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In this special bonus episode of MSP Chat, sponsored by Acronis and its new MSP Academy, Erick and Rich discuss how the XDR solution Acronis recently introduced underscores important cybersecurity trends and three tactics for overcoming the ongoing shortage of MSP talent. Then they’re joined by Acronis President Gaidar Magdanurov for an in-depth conversation about the value of education for MSPs and how vendors can help their partners address education pain points and opportunities. And finally, one last thing: if you’ve been putting something off until hippos fly, that day has now arrived.
Discussed in this episode:
Hippos might fly: UK research discovers animal can get airborne
Transcript:
Rich: [00:00:00] This episode of MSP Chat is brought to you by a CROs and it’s MSP Academy, a dedicated vendor neutral platform, offering tech, business, and soft skills training from bite-sized modules for busy professionals to structured 30 minute deep dives. MSP Academy has the learning plans. Budding and seasoned MSPs alike need to address key challenges and stay up to date with a rapidly changing technology landscape.
You can also earn MSp certification. Receive the Acronis Credibly Badge, symbolizing your expertise, and then move on to more advanced vendor specific training programs from Acronis and other industry leaders. It’s a totally free resource, proven to help users increase Acronis product revenue by an average of 60 percent and reduce support incidents by an average of 40%.
Learn more at academy. acronis. com. And three, two, one. Blast off! Welcome to this episode of the MSP Chat Podcast, sponsored this time by Acronis. This is your weekly visit with two talking heads talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need. To make it big in managed services.
My name is Rich Freeman. I am chief content officer and channel analyst at Channel Master, the organization responsible for this podcast. I am joined as I am every week by our other co host, our chief strategist at Channel Master, Erick Simpson. Erick, how you doing? Feeling strong, Rich. Feeling good. How are you feeling?
I’m feeling great. I’m feeling great. And in particular because thanks to our friends at Acronis We’ve got an entire episode here. I’m focused in on security and security education We’ve got an interview segment, up ahead of us here where we’re going to be joined for the second time in the History of this podcast by Gaidar Magdanirov, the president of Acronis, to talk specifically about education and training for MSPs with security and beyond.
Very interesting conversation. Stick around for that folks. But what do you say? You want to get Want to dive right in, Erick?
Erick: Let’s
Rich: dive right in. All right. Let’s begin with our story of the week. And this particular story actually broke a few weeks back. We didn’t get a chance to talk about it on the podcast then.
And so I’m seizing this opportunity to bring it up now. Because one of the. Biggest recent product releases by Acronis was the addition of XDR to their CyberProtect Cloud solution. And that’s notable, obviously, if you are an Acronis partner, you’re thinking about becoming an Acronis partner.
But there were several aspects of that launch which I first learned about in conversation with them. Back at the RSA conference a couple of months ago that felt to me at the time and still feel now very representative of where we are in this industry right now. With respect to XDR. So first of all the cyber protected cloud platform already includes a wide range of different security functions.
They had EDR, they added MDR. Most recently now they’re adding XDR. That move into XDR is representative of a larger move across the cybersecurity industry into XDR. We’re seeing a lot of companies Barracuda, WatchGuard. There are a lot of companies that have or are adding XDR solutions.
ConnectWise recently introduced a product that looks a lot like an XDR system, although they don’t label it that way. So I think this is a reflection of how important that ability is. To aggregate inputs from a wide range of sensors and correlate them and act accordingly is in cyber security right now.
One of the things that Acronis really emphasized in their implementation of XDR though is what I’ll call MSP friendly functionality. So there are plenty of XDR solutions out there, but if you are an MSP and you’re looking for an XDR product, you need something that is integrated with your RMM and your PSA is multi tenant.
Something that’s going to be easy for your technicians to use because productivity and efficiency are going to be very important. That was something that they emphasized at Acronis in the design of this system. I see it in XDR solutions from some of the other security vendors out there as well.
Another thing I will point to is as a feature of the Acronis XDR that’s notable and consistent with trends. Yeah, it’s that it is part of a cross platform integrated stack. So like I was saying, Cyber Protect Cloud does all sorts of different things. Email security, endpoint security, et cetera.
Rather than introduce a standalone XDR product, they have bundled their XDR in with those other functions, because as we know, Erick. MSPs are increasingly look to get more of their cyber [00:05:00] security functionality from fewer vendors and they want the vendors they buy from to integrate those functions. So again, this is a decision in keeping with long standing policy at Acronis.
It’s very much in keeping as well with a trend a purchasing preference MSPs, particularly in the last year and a couple of years. Acronis. And then the other thing Acronis has a longstanding commitment to cross vendor integration. It predates this XDR solution. They’ve actually invested a lot of time and effort.
I’ve written about this before in my blog, channel, all of it in integrating with third party security providers. That Prior investment came in very handy here when they were creating an XDR solution, because there were a lot of integrations that they could tap into. But Acronis is very much consistent with a, what I will call a welcome trend in the industry, Erick, which is that a lot of security vendors.
Who understand the importance of correlating across vendors, across platforms are very open and supportive of integrating with companies that a lot of people might consider a competitor because they understand as vendors have said to me before, and Acronis has said before, we would love it if our platform is the one and only platform MSPs are using in the real world, that is often not the case.
And in order to help our MSPs succeed and help their end users stay secure. We need to be integrated with third party solutions, and there’s a real willingness to do that I’m seeing at Acronis and more broadly in the industry that’s really reflected in this product. So a few things about Acronis XDR that kind of jumped out at me as being important and noteworthy for our audience in particular.
Erick: Rich, it certainly seems like Acronis is hitting all the right chords from an MSP’s perspective, right? The table stakes. Include the, some of the things that we’ve talked about a lot on the show, Rich, including multi tenancy integration with other platforms, integration with billing systems unified, alerting and things like that.
So those are all, I think, table stakes for MSPs, as we’ve talked about before, how easy is it for me to deploy? How easy is it for my technicians to support? How much more efficiently? Does it allow us to operate and is it great for my clients? Absolutely. So talking about, is it great for my clients?
I just mentioned. Four or five things, which that we both agree are table stakes to succeed in the MSP channel is XDR now one of those able stakes from a security perspective for MSPs to now, do you think,
Rich: It very much. And that was when I was talking about the importance of this product in the world, cybersecurity, especially for MSPs, I think that’s what you’re seeing.
Essentially is there’s a recognition that endpoint detection and response managed or not is very important, but you really get a much more complete and effective picture of what’s happening. You can act on it more effectively if you’re extending that detection and response capability beyond the the end point.
Yeah, I think yes, this is the answer to your questionnaire.
Erick: Yeah. So again, Acronis, like I said, rich kind of hitting all the right cords and this, this openness to integrate with, potential potentially perceived competitors is unique as well. So they’re really taking I think going above and beyond what we see some other vendors doing in trying to meet the needs of their partners, right?
Their partners may be using. Some components from someone else, but they want the stuff that Acronis can provide and allowing that integration is unique in, in our experience, I would say, wouldn’t you, Rich?
