MVP GrowthFest 2021
Are you ready for explosive growth?
Now is the time to jump in with both feet and take advantage of the opportunity you’ll find in the post-pandemic MSP landscape. Let’s kick off a new season of growth for your business at MVP Growthfest 2021 on April 20th from 12pm to 4:45pm ET.
This year’s special guest is the legendary Wayne Gretzky. Learn his incredible perseverance secrets and tips to overcome challenges that stand in your way, as well as gain the knowledge to go the distance in your pursuit of success!
You’ll also enjoy:
Expert help to improve your sales techniques and wow your clients.
Informative panels that will teach you how to find fresh opportunities.
Tips for impressing prospects that will open doors and close sales.
Plus, awesome giveaways including $15,000 in cash and prizes.
Don’t miss this unique opportunity to learn success secrets from MSP sales and business All-Stars and gain wisdom from a legend who knows the power of endurance and spirit!
Reserve Your Seat NOW!
Meet James McCarty of McCarty’s IT!
Tell us a little about your MSP…
McCarty’s IT was established in 1959 and is located in Parsons, Kansas. We serve customers in Southeast Kansas, Northeast Oklahoma, and Southwest Missouri.
How long have you been a member of The 20?
We joined The 20 in April of 2018.
Why did your MSP originally look to partner with The 20?
When starting out so much time was spent looking for vendors and as we know, there are tons of them. Most aren’t suited for startups. Sure they’ll sign you up, but you’re paying for a larger set of tools than you’ll be needing for a few years possibly. Then there’s the learning curve of figuring them all out. The 20’s model solved that. I paid for what I needed, I got a support team and a group of fellow members to help guide us through.
Tell us about the biggest change in your business since joining The 20.
When we started out it was just US. No support, no fallback plan, no one to back me up. Now, I have a team that’s got my back and can help through almost anything that comes up. It’s been huge for me and those I serve.
What do you like most about being a member of The 20?
I’ve seen disasters hit other dealers. From natural disasters to computer related disasters, the response has always been the same. As a group, we rally around those that need the most. It’s a great team!
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
Persistence. You’ll have bad days. You’ll have bad weeks. You’ve only lost once you quit! Just. Keep. Going.
What are your biggest business challenges?
Finding the balance between charging forward as fast and as out of control as possible, while still providing the great level of service your customers expect and deserve.
What are your areas of focus for 2021?
Sales / Marketing / Growth
What advice would you share with an MSP looking to scale their business?
An MSP looking to scale their business?
Plug into a network of peers who are likeminded, that understand your platform, and are going the same direction you want to go. Together we get there faster.
What book are you currently reading?
Business Made Simple by Donald Miller
Favorite blogs/podcasts
Interested in becoming a member like McCarty’s IT ? Click here for more information!
Meet Jim Bachaud of Stratocent Technologies!
Tell us a little about your MSP…
Stratocent Technologies was founded in December 2011 and we are located in Seattle, Washington. This is an interesting market to operate in. We are located right next to the Microsoft Campus, where every potential client has a brother who works at Microsoft so everyone always feels like they already know how to do things, or they should, so they can’t imagine needing an outside service.
How long have you been a member of The 20?
We joined the 20 in May 2017, so almost 4 years.
Why did your MSP originally look to partner with The 20?
One of my concerns in marketing at the time was how to deal with a large client – how could I manage or market to a large client and SCALE – and I had no idea how to do that. The 20 presented an opportunity to provide any size client with the scalable solutions I needed to forget any concerns about being able to fulfill any need a client presented.
Tell us about the biggest change in your business since joining The 20.
Stratocent now uses an entirely new stack of software and security products and services, for better margins, and better products. The 20 presents an economy of scale that no MSP can achieve on their own.
What do you like most about being a member of The 20?
The FAMILY of members. At the beginning, this was the biggest surprise for everyone – the support, expertise, and friendships that are available in this community and the wealth of information and knowledge. Watching someone get hit with a cyber attack and watching other members drop everything to give him a hand. THIS SH*T IS AWESOME.
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
Perseverance and a sense of humor. Nothing about this is an overnight miracle, and there will always be something that will leave a temporary bad taste in your mouth. It’s important to weather the storms and keep at it. This is farming, not hunting.
What are your biggest business challenges?
- Getting myself out in front of new potential clients during a pandemic.
- Expanding the business requires closing new business.
- Getting myself extricated from the day to day support and focus on marketing and onboarding.
This all requires discipline.
What are your areas of focus for 2021?
2020 was our biggest year of revenue at $230,000. I am out to double that this year.
