we’re going to stabilize in a more sensible place over time.
Erick: Interesting, rich. The hype cycle. It’s been with us for a while and those that know that, like you said, emerging technologies, follow this trend that Gartner has identified and is, has made very public and visible to folks that practice kind of stuff.
And, when I look at, that hype cycle, that first, that first phase where there’s this dramatic. excitement and spike and growth and all that for AI that’s happened relatively quickly. It’s been a hockey stick a situation. So I guess I’m wondering, the, when we get to the plateau and we hit the trough of disillusionment, will the drop be as steep as the climb?
And how will that impact things? Because I do believe that there is a lot of hype around AI. You and I’ve talked about it on the program before. We were even ping ponging back and forth, what is the use case for AI? How do MSPs leverage it and monetize it?
There’s a lot of folks entering in. And I think experimenting with a lot of potential solutions or services with AI. Probably more than I can remember with any other kind of emerging technology, in my short career here in the channel. So it will level out, right? There always is this shakeup and the strong survive, right?
Rich, it’s these early movers. It’s the folks that have, the AI models and companies that are on the tip of our tongues right now are there because they are in the lead. And there’s a lot of other folks that are trying to, pitch their wagon to that and come up with some very unique and interesting use cases for it, we’ll have a shakeout like like we always do.
And I think your guidance is right on point. MSPs don’t despair, make decisions that fit your business model, the way you always have identify what’s good for you and your clients. Proof of concept it, integrate it as necessary, and then grow it as needed. Don’t just go in all in and try to, storm the castle.
Let’s say Princess Bride reference, Rich. Yes. Don’t just go in and storm the castle, and start waving the AI flag and try to scoop up a lot of market share and make that your differentiation amongst your competitors, that would be a mistake. So slow and steady wins the race.
Rich: Yeah. And I’ll point out, it’s not just hopefulness on my part that tells me this isn’t pure hype.
I saw Corey Kirkendall and MSP, I’m sure, from the Dallas area at the channel con show last week, I haven’t didn’t get a chance to get into this in [00:10:00] detail, but I do know that he is And this is Corey by nature, right? He’s going to get in on these opportunities early.
He’s going to, he has the courage to experiment and he figures out ways to make money on these things before other people do. And he’s at that stage with AI now. I had a, Conversation with another MSP, you probably know from San Luis Obispo named Brian Weiss. And he’s doing some really interesting things around AI.
And it’s not just, fleshing money away. So there are actually companies out there that got in on this early that are making smart bets on the technology. And look, they’re going to be out in front of their peers and competitors here. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t time for other people to do that kind of thing as well.
It’s just a question of, slow and steady experiment, look for what works. And and when you find that thing that works, do more of that. We’ve got a consultant named Wes McDonald coming on the show in just a few episodes, and he works with MSPs to help them figure out how to monetize AI.
And we’ll be able to get into this In detail with them in our interview segment. I’m looking forward to that conversation. All right. Speaking of things that we are looking forward to, I am looking forward to your tip of the week, Erick, because it has to do with a pretty familiar challenge for MSPs and you’ve got some thoughts on how to overcome it.
Erick: Absolutely, Rich. And, I’ll start off by saying, building an MSP practice, the framework of building a business is, Pretty similar, right? Yeah. Notwithstanding what it is that you’re focusing on selling or delivering, right? There are some basic best practices in any business’s growth that, Accelerate or impede growth, right?
And we’re talking about having a good business plan. We’re talking about having a unique value proposition that resonates with your target audience. And we talk about the ability to sell and market effectively. What happens after you figure out those things and you’ve gotten to the point where you’re, you’ve got your UVP down, you’re selling, you’re marketing, and you are closing business.
That is. A milestone in the growth of any company when we can, repeatedly generate sales, leads and sales. And I know that is a big milestone for MSPs in particular, but once we achieve that milestone, we now rich have a repeatable process, a market, our services and sell them consistently.
The next choke point. Becomes onboarding these new clients and tip of the week ripped from the headlines. I’m working with a client right now and they’ve solved for the first few things. And now they’re having to ratchet back their go to market strategy because they haven’t yet figured out how to optimize and onboard of the onboarding process.
For new clients efficiently and it’s become a choke point and you know what happens rich when You get a client all excited to come on board and they’re ready to rock and roll and they sign the agreement and they pay You that first check and it takes forever to onboard them. Nothing good. Nothing good happens rich.
That’s the answer They lose confidence. They lose zeal You start getting into that trough of disillusionment But we were just talking about In that client relationship. So that’s what today’s tip of the week is about rich. It’s about overcoming these client onboarding challenges. Now I’m not going to share anything that is, rocket science.
There’s no silver bullet here. It’s the same best practices that I’ve been, speaking about for years. The things that I learned in the enterprise before I even thought that I would, want to become an entrepreneur one day and start my own practice. But there are three specific things that I just want to cover quickly, just to keep things top of mind for, our partners out there that are struggling with, delivering a consistent onboarding process before I get into those three, I will share, beyond the disillusionment that you’ll have with a new client and them starting to doubt their decision to move forward with you, lots of other things happen after you feel like you’ve gotten them on board it if we’re just trying to do the minimum.
To get clients onboarded so we can begin delivering a modicum of service There’s all kinds of problems with that. We’re not documenting their infrastructures correctly. We’re probably not integrating our platforms Properly configuring everything to the optimum level so they can really measure what’s going on monitor and remediate things we’re probably not We may not, we may be cutting corners at adding all of the users into the system.
So when, tickets start getting opened up, we don’t know who they’re associated with. All these things that can happen that not only erode client confidence, it erodes your team’s morale and increase disillusionment among, the [00:15:00] larger organization I’m talking about your MSP itself, and ultimately.
You’re delivering services so inefficiently that you’re losing money. And what happens now is rich. You’re reacting to these things in such a way that you can’t scale. And then you think that this, the answer is, Oh, let’s go hire more technicians. That’s not the answer until you solve these fundamental issues.
