Adam Slutskin Talks MSP Success at IT Nation (EP 940)

Hello, friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, coming at you from IT Nation, here in Orlando. We are in the midst of Day 2, and we are recording at the Shingle, Rosen Shingle Creek. It has been that big of a day, folks.

I don't know what number of interview this is, but we're moving right along. I have with me a first-time guest to the podcast, but you know the company well. I almost used them, but something happened.

Something always happens. You probably won't talk about that much. But I have with me Adam Slutskin, the co-founder, president, and chief revenue officer.

So, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So, first time here on my podcast, but obviously not your first time around here.

Let me first start by asking, how are you enjoying IT Nation? Yeah, I love it. I mean, I haven't missed an IT Nation since 2007. So, I obviously got to run it for a little bit when I was the CRO for ConnectWise, chief revenue officer, for nine years, employee number 50.

No, it was 60, something like 60, at ConnectWise. And yeah, I know it well. So, it's like a homecoming now that I'm not part of ConnectWise.

And always just a bunch of family, friends, just a fantastic show. Still doing great. As I mentioned earlier, my listeners know CyberFOX.

Of course, even without me, they know CyberFOX. You guys are all over the place. Everybody recognizes the blue shirts, the Fox in the front.

Yeah, yeah. Initially, when I looked at you, it was for auto elevation. And at the time, I went with another product because they did a little bit more.

But you guys do all the same stuff now, almost. Yeah, yeah. You know, when you took a look at us, it certainly was at that early stage as you begin to build a company.

And I certainly got experience at all of them. I was employee 50 at Kaseya. So, I've gotten to work with all the pretty big vendors, except for Enable.

I would have loved to have that chance. And then even now, I'm currently an advisor for Ninja. So, which, God, they've just taken off.

So, it's been great. But, yeah, so the products come a long way. And it's awesome to be able to be an alternative to some of the other vendors in this space.

Look, here's the deal. Everybody wants to win every single deal. If you're a sports fan, right, you want to win 100% of the time.

But if you're the all-time greatest baseball player, you're still not going to get a base hit 70% of the time. And so, there's plenty enough for everybody. And I even think of the early days of ConnectWise.

And, you know, we were competing very heavily against Kaseya. But if you look at today, who are generally two of the top two or three vendors in the channel? Kaseya, ConnectWise. So, even with all that competition, if you think about it, what did it do for the community? It fueled innovation, right? And also good for helping drive prices down, competitive pressure.

And so, I think that's, you know, for us and, like, for, you know, the company ThreatLocker. I have no problem mentioning their name, you know, that I think you went with. And I think there's enough for everybody.

And when we look at where we are today, we have 4,000 partners worldwide. By the end of the year, it will be 4,500. By the end of next year, it will be over 6,000.

So, it's just been awesome to be part of growing another company. And I think every time you do; you get a little bit better at it. Yeah.

Well, one thing I always like to try to tell people, you know, just because I picked something as my MSP, listen, everybody can't be like me. 100%. You've got to do what works for you.

Yeah. And I like to have all the vendors on because, listen, somebody might hear the show, hear a vendor, and choose it because of that. And it doesn't have to be one that I use.

So, there's, you know, it's funny, if it's okay, just a little bit on that because I love talking a little bit about, like, culture. There's a lot of reasons why we all choose to partner with a specific vendor. And one thing I'm really proud of is, you know, I don't know if you know, like, are you aware of, like, Glassdoor? Yeah.

Right. So, Glassdoor has really been, I think, a really useful, you know, kind of website app where you can get some insight into that company. And it was really interesting.

It initially was designed for people to analyze a company to see if they wanted to go work there. Right. And about seven years ago, here's what I started hearing.

Prospects were going there to evaluate the company before they decided to work with them. The environment, how it treats the employees. To get the insight.

Yes. So, here's what I always say, and I say it humbly. If you're evaluating, like, a tool like ours versus some other vendors that do what we do, I encourage you to go to Glassdoor and then look at all of us.

And I think, you know, there's no lie. If you look at us, you're going to see some really good stuff. And maybe not so much with some of the other vendors.

