Richard Tubb's Blog, page 60
November 7, 2019
Pocket – Capture Content to Read Later
Do you ever find an article online that you want to read, but don’t have the time? 
Would it be useful to capture content to read later?
Every Friday I share one of my favourite finds of the week — a website, tool or an app that has impressed me.
My Friday Favourite this week is Pocket – Capture Content to Read Later.
How much does it cost?
Pocket is free to use.
Why you should Capture Content to Read Later
Pocket is a free service that you can use to capture content to read later.
You can use the Pocket app to capture articles to your own personal Pocket. You can capture from any of your devices — including PC, Mac, web-browser, tablet or smartphone — and the captured article will then be synchronised to all of your devices.
The articles you capture to your Pocket are then available for you to read later whenever you want.
I use Pocket to capture interesting articles via my Desktop PC or laptop. They can be articles I’ve found via e-mail newsletters (here are some ideas of the must-read email newsletters I recommend) or blog posts. I then read these articles at a time that’s more convenient to me. I typically read these articles via my iPad or Smartphone when I’m travelling on the train, sat around in airports or waiting in a queue.
It’s a great way to productively use what David Allen of GTD refers to as “weird windows of time“. The time when you’re unable to get on with anything very important, but want to do something useful.
Using Pocket to capture content to read later has significantly increased the number of genuinely interesting and useful articles I read.
It has also reduced the amount of time I spend mindlessly browsing social media sites.
How can I get it?
Visit the Pocket website to get started with Pocket.
You can also follow @Pocket on Twitter, or visit the Pocket Facebook page.
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The post Pocket – Capture Content to Read Later appeared first on Richard Tubb.
November 4, 2019
Channel Evolution Europe – An exciting new MSP conference!
A heads-up that a brand new conference called Channel Evolution Europe is coming to the UK!
Channel Evolution Europe is an event for IT Solution Providers and Managed Service Providers (MSPs).
It takes place at the Park Plaza Victoria, London over two days on 2nd-3rd December 2019.
What is Channel Evolution Europe?
The Channel is changing at a rapid pace. Clients who were once satisfied with on-premise hardware and software are now choosing cloud solutions.
Therefore, IT Solution Providers need to change their focus to selling solutions as a service.
If you need help to pivot your business to the recurring revenue model or want to add new solutions-as-a-service revenue streams, Channel Evolution Europe is the event for you.
What can you expect?
The Channel Evolution Europe event is a 2-day event featuring:
an expo hall with 35+ leading MSP suppliers
Keynote presentations from industry experts
Peer-based sessions and panels, to help you learn from those who are already doing it successfully
The European Partner 51 awards
Networking opportunities including a Pub Crawl, Alliance of Channel Women networking reception, VIP sessions and more.
Who will be there?
There are expected to be over 300+ IT Solution Providers and MSPs, plus 35+ vendors and distributors, and 40+ thought leaders and speakers.
I’ll also be hosting a Tech Tribe gathering! If you’re a member of The Tech Tribe and attending Channel Evolution Europe, let me know so that can include you in our plans!
My Session on MSP Acquisitions
I’ll be hosting a featured panel session on MSP acquisitions.
The panel and I will be looking at how to do acquisitions effectively, and how to maximise the value of your MSP business to prepare it for acquisition.
For a taste of what we’ll be talking about, check out my conversation with Mitesh Patel about How to Do MSP Acquisitions Well.
What does it cost?
As a speaker, I’ve been given a 25% discount voucher to offer to my friends, so use the VIP code Tubblog to buy your passes!
The Expo-Only pass costs £143 (by using the VIP code Tubblog)
The Conference pass costs £199 (by using the VIP code Tubblog)
How to register
Click here and register for Channel Evolution Europe in London on 2nd-3rd December 2019.
You can also follow @Channel_Expo on Twitter or visit the Channel Partners Conference Facebook page.
Are you attending Channel Evolution Europe? I’d love to say hello to you in London! Leave a comment below or get in touch.
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The post Channel Evolution Europe – An exciting new MSP conference! appeared first on Richard Tubb.
November 3, 2019
How to do Awesome MSP Sales – TubbTalk #59
Richard speaks to channel sales expert Fiona Challis about how MSPs 
can go from zero to hero with their sales process.
Author, channel enablement and sales expert, founder of the Next Gen Sales Academy and winner of the award for Best Female Speaker, Fiona Challis is Richard’s go-to expert for all things sales. Fiona is here at the CRN conference in London to talk about ‘What makes a winning MSP sales team’ and lucky for us she’s found a little time in her hectic schedule to come and give us the inside scoop.
An Interview With Fiona Challis
Whenever you talk to other MSPs about anything sales related, there’s one name that comes up, without fail: Fiona Challis. She’s helped some of Europe’s top MSPs smash their sales targets and with her Next Gen Sales Academy, she’s helping countless others overcome their fear of selling, giving them the mindset, the confidence and the tools to get comfortable with making those customer connections.
Fiona Challis: Sales Guru?
Well, she’s cringing at the guru bit but she is obsessed with sales!
She’s been working in the industry since the age of 18, hiring out stands at the Ideal Home Exhibition and selling nail care kits and bronzing powder and travelling Europe “making a fortune selling and staying in nice hotels”, before settling down to a “proper job” with Yellow Pages.
It didn’t take her long to become one of their best new business sales reps and she was soon asked to train up their new employees. As her reputation for sales training spread, she was headhunted by McAfee where she worked as a sales manager tasked with turning around an underperforming sales team before becoming European Sales Director.
She loved her time with McAfee but decided that the corporate world didn’t mix too well with motherhood and school runs, and so she set up the Next Gen Sales Academy.
Focus on Serving, Not Selling
While Fiona always thrived on the challenging nature of sales, she loves how the industry has evolved and is keen to point out that it’s no longer about the ruthless sales person who’s more concerned with doing deals than serving customers.
“Today sales is actually more of a nurturing, relationship building exercise. It’s about keeping customers for life rather than just winning the deal.”
Fiona appreciates that sales is a difficult topic for a lot of MSP owners — many of them would go so far as to say that it’s the one aspect of their business they truly hate. But she believes that reframing how we view sales is the way to learn to love the process.
“It’s not really a hard-faced sales game in the channel anymore, especially in the MSP business. It’s actually more about being a business consultant.”
For existing MSPs sales has become more of a business conversation. That’s how I get a lot of them to turn around, by showing them that it’s not where it used to be. You don’t have to close really hard, you don’t have to overcome lots of objections. You just need to figure out the right customer for your business and talk to them about how technology can help them achieve their business goals.”
She believes that MSPs have a real advantage there because of their technical knowledge. She points out that resellers and VARs who are moving into the MSP space don’t have that luxury; “they have to learn to be a little bit more techie and have to talk more about business outcomes and how to lead with business insights.”
Fiona believes that the people who achieve real success in the MSP industry these days are the ones who serve rather than sell.
The Biggest Sales Challenge For MSPs
The biggest challenge facing the MSPs that Fiona speaks to is winning and retaining new business.
Many of them started growing their business through word of mouth recommendations, which was fine when the market was less saturated than it is today, but now, “with so many reseller VARs moving into the MSP space, it’s become really competitive and it’s no longer good enough just to rely on getting business from referrals.”
So now they have to develop a sales and marketing strategy to win and retain new business and many find it a struggle because they don’t feel comfortable going out to pitch for new business.
“They think, ‘I don’t want to be a salesperson’, and that’s the hardest thing to get them to overcome. But actually today they’re not a salesperson, they’re a business partner. Customers don’t want a sales pitch, they don’t want features and benefits and a hard sell.
All you have to do is learn how to be a really good trusted business partner and help your customers solve tomorrow’s problems today. And a lot of the time, when they realize what the role of sales is to MSPs today, they actually get really excited about selling.”
Tapping into your natural desire to help people really changes the sales conversation and makes it all a lot more fun.
Growing Your Confidence With NLP
One of the techniques that Fiona swears by to help MSPs grow their confidence when having these sales conversations is NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming.
She explains; “I integrate NLP into every part of my training. The easiest way to describe NLP is it’s a way of changing your fears. So for example, I used to be absolutely petrified of presenting. I would literally sweat, my hands would be sweaty, I’d be shaking — I was terrified.
And all of a sudden the thing that I feared the most — public speaking — is now something I do for a living and that is because of NLP. That’s why I’m so passionate about it. I know that when I use NLP techniques I can quickly put myself into a state where I’m confident; I’m on stage and I’m really enjoying it. It’s almost like it gives you the ability to flip a switch, turning on a state of total confidence.”
