Episode 61: Under the Big Open Tent

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Erick and Rich discuss NinjaOne’s $252 million acquisition of Dropsuite and three tips for managing cash flow and profitability. Then they get an insider’s introduction to the Global Technology Industry Association (which you might know by its former name, CompTIA) by its chief community officer, MJ Shoer. And finally, one last thing: Erick’s vivid description of what the “corpse flower” currently blooming in Brooklyn smells like.

Discussed in this episode:

Hot Take: NinjaOne Buys Dropsuite

GTIA home page

GTIA Communities and Councils Forum home page

Visitors flock to New York botanic garden for a whiff of a flower that smells like a rotting corpse

 

Transcript:

Rich: [00:00:00] And three, two, one, blast off! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome 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. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m chief analyst at Channel Master, the organization responsible for this show.

I am joined as I am every week by your other co host, our chief strategist at Channel Master, Erick Simpson. Erick, how you doing?

Erich: Great. Rich doing great. Where as we record this. We are just rounding the corner toward the end of January for folks that will catch this episode after it goes live. And I just got to say, Rich, it went by in the blink of an eye.

To tell a secret, I’ve still got Christmas lights on the house that I have to take down.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. You might want to take care of that before you you leave town for your much needed upcoming vacation. But

Erich: I will this weekend, I promise.

Rich: Yeah. I appreciate you you making that confession on the show. I have a hunch you’re not the only one out there who can say that.

Let’s dive into our story of the week here, Erick. Now this show is scheduled to go out to the world on February 7th. By the time people are first getting access to it, this 10 days old, but it’s still pretty big news in our industry, so I want to dive into it. This is the news that NinjaOne has acquired DropSuite.

NinjaOne, as we know, is a managed services platform for MSPs. They are actually by market share number three now. They have displaced enabled as number three in the market, according to Canalys and its latest numbers. Fast growing company a pretty big company. And DropSuite is a a backup provider.

And purchasing DropSuite obviously enables NinjaOne to expand its platform. Now, this was not a small deal Erick. The DropSuite is actually a relatively large company. Something like 750 direct partners it works with. Thousands of MSPs, it says, via distribution a very large customer base.

And Ninja bought them for 252 million. So a quarter of a billion dollars for a company like Ninja that not that long ago was thought of as a smaller player in this space and up and coming. To be making a quarter of a billion dollar acquisition like this is is quite something, but it’s also.

Significant in a number of other ways. So first of all, we’ve certainly spoken on this show multiple times about how increasingly in the realm of managed services, it is all about platforms. MSPs want fewer vendor relationships. They want to get more of what they consume and use from fewer vendors. Companies like Ninja, ConnectWise, Kaseya, Enable, et cetera, that have expansive platforms have a significant advantage with MSPs.

Ninja actually had a backup product before but this significantly expands its capabilities there in a very important part of the stack for MSPs, and it certainly raises questions about where they go from here anything we say along those lines would be speculative right now, but you gotta believe this is not the last step they’re gonna take in terms of expanding the platform, and I would expect it.

Their next moves to come in the area of security. The other thing that’s interesting about this is again, drop suite is not a an insignificant company. And if you look at their most recent financial results, the numbers, the arrows are all pointing in the right direction. This is a profitable company that is growing.

So on the face of it, they didn’t necessarily need somebody to buy them but they chose to do that because as we’ve also talked about on the show, I at least believe there is an increasingly fuzzy future out there for standalone providers of backup software to the degree that it’s all about platforms for MSPs and even in specifically with some security.

Backup is part of a security stack. At a minimum MSPs are going to want to get their backup along with the rest of the security or a lot of the rest of the security tools that if they use and that makes that long term future for a company like DropSuite that really just does backup a little bit cloudy.

And Axiant, another great. Standalone backup provider is now owned by ConnectWise. You got to assume because they reached the same strategic conclusion that DropSuite has now. And then, I recorded and posted a video about this on my blog, Channelholic earlier this week, as we record this, Erick, and I finish it up by speculating just a little bit [00:05:00] or asking a question, basically inspired by what I just.

said the future not looking terrific for backup only companies. It raises the question about what the future might hold for Veeam because Veeam is a very substantial, very popular backup only company. A lot of end users, a lot of partners very successful company right now, but all they’re doing is backup.

As of December, they were valued at 15 billion. They show up on PitchBook’s list. Of likely IPO candidates in 2025. If investors agree with the thesis I’ve been outlining here, but the longterm future for standalone backup companies and Veeam hasn’t made significant additional steps. Cause they’ve made small steps, but additional significant steps towards having a complete security stack.

By the time that IPO happened, you got to wonder how great an IPO candidate they are, but at a 15 billion valuation. As an acquisition target, which is the other alternative for them in terms of an exit. It would have to be a really big acquirer for that to happen. So I’m very curious to see what the huge future holds for Veeam.

Erich: Wow, Rich, a lot of analysis to unpack there and appreciate. How you’ve laid it out for us. I have a couple of questions. The first one would be, you mentioned the now, um, Ninja one is number three according to Canalys, how they rank these platforms. It was that because of the acquisition of DropSuite or before the acquisition?

Rich: Definitely before. Yep.

Erich: Wow. So there. They’re well entrenched in spot number three is what I’m taking from that. Second question, Veeam, I think when we, before Datto’s acquisition, right? We thought of Veeam and Datto as kind of those head to head competitors.

Remind us again, what what data was purchased for?

Rich: 6 point something billion when Kaseya bought them.

Erich: I think it was 6. 4 ish and it was Kaseya that acquired them. Now we’re talking Veeam at a 15 billion dollar kind of valuation. So it’s, it will be interesting if your thesis proves true.

And, this playbook that we’re starting to see. In the industry of this platform, aggregation acquisition, consolidation, creating this kind of, one stop shop for MSPs to to engage in by these vendors who might be well heeled enough to consider an acquisition of a standalone backup provider at a 15 billion acquisition?

