Community Meetings

[00:00:01.510] – Amy Babinchak
We have the majority of our board members not in their normal nice office locations today in broadcasting from wherever the heck they are. So it may be an interesting meeting.

[00:00:53.410] – Speaker 2
Hi, everyone.

[00:00:56.230] – Amy Babinchak
Hello, Julie.

[00:02:08.130] – Amy Babinchak
All right. It is 12:00 p.m. On the eastern coast of the United States, so we are going to go ahead and get started with this meeting. Just to let you know, as we went through our pre conversation this morning, we realized that almost every board member is not in their home office. So we are all broadcasting from unusual places. So if there’s any Internet glitches, I apologize. I’m actually on my boat, which has decent Internet access at the dock here, but you never know when it decides to go haywire. So if anything happens, just have patience and we’ll get back to it as soon as possible if there’s a glitch. So let’s go ahead and get started with this meeting today. Well, welcome to the all member meeting for this quarter. Here’s what’s on our agenda today. I’m going to have a little thing we’ll tell you about in a few minutes. Then Karl will speak, unless he isn’t at his hotel yet. Karl is actually traveling in Scotland and there is a strike which has shut down all of the trains. And so he rented a car and he’s driving as fast as possible to get to Manchester, his next destination.

[00:03:32.910] – Amy Babinchak
And as soon as he arrives, he will join us. We do have committee reports and updates and an update on a project that the board has been working on. We’re going to talk about the local contest that’s going on, a little bit about discussions, and then, as usual at the end, we’ll have all the time you want for discussion and Q and a couple of notes. This meeting is open to the public. Anyone is able to join it. It is being recorded, as you should have zoom should have told you that when you logged in. So if you don’t want to be on the video and you don’t want to be on the audio recording, just turn those things off on your end and that will protect you. This meeting, like all of our meetings, is recorded and you’ll find them posted on our YouTube channel as well as on our website with the transcription. And those are shown in the menu there under Meetings, member meetings. So you can review those information. We just see a note in the chat that Karl’s is going to take a little bit longer since everyone is driving on the wrong side of the road.

[00:04:43.670] – Amy Babinchak
He’s in Manchester, England. Hopefully, Karl knows he’s supposed to be driving on the wrong side of the road. All right, so what we’ll do then is we’ll just move Karl down toward the end of the meeting where he’s able to join us and we’ll deal with the other content first. So, my turn. In July, we hit the first major milestone for the NSI. Itsp it’s our first anniversary. Can I get some yays into the chat? I mean we made it for a full year. This has been a real significant effort to get this organization off the ground to this point. So from zero we actually created something. An active order directors developed the founding philosophy of the organization, which is that because this is our industry membership society, that it should be grassroots driven and that equality should rain so that every member, regardless of size or type, has an equal opportunity to vote. Managed service. And from there we created the founding articles within corporation and with the expert assistance of our treasure, filed and received our 501 C Six designation. And we created bylaws we appointed a committee liaison, skilled in negotiations and problem resolution to make sure that our committees are able to communicate clearly with themselves and the board.

[00:06:04.860] – Amy Babinchak
We created the Mission Vision Value Statement for the organization under the expert guidance of one of our directors, who taught us all new ways to think about words and understanding the thinking of others. We created the Governance Committee, to whom in keeping with the overall philosophy, became in charge of creating functional committees in finance, marketing and legislation. They’ve also put a lot of thought into making sure that everything we do is going to scale as we grow. Each committee then created their own charter to measure their actions and accomplishments against going forward. All these documents, they’re all available on the website for members to view and find out more information about what all of the committees are up to, we hired an Executive director, Karl Palachuk, to do the work that falls outside of the purview of the rest of us. Karl has put in a lot of time and his own money and staff into launching the society, the website being the most visible of those activities. It has grown steadily throughout the year and we owe him all debt for his work and dedication for all of everything he’s been doing. If you’ve attended our quarterly member meetings this year, then you’ve seen us go through this process steadily, building an organization up from zero and putting into place all of the infrastructure necessary to carry out the mission of the organization.

[00:07:26.810] – Amy Babinchak
As this year closed, I began to call for committees to shift into action. Because of time. The issues that brought about the necessity for us to organize have not slowed. Now that we are organized, it’s time for us to claim our seat at the table. And for that to happen, we need the support of the vendor community. We need MSP and It provider, corporate members and we need professional members, we need more members. Period. When we started this organization, it looked like legislation was going to be our biggest hurdle. But now we’re seeing that the insurance industry is making decisions for us and effectively regulating us and the Department of Defense recently updated CMMC to say that federal defense contractors can only be served by It providers that are CMMC compliant themselves in states. They’re using existing departments to issue rules and gather information like the Texas Department of Banking’s requirements claim. Our seat at the table in all of these venues. It’s time to shift from organizing into action. And so now we’re going to hear from our committee chairs so they can tell you how we’re doing that. I’m going to jump ahead in the slides just a bit so that we would have had Karl, but let’s make a couple of announcements.

[00:08:48.270] – Amy Babinchak
The next meeting that we’re going to have is November 9, the second Wednesday of the second month each quarter. And you may have gotten a few messages from Karl on correcting the zoom invitations. We should be good on that now. And then be sure to join us on social media and we’ll get those loops into the chat for you as well. A couple of updates. We have a logo contest going on. We have not had a logo. We just had words on the page. And so we thought it would be a good way to raise a little bit of visibility and give some members a chance to submit their drawings and get some things going. So be sure to vote for that. Now you can do that up on the website, and we need you to file for candidacy for elections. So if you go also to the website, there’s a place for you to do that. Now, it’s a two step process. So first you will fill out some real basic information in the form, name, email address, position that you want to run for and such. And then you have to go back in and edit that information.

[00:10:04.080] – Amy Babinchak
And you’ll be presented into your dashboard page where you’re going to upload your photo, give a candidate statement, answer a few questions, and all of that actually builds a page for you. Then to promote your candidacy with. We have waived for the actual voting purposes. We have currently the board voted to waive the requirement for professional members to have two letters of reference. We got a lot of pushback on the requirement, and the governance committee is revisiting other ways that we can use to verify professional membership. So for this election, that requirement is waived, which means that all professional members will be able to vote in the election. So, Larry, we’re going to let you speak now. So Larry has worked with us on our Mission Vision values that I mentioned earlier, and he’s currently working with us on developing a code of ethics. So Larry, I’m going to let you come off the mute and talk about those projects.

[00:11:19.810] – Larry Mandelberg
Thank you, Amy. I want to start we’re going to talk first about the mission Vision and values we approach this. I want everybody to understand how the board approached the development of these three statements to begin with. We think of them as our purpose statements. We think of them as how we define why we exist. And there’s really three groups, if you will. There’s the values, there’s the vision and there’s the mission. And each one has a very specific role. The values define our culture. We hear culture talked about a lot in organizations. And it’s very important to us that we create the right kind of culture for ourselves so that we can serve you, our members, as effectively as possible. And those values define the boundaries for our culture. For example, the first one talks about professionalism and integrity of our industry, which is our passion and why we’re doing this. The second one talks about our communication and how that’s how we maintain our integrity. The third one talks about open and honest communications, both with colleagues, clients and members. The fourth one talks about recognizing that the world is changing and we need to continue to be educated so that we can continue to deliver our clients and serve the industry properly.

