2025 Marching Orders for MSPs, Geeks and Nerds in Tech

Action Items

• [ ] Publish the link to Howard Cohen's "Marching Orders" article.
• [ ] Finish reading the chapter on "soft costs" in Dan Martell's book "Buy Back Your Time".
• [ ] Consider running a "Trusted Business Advisor" (TBA) program to position MSPs as strategic advisors.
• [ ] Evaluate the recent changes in the PSA/RMM platform market, such as Connectwise's drop in market share.

Outline

Howard Cohen's Background and Introduction

• Harry Brelsford introduces Howard Cohen, highlighting his expertise in the MSP and tech industries.
• Howard mentions his corporate entity, Tech Channel Partners Results Group.
• Harry praises Redmond Channel Partner magazine for its intellectual content.
• Howard explains the purpose of the "Marching Orders" series, which he has been involved with for 17 years.

Knowing Your Costs

• Howard emphasizes the importance of knowing your costs, a lesson learned from a service executive years ago.
• He explains that many MSPs are not profitable because they don't know their costs.
• Howard discusses the complexity of fully burdening costs and the need for good bookkeeping and accounting.
• Harry introduces Dan Martell's book, which highlights the importance of valuing one's own time.

Specialization in MSP Services

• Howard predicts that MSPs will follow the healthcare model, with general practitioners and specialists.
• He explains that focusing on specific services leads to higher returns on investment.
• Howard discusses the concept of partnering for services that MSPs don't specialize in.
• He mentions Microsoft's Uniqueness Rule as an example of declaring what you do and finding partners for the rest.

Focusing on Core Competencies

• Howard advises MSPs to invest in areas where they excel and outsource other tasks.
• He criticizes the outdated marketing methods used by many MSPs, such as fax blasts and email blasts.
• Howard promotes networking and community building as effective marketing strategies.
• He mentions his Substack, Tech Channel Marketing, which focuses on professional marketing strategies.

Elevating the Professional Posture of MSPs

• Howard discusses the need for MSPs to be seen as professionals rather than just resellers.
• He highlights the importance of expanding service offerings without hiring new people.
• Howard suggests partnering with vendors to offer services and wrap them with MSP's own services.
• He emphasizes the need for MSPs to get serious about their business and treat it as a professional practice.

The Role of the Founder in Sales

• Howard advises MSPs to consider themselves as professional practices and have the founder do the selling.
• He explains that customers want to talk to someone who knows the business well.
• Howard shares an anecdote about a consultant who advised a president to focus on selling.
• He stresses the importance of knowing sales numbers and being the best salesperson in the company.

Challenges in Finding Salespeople

• Howard acknowledges the difficulty in finding good salespeople and advises MSPs to focus on their own selling abilities.
• He shares an example of a company that could be more profitable if the president did all the selling.
• Howard mentions ConnectWise's recent drop in the PSA and RMM platforms, attributing it to the absence of a strong salesperson.
• He praises Arnie Bellini, ConnectWise's founder, for his sales skills and charisma.

Final Thoughts and Holiday Wishes

• Howard reiterates the importance of looking at one's practice and role anew.
• He emphasizes that MSPs should focus on their core competencies and partner for the rest.
• Harry and Howard discuss the upcoming holidays and wish each other happy holidays.
• They conclude the conversation on a positive note, reflecting on the importance of professionalism and effective marketing in the MSP industry.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE! 

Harry Brelsford  00:04

Hey, hey, nation, nation. What a great way to start. 2025 Good lord, 2024 for me, was a mixed bag, but it ended on a high note, so pretty happy at the end of the day. That's not why we're here. Someone who's always got their pulse on the MSP industry, the tech industry. And a good attitude is Howard Cohen down in the Phoenix area. And Howard, what's the name of your corporate entity? So we get that straight

Howard Cohen  00:33

Our official name is the tech channel partners, results, group. Howard’s LinkedIn profile 

Harry Brelsford  00:38

Okay, great, great. So you just within the last month, dropped a piece and Redmond Channel Partner (link below) , you know? And I'm glad that pub still around. I consider them to be a little bit more intellectual, and I mean, in a kind way, academic, you know, they're not caught up and who got fired and who got divorced and who got hired, right? I'm done.  

