Community Meetings

Nicole Singleton Norman: Again. We’re very excited to welcome you to our meeting. We will have quarterly meetings throughout the year, and excited to see each and every one of you. We do recognize that. The society exists to really bring people and businesses and ideas together, and this past year has been very exciting with a number of webinars and legislative Q and A’s and great activities from our committees. So today, I want to just remind you of our vision, which is to be the voice of the industry, defining the standards for professionalism and IT services. We are hosting this meeting in compliance with our code of ethics as well as directly aligned with our vision and mission, and our hope is to have not only a time where we’re updating you on what’s going on with NSITSP, and its volunteer leaders, but also to hear from you. So please feel free to post and chat. We will open up our time together with a live Q and A. As well, but feel free to use the chat to post any questions that you may have as well throughout our time. As far as this recording is concerned, we will make this available. This will be posted within 24 hours on our YouTube channel as well as on the NSITSP website, and that will be posted under our recorded member meetings. For today’s agenda, we will definitely hear from our President Amy with an update on the Society and any reports from the board. I didnít introduce myself. My name is Nicole Singleton Norman, and I am the new executive director to NSITSP. And of course, I cannot even begin to feel the shoes of our founder and initial executive director, Carl. But believe me, I’m learning as I go. I will provide some announcements from the management office. Also, we will have our Vice President Heather, who will introduce our committees which will provide reports. And then today we will highlight our marketing committee and there’s a lot of activity, and we’re eager to hear from our marketing committee. And then again, we will open up for any discussion. Your photo is being captured. So, if you’d like to go off camera, you can do that. Also, the audio is being recorded. At this time, I’m going to ask Amy if she would provide us with any remarks or updates. Please.

Amy Babinchak: Thank you. Good morning, everybody. If you’re new to the concept of NSITSP, let me just take a minute and introduce ourselves to you. Carl P and I founded this organization because it was time was time that our craft became a profession, and as MSP owners and IT people working in this industry for a long time, we were just tired of having to compete with those that are less than professional. This last week I was at SMB Techfest, one of our great vendor partners, and I spoke to many people at our booth, and I asked if they ever ran into a shady IT professional? Well, as you sure you probably know, every one of them said, yes. and we know this problem exists. But there hasn’t been a way for us to fix it. And this organization is going to fix that problem. It hasn’t happened yet, and it won’t happen this year, either. But our hardworking committee members are making strides in that direction little by little, and we will get there in the end. Consumers of our services will be able to tell IT people apart, much like they understand what sort of person in the field of mechanics does, what type of work they know, what to expect from someone at the oil chain shop and from someone whose a certified mechanic with a specialization in electronics. We need that level of understanding in IT, too. So yesterday I had a massage. I know you’re all jealous. The therapist was telling me that she’s going to be off work for a few days because she has to attend to class and finish her continuing education hours in order to renew her license. Imagine that a massage therapist has a higher requirement to be able to work in the field than we do. So, in addition to the work that has to be done to build a system that will recognize and define professionalism, we also need members. Today, we’re getting close to a thousand members of varying types. More business owners are joining their whole company, which is really great to see and although we haven’t actually counted up those associate members in our totals. But at any rate, we’re somewhere between 1,000 2,000 members. But that doesn’t really get us the respect that’s required to make the real change. We need 10,000 members, or even 100,000 members. Today, you’re going to hear from each of our committees. They will have a summary of what they’ve been up to and how you can help. Our feature committee is marketing, and these are the folks that are in charge of getting us to those daunting numbers. But it won’t just be up to them. It is up to all of us to get the word out there that we exist. that we have an important mission. and that everyone needs to join and support the cause. So I want now to bring back Nicole. She’s going to give us a short report on some of our key statistics and information about upcoming events.

Nicole Singleton Norman: Thank you Amy, and just to build on to the numbers that Amy mentioned to us, we currently have

258 professional members. And we have 58 company members. Again. With various numbers of contacts on our database. We also have 16 associate members and 621 members who registered when the organization was just launched as either free members or, continue to join us as registered guests, for a total of 953. So just shy of that 1,000 mark that we’re aiming to get here in very a short order. In addition to that we know that as a membership organization, we’re always looking for volunteers. Is it? With anything you get out of IT? What you put in so highly encourage you to reach out to us. You can shoot us an email to the admin@NSITSP.org to express your interest in our committees. We currently have 4 active committees, and that includes our finance, our governance, legislative and marketing committees. And we will hear from those chairs today. But please please consider getting involved and engaged in addition to the professional development opportunities that we offer. I do wanna just mentioned, about some of our past and upcoming sessions typically each month we have a content-based webinar some of those that we’ve had here in recent months included bad customer interactions hit your bottom line that came out in January. We also had both Amy and Carl lead a session on retirement. So twentieth century. That was a great session. And and as business owners or business leaders this is really key to take note of. We also have highlighted AI is revolutionizing customer service and anatomy of a plan. And all of these recordings are available on the Ns. It ssp.org website the actual recording of the Zoom presentation as well as a transcript. So I encourage you to go out to the Member resources section – it’s definitely one of your benefits as members, and it’s available for you there under the resources section of the NSITSP website. Every month we have a a very, very interactive legislative Q&A. Session. This is great because we learn about various legislations being proposed across the country, and then also receive tips on how to best engage with legislators in our various states or communities.

Nicole Singleton Norman: So all are welcome to attend this. This is a open session, and it takes place every first Tuesday in the month. So we have one that’s approaching quickly on Tuesday, March fifth. Please mark your calendars, and we’ll definitely have email reminders as well. But please put these on your calendar. Because this is a great interactive session and a great time for you to get your hands

on resources. And we do also have legislative resources available on our website.

Nicole Singleton Norman: We will again meet for our next all member meeting on May eighth

Nicole Singleton Norman: again. These take place the second Wednesday of each of the second month of each quarter. So again we’ll meet May, August and November.

Nicole Singleton Norman: and then we also ask you to join our conversation on our social media pages. So if you have not yet joined as members or interested members, or our vendor partners please join in on our conversation. Our social media links are posted here. But we definitely have these links from our website as well. So if you haven’t signed up or followed us, please do so today.

Nicole Singleton Norman: And then we have a number of partners that we encourage you to meet up with us. And then also we also encourage our members to volunteer in supporting Nsi Tsp, at various shows. We typically have a booth with booth during the the vendor or expo opportunities.

Nicole Singleton Norman: These include Channel pro Channel Company exchanges coming up soon. I know that we’ll have a presence with Channel wise coaching cafe Msp. Rescue and the all of the shows at Smb. Techfest as well. So please visit this and we’ll have the links available. In the recording and on our website for these shows.

Nicole Singleton Norman: If you’re interested in volunteering, we definitely equip all of our volunteers with materials. To support Ns Itsp again, it’s a great way to network and connect and further expand our organization so feel free to reach out to us@adminatnsp.org, which is our email again, reach out to us, either through the contact page on our website or via email.

Nicole Singleton Norman: We would love to see you there and and connect. And even if you’re they’re attending, please drop by our booth just to say Hi and and connect with other Ns Itsp members.

Nicole Singleton Norman: I wanna send a a very special thanks out to our vendor partners who’ve already either joined us in 2024, or have renewed for 2024

Nicole Singleton Norman: really, as a newer organization, as we continue to grow and provide value and resources to our members. Our vendor partner community is so important to our organization. So if you know of any vendors that definitely fit in and with Nsp, and would like to be a part of our organization. Please make the connection and then also to our vendor

Nicole Singleton Norman: partners that may be present. Thank you so very, very much, and if you see any of these vendor partners, please thank them as well for just their continued support of Nsi, Tsp.

Nicole Singleton Norman: and there’s more information about our vendor partner program on our website. If you’re interested in being a part.

Nicole Singleton Norman: And at this time I’m going to introduce our Vice President Heather and Heather will introduce each of our committee chairs. Thank you.

Heather Johnson: Thank you, Nicole. I’m really happy to be here today with you all of Valentine’s Day. Happy Valentine’s Day to everybody.

Heather Johnson: Committees! I know

Heather Johnson: you think I don’t want to be on a committee. That’s a lot of work. Or I don’t know about finance, or governance, or legislative or marketing. That’s fine.

Heather Johnson: but it’s actually more fun than you think, and you probably know a lot more than you think you do about these things. We really, we really want to get a wide variety of people to join together and be on these committees, and they’re always looking for more members

Heather Johnson: some of the neat things that I’ve seen by attending some of the meetings in the past is, you know, the finance Committee. They’re not all finance professionals, but they’re working together. They have interest in in, in money issues and getting things working the right way. You don’t need to be an expert in marketing, and you know what you might learn a few things you can bring back to your Msp. As well. So there’s a lot of advantages

Heather Johnson: in volunteering, and we’d really love to see you be a part of one of these committees. So make sure if you have an interest that you join you email admin@nsitsp.org, because we would just love to have you join us there.

Heather Johnson: I’m going to start with the Finance Committee and Tracy Hardin, who’s going to give us? Tell us a little bit about what they’ve been working on.

Tracy Hardin: Oh.

Tracy Hardin: sorry I had to check my mute there. Hey, everybody! Thanks, Heather! You kind of stole some of my thunder. My committee is actually looking for help and like she already said, you don’t have to be an expert in

Tracy Hardin: accounting or finance. All you have to do is care about how.

Tracy Hardin: and sits, spends or money. That’s what we’re looking for. So love to have another one or 2 members to our committee right now, we’re working on a program. Well, budgets done

Tracy Hardin: for this year. So right now, we are working on a program to hey.

Tracy Hardin: it’s like, it’s an expense donation program. So we have particular expenses that we need pay to run in sits as an overall organization. So

Tracy Hardin: we would love to have more donations come into for particular needs. So my committee is working on that. Those are the kinds of things we do in my committee. We yeah, we do budget. And we talk about money. And look at the bottom line and review financials. But we also look at ways

Tracy Hardin: to make the organization.

Tracy Hardin: Can’t use word profitable, but to bring money in to fund the programs that we want to do.

Tracy Hardin: It’s going to take a lot of money to make the changes we want to do. So we are always looking for great ideas to bring in more funds of.

Tracy Hardin: We are also focused on being member driven and not vendor driven. So that’s an extra challenge we’re working on. But that’s what we got going on right now. Would love to have a couple more volunteers on my team as well. Thanks.

Heather Johnson: thank you, Tracy, that brings us to Dennis Wilson and the Legislative Committee.

Heather Johnson: Do we have Dennis here?

Denis Wilson: You let me know. Is that it?

Denis Wilson: Okay? Great? Thank you. Heather. Our committee is providing guidance for advocacy for it service providers.

Denis Wilson: and we have a full complement of of 7 members currently with an average of of 10 attending each of the meetings. So we actually have a a pretty healthy group of folk who meet with us all the time and and are are putting their ideas in and and volunteering to talk to legislators.

Denis Wilson: Anyway, the current projects that we have going on. We’ve got about 4 of them.

Denis Wilson: we currently maintain a brochures and guidelines and video trainings for advocacy efforts by our society members. Second, we hold a monthly Zoom Meetings as

Denis Wilson: as I was stated previously.

Denis Wilson: this is a Q&A. Resource for society members who are looking for assistance in their efforts to open doors with legislators throughout the the country.

Denis Wilson: Third, we have. We’re also building a calendar of pertinent legislation that is actively

Denis Wilson: active. And and so we know, who’s doing, what? To whom, where?

Denis Wilson: And fourth, we have

Denis Wilson:  targeted us several looking for several states that we can target that we can set up test sites with. And and as part of the advocacy, we

Denis Wilson: take what we have currently, and see if that’s sufficient if we need to have more or need to change the the way in which we talk to the legislators and and their staff, and and that kind of thing. So we’re we’re working on setting that up over the next couple of months.

Denis Wilson:  I wanted to thank all of our members for their their

Denis Wilson: assistance in in making great things happen at within this committee, and to invite any society members to our meetings

Denis Wilson: and to participate in advocacy. It is critical to it. Service providers in in this world of growing regulation. Thank you much.

Heather Johnson: Thank you so much, Dennis and I always love hearing what they’re doing. It makes me wanna like run down and with signs and and meet people and make a difference. And so, you know, I hope you’re motivated by that. I mean, obviously, they’re motivating people if they have so many people on their committee. But you don’t have to be on that committee to find out how to make a difference with them. So reach out and figure out what you can do and who you can meet, and who you know to get our voice out there.

Now I have Jason Thomas, who’s going to give us an update about the Governance Committee.

Jason Thomas: Good day, everyone.

Jason Thomas: Quick. Update the Governance committee is generally in charge of our elections. That happened in the fall. and we’re also working on

Jason Thomas: the an ethics

Jason Thomas: framework to to follow. Once we get large enough

Jason Thomas: to actually need some kind of reporting mechanism for that. The third thing we’re working on is actual

Jason Thomas: Let’s see badges or way for members to self certify that they’re agreeing to follow our code of ethics where they can list qualifications.

Jason Thomas: If you’ve been an NSITSP ambassador

where you’re

Jason Thomas: or a recruiter. So you’re bringing in new membership and a way to recognize all of our users. With those.

Jason Thomas: with those activities.

Jason Thomas:  we’ve got a full committee and we’re very busy in the fall with elections, but this time of year it’s there’s not much going on

Jason Thomas: so shorten to the point.

Heather Johnson: Thanks, Jason, that’s great.

Heather Johnson: Last step we have Andy Higgins in the marketing committee meeting or the marketing committee update. I want to give a little tip, though. Before I hand it over to Andy. If you ever see one of our posts, come up.

Heather Johnson: share it like it, and write something.

Heather Johnson: Give us 5 words. If you give us 5 words, we end up being up higher. In other people’s feeds, and that helps us get the word out. So please help us by not only just liking and sharing, but right a little something. Get that conversation going will help us so much.

Steve Kazan: Okay, so that’s my marketing tip. And and Andy, it’s to you, hey, Heather! This is Steve Kazan. Andy is at a conference in a warm tropical place. So I’ve drawn the straw to do the presentation for the marketing committee

Steve Kazan: and if we could switch to the next slide, I’ll kind of walk through what we’re doing. Thank you

Steve Kazan: from the get-go

Steve Kazan: on the tip on Linkedin. If you’re not following the organization on Linkedin.

Steve Kazan: I’m fine with you, going right now to Linkedin and find the National Society of

Steve Kazan:  it Service professionals and follow us right now. And then you will. We will then be in your feed, and you will then start to see all the posts that are coming out.

Steve Kazan: and we’ve gotten one of the things the marketing committee has done in the past, I would say. Month and a half is worked with Nicole and her team to do a lot more posts. So building up the brand of our organization and getting the visibility that we need for for the group.

Steve Kazan: But let me just talk a little bit about what the marketing committee does.

Steve Kazan: and it sort of falls into a couple of different categories. But our main focus is on growing. The organization, both in terms of members and sponsors.

Steve Kazan: If there are folks out there that have friends and relatives that are in the MSP world, or the MSP vendor world

Steve Kazan: do us a favor reach out to those folks, send them the link to our website and get them to sign up. Make you know. Let them know that this is an organization that they should be supporting.

Steve Kazan: If you have vendors that you like, small vendors, that could be sponsors that want to get some love from the Nsitsp. By all means, let us know. Reach out to us or reach out to them. Have them get a hold of us.

Steve Kazan: So this is the part of my slide where we’re doing the reference selling piece. So if you can provide us those tips and leads, that would be great

Steve Kazan: the other thing that the marketing committee does is we have a Webinar series, and our webinar series is very, very focused on

Steve Kazan:  helping build the professionalism of of our audience.

Steve Kazan: and part of that is through

Steve Kazan:  marketing tips, operational tips. But the last one we had I want to kind of point out. because it’s a topic that doesn’t come up very often, which is how to improve your personal interactions.

Steve Kazan: to build your business. And what sort of drove. This was a bad personal interaction

Steve Kazan: call caused the loss of a customer.

Steve Kazan: and Lisa Shore was our presenter. She’s an Msp. Owns an Msp. Understands how the process works.

Steve Kazan: And

Steve Kazan: really, provided a fantastic presentation on how?

Steve Kazan:  you know you as an Msp can

Steve Kazan: build and improve your customer interactions so that you don’t lose customers, and you build their loyalty, and you grow

Steve Kazan: your revenue per client.

Steve Kazan: So if you have a chance, or haven’t had a chance to see that one. I thought that was a really useful, and the feedback we got on that presentation was

Steve Kazan: that it was excellent and very productive.

Steve Kazan: The other topics that we talk about are AI. So this is kind of a personal favorite of mine.

Steve Kazan: We have an AI Work group that meets periodically, and we share information and best practices around how AI is going to impact Msps.

Steve Kazan: if you’re interested in being part of that group or understanding more about. You know what’s going on with AI. By all means reach out to admin@nsitsp.org or reach out to me directly and we’re happy to to invite you to one of the meetings and have you participate and contribute to our learning around what’s going on with AI.

Steve Kazan: We have done a series of webinars related to AI and how it impacts Msps. The first one was about marketing. We then talked about security.

Steve Kazan: which is a huge issue around AI. The last one presentation was in December around automating customer service.

Steve Kazan: Which is, if you haven’t seen the impact of customer Service AI and customer service yet. You definitely will. And you definitely should look into how it’s gonna impact your particular business.

Steve Kazan: If you have any suggestions. Here’s another. Ask on Webinar topics. again, by all means reach out. Let us know what interests you, what drives your business, and what could help you become more professional.

Steve Kazan: And we’re happy to to dig into those and figure out when we can

Steve Kazan: get great speakers and great presenters. So if you know any great speakers or presenters? By all means let us know.

Steve Kazan:  The other thing. We’re spending a lot of time on on our meetings is

Steve Kazan: building the plan. So the group of us we meet every other week.

Steve Kazan: and we’re making good progress on

Steve Kazan: figuring out the messaging and the process of sharing that message

Steve Kazan: and building out the marketing plan. I’ve got to hand it to

Steve Kazan: to Howard. Who’s on the call, and David and and Andy

Steve Kazan: and Cameron, very productive, very forward-looking

Steve Kazan:  discussions and work being done to build out that marketing plan and then communicating that marketing plan out to out to the audience.

Steve Kazan: We are looking for a couple of more volunteers. So if you have marketing experience, if you don’t have marketing experience, if you work for a managed service provider, or you work for a managed service provider vendor.

Steve Kazan: We’re a pretty welcoming group

Steve Kazan: so by all means, you know. Find out and come and attend one of our calls, and see see where that’s headed.

Steve Kazan: I don’t know. I’ve taken a lot of time, but I think this is useful. The the last ask has to do with the newsletter, and so part of the

Steve Kazan: the communication and the value

Steve Kazan: of what the and NSITSP does

Steve Kazan: is success stories. So we’re looking for success stories. So Howard and I, mainly Howard.

Steve Kazan: is it? a writer!

Steve Kazan: Right? That’s his. That’s his superpower. And what he’s looking for are people that have.

Steve Kazan: or stories of improvements, stories of professionalism, and stories where

Steve Kazan: best practices in the MSP World could be shared with other members. So

Steve Kazan: if you’ve got a story that you think would be useful to share or interesting to other managed service providers.

Steve Kazan: let us know, reach out to us. We’re happy to have the conversation. If it looks like it’s really interesting, we’ll we’ll do an interview and write up a little post, and then that post can then be shared and educate the rest of the organization. So

Steve Kazan: with that, I’m happy to take any questions in the Q&A. Session.

Steve Kazan: To get a hold of Howard, if you have a story, it’s HMC@howardmcohen.com.So again feel free to reach out, and he’s posted that in the chat. So heather. I think that’s all I’ve got for this report, but happy again to take questions.

Heather Johnson: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Steve. You know I always feel like the marketing committee. Their webinar series has

Heather Johnson: really educational

Heather Johnson: information that I haven’t really seen anyone else doing. They they really come up with some unique speakers and and and interesting topics. So it’s a great value. It’s it’s really a great value. And I wanna just take 2¬†s to thank all of our committee members, and board members that that volunteer their time so graciously and always with a smile on their face. And and make all of this happen because it’s a lot of work. But

Heather Johnson: it’s fun work, and we’re really doing great things. So thank you. It’s it’s a pleasure to serve with you, and I’ll send it back to Nicole.

Nicole Singleton Norman: Thank you so very much heather. I appreciate it and thank you, Steve, for also sharing the marketing update. I definitely appreciate that and at this time we do want to open up for a. Q&A. And any questions that our members have

Nicole Singleton Norman: feel free to come off mute and raise your hand. Listen! I think that would kind of help us more if you were to raise your hand and we’ll entertain those questions.

Steve Kazan:  so, Nicole, we did have a question about the status of the CISA organization and the CISA activity.

Steve Kazan: and I don’t know

Steve Kazan: chat about that a little bit.

Karl Palachuk: I think Chris is not on the call, but Chris Barber is our representative to CISA and he sits on the small business community sub council, or whatever. I don’t know if they call it exactly, but it’s the small business council for CISA with the Federal Government.

Karl Palachuk: and they’ve taken a long time to get organized, but they are finally organized and meeting. And so you know, one of the things that we talked about. Amy, Amy and I talked about 2 and a half years ago. We wanna seat at the table whenever anybody is talking about it consultants.

Karl Palachuk: And this is a perfect example of something that

Karl Palachuk: Chris has worked crazy hard to get us a seat at the table and is now representing us. with this board. And there are other, obviously, a couple of dozen small business organizations that are on that board or on that committee. But NSITSP is absolutely one of them. So they haven’t really

Karl Palachuk: done a great deal yet, except get organized. But they’re finally organized, and they will be meeting, and with luck Chris will have more to report to us in about 3 months.

Amy Babinchak: We’re also a member of the It Services Sector Council with CISA

Amy Babinchak: And so we actually have 2 seats with system now, and that’s it is critically important to our overall mission. As Carl mentioned. Now, we’ve not been good at disseminating that information to our members. That’s something that that we do have on our to do list to improve that to get that out to you and our regular newsletters, and also to do some publishing.

Amy Babinchak: And we have Mark lined up to help us do that because he’s a member also. So

Amy Babinchak: I appreciate our volunteers, and it’s in the work. So you’ll be seeing a lot more information coming from our size. Affiliation

Amy Babinchak: any more questions from anybody.

Amy Babinchak: Larry had an important tip in the

Amy Babinchak: in the comments. If you haven’t seen it about Linkedin, and

Amy Babinchak: you know the the best way to get the the biggest impact. That is.

Amy Babinchak: it’s important to understand how the various social medias work. And he’s right. So

Amy Babinchak: actually sharing the post on Linkedin. And then, you know, adding your own message to it is the best way to get to

Amy Babinchak: increase their reach for us in Linkedin.

Nicole Singleton Norman: Great! Thank you and pierce would you like to unmute?

Pierce Rehn: You see that your hands raised time?

Pierce Rehn: And so I’m just kind of getting a feel for the right areas. I was wondering, like recommendations. for, like maybe future webinars. Which committee should I

Pierce Rehn: look at

Pierce Rehn: being part of, or offering things for questions I get from my customers to, I guess, help. Other Msps stay up to date with.

Pierce Rehn: for instance, like new cyber insurance and the pros and the cons, and what these MSPís are going to need to.

Pierce Rehn: I guess, on the consultant side, be aware of like regular training is definitely something they need to check the box. And these are some vendors

Pierce Rehn: that we use like, where’s the collaborative

Pierce Rehn: work that, or what committee can help

Pierce Rehn: or other Msps that become members to join? Look for this information?

Steve Kazan: So pierce the answer to your questions. The marketing committee. right? So send an email to either admin at Ns Itsp or to me. It’s Steve Kazan at

Steve Kazan: enter onion.com

Steve Kazan: And yeah, we would love to have

Steve Kazan:  topics for webinars, and I guess my one question is,

Steve Kazan: cyber insurance. Is that a topic that

Steve Kazan: you’re interested in. I mean it definitely. There are

Steve Kazan: presenters out there brokers ready to sell their wares, but they’re probably also some experts out there that can talk about what’s changed and the impact on Msps in terms of cyber insurance.

Steve Kazan: So do I get a thumbs up. Is that a good topic.

Pierce Rehn: Yeah, I think so. I just think a lot of I see a lot of my customers. You know they have it, but they don’t really know what it is or what they need to do if they ever use it.

Pierce Rehn: And a lot of Msps, they don’t sell it, and I’m not on the sales side, obviously a little bit of it, but

Pierce Rehn: a lot of it, you know. Customers aren’t going to pass if they do need to use it because they’re not checking all the compliance or the regulations to cover their insurance policy.

Pierce Rehn: whether it be multi-factor on admin accounts or regular training. and what is regular training? Does that differ from industry? Does that differ from geographic location?

Pierce Rehn: There’s a lot of details in there that I think could help. and Ms. P. Provide more value to their end customer, and as an It. Professional

Pierce Rehn: or a service provider, you know.

Pierce Rehn: differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Steve Kazan: Great. Thank you for that. That’s good.

Amy Babinchak: So, Pierce. I’m 100% on board with you. With the insurance question, one of the things I had to do with my tech staff, because as it people, you know, they just want to jump in and solve a problem.

Amy Babinchak: And so, you know, we had a little tabletop exercise on cyber insurance. and I said to them, You know what’s the first thing that you do when, if there’s if there’s been some kind of malware incident.

Amy Babinchak: and of course they were like, you know, prevent the spread, you know. Disconnect the Internet. Do you know, do all this stuff? I was like, no. the first thing you have to do is find out if the customer has cyber insurance.

Amy Babinchak: and if they do, what are the requirements that that insurance policy has

Amy Babinchak: because oftentimes it’s that you have to contact them first before you touch anything. And so is it, you know, if we jump in and start helping, we’re actually

Amy Babinchak: done done the wrong thing in that case. And we did a few months ago. I’ll probably

Amy Babinchak: 6 months ago, or maybe even longer ago now, but it’ll be in the recordings on the resources section of the website. You have to log in first to see that.

But we did do a webinar on insurance

Amy Babinchak: a little different than what you typically see in the industry. So we see out there. So maybe have a listen to that, and then we can

Amy Babinchak: certainly talk about having another one, because it’s a big topic.

Amy Babinchak: It’s got so many details in it as you outlined. The other thing, though I wanted to mention, was the continuing education. And that’s something that we’ve charged the Governance Committee to work on

Amy Babinchak: some, and they are looking at some sort of badging program from us and coming up with those numbers of what’s reasonable amount of continuing education. And

Amy Babinchak: as part of our process, right toward moving toward

Amy Babinchak: that verified professional status in our in our industry. So you, the topics that you brought up actually are spanning at least 2 of our active committees right now.

Karl Palachuk: And I would just note in the resource area if your professional member log in go to the resource area

Karl Palachuk: page 2 is where you’re gonna find that recording on insurance deep dive. And from Brian Mahone, one of our members. And

Karl Palachuk: you know the best thing about this presentation. He’s not trying to sell you anything. So it is literally like different from what other people are doing in our industry, because so many people they just want to sell you insurance. Right? So, this is a great presentation. But it’s also something we need to revisit, because

Karl Palachuk: that world changes, you know every 20 min. And

Karl Palachuk: it’s huge, and it’s not going away. And so it’s a great topic, and we we should revisit it. I would also note that you mentioned selling it. Unless you’re an insurance agent, you can’t sell insurance so but you can partner with people who do? You can’t get a kickback, you know. Blah blah blah

but you should absolutely be pushing your clients to to get it.

Karl Palachuk: And obviously you should look at your own contracts. You know

Karl Palachuk: I did a thing in a different group about everybody. Show up with your insurance. Contract, and we’ll go through them together because a lot of insurance companies provide training that nobody ever takes.

Karl Palachuk: And so your clients may actually have within their liability and cyber security policies

Karl Palachuk: training on cyber security.

Karl Palachuk: And some of it is pretty good right? They obviously outsourced to a training organization. But it’s already in their insurance agreement, so they should be taking advantage of that

Steve Kazan: and kind of on a related topic, the AI discussion we had around security. They talked about having an acceptable use compliance

Steve Kazan: policy. So if you’re interested in security and you don’t haven’t looked at one, we do have a sample

Steve Kazan: up on the nsitsp.org website.

Steve Kazan: We also have an AI toolkit.

Steve Kazan: So if you’re looking for sources of useful AI information, check out the toolkit. It’s also up on that same website.

Nicole Singleton Norman: Thanks, Steve, you. I mentioned the AI Work group. Can you provide us with an overview? I know we’ve talked about our committees. But please provide us with more information about the AI work group and how folks can get engaged with it.

Steve Kazan: So it’s just

Steve Kazan: kind of a casual group. We started last summer with people that had questions

Steve Kazan: about how AI was going to impact their business.

Steve Kazan: And now, since creating the toolkit and posting it, we update and refresh the toolkit.

Steve Kazan: The work group comes up with ideas for topics, critical topics to get more information about. We share the latest tools and the latest trends. So, whether it’s Microsoft co-pilot questions over bard or open ais products, we share product information. But we also focus on solutions. So you know, customer service, what’s the impact there? Finance? What’s the impact there? And sometimes it’s just sending out an email? Hey, I read a cool article about how AI is gonna impact the MSP world. And we just share those articles within the group. So right now, I think we’re up to about 8 people. But if that’s a topic that you’re interested in or concerned about, you know, by all means reach out, and we’re happy to welcome you in. And again, if you can add information from a different perspective that would be very useful for us and very helpful. So, we meet roughly once a month. As topics come up and things change. and you know any sort of AI related topic is kind of fair game, whether its people process or technology, you know. And the impacts there. we’re happy to have those chats with everyone.

Nicole Singleton Norman: Great. Thank you. Are there other questions? Is there anything that the group would like to share with us?

Karl Palachuk: I would just like to encourage anybody who’s a paid member to go to our events, Page, you know, and just look at when the committees are meeting, and you know, once a month, or whatever, just look and see what’s coming up and jump into these? You are absolutely welcome to any meeting that we have, and we would love to have more people. You don’t have to be on a committee to be there, and you know the committee meets, and there’s 6 people in your number 7. You’ll certainly be able to join in the conversation, even if you can’t vote on things. And very often no votes are taken. But many things are discussed. So join in the conversation.

Larry Mandelberg: Yeah, Nicole, I just want to, oh, you know, explicitly welcome Pierce. Thank you for coming by and checking this out. I just want to say to everybody, I think, one of the hidden nuggets of gold in the NSITSP are these webinars. They’re really good, and they’re really informative, and they’re really valuable. And I think they’re really excellent ways for you to gain knowledge that will help you in your business. And I’m always looking for ways we can do more promotion of these videos, and I don’t know what the answer is. But can somebody talk about who has access to them, and how membership provides certain access, and that they can’t get just by being, you know, by being a non member.

Nicole Singleton Norman: Larry, if I heard your question correctly, you’re asking about the membership resources that are available. And how can our members access those?

Larry Mandelberg: Well, kind of there’s some of I know some of our web webinars are open to the general public, and some of them are not. and that’s more. What I was asking about is the differentiation between us. Cause there’s a lot of value and membership. If you have access to those other webinars.

Nicole Singleton Norman: I agree with you definitely. Thank you, Larry. We do offer multiple types of webinars, and those are communicated to the general public will say, You know, all are welcome to attend and then those that are specific to members those are offered at no charge. But then we do have some that are separate fee for none members. So to your point, Larry, it definitely pays to be a member, especially if we’re offering, you know, anywhere from 2 to 3 web based development opportunities through NSITSP. So those we definitely check out under meetings regularly, we’re constantly updating and providing information on any of the content that’s becoming available or programs that are becoming available. So you can access that on our website under the meetings tab.

Larry Mandelberg: Thank you, Nicole, thank you.

Nicole Singleton Norman: And then also, just to add to that the recordings are there as well. So if you miss the live participation, you can definitely check out those recordings as well.

So there’s no other questions at this time. Please keep in mind that you can reach out to us at admin@nsitssp.org also. We would love to have all of you engaged, whether it’s supporting us at any of the upcoming industry events, or on a committee, or a combination of both. Please feel free to reach out. Be mindful that we have our next legislative open. Q&A. And we’re hoping to see all of you there, and that will be the second Tuesday in March second Tuesday in March, at 10’clock Pacific time again. Thank you. And we will get an email out to let you know when this recording is available. And so if you have a company, a membership and want to engage other company representatives, they can definitely check that out under our member resources. But yeah, thank you all for your participation today. Bye.

[00:00:01.820] – Karl

Welcome, everybody, to the Q3 meeting for the National Society of IT Service Providers. This is Karl, and we’re going to go ahead and kick this off. Few notes. This meeting is open to the public and anyone may attend, including non-members. It’s being conducted in accordance with our code of ethics and our mission, vision, and values, which are on the NSITSP or website. If you do not wish to be on the video, turn off your camera. If you do not wish to be on the audio, please turn off your microphone. I might ask somebody from Chicago to turn off his camera as well. You can find the recordings after this. They’ll be posted at NSitsp.Org/meetings. There we have the recordings. We put them up on Zoom as well. Follow our Zoom channel, which is just their new thing is @ sign N-S-I-T-S-P, but I’m not sure why they did that since nobody needs the @ sign in order to find us. But anyway, that’s where we store our stuff for now. Anyway, we shall see what the future holds. Today, we’re in talk. We got our regular stuff, some reports from Amy and myself, introducing our new Association management company, and then reports from the committees and lots of actually cool stuff.

[00:01:31.540] – Karl

We are so busy, we can hardly see straight. So with that, I will turn it over to Amy for notes on the industry and explain your picture here, which isn’t really you.

[00:01:44.460] – Amy

Yes, it is really me. We’ll talk about that another time, though. I did use an AI service to generate some new headshots, but it generates headshots from your existing photos, so it’s pretty cool. Maybe what I’ll do is I’ll write a little blog post about it.

[00:02:02.310] – Karl

That would be excellent.

[00:02:03.650] – Amy

Let’s flip to that next slide. The board did some really interesting things this quarter, and I don’t want to steal what’s going on because a lot of it comes bubbles up from the committees because that’s the way that we’re organized here. But a few of the decisions that we made are on the board here, and I wanted just to highlight it, and then we’re going to hear more about them as the meeting goes on. The board made the decision to allow in-kind vendors to come in at the friends level, and this is for those that help actively promote our organization, provide booths at their events that can be quite pricey otherwise. And so we’re going to reward that type of activity with the friends level vendor membership for those in kind donations. We also really took some time to work on our value proposition, which we’re going to be working on for our marketing program and membership drive that will be coming in cooperation with our new Association Management company, which you will hear about. The legislation committee has got some proposed legislation. They’re going to hold a special meeting on, and Dennis is going to tell you more about that.

[00:03:29.100] – Amy

I also wanted to highlight the AI Roundtable and the webinars that the marketing committee has put together because they’re absolutely phenomenal and are things that are just not found elsewhere in our industry. So I think I want to be sure everyone is aware that those are happening. Last quarter, we reported that we started to have some meetings with CISA. And this quarter, we got an invitation to join one of their committees officially as members. So that’s exciting for us, and we hope that that’s going to continue. We’re pursuing other committee membership positions as well. And Chris is going to have more information about that. And the big drum roll here is that we have hired a professional management team for the Association. And as you heard last quarter, Karl is stepping down as executive director, and we’ve hired his replacement. And Karl is now an ex-officio member consulting with the board as of April, August first. They both start with As. Those are just items that I wanted to highlight that the board worked on this last quarter and that you’re going to be hearing some more of from the committees here as the meeting goes forward.

[00:04:53.470] – Amy

So thank you.

[00:04:55.010] – Karl

Very good. Thank you. And I just want to assure people I’m not going anywhere. I’m just changing the nameplate on my desk and working a lot less. I think most of you know I’m fundamentally lazy. So a few stats. We have 200, as of this morning, 235 paid professional members, plus now, in the last couple of months, 43 company memberships. And the beautiful thing about that is companies can have all of their members join as associates. We only have eight of those who are currently logged on. I would encourage all of the company memberships to go ahead and have your employees log on as associates. Associates can access everything on the website, attend the meetings, download stuff, do whatever they need, use our logo on their business cards, so forth. They just can’t vote. You get one vote per company. But pumping up those associate memberships will help us when we go out and try to get sponsors and so forth. Please pay attention to that. We also have 312 registered guests, many of whom are on this call, all of whom should pony up at least $125 for an individual membership or 150 for a company membership.

[00:06:18.630] – Karl

The price is cheap, and if you’re actually interested in helping our industry, the little bits add up very, very quickly. And we’re going to have another tough year for the next year. But I think if we continue to grow, we will be in great shape. I just recently went to both events for ASCII and COMPTIA. Ascii claims 1,400 members and COMPTIA 2,400 IT service provider members. Those are both very small numbers. And if you think about it, I was talking to Jerry from ASCII, and I said between the two of us, we have represented almost none of the IT industry. So the possibility for members is incredibly high and we need to just do it. In terms of finances, we have 65 renewals in August, so we will have a nice little bump here, and then for the rest of the year, 10, 20, 30 per month. Take this opportunity to convert your membership to a company membership if you can. Certainly move from the old system to the new system. If you have any questions, send an email to service@NSITSP.Org, and we will assist you in making that happen. It really is time for everybody to step up.

[00:07:44.820] – Karl

We’ve been doing this for a couple of years, and some people have told me specifically, I’m waiting to see if it’s going to take off. It’s like, well, okay, we get almost 2,000 people on our mailing list. I don’t know what you’re waiting for, right? Please join us now. Now, tadah, I want to introduce Nicole Singleton, who is with Bolder Strategies. We’re going to talk to Chris a little bit about this, but our executive search lasted months and months and months and we talked to many, many people. Nicole graduated with a business degree, I believe, from University of Michigan, Go Blue. And she’s also has a PhD from Walden University. So she is very, very well qualified and has been running, even though she looks quite young, she’s been running Bolder Strategies for over 20 years. So welcome, Nicole, and thank you for being here.

[00:08:47.860] – Nicole

Thank you. Thank you so very much, Karl, and thank you for thinking. I’m a PhD candidate. Not yet. I’m coming up on defending my dissertation soon, so I’ll be back to Nicole soon, but not soon enough. I will say this industry, Association Management, is perfect for me because I committed my life to being a professional student. I also have three masters degrees: MBA and market strategy, a masters of applied communication, and then my masters in divinity. Commitment to continue to education and professional development. I represent a team that’s headquartered out of Denver. We have other satellite offices across the country. The company has been in existence almost 22 years. I do have a colleague that’s online who serves as one of our project coordinators, but we do have team members across the country. We currently work with a little less than 30 national and international associations, professional societies, and medical societies. But today we’re very proud to now be a part of the NSITSP family. We’re so excited to really bring to bear four NSITSP lessons learned and best practices that we’ve garnered from working with diverse industries to further build upon what you all have started establishing the last two years.

[00:10:22.880] – Nicole

As I listen to the membership numbers and the potential for membership growth, we’re excited to be a part of helping drive that forward. No, Karl doesn’t get to go anywhere. He said he’s working less. He’s probably working harder because I’ve been trying to figure out how to get everything from his head to mine. I don’t know yet how to do that, but know that we’re working diligently to learn all things in this NSITSP. Moving forward, we will have just one centralized email communication that will be service@NSITSP. Org instead of multiple emails, I know that you’ll become familiar not only a name, but face with the team that’s assigned to support NSITSP on a daily basis. But again, and I will put that in chat, we do ask that all communications moving forward will go to the service@NSITSP. Org. We applaud the selection task force because as Karl indicated, there were several months put it into that evaluation and issuing RFPs and reading through RFPs, and we know that that’s a diligent process because it really does impact the future of the organization. On behalf of all of voter strategies, know that we are truly committed to embracing the mission and really being the hands feet and helping to provide that brainpower too to continue to push the organization forward.

[00:11:56.870] – Nicole

Thank you so very much for selecting us to partner with you. Very good.

[00:12:01.530] – Karl

Thank you and welcome. By the way, I’ve been a PhD candidate since 1986, so you can take as long as you need to.

[00:12:10.300] – Nicole

You know the pain there.

[00:12:12.630] – Karl

At some point, I had to go get a real job. A huge thank you, Amy, had mentioned that we are giving some in-kind memberships. The ChannelPro has been very supportive, as well as the channel Company, letting us have a booth at Exchange. Channelwise did some coaching stuff with Amy and Jeff Ponsinai in May, and Techfest is having us at all of their shows. So a huge thank you to these folks. And when you attend these events, please thank them for being kind to us. Our next step is to try to get them to encourage all of their members and attendees to not just drop by the booth, but also join us. We have some recorded webinars. If you have not looked at our stuff, please go to NSITSP. Org and just look around, especially if you go to the meetings, you’ll see there’s a recorded meetings subfolder. We have lots of them, including the amazing training that Peggy Tierney-Galvin did on press relations, which is members only, and all of the recordings are members only. Then Larry Mandelberg last month did the change management and a really great introduction to an organization that I think all of us can benefit from.

[00:13:36.850] – Karl

So go check those out. Those are resources for you to take advantage of. And I know some people filter our email right to the side and never get back to it. So take a minute and go check out our website. Next up, the marketing committee has an AI roundtable coming up that is next week on the 17th. They’re going to do a series of roundtables, and they’ve decided the first one is going to be on lead management and so forth. Steve Kazan is putting that together along with the entire marketing committee. Again, go sign up for that, nisitsp.Org/events. The legislative committee is going to focus in on this a little bit later in their section, but the legislative committee next week is going to have the first of an open Q&A section. Part of what they want to do, and if you read the blog post or the event that came out at slash events, Dennis put together a great paragraph that said, look, we are committed to educating people on the entire process, but also in a way that is practical and gets us involved. Someday there’s going to be legislation, but that’s not the day to start building relationships.

[00:14:59.470] – Karl

The day to start talking to a legislature is yesterday. The second best day is today. Please go to our site and check this out. Attend this. You’re going to see why you’re going to want to attend. There might be some controversy around this first meeting, and I’m okay. I completely welcome that. I think a lot of our focus in this organization has to be not to just get a bunch of people together and enjoy being together, but to change the industry to increase the standards. Whether some people like it or not, there needs to be a velvet rope that gets people into this organization and into this industry. There need to be standards and there will be standards one way or the other. I think we should be involved in creating them. Please check out that meeting and Dennis will have more about that later. Huge thanks to all of our vendors and there should be more logos on here. At least one person I saw joined early and I’m going to be contacting him and saying, Hey, you bought me a beer. Now you should buy a membership. We need our vendor sponsors to renew, but we also need more vendor sponsors.

[00:16:17.120] – Karl

That’s going to be a huge push in the next year. Thank you to all of these. I know of at least one more logo that’ll be up there next month, but we need more and more and more. Please keep that in mind. Looking forward, mark your calendar now. November eighth is our next all-member meeting. We do the second Wednesday of the second month of each quarter. In November, we have our next member meeting and a ton of stuff is going to happen between now and then. The marketing committee has at least one webinar every month between now and then, and we have our elections. Right now is election season. Fileings are open right now. Anyone who wants to serve, there are openings on all committees and the boards. Roughly half of all of the bodies are up for election this year. That’s our deal. We try to do about half of the people elected each year for a two-year term. We have some consistency going forward, but we also have the opportunity for some turnover. If you have been thinking that you might want to serve on a committee or on the board now is a great opportunity to jump in.

[00:17:37.830] – Karl

Filing closes on August 31st, and then campaigning, which I already saw somebody who I won’t name, but great, great promotion on LinkedIn of, Hey, I’m running for office. This makes you look good to your clients. This is actually not a bad marketing tool to go out and say, Hey, I’m running to be one of the leaders of this professional association. Spread that on your social media on Facebook and LinkedIn and let your clients and prospects know that you are a professional in this industry. Then the voting is September 14th to the 22nd. Basically, let’s say there’s three positions open on the board. I will announce who those three top vote getters are in a blog post on that Saturday. Voting went very, very smoothly last year, and we already have people who have signed up and are running for office. Just go to nisitsp. Org and you’re going to see a bright yellow banner across the top. You can click to Run for Office. You can also look at who has already filed by clicking on Meet the Candidates. Basically, the yellow banners on that page on that website are all about the elections. Now, Mr.

[00:18:58.790] – Karl

Christopher Barber, who is one of our board members, but he’s also been our representative with CISA and has been instrumental in working with CISA and getting us represented on the small business subcommittee. Chris are you here and has your microphone on?

[00:19:18.000] – Chris

Yeah, I’m here, Karl.

[00:19:19.240] – Karl

I know you were here earlier.

[00:19:20.870] – Chris

Yeah, I’m definitely here.

[00:19:24.290] – Karl

What’s up with CISA?

[00:19:25.900] – Chris

Oh, my goodness. All right, folks. A lot going on here. I believe in brevity everywhere you can do it. I’m just going to try to plow through this. Things are humming along, albeit at the speed of government. We’ve determined as an organization that there are two ways that we should engage with CISA initially. This doesn’t represent everything we’re going to do with them, but this is just a way to get the party started, if you will. I’m happy to report that CISA agrees with us. Those two different ways are getting NSITSP members in the work groups that they have. This is a slow moving process, like everything with the government. But I’d like to start collecting interested by ITSP members for this. If you’re interested in participating in one of the work groups, Karl’s got a URL up on the screen there where you can see the different work groups that are available. If you don’t mind, if you’re interested, take a peek, see what work groups speak to you, and then shoot me a quick email, chriss@cheaperthangeek. Com, that you’re interested. I will do what I can to get all interested parties involved. We’ll have to see what the response rate is like.

[00:20:44.890] – Chris

But shoot them to me, I’ll get it going. We’re not quite where we need to be yet with CISA on this, but we’re getting there. I figured might as well have everybody ready to go so that when we get the word, we’re good to go. I’m talking to these folks on average every three days, so it’s pretty frequent communication. Then the other way that we’ve identified a way to interact with them is CISA, as you might expect with their acronyms, is a very acronym-focused organization. No site, of course, to the NSITSP, but everything they talk about is acronyms. Another way that we’re going to get engaged with them is called the ESF Collaboration, and that stands for Enduring Security Framework, folks. This is a collaborative organization between the NSA, the National Security Agency, and CISO. It’s been around for about 15 years, but only recently has this collaboration been a publicly discussed scenario. They craft solutions around specific key areas of cybersecurity. Right now, those areas are software supply chain. We’ve all heard about how that can go paywire. 5g, identity and access management, edge computing, and also semiconductor ecosystem security. And everybody on this call realizes the value of all five of those current concerns, but they wanked and smiled and made it sound like there’s going to be some more coming.

[00:22:24.140] – Chris

So as that materializes, I’ll keep everybody focused. I did everything I could to get these folks interested, put on my teens, tap dancing shoes. I think I got them excited about working with us. Everything else that we do, this is heavily centered on building relationships. That’s the current MO. I’m working on brokering in-person meetings with these folks.

[00:22:53.370] – Karl

Looking.

[00:22:54.180] – Chris

To get a touch more of their facility. One of the folks on the call that’s this big identity and access management guru is basically one of my neighbors. We’re having coffee sometime soon, but I want to get more of us involved in this process. As soon as we can get that section off the ground, I’ll let you know. Again, I’ll be looking for volunteers that may want to participate in this. We’ll keep everybody posted. It’s a mission that we found was easy to get the government excited about because we are a fabulous conduit for this nation’s small business ecosystem. Again, a lot going on. Wanted to keep it brief, but that’s what we have so far. If you have questions, comments, concerns, feel free to email me. Feel free to call me. We’re all in this together and here’s to making more progress. We’ve made a lot of progress in the years, so we’re keep plugging along here.

[00:23:54.640] – Karl

Very good. Thanks, sir. Oh, Larry posted your email, so perfect.

[00:23:59.750] – Chris

Thank you, Larry.

[00:24:00.780] – Karl

It’s funny, when I filled out the paperwork for the first committee with CISA, they were like, we want these people, these people, these people. One of their aspirational requests is if there is a nonprofit association that represents small IT service providers, I’m like, check. They literally were looking for us. That’s a beautiful thing.

[00:24:23.970] – Chris

Yes, sir. This is going to go well.

[00:24:26.000] – Karl

All right. I think Heather is not on the call, and that’s okay. She’s in Amsterdam, and it’s late in her day. But let me go ahead and introduce the committee chairs and what they’re up to. And we’re going to go ahead and kick it off with Tracey with the Finance Committee.

[00:24:48.110] – Tracy

Hello, NSITs peers. Hey, I am the Chairwoman of the Finance Committee. And what we’re up to this month, going into the third quarter, we’re working on budget for next.

[00:24:58.410] – Karl

Year already. So we’re reaching out to the committees.

[00:25:01.470] – Tracy

Trying to get an idea of what they would like to spend money on for the coming year.

[00:25:06.700] – Karl

Also, we are a short-run member.

[00:25:09.340] – Tracy

So if you would.

[00:25:11.390] – Karl

Like to.

[00:25:12.140] – Tracy

Join, I’m sure there.

[00:25:13.680] – Karl

Will be some.

[00:25:14.120] – Tracy

Information here at the end of today’s meeting to tell you.

[00:25:16.260] – Karl

How you can volunteer.

[00:25:18.080] – Tracy

Keep in mind, I know it’s the Finance Committee, and it sounds like we’re all into a lot of accounting. You do not have to know anything about accounting. You don’t have to know anything about QuickBooks or keeping up with books. You don’t even have to be that good at math because I’m not. All we want you to do is care about money and how we spend money.

[00:25:37.960] – Karl

We like to watch the funds and.

[00:25:40.950] – Tracy

Make sure they are spent responsibly. If that’s something that appeals to you, please.

[00:25:45.410] – Karl

Join my committee.

[00:25:47.380] – Tracy

And we don’t do just the budget. We also look for other ideas and talk to.

[00:25:51.760] – Karl

The board about other ways to raise money and manage money for the group.

[00:25:56.870] – Amy

So back to you, Karl. That’s what we’re up to right now.

[00:26:00.240] – Karl

Thank you. I would note the Finance Committee did major lifting on creating the new membership program. We have a new donation tab on our site, and that was completely from them. They’re working on a lot of ways, ideas for us to bring money into the world. Anyway, that’s great stuff. We do have openings there. Plus, of course, those positions will be available if you want to run for office. All right. Andy Higgins from the marketing committee, is he here? Or if not, we’ll call on Steve. Steve was here.

[00:26:45.980] – Steve

Yeah, I’m here. All right. Yeah. This is Steve from the marketing committee. I don’t hear Andy, so I’ll jump in. The marketing committee is doing a few things. One of them is, as Karl mentioned, a stream of webinars, one a month, I think, is a reasonable amount. The first one is coming up next week. If you haven’t signed up for it, please do that. It’s focused on using new AI tools to drive marketing and sales strategies, plans, programs, activities for managed service providers. It should be very specific. We have an expert in that area doing the presenting, and there’ll be time for questions and answers. That’s the first one. Second and third, we’ve got a couple of topics around more customer service, more marketing, and then a lifestyle discussion about what to do after your MSP life. The other thing I should mention is an AI working group. There were a handful of folks from the organization that wanted to get together to talk about the impact of AI on their businesses. We got together. We’ve had a couple of different meetings. We’re putting together a tool, a written document that includes links and articles and contacts in the AI space.

[00:28:18.230] – Steve

If you’d like that to be shared with you, reach out to me. If you’d like to participate in that AI working group, we meet currently every other week. The conversations are relatively short. We just share best practices, information, resources around AI as well. Feel free to educate yourself and jump in and join us on those calls. With that, I think that’s the report from the marketing committee.

[00:28:48.440] – Karl

Very good. Thank you, sir. Governance. I don’t see Jason or Lisa Marie on the call. Is there someone else from the governance committee who can give us a quick update? Don’t be shy. All right, well, governance is actually… They’re the ones who finalize the dates and times and so forth for the election. They’re mostly on hold for now, waiting to see what’s next, whether we’re going to do something with an Ethics Committee or whatever. The governance committee did a massive amount of work the first year in propping up and creating the outlines of our entire organization. Now they mostly just have the little details to take care of, but they also need members. Even though they have less challenges ahead of them than the other committees, they do have quite a bit of work to do. Finally, I want to introduce Dennis from the legislative committee, and we’ve been doing a little focus on each committee a little bit. This month, this quarter, it’s the legislative committee. Dennis, why don’t you tell us what you’re up to, which is a lot.

[00:30:13.520] – Dennis

Thank you. I’m Dennis Wilson, and I appreciate the opportunity to have been the chair of the committee for a little bit over a year now. The legislative committee is tasked to build a knowledge base of active bills affecting our industry and to work at building a legislative self-advocacy skill set amongst our members and to act as a recommender to the board of directors. We currently have seven voting members, which has us at full capacity. We have another about seven visiting members and a staff member as well. We have four project types that we currently are working on. The first one being that we follow the right to repair bills, the regulatory bills that affect MSPs, privacy legislation, and the like. For instance, the right to repair bill, SB 244 in the state of California, just got voted and passed the Senate. And now in the funding phase. And so that is going to be moving forward and probably see that before the end of the year as to getting that turned into legislation here in California. We are planning to have a forum on the website that will maintain open communications about these bills with all the members and set it up a two way communication.

[00:31:56.710] – Dennis

So I will keep you abreast of that. The second area is guidelines for members to help with conversations and bills. These are printed and/or videoed, so we have them in both formats. We have a guidance brochure on working with legislators on the website currently, and we have two videos and a couple of draft documents in review. The third area that we’re spending some time on is that we’re starting the legislative Q and A Zoom meeting. We’re starting this week, and we plan to do this monthly. This will be to provide guidance to members in an open discussion format so they can come ask people who have a lot of experience in this dealing with legislators, what should you do and all those kinds of questions so thatthat once a month you’ve got some buddies that will be available to you via Zoom calls that really know what are going on and can help you get your questions answered. And the fourth area of projects, we currently are working on marketing communications collateral to assist our members. We have several in draft form that should be completed shortly. For example, things like, what is an MSP?

[00:33:32.970] – Dennis

Since there is issues within the legislators, they don’t seem to know what an MSP is, so we want to do the definition for them. Or another one is, are we are a small business working with thousands of small business? And the other one is, are you concerned about cybersecurity for your small business? That’s one of the things that the legislators have often asked us is if we would be available to give talks to small businesses in their areas principally on cybersecurity. And so we’re working on getting all the mark on necessary to go ahead and make that possible. Four areas of projects. Let’s take a look at an area that we’ve got currently right now. We’ve got a draft model legislation document that has been working its way through the committee. It’s now in draft form. It is available on the website. Now, the self-advocacy skill set is extraordinarily important to the organization. We need to have knowledgeable members, have conversations with state legislators. And as Karl mentioned, we need to have that conversation now before they start having bills hit the pipeline. We need to be, for the legislature, a known quantity, a known expert, somebody that they can depend upon to be able to help them define things to come up with models that would work for us and work for them.

[00:35:26.280] – Dennis

The newest guideline is the draft model legislation document that you might be able to use to start the conversation about what might be acceptable within a state bill, what would be acceptable to us, and what might be in terms of format and everything that goes into it acceptable for them. This type of document is often asked for by the legislators so they can see what it would be that their small business folks like us, what is acceptable to us as well. So this is a draft proposal that we are looking for constructive review and notes from our members. And the draft proposal, as mentioned, is on the NNITSP website in the Resources area. And we’re looking for your input on this document over the next couple of months so that we can get it tweaked here and there and get things moving along so that we can turn this into something real that all the members can use when they go talk to legislators. That is the committee.

[00:36:51.530] – Karl

Thank you, sir. I will note a lot of what we’re doing, everything meshes together. One of the first questions that Dennis got from a few years later when they started talking about all of this was, do you have somebody who can talk to the small businesses in my district about security? Which is a great way to start a conversation. It’s great for your business. We want to train our people up to… You already know about security, but we want to help train up members to be good speakers and to be presenters. The stuff the marketing committee did on talking to the media, you need to be able to have a certain skill set that may not be something that’s naturally part of your business. All of this helps you with promoting your business and being seen as professionals with your clients. It’s also the case. We unintentionally have become the mouthpiece for our clients. We are, as Dennis said, small businesses representing small businesses. Our clients also don’t have a voice in the legislature or in front of the media with regard to any of these issues. So it all works together and it’s a huge, gargantuan undertaking and it’s just going to take some time.

[00:38:14.310] – Karl

A quick notes before we move to open Q&A. You should have this memorized by now, but basically if you’re a registered guest, thank you for supporting us. Now it’s time to step up. You can become a professional individual member for 125. Anybody on this call can be an individual member. If you want a company membership, that gives you one individual membership that can vote as well as a certain number of associate memberships. So update your membership now and if you have any questions, service@NSITSP. Org will get you the answers. And with that, I’m just going to go back and forth with a few slides here, but all of these links, we have the join link if you want to join. We also have this decision tree, so take a screenshot of that. And we’re on Facebook and Twitter and all of the social media, so join us with those as well. We need more YouTube followers, to be honest with you. And on our site, a vendor should go to slash vendors. Everybody should go to slash events for all the stuff that we talked about today. And if you have any questions or you need a little guidance on where to go or what to do, just send us a note and we’ll be happy to help you out.

[00:39:41.750] – Karl

With that, I am happy to open it to open Q&A, whether it’s on the proposed legislation or anything else. Thank you all for being here, by the way.

[00:39:54.860] – Chris

Karl, if I may, I had a full report on the executive search process- Oh, I’m sorry. -and trying to… No, that’s okay. I don’t want to beligour it, but if nothing else, I just want to quickly say that was a very heavy lift. We had a car put together, a very good RFP. We got an incredible response. I believe it was about 16 very well qualified companies. The task force, which was a board member, Steve, I see on the call as well, participated and was a big help. We whittled that down to four really great candidates. Frankly, folks, all four would have probably done a very good job. But as you can see, we picked Bolder and we are super excited to work with them. It was a long process. It went in a direction that I don’t think most folks anticipated, but I believe it’s a very good direction and it’s looking like things are going to really be happening. Nicole, we’re happy to have you involved and look forward to everything you folks can do to help grow our organization. Like Karl said, he’s just changing the knee plate on his desk. He’s not going anywhere.

[00:41:03.630] – Chris

I just want to thank the task force because it was very involved in months and months of hard work. I just wanted to thank everybody.

[00:41:11.020] – Karl

Yes, absolutely. Thank you for that. I think it was April or something when we started actually laying things out. It was a bit of a chore and I really appreciate everybody who was involved on the task force. Thank you, sir. Other comments, questions, topics? Put it in the chat or just open your mic. Wow, I’ve never seen this group so quiet. I will throw out a note about the legislation. This legislation is not intended to be something that we’re going to give to a legislative body and say, Please pass this. It is something that I think we can use to start a conversation. Every state has a code for people who cut lawns or cut hair or do roofing or everything else. No state has a code that says computer consultant, IT consultant, technical consultant, or anything related to our industry. It’s frequently we exist inside of consumer affairs or the Secretary of State’s office or some other thing, maybe even small business. But there is not a code for IT consultants. The legislation that Ben Yarbrough from Kalyptics dedicated, I want to say at least dozens, if not 100 hours to. He really put together a great piece of legislation that is basically it doesn’t set up licensing, it just sets up registration.

[00:43:06.430] – Karl

In other words, unlike a general contractor where there’s licensing and tests and so forth, this is more like locksmiths who, at least in the state of California, a locksmith has to register with the state. I practice locksmithing, and that’s it. But it’s enough so that legislators have a place where there’s a natural place to look for things that are related to that industry. People fear, Oh, well, this is the beginning of setting up a higher bar to get into the industry. Yes, that’s exactly what it is. If you look at the dark side of Reddit, you will see why our industry needs to be improved. Improving the industry starts with saying, okay, we need people who are educated, qualified, certified, who take some interest in their own ongoing education, as Nicole said. A profession should have certain things and so this is the beginning of that. Keith has his hand up and James has his hand up.

[00:44:18.930] – Keith

I just wanted to elaborate on the the point Karl is making. In my capacity doing consulting for the California state legislature, and it is pretty rigid. And since I consult on curriculum for cybersecurity, the first run proposal was, every company have at least one managing partner with a recognized four-year degree from a technical university. Devries and computer institutes don’t count. They meant a real accredited university, and pass a series of tests based on specific, almost like a contractor. You’re a cybersecurity guy, you’re a desktop guy, you’re a printer guy. And that would be devastating to many people in this business and to small business customers, because that would consolidate the service delivery to larger companies and higher rates. And legislators, once that’s explained to them, they begin to understand it. But I thought it was important to understand where they’re coming from. Most of them are attorneys. You go to school, you get a JD, you pass the bar, you join an association, you’re regulated, and you pay dues. Now, I’m going to be honest with you all, every legislator I talk to in numerous meetings, the pay dues part is something they really like.

[00:45:44.790] – Karl

I.

[00:45:45.350] – Keith

Think that’s going to become a reality in some point, especially in states like California, which have a Proposition 13, which limits the state’s ability to increase taxes. So dues and fees become great income tax sources. Having said that, if we’re not engaged, they’re getting their information from attorneys, insurance companies, and big companies. That was my two-minute elevator pitch.

[00:46:16.100] – Karl

Thank you, sir. James?

[00:46:19.090] – Chris

Hey, Karl. I heard you talking about company.

[00:46:22.620] – Karl

Memberships and associates.

[00:46:24.100] – Chris

I.

[00:46:24.250] – Karl

Went in while you were chatting there just now and.

[00:46:26.400] – Chris

Signed up for a company membership.

[00:46:28.630] – Karl

Thank you. Thank you.

[00:46:29.360] – Chris

Very much. I promptly invited the two folks in our company and said, Go sign up for this. But my question for you is, does that allow them to then.

[00:46:37.030] – Karl

Join the.

[00:46:37.890] – Chris

Upcoming.

[00:46:38.460] – Karl

Ai event?

[00:46:39.230] – Chris

And.

[00:46:39.920] – Karl

If so or if not.

[00:46:40.920] – Chris

What other.

[00:46:41.360] – Karl

Events can they join? They can do everything except vote in a committee meeting or vote for officers or run for office. They can attend all of this stuff. They can download the materials. By the way, back to other stuff. When Dennis talked about putting together resources, the legislative committee has handouts on how to talk to your legislature, introduce yourself to the legislature. The marketing committee has put together the trifold brochure. We got all kinds of handouts in the resources area. But anyway, yeah. Your members for your company can all be full participants except for the voting part. The goal there is basically James’s company and Microsoft each have one vote. We don’t want to be dominated by larger companies.

[00:47:37.150] – Chris

Thanks, Karl.

[00:47:43.140] – Dennis

Thank you, James.

[00:47:44.910] – Karl

Yes. Steve?

[00:47:47.880] – Steve

Well, just on the subject of resources, we did some work last spring around the public relations webinar that we did to do some research on local news media. If you have a local market and you want to talk to your local radio, TV, newspaper, we have that data and we’re happy to share that with you to help you contact them, create relationships with those media outlets, and then offer up both your services and your expertise if they want to talk about cybersecurity, want to talk about any issues that are related to your business or your expertise.

[00:48:28.600] – Amy

I’ll go next, I guess. One of the things that I would like to see this organization begin to do is to work on some an accreditation program or at least the very nation’s beginnings of what may build in the future to become one. And I would like to hear some of your feedback and the idea and some of the things, ways we’ve thought of how to kick this off without becoming a full accreditation, but just starting with something to get people used to the idea, maybe to have a place on our website where your corporation can be verified that they exist in your state, that you’re registered with that corporation is registered in good standing with the state. A way to track continuing education that you and your employees are doing and have that badged in some way on the site as well. Just to get us inching toward the idea of accreditation so that those of us that are operating companies that are of more of a professional nature than some others have a way to demonstrate that and point customers to that. And we all know that we’re, I think, all tired of competing against folks that are not operating in a professional manner.

[00:50:06.370] – Amy

And so if we have some way to say them, Hey, I’m with the National Society of IT Service Providers, and you can see that they have verified that we exist in the state and we’re in good standing with our state filings and my staff does continuing education on a regular basis. It’s just something like that that we’d be able to point our customers to, because one of the things that I identify is not only separating us from drug slammers, but also separating, if you think of it, from the customer’s point of view. How dot not only do they not know much about IT, but they really don’t understand how to select an IT firm, and that this would help from a consumer point of view as well. So I’d be interested in hearing your feedback. This is a thing, idea we’ve kicked around, but we haven’t organized into a committee or task group or anything like that yet, but it is something I would like to get rolling. So what do you guys think of these ideas?

[00:51:17.280] – Karl

Well, I love that idea. At a minimum to be able to say, look, here’s a little badge that says the NSITSP has checked me out. I have a business license in the state of California. I have a worker’s comp. I pay my taxes. It’s not huge and it’s not cumbersome. It’s just one of those things where it would be a checkmark that I take my business seriously. But beyond that, I would love to have a system of having continuing education credits where people eventually… We have tiers of membership and people completely volunteer to do it. Currently on our current website, which may change, but our current website, your profile is public. So if you have awards or discussions or sitting on a committee or whatever, you can literally send your clients to your profile on our site. And so you can, I mentioned LinkedIn. You can make it look a little like LinkedIn and brag yourself up there and all of these things that Amy talked about would appear there. This is an opportunity for you to look more professional and to say that belonging to a professional organization is part of your brand and part of your business.

[00:52:45.750] – Karl

Let’s just tuck in and chime in. I’ve long said that we are no different.

[00:52:52.410] – Chris

From your.

[00:52:53.390] – Karl

Lawyer, your accountant, anybody else who helps you run your business. The only difference between us and them is that they have educational institutions that will give them accreditation. They have organizations that will give them licensing. I think that eventually our profession has to mirror that. We have to be on even keel with all the other professionals that help business people run their businesses. I celebrate this effort and raise my hand to do anything I can do to help. I think.

[00:53:29.480] – Keith

It’s an education process. It’s the same thing when I was talking with Comte and they asked me about their trustmark. I said, If we all know about it, that’s great. It just doesn’t mean anything. We have to let the public know and educate them on what this badging or certification means. And I think they’ll be. I think too much we have all these certificates and we’d like to be technical giants in our own little.

[00:53:58.260] – Karl

Community and.

[00:53:59.810] – Keith

We need to educate people on what that is.

[00:54:03.040] – Steve

Yeah, MSP Alliance has a…

[00:54:05.340] – Karl

Msp.

[00:54:05.620] – Steve

Verify, they’ve got a.

[00:54:06.740] – Karl

Bunch of.

[00:54:07.280] – Steve

Levels of it.

[00:54:08.560] – Karl

But.

[00:54:08.820] – Steve

Again, nobody knows about it. So the.

[00:54:10.800] – Karl

Badge doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

[00:54:13.770] – Steve

To people visiting your website or listening to your marketing materials.

[00:54:17.940] – Amy

I would see as an organization, though, we could choose to spend some of our marketing dollars promoting that program to businesses.

[00:54:27.450] – Karl

Right.

[00:54:27.810] – Amy

They don’t want.

[00:54:29.450] – Steve

To-my point might be, rather than reinventing the wheel and.

[00:54:32.660] – Karl

Creating our own.

[00:54:34.010] – Steve

Maybe rally behind.

[00:54:35.290] – Karl

One or the.

[00:54:35.980] – Steve

Other, either.

[00:54:37.110] – Karl

Comptia or MSP Alliance or something like that, is to really make that.

[00:54:42.410] – Steve

Known outside the.

[00:54:45.780] – Karl

Insular industry we are. I think that, Mark, that’s a good idea. The problem is, for example, Comptia, they’re like, No, we’re doing our thing. Either join it or don’t have a nice day. Msp Alliance, to be honest, they don’t actually participate outside of their own organization. They don’t go to events. They don’t make themselves known. Nobody ever introduces themselves and says, hey, you should come and pay attention to us. You know what I mean? I would love to have an alliance with them, but they would need to participate.

[00:55:24.450] – Steve

Yeah. I’ve spoken with Charlie.

[00:55:26.620] – Chris

Weaver and he.

[00:55:28.150] – Karl

Does his.

[00:55:28.980] – Steve

Own thing.

[00:55:29.940] – Karl

So I hear you totally. And to be honest, I don’t want to do anything that somebody else is doing well, but I do think that this organization wouldn’t have the members we have if we weren’t trying to fill a gap that needs to be filled. Hey, guys. Absolutely. So to Amy’s point, I think she’s basically saying, hey, look, if we’re going to do this, the actual program or certification that you do isn’t really the main focus. The main focus is that you are doing something as rather than nothing, right? Right. And so making those connections maybe with a particular program or particular certification track or whatever probably isn’t really the best way to do it. The best way to do it is you’re doing any of these, like just anything that actually promotes your professionalism, your continuing education, what it is maybe isn’t so much as important as that you are actually doing these things. I agree. Other comments, questions, suggestions? I don’t want us to lose sight of our primary mission, and I want to be careful that there’s a need for people who are just a single person working out of their home, pretty amateur.

[00:57:03.320] – Karl

For instance, I have zero interest in working in the residential space. And without those people, a.

[00:57:10.840] – Chris

Lot of.

[00:57:11.260] – Karl

Residential customers who have no one to go to, they have nowhere to go. Like, if they knock on my door, I’m honestly not interested in working with them, but they need somewhere to go. And so sending a message that somebody’s not valid, I would be opposed to that. But I absolutely agree that vetting our members is a real positive and making sure that there are legitimate businesses that they have adequate insurance to protect their clients. Those are all, youknow, good things that I would support. I’m just more leery of creating an us versus them mentality of like, well, if you didn’t get this education or certification, then you should be excluded from participating in our industry. I just don’t want to go down that. Yeah. I don’t think we’re saying that, Steve. I mean, to be honest, if you were a one person shop and you specialized on home businesses, you would still need to go train yourself up on how to be a successful business person, how to run your business appropriately. You would need to know what the security settings are for Office 365. You would need to say, look, I actually participate in educating myself and taking my job seriously.

[00:58:34.320] – Karl

So we would want to welcome them in with that and help highlight them as people who are actually focusing on being professional within their industry.

[00:58:44.630] – Amy

And I think it’s okay to have a differential. So it doesn’t exclude them from the industry, but it just does differentiate different levels of professionalism in the industry. Right. So I know several people who are very successful at focusing on residential and individuals rather than corporations. And they’re very professional in what they do. And it is their company, it’s their business, it’s what they’ve decided to focus on for their market. They should have an opportunity to differentiate themselves from somebody’s nephew who’s coming over to help you with your computer. Just so the consumer understands who it is they’re hiring. Why do you charge $85 an hour when the kid down the street charges me 25 bucks? They need to understand what they’re hiring, just as in other industries, I often use the example of mechanics industry. I know that if I walk into Uncle Ed’s Oil Change, I’m very unlikely to find someone who’s qualified to work on the transmission of my vehicle or who’s an electronic specialist. And I’m not expecting that because I know that I’m hiring someone to change my oil, check the tire pressure. And we don’t have that in our industry.

[01:00:17.290] – Amy

The consumer doesn’t have that knowledge to make those intelligent decisions. And I think rather than keep somebody out, what we want to do, though, is create an environment in which the consumer has the ability to make smart decisions for themselves.

[01:00:32.860] – Keith

Amy just articulated everything I’m hearing when I talk to legislators, and it’s quite often I’m up in Sacramento, not on this, but as the conversation rolls over. Understand their predicament. They’re getting calls from their constituents that says, I just got breached. I have to pay a ransom. And I’ve been paying this guy X number of dollars, and I thought this was taken care of. What they’re looking for is to make sure that the dentist is not doing heart surgery. We’re not looking to put dentists out of business. We’re just trying to give them guidance and education as to say, There are different classifications in our business. There’s no such thing as the computer guy who does everything, and help them understand where we are. And then we improve the standardizations. I encourage people to go into the home business and the Under 25s user networks because I don’t want it. So I get your point, Steve, but I don’t want to refer people to those clients that negatively affect me either, that someone who comes back and says… And so to have that good standardization and baseline, I think, is healthy for all of us.

[01:01:48.930] – Karl

I think.

[01:01:49.570] – Keith

Every industry.

[01:01:51.730] – Karl

Sorry, Keith.

[01:01:52.810] – Keith

No, go ahead.

[01:01:54.610] – Karl

I think we should all learn the lesson of history. Many of our colleagues come from being resellers originally. Many of us, as Amy alluded to, took the time to invest in becoming professionals and to transitioning to a professional organization. Others did not. Others simply had MSP stamped on their business card, and that’s about all they did. Unfortunately, we all pay the price because customers come to us having been, quote-unquote, burnt. I think it’s important to establish… The fact that you call it the National Society of ITSPs was huge to me because I think MSP has been so overused and so diluted and actually so damaged that I think it’s important to promote the difference in terms of promoting certification from an organization like this and to making it stand out, making it truly a difference through education, accreditation, perhaps even licensing. But let’s work hard to establish that difference because it’ll pay huge benefits for everybody. Andrew, do you have a comment? I just see this as a pathway for members of this organization that would want to join because, hey, I could work my way through whatever courses we have, whatever webinars there are, to where I am certified in a way that I may not have other places.

