689 Dawn Sizer on Community and Growth in ASCII

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with our first interview live at ASCII here in Boston. And if you are watching the video, if I post it up, we're getting mocked by the ASCII women. I'm joined by a familiar friend of the show, the darling of the channel, Dawn Sizer.

How are you, Dawn?

[Dawn Sizer]
Good. How are you?

[Uncle Marv]
I am good.

[Dawn Sizer]
I'm so excited to actually see you in person for a change instead of on the other side of the monitor.

[Uncle Marv]
And of course it was at our conference and not on one of your Florida trips. What happened?

[Dawn Sizer]
I don't know. I don't know.

[Uncle Marv]
I had to fly in bad weather, in super fog.

[Dawn Sizer]
You did.

[Uncle Marv]
To land in Boston of all places.

[Dawn Sizer]
But you made it.

[Uncle Marv]
I made it. So how are things here?

[Dawn Sizer]
It's been great, actually. We're into day two of the ASCII event.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. You spoke yesterday.

[Dawn Sizer]
I did. We talked about automation yesterday, which was fantastic. And I think there's a bunch of people that got some really good, you know, little tidbits out of that.

I hit LinkedIn. So that was good.

[Uncle Marv]
You did. Yep. So have you been mauled afterwards where people are like, oh, can you show us a little bit more about how to do that?

[Dawn Sizer]
There's always a couple of people that want to talk. And I think that's great. I mean, that's the point of all of this, right, is to get together with folks, whether it's at an ASCII event or another one, and really, you know, peer interact and make sure that people get the information that they're looking for.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. So this is your, I believe, your first year on the full tour, right? You're doing all the events this year.

[Dawn Sizer]
So I've done this once before, but it was COVID. So I had one event and then it was...

[Uncle Marv]
Did anybody notice?

[Dawn Sizer]
No. No one noticed.

[Uncle Marv]
The year of our COVID. Yeah.

[Dawn Sizer]
Which was kind of sad because it was a really interesting tour. It was the year that the gentleman, gosh, now I've like completely blanked on his name, but it was the Catch Me If You Can guy.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh, the one that Leonardo played.

[Dawn Sizer]
Yes.

[Uncle Marv]
In the movie.

[Dawn Sizer]
Yes. And he, it was really interesting watching him speak. So I think that was, it was kind of a highlight.

I got to see him out in Long Beach and see him do it live. And then after that, I was on like right after him. So I got to see him on the other side of the monitor.

But yeah, doing all of the events this year.

[Uncle Marv]
Nice. Nice. So let me do this.

So I recorded a quick intro last night when I got in, because I got in late. And has anybody been talking about No Before?

[Dawn Sizer]
I've seen it on the news a couple of times. I've seen a couple of memes already. The meme exchange is going to be good with this one, I think.

But I haven't heard anyone actually reference it in passing.

[Uncle Marv]
Because I wanted to ask a couple of larger MSPs that deal with hiring, because I know the trend is to work remote. And the same issue is going to exist with us and is going to exist with our clients, because we're telling our clients they can work remote. How do you verify people if you actually never see them, if they have these abilities to do deepfakes?

[Dawn Sizer]
Yeah, I don't know. Is there a good answer? I don't know.

[Uncle Marv]
Probably not yet.

[Dawn Sizer]
Not yet right? So there is some software out there that can detect deepfake, that kind of thing. But when you're interviewing remotely, I mean, you're going to really have to look and listen and really kind of key into certain things that might tip you off, and absolutely run significant background checks and make sure that IDs are matching and things along those lines.

I mean, one of the things that we had talked about for another project that we're doing is, how do you verify somebody's identity? Do you use clear? Do you use ID.me?

How are you making sure that they are who they say they are? So I think that's something that we're going to have to look at as an organization, but maybe even as a full industry going forward is verifying identity.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, going deeper with our background checks, not just verifying their address and their name, even their social. You're right, doing deepfake checks, digging into social media, which a lot of my law firms do. They actually will check somebody's social media.

[Dawn Sizer]
We have a service that does that.

[Uncle Marv]
You do?

[Dawn Sizer]
We do. So the service just runs a quick scan of their LinkedIn and their Instagram and Facebook and things along those lines.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, I'm sure we'll hear about it. This is the last, what, seven days have just been vendor hell.

[Dawn Sizer]
Yeah, I think it has. It has not been a good time for them.

[Uncle Marv]
No. So we have to stick up for our vendors because we deal with the same stuff here.

[Dawn Sizer]
Well, and the kicker of it is it could be any of us at any time. Yes. It's not like, oh, they did a thing and it was horrific and blah, blah, blah, and only them.

