Episode 55: Lets Go to the Whiteboard

Erick and Rich discuss what agentic AI will mean to MSPs and three techniques for getting more from your vendor relationships. Then they’re joined by attorney Brad Gross for a conversation about legal New Year’s resolutions every MSP should adopt. And finally, one last thing: a report on who won this year’s Microsoft Excel World Championship.

 

Discussed in this episode:

The Agents Are Coming

Brad Gross’s Website

Canadian man wins Microsoft Excel World Championships in Las Vegas

 

Transcript:

 

[00:00:00] And three, two, one, 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. I am Rich Freeman, chief analyst at Channel Mastered, the organization responsible for this program.

I am joined as I am every week by your other co host, our chief strategist at Channel Mastered, Erick Simpson. Erick, how you doing? I’m doing pretty good, Rach. I gotta say, I’m 90 percent done with my holiday shopping. So that’s really great. I’m ahead of the game than I, more ahead of the game than I usually am at this time every year.

How about you? I’m right there with you. Actually, I am way ahead of where I normally am at this point. Now, the ones that I have put off until now are the hardest ones to figure out, but I’ve got the weekend certainly to do this. And yeah I’m feeling, which is good. Cause this was a shorter shopping season than we’re used to.

It certainly was, but all indicators that I’ve been tracking indicate that it will be one of the largest shopping seasons ever, even though it’s short. Okay we are both contributing to that, as I’m sure many are in our audience, and let’s dive into our story of the week, Erick, shall we? It’s precipitated a little bit by some news out there this week from Google earlier this week as we record this Google rolled out Gemini 2.

0, the new version of its large language model which has actually multiple features and functions and it’s specifically directed at agentic AI. Now in September Salesforce made a huge splash introducing AgentForce, their agentic AI technology at its Ignite conference, Microsoft spoke a great deal about agentic AI.

Pretty much anyone who is anyone in the world of cloud computing and AI has an agentic AI strategy. And it it gets me to wondering what. Any of that means for the MSPs in our audience. Now, first of all let’s just define what agentic AI is in relation to the AI we’re a little bit more familiar with right now, and I’m really oversimplifying and dumbing it down, but in relation to traditional AI and generative AI, the thing that is most distinctive about agentic AI is that it has the ability.

To autonomously connect with other applications, other services, other agents, and do things on your behalf for you without your supervision, without your assistance, and without requiring nearly as much specific training and training model data as a typical generative AI application requires.

We are already seeing companies do agentic AI or certainly technology that looks a lot like agentic AI. And I’m thinking in particular of the two most familiar names would be Intercom and Zendesk, both of which are selling what they’re calling automated resolutions. These are customer service department software makers.

And they are selling the ability for a company that has a customer service call center to answer, diagnose, and completely resolve a customer service issue for an end user without any human intervention. And depending on the company and the model the the buyer of that service will pay anywhere from typically a dollar to 2 per automated resolution.

And by the way, they pay nothing for resolutions that are not completed. If the software is just out there and it’s not doing anything for customers, or if it attempts to resolve a problem and fails, there is no charge to the end user. But obviously there isn’t a ton of difference.

There is. Some critical difference, but not a ton of difference between a customer service center and a help desk, right? And so we’ve got to start thinking a little bit, what does agentic ultimately start to mean for MSPs? And this gets us into an interesting area. Now we had Nadir Merchant on the show as our interview guest in the, in the previous episode or episode 54 of the show, we asked him, how do you define agentic AI?

What do you think about it? I had an opportunity since then Erick to interview Gerway Todd, the CEO of PIA and ask him, how much autonomy do you foresee building into your AI software for MSPs? And Nadir said Gerway, everyone I’ve spoken to with the Prominent exception of Atera and Gil Pekelman, their CEO, pretty much everyone out there is extremely reluctant and not even really considering at this point, allowing their RMM PSA software to do a whole lot without the A [00:05:00] technician, at least being aware of it, looking over the A.

I. Shoulders approving of the work before it gets done, et cetera. But that capability is coming. I have an article about this whole topic coming to channel Holic, my blog, w. Channel Holic News. And I, for that article, I interviewed an analyst from Forrester named Leslie Joseph, and he said, Look, I. T.

Management is Ground zero for agentic AI. That’s where it’s going to take off basically because that’s the kind of work these agents can, at least in some cases, can potentially do. And What I am wondering about, and I don’t have the answers to this question Erick, but how long can MSPs, should MSPs resist this idea of allowing the software to be more and more autonomous, to do more and more, at least of the level one kinds of tasks that help desk personnel do?

Again, a lot of anxiety, a lot of resistance to that now. I am not predicting that will have evaporated by a year from now. But I do think we’re going to get to the point where that ability is out there and it’s out there in software that’s available to MSPs, and there are going to be early adopters and late adopters, and the early adopters, assuming nothing goes disastrously wrong with respect to hallucinations and so on could ultimately have a competitive advantage.

And so how early do you get in? How early is too early? How late is too late? And what does it mean longer term for an MSP if instead of essentially being an outsourced provider of it labor. That leans heavily on technology. They start to become an outsourced provider of IT management technology that uses IT labor here and there to round out certain things, roll trucks, deal with the especially complex problems that agentic AI still can’t deal with.

Very different business model, very different staffing model, very different service delivery and service offering model. Wow, Rich, this is really accelerating at a pace that I had not anticipated this whole movement toward actually replacing what we would consider a core function that only a trained technology support person could accomplish.