You’re just throwing more costly labor at the problem. And they go through the same disillusionment Oh my goodness. There is no established process. We don’t have our systems optimized. We’re not. Onboarding correctly. So when tickets are being opened, it takes us three times longer to resolve the issue because of some of these inadequacies in our onboarding process and failure to document.
So quickly, rich. I’ll take a breath getting passionate about this number one document your onboarding process and structure it in phases. It is a project. It is a project. So if I can reach some of my MSP brethren and sisteren and that is a term rich and say it look at it as a project. There are phases prioritize the most important phases.
Document how that’s done and then create clear steps and timelines where these things have to occur in order to ensure a smooth transition to them becoming clients that you can serve. Number two, this one’s tougher. Dedicate an onboarding team. You may have a small team. Of technicians and engineers and everyone is spinning plates all the time.
But as you grow and mature, that you should be segmenting your incident management processes, tiering your service desk staff in such a way. So that, level one tickets are only delivered to level one engineers, level two and level three that way. So we’re not, it’s not costing us three times as much to close level one tickets.
And we have a process where we’re training each tier of those. Of those service desk staff on exactly how to resolve the tickets that they are being assigned, and nothing else so that we become more efficient. Same thing with an onboarding team. Now this may not be a team that only does onboarding one step forward.
Rich could be, Hey, whenever we’re onboarding a new client, these two or three resources within the organization are tapped in there’s tickets created. There’s a project. And they are now focused on that as a priority, perhaps, outside of their normal KPIs, we’ve got to onboard these clients quickly and maintain that high level of satisfaction because after the, during onboarding, one of the phases is when the sales professional had sold that account, rich shows up.
And it’s almost like when you buy or sell a home, right? What happens like the day you’re moving in or out? Your realtor shows up with a bucket of chicken and some soda or a pizza or something and congratulates you and continues that relationship and tries to get referrals from you. So if you’re having a rocky onboarding process, you’re really stymieing your sales potential during that, that onboarding process.
This should be the peak of a client satisfaction. They’ve signed your agreement. Things are happening. You’re showing up. Everybody’s excited. And this is the best time to do that sales follow up. The seventh step of the sales process, right? The close is not the last step. It’s the follow up that happens.
And we typically do that when the client is at their happiest. Before we’ve had a chance to accidentally screw things up yet, right? Number three, standardize on your onboarding tools. Rich, there’s a ton of really good tools that help us automate onboarding processes. Now, identifying and identifying everybody that’s in Active Directory or in the user’s accounts, Identifying all the SaaS applications, identifying all of the devices and the services and the platforms in the organization so that we can begin to onboard and deliver and configure all of these things in a more automated fashion.
And I’m looking forward, Rich, because I am excited about AI. I’m looking forward to the value that AI brings. We’re already seeing it. Improving some of the platforms that MSPs are using today. It’s going to continue to do that. But those are the top three things, rich structured onboarding process, dedicated.
Team of individuals, not folks that are just being tagged in willy nilly to onboard the next client, this or that you’re training folks in these structured processes to deliver it. And then, investing in and optimizing and configuring and integrating your tools to automate as much of that as possible to avoid forgetting things on a checklist or [00:20:00] human, errors in configuration and things like that.
You’ll be happier, your clients will be happier, and your sales team will be super happy.
Rich: It’s a bit of a cliche, Erick, but cliches become cliches for a good reason quite often, and you never get a second chance to make a first impression, right? You nail the onboarding process, and you build up this kind of pool of credit that you can draw on later on if you screw something up.
And conversely, if you screw up onboarding, you’re going to have to work on it. Hard to earn that client’s trust and confidence going forward. So it pays to be smart and be methodical about onboarding. I love the emphasis on documentation. It reminds me of something that our mutual friend, Karl Palachuk.
An MSP consultant likes to talk about, which is the power of checklists. But also, what you’re trying to do basically is come up with a process that is proven and that works. Get that down in writing. And then do it consistently the same way every time. You’re gonna get better results that way.
And checklists can help make sure you don’t leave anything out of that. And then, I’ll skip ahead to the third step, which comes back to something that comes up a lot these days, which is automation. So to the extent that you can use tools to be more efficient about how you do onboarding and maybe more consistent as well.
It’s a really smart thing to do. Quick question for you though, Erick, because you were talking about. Approaching this like a project, and I know because we’ve spoken about it on this show and at other times in the past if you’re a believer not only of dividing projects into phases, but to having meetings with the client in between phases, is that something MSP should be looking at doing during onboarding?
If you’re transitioning from phase one to phase two, is there an opportunity in there to talk to the client and see how things are going? It’s
Erick: absolutely an opportunity that is so often missed, Rich. First, first missed opportunity is not seeing it as a project. Everybody has their definition of what is a project is deploying a new desktop or a new user, a project, probably not right by definition of a project is when you have to manage risk and you have to phase the deliverable in such a way so that you’re managing the risk.
And if, and. If something does go wrong, you can roll back to a previous state. And, you’re referencing a tip of the week that I shared on the program a little bit ago, when I said, a project is delivered in phases for several reasons, right? Number one, to manage risk.
Number two, to make sure that you’re having regular touch points with your client. And typically I like to set up these phases in such a way so that I can meet with a client when we’ve successfully completed that phase and everybody can agree that phase has been completed successfully to everyone’s expectation and they sign off and approve it.
Same thing with onboarding. If you’re onboarding in phases, maybe you’re onboarding multiple locations. Maybe you’re onboarding a location at a time and doing a phase or maybe you’re onboarding a little bit larger organization rich and you’re onboarding business units at a time. Maybe you’re breaking down your phases based upon technologies being onboarded.
Let’s say that there’s a cloud migration that needs to happen. Maybe there’s some migration from an email system to, to on prem email to M365 or something like that, or migrating part of an application. As part of this, maybe there’s an infrastructure upgrade that goes on during onboarding.
Absolutely. You should be conducting phase reviews and making sure that you are presenting the results of those phases for your client to say, yes, I agree, you’ve completed this phase successfully, and when you have, let’s say you have a five phase onboarding process, rich, if the client signs every phase of those phase review documents, approving that phase has been delivered.