And that’s how Fiona uses the technique to help business owners, especially ones whose confidence has taken a knock, to make more sales. She helps them find ways to flick that confidence switch.
The Next Gen Sales Academy
With so many demands on her time, Fiona found that she wasn’t able to share her techniques and her sales training with as many MSPs, resellers and VARS as she’d like, which prompted her to launch the Next Gen Sales Academy.
“The channel is going through such a transformation at the moment. There’s just so much change with technology evolving the way it is, and with changes to buyer behaviour. They’re finding it really tough. Some people who used to be really good at selling products are barely hitting target. So I actually set the academy up because I needed to find a way to be able to quickly help as many people in the channel as I could.
There’s only one of me and I can’t get around every MSP so the online academy, with the mix of online training and live web classes, was the best way to do it.
We use it to retrain all existing people in the channel to give them a chance to get ready for modern day selling. And we want to use it for new starters too, on-boarding new people into MSP businesses and teaching reseller VARs who want to transition to the MSP model.”
The Next Gen Sales Academy system has nine core sales training modules for you to work through to equip yourself for modern day selling, teaching key techniques like storytelling for businesses. Fiona also brings experts in every month to run specific practical sessions (like Richard’s session on “How to move from break-fix and selling time for money to selling profitable managed service contracts”) and there are weekly live training events with advice on things you can implement immediately to start generating more sales for the week ahead.
“At the end of your first quarter on the Academy we have a face-to-face workshop and we certify people by giving them a full certificate of being Next Gen ready. It’s kind of like a transformation journey that we take them through.”
It’s an incredible programme and Fiona can hardly believe the success it’s had so far.
“It’s bigger than I even imagined it would be because we’ve now formed a lovely community of the top channel sales professionals that are out there, and everybody’s really supporting and helping each other. And it’s so weird because traditionally partners from different sales teams, would have been competing with each other but we have these events together and everybody supports each other and gives each other advice as to what’s working, what’s not working. It’s turned into a really great community.”
Fiona’s Top Tip for Getting Stuff Done
With so much going on, you have to wonder how Fiona manages to fit it all in.
For her, the secret is another NLP technique: breaking things into more manageable chunks.
Fiona knows that sometimes the sheer scale of what you want to achieve is enough to knock your confidence but by breaking things into smaller chunks you can overcome the fear and start working towards you goals.
With that in mind, Fiona is launching a 90-day sales challenge for Q4, which, for many of us, is often the busiest time of year. “This is where we literally hold people’s hands and give everyone in the channel a superb amount of support and help just to make sure that they’re able to get pipeline and sales results in every week so that they can make 2019 the best year yet — and to make sure they’re ready for 2020.
I want to help as many channel sales people as possible to smash their Q4 number and be ready for 2020!”
Find out more about Fiona’s 90-day sales challenge and everything else she has going on in the Next Gen Sales Academy here.
Mentioned in This Episode
Next Gen Sales Academy
CRN Conference
Mentori Program
Connect With Me
Subscribe to TubbTalk RSS feed
Subscribe, rate and review TubbTalk in iTunes
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Subscribe and rate TubbTalk on Spotify
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Follow @tubblog on Twitter
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The post How to do Awesome MSP Sales – TubbTalk #59 appeared first on Richard Tubb.
November 1, 2019
Dark Sky – Hyper Local Weather Information
How can you use Hyper Local Weather information to keep you dry? 
If you’ve ever left the house or office without your umbrella, and a few minutes later get soaked by the rain, then you’ll know it’s a frustrating and soggy experience!
Every Friday I share one of my favourite finds of the week — a website, tool or an app that has impressed me.
My Friday Favourite this week is Dark Sky – Hyper Local Weather Information.
How much does it cost?
Dark Sky is free to use.
How can Hyper Local Weather Info help you?
Dark Sky is an app that you can use on Android and iOS smartphones, tablets and wearable devices.
It does one thing – keep you updated on your local weather reports – and it does it really, really well.
The term “hyperlocal” means a small geographic area — your village, suburb or estate.
The Dark Sky app uses to-the-minute weather forecasts to notify you when it will start — and stop — raining. How can this help you? Well, Dark Sky can let you know when to pack an umbrella or postpone your trip accordingly. It’s really useful!
I have been really surprised at how accurate Dark Sky is for me. I love to hold regular walking meetings, and Dark Sky has notified me of impending rain with a high degree of accuracy.
If you want to stay dry when you go outside (which is especially a challenge for us Brits!) then Dark Sky can help.
How can I get it?
Visit the Dark Sky homepage to download Dark Sky for iOS and Android.
You can also follow @DarkSkyApp on Twitter.
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The post Dark Sky – Hyper Local Weather Information appeared first on Richard Tubb.
October 28, 2019
Performance Monitoring for MSPs – TubbTalk #58
Join Richard as he talks to Mark Banfield, Chief Revenue Officer of LogicMonitor, 
a SaaS platform that provides automated hybrid infrastructure monitoring and analytics. Mark talks about the role of performance monitoring for MSPs who want to grow their business, increase efficiency and improve all-round customer experience.
An Interview With Mark Banfield
Mark first found himself in the MSP space back in 2011 when his former boss, Mark Cattini, who had become CEO of Autotask the previous year, encouraged him to jump on board and kick-start Autotask’s first European branch.
He found that he loved working with the very community-driven MSP market and he helped grow the business to the point where they could boast multiple UK sites as well as bases in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Munich, Singapore and Sydney.
Mark first became aware of LogicMonitor through his work with Autotask — he was so excited by the technology they were using that moving over to LogicMonitor seemed an obvious choice. He describes it as a hugely exciting space to work in, “we’re in an absolutely phenomenal market — it’s a critical time for enterprises as well as for Managed Service Providers.”
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Monitoring has always been important for any organisation, but never more so than now. Mark considers the last 10 years to be the Fourth Industrial Revolution — every aspect of every business has become digitised. Every aspect of the customer journey is becoming digitised. And as such, every company in the world is effectively becoming a software company.
“What that means is that the infrastructure that runs these services, these applications that every company in the world is using, is critical. You cannot have downtime.”
He cites banking as an example. The days that you’d go into your bank and know the staff by name are long gone. Now with internet banking and mobile banking, the way we interact with banking services has completely changed. It’s vital to monitor the infrastructure that underpins these interactions “because if you can’t log on to your internet banking, you’re not going to stay with that bank for long.” He continues, “I don’t think monitoring has ever been more important than now. An outage for an organisation can be catastrophic, not only in terms of lost revenue and frustrated customers but from a PR perspective too.”
LogicMonitor’s focus is preventing such disasters by enabling organisations to better monitor their infrastructure, whether it’s based in the cloud or it’s traditional infrastructure on an organisation’s premises. They work on everything from monitoring an airline’s baggage handling systems, checking system and flight control systems to a global healthcare service provider’s MRI scanners and heart rate monitors.
Monitoring and MSPs
Mark appreciates that effectively monitoring practices are particularly important to MSPs, who represent a rapidly growing section of LogicMonitor’s market — “their infrastructure is inherently very hybrid. As they are innovating they’re becoming more agile, shifting to the cloud, starting to embrace cloud transformation, using AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure…they have to be able to rapidly innovate and launch new applications. But they still have to look after a very diverse and very complex range of servers, server infrastructure, virtualised environments, storage, etc.”
LogicMonitor is a SaaS-based platform that can help MSPs monitor any new environment, identify any issues and their root causes more quickly and prevent these issues from occurring in the first place.
Mark reassures us that there is no end to what you can monitor with a platform: “That’s really part of the uniqueness of it — if anything has any kind of IP connection, we can monitor it. And we can collect metrics and start to identify the health of that service. Where MSPs are looking after an organisation’s infrastructure, we’re helping those MSPs proactively monitor and maintain those environments for their customers. If you can minimise the amount of time you need to spend in terms of looking after systems, that’s critical to MSPs.”
“Imagine an MSP is bringing in a new customer and they can turn on and monitor that customer’s environment in a matter of minutes. They can deploy the agents, the collectors; they can start getting metrics on the health of their customer’s environment immediately…that becomes really compelling from a sales point of view for an MSP. They can start to show results to their customers very quickly and when you’re selling a service, that’s critical.”