[00:12:54.230] – Larry Mandelberg
And the last one talks about a member driven organization or commitment to a member driven organization. And if you believe in those five value statements, then you’re going to be aligned with the culture that we want to develop for ourselves as the organization and for you as members. The vision statement is looked at by us as our commitment as an organization to our internal stakeholders. Now, it gets a little interesting when we talk about membership groups like this, but our vision is what we’re trying to ultimately become. It’s not what we are today, it’s what we want to become. And our vision statement is that we are the voice of the industry defining the standards for professionalism It services. We know we’re not there yet, but that’s our future state goal. That’s our vision, that’s our internal commitment. And our external commitment to all of our members and stakeholders is what our mission is. Our mission is the value that we want to deliver to you and the manner in which we want to deliver it. So our mission is to provide pathways to establish high standards and ethics and to improve the perception and credibility of the It profession through actions driven by member engagement.

[00:14:21.110] – Larry Mandelberg
It’s a very inclusive statement, it’s a very large statement, it’s a lofty statement, but it’s what we’re trying to do. Now, we presented these to you six months ago and said if anyone has any questions or comments or edits, let us know. Either people weren’t interested or they were very pleased with what we did. And I’m going to go with the very pleased because we haven’t gotten any feedback other than positive feedback, no changes or suggestions. So thank you all for that. These are going to be formalized at our next board meeting and of course they’re always open to edits if appropriate. But these are our purpose statements now I want to touch on the code of ethics, because the code of ethics is a very interesting and complex area. Just understanding what ethics means was a challenge. The first thing the task force had to do was come together on why are we even creating a code of ethics and what is Essex mean? It was an interesting launch to the process, and we’re not done yet, but we’re making great progress. And what I want to report to you today is that we will have clarity for you on what we see ethics as being, how we look at ethics, just like I went through with you on the purpose, we’re going to have that for you.

[00:15:46.710] – Larry Mandelberg
And our ethics statements are going to be broken down into various areas of behavior or various areas of responsibility. Where we are today is we have three of those areas defined. The first one is competence. The second one is conflict of interest, and the third one is confidentiality. So I want to let you know two things. The first thing is that our code of ethics is in no way an effort to tell any of our members how to behave or how to run their business. This is a document that’s designed to help our members understand the most ethical approach to being a member of a professional organization that delivers it services to clients. MSPs there are no laws or rules making you follow it. And ethics are not something that are legally binding. They’re not something that’s legal or illegal. One example is, under confidence, we will always represent our skills and abilities accurately under conflict of interest, one of our statements is, members shall not knowingly make recommendations or provide advice that serves the member and not the recipient. And under confidentiality, one of the bullet points each one of these has multiple bullet points.

[00:17:19.640] – Larry Mandelberg
The one under confidentiality is, we treat all client information as confidential unless we know it is not. So that’s a taste of our code of ethics and what’s coming. We’ll do the same with that, as we did with these purpose statements. We’ll present it to you, look for some feedback, and be grateful for anything we hear back from you. I’m going to stop there, Amy. I don’t know if anyone has any questions, but I’ll stop and hand it back to you. Thank you.

[00:17:55.950] – Amy Babinchak
So if you do have questions for Larry, go ahead and put them in the chat. The quote of ethics is an ongoing process. We’re not complete with that process yet. And just like we did with Mission Vision Values, our intention to have it available for comments before it becomes finalized. So let’s look forward on to the committee report. Heather is actually in the car with Karl in England and Scotland this week. We’ll let her introduce herself when she comes back to us. Meanwhile, I think we can move forward to the committee chair, so let’s go ahead and start with Finance. Tracy, if you want to come off of Mute and give us an update on the Finance Committee, please.

[00:18:51.250] – Tracy Hardin
Sure, Amy.

[00:18:52.010] – Amy Babinchak
Thanks.

[00:18:52.830] – Tracy Hardin
We actually don’t have a lot going on right now. I have recently emailed all the other community chairs and asked them to start preparing their budgets for next year. We actually get that process started so they have time to meet and discuss their budgets. And we have a deadline later this month that those have to be turned in, and then we ourselves, after that prepare the budget numbers, and we have to present those to the board in November. So right now, we’re kind of waiting on everybody to get back to us with their numbers. That’s where we’re at right now.

[00:19:30.950] – Amy Babinchak
Thank you, Tracy. Brett, would you like to give us a summary of what’s happening with the Governance Committee, please?

[00:19:37.580] – Bret Erickson
You got it. Thank you. So we’ve had a great quarter. We’ve transitioned formally from the Formation Committee into the Governance Committee. We are involved in the election guidelines and kind of helping put things together. And right now, we’re working on the details of the membership programs and just what lands where and how that’s all defined. And so we’ve had some great meetings surrounding that. I just want to thank everybody who’s on our committee, and I announced the names at the last couple of meetings. I’ll spare you this time, but certainly you can hop on the website and see who’s on the committee and shameless segway while you’re up there. Please register for elections in a position, and please vote when it comes up. We’d love to have you join us. We got a great crew. We have a lot of fun. We’re very efficient. We make progress, and a lot of creative people on the committee, and that’s what I got.

[00:20:36.510] – Amy Babinchak
All right, Dennis, give us an update, please, on the Legislative Committee activity.

[00:20:53.210] – Denis Wilson
Can you hear me now?

[00:20:54.330] – Karl Palachuk
Better?

[00:20:55.850] – Amy Babinchak
Yes. Very good.

[00:20:58.050] – Larry Mandelberg
Okay.

[00:20:59.750] – Denis Wilson
The first thing I want to do is to give thanks to my great committee. They’ve done a superb job. We’ve been meeting Biweekly for the last year, putting together what we think are a strong offering that will help our members move forward into self advocacy and the grassroots methodology. First, let me talk about the five goals. The committee has five goals set up that says that, for instance, we should be following the national and state legislature affecting our industry, any legislation that affecting our industry. The second one is to inform the membership of those findings. Third is to educate government and businesses on the value of our offering, service offering, and the effects of legislation on it. The fourth is to create materials to educate the members, to help small businesses understand the legislation affecting us, and lastly, to train members to become effective self advocates. Now, talking to the first area, we have resources to educate us all and to make it really available to our members, readily available to our members. We’re looking at several websites that contract this kind of information to their members and we should have a recommendation to the board as well as to Tracy as to what the cost is going to be and what we should do about that.

[00:22:53.830] – Denis Wilson
The second area, we’re looking at setting up a blogging through our own website so that we can really focus in on those areas of legislation that are going to be really affecting us and those that have been usually outlined by legislature in, for instance, California or Texas or New York. And we’ve got a sense that something’s going to happen there quickly and we want to make sure that we get that information out to the membership as quickly as possible. The third area, we want to working with the Marketing Committee on legislative and business oriented brochures and white papers so that you can use them as part of your discussion with those legislature or businesses. Fourth, we’re currently working on creating templates for videos to fill in the YouTube channel. We expect to put together five and ten minute question oriented videos. So we’ll deal with one question at a time, like what is it that legislators need to have for me? What is it they’re looking for? How should I talk to them? Each one of those individual questions will be talked about in the videos. We should have the first one in Alpha Test this week and we expect to have something in the range of three to five within the next several weeks that we can all take a look at, say, yeah, good, this isn’t so good, and we move forward on it.

[00:24:52.090] – Denis Wilson
And the fifth area is to create training materials as well as an advisory council from within our group that can work with the individual members who are working with self advocating to a legislature in Michigan or Washington or Florida. Everybody has a different style of legislating themselves and everybody has different issues. And what we have is a group that has been working in this area for years. And so we’re hoping that we can offer an advisory group, an advisory committee, not committee, but an advisory group that could help those members that are going forward and working with their local legislators and they just need some help, a bit of hand holding at all. So anyway, those five areas are what we’re working on to create self advocates in a grassroots methodology.

[00:26:21.130] – Amy Babinchak
Thanks, Dennis. I see that Karl has joined us. I don’t see Heather yet, but Karl, we can bounce up back up to your executive report here.