Howard Cohen  01:03

That's why I write for them.

Harry Brelsford  01:07

So you did the 2025 Marching Orders in Redmond Channel Partner. Thank you. Walk us through it. Tell us what are some high level thoughts, and I link off to it. Well,

01:19

we've been doing the marching orders. I look back, we've been doing them for 17 years, which is amazing. Scott Becker started them 17 years ago, and I've been involved for just about all of it. And the idea is to share ideas as to what you should be focused on in the coming year. Yeah, this year I really kind of got back to basics. I really didn't, not much of what I had to say focused on any particular vendor, if you will, or any particular technology for that matter. But I mean fundamental things like knowing your costs. A million years ago, remember, I was in the channel for a million years before I started writing about it.

Harry Brelsford  02:04

Yeah, get me going about dinosaurs and tech. You know, just try to get a job in the Silicon Valley. That and two bits will get you right on the T in Boston. Go ahead. Yeah. Well,

Howard Cohen  02:18

back when dirt was new, I had an experienced service executive say to me in a state of drunken stupor. He said, Howard, you know what the difference is between a great service organization and a not so great service organization? And I was like, No Bob. Now I braced myself, because Bob could be long winded, and he looked at me, he nodded his head a couple of times. Said, the difference is the great service organization knows its costs, and you stop right there. I was like, I was expecting a half hour, and I got knows its cost. And in the ensuing 20 some odd years, I've learned how right he was. I agree. I think you know when I ask, when I ask MSPs, are you profitable? And they say they don't know when we drill back to figure it out. It's because they don't know what the costs are. They don't know how to how to estimate or how to compute their costs. There's a lot in, you know, you have to fully burden your costs. You have to you have to equate in utilization of your personnel. There's a lot to it. You need somebody who's a really good bookkeeper, a really good accountant, to look at that before you can really get to know in any service business, get to know your costs. So knowing your cost was my first one, the other one, if

Harry Brelsford  03:50

you don't mind, let me introduce you. I'll put the link in the teaser blog. I talked to you about that hot shot keynote speaker, Dan Martell, who's the founder of SAS Academy and came out with a good book, buy back your time. And he has a chapter, and I'm gonna well, by the time this publishes, I will have finished it, but he has the a soft cost conversation about Howard's time and Harry's time. And the bottom line is, why is Harry running the FedEx to make photocopies? Right? That's, that's, that's expensive for me to do that. But go on. You get the point? Well,

04:34

my, my point really focuses more on people who charge 50 bucks an hour for for a technician, and don't realize that they're only selling half that technician's time. So the the $40 cost they computed now becomes $80 because they're only recapturing it in half the time. Things like that can trip you up very. Very easily. The second one really is very consistent with what a lot of other people are talking about lately, which is defining what you do. I've been saying for several years now that MSPs will follow the model of healthcare medicine. That is, there'll be general practitioners, sure, and we all are general practitioners today, yeah, but in the future, you're going to see specialists. You know, just like your doctor sends you to specialists for everything these days, technology is going the same way. You'll have storage specialists and networking specialists and data science specialists and all kinds of specialists. And those who are doing that now, who are really focusing down on what they do, are winning. They're seeing much higher returns on their investment in their companies. The popular question that comes up whenever we talk about that is, well, what what project only contains? One skill, you know, you most projects, you need to have a variety of skills. And this is where it aligns with something we've all been talking about, which is you partner for the rest you know, you you have other specialists that you turn to, who you have vetted, who you have evaluated very, very carefully, who you have established great relationships with and you turn to them to provide all those other services. So you know, when you say it takes a village in it these days or going forward, I think it's going to take a village. And Microsoft, of all companies, told us this 15 years ago, when they invented their uniqueness rule, you can only have one of four people take one test. They can't take more than one test and qualify you for more than one specialization. So they said, declare what you do, declare who you are, and find partners to do the rest of it. Um, I'm just rolling through it as I as I'm talking to

Harry Brelsford  06:59

Yeah, no. Give us, give us three or four points, and then I'm going to direct people to go, you know, that'd be great.

