Episode 106: The AI Sh*t’s Getting Real

Erick and Rich discuss why the rise of AI-native “systems of action” poses a potential threat to the future of PSA solutions, as well as strategies for building an effective, valuation-boosting MSP leadership team. Then they’re joined by Kevin Lancaster, CEO of BetterTracker and Channel Program, for a must-hear conversation about what AI means for the long-term competitiveness of smaller MSPs. And finally, one last thing: a phishing attack involving actual fish, or aquatic creatures anyway.

Discussed in this episode:

AI “Systems of Action” Have Worrying Implications for PSA Vendors

By Kevin Lancaster: MSPs, the AI $hit is about to get real

By Kevin Lancaster: The 2026 AI Maturity Model for MSPs

Microsoft Discovers MSPs. Again.

The Case of the $400,000 Massachusetts Lobster Heist

Some guests on this podcast are clients of Channel Mastered. Compensation plays no part in their appearance or the content of the discussion unless the episode they appear on is a “bonus episode” explicitly labeled as sponsored.

 

Transcript:

Rich: [00:00:00] And 3, 2, 1. Blast off. Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of the MSP Chat podcast. Your weekly visit with two talking heads, talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it big and manage services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m chief analyst at Channel Mastered of the organization responsible for this program.

Also one of your co-hosts. I’m seated, side by side, in person in the flesh by your other co-host, our CEO and chief strategist at Channel mastered Erick Simpson.

Erick: Erick. How you doing? Doing pretty good, rich. It’s great seeing you here. And as of today, sunny southern California, it’s been not quite so sunny the last few weeks here.

So I’m glad you brought some sunshine with you

Rich: from Seattle, who would’ve thunk it. [00:01:00] But I guess that’s how things worked out. So we are seated in Channel Mastereds’ temporary headquarters right now, which is to say an Airbnb in Southern California. ’cause we are engaged in 2026 planning this week.

And this gives us an opportunity to record a podcast episode for you in person, which is what we’re doing right now. Let’s dive right into our story of the week. Erick and we’re gonna be looking down the road a little bit here, but I have been writing about and thinking about the impact of AI on the software that MSPs use to run their business from a maybe not long term perspective, maybe a medium term kind of perspective.

The most recent posts that I wrote for Channel Holic, my blog was about. The system of action versus system of record conversation that venture capital folks have been having for years. But that’s new in the managed services world. And so you talk to a venture capitalist person and they’ll tell you a system of record is one of these big core business [00:02:00] applications that companies of all sizes rely on.

Think about SAP, ServiceNow, Salesforce. These are systems that will automate and streamline workflows and they also serve as the single source of truth for an organization’s data. A system of action today typically is an overlay for one of those solutions that instead of just streamlining or automating work, actually does the work for you using AI and specifically ag agentic ai.

And we have been talking on this show and in this industry. For really most of the past year about what, and we haven’t called them systems of action for MSPs, but that’s what they are. A few weeks ago on the show we had, we Silverstone from Phi SoFi is a system of action maker for MSPs sift, Pia thread Everest.

There are a bunch of them out there, and what they basically do is integrate with your PSA solution and actually on an autonomous basis do a lot of your work for [00:03:00] you. This has some interesting potential implications though. If you start thinking about where things can go from there, which is where they are right now.

First of all, to the extent that a system of action. Is doing the most important work that you do for you, more and more of your strategic relationship. Time and value is gonna go into your relationship with the system of action vendor as opposed to the PSA vendor. So there’s a dis-intermediation risk to the PSA vendors because they’re, you as an MSP are getting more value out of that system of action that you’re using.

The bigger risk, and this is not something that I’m saying is guaranteed to happen, but it’s something to be aware of. The bigger risk is not disintermediation for the PSA vendors, but displacement because what’s happening right now with the systems of action is they’re integrating with your PSA solution.

They’re exposed to all of the data in that PSA solution. They are [00:04:00] also out there consuming data from teams and Slack and email and I interviewed system of action vendors who are working on software that’s gonna listen in on every call you have with your customer and just document that and record.

So the system of action companies are building a bigger, deeper more comprehensive pool of data than the PSA vendors, and they’re getting smarter and smarter about agentic autonomous capabilities. And the question you have to ask yourself, Erick is there a point in time, three years down the road when you are gonna ask yourself, do I really need this PSA, do I need to renew my PSA license?

Or is the system of action that I’m using capable of supporting my needs on its own, given that these days I barely touch the PSA? It’s like a data lake that I don’t swim in very much any longer. There’s a bigger question we could get into here, Erick, [00:05:00] just about the future of software. I was talking with you yesterday about how during the break, just for fun, I vibe coded myself an application.

I really can’t code people. And that was okay using Gemini and a simple couple of prompts, I built something really useful, tailored exactly to my needs and my workflows. And you start thinking about, the PO for MSPs out there, all the different tools in your stack. If you can create something that is perfect for you on your own, with a modicum of development activity, how much stuff are you gonna be buying from vendors down the road?

So again, down the road, we’re not talking about 2026, maybe 20 27, 20 28. It could be a really di the whole sort of internal tool stack conversation for an MSP could be very different.

Erick: Such a lot to unpack there, rich, and folks, if Rich can do it, I think a lot of folks can do it, I think is what he’s saying.

And so what’s [00:06:00] really striking to me is, as every single month, every single quarter, we see this amazing amount of accelerated development. If you think, two, three years ago when chat TBT just came along, right? It was just kinda this chat bot thing. It’s been steadily improving.

So we’re going from, the chat bots that help us, do our research and, things like that. We’re now we’re being able to code with these platforms. We’re moving, this system of action reminds me of the leap from chatbot to agent ai, right? So now it’s actually.

Able to take action on our behalf. We can orchestrate this. And your point is well received from my perspective, rich, because what your PSA is exposed to is only what you put into it, and what you’re connecting to it. But think of the massive amounts of data that an MSP [00:07:00] has foreshadowing a, an interviewer that’s coming up here, right?

Yep. The massive amounts of data that an MSP has to pull from all of their clients that’s not in the PSA and from their own business. I was having a chat the other day about how I’ve been training. We, I use chat, GPT personally, I dabble on a few other ones, but I’ve been using chat GPT pretty much from the very beginning.

And so I’ve been training it on everything about our organization, all about our, what we’re thinking about. Just everything that we do and all of the documents that we create, the strategies that we build. And it really now understands at a very deep level more about what we do than any PSA ever could.

And so now Rich, when I’m, using chat GBTI am able to give it much less prompt tweaking and modifying [00:08:00] back and forth. I did that in the very beginning training at feeding it. Now I can get an output that used to take me. Maybe a few hours, maybe a few days at the very beginning and certainly without AI weeks or months of just me trying to do these things in minutes, in hours.