[01:03:41.680] – Karl

So I see it also as a draw for members to gain a level of professionalism. I am one of those that did not go get a business degree, and I’m not going to get one now. But I wouldn’t hurt from benefiting from those who have that knowledge to learn how to do things better in my business. I see that as a great draw for members in this organization. Amy, were you going to say something before I interrupted you?

[01:04:18.340] – Amy

Oh, I was just going to say I was going to thank everybody for their input. This is one of those things that it’s been forever on the horizon, but maybe we’re inching a little closer to we can work toward getting something implemented. I think I’ll bring this up at the next board meeting and see how we might progress.

[01:04:39.860] – Karl

Very cool. Well, this is part of the long term vision of our industry doesn’t have an official internship track. We don’t have an apprenticeship track. Many, many industries have that where there’s some path. Most of us on this call, I think, were one person shops at one time. I know I was and I think the first two years of my business, I spent almost all of my time fixing other people’s broken stuff and fixing things that were done poorly by people who just wanted to get in, make a bunch of money and leave and leave the client hanging. Now, that’s a lot less common than it was years ago, but it still happens. You can be a one person shop and be very professional and do things the right way. But we need a path where people can graduate from high school and college and choose to go into IT. Without getting a four year degree in computers, which isn’t very useful in our job, they can have a path to actually becoming professional in this industry. We just need to start working on it and it will emerge and the right way to do it will emerge.

[01:05:58.740] – Karl

We’re after the hour, so I don’t want to keep anybody who needs to do something else. We’ve been fighting both Comtia and ChannelPro today for attendance. Thank you all for giving us your time. I don’t want to cut it short, so if anybody has anything else they want to talk about or bring up, we are absolutely open to it. I’m here for you. All right. Well, with that, I will thank you all. And Nicole will be running the show starting in eight minutes. So thank you for all of your support over the last few years. And again, I’m not going anywhere, but my role will be changing slightly. And so I really appreciate everything you guys have done to make this organization as successful as it is. And we’ll just double and triple and quadruple in the next few months and we’ll just keep going. Sounds like a plan. Very good. All right. Well, we will get the recording up as quick as we can and it will be at that slash meetings link. We’ll see you there and then please check out slash events for all the stuff that’s coming up in the next two weeks because there’s a bunch of it.

[01:07:20.630] – Karl

Thank you all.

[01:07:23.000] – Amy

With that, we are concluded. Thanks, everyone. With that.

[01:07:24.370] – Karl

We are concluded. Now, I try to connect you.

[00:00:00.460] – Karl Palachuk
With that, it’s nine o’clock and let’s go ahead and get started. Many people will continue to be joining us. I didn’t even look to see we have 23 so far, so we’ll go to 150 so that’ll be fine. Welcome to the Q2 meeting, all member meeting of the National Society of IT Service Providers. Just a few notes. We truly strive to be the voice of the industry defining the standards for professionalism in IT. This meeting is open to the public and anyone may join. This meeting is being recorded and will be posted. If you do not wish to be on the video, turn off your camera. If you do not wish to be on the audio recording, please turn off your microphone. The chat will also be posted. Our team does a spectacular job of turning this meeting into a recording that is an actual strong, powerful resource for you. We’ve had people, a fair number of people, watch the recordings and download them and so forth. Just know that you are participating. Our recorded meetings are posted on our YouTube channel and you should absolutely join our channel. We need more members in general, but we need more people connected to us on YouTube.

[00:01:21.300] – Karl Palachuk
It helps the algorithm. But it’s also going to be on our website with the full transcription and closed captions. So you can always find that at nsitsp. Org meetings. Our YouTube is YouTube. Com nsitsp. So today we’re going to have some notes from the board and from the committees. We have had a crazy busy quarter. So it’s sometimes not always visible how busy we are. I will leave it up to Amy, whether you want to jump in right at the beginning or whether you want to let Andy skip ahead of you.

[00:02:07.060] – Amy Babinchak
I think I’ll go ahead and do my introduction and then we could do Andy. So I couldn’t jump to the next slide there, Karl. So we had, like Karl said, a really super busy quarter. And what happens is with organizations is there’s things going on and people are working on stuff, and then suddenly a bunch of things get finished and we can get we can actually announce them. So on the board side, we authorized the creation of a communication task force this quarter. The job of this task force is going to be to come up with templated documents and sound bites for rapid response to cyber, privacy, and legislative situations. The goal is for you to be able to use those to respond to media requests for quotes. This task force is also going to work to make sure that the overall messaging of the organization is consistent in language and appearance. We have not populated that task force yet, so that will be on our coming to do list as well, so be sure to look for that. We’ve had a couple of volunteers already, so we want a full set of 6 8 people.

[00:03:17.540] – Amy Babinchak
We also voted to support as a general concept, the right to repair. While we recognize that the complexity of today’s technology, we also understand the consumer’s expectability to make basic repairs to a device. Things like hard drive replacement, memory enhancement, screen repair, that stuff that all comes to mind. We also recognize that our industry contains professionals with many different areas of focus and device repair is one of them. But importantly, we did not endorse any specific piece of legislation, just the concept of itself in general, that our organization is in favor of the right to repair. Now, following on the announcement from Karl that he wishes to exit the position of executive director by end of year, and of course, still be actively involved in the organization, we did authorize the creation of an executive search task force. We took applications for it and we populated that with people. And you’ll hear what that task force has been up to later in this meeting from the chair of that group, Chris Barber. And speaking of Chris, we have had two meetings with CISA, the Federal Cyber Information Security Agency. Chris pursued this relationship with CISA, and following these two meetings with different agencies within the department, we will begin to have appointments to various CISA committees upcoming and a continuing relationship allowing us to participate in developing more appropriate messaging to MSPs as security generalist and to small businesses coming from CISA.

[00:04:56.890] – Amy Babinchak
That’s our goal is really to help them get their messaging better so that it means more to the MSPs and it means more to the small businesses of the world that we all work with. Next slide, please, Karl. We’ve been attending a lot of events lately. I wanted to acknowledge our friends at SMB Tech Fest in channel Pro for including us in every event they offer. It’s very generous of them to do that. We appreciate that they offer us space. We could talk to attendees about joining our organization. Some of our members are at channel Pro today, even in Chicago. We were also able to attend the channel Partners Conference and participate in the ChannelWise Coaching Cafe, thanks to Katherine Rose. Myself, Carol, and Jeff Pons offered free business and career coaching as part of her event, which was really successful. We’ve also been at other events, and we appreciate the volunteers that staff our tables and have been out there representing us. We’re wearing out a few of our volunteers, so if you’re willing, please speak up and we will put you on the list. We have, I think it’s three or four table set ups and signage circulating around.

[00:06:12.450] – Amy Babinchak
So if you’re going to an event, please ask them if we can set up a table. We need to be out there talking to people about the organization and generating new members. We also introduced member webinars this quarter. Some of these will be for public consumption, others only for members so far. We had a report from the trenches as Andy Higgins told us about his client that had had MFA cloned, how he was able to identify that and resolve the issue. We also had a cyber insurance deep dive where I interviewed one of our vendor members, Brian Mahone, about what we need to know to interact with cyber insurance as IT professionals. And later in this meeting, Karl is going to tell you about some other upcoming webinars that we have scheduled. I also then wanted to highlight just our committees and just applaud them for doing an amazing job. You’re going to hear a report from each of them, so I’m not going to repeat that here. But as you see on this slide, there’s been a lot going on from each of those committees, and we’re going to hear in detail from all of them.

[00:07:21.170] – Amy Babinchak
What I really wanted to do today, next slide please, Carol, was to take a final moment to spotlight our social media sources. We will get links to all of those into the chat windowso that you can copy them down. We have forums on our website that is a social media thing. We’d like to get member meetups going at these industry events that we’ve all been attending, but we need to know where you’re going. And there’s a place for that in the forum. So please start to visit that regularly and participate in those forums. And then did you know we have a blog? Karl has been publishing to the blog. I recently started to publish and help Karl. The blog content helps our members learn what’s going on inside the organization day by day instead of all at once at a quarterly meeting like this. And we have the usual social media locations too. So you can help us by commenting on our posts. Don’t just hit that like button. The algorithms that bump things up really are increased when you share the content and when you comment on the content. So if you could do that, it’ll really help us to get exposure to people that haven’t yet heard of us and let them know what we’re doing.

[00:08:31.940] – Amy Babinchak
I recently heard some strange assumptions about what it is that the organization is about. So getting our social media out there, our blog posts and sharing those and getting them out to the world will really help define us. Finally, I’m going to highlight a blog post. You can flip slides, Karl. And a significant accolade. Canales, a large data analysis firm, came out with a new study that found us in the top 67 most valuable associations cited by the IT service providers they interviewed, distributors, and vendors in our industry. This was a global study. It really is confirmation that although we’re still very small, we’re having an impact. And it’s thanks to all of our volunteers and those of you that understand the vision and contributed to this organization. So I wanted to thank you for elevating our organization to this level. Next, we’re going to let Karl take over the show with his executive report. And we may need to squeeze in Andy Higgins with his committee report somewhere in here too, because he has to leave us early today.

[00:09:42.490] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. Let me go ahead and have Andy go. I don’t have a slide for you because you’re out of order. It’s not my fault.

[00:09:48.970] – Andy Higgins
I like being out.

[00:09:50.580] – Karl Palachuk
Of order. Yeah, I know you do. So go ahead.

[00:09:53.990] – Andy Higgins
All right. Thank you, Karl, and apologies for breaking up the order, but I’ve got a flight to catch. Yes, I’m going to quickly report on the NHSITS P Marketing committee. Our number one priority has been to get more members into the organization. And to do that, we need more members who are already in the organization to help us out. I think our committee is still relatively small, so we really need people to come and join us and just do a little bit, just a little bit of this, that and the other, and we can spread the load out and get more and more people joining. Okay? We need to provide content. Our three main points is we need to provide content to help members do a better job, more marketing. These webinars that we’ve been doing, Amy mentioned some of them. We put a call out to everybody, anybody who wants to do a webinar. If you’ve had a breach like I had, one of my clients did, not my fault. Sorry, don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. But if anybody has other things, preferably vendor neutral, we try and stay as vendor neutral, but information get it out to our members and have people help out that way.

[00:11:17.910] – Andy Higgins
The committee will also be providing a list of local media contacts. The members can contact their local media. That’s going to appear on the website shortly. We need to better communicate with members, of course. So we’re always looking for tools and ways to communicate with membership. For some reason, email doesn’t seem to be grabbing people. I wonder why. We find LinkedIn. The presence in LinkedIn is growing and what we’d like to do is get members on our committee to push LinkedIn joins and things and likes and comments, as Amy said. That seems to be one of the better ways of getting it going and getting on more podcasts as well. Trade shows. We’ve had a bunch of people go to trade shows. Again, as Amy has mentioned, we want to help communicate with all our members. If you go to a trade show, just let us know, let Karl know, let whoever know. We’ll send you a bunch of cards and you can just drop them on a bunch of tables. That’s what I do. If we don’t actually have a presence there, just drop a bunch of cards around the place and people pick up, spread the word.

[00:12:27.130] – Andy Higgins
We think it’s all great value for our membership. But as I say, we’re always open for new ideas and we really like to call on all members to help with the committee. We’ve got a lot to do and only a few committee members who are all running businesses at the same time, just like all of.

[00:12:46.030] – Karl Palachuk
You all.

[00:12:47.080] – Andy Higgins
Excuse the text ism there. So the more help we have, the better it will be. So just contact me if you just like to do a little bit of work on the marketing member committee and we will appreciate every little thing that you can do. And with that, I’m going to go catch my plane. All right. So thank you, Karl.

[00:13:08.110] – Karl Palachuk
All right. Fly well. So the marketing committee, really, all the committees have done a spectacular job and the marketing committee has stepped up and started actually putting out a lot of stuff. A lot of you may not be aware because you go to our website, you log in and you look for what you look for. If you just scroll down our front page website, you’ll see we have an amazing amount of stuff there. And if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll see our social media kit, which includes graphics you can use and all of our links so you can join us on all the social media. So use our website as a resource. That’s what it’s intended to be. Let me give you my report super quick. We currently have about 260 members, and it’s growing slowly. It’s funny, we will get more members. We’ll get 15 members in the next week because of people responding to this and all of your social media around this meeting. Then we’ll get 10 members next month and we’ll get five members the month after that. That’s our norm. It’s like a heartbeat. I just want you to know, please join us.

[00:14:20.470] – Karl Palachuk
If you are here and you’re a free member, we want to know, what is keeping you from investing $150 in your career, your industry, and your profession. We do have a number of vendor sponsors. We’re going to have a slide for them. We’re extremely grateful to them, but we also need more vendor sponsors. And we need vendors who understand that they need us, that we’re not just a thing that’s out there, that we are part of helping to build a strong profession so that their vendor partners, the people that they use to resell into this community, run strong professional businesses. I think there’s going to be a comeuppance in this industry in the next five years as a lot of the stuff that we have addressed specifically with regard to ransomware and our own reputation, a lot of stuff is going to come to a head. We literally exist to help drive that conversation and to represent this industry. And so ou want to be on the right side when the stuff hits the fan. And that includes having a code of ethics posted on your website. And that’s why we produce the code of ethics.

[00:15:39.580] – Karl Palachuk
Our finances are good. They’re not spectacular. We could use an extra 10 or 20 million dollars, but we’re doing well. We are paying our bills. We’re keeping our head above water, and things are all moving in the right direction. We do have a number of people who have gone ahead and converted their old membership, the $100 flat fee, to the new membership where it’s 125 for an individual member or 150 for a small company, and then it goes up from there depending on the size of your company. Our finances are in good shape. I would like them to be in great shape. But like I said, we’re paying our bills and we’re doing well. If you’re interested in any of the details on this, you’re welcome to attend the Finance Committee meetings as well as any other committee meetings that we have. So if you have any specific questions for me at the end, let me know, but I assure you we are doing well and we’re heading in the right direction. Side note, we have this executive search committee, and every single time we talk to anybody from an association management company, early on they make the comment, Holy smokes, you guys are not yet two years old, and you have between paid and unpaid members, over 800 people, and you’ve got 2,000 on your mailing list.

[00:17:07.060] – Karl Palachuk
This is unheard of in the growth of membership associations. So it seems small when you look at a specific number, but in the big picture, we are doing all the right things and we need you to help us promote that. And I know you’re not all social media mavens, but when you get a chance, as Amy said, click like, make a comment and share it on your social media, and that spreads it all out. That’s the whole point of that viral marketing. Quick poll, and I got to find the polls here. In your words, why did you decide to become a paid member? Take just a minute, everybody, and just find the poll and put in the answer for that. I would appreciate it. Huge shout out to our vendor sponsors. These folks have put in more than $150. They put in $2,500 or $10,000 each, and we really appreciate them. If you have vendor sponsors that you believe should be involved in our industry, please ask them to get in touch with me or to get in touch with anybody on the board, Amy or anybody, and we’ll be happy to start a conversation.

[00:18:35.370] – Karl Palachuk
Again, I think it’s the smaller vendors who realize that they absolutely need us in order to be successful in this industry. Many people come to me for my business and they say, Oh, how can you introduce me to MSPs? And I always tell them, Get involved. Don’t just buy a Google ad. That’s fine. But then you’re just another icon on the internet. All right, keep answering that question. Why did you join? A huge promo. I don’t know if Steve Kizan is on here or not. If you are, open your microphone and begin speaking to us. Steve, from the marketing committee, got in touch with Peggi Galvin and said, Hey, can you help us out? Peggi does press relations training for large corporations. When we started talking about this, one of our big questions was, Well, will this work for small corporations? S he said, Oh, yes. We have a specific slide deck for small organizations, for small companies. How do you talk to the media? How do you know that you’re talking to the right person? Imagine, if you will, that during this meeting, there’s an attack, a major attack on some company somewhere. It doesn’t have to be in our industry.

[00:20:01.120] – Karl Palachuk
Any company anywhere that’s big enough to disrupt and be on the news. It would be great if members of this organization could make themselves available to the media to give that little sound bite. But most of people say, Well, I don’t know anything about the media. I don’t know about the news. I don’t know the difference between a newspaper reporter and the local TV station and local radio station. I don’t know what they want. Well, this is where you get that information. I am very impressed with the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever seen this training anywhere in the IT industry for SMB IT consultants in my life. I literally know people who do this training for the likes of Salesforce and Go Pro and other large organizations, but I’ve never seen it for SMB IT. This is a members only event. So if you are a registered free guest of NHSITSP, thank you for your support. The cost of this training is probably $30,000 or $40,000 if you are a big corporation, but you can get it by joining our organization and it is free to all paid members of NHSITSP. Join us at the end of the month, May 24th.

[00:21:25.330] – Karl Palachuk
Obviously, it will be recorded. It will be presented only to members of our organization after it is recorded. It will become a resource that we can rely on. And it may be the beginning of a longer term series of trainings on media relations. Does anybody have any questions about this before we move on? All right, very good. So let me end the poll and share the results. So why did you join? Well, I don’t know if it’s useful to show all the details. There we go. I guess we’ll have to write a blog post on all of the answers here. Legislation, how it drives professionalism. We saw the value of the organization is trying to do. Very good. I appreciate that feedback. Part of why we want to do this is to be very honest, we want to make sure that we’re sending the right messages to people when we do our marketing and say, okay, people tell us that this is why they join. So I appreciate that feedback. Now I got to figure out how to get back to the slide show. There we go. All right. We have an upcoming webinar at the end of June, and I know that’s more than a month away, but the registration is available if you go to MSIT or MSP.

[00:23:00.170] – Karl Palachuk
Org events. All of our upcoming meetings, including our committees, are there. Larry, if you don’t mind, open your microphone and give us a couple of minutes on what is change management and why we should attend this spectacular webinar.

[00:23:18.620] – Larry Mandelberg
I.

[00:23:19.400] – Lisa Marie Papp
Would be.

[00:23:20.590] – Larry Mandelberg
Absolutely thrilled, Karl, thank you. I want to start by saying that I learned about change management 30 or 40 years ago. And like all new things, you never really know when you learn something new how long it’s been around. I was shocked to find how long change management had been around when I first learned about it. And I’m also surprised today how many people don’t understand what change management really is. So if you don’t or if you think you understand, that’s great. But I think it’s really important that you understand what the change management industry really understands change management to be. Change management is called an enabling framework for managing the people side of change. An enabling framework, something that allows you to manage the people side of change. We all know how many people dislike change. You ask a group of people and 80, 90 % of them will say, No, I don’t like change. Figuring out how to make change happen is very, very important, and it’s critical to understand it for a very simple reason. Business yearns for stasis, stability, uniformity. Business recoals from change. Business as an organization, it likes systems, it likes structure, it likes stability, it likes dependability, it likes it likes predictability.

[00:25:02.440] – Larry Mandelberg
In today’s world, the world that businesses live in, we are in a crazy, high paced, fast paced change that brings friction and turbulence and chaos. The world is changing around us faster than we can keep up with it. Those two dynamics, the desire for status or dependability and the world changing, creates friction. Until business leaders learn how to create a culture that can embrace and implement change, they’re going to continue to fight a losing battle against change and waste thousands of hours and millions of dollars fighting the environment they exist in. This webinar will give you very powerful insights as to how you can begin to change the culture of your organization and your clients to better accept and adapt to change. That’s what this is all about. Unmute myself.

[00:26:10.400] – Karl Palachuk
Excellent. Thank you very much. And of course, we’ll call on you for a blog post promoting this between now and then.

[00:26:17.500] – Larry Mandelberg
Of course.

[00:26:18.510] – Karl Palachuk
Very good. Thank you. A few more announcements. Mark your calendars, believe it or not. August ninth is our next meeting. And I say believe it or not, because the next thing is going to happen is in August, we’re going to begin our election season again. Our quarterly meeting is always the second Wednesday of the second month of the quarter. Join us for that. Join us on social media the elections. We had our first elections last year, which was a huge milestone. The way it worked was that we divided up for our first election and about four people per committee were elected to two year terms and the rest to one year terms. So anyone who is standing for election this year will be standing for a full two year term. And that way we’ve got a staggered roughly half of the people who serve are elected each year. If anyone has been appointed to a committee since the elections, they will also stand for a full term. So basically we’re going to start the promotion in July. And I know that seems like a long ways off because it’s the beginning of May. But before our next quarterly meeting, we will have already requested that people begin filing for office.

[00:27:42.640] – Karl Palachuk
Filing takes place during the month of August and then campaigning in the first couple of weeks of September. Voting will be this eight day period in September. And of course, the results will be posted to our site. If you’re interested in the results of the last election, they are on our blog. And as Amy mentioned, our blog has become fairly busy. Originally it was slash News. So if you go to MSA tsp. Org news or blog, they take you to the same spot because it’s really where we post up what’s new and what’s going on. We also are at a lot of events, literally during this call. If this call was beginning, I got a note from somebody who said, Hey, I’m at channel Pro in Chicago, and there’s a bunch of people here from the MSI DSP. They got a table and they’re greeting people. Look for us at these events. And if you choose to join us, you can actually sit behind a table and shake people’s hands and ask them to join. We have lots of volunteers, NIO, on my staff, pulls her hair out organizing this because we have a never ending list of events that we need to go to and we need to find members for all of them.

[00:29:14.560] – Karl Palachuk
One of the big events that’s coming up is the MSP Rescue. Harry Brouelsford is putting on an event in Princeton, New Jersey in July, and he has given us an entire room to hold an in person MSI TSP meeting. So if you want to volunteer for that, send an email to admin@ msitsp. Org, and we will be very happy to have you help organize that. It’s not difficult. Basically, you’re going to stand in front of the room and say, Hi, welcome to the NSITSP, and we’ll organize it all. We will do everything we can to make you as successful as possible with that. With that, I enjoy always introducing Heather, who started with us in the US and then she said, No, I’m tired of you guys. I have to be further away from you, but I still love you. S he’s joining us from the Netherlands to introduce the committee reports.

[00:30:16.400] – Heather Johnson
Yes, thank you, Karl. I love being a part of this organization and love being able to introduce our committees. For those of you who have been attending all these quarterly meetings from the beginning, isn’t it exciting to see all that we’ve done? I mean, we’ve always had exciting meetings, but we were trying to figure out how were we going to be formed? What were we going to do now? I have a notepad filled of dates that I need to go to webinars and events and channel Pro and this and that and blogs to read and things I’ve missed. And I feel like I read NHSITSP things every day now. There’s so much that’s happening and it’s so exciting for two years. So it’s not just that we’ve gotten a bunch of members, there’s so much that we have to offer to our members. So if you aren’t a paid member, certainly become one. One of the things that is great about being a member is that you get the opportunity to be on a committee. I call it an opportunity because you are part of that change that’s happening. We’re not a lot of people, but we’re swimming in the same direction and we’re making big things happen.

[00:31:32.430] – Heather Johnson
And you can be a part of that even more by joining a committee. You look at the name to the committees and its legislative, finance, marketing, government and governance. And you might think, I don’t know anything about those, so I’ll wait until there’s an IT committee and then I’ll join that. But we don’t have one of those. We have these committees and you can do them. You can all do them. You market yourself every day. I know you look at your finances. Legislative, it’s about passion. It’s about getting out there and making sure that the legislators are listening to us. It’s selling to the government, essentially. And governance is how work created. We need your opinions on these things. And so getting involved, that’s coming up quick, July. So start thinking about it because being involved in this and watching it grow and watching it happen, you’re not just sitting on the sideline, you’re in it, you’re making it happen, too. So join in that as well.

[00:32:35.600] – Tracy Hardin
But I’m going.

[00:32:37.200] – Heather Johnson
To announce first Dennis Wilson. He is the chair of the legislative committee, and he’s going to tell us what his committee is doing. Thank you, Heather.

[00:32:47.140] – Denis Wilson
I appreciate the opportunity to come and talk about what the legislative committee is doing. I’m extremely proud of all the work that we’ve been able to put together over the last year and a half or so. We have now a full slate of seven active members, along with about five regularly attending guest members. We’ve got a full house and plenty of people that are bringing their ideas and bringing their ability to do some work. Currently, what we’ve got done or are in process with is first, the Know Your Legislator handbook is finally up on the website. It is about a 15 page simple guideline to how you go about talking to a legislator, what a legislator does, how the legislation is typically organized, and that thing. So if you’re interested in working with the legislative process, this is a great place to start with, and it’s at Resources if you are a member. So it’s a great place to start. Second, we had this month a proposed legislative change in the state of California. There was the Right to Repair, which we talked about a little bit, SB 244. As you heard, we currently have a position as an organization of supporting the Right to Repair.

[00:34:39.770] – Denis Wilson
This will continue to show up at various state levels. And so it’s going to be of interest to the committee to watch where and how this shows up. Third one is a new reference for members, the state resources brochure so that you can understand where your state resources might be, what the URLs are, and a legislature discussion battle card that we’re in the process of completing should have that for you shortly. In process, we have the legislative recommendation and model that we’re working on an IT appreciation month that we’re.

[00:35:30.760] – Karl Palachuk
Working.

[00:35:31.190] – Denis Wilson
On for a national appreciation month for IT. This is a great way to get us in front of a ton of people and do it for not a lot of money. Next, we had a study we’re doing on the national cybersecurity strategy. Ted is going to talk about that more when we have our next meeting. Next, we are in process with the YouTube Shorts answering a single question with each. We’ve got about two of those done now currently, and we hope to each month do another one or so that will show up as a reference in the YouTube our YouTube meeting.

[00:36:38.560] – Karl Palachuk
That’s all you’re doing? What the hell?

[00:36:45.350] – Denis Wilson
Yeah, hardly anything at all. Currently, we are meeting every other Tuesday at 1 PM in the afternoon, Pacific Time. If you’re interested in coming, go to the website to the Meetings section, and that will not only give you our calendar, but it gives you the Zoom access. Thank you so much.

[00:37:09.430] – Heather Johnson
Thank you, Dennis. That is a very impressive list of accomplishments for a quarter. Wow, that’s awesome. Next, we have Tracy Hardin, who is the chair of the Finance Committee. Thanks, Heather.

[00:37:23.630] – Tracy Hardin
Gosh, it’s really hard to follow up after Dennis. We don’t quite have that list going because this is a slower time of year for us. We tend to get.

[00:37:33.470] – Amy Babinchak
Busier in the second part of.

[00:37:34.420] – Tracy Hardin
The year working on budget stuff. However, what we are working on is a way for people to contribute.

[00:37:44.560] – Amy Babinchak
More to the program.

[00:37:46.360] – Tracy Hardin
One of the things everybody has been saying is they want us funded by members and not by vendors. Nobody wants a big vendor coming in and taking control of our group with a giant donation.

[00:37:57.580] – Amy Babinchak
In order.

[00:37:58.680] – Tracy Hardin
To do that, we need our members to contribute more money. We ourselves, our.

[00:38:05.640] – Amy Babinchak
Group is made up of.

[00:38:06.850] – Tracy Hardin
Mostly IT service provider owners and a few vendors. Several of us have given additional money to the program, but we were like, Hey, let’s come up with something more formal and offer it to everybody. But not only that, when people do donate extra money, can we have a way of saying thank you and show appreciation for those things? So that’s the stuff.

[00:38:28.440] – Amy Babinchak
We’re.

[00:38:28.710] – Tracy Hardin
Working on right now. One of our members also mentioned, she says, I wish you had something that was more like a monthly contribution versus a one time that fits me better. So we’re working on these ideas to present to the board in different ways that members can donate additional funds and get appreciation shown to them for these contributions and to move us more forward to being a true member driven society versus having to rely on vendors for money. So that is what we’re working on right now, Heather.

[00:39:03.120] – Amy Babinchak
That’s wonderful. I put.

[00:39:05.130] – Karl Palachuk
A note in the chat to the donate section. We haven’t figured out the second piece, the NPR type where what recognition you get for your donations. But I assure you, we will recognize you if you help us out. Yes, we will. And if you want to give us a million dollars a month, we will take it.

[00:39:26.340] – Lisa Marie Papp
I did have a stupid question because I’m stupid. When we do for ARCA, as we fight a certain position, we collect money towards that cause. An example, Karl, you’re old like me and lived in California. When Proposition 13 member Travis, every time sign the petition, donate money, is that within our charter? Is that something we can look at as we fight specific issues in specific jurisdictions?

[00:39:59.160] – Karl Palachuk
We can absolutely do that. We’re not there yet, in part because there’s a certain level of bookkeeping because when you collect money specifically, we can lobby because we’re a C6. But to collect that money, we got to keep track of it and we got to file some extra forms. And there’s a level of management that has to take place. That is in our future. That is not today, but it’s a good point. Okay, thank you.

[00:40:26.300] – Lisa Marie Papp
Great.

[00:40:26.670] – Heather Johnson
And we heard from Andy Higgins earlier, just to remind you, he is looking for committee members, and you don’t have to be a marketing professional. You might even pick up a few tips about marketing for your own MSP. So that could be a nice little side added bonus. So do consider joining his committee. And last, we have Lisa Marie Papp, who is the chair of the governance committee. Lisa, are you here? She was.

[00:41:02.640] – Karl Palachuk
She might be muted. Oh, no.

[00:41:10.600] – Lisa Marie Papp
Well, we may.

[00:41:12.230] – Karl Palachuk
Have lost her. She’s muted. She’s muted.

[00:41:16.790] – Amy Babinchak
She’s talking.

[00:41:17.870] – Heather Johnson
Sorry.

[00:41:18.420] – Tracy Hardin
About that. I just wanted to say thank you for this opportunity. And Heather, it was a great segue. Yes, we have the elections coming in, as you saw the slide that Karl presented, and we’re going to follow that same format as for this year. And it gives you an opportunity, one, to stay at your committee that you’re on or venture and put your toe in another pond. Even if you are in a committee, sitting in a seat does not mean you cannot attend another committee just to be a little nosy, as I have sometimes traveled into the legislation or the finances to be a little bit nosy because sometimes their ideas don’t always get to us readily. And I go, well, maybe we can fish and try and help each other out. So this is a great opportunity to become more involved in knowing what we’re trying to do. With that being said, another option as well as myself, I think I accidentally kicked it off by putting a sticker on my Yeti and was sitting down having coffee and somebody recognized it and started asking me questions. I put it on LinkedIn and it blew up from there.

[00:42:26.300] – Tracy Hardin
Thank you, Amy and Karl. So if you have a Yeti and you want to decorate it, everybody seems to be sticker happy. But it’s a great conversation piece because you can do it in stealth mode when you go to ASCII and some other places that I have snuck into. But it’s a great way to promote our organization and just start a conversation because you just never know who you might pick up and grab their interest. With that, we’re also looking at getting started with what we call an ambassador type of badge as well as a recruiter badge. And we’re going to be developing out a brief description and everything, and that will also be put on the website. So it’s like you get these name tags and you’re just going to add badges and stuff, too. But it’s going to be something that stands out and draws attention. The other item is, and I really was excited in hearing this the other day from Karl, because I like to be involved, and sometimes I might get too involved, but hearing that CISA has asked and said, hey, we are interested in having some members or member from an SITS fee that is in the SMB aspect to come over.

[00:43:43.280] – Tracy Hardin
That is a big ask. And that is a great organization. And I was personally really excited because I will say the reason I joined this organization was this something I was looking for 11 years ago. This is such a great way to give back. And I will tell you, what I did when I started my business 11 years ago and what I do today, it is a complete 180. And cyber security, I spoke about 11 years ago, and it is dead on what we’re doing today. So please, we’re going to be putting out information. We’re going to find out and have conversations with these other organizations that are seeking us out for help or support or getting some extra brain power. And with that, we will also be seeing what their needs are, what their requirements, and we’ll be posting those as well. I appreciate it. And Heather, it’s great to see you across the pond. Thank you.

[00:44:43.890] – Heather Johnson
Thank you, Lisa Marie. That’s great. And it’s so exciting to have these programs where we can talk about NSITSP and really get the word out. So many people don’t know what the NSITSP is, or if they’ve heard of us, don’t know what we’re doing. It’s really important to have that as a conversation. And every conference has those lunches and you start talking about legislation, and boy, that really starts the table talking. So it’s a really great way to start having a conversation at a conference when you’re meeting with other MSPs at various places. Get the word out and you could get a recognition badge as well. So that’s it for me. I’m going to turn it back to Karl and Amy. They have a question and answer in an open discussion session. Thank you.

[00:45:34.050] – Karl Palachuk
B y the way, this is such a perfect example of how this organization is truly built from the bottom up and your involvement matters. The recognition badges thing started with the Finance Committee saying, Hey, we need these programs for people to give money. The board said, Okay, and then sent it off to the governance committee. What does that look like? The Finance Committee also started the whole program of, hey, we should be able to do some recruitment. They’re always focused on the money. Give us some more money. So we’re like, All right, get people some stickers and some badges to take to conferences and so forth. So that whole marketing thing, we took it to the marketing committee and they worked out the details. So the board moves things back and forth, but it is the membership. It is you and your committees who are really pushing us forward. Please, please, please, if you are only a guest, please become a full member. And like I said, it’s the cost of one hour of labor that I’m sure you can build some client for. Chris, I hope that you are here and able to open your microphone and tell us about…

[00:46:46.900] – Karl Palachuk
Chris is the chair of the executive search committee, as well as being the one who’s been active with helping us get started actually getting involved with CISA. Chris is.

[00:46:59.540] – Amy Babinchak
Not actually here today, so he’s asked me to…

[00:47:03.430] – Karl Palachuk
I apologize, folks. I am here. But I had something on my books from six months ago that I’m driving to. I had asked Amy to report out on my behalf. But I.

[00:47:19.300] – Larry Mandelberg
Did.

[00:47:19.620] – Karl Palachuk
Want to weigh in on something real quick. Lisa Marie, who I’ve had the privilege of meeting in person.

[00:47:27.050] – Larry Mandelberg
I.

[00:47:27.780] – Karl Palachuk
Totally love your sentiment about CISO, but there’s a part of that story that you probably should know. They did not reach out to us. It was nonstop shenanigans. I’ve been trying to get on their radar since last July, and I started at the very top with director Easterly in person. It was quite a production getting on.

[00:47:55.890] – Larry Mandelberg
Their radar.

[00:47:56.650] – Karl Palachuk
But as Karl and Amy and everybody else will tell you, we are very much on their radar. They are very excited to work with us. And we’ve got some really great things to look forward to that partnership. And of course, we will keep you folks fully involved. I’m in Maryland, I’m 20 minutes south of Baltimore, 20 minutes west of DC. If anybody.

[00:48:18.130] – Larry Mandelberg
On this.

[00:48:18.960] – Karl Palachuk
Call is in my area, I plan on making personal in face trips to CISTA to make sure that things keep moving and would love to carpool if anybody else wants to join me. But I’m going to get off of my soapbox. Amy, thank you for heading this up for me and I’ll shut up now and mute myself.

[00:48:38.820] – Amy Babinchak
Your audio sounds amazing for being in the car. Appreciate you popping in. I will say, Lisa also did mention the badges and whatnot. I was at channel partners this week and I had and you all should have it in your from your welcome kit. The little name tag enhancements, the little ribbon you can stick at the bottom of your name tag. I was wearing it. And a couple of people as I was wandering the Expo hall and stuff, they were like, Hey, what did you get? You got an extra thing on your thing. I was like, Oh, yeah, this is the National Society. Just is that prompt to get me to talk to them. So definitely make use of those materials that you all now have. So as Chris mentioned, he did an amazing job of opening up the opportunity with CISO for us, and there’s going to be a lot of opportunity there. So in addition to being appointed to our committees, our governance committee will be working on the process of figuring out who we appoint to the various committees that are opening up to us over at CISO. But the task force, so we have a big job ahead to do our executive search, to find ourselves a new executive director and administrative assistance to keep this organization moving.

[00:50:07.610] – Amy Babinchak
And the task force has made good progress. We were introduced to the association management companies, often referred to AMCs, something I had never heard of before, but we’re learning. Karlos set us up with one that agreed to educate us on what they do and how they do it. I personally learned a lot, though the presentation was also loaded with subtle and overt sales talk. But anyway, I felt like I learned a lot at that meeting. And at this meeting, we learned about the capabilities of AMCs, which in a nutshell is all about handling the day to day administrative operation of organizations. Some firms, AMCs are not equipped to manage newly formed organizations or aren’t interested in doing so. Some won’t take organizations that are small as we are. Others are happy to take us. Just like all of us in the IT business, we have our preferred type of client that we like to work with, so do they. It’s really not any different than how we select clients. But after that meeting, Karl was able to make some final edits to the request for proposals, which he has sent out now to 58 different AMCs.

[00:51:20.570] – Amy Babinchak
To date, we received a few not interested responses and a couple of proposals. So at our next meeting, we’re going to review the responses and decide whether we think we have a sufficient number or if we need to tweak our process. But we’re making good headway with our executive search, so we’re pretty excited for what’s coming next. Very good.

[00:51:43.820] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you. I just want to assure people I’m not going anywhere. I just have a business to run. We’re grateful to be at a point where we can actually pay a little something to get some professional outsource services, which is what we do for a living, so we’ll let other people do what they do for a living. I am going to go to the next poll, which is at the request of Amy, what additional topics would help you grow your professionalism? You think about talking to the media or understanding change management within your own company and your clients. What other things can we help you with? Please put comments into that poll, and I appreciate that. Just a note, our membership, we need to find somebody who knows what they’re doing to reorganize the way it looks. But basically, those of you who were paid members, please go to your portal and upgrade your membership to a company membership or to the new professional 125 membership. Basically, Cara has done a spectacular job with this. It prorates the difference and does all kinds of magic. We would love to have you renew it at the new rates.

[00:53:10.290] – Karl Palachuk
I will also note, many of you have joined us in July and August, and so heads up that this is coming. And if you want to move to the next level, you may. I will also say, I forgot to mention, and I got to put this in my notes for the next quarterly meeting, we also have some people who have had associate memberships. So let’s say that you’ve got 10 employees, you would join at the 375 level, you would get one vote. You can have one person designated to sit on committees or run for office. But then your other employees could register as associate members. They can view everything on the website. They can sit in on committees. They can do everything except vote in elections and hold office. That’s a way that we can have lots of people involved in helping us and contributing to the mental energy that it takes to run the organization and the creativity, but they don’t each have to pay a big price. Anyway, if you have any questions, send us an email and we’ll be happy to help you. With that, I encourage people to consider… Continue putting things in the poll, but now we’re open for Q&A and we will stay a little longer if we need to.

[00:54:31.860] – Karl Palachuk
What questions do you have of us? I hope you have many.

[00:54:37.960] – Amy Babinchak
Questions because as I just put in the chat, my favorite part of any presentation, any webinar, any talk, any anything is Q&A. I know a lot of presenters hate Q&A because they’re worried they won’t be prepared to give the answer. I just love the conversation part of it. Please unmute or type into the chat to ask us your Q&A. This concludes our meeting for today as far as content wise, but Carol and I and others are happy to hang around for as long as necessary to answer any questions that you have.

[00:55:19.960] – Karl Palachuk
I feel a little guilty of that we took up so much time. On the other hand, just a demonstration of how incredibly busy we are. I do have.

[00:55:30.700] – Lisa Marie Papp
A more comment. I did the Dave Seibels event last week, and I’d really like… I guess this is a nag. I’d really like to see us have some handout. I mean, even even if when I go to events, you just send me the PDF and I take it to Kinkos because it never changed from Kinkos and get them printed up, that’s not a problem. I’d rather do that than ship stuff back and forth. But just for reference, one of the common questions I get is I’m already a member and then I go, Well, did you pay? And they go, No, I didn’t know I was supposed to pay. I don’t think we have anything on the go that I could say this is why you member, and the membership metrics. I think that would be helpful.

[00:56:20.180] – Karl Palachuk
So, Keith, thank you very much. I completely 100 % agree. This is literally one of those things that it’s just I’m the bottleneck. And if people have ideas or drafts or whatever, I will take it. But I have just been too busy to actually generate the handout so that you can just go to that resources page and download the PDF, but I will do so. I just have to have time. Okay. Keith, one of the things we’re doing here at channel Pro in Chicago is we have the Ethics statements that we have at the table for people to pick up so they can get more information about what we’re doing.

[00:57:03.680] – Lisa Marie Papp
I’ll work on what I think the metrics should look like, and maybe it’d be cool if we create a… Have a document file on this landing site where those of us that host these, we can just download it and it could all be completely always edited and approved by the powers to be. It would make us really easy to go to events. Even events we don’t have a table at, I wouldn’t mind printing an extra 50 or so and just bringing them along and handing them to the hallway conversations. That’s a great idea.

[00:57:39.600] – Amy Babinchak
Hey.

[00:57:41.120] – Larry Mandelberg
I’m going to have to go pretty quick. I have another one at 10, but I’m going to be a moment or two late. Let me make just a quick comment and then ask a question. I love the idea of having an e brochure that we can have accessible on the website that anybody can grab whenever they need it. I’d like to see us include in there some of the benefits that we offer to our members, like the webinars, whether they’re past or upcoming. I’d also like to see us talk about what professionalism means. Professionalism is such a big piece of why we exist. I think it would be very important to put in there what we mean when we talk about professionalism. Just some thoughts. The question I wanted to ask for those of you of you that are still here, does anybody have any questions or curiosity or comments about change management, about whether you feel like you understand it or you don’t, where you think it would be valuable to have more insight or not? Anybody have any thoughts about that? It’s an unusually.

[00:58:55.860] – Amy Babinchak
Quiet group today. Usually, in these meetings, we get a lot of questions, and we’re here for half an hour or more just going through them and chatting. So speak up, guys.

[00:59:09.840] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. Well, Larry, I.

[00:59:10.760] – Tracy Hardin
Would say this, change is very hard for anybody and everybody. And those of us that are in this industry, I think we have to be way fluid or way more fluid because it’s such a rapid change. I think right now, what I’m not in a true battle with, but really having to walk quickly is AI. That just seems to be really front and center of everybody right now. And a couple of my guys, all of a sudden I noticed some productivity is going a little bit faster in some of the things they’re creating. I’m seeing that now AI, and that’s a big change. I think it’s a scary one as well. And I think that is causing, in some environments, a little bit of a culture shock per se or a scare change of what are we going to do in the near future? Yeah, E lise, you.

[01:00:11.930] – Larry Mandelberg
Bring up a really good point. I’m going to make two comments. One of the things that I want to talk about during the change management webinar is how we can help clients better embrace efforts to keep them secure. It’s indirectly related to AI, but that’s one of the key points that have come up over the last few months. When it comes to AI, in my opinion, AI is not yet ripe. So we’ve got a bunch of people eating fruit that’s not ready to be consumed. And I get AI shoved in my face probably on an average of three times a day. And my consistent response is the same. I’m not going to talk about AI right now. It’s not ready for prime time. It’s something that you might be able to benefit from. Maybe you won’t. But the risk of trying to work with something that’s not ready yet is too great for me. I have to my world is sustainability, and AI does not contribute to sustainability at this point in time. We’ll talk about it when it’s ready. I know there’s a lot of people who don’t like that, and I’m okay with that.

[01:01:44.950] – Larry Mandelberg
I bought my first computer in 1973. For those of you that are not good at math, that was 50 years ago, and we spent over 200 % of our gross sales to buy that computer. Our annual gross sales. Think about that. I’ve lived on the leading edge for most of those 50 years, and I’m done. I will not continue to exist there. So while I appreciate what you’re saying, I think it’s very important for all of us in the IT industry to find a Lasso, rope that son of a bitch and tie it down for a little bit. It’s just too wild. Interesting.

[01:02:35.120] – Lisa Marie Papp
We have to debate offline. Exactly.

[01:02:37.530] – Karl Palachuk
Or maybe debate online. Okay.

[01:02:39.760] – Lisa Marie Papp
We’ve been using AI at JPL at Caltech for maybe 15 years. So I think that the general statement, I think some of the chats and some of the new integrations are not ready for prime time. But the computing idea of AI in manufacturing, in expiration, in science and research and discovery is pretty well established. You will.

[01:03:12.430] – Larry Mandelberg
Not get an argument from me, Keith. I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve seen it… I don’t know if I would say I’ve seen it. I saw it given birth. I’m not sure if that’s accurate, but I’ve seen it since its nascent stages, and I’ve watched it evolve and develop, and I’ve seen it where it can be very powerful. When people talk about AI today… Let me back up. I hate these generalities. It feels to me like everybody that talks to me about AI today is not talking about the AI you’re talking about. They’re talking about the BS AI AI that isn’t ready for prime time. So you and I are on the same page.

[01:03:58.760] – Karl Palachuk
I just think.

[01:03:59.980] – Larry Mandelberg
What most of the people we’re dealing with as MSPs aren’t in the sophisticated technology environment that you were in 15 years ago when this came into your industry. In fact.

[01:04:15.090] – Lisa Marie Papp
It was the moment that it was 2001, we used it as the modeling for the communication protocols between the Jet Propulsion Lab and the original Mars Probe. Everyone’s opinion is different, not one’s right or wrong. I educate them on we’re looking at fluff, we’re looking at real AI with the chat GPT and all that that’s going on.

[01:04:41.400] – Karl Palachuk
Which is a different way of.

[01:04:42.760] – Lisa Marie Papp
Presenting it. Right.

[01:04:44.830] – Larry Mandelberg
The problem I have with that is that I have clients who have played with chat GPT and found answers to questions that they really were struggling with. And that just creates a sense of value that is false. Let me give you an example. One of my clients has some structural changes that they’re going through, organizational changes that they’re going through that requires them to bring in a formal manager in their finance and accounting department. They’ve never had that before. They’ve had leads, but never an actual manager who’s responsible for direct reports. They struggle to come up with a title. They use chat GPT, came up with a title and fell in love with it. And they’re like, oh, this is the greatest thing. Well, it turns out that we were in a meeting with another client in the same industry and they said, Oh, that’s the title I have for my head of accounting.

[01:05:55.830] – Karl Palachuk
I said, See, all.

[01:05:57.280] – Larry Mandelberg
You need to do, what you need is out there. You don’t need this gimmick. This is a gimmick. This is not something you need. You’re just trying to make life easier on yourself. You’re trying to be lazy. All you had to do is send an email out to your industry, to some of your colleagues and say, What would you consider this position? But people have a misguided understanding of it. That’s why I come at it from a negative perspective. I’m trying to stop them from being overly enthusiastic. And it’s just my nature. Nice guy. Your nature is to come at them in a much softer way. The funny thing I use when I.

[01:06:34.460] – Lisa Marie Papp
Teach people this is just because I’m a sports fan and a huge football fan. They asked chat GPT to list the 10 best running backs in the NFL. Number two was Elliott, who’s getting released by the Cowboys. And the other reason I use it as an example is I said the data set is old.

[01:06:54.480] – Larry Mandelberg
And you expected a.

[01:06:55.440] – Lisa Marie Papp
Current answer, and that skews it. And that skews it and to people that are less technically educated that maybe understand more, that they go, oh, how’s he on the list? And where’s this guy? And you’re going, remember, the data set’s old. And it’s influenced by why you’re are queries. Well, here’s my.

[01:07:17.500] – Larry Mandelberg
Analogy, Keith. I hope you like this. It’s like having someone who’s mastered, I mean, I mean mastered, the various highest possible level of expertise, a flying application, a pilot flying application, and you expect them to be able to get in a plane and fly it. Right.

[01:07:40.130] – Lisa Marie Papp
It doesn’t work that way.

[01:07:43.140] – Larry Mandelberg
It just doesn’t work that way. Anyway, guys, I got to go. I’m late for a meeting. I’d love to talk to you more about this, Keith, and everyone else, thank you all for your participation and contributions. We love it. Perfect.

00:00:31.000 –> 00:00:39.000

We. We have a full agenda, and so let’s go ahead and just get started.

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We are scheduled for an hour, but we will stay as long as it takes.

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Back to discussing snowmobiles. We are certainly able to do that.

00:00:47.000 –> 00:01:11.000
So alright, so a quick agenda we’re gonna do you know, we have some reports from the the bulk and from my office, and then committee reports Graham have a special discussion about the executive director search end a special call for new members and also answering any questions about

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The new member program

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Few notes, please. By the way, if you have if you’re gonna make noise, mute your microphone just for all of us.

00:01:23.000 –> 00:01:40.000
But also note that this is being recorded so if there’s anything that you do not want to say in public, and be held accountable for, mute your microphone, if you don’t want to be on the video, please turn off your video camera, also remember that we have a chat going and we post up

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The video and the transcripts and the chat, and all the links.

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And we create actually a pretty good resource out of this.

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And that is over. At Nsi, tsp org. Just go to the meetings dropped down and there you’re gonna find the recorded meetings as well as a schedule of the upcoming meetings.

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We post the meeting also on Youtube. So it’s on our Youtube channel, which is just Ns Itsp, and so anyway, participate to whatever extent you wish, but also know that this is being recorded.

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So you know you, you need to monitor yourself because we’re not gonna monitor.

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You, with that we’ll go ahead and actually start with the content and the content starts with our President. Amy.

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Bad and check

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Alright. Thank you, Carl. Well, update from the board.

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You know this past quarter. We have been focused on filling committees, which we talked about last time and begged for your participation, and we did get lots of participation.

00:02:45.000 –> 00:03:01.000
So so that was pretty good. We also worked on setting the parameters for the executive director search, which we’re gonna talk about more later, I still feel like we could use more bodies on the marketing committee now, you don’t have to be artistic and you don’t have to be a

00:03:01.000 –> 00:03:09.000
Marketing professional. You just need to know a good idea when you hear one and be able to help us come up with great ideas.

00:03:09.000 –> 00:03:11.000
So please consider helping us out in in that area. We also created a new management.

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Sorry Communication Management Team it is yet to be populated, but its purpose is going to be to create official responses to cybersecurity.

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Events, from the industry, right from our perspective on the industry. It is also going to create, a ready to use set of materials for media.

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We need to understand our industry. What we do, what we stand for, and that kind of thing.

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The board is also becoming consumed with obtaining enough funding to launch this organization into a stable and self-sustaining financial future and to that end we are going to need additional vendor members, and we need your help to make those contacts so please contact carl and I with your

00:04:03.000 –> 00:04:10.000
Introductions, and I’m not going to say too much today, because I don’t want to steal a thunder from our hard-working committees except to say that you’re going to hear about the process that has been laid out for the executive search.

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Your opportunities to join that effort you’re going to hear about a new marketing campaign.

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New membership levels and activities of the Legislative Committee, which are really heating up.

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While I do still have the floor. I want to remind all of you that we have a presence.

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We need to have a presence at every industry event. So if you are going to an event, contact the host and request a nonprofit table, then we will send you a table cover and some business cards, and you get to tell everybody at that event what is great and why they should join this organization, and don’t

00:04:49.000 –> 00:04:55.000
be afraid to do it. It’s a really great experience you get to meet everyone that’s at the event and make some great business contacts.

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So Carline, I will help you out with that, and maybe even get you connected with other of our members that are going to be at that same event.

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So you can do it together I’m gonna be at Chicago along with Jason is gonna be in Chicago as well, and we’re going to have the table over there. So if you’re at Msp rescue, I think that’s the next time that we’re gonna be

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represented. Oh, we’re also gonna be at Smb, Texas.

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They have a table over there, too, so we need to get out next, you know.

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Make sure that the the entire world of this industry knows knows that we exist.

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Andrew, just piped into the chat that he’s gonna be at Ascii Edge in in Southern California.

00:05:39.000 –> 00:05:44.000
So, Andrew, we can get you some stuff. So thank you for all your help.

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And, Carl, let’s move forward with reports

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Very good, thank you. Unfortunately, Andrew Ascii doesn’t have a place for us to have a table at their events.

00:05:57.000 –> 00:06:03.000
So that’s just the way they are, and so I will see you there.

00:06:03.000 –> 00:06:04.000
So make sure you buy me a beer, but we won’t have a table there.

00:06:04.000 –> 00:06:23.000
So a few notes on the you know the stats of what we’ve been doing so right now, we as of like this morning we’re at 297 paid members and 568 registered members.

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So the paid members is up about 49. Since our last quarterly meeting, and we have been meeting our goals.

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So our our goal for this year is to renew everybody and get about 15 new members per month, and obviously, if we can do more than that, we absolutely want to.

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But we are reaching those goals. The number of vendors has remained the same.

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So we absolutely need more vendors, and you know part of part of what we need to look at is our finances right?

00:06:54.000 –> 00:07:07.000
And you know all of our board meetings are open and all of our committee meetings are open, and you can attend them online.

00:07:07.000 –> 00:07:26.000
I wouldn’t know that at the top of the website there has magically appeared a link called Resources, and it will give you access to all of the legislative handouts that Dennis talked about at our last meeting, but also all of the new things that are coming out in terms.

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Of Logos, marketing materials, and so forth. That’s where we’re going to post resources.

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And eventually that site will be divided up into multiple pages.

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And so forth, but go check out the resources link at the top.

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Also the meetings. Link has been expanded so that it now includes a list of all of the committee meetings that you can attend, and it has a direct link you don’t need to register for committee meetings or board meetings.

00:07:54.000 –> 00:07:55.000
You can just go there and you know you do have to be logged in as a paid member.

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But you can just go ahead and attend any of our meetings in terms of finances.

00:08:08.000 –> 00:08:17.000
We are doing. Okay, we’re doing what we had hoped to do, minus getting a new vendor here and there.

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And so right now, our cash is okay, but it will slowly, deep over time.

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If we don’t get additional vendors. So we really need a lot of members to to sort of pump us up.

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But we’re we also need those vendor partners down the road.

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Few announcements. The next meeting for all of us is May tenth, and that is just as always.

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The second Wednesday of the quarter, and so, second Wednesday, the second month of the quarter, so mark your calendars and join us there.

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I’m gonna have 9 posts, our social media links into the the chat.

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So you can join us on all of our social media and we’re gonna talk about that.

00:09:08.000 –> 00:09:18.000
The Marketing committee has put together some really great stuff and is pumping that to my team who is pumping it to social media.

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So nice, and chart of our Hootsuite account, and is doing an excellent job there.

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So when you see those posts like them and share them, whether it is Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, or whatever, make sure that you help get the work.

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Huge. Thank you to our vendor partners and you know all of all of the people who are vendor partners have been participating.

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And I really really appreciate that. And so you know, please reach out to your vendors and ask them to participate at a higher level.

00:09:49.000 –> 00:09:56.000
We would love to have them engage, and they can just contact me.

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And I’m just Carl with a K. Carl. P.

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It’s small business, or I’m at the ends.

00:10:01.000 –> 00:10:05.000
I tsp.org and I’ll be happy to chat with any of the vendors.

00:10:05.000 –> 00:10:06.000
Yeah.

00:10:06.000 –> 00:10:11.000
Hey, Carl, I’m sorry. Do we have any sponsor packages to find that we could share with a a vendor

00:10:11.000 –> 00:10:12.000
Well, so we have a At on our website. There’s a vendor link.

00:10:12.000 –> 00:10:20.000
It says, get involved in one of the options is vendor.

00:10:20.000 –> 00:10:25.000
So there all the vendor partner program materials are there, and I think pretty clearly defined.

00:10:25.000 –> 00:10:37.000
If you have questions about what’s there, I would be happy to talk to you, and we can change that site updated whatever we need to do to make it more clear.

00:10:37.000 –> 00:10:38.000
One of the things that we’ve done with vendors is we?

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We we don’t want a tiered system where one vendor gives us so much money that they basically claim the right to put their logo on every single thing we do, and we appear to be owned by them.

00:10:55.000 –> 00:11:01.000
And there are vendors, that’s the only way they would give money, so that’s just the reality of it.

00:11:01.000 –> 00:11:04.000
So we want the vendors who are would say, We need you.

00:11:04.000 –> 00:11:08.000
We need strong partners. We need a strong industry in order to be successful, and so there is really only one vendor program you’re either in or you’re out.

00:11:08.000 –> 00:11:19.000
But there’s different levels of giving based on what different vendors can afford

00:11:19.000 –> 00:11:21.000
Hey? Can I ask a question, Carl? This is Keith.

00:11:21.000 –> 00:11:23.000
Absolutely.

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Do we have anything that I off? I could download off the website to bring to Smb.

00:11:29.000 –> 00:11:32.000
Texas took tomorrow and Friday

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I will get you some materials. I did so we’ve probably talked about this offline.

00:11:45.000 –> 00:11:46.000
At the tablecloth and the card

00:11:46.000 –> 00:11:48.000
But basically, I thought we had mailed a tablecloth, and and you and you have stickers and and cards.

00:11:48.000 –> 00:11:51.000
Okay, so you just need handouts

00:11:51.000 –> 00:11:56.000
Yeah, I was just looking at. I can. I’ll take it and get it printed.

00:11:56.000 –> 00:11:57.000
Alright!

00:11:57.000 –> 00:12:01.000
I mean pay for it. That’s no big deal, but people want to see something besides my good looking face at a booth

00:12:01.000 –> 00:12:04.000
I don’t know why anybody would want anything else. Got it, anyway.

00:12:04.000 –> 00:12:07.000
We, I I will work on that

00:12:07.000 –> 00:12:09.000
Thank you.

00:12:09.000 –> 00:12:18.000
With that. Unfortunately, our Vice President can’t be here today as she’s making a presentation. She’s making a speech right now.

00:12:18.000 –> 00:12:19.000
So you, I’m going to introduce the committee to.

00:12:19.000 –> 00:12:25.000
So Mr. Dennis will kick off with you.

00:12:25.000 –> 00:12:31.000
Please don’t take the entire hour because you’ve done been doing so much work

00:12:31.000 –> 00:12:38.000
Yes, I noticed that that I I’m not actually Dennis Miller.

00:12:38.000 –> 00:12:39.000
Well, there you go!

00:12:39.000 –> 00:12:41.000
I’m Dennis Wilson, but so

00:12:41.000 –> 00:12:49.000
You know that’s been up there for, like 3 events, I I have no idea what where that came from. But anyway, Dennis Wilson

00:12:49.000 –> 00:12:54.000
The the comedian, the comedian is is Dennis Miller.

00:12:54.000 –> 00:12:59.000
He’s one of the few, if I remember right, that actually spells Dennis correctly with one end

00:12:59.000 –> 00:13:00.000
Alright goodness, awesome

00:13:00.000 –> 00:13:06.000
Anyway, I wanted to talk about the Legislative committee.

00:13:06.000 –> 00:13:11.000
We we have a great group of community members and attendees that have been working with us at that committee.

00:13:11.000 –> 00:13:19.000
Jason Harrison’s our Vice president, Keith Nelson is is the secretary we’ve got Andrew Crawford James.

00:13:19.000 –> 00:13:40.000
Ted Geezler. I hope I didn’t screw that up, and Trevor Deodorf besides that, with that Amy and Karl and and Jeff Grenier, who have been showing up for most of the meetings, and we’ll

00:13:40.000 –> 00:13:43.000
really want to thank you to our vendor attendees.

00:13:43.000 –> 00:13:50.000
Ben, Europe, row and joy abeland add cliptics, and 7 7 resp.

00:13:50.000 –> 00:13:58.000
Anyway, the we want to talk about our projects that we’re looking at for this quarter.

00:13:58.000 –> 00:14:13.000
We we currently have a couple of pieces done, which is the how to pamphlet on working with legislators, that that’s done in an up now as well as the first video.

00:14:13.000 –> 00:14:17.000
Which goes with the pamphlet, talking about the how to use of dealing with legislators.

00:14:17.000 –> 00:14:25.000
There’s another. We’re I’m not sure how how many.

00:14:25.000 –> 00:14:41.000
We ended up with a 7 to 10, probably in that area of these, 5 to 10 min videos that are more focused on the individual questions that the how to pamphlet talks about.

00:14:41.000 –> 00:14:50.000
So the second one we’re working on currently and and so this quarter we should have.

00:14:50.000 –> 00:15:05.000
Oh, probably in the range of 4 or 5 of them done next we’re we’re dealing with the wallet, sized battle cards, and a resources brochure that currently is is in process.

00:15:05.000 –> 00:15:14.000
We are working with the Marketing Committee on Potential Joint Projects and templates for videos and brochures and Powerpoints.

00:15:14.000 –> 00:15:22.000
That kind of stuff. Everything looks consistent across all of that that is being printed or or put on the social media.

00:15:22.000 –> 00:15:44.000
And last, of those things that are in process right now is the a potential example of a a legislation that we might put out for recommendation to to the legislators so they could see what kind of thing we’re interested in, how how we would answer the

00:15:44.000 –> 00:15:49.000
The question of of what is it that we need to do?

00:15:49.000 –> 00:15:55.000
Okay, we. We have a couple of others that that might pop in, but probably not.

00:15:55.000 –> 00:16:07.000
That’ll be for the next quarter. And so that’s it.

00:16:07.000 –> 00:16:19.000
Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. So so the the I do wanna just take a second and shout out to Daniel Burrow, who has been spectacular and just donated.

00:16:19.000 –> 00:16:33.000
I wouldn’t say maybe not hundreds of hours, but many, many dozens of hours, and maybe a 100, and really help the legislative committee with the the legislation into Zoom put together.

00:16:33.000 –> 00:16:53.000
You know some thoughts that are as as least restrictive as possible, and you know one of the things that’s kind of weird to think about is that if you go to any State in the United States of America, there is no chapter in the law entitled it Service providers or computer

00:16:53.000 –> 00:17:02.000
Consultants. So it’s very, very interesting. Given that, you know the people who cut your hair and your lawn have to be licensed with the stuff.

00:17:02.000 –> 00:17:10.000
Alright, finance, committee, Tracy sent me a note that she’s also getting a speech or or making a sales presentation today.

00:17:10.000 –> 00:17:14.000
So she’s not here

00:17:14.000 –> 00:17:15.000
Oh, you are okay. Well, now.

00:17:15.000 –> 00:17:21.000
I’m here. I’m here. I made it. You didn’t catch that last email, my other meeting canceled right before this one.

00:17:21.000 –> 00:17:22.000
So I was able to make it

00:17:22.000 –> 00:17:24.000
I did not alright, so Amy’s got a I mean a trace.

00:17:24.000 –> 00:17:25.000
Well, Amy does, too, but Tracy’s got a priority.

00:17:25.000 –> 00:17:31.000
Stick straight, and we’re more important than her clients. So

00:17:31.000 –> 00:17:32.000
What’s going on with finance

00:17:32.000 –> 00:17:36.000
Yeah, well, it’s a little bit slow time for us at this time.

00:17:36.000 –> 00:17:43.000
A year. However, we’ve been working with the Board on enhancements to the membership contribution program.

00:17:43.000 –> 00:17:44.000
Basically, some members want to give above and beyond what our standard membership offers.

00:17:44.000 –> 00:17:55.000
So we want to provide waste of doing that. And plus what you had said, Karl, we really want to be.

00:17:55.000 –> 00:18:06.000
Get our money more for members than for vendors, so this will help drive that we hope that more of our members will step forward, and we want to recognize members that do that and give above and beyond.

00:18:06.000 –> 00:18:10.000
So, let’s try to get this finance through our members instead of these vendors.

00:18:10.000 –> 00:18:19.000
Also, we do need another member, or we have 6 right now.

00:18:19.000 –> 00:18:24.000
Could use the seventh, you can be either an It service person or a vendor.

00:18:24.000 –> 00:18:26.000
At this point it doesn’t matter. We we’ve got a good balance on the team.

00:18:26.000 –> 00:18:31.000
You don’t have to know anything about accounting, or even math.

00:18:31.000 –> 00:18:35.000
You just have to care about how Ns, Itsp spends its money.

00:18:35.000 –> 00:18:41.000
We meet once a month for about an hour. If you’re interested, please put your contact in info in the chat.

00:18:41.000 –> 00:18:46.000
If that’s okay with you, Karl, if you put it there, I’ll go, or you can reach out through the Ns.

00:18:46.000 –> 00:19:02.000
Itsp website. Once you’ve logged in, you know, you click on a link called get ball and volunteer, and there you can volunteer relief for any committee you must be a paid member to volunteer on one of the committees by the way, we meet on the third Wednesday of every month

00:19:02.000 –> 00:19:11.000
At 11 Am. Eastern or 8 Am. Pacific, and that’s what I have

00:19:11.000 –> 00:19:23.000
Very good, sorry for coughing. I have allergies as usual, so, and and I just want to reiterate that the Finance Committee is mostly about policy.

00:19:23.000 –> 00:19:31.000
It it’s about. Where should we spend our finite resources and so the Finance committee is.

00:19:31.000 –> 00:19:39.000
They go through a cycle just just like any other finance organization, so they they’re going to be talking to the other committees.

00:19:39.000 –> 00:19:43.000
What do you have in mind? You know what what kinds of things do you want?

00:19:43.000 –> 00:19:44.000
Unfortunately, every committee wants to spend roughly a 1 million dollars.

00:19:44.000 –> 00:19:50.000
So you know you can’t all get into the budget.

00:19:50.000 –> 00:19:53.000
But the Finance Committee is is the organization that helps us put together the budget.

00:19:53.000 –> 00:19:55.000
So you just have to know about about what you want. This organization to be doing and not doing.

00:19:55.000 –> 00:20:04.000
You don’t have to do any math so alright, so Governance. Lisa!

00:20:04.000 –> 00:20:12.000
Marie Papp is the vice chair of governance.

00:20:12.000 –> 00:20:14.000
What is going on there

00:20:14.000 –> 00:20:17.000
Okay, thank you. Yes, Jason. Thomas is our chairperson, and he is currently out.

00:20:17.000 –> 00:20:29.000
But I am a try and uphold to his standards a couple of things is, as you all heard, about a welcoming kit as a new member.

00:20:29.000 –> 00:20:46.000
You have these nice little stickers, you have little ribbons to put on your badges as well as cards that you can hand out to perspective new members and, Carl, I will say we have a couple of events occurring here in Atlanta Georgia.

00:20:46.000 –> 00:20:56.000
And you did mention Ascii, which is in March for me, however, tomorrow, Friday, I am going to the Atlanta Cybersecurity Summit, so I don’t know if you want to overnight anything that would be appreciated otherwise.

00:20:56.000 –> 00:21:08.000
I’ll use what I have. So those are great items that were, you know, just handing out so it just kind of gives a little bit of advertising and marketing and and that also brings questions when you’re meeting with your clients.

00:21:08.000 –> 00:21:15.000
They ask, what’s this about? So you can bring it to to say what our credibility is with that being said.

00:21:15.000 –> 00:21:19.000
It’s understand that we also have a code of Ethics Committee that’s being formed.

00:21:19.000 –> 00:21:27.000
And we’re going to be working alongside with them and making sure that we make it comfortable for everybody to be a great Msp.

00:21:27.000 –> 00:21:39.000
Or it service Provider and the member. There was an email that came out in January of 2,023, and it’s in regards to membership, renewal on your member anniversary date.

00:21:39.000 –> 00:21:44.000
So please read that email over because it does have some very interesting information.

00:21:44.000 –> 00:21:53.000
And lastly, Jason said to me, he was looking at, we’re gonna put on the table of a discussion in regards to it.

00:21:53.000 –> 00:21:57.000
Subcontractor space for a membership. As we know, currently, we know the big boys are starting to.

00:21:57.000 –> 00:22:09.000
Unfortunately lay off some. It professionals, but we know there is a great abundance of it.

00:22:09.000 –> 00:22:14.000
Professionals that would rather work as a subcontractor and help us out, and they can help cover when we want to go on vacation.

00:22:14.000 –> 00:22:29.000
Oh, what’s that? Or we might have, you know, some onboarding of mass clients all at one time, because you decide to start a second business, and they can be there to help.

00:22:29.000 –> 00:22:40.000
There you go! Carl

00:22:40.000 –> 00:22:41.000
Okay.

00:22:41.000 –> 00:22:45.000
Thank you, and please bring up the subcontractor question a few slides down the road when we talk about membership cause cause we, the the we actually have a plan for that alright.

00:22:45.000 –> 00:23:06.000
So so next up is Andy Higgins, with the Marketing Committee, which is the official distributor of stake knives for marking campaigns, and we have been doing quite a bit with the marketing committee and actually got some good messaging out so andy what is up with

00:23:06.000 –> 00:23:07.000
You guys

00:23:07.000 –> 00:23:16.000
Hello! Everybody! Excuse me if I to send into a bout of coughing, cause I’ve got the same allergies as call has.

00:23:16.000 –> 00:23:17.000
Cause we’re right down the street

00:23:17.000 –> 00:23:24.000
Alright marketing. Yeah, right? Exactly. Okay. Well, thanks to our current members, we’re working.

00:23:24.000 –> 00:23:25.000
We’ve got about 3 or 4 people working where on our committee, currently, Carl has been helping.

00:23:25.000 –> 00:23:32.000
Eastern encounters at one of those 3 or 4, but he does count, of course, because he’s car.

00:23:32.000 –> 00:23:36.000
He’s been doing a lot of heavy lifting with us, and we are still looking for new members.

00:23:36.000 –> 00:23:42.000
I was amazed to hear one of the committees as 7 people.

00:23:42.000 –> 00:23:46.000
That’s what we need to aspire to. We need lots of people.

00:23:46.000 –> 00:23:51.000
Please excuse me. We meet every 2 weeks on Tuesday late afternoon, 6 P. M.

00:23:51.000 –> 00:23:54.000
Central, which is for the California. It’s only 4 pm.

00:23:54.000 –> 00:24:04.000
But it’s a little late for Eastern, but we still have one guy who 10 sheep out on the east coast somewhere, who joins our meetings, so please reach out if you want to.

00:24:04.000 –> 00:24:07.000
If you’re interested in marketing. No, for a prior knowledge to marketing of marketing is required.

00:24:07.000 –> 00:24:16.000
We just we want ideas like, like, what car was saying, and some of the other committee members.

00:24:16.000 –> 00:24:21.000
So currently, it’s my understanding that we’re also responsible for membership.

00:24:21.000 –> 00:24:27.000
Since the Membership committee has been phased out, you may notice there was a membership committee back in the day.

00:24:27.000 –> 00:24:35.000
Something I wanted to just seize on before I want to talk about a couple of things was a point last night in the States of Union.

00:24:35.000 –> 00:24:42.000
Some of you might have watched it when Mr. Biden talked about subconscious.

00:24:42.000 –> 00:24:45.000
I think it’s that’s a perfect opportunity.

00:24:45.000 –> 00:24:50.000
He talked about side crime doing something about it, and what else other stuff he talked about.

00:24:50.000 –> 00:24:54.000
But I think that would be. That’s a great way to get into the conversation, even with your local legislature.

00:24:54.000 –> 00:25:06.000
Legislative people. So we have as a our friend, the comedian, Dennis Miller, was mentioning.

00:25:06.000 –> 00:25:16.000
We have been talking with the Legislative Committee to work with them on the following about legislation that legislation is going to be coming out on the State level.

00:25:16.000 –> 00:25:23.000
Of course. And we need our members. Anybody knows people who are at the state level.

00:25:23.000 –> 00:25:27.000
You know, in the legislature we need doesn’t matter what the connection is.

00:25:27.000 –> 00:25:30.000
We need to reach out. We need to get those connections.

00:25:30.000 –> 00:25:46.000
So we can be that Zach? Yeah, I know somebody who can be provide zoom marketing to provide you material. And that’s why we come in providing this material working with the legislative committee so that you guys can you know step up.

00:25:46.000 –> 00:25:50.000
And get yourself noticed. I mean, how’s that for marketing yourself?

00:25:50.000 –> 00:25:58.000
If you get noticed by your local legislation that’s that’s perfect it’s a win-win situation for Msps.

00:25:58.000 –> 00:26:05.000
So we’re gonna be producing the material that you can use to reach out to your local representatives.

00:26:05.000 –> 00:26:14.000
And then you’re a member of Ns, I, tsp, you gotta be a member of course, but if you have interest in reaching out you don’t have to be members of the committee right?

00:26:14.000 –> 00:26:15.000
You don’t have to commit to the time on the committee.

00:26:15.000 –> 00:26:20.000
You just have to reach out to us, and we can help you do that alright, and we want.

00:26:20.000 –> 00:26:30.000
A, and we want a 2 way conversation with you, so we can make sure we’re getting a consistent message out to everybody on this in this area.

00:26:30.000 –> 00:26:34.000
So that’s that’s a big area where we’re driving right now.

00:26:34.000 –> 00:26:40.000
Additionally what Carl mentioned about the social media with Nye and himself.

