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

Megan shares her journey from running a 30-person agency to shifting into Pisces Growth Consulting after a cancer diagnosis forced her to rethink what kind of business and life she actually wanted. She talks candidly about the difference between building a business versus just monetizing a skill, the trap of being an “accidental business owner,” and why many MSPs are trying to replace themselves in all the wrong places.

We get into the “lead gen fallacy” and why “I just need more leads” is usually code for deeper problems around positioning, offer, pricing, sales process, and client fit. Megan walks through how she helps MSPs score client quality beyond MRR, clean up bad-fit clients, and stop underpricing services so they can focus on profit, happiness, and building a business they’d actually buy themselves.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Megan Killion, Pisces Growth Consulting

=== 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.

Nick Ross joins me live from Pax8 Beyond in Salt Lake City to walk through how Cloud Capsule is changing the way MSPs handle Microsoft 365 security and compliance. We get into the pain of running traditional assessments, chasing Secure Score, and trying to map CIS and other frameworks across hundreds or even thousands of tenants without burning out your team or living in PowerShell all day. Nick explains how Cloud Capsule was born from those real MSP struggles, and how they’re now scanning tenants in about a minute and turning that data into practical guidance MSPs can actually act on.

We also talk about Cloud Capsule’s new remediation capabilities, how they’re avoiding the “one-click chaos” trap, and why they’re focusing on proactive security instead of just reacting to alerts. Nick breaks down their capsule concept for bundling policies by client type, their support for frameworks like CIS, UK Cyber Essentials, Essential 8, and SMB 1001, and how MSPs can use the platform to standardize security without ignoring the nuances and exceptions every client inevitably has. We wrap up with how his T-Minus 365 channel feeds awareness and leads, and why he’s doubling down on content for the MSP community.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Nick Ross

=== 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.

The pace of change in the AI market continues to accelerate, and few people have a better view of the MSP ecosystem than Rob Rae. During our conversation at Pax8 Beyond 2026, we discussed how AI has evolved from strategy discussions into implementation, execution, and measurable business outcomes.

Rob shared his thoughts on MSPs creating their own AI solutions, the importance of governance and compliance, and why the industry is still in the early stages of figuring out what works. We also revisited some of Pax8's challenges from the previous year and talked about how organizations grow through change while maintaining trust with partners.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Rob Rae, 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.

Pax8 is planting a flag around the “managed intelligence provider” idea, and this episode unpacks how that changes the story you tell clients about AI, data, and business outcomes. I walk through what I heard in Salt Lake City, from the new AI agent store and marketplace updates to how Pax8 wants to help you go from playing with AI internally to delivering real, billable outcomes for customers.

I also have some fun with conference life: a honest rundown of the swag that worked, the swag that absolutely didn’t, and why vendors should care if their Bluetooth speaker won’t even turn off. From clever hats to custom-engraved keychains, it’s a practical look at what actually keeps your brand in an MSP’s bag instead of their hotel trash can. On top of that, I revisit my EnGenius network test, explain what went wrong, and show you how to use tools like NetAlly, iPerf3, and even simple ping and traceroute to validate your networks.

EnGenius Deep Dive Video: https://www.youtube.com/live/AWNasHLmI5E?si=hZ-c-epWWybPmPST

=== Chapters

=== Shout-outs

=== Companies / Products Mentioned

=== 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.

Tim and I talk about a problem every MSP owner knows too well: ideas and insights piling up in notebooks, chats, and AI prompts that never actually turn into content, leads, or sales conversations. Tim walks through how he built a centralized “source of truth” for his learning, plugged in multiple AI models, and layered on workflows for agencies, MSPs, and solopreneurs to turn all that raw thinking into structured, publishable content.

We get into how Golden Iris helps you define your brand voice, create personas, and build repeatable approval workflows so you’re not relying on yet another random marketing tool your team will ignore. Tim shares how he’s using content harvesting, analytics, and human-in-the-loop governance to keep things safe, on-brand, and actually useful for both MSPs and the marketing agencies that support them.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Tim Golden, Compliance Scorecard

=== 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.

Hanging out with Robin Robins in this episode felt less like a marketing chat and more like a reality check for MSP owners who are tired, stressed, and still not getting the growth they want. Robin has been in MSP marketing since 2002, and she’s seen everything from break-fix shops turning into 8 million dollar firms with strong EBITDA, to owners still stuck in the same place decades later because they undercharge, give away work for free, and abdicate marketing to agencies who only implement tactics. She explains why templated campaigns are not the enemy if they sit inside the right strategy, and why so many digital agencies “do SEO” but never ask about your competition, referral systems, or how your team even handles inbound calls.

