{"id":2005,"date":"2024-03-29T20:44:08","date_gmt":"2024-03-30T03:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/killingit.smallbizthoughts.com\/?p=2005"},"modified":"2024-03-29T20:51:19","modified_gmt":"2024-03-30T03:51:19","slug":"episode-207-bigger-and-bigger-msps-ai-and-how-to-consume-advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/killingit.smallbizthoughts.com\/2024\/03\/episode-207-bigger-and-bigger-msps-ai-and-how-to-consume-advice\/","title":{"rendered":"Episode 207 &#8211; Bigger and Bigger MSPs, AI, and How to Consume Advice"},"content":{"rendered":"<br \/><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"display:block;\"  style=\"border:none\" src=\"\/\/html5-player.libsyn.com\/embed\/episode\/id\/30602813\/height\/100\/width\/\/thumbnail\/no\/render-playlist\/no\/theme\/custom\/tdest_id\/1346593\/custom-color\/87A93A\" height=\"100\" width=\"100%\" scrolling=\"no\" 0=\"allowfullscreen\" 1=\"webkitallowfullscreen\" 2=\"mozallowfullscreen\" 3=\"oallowfullscreen\" 4=\"msallowfullscreen\" class=\"podcast-class\" frameborder=\"0\" placement=\"bottom\" libsyn_item_id=\"0\" theme=\"custom\" custom_color=\"75942D\"><\/iframe>\n<p>Check out the bonus Killing IT content on MSP Radio&#8217;s Business of Tech podcast! Today&#8217;s a great day to subscribe to that: https:\/\/www.businessof.tech\/subscribe\/<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; &#8212; &#8212;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Topic 1: The Current State of Mergers, Acquisition, and MSP Consolidation<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Mergers and Acquisitions are alive and well in the MSP channel. Jay McBain from Canalys predicts a growth of M&amp;A of 50% in 2024. In addition to MSPs themselves, he says that we&#8217;ll see some major vendors acquired as well.<\/p>\n<p>The promise of these larger organizations is always that they&#8217;ll bring efficiency and profit. So far, that hasn&#8217;t happened. But that&#8217;s the promise.<\/p>\n<p>Karl thinks this is a GREAT marketing opportunity for MSPs.<\/p>\n<p>Related Links:<br \/>\n<a title=\"Demand-for-Managed-Service-Providers-in-2024.pdf\" href=\"https:\/\/greenwichgp.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/MA-Demand-for-Managed-Service-Providers-in-2024.pdf\"> https:\/\/greenwichgp.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/MA-Demand-for-Managed-Service-Providers-in-2024.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.channelfutures.com\/mergers-acquisitions\/msp-m-a-staying-hot-what-to-expect\"> https:\/\/www.channelfutures.com\/mergers-acquisitions\/msp-m-a-staying-hot-what-to-expect<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8212; &#8212; &#8212;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Topic 2: The Practical Application for AI in Small Business<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Are we there yet?<\/p>\n<p>While AI is the most popular topic in technology, the question remains: what can we use AI for that will produce actual business value? Some industries have made great progress with AI, including manufacturing and medicine. According to a recent study, more than 93% of manufacturers (from start-ups to global giants) are already using AI in some form.<\/p>\n<p>What are the implications and opportunities for MSPs and solution providers to sell their services to manufacturing clients? And what lessons can we learn to accelerate the adoption of AI in other industries?<\/p>\n<p>Related Link:<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/research.aimultiple.com\/manufacturing-ai\/\">https:\/\/research.aimultiple.com\/manufacturing-ai\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8212; &#8212; &#8212;<\/p>\n<p>Topic 3: How to best use predictions and analysis from guys like us.<\/p>\n<p>Summary of the Larry Walsh article linked below: \u00a0&#8220;IT spending growth projections should be taken with caution as they are directional and subject to change. While major analyst firms forecast healthy growth, the market is not uniformly strong, with several countries experiencing recession. Partner confidence is also dampened due to negative macroeconomic trends. Despite fluctuations in forecasts, investors, vendors, and partners rely on them for strategic planning. Channelnomics predicts conditions in the first half of 2024 to resemble 2023, with substantial improvement in the second half. Robust growth in IT spending is expected in 2025 and potentially 2026, driven by investments in artificial intelligence, data management services, and infrastructure refreshes.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Article by Larry Walsh, Channelnomics:<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/channelnomics.com\/taking-it-spending-forecasts-with-grain-of-salt\/\"> https:\/\/channelnomics.com\/taking-it-spending-forecasts-with-grain-of-salt\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>See also:<br \/>\n&#8220;With a projected 6.8% surge in global IT investment in 2024, organizations are positioned at the brink of transformative growth. According to Gartner, worldwide IT spending it expected to total $5 trillion in 2024. This represents a 6.8 percent increase over 2023. And while this is an increase, it&#8217;s down from the previous forecast of 8 percent.