Uncle Marv’s IT Business Podcast: Practical Business Advice for MSPs and IT Professionals

Chris Miller did not come into the MSP industry as a lifelong technologist. He came from telecom sales, thought he knew computers because he knew how to use them, and then got a quick education when he had to explain firewalls, switches, and backups to business owners. What I appreciated about Chris is that he did not pretend to know what he did not know. He sat down with an engineer, asked questions, learned the environment piece by piece, and then figured out how to translate technology into business value.

We also get practical about MSP growth. Chris helped grow one MSP from about $800,000 to $4 million, then joined ATB Technologies in 2018 when it was around $2 million and helped it reach $10 million, all organically. The conversation comes back to having a repeatable sales process, defining an ideal client profile, and recognizing that the strategy needed at $1 million is not necessarily the one needed at $10 million. Chris also shares why culture, customer relationships, and the willingness to learn outside your natural skill set matter just as much as the numbers on a revenue chart.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Christopher Miller, ATB Technologies

=== Resources / Companies / Products / Books / Podcasts

=== Events

=== SPONSORS: 

=== SHOW MUSIC: 

=== Connect with Uncle Marv

🌐 Website: https://www.itbusinesspodcast.com/
🎙 Host: Marvin Bee
🛒 Uncle Marv’s Amazon Store (gear & tools I recommend): https://amzn.to/3EiyKoZ
☕ Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/itbusinesspodcast

If you found value in this episode, share it with another MSP, IT provider, or tech entrepreneur. Your support helps keep practical, no-nonsense IT business conversations coming every week.

Brian Weiss from iTech joined me for a real MSP owner conversation, the kind we need more of. We started with what happens when a vendor changes its roadmap and you are suddenly left having to rethink part of your own business. Brian shared how Pax8 winding down its business applications services affected his support plan for Microsoft Dynamics Business Central. The important lesson is bigger than one vendor: every MSP has dependencies, and standardizing your stack does not remove risk if too much operational knowledge or support capability lives outside your control.

We also got into AI, shadow IT, and why clients often bring us in after they have already started using a tool. Brian made a strong point that employees using AI are not necessarily the problem. They may be the champions your client needs, but they need to be brought under proper company licensing, governance, and data protection. We talked about resisting FOMO around the growing pile of AI vendors, reviewing overlapping tools, and remembering that automation often needs to come before AI. If you run an MSP, this conversation is a reminder to stay flexible, know where your single points of failure are, and make decisions based on the business you want to build, not the noise around you.

=== Chapters

=== Guests Brian J. Weiss, ITECH Solutions 

=== Shout-outs Kristen Pittman, CyLutions 

=== Conferences TechCon Unplugged

=== Resources / Companies / Products / Books / Podcasts 

=== SPONSORS: 

=== SHOW MUSIC: 

=== Connect with Uncle Marv

🌐 Website: https://www.itbusinesspodcast.com/
🎙 Host: Marvin Bee
🛒 Uncle Marv’s Amazon Store (gear & tools I recommend): https://amzn.to/3EiyKoZ
☕ Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/itbusinesspodcast

If you found value in this episode, share it with another MSP, IT provider, or tech entrepreneur. Your support helps keep practical, no-nonsense IT business conversations coming every week.

I sat down with Cameron Brister from SquarePlanIT to talk about the real-world decisions MSP owners are making right now. AI is changing fast, clients want to use new tools yesterday, and we still have to think about security, permissions, data, and supportability. Cameron makes a great point that we cannot become the department of no, but we also cannot pretend every shiny new tool is ready to roll out to clients.

