SMB Community Podcast: Business Advice for Small MSP Owners

I always love to catch up with Chip Reaves from Bigger Brains. This interview is no exception.

Bigger Brains is an educational service that you can resell to your clients. They have more than one hundred e-learning modules for everything from Office 365 to Microsoft Teams, QuickBooks, and more.

The way their service works is that MSPs buy end user licenses in bulk and then sell them to their clients. You can sell one user or ten at a time. You can also include the e-learning classes into your service bundles. It's up to you whether you sell the classes separately, include them at no charge, or bundle them with other services.

After the interview, Chip offered a "Karl" discount to anyone who requests it. Simply use the code KarlSentMe and you'll receive a 10% discount on all licenses.

One cool new tool Bigger Brains developed is called BrainBot.

BrainBot is an app that sends you tidbits of class highlights as well as questions to students after the class is finished. This is based on a well-established educational reinforcement technique. As Chip explains, this application of the material after the class is complete helps the brain focus on the important lessons and reinforces the material. In the long run, students learn more of the material and retain it longer.

There is no additional charge for the BrainBot!

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.

I interviewed Pete Langas from Nerdio – GetNerdio.com. Pete is the Sr. Director of Strategic Partnership and Distribution at Nerdio.

Nerdio empowers managed service providers to build and/or rapidly grow their cloud IT practices through what Pete calls a "ridiculously simple IT management platform" for public and private cloud. Nerdio for Azure is the first IT automation technology that delivers easy packaging, pricing, provisioning, ongoing management, and cost-optimization to complete IT environments in the Microsoft cloud. Nerdio Private Cloud is a fully integrated platform that delivers a comprehensive IT environment at your fingertips – including virtual hardware, software, security, backup and disaster recovery, and 24/7 tech-nerd support.

Without Nerdio for Azure, an unoptimized IT environment running in Azure is higher cost than on-premises. You also need expensive engineers to onboard and manage customers in Azure. With Nerdio, you can automatically deploy a complete IT environment in Azure within 2 hours, and without an engineer. Thanks to Nerdio's cost estimator, pricing out Nerdio for Azure is super simple. It easily enables MSPs to comprehensively calculate the costs and savings of running IT in the Microsoft cloud

We talked about several elements of getting started with cloud services for MSPs. In particular, if you're a Microsoft and have access to Azure as part of that partnership, Pete encourages you to deploy those Azure resources with Nerdio as a was to get experience with both products.

Nerdio Links:

• getnerdio.com
• getnerdio.com/blogs
• twitter.com/getnerdio
• www.linkedin.com/company/getnerdio
• www.facebook.com/GetNerdio

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.

Many people know Len DiCostanzo from his years at Autotask and Datto. Now he's out on his own, helping IT consultants under the moniker MSP Toolkit.

Len is a huge fan of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and best practices. He's also dedicated to models that focus on recurring revenue.

I ran into Len at the NexGen Conference and Expo in December. We sat in on each others' sessions and took notes about each others' advice. We mostly agree on best practices!

A mainstay of the channel community, Len provides thought leadership and best practice guidance to technology channel vendors, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and other Business Technology Service Providers (BTSPs). Most recently, Len was SVP of Channel Development at Datto where he focused on helping partners drive recurring revenue with Datto's cloud-based solution portfolio. Len was with Autotask for a decade prior to Autotask being acquired by Vista Equity Partners for the second time, and merging with Datto in December 2017.

You can find him at MSPToolkit.com – where he helps both vendors and MSPs. He helps MSPs get the right processes and procedures in place. He helps vendors find a broader audience in the MSP space.

Watch the interview:

Len is very well steeped in the ITIL best practices for ITSM (IT Service Management). In this interview, he gives some great guidance about how you approach problems (or are they incidents?) with clients. As you'll see, Len's a firm believer that our industry is better off when more of us follow these best practices.

Len has a few introductory offers. Contact him (email is in the video) to find out more about how you can engage him.

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.

Erick Simpson is my long-time friend and fellow coach.

My good friend Erick Simpson, formerly the Co-Founder, Senior Vice President, and CIO of SPC International, is now out doing consulting on his own.

This is his first interview in his new role as an IT Business Transformation and Channel Growth Expert. Erick is an author and consultant, a former MSP, a great coach, and one of the pioneers of the Managed Services business model.

In this interview, Erick talks about how he recommends filtering which prospects should become your clients. I love the discussion of how to determine whether a client has a strategic approach to business. Hint: Ask them.

Along the way, we tell a few stories and Erick throws out some good book recommendations (besides his own).

Erick's new web site is at http://www.ericksimpson.com – and you can sign up for his newsletter there. I did.