Your example of being able to vibe code an application that it helps you perform, a task that would take you hours or maybe days now and minutes. It’s, it is transformative. And what you said about how relevant will a PSA be to an organization? I guess it depends on the PSA vendors themselves and in, in large part is, are they seeing this as a threat and an opportunity or are they just hey, we’re gonna use it.

Kind of, they have to move beyond the, even the agentic piece to the system of action piece. [00:09:00] And I think some of ’em are thinking that way. But the window’s closing.

Rich: No, I think that is exactly right and a really kind of critical point. I don’t wanna make it sound like the PSA vendors, and love folks are doomed.

They absolutely aren’t. They have huge advantages. In terms of name recognition and financial resources and talent. And it could very well be, they turn out to be the they, create a solution that combines system of action with system of a record. But you’re right they’re going to have to recognize that’s something that they need to be building and they’re really, one of the things I wrote about is this is classic sort of innovator’s dilemma stuff.

It’s hard for a company as big as ConnectWise or Kaseya or Ninja one to carve out, first of all to think in an entirely different way, which is what’s required in this. And just to carve out the resources to pivot that way and create a system of action. They are, I’m sure working on it and we’re starting to see ag agentic, [00:10:00] autonomous things, little bits and pieces of them show up from these vendors.

I think we’ll see a lot more of that in 2026, but as, lee Silverstone, who I mentioned before, said on this show a few episodes back, it’s just really hard. That’s all Zoic does. And it’s taken them years to get where they are. And it, it’s just hard to Mastered that. And it, it will not be an easy thing for these incumbent system of record solutions to take advantage of their edge in the marketplace right now.

And become the system of action too.

Erick: Yeah. It is gonna take strategy and it may take a lot of re-engineering rebuilding, re-architecting depending upon how the platform is built now to close that gap. But, if, if I’m thinking the way some very strategic PSA vendors are thinking, they’re probably thinking, okay, we probably need to open up our platform to ingest more of this data to be more valuable to our [00:11:00] partners because we’ve already got.

The capability to deliver this value. Now we just need to be able to ingest more of it so that we become more strategically valuable and deliver more of that business intelligence rather than that technical intelligence and capability.

Rich: And you’re just reminding me quickly before we move on. I’ve only had one opportunity so far to interview Rania.

Sukar, the CEO at Kaseya. But when we did speak last August, she talked a lot about data and prioritizing data and data cleansing. And in terms of priority for her first year, it’s gonna be getting really good at data. And I, that’s absolutely because she understands. That’s where their future is in terms of AI and agentic and so on.

So we’re talking about the future of PSA software. It could be that for an MSP there isn’t a long-term future for PSA software, but there absolutely is going to be a future for leadership teams than MSPs. And [00:12:00] that gets us to your tip of the week. Erick. Absolutely. Nice

Erick: segue, rich. We’re talking about the evolution of an MSP practice.

We’re talking nowadays, not about technical outcomes. We’re talking about business outcomes. We’re talking about an organization’s nimbleness and increasing strategic value to its clients, the ability to leverage platform solutions, AI integrations to be more efficient, hence more profitable, hence building company value for a possible exit.

But boy, we’re leaving out the biggest component of that conversation, which is the people component, right? So I wanna take a few minutes today and just again, reinforce the need for today’s MSPs that want to become the top tier MSPs, because consolidation is happening and there is risk at the bottom.

How do we grow our organizations efficiently and scale them correctly? [00:13:00] With the people component first and foremost, meaning that the founder of the organization can remove himself slowly but surely. Methodically, thoughtfully out of day-to-day operations, enabling their leadership teams to own the different components that make that organization work.

Because when we’re talking rich about exiting, you can have a fire sale if you want, but I don’t think that’s what our partners want. We want to sell at the highest value, and that means that a buyer is thinking about several things. Are you selling what customers are buying? Can you scale? Are you profitable?

And how dependent is the organization on the founder? IE nobody wants to buy a job. We want to buy an org, a business that is building and thriving and has built a team of leaders that can [00:14:00] carry that organization forward. So three tips to prepare for this. First thing is, if I’m the founder of an organization and I wanna prepare for exit, 24, 36 months, however long it is, first of all, I wanna make certain that I’m working with my team to, to empower them and enable them to take over critical components of an organization.

When we talk about an MSP organization, it’s not unlike any other business rich, right? We’ve got marketing, we’ve got sales, we’ve got, HR, finance, we’ve got delivery of services. So we need leaders in each of those organizations that can run the organization. And one of the best tests is for the founders to take more time off.

If you can take. More time off every year. I remember in the early days when, we were just struggling to try to figure out, how to become an MSP and Rich. I didn’t take a vacation for years and I know a lot of [00:15:00] our listeners feel the same way. So how do you judge how well you’re doing at training and empowering and enabling and expecting there to be mistakes.

Expecting your team to not know what to do at certain points, but to give them the objective and give them the training and let them make these decisions, and then help them learn from things, right? Of course, we don’t wanna put anyone in a position that could lose a client relationship or bought something at that level, but, you’ve got some guardrails that you can you know get delegate more and more responsibility and take more time off.

If you’re, doing, spending three plates and you’re training somebody to spin one of those plates. Just, you don’t have to take time out of the business and go to Italy, but you can certainly say, okay, you’re running the show for the next 30 days and let’s have regular check-ins, and I’ll provide you guidance, I’ll give you objectives and ask questions like, one thing that I learned early on, rich, is don’t tell people how [00:16:00] you would do it.

You could, say things like, look, this is how I’ve done it in the past, but I want you to improve on that. I want you to figure out better ways to do things because no one likes to be micromanaged at the end of the day if they’re growing and our clients are satisfied, and even if, I would disagree with what somebody would do, I had to learn to say, okay, they’re going to run the show, they’re gonna run the show, and I’m gonna assist when I need it.

I want to delegate more of that over time. Number two. Regular leadership cadence meetings with the individuals that you’re delegating to. And also as a leadership team. Here at Channel Mastered Rich we’re, an EOS shop, meaning that we follow the entrepreneurial operating system to manage our business.

And we have regular L 10 meetings every week where the leadership team gets together and goes over, our goals, our rocks are we on track, off track, we discuss issues, and we solve and we move forward. This is the [00:17:00] cadence of a mature business where we are delegating roles to folks.

They’re being measured by goals that we have, set KPIs, and we report on that, and then we jump in and give feedback and guidance. This is now maturing the organization so everyone feels empowered and owns their role and we’re there to support each other when we need to. And then the third one.

Create some incentives tied to reaching performance goals, reaching profitability attaining KPIs so that you’re really influencing the behavior, not just empowering somebody and saying, you’re gonna spend this plate now, here’s your new title. But incentivizing them, rewarding them, and showing them that path to succession.

