603 Community and Peer Groups with Amy Babinchak

00:09 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business podcast, your show where we try to help IT professionals in all shapes, forms and sizes support their business clients better, smarter and faster. Today's show is sponsored by SuperOps, your ultimate solution for streamlining operations and maximizing efficiency. Are you tired of manual tasks slowing down your business? Well, SuperOps offers cutting edge AI technology to automate processes, automate workflows and boost productivity. Say goodbye to tedious tasks and hello to increased efficiency. Https://superops.com/ today. All right, folks, I had mentioned early in the month of February that I wanted to reach out to some community leaders, influencers, Facebook groups and find out how we were all helping each other in our businesses. For some reason, the last few months it seems to have been a big push on community and education. So one of the persons that I reached out to, Amy Babinchak, is here, Of course. You know her. She has been a staple in our industry for over 20 years. Amy, how are you?

01:36 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

I'm good, good. I don't think I've ever been called a staple before.

01:44 - Uncle Marv (Host)

I try to go out and find words. You know it's easy to say, oh, she's been a pillar in our community, been a well, is it trailblazer? What are the other words they use about it? A lot of words.

01:57 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, that's all right. Staple's fine, staple's fine. Okay, I feel like a standard bear. There you go.

02:07 - Uncle Marv (Host)

There you go. For those that do not know Amy, she was a guest on our podcast back on show number 484 a while back and she's also done a lot of things in the community I mentioned. She owns a couple of businesses, had an MSP for a while, provides counseling peer groups through ThirdTier. Do you still have? Sell my MSP?

02:35 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Yes, we do.

02:36 - Uncle Marv (Host)

All right. So, folks, if you are in a position where it's time to exit and you're thinking about selling, Amy might be somebody you should reach out to.

02:47 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

So everything I do is about community. Right In October 1st the new owners of my MSP took over. So it's a very, very recent transition after 23 years, nine months. So it's a good long time in that business. And but you know I've had ThirdTier since 2008. So also a good long time and ThirdTier, you know, as our tagline says. You know all we do is support IT pros and I mean that from a very broad perspective, like you were describing, training peer groups still do a little bit of technical support only for Microsoft 365 these days, but really just trying to help people be better in their business and get involved and have others to talk to and sort of generate that that sense of community you know so you know, you're not out there alone and you're just not out there posting around on social media.

03:58

They have an actual group of people that you might get to know over time.

04:03 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Right Now. ThirdTier was started back before social media and being able to just hop online and find a group and jump into a chat and stuff like that. How is the world different, you think, in terms of what ThirdTier started out as and where we are today?

04:23 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Well, we started out just doing technical support, you know being that place where you know MSPs, it pros, whoever we do some, we did never hit any of our own clients right. Our clients were you, and so you know we just I knew a lot of people that were really amazing technical, technical folks and they were willing to help, and so we just created a form to make themselves available. Eric Neal and I started the company together. He passed away a few years into it, so it's been just me ever since, and both he and I were Microsoft MVPs. I'm still a Microsoft MVP 18 years running now, and when that happened I started to get a lot of calls from other IT people asking if I could help them. And yeah, I was really focused on running my own MSP at the time and so I sort of was doing it on the side for a couple of years and then it was becoming kind of a big thing and didn't really fit with my MSP right. So that was the reason why ThirdTier got started, but it has really morphed a lot over the years and it's just in response to what sort of help do people need now?

05:46

We used to do tons of work on exchange servers and tons of work on exchange server migrations, SQL server migrations, domain migrations all that good stuff when everything was on premises.

06:00

And then we did tons of work migrating, helping people migrate from on premises to the cloud. And then, when that was sort of done and everybody was in the cloud as much as they wanted to be, I actually shut our support services down and I said, ok, that part of life is over and now let's move on. I developed a couple of webinar series and wrote an e-book and was really just working on helping people with training. And then now we've added peer groups and we have some Facebook groups that go and I post a lot of stuff on social media, just a bunch of different social media places. So on LinkedIn, on Facebook, I only post to my own page and in my own groups. They don't post to all the groups out there. Then I also do mastodon threads, post news, trying to get in with some of the new communities that are out there, as everything just sort of broadens its reach.