&#8221;<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.teamdynamix.com\/strategic-it-spending-in-2024-navigating-growth-and-innovation\/\"> https:\/\/www.teamdynamix.com\/strategic-it-spending-in-2024-navigating-growth-and-innovation\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/directory.libsyn.com\/episode\/index\/id\/30602813\/tdest_id\/1346593\">Check out this episode!<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Transcript:<\/p>\n<p>Announcer:<br \/>\nFrom somewhere deep in the cloud and the corners of the earth, this is the Killing It podcast, with a focus on helping you make sense and dollars of all things IT.<br \/>\nWith your hosts, Dave Sobel, Ryan Morris, and Karl Palachuk.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nHere we go. Welcome, everybody, to episode 207 of the Killing It, Killing It.<\/p>\n<p>Dave and Ryan:<br \/>\nKilling It.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nPodcast. I&#8217;m Karl here with my good friends Dave and Ryan, as always. We&#8217;re going to just kick it off with a super quick question of the day.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nI got to ask then, with this not meaning to be a negative question, other than in place on the internet, what&#8217;s your biggest time waster in your life?<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nCurrently for me, it&#8217;s fixing up my tools so that I can begin using them. I have a bunch of outdoor projects for the summer, but I got to get all my and all my benches in place. I spend my weekends just getting ready.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan:<br \/>\nThat&#8217;s a noble pursuit. We said time waster is not a negative thing because we all just You want to have hobbies, right? You want to do things. Karl&#8217;s actually using his time to make his world a better place. My time waster is not nearly so value add. It&#8217;s always been, and it will continue to be, golf. I&#8217;m not good at it, and I&#8217;ve come to grips with the fact that you don&#8217;t have to be good in order to enjoy it. But there&#8217;s always a little piece of equipment or a little thing to research, an article to read about how to do this or how to do that. I do find myself being that guy in my office. When I&#8217;m on conference calls and when I&#8217;m on stuff, I will practice my grip and my swing and whatever. It&#8217;s intended to release the stress, not to cause more stress, which makes me a very bad person to go golfing with because other people, they take it very seriously and they want to be very, very serious. I&#8217;m like, Dude, you&#8217;re not Tiger Woods. You&#8217;re not making money doing this. Just relax and have a good day.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nSee, if I was technically correct with this, it would be TV, right? Because I will admit, if you actually think it up in time, but I&#8217;m going to disqualify that because it&#8217;s on the internet now, it&#8217;s all stream. Exactly. What you actually would into is that hobby thing continues to be the retro video game stuff. I am much more into keeping the hardware working and tweaking the stuff that it is the actual play time, if I&#8217;m honest about it. I just picked up a Calico Vision and an Atari 7200 set of trackballs. I have this thing on my list. It&#8217;s like, Oh, you know what I need to do is take them apart and clean them and make sure they&#8217;re all restored, which is just super fun, relaxing, focused task. And in the end, you end up with this restored piece of tech.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan:<br \/>\nSo I think that would be good. Well, and so, Dave, your pursuit is a digital version of Karl&#8217;s pursuit. He&#8217;s got saws and hammers and stuff. You got digital tools. So you guys are both actually producing things. It&#8217;s the same thing for the thing. Very nice. Very nice. I will say I&#8217;m a person who enjoys watching Home Improvement shows. I&#8217;m also a person who is very bad at home improvement projects. That&#8217;s not a skill set that I possess. I&#8217;m good at lifting heavy things. If you are rebuilding your bathroom, I will carry in the tile and I will carry in the two by fours. But If you want me to actually measure and cut things, you should probably hire a professional.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nWell, before we dive into topics, I will do the quick plugs. We are not sponsored this particular time, except we want to make you all aware that besides our regular, this now quarterly version of the show that we&#8217;ll be putting out, we&#8217;re going to make an occasional appearance on the Business of Tech Lounge&#8217;s new live shows. The live shows are Wednesday, generally at 3:00 PM Eastern, available both on YouTube and on LinkedIn. And occasionally, we&#8217;re going to do a single topic as one of the segments on that show. Show runs about 30, 35 minutes. It is designed to bring you up to date on a number of different things going on, and I bring in outside experts to answer questions. So check that out on the MSP radio YouTube channel or on my LinkedIn, and those drop in the podcast feed on the weekend so that you can catch up.