It’s moving really fast. So I want to. You unpacked a lot there. So just a couple of things jumped out at me. Number one, when will MSPs and ITSPs feel comfortable rolling this into their business model? I think the answer to that Rich is when they feel that they have complete control over the entire experience and the configuration of this platform or this service.

We hear lots of horror stories. Still about how AI goes wrong, right? Creating things, saying things. If you search on the internet enough, you will find horror stories that will shock you about what AI is telling kids to do, when they’re being asked questions. So I think the answer is when MSPs who are risk averse and own the responsibility and the risk of making sure that things are done right, that their clients are treated correctly, that they have a delightful experience for their clients.

I think when they. Feel like they have complete control over the end to end workflow and outcome of those interactions is when we’ll start to see more rapid adoption. I don’t think that we’re there yet early days, right? By the by rich I had the opportunity to test an upcoming solution.

It’s not out yet, so I can’t reveal a lot about it, but was. Exactly what you were talking about. It wasn’t yet built for IT providers or technologists, but it was built for folks that are booking appointments for other professional services, think medical appointments, doctor’s offices, accounting firms, and things like that.

It was a, it was an audio AI where I tested and called in to book an appointment. And I. Almost, almost couldn’t tell it was not a real person. If I wasn’t looking for it, I probably would have thought I was interacting with a real person. I tried to throw it off, Rich. I asked if it could, would take, X, Y, Z insurance.

It had a really, expected response. And it worked through, I tried to throw it off and it did a good enough job for me to think, holy cow, in less than a year’s time, this is what we are going to be [00:10:00] using instead of automated calendar links and things like that. We’ll actually be able to pick up a phone, book an appointment, have a follow on process sent email, text message confirming, and informing us of.

What we need to bring to these appointments. So it’s not a far leap from that to, for me to believe that we can take the most noisy level one tickets that we have. I think, even, this is probably older than what we have automation to do now, where we have users, the ability to allow users to change their own passwords and things like that, but there were a time when that was extra fees for licenses and things like that to allow that functionality before.

Usually need to change their password that have to interact with someone on the other end or, fixing printing issues. I can foresee a time when someone will call in and think they’re talking to a technician that will actually walk them through some of these simple resolutions that don’t take escalation or level two and things like that.

So from that perspective, not only are we putting, our level one technicians at a crossroads to say, you need to, Skill up or upskill to, to be more valuable to the organizations that you serve, internal it, whoever that is, and your clients, but also to some of these outsourced organizations, rich that we think about that provide outsourced service desk support or MSPs today.

Cost effective rate, because they’re, offshore and things like that. I could see there being a competitive scenario play out that way as well. Yeah. There’s a whole interesting issue around that, but I’ll be writing about in my next channel. Does as well, I finally had an opportunity to interview the leaders of helped HCL pt.

Which is a company that provides a outsourced help desk assistance to MSPs. Our mutual friend, Amy Luby is working over there now. Their whole strategy is built around the idea that they’re for the foreseeable future, and we’re not talking like three to five years, but for a long time, there will be a contingent of end users out there that really do want and or need to interact with the human.

And they want to be the humans to to serve that need for MSPs. A couple of other quick thoughts. So first of all, one of the first things you said is just this AI technology in general, agentic AI, it’s moving fast and just faster than, you or anyone else anticipated. And I’ll just say, Earlier today in conjunction with this post I’m working on, I interviewed Wes McDonald who has been on the podcast with us before.

He runs a company called gowest. ai, and it’s a consultancy, a hundred percent dedicated to helping MSPs and vendors embrace and roll out AI based services. And so he is immersed in this world and he made it very clear to me at multiple points in this interview that he was willing to say, you’re not going to see, serious adoption of real, truly agentic AI in the first six months of 2025 and beyond that, all bets are off.

His hunch is that it’s going to be longer than that, but he’s not going out on a limb to make those kinds of predictions because the technology is moving so quickly right now. And then the the other thing that occurred to me as you were speaking there is I made a very prominent reference earlier on to a Tara a Tara was one of the first RMN PSA software makers to introduce an AI, a generative AI co pilot.

A customer facing co pilot basically that could, you know diagnose triage tickets, diagnose what’s going on. Provide information to a technician about how to resolve it, help the technician do that with a lot less work and fewer clicks, but just within the past two, three months or so, they have introduced what they’re calling an autopilot, which is as I understand it, an autonomous, essentially agent.

That in, in the case of some of those noisy tickets you were talking about, Erick, is just handling the whole thing, start to finish. I have not spoken to them since that moved out of testing, and as far as I can tell, went into production, general availability, but New Year’s resolution, I want to check in with them and I want to see how much control does the MSP have over that experience, as you were talking about how willing our MSPs to adopt the technology and what kind of results are they seeing so far?

So stay tuned folks at some point, maybe in, in January or February, we’ll revisit this. Yeah. You know what, rich for the sci fi nerds out there in the audience, I’ve got just a thought. We talk about, AI. The way Hollywood would take it and make it this huge, big, bad, think Terminator two and judgment day and all this other stuff.

But, if I, as we were talking about this, I was reminded by one of the, probably the earliest science fiction movies that I ever watched when I was a little tight, it was black and white. It was on one of those Saturday morning, sci fi shows we used to watch as kids and it was called Colossus.

Project. And [00:15:00] it was about your work. If you remember that, so I’m aging to your age and remember it was the United States and I think it was Russia or whoever was the opponent or whatever it back in those days are in the movie script anyway, they had turned over the defense.

Of those, each country to computers and basically computers decided that, man was the, was the worst thing on the planet and decided to, take us all out. But that was the early, the earliest, I think, memory that I have of, science and almost like this AI thing, like going wrong.

