SMB Community Podcast

New Year's means one thing in business: Tax Season! My good friend Rayanne Buchianico joined me to talk about "all things tax" for 2018. We started off talking about 1099s and other reporting requirements. One of the interesting points Rayanne made is that some pieces of the process are not really required – at least not the way most of us think. This 30 minute interview covers taxes for sole prop...

My friend and one-time business coach Josh Peterson has agreed to run a new set of Peer Teams – based on the "Managed Services in a Month" approach to managed services. I hope you're not too surprised to learn that Josh and I have very similar ideas about most things. Many of you have seen Josh speak at conferences or taken his classes from Bering McKinley or over at Great Little Seminar . This 30...

My friend Brooke Ferguson decided to try running her business from Thailand. That was ten years ago and she's still going strong. Brooke is a Lifestyle and Business Coach. Talk about drinking the Kool-Aide! She started with a three month stint to see if she could really run her business abroad. Then she realized that not only *could* she, but she also thrived. That's when she realized that she nev...

Josh Peterson has been a friend and mentor to me for many years. I am happy to interview him about his company and what he's up to. Josh is the co-founder Bering McKinley, a consulting firm for MSP's and IT Solution Providers. He has been in the IT Solution Provider arena for the last 15 years. First as an owner, then as a management consultant with Taylor Business Group for 8 years, and now as fo...

Lisa Hendrickson Lisa Hendrickson is "Call That Girl" – an Office 365 and Outlook specialist. In this 30 minute interview we cover her business strategy, supporting O365, migrating email to the cloud, SEO blogging, and much more. Lisa has grown a thriving business serving several audiences. She created the business to serve end users. But over time she's found herself helping I.T. consultants figu...

Mark Smith is the Executive VP of EH Media, publisher of ChannelPro magazine, as well as CEPro, Commercial Integrator, Security Sales and Integration. In a former life, Mark founded Windows NT magazine. As I've mentioned in several settings, I'm a big believer that all the really fast-moving technologies are merging and adding TCP/IP into their offering. The key to success, of course, is to add re...

Harry Brelsford is the founder of SMB Nation. In this interview Harry announces a new Marketing as a Service platform called Pivot. We talk about marketing and analytics in the SMB community – and a lot more. See http://SMBNation.com/pivot . Harry stresses that modern marketing requires analytics. You are wasting money if you just do a little SEO and buy Google ads. In addition, there are lots of...

Manuel Palachuk (yes, we're related) is a business coach, author, and trainer. This week he announced the launch of the MSP Pro Acedemy – a training and certification site for managed service providers and IT Professionals of all sizes. More details at www.mspproacademy.com . In addition to launching the academy, Manuel has started an Indiegogo campaign to speed up the release of the first course...

Debbie Leoni is my life coach. I thought it would be useful to introduce her to the SMB IT community. I get questions about why I have a life coach coach and how that's different from a business coach. I hope this interview answers those questions. You can learn more about Debbie from her web site at www.debbieleoni.com . You can also connect with her on Facebook. She has some great Facebook "Live...

I had a great chat with Kendra Lee on the subject of Hiring and Managing Your First Sales Person. We talked about writing ads, choosing a "hunter," setting goals, and managing them through the first year. It was a great discussion. You can learn more at http://www.klagroup.com . You'll find Kendra's blog there as well. If you're interested, you can request a free half-hour consultation with her. C...

You know I'm all about SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures). So I was happy to talk to Raj Goel about his "SOP Culture" project. He has defined a series of SOPs for I.T. Professionals. They are available on a subscription basis. Check out the interview here: This interview is about half an hour. Links mentioned in the video are linked below. Audio Listen to the Podcast . Links mentioned in this po...

I had a great talk with Rayanne Buchianico yesterday. We covered Sell My MSP, QuickBooks, important reports to run for your business, and the next course she's teaching over at Great Little Seminar in October. Here's the video: Audio Listen to the Podcast . Links mentioned in this podcast: Robert Crane's Blog: http://blog.ciaops.com/2016/09/azure-site-recovery-is-cool.html Andy Parkes' Blog: http:...

I interviewed with Dave Seibert from SMB TechFest about the Fall show. This event is held four times per year in Anaheim, CA. This is always a good event. And this year, I'm pairing it up with my 12th Annual Fall Seminar . More about that on a future podcast. Audio Listen to the Podcast . Links mentioned in this podcast: The Need to Know Podcast (Robert Crane) http://blog.ciaops.com/ How to Manage...

