Compass One: Blackpoint’s North Star for MSPs (EP 943)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast recording live at IT Nation here in Orlando. We are continuing on with day two and I want to say thank you to my friends over at Thread that are presenting sponsor for all of the podcasts while we're here on site. They are the service magic to your service desk. 

You can check them out over at the website at ITBusinessPodcast.com. As we continue here on day two, I am joined by my usual friends, Blackpoint Cyber, but in place of McKenzie Brown, I have Mike Estep joining me here and we're going to chat about Blackpoint Cyber as we usually do. So Mike, welcome to the show. Well, thank you for having me. 

Excited to be here and I'll try to fill in as best I can for Mac. I know she's a special person and you know, I'll try to make her proud. Let's see, I'll have to find out how she interpreted that special comment. 

I talk to her on a regular basis, so excited to be part of the Blackpoint family, excited to be here and I've been to IT Nation a number of years, so not new to the show. Yeah, well thank you for accepting the invite. I know when I reached out to Mac, she wasn't available and they said we'll get you somebody and that fell to you but thank you for doing that. 

Let me first get, you know, the pleasantries out of the way. How are things here in Orlando at IT Nation? Having a good time. I mean, it's always fun to be back amongst friends and you know, I'm a big relationship guy, so I've known many people here for a long, long time, so I always enjoy the big shows because you get to catch up with people you may not have seen since the last show. 

Once again, now being on the vendor side where I attend much more shows than I did when I owned an MSP, it's a little bit easier, but excited to be here and see old friends, old faces, and you know, being, you know, in the wonderful world of Orlando and Universal Studios, you know, it should be a fun night. Yeah, I'll go ahead and ask you this question. Did you attend IT Nation as an MSP? Yes. 

And how is it different attending on the vendor side as opposed to the MSP side? Well, the first thing I would tell you that I didn't understand was as an MSP, when you come to a show, you can come to a show, do what you want, and then if you're tired of standing in the Solutions Pavilion or tired of sitting, you can go do what you want. On the vendor side, you got to stay in the booth when the booth's open, you've got to, you know, do all the assigned, you know, things on the schedule, so it's a lot more structured as a vendor than it was as an MSP. Now, you know, once again, we've, our original MSP brand's 50 years old this year, so, you know, we've been coming to these types of things as an MSP. 

We truly enjoyed the interaction with all the other owners, and that was what always intrigued me to come to IT Nation, you know, once again, before it was called, you know, had all this name, but to get to see people, meet people, learn the things we weren't doing. Where vendor side, you still have this little bit of edge of trying to do what the vendor role is responsible for. I just did a session, and I think it kind of, you know, really made people kind of, I don't know whether concerned, but I told everybody, listen, I'm not here to sell you anything.

I'm here to talk about my stories, my experiences, both as an MSP owner, as well as now on the vendor side, and try to build something that works for everybody. Yeah, so now that you've been on the vendor side, tell me how life is like. Do you have a different perspective on the space? I do from a standpoint of, so the first thing I would tell you is, I never recognized how many events there really was. 

I mean, you know, it sure didn't seem like there was this many ten years ago, eight years ago, but, you know, I've traveled probably 40 of the 52 weeks this year between events and client visits, so that's significantly different than, you know, once again, owning an MSP, even a national branded MSP. I didn't travel near as much. I have a new respect for all the work the vendors put in for event planning and things to that nature. 

You know, once again, when you're on the MSP side, you're just coming, you know, you know the vendors you want to see, you know the vendors that are your current partners that you know you want to talk to, you know, you kind of, you have an objective and then meet people. You know, from a vendor standpoint, it's show up, booth setup, booth teardowns, all that's, you know, things I never really appreciated, like, you know, I do now. Right, right, and the partner pulling that comes along with that, where, oh, I'm a big partner, you should, you know, spend time with me while I'm here. 

Take me out to dinner, right? No, I guess maybe I have a, you know, I have a, since we were always one of the bigger partners for most of the guys, you know, I never really pushed for that, but I do see it, but more importantly, you know, once again, being on both sides, I think that many people come to me as a friend, not a vendor. They kind of want to know what, what is Blackpoint doing? You know, you know, John had built a great reputation of being very MSP interactive when we were coming to an event, so once again, trying to, you know, you know, keep doing the things that he was building and then now try to figure out all the things as Blackpoint grows and evolves. Yeah, well, let's go ahead and talk a little bit about Blackpoint stuff, because we probably should. 