What advice would you share with an MSP looking to scale their business?
You cannot do this on your own.
What book are you currently reading?
Never Split the Difference – Chris Voss
Interested in becoming a member like Stratocent Technologies? Click here for more information!
Powershell is a powerful scripting language Microsoft has employed (and contributed to) on multiple platforms. While it can be used to create different types of programs, it’s most useful for managing and automating Microsoft environments. Powershell is basically a modern Perl for Windows, but without the history.
Once support for Windows 7 (and Server 2008 R2) ended, Powershell became a lot more viable. There is a large difference between the older Powershell versions and the newer ones. Powershell 2 and previous were limited, but you couldn’t depend on every Windows 7 machine to have a newer version. Later versions of Powershell got even better and more useful for all manner of automation and management tasks.
Now that every supported machine in an environment is going to be at least new enough to not have old Powershell bugs or weird behaviors, it is the ideal way to automate tasks for Windows and other Microsoft environments. Let’s see what Powershell can do and why you should learn it to do more for your MSP or IT environment.
Basic Automation
Powershell allows you to mix and match with command line utilities as necessary. You can distribute scripts based on older automation techniques but leverage the advantages of Powershell. With Windows 7 out of the way, Powershell is the first thing I reach for when automating remote Windows box.
The language is flexible enough you can do basic data munging, work with CSVs, and parse logs among many other tasks. Powershell is the spiritual successor to Perl with a more modern basis planted in a Microsoft context (for better and for worse).
Most GUI settings on Windows are adjustable from Powershell, you just have to know how (and what to change). You can also use it to check for software or apply updates. It can help automate cleanup from infections. It’s a full featured programming language which is primarily centered around scripting. Our Kaseya instance is littered with countless Powershell scripts which save our technicians and partners thousands of hours of wasted time. Why remote into a machine when you can just run a script across all 50 which need an operation done?
Powershell with Microsoft 365 and Office 365
Not only is Office 365 something which you can administer using Powershell, it’s actually preferred for certain tasks. There are certain tasks which are just a bit easier with Powershell, but there are other tasks which explicitly require Powershell. Ultimately, the more you can learn to do with Powershell, the easier it is to administer your Microsoft 365 instance(s).
Not only can you work with managing Office 365, but you can also send emails, pull reports, etc. with Powershell. If you don’t know how to get started with a specific task, you can always find pre-existing scripts which do what you want and use them as a base to build on. Microsoft 365 and Office 365 have countless options and tools, you just need to know what and where they are.
Powershell just gets more powerful with Office 365 and Microsoft 365 when you consider how much it can tie into. It’s not just that you can work with one tool, you have a predictable interface for multiple products. The object used by one module is often supported in other interfaces allowing reusable pieces.
On-Premise Exchange and Active Directory
Powershell can automate virtually everything with the cloud offerings (we’ll get into Azure below), but more often than not, it’s going to be more convenient (or necessary) to use with on-premise Exchange or Active Directory. Powershell has saved me many times with on-premise Exchange. I’ve dealt with situations where the GUI is completely unusable, but the Powershell interface still works as expected. The Exchange Management Shell is essential for really administering Exchange Server.
Fewer people tend to manage AD with Powershell, but it’s a life-saver when something goes wrong. I’ve had data corruption crash the Active Directory and Users, but Powershell allowed me to resolve it. Being able to pull the data and parse it with a real language made me able to find proof of a breach and to resolve it. Command line wouldn’t have been enough, and doing it by hand would have made it easy to miss the patterns a machine wouldn’t. You can even make scripts to manage complex user settings among many other things.
The power of this form of management is that once you solve a problem, you have a ready fix if you can determine the applicable conditions. Sometimes it’s safe to fully automate, but other times you want someone to look at it first. Just because a person needs to determine what to do doesn’t mean that you can’t script the process. The more common problems you can address, the less time you need to spend babysitting technology and the more you can focus on your business or more important tasks.
Microsoft Azure
Azure is Microsoft’s answer to the cloud. Azure is composed of many services and components which all grow into their greater cloud offering. You can manage them from the console, but some operations can get repetitive. If you’re making a systematic change, why not use programmatic methods to do it?
If you’re publishing a new app, you can also update the firewall with the right bootstrapping. There are all sorts of things Powershell can do with Azure. You can script VM creation and maintenance or firewall rules as necessary among many other tasks.
Azure extends past basic VMs, there are also services such as Azure AD, and many different emulation, virtualization, and abstraction layers. Interfacing into Azure means you can manage AD, virtualization solutions, as well as infrastructure maintenance. The web interface may be good enough, but what happens when you have a predictable process for individual clients?