07:07

That'd be great. One of the things I'm, I'm seeing lately is that a lot of people are putting a lot of concentration and investment into doing very basic, fundamental things. MSPs are doing a lot of they're still doing a lot of network monitoring where that's not their specialty. That's not what they do well, and they're not measured on it. Their customer isn't looking at them for that. And there are plenty of other partners who can do it for you don't, don't invest heavily in the things you're not going to be measured on because you're not going to be measured on them. You invest in the things that customers are looking to you for. And then there's let me, let me focus in on the one that is most important to me. I recently did a session called MSP for MSP marketing services, professionally for managed service providers. Yeah, and I look around me and I see a lot of MSPs advertising, the way they always did with fax blasts and email blasts and postcards and gaudy ads. And it's just, it's, it's, it's an anachronism. It's yesterday's news today. You're not focused on reselling somebody else's products. You're focused on selling your services, which puts you in league with lawyers and accountants and architects and other professionals. Well, how do they market? They market through networking. They market through creating a community. There's a lot of ways in which they market. And as a matter of fact, my my sub stack, tech channel marketing is all about that. It's all about things you can do.

Harry Brelsford  08:51

Yeah, and let me once again. You know me interrupt you that years ago, you may remember the late Robert Cohen from Toronto. Yeah, he had a seat at the table, no, no doubt about it, and he was all about do you remember this goes back to the early SMB Nation spring shows, but we used to do basically classroom training. At the end of the day, you got a certificate as a trusted business advisor, TBA. And the idea was, my spin on it was, is it was a little bit like what they like to call in DC the kitchen cabinet, right? The you get elected president, and you have these advisors, and they're not in a formal role, you know, but they're pretty powerful. And I always felt that, you know, a TBA should be at the table in the the boardroom with the the accountant, the lawyer, right? We're, we're professions. We should be at that meeting. But go on. No,

09:58

I absolutely agree with you. Harry, you know, it's a parallel to the CIO who most recently started becoming more of a part of the seat of the C suite. Cio used to be focused on technology. They now focused on the business and how to leverage technology to make it better. Yeah, I'm working pretty heavily with the National Society of it, service providers, ns, itsp, because they're focused on elevating the professional posture of our profession, we're trying to shift it from being considered an industry to be being considered truly a profession. Because business owners, business executives, turn to us for exactly that. They turn to us to be their advisor, to be, you know, their CIO in many cases. So I think that that's also a very important thing to think about. You know, what are you? Who are you? How do you want to be seen? You know, to market yourself effectively, you have to define yourself very thoroughly. And I think all too many of us are still thinking reseller rather than thinking service provider. You know the and the other thing that goes into that, of course, is expanding your offerings. The one thing that every MSP wants to do is add more services to their portfolio. There's lots of ways of doing that, and most of them think, well, I've got to hire new people, train new people, and it's a lot of time and it's a lot of money. And the reality is, if you're partnering effectively. You can add new services. If you're looking at vendors, look at vendors who will sell you their product. You use the product on behalf of your customer, and you wrap that product with your own services. Now, even though you can't compete on price for the product, you don't have to your your profit is going to come from the sale of your services surrounding that product. So I think in 2025 I guess the overall message that I'm trying to convey is get serious. You know, get serious about your business. And is it a business? Is it an industry? Is it a it's a practice, lifestyle, lifestyle, yeah, it's a professional practice. And if you're going to sell it, because the lifestyle business and you're getting prepared to to retire from it, great, you know, they're going to be much more interesting returns on selling a professional practice than on selling a reseller organization. Yeah, you know. Well, hey,

Harry Brelsford  12:45

final thoughts. Give us another nugget, and we'll, we'll go from there, man.