I know that when I was on with Mac last, we had talked about the, you know, EDR Essentials coming out, having that lower introductory platform to get people in there, and of course having something for everybody at every level, and then we talked about Compass One that was going to be coming out, so I need to ask, I haven't seen much, so where is, where is Compass One? Well, Compass One, you know, so once again, this platform was built from the vision of both John's mind and then ultimately Manoj Shrivastava, who he brought in, you know, from Tenable, from a vulnerability management standpoint, and then a number of other people have been a part of it, so we've definitely taking much, taken much longer than we thought, but I think the final product, because one of the things that I can assure you that I know all the MSPs want, is they don't want a half-cooked product. They, you know, I was talking to a vendor the other day, and they taught me a new term called MVP, Minimum Viable Product, and I know that's not what people expected from Blackpoint, and that's, we've upheld the standards this entire time to make sure as the product come to mark, comes to market, it's everything we say it's going to be, so Compass One Essentials actually will go GA, once again, my days are all running together, so November 5th, so that may be today at this point, and then it's going to stack with Compass One Standard coming behind it as we finish all the billing platform, because it's more than just a new version of our product. It contains all the existing stuff, but it's many more new things and a new billing platform and API integrations behind it, so. 

Okay, I didn't realize it was wrapping everything into that, so it's, it's, from what I understood, it's a single unified dashboard. I just assumed it was for the endpoint security and all of that stuff, but you're talking about billing, you're talking about the compliance side. Correct, so it's going to have vulnerability management, cloud posture, you know, sim logging and ingestion. 

We really wanted to build a product, you know, once again, you've been talking to lots of MSPs, you know, the challenge in, in, you know, what I affectionately call MSPville is that, you know, we have, you know, 10,000 tools for everything, and the engineering tax on the MSP side with all these tool vendors is hard, and so when the idea behind this product and how do we do more inside a single console that we wrote, you know, it wasn't go buy 10 tools and just bolt them together, it was develop this all with the vision of one common platform, one common screen, and then one common vision of being that place for the MSPs and all of their clients to get to that would truly give them, you're going to hear us create a term called the security posture score that is all these different areas. The reason it's called Compass One is the idea is to give every MSP with their client a North Star, you know, to work towards, to take this on this journey of both security and compliance, because to me, the industry is going through an evolution where security and compliance are coming together, so Compass One is built to start to bring everybody on that. Now, once again, caveat, as we look at Essentials, it really starts with our MDR products that were cloud and device. 

We're not giving up on our core product or our, you know, everything still includes our 24 by 7 live human sock with real people doing the job, APG, Max team, you know, all of those threat hunting teams are all built into this. Well, I mean, yeah, and when we talked, you know, before, she said all of that stays the same, we're just introducing a new entry point, which opens up, you know, doors for a lot of people. Yeah, our goal is, once again, we're going to, from a business standpoint, not a technical standpoint, we're going to try to help with the engineering tax associated with multiple tools. 

Hopefully, for the owners out there like me, when you're looking at tool consolidation, how can I consolidate tools, maybe consolidate some expense. Now, once again, caveat being, no MSP owner wants a tool that does 30% of what another tool does and somebody to go, there's tool consolidation. It's not, it's got to be a product that represents properly so that it can help solve those problems. 

Yeah, I do want to make sure before I forget to let you know that I appreciate the fact that I would rather a product come out late and be awesome than come out early and suck. I agree totally. I mean, well, I met with one of my former brand senior leaders and he's like, listen, Mike, I don't have time to be your testing department, so get it right, get it right early, and then we'll just fix little things as we go. 

So, once again, you know it then from an MSP standpoint, there's this belief, I think, by vendors that MSPs have all these extra people just sitting around that can go do things and that's just not the reality of MSP. There's very rarely, in best case, there's maybe a half an engineer to do stuff that's not on the schedule, but in most cases you're an engineer short, maybe more, so you can't be the vendor's testing environment. Or you're an owner that's trying to figure it out as you're directing your staff. 

So, it is very frustrating indeed. Although, I gotta believe you have some beta. Oh, no, absolutely. 