To their satisfaction, then you control when the project is over, whether that’s an onboarding project or that’s an infrastructure project, in many cases, when we’re failing to do that, we relinquish control of the perception of when the project is over to the hands of the client. And how many of us have had that wonderful experience when we.
Feel that we’ve done everything we were supposed to do. And the client says no, you were supposed to do these three other things that we never agreed to do. And maybe they had a side conversation in a hallway with a technician and said, Hey, why you’re over here, could you also do this?
And the technician said, oh yeah, no worries. We’ll take care of it. And that never goes anywhere. So these are the kinds of things that, can help accelerate confidence and trust in a client when we do these things properly. And we’re just setting and meeting the expectations that we, while we’re doing the phase reviews like you.
Mention rich to build that trust encompass like we are delivering what we said We will deliver and that sets the expectation Of for the client of what comes next. Wow, [00:25:00] if onboarding went so I can’t wait, you know till we’re really getting service and that means I can’t wait To that next qbr meeting when i’m going to be told what else I need to invest in and I can’t wait To say yes, because I understand how the project rolls and how you guys
Rich: and I can’t wait to renew my contract good advice on a very important topic folks takes us up to our spotlight interview segment.
Erick and I are going to take a quick break when we come back, we are going to be joined by our mutual friend, Dave Sobel. This is going to be fun. I know it’s going to be fun for us us, Erick. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be fun for the audience as well. Dave Sobel is a very successful MSP once upon a time, a longtime vendor executive once upon a time.
These days, he’s a podcaster. We’ll get into that with him. He is also one of our favorite podcasters. Thought leaders in this industry. And we’re just going to swat around some issues that are bouncing around in our heads on the show, trade a little thought leadership. We out get into some interesting stuff, maybe some controversial stuff.
If you like to hear people who think maybe too much about the managed services industry dive into what’s happening here and what it means for folks like yourself. Stick around because we. Are going to be right back.
All right. Welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP chat podcast, ladies and gentlemen, where we are joined, Erick and I are joined by one of, if not the favorite thought leader in the managed services world for both of us. Sobel. He is best known today as the host of the business of tech podcast, but he actually has a.
A long and an extremely relevant career in terms of the conversation that we’re about to have here. Dave, go ahead and tell folks here who do not know you who you are a little bit about your background and then about business of tech. Rich, thank you for that
Dave: introduction. That is super generous.
And I am really excited to be back with you guys to chat. I always quip and go I’m an IT computer science guy by background. I have a degree in computer science. Launched a managed services provider firm before we called it managed services. So I launched mine back in 02. It was a moderately successful regional MSP.
And I ran it for about a decade. And I specifically talk about it in those terms because for me, I was one of those guys who said, I thought I was pretty good at that. I got super involved with launching with peer groups. I was a peer group member, helped launch in Europe. Was it Microsoft MVP?
I was like that community guy that had got involved in everything. But I ran just one MSP despite that, my fact that I was involved with other people in the learning around that. And I, when I got the chance to sell it, I hopped over on the vendor side. I ran it was with two different RMM vendors. First for about 18 months, we sold that sold level platforms, of course, to AVG then I jumped over to GFI.
We became logic. Now we sold that to. I don’t know. Nobody’s heard of him. Solar winds. We sold that company. And then I stayed another three years post to go through the IPO process. And that eight years as a vendor was all about teaching MSPs to grow their business. And that was literally the metric that I was built on.
Was metric dot was could we make them into better MSPs? And we know that by them consuming more software. So it was a really good relationship between us investing in MSP growth and thus getting the return on that. I, so I spent eight years over on the vendor side and then launched this business like five years ago now to take that knowledge and that expertise and kind of be the MSPs analyst.
I know most MSPs can’t afford an analyst that spends all the time researching and thinking about their space. So instead you can get 10 minutes of insight every single day on my podcast to hopefully make you execute a little bit.
Rich: And we’ll bring this up again at the end of the conversation, but where should folks go to to find that show and.
Become part of your regular audits. If I am on all
Dave: the podcast platforms, you can look for the Business of Tech. But all the links are at the website businessof. tech.
Rich: Okay, awesome. Like I said, Dave is one of our favorite thought leaders in the industry. And so we’re gonna, we’re gonna wing it a little bit here, folks.
Our format for this interview segment is that it’s not actually going to be an interview. Maybe this is like an un interview. To borrow a term from from events sometimes. We’re just gonna each kind of bring up something and a issue in the industry relevant to MSPs on our mind and share some thoughts about that.
And Dave, you are our esteemed guest. I’m gonna let you go first. What would you like to talk about?
Dave: Alright, so I’m gonna, this ones on my mind. I’m just coming off vacation, right? So I have the joy of a little bit of a break, which means you can take a look at all the news stories and say and put them together in interesting new ways.
And I spent a bunch of time with the big tech earnings calls recently, and of course they’re killing it, right? Like they’re doing [00:30:00] crazy growth. Microsoft’s with 29% growth over on the Azure side, Google’s seeing significant in the 20% ranges. By the way, this is at massive scale. So these are huge numbers.
And then I compared that against Enable’s recent earnings report. So they just released theirs with a 12. 7 percent quarterly growth and disclosure. I’m a shareholder of Enable. And additionally, I was also digging through some of the service leadership numbers around and they were showing around EBITDA growth.
And they were talking about 14 percent EBITDA growth being some really great numbers. And it really, so the question for having this sort of panel rift. Is I’ve been thinking about like I use enable as an interesting comparison because they’re the only publicly traded MSP firm that I can latch on to from a numbers perspective.
And if I compare them big tech wise, it’s ah, guys, 12. 7 percent growth. It’s fine, but it’s no Microsoft. It’s no Nvidia. It’s no meta. It’s no big tech guys. And I’m trying to think about who should MSPs compare themselves to in the broad tech ecosystem worth which are numbers we can pull at.
Are there other numbers and other companies that would be interesting to compare against to try and get a sense of good performance? And you’re talking specifically about the MSPs, right? I’m intentionally trying to be a little broad because I think MSP as a term is probably a little broken. And if we latch right on to MSP alone, we’re probably narrowing a little too much.
