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Hello, my name is Brody I really like your content. I was wondering if you were interested in having your videos edited. I could probably do it for $25-$35 per video. Thank you, let me know if you’re intereste.

Tons of great content here. Having gone thru it several times now, you covered the greatest hits! One of the biggest things we didnt realize or count on until we did our first one was how much skill and talent you add to the org. The data retention example is a perfect one. Neither smaller entity had the time/energy/resources to really dial that in, once you free up Tom's time by having Jason doing CEO duties, all the sudden importan internal process projects like this get done and get done at a high level by the person most suited to do it. I think u guys are gonna crush it at ITNation.. again.. Keep up the great work!

All hands meetings are wasted time and money

I treat AI as an opinion that needs to be qualified as competent with respect to the principles of critical thinking.

Can do a live Q&A 😉

😍

I piloted 365 Co-Pilot about a month ago and it was not able to read through multiple files. It was only capable of looking into specific files specified by a / If it did actually have knowledge of all the files, sharepoint lists and excel sheets it would be an invaluable tool for me and our customers. Since we actually track all of our billable time in Sharepoint right now, and leverage Sharepoint as a back-end for PowerApps. But it could not answer the question "What is our average revenue for client x?" and appeared to have no knowledge at all of the Sharepoint site contents. If you don't specify the exact file with a / it doesn't know anything about it, in my experience working with it.

Thanks

That last bit about open source and TCO...Thats why i love this channel. Jason really comes at it from a business and scalability perspective. I love Toms content but he knows his audience which are smb and home labbers. Noting wrong with that user base at all but as an MSP i cant sell a pfsense to 100 clients because that's going to cost me more money to A) build solutions around the things pfsense lacks and B) its not a scalable solution from a management perspective. Same with XCP-NG (at this time). BTW, that single pane of glass from Netgate has been talked about from them for over 4 years now. Safe to say in 2024 its still vaporware. So yeah, keep up the great conversations.

The reality is that VEAM is the defacto product to use for back ups. Customers want it. Full stop. Whichever virtualization platform can get it implemented will be the winner in this space, second to VMware. Thats just a fact. Tom can love XCP back ups all day but the reality is that clients/users would rather not use it than to use it for scalable buildouts.

i do agree with your thoughts in this video, i do lots of the same thing where i work, the only nuance i think Tom where a bit better at is different solutions for different companies. VMware and meraki is a lower total cost for you, but everyone should remember that that may not be the case for everyone depending on what customer you have. that's why it is important to think on the products you do sell and compare.

Hello Dear , I saw much Video content on your Channel. Your content is very good, but no views and subscribers grow perfectly. I am analyzing or researching your content, and I understand that your video Title, Description, and SEO are not proper for this content . I will do white hat SEO and organic work for your TH-cam Channel so that you will get all real Traffic,Organic Growth and authority in search engine online presence. If you give me an opportunity, I would like to work for you. 🚫🧐 The channel "Business Technicalities" is probably not monetized! I am reaching out to you with a view to building up a long-term mutual relationship. Thank You

"We are more expensive, it is cheaper that way" slogan from a big company in Sweden.

~stares forlornly at my luxe business cards~

What did you promise again? Brett ;)

To scale, you have to have a sales system, just like every other aspect of an MSP. Once you go beyond the owner/seller it's the only way to reliably sell new logos and scale.

Appreciate the video. Having one on how you guys are sourcing leads would be great. I’m currently a solo operator so word of mouth is all I’m doing right now.

i do work in a small company that have almost no MSP type of customers, and have always been able to relate more to old Lawrence tech and i feel a big difference and harder to relate with especially this channel after the merge. still interesting topics but it is noticeable that your focus has changed. i do like that you did find an alternative for the customers that do feel that the new style is not for them, and i do LOVE that you are open with that not all customer are for you and that you happily re-fear them. to few IT company's out there that to that, they try to force there style on the customer instead.

Great topic. 3. big take aways considering we can only do (good) business with companies 1 OML level above or below ours. 1. We should be assessing prospect risk to the company (Service Leadership has some good assets on how to do this, charging for assessments is a good start). 2. We should be managing our lower OML clients either up or out. (Service Leadership and Lifecycle Insights have some awesome assets for this) and 3. Successful M&A activity follows the same +-1 OML rule.

Definitely never say "I have insurance for that" to a client. If your lawyer is physically present and says it on your behalf, that's one thing, but aside from that, just keep quiet.

Love the business content, please give more info on finn the security awearnes training. Please do an update video on your msp stack

Thank you for this. Super useful info.

I have read "Upstream" book recently, it was good at covering why sometimes it's better to do something that prevents bad outcomes by changing systems and processes

Great video and genuine content, as always. From the other side of this pale blue dot; I wish you two, Brett, and the rest of the team, a lot of health this year so you can keep on growing.