Rich: I’m seeing more and more of it, and I really welcome that trend and and applaud it.
It’s a very responsible. Way for companies like Acronis to think about the market and the need and their MSP partnership. Because there were certainly a point in time when it would have been very strange in a lot of ways for a company like Acronis to go as far as it has to integrate with third parties.
So it’s something I’m seeing more of particularly in the last year, couple of years, and I think it’s a great thing. I think it’s exactly the right. Attitude for a vendor to have if they are genuinely committed to the success of their MSP partners, which Acronis is. To follow up a little bit on something you said before, you were talking about the table stakes functionality.
In the product, and there was a piece in there where you’re talking about, is this easy for the technician to use and to support? And I think that bears some underscoring in this particular case, because Acronis really put some extra design and development work into taking some of the, the analytical burden and the response plan burden off of that overburdened MSP technician and automating a lot of that in the product.
They aren’t [00:10:00] necessarily the only company that is doing that right now, but they really have to a relatively rare degree invested heavily in that, and I think, at a time when Productivity and efficiency and profitability are very much top of mind for MSPs. I think that’s a really important feature in this product, too.
Yeah, agreed. Let’s move on to your tip of the week here, Erick, and we’re changing topics a little bit, but it’s gonna be a nice segue into the interview segment we’re about to do, because the reality is, although the the unemployment rate in the U. S. IT industry right now has actually been trending up a little bit.
Some of the pressure on MSPs to hire and retain is maybe easing a little bit. There is still an enormous talent shortage out there, and it’s still, as research continually shows us, a pain point for MSPs to cope with that shortage. That’s what your tip of the week
Erick: is about. Absolutely right, Rich. And the demand for skilled I.
T. Professionals is still outpacing supply, right? We’re seeing this. In different, certifications or competency levels, especially in cybersecurity. And as rich, we’ve talked about this on the show many times before. MSPs are moving more towards delivering more of these cybersecurity services and solutions, and, vendors like Acronis are adding these capabilities, making it easier for them to adopt them because, buyers Need them.
These business owners need these, but we still have a gap in terms of having the staff to deliver and support them. And so the first thing that I’ll say, Rich is, in order to compete for today’s higher priced, engineers and technicians, cybersecurity experts, and things like that, MSPs have to, be profitable.
They have to make sure that they’re delivering their services profitably. And they’re growing their businesses because. In order to compete for these hires higher paid resources they have to compete from a compensation perspective. So we’ve got to be able to offer attractive salaries benefits and comp and bonuses to attract these folks if we want to Compete so that’s number one.
We’ve got to be attractive from a compensation perspective not only for new People Technicians that come on board rich, but in order to keep the resources that we have, we want to make sure that we are delivering a competitive on this and compensation and benefits package to our existing staff so that we don’t lose them as well.
So compensation is one work culture. Number two, rich, we have to, promote and manage and maintain A very healthy work culture, something that employees appreciate and they feel like they can get behind. You and I had a conversation recently about work culture as I recall, and how important it is and making sure that we’re working towards improving work life balance.
Sometimes better work life balance, rich and flexibility in working hours and things like hybrid versus being in the office and things like that. Can be more important than, a couple grand in competitive salary for folks. Third thing, rich outsourcing. There are lots of opportunities.
There’s lots of resources out in the channel, many more available today than when I was running my, my it practice, my MSP back in the day that are really focused on helping. Cover the gap for maybe level one support, maybe even higher level support. So how do we overcome this skills gap? Look towards opportunities to outsource some of the noise of the business that you’re operating, like the level one stuff to allow you to get the most out of your existing staff, delivering these.
higher valued, more profitable services, again, allowing you to grow your business, keep your existing staff, and maybe compete more effectively for new talent when you need it.
Rich: All three of those are really great Erick, that the first two in particular remind me immediately of a conversation I had just a few months back with Peter Kujawa, who runs the service leadership division for ConnectWise.
So you were talking about profitability and you were talking about culture. Late last year service leadership published some research with some slightly counterintuitive results where the least operationally mature MSPs, and they are all, according to service leadership data, Not just less profitable, they are unprofitable.
Every [00:15:00] MSP in that bottom quartile is losing money. And they raised pay for technicians more than the most operationally mature top quartile MSPs did. And the reason for that basically as Peter explained it, is it can be a painful experience. To work for an operationally immature MSP that from a cultural standpoint, from a work atmosphere standpoint, it might be a place you just don’t enjoy being, it might be a place where they’re not investing in you and your skills and your growth, and it might be a place just because the business isn’t well run by your higher ups, when you’re constantly getting yelled at by unhappy customers that is not a happy experience for anybody.
And so that’s why these bottom quartile MSPs have to pay more. It’s, in order to retain, attract and retain talent, you’ve got to offer a very more than competitive financial deal or who’s going to want to deal with that. And so that I would roll together culture and profitability is operational maturity.
The more mature you are, not only will you be more profitable, but you’re going to have an easier time attracting and retaining talent.
Erick: Wow. Rich. I. I’d never considered it quite that way. But isn’t that its own like self fulfilling prophecy? You’re just, you’re buying time, right? But if you don’t fix some of these core issues and the pain, everyone has their breaking point, right?
It’s the scenario that I share from time to time where, the guy’s walking through the park and he sees somebody sitting on a bench reading a newspaper with a dog on the ground at his feet, howling, Howling and the guy asked the person reading the newspaper. Hey, what’s wrong with your dog?
Person says he’s sitting on a nail. Why doesn’t he move doesn’t hurt enough yet, right? If you don’t address the pain and the challenge and the you know the work culture and the work life balance and all of that. It’s only a matter of time before Someone reaches the point where they say, okay i’m out and because it’s such a competitive You environment right now for these talented individuals, they can just go, a mile away and work for the next MSP, and hoping that is a better culture and environment for them.
So gosh it’s tough.
Rich: It is. But I mean that, it’s all the more reason to focus on operational maturity folks, so that you don’t have to, Compete on pay essentially. And in, in the course of improving your attractiveness to to technicians are also improving the profitability of the business.
So it’s all good stuff there. Absolutely. All right. With that folks, we are going to take a quick break on this episode of the MSP chat podcast sponsored by Acronis when we come back in just a few moments time We are going to be joined by Gaidar Magdanarov. He is the president of Acronis.
Acronis has recently rolled out some training and education resources that are really optimized to what MSPs need and are looking for right now. And that’s going to give us a great hook to get into what is that exactly? What’s important about training? And what and training and education.
What’s the value of that for for MSPs? A lot of great thought leadership coming up from Gaidar Magdanorov. When we return from this break, as we will in just a few minutes. Alright, and welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat Podcast, sponsored by Acronis. This is our spotlight interview segment, and we are joined by the president of Acronis, a returning guest, friend of the show, Gaidar Magdanarov.
Gaidar, welcome back.
Gaidar: Thank you for having me again. Apparently I was not as boring as I thought.
Rich: Absolutely not. We are delighted to have you back with us on the show now for anyone in the audience our rapidly growing audience who was not able to to check you out the first time you came on here to tell them a little bit about yourself, your background and your role at Acronis.
