Episode 206: This MSP won £7,000 MRR from networking

NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. Around the world. This is Paul Green’s, MSP Marketing podcast. Hello, my friend, and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we got in store for you this week.

[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hey, I’m Scott McCrady with SolCyber. Can’t wait to be on Paul’s podcast to talk about how we raised $20 million to bring a new security service to the market.

[00:00:23] Speaker A: And on top of that, fascinating interview with Scott, later on in the show, we’ll be talking about hidden price rises. Is there an opportunity coming up for you to put your prices up in the new year?

Paul Green’s, MSP Marketing Podcast let’s start this week’s show talking about networking. And I’ll avoid my usual joke of networking, saying, I mean the one with people and not cables. But I do mean the one with people and not cables. Because networking events, depending on your experience of them and whether you’ve ever done them before, networking events are either fantastic places for you to go and meet potential new leads, or they are sheer hell. The idea of them is torture. It’s a torment for you, the thought of having to go out and do them. I’ve done my fair share of networking over the years. When I started my very first business in 2005, it was like a general marketing business. And I used to go out to all the networking events in a county called Northamptonshire in the middle of the UK. And I went to literally every event that I could find. And then I joined BNI, which was great for a couple of years until it wasn’t anymore. And over the years, I’ve had so many badly cooked breakfasts, got up at 05:00 A.m. To go to meetings, gone to evening meetings. It did win business. But then I found really good marketing, and I got really good at marketing, and particularly B to B marketing. And suddenly, networking was just one little thing that we did. It was no longer the thing that we relied on, but for many MSPs, networking is a big thing. And we did a whole subject on this back in episode 179. So if you want to dive into networking and why you should be doing it, go and relisten right now, or listen for the first time to episode 179. Now, the reason I want to mention it here in this episode is because I was recently talking to an MSP, happened to be here in the UK. It’s someone I’m working closely with, but I’ve only known closely for about six months. And they have utterly gone for networking, almost as if there was nothing else. And there is actually lots of other marketing that they’re doing, but they have a full time marketing resource in the business. And that person has decided, if I’m going to do networking, I’m going to do networking properly. And I’ve got some stats that they gave me just a few weeks ago when we had a catch up call. So they attended, they did eight separate events. So they are in London, here in the UK, and there are a lot of networking events and I think eight events was actually a fairly small number, but that was across a two week period. So for two weeks, they went to eight separate events. And I’m not quite sure if they are figuring on doing that regularly. That seems like a hell of a cadence, doesn’t it, to go to? I guess that works out at four events a week. Maybe that’s overkill, maybe you wouldn’t find that many events in your area. But that’s what they did initially. They went to eight different events and their goal was to go there and meet as many new people as possible, have some kind of meaningful conversation with them. So they went to these eight events. Out of these eight events, they got three hot leads. And I pushed them and said, Right, what does that mean? That three hot leads. Three hot leads is where they’ve had a conversation with someone which has ended with an exchange of business cards and diarizing. Hey, great, I’m going to give you a call tomorrow morning, 945, or whatever is the case. So that hot lead is someone that could go on to do business with them. There’s an opportunity there and crucially, it’s in the diary. There’s not just that vague, give me a call. Oh, I hate that, don’t you? Give me a call. What does that mean? Give me a call? It’s a way of fobbing people off, isn’t it? Give me a call next week, see if we’re ready to talk to you. Well, guess what? Spoilers, we’re probably not, because it’s a way of fobbing someone off. If they’re serious about talking to you, they will book something in their calendar there and then. And if they won’t do that, the chances are high that they are not serious. So, eight networking events, lots of breakfasts, lots of talking to people, three hot leads and they have generated a brand new client. Out of those three hot leads, worth 7000 pounds of monthly recurring revenue in US money, that’s around about, let’s say, about nine k $9,000 of monthly recurring revenue. Was that a useful use of their time? I would say so, yes. Wouldn’t you? Eight meetings, three hot leads, one new client. Now, what I don’t want is for you to say, oh, there’s the magic formula. All I got to do is go to eight meetings, all I got to do is talk to get three hot leads and I’ll get a really juicy client out of it. ISIS bet it’s not going to be quite as easy as that for you. I say this not to give you an idea of numbers, because of course, we don’t know the type of events they went to, we don’t know what kind of businesses were there, we don’t know how much work they had to do to actually reel in. That 8000 excuse me, that 7000 pounds of monthly recurring revenue, I suspect quite a lot