I’m curious.

Rich: And of course the third alternative that I didn’t, I talked about an IPO, I talked about an acquisition, but a merger is also potentially a possibility where another large or substantial company could enter into an agreement. To swap equity or sign that who knows that might actually be the most realistic option off for the company.

But yeah, very interesting what they’ve built and it will be very interesting to see what they do with it. I

Erich: agree interesting times.

Rich: So let’s dive into your tip of the week here and a big part of the idea behind platform everything for MSPs is that’s how MSPs get more profitable and you got a profitability angle to this week’s tip, Erick.

Erich: Certainly do Rich. And yeah, so we’ve talked a lot about different components of how an MSP can increase their profitability. And of course the why behind it, right? We want to be more efficient. We want to build company valuation. The more profitable we are, the better we can plan and invest in growth and all these different things.

But, talking about it. Makes it sound like, Oh, just follow these three steps or four steps and we can improve that. It’s really difficult and challenging, Rich, for MSPs to think about their financial health and the strategies to improve that. The way that we or they think of delivering service.

I think I mentioned this kind of analogy in a previous episode as well. It’s like we should be looking at improving our financial performance and KPIs the same way we as MSPs look at improving our service delivery performance metrics or our CSAT scores with clients and taking steps to achieve that.

So three quick thoughts for this week. Number one, as you and a lot of our listeners know, I’m a fan of value based pricing. We see MSPs out there traditionally pricing their services and solutions in several different ways. Typically they could be, a per user type of pricing model per device.

I think that’s going away. The per device pricing model as we’re seeing more licensed user based services being billed to us by our vendors and henceforth, it’s easier [00:10:00] to price by user now because we’re able to bundle a lot of services in and make it an easier decision during the sales process for buyers to buy.

We see, value based pricing models. Now, value based pricing models is what I want to key on here. Rich, these are typically more difficult and challenging ways to price services that requires, I think a higher level of maturity from an understanding from our financial metrics. What is our actual true cost of service delivery for labor, as well as these third party.

Products and services that we’re bundling in and then what is our target margin and understanding that and having the ability to sell potentially beyond what a target margin might be by having the ability to reflect the value of those services beyond what the individual cost of each of those bundled products and services solutions.

So that takes a little bit more maturity, understanding really what our true costs are, and then selling the value above and beyond what the individual prices and a particular markup point might be. And this means that we have to have much more strategic types of sales approaches, selling towards business outcomes.

We’ve talked about this as well, rich in the past on the show. So value based pricing models, number one recommendation, and then number two, monitoring those financial metrics, the way that we monitor and measure our clients, networks, and infrastructures. What are the, what metrics from a financial performance perspective are green, like, where do we want to be?

We want to see, incremental growth and profitability. What’s yellow? What’s red, right? So we’re looking at, like one of the metrics that MSPs may not be tracking are like days outstanding. Like how long does it take clients to pay our invoices, right? Do we have You know, troublesome clients that not only pay us late on a regular basis, but argue about the invoices, right?

Some of these typical challenges that MSP still are dealing with today. I am, I’m sad to say, how many of our clients are actually trued up? That was a big tip that we talked about on a previous podcast episode, right? When we had Nigel Moore on, he’s no member brewing everybody up to our current rates is very important.

So how much energy and effort are we putting into that? And we’re setting goals to do that. And what are we doing to make sure that we achieve those goals? So monitoring those financial metrics and taking action to improve those where we want them to be. And the last one, Rich is. Diversifying our revenue streams in a different way that allows us to be realizing more profitable revenue that is recurring revenue.

We do a lot of I’ve worked with a lot of MSPs on MNA and valuation and things like that. And one of the basic ways to value an organization, no matter what the organization is by EBITDA. But because MSPs. Realize revenue streams and maybe seven or eight or who knows, maybe 10 different buckets, right?

Projects, maybe break, fix, maybe you’re selling block time. I know it’s hard to hear this rich, right? Managed services, security, right? Licensing and renewals. So there’s all these different revenue streams. But the most, the revenue stream that that realizes the highest multiple at valuation rates are managed recurring revenue services.

So that is where we should skew the majority of our revenue from and then diversifying a little bit. Yes, we can have some projects and we can do some strategic things like that, but these are ways for us. Oh, and the last one kind of diversifying those revenue streams and making sure that we don’t have A large percentage of our revenue being delivered by a small percentage of our clients.

That’s also risky from a buyer’s perspective, right? And when you lose, and I think as MSPs and our audience will attest, Rich, we’ve lost some pretty big clients along the way. And boy, when they represent, a large percentage, of revenue compared to the balance of our clients. It puts a hole in the ship and we take on water and sometimes it’s hard to bail fast enough to get the ship floating the right way.

Rich: So a few thoughts on that. The first one I will offer actually for any regular listeners who are a little bit confused about that prior episode with Nigel Moore, that’s actually next week’s episode 62.

Erich: Nigel Enrich.

Rich: Erick and I actually recorded the interview you will hear in a week’s time with Nigel a little bit earlier.

And so from us, from our perspective, it’s Oh, that one’s in the can, but you’ve got that to look forward to. The next episode of the show will feature an interview with the great Nigel Moore of the tech tribe.

Erich: Don’t miss that. It’s a great episode.

Rich: It is. And we’re going to talk about truing up and you may be surprised at how that kind of pops into the conversation.

Actually. It’s good stuff. Value, but it’s interesting to hear you highlight value based pricing because it’s something that I’ve been writing about a little [00:15:00] bit in the context of AI. One of the challenges for vendors in particular, as they introduce AI based products and agentic products out there is.

Figuring out, how to assign prices and and how to measure value that, that in a perfect world, I think everyone who buys stuff wants to pay in alignment with the value they’re getting from what they’re buying. And everyone who sells something wants to be paid in alignment with the value that they’re delivering.