Just three quick tips, things to think about in 2026. And if you’re adopting AI and using AI to justify pulling through additional cybersecurity services, that’s a good thing because that’s gonna drive real dollars to your bottom line. But [00:18:00] you need. To be able to delegate these roles so that you can grow that part of the business as well.

Rich: Yeah. A few quick thoughts. So first of all just quickly, you were talking about, being able to take a vacation if you do this. And it just reminded me once upon a time, I was at one of these conferences, industry conferences I go to, and there was a welcome reception the first night.

And I was having a beer with an MSP there and he said, it took me years to do this, but I’m at a point now where I can just go to a conference and have a beer and be totally unworried about what’s happening back home. I set it up so that it runs effectively if I go away for a few days.

And you could just, I just remember thinking to myself, that’s what success looks like in terms of building a well-managed MSP is it will continue to function effectively even if you’re not looking over everyone’s shoulder all the time. The other thing I will say is I’m sure there are gonna be some folks in the audience right now who are hearing us talk about leaders and leadership [00:19:00] teams, and they’re thinking, I’m sub million dollars.

I’ve, I’m like a five person company, a 10 person company. We don’t have a leadership team there. There’s a difference between having a C-suite and having current and future leaders beyond yourself, and I think that’s worth underscoring.

Erick: Yeah, no you’re right on point there, rich. And again, one thing that, that you made me think about when you were telling the story about, having the beer with this MSP is, how else do you feed yourself from a strategic perspective if you’re mired in the organization’s day-to-day operations?

Just that one ability to say, I can go to these conferences, I can really absorb. Information in a different way that helps me build my business. And this is the great analogy. So in the early days, I would go to conferences and I’d sit in the technical sessions over time as we built the team, and I was able to, disengage more and [00:20:00] more.

I would be going to different sessions. I would be going to, business building sessions. Nowadays there’s tons of m and a sessions. This is where founders and business owners should be spending their time soak up all of that. M and a goodness. Get your teams to go to these technical training sessions and the sales sessions.

Your focus should be now on positioning the organization for maximum profitability and for a, an exit and pick a date and time and work towards it.

Rich: Okay.

Folks we’ve spoken with you a little bit here about AI’s potential implications for vendors serving MSPs. Let’s talk a little bit about AI’s implications for MSPs for you folks in our audience.

Erick and I are gonna take a quick little break now, excuse me, when we come back on the other side, we’re gonna be joined by Kevin Lancaster. He’s the CEO of Better Tracker and Channel program. He has some very interesting thoughts. You’re gonna wanna hear [00:21:00] about that. You’re gonna get them momentarily.

Stick around. We’ll be right back.

And welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat. Po cast, our spotlight interview segment where we are very pleased to be joined by Kevin Lancaster known in the industry a friend of the show here. He is, been our guest before we wanted to bring him back to talk about two LinkedIn posts he wrote recently about AI and what it’s gonna mean for MSPs.

But first, before we get into that Kevin is the CEO of better Tracker. He is the CEO of channel program. Kevin, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me back, gentlemen. For folks who are not familiar with you Kevin Tell’em, a little bit about yourself and about both Better Tracker and channel program.

Kevin: I appreciate that. So I’ve been in and around the channel for the last 25 years, I hate saying that publicly because it, age is the reality. But so I spent again, last 25 years [00:22:00] in the channel and a couple different sides of the channel. So I’ve been an MSP IT service provider and skilled relatively large organization and exited that along the way.

Built out a couple technologies. One ID agent, sold that to Kaseya, stayed on for a couple years and ran their go to market and most recently built out this initially this channel program platform, which the idea was to. Create a two-sided marketplace to help MSPs make better decisions about their technologies and find these, amazing emerging technologies.

And then also give the vendors a chance to be found more efficiently as they entered the marketplace. And so that we launched that back in 2000 21. So just almost what, five years ago now? But it’s evolved. And most recently most, most recently we’ve, basically separated out these two brands, if you will, these two different platforms.

So we built this better Tracker tool within channel program, but we felt that it made sense to, break it [00:23:00] out. It’s a standalone tool that MSPs and their customers can use to manage their technology stack and their expenses. And then we have the channel program platform off to the side as well helping vendors.

And so that’s what we’re up to these days.

Rich: Very good. Very good. And I actually, I wrote a story about Better Tracker in my blog channel Holic latest last year. I’ll maybe include a link to that in the show notes because it’s an interesting product. It’s worth looking into. For now let’s talk about those LinkedIn posts.

They were very thoughtful. They certainly got me thinking Kevin, and I’ll start with the one and if you’ve got kids in the car with you, folks cover their ears. But what you said is this, AI shit’s about to get real in managed services and what you were, if there’s a big theme in this piece, and we’ll link to both of these LinkedIn posts in the show notes, read ’em both folks.

But if there is a big theme to the shit’s about to get real posts, it’s that large MSPs enjoy advantages in AI in terms of their ability to utilize it and [00:24:00] benefit from them that small MSPs don’t have and probably never will. And some of that’s money, some of that’s talent, the predictable stuff.

But the other one, the big one is data. Talk a little bit about the data advantages that these large MSPs enjoy and the implications in terms of what they can do with ai that a smaller MSP can’t.

Kevin: Yeah. No, appreciate it. I think, you and I have funny, we see each other out at all these amazing industry events where we see these thought leaders and, I’m also fortunate to be on a couple of advisory council and boards and what have you.

And I think what I’ve managed to do over the last probably six months is really take a step back and under, try to really understand like where this marketplace is going and there’s a moment about four or five months ago when somebody said it, and it’s, I think often said that data is now the new commodity data is like now the new gold in not just our industry, but just in general.

And if you look at, any market, look [00:25:00] at, as markets mature and velocity and consolidation you see a lot of power, bestowed in the companies that are at the top of that, that food chain of the pyramid and one of their major superpowers moving forward and talking about some of these monolith, these roll up MSPs, is that they have access not just to resource and capital, but they have access to tremendous amounts of data.

And why that’s important is because once you start to, normalize that data and put it in the proper structure, whether it’s structured or unstructured data, you can start to really get into that predictive space. You can start making better decisions and you can start to, basically proactively support your customers moving forward.

And I think that’s one of the themes that really start to emerge about six months ago when you started talking to some of these, larger MSPs out there. They’re now becoming data platforms themselves, right? They realize that they’re sitting on, any, how to quantify it, terabytes and terabytes of data that they can [00:26:00] normalize and start to put put, make sense of that data and then, operationalize that data to better support their customers.

And I’ll take a step further. Now that I think the market understands what AI is and the power of ai, a lot of these larger, mSPs have the ability and the resource and the funding to, to start deploying AI services. So integration services or customization services.

So I think those are the two areas that are going to be just massive industry disruptors. And then there’s the hype cycles. And, what was ai? What is ai? And again, the dust is settling on that. And I think now as the dust settles, the winners are gonna be, they’re becoming pretty clear.