of work. My point was this networking, like any type of marketing, can work really, really well for you. Really well if you throw yourself at it. And I see so many MSPs doing little bits of marketing here. I’ll do a little bit of email, a little bit of LinkedIn, a little bit of something else. I’ll go to one networking event, oh, I didn’t meet anyone interesting there. And actually marketing doesn’t work like that. Especially B. Two B marketing and especially MSP. Marketing. MSP marketing has a very long sales cycle. The kinds of people who are one day going to become your clients are currently sat with your competitors, fearful of leaving them because better the devil you know, they know technology is important, but they don’t understand that technology. Therefore they’re scared to switch to someone they don’t know and that might include you. It’s a very, very slow sales cycle for this and a number of other reasons. Networking is a great way to meet new people, but it is only the start of that. You’ve got to throw yourself into it. If you’re going to do it, try it and give it a good long term push. Now, as you can imagine, my client is very, very happy to keep doing networking. And I’m sure that over a period of time that networking will become less efficient. But they’ve certainly had a good start from it to win one new client like that. And I would encourage them to get going. By the way, while we are talking about this, there is a side conversation which came up about getting stuck, stuck talking to the same person. Well, actually it was two subjects. One was how to work a room, and the other was how to avoid getting stuck talking to the same person. And if you’ve been networking yourself, you may know that this is a problem. Particularly if you’re nervous and you’re not a particularly confident person. And you walk into this networking room and there’s someone you meet the very first time and you shake hands and you’ve not met them before and they’re nervous and you’re nervous and you say hi, hi, how are you? And 3 hours later you’re stills talking to each other, you’re stuck with each other, it’s just you and that other person. And you’re looking at all these other people thinking I missed out on these people, what do I do? Well, actually, we’ve got one thing that we can do which combines both of these things and it’s very, very simple. You spend ten minutes talking to the person that you’ve met, but you talk exclusively about them. You see there’s a number of things that happen when you talk exclusively about someone else. So you go to a networking meeting, you shake their hand. Hi. I’m Paul. What’s your name? You’re Dave? Hi, Dave. Nice to meet you. What do you do, Dave? Dave tells you what he does, and it’s either a good explanation of what he does that he’s bringing to life, or he bores you for five minutes telling you something. I’m an accountant, and I like to do numbers and figures or whatever it is he says. But whatever it is he says, you then follow that up with a series of open questions about him and his business. And the more you ask about him and his business, the more fascinating you will be to him. It’s kind of weird how that works. It’s the opposite of how it should be. It should be that the more we talk about us, the more fascinating we should be. But actually, that’s not how it works. Brains are not wired that way. It’s completely the opposite way. The more you talk about him and his business and ask him interesting questions, the more fascinating you become. And that is the challenge that is open to you. So you ask him about his business. Of course you tell him what you do. But anytime he starts swinging the conversation back to him, back to you sorry. You swing it back to him, and then you make a decision after ten minutes, is Dave, is this person I’m talking to worth continuing the conversation, or is it time for me to move on? And if it is time for you to move on, here’s what you can do. You can say, Dave, I’ve really enjoyed talking to you today. It’s been fascinating. Shake my hand. Shake, shake, shake. It’s good to have the little sound effect there. Shake, shake, shake. And you say, I’m going to go and meet someone new here, and I’m sure that you want to do the same as well. Let’s just swap business cards, and perhaps we can keep in touch. The point is, by talking to Dave about him and his business for so much, you have earned the right to terminate the conversation. Essentially, you’ve controlled the entire interaction here. Now I’m talking about people that you meet for the first time. When you meet them the second, 3rd, fourth time, it’s not so easy to do this. But that first time, you can be completely in control of that interaction, because you know, the goal for you being here tonight is to meet ten or 15 or 20 people, and you’re not going to do that when you’re stuck talking to Dave. So you kind of blitz Dave, learn as much as you can about him, and then you have earned the right to shake his hand. Say, you’re a fascinating guy, Dave. I’m so glad I bumped into you. So I’m going to go and meet some new people, and I’m sure you want to do the same. Always make it seem aligned, like you’re there for the same reason. Look forward to seeing you again soon. And that’s it, you’re off. Simple as that. So is networking a big thing for your MSP? I’d love to know your experiences of it. Why don’t you go into our Facebook group and let me and a whole load of other MSPs know what networking is like for you? It’s the Facebook group. It’s called MSP Marketing and I’d love to hear your experiences in there. Here’s this week’s. Clever idea.