I think service technology services firms is probably a broader swath that I think is worth comparing against. And the reason I’m interested in comparing here is because I’m trying to say who can we compare against to understand who’s doing good things in the industry that we can then take best practices from.
Rich: So I have a suggestion here that I’ll run past you guys. So to the extent that we are talking about technology service providers I don’t think you’re benchmarking against enable or the big tech companies and we can come back to that there and who they should be benchmarking against.
Cause I have a post coming up in my blog about how the entire kind of universe is. Decelerating. But in any event, if you are a technology service provider. And who do I compare myself to that? I can actually, there’s public data available. The candidates that come to mind are really big technology service providers who are publicly traded.
Eat plus Presidio proficient that they’re. They’re operating in a very different world from you. So it’s not an apples to apples comparison, but if you want to see how the state of the art, the upper crust of technology service providers are performing, that’s probably the best place to get objective data that is vetted by the sec, you can have some faith in.
Erick: We talked on a couple of shows about. The influence rich that these P firms, these equity roll up initiatives are having on MSPs. And I remember the conversation that you and I had was about, is that a threat to MSPs or is there still a way to compete against these?
And so I data that I see when we look at these publicly available, like reports and things like that, just like you said, Dave. Is, they lump everything in there. So we look at the, the MNA growth for 2023 and a technology service provider industry, it’s got these gigantic behemoths in there, as well as, everybody else that, that you can gain that.
So I’m wondering for the typical MSP, when we were. Coming up in our MSP practice. When you and I started working together, Dave many years ago, aging ourselves. We were part of ACG peer groups, which, now is it’s been acquired by connect wise.
And this was how we gauged the EBITDA and things like that. And it was interesting because in those early days, like we were in HTG one, so we were like the very first peer group, we didn’t have a big. Data set to compare, until several years later when that organization really started growing, there’s 20, 30 peer groups, and now there was a lot of aggregated data.
That’s when service leadership they were part of it from the very inception and started benchmarking all of us and following that service leadership process and model for EBITDA and against all the different business models and things like that, and I know that service leadership.
Provides that reporting non uniquely identifiable information for MSPs today and also, you can join these peer groups through connect wise now. So I think if you’re an MSP that wants to know how I’m performing against my peers more realistically or more, I think, yeah, [00:35:00] more realistically, maybe something like that would be an option for you to get a report like that, to see what other Providers, your size, your model, a thing.
Dave: Yeah, I referenced them all the time. They’ve got new data that I just covered on the show. Yeah. I will just inside of the way Dave’s brain works, I’m always looking for another way can I figure out another set of data that other people for example, I cover both the Russell 2000 and the S and P 600, which are the small cap numbers.
Are the numbers that I cover on my show a lot, because I find that’s a much more useful gauge of if I’m trying to understand our collective customers, the small businesses out there, like I’d like to know how they’re doing. So my proxies are, let’s go to the Russell 2000. Let’s go to the S and P 600 just to get a sense of the water, right?
Because I can watch that on a weekly basis or a monthly basis where data like service leadership, I’m only getting quarterly or annually, And if I want to have another data set to watch trends, that’s where I’m looking. And I’m so in my head, I’m like, maybe I can assemble a collection of ticker numbers that are representative of the companies that I’d like to generally trend.
And it’s just one more data point to watch, to make good predictions. And that’s really where my head was at. And I figured it was, you asked what’s on my mind. I’ve been thinking about that one a little bit recently.
Rich: I’m going to follow up real quick with a little bit of news that that may have gotten overlooked, which is that the week before last as we’re recording this Grady and MSP announced a new MSP benchmarking service.
I, I. To your point, Erick data like the service readership data. That, that is a way better benchmark tool for MSPs to use than, E plus and these publicly traded, it’s just much more relevant and detailed and and so on, you typically have to pay for it.
I don’t know what. The service leadership data costs, but it, it does cost money. This gradients are, and I can’t speak to the quality of gradients data. I haven’t seen any of it myself yet, but when they came up with this idea we see all of this sort of billing and financial performance data in the course of our normal work, let’s create some benchmarks for MSPs to look at.
They were going to. Turn this into a product, charge people for it. And a bunch of vendors got together and said what if we sponsored us? Why don’t we pay you? And then the MSPs can just use it for free and hopefully they get better at what they do and and buy more of our stuff. So there is actually now a free MSP benchmarking service out there for MSPs to look at.
Again, I just, I haven’t looked at it. I don’t know how much data there is. To
Dave: be fair, they’re almost, they’re answering a slightly different question because my understanding of looking at the gradient stuff is they’re actually looking a lot about what is the correct pricing for your services?
Which is a slightly different question than how is revenue growth doing? What is EBIT and growth doing? A very relevant one, a important one. But I also want listeners to know that they’re actually answering a slightly different question than where I was going, or which is I’m looking for general trends or performance of the market space, whereas what Gradient is offering, which is, often a question we see a lot of MSPs is.
How much should I charge? And they are actually trying to put some data to that. It’s a really interesting initiative and Rich you hit on exactly what, what intrigued me about it too, was the, huh, the vendors are all paying for that. That’s an interesting driver of outcomes. Because you have, you always have to trace the money.
And it will be interesting to watch that and their performance with that product over the next sort of six to 12 months.
Rich: Okay. We’re off to a good start in my estimation, Erick. I’m feeling generous. I’m going to let you go second.
Erick: All right. I want, I’ve been thinking a lot about SaaS services and solutions as compared to what, Dave, you and I would think were our traditional kind of infrastructure, MSP.
Services and solutions being recovering MSPs, both of us. And we’re doing a lot of work on the channel mastered side of the house with new emerging SAS vendors. And what’s interesting about, Oh, I’m having an earthquake right now. That is crazy. You guys probably, I don’t know if you could see it because I’ve got a, the green screen background, but the whole.
I’m on the second floor of the whole place just shook really hard. So stay tuned. If I drop out, you’ll know why. Um, this idea that infrastructure is going away or, it’ll all be applications and it’ll all be in the cloud. We know that we speak a lot about this on the show, rich about this migration accelerated by.
