Episode 62: Rough is Enough
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Erick and Rich discuss Atera’s agentic AI RMM feature and how to avoid burning out your technicians. Then they’re joined by Nigel Moore of The Tech Tribe for an insider’s look at trends and opportunities this year in managed services. And finally, one last thing: The criminal consequences of today’s sky-high egg prices.
Discussed in this episode:
Information about ScaleCon 2025
The heist of 100,000 eggs in Pennsylvania becomes a whodunit that police have yet to crack
Transcript:
Rich: [00:00:00] And three, two, one blast off, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome 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 one of your co hosts on this program.
I’m also the chief analyst at channel master at the organization responsible for this program. I am joined as I am every week by our chief strategist at channel mastered. Erick Simpson. Erick, I suspect you are counting down the hours right about now.
Erick: That’s a great way to put it rich. Yes. Just a couple dozen hours to go before I take my vacation, which I’m very much looking forward to.
Need a little bit of life balance to go along with the work balance. How are you doing?
Rich: I am doing terrific thank you very much. Unlike you, I will not be skiing next week, but Man Alive, you you earned it, sir. Enjoy that. And even though Erick is out of the office next week, we’re still gonna have a podcast episode for you, but when he gets back, we’ll be able to talk a little bit about his good times in Park City.
Erick: Looking forward to it.
Rich: Until then, let’s dive into our story of the week here. And it concerns a topic of much interest in the world of managed services over the last couple of years or so, which is to say the application of artificial intelligence in the delivery of managed services, now all of the big managed services, platform companies, the connect wise is, and Kaseya’s and enables, et cetera, they all have.
Introduced AI functionality to their platforms within the last couple of years or so generally speaking, though, all of that functionality exists and functions in the realm of of the terminology that Microsoft has gotten us all used to employing, which is to say it’s co pilot stuff. So technology that is going to take some of the work off of a technician’s plate.
It’s going to triage and diagnose. It’s going to think through recommended courses of action. It’ll consult with a technician, say, here’s what I think is going on and what should be done about it. Technician either agrees or disagrees. If they agree, the functionality will go off and do that work on their behalf.
But. The AI functionality is assisting a technician in the execution of their duties. There is only one managed services platform maker I’m aware of that has gone, or is at least on the verge of going, one extra step beyond that. And that is Atera. A T E R A for folks who are not familiar with them.
I just wrote about this in the most recent edition of Channelholic, my blog. As we’re recording this right now, Erick. They have, and I’ve had for a while a a feature that they call co pilot, which functions exactly like what I was just describing. They have also though really since 2022 been working on a feature that they call autopilot and autopilot, unlike co pilot truly is an autonomous virtual technician.
That will interact with a customer collect information, triage, diagnose. And actually execute the remediation steps that need to be taken create a ticket, close a ticket, document the whole thing. There is no technician involved whatsoever, generally speaking, when Autopilot is working with an end user.
And, there is a ton of talk in the IT world right now Erick, and specifically with regards to AI. about agentic AI. This is the big new thing in AI. It is the giant growth field. All sorts of companies like Salesforce service. Now you name it. They’re all talking about their agentic AI strategy based on my conversations with agentic AI expert.
Most of that talk is either a forecast about something that’s going to happen later or quite a bit of hype. But I was given by a Forrester analyst once upon a time a checklist of the qualifications something needs to have in order to be a Gentic AI. And I ran through this list and I compared it to what a Terra and it’s autopilot feature is doing.
And it sure does look agentic to me. Now the implications for an MSP are potentially huge. A Tara is saying this is a little bit like hiring for technicians, except you don’t have to pay them and they never get sick. And I asked when I was interviewing Gil Peckleman, their CEO, what about hallucinations?
Cause obviously the MSPs in our audience are going to get really nervous. About allowing an AI agent to go off and do work in an end user environment. And he said, sometimes there’s a little bit of that [00:05:00] in the back and forth on the generative AI piece, the chat piece, where it’ll maybe say something a little bit strange to the customer, but they have it engineered so that it will only do.
A predefined list of things that you have both authorized and trained it to do your way. So I, for example, you don’t have to worry that it’s going to decide the best way to fix this problem is to, delete a virtual server or something like that. Cause if an action like that isn’t in its toolkit it’s not permitted to do it.
Even so it, this is a significant, maybe even a radical step for an MSP to take. And Tara is first to the table with this kind of functionality, but a lot of other companies are going to have it. I, yeah, I suspect certainly within the next 12 months or so. And so here’s a first opportunity, Erick, for the two of us, even.
Just to be talking about the pros and cons, you can understand the business pros you can understand the the technical cons, or at least apprehensions, anxieties associated with this, and this is an issue that every MSP in our audience is really going to have to think through and address sooner than they probably think.
Erick: So much to think about there, Rich. And the term that I keyed in on that you used was radical, a radical approach, a radical departure for many MSPs to think about the implications the risks and the opportunities here. I, the first thing that I thought of when I read your article.
was, holy cow, this makes the smaller one man, two man operations that are delivering services immediately potentially much more competitive, right? I’m not so certain that, a mature MSP with a fully staffed and capable service desk would be as attracted to it. As immediately as some of these smaller providers, but holy cow, and you touched on it, and I think Gil in your article responded, it’s like you guide what the agentic AI agent does, like you allow it to do these things, you build these things, this rich is the nirvana for MSPs and technical service managers to get every one of their technicians doing the same thing the same way.
So what better way to standardize on a process, but to leverage agentic AI agents. And I’m not saying everybody run out and go do this right now, but I’m saying I can see a future where the risk analysis. Is conducted and understood by MSPs that want to test it and try it out on some of their clients in collaboration with the client.
So the approach I would take, Richard, if I was looking at this is, Hey, would you be our guinea pig, a plus client of ours and let us test this out and give us your candid feedback? Because, it’s something that, that we’re exploring. And again, it’s not going to work for everybody and every client and say, look, this is just a little pilot we’re doing.
We’re not charging for it. But what I did pick up from your interview with Gil was that he said some MSPs are actually charging extra for it. Can you go into that a little bit? Because that blows my mind.
Rich: Yeah and I should set that up a little bit. The, this functionality and it’s ability to do what Atera says it can do.
This is not theoretical. They’ve been testing it in the field for a while, for quite a while, with several dozen MSPs. Who have got customers on board with it? And yeah, again the agents the AI agent is never sick it never sleeps. So 24 seven it’s available to to help your clients.
You don’t have to, if you’re, the end user, you’re not waiting, whatever it is a half an hour, two, three hours for somebody to get back to you and help you with your issue, you’re going to get. Immediate assistance and assuming that the agent can actually solve the problem completely on its own you’re back up and running and, everything is fixed ASAP.
And yeah, there are some of these test MSPs out there who are charging extra for this. So not only is this a way basically to expand the capacity of your help desk without actually hiring more people but this is a, a top line as well as a bottom line, a growth opportunity for MSPs.
