SMB Community Podcast

In the July 1st episode of Odd Tuesdays, Karl talks to Phil Elder and Susan Bradley from the SMBKitchen Project. The pair talk about the managed services educational programs they are involved in and offer the chance for a lucky Odd Tuesdays' listener to win a year-long membership to the SMBKitchen ASP Project . The episode also features Third Tier's Amy Babinchak in the show's reoccurring Oddball...

April 15th's episode of Odd Tuesdays, Ted Hulsy, VP of Marketing at eFolder joins Karl to talk about sync and security for MSPs and VARs. Rayanne Buchianico, from ABC Solutions also features in the episode in our Oddballs segment. Rayanne continues her QuickBooks tips series with today's tips surrounding the variety of preferences you can take advantage of in making QuickBooks much more user frien...

3D Printing – An Interview with Alan Ware Sacramento has a great organization called Hacker Lab – part hacker space, part maker space, and part co-working space. I joined last year and plan to cover a number of subjects related to the things they do there. This includes programming, Arduino, robotics, 3D printing, and more. This is an interview with Alan M. Ware, B.S.M.E. Alan is a 3D design and m...

Odd Tuesdays was launched this week by Host Karl Palachuk and Producer Monica Caraway. The Podcast is geared for I.T. Consultants and features what's new in tech management and best practices for running an I.T. business. The Podcast airs on the first and third Tuesdays of each month and features a variety of Vendor & MSP consultant interviews and advice segments. In the first episode, SMB Nation'...

Posted: Karl's State of the Nation Address for IT Consultants In case you couldn't listen live, we recorded the "State of the Nation" address. Recorded January 15, 2014 Notes from Karl Palachuk on the year gone by and the year ahead. Karl Palachuk Announces Odd Tuesdays Karl's Fifth Annual State of the Nation Address for I.T. Consultants 30 minutes. Key contents: – Windows 9 timeline ann...

Online or In Person: Partner Training with Third Tier I ran into Dave Seibert at the recent ChannelPro SMB Forum in New Jersey. He brought me up to speed on the SMB Tech Fest events he produces. The Sixth SMB Tech Fest will be October 19th in Irvine. Details are online at www.smbtechfest.com . The October 19th event will be presented by members of Third Tier, including Amy Babinchak herself! See t...

SaaS Marketplace Allows MSPs to Find Business Cloud Services to Resell Today SaaSMAX Corp. announced the official commercial release of their new SaaSMAX marketplace platform. A few days ago I recorded a short podcast with SaaSMAX Founder and CEO Dina Moskowitz about this announcement and the Saas Marketplace in general. Basically, SaaSMAX brings together channel resellers and app vendors, increas...

Stacey Powell: Take Your Finances to the Gym! Stacey Powell owns two businesses to help companies be more successful by managing their finances more effectively. At Creating Answers ( http://www.creatinganswers.com/ ), Stacey works with business owners to stop once a month and take a closer look at their numbers. Meanwhile, over at The Finance Gym ( http://thefinancegym.com/ ), she works with smal...

Need to Manage Amazon Web Services? ElasticTask Gets The Job Done One of the cool things I noticed about the Autotask Community Live event is that many partners are developing products and services that plug into Autotask. In all cases, these partners solved a problem internally and then turned that program into a product that can be used by others. One of the coolest I saw was ElasticTask. Elasti...

Spam Soap's "Click Protect" Scans Attachments When they Download Len Dimiceli from Spam Soap talked to me at Autotask Community Live in Phoenix about the latest and greatest news from Spam Soap. The latest service from Spam Soap is called Click Protect. Click Protect scans attachments. But more than that, it always scans the attachment before it's opened. So if an attachment's reputation...

Continuum Bundles Everything – And Lets You Test Drive at a Low Price With No Obligation Continuum (formerly Zenith) was the original RMM solution with NOC back end included. Today they have a very large variety of offerings, including Level 1 and Level 2 tech support on the desktop. They have a new Mobile Device Management program, their Vault BDR, and a "Tech Advantage" program that al...

Karen Guarino from Reflexion – Spam Filtering, HIPAA Training, and Automated Email Encryption for HIPAA Compliance Karen Guarino is the Channel Support Manager at Reflexion. She talked to us at the Autotask Community Live event about the latest and greatest campaigns from Reflexion. Of course Reflexion does spam filtering, but they have added some cool services that allow partners to more easily s...