LogicMonitor have solved another one of the common problems facing MSPs. “If you want to extend monitoring capacity and want to monitor a new environment — maybe it’s a new server environment, or a new network environment — we have a team of people that are constantly going in and out and working out environments and building monitoring capabilities to monetise their environment. So out of the box, you can pretty much monitor everything you need. We have in the region of about 5000 different monitoring packs for all different types of environments, all different types of devices. And those are available in a kind of store we call the LM exchange. Again it’s all about allowing MSPs to provide a better service to their customers and reducing their cost of ownership in terms of monitoring.”
“For me, that’s what managed services is all about: serving the customer while lowering your cost of support.”
Planning For Tomorrow with Monitoring
When it comes to troubleshooting, many MSPs are still locked into the reactive mindset; they wait for a problem to come along and then get to fixing it. But one of the main benefits of LogicMonitor’s work, Mark says, is the ability to help MSPs and their clients plan for tomorrow.
“One of the aspects of our platform that’s quite unique is a part of what we call LogicMonitor (or LM) Server Insights. We group together the entire underlying infrastructure that makes up part of a service and look at it from a service viewpoint. So effectively, we can almost like a traffic light system, identify whether or not a service is healthy. There could be many different parts of the infrastructure that’s causing an issue and we can pinpoint them really quickly. This allows MSPs to become really, really productive.”
Monitoring can also help with future planning as it relates to growth. When it comes to expanding infrastructure, advance visibility is key and LogicMonitor can help identify future capacity needs and put certain measures in place to help MSPs and their customers identify where they need to focus when expanding their business.
“We have amazing dashboards, and we can show the data and say, ‘look, we need to buy additional capacity or additional storage, or whatever it might be and here’s the data showing that you’re going to need it in the next three to six months.”
And that’s exactly what progressive MSPs should be doing: not just solving issues as they crop up but opening up revenue opportunities, performance monitoring, and proactively helping customers increase productivity. This, in turn, helps MSPs create better customer connections and increased customer loyalty.
Security From the LogicMonitor Perspective
With MSPs having been in the news rather a lot lately with ransomware strikes and having been targeted by criminals as being the gatekeepers to their customers’ networks, Mark was eager to talk about security from the LogicMonitor perspective.
“We take security very seriously. We host our platforms in the top-rated data centres in the world and have a very stringent security process. We have various accreditations in place that we need from a SaaS perspective to be able to provide our services. One thing that actually helps our MSPs from a security standpoint is our integration with the likes of ServiceNow and ConnectWise and having such a breadth of coverage in terms of what we can monitor.
Being able to pull up all of that device information into assembly is critical. Because if I’m an MSP, how can I protect customers from cyber crime if I don’t know everything that’s in the network, if I don’t have visibility and control of every configuration item. If I can’t see it, I can’t mitigate the risk; I don’t know what’s going to happen with it.
So we’re very strong from a security perspective, but we also enable MSPs themselves to be able to be more security conscious and provide better security for their customers in terms of visibility and the ability to monitor everything in their customers’ environments.”
What’s Next for LogicMonitor?
Mark’s excited about a number of strategic initiatives in LogicMonitor’s future — one of which is their dedicated MSP programme. The programme focuses on bringing MSPs onto the platform, and giving them dedicated MSP account managers to not only help them understand and get value from it, but also to give them the right tools and techniques to sell it better and so help them grow their own business, as they grow customers’ businesses.
“Every person in the company is focused on questions like how can we delight our customers? How do we provide value to the customer? How do we ensure that we continually provide the best possible service and the best possible products to our customers and ensure that they are getting the most value they can? This year we established our first ever user conference and we’ve called it a lab because we’re really looking at how MSPs, as well as other enterprises, can take the level up and start to use monitoring to make their businesses perform better.”
In 2020, look out for some on-the-road style versions of the LogicMonitor conference, where the focus will be on building the community and talking to and learning from customers.
Visit the LogicMonitor website where you can also request a guided free trial.
Mentioned in This Episode
LogicMonitor
ConnectWise
Autotask
ServiceNow
AWS
Microsoft Azure
Google Cloud
Connect With Me
Subscribe to TubbTalk RSS feed
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Subscribe, rate and review TubbTalk on Stitcher Radio
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Follow TubbTalk on iHeartRadio
Follow @tubblog on Twitter
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The post Performance Monitoring for MSPs – TubbTalk #58 appeared first on Richard Tubb.
October 24, 2019
SimpleExtManager – Google Chrome Extension Manager
Let me see if you need a Chrome Extension Manager.
Do you suffer from extension overload in your Google Chrome web-browser? Ever had to turn every single extension off… one by one… for troubleshooting? Then turn them all back on… one by one… afterwards?
I feel your pain.
Every Friday I share one of my favourite finds of the week — a website, tool or an app that has impressed me.
My Friday Favourite this week is SimpleExtManager – Google Chrome Extension Manager.
How much does it cost?SimpleExtManager is free to download and use.
The Google Chrome Extension Manager… Extension?!
If you’re anything like me, you use a ton of Google Chrome extensions to help me do things faster and more effectively.
The challenge with using so many extensions is that they can be a pain to manage, and too many extensions turn Chrome into a bloated, Jabba The Hut style hog, gobbling up all your resources.
SimpleExtManager is a Chrome extension that allows you to manage all your other extensions easily.
It pops a single icon into your Chrome toolbar, from which you can — with one-click — individually (or in bulk) turn on and off your other Google Chrome extensions.
It’s an absolute dream for troubleshooting, and for quickly accessing those extensions that you only use one in a blue-moon (such as Chrono Download Manager) without having to dig into menu after menu.
You can also group together extensions and turn them on or off with a single click. I use this to use specific extensions on different computers — for instance, I use TunnelBear VPN and TextExpander on my Chromebook but not on my other PCs. SimpleExtManager allows me to quickly swap extensions depending on the machine I’m using.
How can I get it?
You can install SimpleExtManager from the Chrome Web Store.
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The post SimpleExtManager – Google Chrome Extension Manager appeared first on Richard Tubb.
October 22, 2019
Are you Babysitting your Staff? – TubbTalk #57
In this episode I talk to someone I’ve been really interested in speaking to for some time, Peter Melby, CEO of Greystone Technologies an MSP in Denver, Colorado. Greystone has experienced 50 straight quarters of growth.
Peter is one of the most quoted MSP owners and with good reason. His views on building a self driven or accountable team are some of the most spot on observations I’ve ever heard.
An Interview With Peter Melby
Greystone Technology is an MSP based in Denver, Colorado with about 90 staff. When he was 17, Peter dropped out of his college degree in Business and Computer science and got a job in IT, before launching Greystone Technology. His lack of experience and formal education coming into this business, was both a blessing and a curse, providing challenges but also a different perspective on the industry in comparison to many other MSPs.
The barrier to entry with MSPs is very low, but growing them is really hard. Scaling them is another matter altogether. At Greystone the focus was on looking at the MSP from the perspective of what the market really needs. Every year Greystone reviews what place in the market they are occupying. What would the market be missing if they were no longer around. MSPs should be filling different spaces.
By the time Peter was in his mid 20s he an offer to buy his MSP for a million dollars plus, but that made him realise that what he had was worth something and he wasn’t ready to give that up. So he turned it down and still runs it to this day. Greystone have reinvented some wheels that we probably didn’t need reinventing, but their success is based largely on that perspective of the industry. They are constantly trying to turn things around and move the industry forward.
One of the main reasons Greystone has thrived, is due to Peter’s attitude towards the people within his business.
People are hard: How to Build a Self-Driven Team
One of the quotes I love from Peter is:
“People are hard”
I used to manage people, and it is difficult. But Peter seems to have come across a formula, or a way of managing people and building a team that is just incredible, and brings out the best in people. So what does it take?
For Peter, it took a lot of failing at first. But the thing he continually came back to was the idea that we have to understand human nature in order to really understand how to motivate. So many of our mindsets and processes are based on really simple influence mechanics. Understanding what makes people tick is the lost art of company culture right now. Yes, people are hard, there is no getting around the fact that people are complex, and we all need people in our business, at least until AI robots take over.
What businesses end up trying to do to combat this is to create a culture that has nothing to do with the work at all. When people talk about company culture, they talk about their office layout, they talk about the keg of beer in the fridge, the table soccer table or that they have a ping pong, or a great benefits packages, unlimited vacations, all these things. But all that is doing is hitting the snooze button on the inevitable culture failure. It’s not what is necessary to be a top performing organisation. Buying people beer is only going to work for a little while, until they wake up and say: ‘oh wait, the work sucks’.
