MSP Chat Episode 01: Succeeding in AI and Managed Security

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In the very episode of a brand-new podcast, your hosts Erick Simpson and Rich Freeman explore the $158.6 billion channel opportunity in AI and how MSPs can leverage AI in their own businesses while minimizing risk. Then they speak with SonicWall global channel chief Michelle Ragusa-McBain about the top three strategies for succeeding in managed security. And finally, one last thing: the record-shattering $32,000 sale of some apparently very tasty Spanish bleu cheese.

Discussed in this episode:

Generative AI will be a US$158.6 billion opportunity for the channel ecosystem by 2028

Spanish cheese breaks world record in $32,000 auction

Machine Transcription Included Below:

Rich: [00:00:00] And 3, 2, 1. Blast off, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome. To the inaugural episode of MSP chat, your weekly visit with two talking heads talking with you about the strategies, success tips and services you need as an MSP to grow the business And stay ahead of the competition. My name is Rich Freeman. I am the chief content officer of channel mastered your host for this program and the company that’s responsible for this fine program.

I am joined by your co host also from channel mastered. He is my friend, my colleague, and our chief strategist channel mastered. His name is Erick Simpson. Erick, welcome to the show.

Welcome to the show yourself, Rich. We are back, baby. I just, I’m so excited. To be able to put on this great podcast with you my colleague friend business partner it’s just exciting to be back and to deliver the content that we feel Our audience is interested in throw a few tips out there Have a little bit of humor and have some really great interviews with some amazing guests So I can’t wait to get into today’s inaugural episode with you, Rich.

Rich: Totally agree, folks. You’re going to learn a few things, have a little fun along the way if we’re doing our job right. So thanks for tuning in. Let’s jump straight in, Erick, to our story of the week. And guess what? Surprise, people. It has to do with AI. Specifically some very interesting and rather sizable projections for the size of the generative AI market for service providers.

We’ll get to that in a second. Thanks. Hat tip to our mutual friend, Erick Dave Sobel of the Business of Tech podcast. He pointed me to some research I otherwise don’t think I would have seen. It’s from Constant Contact, and they recently went out to a whole bunch of small businesses and asked them, are you using AI, generative AI, are you getting results?

Of the businesses, the small businesses that are using AI, 91 percent of them say it has made their business more successful of the entire sample, all the businesses, including the one that’s not yet using AI over a quarter expect AI and automation to save them at least 5, 000. over the first 12 months that they’re using it.

But, and here’s the key thing, 74 percent of the surveyed small businesses are interested in using AI or automation in their business. 55% say their interest has grown in the last six months. Not a terribly big surprise there. But 46 percent say they have only a beginner’s understanding about the benefits of these technologies.

Erick, that screams Services opportunity. Obviously, they need someone like, say, an MSP to help them understand what this AI stuff is about and how they can put it to work. And how big an opportunity is there if you go ahead and be that I. T. Provider. Here’s some data from this week from canalis. The analyst organization there, they are predicting that generative AI, and mind you, this is just generative AI.

AI is a much bigger field, right? Generative AI alone will be a 158. 6 billion dollar opportunity for the channel ecosystem. By 2028. Now, the word ecosystem in there is important because the research covers MSPs and system integrators and bars as well as software makers and developers. So this is for anyone who is creating software or helping other people use it.

But the number one, they stack ranked the revenue opportunities and that 158%. Plus billion dollar opportunity. And the number one opportunity on the list is AI services. And this is the strategic guidance, what you need to do, how to use it, how to apply it to growing the bottom line. Number four on this top four list is reselling, co selling and upselling AI products from software developers who account for the number two and number three opportunities on the list.

So even if you’re not providing. strategic guidance, you have an opportunity to make money in AI. So what are they suggesting that you do, basically, Canalys, to get yourself ready? They have a four part list here. They said, start out by deciding where you’re going to play in that generative AI ecosystem.

Are you going to be the strategic advisor? Reseller, et cetera. Start accumulating expertise. Obviously, you need to study up before you’re ready to talk with the stuff about customers. And that means you’re going to want to partner up with somebody who can help you with that. Now, I’m [00:05:00] guessing for a lot of the folks in our audience, the logical candidate is Microsoft.