We get into the uncomfortable stuff: owners chasing 10X growth because “that’s what everyone else is doing,” MSPs under a million who are more stressed than the eight-figure shops, and folks who get to their sixties with no exit and no savings. Robin talks about helping clients pick their financial freedom number, treating the MSP as the vehicle to get there, and refusing to add new customers to an unprofitable model that will just implode under growth. She also shares her bullish view on AI, comparing it to past disruptions like cloud and the internet, and walks through practical ways MSPs should use AI internally, secure client usage, and either partner or carefully structure AI consulting instead of sinking CEO time into one-off, unscalable dev projects.

=== Chapters

=== Guests: Robin Robins

=== 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.

Andrew Hartman knows what it's like to wake up at 4:25 a.m. in a cold sweat, already behind before the day starts. As a former fractional COO of an MSP in Orange County, he watched stress destroy his health, relationships, and peace until he built Time Boss, a framework that's helped 95% of participants experience more peace and reclaim five hours per week. What stuck with me was his "time is cash, not credit" philosophy because we MSPs keep swiping that time credit card without knowing if we have enough hours to pay it off. Andrew breaks down how to architect your week with weekly planning and daily review habits, how to deputize fires to your team instead of living as a firefighter forever, and why solo techs need to protect focused time even when servers are burning. The framework handles the three things coming at all of us: recurring tasks, one-time tasks, and the chaos we didn't see at 6 a.m. that becomes our priority by 10 a.m..

Chapters

=== Guest: Andrew Hartman, Time Boss

=== 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.

This one is a fun mix of money, mindset, and real‑world scars from inside MSP financials. I sit down with Rayanne Buchianico, who’s spent decades inside your QuickBooks, PSA, pricing, and procurement, and who just graduated from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program. We use one of her client stories about an AI rollout to show why features and benefits don’t sell on their own, and why your client has to actually feel the problem before they’ll part with a dollar. Rayanne explains how the Goldman Sachs framework made her map out risk, target customer, market demand, team readiness, and personal goals before green‑lighting a new service, and how she translated that directly into the managed services world.

We also look at the bigger pivot she’s making at ABC Solutions: moving from “just the accounting person” to a strategic back-office partner that understands your PSA, invoicing, procurement, and service mix as one system. She talks about the workbook she’s building for MSPs to test new offerings on paper first, forecast revenue and costs, and figure out if that extra 700K in sales is actually supportable by your people and processes. Along the way we revisit the early days of connecting PSAs to QuickBooks, the messy P&Ls she kept seeing in MSPs, the fatigue your team feels when you constantly change vendors, and how getting clear on your own “why” sets you up for better M&A and exit decisions down the road. If you’re tired of guessing at bundles and hoping a new tool fixes your business, you’ll get a ton out of this chat.

Chapters

=== Guest: Rayanne Buchianico, ABC Solutions, LLC

=== 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.

Let’s be honest, most of us as MSPs are still faking it when it comes to credential management, with passwords scattered across browser managers, Excel, Google Docs, old ticket notes, and that one tech who “just knows” where everything lives. In this conversation with Passpack CEO Chris Skipworth, we unpack the real mess behind password sprawl, painful offboarding, and ghost access for ex employees, and why that puts you one incident away from explaining to a client how someone walked in the digital back door. Chris explains how Passpack took a consumer focused Italian brand and rebuilt it into a B2B zero knowledge, browser based platform for teams, focused on adoption, reporting, and shared access that small and mid sized business users will actually use.

We get into how Passpack compares with familiar names like Keeper, 1Password, and LastPass, and why they chose to encrypt individual records instead of entire databases to raise the bar on security while keeping the tool simple for MSPs and SMBs. You’ll hear why they prefer working with MSPs and businesses over consumers, how they think about real time updates and accountability for “who has access to what and when,” and how aggressive, easy to understand pricing helps you roll out an enterprise level credential solution without a massive learning curve.

Chapters

=== Guest: Christopher “Chris” Skipworth, Passpack

=== 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 brought Tim Fitzpatrick from Rialto Marketing back because too many MSPs keep telling me the same thing: “We tried marketing, it doesn’t work.” Tim breaks that thinking apart and explains why most of us don’t have a lead problem, we have a strategy problem. We dig into why “strategy before tactics” is the real fuel for your marketing engine, how to get specific about your ideal clients, and why your generic website hero section is quietly sending good prospects to your competitors.

We also talk about where the easy money is hiding inside your business right now. Tim walks through smart referral systems (not just client referrals but true referral partners), tapping MDF without the usual friction, and a real example of a 2M MSP that accidentally niched into healthcare but never built a plan around it. We wrap up on paid ads, SEO, and AI, and Tim explains why those tools only work when you already have an engine in place, plus how to use AI for data and research instead of just cranking out more weak content.

Chapters

=== Guest: Tim Fitzpatrick, Rialto Marketing

=== 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.