We also get into the less glamorous but very real work of running an IT business: migrating from Autotask to Halo, planning a move from Datto RMM to Ninja, dealing with relentless vendor outreach, and figuring out whether marketing is actually working. Cameron shares why he sees AI as a back-office helper for things like ticket triage and research, why community involvement builds long-term trust, and why saying no to the wrong client can be a sign of operational maturity instead of a missed opportunity.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Cameron Brister

=== Resources / Companies / Products / Books / Podcasts

=== SPONSORS: 

=== SHOW MUSIC: 

=== Connect with Uncle Marv

🌐 Website: https://www.itbusinesspodcast.com/
🎙 Host: Marvin Bee
🛒 Uncle Marv’s Amazon Store (gear & tools I recommend): https://amzn.to/3EiyKoZ
☕ Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/itbusinesspodcast

If you found value in this episode, share it with another MSP, IT provider, or tech entrepreneur. Your support helps keep practical, no-nonsense IT business conversations coming every week.

I had a great conversation with Mike Glasman, president of Vitalpoints IT Services in Los Angeles, because he came into the MSP world from a path many of us did not take. Mike spent years in channel and enterprise technology sales, working around major vendors and large solution providers before he became an MSP owner. That background taught him how to get in front of customers, ask better questions, evaluate vendors, and build credibility around difficult technical problems, even though he does not position himself as the person who has to fix every ticket.

What really stood out to me was Mike’s insistence that the owner cannot be the single point of failure. He outsourced help desk work from the beginning, built a bench of people he could call on for specialized projects, and trained clients to use the support process instead of calling him directly. We also get into the realities of growing on the side, the high cost of client acquisition, one-year agreements, avoiding unnecessary tool commitments, and why your standard stack still needs room for exceptions when a client has an unusual backup, Wi-Fi, Mac, or large-data problem

=== Chapters

=== Guests: Mike Glasman

=== Resources / Companies / Products / Books / Podcasts

=== SPONSORS: 

=== SHOW MUSIC: 

=== Connect with Uncle Marv

🌐 Website: https://www.itbusinesspodcast.com/
🎙 Host: Marvin Bee
🛒 Uncle Marv’s Amazon Store (gear & tools I recommend): https://amzn.to/3EiyKoZ
☕ Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/itbusinesspodcast

If you found value in this episode, share it with another MSP, IT provider, or tech entrepreneur. Your support helps keep practical, no-nonsense IT business conversations coming every week.

Matt Forman from The Local Circuit and I sit down for a good old-fashioned MSP catch-up, covering his steady growth, a changing vendor stack, and why automation is helping his team do more without hiring faster than they need to. We also get into practical AI guardrails, ticket triage, and the tools that save real time in the field.

We talk through some decisions MSP owners deal with every day: changing cloud-distribution partners because of payment-processing costs, moving from Synchro to Halo and NinjaOne, and putting Huntress to work for endpoint and Microsoft 365 identity protection. Matt also explains how his internal AI tools are helping triage tickets, improve ticket subjects, produce technical suggestions, automate onboarding and offboarding, and reduce the little repetitive tasks that steal time from the day.

=== Chapters

=== Events

=== SPONSORS: 

=== SHOW MUSIC: 

=== Commercial Music 

=== Connect with Uncle Marv

🌐 Website: https://www.itbusinesspodcast.com/
🎙 Host: Marvin Bee
🛒 Uncle Marv’s Amazon Store (gear & tools I recommend): https://amzn.to/3EiyKoZ
☕ Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/itbusinesspodcast

If you found value in this episode, share it with another MSP, IT provider, or tech entrepreneur. Your support helps keep practical, no-nonsense IT business conversations coming every week.

Shaun Webber, Co-founder & CEO of Spotto, joins the IT Business Podcast to discuss an AI cloud-operations platform built to help MSPs manage and optimize Microsoft Azure environments at scale. Spotto surfaces actionable cost, performance, security, and reliability recommendations, with controlled remediation and automation designed to help providers reduce operational toil and identify service opportunities.