Automating basic setups is a service that many providers such as Nerdio provide and take to a different level. Azure favors those who know what they’re doing. You can burn money easily if you don’t get how Azure operates. If you play the game, you can come out ahead though. Some basic automation makes the difference between being a user and being an expert.
Windows Update
Windows Update can be a pain if something goes wrong (and with enough agents, it’s not if, but when). While the fix can be easy, it can be hard to automate without proper scripting. You’re typically repeating the same basic commands, maybe with some system specific information.
You can leverage Powershell to handle Windows Updates. While you may not use this for every patch cycle, it can be useful for specific zero-day exploits and similar patches. This framework gives you complete control of the patch process and a non-invasive way to deliver it.
We’ve deployed zero-day fixes and patches en masse by leveraging this methodology. It can rectify the damage done by bad patches, or you can use it to automate removal of a known trouble patches which end users keep reapplying. If you combine this with WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), you can build scripts which detect known trouble conditions and resolve them.
NTFS
Most Windows systems use NTFS for storage. Permissions in local NTFS systems can impact your shares and your data (loose lips sink ships). Powershell enables you to manage permissions without having to deal with a mix of standard CMD and GUI tools. You get an easy way to manage permissions that are rule based rather than hierarchical.
Once you get used to automating file system problems, you end up moving away from the GUI. While the GUI is faster for simple problems, it tends to get in the way more than not with more advanced solutions. No one is calling in a tier 3 equivalent because someone added John from accounting to the wrong share, but they are when John has incidentally been granted privileges he shouldn’t have.
Powershell also shines when you have a lot of work to do on disparate files and folders where there is a specific condition you’re targeting. If everything at and below a level will have the same change, the GUI is probably faster, but once you deviate from the norm, the GUI breaks down fast. I’ve used Powershell to fix the fallout from a technician applying the wrong permissions to a set of folders in a way which made sense systematically, but didn’t fit the hierarchy.
OS Administration
Certain Microsoft products like Windows Server Core can only be managed remotely via command line. While licensing costs and methodologies change, Windows Server Core tends to be cheaper to license, but also more stable due to the missing graphical components. Whether or not it works out cheaper now doesn’t matter, sometimes the reduced footprint (security and admistrative) or the grandfathered in infrastructure mean you need to deal with it.
WMI is a powerful tool in its own right, but combining it with Powershell makes it even more useful. WMI can tap into system information, but also manage patches and software installations. I use it in more advanced scripts to manage conditions for automation or for knowing what version of Windows we’re dealing with, or what specific conditions exist on the system. You can pull information about software, hardware, etc. and collate the information to find patterns for more efficient automation. WMI touches of affects almost everything to some degree if you dig deep enough.
Virtually everything you do with the Windows GUI can be accomplished with Powershell, you just need to know how. This is more valuable when you factor in the fact that for many operations, you don’t need to impact the user. Some operations are noticeable, but many are silent (or close enough).
I’ve fixed countless machines remotely using Powershell. It’s even more efficient with a troublesome user who you can’t ever reach. As you encounter common tasks, you can create more and more automation items or even just a collection of scripts to build from. It’s one thing to know where to go in the GUI, it’s another to remotely collect data and run a fix you need without interacting with the end user’s side at all.
Conclusion
Powershell is versatile and near ubiquitous. It allows you to administer and maintain a system in ways that plain command line just can’t. Powershell taps into virtually every system and functionality present on a modern Windows system. You can technically make full programs with it, but you can also make sure that systems or processes you manage are healthy and apply fixes.
This article just scratches the surface of what Powershell can do for an administrator. Modules and methods exist for a staggering number of tasks and interfaces. Powershell is readily available on modern Windows machines without any extra installation, and more than powerful enough for most automation purposes. Gone are the days of worrying if a system has a new enough version of Powershell to be useful. You also don’t need to worry about installing another programming or scripting language just to automate basic tasks without using CMD.
Powershell lets you manage systems without having to resort to jumping onto machines continuously for trivial issues. A little knowledge goes a long way in making your business and your job more efficient and more scalable. It’s more than CMD ever was, and it’s available without installing anything on modern systems. If you’re responsible for maintaining an MSP or even just IT for a few machines, Powershell pays big dividends quickly. Try it out and see what it can do for you, your career, and your business.
Meet Brandon Stewart, Member Success Manager
Today we turn the spotlight on Brandon Stewart. Brandon quickly became a tremendous asset to the entire team at The 20. Read below to find out more about Brandon.
What do you do here at The 20?