Don’t hate me, but I’m going to be one of the first to say it. Christmas is nearly here. I know, I know. We’re only at the end of October, more or less, and it does seem like we’ve got two months, but we haven’t. We’ve got about six and a half weeks, something like that. It’s kind of crazy when you look at how fast Christmas sneaks up on you once you get to this time of year. Christmas is good because it leads on to New Year and January a new year. And January presents you an opportunity to do something very cool, specifically to put your prices up for your existing clients. Now I love price rises. Ironically, not with my MSP Marketing Edge service. It is still the same price today as it was when we launched it in 2016. It’s 99 pounds a month, plus VAT in the UK and $129 everywhere else in the world. Bit of a warning. We can sign a claxon warning in January. February, we are going to increase the prices for new members. So if you want to lock that price in now, go and have a look. MSP. MSP marketing edge. Just sneaked in a sneaky advert there. You didn’t even know that I’d done it. Anyway, I might not love price Rises for my service. We’re playing a bigger game. We’re playing a subscription. Not a bigger game, a different game. We’re playing a subscription game where we have I mean, we’ve got 700 plus MSPs. It’s a little bit different to the MSP game that you’re playing where you might only have ten or 20 or 30 clients and actually you’ve got to grow their revenue in order to grow your own revenue. So January gives us a massive opportunity to do this, and one of the opportunities in January is to do kind of like a hidden price rise. Now, there are a number of different ways that you might do this. Here’s one that I like. You can email your clients or write to them on some dead tree or talk to them in person, whichever you feel most comfortable with. Some MSPs prefer email, some MSPs prefer to have this conversation in real life. And you can say to them, well, you can either just say, we’re putting our prices up because it’s another year and it’s our annual price rise. But I think sometimes you need to be a bit smarter with that, especially now where we’re still in this kind of cost of living crisis. Everything is so expensive. The economy is still a bit yeah, it’s not like we are full on in good times, like we will be again in about three, four years time because everything is cyclical. The economy is a permanent cycle of up and down and up and down. No, instead, what we could do right now is we could just do a sneaky price rise, a clever hidden price rise. And the easiest way to do that is just to tell your existing clients that you are upgrading them to the 2024 plan. Now, there is a certain amount of fluff and packaging to this, but let me explain what I’m thinking. So you’ve got your current 2023 plan, and what I mean by plan is actually stack, except we’re not going to use the word stack with clients because they don’t know what a stack is. To them, a stack is for pancakes. They don’t understand what it is to have a stack, whatever it is. Stack, you’ve got your security stack or you’re just your stack stack. I’ve said the word stack too many times now. So we’re going to use the word plan and you can write to your clients and you can say, we are automatically upgrading you to our 2024 plan. Dear client, for the last three months or so, you’ve been benefiting from our very latest protection and our very latest plan at no cost to you. We’ve upgraded you to this for your own protection and for our own protection, because it includes the latest security products. As of the 10 February or whatever date you pick, we will now be shifting your pricing over to that 2024 plan. And all you’re doing with this is you’re putting your prices up. You’re not saying to them it’s going up by a percentage, as we say. It’s like an upgrade to their plan. And we’ll talk about what happens if they don’t want to upgrade. In a second, we will come back to that. But you say to them and you need to kind of put some justification in. So you might say to them, without getting too much into detail, and certainly not naming vendors, that’s never a good idea. And they don’t know who they are anyway. But you might say to them, in the last year with the rise of AI, we’ve seen a huge proliferation, that’s a good word, huge proliferation in the amount of AI spam. So we’ve upgraded your email filters. We’ve also seen more AI driven phishing attempts. You explain what phishing is to them. So we’ve upgraded your protection on that. Essentially, as you buy in new things in your security stack and you add those in, which you’re probably just doing anyway, there comes a point where you need to catch up, isn’t there, where the clients need to start paying for these services that you’ve bought over the last year. That’s the opportunity that’s coming up and that’s what you do to them. So you say to them, you’ve been on the 2024 plan for a few months, enjoying that while we get it all settled down, and your pricing will increase on the 10 February to reflect that and to reflect the enhanced investment that we have made into your business. So some of them, well, many of them will just go, okay with this. They just see a price rise. They understand that a price rise is coming. You’ve actually linked the price rise to an increase in performance, to an enhancement to their plan. That’s fine. Everything’s cool. It’s all good in the hood. But there will always be some who don’t want to have that price rise. And you do give them the option to opt out. And what you say to them is, if you don’t want to upgrade to the 2024 plan, please can you book a ten minute call with me where we can just talk through the security implications of that and we can discuss what’s best for your business? Rest assured, if you want to stay on your current plan, your current price point, then you can do that and you give them your link to your calendar. Now, the reason you give them a link to a calendar and don’t just say to them, Hit reply or something like that, is we want to give them a hoop to jump through.