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nAnd we&#8217;ll put those links in the show notes. One more thing, and then we can do a show. I just have to ask Dave, tell us about traveling to see the Eclipse.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nWell, we&#8217;re going up there, so we will be able to report back of how it actually looks. I&#8217;ve got all the gear and the goggles and stuff. My wife and I are going up to the the south tip of Lake Erie and going to see the Eclipse from there. We were looking at Texas, and then it got too pricey, and we switched our plans, and we&#8217;re driving up to Ohio.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nAll righty. Well, so let&#8217;s kick it off. Topic number one today is about the current state of private equity and managed services. Really, what I&#8217;m particularly interested in is the consolidation of MSPs. There&#8217;s stuff going on on the vendor side as well. But to me, one of the things is that these big companies, when they start gobbling other companies, they keep saying, Well, we&#8217;re going to get all this efficiency and we&#8217;re going to increase profit and all that stuff. We&#8217;ve linked to a few articles about this, but it seems to me the one thing that everybody listening to this needs to understand, these big companies cannot be as good with customer service as you can. They cannot provide the white glove experience. They cannot give the attention to detail. To be honest, I think, personally, they cannot be as secure as you can make your clients. To me, this is just a 100% great marketing opportunity for MSPs that&#8217;s going to last about five years.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nOh, it&#8217;s going to be fun because Ryan&#8217;s nodding and I&#8217;m waiting. Ryan, go ahead, and then I&#8217;m going to weigh in as well.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan:<br \/>\nWell, so architecturally, we in the channel in the technology industry exist for precisely the reason that Karl just described. A vendor makes a great piece of technology. They sell it, they support it, they do what they can to make it a standard in the industry, and then they grow, grow, grow. And what they lose as they grow is the ability to touch an individual customer in any meaningful way. That&#8217;s why resellers, integrators, solution providers, MSPs of any Stripe, that&#8217;s why we were born. We were born because the local opportunity is where technology actually matters. And that&#8217;s what I take away. Because, Karl, the articles that you provided and the data that I&#8217;ve been tracking, I do see that there is an uptick in the numbers. There is a meaningful acceleration in the consolidation of our industry. I&#8217;m not surprised. Based on the age of the industry, based on the maturity of business models, you would expect that this is about the time where people go, we could standardize and we could consolidate and we can make a lot more money in a larger operation. But that&#8217;s all in the reality check of, Yeah, but are bigger businesses actually good at business.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan:<br \/>\nThey can be, obviously. There are some very, very good examples of very large service providers who do excellent work locally, but that&#8217;s the exception. The rule is you merge, you get bigger, you lose touch with the local things and the ability to invest in individual relationships. And it does become a great growth opportunity for the local smaller providers. It&#8217;s something that we&#8217;ve been projecting from a data perspective. There will be fewer MSPs in five years than there are now, which, by the way, if you&#8217;re an MSP vendor, what&#8217;s your go-to-market strategy? You got to figure that part out, right? There will be fewer, but will they be better at the process? I feel like there&#8217;s an opportunity for a local company that knows how to do it well and really can grow and charge higher prices than those big guys do with their Walmart type approach.