They are a leader in generative AI through the relationship with open AI. And I’m guessing everybody here is doing business with them anyway. Could be Google, could be somebody else, but find somebody who knows more about this than you do, who you partner with, draw on their resources and expertise to get the certifications and the skills you need, then go to market.

What do you think, Erick? Sounds like a pretty big opportunity.

It’s a huge opportunity, Rich. And, as I’m listening to those statistics, I’m reminded of, the before four times before the electrical grid, before the electrical grid was in place. And we’re talking, a hundred plus years ago, right?

The electric grid folks had, the story is the company that would bring you a block of ice to put in your, ice box. It was like delivering milk every day. They’d bring a block of ice, they’d haul it up, they’d put it in your ice box. And there was no electricity.

That’s how people kept stuff cold. And when the electric grid started to be a thing, like we’re going to light up everyone’s homes there, there’ll be light and electricity and there’ll be refrigerators and things like that. These folks that were delivering the ice to the ice box were threatened because they thought they would be out of a job.

The companies would be like, Oh my goodness. Our whole business model is topsy turvy. What they didn’t realize was by deploying the electrical grid, it spurred such innovation. It created industries, it created companies, it created all the things that plug into your electrical socket. That’s what the electrical grid produced.

It tremendously accelerated the growth of entrepreneur ism and businesses and, services. And this is what this reminds me of. We have a lot of this, FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt about AI. Oh, people are going to lose their jobs. We’re going to be out of work. It’s going to replace, this segment of workers.

And I heard a really smart person say a few months ago. The only people that are going to lose their jobs to AI are the folks that aren’t getting in on the AI opportunity, right? So skill up, get those, tune yourself up and then help others help as MSPs helping clients navigate this and really understand the value proposition and pivot.

You’re MSPs. You’ve seen lots of products and services come and go. Some stay and some don’t, but we’re talking about managed IT service. Holy cow. What a revolution that was, right? Rich. We’re talking about cloud. What a revolution. People have the same FUD. About cloud. I remember very clearly being at a Microsoft worldwide partner conference when they announced what they were doing and the partners lost their minds.

Oh my goodness. You’re going to sell this and sell it directly. And yes, but you have to pivot the world changes. Take advantage of these opportunities. AI is such a huge opportunity backed by the data that you just shared with us. Rich. And it’s one of those things where it’s different than anything we’ve ever seen.

We the early adopters will be the most successful. We’re already seeing, I’m already seeing this industry taking off. There are tons and tons of. Online training courses. There are consultants. There are coaches that will teach you how to Leverage ai in your business and guess what? Not a lot of them are msps Yet.

Rich: Yeah, you know a few really important points there, Erick and you know the people the only people in it who really need to be afraid of generative AI are the ones who don’t adapt to it, obviously. If you stubbornly insist on staying in the ICE delivery business, this is going to be bad news for you.

If you do adapt and figure out how to profit from this technology, it’s going to be a huge source of revenue for you. And I agree very much with what you said. That there is a first mover advantage here. I think a lot of MSPs are probably in the same boat as those small businesses. Constant contact talked about trying to figure out how do I put this to work exactly?

And the time to start fixing that issue and coming up with answers to that question is now. And by the way, something else that canalis points out. Is you as an MSP, you can put generative AI to work in your business, running your business more efficiently and more profitably, and that right there is a great way to get started and begin to see how this stuff works in action.

Put it to work for yourself. You can show off. for your clients when you’re ready to meet with them. Here’s what we’re doing. Isn’t this amazing? So get started now, talk to the people who know more about it than you do, and you’re going to be good. Now, speaking of being good Erick, it’s time for [00:10:00] your tip of the week.

And I believe this has to do with AI as

well. That’s right, Rich. We’re going to stick with the theme of today’s show and it’s all about AI. So how to leverage AI. And minimize the risk. So we’ve just heard everybody, how much of an opportunity there is and how we need to pivot to continue to grow in our own businesses and to add value to our client’s businesses being much more strategic.

And so I just want to share a couple of ways that we’re using AI. And then share some ideas for you and your MSP practice. Right now we’re leveraging generative AI for sure. And some of the Adobe products that we are using to manipulate images and things like that. And we expect generative AI to grow across image editing software, just like it’s growing across other platforms.

