The One Thing for 2025 – Register now for my 16th Annual State of the Nation Address for SMB IT
This year’s focus: The One Thing for 2025.
Recorded January 2025.
Last year we set the stage for the rest of the decade. We talked about your business as a system. I’ll give you an update on that and then we’ll look ahead to 2025 and beyond.
Our theme for 2025 is The One Thing. We’ll look at the one thing you need to do to thrive in the new year. And we’ll give some tips on how to focus on the most important things you need to pay attention to going forward.
A fundamental shift is under way in our industry. You might feel like your are severely disadvantaged if you are a small IT business. I will argue that you have the advantage. You just need to have strategy to take advantage of it. I’ll give you my thoughts.
Topics Include:
- Highlights and low-lights from 2024
- Technology Updates for 2024 . . . and what’s next
- The obligatory update on Artificial Intelligence
- The Economy
- Speculations about 2025 – and beyond
- A strategy for taking advantage of the changes ahead with large vs. small companies in the SMB IT space.
PLUS, we’ll have time for questions and answers. So plan to take notes.
Don’t worry – No Politics Here! Also, no selling.
No cost. Just register and tune in.
Paste that date into your calendar so you don’t forget!
Links for State of Nation 2025
(Transcript follows)
First Year MSP = https://www.smallbizthoughts.org/first-year-msp/
Webinar Registration –> Intro to First Year MSP = https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2szVSoiwS4K7oyei9RLByg
National Society of IT Service Providers = https://www.nsitsp.org
IT Service Provider University = https://www.itspu.com
Pinterest meme = https://ro.pinterest.com/pin/861735709932091271/
Small Biz Thoughts = https://www.smallbizthoughts.com
SBT Technology Community = https://www.smallbizthoughts.org
Karl’s Books = https://store.smallbizthoughts.com
YouTube Channel = https://YouTube.com/smallbizthoughts
My Blog = https://blog.smallbizthoughts.com
SMB Community Podcast = https://www.smbcommunitypodcast.com
The Killing IT Podcast = https://killingit.smallbizthoughts.com
Relax Focus Succeed = https://www.relaxfocussucceed.com
Free Webinars for SMB IT = https://www.mspwebinar.com
Full Transcript
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Welcome everybody. It is time to get started, so I am so grateful to see people. I look down the list. I see people from Germany, from England, nobody from Australia, but of course Canada, and all over the Us. And more people will be joining us after they refill their coffee. I also see at least one vendor, and I see lots of people that I met
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for the 1st time in my big roadshow in 2017, so seems like forever ago, and sometimes I think my annual state of the nation address is really just a huge family reunion. At least that’s what it feels like to me. So put a note in the chat. If you’re interested in sharing where you’re from
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and we will get going. We will not wait for people who are running down the hallway or refilling their coffee.
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I love this quote, and this is no exaggeration. On my wall.
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I have a little postcard that I had made many years ago, so that I could frame it, and it says the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
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and I love that because it is such. 1st of all, it’s a little humorous, but it’s such a great statement about, you know.
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you really need to focus on one thing, and sometimes it is, you know, not as easy as it. We make it sound.
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And
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another great quote is, it’s not your commitment I’m worried about. It’s your commitment to your commitment, right? So so we’re going to talk about that sort of stuff today. And we’ve got a regular format that we go through
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super quick intro for those of you who don’t know what I’ve been up to recently I wrote several books. I’ve written over 20 books. Now the most recent one is the It Consultants year of intention. I originally wrote this for people inside my community, my paid community at small business thoughts.
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and it went over so well that I revamped it and made it a little a little less specific to the year that we were going into, and made it more of a general reusable thing. But it’s really literally intended to be a tool for focusing the year ahead, quarter by quarter. What are you going to do in your company? Where are you going to go? And what? Your, what your goals are.
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as well as what events you’re going to attend, and what you’re going to get out of them. So you probably I think anybody on the call could probably use 2 thirds of it and get some value out of it, and it’ll be a different 2 thirds for everybody.
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Anyway, you can check all that out. smallbusthoughts.com.
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So I am literally completely dedicated to helping make it consultants as successful as possible.
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That’s what I do. And if you go to smallbizthoughts.org, you’ll see that that entire site is designed specifically to make that happen. So you can hold me accountable to is is what Karl is doing today helping it consultants to be successful, yes or no. That is my yardstick of of how I determine whether or not I’m heading in the right direction.
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So just a little housekeeping today I’m going to look at questions in the Q&A panel. So if you put a question in the chat, I will be happy to ignore that until this is all over, and then I’ll read through the chat. The chat is here because people insist on using it, so
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feel free to talk about me behind my back and talk with each other, and whatever you can even heckle me there again. I won’t see it till after this is over, but put questions into the Q. And a. If you want me to see them.
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this is being recorded, it will be [email protected], which is how many of you got here?
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And I allude to Kpis a little bit in this presentation today. But if you want my full presentation on. Why, almost all kpis that you follow are completely stupid and useless. Then I’ve got an entire hour-long webinar on that. No registration is needed. All you have to do is click and watch, and that’[email protected].
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And then I got other stuff up there as well. That’s literally a place for me to store free trainings for people who wander in off the Internet and have never engaged with us. It’s it’s a sampling of the kind of stuff that we do. So. Even some of you who’ve been connected to me for 15 years may not know that that’s a place where you can go and get a bunch of my stuff
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at no additional charge, including I have some sample trainings like a sample AI training and a sample security training where
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you are authorized to download the entire Powerpoint. Take off my logo, put on your logo, you know, put in a couple of fresh examples from last week’s news, and make those presentations to your prospects again and again and again as sales tools. So anyway, go check it out.
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These are our brains, and I think I think I got them all on there, but I could be wrong.
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So, you know, take a screenshot. Memorize this. So forth.
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AI transparency again. I’m I always try to, you know, come up with something that demonstrates the state of AI. So I asked for a target here, and that’s what it gave me, which is, you know, sadly, the arrows coming towards me, which makes me a little nervous. But
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we use licensed graphics, and I use some AI generated graphics. I don’t use any AI content
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as a writer. I just sort of have to draw the line and let you know I wrote all the words that will be spoken today, or or that appear on the screen, and I have an AI
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disclaimer in my Weekly Newsletter, and I encourage you all to do the same thing. If you are using AI, that’s cool, you should just say so. And if you’re not, you should say so as well.
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So today our our standard agenda. I have a few announcements, in fact, one big announcement.
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and then lots of
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small announcements. But we’re going to do a review of 2024 kind of where I speculated where we were going to be, and so forth, and then some predictions for 2025, and then I always try to do some focused content. And then we’re open to Q&A, which can be about anything we do today or just anything, anywhere that you just happen to have on your mind.
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So now
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I have an announcement that doesn’t apply to 85% of the people on this call. But you might know somebody that it does apply to. I’m starting a new program called The 1st year Msp. And it is for people who started their businesses in the last year or 2,
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and want to make sure that they hit all the bases, answered all the questions set things up properly are heading in the right direction and sort of got a a head start towards running their business appropriately.
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And it’s at Smallbiz. thoughts.org slash. 1st year, Msp.
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The actual content. The 1st meeting is on February 27, th and so we’re signing people up now. It will meet on the 4th Thursday of every month.
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and I know that that doesn’t work for everybody. But that’s the way the world works. Sometimes it will consist of live
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group coaching meetings, coaching calls.
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We will have resources that we focus on.
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and it will be a subset of the resources available inside my community.
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So every month we’ll have very focused resources. We will have people talk about a specific topic. People will post up their challenges and interact with that group somewhat as a sounding board, and then we’ll hold you accountable. The next month we’ll come back and give you red, light green, light, yellow light. How did you do in the last month?
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So if you know somebody who could use this, please tell them to go to this site, and or just, you know, with luck you’ll you can just have them get in touch with me, and I’ll be happy to talk to them about it.
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We are signing people up now, and it begins the actual launch. The 1st meeting will be in February.
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and we’re going to have a webinar on January 20 second, to go into this. If you go to that site you can register for the webinar if you wish. And of course, since this is all being recorded, all of the links and everything that anything that shows up on the screen as a link is going to be at the top of the transcripts. When I post up the recording with the transcript. So we always, we always do transcripts of our webinars as well.
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So summary of 2024.
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Some of you may recall a picture of a cute little baby last year. Well, the cute little baby is now walking, not quite talking, but she is a delightful toddler at this point.
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and last year, because I have a grandchild. I did a lot less travel.
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so there will be a little increase in travel this year, and that all has to do with baby babysitting schedules. But I did only 8 in person events last year travel to about 10 cities in a couple of different countries, and we put on, of course, every year we do 15 week courses over at it. Service Provider University
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did a hundred 49 blog posts
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between relax, focus, succeed, and small business thoughts and the other blogs. There’s a couple other blogs that I post on
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61 videos, more than 20 podcasts I appeared on, did 7 Webinars and put out 62 newsletters. So I was still busy, even though I did most of it from home.
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For those of you who are interested. The National Society of It Service Providers continues to grow.
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and we are
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currently this. You know, we were actually founded in 2021. So this is our 4th birthday is coming up, which is pretty amazing. And last year we finally launched the Professional Development Committee, which is looking at, you know, defining some continuing education programs and so forth.
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We had a big turnover on the Board of directors. In fact, we had such a hotly contested election for the board that we had a runoff
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for one of the seats, and so we have new Board members. One of the new Board members is a former board member. So, even though he’s new to the board this year, he’s also old to the board and returning to us. So it’s a very active, very engaged group, and lots of webinars coming up. And so, if you haven’t joined the National Society today is an excellent day to do that
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quick plug. Our classes are at it Service Provider University. We have a brand new class on mergers and acquisitions coming up in February, and it is going to be run by James Kernan, who coaches people through mergers and acquisitions. He’s also a great
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leadership coach in a in a great coach for sales.
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All right. So let’s talk about
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2024, and kind of where where we stand.
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I always have to give this disclaimer because I got one guy who keeps bugging me. I’m not a financial advisor. This is not financial advice. I’m not an accountant. I’m not an attorney. I’m not a doctor. I don’t play one on TV. Blah blah blah! I’ve been running businesses for myself and for other people since 1993,
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and I think that my experience counts for something.
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And so, you know, in 2024, when you look at the economy, inflation was about 2.7%, and I know it feels higher to some people, and if all you do is you look at one glass of milk, it may feel higher. If you live in certain States like in California, we have a special recipe for our gasoline. So it’s always a little bit higher.
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Inflation for 2025 is expected to be in the range of 2 and a half to 3%. So those are all historically low interest rates. Unemployment is still historically low around 4%.