As a Member Success Manager, I am responsible for on-boarding our new partners into The 20 and setting them up for success. This includes ensuring that they are properly set up and trained in our systems and methodologies.
Describe The 20 in three words…
Inspirational. Growth. Excellence.
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Growing up, I always enjoyed tinkering with things which made me think I wanted to be an engineer. Then I got my first PC, and I knew that I wanted to work with computers.
What’s the most challenging thing about your job?
The most challenging part of my job is gaining the trust of new partners that are navigating a major change in their business operations.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
My greatest achievement is the continual self-growth I have achieved through hard work and determination.
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
The most important quality for success is determination. No matter what challenge you face, the only thing that can lead to failure is YOU quitting.
What do you like most about The 20?
What I like most about The 20 is the sense of camaraderie between the employees, even through enduring a remote workforce, we are all on the same team.
What do you like to do in your spare time? / What are your hobbies?
Pre-COVID, you would probably find me at a comedy club or traveling across the state and country. Now, I enjoy cooking delicious meals for my wife and relaxing with our animals.
Where are you going on your next vacation?
Colorado. My wife and I were supposed to go for our first anniversary but COVID hit, now we are going in late August for a friend’s wedding.
What’s your top life hack?
You just gotta keep livin’ man, L-I-V-I-N.
Interested in working with Brandon at The 20? We’re hiring! Check out our Careers page for more info.
A recent social engineering campaign with links to North Korea is showing just how complex a social engineering attack can get. As solutions come into being to prevent social engineering, social engineering attacks will get smarter and more complicated at the cost of limiting their scope. This increased minimum will reduce the number of coordinated attacks unless there’s something to gain from it. Most smaller targets will see little change overall, but bigger targets will get more sophisticated attacks. The era of deepfakes and easily spoofed communications has shown the world just how much trust we put in another person’s word.
Social engineering is nothing new by any stretch, but the standard security arms race has reached a crescendo for tension. Smash and grab doesn’t work without a heavy investment in exploits and luck. It’s harder to find a Windows zero-day that works for what you need than to call in as “John from accounting” to get a password. Watch how much (or little) someone is checked when they walk through a controlled entrance with a bright safety vest on. It doesn’t matter how secure your lock is if someone gives away the key first.
Let’s go over current events to see exactly what happened with multiple security researchers, then we’ll cover just how this sort of attack works. We’ll look into the implications of this sort of attack on security across the board. Finally, we’ll see how it can be prevented or at least reduced.
Targeting Security Researchers
Google found that a North Korean sponsored group has been targeting security researchers. The group used multiple social media accounts between Twitter and LinkedIn among others to establish “security researcher” personas. They linked to their blog and posted video “evidence” of exploits they had used. At least one of the videos was fake (the others aren’t confirmed one way or another), but they were enough of a hook to get their target(s) interested.
After an initial outreach, they would invite their mark to collaborate on security research for their blog. They provided a compromised Visual Studio project to create a compromise on the researcher’s system. Their blog also had certain exploits which could compromise visitors.
The threat actors employed a large number of communication channels to worm their way in with their targets. They also created a large network of linked accounts faking a larger social media presence and helping provide a “third party” to dispel scrutiny. This methodology is highly effective and parallels how some (sleazier) social media presences succeed or perform damage control. By coordinating several “different” research groups to confirm results, they could effectively control the narrative enough to hook a more curious mark.
How This Attack Works
Despite the higher risk and large ante, targeting security researchers is a great move for a larger hacking group for several reasons. First, it reduces the complexity of expectation from the researcher. If you’re working with someone to exploit Windows, you’re not going to be surprised when something in the code is extremely suspect. Should you not follow the golden rules of security testing and keep your test and research environment completely separated from your personal environment, you run the risk of letting an exploit in one impact the other.
Secondly, by using a novel social engineering technique to target researchers, they created personas which were believable. The threat actors provided a compelling reason they were reaching out and a believable benefit to the targeted researchers. Adding more personas to support the originals served to control the narrative making their more extraordinary claims more palatable. It’s one thing to claim to have some novel exploit, it’s another entirely when “peers” back it up.
These factors are further compounded by the fact that this attack used so many different avenues to fake authenticity. This attack had a large initial investment to even have a potential chance to succeed. It’s hard to verify a stranger. You aren’t dealing with someone claiming to be “John” down in accounting needing a trivial password, you’re dealing with a whole faked social web.
Add to this that it created an environment that seemed both plausible and believable to reel their targets in. Some of my smaller personal projects get virtually no traffic compared to a low-effort, mediocre security blog and I get continuous interest in collaboration. It’s no real jump in plausibility that a security researcher or group would be interested in collaboration. We aren’t dealing with a first day WordPress blog; it’s an established presence which has worked to generate clout in the industry.