We’re not talking here about raising prices for the sake of it. We’re talking about them paying you back for the stack that you’ve improved. You may put a bit of a hidden price rise in there and actually increase your prices as well. But essentially, we’re talking about getting your clients to pay for the extra protection that you have gone out and got for them. So let’s not make it too easy for them to hit reply and go, no thanks. And as far as they’re concerned, that’s the end of it. Let’s get them on a call, and when you get them on that call, you need to talk them through all the different things, why you’ve put things in place, how it benefits them, what the downsides are of not improving it. At this point, most people will just go, yeah, okay, you’ve got my back. I get that. I completely understand that. Thank you.

It’s annoying. Things are tough at the moment, but we’ll take the price hit, and that’s what you’re kind of looking for. But you will now and again get some people who still say no. And this is the point where you can ask them to sign a disclaimer. Now, this disclaimer we’re going to ask them to sign has no legal power. It’s not something you would ever use in court. But what it is is a psychological tool that will show them they’re about to make a big mistake. That’s very exciting. So this disclaimer, and we actually give one to our MSP Marketing Edge members, I’ve just got another advert in this disclaimer. It’s something which you put in front of them and you talk it through with them and you say, right, please, can we just run through this? And I’m going to record this call. So I’ve got your acceptance of it, and then I’m going to ask you to esign it. So do you accept that by not coming onto the 2024 plan, you’re leaving your email, you’ve got less than advanced security for your email, less than advanced phishing protection, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you just take them through all these things and then you send it to them. And this is critical. This is the most important bit with a disclaimer. You ask them to esign it, or if you’re physically in front of them, you ask them to sign it. Why? Because that is the point. Their brain goes, whoa there, horsey. What’s he asking me to or what’s she asking me to sign? And anytime someone’s asked to sign something, they are committing to something. And that’s the point. Their brain kind of goes, whoa, hang on, stop. What is this? Read this through. What are the implications of this? I am signing, particularly if you had a little bit of text at the bottom that says, by signing here, I confirm that I have denied an upgrade to the 2024 security plan and I accept all of the risks to my business, as detailed above. As I say, no legal ramifications of that whatsoever. A lawyer would probably laugh that out of court. I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer. Don’t get on well with lawyers, but you get the idea. It’s a psychological tool to make them look at this and say, do you know what, maybe these guys are right. Maybe because we’re serious about business, maybe we should just go with that 2024 plan. Paul’s, paul’s. Blatant plug. Blatant plug. Do I deserve another Blatant plug? Do I really? I’ve already mentioned the MSP marketing edge. And I’ve already mentioned the Facebook group. But let me tell you a little bit more about that because it is a free resource for you. You can hang out with a thousand or so other MSPs people just like you who are interested in growing and marketing their business. And it’s completely free. It’s a vendor free zone as well. There’s just me and MSPs there, and we just talk about marketing and growing your business. If you want to get in, grab your phone, tap on Facebook, go to the search bar, type in MSP marketing, go to groups, and you’re looking for the MSP Marketing Group on Facebook, join that. And I look forward to having a talk to you there and helping you grow your business.