And I’m sure that influenced, James Cameron’s thoughts as he was writing, Terminator and these other things. Movies as well. Yeah. I remember that movie too. It’s actually in color. You probably watched it on a black and white TV, but yeah, I, and it’s a classic sort of alignment problem issue in AI there where the intention obviously is to automate a cold war readiness and response and so on, and then, yeah, like you said the Soviet Union had a computer system.

The United States had a computer system and eventually they realized they had a common foe, which was us. And they integrated themselves and then started running everything. Supposedly for our benefit. Yeah. I wonder, I’ll look later to see if that movie is available online somewhere, cause it comes up fairly regularly in these AI conversations and I would love to to rewatch it now and see how sort of prescient it is, or at least how disturbing it is.

Yeah, me too. I want to watch it. I have this. And for those of, our listeners that always are trying to figure out where something is streaming or not, I have this app on my phone. It’s called just watch. And you’ll just type something in there and it’ll tell you on what platform it is, whether it’s available free, whether it’s a rental where you can buy it.

It’s really cool. No checks were cashed in for promoting that. I’m just saying, I like using that app because again, it’s a way to find where things are, or if it’s just not available for whatever reason. But yeah, that whole, the, AI and these new solutions basically autonomously will reach out.

And connect to things and all that. That’s what kind of got me thinking of this whole Colossus Forbidden thing, where these computer systems basically started taking over all infrastructure and communications, and locking the humans out. But anyway, enough of that crazy sci fi talk, Rich.

Yeah, on a lighter note, right? Let’s move on to your tip of the week basically, and end users someday whether they know it or like it or not, will probably be having a relationship with artificial intelligence, but MSPs have relationships today with vendors, all sorts of them, and that has something to do with your tip of the week.

Right on target, Rich, as always, and we talk a lot about vendors and vendor relationships and Vendor sprawl and technology sprawl and platform sprawl. Today’s tip of the week is all about how to make the most of the vendor relationships that we currently have. And I’ll bet Rich as I go through kind of three areas here, that it’ll cause a lot of our listeners to think about things that they could be doing a little bit differently or looking at the relationship in a different way.

To understand how they can elicit more love and benefits and strengthen those relationships with their vendors. So let me just kick it off by saying, number one, are you participating fully in your strategic vendors partner programs? I talked to a lot of MSPs, Rich, and I find that As I ask questions about, are they leveraging this feature or this benefit from some of the vendor programs that I am familiar with a lot of the time, they’re like, no, I’m not even leveraging that the easy ones are like MDF or training programs or certification opportunities.

And co marketing discounts, like how are they leveraging this? We talked a few shows ago, rich about thinking about some of these vendor programs being almost like loyalty programs, right? So understand what is in your vendors, loyalty programs for you and identify areas where you are not taking full advantage of it.

So that’s number one. How do you find out about these things? That’s tip kind of number two here is scheduling regular check ins with your vendor. So how do you become that go to partner? Rich thinking, to yourself. That allows vendors to think of you, be top of mind when things like potential leads come over, and they want their channel only, so they’re going to distribute those leads to their partners.

How do you position yourself and become visible as that go to partner that allows vendors to build a great relationship, [00:20:00] you with them, they with you, so that you get some of that. Along with other benefits, so there’s a regular check ins. Can we schedule, maybe it’s not a monthly check in, maybe with some of your really critical vendor relationships, you might have a 30 minute monthly check in, Rich, but maybe it’s a quarterly kind of motion or every couple of months.

But just make it consistent so that you can, identify mutual opportunities for growth, maybe develop mutual goals together and maybe some measuring performance on both sides, being candid about, what you’d like to see or the other way around. And, some of these conversations ultimately lead to positions inside of advisory programs or councils and things like that, that vendors really value Rich?

Now the third one’s a little bit different. It’s remaining vendor agnostic when necessary. So what I mean by that is sometimes, and we’ve had this conversation on the show before too rich, there’s this conversation that says should I always go with. A custom built stack of solutions with multiple vendors, because I want best of breed stuff and I don’t want to over rely on one vendor or multiple things, that single point of failure concept, I think that there’s room in today’s modern MSP stack.

For a little bit of both you need to make sure that you don’t have too many of your eggs in one basket, but you also want to have the solutions that some of your clients need and require that may be more costly, that may, you may have to source from specialists in those particular categories of solution, if that makes sense, Rich.

Just thinking about how we’re going to improve our. Our organization’s growth and increase efficiencies and maybe reduce some of the noise and sprawl. These are three areas that I thought would be helpful for our listeners to think about as they begin strat planning for 2020.

And I’ll just add one thing, and this is a topic we’ve discussed on the show earlier in the year, which is just that we know. From a variety of surveys and reports and statistics that MSPs, really channel partners more broadly, are looking to consolidate vendor relationships. They want to have fewer vendor relationships.

Vendors are aware of this and it’s happening precisely as vendors, more and more vendors want to recruit more and more MSPs. And so it shifts the leverage in that relationship a little bit in the direction of the MSP. I don’t want to exaggerate how much but they, the vendors need you as an MSP a little bit more maybe than they used to before.

And so what that means is By all means, understand what resources are available to you in the partner program, the loyalty programs you were saying, Erick, and have a regular dialogue with the vendors, particularly that you’re closest to as well, but if there’s something that you would really like to have access to in a partner program, or if you’ve just really never been offered the opportunity to have a regular dialogue with a vendor before, this is a better than usual time in the history of the channel for you to go to that vendor and basically say, look, This is what I want.

