MSP Websites Need AI (EP 1081)

[0:24] Hello, friends. Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT service providers and managed service providers and IT professionals

[0:34] and whoever else you want to be in the tech world. And we try to help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. And as you can see, we're doing a video version today, a very special episode. And I have with me good friend and fellow podcaster, Dave Sobel. Dave, how are you? I'm good, Marvin. I'm excited to be back with you. You always bring uh really great questions and it's a fun discussion, well this one should be an interesting one and uh so just to let you know i of course was struggling with how i was going to introduce you because even though i said you're a fellow podcaster that's the easy version uh you are uh, Mr. MSP Radio and you recently purchased the SMB small biz thoughts community uh you are a prolific, thought leader in our space, what aren't you going to do when it's all said and done?

[1:26] You know, I just am in the business of helping MSPs. Like that's, you know, we do a bunch of different things to try and help MSPs. Started with the media side, have the community as well. We've got the training stuff. I know we're going to get into some of that. We're going to get into a lot. And I want to go ahead and say a couple of things up front. We're going to talk about AI, folks. And we're going to talk about it in a way that I think most of you, you've thought about it, but you haven't talked about it out loud. So Dave and I are going to do that and we'll see how that goes. And we both have disclosures. When it comes to another topic that we'll bring up. But the first thing I want to go ahead and bring up, let's talk about the fact that as part of your ventures with the Small Biz Thoughts communities.

[2:10] You're obviously redoing some content. You're getting some more stuff out there. And one of the things that has popped up is this free MSP checklist that was famously put together by Carl and you have updated. Yes. Carl's famous 68-point checklist, still the product. We updated it to its new version 5. We released it in August. And the way we actually do it is the versions aren't necessarily the placements. Version 3 was all about local servers, your local infrastructure. For those of us that have been doing this a while, we'd be very familiar with the way you do that. Version four, we added the cloud awareness portion, right? So it was much more cloud aware. And what version five does is it focuses also on adding AI and compliance. Because as we all know, anybody that's dealing with this right now, like that's the open-ended question is how are we going to help customers with their AI needs? Are they correctly thinking about the right questions? And frankly, you know, in working on this, both myself and Carl, both were thinking about all the kinds of questions we wanted to arm MSPs with, the 68 points that they should be going over with their clients. And we said, you know, it was time to do an update to compensate for that. Yeah. So I'm going to go ahead and put the website up first. So it is a free download if you don't already have it.

[3:39] FreeMSPchecklist.com. You can go there. Yes, you got to put in your name and email address and all of that. But there's no cost to you. You do check out and all of that. I've already downloaded my copy and it's pretty nice. Pretty nice.

[3:53] And you got a new section there on AI, which we will talk about. But one of the things that I guess really came out of it, You did a study. And I want to know how you did this study. Because basically, let me get the graphics off the screen here. So you guys went out and, I guess, surveyed or analyzed 3,600 MSP sites and found this startling statistic. 68% of those sites say nothing about AI.

[4:32] So my first thing is going to be, is all of this from the SMB community, or is this a combination of stuff? How did you come up with the 3,600 sites? Well, so the Business of Tech is our media podcast and journalist analyst stuff, right? Many of you know I've been reporting and covering the space for a long time. We do a lot of work to try and understand the space, right? We know a lot of MSPs. We talk to a lot of MSPs. And we built our own research system for going out and, and I'll smile and go, you guys all have websites. It's not hard to find people's websites. We went out and we started, you know, indexing and selecting all of the public websites of firms that identified themselves as IT service provider. And we thought about ourselves in the same way that a prospect would read your website, right? So we would say like, hey, we can just read your website and we can determine what it says. And so we worked through that to build a system to survey those overtime. And, you know, we're continuously adding websites to it. We're tracking.

[5:36] As you said, 3,600 right now. We're continuing to grow that number because I want to get a sense of what are people talking about. And many of the times, for me, there's a lot of these surveys out there where they go out and they interview 500 employees or so. That's a useful way of doing it. But I wanted to look at this from the perspective of a prospect, like someone that doesn't know who you are as an MSP, doesn't know anything about you, and doesn't know what your internal statement is, but they would read your website, so we started from that and that's how we started looking at it and the first qualifier was just the do you mention ai in any capacity on your website, that was our first qualification yeah now was it just specific specifically did they have to say ai or artificial intelligence or did they have to go beyond that.