[00:26:34.580] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you. So thank you everybody, for your patience. There’s a train strike in the UK, and so we just finished a four hour drive from Glasgow, Manchester. Anyway, we got the perfect storm. We also have the perfect team, so they made this all come off without a hitch. So we have 203 professional members as of yesterday and 521 registered members. So that’s over 700, which is pretty darn good. We have 1673 on the constant contact list and so we have a good core. Part of what we need to do going forward in the fall is to get more people to go ahead and join and become a professional member. So that piece of it becomes the most active and strong piece of the organization in terms of finances. All of those 200 members represent some money. Some of the people have also donated money, so our revenue is slightly larger than that. At the end of July, we celebrated our first official year in existence. So congratulations to all of you. It’s pretty shocking how much we’ve done in a year and I know some people are frustrated with how slow things are going, but I assure you the board and the committee members have worked their tails off to get us where we are and it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to go from nothing to something in a year.

[00:28:19.150] – Karl Palachuk
Membership renewals will start automatically on August 24. That was the first enrollment paid enrollment and we’ll continue from there. So on your anniversary dates, you will get a renewal. The next all member meeting is going to be in actually, I think there’s another slide for this. Next all member meeting is November 9. We always do the second Wednesday of the second month of each quarter and so we’ll be putting that and I hope by then we’ll have a little extra few extra resources to commit to promoting these meetings and getting a lot of people registered sooner. And so make sure that you’ve got that in there. Also, if you go to our elections page right now we are in the midst of the season of filing for candidacy. So I believe legislative Committee has nine members, all the others have seven. And then we have the board of directors. So we have 32 positions open and I put the banner with the yellow at the top so you can see that if you click on the Learn More or you’re clicking on Get Involved and go to 2022 Elections, you will see the Elections page.

[00:29:42.040] – Karl Palachuk
It’s got a nice timeline that explains everything. There’s actually an intro video from a meeting that we all held about a month ago and once you begin to file for office, you can start it and come back and finish it later. But please do so because the next thing Jen is going to start bugging you about is to make sure you get that done. But we recommend that you just go ahead and write up all your information and copy and paste into your application and you can build quite a nice little page so that people know what office you’re looking for and your social media links and so forth and so on. So if you have any interest at all, there is some commitment. It does take time. And being the nature of our organization, we have people who sometimes can’t make a meeting. That happens, but we really want people who are actually committed to doing some work and taking the time and participating as a member of the community. So it’s really extremely important that we have these filled. And I think we have at least ten people have filed so far, but we need to get all those 32 slots filled and the application to run for the office is through the end of this month, but please don’t put it off.

[00:31:02.200] – Karl Palachuk
And then in the month of September we’ll have the first 15 days as to basically there’s forms for the elections and we’ll have people discuss whatever things they want to talk about and what they think the future of this organization should be. And then September 15 to I think the 23rd is the actual voting. So we’re trying to take it at pace and make sure that it’s organized and that people have time to do this with your very busy lives running a business. The other thing that’s going on is that the Logo Contest is underway and Andy could not be here, he had a client issue at the last minute, so he’s the chair of the marketing committee. But the Logo Contest voting is going on now, so there are three candidates and again, go to get involved and click on Logo Contest vote now. I think as of this morning that there were only 34 votes cast. So anyone who is a paid member, you do not have to have your letters of reference in for this you do not have to have your letters of reference in for running for office either. If you are a paid member, you should be able to access those pages both in the contest and run for election.

[00:32:21.970] – Karl Palachuk
If you have any issues with any of those things, send us an email through the site or just to me and we will figure out. Make sure that you have access to that, but don’t put it off. Make sure that you do it as quickly as possible and do vote in that contest. And if you have a particular design that you like so much more than the others, then encourage other people to vote your way with that as well. I think that’s all I had. Just as a side note, you may or may not have noticed, so due to some hosting issues at my company, we moved the PSA SPP domain to a standalone server. It is through cloudways using Linole servers. It has nothing else on that server except this. So the performance should be pretty snappy. I think that we average two or 3% CPU time, so it should be stable and it should not be interfered with by anything else going on anywhere else in the world. And of course we can upgrade from there if we need the resources. Unless I forgot something, that’s what I had. Amy, is there anything else before I introduced Larry?

[00:33:41.290] – Amy Babinchak
You already missed that part of the show. Karl got it. Larry has done his thing. We’ve heard from all the committees. We didn’t hear anything from the Marketing Committee because Andy’s not here. So I don’t know if you’re able to see. Heather is with us now if you’re able to provide any additional information about what’s happening in marketing or in general. We did hear from the other leaders.

[00:34:08.410] – Speaker 2
Sure. So absolutely. As Karl had mentioned, the Marketing committee is working on the logo contest that is kind of keeping their hands full at the moment, although I know they have a lot of other things that are going on as they work with other committees. One of the things that I wanted to say is I am Heather Johnson. I’m the vice president of the board and also I’m the committee liaison. So I want to give a little pep talk about you’ve heard a lot about making sure that you sign up to be a candidate to be voted on to one of these committees. I’ve had the honor of working with these committees throughout the year. They are so dedicated. But I wanted to make it very clear that you don’t have to be a financial guru or a marketing maven, just have some interest in it and want to make a difference. The other thing is when you hear the word committee oh, no, I don’t want to be on a committee. They actually are having a great time. So don’t just kind of think of this as well, maybe I’ll do it. You actually will make a lot of friends with a lot of other great MSP and it seems like and vendors as well.

[00:35:26.380] – Speaker 2
It seems like these meetings people are getting on the calls earlier and earlier because they want to catch up and chat when they stay on later and later. So it’s a really great way to make some other friends in the industry by joining the committee and making a difference at the same time. So if you’re on the fence about it and you feel like you don’t have enough background in it, just do it. It’s fun. You’ll have a great time with it. I promise that you won’t regret it. And also just to reiterate that you no longer need those two letters of references that’s being held off for now. So if that was something that was holding you back, make sure that you do that. I’d love to read everybody’s nominations and pages, so get them all up so we can start seeing them and getting ready to vote.

[00:36:22.750] – Karl Palachuk
All right, so with that, we will go to the open Q and A and actually Andrew put the first question and you’re welcome to just ask open your mic and talk if you wish, or just put it in the chat. So Andrew says. I was going to join a committee? Well, there’s two ways. The first one is if you run in the election, you want to join a committee. So if you want to be in Finance and Finance is a great example of you don’t have to have financial background that’s really a policy committee because what gets funded gets done right so that committee doesn’t sit around and talk about spreadsheets and balancing the checkbook and so forth. But if you want to be on the Finance committee, for example, you go to file for candidacy and you just pick that from the list. You can run for one office and the top four vote getters will serve a two year term, the next three vote getters will serve one year term and then everybody starting next year, all terms will be for two years. So it’s just a way for us to kickstart. Roughly half of the committee is chosen each year.

[00:37:34.230] – Karl Palachuk
The other way that you could be on a committee is if there’s a committee vacancy, the committee chooses, they filled their own vacancies. So let’s say halfway through the year somebody decides to move to another business or whatever. If they choose to quit a committee, then there’s a vacancy and that committee chooses its own member so they would choose another replacement who would then serve until the next election.

[00:38:07.850] – Denis Wilson
Can I make a mention? Karl? Sure, you do a great job so far, but there’s one thing that I didn’t understand and I’m sure that there’s other people in the society that don’t understand as well. You can simply attend a committee. You don’t have to be a voting member, which is what we’re voting on is the voting members in the committee. You can come in any time.

[00:38:38.130] – Larry Mandelberg
Especially.

[00:38:38.720] – Denis Wilson
As far as I know. All the committees are open to having other folks there who want to come by and understand what’s going on with the committee and then if it turns out that we have membership issue with someone who can’t spend more time with us. Then we normally go to those people who have been coming to the committee meeting as informal members and look for them to come on board then as a formal member.

