619 Channel Pro Live & Swag Report

00:05 - Speaker 1 (Announcement)
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01:14 - Uncle Marv (Host)
You want a little more. I think folks are really, really excited about what they can do with their customers and how they can help grow their business. 

01:20 - Speaker 1 (Announcement)
It's a massive opportunity for all of you. Cheers to the channel community. 

01:58 - Uncle Marv (Host)
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals, managed service providers and even those of you in the corporate sector. If you're working full time in an IT job, this show is for you, where we try to help you do your job, run your networks better, smarter and faster. This is the Wednesday Live Show and tonight I am going to do a recap. I'm back from my trip to O-Town, which is Orlando, Florida, where I was at Channel Pro Live and, guys, it was a pretty good show, so I want to give you a little bit of a recap on that. I also have a junior story for you today. If you guys were paying attention to the All Things MSP show, they actually were talking about the intricacies of pricing, and my story today has a little bit to do with that, because I got to tell a customer you got what you paid for and it felt good. And then, of course, some of you are going to be here to hear what I have to say about the vendor swag. We will talk about that. We'll talk a little bit about vendor etiquette as well, and that is going to be our show. Now. 

03:17
The IT Business Podcast is presented by NetAlly. You saw the ad at the beginning of the show for the Link Sprinter. I have just about all the tools. They are a fantastic partner and they are fantastic tools to have with you out in the field to help you troubleshoot networks and a lot of that stuff. You can do in as little as 10 seconds, but definitely in just a few minutes you can get an overview of the network. One of our podcast partners is Super Ops, the all-in-one, ready-made RMM PSA tool that will help you supercharge your business. They are supporting sponsors of the show. They are on the mug that I have that I drink from each night. This is not angry tea, folks, but it is a nice beverage that I have here. They also sponsor Florida man and then our live stream is sponsored by Computers Done Right, an MSP down here in Florida, actually across Alligator Alley over in Venice, Florida. They do computer repair; manage services and they can also help with your social media marketing websites and all that good stuff. So check out itbusinesspodcast.com. You can click on the sponsor link, see everyone there. You can see other affiliates there and that is a good way to support the show as well as shopping on Amazon. I do want to say thank you for a lot of you that have purchased some pretty nice stuff, and I will be reviewing that not tonight but in a later show. I'm actually going to go through some of the Amazon purchases that I think are pretty neat and that you guys should know about. So let's start with Channel Pro Live. 

05:04
That was last week and a two-day event held at the. I don't even know the actual hotel, but it was a Marriott, which is a pretty nice place. I usually stay at a Hilton or, of course, most of the conferences are at these nice, big, huge hotels, but this was a pretty good hotel, and so, of course, one of the first things that when you're evaluating a conference, one of the things is location, and of course, you can't go wrong with Orlando, Florida. I know some of you are like everything's in Orlando. Well, you know what, if you don't have storms in the rest of the country and incessant rain and snow and stuff like that, well, you're going to come down to Florida. So Orlando is a good place to get. So the location was actually pretty good. 

05:55
The accommodation was nice, and I have to say that because the last time I was in Orlando it was for a podcast conference and it was horrible. It was called a resort, but it was basically a motel with a pool, all the doors opened up to the outside. It was right next to the interstate. The rooms were nasty, I can't say much more about that, but it was a bad experience. So this was not Nice clean rooms. The Wi-Fi at the hotel A couple of people did make some comments, but I myself had no issues with the Wi-Fi on any of my devices. In fact, I did last week's live show right there at the hotel, in the very room that we were having Channel Pro, so I was able to stream the show live. Didn't have any issues with the internet, unlike the issues that you see me have here sometimes because life is so comcastic. I'm working on it. At&t Fiber says they're going to be here soon, so we shall see. So, yes, location accommodations are all things to talk about when you're at a conference. 

07:10
Channel Pro you guys did good. I appreciate that. So, of course, channel Pro Live our good friend Jay-Z, that's their event. Channel Pro. It was a great event. I had some good content, some good speakers Manuel Palachuk was the keynote speaker, did a fantastic job and then, of course, some of our good friends were on the panel there. I did not literally write down all their names, but some of the names you will know. You will know Rayanne Buchianico was on stage, eric Long, Carlos Perez and some others. The topics were all good. 

07:49
It was not a pitch fest, which is one of the things that in the past few years, conferences have been trying to get away from. The pitch fest. These were not. These were conversations that, for the most part, you wanted to pay attention to. People we'll be back for another one. Let's see In terms of notes, of what else went on up there. 