Gaidar: I’m a president of Acronis. I’m in charge of marketing, education, sales, and environment right now. But I’ve been with the company for over 11 years in different roles including running strategy sales at some point for consumer and small and businesses small media businesses and running technical support, professional services.
So I had a chance to see the business from very different angles, I would say. And as Acronis, we are focused on delivering cybersecurity or even cyber protection to managed service providers. And providing them the platform that they can use to deliver services to the end customers.
Rich: Now you mentioned one of your responsibilities is education and that’s actually what we’re going to be talking about in this conversation here and it’s one of those topics I love to get into now and again in managed services because I think there’s a tendency among people to think that everything that [00:20:00] kind of needs to be said and done around MSP education has been said and done.
It’s a, it’s an old topic, what’s there to discuss there. And I don’t think it’s actually true that that the industry has nailed that. So you talk a lot. with MSPs. Just to set the stage, kick things off a little bit. When you’re talking with them about education what do they say to you about the importance of education, the impact it can and does have on the business?
Gaidar: So I would say that I’m consistently hearing that education is extremely important. But that’s what people say. That’s not what they actually do. They don’t dedicate time for their technicians to go through a training and education. That’s why we have to be creative and ways to deliver the maximum amount of information and knowledge in a very short, condensed form.
And it’s becoming worse and worse. If we really want to educate new shops that who have no time, we just have to be creative. It can be like, I’m proud of the UK shall I quick bite sized learning and so on and so forth. But I just noticed an important trend is that in the past, education for MSPs was something about their technicians primarily, but now it’s also about the customers.
Thanks to cyber insurance requirements where they started to demand cyber awareness training for the end customers and the speed started to think about how are they going to train their customers and what are they going to do with our team to prepare them to handle cyber security incidents. So I would say the last year or so, there is significantly more demand for education among service providers.
Erick: Hey, Gaidar. On that topic, I hadn’t really considered the end customer education. You and I, we’ve worked together in the past and we share this common insight into the importance of education for MSPs. Sometimes what we believe MSPs need and what they believe Is two different things and there’s a gap there.
So from your perspective, Gaidar, what kind of training do MSPs need beyond kind of the technical or product specific training, you mentioned the customer conversation training, that’s interesting. What else do you see as being vitally important for MSPs in order to succeed in today’s.
Much more competitive environment.
Gaidar: Yeah, I know. It’s a very good question. Thank you for asking it because I’ve been working in education of MSPs for many years now. It was one of the things that we were really big on at Acronis and I can see how the demand for education is changing. So if in the past it was mostly product training.
And what partners were telling us that they want to know how to use the product in particular scenarios, how to be more efficient, how to be more effective, how to make sure everything is reliable and so on and so forth. That was the demand. And then over time they started telling us, Hey guys, we need training on how do we talk to customers about it?
How do we sell? How do we upsell? How do we cross sell? And it became a scene. And now recently, I would say starting last year, more and more partners are coming to us saying. Look, I have lots of technicians working for me and they are my sales force, but they have no clue about how to sell. They have no clue how to do marketing.
Can you help me, the owner of the MSP, to educate my team on how to be more productive when they try to out, to do outreach to the customers? So that was the dynamic, like technical training. Technical sales training. And I was general marketing and sales training. And I got a general soft skills training because a lot of owners of MSPs, they realized that their team has to adopt because the world is more competitive.
You need to go after the customers. And one thing that people learned, and actually I hear it from a lot of people who went through your training as well, is that they understood now that. Marketing is not one off thing. You just do it once, get some customers, everything works. No, you have to consistently repeat it.
You have to do it. You have to do it. You have to build the database of prospects and constantly nurture it. And then over time. It will give you some returns. So that’s my observation so far on what they demand. But then on the other hand, what I see is happening, if in the past would have multi day training and people really appreciate that.
And for technical training, it’s still there, but people ask for shorter format. Let’s say, make a one day, half a day and so on and so forth. But for any kind of sales and business training, people are asking for different formats. Make short videos, three, four, five minutes, something I can consume during a coffee break, something that I will just have one or two thoughts out of it.
And this is how we are evolving the education. And when we’re building our MSP Academy, that is all about opening eyes of those technicians on how to do marketing and sales. [00:25:00] We focused on very short, very like sappy format where you just learn one idea, two ideas, and you can move on with your day.
And then you can come back and learn something else.
Erick: Wow, there’s a lot to unpack there, Gaidar. So let me start with your, your, you’re addressing as a, the Achilles heel of MSPs as a recovering MSP. I speaking for my brethren and sistren, if that’s a term. So yes, the value that today’s MSPs are seeing in expanding their Ability to train themselves and their team beyond the technical into the marketing and sales.
So that’s what I was meaning is that those are the challenges for MSPs. So we hear it all the time. So I love, yeah. And I love the approach that. Order is now better because, I sense Gaidar, give me your thoughts on this, but I sense that MSPs now are, what is the one device that we have on us pretty much at all times of the day.
It’s our mobile device. It’s our phone. It’s the thing that we carry around as well. And I’ve also begun adjusting my perception and my thinking about, delivering training in smaller bite sized chunks, I’ve spoken with other training organizations. That are moving in that direction. I think it’s because it’s something that you can, while you’re waiting somewhere to do something in between times it’s, your phone is with you, you can get a quick four or five minute, tip or technique or training as you carry that around.
So here’s my follow on question. On that point guide, or do you think that MSPs. Are you, do you agree with that? Is that what you’re seeing? And then number two, do you think that MSPs accelerated their understanding and their adoption of training like during COVID? Because there was a lot of kind of this remote downtime and things like that.
What are your thoughts there?
Gaidar: Yeah, so I can share my observation. So first of all, when I was learning how to do marketing, I was just reading books a lot of it and practicing, because I was a scientist and software engineer, and then I started to do business. And for me, the way to learn was just to consume an enormous amount of information.
And I probably would read about a hundred books a year. And first I actually invested a lot into learning how to read quickly. That was very important. In other words, I wouldn’t be able to do that. And that was normal. And for me at the time, but now, especially with like new generation, People coming into the workforce, they just don’t want to invest that much time.
They don’t read books. They read like summaries of those books. They prefer like video with a quick ideas. And that’s just happening for, with everybody because we just don’t have enough time anymore. So I used to read a hundred books a year. Maybe now I’m getting like, 40 it’s the best because there’s just too much same things going on.
It’s one thing. The second thing what happens is that a lot of things that we try into, especially in marketing now, it’s getting irrelevant quickly because marketing now, it’s all about data and experiments. It’s not like you come up with a great story and then you try to deliver it everywhere.
No, you have to experiment with different ways of delivery. You have to do it. bunch of A B tests, see what’s working and what’s not working and have a quick turnaround and our new technologies all the time. So in the past, we just send emails, but now I have AI tools that will create personalized communication through the channel that you prefer and so on and so forth.
