SMB Community Podcast: Business Advice for Small MSP Owners

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, schedule until the schedule is full. The problem with that is, the schedule turns out to be a huge line of dominoes, stacked and ready to fall. When the schedule is packed so tight that it squeaks, it only takes one small problem to mess up the whole day – and potentially the week.

Agile Service Delivery takes a different approach, based on priorities rather than schedules.

The best news, according to Manuel, is that you don't need a new PSA or other tools. You already have the tools you'll use. It's your processes that need to change!

Check out all the details in the interview below.

Manuel also announced his new Agile Service Delivery master class. See details on that site.

Web Site:

Coaching Site: ManuelPalachuk.com

Agile Service Delivery www.agileservicedelivery.com/agile-workshop-replay/

Watch the video podcast:

This interview is 30 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 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 most of our collaboration online.

In this interview, we talk about our respective communities (The Tech Tribe for Nigel and Small Biz Thoughts Community for me). After that, we talk about several aspects of selling a business and the crazy valuations we're seeing for MSP businesses in the U.S. At last we get to the topic we were scheduled to talk about: Building culture in your business.

The rambling and spontaneous nature of this interview is exactly why I love working with Nigel. He's super smart and talented. He's one of those few "coaches" who can speak on any topic and give some great advice off the cuff.

NOTE: At the very end, we tease an event we're putting together for a few folks in Melbourne at the end of October. Tune in to the emerging details at www.TheTechTribe.com/melbourne2018.

Web Site:

The Tech Tribe

Watch the video podcast:

This interview is 30 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.

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' Technology Marketing Toolkit, Jennifer's team can implement it for you. When you buy a program like that, you know it's awesome and amazing. But YOU don't want to build the list, print the postcards, send the mailing, and make the followup phone calls.

Jen wants to do that!

Listen to the interview. If you have questions, contact her!

Web Site:

www.astekmarketing.com

Watch the video podcast:

This interview is 30 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.

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 by an influx of investor capital. In fact, Josh has a couple of great stories about crazy (high) valuations.

I make the point point that YOU can take advantage of the mergers as a time to get new clients. When companies are in the throes of gobbling, combining, and figuring out what to do next, there's a period of chaos in which their service delivery plummets. And you might be able to come in and say you'll give these clients the attention they deserve.

This 30 minute interview touches on the Managed Services in a Month Peer Teams, the different challenges of small IT companies and large, weeding your client garden, making hard choices, training your clients, and convincing your spouse that Managed Services won't destroy your marriage.

Josh also has a big sales training coming up Super Bowl Weekend 2019 in Las Vegas. He gives some juicy information about this two day sales retreat.

Related Links:

Bering McKinley web site: www.beringmckinley.com

Note: I also interviewed Josh about peer teams back in August. See that podcast here.

Find out more and sign up for MSIAM Peer Teams Here.

Josh Stuff:

Bering McKinley is a Management Consulting firm specializing in IT Solution Providers. They have over ten years experience in consulting owners and staff of IT Firms. They proudly provide Blue Chip consulting to small business. Since they only focus on one industry, they have in-depth expertise in all three business units: Sales, Service, and Finance.

Josh Peterson has more than 14 years of management consulting experience. He has run Bering McKinley for five years, focusing very heavily on the most important challenges facing managed service providers.

Josh is also very active as a Peer Team leader. Bering McKinley Peer Teams focus on accountability and constant improvement. He has helped over a thousand companies move to a higher level of success.

Watch the video podcast:

This interview is 30 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.

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 Page or Wikipedia. She has been a driving force in the writing community worldwide, and particularly in Northern California. She is the founder of the Nonfiction Authors Association, with chapters all over the globe.

On top of all that, Stephanie runs the Nonfiction Writers Conference. The Fall Conference will be held online November 8-9. More details at https://nonfictionwritersconference.com/. (I am honored to be a speaker at this event.)

So, with all that going, I don't know how she found time to talk to me on the SMB Community Podcast, but she did!

After helping each other with thousands of business ideas and projects over the last 15-ish years, Stephanie and I finally collaborated on a book. Previously, Stephanie had great success with The Nonfiction Marketing Plan, and I wrote Publish Your First Book a long time ago. So we combined our knowledge of book publishing to come out with this guide to profitable self-publishing.