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The Federal funds rate is about 4 and a half percent. And but but home loan rates are not based on that now. A lot of people are confused about that. Home loan rates are based on usually 10 year bonds. And so what those bond prices that you’re looking at are going to make interest rates for houses in the 5 to 6% range
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and 6% might be the norm going forward. So but we still have a growing economy. The economy still grew at 2.8% in 2024, and it’ll probably be 2, something in 2025. So the economy is growing now.
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The economy is not the stock market. The stock market is not the economy, and I normally go back one year. But this year I’m going to go back a few years because 2022 sucked for a lot of people, and the Nasdaq, which I think is the only stock market you personally need to pay attention to. In my opinion.
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It went down
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about 30% in 2022. And that was painful, and that you know that a lot of people felt that one.
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And I predicted that it would go back up and regain all of that in 2023, which it did, and I predicted that 2024 would be a little rough.
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but it would end significantly up. And that’s exactly what happened last year. Now.
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if you’re not familiar with these scales, do not underestimate the pain of the July
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drop, because if you were living through that, and you cut off the right side of this and then blew it up to full size. That’s a significant drop. And you have to remember in the stock market on any day any stock can go down 50%, which means on any day all the stocks can go down 50%.
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And as we learned in 2,008, they can also go down 50% the next day as well. So be careful about this, but you know, if you’re willing to take the ride, it is truly a great long term investment.
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I believe that what we’re looking for is kind of more of the same. In 2025 there will be. There’s always volatility. The 1st year of a presidential term.
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simply because there’s a lot of unknown stuff, and the the new President is living under the budget of the old President at least for one year, and they’re going to try to do things, you know, to change the way that money gets spent. But it is really in 2026 that the new President will have his own budget that he will have had the most influence over.
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I do believe we’re going to have lots of ups and downs in 2025, but overall I believe it will be up.
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It also is going to be a year where interest rates could potentially go up as well, there’s a lot of pressure that is going to lead to increased interest rates, increased inflation, increased wages. But that’s you know, the stock market goes down when all those things go up. And so then we get used to it and realize, hey, you know, it doesn’t suck to have more money in your pocket. So maybe higher wages are not the worst thing in the world.
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We talked in 2023, and 2024 about the magnificent 7. Right. These these great stocks that went up significantly for a couple of years.
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and you know they’re probably going to do the same thing. I think you know the the drop from 75 to 63% growth is probably going to continue. You’ll probably see it be somewhere closer to 50%. But that still is pretty darn awesome, and we’re going to come back to talking about the magnificent 7 in a minute. But
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many investors, unfortunately, are moving to
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heavily investing in only these stocks, which means.
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if you think about the having a diversified portfolio,
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one of the things that happens is that if everybody says well, I have this fear of missing out, so I have to invest heavily in those 7 stocks. Well, now you have a lot less diversification.
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and even if you are not a tech heavy investor, if you’ll only pick these 7, you are suddenly a very tech heavy investor, and so, having less diversification, is always a dangerous thing, because it means that there’s just going to be a great deal more volatility in your investments. So
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what’s happening is the stock market as a whole is becoming less diversified because so many funds are shifting to putting more and more money into these 7 stocks. So that has long term. I guess
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danger signs that we all need to be aware of, and it may turn out to be nothing, and it’s a beautiful thing, and just go on. But you know, as soon as people start investing, based on fear of missing out or fear of anything, instead of looking forward with a positive attitude, the danger signs should begin to appear.
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Oops!
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There we go! So my predictions for 2024. I said that the M. And a frenzy would continue and expand, and that was a pretty easy win, and by frenzy I simply mean
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that it is irrational.
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and that it is a. It is a true frenzy that that people are gobbling up companies as much as they can and if you are selling.
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I highly recommend that you get as much money as you can as quick as you can, and don’t worry about it.
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I also know there’s whatever 100 people on the call, 90 of you, 90% of you are not selling your business this year or next year. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about that as well.
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And I said that private equity is going to fuel more and more of this frenzy, and that was again.
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it’s not a genius move, I’m just saying, but but that was my prediction. I said that AI would become more real, especially chat gpt and
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and that we begin to see AI devices, and most of you are probably not selling computers with AI built in yet, but you all will in 2025, and those devices have come into existence.
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and of course increased spending, mostly driven by AI. That one was an easy win
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with regard to private equity in small business.
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You know.
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I talked about how we’re moving from investments that have 1, 2, 3 billion dollars, and that where we’re going, it’s that that’s going to be 1020, 30 billion dollar funds, and you know, and it’s not just Blackrock, but lots of other investors as well. And
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all of this is coming true.
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And in our industry. We are seeing massive consolidation of the biggest vendors.
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and we’re seeing multi-state Msps that are growing and growing. And I saw I didn’t take a screenshot of it, because I didn’t want to call out anybody in specific. But
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I saw a post probably a month ago where somebody had said, Hey, does anybody know of a company an Msp. That’s worth somewhere around one to 3 million dollars and is interested in selling. And the very 1st response was welcome to the game. That’s what everybody’s looking for.
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right? Well, that sounds great except what everybody’s looking for is to be bottom feeders and to buy that, for, you know 60 cents on the dollar. So it is a tough market, even though people there’s lots of people buying. And there’s a handful of people selling at some point.
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this consolidation cannot
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continue at the rate it’s been continuing. And so at some point, it’s like, Okay, what does this actually happen? And that’s why you if you’re going to be successful and you’re not planning to sell in the next couple of years.
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you need to be 100% focused on sticking to your knitting. Stick to what you do well, and you know, put your head down and make sure that you have properly protected yourself primarily from the possibility that you will have vendors who have a great deal of
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disruption, and may, in fact, begin to disappear, and that collapse and divestiture is something that, I predicted, and it hasn’t happened yet, but I firmly believe that it will.
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Now, if you tuned in last year, if you didn’t tune in last year you can go to mspwebinar.com and watch the replay, so hold me accountable to it, and find out the the more detailed information about
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this, which is, I predicted that there is going to be a major crash, a worldwide economic
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crash, and it’s gonna happen
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in the next 5 years. And so, you know, it’s it’s a year later. So this is the this is going to be. In my opinion, this is a crash that’s going to be, you know, on the level of something like we’ve seen only a few times.
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and you know it happens every you know, 20 years, more or less that something gets so unregulated and so out of control with so much, you know, Fomo, and so much frenzy that it collapses in on itself, and then it takes a year or 2, or maybe 3, to get back on our feet, and we come back with lots of regulation that should have existed. In the 1st place, and I would also say.
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almost everybody who pays a close attention to the private equity frenzy that’s going on worldwide can probably see this coming.
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We have tremendous lack of transparency with these companies at the, you know, the largest companies. They have essentially uncontrollable growth. And at some point when you’ve bought up enough
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100 million 200 million 500 million dollars companies. And you start gobbling up one and 2 and 3 billion dollars companies at some point. You can’t do that anymore, and it it must come to an end. Which is why one of the earlier slides had a little house of cards.
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Now remember the magnificent 7. We have unbalanced portfolios.
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We have a stock market that wants to grow and grow and grow. We have an economy that’s growing. But you cannot take your eyes off of this, and don’t forget this.
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The good news is you can participate in the upside and skip the downside by just putting in a stop loss. And if you don’t know what that is, go talk to your investment, advisor, and just make sure that you you limit how much you can lose. But you, you know you’re not a major player. If you’re on this call, chances are you don’t have a billion dollars to invest.
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There’s 1 person who might, and I didn’t look to see if he’s on the call or not.
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But you know most people don’t have that kind of money. And so, you know, you need to take care of your business, your employees, your family, and your clients.
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So as 2025 begins. I think we’re still going to have this Msp. Merger frenzy. I think it’s going to last the entire year. It’s going to go on beyond that. But you need to think about what is your timeframe to exit and
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focus on your clients. Build that client loyalty, build the employee loyalty because I do believe that we’re going to see another round of wage increases in the next couple of years. So make sure that your employees love working for you. If people are paid well enough.
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then they don’t need extra money when the craziness happens. What they need is to know that they are valued and that they are trusted that you’re going to invest in them as individuals, and that you’re going to help them grow their career.
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and then they will have loyalty to you, and it’s the same thing your clients. You can build that loyalty right now, going forward
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in terms of vendor mergers.
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you should seriously evaluate your vendors, and don’t just say, well, they’re so big they can’t fail. Yeah, you know, I I literally remember
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watching the news when Yahoo became so big that they were worth more money than General Motors. And I was thinking, man.
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that has to be real, that can’t just simply disappear one day.
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right? So any stock on any day can go down 50%.
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How stable are your vendors? Are they simply growing at a rate that is unsustainable? And what happens after that? And in particular you need to look at
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how transparent their license agreements are, and we, as an industry, need to push each other and push our vendors to have good, clear, transparent licensing that is reasonable, and that you should be able to literally go to a website and say, Show me all license agreements that I’ve agreed to boom.
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And what’s funny is, there’s 1 company that’s working to do this. And they have a lot of stuff in place. And that is Google.
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But there’s plenty of vendors in our industry that don’t even come close to this and don’t have any interest in participating in it.
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But we need to start talking about this and pushing for it.
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You also need to have a good handle on how portable your data is if your largest vendor
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ceases to exist, or gets gobbled up by their largest competitor.
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What will you do?
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And if you decide you’re like, I might want to try one of these other tools
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that maybe it’s not as good, and maybe it’s not as big, and maybe it doesn’t have all of these features. But maybe it’s going to be a lot more stable in the next 5 years. Can you take your data and go somewhere else?
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And how portable is it?
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I think you all know the answer to that. It’s pretty darn, not very portable.
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And even though when you move from one tool to another it doesn’t look the way you had hoped it would.
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So, and then also think about your client data. So
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you should offer your clients portability as well. You should document their stuff.
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and in some ways it will make you more sticky, because you will be one of the players who is offering the kind of transparency and portability that you
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should be requesting from your vendors as well.
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All right. So 2025. Here are my predictions. Write them down, or just watch the recording.
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I believe the stock market is going to do. Well, it’s going to have a very rough ride, but it will end up for the year.
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I believe AI is going to have some really interesting changes.
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We’re we’re we’re entering an era of agentic AI. You can create an agent that literally, you go to like Gemini, which is the Google product. You can say, I want to create a gym, which is what they call their agents to do this, this, this and this, and set it off to go do its thing.
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And so we’re going to see a lot of that we’re going to see prepackaged agents and special tools out there.
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And if you haven’t heard of guardian agents today is a good day to start looking into that, you will begin to see some new AI products from the stage this year. It means you need to attend a show or 2, in my opinion. But AI is
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well into the trough of disillusionment in the Gartner Hype cycle. And we’re beginning to see real products and services that can actually be sold by the Smb community, and that is a beautiful thing.
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So you’re also going to see AI and IoT merge in a great way. You know one of the things that AI absolutely has to have to be successful is lots and lots and lots of data. So why is IoT monitoring difficult? Because it produces lots and lots and lots of undifferentiated data that somebody’s got to figure out.