07:11

Yeah, so, first of all, that's a lot of posting, yeah well, thank goodness for tools, because at least it I can create the thing. And then there's a tool that I use called Publr, which I just love, and it will post them to all the other places for me. Probably saves me half an hour just from not having to flip around between social media outlets to repost something.

07:40 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Right. So let me ask this clarification question in terms of what the peer groups do at ThirdTier versus what the Facebook groups do. You have two, by the way. I should let listeners know you've got the Intune group and the ransomware and security group on Facebook, but how do they differ?

08:03 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Well, peer groups are way different than Facebook groups. Right, in a Facebook group you might get to know some of the people there, but they're not necessarily people that you trust with the intimate details of your business. Right, they're usually there to work out some kind of technical issue or some discrete marketing issue, maybe to get some advice on what are you guys doing for marketing? Now you hear that question over and over again. But the peer groups I have three peer groups. So we have a large business, a small business and a solopreneur group and they each have six businesses in them. I've limited them just to six and these folks get together every month and they talk about what's new in their business and then they talk about the latest challenge in their business and everybody in the group provides input and their advice and their experience on how to maybe address that particular issue. So it's not at all about technical. It's about running a better business and developing that group of friends.

09:23

I started this just two years ago and there's so many peer groups in the world. I thought, well, people say you should start peer groups Because they thought my business was well run and my MSP and maybe I would have some advice for folks. And I thought, well, maybe I'll give that a go, but there are so many peer groups out there, so is there really a need for this? And I said, well, just start with two and I divide them into smaller and larger. And they filled up in the first week just instantly. So I was like, ok, well, there is something there.

10:04 - Uncle Marv (Host)

And this is even with them being paid right.

10:07 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

They're paid, yeah. And so I said, OK, I'm just going to do the two and we're going to see how it goes, Because I'd never run a peer group before. And then something really miraculous happened to me to verify in my own mind that the groups were working and doing. What I hoped they would do was that people would really coalesce into trusting each other completely. And a guy started to talk about his business and some of the business challenges and he told the group his business challenges were actually related to his marriage and the struggles and the lack of support there and that was leaking over into his business and was really causing him a great deal of stress personally and a great deal of stress in the business, because he had lost family support for running a small business.

11:08

And family support is critical for running a small business, as I'm sure that you know. If you have someone in your life who's actively working against you from that business being what you need to know, what you know the business needs to be successful, that's a huge challenge. So when a member opened up that way in a very personal way, I said, ok, we're doing something really well here, we're doing good work. And after that I did create a group specifically for marketing which was called Growth Group. It was just a one-year, once-off, discrete, start and end kind of thing. That went really well too. That also filled up immediately. And then this year I've expanded the peer groups into three. And then we also started something we're calling learning groups. We have our first experiment with that one going and our learning group is on Intune, so it's different than the Facebook group. This is what we're calling a learning group, and we selected a textbook for Intune and said, okay, we're going to meet for six months twice a week for two hours each session. We're going to limit it to 12 people and we're going to sort of flip the script on learning Right. So we all go to lots of training programs and watch webinars and all this stuff, but it's really hard to get from the point of learning the technology to figuring out how you're going to implement it in your business and across your client base. You need those, those SOPs developed too right, and people you can talk to you about how you're going to put this all together. So the way we flip the script on that is everybody goes out and studies a section of the book and attempts to implement it in either on themselves or in their practice. You know tenants that they've set up and then they come to class and talk about how that went, what the questions are, what the problems were, what they ran into, review the draft SOPs that were created, make tweaks to those. So we're in our second month of that. It's going really really well.