Our vendors are integrating AI into their software stacks, into their solutions. MSP should be looking at ways not only to help improve efficiency by leveraging either AI itself to integrate and simplify processes, but also looking at other platforms and other strategic vendors that are leveraging this technology to help us reduce our costly labor burden costs.

And so how can we do more with less? How can we leverage? AI to simplify our service delivery. Another way that we’re using AI is in our sales process. So we are taking sales sales, copy sales ideas. websites and we’re running them through AI platforms to try to improve. And we’re using them in several different AI platforms.

We’re using chat GPT, which is open AI. We use copy. ai as well. We’re also leveraging in Microsoft’s edge, the Bing AI because it does crawl websites. So we’re, and sometimes we’ll use the same prompt rich. In all these different platforms, and they’ll each come up with a little bit different perspective.

And then what’s nice about AI is you can tweak the prompt and say, Hey, rewrite this from this perspective, or rewrite this and add this and continue to work that. I remember how long it took me in another, Lifetime to write content and copy because and the majority of it wasn’t the time It took to write it and you can speak to this rich.

It was the time to do the research And just try to find sources of data and opinions and things like that. With AI, we’re crawling the internet with some of these AI platforms and bringing that stuff back. And then, like I said, because we’re using multiple platforms, we’re picking and choosing what we think is valuable.

And then we’re adding that the part that AI can’t provide, it’s the human perspective and humanizing that content. And not leveraging as it as just a way to produce content and copy and then just roll with it. The danger here is you begin to lose your voice and your brand moving forward. Leveraging that and then.

Evaluating how you would then rewrite what AI is doing. And that saves a lot of time as well. And then of course, we’re also leveraging it tremendously in our marketing and our marketing activities. We’re posting social media posts and we’re grabbing data from different places and we’re putting it through AI and we’re saying, Hey, review this article or this post.

Give me, three bullet points and summarize it for me and then focus it in this manner. And what’s cool about AI Rich is you can tell it how to behave at the very beginning. You can create a brand voice for yourself. You can create a persona. You can have multiple personas. I am a marketing expert and I’m looking to achieve this and now you’ve built out that persona that reflects that or my, or you can have a company.

brand voice and say, write it in the brand voice of my company. And you’ve typed into AI what your mission, vision and values are, what your value proposition is, services that you deliver. And then you can also point it to things that you’ve written. Like I’ll send it out to crawl the blog posts that I’ve written, and then it will help generate.

That brand voice and write, it’s not going to write just like me or you, rich. Come on now. But it’ll get us, maybe if it does 20 percent of the work, then it takes less editing and less tweaking for us to actually deliver the message that we want to deliver. And again, saving us a ton of research and comparing different things.

from the old manual way we used to do things.

Rich: A few thoughts on that. Great stuff. First of all, you mentioned tools like ChatGPT and CopyAI, which we’re using very successfully at [00:15:00] at Channel Mastered. But and this won’t be news to most folks in our audience, but AI is showing up.

Everywhere. Basically, I do just a little bit of work in WordPress for the channel mastered website and quite recently, the ability to just generate content through AI has been added to that tool right now. So you’re going to find AI capabilities in a lot of the different systems that you use. Look for that experiment with that.

Find ways that actually makes sense for you to accelerate processes. And help you get more stuff done more quickly. In particular the RMM tools are beginning to incorporate some AI functionality. We’re gonna see more and more of this happen. That process, I think, will be a little bit slower.

Then with some of the tools we talked about, because you’ve got to be really careful when you’re putting AI in contact with anything that is in turn in contact with the end user environment. But for scripting purposes ConnectWise RMM tools have had that built in for months at this point.

Can save you a ton of time. You should be looking at that. And then the other thing I want to reinforce, Erick, and this kind of goes back to what we were talking about in connection with the story of the week is thinking about as you’re learning how to use these A. I. Tools in your business so that, as I was saying before, among many other things, you can show Some of this to your customers is examples of ways these technologies can be put to work.

Think about where your unique value ad is. You were talking about that human element that comes on top of what the A. I can do. In my field, I could theoretically use copy dot a I to just do my writing for me, but the writing would sound like it came from a I and the depth and the originality of the content Would sound like something that AI produced my value ad is my voice which AI can recreate up to a point But also what I know About the channel about the industry so that’s what I have to focus on to make sure I don’t get driven out of business by AI in the years going forward you As an MSP, you have to be thinking about all the work that you do today that could potentially be automated at some point within the next two, three, four years.

