Episode 141: Sales Profanity

 

Transcript:

Rich: [00:00:00] You’ve rolled out MFA. You’ve run the phishing training. Your clients are still getting compromised. Kaseya says identity attacks are up 32%, and more than 97% of them start with a password. They’re not breaking in, they’re signing in. On Thursday, October 8th, MSP Chat’s Erick Simpson and Kaseya’s Matt Sivak will run a live account takeover demo.

Watch Matt phish a user and take their credentials, and then see what happens next. It’s all at 1:00 PM Eastern on Thursday, October 8th. Register at bit.ly/takeoverdemo. That’s B-I-T.LY/takeoverdemo, one word. And now, on with the show. And three, two, one, [00:01:00] boing. 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 in managed services.

My name is Rich Freeman. I am chief analyst at Channel Master, the organization responsible for the show. I’m joined, as I am every week, by your other co-host, our CEO and chief strategist at Channel Master. His name is Erick Simpson. Erick, how you doing?

Erick: Doing well, Rich. Just savoring the last few days before you and I both have to travel again next week.

Rich: I, as we record this on Wednesday, my, that, that day is 48 hours away for me. I’m, I will be heading down to San Diego to attend the Scale Con Conference which I’ve not been to before. But I will be moderating a panel there. It will be great. We, we’ve had Nigel Moore on the show. It’s been a long time and I’ll invite him back on when I see him in San Diego.

But it’s actually been about six years since I’ve seen him face to face. [00:02:00] So that’ll be very nice. I’m looking forward to that, and then we are both headed off to Orlando for MSP Summit next

Erick: yes. Back to a little bit of humidity that neither of us are quite used to.

Rich: Yeah a little bit.

We’ll compare notes on on how much qualifies as a little bit once we’re down there in a week’s time. For now, let us dive into our story of the week instead, and it concerns an issue, what I will call a risk for the MSPs in our audience that I certainly didn’t fully appreciate until quite recently when I wrote about it in Channelholic, my blog.

And I am guessing there are a lot of folks in the audience here who haven’t really looked into this deeply as well. To set the context, go back like 10, 15 years ago. The insurance industry was in what it apparently called the silent cyber era. And this is when cyber attacks are starting to do real damage to businesses, and those businesses are filing claims against their business or their property insurance looking for [00:03:00] coverage on those losses.

Those policies were silent. They said nothing about cyber attacks one way or the other because the whole risk associated with cyber was so new, and it was a big mess for everybody, right? There, there was a lot of claims activity. There was a lot of claims processing at the insurance companies denied claims, unhappy people And so out of that comes cyber insurance.

The insurance industry now is in what it calls a silent AI period. Now we are all aware of the fact that AI hallucinates. AI can and is being used now by threat actors to design and execute entire at- attack sequences. We are watching agents break into Hugging Face just for…

AI is doing harm in the world. Y- based on my research, there isn’t actually a lot of claims activity coming out of that damage right now, but there’s no question about the fact that this is on the way. And [00:04:00] in- the insurance industry is struggling right now to kinda catch up to that risk and figure out what to do about it.

So let’s look specifically at cyber insurance. If you have cyber insurance, if your clients have cyber insurance most of those policies are silent on AI. But the people in the industry I’ve spoken to tell me you’re probably going to be okay if somebody, if a, a hacker breaks into your environment or a customer’s environment using AI, if somebody’s agent does that, even though the cyber policy is silent right now, based on what we’re seeing in the industry, you’re still gonna get the coverage you’re expecting to get.

It’s a very different question, though, if your agent, an agent you’re running in your office or one that you sold to a customer, breaks into somebody else’s environment and, or attacks somebody el- like Hugging Face, attacks somebody else and does some damage. Cyber policies won’t necessarily cover that, and the insurance companies that are breaking the silence [00:05:00] on that aren’t affirming coverage.

On the, the, being on the attack side of that, we’re starting to see more and more insurance companies add what’s called affirmative language to the policy that says, “Yes, you’re good, you’re covered.” They’re not adding affirmative ang- language about coverage if your AI does harm to somebody else.

They’re adding exclusions that specifically say, “We won’t cover you for that.” And this is coming to other forms of insurance as well your E&O policy, your general liability, your officers and directors. They are silent on all of the very real risks associated with AI right now. And to the degree that insurance companies are breaking the silence, they’re doing it in a way that isn’t gonna be great for you or your customers.

And so you really need, as an MSP as you’re thinking about your own risk, as you’re advising your customers, I think everybody needs to become much more aware, much more cognizant of the fact that they are more exposed to risk right now than they probably realize they are. And, [00:06:00] take a close look at your policies, talk to your insurer.

There may not be all that much you can do about some of the dangers getting coverage for some of the dangers I just outlined. But as a starting point, Erick, you at least need to figure out how exposed you and your customers are.

Erick: It sounds to me, Rich, like there’s there may be two areas where insurance might play a role.

The, the first is cybersecurity, cyber liability insurance, right? If AI is being used to attack you, to penetrate, I think, again, speak your, insurance expert on this. The other one is that you didn’t mention is what happens if what we’re seeing right now in, in the market leaks data out.

So MSPs are trying to get ahead of shadow AI and the AI that all the users are using, and maybe even the business owners themselves are just letting, the AI crawl through all of their company [00:07:00] data and this and that, and it then becomes available to the public or hackers somehow, or competitors.

That’s the question that I would like to, figure out what… how MSPs can protect their customers around. And it sounds like from your reporting, Rich, that this is so new that insurers just haven’t caught up with all of the potential ramifications of what’s ahead of us potentially.

Rich: Yeah, absolutely.

So it is a great question. It is nearly 100% certain that whatever kind of insurance we’re talking about right now is silent on that topic. And the risk, the, the danger, of course, the concern is your AI leaks data. It’s a hugely valuable IP. It goes out into the world and this does immense damage to your company or your client’s company out there.

There, there is a real risk that the insurance company is going to say, “We’re not covering that because [00:08:00] you did this. You’re responsible for, not guarding against shadow AI and making sure that your employees aren’t, putting the sensitive data into tools like that.

You created that agent that leaked the data out to the world. This is not something you were victimized by. This is something you victimized yourself with and not covered.” Again, unless it explicitly says that you are covered for that kind of a thing, probably says nothing right now, and I, at least, would be very concerned that’s what the insurance company says, “You’re bad.

We’re not paying.”