It’s the data and how do you leverage that data and turn yourselves into a platform. And then how do you provide the right AI services to help your customers make better decisions with the data that they have? Because again, your data, your customers are sitting on, mounds and mounds of data.

So I think that’s really what’s gonna [00:27:00] separate the week from the chaff here moving forward is understanding how to utilize that data that they’re sitting on and how to really deploy these AI services moving forward.

Erick: Kevin, that article and your point there really struck me.

I had not thought about it that way before. Because, we as consumers, we always hear that, in marketing and advertising, we’re being tracked. All of our platforms know who we are. So the people are the product. I had never thought about what you wrote about and your thesis that, the data is, the product is the value now.

And how that accelerates these larger MSPs to the forefront and gives them, different opportunities. You, rich and I talk on the show a lot about, leveraging AI and other technologies to help move the MSP’s conversations from the server room to the boardroom, if you will. And we really talk about AI in that sense.

So I wanna ask you specifically about, those additional services. Notwithstanding the, the value of [00:28:00] the data. So you wrote in your article that the top 10% of MSPs will control 60 to 70% of the SMB market by 2030, not because they’re cheaper, but because AI lets them deliver better results, be more strategic at 10 times the efficiency.

I think it’s probably gonna be higher than 10 times the efficiency. But give folks a sense for what from that thought process where we’ll be delivering different, better, unique services at a much greater level of efficiency, may be creating a lot of, heartburn for some smaller MSPs.

Kevin: Yeah, look, again, this goes to how just any or most markets mature. You think about the. You think about these AI enabled tools that have come to market here recently. There are a ton of amazing ones. One that I think, most people now have become familiar with, like Zoic, for example. Where, lean, those guys [00:29:00] actually launched a on channel program.

I like to say that about maybe 10, 11 months ago. But the idea is how do you take AI and improve and enhance existing workflows and create even a higher level of automation within an organization. And so over the last 10 months, you’ve seen a dramatic, acceleration in the market, adopting the xfr like tools.

And it’s clearly the larger MSPs that have the ability the resource that are able to adopt those tools. The net impact is increased automation. The net impact is reduce technician latency. The impact is that they’re able to eke out another couple of points of margin. And when you’re able to do that and you’re running more efficiently, then do you have a lot more pricing, leverage pricing, power.

And so that ultimately is what happens in, in most emerging and maturing marketplace, is that the larger. Platform providers are able to optimize, optimize, [00:30:00] leverage these new solutions and, drive their, pricing models to, have a dramatic impact on the smaller ones that, don’t have that pricing leverage.

So I think in one kind of path moving forward, you’re gonna see really interesting pricing disruption because of optimization, because it doesn’t take, nearly the same level of staff on, particularly on tier one that you needed, two or three years ago. And so if you’re able to do that across your entire portfolio of customers, just imagine how much more profitable a business is.

And again, we’re at the front end of the, the AI optimization. And that’s not just ai. As most of these tools, the existing tools that. MSPs evolve and become more efficient. And you see again, there the ability to drive, better margins. But that is going to no doubt be accelerated here in the short term because it’s, there is a whole new wave, as you guys know, of these new AI enabled solutions [00:31:00] that are really gonna make service delivery that much more streamlined and more cost effective moving forward.

And I think, again, if you’re able to do that in volume it’s gonna put tremendous pressure on that bottom half of the marketplace to compete. That is

Rich: actually a great segue to something I wanted to ask you about. Before I do that, I’ll quickly point out, you mentioned Lee Silverstone and Zoic. I’ll just remind the MSP chat Ready horse out there.

Lee was our guest on the show just a few episodes ago. I encourage folks to go back, listen to that interview, to really understand what Zoic and companies like it are doing. The thing about Zoic, of course, is any MSP on our audience, theoretically can buy that service to ai, enable their business.

But something that you wrote about in one of these posts that really grabbed my eye is you said, quote, if the rumors are true, and I have it on good word, that they are large PE-backed MSPs will start buying AI enabled software vendors in 2026. [00:32:00] So like you said, there are a lot of these startups out there.

You’re hearing murmurings that some of these big roll ups are gonna start buying those companies. We already, I, I wrote multiple times in 2025 about shield Technology partners and Titan. Which are these sort of VC funded startups that have AI talent from Silicon Valley in-house. Talk a little bit about the implications of companies like Shield and Titan, these MSP roll-ups, not just having access to AI automation software and so on, but actually having the developers and the people who make the software under their own roof, like it’s part of their business.

Kevin: Yeah. You look this actually came from a, an interesting conversation I had with again, with the, it’ll remain nameless, but with one of the large, larger MSPs that are PE bath, a big roll up platform, and their, the initial thought and why they would [00:33:00] go down this path is that ’cause they’ve fundamentally outgrown.

The traditional PSA and RMM tools that are out there. ’cause they’re operating at such a scale where, the traditional legacy platforms aren’t able to keep up based on endpoints. Right? Just, they’re just not built the scale to the degree that a lot of the roll up platforms.

And so I think they started looking at this this challenge. How do they solve this challenge? And it’s do we go to the next vendor? Do we go to the next vendor or do we find something and solve this on our own? Operationalizing it and then. Bring this out to the marketplace and maybe use that as a hook to recruit even more MSPs and build another, service, line of revenue out there.

So I, I think that’s where that’s where you get a really interesting, innovation in this space. And it happens on the smaller end of the marketplace as you, the lower end of the marketplace, as ’cause a lot of these emerging technologies are started by some of the smaller MSPs that are out there trying to solve a problem.

But [00:34:00] I think what’s different about this is that it becomes a massive. For multiplier disruptor, when you have a large MSP going out there and saying, you know what, we don’t need to go out and buy, the traditional tools that are offered out in the marketplace. We just build our own because AI allows us to build even faster, right?

Whether it’s vibe, coding or whatever. You can build a lot faster and is a side note, right? This is gonna have a dramatic impact on, private equity and really the roadmaps of the large platforms moving forward as well, because that buy versus build. Equation has fundamentally turned upside down, where in the past it’s all right, it’s gonna cost us more to build this tool than it would be for us to buy it.

So let’s just go out and buy it. Where today, it’s almost parody in a lot of cases, right? It’s probably in, in some ways more cost effective to build, some of these newer, capabilities because of the tools that are out there versus going out and acquiring. So I think a generalness just.

Just really [00:35:00] interesting shifting in acquisition dynamics. But then you’re gonna see a number of these, larger platforms come out with these really interesting purpose-built solutions that they can monetize, they can provide out to smaller MSPs and create a bigger, even bigger network effect.

And so I think that could be, and this is maybe a little speculation on my part but I think this could be a really interesting evolution of this marketplace in bringing some of these smaller MSPs into the fold of the larger platforms, almost in a non, m and a model.