Erick: Now, Rich, I could go days talking about this because obviously the immediate, I think, opportunity would be some of these low level one tickets, like password resets, things like that. These are the things that are the noise in the level one queue and the job of a level one queue. are a level one here is to clear the queue as quickly as possible.
So the more that we can get an agentic a I technician to do some of that and offer that value like you just expressed is the client doesn’t have to, the user doesn’t have to wait now for that ticket to be prioritized and assigned and [00:10:00] all that, however you do it they can get that self help immediately.
It’d be interesting. How much of that is divulged to the users when MSPs are deploying this service. Another thought crossed my mind many are hitting me right now is this is that next evolution of moving from a, a fully burdened on premise internal in the office.
Highly skilled, costly technical resource to offshoring and nearshoring, and then ultimately the agentic AI technician. So it’s an interesting melange that we now have to pick and choose from what tickets go to the agentic AI technician, what tickets go to our nearshore offshore resources and what tickets go to our, high, most highly skilled and costliest technicians.
In the office. So just another thought, Rich. The last thought I’ll say is probably it’s not going to work for MSPs that want all of their employees in the office every day. Just saying.
Rich: And I’ll I’ll both ask a question and talk a little bit about the homework assignment that I’ve given myself.
And so the question I wonder about following up on your point is For how long are MSPs going to have the option of neither offshoring anything or employing agentic AI and still be able to compete with other MSPs, given the top and bottom line implications of both of these options? And then the homework assignment I’ve given myself, I just recently interviewed Gil Pekelman, the CEO.
The next time I check in with the Tara I want to talk to one of those MSPs, if I can, who has been field testing this and really get an MS. P’s perspective on the impact it has on their business. What it’s like for the client. It’s just a really interesting story, I think, to understand what it’s like in the real world to use a, an IT management agent like this.
And hopefully that’ll be something that I get to write about in the coming months here. But for now, Erick, let’s move on. To your tip of the week and you tell me if I’m right. Is this particular topic related to the fact that you’re going to be on vacation next week?
Erick: Not in the slightest, Rich but nice try.
So yeah the tip of the week here is all about preventing burnout in your MSP teams. And you know what? Had we talked about a Tara before I came up with a topic and my talking points, it might’ve been, Hey, consider. A genting AI technician. So how do we prevent burnout in MSP teams?
Rich, this is the challenge that we’re seeing now in organizations where the labor market is much more competitive. We’ve got competitors, poaching technicians from our organizations. We’re having trouble maintaining enough margin to, pay these folks and especially if we lose some, we churn out a highly skilled technician, it’s going to cost us, much more to bring somebody new on to replace them, train them up and still, pay them the salary that they’re.
That they’re commanding these days. So how do we keep our technicians and keep them happy and make sure that we’re doing everything we possibly can to prevent burnout. I think burnout is one of the, top reasons why anyone is a contributing factor of why they leave a position and just need a break, or they’ll don’t think they can get help and get through it, or just don’t see it getting any better anytime soon, right?
It’s like this symbol. I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. I can hang on. So first, the first tip would be encouraging, better work life balance. I know this is tough for MSPs, Rich, that, it’s like you’re in the foxhole with us for eight hours a day and we’re going to, we’re going to leverage you and it’s going to be, taking fire from all sides if we’re less strategic and just doing reactive, reactive, take it.
Support and things like that. So how do we do this? Number one, we’ve got to be able to pay for giving our teams the comp and commissions and Bonuses that keeps them, at least from a salary perspective in the position But work life balance is a little bit more elusive. Like we have to be profitable enough to give our teams time off Holidays, things like that.
Maybe they can earn additional PTO. So how do we compete? We’ve got to be profitable and we’ve got to be able to provide that time off for our employees so that they don’t feel like, how many times have you spoken to an MSP, Rich, and they say something to you like it’s been three years since I took a vacation.
Holy cow. It’s tough. And then when we tell and when we make it difficult for our team to book time off on vacation, because, oh, no, we got this huge project coming up, right? We’ve got to be able to give them more of that life balance along with better [00:15:00] work balance. Number two, let’s recognize and reward our team members.
In my MSP back in the day, Rich, we had lots of team building competitions and challenges, and we would have individual recognition for folks that hit their individual goals, and we would have team goals and recognition for the team when they, when everybody hit their individual goals as a team, and then we did a company wide goal.
And you know what’s interesting, Rich, is Not all of our technicians were interested in like cash bonuses and incentives. They would take it of course, but what really got them motivated was like, like our team, for whatever reason, they love doing like paintball. They said boy we’ll hit that stretch goal.
If you just, cover a whole Saturday for all of us to go, I’ll do paintball. It was the weirdest thing. I never would have thought of that, now I know different, like everybody’s motivated by different things, so finding things that individuals. Are that motivates them that isn’t all about money.
What are they interested in doing? Are they interested in in, in having experiences? Like maybe it’s a night out on the town with you and your significant other, a reward could be dinner and movie or a play or a concert. Or we can get away at a resort, be creative and think about these rewards and then establish some goals for the team to strive.
And then now you reward them. And I like the ones that give the experiences myself, because that’s giving them a different. Experience where they might not think to themselves, Hey, I’m going to take my significant other out for a, weekend getaway at a resort, things like that. So that’s another really cool tip.
And I think the last one, which has been getting a lot of attention in the last couple of years, rich is this. mental health support opportunities. So providing access to your team members, maybe it’s a, an additional benefit of your health plan that you’re providing or just offering and to pay for mental health resources, counseling, stress management.
Rich, we know MSPs and other organizations that come in and they’ll have. Like the massage team come in once a month and they bring the, and give everybody a nice neck massage, things like that. So just these little. Things that make the work life balance a little bit more on the balanced side rather than the unbalanced side and keeping the team from burning out quite as quickly as they might be otherwise.
Rich: Yeah, a few thoughts on that. So first of all it is true that within the, just the last few years you started to see people talk about mental health, both in terms of the folks who own and run MSPs and the folks who work there, which is good. Because there’s not been nearly enough acknowledgement of the stress and the strain mentally and emotionally that the work can entail there, there hasn’t been still isn’t enough focus on just physical health as well.
That is an important part of avoiding burnout. I’m glad people are paying attention to that. In terms of rewarding folks, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, Erick, but another option basically that pays business dividends in addition to helping your employees avoid burnout is, some people are refreshed and engaged and can avoid burnout.
By acquiring new skills, taking on new challenges. And getting people training, helping them get certifications maybe mixing up their mix of responsibilities is another thing that maybe keeps the job fresh and keeps them fresh. And then the last point I’ll make is about the.
First point you made work life balance, which is just that in my experience, that is an issue that really has to start from the top. And so you made a point of saying you’ve got to not just allow, but encourage your employees to take time off so that they don’t burn out, but you need to set an example along those lines as well.
If you haven’t taken a vacation in three years, if your employees all. See you regard you as somebody who is working 24 seven. It sends a message about the culture and the expectations within that business that make it harder for people to take the time off they need to stay fresh and avoid burnout.
Just remember your. Establishing a tone, you are driving the culture and work life balance needs to be part of that.
Erick: And I’ll tag in on that last one and agree with everything you said, rich. But that last one is you have a responsibility. As a leader to your team to take care of yourself, you mentioned health, right?
So you’ve got to, you can’t just drag in late to the office and look like, you haven’t slept in four days and expect that the team to respond positively to that. So like you said, rich, be the example, take care of yourself health wise, mentally.
Take the time off, encourage that, build an organization that Takes care of its team first. [00:20:00] Because if you do that, the team will take care of your client.
Rich: Okay. Very good. Folks, we’re going to take a quick break here. When we come back on the other side, we will be joined by this week’s spotlight interview.
Yes. And Erick I’m a little biased in this regard, but as far as I’m concerned, the industry’s foremost expert on running a successful managed services practice is you. But if there’s anyone else up there at the very top of the pyramid alongside you, it is this week’s interview guest.
He is Nigel Moore. He is a former MSP. These days he runs the Tech Tribe. I am super excited to get a chance to have him with us on the show. Stick around folks. We will be right.
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 the one and only Nigel Moore. He is the founder and CEO of the tech tribe. Nigel, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It’s awesome. For the few folks I trust in our audience who are unfamiliar with you or with the tech tribe, just tell folks a little bit about who you are and maybe a little bit about your background and then also about the tech
Nigel: tribe.
So in a nutshell, I used to own an MS, I used to run MSP for a guy many years ago, got into the it space in probably 20, 2002, 2003. Ran an MSP and then through a crazy turn of events, I ended up owning an MSP in about 2007 of my own. I was 50, 000 in credit card debt, trying to run it from a dining room table, from a dodgy old laptop and from a car that didn’t work that I had to try and drive servers around in and and ran that for a bunch of years and slowly grew it and grew it.
Merged with a friend, we pulled two both our MSPs together, probably about six years later and ran that for a couple of years and then eventually exited out of that business in 2016 and started the tech tribe, which is. Started off as a membership program or a community for MSPs where I taught other smaller MSPs how to avoid all the stupid crap that I did wrong in those early years that I was in my MSP.
And that’s how we kicked off the tech tribe. And then the tech tribe has morphed into this amazing, crazy, large now community of MSPs all around the world. And and our job is to help make their lives easier and better. And we do a lot of marketing and sales related stuff for them and whatnot.
And we’ve got, I think we’re about 4, 500 MSPs in the program all around the world now. And having fun, it’s taken off in a direction that I didn’t think it would, but the market was there and it’s I was just describing it off air is it’s like being a. Grabbing onto a rocket ship and trying to hold on for dear life as this business has gone up and crazy and the tribe has grown.
And and so that’s us in a nutshell. I’m an Aussie, as you might be able to tell from the accent and live out here on the beach in Australia. And whenever I’m not working, I’m trying to surf as much as I can.
Rich: And I’ll just say for folks who are curious, as we record this right now, it is 3 p.
m. On a Wednesday for Erick and me, it’s 10 a. m. tomorrow for for Nigel, this is very much a global interview here glad we were able to find a time that works for everybody. You’ve got 4, 500 ish MSPs in the community. You have your finger on the pulse of the MSP community in general.
You have had for quite some time. So let’s just kick things off here with maybe a very general kind of question. We’re very early in 2025. What is the mood out there in the tech tribe right now about this year? Confident, optimistic, wary, how would you
Nigel: characterize it? Optimistic.
Optimistic I’m saying a bunch of optimism in the market everywhere at the moment. And there’s still I think with every optimistic market, you’ll still always find the naysayers that are still out there saying MSPs are dead. And I’d say you have a Canova and you’re not going to have a business tomorrow.
They’re always there. And you always say them, but in general, I’m seeing far more of the optimistic people out there now that are seeing the businesses moving along. They’ve most people had a fairly toughish year last year with no other. Not a lot of growth or sometimes a little bit of reversal, but in the past couple of months I’ve been seeing a bunch of people having great wins and doing some good things and confident about the global economy as well, which cause we all, like business follows along with what’s happening.
And mostly from you guys over there in the U S and you guys have had a pretty crazy. Last couple of months. And so I think the rest of the world is jumping on those coattails and being like most business owners are quietly optimistic that this is going to be a pretty strong year. I think we’re still got some turbulence that the markets need in the next couple of years to get rid of some of the fat that’s there at the moment.
But but overall the MSP space as a whole. Our industry is just on fire and it just keeps growing and growing and more stuff keeps coming into it. More need for MSPs keep happening and more services that MSPs can add to their line items keep turning up for us. And I think it’s just a strong period for MSPs, especially the ones that are happy to.
To keep evolving and keep making sure that they’re doing the latest and greatest things rather than getting stuck in the old school kind of methodologies that are really starting to wax and wane now after kind of 10, 15 years of the old break, fix methodologies and whatnot that are really starting to disappear properly now.
It’s taken some time. And some people were like, Oh, break fix is going to be gone tomorrow. But these things take time. [00:25:00] It’s been a decade since those conversations first happened, but they’re really starting to show up now that. Proper managed services is the way that everybody should be and whatnot.
So I’m saying a lot of optimism and I’m super excited about this year. I’ve got a bunch of stuff that we’ve got on the boiler and I can’t wait to start rolling a short and knocking stuff out,
Erick: Nigel, you and I, as we share the, the moniker of former MSP, right? And we were around, around the same time, decided to help the community and do good.
So let’s compare notes, you and I, right? I’ve written some books, you’ve written some books, you’ve written a book completely focused on pricing for MSPs. And this has been, a conversation that you and I have been having with MSPs that we’ve done and worked with for years and years a year. The pricing challenge that MSPs struggle the most with.
And how has this transition to more cloud service licensing and these new services, cybersecurity and things like that that MSPs are selling today impacted that, exacerbated the challenge, made it easier. What are your thoughts?
Nigel: The complexity of the so many different things that an MSP needs to do nowadays is complicated and made it a challenge for everybody.
It’s because you look at when you go to peer groups or you’re talking communities or whatnot as an MSP, you hear all these different models that people are using. One person’s using. Per user this way. One person’s using per device this way. One person is doing a mismatch. And there’s 50 different types of hybrid models out there, left and center nowadays.
And with all of that information, newer people that are, or newer entrants that are coming into the market that are trying to figure out their pricing and getting pretty confused. And they’re like, I’m seeing a ton of confusion of. The other, the people that are trying to build a managed service offering for the first time, or those that are trying to shift across to it, because they’re going, holy crap, like these guys are doing this.
These guys are doing this. These are doing this. And then they’re in that whole analysis paralysis mode where they actually sit there ingesting all of this information and actually not making a decision on what they should be doing themselves. And to me, that’s probably the biggest challenge I’ve seen around pricing in the past couple of years.
It’s just the number of different models that are out there is confusing everybody. And the reality is a lot of the, what’s really got to happen is. The MSP that’s setting up their pricing, it’s just got to go and ingest it all. And then just spend a bit of intentional time going out and figuring out what they’re like, their marketplace, their business model, their everything.