[6:25] We made it really easy the first game is literally just AI or artificial intelligence. You know, any, we have a corpus of vocabulary that we're looking for, but it's anything that's, yeah, I mean, anything that's related to that, right? We've got, you know, and you can appreciate we've got some software to do all of this and to, but we're just reading webpages, you know, and so you can parse it, interpret it, and we can read webpages and then make determinations about that. And we literally made the entry bar really low, Like, just do you say something? And the headline was 68% of the MSP sites that we've looked at, Don't mention anything at all. And in fact, by the way, like I pulled those numbers to double check it, you know, right before coming on with you. And it's 68%. Like back in early January, it was 67.8. It's right now it's at 68.3. So wait. It went up. It actually went up. It's now slightly, right? Like not enough that I'm necessarily going to really freak out about it. But it's kind of a constant that we're looking at. So let me say this so I m listening to my local radio this morning, and for the past couple of weeks they've been following some of these big ai stories talking about you know the ai robots doing this ai fighting amongst each other and, and when i get into the office i open up a YouTube window and i watch it and then there's a chat.

[7:54] And the chat room is pretty active and it's to the point where listeners in the chat are like, I'm so tired of AI. And it's like, everything is AI, AI, AI. So it's, it's interesting that that many sites would not even mention it on their, on their website, but yet every conference we go to, I was just at a conference this past weekend and AI was half of the topics up there. So it's interesting that as Much as we talk about it, we're not showing it on our website. And it seems as though our customers, our prospects, are getting their AI information from someplace else. Marvin, you have literally just said the reason that I'm highlighting this is the MSPs, community. I think you want to be involved in this conversation. Like I really, if you are the trusted advisor for your clients, if they're coming to you with your technology questions and you have self-selected yourself completely out of the conversation by not even putting it on your website, I think we've got a problem.

[9:06] Other side to that though so and I ll say it I ll be open about this, i have a law firm that i have been talking with for several months since their managing partner left and we've been talking about they wanted to upgrade their software to include ai, and i said okay let me be a part of the conversation let's put together an ai policy i know you're already using it inside of your office now because I can see, you know, the web history and all of that stuff. And for months, we've been doing this Sunday. One of the ladies that had gone to a American bar association conference came back, put together a nice little brief for the partners of the firm, and then sent me a copy of an AI policy that somebody from the conference gave them.

[9:57] So to be fair to other MSPs, I know that I'm talking about it with my clients and it's just not sticking somehow. Well, I want to separate the two issues out though, by the way. Okay. So, so in particular, think about, remember your website is oftentimes for people who don't know you at all. Right. Okay. Versus your clients. Right. So, so I want to say like the reason I'm highlighting this information from a website perspective is I want you involved in the conversation. Conversation I m not even saying what i want you to say right whether you're pro or anti or policy I m not saying that all what I m saying is for prospects you want to be in that conversation it should be on your website that you have opinions.

[10:38] About ai that you offer discussion that you offer services that's a marketing function and remember oftentimes your website is for people that don't know you. Now, your conversations internally, that's a different set of problems, right?

[10:55] And you've got a very, very legitimate sort of, this is how clients go. We all know that you're going to have to be navigating that set of conversations. My data that I've been focused on is the first bit, right? If a potential customer, or even somebody of your own customer who hasn't asked you yet, wants to know what your position is, do you do anything with AI? I think the answer should be yes. And you need to say it. Then what you say, those are obviously harder conversations. We know that that's going to go a different path. I'm just highlighting that the first one, I want to get you involved in those prospecting questions. Okay. What about, I'm going to play devil's advocate here. What about people like me who I know, I don't get my prospects from my website. They're going to come from someplace else, a referral from a colleague, a referral from a client. I don't know how many people look at my website. So there are a lot of people that are going to be like, eh, what do I care? I mean, they're going to look at my LinkedIn profile before they look at my website.

[11:57] So I 100% disagree with that statement, Marvin. I'm going to sort of say, like, if you're engaging with any company, anybody, we talk about the buyer's journey a lot, right? Jay McBain has a lot of discussions around the way you look at the changes in the buyer's journey. Tiffany Bova's done some really great work around this. They have gone to your website. They have looked you up. They've Googled you. They have looked you up. They have read your website before engaging. And by the way, that's the ones that call you. What about the ones that don't because you didn't offer the thing that they were interested in right and that's just the human side of this if we're having the conversation about where we're going with agentic ai the idea of that an agent is going to do the searching for you, i have a problem with my network and I d like you know agent go I d like you to go find five MSPs that are in the Florida that serve the Florida areas and these are the this is what I m looking for and I'm interested in AI, and you send your agent off to do that and they go find your website, that agent is going to eliminate you from searching because you don't offer AI.

