Big Red Media - May/June 2022

Big Red Media - May/June 2022

IT CHANNEL INSIDER May/June 2022 | Volume 9

audIT’s Mike Brooks’ Thoughts On Big Red Virtual

How The Right Products Helped Opti-Vise IT SUPPORT $1,080,190 In Client Upsells In Just 3 Months Page 10

You Had Me At ‘Guaranteed Leads’

Page 9

Page 6 Chaos Embrace

Meet Gradient: On A Mission To Make Partnerships In The IT Channel Stronger And Better Through Integration Page 4

Colin Knox, Founder & CEO – Gradient MSP

A Big Red Media Production

Letter From The Editor

Business Is Always Changing — You Need To Adjust Or Be Left Behind Just a few weeks ago, we successfully navigated our 15th annual IT Sales and Marketing Boot Camp here at Big Red Media (and our parent company, Technol- ogy Marketing Toolkit). A big theme of that event, thanks to Kaseya’s purchase of Datto the week prior, was the changes happening within the MSP industry and how we all must adapt. When Colin Knox, CEO of Gradient and the featured story in this issue, started his newest company, he didn’t even know what the product was going to be. Change was literally built into the business plan. He’s continued to change course and innovate as the company has grown this past year, and he's done so by listening to the customer and hearing what they want.

3 IT Channel Newsflash 4 Meet Gradient: On A Mission To Make Partnerships In The IT Channel Stronger And Better Through Integration 5 Upcoming Channel Events INSIDE THIS ISSUE

6 Embrace Chaos 8 As Seen In MSP

Success Magazine

It was all smiles at Gradient MSP's booth at the IT Sales And Marketing Boot Camp, including CEO, Colin Knox, along with his team.

9 audIT’s Mike Brooks’ Thoughts On Big Red Virtual 10 How The Right Products Helped Opti-Vise IT

Here at Big Red Media, we’ve gone through constant change the last two years. One of the biggest shifts we adopted early last year is the inclusion of guar- anteed lead counts on nearly every non-event service we deliver. Guaranteed results are what the market was looking for, particularly in the virtual world, and by shifting our model that way, our sales AND the results of channel companies that engage with us soared, increasing by nearly 150% last year alone. Where are you embracing change in your business? Are you listening to your customers and adapting to what they want, or are you stuck in your old ways just hoping everyone just ignores the rest of the world?

Support $1,080,190 In Client Upsells In Just 3 Months

Jeff Johnson Executive Director, Big Red Media

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waiting on new client photo IT CHANNEL NEWSFLASH

Coming out of a pandemic where the IT industry quickly became among the most essential industries, thousands of businesses and individuals have been influencers in the channel. Because there can only be a handful of top influencers, here is our selection of the top three. Top 3 Channel Influencers In 2022

Fred Voccola, CEO, Kaseya Fred Voccola has made a name for himself as a technology executive for over 20 years. By mastering multiple responsibilities, including sales, product development, marketing, and business development, Fred has put Kaseya in a position to be an authority in the IT management software arena.

administrator, running Angry Birds or Microsoft Office. Everything we run can see everything we see.” At the MSP summit in November, Danny presented how zero-trust ensures certain applications don’t connect with each other and how zero-trust removes user privileges. As Danny’s star is on the rise as one of today’s leading influencers in the channel, he continues to beat the drum of the importance of zero-trust security. Danny said, “I’m ecstatic that the effort and hard work we’ve put into ensuring that ThreatLocker delivers value to the channel is being recognized with such a great honor. The ThreatLocker team and I will continue to deliver high value and innovate in ways that bring effective enterprise class security to everyone.” Rob Rae, Vice President Of Business Development, Datto Rob Rae joined Datto in 2013 with the goal to develop more meaningful relationships throughout the MSP market. He has since surpassed all expectations to help grow Datto’s MSP partner ranks to more than 18,200. As a result of Datto’s record-setting revenue growth, Rob has been honored for the second time to be named a Top Channel Influencer. Rob says, “A channel leader, in essence, is the identity for an organization. As vendors get larger, as you call the 1-800 number, as executives churn in and out, it’s important to have a consistent face of the organization — that’s been my goal.” If you’ve been to any MSP or channel event in the past several years, you’ve probably heard from Rob. Either he was presenting on stage as the keynote speaker or moderating a panel. In any speaking capacity, Rob’s goal is to educate, entertain, and make friends. Funny, charismatic, and a master of IT hardware and software sales, Rob is proud to be the face of Datto. “When people think of Datto, they think of me. If things go bad, they know to call Rob. You have to be willing to answer tough questions for your community and to get yelled at,” Rob said. Rob Rae, SVP Business Development, Datto