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AI can do that right. It’s actually a marriage made in heaven. So I think we’re going to see some cool products in 2025 and and beyond.
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And of course, here’s the easy one, number 3, you know. There’s lots of investing in technology, it’s going to go up. It’s just going to increase with AI. And
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the good news is you need to be like very hyper aware that there’s a ton of money in this industry.
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I literally, just before this got off a call where somebody was talking about raising rates and having this difficult conversation. Well, you know what you’ve got to have those conversations.
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Every single person on this call. If you have not raised your rates in the last year, you must. You are required by me to raise your rates this year. It’s just, you know, we’re in an era where we know that this has to happen, and if you haven’t taken your turn, today’s a good day to start.
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you should never compete on price. But in particular, when you’re in a market where the amount of spending is increasing and increasing and increasing. You just got to figure out, how do you get your piece of that market? Because there’s plenty of money out there.
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On the compliance front. We all know this compliance is exploding, and whether you like it or not.
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you have taken on the role of compliance officer. If you are the It person you are. The compliance officer. Whether you want to be or not is irrelevant. Your clients turn to you, and they’re never going to fill out paperwork. They’re never going to educate themselves on this. They don’t care about it. It is literally
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blah blah blah stuff that the Government wants them to do, and they turn to you and say, Do that for me, and if you are not already involved in compliance you have to be. Compliance is not an event. It’s sort of like when you think about, you know, security
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security isn’t a thing where you say, okay, you’re secure. Your check will come back next year. Good to go right? That’s not the way the world works. Security is a state that is constantly changing. And you need to keep people and same thing with compliance. You need to keep people compliant, and that is a moving target. It’s your job to keep them, you know, within the circle, right?
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And finally, you know, the security challenges that nobody’s. This isn’t new to anybody. But some of the new things we’re seeing are disinformation. Security is going to be a new trend. Impersonation. Is happening more and more and becoming more and more sophisticated and you know.
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smarter people than me have to figure out, how do we protect ourselves when what people are doing now is exfiltrating the data, even though they, it’s already encrypted and saying, Okay, I can’t decrypt it today, but there’s a newer, bigger, better computer coming down the road. And as soon and I can store it right. You imagine somebody funded by the the government of Russia or China. They can just store that data until they decide that they’ve got the power to crack into it.
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How do you secure already encrypted data?
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And so somebody’s gonna come up with something and we shall see. But that’s going to be one of the big challenges, and luckily all you have to do is pay attention to your clients and your employees and your culture.
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and you should be able to continue to be very, very successful. So I know there’s a mixed message of good and bad here, but the the good news is, I think in the end it’s always good news. I think our industry is always going to be successful, and we’re always going to move ahead. That doesn’t make it easy. But
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this is the game you’re in. And you know you could go play a different game. But today you’re in it. So this is what you get.
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So
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my advice is always stay focused on your business, your clients, your employees, your culture, and that will absolutely move you forward, and, you know, turn off the news. I’m not kidding, you know. Don’t pay attention to your competition. Don’t pay attention to the news. Don’t pay attention to
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all of the frenzy. Don’t pay attention to anything related to mergers and acquisitions. If you’re not buying, and you’re not selling, if you are, then by all means you got to pay attention to that. But if you’re in the 90%, who’s not even thinking about buying or selling a business this year, ignore it.
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There’s so much of this industry is focused on that, and it’s not relevant to what you do. And we’re going to talk in a minute about. You know the the short term view and the longer term view.
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So
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the theme for today is the one thing, and I’m gonna take a sip of coffee and a deep breath.
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But
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I remind you, as I do, that this is the year of the snake and snakes. The reason there’s a snake on the calendar.
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Snakes shed their skin so they can grow.
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They get rid of them old selves and become something new. So cue up your questions in the Q&A module while I take a sip of coffee.
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Now many of you are feeling overwhelmed, so I will just say
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one of my favorite recurring means is the you know you had one job right?
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Well, you only have one job.
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You really only have to focus on one thing, and if you are dedicated to focusing on one thing you will be successful.
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One of my books is called Relax focus, succeed, and you know, in there I talk about the building blocks where 1st you have to decide what success means to you.
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and then you need to identify your values like the values that drive you personally and drive your business. Then
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you can create priorities if you don’t know your values, and you haven’t defined what success means to you. Well, it’s really hard to have priorities, and a lot of people are like, I’m overwhelmed. You always say I have to work from highest to lowest priority. But I have a million things to do. What do I do with the 1 million things? So I want to go through a real quick exercise on focus.
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So here’s here’s your desktop. Okay? Well, all right, there’s a lot of stuff going on there. Let’s light it up. If you turn on the light overhead.
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everything comes into focus. It’s beautiful, all right. You got all kinds of notes. You have things to do. But
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you can’t focus on all those things at the same time. So what do we do? Well.
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here, says we, oh, we need to do a Linkedin review for somebody, and I got to renew my mailbox
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oh, marketing notes. So there’s January, February, March. Okay, January. I have to clean my list, and I’m going to outsource that to upwork. Great February and march. Those can be scheduled for another day. Oh, there’s a there’s a cute baby! And then oh, I have brunch with John, and I have to schedule that, and then I have to do some Q. 4 financials and get reports to my accountant. All right. So I got to do that.
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I need to get a quote out. I collected this information last month, and I owe this prospect a quote, and I got to find a supplier for that job.
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And I’m gonna commit to going to the gym on Mondays. All right. So that’s a time bound event. That’s a beautiful thing, all right.
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So there are the things on my desk. I’ve decluttered just a little bit.
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What should I do first? st
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What would you do first, st and then you can. You can put this in the Q&A module. Actually, you can put in the chat if you want. I don’t care. I’ll go look at the chat. So what would you do 1st on that list?
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Somebody, anybody, Bueller.
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assign everything possible prioritize? Well, so we’re trying to prioritize. How do we prioritize Scott?
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How do we prioritize.
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All right.
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Hit the gym.
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Intuition. Oh, in intuition. Oh, you prioritize through intuition. Okay, well, all right.
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I’m going to sell you my coaching program as soon as this is over.
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hit the gym plus one. All right. Okay, here’s the thing.
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You have 2 ways of organizing what you do. First, st you can either use priorities
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or you can use schedules.
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Now, priorities. You know all of these things.
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All of these things, basically in one way or another, are some kind of a promise that needs to be kept.
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So I believe that you should only schedule things when you have to.
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Schedules exist so that you can interact with people outside of your company.
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Schedules exist so that other people can put their priorities on your list.
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which may not be the best thing for you.
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you got to figure out what your priorities are. And there is a right answer to this. So when I look at priorities, I say, Okay, 1st of all, what constitutes success
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right, and you have to determine your success.
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Right? I I can tell you what success means to me.
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but that’s not your vision of success, and you should not get success. The definition of success from the industry, or from a book, or from general wisdom. Success may not be having 1 million dollars and a boat, and I literally had dinner with somebody yesterday who
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wants to buy a Lamborghini, and I’m like man that is nowhere on my radar like I I would drive it for one day, and then I’d kind of be done. Check the box. Now I got to sell this damn car, right? So
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you know. What does success mean to you? And it’s going to be you personally, not your mother, not your father, not your spouse, not your employees, not your clients, not your vendors. Don’t let vendors tell you what success is right. What does success mean to you? And then you need to identify your values.
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and then, and only then, can you build on priorities. So what I do is I would take all these actions, and I would put them into categories, high, medium, and low. The low stuff can be scheduled now. Scheduled means, even if it’s low priority. If I got a meeting on Thursday. I’m going to be there on Thursday, right? So you need to set your priorities
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and determine your criteria. And sadly, most of you won’t do this. I know you won’t do this, and then
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I’m going to find myself in a conversation with you. Probably beer will be involved.
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and you’ll be whining about how you have too many things to do, and everything is high priority. Well, everything can’t be high priority. So when I say high priority.
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the highest priority here. Seems to me I got a quote to get out. Why is that a high priority for me? Because for me.
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that’s how I get money in the door, and, to be honest, I’ve scheduled the gym on a date and a time. I’m not going to the gym unless it’s Monday, because I’m lazy, but
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there’s a i put that in the schedule. I’ve taken care of that now. I don’t have to use any brain cells on it.
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and it doesn’t bring money in the door. It helps me live just a little bit longer. So I get to make money for one more year. But today the quote needs to go out. So after it. I do that there’s always one highest priority, no matter what you do, no matter what’s going on in your business right now. There is one highest
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priority that must be done before everything else, and you have to figure out what are your rules for identifying your highest priority.
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and then it then life becomes very simple.
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What is the single most important thing you need to do for your business right now.
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and those of you who’ve been on more than 10 webinars with me, have heard me say that more than 10 times
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everyone in your company should always be working on the single most important thing they have to do.
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And there are some practical tips on how you get that done. But basically.
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then you don’t have to worry. You don’t have to use your brain cells to worry about all that other stuff.
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I am a huge believer in something called the reticular activating system, which basically is how your brain filters what you will and will not pay attention to.
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and if you fill it with clutter, if you’ve got everything on your desk lit up, and everything is highest priority. The more you focus on that, the more your brain is going to say. I can’t make priorities. I have to focus on everything. But I can’t. The very job of the reticular activating system is is to help you focus on what’s really important.
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But you have to help it. You have to prime your brain and let it know what’s important, and if you fill your newsfeed with junk
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that does not contribute to your business. Well, your brain thinks that that’s important, because you have chosen to put that stuff in front of your face
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so few practical tips.
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this is going to take time. It might take months for you to determine what success means to you, and I know that sounds like Bs, but it’s not
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What makes you successful? Is it money? I mean? Because let’s be honest. You can do almost anything today and make money.
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And
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you, you know. So if you don’t like your job and you’re not making money well, go get a different job. Everybody on this call could be earning 80, 9,000 $100,000 with a job where you take a paycheck home.
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I don’t know if they have paychecks anymore, but you know, direct deposit.
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So and then you need to identify your values and principles. And you know, I literally think you should put them on your website. If you go to small business org. And you go to the about page. What you’re gonna see is here’s what we do. We help it. Professionals be more successful in running their business right. Our mission
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is to make every it professional, as successful as possible. And then here’s our values. We believe in this, we believe in this, we believe in this right, and
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everybody in my company knows what those are. It’s not a secret. We don’t hide it, you know. Sometimes I take on coaching clients. And I say, what’s your mission? Vision and values? And I go. Oh, I think Jennifer’s got that in a drawer somewhere because we worked on it. We went through a weekend and we spent $5,000 and we wrote that down.
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Oh, okay, right? That’s not useful. You need to personally put your values into your business, and I know a lot of you. I know personally, just looking down the list of of attendees. I know many of you put a huge emphasis on being professional, being great at service and providing white glove service.