00:26:40.000 –> 00:26:51.000
We’re using a protocol hoopsuite where we’re pushing out social media management or managing the social media with that so that’s a piece of the whole puzzle, too.

00:26:51.000 –> 00:26:56.000
And that’s about it. A brain dump from me. Thank you.

00:26:56.000 –> 00:26:57.000
Alrighty. Thank you. So if you have any interest at all in helping promote the Ns.

00:26:57.000 –> 00:27:07.000
I tsp, please, Andy, why don’t you go ahead and throw your email in the chat?

00:27:07.000 –> 00:27:16.000
Or folks can email me, or nigh not the best way to get a hold of nigh is admin at Ns. I. Tsp.

00:27:16.000 –> 00:27:24.000
Org. And we need new members. So there you go, big announcement for a task force.

00:27:24.000 –> 00:27:39.000
One of the things that we want to do is get some people together and begin the task force to find someone find a some one or some company to help us with the admirative side of running this organization.

00:27:39.000 –> 00:27:52.000
So I cannot run my company and another full organization at the same time.

00:27:52.000 –> 00:28:01.000
So we have a task force forming the board has approved the task force and has asked people to volunteer for it.

00:28:01.000 –> 00:28:04.000
And the way this process is gonna work is that there will be a form to fill out.

00:28:04.000 –> 00:28:15.000
But first we’re asking people to send a very brief letter to admin at Ns.

00:28:15.000 –> 00:28:20.000
I, tsp org, and just say, this is why I think I should be on the task force.

00:28:20.000 –> 00:28:37.000
And this is my relevant experience. We will then the board on their regular meeting on the fourth day, Monday, will go through those letters of application, and invite people to fill out the online application form.

00:28:37.000 –> 00:28:43.000
And so the deadline for getting your letters into admin at Ns.

00:28:43.000 –> 00:29:00.000
Itsp.org is February the twentieth 4, and then the board will ask people to fill out the form, and the reason that we’re doing it this way, just to be very honest is that filling out the form has turned out to be a very low commitment event

00:29:00.000 –> 00:29:09.000
And part of what we saw in the elections is people who, you know, there’s a whatever big, long form people put in their name and their email and hit, enter.

00:29:09.000 –> 00:29:10.000
And so we had, you know, candidates with no positions, no nothing, no information.

00:29:10.000 –> 00:29:30.000
No background, no links to their social media. So we want people to have to have to take some effort to demonstrate that they’re actually interested in putting out some work because this task force will probably go on for several months and it has an extraordinarily important job.

00:29:30.000 –> 00:29:46.000
So we are honored to be at the position where we’re growing fast enough that we need to move up to the next level of professional administration.

00:29:46.000 –> 00:29:57.000
And so side note, I’m not going anywhere. The board is approved for me to stick around for the rest of my life, so you know that that that’s not gonna be a problem.

00:29:57.000 –> 00:29:58.000
But I just can’t be, you know, balancing the budget and organizing all the people.

00:29:58.000 –> 00:30:02.000
And all that happy stuff. So anyway. So the the task force has a hugely important job.

00:30:02.000 –> 00:30:21.000
And so we encourage anybody who is remotely interested to send a very quick letter, just, you know, expressing your interest. Larry, you have your hand up

00:30:21.000 –> 00:30:30.000
Carl, I do have my hand up. Thank you. I I just want to say something very briefly, and it it speaks to everything that everyone has been talking about this morning, and I gotta say I just love hearing all this.

00:30:30.000 –> 00:30:37.000
I’m so happy that we’re doing so much.

00:30:37.000 –> 00:30:44.000
I just want to reiterate our vision. Our vision is that we want to become the voice of the industry and define the standards for professionalism in it.

00:30:44.000 –> 00:31:09.000
Services. And the reason I want to repeat that is because this is a vision that cannot be done without the support and participation of our membership can’t be done, and

00:31:09.000 –> 00:31:16.000
Doing this, I think, helps everybody. That’s a member. It doesn’t help the organization.

00:31:16.000 –> 00:31:24.000
The organization is just a vehicle to try to create these professionalism standards, these, the definitions.

00:31:24.000 –> 00:31:37.000
So I wanna I just wanna make the point that if you care about defining standards for professionalism in it, services having a say in what those standards are and making those standards standards right?

00:31:37.000 –> 00:31:45.000
Things that everybody in the it industry says, Oh, these are professional standards!

00:31:45.000 –> 00:32:04.000
What what we’re trying to do is an organization is provide an opportunity for you to be a part of that journey, and if if that’s a journey, if that’s a goal that resonates with you, and if that’s a journey you want to take with us, we absolutely want you there and we will

00:32:04.000 –> 00:32:17.000
find ways to have you help us that works for you in all of these committees, and all of these requests to promote us and to go to these events and hand out flyers and stuff.

00:32:17.000 –> 00:32:23.000
I just want to be very clear about it. The whole reason for that is to give you guys the opportunity.

00:32:23.000 –> 00:32:28.000
You guys and gals to help all of us define the standards for professionalism and it services.

00:32:28.000 –> 00:32:35.000
And if that’s important to you, that’s why we want your help.

00:32:35.000 –> 00:32:38.000
And and that’s why we need to do this together.

00:32:38.000 –> 00:32:40.000
Thank you.

00:32:40.000 –> 00:32:47.000
Alrighty, so anyway, if you have any questions, send them to admin or send them to Karlp, and we will help you out.

00:32:47.000 –> 00:32:56.000
I know that once we start spreading the word that we will have many, many ridiculously good talented people.

00:32:56.000 –> 00:33:04.000
I have been very, very impressed with the people who have stepped up on the various task forces and committees in the last couple of years.

00:33:04.000 –> 00:33:06.000
So alright.

00:33:06.000 –> 00:33:10.000
I I’m in press, Carl

00:33:10.000 –> 00:33:15.000
Plus Dennis Wilson, who I’ve known for 20 years, lets me make fun of him publicly.

00:33:15.000 –> 00:33:21.000
So there you go. So the membership. I do want to spend some time on this.

00:33:21.000 –> 00:33:26.000
And and to the question of subcontractors. If you are a subcontractor, if if you are somebody who used to work for whatever Intel HP.

00:33:26.000 –> 00:33:36.000
Microsoft blah blah blah, and now you’re you’ve got a job or what you wanna do is be a specialist in a certain area and help out other it service providers.

00:33:36.000 –> 00:33:51.000
It seems to me the the relevant role for you to play is to join as a professional individual.

00:33:51.000 –> 00:33:55.000
That cost is $125 a year, and you I just stay a, you know, a sole proprietor working for other.

00:33:55.000 –> 00:34:05.000
It, professionals. If you were working for Intel, you could also join as an individual member at $125 a year, and you retain that membership.

00:34:05.000 –> 00:34:08.000
It’s not tied to your company, so then you can move to HP.

00:34:08.000 –> 00:34:20.000
Or work for Dennis, or work for somebody else, and go back and work for Microsoft, whatever that that seems to be.

00:34:20.000 –> 00:34:30.000
The appropriate place for that. If you are a one person shop, but you might occasionally have subcontractors, or or have employees that you would want to be members as well.

00:34:30.000 –> 00:34:36.000
Then the company membership makes sense. So you would get one full.

00:34:36.000 –> 00:34:42.000
Professional individual membership as a company, but then you would also get for a associate memberships and that’s at the 1 50 range.

00:34:42.000 –> 00:35:04.000
So we are having a lot of people are having great luck, just, you know, moving over to the committee, the company memberships Kara has designed an excellent process that makes it very easy occasionally there’s some questions about the proration because the proration.

00:35:04.000 –> 00:35:14.000
Basically, we start a new membership. So you, there’s sort of the difference between what you have paid for and what you need to pay for.

00:35:14.000 –> 00:35:15.000
But we’re happy to work that out with people so that they understand where the numbers come from.

00:35:15.000 –> 00:35:28.000
But there’s a certain as much, usually a much smaller amount due today, and then it renews at the 1 50 level.

00:35:28.000 –> 00:35:46.000
We do have some people joining at the higher tiers, so depending on whatever you think is appropriate, I would say just a wild guess, but probably 80 or 90% of our membership is gonna be in tier one or tier, 2 but whatever it the size of your company is we think

00:35:46.000 –> 00:36:01.000
These numbers are very, very reasonable, and the the board has looked at this a dozen times, and the membership or the Finance committee has looked at it a couple of dozen times, and the Governance Committee has looked at it a dozen times.

00:36:01.000 –> 00:36:04.000
So you know it’s it’s a good model, and I think it makes a lot of room for everybody who’s in the industry. Right?

00:36:04.000 –> 00:36:22.000
So any questions on that before we move on

00:36:22.000 –> 00:36:26.000
Alright! Well, I highly encourage everybody who’s here.

00:36:26.000 –> 00:36:45.000
We also have a growth of I think it was fifty-ish people who joined as registered guests, and I believe that if you are in this industry, and if you’re on the list and if you are on our mailing list, we have about 2,000 people, on our mailing list, they should all

00:36:45.000 –> 00:36:53.000
Just spend the 125 or 150, and join, you know, I think we are not asking you for very much, and we are.

00:36:53.000 –> 00:37:01.000
We are doing a hell of a job. So that’s my opinion.

00:37:01.000 –> 00:37:18.000
Everybody’s already talked about events. But if you have events nigh is making a list of all the events that anybody tells her about, and then trying to contact the right people to see if we can get a table at their event, so I wouldn’t say it’s a full time. Job.

00:37:18.000 –> 00:37:28.000
But she’s spending lots of hours on that. So if you know of events that we should be@sendanemailtoadminatnsitsp.org if we can’t organize a table this year, we still want the on the list, so we can ask them.

00:37:28.000 –> 00:37:54.000
About organizing a table next year. Everybody on this call, unless you give us a bad address, should have received a mailing from us with welcome letter, and you know some guide to how to get around the website and some stickers and some business cards and so everybody has a little bit of what they need

00:37:54.000 –> 00:37:56.000
To attend events, as well as a little name, tag enhancement for your your name, Badge.

00:37:56.000 –> 00:38:04.000
We’ve ordered more of it, and so anybody who’s attending an event and wants to help represent us.

00:38:04.000 –> 00:38:10.000
Just send us a note, and we will get that out to you.

00:38:10.000 –> 00:38:14.000
Ben had his hand raised

00:38:14.000 –> 00:38:18.000
Thank you, Carl. I had a couple of comments I’d like to share one.

00:38:18.000 –> 00:38:22.000
I really appreciate Larry. I think it was Larry, you know, reallyiterating the purpose of the organization and the members and the journey.

00:38:22.000 –> 00:38:32.000
And I want to plug him and and and sort of that along those lines.

00:38:32.000 –> 00:38:37.000
So elliptics will be at 6 Ascii events this year.

00:38:37.000 –> 00:38:42.000
We, you know, these things are really expensive. Frankly, you don’t get a lot of boot time.

00:38:42.000 –> 00:38:45.000
It’s hard if you don’t get the speaking slot.

00:38:45.000 –> 00:38:50.000
And I would love for us to have a you know.

00:38:50.000 –> 00:38:57.000
Ns, i tsp brochure on our booth at every event put every other vendor, hey?

00:38:57.000 –> 00:39:01.000
Ask us why we’re supporting the the Itsp, right?

00:39:01.000 –> 00:39:18.000
So it’s a force multiplier for us. We attract like minded people that want to be on this journey and it’s it’s a community driven engagement whether or not you know, so I would encourage you to think about how the the handful of vendors that you do have you know

00:39:18.000 –> 00:39:32.000
Can create some momentum with you guys at these events. And then the other comment along the the the cyber side and we’ve shared this in the legislative group.

00:39:32.000 –> 00:39:41.000
But but you guys are force multipliers for cybersecurity, and that means for legislation and communication.

00:39:41.000 –> 00:39:51.000
So, if you have 10 clients or a 100 clients, you’re helping provide cybersecurity and good technology.

00:39:51.000 –> 00:39:59.000
So you know, one of the data points. I’m really interested in getting is, you have 800, you know, over 850 members providing services to over 15,000 small businesses in 25 states.

00:39:59.000 –> 00:40:11.000
Right, and all of a sudden you’re reach when you, when you illustrate that reach you.

00:40:11.000 –> 00:40:31.000
Become much more significant of that voice as you were the stewards, the shepherds, the trusted advisors, to thousands of small businesses, with thousands of employees and that’s a real mission, and I think you should be proud of it, and you should communicate it, and you should grow it

00:40:31.000 –> 00:40:33.000
I’m really thrilled to be involved

00:40:33.000 –> 00:40:37.000
Thank you, sir, and we are grateful to have you here.

00:40:37.000 –> 00:40:49.000
It’s funny, because I know both you and Larry, like have had have had the mission of this organization as part of your personal mission for more than 20 years, even though we have only existed for 2 and a half years.

00:40:49.000 –> 00:40:51.000
So I appreciate that. Alright. So now we’re de into the Q, a.

00:40:51.000 –> 00:40:58.000
Section, and Max will ask, well, have you hold your question for just a minute?

00:40:58.000 –> 00:41:08.000
But then we will get to it. One of the questions that always comes up at every one of these meetings is, you know, what’s going on with comptia and and so forth.

00:41:08.000 –> 00:41:11.000
And you know, kind of like, hey, how come come Toia isn’t doing this, or what is Kantia doing or not doing?

00:41:11.000 –> 00:41:15.000
And I I just want to let you know. I think M.

00:41:15.000 –> 00:41:28.000
Chain I’ve had 6 meetings since the last time we had our quarterly meeting, so we talk all the time, and so I invited Mj.

00:41:28.000 –> 00:41:29.000
To just come and answer the question. So what’s up with Comtia?

00:41:29.000 –> 00:41:39.000
And feel free to promote the communities and councils form coming up every mark

00:41:39.000 –> 00:41:43.000
Thanks. Carl. I think you know, in terms of answering the question.

00:41:43.000 –> 00:41:54.000
I guess I’d want to know what what questions you have, cause. There’s a lot going on with Comtia and and

00:41:54.000 –> 00:42:03.000
Well, one of the questions is like, Why should I join Nsa. Tsp, isn’t com tia already doing all of this

00:42:03.000 –> 00:42:11.000
Well, I’d say there’s certainly some overlap between what you’re doing and what is doing.

00:42:11.000 –> 00:42:16.000
But that overlap is is, you know, additive and complementary. You know.

00:42:16.000 –> 00:42:24.000
It’s it. We certainly don’t consider ourselves, or you to be competitive in any way, shape or manner.

00:42:24.000 –> 00:42:40.000
You know Comtia is a big open tent where a vendor, neutral nonprofit trade association and everyone is welcome to to participate I know a few of the folks on the meeting today are members, and and you know there may be others that I’m not aware of that

00:42:40.000 –> 00:42:48.000
Are members. But from that perspective, you know, we certainly like a lot of the things you’re talking about agree with a lot of the things you’re talking about.

00:42:48.000 –> 00:42:53.000
As you know, we used to directly lobby at the State and Federal level.

00:42:53.000 –> 00:43:07.000
We decided to get out of that work, because, quite frankly, our members were at odds with one another as to what was the best course of action or the best position to take.

00:43:07.000 –> 00:43:21.000
It’s one of the difficulties of being a large global trade association is that our members span the very smallest organization that could be.

00:43:21.000 –> 00:43:27.000
A single person could be an Msp. Could be a software developer who knows?

00:43:27.000 –> 00:43:34.000
All the way up to the gorillas in the industry, and, as you might expect, there’s oftentimes a clash of opinion within that within that broad spectrum.

00:43:34.000 –> 00:43:43.000
So we decided to get out of the business quite frankly.

00:43:43.000 –> 00:44:00.000
It was an extremely expensive business to be in so I applaud your finance committee for working the numbers and figuring out how to go at this effectively, because it can be all consuming.

00:44:00.000 –> 00:44:22.000
And so when we when we did that, what we did at the same time, though, was, we do keep some, some certain consultants on retainer to keep an eye on different things that are going on in the legislative arena more at the Federal level than the State level for sure but we have visibility there

00:44:22.000 –> 00:44:36.000
As well. And so if and when we detect things that are of impact to our members, we assess it, we communicate it, we share it with the right people, but we’ve taken a different approach than the direct approach that that you’re taking I don’t.

00:44:36.000 –> 00:44:43.000
I don’t know if that accurately answers the question, but you know certainly I welcome any further questions

00:44:43.000 –> 00:44:44.000
Well, thank you for being here, and you know just the last meeting which we had in November.

00:44:44.000 –> 00:44:52.000
We had a big question, which is, you know, hey? Are we up or nonprofits?

00:44:52.000 –> 00:44:56.000
Are we a not-for-profit? What are we?

00:44:56.000 –> 00:45:03.000
And we are a 501 c. 6, specifically, because we believe that we need to be able to talk to legislators.

00:45:03.000 –> 00:45:13.000
And there’s a point at which that conversation, however you might define it, the law defines it as lobbying.

00:45:13.000 –> 00:45:14.000
Correct.

00:45:14.000 –> 00:45:17.000
When you do certain things. So so we need, we need to be as C. 6.

00:45:17.000 –> 00:45:23.000
And so dues are deductible on your taxes as do’s and subs, which is an operating expense, is probably better than a charitable contribution.

00:45:23.000 –> 00:45:31.000
But it means that we’re not at a a charity, right? We don’t.

00:45:31.000 –> 00:45:35.000
We don’t do charity work. So, anyway. So

00:45:35.000 –> 00:45:36.000
Yeah, we’ve just on that point. Carl comptia is the same.

00:45:36.000 –> 00:45:42.000
Come to as a C. 6. But our foundation comes to you.

00:45:42.000 –> 00:45:51.000
Spark is a C, 3. Because it is a charitable foundation, and we do make charitable donations into the industry.

00:45:51.000 –> 00:45:55.000
So we we sort of live in both worlds. But the Trade Association, much like what you described as A. C. 6.

00:45:55.000 –> 00:46:00.000
For for very similar reasons.

00:46:00.000 –> 00:46:06.000
Right so anyway, now’s your time. Mj.

00:46:06.000 –> 00:46:14.000
Is here. So if you have questions, let him know, and you know we have a very open relationship, and we talk all the time, and I’ve been a member of Ascii for a while.

00:46:14.000 –> 00:46:28.000
And so you know I I mean I’ve been a member of Comptia for for many, many years, Ascii also.

00:46:28.000 –> 00:46:33.000
But so you know, there’s there’s no fight between us.

00:46:33.000 –> 00:46:37.000
I think that we’re all both facing in the same direction and looking at same things.

00:46:37.000 –> 00:46:40.000
We just specially stuff. So

00:46:40.000 –> 00:46:41.000
Yeah, I think that’s a I think that’s a very fair comment.

00:46:41.000 –> 00:46:48.000
Dennis. I’m not sure if you’re comment was a question for me, or for that was just a general comment to the to the folks on the meeting.

00:46:48.000 –> 00:46:52.000
So, if if it is a question, please let me know. But yeah, you know, you mentioned our our communities and councils form.

00:46:52.000 –> 00:47:08.000
Obviously anyone who is a comptia member. You can attend any and all of our events as well as all of your employees, for free comptia.

00:47:08.000 –> 00:47:17.000
Membership is is structured a bit differently than your membership here and Ns, I, tsp, in that ours is company membership.

00:47:17.000 –> 00:47:19.000
So a company joins, and however many employees that company has all of those employees have access to the benefits as well.

00:47:19.000 –> 00:47:25.000
We don’t count every employees an individual member. We only count the company as a member.

00:47:25.000 –> 00:47:32.000
So a company could add 10 employees, all 10 people have access.

00:47:32.000 –> 00:47:41.000
They’re one member. A company could have 10,000 employees, all 10,000 have access to the member benefits, but that’s still only one member.

00:47:41.000 –> 00:47:47.000
So that’s just an interesting little distinction.

00:47:47.000 –> 00:47:51.000
But our communities and councils form is, is an annual event.

00:47:51.000 –> 00:47:53.000
We hold in Chicago every March it’s some.

00:47:53.000 –> 00:47:58.000
It’s our more intimate event has more of a North American focus to it.

00:47:58.000 –> 00:48:03.000
And it attracts typically 2 to 300 people. Give or take.

00:48:03.000 –> 00:48:16.000
So our more engaged members, who are active in the different communities and committees and councils that we have, and we come together for more of an interactive, collaborative couple of days of working meetings to sort of set initiatives for the year and what deliverables.

00:48:16.000 –> 00:48:32.000
What what resources we’re gonna produce. Content. We’re gonna produce new registers. We’re gonna produce new education trainings, we might develop, etc. So obviously, if you remember, anyone’s welcome.

00:48:32.000 –> 00:48:39.000
If you’re not a member feel free to reach out to me happy to happy to get you access to the event.

00:48:39.000 –> 00:48:44.000
The more the more people, the merrier I’ll be at Msp.

00:48:44.000 –> 00:48:59.000
Rescue next week as well. So I’ve got a couple of panels there, and we’ve got one of our workforce people there, so certainly, if any of you are attending that, please introduce yourself if I don’t know you’d be happy to happy to meet you in chat I

00:48:59.000 –> 00:49:03.000
Think you know, in terms of overall what’s going on with Comtia.

00:49:03.000 –> 00:49:06.000
You know our our focus is very much on our member communities.

00:49:06.000 –> 00:49:13.000
We’ve just launched a new dock community which is the countries of Germany, Austrian, Switzerland.

00:49:13.000 –> 00:49:18.000
That’s our global community where we’ll be launching a 6 later this year.

00:49:18.000 –> 00:49:38.000
So we’re continuing to expand our global footprint to share the knowledge and best practices in the industry globally, you know, my, my, my loose analogy for that is there’s no reason why a best practice that an Msp might might come across in Melbourne Australia isn’t available

00:49:38.000 –> 00:49:49.000
To an Msp. In Birmingham, England, in Birmingham, Alabama, in real time so we’ve got the ability to facilitate that global sharing and learning and best practices and understanding the nuances of different markets.

00:49:49.000 –> 00:49:54.000
If you have customers across markets and things like that, we have some tremendous.

00:49:54.000 –> 00:50:15.000
We have a a tremendous amount going on around cybersecurity. We have a dedicated cyber security programs, team that runs our cybersecurity information sharing an analysis program we’re launching a new organizational credential called the company of cybersecurity trust mark

00:50:15.000 –> 00:50:19.000
it’s. It’s an evolution of the former Security Trust mark plus.

00:50:19.000 –> 00:50:24.000
But it’s a whole new ball game on that, you know.

00:50:24.000 –> 00:50:46.000
Comptia has deep, deep expertise in certification and training, and a lot of our sort certifications and and trainings have been accepted by accreditation, organization standards, boards, and and meet different criteria for different requirements and we have every intention of positioning this trust mark

00:50:46.000 –> 00:51:01.000
To be something that will hopefully be a wedge against coming legislation, because it’s absolutely coming as well as to provide some, some guarantees and and hopefully preferential ratings around cyber insurance

00:51:01.000 –> 00:51:02.000
Very good, so Eric has his hand raised. Eric, do you have a question for Mj.

00:51:02.000 –> 00:51:08.000
Or on something else

00:51:08.000 –> 00:51:10.000
Yeah, I do. Good morning. Can you guys hear me? Okay. Good.

00:51:10.000 –> 00:51:12.000
Good morning. Yeah.

00:51:12.000 –> 00:51:14.000
Yes, indeed!

00:51:14.000 –> 00:51:15.000
So I I guess I actually have 2 questions but I’ll I’ll go to Mj.

00:51:15.000 –> 00:51:23.000
First I operate in kind of a unique space. I am a self-employed it field engineer.

00:51:23.000 –> 00:51:36.000
I serve basically Mss and other it service organizations.

00:51:36.000 –> 00:51:43.000
I’ve been, I I really don’t do any client direct work.

00:51:43.000 –> 00:51:48.000
So, I’ve been doing this for nearly 10 years.

00:51:48.000 –> 00:51:56.000
I’ve been doing it without the need for having an a plus certification.

00:51:56.000 –> 00:52:02.000
I’ve in all that time I’ve really haven’t been asked by anybody that in order to work for me, you have to have an April certification.

00:52:02.000 –> 00:52:07.000
I know you guys still have that program, and I know you believe in it strongly.

00:52:07.000 –> 00:52:19.000
Make the case to me why somebody like me should have the a plus certification

00:52:19.000 –> 00:52:25.000
Well, you may not need it. It may not, it may not be an appropriate certification for you in your space.

00:52:25.000 –> 00:52:31.000
It in, and a plus is isn’t isn’t the only one you know.

00:52:31.000 –> 00:52:36.000
We’ve got networks plus security plus. And then we’ve got more advanced certifications.

00:52:36.000 –> 00:52:42.000
Beyond that you know where we do our certification business is.

00:52:42.000 –> 00:52:43.000
Does the majority of its work outside of the traditional Msp.

00:52:43.000 –> 00:53:00.000
Channel, if you will so enterprise public organizations, government agencies, those are the types of organizations that may require an a plus, a network plus a security plus or an advanced one in their work.

00:53:00.000 –> 00:53:13.000
You should never pursue a certification if it doesn’t provide you with the ability to expand your professional capabilities or generate more revenue by being able to capture more customers.

00:53:13.000 –> 00:53:21.000
If a plus doesn’t do that for you, I wouldn’t.

00:53:21.000 –> 00:53:22.000
I wouldn’t make a case that you should pursue it.

00:53:22.000 –> 00:53:27.000
I would certainly make a case that you should keep your skill sharp, and that you should look for opportunities to enhance your own career.

00:53:27.000 –> 00:53:46.000
Development and differentiation in your market. But if an individual certification, whether it’s ours or anyone else’s, doesn’t provide that value, I wouldn’t invest that money in it.

00:53:46.000 –> 00:53:51.000
Okay, thank you for that answer. I’m glad to hear that.

00:53:51.000 –> 00:53:57.000
One other side question I had, and this points more back to the Karl.

00:53:57.000 –> 00:54:02.000
The organization in general. You’re talking about membership before, and I apologize.

00:54:02.000 –> 00:54:07.000
I was driving, so I couldn’t get in when you were looking for questions in that area.

00:54:07.000 –> 00:54:08.000
But that’s probably in general something that I would throw out that.

00:54:08.000 –> 00:54:18.000
Maybe you guys would want to look at in the future would be the space of us, I guess.

00:54:18.000 –> 00:54:26.000
Independent service providers. Again, I’m somebody who works mainly for platforms.

00:54:26.000 –> 00:54:41.000
Things like, you know, field national work market. But I also work for other It service organizations and Msps directly to provide, like, you know, smart hands type support that kind of thing.

00:54:41.000 –> 00:54:48.000
And maybe some, you know, marketing directly to those sort of individuals.

00:54:48.000 –> 00:54:49.000
As to why it would be a good idea to belong to an organization like you know.

00:54:49.000 –> 00:54:57.000
Ns, its

00:54:57.000 –> 00:54:58.000
Well, so I, as I mentioned then, I I think the professional individual membership is perfect for you.

00:54:58.000 –> 00:55:07.000
It it allows you to participate fully, to vote, to sit on committees.

00:55:07.000 –> 00:55:23.000
You know all that stuff, and in the at the end of the day you need this industry to be as professional as possible, so that you are respected at the Github when you start having a conversation with somebody.

00:55:23.000 –> 00:55:28.000
So many people, especially people in really big businesses. They hate it.

00:55:28.000 –> 00:55:37.000
People, right the entire Dilbert cartoon is based on the premise that it sucks and the people who provide it suck, and the way that their company support it sucks right?

00:55:37.000 –> 00:55:54.000
And so there’s a you know. There’s this uphill climb to be respected even in your own workplace, and I just think that we need to make that a thing in the past, you know people make fun of lawyers.

00:55:54.000 –> 00:55:59.000
But but people respect them. People know they need them, and they don’t. You know.

00:55:59.000 –> 00:56:19.000
They they make rumble about the cost, but they don’t grumble about whether or not they need to have a lawyer in the room, and every company on earth needs it, and and yet they they kind of grumble about having us in the room, and and so I think there’s a huge need for our industry.

00:56:19.000 –> 00:56:29.000
To focus on actually improving our own reputation, not just among legislators and lobbyists, and the media, but among our own clientele.

00:56:29.000 –> 00:56:33.000
And so that’s all of what we’re doing.

00:56:33.000 –> 00:56:41.000
And you know as Larry pointed out earlier, our goal is to is to actually help improve the reputation of our industry.

00:56:41.000 –> 00:56:44.000
And you know that’s that’s one of our stated goals.

00:56:44.000 –> 00:56:48.000
So I think your money is well spent as a professional member, even if you don’t belong to a specific company for the next 5 years.

00:56:48.000 –> 00:56:58.000
So anyway, we we can build and and we’ll build marketing programs around that.

00:56:58.000 –> 00:57:02.000
It just takes money. Keith has his hand up

00:57:02.000 –> 00:57:24.000
Yeah, I just wanted to comment for on the Comtia certifications as I write, curriculum for the California community colleges and universities having those Comtia certifications at our non vendor verification of our testing criteria has been because as as well

00:57:24.000 –> 00:57:25.000
So even legislators on that you start saying, well, I got a Cisco certification.

00:57:25.000 –> 00:57:47.000
They go. I don’t care, but when you say I have an independent organization that certifies us and set some standards that has had real value and allowed us to create a cybersecurity program jointly with come to you, we’re we’re piloting at riverside

00:57:47.000 –> 00:57:52.000
Community colleges to get people into our industry and body people.

00:57:52.000 –> 00:57:57.000
So I think that’s one of the huge values of those certifications

00:57:57.000 –> 00:57:59.000
Great Point, Keith.

00:57:59.000 –> 00:58:00.000
Yeah.

00:58:00.000 –> 00:58:11.000
And I would just point out in general, I mean Amy, and I’ve talked about this roughly a 1,000 times in the last year there’s a massive need in our industry to refocus back on certification.

00:58:11.000 –> 00:58:17.000
You know, if people sometimes poop who and say, Oh, you know, I know somebody who got their Mcs in a weekend.

00:58:17.000 –> 00:58:21.000
And I, okay, whatever. But the reality is, I don’t know anybody who’s taken 5 or 6 or 7 exams on something and not actually learned a lot of really useful information.

00:58:21.000 –> 00:58:26.000
It’s just like any other education you get. It doesn’t all stick.

00:58:26.000 –> 00:58:37.000
But but you know how to know things, and you know how to learn things and how to look things up, and how to find things.

00:58:37.000 –> 00:58:42.000
And so I think all certification is good, and that’s why one of our eventual plans is to, you know, encourage people to to go get additional training, whether it leads to assert or not.

00:58:42.000 –> 00:58:51.000
And to eventually have a program of having continuing education credits and having organizations like Comp.

00:58:51.000 –> 00:59:04.000
Tia be on the list of, hey? You can get your continuing hours here and here and here and here, and certainly absolutely no question.

00:59:04.000 –> 00:59:12.000
Comtia would be on that list. Max asked the question, have you considered the idea of local chapters?

00:59:12.000 –> 00:59:23.000
I’m tired. That’s a huge amount of work, and and, to be honest, we used to have kind of the framework for all of that.

00:59:23.000 –> 00:59:41.000
I think half the people on this call who are or over the age of 50, used to belong to an It user group or an a small biz or a small server windows, small business server user group and a lot of those have gone away.

00:59:41.000 –> 00:59:42.000
And you know we can bring them back. But man, that’s a lot of effort.

00:59:42.000 –> 00:59:51.000
So, Max, if you want to volunteer

00:59:51.000 –> 00:59:52.000
It’s it’s easier than it used to be, because, like our our user group still exists all the way.

00:59:52.000 –> 01:00:01.000
Haven’t met in a while, and we use meetup as that.

01:00:01.000 –> 01:00:08.000
So you know the the the opportunity is there, but it just takes somebody to be dedicated to putting out a lot of work empty.

01:00:08.000 –> 01:00:13.000
You wanted to say something else to Eric.

01:00:13.000 –> 01:00:16.000
Oh, I just I just put it in the in the chat.

01:00:16.000 –> 01:00:17.000
Oh, okay.

01:00:17.000 –> 01:00:21.000
Sorry I just. I just made the typical mistake of hitting enter too soon.

01:00:21.000 –> 01:00:27.000
Well, yeah, oh, yeah, just, you know, a big organization.

01:00:27.000 –> 01:00:28.000
So the certain businesses over here, and the membership is actually a different log on different website.

01:00:28.000 –> 01:00:41.000
So you know you I I need a membership or a log on for both.

01:00:41.000 –> 01:00:42.000
So.

01:00:42.000 –> 01:00:43.000
Yeah, yeah, we’re we’re like a business within a business.

01:00:43.000 –> 01:00:44.000
If you will

01:00:44.000 –> 01:01:01.000
Yeah. And Dennis Wilson put in a note that techfest Dave Cybert, has been a big supporter of ours, and, to be honest, so as Harry Browsford, who’s got an event that we’re gonna be at in Chicago and

01:01:01.000 –> 01:01:10.000
We’re gonna be at techfest, and both of them have given us shout-outs in their marketing in their newsletters and from the stage.

01:01:10.000 –> 01:01:11.000
Okay, Carl, connection.

01:01:11.000 –> 01:01:14.000
And so we appropriate that other comments. Questions, yeah, Larry.

01:01:14.000 –> 01:01:20.000
So I want to go back to this business about chapters

01:01:20.000 –> 01:01:25.000
Chapters are an interesting

01:01:25.000 –> 01:01:35.000
The ticket, element to what we’re doing and what I want to say is absolutely the same thing that Carl said.

01:01:35.000 –> 01:01:41.000
I just wanna put my own little spin to it, if I may

01:01:41.000 –> 01:01:46.000
Hmm, hmm! It’s important to remember. What are we?

01:01:46.000 –> 01:01:50.000
Long-term goal is our purpose and help intimately connected.

01:01:50.000 –> 01:02:00.000
It is to developing standards for professionalism and being seen as the the source for that.

01:02:00.000 –> 01:02:11.000
So to the, to the question about local chapters, and I want to reiterate absolutely we’ve thought about that.

01:02:11.000 –> 01:02:26.000
There needs to be somebody who has passion. Who says I, I think this local chapters, or a vehicle that we can use to enhance our efforts and achieve our ultimate goal.

01:02:26.000 –> 01:02:27.000
More efficiently, more effectively, sooner, with greater impact.

01:02:27.000 –> 01:02:34.000
You know you know where I’m going. With all these words.

01:02:34.000 –> 01:02:39.000
It’s about, you know. More is better. Right? It’s it’s, how do we do this? Better?

01:02:39.000 –> 01:02:50.000
And if that vehicle of local chapters will give us that opportunity, and if it’s a it’s a broadly enough shared idea that other members of Ns.

01:02:50.000 –> 01:03:05.000
It. Sp. Have a passion for local chapters that are it designed and engineered to support that vision and mission.

01:03:05.000 –> 01:03:13.000
Then it will be easy for us to to create a place for those people to come and execute.

01:03:13.000 –> 01:03:22.000
Which is the only way that the capacity to create them support them and maintain them, can be delivered.

01:03:22.000 –> 01:03:32.000
It. It can’t be done any other way. So I say this for anybody who feels like local chapters would be important.

01:03:32.000 –> 01:03:37.000
It takes the members to bring that to us, and to say, we think this is important.

01:03:37.000 –> 01:03:49.000
This is, why would you guys consider reaching out to your, to your membership and seeing if there’s enough other people who agree with this, that might be willing to participate.

01:03:49.000 –> 01:03:58.000
And I. I speak for myself as a board member. I am not speaking for the entire board, but I will advocate for this to the entire board.

01:03:58.000 –> 01:04:01.000
If any member can come to me as a board member and say, this is what I think we should do about local chapters in the these are the people I’ve found.

01:04:01.000 –> 01:04:11.000
That are want to participate. I’ll take your case to the board and and advocate for you.

01:04:11.000 –> 01:04:19.000
But until we have that, it’s more than we can handle the board, the the staff, the our volunteer leaders.

01:04:19.000 –> 01:04:22.000
We just can’t. We don’t have the time right?

01:04:22.000 –> 01:04:39.000
We can’t make 25 h in a day. So I I I don’t want that to go away, because I think it’s a very potentially powerful idea, but it has no, it has no fuel without the passion for members to fuel, it, thanks.

01:04:39.000 –> 01:04:44.000
Well, and to be honest, you know I always say that the Legislative Committee is like, you know, how does an antidote, an elephant?

01:04:44.000 –> 01:04:47.000
One bite at a time. Legislative committee has so many things that eventually we hope to do.

01:04:47.000 –> 01:05:02.000
And we’ve talked about having local organizations that help, because it’s the local people who have to lobby their legislatures.

01:05:02.000 –> 01:05:06.000
I can’t lobby in Connecticut. I can’t lobby in 49 States.

01:05:06.000 –> 01:05:19.000
I can lobby in Canada right? And so on the day that we have events, and we actually have legislation that pops up that says, Hey, let’s regulate the hell out of the this industry we need to be ready.

01:05:19.000 –> 01:05:25.000
And so it’s just it just takes a lot of effort and a lot of time and a lot of organizations.

01:05:25.000 –> 01:05:26.000
And at some point that will eventually be at the local level.

01:05:26.000 –> 01:05:31.000
You know, but but as Larry said, but we need volunteers to do that.

01:05:31.000 –> 01:05:39.000
So we we certainly don’t have the money to hire thousands and thousands of people to to do that organization

01:05:39.000 –> 01:05:45.000
Volunteers with passion.

01:05:45.000 –> 01:05:46.000
Okay.

01:05:46.000 –> 01:06:05.000
That’s a key point. Great there is. They gotta have the passion for I’ve been a member of acm since around 2,006, and then also, I’ve been a member of the Dmi Project Management Institute and several other things, and I have experience with local chapters with regard to those

01:06:05.000 –> 01:06:16.000
I I’ve been an active participant, never random, but I have worked in other local chapters that aren’t necessarily related to it.

01:06:16.000 –> 01:06:24.000
Where I was like a lead in that group, and was elected to the position or that chapter.

01:06:24.000 –> 01:06:32.000
So I I do understand that. And I understand I’ve been an it for 30 years, and a lot of consultants.

01:06:32.000 –> 01:06:35.000
I ran into, or had to go clean up message from them.

01:06:35.000 –> 01:06:44.000
That that speaks to being professional is really good, because it doesn’t hurt us.

01:06:44.000 –> 01:06:53.000
The next time a consultant comes in, or a managed service comes in and does the work, and really means it.

01:06:53.000 –> 01:07:02.000
So I I’ve got a passion for, hey? You have to be professional I don’t hold any certifications, but I study every one of them.

01:07:02.000 –> 01:07:05.000
I can so

01:07:05.000 –> 01:07:18.000
You know, it’s interesting in in my state of the nation address in January, one of the things I pointed out is, I believe, and I have believed for a long time that we’re entering an arrow where there’s gonna be a lot more subcontracting and a lot more

01:07:18.000 –> 01:07:21.000
specialization. You know, we’ve always had sort of like.

01:07:21.000 –> 01:07:24.000
Here’s the group that installs the the business machine.

01:07:24.000 –> 01:07:29.000
The fax machine, the printer all in one, and then here’s the it.

01:07:29.000 –> 01:07:30.000
Consultant who fixes the network after those guys leave right?

01:07:30.000 –> 01:07:38.000
And we’ve always been the the people who fix the network after those people leave.

01:07:38.000 –> 01:07:55.000
But there reality is that there are people who specialize in security signage, business machines, all kinds of stuff that today it all touches the Tcp IP network, and at the end of the day we need to do lots and lots of subcontracting.

01:07:55.000 –> 01:08:12.000
And, in my opinion, this organization has a place for every one of those people to be a member and and to be honest, I also think that we all need to get back to having a lot more certifications the you know 30 years ago lots and lots of people in this industry.

01:08:12.000 –> 01:08:18.000
Were certified by Microsoft and that sort of faded way, and you know, in the last 10 years it’s just not been an important thing for a lot of people.

01:08:18.000 –> 01:08:29.000
They off they go off and get those industry or vendor specifics, certifications that Keith talked about.

01:08:29.000 –> 01:08:44.000
But you know more, general certification, I think, really needs to help, because there’s a lot of people that right now they’re the target of the F Federal Trade Commission and some others because they are selling one thing called manuscripts.

01:08:44.000 –> 01:08:51.000
But there’s they’re delivering a different thing called break fix at a flat fee, and this part of it is they don’t understand the business model.

01:08:51.000 –> 01:08:58.000
So part of that training needs to be on what is a managed service provider.

01:08:58.000 –> 01:09:02.000
Amy, you have your hand raced

01:09:02.000 –> 01:09:06.000
Well, I’m just gonna gonna meet you a little bit on your on your comment.

01:09:06.000 –> 01:09:19.000
I’ve been in advising in my peer groups to everyone to begin to make a plan for education, because I do think that we have reached full circle, hey?

01:09:19.000 –> 01:09:24.000
When I started in this industry you could not get a job with a certification.

01:09:24.000 –> 01:09:29.000
You had to have that Novell Cna, or that Microsoft, Mcse, or whatever.

01:09:29.000 –> 01:09:32.000
No one was going to talk to you about getting a job.

01:09:32.000 –> 01:09:39.000
If you didn’t have that, and I do believe that we are fast approaching the time where that’s gonna happen again.

01:09:39.000 –> 01:09:54.000
And so I would encourage everyone to make a plan in their business for obtaining certifications, and begin to promote that as part of your your qualifications, and actually encounter.

01:09:54.000 –> 01:09:59.000
And I’ve had discussions because your profile is public on the the Ns.

01:09:59.000 –> 01:10:12.000
I, Tsp website. So we can use that as a place where your potential hires in your potential customers can go.

01:10:12.000 –> 01:10:20.000
And you know, find out what is. Makes your business more interesting to them, perhaps more qualified, more legitimate.

01:10:20.000 –> 01:10:31.000
Then the next company that comes in the door. Who doesn’t have that information lined up

01:10:31.000 –> 01:10:38.000
Yeah, and you know, on my long list of things to blog about in my spare time is how you can get the most out of your Ns.

01:10:38.000 –> 01:10:50.000
I tsp profile? Because you know, as we add little badges for this and that, and and things it’s going to be something where you can actually point your prospects and clients to it and say, see this professional organization.

01:10:50.000 –> 01:11:02.000
I belong to I volunteer with. I participate in. That’s the kind of thing that helps improve my entire industry.

01:11:02.000 –> 01:11:08.000
And you should think about hiring only people who belong to such organizations.

01:11:08.000 –> 01:11:09.000
So I

01:11:09.000 –> 01:11:17.000
And then then, yeah, and that is one of my grand goals for this organization, that from the consumer point of view, right?

01:11:17.000 –> 01:11:31.000
The consumer of our services, that just as we are today able to tell the difference between hiring our neighbor to help us out with the books for our business, hiring a trained bookkeeper hiring an Ea.

01:11:31.000 –> 01:11:53.000
Hiring a Cpa. And we know what those things mean, and we know that they all earn different amounts of money because they have different levels of qualifications that we end up with that for our industry, and that it is in general in the world, understood that I can hire my neighbor to help me out with

01:11:53.000 –> 01:11:58.000
my computer and I can pay them 25 bucks for that, or I can hire.

01:11:58.000 –> 01:12:18.000
You know, an independent professional that has a certain skill level or a firm that has a broader skill level, or, you know, in specialties, and that those things are generally understood, and that is one of the values that a society like this will ultimately provide to our to our industry, so for me that’s really what the the

01:12:18.000 –> 01:12:19.000
big picture is here

01:12:19.000 –> 01:12:39.000
Yeah, when Ben and I were talking about legislation, one of the things that we talked about quite extensively was how to make sure that late la legislators do not accidentally sweep in a bunch of people that they don’t even intend to to regulate right because if you think

01:12:39.000 –> 01:12:45.000
About it. Most legislatures have, even if they’re a part time legislature, they have a full-time it staff.

01:12:45.000 –> 01:12:54.000
They have some agency, that is, has more fun than any small business you’ve ever seen in your life, and you know they have a good size staff.

01:12:54.000 –> 01:13:04.000
They have all layers of management, and all that kind of stuff, and their vision of what it is is very different, and they get lots of lobbying from organizations.

01:13:04.000 –> 01:13:07.000
So they’re really big and have really big it companies.

01:13:07.000 –> 01:13:14.000
And they don’t see that that you have to draw a line and not cover the seventeenth year old.

01:13:14.000 –> 01:13:33.000
Who’s helping grandma get connected to the Internet. But it’s some point that 17 year old becomes an 18 year old becomes a 19 year old, says, Hey, you know what I could do this for a living and becomes a business that now they need to learn something about you know how one operates as a small

01:13:33.000 –> 01:13:54.000
Business. And you know, way back, when I wrote this white paper about part of what we need to do in this industry, and I think a big piece of it is we need to have legitimate pathways for people to enter this industry, how do you start out as a non certified amateur and become a

01:13:54.000 –> 01:13:55.000
Professional. And that’s a path, right? Or a series of paths that we can actually create.

01:13:55.000 –> 01:14:04.000
And it’s long overdue. You know our industry, the integrated circuit just hit 50 years old, right?

01:14:04.000 –> 01:14:15.000
You know, like W. We, our industry is young, so we have time to to craft what it looks like as it grows.

01:14:15.000 –> 01:14:19.000
Keith local Chapters.

01:14:19.000 –> 01:14:25.000
Oh, I just was on the comment was what we do. A tech truck, which is kinda easy.

01:14:25.000 –> 01:14:29.000
Is well, like we’re an It nation. It was just on the tech tribe website, hey?

01:14:29.000 –> 01:14:39.000
All my members. Let’s have lunch at this time, and that may be a way for us to start to develop it without an expense.

01:14:39.000 –> 01:14:40.000
We could totally do that

01:14:40.000 –> 01:14:51.000
So Texas, yeah, let’s all get together at a table and just have a discussion if we’re all in C Ns, it sp, members.

01:14:51.000 –> 01:14:53.000
And and you know, just make sure we search each other out.

01:14:53.000 –> 01:14:55.000
That was my only point.

01:14:55.000 –> 01:15:01.000
Yeah, that’s a good idea. So do you want to be in charge of that?

01:15:01.000 –> 01:15:02.000
Or is it? Or is it just a good idea

01:15:02.000 –> 01:15:04.000
You put me in charge? Yeah, no, no, I will do.

01:15:04.000 –> 01:15:08.000
I mean, I it’s something we could start posting just some place

01:15:08.000 –> 01:15:14.000
I could help you on that, too, in particular, I think we need some sort of way to link out.

01:15:14.000 –> 01:15:23.000
We use meet up to start with. But we need something more centralized with our organization to set up these meetups for members

01:15:23.000 –> 01:15:31.000
But we do have forums on our site, and we do have pages on our social media.

01:15:31.000 –> 01:15:34.000
So I think it’s alright. There we go.

01:15:34.000 –> 01:15:38.000
Yeah, I think we could quite easily promote local locally organized meetups, you know.

01:15:38.000 –> 01:15:42.000
Yeah, and check private a forum. It started with, I’m going to it.

01:15:42.000 –> 01:15:48.000
Nation? Who else wants to hook up, and then connect? Why?

01:15:48.000 –> 01:15:53.000
Said, Hey, there’s like 5 or whatever we had. 10 of you will set aside a room.

01:15:53.000 –> 01:15:57.000
You will buy you lunch, and we just got to meet other members

01:15:57.000 –> 01:16:05.000
Right well, and I I I don’t know if Andy’s still here or not, but I’ll throw him under the bus.

01:16:05.000 –> 01:16:11.000
It. It can never hurt to contact the marketing committee and say, Hey, I’m gonna be at this event.

01:16:11.000 –> 01:16:17.000
I’m gonna be a techfest, for example, can you help me promote this to other people who are going to be a techfest?

01:16:17.000 –> 01:16:18.000
You know, and also Nile put in the address again.

01:16:18.000 –> 01:16:32.000
Admin@nsatp.org she’s keeping a list of people who want to help us attended events, and she’s keeping a list of people who, you know, want to help us promote.

01:16:32.000 –> 01:16:34.000
So this is a easy, easy thing for her to, you know.

01:16:34.000 –> 01:16:35.000
Yeah.

01:16:35.000 –> 01:16:39.000
Just sort of keep people on that excel spreadsheet.

01:16:39.000 –> 01:16:48.000
So if you’re if you want to volunteer for that, just send us a note

01:16:48.000 –> 01:16:49.000
Okay.

01:16:49.000 –> 01:16:51.000
I will be happy to sit at a table with other Nsit Sp.

01:16:51.000 –> 01:16:56.000
Members in Chicago on the seventeenth

01:16:56.000 –> 01:17:06.000
So I would say we should get shirts, except we don’t have the money to print them all up, but maybe we could set up a print on demand store, and people can print their own shirts and we’ll just put it.

01:17:06.000 –> 01:17:19.000
We’ll just upload the logo, and you can get shirts and hats and all the other very strange things that people throw into those stores

01:17:19.000 –> 01:17:20.000
There you go!

01:17:20.000 –> 01:17:21.000
Yeah, that’d be nice. Like, I bring this, of course, and people ask me, what’s that about?

01:17:21.000 –> 01:17:26.000
And you know

01:17:26.000 –> 01:17:35.000
Very cool, alright. Other comments, questions, suggestions.

01:17:35.000 –> 01:17:36.000
I appreciate that we’re we still have almost 30 people here.

01:17:36.000 –> 01:17:45.000
So I I’m I’m grateful to everybody for that.

01:17:45.000 –> 01:17:49.000
Alright, very good. So May tenth is our next all member meeting.

01:17:49.000 –> 01:17:54.000
If we miss something, or you think, Hey, you guys are totally not talking about the right thing.

01:17:54.000 –> 01:17:58.000
Send us a note. I am, and I’ll put it in the chat.

01:17:58.000 –> 01:18:04.000
But it’s carlton@nsitsp.org.

01:18:04.000 –> 01:18:08.000
Or obviously famine wants to put hers in there.

01:18:08.000 –> 01:18:16.000
Amy@thirdtier.net, and we’ll be happy to, you know.

01:18:16.000 –> 01:18:20.000
Add you the conversation. If you’re not a member, please, please, please, please please.

01:18:20.000 –> 01:18:27.000
Just spend a tiny bit of money if you, if you can’t afford a $100 you might be in the wrong.

01:18:27.000 –> 01:18:33.000
You just industry, that’s all I’m saying. So

01:18:33.000 –> 01:18:37.000
Very good, all right. If there are no other comments or questions, I’ll go ahead and and put this to sleep, and we will get the recording up as quick as we can.

01:18:37.000 –> 01:18:44.000
You’ll be able to find that at our website under meetings.

01:18:44.000 –> 01:18:48.000
And then the recorded meetings.

01:18:48.000 –> 01:18:49.000
Alright!

01:18:49.000 –> 01:18:51.000
Right.

01:18:51.000 –> 01:18:52.000
Thank you all

01:18:52.000 –> 01:18:58.000
Thanks. Carl, thanks. Everybody.

[00:00:00.160] – Karl Palachuk
There we go. Welcome, everybody, to the Q four meeting of the National Society of It service providers. We have a brief agenda, but some really important stuff. And also, I think we have the Fodder for a truly great conversation at the end. So thank you for being here. Just a couple of reminders we want to be our goal is to be the voice of the industry defining the standards for professionalism in It services. This meeting is open to the public and anyone may join. It is being recorded and will be posted, so if you do not wish to be on the video, please turn off your camera. If you do not wish to be on the audio recording, please turn off your microphone. So the recordings are always under the meetings tab at nsitsp.org, and we will also be posting them to YouTube. We get a full transcript and post it up with the meeting, so you get all the notes and the chat and so forth. So I would also say, if you’re too much of a smartass, be careful what you say in chat because it will be posted as well. And with that, let me introduce our president, Amy Babinchak, who has just finished some time with me at the Acronis Summit in Florida, where we had a ton of visitors, and literally everybody who came by was excited that this organization exists.

[00:01:30.270] – Karl Palachuk
So. Amy.

[00:01:31.780] – Amy Babinchak
Thank you. Yeah, we had a great time down to Acronis. They were so nice to us. They created an awesome background, gave us a booth, and everybody that did come by to the booth, they seemed to get it immediately. Once he described what it was organization was all about, they were like, oh, yeah, I need to be involved in. So I’m expecting that we’re going to get quite a few members out of that. And I would really love to see some of our other important vendors that we have in our industry also get involved, like Acronis has, and help us out in growing this organization. So any opportunities that you have to talk to vendors about events they’re having to just see about us, even a table in the corner will help, and we will get some people there to stop it. So I just have a few moments here. Nothing super earth shattering to say other than welcome to all of our elected folks. The elections went fabulously well, very smoothly. I was very impressed with how our web developer organized the whole thing and how Karl ran it. And we’ve got lots of great new folks in committees and some spaces still to fill, so we’ll be working on that.

[00:02:47.760] – Amy Babinchak
I am super excited for what’s coming for the new year. And today I’m at an airport, so I’m not going to be able to stay for the whole meeting, which is kind of a bummer because that Q and A is my favorite part. So I hope you guys have a great conversation over there and with that I’m going to turn the meeting back over to Karl. Thank you for joining today.

[00:03:06.860] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you. So I just have a few quick announcements. First of all, our membership is up to 257 paid professional members and we’re growing six or seven a month and I know Andy’s on the call, the chair of the Marketing committee and so heads up, new membership drive is clearly the next big thing that we need to do. We have 548 registered members so we have about 800 total that have registered or paid on our website, plus nine vendor partners who have contributed a great deal of money and support to us. We have about 20 people on our constant contact list so we are growing very quickly and probably, I mean, I’m just going to say I think we’re going to have 1000 between professional and registered. I think we’ll have a thousand by the end of the year without any problem, but it should be $10,000. So make sure that you tell your friends and so forth. Financially we’re doing pretty well because of the vendor partners and the constant trickle of new members. I think with the renewals we only had like two people who did not renew their original membership. So that bulk of renewals came through last month and that really helped us out a great deal as well.

[00:04:32.960] – Karl Palachuk
Heads up, February 8 is our next all member meeting. Remember, these are always on the second Wednesday of the second month of each quarter and I was just talking to Todd Curtis this morning from the marketing committee. There’s going to be a big push to the social media as well. So keep an eye out for that and know that whenever you see anything that’s related to NSITSP MSP please comment and share and like and join us on all those social media because it really helps us have a bigger footprint and be seen which we have to be seen in order to be seen as the voice of the industry. Also shout out to the Canadian folks who have been on a lot of our meetings and have been almost instantaneously trying to organize an organization in Canada. So they have a new website, the Information Technology Service Providers of Canada and nice little logo, shockingly it has a maple leaf on it so that was a big surprise for me. But anyway, congratulations to those folks and I’ve also talked to many people from other countries who are interested so we’re going to help everybody who wants to to be part of this movement.

[00:05:52.470] – Karl Palachuk
I guess these are the vendor partners that we have so far and we really thank them and encourage others to participate. It means a lot that we have vendors who are willing to say it’s important to have a strong industry, to have a strong group of people and you know, not just because they need new clients, new prospects, but because it’s important that we have a strong industry, that we have a good compass, a moral compass. And what we’ve been working on recently is the code of ethics. And so being able to launch that very soon is huge. And it’s something that all of these vendors are going to help us promote as well. So thank you to all of our vendor sponsors. With that, I will turn it over to Larry Mandelberg, who has been running the code of ethics task force for many months. And we really have done some amazing stuff. So tell us where we are and where we’re going.

[00:07:06.560] – Denis Wilson
You’re still muted, Larry.

[00:07:10.710] – Jason Thomas
You’re muted.

[00:07:14.740] – Larry Mandelberg
Sorry. Thank you, Karl. Sorry, I thought I turned it off. It’s a pleasure to be here. And the first thing I want to do is a shout out to the task force members. We started meeting back in March. Our first meeting was on, I believe it was March 7, and our last meeting was this past Monday, November 7. We had 15 meetings during the course of the year, and I can’t tell you how many hours of FaceTime we had coupled with hours of work outside of our actual meeting. So much thanks to all the people who participated in the task force. Bit of a surprise announcement for you. We have completed the first phase of our work as of this past Monday. So what we’re going to show you today is a completed code of ethics. It is not finalized. It is completed. For now. We’re going to give it to you. We’re going to talk to you about it. We want to take it out for a test drive, have you tell us what you think. So in terms of where we are now, I want to tell you a little bit about how we got here.

[00:08:23.140] – Larry Mandelberg
The first thing that we had to do was decide what is a code of ethics and why do we care? We had several members say to us, why do you care about a code of ethics? What’s it going to do for you? What’s the point? So we created a statement to help answer that question. The answer to the question is, the NSI Tsp Code of Ethics provides foundational guidance for holding ourselves accountable for our professional behavior. The code of ethics brings clarity when the proper ethical action is ambiguous. The task force really connected with this because as we went through the process, we kept coming up with a lot of scenarios where we said we don’t know what the right thing to do is. We have a lot of other people that are also MSPs that are facing these things. None of us really know the right thing to do. For example, what happens when you’re out in the field and you intersect with another incompetent MSP who’s screwing up this prospect? What about when you run into another MSP who is a self interested bad actor. They’re doing something strictly for themselves and not the client.

[00:09:44.590] – Larry Mandelberg
Another scenario that we talked about was people MSPs who are unrealistic self promoters. We can do anything for anybody anytime faster and cheaper than anybody else. I’m sure none of you ever do this. Another scenario that we looked at a lot were controlled freaks. People who and I know this is going to resonate. There’s some kind of an innate need to hold on to passwords and security. And so we wanted to address all of those situations and more. And again, I want to stress foundational guidance for holding ourselves and each other accountable for our professional behavior to bring clarity when proper ethical action is ambiguous. Now, if we can go to the next slide, please. This is the code of ethics that we have completed. We have four categories the area of competence, the area of conflict of interest, the area of confidentiality, and the commitment to clients. What is it, in fact, we’re really making? What commitment are we really making to our clients? And I don’t want to go into a lot of this right now because you’ll have access to this and you’ll be able to look at it and digest it.

[00:11:00.250] – Larry Mandelberg
Listen, we spent a lot of time on this, and it took us a lot of time just to absorb it and really understand what it meant and think about how to apply it. So I’m not going to go into that right at the moment. But I do want to say that we really identified just a handful of things that we wanted to highlight. The first was professionalism. We think that professionalism is a cornerstone of what this organization is. And if we’re not acting in a professional manner, we don’t have any right to say anything or to tell anybody anything. We’re going to be controlled instead of having to control ourselves. The second thing is education. And these are in somewhat of an order of priority. If we’re not well versed in what it is we’re doing, if we’re not the most well versed, we’re always going to be at a disadvantage. Education is critical to us being successful as MSPs. The third one is honesty. There’s just no need to be dishonest or to hide or to pretend that things aren’t what they are. The fourth is transparency. And the fifth is competence. Professionalism education, honesty, transparent competence.

[00:12:15.330] – Larry Mandelberg
Those are the things that we wanted to try and bring to the forefront. Forefront. And they’re the kind of the cornerstones that we built this code of ethics around. And I offered them to you on behalf of the committee with our great pleasure and pride and joy and ask you to review them, look at them, comment on them, and adopt them. Now, there’s one more thing I want to talk about, and that is the what’s next? When I talked about these at our last all member meeting, there were a lot of questions about things like mandatory enforcement, penalties, etc. Et cetera. What I want you to know is that the Task Force was tasked with creating a code of ethics. Beyond that, our role ceases. The Task Force is in hibernation, and we will reconvene in six months to find out what feedback we’ve had about this so that we can make adjustments based on your input. But where this goes now is back to the board for decisions about how it will be applied and how it will be enforced and how we will deal with transgressors that is not yet done. The other thing I want to tell you is that there’s a very thin line between ethics and conduct.

[00:13:43.010] – Larry Mandelberg
So the code of ethics is done. The Code of conduct is on the planning board. It has not been started. It is on our radar. We will be going there. But the code of conduct, how you operate specifically, we aren’t getting into that yet. So I don’t have answers for you as to how this will be applied, enforced, et cetera. But what I can tell you is with another consulting organization that I’m a member of, I have been involved with enforcement, and with every proposal I send out, I have my own code of ethics that we develop with that other organization. Every proposal has itsp code of ethics attached to it, and it served me quite well. If any of you are interested in talking about how you might be able to use this or any concerns or questions you have, I want you to feel free to reach out to both me. Feel free to reach out to me first. As the chair of this Task Force, feel free to reach out to the board and feel free to reach out to the Task Force. I’m sure that anyone on the Task Force will be happy to talk to you.

[00:14:49.990] – Larry Mandelberg
With that, I’m going to turn it back over to Karl, and thank you.

[00:14:55.390] – Karl Palachuk
And thank you, Larry, because I’d forgotten that we started in March. But you have done a spectacular job with this, and the entire Task Force body has done an amazing job. I mean, people showed up again, again and and again, and a lot of folks don’t know. The task force met twice a month since March. People literally went on vacation and came back and did other things. But one of the things that we’ve done a couple of times now with the mission vision, values and with the code of conduct or Code of Ethics is we have taken our time. And I think that’s really important because some people think we’re not moving fast enough. But we have to do this right, and even though nothing is set in stone and we will revisit this again and again, and the final version, 20 years from now, will probably look different from this. We want to make sure that we don’t just throw something up and say, well that looks good, let’s do that. And so I think we’ve taken our time, we’ve taken the amount of time that it should have. So next step is this will go to the board and then we’ll put it on the website and folks can give us their feedback.

[00:16:09.550] – Karl Palachuk
So look for another blog post on that. Alright. And then we are also happy to discuss all of this in the discussion at the end. Yes, sir.

[00:16:19.990] – Larry Mandelberg
I’d like to ask the people that are participating if they see something that they like, put a Y in there. If they see something that they don’t like, put an N in the chat. I just like to take the temperature while we’re going through the meeting.

[00:16:36.560] – Karl Palachuk
Okay? Yeah. And Larry, I know you put your email in the chat to make sure, since you’ve invited people to contact you, that they know that cool, although they can obviously do it within our forms within our site. Next up, Heather, our Vice President has information on what the committees have been up to because she’s our committee liaison as well.

[00:17:01.010] – Heather Johnson
Hi everybody. I am coming to you from Orlando, Florida at It Nation, right in the path of Hurricane Nicole. I think it’s been upgraded right now. What that means is that after this call, I’m going to jump off because there are a whole bunch of people in this hotel that need to get an NSI itsp card so they can join, so I don’t need to chase them down at events and parties. They’re all here and they will all get a card. I probably should have had more cards than this, but I didn’t know there was a hurricane coming, so that’s just how it is. Besides that though, one thing that I want to say. I think each of our committee reps have prepped something today to talk to you about what they have been meeting about. All of our committees meet once a month, sometimes more. I know when we were starting they were meeting once a week. They’re hard working, really skilled, dedicated volunteers that are helping drive our mission and we’re so thankful for all the work that they’re doing. We did get some new committee members onto our committees. One committee is I do know is looking for members and that’s the Finance Committee.

[00:18:15.810] – Heather Johnson
And I just wanted to take just a few minutes to talk about what it takes to be on the Finance Committee. You do not need to be a financial expert. You do not need to be an accountant. You don’t need to be a CPA. You don’t even have to be a QuickBooks online power user. You just need to actually care about our organization and where money is going. You’re all business owners, you all have budgets. Think about these decisions all the time. So if you have some time and you want to help us out even more than you are now, join one of these committees. It’s also a great way to network with some other MSPs and vendors that maybe that you haven’t met before from all over. So consider doing that. The Finance Committee meets, I believe once a month and I know they would love to have you. So I’ll have each of the committee chairs talk about more specifically what they’re doing but would love to see you on one of those committees.

[00:19:25.090] – Karl Palachuk
So Dennis, you want to kick us off and tell us what sure.

[00:19:30.710] – Denis Wilson
I want to make sure that I didn’t step on Heather’s presentation sitting here waiting. Okay, tell me anyway. I’m Dennis Wilson, chair of the Legislative Committee for a second year here. We are fortunate to have a full committee staff and two vendor representatives as well meeting with us so we feel like we’ve got everything that we need to make things happen. However, we are welcoming any interested guest members. We meet twice a month at 01:00 P.m. California time on Tuesday, every other Tuesday and so if you’re interested send me an email. I’ll put my email in the chat box here in a moment and we’ll get you a Zoom URL and all that kind of good stuff and tell you what’s going on about the Legislative Committee. What we are producing right now is first a series of how to videos that provide a simple guide for Nsit SP members that are working with each state. These are five to ten minute videos which talk about one issue at a time, whether it be who is it that we need to talk to, what is it they care about, what committees are they on, how do you find out what committees they’re on, what committees are we concerned about and all that kind of stuff.

[00:21:15.410] – Denis Wilson
So we will have that. The first one is out now in beta test version, but the others will shortly be out within the next several months so I’m looking forward to that. Second thing we’re looking at right now is also working on a model legislation that you can use as a starting point for legislators and their committees. And so when we’re talking about professionalism and education and all that, those are pieces that necessarily may go into legislation. What we’re looking for is a model that you can take it out to folks in your state and talk to them about that and use it as a starting point. Third thing where we have currently is a twelve page printable playbook that’s basically the same thing as the videos except it’s on paper. It’s being approved now by the board to be published on the shared storage on the website the guy talks about who you’re supposed to talk to, who you should talk to, why you should talk to them, what are they concerned about, that kind of thing. And lastly, we are looking at legislative calendars so that we can have a sense for what’s showing up, where and coming up to votes and all that kind of stuff.

[00:22:58.300] – Denis Wilson
And second, presentation material that you can use when you go to talk to these folks about the Nsit SMB and you can modify them as necessary, but those are the four items now we’re excited about this coming year. The first year we were basically looking at the organization, what kind of things we wanted to do, and then now we’re looking at doing solutions and that’s a lot more fun, I’ve got to admit. We’re working on one of the walls of the structure. We need this for success as an organization and I’m really looking forward to this year.

[00:23:48.040] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you, sir. Next up, Tracy With, finance.

[00:23:52.990] – Tracy Hardin
Hey, good morning. Tracy Harm here with the finance committee. Just a quick update. We have finished up the budget for 2023 and got that submitted to the board. And going into next year, we will continue to work with the budget because as the society is so new, it’s changing and evolving. So we want to make sure we keep the money to what’s needed and make sure more is coming in. So basically this committee serves all the other committees on the board. That’s our primary focus. And Heather kind of stole my thunder when she told you we needed two more volunteers. That’s okay, so please join us. We do meet once a month. You don’t have to be a math whiz, because I’m not and I do fine. Just care about it. And don’t forget, vendors can also be members of committees. So if you’re a vendor with a vendor, please, we’d love to have you on there. I will put my contact information in the chat so you guys can reach out to me if you’re interested or if you have any questions about the meeting and what we do, please reach out and be happy to help.

[00:25:03.700] – Tracy Hardin
And that’s basically it on the Finance Committee.

[00:25:07.460] – Karl Palachuk
Alrighty. Marketing. Andy.

[00:25:10.990] – Andy Higgins
Hello, Amy.

[00:25:12.630] – Karl Palachuk
Indeed.

[00:25:13.720] – Andy Higgins
Good, yeah. Marketing committee. Yeah. We’re also looking for new members just like everybody else. We have four members, actually three functioning right now on the Marketing Committee, so a few more would certainly help. As said by my colleagues, you don’t need to be a marketing expert for this, but as you know, most MSPs are a little bit marketers to a certain degree, so we welcome any level of involvement. You can be a massive sweet administrator or you can just know a little bit about marketing, whatever would be great. Our goal, our end goal, is to market the NS It’s to the world. And currently we’ve been looking at using specific products to help us push out the message. We’re also looking how we can interact with other committees and see what responsibilities we should take in our all this marketing and what should be held by other committees. That’s a whole discussion in itself. And then one particular idea that I thought was pretty cool that came up in one of our meetings recently was we’re gathering a spreadsheet together of all committee members who are interested in maybe representing itsp at future events, conferences and such.

[00:26:40.530] – Andy Higgins
And so if we can get a location together of all our users who are interested in representing, then we can send local users to local conferences and keep our costs down. That was the idea behind that anyway. Andy against Marketing Committee.

[00:26:57.340] – Karl Palachuk
Very good, thank you. And just a note, all members of the PSA spin attend all of these meetings and we’re going to be putting up a page that’s got when the meetings are. It was a little crazy the first year because people were meeting every week again. I’m just shocked and amazed at how much effort folks have put into this. But now that it’s settled down to mostly once a month for most committees and twice for some, it’ll be easier to manage making that public all the time. And certainly everybody is welcome. Even if you can’t vote on committee matters being part of the conversation, you will have influence. So everybody’s open to that. Finally, I have a separate slide for Jason because Jason new chair of the governance committee is going to talk to us about the proposed new membership plan. So with that, Jason, take it away.

[00:28:01.990] – Jason Thomas
All right. Good morning, or good afternoon everyone. I also want to thank Lisa Papp. She’s the vice chair of the governance committee and she’s on today imagine number of our other members are on as well. Our committee is full, so obviously everyone likes to govern, right? But we definitely will encourage everyone to attend our meetings, which are on the second Monday of every month, and we try to keep it to once a month. So from the slide you can see that let’s see here. Let’s start off in the upper right hand corner. Registered guests. We’re up to 548. They essentially have access to everything on the site and can see we want to convert all those people to professional members. And you can see this is going up to $125, I believe, on the first of the year. So it behooves everyone to reregister today if they had signed up last year around this time. And then we have a whole new category of company memberships. And we went totally cheeky on the title of each tier, and we’re looking for suggestions on that. But essentially what this will do is allow one pro membership per company and everyone else will be an associate member, which they can participate in the forums, attend meetings, but they will not have voting rights.

[00:29:46.390] – Jason Thomas
Along with that is to limit essentially the influence any larger companies may have on the society, since we really want to stay as a focused society without any one company having more have undue influence due to their size. And going along with that, the vendor partner level, which is already set and on the website with the friends over Gold and Elite levels. I don’t remember who we have at which level. I believe we already have a Silver level member.

[00:30:29.520] – Karl Palachuk
Yes, calyptics is silver. The rest are at different level with the Friend level.

[00:30:34.840] – Jason Thomas
But this has been submitted to the board. It’s a work in progress and we hope to have all this finalized before the end of the year. So 2023, we can come out of the gates ready for a bunch of new company memberships.

[00:30:54.860] – Karl Palachuk
And I would just note that this is kind of the big picture, right. That part of what we want to do at the end of today is I want to talk about what your feedback is on this. Are these the right prices? Are these the right names? Doesn’t matter. I was informed this morning that Terra, the way I have it spelled, refers to Earth and not Terabyte. So I’m going to correct the spelling on Terra. But we do want your feedback on all of this anyway, so thank you, Jason, and we will be back to this. This is kind of one of the primary pieces of our discussion. Does anybody else have anything to say immediately before we move on? All right, well, thank you to the committees. Again, just massive amounts of effort and really producing some good stuff. And so it took us a while to get the committees all settled in, but they’ve done a great job and they’ve really made it a great year. So here’s our social links and other links and I’ll be happy to put up that last slide for discussion, but we are open for open Q and A on any matter at all that you might have.

[00:32:14.690] – Karl Palachuk
I’m going to look at the chat, see there’s anything going on I need to pay attention to. Anybody? All right, well, I will ask Jason. With regard to the proposed membership program, is this something that you think it will be like, solid for a year and then you’ll revisit or is this something that you’re hoping, like, we’re going to make the decision for the next ten years?

[00:32:57.560] – Jason Thomas
Well, that’s probably going to be a moving target. And working with Tracy from Finance, we need to set some goals. Whether or not our vendor partners actively increase how many companies we have connected and essentially what the influence will be or how many new company memberships we have will actively determine if those levels stay the same. And in addition to that, there are definitely some rules we’re going to need to set in place. Some company theoretically, like Microsoft, could join at the Kilo tier level, which is with just one pro membership and four associates. And that’s all they ever do. They don’t need to unless they want all their member associates and employees to be members. So a lot of this is based on self monitoring and our code of ethics that says, hey, you’re going to represent yourself as. A properly sized company and not the terabyte level or the gigatar level and look like a much larger company than you’re actually than you actually are.