Fred Voccola, CEO, Kaseya

How did Fred surpass other channel executives to be among this year’s Top Channel Influencers? It starts with his perpetual attention to his customers’ needs and goals. Other factors include his teamwork approach to executive leadership, creativity and process-oriented solution implementation skills. When told he was a leading channel influencer, Fred said, “It’s an honor I must share with Kaseya’s global team for their unwavering commitment to our MSP and channel partners. We are driven to see our customers succeed and are continuously innovating to make them more profitable. This recognition reinforces we are on the right track.” Not one to take a break and pat himself on the back, Fred revealed where Kaseya is heading: “This year, we will announce some exciting acquisitions to keep supercharging our IT Complete platform. Also, we plan to expand our educational offerings to support our clients.” Danny Jenkins, CEO, ThreatLocker

The term “zero-trust security” used to be a distant future goal. Through his education to MSPs and his ThreatLocker applications, this network security model based on a strict identity verification process became a here and now reality.

Danny Jenkins, CEO, ThreatLocker

Danny knew that when you have an entire industry outmatched as ransomware attacks are up 800%, a more aggressive model was necessary. He encouraged MSPs to shift their thinking of zero-trust from simply a user perspective to applications. He said, “The application has access to everything that we have access to. It doesn’t matter if you’re a local user or a domain

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IT Channel Rock Star

On A Mission To Make Partnerships In The IT Channel Stronger And Better Through Integration Meet Gradient:

In December 2020, Colin Knox did something extraordinary.

“Our platform ensures MSPs are capturing all the revenue they’ve sold,” Knox said. “This saves them time and helps them be better in tune with their business. For vendors, it answers a big gap for them.” Knox originally stepped into the IT Channel while working for a small consulting company in Canada in 2004. After falling in love with the variety of companies he worked with, the entrepreneurial bug bit him. He launched his own MSP, XCEL Professional Services, in 2009, building it to $1 million in revenue within the first year. “It took off fast and quickly turned into 17-hour days,” Knox said. Discovering he was better at the business and strategy side than IT, he began focusing on growing the business. Within five years, he’d built it to $4 million and opened a second location. He later sold the business. “After a while, I realized I had built this engine that ran itself,” Knox said. “I took a six-week vacation. I watched countless Netflix series in my office. The company just kept growing and ran extremely well. I realized there was no motivation for me.” Knox then began focusing on a password management software he’d developed years earlier called Passportal. “When one of our technicians left to go to work for an enterprise organization, we had to change all the passwords,” Knox explained. “After looking for a solution and not finding an affordable one that met our needs, we built our own.” At the time, Knox built a website and left it for other MSPs to use. In 2014, when looking for a new challenge, he discovered that several hundred MSPs had signed up and were using Passportal. “We built out the cybersecurity solution and grew that to a couple thousand MSPs around the world securing credentials for well in excess of 100,000 SMBs,” Knox said. “As we were preparing to further accelerate, we had a lot of inbound interest to acquire that business.” In 2019, Knox sold Passportal to SolarWinds MSP (now N-able) and joined their executive team to oversee a community 20,000-plus MSPs using and reselling the combined product portfolio. Today, Gradient’s rich MSP heritage is benefiting the MSP community. Not only is Knox a former MSP, but 9 of his 40-plus employees are also former MSPs or MSP employees. “We want to keep that close attachment to what MSPs are experiencing and doing,” Knox said. “It’s important we don’t ever lose touch of that. There is not a single employee in our group who doesn’t love MSPs, believe in them, and truly understands what their life is like.”

He launched a company without a product or a mandate.

As a serial entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of Gradient

MSP, Knox had the novel idea of letting his peers in the IT industry tell him what they needed. “We had nothing,” Knox said. “Instead of ‘Build it and they will come,’ our strategy was to listen,

create something people said they need, and validate the idea with the market. The whole launch was, ‘Tell us what the industry needs. Tell us what you need. Tell us what you’re experiencing.’” After months and months of listening and conversations with MSPs, Knox and his partners launched their first offering centered on a billing reconciliation issue they’d identified. Even then, as they tested their idea, more conversations and listening identified that they hadn’t quite nailed it, so they adjusted their product. “After conversations with vendors, we discovered they wanted something different than what we planned to build,” Knox said. “We looked at it and said, ‘If we’re going to solve this problem for MSPs, why can’t we solve that for channel vendors as well?’” In the end, they created an integration platform that serves as the hub connecting channel vendors and MSPs. “We found a way to allow channel vendors to answer the requests of their partners by integrating with Gradient and automatically integrating with MSPs Professional Services Automation (PSA) software.” The new hypothesis has proven to be a home run. What started with three people (Knox, Ryan Barker, and Mike Urquhart) reached 13 people by November 2021. An investment of more than $10 million exploded their growth to over 40 employees, with hundreds of MSPs jumping on board, with each month topping the last. Gradient is also expanding into more use cases with their integration platform.