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30 30% of the people on this call. If I go to your website. It’s gonna say, we provide white glove service right? Because you actually value that. And it’s good that it’s on your website. Whatever
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value that you have, you should put that forward and let people hold you accountable to it.
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So luckily you all have some kind of system, whether it’s a Psa or just a ticketing system, or a 3rd party. Crm, you know, whatever it is you’ve got tools you might even use outlook. But
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you can put every single thing that needs to be done inside your company into a list.
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and it literally helps relax your brain to know somebody somewhere has that written down, and they’re prioritized
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high medium and low priority. Right? And I believe that you will be more successful in your business and your life. If every single day you write down 3
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things that you will do today. Not 10, not a thousand, not 103, and very often you won’t get 3 things done today, you will not get the 3 most important things you have to do.
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So you might do 3 business and 3 personal. But I have to be honest. You definitely will not finish that list.
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I just can tell you that I’ve been doing this for 30 years.
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Every day I write down 3 exactly 3 things that need to be done.
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and it also means that you need to eliminate distractions. Turn off all those beeps and tweets, and all of those text based communications that just do nothing but interrupt you all day long.
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A lot of times we get addicted to the dopamine. And we
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think we’re being more productive when we are actually being less productive. This is a fact.
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There’s a hundred different examples of this. And if you’re in it. This is worse for you than pretty much everyone else in society.
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Get rid of crap on your newsfeed on your social media that
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is not related to making you more successful. Whatever your vision of success is, even if you agree with it, it doesn’t matter
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when that stuff shows up. And you’ve said opt into this opt into this opt, into this you see more and more and more of it, and that forces your brain, your reticular activating system to pay more attention to it, because you have chosen to say that’s important in my life.
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Well.
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you know what if your business is cruising along, and you’re making all the money you need, and you’re as successful as you ever want to be. By all means go distract the hell out of yourself.
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But if you’re not done yet, if you still want to be more successful, if you still want to
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fight the challenges that you know are coming in the next few years, then you have to filter your life.
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And why is that? Well?
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Because nothing happens by itself, and no one else is going to do this for you. So you have to cut out the distractions. You have to clean your social media. You have to stop answering the phone and call people back. You have to declutter your office. You have to focus. You have to focus. You have to focus buying. Another program is not going to get this done buying another piece of software is not going to get this done, you have to decide that decluttering your life and your brain
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is worth the effort. And it’s only then that you’re going to be able to ignore the whirlwind and pay attention to the things that actually matter inside your company.
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You know, you’re gonna run your business. Most people on this call, you’re gonna run your business for at least 15 or 20 years.
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focused on growing focused on being successful, focused on feeding your family, focused on putting a little money aside for retirement focused on the long term goals. And then.
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after that 20 year, Marathon, you’re going to spend a year or 2 selling your business.
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and almost every so-called key performance indicator is not key and doesn’t indicate performance
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and does 0 to help you run your business efficiently, or better.
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all those Kpis exist for is so that when people are buying businesses they have something they can use to compare those businesses to each other so they can beat up the owners on price.
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and, you know, lure them with vanity statistics instead of the bottom line, which is.
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if you’re gonna run a business for 20 years.
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you should have a business you love with clients you love and employees you love and processes and procedures that overall. When the day is done.
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they increase the happiness in your life. If you’re in small business, your business exists to fulfill your goals and your desires
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period. That’s why your business exists.
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because, if all you need is $80,000 bottom line at the end of the year.
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Go get a job, and I promise you it’ll be a lot less stressful than running a business. Businesses are challenging and difficult, and it’s never going to be super easy, no matter. You know how easy I might make it sound, but they’re extremely fulfilling, personally and professionally. If you do them well.
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I will now take questions, and I will put up a list of all the links that I have mentioned in this presentation. But I’m happy to take questions.
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1st one. Not much time for a screenshot. Well, there you go. Solve that problem. Okay, Keith, looking at employment, we still have a gap in full-time employment which should help us in the industry. If we offer full-time jobs with benefits, your thoughts, I agree. If you can afford to give benefits, you should, and I will say this, if you have young technicians.
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I’ve always loved paying for health care simply because I get the good group account price and young people. Their health care is not very expensive on group health. So you know, it’s if you think about.
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you know, comparing a few $100 to their hourly wage. It’s pretty darn affordable to give people health care. In my opinion we always did it all the time that I had employees, and the bigger we got, the more benefits we were able to offer. So benefits do make you sticky. I will say I was
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for the 1st time ever I heard somebody who is an employer, I mean employee say that they like the benefits, except
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it makes them feel a little bit trapped in their job. So just be aware there are employees who will feel a little trapped by your golden handcuffs, you know.
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Ted, how do I feel about Eos? So I think Eos is great, especially for everybody on this call. Eos is designed for small businesses. They don’t say that they tell you it’s designed for every business. But it’s really it’s 1 formula for setting goals, holding people accountable meeting as a group. Many, many consultants who have become Eos consultants have then
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morphed into doing something pretty much the same, but not quite because, you know, they wanted to do a little bit this way or that way. But if you haven’t heard of the Eos system today’s a good day to look that up and I would endorse anyone who wants to adopt something like that. Most coaching programs kind of look like that. To be honest with you.
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How do you see Msps making actual service project recurring revenue from AI technologies. Well, so part of it is that you need to be tuned. Into
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what kinds of things are people already buying? You know this is one of these industries where
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2 things are happening, that one is very common and one is not so. The common thing is that people are buying this stuff without telling their it people so it’s showing up at your clients offices, but you don’t know about it.
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and in fact, the owner might not know about it. A lot of businesses have forbidden AI which has done approximately nothing to stop it from being adopted by their employees. The other thing that’s happening. That almost never happens is that
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this technology is emerging with an eye toward putting guardrails on it, having some discussion about ethics having some discussion about. You know how it should and shouldn’t be used, and how it can and cannot be used.
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and so forth. So that’s a beautiful thing, but it allows you to play the role of saying, Oh, let us help you design an AI policy. What is an acceptable use policy for AI, which tools are authorized, and which are not what you know. Right.
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make that part of your quarterly meeting. With luck. You can do it quarterly, but at least annual meeting, where you have a roadmap meeting with your clients and say, You know, can I do an audit?
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Talk to every one of your employees and see what tools they’re using. They may not know they may not put it in the category of AI, but they’re buying a bunch of tools. You know. You’ve seen the research on this that you know, most companies have, like 70 or 80 tools that the boss doesn’t know about right. But they’ve worked their way into the system.
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fast. Follow up co-pilot for Microsoft 365. So I have not used copilot to to my knowledge. That doesn’t mean I haven’t used it. But they’re building AI stuff into all of their tools. You know, some of it is like, Oh, here’s a better way of making this presentation, that presentation, a lot of suggestions, and so forth.
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So those sorts of things. I think it’s great that they’re doing it. When I use. AI. I try to be very intentional, like I will. I have subscribed to Gemini, which is the Google product so that I can log in what I love about it is I can do research
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that I couldn’t do before. Right I and in Gemini you can say.
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don’t ever give me information without citing the source.
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And so, because it used to be. My second question was always, Do you have sources for that? Right? So if I want to say like. For example, I did a handout for a presentation last month, I think, where I talked about all of the things that that technology consultants don’t control.
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So I went to Gemini, and I said, Can you give me a list of 100 things that business owners do not control? And it did, and it divided them into categories with sections, you know, like the economy, the government, their clients, their employees, so forth.
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And then I had to say, Can you give me citations for every one of these, and it did.
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Now, that’s the kind of thing I could have probably come up with a list of a hundred things you don’t control. It would have taken me hours.
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and you know. So I in the handout I created for that I literally I put the prompt and the source and the date of the prompt in the footer. As the source like this is how I got that. And you know. So
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that’s an example of something where I can hand people something and say, this is how I did it. This is how I got the information. This is how I used AI, and this is how I report that I’m using it right? So I’ve got that that transparency element.
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But in terms of copilot, Amy Babinchek I actually mentioned last year in my state of the nation dress. She’s teaching classes on how to use this in the various Microsoft tools, and everybody who is selling it should probably learn at least the basics of what it does and how your clients could potentially benefit from it.
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So that’s my opinion, other comments or questions you could please put them into the Q. And A. Module. I know we’re a little bit after the top of the hour, and I appreciate your patience with me.
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and of course, if you’re not connected me [email protected], don’t get my newsletter. Today’s a good day to sign up for that as well.
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All right, if there are no further questions. Oh, wait here. We got something end of windows. 10 this year. Thoughts opportunities. Well, my thoughts, to be honest, this has been my thought since 1999, I think 1998,
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when there’s a new operating system, you should adopt it inside your company as soon as it’s available on the next brand new machine you buy, and all of your clients should buy it the very next time that they buy any brand new machine. So basically for me, the new operating system always shows up when the new hardware shows up. So if I bought a brand new machine
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last year, and there’s a new operating system this year. Well, when that machine is 3 years old, I’ll replace it with the machine that’s got the new operating system. I only install new hardware and new software together, so I never have a mismatch between the the era of the hardware and the era of the operating system.
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So it should just be rolled in with everything else. And I would. Personally, I would charge people extra
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for having an outdated windows system, and I would say they’re not eligible to be on managed services because the whole point of managed services. One of the points is to maintain
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current levels of patch management which can’t exist on an operating system that isn’t going to take any more patches, right? And clients will say, Well, I don’t call Microsoft. I call Thomas. Well, okay.
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good for you. But it takes more of your effort to maintain an obsolete system than it does to take to maintain a new system. And you’re responsible for the compliance. And you’re responsible for the security that becomes harder with older operating systems. So
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and you know, we’ve been through areas where people have fallen in love with an operating system. Oh, you know, I’ll I’ll give up my, you know, windows 97 when they tear it from my cold, dead hands, like, okay, get over it, you know.
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So nowadays I mean to be honest when my machine rolled from windows 10 to windows. 11. I like. I didn’t really notice, except I had to get rid of all the annoying stuff that Microsoft does whenever they upgrade their systems. So I hope that helps. That’s my opinion.
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Other comments, questions.
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I’m here for you.
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Obviously the people who are still here don’t have another meeting at the top of the hour.
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Okay? All right. Well, if there are no more questions, I’ll go ahead and put an end to all of this. I will get up the recording as quick as I can. It will [email protected]. Thank you for the kudos. I appreciate that.
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So it’ll be an Msp. Webinar. We’ll have the video and we will have a full transcript. And all of the links up there.
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Cool, all right. Thank you all for being here. I appreciate it, and I’m honored to be able to get some folks together once a year and go through this, and I hope that you found value in it. Thank you all, and I will see you next year.
###
🙂
The One Thing for 2025 – Karl’s 16th Annual State of the Nation Address for SMB IT
The One Thing for 2025 – Register now for my 16th Annual State of the Nation Address for SMB IT
This year’s focus: The One Thing for 2025.