Erick: Yeah. This is on your watch. It’s not like you had an employee take, information and go peddle it to somebody. This is under your watch here. And so that kind of ties back to my philosophy around, using AI to pull through more cybersecurity work that, clients have been hesitant To invest in, right?

Oh, nobody, wants my data. I’m a small mom and pop shop. But you- you’re probably one of the [00:09:00] top targets of these folks that are hacking, right? It’s a sh- shotgun approach. They’re trying to capture everybody, and we’ve seen stats Rich, that, that indicate that small and medium businesses are in fact more targeted or more successfully breached than some of the larger organizations.

So taking that philosophy, one might argue as an MSP to a client, “Hey, your cyber insurance policy probably has nothing that covers data leakage from your internal use and your employees’ use, whether you are aware of it or not. So this is the reason why we need to come in and be your vCISO, and implement security guidelines and safeguards and guardrails and, optimize the AI that you are using so you are not accidentally leaking data out that a competitor can use against you.”

So I’m always thinking of the opportunity for an MSP to have a more [00:10:00] strategic conversation with clients to get them to do what MSPs have always wanted them to do. Just trust us and listen to us, because we know better than you about security and technology.

Rich: It’s a great great idea, great suggestion basically.

You point out the insurance related issue and you say, “I can’t eliminate your AI risk, but I can shrink it if we do these 10 things, 15 thi- if we make these changes that I recommend, you’re less exposed to what could happen when your AI breaks into hugging face or whatever.”

It’s a very compelling argument right now, and it’s a… it’s not just a great sales technique. It’s something that customers really need to hear and understand and should invest in.

Erick: Yeah. I think document what you’ve done, demonstrate that you’ve thoughtfully taken, taken steps towards preventing this from happen- happening, and then hopefully that increases your chances should something happen and data leaks out, that the insurance company will see everything that you’ve done, [00:11:00] in, in good conscience to try to prevent it from happening, and maybe be a little friendlier when you file a claim should the worst thing happen

Rich: So when not if you do start having that conversation with your customers and you create a service around mitigating AI risk, you’re gonna have to figure out how to price that offering.

And Erick, that sets us up for your tip of the week.

Erick: Yeah. Boy, it’s a moving target, isn’t it, Rich? The tapestry of pricing options and challenges and conversations that MSPs, struggle with just in delivering, the, the peanut butter and jelly MSP services that everybody says are absolutely this is the baseline.

Then you add in, oh now we need to, figure out how to price AI and some of these platforms and all these, unique and different ways that we’re hearing about that no one has yet settled on as this is the way, right? There’s all kinds of ways to price AI. [00:12:00] Consumption, by workflow, by outcome, by agent.

Time and material, don’t do it that way. We all don’t wanna, reduce the value of what we deliver to an hourly rate. But I wanna s- back up a little bit more generally and talk about The biggest question that I hear working with partners, Rich, is what should we charge? What should we charge first?

And sometimes they’ve decided kind of a dartboard approach, right? Oh, it lands here. I think that, that fits, that makes sense. And what ends up happening a year, two years, three years later, partners start understanding a little bit more about, who their most unprofitable clients are, who the profitable ones are, and sometimes that’s by luck.

I was speaking with a, a partner the other day, and I said you know how we learned in the early days, my infancy as an MSP of how to raise our prices?” I just said one day, “I’m just gonna raise the price of this agreement by 20% and see what happens.” And people said yes to it. And then I said, [00:13:00] “Huh?”

And then I did it a couple more times. It was very unscientific, but it just… It got me past that, that mental block, Rich, that said, “I don’t think clients will pay that.” And I was trying to base my pricing model around what I thought clients should pay. So we now know after many years of, trial and error and training and sales training, I’ve put myself through a bunch of sales training since then, that we don’t price based on what the client, what we think or forecast what a client will pay.

Because you could always negotiate down a little bit, remove things out of the agreement if it’s a little rich for their budget. But the most important thing is to first ask the budget question when you’re in the sales conversation. Give me a range of budget. And I’ve learned to ask it in a very, I think, easy-to-express way to a client.

I’ll, and I do it today. I’ll say, “Hey, what would the absolute minimum amount you would be able to invest to achieve [00:14:00] this outcome? And if we can demonstrate the need, what’s the absolute highest budget amount you could find?” And I use find, I don’t use cost, price, budget, right? I call this sales profanity.

But beyond that, just trying to get a range out of somebody that may not know what the range is, you’ve gotta ki- take a swing, good, better, bested and see where they fit, what the need is and things like that. But before we even get there, Rich, we have to understand what it actually takes for us, our internal costs, to deliver those outcomes.

And, from a simplistic perspective, many MSPs might think, “Oh my goodness, it costs me, a couple of bucks per, for my RMM. It costs me this for my cyber insurance package. It costs this for my licensing of this product, and they’ve got a checklist of things that are the ingredients of their smoothie that they blend up for the client.[00:15:00]

But what they’re missing, Rich, is the total labor cost of what it costs to deploy it, to maintain that bundle or package or portfolio of services, not only the technician’s labor, but escalation, service management’s labor, account management, that customer success role that we’ve been talking about recently, VCIO, VCAIO and all the time that we spend with customers on a QBR.

And just in general, the operational platforms that we… Some MSPs assume are a cost of business. Oh, my PSA solution, my, my Bright gauge reporting solution, all these things that it takes us to run our business, those also have a cost, plus a portion of overhead per billable technician. So when you start adding all those things up, you get to a fully burdened cost of labor, not just a fully burdened labor cost, but I’m gonna include some [00:16:00] overhead in there too, just to see what that looks like.

So when I then calculate that overhead burden, it’s much different than just taking a technician’s payroll saying, “Oh, it’s $80,000 a year. Divide that by 2,080 hours, and I forecast that we’re spending about four hours a month on that client.” It’s a lot larger than that. And then Take that cost and then look at how it compares to what you’re charging to different size clients, and maybe with complexity and things like that.

This can become a little bit of a, a journey with AI, if you will, and just plugging in different things to really understand what it takes to deliver service to clients that may look like this. Maybe they’re in a specific vertical, there’s specialization tools there. Does it cost extra to onboard clients that look a little bit differently?

Look at all these different variables and then [00:17:00] add your pr- your margin, not markup, margin that you’re trying to realize on top of those costs, pricing for the outcome. And we talked recently on one of the, one of our episodes, Rich, about we have to shift away from, pricing based upon a list of activities that we present in our proposal to a client.