[13:04] You never heard of that person. You never found them. They didn't call because you were already eliminated before they even called you. Now, you're right. You get a lot of work through referrals. And most of them do, like, that's the thing. But don't ever think that they haven't done the research. 80% of the conversation has happened before they have even reached out to you. They have looked into you. They understand. You're right. They've searched your LinkedIn. They've searched your website. They have looked at that, at you, who you are. Before they follow up on that referral. All right.

[13:37] So let's take that another step further. Have you started to have the conversation or done the research to find out why MSPs aren't putting it on their website? Is it because they're not ready?

[13:49] Is it because they're not doing AI themselves? Have you done anything on that? Yeah, so interestingly, I've not done research on this, right? I've talked to a bunch of MSPs around this. And by the way, listeners, if you have reasons, please tell me i would like to know more um but actually the interesting thing i get most of the time from it is one i wouldn't have guessed and it's a, oh we don't actively maintain our website, we published it once and then we left it alone and you're laughing and it's like i bet you relate to that statement i don't i don't check my website i don't do my website you know and by the way like you know I ll smile and go I m i run a media company we think about i think about my website continually, right? Because I expect that people are coming to our websites and getting information from us. I think about them all the time.

[14:40] And somewhere in the, you're not Dave running a media company and you should never look at it.

[14:48] Is probably a better middle ground of the way that you should be deliberate about your marketing message out to your customers. This is the basic discipline of doing good marketing, right? Is if you put it up once and you forgot about it, well, then shockingly, you haven't updated it with the new technology we're all talking about. That is true. And I mean, I'm still trying to figure out social media, LinkedIn. I mean, it's a lot of stuff. And yeah, I'm probably going to have to hire somebody.

[15:18] To do a lot of stuff. Now, I have a company that is providing my website stuff for me, but we need to have a talk about that. Yeah. And by the way, like all good MSPs, there's a system, right? You build a procedure, you build a procedure, you update it on a recurring basis. You set the schedule that works for you. We're all really good at solving these kinds of problems. You've got all the tools, everybody. I'm just pointing out the industry is having the largest conversation about a particular technology that I can think of in a very long time, probably since the cloud discussion. I want you involved in it.

[15:56] Yeah. Now, again, I know that you probably haven't gotten a ton of research

[16:01] of this, and I was actually trying to look myself. I know that part of the problem is which AI discussion do we have? Do we have just the talk about generative AI where, you know, they're going out and using Claude and ChatGPT? Or are we talking about the internal tools that are already in our ecosystem, Copilot, and all of this stuff there? I got a call from Microsoft today because, so my partner core membership, it expired last week. But of course, you can't renew until it expires, which I think is the stupidest thing in the world, Microsoft. So of course, I haven't gotten around to renewing it. They call me today and they're like, oh, by the way, we want to give you some updates. You now have Dragonfly Copilot in your studio. like okay, so there's these multiple conversations about generative ai internal ai i think you kind of mentioned it before MSPs you know have we even established what we're doing, in our own company when it comes to ai i don't think a lot of us have, and by the way that's okay there's a lot of discussion around the idea of being customer zero right like understanding like figuring out for yourself what it means and I ll give you some of the so you're right we have some data so we when we break down the 32% or so of the space that mention AI, right? So 32% of the websites we've looked at mention it.

[17:21] Only 26% actually offer something, right? Like have any level of like a thing they're offering. And again, our criteria were super loose. You have defined that you have something, a kind of service. We do governance. We do, you know, we do, you know, AI solutions. Like any definition at all fit that.

[17:42] 19% have defined an AI service, like a standalone AI service. You can buy this. Only 15% of the total population have named it, scoped it, and offer some kind of like advisory. And then 11% of those websites we looked at are the ones saying that we sell a particular thing. And I will tell you, by the way, that we dug into it. We looked at how many times a vendor is mentioned. If a vendor is mentioned at all, 87% of the time it's co-pilot. So essentially the MSP space has sort of said, if we're going to mention a particular vendor, it's Microsoft. Well, I mean, Microsoft has kind of already forced its way on us. So how can we ignore it?

[18:28] But by the way, totally legitimate strategy. For those of us that have been doing this a long time, we slip streamed off SPS in the old days, small business server, right? Then we slip stream off, you know, we slip stream off Microsoft 365. Like there is absolutely honor in using the Microsoft ecosystem to grow your business. Like, I just want to highlight that, like, by the way, if they're naming a vendor, it's Microsoft.