Recorded January 2025.
Last year we set the stage for the rest of the decade. We talked about your business as a system. I’ll give you an update on that and then we’ll look ahead to 2025 and beyond.
Our theme for 2025 is The One Thing. We’ll look at the one thing you need to do to thrive in the new year. And we’ll give some tips on how to focus on the most important things you need to pay attention to going forward.
A fundamental shift is under way in our industry. You might feel like your are severely disadvantaged if you are a small IT business. I will argue that you have the advantage. You just need to have strategy to take advantage of it. I’ll give you my thoughts.
Topics Include:
PLUS, we’ll have time for questions and answers. So plan to take notes.
Don’t worry – No Politics Here! Also, no selling.
No cost. Just register and tune in.
Paste that date into your calendar so you don’t forget!
Links for State of Nation 2025
(Transcript follows)
First Year MSP = https://www.smallbizthoughts.org/first-year-msp/
Webinar Registration –> Intro to First Year MSP = https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2szVSoiwS4K7oyei9RLByg
National Society of IT Service Providers = https://www.nsitsp.org
IT Service Provider University = https://www.itspu.com
Pinterest meme = https://ro.pinterest.com/pin/861735709932091271/
Small Biz Thoughts = https://www.smallbizthoughts.com
SBT Technology Community = https://www.smallbizthoughts.org
Karl’s Books = https://store.smallbizthoughts.com
YouTube Channel = https://YouTube.com/smallbizthoughts
My Blog = https://blog.smallbizthoughts.com
SMB Community Podcast = https://www.smbcommunitypodcast.com
The Killing IT Podcast = https://killingit.smallbizthoughts.com
Relax Focus Succeed = https://www.relaxfocussucceed.com
Free Webinars for SMB IT = https://www.mspwebinar.com
Full Transcript
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Welcome everybody. It is time to get started, so I am so grateful to see people. I look down the list. I see people from Germany, from England, nobody from Australia, but of course Canada, and all over the Us. And more people will be joining us after they refill their coffee. I also see at least one vendor, and I see lots of people that I met
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for the 1st time in my big roadshow in 2017, so seems like forever ago, and sometimes I think my annual state of the nation address is really just a huge family reunion. At least that’s what it feels like to me. So put a note in the chat. If you’re interested in sharing where you’re from
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and we will get going. We will not wait for people who are running down the hallway or refilling their coffee.
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I love this quote, and this is no exaggeration. On my wall.
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I have a little postcard that I had made many years ago, so that I could frame it, and it says the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
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and I love that because it is such. 1st of all, it’s a little humorous, but it’s such a great statement about, you know.
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you really need to focus on one thing, and sometimes it is, you know, not as easy as it. We make it sound.
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And
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another great quote is, it’s not your commitment I’m worried about. It’s your commitment to your commitment, right? So so we’re going to talk about that sort of stuff today. And we’ve got a regular format that we go through
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super quick intro for those of you who don’t know what I’ve been up to recently I wrote several books. I’ve written over 20 books. Now the most recent one is the It Consultants year of intention. I originally wrote this for people inside my community, my paid community at small business thoughts.
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and it went over so well that I revamped it and made it a little a little less specific to the year that we were going into, and made it more of a general reusable thing. But it’s really literally intended to be a tool for focusing the year ahead, quarter by quarter. What are you going to do in your company? Where are you going to go? And what? Your, what your goals are.
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as well as what events you’re going to attend, and what you’re going to get out of them. So you probably I think anybody on the call could probably use 2 thirds of it and get some value out of it, and it’ll be a different 2 thirds for everybody.
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Anyway, you can check all that out. smallbusthoughts.com.
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So I am literally completely dedicated to helping make it consultants as successful as possible.
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That’s what I do. And if you go to smallbizthoughts.org, you’ll see that that entire site is designed specifically to make that happen. So you can hold me accountable to is is what Karl is doing today helping it consultants to be successful, yes or no. That is my yardstick of of how I determine whether or not I’m heading in the right direction.
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So just a little housekeeping today I’m going to look at questions in the Q&A panel. So if you put a question in the chat, I will be happy to ignore that until this is all over, and then I’ll read through the chat. The chat is here because people insist on using it, so
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feel free to talk about me behind my back and talk with each other, and whatever you can even heckle me there again. I won’t see it till after this is over, but put questions into the Q. And a. If you want me to see them.
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this is being recorded, it will be [email protected], which is how many of you got here?
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And I allude to Kpis a little bit in this presentation today. But if you want my full presentation on. Why, almost all kpis that you follow are completely stupid and useless. Then I’ve got an entire hour-long webinar on that. No registration is needed. All you have to do is click and watch, and that’[email protected].
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And then I got other stuff up there as well. That’s literally a place for me to store free trainings for people who wander in off the Internet and have never engaged with us. It’s it’s a sampling of the kind of stuff that we do. So. Even some of you who’ve been connected to me for 15 years may not know that that’s a place where you can go and get a bunch of my stuff
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at no additional charge, including I have some sample trainings like a sample AI training and a sample security training where
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you are authorized to download the entire Powerpoint. Take off my logo, put on your logo, you know, put in a couple of fresh examples from last week’s news, and make those presentations to your prospects again and again and again as sales tools. So anyway, go check it out.
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These are our brains, and I think I think I got them all on there, but I could be wrong.
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So, you know, take a screenshot. Memorize this. So forth.
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AI transparency again. I’m I always try to, you know, come up with something that demonstrates the state of AI. So I asked for a target here, and that’s what it gave me, which is, you know, sadly, the arrows coming towards me, which makes me a little nervous. But
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we use licensed graphics, and I use some AI generated graphics. I don’t use any AI content
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as a writer. I just sort of have to draw the line and let you know I wrote all the words that will be spoken today, or or that appear on the screen, and I have an AI
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disclaimer in my Weekly Newsletter, and I encourage you all to do the same thing. If you are using AI, that’s cool, you should just say so. And if you’re not, you should say so as well.
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So today our our standard agenda. I have a few announcements, in fact, one big announcement.
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and then lots of
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small announcements. But we’re going to do a review of 2024 kind of where I speculated where we were going to be, and so forth, and then some predictions for 2025, and then I always try to do some focused content. And then we’re open to Q&A, which can be about anything we do today or just anything, anywhere that you just happen to have on your mind.
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So now
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I have an announcement that doesn’t apply to 85% of the people on this call. But you might know somebody that it does apply to. I’m starting a new program called The 1st year Msp. And it is for people who started their businesses in the last year or 2,
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and want to make sure that they hit all the bases, answered all the questions set things up properly are heading in the right direction and sort of got a a head start towards running their business appropriately.
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And it’s at Smallbiz. thoughts.org slash. 1st year, Msp.
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The actual content. The 1st meeting is on February 27, th and so we’re signing people up now. It will meet on the 4th Thursday of every month.
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and I know that that doesn’t work for everybody. But that’s the way the world works. Sometimes it will consist of live
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group coaching meetings, coaching calls.
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We will have resources that we focus on.
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and it will be a subset of the resources available inside my community.
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So every month we’ll have very focused resources. We will have people talk about a specific topic. People will post up their challenges and interact with that group somewhat as a sounding board, and then we’ll hold you accountable. The next month we’ll come back and give you red, light green, light, yellow light. How did you do in the last month?
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So if you know somebody who could use this, please tell them to go to this site, and or just, you know, with luck you’ll you can just have them get in touch with me, and I’ll be happy to talk to them about it.
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We are signing people up now, and it begins the actual launch. The 1st meeting will be in February.
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and we’re going to have a webinar on January 20 second, to go into this. If you go to that site you can register for the webinar if you wish. And of course, since this is all being recorded, all of the links and everything that anything that shows up on the screen as a link is going to be at the top of the transcripts. When I post up the recording with the transcript. So we always, we always do transcripts of our webinars as well.
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So summary of 2024.
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Some of you may recall a picture of a cute little baby last year. Well, the cute little baby is now walking, not quite talking, but she is a delightful toddler at this point.
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and last year, because I have a grandchild. I did a lot less travel.
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so there will be a little increase in travel this year, and that all has to do with baby babysitting schedules. But I did only 8 in person events last year travel to about 10 cities in a couple of different countries, and we put on, of course, every year we do 15 week courses over at it. Service Provider University
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did a hundred 49 blog posts
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between relax, focus, succeed, and small business thoughts and the other blogs. There’s a couple other blogs that I post on
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61 videos, more than 20 podcasts I appeared on, did 7 Webinars and put out 62 newsletters. So I was still busy, even though I did most of it from home.
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For those of you who are interested. The National Society of It Service Providers continues to grow.
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and we are
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currently this. You know, we were actually founded in 2021. So this is our 4th birthday is coming up, which is pretty amazing. And last year we finally launched the Professional Development Committee, which is looking at, you know, defining some continuing education programs and so forth.
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We had a big turnover on the Board of directors. In fact, we had such a hotly contested election for the board that we had a runoff
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for one of the seats, and so we have new Board members. One of the new Board members is a former board member. So, even though he’s new to the board this year, he’s also old to the board and returning to us. So it’s a very active, very engaged group, and lots of webinars coming up. And so, if you haven’t joined the National Society today is an excellent day to do that
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quick plug. Our classes are at it Service Provider University. We have a brand new class on mergers and acquisitions coming up in February, and it is going to be run by James Kernan, who coaches people through mergers and acquisitions. He’s also a great
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leadership coach in a in a great coach for sales.
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All right. So let’s talk about
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2024, and kind of where where we stand.
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I always have to give this disclaimer because I got one guy who keeps bugging me. I’m not a financial advisor. This is not financial advice. I’m not an accountant. I’m not an attorney. I’m not a doctor. I don’t play one on TV. Blah blah blah! I’ve been running businesses for myself and for other people since 1993,
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and I think that my experience counts for something.
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And so, you know, in 2024, when you look at the economy, inflation was about 2.7%, and I know it feels higher to some people, and if all you do is you look at one glass of milk, it may feel higher. If you live in certain States like in California, we have a special recipe for our gasoline. So it’s always a little bit higher.
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Inflation for 2025 is expected to be in the range of 2 and a half to 3%. So those are all historically low interest rates. Unemployment is still historically low around 4%.
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The Federal funds rate is about 4 and a half percent. And but but home loan rates are not based on that now. A lot of people are confused about that. Home loan rates are based on usually 10 year bonds. And so what those bond prices that you’re looking at are going to make interest rates for houses in the 5 to 6% range
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and 6% might be the norm going forward. So but we still have a growing economy. The economy still grew at 2.8% in 2024, and it’ll probably be 2, something in 2025. So the economy is growing now.
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The economy is not the stock market. The stock market is not the economy, and I normally go back one year. But this year I’m going to go back a few years because 2022 sucked for a lot of people, and the Nasdaq, which I think is the only stock market you personally need to pay attention to. In my opinion.