They will realise the problem is with the core job, and all those benefits aren’t changing that. So Peter realised that they can’t build a culture that expects their employees to be selfless, or expect their employees to not be entirely self focused. In understanding that and just recognising, and looking at people at face value, the disconnects in the typical corporate structure and typical corporate processes start to unwind.
A really interesting comparison between a good and bad culture is Uber vs. Google. Uber was highlighted for having a dismal employee retention at 1.23 years on average. In comparison, Google has always been held up as the standard of culture. But their average tenure is 1.8 years. This is really fascinating, because it’s not all that different. So really it’s about figuring out why people are quitting and how to stem that tide rather than creating a culture of benefits.
What Companies Want vs. What Employees Want
So how can you build a successful company culture?
Peter had been quoted saying:
“Every company culture succumbs to the law of human nature”
This summarises what Peter was saying, in that people do things for their own reasons. And the challenge is that when we see that and when we start to understand that, we don’t have a very good view of humanity. When we look at the human nature of our employees, oftentimes, we only see the disconnection between what a company wants and what an employee wants. A company sees employees who want money, but don’t want to do any work. They gossip, they don’t follow through, they’re not accountable, and we have all of these things where managers will point back to challenges in human nature, that humans are naturally lazy and self focussed.
But on the flip side, when you look at what employees think about their companies, they think they just want to make a bunch of money, while the employees do all the work.
Both employees and companies view of each other is very similar. When you dig into the core of who people are, we all kind of want the same thing. To be seen and known and accepted. To make more money, to improve our standing and to better ourselves. People want to take risks, but they want to know that they’re safe. That’s what separates the entrepreneur from the employees, the willingness to take that risk and not have a safety net.
So that’s what we need to provide. We need to allow our employees to own who they are, while at the same time providing a safety net and boundaries. When we embrace that we start to realise that we are not disconnected with our employees. But that’s a hard thing to embed in an organisation.
What is Directed Autonomy?
Peter talks about directed autonomy. But, what is that?
Autonomy is misunderstood in so many spaces. Autonomy is more than hiring someone smart and just letting them run with it and expecting them to know what to do. It doesn’t work like that. A process and oversight is necessary. Autonomy doesn’t mean freedom. Autonomy is where freedom meets accountability and purpose. Employees need an understanding of where they are going in order to be autonomous and to work with autonomy. And for most people what unlocks autonomy is boundaries. It gives them ownership over a situation, but it still gives companies the ability to steer the larger ship. It’s amazing how people make great decisions when they don’t have to consider every aspect of something.
United Airlines is a good example of this. Most of us remember that story from a couple of years back when they dragged that passenger off the plane. And you know they lost a lot of value in their stock. People were asking how a company could do that. But actually the issue was they did absolutely everything exactly as their processes stated, with no deviation. The last step in the process for disruptive passengers was to call airport security. And so that’s what United Airlines staff did, and it was an airport security officer who dragged the passenger off the plane. Yet, United Airlines name and value still got dragged through the mud. All because they followed strict processes with no parametres. The employees had no autonomy.
Another example from United Airlines involves a change around in their policy and processes for holding flights for connecting passengers. Employees were now allowed to hold the flight as long as the departing plane was still going to arrive within it’s time frame at the destination. Staff have saved thousands of connections already, all because they were given the autonomy to do so and boundaries within which to operate. The reality is, when you give people the ability to make those decisions, they do something with it and generally they go the right direction.
How to Motivate Staff and Improve Productivity
As a manager, owner or founder, the more you babysit, the more you need to babysit. The worry for MSP owners is that if they leave people to get on with it, they won’t deliver, so they’ve got to babysit. It’s a vicious circle.
As soon as people don’t trust people, they act untrustworthy. Employees end up becoming dependant on companies in a miserable way if they aren’t trusted and aren’t treated with respect.
The hardest lesson for business owners is that they need to trust first rather than waiting for proof that they can trust. They need to recognise that leap is a lot safer than it seems like if it’s set it up in the right ways.
Performance Management: How to Give Autonomy and Show Direction
How do you give people autonomy, yet show them direction in order to manage their performance?
The recruitment process is based on lies. We’re only showing our best side, both as employees and companies. You’re not talking about you challenges and flaws. It’s a sales pitch and it’s never going to be different than that.
One of the things Greystone emphasises when they hire someone is that, some days they will not want to be there. Even if it’s their dream job. In the beginning everything seems phenomenal, but eventually there will be the realisation moments. Maybe the employee will realise that the job isn’t perfect. And Greystone will realise that they didn’t hire a perfect employee, but an actual human being. When this is recognised we can begin to pick apart that traditional performance management processes are completely misguided. Annual performance reviews, things like that, we don’t get to where we want to go with those things. There are so many elements that need to be considered in order to have continuous performance management and continuous employee engagement.
It all comes down to this. Employees want to know where they stand, they want clear feedback and they want to get better. But they also have a really important part to play, as most know where their own challenges lie. It’s about how this feedback is presented. If it’s confrontational and direct, the employees may close up and become defensive which is very natural.
But, if instead we ask employees: ‘Hey, what are you working on to improve?’, ‘What are you trying to get better at?’, you start to get honest answers. It’s amazing how much employees already know what they are failing at and where they are falling short.
Greystone has built a process, a consistent monthly process of engagement between leaders and employees to ask them that question. To find out what they are working on to improve, and then be very direct in return with what they feel the employee needs to improve on. This strikes a balance with criticism so that it’s not demoralising and the employees can make consistent process.
“Steve Jobs is Full of S**t”
Peter once said:
“Steve Jobs is full of S**t”
What did he mean by that?
Peter says there is a quote going around LinkedIn that is attributed to Steve Jobs that says:
“We don’t hire smart people to tell us or to tell them what to do. We hire smart people, so they can tell us what to do.”
Safe to say, Peter doesn’t agree. Steve Jobs never got told what to do. He told everyone what to do, and exactly how things had to be. That might not be the best management methodology. But smart people don’t do what we need them to do just because they are smart. Anyone who’s run an MSP knows this because oftentimes, it’s our smartest people, technically, that need the most direction in other aspects of what they’re doing. Working with clients, the bedside manner, the business knowledge, the business case for things. It’s not about how smart we are, it’s about how impactful we are, how influential, how much value we can bring in a situation and value is not just technical. And so, there is no such thing as just let a smart person go and they’ll automatically go the right direction. They still need to be managed.
What Are Millennials Like As Employees?
If there is one subset of employees that get a bad reputation it’s millennials. They are sort of demonised in the MSP industry. One thing I often hear is that millenials talk about the fact that they want to do meaningful work. But what I hear from MSP owners, is that they can’t get the basics right. And this is a real bone of contention for the generation above.
Peter suggests that the criticisms of the emerging workforce and upcoming generations around lack of loyalty, lack of care about those basics and lack of work ethic are all unfortunate stereotypes. It’s understandable why they have perpetuated the way that they have and we love to compartmentalise things because it makes it easier for us to think about them.
Millennials are the most external self confident workforce ever, but the most inwardly self conscious work force ever. The reality is, millenials have work ethic if you connect to them as real people and are very clean upfront about what is expected. If an employee shows up and is presented the basics, the non negotiables, and they know from day one, or better yet, through the hiring process, it gives the company a tremendous advantage because we’ve interrupted any notion that this is an option. So while we do give autonomy, there is also a basic set of non negotiable rules and boundaries. Once we have that decided, then we can build on top of all this other meaningful, exciting work.
As different as we are, these are the core things that we’ve recognised, are foundational to what we’re doing.
How to Set Expectations With Existing Employees
That is one of the hardest things. It’s very hard to change someone’s habits. If you don’t change their environment in some way, if everything stays the same but you expect their behaviour to change it probably won’t work. You’ve got to get creative. Rearrange the office or move office. Reset the environment. You can’t do this every time you need to make a change, but we shouldn’t underestimate the benefit that it can have.
How Can We Help Our Employees Learn?