13:38

That was again a thing that really surprised me on the interest, because I thought do people want to really join a class for six months and they could take an in-tune class somewhere for a week and so, okay, we're going to have 12 people.

13:55

You know, maybe we'll get. We'll get 10 people or 12 people. We're going to cap it at 12, though, so we can make sure they have good conversations and we got 48 people and to reopen that class four times and get a second instructor to be able to handle all the demand for that, and at 48, I was like we're done, if I have to go more, I have to get a third instructor, and getting people that are that in depth with the product isn't easy, right? I want to keep the quality very high, so, yeah, so I'm excited about that, and that might be something that ThirdTier does with other technologies as well. I've already had requests from people to do enter ID and also defender, so we're looking at maybe, you know, doing some more interesting things with groups and group learning activities. Yeah that sounds amazing.

14:52 - Uncle Marv (Host)

I had a couple of notes here. One I was going to ask you about the fact that you know I've been part of a few peer groups and some were good, some were not, and one of the things that has to make the group good is the commitment of people to the group, and you know a lot of peer groups. If they're not paid you know there's a lot of interest in the beginning people fall off. You know there's no real incentive to stay if you're. You know if you're paying or you're learning, that's a really good incentive. So I was. I was going to ask you in terms of you know the initial interest you got and then the commitment of people to follow through on the group I have to assume from the way you're talking, is it pretty much stay consistent the whole way, right?

15:40 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Yeah, pretty well, there's a there's a little bit of turnover. We were able to fill that right away. So the groups remain full, but you know the turnover was minimal. So between the growth group and the two peer groups, I think I think I had like four people, you know, drop out over the course of the of the year and the growth group, you know the peer group seats were like six. So they're really small. The growth group had 25 people in it. So you know, so, or in total, it wasn't, wasn't too bad and it kind of happened right at the beginning.

16:19 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Right.

16:20 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Right. So somebody gets in and goes, oh yeah, this really isn't for me, right? They were looking for more technical support and I was like, no, no, this is about. This is really about business support, right, and so, yeah, it's, it's been pretty, been very consistent, and we're into the second year and I would say probably three quarters of the people are also in their second year.

16:48 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Okay, fantastic. And then I wanted to go back and comment on the point that you made about somebody being willing to open up about the personal side of what we do, because you are correct, family personal relationships tend to bleed over more than people will publicly admit and I have found that that's something you got to do with and you, you know, talked about the fact that. You know, family support is one thing, but there's a lot of people we're finding in the industry where family work in the business with us. So you've got to, you've got to deal with that. Almost 24, seven, you know, trying to. You know, work together in the business and then work together in the house.

17:41

And how do you keep personal professional from blending over? So that's a that's a big thing as well. But the other side of that is being able to be honest and open with how things are really going. You know is you. If your business is suffering, can you step back and look at what are the real reasons and finding the real peer group of people that you can trust, people that have been down the same road or on the same road as you, and you can talk about shared experiences and how to help each other. I don't know if there's a price that can be measured with that.

18:25 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

It's. It's. It's really invaluable to have people that you can talk to. We're all. We all have a serious independent streak, right? Is that's why we started businesses in the first place, probably, but it's still really valuable to talk to people that are like you, that have the same challenges as you, that are trying to reach the same goals that you are. Unfortunately for us, our industry is big enough and the opportunities are tremendous enough that we don't have to worry about competition. You know what we have to do. What we have to worry about is educating ourselves on how to do things better, because most of us are not business majors. We've not run businesses before. We're making it up as we go along and you know so good advice is it is truly, truly invaluable in having those close relationships where you have that trusted relation, relations. That's. That's super important.

19:29 - Uncle Marv (Host)

All right Now. The Facebook groups obviously are not as involved or intense as the peer groups, and no charge to be in the Facebook groups, but a lot of good information, nonetheless. So I was poking around. It was the last night or this morning when you guys posted that Microsoft now allows for the multi-tenant defender, yeah, management. So what type of feedback have you gotten on that so far?

