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

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.

Tonight I kicked back and pulled together everything I’ve learned so far from this Money, Marketing, and Growth series, and I didn’t hold back on how it applies to my own MSP world. I walk through five big pillars that kept coming up from folks like Laura Johns, Colin Knox, Nate Freedman, Dave Scott, Dori Spade, Tim Fitzpatrick, and Lisa Shorr: fix your foundation before you spend, close more from the pipeline you already have, protect your margins before you chase growth, use AI to support execution instead of replacing strategy, and remember that human trust still wins the deal. I talk about tightening your ICP and website, speeding up proposals and follow‑up, finding billing leakage in licenses and devices, and using AI for SOPs, email drafts, and workflows once you’ve actually figured out who you serve and what you offer.

I also share some real‑world stories from my day: spotting offline workstations via RMM, catching a client moving a UPS in real time, and sending out an FBI flash alert about a ransom group impersonating IT staff that my client was smart enough to question. You’ll hear why I love tools like ThreatLocker for zero‑trust endpoint protection, TruGrid for secure remote access when I don’t want to touch home PCs, and OneStream for Teams‑based calling, plus how Domotz is tying into AI so you can query environments and alerts with natural language. I wrap up with what’s coming next: Pax8 Beyond in Salt Lake City, TechCon Unplugged in Chicago, an August all‑MSP lineup with no vendors, some EnGenius networking gear and test tools on the bench for review, and even a quick dash‑cam rabbit hole live with Cory in chat.

Chapters

=== 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.

Sitting at ACES in cold Minneapolis, I pulled Justin Maxwell aside after his wealth session because the room literally shifted once he started making us write down real numbers for the life we actually want. Justin has a teacher’s gift for taking the scary, foggy “money ball” in our heads and breaking it into clear targets, simple math, and real choices that don’t make you feel sleazy or like you’re selling out your values. We dig into the biggest fear most of us have, which isn’t taxes or markets, it is quietly worrying that we’ll outlive our money and end up shrinking our lives out of scarcity instead of using our business to expand our options.

Justin also calls out the mess most of us live in with our “money people” where the accountant, financial advisor, attorney, and insurance folks never talk to each other and definitely are not pointed at the same long‑term goal. He explains how Big Life Financial built an umbrella team that handles accounting, proactive tax planning, wealth management, insurance, estate planning, and even making your MSP a sellable asset, then shows what that same structure can look like when you build your own crew. We walk through when it makes sense to invest in proactive tax strategy, how to use the “tax savings arbitrage” to buy real assets instead of toys, why hitting around 200–300k in personal income opens up accredited‑investor opportunities, and how to start behaving like the owner of a 10 million dollar MSP before you ever cross seven figures. If you’ve had good years on paper but nothing to show in net worth, this one might feel uncomfortably personal in the best way.

Chapters

=== Guests: Justin Maxwell, Big Life Financial

=== 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 back my friend Dori Spade, founder of Call to Action, to talk about something most MSPs quietly struggle with: you spend money on marketing, hire a sales rep or two, and still only close a few deals a year. Dori walks me through how she has helped MSPs move from the industry standard 25 percent close rate up to 70 percent by closing what she calls the “trust gap” that prospects feel when every provider sounds the same. We talk about turning around a struggling acquisition region that was losing clients and staff, why proposals should read like they were written for one specific business, and how bringing in technical and client success folks during the sales process actually pays for itself when you win just a couple more 5K MRR deals.

We also get into real world scenarios: a 10 person MSP with only 10 good leads all year, big shops averaging just 2 to 3 solid leads a month, and the friction owners feel about “pulling” techs into sales meetings. Dori explains her Seamless Sales Delivery Model in plain English, shows how the same framework powers both retention and expansion, and shares why MSPs should use it to operationalize AI offerings the same way they did with cybersecurity. If you are a one person shop wearing every hat or a multi region MSP trying to get your team rowing in the same direction, this episode will give you a practical blueprint to turn the pipeline you already have into real, predictable revenue.

Chapters

=== Guest: Dori Spade, Call To Action LLC

=== 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 grabbed Richard Wingfield at ACES Conference in Minneapolis to talk about something every MSP and IT consultant secretly worries about: how do you actually get out of the business without it collapsing or ticking off your best clients. Richard has been running Envision Design out of Houston since the early 90s, starting as a Mac‑only consultant when you could “throw a rock and hit a Windows guy,” then shifting into a cross‑platform MSP as iPhones and iPads forced everyone to live in mixed environments. We dig into why he’s always led with true consulting instead of one‑size‑fits‑all stacks, and how that mindset shaped the way he built his company and his client base of 20 to 50‑user firms.

Chapters

=== Guest: Richard Wingfield, Envision Design, LLC

=== 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 brought back my friend Dave Scott from Scott Growth Strategies to poke the bear a little and talk about why so many MSPs feel stuck, even when they’re working their tails off. Dave lives right in the middle of that problem as a fractional CMO/CRO for MSPs and B2B firms that have hit a growth ceiling, and he does not sugarcoat the reality that a lot of us are fantastic engineers and pretty rough business owners. We dig into the difference between being an “idea-heavy” entrepreneur and a disciplined business owner, why 77 percent of MSPs are under a million in revenue, and how that shows up as burnout, bad clients, and lumpy, random sales.

Chapters

=== Guest: Dave Scott, Scott Growth Strategies

=== Florida Man Stories

=== 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.