[00:34:27.560] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah, we’ll have to look at that and see I know that most of the organizations I’ve ever belong to, it’s kind of a self reported level. Don has a question. Are there any plans to create peer groups? I would appreciate the opportunity to share policy procedures and costs with other MSPs. So right now we don’t have plans for that. We’d have to figure out one of the things that we don’t want to do is stuff that doesn’t fill a gap in the industry. Right. So what would our peer groups be doing that are different from other peer groups that exist? Because there are many opportunities. On the other hand, if the membership says no, we absolutely have to do this. We just have to figure out what differentiates us so all things are possible. And it might even be the governance committee to take up that question. So I did get a question that was just to me directly, so I don’t know if he wants me to say his name, but conversation came up about, is this a nonprofit? And so donations are tax deductible? Well, yes and no. The PSA SPP is a not for profit corporation, but we are one C Six, which means we’re a membership association that allows us to do things like muck around in legislation and try to affect the way the government looks at us.

[00:36:05.520] – Karl Palachuk
But it means that we are not a charity. So charities do things like public education and so forth, and we might someday have a C Three charity whose donations would be completely deductible. But as a C Six, we are not a charity. And so your dues are deductible as under Rand will correct me fees and dues or dues and subs for tax law. And so it’s actually a better deduction as a business, but other contributions are not tax deductible the way a charity would be. So I hope that clarifies, and if it needs further clarification, I will turn you over to Rayanne. But Joonico Karl, can I just make a comment?

[00:36:59.960] – Larry Mandelberg
I don’t mean to steal Rayann’s under. She’s definitely the professional expert at this. The thing I would say is office expense or operating expense. But this is a big deal and we spend a lot of time talking about this. I want the members to be aware of this. We felt it was very, very important, if not crucial, that we were able to impact legislation to talk to legislators, in effect, the way we’re seen by the people making the laws we have to operate under. And in order to do that, we could not be a charity. So that was a very conscious decision and there was a very specific reason for it. I hope everybody understands that. Yeah, and you are right. It is a better deduction as an operating expense than as a donation.

[00:37:51.790] – Karl Palachuk
All right, so that’s that.

[00:37:55.390] – Jason Thomas
I was just going to say again, any other names for company level versus Kilo, Mega, Giga and Terra, please put out your ideas. This was off the cuff and almost as a joke, but at the moment they’re sticking.

[00:38:11.680] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah, it’s sort of like these are the proposed names that nobody likes, but we’re open to better names. Jason says need to stay focused on the core objectives. We have a big enough challenge ahead with dealing with legislative issues. So I would say no to peer groups. That’s another direction entirely. Wayne Small. Well, welcome Wayne. All the way from Australia, although he’s not in Australia now, I take it. There’s amazing wisdom in wanting to influence legislation versus get a tax discount from the membership. This is the reason you need a body like this. And Wayne is the newly elected CEO I believe is the title of the SMB. It professionals in Australia. He’s in Edinburgh. So very nice, very cold. Other comments or questions? Anyone is welcome to open your microphone and just say your peace. Alright. I’m taking silence to mean we have complete approval from everything, especially Chris.

[00:39:34.380] – Andy Higgins
Hey, Carol.

[00:39:35.570] – Karl Palachuk
Go ahead, Scott.

[00:39:37.610] – Andy Higgins
Yeah, before just as a clarification about the tax stuff, as a committee we wanted to buy something like buy a license for a product that we would be using for the NSIS. Can we claim that we’re not charity, but you said not for profit and get a discount on there.

[00:40:06.850] – Karl Palachuk
Anything that you purchase would need to go through my office and if it were over a certain amount has to go to the board. Right. So because we want to make sure that things are registered in the association’s name and so forth and paid for by the association’s credit card. Most of the charity programs, and you’re all familiar with the TechSoup, they specifically are designed for charitable C Three S. And so we are not eligible for most charitable programs, which is too bad. But they don’t want to pick nits and say, well, if they support a C Six and it’s an association for something they don’t agree with, So anyway, it’s sort of a minor thing. There’s not, I don’t think that much that we need where we need charitable for like hootsuite or something. I don’t know that we would save enough money to make it worthwhile. Okay, thanks. Very cool. And I actually took a note, Andy, to talk to you about and work out with Karl where we would put it. But basically we should figure out if it’s a forum or wherever to put a place for people to volunteer to be at these events.

[00:41:35.130] – Karl Palachuk
We had, let’s see, Rayon and Amy and I were the primary members who sat at the booth at A Kronos and we really got a lot of attention and a ton of people. And in fact, I’d say we probably talked to people from nine other countries as well who are interested. The need for what we’re doing is very, very strong and I’d like to.

[00:41:58.840] – Andy Higgins
Open that to all members and anybody who wants to participate at a conference and help out that way. That’s where that comes from.

[00:42:07.450] – Karl Palachuk
Absolutely. We now have a sign actually that a chronos had made for us and we need to fix something on it. But we have a sign that can be used for certain purposes. But we also have table throws so that anytime that somebody will donate to us a booth or a table at an event, we have cards printed up by the thousands too. So any member who wants some can send me an email. Karl P@itsp.org and we’ll send you some cards to give out and we’re also going to print up some stickers and stuff. We’re preparing a sort of a membership kit that includes some of the things that you can use to help promote our association. So we’ll be sending those out to members just as soon as probably the stuff is there when I get home.

[00:43:07.680] – Denis Wilson
We’ve also had Keith go to the SMB Tech fest for the first time and I have not heard back from him yet as to the feedback that he received. Did you by chance talk to Keith?

[00:43:25.970] – Karl Palachuk
Karl no, I’ve been on the road since he was there, so yeah, I figured his money was just last week.

[00:43:32.160] – Denis Wilson
Yes.

[00:43:35.200] – Karl Palachuk
So we have like the tablecloth and we’re going to be producing some materials as handouts. Most people don’t want handouts but we’ll probably produce a really big QR code and that way we don’t feel people’s bags. But there’s a lot of people that literally signed up while they were talking to us at the booth. So it’s a very effective way to do it. And many of the organizations have kind of like a community area where they set up booths for channel pro and ASCII and so forth and so we just want to be in that with everybody. And we have members in every state so we should be able to hit all of the conferences because somebody’s going to be there from NSI, itsp they might as well sit at a booth. And Acronis also produced for us a little stamp so that if they give you those passports where you go around every booth and so forth. So now we have a stamp to stamp those things with. Wayne absolutely. You may speak. Everyone is welcome.

[00:44:48.180] – Wayne
Thank you so much. Karl. Hopefully my internet connection will hold up. It’s been a bit flaky in the hotel here. I wanted to commend you guys on what you’re doing. We’ve had the SMBiT Professionals Association running in Australia now for ten years and in a very short period of time you’ve come a long way. So to all the committees involved, good work on the work that you’re making. I’m seeing a few ideas on the membership slide here that I might steal for ourselves. But I also wanted to offer you guys everything that we’ve done over the last ten years. If there’s something there that we can provide to help support the Ntisp, let us know. You have my vote to help support because it’s through formal associations like this that we It providers get the chance to actually influence our politicians ultimately and therefore have a positive influence on our customers businesses through the different regulatory compliance and things like that. So we have our motto is strengthened numbers and the same thing really applies to you guys. So I just wanted to commend you all. You come a long way in such a short time.

[00:45:57.180] – Wayne
Well done guys, well done. Thanks for letting me be part of this.

[00:46:01.090] – Karl Palachuk
And your internet is stable, but your southern accent is a little strong.

[00:46:10.830] – Wayne
My wife right here doing the ironing. I can get her to translate for you in her teeny girl.

[00:46:18.700] – Karl Palachuk
All right, well, thank you and good luck. You’ll get up at 04:00 in the morning and join us at our next meeting in February.

[00:46:27.780] – Wayne
Look, I absolutely just happened on this particular meeting today. It’s nearly 06:00 p.m. In Edinburgh at the moment and yeah, I just saw the link and thought why not jump on, but yeah, I’m going to try and attend them.

[00:46:43.740] – Karl Palachuk
That’d be great. Thank you. Very cool. Will we be represented at Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas? So Steve, I do not know if you know who we contact about that. I’d be happy to start that conversation or I like throwing stuff off to other people to do so. Maybe I’ll ask Andy. But any show that you know of a contact or who is organizing it, we would love to have that and we will begin the process of seeing if they will give us a table. Yes, Andrew? Yes. You have to send me an email. We are going to produce the logos and so forth. I’ve just been running around like crazy. So we’re going to have downloadable logos for paid members and instructions and all of that. So that’s sort of the last thing that needs to be done after we adopted the new logo. So it shall be done and I have nothing else to do the rest of the year, so it’ll be done quicker.

[00:47:57.200] – Jason Thomas
And that is something that we could bring up, is the welcome kit for professional members or a company membership. What would everyone like to see in those packs? Like company membership is going to be right to have the logo on their website, et cetera. But is there anything in particular that people here had an idea of what should be in those kits?

[00:48:24.550] – Karl Palachuk
That’s a great question.

[00:48:30.100] – Jason Thomas
I figure since we have our large audience here, we’ll see if we can get some more answers from Dennis.

[00:48:35.370] – Karl Palachuk
Kara is on the line. I haven’t looked this morning. So I don’t know if the code of ethics is on the website yet, but probably not just because I sent her a note with a heads up yesterday, because I knew that that question would come up. It will be posted on the website. It’s always a matter of trying to balance things because when we put something on the website, it’s like, oh, do we put it in like the about page and make that continue to grow longer and longer and longer? Should it have its own section or whatever? So you’ve all done some web development, you know how that goes. But it will be on the website and then I will be posting it in a blog and will point to its somewhat permanent location. Look at that. So in the chat, Kara has posted the code of ethics. There you go. Exactly.

[00:49:27.780] – Denis Wilson
Thank you, Kara.

[00:49:29.880] – Karl Palachuk
She’s always amazing. And let’s see, discounts for new professional members. So what is the exact question, Andrew? Do we have discounts for members or are you thinking about a discounted membership price? Because I think the price is so low, it doesn’t need to be discounted. Is my opinion. Some kind of reward for going out.

[00:49:58.450] – Jason Thomas
And recruiting professional members, was my thinking.

[00:50:05.950] – Karl Palachuk
Well, we’ll have to think about that. Again, I think anybody is a professional in this industry, the price should not be an issue. But also, if you’re a member, I kind of think you should be motivated to in your own self interest to help get as many members as possible in the association.

[00:50:57.630] – Wayne
I tend to agree with you there, but we found that naturally incentive to do seem to help some members promote more avidly than not.

[00:51:08.490] – Karl Palachuk
Right? Well, and it may be. I have talked to some vendors, including one who is one of the vendor partners, who has already given us some money about the possibility of having them pay for memberships for their key partners. So that basically we would grow membership by having our vendor partners pay the membership fees for some or all of their resellers. So there’s lots of things that we can do with that.

[00:51:42.330] – Wayne
We’ve actually got a vendor here in Australia, Karl, that as of our conference that you’re at just last month, that they’re looking to utilize their call team to call out to their resellers to join SMB It professionals here in Australia. And there’ll be a bit of a bonus that goes if they do join. Yes, they’ll have to pay full price for membership, but it’s something we’ve been working on to try and work with our vendors more clearly because, heck, they’re the channels that typically we want to try and penetrate and we want to try and work together with. So, again, anything we can do to help, let me know.

[00:52:20.280] – Karl Palachuk
Right. Very cool. We’re almost at the top of the hour, so we can stay as long as we need to, but I just want to make sure people know. If you got anything else that you want to say before people start heading off to their next Zoom meeting, now is your chance. Not sure who pays Ken for the trip to Australia to visit Wayne, so that’s a big question.

[00:52:47.650] – Wayne
I’m not really sure that’s a benefit, to be honest.

[00:52:52.900] – Karl Palachuk
Well, first price is a week with Wayne, and second price is two weeks with Wayne.

[00:53:03.850] – Wayne
Well, I see a chuckling in the background.

[00:53:10.300] – Karl Palachuk
Alright, so folks, there has been there was a blog post in September with kind of the core outline of the new membership thing, but if you have any comments, please send us notes. There are forums on our site give us feedback because barring any feedback, the board is going to take a look at this and probably make some changes here and there and some tweaks and whatever, but I think they’re pretty set to put this in place. I don’t know if it will be by the first of the year, but it’s definitely on the agenda for the next board meeting. So any feedback you have, now is the time. And we’ve done a pretty good job, I think, of being transparent with folks about the code of ethics, the values, mission and vision, you know, the things that we are producing. And this is kind of the outline of what we think the membership is going to look like going forward. So if you have feedback, we will absolutely take it. And again, this is one of these things where the governance committee didn’t rush out and put this together in a week. They took months and months to do it.

[00:54:21.360] – Karl Palachuk
So if you have feedback, give it to us and we will integrate it into our decision making process, as always. All right, Diana. Thank you. All right, any other comments, questions, whatever? We got like 3 minutes until people start jumping to other meetings. I gotta break in the storm, so I might run to the airport.

[00:54:54.450] – Larry Mandelberg
Thanks, everybody.

[00:54:56.250] – Karl Palachuk
All right. Thank you all for being here. Another great meeting. I certainly appreciate it. Could someone explain the difference between the benefits of one of a one person shop as compared to a company? Great question, Ken. So if you are a one person shop and you want to just be a professional member, that’s absolutely the core of our membership right now. But if you have three or four or five employees, you may decide that you want to be a company membership. The only real difference is that with a company membership, you would get one paid professional member. So you’d have to pick who that is. Probably the owner or the general manager, whatever. But then the rest of your employees would become associate members, which means that they’re associated with your company. And so they can sit in on meetings, they can have full access to everything on the website. And it’s just that if they are in a committee meeting, for example, they can’t cast a vote. Only the one person designated as the professional member would have the voting power, but they can fully participate. And if you think about what CompTIA does, if you’re like, I have a membership in CompTIA, so that means that Kara and I are also members of CompTIA, so they can participate and so forth.

[00:56:23.420] – Karl Palachuk
They can’t sit on the executive councils of CompTIA, but they’re full members. Right. So it’s sort of like that. Right. So I hope that answers the question. And if I got any of that wrong, the folks on the governance committee can smack me in the head and correct me. Very good. All right, so I think we got a couple of minutes left, although, like I said, if people still have questions, happy to. Yeah. So, Ken, if you’re a one person shop, there really isn’t a difference. Just join us as the professional member. So we’ll get the recording up as quick as we can. And again, it will always be in that meeting area on the site. And of course, if you have any questions in the meantime, all the boards and committees are all listed on the site. Now, we had very little change after the elections, which is good. I think it means that we had the right people in the place in the first time, but it feels very good to have them be elected by the entire body. I think that’s a huge thing for us and a major, major milestone in our evolution.

[00:57:50.630] – Karl Palachuk
Alright, so if there are no other questions, I’ll go ahead and put this meeting to bed and we’ll get the recording up as quick as we can. Alright? Alright. Thank you all. Thank you.

[00:00:01.510] – Amy Babinchak
We have the majority of our board members not in their normal nice office locations today in broadcasting from wherever the heck they are. So it may be an interesting meeting.

[00:00:53.410] – Speaker 2
Hi, everyone.

[00:00:56.230] – Amy Babinchak
Hello, Julie.

[00:02:08.130] – Amy Babinchak
All right. It is 12:00 p.m. On the eastern coast of the United States, so we are going to go ahead and get started with this meeting. Just to let you know, as we went through our pre conversation this morning, we realized that almost every board member is not in their home office. So we are all broadcasting from unusual places. So if there’s any Internet glitches, I apologize. I’m actually on my boat, which has decent Internet access at the dock here, but you never know when it decides to go haywire. So if anything happens, just have patience and we’ll get back to it as soon as possible if there’s a glitch. So let’s go ahead and get started with this meeting today. Well, welcome to the all member meeting for this quarter. Here’s what’s on our agenda today. I’m going to have a little thing we’ll tell you about in a few minutes. Then Karl will speak, unless he isn’t at his hotel yet. Karl is actually traveling in Scotland and there is a strike which has shut down all of the trains. And so he rented a car and he’s driving as fast as possible to get to Manchester, his next destination.

[00:03:32.910] – Amy Babinchak
And as soon as he arrives, he will join us. We do have committee reports and updates and an update on a project that the board has been working on. We’re going to talk about the local contest that’s going on, a little bit about discussions, and then, as usual at the end, we’ll have all the time you want for discussion and Q and a couple of notes. This meeting is open to the public. Anyone is able to join it. It is being recorded, as you should have zoom should have told you that when you logged in. So if you don’t want to be on the video and you don’t want to be on the audio recording, just turn those things off on your end and that will protect you. This meeting, like all of our meetings, is recorded and you’ll find them posted on our YouTube channel as well as on our website with the transcription. And those are shown in the menu there under Meetings, member meetings. So you can review those information. We just see a note in the chat that Karl’s is going to take a little bit longer since everyone is driving on the wrong side of the road.

[00:04:43.670] – Amy Babinchak
He’s in Manchester, England. Hopefully, Karl knows he’s supposed to be driving on the wrong side of the road. All right, so what we’ll do then is we’ll just move Karl down toward the end of the meeting where he’s able to join us and we’ll deal with the other content first. So, my turn. In July, we hit the first major milestone for the NSI. Itsp it’s our first anniversary. Can I get some yays into the chat? I mean we made it for a full year. This has been a real significant effort to get this organization off the ground to this point. So from zero we actually created something. An active order directors developed the founding philosophy of the organization, which is that because this is our industry membership society, that it should be grassroots driven and that equality should rain so that every member, regardless of size or type, has an equal opportunity to vote. Managed service. And from there we created the founding articles within corporation and with the expert assistance of our treasure, filed and received our 501 C Six designation. And we created bylaws we appointed a committee liaison, skilled in negotiations and problem resolution to make sure that our committees are able to communicate clearly with themselves and the board.

[00:06:04.860] – Amy Babinchak
We created the Mission Vision Value Statement for the organization under the expert guidance of one of our directors, who taught us all new ways to think about words and understanding the thinking of others. We created the Governance Committee, to whom in keeping with the overall philosophy, became in charge of creating functional committees in finance, marketing and legislation. They’ve also put a lot of thought into making sure that everything we do is going to scale as we grow. Each committee then created their own charter to measure their actions and accomplishments against going forward. All these documents, they’re all available on the website for members to view and find out more information about what all of the committees are up to, we hired an Executive director, Karl Palachuk, to do the work that falls outside of the purview of the rest of us. Karl has put in a lot of time and his own money and staff into launching the society, the website being the most visible of those activities. It has grown steadily throughout the year and we owe him all debt for his work and dedication for all of everything he’s been doing. If you’ve attended our quarterly member meetings this year, then you’ve seen us go through this process steadily, building an organization up from zero and putting into place all of the infrastructure necessary to carry out the mission of the organization.

[00:07:26.810] – Amy Babinchak
As this year closed, I began to call for committees to shift into action. Because of time. The issues that brought about the necessity for us to organize have not slowed. Now that we are organized, it’s time for us to claim our seat at the table. And for that to happen, we need the support of the vendor community. We need MSP and It provider, corporate members and we need professional members, we need more members. Period. When we started this organization, it looked like legislation was going to be our biggest hurdle. But now we’re seeing that the insurance industry is making decisions for us and effectively regulating us and the Department of Defense recently updated CMMC to say that federal defense contractors can only be served by It providers that are CMMC compliant themselves in states. They’re using existing departments to issue rules and gather information like the Texas Department of Banking’s requirements claim. Our seat at the table in all of these venues. It’s time to shift from organizing into action. And so now we’re going to hear from our committee chairs so they can tell you how we’re doing that. I’m going to jump ahead in the slides just a bit so that we would have had Karl, but let’s make a couple of announcements.

[00:08:48.270] – Amy Babinchak
The next meeting that we’re going to have is November 9, the second Wednesday of the second month each quarter. And you may have gotten a few messages from Karl on correcting the zoom invitations. We should be good on that now. And then be sure to join us on social media and we’ll get those loops into the chat for you as well. A couple of updates. We have a logo contest going on. We have not had a logo. We just had words on the page. And so we thought it would be a good way to raise a little bit of visibility and give some members a chance to submit their drawings and get some things going. So be sure to vote for that. Now you can do that up on the website, and we need you to file for candidacy for elections. So if you go also to the website, there’s a place for you to do that. Now, it’s a two step process. So first you will fill out some real basic information in the form, name, email address, position that you want to run for and such. And then you have to go back in and edit that information.

[00:10:04.080] – Amy Babinchak
And you’ll be presented into your dashboard page where you’re going to upload your photo, give a candidate statement, answer a few questions, and all of that actually builds a page for you. Then to promote your candidacy with. We have waived for the actual voting purposes. We have currently the board voted to waive the requirement for professional members to have two letters of reference. We got a lot of pushback on the requirement, and the governance committee is revisiting other ways that we can use to verify professional membership. So for this election, that requirement is waived, which means that all professional members will be able to vote in the election. So, Larry, we’re going to let you speak now. So Larry has worked with us on our Mission Vision values that I mentioned earlier, and he’s currently working with us on developing a code of ethics. So Larry, I’m going to let you come off the mute and talk about those projects.

[00:11:19.810] – Larry Mandelberg
Thank you, Amy. I want to start we’re going to talk first about the mission Vision and values we approach this. I want everybody to understand how the board approached the development of these three statements to begin with. We think of them as our purpose statements. We think of them as how we define why we exist. And there’s really three groups, if you will. There’s the values, there’s the vision and there’s the mission. And each one has a very specific role. The values define our culture. We hear culture talked about a lot in organizations. And it’s very important to us that we create the right kind of culture for ourselves so that we can serve you, our members, as effectively as possible. And those values define the boundaries for our culture. For example, the first one talks about professionalism and integrity of our industry, which is our passion and why we’re doing this. The second one talks about our communication and how that’s how we maintain our integrity. The third one talks about open and honest communications, both with colleagues, clients and members. The fourth one talks about recognizing that the world is changing and we need to continue to be educated so that we can continue to deliver our clients and serve the industry properly.

[00:12:54.230] – Larry Mandelberg
And the last one talks about a member driven organization or commitment to a member driven organization. And if you believe in those five value statements, then you’re going to be aligned with the culture that we want to develop for ourselves as the organization and for you as members. The vision statement is looked at by us as our commitment as an organization to our internal stakeholders. Now, it gets a little interesting when we talk about membership groups like this, but our vision is what we’re trying to ultimately become. It’s not what we are today, it’s what we want to become. And our vision statement is that we are the voice of the industry defining the standards for professionalism It services. We know we’re not there yet, but that’s our future state goal. That’s our vision, that’s our internal commitment. And our external commitment to all of our members and stakeholders is what our mission is. Our mission is the value that we want to deliver to you and the manner in which we want to deliver it. So our mission is to provide pathways to establish high standards and ethics and to improve the perception and credibility of the It profession through actions driven by member engagement.

[00:14:21.110] – Larry Mandelberg
It’s a very inclusive statement, it’s a very large statement, it’s a lofty statement, but it’s what we’re trying to do. Now, we presented these to you six months ago and said if anyone has any questions or comments or edits, let us know. Either people weren’t interested or they were very pleased with what we did. And I’m going to go with the very pleased because we haven’t gotten any feedback other than positive feedback, no changes or suggestions. So thank you all for that. These are going to be formalized at our next board meeting and of course they’re always open to edits if appropriate. But these are our purpose statements now I want to touch on the code of ethics, because the code of ethics is a very interesting and complex area. Just understanding what ethics means was a challenge. The first thing the task force had to do was come together on why are we even creating a code of ethics and what is Essex mean? It was an interesting launch to the process, and we’re not done yet, but we’re making great progress. And what I want to report to you today is that we will have clarity for you on what we see ethics as being, how we look at ethics, just like I went through with you on the purpose, we’re going to have that for you.

[00:15:46.710] – Larry Mandelberg
And our ethics statements are going to be broken down into various areas of behavior or various areas of responsibility. Where we are today is we have three of those areas defined. The first one is competence. The second one is conflict of interest, and the third one is confidentiality. So I want to let you know two things. The first thing is that our code of ethics is in no way an effort to tell any of our members how to behave or how to run their business. This is a document that’s designed to help our members understand the most ethical approach to being a member of a professional organization that delivers it services to clients. MSPs there are no laws or rules making you follow it. And ethics are not something that are legally binding. They’re not something that’s legal or illegal. One example is, under confidence, we will always represent our skills and abilities accurately under conflict of interest, one of our statements is, members shall not knowingly make recommendations or provide advice that serves the member and not the recipient. And under confidentiality, one of the bullet points each one of these has multiple bullet points.

[00:17:19.640] – Larry Mandelberg
The one under confidentiality is, we treat all client information as confidential unless we know it is not. So that’s a taste of our code of ethics and what’s coming. We’ll do the same with that, as we did with these purpose statements. We’ll present it to you, look for some feedback, and be grateful for anything we hear back from you. I’m going to stop there, Amy. I don’t know if anyone has any questions, but I’ll stop and hand it back to you. Thank you.

[00:17:55.950] – Amy Babinchak
So if you do have questions for Larry, go ahead and put them in the chat. The quote of ethics is an ongoing process. We’re not complete with that process yet. And just like we did with Mission Vision Values, our intention to have it available for comments before it becomes finalized. So let’s look forward on to the committee report. Heather is actually in the car with Karl in England and Scotland this week. We’ll let her introduce herself when she comes back to us. Meanwhile, I think we can move forward to the committee chair, so let’s go ahead and start with Finance. Tracy, if you want to come off of Mute and give us an update on the Finance Committee, please.

[00:18:51.250] – Tracy Hardin
Sure, Amy.

[00:18:52.010] – Amy Babinchak
Thanks.

[00:18:52.830] – Tracy Hardin
We actually don’t have a lot going on right now. I have recently emailed all the other community chairs and asked them to start preparing their budgets for next year. We actually get that process started so they have time to meet and discuss their budgets. And we have a deadline later this month that those have to be turned in, and then we ourselves, after that prepare the budget numbers, and we have to present those to the board in November. So right now, we’re kind of waiting on everybody to get back to us with their numbers. That’s where we’re at right now.

[00:19:30.950] – Amy Babinchak
Thank you, Tracy. Brett, would you like to give us a summary of what’s happening with the Governance Committee, please?

[00:19:37.580] – Bret Erickson
You got it. Thank you. So we’ve had a great quarter. We’ve transitioned formally from the Formation Committee into the Governance Committee. We are involved in the election guidelines and kind of helping put things together. And right now, we’re working on the details of the membership programs and just what lands where and how that’s all defined. And so we’ve had some great meetings surrounding that. I just want to thank everybody who’s on our committee, and I announced the names at the last couple of meetings. I’ll spare you this time, but certainly you can hop on the website and see who’s on the committee and shameless segway while you’re up there. Please register for elections in a position, and please vote when it comes up. We’d love to have you join us. We got a great crew. We have a lot of fun. We’re very efficient. We make progress, and a lot of creative people on the committee, and that’s what I got.

[00:20:36.510] – Amy Babinchak
All right, Dennis, give us an update, please, on the Legislative Committee activity.

[00:20:53.210] – Denis Wilson
Can you hear me now?

[00:20:54.330] – Karl Palachuk
Better?

[00:20:55.850] – Amy Babinchak
Yes. Very good.

[00:20:58.050] – Larry Mandelberg
Okay.

[00:20:59.750] – Denis Wilson
The first thing I want to do is to give thanks to my great committee. They’ve done a superb job. We’ve been meeting Biweekly for the last year, putting together what we think are a strong offering that will help our members move forward into self advocacy and the grassroots methodology. First, let me talk about the five goals. The committee has five goals set up that says that, for instance, we should be following the national and state legislature affecting our industry, any legislation that affecting our industry. The second one is to inform the membership of those findings. Third is to educate government and businesses on the value of our offering, service offering, and the effects of legislation on it. The fourth is to create materials to educate the members, to help small businesses understand the legislation affecting us, and lastly, to train members to become effective self advocates. Now, talking to the first area, we have resources to educate us all and to make it really available to our members, readily available to our members. We’re looking at several websites that contract this kind of information to their members and we should have a recommendation to the board as well as to Tracy as to what the cost is going to be and what we should do about that.

[00:22:53.830] – Denis Wilson
The second area, we’re looking at setting up a blogging through our own website so that we can really focus in on those areas of legislation that are going to be really affecting us and those that have been usually outlined by legislature in, for instance, California or Texas or New York. And we’ve got a sense that something’s going to happen there quickly and we want to make sure that we get that information out to the membership as quickly as possible. The third area, we want to working with the Marketing Committee on legislative and business oriented brochures and white papers so that you can use them as part of your discussion with those legislature or businesses. Fourth, we’re currently working on creating templates for videos to fill in the YouTube channel. We expect to put together five and ten minute question oriented videos. So we’ll deal with one question at a time, like what is it that legislators need to have for me? What is it they’re looking for? How should I talk to them? Each one of those individual questions will be talked about in the videos. We should have the first one in Alpha Test this week and we expect to have something in the range of three to five within the next several weeks that we can all take a look at, say, yeah, good, this isn’t so good, and we move forward on it.

[00:24:52.090] – Denis Wilson
And the fifth area is to create training materials as well as an advisory council from within our group that can work with the individual members who are working with self advocating to a legislature in Michigan or Washington or Florida. Everybody has a different style of legislating themselves and everybody has different issues. And what we have is a group that has been working in this area for years. And so we’re hoping that we can offer an advisory group, an advisory committee, not committee, but an advisory group that could help those members that are going forward and working with their local legislators and they just need some help, a bit of hand holding at all. So anyway, those five areas are what we’re working on to create self advocates in a grassroots methodology.

[00:26:21.130] – Amy Babinchak
Thanks, Dennis. I see that Karl has joined us. I don’t see Heather yet, but Karl, we can bounce up back up to your executive report here.

[00:26:34.580] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you. So thank you everybody, for your patience. There’s a train strike in the UK, and so we just finished a four hour drive from Glasgow, Manchester. Anyway, we got the perfect storm. We also have the perfect team, so they made this all come off without a hitch. So we have 203 professional members as of yesterday and 521 registered members. So that’s over 700, which is pretty darn good. We have 1673 on the constant contact list and so we have a good core. Part of what we need to do going forward in the fall is to get more people to go ahead and join and become a professional member. So that piece of it becomes the most active and strong piece of the organization in terms of finances. All of those 200 members represent some money. Some of the people have also donated money, so our revenue is slightly larger than that. At the end of July, we celebrated our first official year in existence. So congratulations to all of you. It’s pretty shocking how much we’ve done in a year and I know some people are frustrated with how slow things are going, but I assure you the board and the committee members have worked their tails off to get us where we are and it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to go from nothing to something in a year.

[00:28:19.150] – Karl Palachuk
Membership renewals will start automatically on August 24. That was the first enrollment paid enrollment and we’ll continue from there. So on your anniversary dates, you will get a renewal. The next all member meeting is going to be in actually, I think there’s another slide for this. Next all member meeting is November 9. We always do the second Wednesday of the second month of each quarter and so we’ll be putting that and I hope by then we’ll have a little extra few extra resources to commit to promoting these meetings and getting a lot of people registered sooner. And so make sure that you’ve got that in there. Also, if you go to our elections page right now we are in the midst of the season of filing for candidacy. So I believe legislative Committee has nine members, all the others have seven. And then we have the board of directors. So we have 32 positions open and I put the banner with the yellow at the top so you can see that if you click on the Learn More or you’re clicking on Get Involved and go to 2022 Elections, you will see the Elections page.

[00:29:42.040] – Karl Palachuk
It’s got a nice timeline that explains everything. There’s actually an intro video from a meeting that we all held about a month ago and once you begin to file for office, you can start it and come back and finish it later. But please do so because the next thing Jen is going to start bugging you about is to make sure you get that done. But we recommend that you just go ahead and write up all your information and copy and paste into your application and you can build quite a nice little page so that people know what office you’re looking for and your social media links and so forth and so on. So if you have any interest at all, there is some commitment. It does take time. And being the nature of our organization, we have people who sometimes can’t make a meeting. That happens, but we really want people who are actually committed to doing some work and taking the time and participating as a member of the community. So it’s really extremely important that we have these filled. And I think we have at least ten people have filed so far, but we need to get all those 32 slots filled and the application to run for the office is through the end of this month, but please don’t put it off.

[00:31:02.200] – Karl Palachuk
And then in the month of September we’ll have the first 15 days as to basically there’s forms for the elections and we’ll have people discuss whatever things they want to talk about and what they think the future of this organization should be. And then September 15 to I think the 23rd is the actual voting. So we’re trying to take it at pace and make sure that it’s organized and that people have time to do this with your very busy lives running a business. The other thing that’s going on is that the Logo Contest is underway and Andy could not be here, he had a client issue at the last minute, so he’s the chair of the marketing committee. But the Logo Contest voting is going on now, so there are three candidates and again, go to get involved and click on Logo Contest vote now. I think as of this morning that there were only 34 votes cast. So anyone who is a paid member, you do not have to have your letters of reference in for this you do not have to have your letters of reference in for running for office either. If you are a paid member, you should be able to access those pages both in the contest and run for election.

[00:32:21.970] – Karl Palachuk
If you have any issues with any of those things, send us an email through the site or just to me and we will figure out. Make sure that you have access to that, but don’t put it off. Make sure that you do it as quickly as possible and do vote in that contest. And if you have a particular design that you like so much more than the others, then encourage other people to vote your way with that as well. I think that’s all I had. Just as a side note, you may or may not have noticed, so due to some hosting issues at my company, we moved the PSA SPP domain to a standalone server. It is through cloudways using Linole servers. It has nothing else on that server except this. So the performance should be pretty snappy. I think that we average two or 3% CPU time, so it should be stable and it should not be interfered with by anything else going on anywhere else in the world. And of course we can upgrade from there if we need the resources. Unless I forgot something, that’s what I had. Amy, is there anything else before I introduced Larry?

[00:33:41.290] – Amy Babinchak
You already missed that part of the show. Karl got it. Larry has done his thing. We’ve heard from all the committees. We didn’t hear anything from the Marketing Committee because Andy’s not here. So I don’t know if you’re able to see. Heather is with us now if you’re able to provide any additional information about what’s happening in marketing or in general. We did hear from the other leaders.

[00:34:08.410] – Speaker 2
Sure. So absolutely. As Karl had mentioned, the Marketing committee is working on the logo contest that is kind of keeping their hands full at the moment, although I know they have a lot of other things that are going on as they work with other committees. One of the things that I wanted to say is I am Heather Johnson. I’m the vice president of the board and also I’m the committee liaison. So I want to give a little pep talk about you’ve heard a lot about making sure that you sign up to be a candidate to be voted on to one of these committees. I’ve had the honor of working with these committees throughout the year. They are so dedicated. But I wanted to make it very clear that you don’t have to be a financial guru or a marketing maven, just have some interest in it and want to make a difference. The other thing is when you hear the word committee oh, no, I don’t want to be on a committee. They actually are having a great time. So don’t just kind of think of this as well, maybe I’ll do it. You actually will make a lot of friends with a lot of other great MSP and it seems like and vendors as well.

[00:35:26.380] – Speaker 2
It seems like these meetings people are getting on the calls earlier and earlier because they want to catch up and chat when they stay on later and later. So it’s a really great way to make some other friends in the industry by joining the committee and making a difference at the same time. So if you’re on the fence about it and you feel like you don’t have enough background in it, just do it. It’s fun. You’ll have a great time with it. I promise that you won’t regret it. And also just to reiterate that you no longer need those two letters of references that’s being held off for now. So if that was something that was holding you back, make sure that you do that. I’d love to read everybody’s nominations and pages, so get them all up so we can start seeing them and getting ready to vote.

[00:36:22.750] – Karl Palachuk
All right, so with that, we will go to the open Q and A and actually Andrew put the first question and you’re welcome to just ask open your mic and talk if you wish, or just put it in the chat. So Andrew says. I was going to join a committee? Well, there’s two ways. The first one is if you run in the election, you want to join a committee. So if you want to be in Finance and Finance is a great example of you don’t have to have financial background that’s really a policy committee because what gets funded gets done right so that committee doesn’t sit around and talk about spreadsheets and balancing the checkbook and so forth. But if you want to be on the Finance committee, for example, you go to file for candidacy and you just pick that from the list. You can run for one office and the top four vote getters will serve a two year term, the next three vote getters will serve one year term and then everybody starting next year, all terms will be for two years. So it’s just a way for us to kickstart. Roughly half of the committee is chosen each year.

[00:37:34.230] – Karl Palachuk
The other way that you could be on a committee is if there’s a committee vacancy, the committee chooses, they filled their own vacancies. So let’s say halfway through the year somebody decides to move to another business or whatever. If they choose to quit a committee, then there’s a vacancy and that committee chooses its own member so they would choose another replacement who would then serve until the next election.

[00:38:07.850] – Denis Wilson
Can I make a mention? Karl? Sure, you do a great job so far, but there’s one thing that I didn’t understand and I’m sure that there’s other people in the society that don’t understand as well. You can simply attend a committee. You don’t have to be a voting member, which is what we’re voting on is the voting members in the committee. You can come in any time.

[00:38:38.130] – Larry Mandelberg
Especially.

[00:38:38.720] – Denis Wilson
As far as I know. All the committees are open to having other folks there who want to come by and understand what’s going on with the committee and then if it turns out that we have membership issue with someone who can’t spend more time with us. Then we normally go to those people who have been coming to the committee meeting as informal members and look for them to come on board then as a formal member.

[00:39:14.350] – Karl Palachuk
That’s a good point and we need money so we can get more staff time. But one of the things that I’m hoping to do soon, if not very soon, is to begin printing up a calendar online on the site so that you can all know when committees are going to meet and that way you can choose to attend. If you are a paid member, it doesn’t mean you can vote but the reality is if there’s eight people there and you join in the conversation, you will have some influence even if you’re not an official voting member on the committee. So Eric has a question. So is the primary focus of this organization MSPs? I’m not an MSP, I’m a field engineer. And that’s a great question, Eric, and I’m glad that you asked it. This is for everybody in this industry as far as I’m concerned. And so the membership program is being revamped by the governance committee they’re looking at. If you are let’s say you’re an employee of intel, you could be a member of this organization because you are a professional in It services. If you just focus on home offices or you just do a break fix or on demand support, you are still a professional in the It services industry, and we want you to be a member.

[00:40:38.850] – Karl Palachuk
If you’re a small company, we want you to join as a company, and you get one vote per company. If you It big company, we want you to join as a company. You still only get one vote. But we want every organization that does it to be here because there’s kind of two major focuses that we’ve been looking at, and one is we need to protect the reputation of this industry because right now something goes wrong and legislators and others look at us and say, what are those people up to? Why do they use such dangerous tools? Right? And the other thing is, we need to we’re mature enough, it’s been, whatever, 50, 60 years that this kind of It company has existed. We need to hold each other accountable to a code of conduct and a code of ethics and to be able to say, hey, that is not the right way to do business. And I actually thought about we should have a blog post called the Reddit Post of the Week, because there’s always something on Reddit about, should I be paid for my overtime because my boss doesn’t pay me right?

[00:41:44.580] – Karl Palachuk
Or we call ourselves a managed service provider, but we don’t actually sign contracts or do preventive maintenance. Are we really an MSP? Right? All those kinds of things are things that our industry should be talking about, and it’s important to talk about what tools are you using? But that’s not the core of why this organization exists. This is about us holding each other accountable and making sure that the rest of the world knows that we’re holding each other accountable. And Amy mentioned that the code of conduct is an agenda for the future. We’ve been working on it. Other comments, questions? And again, you’re welcome to open up your mic. Do we need to leave the slide up or should we just have a free for all? I’m easy. Look at all those happy faces. Comments? Questions?

[00:42:46.750] – Amy Babinchak
Well, Keith has an excellent item for thought, I guess, in this question here. Have we forged relationships with other It organizations since we cover a gap not addressed in those memberships? As an example, a group within Tech Tribe where we can engage and encourage conversations about It legislation pending and insurance requirements. I would love to see that happen. What we would have to do in order to make that happen is really an outreach program to those organizations. In my mind. I think that would be something that the marketing committee may be able to lead. But it would require we definitely have to have a volunteer in those organizations in order to sort of be the point person that would lead that. Because certainly. One. We don’t have any employees in this organization yet. So there’s no one we can say.

[00:43:53.230] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah.

[00:43:53.470] – Amy Babinchak
You need to go into each of the communities around the It industry and make sure that the forum is up to date and comment on it. But if we had volunteer who would do that in their community that they’re very active in, I think that would be of great value.

[00:44:11.670] – Karl Palachuk
And I am in regular contact with folks at the Tech tribe. I happen to be on a little three day extravaganza in the UK. With Richard Tubb, and Nigel Moore and I are super good friends for a long time, so we’re in contact all the time. And Amy and I were just add comp tia, and we’re sort of directed, hey, we need you to go meet with these people. And we’re like, okay, but those conversations are taking place, and they will someday be a little more formal, but we are trying to do exactly what you suggest, Keith. And there’s lots and lots of organizations, but most of them, they’re pretty focused on a specific goal, and they don’t have a lot to cooperate on. CompTIA is probably the biggest one that we have a lot in common and a lot to cooperate on. They have a huge agenda and a huge budget, but they also have some big gaps where they basically said, we’re not going to be in this part of the discussion. But they’ve started the conversation with us, too, for example, in lobbying to say, okay, well, let’s begin the process. We’re trying to figure out whether we have issues in common and then begin the process of saying, okay, how might one figure out what our stand is on those things?

[00:45:36.670] – Karl Palachuk
And that’s something that I sent a note to Dennis and poor Dennis on the legislative committee. They have such a gargantuan agenda. But I’m like it wouldn’t hurt to start having this conversation of just sort of on the side. What kinds of issues might come up. Right to repair is the most obvious one. But as small business people, we would be interested in things that affect taxes for small business, licensing for small business, insurance for small business, contract legislation, so forth and so on. There’s many issues that affect us, and part of it is we’re also what Dennis is doing, what that committee is doing is beginning the work of beginning to create outbound communications that are to basically introduce us so that when it’s time for us to sit down at the table. We’ve built some relationships, and it all takes time the only reason I brought.

[00:46:38.130] – Speaker 8
It up is being 187. People think I know something after all those years and see how you got. I told you actually, because of some background I have in legislation and preparing curriculum, I’ve been asked a lot about that in forums and I just didn’t know if it was right to represent the legislative committee or the organization or just talk as an individual. People are asking, what do I see in my purported crystal ball? Because they are getting nervous. And the other thing I was thinking, since you’re over in the UK, and I don’t mind putting work on your plate, UK is probably being more aggressive governance wise. And it always fears me that some of those things our legislators will look at and say, hey, that worked over there.

[00:47:35.870] – Karl Palachuk
It’s also a case not just the UK, but all of Europe GDPR and other things. Europe has no problem saying these are the rules and if you don’t like it, the fines are ridiculously high. If you do business with people who do business in Europe, you become legislated by them whether you want to or not.

[00:47:58.490] – Speaker 8
Yeah, I thought that’d be good to tighten, get some stuff from Richard while you’re up there, while you’re out there or really show this is what can happen if we don’t act. And what’s happening in Europe I’m sorry I just gave UK off Europe, but is concerning, especially how they like to hold people financially responsible in big fine numbers.

[00:48:27.770] – Karl Palachuk
Yes. Let’s see. Oh, Josh might volunteer to be a trip three way lays on. So Michael asks, do you have a goal when it comes to state level oversight? I’m not sure exactly what you mean by oversight. Eventually we’re going to have to have somebody, some kind of organization in each state or somebody centrally who monitors the legislation in each state. For the most part, the federal government has sort of taken on privacy because when data moves across state lines, they can in the Commerce Clause legislate directly almost everything else that we deal with. With regard to two organizations, you and your customers, having a contract has to happen at the state level. There’s no federal authority for that to happen. So a lot of the things with monitoring organizations like ours or companies like ours is going to be state by state by state. And I think that eventually, whether people like it or not, I think we are going to be involved in creating some model legislation. Because if Florida or California or Texas or New York passes a law, it will become model legislation for the rest of the country, period. It just will.

[00:49:59.930] – Karl Palachuk
And we need to be in that conversation as quick as possible.

[00:50:06.290] – Speaker 9
Yes, Karl, if I can add to that. And the reason I asked about the state level is Vermont a lot of times looks at Massachusetts. So whenever Massachusetts makes a move, whether it’s in law or some similar aspect. Somehow the state looks at it too. So we don’t have any professional level in our industry in Vermont. But I do know that the state is starting to think about it. And one of the major reasons why I like what we’re doing here is to kind of help promote that level. Within reason.

[00:50:46.010] – Karl Palachuk
Right. Well, it’s funny. Six months ago, I would have said we really should have started this five years ago. Now I think we should have started it 20 years ago because it’s such a gargantuan effort. And again, all the committee members can take a nod for this one, the effort to get us where we are. And then I think about how would we start 50 state organizations? Right. We need to start getting the national level going and head in the right direction. And we need some vendors to chip in and to join the cause. We need a lot more members to join. Heather and I are having a discussion about how many MSPs are there in the world. Right. Oh, well, there’s all kinds of different numbers, but I can tell you it’s tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands more than we have now. So we have nothing but growth ahead of us. But part of that is that will bring enough money to have a dedicated person to make sure that all the things that we’re trying to do now get done, and then all the things we do in the future get done.

[00:51:58.430] – Karl Palachuk
It takes human bodies to do that. And we can call for volunteers, but quite realistically, we can’t ask people who are running a business to also then dedicate 20 or 30 hours a week to this organization. It’s just at some point, we have to have staff.

[00:52:17.750] – Tracy Hardin
Hey, Karl. This is Eric Lorenz. I’ve got another quick question.

[00:52:20.900] – Karl Palachuk
Yes, sir.

[00:52:21.750] – Tracy Hardin
And I guess this would be for I forget which committee it was concerning the proposed code of ethics. I’ve been part of other professional organizations in the past who have had code of ethics, and I want to make sure I didn’t misunderstand what was being talked about. But it sounded to me like what was being said. Well, we’re going to have this code of epics, but we’re not going to require you to subscribe to them. And you don’t have to sound it like you don’t have to follow them. And if not, that’s okay. For most of the time when I’ve been in organizations, by joining that organization, they’re saying that you agree with our code of ethics and you agree to follow and abide by them. And maybe if you don’t agree with them, maybe this isn’t the organization for you. And I didn’t hear that, or maybe I heard incorrectly. I just wanted to get a clarification on that because obviously you can have a code of ethics, but if nobody’s necessarily following it, then what good is it?

[00:53:33.150] – Karl Palachuk
Mary?

[00:53:35.610] – Larry Mandelberg
Yeah, I’m right.

[00:53:37.520] – Karl Palachuk
Here.

[00:53:37.750] – Larry Mandelberg
Just a second, I’m getting to where it’s quiet. Sorry.

[00:53:40.690] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. And part of it, Eric, is just a preference until Larry can get settled up. We’re going to tiptoe into this the same as we did with Mission Vision and Values. We’re going to put something out there and say, okay, is that the right fit? And then part of what we’re doing in terms of professionalizing the industry is saying, okay, now we’re doing this. And then I can see the next thing we’re going to do is this. And the next thing we’re going to do is this. And the next thing we’re going to do is this.

[00:54:10.030] – Larry Mandelberg
So I think the noise is abated enough that I can talk without being too disrespectful.

[00:54:16.520] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah, we can hear you fine.

[00:54:19.870] – Larry Mandelberg
And I got cars moving around me. I really apologize for this. It’s the beauty and the ugly side of being so mobile with technology. So the thing that I want to say about that is there are a number of what I’m going to label loose ends. And two of those loose ends are enforcement, which includes monitoring, and the other is what do I want to call it? How binding they are. And both of those are items that we have discussed as a task force at great length. And it’s become very clear that we have to put more thought into it before we put our stake in the ground. It’s a suite of very complicated, detailed tactical issues and there’s some conflicting components. For example, we want this to be member driven. Well, we don’t want to be the power up on high, dictating what members can and cannot do. That’s not being member driven. And to your point, I was involved in an international organization who you had to agree to conform to their code of ethics and they actually had an enforcement division and I was involved in the testing. You have to be tested to be a professional member and pass the certification.

[00:56:06.550] – Larry Mandelberg
And I was involved in the development of the re certification process because it wasn’t a one time certification for people who had the higher levels of certification in ethics. So this is very complicated and I want everyone on the call to be aware that we are really approaching this with a great small biz thoughts and care to make sure we bring you something that is valuable and will help us achieve our vision while delivering on our mission and operating within the boundaries of our values. And there’s an example of where you see those purpose statements coming into play. I’m going to stop there and see if anyone else has any questions.

[00:56:58.810] – Speaker 8
Yeah, I do have a comment.

[00:57:00.650] – Karl Palachuk
Really?

[00:57:01.040] – Speaker 8
I headed the board of ethics in our city and then was asked to headed for the state and we had judicial backing. However, it was not effective until I changed the theory from being punitive to being a learning experience. And I think sometimes ethics panels or ethics reviews can be considered punitive, and then you’re causing the old act react where I think we really want to be more of a learning and making our community better and approaching what may be perceived as ethics violations or gray actions, as learning experiences versus administrative action. I think if we kind of fit it that way, we’ll have better acceptance and people will be more apt to.

[00:57:53.990] – Larry Mandelberg
Listen to us, right? So, Keith, don’t take this the wrong way, but if I was there, I would hug you and kiss you, and I am vaccinated, so you could not be more right on target. This is about not about penalizing people. It’s about helping people understand what those ethical guidelines are. Now, I don’t have it handy, but we developed a statement for answering the question, why do we have a code of ethics? And it speaks to this very issue. I’d give it to you if I was home on my computer, because I could look it up. But if you want to shoot me an email, my email is in the chat. Shoot me an email and I’ll send it to you, and we’ll get it posted so the rest of the members can understand our task forces statement on why we’re creating a code of ethics. But yes, we are not trying to be punitive. And this is where the purpose statements I’m going to go back to those purpose statements because they are I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years, and I’ve been in technology since 73. Having this clarity of vision, mission, and values allows us to say, hey, if you don’t want to play in our space, go away.

[00:59:10.120] – Larry Mandelberg
If you don’t want to achieve the goals we want to achieve and do it the way we want to do it, go find someone else to play with. It’s not that we don’t want you here, it’s that why would you be here if you don’t want to do it the way we want to do it? It’s about being crystal clear and communicating about where we’re going, how we’re getting there, and what our boundaries are. And when you go there, what you find is that the people who are either intentionally disruptive or intentionally try to take advantage find that the culture and the organization tends to be so strong that it’s too much work for them to cheat and steal. And the people who don’t know will appreciate learning and being a part of something bigger than themselves.

[00:59:54.970] – Tracy Hardin
Just to be clear, I wasn’t necessarily thinking along the lines of being punitive in the way of dropping 100 pound ambles on people who didn’t follow things according to the letter of the ethics. At the same time, and I’m guessing, as I understand this being a new organization, this will come with time. That other organization I referred was for 15 years, I was a professional photographer, and I was a member of the professional photographers of America and they had a code of ethics. And kind of the way that worked was what would happen is if a studio did something that was really shady or didn’t come out right, their customer would probably end up at the doorstep of the PPA and saying, hey, this happened to me. Then they had a committee that would come back to that photographer and have a process where they’d say, hey, this happened. What’s going on? And it would either be cleared up or they would gently be told that we’re probably no longer interested in having you as a member if you’re not willing to correct this action. Right?

[01:01:10.210] – Larry Mandelberg
In the interest of time, let me just say this. I agree with everything you said. The way I think about it is we’re here to let you know that you’re not fitting in with the way we want this organization to run. And if you want to be part of it, we want to help you. And if you’re don’t know why you’d want to be here, you won’t enjoy yourself. But again, this is a much bigger conversation, and I would invite you and anyone else that’s interested, please reach out to me directly and we will get you involved one way or another in this conversation as it goes forward, because it’s a big conversation and it’s barely just begun.

[01:01:50.170] – Tracy Hardin
Fair enough.

[01:01:52.330] – Karl Palachuk
The other thing is, Brian said in the notes, if we can’t dictate something as simple as that, people should be honest. There’s no point in doing any of this. And I agree with you, but part of it is we can’t dictate, right? That what we can do. And Larry, I’m just going to post your email in the chat just for fun. What we can do is we start out and say, look, these are recommended code of ethics. And once we’re sure that after a few months or whatever, that we actually believe that we got it right. This is the code of ethics. You can have more, you can have less, but this is the place to start. And then we can move to saying that the next level of the next go round of the partner program is you must accept our code of ethics. And then it’ll be like perhaps even a check box when you join. And then from there again, keep raising the requirements, perhaps having continuing education credits and so forth. So our goal is to not only improve the industry, but then also improve its reputation more broadly. And that’s why the logo contest seems trivial to some people.

[01:03:05.020] – Karl Palachuk
But I got to tell you, once we have a logo that we say, this is our logo for at least so many years, then we can take it, put it on our emails, put it on our website, talk to our clients and say, Guess what? I do. I belong to this professional organization. And here’s what we’re doing right? This is what we stand for. And so it begins there. And I really think that it’s somewhat telling that we had so many people, a couple of thousand people interested in this, in large part because we are having a discussion about ethics in this industry and nobody else is.

[01:03:45.070] – Larry Mandelberg
Karl, I need to just cut in. I have got to go. I’ve got a client waiting for me. So I’m going to say thank you very much. Please reach out to me if you have any questions or comments.

[01:03:55.510] – Tracy Hardin
Thank you for addressing it. I appreciate it. And you too, Karl.

[01:04:01.870] – Karl Palachuk
And I’ll just publicly say we would not be anywhere as far as we are with regard to the mission, vision, values, and the code of ethics if Larry was not helping us on those task forces. See, Chris got his thumbs up there. Other comments, questions? Eric?

[01:04:22.710] – Bret Erickson
I was just going to mention governance committee wise, I’ve got the draft of one of the drafts of the membership stuff. And right here, professional member, the very last bullet currently says adhere to the itsp code of ethics. So it’s definitely on the road.

[01:04:40.290] – Karl Palachuk
MSP. And now you too can join the race, file for candidacy, and help have that whole entire discussion, other topics, or anybody who has not had something addressed that they have on their mind.

[01:04:59.570] – Amy Babinchak
The whole discussion that had is really important. And it’s part of our challenge as a new organization of figuring out how do we start? We have that conversation so many times. We want everybody in this industry to start to be nice people and be good for their clients and stop doing stupid things. How do we start? And literally everything we do has that same challenge over and over again. We are starting at all of the things. And because our industry hasn’t had any guidance, those of us that are here and are volunteering and our members of this organization and most of us in this position have many years of experience, we’re bringing that forward, and we’re figuring out how do we start and then how do we make this industry better? We know where we want to go. We know we want to be. We just have to get the roadmap together to do it. And that’s a large portion of our work right there.

[01:06:14.710] – Karl Palachuk
Let’s see. Probably not active in a committee this year. I’m already a volunteer leadership advisor. All right. Be an active member. Yes. Again, as soon as we can figure out how to have a nice little somewhat automated system for having the meeting schedules go live and members can attend, that would be great. If you’re on this call and you are listening to a recording and you are not a paid member, please. It is the most minimal thing that you can do. And I know $100 doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it adds up and it does help. And all the little things help lots of people who have donated money as well or donated time. But as we begin to grow those memberships matter, it also helps us with numbers. If we had 1000 members, it makes it much easier to go to somebody and say, hey, look, we’re a real organization and we know we have thousands of people who are interested in this. We just need them to go ahead and join because it matters whether you like it or not. Yes, we’re doing the right thing. But if you got 1000 members and you’re doing the right thing, you get more people to pay attention to you.

[01:07:35.600] – Karl Palachuk
If you go to a state legislature and you say, hey, wow, there’s like over 200 of us, they’re like, oh, that’s really nice. Yeah, very good job. So we need numbers matter, other comments or questions already then? Well, if that’s it, people are beginning to drop like flies. It’s five after, six after. Thank you for your attendance. Thank you for your support. If you have any comments or questions, send them to me, Amy, or anybody that you’ve seen on the call today. We’re going to get this recording up. It’s always available on the website. There’s a meeting tab and we post up the meetings there in reverse chronological order. So this meeting will be at the top of that list and we’ll get a transcript.

[00:00:01.870] – Karl Palachuk
You. Very good. Welcome everybody. And now let me introduce all the way from Michigan, that the one of the highest points in Michigan, just below to you, P amy Babinchak, our president from Harbor Computers.

[00:00:19.790] – Amy Babinchak
Hey everybody. So my goal today is to tell you a little bit about sort of where we’ve been and where the organization is going so that you know what you might be getting into if you decide to serve on a committee.

[00:00:38.550]
Here.

[00:00:38.900] – Amy Babinchak
Before this first year of our organization, everyone who is serving was appointed. We had to get this organization off the ground. And so our year long effort has been to create the necessary committees, to get charters for those committees, to get a charter for the organization itself, to develop our mission, vision, values. We’re currently working on a code of ethics for the organization, really all those organizational things that are required to create a national society from the ground up, which has been a tremendous amount of work. So this year was really given over to organizing. And I’m hoping that in this next year that we will be changing our emphasis from organization to action. Right? So instead of our committees forming up and deciding why they’re here and what their purpose is, we want them to actually get busy and start doing stuff. And at the point of our organization, which this is a very hands on kind of place, we do not have staff, we don’t even have funding yet. So we are depending on the committee members to not only just serve on a committee to make decisions, but to actually participate in fulfilling the goals of the committee and performing the actions that will take them to those goals.

[00:02:10.350] – Amy Babinchak
So for the board, I really see us as shifting ourselves from creating things to really assisting in fundraising for this organization. And not everybody agrees with me, but I think that is a major responsibility of board members to bring in money for the club. And I really kind of see that as everyone’s responsibility, but particularly those of us at the board level to use our influence to try to get that vendor program rolling, which we just announced recently. We do have the marketing committee, which is of course involved in the look of the club. They will be running membership drives and developing our presence on social media and even our presence at events. Right? What’s that going to look like? How do we want to represent ourselves? And we really have to start to get out there, enforce at events and let everybody know that we exist and build our membership up. We have a finance committee. The finance committee, of course, project expenses as an organization. We’re a membership organization, a membership nonprofit type, I should say it’s a C Six legislative committee has already started to move toward action. They are building educational materials for self advocacy and that is just now getting off the ground.

[00:03:56.550] – Amy Babinchak
And I expect that’s really going to ramp up here in the next year. I’m expecting great things from them and that is going to really allow us to be prepared to respond to local legislative initiatives that we know are coming and some that are already in progress. And then arguably the very most important committee that we have is the governance committee. The governance committee actually forms the other committees. They help the committees develop their charters and make sure the committees are fulfilling their charters. And they’ll also be involved in any dispute resolution that happens to come up. This is very much a bottom up organization. So this is not a situation where the board dictates what the committee should do. We want the membership to dictate what their membership organization does. So as a board we chose early on to empower the committees to take action and be the face in.

[00:04:54.110]
Where.

[00:04:54.510] – Amy Babinchak
Everything springs from in this organization. So that is my grand summary of where we’re at and where I hope this organization is going to go next year.

[00:05:07.490] – Karl Palachuk
All right, very good, thank you. And just a quick intro to the elections. So all of the positions in the organization are up for elections. So the way that the bylaws are written, the individuals are elected to committees and then the committee chooses their chair or board president. Each person will be elected to the committee and then it’s up to the committee to choose their secretary, treasurer or whatever they want. Most of them don’t need treasures, whatever they need. If you look at itsp orgelections, we’ve got a little timeline there. Basically we’re educating folks in July so that you can look around, see what’s what, decide whether you want to run, prep your statements, that sort of thing. And then beginning August 1, you’ll be able to actually apply to run for office. The campaign itself is the first couple of weeks in September and then the voting is the 15th through the 23 September. And that’s when we will go ahead and announce the elections. And if you have questions, put them into the chat. Also, if you came in late and you ask a question that’s already been answered, it may be up in the chat that you can’t see.

[00:06:40.120] – Karl Palachuk
So we’ll be happy to repost links and so forth if necessary. So to run, you have to be a professional member, which is a paid member rather than a registered member. If you have not finished your professional membership, you should by now have roughly 1000 emails from Jen reminding you to get that done. If you need help, get in touch with us and we’ll see what we can do. But I’d say if that’s your sticking point, go look at your LinkedIn profile and find one of the people who’s written something nice about you and say, hey, can you take that nice thing and put it on your letterhead so that I can upload it. It’s really not a huge hurdle for professional to get an endorsement from one of their clients to vote. You also need to be a professional member. So once the voting actually starts, only professional members will even be able to see the ballot. And you can vote once. So you can’t go back in and change your vote. Because we’re not keeping track of how you voted. We’re only keeping track of whether you voted. If we were to allow you to change your vote, it would mean we would have a not anonymous election process.

[00:08:01.830] – Karl Palachuk
So make sure you know who the candidates are. And Kara is actually the web developer and sort of all around wrangler of problems here. So she’s going to give us a bit of information about the website specifically and give us a little show and tell. So, Kara, I will let you drive. Do I need to stop sharing at this point?

[00:08:30.980] – Kara Schoonveld
Hello. Yes, why don’t you stop sharing? And you might need to let me see if I can automatically share or if you have to give me let’s see. I think that worked.

[00:08:44.400] – Karl Palachuk
Yes.

[00:08:44.810] – Kara Schoonveld
Does everyone see the elections page?

[00:08:46.190] – Karl Palachuk
Yes, indeed.

[00:08:47.230] – Kara Schoonveld
Okay, perfect. So what I’m going to do right now is to walk through the entire process from start to finish as if you want to run. So obviously, we’re going to start at the elections page. And just real quick, if you’re following along real time in your browser, you will notice that the form to file is actually available right now, but it doesn’t actually start until August 1. So if anyone decides to get ahead of ourselves and you go ahead and start to file today, note that that will be deleted so that we can have a fresh start on August 1. So disclaimer. Okay, So you’ll start here. If you decide that you want to run and you’re not sure which committee or board you want to serve on, you can head over to the committee’s page. And this is going to just give you some information about what, for instance, the governance committee is all about. You can read through their objectives, the deliverables and outputs, and also the critical success factors. See if those things are resonating with you. And you can also view who the current committee roster is. And like Amy mentioned, everyone that’s here has been appointed, not voted in.

[00:09:56.450] – Kara Schoonveld
So all of the members that are listed in the committee rosters and the board of directors all have to run again. So just because you see a roster here, you still have an opportunity to serve if you’re not yet all right. And of course, you can go through and look at all of them, compare them, et cetera. Once you determine what you want to run for, you’re going to come back to the election page, and beginning on August, you’re going to file for candidacy. And so I’m going to run through this now I am not logged in at the moment. And so I get a note here that I need to be logged in and a professional member. If you are a professional member and you don’t have your letters of recommendation uploaded, then you will get a notice that hey, exactly. That you need to go ahead and upload either one or two letters. So I’m going to log in with a test account to go through the process. And in my test account, I’m a professional member who has submitted both letters. And So now I get access to the form and I just simply get started.

[00:11:01.460] – Kara Schoonveld
Company name, right? Which committee are you running for?

[00:11:08.710]
Of?

[00:11:09.110] – Kara Schoonveld
No, there have been questions about this. So there are specific roles such as secretary and things of that nature. Those are voted on by whoever the current members of a committee, of whoever the current members are of that committee. So in this case, if you are wanting to hold a secretary seat or something similar and you are elected into that committee, then probably in October or sometime around then that specific committee is going to have an internal vote of who is going to hold those seats. Hopefully that makes sense. And if you have questions about that, throw them in the chat. Someone other than me can answer them better. So I’m going to say that I’m running for the marketing committee and we just had two quick commitment statements that you should read through and be sure that you can fulfill these commitments. And then you have a chance to make sure that everything is correct. And if it’s not, you can of course go back and change anything. But once you decide it all looks correct, go ahead and submit your candidacy. There we go. All right, so this lets us know our next step is to complete our candidate profile.

[00:12:26.590] – Kara Schoonveld
To do this, head to your dashboard and click on the blue pencil to fill it out and we can go to our dashboard real quick before I do this, this page hasn’t been refreshed yet, so you’ll still notice that I do not have a dashboard button here. But once we submit now you will have this option to go to your dashboard that’s only available for candidates. It just gives you a quick, easy way to get to your candidate dashboard. All right, so from here I can see some quick details, see what my next steps are. The next one up is to complete the campaign page. Here it is. When did I submit it? And here is how I can edit. So I’m going to go ahead and edit. And your campaign page is public. It’s visible to everyone who happens to browse to this page. You don’t have to be logged in or even a member of the NSI, itsp in order to view it. So keep that in mind as you’re filling it out. There are a couple of areas that are required here, but you can always come back and make any updates you like up until the end of August.

[00:13:35.740] – Kara Schoonveld
So August 31 is going to be the final day and then they’re kind of set in stone for the voting period. So one of the things that we do recommend is that you prepare your answers in a word doc or something similar so that you can copy and paste them so that you don’t lose anything. So I’m going to go ahead and fill this out mostly with some dummy text, and I am going to go ahead and copy and paste for time purposes. For your headshot, we do recommend a square image that’s at least 300 x 300 pixels. I’ll grab that one. Candidate statement. There’s some more information about what exactly we’re asking for when we say candidate statement, as well as relevant experience. And keep in mind that these little blurbs are also going to be visible to viewing members on the front end so they know what it is you are answering. Social media links are optional, of course. We recommend them so that others can, again, just learn a little bit more about who you are, what you stand for, what types of communities you’re involved in, and things of that nature.

[00:14:48.460] – Kara Schoonveld
For the additional website, this is for your business website or your blog. The hope is that you are the primary content creator, right? There should be a website that represents, again, who you are and what you stand for and will allow people to get to know you a bit better. Organizational affiliations. Go ahead and list any that are applicable to you. If you have more than one, you can continue to add as many as you are affiliated with and you can also close them out. Of course, check any skills and experience you can bring. I’ll just grab a couple at random and if you have more that are not listed, you can again add more as necessary. Finally, we have a declaration of accuracy. This is just saying that everything provided here is true and correct, else you may be excused from the election process. All right, and now we SMBiT. All right, so of course this brings us back to our campaign dashboard. So to see our page on the front end, you can click on your name. If you look in the bottom left hand corner of the screen, the URL is itsp orgcandidatemyfirst and last name and that’s automatic.

[00:16:12.470] – Kara Schoonveld
So the idea is that only professional members can run. And so this helps prevent anyone trying to run under the guise of someone else’s account and it just kind of helps to keep those processes tight. If for whatever reason you do need that updated, you won’t be able to do that on your end, but you can send us a note sort of explaining what happened and why it might need to be updated and we can do that on our end. No problem. All right, so let’s click into the front end. Let’s see what’s happened here. This is the joy of doing things live, right? All right, just 1 second. I think I need to reset permalinks. Let’s actually do this. All right, do we see my page here?

[00:17:29.070]
Yes.

[00:17:29.470] – Kara Schoonveld
Thank you, Carl. Okay, so this is what your page will look like. On the front end, we have first and last name some information about you, all of your social links. If for some reason you don’t have one of these social accounts, maybe you don’t have a reddit account. This just simply won’t show up on the front end and it will only show exactly what you put in. You can see what committee you’re running for and then also your candidate statements. So I mentioned that it gives the prompts on the front end as well. This just gives some context about what your answers are explaining and that’s that. We have the organizational affiliations on the side here and then all of the special skills that you listed as well. So that’s your page. You’re welcome to share that on your social media and your blogs, email, marketing, what have you, to sort of get the word out about your specific campaign. And then when you want to go see who else is running, you can go to the Meet the Candidates page. This is filled with profiles from folks who I have asked to help test the process as well.

[00:18:37.540] – Kara Schoonveld
So, like I mentioned before, these will all be cleared out ahead of August 1, but I’m hoping that Carl will still choose to use his Vaccination eyes photo. So these are all the candidates together. If you want to view by committee, you can just click into a filter and then, of course, you will just see the board of directors and then whatever other committee you like. Or you can view all at this point, vote will take you absolutely nowhere, of course, because the voting will not happen until I should know this date off the top of my head. September 15 through 23rd is when you’ll actually be able to, of course, vote. If for some reason you need to stop your campaign or if you want to switch your committee or something like that, you also need to ask us for help to do that, which will be no problem. And the final thing that we recommend that you do is we will have an election forum up and we suggest that you create sort of an ask me anything type post so that members can start to engage with you and you can answer direct questions, provide any further explanations, things of that nature.

[00:19:56.630] – Kara Schoonveld
And let me just check the chat here and see if anything was related to what I’ve been sharing.

[00:20:03.290] – Karl Palachuk
There are plenty of questions that we’ll get to.

[00:20:06.590] – Kara Schoonveld
Okay, perfect. Yeah, I just wanted to check were any related to the process I don’t see that there are so very good. Okay, I’m going to go ahead and stop the share and I will send it back to Carl.

[00:20:21.470] – Karl Palachuk
Very good. Zoom, of course, changes everything up every time you do that. Let’s see which one of these is the PowerPoint slideshow.

[00:20:33.510] – Amy Babinchak
Did an excellent job at creating the election pages for us. I don’t know if you guys were impressed by that, but I’ve been very impressed with it myself. Thanks, Amy.

[00:20:44.320] – Kara Schoonveld
I appreciate that.

[00:20:45.490] – Karl Palachuk
Let me go through a few FAQ slides that we’ve prepared and then I saw tons of stuff. Great questions in the chat. So we’ll get to those. First of all terms, the goal long term is that about half of each body will be elected each year. So the way that we jumpstart that is that for each position. So you will run for a committee. You can only run for one. You’ll run for a committee or a board, and the top four vote getters will serve two year terms. The next three vote getters will serve for the next year, and then they’ll stand for re election for a two year term. And then after that, everybody search two year terms, but basically about half of them each year. And so those are the four committees plus the board of directors. You may run for one office at a time, and Kara covered this, but you don’t actually run for the chair or secretary position and so forth. You run for the body. And then the overlap will be the month of September. Basically, people will be elected in September, and then with luck, they will try to get together with the outgoing committee as quickly as possible.

[00:22:21.790] – Karl Palachuk
In the month of October, people will begin serving their new terms. And I assume at the first meeting you may choose not to do at the first meeting. Committees can do whatever they want, but in October, we hope that you’ll then elect your chair and so forth. These are not paid positions. Nobody has any money. So that’s not an option.

[00:22:51.990] – Speaker 4
Right now, is they’re up and down with a WiFi.

[00:22:54.600] – Karl Palachuk
Okay. All right. Somebody is talking to Muting. All right. So can vendors serve? Absolutely. So we have vendors on the board now. We have vendors on a few committees. We would like to have at least one vendor on each committee. And that’s what I would like personally. Vendors are a key piece of this community, and we need them to be successful and they need us to be successful. So in the vendor partner program, whatever level that a vendor might choose to participate in, they would still have included in that one professional membership. They would assign who it is, So they might choose to sign it to the owner or to somebody who is a community manager or whatever. So vendors may have one seat and one vote. They have to designate who that person is. But we obviously want vendors to participate in what we do and give us their perspective. With that. I will just remind you that the election site is up there. If you have questions about any of this, send them to me. Karl@itsp.org and with that, go to the chat. Amy, have you been following all the chat questions? Any good ones picked up for us?

[00:24:26.700] – Amy Babinchak
I’ve been following all the chat questions and trying to at least acknowledge them with a little response. We do have committee members here, so if you have a question about any particular committee and what they’re doing and what they expect to be doing in the next year, feel free to ask those questions. Kenneth was asking what’s the date of starting? Is that October 1 or is it October, something? I didn’t for the service when the new people begin?

[00:25:02.920] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah, basically it’s in October, so whenever that committee meets the first time in.

[00:25:07.120] – Amy Babinchak
October, the first committee meeting in October. So the overlap point then is between the end of election in September and the first committee meeting in October, and we’re encouraging each committee to have a meeting in between to do a kind of a transitional thing between the existing folks in the incoming members.

[00:25:27.950] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah, it would be great if there was some get together and overlap, even if it’s just a very casual thing just to get to know each other and sort of what have you guys been up to and so forth. Between now and then, I’m going to be preparing all kinds of introductory materials, kind of like all the stuff that the current committee members didn’t get, which is welcome to the committee. Here’s where things are, here’s where you find, and so forth. Maybe just like a three to five page guide. But where to find things? Steve asks, what does campaigning entail? That’s kind of up to you. I mean, basically my hope is that you’ll point people to your page where you will have a well thought out statement, and then you can promote that anywhere. So if you choose to promote it on social media, just know you have to kind of point to the people who are actually members who can vote. We do have a forum set up for elections, and you can put a page there and says, hey, vote for Steve, he’s the best, blah, blah, blah. And I hope that you’ll be answering questions and so forth.