Security Implications
This attack will (or at least ideally should) make technical professionals revisit how much they trust uninitiated communications. Is someone reaching out to you as part of a multi-step attack or are they a genuine user? With social media, it’s easy to fake a presence on the internet that looks legitimate. Add in a novel exploit or two, and you can earn trust and succeed in your goals.
I also expect we’ll see more meta-hacks, that is, hacking to obtain information about hacking. There really wasn’t a losing case for this type of exploit outside of the cost. If our threat actors worked with a researcher but were unsuccessful in compromising them, they got intelligence on what their marks were actively researching. Ideally though, they were able to gain intelligence on everything or at least a large subsection of what their targets had and were using.
Most attacks have some sort of monetary goal, but these threat actors are more interested in gaining access to tools to perform more attacks (for monetary gain or similar). MSP’s and MSSP’s will probably see more attacks like this to gain access to business intelligence, clients, or their internal workings. While some groups will still just want to phish or smash and grab, bigger players will be looking for more.
Breaches at this level are about an overall strategy working towards a larger goal. The standard risk to reward analysis for security becomes a bit too one-dimensional of a metric for safety. What do you have that someone could want and how much are they willing to spend to make it all succeed? You have to pay more attention to the meta-game behind exploits. You may be a small fry overall, but what happens when you serve a vendor that works with a company that is partners with another business that a nation state level group is targeting?
Prevention
I’m not surprised at all that this happened. While it’s easy to say what you would have done better after the fact, it’s hard to know how to confront the unknown. Simply put, the researchers could have done more to prevent this from being as big of an issue, but it would have required adding an extra layer of tin foil to their hat.
Now that we know this is a valid tactic, it’s a bit less crazy to be a little more paranoid. You have to think of more than just how much you’re worth as a target, but how much is everything you possess or have access to worth? If you run an MSP, what do your clients do and what kind of trade secrets or similar do they potentially have? What access do they have to other clients or customers? The actual client may be near useless when exploited, but the access they have may not.
How do you handle unsolicited communications personally and for your job? Should you trust every potential vendor who wants you to start a Zoom meeting or have you run a demo? A target may be more valuable for their access rather than their actual use so what happens when a threat actor targets an employee personally and they open that compromised email at work? The less access any given element has which isn’t essential, the more resistance there is. A threat actor will prefer the path of least resistance, so what are you doing to make sure you aren’t it?
What Does AI Mean for the Future of Marketing?
The next big leap for artificial intelligence has “been around the corner” for decades. It’s not that the technology hasn’t been advancing, it’s just that the more we learn the less we know about what to do to really raise the bar. We’ve been waiting for the AI equivalent of the transistor, but nothing seems to really nail it to bring us into the Star Trek utopia singularity we’ve been promised (or at least make our jobs that much easier).
While it’s too early to really determine whether using a light based system over a standard electrical one will be that change, it will do what most AI advances do and open new doors which push everything forward. From the preliminary results we’re talking about an order of magnitude or more of improvement, but will this scale with current AI is the question? I can’t claim to know enough to give an answer, but what I do know is that the prospect of more accessible AI opens the door to many life changing prospects from career and on.
AI being easily applicable in marketing would be game changing for the field. The old way of marketing has had a rougher year than most of us, pushing digital marketing to the front. Despite the chaos around the world, marketing is seeing an almost Renaissance level of change and revitalization. The core of classic marketing is being rebirthed into the current era. It’s not much of a silver lining, but I’d rather see the drop in the glass than say it’s dry.
How Will AI Change Marketing?
Marketing has largely moved from physical networking to digital marketing. Your business card is something nice to have, but not a necessity anymore either in many circles. Going to a conference can help you network and forge deals, but it’s not the penultimate solution it was previously sold as. (That isn’t to say the traditional methods are dead, they have become an element rather than a full solution). It’s cheap and easy to reach out to basically any market anywhere in the world with the globalization of the internet and the collapse in advertising costs.
You aren’t constrained to a single market or markets you can physically reach, you’re constrained to your solution solving a specific problem. A plumber in Denver isn’t going to fix anything in Florida, but that doesn’t mean that digital marketing isn’t essential. Even local businesses are found mostly through search results and digital ads.
The problem your solution answers is constrained by region, but your outreach isn’t. This is both a blessing and a curse. The extra reach is a byproduct of your effort, not really a cost when done right, but that just means there are that many extra results in each search. It’s cheaper than ever to market which means everyone is doing it, you have to learn to do it better.