[00:19:34] Speaker B: Hey, Paul, thanks for having me. Scott McCrady, CEO, Founder of SolCyber I’ve been in the security space for almost my entire career, was an engineer by trade, but has spent most of my time in managed security services.

[00:19:47] Speaker A: And I’m so excited to have you on the show, Scott, because I’m always looking for unusual guests. I should probably say interesting guests. Interesting and unusual guests who have done cool things that ordinary people like myself, the owners of MSPs, haven’t done. And you’ve had a pretty amazing career. And then the last few years, you’ve been very focused on building your own business, but not in the bootstrap way that many of us build our businesses. You’ve gone out and you’ve done some serious fundraising, and we’re going to explore that later on in the interview. Let’s first of all just talk about your career. So give us sort of a brief history of what you’ve done, some of the cool businesses that you’ve worked for, and some of the stuff that you’ve learned along the way.

[00:20:29] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. As I mentioned, I was an engineer by trade, so when I came out of university, I was setting up networks and security infrastructure. And at the time there wasn’t clarity on what to do with the information coming out of the new security component. So these were back in the days of early firewalls and early intrusion detection systems. And so I had a job at Eds and I started building what would become a sock, but at the time, it was just a place to consume the data and we’d put it into the NOC. I then got hired by a company that ended up becoming semantics MSSP business. And at the time, it was about the only MSSP company out there. There were a couple others that came on soon after, and I just got super lucky. I got the opportunity to get sent to Sydney to build out the Asia Pacific and Japan business, build a stock in Sydney, one in Tokyo, and then we had one in India as well. Spent four years in Sydney, and as everyone likes to tell me, it was a very rough assignment. But somehow I managed to fight my way through living in Australia and then went back and ran the global MSSP business out of DC and then went to a pre IPO FireEye, pre Mandian acquisition. Then the Mandian acquisition happened and built their MSSP business. And it’s been a great career, and it’s really been interesting to see both the changes, but also the fact that in a way, there also hasn’t been that much change since the original models that we set up 20 years ago.

[00:21:53] Speaker A: And what do you mean by that? Because obviously I’ve only been in the MSP world since 2016, and even I’ve seen huge amounts of change in the threat landscape and how much activity there is. Those models that you put in pace 20 years ago, are they broadly still the same models now? Could you explain that a bit more?

[00:22:11] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So the model that we had 20 years ago was something along the lines of and at the time it was only large companies that cared. Is they would go out and pick out their security technologies. They would test them, implement them, buy them, and then take the data feeds from them and ship them off to somebody like us at Symantec. And so it was a very alerting focus model, which was we see data, we correlate the data, we look for when something nefarious is happening, and then we’d send these alerts to the customers that would say, this is really bad. We think this is bad. We’re not sure this is informational. And the customer would have to work their way through these alerts. Believe it or not, that model has not changed that much in 20 years. And that’s part of the problem is if you’re anybody besides a super large bank, it’s really hard to work your way through all these security alerts. And so you’ve got 4500 vendors out there, 1000 seat company has to figure out which ones to buy, purchase, ship those pieces of data off to the MSSP and the MSSP sends alerts back. And then that customer has to consume those alerts and do something with them. And that model is still basically in place 20 years later. And part of the reason why we’re doing what we’re doing is we think that model is probably going to change a lot over the next five years.

[00:23:28] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So there’s three things I want to talk about from this point on, and what your product is and what it does is the final thing we’re going to talk about, if that’s okay, because I know a lot of MSPs. Listening will be very interested and also almost slightly cautious of, oh, my goodness. Is there really another product? But I know that that’s actually you’re hoping that to be the answer to that problem. So we’re going to leave that till the end. Before that, I want to talk about the decision that you made to start your own business, to create your own solution, and then I want to talk about the funding of it. So where were you working and what were you doing when you first had this idea and how did that idea come up and how did you start to flesh it out?