Watch the Podcast:

This interview is about 30 minutes long.

Listen to the audio podcast

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.

This SMB Community Podcast is the sixth in a six-part series entitled Go To Market with Remote Support Service, with Dave Sobel, Senior Director of MSP Evangelism at SolarWinds MSP.

Dave starts out this episode focusing on using the Take Control tool as a way to differentiate yourself from other service providers. More specifically, he has a great analogy about the place of Take Control in your offering. Rather than "selling" this tool, bundle it with everything you do and sell the total service.

Reporting is a huge component in that differentiation. You can generate a lot of information per-client and per-user. These are great for showing clients what they're getting for their money. Plus you can access recordings of all sessions, track time, and provide the client with regular tracking information. Even if they never look at these reports, they'll think it's cool that you offer them.

The recording option is particularly nice. You can record to the cloud. You can share these recordings with clients. You can add searchable notes, which then allow you to review your actions in detail if necessary.

Dave makes an excellent point that you can move away from fear-based selling that is so common with security products. With Take Control, you can engage clients and prospects with a product that they'll want to buy. As Dave says, no one likes to be sold, but people love to buy! Show them a cool tool that they will want to have in their company. It's a great way to get started with SolarWinds Take Control!

If you haven't seen the entire six-part series, you can binge watch today at SMB Community Podcast.

And if you haven't signed up for a free trial, please do so today!

As always, your feedback is welcome.

Podcasts in this series include:

• What to Look for In a Remote Support Tool
• Making Money – Break Fix vs. Managed Services
• Implementing Your Cloud Services Bundle
• Remote Control – A New Hope for Security
• Manage the Customer Experience/Manage the Customer Relationship (this one)
• Remote Control as the Ultimate Sales Tool

Tune in next Thursday for episode six!

Watch the video podcast:

This interview is about 15 minutes.

Audio Listen to the Podcast.

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.

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 configurable/customizable). Others come into play as a result of agreements or policy decisions you make with the client.

Offline options = Create business-focused policies. e.g., what is "privacy" at each client? Work with the client to help them to create their employee-facing policy regarding monitoring and privacy. And of course you can agree on the level of reporting that clients will receive. In fact, you can use this to help the client set policies about which software you are authorized to uninstall and what kind of reporting they expect regarding their employees' computing habits.

Dave mentions that you can set higher priority for your managed service clients vs. break/fix clients or folks who aren't customers yet at all.

As we mentioned in another podcast, you can use the Take Control app to help the client create terms of service. This is great for setting expectations with your primary contact as well as with end users.

Dave explains how you can use Take Control to set up a "help desk" queue so users actually get estimated wait times as well as notices about where they are in the queue. This can relieve end user anxiety and frustration. This can be used for existing clients via a button on your web site. In fact, it can be used for strangers to go through your web site and request help. Dave calls that a "sales lead."

We also touch on juggling simultaneous sessions, providing client training, focusing on one-to-one communications, getting the most out of the licenses

As always, lots of good information here. Listen today and download a free trial!

Podcasts in this series include:

• What to Look for In a Remote Support Tool
• Making Money – Break Fix vs. Managed Services
• Implementing Your Cloud Services Bundle
• Remote Control – A New Hope for Security
• Manage the Customer Experience/Manage the Customer Relationship (this one)
• Remote Control as the Ultimate Sales Tool

Tune in next Thursday for episode six!

Watch the video podcast:

This interview is about 15 minutes.

Audio Listen to the Podcast.

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.

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 securing endpoint connections, clipboard access, passwords, and more. Dave gives some good information on the two-factor authentication you'll experience within Take Control. All that is paired with an authenitcator app that uses unique one-time-use passwords that are managed automatically.

If you think about it, a remote control tool gives your staff total access to all client secure data. And with multiple sessions into multiple clients, someone has to make sure that all those sessions are independently secured – and secured from each other. Take Control builds all that security in from the start.

We also talked to Dave about GDPR, HIPAA, and the privacy laws we're seeing across the globe and within local and regional governments. With the new higher standards, technology consultants are responsible for reporting breaches – to the public as well as to your clients. So the question becomes: Can you afford the reputation hit of being breached and having to report that data breach publicly?

I really liked the information about levels of access and policies around technician access to end user machines. Within the Take Control tool, the client can configure the level of "privacy" they want their employees to have. For example, you can work with the client to approve or not approve announced and unannounced sessions. Also, you can develop notifications to end users about what they can expect with regard to company data as well as personal data.

Dave makes a good argument for using this security setup as a selling point. It certainly makes the point that you take client security and privacy seriously.