We want to then develop the outcome. We’re going to provide security. We’re going to provide support for your staff to make sure that they’re that they are able to operate, that business operational uptime. And I’ll go back t- to the days, Rich, when we were, one of the first MSPs trying to figure out how to demonstrate to a client what the value of that was.

And we had a calculation that indicated cost of downtime and an idea of what labor costs for these folks and things like that. And then we explained to them, this is what we’re delivering to you, is that ability for your staff not to [00:18:00] be down or to lose time or, in the event of a hacker breach, we’re gonna do everything we can to prevent that so that every member of your team can be productive and add to your top line and bottom line profit, top line revenue and bottom line profit.”

So- There’s a lot more that goes into the formula to figure out what an hour costs us to deliver service to a particular client, and that could vary between, the complexity of that, that bundle of services, and maybe the vertical, and maybe there’s even governance and other things that you have to layer on top.

So I’ll stop there, and I see you writing notes. Go ahead, Rich.

Rich: Yeah, no I wanna underscore… So first of all I, I just wanna say for the MSPs in the audience here, it is so natural and intuitive and human to begin a pricing conversation with what should we charge, that I just did it. When I was setting up this segment, I said, “Hey, if you’re gonna do this AI risk mitigation [00:19:00] thing, you gotta figure out what to charge.”

Wrong question, Rich, for all the reasons that you just outlined, so I’m fessing up here a little bit. The other thing I wanna do is underscore the last of those suggestions that you made there about focusing on the outcome because I listened to that story you told. You went to a, a client once upon a time.

You raised their rates 20%, they didn’t blink. Cost never entered into that exchange at all. It was all about value. They knew something you didn’t know, which is that the, the services you were providing them were at least 20% more valuable than they were paying for. They contemplated life without you.

You raised the rates 20% and it’s like, “Okay, I’m gonna keep paying that.” So the real the formula that really gets you to the optimal price for whatever it is you’re pricing absolutely has to be grounded in this thorough kind of understanding of cost that you’re talking about here. But it also has to factor in the value that you’re delivering to them, which will vary [00:20:00] depending on the service that we’re talking about.

But you deserve to be compensated for that value to the fullest, and you need to make sure you’re factoring that in.

Erick: Yeah. And, you’ll learn real quickly which clients are really- Looking for something at the lowest price possible during your qualifying because you’re right, and I did test that a couple times during that little sprint I did just to see how much.

Would the next client pay even more? And then I figured out what the value that I was able to to demonstrate was actually worth in a buyer’s perspective. And then my job came back to, okay, if we need to char- if we wanna charge more, and again, in, this was before the times when we had, figured out all this, all, all the mechanics of our economics here and the costs.

But it just kinda gave me a way to measure what the market would bear at that point for the outcomes that we were presenting. So we went back, checked what it cost us. We even actually eliminated a [00:21:00] couple of things to bring pricing a little bit down for our good bundle, making sure that we were then hitting that target margin, and then we had our better and our best bundle.

And now we had a way to deliver a potential service bundle that could fit within that price range that I asked, learned to ask in my qualifying, what’s the absolute minimum you think you could find in order to, help us deliver these outcomes for you? And if we were able to justify it, what’s the absolute maximum you think you would be able to find?

And then that gave me my range. And if I couldn’t fit good in there, then they were just not a client for us. But if I could fit good and maybe better, I always presented good, better, and best to clients when we went to to every sales meeting because what I found out later, here’s a bonus tip, clients don’t know you deliver more [00:22:00] services until you tell them, and they will buy those services from someone else, and then you find out later.

Ask me how I know, Rich.

Rich: Folks we have spoken about AI risk. Let’s talk a little bit about AI value and innovation. Erick and I are going to take a quick break here. When we come back on the other side, we are gonna be joined by Jeff Gaines. He is the chief growth officer at Treeline.

Treeline is one of this new emerging class of companies you’ve been reading about, like Shield Technology Partners and Titan with absolutely first-rate Silicon Valley grade AI talent in there building these customized, very sophisticated internal AI engines. If there’s anyone we could bring onto the show who could really help us understand the state-of-the-art with AI in managed services, both in terms of what you do with it internally and what you do with it with customers, it’s Jeff.

You are gonna hear his thoughts on what they’re up to at Treeline in just a moment, so stick around. We’ll be right back.[00:23:00]

And welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat Podcast, our spotlight interview segment, where we are very pleased to be joined by Jeff Games. He is the chief growth officer at Treeline. Very interesting company I think a lot of you have probably heard of. For those of you who haven’t, you’re gonna be very interested to learn what they are all about.

But before we get into that Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff: Yeah. Thanks for having me, guys. A pleasure to be here. And Erick and Rich, always good to see you.

Rich: I have written multiple times in Channelholic, my blog, about Treeline. To, to my great disappointment and dismay, not everyone in the channel reads every Channelholic post carefully, so there are probably a few people in our audience who are new to Treeline and new to you as well.

Kick us off a little bit by telling folks a little bit about yourself and your role at Treeline, and just who is Treeline? [00:24:00] Sure, yeah. I can start with my background. Career MSP person. Have been a technician, seller, owner operator. I’ve held a lot of different hats over the years at various MSPs.

Jeff: I spent a good chunk of my career running an MSP down in San Diego. We actually sold that MSP to private equity back in 2018 and stayed on in that platform for many years. And then back in January of this year joined Treeline, which I think is maybe where the, the relevant conversation goes today.

And then just a little bit about Treeline. We basically are building an AI native MSP for, And there’s a lot of interpretation around what that typically means. I’m sure we’ll get into the, the details, but just really thoughtfully trying to build technology into our business selling and serving MSP services, products to the end market.

And and hopefully delivering better outcomes along the way with the technology in full effect. [00:25:00]

Rich: But we definitely want to get into your particular definition of being an AI native MSP, and that’s the main reason we wanted you on the show, is you guys are kinda out there on the vanguard a little bit with some of the other companies out there Shield and Titan and so on in terms of what you’re doing internally and with customers.

We kinda wanna get into that a little bit. And just for folks in the audience, speaking of Shield and Titan, those are both backed by pretty prominent, well-known venture capital firms out there. One of the things, Jeff, that grabbed my attention about Treeline when I first heard that it was going to be launching and going public soon, was that you’ve got venture backing as well from the biggest name in venture capital, Andreessen Horowitz.

