Community Meetings

[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