And I think, you know, you work hard to earn that. Build the right culture. Get the right people.

Make sure everybody's very customer centric. Know who an MSP is. What your challenges are.

And we invest heavily in that. And I think it then comes out, like, that's just one example, through Glassdoor. Obviously, Reddit's a great source of the no bullshit truth, I think, where you can go there and, hey, if you mess up as a vendor, you're going to get called out.

And so I'm always very proud to say, feel free to go to any of them. We're not perfect by any means, like anyone. But, again, I think you'll be very pleasantly, not surprised, but pleased, that you're going to see good insight about us.

We work really hard. If people, you know, went by reputation alone here, having your name on the product meant a lot. I will say that.

It means a lot. So people have seen your track record and, you know, love it. I don't want to say unblemished, because I don't know.

I don't know if you've got skeletons. Well, I am from New York. I probably have a couple.

But I think I became a little bit of a Boy Scout. You know, most of my friends, Veron, you know my back story. You know, I was an Air Force guy.

Did the military for 21 years. Four or five conflicts along the way. And I know what it's like to love your job and be poor.

And, you know, I'm very thankful for all the vets, because you guys really have no idea how much we truly love our job, but really don't make any money. Right? A lot of the guys with family, even though you're serving your country, you know, they get food stamps, you know, because we're not in it for the money. We're definitely there to do a good job.

So I think that carries over. So I think that's what you try to bring into your company and build that culture. But, of course, then the tech is important as well.

It's got to be something that works. But when you have good tech and you put it with good people, and you really get to make that synergy happen, you can move mountains. And so I think, you know, we're really working hard to do that.

You know, we want to do a good job. And you're adding to the product. Like I said, when I looked at it, it was about two and a half years ago.

Auto elevation and password boss, I believe, was there. Yeah, like a last pass or a one pass or a keeper. But you've since added some other stuff.

You've got the DNS filtering you just added. We just launched that in the last few months. So that's in there.

What else is in? So kind of the core things would be certainly our elevation piece, which we really do believe, and I know it's always a humbling thing to say, that piece is really best in class. And we've made it simple. So behind us is a 43-year-old MSP.

Right? So if anyone knows the ConnectWise story, before there was a ConnectWise, really ground zero the vendor kind of ecosystem, the Bellinis had this MSP. Of course, it wasn't an MSP 43 years ago, computer repair, web design. But from that is where ConnectWise PSA, you know, gets developed.

So everything we do, we kind of leverage that experience with our MSP, which is still owned by the Bellinis, sits on my floor like it has since my first day at ConnectWise. They're 10 feet away from me at all times. And we get to live and breathe and experience what it really is like to be an MSP.

And then we put that in the product. We try to make it simple. And then some of the other things are like, here's what we know, and you know this, Mark, is as an MSP, we get to the end of the year, and then we wait for it.

Here come all the vendors with the price raises. We never, ever do a price raise. So once you're with us, you will never, ever get a price raise.

And I'm going to be very straight, that's been my entire career. Now, after I left, I can't control those things. During my tenure at ConnectWise, we never did a price raise.

At LionGuard, we never did a price raise. Here, well, we'll never do a price raise. It's easier now because I'm the owner.

So I don't have to worry about someone else raising it. So it's the little things like that that we appreciate as an MSP, man. But let me just stop right there.

Yeah, go. I'll say this personally. I'm not going to speak for every MSP.

I don't mind price raises as long as they're reasonable, as long as they're thought out and not sprung on us, and not 30%. Yes. Because I do expect the company to continue to make money, invest, make the product better.

So while I do appreciate not raising prices, I am somebody who's like, you know what, raise prices, make it better. Here's my little bit of a counter to that would be there's a lot of ways to make money. And I've been doing this a little bit; is I believe in a little bit of a different way.

And I did get this experience from the military and from anybody that's ever been in or been to Asia, where they have this very strong concept of, you know, take care of your early customers, right, for example. So for me, I experienced that. I decided I could leverage that in the companies I built.

So I believe just a little bit different. I hear you, is I don't need to raise prices on the things that you've already got. If I do a good job for my customer, they will want to purchase my other products.