So this, there, there is a big bet being made in the AI native MSP model in Silicon Valley right now. And speaking of venture capital and big bets around services, the first time I wrote about Treeline, I kicked off the post by quoting Julian [00:26:00] Beck, who’s an investor at Sequoia, this big venture firm, and just a few days or weeks earlier, he had written something that kinda made a stir online and the quote exactly is, “The next trillion-dollar company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm.”

And that sort of sent him in a very interesting direction where he was talking about a software company that owns service delivery and what that winds up meaning and why the trillion dollars is more on the services side. Talk a little bit about your take on that quote, but also how do you think about Treeline?

Is it a, a software company that does services? A services company that builds some of its own software? How do you sorta sort that out?

Jeff: Yeah. It was a great piece. I think just continued, Sequois’s thought leadership around this space. I think maybe a year before that or 18 months before that, they had come out with a pretty big white paper on this concept of service as a software, which is, a cute inversion of [00:27:00] software as a service.

And we certainly fit squarely within that, in that model. I do think about Treeline as both a service and a software business, really. And we’re fundamentally trying to put the software in places where it advantages the end user, the consumer of the service and product the people delivering the service but not in a way that’s so blatant that it feels dehumanized for the consumer, that it feels like they’re, now interfacing with a piece of software or product.

And so it’s obviously a fine line that we have to kinda walk there. But ideally, we’re serving the SMB, the mid-market, like many MSPs out there. And, when I think about the types of businesses that operate in that space the relationships really matter still. They wanna feel like they’re getting personal white glove attention.

And software or product is never gonna be able to fulfill that, that need. And the, the human- … element of this is very important. So very much still a [00:28:00] service business just a supercharged service business because of some of the software elements that we can bring into the mix accelerate outcomes deliver better service ultimately.

Erick: Jeff, you’ve used the term outcomes several times, and, this is what we’re seeing is, in, in customers, clients they’re really buying outcomes now, I think as a result of AI delivering service so efficiently that maybe customers are scratching their head going why are we still paying so much when you’re delivering things so quickly and differently and efficiently?”

Outcomes is really important, and I think this is where, MSPs need to shift to selling more of these business outcomes. We wanna talk to you about what TreeLine’s doing with AI for your clients as well as internally. But start with the internal part for us. What’s in your stack?

What does your AI software stack look like? And what does it do? Why is it different than what other traditional MSPs are doing?

Jeff: Yeah, for sure. I think yeah, outcomes is such an [00:29:00] interesting topic right now, and there’s everyone’s crystal ball’s a little foggy here on exactly where it goes.

But I think, if you just follow the the natural conclusion of all this, things are getting simpler and easier and more cost-effective, and so there’s gonna have to be some kind of update to the way that all the MSPs go to market. For us specifically we’ll start with, what our software’s doing for TreeLine internally and why we think it’s different.

At the core it’s ITSM built on AI, and so you can think about there’s a lot of off-the-shelf products that do this today AI help desk, AI service operations. Ours is home brew, so we’re building it ourselves. We have a team of software developers in our, at our headquarters in San Francisco.

They spend all day, every day of the week working on this software and improving it and shipping new features and updates but it very much shows up as AI ITSM. So you– if you were an MSP, you could go buy something [00:30:00] similar to this, like off the shelf right now and integrate it into your business.

I think what’s really interesting about what we’re doing in Tree Line is, the sort of point solution concept being, Look, I ran an MSP. What was always really hard for me when I ran an MSP was how do I get all the different systems and data talking together and applying context around all of this?

Data can inform orchestration, et cetera. And it was always really tough for me to unlock that. We had the vision. We definitely knew that there was possibility to do more for our customers and just run the business more effectively. But it was really hard to actually bring that vision to life because the technology and the talent gap was just so wide at that point.

The technology gap is closing. There’s a lot of off-the-shelf solutions now, as mentioned, that can k- kinda help close some of that gap. The talent gap is still pretty wide, and I think the access to talent that MSPs have versus right now we’re competing against some really big names out there in the AI space for the software development talent.[00:31:00]

Putting that together with the service, with the vision of what we’re doing, I think is where the differentiation’s coming in, where we’re actually creating new value But again, right now it’s very contained to ITSM. Where we do see it going long term is on the edges of that and even beyond.

So can the software that we’re building help us bill more optimally? Maybe it’s a catalyst to driving some outcome-based billing opportunities that are on the horizon. Can it help us manage our current customers’ retention, upsell opportunity more effectively? There’s a lot on the margins here that we haven’t really tapped into yet.

But, when I talk about this off-the-shelf versus what we’re building internally, I think the, the real difference is by building it ourselves, we have this opportunity to build it in this very highly kind of bespoke custom way into our business. Whereas if you buy anything off the shelf, there’s a lot of enablement that has to come along with that to- in order for it to adapt it to your business, to integrate it completely.

We’re [00:32:00] doing that from the jump, and I think that’s where quote-unquote AI native concept comes from. We’re starting there versus trying to bolt it onto something that otherwise is not AI native, right?

Rich: Yeah. Like we say, you’re, you are competing with some heavy hitters for AI talent right now, especially in the Bay Area.

So that w- whatever it is you’re paying those people it’s a lot which bring, raises the question of ROI basically. You’re saying that because your tools are custom designed for your environment and they’re integrated in a way that store-bought systems can’t be, they perform better.

W- what kind of productivity efficiency, profitability gains have you seen and gotten in return for the substantial investment you’ve made?

Jeff: Yeah, I think w-we should probably just, maybe ladder up a-as another step. And so kind of the core thesis of Treeline is if we’re building this great, in some ways novel software, we think it’s a catalyst to driving better results for the end [00:33:00] market.

We need distribution to get to the end market, and so we’re partnering with MSPs to do that through acquisition. But then we also feel Treeline has this, this great opportunity to grow organically in a way that just doesn’t naturally exist in the MSP space. If you’re growing 10, 20, 30% year over year, you’re doing really well in the MSP space, and we’re really trying to I think, push the boundary on what’s possible there without totally breaking apart operations.

And so when we think about, where, like… When we think about where the opportunity is in the market, we think it’s really on the growth side, and the software is a catalyst to that growth. Removing some of these constraints and bottlenecks. You talk to typical MSP and it’s like we can only onboard two customers a month,” right?