So the world evolving so fast. That people don’t want to invest a lot in learning something that will become irrelevant quickly. So they want to have something that they can use right now, something practical. So somebody goes and Instagram real and says, Hey, look, there’s a new tool. AI tool, put your customer list here, your key messages here, and we’ll deliver it to the customer and in the best way possible, that’s what they want to hear.
They want to do that quickly, super quickly. And at the same time, it’s connects back to. General framework and for me being a technical person marketing, and I understand technical people. Why I tried to learn marketing and they think it’s a, CV activity. I know it’s marketing and everybody can do it.
It’s just go around talking to people. But in reality, when they start to unpack that marketing actually includes multiple activities, you have multiple campaigns, you have to be consistent with your messaging across multiple channels, and it’s not only just publish something on the web, but it’s also ads, SEO optimization, events, offline, online events, follow ups, and so on.
There’s a whole world behind it. And the thing is most technical people, they dismiss it. And they just don’t even know the main concept. Every other MSP, maybe every second MSP I talk to, all they do for marketing is they ask their customers to introduce them to something. Some go to industry events and talk to.
People there, but that’s all they do. They don’t think in terms of [00:30:00] let’s build a website that will be discoverable. Let’s build some campaigns that will bring people to me. They will sign up for my newsletter and I will give them some good tips. So over time we’ll build trust and we can reach out to them and become their trust technology partner.
They don’t think about it. So when they go. And learn something through our MSP academy. And it’s very basic content, super high level. They still see it as something completely new. They’re like, have aha moment. Whoa, Oh my gosh, I can do this. Oh, I can do that. I never thought about this. And then they start looking for the ways to do things that will be you Then they will provide the maximum efficiency at the same the minimum Time commitment.
So that’s what we see and as for a second question about learning more during covid actually yes and no it really depends I think on the country. So my experience and during covid I was Running sales in latin America for a little bit We’re in transition between leaders and what I learned that in some countries, like in Latin America, in many countries, people started to invest more time in education, remote education, joining webinars, going to online, on demand training.
I’ve seen the similar thing happening in Asia, especially in India, but in some countries like in the U S and UK, at least from the perspective of our partners, they didn’t do a lot of education because it wasn’t a downtime for them. They actually had more work to do because they had to manage everybody remotely.
And even though they were working from home, everybody else that they were serving at working from home. So instead of supporting one company with localize in particular location, they had to support multiple people in different locations. So what I was hearing from partners that they were actually overloaded during COVID time.
So they were not investing a lot of time into the education.
Erick: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because during COVID times, what we saw in the industry. Was MSPs were actually busier, especially in co managed IT opportunities where they weren’t as successful before COVID because all of a sudden, all these internal IT departments were not prepared to deal with that.
They were looking to MSPs. And so MSPs the ones that were, at a decent operational maturity level took advantage of all those opportunities and we saw revenues grow. During that time. So that makes sense that they wouldn’t necessarily have more time during COVID to, to dedicate.
I was just curious about, the mindset and the challenges that MSPs have and justifying, carving out time for their teams to take training, because that’s always been. The conversation that I’ve had with MSPs guide are, is, I want to give them training, but I need them to build up.
So when do I just eat that cost? Or do I have them do it on their time? What are the pain points that you hear the most from partners in, in terms of what they need to train their teams on, but in just. How they can facilitate and adopt the training and justify it and make it make sense for them when they’re, busy with dealing with client service and billing and all of that.
Gaidar: Yeah, there’s a really a lot to unpack here because what I’m hearing from partners, exactly what you say, like time of the technician as cost, that’s, yeah, that’s profit. Like we want them to bill for that time. At the same time, we want them to learn. So I would say From talking to our partners and not only partners, just to go on to the MSP event and talking to people, companies that do not want to work with us and talking with distributors, I’m hearing consistently one kind of thing.
There’s a tiny percentage of technicians that will actually educate themselves in their free time. So it’s a myth, people mostly not doing that. You cannot just tell them, Hey, you learned something new with some, and just allocate some time to it. They don’t do it. They just cannot, they have their families, they have other things to do.
So the only way that actually works is if the owner of the MSP or the manager of MSP allocate the time for training. And then what happens is that people get into the situation where they trick themselves. I would say if I’m an owner of MSP and tell my guys, okay, you have a few hours today.
Just go through the training. Here’s a link, go through it, get the certification at the end, whatever. In reality, what happens, they sit at their desk and they keep doing their work. They handle tickets and they have a little window open somewhere, something, somebody’s talking there. So they participate, but in reality, there’s almost no retention of information.
And then they Google the answer, go through the tests and get certification. But in reality, it was a useless activity. They were not deficient at their work and they didn’t get anything from that training. And it is a consistent thing I hear a lot from people. And when I talk to those technicians, they tell me, but what else can we do?
We’re super busy. And the management tells us here’s the time for trading. But in reality, they demand to deliver on the [00:35:00] same KPIs, number of incidents, the number of failures. Tickets handled, average response time, and so on and so forth. In that case of MSP owners of managers, they trick themselves, they allocate time, but then don’t want to do that.
So what we see now is happening more and more. And again, different depending on the country, it’s either a dedicated time when people join an online training where they have to participate with the video. But even more and more, we see people going for offline. That’s why we’re a chronic educational team.
We do a lot of bootcamps where we have people physically coming to a location for a day or two, because that is the time that they dedicate for training. And if they cannot learn. During that time, there’s no way they would learn outside of those hours. And that proof that at least that has proven to us that it’s actually working.
And the way I see it in my kind of business metrics, I look at the amount of revenue we get from the partners before trainings and after training. And our revenue really depends on what kind of products and services they consume and they consume it when they deliver to their customers. So basically. I know if my revenue’s growing, their revenue’s growing ’cause they onboarded new customers.
So they sold higher tier packages, or they sold additional services like security, disaster recovery. So they make more money. And I see that people who went through training, really went through training, went through about boot camps within three to four quarters, get to a hundred percent growth of the revenues with us.
So I can clearly see it actually works. And the other indicator for me that training is working, those people are coming back. So they would send two people from their company to go through a training. And then maybe half a year later, they sent two, three, four more, just because they see the value in that training.
And at the same time, I’m not kidding myself. I understand it’s a significant investment. When I’m having conversation with business owners, I said, look, at the time of my MSP technician is extremely valuable. One day or two days of training will cost me that much. And also travel costs, accommodation costs.
If we have to travel somewhere, it’s significant investment. What I’m going to get my return. And so far, what I see is that people were able to realize that return and that, that’s what works, but it requires a real commitment. And I just had literally this morning, I had a conversation with one of the larger partners.
And they told me that they have this now, this practice, when they send the technicians to a training. They prohibit their managers to call them because in the past they used to call. Imagine you’re in a training and then your manager calls. Oh, we have an emergency. You have to handle it again. It’s a wasted investment.
So yes, education is extremely expensive because you waste time on it. Kind of waste time, deliverable hours, but at the same time, you get more efficiency, more productivity after that. So it’s a balance.
Rich: Gaidar, Erick was asking about pain points. People are very short on time.