So yeah you’re seeing this being talked quite extensively now at a lot of the, a lot of the events and how do you, instead of going out and having to buy these tools, how do we just use some of these, off the shelf AI platforms or how do we vibe code something real quick and build it ourselves?

And again, it’s the, the ones that have the resource are often the ones that are able to do it and they’re out in the market first.

Erick: Kevin so that’s like a complete reversal of what we’ve seen, right. In the channel. It’s been [00:36:00] MSPs trying to get vendors to build and modernize their programs and products.

Remember the early days you talked about how long you’ve been in the industry? Yeah. Me and Rich, we feel that that as well, right? We’ve seen, we’ve been watching what’s happened through the evolution of managed services and the very early days. As if an MSP wanted to buy, a license or a license for a small customer, they would’ve to buy a thousand licenses to get the best pricing and things like that.

And they have to sell their way out of it. The MSPs have been championing and the vendors have responded ultimately to the point where, now programs are more, Ms P friendly pricing is more MSP friendly, but what you’re alluding to now is the MSPs actually now will be, have an opportunity, the larger ones, to take the lead and build these platforms that they’ve always wanted the way they want to build them because they understand their business more better than anyone else, providing them a huge competitive advantage against anybody else, and then als and then become a vendor to other MSPs, which might even create a, an even better outcome for all the [00:37:00] Ms.

U because these solutions have been built from the ground up guided by these larger MSPs. But that’s not my question. I just wanted to reflect that, that it’s, you’re right. It’s amazing what’s happening here. So my question, Kevin, is it can’t all be gloom and doom. The smaller MSPs, right? It say it ain’t.

So what should smaller MSPs be thinking about and doing to remain competitive?

Kevin: No it’s certainly not all doom and gloom, but I think that is, it’s the caveat to that and that’s, how fast you can adopt, modernizing it and adopt these solutions and, eke out the same, same margins and the same level of efficiency.

There’s always going to be room for niche and verticalized specialization, no doubt about that. But in aggregate, as it becomes easier. Easier and easier, and the barriers of entry become lower and scale is no longer an obstacle. [00:38:00] It, just because of the way, platforms now are architected and, this cloud first, push as well.

It’s goes back to maybe the second article that you’re referencing is that it gets back to how fast you can adopt and how mature your your AI strategy is. And I think I, I alluded to in that in that maturity model, that’s just, it’s the same thing we’ve been seeing over the last 10, 15 years in security, right?

It’s really no different. The becoming an MSSP and becoming security first maybe came, vogue. Eight years ago, 10 years ago, we’re really where we start to see the shift to this, phrase or the term MSSP. And again, you saw early adopters that had the capability and understood security.

They were able to get in, on the, in, in the market pretty quick. And what’s great is that the bell curve is moving and, the maturity, you see a maturing of the security in this space. And that’s exactly what you’re seeing now with [00:39:00] ai. And interestingly though, this is a, this was a 10 year progression, 15 year progression in the security space.

It’s a three year progression in the AI space. That’s how dramatic of an impact this has. And I think what the entire industry needs to be doing is, looking at. And being honest with themselves. Like, where are you in this, maturity model? Like where are your capabilities, not just from a security standpoint, but AI specifically.

Are you still in that kinda aware stage trying to, figuring it out and just using, chat GPT or cloud or whatever to ask questions, or are you really operationalizing ai? And that’s gonna, I think, set the stage for how you grow and how profitable you are over the next couple of years.

Rich: Yeah. That’s a a great opportunity for us to pivot into talking about the AI maturity model that you wrote about in the other of the two LinkedIn posts. And as you mentioned you wrote earlier on about a [00:40:00] security maturity model. This is, informed by that approach to how MSPs can make that kind of voyage.

With the AI maturity model. It’s a sort of a six level process of evolution from a starting point of practically no AI to being really top of the game in utilizing AI internally and externally. We’re gonna get into some of those six specific steps with you momentarily here. But just to kick things off tell folks a little bit about, what the AI maturity model is, but also I’m curious to what degree could understanding the maturity model and really getting serious about progressing through it, help the smaller MSPs in our audience counteract or threat that we’ve been talking about in the, first half of this interview, basically.

Kevin: Yeah. One of the hardest things is thinking through this is, is a maturity model, is it three levels? Is it. 20 levels, how complex, if you [00:41:00] think about all these frameworks that we have and you know what level you are and what have you. And so one of the hardest things about, framing this out was are, looking at what we know about the industry and the MSPs and their stack and kinda where they are operationally.

How do you create a basic model? So I basically took six core layers. If you look at it as a progression, these are milestones that you would achieve. There’s a seventh and that’s the kind of layer zero. It’s we just know what AI is, right?

Or we have an idea of what AI is, but we might be just using it. Might not even be using, we just heard of it, right? It’s foundational. First layer is all right, now we’re using chat, GBT, we’re using some type of LLMM to ask questions or maybe even to, figure out a script that you need which in and of itself is very helpful and useful.

And having it maybe even write a, a script for you. ‘Cause in, in the past you had to go in and whether it’s [00:42:00] crowdsourced or going out to Reddit form or whatever, it it took a little bit of digging and exploring. Now you can essentially, prompt what type of script.

Now obviously you have to do a little little homework and due build diligence, make sure it’s right and what have you. But so that foundational layer is actually. Pretty solid starting point for, a small MSP, just getting into it and just trying to figure out how do we lever and, what’s the utility of ai?

But as you progress, it’s all right. How do you just take, how do we just take, go from just searching to what vendors provide tools that have some type of AI capability built into it that makes their tool operationally more impactful within my business? And that’s I think where we are today with most I wouldn’t say most vendors, I’d say.

I’d say probably 30% of the vendors out there that they have picked up this AI torch and, maybe they’ve just taken an LMM and they’ve integrated in their tool and it’s [00:43:00] helping, make answer questions more efficiently or maybe it’s a bot or something like that. So I think if you look at where most of the market is, it’s at that layer one, kinda that, that level one or level tool that they’re consumers of ai, they’re using it, day in and day out.

Or and they’re using it maybe from some basic, activities or they’re, now they’re working with some vendors that have AI built into it. They’re AI enabled tools that are helping to, make their operations of that tool a little bit more efficient. And I’d argue that’s probably where.

I don’t know, 70% of the MSP marketplace is today. That’s why they’re still at the front end there of that, maturity model. But then when you get into that second and third layer and in the fourth layer you’re talking about how do you use AI to augment our actual services?

It’s not just asking a question within the vendor’s product, but how does AI actually impact our day-to-day lives, right? In our operations of our [00:44:00] MSP. So again, mentioned tools like SoFi, you could look at thread you look at some of the other ones that are out there in those categories.