And so a value based pricing scheme makes an enormous amount of sense, but it’s also not easy to figure out exactly what that number is. And I’m working on some stuff for my blog. That’s going to go out. It’ll actually go out, um, like a week or so before this show does about. Atera Ninja One company, they have this agentic AI feature coming to market very soon.

And they’ve finished everything about it. The piece that they’re working on right now is the pricing because they can’t quite figure out haven’t figured out just yet, what is that value and how do they assign that? So that’s a difficult thing to do, but I, it’s, if you can pull it off. I think it makes a ton of sense for the reasons that you outlined there.

What I was thinking when you were talking about the finance metrics is it sounds so much sales and marketing. For so many MSPs out there, sales and marketing is this unfamiliar discipline. And what am I supposed to be doing? But also, what am I supposed to be tracking and measuring?

It’s something that you either have to learn or outsource and finance is very often the same story for IT services entrepreneurs. That’s another sort of critical operational discipline that you’ve got to learn or get some outside help with or both. And then last but not least, I’ll just quickly MRR in every conversation I’ve ever had with people on the buy side.

Of MSP, MNA every last one of them in my experience says there’s pretty much no such thing as too high a percentage of MRR. There is too low a percentage where you, you’re not quite yet an attractive acquisition target, but it’s not if you. You’ve got a market in a 90 percent MRR.

Someone’s going to say that’s a problem for us. Diversification is important, Erick, for the reasons that you said, but you’re also absolutely right that the key number at sale time will be MRR.

Erich: Yeah. And on that last point I’ll just share this. When we talk about the multiples between all these different types of revenue streams.

So listen to this shocking statistics. Let’s say that. For whatever reason, MSP is still delivering some break fix services for every dollar of break fix billing that an MSP delivers the multiple on that dollar taken in valuation terms is 15 cents. That’s it for managed services. It’s closer to 2 for every dollar.

So think about that.

Rich: I had not heard that statistic before. And that’s a really great and interesting statistic. Folks, it is time for Erick and me to take a quick break before we come back. When we’re, we do come back on the other side of that break, we’re going to be joined by NJ Shower. He is the chief community officer at the global technology industry association.

Or GTIA you might not be familiar with that name or acronym. But you probably are familiar with CompTIA. For reasons we’ll get into CompTIA has gone one direction and the community piece of that organization has gone on its own. NJ is the chief community officer at GTIA, the community piece of what was CompTIA, and we’re going to speak with him about GTIA, its mission the value that it provides the channel and why folks not familiar with it might want to check it out.

When we come back from this break, which we will do momentarily

and welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP chat podcast, our spotlight interview segment, where we are very pleased to be joined by NJ Shower. He is the chief community officer at the global technology industry association. And MJ, before I give you a chance to tell folks a little bit more about yourself, I’ve been waiting to ask someone who knows this question.

Is the correct way to pronounce the acronym for the Global Technology Industry Association, GTIA or GTIA? You are correct with number one. It is GTIA. Okay. Okay. For what it’s worth, as a longtime CONCTIA member, I was hoping for GTIA, but okay. GTIA. GTIA it is. So tell folks a little bit about about yourself and your role as a chief community officer at GTIA.

MJ: Sure. Thanks, Rich. As you said, I’m MJ Shore, Chief Community Officer at the Global Technology Industry Association. And in this role, I run a global team that manages our member recruitment and retention, our member communities, all of our member groups, our advisory councils, marketing, [00:20:00] cybersecurity programs, internal operations programs as well.

Basically, we focus on our six global regions where our members are currently. That’s North America. The UK and Ireland, the Benelux region of Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, the DAF region, which is Germany, Austria, Switzerland ASEAN, which is a little more complicated. It’s an economic block. It’s called the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

It’s 10 countries. Best way to think of it is south of China, between India and Japan, but not the Koreas. I was off for a little complicated geography. And then and then ANZ, which is Australia and New Zealand. We have our member communities in those regions. We have interest groups in those regions.

We have our advisory councils, which are the Headlights on the industry and all of our other programming that goes along with that. So I’m really fortunate to have an amazing team that is laser focused on our members and driving positive impact for our members so that they can deliver their products and services with, even a little more expertise than they might on their own.

Rich: So I I invoked the name CompTIA. Yes you do. Beginning of this conversation here, for folks in our audience who are unaware, not up to speed, fill them in a little bit. So GTIA and CompTIA used to be the same organization. Why are they now? Separate organizations and when did that happen?

MJ: Sure. I was an MSP myself for about 25 years and I joined CompTIA as a member in the year 2000.

And CompTIA was an acronym for the Computing Technology Industry Association, the very same vendor neutral non profit trade association that is now today, GTIA. And last fall, we announced our intention that the Computing Technology Industry Association was selling the CompTIA brand. And our revenue generating activities, which is our certification, was, the certification is, so weird, the certification and training business of CompTIA to a consortium of private investors, and it would spin off and become its own for profit entity, which it is now, CompTIA Incorporated, and the trade association would continue forward, but under a new name, because CompTIA Incorporated.

We were known as CompTIA, but that was actually a brand. It was a brand name. It wasn’t the official name of the organization, but it’s how everyone knew us. So we needed to rename, but because of selling the brand. And so we’ve done that. And now we are the Global Technology Industry Association or GTIA for short.

So that’s why the change, but it also gives us a really great inflection point, which to focus in back on our members on what our core has always been, as. As the association grew over the last 42 years, certainly in the last couple of years, we really saw that the needs of the trade association and the needs of the training and certification business were starting to diverge.

And so the opportunity presented itself. It made sense. Our longtime CEO, Todd Thibodeau, always had this dream, hope, desire to set the association up to be financially secure in perpetuity and its future. And that’s exactly what happened. And the result of the sale, the the income from the sale of those assets accrued entirely to the association.

And we are now. Very fortunate to be the stewards of a significant endowment that will fund our operations moving forward. So instead of having that revenue engine of the certification and training business, our revenue engine is now the earnings on our endowment, and that’s going to outlive all of us.