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nI want to push back on Karl&#8217;s statement because it&#8217;s too absolute for my taste. Because the position I have is not that you&#8217;re wrong, it&#8217;s that There&#8217;s a lot more subtlety, and Ryan was doing a better job of encapsulating that. But the message I want MSPs to think about more is not all private equity is the same. In fact, I want this industry to be much smarter about asking the questions of the private equity, of what their investment thesis is. Because if you get into all of the M&amp;A noise, everyone always talks about how amazing it is for exit and what you need to do to get there. And what they aren&#8217;t actually doing is asking the question of, well, what happens with the asset on the other side? How is it executed? And how will the private equity make money? And not all PE is created equal. I am 100% on board with the fact that there are ones that I think are toxic and evil, right? But that&#8217;s not an absolute. And in fact, I&#8217;ve been specifically reaching out to private equity organizations to have them on my show and ask them specifically the question, explain to me your thesis, because I think that&#8217;s important to understand how they want to make money with their long term ranges, with the short, how short term it is, long term time horizons, how they&#8217;re doing it, how they&#8217;re structuring the deals, because it&#8217;s all well and good to talk about, I&#8217;m going to sell my business.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nUnless you know how the other side looks to make money, you don&#8217;t understand half the deal. Too much of the M&amp;A hype is designed to get MSPs to think about selling, not to think about what is the asset on the other side. I want to have smarter conversations about that.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nI will say in my own defense, I didn&#8217;t say anything about private equity. If I did, it wasn&#8217;t the primary focus. A lot of the company like NetShirt, which is one of the companies mentioned in the article, they&#8217;re not private equity, but they are consolidators. And so they want to consolidate. And my point is simply, when you begin to look at any MSP that operates across whatever, 10 offices, 12 offices, three states, you begin to have a layer called the customer Service Department, which is the one and true indicator that you have bad customer service. Because you have to have a department dedicated to what is for the average MSP, a microscopic percentage of all the things they do, which is deal with problems. When I talk to MSPs, unfortunately, 99% of them say, We provide white glove service. Well, I used to say, Well, okay, that doesn&#8217;t really differentiate you from everybody else. Well, going forward, I think it might actually. I do think part of it is the strategy of running a multi-state operation just is different. I think that the people who are primary core audience are going to have a tremendous advantage in that market.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nI want to push back a little bit because I made this statement to somebody privately recently, so I&#8217;m going to throw it out here on the podcast and say, Look, in order for there to be a best in class, defined as top 20% of the market, there has to be a rest of the market that is 80%, right? And in order for that to happen, and I don&#8217;t want to&#8230; And if I look at the MSP market really broadly, really quickly, 20% best in class, 30% of them are or lose money. That&#8217;s just the math of the market. But that means there&#8217;s half in the middle that are just okay. I want to observe that just okay actually is a thing, right? It&#8217;s the majority, by definition of math, I&#8217;ve just said it&#8217;s 50% of the market. There is a world to carve out there. Now, I&#8217;m not saying you don&#8217;t want to make that business better or you don&#8217;t want to aspire to that, but 50% of the market is just in the middle, and there is a space for that. It&#8217;s about, ultimately, it&#8217;s all about how you run your business. You could build a multi-point business that runs exceptionally well, and you can run a multi-point business that doesn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan:<br \/>\nYeah, and see, that&#8217;s the point, right? This is not the first time Our industry has experienced this. We all remember in the reseller days, the experience of microage. There were some microage acquisitions and rollups that were phenomenally successful, that even after that thing re-disintegrated later on and those became re-independent shops. There were some very good businesses that were pre, during, and post-microage. There were some that were not. Just because the money is there, whether it&#8217;s private equity or another company to merge with or an aggregator, just because the money is there does not guarantee that consolidation is a good strategy. You got to actually know how. And being good at running an MSP is a very different skillset from being a manager in a multi-state, multi-megamillion dollar operation. That&#8217;s a different job description. All right, let&#8217;s move on to topic number two, guys. And nobody&#8217;s going to be surprised the topic number two is about AI. Shocking. But they might be surprised, and pleasantly so, that we&#8217;re actually going to discuss actual applications where it produces legitimate business value. I don&#8217;t know about you guys. We I think it&#8217;s safe to say we&#8217;ve spent enough time playing with the tools, figuring things out and trying to find these applications.