Where is your unique value add? And if some of that, for example, is in helping businesses forge and implement AI strategies, that’s not going to be something that ChatGPT can do for you anytime soon. That’s going to require some expertise only you have. So be looking for that. While you’re looking for ways to put a I to work,

right?

And just a couple of, thoughts to tag on. The if you rely completely on a I to do your writing, which we are not recommending, we’re recommending the opposite. It is a tool right to help save you time and to give you the data quickly and to give you options and different directions where you can put that stuff together.

But if you happen to leverage a I too much, let’s say, for instance, It’s going to hurt you in terms of SEO on the internet. So if you’re writing blog posts and things like that, and you think, Oh boy, I’m just going to set up, these prompts and I’m going to run them and I’m going to scan these websites and it’ll just generate it for me.

And I, and you start posting that. The search engines will begin to penalize you because they can identify what AI writes like and sounds like. Now they’re trying to, overcome this. The AI is trying to get even smarter, right? To become to pass the Turing test, Rich. But right now we don’t typically recommend that.

The other point that comes to mind is, again, getting past this fear, uncertainty and doubt we’ve got a real problem in our industry right now in terms of the tech shortage. It’s tough for us to find and hire good quality technicians and engineers. And in some cases, rich, it’s hard for us to hold on to our existing technicians and engineers because they’re getting, poached and getting offers from somewhere else.

And we’ve talked about this on other shows previously, rich, where. It’s sometimes it’s not the money finally gets a really good technician or engineer to leave. Sometimes it’s just the sprawl. of applications and platforms that we’re asking them to manage in order to deliver great service to our clients.

Sometimes it’s the many vendors that we have to deal with and things like that. So again, leveraging AI from the perspective of how do I start minimizing that sprawl? How do I start looking at platforms and services and solutions where AI. Can actually reduce the cost of labor and allow me to be more profitable to reward my existing team to keep them and to keep them happy and to show them that we’re moving in a very strategic business growth direction and then delay the time that we, that it takes to hire.

new staff so that we can take care of our existing team. I think that’s a huge value proposition. And then as we learn how to do that for [00:20:00] our own organizations, then those conversations with existing clients and prospects about how we can help them in, transition in this journey, it’s just the S it’s the same conversation with a different topic.

Then we have with clients when we’re trying to get them to move toward the cloud or to strengthen their cyber security posture or to stop, paying reactively for emergency services and sign a managed I. T. Services agreement, where maintenance is always cheaper than reactive firefighting.

Right, Rich?

Rich: Absolutely. Absolutely. You know what, Erick? I think that was multiple really strong tips of the week. Erick. packed in there into one conversation about A. I. So fantastic stuff is usual. Thank you very much for that. Erick, when people aren’t talking about A. I. These days, what’s the other thing they always want to talk about?

Security, of course, that’s what we’re going to talk about next in the next part of the show here, but not with just anybody. We are privileged to be joined by Michelle Ragusa McBain. She is the global channel chief It’s SonicWall, and she’s going to get into three very specific ways the MSPs in our audience can build a successful managed security practice.

We’re going to talk about that with her coming up right after the break. Stick around. We’ll be right back.

All right, and welcome back to the MSP chat podcast for our spotlight interview of the week. IDC expects global I. T. And business services spending to go up 5. 2 percent this year. They’re looking for spending on security services worldwide to go up by 11 percent more than twice as much.

There is no hotter quarter in security right now than managed security. But what are the secrets? What are the keys to building and running a successful managed security practice? Here to share three specific actionable ideas on that topic with us is somebody who knows a ton about managed services and security.

She is Michelle Ragusa McBain the Vice President of North American Channels at SonicWall, and we are really pleased to have her with us. Welcome, Michelle.

Thank you so much, rich Erick. I’m so happy to be with you all today. It’s very exciting times and very exciting topic.

Rich: Yeah, absolutely. Before we dive in tell folks a little bit about yourself and about this role of yours at Sonic.

I stumbled over the title because you’ve only been there a little while.

Yes, no, it’s true. And depending on when this launches, we might some have some more exciting news for you as well. I’ve been in the technology channel for 18 years. And I’ve been in various roles in companies, including Cisco office depot during the CompuCom acquisition.