[00:39:14.350] – Karl Palachuk
That’s a good point and we need money so we can get more staff time. But one of the things that I’m hoping to do soon, if not very soon, is to begin printing up a calendar online on the site so that you can all know when committees are going to meet and that way you can choose to attend. If you are a paid member, it doesn’t mean you can vote but the reality is if there’s eight people there and you join in the conversation, you will have some influence even if you’re not an official voting member on the committee. So Eric has a question. So is the primary focus of this organization MSPs? I’m not an MSP, I’m a field engineer. And that’s a great question, Eric, and I’m glad that you asked it. This is for everybody in this industry as far as I’m concerned. And so the membership program is being revamped by the governance committee they’re looking at. If you are let’s say you’re an employee of intel, you could be a member of this organization because you are a professional in It services. If you just focus on home offices or you just do a break fix or on demand support, you are still a professional in the It services industry, and we want you to be a member.

[00:40:38.850] – Karl Palachuk
If you’re a small company, we want you to join as a company, and you get one vote per company. If you It big company, we want you to join as a company. You still only get one vote. But we want every organization that does it to be here because there’s kind of two major focuses that we’ve been looking at, and one is we need to protect the reputation of this industry because right now something goes wrong and legislators and others look at us and say, what are those people up to? Why do they use such dangerous tools? Right? And the other thing is, we need to we’re mature enough, it’s been, whatever, 50, 60 years that this kind of It company has existed. We need to hold each other accountable to a code of conduct and a code of ethics and to be able to say, hey, that is not the right way to do business. And I actually thought about we should have a blog post called the Reddit Post of the Week, because there’s always something on Reddit about, should I be paid for my overtime because my boss doesn’t pay me right?

[00:41:44.580] – Karl Palachuk
Or we call ourselves a managed service provider, but we don’t actually sign contracts or do preventive maintenance. Are we really an MSP? Right? All those kinds of things are things that our industry should be talking about, and it’s important to talk about what tools are you using? But that’s not the core of why this organization exists. This is about us holding each other accountable and making sure that the rest of the world knows that we’re holding each other accountable. And Amy mentioned that the code of conduct is an agenda for the future. We’ve been working on it. Other comments, questions? And again, you’re welcome to open up your mic. Do we need to leave the slide up or should we just have a free for all? I’m easy. Look at all those happy faces. Comments? Questions?

[00:42:46.750] – Amy Babinchak
Well, Keith has an excellent item for thought, I guess, in this question here. Have we forged relationships with other It organizations since we cover a gap not addressed in those memberships? As an example, a group within Tech Tribe where we can engage and encourage conversations about It legislation pending and insurance requirements. I would love to see that happen. What we would have to do in order to make that happen is really an outreach program to those organizations. In my mind. I think that would be something that the marketing committee may be able to lead. But it would require we definitely have to have a volunteer in those organizations in order to sort of be the point person that would lead that. Because certainly. One. We don’t have any employees in this organization yet. So there’s no one we can say.

[00:43:53.230] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah.

[00:43:53.470] – Amy Babinchak
You need to go into each of the communities around the It industry and make sure that the forum is up to date and comment on it. But if we had volunteer who would do that in their community that they’re very active in, I think that would be of great value.

[00:44:11.670] – Karl Palachuk
And I am in regular contact with folks at the Tech tribe. I happen to be on a little three day extravaganza in the UK. With Richard Tubb, and Nigel Moore and I are super good friends for a long time, so we’re in contact all the time. And Amy and I were just add comp tia, and we’re sort of directed, hey, we need you to go meet with these people. And we’re like, okay, but those conversations are taking place, and they will someday be a little more formal, but we are trying to do exactly what you suggest, Keith. And there’s lots and lots of organizations, but most of them, they’re pretty focused on a specific goal, and they don’t have a lot to cooperate on. CompTIA is probably the biggest one that we have a lot in common and a lot to cooperate on. They have a huge agenda and a huge budget, but they also have some big gaps where they basically said, we’re not going to be in this part of the discussion. But they’ve started the conversation with us, too, for example, in lobbying to say, okay, well, let’s begin the process. We’re trying to figure out whether we have issues in common and then begin the process of saying, okay, how might one figure out what our stand is on those things?

[00:45:36.670] – Karl Palachuk
And that’s something that I sent a note to Dennis and poor Dennis on the legislative committee. They have such a gargantuan agenda. But I’m like it wouldn’t hurt to start having this conversation of just sort of on the side. What kinds of issues might come up. Right to repair is the most obvious one. But as small business people, we would be interested in things that affect taxes for small business, licensing for small business, insurance for small business, contract legislation, so forth and so on. There’s many issues that affect us, and part of it is we’re also what Dennis is doing, what that committee is doing is beginning the work of beginning to create outbound communications that are to basically introduce us so that when it’s time for us to sit down at the table. We’ve built some relationships, and it all takes time the only reason I brought.

[00:46:38.130] – Speaker 8
It up is being 187. People think I know something after all those years and see how you got. I told you actually, because of some background I have in legislation and preparing curriculum, I’ve been asked a lot about that in forums and I just didn’t know if it was right to represent the legislative committee or the organization or just talk as an individual. People are asking, what do I see in my purported crystal ball? Because they are getting nervous. And the other thing I was thinking, since you’re over in the UK, and I don’t mind putting work on your plate, UK is probably being more aggressive governance wise. And it always fears me that some of those things our legislators will look at and say, hey, that worked over there.

[00:47:35.870] – Karl Palachuk
It’s also a case not just the UK, but all of Europe GDPR and other things. Europe has no problem saying these are the rules and if you don’t like it, the fines are ridiculously high. If you do business with people who do business in Europe, you become legislated by them whether you want to or not.

[00:47:58.490] – Speaker 8
Yeah, I thought that’d be good to tighten, get some stuff from Richard while you’re up there, while you’re out there or really show this is what can happen if we don’t act. And what’s happening in Europe I’m sorry I just gave UK off Europe, but is concerning, especially how they like to hold people financially responsible in big fine numbers.

[00:48:27.770] – Karl Palachuk
Yes. Let’s see. Oh, Josh might volunteer to be a trip three way lays on. So Michael asks, do you have a goal when it comes to state level oversight? I’m not sure exactly what you mean by oversight. Eventually we’re going to have to have somebody, some kind of organization in each state or somebody centrally who monitors the legislation in each state. For the most part, the federal government has sort of taken on privacy because when data moves across state lines, they can in the Commerce Clause legislate directly almost everything else that we deal with. With regard to two organizations, you and your customers, having a contract has to happen at the state level. There’s no federal authority for that to happen. So a lot of the things with monitoring organizations like ours or companies like ours is going to be state by state by state. And I think that eventually, whether people like it or not, I think we are going to be involved in creating some model legislation. Because if Florida or California or Texas or New York passes a law, it will become model legislation for the rest of the country, period. It just will.

[00:49:59.930] – Karl Palachuk
And we need to be in that conversation as quick as possible.

[00:50:06.290] – Speaker 9
Yes, Karl, if I can add to that. And the reason I asked about the state level is Vermont a lot of times looks at Massachusetts. So whenever Massachusetts makes a move, whether it’s in law or some similar aspect. Somehow the state looks at it too. So we don’t have any professional level in our industry in Vermont. But I do know that the state is starting to think about it. And one of the major reasons why I like what we’re doing here is to kind of help promote that level. Within reason.