[00:24:11] Speaker B: Yeah, so the idea we call ourselves a security program subscription, and it has MSSP and MDR, it has all these pieces. We can talk about that here in a bit. But the idea actually started way back at Symantec because at the time we couldn’t do much to help the customer. So when there was a problem, it would be on the customer to really go out and try to validate it and then hunt it down and then solve it. And this was back in the day of what we just like AV and there was no tool in AV that the msfp could use to impact the customer in a positive manner. And so when we went to know we were starting. To get into the EDRs, which had the capability to at least do something if there was a problem versus just relying on the AV to solve a problem. And that was the whole reason for leaving, semantic, was this idea was how do we build the next generation MSSP that would allow for an easier time by customers to solve the problem when there was something bad happening. And that’s really where the germination of the idea then if you fast forward it five or six years to what we’re doing now, the tooling and the technology in the market now enables us to actually build and deploy a security program that allows for this sort of 360 capability of both deployment detecting the problem and then solving the problem for the customer. So it’s much less alerting and much less, hey, we fixed this problem. We kick the bad guys out. Go about your day.

[00:25:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. I also love the fact we can hear is it one of your dogs in the background that’s chewing a squeaky toy.

[00:25:53] Speaker B: It’s funny because he has been passed out all day long and he’s very quiet 90% of the time. But lo and behold, when you get on a podcast, that’s when he decides.

[00:26:01] Speaker A: That, I love it.

[00:26:02] Speaker B: His chew toy is very important to him.

[00:26:04] Speaker A: I love it. Come on, Daddy. It’s time for walkies. Stop talking to boring people. Let’s get on with it.

[00:26:09] Speaker B: That’s exactly it.

[00:26:10] Speaker A: So in his classic book, The E Myth Revisited, which I’m sure you’ve read, michael Gerber describes something called the entrepreneurial seizure, which is where you’re working for someone else and you suddenly realize you’ve got to start your own business. And from that point on, it’s an obsession. And the vast majority of people listening to this have acted on that obsession as you did. So for you, you’ve explained that obviously it was a germ of an idea. It was there for a number of years. Had you reached the end of something and this was the right moment to flesh it out, or did you end up leaving something to go and explore this new idea?

[00:26:45] Speaker B: It’s one of those things for me, anyways. It was a very serendipitous type situation. So our primary investors, a company called ForgePoint Capital, they were looking to invest and build an MSSP. I had this idea of the security program subscription, of which the MSSP is the central piece, but there’s all these other components, and so their desire to build one and my desire to bring one to market was really just great timing. So they were willing to step in earlier than what you would traditionally see inside of a fundraising, almost like an incubation type model, because they were really bought in on the idea that this services led motion was going to be wildly different over the coming five or six or seven years. Of which, of course, I was in agreement on that as well. And if you could find the right model, you really had a chance to transform the industry and obviously have some good business success along the way.

[00:27:38] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you mentioned the funding, obviously it doesn’t sound like you were out there doing what everyone in Silicon Valley seems to do, which is go out there and do presentation after presentation and raise a ton of money. Was it still quite a stressful experience for you? I guess you have essentially put your entire ownership of the business on the line in order to raise the money to build the business in the first place.

[00:28:03] Speaker B: It is. And I’ve actually done some fundraising with a previous company as well. And so this whole standard process of building out the business pitch, selling it really a high level of due diligence by the VC community is not a trivial. It’s a lot of work and it’s pretty daunting. And there’s this weird mix where it’s hard right up until enough people get interested or you get enough momentum. Then it becomes easy.

[00:28:27] Speaker A: Right?

[00:28:27] Speaker B: It’s like nobody wants to be the first but no one wants to be the last either. And so with SolCyber, obviously an easier process for sure, but you’re still giving up a lot for the opportunity because you can always go work when you’ve been around the block for a long time. You can always go work for a big company and they’ll compensate you well and so you’re always having this trade off but on the other side.

[00:28:52] Speaker A: You.

[00:28:53] Speaker B: Sort of live in this mental state of excitement on one day and just like terror the next day that it’s going to fall apart. And so obviously business has been good but this up and down motion is definitely different than in a traditional job. That being said, you also can’t really beat it, right? I mean, the chance to build something from scratch and make your own and put your thumbprint on it is an opportunity that’s just fantastic. So I’ve loved it, but it has been a challenge, there is no doubt about that. Yeah.