And just sitting down, just making a decision and just making that decision, getting it out to market and figuring out whether it works, not worrying about it being the permanent model that’s for them, because you can change. And this is the mistake that I used to, I made it many times in my MSP is. I kept going for months and years at a time, trying to perfect my plan and my offering and exactly what I’d include and how I’d pundle this cloud and this cyber stack or whatever it was, but I never got my plans out there and not getting your plans out there as useless as pardon my language, but it’s on a bull and and that was so to me, all of those MSPs that are in that space of I’ve seen all this stuff and I’m not.
Figuring out whether to do this. And I don’t know whether to do that. And I don’t know what way I should do it. Just pick one and just get it out there. And if you make a mistake, go cap in handy, your clients and say, sorry, we’ve made a mistake on this pricing model. We just got to adjust it. And I, once I became confident with having that conversation with a client where I’d made a mistake and was able to change a pricing model, things became so much easier.
I was able to learn my lessons really quickly and make mistakes really quickly. And then improve my pricing, my plans and my margins based on the mistakes that I was making. And so I think, and that’s not that whole approach is not really time specific. You could do that 10 years ago.
You can do it now. I just think the challenge we’ve got now is there’s so much information out there now that’s confusing people versus 10 years ago, Ericka was your book and Carl’s book, I think were some of the two only bits of information that were out there. 5, 000 blog posts on MSP pricing out there and books from crazy Aussie guys and all sorts of stuff out there.
Now, and it’s just, it can get confusing. And so I think for anyone that’s sitting in that space of not confident in their pricing, just pick what you’ve got now. You can always learn more and you can always ingest more, but pick with the decide with your new plans, with the information that you’ve got at hand right now, run with them, get them out there to market, figure out how they’re working, figure out how you go about selling them, figure out if you enjoy selling them, figure out if clients are buying them easily.
And if not makes and tweaks and changes if they work, run with them and slowly tweak and improve them over time. They’re not a permanent thing. They’re a, they’re an ongoing transient, changeable, morphable malleable thing. And that’s, I think a key point that most MSPs really need to take into place.
Erick: So progress over perfection is
Nigel: 100 percent rough is enough. I think is one of my favorite nerves that are done is better than perfect or whatever way you want it. And it’s hard for us perfectionists. Like I think probably everyone in the MSP space is a perfectionist or recovering perfectionist in some way, shape or form.
But, and so that’s hard to then go out and say, Oh, like it’s not perfect. You’ve got a choice. You can either be per like perfect as the enemy of progress, really. You’d be not, if you’re trying to make a perfect, you just never get anywhere and you’ve got to, you’ve got to get that rough as enough or good enough is that [00:30:00] I’m done is better than perfect or whatever mantra that you’d take for it, you just got to get something out there and run with it and learn the lessons from the trenches, not from.
Inordinate amounts of research.
Rich: So I, I don’t know, but I’m just assuming that like MNA consulting is not a big part of what you do familiar with the tech tribe.
Nigel: Not today. I’ve been across a couple of them around, but not too much.
Rich: And and again, you’ve got your finger on the pulse of the MSP community.
What are you hearing from MSPs right now, if anything, about the degree to which this is a seller’s market, a buyer’s market and here in the U S this big phenomenon is the rise of these MSP rollups where, yeah, I hope what’s in very. That phenomenon too. What are you hearing from the tribe out there?
Nigel: It’s the same in like in the U S you’ve been having some rather large roll ups over there, often PE backed or PE funded in there as well. We’re not seeing much of that, if at all out here in Australia, although Australia is only 16 percent of our tribe in the community. And so in the mid tier MSP space, there’s a bunch of that happening out there.
And a lot of MSPs, as you, you would know, like getting those weekly phone calls now from private equity firms that are trying to hunt acquisition targets left and center. And and that’s heating up everyone I know in the UK, it’s heated up like crazy as well. There’s a bunch of. Of people in the UK that are like us, we teach MSPs how to be a better MSP.
There’s a bunch of M and a wrap up gurus over there, teaching people how to wrap up businesses in groups over in the UK. And I don’t know why they picked the UK like crazy in the last couple of years, but there’s three or four of the main players over there. And so all the MSPs over in the UK, because they’ve been identified as another, as an industry to go into a being cold and canvas by these people that.
Have zero experience in the MSP industry and they’re trying to wrap them up. And I’ve seen a number of them sell to these mobs. And and it’s, those ones are typically a horrible scenario because the people that had done it have gone and learned from an online course, how to do M and a, they’ve gone and structured some sort of vendor finance deal with these smaller ish MSPs, and then try to bundle them all together with no domain MSP experience on board whatsoever.
And all of these, all the owners exit and all the service delivery disappears and. And it’s good for the competition in the area because they come and lap up all the clients pretty quickly, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not good for the enterprise value of those businesses that have been built.
And so that’s happened a little bit in the UK. I’ve seen a number of those ones happen over there. I don’t know if that’s happened too much in the US. I haven’t seen that over in the US, but what I have seen, which I’m sure you’ve all seen as well as those great. Mid tier MSP sizes from the 20 seats to the 60 seats where three, four, five of them get pulled together via a deal and become a larger MSP.
And I think there is some great success stories out of some of those ones. There are challenging project to go through, like a very challenging project to go through because you’ve got four or five fairly. Often fairly different cultures, like in the MSP space, you’ve got tech stacks, like up the wazoo.
Like we’ve got, like trying to integrate four or five different tech stacks in a year into one thing is just a mammoth gargantuan task. And they’re happening and MNA sorry, PE, the more and more they’re seeing money in our marketplace, the more they’re throwing, they obviously started up at the vendors first and they’ve worked their way down to the MSPs and they’re working their way through the MSPs now.
And a lot of the MSPs that have been around for 10, 20 years that the owners. Thinking it’s time to take money off the table or it’s time to exit out of this hug, jumping into those deals. And they’re making sense because the PE has got the right amount of money in there. They’re getting their multiple further up the chain in there.
And so they’re offering fairly good multiples still from what I’m seeing out there. So I think it’s a fairly healthy ish thing. Like a fairly healthy ish M& A space, except for those ones that are coming in that have no idea what they’re doing. And they’re just being led to believe that it’s very easy to wrap up a bunch of MSPs together.
Which it is not very easy at all to wrap up a bunch of MSPs together in any way, shape, or form.
Erick: Yeah, it’s these folks that think they can just flip these businesses for a quick profit that are hurting that whole, concept and hurting The clients and hurting the MSPs and it was,
Nigel: see, we’ve heard some of those, they’re hurting the reputation of the PE firm.
There’s good, as you guys would know, there’s good PE firms in our industry that know what they’re doing. They’ve got the main experience in our space, but unfortunately the bad ones that are coming in that have got zero experience and are causing these. Horrible outcomes tarnishing the good ones.
And so you’ve seen in all these places now that PE is the devil kind of conversations that are happening when reality is not PE private equity. It’s just a tool, right? It’s just a, another vendor and a tool and a group of people doing things. And there’s good tools and bad tools, and you can’t paint everybody with the same brush because it’s dangerous.