[00:50:46.010] – Karl Palachuk
Right. Well, it’s funny. Six months ago, I would have said we really should have started this five years ago. Now I think we should have started it 20 years ago because it’s such a gargantuan effort. And again, all the committee members can take a nod for this one, the effort to get us where we are. And then I think about how would we start 50 state organizations? Right. We need to start getting the national level going and head in the right direction. And we need some vendors to chip in and to join the cause. We need a lot more members to join. Heather and I are having a discussion about how many MSPs are there in the world. Right. Oh, well, there’s all kinds of different numbers, but I can tell you it’s tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands more than we have now. So we have nothing but growth ahead of us. But part of that is that will bring enough money to have a dedicated person to make sure that all the things that we’re trying to do now get done, and then all the things we do in the future get done.

[00:51:58.430] – Karl Palachuk
It takes human bodies to do that. And we can call for volunteers, but quite realistically, we can’t ask people who are running a business to also then dedicate 20 or 30 hours a week to this organization. It’s just at some point, we have to have staff.

[00:52:17.750] – Tracy Hardin
Hey, Karl. This is Eric Lorenz. I’ve got another quick question.

[00:52:20.900] – Karl Palachuk
Yes, sir.

[00:52:21.750] – Tracy Hardin
And I guess this would be for I forget which committee it was concerning the proposed code of ethics. I’ve been part of other professional organizations in the past who have had code of ethics, and I want to make sure I didn’t misunderstand what was being talked about. But it sounded to me like what was being said. Well, we’re going to have this code of epics, but we’re not going to require you to subscribe to them. And you don’t have to sound it like you don’t have to follow them. And if not, that’s okay. For most of the time when I’ve been in organizations, by joining that organization, they’re saying that you agree with our code of ethics and you agree to follow and abide by them. And maybe if you don’t agree with them, maybe this isn’t the organization for you. And I didn’t hear that, or maybe I heard incorrectly. I just wanted to get a clarification on that because obviously you can have a code of ethics, but if nobody’s necessarily following it, then what good is it?

[00:53:33.150] – Karl Palachuk
Mary?

[00:53:35.610] – Larry Mandelberg
Yeah, I’m right.

[00:53:37.520] – Karl Palachuk
Here.

[00:53:37.750] – Larry Mandelberg
Just a second, I’m getting to where it’s quiet. Sorry.

[00:53:40.690] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. And part of it, Eric, is just a preference until Larry can get settled up. We’re going to tiptoe into this the same as we did with Mission Vision and Values. We’re going to put something out there and say, okay, is that the right fit? And then part of what we’re doing in terms of professionalizing the industry is saying, okay, now we’re doing this. And then I can see the next thing we’re going to do is this. And the next thing we’re going to do is this. And the next thing we’re going to do is this.

[00:54:10.030] – Larry Mandelberg
So I think the noise is abated enough that I can talk without being too disrespectful.

[00:54:16.520] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah, we can hear you fine.

[00:54:19.870] – Larry Mandelberg
And I got cars moving around me. I really apologize for this. It’s the beauty and the ugly side of being so mobile with technology. So the thing that I want to say about that is there are a number of what I’m going to label loose ends. And two of those loose ends are enforcement, which includes monitoring, and the other is what do I want to call it? How binding they are. And both of those are items that we have discussed as a task force at great length. And it’s become very clear that we have to put more thought into it before we put our stake in the ground. It’s a suite of very complicated, detailed tactical issues and there’s some conflicting components. For example, we want this to be member driven. Well, we don’t want to be the power up on high, dictating what members can and cannot do. That’s not being member driven. And to your point, I was involved in an international organization who you had to agree to conform to their code of ethics and they actually had an enforcement division and I was involved in the testing. You have to be tested to be a professional member and pass the certification.

[00:56:06.550] – Larry Mandelberg
And I was involved in the development of the re certification process because it wasn’t a one time certification for people who had the higher levels of certification in ethics. So this is very complicated and I want everyone on the call to be aware that we are really approaching this with a great small biz thoughts and care to make sure we bring you something that is valuable and will help us achieve our vision while delivering on our mission and operating within the boundaries of our values. And there’s an example of where you see those purpose statements coming into play. I’m going to stop there and see if anyone else has any questions.

[00:56:58.810] – Speaker 8
Yeah, I do have a comment.

[00:57:00.650] – Karl Palachuk
Really?

[00:57:01.040] – Speaker 8
I headed the board of ethics in our city and then was asked to headed for the state and we had judicial backing. However, it was not effective until I changed the theory from being punitive to being a learning experience. And I think sometimes ethics panels or ethics reviews can be considered punitive, and then you’re causing the old act react where I think we really want to be more of a learning and making our community better and approaching what may be perceived as ethics violations or gray actions, as learning experiences versus administrative action. I think if we kind of fit it that way, we’ll have better acceptance and people will be more apt to.

[00:57:53.990] – Larry Mandelberg
Listen to us, right? So, Keith, don’t take this the wrong way, but if I was there, I would hug you and kiss you, and I am vaccinated, so you could not be more right on target. This is about not about penalizing people. It’s about helping people understand what those ethical guidelines are. Now, I don’t have it handy, but we developed a statement for answering the question, why do we have a code of ethics? And it speaks to this very issue. I’d give it to you if I was home on my computer, because I could look it up. But if you want to shoot me an email, my email is in the chat. Shoot me an email and I’ll send it to you, and we’ll get it posted so the rest of the members can understand our task forces statement on why we’re creating a code of ethics. But yes, we are not trying to be punitive. And this is where the purpose statements I’m going to go back to those purpose statements because they are I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years, and I’ve been in technology since 73. Having this clarity of vision, mission, and values allows us to say, hey, if you don’t want to play in our space, go away.

[00:59:10.120] – Larry Mandelberg
If you don’t want to achieve the goals we want to achieve and do it the way we want to do it, go find someone else to play with. It’s not that we don’t want you here, it’s that why would you be here if you don’t want to do it the way we want to do it? It’s about being crystal clear and communicating about where we’re going, how we’re getting there, and what our boundaries are. And when you go there, what you find is that the people who are either intentionally disruptive or intentionally try to take advantage find that the culture and the organization tends to be so strong that it’s too much work for them to cheat and steal. And the people who don’t know will appreciate learning and being a part of something bigger than themselves.

[00:59:54.970] – Tracy Hardin
Just to be clear, I wasn’t necessarily thinking along the lines of being punitive in the way of dropping 100 pound ambles on people who didn’t follow things according to the letter of the ethics. At the same time, and I’m guessing, as I understand this being a new organization, this will come with time. That other organization I referred was for 15 years, I was a professional photographer, and I was a member of the professional photographers of America and they had a code of ethics. And kind of the way that worked was what would happen is if a studio did something that was really shady or didn’t come out right, their customer would probably end up at the doorstep of the PPA and saying, hey, this happened to me. Then they had a committee that would come back to that photographer and have a process where they’d say, hey, this happened. What’s going on? And it would either be cleared up or they would gently be told that we’re probably no longer interested in having you as a member if you’re not willing to correct this action. Right?

[01:01:10.210] – Larry Mandelberg
In the interest of time, let me just say this. I agree with everything you said. The way I think about it is we’re here to let you know that you’re not fitting in with the way we want this organization to run. And if you want to be part of it, we want to help you. And if you’re don’t know why you’d want to be here, you won’t enjoy yourself. But again, this is a much bigger conversation, and I would invite you and anyone else that’s interested, please reach out to me directly and we will get you involved one way or another in this conversation as it goes forward, because it’s a big conversation and it’s barely just begun.

[01:01:50.170] – Tracy Hardin
Fair enough.