And I hope like me, you guys aren’t planning to go anywhere anytime soon.

Erich: MJ speaking about. Not planning to go anywhere anytime soon. Both of us are former MSPs in a previous lifetime, right? So for the other MSPs in our audience, how does the GTIA membership benefit them? And why should they consider signing up?

MJ: So there, I’m going to, I’m going to take the why first, because then it’ll, I think it’ll provide the right context for everything else. The why is really simple right now. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to have more engagement and more influence on the future of your industry trade association, Ben.

We’ve had the opportunity to have really almost since it’s founding 42 years ago, now that we’re in our new iteration Completely separated from CompTIA. We have the opportunity to reimagine everything that we’re doing now We’ve clearly stated it’s business as usual. We’re gonna continue to offer the same benefits We’re not changing our dues structure anything like that To provide that stability through this transition, but it would be remiss of us not to use this as an opportunity to [00:25:00] really look at what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, are we doing it as well as we could?

Are there new programs that we should think about that our members are looking for? Should we double down on some of our existing programs? Maybe pull back a little bit from ones if they’re not getting any engagement. So we’ll see. That’s the number one why in my book, there’s an opportunity as an MSP to get involved with the association and really make a difference for the future.

Now, from the benefit standpoint, one thing that hasn’t changed is our membership dues are highly subsidized. You probably remember from your days, Erick, dues are 450 a year for an MSP member. It’s hardly anything to even think about. And so if you can’t extract. I’m even going to say 10, 20, 30 times the value of that, if not a hundred times, then you’re just, you’re not trying.

And like anything, if you can purchase something, but if you don’t put anything into it, you’re likely not to get too much out of it, but between our network of events, which are always, the regional community meetings, we meet twice a year in person in each region, our flagship channel con events, those are always rated.

As our highest, member value because members love to come together, love to network, love to learn. And because we’re a vendor neutral trade association, we don’t take sponsorship dollars. Everyone’s on the same level playing field. So whether you’re looking at new vendors or partnering with other MSPs, everyone comes together under the big open tent to work together to make things better for everyone.

And I’ve said this a hundred times, if you’ve heard me before, I apologize, but it reminds me of my college fraternity back in the day. Our motto was give expecting nothing thereof. And when you get involved in a trade association like GTIA, if you come at it the right way, you will Get returns that you never imagined.

But if you’re just looking for a penny. And maybe this isn’t the right place for you, but between those networking events, all of the member education, the industry research, which I’ll put on par with any other research organization out there. These are research reports that could cost tens of thousands of dollars if you were to go out and purchase them yourself.

Everything is included with your GTIA membership and every single employee is considered a I shouldn’t say considered a member because it’s the company. That’s considered a member, but every employee of the company, whether you’re a one person company or a 100 person company. If you’re an MSP for that 450, every one of your employees get full access to your GTIA benefits.

And we’ve got tons of white papers and other things that have been. Produced by members. It really is for the members by the members.

Rich: I am, I’m a huge fan of the of research in general, but especially comp to your research. And you’ve just settled an issue for me because a few weeks back, right at the beginning of the year, I was on a webcast with Seth Robinson, who is part of the research organization over there, and I asked.

I think off the air is is the research organization staying with CompTIA or going to GTI and he didn’t know at that point, but now it sounds like we know, and it’s sticking with a GTIA, which is very good

MJ: news. Just to be fair and to be transparent, it actually it’s sticking, it, the research organization itself split and has stayed with both.

So the folks that have traditionally done the channel research stayed with the association and the folks that are doing more of the research around workforce and career development and all of that. Went with CompTIA Inc.

Rich: Okay.

MJ: We Fundamentally, you were correct.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of Seth and Carol and April, who’s been on this show before, and the research that we look at, yeah.

Yeah. That’s still part of GTIA. We were sent some press materials in advance of this interview, just to give us some background on GTIA and and there was something interesting in there that I wanted to ask you about. There was a quote somewhere in there that said we no longer have competing interests within our association, that this was an opportunity for GTIA.

So what kind of competing interests were you maybe dealing with before? How did they affect you? And how does not having those. Benefit or free DTIA up in the future,

MJ: sir. So when you think of legacy Comte, I’ll just refer to it that way. It really was two organizations within one that were very.

codependent on one another. There was the training and certification business, which is how we generated our revenue, which other associations do that too. It’s not uncommon for a nonprofit trade association to develop a credential or certification that becomes, a portion of their income.

But the [00:30:00] overwhelming Majority of associations rely on membership dues for their income. We were very fortunate to be what we call a self funded trade association. That’s why we subsidize the dues very heavily because we have this massive revenue generating arm. So what that meant is our board of directors was focused on running.

Two businesses within one. Now they’re focused just on the trade association. It also meant that on an annual basis, we would look at priorities for the organization and where we want to make our investments. There were some years where the majority of the investment might have gone into the trade association and the member benefits.

There might be another year where more of that investment would go toward developing training and certifications. What became clear over the last several years is that there was almost a natural divergence happening within the organization. Even while we were still very much compatible and codependent, but the needs of the certification and training business and the needs of the non profit vendor neutral trade association We’re really starting to diverge a bit, whether that was in terms of technology requirements, internal systems, we still have lots of common back ends, but it became clear that both were looking for investment.

And so this opportunity to sell and split the organization gave the training and certification business the infusion of capital it’s looking for to really try and up the impact on the workforce. We all know there aren’t enough skilled people in the coming into the tech industry, whether it’s kids coming up through traditional school systems, non traditional learners, career changers, whatever, there are huge opportunities, underserved populations, to bring more people into tech, and certainly the three of us know Tech’s a pretty cool place to be, right?

It’s certainly served the three of us pretty well, and we’ve got lots of mutual friends in the industry. It’s a great place to work. It’s a unique industry, and we need more people. So the training and certification side really wants to help address that and be part of a solution to making good tech careers available to more people globally, and that requires a lot of money.

