SMB Community Podcast: Business Advice for Small MSP Owners

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 podcast:

Andy Parkes' Blog:

http://andyparkes.co.uk/blog

Jay McBain on the most visible leaders in the channel:

http://www.jaymcbain.com/2016/10/100-most-visible-channel-leaders-2016.html

Raj on Creating Obvious SOPs:

https://www.brainlink.com/creating-obvious-sops/ Raj on SOPs:

http://www.sopculture.com/secret-to-brainlinks-success-process-and-sops/ VIDEO that you should watch before or after this interview: https://youtu.be/HD-8eB20M6c

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 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://andyparkes.co.uk/blog/index.php/2016/09/13/command-prompt-and-the-clipboard/

Rayanne on Robert Crane's Podcast:

http://ciaops.podbean.com/e/episode-112-rayanne-buchianico/

Sell My MSP: http://www.sellmymsp.com/ Rayanne Buchianico Accountant and MSP Business Consultant

Rayanne has over 25 years of accounting, tax and business experience in the SMB sector. She specializes in working with IT Professionals and MSPs to improve profitability through accounting systems, financial reporting, and PSA integration.

Rayanne was awarded the 2012 Jim Locke Memorial Community Award by SMB Nation and SMBTN and was named to the SMB 150 list by SMB Technology Network (SMBTN) and SMB PC magazine in 2011 and 2012. She partnered with Bigger Brains to provide the QuickBooks 2013 video training course.

She is the founder and leader of the Tampa Bay IT Pro Group, and is the past Treasurer of the Global IT Community Association for both the North American Board and the Global Board. Rayanne is the owner of ABC Solutions, LLC in Clearwater, Florida. ABC Solutions provides accounting, tax, and accounting systems consulting services to SMB IT companies throughout the United States.

The course: Financial Processes that Make All The Difference

Xero

https://www.xero.com/us/

PeachTree – MAS90 – Business Works

http://www.sage.com/us/sage-50-accounting

Great Plains / Microsoft Dynamics

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/small-midsize-business.aspx

Topics for this class include:

• Separation of duties – Handout includes a list of accounting/financial duties for students to complete
• What services are profitable
• Separating out information on the P&L for management decisions
• Entities and tax considerations – understanding how your entity is taxed. Handout is a tax projection worksheet for 2014 taxes
• Cash flow forecasting – Handout is a cash flow projection spreadsheet to forecast revenues and expenses
• Understanding margins and ratios – Deep dive into the P&L and Balance Sheet to understand how the numbers work together to make decisions. Handout is a worksheet on calculating and
• understanding the ratios & margins.
• Understanding the balance sheet
• Controlling inventory & Cost of Goods Sold
• Action plans for success . . . and More!

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 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 Your Daily Workflow (LogicNow blog) https://www.logicnow.com/blog/how-manage-your-daily-workflow

3 Magic Questions a Sales Manager Must Know (Ken Thoreson) http://yoursalesmanagementguru.com/2016/08/3-magic-questions-a-sales-manager-must-know/

Attend SMB TechFest for free at … http://www.SMBTechFest.com/karl

Karl's Fall Seminar http://www.smbpreday.com

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.

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 Tier and Sell My MSP. Amy is very well known in the SMB IT community. Recently, she's noticed that there are a lot more buyers looking for MSPs than there are sellers listed to sell their business.

One reason for this, she believes, is that there's a myth in the community that a small MSP has no value. I'm not sure where that myth originated, but it's one of the things people keep telling each other over and over again.

Amy has a very different perspective: If you've been making money in your business for 10-20 years, it has value and it can be sold. You just need to find the people who are looking to buy. A lot of buyers want to be anonymous, though, so their competition doesn't find out that they're in expansion mode.

That's where Sell My MSP comes in. It's like a dating service for your business . . . except you can't use a ten year old picture. The site includes a tool you can use to get some idea of what your business is worth.

Get all the details – and more – in the interview:

Video

Audio Listen to the Podcast.

Links mentioned in this podcast:

– Lisa Hendricks' Call That Girl Office 365 Podcast

Blogs – The Three Biggest Mistakes Non-IT People Make When They Plug Things In

– New Ransomware Kit Materials Released

– Blog series on Documenting New Server Install

Amy Links – Third Tier Consulting

– Sell My MSP

– Infographic Maker

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 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 a few emails with Dave as he's traveling in Portugal right now. He is very excited and positive about the changes ahead.

Change brings uncertainty, and I've received lots of emails and requests for information about this merger. So I asked Alistair to join me for a quick conversation to answer the big questions. This interview is about 15 minutes.

More details about this interview are on my blog at http://blog.smallbizthoughts.com.

As always, I am impressed with the LogicNow team's openness and willingness to directly answer the major questions being asked online and in the forums. It's a period major change, so there's some natural "fear uncertainty and doubt." But it looks like a great move in the right direction for LogicNow partners.

More information about SolarWinds MSP is here: http://www.solarwindsmsp.com/

More information about LogicNow is here: https://www.logicnow.com/

Listen Now:

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.

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. You can then answer their questions and begin to build a relationship. The match-up gives you a warm lead because you are helping them answer a question. Now you're "known" expert who can help them at a deeper level.

Patrick talks about using the system to position yourself as an expert and for focusing on a niche market. There is no cost to you as the expert.

Finally, I talked to Rich Maddalena from LogicTreeIT.com about their Two Vie Hub product. Two Vie Hub is a mobile app platform that gives users the ability to customize the look, feel, and content of applications very easily.