12:53

Okay, let's talk about the fundamental shape of NSPS and how it's changing. Okay, one, if there's one complaint I've heard over the years consistently, it's that they can't find salespeople. It's hard to find good salespeople, and my advice is don't try stop looking for great salespeople. Consider consider yourself a professional practice and run yourself that way. That is to say that let it be your senior partner who is doing the selling, because your customer, your customer, wants to talk to somebody who really knows what they're talking about. So if you've got your MSP practice, and you're the president of it, or a senior executive in it, you're the one who should be doing the selling now, you can have all kinds of people beneath you setting appointments for you, going out and penetrating new opportunities for you and bringing you in, but focus on the idea that it's your smarts, it's your intelligence that the customer wants to buy, and who has a better grip on that than you do. So you know, if there's a last comment, you know that I think should sing from the article and from you know, from my thoughts it is, you know, look at your look at your practice anew. Look at your role anew. It's very likely that you are the best salesperson you will ever have.

Harry Brelsford  14:22

Yeah, the founder is always the best salesperson, because my experience, yep, and that's, that's what they should do, and they get caught up. Howard, you're aware, no names, please, but you're aware the side hustle I did about two and a half years for a data center client up in Round Rock, north of Austin, and he, he's one of the best sales people I've ever seen. Yeah, nobody can work better. And but then, you know, he gets caught up in stuff. You know. So micromanaging people, and it's just not as gift and respectfully, but yeah, I stay in touch with them

15:12

once, long ago, I was called in to consult in a to be unnamed, practice, and the president of that practice wanted me to tell him what he could be doing to build up the practice to make it bigger. And I ended up telling him that he doesn't need more executives. What he needs is a president. And I said, and he looked at me, he said, but I'm the president. And I said, Yeah, and you suck at it. And it shook him up. But I said, Look, let me prove it to you. Okay, calculate your sales and all of your sales, people's sales, who sold the most? He said, probably I did. I said, by how much? And he looked at me like I was. Had three heads. I said, if you don't know those numbers, you're not being a good president. Let's just start, start there. But the fact is, you individually outsold all of your sales people, taken together, you sold more than half of your company's sales last year. That means that you could fire all of them and be more profitable. So my first piece of advice is, by yourselves, people. It was crazy, but it points out that, yeah, yeah, more often than not. You know, as you look at look at connect wise. Connect wise just dropped, and Jay McBain reported on this just last week. They just dropped from, you know, the first place in in PSA, RMM platforms, to second. That's the first time in 29 years. And let me tell you, I think the difference

Harry Brelsford  16:46

I buy, I didn't read it. Thank you for the

16:49

I'll tell you, I think the difference is a guy came to sell me connect wise in 1996 Yeah. Arnie, yup. Arnie Bellini. And man, you know, if one fact that he was on the wrong platform at that time, we definitely would have been like his first customer. He was great. I watched him at a show with a met with a megaphone, calling people over to enter a contest at his booth. Yeah, he did. This is the penultimate sales guy, and without him, I suspect connect wise going to have more of a struggle. He is a big differentiator for him. So, you know, don't, don't sell yourself short. You know, you're a big differentiator for your company.

Harry Brelsford  17:32

Yeah, he I, as I recall, I his dad. I know his dad did, and I think Arnie did, came up through the IBM System, which is good because that's like saying a Steve Ballmer learned marketing at Procter and Gamble well, that that's a, that's a gold standard dude,

17:51

absolutely. Hey, our buddy McBain came up through IBM.

Harry Brelsford  17:55

Yeah. Well, there, there we are. There we are a

17:58

lot of successful people.

Harry Brelsford  17:59

Well, hey, happy holidays. They're obviously on the down slide as this is being published, I'm talking to you in just a few days before we get to the last couple major dates. You know, Christmas and and it helped me out is, is Hanukkah overlapping? Yes,

18:20

okay, Hanukkah is very late this year. It starts actually on the 27th Oh, my god, yeah, so Christmas vacation will be Hanukkah vacation too. Yeah,

Harry Brelsford  18:33

hey, yeah, that's great. All right, my friend, good help. Thank you very much. Thank you, my friend. You