And so in th- in this case, it’s like, “Hey can we onboard four or five customers a month?” Because the software is doing a lot of this heavy lifting. So naturally, that’s gonna show up and you can talk about the efficiency gains. Naturally, that’s gonna show up, on the income statement in some way where we have some leverage in the business.

Human capital [00:34:00] can just do more throughout the day because the software is enabling a lot of the en- enabling them to focus on higher value activities because it’s doing a lot of this kinda like low level blocking and tackling type of work, right? And that’s, I think that’s a core concept, and that would be the same for any of the off-the-shelf solutions, et cetera.

For us, when we talk about those efficiency gains, it’s how do we then steer that newfound efficiency, not in a way that’s just like dropping money to the bottom line, but also really be- becomes a catalyst to growth and allowing us to do more for our end customers and acquire more customers overall in a shorter amount of time.

That’s really where we’re focused. We came out with our first acquisition we did with a company called Sugarshot out of Los Angeles. We had a press release. We just announced that I think it was like a month ago now, maybe three weeks ago. And the kinda the punchline on that story was in 18 months, we were able to…

there’s a lot of down income statement stuff we can talk about, but the, the headline there is we were able to double top line for them in 18 months. And not a massive business by any means, but, sizable for [00:35:00] the MSP space. And to be able to grow top line by double in th- in that amount of time is, I think, is a really cool story, and that’s really our goal

It’s how do we enable that type of growth for all of our MSP partners that are coming into the mix?

Erick: Jeff, you bring a lot of experience to, to TreeLine. Like yourself, I was an MSP as well, and the challenge we were always having was what you’re addressing now is, like, how do we get more billable work out of, the staff that we have?

How does using AI as extensively as you’re using it in TreeLine change what it means to fundamentally be an MSP? And using, your vision, like following your vision, what does a successful MSP growth strategy look like now? Because to me, it feels completely different than, traditional managed services and the growth trends and the value proposition.

And you mentioned, selling, [00:36:00] monetizing business outcomes. Everybody’s trying to figure out how to monetize all of this. So what does it mean to be an MSP now using a strategy like what you’re developing at TreeLine?

Jeff: Yeah. In, in a lot of ways it’s the same as it always was, and in a lot of ways it’s different, right?

And so when you think about the, what I mentioned earlier, hey, allowing our people to go do more valuable things for the customers, that, that’s happening right now, right? And so we can spend more time consulting with them, helping them with strategy, like looking through their data, help- analyzing the data, extracting insights, all the things that we’ve always wanted to do for our customers, like we can do that right now.

Where it goes long term, when we think about some of the commoditization maybe of some of the traditional MSP services, help desk is a great example, which is already becoming highly commoditized. Just like getting ahead of that curve a little bit is also on our mind. And I think where we’re going with this is hey we also have AI services for our end customers, right?

And so we’re helping [00:37:00] them with their AI strategy, we’re helping them with adoption, enablement of their workforce all the way through to, for deploying and, helping them with business process automation. We’re very early on the latter part of that story, but like it’s something that we’re really bullish on right now and, we’ve seen Anthropic and Palantir kind of follow this model for the enterprise.

So how do we take that now and then make it, one, economically viable but two, accessible for the middle market and SMB? That’s something that we’re very focused on right now. And then the kind of third part of that is, okay, then how do we actually monetize it? Like, how do we get paid for it?

Right now there’s… I think there’s a lot of people out there that are trying to do it like fixed fee, on a monthly basis. Some people are still hanging on to the per seat per month, all you can eat model for some of this stuff. I don’t know that anybody has a good bead on like the exact lane this is gonna like land in ultimately.

For us, we’re experimenting with a bunch of different ideas and concepts here. I do think that there’s something to the idea of, hey, if we can actually [00:38:00] generate real business value for our customers, and we can prove it we should be able to just capture some percentage of that as our fee for that and on s- whether that’s into perpetuity or some kind of residual, I don’t know.

But yeah, I think the opportunity here is really great, guys. ‘Cause Erick, you said you were an MSP at one point. Man, it was always so hard to be like, yeah, we– It was the, the classic conundrum of the MSP is if you’re doing a bad job the customer knows it for sure, and then they’re like breathing down your neck, right?

They’re on the phone with “Why didn’t you respond to this ticket on time?” Or, w- you miss this alert of my network going down or whatever it might be. But if you’re doing a good job, you also get the same story. “Why am I paying for you?” Like what, like where is the value you’re creating here, right?

And it’s not super visible To the end customer when you’re doing a really good job and it’s very valuable. The opportunity here is quite the opposite. It’s, “Hey, this is costing you X amount of dollars or X amount of time times billable rate at the end customer level every month or every year.

How can we maybe [00:39:00] save that? Can we shave 20 or 30% off of that?” And we can actually prove it, right? We can do a baseline study against what it’s historically cost you or maybe the opportunity that you’re leaving on the table as in terms of net new revenue. And if we can baseline that, and then we can move that number and prove it and show it, man they’re– this is like an MSP dream to be able to, to actually hard quantify.

I remember building the ROI calculators for our websites and stuff, and it’s just you’re talking to a CFO, and he’s “Okay is it really gonna, am I really getting this much value out of this? You’re really saving my t- my team this much time and productivity?” Yeah.

They’re seeing they’re seeing through that, right? That story. This is hard numbers, and that’s such a blessing for the MSP community to be able to anchor on that.

Rich: Let’s f- y- you kinda got us moving in the direction of what you’re doing with AI for and with your clients there.

And I believe the last time we spoke prior to this certainly face-to-face, was at the Pax8 Beyond event way back in June, eons ago in, in AI. And I [00:40:00] remember you saying in that conversation that somewhat to your surprise at Treeline, the phone was ringing pretty steadily from net new clients like end users you had no relationship with, who were just looking for AI help- Yeah

basically. So this has been going on at least a few months right now. Just to kinda set the stage a little bit for, the market conditions out there and so on, when how many of those calls are you getting? When you get them, what are they asking for, and what are you doing in response to those requests?

Jeff: Obviously, when we made this announcement about Treeline, about the the partnership with Andreessen back at the end of March, it was March 31st it got a lot of traction, a, a good amount of pickup. And so just from that announcement the amount of inbound we were taking early on was, like was pretty, we were very happy with the amount of inbound that we were getting. And it’s continued, obviously at a slower pace than initial splash. However, what has remained true [00:41:00] is that almost every conversation we’re having is some element of it’s gonna have AI help come up, right?