[01:01:52.330] – Karl Palachuk
The other thing is, Brian said in the notes, if we can’t dictate something as simple as that, people should be honest. There’s no point in doing any of this. And I agree with you, but part of it is we can’t dictate, right? That what we can do. And Larry, I’m just going to post your email in the chat just for fun. What we can do is we start out and say, look, these are recommended code of ethics. And once we’re sure that after a few months or whatever, that we actually believe that we got it right. This is the code of ethics. You can have more, you can have less, but this is the place to start. And then we can move to saying that the next level of the next go round of the partner program is you must accept our code of ethics. And then it’ll be like perhaps even a check box when you join. And then from there again, keep raising the requirements, perhaps having continuing education credits and so forth. So our goal is to not only improve the industry, but then also improve its reputation more broadly. And that’s why the logo contest seems trivial to some people.

[01:03:05.020] – Karl Palachuk
But I got to tell you, once we have a logo that we say, this is our logo for at least so many years, then we can take it, put it on our emails, put it on our website, talk to our clients and say, Guess what? I do. I belong to this professional organization. And here’s what we’re doing right? This is what we stand for. And so it begins there. And I really think that it’s somewhat telling that we had so many people, a couple of thousand people interested in this, in large part because we are having a discussion about ethics in this industry and nobody else is.

[01:03:45.070] – Larry Mandelberg
Karl, I need to just cut in. I have got to go. I’ve got a client waiting for me. So I’m going to say thank you very much. Please reach out to me if you have any questions or comments.

[01:03:55.510] – Tracy Hardin
Thank you for addressing it. I appreciate it. And you too, Karl.

[01:04:01.870] – Karl Palachuk
And I’ll just publicly say we would not be anywhere as far as we are with regard to the mission, vision, values, and the code of ethics if Larry was not helping us on those task forces. See, Chris got his thumbs up there. Other comments, questions? Eric?

[01:04:22.710] – Bret Erickson
I was just going to mention governance committee wise, I’ve got the draft of one of the drafts of the membership stuff. And right here, professional member, the very last bullet currently says adhere to the itsp code of ethics. So it’s definitely on the road.

[01:04:40.290] – Karl Palachuk
MSP. And now you too can join the race, file for candidacy, and help have that whole entire discussion, other topics, or anybody who has not had something addressed that they have on their mind.

[01:04:59.570] – Amy Babinchak
The whole discussion that had is really important. And it’s part of our challenge as a new organization of figuring out how do we start? We have that conversation so many times. We want everybody in this industry to start to be nice people and be good for their clients and stop doing stupid things. How do we start? And literally everything we do has that same challenge over and over again. We are starting at all of the things. And because our industry hasn’t had any guidance, those of us that are here and are volunteering and our members of this organization and most of us in this position have many years of experience, we’re bringing that forward, and we’re figuring out how do we start and then how do we make this industry better? We know where we want to go. We know we want to be. We just have to get the roadmap together to do it. And that’s a large portion of our work right there.

[01:06:14.710] – Karl Palachuk
Let’s see. Probably not active in a committee this year. I’m already a volunteer leadership advisor. All right. Be an active member. Yes. Again, as soon as we can figure out how to have a nice little somewhat automated system for having the meeting schedules go live and members can attend, that would be great. If you’re on this call and you are listening to a recording and you are not a paid member, please. It is the most minimal thing that you can do. And I know $100 doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it adds up and it does help. And all the little things help lots of people who have donated money as well or donated time. But as we begin to grow those memberships matter, it also helps us with numbers. If we had 1000 members, it makes it much easier to go to somebody and say, hey, look, we’re a real organization and we know we have thousands of people who are interested in this. We just need them to go ahead and join because it matters whether you like it or not. Yes, we’re doing the right thing. But if you got 1000 members and you’re doing the right thing, you get more people to pay attention to you.

[01:07:35.600] – Karl Palachuk
If you go to a state legislature and you say, hey, wow, there’s like over 200 of us, they’re like, oh, that’s really nice. Yeah, very good job. So we need numbers matter, other comments or questions already then? Well, if that’s it, people are beginning to drop like flies. It’s five after, six after. Thank you for your attendance. Thank you for your support. If you have any comments or questions, send them to me, Amy, or anybody that you’ve seen on the call today. We’re going to get this recording up. It’s always available on the website. There’s a meeting tab and we post up the meetings there in reverse chronological order. So this meeting will be at the top of that list and we’ll get a transcript.

[00:00:01.870] – Karl Palachuk
You. Very good. Welcome everybody. And now let me introduce all the way from Michigan, that the one of the highest points in Michigan, just below to you, P amy Babinchak, our president from Harbor Computers.

[00:00:19.790] – Amy Babinchak
Hey everybody. So my goal today is to tell you a little bit about sort of where we’ve been and where the organization is going so that you know what you might be getting into if you decide to serve on a committee.

[00:00:38.550]
Here.

[00:00:38.900] – Amy Babinchak
Before this first year of our organization, everyone who is serving was appointed. We had to get this organization off the ground. And so our year long effort has been to create the necessary committees, to get charters for those committees, to get a charter for the organization itself, to develop our mission, vision, values. We’re currently working on a code of ethics for the organization, really all those organizational things that are required to create a national society from the ground up, which has been a tremendous amount of work. So this year was really given over to organizing. And I’m hoping that in this next year that we will be changing our emphasis from organization to action. Right? So instead of our committees forming up and deciding why they’re here and what their purpose is, we want them to actually get busy and start doing stuff. And at the point of our organization, which this is a very hands on kind of place, we do not have staff, we don’t even have funding yet. So we are depending on the committee members to not only just serve on a committee to make decisions, but to actually participate in fulfilling the goals of the committee and performing the actions that will take them to those goals.

[00:02:10.350] – Amy Babinchak
So for the board, I really see us as shifting ourselves from creating things to really assisting in fundraising for this organization. And not everybody agrees with me, but I think that is a major responsibility of board members to bring in money for the club. And I really kind of see that as everyone’s responsibility, but particularly those of us at the board level to use our influence to try to get that vendor program rolling, which we just announced recently. We do have the marketing committee, which is of course involved in the look of the club. They will be running membership drives and developing our presence on social media and even our presence at events. Right? What’s that going to look like? How do we want to represent ourselves? And we really have to start to get out there, enforce at events and let everybody know that we exist and build our membership up. We have a finance committee. The finance committee, of course, project expenses as an organization. We’re a membership organization, a membership nonprofit type, I should say it’s a C Six legislative committee has already started to move toward action. They are building educational materials for self advocacy and that is just now getting off the ground.

[00:03:56.550] – Amy Babinchak
And I expect that’s really going to ramp up here in the next year. I’m expecting great things from them and that is going to really allow us to be prepared to respond to local legislative initiatives that we know are coming and some that are already in progress. And then arguably the very most important committee that we have is the governance committee. The governance committee actually forms the other committees. They help the committees develop their charters and make sure the committees are fulfilling their charters. And they’ll also be involved in any dispute resolution that happens to come up. This is very much a bottom up organization. So this is not a situation where the board dictates what the committee should do. We want the membership to dictate what their membership organization does. So as a board we chose early on to empower the committees to take action and be the face in.

[00:04:54.110]
Where.

[00:04:54.510] – Amy Babinchak
Everything springs from in this organization. So that is my grand summary of where we’re at and where I hope this organization is going to go next year.

[00:05:07.490] – Karl Palachuk
All right, very good, thank you. And just a quick intro to the elections. So all of the positions in the organization are up for elections. So the way that the bylaws are written, the individuals are elected to committees and then the committee chooses their chair or board president. Each person will be elected to the committee and then it’s up to the committee to choose their secretary, treasurer or whatever they want. Most of them don’t need treasures, whatever they need. If you look at itsp orgelections, we’ve got a little timeline there. Basically we’re educating folks in July so that you can look around, see what’s what, decide whether you want to run, prep your statements, that sort of thing. And then beginning August 1, you’ll be able to actually apply to run for office. The campaign itself is the first couple of weeks in September and then the voting is the 15th through the 23 September. And that’s when we will go ahead and announce the elections. And if you have questions, put them into the chat. Also, if you came in late and you ask a question that’s already been answered, it may be up in the chat that you can’t see.