08:39
Let's see here. Well, of course, the vendors were nice. I'll talk a little bit about some of them. Well, I will say this Overall and I don't really grade conferences, I try not to do that but if I had to grade a conference, this would be a 9 out of 10. Maybe an 8.5, but it was pretty good, pretty nice. So that is there. A lot of vendors were there. I think there were, I don't know 19 vendor booths or something. 

09:10
It was a small conference. I mean, there was less than 100 people. Probably. I think TechCon is going to be a little bit bigger this year, but that's about the size. If you're looking at it, it's a good-sized conference, not too many people that you get lost in the shovel. Not so small that you feel like you've met everybody by the end of, you know, the first session. A good conference and, again, interactive enough that you had stuff to do. It was on a big enough hotel platform that you could walk around and it was a nice little area. So that was good. 

09:51
Since I'll be mentioning a lot of the stuff later when I start to talk about the vendor and the swag, let me go ahead and get to my junior story. So I mentioned that Eric and his had a little panel on where they were talking about pricing and of course, a lot of them were the usual conversations about pricing, setting customer expectations, packaging your stuff in such a way that you're presenting value to customers, being able to explain what it is that they're getting, whether you're doing an a la carte or an all-you-can-eat. That is one of the big things that we have to, you know, get across from the very beginning when you're dealing with a client. This particular client is one, that is, they are on a managed agreement. They long since went off of the commitment, meaning in the beginning we did sign them to a one-year deal, but now it's pretty much yes, they agree in principle to an annual agreement, but I don't really hold them to that. It's a nice agreement and it works out well. 

11:00
I do not bill them all-you-can-eat. I do bill them and it's an almost all-you-can-eat remote support. So they get you know as much of that as they can, but only during business hours. And I say that specifically because this is a client who thinks that they need 24-7 support, who thinks that they need 24-7 support. The problem is they don't want to pay for 27 support and we've had that discussion with them many, many times. 

11:32
This is a customer that every I don't know every two, three, four years, I mean. I've been with them a while and they have shopped me around many times. In fact, they did an experiment back during COVID. I did not say that this is actually a co-managed client as well. So I have two juniors at this place, I have an AJ and I have a CJ and during COVID they did not have one of the juniors, they just had AJ and they did not want to pay me to provide them some onsite support to put a tech in their office. So they actually contracted with another provider, and it was a copy vendor. 

12:19
Let me see if I can explain this properly. This was a copy vendor that was acquired by a national MSP and so they thought that they could start offering managed services to all their copy clients. So the copy vendor that I worked with approached AJ and said hey, you know, we can provide you support as well. Come to find out it wasn't what they claimed it was. They touted the 24-7 support. They touted that you could call any time. There was a whole bunch of stuff that happened with that, but the bottom line is that project only went maybe three, four months and then they ditched it and I'm trying to think they probably went maybe three or four months before hiring. They hired another junior before this junior. So they've gone through a couple, but bottom line is that's where they are, and I've talked to them a couple of times about providing 24-7 support and they keep saying no because it's just too expensive. And I'm like understood. So your support hours are 8.30 am to 5.30 pm, and that is. 

13:37
That Leads me to an email that I received at 9.52 pm last night where AJ was like I really need to speak to you. We have a situation where an employee filed a personal claim against one of our clients and now the client wants to know what files they have access to. That's probably the most I can give you about the situation, but that was at 9.52 pm last night, so at 7.42 am AJ responds again. I'm sorry, I don't know why this says 7.42, but here's the thing. So at 8.45, I actually sent him an email saying call you soon, working on a server emergency for another client, and that is one of the ways that I prioritize what's important. You guys do it, I do it. So if there's a server down, that trumps other situations and I don't prioritize based on the size of the client, I prioritize based on the size of the problem. So a client that had a server down, I was working with them, and so the email that I got back. And so the email that I got back I believe should have been 8.54 am, but it says 7.54 for some reason, or 7.42. Should have been 8.42. The response is I know you have an emergency this morning, but we really need to get an answer back to our client in the below. Can you please respond to the big fancy owner name and I on any options and or when you will be available to call me back. So that was the premise of how I got my start with the client this morning. So come to find out. 