Oh man what a great video

Camera is a must for me. There are only few exceptions, like meetings with a bunch of people where clearly the majority are listening and not expected to participate... and if I'm for some reason eating due to some weird schedule. And I feel that, if anything, having yourself shown is a sign of respect to the others / speakers, especially when body language a major part of communication. Also I feel more anxious myself if I'm speaking with someone with his/her camera off while mine is on, and as someone who really suffers from anxiety (not only from being an introvert :'D ), I don't want others to feel the same. Another thing, when I'm scheduling meetings myself, I schedule them to finish 5 minutes earlier (so either 10, 25, 40, 50 minutes). This gives anyone enough time for a quick break (prepare a drink, toilet break, etc...) if they have other tasks.

on my job we have this big problem of working in multiply different areas and because we are small the same person does lots of different stuff, it is hard to get the customers to understand that some work cost more than other. i know an electrician that do have like 10 different prices per hour depending on what type of work they are doing, easy if there are 10 different persons doing it, but not if it is the same person doing it.

Yeah glitter is a big problem, gets everywhere

What is the Huntress record in the background?

I tell people that if they're starting a business, the first three people they need are an attorney, accountant, and a shrink 😉. Or perhaps a bartender instead of a shrink.

Thanks for sharing inside details. Gotta be a little tough to share but it grows the community.

Talking about SCO on VMWare made me curious about my old SCO VM.......just booted it up and ran some old LoB software from the 90's we used to write and sell, all worked perfectly! Those things were rock solid.

Hands-Down the best Management information I’ve ever found is Manager-Tools. This is a testimonial, not a sales pitch… I use them and it changed everything for me. It’s based in DiSC and most importantly… ACTIONABLE, and teachable (sustainable) for people who don’t have those skills naturally (which is about 90% of the population). 41:09

Thanks

Host needs to provide agenda and action items. Or it needs to be delegated.

Appreciate the content guys.

Enjoyed this podcast, especially since some of your points hit home. In today's day and age, especially in industries whose primary focus is IT (which automatically makes it a fast paced one), mindfulness is something that's easily disregarded. I've overburnt myself this year to a point that I couldn't even manage to hang out with people. Transitioned from a toxic company to another toxic company. I came up with a 6 month plan (which also included some IT related training which I'm doing at my own pace), resigned from my full time job for the duration of this plan (still doing freelance IT), with the aim to spend time to reset, re-think what I really want out of my life, and learn about mindfulness (among others). Also, Wim Hof's breathing method is the one Jason referred to, and I think it's best to start doing something like this in the presence of someone else :)

Very informative video. Great job gents

That was an awesome video! ❤ love the transparency and having you both on together to talk through these topics.

More than a Tshirt is called upon for such important meetings…

Having lived the MSP life and in-house IT I can say there are positive and negatives of both. Working for an MSP is like being in an accelerator for IT knowledge but I also found we maybe deployed solutions sometimes that we didn’t full understand the pit falls because we wanted to try the “cool new thing” rather than a tried and true solution that maybe wasn’t as flashy. When I was in-house IT I was slower to deploy new stuff because I had to learn it on my own but also really needed it to succeed. Failure meant I lost my job instead of a client.

Good talk! The why for me has been the automation side. I started out in corporate and implemented a lot of deployment solutions and automation scripts. I wanted to bring that experience to small businesses. These days I leverage the Power Platform a lot to do automation within Microsoft 365.

@13:36... just starting with IT consultancy (as right now I do mostly break/fix) and I was already bitten because of this. Epic fail :D

i like live, it is honest. though the sound quality was not good in this one.

i really appreciate these behind the scense talks. So interesting in how an MSP merger happens. This is good stuff. not saying Tom ran a messy house but...........Clearly more oversight was needed which i think was part of the reason the merger was needed and done.

Would love to see how you use EOS/Traction Tools. Was used by an internal IT department of 10 people. We even customized it for weekly one on ones and found the structure was great not just for managers but everyone else on the team. Please keep posting this content, I don't know what you guys get out of it but its valuable to some of us.

“Defense in depth” but no MITM? I manage to many financial orgs to not have this option even highly considered

I see no pfsense on the list but I do see Meriyaki 🤔

This stream was great and very informative. Could you please state what solution helped with information IT of what websites or platforms users snuck in. Your example was the user logging into Trello that wasn't part corporate policy.

For Brett or anyone that is self hosting the controller. Make sure you schedule your backups on whatever time schedule within the GUI. From there the backups are stored here in Linux: /var/lib/unifi/backup/autobackup I use syncthing to copy whats in this folder whenever there is a change to my Synology. From there i have a schedule backup to upload that file to backblze. Worse case i can pull the file from my backblaze account but your network will be on default settings which is something Ubiquity needs to adjust in the future. As mentioned, losing an AP is no big deal but now i have to factory reset my CORE switch to get it readopted..fuck. Theres all pros and cons to any solution