The interview also introduces the new Take Control Secrets Vault. This is a great tool for managing secure information so that it is never moved outside of the remote session, the technician doesn't access actual passwords, and the secure information isn't even available unless a logon screen is asking for credentials. Dave goes into detail here. Very cool stuff.

Podcasts in this series include:

• What to Look for In a Remote Support Tool
• Making Money – Break Fix vs. Managed Services
• Implementing Your Cloud Services Bundle
• Remote Control – A New Hope for Security (this one)
• Manage the Customer Experience/Manage the Customer Relationship
• Remote Control as the Ultimate Sales Tool

Tune in next Thursday for episode five!

Watch the video podcast:

This interview is about 15 minutes.

Audio Listen to the Podcast.

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.

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. As you may know, I am a huge advocate of bundling your cloud service offering in order to maximize profit and client stickiness. So, we start off with a discussion of setting up the agent and creating default configurations.

Here's the bundle we are discussing:

After that, Dave walks us through mass deployment. This is a very cool feature, and one that you might expect from a remote management tool.

Dave also goes into detail about customizing your "terms of service" within the app and protecting yourself legally. After all, remove control of client systems is a very serious undertaking. You need to agree with clients on what kind of access you will use (visible, invisible, with prior arrangement or without, etc.).

And, finally, we discuss several other opportunities to customize the Take Control applet.

As always, I learned a lot in this interview and I encourage you to give it a listen. And if you haven't used Take Control, click the link below for a free trial.

Podcasts in this series include:

• What to Look for In a Remote Support Tool
• Making Money – Break Fix vs. Managed Services
• Implementing Your Cloud Services Bundle (this one)
• Remote Control – A New Hope for Security
• Manage the Customer Experience/Manage the Customer Relationship
• Remote Control as the Ultimate Sales Tool

Tune in next Thursday for episode four!

Watch the video podcast:

This interview is about 15 minutes.

Audio Listen to the Podcast.

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.

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. But the truth is, there are still lots of people making money with "on demand" or "as needed" tech support. It is the right solution for some clients. It's also a great way to get started as an IT solution provider.

So we start out with our definitions of both break/fix and managed service. The next question is, how do you maximize revenue with the break/fix model? As Dave says, you have to figure out how to use your time as wisely as possible and bill for as much of your time as possible.

And even though tools like Take Control were developed to help MSPs make more money by leveraging their time better, they also work for break/fix companies. After all, both tools and processes can help you become more efficient.

Then, of course, you get to some of the added features that allow any company to offer a higher level of service. With Take Control, this includes recording sessions, tagging the recordings with searchable keywords, providing more timely support, and more.

Best of all, Dave points out, you can start charging break/fix clients a small monthly fee to have access to this higher level of support. In addition to offering better service, you begin to taste that juicy good recurring revenue. And who knows? You might just decide that you can start transitioning those clients to full fledged managed service.

Once again, I learned a lot in this interview and I encourage you to give it a listen. And if you haven't used Take Control, click the link below for a free trial.

Podcasts in this series include:

• What to Look for In a Remote Support Tool
• Making Money – Break Fix vs. Managed Services (this one)
• Implementing Your Cloud Services Bundle
• Remote Control – A New Hope for Security
• Manage the Customer Experience/Manage the Customer Relationship
• Remote Control as the Ultimate Sales Tool

Tune in next Thursday for episode three!

Watch the video podcast:

This interview is about 15 minutes.

Audio Listen to the Podcast.

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.

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 tool. These include one-to-many scripting and recording the control session. Take Control was built specifically for the SMB market. As Dave says, this is not an "enterprise" product watered down for SMB or a home product stretching to be the right solution.

Dave gives us a long list of questions to ask when you go shopping for a remote control tool. And, finally, Dave covers billing. After all, the bottom line is the bottom line. He covers some of the key elements of squeezing as much money as possible with the right remote control tool.

And of course he touches on the questions of security, performance, and managing all clients and devices from a single dashboard.

I was surprised to learn about some of the cool features he mentions, including adjusting the amount of bandwidth used, recording sessions with notes, and managing multiple sessions at the same time. It's ironic that I use this tool and didn't realize how little I have actually been using.

Bottom line: I learned a lot in this interview and I encourage you to give it a listen. And if you haven't used Take Control, click the link below for a free trial.

Future topics in this podcast series include:

– Making Money – Break Fix vs. Managed Services – Implementing Your Cloud Services Bundle – Remote Control – A New Hope for Security – Manage the Customer Experience/Manage the Customer Relationship – Remote Control as the Ultimate Sales Tool

Tune in next Thursday for episode two!

Watch the video podcast:

This interview is about 15 minutes.

Audio Listen to the Podcast.

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.