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

We’re on the floor at Pax8 Beyond in Salt Lake City with GTIA leaders Dan Wensley and MJ Shoer, talking about ChannelCon 2026 in San Diego and what’s changed since the CompTIA transition. They share how GTIA rebuilt from zero infrastructure, doubled IT service provider attendance year over year, and is leaning into education, research, and community to deliver “more value to more members.

We also dig into the new AI and innovation awards, the GTIA ISAO, and a major collaboration with Texas A&M to define standards for responsible, professional IT services. Dan and MJ explain why now is the time for MSPs to stop sitting on the sidelines, plug into a global trade association, and take advantage of millions of dollars in resources, threat intel, and free access to ChannelCon for just a few hundred bucks a year.

=== Chapter

=== Guest: Dan Wensley

=== Guest: MJ Shoer

Shout-outs

Companies / Vendors / Products / Events / Organizations

=== 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.

Cynthia Schreiner joins me live at Pax8 Beyond to talk about her first year at Pax8, what makes their partner community feel different, and how she’s using AI and automation to transform event operations.

Catching up with Cynthia at Pax8 Beyond 2026 in Salt Lake City, we dig into her move into the Senior Manager of Channel Engagement role, what it’s been like working alongside channel heavy hitters, and why this first Beyond feels so energizing for partners. We get into the real value of MSP community, the stress and isolation that comes with running an IT services business, and how it changes when you’re in a room full of vendors and peers who actually understand what you do. Cynthia also shares how she shifted her mindset around AI: instead of waiting for “free time” to learn tools, she started attacking annoying tasks with Copilot and CoWork, building skills that now save her hours across 90+ events.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Cynthia Schreiner, Pax8

=== Shout-outs

=== Companies / Vendors / Products / Books

=== 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.

Gene Reich from Traceless joins me live at Pax8 Beyond to walk through a fresh way MSPs can protect identity, data, and high‑risk business communications from modern phishing and social engineering attacks. We talk tools, workflows, and the realities of building a security product that respects the MSP business model instead of competing with it.

This conversation starts with a simple question every MSP wrestles with: how do I really know who’s calling my helpdesk and how do I safely share passwords and sensitive details without leaving them in tickets, chat threads, or inboxes forever? From there, Gene breaks down how Traceless grew from that pain point into a broader mission of protecting business communication—beyond just email security—by layering identity verification, secure data exchange, and contextual AI on top of the tools we already use.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Gene Reich, Traceless

=== Shout-outs

=== Companies / Vendors / Products / Events / Organizations

=== 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.

David and I sit down on Radio Row at Pax8 Beyond 2026 to talk about the real-world impact of AI automation on MSP operations and service delivery. David shares how Pia moved from educating the market pre‑ChatGPT to now serving a much more AI‑aware MSP community, and why waiting on the sidelines is a risky growth strategy if you want to keep up with demand.

We walk through Pia’s Engage stack—PiaChat in Microsoft Teams and resolution‑driven smart forms that turn conversations and requests directly into completed tickets—plus a growing automation hub that lets vendors and MSPs publish and share proven runbooks. David explains how Pia’s out‑of‑the‑box automations free up level one techs, protect level twos from onboarding backlogs, and give MSPs room to focus on higher‑value projects instead of reinventing tools that already exist.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: David Schwartz, Pia

=== Shout-outs

=== Companies / Vendors / Products / Books

=== 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.

Statehouses have been busy, and the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity at UC Berkeley found that in 2025 alone, state governments passed 99 cybersecurity-related bills, creating 393 new statutory requirements. Most of these new laws hit public schools, state agencies, cyber insurance policyholders, and critical infrastructure, which means your client base is becoming more regulated even if MSPs aren’t named directly in the statutes. I walk through how this shows up in your day-to-day work as new documentation, governance, and compliance expectations that land on your plate, and how to use the referenced database as a cheat sheet for scoping projects and updating your service catalog.

We also unpack cybersecurity safe harbor laws, now on the books in states like Ohio, Connecticut, Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma (for hospitals), Tennessee, and Texas, where a written, framework-aligned security program can give you an affirmative legal defense after a breach. From there we head into Colorado’s digital right to repair fight, California’s proposal to tax downloaded software, the broader trend of states taxing software in more than 30 jurisdictions, and NSITSP’s work building a legislative toolkit, outreach guides, and model IT provider legislation that’s ready to use if regulators decide to come back for our industry.