15:42
The issue that really needed to be resolved was something happened back on March 4th that wasn't communicated to anybody until yesterday and AJ didn't decide to email me until 9.52 last night, until 952 last night, and what he wanted was for me to pull file access for one employee for all files related to this client that they had accessed and all of that stuff. And I said we don't have that. And he's like, why not? I said you didn't want that. We talked about this 10 years ago when we started with you. I think it's longer. We talked about it two years ago when you were looking at other programs, and one of the features in some of these other programs that you wanted was the ability to track when somebody touched a file, created a file, moved a file, deleted a file, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all of the programs were too expensive for that. Well, we switched them over to a Synology NAS, which actually does have that ability, but as part of the proposal that I gave them back when we did this. This was an upgrade that we did for them last year. 

17:11
It ended up being in November when we did that, one of the considerations was storage for server logs and other programs. And the comment was, well, we don't need that, we don't want to pay for the extra storage, we just need to pay for storage for what we need now. And I said, well, I do need to plan for storage in the future because you're probably going to have this at least five years and you guys use a lot of space, you guys have big PDFs, you guys have big video files that you get in from other clients and you've got to have some place to store that. So we bought them one of the Synology NASs that were a little bit bigger I think it was the 3622XS Plus that has 12 bays. That has 12 bays. And so we filled up eight of them, two of them with a system drive, solid state drives, to kind of run all their apps and do all this stuff. And then we had six drives that we put just your regular SATA Synology drives in, giving them four drives, bays for extension, for expansion. I mean so we have the ability to add more space expansion. I mean. So we have the ability to add more space and they're about 40% used right now. 

18:31
And so he started saying well, we should have done that. Why didn't you do that? I mean, you said no. You said no to the 24-7 support, you said no to the extra storage, you said no to the file monitoring and there was actually a whole bunch of other stuff that they said no to. And, as I said in the intro, you're getting what you paid for. If you want more, then we have to charge you more. 

18:59
And trying to think if he even said anything, but it was quiet for quite some time. But what's funny is the big-named owner that he said I needed to get back to had written an email that said we are about to lose a client if I do not immediately inform them of our research on this topic, them of our research on this topic. And I had to explain to him that you know I will respond to you when I can respond to you. I have somebody with a server down and you have a problem that you've known about since March 4th that you didn't want to tell me about. So why is that my emergency now didn't want to tell me about. So why is that my emergency now? So it's been a fun day, so that is my junior story. 

19:52
Of course, AJ is who I was dealing with, and now I should probably go ahead and say this I have engaged a digital forensic person that is going to come in and run some program that will go back and check all the metadata on the profile of the user Because, needless to say, there are ways that you can go and track that information. The Synology options that I did say are available. We are now going to turn on. We are going to figure out a place to store the logs in Synology and I didn't know this, but there is a transfer service under the file areas and stuff that you can turn on tracking and usually it just has what's deleted and something else. But in order to track what's created, what's read, what's moved, you actually have to check those and, as you can imagine, the larger the client, the larger amount of storage that is needed for these logs. So that's why we had to go through that. They said we need to turn that on, that they said we need to turn that on because if this ever happens again and I said, okay, just know that there will be an extra charge on your monthly invoice and I've not heard back from them yet. 

21:18
So the guys that were on the All Things MSP show were all saying things of you've got to set the customer expectations, you have to stand firm with your pricing in the beginning. I know that when I talked about some of this in the billing tips that I gave last month when we were talking about MSP money some of the things with billings you've got to do that. You've set your prices and you stand firm, and if you have things where you will provide support from this hour to this hour and if you need support extra, you're going to pay extra, and if they want to renegotiate, you've got to have all of that stuff in there. So it was interesting Good day, I mean from my perspective. I mean I was able to do some of the stuff they needed. I got them the contact that they needed. They're now going to pay $3,500 to do research on this person's profile and I hope that they find what they're looking for. All right, that's our junior story for today. 

22:30
Now some of you have been patiently waiting for me to talk about vendor swag, and one of the first things that I should probably say is that I'm not going to pick an actual swag winner for this conference. I just don't think that it's fair for the venue that we were at, the vendors that showed up yes, there were 19,. A good number of vendors. We had a good amount of swag. I came back with two bags of stuff, but I'm not going to pick an actual winner, but I am going to talk about some of the different stuff that we got. So I did prepare something. Here we go. So I did prepare a little slideshow. 