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan:<br \/>\nBut we&#8217;re in that innovator&#8217;s curve, the hype cycle of, This is the best thing is going to change everything. Yeah, but what do you actually do with it? We&#8217;re linking to an article in the show notes about practical applications for AI in the manufacturing and engineering industries. And And it&#8217;s not the only place, but it&#8217;s a specific place that I wanted to highlight because it&#8217;s not just, Can you help me write the memo for the staff meeting type applications? These are tangible, meaningful applications of artificial intelligence technology that makes products better, that makes factories safer, that makes manufacturing businesses much more profitable. There&#8217;s a bunch of good and we&#8217;ll talk about some of them here. But just as you guys are looking at it, AI in general and in the manufacturing space, what are your thoughts about practical, real-world applications that you&#8217;re seeing?<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve been covering a ton on the daily pod, so I get a plug for that. In particular, one of the things that I&#8217;ve really been trying to highlight is find really good use cases to discuss them, just to present them, because I&#8217;m hoping to stimulate thought in MSF SPSI solution for writers heads of, Oh, it&#8217;s not about the hype. It&#8217;s not about the chatbot telling jokes or some stupid stuff. It&#8217;s actually like, How can I make this practical to my customers? Medicine is another one where there&#8217;s tons of stuff with data analysis, gene therapy, and some of the drug discovery, and some of the work that they&#8217;re doing there has proven to be really interesting in terms of what they&#8217;re seeing uptakes on, manufacturing, the industrial stuff. The core commonality that I&#8217;m seeing, that I&#8217;m guiding people and recommending is that it&#8217;s places where they&#8217;ve invested in some thought of the way their data is organized so that it is ready to be used by AI technologies, and where they&#8217;ve given some thought to the framework of which the data will live within and what their boundaries are. Those two tend to be commonalities. For me, I&#8217;ve been saying, Hey, when you&#8217;re thinking about this, know that to be useful AI, you have to have done those two things beforehand.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nGet your data ready for AI, which is, by the way, useful even if you&#8217;re not applying AI. Second, have some good guidance for the way that data will be managed and what you&#8217;re, I&#8217;ll call them ethical edges, like how it can be used, what you&#8217;re comfortable with. Knowing those frameworks makes you ready for those use cases.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nI love the stuff that&#8217;s being done with AI in manufacturing, in medicine, in other things. I don&#8217;t think we have a killer app in SMB yet, and we may not have one for quite a while. I was thinking that some, Oh, here, make a chatbot widget for every client&#8217;s website would be the thing. But chatbots seem to be making absolutely no progress. They just suck out loud. I had a literally humorous experience with Xfinity just yesterday. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s it. But I do think the fruit for MSPs is still, as always, education, education, education. Go to your clients, talk to them about that. Explain what AI is so that they can begin to have an intelligent conversation and know the difference between large language models. Is this just an algorithm or is this actual artificial intelligence? And do we care? Because AI is now a buzzword that everybody can spell, and that&#8217;s pretty much all it is for a lot of people. But I do You think that getting into your clients and having these conversations will set you up to be the one they go to when you can come back and say, Now let me train you on copilot.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nNow let me train you on the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve been seeing success in what I&#8217;m thinking of as supportive AI versus customer-facing AI. You&#8217;re exactly like, Putting it out in front of customers, what a horrible idea. Because you&#8217;re losing some of the the insight that your own people get. But supportive AI, those technologies that help people be better at their jobs and then interpret, and you can catch those. That doesn&#8217;t make any sense. That&#8217;s not a good idea. But for MSPs, I look and say, it is an incredibly useful research system to help you diagnose problems. You should absolutely be working with it and saying, this customer is seeing this, one of the five things I should go look at. That usefulness is what we&#8217;re also seeing in some of those other areas. When we talk about drug discovery, the kinds of things that are working is where the scientists throw it in there and say, Here&#8217;s a million different combinations, which are the first 6,000 we should look at? That work is where we&#8217;re seeing usefulness, and that framework of thinking is the most valuable.