COVID and the lockdown and all that, where everybody just started moving more quickly toward the cloud, more, more quickly toward and strengthening cybersecurity and hybrid workforce and all that. The SAS solutions that MSPs are beginning to be aware that they should [00:40:00] be managing as well.
This is where the puck is going, right? So we got to skate toward where the puck is. And my curiosity, very specifically, is around how the increase in adoption of reselling SaaS solutions and SaaS management services impacts the valuation of the traditional MSP. Because we know that, from a SaaS company perspective, it’s a different valuation.
Typically, if all we’re doing is selling and reselling and managing SaaS, we have a higher multiple when we do valuation exercises for M& A. So I’m just, I’m curious about how the shift because affects the evaluation of MSP. We know right now that as a line item service, monthly recurring revenue under managed service agreements has the highest multiple when we do evaluation for M& A.
I’m curious to see how that changes if we increase, the SaaS management or does it all become part of it? So those are things I’m thinking about. It’s interesting because
Dave: my reaction to that is it should continue to increase. And, I always go back to very much a fundamental on this.
I fundamentally believe the value of a good IT services organization remains Providing good technology advice and guidance to make sure that the technology spend is implemented efficiently, tracked well, and drives business outcomes. And nothing I just said has anything to do with infrastructure or SaaS, or I would make that exact same statement back in 2002, when I started my provider.
I just wouldn’t have been as good at it because I’ve been practiced over 20 some years. But the point is like the core value never changed. And if you’re good at that, You should be able to see increased valuations by delivering that using more sticky and more difficult to remove technologies that by the way, should also deliver better outcomes at lower cost.
The trick to or better, per unit economics. One of the things I always laugh about is IT spend never actually goes down. We’re never actually, Reducing what we charge our customers. We’re still taking as much as we possibly can from the customer. We’re just being smarter about what they get.
And a SAS spend should be significantly higher value because it also includes all the previous infrastructure stuff. So we should be able to get better value, more efficiency, better deliverables, better outcomes. And thus better valuations over top of that. And we see a lot more SAS retention and we’re able to manage churn better.
So I sell a lot of stuff to like all of those numbers should lead to a higher valuation because we can do a better job as providers. That’s my theory. I think it’s I’m willing to throw some reputation behind that. If you’re asking do I think that’s where it is? Yes. But I will also note that I don’t necessarily think it’s going to be explosively different.
It’s you’re still a services business and you’re still labor constrained at some level, because the most important element of dealing with your customers. Is the actual advice and personal interaction and consulting services that are not infinitely scalable the same way like a SaaS application would be.
Rich: And I’m going to totally endorse what you just said there, Dave, and add a little color to it because this actually goes directly to something that Erick and I spoke about in a very recent episode of the podcast with Carolyn April of CompTIA in which she was referencing some CompTIA research and, essentially bigger and bigger percentages of IT service providers out there are really getting out of the product resale business altogether.
And this is perhaps particularly true in the SaaS world because the margins stink. And it’s pretty easy to buy self serve if you’re an end user and end users are getting more and more used to that kind of experience and everything that they do. And so to, to the extent that is true what is it that you are still doing as an IT services provider, all that stuff that you were talking about in terms of, being the trusted advisor who is constructing solutions and providing advice.
And I, I’ve got to believe to reinforce what you’re saying, all of that stuff if more of your business is built around that kind of outcome oriented consulting, that is higher margin service work. And that’s got to play well to valuations on that and the future of your business.
Erick: And I love Dave that you use the term business outcomes, right?
Focusing on business outcomes, because many of us, when we start our practices, we’re focused on technology outcomes. We’re figuring it out where we’re at a low level of maturity. Over time, we start understanding what you’re preaching right here is that, Hey, we need [00:45:00] to be a valuable driver of profit for our clients.
We need our job is to is to increase operational uptime, the more effectively that organization can operate without downtime, without security risks, leveraging all the platforms that they’re using, whether they’re, infrastructure apps or whether they’re in the cloud SaaS applications are our job is to quiet the noise so that we can have those meaningful, valuable, consultative conversations with clients and be that true Outsourced CIO, CTO, CISO, whatever that thing is.
So I love that you brought that to light and we know that, a couple of other points that you mentioned is how do we reduce their costs and things like that? That’s why I think, as more of these organizations are leveraging these SaaS applications, there might not be a lot of margin in us reselling it, but including that as a management role for us and adding the value and pricing correctly.
Means we’re not rolling trucks to support those saas apps, right? We’re not rolling trucks to you maintain your cyber security posture or compliance. So that’s the shift that I’m thinking about is as we’re reducing our internal costs, we’re either maintaining or increasing our margins and our profitability, and those are the kinds of things that I’ve been thinking about.
I want
Dave: to flip it a little bit more though, Erick, because we’re still talking a little too much in terms of backend infrastructure. And I want, I really want to push providers to think about this from top line revenue of your customer. I really want you to think about. How does technology drive more to the top of my customers P and L?
It’s not good enough to just be at the cost level or keep things like help them reduce costs. You need to figure out the way for every dollar they spend, they get a buck 25 back. That’s the goal, right? And it is, it’s hard, by the way, I’m not saying this is easy, but you’ve got to lean into what is their business and how do they drive?
Do they drive additional membership? Do they need to sell more widgets? Do they need to see more patients? Do they need to, like, how can they put more stuff through their P and L machine? And how can you do it with technology? The moment you solve that, it unlocks and solves all the other problems, right?
All the other problems are solved because they are happy to spend money. I’ve never met a business owner that won’t spend a dollar to get a buck 25. Like just they’ll it’s the cash faucet opens up and you just start, but not enough technologists think about that. They spend time on the I’m going to reduce costs.
I’m going to like help with your infrastructure. I’m going to keep you secure. It’s yeah, that stuff’s important, but it’s not the real way.
Erick: Yeah, that’s why I was tagging in on being a profit center and we’re starting to see different solutions and vendors coming into the market that focus on helping organizations and teams improve their productivity that are entering the market and being available at MSPs.