Of course the book has it's own page here: http://store.nonfictionauthorsassociation.com/book-the-nonfiction-book-publishing-plan/

Stephanie gives us some great tips on how to use your book to promote your business. You can tell she knows here stuff when I ask her to apply her ideas to the technology consulting market. She immediate threw out half a dozen ideas about how to use the book to promote your business, get local speaking gigs, and make sure your prospects have handouts with your name on them pinned to the bulletin board.

We also discuss the strategy Stephanie used right there: Give your best information up front – hold nothing back. Remember, your prospects (and those you speak to at Chamber meetings, etc.) are not in your business. So they can't absorb the information as easily as if you were talking to technology consultants. So give them the juicy good information and you will make them hungry to understand. And a great way to get that understanding is to buy your book or engage you in a contract.

If you want to engage Stephanie, follow the links below. And I highly encourage you to join the Nonfiction Authors Association and plan to attend the online Nonfiction Writers Conference in November. I promise you'll love it.

Links Mentioned:

Nonfiction Authors Association: https://nonfictionauthorsassociation.com/

The Nonfiction Book Publishing Plan: https://nonfictionauthorsassociation.com/the-nonfiction-book-publishing-plan-the-professional-guide-to-profitable-self-publishing/

Check out the interview here:

This interview is 30 minutes.

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.

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 their marketplaces and to leverage public speaking and group-based selling to massively grow their companies.

In this SMB Community Podcast, I talk to Frank about how you can get started as a speaker – promoting your business services from the front of the room. In the video, Frank mentions a free report you can get at https://mspspeakers.com/. He also has a webinar coming up. You can learn more about that at https://mspspeakers.com/webinar.

Frank is also member of the CompTIA (www.comptia.org) Committees on IT Support and Cyber Security, helping to develop policies and standards to protect companies worldwide. He has been interviewed and written for outlets such as Reuters, The New York Time, Forbes, The Daily News, Long Island Business News, MarketWatch, The Daily News, Newsday, Business Solutions Magazine. CNBC, Fast Company, WLIX Radio, LI News Radio, and many more. Frank is also a two-time author, with his third book "Unleveling the Field: Leveraging Technology as a Competitive Advantage" forthcoming in 2019.

Links Mentioned:

Web Site: https://mspspeakers.com/

Webinar: https://mspspeakers.com/webinar

CompTIA: http://www.comptia.org

Check out the interview here:

This interview is 30 minutes.

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.

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 prospect to buy in to a productivity audit. His approach is very conversational and is totally focused on the client rather than the technology.

Gil gives his email in the video. I'll just list his web site and phone number below.

Links Mentioned:

Web Site: http://www.gilcargill.com

Phone: 310-447-4102

Check out the interview here:

This interview is 30 minutes.

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.

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" goal setting within your team.

Note: The handout mentioned is linked from the SMB Community Podcast blog post is HERE in PDF format. That handout is on financial goals and KPIs.

Links Mentioned:

Web Site: http://www.kernanconsulting.com

Check out the interview here:

This interview is 30 minutes.

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.

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 Veeam and also helped spearhead Veeam's community and technical evangelists efforts as well as provided insight into product strategy. Doug has held various management positions at other software companies throughout his career. He graduated with a BS in Computer Science from Western Illinois University with a minor in marketing..

Links Mentioned:

Forum: https://forum.cloudberrylab.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/cloudberrylab Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CloudBerryLab/ Blog: https://www.cloudberrylab.com/blog/

Check out the interview here:

This interview is 30 minutes.

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.

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 of experience in marketing. Ramey has owned and operated a computer repair shop in Oak Harbor, Washington for the last six years, using those marketing skills to grow his business. He found that having an automated system in place to capture positive reviews led to improved word-of-mouth referrals and increased revenue.

Fully understanding the time limitations all IT owners face, he decided to offer an automated service and marketing system that enables owners to quickly understand their current reputation and manage all of it from a single place.

Google pays attention to about fifty sites that publish reviews. Tech Reputation automates the process of getting positive reviews from your clients.

Note: You can get a discount with the code KARL!

Links Mentioned:

Web Site: www.techreputation.com

Check out the interview here:

This interview is 30 minutes.

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.