[00:26:42.040] – Karl Palachuk
With luck, people who want to vote will read through the statements and choose their candidates for each of the offices. With luck, we’ll have ten or twelve people running for each office, So I was very happy to see the registration for this exceed the number of open positions.

[00:27:02.130] – Amy Babinchak
So Damie, who is not me, asks if we have community leaders who would give a quick pitch on what they do and what they’re planning to do in the coming year. I don’t know that we have them all here, but if there are any here that would want to do that, make a pitch for their committee, we could certainly unmute you and have you do that.

[00:27:25.940] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. Dennis yesterday with Nye about creating videos, and so they’re moving forward on that project. Dennis, did you want to yeah, just quickly.

[00:27:38.620] – Speaker 5
Legislative committee has decided that the easiest way to communicate the kinds of things that we’re doing and what we should be doing as far as legislators are concerned and such, we’re going to do that in video. These will be five to ten minute videos, and we are doing the first one as we speak. And so what we’re looking for is our members to assist with either manufacturing these videos with the professionals at Carl’s office and or to be completing the brochures that go along with each state. And we would hope that you folks would have your state understood so that you could easily write that into a brochure form and we would put it up and make it available to members, especially those members from your state.

[00:28:53.550] – Amy Babinchak
We have a lot of education to do. Right. So there’s been some communications with State of California so far, and one of the first questions they had was, like, what is an MSP? Right? Who are you people? What is an It service provider? What makes you qualified? What degree do you hold? They don’t know anything about us, and so the only thing they know is that their constituents are complaining about ransomware, and so they’re starting to want to do something. And of course, privacy is a big issue that’s out there as well. And all these things point back to who’s actually providing those services, but they don’t know anything about the people that provide those services because we’re not licensed. We have not, until now, been organized in any way at all where they or the consumers of our services can go and say, oh, those are people that I would like to do business with, or those are people that I need to talk to because I have questions about how to make good legislation that makes sense.

[00:30:07.350] – Karl Palachuk
So, Tracy, do you want to tell us what you guys are up to? Sure.

[00:30:14.250] – Speaker 6
I am the chair of the Finance Committee. This year has been a building year, so we did a lot of work on getting things together as far as money and how it’s going to be spent, we worked a lot on the budget. We also worked on the vendor partner program a lot this year. So next year is going to look very different for this committee. We are about to go into getting budgets together for the next year. What’s our next step right now? But next year we’re going to be more involved in how money is spent. Do we have enough money? Is it being spent wisely? So we’re a great committee to join. If you are interested and you care about how money is spent. We have about eight members right now, and we have a nice mix of vendors and MSP and other non MSP owners as well. So that’s kind of what we’re about, is how money is spent. Is it spent wisely and then getting each of the other committees to get budgets to us is very important.

[00:31:21.870] – Karl Palachuk
That’s about it. Thank you. Andy Higgins. The Marketing Chair is off in the UK, but Steve is here. Can you sure. We didn’t prepare for this, but no worries.

[00:31:36.650] – Speaker 7
I’ll So he’s off on holiday, as they say. So I would point folks to the Marketing Committee mission statement that’s posted for details on what we hope to get done next year. Those things would include getting the messages out, creating appropriate messages for specific target audiences, whether that’s MSP or prospective members, or even assisting in the legislative contacts, and then branding. So making sure that the organization has a strong and vibrant brand that gets shared and understood by the market in general. We last year spent some time on having a branding contest, and that’s going on right now. So if you haven’t voted for that, get your votes over and we meet once a month. So it’s not terribly taxing, but we try to be as smart as we can to optimize the time we have to maximize our message. So are there any questions out there? I’m happy to take them either on the chat or you can contact me after the call.

[00:32:54.690] – Karl Palachuk
Very good, thank you. Brett is not here. Somebody else from the Governance Committee want to step up and give us two minutes worth. I think Amy gave a pretty good overview. Governance Committee kind of created all the other committees and sort of made the framework for everything we’re up to, and they will, going forward, help to sort of guide the whole organization. So that’s a great community. Each of the committees meets for ideally, once things are moving along, they will meet for once a month for about an hour. And I know that doesn’t sound like much, but there’s a lot of prep work, and even now, committees are sort of dividing up work and saying, hey, we need these subcommittees. Go off, do this work, and bring some stuff back to us. So that’s a very common thing that happens. Amy and I have already spoken. Heather, do you want to talk a bit about what the board does? Also not give an advance notice that we’re going to do this?

[00:34:23.310] – Speaker 8
Well, we do so much, but.

[00:34:27.730] – Kara Schoonveld
I.

[00:34:28.040] – Speaker 8
Hope my camera is working okay. But the board has been working on ethics, and we have an ethics committee that has been focusing on that and developing a code of ethics. So we’ve been working really hard on that. That’s been twice a month that we’ve been meeting to do that again.

[00:34:52.330] – Kara Schoonveld
Also, the board meets once a month.

[00:34:56.830] – Speaker 8
We have a great group right now. But we always want different thought leaders and different minds and different viewpoints. So if you have an interest in making a difference, this is a place to do it. I’ve had past year here in the board during this formation time and to see where we’ve come in the past year has been amazing. I’m really excited for the action part of it. And once comes up to serve and be part and you can sit on the chair and say, oh, somebody else will do it or you can roll up your sleeves and get to work. And that’s what this board and these committees are doing, is taking action and doing something. But we can do it together. We can’t do it if we just it on the sidelines and say, well, that looks like a really big mountain, we need to get on those hiking boots and gear up for a big climb, but we can certainly do it. We have a lot of great minds MSP were vendors and I’m excited to be able to be a vendor and also a board member. But I’ve talked to have these skills that are needed thinking about legislation.

[00:36:30.450]
And.

[00:36:30.760] – Speaker 8
Making connections, thinking maybe this isn’t for me, maybe I don’t have the skills. Yes, you are getting here and get fighting with us.

[00:36:46.170] – Karl Palachuk
Excellent. Thank you. So speaking of climbing the big, big mountain towers, perhaps there should be a regional or sub regional committee because there’s so much work to do. And I would say I point to the legislative committees. They have just an amazing and almost overwhelming amount of work to do because eventually they’re going to have to have some presence in every state and they’re looking at educating lobbyists, legislators, the media, the small businesses that talk to the legislators, so forth and so on. So there’s plenty of work to be done and I expect that that piece of the organization will grow and mature. As Amy said, start going from organizing to actually producing. And we’re actually doing that now even though it’s just the middle of the year. Amy, did you see another question?

[00:37:50.210] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, so there’s a question about if there’s a link that lists what the committees are defined as and I just asked her if to post that up. So there it is. So nsitzp. Orgcommittees. If you click that link, each of the committees this year worked on creating a charter for their committee. What their goals are, what their potential blockers for achieving that goal is, what their needs are. So we tried to make it a really nice holistic view of what the committee’s purpose is. So please go ahead and click on those and you’ll get all the details of what the committee believes their function is.

[00:38:39.890] – Karl Palachuk
Tony asks why you’re having people sign up for particular positions rather than get elected and then have the people too. So the reason that it’s organized this way is basically it’s sort of a nod to the bottom up organization that I don’t even know if we specifically discussed it. We just started doing it. That committees are in charge of their membership and also the board is in charge of Vids membership. So they get to choose who their chairs are rather than having people run for specific positions because it might be that somebody will choose not to be a chair after the first year. All of their hair has been pulled out and they’re just like done with it. But they still want to serve on a committee anyway. That’s different.

[00:39:36.740] – Kara Schoonveld
Go ahead.

[00:39:37.400] – Amy Babinchak
In the forming of this organization, we took a long time to discuss the failings of other organizations that we’ve been members of. What caused them not to be successful, some in industry, some outside the industry, just how we could best function. And our goal really is to make sure that all members have equal voice, so that if you’re a vendor or really large MSP or one person MSP, that your voice is still heard and is still equivalent to everyone else’s. And in order to do that, we decided one of the ways was that committees are going to be really in charge of themselves with the governance committee being sort of their overarching group that is going to make sure they’re completing their charter, that they’re doing the things that they said they were going to do in that. So that’s a really important piece of how this organization chose to organize itself.

[00:40:49.530] – Karl Palachuk
True. And I got a direct message from somebody who says maybe there are some jobs that you want to exclude vendors from, like chairman of the board. I believe that we agreed, and it’s up to the governance committee to verify this, but I believe we agreed that the vendors would not be a majority of any committee, but we don’t really have that many active vendors, so that it’s a concern right now. But the reality is that if the committee decides that they want to do that, they can. Now if you’ve got a committee of seven and one of them is a vendor, I don’t think that they’re going to be pushing their weight around too much. So today I would say that’s not an issue. We are fundamentally an It service provider organization, not a vendor organization. But we clearly need vendors to be successful. So again, it’s not an issue so far, but it’s something to keep in mind and there may be more guidance down the road, but right now it hasn’t been a problem. And to be honest, I have to say and I just shout out to Heather and also Ray ASCII who was on one of the committees for a while.

[00:42:07.410] – Karl Palachuk
Those are two examples of vendors who have just been tremendous contributors to this organization. So we appreciate it.

[00:42:15.870] – Amy Babinchak
I don’t see any other questions in the chat, so if you do have questions, go ahead and pop them in. There.

[00:42:21.720] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. And you can just open your mind and ask. The other thing is if you’re concerned a bit about who we are and what we do for a living, the about page@itsp.org lists our mission, vision and values, which the board, I’m just going to let my old brain try to remember worked on for about four months, I think might be longer. But it was a huge endeavor and Larry Mandelberg let us in that and did a spectacular job. So there’s that. And I think that the mission, vision and values are and actually a really good representation of who we are and what we want to be. We want to be the voice of the industry and we want to increase professionalism and the integrity of people in our industry. It’s funny. There’s questions I see. I’ve almost thought about writing a blog post called The Reddit of the Week where people say things like, I don’t know why we need standards. I don’t know why we need to have all these things that keep people out of the industry. I don’t know why we need professionalism. Who are these people? And I’m like, okay, So you might not be our ideal member, but we do need professionalism.

[00:43:39.800] – Karl Palachuk
And the people who say, well, I’ve been in the business for 20 years. You have nothing to teach me about professionalism. Okay, that might be true. You may do everything right, but you live in an environment where people are signing contracts and not delivering the services that they provided or that they promised that they would provide. So there really is a need for integrity and professionalism in this industry. And a handful of people have told me this has been one of their passions for years. And so I’m glad that those people are getting involved.

[00:44:13.570] – Amy Babinchak
One of my goals is that first, let me say I think this organization has gotten the reputation of mainly caring about legislation. But one of my goals really is truly to help the consumer decide if I have an issue with my car, I’m able to tell the difference between the guy that works at the oil change shop and a certified mechanic. If I’m a consumer of It services, I’m not able to tell the difference between different It people. I have to sort of take their word for it. I don’t have an organization that might be able to provide some input on it. I don’t have really any information as a consumer as to the reputation and the likelihood that I’m going to get good service from a particular company or individual. And so it is one of my goals for this organization that we provide the consumers with better information about who they’re doing business with and what their capabilities and their professionalism is.

[00:45:37.590] – Karl Palachuk
Very good. Other questions or comments from folks I’m hoping that you’re all going to run. So prep those statements now so you can copy and paste them when the time comes. So one of the questions was about whether if people make comments on a forum, would you be able to get an email? And Kara answered it in the chat. But yes, if you log into the forum and then you check the box that says subscribe to this forum, you will get emails at the email that you are logged in as. This is Larry.

[00:46:18.570] – Speaker 9
I just wanted to make a comment real quick. This question about why we exist is massive and I think it’s really core foundation to who we are and what we do. I think it describes everything about why I’m here. And while I’m not an MSP, obviously my life is embroiled in technology and this issue of not being able to really properly evaluate good versus bad vendors is everywhere in the world, whether you’re hiring a contractor or an It person or a lawyer or an accountant. And I just want to emphasize the vision. The Nsitv is the voice of the industry defining the standards for professionalism and It services. And that’s why I’m here. And I think that my elevator pitch for this is making the industry more professional, which is, in my way of thinking, a metaphor for better making it a better industry. And whatever we have to do to make that happen is what we want to do with the help of the industry. So I just wanted to put that out there.

[00:47:38.450] – Karl Palachuk
You’re here again. I’m not sure why this person maybe it’s accidentally sending to me directly instead of to everybody, but comment that we’re trying to do something at a time when there’s so much distrust of experts and governments and outside companies wanting to load consequences onto others. Yes, these are difficult times, but the reality is our industry certainly less than 100 years old, somewhere around 60 or 70 years old. For most of us, it really took off in the so at 20 or 30 years old. The SMB It industry is really just now mature enough to say we are going to be a profession, we are going to step up and we’re going to have some barriers. We’re going to say, look, we need you to be professional. If you want to be in this industry, you can no longer just put your name on a laser perf business card and go take care of $3 million computer systems. You need to be a professional. And that we’re not selling training, we’re not selling advertising. We’re here to set standards and it’s a long, difficult road and we will not be done next year or the year after.

[00:49:07.670] – Karl Palachuk
This is an undertaking that’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort. To be honest, I congratulate everybody on this call because you are clearly interested and I think most or all of you are willing to participate. And I think that’s huge and I think that speaks to our future success that we have so many people who are sincerely interested in the industry as an industry. So thank you for being here. Hey, Carl. Yeah.

[00:49:35.650] – Speaker 4
I understand another compelling reason this organization exists is to help influence and shape the developing regulations in our industry and try to prevent the nightmare of folks that still refer to the internet of tubes as being those that create the rules that manage or govern this space. I think that’s easily as important as the other goal. They should be related, of course, and I know that there’s a legislative committee. What I don’t know is how to actually find the right people to address and how to address them in my own particular large but small state. Do we have a group of people or anyone who has insight into that? If I was in that committee, Dennis.

[00:50:22.220] – Karl Palachuk
May or others, ted or others on the legislative committee may have something to contribute on that front, but it is one of the big, big chores of the legislative committee. Some days, like again, building this infrastructure of talking to MSPs and saying, how do you get to know people in the legislature? How do you build those relationships before an issue comes up? Because we don’t know where and when, but we do know that there will be a bill introduced somewhere and we don’t exist solely to lobby, but someday we will be called on to give our position on a piece of legislation. And the sooner people build those relationships, the easier it will be to participate in that conversation because ultimately we have not built in the 50 years or so, we have not built a seat for ourselves at the table. And so this is the beginning of that process.

[00:51:29.310] – Speaker 4
So another thing that occurs to me and you know a lot about how CompTIA at one time believed that they were involved in lobbying and stepped away from it. At first when I heard of this organization, it felt like the goal of being part of this would be stepping on the toes of CompTIA until I remember that they don’t do this. But we talked about, let’s call it a mark of excellence or some sort of certification. CompTIA has a tressmark, which at least is supposed to be this concept. It’s supposed to be a demonstration of your excellence or at least your adequacy in the field. Is anybody in this group looking at what those kind of overlaps might be between that trust mark and what we want to achieve?

[00:52:19.570] – Amy Babinchak
There should be zero overlap, Josh, because this organization isn’t going to certify anybody. We’re not going to teach anybody. What we’re going to do is say, for example, the AICPA does requires a certain amount of continuing education requirements in order to be a member of that organization. And then that way, again, the consumer knows, am I dealing with the bookkeeper? Am I dealing with somebody who’s not participating at all? Am I dealing with somebody who is in EA? Am I dealing with the CPA. And those are the types of differentiations. We will not be the people that are providing that. So CompTIA continues to provide their trust marks. Great. You can add that to your profile here and check that off as some of your continuing education efforts.

[00:53:17.730] – Speaker 4
I guess my point was not that we would offer as an organization something competitive, but that we might identify that trust mark as something that would be appropriate along the lines of demonstrating your capabilities. Maybe say that you come up with some sort of framework for what would qualify as a demonstration of the professionality of our decision.

[00:53:41.910] – Karl Palachuk
So I am working with some folks at CompTIA specifically to talk about how we can work together. They are very open to working with us and in particular also looking at things where we might have some stuff in common with regard because they have stepped away from lobbying, but they may want to take a position on some things that represent the needs of their membership and so they want to partner with us in regard to those. So we are in a friendly relationship with CompTIA and working on building more of that.

[00:54:21.750] – Amy Babinchak
So, Josh, the way that I think that might work with the trust mark as your example there that you brought up is that the governance committee would assign a certain number of continuing education credits to that trust mark type thing.

[00:54:36.770] – Speaker 4
Okay, understood. I don’t know if we can get away with calling them CEUs, but I know what you mean. We can come up with some sort of metric and that might satisfy some or all of that requirement.

[00:54:48.360] – Karl Palachuk
And why would there be an issue with us calling them whatever we want?

[00:54:53.910] – Speaker 4
I think the continuing education units, there are requirements to offer something that’s called that because they are specific to certain industries. I don’t know if we call them CEOs, but we can call them qualifying points or something. Are you going to talk to the folks at Channel Con about this while you’re there?

[00:55:12.630] – Karl Palachuk
I’m talking to them weekly, so I’m sure I’ll talk to them there also.

[00:55:18.040] – Speaker 4
I’ll go up with you. Maybe we can even talk to him strongly. Thank you.

[00:55:23.250] – Amy Babinchak
There’s absolutely no lack of educational opportunities in this industry. Right. So we’re definitely not going to reinvent the wheel on that one.

[00:55:33.990] – Speaker 4
Great, thanks.

[00:55:37.810] – Karl Palachuk
I don’t know if MJ is on here. He could speak up if he is. MJ Shore is the community outreach manager at CompTIA, one of our longtime community friends. Actually, most of our longtime community friends are on the board of CompTIA, so we have plenty of connections there. Other comments, questions. I would love to everybody. Go find the reaction button and raise your hand if you think you might run. I love to see all the little hands fly up. And now people are leaving. Way to go. Just make everybody upset and have them all leave. Oh, well, it is what it is.

[00:56:33.710] – Speaker 4
Now that Jay is here, I’m going to have to call it a day. Hey, Jay.

[00:56:37.220] – Karl Palachuk
Good afternoon, brother.

[00:56:38.410] – Speaker 4
Hey, nice to hear you. So I’m going to head out for an 11:00, but this was good. I didn’t really understand this structure and I understand more. I can play around online. I’m not sure where I might fit in, but I hope to. And I’ll talk with you at channel con, if not before.

[00:56:56.570] – Karl Palachuk
Thanks. Very good. Well, you’re all welcome to email me. It’s just, you know, Karl@itsp.org or Amy or whoever boardmembers? Yeah. All the board members are on the site. So if you go to the about page and you’ll see the committee members and the board members talk to folks who are already in here and ask them what their experience is. And thank you for the links on social media. I appreciate that also. Yeah. We have 1 minute left. Our next meeting, August 10, is the all member meeting where we’re going to talk about many things, but it will include these elections. So that link will be at the top of your browser window@nsatsp.org almost immediately.

[00:57:55.210] – Speaker 9
I think that’s our six month window for vision, mission, and values as well.

[00:58:00.790] – Karl Palachuk
Oh, excellent.

[00:58:02.320] – Speaker 9
So we had talked about putting this out for feedback and if anyone has any comments that they think we need to make a changes or adjustments, we wanted to let the organization live with them for six months before we formalize them. So I think that’s what we’re scheduled for August there too.

[00:58:19.610] – Karl Palachuk
Excellent. Great. I will add that to the agenda. Very good. Well, as was noted, it’s the top of the hour, so I appreciate you all being here. Amy’s got an email in the chat as well. Let us know if you need anything and I will see you at the next member meeting. Thanks. Bye.

[00:58:45.410] – Amy Babinchak
Bye, everybody. Thank you for Kenning.

Full Transcript:

[00:00:00.010] – Karl Palachuk
Hello. Hi, this is Karl Palachuk. I am the Executive Director of the National Society of It. It It service provider held a meeting on June 15 and pushed the recording button just a little bit late. So I’m going to give you just the first couple of slides and then we’ll go to the recording of the actual meeting. So this meeting is presented by myself and Amy Babinchak, who is the President of the Board of Directors of the NSITSP. And we are here to welcome all the vendors and to describe the vendor partner program and how you can participate.

[00:00:41.390] – Karl Palachuk
So this is a picture of Amy and I in Australia a few years ago. And I was really happy when Amy picked this picture just because it so very much represents us. We are looking out over the water at Monster Huge Jellyfish and wondering what we’ve gotten ourselves into as we make our way to Morrison Island. And the reason I say this represents us. Amy and I have worked together and separately to literally just support and build the SMB It consulting community for about 20 years. And so this sort of culminated in the last year of us helping to found the National Society of IT Service Providers.

[00:01:34.780] – Karl Palachuk
You will see our goal, our mission is to increase the professionalism of this industry and in fact, to help this industry, now that it is mature, become a profession. It used to be that we could say that the clients of It firms were under attack, but we are not under attack. Sure, our staff could just as easily fall victim to a phishing email, but generally they didn’t. Tech staff generally seem to be immune from social attacks and we sat back smuggling knowing that there was no malware incident in our systems in the last couple of decades. It couldn’t happen to us because we’re the smart ones. Then It did as ransomware increased 300% in 2020 from the previous year. And it’s not like they were starting from zero. And the ransom themselves went from $300 in 2013 to millions of dollars in 2020. Suddenly our trusted unattended remote access tools got hacked and companies became household names for all the wrong reasons. Our vendors were now talked about by the media and legislators and not in a good light. At first the blame was placed upon the tool manufacturers, but that narrative was subsequently shifted to MSPs and MSP.

[00:03:03.410] – Karl Palachuk
Our entire industry was dragged through the mud. When a cyber security news story breaks, you hear some really silly things from the media because they don’t understand why would you have this tool that’s so dangerous? Why would you have this RMM thing? What is that thing and what does it mean? And why would you hire somebody else to take care of your security? Why would you outsource your It? We know the answer to all of these questions. It’s because this business is complex and hard. And so you need tools and you need experts. And the technical business can’t protect itself from anything without these tools. But we’re the only ones that know that. Our voice was literally missing from this news story, and it’s been missing from the legislatures and it’s missing from everything now. We need a seat at the table.

[00:04:03.070] – Amy Babinchak
It firms were rightly called out for not applying patches to their own systems, for using old versions of software, for not adopting multi factor authentication. Those are unforgivable sins. If you’re out there calling yourself a professional, we can do better. And the consumer deserves to be able to make a distinction between companies and individuals. Right now, we’re a black box to them, and that needs to change. The tax on the industry have continued. Errors and emissions insurance rates have doubled, tripled, even quadrupled for some tech firms. Cyber Insurance put in exclusions for paying ransoms, and many small businesses are deciding to simply take their chances instead of paying high premiums and potentially have a claim denied. The state of Louisiana was first out of the gate with MSP and MSP regulation. Many other states are now construing them, and all it will take to push that forward is another major incident. And I think it’s safe to say that incident is going to come. Since Solar wins and could say I had their good names dragged through the mud with negative press. The world has not become a safer place. That horrible treatment could happen to any of us.

[00:05:13.270] – Amy Babinchak
Now the federal government’s getting into our business too, for our clients. The IRS started applying the anti terrorism rules, saying it’s illegal to fund terrorism, which they define as paying ransom to certain known criminal organizations. And now they want reporting on everything that is spent greater than $600 so they can track ransom payments even more closely. For those firms whose best option out of a bad situation is to pay the ransom, this could be really disastrous. Has been on a publishing tear, telling everyone from enterprise to small business what they need to consider when hiring an It service firm of any stripe. And that document even addresses how to protect your business from an MSP. That is definitely not a message that is good for our industry. Sisa is not speaking for us. They are speaking out against us. Several of us wrote to sites and recently they’ve kind of changed their tone. But their overall message is still for firms to protect themselves from our industry. And that is not how we want to be viewed, now is it? But one of our goals is to change that narrative. You are up, Karl.

[00:06:29.980] – Amy Babinchak
You’re on mute, Karl.

[00:06:33.890] – Karl Palachuk
Got it. All right. So with regulations, one of the things that’s happened is that several of the states have regulated us and are looking at licensing us, and they’re talking about us. In all the states, the media are reporting about us and not in a good way. We’ve been noticed by several organizations, including businesses and governments. And there’s a great call for cybersecurity education by local business groups and a skyrocketing market for providing cybersecurity to businesses of all sizes. The good news is that we’re all making money. The bad news is that the governments and businesses are wondering who we are and kind of what we’re up to. We’re in a black box to them and they want to shed some light into that box. They want to know which firms are qualified and which might not be. Are you making solid software? Are you offering the right services? They want to know what qualifies you to do the job that you claim you’re doing or that others are saying that you’re doing. The federal government can’t reach down to the states and regulate us or license us, but state and local governments can.

[00:07:49.480] – Karl Palachuk
And those politicians have noticed who we are. I said last year, they’re talking about us and we don’t have a seat at the table. So we do have a reputation problem and basically it’s a very serious one. The business world needs to know that we care that and they need to know that we have an outstanding group of professionals and lots of reputable firms. There’s no lack of educational opportunities in our industry, but there is a lack of accountability at taking that education seriously. There’s no lack of vendors taking security quite seriously, but there is a lack of trust from the business community. So there’s no lack of It firms, but there is no way for the consumer to know which firms they should choose. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we need to have licensing or regulation or require degrees. What we are saying is that we need to do something. That’s one of the things that the National Society of It service professionals is going to do. It’s going to figure out what we need to do to get it right. We need to make sure that our ship is upright and heading in the right direction.

[00:09:08.230] – Karl Palachuk
We’re at a point in our industry where we need to hold each other accountable and to decide to let the law and government hold us accountable. So we need to hold each other accountable. We need to set high standards for what we are going to do as an industry. So we are becoming a new organization. The SMBiT community literally didn’t exist 25 years ago in any meaningful way and now we need to come together and we need to form what will be the future of this industry. So you want to go over the mission super quick?

[00:09:54.670] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah. So we took some time to figure out the mission, vision and values of this organization. And so our mission is what drives the day to day work of the organization. And that is we provide pathways to establish high standards and ethics to improve perception and creative credibility of the It profession through actions driven by member engagements. We do want this to be a member driven organization. We do view It as a grassroots movement that needs to occur for vision. We want the Nsatsp to be the voice of the industry, to define and define the standards of what it means to be a professional in It services and this Vision defines what we’re hoping to achieve together by this membership. And then we also set up a number of values that are important to the organization and I’m not going to really take time to go through those, but just know that this is a lot of what we have been thinking about as a board and building out this national organization and setting it up for success.

[00:11:09.950] – Karl Palachuk
And those are all on our website as well.

[00:11:12.690] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, there’s been a lot of questions among It providers and vendors alike about whether this organization is just another in a long list in our industry. So we have specific organizational principles that I wanted to tell you about but the answer is really that we are guided by these organization principles. It’s modeled upon others that have gone before us like professional engineering, accounting, legal trades, project managers and more. We formed an organization that is bottom up structure where individuals and corporations are equal in representation just as they are equal in their desire and need to work in a professional industry. Individuals are associated with corporation. Each corporation gets one vote. All paid members are able and encouraged to take board and committee seats. However, in keeping with our grassroots mission, none will be dominated by vendors. Instead we’re going to strike a balance on each of those committees and make sure everyone has an equal voice. No one else is focused on turning this industry into a recognized profession. That is our big overarching goal. As you can imagine, starting an organization like this is a huge task. The rotary was not built overnight. Just getting through the initialization of phase has been a huge effort and Karl and I are amazed at the breadth of experience and the talents that people have brought to this organization and thankful for all the volunteers that have gotten us from zero to a solid infrastructure that is prepared to be a thriving national trade organization.

[00:12:57.710] – Amy Babinchak
We need your help to move from the organizational phase into the action phase and we have plans and dreams to be fulfilled. Our goal is to define what it means to be an It professional and have those requirements be akin to other industries so that when businesses are evaluating firms to contract with or individuals to hire that they have some objective measurement that they understand. These might be things like continuing education requirements, the adoption of ethics statements, the ability to review recommendations from previous clients and so on. But we also know that we have a huge need to educate members of the public like media, legislators, their staff, business leaders. The more they understand our industry and can relate it to what they already know, the better it will be for everyone. We have to get out of being a black box So that to those that might control our futures and some of the ways that we intend to do that are to develop our membership into effective voices for the industry and to teach them to self advocate so that we have a voice when legislators in meeting media are talking about us and we then expect to get involved in lobbying and alliance building with other industries too.

[00:14:15.830] – Amy Babinchak
We have some challenges to overcome before we can get there though. We need this industry to be healthy and successful. We need the insurance industry not just to raise rates, but to understand us and become our partners in fighting the very things that caused the claims in the first place. We have to continue to work to overcome technical limitations that allow ransomware and other attacks on security of business to continue. We have a challenge to become viewed as a legitimate, qualified voice. One of the first questions that legislators ask is what makes you qualified? Do you have a degree? They do. That’s how they view the world. Who represents you? They ask no one. Most people in the industry do not have a degree in computer science, nor do they carry any kind of certification. There is no common banner that we all get behind that makes it very difficult to convince the power that you are legit. Seeing this. They’ll immediately put you into the semi skilled general labor category. So unless we can shift to this end of profession, the respect is never going to come and we will be done too instead of consulted about our future, our challenges are large.

[00:15:32.210] – Karl Palachuk
You know, it’s somewhat humorous that we were talking about haircuts before this. You need a license to cut your hair no matter how poorly. But you can take over a $7 million computer operation just because you have a business card that says It professional. So the world is changing significantly.

[00:15:58.910] – Amy Babinchak
Because our challenges are so large. This is why we need our vendor partners to join with us. We need each other to make this happen. Our success is interdependent.

[00:16:13.290] – Karl Palachuk
So clearly there’s a need for why the National Society of It It service Provider bottom line is no one else is doing this. And it’s not that they are falling down. It’s not their charge. If you think about Good to Great by Jim Collins, I hope everybody here has read that. If not, go read it. But we need to look and say what can we do better than anybody else? What’s the one thing that we can do? And no one has to charge. No one is focused on improving this industry and turning it into a profession, a true profession that is well respected, that has a successful business model where people who get into It can come in as newbies and learn the skills of running a business. Being in this industry, knowing who the vendors are and who the distributors are, and how you build a successful system, and then moving forward and maturing and helping the entire community rise up together. And so between ransomware and regulation and all the things that Amy talked about, we truly are at a critical moment in our history. And this is true for the vendors as well as for the It.

[00:17:37.660] – Karl Palachuk
It service provider. Vendors need us. We need them. We literally only exist as a community because together, we literally need each other to succeed. Because we need each other to succeed. We need strong vendors who provide good products, good services that are reliable, that we can depend on. They need good partners who can grow, who have a good reputation. It doesn’t make them look bad in front of either the public, their clients, business people, the government. Right? We need each other to succeed. And that’s why when we talk about the Symbiotic piece of this, it is absolutely true. We need to do this together. We could do it without vendors, I’ll be honest. It would just take a very long time because we need the other half of the community to be fully engaged. So let me give a couple of stats. So as of this morning, we have over 600 people who have registered as members on our site at some level. And so the stats, in terms of the people who filled out the form that said, hey, you’re a member, tell us about you. As a rule, the biggest bulk are making over 500,000 or $100,000 a year.

[00:19:07.000] – Karl Palachuk
I think it’s fairly representative of our industry as a whole. This may or may not be your partners today, but this is who we are now, and we think it’s fairly representative. So in terms of who we serve, most of the people here, when we ask them how many clients they serve, most of them have between 20 and 50. Right. That’s the absolute bulk, the majority of the folks who are out there. So these are true S and B It consultants. And now we want to talk about the actual vendor program. So the membership piece is only $100 a year. If you wanted to join as a member, that gets you one vote. It allows you to sit on committees and vote in elections. I encourage you to download a PDF version of this. If you want to scan the QR code or go to itsp. Comvenders. And on that site you’ll see this where it’s a little easier to read. But basically the vendor partner program is separate from the membership in that it is actually a more of a charitable membership. And we need to make sure that when you look at the program, I don’t want vendors to think of this as an advertising opportunity.

[00:20:42.620] – Karl Palachuk
And I know many of you, that’s sort of your first knee jerk reaction, because that’s the way things are done in this industry. But when you give money to something and you expect something back, there really needs to be a visible ROI in dollars. And I want folks to take a slightly different view of this and think about, this is an investment in your industry to build strong partners, so that 510, 20 years from now, we will have a powerful industry made up of massively successful partners who then help support massively successful vendors. And that’s the long term goal. You can’t think of ROI the same as you do when you say, well, I’m going to join this group, I’m going to give them $5,000, and I’m going to have a booth at the show. That’s not what we’re up to here. And some of you may just simply say, that’s it, I’m out, and it is what it is. But I believe that we have a lot of vendors who understand the bigger picture and understand that long term, we absolutely need each other. And we have so many challenges if we look ahead just to run the organization.

[00:22:05.800] – Karl Palachuk
And yesterday I met with the Legislative Committee and they were like, okay, so the first thing we do is we need at least one volunteer in every state to just keep an eye on the state legislature, right? Things like that. This undertaking is far bigger than we even realized it was when we started. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. That just means it’s going to take longer and it’s going to need some resources. One of those resources is strong vendor partners. Amy so with the vendor partner program, you will get a membership that will be included. And we really want vendors to sit on the board and sit on committees. We do have vendors on our board. We do have some very powerful vendors who are participating in our committees and have been tremendous contributors to the intellectual side of building this organization. But we want lots of vendors to be in this organization. We want them to help us guide the industry. It’s interesting, as a consultant, sometimes I’ll go into a client’s office, and I remember one guy in particular, he gave advice to a specific industry, and I would be in there working on things, and he would just have these conversations where it was clear he knew more about the technical side of their industry than they did, because he came from a certain financial perspective.

[00:23:35.530] – Karl Palachuk
And in the same way, vendors sometimes know more than the It service provider, certain aspects of our industry because they see it from a completely different perspective. We need that perspective. We need you to sit on these committees and say, well, don’t forget about this, or be aware of that. Right. That kind of diversity of viewpoint will make us all stronger and maybe I’m pie eyed, but I’ve got to say, I think this industry has an amazing future. Like, we might only be about 20 years old, but the next 100 years are going to be phenomenal. We want your voice on what we’re going to do. With luck, we will be able to put together a conference next year. We are monitoring legislation already, and with luck, we will begin building the relationships that allow us to actually have some influence when legislation is being discussed. We want to build educational programs at all levels for the media, for lobbyists, for members, for vendors. Ultimately, we would love to be able to be the first organization that people think about when they think about anything related to It. Service providers get a little irritated when they show up at a client’s office and they say, hey, we’ve got a new ISP.

[00:25:00.520] – Karl Palachuk
And they hadn’t talked to the technical consultant about that. Well, it’s the same way we don’t want people to talk about us with us unless we have a seat at the table and are in the room when we’re being discussed. So overall, I can’t promise you a lot, except that the long term goal is to have a much stronger industry and a true profession and to have partners who are very successful and are able to support you, the vendors, in everything that you need to do to be successful. All right, please download that. Go to the site. And I think unless Amy has something else to add, we’re open for questions and comments.

[00:25:51.330] – Amy Babinchak
Open for questions and comments. This is the end of our presentation, so I hope that we gave you guys some food for thought that we picked your interest in the organization and that you will consider joining us. I don’t see how an organization, a trade association, moves forward without everyone in the organization. We can’t do it with just half. We don’t want to do this with one anti behind our back. We want equal representation from the vendors and the It service providers and to really build this out into something phenomenal and desperately needed for organization, for industry to move forward. So thank you for attending today. Karl and I will take a look at the chat. Throw in any questions in there. We would love to discuss this with you. We would love to give your feedback as well. So shoot us an email. It is not difficult to find Karl’s email or my email. Just type our name into Google and there it’ll be.

[00:26:57.910] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. Well, the good thing about having a name like Babinch or Palo Chuck is 21st century. You can’t even misspell it. You’ll still find us. George has a question that maybe it was answered in the presentation about what we intend to do with the money. Well, first we have a preliminary budget, which we’ve put up into the blog post on the site we’re going to present it actually the finance Committee talked this morning about presenting our budget a little more easy for people to access. But first of all, assuming that we get some serious funds, we will need somebody to run the organization full time and organize the volunteers. We also will need to create educational materials, like I said, for example, with videos. I would love to have us be able to put some materials together for the media so that the next time that you go on vacation for the 4 July and there is a cyber attack, that the media will have a place to go to download some materials. What is an MSP? What is an RMM? What are these tools? Why do you outsource your technical support? And then they can connect with a local partner and say, okay, I’ve put together this five minute story for the 06:00 news.

[00:28:25.120] – Karl Palachuk
Now I need 30 seconds from a local MSP to finish off the story. And that partner will have been trained up a little bit on how you talk to the media and how you present yourself and have some talking points. All of that takes organization and money and resources and preparation. So that’s the kind of thing we want to do. Eventually. I would love to have us have kind of a continuing education credit program that so many industries have. We already have just an unbelievable group of people on our committees. Amy alluded to this. The talent that we have is phenomenal, and the number of people who have been involved in other organizations is just amazing. So there’s no shortage of things for us to do. And I’d be happy to discuss if you go to the site, if you go to the Itsp Combeders, you can schedule a meeting, and we will schedule a meeting on Zoom or Teams and talk to you about the details. I’ll be happy to share the budget that’s been approved by the board.

[00:29:36.310] – Amy Babinchak
So Re brings up the topic of subpar quality It providers out there. And one of the things that is very important to this organization is that we don’t prevent anyone from entering the industry. We all got here by hanging out a shingle, and we all do want to still make sure that there is a pathway for that to happen. I remember early on in our discussions, Karl, you told me about the construction industry in California, that if you are licensed, you get to build at higher rates than if you’re unlicensed. You’re restricted by the state of California as to what you’re allowed, what size of jobs you’re allowed to bill for. Right.

[00:30:28.780] – Karl Palachuk
So you can’t do a job over $600 without having a contractor’s license.

[00:30:33.910] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah. And what I think to myself is, doesn’t the consumer deserve to understand the difference between the guy that works at the oil change shop and a master mechanic? We have the same problem in our industry, but there’s no way for the consumer to make an intelligent decision and so that’s what I really see as the fundamental problem and we need to make sure that there’s a path toward getting from start to being a recognized professional. And Karl, I’m going to let you take the question from Ben about how we’re different than CompTIA. Both you and I have served on the executive committees over there and you’re currently more involved than I am.

[00:31:25.190] – Karl Palachuk
There might be well, I know Corey’s on the board and he’s the Member of the Year at CompTIA. I sit on the executive council for one of the forums for advancing Tech Talent and diversity. But it’s interesting there might be somebody else from CompTIA here. We’re working with CompTIA to see which things we have in common that we might be able to push forward. CompTIA fundamentally has removed themselves from influencing the government. They used to have an entire arm whose job was to lobby and what they found was that it was largely funded by the larger vendors, the likes of Microsoft and Amazon and Apple. They took some stands that may not necessarily be what a smaller It, It, It service provider liked. And so they have removed themselves from the lobbying side of things. Now having said that, they really have expressed a strong interest in working with us to educate members, which they’re very good at. And clearly they have some certification programs that will help members improve. And so we have a lot of things in common. But I mentioned before we need to focus on what we can do better than anybody else.

[00:32:50.650] – Karl Palachuk
And CompTIA is interested in creating generalized policies for It. It, It service provider represent all vendors and all partners of all sizes and their focus is not to educate legislators or the media, it is not to advance the legislative agenda of the It industry. So we have a good symbiosis with CompTIA and are building those partnerships as we speak. But we do have a different mission than they do. And somebody might ask the same thing of ASCII or other groups. There’s no shortage of groups, but what we found is that there’s a gap that’s not being filled and it is the gap of increasing the professionalism of the entire industry while trying to address some just monster problems that I think a lot of people couldn’t have even foreseen where we would be just ten years ago with regard to ransomware and legislation. So I hope that answers that. Other questions from vendors about specifics or concerns or anything and you’re free to open your microphone and just ask.

[00:34:10.570] – Amy Babinchak
Well, there is one there from Mendy Green. He’s asking what we’re doing to improve the MSP themselves currently and specifically about ethics and standards and whatnot. There’s a committee that is working on developing an ethics statement and the membership committee and the governance committees themselves are tackling that question now of how to raise the bar and what that means for the It service provider. Remember, this isn’t limited specifically to MSPs. We have a lot of different business models out there. We want to make sure that everyone is encompassed in the solution.

[00:35:05.310] – Karl Palachuk
And long term, I don’t expect that this organization will create classes or anything like that, but there’s so many places to get education that I think that it is appropriate for this organization to basically approve training systems to say, okay, that counts towards continuing education, and maybe someday we will even have continuing education as one of the requirements for a certain level of membership. So it’s a long term strategy. None of this is going to fix the world overnight, but I’m hoping it will help it get pointed in the right direction in surprising short order. Go ahead.

[00:35:52.460] – Mendy Greens
It’s interesting because honestly, I am at an MSP, well, it’s hard to say, but I’m also MSP geek, which is how I found myself in this call, I think, for vendors. But at MSP Geek, we’re looking to build something similar to what you described in terms of because our MSD exhibition is like a rising tide, raises all ships, right. We’re looking to build something similar from a training platform so that we can standardize tier levels, so that when someone says they’re a tier one, what does that actually mean? Right. And when there’s a tier one at one company, whether it’s a technical department or MSP or bar or whatever, and they come to another company, now they’re tier one, are they at the same level? What based on the knowledge they have? I’m actually in charge of creating a training platform, not really classes, but a certification process where we can say or test someone and say, okay, you qualified for tier one, tier two, tier three, or as an engineer, and then this is the level you’re now at. So it’s interesting because I think there are also other places that are doing similar things.

[00:37:11.000] – Mendy Greens
And if we all come together, I think that we can actually unify something that they will go faster, hopefully, and B, that everyone can agree and acknowledge on that’s. The hardest part is getting standardization means that people have to accept it across the board.

[00:37:27.450] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah, well, I appreciate that, and you’ll be getting an invitation for a podcast soon. There are two things that really stand out about this industry, which is why I literally fall in love with this industry every year. One is that anybody, anywhere, like a new social media shows up. People will show up and say, hey, I’m an It nerd and I have this question about charging something or about a technical problem or about a client issue or whatever, and people come out of the woodwork to help them. This industry literally, more than anything I’ve ever seen in other industries, people want to help each other as sort of the first reaction to problems. And there are exceptions, but for the most part that’s the rule. And the second thing is this industry has such a powerful need for education that I think we couldn’t fulfill all the educational needs if we wanted to because there are so many people who want to be educated and want to step up both on the business side and on the technical side. So that’s why I say I don’t see the NSI Tsp actually like offering classes per se, but I do see us working with all kinds of educators on technical and professional things to say how do we improve everything in the industry in order to help us all move forward?

[00:38:54.200] – Karl Palachuk
And I don’t know of another industry that works as well together as we do.

[00:39:00.330] – Amy Babinchak
There’s absolutely no lack of educational opportunities in this industry. What there is a lack of is people willing to take them, people understanding that that’s an important step for their career, for the people that hire the It folks to actually value those because we’re beginning to see a sea change in that. When I started in this industry, if you did not have a certification from Novel or Microsoft, you were not getting a job, period. And we’re seeing that change back into more of that model again where the certifications are becoming important and are going to be enforced and Microsoft is leading that charge and looks like Cisco is getting back into the game as well. So I do see that coming. But like Karl said, this organization’s place is not to provide education at all. No chance that we’re going to be competing with you. This is a membership organization, right? This is about industry building. This is about professionalism. The bits and pieces of how that works will be provided by you, not by us.

[00:40:24.930] – Speaker 4
Amy, this is can you hear me?

[00:40:27.080] – Karl Palachuk
Yes indeed.

[00:40:27.790] – Speaker 4
Hey, this is Ben Yarbo with ConnectWise Security. First and foremost, I want to applaud you guys for the effort as a lawyer turned crazy It entrepreneur. You guys are speaking truth and some of it scary and So it’s very exciting. But I think you’re moving in a very positive direction.

[00:40:50.670] – Amy Babinchak
Then you probably know the history of the legal industry and how the bar formed and we’re essentially just following the same well trodden path of an industry.

[00:41:04.410] – Speaker 4
Yes, I don’t know the history, but I certainly remember filling out my 50 page bar application for the state of North Carolina for 20 years of everything. But I was going to suggest that is actually a great model and there are a lot of things that are out there and I missed the first intro, but if I hear you right, you’re saying that the purpose of this organization is to drive the professionalism of the It services and that is about it’s going to entail education standards and quite likely the recognition you’ve got state legislation and you’re right. Karl Cosmetologist, landscape architects, people that put out chemicals on grass, lawyers, contractors, all these guys are regulated in every state. They have to have a license. And one way to approach that is with a model statute. I don’t know how, and I want to dig deeper into how you guys want to spend your budget and your money, but speaking directly to creating a prototype model for every state to consider as a state statute on how to regulate it professionals, that’s typically a way to drive a standard. And for lawyers, that’s approval by the state bar.

[00:42:34.140] – Speaker 4
The bar happens to be funded the bar is funded by the fees that lawyers pay to the state. That’s continuing education requirements, that’s ethics standards, all that’s bolted into the statute. And it’s driven down to a county by county oversight in the state of North Carolina. So there is a huge parallel opportunity, I think. Again, I applaud you. I look forward to getting involved in learning more.

[00:43:02.950] – Karl Palachuk
We would love to have you on the legislative committee.

[00:43:09.430] – Speaker 5
Amy. Amy, can I say something real quick?

[00:43:13.160] – Karl Palachuk
Sure.

[00:43:15.970] – Speaker 5
As for the vendors, I’m going to say this. I started my MSP ten years ago and it was a dream three years prior to that. I never Googled anything to start my business. My dream was to help the small business people, to have the tools that the enterprise people get. And that was my goal and that was my dream. When this came about, it was like, oh my gosh, if I had this ten years ago, I would have had an easier path and a better path to provide better service when I first started versus continually building vendors, I mean, I saw Eric Erickson on here. I remember taking several of his classes. I remember going the first thing I thought of, getting in with Microsoft, get in with HP, get in with all the big boys. But then I slowly go, what RMM am I going to use? What backup system I’m going to use with you all? When you hear somebody, hey, I’m a new MSP, this will be a great opportunity as a vendor to say, listen, here’s an organization that’s going to help you, give you some type of path and some type of guidance.

[00:44:23.600] – Speaker 5
And I think that if I had that ten years ago, I would probably be further ahead than I am today. But I really rely on the vendors that, hey, help us out. And I’m seeing more and more, like Karl said, more and more people are reaching out and helping others out and this is what it’s all about. And I appreciate Karl and Amy really putting this together and I’m part of the membership committee. And so it was Christopher Barber. We both worked together and this has been a tremendous ride and it’s roller coaster, but we really would really love to have you all help us out.

[00:45:03.170] – Amy Babinchak
So, you know, there’s a great advantage to having the independence that we have in this industry of being able to say, hey, I want to get into business and being able to just do it. There’s a tremendous disadvantage to not having that path and not having that recognition of legitimacy when you’re starting your business out and having to be every person that comes along that comes into the industry, having to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again.

[00:45:34.670] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you for that company today. When I travel around, sometimes I will meet people who don’t want to share what they consider to be their secret sauce. Right. I always remind people secret sauce ships in a clear jar that’s labeled with all the ingredients on the outside. Everybody knows what the secret sauce is, but there are people who just come together and help each other, and there are people who think that they’ve somehow figured it all out. And I think if you’ve been in business for very long, you know you always move faster when you rely on other people to make the mistakes, document them, and then turn it into a training for the rest of us. I can’t even count the number of mistakes that are on this meeting right now, but it has all resulted in massive amounts of knowledge and an ability to understand how we as an organization need to go forward to thrive so that we as individuals can go forward and thrive. I do encourage vendors, please sign up for a meeting with us if you’re interested in contributing or talking about the programs. At a minimum, join as a member.

[00:46:53.050] – Karl Palachuk
You could join as a registered or a paid member, either one. Get on our mailing list and make sure that we can contact you in our next newsletter and you can keep track of what we’re up to. Do we have any other questions?

[00:47:08.910] – Amy Babinchak
We have somebody asking about in person meetings in the future, and it’s definitely on our roadmap, but until we get the right level of sponsorship, it’s not even possible. So we are definitely still in the organization stage, and we need you guys. We can’t go it alone.

[00:47:37.930] – Joseph Brunsman
And I would just add real quick, so kind of your equivalents in other professions. If you look at the American Bar Association that came around 1800, the HIPPA for accountants that came around late, 1018 hundreds. So this is a big lift for Karl and Amy, and it’s just something I’m a former It guy now. I work on the risk management side, the insurance side. And one of the things that’s really holding you guys back as a profession, quite frankly, is that there is no licensing. There’s no standards, there’s no code of ethics or code of professionalism. There’s no enforcement mechanism. And so I think to some degree, there’s going to have to be a BDR that gets set. And I know Amy and Karl and I’ll volunteer wherever I can to do that, to help you guys. There’s going to have to be some bar that has to be set or otherwise. I’m going to say that probably 95% of people on this phone call, you effectively have three insurance options, and that’s about to be two as far as your Eno insurance goes. And so until there’s movement, I know you guys are doing that.

[00:48:49.710] – Joseph Brunsman
It’s just really going to hurt the profession. So I applaud both of you guys for jumping on this grenade because that’s quite the endeavor. But wherever I can help out, just let me know.

[00:49:01.000] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you. And we’re a little behind, but adel lovelace invented computing in the mid 1800, so you got to get a cut of some slack. I will also say that there’s been some frustration of people to say, hey, if you guys start requiring us to be competent, you’re going to raise the bar and then make it difficult for people to get in the industry. I just have to say that’s okay, to a certain degree, we don’t want to limit how people get into the industry, but we do want to say, here’s the path you want to get in the industry. Yes, go print up some business cards, but also go here and learn about a business model so you can be successful. I don’t know if Gary peeka’s on the call, but Gary’s stats say that 25% of the people in this industry are going to go out of business in the next year. And this economic challenge that we’re facing right now with interest rates and so forth might pretty much guarantee that that’s a low percentage of the people who will go out of business. You need a strong business model so that we can rely on you to be here, to be with us in the industry.

[00:50:11.890] – Karl Palachuk
That’s literally step one. So we’re not trying to keep anybody out. We just want to make sure that those who decide to get in know how to be professional, literally know how to be successful. And obviously the vendors need that. They need partners that they can rely on who are not going to disappear after selling one unit.

[00:50:32.650] – Amy Babinchak
Stuart asks if there are other countries that have tackled similar things. Our model for similar things is really what we’ve just been talking about, right? Industries that have a need for recognition as a professional industry. As far as other countries go, we have had interest from It providers in other countries in starting organizations like this in their country and wanting to have an association with us. So potentially there’s an opportunity to become an international organization. We are not ready to tackle that though. We’ve got our hands full just trying to get this thing off the ground. But there is an organization that is forming in Canada right now, will be our sister organization. There has been interest, I know from Australia in forming a similar organization. These both happen to be countries that are part of the It community in the United States. So there’s an interesting alliance between us It providers and Australian It providers, we’re pretty close. And same with Canada. So I’m not too surprised that those are the first two that have come to us and said, hey, we want to do what you’re doing. So I do believe that this is going to be a worldwide movement to professionalize the industry.

[00:52:06.670] – Amy Babinchak
We are the first and we will be the one to lead that charge.

[00:52:11.590] – Karl Palachuk
So I put a link to the Canadian It’s, the information technology service providers of Canada. We have within Nsitp, I know we have members from at least five countries because lots of people in Europe, and I think we got one or two from Africa, one or two from South America, and I should put together the stats, but we have people from other countries who have already joined and paid to be professional members because they know that this is in their interest. And I am overwhelmed by the number of people from other countries that have come to me and said, how can we bring this to my country? And I’ve had to say, let me just do one thing at a time because we’re still trying to bring it.

[00:53:01.800] – Amy Babinchak
To our own country.

[00:53:05.090] – Karl Palachuk
My analogy has been like an ant trying to eat an elephant one bite at a time. It’s a ridiculous amount of work. On the other hand, we’re operating completely openly. So if you’re in another country and you want to look at our bylaws, they’re on the website. You want to look at our budget, it’s on the website. You want to look at how we’re formed, we’ll give you whatever we have. Again, this industry is sort of built around helping each other to be successful and this organization is no different. We’re following that long trod path within the S and Vital industry.

[00:53:48.750] – Joseph Brunsman
And if I get one more thing here because I know people are always kind of terrified, right, when we start talking about rules and regulations and standards and ethics, your peers and other similar organizations, it actually kind of swings both ways, right? So there’s times when my clients and other professions are asked to do something specifically that is very detrimental to their organization and that’s actually codified within the rules of their profession as being contrary to the code of conduct or outside their professional standards or the state bodies or national bodies to actually put that into legislation. So it’s actually a very useful tool. It’s not all necessarily scary buried entries. It’s also a very useful tool for business owners to kind of put in their back belt where they can push back against, we all know kind of what sometimes what clients want us to do versus what they should do. So I think that could be useful as well.

[00:54:48.450] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, we have an ethics task force in progress right now and there has been a lot of discussion on how what is ethics, what is code of conduct, and separating those pieces. And once the ethics Task force is done, the Code of Conduct task Force is going to be spinning up. We only have the bandwidth to do a certain amount of things at one time at this point. If we can get more of you guys on board, we can do more things at the same time and speed this up and that would be amazing. But we are making progress exactly in that direction, Joe. That’s where we’re going.

[00:55:31.260] – Karl Palachuk
And along those lines of sort of spreading the word, just heads up that we have elections coming up in the fall and so we’re working on that and we would love to have vendors to be involved and actually running for the offices to help us on various committees and boards and so forth. So the more hands, the lighter the work, right? That’s what they say. Other comments or questions?

[00:56:05.050] – Mendy Greens
Our vendor is going to be upheld to the same ethics and code of conducts that we’re going to be holding members to It service provider and whatnot or is it just like vendors can get involved no matter what and donate and send money and then only the members will be withheld to as a.

[00:56:24.600] – Speaker 4
Lawyer and a vendor, I love to comment on that as a thought. I think it’s a great idea. I think realistically, the larger corporations are going to have a really hard time adhering to the same standards, so it’s a fair ask and it’s a challenge of the small business space I think is having that transparency and integrity up and down the line. But I’ve done a little coaching with is that sometimes you have to look in the mirror first and start your work there. And so I think it’s an organization focusing on the initial focus is really important.

[00:57:13.870] – Karl Palachuk
Well, and on the vendor site, which is the itsp.org vendors at the bottom, we have some vendor guidelines. So we certainly expect as a voting member of this organization, that vendors are going to follow the same rules as everybody else. We’ve gone out of our way and he mentioned this to make sure that it’s one vote per company. So Microsoft gets one vote, Mindy gets one vote, Joe gets one vote, you know what I mean? So we do not want to be so dominated by a vendor that people see us as just somebody showing for that vendor. Right. The nicest thing I can say is there’s no gap to be filled by doing that. Cool. Thanks Steve, I appreciate the comment. Other comments or questions? Boy, Ben, I really want you to get involved here.

[00:58:17.820] – Speaker 4
Just saying, no, I’ll commit on this call, we’ll join. Okay, we’ll do it. I have no problem with that.

[00:58:27.040] – Karl Palachuk
Thanks. Excellent. Other folks.

[00:58:40.430] – Amy Babinchak
See other vendors committee to join as well.

[00:58:45.240] – Speaker 7
Sorry to cut you guys off. I left a long chat near Amy call that I kind of let me come off camera so I won’t be rude. I’m on camera.

[00:58:54.030] – Karl Palachuk
Sorry.

[00:58:55.550] – Speaker 7
Just about pushing the profession. A lot of it is going to depend on your customer base. I do have government customers, so if we’re going to push the professional compliance and ethics, we’re going to be held accountable to certification and licensing, right. We’re going to be held accountable to what every other profession is doing. And unfortunately, the world judges that off of license or certifications or compliance that meets industry standards. So we just have to be very careful. Called the Navy. If we’re going to push this as a professional concept, we have to be ready. For example, CMMC is out there, right. They could require you since you’re managing other companies information. As a managed It service provider, you’re required to be stage one CMC certified, which the first 15 requirements under this 800, 171. So if we’re going to make this push, we just have to be ready. It could go, I won’t say negative, but it’s just going to put us all in a situation that could be different. So just some concepts I’m seeing and I’m just thinking about my government, state, local customers that I have to make sure I abide by their requirements and initiatives.

[01:00:10.400] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, absolutely. That’s why we need this organization. We want to talk with the people that are going to be making these. We don’t want them to make those decisions in a vacuum. Right. That’d be the worst. We’d end up with another HIPAA law. That would be terrible.

[01:00:30.950] – Karl Palachuk
We don’t want that, right?

[01:00:33.230] – Amy Babinchak
And we don’t want that. We don’t want to be regulated in a way that could be detrimental to the industry. We need that voice. That’s why we need an organization like this. I’m 100% behind you with that CMMC stuff. I think CMC is a great thing that the government has done to bring together all the different regulations that they were starting to have in their different departments under a single banner. And there is a chance that something like that could be seen as, oh well, let’s just take that and let’s just apply it to the world, right. Even though it may not necessarily fit exactly, but we have to be in all those conversations so that our industry is represented where it needs to be so that we’re not done too, that we are leading our own and representing ourselves.

[01:01:28.190] – Karl Palachuk
Right. But the other thing is, there’s It service provider, we use that term because it’s as broad as possible, right. There might be one person whose entire business consists of installing lighting or something where they need to follow certain guidelines, but it’s not the same as somebody who needs to have an entire security stack. And to your comment, Lisa mentioned earlier, just being able to say, if you’re doing this, go consider those guidelines, and being able to help people find the guidelines will help them get a quicker step up in their own professionalism and in their own industry. And for some, CMMC is exactly what they need to be doing. And for others, it will be a different set of guidelines. But to help people figure it out, everybody starts out not knowing what and anything. And with luck, they grow to know lots and lots. Thank you.

[01:02:25.370] – Amy Babinchak
All right, well, I think we’ve gotten through all the questions, Karl, and people are understandably starting to drop off, because I think we did a good job of sticking to our 30 minutes. And I appreciate another 30 minutes of Q and A. It’s my favorite part of any presentation.

[01:02:41.050] – Karl Palachuk
I’m sorry I started the recording late. That’s all right. I only screw up one thing per meeting, so that was it. All right, well, thank you all for being here. Please send us emails, connect on the website, and make sure you’re on our mailing list. Join. If you have not joined. The basic membership is $100. So I can’t imagine there’s anybody in this industry who can’t afford that. So become part of us and help us become what we need to be. And with that, I think we will go ahead and close this up. We’ll get the recording up as soon as we can, and if you have any questions, send us an email. Thank you.

[01:03:25.040] – Amy Babinchak
All right. Hi.

[00:00:02.170] – Karl Palachuk
Recording now. And so if you do not wish to be on the recording, do not speak. If you do not wish your face to be on the recording, do not turn on your video. Sop it is being recorded. But we recognize that some people have a need for Privacy, so you are responsible for taking care of that. And I appreciate that. So to find the meeting recording, if you go to our website, one of the resources at the top is meetings. And then within that we’ll post this. The meeting is there from last time and you’ll see it becomes quite a resource. We post it up on YouTube. We have the video linked inside of our site along with the full transcript and the chat. Sop you’ve got everything here and the chat, I promise you, will be full of links. So some people are already putting them in. And Ni has the job of whenever she hears a certain keyword, she’s going to post up relevant links for that. So we’ve got really good resources there. Also note at that same place, when you look at committee minutes, if you are a professional member, you have access to the minutes of all of the meetings of the committees, finance committee, membership committee, all that.

[00:01:27.080] – Karl Palachuk
And so there’s lots and lots of resources there. And as you are involved in this, if you have questions, if you want further access or you want to be on a committee, get in touch with those committee chairs. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to browse around the website. You can find other members there. You can connect to people we’ve already had people say, hey, I’m looking for somebody to help me with a job in another state. And so they’ve used our site for that already. And so use that resource. If you want other things or you think something should be different, send us a note. All right. With that, Amy or Heather, I’m not sure who is the designated speaker. This all depends on Amy’s health.

[00:02:16.410] – Heather Johnson
So today, Amy just put it in the chat to verify that I will be doing our update from the board today as she is feeling under the weather. So when I thought about what to say to the membership, I thought about birthing and organization. Like, wow, I’ve never been involved in such a thing. But I birthed two children. So would there be relevant experience there? No, because I didn’t have to figure out what their fingers and toes look like and how they moved. I have had lots of experience in fully formed organizations, and many of you probably have as well. But did you really think about who came up with the policies, who came up with what the committees did or their code of ethics or their mission and vision? I guess I just took it all for granted. But being involved with the birth of the NSAP has been such an amazing experience to be a part of. And really, it took so many amazing volunteers. It’s those things that you take for granted in an organization that takes the most work to figure out, like how to make a fair election, how to form a budget based on just plans and dreams.

[00:03:41.220] – Heather Johnson
And then how do we pay for all that once we have that budget, how do we pay for that? Every detail has to be examined from all sides because every decision you make has ramifications that are attached to it on what the organization looks like in the future. They’re really important decisions, and they need lots of different viewpoints to give different perspectives on the ramifications of those decisions. It’s been countless hours from all the committees and the board we’ve been meeting weekly and really digging into sometimes just a sentence, just really looking at just how the essence of how we want that to form. But it’s really important because all of those decisions reflect what we want the Itsp to be. We’ve been so fortunate to have all of these perspectives and eyes on these decisions. Each and every member I’ve worked with brings a different viewpoint and questions for us to consider. And now the organization is really taking shape. Business membership levels are being introduced. Committee charters have been developed for all of our committees. We have a draft budget and a member code of ethics that is being really close to being actionable.

[00:05:08.510] – Heather Johnson
We are no longer in our birthing phase. The framework is ready for us to take action, and we really want to celebrate that because that’s a huge accomplishment. One of the most important points I like to get across when I talk about the NSI Tsp is that this is not an organization that is going to just do something for you. The NSI Tsp was formed for all of us to get together and make something happen. We need everyone to lend their skills and hands to achieve these goals. If you haven’t joined yet, join now. Don’t wait to see what happens or say that you’re going to just watch for a little while before you see if it’s worth your time. We need you to achieve these goals. Don’t sit back if you haven’t joined a committee yet, join. Listen to what our committees are working on and that will be coming up later in the meeting. Karl will be telling you other ways you can get involved and volunteer in some legislation actions and find something that resonates with you and get involved. You may say to yourself, I’ve never done anything like this before.

[00:06:21.760] – Heather Johnson
She’s probably talking to the next person in the next square. No, that is not the case. You don’t need experience in committees or nonprofits profits directly. You already have the experience and skills by building your businesses, by working with people, by achieving goals as a team. You’re all doing that every day. You will make a difference here, and we need that. We have done so much so far. And thank you to all who’ve been a part of this birthing phase. And let’s get ready for this next thing and see what we can accomplish together. So if you have enjoyed now go do that. Follow us on all our social media share posts. Do everything you can, because we can do this. That’s all I have.

[00:07:18.910] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you very much. You took up about half of the announcements I was going to make, but that’s okay. Repetition never hurts. So Heather is our vice President. Amy is our President. We have a truly great board of directors. And so please go cheeky out those BIOS and so forth on the site. Again, recommend that you visit our website. Rob sent me an email that he’s a professional member, he paid and so forth, but can’t access stuff. If that’s the situation for you, send us a note. Jen’s job is to make sure that people go through the entire process and get everything done so that everybody has the access they need. So if you have paid and you don’t have access, please send us a note about that. So one of the big things that we’ve decided is that we’re going to standardize when the meetings are so the next all member meeting is going to be in August 10, and future all member meetings are going to be on the second Wednesday of the quarter. So you’ll know when we’re doing this. So please Mark your calendars and we will give you notes and schedule them in advance and so forth.

[00:08:36.400] – Karl Palachuk
But there’s that also the social media links. If you are not joining us on social media, you should please everybody. I think NA is going to put the link in the chat, but go to YouTube right now and subscribe to our channel because when we get 100 people, we can have a custom name. So we want a custom URL for our YouTube channel, and it requires members to be able to do that. Sop one of the things about the regular meeting, especially the August meeting, is that we’re going to be having some important stuff going on this fall. And August meeting will be super full of details about the elections and so forth. So do not miss that meeting. These are the values for our organization that we have put together. Again, all of these are in the about section on the website, and I encourage you to go look through them and not sure where the rest of my slide deck went. All right. Maybe I shared the wrong one.

[00:09:48.030] – Tracy Hardin
All right.

[00:09:48.540] – Karl Palachuk
So anyway, let me go through the announcements as we go along. The first thing is that the Code of Ethics Committee is currently meeting and we’ve got I can’t even remember how many members now, but it’s over ten members and they’re meeting twice a month and working on figuring out a code of ethics, which sounds simple, except that we’re super dedicated to the fact that the code of ethics needs to be something that actually represents the values that we’ve put down for our organization. And as a result, that code of ethics needs to be something that is truly clear and concise, but also needs to be something that all of you could theoretically post on your websites. And so make sure that gets done anyway. That’s working. And I know that that’s hard for people to see, like there’s no real report per se, but it is happening. And we need you to know that second big announcement is that the formation committee, which has now become the governance committee or is becoming the governance committee, has decided on elections. And so we’re going to be announcing some details as we move along with that.

[00:11:15.170] – Karl Palachuk
The elections will be held in September. And so we will put up an area on the site where if you are interested in running for an office, you’ll be able to declare your candidacy, put together a candidate statement, give us your information, and so forth. And so all of that is in the works. And all of that starts in the next few months. So keep your eyes open. Make sure that you read our newsletter. If you are a member and for whatever reason, don’t get the newsletter. You may have removed yourself or something. But anyway, get in touch with us and we will help you figure out how to get that newsletter. And so all the details on the election are coming. But I would tell you this. We need you to serve. I literally I’m looking around at all the little pictures here, and I’m saying, oh, I want her to serve. I want him to serve. I want him on a committee. I want her on a committee. We need people to serve on these committees. We have some really great committee chairs and committee members right now. So I’m hoping they will all stand for election.

[00:12:26.630] – Karl Palachuk
You can run for one office. So we need some people to run for the board. We need some people to run for each of the committees. Now, the committees will choose their own chairs. So the election will be to be on a committee, and then once on the committee, the committee will choose their own chairs. So that’s how it works in general. Right now, I think all the committees are seven members, and the goal will be that we will have some of them. I’ll have to look at the details, but either the first four, I believe, will serve for a two year term, and the next three will serve for one year term. After that, everyone serves for a two year term. I know that’s a little complicated, but all the details will be on the website. And the other really big announcement is that we now have a vendor partner program. And so it is time to begin talking to vendors about contributing to our organization at a larger level. And, of course, we want vendors to be members, I do have to say. So just a shout out to. Heather has been an incredibly valuable member of the board.

[00:13:47.770] – Karl Palachuk
And as both a vendor and just a great person, she has helped us tremendously. And if she is any indication of what we can expect from vendors, we need all of them. Vendors, when they are members, get one boat, the same as everybody else, but we need them to participate. Our entire ecosystem as a community exists in part because we are here and in part because the vendors are here. And so we really need them to participate. So if you have a contact for a vendor that you want to get in touch with, talk to me. If you would rather just give an introduction and have me call them, I will be happy to do so. But we need to begin that process as quickly as possible. So there’s some chat that we can get to, and we’ll get to an open Q and A, I promise. But I just wanted to make sure that you all know that that’s coming and that that vendor program. We’ve sort of agreed to the outline and begun discussion with vendors. So if you have people that you want us to get in touch with, please let me know with that.

[00:15:02.320] – Karl Palachuk
Heather, do you want to introduce the various chairs and we will have the quick reports for various chairs?

[00:15:11.470] – Heather Johnson
Absolutely. I would love to. And I also just wanted to add before we get into that, the board did do our mission, vision, and value, and it’s in a stage where we’re looking for feedback. This isn’t something that is permanent, and we might revise that. So we are looking to you to spend some time think about if you feel like we’re on the right track and give us your feedback as we continue along. Sop we have these amazing committees, and I am fortunate enough to be able to be the committee liaison. So I do get to go to a lot of these meetings, and I’m just shocked at how much these committees get done. So I’m going to introduce the chair of the legislative committee, Dennis Wilson first. He’s from DWP Information Architects.

[00:16:08.590] – Karl Palachuk
And he’s muted.

[00:16:10.990] – Heather Johnson
Dennis, I think you might be on mute.

[00:16:17.330] – Denis Wilson
I’m small biz thoughts. We were going to go through the whole list first. Okay, so let’s do this. One of the things I appreciate is that we have now got a fully staffed committee. We have nine members and a plus Heather as the board liaison. This is now an active community focused on providing training and marketing communications materials to society members. The legislative committee is tasked with the preparation of volunteers who would be talking to local senators and assembly people. Their job, then, is key to what our society and its success, and they deserve it to have the best tools that we can provide them, and that’s basically our job is to get those tools to them as quickly as possible and the best quality possible. The mission of our site, as we talked about earlier, is to be the voice of the industry, defining the standards for professionalism and It services. The issue that we are facing is that local state legislatures are waking to the reality and the costs of managed service and cybersecurity and all the things that are involved in it, and they are about to create regulation that defines our industry without any feedback from the industry itself.

[00:17:54.590] – Denis Wilson
We need to raise our voices and to be heard, and we will be heard. Part of the way we will make this happen is to mobilize our members in all the States to start knocking on doors and becoming the voice of the industry within the legislatures, to be the professionals representing the hundreds of small It It It service provider, thousands of small businesses that we serve. We need to answer the question, who is providing those services? Who is it that’s consuming those services, and what should those services look like? The legislative committee believes that the best way to prepare for these discussions is to create short Q and A style YouTube videos that will be how SOP video, how to deal with each question. So there’ll be a single question per video. Each video will be three to eight minutes in length, and then we expect that there will be a lot of videos on the YouTube channel. We expect to have the first of the videos done within the next couple of weeks and the rest of them done fairly quickly after that. And so one of the things that we’re feeling is the pressure that the legislature is potentially starting to get work done before we’re ready.

[00:19:29.990] – Denis Wilson
So we’re trying to get this done as quickly as possible. In support of our main effort, we will expect to provide some printed marketing materials in cooperation with marketing committee and also to blog information about the activities of the various legislatures so that the folks that will be going to talk to them will know what the heck is going on. The other thing we have achieved is to get a group of experts to staff committees and to meet our goals of diversity. Of membership members are Amy Babinchak of Michigan, Trevor Geirdorf of Colorado, Karl Paula of Northern California, Brett Erickson of Minnesota, Ted Geisler, pardon me, I forget, from Illinois, Keith Nelson of Southern California, Jeremy Kirk from Massachusetts, Jeff Granier of Ohio, Heather Johnson of Connecticut, and myself from Southern California. Within those nine voting members and one board liaison, we have a variety of experience with certainly local legislatures and politicians and lobbyists and local political party workers. It’s just amazing that we have this much expertise and we’re able to grab them and bring them into the committee and make this happen. And more importantly, the committee is professional and it’s committed and it’s talented and they are just like you.

[00:21:18.030] – Denis Wilson
They’re small business owners focused on serving small businesses. Thank you.

[00:21:25.650] – Heather Johnson
Thank you, Dennis. The next committee is just got their new name. They were the formation committee, and that’s an exciting thing because we’re no longer in formation. So now they are called the governance committee, and that is shared by Brett Erickson from Passkey Technology.

[00:21:49.050] – Speaker 4
Thank you, Heather.

[00:21:51.150] – Tim Golden
Hear me?

[00:21:51.680] – Denis Wilson
Okay.

[00:21:53.430] – Speaker 9
All right.

[00:21:54.000] – Speaker 4
Thanks for the opportunity to cover some of the goals and the tasks that we’ve accomplished. We’re honored to be a big part of the birthing of the society. Like Heather talked about. We have finished up all the new committee recommendations and all those committees are formed. We did complete that generic committee charter document that Heather mentioned for each committee to fill out, and that’s just to standardize and define and separate duties. And lastly, we assisted with the framework for last year’s elections or for next fall’s elections. As Karl mentioned and Heather just mentioned, we’re now working on a framework for the NSI Tsp governance committee. Once completed, we will be recommending to the board that formation committee or us will transition into that new governance committee. So the goal of the committee will be to ensure that the operational framework of the organization is properly engineered for the ongoing pursuit of its purpose statements, vision, the mission, the value statements, so creating and maintaining policies and procedures as needed, and then providing guidance on those policies and procedures for committees and the board. Yeah. I’d like to quickly acknowledge as well the committee members and all of their hard work, Diana Giles, David Yates, Jason Thomas, Carmine Corridor, and Doug Golio, other regular attendees, Larry Mandelberg, Heather Johnson, Karl Palachuk, and Amy Babinchak.