23:16
So, rather than me trying to have all this swag just hanging out here, channel Pro Live was the event that I was at and, of course, the first thing we always talk about is the bags. That has become something that I believe needs to be a mainstay, and if vendors really want people to dig their swag, having a bag is important because you got to have something to put it in, is important because you got to have something to put it in. And the bag that really impressed me this time was presented by Any Desk, a vendor that, let's just say, I wasn't quite sure that they were a real vendor, because Any Desk is one of those remote access programs that I thought was what the bad guys used all the time to get into stuff. Now I obviously could be wrong and if I'm giving any desk a bad name I apologize. But they had a good bag. It was a nice hefty tote made of cloth, sturdy. It's going to last. You know I don't like bags that fall apart after the conference. The handles rip this bag. They won't do that. There's actually even an internal little pocket that if you want to stick things like business cards or your wallet or keys or stuff like that, you can do that inside the bag here. So any desk gets a mention for a very nice bag For apparel. 

24:47
So this shirt caught my attention. I do believe this is the first time that I have seen it at any of the conferences that I've been to. It's got an interesting front, which is what you're seeing on the screen now with the phrase hey, hackers. And then when you turn the shirt over and look at the back and I don't know that I can magnify this, but it is a shirt that you can tell is from Huntress and it's got a good little phrase there with a little graph versus find out or F around. Just a cool little shirt. They've got their logo kind of embedded in the image there. I will say that it doesn't have the feel of a shirt that I would wear and most of you know I don't really wear vendor shirts. Out and about this one's I would say that this is more of a heavy shirt, more of a fall winter type of shirt here in Florida, so it's not that super soft feel that people were talking about. It's also not that the sports feel, but it's a good shirt. I like the image; I like the logos there. So Huntress gets a nod for me for the shirts. Now, what you're seeing now is probably my biggest disappointment of the show. 

26:23
This is a phone charger and it's one of the show. This is a phone charger and it's one of the cylinder charges that you would put on your desk and plug in and then you can lay your phone on top, and this was presented by TruGrid. Great vendor, wonderful product, love it, use it. And at first I made fun of them because the box that it came in did not have their logo on it. But when you open it up, the charger has their logo on it and it was great. My disappointment is this is one of the swag items that I actually was kind of hoping to get set up and use, to get set up and use. 

27:07
And when I got home or not home, actually when I got to my office and plugged it in, it did not work. It didn't work, TruGrid, what's up? So I've not yet decided if I'm going to try to reach out to my folks and say, hey, send me one that works, because this actually is pretty good, it's, it's, it's. It doesn't have, it's a weird little feel. It's not cheap plastically, like some of them are. Uh, it's not as hefty as a coaster. You know some of the coasters like zoris has a really nice coaster, by the way. They weren't there but just saying, um, but it's, it's a good little product and I, I wish it had worked. 

27:49
So, true grid, I, I, I'm kind of disappointed in you guys. It's the first time I actually even too, that I had seen true grid representatives out. My rep, Brandon and peter uh, fantastic guys on the show three years ago and talked about what a great experience Want to be on the show again. So we got to get this fixed. And mr Anthony, thank you for hopping on. You did a fantastic thing with your show earlier. I mentioned that, not sure if you heard it, but good panel on pricing there. So for those that are listening by audio, eric has put his comment in the chat love the swag. So, yep, good swag, good swag. Of course TruGrid need a charger that works. 

28:40
But TruGrid also came with hats, and hats are getting to be a popular thing at conferences. And TruGrid brought two hats of different colors, so a blue and a white, and you can't see by the sticker that is in the picture there. But this says it is the original flex fit that fits your life. So it's the hat that basically has the stretchy band in the back. It does not have that little plastic knobby thing that you try to adjust to make sure it fits your head. This is a flex fit. So even though I don't wear hats and I put it on, it kind of it would stretch to match your head without that annoying strap on the side. So again in the apparel category, TruGrid came through with some very nice hats, so kind of a toss-up. 

29:40
TruGrid Got a crappy charger, but good hats. So I will say that Our next swag item. You know, I did not know what to say about this. I wasn't sure I was going to put it in, but I wanted to also talk about swag. One of the things that I truly believe when it comes to swag is, even though we know that vendors are trying to be a little bit on the inexpensive side, you don't want to spend a ton of money. You know that people like me are coming for the free stuff, but again, we want to not only get stuff that we know works, but we want to get stuff that we understand. 