Content gets outdated. Marketing is the squishy concept. It’s not very interesting. There are a number of different pain points that you’ve identified already for MSPs around training. And these are not theoretical issues for you guys, because you’ve actually had to think about addressing those.
In your, particularly in the online MSP Academy. So you’ve actually, put some rigorous design thought into the scope of these pain points and how to address them. What can Acronis, what can a vendor like Acronis do to help MSPs get value from training and overcome these pain points?
Gaidar: So I would say. That the main issue I see currently for MSPs is selling to customers. Like I’m selling existing costs, not recruiting new customers. And that issue grows from the way MSPs treat the sales process. They think in terms of selling a technology, selling a product, but they don’t think in terms of value for the customer, and this is what they do.
Vendors can help MSPs to improve if they would teach them how to talk about the product and services that they offer from a perspective value to the customer. So I’ll give you an example talking about like backup disaster recovery solution, being able to quickly recover back to working state.
If you’re talking terms like, Hey, we have this amazing technology, like Acronis OneClick recovery, you can deploy it to all your offices. You don’t need IT people. Something goes wrong. You pull like a little cheat sheet, just quickly click and recover. And an employee can do that. That’s amazing. No downtime for you.
The customers will say, okay, cool, great. Amazing technology. Amazing. That’s what they usually say. But if you tell the same story you are a huge logistics company. You have to deliver lots of packages. And if you’re hit by ransomware, your computer system is down, you [00:40:00] cannot deliver packages. And one hour downtime costs you a million bucks. I’m coming up with different numbers depending on the company, of course, the cost is different. And this leads to this consequences, like you don’t deliver the food on time, it gets bad and you have insurance costs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So basically, if you talk in terms of the value for the customer, that is completely different approach to how you sell.
And most of the technical people in MSP, they talk about technology. I probably in nine out of 10. Calls and meetings where I participate with MSP owners who run the business. They always talk about the technology. And then there’s another thing when they sell security, cyber protection, data protection, they talk about it in terms of insurance, like we’ll get you great security solution.
That means that probably nothing will happen. You just do your business and then it’s a kind of insurance. If something goes wrong, you don’t suffer. And customers, they I don’t like insurance. Nobody wants to buy insurance. You buy a car to get from point A to point B, but you don’t want to pay insurance because why, I just want to get from point A to point B.
That’s why in this case, it’s important to position security as an enabler rather than insurance. So if we do that, if we deploy with security, redeploy this one click recovery, we enable you to digitize your processes and fully rely on the On what you do, like you don’t have to switch back to paper.
If something goes wrong where you don’t have to maintain some kind of duplicates of your processes, because you are afraid that your system will not be working. Just a great example. Like literally I was talking to our VP of marketing yesterday, and she told me that she was buying a new car and she’s in Boston area she went to dealership and she had to spend six or seven hours there because they were hit by ransomware like two weeks ago.
And they still didn’t recover. They have to do a lot of work. On paper, and it leads to hundreds and thousands of car. They will not be able to sell that leads to employees not getting bonuses. Some people being laid off because the company has to maintain the profit margins. So there’s a huge chain of events that could be averted if the management service provider or like a department working as a service provider for that company would deploy proper solutions and proper protection. So that’s, The kind of the type of stories that business want to hear from their service provider to really consider them trusted technology advisor. And from then to then, I participate in those kind of sales calls when I must be talked to their potential customers. And this is what I see here.
The business doesn’t care about the technology you deploy. They don’t even care about what vendors you use. They don’t care. All they care is what does it mean for their business? That’s what vendors could do. And I think most of the MSP vendors could do much better job at doing that. Cause we all tend to focus on technology.
We all kind of start with the value and then we’ll start talking about the technology.
Rich: Very true. In this industry you use the term bite sized chunks earlier on in the conversation to describe shorter form training content, education content that’s maybe more suitable to people with very busy schedules, but not every topic necessarily lends itself to a bite sized chunks.
How do you think about striking the right balance between short form content that is consumable for people when they can actually fit it in and these sort of bigger issues bigger topics that people need to tackle maybe in a more structured kind of way.
Gaidar: Yeah.
So the way we approach it is that for like high level topic, what’s for information, like MSP Academy, we use this, like putting short videos, like Three, four, five, seven minutes. That’s maximum. And then we can have a little course, let’s say about hosting events. And it would be like a few modules in it.
And each module will be like five, seven minutes, but this is for introductory content. If we think about something deeper, like more technical or more complicated from the sales content perspective, then the way we approach it is that we provide. Different level of content and different options. So let’s say for our partners, we have three levels.
We have like foundational training that is basic basis of everything. They will learn about product with selling the product. Then we call it associate training and then professional it’s different length, different depth of content. So people can choose what level for what product or service they want to get.
So they can mix and match depending on their needs, but also within each of our training, we try to make. Every segment as small as possible. So sometimes when we have a 20 minute video, of course, but we try to minimize and split the bigger chunks to chapters. So that way you go into the training and you learn something.
I don’t know if you’re learning about the XDR and you’re learning about integration with and ID and how XDR helps you to [00:45:00] block compromised accounts, for example, that would be like one chapter. And then. After the chapter, you have some questionnaire, so you can test your knowledge and kind of reiterate the thoughts that you had while you were watching the video, but then you can stop and you can do something else.
So you can come back, the next chapter will start from something new, right? It has. Some kind of complications, especially when it’s shorter content, it has to do like an intro, outro remind people about the previous topic. So you have less time for the actual content, but this is the balance that we’re trying to find.
We’re experimenting a lot, basically getting the feedback from people who went through the training and they’re telling us, did it work, did not work? Was it good? Was it not good? And we constantly adjust what we deliver. And basically every year we rebuild all the content that we have based on the feedback and based on the new things that happen on the market or new things that happening with the product with requests from partners.
And for that, we have to employ a lot of AI based tools that help us to produce the scripts, update the scripts, generate videos, generate audio.
Erick: Gaidar, you it’s interesting. I want to come back to the AI point you just made in a second, but I want to, go back to what you were sharing earlier about the your, what your research has revealed about partner performance.
I know that you’re tracking the performance of partners that are participating in your education and training programs and MSP academy and things like that, you’re, you look at it from a, in Acronis business perspective and you’re seeing that. Partners that are going through the training, getting certifications, are performing better.
How important is it to reflect that information to partners that may not be taking the training? How do you influence someone? And what kind of data do you expose to partners that are going through the program? To show them, their performance and have your, are you collecting data from them also so that you’re understanding where to adjust training and guidance to these folks.
So it’s almost like a two part question, right? So for existing partners, you’re collecting it and you may, and how are you reflecting it back to them so that they can see the value of their investment in carving out that time to get their part, their staff trained. And then how do you influence.
Partners with a subset of that data, perhaps to get them to appreciate the value of training and to justify, the investment in time and costs that put their team through it.
Gaidar: Yeah. So the first part of the question, I would say, I wish we would be more Efficient or effective and delivering the message back to partners who went through training, but we don’t really, because what happens is that partners that go through training and when they see increase in sales, they actually see it themselves or they see increase in sales or productivity of their technicians.