The big problem is that we have so much more data than we have ways to make sense of it all. People have gotten used to more and more personal outreaches (while expecting fewer in person and phone outreaches), and expect things to be more and more tailored to them while wanting to volunteer less and less. You have to read between the lines, but you need to know which lines matter too. Knowing where to go next and how much to use for any part of a campaign just gets increasingly complicated with the plethora of variables to track. There are also things which are repetitive but painfully manual due to technical limits. These are the problems AI in marketing will (eventually) solve.
We won’t start at AI, but we’ll work there as the technology becomes financially feasible. Amazon, Microsoft, and others have each released machine learning and AI frameworks, but they can be cost prohibitive. Frameworks like Torch exist, but they require you to understand more than just the recipes. The big barriers to entry are the cost in terms of both skills and platforms in order to really get moving. You need the right people who can create, condense, coalesce, and coordinate every piece of relevant data into something which can be further processed into something meaningful. The Amazon of today for that level of AI and machine learning (ML) will be the one-person marketing hustler of tomorrow once we find the right catalyst.
Automating Data Science
Virtually no one in marketing or otherwise has a problem getting data, they have a problem in getting the right data. You can either build data as necessary which is time consuming and slow, or try to get a massive dump of data and cut it down. These processes can be combined in different ratios and different stages as the secret sauce of your marketing program, but it’s still the same two ideas at play.
When should you acquire bulk data and scale down, and when should you slowly build a list? Just how should you cut out unnecessary bits and just how should you add individual entries? There isn’t a universally correct answer, you have to have some kind of metric for each effect, a way to measure changes from your action(s), and the knowledge and wisdom to make it work.
Ideally, AI will eventually take this sort of task over. You guide it based on what your campaign aims to do, and you offload the pain to a machine which won’t make mistakes (unless misprogrammed to do so). The seeds of change already exist in various analytic systems and similar which help collate and break down data. When it gets economic to do so, we’ll see a huge jump in platforms working in machine learning and beyond in some form. This process will either target increasing efficiency, decreasing inefficiency, or a balance.
Campaign Personalization
Once we have a bunch of data, we need something to do with it. If a specific campaign hits on 75% of the metrics for a subset of an audience, but the average take from the same campaign is 50%, how do we only target the more profitable side with that piece? How do we know what kind of campaign to build and balance? Your data is working to help you identify how to bring in clients, how to keep them happy, and how to get them to your sales team to close the deal. It also helps you figure out how to retain who you’ve already pulled in (if you use it right).
All of these sorts of things exist, but they’re buried in the data and metrics. It’s beyond what the average person can make sense of all the time. You need to have a way to reduce the data to something a person can cognitively process, then find a way to make use of that data. If you find that you get a nice Pareto distribution of a specific group from your data, you can personalize campaigns for them.
That can be cost prohibitive now because by the time you run the numbers, the campaign is usually already dusty with more traditional methods and more diverse campaigns. AI will make crunching the numbers for that something far easier. What are the unifying factors between various groups and what divides them? You could make 10 variations of each section and a program could reassemble them easily, but then the content looks fake without multiple people to proof and test. AI will provide a way to accommodate these sorts of changes without having to reinvent the wheel at each step.
You have to keep track of which people are in which group, and which campaign hits which group or groups. Identities change and it’s easy to miss subtle changes in a person the traditional way. A machine doesn’t make mistakes, but you can and will. Most of these ideas exist in some consumable form, but they just aren’t as mature as they could be. As automation accelerates, we’ll see more and more personalization with a cut to budgets due to the extra efficiency.
Resource Utilization
Part of increasing efficiency and reducing inefficiency is getting the most out of your resource utilization. If you know what is important (and most important) for a campaign, it can be easy to refocus your resource utilization in a way that makes sense. You don’t put your best graphic designer on a low importance task if you can help it.
If you know what matters, you know what you can target. This doesn’t need to be some Orwellian level robot overlord, but you want to be able to more efficiently use your resources. Where are things falling through the cracks and what is missing its mark, without being creepy?
HR, managers, and various leads currently try to balance this role, but there is so much more to it which takes way more people than it feels it should to get an underwhelming level of efficiency (compared to what is possible). You need someone making sure things function correctly, but you also need management to translate tasks between one group to another, and you also need oversight that the process hits the requisite checkboxes.
The right analytics, metrics, data, and algorithm could make this process more efficient. We probably don’t want to take the humanity out of the process anytime soon (if ever), but a lot of wasted labor could be reduced so that people can accomplish more important tasks rather than communicating the same things differently a dozen times a day.