I was a consultant with JS group, working with various vendors and partners and distributors. And now I am very delighted to be at SonicWall leading their channel strategy. With amazing partners around the world. We have great opportunities, a great company, and I like to say, there’s never been a better time to be a SonicWall partner, and it’s not just because of me, I’m happy to be a part of it.

Congratulations on all that success, Michelle. We’re just so glad and happy to have you on our podcast today. As Rich mentioned, we’re going to talk about three managed security success tips and get your feedback on those. So I’m going to start with the first one. So let’s talk a little bit about.

The value of focusing on a specific targeted market for managed security, knowing your niche. And what the value is on the benefits compared to just a shotgun approach selling to everyone. What are your thoughts? Yeah, no, that’s a great conversation. This is coming off of the heels of, I was just in the it nation pitch at competition.

And I talked a little bit about this with some of the people there. So I’ve been a vendor most of my life in various ways. Engineering is how I started my career sales operations, marketing channels. And the one thing that remains true. to everybody, whether in sales or marketing or engineering, you have to know who your persona, your targeting is.

You have to know what your company’s why is, and you have to figure out how to marry the two of those things together. And it sounds easy theoretically, but when I was a consultant, I met with a lot of MSPs and I’d say, okay, tell me, what do you sell? And who do you sell it to? And they’d say, I sell all the things to all the people in all the world.

And you’re like, wow that narrows it down. Let’s get a little more laser specific and focused in that. And so in order to look at the big picture, you have to say, okay, maybe my sweet spot is in a midsize clinics in upstate New York, or maybe I’m really good in the education vertical.

Because I really [00:25:00] understand this demographic and we understand their complexities and their pain points and their needs. And we have the right products and the right solution and the right service capability. To lean towards what they need and help them give them peace of mind and reduce their stress and anxiety as they’re making decisions because we’re their trusted advisor.

I say after covid every company is now a technology company, which also leads to the fact that there’s many different types of decision makers. And I’ve seen this evolution from cold calling back in the day and call blitzes and Asking people for their IT director or their CIO to now marketing is making technology decisions and sales is making technology decisions operations making technology decisions and the local pizzeria wants technology in their office and professional service insurance companies need information and protection and, especially in the cyber security space.

with fiduciary responsibilities and banking verticals and HIPAA compliance and medical verticals. There’s a lot of complexity and there’s a lot of noise and clutter. And if you don’t know who you are, it’s very hard to differentiate yourself from the competition. So to start with the end in mind, What problems are you solving and for who you’re solving them and who are you best at doing that for?

And then you need to really be very prescriptive at looking at the segment size, the industry type, the vertical type, the geographic type. Is it that you can do things You know, maybe in Florida, say, for example, or Metro New York City, or maybe you’re a national company and you’re really good at doing that because you have the right coverage and capacity and you can meet those needs or you have the right partnerships and you could fill gaps.

So I think That’s the biggest thing that most companies really need to just level set day one. Who do I want to be? What do I want to grow into? And depending on your age or stage, maybe who do I need to like laser focus on? Because if I’m not, if I’m half good at everything, I’m good at nothing.

So you’re much better off being an expert in something than a jack of all trades sometimes.

Rich: So you touched on differentiation there. So now we know who we’re selling to but now let’s figure out a little bit or talk a little bit about why they should buy from you and differentiation, I think, is very much core to your thinking about that.

So what advice can you offer the audience about standing out differentiating themselves in what is, a relatively crowded market for managed security?

Yeah, no, that’s a great question. Okay, so let’s take it back high level and I’m a vendor in a cyber security industry that has 4300 cyber security vendors in it, right?

That’s a lot of noise. That could be a lot of competition. How do you stand out? That’s a great question. Sometimes You have the benefit of like in our case at SonicWall being a 32 year trusted vendor with best in class products, right? That’s helps, but say you’re new to the game and you haven’t really laid out that foundation or roadmap for yourself.

How do you differentiate yourself? So as you go through that motion, you have to say a few things. One, what’s in it for them. Don’t think about yourself. Everybody wants to lead with product. And all things created equal, your products might be fairly similar. You should know the key differentiators and what makes yours that much better than the other person’s and how you integrate better and how you scale better and how you can support better and what your roadmap for the future looks like.