30:22
And this was a weird little transmitter slash receiver. I didn't know what it was, but I thought, ooh, that might be cool. I thought it was a two-piece thing where you could maybe do a radio across the room and listen to your earbuds, or something like that. Well, that did not happen. I don't even know what I'm going to do with this. It looks like it has a cord that would plug into an old school phone that still has the stereo plug that comes out, on which iPhones today don't have that plug. They took away that little 3.5 millimeter plug. So this receiver does nothing, and this was presented by my friends at TD Cynics and TD Cynics. I was going to praise them because they are now my number one distributor. It used to be, you know, d&h, and then it was Tech Data before that, before they got purchased by Cynics or merged with Cynics to become TD Cynics. So I was really looking forward to it, to this. 

31:23
But the other downside is when I opened up the package and brought out the instruction manual, it's not in English. It's not in English, it's in, I don't know, Korean or Japanese or Chinese or I don't know, but I need the instruction manual. Now, when you open it up, there is an English page inside. So I don't want to keep harping on it. That bad, but I can't have the front of an instruction manual is not in English, even if it's English at the top and everything else out of whatever. And the other thing is, I just couldn't figure it out. I's you know, I consider myself a decent tech. I can usually figure stuff out. I couldn't figure this thing out. It's a little plastic thing that's going to go in the trash as far as I'm concerned. So TD Cynic sorry, not good swag. Now, the picture you're seeing here is not swag. Picture you're seeing here is not swag. 

32:34
This was a new vendor to, at least in my eyes. I've never seen this vendor before. This was a booth that was set up as the Island Router. So let me actually get this picture off because I want to show you that what this vendor did is, if you're watching the video, I am holding in my hand an actual island router. This was a vendor who, when I was sitting with a group of people at the high top tables having a little chow, we were looking around at all the booths, people were kind of looking at it, walking by. They did have swag, they had a little Frisbee, they had Chapstick and probably something else. I don't remember, but people didn't want to talk to them and somehow I got well, I didn't. I went up on everyone's behalf and said look, we see you guys here, you've got a router, you've got an app that looks pretty cool. On behalf of everybody here that's not talking to you, I want to talk to you. And they were appreciative, they were fantastic. 

33:46
This is let me go ahead and set the record straight this is just a router. This is not something that, at this point in time, is going to compete or replace your firewall appliance like SonicWall, FortiGate WatchGuard In terms of security. It does not have any of those features in there. It has content filtering those features in there. It has content filtering, but the biggest thing with this is that it has some tracking when it comes to users and devices and it is supposed to be fast. So if you ever had an issue with an appliance that as soon as you turn on the services, it slows down, this is not supposed to do that. This vendor and again it's Island Router and it's islandrouter.com is their website. I'll have the link in the show notes, but the actual parent company, I believe, is called PerfTech. 

34:48
This is the type of device that I think would fall into the realm of maybe an Araknis, where, if you just need a very basic firewall slash router and a customer that doesn't need all of the security services, well, this might fit the bill. As I mentioned, it's got URL filtering. It's got what I think might be some pretty good tracking. So even though, like so, I'm a SonicWall shop, you guys know that I can go in and I can see you know which IP addresses have used the most bandwidth. I can go in and see you know some other routes and data and stuff like that. This. There are features here where you can actually group devices to a user. So if a user has a desktop and a tablet and a mobile device and you want to track all of the internet traffic for that particular user, you can group devices to be a user group and just name it Chuck and that way, whatever device Chuck is on, you can track what Chuck is doing and then, if you want to drill down, see what websites, what categories, this seems to be able to do that. There's some other stuff in here. It's got some auto-sensing ports here. They're all gig. 

36:11
Now let me tell you, this is one of the reasons I brought this up, because, as a new vendor, this was fantastic. They literally at the conference and I talked to them on Thursday, the gentleman there was saying you are going to have an evaluation unit in your hand by next week, and they did. This was one of the vendors that I actually said. You know what? Call me, let's do a demo. You know I don't do that folks. You know I'm like, don't call me, I'll call you, but I said to do that. So 11 o'clock Monday morning I'm on a demo. I've got a product engineer, I got the head of marketing, I've got two other people. It was, it was a nice call, they weren't pushy, they weren't salesy. In fact, I don't even know what it cost, um, but they sent me the unit and I will be putting this in, uh, probably tomorrow morning and I'm going to start playing with it. 