And so by giving them the investment that they now have access to, they’re going to be able to pursue that much faster than they would have otherwise. For us, it allows us to remain squarely focused on our members. We don’t have to worry about competing for investment dollars, or I want to break away from this system because this would serve me better than that system.

Our board of directors now isn’t managing the responsibility of. A piece of the business that generates a ton of capital and a piece of the business that’s investing in the industry and education and things like that, they’re able to focus. So we expect to have an even bigger impact than we’ve been able to have over the last 42 years on a go forward basis, solely focused on the members of our association.

I hope that answered your question.

Rich: Yeah, very

MJ: interesting.

Erich: Yeah, that definitely clarifies things for me, MJ. It’s oh, single mission single focus trying to serve two interests is, can be difficult, right? I also want to call out a comment in some of the press release verbiage that you sent over.

It’s and I’m reading from it. We are now able To step back and look at what we do. You, you mentioned this, look at what we do well and double down on those things that are being highly utilized or introduce some new things. Can you give our audience a little bit of, perspective and the crystal ball, like what are some of those things that you might consider not doing and some things that you might want to do differently or bring on new things, any kind of behind the scenes guidance there you can give us.

MJ: I can tell you that, there haven’t been any real hard decisions made yet, because we’re still in the very early days, right? We’re not even a month old at this point. We’re just a couple weeks old at this point, when you think about it. We definitely know that things like our cybersecurity programs are highly valued by our members.

So we’re going to continue to invest there, the Cybersecurity Trust Mark. Al things like that. We know that members are looking for a lot more when it comes to ai, right? But we don’t want to jump on the hype bandwagon, that’s been in our DNA for decades. We try to sift through the hype and focus on the real world impact that technologies may have.

And so we’re leaning even more heavily on our advisory councils. Which are those guiding lights. And AI is a perfect example. We’ve had an AI advisory council for about seven years and for, up until, pretty much 2023. Everybody’s yeah, okay, AI. Okay. It sounds cool.

Don’t really [00:35:00] see how it’s going to impact me. And now. I don’t think there’s anybody who doesn’t understand how it could impact them. So we’re really focusing on resources and education around developing what’s needed to help bring AI into the same kind of general practice acceptance of MSP best practices, cyber security best practices, et cetera.

So I know we’ll see something there again. We’re not ready to announce anything specific, our channel con brand, it’s big. One thing I can tell you is we’re going to rebrand our AMIA event to channel con AMIA because why do we call it something different? So we’ll have channel con still is our flagship event.

In the summer in North America, we’ll have ChannelCon EMEA down the road, there could be ChannelCon, who knows, ChannelCon APAC, anything’s possible, but it’s all going to depend on what we’re hearing from our members, what they’re looking for, what they’re asking, so that’s, that’s where now is a unique opportunity, and over the next several weeks, we’re going to host three open town halls one for North America, One in the ASEAN ANZ region and one in the UK European region.

Open town halls, an open call for people to tell us what they’d like to see from GTIA on a go forward basis. We’ll share a little bit about where we are and what we’re thinking, but then the real focus of those is just an open invitation. Now’s your chance. If you’re a current member, former member, never been a member, And, you’ve got ideas about how we, as a trade association, can help make your career the best it can be, your business the best it can be, in delivering your products and services to whomever your end customers are.

We want to hear from you. Now’s a perfect time to get that kind of input, and to So openly asked for it.

Rich: So this was in the the press materials as well. There was some reference to the fact that having access to this endowment that you now have at GTIA will enable you to increase your charitable giving.

Yes. So talk a little bit about the kind of charitable giving you do, have done, will do, and maybe the scale that you foresee that increasing. Sure.

MJ: So we’ve had, we’ve done on average over the years about 5 million in charitable giving for quite some time now. Some may be familiar with the Cecilia Galvin scholarship that we do in partnership with Channel Pro.

I know you guys both knew Cecilia. And we’re going to continue to do that. Each of our member groups around the world our regional communities, our interest groups, our advisory councils, our task forces, each of them get an allotted sum of money that they can then direct in their local region to a worthwhile charity.

And we have a process to, take in the names of potential charities, vet them. They have to be, in in U. S. speak, they need to be a 501 C3. They need to be a charitable organization, not a just a nonprofit. There are different flavors. But they need to be focused in some way. Or some are some way associated with technology, whether they’re bringing technology to underserved populations, whether they’re helping communities that wouldn’t ordinarily have access to technology education could be getting their hands on physical technology, providing, actual computers or whatever resources could be supporting organizations that support disaster relief or.

Other types of human service programs that involve technology, but basically anything that is in any way connected to the tech industry and growing the tech workforce and enabling communities that otherwise might have a struggle bringing programs forward, as I, I have the very good fortune of being able to travel the world to visit our global regions.

I make it a point to get into each region at least once a year. And I was in Auckland. New Zealand shoot this fall. I think it might’ve been September, October timeframe. And I met a young woman and she was really interesting. And she interviewed me for her own podcast. And I just thought she was a member who had a podcast, but then she actually got up as part of a group who our ANZ community had made a donation to last year, and she shared the most inspiring story.

She’s from the Maori indigenous population in New Zealand. And I’ve got to tell you, New Zealand. If you haven’t, if you’re not aware of it, New Zealand has embraced their indigenous population as if there’s no separation anymore to who’s indigenous and who, is not indigenous. But they’ve really broken down those historical barriers that you see and so there’s such better access, but this group was helping, Communities that are still not quite pulled into the full [00:40:00] opportunity, I guess that New Zealanders have, but she was talking about how she was, came from a difficult.

Upbringing had been in trouble with the law a little bit, but now she was a mom and a six and had a successful career in technology, all thanks to this organization that, through donations from us and other like organizations have been able to give, kids and young adults who didn’t have access to you.