[00:23:28.260] – Speaker 4
So I can say we have a very fun and talented group. We have a good time, I think, during meetings and get a lot accomplished. We have a couple of spots we’re trying to fill. It’s a great way to give back to the community. Very rewarding. So please reach out if you’re interested. That’s all I got.

[00:23:44.830] – Heather Johnson
Great. Thank you, Brett. The next committee is the Finance committee, which is chaired by Tracy Hardin from Next Century Technologies.

[00:23:55.050] – Tracy Hardin
Hello. Thank you, Heather. Thank you very much. I am the chairperson for the Finance Committee. This year, our big accomplishment was setting up a budget for this calendar year as well as next calendar year. Of course, that’s going to change, but we at least have the underpinnings of it set up. We also played a huge role in setting up the vendor partner program, and we will continue to help with that. Other goals of our committee are to manage and allocate funds raised by NSI Itsp, and we oversee the monthly and annual accounting functions. Like several of the other committees here, we are looking for more volunteers. I don’t think this was said earlier, but on the committees, we must have a majority of members, must be It providers. So right now we’re at kind of an Imbalance. We need more It providers, MSP, non MSP, whoever. There are a couple of requirements. You will have to be a paid member, and you have to follow the requirements to become a paid member. Also, we meet about one time a month. We were weekly for a while, but we’re down to one time a month, and we really love to have you join us.

[00:25:13.120] – Tracy Hardin
In my opinion, we’re the best committee, so please join us. You do not have to be a math whiz to join our committee. Quite the opposite. What our requirement is is that you care. You care about how we spend our money. If you’re worried about this committee and what’s going to happen to the funds that have it that are being raised here, please join my committee and let us know how you feel. We have somebody on staff already handles the books. You don’t need to know how to do any financial reports or anything like that. You don’t have to be an accounting with you just have to care. Let me give a shout out. Our current members are right now, Brian Johnson, Heather’s husband, Eric Long, Kenny Iconos. Larry appears occasionally. And Ryan, of course, Larry Mandelberg appears occasionally to help us need it. And Ray Anne is also a member of the committee and is handling the books as well as myself. So we need some more volunteers. I will put some information in the chat so you can reach out to me directly, and I hope you get started. Thanks. Back to you, Heather.

[00:26:22.530] – Heather Johnson
Thank you, Tracy. Now we’re going to move to the marketing committee, which is chaired by Andy Higgins from IMC Collaboration. And I hear he has some really big news to talk to us about, which will be very exciting to hear.

[00:26:37.590] – Andy Higgins
All right. Greetings from Texas. Yes, I’m Texas, as you can tell. What is it about marketing? And I see people that they just don’t like. I don’t know. I got into marketing. I went to receive Robin Robinson, and I got into marketing big time. I need people who are fired up about marketing to join my marketing committee because there’s only three of us right now, and we have a lot of work to do. We have defined all our communication targets and all the communication outlets, which you can imagine must be many all the social media outlets. We need people to cover all these to take responsibility for pushing information out on the different outlets and discovering new ones as they appear. We have Marty and Tim so far and myself, and we’re totally overwhelmed with the amount of work we need to do. So we need people who are interested in marketing. You don’t need to be a marketer. You just need to know how to use Facebook. I guess the exciting news that we have, which I’ll roll right into, is that we are going to have a logo contest.

[00:28:06.320] – Karl Palachuk
We’re going to decide.

[00:28:07.520] – Andy Higgins
Well, we got you guys are going to submit logos, and then we’re going to decide which one looks best. If you go to the Itsp website.

[00:28:22.500]
You.

[00:28:25.090] – Andy Higgins
Can see and then you can enter the logo competition yourself. We were tempted to give away a set of state nights as the main prize, and we still may do that, but right now it’s just cash. And please feel free to go there and get your ideas out there for a new logo. And there’s nothing wrong with our current logo, but we want something nice and fresh from our people out there, our members. And I think that’s about it. That’s all I’ve got to mention. So thank you for listening to me. And join the marketing committee.

[00:29:05.260] – Speaker 9
Thank you.

[00:29:06.730] – Heather Johnson
Thank you, Andy. And then we are moving on to our last committee. Save the Best for last. I don’t know. And that is shared for now. All of our committees are equally fabulous. Seriously. I know, but this is a membership committee, and it is chaired by Tim Golden, who is from Vital Tech Services and Compliancerisk IO.

[00:29:33.670] – Tim Golden
Good afternoon, everybody. And wow, save the Best for last. Thanks for the plug, but I don’t think I’m the best, Karl. And you all are. We’ve had a lot of great information put out here today about membership, about what all the committees are doing. There’s been a lot of really great work happening here. I can just personally speak for my team here. They really worked hard on figuring out what the member structure will look like going forward. Pretty easy. Think about parentchild relationship. Right. So professional member, one representative from your company or your business, and then an associate member, your staff, whether it’s a vendor or an MSP, It service provider, parent child relationship, one voting right per member, professional member, and then your associate members within your organization. Pretty easy to figure out. We’ve talked a lot about member benefits. I’ll go ahead and drop the link in chat so that you can see some of the member benefits. But as you know, and as it’s been said, getting us ahead of the legislation is one of the key factors that we’re trying to accomplish here. And we need to hear from you and your help and us all working together as a member organization will be invaluable to trying to get ahead of this as far as membership requirements, small $100 fee dues.

[00:31:07.160] – Tim Golden
And we are asking for two professional letters of reference. There’s an article on the website that I’ll post about why we ask for the professional letters of reference. In fact, I’ll even drop that in chat for you. So you have that. But it’s basically for us to be able to make sure you are who you say you are and your clients are who they say they are. Sop after that, lastly, I wanted to talk a little bit about we’re asking those that have been part of this to kind of leave us a little bit of a video testimonial. We’re trying to obviously raise awareness and grow out what we’re building here in our membership base. And so I’m going to put a little link in chat for you. We’d love to have you leave a one to two minute video about why you think this is important, how this can benefit you and us as it it it it it it service provider. Well, and then lastly, I think I got five to seven minutes, but I’m going to wrap it all up in less than two. For those of you that do use Slack, we have a Slack channel dedicated to national society.

[00:32:32.310] – Tim Golden
It it it service provider is in chat as well. If there are any specific membership related questions, you can email me Tim at compliancerisk. Io I guess I forgot to ask for volunteers, too. Like all the other committees, we are specifically looking for a large MSP, 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 staff to represent us, larger MSPs to help volunteer with the membership committee. And we’re looking for a few vendors as well to help with the membership to be the vendor voice as part of the membership committee. And I think that’s all I’ve got for you, Heather.

[00:33:19.670] – Heather Johnson
Great. Thank you, Tim. As you can hear, those committees are doing amazing work. You don’t have to be an expert in that. You don’t have to have legislative experience or direct marketing experience, just a passion to help out. We need everybody. So figure out a place that seems to resonate with you and reach out to the committees and get involved. Sop that’s all I have. So back to Karl.

[00:33:52.850] – Karl Palachuk
Very good. I do like the whole competition of one committee over the other. I think at the next call we’ll have competing T shirts or something. I did want to point out a couple of things Heather just mentioned. She’s always stealing my fire here. But you do not have to be a finance pro or an accountant to be on the finance committee. You just have to have an interest that we spend our money appropriately. Same thing with marketing. You don’t have to be a marketing expert. Basically, that committee’s job is to come up with ideas, and then we’ll find people who can make the artwork, create the handouts, whatever we need to do, so forth, and so on. We need you to be interested in your profession, and that gives you what you need to serve on all of these committees. So pick the one that you love the most. I do want to share the website for just a minute and show you a few things. First of all, if you haven’t been to our website, go there right now. Itsp.org you notice next to the My account. Once you’re logged in, you can click on members and find other members.

[00:35:05.250] – Karl Palachuk
But also, Kara came up with this really great idea. Click on invite new members. And there’s actually a form you can fill out with people’s name and email address and it will send them an invitation so they can join. So please do that and check it out. Invite people that you think might be welcome. And then we also have under get involved, the volunteer opportunities and so forth. But the logo contest is up. Now, here’s the deal. We might keep our current logo, but there’s been some discussion. Hey, do we need a better, more professional logo? So what we’re going to do is the marketing committee is going to choose the top three logos that are submitted, and then we’ll have people vote. The first vote is, should we keep our current logo? And then if that fails, then one of the other three will be selected. All of these things. If you haven’t seen Bodie McBoat face, go Google that. And you’ll know why? All decisions have to be approved by the board. Sop we love your input, but sometimes these things get carried away. Sop anyway, also check out the committee minutes. The committees are super active and we want to make sure that you are as involved as you would like to be.

[00:36:35.110] – Karl Palachuk
And I know many people have emailed me and volunteered sort of generically, but then when there’s a specific committee, they don’t respond. Sop I know people want to volunteer. And if you have some idea of what you specifically want to do, just send me an email. We also have a new legislative and regulation page that’s under the about section. These things are going to move around a bit as we keep reorganizing the website in preparation for the elections, but continue to check this out. There is a blog that’s very low volume. So subscribe to the blog and make sure that you are continuing to stay informed on what we’re doing and what we’re up to. Just so you know, we have about right now we have 171 professional members and we have about 478 registered members on the site. Now, we have over 1000 people on the constant contact list. So that means that at least 500 of you need to make the next step and actually join as a member. So we really need the numbers. And I know some people are saying, well, I’m waiting to see if it’s viable or whatever. Look, this is not going away.

[00:37:54.650] – Karl Palachuk
One way or another, this organization has to be successful. We have to become more professional. This industry, literally, our survival as an industry depends on us. And we are at a critical moment in history. And I know that sounds dramatic, but I’m just telling you, between ransomware and the Russians attacking your clients and the government putting in regulations left and right, often without knowledge, often without a true education of what we do or the challenges we face. The media doesn’t understand who we are or what we do. I had a lengthy conversation with a former client last week, and I could not explain to her what we do for a living. She was a client of mine for 20 years, absolutely loves our company, never questioned a bill, never question anything we asked her to do, but can’t speak in one paragraph. She can’t describe what this industry is about. So if you think your clients understand what you do, you are wrong. They don’t understand your business anymore than you understand the inner workings of a complicated client that you have. You think you know what they do, but you just know the surface level.

[00:39:11.420] – Karl Palachuk
And so we need to educate the public. We need to educate the media. We need to educate legislators. Also, our vision that we started out with, we need this industry to make itself more professional, to hold each other accountable to higher standards. And that’s why the continuing work of the committees, the code of ethics that we’re working on, these are important things. And the draft of the mission, vision and values, the statements that’s up, we sort of put that out there. The board said, let’s give this six months. So Larry sent me a note. If you have feedback on any of that, please get involved. Send an email to me or to Amy or to any of the board, any of the committee chairs, and talk about it in the forums and so forth and so on with that, I would like to see if any of the board members or committee chairs have anything else they want to add before we open it to open Q and A. I do.

[00:40:16.400] – Tracy Hardin
I got something to add to some.

[00:40:17.590] – Speaker 9
All right.

[00:40:18.340] – Tracy Hardin
And this is a great question. They wanted to know when the Finance Committee meets. Just so you know, we’re the third Wednesday of every month at 11:00 A.m.. Eastern. So our next meeting is May 18. So that’s really important if you’re looking for a meeting to join. I’ll let everyone else pitch in when their committees are joined, but I just wanted to throw that out there because somebody just asked and I’ll put it in the chat as well.

[00:40:39.860] – Karl Palachuk
And we have an events calendar module, and so we can begin to post. It used to be that the committees were all meeting every week. And trust me, Heather and I were so busy, we couldn’t see straight because we tried to attend everything. But now that things have slowed down a bit, our goal is that committees will eventually meet once or twice a month, and some of them may be once a quarter, but we will standardize that schedule. So everybody who wants to attend, can you show the vendor membership levels? Oh, I don’t really have a handout on the vendor membership levels. I was not ready for that. Other questions? Comments all right. I saw at least one. Was it Jason had his hand up. And you guys are welcome to open your microphones and just ask the questions if you wish. So Robert says part of the membership benefits. Just use our logo. Is the main homepage logo, same as the member logo? Yes, basically, that’s it. And if Kara is on, she may be able to tell me if we have another place for people to download the logos specifically. And if not, we will shortly.

[00:42:11.730] – Karl Palachuk
And also, obviously we have a contest. That logo might change, but I know some people. Tracy in particular embarrassed me by putting the logo into her email signature before I did.

[00:42:24.990] – Tracy Hardin
I do have a PNG copy of it without the background, but I sold it on the website, so it’s not really a good pirate is original.

[00:42:35.200] – Karl Palachuk
All right. What I’ve done on mine is it’s got a PNG background, but I put in a color there, which is like one dot off of white so that it shows up on the because when you go to the night mode, the clear PNG doesn’t work well. Other questions? Comments SOP Stewart asked about Canadian. Yes. So we do have an emerging Canadian sister brother organization. And with luck, we will be helping them launch very soon. And so that’s something that I would like to make some visibility on the blog post. So make sure that you follow the blog. But that will be coming in the chat. Kara says she just finished this page and it’s not live yet, but you can link to the social media kit page, which includes graphics. So if you’re interested in the Canadian version, please send me an email and I’ll put it in the chat. But Karl P@itsp.org and I will connect you up with the folks who are now forming the Canadian chapter. And it’s not really a chapter. It’s a completely separate legal organization. But they’re in the formation stages. And to be honest, I am helping them.

[00:44:24.120] – Karl Palachuk
I will help anybody from any country that wants to get something started. This organization, taking it on and making this go from zero to something is a massive undertaking. So to spread it out and take over the world is not something we are currently capable of doing. But we will show you what we did, show you all of our information, the forms that we use, whatever. I’m happy to share everything because it’s very important. And eventually we will have an international organization, but it will be a coalition of independent organizations. Comments Questions Boy, this is a very quiet crowd compared to the last several meetings.

[00:45:18.830] – Speaker 8
I have a question.

[00:45:19.980] – Karl Palachuk
Yes, sir.

[00:45:20.850] – Speaker 8
Specifically to legislation. So I’m in Ohio. Ohio has a data Privacy bill that’s being talked about quite a bit. I’m trying to get my head wrapped around it because a lot of it’s like legalese stuff that I’m not real familiar with and how do I go and talk intelligently to my legislator about what the heck is going on? Some of this is going to affect us as an industry, especially here in Ohio. And it’s more about more of a legislative committee thing. But I’m just wondering if there’s going to be a page for Q and A, or how do we get this ball rolling to actually have an intelligent conversation with our representatives?

[00:45:59.490] – Karl Palachuk
Great. And I welcome Dennis and Keith and others from the Legislative Committee to chime in. But one of the things is it depends on the state, right? I mean, in the US, in Ohio, it might be a little harder to actually sit down with the legislator than it is in Idaho. But you can begin the conversation by literally going and introducing yourself to the staff and saying who deals with technology stuff and so forth. Find out who the key staff members are, who the key legislators are. Go talk to their staff. It takes some time and it takes some effort. The legislative committee is interested in putting together, as Dennis mentioned, some videos, some trainings Keith is talking about some training videos on like, literally, how do you talk to a legislator? One of the interesting things that’s happened in California is that when Dennis went to talk to somebody in the legislature, the first question she had was, can you educate local businesses about the risks of ransomware? And of course, the answer is absolutely. But that might be the best in is to become a resource to legislators who all have local businesses as their constituents and become a resource and know them as individuals.

[00:47:28.030] – Karl Palachuk
Every one of these legislators in the United States represents a small community that people actually live in. And in that community, they may or may not be recognized at the grocery store. That’s how local politics is in America. They are real human beings. They are friendly. They are approachable under the right circumstances. So you can get involved. But we are going to help build the resources to help people. The other thing I would say is there’s levels of involvement. Some people just want to show up for a legislative day and wear a baseball cap and be at the state capital for a day. Other people want to actually learn about lobbying and so forth. Sop we are early in the stages of this education. But that is a key piece of what we want to do.

[00:48:20.930] – Denis Wilson
If I can throw my $0.02 in.

[00:48:22.760] – Karl Palachuk
Absolutely.

[00:48:24.770] – Denis Wilson
What we’re trying to do right now, as Karl intimated, is that we’re trying to get these questions put into video format so that when it’s easily consumed and easily found and they’re not ready yet. So what I’m willing to do is if you have an issue that is coming up currently, get in touch with me. I put my email on the chat so you can pull that up there. Give me a call or give me an email and let’s talk about what needs to be done for you in your area. The great thing is that we’ve got one person in Ohio that has experience in dealing with the legislature in that area that might be able to give you a hand.

[00:49:26.850] – Karl Palachuk
And you’re welcome to join a committee like the legislative committee. And I also recognize that we have you know, it’s funny, Dennis said hundreds of It professionals and thousands of clients. It’s thousands of It professionals and millions of clients. We’ve got a lot of members. And so we don’t need each of you to get involved and commit 100 hours a month. Two, three, 4 hours a month is literally all we can expect to ask from people. And then if we get 500 volunteers, we’ll have everything covered. So there’s some chat about various things for joining. So if you are not yet a professional member, please put out the effort to do that. It will help us. Other comments, questions. We are scheduled for 60 minutes, but we can go longer if we need to. We did last time. Sop in fact, some people hung out for like an hour and a half afterwards.

[00:50:29.230] – Tracy Hardin
I had somebody else ask me a question. It was a good one to ask, how long did the Finance Committee meetings last? And it’s 1 hour for ours. I can’t speak for everybody else. We’re probably better than everybody else. We would do 1 hour and we tried to stick to it. Thanks.

[00:50:46.670] – Karl Palachuk
I might suspect the first committee to have a T shirt will be the Finance Committee. Other folks. Well, I want to know also one of the comments made in the chat is what do you want from us? What do you the members want from this organization that we haven’t yet mentioned? How can we provide you with excellent service today? All right. Well, if there are no other comments or questions, we can put this to rest. But I really would appreciate, you know, if anybody has comments or if you have a question or you’re not sure about something, now is your opportunity. You’ve got the entire board here and many, many committee members. Can we set up a committee for tools like backups? I’d be happy to chat with you about that. Re not sure exactly what you mean, what that committee would do, but if it’s appropriate to advancing our causes, we can certainly take it to the board. I’m a residential computer It service provider.

[00:52:19.500] – Andy Higgins
I qualify. Yeah.

[00:52:20.320] – Karl Palachuk
So that’s the thing. That’s a great question. So Linda says she’s a residential computer service provider. That’s exactly what we want. This organization is not called MSP it’s It service provider. If you do anything with technology, if you install signage or security systems or local whatever, in house or video, everyone is welcome. We want to have a very broad definition of what an It service provider is because ultimately the home computer, the home systems. We’ve certainly learned this in the last two years. Must be as secure as everybody else’s system, right? Everybody has to be secure. Everybody has to be backed up. Everybody does work with somebody else. And every business on Earth, what is their data? Their data is other businesses data, other people’s data. So the data that you protect from one of your clients represents their clients. And so ultimately, ransomware is spread by the fact that every computer on Earth is some way or another connected. So, yeah, we need all It service provider writers of every stripe to be involved. And that’s part of the beauty of the way that the board has put this together is that you serving home clients have one vote.

[00:53:54.040] – Karl Palachuk
Microsoft has one boat. Andy has one vote. Brett has one vote. Right? Sop, yes, we want you to join. We want you to participate as fully as you would like to.

[00:54:10.250] – Speaker 4
I got R1 quick, Karl.

[00:54:11.880] – Karl Palachuk
Yes, sir.

[00:54:12.810] – Speaker 4
So I noticed somebody talking about going to It Nation in the chat. Is it a good time to mention that we do have business cards and other things to hand out at events if you’re attending something absolutely so impossible to see here.

[00:54:26.130] – Karl Palachuk
But we do have business cards. They’ve got a nice little QR code on the back that basically goes to our Join US page. We had a presence just recently at Channel Pro in Chicago. So if somebody who was there wants to report on that, we’d be happy to have it. And we are going to begin attending as many of these events as we can. So if you would like some of these cards, send me an email and we have a few thousand of them printed up. And if we need more, we will get more. And if we change our logo, we’ll update the cards.

[00:55:08.090] – Speaker 9
Karl, since you mentioned about the Channel Pro thing in Chicago, I was one of the people that was there. We kind of had a table that one vendor didn’t show up, that we sort of appropriated and kind of stood around and grabbed people as they were walking by and just said, hey, are you in MSP and told them what we were doing and there was a lot of interest in what was going on. Everybody that was out from out of state, I passed them up, gave them a bunch of cards to hand it around to other people around. So there is a lot of interest in there out there. Don’t be scared that people are going to bite you. If you mention it. The dozens of people I’ve talked to between Channel Pro and CompTIA and Ashy, only one person said that they weren’t interested in being involved in politics and want nothing to do with it. So don’t be afraid.

[00:56:04.700] – Andy Higgins
They won’t bite you.

[00:56:05.640] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah, I don’t want to be involved in taxes either, but somehow I get managed to be pulled in every year.

[00:56:12.710] – Heather Johnson
Another great tip on events. When I went to It Nation in November, there wasn’t one time that I sat down for a meal that was a joint meal that this topic didn’t come up of legislation. So having cards is a great way to say if yes, you’re clearly concerned about it since you’re having your meal and talking about it every single time. At that point, we didn’t have the card. So I put just contact me, and I think we got a good amount of people from that. But that conversation is happening every time people are sitting down to eat. So find some new people to sit with that you don’t know and I can guarantee you it will come up naturally.

[00:56:59.150]
Right.

[00:57:00.290] – Karl Palachuk
So David had a great idea about we can put up the PDF or JPEG version of this card and folks can have them printed themselves because it is cheaper than the shipping. I have to assure you, when we first got these cards, I was like, oh, okay, maybe I’ll just have these printed in near Amy’s house and she can go pick them up. But anyway, that’s a great idea. So we’ll actually figure that out. Thank you.

[00:57:30.440] – Speaker 10
Hey there, can you hear me?

[00:57:32.100] – Karl Palachuk
Absolutely.

[00:57:32.850]
Okay.

[00:57:33.360] – Speaker 10
Stewart here again, sorry to bargain, but somebody had asked about what the association could do. It could kind of be a bit of a clearing house where you can help small businesses with some of the government programs that are now coming available. In Canada, we have what is called the Canadian Digital Adoption Program, which is the federal government’s way of kick starting. After Kobet, they’re granting $15,000 to do a digital adoption to small businesses. Sop there could be those kind of programs that members could share. I don’t know if there’s anything in the US with the Small Business Administration and that kind of stuff is that somewhat of the mandate of this organization.

[00:58:21.650] – Karl Palachuk
It could be anything where we can have a great resource that ultimately I would like to see our site evolve to the point where It service providers come to the site and find the resources they need to educate themselves, educate their local media, educate their legislators more and more and more. A lot of what we are really interested in falls under generic education. Ultimately, lobbying is education. But yes, I just made a note about that. It’s a great suggestion. Thank you, sir.

[00:58:59.210] – Speaker 10
What I’m going to do is just paste in anyone that’s interested from the Canadian side and there’s only about nine members. But having said that, it’s kind of thinking that you can avail yourself to these programs and help your small businesses meet the challenges after covet. And then perhaps there’s something on the Small Business Administration side in the US. I’m not familiar, but thanks.

[00:59:27.770] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you. Let’s see.

[00:59:31.140]
Karl?

[00:59:33.030] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah.

[00:59:33.960] – Speaker 11
Jay Fern. Long time ago. Wait. I’m doing all the channel pro events. I’m a speaker at the events. As is obviously somebody else from the board on the security stuff. Have you thought about adding some security content to it? Because I hear a lot of MSP and It providers going, I got to get up to speed on security. I don’t know enough to know what I don’t know. I’m more than willing to help with that.

[00:59:59.740] – Karl Palachuk
You mean for our site to be a resource on security? Well, generic, yeah. Here’s the problem is that ultimately what we want to do is not to provide information that’s going to change all the time, technical information or security specifics. But ultimately I’d like to be a place where folks would say, how do I find out about security? And then other members can help them find those resources. Ultimately that we without an extra billion dollars, there’s no way we could be the place to go on any one topic.

[01:00:41.410] – Speaker 11
I’m not thinking about it that way. I’m thinking more of the generic of here’s the basic things you should do. Do you know how to baseline your network? How do you know how to verify that you’ve got firewalls if you don’t here’s resources to get it, those kinds of things. Not how do you configure Windows? Forget it, but more the generics of the things. Because as licensing becomes more and more of an issue, you can guarantee security is going to become that conversation as well.

[01:01:11.560] – Karl Palachuk
Yes. Sop I encourage you to get involved in the committees and help us figure out what’s a practical way to do that. Ultimately, a lot of this education. Right now we are hoping that we will someday be asking folks to do continuing education and point to certain organizations and say, well, you can get this from CompTIA, you can get this from ASCII. You can get this from wherever and help them find places that are the best places to go to get that education. But again, it’s such a changing, evolving market that we’d have to figure out what’s a practical way to do that, because ultimately we can’t keep up with the changes that I don’t know that that would be the best use of our resources.

[01:02:04.450] – Speaker 11
Okay. I will start the group, though, at the channel Pro Events, because I’m doing all of them.

[01:02:12.180] – Karl Palachuk
Excellent. And if you have resources that you want to share with people, you’re welcome to post them in the forums and say, hey, get started here or help me build something there.

[01:02:23.050] – Speaker 11
Okay.

[01:02:29.510] – Karl Palachuk
Other Comments Questions A lot of great links in the chat since you can’t see the chat since before you got here. But I think if you click on the chat there’s a little three dots. Click on the more and save the chat. You may be able to save the chat from even before you got here, but either way, just know that the chat with all the links will be posted on our website under committee meeting, under meetings, and the recording and so forth. Oh, Amy Sisa came out with new guidance today for MSPs and their customers. Great. Can’t wait to see what the latest warning is about. Msp. It’s funny. Ted was saying that. Somebody was saying no legislation. It’s just so much not an option.

[01:03:32.580]
Right.

[01:03:32.970] – Karl Palachuk
The legislation is coming whether you like it or not. Your only option is whether or not you get a seat at the table. And our goal ultimately, is to have this industry have a seat at the table. Just so you know, we’re also working with CompTIA. Comptia no longer has a legislative arm. And so I’m in negotiation with them about what kinds of issues they think would be common between us. And we can help them promote those issues from the small business perspective. On our legislative page that I put up earlier in the about section, it lists some of the topics that we might need to look at, but clearly there are more. And if you have other suggestions of topics like right to repair, please let us know. Ultimately, if you think about what we might lobby on potentially. Someday. It’s anything that has to do with running a small it business. So that includes taxes and regulation and Privacy laws and insurance rates and cybersecurity and in our case, right to repair. But if you have other suggestions, please let us know. Hi, Kevin. Bye, Kevin. I haven’t seen Kevin in years. All right, other comments or questions?

[01:05:01.610] – Karl Palachuk
Looks like folks have taken the opportunity at the top of the hour to find other things to do.

[01:05:07.640] – Tim Golden
Just wanted to say thank you to everybody who’s been working on the committees and look forward to seeing what we do going forward.

[01:05:16.880] – Karl Palachuk
Thanks, Wayne.

[01:05:17.680] – Tim Golden
I just joined as a professional member during this meeting.

[01:05:21.450] – Karl Palachuk
Excellent. Thank you, sir. All right. Very good. Well, thank you all. If there are no more questions, we’ll go ahead and put this to rest. And with luck, we’ll see you again very soon and see you on the committees. And with luck, you’ll all run for office. That’ll be fun. So stay tuned for all of the election information.

[01:05:50.330] – Andy Higgins
All right.

[01:05:50.900] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you all. I’m going to stop the recording now. If I can find Thun.

Note: this transcription is approximate. please excuse any spelling errors, mis-attributions, or incorrect wording.

[00:00:02.930] – Karl Palachuk

Welcome, everybody, to the February meeting of the National Society of It Service Provider Writers. We have over 330 people registered today, and we’re going to go but at least 60 minutes. And if we have a good discussion and good questions, we can go longer if we need to. We have over 100 people logged on already. I would ask you to mute yourself unless we’re at the question and discussion area encourage you to put things in chat. And Nye is in the other office and she’s going to post up some links as they are necessary or useful, including our agenda and so forth. Feel free to also have a side conversation there. It will be posted just so you know. So be careful of what you say. If you do not wish to be recorded, do not turn on your camera. If you don’t wish your audio to be recorded, don’t turn on your microphone. So this meeting will be posted on the site as usual. And we will get to some of the social media stuff that we’re doing a little bit later. But our goal here today is to give you a big update on all the massive activity that’s been going on and encourage a little bit of involvement and some steps about going forward.

[00:01:33.990] – Karl Palachuk

So with that, let me introduce Amy Babinchak, who is the chair President, I guess, President of the board of directors. And she has been working very, very hard, as have the entire board, to really push things forward. And so, Amy, take it away at your leisure.

[00:01:58.350] – Amy Babinchak

All right, let me get my screen shared. So I’m really excited to see this group growing. To double the registered attendees for this meeting shows a level of concern and commitment to the industry that you all have. And I want to thank you for being here and taking the time out from your day. It really does mean something. Many are still unsure what we’re all about. This organization has two co equal items at its core. The first is to raise the level of professionalism in our industry. And just yesterday, I read in a group where a call was received. And long story short, the potential client was found to have a critical database application running on a pie device. The business didn’t know what the pie was, and SOP they threw it out because they thought it was a broken cell phone charger. So we can’t save everyone from themselves. But we can agree that it’s not professional to install a critical application on a pie and leave it on someone’s desk. We need to raise the level of professionalism so that businesses consuming our services can tell the difference between the trunk slammer and the professional and make an informed decision on which to choose.

[00:03:09.170] – Amy Babinchak

We are not interested in making it more difficult for people to get into this business, but defining what will denote professionalism in our industry is one of our charges. At the same time, our industry is a huge looming problem at all levels of government. At this point, all 50 States have enacted data Privacy rules and several have cybercrime laws, and most are taking up cyber topics in huge numbers. On the good news front, we are now known as being critical to the functioning of the economy. During the pandemic, we were put into the essential bucket. Now more businesses know the acronym of MSP. But as Ranch has risen and organized crime has taken up arms against our clients and against us, the regulators and legislators are looking around and wondering who we really are. Is there a degree that makes us qualified? No. Is there a qualifying exam? No. So if we aren’t degree professionals, are we a trade? Is there a governing body of any sort? Not yet, but it will be the Nsitp. If we can build it fast enough, and if we can get organized enough to represent ourselves. If we don’t, then they’ll make the rules in a vacuum or worse by the advice of the largest firms, and that won’t be good for anyone representing ourselves everywhere.

[00:04:31.260] – Amy Babinchak

That legislation and regulation is being considered is the second of our main charges. Together, these two things are the reason for this organization and the big topics that everything we do is working towards supporting the board’s part. We’ve put a huge amount of time on working on professionalism this past quarter, we’ve defined the mission of this organization, the vision and the values. And these aren’t just words going on to a website or engraved onto a plaque hanging on a wall. These are the words that this organization is going to use when making decisions going forward. We are very fortunate to have Larry Mandelberg guide us through the process of creating these guiding lights. Larry is going to reveal to you shortly just what those words are, but our next challenge is to work on coming up with a code of ethics not only for ourselves, but for our industry as a whole. We’re looking for volunteers that are passionate about ethical standards to join us in that effort. All other professions have code of ethics that everyone working in that industry is held to. It’s time for us to do the same. You’ll hear more about this opportunity for you to get involved in creating that code of ethics from Karl.

[00:05:44.690] – Amy Babinchak

The development of the code of ethics is going to take much of our time for the next quarter. The rest of our job on the board has revolved around enabling productivity in the committees of which we have a bunch. Now. The committee members continue to impress me with their dedication to the task and their level of expertise. We help them in a variety of ways, which includes getting fully populated by providing Heather as a conflict resolution expert in board liaison, and by responding to and approving their request in a timely manner. Heather is going to tell us more about what each committee has been working on has accomplished since our last membership meeting. She might also have some calls for volunteers. These committees are so important to our organization because at this point, they’re not only responsible for setting the direction and building the process for the areas under their charge, but they also have to implement it, too. It’s a huge task, but many hands make light work as a committee driven organization. It is the committees that are responsible for implementing everything this organization is going to do and be for its members.

[00:06:49.910] – Amy Babinchak

That’s it for my board. Update back to you, Karl.

[00:06:57.030] – Karl Palachuk

All right. Thank you very much. I have to just say, as a side note and an apology, I was wrong. Our capacity was 100, and Kara is looking into increasing that. So with luck, she’ll be able to do that live while we’re here. So I have a few announcements that I want to go through for folks. And the first one is, if you are not receiving our newsletter, please get in touch with me and I’ll make sure that we get to it and somebody will help you figure out how to whitelist it and so forth. It comes from itsp.org, but it’s through constant contact. So just so you know, that big announcement. So we only have two days left. We’ve been posting into the newsletter, but we have an opening on the board of directors. And so we would like to fill that. And so I’m going to have Ni put the link in the chat. But it’s also if you go to our website and look at leadership, there’s a place there. So if you just go to Itsp. Orgleadership, there’s a link there. There’s also one in the news area. And I encourage people to look at that news area because that’s where we post up things like announcements for this meeting.

[00:08:22.930] – Karl Palachuk

But also when we are in the news or when we have graphics that we want to share, we have a lot of people who helped us get this meeting registration to 330. And so we want to thank all those people who did that, but also encourage more people to participate. I also want to encourage everybody to be a professional member, which means sort of stepping up. It costs $100, which the board has decided is a very low bar to let people in. And that’s $100. And then two letters of reference. And I know some people have questioned what’s the point of all of the letters of reference? And basically, you should be able, after many years in business, to find two clients who will say something nice about you. And that’s sort of a minimal standard for professionalism other announcements. I want to make sure that we all are headed in the right direction. And so one of the things the board has done is come up with vision, mission, and values. And Larry’s going to talk about what we came up with and what it means for our organization and for the industry as a whole.

[00:09:46.590] – Karl Palachuk

So I encourage you to follow the news and also to check us out on social media. I’ll repost it from time to time. But there is one of the news items. There is a list of our social media links on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, so forth. So we encourage you to share those things. And whenever you’re at a professional meeting, please share the news about us. Tell people about us. I have ordered some business cards that are basically little advertisements for the NSI, Itsp. And so if you want some of those to distribute, send me an email with your address and so forth. And I will send you some of them so that if you wish to hand them out, they basically have a QR code and they say join the organization, but it’s something that people can take home with them so that they might then check us out and join. So with that, I encourage you to spread the word. And we’ve been super busy. Heather is going to talk about the busyness of the last several months, and Larry’s going to talk about the future. So with that, let me throw it back to Amy and Heather.

[00:11:05.710] – Karl Palachuk

And they’re going to give you the report on what we’ve been doing so far.

[00:11:13.330]

Sure.

[00:11:14.070] – Heather Johnson

So I am Heather Johnson. I am the co founder and chief operating officer of Gozinta, and I’m also the vice President and committee liaison of the NSAP. What it means to be a committee liaison is that I get to I have the privilege of being able to go to all of the committee without a vote, but they do listen to me. And that’s lovely. But also I get to learn a lot from them. Currently, we have five committees that have been formed. They are the formation, legislative, finance, membership and marketing. We are a ground up organization. So these committees, we really rely on them on the board to help us and guide us in these decisions. The formation committee has been working hard in this past quarter to provide the general guidelines for our committees and have supplied guidelines on what they see each committee doing. So it’s the general guidelines for how people behave on committees, how elections are done. And then also what are those charges that they see during these formation stages of the organizations that the committees will be doing? The legislative committee has been really working this quarter on making the tools that are needed to talk to your legislature to be accessible.

[00:12:42.770] – Heather Johnson

They’ve been talking about how MSPs are in a prime position and have the skills already within them to talk to legislature. Government is approachable and we can make the changes that we need to do that. Of course, education in that is really important. So they’ve been making guides and videos to be able to guide MSPs on this process within their own state so they can take charge of what needs to be done so that we have a voice in government. For the Finance Committee, they have the difficult task of figuring out what we need as far as our finances to support the endeavors and dreams and what we want to get done. Why this is so difficult is that we have to collect all of those hopes and dreams and plans from all of the committees and figure out how much is going to make those happen and how we’re going to pay for it, which is a difficult task on its own. Membership and Marketing committee are our two newest committees and have done an excellent job, obviously getting the word out to 330 people to be here, and right now they’re planning upcoming membership drives to get more people excited and charged up about what we’re doing.

[00:13:58.770] – Heather Johnson

We have been noticing lots of overlap between the conversations within the committees and to avoid siloing because that can really be a struggle for an organization. The committee chairs will be meeting for the first time on this Friday and in the future to have conversations about some of the difficult conversations that they’re getting stuck on to see if they can work those out together. It has been an absolute pleasure working with these committees. I’ve worked with many committees in the past and had some very painful experiences on committees and I’m sure many of you can relate to that where you just couldn’t move forward or get anything done. There was an incident in particular where there was a two hour meeting deciding on whether to get sausage links or patties, and then it was continued to the next meeting decide which grocery store to go to. And obviously, this is not what is happening here. Every committee is filled with such experienced people that while they understand the urgency of what we are trying to do, is trying to examine each decision to see how it will impact the organization in the short term and the long term.

[00:15:07.610] – Heather Johnson

Not one of these committees is backed down from a complicated decision and looking at it from all angles, these beginning decisions are the most important for what this organization becomes and not one person is taking it lightly. Most committees are still working weekly because they realize they need to move at a quick pace in the beginning and take the time to not back down from a decision and make those decisions very deliberately. The dedication is so amazing and I thank each and every member. I’ve learned so much from this experience and can’t wait to see what the committees will do over the next quarter and I will send it back to Karl.

[00:15:55.010] – Karl Palachuk

Okay, sorry about that.

[00:15:56.670] – Heather Johnson

No.

[00:15:58.070] – Karl Palachuk

So I have on my list that Amy’s going to introduce Larry, but that’s okay. I will introduce Larry. So Larry Mandelberg is on the board of directors and he has helped guide us through the process of coming up with the mission, vision, and values. So with that, Larry, why don’t you go ahead and share your screen and we’ll walk through this and then we’ll have discussion at the end and we can’t hear you.

[00:16:35.230] – Larry Mandelberg

That must be what the mute button is for. Believe it or not, I went to three It companies. I bought my first computer in 1973, so I’ve been doing this for a little while. I’m the author of a book called Businesses Don’t Fail. They Commit Suicide. How to Survive Your Company’s Success and Thrive in Good Times and Bad. One of the things that my 23 years of research uncovered was that most startups and early stage organizations fail because of a lack of clarity of purpose. Clarity of purpose can mean many different things depending upon each individual’s background and experiences. To create this clarity of purpose for the NSISP, the board had to agree on some standards of meaning. Once we had alignment on what we were creating, we invested just under 40 manhours between October 12 and December 27 last year to create these purpose statements. One of the things I noticed on the announcements for the member meeting today emphasized our desire to increase professionalism in our industry. Amy also talked about professionalism and the links to legislation and regulation. There are two equally important guideposts that we as a board, wanted to adhere to transparency among leadership and that we will be a member driven organization.

[00:18:15.550] – Larry Mandelberg

That is you. And to that end, on December 27, when we approved these draft purpose statements, which I’m going to share to you momentarily, we agreed that they would be presented to the membership for review and feedback and ultimately approval. This is your organization, not ours. So to help with that process, I’m going to show you the standards we used in creating these purpose statements. Then what we created. This information will be available for your review over the next six months if you’re interested. So I want to begin with our values. So again, this is what we use to guide our development. The value statements are the bricks we use to build our culture, and that helps to clarify, but without actually putting it into action, it doesn’t really mean anything. I mean, I’m sure many of you have heard people say, you got to have a purpose statement. You got to have a mission statement.

[00:19:15.980]

Why?

[00:19:16.440] – Larry Mandelberg

Who cares? So what? It’s a bunch of soft crap that nobody really does anything with. Well, I know that doesn’t have to be true. Sop here’s how these things actually apply. First of all, our values help us make decisions. If there are two equally good choices, does one option better align with our values than another? And by having these written values, it allows us to go to the members and say we made this decision because it was in alignment with this value. It’s a very practical, on the ground way to apply value statements. Another is that it describes what it feels like to work for or with your organization. Another way to implement them is they should describe what you want your customers to say about you and why you do business with them. So our value statements represent what we want you to think about us. And we we want you to know that we’re trying to do for you and for our industry. Sop let’s look at the value statements we came up with. They often reflect the core beliefs of the founders. Sorry. Sop value statements the first one, which shouldn’t be a surprise.

[00:20:40.040] – Larry Mandelberg

The professionalism and integrity of our industry are our passion. Now, I want to reinforce I’m not going to keep doing this, but I do want to say one more time, these are for you, so don’t feel like anyone shoving these down your throat. We want you to look at these and live with them for six months, and then we’ll revisit them. The second one, communication is the cornerstone of our integrity. It supports our desire to be transparent and to provide a mechanism for member driven guidance. The third is we choose to communicate openly and honestly. Our clients and colleagues always deserve the truth. Number four, we embrace change and education as the foundation of our industry. Technology is one of the few industries where the change is so rapid and so constant that if we get bogged down in the past, we get left behind very quickly. We all know that. We all know how important education is staying on. Sop of it is we are devoted to operating a highly successful, member driven organization. Now, I’ll let those sink in for a moment when I’m finished here, we’ll have plenty of time for open discussion about this or anything else you want to talk about.

[00:22:13.260] – Larry Mandelberg

And the board is going to be keenly interested in your feedback for the next six months. We want you to be able to be comfortable with these and to embrace them. So let’s talk about what is a vision statement? A vision statement is an internally focused commitment to staff and internal stakeholders that’s each of you who are professional members that describes our long term goals and gives meaning to our existence. What is it we want to become? One of the things I tell my clients when they come to me, they say, we need to do strategic plan. And I say, what’s your vision? We don’t have a vision. Well, if you don’t have a vision, what are you strategically planning to achieve? How can you create a strategic plan to get someplace you don’t know exists? So here’s our vision statement. Here’s how we apply the vision statement. Something big that we want to accomplish, how we will be perceived by others in the future, and what is a better place that every member of the organization can emotionally embrace? And contribute to achieving and something that we want to be striving for that’s bigger than one individual, especially in tough times.

[00:23:48.130] – Larry Mandelberg

If there isn’t a better reason to be a member driven organization, I don’t know what it is. So here’s the vision statement. Nsi. Itsp is the voice of the industry defining the standards for professionalism in It services. I’m going to pause for just a moment. The voice of the industry defining the standards for professionalism. So let’s talk about the mission statement. What is a mission statement? The vision is internally focused, and the values are how we create culture and make decisions. The mission is externally focused. It’s our commitment to prospects and customers. That answers the question, what’s in it for me and in this environment? I personally believe that you, the members, not only serve as internal stakeholders, but also as external customers. We exist for you. We deliver value to you. So how do you put a mission statement into practice? It should define the value you deliver, and it should describe how that value is delivered to those markets. When you break it down like this, it’s pretty simple. Now, the mission statements I’ve been involved with, including hours in Sips, tend to be a little long. And I know people I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about whether or not there should be a limit to the number of words in a mission statement.

[00:25:29.170] – Larry Mandelberg

Personally, I don’t believe a mission statement needs to be short so that it can be memorized. I think a mission statement needs to be good and so compelling that people memorize it. No matter how long it is, it’s better to have a good mission statement that you can follow than a short one that isn’t clear. So what’s our mission statement? Nsi Tsp provides pathways to establish high standards and ethics and to improve the perception and credibility of the It profession through actions driven by member engagement. Read that again. The value we deliver is we provide pathways to develop high standards and ethics and to improve the perception and credibility of the It profession. And the way we do it is through actions driven by member engagement and the community we’re talking to, again, is the It professional. I’ll just give that about 10 seconds for you to digest. So we’re doing very good on time. And here is a summary slide with the vision, the mission, and the values. And I want to remind you that we have the rest of our time for Q and A. We can talk about anything we’ve talked about today or something we haven’t talked about.

[00:27:16.370] – Larry Mandelberg

But it’s very important to the board and me that we share these with you and that you give us your honest feedback. We will not take it personally. This is for us and you, and this is how we see the NSI. Itsp moving forward into a very successful future. And with that, I’m going to turn it back over to you, Karl.

[00:27:46.950] – Karl Palachuk

Thank you, sir. And I agree with the comments from Steve in the chat that this was great work and the basic core mission statement is already on the website under the about. But we will be posting up all the information, the slides that the slide decks that Larry had so that everybody has it and everybody shares it. Are there any comments or questions, first of all, from Amy, but after that from anybody else as we move forward.

[00:28:30.790] – Amy Babinchak

I don’t have any specific questions. I do want to say that coming up with these mission, vision and value statements, I’ve never been through that process before. It was far more involved and detailed. And we agonized over every word in trying to create this for the organization because we do view it as the standards at which we’re going to measure future decisions against. Sop Larry mentioned that we had put a six month timeline on this to look at it, to try to use it in our decision making, and to give you all a chance to give all of us a chance to sort of embrace it. And then in six months time, we’ll revisit it, refine it, do what we need to do, and at that point and make it more permanent. But it was something I feel it’s something very important that we did to our foundation of this organization and the ability to drive it forward from here.

[00:29:38.450] – Karl Palachuk

I agree. And it’s funny. When we first started out, it’s like there’s a million things to do and we’ve got to create this committee to do one thing and this community to do another thing. I was using the analogy then of it takes a whole bunch of us pushing to get one railroad car to start moving. Now I’m going to change, and I want to use the analogy of we’re building an airplane while it’s flying. So the mission statement, the vision, I think that what we have is amazing, and we’re going to live it for a while. But we’re also a living organization and a membership focused organization. So if something obviously needs to be added or changed, we’ll be happy to do that. So Jeremy asked the question, organization is good and necessary, but he’s wondering specifically what legislation prompted this. And I would say SOP. One of the things on the website is there’s a link to the nine pillars document that I wrote, kind of as a manifesto to get all of this started. And if you haven’t read that, I encourage you to read that. It is a little bit long, it’s 20 pages or something, but it lays out the problems of our industry with regard to insurance ransomware, the issues that we’re facing, including several bad actors who are just not giving our industry a good name.

[00:31:09.160] – Karl Palachuk

And so what we see is that legislation is coming. Amy mentioned every state has at least one committee in their legislature dealing with cybersecurity. Those committees don’t exist to not make legislation. So we will be regulated. And when it comes to cybersecurity, and especially it companies having contracts with their clients, that’s a state level activity in the United States that is not a federal thing. The feds basically don’t get involved with contracts between two organizations or very rarely. So it has to be a state by state movement. So part of what the legislative committee, Dennis and his, Keith and their team, what they’re doing is beginning to monitor legislation, beginning to keep our ears open at the same time trying to figure out, okay, where do we stand? What exactly would we like the government to do? Because you can’t stop the legislation from coming. That’s not the option. The option is, can we affect it as it takes form? Can we help create model legislation in the larger States which then gets copied to other States? So there’s a marketing committee that’s going to work with this. There’s legislative committee. There’s a lot of people who need to come together on this.

[00:32:40.220] – Karl Palachuk

There are many layers of volunteers that are needed.

[00:32:44.890] – Amy Babinchak

There is a question in there asking on this topic, what was the specific legislation that prompted the creation of this group and think there was one specific item. I gave a small talk on the beginning formation of our organization. We have a recording of that, and we’re going to get that posted up. And in there, I do talk about what the different States were doing. And one important thing that came out was that CISA, which is federal regulation, they started coming forward and producing documents for small business, telling them that they need to protect themselves from MSP, which means that we have a serious reputation problem out there. So it’s not just regulation. It is about the professionalism, the perception of our industry. It’s a big encompassing thing that results in our need to form an organization like this so that we can represent ourselves properly in legislation, but also just to the marketplace in general.

[00:33:56.050] – Karl Palachuk

And as Tracy noted, the state of Louisiana does have some actual legislation. Luckily for most of us, it has to do with MSPs, supporting state agencies and cities. That’s the first thing that got out there. And they define MSP and MSP, but they don’t do a very good job of it. And so I pray that it does not become model legislation in this area. Todd says, do we have actual bad actors and unethical people in this industry? And he says he hasn’t seen them in Seattle. I am grateful that you have not seen them in Seattle. I can tell you I see them all the time, not just in Sacramento, but all over. There are people who literally flat out lie to their clients about what they’re offering. And the classic example for me is, oh, you can have unlimited support for $25 a desktop. No, you can’t. We all know you can’t. So you can make those statements or there are people who put all kinds of stuff in their contracts. There are people who register client software and hardware in their own name, don’t give clients their passwords, sell used equipment is new. There’s lots of reasons why Sisa is warning people to be careful of MSP.

[00:35:25.440] – Karl Palachuk

Their specific concern is that MSPs. And the Federal Trade Commission is looking into this as well. Msps sell things that they don’t deliver. They say they’re managing everything, but they’re not they’re taking a flat fee and they’re not delivering the services. They’re not maintaining the systems. So I would consider those non professional activities. It’s really hard, and that’s why there’s a task force on ethics. It’s hard to convert that into what does that look like Day To Day? What can you say? This is the behavior we want, and this is the behavior we don’t want. That is never an easy thing to do anyway. That’s that the next question is where should new members find openings in the committees to volunteer? Should people reach out to committee chairs directly? Yes, you can reach out to the community chairs on the nsitsp. Orgleadershippage. There is a form for volunteering for committees. I apologize that not everybody has been contacted or been able to serve on a committee, but we also have a case where some committees looked and said, well, let’s take everybody who chose us as their first option. And forms are kind of a blunt instrument, because if there are people who chose something as a third option, that they would have been happy to also serve it as a first option.

[00:36:54.270] – Karl Palachuk

We’re constantly going through those forms and distributing them to the committee chairs when they’re looking for volunteers. So that would be the place to still continue to go. If you want to contact a committee specifically, you’re welcome to do that. One of the things that we’ve done in the bylaws is that eventually we hope in September we will have elections, and after that, all the committees will be filled by election. But one of the rules that we have established is that if a committee has a vacancy, the committee can fill that vacancy, and that person will serve until the next election. So in kind of the get going stage to building the airplane as we’re flying stage, committees are now filling up their membership until they have at least seven to nine committee members who will serve until the next election. And excuse me, I would say the work that’s been done by the committees is truly phenomenal. And if you go to the minutes, there’s actually a meeting minutes area on the website. You can see the minutes that are posted of the activities that all of the committees are taking place. So that’s a place to start.

[00:38:19.350] – Karl Palachuk

All right. Any other questions that popped out of you, Amy? I’m just going to kind of read through these. It’s hard for me to talk and read. At the same time.

[00:38:29.050] – Amy Babinchak

There were quite a few examples of unethical business practices that were thrown in there for the people that haven’t seen them before. So if you’re reading through the Q and A to the chat, you’ll see those two. There was an important question from both Larry and Lynn about whether this organization is only for MSP. And the answer to that is no, it’s not only for MSPs. That’s why we didn’t put MSP in the name of the organization. It is it service provider’s. Sop however your organization provides service to businesses, it doesn’t matter. You’re part of this organization. You’re part of this industry. Msp has really sort of become that generic catch all. Now for people that are going to in this industry. I don’t tie it to a specific model of business.

[00:39:34.150] – Karl Palachuk

Yeah. And actually, one of the reasons why the name is National Society of it it, it, it, it, it service provider. There are bars and resellers, and there are people who specialize in security or signage or cameras or whatever. I actually talked to somebody the other day who is primarily a copy or business machine Reseller, but they own a managed service business as well. All of those people are welcome. And to be honest, all of the vendors who support them are welcome. I’d actually like to see more vendors serving on committees. We have a handful, but I’d like to see more. The vendors have a role that’s much larger than simply donating money to help us operate. That will happen someday. But in the meantime, our community exists because we have people who help us to be successful, whether they are distributors or vendors. They sell us tools, they sell us services. They have services we can resell, and we want them to help us figure out how to make this community as strong as possible. So there’s that. And if you run a break fixed shop and you’re professional, that’s totally fine. There’s a lot of breakfast.

[00:40:54.290] – Karl Palachuk

People people look down and say, oh, they’re trunk Slammers or whatever. But pretty much everybody on this call started out as a one person shop. One of the pillars is how do we create a way for people to enter this industry, learn about how to be professional in this industry, and move up to the point where they have employees if they wish them, and that they have a long term, strategic, successful business model. We, as a group have a lot at stake here. And if you look up I’m just putting it in the chat. Sean asked about legislation and tracking the National Conference of State Legislators, which is something that the legislative committee has been looking at. They have a way to track legislation, and you can put in keywords and so forth and track legislation in your state or in surrounding States. And there are services you can buy Nexus, Lexus, and so forth. But that’s one that NCSL is funded by the state legislators when they’re trying to work together on issues. The fact that that organization exists also tells you that once they find something they like, they find a topic that they like, they share the knowledge about that, and they share the way that they have implemented things in their individual States.

[00:42:28.430] – Karl Palachuk

My last real job, which was almost 30 years ago, I worked for a company that tracked legislation, and we were a member of NCSL and worked with many of the people who are members of that. So that old piece of my past is coming back to me. But just know that that’s a resource that’s out there. It’s free. You are paying for it no matter what state you’re in your state and federal dollars go to fund that organization. So to Larry’s question, I don’t think there needs to be a different organization for people who are not MSPs. And to Amy’s point, we want everybody to feel welcome here.

[00:43:11.560] – Amy Babinchak

I wanted to add something to Sean’s question about is it the members responsibility to track legislation? Ultimately, probably, yes. Obviously, at this point, as a new organization, we do not have staff at all, so we don’t have people to go out. I am, though, a member of Dennis Wilson’s Excellence Committee on Legislative Efforts. And what the committee and maybe you want to chime in here, Dennis, but what the committee is working on is creating and documenting a process by which we can educate our membership to go out and be those people for their local areas. So whether that in their own States and what that looks like, how you get a meeting, how you talk to them. And so we’re working towards developing that type of training. Dennis, I see you’re off mute if you want to say something toward that and what you’re working on.

[00:44:11.050] – Denis Wilson

Yeah, we’re providing a series of originally we thought manuals or white papers, but we decided that short videos, talking to specific issues would be the best thing for our members to quickly absorb and get the information so they can use it. But basically, the idea is you need to feel comfortable with the legislature when you walk in there for the very first time. And we want to provide you the answer to the questions you have in your mind of what is that they are looking for, what is it they want? They have the same kind of things that are concerns as your customers do, and we’re going to provide that as quickly as possible to all of our members.

[00:45:06.190] – Amy Babinchak

Makes sense.

[00:45:07.750] – Karl Palachuk

And another thing along those lines is that there are so many layers of volunteers needed. Each state needs somebody who wants to sort of take charge and organize things. And every state needs people who will volunteer to go meet with a legislator. And every state needs people who they don’t have time for all that but they will show up on a given day at a given time and be part of the crowd that just sits in on committees and supports things and is present on a legislative day. And luckily, we have many people and I would actually make a shout out to all the 125 present here today, but also everybody who sees this recording. If you have skills and experience in the government, whether it’s city, county, state or even federal, we would love to have you help us create educational programs. I’ve been amazed at the talent of people who have applied and served on the committee so far, wide ranging talent of all kinds. So we encourage you to participate. We’re trying to coordinate the volunteers, but again, we’re sort of building it as it’s growing. Ross asked a question about specific technologies, and I would say one of the things that’s important to know about this organization is that we are trying to fill a void that we perceive to exist.

[00:46:40.450] – Karl Palachuk

And so things like training on specific new technologies, blockchain and so forth. That is not something that we are currently paying attention to. It might be someday, but this industry changes so fast that the specific training on specific technologies is something that vendors do well. Some of the distributors do certainly CompTIA. I would encourage everybody to be a member of other organizations as well that actually focus on newer technologies and so forth. Sop I don’t see that as something we do along the same lines. This is not an organization where I think that we’re going to be putting on webinars sponsored by your favorite vendor. All right. There’s plenty of opportunities for that without this organization. We really want to be focused on service providers and helping you personally to feel like you’re part of an organization that’s moving things in the right direction, but also an industry that has some challenges that need to be addressed. And so we don’t want to get sidetracked into things that other people are doing. It’s not really a matter of competing per se, but just if there’s not a void to be filled, then we’re probably not going to be involved in things that other people are doing.

[00:48:09.010] – Amy Babinchak

Yeah, I was looking at that same one. But one of the things that we have bantered around and this is still amongst the committees is our industry does have loads of training available to it. There is no lack of training in our industry. We do have a lack of people obtaining those certifications and trainings, and that may be something that we can help encourage. But as we look forward in this organization and think about what it means to be a professional member currently, it just means you were able to come up with two references, but sometime down the line, it may mean some continuing education credits, but I don’t see us ever developing that educational material ourselves. That role is already taken we don’t want to reinvent the wheel out there. We want to fill the gaps of a membership organization and let the folks that are good at training do training.

[00:49:22.010] – Karl Palachuk

Right. And police put a note in the chat about trying to figure out how to eliminate people who are unscrupulous. And she says educating your clients, having a chat with them and saying this is what actually is going on and this is what you need to know. It allows them to have the knowledge they need to filter out bad actors to some degree. Clients are never going to know everything you know about technology. It’s not their job, and it’s why you exist. You can only go so far. And she mentions contracts also to go through the contracts with clients. And Larry says, what do you think about the idea of Itsp offering a contract review service? Again, that’s something that there are attorneys who do that.

[00:50:17.270] – Amy Babinchak

My Insurer actually offers that service. So it’s out there already. But the important part that I think that isn’t being filled, that perhaps this organization can fill in the future is to make it more clear to the consumer what it is that they’re purchasing and who they’re purchasing it from. There are different levels of expertise. And right now we’re sort of a black box when it comes to consumers deciding between two firms. There are no standards that they can set us up against. They don’t know anything about it. That’s why they’re hiring us in the first place. So to even give them some idea, for example, you could go to a CPA, you could go to an EA, you could go to a bookkeeper, but you know that you’re going to get and have different expectations from each of those different types of people in the accounting industry. We don’t have that. There’s no way for the consumer to know that about the different types of people that we have in our industry. And they should be able to it should be a way for them to make that informed decision to understand what that means.

[00:51:42.500] – Amy Babinchak

And I think that could be a role that our industry can fill. Felicia, our membership organization can fill rather.

[00:51:50.170] – Karl Palachuk

Yeah. She says that educating buyers is a key thing. So along those lines, Amy, I could totally see us educating the media and buyers because I’m finally tuned into the response of the media when there’s a ransomware attack. So the next big one that comes out, pay attention to what the media are saying about you and your industry, because they say things like, well, this must be really poorly written software. No, that’s not true. Or they question, why do you use such dangerous tools that can be abused in such a way? Why would anybody outsource their it? And so those are the kinds of questions where Dennis talked about putting together educational videos regarding legislators and their staff and people who are going to help on the legislative side, but we also can do the same thing for buyers, people who own businesses across the world who need to have it. People so far, what they know about it is they watch movies and they see that there’s one it person who knows everything. And that’s true whether you’re running Jurassic Park or a spaceship. So the world is a little more complicated than that. Larry.

[00:53:11.850] – Karl Palachuk

Go ahead.

[00:53:13.550] – Larry Mandelberg

Thanks. I wanted to make a couple of points in we wrote our first support contract, and the state of California, the Board of Equalization, came after us for taxes and penalties because, first of all, they thought it was a product and that we weren’t taxing it. And secondly, they thought that we should be reporting it as income even though we hadn’t delivered any services. They didn’t understand the concept that somebody was paying us a fee for a future service. And we went to law firms in Santa Rosa, San Francisco and Sacramento trying to get them to help us legally clarify what we were doing so that the banks would understand so that we could get the bank to support us with the IRS and the state governing agencies. So what’s your point, Larry? My point is that lawyers don’t know a damn thing about technology unless they went to law school after they left the technology industry. They don’t look at it the same way we do. Well, with all due respect, Amy, there are lawyers out there that specialize in this. The pace at which our industry changes is a pace that lawyers simply cannot keep up with.

[00:54:42.990] – Larry Mandelberg

They have all they can do just trying to watch case law and case precedent. I think this problem is much bigger than anything we can put into a short statement or a short observation, which leads me to my primary point. This is where a code of ethics can play a major role. And this is the next deliverable on our plate. And I want to remind everybody, if you have an interest in participating in our development of the code of ethics, we really want you to come on board or at least submit an application to join us, which is on the website. This is going to be a very big deal, and it’s going to be very important, and I’m really anxiously looking forward to the process. This discussion over the last 20 minutes has brought out some very valuable points that I think we’ll need to address in that code of ethics.

[00:55:44.030] – Eric Hanson

Very good.

[00:55:44.720] – Amy Babinchak

Thank you, Larry. Just a point of clarification. When I said that contract review exists, it’s through my insurance company. In fact, in order to be insured and to not suffer some of the huge price increases that a lot of others did, they actually reviewed our contract to see to make sure that we weren’t over promising and under delivering and all that kind of stuff, and that the modern day liability restrictions were in there and stuff like that. So that’s really what I was referring to. So the insurance company has a legal specialist Department that reviews our standard part of the contract.

[00:56:34.350] – Karl Palachuk

I just wanted to say that with regard to all the legal stuff, one of the things that we want to do is to make friends with the insurance industry because I think we have a lot of needs in common. In particular, if we can figure out how to address liability so that you can go in and do a job and not be worried that you’re going to get sued for $1.7 million. The famous case from last year. If you look at it, this lawsuit was over a fishing attack, and no amount of me having a good firewall is going to stop you from wiring $1.7 million to somebody. There’s a lot of education and there’s a lot of liability. And so I think that we do have a lot in common with the insurance companies, and they already have a great lobbying organization that I hope we become friends with.

[00:57:32.920] – Amy Babinchak

Karl, there’s a few people with their hands raised there. Keith, Frank, Josh.

[00:57:37.210] – Karl Palachuk

Not sure who is Joshua’s first, I think.

[00:57:39.710] – Larry Mandelberg

Can I just make one quick point?

[00:57:41.460]

Sure.

[00:57:42.450] – Larry Mandelberg

There’s an interesting relationship between the legal industry and the insurance industry. Lawyers don’t want anything that’s specific. They want to be able to argue around the edges. And insurance companies want absolute specificity. And we ran into this in the late 80s. When you integrate those two professions, there’s an inherent conflict between them, like dogs and cats, because you have one side that wants details and one side that wants vagueness. So the point is you’ve got to be very careful about this and don’t lean too much on any one resource. Thanks. Sorry.

[00:58:22.650] – Joshua Liberman

I got to run to actually, another security committee meeting. But I will say that, Karl, you talked about placing blame. And in the last month, our county and our city school district have been hammered by random somewhere. And the two TV stations that I’ve worked with before to do stuff, they both called me. They wanted to commentary. They wanted me to place blame before there was any details out about what had happened. And I begged off both times, explained to them that it’s irresponsible and it won’t be helpful. But that’s what’s happening with legislation that I can see is that they’re looking for ways to hold people culpable and place blame. And that’s where we really need to be involved, because as you pointed out, there’s no amount of technology that can protect against somebody opening the front door. And that’s what I’m seeing. That’s all I have to say. Thank you for the invitation. I’ve got to run to another show.

[00:59:15.380]

Sure.

[00:59:15.710] – Karl Palachuk

Well, and along those lines, the whole thing of training the media or having resources available so that when the media come to you, it would be great if you could go to our website, download some clips and say there’s the core background information you need to know. I will be happy to provide you with the seven second local quote from the local It service provider. Those are the kinds of resources that don’t currently exist. Essentially, when a story comes out, our voice doesn’t get hurt. And so it’d be great if it were Frank. Yeah.

[00:59:49.750] – Joshua Liberman

Hey, Carol.

[00:59:50.230] – Frank

Thanks for taking my hand. I did post in the chat. I’m with a vendor. The product is called no where it’s a vulnerability management. And we’ve been doing for six months now, once a month, every maybe sometimes twice a month, an educational webinar series very focused on educating SMBs on the ins and outs of cybersecurity, where to start, the insurance elements and all different kinds of things. I put the link on there if you’re interested to join. And actually, Josh was on one last week where we did it was more focused on the use of the tool. But we’ve had him and Dave Sobel, we’ve had folks from with all the cyber acronyms participating. So it’s an interesting thing. And MSP can send it to their customers and get them educated.

[01:00:46.910]

Right.

[01:00:47.080] – Frank

Because as you said, that’s kind of a big roadblock there. So if anybody is interested, they can follow up with me separately.

[01:00:55.470]

Good.

[01:00:56.020] – Karl Palachuk

And you might repost that just so it refreshes and folks can find it super easy.

[01:01:00.530] – Speaker 7

You bet. And the other thing that.

[01:01:04.890]

We.

[01:01:05.630] – Speaker 7

Oh, somebody just did.

[01:01:06.860]

Sean.

[01:01:07.150] – Speaker 7

Thank you, Sean. On the insurance side, we’ve been working with some Transmosis Cowbell, Travis, that are really doing an interesting service for MSP, where it’s kind of helping their customers identify what the risks are so they can apply for insurance right before you can even get to that point. And so we’re working with integrating our product into them. So it’s a service that you, as an MSP, could deliver, add the value of the insurance, get them smart before and so they can actually be accepted into a term. Sop again, there’s some other information on that you can reach out to me.

[01:01:45.020] – Karl Palachuk

Great. Thank you. Also, just a side note. In my membership community, we did a little chat one time about examining your insurance policies. I discovered in the middle of my insurance policy my insurance company offers me a whole series of educational materials and things I can go through and stuff that I can learn to make myself more secure. And your insurance policy might cover the exact same thing, and your clients insurance policies might have the same thing. The insurance industry has a real interest in how we respond to cybersecurity and how we prevent it and so forth. And I think they kind of mostly acknowledge they don’t know what to do, so they’ve outsourced a lot of this stuff. But all that education is useful.

[01:02:32.810] – Amy Babinchak

I think it’s always true that an educated customer is a good customer.

[01:02:38.730] – Keith

I’d like to say from experience, because I’m an adjunct. Stanford, for one, has programs that specialize in technology and law. I also teach one at Caltech. So there is IP attorneys. There are attorneys that specialize in technology. They are not ignorant to what we do. That’s something to be very clear about. If you look at Stanford programming, law, science and technology, there’s also the Hoover Institute. There’s people that specialize in that. As far as the media and legislation, I want to make two quick points. There’s a lot of talk in the chat that talks about how do we keep track of legislation and then act. To me, that’s too late. You need to spend the time, invest the time up front, develop the report, do the networking, and become a resource to legislature so your legislators are involved in the process, not reacting once the bill gets published. Same for media. Being a Liberal, that’s a joke. I hate profiling. Media will listen if you establish yourself as an expert with some background, and if you can speak intelligently, you can guide them from their preconceived prejudice to where they need to be educated. So let’s not broad brush that the media is our enemy.

[01:04:09.640] – Keith

We need to develop those relationships. And I think that’s just the only point I need to try to make is we need to not profile all these groups. We need to develop relationships and establish them and nurture them. They’re ongoing. So we become a resource to guide them through a tough time. And take it from the Legislature’s perspective. They’re getting businesses raising their hand and saying, I got attacked. I thought I had everything, and we’re forcing them to react by being not involved. That was my only point. And I do have to run to a security committee as well. But that was it.

[01:04:52.490]

Understood.

[01:04:53.270] – Karl Palachuk

Thank you, sir. The thing about the media, somebody had posted up that they like to create their own stuff. That’s true for some media. But when we first started out, I engaged Sharon Sobel, who is a video producer, about how do we create a whole package that’s sort of ready to go and background information and so forth. And she gave me so much information. This is a standard thing that many organizations, companies and associations do that they basically create resources so that the local news reporter can go and take well, here’s what this is. And they explain something and then they chop in some local person to quote. And so we can have influence on how the media sees us. And with some media training that we might someday be able to provide, we really could have several people who are the voice of their local networks. When something happens, if you get in somebody’s Rolodex, it goes a long way. And again, I don’t want to say that the media are enemies or anything like that. That’s not what I meant to imply. But they’ve got a void of knowledge. And SOP when they have a story there handed, they got to figure out what to say and what Josh sort of hinted at.

[01:06:21.010] – Karl Palachuk

My experience has always been the first 24 hours of the news cycle. Almost all of the information on a story is wrong because they’re like, oh, here’s something going on. This happened just the other day with the inflation report. The inflation report was out like 6 seconds and they asked somebody on Bloomberg to comment on it, and he was just trying to read and make commentary at the same time. There was no analysis there at all. So we need to be able to give people resources on the next time something happens because something is going to happen and we all know it. It’s just a matter of time. Other comments or questions.

[01:07:07.410] – Eric Hanson

I shot you an email on it. But you know this conference was full, right? I tried to get on before 09:00.

[01:07:15.570] – Karl Palachuk

It’s not full anymore.

[01:07:17.090] – Eric Hanson

Well, that’s why I’m on.

[01:07:20.290] – Karl Palachuk

Yeah. We upped the level significantly during the call.

[01:07:28.030] – Speaker 7

Thank you.

[01:07:32.650] – Karl Palachuk

Yes. I looked at the licensing and saw we had any questions.

[01:07:36.330] – Eric Hanson

Have him give me a call and I’ll be happy to explain what we’re trying to do.

[01:07:41.050] – Larry Mandelberg

Eric, I wanted to say this is Larry.

[01:07:43.270] – Eric Hanson

Okay, you’re welcome.

[01:07:46.970] – Larry Mandelberg

When we first started writing code back in the early 90s, we used to have a saying that you can’t make code foolproof because fools are ingenious. You can’t find ways to make sure problems don’t exist in technology. This is just another one of those technology experiences that we thought we had covered and didn’t.

[01:08:06.830] – Eric Hanson

Not a problem. I’ll go back and look at the recording. I’m just sorry I was not able to get on right away.

[01:08:14.150] – Karl Palachuk

Yeah, we took care of it as quick as we could, but basically I looked and saw that we had 500 licenses for the webinar, but I didn’t see that we only had 100 for the meeting. But now we have 500 for the meeting.

[01:08:28.910] – Eric Hanson

I was hoping that meant that you were at 500 on the initial call.

[01:08:33.980] – Karl Palachuk

So the last item on every checklist is update the checklist.

[01:08:43.590] – Eric Hanson

That’s why you got to check every box, Karl. Every box.

[01:08:47.450] – Karl Palachuk

Yes. First do the thing, then check the box.

[01:08:50.380] – Amy Babinchak

All right. I think our questions are dwindling. They do definitely revolve around the two main topics that we’re after in this organization right now. And there are going to be others in the future. Right. I think that continuing education is a big piece. I think customer education, giving our members tools to be able to differentiate themselves in the market. I know that has always been a problem that we’ve all struggled with. Right. If one firm that comes in and the next firm looks like it. I know when I consciously went out to grow my business a few years ago, I was met with people that knew the term MSP, which we had decided to hold the business where it was for a number of years. And so I hadn’t been out there talking to potential clients in a while. But then it’s like, okay, let’s double the size of this business. We went out and did that, and I found myself in meetings with potential clients that were like, we’ve already met with three other MSPs. We just need to see your list of things you’re providing in your price per seat. They didn’t want to have a conversation because they just assumed that we were all the same.

[01:10:09.970] – Amy Babinchak

And we are not all the same by any stretch. And so having those conversations is important. We need the marketplace to know that there are different types of providers out there. And I do see that as an important part of this mission of this organization, to educate not only the media, but to educate our business community so that they know what they’re buying.

[01:10:41.030] – Karl Palachuk

100%. Agreed. So I just want to encourage everybody who has not bought into the professional membership that you go ahead and do that. If you have questions about the letters of reference, there’s actually a post on the news section of the site answering it’s an FAQ on the letters of reference. So take a look at that. And obviously, you can email me or email Amy at any time, and we will be able to help you in any way we can. Also, if you’re interested in serving on the board, that application is open for two more days. So I guess Friday at five my time will close those out. So if you’re interested, go ahead and fill out that. And with luck, we will have lots and lots of good stuff to report, I think. Did we decide on doing unmeeting quarterly?

[01:11:36.980] – Amy Babinchak

Yes. We’re going to do these meetings quarterly to keep everybody up to date on what’s happening to your membership organization.