Rich, you and I talked about a vendor recently and I had a call with them and they’re introducing these kinds of things that it’s completely outside of what an MSP thinks they should be introducing to their clients, but it’s the perfect thing to introduce because it Helps that business become more profitable and produce more.
So be that profit center. So I’m with you on that. And I’ll
Rich: just quickly say, I can’t remember now if it was 2020 or 2021, but I remember one year one of my very few new year’s resolutions was that I was going to go an entire year without writing the words digital transformation, which I didn’t quite pull off, but I came pretty close.
But I’m forced to admit that is a real phenomenon in the industry out there. And businesses are rightfully thinking about how do I apply technology for strategic advantage, more about or more than just keeping the lights on or saving a few bucks here or there.
And, how can I really put technology to work to, as you put it, Dave, get a buck 25 back for the dollar I’m putting in. And if you’re the guy who can answer that question. You’re in a much stickier, more secure, and I would think profitable. Position to be in and that’s gotta be good for your business.
Dave: Oh, I hate digital transformation is a phrase too. And I’ll remind everybody it is consultant speak for, you got to keep up with your technology. Like it’s just a nice way of saying you got to catch up because you’ve fallen behind. Now that’s not to say that isn’t a valuable thing to communicate to clients.
And sometimes you don’t want to deliver a message of. You fell behind everybody and you got to spend some money. It’s much better to talk about digital transformation. That’s why that you sell something differently than the outcome. I just look at it and say, you constantly have to be investing in technology to make sure that you’re staying at the appropriate level for your business.
That may be bleeding edge. That may be cutting edge. That may be middle of the pack. You may be comfortable as a laggard. I don’t really care. I just know you’re going to continually be spending to stay up to date. In the space, you want to be at. [00:50:00]
Rich: Okay. I I’m jumping in. It’s my turn now here. And I’m going to go with something that’s top of mind for me, because as we’re recording this, it’s just like three days before my most recent channel hall at blog post went up and I wrote about something that we Erick and I spoke about with And it’s come up in my blog on and off again for, the last six, nine plus months which is a phenomenon that you are perfectly positioned to chime in on air cause you or Dave, cause you are a former MSP and you’ve also worked extensively on the vendor side.
And so this phenomenon here is the idea very much backed by research out of CompTIA out of IDC. for having me. That MSPs and other IT service providers are increasingly looking to reduce the number of vendor relationships that they juggle. So that, and what this ends up meaning, it’s not like they’re getting out of lots of different markets.
If anything, like in the security space in particular, I’ve quoted some data in the blog in the recent past. People are adding services. They just want to get more of them from fewer vendors. For a whole variety of different reasons and this has implications For the dynamic and it has implications for the vendors And what they need to be focused on to attract and retain MSPs to their, because they’re competing harder now, has implications for the MSPs in terms of what they can and should ask for, but also what they should be looking for maybe, and that, in that smaller set of vendors that they are going to commit to.
And as an ex MSP, an ex vendor guy, first of all, how much of this are you seeing? How top of mind is this for you too? But also what do you think, how do you see this kind of playing out over the course of the next couple of years?
Dave: Yeah, it was, I saw, I read the regular article as well as dug into the data myself, and it was fascinating because it’s one of those things or interestingly, I’d seen vendor data that was coming out prior to that.
Acronis did a report on vendor consolidation. There’s been a couple of these where they’re looking for less for more. And my first inclination was. So to think of this as a good sales pitch from the vendor to try and get everyone to buy just from one vendor, right? Like my reaction initially was the, okay, you found some research that backs up what you want everyone to do, but it actually does make a ton of sense to, to recognize that.
Multiple tools are not necessarily the answer. And you have friction for every vendor relationship that you have to make. And the more friction, the just the slower you’re going to go because you’ve got to manage all of those relationships. And the dirty little secret about most of these technologies, most of them are good enough.
Let’s pick on two spaces that are incredibly easy to do. The first is backup and the second is RMF. They’re all fine. Everybody, you’re going to get into religious fights over which one is better. They all basically do what they say on the outside and they will remotely manage and monitor your boxes.
And we can get into all kinds of subtle differences between those that, by the way, the vendors want you to focus on, because then you get into all kinds of competitive differences. But you know what? They’re all cars. They come with four don’t four wheels and a basic chassis and they own a steering wheel and they all work.
And so that’s not the competitiveness. The competitiveness is can I deliver to you a suite of services so that you can get it all in one roof? That’s why we’ve seen the consolidation that we have among the vendors themselves. They want to move into a platform position so they can offer all those solutions.
Thanks. And I would be remiss if I didn’t say it’s why I’ve actually seen the rise of distribution as a really critical component. All of this, because you can manage one vendor relationship. I’m putting that in giant quotes, where they then aggregate a number of solutions for you. You have one close relationship with distribution that gives you a wider spot.
It simplifies down things for organizations that are big on process and efficiency, and thus drives better outcomes for the business, for the MSP business.
Erick: Go ahead, Henry. So you brought up the the D word, distribution, and we were told recently by someone we respect that, it’s, we’re going to stop using the D word. What’s the word that we should be using? The M word, marketplace. Marketplace, right? It’s all
Dave: just branding. All snippet branding.
And they want you to all think they’re advanced. Who gives a F? That, and and I’m being dismissive intentionally because everyone wants to reinvent themselves as the next cool thing. Stop that. It’s the foundation of just helping and aggregating. We can call it a marketplace. We can call it distribution.
They all just want to seem cool and new. When they’re, when they’ve just established thing, the core value remains the aggregation and assistance in getting you to actual, to multiple solutions, whether or not they want to do that in a marketplace, or they just want to be a distributor, I’m not going to get hung up on that.
I’m going to instead focus on the value. They just want to seem new and cool. Okay. Whatever. That’s not the actual focus here. Sure. We can call them marketplaces. So now [00:55:00] they’re all delivering marketplaces and we’ll go to the marketplace. That makes them feel better, but again, focus on what they’re doing.
