SMB Community Podcast

This SMB Community Podcast is the fifth in a six-part series entitled Take Control and the Customer Experience, with Dave Sobel, Senior Director of MSP Evangelism at SolarWinds MSP. In this episode, we touch on many features of the Take Control tool designed to help you improve and manage the Customer Experience with your technology consulting business. Some of these features are built in (and con...

This SMB Community Podcast is the fourth in a six-part series entitled Episode IV: A New Hope for Security, with Dave Sobel, Senior Director of MSP Evangelism at SolarWinds MSP. As you might imaging, the Take Control application from SolarWinds MSP has lots of security built in. In particular, we talk about all the little security-related details that many people don't worry about. This includes s...

This SMB Community Podcast is the third in a six-part series entitled Successfully Implement Your Cloud Service Bundle, with Dave Sobel, Senior Director of MSP Evangelism at SolarWinds MSP. For six episodes, we're talking about how to get the most out of your remote control tools – and make more money. I really wanted to include this discussion of implementing cloud services in this podcast series...

This SMB Community Podcast is the second in a six-part series entitled Break-Fix vs. Managed Services, with Dave Sobel, Senior Director of MSP Evangelism at SolarWinds MSP. For six weeks, we'll be talking about how to get the most out of your remote control tools – and make more money. Right off the bat, you might think that Dave and I would wave our hands and dismiss Break/Fix as a business model...

This SMB Community Podcast is the first in a six-part series entitled Remote Control Deep Dive: Build and Grow Your Business, with Dave Sobel, Senior Director of MSP Evangelism at SolarWinds MSP. For the next six weeks, we'll be talking about how to get the most out of your remote control tools – and make more money. Here, Dave talks about the core features of the SolarWinds MSP's Take Control too...

This SMB Community Podcast features my brother Manuel, discussing his new Agile Service Delivery philosophy and training. Basically, Agile Service Delivery applies the principles of "agile" to the industry of managed services. As Manuel says, we stop managing people and start managing the work. One of the big weaknesses of old-school service delivery is that MSPs are taught to schedule, schedule,...

This SMB Community Podcast features Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe . Topics include his community, crazy selling prices for MSPs, and a great discussion about building culture within your IT business. I always enjoy talking to Nigel. I met him just over ten years ago and am happy to still be doing things together. Of course a person can only take so many trips across the ocean in a year, so we do...

Jennifer Fields of Astek Marketing has been helping out with my SMB Roadshows this year. She implements marketing programs for managed service providers. Jennifer has been helping MSPs for more than five years. She'll help you build a list, clean it, pre-approve it, and "warm" it so that people know who you are when you contact them. If you've purchased a marketing program such as Robin Robins' Te...

I had a great interview with Josh Peterson of Bering McKinley ( https://beringmckinley.com ) about the state of our industry and what small IT consultants need to be paying attention to. Our first topic was actually unplanned. We just started talking about what we're seeing as we travel around the country and meet MSPs. What we're both seeing is a frenzy of M&A (mergers and acquisitions), fueled b...

Stephanie Chandler is a long-time friend and mastermind partner. We are happy to announce our first book project together – The Nonfiction Book Publishing Plan . Between us, we have almost thirty books. But Stephanie also runs Authority Publishing, so she has experience publishing many more books, focused on almost any audience you can think of. You can learn more about Stephanie on her Speaker Pa...

Frank Bravata is a technology expert, serial entrepreneur, public speaker, best-selling author, podcaster and Veterans' supporter. He works as a business technology coach assisting companies all over the country to fuel their explosive growth through technology and digital marketing. He is also the president of MSP Speakers, a training firm dedicated to assisting MSPs to become the authority in th...

Gil Cargill is a sales trainer and coach. In this interview he talks about the importance of business-focused communication during sales calls. Too many technicians thing clients care about technology. They don't. They care about how you can improve their profit, improve their productivity, or help with cashflow. Gil gives some great tips on how to get the conversation started, and to get the pros...

James Kernan is a business, "success," and sales coach. He has owned and built some very successful managed service companies. This SMB Community Podcast with James Kernan covers "Gamification" within Your MSP. How do you motivate employees, make their job fun, and improve your success? Coach James Kernan gives you his best tips. This includes his five points to keep in mind as you look to "gamify...