37:11
Now I say that, with all that I said about it's not going to overtake my sonic walls or any of the other ones that you're using. They are coming out with an enterprise-grade unit later this year or the beginning of next year I don't know exactly when they really wanted to come out this year, but they were honest and said look, it might not be till then. If you see the device now, this looks like it looks like an access point. It's got colored lights. I know you can't see them because of the screen. When it lights up, the lights go blue and it I mean it looks funky, go blue. And it I mean it looks funky, it doesn't really look like something I would put in a client's office, especially my larger law offices, where I'm like, yeah, we're going to, you know, provide you with security. This looks like a residential unit and I told them that I'm not saying anything. 

38:12
I didn't tell them on the call, but they are supposed to be coming out with a rack mount unit that is going to be more like the products that we see on a regular basis, and I think when that happens, I'm going to be looking at this and again it's, at least at this time, not something that I'll look to replace for my larger clients, the ones that are security-minded and need that type of stuff, but for the clients that I do have and I do have some I've got a retail store that is just not interested and don't have compliance needs, blah, blah, blah we have other ways that we are secure in them. We do have our BDR stuff on there. We've got ThreatLocker, we've got all that stuff. You know our BDR stuff on there, we've got Threat Locker, we've got all that stuff. They just need a firewall that blocks all their ports so they can pass PCI compliant, blah, blah, blah. So this might be something for them and I'm going to look at it. So I will have the link in there and we'll go through that and it will keep an eye on the Island router and we'll go through that and it will keep an eye on the Island router. 

39:24
Now I wanted to do that segue to again talk about vendor etiquette and what I see happening at conferences and after conferences all the time this was a vendor. Now, granted, it might be because they're new and they know that they've got to make an effort, that they've got to do whatever to put forth a good first step, but they were fantastic. They were excited to be there. Now I know that, listen, some of our vendors and you know who they are they are at I don't know 200 events a year. They see the same faces, conference after conference after conference. They know they're not going to get a sale when they see me. They oh, Marv's just here for the swag. Listen, these people were excited. They were happy that people came up and talked to them when they did that demo and we had our chat. Even though I told them my people may not like this, they were like we understand, we're working on it. Got to love it. Most of the vendors that were at Channel Pro fantastic. However, I do need to throw a couple under the bus, and the one I want to throw under the bus in a very nice, easy manner because it was an honest mistake ThreatLocker was there. You guys have heard me talk about the fact that I now am a ThreatLocker partner. 

40:53
Last July signed up for a one-year deal with ThreatLocker. My original intent was to sign up with the friends over at CyberFOX. That was my intent, but ThreatLocker had some other things that CyberFOX didn't have and not to disparage partner vendor against vendor, but that's just the way it works out. My goal here is to try to be nice with all the vendors and some things work better for some MSPs that don't work for others. So the way that we are treated by our vendors is important. Whether we use them or not is important whether we use them or not. ThreatLocker I use, so we get a call at my office from ThreatLocker and I'll set this up by saying that when I go to conferences day one, I'm on a swag run. All I want to do is go by, grab your swag so I can get it in the bag, get it up to my room so I can bring it back for evaluation. Day two, I'll go around to the booths and if there's somebody that interests me, like Island Router did this time, I'm going to stop and I'm going to talk. If there are partners there that I know, vendors that I have seen, that I'm cordial with, even if I don't use your product, I'm going to come say hello. 

42:17
Jennifer, I had a nice chat with her. Rayanne had a booth. Our good friend ABC Solutions had a booth, had a great saying on the back of her shirt too that I'm going to try to steal for a mug. The Kaseya folks had a booth, went by and said hello to them, but ThreatLocker. I don't remember what I said to them. I know I probably waved as I went by. I probably said hello, I didn't recognize the people behind the booth. But listen, you can't call my office and tell Kim when she answers a phone that hey, Marv stopped by our booth and he was so interested and wanted to learn about our product so we're calling for a demo. And she said I don't think he did that because we're already ThreatLocker partners and the salesperson had had to say really, but he seems. 

43:14
So she knows. She knows all the people because I come back and I tell her who I talk to, who I'm expecting calls from and of course she does all my bookkeeping. She does half of the, the taking of the calls from customers. Every time something comes through on email she reads half of the reports she's, you know, half of. I don't want to say she's my dispatch, but there's a lot of stuff that come in for alerts that she actually gets a lot of them Threat locker. She doesn't because she knows that that's really more of a tech thing. So it comes straight to me and if it needs to go to somebody I'll send it. But she knows what I use. She knows what products we use. So, and by the way, before you guys start calling me out on stuff, I did send an email to my account manager, of which so in my contacts I have two, I don't know which one's my primary, but I sent an email to them and said hey look, I'm going to be talking about you guys on the show and here's why. So they know I'm not trying to, you know, surprise anybody or stuff like that, but I did want to say I understand it's probably an honest mistake Not every person knows who I am. 