So it’s an internal metric. And again, it doesn’t work for everybody. That’s the thing. So on the average, they grow like a hundred percent, but it doesn’t mean that everybody grows a hundred percent. Because in some cases their capacity or their application, or they can work with a customer. So they focus on the wrong vertical.
They cannot expand there. So there are many reasons why partners may not grow after that. Although on the average, we see a significant growth. What we’re trying to do with partners Trying to communicate them constantly. What else do we have available? Not only from the training perspective from marketing and sales materials and support So let’s say you go through training you learn how to sell xdr or etr or whatever you want to sell And then we tell you look at the partner portal.
We have dedicated materials campaigns I will just report whatever You need it’s brandable and you can use it for your marketing activities. So what we track is we track the consumption of those materials. So we can have indirectly a view on did that actually work for them? Because if they consume more, if they run more campaigns and probably they see the value.
And they keep doing it and we also see more and more requests from partners. So we’re training for particular materials in particular countries, like literally right before this call, I had a person from Brazil reaching out asking for particular assets that are relevant specifically for Brazil. Because they see great success with replacing one of the security vendors that we simply get quick bond in us in Brazil and they reach out saying, look, we need a specific brandable material that we can send to our customers right now that would explain what is the difference between the solution that they used to use in your solution.
’cause we’re switching that. And we want to accelerate that switching process. And that’s one way we see that customers and partners are actually consuming and seeing some kind of a useful outcome from the education. As for your second part of the question, how do you convince people?[00:50:00]
That’s my pain. That’s huge pain because I go on stage during partner events and say, look, our partners grew that many percent. And then partners who don’t do that or prospects come to me saying, look, It would be amazing, but we don’t believe in it. We don’t, we cannot acquire more customers. We cannot handle more customers.
So we don’t know where to acquire the customers. Magic is not going to happen. So it’s hard for us to believe that it will work. And for them, we usually have a conversation before you try it. I don’t know. And the kind of convincing that we do is we don’t talk to them directly and say we’ll educate you, we’ll do better.
No, we actually leave it to the other partners. So we have thousands of partners who went through the training and they actually tell to their peers. And I would say that half of the people coming to bootcamps, actually, we don’t invite them. It’s somebody from our partners who got the value. They invite other people.
Lots of prospects that we have coming to Acronis. They come maybe to us directly or maybe to our distributors. They come Together with an existing partner, the partner deploys the technology, tries it, gets through education, start deploying it more, start making money on it. And they tell their friends or competitors or co petitors, they sometimes can be sometimes corporate, they tell them.
And they bring them to the events and activities and more and more of what we see is that people going to education, they coming there because somebody told them the education is good. And for me, it’s the main metric. If somebody was so happy with the results that they got, that they actually went to great lengths to bring somebody else, it tells me that I’m doing the right thing.
Erick: Yeah that’s absolutely absolutely a good way to measure it. And I think, from the perspective of the existing partner seeing the value on the results themselves because they are, delivering better service to their clients. They’re being more efficient. They’re being more profitable.
They’re selling more. It’s more consistent. I understand that’s an internal metric that the partners take. But then, the challenge that, that you just shared guide R is it’s a challenge that everybody faces Convince someone that they should try something differently.
It’s like the definition of insanity, right? You can’t expect a different result if you just keep doing the same thing. There’s another quote that I like to throw out there. It’s if somebody falls, if you’re on a boat with somebody and they fall overboard, right?
They have to, you can throw them the li the life preserver, right? But they have to swim towards it in order to, they have to participate in their own rescue. So you’re offering these partners a chance to say, Hey. Participate in your own improvement, right? We’re creating these opportunities for you.
And the third point that I’ll just double down on is I absolutely agree with you in the fact, being a recovering MSP myself is that we trust other MSPs and our peers even more than we trust anybody else, right? So we may think, okay, this is a great opportunity or not, but. I’m gonna, I’m gonna trust other MSPs.
And so that’s an interesting side effect that you’re seeing that you’re attracting folks that you haven’t directly invited to these training engagements because they’re hearing about it from their peers. So you’re doing something right there, obviously, right? This is something of value. And the more value that you deliver to your partners it’s an interesting dynamic in the MSP community.
Something that I really love about it is, we are different than other industries where we like to share and we have a sense, the folks that are in the community and get it right. We didn’t get here by ourselves. We got here because people shared with us and we share and we give back.
And it’s a very different dynamic. When you’re doing good, the word spreads. So that’s really interesting that you’re experiencing folks that you haven’t invited that the word is getting out and you’re welcoming them too, because the rising tide lifts all shifts part of that whole community.
Kind of education, improving the industry. I love that. Yeah.
Gaidar: If I may, I would add this one point here. That’s interesting that I see as well. So over the last couple of years, we see the rise of what we call cloud aggregators. It’s our, they’re both MSPs delivering the service, reselling services to a third party.
So it’s a. They do both and also we see this kind of master MSPs that kind of combine, they provide services to the other MSPs delivering the service to the end customers. And we see a lot of that happening. And what’s curious to me is that the way it usually starts is that we get one of those partners.
They go through education, they learn the technology, they understand how to sell it. And then they, in turn, go and train. They become those evangelists or like educators for the other partners, because they see [00:55:00] the value in what the training gives them. And then they try to share it with others because others are directly influencing their business.
But another interesting thing that I see is there are more and more MSPs reusing services of each other. So one MSP is delivering managed service for the network and serving endpoints, replacing printers, whatever servicing operating system. But then they use a partner that is doing cloud services or doing smart.
Backup and other partners doing security. So they work together as a subcontractors, sometimes complicated relationships. But then what we see is that those partners, they tend to stick together. And when you start educating one of the partner, they push the others to go with them because they eventually want to, standardize the technology stack that they’re using.
They want to speak the same language. They want to have the same procedures. They want to approach customers the same way and they see value in it. And they bring those other MSPs into the same process for education.
Erick: Yeah. I appreciate that. From where I’m sitting, being in the channel for as long as Managed Services has been in the channel, even before I’m aging myself, I’ve, I see the maturity level of MSPs in general accelerating. When I sold my MSP in 2007, we were very immature. As in our operational, we were mature enough to exit, but the industry at that time had a long way to go. And today, you, I think you made a comment earlier got her about, managed services or still.
Teaching these MSPs kind of the things that we’ve always had a pain about. I say the same thing. It’s when I’m working with MSPs, it’s best practices is best practices, no matter where you are in your journey of growing your business, and it doesn’t even have to be about managed services.
You can be running a business doing something completely different, operations, marketing, sales, delivering service, customer satisfaction, financial discipline, all of those things. Are you know, there’s best practices that are common among all businesses and help increase the business maturity What’s specific about our channel obviously is that we have a lot of risk we own and we are responsible for Serving the technology and security needs of our clients.
So we have to train Our team on all these disciplines. So my question to you now is specific around, what happens when a an MSP business owner decides to train their team, they get training themselves. So there’s, however we get the training, how important do you feel delivering a certification?