20:03 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Um, you know I spoke at SMB TechFest earlier this month and I was doing a session. Basically it was about how MSPs need to work on modifying their business models so that we can be more proactive. First, less so on the help desk, ticket, close speed time, pki, and more about how proactive we can be, how well we're dealing with security configurations and I use Defender as my example of what it's like maybe for your help desk person to work in that environment. And, of course, there were questions about you know how do I do that across to all of my clients? How do I, how are my techs going to see everybody? And there's lots of third party products to do that?

21:02

I had said at that time Microsoft was coming out with a multi-tenant, but I hadn't seen it yet. Now that I saw that they did announce it and I actually tried it myself and it's pretty cool, I can just make a connection to the clients that I'm allowed to manage through the. So if you have that relationship already set up in the partner portal with your clients where you're an administrator on their tenant right, they've already approved that In Defender you'll see that list of clients and you can just check off the ones that you want to see in Defender now. Then when you make a configuration change or you're monitoring their security and their patches and all that, you'll see the whole scope of what that looks like across your entire client base. So when you do something, you can push it out to whole groups of clients at once. It'll be really helpful.

21:58 - Uncle Marv (Host)

That'll be nice the ability to see again we always want that single dashboard that we can do that. So that should be fantastic. Now again, you mentioned you have to have the relationship set up, you have to be an admin in the tenant. Sorry, the lawn people are going by.

22:19 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

I don't know you say Couldn't even hear him. It's all good about zoom is pretty good about filtering out. Yeah, you know, one of the things I liked about the multi-tenant was you've got your list of clients there so you can just check the ones that you want to deal with in a group Then leave the others independent, maybe they have specialized regulatory compliance or different tolerance for security settings, as we know some clients do, so I can easily switch back and forth from dealing with a single tenant to getting that broader view across to everybody.

22:56

I think it looks like they did a really nice job with it. But back to just the Facebook groups themselves. Their ransomware and security group is really pretty darn active. It's really about putting information out there of what's going on in the world so people can keep up with stuff. Then the interim group is hit and miss.

23:20

It's a lot of consuming and not a lot of commenting, so yeah, but it's got a nice group of followers in it. When an issue sparks their interest, you do see them coming in and making some comments on it or working out a configuration.

23:42 - Uncle Marv (Host)

I think the Intune group will start to change here now that the defender stuff is in there. You still deal with Lighthouse in there. There will probably be, although it's not even called Intune anymore, is it? What's the name?

24:00 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

It is called Intune.

24:01 - Uncle Marv (Host)

They still let them.

24:03 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Yeah, you also hear it referred to as Endpoint Manager, which at one point they were going to get rid of the Intune name and call it Endpoint Manager. Now they just call it Intune Endpoint Manager.

24:13 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Okay, Because the whole thing with changing from to Intra for the Azure AD stuff. So it's going to be fun. But I think all of that's going to pick up. I believe if people haven't migrated to, even if it's Azure AD, it's going to start to happen. Even if people are on-prem, they're going to need hybrid stuff. So there's going to be a lot of activity here, absolutely In Entra.

24:41 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

there's so much now for identity security, which is critical in the conditional access, of course. Then I was talking with Tech Isle the other day. If you guys aren't familiar with them, they're an analyst for our industry and they do a lot in the SMB space for figuring out trends and whatnot. They work with the vendor community. But he showed me some of their recent research. It showed that Intune was by far the most common solution used for endpoint management.

25:24 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Really.

25:25 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

The graph he showed. Intune was like that a bar that was four inches high and everybody else had a bar that was one inch high next to them. It was all the familiar faces that we know as friendly vendors in our space, but there are so many of them, it's really highly fragmented. There seems to be a certain coalescence around Intune and managing devices. Maybe it's because it manages all the devices. It'll manage Linux, mac, iOS, android, everything.