[18:53] That is true. All right. So getting back to the checklist. So we talked about the points that the AI section has been added. Is there anything you want to highlight specifically out of those items when it relates to AI? Well, the big question actually is, is I really want to highlight that I do not expect when you ask the questions in the checklist to your customers, I expect none of them to have answers.

[19:21] I, I legit, like I expect, I really do. I legitimately expect. And so I want to tell everyone it is not a failure of the system when you're asking questions that they do not have answers to. Let me point out that that is a sales opportunity. Opportunity. When you ask them a question about something, there's a lot of questions around governance. Do you have a policy? Do you know what tools are being used? Lots of these kind of very open-ended questions. I am expecting most customers to say they don't know.

[19:52] But by you raising the question, that means that you are engaged, you are helping them understand what's going on. And by the way, I have a suspicion there's more going on in their environments than they know. You know, in fact, I literally on the show today, I was I released new data around the fact that, you know, there's a sizable percentage of employees that are paying for the tools themselves and not telling their employer at all. Oh, yeah. Right. Shadow AI is a think. The point of the questions is to get you talking to your client. That is the whole point of it. To start those conversations, to frame them in a way that's around their business, that makes sense for them. That's the point. Don't expect them to have answers. No, but you may have to force your way into that conversation because, like you said, they are probably doing it on their own. And... Possibly because they don't want to be told no.

[20:54] They don't want to be told we have to put guardrails on it or anything along those lines. It is so much in front of their face that it's like, well, we don't need IT for this. Yeah. No, they do. And don't be the department of no. Like, I mean, again, my second level of advice here is just understanding what's going on is of high value. Most business owners don't know that that's what's happening let's help them understand they can make informed decisions they may decide that this is worth doing, but they're that they really want some of these tools and they and they like that you know their employees are using them and they want to like want to embrace them, but you can't make decisions without insight and without knowing what's going on so your value your first round of value really is going to be about just helping the business owner understand, but know what's actually going on. That is a really important value. Focus there. Okay. All right. I want to sneak in one more topic here. If you're willing to answer it. You know, I'm always up for it, Marvin. I always am up for answers.

[22:02] You did a show about a week ago, right after the big announcement that everybody is talking about GTIA acquiring the ASCII group. And I'll go ahead and just throw out the disclaimers ahead of time, folks. I am not, or I was not a member of GTIA. I was a member of ChannelCon years ago. I got out of that. I am a member of ASCII. And I'm a member of another group that I'll bring up in just a second. So as I ask these questions, realize that, yes, I'm straddling the fence here with how I ask. But you did a masterful job I think of trying to lay out why people should be happy about this acquisition and why people should you know if they're, you know, trying to raise a flag about it. Why are you raising the flag? Ask the appropriate questions because this could be a good thing for the channel. So we're going to bring it all up. I have a ton of disclosures because I'm so not neutral in this, right? And that's important because you really do want to understand it. I want to put all of my conflicts out on the table because I got a lot of them. So Karl Polachuk founded the NSITSP, right? The National Society of IT service providers. And I bought several of his businesses, right? I bought Small Biz Thoughts.

[23:26] I bought IT Service Provider University. IT Service Provider University is an NSITSP authorized training partner. So those two organizations, we do business together. Small Biz Thoughts is a paid MSB community, right? Which puts me in the same business as ASCII. And on top of that, I spent years on CompTIA councils before GTIA even existed, right? So I have my fingerprints are all over these. I am a competitor to one of the organizations. I'm a partner to the other. You really do need to weigh everything that I say accordingly. I appreciate you saying, like, I want to look at this from the perspective of like, hey, I've got a ton of experience in communities and in the various pieces of this. I want to provide value out to the community. Say, hey, I think these are the questions you want to answer. Yeah. But I also want to mention too you were an MSP so you at least have a little bit of our mindset as well so you know a little bit of both sides and you were on the vendor side back when you know we were with solar winds i can know i know how to think like an MSP i know how to think like a vendor, and now i try and call balls and strikes yeah so here's the question um setting aside community groups, because i think that's the one thing that if you look at you know what GTIA did in acquiring asked me, it was a community group and it was.