Peter told a story of when he was in Vegas, a couple of years ago. He went there with the best intentions of being healthy and so went for a run a couple of miles up the strip. While he was out he saw two large cars sitting in traffic lights.. A large SUV was sitting in front of a small SUV. The lights changed to green, but the large SUV did not move. So the driver in the small car honked his horn pretty persistently, but the large SUV still wasn’t moving. So, the driver in back rolled down his window yells at the driver ahead of him and is very agitated. Next thing, the driver of the small SUV rolls down his sunroof and launches an iced coffee at the car in front of him. It goes all over the car and hits a man in a wheelchair, who was stuck on the kerb in front of the large SUV, hence the hold up. Most of the time it takes years to see someones perspective change on something. But Peter saw the moment this man in the small car realised what was happening, how he had misunderstood the situation and obviously the utter shame that followed.
So how does this relate to employees and how they think of themselves and learn?
Nothing could ever have been said to the man in the small SUV that would have made him learn his lesson better. No one needed to ask him if he had learnt the lesson. And in fact if anyone had, he would probably have closed up and gotten angry. But his perspective will be changed forever. It’s an extreme example. But employees are like that in so many ways. We can guide them and coach them, but we don’t have to be the director in every lesson that they learned.
The State of the Current MSP Market
So many of the challenges that MSPs face comes back to people, and the focus on people at Greystone is because this is a people business 100%. People use technology, we are enabling people, we are enabling so many aspects of how people operate and I think that one of the shifts that we’ve seen recently is that technology used to be simple but hard to manage.
Everyone had a Microsoft server or multiple Microsoft servers, everybody had Windows desktops, everything was on premise, you needed an IT department to run it. But it wasn’t hard to make any decisions, because everybody had the same general systems.
Now, the technology is easy. You don’t need an IT department to go sign up for Office 365, to sign up for Salesforce, to choose a system but it’s very complicated because how all these platforms work together. The shadow IT that exists in organisations is such a security threat and just an overall business efficiency threat. The MSP market is still trying to manage this, like technicians would manage it, instead of recognising our bigger play in this is how we help organisations operate in a new technical ecosystem. We’re working on the edges of that a little bit just to try to define some things differently but the IT department in the future is far less specifically deeply technical, and far more organisational embedded and organisationally connected.
We use the word context a lot. Good idea people solve problems, but great IT people know what problem they’re solving. That is the difference between where we have been and where we need to go. It’s understanding that deeper context and being able to do something with it
Want to get in touch with Peter? You’ll find all of his contact details in the show notes.
Mentioned In This Episode
Quotes
“People are hard”
“Every company culture succumbs to the law of human nature”
“The more you babysit, the more you need to babysit”
“Steves Job is full of s**t”
“Good idea people solve problems, but great IT people know what problem they are solving”
Contact Peter
Connect with Me
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October 21, 2019
Compliance as a Service for MSPs – TubbTalk #56
In this week’s interview I’m speaking with a good friend, and CEO of Keepabl, Robert Baugh. Keepabl is an award winning service solution that solves GDPR headaches for organisations. For MSPs, it really helps them to accelerate their revenue and reduce data risk.
An Interview with Robert Baugh
Robert was previously General Counsel and Director of VC backed growth SaaS companies, when he decided he wanted to start an MSP in compliance. We met when he was scouting Totally MSP and other events to see what launching an MSP involved, what the state of the market was and what issue MSPs were facing. After completing an Engineering Economics and Management Masters degree and then cross qualifying as a lawyer, he naturally gravitated towards technology law. This lead to joining a start-up called LoopUp, before being head hunted to another company. In his roles, Robert recruited MSP providers to help out with the aspects of technology that they needed done quickly. And he wanted to run one.
There is this great article about your start-up superpower. And Robert felt that that was missing in the industry. He wasn’t feeling any real synergy or electricity with MSPs. It wasn’t until an event in 2017, when everyone was talking about GDPR. All the MSPs customers were asking them about GDPR. They knew the processes, the data and the security. But they were scared of it. There were SaaS providers out there, but they were just too complicated, they were created for specialists. Robert knew he could create something that turned the complex into the simple. Not because MSPs couldn’t understand the complex. But because they already had so much on their plate. That is the superpower of Keepabl. At that is the point Robert switched from wanting to be an MSP, to a vendor for MSPs.
What is Keepabl?
So, what is Keepabl and what does it do?
Robert explains, that the ‘why’ of Keepabl is to joyfully use technology to solve people’s problems and make them feel happier. That’s what’s at the core of Keepabl. Their aim is to build out the salesforce.com or compliance effectively.
Full disclosure I’m an advisor to Keepabl and the reason is that it’s a beautiful product. It’s sophisticated and simple to use and those are words I never thought I’d say in relation to GDPR. But it is, and it absolutely fill the need that MSPs have with GDPR. And I can see so much opportunity going forward. The dislike that people feel towards GDPR, is the exact opportunity that makes Keepabl great. It makes people excited about GDPR.
Keepabl & GDPR Compliance
So, let’s look at those two things in tandem. We started by understanding that GDPR was a complex issue, something that scared most MSPs. Robert put a global company, LoopUp, though ISO 2710, and had felt like he was banging his head against a wall. But once it was done, it all clicked into place. The problem with compliance was that there is so much to understand and people just don’t have the time to take it on and learn it. They need someone else to take care of it for them.
Keepabl joins these two things. It joyfully uses tech to help solve the complexity of GDPR. MSPs know they need to deal with it, they know they’re going to be asked about it. They know they have warranties within their current contracts surrounding compliance. And they knew their customers were going to want help with it to. But it’s such a big and ambiguous topic. And this is where Keepabl comes in. The Keepabl system is incredibly comprehensive, and yet really, really simple. It does a lot of the heavy lifting in the background without you having to do any of the work. You just need to fill in a few things and it creates all of your reports. One of the great Keepabl features is the is the breach model. If you have a breach, you can enter them into Keepabl to keep a record, which is then sent to the MSP so that they can rapidly contain it.
What is GDPR?
Let’s rewind a little. We’ve mentioned GDPR quite a lot. And it’s been a few years now since GDPR has become a buzzword. And most people will have heard of it. But what is GDPR in layman’s terms?
GDPR is the ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ from the EU. It’s general as it applies to every single business, no matter what you do and no matter what you are doing with personal data. It’s not like, for example, HIPPA, which only applies to health information.
The data protection is not technical in the way that MSPs are used for making sure there is no leakage of data on email or, encryption and security, although this security is fundamental. But, the data protection is with regard to protecting the rights of individuals and their personal data. It’s the general law for everybody, covering everybody, whenever you’re touching personal data about people, using any information that could identify that person. And it’s directly applicable law in every single member state of the EU.
GDPR has overhauled the data protection laws which have been in place for over 20 years, and it put the individual and their rights front and centre. They have rights to access and erase their data. And the ‘right to be forgotten’ by any company that holds their data.
The fines that go along with GDPR have the potential to be huge. And so regulating the data and ensuring the risks are mitigated are highly important.
Even though it applies to all EU member states, it has already been decided that if (when) the UK leaves the EU we will still maintain the GDPR law. It will just change from an EU to a UK law. This means that in future, there will potentially be the need to comply with two lasts (the UK and EU) if you need to transfer data from the EU to the UK or vice versa in your MSP.
Requirements for GDPR in MSPs
MSPs need information security policies. And they need data protection policies. GDPR is a live thing for MSPs. Particularly if they deal with regulated industries such as health or finance sector. But it works both ways. Not only do they need to have both good GDPR practices themselves, but they also need to be able to provide the same thing to their customers.
Cisco did a study in Jan 2018 and February 2019. Both figures showed that 87% of businesses have a sales delay due to privacy concerns. That delay can be reduced by up to 40% if the MSP is GDPR compliant. On average, the sales delay is 5 and a half weeks. So if you can reduce a five and a half week sales delay by 40% just by easily showing compliance, what kind of impact would that have on your business? Being compliant, and being able to prove it, also reduces your risk of data breach and the same Cisco study showed that there is a 42% reduction in the chance of you having a data breach that costs you over half a million dollars in 12 months if you are GDPR compliant. Not only is the risk of breach reduced, but because you’ve complied with GDPR and reviewed your data practices the cost of the number of data records breached are reduced, the downtime is significantly reduced and therefore the cost is reduced. So GDPR is very much about managing that risk, ensuring business continuity and managing not just the financial part, but the PR aspects and the contractual impacts on customer wins.
There is a crossover here between GDPR compliance in general and cyber security. Although they are not the same thing. They go hand in hand. So for MSPs, when trying to describe to them their requirements with GDPR and what their customers are going to expect of them, data security, cyber security and the wider information security arena is often mentioned. Their clients are going to turn to them for advice on all of this. This is where Keepabl comes in.