26:00 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Yeah, first of all, that's surprising that it would be that big of a difference. I didn't think it was that much, but the fact that Microsoft is really pushing to be able to manage everything, that's what we want when we go out and support our networks. Sometimes we can control all the devices, but sometimes we can't. But being able to manage them is huge.

26:28 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Yeah, I think Zero Trust is finally a standard Intune. Really helps you develop that.

26:38 - Uncle Marv (Host)

It's a standard, but I still have people I'm actually fighting with. I'm not fighting A client that finally agreed to do multi-factor authentication on their 365.

26:53 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Marvin, you should have fired them years ago.

26:58 - Uncle Marv (Host)

I have got stories about them.

26:59 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

They tell you a story about that In my MSP. Gosh, I'm trying to think how many years ago it was now that we pushed out MFA to everybody quite a few. I just said, all right, we're doing this In my texts. We're all super nervous. They were like, oh my God, we're going to get so many calls. People are going to be so unhappy. They're not going to want to do this. They're doing it at their bank, they're doing it at their credit card. It's just a thing. That's what they have to do. They're not going to want to use their phone, they're not going to like the app, they won't want to use their personal foot. They are just throwing up all kinds of Roblox and I'm like I don't care, we're doing it.

27:37

We had three clients who said we don't want to do this. All the rest of them did. We had 80 clients it's a very small percentage who balked. I said that's okay. I had my opt out letter ready and I said I just need you to sign this opt out that you don't want us to do MFA, even though studies show that we can eliminate 99% of malware for your business if you do MFA.

28:11

Well, nobody wanted to sign that, of course. So they all grudgingly agreed to move forward. And one of those companies, about six months later he sort of came to us, hat in hand, and he was like thank you for forcing me to do MFA. He goes I didn't want to do it; I gave you guys a lot of grief. And he did. He complained and whined and you know he went kicking and screaming and he said but he had been out golfing with some buddies that were also business owners and everybody on his or some except him had been ransomware and he hadn't. And he said I know it's because you forced me to do MFA. So we took the win.

29:03 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Well, this, this client is and I call them client loosely because they have been a co-managed client that we have been trying to basically take over completely and there is a, there is a TJ on staff, a tech junior, what I call them, who's their part time, and we found out that he was Microsoft certified back in 1990, something.

29:37 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Oh, so he's not a young tech TJ.

29:39 - Uncle Marv (Host)

No, he's not a young TJ. Yeah, but he hasn't done tech since that certification and this was a situation where something happened to the previous tech. So they just asked him hey, could you help us do stuff? So he's there and he can basically do setups and install some software no, network management, which is how we got in there, but they fought us on all the stuff and we have been redoing our agreements so that we have the baseline. Here is the very least that you will do if you want us to service you, and so, because of that, they've not been wanting to sign a full managed service agreement with us and they're like well, we'll just keep doing what we're doing. I said, well, we're not really doing anything.

30:33 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Right.

30:34 - Uncle Marv (Host)

So you know, you're insurance.

30:35 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

You're an insurance company. Uh, you know, they're not quite demanding that of us yet, as IT firms, it's coming, it's coming. It's going to come fast and so you know, pretty soon you won't even have the option to work with that client unless they, unless they're willing to come up to some base level standard.

30:57 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Well, yeah, and that's what I've been telling him and it's just a matter of. I said it's only a matter of time before you call one day and we say we can no longer help you. But uh, was it three weeks ago? They called because one of their emails had been compromised and had sent out something to another organization. And it was a big deal. And the owner who called, he, he soon as he picked up, as soon as I picked up the phone, he said so we should have been doing that thing you told us about, right? I said yeah.

31:31 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

It's funny how they're willing to spend the money when something bad happens.

31:35 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Yeah, so we're halfway there. So we got multifactor, we're upgrading there. This was a company that was just on 365 basic with a few premiums out there I'm sorry, a few standards, and we told them. I said you got to get up to premium.