Learn about tech careers and go into technology to learn about tech careers and go into them. And now she’s an influencer and a podcaster and a video blogger and the whole nine yards. It was really something and I’ve heard those stories some. Every region of the world. And so that’s where we want to make an impact where we can actually see the fruits of that, change experiences on the ground that’s where we want to do it.

And we’ve announced our intention to raise our charitable giving to tens of millions of dollars annual. That may not happen in our first year out of the gate, cause it’s going to take us a while to get the infrastructure in place. And I don’t know if this comes as a surprise to you, but it was certainly eyeopening for some of us.

It’s not easy to give away that much money. It’s a, it’s quite a process to find, the right types of organizations, vet them, make sure that the money is going to go to the stated purpose. And that’s a lot of money to give away. So we’ve got a, there’ll be an announcement shortly about the formation of a charitable committee that’s going to be driving this that will be made up of board and non board members.

And we’ll have an entire, a very transparent, fluid, efficient process to do this. But this is another area where by being engaged as a member in the association, you have an opportunity to help direct where these Charitable dollars go. And that’s a pretty amazing thing to be a part of.

Erich: MJ, that’s that’s got to be just amazingly gratifying to be in a position to be able to do that and to hear these stories, right?

MJ: Yeah. Very. At Zeehark, we’re going to build a whole library of these stories to share on our website so that we can, people can see the impact of being involved in helping to do this work.

It’s amazingly humbling.

Erich: That’s amazing. I think it’s no surprise to our audience that a lot of the folks that we have on the show, like yourself, MJ, myself, Rich, we’re, we’ve been in the channel a little while now, right? I like to say we’re old channel dogs.

And in fact, I remember, I was a member of CompTIA when I had my MSP in the early two thousands, I actually participated in helping create the first. Manage services. I mean that, that dates us right. And more recently, Rich and I through a channel master, the organization responsible for our podcast here, we’ve contributed to research CompTIA a little bit ago as well.

Beyond the value of the research reports that we all, love to consume and apply in our businesses, whether we’re MSPs Or otherwise, what other membership benefits of GTIA do you feel are maybe potentially the most overlooked by members?

MJ: It’s definitely the research. I took the

Erich: easy one

MJ: out.

Yeah, I took the easy one out. That is, I would also say, we’ve got some incredible member ed courses. We’ve got a library of over 30 courses. We have a professional, just, we have a, just a top notch team of educational professionals who work with consultants and subject matter experts and build these courses.

We can, if there’s a need for a course and we don’t have it, we’ve got the ability to go and build it. So I think that is an underutilized resource. Not on, I shouldn’t say underutilized. It’s actually well utilized, but I don’t know it could be even more utilized, right?

It’s definitely one that I think is high value. The other thing are our member produced guides. We’ve got a basic and an advanced cyber security guide. We’ve got guides that focus on the vendors and distributors. We’ve got guides that focus on the MSPs in terms of Basic best practices around marketing and sales and other things, these are built by members based on member experience.

So it’s built by people just like the people consuming it. And then our professional staff packages it all up and puts it together and makes it easy to consume. I think that’s another terrific. Resource that’s available. There’s just, the one problem we don’t have is having enough benefits.

The one problem we do have is making it. As easy as we can for our members to find them and consume them. And that’s something that we’re gonna definitely improve on as the days and weeks, roll ahead. We’re trying to make things much easier to find [00:45:00] and consume. Our cybersecurity ISAL is a tremendous resource.

I was at an event this last, this past fall, and I don’t know if many people know this, but that’s how I actually came to CompTIA. I’ve been an active member for a long time, a highly engaged member for a long time, but I was doing some consulting back in I think it was 2019. I had sold my MSP in 2015, really before the big M& A wave and went through another roll up acquisition after that.

And then after my contract was up, I decided to just do some consulting and Contia reached out and asked me if I would do a quick project for them. And that project turned into what is now the GTIA ISAL, and that is a threat intelligence sharing organization. So it’s near and dear to my heart, but it takes this complex notion of, not notion this complex world of cyber threat intelligence, which you guys know the cliche, it’s like drinking from a fire hose.

This is more like getting pinned to a wall by a water cannon. There’s so much information and it can get so deeply technical and boils it down to. Simpler language, especially for MSPs who aren’t able to have a true SOC analyst on staff or cyber security engineer on staff. So the ability to know what threats are out there and how they might impact, your business as well as your customers, that’s huge.

The cyber educate, the cyber security education that we’re building around that is tremendous. The white papers that come out of our advisory councils that talk about in trends or things that are developing or changing in the channel and how that impacts and fits with your business model. And the list just goes on and on.

There’s even the mundane, I shouldn’t say mundane. I’m going to have somebody yell at me for saying that, but there are some, just business benefits to like FedEx discounts. Things like that hurts discounts that have value. And we’re very fortunate that our members. Historically have purchased enough CompTIA certifications that we qualify as a CompTIA customer to still extend the 20 percent discount on CompTIA certifications.

So that was a member benefit that some of our members were concerned about losing, and we’ve been able to maintain that. So as a GTIA member. You still get very preferential pricing on CompTIA training and certifications. If you’ve got engineers that want to go down that road and we’re looking at other opportunities to extend similar types of benefits for potentially other.

Other trainings that are out and certifications that are out there. So there’s just a wealth of member benefits available. And, not to mention this, the value of the event attendance that you can go to all of our meetings are free for members. So that alone is a significant value add.

Rich: So speaking of of meetings and events, you mentioned ChannelCon earlier on and there’s also the Communities and Councils Forum, which is coming up at the beginning of March. Tell folks a little bit about both of those events, what happens at those events, and then where they can go to get information and maybe register.

MJ: Sure. So you can go out to gtia. org slash events to see the list and to register. So the first one that’s coming up, actually our very first community meeting of the year is happening on February. Six had to make sure I got the date. Yes, February 6th in Methyl in Belgium. That’s our Benelux group community that’s getting together there.