How Does Keepabl Help MSPs to Keep Their Clients Safe?
GDPR is not a technology law. It’s a data protection law. Security is fundamental to GDPR. But it’s about 15% of GDPR.
There is a whole load of other stuff about GDPR that need to be there apart from security. They are like siblings, they go very well together. Two thirds of breaches reported to the UK ICO are not about security. It’s more about cultural stuff such as disclosure of data, and people sending the wrong email. Not about failure of technology.
So security itself is not purely a technology job. It’s a consulting job and MSPs are starting to offer more and more. There is a responsibility to advise your customer to implement and to understand that security is fundamental to everything. And it’s the same with data protection. By providing both security by design and privacy by design MSPs can look after customers more holistically, build on the trusted advisor relationship and not only get more of the customers purse, but also by offering this, they are securing the customers relationship.
What is Privacy as a Service?
Robert coined (or at least popularised) the term ‘compliance as a service’. The most progressive MSPs jump upon compliance or privacy as a service for all the reasons that you’ve mentioned. And whether or not MSPs clients ask for this, they are going to need it. So many MSPs are offering higher revenue based packages to look after compliance for them. We are seeing MSPs that are using Keepabl going down that route, they are offering the essential compliance services as well as lowering the overall cost of support.
How Can Keepabl Help an MSP Do This?
Keepabl is the app that they’ve been looking for to simplify GDPR. Not only does it allow them to take control of their own GDPR, but it also helps them manage relationships with customers. They can offer training, and policy packs, plus procedures and templates. The software can be used as a service that give you real visualisation and gamification of your KPIs, shows you where you are, where your gaps are and when we get you to 100% you can use it to show people that, but more importantly we can use it to drive ongoing compliance. So the MSP can offer the managed service role in compliance as a service on a nice recurring revenue basis, using Keepabl as the platform. MSPs can actually start selling and pushing the services that often clients pushed back on before.
GDPR as a Sales Tool
In my opinion, GDPR is the best sales tool that has come along for MSPs in forever.
Backup and disaster recovery is a classic. Beforehand customers weren’t sure of the legal obligation. Did they need it? Was it necessary? Or was it just good practice. But now, with GDPR there is an obligation to have appropriate security measures in place to make sure you protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the information. If you don’t have good backup and disaster recover you are not meeting GDPR obligations.
GDPR gives those conversations that urgency. This is why Keepabl is such a powerful platform. And why it’s so important to the future of managed services as I believe that is along the lines of MSPS helping companies with their business processes and that includes compliance.
The Future of Managed Services and the Role of Compliance
Margins are being squeezed for small, local MSPs who’s customers are going direct to the cloud to get the services from there instead of via an MSP. The MSPs ability to show value to the customer is difficult, as a lot of what they have done is invisible. So, how can MSPs move away from the traditional model? With the move to the cloud, MSPs are moving into security services and compliance as it has a higher margin. GDPR is the next aspect of that. People will pay for the security aspect, plus they want things to be ‘taken care of’ for them. When customers question GDPR policies, MSPs using Keepabl can ensure the customer continually has really great answers to give those customers and those auditors.
So What’s Next for Keepabl?
Keepabl is allowing MSPs to sell compliance as a service, which allows them to take really high value recurring revenue. I’ll just finish up by saying, if you’re not having those conversations with your clients, with your prospects, your competitors, it will be something that you cannot ignore. Whatever you reaction to GDPR, it is an opportunity as an MSP. We certainly have a lot of uncertainty as a country with Brexit, but with Keepabl it’s a very exciting time for managed service providers.
Want to get in touch with Robert? You’ll find all of his contact details in the show notes below.
Mentioned in this episode
Keepabl
Totally MSP
LoopUp
FinTech Power 50
Beachhead Solutions
Wiggan Law Firm
Datto
Tresorit
Techspaiens
ZedSphere
DattoCon
Reply
Contact Robert
Twitter: @RJBaugh
LinkedIn: Robert Baugh
Email: hello@Keepabl.com
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October 20, 2019
The Author of 20+ MSP Books – TubbTalk #55
In this episode Richard speaks to Karl Palachuk, a public speaker, 
|an author of many books and widely recognised as one of the pioneers of managed services.
“All I do is write down the stuff that other people don’t write down.” Typically humble words from prolific author, speaker, business coach and MSP expert Karl Palachuk. Richard is convinced, however, that there’s a little more to Karl’s writing process than that, and he’s ready to find out what!
An Interview With Karl Palachuk
If you’re in the managed services industry and haven’t yet heard of Karl Palachuk, it’s time to check him out. After 25 years in the industry and having run two managed services businesses, there can be very little he doesn’t know. Today he teaches, presents at conferences and his site Small Biz Thoughts is a treasure trove of resources that covers just about every MSP-related topic — there you’ll find all of his books, audio programmes and classes.
The Right Place At the Right Time
But Karl didn’t necessarily set out to become a prolific author and MSP expert. He claims that it was more a case of being in the right place, at the right time. He says of his Network Documentation Workbook, “I like to joke that I did it more for me. But it took off, it was just at the right time; it came out when the industry was ready for standardisation”.
He admits, though, that his Network Documentation Workbook wasn’t his first foray into writing. He had already begun work on what he had intended to be his first book, Relax, Focus, Succeed and so booked himself a spot at a writers’ conference. He says, “It was going to be a three day conference so I took work. And so I was organising my documentation, right? I began to ask, why do we have this document? Why do we need this information? Why don’t we need all the other information we could be putting on this form? And how do we fill it out? And what does that look like? So I could train my technicians to do everything they do consistently. And so when the weekend was over, I had written about 90% of the Network Documentation Workbook.”
He then put it all together and took a sample to SMB nation to pass on to Harry Brelsford and Nancy Williams. Two weeks later Harry finally called back with an offer to help distribute the book as well as a request for a second book on storage area networks. He then wrote SAN Primer for SMB before finishing Relax, Focus, Succeed.
Relax, Focus, Succeed
Karl is a firm believer that for small business owners, the business should exist to fulfil what you and your family want. He explains,
“That’s where the the switch flips; it’s when technicians realise if I don’t take care of the business side, I’m literally just going to be a labourer for the rest of my career. And so at some point owners become business people, and you decide that this business should be bigger than me, it should last longer than me and it should fulfil my dreams.”
But there was a point at which running his business threatened the balance Karl was working so hard to create.
“I moved to having more and more clients, and I literally went through this great experience of the y2k rollover. And the great experience was everybody was willing to spend money, they had no idea why. And so I was just growing, I was signing new contracts all the time, all the time.”
And while Karl was always trying to figure out ways to leverage technology and use remote processes and procedures to make running his business easier, work became much harder following a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis.
“I went through a couple of years where my business was growing, despite me. I was unable to work full time, I was almost crippled and it took a few years to get the disease under control. And during that period, I look back on it and I said ‘How did I do that?’, you know, working 30 hours a week and growing my business and hiring people and so forth. And so I wrote about it.”
The result was Karl’s third book, Relax, Focus, Succeed which is a guide to balancing your personal and professional lives. And while the philosophies contained in the book helped Karl achieve more balance in his life, they also helped his business grow even faster.
The Importance of Knowing Your ‘Why’
The book — which explores topics like mindfulness, meditation and journaling —has since had a profound influence on many people in the IT industry, possibly because as a business owner caught up chasing your tail, focusing on things like pricing, agreements and tools is pointless if you don’t have the framework in place to actually manage yourself.
Karl agrees;
“You know, I have coaching clients, who have sometimes been in business 10 or 20 years. And they don’t know why. Their why consists of, ‘well, I know, technology, and I like technology. So I do technology, and then I make money at it, it turns out I’m good and rinse repeat for 20 years. But then they find that they’re in a position where they don’t have the culture they want, they don’t have the employees they want, they don’t have the clients they want, they’re being driven by forces they can’t see.
If you don’t know why you’re in business, then it just becomes about money. And, and so you work and work and work, and you get some money, and you realise if you work more, you get more, but there’s a limit to how much a human being can work. And unfortunately, a lot of people realise that when they get a heart attack or a divorce, or, you know, they realise that they don’t know their kids names — there’s all kinds of things that happen when you don’t know why you’re doing what you do.”
It’s a pitfall that many MSPs, and business owners in general, fall into. For Karl, meditation or a form of daily prayer — taking time to be with yourself and look at your big picture — is the perfect antidote.