That's not at all the case. It could have happened to any one of us.

[Uncle Marv]
No, that's happening all over. So one of my clients, we detected a user that was putting on one of those clicker programs that was working remotely. This was an attorney who they let work remote from day one, and they were questioning their billing.

But they had one of the remote programs that they didn't check activity. They just checked when people logged in and logged off. And they were asking me to put on Activetrak, which we'll put on there.

But I have the ability to where I can hop on and do some screen viewing. And I just noticed O's going across the screen of a Word document. And I said, hmm.

So I took a couple of video screenshots and sent it to them. So even stuff like that, it's happening. It's out there.

[Dawn Sizer]
Oh yeah, I'm sure. I saw, I think it's actually a commercial somewhere. Somebody had their mouse hooked to their robotic vacuum to keep it going.

And I was like, oh, that's pretty genius. I like it.

[Uncle Marv]
But they're selling those things on Amazon now.

[Dawn Sizer]
Right? It's crazy.

[Uncle Marv]
You can get the clicker things for like 30 bucks.

[Dawn Sizer]
That's crazy.

[Uncle Marv]
It is. So let me do this and honor the girl's wishes and talk about ASCII.

[Dawn Sizer]
Yes, absolutely.

[Uncle Marv]
Because now let's see, you joined ASCII, was it 2017?

[Dawn Sizer]
Somewhere around there. Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. And outside of them getting you to be on tour here, what have you gotten out of that over your years?

[Dawn Sizer]
Oh, so many little and big things. Community, right? We would never have become friends outside of ASCII.

Right? It's how we met.

[Uncle Marv]
Do you even remember the first time we met? Was it on a video call or was it...

[Dawn Sizer]
I don't know. I honestly don't. You know what?

It might've been in DC at one of the...

[Uncle Marv]
At the Cup?

[Dawn Sizer]
At the Cup. And that's when we met.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[Dawn Sizer]
Because it was probably one of those, Alicia said, you need to go talk to Mark B. And I was like, okay.

[Uncle Marv]
You sure it wasn't the other way around?

[Dawn Sizer]
You were a celebrity then.

[Uncle Marv]
Not back then. Wow. But that sounds about right.

[Dawn Sizer]
But realistically, you get this amazing community of people that do the same thing that you do that you can contact at any time. And obviously you're going to become closer to some people than others, but you get a great sounding board for all kinds of different things. I mean, we've used each other many times as sounding boards for all kinds of things.

And I think that's a big thing. Insurance is the other one. And I'm talking about business insurance, not health insurance.

Totally different scenario. But the business insurance is huge. I save the cost of my membership every year just in my business insurance.

[Uncle Marv]
I got mine through them as well.

[Dawn Sizer]
That's a big thing. And then depending on how large your MSP is, you might be able to get really good deals through some of the vendor relationships that ASCII has put into place. So I think that's another really good one.

So I would say community, business insurance, and then some of the deals that you can get through ASCII.

[Uncle Marv]
I remember when I first signed up, this was, I don't remember, I think it was 2014 or 15 when I signed up. And the first month of using the distributor discounts, I saved my membership when I would order HP equipment. Because I was getting 50 to 60 bucks more off of those.

Now those margins have come down, but back then that was still huge. And I still get discounts through ASCII. So very good.

Very good.

[Dawn Sizer]
One of the other things I do want to mention, before Alicia gets mad at me, because she will, ASCII does have a women's network. Specifically inside of the organization, just for women. And it's not just for women owners.

It's for women in all levels of the organization to come together and deal with some of the issues that we have to deal with. But also business building, right? It's not just, oh, we're a woman, it's terrible for us.

And that's not the case. It's more along the lines of like, how do we deal with this thing? How do we deal with that thing?

What about this HR thing? So it's the same conversations that are happening in the ASCII forum, but sometimes they're just mostly women.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, there you go. If you are a lady in the channel and just need a group to hang out and chat, and actually, you're going to learn a lot, because the women that I know that are in here, yeah, CEOs, darlings of the channel, I mean, multiple millions in business a year. So you can learn something here.

All right, well, Dawn, I will let you skedaddle here and get back to the day.

[Dawn Sizer]
Well, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

[Uncle Marv]
And, you know, I got to see Connor.

[Dawn Sizer]
He's back in the room.

[Uncle Marv]
He's in the room. All right, I'll have to get into the room. But all right, sounds good.

Thank you much for hopping over. That's going to do it, folks. We'll see you soon with another interview here from ASCII Live in Boston.

We'll see you then. Holla!