44:35
I'm Uncle Marv, I'm the man in the van. Some of you don't even call me an MSP. I get it. But one thing I would say to vendors at least compare the names you get at a conference against the partner list, and especially somebody like me who, yes, my day job is an MSP, but as a podcaster I try to talk about the vendors, especially if I use them or if I've had them on the show or if other people have talked. It's not like I'm just living in, you know, winter wonderland. ThreatLocker should know I'm a partner, so that's the skinny on that. Not a huge thing, but it's a thing that gets talked about in the forums and on things like the Facebook and Reddit. You guys know vendors get trashed all the time because people complain stop calling my office. Eh, we work with it. We do the best we can. Now the other vendor I want to call out was actually not at Channel Pro and this one is much more egregious in what I think and Keith is in the chat saying everybody knows Uncle Marv. Keith, that is not true. That is not true at all. Everybody knows you. You can't go anywhere without somebody talking about the wise sage Keith Nelson. They all want to rub your beard like it's a Sinbad something. 

46:08
So the vendor I want to call out because of vendor etiquette is when I went back and looked at my emails and I'll be honest, I get a lot of emails from vendors that I don't look at. I get a lot of spam. I get a lot of junk mail. You guys, you know you all get this and I don't know how much I get just simply because I've been in IT. I don't know how much I get because I go to conferences. I don't know how much I get because of the podcast, but I know that I get a lot. I get a lot from partners that I'm already partners with. 

46:49
Where I'm getting you know, I'll say Kaseya only because I'm going to be going to Kaseya May 9th. So let me get this out of here. Kaseya has a ton of products in their portfolio. I don't use them all. I think they have I don't know 15. I don't know, I'll find out on May 9th, but I use three. I use three of their products, but I get emails. I would say almost every day, multiple times a day. Hey, have you looked at this? Hey, we're doing. I get a lot of emails. I don't read them all. So I get this email from Nord Lair and I didn't really know who they were and I got an email. Actually, you know what? I'm going to pull up something real quick on. Yeah, Okay, so this used to be NordVPN? 

47:42 - Speaker 1 (Announcement)
I don't I whatever that's. 

47:44 - Uncle Marv (Host)
That's where the thing comes across. So, Nord layer, so here's the email that I got. Marvin, I regret to inform you that after several attempts to reach out, I have not been able to connect with you. As a result, I must say goodbye and move on to other opportunities. I would also like to ask are you the best person to speak about new vendors at MB Systems of South Florida Inc. Or is there someone else within your team who would be better suited for this conversation? 

48:21
So this actually came in on Friday and me, again, I didn't pay it much mind because I don't know the name. I don't know the name of the person. But then I was going through and cleaning out my email, like I do, and I came across this and I looked at it. I'm like, hmm, let me research this a little bit. So I found two things. One, that this person had been trying to reach out to me since January 2nd. I get it. If I've not responded to you, I apologize. I'm sorry. I understand that that could be frustrating as a salesperson, account rep, and you're trying to get a sale and people aren't responding, I get that. 

49:04
But when I read the first email because I realized I hadn't read any of them. So I went back and read this first one from January 2nd, and it starts off by saying Marvin just reviewed MB Systems of South Florida Inc. Partners Hyphen great offering for your clients. Looks like you've carefully chosen the best vendors and you might already have something in your portfolio that covers the cybersecurity stack. Would you be open to exploring new vendor options for cybersecurity and are there any specific challenges or priorities within your cybersecurity strategy that you'd like to address? Hope to hear from you, boom. 

49:53
Now I'll be honest. Like I said earlier, I didn't read this back in January. I read this today after I read the other email that came on Friday, and then I went and looked back and this person was a contact or connection on LinkedIn that I unconnected today. And listen, this is one of those areas where I'm kind of like eh, vendor etiquette. I would have rathered he just not sent an email at all rather than start off. I regret to inform you. There's no regret. We don't have a relationship and, first of all, if you were going to use my company name in such a way that I know that you didn't edit your template properly, because MB System of South Florida Inc. Partners is not my company name. Do your research Be better? That now leads me on to another peripheral rant and some of this is already out in the ether because I'm going to be mentioning something that I got a text message from a friend of mine who sent me a screenshot of their LinkedIn where somebody had reached out to them. And here's where I'm at with LinkedIn. 