And if you want me to be more committed to you and helping you drive business what are you going to do for me? And see what happens. They will be more willing to talk than maybe they have been in the past. Yeah, it certainly works both ways. So I think you’re right, Rich. I think today MSPs have a lot more leverage than they have historically, because candidly, there’s so many more vendors vying for their attention and wallet share.

All right, folks, Erick and I are going to take a quick break right now. When we come back on the other side, we will be joined by Brad gross. He is an attorney. He specifically. Works with MSPs we’ve known them for a long time. And as we are approaching New Year’s here, it’s that New Year’s resolution time of year.

We’re going to speak with Brad about some New Year’s resolutions that every MSP out there in our audience should be making, I’m sure this is going to be a very useful an interesting conversation and it will begin in just moments when we come back from this break, stick around

and welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP chat. podcast, our spotlight interview segment where we are delighted to be joined by someone. Erick and I have both known for a long time. He is one of the foremost, if not the foremost legal authorities on managed services. He is Brad gross attorney at law, Brad, welcome to the show.

Thank you guys. Good to be here. Good to be here. Happy holidays to all of you. Looking forward to talking about some new year’s resolutions here today. Absolutely. And we’ll get into that in just a second, but first for folks who do not know [00:25:00] you as well as Erick and I do tell them a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Sure. So who I am, I’m the guy who started programming on that TRS 80 right back here back in 1979, that’s how I what I do now is my firm represents MSPs and service providers across the country. We’ve done so for about 24 years. We have counseled thousands and thousands of them. So we get to see a lot of the realities and a lot of the issues that arise on a day to day basis.

And that’s what I want to talk about today with you guys. We’re going to talk about what, what has occurred and how we’re going to avoid them in 2025. Okay. Very good. And a perfect timing because we we’re actually recording just before New Year’s folks, but this show is going out just after New Year’s.

So now is the time MSPs to make those resolutions and and get started on that. And I am just going to guess, Brad, that some of the items on your list are things that you have been recommending to MSPs, urging them to do for a long time. Am I correct? Yes, unfortunately, the list of resolutions for this year are probably at least somewhat similar to or overlap the resolutions for 2024, then 2023 and 2022, but that’s not because MSPs aren’t really listening and taking your advice, Brad, it’s just because you like to repeat yourself over and over again, right?

No, nothing else to do. I have nothing. And no one else is listening to me anyway. So I’ll just keep going. All right. All right. It’s, it sounds like it’s going to be an oldie, but a goodie, but give us a New Year’s resolution for MSPs. Legal New Year’s resolution. Number one, legal number one. So I should say that I did whiteboard these out in a very sophisticated whiteboard manner.

Here’s my whiteboard. I was going to write it out as I said it and I realized that would be a total disaster. So I’m just going to go through them with you. The first and perhaps the most obvious coming from an MSP attorney is contracts. Now here’s the resolution that you should be making if you’re an MSP.

We’re going to get a contract. We’re going to stop relying on a purchase order or an invoice or a couple of terms that we’ve pulled in from the chat GPT and threw it on a, on an invoice and said, this is what we’re, this is protects us, right? We’re going to stop doing that. You’re going to get contracts.

And if you have them, then you’re going to look to update them because a lot has changed. And I’m not even going to talk about, Legal statutory changes. Let’s put that aside because candidly, there’s not a lot of statutory change that occurred between last year and this year. But you know what there is?

There’s a lot of reality. A lot of the realities of the industry change from year to year. Sometimes they are compliance related, security related. Sometimes they are logistics. Two or three years ago, if we were talking about Microsoft NCE we’d say what was that now? It’s a big thing.

What does your contract have to say about that? Was that reality updated in what you’re doing? So the realities of the industry need to be addressed. So if you don’t have a contract. Get one. If you have one, it’s time to update it. You know what I love about that, Brad? I’ll just jump right in. It’s the reality is that not only does this help protect you and your clients, it helps avoid risk and things like that, but it also adds value to your organization, right?

The valuation of your organization in today’s M and a reality using your chart is that the. Having an agreement or a contract adds value. Having a longer term agreement or contract adds much more value. And I think I’ll tag in and in addition and say, you probably have clients out there that are on an old agreement or contract, right?

So think about that, right? They’re probably on some legacy. Agreement or contract. Maybe it’s a handshake, like your point, Brad yeah, handshakes are no good. We trust each other. Think about how to address that and how much risk you’re putting yourself and your clients under by not protecting both of you.

And the impact of company valuation. Yeah, I’ll tell you. So I’m going to add to your addition first. I think that contracts also add a level of credibility to your company. Okay. It’s far more credible. You appear far more credible when you offer a contract that looks like it was written properly, looks like it was written by somebody who understands the industry, as opposed to something that is loosey goosey and not so wonderful.

And then if they can’t spend money on the contract, are they really spending time on the services and that and what I need? So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that you do see a lot of MSPs operating under legacy [00:30:00] contracts and they don’t want to update them because, at least sometimes, it’s because they think that the relationship with that client is stable.

And if it’s stable, why would we mess up that stability? Why would we undermine it by introducing a new contract, an updated one? And the answer that I give whenever I hear that is it’s because we’re all friends until we’re not. Bye. Until we’re not, your relationship is stable right now. Maybe it’s because nothing has challenged the stability, but should something challenge it at that point?

We’re not buddies that, that we’ve been working with together for 10 years of, no, now I’m your customer and you’re my MSP and what are you going to do for me? So I would not rest on the fact that you have these long term relationships, so we won’t upset the apple cart. That apple cart needs to be updated with some new wheels and.