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It went down
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about 30% in 2022. And that was painful, and that you know that a lot of people felt that one.
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And I predicted that it would go back up and regain all of that in 2023, which it did, and I predicted that 2024 would be a little rough.
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but it would end significantly up. And that’s exactly what happened last year. Now.
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if you’re not familiar with these scales, do not underestimate the pain of the July
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drop, because if you were living through that, and you cut off the right side of this and then blew it up to full size. That’s a significant drop. And you have to remember in the stock market on any day any stock can go down 50%, which means on any day all the stocks can go down 50%.
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And as we learned in 2,008, they can also go down 50% the next day as well. So be careful about this, but you know, if you’re willing to take the ride, it is truly a great long term investment.
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I believe that what we’re looking for is kind of more of the same. In 2025 there will be. There’s always volatility. The 1st year of a presidential term.
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simply because there’s a lot of unknown stuff, and the the new President is living under the budget of the old President at least for one year, and they’re going to try to do things, you know, to change the way that money gets spent. But it is really in 2026 that the new President will have his own budget that he will have had the most influence over.
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I do believe we’re going to have lots of ups and downs in 2025, but overall I believe it will be up.
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It also is going to be a year where interest rates could potentially go up as well, there’s a lot of pressure that is going to lead to increased interest rates, increased inflation, increased wages. But that’s you know, the stock market goes down when all those things go up. And so then we get used to it and realize, hey, you know, it doesn’t suck to have more money in your pocket. So maybe higher wages are not the worst thing in the world.
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We talked in 2023, and 2024 about the magnificent 7. Right. These these great stocks that went up significantly for a couple of years.
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and you know they’re probably going to do the same thing. I think you know the the drop from 75 to 63% growth is probably going to continue. You’ll probably see it be somewhere closer to 50%. But that still is pretty darn awesome, and we’re going to come back to talking about the magnificent 7 in a minute. But
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many investors, unfortunately, are moving to
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heavily investing in only these stocks, which means.
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if you think about the having a diversified portfolio,
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one of the things that happens is that if everybody says well, I have this fear of missing out, so I have to invest heavily in those 7 stocks. Well, now you have a lot less diversification.
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and even if you are not a tech heavy investor, if you’ll only pick these 7, you are suddenly a very tech heavy investor, and so, having less diversification, is always a dangerous thing, because it means that there’s just going to be a great deal more volatility in your investments. So
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what’s happening is the stock market as a whole is becoming less diversified because so many funds are shifting to putting more and more money into these 7 stocks. So that has long term. I guess
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danger signs that we all need to be aware of, and it may turn out to be nothing, and it’s a beautiful thing, and just go on. But you know, as soon as people start investing, based on fear of missing out or fear of anything, instead of looking forward with a positive attitude, the danger signs should begin to appear.
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Oops!
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There we go! So my predictions for 2024. I said that the M. And a frenzy would continue and expand, and that was a pretty easy win, and by frenzy I simply mean
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that it is irrational.
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and that it is a. It is a true frenzy that that people are gobbling up companies as much as they can and if you are selling.
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I highly recommend that you get as much money as you can as quick as you can, and don’t worry about it.
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I also know there’s whatever 100 people on the call, 90 of you, 90% of you are not selling your business this year or next year. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about that as well.
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And I said that private equity is going to fuel more and more of this frenzy, and that was again.
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it’s not a genius move, I’m just saying, but but that was my prediction. I said that AI would become more real, especially chat gpt and
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and that we begin to see AI devices, and most of you are probably not selling computers with AI built in yet, but you all will in 2025, and those devices have come into existence.
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and of course increased spending, mostly driven by AI. That one was an easy win
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with regard to private equity in small business.
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You know.
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I talked about how we’re moving from investments that have 1, 2, 3 billion dollars, and that where we’re going, it’s that that’s going to be 1020, 30 billion dollar funds, and you know, and it’s not just Blackrock, but lots of other investors as well. And
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all of this is coming true.
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And in our industry. We are seeing massive consolidation of the biggest vendors.
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and we’re seeing multi-state Msps that are growing and growing. And I saw I didn’t take a screenshot of it, because I didn’t want to call out anybody in specific. But
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I saw a post probably a month ago where somebody had said, Hey, does anybody know of a company an Msp. That’s worth somewhere around one to 3 million dollars and is interested in selling. And the very 1st response was welcome to the game. That’s what everybody’s looking for.
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right? Well, that sounds great except what everybody’s looking for is to be bottom feeders and to buy that, for, you know 60 cents on the dollar. So it is a tough market, even though people there’s lots of people buying. And there’s a handful of people selling at some point.
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this consolidation cannot
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continue at the rate it’s been continuing. And so at some point, it’s like, Okay, what does this actually happen? And that’s why you if you’re going to be successful and you’re not planning to sell in the next couple of years.
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you need to be 100% focused on sticking to your knitting. Stick to what you do well, and you know, put your head down and make sure that you have properly protected yourself primarily from the possibility that you will have vendors who have a great deal of
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disruption, and may, in fact, begin to disappear, and that collapse and divestiture is something that, I predicted, and it hasn’t happened yet, but I firmly believe that it will.
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Now, if you tuned in last year, if you didn’t tune in last year you can go to mspwebinar.com and watch the replay, so hold me accountable to it, and find out the the more detailed information about
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this, which is, I predicted that there is going to be a major crash, a worldwide economic
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crash, and it’s gonna happen
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in the next 5 years. And so, you know, it’s it’s a year later. So this is the this is going to be. In my opinion, this is a crash that’s going to be, you know, on the level of something like we’ve seen only a few times.
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and you know it happens every you know, 20 years, more or less that something gets so unregulated and so out of control with so much, you know, Fomo, and so much frenzy that it collapses in on itself, and then it takes a year or 2, or maybe 3, to get back on our feet, and we come back with lots of regulation that should have existed. In the 1st place, and I would also say.
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almost everybody who pays a close attention to the private equity frenzy that’s going on worldwide can probably see this coming.
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We have tremendous lack of transparency with these companies at the, you know, the largest companies. They have essentially uncontrollable growth. And at some point when you’ve bought up enough
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100 million 200 million 500 million dollars companies. And you start gobbling up one and 2 and 3 billion dollars companies at some point. You can’t do that anymore, and it it must come to an end. Which is why one of the earlier slides had a little house of cards.
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Now remember the magnificent 7. We have unbalanced portfolios.
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We have a stock market that wants to grow and grow and grow. We have an economy that’s growing. But you cannot take your eyes off of this, and don’t forget this.
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The good news is you can participate in the upside and skip the downside by just putting in a stop loss. And if you don’t know what that is, go talk to your investment, advisor, and just make sure that you you limit how much you can lose. But you, you know you’re not a major player. If you’re on this call, chances are you don’t have a billion dollars to invest.
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There’s 1 person who might, and I didn’t look to see if he’s on the call or not.
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But you know most people don’t have that kind of money. And so, you know, you need to take care of your business, your employees, your family, and your clients.
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So as 2025 begins. I think we’re still going to have this Msp. Merger frenzy. I think it’s going to last the entire year. It’s going to go on beyond that. But you need to think about what is your timeframe to exit and
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focus on your clients. Build that client loyalty, build the employee loyalty because I do believe that we’re going to see another round of wage increases in the next couple of years. So make sure that your employees love working for you. If people are paid well enough.
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then they don’t need extra money when the craziness happens. What they need is to know that they are valued and that they are trusted that you’re going to invest in them as individuals, and that you’re going to help them grow their career.
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and then they will have loyalty to you, and it’s the same thing your clients. You can build that loyalty right now, going forward
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in terms of vendor mergers.
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you should seriously evaluate your vendors, and don’t just say, well, they’re so big they can’t fail. Yeah, you know, I I literally remember
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watching the news when Yahoo became so big that they were worth more money than General Motors. And I was thinking, man.
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that has to be real, that can’t just simply disappear one day.
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right? So any stock on any day can go down 50%.
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How stable are your vendors? Are they simply growing at a rate that is unsustainable? And what happens after that? And in particular you need to look at
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how transparent their license agreements are, and we, as an industry, need to push each other and push our vendors to have good, clear, transparent licensing that is reasonable, and that you should be able to literally go to a website and say, Show me all license agreements that I’ve agreed to boom.
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And what’s funny is, there’s 1 company that’s working to do this. And they have a lot of stuff in place. And that is Google.
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But there’s plenty of vendors in our industry that don’t even come close to this and don’t have any interest in participating in it.
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But we need to start talking about this and pushing for it.
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You also need to have a good handle on how portable your data is if your largest vendor
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ceases to exist, or gets gobbled up by their largest competitor.
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What will you do?
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And if you decide you’re like, I might want to try one of these other tools
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that maybe it’s not as good, and maybe it’s not as big, and maybe it doesn’t have all of these features. But maybe it’s going to be a lot more stable in the next 5 years. Can you take your data and go somewhere else?
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And how portable is it?
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I think you all know the answer to that. It’s pretty darn, not very portable.
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And even though when you move from one tool to another it doesn’t look the way you had hoped it would.
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So, and then also think about your client data. So
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you should offer your clients portability as well. You should document their stuff.
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and in some ways it will make you more sticky, because you will be one of the players who is offering the kind of transparency and portability that you
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should be requesting from your vendors as well.
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All right. So 2025. Here are my predictions. Write them down, or just watch the recording.
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I believe the stock market is going to do. Well, it’s going to have a very rough ride, but it will end up for the year.
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I believe AI is going to have some really interesting changes.
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We’re we’re we’re entering an era of agentic AI. You can create an agent that literally, you go to like Gemini, which is the Google product. You can say, I want to create a gym, which is what they call their agents to do this, this, this and this, and set it off to go do its thing.
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And so we’re going to see a lot of that we’re going to see prepackaged agents and special tools out there.
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And if you haven’t heard of guardian agents today is a good day to start looking into that, you will begin to see some new AI products from the stage this year. It means you need to attend a show or 2, in my opinion. But AI is
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well into the trough of disillusionment in the Gartner Hype cycle. And we’re beginning to see real products and services that can actually be sold by the Smb community, and that is a beautiful thing.
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So you’re also going to see AI and IoT merge in a great way. You know one of the things that AI absolutely has to have to be successful is lots and lots and lots of data. So why is IoT monitoring difficult? Because it produces lots and lots and lots of undifferentiated data that somebody’s got to figure out.
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AI can do that right. It’s actually a marriage made in heaven. So I think we’re going to see some cool products in 2025 and and beyond.
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And of course, here’s the easy one, number 3, you know. There’s lots of investing in technology, it’s going to go up. It’s just going to increase with AI. And
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the good news is you need to be like very hyper aware that there’s a ton of money in this industry.