[00:29:23] Speaker A: And I have to say, as a small business owner, where this is my second business that I’ve built from an idea in a spare bedroom to not massive business, but certainly a nice profitable business that gives me a nice lifestyle. Even I, and I’m sure every MSP, every business owner listening to this, has days where you think the whole thing is going to collapse, it’s all going to go wrong and you have other days where you’re absolutely on a high and it’s the roller coaster of business ownership. I think you just have probably higher stakes than we do. So let’s talk about the product then. Tell us about SolCyber.

You mentioned earlier that you started to create it because there were too many security solutions out there. So what’s the pitch for SolCyber and what are you hoping that you’ll be able to do with it.

[00:30:10] Speaker B: So if you think about a security program for a company, and this is we support companies at 100 employees and we support companies in the tens of thousands, but the tricky bit is three actual pieces.

And this is super boring. Like nobody really wants to talk about this next thing, which is the concept of operations, which is how do you run a dang security operations consistently, repeatably and effectively. So you have to have this concept of operations on how you run the business. Then you have to have the right tools in the right locations to detect all the different threat types. So you need to be able to detect like if something malicious is put on a machine, but you also need to be able to detect if somebody hacks Scott McCrady’s username and password and is just logged in as me and hasn’t done anything malicious yet. They’re just roaming the network as me. And then the third thing is you actually have to have smart people that can actually put all that information together when something bad is happening, recognize it, and then respond. Like actually fix the problem, kick the bad actors out. And that three step process isn’t in place. We call it a security program, and the customers have two choices. They either build it all themselves, they go through and buy all the tools themselves, and then they get an MSSP that sends them alerts. That’s this traditional model. Or there’s something that we think that almost everybody’s going to end up probably doing in the future, which is a security program subscription. And we use all the tools that anybody else uses. So it’s not like Scott McCrady’s endpoint tool. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken the tools that we’ve used in Fortune 500 companies when we’ve integrated them all together into an integrated hung together stack.

We sell that with the MSSP and the MDR capabilities and the response and the detection, and we sell that all per user, per month. And so as a customer, they can either work their way through the 4500 vendors, pick out the ones they think they need, they maybe are right, maybe they’re wrong, go get an MSSP and then pay up front for each of those pieces, or they can use us. And the easiest analogy is like cloud migration. Ten years ago, everybody had like 1000 Dell servers and you have a data center and you have bandwidth and you got a bunch of engineers that run it, and you got software and you have an orchestration layer. And now obviously most people use the cloud and then you just manage the cloud. It’s a very similar concept to us, which is you can go build a security program yourself. But why? Right? It’s not core to what you do as a company, outsource that get an outcome and move on to get back to making the Widget or the service that is important and supporting your customers. And that’s really what SolCyber is. And we work great with MSPs, which.

[00:32:49] Speaker A: Is exactly what we want to hear. So, Scott, thank you so much for your time on this, for sharing the story about the terrifying idea of raising so much money to build a business. Just tell us how we can learn a little bit more about the business and how can we get in touch with you?

[00:33:03] Speaker B: Easy, Scott@solcyber.com. Solcyber.com is the website. And for your MSP audience out there, we love partnering with MSPs. We have a lot of them. We’re very partner friendly. We’ve built channels. So we’re very familiar with what you all want and what you don’t want. And so if anybody’s looking for a really great security partner, we have lots of deals that we send to our MSP partners. We’d love to have a conversation.

[00:33:28] Speaker A: Paul Green’s, MSP Marketing Podcast this Week’s.

[00:33:33] Speaker B: Recommended Book I’m Emmanuel Rose, author of Authenticity Marketing to Gen Z. And since Paul won’t let me recommend my own book, I’m going to recommend anything by Jay Abraham because he will show you how to take your existing customer base and triple your net profit in a very short amount of time.

[00:33:55] Speaker A: Coming up next week.

[00:33:56] Speaker B: Hey everyone. I’m Mariana Henninger. I am obsessed with brand videos and the most amazing, powerful things that they can do for your business and building that emotional connection with your customer. So join me on the podcast to hear all about brand videos.

[00:34:11] Speaker A: And on top of that interview next week, we’re going to be talking about holidays and how important it is for you, the owner or the manager of the MSP to take proper holidays. In fact, I believe you need to put the holidays in your calendar for next year and then protect those holidays from everything. In fact, this is critical for both you and for the health of the business as well. I’ll tell you more next week. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP