Uncle Marv's IT Business Podcast (Products, stories, and tips for the MSP and IT Professional)

NSITSP just hit its five-year mark, and I break down why this professional society still matters for MSPs, IT consultants, and service providers who want a real voice when security headlines, compliance rules, and industry standards start to shape how we work. The organization has grown from a grassroots response to unfair blame on “the IT people” into a formal professional society with elected leaders, active committees, and a clear mission to advocate for our profession, educate both members and policymakers, and help define what it means to be a true IT service professional.

Looking ahead, the focus is on “build, grow, influence”—expanding structured continuing education with unit credits, showing up at more trade shows to talk membership and standards, and digging into complex issues like AI ethics and CMMC that impact every MSP whether you’re solo or running a larger team. If you’ve ever felt like “nobody represents us,” this update is a call to get involved: check out membership, find a committee that fits your interests, and lend your voice so our profession isn’t defined by people who don’t actually do the work.

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=== 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.

I kick this one off with a real-world vendor story from my own MSP, talking through changes at Intermedia, CORE program fees, and what those decisions mean when you’re trying to protect margins while keeping clients fully supported. From there, I roll into a quick “know your network gear” segment that breaks down hubs, switches, modems, routers, firewalls, and Wi‑Fi access points in plain language you can use to train your team and design more secure, reliable networks.

Then I bring on Paco Lebron, CEO of Prodigy Techs and co-host of MSP Unplugged, along with Nancy Enriguez, MSP founder, author, and head of community for MSP Unplugged, to dig into TechCon Unplugged 2026. We talk dates, location, why all the content is in one room this year, and how workshops from Cyber Matt Lee and the IR Games crew will give you tangible cybersecurity and incident response takeaways. Nancy shares how she’s shaping the MSP Unplugged community around presence and peer relationships, while Paco explains why the “magic happens in the hallways” and why being in the room with other MSPs still matters for business growth.

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=== Guest: Paco Lebron

=== Guest: Nancy Henriquez

=== Events

=== 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.

Ann Cloyd, CEO and co‑founder of Deep Tech Inc., joins me to share how she took a Mac‑focused niche supporting New York art galleries and turned it into a 30+ person, dual‑platform IT services company serving both Mac and Windows clients. She walks through why she positions Deep Tech as an outsourced IT department instead of “just an MSP,” how staying hands‑on with clients and committing to on‑site visits has built long‑term relationships and word‑of‑mouth growth, and why acquisitions became her preferred path to scale without losing that in‑the‑trenches feel.

We also dig into Ann’s vision for Tech Bloom, a nonprofit apprenticeship program that pays women to learn tech support through real client work, mentorship, and a strong professional network. The big takeaway: if you want your help desk and day‑to‑day support to be a real growth engine, you need to treat relationships as a core asset, show up in person when it counts, and think creatively about building your own talent pipeline—whether that’s through acquisitions, apprenticeships, or partnership with programs like Tech Bloom.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Ann Cloyd, Deep Tech Inc.

=== 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 sat down with my buddy Stan Louissaint to talk about a reality most of us are already feeling: MSPs are under fire from shadow IT and shadow AI popping up in client networks. We unpack why employees and even attorneys are spinning up their own agents, apps, and AI workflows just to get work done, and how that can leave us and the business completely out of the loop on risk, support, and compliance.

We hit real examples, like an attorney quietly building an AI-driven app in the browser and an intern using Claude and VS Code to develop internal software, and use them to highlight gaps around approval, system requirements, data handling, and ongoing ownership. From there, we shift into the practical side—bringing owners into policy decisions, watching the new risk surface created by SaaS and AI tools, and tightening things up with Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint settings so storage issues don’t bite you later.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Stanley Louissaint, Fluid Designs

=== Companies / Vendors / Products / Books / 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.

I start by sharing a real-life update on my mom’s health and how that’s pulled my attention away from work and the podcast, because I believe family and personal life have to come before business—even when you run an MSP and a show that people count on. I talk honestly about what it feels like to keep pushing through while your head isn’t fully in the game, and why I’m finally letting the community in on what I’ve been dealing with.

From there, I walk through several “confessions”: clarifying what I said about ThreatLocker and Microsoft updates after testing and confirming the issue was on my side, admitting my part in vendors calling my wife’s cell, apologizing for missing a DNS change email, and even revisiting an early-2000s server incident where I lost customer data before I truly understood that RAID is not backup. Those stories lead into a bigger conversation about how rarely IT pros simply say “I’m sorry,” how cliquish some peer groups and conferences have become, and how often MSPs oversell managed services and security stacks while under-delivering on real outcomes. I also touch on vendor and swag booth etiquette, podcast etiquette, and why community still matters more to me than endpoint counts or flashy growth.