They are helping to. Do some basic things. For smaller MSPs, they’re pretty sophisticated. So automating workflows and making, smarter decisions, faster decisions and then looking in within environments and aggregating the data that’s an environment and starting to, say maybe you should do this across, two or three or 10 of your customers.

And I think that’s a very, that’s a great spot to be today. I think, call it maybe 15% of the marketplace is there. So there’s a ton of greenfield, not just from a vendor perspective, but there’s a ton of Greenfield from NMS P’S perspective to take that data and start to, to take those solutions and start to have that integrated and implemented and operationalized again.

That’s where I would argue maybe, I dunno, six months ago, may, maybe nine months ago, the larger vendors or larger MSPs were, clearly at that kind of layer two, layer three, moving into the layer four and [00:45:00] becoming more sophisticated. I think the next phase, and you group that, that I keep saying layer, but level four or five and six, that’s where you’re really operationalizing ai and you’re using it to actually reduce head count.

You’re using it to not just automate, ticket triage and questions of customers, but you’re. You’re operationalizing it and you’re moving in a way that it’s really helping you become a more efficient and more scalable MSP. And so I think less than 5% of the marketplace, maybe two, 2% of the marketplace is at that higher end of the market or that the higher end of the that maturity model.

So it, it’s gonna take a while. But the problem with this is that, we just don’t have luxury of time because this stuff is moving so it darn fast. And so I think is, people are thinking about this framework, this maturity model. It’s alright, run through it. And what level are we [00:46:00] at today?

And then how do we build out a checklist? And maybe that’s something we should do, is build, say, these are the things that we need to do as an MSP. They get to level two, to level three, to level four, level five, level six, and this is the timeframe that we want to do it. Because again, it’s, you’re gonna see this massive disruption with this.

And I wouldn’t have said it six months ago, really. I think I was in the same, it was in the same kind of bucket that everybody else trying to figure out really, what is this? What is AI really gonna do? Asking questions on these LMS is a wonderful thing and what have you, but really is it gonna have the impact that, everybody’s hyping, this stuff up to, to be and have.

But I think clearly the, again the dust had settled and I think, I think some of the vendors that are out there, some of these new vendors that are emerging, are building these capabilities that are gonna make probably 20 to 30% of the core MSP stack almost obsolete over the next [00:47:00] 12 months.

Because ni, I think I wrote about this maybe, I don’t know, six or nine months ago actually, when we launched the the it IT management map. You could see clearly in that core group of IT management software, those categories that we have up on our site. You could see clearly that 20 to 30% of those categories are becoming obsolete because.

Those capabilities of the products that within those categories are now just features within, inside of larger platforms. And so again I think you’re gonna see this rapid evolution of these MSP tools. There’s gonna be a amazing new entrant and there’s gonna be solving entirely new problems. But I think there’s a massive threat that, that is servicing to some of the larger, platform vendors out there where their tools, I’m not gonna say they’re obsolete, but they’re just basically becoming features now.

And AI is gonna allow, just about anybody to come in and build something and and compete [00:48:00] with those platform vendors. Might be going off in a whole different direction, but yeah, this is just, it’s just fascinating to see just over the last, I would say, three months how fast this has just started to evolve.

Erick: Yeah. Kevin, you mentioned, you really. We’re thinking it this way six months ago. For me it just feels the industry and the MSPs and the vendors that have been in it, we’ve been through these cycles of evolution, right? We talk about, Jamie Mcna talks about, decades or a couple of decades, we came from here, now we’re here now, we’re here now with ai.

It’s not twice as fast. It’s not, four times as fast. It seems like it’s changing every minute, every day, every month. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense for what you’re saying to me. I see what’s happening and in your maturity model, right? You write in that post and we’ll link to your posts in the show notes so folks can catch up on what we’re talking about.

They haven’t read them already, but you [00:49:00] really are talking about getting MSPs. To level three. That’s where you really feel like they should be. The second and the other thought that I had, I wanna ask you about that. The other thought that I had is the maturity model isn’t, as I’m, and I’ve been looking at it while you’re talking.

I’m well looking at it, I’m ’cause you’ve got a nice graphic that kind of breaks it down. But if you just replace MSP with any other business, it aligns perfectly well because I’m thinking about the stuff that we do at Channel Mastered and MSP mastered and SP chat, and I’m like, oh, we’re probably pushing level two.

Maybe a little bit into level three, but talk about level three and why that’s so important for MSPs and any other businesses and why MSPs need to be there as quickly as possible. What happens in level

Kevin: three? Again, level three, pull my little chart up here. This is, again, like I said, this is where you’re starting to.

Augment your services with these AI tools, right? And it’s one thing that just [00:50:00] can search and then, log into a vendor’s tool and use, some of their, integrated AI to, to make, ask questions and you make better decisions. But it’s another thing to start using these and operationalizing these tools to reduce, latency to improve the customer interaction and then, ultimately to improve margin.

And so this is where you’re starting to take some of these tools and integrate it and implement ’em in their customer facing at that point. And whether it’s, that, they call it the traditional bot on the website, right? And that’s reducing the number of phone calls into the desk service desk.

You’re seeing, again, a couple of months ago, I don’t think it was dramatic, but now you’re seeing an empath where, it is mitigating the volume of calls to the desk because you’re now enabling the customer. And I think it also aligns with the fact now that the customers and the general population is now.

Accustomed to these types of solutions and these types of tools, and oftentimes they want the answer, [00:51:00] in real time versus waiting for somebody. And so I think there’s a messaging opportunity in there for the MSPs that then, kind of enablement and empowerment messaging in there.

But I think that’s that first, big gate is our, we’ve dabbled with them, we’re a consumer of ’em, and then now we’re, looking at some of the vendors that have it integrated, but, how do we actually take some of these, AI tools and how do we automate a lot of the things that we’re doing?

And so I think that’s where, a lot of the vendors that are out in front of this has spent the last 12 months educating the marketplace and it’s maturing and have this really interesting, inflection point or, intersection where the general population the consumer, the public, your customers is, now comfortable with these tools and they’re empowered.

And I think there’s almost an expectation. And if you’re not leveraging ai in servicing, our account, then, what are you doing? You’re behind the times. So I think that’s where MSPs need to get to that kind of, that first true date is [00:52:00] getting to that level three or using AI to augment, some of your services become more efficient.

I think you get to that point and then I think it’s, how do you optimize your business? And I think getting to level, four or five and six should be a lot easier once you get to that level.

Rich: Yeah. And I wanna spend our remaining time talking about levels five and six actually, because regardless of where the folks in our audience are on on the model right now they’re probably towards the lower numbers on that scale.