Technical Limitations
Whether or not light based TPUs will bring us to the singularity remains to be seen, but each development is a step towards a more automated future. As technology progresses and our interactions with it do too, we’ll continue to see more and more growth in the applications of advanced data science with marketing and everything. AI is arguably just advanced data science with the right math to make things work. It sounds simple, but it’s like saying marketing is just sending the right communication. The devil is in the details for each part of the process.
Technical limitations, including scale and cost are what really hold us back from further use of AI in marketing and beyond. As the technology matures more and more, we’ll see data science and ML take off. It’s begun in some places, but it’s a bit like the Dot Com era, a Wild West of technology complete with the digital snake oil salesmen. Some supposed AI is just a weak ML principle with lot of “if” statements to make it work. It’s a black box by necessity and by design.
As the veil is lifted and it becomes easier to more scientifically approach the application of ML and AI in marketing, we will see a shift at even the lowest level to more integrated data science. Moving the apex moves the base of what is acceptable. The bar will get higher and higher until we hit the true singularity for AI. Until then, we’ll see advanced data science grow and grow in application in modern marketing from big to small. As more and more data can be produced and processed, we’ll see more and more automation of actions on this data. The singularity is coming, but that doesn’t mean you can’t grow from it first.
Meet Dennis Ward of Code Red Networks!
Tell us a little about your MSP…
Code Red Networks is located in Plymouth, MI and was started in March of 2018.
How long have you been a member of The 20?
We have been a member since we opened Code Red Networks in 2018.
Why did your MSP originally look to partner with The 20?
I was tired of fixing tools and wanted to scale without building my own help desk.
Tell us about the biggest change in your business since joining The 20.
We are growing and have doubled every year.
What do you like most about being a member of The 20?
The 20 is willing to help you out in a drop of a hat. We are a one man shop and have to do everything. With that being said, when I run into a problem that I can’t fix, I lean on The 20 community to help.
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
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Scale
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Being afraid of bringing any type of client, no matter their size or complexity.
What are your biggest business challenges?
-Learning how to think outside of the box
-Looking at the bigger picture.
-Learning how to talk to bigger prospects.
What are your areas of focus for 2021?
-Moving all clients to the help desk
-Sale process
-Marketing funnel
– Scale
What advice would you share with an MSP looking to scale their business?
- When you are joining The 20, go all in.
- Open your mind to the bigger picture that Tim is laying out for us.
What book are you currently reading?
Scaling up
Favorite blogs / podcasts
Daren Hardy
Interested in becoming a member like Code Red Networks? Click here for more information!
Meet Eric Hoffman, Sr. Tier 1 Support Desk Technician
Today we turn the spotlight on Eric Hoffman. Eric quickly became a tremendous asset to the entire team at The 20. Read below to find out more about Eric.
What do you do here at The 20?
Senior T1 overnight
Describe The 20 in three words…
synergistic, personable, family
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to play Major League Baseball.
What’s the most challenging thing about your job?
In a largely solo-shift role, I must be able to handle a lot of variables thrown my way.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Becoming a United States Marine
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
The willpower to put in the work
What do you like most about The 20?
I know that my voice is heard.
What do you like to do in your spare time? / What are your hobbies?
I like to paint and newly into 3d printing.
Where are you going on your next vacation?
The couch, the pandemic pretty much shelved travel for us.
What’s your top life hack?
Wake up 15 minutes early and get started with your day as if you have not. You’re now ahead of schedule and can use that 15 minutes as a time out if needed.
Interested in working with Eric at The 20? We’re hiring! Check out our Careers page for more info.
What is the Channel?
“The Channel” is a special term with its own special meaning to MSPs and other B2B technical solution providers. The channel is also a business term for a more symbiotic pipeline of vendors working towards a shared ecosystem. In short, the channel is just the path to market for B2B services and providers.
This term isn’t quite steeped in the near mystic qualities attributed to it from every technical trade show who swears their fealty to the channel, but it is still important. The channel is a fast-moving river of opportunity for B2B services and products in any industry. The hard part is finding it. When you ride within the channel, you are propelled forward, from knowledge to pricing.
The channel in tech is just a bunch of people who talk to each other, work with each other, and build greater ecosystems along the lines of business deals and alliances. If you don’t drink the Kool-aid, this doesn’t sound like much at first glance. Joining the IT channel means getting the momentum from the rest of the movement to push forward faster than you could by yourself. The channel can be the tool to unlock your potential, but only when tapped correctly.