Rich Maddalena

As Rich mentions, it only took about four hours to take the customizable app and generate the SMB Nation conference-specific app. You can check it out by going to your app store and searching for SMB Nation.

Vertical markets, including cities, restaurants, schools, and of course conferences. Home owners associations is a very strong vertical market for them already.

At this event, Rich is looking for channel partners who are interested in making money by selling customized apps. Rich has some great tips on how to make apps usable and valuable so that people actually open them. If you're interested in a free trial – as well as advice on designing and selling apps – contact Rich.

You can sign up as a reseller by calling Rich at 916-676-7335.

Listen Now:

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.

The first person I grabbed at SMB Nation was Robert Crane from CIA Ops – CIAOPS.com. Robert presented a great demonstration on using live data to create meaningful information for clients.

Robert Crane

Microsoft's PowerBI is a business intelligence. Robert showed how to analyze data from a variety of sources. Once you have an Office 365 login, you can add this product and it will be just another app on your portal.

In this interview, Robert covers a lot of territory about getting started with data analysis, including some notes about mashing up client data with public databases. The really good news is that these tools are readily available to your clients for no additional cost. He also talks about the huge public databases you can access. And of course everyone has web data. Some clients have data on sales trends and other internal processes.

The one thing that's very clear from this interview: Technology is not enough! You need to help your client with their business.

Find out more and follow Robert at CIAOPS.com and on his blog at Blog.ciaops.com. You can also follow him on Twitter at @directorcia.

Chip Reeves

Chip Reeves from Bigger Brains had a table to promote online training.

In addition to providing training that you can resell to your clients, Chip announced "Bigger Brains Tech" in association with SMB Nation. For $99, you can give your technicians access to a series of training specifically for IT Pros. The first training is on network basics. A training on HIPAA will be released later this month, and troubleshooting course after that.

Now you can get great training yourself, in addition to raising money selling training to your clients!

More information at BiggerBrains.com.

Joel Zaidspiner

Finally I chatted with Joel Zaidspiner from ChannelPro Network.

He covered what's in the ChannelPro magazine and how to subscribe for free.

We also talked about the big ChannelPro SMB Forum coming up November 3rd in Neward, NJ. (Details at http://events.channelpronetwork.com/). As always, that event will feature great content that you can take home and use right away. I am honored to be a speaker there.

If you register for the big ChannelPro SMB Forum in New York, mention me and you will receive 100% of your registration fee back when you attend the event.

Of course you can find out more about ChannelPro magazine at www.channelpronetwork.com.

Listen Now:

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.

Report One from SMB Nation 2015.

Featuring Nick East from Zynstra and Dave Seibert from SMB TechFest.

Nick East

Last year Zynstra (www.zynstra.com) pretty much dominated SMB Nation with demos.

This year Nick East announced that Zynstra is now distributed both through Ingram's cloud program and through D&H. In fact, they were at the show with D&H (www.dandh.com). If you're interested in finding out more, there's a TCO (total cost of ownership) tool on the Zynstra site.

Research shows that the number one thing you can do to increase your company's value is to increase Recurring Revenue, followed by Professional Services. At the bottom are hardware and software. Zynstra's goal is to turn all of these into recurring revenue.

Nick also noted that Zynstra has a new acceleration program that gives you a huge boost in margin for your first three deals.

Dave Seibert and Karl Palachuk

Next I talked to Dave Seibert from SMB TechFest (www.smbtechfest.com) about the big event they have coming up October 15-16.

I will be joining Dave on the stage on the 16th. I fly in from Australia that morning. I'm renting a car and driving down to Orange County just in time to climb on stage. Join me.

. . .

In this interview, Dave talks about technology trends and some of the things we're going to cover in our talk at SMB TechFest. I'm sorry I won't see all the great speakers, including Gil Cargill, James Kernan, and Mike Semel.

I'd love to see you there!

Listen Now:

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.

At the Business Solutions Channel Transitions event in Chicago (two weeks ago), I caught up with Randy Clark from Mercury. Mercury is a payment processor. Think credit cards.

Pretty much everyone takes credit cards. Everyone who has clients that trust them has the potential to sell credit card processing.

Randy Clark – Mercury Pay

In this interview, Randy talks about getting started as well as the opportunity options for credit card processing. Some people sell directly to their clients. Others create a complete side business selling credit card processing.

In addition to working with Consultants and VARs, Mercury works with software developers. As you know, there's at least one live of business application for every business out there.

One very important point: If you want to increase the resale value of your company, recurring revenue from payment processing can increase the value dramatically. The key is that you get a small faction of every sale made by the merchants you set up.

Find out more about Mercury and how how can create a stream of recurring revenue at www.mercurypay.com.

The next Business Solutions Channel Transitions conference will be in Orlando in November 5th. Details and registration are at http://www.channeltransitions.com/.

Listen Now:

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.

Mike Monocello

Mike Monocello

Mike Monocello is the editor-in-chief of Business Solutions magazine, a monthly publication dedicated to helping IT solutions providers grow their businesses by selling complementary technologies and moving into thriving markets. We talked about building recurring revenue models, technology, and business.

Mike has to come up with new articles for a variety of readers every month (retail VARs, managed service providers, etc.). As you can imagine, it's hard to figure out which content to focus on. They spend a lot of time listening to their readers in order to get feedback about where their audience is and where they're going.

We talked about the Business Solutions Channel Transitions conference in Chicago last month. We also looked ahead to the conferences Business Solutions had coming up later this year and next.

The next Business Solutions Channel Transitions conference will be in Orlando in November 5th. Details and registration are at http://www.channeltransitions.com/.

You can find out more at www.BSMInfo.com.

Listen Now:

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.