Or some sort of a certificate, it’s a technical certificate, sales certificate, certification of completion. How important is it to deliver a certification at the end of that? Is that something that you feel the partners find value in? What have you found?
Gaidar: I found that it is extremely valuable not to say it’s critical.
If you deliver any kind of training. You ideally want people to start using the knowledge that they receive right away, but it’s not always possible. So what you want them to do is you want to remind themselves about what they did what they learned, they what kind of new ideas they had.
So certification is not only like a badge of honor that you receive after you go through the training, but it’s rather a way for you to force people to just repeat. to themselves. What did they learn? So I would say it is crucial. If you don’t do certification, any kind of exam at the end of the training, it’s half useless because people forget extremely fast.
And related to that, what we saw and we see it Consistently across the whole world is that people like to have those badges and they share them on LinkedIn or wherever they show it as a proof that they spend some time doing something. So it’s a gamification to some extent. Get all the badges.
That’s why, for example, if you wanna get a professional badge from a client, you need to do the associate and foundation write your training. You handle on a roadmap and you get there and people like to share. And then the other people in the organization see that. And they also wanna do the same. So it also help you to inspire other people to go for training, which is also good.
But then the third point here I would make is that it’s certification has been better. It’s important. It’s extremely important, but also people need to have some hands on experience and what I learned in the process that the best. Training that has the best result usually consists of information.
One, we just consume information. You learn about new things, then some basic questions. So you repeat what you’ve done [01:00:00] and then a specific kind of a form of an exam or certification when you have to do something in the product or a virtual environment related to the product. So we invest a lot into virtual labs and now we’re actually shifting towards more of a, Asking partners to use the product and use the NFR licenses.
So they don’t have to pay for it, but they could just deploy it in their environment, but it would have the hands on experience right away. But in the past, we were doing a little labs and with lab, it’s basically a script that you have to get you to complete it. So it’s a part of the overall test, but also gives you the specific experience, where to click, what to expect, what kind of errors may happen.
And what I learned so far that without it. Any kind of informational training is not efficient. Like people just don’t have this that kind of a connection to what they learned, so they just forget about it. And in the near future, they have to go through it again to better remind themselves about what they learned.
Erick: Yeah, I appreciate that perspective. I always say that education without an exam or certification it’s just entertainment, right? Because how do you prove that you retain that knowledge and can demonstrate it? That you have retained it, right? So definitely I agree that you’ve got to have some sort of a way to demonstrate that Exam certification.
It’s a badge of honor. Like you say and in today’s very competitive industry and it’s not lost On the staff that the more that they can get these certifications The more they can, you know justify or compete for you know You Salary and, bumps and things like that and career path.
Improved career path trajectories and things like that. Just saying, yeah, go ahead. Yeah. It’s good that
Gaidar: you mentioned it. It was I just had a few conversations yesterday with a few MSP technicians. They’re were asking me And I’m just a backstory to them.
I have a little blog about MSP, mspnodes. com. And some people read it and they send me some questions and they sometimes want to talk to me about some things. And when I have time, I’m always open to do that. And I had some technicians reaching out to me saying, what is my career? Like I’m working for MSP for many years and what’s my next step?
I don’t want to be an MSP owner. I just want to do IT. Work, but I want to make more money. I want to have some career growth, but at the same time, I just want to have my own kinds of the bill environments where I just solve issues or deploy technology. So they think about moving to corporate.
And the reason I was laughing when you mentioned that it’s because two people from completely different places not knowing each other had exactly the same conversation with me on the same day when they said we apply for corporate jobs, they ask us not about what things weigh. What technology or tools that we use, but rather our ability to learn new tools and new technology, and they ask about examples on how did you implement new things in the customer environment?
Or how did you switch to new tool? What did you do? How did you learn? So people started to understand that if they want to advance their careers within MSP or corporate IT jobs, they have to learn how to learn because the world is changing so rapidly and you’re replacing IT systems all the time. So that became value by itself, the education, not for the sake of the particular specific skill that you make useful right now, but rather education for the sake of ability to learn new things.
Erick: I love that. I’m going to take that quote away. Gaidar as my favorite quote, they have to learn. That’s my favorite quote of today’s podcast. Thank you so much for sharing that.
Rich: Yeah. And thank you so much for sharing your time with us, Guy Darf. I’m going to congratulate myself here. I said at the beginning of the conversation MSP education is a much deeper, more interesting topic than maybe people realize.
I think we’ve just proven that I’m correct. So again, thank you very much for folks in the audience who. Want to get in touch with you? Want to learn more about Acronis or MSP Academy? Where would you have them go?
Gaidar: Yes, of course Acronis, MSP Academy, that’s a good start. Just in general, Acronis has a lot of educational materials.
If you want to reach out to me, that’s very easy to find my contact. And I have this blog, mspnals. com, where I just basically put the thoughts that I use for some responses to somebody. So usually people ask me questions and I just post it somewhere. I just send the link to the post instead of just repeating myself all the time.
And the thing is there are so many great educational resources. Including Erick and whatever he does for MSPs, but there’s still a lot of gaps because the world is so big and we need to cover so much area to help people. So all of those resources that kind of complement each other. And what I would say and sorry for hijacking the time here.
But what I would say is that I would suggest all MSP technicians, OSP owners that are listening to us right now is [01:05:00] to build some kind of educational roadmap. For your employees and for yourself and do it in a very simple fashion, define the future. Where do you want to be? What do you want to do?
What qualities you want to deploy? How efficient do you want to be in marketing? Whatever it is that is relevant for you. Define the future. Now look at where you are and think what gaps do you have? What do people need to be able to do? And start filling it, filling in those gaps, build a roadmap, the most efficient way or effective way, I would say, to get education is to have a purpose and have the roadmap, just sending people to random training is useful, but not as remotely as useful as if you have the roadmap.
So I would say before even going to Acronis or Erick or anybody else, think about what do you actually need? And start from building this roadmap.
Erick: And if you tie that to a succession, if you tie that, sorry, to a succession plan, a succession strategy within your organization, then you can definitely influence and encourage those team members to get through that training.
Because again, they’re, they’re competing. For better pay and better opportunities. So if you can tie that to different roles that they can compete for in the organization that have these requirements Gaidar, and I know that’s exactly what you coach and influence partners to do then everybody wins, right?
And again, you’re putting together a plan for them to. Learn to learn. See, I hit it again. Hashtag
Gaidar: learn to learn. That’s my favorite hashtag. Another one that I love is ultimate or die, but it’s a different
Rich: topic
Gaidar: next
Rich: time. Yeah. You know what? We’ll have you on again. It’s gone great twice. Now, Gaidar, we’d love to have you on the show a third time.
And folks, we will link to the MSP notes blog in the show notes too. Just so that you can find it that way if you have trouble finding it otherwise. Gaidar, thank you so much for joining us. Erick and I are going to take a break right now. When we come back from the other side, we’re going to share some thoughts about this.