Steve Noel: Management by Exception Interface takes continuity to the next level I caught up with Steve "The Dude" Noel, Technical Sales Engineer with Axcient at the Autotask Community Live event. Axcient's big push right now is on their "Management by Exception" Interface for their business continuity solution. With this tool, you can get alerts if a good backup is not receive...

Ken Edwards: Adding Streams of Income … and More My friend Ken Edwards is a busy member of the community, an SMB 150 award winner, and an Autotask user. Ken owns Maverick Mesa Computers in Glendale, AZ. He also owns a few other small businesses unrelated to I.T. service delivery. Here he gives us some ideas about how to set up "automated" businesses that sell products without him having...

Mark Moreno: Success with the "Mom and Pop" Mid-Market My friend Mark Moreno is an active member of the SMB community, an SMB 150 award winner, and an Autotask user. He owns C&M Support Services & Consulting, Inc. in Elkhart, IN. He has built a great business based on a specific kind of client, which he calls the "Mom and Pop" mid-market. This is an interesting hybrid m...

John Phillips: Synnex has an entire Small Business Team I talked to John Phillips from SMB Connect at Synnex while I was as Autotask Community Live. Synnex SMB Connect John was at AT Live to educate folks about a special sales group at Synnex focused completely on the SMB space. The group has 44 sales people, credit programs, and exclusive vendor rebates for participants of the program. See detail...

Michael Siggins from ChannelPro SMB At the Autotask Community Live conference, I caught up with Michael Siggins, Publisher of ChannelProSMB. They loved the event and the sense of community. Michael highlighted for us the upcoming ChannelPro SMB Forum in New Jersey September 10th. Channel Pro Forum will be a jam-packed, one-day affair with great content, great food and great networking opportunitie...

Travis Austin: PumpUpTheAuto.com One of the first and best Autotask experts is Mr. Travis Austin. Travis has developed programs for getting information in and out of Autotask. Now he specializes in helping companies get the most from their Autotask investment. Austin's new venture is called PumpUpTheAuto.com . Of course Travis was at Autotask Community Live in Phoenix last week. We caught up and t...

Richard Tubb – Effective Business Networking: How to Network Online and Offline Richard Tubb is well known for the Tubblog at http://www.tubblog.co.uk/ . Richard is a former Managed Service Provider and now a successful coach for I.T. Consultants. Richard has worked in the IT industry for more than 15 years, working at large corporations such as Ernst & Young and the NHS, as well as being the...

John Armato – Think Inside the Box John Armato is a Senior Vice President & Senior Partner, and Creative Strategist for Fleishman-Hillard International Communications. John helps companies set strategy, shape messages, and develop programs to inspire people, sell products, solve problems, promote causes, and avert crises. He has won dozens of awards and worked with more than 100 clients, inclu...

Rayanne Buchianico Rayanne Buchianico is an Accountant and MSP Business Consultant. At the SMB Online Conference in June, she'll be talking about Understanding Your Financials: Three Mandatory Monthly Reports and What They Are Telling You. We talked last week about how you can use QuickBooks and your financials. She gave some great information – which is why she has TWO presentations at the SMB On...

Manuel Palachuk My brother Manuel is an author, business coach, and outsourced CIO. He worked at KPEnterprises for six years, half of it as President. In this presentation he talks about the five tools that can transform your company overnight. He has over 25 years of business, management, and training experience in the computer and electronics industries. He is an expert of process, systems, and...

Brian Sharp Brian Sharp is a great motivational speaker/trainer. He runs a company that helps small business owners learn to use speaking and presenting as a means to expand their company and make sales. His company is called Go Big – http://www.gobigcompany.com/ . As you'll hear in this interview, Brian does not like the "pitch fest" approach to motivational training, which is very popu...

Strategies for a Post-SBS World "June 30th isn't that far away." Kevin Beares is the Community Lead for the Windows Server and System Group at Microsoft. Kevin is in charge of driving community interaction for the SMB space. I caught up with Kevin at SMB Nation Spring at the Microsoft Conference Center. Kevin gets props for putting himself on stage and letting the entire crowd put their...

Better Sales Through Better Education Chip Reaves from Bigger Brains is going to be one of the featured speakers at the 2013 SMB Online Conference. We did a press release recently on Chip's appearance. See the press release here: SMB Online Conference Press Room . In this podcast Chip talks about some research he'll be presenting in his June presentation. Here's a very good tidbit: When asked what...