Doug Hazelman is the VP of Technical Marketing at Cloudberry. We talked about Cloudberry's cloud backup options as well as their managed service reseller program. (I didn't know their cloud agents could be deployed with many RMM tools.). About Doug Hazelman: Doug is a software industry veteran with over 20 years experience including 9.5 years at Veeam Software. He was on the executive team at Veea...

I interviewed Ramey Bell from Tech Reputation – www.techreputation.com . Tech Reputation automates the process of getting reviews posted on the major review sites. They also have a process to alert you to potentially bad reviews and help you intercept those reviews so you can potentially turn them around. Tech Reputation was founded in 2017 by Ramey Bell, an IT professional with over twenty years...

I caught up with my brother, co-author, and fellow coach recently. It seems odd to interview my brother, but I have massive respect for Manuel. In addition to practicing a work/life balance that few achieve, he is a true master of process control and an amazing business coach. Manuel Palachuk You can find out more about his coaching programs at www.manuelpalachuk.com – and more about our ChannelPr...

I had a great interview with Nigel Moore from My Technology Business (The Tech Tribe). Nigel Moore Nigel joins us from an hour north of Sydney, Australia. He tells us the story of how he sold his managed service business AND maximized the price by creating standardized processes. Great line from this interview: When you move the sale from simply acquiring clients to a strategic buy, then the price...

Harry Brelsford In this SMB Community Podcast, Harry Brelsford from SMB Nation gives us an update on the latest and greatest from his world. Highlights include the Spring SMB Tech Talks (Topics include Blockchain and Bitcoin), Life-long learning, new analytics courses from Microsoft, and an update on "Pivot" marketing program. Harry finishes off with a quick summary of his hottest five tips for ma...

If you've attended an ASCII Success Summit in the last few years, I'm sure you've run into Herman Pool from Vertical Axion ( www.verticalaxion.com ). If you haven't attended an ASCII Sucdess Success Summit – You Should! Visit asciievents.com for more info. Vertical Axion helps Managed Service Providers with a variety of marketing programs, including building customized web sites. They also provide...

I had a great chat with my friend Dave Sobel, Senior Director of MSP Evangelism at SolarWinds MSP. We covered a broad range of future-looking topics – and how they might affect us in the small business space. Dave is an author and former managed service provider. Note: This is NOT a vendor-centric podcast. Dave is a tremendous thought leader in our community and I'm always happy to catch up with h...

I caught up with Michael Siggins, founder and Publisher of ChannelPro Magazine. In addition to covering a bit of the history of ChannelPro magazine, Michael gives us some great information about the ChannelPro events and other resources. Two cool topics we touched on include the State of the Channel research that was recently released (see link below) and the new IoT Playbook (also linked below)....

Joshua Liberman is a well known member of the SMB IT Community. In addition to writing for ChannelPro and other magazines, you may recognize him as the guy taking pictures at several shows, including ASCII and SMB Techfest. Josh owns Net Sciences in Albuquerque, NM. They are an MSP with a strong focus on security. Luckily, Josh also makes presentations to IT Pro conferences. I've seen him present...

In this SMB Community Podcast, I interviewed Jennifer Fields and Elizabeth Vanover from EMC – Executive Marketing Collective – on IT Marketing Strategies. Each of them had a successful marketing business. Then they merged into a bigger, better company focused on helping Managed Service Providers do effective marketing. They help MSPs find clients and convert them through an amazing variety of tech...

In this SMB Community Podcast, I am joined by Justin Esgar. He runs an MSP business in New York City called Virtua Computers. They focus primarily on Apple computers. Justin runs a conference called ACES that will be held in Baltimore, MD May 9-10, 2018. More information at http://www.acesconf.com/karl . The ACES conference evolved because Justin realized that the technology conferences he was att...

In this SMB Community Podcast, we talk to James Kernan of Kernan Consulting about selling managed services. James is a sales coach and the author of the 36 Month Millionaire program. I got an email a few weeks ago from someone looking to hire a sales person. I answered that email – but immediately thought about James. What advice would James give to a sole proprietor who is looking to hire a sale...