Hey Reader! Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends! 🦃 For all of us, let's use the spirit of thanksgiving to reflect and be grateful. IT is a difficult industry, plain and simple. The thing we can sometimes lose sight of is that 99% of the world would trade you places in a heartbeat for their circumstances. No matter how challenging your week, you're in the Goldilocks zone of winning in life simply because you are reading this email. Be thankful, be grateful. Life will inevitably be...
11 days ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader! I hear it all the time from MSP owners, "My team just doesn't have critical thinking skills." But here's what's actually happening. You've spent 15 or 20 years building expertise that now feels like second nature. You see patterns instantly. You know which shortcuts work and which ones will bite you later. You've internalized lessons from hundreds of client environments. Your team doesn't have that. Not yet. What looks like a lack of critical thinking is actually just a lack of...
18 days ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader! Communication is at the core of every dysfunction in relationships and business. When people lack alignment, there is conflict. Communication is the primary tool to create shared expectations and common perspective. In many conflicts, people feel like they have communicated. I shared a quote on a recent LinkedIn video this week. (If we're not connected on LinkedIn, let's fix that. I share short, punchy videos a few times a week there.) “The greatest failure of communication is the...
25 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, do you think AI is living up to the hype? There is a lot of talk in the tech sector that maybe the results from AI aren't what we've been promised. A recent Harvard Business Review article suggested that 80% of corporate AI projects are considered failures. A similar MIT study suggested the number is over 90%. How is this possible?! We were promised utopia! Well, maybe the picture isn't as grim as is being suggested. I brought on Mark Alayev and Michael Evers from Thread on the...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, do you do annual and quarterly planning with your staff? Typical review season is coming up quickly for many companies. If you're doing annual planning, you're potentially doing more damage than positive impact. Recency bias and people's fixation on salary in these events create a toxic mix of unmet expectations and disappointment. In my group coaching program, I've been teaching the group about the Career Life Plan (CLP) framework. It's a simple and powerful tool to help staff...
2 months ago • 1 min read
I've been asking MSPs lately, "If you had an army of developers and could automate any part of your help desk workflow, what would it be?" Here's what's wild. Nobody's thinking big. Everyone tells me the same thing. Triage, ticket dispatch, automated documentation, and basic ticket management stuff. The crazy part? All of that is already solved. Like, available right now. Reader you don't need to wait for some sophisticated AI breakthrough. The tools exist today, they're easy to implement,...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader. Building a team culture that provides fanatical service to your clients should be a goal of any MSP. However, influencing culture isn't as easy as we think it is. It's not something that gets fixed with training or direction. I often describe culture as a garden. You can't tell a garden what it will look like and make it appear overnight. You need to plan, plant, cultivate, provide conditions, and care for it until it starts to slowly grow into something like what you had hoped....
2 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, AI is going to change the way that we work at MSPs and in every other business as well. A growing trend that I think a lot of people are sleeping on is robots. The next direction for AI to go is to become embodied. AI will get plugged into physical robots and begin to do basic tasks. Especially in factory settings and logistic operations. Then, eventually, in the house and around the office. I can imagine a future where MSPs are even more broadly "technology companies." Part of...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, how many times a week do you hear the word "busy?" If you're like most MSPs, it's A LOT! Stop accepting "busy" as an excuse for why things didn't get done. Busy is a useless adjective that doesn't help to explain why someone wasn't able to get work done. Take up my Ban Busy challenge with your team. Tell them that you are banning the word busy for two weeks. You included. You're not allowed to use it as an excuse either. Now, how different are your work conversations? It forces...
3 months ago • 1 min read