They’re first out of the gate this year. But then we’ve got CCF, the Communities and Councils Forum coming up in Chicago, the 10th to the 12th of March. And that’s where our North America community comes together and gathers. So we have the North America community meeting. We have our North America Spotlight Awards.

So they’re We’ll be giving out our spotlight awards, which are independently judged. These are member awards for individuals and organizations. You can there’s cyber security leadership for, there’s community leadership. There’s a diversity category, advancing women’s category, innovative Okay.

Thank you guys. Organizations, innovative vendors, innovative MSPs, et cetera. And that’s a nice night, a nice dinner to celebrate. And those what’s neat about our spotlight award programs, those happen in three regions around the world currently the. The judges are not from the awarding region, so these are truly independently judged based on the merit and the strength of the applications.

These aren’t pay to play awards, people put in their nominations. And then judges are recruited. So we’re, we have judges from the UK and Ireland region, Benelux, ANZ, who will review all the nominations for the North AmEricka Awards and [00:50:00] vote. That ensures nobody gets, cronyism or favoritism or your best friend gets the award.

It really is based on The quality of the award and you’ve seen these programs grow year after year. It’s it’s really nice to see how much the industry values those. So that’s part of CCF. Is that nice celebratory evening with a professional emcee and. Nice cocktail hour dinner that will happen on that Tuesday.

Our advisory councils come together for working sessions. The community itself has breakout work working sessions. We have our genius cafe where subject matter experts. I know Erick, you’ve participated in that before. At least I’m pretty sure you have act as a subject matter expert in an area of expertise and Members can sign up for 20 minute one on one sessions.

We’re launching another cohort of our mentorship program where we put mentors and mentees together for a year for peer learning and growth. And we do a charitable event there as well. It’s a give back, a GTIA gives back event as part of it. So that’s a really great, fun meeting.

That’s usually somewhere between two and three hundred attendees because it’s a region, it’s focused on just North America. Then ChannelCon ChannelCon in the summer is our flagship event that always draws somewhere between Recent years between 12 and 1500 attendees. Usually it has a more traditional trade show component to it though again because we’re a vendor neutral trade association the vendor exhibit floor, every single vendor or associate that the exhibits, it’s part of their membership.

They don’t pay extra for it. Everyone has the exact same size booth and members rate that very highly year after year because they say It’s a less intimidating environment to meet and talk to vendors and explore other vendors because you don’t have anyone with the, huge central pavilion or the big bigger booth than another organization that’s potentially grab your attention.

So that’s nice. All the sessions of thought leadership. There’s no selling from the stage of the GTI event. So it’s all, we have a call for speakers. We get submissions from lots of members and non members channel cons open to anyone. Whereas CCS is a member only event. But that’s our flagship event.

And it’s always great. We always throw a Heck of a good party at that event. And we always have a really great keynote speaker as well. Last this past summer, it was Kara Swisher. She was she was fascinating to listen to. Boy, talk about someone who pulls no punches. But she was great. She was absolutely terrific.

So that’s a great event. And again, it’s free to attend for members. So for anyone in our member companies,

Rich: I’ll say channel mastered was among the exhibitors at channel con last year. I’m sure we will be again, Erick and I actually have people at A session at channel. Sorry, we haven’t submitted anything yet, but I’m sure we’re yeah.

We’ll put our heads together and get something in there. Cause we would love to to do that again. Thank you. You’re talking about the ice there, there’s nothing like the ice out in the industry. And honestly, there’s nothing like GTIA in the industry. And, both of those play a really kind of critical role in the channel.

So we, we are unabashed fans of the organization. For folks in the audience who are new to you, want to learn more about GTIA, where should they go?

MJ: So I would recommend a couple things to learn more about GTIA, go out to our website, which is gtia. org. Go to LinkedIn, follow our LinkedIn page. If you go to LinkedIn and search GTIA or Global Technology Industry Association.

We’ll come right up. Our handle across social media is at GTIA official. So you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. Even X I still want to say Twitter. And then for myself, if you go out to LinkedIn, just search MJ Shore, I’m pretty easy to find. I think it’s LinkedIn, if I remember right, it’s linkedin.

com slash n slash m s h o e r. My last name is spelled a little differently. It’s S H O E R, but definitely find me, follow me on LinkedIn. You’re also welcome to email me. I’ve got a super easy email address. It’s just N J H O R E T I A dot org. I love hearing from members and people in the industry.

Spend most of my days talking with folks like you, and I love that. There’s nothing better. And, I just, I thank you both for the opportunity to share a little bit more about GTIA. I can talk about it all day long, but it speaks volumes more when Folks like you are sharing your thoughts about it.

So I, I very much value and appreciate your membership and your engagement and the kind things you say, because as you said, we do, we, I believe it in my core we occupy a very unique spot in the industry. And with that comes a lot of responsibility to do the right thing for the industry.

And so we’re a sponge to, to constantly evaluate. What could we [00:55:00] be doing differently? What could we be doing more of? What should we do less of so that we have that positive impact and really help this industry make a difference in the world, which we do. And that’s a, it’s great to watch. It’s even better to be a part of, and it’s a pretty, pretty awesome experience to be a part of.

Rich: MJ, always a pleasure. Sam. Rich, thank you. And Erick as well. It’s always great to see you. I appreciate your time and for bringing a lot of clarity to GTIA, very interesting stuff. Folks, we’re going to take a quick break now and Erick and I come back on the other side. He and I will share a few final thoughts about this conversation with NJ Shower of GTIA.

We’ll have a little fun, wrap up the show, stick around. We will be right back.

And welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat Podcast. Great conversation there with NJ Shower timely. Obviously because GTIA is so new and you and I. Both have heard a lot about the new name and the background to that and so on. But to actually get a chance to speak with the chief community officer over there and get it firsthand was helpful in clarifying a couple of things.