Quick question for you before we move on to resolution number two. So if you’ve got a contract, now’s the time to go take a look at it. Update it for new realities. Is that exercise something that ideally an MSP is doing once a year or even more often? Maybe. No, I’ll tell you this. If your MSA is written correctly, okay.

From the start, it probably doesn’t have to be updated more than once every two to three years. Okay. That’s the update, right? If it’s written correctly, if you write it in a way that is comprehensive and broad enough to cut, to be flexible, it’s a, think of it like a stick, you want it to be flexible.

So it bends. You don’t want it just to break at the first thing that happens or the first thing that doesn’t fit squarely within the content of the agreement. Like I said, the law related to MSPs doesn’t change that often. So if you’re updating your MSA, the text of that MSA. A few times a year, then it means either your MSA was written incorrectly to begin with or you are simply not addressing all the realities of the industry.

And as you discover them, you’re adding to them, which means you’re not thinking it through from the beginning, two to three years for an update. Okay let’s go back to the whiteboard. What is resolution number two to the whiteboard? The whiteboard number two L. I don’t know if you could see it with the light, not elevate it.

Elevate communication. So what do I mean by elevate communication? I am telling MSPs to go beyond mere reporting and mere descriptions of their services. It is time for MSPs to elevate the quantity and quality of the communication that they have with their customers. I, whenever I speak on these issues, I always say the worst, the most belligerent, the most expensive battles between an MSP and its customer always relates to a mismanaged expectation.

That’s what it is. It is very rare that an MSP utterly fails to provide a service. That’s rare. Instead. The MSP is providing A, B, and C, but the customer thinks A, B, and C includes D, E, F, G, H. And that gap in understanding, okay, is not realized until something bad happens. And then when that happens, we’re all friends till we’re not.

The question is, where’s D. E. F. G. N. H. That is not the time for the first time to try to explain to your customer what the scope of your services are, right? What the scope is what the limits of those services are. That is not the time you try to explain that. Oh maybe they should have had better services or maybe you didn’t understand what we’re doing.

Elevate communication from the beginning, more language is better, more description is better. Think of it this way, read your scopes of services, read the scope of whatever service it is you’re describing, and then flip it around. Now take it from the customer’s perspective. What questions might your customer have, reasonably have, and are they addressed in your scope, right?

If you’re providing a backup solution. Okay, a backup solution. So you list the backup solution, how many licenses and the term and so on. What might a customer ask? How often is my stuff backed up? That’s a fair question. How much of my stuff is backed up? How long do you keep my stuff? These are fair questions, right?

I need to get my data back. How do I do that? How long will it take? These are the questions that are reasonable questions. But the problem is. If you don’t communicate this type of information and you don’t elevate your level of communication at the outset, those questions become issues which foster disputes, which [00:35:00] result in attorneys.

So we’re trying to avoid that. Elevate communication. It, are we talking, in terms of how you’re delivering this communication and how you’re clarifying, what it is that you are promising or not promising, are we talking about documents here or is this just like a discipline to get into when you’re doing QBRs?

I think it’s both. I, and QBRs are a great focal point for elevating communication, right? That is the time when you’re sitting down, at least having a video conference, maybe with your customer, you have their attention. That is the time to say, listen, I want to impart this and this to you.

You need to listen to me, okay? Elevating. Don’t just assume the customer understands. Don’t just assume that they understand what you are saying. You go to somebody and you say, listen, I, you have endpoint protection. I’d recommend an XDR with a multi factor authentication built in. Your customer is going to sit there and go, man, it sounds good.

You don’t know what that means, right? Or they might say, I don’t need all that. That’s very fancy. How much is it now? I don’t need it. They don’t even know what they’ve rejected. So the point is. At QBRs and in your scopes and documents at all stages, I would like to see MSPs elevate their levels of communication.

You know what I love best about that New Year’s resolution, Brad, is it forces the MSP to think about every communication that they have with the client, right? So this to me goes beyond conversation. It goes beyond an agreement or a sal that’s signed you’re an MSA. It, it is included in the initial kickoff call with the client during the onboarding process with the client in any of your leave behinds on your website.

I hope I’m not stepping on, on another new year’s resolution, Brad, about, what we say in our marketing and our website and things like that to avoid risk. I didn’t include that. Keep going. Okay, I know you’ve talked about that in the past, but yes, this is, it has to be uniform. It has to be consistent and every single one of your team has to understand what’s included, what’s excluded.

And how they handle a situation. I’ll add, this is my ad on when there is a disconnect or a misunderstanding between the end user and a technician. The technician may. They need training and my guidance always when I’m working with MSPs is say, look, we never want to create a confrontation ever between an end user or a client or customer and the technicians that are doing the work.

They need to be able to say, you know what? Let me get Erick included in this conference. Let me escalate that to Erick so he can address that with you. But meanwhile, let’s go ahead and take care of this thing. Like I want to keep my technicians and engineers, the folks that the clients are working with day in and day out to be seen as heroes and champions and be clean.

And if there is a potentially difficult discussion or critical discussion needs to be had. I don’t want that to be had between anybody other than leadership or myself in that kind of a situation. I want it escalated out. To keep those relationships between the technical team and the clients really awesome.

Because, if these are, if these issues that you’re talking about aren’t addressed addressed properly or they’re subjugated or whatever it is, they don’t disappear. They just fester and foster until something else happens and then it all blows up. So you’re a hundred percent right.

You’ve got to keep it consistent. You have to keep communication going on a consistent basis. Okay. Okay. We’re on a roll. Let’s go to the whiteboard once more. Give us one more. I’m not sure that you have five new year’s resolutions. This is number three. Okay. Number three, offer new solutions. So what am I talking about?