=== Chapters

=== Companies / Vendors / Products / Books

=== 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.

Brook Lee and I catch up in Salt Lake City and dig into why she joined Rev.io, how the company evolved from telco billing into an AI-first PSA platform, and what “good leadership” actually looks like from the vendor side. We talk about why most PSAs are still glorified ticketing systems, how that hurts sales, marketing, and finance, and why a modern platform has to be something the entire MSP can actually use without a 600-dollar-an-hour consultant.

We also get into Brook’s unapologetically spicy guidebook on leveraging vendor relationships, why vendors should be doing a lot more than handing out MDF, and how MSPs can demand real training, better support, and useful assets instead of shelfware. Then we lighten it up with a surprisingly serious breakdown of swag strategy, from good pens and koozies to the worst throwaway giveaways on the expo floor and some “super secret” Rev.io dice.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Brook Lee

=== Companies / Vendors / Products / Books

=== 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.

Synology has been a go‑to for a lot of us because of price, reliability, and that rich app ecosystem, but the recent changes around Active Insight, drive “compatibility,” and DSM 7.4’s storage efficiency are raising serious questions for MSPs. In this episode, I share what I’m seeing in production, how client quotes balloon when you go “all Synology,” and why these policy decisions feel less like engineering and more like a cash grab that erodes trust with partners.

From there, I pivot into some nuts‑and‑bolts network talk: why I insist on managed switches almost everywhere, how to use port statistics to find bad cabling and terminations, and where tools like the Fluke LinkIQ Duo actually fit compared to NetAlly devices. I walk through real testing examples, pricing comparisons, and when it makes sense to spend three to four grand on a network tester versus just leaning harder on managed infrastructure and monitoring.

=== Chapters

=== Shout-outs

=== TechCon Unplugged: https://www.mspunplugged.com/techcon-unplugged/

=== Companies / Vendors / Products / Books

=== 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’m live at Pax8 Beyond 2026 in Salt Lake City with Acronis Channel Chief Officer Alex Ruslyakov, breaking down how Acronis is protecting GenAI, simplifying MSP operations, and helping partners scale smarter. We talk AI security, automation, CyberFrame, and a new partner program that bakes business growth tools right into the Acronis platform.

From there, we zoom out to the bigger Acronis platform strategy: automation, agentic AI, third‑party integrations, and a unified console designed to cut tool overload while reducing operational overhead. Alex also walks through Partner Program 2.0, baked directly into the platform, along with CyberFrame virtual infrastructure, integrated endpoint protection, backup, disaster recovery, and even automated social media marketing to help MSPs actually find and close new business.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Alex Ruslyakov

=== Shout-outs

=== Companies / Vendors / Products / 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.

I caught up with David Meister from Check Point live at Pax8 Beyond to dig into what they’ve really been building for MSPs the last few years. You probably know them from Avanan on the email side, but David walks me through how Check Point has pulled together Avanan, Perimeter 81, Cyberint, and the Lakera AI security acquisition into a single, multi‑tenant MSP platform with consumption‑based billing, no minimums, and no lock‑ins.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: David Meister, Check Point Software

=== Shout-outs

=== Companies / Vendors / Products / Events / Places

=== 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.

ConnectWise has been talking platform for years, but David Raissipour explains what’s actually changed in the last 18 months and why MSPs should care now. We dig into how the former ASIO stack has been refocused and rebranded as the ConnectWise platform, with a single data layer, unified services, and an AI and automation layer that sits across PSA, RMM, ScreenConnect, documentation, and security.

David breaks down how ConnectWise approached their agentic platform, why they quietly rolled out a 15‑minute SLA for their managed SIEM and EDR before talking about it on stage, and what it took to hit 100% on that SLA before they felt comfortable putting their names on it. We get real about the “heavy” reputation ConnectWise had, what partner migration looks like now, and how an outsider to the MSP world thinks about listening to partners without needing to “have been an MSP” to build the right tools.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: David Raissipour

=== Shout-outs

=== Companies / Vendors / Products / Books

=== 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.