[00:06:40.120] – Karl Palachuk
So we’ll be happy to repost links and so forth if necessary. So to run, you have to be a professional member, which is a paid member rather than a registered member. If you have not finished your professional membership, you should by now have roughly 1000 emails from Jen reminding you to get that done. If you need help, get in touch with us and we’ll see what we can do. But I’d say if that’s your sticking point, go look at your LinkedIn profile and find one of the people who’s written something nice about you and say, hey, can you take that nice thing and put it on your letterhead so that I can upload it. It’s really not a huge hurdle for professional to get an endorsement from one of their clients to vote. You also need to be a professional member. So once the voting actually starts, only professional members will even be able to see the ballot. And you can vote once. So you can’t go back in and change your vote. Because we’re not keeping track of how you voted. We’re only keeping track of whether you voted. If we were to allow you to change your vote, it would mean we would have a not anonymous election process.

[00:08:01.830] – Karl Palachuk
So make sure you know who the candidates are. And Kara is actually the web developer and sort of all around wrangler of problems here. So she’s going to give us a bit of information about the website specifically and give us a little show and tell. So, Kara, I will let you drive. Do I need to stop sharing at this point?

[00:08:30.980] – Kara Schoonveld
Hello. Yes, why don’t you stop sharing? And you might need to let me see if I can automatically share or if you have to give me let’s see. I think that worked.

[00:08:44.400] – Karl Palachuk
Yes.

[00:08:44.810] – Kara Schoonveld
Does everyone see the elections page?

[00:08:46.190] – Karl Palachuk
Yes, indeed.

[00:08:47.230] – Kara Schoonveld
Okay, perfect. So what I’m going to do right now is to walk through the entire process from start to finish as if you want to run. So obviously, we’re going to start at the elections page. And just real quick, if you’re following along real time in your browser, you will notice that the form to file is actually available right now, but it doesn’t actually start until August 1. So if anyone decides to get ahead of ourselves and you go ahead and start to file today, note that that will be deleted so that we can have a fresh start on August 1. So disclaimer. Okay, So you’ll start here. If you decide that you want to run and you’re not sure which committee or board you want to serve on, you can head over to the committee’s page. And this is going to just give you some information about what, for instance, the governance committee is all about. You can read through their objectives, the deliverables and outputs, and also the critical success factors. See if those things are resonating with you. And you can also view who the current committee roster is. And like Amy mentioned, everyone that’s here has been appointed, not voted in.

[00:09:56.450] – Kara Schoonveld
So all of the members that are listed in the committee rosters and the board of directors all have to run again. So just because you see a roster here, you still have an opportunity to serve if you’re not yet all right. And of course, you can go through and look at all of them, compare them, et cetera. Once you determine what you want to run for, you’re going to come back to the election page, and beginning on August, you’re going to file for candidacy. And so I’m going to run through this now I am not logged in at the moment. And so I get a note here that I need to be logged in and a professional member. If you are a professional member and you don’t have your letters of recommendation uploaded, then you will get a notice that hey, exactly. That you need to go ahead and upload either one or two letters. So I’m going to log in with a test account to go through the process. And in my test account, I’m a professional member who has submitted both letters. And So now I get access to the form and I just simply get started.

[00:11:01.460] – Kara Schoonveld
Company name, right? Which committee are you running for?

[00:11:08.710]
Of?

[00:11:09.110] – Kara Schoonveld
No, there have been questions about this. So there are specific roles such as secretary and things of that nature. Those are voted on by whoever the current members of a committee, of whoever the current members are of that committee. So in this case, if you are wanting to hold a secretary seat or something similar and you are elected into that committee, then probably in October or sometime around then that specific committee is going to have an internal vote of who is going to hold those seats. Hopefully that makes sense. And if you have questions about that, throw them in the chat. Someone other than me can answer them better. So I’m going to say that I’m running for the marketing committee and we just had two quick commitment statements that you should read through and be sure that you can fulfill these commitments. And then you have a chance to make sure that everything is correct. And if it’s not, you can of course go back and change anything. But once you decide it all looks correct, go ahead and submit your candidacy. There we go. All right, so this lets us know our next step is to complete our candidate profile.

[00:12:26.590] – Kara Schoonveld
To do this, head to your dashboard and click on the blue pencil to fill it out and we can go to our dashboard real quick before I do this, this page hasn’t been refreshed yet, so you’ll still notice that I do not have a dashboard button here. But once we submit now you will have this option to go to your dashboard that’s only available for candidates. It just gives you a quick, easy way to get to your candidate dashboard. All right, so from here I can see some quick details, see what my next steps are. The next one up is to complete the campaign page. Here it is. When did I submit it? And here is how I can edit. So I’m going to go ahead and edit. And your campaign page is public. It’s visible to everyone who happens to browse to this page. You don’t have to be logged in or even a member of the NSI, itsp in order to view it. So keep that in mind as you’re filling it out. There are a couple of areas that are required here, but you can always come back and make any updates you like up until the end of August.

[00:13:35.740] – Kara Schoonveld
So August 31 is going to be the final day and then they’re kind of set in stone for the voting period. So one of the things that we do recommend is that you prepare your answers in a word doc or something similar so that you can copy and paste them so that you don’t lose anything. So I’m going to go ahead and fill this out mostly with some dummy text, and I am going to go ahead and copy and paste for time purposes. For your headshot, we do recommend a square image that’s at least 300 x 300 pixels. I’ll grab that one. Candidate statement. There’s some more information about what exactly we’re asking for when we say candidate statement, as well as relevant experience. And keep in mind that these little blurbs are also going to be visible to viewing members on the front end so they know what it is you are answering. Social media links are optional, of course. We recommend them so that others can, again, just learn a little bit more about who you are, what you stand for, what types of communities you’re involved in, and things of that nature.

[00:14:48.460] – Kara Schoonveld
For the additional website, this is for your business website or your blog. The hope is that you are the primary content creator, right? There should be a website that represents, again, who you are and what you stand for and will allow people to get to know you a bit better. Organizational affiliations. Go ahead and list any that are applicable to you. If you have more than one, you can continue to add as many as you are affiliated with and you can also close them out. Of course, check any skills and experience you can bring. I’ll just grab a couple at random and if you have more that are not listed, you can again add more as necessary. Finally, we have a declaration of accuracy. This is just saying that everything provided here is true and correct, else you may be excused from the election process. All right, and now we SMBiT. All right, so of course this brings us back to our campaign dashboard. So to see our page on the front end, you can click on your name. If you look in the bottom left hand corner of the screen, the URL is itsp orgcandidatemyfirst and last name and that’s automatic.

[00:16:12.470] – Kara Schoonveld
So the idea is that only professional members can run. And so this helps prevent anyone trying to run under the guise of someone else’s account and it just kind of helps to keep those processes tight. If for whatever reason you do need that updated, you won’t be able to do that on your end, but you can send us a note sort of explaining what happened and why it might need to be updated and we can do that on our end. No problem. All right, so let’s click into the front end. Let’s see what’s happened here. This is the joy of doing things live, right? All right, just 1 second. I think I need to reset permalinks. Let’s actually do this. All right, do we see my page here?

[00:17:29.070]
Yes.