So product is very important, but it’s not the only thing people buy on. People buy on the ability for you to have simple ways to do business with. For you to really support and enable them, and also for them to trust you. They want trusted advisor. There’s a lot of people coming at them, trying to win their business, trying to win their mindshare.

Your relationship, that old adage, people buy from people they like, it’s really critical, and part of what I just talked about was elevating your brand and elevating your business. Because this is not a job for somebody that you hire, but also if you’re a business owner, you’re the principal of the company you’re an engineer in the company or sales marketing of the company, you reflect the company, each of you, holistically, are the brand of the company.

Are you portraying your brand in ways that provides insight, expertise, thought leadership? Do you have a blog? Do you post content on LinkedIn? Are you writing articles? Are you doing podcasts? Are you having webinars? Do you have customer testimonials? Is there ways that you’re sharing your brand? To help, if you looked at your whole partner database right now, you probably have the same customers that have the same problems over and over again in different ways.

And if [00:30:00] you can be proactive to share how you can help them, how some of these very common problems that happen, you can remedy them before they even become a problem. You’re Wayne Gretzky. Now you’re skating to where the puck is going. So these are the ways that you have to think about your business.

It’s more than. It’s more than just one piece. It’s an integrated kind of three legs of the stool. So what does my product roadmap look like? What is the voids I’m filling? How am I simplifying the complexities that my customer is experiencing? But then how am I communicating that? How am I marketing it?

How am I branding it? And how am I sharing that so that they can think of me when a thought comes up like, Oh, this is a problem. The first person they think of? Is this person, is this team, is this company that is a big differentiation and that’s built on the relationship, the rapport and the brand of the company and the people in it.

Wow. That’s a great tip number two, Michelle very well positioned the distinction and differentiation that MSPs, have a harder time struggling with now, because there are so many competitors out there. I’d like to ask you about a third tip that Is adjacent to the differentiation.

And it’s, not about how we present ourselves and market ourselves specifically, but how we position our services now, as we become more mature organizations, To attract larger, more strategic clients in terms of selling business outcomes rather than technical or technology outcomes. Can you touch on that?

Yeah, that’s a great, that’s a great talking point right there. So I think Many traditional partners you’ve got to the value added reseller motion. I’m going to sell you a key strategic products. And then maybe in two years, when we’re going to have an end of life or a refresh, we’re going to put a new products to help you drive your business.

And now you have the managed service provider and the managed service security provider saying, we’re going to work with you month over month, quarter of a quarter, year over year. If you don’t hear from me, that’s probably a good thing, but you probably want to know why you’re paying me and the value that I’m providing.

And so thinking about that, the outcomes that you’re driving, you really need to understand some of the pain points and the layers of security that are so vital. We look at, Cyber attacks. There was a cyber attack every 39 seconds. How many cyber attacks just happened while we were speaking so far?

There’s a ransomware attack every 14 seconds. We all know it’s not if, but when. When will you be attacked by that bad actor, that cyber criminal that’s taking advantage of your customers? And how do you keep yourself and your customers safe and protected? What vendor relationships, what partnership, what’s in your stack to allow you to cover all of those layers of security from network to client control to end client to cloud capture, like all of these disparate layers that are so important and pivotal and sometimes Your customers just don’t know what they don’t know.

So as new trends are happening, as new types of crime is happening in the cyber community, it is so important that you are keeping them up and running and safe and protected and keeping their customers confidential information secure. There’s a, I think the statistic is if an SMB customer is attacked in a cyber crime, that 60 percent of them go out of business.

So that’s a huge. Outcome. And so what does it mean for them? If you can do these things for them and you can drive a bigger picture, I’m not just selling you a firewall. I’m selling you the outcome of keeping you safe and protected up and running, keeping your clients safe, making sure that nobody goes out of business on my watch.

That is a bigger vision that you’re going to have with them. And you have to do that by constantly being ahead of the curve, being in the know of who’s where the landscape is taking you. And so that’s why again, I echo that thought leadership, the people you partner with, I’ll think of come to you.

I sell as an example. I think of all of the great work that many CISOs have done, like Ryan Weeks and Wes Spencer and all these people that have come together for the good of the community, because it wasn’t vendor specific. If a cyber crime happens in the technology channel community, it impacts everybody.