But unfortunately I’m seeing a lot of that being PE private equity being painted with the same bad brush when they’re not all bad out there.
Erick: Very well said, Nigel. So let’s compare more notes. You and I know. From where you sit, do you feel today as things get more and more complex, right? New solutions, business needs change and all this.
Where do you feel the biggest new revenue opportunity is for today’s MSPs? I’m going to give you Maybe three options for categories, three categories, like one, just [00:35:00] get into, go wider and deeper with your existing clients. That’s one. Number two Hey, let’s latch on to or number two, let’s make sure we true up our pricing.
So net new revenue from existing clients and then true up all the legacy clients that we’ve had for years that are paying, some crazy amount of non profitable. Fees to us, right? True them up to today’s standards, what you would sell a brand new client or number three, new emerging technology or the latest trend, cybersecurity, find out, figure out how to leverage AI.
We’re hearing all these different things. So one go wider and deeper existing to screw up. Three new emerging technology
Nigel: or dealer’s choice. You tell me. Yeah, I would a hundred percent go number two. First, if I was in, in that situation get in there and get all your pricing up to reasonable pricing levels.
Like it’s the easy win and I’ve never yet met an MSP that’s pricing appropriately. Like I’m sure you’re both the same. You go and look in and you just go, you are severely undercharging here. You’re severely undercharging here. And I think it’s a, it’s, as part of our industry is most MSP folk not profit motivated first.
We’re wanting to help people motivated first. And that plays out in that we often, like I was horrible at this. It’s under quoting, undercharging our clients and underpricing our products. And so to me, a hundred percent, like you’ve already got the clients on your books. You’ve already servicing them.
You’ve already assuming they have high trust with them and you’re already giving them a good deal. Go out and true up your pricing, go up and figure out what the market rates are. And start at, even if you just have small jumps to start with, and then put in some sort of more regular process to true things up every six months or every 12 months or whatever it is.
But as you, you would both know the average time or the average. Time between an MSP’s price increases is sometimes like it sits up in the three to five years range, right? Even though we have inflation that’s blowing things out of the water like crazy and MSP will sit on the same pricing model for three to five to seven years out there, or the same prices for some weird reason.
And it comes back to that same thing of, Hey, we just want to help the people. We don’t want to, we don’t want to care about profits too much. And so number three, sorry, number two would be my number one. Number one would then be my second line. There’s all this AI and there’s tons of opportunity out there.
There’s billions of dollars of opportunity out there and all that sort of stuff. But you’ve got this opportunity in your plate right at the moment that, that is also ready for you to go out and do stuff for. And it’s, you’re doing a service to your customers when you’re going wider with your customers, rather than going out and trying to find the newest thing to go and try and broadly sell to everybody, go on and get really good at figuring out those other things that you’re not servicing them very good with that you really should be now and go and get them all up.
The spec first, you always say it. And I’m a stickler for this. We’re all, our industry is also a stickler for red shiny object syndrome, right? Hey, what’s the next thing over here? And Holy crap, let’s just go and do that. And the reality is they’ve got these books of amazing clients that they’re probably only get extracting 30 to 70 percent of the value that they could be extracting out of those clients while still maintaining the extremely high levels of value that they’re giving in return and the trust that they’ve got out there.
And so to me it’s go out and. Sort out that whole the, whatever you call it, some people call it the product matrix or whatever it is where you go out and you figure out what you’re not selling to your current clients that need it and go out and do that Excel spreadsheet and get them all up to, or get as many as you can up to going as wide as you can with those clients and then go out and figure out whether you can stack AI on as a, another line item on there and bring some talent into your team to figure out how you can leverage AI services and whatever out to them.
But to me, those two other ones, they’re the low hanging fruit, right? Go number, if it was me, number two, number one, then number three.
Erick: Yeah, I agree. That’s why, we, the true and up part was the hard lesson to learn first. But then we did that client solution roadmap. That’s that spreadsheet you’re talking about.
We started identifying what clients had, what we offered and. Which ones didn’t, and it was just us being our own worst enemy, trying to find new clients. And wow, there’s a gold mine right here. Let’s still sell them on everything in our stack. So
Nigel: yeah, a hundred percent. And it’s that whole thing there.
It’s it’s, it makes sense, right? It’s logical. It makes complete sense. But to our brains as MSP owners, it’s often not logical. We’re like, Oh, we’ve got to go and do this. Cause we’ve got this FOMO of fear of being left out of the new trend or whatever that’s coming on. And also often, a lot of us are like, I know for me, I can speak for myself either the wildly ADHD driven to the point where we’re like, ah, if I’ve got to go and read, re go through a sales process that I’ve already been through that sales process with five other clients, it’s boring to me, so I’m going to go across and find something fun over here in the AI world or the high end cyber world or whatever it happens to be.
And that’s. The reality is that problem of picking number two, the number one, the number three in the order that you spoke about it is not the decisions around picking those things. I think most MSPs would pick those things in that order. It’s actually being in the right mindset to focus and actually do those things is the problem that most of us face.
And it’s. It’s getting some sort of accountability or structures or systems in place to make sure that you’re doing number two, then number one, then [00:40:00] number three, and not getting sidetracked by number three before you’re ready for it in there.
Rich: So Nigel, a theme we talk about fairly regularly, it seems on this show here is the importance, particularly now for MSPs of avoiding commoditization.
From your perspective how big a priority Should that be for MSPs today? And do you have any sort of favorite bits of advice for what MSPs can do to avoid being just another MSP?
Nigel: Don’t compete on price. So many people just compete on price thinking that’s the only way to compete when it’s not.
It’s the worst way to compete on things. And we could probably have it a completely separate episode on just this whole differentiation and the different ways, like the positioning that you should be doing and whatnot. But commoditization happens in every, and it’s a natural part of every industry, right?
And so you’ve got to be wary that it’s there. It exists. Like things that come and always the bottom layers and the simplest layers in an industry get commoditized first. And so the commoditization has already happened around like level one. So the help desk services, right? That’s just a commoditized product.
Now offering level one help desk services ends up getting to, you can really compete on price and a little bit on service and whatnot. But. Not too much compared to everyone else. You’ve got to keep looking further up that chain as to what are the real value ads that I can give in here that are not just a commoditized thing that every Joe blogs can go and offer really quickly.
And and that takes time and effort. It’s not something you can solve immediately. You’ve got to be constantly on the lookout for how I can add more value to my relationship with my clients. And Erick, you talked about like roadmap plans and whatnot. That is a huge, still wildly untapped area, annoyingly enough.
For MSPs out there to actually be going and doing that strategic level work with their clients. And that strategic level work with your clients is not commoditized yet. There’s nothing commoditizing that it’s sure. AI tools are going to be starting to commoditize some of that stuff over many years.
But we’re not there yet. We’re nowhere near it yet. And I think there’s all sorts of. Crazy things that you can do at the high end, but to me, just that middle layer of just building that strategic layer of service in the, or your product in there, where you’re operating from a true VCIO level or a true.