And that's what we've seen. So, you know, as we continue to build out our stack, I've earned that, right? I've done a good job for you. You'll want to use some of my other products.

But I agree with you. Look, you know, if a company is raising prices fairly, but as our MSP, putting on the MSP hat now, it's nice that if most of us have 20 products in our stack, right, which is generally I think what most MSPs would say, right, if the number has grown, is it's nice that at the end of the year and if you're using your user-based pricing, and that a lot of MSPs don't want to raise their pricing because there's always some fear that my clients might get upset and leave me, go to somebody less expensive. So we continue to eat in our margins with those price raises, sometimes with 20 products.

So we made the decision. We didn't want to be the one that ate into the margin. That's it.

But, you know, like I said, lots of ways to do business. That's something we thought that could be a value add. And we've never raised anybody a penny, and we won't.

All right, that's fair. I'm okay with that. Oh, and, you know, look, we have this other thing.

When we reduce other technologies, I just, again, I believe it like, man, I am so thankful and loyal to the clients, the partners that have gotten us there. So, for example, like the DNS filtering, I made it $0.25 for partners. Most MSPs, you know, I don't know what you're paying or if it's embedded in another product you're using, are generally paying like $1 to $2.

I was going to say at least $1. Yeah, yeah. And so we offered that $0.25 for our partners just as a way to say thank you, right? And so for those that make sense, that's great.

If you have another product and you're fine, I have no problem with that, you know. But I'm just always going to lean forward to finding those ways to extend whatever value I can, you know, to our partners. So I've seen throughout all the social medias, you guys have posted all the time.

Employees are happy, have events celebrating that. You've got your events that you're having, which I haven't yet been to, but I will. You need to come. 

They are fun. It's just on the other side of the state. Love to have you.

What do you see as probably your milestone marker as to how successful you guys have been over the last, what, three years? It's just about four now. Okay. Sometimes it's hard to see that because I think we're a community of entrepreneurs.

We're always focusing on what we don't have sometimes rather than what we do. And so I think it's a journey. I think, you know, the milestone, I think as a vendor, what you generally see, because I'm an advisor for a lot of companies like Ninja and Blackpoint and a bunch of others.

And David, my co-founder and I, Bellini, we've invested in about 14 vendors in the space. So we're all in on MSP, y'all. And, you know, I think that first milestone is, you know, a thousand partners.

You know, there's something that changes as a vendor when you're doing a good job and you get those first 1,000 partners that believe and want to jump in the journey with you. And then just continuing to mature the product. And so, like, you know, we were talking about since you evaluated us, we have released a ton of other features into AutoElevate.

And, you know, we think they're very useful and some are different than the competitors and some might be better. Maybe there's some other things we don't do because you can't do everything. You have to pick a path.

But, you know, I think we really were like, hey, this is real when we got to that first 1,000 partners. You know, we were like, okay, we're off and running. So you call your MSPs partners.

Yes. But you're also doing partnerships with some other vendors. I saw you just did something with Blackpoint Cyber.

You mentioned them. Yeah. Yeah, we resell Blackpoint.

We're just – it's a vendor. We're very close to. And we thought we could extend value because you can't build everything, right? And you can't always buy everything.

Right. So we like simplifying engagement for, you know, for our partners. And so we resell Blackpoint.

And then another vendor maybe some of you all don't know much about yet. They're a little bit smaller, but MSP process. And they just have a really great user verification tool.

And so rather than build it, we decided to partner with them. All right. Yeah.

So how does that work? Is all of that stuff still kind of separate in the portals and stuff? Or are you going to find a way to integrate and bundle and do a single agent like everybody else? You just touched a very, very good nerve with me. So today, as we all know, what is the one thing that all of us in the community hate? The 80 million different portals and dashboards that we need to log into. We are on a journey to simplify that.

So as we've built these different products and partnering, I have some really good people that we're going to be bringing in. There'll be good future announcements that many of you all know in the community. And we're really going to attack that.

Okay. We believe we can simplify that. And so that we can unify everything onto that unified platform.