Conceptually, at least if you look at one through four, they’re aware of what, what is going on there in terms of utilizing AI internally with increasing sophistication and power building and delivering and profiting from AI services to your customers. Things, in my view, start to reach a particularly advanced and interesting stage and levels five and six that I suspect, and this is what we’re gonna talk about [00:53:00] with you, start to change what it means to run an MSP, what the managed services business even starts to look like.

What, let’s look at level five. You said basically in some level five is having AI. Embedded into your MSP operating system. So already, one through four, you’ve been using ai operationally for a while. What does it mean to have AI embedded into the MSP operating system in practice?

And what kind of advantage does that wind up conferring on a company?

Kevin: Yeah, so this is, to your point, this is where you’re getting, particularly sophisticated or advanced as a, as an organization. And and going back through those gates, right? It’s, the awareness, it’s being consumer.

It’s dabbling and then it’s starting to, we’re starting to deploy some of these first tools. But when you get to level five, that’s where we’re saying, all right, we’re gonna look at some of these large language models. Or what’s really becoming more popular these days is a smaller language model, right?

There’s a number of reasons for [00:54:00] that, right? It’s more condensed the more. Think about it more containerized. So you can containerize your business around a small language model. But the benefit of that is that you can now look at all of the data within your MSP, right? Start just starting with your MSP.

You can look at all the data and you can start to really operate, really improve the operations of your MSP. So you’re looking at, everything, you’re correlating tickets, you’re correlating technician efficiency, you’re correlating your stack, you’re correlating your spend, right?

Everything about your business, you’re starting to take a look at and saying, all right, where can we operationalize? Where can we prove the margins? Where can we prove the overall health of our business? And so you think about it from an internal standpoint, there’s a massive opportunity to.

Just improve the efficiency and the overall, operations of your business, right? And that correlates to margins and your ability to [00:55:00] reinvest and growth. And growth that’s like that flywheel effect that every business looks to get to optimize and then, become more profitable and then reinvest to become, more optimized and more profitable.

And I think that’s again, where you’re starting to get to on that level five and level six. And I think level six really dovetails into, right? You’re operationalizing it but now you’re AI first. And it’s funny I don’t think every business is gonna follow, steps one through six.

I think some are gonna skip ahead and some are gonna bounce around. But I think when you get to level six, you’re now, you’re operationalizing. Ai, you’re taking a lot of these tools and you’re actually helping your customers leverage these tools and optimizing their businesses. And so I think some of the smaller MSPs are thinking about some of these things and how do we take co-pilot and integrate it into, our customer’s operations.

So they start to, surface data and see what’s going on, in your business. But I think that, I think there’s a big leap between, level four to [00:56:00] level five, and then there’s a, even bigger leap between level five and level six. And that’s where you’re taking, all of this operational capability and then you’re transforming that and, into your actual service delivery and supporting your customers and enabling your customers to become AI first or AI optimized.

And so that’s, I think again the larger MSPs are. Jumping a couple steps ahead because they can think about it. They have the resource they can invest, and they’re actually gonna invest in the tools that allow them to build these things to move faster. But the, I think the rest of the industry they’re big markers, again, between level three, getting level four or five and six.

But I, I think they’re achievable and I think they’re achievable by 80% of this marketplace over the next 18 to 24 months. It just takes, again, building out, kinda level setting and then building out that checklist and the progression. And it’s, it is challenging, no doubt, right?

Especially for the smaller MSPs [00:57:00] that you know, that are owner operated, led and you’re on one minute, you’re on a sales call. Next minute you’re jumping in the sales desk or the, the, on the service desk. But, this is one of these things now where. You can’t take it for granted and you have to spend nights and weekends educating yourselves and really getting up to speed to, progress, along with the rest of the industry because as Erick mentioned it, it’s, and I wouldn’t have said it, it’s gonna have a hundred x impact on the industry six months ago.

I think. I think we all saw there was amazing promise and potential, but, and I think now I think it’s pretty clear that this is gonna have a dramatic impact on this industry. And yeah. So I’d say get your butts moving on this stuff.

Erick: Yeah. And Kevin, I’d just like to pick your brain a minute on what your thoughts are on the impact of valuation.

Or MSPs as they progress through this maturity model. Because, we’ve been watching the m and [00:58:00] a activity, rollups, the acquisitions. MSPs are now getting financing themselves to buy their MSPs. We’ve got PE back folks jumping in. We’ve got organizations that are AI first buying MSPs.

So give us your thoughts as we close out on what you feel adopting this AI first service second kind of mentality moving through this maturity model will do for an MSP’s value when they’re negotiating an acquisition or an exit.

Kevin: I think this is, it’s probably the single biggest multiple multiplier out there for an MSP, right?

This allows MSPs to, again, become more operationally mature. More efficient, but most importantly, to the acquirer, more profitable, right? You’re able to leverage these tools and it’s not just, more profitable because you’re reducing hood [00:59:00] count, right? It’s, it everything is optimization.

I think that’s one of the things interesting kind of side trends that’s occurring. Like we’re not seeing massive. Maybe it was predicted, 12 months ago and I might even have put something out there and I thought this is gonna be a total job killer. There’s definitely areas that it’s slowing hiring, but I think you’re seeing the smart MSPs today.

They’re leveraging this not to reduce headcount, but to turn that headcount into, higher productivity headcount to drive even more optimization and profitability. Yeah. So from an acquirer standpoint, m and a i, it’s all about how efficient, how scalable and how profitable your business is.

And I think this is what’s gonna allow these MSPs to drive, multiples up by a couple turns, is that if you can really show that you have [01:00:00] operationalized it that you’re that much more efficient, and because of that, you’re able to squeeze out another, five to 10% ebitda, that, that’s, those are massive numbers.

Average two or three years ago, if you’re saying you’re able to drive, two or 3%, to the bottom line, trace your ebitda, that’s massive. But if you’re able to move five to 10%. Maybe 15% because of optimization. Yeah. I mean that, that’s that’s a private equity backed MSP’s dream to find an Ms.

P that is running running that efficiently. So I think this could have a massive positive impact on m and a in this marketplace. And just like anything the ones that are out there, first movers, the ones that are adopting it and out in front they’re gonna be the ones that get picked off first.

That’s just how it works.

Rich: Yeah. I wrote a post recently in Channel Hawk in which I mentioned based on some input from somebody in touch with a lot [01:01:00] of these roll who used to work at one of these roll ups that acquirers now are paying more for an MSP with. Lower EBITDA and less NRR, compared to a, another potential acquisition target if they are more sophisticated in ai.

That’s become such a, an important variable in the acquisition formula right now. That, yeah it’s gonna have a huge impact on valuations even, even bigger than it than we’re seeing now. Kevin, super interesting conversation. I encourage folks in the audience to read both of those posts.

A lot of a lot of stuff to chew on there. Anyone in the audience who is not chewing already needs to start doing so and chew faster, chew more. ’cause time is not your friend in this dynamic right now. For folks in the audience right now who would like to learn about you get in touch with you, learn more about Better Tracker channel program, where should they go?