True like that what’s the word I’m looking for? Anyway, like the, from a true VCI level and properly building a service around that and going out and delivering proper TBRs or some people still call them quarterly business reviews with your clients, which as yet, I’m not sure if any of you have ever met an MSP that’s ever done them on a quarterly basis consistently, but I’d never have.
So I think calling them quarterly business reviews is by the worst name in the world, but technology business reviews is still this. Stupid enough, wildly untapped area in the MSP space. There is mature MSPs doing them well, there’s some doing them great, but the majority of the MSP space is still only doing them good to average.
And so that’s a huge opportunity to go out and just become better and better and invest time and effort and energy into creating your part of your VCO slash TBR offering in there to be a world class thing where you’re not commoditized there. No one’s coming in and commoditizing that like crazy yet.
And because. 90% of MSPs, and I’m, that’s a rough number, but 90% of MSPs just aren’t doing it very well at the moment. You can go out and differentiate. So differentiate yourself pretty easily there. And the bonus is it increases your revenue because you, it’s the easiest way to go deeper and wider with your clients in there.
Erick: Nigel, you and I have both benefited from the Ms. P community, right? In general, the spirit of community, right? We are, and you’re, I think you’re right. Most MSPs are givers, I. And my behavioral profile says I am a giver to the extent that I, I want to help others so much, even to perhaps my own detriment, right?
A hundred percent, right? That’s who we are. Now you’ve created the tech drive. It’s both, an educational, a great educational and training, mentoring resource for MSPs, but it’s also its own community, like you described, so what makes the MSP panel so unique in terms of community compared to like other verticals that we know, there’s tons of other burglars, but I’ve never experienced such a feeling of true.
Community and this rising tide lifts all boats feeling that we have here. So what do you think contributes to that and how an MSPs that have not yet experienced the true value of that, take advantage of it.
Nigel: Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny. You mentioned that it’s not prevalent in a lot of industries out there and I’m in the coaching space.
So you, you meet lots and lots of different other industry coaches and I was speaking to one that’s in the salon hairdressing industry once. And then if I got all of my industry together in the room, they would probably murder each other. And I’m like, our industry would just help each other.
That’s all they do. They wouldn’t be able to stop helping each other. And if you there’s many layers to that. And obviously there’s that surface layer of, we just love helping people. But when you think. When you dive a couple of layers deep into where that comes from, it often comes from sometimes childhood trauma, but a lot of things in our childhood bring that up.
And we were all the often the introverted nerds in class and just wanted people to like us, right? [00:45:00] We just wanted people to like us because no one did. I don’t know about you guys, but when I was at school, I was the redheaded guy that was also a bit nerdy. And I had a group of friends in high school, but in primary school, I got beaten up and I was a nerd and that.
That kind of put these, this that I see in a lot of MSPs this thing where I just want people to like me. I just want people to, and I just want to go and do good out there. And so that fed my early years of helping other people is that fuel from way back in my, you call it childhood trauma or whatever you want to call it.
But that fueled me in my early years. And I know it feels a lot of people is. Is that just wanting to be liked and just wanting to do good out there. And we’re all nerds. And so doing good with technology makes logical sense and helping people. And and so my, when I first joined the MSP space though, and I was running an MSP for someone else at the time, but we would come into the very end of that, and I was about to start my own MSP.
And I’d never ever heard of the term MSP. All I knew that was we were the computer guy and that I was the computer guy and that was it. And I was just break fix. And I tried to a side story, but I tried to do my very first version of managed services while I was at that thing by. Regularly sending out bills to all of our existing clients for backup checks and AV checks once a month without asking them if they wanted to do regular billing on that stuff.
And I just send, and I started getting all these complaints coming in saying, what are you charging this regular bill for to do AV checks or whatever, we didn’t ask you to do that. And I’m like, Oh crap. Maybe I should have asked them first before, before I did it. But but back when I was going through that, that, that whole thing I came across this.
I don’t even know where I read it, but I came across this thing that these other it companies were having a meeting at the Microsoft building in Sydney. And so I know I’m going to go across to that thing and see what this thing is all about. And I came up into this room. And in one of their theaters in the Microsoft building, and there was a bunch of smart looking older than me, it people in there that were all running MSPs or back then it was mostly break fixed up and I walked in this room and holy crap, these people are all my competitors, we can’t be in a room like this. This is not right. Something’s not right here. And and I remember in the break there was pizzas or whatever in the break, hiding in the corner thinking, I don’t want to speak to any of these guys. I don’t want to give them all my secrets because they’re going to make my business is going to be horrible afterwards.
And I was speaking to one guy, I was very garged and he’d come up and spoken to me and I was very guarded and cagey. And and we’re talking about managed service agreements. Cause I was just going through that process of trying to do managed service agreements. And I was trying to figure out the legal contract and how you would price things and everything.
And he goes, Oh, what’s your email address? And I’m like, Oh no, we’re like, I don’t want to give anything away to these competitors in here. And, but I gave it to him and he jumps on his phone and goes, I’m just going to send you my managed service agreement, all our sales pack and everything. And my jaw literally fell to the floor and I’m like.
What the heck? I’m out there trying to figure all this stuff out on my own and try to figure it out. Like I had no money to pay a lawyer to do it. So I’m trying to figure out how to write my own legal agreements and whatever. And this guy did that. And that, that one moment opened my eyes to this whole industry.
That was like the beginning moment of me seeing this whole industry of giving Of this spirit that our industry has deep at its core, often from our childhood upbringing and whatever that they just love helping and serving others often, as you said, Erick, to the detriment of themselves.
And I felt victim to this and I still do to this day is that I would much rather. Help someone and get the, that thank you. And that word of affirmation, then I care about making a dollar out of that. The thank you. And the word of affirmation is worth far more to me from a values perspective than that dollar is in my bank account.
But the good thing is that when you focus so much on still delivering that value and trying to build those words of appreciation and thank you back to you, and you do it to the right audience and the right customers for the right amount of time. The money does start to stack up in the bank account after time as well.
But all of us, like mostly we just don’t focus on it. And we just care so darn much about humans and people liking us and doing good out in the world and in the community that we just go and help whoever we can and wherever we can. And it’s all comes down to it’s really ego stuff for us, right?
If you get to the root core of it all there’s an ego drive driving all of those actions in there to. That push people to go on and feel like we feel good in our core when we go out and help other people in those scenarios,
Rich: In the spirit of people helping people and MSPs trying to figure out stuff on their own.
I go to a lot of conferences in a typical year and the one that kind of got away in 2024, I couldn’t go because there was a time and time. Was an event you were part of here in the States called Scale Con. Yes. Talk a little bit about what Scale Con was in 2024 and then I’m curious to see what plans there are, if any, for 2020.
Oh, there is,
Nigel: So 23 4, and I’ve been asked for many times over the years, when is a tech tribe doing a conference and and I’m like, ah, one of these days. But I’m not really a conference guy. I don’t go to too many conferences and I’m the typical introverted nerd that just loves sitting here and creating and surfing when I can.