It is time for MSPs to offer and implement solutions that they thought, or they may have thought were out of reach. What am I talking about? In particular, greater security solutions. Greater compliance solutions. Historically, MSPs have stayed away from these types of areas because they think they’re a hotbed of litigation.

You think, Oh, it’s too complicated. Compliance as a solution. Oh, forget it. Or, I’ll provide a malware solution, but I’m not getting into the pen testing area or anything like that. Why not? Why not? And the answer. He’s always the same liability. That’s why you have contracts. Remember resolution number one.

That’s why we have contracts. You are a creature of contract MSP. If you’re listening, you’re a creature of contract by contract. You can allocate responsibilities, you can limit your liabilities, and there are amazing solutions out there now. Amazing for compliance as a service. Four, pen test, invulnerability scanning, and all kinds of things.

You’re [00:40:00] leaving money on the table because you’re scared. You’re using fear as a as a business solution as a as a business process. And it’s not a good way to go. Don’t be paralyzed by fear of the more complex or the more hotbed type solutions. You’re going to have contracts in place. You’re going to offer great solutions from wonderful providers.

It is time for you to move past the days of we just do RMM and BDR and, we’ll do ad move and installs and things like that. Move past it, you’re leaving money on the table. Move into areas that you thought were out of reach. It’s really interesting because the the last post to my blog that will have gone out in 2024, by the time people are enjoying this episode, it’ll be out there in the world, but it will discuss this compliance issue in particular.

And there are a bunch of reasons why, you’re exactly right, MSPs are terrified about this. Thanks. Compliance. And there are a bunch of reasons for that some of which are outside the scope of what we’re talking about here, just in terms of the amount of time and effort that has to be invested to understand the regulations and the money you’ve got to spend to hire people who can do that kind of work.

But one of the things I always hear is if I get anything wrong, They’re going to sue the living daylights out of me. And I love that you’re just taking that concern of if you have an attorney, that doesn’t have to be a barrier that keeps you out. That’s what it says. Yeah. And I’ll tag in and say, Holy cow.

By you not moving in that direction, that just opens up the opportunity for all of your competitors come knocking on the door. And get an appointment with your client that you’ve had for 10 years. You’ve been to their New Year’s Eve celebrations, right? You’ve done their you’ve congratulated them on their business success and they’ve done the same for you.

But at the end of the day, if I’m coming in as in a competitive fashion, the first couple of questions I’m going to ask of that client is, what’s your cyber liability insurance say that you have to comply to? Are you in compliance? What else are you out of compliance with? Do you have an MSP? Oh, are they doing all this stuff?

I’m looking for the opportunities to drive a wedge and create distinction and put some fear in that client. What’s the worst thing that could happen if you had a breach? Heck, I’ve done this for a little bit, right? And these are the things that open up the doubt. In a good client or customer’s mind, because not only are you leaving money on the table, you’re opening up yourself to churn out those clients, because that’s what the best in class MSPs are doing today.

They’re leading with these cybersecurity and compliance conversations. Like you said, that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re leading with it because they’re taking the time, to look into what the solutions are just five, six, seven years ago. A lot of the solutions that are here today didn’t exist.

The third party solution provides. There are wonderful options. You’re leaving money on the table if you’re scared of liability. That’s the bottom line. If liability is stopping you then you’re leaving money on the table and you have to have a new year’s resolution to get over it through council and proper solutions to circle back to something you said earlier on compliance is very likely to be on that D E F G list.

Your customer gets fined, audited or whatever. That’s when you’re going to hear. I thought you were doing this for me. All so one more good thing to, to clarify with them. Correct. Okay. Here we go. Yes. Number four. And Erick, it’s funny. You just said it and you led right into it. You said cyber insurance.

Insurance and warranty. I could see that. Insurance and warranty. Insure insure, and warrant. Okay. What do I mean by that? Okay. Any MSP that doesn’t have insurance is being ridiculous. Oh, it’s expensive. I know, but so are attorney’s fees. Okay. You want to know what expensive is? Expensive is. Having to hire an attorney in a PR firm to rehabilitate the reputation of your of your company after you’ve unintentionally left the port open that got 5 million records into the dark web.

That’s more expensive than insurance, okay? If you don’t have insurance, Then you are on a tight rope, a thousand feet up with no safety net. Will you get across? I guess some people will, but if you fall, there’s no it’s not a fender bender, it’s destruction. Okay. So you must have insurance. You must have general liability insurance.

You must have cyber piracy insurance. You got to make sure that your insurance has first and third party coverage, meaning you If I get injured, I’m the MSP, and something happens to my own systems, I’m covered. Or third party, if something happens to one of [00:45:00] my customer’s systems as a result of what I did, I’m covered.

New Year’s resolution. If you don’t have insurance, you need to get it. If you have insurance, but you’re not quite sure how, what it’s about, you need to talk to someone, okay? You need to talk to an insurance broker. Alternative, not alternative, but alongside of insurance. Warranty. There are now amazing warranty programs out there that are not insurance.

Okay. That, that offer you the ability to get funds should an incident arise. They don’t have the same breach requirements. They don’t have the same. Exculpatory exclusions, Oh if this occurred on a Saturday between nine and 11, we’re not going to cover you. No, there are solutions out there.

You need to do your research and find a good warranty company that offers. a warranty payment, warranty coverage alongside of insurance. These days, these are not expensive endeavors. They are amazing solutions. And I think that, one of the things that MSPs don’t understand, but they should, okay, is especially in the warranty area of things is that this is money that you’re going to get real fast to cover minor incidents.