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan:<br \/>\nWell, see, and Dave, you touched on it in your first comment about, you are an MSP, what is your job in AI? Well, your job is not necessarily to create AI assistance for your customers, but that get your data ready, manage your data effectively, create an infrastructure that is productive and secure and reliable, where you can use AI for practical business purposes. Well, that all sounds like your job description as an MSP, right? These are things you can sell. Services, products, hardware, software. It&#8217;s tangible. The reason I was highlighting the idea of AI in manufacturing. It&#8217;s just things that we don&#8217;t understand. We&#8217;ve all watched the show How It&#8217;s Made, where you sit around and watch how factories actually do stuff, and it blows my mind. You think, My God, somebody didn&#8217;t just make that stuff. Somebody had to think of it first and then make the machine that makes the stuff. Do you guys remember the movie The Founder, Michael Keaton, about the Ray Crock story founding McDonald&#8217;s? If you remember that movie, what their essential innovation was, the reason McDonald&#8217;s became McDonald&#8217;s once they got over the personality issues and him trying to take over the business.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan:<br \/>\nOnce they got over that, it was process flow. Design. It was how do you set up the workstations and you move things through so it can be so productive that you can radically increase the quality while radically decreasing the cost. Okay, think of that concept applied to a manufacturing facility and how things get organized in a physical warehouse, how the machines actually process things. We actually participated in a thing recently where they were talking about the idea of powder coating things in a factory, where you&#8217;re going to spray on a powder. That becomes rust proof. How do they design the nozzle for that thing that says the maximum throughput, least clogging, best coverage, best utilization of material to reduce the consumption, yada, yada? Well, a guy sat around one time and he was like, I think it should be shaped like this. And then somebody said, Why don&#8217;t we just ask AI? And the AI applies the principles of liquid flow dynamics and aerodynamics and stickiness and friction and yada, yada. And it comes up with a concept design for the shape of a of a nozzle that literally could not have been conceived by a human.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan:<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s not straight, it&#8217;s not flat. It&#8217;s all and bubbly looking and whatever because it captures and recaptures the flow dynamics. It is mind boggling. And there&#8217;s a chart in the article that I want to point everybody to that highlights the popularity of manufacturing AI. Go there, look at that. Look at the uptick.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nAll right, well, we&#8217;re weird and bubbly, too. I&#8217;m going to use this as an opportunity to go a little meta with our third topic. I&#8217;m going to&#8230; Larry Walsh published something recently, and Larry, it feels&#8230; Only occasionally, I get to read his writings. This one resonated with me because the title is really good, Taking IT Spending Forecast with a Grain of Salt. We&#8217;ve linked to the article if you want to dig into it. One of the things he laid out was the fact that there are so many of these predictions. He guides people to say, you should use these as directional ideas rather than absolutes. I wanted to take a quick moment and be a little and step back and say, how do you think listeners and MSPs should use predictions and analysis from guys like us? What is the guidance you think when you give it of how it should be used?<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nWell, you already know the answer to this. I loved the business of tech last week where I&#8217;m listening to it and you said, Some of these financial numbers, remember, this is unique data, so don&#8217;t take all the lessons from the past and apply it here. I was like, Yeah, Dave, go. More people ought to be talking about this. And your very next sentence was, as my friend Karl Polachuk says, I&#8217;m 100% believer that you really have to take whatever I give you. If I give you advice on SOPs or money or anything else and consume it into your business in your business model, in your city, with your clients and your employees and your products and your stack, and you have to take this and use your brain. Every single person who listens to this is a successful business owner who has been running a business, doing a budget, making the engine go for a long time. Don&#8217;t think that you have to read what some expert says and then just do it. Take what an expert says and says, Okay, does that apply in my actual business? Just one last thing, and then I&#8217;ll let Ryan, who&#8217;s chomping at the bit here.