How the Channel Works
A channel works because people believe in it. Some of the tech sector believes it created The Channel itself, but in reality they just created a more efficient channel than most other industries, and earlier. This faith in its success and faith in its value has kept it relevant as natural market forces keep it stable or risk turning it over to another stack. It isn’t the exception, it’s an ideal realization of the concept.
Technology is too complicated to make choices on every single solution every single time. Tech has had schisms since the first moments of commercial viability. When you have limited choices which are approved by other vendors, you have a bare-minimum guarantee that you’ll get a certain experience. If you buy A, B, and C, you know that they’ll work with D.
This limitation of choice, combination of vendor efforts, and similar leads to a system where a tech company can make an easy choice, or buy into the fringe. You have a named brand which is like a recipe for building a certain stack, but you can make substitutions if you know how.
The channel also works similar to cable TV. By certain vendors partnering with (or acquiring) other solutions, you get a stack with certain choices depending on the primary vendor. You get the Kaseya bundle, the ConnectWise bundle, or similar. You can still choose to piecemeal things together, but each vendor offers a basic set of integrated solutions to get you from zero to a full business operation.
This packaging provides power to the channel. You don’t need to get the bundle to succeed, but it’s cheaper if you don’t know how to shop or don’t have the time or personnel to continually make things work. The MSP channel offers shortcuts, for a price.
What it Means
The channel and The Channel are two different entities entirely. The Channel is a set of conferences and trade shows which feed into one another. If you’re an MSP in technology, you’re probably already acquainted with parts of The Channel. The 20’s own VISION conference is a part of The Channel, Robin Robins is a part too, ChannelPro contributes as well, etc. This is just a piece of the pie.
The greater channel in technology is the set of pathways which work toward technical integration. It’s a filter for the selection limiting specific vendors who will try to play nice with others. This means you don’t need to dig as deep to find who works with whom, you can just jump around on the list.
A waterway can have multiple channels, but not every channel is equal. Some channels are direct, others are slow or bottlenecked. The right channel gets you from where you are to where you want to be with minimal issues. The wrong channel is a riptide.
The channel in general business is just a combined industry effort to partially standardize certain elements. It’s just one of the many roads leading to Rome. The difference is that one is well-traveled and well-regulated if you don’t know exactly where you’re going, but others are less predictable. Convenience comes at a cost in most industries, but the TCO can work out cheaper. The channel means convenience, but it also means a cost for that convenience.
Why it Exists
Each channel is an example of financial symbiosis. A complete solution is worth more than a bunch of better partial solutions when it’s trivial to put the pieces together. It’s easier to squeeze a little money out of from a giant when they provide an audience bigger than a vendor could bring in themselves.
The Channel exists because people want convenience and are willing to jump in to find it. More traditional channels exist because it’s easier to sell a solution which has a context. Most vendors can’t be one stop shops, but that doesn’t mean a one stop shop for most people can’t exist. It just requires cooperation from multiple vendors and a way to package it all up.
Almost every industry is going to have some kind of B2B channel flowing through it, if not multiple tributaries each pushing their own stacks. Some options will span each offering like a town in a spot where rivers meet, while others will buy into their one channel. It all just depends on the economics of competition and cooperation.
Channels are like the business equivalents of a city. Cities form because they make sense in a location to settle due to the resources and the routes in and out. Each channel is just a business abstraction of a city. They exist because there is greater strength in cooperation than in continuous wildcatting.
The Channel as a Business Concept
The channel is a powerful business concept. While The Channel tech clings to is the extreme of the concept, it is just an implementation of a standard channel in its ideal scenario. It is just a business concept which exists when businesses work together for the greater movement of their industry.
A channel is a symbiosis brought about by the movement of the industry rather than the ideal movement of each individual constituent. A rising tide raises all boats so to speak. You trade the individualistic angle for the push you add to the combined whole.
Just because your peers are involved doesn’t mean you need to be involved with a specific channel. If you do things differently, then find the right way forward. A channel is a path forward for businesses which fit the agreed upon ideal use case, you just need to know what each channel brings to you.
The channel is the B2B equivalent of a cable package. Everyone you know may want one, but which one works for what you need? If not, what pieces can you get from where and how do they work with one another?
The IT channel is an organic ecosystem of interdependent services tied into one another. The quicker you drink the Koolaid, the faster you come out ahead. Pieces can function on their own, but they tend to work best in conjunction with others in the channel unless you’re willing to add value. You can split your services out, but you need to offer something extra.
It is a construct which benefits its constituents and its audience. You can either leverage it, or let it push you out of the picture. Understand what it brings and how you can use it to succeed.