Guest: Shaun Webber

=== Chapters

=== SPONSORS: 

=== SHOW MUSIC: 

=== Connect with Uncle Marv

🌐 Website: https://www.itbusinesspodcast.com/
🎙 Host: Marvin Bee
🛒 Uncle Marv’s Amazon Store (gear & tools I recommend): https://amzn.to/3EiyKoZ
☕ Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/itbusinesspodcast

If you found value in this episode, share it with another MSP, IT provider, or tech entrepreneur. Your support helps keep practical, no-nonsense IT business conversations coming every week.

Aaron Birnbaum, co-founder of Seron Security’s TRaViS ASM, joins the show to discuss an AI-enhanced external attack surface management platform built for proactive cybersecurity. TRaViS helps MSPs identify exposed assets, vulnerabilities, leaked credentials, and shadow IT, then turn that visibility into an actionable security service for clients.

Guest: Aaron Birnbaum

=== Chapters

=== SPONSORS: 

=== SHOW MUSIC: 

=== Connect with Uncle Marv

🌐 Website: https://www.itbusinesspodcast.com/
🎙 Host: Marvin Bee
🛒 Uncle Marv’s Amazon Store (gear & tools I recommend): https://amzn.to/3EiyKoZ
☕ Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/itbusinesspodcast

If you found value in this episode, share it with another MSP, IT provider, or tech entrepreneur. Your support helps keep practical, no-nonsense IT business conversations coming every week.

Mark Balovnev, CEO of Cyrisma, joins the IT Business Podcast’s PitchIT 2026 series to discuss helping MSPs turn cyber risk and compliance into scalable services. Cyrisma consolidates vulnerability management, asset and data discovery, secure configuration, compliance tracking, and remediation workflows so providers can reduce tool sprawl and better operationalize security services.

Guest: Mark Balovnev

=== Chapters

=== SPONSORS: 

=== SHOW MUSIC: 

=== Connect with Uncle Marv

🌐 Website: https://www.itbusinesspodcast.com/
🎙 Host: Marvin Bee
🛒 Uncle Marv’s Amazon Store (gear & tools I recommend): https://amzn.to/3EiyKoZ
☕ Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/itbusinesspodcast

If you found value in this episode, share it with another MSP, IT provider, or tech entrepreneur. Your support helps keep practical, no-nonsense IT business conversations coming every week.

Romain Basset, co-founder of belfor.io, joins the PitchIT 2026 conversation to discuss a human-risk-management platform built specifically for MSPs. Belfor helps providers deliver white-labeled security awareness content, adaptive phishing simulations, and actionable risk insights through native Microsoft 365 integration and automation.

Guest: Romain Basset

=== Chapters

=== SPONSORS: 

=== SHOW MUSIC: 

=== Connect with Uncle Marv

🌐 Website: https://www.itbusinesspodcast.com/
🎙 Host: Marvin Bee
🛒 Uncle Marv’s Amazon Store (gear & tools I recommend): https://amzn.to/3EiyKoZ
☕ Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/itbusinesspodcast

If you found value in this episode, share it with another MSP, IT provider, or tech entrepreneur. Your support helps keep practical, no-nonsense IT business conversations coming every week.

Lewis Williams is the Technical Project Manager and founder behind Handover, a PitchIT 2026 company built for MSP delivery teams. Handover connects to HaloPSA and ConnectWise to turn live ticket and project data into client-ready status updates, action logs, risk registers, service reviews, and QBR packs—reducing the manual reporting workload for project and service-delivery teams.

Guest: Lewis Williams

=== Chapters

=== SPONSORS: 

=== SHOW MUSIC: 

=== Connect with Uncle Marv

🌐 Website: https://www.itbusinesspodcast.com/
🎙 Host: Marvin Bee
🛒 Uncle Marv’s Amazon Store (gear & tools I recommend): https://amzn.to/3EiyKoZ
☕ Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/itbusinesspodcast

If you found value in this episode, share it with another MSP, IT provider, or tech entrepreneur. Your support helps keep practical, no-nonsense IT business conversations coming every week.