Maybe incidents that you have that you don’t want to file an insurance claim, but it’s still going to cost you something, right? That’s when you need warranty coverage. So my fourth resolution for people is, Not only ensure and make sure your insurance is up to date and proper, but consider warranty coverage.

It is a relatively new concept, new meaning two, three years old or so. Really, that’s when it came to pass, but that’s what you should be doing. That’s going to help you dramatically. Yeah. And I’ll just point out these are not mutually exclusive things. So you were talking about the speed with which warranties pay off.

That’s critically important. Even if you have insurance, which you should have both of these things. It could take weeks. If there’s, some sort of attempt to deny a claim, it could take months before that money arrives. And there are expenses that need to get paid. Immediately and the warranty providers, they’re not, you’re not going to get enough money to just completely resolve and remediate everything, but you’re going to get that, that pile of cash that you need right away to get moving on on things and.

Insurance could take weeks. Even if they say yes, you’re insured, you still might not get a check for two, three, four weeks. Whereas a breach I’m sorry, a warranty company will pay you out within 24 hours. So your business process, your business operations aren’t interrupted. So many MSPs are just not looking to insurance and warranty.

They need to. What a great, sorry, I was going to say, what a great recommendation, Brad. And, I’ve had, and I’ve had. Recent conversations with two different cyber insurance carriers that have added a warranty component to their policies. Just within this quarter, I’ve talked to two folks that I’ve never even heard about it before.

So you bringing that to everybody to hear that it’s, oh, that’s something that should be added alongside your cyber insurance, the warranty. He gives a super great recommendation. There you go. See resolutions. We’re moving right along. The last one resolution, number five community. I even circled it here.

This is as artistic as I get, by the way, community. Look, the MSP industry is an incredible, is comprised of an incredible community. There are LinkedIn groups, there are Facebook groups, there are peer groups, there are industry consortiums. There are so many. different avenues that provide information and advice and help.

There is absolutely no reason for an MSP to think, I’m having this problem, I don’t know, maybe nobody else is like this, nobody else is having this problem. There are so many people in the community and they all want to help. Reach out to the community as a resolution, get involved with peer groups, get involved with LinkedIn groups and Facebook.

There are plenty of them. Get involved, ask questions. There are thousands of MSPs and I’ve seen it. Okay. Because I’m part of some of those. I’m part of some of those peer groups and so on. There are, They’re ready to give you information. It’s it’s like having Google, but only people who have your best interests at heart and have gone through the experience and not just pulling random thoughts and putting them together.

As a resolution, get involved in the community and what you’re going to find is not only will [00:50:00] you benefit from the information that you learn, you’re going to be able to help others because they’re going to ask, as no matter where you are in the chronology of your business, there’s someone that’s before you, right?

There’s someone that hasn’t gone as far as you have yet and you can help that person. And I really encourage community involvement. This is an incredible community. You need to rely on it as a resolution. Get involved. Get involved with peer groups groups online and use the information that’s out there for you.

I love it. And there are a lot of really good reasons to get involved in community. But to tie it to the legal theme here, you don’t know what you don’t know. You, the things that you should talk to a lawyer about, but have not spoken to a lawyer about. Just stuff you don’t know but there are people in your community who do.

They, they’ve made the mistakes that you’re at risk of making and so on. So when you’re not trying to figure everything out on your own when you have access to peers who can, answer a question, warn you about a potential liability, that risk that you’re taking it, it makes a difference.

You’re just going to avoid a lot of potentially expensive mistakes. Yeah. And what’s amazing about the community is that. There’s no other service industry that has a community like this, right? There’s no physician community where they can say, listen, I think this might be a gallbladder problem or this or that.

What do you think, guys? Oh did you check this? Did you check that? That doesn’t exist for doctors. It doesn’t exist for lawyers or accountants. MSPs can say, I have a client that’s experiencing this. I’m thinking about that solution or this solution. What have you guys heard and what have you tried?

You’ll get a dozen answers inside of ten minutes. Now, some of them are a little wacky, I get it, but you gotta filter them. The point is, we have an amazing community that’s unlike any other service industry. Resolution. Rely on it. Yeah, it’s a great resolution. And, there’s associations, there’s online communities, there’s live events, there’s You know, one thing that I would caution folks to shy away from, or just like some of those platforms, you gotta, stay away from like the Reddit and stuff like that.

Like you want to join a real community, right? A real community where we as MSPs come together, me as a recovering MSP, I do participate in these online forums and communities as well, but you will never see me. On Reddit posting anything because this is just a board to complain about things.

That’s really, it’s very rare that you see Reddit. I love this. So did I that’s and then the thread ends. No, that’s not working. So yeah the folks that are invested in giving back are part of these communities and associations, and you’ll be able to determine. Who they are because they are where your peers are for sure.

And they can and, people can reach out to anyone. They can reach out to Richard, reach out to Europe. They can reach out to me. We know the communities. We know the peer groups, some are free, some are not, but there are a lot of options out there. Great stuff, Brad. Thank you. And it’s five things, five resolutions, folks.

If you have not done or, or haven’t even thought about it. Form your MSP New Year’s resolution list for 2025, five things you can do this and you will thank yourself for doing them. Brad, for folks who want to follow up with you and maybe have a question about something you said, maybe you would like a little legal advice, how can they get in touch?