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I literally, just before this got off a call where somebody was talking about raising rates and having this difficult conversation. Well, you know what you’ve got to have those conversations.
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Every single person on this call. If you have not raised your rates in the last year, you must. You are required by me to raise your rates this year. It’s just, you know, we’re in an era where we know that this has to happen, and if you haven’t taken your turn, today’s a good day to start.
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you should never compete on price. But in particular, when you’re in a market where the amount of spending is increasing and increasing and increasing. You just got to figure out, how do you get your piece of that market? Because there’s plenty of money out there.
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On the compliance front. We all know this compliance is exploding, and whether you like it or not.
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you have taken on the role of compliance officer. If you are the It person you are. The compliance officer. Whether you want to be or not is irrelevant. Your clients turn to you, and they’re never going to fill out paperwork. They’re never going to educate themselves on this. They don’t care about it. It is literally
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blah blah blah stuff that the Government wants them to do, and they turn to you and say, Do that for me, and if you are not already involved in compliance you have to be. Compliance is not an event. It’s sort of like when you think about, you know, security
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security isn’t a thing where you say, okay, you’re secure. Your check will come back next year. Good to go right? That’s not the way the world works. Security is a state that is constantly changing. And you need to keep people and same thing with compliance. You need to keep people compliant, and that is a moving target. It’s your job to keep them, you know, within the circle, right?
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And finally, you know, the security challenges that nobody’s. This isn’t new to anybody. But some of the new things we’re seeing are disinformation. Security is going to be a new trend. Impersonation. Is happening more and more and becoming more and more sophisticated and you know.
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smarter people than me have to figure out, how do we protect ourselves when what people are doing now is exfiltrating the data, even though they, it’s already encrypted and saying, Okay, I can’t decrypt it today, but there’s a newer, bigger, better computer coming down the road. And as soon and I can store it right. You imagine somebody funded by the the government of Russia or China. They can just store that data until they decide that they’ve got the power to crack into it.
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How do you secure already encrypted data?
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And so somebody’s gonna come up with something and we shall see. But that’s going to be one of the big challenges, and luckily all you have to do is pay attention to your clients and your employees and your culture.
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and you should be able to continue to be very, very successful. So I know there’s a mixed message of good and bad here, but the the good news is, I think in the end it’s always good news. I think our industry is always going to be successful, and we’re always going to move ahead. That doesn’t make it easy. But
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this is the game you’re in. And you know you could go play a different game. But today you’re in it. So this is what you get.
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So
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my advice is always stay focused on your business, your clients, your employees, your culture, and that will absolutely move you forward, and, you know, turn off the news. I’m not kidding, you know. Don’t pay attention to your competition. Don’t pay attention to the news. Don’t pay attention to
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all of the frenzy. Don’t pay attention to anything related to mergers and acquisitions. If you’re not buying, and you’re not selling, if you are, then by all means you got to pay attention to that. But if you’re in the 90%, who’s not even thinking about buying or selling a business this year, ignore it.
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There’s so much of this industry is focused on that, and it’s not relevant to what you do. And we’re going to talk in a minute about. You know the the short term view and the longer term view.
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So
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the theme for today is the one thing, and I’m gonna take a sip of coffee and a deep breath.
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But
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I remind you, as I do, that this is the year of the snake and snakes. The reason there’s a snake on the calendar.
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Snakes shed their skin so they can grow.
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They get rid of them old selves and become something new. So cue up your questions in the Q&A module while I take a sip of coffee.
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Now many of you are feeling overwhelmed, so I will just say
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one of my favorite recurring means is the you know you had one job right?
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Well, you only have one job.
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You really only have to focus on one thing, and if you are dedicated to focusing on one thing you will be successful.
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One of my books is called Relax focus, succeed, and you know, in there I talk about the building blocks where 1st you have to decide what success means to you.
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and then you need to identify your values like the values that drive you personally and drive your business. Then
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you can create priorities if you don’t know your values, and you haven’t defined what success means to you. Well, it’s really hard to have priorities, and a lot of people are like, I’m overwhelmed. You always say I have to work from highest to lowest priority. But I have a million things to do. What do I do with the 1 million things? So I want to go through a real quick exercise on focus.
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So here’s here’s your desktop. Okay? Well, all right, there’s a lot of stuff going on there. Let’s light it up. If you turn on the light overhead.
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everything comes into focus. It’s beautiful, all right. You got all kinds of notes. You have things to do. But
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you can’t focus on all those things at the same time. So what do we do? Well.
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here, says we, oh, we need to do a Linkedin review for somebody, and I got to renew my mailbox
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oh, marketing notes. So there’s January, February, March. Okay, January. I have to clean my list, and I’m going to outsource that to upwork. Great February and march. Those can be scheduled for another day. Oh, there’s a there’s a cute baby! And then oh, I have brunch with John, and I have to schedule that, and then I have to do some Q. 4 financials and get reports to my accountant. All right. So I got to do that.
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I need to get a quote out. I collected this information last month, and I owe this prospect a quote, and I got to find a supplier for that job.
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And I’m gonna commit to going to the gym on Mondays. All right. So that’s a time bound event. That’s a beautiful thing, all right.
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So there are the things on my desk. I’ve decluttered just a little bit.
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What should I do first? st
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What would you do first, st and then you can. You can put this in the Q&A module. Actually, you can put in the chat if you want. I don’t care. I’ll go look at the chat. So what would you do 1st on that list?
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Somebody, anybody, Bueller.
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assign everything possible prioritize? Well, so we’re trying to prioritize. How do we prioritize Scott?
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How do we prioritize.
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All right.
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Hit the gym.
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Intuition. Oh, in intuition. Oh, you prioritize through intuition. Okay, well, all right.
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I’m going to sell you my coaching program as soon as this is over.
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hit the gym plus one. All right. Okay, here’s the thing.
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You have 2 ways of organizing what you do. First, st you can either use priorities
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or you can use schedules.
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Now, priorities. You know all of these things.
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All of these things, basically in one way or another, are some kind of a promise that needs to be kept.
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So I believe that you should only schedule things when you have to.
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Schedules exist so that you can interact with people outside of your company.
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Schedules exist so that other people can put their priorities on your list.
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which may not be the best thing for you.
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you got to figure out what your priorities are. And there is a right answer to this. So when I look at priorities, I say, Okay, 1st of all, what constitutes success
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right, and you have to determine your success.
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Right? I I can tell you what success means to me.
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but that’s not your vision of success, and you should not get success. The definition of success from the industry, or from a book, or from general wisdom. Success may not be having 1 million dollars and a boat, and I literally had dinner with somebody yesterday who
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wants to buy a Lamborghini, and I’m like man that is nowhere on my radar like I I would drive it for one day, and then I’d kind of be done. Check the box. Now I got to sell this damn car, right? So
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you know. What does success mean to you? And it’s going to be you personally, not your mother, not your father, not your spouse, not your employees, not your clients, not your vendors. Don’t let vendors tell you what success is right. What does success mean to you? And then you need to identify your values.
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and then, and only then, can you build on priorities. So what I do is I would take all these actions, and I would put them into categories, high, medium, and low. The low stuff can be scheduled now. Scheduled means, even if it’s low priority. If I got a meeting on Thursday. I’m going to be there on Thursday, right? So you need to set your priorities
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and determine your criteria. And sadly, most of you won’t do this. I know you won’t do this, and then
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I’m going to find myself in a conversation with you. Probably beer will be involved.
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and you’ll be whining about how you have too many things to do, and everything is high priority. Well, everything can’t be high priority. So when I say high priority.
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the highest priority here. Seems to me I got a quote to get out. Why is that a high priority for me? Because for me.
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that’s how I get money in the door, and, to be honest, I’ve scheduled the gym on a date and a time. I’m not going to the gym unless it’s Monday, because I’m lazy, but
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there’s a i put that in the schedule. I’ve taken care of that now. I don’t have to use any brain cells on it.
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and it doesn’t bring money in the door. It helps me live just a little bit longer. So I get to make money for one more year. But today the quote needs to go out. So after it. I do that there’s always one highest priority, no matter what you do, no matter what’s going on in your business right now. There is one highest
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priority that must be done before everything else, and you have to figure out what are your rules for identifying your highest priority.
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and then it then life becomes very simple.
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What is the single most important thing you need to do for your business right now.
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and those of you who’ve been on more than 10 webinars with me, have heard me say that more than 10 times
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everyone in your company should always be working on the single most important thing they have to do.
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And there are some practical tips on how you get that done. But basically.
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then you don’t have to worry. You don’t have to use your brain cells to worry about all that other stuff.
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I am a huge believer in something called the reticular activating system, which basically is how your brain filters what you will and will not pay attention to.
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and if you fill it with clutter, if you’ve got everything on your desk lit up, and everything is highest priority. The more you focus on that, the more your brain is going to say. I can’t make priorities. I have to focus on everything. But I can’t. The very job of the reticular activating system is is to help you focus on what’s really important.
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But you have to help it. You have to prime your brain and let it know what’s important, and if you fill your newsfeed with junk
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that does not contribute to your business. Well, your brain thinks that that’s important, because you have chosen to put that stuff in front of your face
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so few practical tips.
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this is going to take time. It might take months for you to determine what success means to you, and I know that sounds like Bs, but it’s not
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What makes you successful? Is it money? I mean? Because let’s be honest. You can do almost anything today and make money.
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And
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you, you know. So if you don’t like your job and you’re not making money well, go get a different job. Everybody on this call could be earning 80, 9,000 $100,000 with a job where you take a paycheck home.
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I don’t know if they have paychecks anymore, but you know, direct deposit.
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So and then you need to identify your values and principles. And you know, I literally think you should put them on your website. If you go to small business org. And you go to the about page. What you’re gonna see is here’s what we do. We help it. Professionals be more successful in running their business right. Our mission
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is to make every it professional, as successful as possible. And then here’s our values. We believe in this, we believe in this, we believe in this right, and
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everybody in my company knows what those are. It’s not a secret. We don’t hide it, you know. Sometimes I take on coaching clients. And I say, what’s your mission? Vision and values? And I go. Oh, I think Jennifer’s got that in a drawer somewhere because we worked on it. We went through a weekend and we spent $5,000 and we wrote that down.
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Oh, okay, right? That’s not useful. You need to personally put your values into your business, and I know a lot of you. I know personally, just looking down the list of of attendees. I know many of you put a huge emphasis on being professional, being great at service and providing white glove service.
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30 30% of the people on this call. If I go to your website. It’s gonna say, we provide white glove service right? Because you actually value that. And it’s good that it’s on your website. Whatever
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value that you have, you should put that forward and let people hold you accountable to it.
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So luckily you all have some kind of system, whether it’s a Psa or just a ticketing system, or a 3rd party. Crm, you know, whatever it is you’ve got tools you might even use outlook. But
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you can put every single thing that needs to be done inside your company into a list.