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nWhen you read books, a lot of times I read books and I&#8217;m like, Oh, that&#8217;s really great if I was a big business. But I&#8217;m not a big business. I&#8217;m a small business, right? So I have to adapt the book to my environment.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan:<br \/>\nSee, this is 100% the difference between, I read it in an article, and therefore it must be true, versus a business that can actually consume ideas and convert them into business performance. The difference is local application and customization. The way I have described this for years in my own practice is context matters more than content. And what I mean by that is there are seven best practices that might make your business much more effective, or they might be exactly the wrong things for you to do in your situation. You guys remember the book Good to Great? Everybody read the book. Everybody loved the book. It had so many good things. But did you remember that the data set for those companies were more than $500 million in total revenue, had been on the stock market for more than 25 years, and had experienced a major uptick in business performance, out sustaining that performance over their peers in their industry segment for at least a decade.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nThat&#8217;s actually the book I had in mind when I made that comment.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan:<br \/>\nSee, it&#8217;s like, Oh, you should go read Good to Great, and you should do everything in there. Yeah, you should if you&#8217;re IBM or if you&#8217;re Microsoft or if you&#8217;re HP, etc. But if you are a local MSP and you apply the things that Good to Great teaches, you will crash the car. It is absolutely the wrong advice for your business because it&#8217;s a different context. My advice has always been to to people. There is no such thing as one path to success for everyone, but there is absolutely a path to success for anyone. It&#8217;s just a question of understanding your business, your unique circumstances, your tolerance your tolerance for risk, your appetite for investment. All of those things go into, yeah, and how should you apply this? We literally just have gotten back from a big trip where we traveled to Taiwan, to Vietnam, to Spain, to Austria, to meet individually with solution providers and talk to them about their business. One on one individual consulting meetings in all of these places. And what I said to them was, I know that the first thing you&#8217;re going to say to me is this is all nice in America.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan:<br \/>\nAnd an American who says this is the way you ought to run your business, but you must understand it&#8217;s different here. And I said, I know you&#8217;re going to say that because I know that it is different here. And I promise, I&#8217;m not going to waste your time with any general recommendations. I&#8217;m going to learn about your business and give you something specific. Context matters more than content. And the thing you highlighted, Dave, the general rule of market forecast Perhaps. Karl has said this for years and years, and it&#8217;s more true now than ever. The market will grow by 4.8 % in aggregate, but that means it&#8217;s going up by 20 in one segment and down by 20 in one geography, and it&#8217;s going to net out somewhere at a positive. What&#8217;s it going to do in your local economy with the verticals that you sell to? Well, you&#8217;re the one who needs to know that. Don&#8217;t listen to some big national guy give you general advice.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nYeah. I like to think of it a little bit like weather reports, right? There&#8217;s a certain degree of&#8230; I want to know what conditions look like on the ground so that I can understand any headwinds that I&#8217;m dealing with. Should I wear my raincoat? Or is this a time for a little bit more aggression? Do I have additional wind in my back because of conditions that I want to take advantage of? It&#8217;s that directional thinking. The other thing that I always I think about it is, is I want people to use analysts&#8217; advice to stimulate ideas. The, okay, I&#8217;m examining one of a hundred different ways that I can get to success. As Ryan just said, there isn&#8217;t just one way to do this. There is one for everybody. But by the way, there&#8217;s probably X. There&#8217;s probably 49 of those that will lead to some version of success. I&#8217;m okay with everybody go in any of them, as long as it is directionally what you want, if it is heading in the right direction. I don&#8217;t believe there is one way to do this. And in fact, for me, the people that are unique bring unique ideas.