51:30
Some of you don't know I have a system with LinkedIn. If somebody, first of all. I don't reach out to random people to get connected on LinkedIn or the Facebook. I have a rule that For the most part, I wait for people to reach out to me, and my rule on LinkedIn is if you reach out to me to be a connection, well, first of all, I'm not going to accept your connection unless we have at least five people in common. I just had to put something in there to do that. I just had to put something in there to do that. So the only exceptions to that are if we've talked in person and I know you directly, I was referred to you and we have something in common in terms of business or even the podcast, things of that nature. But if not, you're going to sit there until we have five connections in common and then I'm going to evaluate those five connections to see if not whether or not they're legit connections, but some connections I have because they're salespeople trying to sell me something, and so I'm like, okay, the only time I automatically accept if I don't know you or if I haven't been introduced to you, the only time I automatically accept a connection is if it's more than 50. So it's the 5 and 50 rule. So the person that I had on there was, I think, 48. And now I'm wishing you know what. I wish I had not done that, so I unconnected with somebody today. 

53:16
The other side to that is whether you are a vendor, whether you are a salesperson, whether you are a business coach, whether you are an influencer or whatever you think you are. If you send me a friend connection and I hit accept, what I do not want happening is, five seconds later, to get your pitch and your request to set up a meeting. No, no, no, no. You got to woo me first. I request to set up a meeting. No, no, no, no, you got to woo me first. I got to know who you are. You got to give me a reason to like you. Yeah, I accepted the connection and the friend request, but we need to do more than that. 

54:04
And so the next comment that usually happens is hey, whenever you're ready, blah, blah, blah, and then it diverges into stuff like hey, are you truly trying to grow, are you really wanting to expand? Or it goes the other way, where hey, didn't mean to scare you. Well, that would be an unconnect from me, because if you're going to make a comment about didn't mean to scare you, first of all I don't get scared, but I do get frustrated, upset and disappointed and somewhat angry in the tone as which to some of this happens. So I don't know how I didn't mean for that to go as badly as it sounded, but that's where we are. So let me put a good sandwich back on this, because I mentioned that. 

55:04
You know we do have some great vendors. TruGrid, as I mentioned, was a great vendor. Again, I mentioned that this was the first time I had seen them out in public. My actual account manager was out there and great guy, a little awkward at the bar, but great guy, and I want to say thank you to that. Of course, our friends at PX 8, always a good thing. You saw the ad before the show, or you heard the ad that I will be at the PAX 8 Beyond this June in Denver. That will be my trip across the Mississippi out west, so I will be doing that. There's some other great vendors there. I wanted to give a shout out to somebody. All my pages are all messed up because I got so flustered with stuff. But some great shout outs to some other vendors that were there Pax8, TruGrid, oh, Avast, tiffany Pruitt, my account manager when I was back using AVG for business. Tiffany, great to see you out and about Hope to chat with you soon. And maybe I didn't even bring the page with me, oh well, but I did mention, of course, huntress. But I did mention, of course Huntress, td Cynics, great partner there, and some of the others. 

56:33
Channel Pro Live was a great event. Again, jay-z, thank you for putting that event on. It was fantastic. I hope to do more. And what else? I know a lot of people are right now in Nashville at the MSP Initiative. I know there's an ASCII event going on. I will be at, I believe, the Boston ASCII event. And of course, I will be at Pax8Beyond I mentioned. I'm going to be at IT Nation Secure. I think that is the one that happens in June and, of course, later on the line. You know that there's TechCon unplugged and all of that, so we'll be seeing everybody out and about. I think that is going to do it for this show. So thank you all for hanging out Keith Nelson, Mr. Old man, thank you for coming on, eric Anthony I know there was some others out there hanging that didn't participate in the chat, but thank you for attending the live show. 

57:31
I do this every Wednesday at 8 pm Eastern. Of course, I have audio content that comes out. There was a show that came out yesterday about strategic marketing, so be sure to head over to itbusinesspodcast.com and hit one of the pod catchers to be alerted whenever shows come out. I'm actually doing another MSP Money podcast, I believe either tomorrow or Friday. That will talk about profit first for MSPs. So I want you to be looking forward to that and, of course, I'll be back with another live show next week. That's going to do it, folks. I went much longer than I thought I would talking to myself, but I appreciate you for indulging me and listening and supporting. That's going to do it. We'll see you soon and until next time, Holla!