So if you’re a manufacturing company, a legal firm biotech, whate- whatever industry you’re in as the end customer, as they come in and they start having conversations with us, even if they don’t start with AI as their need, they eventually navigate to that as part of the conversation.

I think it just it validates that it’s on the mind of business owners, decision-makers, executives at every level of industry a- across the country. And I’ve, if I went back through right now and looked at our, kind of voice of the customer stuff data, I’d be surprised if it weren’t 90-plus percent of the conversations had some element of an AI need for their business i- in the mix.

And so again we’re very happy to help them where they’re at. We still are very much focused on delivering IT services, cybersecurity, compliance services, the, the core things that make AI even possible in a secure and safe way for their [00:42:00] business. But also meeting them where they’re at and helping them develop a strategy around that, help them actually make AI a productive tool within their business versus like a, you hear the stories of people just burning out tokens and all this kind of stuff.

So it’s how do we put the right guardrails around it and make it a useful asset for small businesses, for medium-sized businesses. That’s something we’re working on right now.

Erick: Jeff, you mentioned a few moments ago about also delivering s- AI services to some of your end user, end users and clients and things like that.

That’s al- also very, something that’s on every MSP’s mind as well, you know, how do we, monetize creating other services to deliver to these clients that, that makes us more strategically valuable to them and things like that? Can you share what has worked for you in that journey, and maybe what you’ve learned to stay away from?

Jeff: Yeah, definitely. I think [00:43:00] the, the number one learning was you can’t, we can’t just start with, we’re gonna build a bunch of AI infrastructure for these businesses, or we’re gonna come in and just build a bunch of agents. What would also we learned is we can’t just, be pure strategists.

We kinda have to do both, right? And I think pretty early on, going back a few months ago, we just realized all the conversations need to start with advisory, which is great for MSPs because we’re advisors first and foremost, right? We’re consultants. So this is just consulting on a new avenue of technology, a slightly different topic than we’re, we’ve traditionally been consulting.

And so we’re, we, you know, basically starting every conversation with strategy advisory. What is your business doing today? What do you want to be doing? Where are your concerns? All, all the basic stuff like what is your budget? Where, where are your costs, out of control?

Like where can we help in a broader business context in a broader business framework? By doing that, we’re really kinda controlling the conversation with the customer and saying, “Okay, like, how do we then take this [00:44:00] information now and operationalize it?” Do we have employees that are not adopting AI?

They’re not using it at all, and so there’s, literal- li- zero leverage for them in their day-to-day. Okay, like, how do we make it less scary for them, give them the training they need, give them the tools and resources they need to be successful with AI on a day-to-day basis? On the other end of the spectrum, do we have employees that are no holds barred, like kinda throwing sensitive information into these large language models and using the the tool with no guardrails?

Okay, how do we inform them and educate them about s- best practices and the safe way to use AI in their day-to-day? And then like I mentioned from there, it’s okay, how do we build some, actually build some guardrails into the business, build some infrastructure that has resilience, that has some cost optimization features in it for each business, all the way through to can we actually then take all this information and learning and then build agents and automations in the business that help help the business be more productive, get leverage in their business themselves.

On the other end of the spectrum, like what we’ve seen out there [00:45:00] is there are a lot of quote unquote “AI agencies” right now that are coming in and probably competing against MSPs. I’m sure some of your viewers have had this happen, where, it might be just like a, a contractor or a very small operation.

They’re gonna come in and build a bunch of agents for you, but they’re really doing that in a vacuum, right? So the AI agents need all of this data and context. There’s only so much they can do with inference, right? They need all this- all this backend access to be able to do anything effectively that’s wor- of value to, to generate revenue or cut costs or whatever the AI is setting out to do.

And for a outside agency to come in and do that it’s almost irresponsible in my opinion because there’s so much there’s so much risk in exposing all of these critical systems of the business, all this data in the business. We’d much rather have the people that you’ve been trusting for years and years to safeguard your business technology do this as an extension of what they’re already doing rather than kinda what’s the new flashy thing out there in the market that’s [00:46:00] gonna come in and just build agents for you, right?

To vibe code some stuff together. So again going back to what we’re doing, w- we’re very bullish on IT. Cyber compliance is kinda the bedrock of what we do. AI for our customers is a very much nice to have right now, and we’re very bullish on it for the future. But it doesn’t actually work or not, in my opinion, work as well without all the fundamentals in place.

Rich: So you mentioned before, Jeff, you guys recently made an acquisition. Won’t be your last. You’re not one of these roll-ups looking to acquire 100 or more MSPs, but there will be more acquisitions coming, which of course raises a question for folks in our audience who are contemplating an exit, either imminently or down the road at some point.

What do acquirers look for in an acquisition target these days? That’s gonna vary company by company. But what would you tell them just based on your own criteria, what you’re seeing in the marketplace out there right now, what is most valuable in an MSP to a [00:47:00] potential acquirer? And in particular, what role does AI expertise, having an AI business of some kind play in that valuation?

Jeff: Yeah, definitely. I think just to address the first part, our, we’ll call acquisition strategy is really targeted at just activating new markets for us so that we can grow organically. And whether that’s a new geography or a new vertical we can enter with true vertical expertise, like that’s really what we’re focused on right now.

And yeah, and so it’s… There is a acquisition strategy here, but it’s, I think in many ways different than we’re just trying to acquire EBITDA and look for ways to expand it. On the what the market’s looking for, I don’t think that’s changed at all. It’s, quality of earnings.

Obviously like due diligence, looking for like legal liability and things like that, so just making sure you have your paperwork in order as a MSP. For us in particular, when we talk about like AI, say, capability, really what we look for when we’re talking to founders that like want to partner [00:48:00] with us and and typically the way that we try to get these agreements in place is the founders are staying with us on this journey as we’re trying to grow this into, a really massive business.

We’re looking for people that are leaning in on this future of the MSP industry that are like really excited about AI. I had a lunch with a gentleman here in Texas last week and he was like, “I got my second wind, like I’m totally like reinvigorated right now.” He’s like, “I’m staying up till like midnight, 1:00 a.m.,

like on AI.” And that gets me fired up, man. I’m like, cool. There’s people that still have a lot of track in front of them. And if you got a lot of track in front of you and you’re really excited about AI then we’re really excited about partnering with you because the– we have a great team of software developers in San Francisco, as previously mentioned, and like that, that’s certainly an asset for us.