But people have been pushing for ages and I’m like, maybe one day we’ll do a conference somewhere. And then I’ve been working pretty closely with MSP camp. And and I flew over to an event, a marketing event over in the U S and I invited him to come up and hang out with me at that event.
And so we hung out for a couple of days. It was a great event. And we hung out, we went to my first ever [00:50:00] NBA game, which was awesome. And came back home and the week later, we’re on a call talking about business. And he goes. Nigel, I’m going to run a conference and I want to do it with you guys and and make it a co brand thing.
And I’m like, my standard response was, I know everyone wants us to run a conference, but I just don’t want to do it yet. I don’t have the mental energy and I’m not a conferencey like, he twisted and twisted and twisted. And eventually I succumbed and said, yes. And so we dove all in and did this thing and and it worked out awesome.
We had close to 300 ish odd people there. And it was in Vegas. Of all places, we thought we’d, we have to pick a place where if the event is crap, they can at least still go out and have a bit of fun out there. So that was our real, our only reason for picking Vegas. And I’d never been to the place and it worked out amazing.
We on the last day it was a three day event and we focus one of the things that, that I said, if I’m like, I had these rules that I said to Tahir that if I’m doing an event, that’s got the tech tribe name on it, I’ve got some. Some ground rules in there. And one of them is that no one can buy space on stage.
You’ve got to earn your space on stage via because we all go to these vendor events where a lot of the stage space is taken up by, by vendors that have paid for that spot. And that often dilutes the thought leadership that’s coming out and whatever. And so we, we went the opposite thing. We said, we’re going to find the true practitioners, the ones that were actually in the trenches.
That are getting the results, the ones that are running the Google ads, the ones that are rolling out the direct mail campaigns, the ones that are on running the sales team, we’re going to get them up there and sure they might not be the most polished speakers in the world, but they’re the ones actually getting the results all day, every day in there.
And so we took that approach with this one and it worked out really well. We had some amazingly unconfident speakers get up there and blow people away with the amounts of information. And and overall, we had some amazing feedback from it. We’ve already sold somewhere like a hundred tickets to the next event in 2025.
And we’ve got vendors knocking on our door every week at the moment saying, where’s the prospectus? And we haven’t even picked the date or the location yet, although we secretly have now picked the location and the dates and we haven’t announced them just yet, hopefully in the next week, but it’s suffice to say it is scalecon25 is happening.
And it’s. It’s going to be following all the we learned, I put together this list of probably four pages of lessons that we learned from this particular one of all the mistakes that we made and the things we could have done better. And so we’re taking all of those things to the next one. And we’ll hopefully make ScaleCon 25 even better again.
And it’s the word scale and it is focused on helping MSP scale. So we went through the first day was all marketing. The second day was all sales. And the third day was that account management, like going wider and deeper with existing clients in there. And that format seemed to work fairly well. So we’re going to be taking that, tweaking it a little bit and using a similar format into 2025 as well.
Erick: Well, Nigel you say you’re going to announce a secret location and date in about a week’s time. This episode won’t air after that. So would
Nigel: you like to share? Hotel signed yet. So I can’t so it’s in the U S that’s probably the easiest. The dates end of September. We haven’t got the hotel is hopefully a week away from being signed.
And so end of September somewhere in the U S which is another fun place. Like it’s a fun area, fun city. And so we’re going to be we had some great VIP nights where we took a bunch of VIPs out that and. Went to Hell’s Kitchen in Vegas and a Topgolf thing. And we’re going to be doing similar things down here and just making it experiential driven as well as.
Getting those true practitioners up on stage, but definitely late September ish is it? I would love to say more, but give me a week, give me a week or so. So they’ll email us
Erick: and we’ll put it in a show notes.
Nigel: Okay. Oh, awesome. That’d be cool. Thank you. I appreciate that. I don’t want to give it away. Cause the last one of the lessons we learned last time is we gave away too much information upfront that.
Ended up changing and wasn’t correct. And people kicked us up the rear end, like crazy for those things. And I’m like, ah, we just got to, until we know things a hundred percent, don’t give things away because otherwise people are going to kick us up the rear end. When it’s not, when it might not work out to be exactly that.
We respect that.
Erick: Believe me. So beyond scale con Nigel. What about tech tribe in 2025? What plans? What super secret? What can you give us a little bit? Yeah. What are you guys cooking in the back room that we’re on the last couple of years of economy?
Nigel: This is probably the worst. The worst.
What example of someone saying what’s the word, the old first world problems that you’ve got, like we’re always complaining about things that aren’t really crazy. And the last year or so in the tech job has actually been one of those challenging years, like as a leader of the business, it’s been challenging because we’ve grown really fast.
And. I wasn’t able to grow my leadership as fast as the business was growing in that last year. So I’ve had gone through this journey of, Hey, Nigel, you got to step yourself up, buddy, to be a better leader in here. And so that last year was a lot of lessons and learning around that and making a bunch of mistakes and having to make some really tough decisions last year that, that rocked me to my core.
And we’re past all of that now. And so this year I’m I’m really excited to get back into we’ve got a new leadership team structure that I’m going to be building out this year. It’s going to bring in a bunch more [00:55:00] content for our members, a bunch more marketing resources for our members.
And this year we plan on, we keep getting asked for this one. We plan on launching a higher level tier of the tech tribe as well. At the moment, we’re still only one product, one price, one offer. It’s 59 us dollars per month for everybody. And every member pays that except for the ones that were in on the previous price model.
But that’s it. And so this year we will be doing a higher cohort based thing around building a marketing and growth engine in there, which is going to be facilitated cohort based groups in it. And so that will happen sometime this year. We’re I’ve got to structure who we need on the team to make that happen and when it’s going to happen.
But the rest of it is going to be focused, like just doubling down on doing more of what we’re doing, but better. And so we’ve, I look at the tech drivers. To me it’s like my art like painting and doing things like I’m a horrible painter, but I’m I see my business as the artwork and like rolling out this service line item is a new stroke over here and whatever.
And so I look at the tech tribe as this crazy unfinished project. And lots of people look at it and go, Holy crap, how can you do all of that amazing stuff for that amount of money? And I’m like, Holy crap, we’re not doing hardly anything for what, compared to what I want to be doing for everybody and all this up in here.
So this year to me is all about getting far more of what’s in here out. Into ideas through building a bigger leadership team. And and a lot of that’s going to be marketing and growth focus, because that’s as you would both know, a very big pain point for our industry is how do I get more clients on like they’ve most MSPs are pretty.
Pretty good at the sales process. Like they’re good enough to close, uh, even the worst sales people that are good enough to close a semi decent percentage of deals, but getting leads to show up to your door is perennially like horrible for most MSPs and and to start those conversations.
So we’re going to be focusing a lot on that and. One of the things that we give out to all of our members as part of their membership, which we don’t actually advertise publicly at all, they find out after they join us as they get access to a full marketing and sales automation platform that we call growably, which is a white labeled version of high level, which is an amazing CRM platform out there.