And so we all have to roll up our sleeves. and help each other to make sure we have the right people, the right partnerships, the right programs, the right capabilities to make sure that doesn’t happen. And in order to sell your service and or charge more for your service, or charge the right amount, because sometimes people undervalue what they’re worth and they don’t realize the importance of finding out that pricing or [00:35:00] that packaging.

But if you can sell the outcome of what you’re doing, there’s no intangible amount that you could give to a customer that says, wow, I really want to make sure that I don’t have this negative impact. And therefore what you’re doing for me is so invaluable that it’s worth every penny. And that’s a different place to be at with your customers.

Then I sold them a product.

Rich: I love it. Reliably outstanding stuff as usual. Michelle, thank you so much for that. Before we go for anyone in the audience who wants to reach out to you, learn more about you, or get in touch with SonicWall where would you point them?

Yeah, so you can email me directly mragusa, r a g u s a at sonicwall.

com. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I love to connect. And if you’re going to be at an upcoming event, there’s a few that I’m attending. I’d love to see you there. Coming up soon come to your channel con. I will be there. I’ll also be at Taylor Business Group. I’ll be at build it and a few other events that we’re working on DattoCon and IT Nation.

So if you’re going to be there, I’d love to connect with you. Let’s grab a coffee or a cocktail and talk about how we can help drive your success.

Rich: So Erick and I are going to hold you to the coffee swipe cocktail invitation there because we’re going to be at Channel Con too in just a few weeks and we’re looking forward to seeing you there.

Until then, Michelle, again, thank you so much for making time and joining us here today. So folks, we are going to take another break and then we’re going to go into the closing segment of the show. So stick around, there’s more to come.

And welcome back to the final part of this episode of the MSP chat podcast. Always a pleasure speaking with Michelle Erick. What I really loved about that conversation is that even though we’re talking with the global channel chief from SonicWall, she’s not talking about SonicWall products.

This really was business level advice that anyone, regardless of who they partner with can put to work. And I thought it was three really good practical ideas based on her experience. She obviously has a ton of experience working with MSPs. I thought it was three really good, solid suggestions for how to build and grow that managed security practice.

Yeah, I appreciated her perspective and, willingness to go down these discussion paths with us because at the end of the day, she has a tremendous wealth of experience and expertise in the channel working with MSPs, as you said, Rich. And, what better guests to have on that aligns with kind of the vision of our podcast, right?

It’s delivering really good information, advice, and guidance to MSPs and IT business owners to help them navigate the sometimes challenging path to growth in our industry.

Rich: Absolutely agree. And you can expect more conversations like that in future episodes of MSP Chat. Erick, before we go, though, we have time for one last thing.

And this particular one last thing this week comes to us from Spain has to do with a 4 point Eight pound wheel of blue cheese that sold at auction recently there to a restaurant owner in Spain for, get this, a little over 32, 000, Erick. By my reckoning, that’s 422 an ounce for this blue cheese here.

And by the way, that shatters the previous record. There was a a similarly sized wheel of blue cheese that sold for a mere 22, 000 in 2019. We’re getting up there over 32, 000 now. I would say, Erick, you want to choose your cracker carefully if you’re going to put a 422 ounce bit of blue cheese on top of it.

And which wine do you choose to compliment that? It can’t just be any wine. It’s gotta be up to the level of that experience. What boy, I tell you rich the things that people spend money on.

Rich: Yeah and maybe the answer to your question is a 32, 000 bottle of wine. Go for it.

Make it a 64, 000 appetizer plate. Folks, that is all the time we have this week. Thank you so much for joining us. We’re going to be back again next week with another episode. You can find us on video at YouTube you can get the audio only version of this podcast at Google, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, pretty much anywhere else.

You get your podcast, go out and look for us, and when you find us at any of those destinations, please rate and review. It’s a very young show. This is really going to help other people out there who will benefit from it discover the show. You can learn more about Channel Mastered at www.

channelmastered. com. That is one word. If you are [00:40:00] curious to check out my blog, my SMB channel blog, it’s called Channelholic. That’s available at www. channelholic. news. Thanks very much to Russ Johns our producer here. You can learn more about him at russjohns. com. Once again, folks, we’re gonna be back again next week.

Thank you so much for joining us until then. Please remember, you can’t spell channel without M S P.