We, we spoke about the. The unique role that CompTIA in the past and GTIA now play in the channel, and this is something that you and I have spoken about many times through the years, there really isn’t an organization. There are certainly other, industry bodies out there, particularly maybe in the cybersecurity area, but there just isn’t anything quite like.

GTIA in terms of being both an advocate for and an enabler to the channel, just a source of of education and resources and advocacy and all this great stuff that the channel needs to grow and thrive and. Prosper. I’ve always appreciated the value that they had over there, and it’s good to know even after the sale of the certification and training part of CompTIA to private equity that goes on.

And if anything they are in better shape, apparently financially to continue that mission, which is great. Weeds into the second thing. I was aware in the past, Erick, that there was charitable giving happening out of CompTIA out into the world. I was not aware it was 5 million a year actually.

And so that was an interesting number to learn. And it was also great to learn that this endowment coming out of the CompTIA sale actually sets them up. To do more, and enough more that they actually have to spend some time figuring out how to spend that money or donate that money responsibly.

That was interesting stuff and a further reflection of that kind of function GTA plays in the it industry and in the channel that nobody else I’m aware of does.

Erich: You’re absolutely right, Rich. And it’s great to know that the torch is still being, burning brightly, let’s say, and, for me I’ve been a CompTIA member ever since, my early days as an IT provider before we were even, the, one of the first MSPs around 2004, 2005.

So I’ve received a tremendous amount of value and benefit from the CompTIA relationship all these years. And we at Channel Master, the organization responsible for this podcast, we are members of. GTIA soon to be and we have both you and I rich have contributed to CompTIA over the years and panels and communities and.

And delivering, I helped with their first managed services certification so many years ago. And ongoing research and things like that. So what I love about the organization is that spirit that, we, as many MSP shares, like we are here to help him and the rising tide lifts all boats and they’ve done a great job supporting the it industry in all the things that they do.

And I’ve been, happy to try to help in that mission and collaborate together for the benefit of all the members and the it community in general, the things that they do that we don’t hear a lot about lobbying and things like that on behalf of the it industry, which is great.

I was also pleasantly surprised to understand the, how large this endowment is. And how they’re, thoughtfully considering how to manage it and distribute it in ways that meet their mission statement. I was aware that they did split sizable contributions, but not to the numbers, like you said, that they, that MJ shared with us.

So Super commendable, and

Rich: it just sheds a little. I am one of the big questions that came out of the very surprising news late last year about company is selling to Tomer Bravo and another private equity investor was how, they announced right away the community lives on independently, how are [01:00:00] they going to be able to do that because the for profit training and certification part of company was where the money came from for the community and the answer that emerged relatively quickly was an endowment enabled or created by the sale, but how big an endowment.

Yeah, you’re right. We’ve gotten a feel just from this conversation with injury. You get a feel, this is. This is a substantial endowment, and it’s not something that we need probably to worry about. Is it big enough? Will it last long enough for the organization to continue serving the community?

So that’s good to know. Folks, we’ve got time now for just One last thing. And this is actually a topic that Erick and I have spoken about before on a different podcast that we used to do years back. And you’ll see why I’m bringing it up again. There’s a particular angle to this, but it turns out that as we’re recording this right now, people are lining up at the Brooklyn botanical gardens.

To get a look at, take a picture with, and get a whiff of Amorphophallus gigas. I hope I’m pronouncing that it’s otherwise known more popularly. As the corks flower, and it is a very large flower. It only blooms every few years. And when it does, it apparently emits an odor, unlike anything you’ve ever heard and or smelled before, and probably a whole lot worse.

Now I say apparently, cause I’ve never been anywhere near one of these things when it’s in bloom, but Erick Simpson has, so Erick, tell us a little bit about what that experience is like.

Erich: Yes, rich. Yeah. So yeah, we did cover this years ago on another podcast that we were both co hosts on and, we are, I guess you could look at it one of either ways, interestingly or lucky enough to have a corpse flower at the Fullerton Arboretum this is where I.

Enjoyed the experience of seeing this, very beautiful flower that smells like year old rotting flesh. And I’m trying to not gross people out, but it is, it makes you pucker up, man. It is rancid. It is nasty. And it’s the experience. It’s a beautiful flower.

But you can smell it like a hundred feet away. Like it is pungent. It’s probably the best way I’ll leave that description.

Rich: So if it’s blooming in Brooklyn, I assume it’s blooming in Fullerton as well. Are you going to get back on the line?

Erich: I’m going to have to figure out if they still have.

One here or how that works. I haven’t seen anything announced I did read something on the internet rich recently where there’s one somewhere else in the world outside of the united states I thought I saw that but I don’t know if it’s like the cicadas every 17 years They all just come out everywhere or if it’s different life cycles I don’t know how that works, but I will definitely be checking in on that After this episode.

Rich: All right. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us on the show. That’s all the time we’ve got for you this week. We’re going to be back again in another week’s time with another episode of the show for you until then. I’ll simply remind you that this is both a video and an audio podcast.

So if you are listening to us, but you’d like to. Check us out on video, go to YouTube, look up MSP chat. You’re going to find us there. If you are watching, but you’re also into audio podcasts, go to Google, Apple, Spotify, you name it, wherever you get your audio podcasts, you’re probably going to find us there too.

However you find us, please subscribe, rate, review. It’s going to help other people discover and enjoy the show just like you do. This show is produced by the great Russ Johns. It is edited. By the great Riley Simpson. They are part of the team with Erick and myself at a channel mastered. They would be ready, willing, and able to create a podcast for you.

If you want that. And podcasts are truly one of the very smallest things that we do for our clients at channel mastered. If you want to learn more about channel mastered. Go to www. channelmastered. com. Channel Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered. That’s Erick working directly one on one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business.

And you can learn more about that organization at www. mspmastered. com. So once again, we for joining us this week. We’ll see you in a week. Until then, folks, please remember, as always, you can’t spell channel. Without M. S. P.