And so all our members get access to that and we fill that up with marketing campaigns and everything for them every month. And this year we plan on five times in the quality and the amount of stuff that’s going in there as well. So that MSPs have loads and loads and loads of.
Of stuff to help them in their marketing journey. And all they need to do is just click a couple of buttons and it’s done for them. Everything. Once we throw it into that system, it’s already automatically branded as them. So the landing pages are branded as them and all the photos and the copy and the content and the colors and everything is all branded as them automatically through this system that we give them, which is super cool.
And they can do their email marketing and social media marketing and. And web marketing, all of that stuff, all the sales here and can all happen inside that system. And so we give that to all our members as a, an added free bonus as part of their tech drive membership. And this year we’re going to be tripling down on making that 10 times more valuable than what it currently is in there.
And just help MSPs get past that excuse of, I can’t get call that challenge and that pain point of, I can’t get clients with every step that we try to make is just. Trying to reduce the friction in the process for them to make it easier for them to get new clients in the door.
Rich: So Nigel, we we will include the now secret information about scale condo will no longer be.
Ever found this episode comes out in the show notes for folks in the audience who want to get in touch with you, want to learn more about the tech drive and membership, where should they go?
Nigel: The tech tribe. com that’s probably the easiest that’s everything’s there. Like every single person that’s joined us has just joined us through that one webpage on there.
We don’t have, cause it’s such a low price thing. We don’t have sales conversations or anything like that. It’s just, it makes, if you join up and it doesn’t make sense and you don’t like it. You can even ask us for a full refund and we’ll pay you, we call it our tribal, we’re being a bit silly, but we call it our tribal taco guarantee that if you join up with a tech tribe and you think it’s crap and you don’t want to be around.
We’ll give you your money back and we’ll give you an extra 20 to say so. So you can buy yourself a plate of tacos to say, sorry for wasting your time. We’ve fed three hungry people over the years since we’ve had that guarantee in place. But actually it might be four. I think I saw another one recently in the last few months.
But but yeah, like you just go to the tech tribe. com and you can find out everything from there. And and if you like it awesome, if not ask us for a plate of tacos.
Rich: Fantastic. It is great catching up with you. And Nigel, we’ve really only communicated electronically for a little while.
So good to see your face and hearing your voice. Thanks for joining us on the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Folks, Erick and I are going to take a break here. When we come back on the other side, we’ll share a few final thoughts about this great conversation with Nigel Moore of the Tech Tribe.
Have a little fun, wrap up the show, stick around. We are going to be right back.
All right, and welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat Podcast. Always informative, always fun, always a pleasure to catch up with Nigel. It’s been a little while. Since I’ve spoken with him. And so I really thank him for for making time with us. I’m glad we were able to find a time that works for him in Australia as well as us.
It was first thing in the morning for him. So I appreciate his joining us on the show. Lots and lots to chew over from that conversation, Erick. I think the [01:00:00] thing for me that was most interesting is when we were talking about, those revenue opportunities that MSPs can take advantage And it wasn’t about adding this service or charging more for that.
It was all that sort of low hanging fruit stuff in terms of cross selling services to existing clients and true upping. And it was just really interesting for me to hear you and Nigel go there first, there is the place to to augment the the top line that MSPs so often neglect.
Erick: Yeah, that was my favorite part of the conversation and what I keyed on. As well, rich, it’s just do what you’re supposed to do. Get the blocking and tackling done before you start getting distracted with all this other stuff. Let’s get let’s pick up that money that you’re leaving on the table right now and move forward.
But yeah, it’s always a pleasure catching up with Nigel, wherever. I happen to catch up with him. He’s just he’s really fun. The energy and the enthusiasm and I think he’s solved a bit of a work life balance it feels like to me.
Rich: Yeah. Yeah. No that’s a guy who goes surfing almost every morning.
And and still works really hard and yeah, you’re right.
Erick: Yep. Yep. Yeah. Great conversation. Looking forward to the next one we have with them. We’ll have tougher questions
Rich: until then, folks for this week, we have time for just one last thing. And this one comes to us from Antrim Township, Pennsylvania.
Now according to the most recent figures, I have seen Erick a dozen eggs on average in the United States right now is selling for about 4 and 15 cents. It’s just a touch more than that here in my hometown of Seattle, but that’s about what it’s obviously that’s not an amount of money that’s going to bankrupt anyone in our audience probably, but it’s a whole lot more than people are used to paying for eggs.
Bird flu is responsible for that that issue right now. So clearly eggs are more valuable than they have been in a long time, but I would not have guessed they are quite. This valuable that the people who would ordinarily be robbing armored cars, breaking into banks, what have you are stealing eggs in Antrim Township, Pennsylvania.
In fact, some criminals made off with 100, 000 eggs that they stole out of the back of a truck. I will not use the terrible pun that the media has used as of right now. The culprits have not been identified or apprehended, which is to say the police have not. Crack the case. Yeah, we’ll just move on from that obviously, but I, what do you do with 100, 000?
Are they selling those, but behind the bar, like, where do you how do you move? How do you offense 100, 000 eggs?
Erick: It is a time. It is a time sensitive conundrum, isn’t it? Because, that. These eggs, I remember back in another lifetime, Rich I worked at a large drugstore chain and we would stock groceries in a certain section and eggs and things like that.
And I remember the egg company that would show up and they would have the eggs on these racks. It wasn’t refrigerated. So there was a, they had to get it to us. But invariably, there were broken eggs, like all over this truck, like not every egg survives, especially when you’re trans, transporting it, right?
100, 000 eggs, hijacking 100, 000 eggs is a little bit of a messy proposition to begin with, but yeah, I don’t know what you do with 100, 000 eggs. Now, if we come back next show, Rich, and have a, last thing that talks about, the largest omelet ever made we’ll probably have a little bit of a clue as to what happened to those eggs.
Rich: All right. Until then, folks, we thank you so much for joining us this week on the MSP chat podcast. That’s all the time we’ve got for you. Even though Erick will be on the slopes when it airs, we will be back with you in one week’s time with another episode. Until then, I will just remind you that this is both a video and an audio podcast, which means if you’re listening to us right now, if you’d like to check us out on video, just go to YouTube, look up MSP chat, you will find us there.
If you are watching us on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, go to Google, Apple, Spotify, wherever it is. You get your podcast because you’re going to find us there too. And wherever you do find us, please subscribe, rate, review. It’s going to help other folks find 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’re part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered. They are ready, willing, and able to create a podcast for you. And podcasts are really, truly just a tiny sliver of what we do for our clients at Channel Mastered.
You can get the whole picture by visiting our website. www.channel mastered.com channel mastered has a sister business called MSP Mastered. That is Erick working directly with MSPs to grow and optimize their business. You can learn more about that at www.mspmaster.com. So once again, we thank you for [01:05:00] joining us.
We’ll see you in a week. Until then, ladies and gentlemen, please remember you can’t spell channel without MSP.