Kevin: The easiest place to start is just, better tracker.com. We’re undergoing a pretty massive [01:02:00] evolution here over the next couple of days as we record this. So we’ll. Clearly break out those two, platforms and so the home will be better Tracker dot com for the MSPs.

And then, certainly when I connect with me I’m out in the socials probably a little bit too much these days, but I’m out there pretty easy to find, out on LinkedIn and some of the other platforms.

Rich: Fantastic. Thank you once again Kevin for joining us on the show. Folks, Erick and I are going to take a quick break now when you come back on the other side, we’re gonna share some thoughts about this conversation with Kevin Lancaster.

Have a little fun wrap up the show. Stick around. We’re gonna be right back.

And rock back part three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. Great conversation with Kevin there. I really enjoyed the the LinkedIn posts. We’ve got links to those in the show notes here. I do [01:03:00] encourage you to read them. And, so much of what we talked about goes right to what we were discussing at the beginning of the show here.

Starting with as you alluded to early in the show, the importance of data for an MSP and data has as a huge source of value, store of value for MSPs. And it is a sobering but very real thought that the larger you are as an SP, the more data you have and therefore the more value that you have.

And this is something that m smaller MSPs can navigate, but they’re very much gonna have to think about how they go about doing that. And then the other thing I’ll say is that whole. Build versus buy conversation, which again, that goes right to the PSA conversation. We we had early on in the show that was really interesting to me.

And I’m already working on a a future post for channel Holic about this. Because, at the PSA solution is a perfect example of this. You can’t be an MSP, at least in up until now. You [01:04:00] couldn’t be an MSP without a PSA solution. And the only way to get a PSA solution was to buy it. You weren’t gonna go out and write your own PSA base, except maybe you can now if you’re a little bit larger, if you’ve got the resources to afford reasonably talented developer.

Maybe you can interesting thought,

Erick: vibe, coding.

Rich: Yeah,

Erick: If you could vibe, code different little components it’s step one, step two, step three. I know. For a fact that there are some features that, some of the PSAs that, that I’ve worked with and I’ve consulted on with other MSPs.

And I’m not gonna say I’ve worked with all of them, but I’ve worked with the top ones for sure. And none of them are perfect. It’s a Swiss Army knife at best. And it begins with, ticketing. And then beyond that, the business kind of functionality they have improved in [01:05:00] the 20 years, since I was an MSP back in the day.

Rich I’ll give ’em that. But what we’re talking about is. Not an evolution. It’s a revolution. The opportunity for AI and the ease with which it continues to enable regular folks like you and me, if we want to build things to analyze things is, and it’s only gonna continue accelerating.

And we talk about 2026, holy cow, six months from now we may be, going, remember when we said this? Here’s what’s happening now. So you really gotta stay in front of this. And if you’re going to leverage AI as an MSP in your own business and you’re gonna leverage what you’re learning about using and leveraging AI in your own business and then focus that lens to your clients, there’s a tremendous opportunity here.

And, we’ve also been talking recently Rich about. The increased valuation that is attributed [01:06:00] to organizations that are AI first and pulling services through behind them. Just keep track of that as well, because the more AI forward you are as you, prepare your business for an eventual exit, the more valuable you’ll become to potential buyers.

Rich: Yeah, I, and I really do wanna underscore that last point because it’s huge. The skills that you cultivate, being able to use AI to create an application for your own use internally within, let’s just say four hours or whatever, you apply those skills to customer.

Can you imagine sitting down with the owner of one of your client organizations? You identify some business need and you come back the next day with an application that you’ve created for them, and it’s just for them, it’s there’s not gonna be any customization or configuration required. ’cause we wrote this from scratch just for you, and it won’t be perfect.

But in a very short amount of time, you can just completely transform a workflow for them that. [01:07:00] Is some sticky value add right there.

Erick: Yeah. And we don’t charge per hour for creating those types of applications. This is where the potential for revenue growth is just immense. You could build them based upon outcomes that they help, that you help them generate.

You could, build them based upon, performance increases. There’s all kinds of ways that you could structure this, where it, you can position it so it doesn’t appear to be a hard cost to the organization, but the increased profit or revenue that’s generated, or efficiency improvements that are being realized by that organization, now you’re getting a piece of that.

So it’s not like a cost, it’s almost like a business outcome, revenue, potential share opportunity. So if you really think about it. You could, do this for five or six or 10 organizations and really create some mailbox money for yourself.

Rich: [01:08:00] Alright, folks, that leaves us with time for just one last thing and I hope you’re as amused by this as I am.

‘Cause we talk about cybersecurity a lot on the show here and in the industry. And when you’re talking about cybersecurity, you wind up talking about phishing a lot. How about a phishing attack involving the theft of lobster? Now, technically speaking, lobster is not a fish, but it’s pretty darn close.

Recently in New England thieves stole a truckload of lobster worth $400,000 from a Massachusetts facility, and they were able to pull this off using a phishing attack that got them the information they needed to get. There you go. A phishing attack. For stealing fish more or less.

Erick: Yeah. I read that as well.

There’s a couple of interesting humor stories that I was catching up on this weekend. I was wondering which one you would choose and Yeah, man, this is crazy. How do you fence $400,000 worth of lobster? The questions but yeah, they were able to pull that off and this is, that is a [01:09:00] huge hit on the company’s bottom line and a phishing attack, and who knew?

But they can steal love. So they can steal anything,

Rich: So I think the answer to your question is you need to steal $400,000 worth of steak and then it’s a surf and turf play. And that maybe it fences. I don’t know. I’m not, stay tuned folks. Stay tuned. Folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you on this episode of MSP Chat.

We thank you so much for joining us here. I will use this moment to remind you, as I always do, we are both a video and an audio podcast, which means that if you’re listening to us right now, but you wanna check us out on video, go to YouTube, look up MSP chat if you are watching us on YouTube, but you are into audio podcast too, go to Spotify, Google, apple, wherever it is, you get your audio podcast.

You’ll find us there as well. Wherever you find us, please subscribe, rate, review. It’s gonna help other people find and enjoy the show just like you do. This program is produced by the great Russ Johns. It is edited by the also great Riley Simpson. They’re part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered.[01:10:00]

Podcasts are one of the things we do for our clients, but really one of the smaller things that we do. If you really wanna understand what we’re about and that’s all about helping vendors grow, improve, optimize Perfect MSP channels, go to www.channel Mastered.com to get the complete Picture.

Channel mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered. That is Erick working one-on-one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business. And you can learn more about that at www.mspMastered.com. So once again, we thank you for joining us. We’ll see you in a week’s time. Until then, please, folks, for Remember Ya Can’t Spell Channel.

Without [01:11:00] MSP.