Another huge asset, if not the biggest asset, is getting the best MSP minds into our Tree Line portfolio so that we can kinda build that brain trust together. What do we need to build? What does the customer value? What are the pain points in the [00:49:00] operation? So for us, yeah, we’re looking for folks that one, we’re just trying to check some boxes, strategically on are we entering a new market?

Is this, does this add does this open up new addressable market for the overall Tree Line strategy? But then as important is out of all the businesses that do that for us, are we picking the right one that has the right, leadership team? It’s a well-run business.

They’re very excited about the future. They’re prob- like in, in almost all cases already building on their own right now, and they’re looking for a catalyst to what they’re doing. And a growth mindset, like they’re pumped on growth. A lot of MSPs are lifestyle businesses, and that’s totally cool, right?

Like my dad was a, a contractor, ran his own business. It was totally a lifestyle business. It was like, how can this pay for me to go out on my boat on the weekend, right? But we’re looking for folks that like wanna grow and just build like an empire and like a really massive business. And those are things that we’re looking for.

Obviously there’s like financial components to all of this. There has to be, but like that’s, the, at the headline level, that’s what we’re looking for. [00:50:00]

Erick: Yeah, I’ve done a l- a lot of work on the M&A side with partners and with a few vendors as well, Jeff, and it sounds to me like what you just described are the business basics still have to be in place, right?

You have to have a business that’s in growth mode, gotta have a leadership team. Nobody wants to buy a job, right? There’s gotta be, and the accelerant is opportunity to grow through AI. So while there isn’t an exact parallel to, some of the companies that Rich mentioned earlier, like Shield and Titan with Tree Line, there’s some similarities there.

And, you being an an, an ex-MSP as I am, MSPs, they have a little FOMO about things, about, missing out, right? It’s like what am I, what am I gonna do based upon what I see happening, where the industry is going, what we’re hearing, from folks like us on these podcasts?

If you were to encourage MSPs to rethink their business strategy today, what… based upon what you’re doing and what you’re seeing,

Rich: [00:51:00] right?

Erick: Give us a tip or two about how these MSPs should, should look at this opportunity and think about how they can remain competitive and maybe even grow, or maybe even be an attractive acquisition target for folks like Tree Line.

Jeff: Yeah. I think like I’d start with, we probably don’t need to have FOMO. There’s plenty of opportunity out there. I know the cycles feel like they’re moving really fast, but the relationships are what matter most right now. So if you’re an MSP owner, you’re working with a small business, you’ve got a personal relationship with the principal executive, founder, whatever, of that customer, that matters more than anything else right now.

Now, the tip is what you do with it also matters. And so you can’t just sit on your hands, because if you sit on your hands someone else is gonna come along, and eventually that business owner, if they’re savvy, they’re gonna, they’re gonna wanna know what AI can do for their business. They’re gonna wanna know what they’re missing out on, where their, [00:52:00] their FOMO comes into the mix, right?

So I think just starting to get a strategy together and executing on that. You don’t have to go full bore and do all this agent deployment and business process automation on day one. Just start, like I mentioned earlier, just start being their consultant, I gotta imagine every MSP owner, or maybe not all of them, but 99% of MSP owners in the country right now are dabbling on their own with AI at the very least, right?

They’re very curious about it. And as technologists, we usually are the first people that see where things break and see where things add new value and all this kind of stuff. And that’s the same story that we were doing 10, 15, 20 years ago in the IT world or five or 10 years ago in the cyber world, right?

It’s no different now. It’s just like you’re an early adopter yourself. Pick it apart, tinker with it, put it back together. Use it in your business, learn where the cracks are, learn, where the gotcha moments are, and then take that insight and actually go consult with your customers on it.

And if you do that, like it’s just a natural pathway from that to actually like building with your customers into their environments and helping them that way. So I don’t know that anyone needs to have [00:53:00] FOMO. I do think people need to have urgency, and that’s true of any business. I… The platform we, I came out of, we used to say lack of urgency was a business killer for RMSPs.

It was just, if you’re just gonna sit there and not do anything the opportunity cost is so great in that equation, that’s just not gonna work out long term for most. And so this is no different, right? It’s, “Hey, we gotta get out there and we gotta start activating and learning and probably making some mistakes,” but through those mistakes we’re gonna find ways to generate value like we always have.

Erick: Yeah, we hear that a lot. Be customer zero first and then, enlist a, a couple of your A clients to help you through this journey and figure things out together.

Jeff: That’s right, yeah. Eat your own dog food and, be… I love that like, figure it out together, be upfront. Hey, like we’re in it together.

We- it’s- we need tight feedback cycles here for this to work for everybody. And as long as you kinda go in with that mindset, I think there, there’s not really a lot of ways it could go super wrong for you.

Rich: All right. S- really interesting stuff, Jeff. Always good to catch up with Treeline.

For folks in our audience who are maybe curious [00:54:00] to learn more about Treeline, curious to get in touch with you, where should they go?

Jeff: LinkedIn. I don’t know what my LinkedIn URL is, but I’m assuming whenever you guys put- post this on LinkedIn, if you do, like you can share that information.

Probably the easiest way to get ahold of me. You could email me, [email protected]. Always willing to talk shop and be a resource. But yeah.

Rich: Fantastic. Jeff, once again, thank you very much for joining us on the show. Folks, Erick and I are going to take a quick break right now. When we come back on the other side, we’re gonna share some final thoughts about this conversation with Jeff Gaines of Treeline.

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

And welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat Podcast. Thanks once more to Jeff Gaines from TreeLine for joining us on the show. Always a good time to catch up with him, and always an interesting [00:55:00] conversation as well. Th- the first thing I’ll say, and we’ve, I’m sure, made this observation in the past on the show here, is just that if you are one of the many MSPs out there right now still trying to really get your grip on an AI strategy for your business and the right AI services to be bringing to your customers, don’t feel bad because even companies with millions of dollars of Andreessen Horowitz money behind them, like TreeLine, are working on this right now, actively right now.

And I’ll just say as we’re recording this, I had a chance to interview the CEO of Shield Technology Partners a day or two ago and they’re still … They’re doing, amazing things internally with AI. They are still very much working on what they do with it for customers. So everybody is in the same place right now.