[01:11:44.810] – Karl Palachuk

And final note on serving, I actually talked to somebody yesterday that I sort of talked him out of applying for the board of directors. He was interested in something that would have a little prestige and would improve his career. And that’s all fine. That’s a legitimate reason to serve, but I would like it to be below your first reason. Like your first reason for serving because you want to make this industry better and stronger and a key piece of the success of all the people who are in this profession. So we would love to have you serve, but I would like service to be the first thing in your mind rather than self service. Cool. Anything else? Excellent. Thank you all for being here. Join the social media and help us keep growing and growing. And with luck, we will have more licensing issues at 1000 members next time.

[01:12:55.750] – Amy Babinchak

That’d be awesome. Karl, can you make sure we capture this chat? There’s some important things in there.

[01:13:02.230] – Karl Palachuk

Chat will be posted, and along with the recording and we put captions on the recording so that the people who are visually impaired can access it.

[01:13:17.330] – Amy Babinchak

So that will all be posted and Kara says within 24 hours we’ll get this recording out posted up to all the socials too because I know we had a lot of people registered that unfortunately couldn’t get in because of our mishap but we’ll get that out to everybody.

[01:13:37.080] – Karl Palachuk

Also, we have a YouTube channel so that’s where this recording is going to live. Even though we’re going to link to it from our site, it will actually be on our YouTube channel. So if you’re not subscribed to that, go subscribe to that as well. All right. Thank you all for being here and if you want to capture the chat before we close, just click on the three little dots to the right of the chat window and there’s an option that says save chat and you will have your local file version of this but trust me, we’ll post it. All right, with that, I will go ahead and put this to bed and with luck we will see you online. Thank you all.

[01:14:19.840] – Eric Hanson

I’ll see for you tomorrow.

[01:14:21.600] – Karl Palachuk

Yes, I’ll see many of you in the evening. All right. Thank you all. Bye.

Note: this transcription is approximate. please excuse any spelling errors, mis-attributions, or incorrect wording.

[00:00:13.550] – Karl Palachuk
Michigan.

[00:00:16.290] – Amy Babinchak
That West Michigan people are like that.

[00:00:24.910] – Kara Schoonveld
If I said where I was actually from, no one would know the town.

[00:00:30.250] – Karl Palachuk
All the people in Grand Haven would know all one person on this call.

[00:00:36.163] – Kara Schoonveld
All one person would know.

[00:00:36.730] – Amy Babinchak
All the people in Michigan would know. Like Patrick Collins and myself.

[00:00:42.250] – Kara Schoonveld
I feel like most people don’t know about Grand Haven. Grand Rapids, for sure. Yeah, you might know more because you’re a boater and stuff and there’s the Grand River and the channel and all that. I don’t know.

[00:00:53.910] – Amy Babinchak
My boat doesn’t travel down that far. That’s a long ways around for me.

[00:01:01.900] – Kara Schoonveld
You’re still more aware of the waterways than most.

[00:01:02.730] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, I would think that. Maybe people would think that it’s part of Indiana or Illinois. Like so far down in that corner.

[00:01:13.810] – Kara Schoonveld
Well, it’s not quite that far down.

[00:01:16.210] – Ted Giesler
It’s the wrong side of the Lake for Illinois.

[00:01:20.290] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, but Indiana comes right up across the bottom there. Well, Chicago is on the bottom of the Lake, right.

[00:01:27.040] – Ted Giesler
But it’s on the west side, not the east side.

[00:01:30.490] – Amy Babinchak
Okay, Ted

[00:01:35.410] – Karl Palachuk
If you’re not from Chicago, you can forgive people for not knowing that.

[00:01:39.490] – Peter Frasco
I may live in rural place now, but I’m originally from Chicago. Sure. Grand Haven is right near Mickey and which has a Lough track up there that you could just go to.

[00:01:58.290] – Amy Babinchak
It’s a blast. I love your loose track. We’ve done it multiple times. It is so much fun.

[00:02:03.850] – Kara Schoonveld
I read about that last winter. I was going to take my nephews, but I didn’t with covet and everything. Maybe this winter will have to do it.

[00:02:09.670] – Amy Babinchak
Oh, definitely.

[00:02:10.910] – Karl Palachuk
What’s way fun to lose track Lough.

[00:02:16.490] – Amy Babinchak
Yes, you can do the loos. It’s also just a great state park in general. It’s right on the water. They get massive amounts of snow. They have great cross country ski tracks. Both the traditional track as well as the skate style. And a huge ice rink.

[00:02:35.190] – Peter Frasco
Yeah, you can skate through the forest there if I remember right.

[00:02:38.310] – Amy Babinchak
Yes. And they have lighted night trails. We usually make up pilgrimage to Muskegon once a year just to go to that park in the winter. And if we’re lucky, the snowy Owls will be there as well.

[00:02:51.290] – Kara Schoonveld
They should have recorded that. That would have been great marketing for them.

[00:02:55.790] – Peter Frasco
Make sure you hit Pentwater in the summer.

[00:03:04.470] – Amy Babinchak
Tinnirello. I haven’t seen you in a long time. It’s nice to see your face.

[00:03:10.830] – Vince Tinnerello
It’s nice to be seen.

[00:03:12.310] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah.

[00:03:14.730] – Vince Tinnerello
I haven’t been around and I got really sick in March. And call it three weeks before the finish line of a vaccine, which was heartbreaking. And aside from going to a couple of peer group meetings, I haven’t had the guts to go anywhere. So it’s good to be seen. Maybe next year.

[00:03:39.250] – Amy Babinchak
Alright.

[00:03:40.930] – Karl Palachuk
I hope you’re all better now.

[00:03:42.860] – Vince Tinnerello
It’s been a long road. My friends, doctors galore and an ambulance ride and three ER visits is not fun. But seven months later I’m candidly, finally feeling myself again. Which is good.

[00:04:06.010] – Amy Babinchak
Good glad to hear it.

[00:04:12.110] – Karl Palachuk
Well, I look forward to seeing all of you in the real world. Want to see anybody in the real world?

[00:04:19.790] – Vince Tinnerello
I’m ready for a beer in a lobby bar, Karl.

[00:04:22.850] – Karl Palachuk
There you go. Absolutely.

[00:04:26.690] – Vince Tinnerello
And some pictures of grumpy old man faced photos. There you go. Exactly. Just like that.

[00:04:34.730] – Amy Babinchak
Karl hopes that you owe him a beer. He hopes everyone owes him a beer. That’s his life plan.

[00:04:40.650] – Karl Palachuk
And I die. I want every one of you to owe me a beer.

[00:04:43.670] – Vince Tinnerello
He made me try Crown Royal for the first time ever, but it was incredulous that I’d never had crowned before.

[00:04:50.820] – Amy Babinchak
I’m a little incredulous myself.

[00:04:55.150] – Vince Tinnerello
In the Hilton, he made me have one with them.

[00:04:59.310] – Karl Palachuk
Loved it.

[00:05:00.140] – Vince Tinnerello
And I loved it. It was delicious.

[00:05:04.750] – Karl Palachuk
Vince is my example of a great customer service person. He got his training in the Marriott organization. And when you sit in the lobby, he can tell you things that are going on that you would never notice in a thousand years.

[00:05:21.430] – Vince Tinnerello
A blessing and a curse that worked in the hotel business for 13 years. Many travel now, so I know what to look for.

[00:05:28.810] – Amy Babinchak
Yes, I’ve noticed that you also have very high expectations where the rest of us are just kind of like the hotel.

[00:05:35.390] – Vince Tinnerello
Yes.

[00:05:38.870] – Vince Tinnerello
I do have higher expectations for what to me should just be common sense. There’s a couple of things. There’s one thing in the restaurant business, having worked in restaurants for years to stop asking me if I’m working on it. Are you still working on that? I’m not a chipmunk. Ask me if I’m still enjoying my dinner. Are you still enjoying your dinner? Right. Don’t say just one. Yeah, I’m a loser. I have no friends. I’m just one tonight at dinner.

[00:06:06.620]
Right.

[00:06:07.110] – Vince Tinnerello
Don’t do those things. I could give you a whole list of things of like do’s and don’ts.

[00:06:14.210] – Karl Palachuk
I may interview you for a book. All right. We have over 50 people, Amy. Why don’t we kick it off?

[00:06:20.050] – Amy Babinchak
Why don’t we kick it off? All right. Well, thank you all for showing up for our very first membership meeting of this great new organization. I am so excited that we finally have an organization that can represent us as MSPs out in the world and have a voice for ourselves because there’s a lot of things that are happening out there that we have no unified voice on, and it is going to cause us big problems in the near future if we can’t get our act together. So my high goals for this organization is that we do get our act together. We have a more professional industry and that we have a unified voice to go forth into the world and make ourselves known for what we actually do as opposed to what they might assume that we do, which is never a good thing. So right now, I am pleased to introduce you to somebody you might already know, but he is a very important man, Karl Palachuk. He has been appointed the executive director of this organization. And truth be told, it was mainly Karl’s idea that we launched this organization. So it’s only fitting that he is our first executive director.

[00:07:39.020] – Amy Babinchak
So please welcome Karl.

[00:07:42.470] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for being here. Just a note, this meeting is being recorded, and it will be posted. So if you don’t want your face or your voice to be recorded, then you need to mute or hide yourself. Just so you know, we respect whatever you choose to do. Everybody joins muted if you want to chat, we will have the chat open the whole time. And Kara is diligently monitoring that. I want to make sure everybody knows that we are doing a lot of work. And so part of what we wanted to do with this meeting is just let you know that we’re not doing nothing. A lot of the work that has gone on has been outside of the public view just because it takes a huge amount of effort to get something like this going. And we go back and forth with the analogy, but it’s sort of like getting the train moving. It takes a whole lot of people. So we have a board of directors and Amy is going to introduce them. We have several committees, and we actually have a committee to help us figure out which committee we should create next.

[00:08:56.330] – Karl Palachuk
Many of you have volunteered, and today you’re going to meet some of the people that you can contact. And we are continuing to improve our processes for communication and posting up information. So I want to just give you a sense of what we’ve been up to. The committees have been meeting mostly every week. There are people on this call, and I mentioned earlier, Amy and Heather, there are several people on this call that go to two or three meetings a week and sometimes more for this organization. And so there’s a huge amount of effort going out. And the board has just literally just jumped in with both feet and is meeting every week. And that can’t continue forever. But we absolutely are blessed to have so many people with so much talent. And so we’ll have more on the agenda for today. The agenda is posted in the chat, but with that, let me introduce you to the President of our board of directors, Amy Babinchak, who is, in addition to being a very long time friend of mine, is one of the most talented and successful managed service providers in the world. She’s Microsoft MVP for, I don’t know, 70 years, something like that.

[00:10:27.920] – Karl Palachuk
And Amy and I are a good combo because we do everything exactly the opposite. In one board meeting, Larry Mandelberg was going down the list of things that could be considered a profession. At the same time. Amy said it’s all of those, and I said it’s none of those okay, now you understand where we come from. It is that difference of opinion and different approaches that brings power to this group. And it’s okay to disagree with people as long as we do it respectfully. So with that, Amy, welcome and thank you for your service.

[00:11:06.650] – Amy Babinchak
Thank you. Karl the key thing about Karl and I’ve teased Karl for years that I disagree with everything he says. But the thing is we appreciate that there are many ways to be successful in this industry. And so I think it’s important to recognize that all of our membership, too, is not going to be exactly like the other. It would be a shame if to create just a whole March of the Clones. We want everybody to be successful in their own way, but have our unifying force be that we are all in the same profession together. So what I’d like to do now is to actually introduce you to who our board members are. Now, these board members were all appointed. We will have elections later in the year. When Karl said that this is a lot of work because what we are doing is setting up the infrastructure for a truly national organization. So there’s a lot of stuff to do to make that happen. So here are the folks on the board that are getting that underway. Chris Barber. Chris is the owner and self proclaimed chief nerd at Cheaper Than a Geek. They’re an MSP that is about to celebrate 22 years in business just out of DC and Baltimore and they specialize in the smaller side of the SMB space.

[00:12:26.810] – Amy Babinchak
Rayanne Buchianico is the owner of ABC Solutions and MSP accounting Expert. She’s also a PSA consultant and podcaster and M Ana expert and author, instructor and speaker. And she has won awards for her working community involvement from every organization that matters in our industry. Jeff Grenier is an expert in MHP operations and service delivery. He’s working in It for 19 years. Owning and operating MSP for 15 of those years. Has a vast knowledge of the industry and client support. Heather Johnson is the cofounder and CEO of Gozynta. She’s created successful marketing, sales and support Department in her first three years there and prior to coming to Gazette, she was an HR director and was the lead organizer for two events at the White House. Larry Mandelberg owns Mandelburg Consulting, is a fifth generation owner with a total of 13 businesses under his belt. That’s impressive. Larry. Larry mentors SMB leadership teams. His book Businesses Don’t Fail, They Commit Suicide explains why Businesses fail with his partner Nancy of 14 years. Larry has a Drexel MBA and serves as Board Chairman for Innovative Education Management. Robert Patterson recently joined our board. He is the Director of Sales and Marketing at Progressive Computing.

[00:13:57.740] – Amy Babinchak
He’s a great community guy out of New York, has been in our channel for 18 years and he is the founder of the New York Small Business server group that’s been running for many years now. Those are our board members, and these folks are extremely talented and extremely hardworking. I’m really glad to have them in our organization. So, Karl, I’m going to turn it back to you, and you can see on the agenda that we have a poll coming up.

[00:14:32.430] – Karl Palachuk
There we go. I have to unmute myself. Carol, will you launch the poll, please? So we want to know we have a few polls, and the first one is, what’s the most important thing that we can do for you? This association we started with some specific goals and things that we wanted to set up, but we want to make sure that there isn’t something else that you need that we can provide. And if you choose other, just throw it in the chat. And while that’s up, let me talk a bit about some things that are going on. So very soon we’re going to be making some big changes to the website, which will include posting up minutes from the meetings. And that’s basically going to be a resource in case people are interested. We do post up these meeting recordings. One of the committees is working on. The formation committee is working on sort of figuring out when we can set up practical elections. Speculation right now is it will probably be in September of 2022. And the way that our charter, I guess, is written is that the people serve on aboard until the next election.

[00:16:10.300] – Karl Palachuk
And so the people who we have now have been appointed, basically what we do with committees, what we have done to get things started is to try to find somebody to be a committee chair and then encourage them to go get additional people. We do need some more committee members specifically for finance. And we don’t need people who are like financial Wizards. We need people who are willing to say, I will look and help put together a profit and loss, help put together a budget of what we think we can spend money on. Some of that money needs to come from additional resources. So we have membership, which the board set at $100. And I hope everyone here is a member, a paid member. But if you’re not, I encourage you to go and convert to a paid membership on the site. And then one of the people that works for me has been contacting people and getting in the letters of rack and so forth so that you can become a full fledged paid member. To sit on a board or to vote in the elections, you have to be a paid member. So we want to make sure people have some stake in this.

[00:17:30.430] – Karl Palachuk
The board has, I mentioned, been meeting weekly, and it has been quite a struggle for some people. And I completely acknowledge that we’re adding an hour or sometimes two to people’s schedules. And that’s difficult. Eventually there’ll be a little less frequent. But the board has also taken on the chore of trying to figure out we want to come up with the vision, mission and value statements that really reflect what we want to do here. And sometimes we get pretty nitpicky about the meaning of this word and that word. But it matters in the long run because we don’t want a mission statement that gets printed out and put into a drawer and never seen again. We want a mission statement that people can look at and say, that is exactly what this industry needs to do. That’s where we need to go. And so it’s a fair amount of hard work on that front. And I think we could probably end the poll at this point and show the results. So the legislative advocacy is clearly something that needs to be done. And just yesterday, Sisa put out some more guidelines for responding to cyber securityecurity incidents, and they put out a couple of different playbooks.

[00:19:08.550] – Karl Palachuk
So it’s just another example. The people on Facebook and Reddit who say, I don’t see any legislation, I don’t know what you’re talking about. It is absolutely coming. And in some ways, it’s almost as if we may be a little bit late to the game, but we need to do that second in the poll makes perfect sense, elevate the standards of ethics across our profession, that is huge. And the education and certification piece, now the talking points. I know that seems so not a lot of people saw that as a super high priority. And it may be that it was your second. But part of what we want to do is be able to give you resources so that when there’s a news story, the next time there’s an incident that hits the media, we want to make sure that you are all empowered to have some talking points to literally say, well, here’s why people would outsource their it. Here’s why you would use these powerful tools. Here’s why you would do this. And eventually, if we have the money, I would love to see us produce some video and audio so that your local reporter can download that, make a story, and contact you for the seven second sound bite from the local It service provider who is actually serving that community.

[00:20:35.430] – Karl Palachuk
And if we can do that with a fair amount of consistency, then the voice of the small It service provider will be heard. I love Microsoft, don’t get me wrong, but Microsoft has their voice. They can be in any discussion they want to be in. And the same with Dell and HP and intel and everybody else, as well as the really big managed service providers. If you got big money, then you have a voice. Well, most of us, we have just enough money to feed our family and guarantee our retirement and a handful of people own Tesla. But we don’t have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying so it’s a step. One of the things that the board decided early on is that they want to make sure that this is a bottom up organization. So there’s a little irony in that. You start by appointing people and then creating a more Democratic process. But as Eric put in the chat, that’s the way it goes. Heather Johnson was appointed as the liaison between the board of directors and the committee. So if the board says, hey, we want to standardize on this, she makes sure that community chairs get that information.

[00:22:01.290] – Karl Palachuk
Community chairs then send requests to the board through her. And it’s just a way for those things to move. So I want to thank Heather for that. And one of the reasons we see each other all the time is that we seem to always be in meetings, sometimes two in the same day. So that’s a huge thing. Another decision that the board made is that there is one vote per company. So if you have an organization and you have, let’s say, ten employees, we would love all of those employees to be members, but only one would need to be a paid member and have a vote. So what we don’t want, again, is for large organizations to come in and say we’re going to register 50 people and we’re going to take 50 votes and we’re going to take over this organization. That was never our intention. And the board has sort of solidified that their goal is that it’s one vote per company. And that way one of the first things that people said online was that the big companies are just going to dominate. And I think that simple move takes care of that.

[00:23:26.490] – Karl Palachuk
Of course, we’re happy to discuss that as well. The board did adopt the bylaws for the organization, and if those are not yet on the website, they will be soon again. We have a resources section that we’re building, so it will show up eventually. All right. And with that, I’ll turn it back to Amy. But let’s go ahead and launch the poll. I’ll stop this. I’m going to not click anything. I’m going to let Kara do her job and let’s launch the poll on communications. Amy, take it away.

[00:24:17.730] – Amy Babinchak
All right. Thanks, Karl, for that. It was a really big, important thing for me that this be a grassroots organization and that we truly represent the small MSPs and that we don’t get taken over by vendors, even though that we may need their assistance in helping our organization. We want this to be led by the committees and what is actually needed in our community rather than to have something dictated out to us. I don’t know if you all saw the message going around from Google asking you to sign up for their new group so that they can represent our community. I do not trust Google or Microsoft or Accenture or any of these giant corporations to truly represent what we are as MSPs. And we’ve been doing a lot of work in the committees to make sure that that happens. And it’s really, I think, a critical component and something that makes us different than other organizations that are out there today. So let me introduce you to our committee chairs. We have a formation committee which is chaired by Brett Erickson of Paskey Technology. We’re going to allow each of the committee chairs to give a couple of minutes feel on what it is that they’re working on.

[00:25:46.970] – Amy Babinchak
So if we can get Brett up and unmute it to talk about his community for a moment.

[00:25:54.570]
Great.

[00:25:55.770] – Bret Erickson
Thanks, Amy. Everybody hear me? Okay?

[00:25:57.970] – Amy Babinchak
Yes.

[00:25:58.810]
Okay.

[00:25:59.220] – Bret Erickson
Awesome. Hey, Vince, that sounds like quite a journey. We’re very happy that you made it through okay.

[00:26:06.630]
Yes.

[00:26:07.030] – Bret Erickson
So I’m Bret Erickson. I’m the chair of the formation committee. I own Passkey Technology up in Minnesota. Actually, Minneapolis, we’re a first ring suburb, Golden Valley, and we’re a small ten person MSP been around since 91, and I’m very happy to be involved in this organization. Our industry’s reputation is very important to all of us, and I’m guessing we’re all believers that a rising tide lifts all boats. So right off the bat, I’d love to acknowledge the other regulars that are committee meetings, Diana Giles of Skyline It Management from Oklahoma, Jason Thomas of JTAG Solutions from Illinois, and David Yates of Geeks, R US from Florida. We’re also usually joined by board members Heather Johnson of Gozynta and Karl, and then sometimes Amy peaks on us as well. So what does the formation committee do and what are we up to? We’ve been meeting weekly, actually, mostly because there’s a lot of work to do to get the right committees in place. It’s a critical piece of getting this organization launched. So quite simply, the formation committee we’re working on what kind of committees the organization needs and in what priority order we need to create them.

[00:27:21.450] – Bret Erickson
So we basically come up with a scope and some guidelines off of an idea for a committee we need, and then we send that off to the board as recommendations. So to date, we have formed, obviously, the formation committee, the legislative committee, finance committee, marketing committee, and most likely next is a membership committee. So we also define the committee’s general rules, guidelines, and standards for the committees and then send them off to the board has recommendations and also involved in recommending the election details and process and timing and get those off to the board. So eventually we see ourselves after committees are formed as migrating or moving from a formation committee to a governance committee. And then I’m glad Karl touched on this when referencing submitting to the board, and we send this off to the board for approval. Karl does talk a lot in our meetings about the board’s preference for this to be a bottom up organization and committees having a large say in direction. So great segue to volunteering to be on a committee. What bottom up means for you is that you can have a lot of influence in the success of this organization.

[00:28:41.730] – Bret Erickson
And I will defer to Amy Karl and crew on how to best volunteer. So there’s plenty of opportunity and we would love to help. And that’s all I got unless we have questions.

[00:28:52.650] – Amy Babinchak
Great. Thank you, Brett. Yeah. It should also be noted that one of the additional decisions that we made as a board is that no board member could be a chair of the committee. So we’re really taking this bottom up thing quite seriously. And the formation committee is arguably the most important committee that we have right now. They are designing this organization. So we do need to get involved. We need you to get involved. We want as many members involved in our committees as we can possibly get. So now let me introduce you to the Legislative Committee and tell you what they’re all Dennis Wilson is the chair of that committee of DWP Information Architects out in California. And I’m going to let Dennis tell you all about what the Legislative Committee has been involved in.

[00:29:46.350] – Denis Wilson
Thank you. Amy, can you hear me?

[00:29:47.800] – Amy Babinchak
Okay, I can hear you. Great, great.

[00:29:50.850] – Denis Wilson
I really do appreciate the opportunity to outline the real work that the Legislative Committee has achieved in the last several weeks. Currently, we have the following folks on the committee Besides myself, we have the vice chair and Secretary of the committee, Keith Nelson, who said Vista Solutions in Southern California. We have Heather Johnson as the board liaison, Amy Babinchak, as I don’t know, whoever she does at the time. Karl, Paul, Chuck, of course, drops in most of the time. Brett Erickson that you all just met from Passky Technologies in Minnesota and Ted Geisler of Cyprus Consulting Group in Illinois. So we’ve got basically six of us currently. However, we could use a few more active community members and you can volunteer on the NSITSP website or just give me a call and we’ll work it out. The purpose of the Legislative Committee is to put together resources needed for our service provider members to actively knowledgeably participate in conversations with state legislators all over the US. Our goals currently are for we need to get to know who the state legislators are in the legislative committees that are driving or will drive the regulation and laws that will affect the It service providers.

[00:31:26.850] – Denis Wilson
Second is to provide educational materials to help these state legislators understand the background and the issues that are or will affect these regulations and laws. Third, to provide educational materials to help the Society members understand how to present and how to discuss the educational materials with the state legislators and what are the key points that we need to promote. And fourth, to provide assistance to the Society members to help them achieve a knowledgeable and respected position. Visa Visa The state legislators. And so far, what we’ve been able to do is we’ve established a prioritized list of goals and objectives to quickly achieve our goals so that the Society members have the tools to use in discussions with their state legislators. We’ve established a weekly schedule for the work and a procedure that the committee members are comfortable with. We’ve created a fact document that doesn’t describe who, what and why our It service providers, one of the key legislative key constituents and what their concerns are. We should have that completed by next week. Next, we created in the process of creating a guideline or an outline of the typical state legislature, a glossary of key terms who are the key players in the state, what committees should be targeted, and we should have that started next week.

[00:33:13.610] – Denis Wilson
And then we expect that after that, we will have created a battle card and a description of the personas involved in those discussions so that the Society members will understand who it is it’s playing, how it is they expect to be talked to and all that kind of stuff that we’ve gotten so used to in the sales process, when we expect to get a preview to the committee members within the next several weeks. And Additionally, we coordinate with other committees to create marketing and other types of materials. I’m very proud of this committee. We’ve started from the ground up, and we’re now actively getting our priorities knocked out. And one of the things that we are painfully aware of is that some of the legislatures and other key participants are actively working on regulations that we will have no input on. We are scrambling to try to catch up and represent the It service providers efficiently and thoroughly, and we’re going to do what we can.

[00:34:22.780] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you.

[00:34:24.530] – Amy Babinchak
Thanks, Dennis. Yeah, Dennis, in our committee, which I’m most passionately involved in this committee myself, we are focusing on building out materials that is going to empower all the members of this organization to be active in the legislation process because we’re going to need everybody. Right now, we’ve got a situation where we have politicians that have woken up to the idea of cybersecurity, and they all want to be the one that created the solution to the problem. And the legislation is coming forward fast and furious, both at the state level and the federal level. At the federal level, in the House, there were 321 bills created for cybersecurity regulations in the first half of this year. One of them has pushed forward to the Senate, which is troubling, and it has the most screwed up definition of MSP that you’ve ever seen. And if that becomes legislation, that will become the words that define who we are. And so we have to get ourselves involved really rapidly here. So we’re trying to fire up as quickly as we possibly can. So now let me introduce you to Rayne Buchanano. She is a member of the board.

[00:35:47.420] – Amy Babinchak
She is acting chair of the committee because their financing fundraising committee is brand new. And so, Rayanne Buchianico, tell us about your hopes and dreams for this committee.

[00:35:59.390] – Rayanne Buchianico
So thank you, everyone. And I’m Rayanne Buchianico and I’m currently acting chair for the finance committee. And so that’s because up until about a few minutes ago, I was the only one on the committee. So thanks to Kenneth Konos for volunteering and also Eric Anthony, who has offered to step up and help out. What we’re looking to do is raise funds for the organization so that the other committees can get out there and spend what they need to spend in order to do the jobs right. So the legislative committee and the marketing committee, they need dollars to do their jobs. And what we really want to do is start to meet now, build a budget for 2022, build a membership drive or some sort of forecasting for how many dollars we’re going to get in versus how many dollars we’re going to need to spend out. So as you might imagine, budgeting and the finances is kind of in my wheelhouse. But I cannot be the chairperson of this committee since I’m on the executive board already. But I’d like to hold it together until we can get a full fledged committee together. I will be filing the 501 application with the Internal Revenue Service before the end of this month so that we can be officially recognized as an organization and all of your dues will be tax deductible as business expenses.

[00:37:40.980] – Rayanne Buchianico
And so far, that’s all I really have for the committee. Anybody out there that wants to help us increase membership, increase some fundraising, maybe get some vendors to donate dollars to our cause, we could really use your help. So don’t be shy. Step right up and help us out.

[00:38:04.310] – Amy Babinchak
Thank you, Rayannne. Our next committee up is the marketing and communications committee, which is headed up by Tim Golden of the compliance.

[00:38:16.080] – Karl Palachuk
You guys, good afternoon, everybody. And thank you so much.

[00:38:19.140] – Tim Golden
Brett, Dennis, and Rayanne for those great introductions of your committees. And I’m glad to see that yours are really starting to take off and take foundation here. As a newly appointed marketing chair, I just dropped the membership application in Chat. We could use some more help. It would be beneficial if we could get a couple of more people as part of our team to try to bring forth the message of what we’re doing here to not only the MSP community at large, but the general overall community around making sure that we are staying up to our standards and we’re following what we want to believe in and we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing. I’m going to be brief because I don’t have a lot of members to introduce and a lot of outlines and goals yet as the newly appointed member. But, yeah, apply there. The link is in Chat. So looking forward to working with some of you here on bringing forth our great message and what we’re trying to do here with the society. Thanks, Tim Golden compliance to you guys.

[00:39:18.170] – Amy Babinchak
Thanks, Tim. Yeah, it’s not that Tim was newly appointed. It’s that the committee is brand new itself. So this was one of the first acts of the formation committee was to create this one. And it would be a great one to join because they are going to be developing not only the image of the organization, but also the standardization of how we communicate to the world what organization is about, what MSPs are about, what our industry is about. So they have a very critical role to play, and I look forward to seeing what they’re going to do. So, Karl, I’m going to turn it back over to you. And I think, Karl, we have a new poll. We can probably close that one and then get up the next poll.

[00:40:08.050] – Karl Palachuk
Did we share the results of the communications poll?

[00:40:12.050] – Amy Babinchak
There they are.

[00:40:13.250] – Karl Palachuk
Okay. So thank you very much. So semi monthly seems pretty good. I’m thinking that we will do a monthly newsletter, and then we have to figure out the frequency of meetings, stuff like this. This is a big one just because we have so many things to introduce you to. But I’m hoping to help work with Tim and his committee to figure out, like how can we have a regular cadence and so forth. So let’s go ahead and start the next poll, please. And while you’re looking at that, this is about education and what educational topics would be the most interest to you. I want to talk about several other things. One of them is and Amy, just jump in whenever you choose to. Not that I can stop you. Paid membership. So right now, paid membership, we only have one level which is paid. So there’s an unpaid level, I guess. But in terms of a paid membership, part of what the formation committee is going to look at. And maybe this will get handed off to a membership committee. Is should we have levels of membership and what would that look like? And so Canos and some others have been discussing in the chat about how many votes would make sense for an organization and so forth.

[00:42:02.270] – Karl Palachuk
We’re happy to have that discussion. And when we get to the Q and A section, obviously people are welcome to discuss that. But we also need to look at vendor memberships and what the role of vendors is. And part of that depends on the committees working together. The Finance Committee has got to figure out how much money we need. If you just pick a number out of the top of your head, do we need 50,000? Do we need 100,000? If we’re going to do lobbying and hire some administrative staff, do we need 250,000? Like, what do we need? And we don’t really have a handle on that yet. And so we have to come up with a budget and then figure out, okay, what’s the role there are several vendors have contacted me and said, what can we do? And so part of what the board has discussed is that it doesn’t have to be money. If a vendor says, we can give you a boost at our show, we can give you some marketing materials, we can help you with this or that. There’s many pieces of various budgets Besides spending money to get your logo on a website.

[00:43:17.090] – Karl Palachuk
So we’re very open to that. And several vendors have contacted me, and I’ve had a few conversations. Many of them the larger ones, anyway, are very interested in getting their logo out there. And part of what I’ve said from the start is I don’t see this as an opportunity for you to give us money and have another webinar that’s not filling a void in any way. And so I don’t see that as part of what this organization is going to do. And while we believe that the vendors are critical to this community, literally, there is no community without the vendors. Right. There’s no channel without the vendors. But this is an It service provider centric organization. And so I’m happy to have discussions and maybe at some point we will have a meeting of interested vendors to see what role they would like to play, because they come to me and say, well, they have to be give and get. So make a proposal. I’m like, okay, that’s not really very helpful. We do want to figure out exactly the kind of thing, what role that they can play to help us get our message out, to get this education out, to get in front of state legislators.

[00:44:39.880] – Karl Palachuk
One of the things that developed early on that Dennis was talking about was that as soon as we started talking to just casually talking to state legislators, the first question was, do you provide educational materials for small businesses? And we’re like, well, we don’t yet. But if that’s the first need that you have, we can make that happen. And that’s the kind of thing that vendors might be able to help with. So there’s that second topic is membership drive. So now that we have a membership committee or forming a membership committee, one of the first things that it’s going to do is to try to get people to help promote all of what we’re doing so that will evolve. And again, if people have input on what that would look like, we would love to have you involved. It will probably be the communications committee that will get that kicked off and be the public face of that. I hope you got a sense from the committee reports that there truly is an overwhelming amount of work to do. When Dennis was halfway through his thing, I felt like saying, enough already. You’re going to overwhelm people.

[00:45:57.530] – Karl Palachuk
So there’s that related to all of this is that we’ve set up several social media pages which are not intended to be the conversation area. Right. So we do have forums on our site, and the communications committee is going to have to figure out exactly which places we communicate with each other and have these public discussions. But the Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages are intended to be sort of broadcast areas where, with luck, we will have people who volunteer to track things going on in the association and let people know about those and use those as a way to get people to loop back and join us and participate, whether it’s in committees or other things, but spread the word about this association. And then, of course, we need to have some kind of fundraising. And again, that may be looping back to the vendors. It may also be from members themselves. Several of you and I’m extremely grateful several of you have donated money above and beyond the $100 cost of membership, and we absolutely appreciate that. And so that can continue. That will continue. Another topic that has come up is, what do we do about international communities?

[00:47:35.390] – Karl Palachuk
I at least saw Canadians on here. I don’t know if there’s anybody here from the UK, but we’ve had people contact us from Australia, New Zealand, a couple of places in Africa, a couple of places in Europe. It’s like people want to join this organization. And so right now we’re focused on making this happen in North America, but we will at some point this will spread a little further. If nothing else, part of what we have committed to is transparency. There’s some discussion about putting up documents for people to see what the committees are up to and so forth. We absolutely are going to do all of that. And as I said, some changes to the website are coming soon. That’ll be a place where you’ll be able to see exactly what’s going on here and ask questions and have them answered. We do have forums within the website already, and some people have used those. They’re not very active. One of the problems with having so many means of communication in the It industry is that there are 50 social media outlets, and everybody uses something different, and some people refuse to use one and some refuse to use another.

[00:49:04.350] – Karl Palachuk
I’m just like everybody else. I refuse to use them, and I refuse to and I always use other. So we have to figure out how to communicate with everybody across all of that. And finally, one of the next things that the board is going to do after they finalize the mission, vision and value statements is to come up with a solid code of ethics. I have a sample up on the site that just came out of my original nine pillars document. But the board wants to come up with something that we can say. This is a code of ethics that we stand for and ask members to post it on their websites and talk about it amongst themselves, talk about it with their clients and be held responsible. If you follow the news, some of what’s going on with Saisa is that somebody in that government organization is convinced that MSPs are regularly not doing what they are telling their clients they’re doing. They’re taking money and not delivering resources. And it is becoming like the focus of how we are going to be regulated. There is no question that that is where this is going.

[00:50:21.190] – Karl Palachuk
And part of what we can do to fight that is to say, well, wait a minute. There are a whole bunch of It service providers who do exactly what they say they’re going to do, who document what they’re doing, who have a transparent system, who let clients have access to their own password and their own data. But we need to make sure that we’re visible about that and we hold each other accountable. So that’s also a piece of where this goes.

[00:50:51.570] – Amy Babinchak
One of the really eye opening things was a recent document for that CISA put out as a guidance to businesses. And in there they had a checklist of things that you can do to protect yourself from your MSP. That’s how low the reputation of our industry has become. They have reputable organizations like that, putting out those sorts of materials that does not speak well for our industry. And we all know that we’ve had trouble distinguishing ourselves or being seen as distinct from the inscrutable people that are in our industry. We all know them and we have derogatory names for them, but we know that they’re out there and they are not being seen as different from those of us that are responsible. So that is an important thing that we need to address. And that is really part of what the code of ethics. And honestly, this whole list of things that is in the education poll that’s open now, that’s what that’s all about.

[00:51:59.110]
Yeah.

[00:51:59.460] – Karl Palachuk
It’s interesting. In the board discussion about mission, we go back and forth on, you know, the word professional and what that means. And while the word professional isn’t a good fit for a mission statement, we all sort of have some sense of what we think that means. And I think we have an amazing amount of agreement on it. It’s just a matter of, okay, so turn that into actions, turn that into visible activities that another person can see. What does that look like? Again, I use the word transparency. Part of what we want to do and we’re working on is to make this as transparent as possible. And I’m meeting with Kara tomorrow or Friday about several things, but one of them is I want to make sure that we know exactly what we’re doing on the website. And probably within a week we will have the minutes all up for all the meetings from now on. And then it’s a matter of just making sure those processes are in place. But everything takes time. And on one hand, I am a little frustrated that this thing doesn’t move at the speed of light. On the other hand, we have done amazing amount of work because we’ve only existed for three months.

[00:53:22.370] – Ted Giesler
All right.

[00:53:23.080] – Karl Palachuk
Anything else? Let’s go ahead and end that poll and share the results. Anything else we need to cover before we open it for Q and A?

[00:53:31.040]
Amy?

[00:53:32.450] – Amy Babinchak
No, I think that we’ve covered it and we did it in the amount of time that we wanted to, which is awesome. So what we plan to do for the next 30 minutes is to leave it open for Q and A to really hear from you guys what you’re thinking about this space and our role and accomplishments and how you can help us move this organization forward. So I think at this point, we’ll take stuff out of the chat and just have a conversation before people start leaving in droves, which I hope you won’t. Thank you for attending this first meeting as well. I think we really wanted to introduce you to the organization and appreciate that you have early jumped on and said, yes, I want to be part of this and that you’re here today. That really means a lot. And it is good to see that. I think that we’re on the right track and as a community, we know what we need to do. We just have to get busy and do it.

[00:54:40.230] – Karl Palachuk
All right. With that, I’m trying to figure out how do I remove all the pins. I guess if everybody goes to the Gallery view, then we get rid of all of the spotlights.

[00:54:49.350] – Amy Babinchak
Did we share the results for the education poll yet? Let me do that. There we go. Yeah. So the compliance and regulation piece seems to be the main thing that we need to educate on legal, insurance and risk management. That is a closely related topic in my mind. Very good to see that.

[00:55:20.190] – Ted Giesler
Very cool.

[00:55:23.130] – Amy Babinchak
All right.

[00:55:27.970] – Karl Palachuk
I guess we’re done right with the polls.

[00:55:30.290] – Amy Babinchak
We’re done with the polls. So let’s take a look at what’s in the chat, which has been very active, which I love. I love to see people participating.

[00:55:41.950] – Karl Palachuk
For future meetings. In case you guys don’t know it, you can go into your settings for Zoom and set it to be seven by seven. So I have 49 of you on the screen instead of 25, so you’re slightly smaller, but I see more of you. So who wants to talk about what? Is there anything we missed that you want to chat about?

[00:56:06.230] – Amy Babinchak
Well, if we look in the chat, Steven Faulkner says he doesn’t trust Google or the others either. And I think that’s safe to say. I hate that when an issue comes up that the legislators, if they don’t know anybody they’ll be like, hey, we’re talking about this cybersecurity stuff. Let’s get Microsoft on the line. It just doesn’t fit in with small business. They’re not going to have the same reality scope that we have. So we need to make sure that they’re contacting the right people. And the only way to do that is to tell them, hey, when you have this kind of thing coming up and you need some import or you need help on developing that legislation, or you need to know what the definitions of this or that are, please don’t Google it literally or figuratively. Come and ask us.

[00:57:01.710] – Karl Palachuk
Well, part of my job as the executive director is to make sure that that website, when people Google the definition of something, we’re on it. I would love to have a whole strategy around that just because we need to be the voice of what these things are for small business. Ultimately, that is one of the goals.

[00:57:26.610] – Peter Frasco
I think one of the things that I’d like to get out, I’m a relatively new guy in this realm, in the MSSP type realm, but 30 years of experience in the military, then Silicon Valley, then big corporate powerhouses, relatively new been doing this about nine months. And one of the things that’s hard is getting mastermind groups together. I think that we should be able to facilitate, facilitate that some from this group of professionals who are all in the same industry and want to do this ethically well.

[00:58:11.900] – Karl Palachuk
There are many mastermind groups. I think if we did something, it would really need to be very focused on the specific topics we cover in terms of general, like success, mastermind groups. There are dozens. There’s probably 20 people on here who could share the groups that they’re in. I know many people have them.

[00:58:40.030] – Peter Frasco
Yeah, I get that they’re all over the place. I’m talking about sharing experiences in the group as well, not necessarily developing a specific mastermind group by participating in one that’s kind of general business owners, but I use that term kind of broadly as a think tank for certain things and lessons learned well.

[00:59:06.770] – Karl Palachuk
Certainly discussing how we approach problems and how we respond to this legislature or that news media or whatever, I don’t know about anybody else. I’ve mentioned this several times, and they haven’t really had a lot of feedback, but I am very frustrated about how the news media cover these cybersecurity incidents without any knowledge, just waving their hand. Well, clearly they’re not very good at what they do. It’s like, clearly you’re not very informed about this topic.

[00:59:41.030] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, we can all be really good at what we do and still have one of our clients experience a cyber security incident. And I do think it’s important that they know that and that they don’t necessarily immediately assume that that’s a black Mark on our industry. There are a huge number now of international crime organizations that are developed just to thwart the good work that we’re trying to do. So we as small businesses are ourselves up against overwhelming force. And I think it would be better for us if it were put out that way. We are out there doing everything that we can do to keep our clients safe, but sometimes bad things are going to happen. One thing I wanted to call out in the chat is there was a bit of discussion about the one vote policy and the paid membership thing. I see that kind of a cool discussion. Kenneth brought it up and then there was a little back and forth and says he was kind of thinking out loud and you can sort of see the value. The thing about we don’t want large organizations to take advantage of smaller organizations to have it become a lopsided thing.

[01:01:13.730] – Amy Babinchak
If you have been in this industry for a while, you’ve seen that happen in other organizations in our industry where either the vendors end up being the leading voice or the larger MSPs end up being the larger voice. And actually, in our industry, most MSPs are small. And when I say MSP, I’m encompassing it, service provider, VAR, MSSP, whatever you want to call yourself, the organizations out there serving the community. We’re in general, all types of consulting firms and consulting firms are mostly small in any industry you go to. And so we want to make sure that the small firms have just as much a voice because they’re just as important to their customers as the big firms are. And that is a key component of who we are and who I think we’re going to be going into the future.

[01:02:14.710] – Karl Palachuk
Larry, you had a comment. You’re muted Larry, you’re muted.

[01:02:29.390] – Larry Mandelberg
The education poll had business operations low. It wasn’t one of the top two. I don’t think it was at the bottom, but it was low. And I’m just curious how many of you on this call are satisfied with your level of sales, profitability and organizational size. This kind of fits in with what Amy was talking about. There are a lot of business people who don’t want to have a large business. They want to have a small, intimate organization. And I’m just wondering if that low level of importance of business operations education is a reflection of your success or of the lack of desire to grow and become a larger organization or something else. Does anybody have any comments on that?

[01:03:27.350] – Karl Palachuk
I have to say my impression is that there’s plenty of that education provided by me, Amy, Eric, Simpson, many others. Right. And that this organization doesn’t really fill a void by providing that specific kind of education. That’s my suspicion. Patrick said I have organizations and partners for that subject. I didn’t mean to cut off conversation, but no thanks.

[01:04:05.440] – Larry Mandelberg
Like I said, we’re for some other reason. I appreciate the insight.

[01:04:10.450] – Karl Palachuk
So what do folks think about the one vote per organization.

[01:04:19.570] – Eric Hanson
That’S perfectly reasonable, not unusual in an organization like that or like this, then I have another vein we can go off on.

[01:04:38.350] – Karl Palachuk
We’re totally ready.

[01:04:44.990] – Vince Gerasolo
I’d like to hear the reasons that you would want more than one vote per organization that was advocated, because I personally think one vote for organization makes the most sense. It’s the business owners that have the stake in this whole thing, not necessarily the employees, but the employees are part of the industry and they should have a voice to some degree. I’m just curious. Again, I’m for the one vote per organization, but what is the value of having more than one vote per organization? Is there an argument there?

[01:05:22.710] – Eric Hanson
Yeah. I haven’t seen anything in the chat where anybody said any different. They thought that, well.

[01:05:32.500] – Karl Palachuk
One person had said, and I’m not going to scroll up and try to find it, but that if you got two partners who disagree on something, who gets the vote. And I guess I sort of feel like you should never have only two partners. You should have three partners, and then you get to decide definitely no.

[01:05:54.900] – Vince Gerasolo
50 50 on partnerships.

[01:05:56.630] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. Somebody should be 51%.

[01:06:00.070] – Eric Hanson
But I think that’s an internal organizational thing to figure out. You guys have one vote to figure out what it needs to be.

[01:06:07.460] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. So Larry says some large organizations might want one vote for each Department, and that’s exactly what we don’t want. I think.

[01:06:17.410] – Kenneth Iconos
There’s value in recognizing that a lot of It programs get their start working for other firms.

[01:06:27.630]
Right.

[01:06:28.430] – Kenneth Iconos
That’s how I got started. 20. Let’s not say how many years ago, too many years ago.

[01:06:34.870] – Karl Palachuk
Years ago.

[01:06:38.210] – Kenneth Iconos
Allowing those individuals to grow in their own way, in their own time and still have a voice in the industry that they plan on making a career, being part of those decisions and discussions. And I think is key. And I think having the option if you choose to. And that’s kind of where I was going later in the chat about maybe an entity based membership that doesn’t necessarily afford additional voting rights, but maybe allows the other company members to be part of committees and have a more active role than that of the designated speaker for that entity within our organization.

[01:07:28.080] – Karl Palachuk
So that’s a great idea.

[01:07:31.470] – Kenneth Iconos
But I do committee with one vote per organization because we need to make sure that we’re focused on the present here and now and making the impact that we need to make in order to continue succeeding.

[01:07:48.170] – Karl Palachuk
I think for things like elections, it would still be one vote per organization, but the membership committee might come up with some clever way of saying that your employees can serve on committees. But again, we’ve got to figure out how to make sure that this doesn’t become 100 employee organizations dominating the one employee or five employee organizations.

[01:08:15.450] – Kenneth Iconos
I know somebody mentioned pay for play, but in these early stages, I think it may be worth having a longer conversation from a finance perspective, in order to fund all of the things that we know we need to address while we vet some of the vendors that we want to associate ourselves with that vendor reputation. I know that we don’t want to be a vendor forward organization and we shouldn’t be, but it also affords us more credibility by developing partnerships with well established enterprise level organizations that are world renowned and their security practices seek less credibility.

[01:09:02.850] – Karl Palachuk
Well, it’s the chicken and the egg. At some point I would like this organization to have the membership and the stature so that a Microsoft comes to us and says, hey, for whatever $100,000, we want to be able to say that we support your organization or whatever. They get their logo on our site and we get their logo, they get our logo. Basically. Maybe that’s all they need. But if we have enough status, all those organizations will come and say, hey, we want to support you, we want to support professionalism in this industry.

[01:09:44.530] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, we really have no desire for the vendors to advertise in the organization. That’s not where about want to flip side. We are not going to promote them and we are not going to rank them. Why they should want to participate in supporting an organization like ours is because a more professional industry is better for them too. I think the best ones out there do recognize that, that they are participating in some role, and that’s why they offer free education programs and free marketing materials. It’s not only just that, not only just that they want to make money from you, it’s that they want to make sure that it’s they’re working with partners that are going to represent their product and their industry in general in the right way. It’s not good for them if there’s people that aren’t behaving in a professional manner that are out there wagging their business name around either. So I think we have a good selling point there. That may be enough.

[01:11:00.850] – Karl Palachuk
I agree. Ed, did you have a comment? See, your hand is up and you’re muted.

[01:11:10.140] – Ed
Okay, yeah, I just want to comment on the education survey. The top two choices. I think it may make sense to pretty much integrate into the operation area because I would say the people should have the other topics, compliance and things like that, insurance built into their standard operations. So that will be part of it, not an afterthought type of thing. So I think that the standards of practice of how you operate your company and how you set it up, how you support your customers should be part of those things. To contract all these registrations and rules that coming down the pipe should be the whole thing as an integrated process.

[01:12:05.510] – Amy Babinchak
I think that’s part of what we hope to accomplish with the ethics statements that we can reach some kind of cohesive message of this. If you’re not adhering to these ethics, if you’re not willing to put these out and say this is who we are, then that may be an indication that you are not necessarily acting as a professional in your industry.

[01:12:37.410] – Karl Palachuk
Right, Rob?

[01:12:40.950] – Rob Eberhardt
Yeah, just about the one vote per organization, practically speaking. I guess I just comment it would be a heck of a lot easier to enforce one vote per membership than it would be for organization. You’re going to have some people who may feel sneaky and sign up twice with multiple organization names playing Devil’s advocate on it a little bit. But if someone wants more votes, they’re going to get more votes.

[01:13:17.410] – Karl Palachuk
Well, we’ll have to address that problem if it shows up. What we have done so far, just so you know, is that if you sign up and pay, let’s just assume you’re the owner and then three of your employees sign up and pay. We rebate their money and put them as just basic membership so they can see things and so forth. But they don’t get to vote. They don’t get to sit on committees.

[01:13:50.890] – Rob Eberhardt
I’m just saying there will be some effort to make sure that happens that way. I’m not saying the effort is not worth it. It’s absolutely worth it.

[01:13:59.970] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah. There will be some effort around that. And to me, that falls into the category of not making a policy based on an exception. We’ll have to deal with those exceptions. But in the rule, I think we can have an overall thing, and it is something that we know we’re going to have to keep an eye out for. So in the chat, there’s discussion about badges, membership logos, and that kind of thing that we could all display on our websites and signatures and such. And yes, that’s going to be on the way. That is, you may have noticed that we have a logo. I don’t think it’s as bad as Karl thinks it is. I thought he did an okay job developing it, but we will get a more professional logo. It will be badge. It will be something that you can probably display as a member of the organization and begin to use that in your marketing materials to help differentiate you.

[01:15:07.230] – Karl Palachuk
I intentionally didn’t go to a graphics person and say design a logo for us because I wanted to have that be a thing that evolved from the organization. So I created something that I consider a placeholder. But I really would love to have this be something where paid members are allowed to and are eager to put the code of ethics on their website, with the logo, in their email signature, and on their website and talk to their clients. In fact, part of your big bundle that you give prospective clients is a page that says, here’s our code of ethics, and we’re a supporting member of the National Society of It Service Providers. And here’s why. It really will differentiate you from the people who are just selling licenses and walking away from clients and not providing the services that they’ve been paid for.

[01:16:15.830] – Amy Babinchak
Earlier, I think I was remiss in not properly introducing Heather Johnson, who’s on our board. I did introduce her as a board member, but I did not really introduce her as the important role that she’s playing on our board as liaison to the committees. So part of our ground up grassroots, if you will, organization here is that the committees are the power center, and they will funnel things that they need the board to take action on through Heather and Heather’s expertise in her previous life before it goes into is in HR and organizational problem resolution. And so she is the perfect person to do that job, and we’re very lucky to have her. So thank you, Heather, for taking that on your rock.

[01:17:10.440] – Heather Johnson
Thank you.

[01:17:11.320] – Rayanne Buchianico
Thank you.

[01:17:11.700] – Heather Johnson
And it’s funny, I started going to some of those committee meetings, and everybody should sign up for a committee after I say this, if you haven’t already. I was only supposed to kind of attend for the first five or ten minutes and just kind of see what the temperature is. And I love these committees and they are really doing things and they know what they’re doing and they’re respectful to each other and each other’s opinions. And it’s just so exciting that now it’s like, when are other people meeting? I want to be on all of these committees because they are fun. They are actually fun and they’re doing amazing things. And I’m learning so much from them, and I hope I contribute as well. So I’m thrilled that my fellow board members put me in this position because I’m having a great time. Lots of hours, but fun hours. So everyone should be in a committee because let’s do great things together, right?

[01:18:08.870] – Amy Babinchak
Yes, absolutely. On your second page of your agenda that we handed out at the beginning, if you don’t see it, scroll away up in the chat at the top on that second page is a link to the social media locations that we have set up. They are all brand new, so they’re waiting to be populated. So please jump out there and do that. And some of you may also know of the Facebook group that I run, which is called MSP Legislation and Regulation. It is a group off of third tiers. So if you search for third tiers page and list groups, you can join it over there. We have about I think we’re like two people, maybe short of 700 over there that are talking about those topics. So although not an official part of this group, I think we did play a little bit of a push to make this group form and happen. So you can join us over there for discussion on that particular topic.

[01:19:14.250] – Karl Palachuk
Also, I’ll be posting up some graphics to those places so that you can grab those graphics and share them on your social media. We have to create one square one for Instagram, but everything else is the standard wide format. And so even though there’s literally one Pixel difference between what Facebook wants and what LinkedIn wants, it’s like, okay, whatever you guys figured out. So we have one graphic for everything. Steve asked the question, I think it was, Steve, about whether we might consider having an annual get together. Well, you know, when the Pandemic is over and we have enough money to put on an event because a national conference is a boatload of money and it takes massive amounts of coordination. But if we get the right person who has some skills around putting on something like that, I do four hour events. I do eight hour events. After seeing what goes into national conferences, I wouldn’t take that on without a staff member who knew what the hell they were doing. But that is also a thing that it would be easy to engage vendors. We just need to make sure that it stays. It service provider centric and the vendors are there to support and not dominate because again, we’ve all seen many organizations that are just gobbled up by the vendors who want to support them.

[01:21:06.010] – Karl Palachuk
So Ken, did you have a comment or question.

[01:21:11.090] – Kenneth Iconos
More of a suggestion on the get together? Because I’m a huge proponent of that from a community perspective, but also from getting to like, getting to know the people that you’re working with on such big things. Maybe we could conduct a poll just initially on conferences, events that our membership base largely attends in Mass already, like Ignite is something that I go to every year or was before the Pandemic, and we could easily tack on to one of those events and just do something informal to start up with. Funding is obviously a huge issue when it comes to these annual get togethers. So standing on our own 2ft I think it’ll be a bit before we can get there financially. However, having tickets for sale to attend the in person event is a great way to help offset that cost. Another way is to in source some of that. I’ve got contacts for venues where we can host large groups of people that has connectivity that wouldn’t charge a high rate if a rate at all. Other folks may have family connections and hotels and gosh no spot. So I think that a larger conversation around that is something that would definitely fit easily within the committee.

[01:22:42.350] – Karl Palachuk
So I do like the idea of sort of piggybacking on a bigger event because they will already have set aside meeting rooms and space and they can add two days or one day to the conference or whatever. But it’s almost like how some organizations like, oh, we’re going to go to Florida one year and then we’re going to go to California and then we’re going to go to Seattle and then we’re going to go to Chicago, New York. Right. You got to move it around. I would not want us to necessarily be sponsored by the same very large vendor organization every year. Right. And be seen as because ultimately that’s what they would want. If they would want us to be associated only with them and not with their competition.

[01:23:23.970] – Kenneth Iconos
I would say more of an informal association. So if a large portion of our base goes to Ignite every year, just because that’s off the top of my head, it wouldn’t have to be advertised with Microsoft stuff. And we’d be hosting a session. Sure, we could host a session. Sure, we could associate with them if we chose to at the time. But there’s nothing that prevents us from getting together outside the context of Ignite while at Ignite.

[01:23:54.570] – Karl Palachuk
That’s true. That is absolutely true. And another thing which we didn’t really talk about here specifically is that eventually the Communications Committee is going to want to gather up people who are able to speak at all of these events. If we could have five minutes on the stage at every one of the 300 events in this community, that would go a long ways. And so part of that is we need to provide you with materials and handouts. If somebody volunteers to give us a booth, we need to get people to be in the booth and to hand out those materials and to be able to talk knowledgeably about what we’re doing.

[01:24:39.730]
Right.

[01:24:40.520] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. And we would give you talking points. Amy’s already put together an amazing PowerPoint, and that will go up in the resources section as well. But eventually we want the Communications Committee to help produce some of these materials. I think you see that every committee has just an overwhelming amount of work to do. So please be patient with us that it will take time to actually get these things done because any one of us could pop up a seven bullet point handout. But that doesn’t mean that we could say that it actually represents what this organization is for. So these things do need to be discussed and voted on and approved. And in many ways, we’re moving forward while at the same time assuming that what we’re doing is going to be in line with the mission, vision, and values that we’re also moving forward on. So at some point, those things need to come together and mesh well. So it will happen. It will happen, and we are getting there. So I appreciate that. I have a question. When and how frequently or whatever? When should we meet again like this in two months? In three months?

[01:25:58.920] – Karl Palachuk
I think monthly is too much, unless you’re going to give me a bunch of money.

[01:26:06.590] – Amy Babinchak
And we haven’t really talked about this. But as a whole organization, quarterly seems to be the thing. I mean, it could even be quarterly or even twice a year. Right. I think that there may be times when the committees want to get specific input, and we need to make that happen as well Well.

[01:26:31.520] – Karl Palachuk
I mean, we could have a quarter where it’s literally I don’t know how many committees we’ll have, but let’s say there are six committees. Each committee gets one 6th of the agenda and get some feedback, talk about what they’re doing and so forth. That could be a whole meeting in itself definitely.

[01:26:53.070] – Eric Hanson
I think that one of the things we need to consider is being able to focus a little bit more effort on those States. I believe that I live in one. This is not self serving by any stretch of imagination, but the reality is one or two States take this on and provide some legislation, and then everybody follows suit because, okay, somebody has written here’s what needs to be happening. And I’ll use the cliche as California goes, so goes the nation. But it’s the reality. I think that Louisiana, much to everyone’s amazement, kind of took the first swipe at this. But the reality is I think some States are going to be more progressive and more motivated to get something done quickly, and we need to perhaps be a little more aggressive in those States where we believe that we’re going to see something happen sooner than later to help our other members have good stuff show up when they basically go, oh, yeah, we like California’s legislation. We’re just going to swipe that, change California to Colorado. And here’s your legislation.

[01:28:25.180] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. And that’s exactly how it works. New York, Florida, Texas and California, whatever we do, it literally has to start in one of those four States. Luckily, Dennis is in charge of the legislative committee, and he has a good friend who’s the chair of the cybersecurity committee in the state legislature. And so we already have some ins there. And early on, we were joking about how there’s a lot of Michigan representation sometimes in our meetings, but there’s a lot of California representation on that legislative committee. And I think it makes sense early on and will probably be the first day where we’re able to move simply because those connections already exist. And Dennis has opened some conversations already well.

[01:29:22.850] – Amy Babinchak
It’S the case I represent Michigan, while it’s the case that it is true that they’re often lead States in new areas of legislation. We do know that every single state, all 50 States, have cyber security items on their docket this season. So this is something that seems to be happening simultaneously everywhere well.

[01:29:53.750] – Karl Palachuk
One of the things is for anybody who’s familiar with the legislative process, there is an organization called the National Conference of State Legislators in CSL. And I used to work for a legislative tracking organization, and we were a member of NCSL. That is literally a conference of state legislators and all of their staff, and they have not gotten together in person in the pandemic. But they normally meet. They’re kind of like CompTIA. They meet in July in the hottest city they can find, where the rooms are cheap, and they exchange like, hey, what are you doing on legislating driverless cars? What are you doing on this? What are you doing on that? And they have a massive website where they exchange with each other. But the text of the bills that they are trying to lead the nation in. In many ways, we should be grateful that Louisiana was a swing and a miss. Kyle Ardouin was the Secretary of state. He asked the legislature to put together a bill. It only applies to people who are doing business with state agencies, but it’s that close to applying to everybody who does business in the state.

[01:31:15.630] – Karl Palachuk
And it has a definition of MSP and MSP again, so that you would recognize that as your business, but it does exist in law. Anyway, once again, it’s just one of these things where it’s going to take more time than any of us wants it to, but we have to do it right.

[01:31:44.650] – Amy Babinchak
Well, I want to thank everybody for attending today. We’re at the 90 minutes that we scheduled. And as I mentioned in the chat, I think a few of us are willing to stay and hang out. And I appreciate everyone who’s participated. It’s been great conversation, and we’re really happy to be hearing from the membership. That’s really important to the organization, that we know what’s on everybody’s mind.

[01:32:15.830] – Karl Palachuk
And I’ll put it in the chat just for fun. But I think everybody knows that you can find me at Rlp@smallbusports.com. I’ll be happy to take your feedback and comments and questions and suggestions. And if you feel like you’ve been banging on my door to get appointed to some committee or this or that, I’ll be happy to see what I can do to help you. I can’t appoint 100 people to 100 things, but I can ask committee chairs to give you a consideration. Yeah. So the question about insurers and policyholders insurance is a massive area that we also need to address, and we need to make friends with the insurance industry. Otherwise we might get painted as the enemy.

[01:33:17.460] – Amy Babinchak
I did see something recently. Well, we did all get painted as the enemy, and we saw our rates double, triple, quadruple. Some folks didn’t even get insured big, huge mess in the last couple of years. But I also saw something recently from the insurance industry saying that they think they screwed up, that they were putting that in the wrong place. They thought that if they put their regulations and requirements on us, that it would make an impact on the business. And it turns out it didn’t. Where they were still losing their money was on the cyber insurance plans that they’re providing to businesses, and they didn’t make changes to those. So we may see a little rebalancing of the scale where more of that responsibility to bear the cost of that insurance is going to fall on our fall on our clients.

[01:34:17.630] – Karl Palachuk
Well, somebody mentioned in the chat that some of these insurance companies pay off too quickly, and they may flip the other direction and say, all right, everything is denied first, kind of like workers comp, and then if you’re serious, then just continue to prove it.

[01:34:34.800] – Amy Babinchak
Well, part of what’s happening there is the first blows from legislation coming down is that you can’t pay the ransom anymore. You might be dealing with an International Criminal Organization, which would make that illegal from the IRS point of view.

[01:34:55.750] – Karl Palachuk
Right.

[01:34:56.440] – Amy Babinchak
And the insurance agencies are getting the same pushback of we don’t want you you guys should not be out there paying these ransoms, and we don’t want that to be part of your cyber insurance policy changes.

[01:35:12.370] – Eric Hanson
Even the FBI will say that’s great in theory, but in reality, when the bad guys have your kids, you might still pay the ransom.

[01:35:25.020] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. Part of my approach in the original nine pillars was I think that we should be obligated to if you offer back up and disaster recovery, you should be obligated to offer that to your clients. And if they choose not to pay for that or choose not to buy that, I think you should be able to opt out of being held liable for that network. The only way to do that is through legislation. You can’t sign a deal on a card with your client and say, oh, yeah, I’ll never sue you or hold you responsible clients, literally. I just had a meeting earlier this week with I call her a former client, except that she pays me to do work, so she must be a client. But I did a training for them, and I had her fill out this form of what kind of data they manage and how they handle it. And does it have personally identifiable information? Then it follows these rules. And does it have Social Security numbers? It follows these rules. And is it personnel related? It follows these rules. And is it related to the board of directors? It follows these rules.

[01:36:33.770] – Karl Palachuk
And she literally had no idea what I was talking about. She was like, you understand this, and I don’t. And I’m like, how can you not understand this? If you have the minutes of your association and they’re private, then you should not send them in a public email on Gmail to your cousin. Right. But just getting her to fill out the most basic matrix, she doesn’t understand it. And so we’re kind of caught in this position where we have to educate the clients and then educate the legislators and get the insurance companies to understand somebody has to get these people to do the things that are on that checklist in order to get the cyber security insurance. Because right now, part of why the insurance companies have been screwed for the last couple of years is they sold that system to everybody, and you could check. No, I don’t have a firewall. No, I don’t have my virus. No, I don’t do training. No, they would still sell you the insurance. Then you get compromised. They have to pay off. They were selling them, like extended warranties, and now they’re getting bit in the butt and increasing their rates.

[01:37:43.200] – Karl Palachuk
That’s not your fault. Right? That’s that company wanted the insurance so they could check a box, and they did nothing to actually secure their networks.

[01:37:53.690] – Eric Hanson
Well, where I was going to go with that was maybe we need to think about having an insurance committee. I’m not quite sure how we’d go about getting the attention of these insurance companies and the underwriters, because it’s all very convoluted who can talk to who in the insurance industry, but to have a you know, this is a minimum baseline guidance for the insurers so that you have a mechanism that says, hey, Mr. Insurance Company, you should probably have on your list. And this is a little self serving for us, admittedly. But you should require, if you’re offering insurance to this size organization, that whoever your It technology partner is should be a member of this group, right?

[01:38:54.650] – Karl Palachuk
Absolutely.

[01:38:55.660] – Eric Hanson
Or that that has some bearing on the risk tolerance that it gets really close to what I want to call professional licensure. That is where we’re headed, I think, anyway.

[01:39:11.500] – Kenneth Iconos
Yeah. And it gets really hard when you start getting into that space. But in order to get in with those insurers and have those conversations, you almost need to be licensed in order to influence them with some authority.

[01:39:30.850] – Karl Palachuk
That’s why I say we need to work with the insurance companies. And as was pointed out, Dennis and Keith and the group in the legislative committee have been talking about this with insurance companies. They haven’t been talking with the insurance companies, been talking about working with the insurance lobbyists and so forth. The good news is once we get into the state legislature, once we start walking the hallways, we will be introduced to the people we need to talk to with regard to insurance. It’s funny, because insurance is one of these odd industries where it’s so tiered. There are ultimately like three insurers in the world, and everybody is a broker and a vendor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, layers and layers of it. So everybody you talk to just say, hey, that sounds great. Let me sell you a plan you’re like, no, I don’t want to talk to you about you selling me a plan. I want to talk to somebody at the level that we can discuss lobbying at the national level, and finding those people is a little harder. Anyway, it’s all about building ourselves a seat at the table. Right. Cool.

[01:40:40.060] – Karl Palachuk
All right. Well, I think we’re now about ten minutes overdue. So anything else? Any super important stuff before we go. Thank you all for being here. I appreciate you taking the time. And I know everybody on this call is incredibly busy. So we appreciate you being here.

[01:41:04.170] – Amy Babinchak
Have a great day. Everybody.

Note: this transcription is approximate. please excuse any spelling errors, mis-attributions, or incorrect wording.

[00:00:03.170] – Karl Palachuck
So welcome, everybody. I’d say we have about half as many people registered for this, which is kind of what I expected. Once it looks like work, the numbers drop off. But I also know that many people can’t make it just because of scheduling, and we sort of randomly picked a day. So towards the end, I want to talk about scheduling for the future. But in the meantime, today I want to talk just giving you a couple of notes to get started and let you know what we’re doing. And of course, call for some volunteers. I will note for the record, this meeting is being recorded, so if you don’t want to be seen, turn off your camera. If you don’t want to be heard, turn off your microphone. Otherwise it will be recorded and posted publicly on the NSI Tsp site. So I encourage you to use the chat for links of things that are coming up or to share things. Also note, we’ve moved the draft code of ethics to the about page. And I say draft because I just made shit up. And at some point I’m hoping that there will be a committee who will look at that and some other things and sort of give us guidance with regard to clarity on mission, vision and actions.

[00:01:28.290] – Karl Palachuck
So just a note. The last week I was the only real surprise I had from the last meeting was how overwhelmed I was trying to clear out all the messaging systems on Earth. After that meeting, the way to get a hold of me is email, period. End of story. I have employees who might occasionally see activity on some of these other channels, but I don’t follow them, I don’t watch them, I don’t respond on them. And if you need me, email is the way to go. Oddly enough, I may be the only person who cares about this, but we’re in this world where there’s this diaspora of how we can communicate, and I think everybody needs to control how they want to be communicated with. For me, it’s email. So if you send me an AOL instant message, I will not receive it. One time, a friend of mine, I popped into some chat room by accident and he literally instantly popped up and said, Are you lost? Because he knows that’s not what I do. So the site continues to grow. Anyone who is on this call who has not registered as a member, please go register.

[00:02:48.630] – Karl Palachuck
And so we have that growing list. I think we have close to 300, or maybe it’s over 300 by now. And that’s an area where we’re going to post up recordings and resources and so forth. The nine pillars. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s not any kind of a Constitution or anything. These are my thoughts on where we’re getting started and why we started, why I started doing this in the first place. And it is my goal to grow a group who does a lot of stuff. And it’s more than lobbying. It’s interesting. I’ve had just a handful of people who have been visible on social media who have resisted this. And one very common thread is people who say that we are naive and that if you go down this road, ultimately what’s going to happen is there will be some kind of official certification, and then there will be training, and then there will be continuing education, and you’ll continually raise the bar of what constitutes entry into this profession. And my only response is, yes, I don’t think I’m naive at all. I think that’s where we need to go.

[00:04:14.660] – Karl Palachuck
And we have too many people in this industry who are amateurs and wish to stay amateurs forever. We also have some bad actors who want to stay bad actors, and I think we need to make that more difficult. So I am very much interested in professionalism within this industry. And I think a lot of the response from people who were here last time is that’s exactly what appealed to them. And the legislation is sort of a thing that sort of time down because of where we are with regards to certain issues. But it’s not the big picture. A second kind of, I guess, opposition that’s out there is that people are saying, well, I’m already professional. You can’t make me any more professional. And I have to just say, that’s not the point. The people who are here who are very professional and take pride in that live in a community where there are people who register their client software in their own name and don’t give their clients their passwords and sell the same piece of hardware three times and sell used stuff as new. Many of the people on this call started out like me.

[00:05:34.980] – Karl Palachuck
I think the first 20 jobs I did constituted cleaning up systems that had been set up by people who didn’t know what they were doing. And that unfortunately, still happens. And 25, 30 years later, there’s absolutely no excuse for our industry to still have so many people operating that way. Some people think that we’re trying to unionize. I’m not sure where that came from. Again, one of the things that happens is we start moving down a certain road, and a lot of the people who come in at the second wave haven’t read any of the stuff, haven’t seen any webinars, didn’t attend the first meeting. So they’re responding to a simple blog post or a simple note on Facebook or LinkedIn, and they are not responding to the bigger picture. So obviously part of what we need to do is to have a community to help get the message out. One of the big things I want to talk about today is the next steps, and that includes forming committee. So I created a form that I would appreciate if everybody could fill out what I want to do is try to gather up a list of people who actually want to serve on a board of directors, on a committee chairmanship or as a committee member, a state chair, a state member, and try to begin to put that together.

[00:07:02.670] – Karl Palachuck
Movements like this frequently start with whoever raises their hand first gets in, and then we put together a temporary structure and begin moving towards elections and having a more permanent structure. But we have to start somewhere. So it always starts out a little less Democratic than it will end up in the end. So we have a small group of, I guess, steering committee board of directors that includes Eric Simpson, Amy Babichek and Rhian Buccianiko. And we want to grow that, but we need to be deliberate and we need to make sure that we involve you in this process. And again, there’s always kind of that balance of how you do something like that with the membership association. But if you’ll fill out that form, we’ll get a definitive list of people who actually want to serve, and then there will be some kind of process to say, okay, here’s an application and we will contact the people who have stepped up. Some people want to serve, but they don’t have an interest in being on a board. They don’t have an interest of being a committee chair. That’s totally cool. At this point, we need all kinds of stuff.

[00:08:26.870] – Karl Palachuck
Last time I was thoroughly impressed with how many people offered services of legal services and financial services and lobbying advice and organizational advice and so forth. And so we have a huge amount of talent, and it’s funny, we don’t have to go an extra layer out to find all the talent we need. Between this call and the last call, I think we have it all. So please help me with that next step, which is the committees. I think what we probably want to do is to take a little time and do some organizing and then set up the next meeting. So I think what you should keep an eye out for is I just set my doodle so that I can get a thousand people to fill out a form and request a day. It’s impossible to choose a day when everybody can be here, and me just randomly picking a date is obviously not the best choice. So we’ll figure out some kind of process for choosing when and when the next meeting will be. But again, for people who actually want to get involved and are willing to dedicate some time, if you fill out that form, I will greatly appreciate it.

[00:09:48.210] – Karl Palachuck
And it’s a very simple form and we don’t ask for address and all that kind of stuff. It’s just the information we need. Again, I am currently running all that through my company. So if you have permanently removed yourself from my weekly newsletter, that’s cool. Just know that if you removed yourself from receiving communications from me. You won’t get the emails from that as well. So you need to add yourself to that list. I cannot add you back on, but I can help walk you through it if you get in touch with me by email. So with that, we had a lot of content that came into the forums, and I want to make sure that people have an opportunity to talk about the things that they want to do, one of the other things that we need to talk about. And it’s again, too early to get too deep into the weeds. But is funding. And as one of the people that I’ve been talking with mentioned, you can’t get too deep into funding until you tell people what the money is going forward. So we need to develop a preliminary kind of budget.

