SMB Community Podcast

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...

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...