Had a great interview with Lori Tisinai from the IT Owners Compass conference – www.ITOCompass.com. Lori Tisinai ITO Compass is April 27-28 in downtown Chicago, with a reception the night before. Plan to join me there! I am proud to be the keynote speaker for this conference. And there will be many other speakers as well. Please see the web site for details. In this interview, Lori walks through some of the agenda, followed...

I interviewed Amy yesterday on three topics. Two (Third Tier and the SBT Community meeting) were quick. We spent most of our time on the topic of mergers, acquisitions, and “Sell My MSP.” Amy Babinchak Best comment is a quote from Will Smith. What do I have to do today to keep this going? Where do I have BE to keep this going? Unlike the massive MSP merger/acquisition stories you see on Channele2e and other places, we...

This SMB Community Podcast features Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe. Topics include his community, crazy selling prices for MSPs, and a great discussion about building culture within your IT business. I always enjoy talking to Nigel. I met him just over ten years ago and am happy to still be doing things together. Of course a person can only take so many trips across the ocean in a year, so we do most of our collaboration online. In this...

Jennifer Fields of Astek Marketing has been helping out with my SMB Roadshows this year. She implements marketing programs for managed service providers. Jennifer has been helping MSPs for more than five years. She’ll help you build a list, clean it, pre-approve it, and “warm” it so that people know who you are when you contact them. If you’ve purchased a marketing program such as Robin Robins’ Technology Marketing...

I had a great interview with Josh Peterson of Bering McKinley (https://beringmckinley.com) about the state of our industry and what small IT consultants need to be paying attention to. Our first topic was actually unplanned. We just started talking about what we’re seeing as we travel around the country and meet MSPs. What we’re both seeing is a frenzy of M&A (mergers and acquisitions), fueled by an influx of investor capital....

In this SMB Community Podcast, Harry Brelsford from SMB Nation gives us an update on the latest and greatest from his world. Highlights include the Spring SMB Tech Talks (Topics include Blockchain and Bitcoin), Life-long learning, new analytics courses from Microsoft, and an update on “Pivot” marketing program. Harry finishes off with a quick summary of his hottest five tips for marketing online in the SMB Community.   Links...

I caught up with Michael Siggins, founder and Publisher of ChannelPro Magazine. In addition to covering a bit of the history of ChannelPro magazine, Michael gives us some great information about the ChannelPro events and other resources. Two cool topics we touched on include the State of the Channel research that was recently released (see link below) and the new IoT Playbook (also linked below). One cool stat from the State of the Channel...

In this SMB Community Podcast, I am joined by Justin Esgar. He runs an MSP business in New York City called Virtua Computers. They focus primarily on Apple computers. Justin runs a conference called ACES that will be held in Baltimore, MD May 9-10, 2018. More information at http://www.acesconf.com/karl. The ACES conference evolved because Justin realized that the technology conferences he was attending we focused on technology more than...

Manuel Palachuk (yes, we’re related) is a business coach, author, and trainer. This week he announced the launch of the MSP Pro Acedemy – a training and certification site for managed service providers and IT Professionals of all sizes. More details at www.mspproacademy.com. In addition to launching the academy, Manuel has started an Indiegogo campaign to speed up the release of the first course materials. Contributions there will...

I had a great talk with Rayanne Buchianico yesterday. We covered Sell My MSP, QuickBooks, important reports to run for your business, and the next course she’s teaching over at Great Little Seminar in October. Here’s the video:   Audio Listen to the Podcast. Links mentioned in this podcast:   Robert Crane’s Blog: http://blog.ciaops.com/2016/09/azure-site-recovery-is-cool.html   Andy Parkes’...