[00:11:02.500] – Karl Palachuck
But clearly, there are expenses related to even the basics of keeping this going, having some communication tools. There’s fairly minor expenses, and I’m finding that right now through my business. But obviously, there’s a limit to that. I’m happy to do what I can. And eventually, if we’re going to have nationwide and international organizations and meetings and so forth, there will be some expenses. I don’t think it’ll be very expensive. I can’t see us ever having a hired director who gets $400,000 a year. That’s certainly not my vision of where we’re going. I think the focus is on the community and on professionalism, but deciding what that means and where it goes does take some organization and take some administrative skills. I wish I had an extra 20 hours employee in the last week just for that. So anyway, that’s what I had, and I am happy to see that there’s some chat activity. I haven’t really looked at it yet, but I am open to your discussions about next steps and committee organization and so forth. So with that, I’ll take my screen down. But if people have links, put them in the chat. Anybody, feel free to open your microphone.

[00:12:49.670] – Rayanne
Hi, Carl. Can you guys hear me?

[00:12:54.680] – Karl Palachuck
We can. I was looking through I have 49 faces on my screen.

[00:13:01.270] – Rayanne
In the chat where questions are, do we have a list of committees that people can volunteer for?

[00:13:10.030] – Karl Palachuck
We don’t yet. So the reason I want people to fill out that form is that we have a lot of committees that people have mentioned in the forums. But I want to get a full list and then have a group look at that list, the board sort of look at that list and determine which committees we need to start first and second and third and then move from there. But first, I’m going to get a list of the hive mind of what all the committees are that we should have eventually.

[00:13:55.610] – Denis Wilson
But I see, Rayanne, that you’ve already been volunteered for committee care.

[00:14:02.250] – Eric Hanson
Yeah, I think I was volun-told.

[00:14:05.610] – Karl Palachuck
Well, I’ve told many, many people, if there’s anybody that I would ever need that knows finances and managed services and how to deal with the PSA. Literally, that venn diagram, as far as I know, gets me Rayanne Buchianico. There may be another one out there, but I haven’t met her.

[00:14:28.770] – Rayanne
Neither have I. But if you do meet her or him, just introduce us so I can hire them. So the next question up on the screen seems to be the meetings. And you mentioned about not scheduling the next meeting until we get something off the ground. Is that probably right?

[00:14:53.150] – Karl Palachuck
Yeah, I’m thinking it will probably be like two weeks. Last time somebody threw out we should meet every week. And at first that sounded great, but it requires a great deal of activity in a very short period of time while we’re trying to put the structure together. So I think we need enough breathing room to come in to have the meeting. The next meeting have a much Fuller, more organized schedule with actual actual apps and people. I want to figure out what the nominating process is, figure out how we begin to build this. Any organization takes time, so we just need to figure out how much time do we need?

[00:15:36.670] – Rayanne
So Tim Golden suggests that we get the committees established with the chairs and then define the cadence. Right. And I think that’s a great plan. So as people are starting to fill out this form and suggesting different committees, how are we going to communicate that with them?

[00:15:56.710] – Karl Palachuck
Well, at some point, again, I’m going to rely on the steering committee to sort of look at that, and there might be 200 different committees proposed. So we got to figure out I mean, clearly there are some fairly obvious ones in terms of a committee to deal with the organizational structure and look at bylaws. And there’s another committee for looking at defining the actual code of ethics and the mission, vision and purpose. I know what I want the purpose to be, and it’s on the about page, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s going to be written in stone. So again, I’m trying to balance the pushing things as quickly as possible and getting input from the community.

[00:16:40.930] – Amy Babinchak
Carl, on your slide, you showed an organizational logo as well as a California logo. What’s up with that?

[00:16:50.190] – Karl Palachuck
Just when I first started out, I registered both of those names because I’m happy being in California to help organize the California contingent, to actually go start working on talking to legislators and committee members and so forth. So I’m just running them both out of my office for now.

[00:17:15.550] – Amy Babinchak
So is it your vision, then, that each state would have a similar independent organization? It looks independent from the national.

[00:17:24.950] – Karl Palachuck
So one of the things we need to look at is that I don’t want anybody to just randomly take this name and say we are that and then go do other things that are unrelated or, to be honest, less professional. So one of the comments in last week’s chat was about using subdomains so that you might have, for example, CA for California Dot, NSITSP.org, and so we can create that as a subdomain. In that way, we would say, okay, if you’ve met these criteria and you’ve pledged that these are your goals and these are what you want to do, then we will allow you to use our sub domain. That way we control that simply through DNS. But people have to pledge to actually be consistent with our goals at a larger level. But if somebody just wants to start something up and push the same goals, I’m certainly not opposed to that. I just think that the more the more we are centrally located, the easier it’s going to be.

[00:18:38.230] – Eric Hanson
Ultimately, the more power you have.

[00:18:40.990] – Karl Palachuck
Right. At some level, one of the things people talked about is, well, there should be a piece where you join the membership and some little fee goes to the state and some little fee goes to the national. And I don’t know if that’s what we’ll do, but that sort of organization makes it easy to say that the national organization is the one that sort of structurally organizes everything for everybody else.

[00:19:11.350] – Denis Wilson
I think we have to decide what we are. If we’re a non profit, you need certain committees. You need people that are familiar with forming and running 5013C’s. If we’re going to be lobby, you need people that are familiar with that on the formation. And you have to have some standard committees. They sound more dominant in structure than they really are overall, and they really don’t. You have to have some committees that are needed for 50 3C, and they may just meet a few times a year. So I think the first step is defining the structure. I would see it as a and that’s the beauty of doing it state by state. Each state has different regulations.

[00:19:59.120] – Karl Palachuck
So just so you know, we have formed a 501C6, which is a membership.

[00:20:06.730] – Eric Hanson
Yeah. I was going to point out it needed to be a c6, not a C3.

[00:20:10.520] – Karl Palachuck
And as Rayanne pointed out, part of the benefit of that is if there are dues, they’re actually better for your taxes as dues than if you were trying to take a very nonprofit donation.

[00:20:32.330] – Rayanne
We have not completed the application for the C6. We’ve just merely incorporated as a nonprofit. And we were waiting for the initial forming board before I take it to the next step and start filling out the 1023.

[00:20:53.120] – Karl Palachuck
And I don’t see Larry Mandelberg here. He might be, but last time he mentioned that he’s worked with several boards and that the sort of nine to 13 members is a good number. All I know is enough to know that it should be an odd number of members so that the majority is very clear and obvious.

[00:21:18.090] – Amy Babinchak
It’s typical that boards are usually split in terms half and half as well. So half remain half her half are elected for the next term.

[00:21:30.730] – Karl Palachuck
Right.

[00:21:31.420] – Amy Babinchak
The following year, flip it.

[00:21:33.350] – Karl Palachuck
Or even more staggered.

[00:21:35.350] – Eric Hanson
Yeah, two or three year terms.

[00:21:38.770] – Karl Palachuck
So Carl asked about Canada, and Peter was on here from South Africa last time. So other countries, we have to figure out exactly what we want to do, but we want you to be involved in this. I don’t know that I have the bandwidth to create an intergalactic organization, but if we can create a model that works in other countries, I’m happy to do that as well. I do think ultimately that there needs to be this same activity, any place where It professionals are working, which at this point is every nation on Earth except North Korea. Other comments or questions?

[00:22:34.230] – Bob Coppedge
Yeah, I have a question, and it’s more clarification on my brain when we talk about the membership or the goal I’m seeing on the about page, both talking about organizational entities as well as individual entities. So is there going to be a difference in terms of what the goal is for an employee of an MSP versus an MSP in terms of what they’re committing to, and then in terms of a person whose job It is, they work for a traditional MSP client, in other words, a network administrator and a manufacturing company?

[00:23:20.610] – Karl Palachuck
Well, so part of this is that we have a lot of education, but we don’t have a lot of standardized education. And I don’t know that at this point in the evolution of our community that that’s even possible. But I do think that it’s possible to say that there are certain levels where we would say we want somebody to have a basic understanding of what is managed services, whether they choose to do many services or not. And so I think there are ways for us to develop systems to say, these guys, all of these different training groups have something that we think is appropriate as a training. So I want to increase the number of It professionals who get training on the business side as well as technology. The technology side is kind of taken care of by manufacturers and developers. But on the business side, I think we need to have a way to say, like, many industries have lots of different organizations that are authorized to provide continuing education. And so I’d like to see something along those lines. Obviously, that needs to be figured out and mapped out and developed in terms of businesses.

[00:24:41.010] – Karl Palachuck
There are lots of ideas, and I’ve been exchanging emails with lots of people about different ways to structure the membership so that both organizations and individuals would be members. Most of the It pros that are associated here work with very small companies. And so the person is there might be five people in the company, but only one is the owner and they’re the obvious member. If you work for a much larger organization, to be honest, they have their own stuff. And I don’t anticipate having 500 engineers from intel become members of this, nor do I particularly expect intel or HP to be members of this. In many ways I want to address, at least from me and my perspective, I want to address the problems of small and medium sized It companies serving small and medium sized customers.

[00:25:46.330] – Rayanne
So, Carl, if we can just define the action steps for today’s call. Right. So step number one, complete the form and I’ve posted the link in the chat window. What are steps number two and three for the members that we are looking for?

[00:26:11.410] – Karl Palachuck
Well, the biggest thing is to fill out the form and help us identify who wants to serve so that we can start actually organizing committees. That’s the Biggie if people have ideas. I appreciate any activity in the forums on the website, just in terms of ways to structure membership or requirements. One question that nobody has brought up publicly, but I’ve gotten several emails on, and that is what is the role of vendors in this? Should we have vendors on the board? Should we invite vendors to be members or our vendors, simply folks that we would like to rely on to support us with money, but they don’t get a vote?

[00:27:08.930] – Lisa Marie Papp
Carl, I would say I think it’s a good idea to have some have vendors be a part of this because as an MSP, we rely on them. As much as I’m rocking a very fine line, we rely on them as they rely on us. And there are some of them that we rely on more heavily. And I think that if we involve them, I think they would be become a better asset to the MSP versus a liability to the MSP.

[00:27:40.790] – Rayanne
My only concern with that, Lisa, I think if we invite Microsoft, let’s face it, Microsoft is one of our largest vendors. Right. The concern I think there would be that they would take over and tell us how we should run things or what the regulations should say based on their needs and not necessarily the needs of small businesses or It professionals.

[00:28:10.940] – Lisa Marie Papp
And I agree with you on that, Rayanne. You’re going to the tip of the iceberg on that one. But I think there’s some of the other vendors down a little bit. That’s why I was saying I’m walking a fine line here. So I agree with you.

[00:28:23.600] – Amy Babinchak
Yes, Rayanne is technically a vendor and kind of so is their tier. But my concern with vendors in the group is that I think we should have them, but I think we need to carefully carve out a space for them, probably in the organizational bylaws of the group, because if we look at CompTIA, it’s really been taken over by vendors and in my opinion is not good at representing the majority of its membership at this point because the vendors are so dominant in that organization, it’s made them ineffective.

[00:29:11.150] – Karl Palachuck
Well, there are other organizations that basically they exist to collect vendors and then get enough it pros to let the vendors give them enough money so that they can fund their organization. That’s their business model. I don’t anticipate that as our business model. So I think vendors as members, if Microsoft has one vote, I’m okay with that. I wouldn’t see them having an outweighed vote simply because they outweigh everybody else in the room.

[00:29:48.200] – Amy Babinchak
Well, if you look at CompTIA’s committees, of which I’ve been on a few and I’ve been on the executive word of some of those committees, they were all dominated. The executive committees. That’s the word I’m looking for. Managing those committees were far dominated by vendors. So you would have eight people on the committee and six of them were vendors. I really think that we need to avoid that so that if vendors are going to participate and I would like them to, but I think they need to be controlled somehow through our bylaws one. Maybe vendors not as board chairs, maybe vendors not as in controlling influence, but just simply as members at large. Something like something like that.

[00:30:49.170] – Lisa Marie Papp
Yeah. And I think, too, I’ve been running across I just came out of a summit here in Atlanta, which was nice because several of the vendors were previous MSPs. They were MSPs to begin with, and they kind of went into a specialty. And I find that those people to me. And of course, I’ve not been around as long as most of you. I found that to be more of a good relationship because they now have walked the walk I’m walking versus a Microsoft or somebody huge. And I agree with you, Amy, with the vendors trampling on the comp Ti aspect.

[00:31:27.270] – Karl Palachuck
Jim Morrison, did you have a comment?

[00:31:33.670] – Jim Morrison
I did. Thank you. I’m actually driving. So participate in the chat. But the idea that vendors aren’t going to be a part or shouldn’t be a part of this organization, I think is a little naive. Correct me if I’m wrong. I mean, that the point of the organization in general is to help steer the conversation of upcoming legislation issues. And if we don’t think that Microsoft is not going to be a part of that anyway or any other major vendor might as well have them with us and not necessarily being a larger voice somewhere else.

[00:32:27.030]
Right.

[00:32:28.070] – Jim Morrison
That’s all I wanted to say.

[00:32:29.650] – Karl Palachuck
Thank you. I think that one of the best roles of vendors is that vendors need professional, successful It service providers. Right. Eventually support organizations that help them get the people who can actually distribute their products and so forth and so on. One of the things that we have is the ability early on to define different types of members so you could have free members who get certain benefits paid members who get other benefits, vendor members who get other benefits, and each of those can have different requirements eventually. I guess my dream is that someday those requirements will begin to notch up. Many of you on this call have been in the past Microsoft certified partners. And one of the best things they ever implemented, in my opinion, was getting letters of wreck from your clients and documenting projects that you’d actually completed. I don’t know that we need to do that, but it’s the kind of thing where I could see us saying, well, there is a level of membership where you’ve demonstrated this level of ability to actually do the things that we define as professional, not yet defined. So, Dan, did you have a comment?

[00:33:57.530] – Dan Tomaszewski
Yeah, I was just going to say that not to minimize us as MSPs, but the vendors will have a greater level of clout and possibly connections than most of us as MSPs have. And I think the concern that is being brought up about vendors is probably that the vendors contributions financially would provide them with advertising and it’s going to be interface and all that. And as long as that’s not the intent in that their contributions to being a member, just like MSP’s, contributions of being a member are for the greater good of our community as an MSP, it shouldn’t matter that vendor is involved. So that’s just my two cent on that part.

[00:34:48.070]
Yeah.

[00:34:48.450] – Karl Palachuck
I mean, I have to say I have no fear that vendors will dominate, take over, or do anything that we don’t want them to do.

[00:34:58.010] – Michael Menefee
If you allow them.

[00:34:58.960] – Karl Palachuck
I’ll do it well, but I mean, Microsoft, as far as I can tell, has lots of ability to affect the market that they work in without us, without being part of this or to try to dominate committees or anything like that. And at the same time, there’s a lot of smaller vendors who can we talk about not having a seat at the table? There’s a lot of small vendors who they don’t have anybody representing them. And so maybe this is a place for them to get some of that as well.

[00:35:33.230] – Amy Babinchak
Well, to be clear, since I brought up this household that I’m not talking about excluding vendors from the group. I think they’re important, but I think we should be cautious. We can look at CompTIA’s example, having gone before us to make sure that we don’t fall into the trap that they find themselves in.

[00:35:55.550] – Bob Coppedge
Well, my experience goes a lot further than that because I’m old and I was very much involved with DPMA, the Data Processing Management Association, which was a national, international It professional, whatever, extremely old. And that was essentially they had chapters all that. They actually did do certifications for It professionals. They came up with, I think, three of them that were CDP CSP. And I forget what the third one was. This is even before PCs were in existence, okay. But they tried to do it as to have some vendor free standard professional conduct. Basically, they were trying to carbon copy the CPA and all that. And I won’t say it was a disaster, but it didn’t go anywhere. And part of the reason, I think, was they did lousy PR in terms of really defining what this brought and what it brought in terms of employers or seeing value in people having these certifications. DPMA ultimately crashed and burned and then combined with another group called the AITP, did this about 15, 20 years ago, became a national organization that also crashed and burned and then was bought up, excuse me, rescued by CompTIA and CompTIA then tried to turn that I think they’ve renamed it, but they’re trying to turn that into a professional organization on the It site as well.

[00:37:42.300] – Bob Coppedge
The certification side is completely gone off. I think CompTIA has an absolute great infrastructure. I think they have great resources. They just use them very poorly. I used to participate in their annual DC flying. I did that about four or five times until they canceled that a couple of years ago. So anyway, ransoff.

[00:38:11.670] – Michael Menefee
I was going to say the vendors are going to want to donate or pay for ads because you’re going to have hopefully hundreds of MSPs at their fingertips. It’s like any other organization that they buy ad space on. This shouldn’t be much different than that. You allow them to come in and start making rules and mucking the waters. It’s going to cause issues. I think the organization needs to be formed first with the MSPs, with the MSPs actual goals in place and what we can do. Like you said, Carl, to eliminate the hacks that are out there, the one man show that crops up on Craigslist that wants to fix somebody’s computer for $50 here and there in a parking lot, versus companies like all of us that have been around for 20 plus years, or even the new guys that are starting up that actually care about the clients, that actually know what they’re doing out in the industry, the vendor piece of it. They come after the fact after all of our pockets are saying, okay, we could use a little bit of a break now. Then you utilize the vendors and you let them in sparingly to help the calls, not to drive the calls to whatever their particular motives would be, because obviously they’re going to be different than ours, right?

[00:39:41.370] – Eric Hanson
Yeah. What I was going to add was, you know, I think we should at least look and understand how an organization like AICPA exists, because you go to their site, there’s no vendor stock. I mean, there’s a little bit of here’s the industry publications, but it’s not a vendor ad space. If we’re trying to encourage having professionals, this becomes no different. You know, the trunk slammer becomes the unlicensed bookkeeper in the accounting world, the unlicensed bookkeeper or whatever other services you can hire somebody to do that are accounting related, where somebody who’s an AI CPA member is that professional that we’re trying to create here. And unfortunately, at the end of the day, you probably have in a typical CPA firm, you have people who are licensed CPAs, you have bookkeepers who are overseen no different than a contractor. Somebody has the license, and there are other people Besides that person necessarily that do the work. But the person who is licensed becomes the responsible entity for that organization. And I think that’s the kind of structure that we’re looking to build. Am I mistaken?

[00:41:23.630]
No.

[00:41:28.530] – Eric Hanson
I think we got to be real careful about vendor influence. We’ll happily take their money. I’m not sure that they should have a lot of influence over how the organization is created, because at the end of the day, they probably do have to become a member. Hp consulting organization probably needs if we’re going to be holding ourselves out as professionals, we need to be everybody’s got to have a level playing field.

[00:41:59.220] – Karl Palachuck
I would also say there are some vendors, and I’ve been happy to work with a number of them who have a sincere interest in improving the business side of the It business, that they sponsor classes and they do trainings, and they bring people from all over, and they do more than just say, here’s how to use our product. Right, right.

[00:42:25.410] – Dan Tomaszewski
And I just want to throw one thing out, too, is that when someone brought up vendors and advertising let me just, first off, apologize. I wasn’t on last week’s call because I was having my surgery. But as long as the intent of the organization is as far as what we’ve been talking about with regulations and standards and such, the vendors are more or less just helping to build the foundation and structure for us that I actually pay for that much like if you’re in a hospital and you see, like, I was in the hospital and the lobby or the waiting area had a plaque that it was donated by so and so. I think those dollars from the vendors can be recognized, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be in an advertising format. It’s just recognized that they’re contributing to help us just for the greater good of our industry.

[00:43:31.050] – Denis Wilson
I would say that one thing that bothers me is where we profile all vendors are, and we’re supposed to be professionals, and if we can’t control the direction of the organization, it’s kind of useless from the beginning. So the fact that we fear vendors causes me some reservation. Vendors are part of our toolkit, and we better communicate with them in a way that we want them to meet the same level of service delivery that we do. That’s just my opinion. Having a vendor here, I don’t find intimidating in the slightest. If they take over it’s because we were weak. That’s my opinion.

[00:44:15.870] – Karl Palachuck
I have to say. I don’t think anybody’s actually saying that we shouldn’t have vendors. I don’t think anybody is in fear of vendors from vendors who are here. What do you think of this? I think there’s a positive role for vendors.

[00:44:39.650] – Dan Tomaszewski
You could just move it.

[00:44:40.620] – Denis Wilson
Like right.

[00:44:47.710] – Amy Luby
There we go. So I’ll speak out for one vendor. A lot of good points being made here. And for those who don’t know me, I was an MSP for 16 years, so I’ve got a good deal of experience on both sides of the fence. But we’re an ecosystem. We all need each other. Vendors know that. Msps know that we’re not operating in a mutually exclusive swim Lane. Vendors need partners, and partners need tools and products to deliver services around. So I think that there are plenty of vendors out there that really understand that there are some that are predatory. I’ve experienced that too. But just like the whole purpose of this organization being formed, there are some service providers out there that are really doing a disservice because they’re not acting professionally, and then there are others that really do. So I think we have a lot of common ground, and I think it’s absolutely appropriate to lean on each other for support. Clearly, vendors have a budget, some value spending that budget to help partners grow and be better, and that’s mutually beneficial to everybody. It’s mutually beneficial for the partner, and it’s beneficial for us as vendors to have good, strong, healthy bottom line partners selling products and services.

[00:46:29.250] – Amy Luby
So I say move forward with it. Just be careful. Create a program that’s mutually beneficial. Right. Give vendors an opportunity to support this community, this ecosystem effort, but do it in a way that is mutually beneficial for the group too. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect vendors to support it. And you don’t need to let vendors take over. Frankly, Microsoft doesn’t have time to assign somebody full time to infiltrate this group and do something bad. That’s not going to happen.

[00:47:08.570] – Karl Palachuck
I also think there’s a lot of vendors who understand the small end of the market, and I love Microsoft. I own stock, blah, blah, blah. But Microsoft will always do exactly and only what is in their best interest for the next three months after the next quarter. Well, then they might just unplug everything and do something else. At the smaller end, there are vendors who understand this market and want to do what is in the very long term best interest of the SMB market. And those vendors behave very differently. They engaged long term, and they don’t just randomly change their programs. So in some ways, if we can build a resource that’s valuable to them, they can help us build a resource that’s valuable to us. So we only have about twelve minutes left, and I want to make sure that we tried to end on time. The final thing I wanted to talk about and make sure that we get it out there is that before we get membership going, we still have a few things where we could use some money to get organized. And so I think that we’re going to try to figure out a way to put up something on the website where people can basically make a donation, knowing that it’s going to a professional association will keep track of the money back, but it will not be I don’t think we’re ready to say what a membership is and how much it costs and so forth, but just a place where people can give a little something, kind of not a Patreon, since we actually have a way to collect money, but that sort of concept of being able to contribute something and sort of help kickstart things.

[00:49:06.030] – Karl Palachuck
So when that happens, I’ll send out a note as well.

[00:49:11.010] – Rayanne
Somebody had asked earlier in the chat what kind of expenses we’ve already experienced. Carl, I know that you’ve put out some personal money to get the website up and running and all of that, and I put out a couple of dollars so far just to incorporate the organization.

[00:49:38.370]
Yeah.

[00:49:38.770] – Karl Palachuck
Well, I mean, the obvious things that you can all see are we have some domain names, some communications, hosting, web development. My web developer is an outsourced employee of mine, but I think she can tell you, but I think she was three quarter time building the website for about three weeks. So there’s a significant outlay of money there, but I’m happy to do it. I allocated a significant chunk of money to help support this organization through the end of the year. And just so you know, my personal timeline is that I would hope by the end of the year that we got it all. We’ve got the structured place, and we’re ready to hit the ground running. And I know that seems like a long time to some people, but the weeks slip away very quickly and we’re not doing any advertising or anything like that. But web development and just the administrative support to be able to do this. It’s not hundreds of thousands, but it’s dozens of thousands. And I think that there’ll be no problem. The money that I have pledged from my personal business will take us through the end of the year, but beyond that, we’ll have to see.

[00:51:16.070] – Karl Palachuck
So any questions about funding and being able to support? I do thank you to the people who have pledged already, Bob and Jay, I’ve had other people contact me, and I think everybody knows it takes money to do stuff. Yeah.

[00:51:39.200] – Eric Hanson
Well, realistically, what do you think we need through that organizational phase, Carl?

[00:51:46.140] – Karl Palachuck
Financially well, so I have allocated $25,000 from my company, so I quite realistically. I think that’s what I expect it will cost between now and the end of the year. So if I get assistance with that, well, that will be okay, too.

[00:52:09.670] – Eric Hanson
I’m not sure that we get to the finish line by the end of the year. They’re creating an organization, probably, but I think the finish line is going to be in a different place.

[00:52:20.430] – Karl Palachuck
No, I hang up on this line. I mean, we’ve got a board, we’ve got committees, we’ve got some structure. We can hold elections. Basically, we move from steering committing to a membership association. Rayann is out of pocket for some stuff as well, for the filing, paperwork and all that. Anyway, we will make it happen. I think there’s enough energy in the last couple of calls and the chat. Last time it took me two days to filter through everything. The chat was over 3000 words. So you guys wrote a couple of nice articles in Channel Pro with that. By the way, we have been getting some decent press. So tell your friends and neighbors and promote the word. And if anybody has any questions anytime during the week, send me an email. And if you have ideas, if you say, hey, this is a structure that works, we’ll be happy to take it. Please fill out the form to volunteer and also give us feedback on which committees we should create.

[00:53:47.830] – Eric Hanson
Right. Just because, Amy, you kind of stepped in here and took a little vendor role, do you think it’s unreasonable to expect or get vendors to throw five grand at it without knowing necessarily where it’s headed?

[00:54:12.350] – Amy Luby
I don’t think that’s unreasonable, and I’d think higher.

[00:54:15.830] – Eric Hanson
Well, I would think higher. I’m trying to be it, but I’m trying to be conservative. But you’re in that vendor space. You get ten or 20 vendors to throw a few Bucks at it.

[00:54:30.950] – Amy Luby
Yeah, you’re hitting a decent pool of money at that point. I think there’s plenty of vendors that would be willing to support this initiative. It’s something that has been needed for a very long time. I’d be hard pressed to think of a vendor who wouldn’t at least see the value now, whether they’ll actually cut a check, that’s a whole different ball game because there needs to be some kind of program. Like I mentioned, that’s mutually beneficial. But the ultimate benefit if you keep the messaging the way you’re starting to, which is we vendors need professional, profitable, well run partners. It’s in our best interest to support that however we can so kind of keep that messaging wrapped around that core value. I think you’ll attract all kinds of vendors, frankly, and I’m happy to help form a program or give my opinion. Everybody’s got opinions, but on how to make it attractive for vendors and how to deliver some benefit to them. That isn’t necessarily handing over a bunch of power to drive where this organization goes. This is MSP. Driven, like, clearly MSP. Driven, and that’s the way it should stay. I think it’s possible to get there, though.

[00:56:07.270] – Karl Palachuck
It’s funny. I had an experience with a vendor about a dozen years ago where they had spent a massive amount of money and they had accumulated about 1500 partners who over the course of six months sold one unit of their product. And so they were like, okay, how do I get vendors who are actually going to participate and sell and so on and so on. They were eagerly looking for somebody who was going to actually do what they said they were going to do. So clearly there are people in this space who are not professional and there are people who are. And we need to make it more appealing to be able to say I want to be professional instead of I don’t want to be regulated and you guys are trying to unionize me and don’t make me take an exam. There will always be those people. But I think it needs to be okay to say, hey, we’re going to step up to the next level.

[00:57:04.990] – Amy Luby
And historically, if you look at the last 1520 years, There have been a couple of entities that have tried to do this kind of tried to organize MSPs, Whether it’s through certification or trust marks or different avenues. And the one thing that they didn’t have was literally MSP leadership. It wasn’t done by MSPs. It was done by vendors and it was ultimately done to sell more licenses of whatever their product was. So this is starting from the heart of where this channel is, the MSPs. So this will be successful, I have no doubt.

[00:57:50.330] – Karl Palachuck
Well, good. I hope you are correct.

[00:57:53.990] – Bob Coppedge
Worth the risk.

[00:57:55.460] – Karl Palachuck
So. Well, I absolutely appreciate everybody being here and participating. And so the next step from my perception is we’re going to collect the committing information. We’re going to start building out that structure. Watch for some kind of email about how we’re going to pick the next date and time. My super strong bias is that I hold business meetings during business hours So it will not be Saturday at 07:00 p.m.. So I have a business meet up locally that I totally love except they need it Saturday and I’m like Saturday I’m picking weeds or painting a fence or something so I’m not available. But anyway, I think that’s it. If you have future comments, please go to the forums and make comments there. If you have questions for me, send me an email. I appreciate your time and by my watch, we have about 30 seconds left. Anybody else want to say anything? Keith, that was a slow pitch.

[00:59:06.190] – Bob Coppedge
Puppies are cool.

[00:59:08.770] – Karl Palachuck
Thanks for puppies. Puppies are cool. Okay. All right. Thank you all. I will get up the request recording as quickly as Kara can and thank you and we will see you online. I appreciate you being here. Bye.

Note: this transcription is approximate. please excuse any spelling errors, mis-attributions, or incorrect wording.

[00:00:03.350] – Karl
Good morning, everybody. I am going to go ahead and kick this off. I don’t want to punish the prompt. As my friend Yvette Steele says, we have the chat going, and I am not going to be able to follow much of the chat, at least at the beginning. So you can heckle. But just know that as somebody who’s already politically active in California, you’re on my radar. So remember, paybacks are hell. So I want to go ahead and get this started. I know many people are here because the word legislation was placed in front of their face and a handful of them, I would say some people panicked. Other people said it’s about time. And at this site that we have put up, Kara, who works for me, did an amazing job about, I don’t know, three weeks ago. I said, hey, I need you to pop up this real quick site. It’ll be easy, brain dead, no fancy stuff. Well, then I came back and said, we need a membership module. We need to be able to locate people and search by state or province or country. We need to have forums, one thing after another.

[00:01:31.120] – Karl
So we have this full featured site, which, in addition to being very useful, is also very beautiful. So kudos to Kara for doing that. And she deserves a lot of credit for putting up with my whims. But anyway, the site is a place where, if you are not familiar with the background of this, I highly encourage you to get started and look at kind of what we’ve already done. Not that that calcifies where we’re going or how we’re going to get there, but you should have that background. A little housekeeping. It is great to work with it professionals because I’m not hearing 42 people with their microphones open. And so I appreciate the fact that people mute themselves when they are not talking and not open the mic and forget to close it. This meeting is being recorded, the recording and the chat will be posted up onto the Itsp site. And so if you do not want to be seen or heard or whatever, then you need to either log on anonymously, enclose your microphone, close your camera, or whatever. That’s up to you. You got to take care of that. You have been warned.

[00:03:01.340] – Karl
I have asked Kara to put links. If people have links, she’s going to be putting some of them into the chat. If you have additional resources that might be useful and should be part of the permanent record, please put those in the chat as well. We also endorse a code of ethics. So one piece of the nine pillars document that we’re going to talk about is about having a code of ethics. And so some of that ethics is I want to be very transparent about what we’re doing. And to be very honest, this is one of these projects where I know it needs to get done. But I can only see so far into the future. So I’m going to be very transparent as we build this. And of course, we want to treat everybody with respect. So you are absolutely welcome to disagree with me.

[00:03:54.610] – Speaker 7
You will be wrong.

[00:03:55.840] – Karl
But no, I’m kidding. But you’re welcome to disagree with me. Just be respectful about it. And I don’t want this to be a political discussion. But having said that, I really believe that we’re at a point where they are coming for us and we will be legislated upon one way or another. I think we just need to get ourselves a seat at the table. So for those of you who haven’t heard of me, my name is Karl Palachuck, and I wrote a bunch of books. I wrote about 20 books for It service providers, plus a few others. And I would be happy to have you connect with me primarily on LinkedIn, but also Twitter, Facebook, and so forth, and would love to connect with everybody here and continue this conversation online. And don’t worry, I only have a handful of slides just to kick us off here. So the site is a place where I would love to have everybody register. And registering just means you want to get on the list so that, you know when we have the next meeting and when we start organizing. And that list will not be used for anything else.

[00:05:12.810] – Karl
If you want to join my personal newsletter list, you’re absolutely welcome to do so. Joining on this site does not get you that. What it does do is it allows us to begin the process of getting members and saying, look, we have numbers. And the beautiful thing about an organization that is trying to influence anything is that numbers matter. And so there will always be a free component just so we can point to all those names and say, see, we have whatever, 10,000 members or whatever it turns out to be. There are some downloads. The nine pillars white paper that I wrote as a series of blogs and then sort of retooled into one good sized document is my vision of where our industry is and where we need to go. And there’s also a webinar where I presented this. So I have no interest in repeating all of that here today. So if you want to watch the webinar, read the white paper. And then in the webinar I talked about we need some legislation. We need the next level. And so the proposed legislation is completely amateurish. Yes, I have a background in political science.

[00:06:33.070] – Karl
Yes, I have an English major, but I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a legislator. I’m not a lobbyist. So this is just common sense English language and needs to be turned into legislative gobbledygoop. The site also has forums where in particular, I put up one after some of you joined. That is, if you want to be a leader. If you want to volunteer to actually lead a local group, a state group, a provincial group, or in the case of the UK or Australia, whether it’s a state or start the national organization, we need people to step up and knowing that being a leader is going to take a little more energy. And I fully admit I am so busy, I can’t see straight. So like all of you, I don’t have time to dedicate massive amounts of time to this, but I think this is important and I think it needs to be done. I sent a note to somebody online about this. That the way that I look at it is literally that last year, when the state of Louisiana turned their focus and used the term managed service provider and created legislation and defined what that is in law.

[00:08:01.690] – Karl
The way that I look at it, the board have entered our Quadrant. They know who we are. The state legislators know who we are. They know what we call ourselves. They know what we’re doing. On top of that, you have the news media talking about solar winds and Casa and whatever the latest cybersecurity incident is. And I hope there’s nobody here from the media except to say when I hear these people talking on the radio, they sound like complete idiots. And that’s not their fault. It’s not what they do for a living. They don’t understand why somebody would have such a powerful tool at their fingertips, or why it’s valuable to have a single pane of glass, or why it’s valuable to run scripts on client computers. It’s not what they do, I don’t expect them to understand, but what I want to do. One of the things I want to do with this organization and with this site is to develop materials to educate the media on talking points. From the MSP’s perspective, we’re looking at providing those services and helping you learn how to talk to the media, how to be the whatever the seven second sound bite the next time there’s a major Earth shattering cybersecurity incident that makes all the news.

[00:09:29.270] – Karl
We not only need people to talk about this in an educated fashion, but we need our perspective to be seen in the Nine Pillars paper I talked about. There are four actors in this. There’s you, your client, the government, and the insurance companies. And right now, you and your clients have no seat at the table. The government and the insurance companies are deciding how our industry is going to be regulated. And I think that there’s a natural ally ship with the insurance companies. I think we need to partner with them to help all of us. So we need affiliates. We need other organizations. I have registered California Society of It Service Providers and National Society of It Service Providers. Both of those point to the same site, and I’m happy to take some role in California, but I need volunteers in every state. We need volunteers in every province in Canada. We need people to sign up to do this. And by this, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t know what I’m asking you to do, but we need to learn that together if you want to find other people in your state so far, right again, part of this depends on how many people have actually signed up and filled out the forms.

[00:10:57.110] – Karl
But if you go to the site, go click on Forum and then members and then search by state. Now, just a fair warning. If you search by country and then search by state, you’re not going to get any results. You have to clear the search and then search again. So do a search. Clear the search. Search again. And lots of people have stepped up. I’ve gotten emails and notes and people send me little side notes on LinkedIn and Facebook and whatever. That’s all great. But I can’t collect all of the tidbits on the Internet and put them in a shoebox. I need there to be one place where people actually step up and volunteer. So I ask you, even if you’ve sent me a note, please go to the site and go to the Forum for Leadership and say, I step up for whatever the great state of Illinois. And that will help us tremendously. Now, if you also see that people are organizing in your state and you say, I also want to help, please jump in. This is not necessarily a first come, first serve. We’re going to try to figure out how to help everybody organized.

[00:12:11.790] – Karl
I have never started an organization this big or this important before, but my last real job was running an organization that are helping to run an organization that tracks legislation in the state of California as well as New York and two other States. So we ran a multi state operation to track legislation. So I have some idea what that’s all about. Few notes on lobbying in the United States. This is a quick link. Ncsl is the National Conference of State Legislators, and they’re kind of like CompTIA in the sense that the primary thing that they do is they find the hottest city in America and they meet there in July. Usually, CompTIA meets in August. But NCSL National Conference and State Legislators has this page with basically a summary of lobbying in their state. The good news is if we’re not spending money, if we’re not pushing legislation, talking to legislators and spending money, then it’s easy to kind of stay under the radar. But at some point it will cost money. Now, I don’t expect us to ever be giving Brown bags full of $100 bills to state legislators, but it does cost money.

[00:13:47.080] – Karl
If at some point we say, look, we need to gather people. We need to put together some materials. There’s printing costs, there might be some hotel costs or whatever, I don’t know. So there’ll be some expenses. But anyway, one place to start is to find out what are the basic laws and who in your state can give you more clear information about your state. For Canada. There’s actually a lobbying agency for Canada, so you can look at the rules for lobbying there. And again, they point out provincial information that you need to know. So it’s a place to start. So today what I want to try to do is to figure out what we need to do and get your thoughts about organizing at the state and national levels, call for volunteers in particular. If people have ideas about funding, like right now, we don’t have a formal organization. We don’t have a Corporation. I’m working with Ryan Buchanano, one of the smartest people I know in the universe and trying to figure out what kind of organization we need. I thought we should not have a 501 C three since they can’t lobby. On the other hand, there is a way to say, look, if you spend less than X percent, you can still be a nonprofit.

[00:15:22.000] – Karl
There are other codes, if we were to incorporate that are allowed to lobby, but they do not allow tax deductible contributions, right. So anyway, I am learning all of this, but I don’t think that we can create one lobbying organization for the entire country or the entire world, which is why we need locals as well. So one question would be at what point do we figure out if we need to charge people for membership and how regularly should we meet? In many ways, monthly seems easy. On the other hand, it also seems like not enough. I don’t want to overwhelm you. I know you all have businesses to run and 270 people signed up for this meeting. So I know there’s a massive interests just trying to figure out where we go from here. One thing is to have different groups meet and anything I can do to help facilitate that, I am willing to do so I will throw open the doors. I ask that people be as respectful as possible with over 100 people on the line here. But basically, what do you think? And I personally would start with the question of do you think that we should have a paid level of membership early on or should we wait until we have a certain number of people who are signed up as members?

[00:17:09.650] – Karl
There would always be a free membership only because we need the numbers. And I would not expect any membership to be expensive at all. But I would much rather see 10,000 people at $100 a piece than to see a very small number at a large, expensive cost. Karl?

[00:17:31.010]
Yes?

[00:17:32.070] – Larry Mandelberg
This is Larry Mandelberg, Sacramento, California. I think it’s very important to have a fee. I agree with at least starting with two tiers–zero and cheap. But I think you have to begin very quickly with some fee. I don’t know if $100 is the right number or not, but I think it’s very important to start accumulating some money, because when we need to spend money, you want to have a pot of money to go to.

[00:18:08.490] – Eric Hanson
I agree. A couple of $100, $250 is not unreasonable. When you think about the other fees that we pay in our businesses at $100, I’m concerned that you don’t generate enough money to do what you’re going to need to do, because at some point there’s going to have to be an attorney involved and, you know, or someone that can get this a little better dialed in so that we can hand it to a legislator and say here, it’s basically done. But you also need the numbers because a big pile of letters makes a big.

[00:18:48.010] – Keith Nelson
I have some history and being involved in politics and legislation, as you know, Karl, first of all, it’s important to develop the fee. So part of it is offset as a political donation if we’re doing that. So the base fee may be extra. The political donation, which has to be voluntary, could be a minimum, plus more. And I’m willing to help you out because of my connections and legislating at the state and federal level. And also and I’ve mentioned another group I’ve been writing the criteria for the California State, UC and community colleges certification programs. So I have those. I have the curriculum since I write them. And that would give us a baseline of where the legislators in California has started to adopt community College certification program, which is part of the, as you know, the legislation. And I’m on the advisory board for those. So I can help you with that.

[00:19:54.730] – Karl
Very good. Thank you.

[00:19:57.910] – Speaker 3
It would also make sure that people are serious about being involved, too.

[00:20:03.130] – Karl
Right, Rayanne, you don’t have to raise your hand.

[00:20:05.430] – Rayanne
I know. I feel like I’m in school. Hi, everybody. I’m a member on a number of other organizations, the MAEA, the FSEA, and so on and so forth. Generally, you can be a member at the national level, or you could be a member at the state level and where part of your annual membership fees goes to your membership at the national level. Right. If the state organization wanted to charge a certain annual membership fee, perhaps a portion of that goes to the national level, because we need a national stance here in order to get anything done at a national level. Somebody in the chat window mentioned that the AICPA owned sock, and they do. And Keith was just talking about the political contributions and whatnot I was speaking to somebody last night about it. And the first thing he suggested was starting a path. And we’re going to need a political action committee if we’re going to get anything done at a political level anyway. So just some of my thoughts, and I’m going to open it up for everybody else.

[00:21:39.580] – Larry Mandelberg
Karl, I want to make a couple of comments again, if I could.

[00:21:42.060] – Karl
Sure.

[00:21:43.090] – Larry Mandelberg
First of all, with all due respect to you, Rayanne, I think it’s a huge mistake to have state level chapters. I’ve seen many organizations use that model, and they fail desperately. You end up with rogue States who simply refuse to go along with what the national entity wants and it creates splintering. I don’t think that’s a wise move. I completely agree that it needs to be national. I also think there needs to be multiple sources of revenue. And in terms of the initial fee, I’m not worried about the cost of lawyers, as in, we’re going to need $5,000 to get all the legal documents set up. If we don’t have $5,000, we got to get $250 to join. I don’t buy that. From my perspective, even if it was $10 to join, it would show a commitment and start a pool. There are many ways to create income, whether it’s a special assessment fee. One of my clients just recently had a need to do something, and they asked the members, do you want to contribute an extra 40% of your dues for one year to cover this? I don’t think the amount we get is important.

[00:22:54.490] – Larry Mandelberg
I just think it’s important that we get started with it, which really leads to my primary point. Karl, you’ve done, as always, an amazing job of organizing. I will never buy anything you say that demeans what you do or minimizes what you do, because you are absolutely amazing. I feel this organization needs to really be clear about its purpose. I think we need to have a vision statement. I think we need to have a mission statement, and I think we need to have a set of values. You’ve already started with your ethics as one of the pillars. I think we need to continue to build around your nine pillars. And as I know you realize, I’m more than happy to help with this stuff. I’ll add myself to the list. Thanks.

[00:23:42.310] – Karl
Thank you.

[00:23:43.420] – David Phillips
Karl, this is David Phillips in St. Louis. I want to just reiterate what Larry just said. I think we might be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit in talking about specific fees and what the fee structure should be in the state or the state chapter versus the national organization. I think we need to kind of take a step back and do exactly what Larry was talking about in terms of let’s get a steering committee or some sort of so that we know how we want to move forward as a group. Prior to discussing all of this, I don’t want to say minutiae, but getting bogged down in the smaller picture stuff before we have the big picture fleshed out.

[00:24:40.430] – Karl
Good points all around. One of the things about getting something moving is we’re here because I think everybody on this call wants to at least get something moving and so this is the place to start. One of the things that I want to kind of come out of this personally is to help us as an industry become more professional. And so the whole mission and vision and values, I think we need that. And 20 years ago, many people on this call have Gray hairs, as I count almost everybody. 20 years ago, we were in industry of trunk Slammers who were figuring it out as they went along. And that’s not sustainable. And it’s also the case on the political side that at some level we have time to take our time. But at another level, there will be another major cybersecurity incident that makes international news. And when lobbyists and legislators see something like that, they take action. And it’s very frequently in response to an event, it is not well thought out. And you’ve seen this pick whatever political topic you want. Their actions would not have prevented the incident that they are responding to.

[00:26:11.880] – Karl
So their actions are very frequently completely inappropriate. On the other hand, if somebody is standing there on the side ready to hand them a piece of draft legislation, they will start with that. I want to take our time. I want to do it the right way. But just also acknowledge there will be States, there will be additional States who will pass inappropriate legislation. This year, it will happen. I don’t know if the folks from Termageddon are on this call, but one of the services we subscribe to and help our community members get in part of their storefront is this service called Termageddon. That basically it looks at all of the overlapping laws on Privacy and compliance in all the States, in all the provinces, in all the countries they can grab and tries to keep you legal by putting a short code on your website that then links to an updated, up to the minute list of these compliances. And you know, it’s a necessary service only because it is impossible to keep up with this. Things are changing too fast. And again, just to say we should go at a deliberate speed, but know that the faster we go, the more likely we are to have a seat at the table.

[00:27:47.850] – Keith Nelson
Karl, you’re so right on. Because in California, Loan, which is the one I’m most active in, there is legislation being sponsored or written, which is the proper word by big players who are their goal would be to have some minimums that would make it non cost effective to be a single or two or three person. Msp.

[00:28:14.070] – Karl
Well, and that’s the other thing is the people who have influence are the IBM’s and Entails and major monster consulting agencies that have thousands of players. They can afford a $1.7 million lawsuit, they can afford the insurance, and they can afford the payout. I doubt if anybody on this call has 1.7 million sitting around with nothing else to do. So again, the people who have representation also have the money.

[00:28:53.470] – Keith Nelson
And the players you don’t want to see in our scope, the OfficeMaxes and the copier companies. So we must show some caution.

[00:29:03.500] – Alex Farling
There a big chunk of them have already proven they can’t do the job.

[00:29:09.010] – Keith Nelson
I don’t think that matters. The legislators.

[00:29:11.510] – Alex Farling
No, I get it.

[00:29:12.360] – Speaker 8
Yeah.

[00:29:12.600] – Alex Farling
They have the money to steer the ship.

[00:29:14.770] – Ben Flipelli
What about working more with the insurance companies instead of trying to go on the political route and using these large insurance companies and working with them and then maybe get them to push the thing that we want to push. So they see.

[00:29:29.100] – Karl
So that’s also a piece of the plan is to basically the proposed legislation that I put out is to work with the insurance companies because they already have a nationwide, statewide, county wide. They’ve got lobby organizations in place, but they have to be convinced that this is in their longterm best interest. There’s a lot of pieces to the puzzle. At the simplest level, I want to address reducing your liability and your insurance company’s liability. So that will reduce rates. But we also clearly, if you want to make legislators happy, you have to reduce the number of cybersecurity incidents, which means you have to have more clients actually buying these services. We can’t force them to do that. But there might be ways with the insurance companies to make it more attractive to actually do the things you’re supposed to do. One of the things again, in my membership community, we’re having a workshop tomorrow where we basically are asking everybody to dig out your insurance, your cyber security insurance policy, and find a page where they’ve got extras, they’ve got training for you, they’ve got links where you can download materials and so forth. Insurance companies are trying to do something, and it’s almost in an HMO way.

[00:30:57.340] – Karl
Right. To help you be healthy by providing preventive care. And so we have a lot in common with them on this issue.

[00:31:09.610] – Ray Orsini
If I may. I absolutely agree. I do think my goal for this year is to have a seat at the table. I think legislation, while it needs to happen, is probably going to be the last in the pieces of the puzzle to fall in line. And we’ve all spoken about this before. I think the insurance companies, since they’re the most affected by it financially and risk wise, they’re going to be the ones that have the teeth that bite. So I’m already working with a number of insurance companies to develop a set of basic standards. And I know they’d very much like to be involved in something like this because at the end of the day, they can afford to offer discounts and set the baseline for their clients that affect their premiums. And the MSPs can be the ones to affect those things. And it’s a solution for all that provides benefit for all involved to the end of. And I agree with you. We all agree something needs to be done. There’s no question about that. I definitely am very eager to see what the goals are, what the stated goals are, what the path to that is.

[00:32:09.480] – Ray Orsini
I know a lot of that needs to be resolved. That’s the whole point of the meetings and the gatherings. I will add to the point of sponsorships or membership fees. I’ve said this before, in other communities, the vendors are going to be the ones that really pay for this. At the end of the day, we’re the ones with the bigger pockets. And I’m saying this as a smaller vendor. Yes, the MSPs. And we do this with Wisp, we do this with Nanog, we do this with a ton of other communities. The MSPs, those that are part of it should have some kind of free and paid memberships to allow for voting and stuff like that. But I also think the vendors, those of us need to step up as well. I think there should be a higher cost vendors don’t hate me. There should be a higher cost vendor membership cost here too, because honestly, we can afford it. And I think that’ll go get us toward the line a little faster as well.

[00:33:08.050] – Keith Nelson
I would say as we’re talking about and this is to Ben and Anne Ray, my mentor. Ray, as we talk about insurance companies, remember, we do forensic audits for insurance companies already. Travelers and two other ones already have some vendors that they allow to use for remediation. So those relationships were a little bit behind, if that’s where we want to go. So we have to move forward because they are creating business relationships, not technical relationships. Alex and Ray know what I’m talking about there that they are doing business for remediation with providers that knew how to grease the palm and get in the door and we’re overseeing it. And personally, I wouldn’t let them touch my cellphone, but that’s a different subject. So if we want to start an insurance relationship, we better start moving on it now.

[00:34:07.640] – Ben Flipelli
And I was thinking, like from a technical perspective, right, that we could help the insurers draft up things because we just went with the Lloyds of London for one of our clients. And they were like, oh, everything has to be multifactor. I was like, okay, I get it. And then they were like, no, everything. Like, what do you mean everything? Like every time they open a file, they didn’t define it clearly. And I was like, well, this is great. So it’s not really clearly defined. And yet if my client hasn’t reached, they’ll be like, well, you didn’t have the MFA on opening this folder inside this share inside one drive. And so therefore you didn’t qualify for the insurance.

[00:34:42.970] – Keith Nelson
But I think that’s where Karl’s right on. I’m not politically correct. Insurance companies don’t view MSPs as a solution right now. They view us as part of the problem, because we’re disjointed, because we have Trump slammers, because we have a lot of people in this business that have no formal training. And I’m not saying that makes you better. I’m saying that’s what people in suits understand. And if Karl’s organization or our organization shows a list of standards, checklist procedures SOPs that we live up to, we could suddenly approach insurance companies as no longer the cause of breaches but a solution to breaches.

[00:35:30.050] – Lisa Marie Papp
Karl, I have something, Ray, I want to piggyback a little bit off of what you said in working with insurance companies and things. I’ve been pounding on that door for about five and a half years and everything because I felt long time ago that the insurance companies were going to be a very hard part of this picture. And the thing is, what I’m coming across is they just don’t know what they don’t know. And again, a lot of these insurance companies, they’re used to handling the PNC and things like that, but even on the commercial side, they’re not used to handling this technology aspect that we have today. And so I’m actually getting calls of, can you teach me this? Do you have this, the checklist? I mean, Hartford has a checklist. And trying to get that and putting together a training for them and show me lunches and things like that to show them, hey, this is our world. We’re here to help you, because not only are we here to protect the asset, which is the business, the client’s business, from something happening, but when it does, like a car accident, we’re here to get them through this as well as you’re there for them.

[00:36:42.700] – Lisa Marie Papp
So that’s how I’ve been able to kind of massage that. But I think, too, it comes down to not only us as MSPs, but also the insurance companies, because once this starts to fall and I know we’re seeing those repercussions of solar winds in Kaseya, this whole nut has actually started phone calls filtering to me because of the relationships I have. But again, I tend to agree that a lot of times with the insurance companies, they don’t know what they don’t know. So, yeah, they have that stop out, that hand out going, wait a minute, wait a minute. But when you start smoothing it over and putting it in their terms of a car or something, then they’re opening and going, oh, wow. And this is not technology today has come so far into the forefront. I hate to say the pandemic just kicked that door wide open. I think that’s part of it. And I think that if we could get some insurance companies to be here to listen, we might be able to get a good partnership. And like you say, they have some teeth that they can bite into this.

[00:37:56.750] – Ray Orsini
So the groups I’m speaking with are represented by Lloyds, are represented by Hartford. So there’s three aspects they’re looking at there’s initial attestation, right? I say I have this. I say I have this. They have varying degrees of questionnaires. And we’ve seen this with PCI compliance. We’ve seen this with everything else. It’s like three and a half to 20 pages, depending on the underwriter. Then they have the ongoing audits. This is a piece they’re missing. A lot of them are not doing audits at all, but they intend to in the beginning of 2022. And then the third piece is incident response. Most of the cybersecurity providers are very clear in that if something happens, you can only use their IRMS. What I’m concerned with is, I agree with you. It’s awareness and understanding what’s going on. A lot of them don’t know, and a lot of them are just throwing spaghetti at the wall. The reason I’m so concerned with having a seat at the table and being able to engage in the conversation is because I’m terrified that they’re going to say, okay, everybody needs to be ISO 27 at one. Everybody needs to be CMMC.

[00:38:59.400] – Ray Orsini
And they’re just going to say this is some kind of classification that we know says something about security. Now you have to do it, too, without any understanding what the ramifications are. And that’s why a lot of them.

[00:39:12.030] – Karl
When people have mentioned specific solutions online, I’ve tried to steer the conversation to, I don’t think we want to put that like CMNC. We don’t want that in the legislation because NIST could just say, hey, you know what? We’re going to put that to sleep in two years and replace it with something else. That’s where what the accounting business calls generally acceptable account. We rely on some organization to say, we recognize these as approved trainings, approved practices and so forth. And one current example is CMC, but it’s not the only the other thing. Ray, from your perspective, there are a lot of people who are It service providers who are not managed service providers.

[00:39:58.110] – Ray Orsini
Right.

[00:39:58.410] – Karl
They go in and put in phone systems. That’s it. They don’t offer back up and disaster recovery, and they should not be held liable simply because they touched the equipment. And so there’s like.

[00:40:10.580] – Sunny Lowe
There are people who Karl, of course they should be. Of course they should be. I’m not kidding. How many times has a thing been introduced by a company that does HVAC, like the target attack, if you’re going to touch the network, you have to be compliant for it.

[00:40:27.800] – Karl
No, I agree with that. I’m just saying that in terms of if there’s a cyber attack and you can’t get them back in business the next day, I don’t think you go after the phone company and I don’t think you go after the guy who only came in and installed a monitor. The managed service provider should be the one doing vendor management and making sure that entire picture is taken care of. So there’s kind of like there are people who are not going to be liable. There are people who should be held liable but are not being held accountable. And then there are people who do this half ass and they don’t want to be held accountable. And those are the people that we need to move out of this business. Let them have the liability.

[00:41:14.340] – Ray Orsini
That’s what I think is one of the chief priorities that need to be established upfront the categorization of the types of service providers. I’m not talking about who’s liable, who’s not liable, but we’ve talked about this a thousand times. You take two MSPs, put them in a room, they can’t decide what color the sky is. But if you look at the national electrical contractor codes, they’re very clear as to who does this, who does that. I think we need to establish the baseline of this is what’s qualified as an MSP. This is what’s qualified. I’m not trying to be derogatory toward anybody or their business model. That’s not the point. But I think there needs to be a clear definition of what an MSP is, because again, I’m going back to the group of 50 or so insurance providers I’m working with, but they’re getting to the point of saying we are going to certify MSPs, have them go according to a certain baseline by the end of 2022. And if you’re not on this approved list, we will not provide you cyber security insurance or any kind of policy unless you’re using these firms. I don’t want it to get to that.

[00:42:17.220] – Ray Orsini
I think that’s very dangerous for our industry, but if we don’t qualify ourselves, somebody else will.

[00:42:22.970] – Keith Nelson
And you have to define what back in operational is. And that’s where a lot of MSPs get it wrong. They take making all the computers work is a failover program. It’s not. So you start defining that. The backup systems that allow a company to continue functioning.

[00:42:44.450] – Ray Orsini
I think Rayanne stating it right in the chat. That initial outline of the committees that need to be established, I think is a great starting point. I would start with some committee starting with what is going to be our meeting cadence for the year, for the remainder of the year. One other one for determining how we establish voting protocols and the establishment of those committees, another one to talk about qualification categorization of MSPs. But I think those working groups probably should be the first point of order.

[00:43:20.630] – Karl
So on the forums, if you are interested in being in a working group, put a note in there for that as well, whether you want to be a leader at some level or be on a working group, and we shall do what we can. What do you all think about is monthly enough? I mean, clearly we want to get some leaders to get together as quickly as possible.

[00:43:49.290]
But.

[00:43:54.750] – Larry Mandelberg
I was afraid this is going to happen. We’ve done really good for 45 minutes, but now I feel like there’s ten people who really have something they want to say. And I’m sorry for this, but one of the things is just a couple of quick things. I have a lot of ideas, and I don’t know where to put them down. I don’t know if they’re going to be captured out of this cap this chat session. I don’t know if I need to go to the website where you have the volunteers. I don’t know if you want an email. You need to let us know where you want all these ideas. And the second thing I wanted to say is that I do think the right way to start is to find a group of people who will be the governing body. I’m thinking of this from a governance perspective. So I’m thinking of a board, and I’m thinking in the nine to 13 member range, and the board can then do all kinds of things from a committee perspective. One of the committees that often gets missed is what I call an issue management team so that any issues that come to the organization don’t go to any committee or the board until the issue management team reviews it.

[00:44:56.140] – Larry Mandelberg
And their job is to review it and make sure it’s relevant for the organization and then send it with the proper background to the group that it belongs to. And the last thing I wanted to say is I think most of the people on this call are MSPs. I don’t know that I am not an MSP. I’m not even an It guy anymore. As you know, Karl, I was in it for 50, 40 plus years, but I’m not active in it anymore. But I’m here because the name of this society of It service providers. Are you intending for this to be exclusively for managed service providers or any It service provider?

[00:45:39.060] – Karl
Well, any, because at least from my perspective, part of my goal is to say, look, there are people who we need to have a way for people to get into this industry, grow up, become more professional, and with luck, they’ll become what we currently call managed service providers. But there’s a lot of people in this industry that they don’t want to offer managed services. They don’t want to offer flat fee, they don’t want to have subscriptions, but they want to provide tech support.

[00:46:09.510] – Speaker 14
And they are poor people.

[00:46:11.210] – Karl
Well, but there’s a lot of people who are hardware focused or whatever, and they’re very, very successful. But what they do is not what we would call managed services. They’re part of this industry, and they can be very professional and very profitable. So managed service providers have been kind of my focus for 20 years, but they’re not the only people in the industry.

[00:46:36.450] – Jason
Hey, Karl, it’s Jason from North Carolina.

[00:46:40.060] – Karl
Yes, sir.

[00:46:40.910] – Jason
And I just had a couple of different things I wanted to share. One thing is focus on building membership right. I think that’s going to be the big thing because the magic is going to be in the numbers. Secondly, I think I mentioned this to you in the email that we were exchanging earlier in the week, Department of Insurance for each state. That’s central to all everything we’re talking about here. Legislative, all the insurance companies have to go through that channel. So it’s almost like a single point of attack per state. So instead of working with 50 different insurance companies plus. Right. We only have maybe 50 different entities to work with to at least start the channel. And Department of Insurance is mostly focused on consumer fairness and insurance. That’s kind of their main goal. And I think that kind of plays into some of what we’re talking about today.

[00:47:27.170]
Right.

[00:47:29.850] – Karl
So the question keeps coming up, where to volunteer. I think the site, the Nsitsp.org, is the place to go because it’s one central location. And again, if people can volunteer there, it allows us to have just one place to start looking at stuff and organizing. And I would take all commerce. Tim golden. Yes, sir.

[00:48:04.090] – Speaker 13
I have to find the mute button. Hey, thanks for taking my time and thanks for putting this all together. There’s been a lot of talk of committees and cadence and all kinds of great stuff and where and how you keep pushing the website, which I think is amazing. I think you should start a separate forum just for the committee and board discussion as outside of the hey, I want to volunteer. Right. So I see that we can’t start our own threads or own initial discussions in the forum. So it would be great if there was a topic dedicated to just committee and board building as opposed to I want to volunteer for my state. So just a sort of housekeeping organization piece. Thanks, Tim Golden.

[00:48:46.530] – Karl
Yeah, good. Part of what we wanted to do is sort of get something started and then say, okay, we don’t want this to turn into Reddit with 1000 likes to have one comment.

[00:48:59.710] – Speaker 13
Totally agreed.

[00:49:03.250] – Karl
These things always have to start at the top down, but then you have to grow them from the bottom up. Like I said, this is my first time trying to start something from scratch of this nature. That is something that we will absolutely do. So shall we meet again like this in a week? In two weeks? In a month?

[00:49:29.730] – John Rutkowski
God have it in a week. You can’t make any progress on a monthly schedule. I know this from experience. I’m a co founder of the 20 and the 20 is interested in this. I don’t speak for the 20. I speak for my MSP Boulder designs right now. But there are other fellow members on this call as well. You have to get the cadence going to get it off the ground and get it joined. And I have the ears of a huge number of MSPs out there mostly within the 20, which if you wanted a physical meet up end of September, is the 20s annual event down in Dallas. Pretty well attended, very high, powerful and established companies. I’ve been in business 35 years before and being an MSP before the term was invented.

[00:50:35.850]
Yeah.

[00:50:36.250] – Speaker 3
This early in the ballgame, I’d say weekly to get traction.

[00:50:41.610] – John Rutkowski
One last thing I threw out in the chat. People are trying to say where to measure where you are. I built a scoring card called Businessecurityscore.com. I’ve already got insurance companies using that to evaluate where somebody is. It was built on a lot of the other models. Just puts the number on, gives you a number of where your cybersecurity score is. So you know what you need to improve and what are the low hanging fruit to improve the score real quick.

[00:51:15.600] – Ray Orsini
If you don’t mind. I did start a thread for working group ideas. I put the link in the chat for people to start adding there what they think the groups could be. I wanted to ask your permission first on another thread since Rayne has done such an amazing job of taking notes on this stuff. Thank you for the foresee on that. Would it be okay to start another thread with the meeting notes from each meeting, or are you not comfortable with that being public yet?

[00:51:42.030] – Karl
I’m totally fine with it. From my perspective, I want transparency in this, right? Clearly, I kicked it off and my company has made a significant investment so far, but I don’t want to own this. This is not my retirement plan. I have no interest in being whatever, but I think it’s important and I think it needs to get done.

[00:52:10.030] – Keith Nelson
I would say for next week’s meeting, someone is asking what we should have for an agenda, form committees, form state groups and Six Sigma strategies. And that would be a full meeting, and that would get us off and running and allow us to disperse into groups that will be more productive and reporting back to the whole.

[00:52:31.090] – Speaker 11
All right.

[00:52:32.830] – Speaker 15
If I may ask a question? Laura?

[00:52:35.200] – Karl
Yeah.

[00:52:37.210] – Tony Tsao
Hi, I’m Tony. I’m a CPA in Vancouver, Canada. It’s really not much of a question. It’s really for clarification and kind of discussion. So the way I understand it is we are reactive to legislature coming to our industry, the responses to professionalize, which I could totally understand and support. That when I first heard of this group, I perceive it as being full legislation, which is we are coming up with our own draft legislation, going to the legislature and have every state legislature. But now hearing this. I think maybe that’s not the intent. The intent is to first professionalized. So we’re getting ready in case of state or provincial legislature coming to us and saying we need to legislate it. The reason why I’m thinking about this is because I think a lot of people that I met in the Facebook group and other places are not supporting legislation. They want the freedom of having an unregulated industry. I also know the fact that’s not possibly the case because now they’re coming for us. So I want to emphasize maybe the first priority is to quickly organize into a professional group to set standards. And then whether the legislature is coming to us to regulate us or not, we’re working with them.

[00:54:01.440] – Speaker 15
But we’re not proactively trying to regulate our own industry. Because I’m a CPA, I understand regulation means less freedom. Legislation also means that there’s always somebody watching over our shoulders.

[00:54:19.220] – Speaker 7
Well, I think there needs to be somebody watching over our shoulders. That’s kind of the problem. Freedom that we have is the biggest problem that we have today. This isn’t a hobby for a lot of folks. This puts people out of business when we fuck it up. Pardon my French, but this is important. And the group that’s saying I don’t want to be regulated, I’m concerned, and I don’t have anything to back it up with is the group that we have to be worried about bringing down the house for the rest of us.

[00:54:42.830] – Speaker 15
I don’t understand.

[00:54:44.470] – Speaker 7
Sorry to be the one that has to say the hard thing, but I think that’s the hard thing.

[00:54:48.140] – Speaker 15
That’s the hard thing.

[00:54:49.200] – Speaker 12
Completely agree.

[00:54:50.650] – Speaker 15
The part that I’m wondering is about.

[00:54:52.240] – Speaker 3
Absolutely agree.

[00:54:53.190] – Speaker 15
I want to emphasize that the first priority is to organize us professionally, to bring our standards up.

[00:54:59.730] – Karl
Right.

[00:55:00.110] – Speaker 15
And the regulation is hopefully going to be the part that follows.

[00:55:05.680] – Karl
Tony, I completely agree with you. And again, I don’t know if everybody on this call has read the nine pillars document.

[00:55:13.120] – Speaker 15
Not with anything.

[00:55:14.500]
Yes.

[00:55:15.340] – Karl
Had over 1000 people download that, but I don’t know how to regret it. Just a second. Let me just hear. But part of what I did in there, as I said, look, we need education. We need standards. We need a way for people to get into this business and mature up. Right. I mean, those are the elements of professionalism. And part of it is also I mean, I started that document by saying is what Alex was referring to. We’ve had a lot of people who have not been responsible in this industry. They come in, they do a job in a halfass manner, and they take the money and they run. And even if you have never had any cybersecurity incidents, you live in a profession where that person lives, where that person behaves. And then you have to go back out and try to find new clients. And they have this vision that all these It service providers are just going to hand you a three tiered price list, take your money, not do the work. Right. We have bad actors, and it is in our everyone’s professional interest to have them be set aside and basically recognized for not being the professionals that the rest of us want to be.

[00:56:30.590] – Speaker 7
I’d just like to say I have to cut for another meeting, but I’m happy to help in any way that I can. But I’ve heard more than once and read more than once, and I’m going to say dozens of times, people say if I screwed up and get sued, I’m just going to close my business. I don’t have anything they could get me for anyway. I don’t really care that much. And that’s what we have to grow this group out of. That’s what we have to grow this industry out of. One where a trunk slammer can say.

[00:56:55.260] – Speaker 6
I’ll just flee the country. I’ll just close up and roll out.

[00:56:58.480] – Speaker 7
Right. And they can’t do anything to me. Right. That attitude has to go away. And we have to be the method this has to be the method for fixing that.

[00:57:11.830] – Speaker 11
Karl, what you’re doing is you’re starting a small business. And we need to realize that this will be a non profit business. But it’s a small business. It has to be profitable eventually. It’s going to have to have staff eventually. It’s going to have to have permanently dedicated people. And we need to have some people that can put seed money in to get this started. I mean, you need to figure out what your number is, whether it’s ten K or 20K, whatever the number is that we can get founding partners in. And I think MSPs need to step forward and say, I’m willing to be a founding partner. I want to vote on the board to be able to make these things happen. And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is, and that will give you the seed money to do everything else that you want to do.

[00:57:53.490] – Karl
Thank you. Yeah. I think one of the early committees is going to be like, how do we fund this committee? Somebody else was fucking yeah.

[00:58:00.810] – Speaker 10
I was going to say, Alex, I know you’re kind of passionate and I agree with you. I think this last ransomware, I mean, when I first heard about it on July 2 and MSP was just thrown right out there and I was like, oh, my gosh, here we go again. And here comes another black Mark. We got the first black Mark about a month ago. Now we got another one. And there’s people who have asked me, Lisa, you say you’re an MSP. And I have to back. I feel almost have to be on a defense. Yes. If we step forward as a group first before these legislators and say, hey, we’re taking upon us, because I hate to say what happened before on July 2, it came through a major vendor and then it filtered out and it ends up falling on what we call the little guys us. And I agree with that. And I think if we step up and say, okay, this is what we’re trying to do, and we’re trying to say if this happens, this is how we can go about it. I agree. And I think too, we need to make sure that on the board and on the committees that there’s full inclusion.

[00:59:08.510] – Speaker 10
And what I mean by that is I think Ray had mentioned it before. We might have MSPs that are one, two, three man shops. And we’re also fighting off the big boys like Dell and Xerox and Office Depot, Office Max. I think there needs to be a big I say a good range because us small guys. And I say that small guys, we’re out here because we care and we want to be a part of it. But there’s a lot of times small guys get pushed to the side. And that’s why I think that we need to have a full inclusion. But also I think this is a great idea because we’re coming forward first before we’re pulled well.

[00:59:50.080] – Speaker 4
Inclusion is built into being a path if we’re going to be a pack of any sort. Inclusion is dictated because we can’t be exclusive and be a pack. That’s kind of dictated there if you’ve ever formed a pack. So those requirements are a little stringent, but make us a little more acceptable to the legislators. And just as we’re thinking, remember the legislative attitude now, Karl said don’t get political. I never listen. I’m not good at obeying just a political climate right now is to legislate, to fix things. And so any stand alone is not in the climate nationally or in many States. So we need to be aware of that, I think.

[01:00:43.990] – Karl
Yes, sir. Well, legislators, legislators, their job. So we are basically out of time. James, did you have one more point you wanted to make?

[01:00:51.970] – Speaker 16
Yeah, I was going to add to Alex’s point, not only is it the bad, it actors who honestly, truly believe they can put together a hockey beat closure just because they can level the water work I’ve carried up to 100 on the weekend. It’s not just those guys we have to worry about. It’s also the customers who honestly don’t care. I am managing over a dozen Windows Server 2003 machines right now because the customers will never upgrade. They honestly don’t want to put the money towards it. They want to put their efforts towards it. I’ve got a better chance of shaving off Keith Nelson’s beer through the monitor than I do getting them off when it’s advertised. Yeah, there’s a whole slew of customers out there that are also going to hurt us. These are the guys that are going to get hacked. They’re not going to spend money on backups. They’re not going to spend money on cyber security. They’re not going to see a need in it until they do get hacked. And we’re going to have to deal with not only the bad It actors, but also the bad customers who are not going to rule.

[01:01:44.910] – Speaker 16
In Microsoft’s list of rules, no one thinks anything back. And happen to them until it does.

[01:01:52.110]
Right.

[01:01:52.900] – Karl
Well, a piece of the proposal so far was about if you offer them the appropriate services and they turn you down, you can be relieved of liability and that’s the part where the state has to get involved because you can make a deal with a client and have them sign a piece of paper but that will have no effect whatsoever when their insurance company sues your insurance company.

[01:02:18.150] – Speaker 13
But that doesn’t solve the PR problem of this though. Like at some point or another we just have to stop servicing customers that are shitty customers. And until we’re willing to do that we’re always going to have customers that are going to shop around for the cheapest option that is going to drag all the rest of us down.

[01:02:33.280] – Speaker 3
Yeah, unfortunately there will always be somebody there to service the shitty customer.

[01:02:39.090] – Karl
Right.

[01:02:39.490] – Speaker 15
Somebody will always want to take and be that lowest price Kmart vendor.

[01:02:44.330] – Speaker 16
Right.

[01:02:44.760] – Speaker 4
And remember Nancy Reagan answered this decades ago. Just say no. Here’s your answer. Just say no.

[01:02:52.040] – Speaker 3
Oh yeah, but legal I don’t want to go off in the weeds here. But legal weed didn’t make underground weed go away.

[01:03:01.530] – Karl
Not at all. Especially in terms of right?

[01:03:04.060] – Speaker 4
Yeah, but off on a conversation, Eric which we could probably put in the generator. Do we care if a non member MSP is one of them that is held liable? I think that shows our members don’t do this. That’s why our little seal of approval has value.

[01:03:24.900] – Karl
I would like to go ahead and put this to sleep just so we cannot go too far off in the weeds and we’ll come back next week and one of these discussions can be a thread on the forums and if you have ideas send me an email. I think the email of concierge at smallest dots is also on that site. That goes to my team so we want to be responsive. We want to help move this forward. Stay tuned and I will try to get together another meeting and unless somebody has objections, I’ll probably do the same time. Same stations. Very good. Thank you all for being here. Sorry to cut it off but I do want to respect people’s time and I also want to be able to try to put this into a manageable of chunks as possible.

[01:04:21.750] – Speaker 12
Thank you Karl for doing all this. This is fantastic.

[01:04:25.540] – Karl
Thanks Karl.