- The MSP industry has a ton of providers,
a ton of competitors if you will,
vast majority who are, a smaller business,
less than 10 employees, less
than a million dollars, right?
And in each one of our
markets, has five, 10, 50,
a hundred different
MSPs, working alongside
in kind of that same market.
And really now more than
ever it's time for all of us
to kind of really join
together, really work together
in a few different ways to
really support ourselves,
our industry.
But then, the general population
in all of the organizations, businesses,
and everybody that work in
charge of protecting, right?
These are very challenging times
and it's important for
all of us to work together
in a few different ways.
I just think there is a few
different ways that MSPs
need to really start working
together now more so than ever,
in kind of this COVID and
cybersecurity wave time,
especially given that there
are so many of us out there,
trying to do the hard
work every single day,
even just having a good
network of your peers
to be able to reach out to you
and get some understanding,
or get some guidance on something
that maybe they've already gone through.
So there's a few different
ways that all of us as MSPs
should be working together.
And we'll talk about that today.
I'm Steven Taylor, this is WeeklyST.
For the last 10 years
I've been building a
couple million dollars,
cybersecurity, IT Support
company here in Chicago land,
and I'm fascinated with living
a wholly successful life.
We talk about all this and
more every single week,
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The first thing that's happening
is cybersecurity is rife.
There's a ton of bad actors out there,
and a lot of bad things are happening.
And unfortunately it's
our job in the industry
to get everybody up to speed,
to, make sure that we're
following all the best practices
to get all the hardware
and software up to date,
if it isn't already,
to ensure that we're rolling out
different layers of
cybersecurity protections
and certainly educating our
clients and the market on
what they need to look out for.
It's a lot of work, right?
And there's certainly not
enough of us in the industry,
not enough talent to really grind through
all of this anytime soon.
There's going to be a lot of work,
over the next six to 12 months,
and this is a moving target.
It will constantly change.
And so I just think it's
important for all of us
in the MSP industry to be working together
in such a fashion where we're
all educating the market,
educating our clients,
providing new additional
layers of security so that,
our clients and these organizations
are not in the headlines.
Ensuring that our house is
locked down, we talked about,
if you're an MSP and you do not have
two-factor authentication enabled,
drop what you're doing right this minute
and ensure that that's happening.
And, I believe there's an
importance in knowledge sharing.
A ton of is happening in cybersecurity
and it's important for us
to knowledge share and knowledge transfer.
What are we learning?
What are we seeing out there?
What are the bad guys
doing so that all of us
can benefit from this
data and this information,
and we can adapt what we're
doing in real time, if you will,
so that, again, our
industry, our economy, our,
local organizations and
businesses are protected.
And it's important for
us to share that data,
whether it be Facebook Groups,
Reddit Forums, or whatever,
that helps keep us one
step ahead of the bad guy,
so to speak, and helps us
then put in one more hurdle,
or one more layer, or
one more best practice,
that's gonna prevent these
guys from doing bad to again,
our customers and the
organizations and businesses
in our markets.
I think the other big factor again,
there's a lot of MSPs who
are, they're new, right?
They they've just gone into startup mode,
it's an exciting industry,
there's a lot in this,
in the startups.
There's a lot of guys who have
been doing it for some time,
but might be kind of at that
million dollar mark might have,
only five or 10 employees.
And that's a very tough
business to manage, right?
We were there at one point
and you just don't have enough resources.
And so I think, again, this is
another time for us to look,
to our peers and maybe
caught our competitors.
And it might be time
for more and more of us
to merge together, to acquire others,
but really to start joining forces, right?
To spend the money on the tools,
to spend the money on the admin staff,
to spend the money on the
overhead of a building
and this that and the other
thing, gets really expensive.
And when you look at,
two equals in the market,
two MSPs that might be
a million or $2 million.
Them joining forces gives
us great efficiency, right?
We can lower the overhead of two buildings
because we're close enough
in geographic reach,
and the most of the work
that we do is remote anyway.
We can lower the admin overhead, right?
We don't need people doing billing and,
the paperwork and those kinds of things,
if we have, two houses coming together.
And then we're banding
five and 10 employees into,
now a 20 person organization.
We've got plenty of technicians
to support the workload
and learn the better efficiencies
on both sides, right?
And consolidating the toolset.
Every one of these vendors
who there are some great
vendors in this industry,
but every single one of them
is looking to milk another
four or $500 a month
out of each one of us.
But if the two of us band together,
then it might only cost us 600 bucks,
instead of $1000 for each of us, right?
And so there's a lot of
consolidation in the tools
and the vendors, and all
of the different things
that we need to deploy to our clients.
And we get purchasing power, right?
Also these vendors have
tiered pricing, right?
And so when you have 250 endpoints,
your price is three times
as much as it would be
if you had a thousand endpoints.
And I just think, as all
of us, as MSP owners know,
we're wearing so many different hats,
and I think it's death
of a thousand paper cuts
with all of these different vendors
who are doing good work for us.
But, the tier pricing
and the minimum spend,
and all that kind of stuff really,
really starts to bleed away at
our expenses and it's tough.
And, our owners, us as owners
wearing so many different hats,
but when you bring two shops together
or three shops together,
you work together,
then each of those owners
can go and do the thing
that they're most passionate about, right?
Maybe it is the projects
and the onboarding, right,
for the more techies.
Maybe it's sales and marketing, right?
They're really interested in
that, but they only spend,
30 or 50% of their time doing that
because they still get
pulled into tech work
because there just isn't enough team,
and enough capacity to
support the customers.
Or maybe it's something
altogether different.
They might've be a great, CFO
and a financial person, or,
better at marketing or
account management, VCO role,
whatever it might be.
And so, I think it's a great
time for us to look at,
some of the competitors in our market
and if there's great symmetry
and if there's great, gel there
and the customers look the same
and the way that they're
doing things is similar,
or a little bit different, but can again,
can be grouped together, they can,
join up the wagon train if you will,
and we're all gonna see great efficiencies
and it's gonna do good
for us as a business then,
as well as for our customers,
as well as for our teams.
Because we're not always trying to find
a little bit more juice
to squeeze out of it,
because it's just,
it can be very tight
and expensive right now
at that smaller level.
So I think it's super important to,
keep your eyes open and be communicating
with those in your market,
your competitors, if you will.
I think there's great opportunities in us
joining and working more together.
So I think the question we all
need to be asking ourselves
is who are three to five of
my peers, my competitors,
other colleagues in the industry,
that I'm touching base with?
Communicating, whether it's stuff
that we're learning in the industry
from a cybersecurity perspective,
or even going deeper and finding out,
is there opportunity in
two or three or four of us
banding together and, really having
some more efficiencies in
our business to be able to
better support our customers
and really continue
driving business forward,
instead of kind of the quagmire of,
pushing the rope uphill so to speak,
in the challenges every single day
that all of us face in this industry.