We're kicking off a whole new podcast series here at SMB Community Podcast. So subscribe today so you don't miss a thing. We're going to be doing a series of "video call" podcasts of about 30 minutes each. These will be recorded as both a Video and as an Audio download. So you can decide whether you want to watch or just listen. To kick off the new series, I talked with Amy Babinchak from Third Ti...

I had a great conversation with Alistair Forbes, the new Managing Director of SolarWinds MSP (formerly the General Manager at LogicNow). In case you missed the news yesterday, SolarWinds MSP bought LogicNow . LogicNow CEO Walter Scott now becomes the Executive Vice President of Solarwinds MSP. And Dave Sobel retains his title as Senior Director of Partner Community and Field Marketing. I exchanged...

Final report from SMB Nation 2015. My guests here are Patrick Houston from Biz Tech Xperts and Rich Maddalena from LogicTree IT. Patrick Houston Patrick Houston is the co-founder and editor at Biz Tech Xperts (see www.biztechxperts.com ) – Note: Not experts – xperts. BizTechXperts.com is a site for end user clients to come and ask questions. The site pairs you up with people looking for answers. Y...

The first person I grabbed at SMB Nation was Robert Crane from CIA Ops – CIAOPS.com . Robert presented a great demonstration on using live data to create meaningful information for clients. Robert Crane Microsoft's PowerBI is a business intelligence. Robert showed how to analyze data from a variety of sources. Once you have an Office 365 login, you can add this product and it will be just another...

Report One from SMB Nation 2015. Featuring Nick East from Zynstra and Dave Seibert from SMB TechFest. Nick East Last year Zynstra ( www.zynstra.com ) pretty much dominated SMB Nation with demos. This year Nick East announced that Zynstra is now distributed both through Ingram's cloud program and through D&H. In fact, they were at the show with D&H ( www.dandh.com ). If you're interested in finding...

At the Business Solutions Channel Transitions event in Chicago (two weeks ago), I caught up with Randy Clark from Mercury. Mercury is a payment processor. Think credit cards. Pretty much everyone takes credit cards. Everyone who has clients that trust them has the potential to sell credit card processing. Randy Clark – Mercury Pay In this interview, Randy talks about getting started as well as the...

Mike Monocello Mike Monocello Mike Monocello is the editor-in-chief of Business Solutions magazine, a monthly publication dedicated to helping IT solutions providers grow their businesses by selling complementary technologies and moving into thriving markets. We talked about building recurring revenue models, technology, and business. Mike has to come up with new articles for a variety of readers...

One of the coolest things I've ever seen at a conference is a "Visual Practitioner" summarizing the event via large scale drawings. I talked to Jackie Forbes at the recent MAX 2015 conference. She is with Drawn to Learn ( www.drawntolearn.co.uk ). Her background is in meeting facilitation, so she has good skills around picking out the important points of the day. Here's a picture of the drawings s...

Back at the vendor hall . . . I talked to four folks about taking your business to the next level. Two of them are directly in sales and marketing (helping you with S&M), one who helps you generate reports to make more sales, and an industry organization you should absolutely be involved with. Ken Goldstein is with Choice Technologies. They are an MSP with a successful sales process – and they're...

While in DC for the MAX 2015 conference, I wandered down to the vendor hall. Of course I took my trusty recorder along for the stroll. Here are three quick interviews with vendors I met. Carl Banzhof from iScanOnline talked about "data breach intelligence." Basically, they use a host-based agent to search for sensitive data. In addition to the places where you know you have data (e.g., the databas...

I always love working with Joe Panettieri. He's a very smart guy, very fun to talk to, and totally tuned into the channel. So I had to grab him for a quick podcast when I saw him in DC this week. Joe Penettieri at MAX Joe and his partner Amy Katz run After Nines, Inc., a consulting company. And they've been working on a new project. In fact, they're going to announce it and launch in a few days. I...

I love the ChannelPro SMB Forums. There's always something new and different going on. Even the panels change from city to city. Here's a quick report from the ChannelPro SMB Forum in Chicago last week. You can still sign up for the last show of the year – November 3rd in New York / New Jersey. See http://events.channelpronetwork.com for more details. In this podcast, I interview Erick Simpson and...