When I got to Blackpoint, we modernized our partner advisory council. We probably got 30 partners who are already there, you know, just trying to make sure, you know, once again, I tell people, what you don't understand about the MSP industry is there's such a wide variation of partners. As you asked before, vendor versus MSP. 

As an MSP, I was concentrating on what we were. As a vendor, you're trying to figure out how to help the under five employees start up MSP, as well as the thousand employee roll-up MSP. I mean, so the vendor world's very tough from a standpoint of because the MSP industry is so widespread, you know, what is good for one may be painful for another and vice versa. 

So, we've worked really hard to try to solve those things. All right. You mentioned a topic that, well, not necessarily a topic, it made me think. 

A lot of companies are maybe down an engineer, down a tech, and in this time where people are actually trying to turn up AI to reduce that friction and, in some cases, reduce staff. Not at all, but what, I don't know why I'm thinking of asking you this, but in terms of vendors helping us to prevent engineer burnout, that's something that, for some reason, it just stuck with me right there. That, yeah, I'm being sold a bunch of new tools here, but in a lot of cases, I'm like, I don't just need a new tool, I need to, you know, I need to stay sane, right? And I need techs to stay sane and stuff like that. 

So, I understand that a lot of what's driving us is, you know, to be better at cybersecurity, to be better at compliance, to figure out how to sell AI and stuff, but a lot of what I think needs to happen is, I would like some help. How do I prevent that fatigue in my MSP? Well, so, I'll give you, ultimately, a little bit of what I hope to bring to Blackpoint. I mean, I think the advice I would give to every vendor is hiring someone who truly has lived the MSP life, because burnout's real. 

It's everywhere. I've seen it in my own brands and tried very hard to prevent it. You know, so the first thing I would tell you, I'm a people person first, so I love technologies. 

I've been in the technology industry a really long time. I believe in, you know, we were early adopters to automation tools that I'm sure you've interviewed, you know, Aaron and those guys. I mean, we were early adopters to how we can do things faster, better, more efficiently, but we've always worried about our teams. 

And what I will tell you that, you know, through, you know, kind of the side vision of looking at Blackpoint and going, okay, the first thing we've got to do is make sure we invest as much in our training platform to help MSPs drive and use our product. Most MSPs today, in my humble opinion, when they see a new tool, they buy a new tool, they hand it to their engineer and go, here's the new tool, figure it out. The vendors have done training, but it's not training from the vision of the MSP. 

It's training by the people who wrote the product. It's two different use cases. So we're working very hard. 

We've built Blackpoint University both as a business standpoint. It was actually one of John's initial projects when I agreed to join Blackpoint a couple years ago. He's like, we want to build a university platform that's free to all of our partners, that gives them not only technical education, but business education. 

One of the things, like my standing joke, like we developed a program to teach engineers soft skills. You know, so many companies don't take the time to, you know, shaking a hand is not, everybody just doesn't know how to do it. You and I have the same wisdom hair. 

So we kind of grew up in an age where that was something that was important. You shook hands and it meant something. Correct. 

Today, it's just a byproduct. And so we're trying to invest in one education, truly career pathing that's associated with a Blackpoint product, as well as being an MSP leader. So I think it goes both ways. 

So burnout is something that every MSP owner needs to recognize as we go forward. You know, listen, I love AI. I'm a huge advocate for AI. 

I use AI, but as you know, I'm blessed to all of my kids ultimately worked for us when we were in MSP. I still have one son who's in the brand in Atlanta. And as he looks at me and he goes, listen, dad, everybody comes to me and says, here's the answer. 

I got it from AI. And he looks at me and goes; I'd already done those 50 things. They don't work. 

So don't tell me that AI is going to fix the problem. AI has a purpose. AI has places, it is going to help efficiency. 

But the people still have to make it go have to critically think, you know, the last thing any MSP owner tech is going to get away with is telling a customer, listen, the server blue screen, I don't know why AI is going to fix it. Doesn't work that way. You know, so I see burnout being one of those things that owners have to own, vendors have to own, our entire industry has to own. 

I did a, you know, not too long after I went to Black Point, I was asked to do an event for Wes Spencer. And it was, I got to interview a psychologist and a psychiatrist both. And they talked about what they wanted to talk about was not only burnout, but suicide rate. 

You know, and in this case, it was on sock analyst. And they were talking about how it's really high. I mean, we're in a high-pressure industry, people just don't recognize it. 