Very interesting conversation we’ve just had. Maybe have a little fun, wrap up the show. So stick around, folks. We are going to be right back.
All right. Welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP chat podcast. This time sponsored by our friends at Acronis. Once again, thanks to Gaidar Magdanarov for joining us on the show. As we have noted, he’s. Already been on the show twice, Erick. I have a hunch he will be back again for a third time or beyond.
Cause every time we managed to get him on the show, it’s an interesting conversation that there was a lot to, to dive into chew over in that conversation, but the thing that’s hanging on for me, then I’m really sticking to top of mind is just how great it was to quantify.
The impact on on revenue and deal size and growth, et cetera, that training and education can produce, we were talking at the beginning of the show about attracting and retaining talent, and that’s a great reason to invest in, in training and education in terms of helping people feel like they’re acquiring skills and they’re learning more that something that’s going to make them want to be there.
But it, there is also like a. A top line and a bottom line impact measurable when Acronis went out and did the research that can really be beneficial to business MSPs, and that’s good data for MSPs to have, and I would encourage them to to really focus on that, take that seriously, and and use it as inspiration to invest in, in training and educating people.
Erick: It’s one of the, and yes, Rich, it’s one of the things that I really appreciate about Acronis perspective on what MSPs really need, right? They’re taking the initiative to say, look, we’re going to deliver, of course, every, strategic vendor partner that we engage with. We expect them to deliver technical training and maybe some sales training and things like that, but to be delivering, the breadth of training that Gaidar was sketching out for us.
And to understand how today’s learners have adapted and adjusted in terms of, their availability to get training. I loved hearing how he expressed the importance of having training delivered in different formats and in different durations, like two minutes, five minutes, 15 minutes. And then of course, a longer form.
So for, folks like us that are always on the go normally we don’t, when we’re traveling or offsite or something like that, think, Oh, I’m going to do some training legacy style, where it’s okay. It’s an hour of, some course and then a quiz and things like that. But to be able to say, Oh, I can, jump in for five or 10 minutes in between things.
Or also to deliver that training rich to the technical staff or the sales staff or the operational staff and require them To [01:10:00] take some of the training, you know while they’re on the clock If you will has always been painful for msps because on the one hand we’re asking our teams to Train up and get certifications and things like that.
But then the challenge is well How many hours does that take and how much can I afford? To give them when they’re not, they’re doing the only thing that they can do for us, either the sales operations or the service, the billable service. So in these bite sized chunks, it probably makes it a lot easier for business owners or leaders in the MSP practice to say, okay, we’re going to carve out, an hour a week, you can do some of this stuff in between times and make it a little bit easier for them to consume it, and then maybe.
As they see that improvement, start rolling in rich, say, wow, we’re going to go all in. All right. We’re going to give you more time to do it because we see the value, right? The benefit, you’re getting better at what you do. You’re delivering more value to our clients. So you’re more efficient.
We’re able to grow and sell more. We can grow without, maybe having to hire more folks over time because we’re learning ways to be more efficient. We’re adopting. Platforms and technologies that are, more consolidated and reducing our vendors for all and things like that. So those were the things that struck me, as rich, I’ve been, coaching and training MSPs for many years and anything that I can glean that can help, MSPs perform better and justify the investment in time and the cost.
I’m. I’m signing up to learn about it and promote it
Rich: and I’ll just quickly follow on Part of what he said there. I think that’s really important is that variety of different formats and durations is something that makes Providing training and education easier for the msp. It also makes consuming the training and education easier for the technician And, I think there’s a tendency, but for me, what was in some ways, the most clearly thought leadership aspect of this Acronis Academy platform that we’ve been talking about is that recognition that people in that sort of core technician age cohort right now have different expectations, different attention spans, different expectations for how content is delivered and how they consume it.
And so in, in the past, where I might have thought about technician training as a yes, no topic we do it or we don’t, but there’s really only one way that we do it, that the thought that Acronis has put into providing different options for different needs, different people at different stages and doing it in ways that align with technician expectations, I think is really smart.
Erick: Absolutely. Yeah. And it was inferred. It’s not, if I didn’t say directly, but yes, the ability to consume it, right? If you’re running virus scans or whatever you’re doing, as you’re sitting here watching a screen, you can, launch a window and get 10 minutes of training real quick.
And knock out that, that, that checkbox or requirement from your leadership that says, I want you to go through these courses. So it’s again, it’s catering to the needs of, today’s. Team members, right? And business owners in a way that, 10 years ago, we, you didn’t think of it that way.
At least I did. Good
Rich: point Erick, and it leaves us with time for just one last thing. And I’m guessing, I suspect there are people in our audience here who have responded to something somebody told them they were going to do, or or considered doing with a comment along the lines of yeah, when pigs fly.
Or maybe, when hippos fly. You’re going to have to stop using that particular retort, if you’ve been going with the when hippos fly one, because there has been some research conducted by professors of evolutionary biomechanics using video analysis of hippos. Moving along at full speed and by golly Erick, it turns out that hippos get all four feet off the ground at once up to 15 percent of the time when they are running along at full speed, which is to say that a hippo running at full speed is flying about 15 percent of the time.
So just factor that in when using that particular line going for maybe stick with the pigs.
Erick: Yeah, it’s interesting, Rich. I read that that article also, and it’s because of the way that they gallop, like they have, instead of like some animals will, like horses, I believe when they’re just, they’re doing, the way they drive, they don’t like, it’s almost like they’re lunging like back feet and front feet at the same time.
It’s very interesting. The mechanic evolutionary mechanics, tell us this, right? Yeah. So it’s because of the way that they run, that allows them to get all four feet off the ground at the same time. I think the only time I think we’ve seen horses do it is when they’re jumping like steeplechase or something in the Olympics, right?
But normally, they’re galloping. It’s not the same as when hippos are galloping. Doing their flight check.
Rich: [01:15:00] Folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you. This time on the MSP chat podcast, this episode sponsored by Acronis. If you want to learn more about Acronis and their cyber protect cloud platform, everything else that they do with and for their partners and end users, go to www. acronis. com. I will remind you as well for those of you who are consuming this podcast on video.
We are an audio podcast as well. Go to wherever it is, Spotify, you name it, where you get your audio podcasts. You’re going to find us there too. If you’re listening to the audio version but you’d like to check us out on video, go to YouTube, look up MSP check. You’re going to find us there too.
Either way, please subscribe, rate, review. It will enable other MSPs just like you to find the program more easily and enjoy it. This show is produced by the great Russ Johns. He’s part of the team here at Channel Mastered. He would be. Happy to create a show just like this for you. And if you want to learn more about that and all the other great things Channel Master does for its clients, please visit www.
channelmaster. com. Channel Mastered has a sister business called MSP Mastered, where Erick works directly with MSPs on optimizing and growing their businesses. If you want to learn more about that, go to www. mspmastered. com. So once again, we thank you very much for joining us today. On this special episode of the show sponsored by Acronis.
We’ll see you next, this coming Friday with a regular edition of the show. Until then, please remember, you can’t spell Channel without M S P.
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