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and it literally helps relax your brain to know somebody somewhere has that written down, and they’re prioritized
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high medium and low priority. Right? And I believe that you will be more successful in your business and your life. If every single day you write down 3
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things that you will do today. Not 10, not a thousand, not 103, and very often you won’t get 3 things done today, you will not get the 3 most important things you have to do.
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So you might do 3 business and 3 personal. But I have to be honest. You definitely will not finish that list.
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I just can tell you that I’ve been doing this for 30 years.
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Every day I write down 3 exactly 3 things that need to be done.
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and it also means that you need to eliminate distractions. Turn off all those beeps and tweets, and all of those text based communications that just do nothing but interrupt you all day long.
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A lot of times we get addicted to the dopamine. And we
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think we’re being more productive when we are actually being less productive. This is a fact.
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There’s a hundred different examples of this. And if you’re in it. This is worse for you than pretty much everyone else in society.
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Get rid of crap on your newsfeed on your social media that
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is not related to making you more successful. Whatever your vision of success is, even if you agree with it, it doesn’t matter
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when that stuff shows up. And you’ve said opt into this opt into this opt, into this you see more and more and more of it, and that forces your brain, your reticular activating system to pay more attention to it, because you have chosen to say that’s important in my life.
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Well.
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you know what if your business is cruising along, and you’re making all the money you need, and you’re as successful as you ever want to be. By all means go distract the hell out of yourself.
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But if you’re not done yet, if you still want to be more successful, if you still want to
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fight the challenges that you know are coming in the next few years, then you have to filter your life.
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And why is that? Well?
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Because nothing happens by itself, and no one else is going to do this for you. So you have to cut out the distractions. You have to clean your social media. You have to stop answering the phone and call people back. You have to declutter your office. You have to focus. You have to focus. You have to focus buying. Another program is not going to get this done buying another piece of software is not going to get this done, you have to decide that decluttering your life and your brain
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is worth the effort. And it’s only then that you’re going to be able to ignore the whirlwind and pay attention to the things that actually matter inside your company.
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You know, you’re gonna run your business. Most people on this call, you’re gonna run your business for at least 15 or 20 years.
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focused on growing focused on being successful, focused on feeding your family, focused on putting a little money aside for retirement focused on the long term goals. And then.
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after that 20 year, Marathon, you’re going to spend a year or 2 selling your business.
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and almost every so-called key performance indicator is not key and doesn’t indicate performance
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and does 0 to help you run your business efficiently, or better.
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all those Kpis exist for is so that when people are buying businesses they have something they can use to compare those businesses to each other so they can beat up the owners on price.
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and, you know, lure them with vanity statistics instead of the bottom line, which is.
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if you’re gonna run a business for 20 years.
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you should have a business you love with clients you love and employees you love and processes and procedures that overall. When the day is done.
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they increase the happiness in your life. If you’re in small business, your business exists to fulfill your goals and your desires
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period. That’s why your business exists.
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because, if all you need is $80,000 bottom line at the end of the year.
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Go get a job, and I promise you it’ll be a lot less stressful than running a business. Businesses are challenging and difficult, and it’s never going to be super easy, no matter. You know how easy I might make it sound, but they’re extremely fulfilling, personally and professionally. If you do them well.
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I will now take questions, and I will put up a list of all the links that I have mentioned in this presentation. But I’m happy to take questions.
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1st one. Not much time for a screenshot. Well, there you go. Solve that problem. Okay, Keith, looking at employment, we still have a gap in full-time employment which should help us in the industry. If we offer full-time jobs with benefits, your thoughts, I agree. If you can afford to give benefits, you should, and I will say this, if you have young technicians.
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I’ve always loved paying for health care simply because I get the good group account price and young people. Their health care is not very expensive on group health. So you know, it’s if you think about.
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you know, comparing a few $100 to their hourly wage. It’s pretty darn affordable to give people health care. In my opinion we always did it all the time that I had employees, and the bigger we got, the more benefits we were able to offer. So benefits do make you sticky. I will say I was
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for the 1st time ever I heard somebody who is an employer, I mean employee say that they like the benefits, except
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it makes them feel a little bit trapped in their job. So just be aware there are employees who will feel a little trapped by your golden handcuffs, you know.
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Ted, how do I feel about Eos? So I think Eos is great, especially for everybody on this call. Eos is designed for small businesses. They don’t say that they tell you it’s designed for every business. But it’s really it’s 1 formula for setting goals, holding people accountable meeting as a group. Many, many consultants who have become Eos consultants have then
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morphed into doing something pretty much the same, but not quite because, you know, they wanted to do a little bit this way or that way. But if you haven’t heard of the Eos system today’s a good day to look that up and I would endorse anyone who wants to adopt something like that. Most coaching programs kind of look like that. To be honest with you.
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How do you see Msps making actual service project recurring revenue from AI technologies. Well, so part of it is that you need to be tuned. Into
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what kinds of things are people already buying? You know this is one of these industries where
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2 things are happening, that one is very common and one is not so. The common thing is that people are buying this stuff without telling their it people so it’s showing up at your clients offices, but you don’t know about it.
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and in fact, the owner might not know about it. A lot of businesses have forbidden AI which has done approximately nothing to stop it from being adopted by their employees. The other thing that’s happening. That almost never happens is that
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this technology is emerging with an eye toward putting guardrails on it, having some discussion about ethics having some discussion about. You know how it should and shouldn’t be used, and how it can and cannot be used.
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and so forth. So that’s a beautiful thing, but it allows you to play the role of saying, Oh, let us help you design an AI policy. What is an acceptable use policy for AI, which tools are authorized, and which are not what you know. Right.
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make that part of your quarterly meeting. With luck. You can do it quarterly, but at least annual meeting, where you have a roadmap meeting with your clients and say, You know, can I do an audit?
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Talk to every one of your employees and see what tools they’re using. They may not know they may not put it in the category of AI, but they’re buying a bunch of tools. You know. You’ve seen the research on this that you know, most companies have, like 70 or 80 tools that the boss doesn’t know about right. But they’ve worked their way into the system.
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fast. Follow up co-pilot for Microsoft 365. So I have not used copilot to to my knowledge. That doesn’t mean I haven’t used it. But they’re building AI stuff into all of their tools. You know, some of it is like, Oh, here’s a better way of making this presentation, that presentation, a lot of suggestions, and so forth.
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So those sorts of things. I think it’s great that they’re doing it. When I use. AI. I try to be very intentional, like I will. I have subscribed to Gemini, which is the Google product so that I can log in what I love about it is I can do research
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that I couldn’t do before. Right I and in Gemini you can say.
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don’t ever give me information without citing the source.
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And so, because it used to be. My second question was always, Do you have sources for that? Right? So if I want to say like. For example, I did a handout for a presentation last month, I think, where I talked about all of the things that that technology consultants don’t control.
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So I went to Gemini, and I said, Can you give me a list of 100 things that business owners do not control? And it did, and it divided them into categories with sections, you know, like the economy, the government, their clients, their employees, so forth.
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And then I had to say, Can you give me citations for every one of these, and it did.
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Now, that’s the kind of thing I could have probably come up with a list of a hundred things you don’t control. It would have taken me hours.
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and you know. So I in the handout I created for that I literally I put the prompt and the source and the date of the prompt in the footer. As the source like this is how I got that. And you know. So
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that’s an example of something where I can hand people something and say, this is how I did it. This is how I got the information. This is how I used AI, and this is how I report that I’m using it right? So I’ve got that that transparency element.
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But in terms of copilot, Amy Babinchek I actually mentioned last year in my state of the nation dress. She’s teaching classes on how to use this in the various Microsoft tools, and everybody who is selling it should probably learn at least the basics of what it does and how your clients could potentially benefit from it.
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So that’s my opinion, other comments or questions you could please put them into the Q. And A. Module. I know we’re a little bit after the top of the hour, and I appreciate your patience with me.
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and of course, if you’re not connected me [email protected], don’t get my newsletter. Today’s a good day to sign up for that as well.
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All right, if there are no further questions. Oh, wait here. We got something end of windows. 10 this year. Thoughts opportunities. Well, my thoughts, to be honest, this has been my thought since 1999, I think 1998,
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when there’s a new operating system, you should adopt it inside your company as soon as it’s available on the next brand new machine you buy, and all of your clients should buy it the very next time that they buy any brand new machine. So basically for me, the new operating system always shows up when the new hardware shows up. So if I bought a brand new machine
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last year, and there’s a new operating system this year. Well, when that machine is 3 years old, I’ll replace it with the machine that’s got the new operating system. I only install new hardware and new software together, so I never have a mismatch between the the era of the hardware and the era of the operating system.
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So it should just be rolled in with everything else. And I would. Personally, I would charge people extra
321
01:03:51.180 –> 01:04:03.120
for having an outdated windows system, and I would say they’re not eligible to be on managed services because the whole point of managed services. One of the points is to maintain
322
01:04:03.370 –> 01:04:17.000
current levels of patch management which can’t exist on an operating system that isn’t going to take any more patches, right? And clients will say, Well, I don’t call Microsoft. I call Thomas. Well, okay.
323
01:04:17.290 –> 01:04:34.950
good for you. But it takes more of your effort to maintain an obsolete system than it does to take to maintain a new system. And you’re responsible for the compliance. And you’re responsible for the security that becomes harder with older operating systems. So
324
01:04:34.950 –> 01:04:47.990
and you know, we’ve been through areas where people have fallen in love with an operating system. Oh, you know, I’ll I’ll give up my, you know, windows 97 when they tear it from my cold, dead hands, like, okay, get over it, you know.
325
01:04:48.630 –> 01:05:08.609
So nowadays I mean to be honest when my machine rolled from windows 10 to windows. 11. I like. I didn’t really notice, except I had to get rid of all the annoying stuff that Microsoft does whenever they upgrade their systems. So I hope that helps. That’s my opinion.
326
01:05:09.640 –> 01:05:11.860
Other comments, questions.
327
01:05:12.150 –> 01:05:13.410
I’m here for you.
328
01:05:16.920 –> 01:05:21.569
Obviously the people who are still here don’t have another meeting at the top of the hour.
329
01:05:27.350 –> 01:05:41.229
Okay? All right. Well, if there are no more questions, I’ll go ahead and put an end to all of this. I will get up the recording as quick as I can. It will [email protected]. Thank you for the kudos. I appreciate that.
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01:05:42.020 –> 01:05:49.989
So it’ll be an Msp. Webinar. We’ll have the video and we will have a full transcript. And all of the links up there.
331
01:05:50.090 –> 01:06:06.099
Cool, all right. Thank you all for being here. I appreciate it, and I’m honored to be able to get some folks together once a year and go through this, and I hope that you found value in it. Thank you all, and I will see you next year.
###
🙂
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