SMB Community Podcast: Business Advice for Small MSP Owners

We kick off Episode 9 with our pet peeve slides from the front of the room. Give us your feedback: If you could eliminate one slide forever, what would it be?

... Wherein Ryan admits he has used more than his share of data slides ... leaving fewer slides for the rest of us.

From there we pivot to "The Dark Side of Emerging Technology." Technology is super cool ... until something goes wrong. We touch on accidents, mistakes, unintended consequences, as well as malicious actors.

We conclude with a nod to a future topic: Building ethics in technology and into our consulting business.

Referenced show: Netflix series "The Blake Mirror."

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Ryan sent us a blog post that just didn't hit home with him. Dave breaks it into three pieces and then shreds it. Wherein we note that The Google can't lie.

Then we slip into a very serious discussion of business models and business model generation.

Book: Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur.

They define the business model based on nine things (all of which contribute to value):
- Customer Segments
- Value Propositions
- Channels
- Customer Relationships
- Revenue Streams
- Key Resources
- Key Activities
- Key Partnerships
- Cost Structure

Taken together, all of these define your value proposition. But, we seem to argue with each other, most of us don't have a clear focus on the most important elements of a business model when we use the term "business model."

Question: Do you buy into your own value prop?

Final analysis: Don't use the term "Business Model" to mean some small subset of what's important in your business.

. . . Then we segue . . . to who's who . . .

Is it useful to create a menagerie of the IT industry? Wherein we explore the ways that we all use labels and titles and categories? How do we get a big picture of the universe when we KNOW that most of the universe is invisible to us?

. . . And then, suddenly, we move to a discussion of the Gartner report on what we need to pay attention to.

See https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018-10-15-gartner-identifies-the-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2019

Gartner's The Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019:

• Autonomous Things
• Augmented Analytics
• AI-Driven Development
• Digital Twins
• Empowered Edge
• Immersive Experience
• Blockchain
• Smart Spaces
• Digital Ethics and Privacy
• Quantum Computing

For comparison . . .

Here are Comptia's Top Ten Emerging Technologies for 2019:

• Internet of Things
• Artificial Intelligence
• 5G
• Serverless Computing
• Blockchain
• Robotics
• Biometrics
• 3D Printing
• AR / VR
• Drones

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:-)

Ryan is wandering off with a client this week (or feeling sick or some such nonsense), so Dave and Karl conspired to riff on the IT industry without his perspective.

Dave asks the question, "Did I become dumber when I went to work for a vendor?" Sometimes IT service providers assume that anyone who works for a vendor just doesn't understand the industry. (Hint: We think that's not true.)

. . . Next topic . . . How much of the market has been penetrated? Sometimes we're amazed at how many people are not "inside" the "connected" SMB IT community. How do we determine the size of the IT Universe? Does it include Home Theater, cameras, secure door locks, IoT, signage, consumer electronics, etc.?

[Insert long discussion about how you define who's in the IT business, who's not, and who decides.]

Eventually we get around to why we care. We care because we need to justify our investment in this space. If you don't know the universe, you can't measure your penetration.

Once again we loop back to the beginning.

Karl ends with a rant on money and traveling. Dave offers an obvious tip Karl should have learned 100,000 miles ago.

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:-)

Dave kicks us off with some notes about emerging technologies and how soon we might be able to find business opportunities.

Ryan posits that the term "Managed Service Provider" isn't useful to customers. And of course that leads to a discussion of "cloud" and the use of terminology over time.

There follows a detailed discussion of the pros and cons and possibilities for using the term MSP going forward.

. . . and then we jump down the rabbit hole of "Is MSSP a useful term?" To be honest, it was hard to get the question out before the chuckling started.

Mild side track: Is the question of security important if there are no actual consequences for screwing up?

Finally, of course, we loop back to emerging technology and how we need to describe our value proposition going forward. Some days it's all about the terminology!

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:-)

I always love catching up with Jeff Ponts from DataTel Solutions. If you attend a few conferences a year, you are likely to have seen Jeff somewhere.

Jeffery Ponts is COO/Executive Vice President and founder of Datatel Solutions Inc. Datatel Solutions is an Integrated Communications Provider (ICP), and systems integrator focusing on marketing, delivering, and managing best-of-breed data and telecommunication products, services, and applications through the independent sales channel for small to medium size enterprises (SME).

As Jeff says, his company does the "heavy lifting" for IT companies that want to resell telecom services. Datatel works with more than 500 agents and 4,700 end customers.