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Big Red Media | A Robin Robins Company

Gradient MSP’s Go-To Marketing Strategy Conversations and building relationships are important strategies for Gradient. After launching their offer, Knox partnered with Technology Marketing Toolkit (TMT) so he could continue conversations with the MSP community. “We developed a lot of great relationships with the team at Technology Marketing Toolkit and had firsthand experience of the ROI available,” Knox said. “My history with Passportal and our engagements with the Technology Marketing Toolkit community brought a lot of advocates and supporters for what we were doing. We did extremely well with it. Our VP channel, Dave Goldie, had the same great experience when he was driving growth for IT Glue, so we were extremely excited to partner with TMT again to drive mutual value.” Knox appreciates the “synergistic approach” Robin Robins and her team take to helping MSPs grow through marketing, sales, and acquisition. His goal is to help MSPs on the back end. “They’re selling all this great stuff on the front end, but then letting it spill out the back end by not actually invoicing their clients for everything because they are so busy delivering those services,” Knox said. “We solve that by taking this tedious, manual process they hate and automating it. There is a natural connection. We love the community she’s built and the eagerness of the community toward growing their business, improving their business, and bettering their best.” Webinars are one way Gradient partners with Technology Marketing Toolkit. “A big part is education,” Knox said. Gradient also gives away the first level of their product completely free. Any MSP can sign up and keep it for as long as they want. One of Gradient’s more unique approaches is to bring in massage chairs and massage tables with masseuses to live events. “The MSP business is stressful,” Knox said. “Although they are proactive, as an MSP, there are still fires you’ve got to put out all day long. An approach we’ve taken at events is to offer massages. MSPs are making the investment in themselves to learn and become better, so we want to give them a chance to de-stress and relax.” Another approach Knox uses is listening. “We spend time just engaging with the MSP community so we can continue to listen,” Knox said, “and understand what they’re seeing on the ground, what they’re experiencing, what their challenges are, and how we can help so we can support them.” Although Gradient’s partnership with Robin Robins and Technology Marketing Toolkit is new, Knox believes it will bring more vendors and MSPs to the table and make their lives easier. “Our dream and mission are to bring more and more vendors and MSPs together to create this wonderful ecosystem where partnerships and opportunities can happen,” Knox said. “So far, we’ve been successful in engaging with and educating more than 1,000 MSPs in that community and have welcomed a number of them into our platform. We’re confident this will be a mutually successful and beneficial partnership for us, for Technology Marketing Toolkit, and for the MSP community.” To find out more, visit MeetGradient.com or follow them on LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com/company/meetgradient.

Upcoming Channel Events 2 0 2 2

Cybersecurity Marketing Roadshow Aug. 30-31 · Philadelphia, PA Producers Club Meetings Jul. 14-15 · Franklin, TN Oct. 13-14 · High Point, NC TMTProducersClub.com

Sep. 08-09 · Chicago, IL Sep. 29-30 · Boston, MA Oct. 06-07 · Orlando, FL Oct. 20-21 · Houston, TX Nov. 02-03 · Las Vegas, NV CybersecurityRoadShow.com

ASCII ’22 MSP Success Summits May-Oct. 2022 · Multiple Cities ASCIIEvents.com ITNation Connect Jun. 06-08 · Orlando, FL ConnectWise.com/theitnation/connect-na Kaseya – ConnectIT Global Jun. 20-23 · Las Vegas, NV ConnectIT.com

DattoCON Sep. 11-13 · Washington, D.C. DattoCON.com

For a complete list of channel events, visit MSPSuccessMagazine.com/channel-events.

