I’m cautious about interviewing companies that provide services to MSPs. After all, you get bombarded by sales content day in and day out, and I don’t want to add to the noise. But when I interviewed Megan Killion of MKC Agency in Orlando, a revenue consultancy specializing in scaling MSPs and other channel companies, I was super impressed by the combined sales/marketing paradigm that she uses. Megan champions ethical marketing practices, elevating marginalized talent, and empowering businesses to thrive in competitive markets. She also has an offer for our podcast listeners: 20% off the first 4 months of her newest program IF you complete this worksheet before your first call with her (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gmqzRXv54EdZBFGtUxZAnqc-wLpMaIjDHIpv7H9tZFY/edit?usp=sharing, NOTE that you will need to request access). Here's what I learned in this episode:

• Why sales needs to be a function of your business instead of just outsourced
• MKC's value add is helping create a scalable internal program
• How Megan designed her sales offerings, and how you should too
• Megan's take on hiring sales talent the wrong way
• Megan's secret sauce for finding sales talent the right (and easy) way
• Can technical people become effective sales people
• Why technical owners are unlikely to create effective sales organizations without help
• Does the hunters vs farmers framework make sense
• Prediction, project planning, copywriting, social skills, time management: these skills and more are required to be an effective sales resource
• What size MSP is best positioned to benefit from her services
• What constitutes ready for growth
• Embracing the 'suck' of the middle (organic growth is not easy)
• You must understand your clients to build messaging
• How will AI affect your sales process
• The difference between inbound and outbound and how they go together

Financial Modeling Service provides M&A and Intermediary services to IT companies. As a former IT company owner, Jeff Greenspan understands your business and will work with you to achieve an optimal result based on your specific needs. You can reach Jeff at Jeff.Greenspan@financialmodelingservice.com or through his contact form at https://financialmodelingservice.com/contact-us/.

S2E2 features a conversation with the US team of Ionos, a hosting and cloud provider looking to compete with Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. I'd heard that Ionos was a billion dollar company, but when I checked their market cap in late December, it was just over $3B! What's up with that? So I sat down with Seth Helgesen, Zachary Watson, and Brian Wick to get a better understanding of Ionos's potential value to you. Takeaways from the episode include :

• What are the key Ionos differentiators
• Is any hosting equipment required
• Where are the colo facilities
• Is redundancy available
• Ease of migrating to the Ionos platform
• What security features are built in
• Who does Ionos integrate with
• How does pricing work
• Direct and distribution channels
• Partner/Reseller programs with marketing dollars
• What does the roadmap look like
• Support for monolithic legacy applications
• Object storage just launched
• A special offer for podcast listeners

Financial Modeling Service provides M&A and Intermediary services to IT companies. As a former IT company owner, Jeff Greenspan understands your business and will work with you to achieve an optimal result based on your specific needs. You can reach Jeff at Jeff.Greenspan@financialmodelingservice.com or through his contact form at https://financialmodelingservice.com/contact-us/.

With his company Olive and Goose, Ankur Kothari provides proof that you really can run an MSP from anywhere. From his not-quite-humble beginnings at Microsoft, he's built an impressive three-division IT company headquartered in Seattle but with an international clientele. And when he's not strategizing, he's enjoying the intellectual flavors of Barcelona, learning both Spanish and Catalan while connecting with the vibrant but quite different European startup community. Takeaways from the episode include:

• What roles does Ankur play in his company, and how that differs from expectation
• Europe is ahead of the US from a sustainability prespective. How might that affect US MSP's relationships with their clients in the near future?
• Be faster to hire, and faster to change
• The most common error made by young MSPs
• How Olive and Goose drives organic growth
• How to create a beachhead in a new area
• The hunter/farmer model
• The opportunity that AI presents for MSPs who are able to assist their customers with adoption
• Ankur's take on rollups for higher EBIDTA multiples
• Growth opportunities, no matter the type, must be evaluated to ensure that they offer value to all of the firms stakeholders

Financial Modeling Service provides M&A and Intermediary services to IT companies. As a former IT company owner, Jeff Greenspan understands your business and will work with you to achieve an optimal result based on your specific needs. You can reach Jeff at Jeff.Greenspan@financialmodelingservice.com or through his contact form at https://financialmodelingservice.com/contact-us/.

One way that MSPs increase their scope is by joining an affiliation group. There are many forms, and the levels and types of integration with other firms varies. In this episode, we interview Tim Conkle, whose company The 20 consists of both an MSP alliance with (currently) 170 members, and an MSP rollup that just completed their 37th acquisition. Tim is an interesting and passionate MSP, and this episode provides the opportunity to learn:

• How does The 20 work
• What are the three things MSPs need to do to be truly successful
• What does 'better together' mean, and why
• How Tim thinks about economies of scale
• Removing friction and technology debt
• Running both Connectwise and Kaseya inside the box
• What tools they've homegrown and why
• 2% of helpdesk calls are not the people who they say they are!
• Benefits of joining the affiliation

Financial Modeling Service provides M&A and Intermediary services to IT companies. As a former IT company owner, Jeff Greenspan understands your business and will work with you to achieve an optimal result based on your specific needs. You can reach Jeff at Jeff.Greenspan@financialmodelingservice.com or through his contact form at https://financialmodelingservice.com/contact-us/.