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nI am very much rebelling against the idea of people that&#8230; Anybody who tells me, Oh, well, you pick your tech stack and put something in each of these buckets. I&#8217;m like, Okay, so you&#8217;re completely replaceable because you have defined I have seven buckets that I must have something in, and it doesn&#8217;t really matter what goes into each of those. I don&#8217;t need you because you have come up with nothing new here at all. It&#8217;s okay, by the way. See, Dave&#8217;s earlier point, about 50% of the market right in the middle. That&#8217;s fine. It&#8217;s all good. I want you to make money. Whatever works for you. But remember, whatever works for you. Now, I&#8217;m trying to say, Hey, let&#8217;s identify areas where this looks like higher levels of success. That looks like a better idea. There feels like there&#8217;s something in this concept, and you will put it together and to assemble something that is performing well for you. That&#8217;s the way that I think.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nI agree completely. I will say one thing is that We need to make sure that we don&#8217;t give people the advice that you can do anything you want and be successful. If you&#8217;re not successful, stop doing it and go do something else. It&#8217;s not like the quiet quitting. I want to work 12 hours a week, and I want to get paid $90,000. Okay, yeah, good luck. Have a nice day. But in business, you try things, and if they work, you do more, and if they don&#8217;t work, you do less. But I highly encourage people, and this is what I have said for years, go create the business you want and then go find people who want to do business your way. Now, having said that, if you don&#8217;t find them, change what you do.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nChange something. They&#8217;re not there. They&#8217;re not a buyer.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nSo moving back to the original question, how to use this advice is, once again, integrate it, integrate it, integrate. The whole world, especially in IT, changes every day. And holy smokes, you cannot grab a business model and do that for 12 years. You will be 11 years behind by the time the 12 years are over.<\/p>\n<p>Dave:<br \/>\nAnd by the way, one last thought as we wrap this, because I want to say, things go slower than guys like us think. Particularly when you are in the prediction business and the directional business, you will talk about where the market&#8217;s going or adoption of technology. And we are looking at, we like to look for the early adopters, the early success stories. We&#8217;ll see growth, something along the lines of 20% adoption, and we&#8217;ll go, That&#8217;s really good. But remember, 80% hasn&#8217;t. There&#8217;s a long tale of implementation. I don&#8217;t think of something as truly mainstream and adopted until it&#8217;s in massive numbers of adoption levels, 80, 90% adoption, where it is truly commoditized, things go a lot slower than predictor&#8217;s agenda.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\n206 episodes since we made a bet about who would get their pizza delivered by robots.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan:<br \/>\nExactly. It hasn&#8217;t happened yet. But see, my final thought to echo both of you guys. If you take the standard advice from any national guy who is available to everyone, that creates standardization. Standardization is the exact dictionary opposite of differentiation, and differentiation is the path to profit. If you&#8217;re going to do the same thing everybody else does the same way they do it, as Dave said, you are totally replaceable.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nAnd that, my friends, will do it for episode 207 of the Killing It&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Dave and Ryan:<br \/>\nKilling It.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nPodcast.<\/p>\n<p>Announcer:<br \/>\nThanks for tuning in to the Killing It podcast. Please share with your friends and tell everyone to subscribe on iTunes and all the podcast places. Join us next week and help us keep killing it in the technology business.<\/p>\n<p>Karl:<br \/>\nI forgot to point. That was the thing. And I said chomping when my pet peeve is champing at the bit, not chomping.<\/p>\n<p>\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Check out the bonus Killing IT content on MSP Radio&#8217;s Business of Tech podcast! Today&#8217;s a great day to subscribe to that: https:\/\/www.businessof.tech\/subscribe\/ &#8212; &#8212; &#8212; Topic 1: The Current State of Mergers, Acquisition, and&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2007,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":4,"label":"Killing IT Podcast"}]},"featured_image_src_large":["https:\/\/killingit.smallbizthoughts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Q1-Episode-207-1024x538.jpg",1024,538,true],"author_info":{"display_name":"Karl W. 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