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From the Desk of Robin Robins

Embrace Chaos

After having him speak at a Producers Club meeting in 2014, I convinced Robert Herjavec, CEO and co-founder of the Herjavec Group, to allow us to bring 20 MSPs to his Toronto headquarters to see the inner workings of a $400 million MSP (his revenue at the time). It was an absolutely brilliant experience for all, with many lessons and insights that even I personally use to this day. I had my leadership team in attendance, and one of the shining moments of the day was when Nicole Rogers, my COO, came to me and said, “Now I get it.” She was referring to the pace, complexity, and intensity his entire team was running at and why it was necessary for growth. To quote Robert, you must EMBRACE CHAOS (the title of a chapter in his book, “Driven”). For years,

I suspect she thought I was crazy, constantly pushing the limits of what our company could do, always inventing, always starting multiple projects at once, and never slowing down. But, as Robert so elegantly summed it up in that chapter title of his book, every entrepreneur must not just tolerate chaos, or worse, try to avoid it — we must embrace it, nurture it, and welcome it. There’s profit in the chaos. No business grows and competes effectively at a steady jog, much less a snail’s pace. Your competition will crush you before you have a chance to get out of bed in the morning. A big contributing factor to why so many businesses stay small is their dislike of and aversion to messes and chaos. Small is easy. Small is controlled. Small is predictable. But most important, small feels safe, delivering a false sense

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Big Red Media | A Robin Robins Company

of security to the owner. Of course, there is no such safety in business. The ONLY real security you have is your ability to produce results in any type of circumstance. Another chapter in Robert’s book is “Appreciate What It Takes To Succeed.” Specifically, you have to be intensely determined. Casual wishes attempted with easy buttons and “hacks” don’t work here. You’ll give up way too soon and fall short of what’s necessary for sustainable, profitable growth.

Most people only pay attention to the people and things they already know, listening only to the opinions of people who inherently agree with their point of view. They treat the news, things they read, and people they follow like a finicky 3-year- old at a buffet line, selecting only the stuff they like, and avoid exploring some things that might not initially taste good but are very good for you. But as an entrepreneur, you need a lot of input from a lot of sources — different industries with various models and marketing campaigns, approaches to customer service, pricing, hiring, and distribution. Eclectic input is fodder to stimulate your thinking. An unstimulated mind is one that doesn’t grow or expand. Ask yourself this: HOW could I use this in my business, even if it’s not entirely apparent from the start? Many call this “creative thinking” or “thinking outside the box,” but what they miss is that you have to get out of the box entirely before you can see other possibilities. You can’t read the label from inside the jar. Here’s one final note about Robert: Many people have asked me what he's really like in person. I am happy to report that the Robert you see on “Shark Tank” is the Robert you see in real life. He is, without a doubt, a deeply genuine, driven, intensely smart, passionate serial entrepreneur as well as a happy person who loves his life.

Every entrepreneur must not just tolerate chaos, or worse, try to avoid it — we must embrace it, nurture it, and welcome it.

We all know that the constant commonality among all exceptional people is a strong work ethic and a willingness to do things that other people simply refuse to do. Yes, talent and intelligence matter, but there are a whole lot of people who are extremely smart and extremely talented who never amount to much in their lives, going completely unnoticed and unrewarded for their talents. They’re constantly pumping the brake, looking for the easy way out, wanting a vacation

Founder And CEO, Technology Marketing Toolkit, Inc.

over a good opportunity. A common desire of the poor is to win the lottery so they never have to work, but what kind of life would that be? What would get you out of bed in the morning? What would challenge you? What would be your purpose in life? Your calling? Not having to worry about money is not necessarily a bad thing, but the second half of that — the “so I never have to work again” — is a sad and pitiful wish you really don’t want to come true. And finally, Robert’s curiosity and interest in learning is abundantly clear. He always has a notepad and pen in his suit jacket, and on several occasions during our interactions, he whipped it out to jot down a note or two about my thoughts in this industry, marketing, managed services, etc. We should all do this. I can’t tell you the number of speakers I’ve had on stage who have zero curiosity about our community and what we do.

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Let’s gather up now and head straight to Boom Town so YOU can experience a sudden rush of new activity, interest, and revenue- generating opportunities. To Read The Full Article, Go To: www.MSPSuccessMagazine.com/gold Practicing Corruption

As part of my research for this year’s IT Sales And Marketing Boot Camp, I’m rewatching “The Sopranos.” It’s interesting when you watch it for research rather than entertainment. Lots of hidden gems about running a business, dealing with difficult people, and developing mental toughness. One thing you might not have picked up on is that the series follows

The Most Dangerous Number In Any Business Recently, Apple announced new privacy changes that would allow users to opt out of >Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12

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