And they’ve always done really well. Is there they’re good at aggregating a number of different tool sets and solutions, and they’re able to give you a single point of content to help with that. What I find more interesting than their. Marketplace shift is actually their investments in services. I find that significantly more interesting because, and here’s why.
If you’re interested in extending your offering into a bunch of service areas that you can’t do. A marketplace provider, formerly distributor, more importantly, who’s really good at delivering value on incredibly small margins. Their magic has been the fact that scale, they can actually make money on that half a percent equipment.
They are overjoyed to make 10 percent on services. This just gives the massive room and they’ll give you the other 30 percent because they’re just happy to be there and they’re making real money for them in a much easier way And I find that area so much more interesting because if they can actually deliver on the promises that they seem to be delivering on, which is we can get you into services areas that you couldn’t do before.
We’re incredibly happy with the margin that we’re getting. We’re bringing our size scale and then expertise, because if you look at all of the services, wings of these providers, I’m going to keep calling distributors. If you look at that, they’re Bringing in former services, people, tons of former MSPs are working there to deliver their efficiency, their service delivery at scale like that’s interesting magic to me.
Rich: And it’s a really great follow on to what we were just talking about before, right? So you don’t want to be focused on infrastructure. You don’t want to be focused on, selling seats, being the source of the licensing and so on. You want to be. More in that outcome orients, oriented solution kind of zone.
The objection that can come up when you raise that as, okay, so why am I not, doing IOT solutions? Why am I not doing digital signage? Why am I not doing sophisticated conferencing in conference rooms and so on? I don’t have the skills and it’s very expensive to acquire them.
And that actually, that barrier starts to disappear a little bit. If you have the right relationship with the distributor in there, I said it too. I’m unashamed cause they can do that for you and they’ll do it white label and it’s coming for you. And I certainly heard some of these distributors say that we will do it with you in a way that enables you to learn on the job.
So you don’t have to lean on us forever. Sooner or later, you’ll know how to do this on your own and capture that piece of margin as well. But yeah that services capability that’s become more and more important with distributors is something, important to know about and take advantage of if you want to get more into solutions and services and all this other kind of higher margin stuff.
Dave: But the whole marketplace thing allows you, more importantly, to have less direct vendor relationships. I don’t need to have all those direct vendor relationships if I’ve got an aggregator who’s doing it for me. Whatever they want to call themselves. And, but more importantly, that’s the trick, right? Is I don’t have to do that.
I can have one really deep relationship with that marketplace slash aggregator slash distributor. I can do that really well. And then they amplify my reach through all of their connections. And then I’ve got my other two or three slots that I can have really deep relationships, probably with my primary cloud vendor, and probably with my MSP platform vendor. And then I can get this down where I only have a few relationships to manage, but I can go very deep.
Rich: I want to follow up on that just quickly because it popped into my head. So I’ve had it in my head for a while that for a number of reasons, one of which is that service providers are looking to have fewer relationships to juggle for a number of different reasons.
The future might be a bumpy one for a sort of best of breed vendor. If you are a, a backup is the thing that you do and there are companies out there that do backup and 15 other things as well. You might be in a tough competitive spot if, people are looking to have fewer vendor relationships.
And as you said, a lot of the stuff out there is good enough. You might have a slightly better backup solution, but maybe not better enough to justify the additional relationship. So I’ve been thinking this is a dicey time to, to be really focused. On one particular part of the stack, but as you’re talking about distributors, I just wonder maybe I’m wrong and that’s a sort of countervailing force because the relationship with the primary relationship that the IP service provider has is with a distributor.
And as long as the distributor is building a bundle for me or a suite and it, and it integrates some, that’s [01:00:00] important. Then maybe it’s not actually a disadvantage for me to to be working with this best of breed vendor. Maybe to the contrary. To the degree of the software is best of breed.
That really is a competitive edge.
Dave: Best of breed has to mean something, by the way. It’s really difficult for best of breed in a super established market. I’m going to pick up back, pick on backup because it’s been around forever. How much are you really going to differentiate in an incredibly established market that’s been around for 40 years, but I needed to back up my stuff.
Most people can back up my stuff. And that isn’t the actual. Degree of difficulty. In fact, if we actually look at where differentiation and backup is, it’s in the people in process to do it well, like that’s the actual best in breed as somebody who can correctly use those systems and ensure that you can, for example, restore from that information, right?
That’s where the actual differences. So if we’re talking about these small incremental differences that separate best of breed from the rest of the pack, it’s incredibly difficult and maybe you and rich, I would say. That those players could compete at a distribution level to try and get that top spot.
Now I want to differentiate that from an area where it’s moving at a particular rate of speed that is different. So for example, I’m tracking a lot of AI models. That’s really interesting when you get into the differentiation between different models and what is best to breed right now versus what may be best to breed.
Six weeks from now, the difference in best of breed is a significantly greater level and degree of difficulty where you can still compete on being best in breed. So it’s the maturity of the technology space that really matters.
Rich: We’re just about out of time. In fact, we don’t really have time even for one more round here, but that was such an interesting topic.
You just brought up that. Do you have it? Because I can’t even imagine how you would differentiate among the AI models, right? Given how, I’m truly, I listen to a lot of podcasts, including yours. And one week, the hosts of the show are like, Oh yeah, chat GPT, it’s all about GPT whatever, 4. 0. And then the next week, it’s all Claude.
I’m all about Claude. How do you even begin to evaluate and then decide where you’re going to place bets, given how rapidly that landscape is changing?
Dave: Isn’t it great? And I say that like intentionally. Chaos is good. This is good for our expertise, right? It’s hard. I like problems like this.
Actually, my counsel to most solution providers is to not dwell there. I think it’s moving too quickly and most customers are not ready for those differences. Anyway, most of the differences are useful for those that are doing product development and product design to bring those technologies To to their own products.
So I would tell most solution providers just be cursory of, aware of the various different models. The differences that I think are going to expose that are going to be much more interesting are the ones that are going to be industry specific. Those that are, for example, models that are trained on medical information, those that are trained on say financial information, those that are able to be trained on your particular business.