You know, when from a security standpoint, every call is an important call. There is no unimportant call. So and by the way, it used to be that way when I'm working on servers, and I decide to do something on nt351. 

And it doesn't go the way it's supposed to. It's an important call when you take businesses down. And today, this is always on. 

So I mean, long story short, I burn out something all vendors need to be helping with, we need to understand that accountability for helping engineers learn and making it easy. You know, like, once again, doing hour long classes these days is really hard. So we tried to break everything up in like 15 minute, you know, YouTube like videos, and, you know, train it and certify through it, and then keep it going. 

And then give the MSP from a BlackPoint standpoint, a benefit because it helps them in our partner program. And I've seen the best vendors have great partner programs that reward training and certification. All right. 

Well, thank you very much for taking that side tour. I just I don't know why that just stuck in there. But thank you for answering that. 

From BlackPoint's perspective, let's say moving forward, this is the last big event of the year. I know that you guys are still pushing on Compass One. But in terms of visibility, things will probably die down holidays are coming up. 

What's next on the plate coming up in 2026? Well, you know, listen, you know, BlackPoint's going through a lot of evolution. I don't know whether Max talked about it at all. But we have a new CEO, CEO Gagan Singh, great guys, you know, really understands, you know, the market to which we're trying to grow to. 

So we, as he would tell you, partners first partners last. So we are very focused on staying in the channel. Somebody questioned me the other day is BlackPoint going to BlackPoint wants to become a worldwide brand. 

So we are very focused on partnering with MSPs, resellers, VARs outside the United States, outside of North America as a whole. We're growing faster, you know, in Australia and New Zealand percentage wise than probably anywhere. So for us, it's, you know, the event schedule for MSPs where you meet people. 

So they're already working on that for 2026. You know, the first big events are already on the books for late January, early February, and then we'll be focused on all the event side. But then it's, you know, a worldwide expansion with we announced yesterday via LinkedIn that we're hiring people in Australia, New Zealand in the UK, and trying to become a more worldwide driven platform than just a North American driven platform. 

We have brought in a new marketing leader who same thing has the capability, we want to drive more brand awareness, you know, we think I used to joke with vendors, it's really hard for me to drive demand, because I'm just in one market. So, you know, we had a great partnership with another vendor when I was running our MSP that really spent time driving demand. So we brought in a former leader from Microsoft, who's going to run marketing for us, who's very focused on how do we drive demand for Blackpoint and recognition of, you know, in that commit space, that small medium enterprise, small medium corporate. 

So those are what I will call first half priorities of 2026. You know, and then once again, trying to be the best partner possible to the you know, everyone else, we're very focused in how do we help our current partners grow? You know, one of my passions as Chief Client Officer, I think, today, there's more interest in the clients you don't have than the clients you do have, you know, both from a vendor standpoint, maybe even from an MSP standpoint. So I believe that the key for MSP and vendor is to say, the customers who are already your clients, how do you help them grow? So we're very focused on that.

Glad to hear you say that. That's been my motto for years is that I focus on the customers I have, I don't want to lose them. And I actually so my business has been 28 years. 

Congratulations. 27 years is the longest customer I have. And he's retiring out finally. 

And it's interesting that he's stayed with me this entire time and grew with his business and stayed with him as he you know, kind of scaled down. And it's been a neat little journey. Yeah, listen, you know, I try to remind people and this may be one of those sidetracks you were talking about. 

When I joined the company in Atlanta, we were the largest typewriter company in the US by over 40%. The business was typewriters. This is 1989. 

You know, needless to say, there wasn't a lot of people who were about to be buying typewriters over the next 20 years. Yet the majority of the client base came with us on the journey. And I see the same journey, you know, what I love about our space, skip the marketing terms we all use today, like MSP, bar, reseller, we're really a services business, helping people, you know, and as long as that core doesn't change, you know, whether it's the cloud, whether it's on prem, whether it's software, hardware, it's the core of helping people do something that helps their business grow. 

And that's what I have a passion for. That's what I think you have a passion for. Because if it was about on prem hardware, cloud heart cloud services, we'd all pour hair out because we can't control any of the vendors. 

I mean, yo, it's about giving that great service and people, as I say, most of our best clients became our best friend. Yeah, you know, it wasn't. It wasn't that it was two different things.