In this podcast, we cover a bit about the past and a lot about the future of the telecom industry. Jeff gives some great information about the reality of 5G connectivity and SD-WAN. He makes an interesting point that 4G will be around for a LONG time because it's impractical to have millions of 5G antennae all across the sparsely-populated areas of the country/world.

Lots of great information here!

You can find Jeff at

www.datatelsolutions.com

or www.concordusapps.com

Download MP3

About the SMB Community Podcast: Weekly business advice for small MSP owners from Amy Babinchak and James Kernan of the Small Biz Thoughts community — MSP sales, MSP pricing and agreements, hiring and leading an MSP team, MSP operations, selling your MSP, and AI for small MSPs. Produced by MSP Radio. More for MSP owners at smallbizthoughts.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dave kicks us off with the reality of Drones being legalized in Rural Virginia.

Alphabet (Google) has been granted license to allow drone delivery services in rural delivery. But don't run out and buy one, thinking you'll be able to fly it anywhere and make a bunch of money. Before you do that, go learn about licensing and permits.

Question of the day: Will the first burrito be delivered to your house by flying drone or autonomous vehicle? (Note - We'll revisit this later this year.)

. . . Next up: Using virtual reality and augmented reality to fight pain. The only drawback is that you might throw up the whole time.

And Dave goes down the Nerd Hole with Ingress Prime, Pokemon Go, and how all that fun got us where we are with AR medicine.

. . . and should IT professionals really care about any of this?

Books mentioned: The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution by Clayton Christensen.

If the question is, can you do all this stuff with new technology? The answer is, probably not. How do you figure out the right technology for the clients at a specific level of technology evolution?

Please give it a listen. Share with your friends. Subscribe. And give us your feedback below.

:-)

The fun continues!

Thanks to everyone who downloaded, listened, and shared the Killing IT podcasts. We would love your feedback, questions, and comments. See the form.

Is AI ruining search results? Should we have paid search options with better results?

What constitutes "best practice" in our industry? Is it just "most common" practice? And does that lead inevitably to commodity pricing?

. . . which leads to some great stories about the effect of expensive people on business choices.

and a riff on the tools you choose.

Please give it a listen. Share with your friends. Subscribe. And give us your feedback below.

I caught up with my good friend Joshua Liberman for this SMB Community Podcast.

Josh is a great community leader and the owner of Net Sciences in Albuquerque, NM.

In this podcast, Josh walks us through the various elements they offer (and bundle) for their clients.

I asked Josh to talk about this because it's the basis for a presentation I've seen him make. Josh has worked on this offering for a long time – and sold a lot of these services over the last several years.

Note, Josh relies on SonicWall and Datto for their key services. Since Josh brought this up, I asked him why brand names and vendors matter to him.

The handout Josh mentions can be downloaded here: How We Secure Your Network.

You can catch up with Josh at www.netsciences.com.

Watch the interview:

Listen to the Interview (mp3)

About the SMB Community Podcast: Weekly business advice for small MSP owners from Amy Babinchak and James Kernan of the Small Biz Thoughts community — MSP sales, MSP pricing and agreements, hiring and leading an MSP team, MSP operations, selling your MSP, and AI for small MSPs. Produced by MSP Radio. More for MSP owners at smallbizthoughts.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You never know where you'll end up with the Killing IT podcast.

We start off talking about laser mapping the inside of Notre Dame before it burned. And somehow we end up with car detailing and "Managed car wash."

Episode Three is free-form and pretty fun.

Strangely enough, we seem to have one foot in the world of actually paying attention to money and profit.

Connect with us on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. And don't forget to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, and wherever you can. And tell your friends!

:-)

Normally, we're going to broadcast new shows on Tuesdays, but for the first few weeks, we are front-loading the podcast with shows so we can propagate through iTunes, Stitcher, and all the podcast places.

Topics here include SD-WAN, 5G, and other things that don't exist. Well, 5G exists somewhere. Just not in the U.S.

As always, Ryan Morris, Dave Sobel, and Karl Palachuk talk about fast changes and what they mean to you. For example: Do clients actually need a private network going forward? If not, what does that look like?

Topics Include:

• SD-WAN - Do you have to adopt it?
• Data, examples, and advice

With a node to Jim Collins' Good to Great (Go read that).

Give us your feedback! Share it! Tell your friends.

More on Tuesday.

:-)