And then the, the other thing he said that I kinda wanna underscore was it w- I forget the context exactly when it came up, but he was talking about this idea of service as a software, and it just really reminded me, when you’re talking about TreeLine or Shield [00:56:00] or Titan or anyone else like them, it, it

You look at them in one light and they are software businesses that own service delivery, and you look at them from another angle and they are services businesses that make their own software. And I think that’s how TreeLine looks at it. And even I don’t know for sure how Shield looks at it, but just based on this conversation I had with them, I think it’s easy to think that what these companies focus on exclusively is the AI component of what they’re doing.

It’s an extremely important part of the success formula for them. But ultimately, what they are f- focused on and where they see the growth and the upside is in service. The depth and breadth of service, the quality of that service. I would … The, the idea of service as a software puts the accent on service as opposed to the, the technology behind it.

And that is, that’s been a constant in managed services forever, the, the people who win are the ones who are really good at service, [00:57:00] and AI doesn’t necessarily change that

Erick: Yeah. When I, as we cover these these frontier, AI first kind of organizations that are doing this blend of SaaS and service, it just, I’m, I’m thinking about how valuations work, right?

Because with, with MSPs with ARR, there’s, there’s EBITDA there’s NRR, there’s, lots of things that, that value or provide a multiple a little bit beyond just EBITDA for an MSP because of the component that is recurring revenue. SaaS organizations are valued completely differently, and typically their multiples are much, much higher, two times, two and a half times sometimes what a services company multiples are for obvious reasons.

I’m curious how an organiz- these organizations that kind of blend service and SaaS [00:58:00] will be valued. What’s the formula there? There’s so much more valuation, Come up through, come up with through a little bit of a blend of a SaaS valuation, and then you’ve got the services component.

Those are the things that I’m thinking about these days, Rich. It’s a different unique animal than we’ve seen in the market s- historically.

Rich: Yeah. At, y- none of these companies that we’re talking about here it’s worth pointing out, none of them are owned by private equity, which typically has a relatively restricted window in terms of how long they wanna own these companies before they flip them in one way or another and find out what the valuations look like.

These are all companies backed by venture capital or in the case of Shield it’s a bit of a technicality, permanent capital, you can look it up. But they’re not gonna test the market for a long time. But you’re reminding me I, I moderated a panel at the at the spring version basically of the MSP summit this year.

One of the panelists was Jason McGee [00:59:00] of formerly CEO of ConnectWise, now the CEO of Signit, and he kinda made the point that the AI f- he wasn’t talking specifically about Treeline or Shield, but he’s saying any MSP that leans into AI and really exploits all of the operational efficiency power there can get to a SaaS-like valuation at some point.

And again, even, outside the context of Treeline and Shield and so on, I can’t think of anyone who has proven or disproven that yet. But it is a very plausible, very interesting thesis, and I wonder too about it, for any MSP out there, what is the impact, the valuation impact of getting really good at AI from a profitability standpoint, a top line and bottom line standpoint going to have?

Erick: Yeah. The dots I was always thinking about connecting with, AI in an MSP and how it affects valuation was more about how much [01:00:00] more efficiency and profitability it can drive. Just going back to what I’m used to when I’m doing valuations, it’s a multiple of EBITDA and a couple of other factors that may sprinkle in there to make it a little bit more interesting for the buyer, depending upon whether they’re, more of a strategic buyer or more of a financial buyer just looking at numbers, right?

So I never thought- At least yet, I’m kinda waiting to see what kinds of services that MSPs then spin up that leverage AI for their end customers. Like this new category of services that they can add to their to their product portfolio that then generates potentially even higher margins than traditional services first service delivery.

So that’s kinda how I was thinking about it. So it’s interesting. I’ll have to think about and ponder, what Jason was communicating there because, I don’t have enough data yet, and I don’t know if anybody really does. We’re all still trying to figure [01:01:00] this out. But it is interesting.

We do agree, you and I, that yes, leading with AI is a good thing for the v- for the obvious reasons for an MSP. As long as it’s, utilized meaningfully with guardrails and secure and all that, and if they can take some of that to their clients, great.

I’m I wanna ponder a little bit of how you get to a more SaaS based valuation because you’re using that. So more to come, rich?

Rich: Yeah, absolutely. I I’m as interested in the answer to that question as you are. And maybe we’ll get a little closer to it on a future episode of the show.

For now, we have time for just one last thing, and it concerns a situation in which the question about a dog who’s a good boy is not actually a rhetorical question. We go now to the San Diego area, where an intruder used a ladder to climb up to the second floor of a condo complex, let himself into somebody’s apartment when everyone else was out at work.

He [01:02:00] went into the kitchen and made himself lunch Erick, and then took a 30-minute nap on the couch. He was in this apartment or condo or whatever, for quite a little while, and so was the the apartment’s owner the or dog who belonged to the apartment’s owner, named Nash. Nash is a golden retriever.

All of this I’m describing was captured on a Ring camera. It was all on video. And so the the renters could basically see Nash not only not doing guard dog stuff when somebody breaks into the apartment, but trotting on over to the intruder at one point, which is with his favorite toy, ’cause he figured, “Hey, this is playtime.”

So Nash it scores very high on the adorable scale. Very low on the guard dog scale

Erick: Yeah. Golden retrievers are, I think that breed is just known for being just super friendly, great with kids, little kids, just, “Hey, where’s … Oh, you’re my new playmate.” Yeah, so if if the owners thought that they had, invested in [01:03:00] a guard dog with Nash, they found out they were sadly mistaken, and there’s video to prove it.

Rich: Turned out to be a better n- day for Nash apparently than for the folks who lived there. But folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on the show. We thank you so much for joining us. We’re gonna see you in a week’s time with another episode. Until then I will simply remind you this is both a video and an audio podcast, which means that if you are listening to us right now, but you’d like to check us out on video, you can go to YouTube, look us up there if you’re watching us on YouTube.

If you like to listen to podcasts too, you can go to Spotify, Google, Apple, you name it, probably gonna find us there. And wherever you find us, please subscribe, rate, review. It really does help other people discover and enjoy the show just like you do. This show is produced by the great Riley Simpson, part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered, where we help vendors build, grow, and optimize thriving MSP channels.

You can learn all about the many ways we do that at our website, which is located at [01:04:00] www.channelmastered.com. Channel Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered. That’s Erick and his team working directly with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business. 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. Until then, please remember, as we always ask you to, you can’t spell channel without MSP.