=== 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.

Mike Smith joined me live in South Florida after a day on-site with a client, and we turned his trip into a full-on therapy session for MSPs dealing with Adobe, ISPs, and over-engineered networks. We dig into Acrobat crashes, painful uninstalls, and why I lean on tools like Ninite Pro and Action1 to deploy and patch software without all the bundled nonsense. From there, we pivot into law firms that demand every browser under the sun, iCloud users getting winmail.dat instead of PDFs, and how a simple Microsoft 365 setting can make or break delivery.

We also share some hard-earned lessons from ISP “solutions” like Comcast Security Edge that silently hijack DNS and cause more trouble than they solve, plus stories about move projects blocked by county approvals and wrong suite numbers. I wrap up with a NetAlly EtherScope tip where I walked into a seven-user shop running multiple VLANs for no good reason, and how simplifying that network instantly fixed their printing issues and future support costs.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Mike Smith, Mike Tech Show

=== 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.

Melanie Curtis joins me to talk about pivoting careers, building a coaching and speaking business, and choosing family, boundaries, and fun over the nonstop hustle grind.

We start with Melanie’s shift from investment banking into pro skydiving, then from skydiving into coaching, driven by a subtle realization that her “dream job” still wasn’t the whole story. She unpacks the decision to lean into life coaching when it wasn’t cool, how she navigated the fear of it being a scam, and what it took to trust that quiet sense of calling anyway.

From there, we get personal about missed flights to family events, the danger of filling your calendar with only client work, and the moment she decided she couldn’t outrun future regret. Melanie outlines how a coaching relationship starts with business problems and quickly hits deeper human patterns, why she pushes for year-long masterminds with real structure, and how she uses humor and her “comedy content creator” side to keep the pressure of entrepreneurship from boiling over. We close with her real-time experience of building a keynote speaking practice: long prospecting cycles, thousands of emails, warm intros that actually convert, and a clear stance on why discipline must sit alongside boundaries, rest, recovery, and connection if you want to stay in the game.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Melanie Curtis, Melanie Curtis Coaching / Speaking

=== 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.

Melanie Curtis joins me to unpack how skydiving, world records, and adversity actually map to client issues, cash flow stress, and growth decisions inside an MSP. We explore smart risk‑taking, realistic timelines for “overnight” success, and how to build an IT business that matches the life you want instead of someone else’s revenue goals.

Melanie explains why fear around leaving a steady paycheck feels like mortal danger, and why that reaction is normal for MSP owners whose livelihood supports families, staff, and clients. She shares how she spent eight to ten months saving money, paying off her car, and pitching a brand‑new role at her drop zone so she could move into skydiving with a safety net instead of a blind leap.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Melanie Curtis, Melanie Curtis Coaching 

=== 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 conversation starts with a confession: I’ve been living in Lifecycle Manager just for hardware reports and ignoring the big SaaS management piece sitting right in my Pro license. Ryan breaks down how ScalePad pulled in tech from their Produce8 acquisition to build a SaaS management layer that finally gives MSPs visibility into the cloud side of the stack—apps, users, time in app, and historical usage—so you can see what’s actually being used and what’s burning budget for no reason.

We also zoom out and talk about the bigger picture of where ScalePad is heading. Lifecycle Manager has been rebuilt to bring more of the MSP workflow inside the platform: assessments, comparables, initiatives that sync to your PSA, roadmaps tied into budgets, and automated QBR reports that save you from copy-paste hell. On top of that, ScalePad is going API-first and AI-enabled, exposing Lifecycle Manager through MCP, adding an AI agent and ScalePad Copilot, and lining up CSAT, NPS, UI refresh, and alignment modules so you can measure client sentiment and grow inside existing agreements.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Ryan Sigouin, ScalePad

=== 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 caught up with Victor Lopez from FlexPoint live at Pax8 Beyond in Salt Lake City to talk about one of the least‑loved parts of running an MSP: getting paid. Victor breaks down how FlexPoint sits alongside QuickBooks and your PSA to automate accounts receivable, from credit card and ACH payments to client self‑service through a portal, all while keeping your existing billing workflows intact.

We get into cash‑flow friendly features like same‑day ACH funding, short‑term financing that lets clients spread big projects over 30 days to 12 months while you still get paid upfront, and a fixed monthly subscription model that doesn’t scale your fees every time your revenue grows. Victor also previews FlexPoint’s AI voice agents that can call clients, explain invoices line‑by‑line, resend invoices on the spot, and show you opens and clicks, all designed to protect the MSP–client relationship while reducing back‑office friction.

=== Chapters

=== Guest: Victor Lopez, FlexPoint

=== 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.