I think there’s much, much more interested in the opportunity right now for a solution provider or an MSP to help their customers with co pilot. Rather than worrying about, is that powered by GPT 4. 0 or CLAWD Anthropic 5. Like I, I think that’s the actual area where there’s real interest. I just like to make sure that providers are aware of that speed because when it starts slowing down.
And we might start seeing that soon. Some of the, based on some of the early buzz that I’m watching, that’s the point where we’re starting to see some stability and what can be done with the product levels and we’ll get into even more interesting specializations.
Erick: You’re hinting at the Slope of disillusionment.
Dave: We’re distinctly within that. If we really think about this, and in particular, you can see it in some of the Wall Street reactions recently, people are asking really good questions about how will this make money? I remain pretty convinced that there is money to be had here. I think it’s just a matter of getting to it and figuring out the balance because by the way, it’s expensive on the back end too.
This isn’t free that we’re to do with anything. I But I think there’s something there. And I continue to say, anybody who asked me, if you were a solution provider right now, your best opportunity is in helping customers get their data ready. For AI, like right now, that’s because most customers aren’t ready.
It’s just not completely ready at all, but this stuff, but if you invest time, it doesn’t matter how fast or slow that comes, you’re very well positioned to leverage
Erick: that. I meant the trough of disillusionment. Sorry about that, everybody. Oh, by the way, before we end. 5. 2 was the Richter scale of the earthquake that we had 19 miles.
The epicenter was [01:05:00] 19 miles away from me. 5. 2. So that’s
Dave: a real one. That’s a real one.
Erick: We Californians, we sleep through those. Don’t worry.
Rich: I certainly hope there was no no damage somewhere out there from that 5. 2. Yeah. No kidding. The folks that are closest to the epicenter hope. Yeah.
Erick: Okay.
Rich: Yeah, we’ll have to see where that epicenter wound up.
But for now, all that does is prove that this truly was an earth shaking conversation right here, folks. And we have proof of that that that we recorded. Dave, I could do this all day. I really could. I always enjoy talking with you so much. But we do have to move on.
Before we do, remind folks where to find you, Business of Tech, MSP Radio, et cetera. I’m easy
Dave: to find all the links. Everything you need is that business of. tech click the big blue button and you’ll find me on all of your favorite platforms, whether or not you prefer on the podcast side, if you prefer watching videos, if you prefer newsletters, I’ve got all different versions to get versions of my stuff, but make sure to follow the business of tech podcast, wherever you get fine podcasts.
Rich: And I thoroughly endorse that. I’m a follower, a regular listener myself. And Dave said before it’s like. 10 minutes a day and somehow or another every day Dave manages to find stuff nobody else found so this is time well spent in in my experience Dave Sobel. Thank you again very much for joining us today Erick and I are going to take a quick break now when we come back on the other side We’ll share a few final thoughts about this very interesting conversation with dave have a little fun wrap up the show stick around folks.
We are gonna be right back And
welcome back to part three of this episode of the msp chat podcast I meant it when I said it Erick It is always a pleasure to engage and You In speculating, thinking about this industry with Dave Sobel. And that segment was no exception. I hope folks in the audience and truck that as much as we did.
Erick: Yeah, that was a great panel riffing with Dave. That was very fun. And boy, oh boy, just, engaging. I think fun and also controversial. You get all of that when you’re talking to Dave, which is, which keeps it very lively and interesting.
Rich: And we can obviously dive into any number of different topics that came up there.
That the one big takeaway I’ll leave folks with on my end is just. What Dave is really good at and what he was really good at when he was an MSP is thinking big picture, finding the time, making the time to think about strategic level issues about what kind of company I’m building.
And and you saw and heard a lot of that in terms of how he thinks about the various industries or issues that we were talking about there. And I would just encourage folks to, to, mimic that a little bit. It’s a good investment of your time and effort.
Erick: Yeah. And getting the data to make informed decisions, keeping your eye on the big picture, don’t sweat the small stuff.
I love how he just slices right to the crux of it. It’s look, these small little differences aren’t, the big earth shattering value proposition is going to make somebody, rip and replace something, good enough is good enough. It’s how we use that technology to deliver true value to our clients as an MSP.
I really appreciate that, direct, transparent.
Rich: Folks that leaves us with time for just one last thing this week on the show and Erick if I told you that Luxury fashion brand Dolce and Gabbana had a new star scent a new fragrance out in the market probably wouldn’t surprise you very much they’ve been in the fragrance business for a while as I understand it What might surprise you a little bit is to discover that this particular new fragrance is meant for dogs.
That’s right there is now a dog perfume, on the market actually it turns out there have been dog perfumes for a while. This is the first one from a sort of name brand High end fashion designer The name of this particular product is Fefe, which happens to be the name of Dominic Dolce’s dog.
Dominic Dolce is one of the co founders of Dolce Gabbana. He named the scent after his dog, Fefe. It goes, Erick, for I don’t even know how much you’re getting, but I’m guessing not a lot. It sells for 99 euros. Which as of the last time I looked is about $108. It it, it delivers warm notes of musk and sandalwood.
It speaks to the playfulness of your pet. All of this actually sounds good for people with more money than sense as it were, although I will say that in the story that I read about this, there was an animal rights activist who was basically pointing Dogs rely on their nose the way we rely on our eyes.
This is how they know where they are in the works. And if all the dog is smelling is its own perfume, that’s probably not a good, so it might not be a good use of your money. It might not be great for your dog either.
Erick: Nope. So that’s a left view. Rich [01:10:00] might be a, it’s Oh, I don’t roll my perfume.
Oh yeah. And. Is it, who is it for? Is it for the owner to like, Oh, my dog smells awesome. Like you mentioned, like the dog, like I smell. And the last thing we want is, your dog to be attracting all the other dogs in the neighborhood every time you take it out for a walk.
Rich: All right.
If you were in the market for dog cologne or perfume, rather good news for you and drop us a line, let us know how that went for you. Unfortunately though, that is all the time we have for you this week on the show. We’re going to be back in a week with another episode for you.
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