Yeah, it was all about product and price. We'd all be Amazon. Yeah, man. 

So, you know, to me, that's the special thing about our industry. I mean, you know, I was telling somebody earlier, I, I look at my doctor, my lawyer, my accountant, as people that I trust with everything. Well, I think the person who helps you with your technology should be considered in the same category. 

Yeah, you know, and that's how I built my businesses. That's once again, as I look at Black Point, I'm like, this is the level of attention that everybody needs to understand is expected. It's not they're not buying just a product there. 

When we say they're looking for safety, or trust, it's more than just words, it has to happen. Right, Mike, this comes to a part of the interview where if Mac were here, it would, it would seamlessly work. But I'm going to go ahead and ask you in her absence and see if how this works. 

Do you own any Vuori clothing items? Well, I don't own any Vuori clothing items. And she surely does. But more importantly, I've been lucky enough to be married for 37 years. 

So I am very familiar with the Vuori brand. And, you know, have a wife that does like it very much. And, you know, so I've actually been to their store in the last two or three weeks to, you know, my, my youngest son moved to Denver, and there's one of their stores in Denver. 

So every time I go, I know to come back with something special. Interesting. All right. 

You know, they have a men's department. Yeah, but, you know, once again, I don't, I don't see any cameras. So I'm assuming this is all audio. 

So I don't have a Vuori body type. Okay, I don't know if I'm still in that category or not. But I, I know that when it said active wear, I'm like, yeah, I've passed that stage of life.

Yeah, no, I, if, if, once again, when I came to work for John, everything he bought was athletic cut. And I'm like, John, two different body types, babe, you know, so yeah, it's a, I, I'm more of a, a, you know, Carhartt, DXL guy, than the other. Okay. 

Well, when you go back, if Max, you know, if she asked you about that, you could at least tell her you did talk Vuori. Well, I'm sure she will be listening to this. And, you know, hopefully she'll, you know, be with us on the next journey, where you're there, and you get a chance to catch up with her. 

We're very excited. She just actually, you know, was finished in some of our internal stuff that we're trying to get done. And, you know, we, we see 2026 is a very bright year for where everything we need to go with Blackpoint and for the industry is going as a whole, I think it's going to be great.

Well, you guys are doing good work. I appreciate it. You're doing a good job sitting in for Mac. 

And I believe on Monday or Tuesday of next week, I have a call to do my onboarding for the EDR essential. So sweet. Well, see how that goes.

As always, if you not now you face to face, you know, the chief client officer. So ultimately, anyone who's a Blackpoint client, I want to, I want to be helpful to everything we're doing. And try to be the guy who looks at everything vendor Ish and go, this is how it works in MSP. 

Yo, and, you know, just once again, at one foot in front of the other fix things that, once again, my humble statement, I don't think vendors understand us as well as they think they understand us. And trying to be a guy who's trying to help solve that problem. It's I'm going to I'm going to decline to comment because that'll be a whole other discussion. 

Because you you're right to a lot of degree. But that whole vendor MSP relationship, we need to talk about it. Yeah, they, you know, and another show, I will just leave you with, you know, I think what MSPs went through 20 years ago, when we all learned, if we work together, we will end up in a better place. 

That still is going to come to the vendor world. Because the other interesting fact to me is many people in my world are now seeing helping vendors as, to me, it's part of giving back. Yeah. 

Yo, and trying to help Blackpoint trying to help, you know, there's probably five or six vendors that I talked to on a weekly or at least every other week basis just saying, here's how it really works. You know, listen, in the tax associated with invoice reconciliation for an MSP is huge and real. And Blackpoint's a security guy, they look at invoicing and go, oh, that's it. 

That's not our concern. It's not our concern. I'm like, yes, it is.

It is. All right. Well, Mike, again, thank you very much for stepping in. 

I didn't mean to say that in case you, somebody will think that was a pun. But no, you're good. Thanks for having me.

Yes. And, you know, as always, just holler, I'll come. I have no problem talking about just about anything caveat with this year, except my Florida State Seminoles.

And moving on, folks, thank you for tuning in to this episode of the IT Business Podcast. Thank you to Mike Estep, Chief Client Officer of Blackpoint Cyber. And we'll be back with more from IT Nation here in Orlando.

We'll talk to you soon, folks. Holla.