The MSP Junk Drawer: What’s in Yours?

Power Up by Empath Cyber

In today's rundown:

• 🤖 The MSP Junk Drawer: What’s in Yours?

• ☣︎ Hip to Hip Training: The Poison to Growth

• 💻 The Latest HOTNESS from RejectionCon! (It’s on fire!)

Read time: 4 minutes 👇

The MSP Junk Drawer: What’s in Yours?

We all have that junk drawer. You can barely open it because it’s stuffed with trinkets, mail, and useless things from a bygone era that you just can’t chuck out. So what about your MSP? Got a junk drawer from your MSP?

The proverbial MSP junk drawer is usually filled with things like:

• Archaic processes and documentation that are never opened, used or viewed

• Old school nearly-useless vendors still hovering around on nothing but auto-pay and a prayer

• Bloated big-boy vendors offering a critical service that you’d LOVE to replace but just can’t because the cost to move is more expensive and dramatic than rewards of switching to someone more innovative.

Oof. Not great. But what’s an MSP to do? I think sitting down with your team and having an honest conversation. Things like:

• Do we even utilize this vendor any longer? When is the last time we’ve even hit their partner portal?

• We promised that we care about process and even began a mission to dive deep into documentation but it eventually all fell off the vine and literally no one owns it or maintains it.

• Our MSP training curriculum is meh. Super meh. We aren’t onboarding correctly and we’re squandering talent left and right.

Life ain’t easy as an MSP. Nope. Not at all. But here’s the good news: if you’ve hit this problem, guess what? You’re the same as every other MSP on planet earth (and Mars.) You’ve hit great revenue, you’re growing fast, and there’s just more fires burning than time to put them all out.

So what’s the solution? I’m not gonna preach it to you. How dare I? I’m not an MSP. But I want you to know this: you’re in common company. And the way out is hard work.

But also know this: you’re not being punished. You’re actually reaping the rewards of hard earned work. You’ve had the success to have lots of vendors (some of which have outgrown their use.) You’ve grown to a stage where the need to consistently onboard is critical.

Good for you! But just know this. If you can solve this challenge, it’s the key to hitting $5M in revenue. Or $10M. Or more.

So I’m curious to know. What are you doing to get there? Hit a reply and let me know!

Hip to Hip Training: The Poison To Growth

Today I had an enlightening conversation with someone who ran ALL of corporate training for Panera Bread. They are over $6B in revenue and over 100,000 employees.

Insane.

What’s even more insane? Before he took over, 100% of all training for their store employees was by osmosis. “Come in and learn and we’ll show you the ropes.”

Zero consistency. Not a bit of thought going into the most critical things that make the company tick. And what’s worse, turnover means that the average tenure of a Panera employee is just 6 months.

Woah. Imagine that struggle. Before he came onboard to revoutionize their training, they called their ad-hoc training “hip to hip”. Meaning you only learn next to someone. And the capacity to learn was limited by the quality of the person whose hip you were attached to.

Oh wow. Talk about a recipe for disaster if you have bad hips around you. (Sorry for the old person joke lol.)

For MSPs, we may not have that size or that level of turnover. But we’re still likely training hip to hip. And that needs to stop. It’s bad for us. We need to standardize, build consistency, establish KPIs around learning, and ensure we have two-way accountability to learn.

And guess what? That’s exactly what we’re doing at Empath. Come check us out at https://www.empathmsp.com. We’d love to show you what we’re all about. And if you want to jump in a discussion to see the cutting edge of how we’re revolutionizing learning for MSPs, take a peek at https://www.calendly.com/wesspencer.

The Latest Hotness from RejectionCon: It’s on FIRE!

So RejectionCon is full speed ahead. Haven’t heard about what we’re doing with this incredible event? Hit the link in the sentence prior and go find out.

We’re giving a voice to the voiceless. And you know what? We’re going to raise $25,000 in charity money to help build technology (STEM) in schools all around us. Literally making the world a better place.

Are you in? Then guess what??? There’s a few huge updates you should know about:

• Hit us up at https://www.rejectioncon.com and get on our wait list. Very soon you’ll be able to register you (and your entire MSP!) to attend and hear some INCREDIBLE talks!

• Our Call for Papers is now open! I want to hear from YOU! But here’s the key requirement: I’m only allowing speakers who have a rejected talk. So if that’s you, and you’re salty about being rejected guess what? Now is your time! Here’s the link for Call for Papers: https://www.rejectioncon.com/awesome

• I need some help! I need more MSPs to know about this event! Would you share on LinkedIn and your Peer Groups about RejectionCon? Spread the word!

• Lastly, got any vendors that want to support the event? I’ve already booked sponsorships from the likes of Blackpoint Cyber, Ninja, Huntress, SuperOps, Flexpoint and others. But we need more! Hit up your favorite vendors and tell them to reach out to me at [email protected] 

That's all for now!

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If you have any interesting projects or ideas, please reach out to us by [email protected] or hit me up on LinkedIn. As always, thanks for reading, and see you next time. 🫡

Find Empath Cyber and Wes here:

• empathcyber.com/join 

• linkedin.com/wesspencer 

• https://www.thecybercast.com/

• https://twitter.com/wes_spencer

• https://www.youtube.com/wesspencer