God, if you don't say AI once, you have to. But we believe leveraging AI and with this mentality of simplifying it, because our mantra is reducing complexity, we do think we're on that journey to kind of accomplish that. Today, no.

The answer is no, not today. Future state, when we do a follow-up, I look forward to having a chance to talk to you about what we've accomplished on that. I'll be looking forward to that.

So you can all hold me honest. I never say anything that I will not deliver on. Because then it's just empty air and your credibility goes out the window.

Right. Well, that helps me understand that you'll be here for a while. Because one of my questions was going to be, what do you see the future for you? Because I don't know.

There's never a real timeframe. Yeah. But I can still see you doing one more company down the road.

Or do you think this might be it? It does come up. But I'm going to live in this moment because I have done a few. I've been very blessed.

And you always have ideas. But I have been at this a bit. I'm going to be 60 here in a couple weeks.

I'm not old. But all that time in the military does take a little bit of toll on you. It adds a few years.

It does add a few years and a couple conflicts along the way. And I thought I would be at that place where I would want to be done at 60. But I've got a lot left to give.

And I think I'm very energized about what I believe CyberFOX can come. And I felt this way when I was at ConnectWise in year one. And you could see there was this massive opportunity.

We can all be revisionists and maybe others will say they saw it. Nobody could spell MSP back then outside of MSP. Half of us in the channel couldn't spell MSP.

But you look at us today, everybody wants in. How do we see that? Forget the vendors and all the private equity money and outside money that's flowed in. How about the MSPs with all the roll-ups? How about back in the beginning? If we held an event with buyers and sellers, it was all sellers.

Now when you have those events, it's all buyers. And that's awesome. That's provided our community the opportunity to monetize.

And that's amazing. We all work hard. So I had a couple of discussions about roll-ups with some MSPs outside of the podcast.

And since you brought up the word, I wasn't going to bring it up. I'm going to go ahead and ask. I'm sure you have been approached by some private equity places.

At this event alone, if you're a vendor here, you've probably had four or five meetings here. There's a lot of money that's not being spent right now that they're looking to put that money into everything. By the way, vendors and MSPs.

But my question is this, though. A lot of that money that's flowing in, a lot of it is, what's the best word I can say? Kind of like undirected. They just want to get in.

Well, they want to put their money at work. Which, by the way, I don't think is always a good thing. So I think for a lot of us guys, and I apologize.

I lost my voice last night. I usually sound much worse than this. But I think what's happening is we all have to educate them.

So I know there's always a lot of discussion. Is it good or bad? And I don't think anyone can say yes or no to that. I think what we have to say is it's on all of us that truly champion the channel that we have to educate them.

And I take every single meeting. I've probably done 38 meetings in the last 18 months because I'm evangelizing this community. And I want to make sure that they understand.

I won't call anyone out. Along the way, there was one company I was with, and they owned by private equity. And I didn't feel they got us.

And it was the reason why I chose to leave at that time. Because if you don't understand us or have a willingness to understand this channel, we are not enterprise. If you expect us to function like enterprise, it's just going to be a horrible relationship between any of the PE, GE, VC, and any of us, the MSPs or the vendors.

So I think it's more a matter of can you partner with someone that truly gets us and isn't going to try to change us? We are not Reuters. We're not Morgan Stanley. We're not GE.

We're not Fortune 500. We are who we are, and we are unique. All right.

Well, Adam, I'm going to say this. It's going to sound horrible. But I'm sorry I asked the question because it didn't allow us to continue the interview.

Oh, that's okay. You've got to go. So I'm going to have to reach out another time and see if we can't continue this and chat more.

Well, I'd love to have you in Tampa. Thanks for having me on this one. And the only other thing I'd like to leave it with, if you're interested in learning more about us, please just go ahead and check out CyberFox.com. Feel free to do it after looking at Glassdoor or read a little bit about us on Reddit.

But, yeah, we'd love to talk to you if you think we could add some value to you. Sounds good. Thank you very much for coming on, ladies and gentlemen.

Adam Slutskin, co-founder, president, and chief revenue officer. Thank you, sir. That's okay.