31:52 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Yeah, that's the that's. That's the bottom, that's the bottom license level for me. Yeah, so Microsoft 365 business premium there, there is no less than that.

32:05 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Yeah, It'll be interesting. There's a lot of companies out there and this is one where they're a client, that they don't have anything to do with compliance. They're kind of on their own. They're kind of in between retail and entertainment. So of course, you know the bad guys don't want us. I'm like you guys don't understand. Bad guys don't care, you have money.

32:26 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

You have money and you also have connections and they're willing to exploit all of those things.

32:33 - Uncle Marv (Host)

And you have data that you don't want to lose, right? So, anyway, well, we, we, we wandered off into the rant zone, but that frequently happens. So, Amy, I'm going to have all of the links. For ThirdTier, I'm going to have the links to both of your Facebook groups. Is there? I'm going to go look for tech aisle. Since you mentioned them, I'll put a link in for that.

33:01 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Any other thing that I should tell listeners or place a link in the show notes for no, if you just do the website and if folks are interested in joining us for some future learn groups, if you haven't been to the website before, you'll get the, the very common pop-up saying here sign up for the, for the list. I don't send a lot of emails out. If you're on that, that mailing list, so what? But? But I will when new groups open, when new learning groups open, when we're doing something interesting. So if you want to find out about that stuff, you can get on that list.

33:42 - Uncle Marv (Host)

And folks, even if you just go to the website and you want to learn something without signing up for anything, they've got links right on the front page Today up there how to secure your network from OAuth permissions with a whole article there that you can just learn without signing up, which should incentivize you to go sign up.

34:03 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Yeah, you'll see, on the blog I actually have them categorized into stuff, so I just wanted it to be easier to find. So there's an enter category, a co-pilot category, and a defender category. There's a fourth one. What's the fourth one?

34:19 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Where am I here?

34:21 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Enter, enter, defender, enter, defender. Co-pilot. I'm drawing a blank. It's not in front of my face.

34:28 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Yeah, I'm like clicking on the website. I don't know if I can get there in time.

34:32 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

All right.

34:34 - Uncle Marv (Host)

So, Amy, thank you for coming on the show and chatting with us about your groups, and I should tell the listeners you're going to be back at some point in the future because we are going to talk about the National Society of IT Service Providers.

34:52 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Yeah, that's another, another passion of mine. Yeah, we don't. We don't have any respect in our industry, right? Nobody knows that we exist. I mean, they do know that we're out here, but they don't see us as an industry. They just see us as a bunch of mom and pop shops and IT people, and you know so we're not taken seriously. That means insurance companies, regulators, business they can just do whatever they want and we don't have any input. And we're getting to the point where we're mature enough that we should have input on those things, we should have a seat at the table, we should be recognized as, as an industry with clout, and that's ultimately the goal of NSITSP, and so I look forward to telling you all about what we're doing over there. We've got a lot of exciting things going on.

35:48 - Uncle Marv (Host)

Look forward to that, because we do need a seat at the table and we need to have those companies that are trying to make those decisions for us. Some of them don't even understand what it is we do Exactly, and they just want to throw out stuff. And then we're asked to do things and not only are we disrespected, but we're under compensated for what they want us to do and don't want to pay us for. So yeah, be looking forward to when we talk about that, folks and come out and pay attention. The National Society of IT Service Providers. I'll have a link to that website as well, so that you can go ahead and sign up if you want to do so before we're on the show. Amy, thank you very much, you're welcome.

36:34 - Amy Babinchak (Guest)

Thanks for the invite. All right, that's going to do it folks.

36:38 - Uncle Marv (Host)

We'll be back soon with another episode, whether by audio or the weekly live show. For all things IT business podcast related, head over to the website, simple enough to remember https://www.itbusinesspodcast.com/, and we'll see you soon. Until then, Holla!