There is incredible variety in the MSP space! Today's guest, Brian Strong, isn't buying and he isn't selling, he's just trying to run a top-notch MSP. Brian is the CEO of Ten Hats in Knoxville, TN, a company wholly owned by a large local healthcare provider. A significant pivot was required when he came on board, which presents an interesting opportunity to learn:

• How an economic upheaval presents both downsides and upsides
• How personal disasters also present downsides and upsides
• What it takes to turn around a company hemorrhaging cash
• The risks of losing clients outside of your geographic market
• Why Ten Hats uses a 'building block' approach to providing services
• Don't micromanage people, micromanage the numbers
• The critical CEO-level task set
• When to add new tech people, and how they grow specialists
• Which metrics Ten Hats looks at
• Why go to peer groups? To see what you're doing wrong!
• How to evaluate new technologies
• What changes does Brian see coming to the industry

Financial Modeling Service provides M&A and Intermediary services to IT companies. As a former IT company owner, Jeff Greenspan understands your business and will work with you to achieve an optimal result based on your specific needs. You can reach Jeff at Jeff.Greenspan@financialmodelingservice.com or through his contact form at https://financialmodelingservice.com/contact-us/.

In this episode I've recorded and discuss the five key actions that you should take to be prepared for a sale regardless of the timing. These steps ensure that you will be able to optimize your exit, whatever that means for you. I've also broken down each step into its own short video and I'm publishing these on my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@FMS-Jeff (look under Playlists). In this episode we cover:

• Creating value by choosing the right business structure
• Understanding and communicating how your business creates value
• Eliminating bad habits that decrease exit valuation
• Removing impediments to a sale
• Preparing for due diligence

Financial Modeling Service provides M&A and Intermediary services to IT companies. As a former IT company owner, Jeff Greenspan understands your business and will work with you to achieve an optimal result based on your specific needs. You can reach Jeff at Jeff.Greenspan@financialmodelingservice.com or through his contact form at https://financialmodelingservice.com/contact-us/.

Today we take our second look at an AI-based technolgy available now for MSPs to work more efficiently. Our eleventh episode features Jeffrey Newton, CRO and recovering MSP, and James Farrow, CEO of Cyft. Cyft is focused on applying AI to make MSPs more profitable by solving unacknowledged problems within the four walls of the MSP. I was particularly impressed with their ease of implementation, but even more impressed with their long-term vision, which you will have to listen to! In this episode we cover:

• What key problems does Cyft solve
• What Cyft does
• Cyft's 'no-PSA touch required' interface for data input
• How Cyft supports higher profitability
• Cyft's high accuracy level
• Cyft's 'Speak It, Review It, Submit It' process
• What training is required for your staff
• How quickly Cyft can be implemented
• How much does Cyft cost
• Cyft is an AI on-ramp for MSPs
• Roadmap includes AI-based contextualized data out
• Cyft is looking for MSP investors

Financial Modeling Service provides M&A and Intermediary services to IT companies. As a former IT company owner, Jeff Greenspan understands your business and will work with you to achieve an optimal result based on your specific needs. You can reach Jeff at Jeff.Greenspan@financialmodelingservice.com or through his contact form at https://financialmodelingservice.com/contact-us/.

Everyone's heard about artificial intelligence, and today we start looking at two AI-based technolgies that are available now for MSPs to work more efficiently. Our tenth episode features James Allen from Pia.ai. Pia was born when a large Australian IT firm started running tickets through a small language model, and it has evolved into a combination AI / automation tool that reads tickets and moves them forward as far as possible using automation. Pia currently supports over 60 different types of tickets. For our listeners, Pia is extending their Q3 50%-off onboarding / 25%-off platform fee offer through the end of November. You will learn about:

• What metric clearly presages profitability
• On average, how many endpoints can a help desk tech support
• When is the best time to implement a tool like Pia
• What Pia does and how it works
• Pricing models
• How Pia support rapid economies of scale during acquisitions
• What does the client onboarding process look like
• What are the most common types of tickets that Pia automates
• Dispatchers can close tickets
• How clients can initiate onboarding through Smartforms, including approval processes
• Pia's roadmap

Financial Modeling Service provides M&A and Intermediary services to IT companies. As a former IT company owner, Jeff Greenspan understands your business and will work with you to achieve an optimal result based on your specific needs. You can reach Jeff at Jeff.Greenspan@financialmodelingservice.com or through his contact form at https://financialmodelingservice.com/contact-us/.