[24:48] MSP-led, even though there was vendor involvement, but there's a lot of other community groups that are now starting to get a little worried because they're like, okay, does that mean other groups are going to start coming after communities? And will communities have to be tied to a vendor or another organization of that thing? But then there's the group that you mentioned NSITSP which was born out of the idea of getting us a seat at the table when it comes to the laws that are being written all over this country that would affect us in the future and that organization was meant to you know help promote professionalism try to put standards together now GTIA, big gorilla big elephant coming in saying we're going to do that uh how do you see, the governance of the channel when it comes to what's just happened well since what i also what i really want to start with the baseline is that you can have the.

[25:53] Different structurally, right? And they have different goals, right? So I think you've kind of, I want to separate out three basic buckets. I think I may even be oversimplifying this. And the first is like trade associations, right? So GTIA and NSITSP are trade associations, right? So, and that's a particular tax status. There's particular governance that fits around it. What they do can be different, right? But there's a spectrum of things. There's vendor-driven communities, right? So those are the ones that are owned by vendors that are, and there's a bunch of them that were the third category that became the second category, because the third category is private ones, right? So a private community that comes together, generally peer-led is the way that those come together. You might have some professional structure to them, but they are a peer-led group. And what's interesting is, so ASCII, for example, has gone from being a private one to part of a trade association. So they've changed legal status. And that's the piece that I kind of want people to think about is there's just implications to that.

[27:03] NSITSP has been a trade organization the way they've structured it for a long time, right? That's since founding. That's the thing that they're focused on. So they are a slightly different thing. There's room for more than one, by the way. Like you can have trade associations that do different things. Again, if we're going to highlight here, GTIA is a trade association for everybody.

[27:27] And NSITSP focuses on service providers, right? It's in the name, right? So they are, and they are different. Like GTIA treats their members as all the same. And NSITSP has different classifications, right? There is a full member, then there's a, like, they're different. Right. That's great, right? And by the way, there's other trade associations that service this space. There's MSP Alliance. There's, you know, there's other ones. And then there's related ones, right? We've got all the ones of the telecommunications guys, the distributors have a, I mean, there's all kinds of trade associations out there. So I don't want everyone to think that like all communities are the same or all organizations are the same. That's where my questions is like, Hey, you have to understand what they're good at. Right. Okay. I just wanted to get a quick perspective on that because again, everybody's kind of like, Oh, what's going to happen? And what's going to happen with this one? And is, you know, you're right. Each has their own focus. Each has their own function, I guess, in this case. But there seems to be... By the way, let's also say, I think you should be a member of more than one.

[28:36] And the point of my piece, I mean, thank you for the kind words on it. I hope it's helpful to MSPs and I would encourage them to listen to it. The point of my piece is to make sure that you're in the right rooms for the right reasons. And I do legitimately think you should be a member of more than one because you want to be in different rooms for different reasons. Right. And then if the room changes, you reevaluate it periodically to make sure that it is, you are in the right rooms for the right kinds of conversations. All right. And a lot of rooms are out there still. So it's not like they're going away and private equity, at least at this point, is not going to come in and take away our rooms. Or they may. No. But remember, that's why you can change rooms.

[29:22] It's, you can vote with your dollars and with your feet. Like be in the rooms that make the most sense for you and your business at the right time. And no, by the way, those rooms may change because that's what happens and that's healthy. And some of the changes are going to be very positive. And some of the ones may remove benefits that you're focused on. And then you reshuffle which multiple rooms you want to be in for what reasons. All right. Well, that was it.

[29:49] I just wanted to get your quick thoughts on that. So thank you for that. I'm going to throw the link up here again for the free MSP checklist that has just been updated to version 5. Dave Sobel, and you did collaborate with Carl on that. So Carl is still very much involved. And uh you can always go over to the SMB uh, community uh small biz thoughts.com and find out what else he's got going on there a lot of changes there and of course if you want to follow the podcast business of dot tech uh, is it award-winning like three times now.

[30:29] You know the main thing that i always look for is we're very well ranked across the tech news podcast. We're a top 50 tech news podcast in the U.S. We're ranked in multiple countries. We have a Spanish edition now that's been running for a long time, so you can catch the show in Spanish. We're ranked in multiple different countries in the Spanish show. Those are the awards that I look at, is that the listenership continues to grow and the audience is there. I guess I've got to do Spanish now to keep up with you. Marvin, don't worry about keeping up. Keep doing what you're doing. I love the questions that you bring in the community perspective. Keep doing what you're doing all right thank you very much sir folks that is going to do it for this special edition of the it business podcast thank you to my guest Dave Sobel and check him out all the links will be in the show notes and we'll be back with more when stuff comes out I ll reach out to Dave and we'll get perspectives so until next time folks we will see you out there and until next time. Holla!