“I always challenge people meditate for 15 minutes, every day for 30 days. Don’t have instructions don’t have a why, just sit down in a chair, empty your mind and it will be hard. It’ll be super hard for most people, but it will change your life. It literally will. And I can’t even explain why because it’s going to be different for you than it is for me. But it begins to help you get the big picture.”
Karl’s Big Picture
“I’m about to turn 60. And I feel like I’ve got things right when my daughter goes on vacation with me. I can look around and say yeah, I’ve actually managed to build the life I want. And none of it is around money. I always tell people if all you care about is money, then quite this consulting gig and get a job”.
For Karl, the big picture isn’t taken up with a fancy house or an expensive car; it’s centred on things like being able to write more, doing more speaking, and travelling more. And it’s a lifestyle that’s made possible by having a team of just four core people and the right processes, “it doesn’t matter where they are, it doesn’t matter where I am, we’ve designed a system that just works”.
The thing that’s kept Karl going for so many years? The desire to help people, the excitement of keeping up with new developments (right now he’s fascinated by robotics and Intelligent Automation!) and exploring new ideas.
Karl’s Key Advice for MSPs
In fact, if there’s one piece of advice that Karl would pass on to fellow MSPs, it’s exactly that: keep exploring. Keep learning. Keep educating yourself.
And read! He believes that the smallest idea can pop out of the page and change the course of your business.
Of course Karl’s own books are a great place to start. Most are evergreen, based on fundamental truths of business rather than specific products — they still hold up even after 10 years or more. (Although he does update his publications to keep them fresh and relevant.)
When asked about other resource recommendations, Karl has an extensive list he can pass on. Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth is one that he returns to frequently and he says he always seems to find a new lesson that applies to wherever he happens to be in his business.
He’s also a huge admirer of Erick Simpson, Robin Robbins, and of course, Harry Brelsford.
“Harry wrote several books on small business server but he’s always been a business focused person. He literally went around the world and he would get together at a little airport hotel, get 30 people in the room, sell them books, give them a day’s worth of education and then he told them, when I leave, I want you all to get together every month and talk about this. So he was Johnny Appleseed going around the world, planting SPS user groups, and they’ve evolved now to the SMB IT pro groups in Australia and other places.
It literally all started with him and I think we as an industry owe a big nod to Harry Brelsford for kicking us off.”
Daniel Burrus is another name Karl recommends looking out for.
He talks about how a lot of the future is already here. It’s literally been designed, it’s been built, like 5G, for example. The specifics of how we implement the standards are just evolving. But it’s here, you can literally look at it and say, in five years, these things will be possible because this bandwidth exists and then your brain can go expound about that. That’s literally an opportunity for you and me and everybody else to say, what could I be doing with that technology? And don’t think about next week, like next week’s already planned, it’s in the calendar. What about next year, what about five years from now, and some of that dreaming becomes possible when you really have an understanding of what the future might look like, and it’s not that difficult. He’s got eight ways that you can look at the future and see what’s coming. So I find that very exciting.”
While that’s probably more than enough to get you started, there’s one final title you should add to your must-read list: Karl’s latest book, The Unbreakable Rules of Service Delivery, which will hopefully be released early in 2020.
To keep up to date with Karl’s books, events and resources find him at Small Biz Thoughts and subscribe to his Managed Services and Relax, Focus Succeed mailing lists.
Mentioned in This Episode
Karl’s site: Small Biz Thoughts
The E-Myth
SMB Nation
Datto
ConnectWise
Solarwinds
Killing IT podcast
DotComSecrets
Good to Great
Great by Choice
Daniel Burrus
Connect with Me
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Are you Babysitting your Staff? – TubbTalk #57
In this episode I talk to someone I’ve been really interested in speaking to for some time, Peter Melby, CEO of Greystone Technologies an MSP in Denver, Colorado. Greystone has experienced 50 straight quarters of growth.
Peter is one of the most quoted MSP owners and with good reason. His views on building a self driven or accountable team are some of the most spot on observations I’ve ever heard.
An Interview With Peter Melby
Greystone Technology is an MSP based in Denver, Colorado with about 90 staff. When he was 17, Peter dropped out of his college degree in Business and Computer science and got a job in IT, before launching Greystone Technology. His lack of experience and formal education coming into this business, was both a blessing and a curse, providing challenges but also a different perspective on the industry in comparison to many other MSPs.
The barrier to entry with MSPs is very low, but growing them is really hard. Scaling them is another matter altogether. At Greystone the focus was on looking at the MSP from the perspective of what the market really needs. Every year Greystone reviews what place in the market they are occupying. What would the market be missing if they were no longer around. MSPs should be filling different spaces.
By the time Peter was in his mid 20s he an offer to buy his MSP for a million dollars plus, but that made him realise that what he had was worth something and he wasn’t ready to give that up. So he turned it down and still runs it to this day. Greystone have reinvented some wheels that we probably didn’t need reinventing, but their success is based largely on that perspective of the industry. They are constantly trying to turn things around and move the industry forward.
One of the main reasons Greystone has thrived, is due to Peter’s attitude towards the people within his business.
People are hard: How to Build a Self-Driven Team
One of the quotes I love from Peter is:
“People are hard”
I used to manage people, and it is difficult. But Peter seems to have come across a formula, or a way of managing people and building a team that is just incredible, and brings out the best in people. So what does it take?
For Peter, it took a lot of failing at first. But the thing he continually came back to was the idea that we have to understand human nature in order to really understand how to motivate. So many of our mindsets and processes are based on really simple influence mechanics. Understanding what makes people tick is the lost art of company culture right now. Yes, people are hard, there is no getting around the fact that people are complex, and we all need people in our business, at least until AI robots take over.
What businesses end up trying to do to combat this is to create a culture that has nothing to do with the work at all. When people talk about company culture, they talk about their office layout, they talk about the keg of beer in the fridge, the table soccer table or that they have a ping pong, or a great benefits packages, unlimited vacations, all these things. But all that is doing is hitting the snooze button on the inevitable culture failure. It’s not what is necessary to be a top performing organisation. Buying people beer is only going to work for a little while, until they wake up and say: ‘oh wait, the work sucks’.
They will realise the problem is with the core job, and all those benefits aren’t changing that. So Peter realised that they can’t build a culture that expects their employees to be selfless, or expect their employees to not be entirely self focused. In understanding that and just recognising, and looking at people at face value, the disconnects in the typical corporate structure and typical corporate processes start to unwind.
A really interesting comparison between a good and bad culture is Uber vs. Google. Uber was highlighted for having a dismal employee retention at 1.23 years on average. In comparison, Google has always been held up as the standard of culture. But their average tenure is 1.8 years. This is really fascinating, because it’s not all that different. So really it’s about figuring out why people are quitting and how to stem that tide rather than creating a culture of benefits.
What Companies Want vs. What Employees Want
So how can you build a successful company culture?
Peter had been quoted saying:
“Every company culture succumbs to the law of human nature”
This summarises what Peter was saying, in that people do things for their own reasons. And the challenge is that when we see that and when we start to understand that, we don’t have a very good view of humanity. When we look at the human nature of our employees, oftentimes, we only see the disconnection between what a company wants and what an employee wants. A company sees employees who want money, but don’t want to do any work. They gossip, they don’t follow through, they’re not accountable, and we have all of these things where managers will point back to challenges in human nature, that humans are naturally lazy and self focussed.
But on the flip side, when you look at what employees think about their companies, they think they just want to make a bunch of money, while the employees do all the work.
Both employees and companies view of each other is very similar. When you dig into the core of who people are, we all kind of want the same thing. To be seen and known and accepted. To make more money, to improve our standing and to better ourselves. People want to take risks, but they want to know that they’re safe. That’s what separates the entrepreneur from the employees, the willingness to take that risk and not have a safety net.
So that’s what we need to provide. We need to allow our employees to own who they are, while at the same time providing a safety net and boundaries. When we embrace that we start to realise that we are not disconnected with our employees. But that’s a hard thing to embed in an organisation.
What is Directed Autonomy?
Peter talks about directed autonomy. But, what is that?
Autonomy is misunderstood in so many spaces. Autonomy is more than hiring someone smart and just letting them run with it and expecting them to know what to do. It doesn’t work like that. A process and oversight is necessary. Autonomy doesn’t mean freedom. Autonomy is where freedom meets accountability and purpose. Employees need an understanding of where they are going in order to be autonomous and to work with autonomy. And for most people what unlocks autonomy is boundaries. It gives them ownership over a situation, but it still gives companies the ability to steer the larger ship. It’s amazing how people make great decisions when they don’t have to consider every aspect of something.