Sure. God, so many different ways. They could email me, brad at bradleygross. com. They could hit me up on LinkedIn, Bradley Gross, the MSP attorney, Bradley Gross. They can call the office 954 217 6225, or you can find me at all, a lot of different events. We all hit the lecture circuit. Of course, it’s over for the balance of 2024, but it’s going to start up pretty soon in 2025.

And yeah, I think that everyone’s approachable. Come on over, ask questions. Would love to talk to you. Brad, thank you so much for joining us on this first episode of New Year Here. Happy New Year to you. Happy New Year to you as well. All right. Folks, we’re going to take, Erick and I are going to take a quick break.

When we come back on the other side, we’ll talk a little bit, share a few final thoughts about this very useful conversation with Brad, have a little fun, wrap up the show, stick around. We will We’ll be right back

and welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP chat podcast. Once again, big thanks to Brad for joining us during this busy holiday season and for sharing all this wisdom folks in our audience. I hope they take it to heart. And I, one of the, there was a lot for us to chew over there, but one of the things that really struck me, Erick, is five resolutions suggested and a bunch of them, maybe all of them were not only good legal advice, but just good advice for MSPs in general, right?

He was talking about the clarity and completeness of your [00:55:00] communications, that’s great legal advice. It’s also good marketing. Advice. He was talking about compliance and not letting the legal fears keep you out of that market. That is great business advice for MSP participating communities.

There, there are legal reasons in terms of things you can learn by participating communities, but that aside, it’s just a smart thing for everyone to do. These were great resolutions coming to us from an experienced attorney, but just great resolutions for partners in general.

Yeah. And even beyond MSPs, right? It’s great. I guess the only resolution that is, probably, narrowly available primarily for MSPs are, is the community opportunity, right? Because as Brad mentioned, Rich, you and I have participated in many communities and associations and we continue to do so today.

And it is one of my favorite Aspects of the industry that we are in. It’s this unique. sense of even, competitors coming together and sharing for mutual benefit and partnering together and providing advice and assistance. I’ve never experienced that. Outside of my lengthy career, I’m aging myself here in the I.

T. industry. But other than that, every one of those just, hammered home, great just business advice and resolutions that every business owner should be thinking. Totally with you actually about community. It is very easy to take for granted. And Brad said, you’re not going to see a community Of doctors.

But I was thinking to myself, I, what about community of attorneys? I’m sure he would love to enjoy that the benefits of having a community to participate in the way folks in our world. Like I said, take take for granted. Folks, that leaves us with time for just one last thing.

And Erick, did you know we all know probably more than we would like to, all about Microsoft Excel. Did you know there is such a thing as the Microsoft Excel world, excuse me, championship? I had no idea, Rich, until, you surfaced this as our one more thing segment today.

Yeah, interested to hear all about it. Yeah. I, this is totally new to me as well. I stumbled across this online recently. The Microsoft Excel world championship took place recently in Las Vegas. We have a winner. We have a champion for 2024, Erick. His name is Michael Jarman. He is a financial modeling director from Canada.

Obviously spends a lot of time in Excel. He defeated 11 other finalists in a final challenge that had a World of Warcraft theme to it. Apparently the finalists each had to track the experience points, earned gold and other stats of a team of orcs. In a simulated campaign I have, I’m guessing this was happening rapidly and you got to track all this in real time.

Michael Jarman is our winner. As a result he took home 5, 000, which may or may not cover the costs of his trip to Las Vegas. I don’t know. He also got a big wrestling style championship belt and the pride that comes Erick, with having defeated three time world champion, Andrew, the annihilator in a guy.

Of Australia. Some bragging rights there for sure. Rich. I, it would be interesting to figure out like, what does that look like? I happened to read this morning separately about the youngest world chess champion awarded an 18 year old young man. But holy cow, never thought that there would be an excel world champion, with a chess world championship, you’re going head to head.

There are very specific rules. The game does not change, right? Chess has been the same game or probably hundreds of years, I would imagine. So you really know what that is. It’d be interesting to find out. How they determine what the challenge is for the Excel competitors. I love you had me at world of warcraft.

And then when, you got extra points when you said, get tracking the points of the orcs and all that. I love all that. It’s cool that they made it fun and a little nerdy at the same time, don’t you think? Absolutely. And you’re actually raising a question that didn’t occur to me, angel, just this moment is who is responsible for this competition and who runs it?

And and so that would be a, an interesting thing to investigate. So I will I will look into that and and let you know what I discover. Folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on this episode of the show. In fact, that is all the time we’ve got for you this year in 2024.

This is our final episode of the year. We are going to take next week off for the holidays. We will be back with you. The next episode of this show will go out on Friday, January 3rd. And we look forward to joining you there. Until then, happy holidays, happy new year. And as I always point out, this is both a a video and an audio podcast, which means if you’re watching us on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, go to Google, Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast, look us up there, you’re going to find us if you’re listening to us, but you want to check us out on YouTube go to [01:00:00] YouTube, look up MSP chat.

You will find us there. This show is produced by the great Russ Johns. It is edited by the great Riley Simpson. They are part of the team with us here at Channel mastered. They will be happy to help you create a podcast of your very own. Podcasts needless to say are a tiny portion of what we do for our clients at Channel mastered.

You want to learn more about that? You can find out everything at www dot channel mastered. Dot com channel Mastered has a sister organization called Ms. P Mastered, that is Erick working directly with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business. You can learn about that venture at www do msp mastered.com.

So once again, folks, happy holidays. Happy New Year. We’re gonna see you in a few weeks time. Until then, please always remember you can’t spell channel without MSP. Happy Holidays. Happy New Year, Rich. I’ll see you next year, brother. Absolutely.