United Airlines is a good example of this. Most of us remember that story from a couple of years back when they dragged that passenger off the plane. And you know they lost a lot of value in their stock. People were asking how a company could do that. But actually the issue was they did absolutely everything exactly as their processes stated, with no deviation. The last step in the process for disruptive passengers was to call airport security. And so that’s what United Airlines staff did, and it was an airport security officer who dragged the passenger off the plane. Yet, United Airlines name and value still got dragged through the mud. All because they followed strict processes with no parametres. The employees had no autonomy.
Another example from United Airlines involves a change around in their policy and processes for holding flights for connecting passengers. Employees were now allowed to hold the flight as long as the departing plane was still going to arrive within it’s time frame at the destination. Staff have saved thousands of connections already, all because they were given the autonomy to do so and boundaries within which to operate. The reality is, when you give people the ability to make those decisions, they do something with it and generally they go the right direction.
How to Motivate Staff and Improve Productivity
As a manager, owner or founder, the more you babysit, the more you need to babysit. The worry for MSP owners is that if they leave people to get on with it, they won’t deliver, so they’ve got to babysit. It’s a vicious circle.
As soon as people don’t trust people, they act untrustworthy. Employees end up becoming dependant on companies in a miserable way if they aren’t trusted and aren’t treated with respect.
The hardest lesson for business owners is that they need to trust first rather than waiting for proof that they can trust. They need to recognise that leap is a lot safer than it seems like if it’s set it up in the right ways.
Performance Management: How to Give Autonomy and Show Direction
How do you give people autonomy, yet show them direction in order to manage their performance?
The recruitment process is based on lies. We’re only showing our best side, both as employees and companies. You’re not talking about you challenges and flaws. It’s a sales pitch and it’s never going to be different than that.
One of the things Greystone emphasises when they hire someone is that, some days they will not want to be there. Even if it’s their dream job. In the beginning everything seems phenomenal, but eventually there will be the realisation moments. Maybe the employee will realise that the job isn’t perfect. And Greystone will realise that they didn’t hire a perfect employee, but an actual human being. When this is recognised we can begin to pick apart that traditional performance management processes are completely misguided. Annual performance reviews, things like that, we don’t get to where we want to go with those things. There are so many elements that need to be considered in order to have continuous performance management and continuous employee engagement.
It all comes down to this. Employees want to know where they stand, they want clear feedback and they want to get better. But they also have a really important part to play, as most know where their own challenges lie. It’s about how this feedback is presented. If it’s confrontational and direct, the employees may close up and become defensive which is very natural.
But, if instead we ask employees: ‘Hey, what are you working on to improve?’, ‘What are you trying to get better at?’, you start to get honest answers. It’s amazing how much employees already know what they are failing at and where they are falling short.
Greystone has built a process, a consistent monthly process of engagement between leaders and employees to ask them that question. To find out what they are working on to improve, and then be very direct in return with what they feel the employee needs to improve on. This strikes a balance with criticism so that it’s not demoralising and the employees can make consistent process.
“Steve Jobs is Full of Shit”
Peter once said:
“Steve Jobs is full of Shit”
What did he mean by that?
Peter says there is a quote going around LinkedIn that is attributed to Steve Jobs that says:
“We don’t hire smart people to tell us or to tell them what to do. We hire smart people, so they can tell us what to do.”
Safe to say, Peter doesn’t agree. Steve jobs never got told what to do. He told everyone what to do, and exactly how things had to be. That might not be the best management methodology. But smart people don’t do what we need them to do just because they are smart. Anyone who’s run an MSP knows this because oftentimes, it’s our smartest people, technically, that need the most direction in other aspects of what they’re doing. Working with clients, the bedside manner, the business knowledge, the business case for things. It’s not about how smart we are, it’s about how impactful we are, how influential, how much value we can bring in a situation and value is not just technical. And so, there is no such thing as just let a smart person go and they’ll automatically go the right direction. They still need to be managed.
What Are Millennials Like As Employees?
If there is one subset of employees that get a bad reputation it’s millennials. They are sort of demonised in the MSP industry. One thing I often hear is that millenials talk about the fact that they want to do meaningful work. But what I hear from MSP owners, is that they can’t get the basics right. And this is a real bone of contention for the generation above.
Peter suggests that the criticisms of the emerging workforce and upcoming generations around lack of loyalty, lack of care about those basics and lack of work ethic are all unfortunate stereotypes. It’s understandable why they have perpetuated the way that they have and we love to compartmentalise things because it makes it easier for us to think about them.
Millennials are the most external self confident workforce ever, but the most inwardly self conscious work force ever. The reality is, millenials have work ethic if you connect to them as real people and are very clean upfront about what is expected. If an employee shows up and is presented the basics, the non negotiables, and they know from day one, or better yet, through the hiring process, it gives the company a tremendous advantage because we’ve interrupted any notion that this is an option. So while we do give autonomy, there is also a basic set of non negotiable rules and boundaries. Once we have that decided, then we can build on top of all this other meaningful, exciting work.
As different as we are, these are the core things that we’ve recognised, are foundational to what we’re doing.
How to Set Expectations With Existing Employees
That is one of the hardest things. It’s very hard to change someone’s habits. If you don’t change their environment in some way, if everything stays the same but you expect their behaviour to change it probably won’t work. You’ve got to get creative. Rearrange the office or move office. Reset the environment. You can’t do this every time you need to make a change, but we shouldn’t underestimate the benefit that it can have.
How Can We Help Our Employees Learn?
Peter told a story of when he was in Vegas, a couple of years ago. He went there with the best intentions of being healthy and so went for a run a couple of miles up the strip. While he was out he saw two large cars sitting in traffic lights.. A large SUV was sitting in front of a small SUV. The lights changed to green, but the large SUV did not move. So the driver in the small car honked his horn pretty persistently, but the large SUV still wasn’t moving. So, the driver in back rolled down his window yells at the driver ahead of him and is very agitated. Next thing, the driver of the small SUV rolls down his sunroof and launches an iced coffee at the car in front of him. It goes all over the car and hits a man in a wheelchair, who was stuck on the kerb in front of the large SUV, hence the hold up. Most of the time it takes years to see someones perspective change on something. But Peter saw the moment this man in the small car realised what was happening, how he had misunderstood the situation and obviously the utter shame that followed.
So how does this relate to employees and how they think of themselves and learn?
Nothing could ever have been said to the man in the small SUV that would have made him learn his lesson better. No one needed to ask him if he had learnt the lesson. And in fact if anyone had, he would probably have closed up and gotten angry. But his perspective will be changed forever. It’s an extreme example. But employees are like that in so many ways. We can guide them and coach them, but we don’t have to be the director in every lesson that they learned.
The State of the Current MSP Market
So many of the challenges that MSPs face comes back to people, and the focus on people at Greystone is because this is a people business 100%. People use technology, we are enabling people, we are enabling so many aspects of how people operate and I think that one of the shifts that we’ve seen recently is that technology used to be simple but hard to manage.
Everyone had a Microsoft server or multiple Microsoft servers, everybody had Windows desktops, everything was on premise, you needed an IT department to run it. But it wasn’t hard to make any decisions, because everybody had the same general systems.
Now, the technology is easy. You don’t need an IT department to go sign up for Office 365, to sign up for Salesforce, to choose a system but it’s very complicated because how all these platforms work together. The shadow IT that exists in organisations is such a security threat and just an overall business efficiency threat. The MSP market is still trying to manage this, like technicians would manage it, instead of recognising our bigger play in this is how we help organisations operate in a new technical ecosystem. We’re working on the edges of that a little bit just to try to define some things differently but the IT department in the future is far less specifically deeply technical, and far more organisational embedded and organisationally connected.
We use the word context a lot. Good idea people solve problems, but great IT people know what problem they’re solving. That is the difference between where we have been and where we need to go. It’s understanding that deeper context and being able to do something with it
Want to get in touch with Peter? You’ll find all of his contact details in the show notes.
Mentioned In This Episode
Quotes
“People are hard”
“Every company culture succumbs to the law of human nature”
“The more you babysit, the more you need to babysit”
“Steves Job is full of shit”
“Good idea people solve problems, but great IT people know what problem they are solving”
Contact Peter
Connect with Me
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