[00:17:29.470] – Kara Schoonveld
Thank you, Carl. Okay, so this is what your page will look like. On the front end, we have first and last name some information about you, all of your social links. If for some reason you don’t have one of these social accounts, maybe you don’t have a reddit account. This just simply won’t show up on the front end and it will only show exactly what you put in. You can see what committee you’re running for and then also your candidate statements. So I mentioned that it gives the prompts on the front end as well. This just gives some context about what your answers are explaining and that’s that. We have the organizational affiliations on the side here and then all of the special skills that you listed as well. So that’s your page. You’re welcome to share that on your social media and your blogs, email, marketing, what have you, to sort of get the word out about your specific campaign. And then when you want to go see who else is running, you can go to the Meet the Candidates page. This is filled with profiles from folks who I have asked to help test the process as well.

[00:18:37.540] – Kara Schoonveld
So, like I mentioned before, these will all be cleared out ahead of August 1, but I’m hoping that Carl will still choose to use his Vaccination eyes photo. So these are all the candidates together. If you want to view by committee, you can just click into a filter and then, of course, you will just see the board of directors and then whatever other committee you like. Or you can view all at this point, vote will take you absolutely nowhere, of course, because the voting will not happen until I should know this date off the top of my head. September 15 through 23rd is when you’ll actually be able to, of course, vote. If for some reason you need to stop your campaign or if you want to switch your committee or something like that, you also need to ask us for help to do that, which will be no problem. And the final thing that we recommend that you do is we will have an election forum up and we suggest that you create sort of an ask me anything type post so that members can start to engage with you and you can answer direct questions, provide any further explanations, things of that nature.

[00:19:56.630] – Kara Schoonveld
And let me just check the chat here and see if anything was related to what I’ve been sharing.

[00:20:03.290] – Karl Palachuk
There are plenty of questions that we’ll get to.

[00:20:06.590] – Kara Schoonveld
Okay, perfect. Yeah, I just wanted to check were any related to the process I don’t see that there are so very good. Okay, I’m going to go ahead and stop the share and I will send it back to Carl.

[00:20:21.470] – Karl Palachuk
Very good. Zoom, of course, changes everything up every time you do that. Let’s see which one of these is the PowerPoint slideshow.

[00:20:33.510] – Amy Babinchak
Did an excellent job at creating the election pages for us. I don’t know if you guys were impressed by that, but I’ve been very impressed with it myself. Thanks, Amy.

[00:20:44.320] – Kara Schoonveld
I appreciate that.

[00:20:45.490] – Karl Palachuk
Let me go through a few FAQ slides that we’ve prepared and then I saw tons of stuff. Great questions in the chat. So we’ll get to those. First of all terms, the goal long term is that about half of each body will be elected each year. So the way that we jumpstart that is that for each position. So you will run for a committee. You can only run for one. You’ll run for a committee or a board, and the top four vote getters will serve two year terms. The next three vote getters will serve for the next year, and then they’ll stand for re election for a two year term. And then after that, everybody search two year terms, but basically about half of them each year. And so those are the four committees plus the board of directors. You may run for one office at a time, and Kara covered this, but you don’t actually run for the chair or secretary position and so forth. You run for the body. And then the overlap will be the month of September. Basically, people will be elected in September, and then with luck, they will try to get together with the outgoing committee as quickly as possible.

[00:22:21.790] – Karl Palachuk
In the month of October, people will begin serving their new terms. And I assume at the first meeting you may choose not to do at the first meeting. Committees can do whatever they want, but in October, we hope that you’ll then elect your chair and so forth. These are not paid positions. Nobody has any money. So that’s not an option.

[00:22:51.990] – Speaker 4
Right now, is they’re up and down with a WiFi.

[00:22:54.600] – Karl Palachuk
Okay. All right. Somebody is talking to Muting. All right. So can vendors serve? Absolutely. So we have vendors on the board now. We have vendors on a few committees. We would like to have at least one vendor on each committee. And that’s what I would like personally. Vendors are a key piece of this community, and we need them to be successful and they need us to be successful. So in the vendor partner program, whatever level that a vendor might choose to participate in, they would still have included in that one professional membership. They would assign who it is, So they might choose to sign it to the owner or to somebody who is a community manager or whatever. So vendors may have one seat and one vote. They have to designate who that person is. But we obviously want vendors to participate in what we do and give us their perspective. With that. I will just remind you that the election site is up there. If you have questions about any of this, send them to me. Karl@itsp.org and with that, go to the chat. Amy, have you been following all the chat questions? Any good ones picked up for us?

[00:24:26.700] – Amy Babinchak
I’ve been following all the chat questions and trying to at least acknowledge them with a little response. We do have committee members here, so if you have a question about any particular committee and what they’re doing and what they expect to be doing in the next year, feel free to ask those questions. Kenneth was asking what’s the date of starting? Is that October 1 or is it October, something? I didn’t for the service when the new people begin?

[00:25:02.920] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah, basically it’s in October, so whenever that committee meets the first time in.

[00:25:07.120] – Amy Babinchak
October, the first committee meeting in October. So the overlap point then is between the end of election in September and the first committee meeting in October, and we’re encouraging each committee to have a meeting in between to do a kind of a transitional thing between the existing folks in the incoming members.

[00:25:27.950] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah, it would be great if there was some get together and overlap, even if it’s just a very casual thing just to get to know each other and sort of what have you guys been up to and so forth. Between now and then, I’m going to be preparing all kinds of introductory materials, kind of like all the stuff that the current committee members didn’t get, which is welcome to the committee. Here’s where things are, here’s where you find, and so forth. Maybe just like a three to five page guide. But where to find things? Steve asks, what does campaigning entail? That’s kind of up to you. I mean, basically my hope is that you’ll point people to your page where you will have a well thought out statement, and then you can promote that anywhere. So if you choose to promote it on social media, just know you have to kind of point to the people who are actually members who can vote. We do have a forum set up for elections, and you can put a page there and says, hey, vote for Steve, he’s the best, blah, blah, blah. And I hope that you’ll be answering questions and so forth.

[00:26:42.040] – Karl Palachuk
With luck, people who want to vote will read through the statements and choose their candidates for each of the offices. With luck, we’ll have ten or twelve people running for each office, So I was very happy to see the registration for this exceed the number of open positions.

[00:27:02.130] – Amy Babinchak
So Damie, who is not me, asks if we have community leaders who would give a quick pitch on what they do and what they’re planning to do in the coming year. I don’t know that we have them all here, but if there are any here that would want to do that, make a pitch for their committee, we could certainly unmute you and have you do that.

[00:27:25.940] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. Dennis yesterday with Nye about creating videos, and so they’re moving forward on that project. Dennis, did you want to yeah, just quickly.

[00:27:38.620] – Speaker 5
Legislative committee has decided that the easiest way to communicate the kinds of things that we’re doing and what we should be doing as far as legislators are concerned and such, we’re going to do that in video. These will be five to ten minute videos, and we are doing the first one as we speak. And so what we’re looking for is our members to assist with either manufacturing these videos with the professionals at Carl’s office and or to be completing the brochures that go along with each state. And we would hope that you folks would have your state understood so that you could easily write that into a brochure form and we would put it up and make it available to members, especially those members from your state.

[00:28:53.550] – Amy Babinchak
We have a lot of education to do. Right. So there’s been some communications with State of California so far, and one of the first questions they had was, like, what is an MSP? Right? Who are you people? What is an It service provider? What makes you qualified? What degree do you hold? They don’t know anything about us, and so the only thing they know is that their constituents are complaining about ransomware, and so they’re starting to want to do something. And of course, privacy is a big issue that’s out there as well. And all these things point back to who’s actually providing those services, but they don’t know anything about the people that provide those services because we’re not licensed. We have not, until now, been organized in any way at all where they or the consumers of our services can go and say, oh, those are people that I would like to do business with, or those are people that I need to talk to because I have questions about how to make good legislation that makes sense.

[00:30:07.350] – Karl Palachuk
So, Tracy, do you want to tell us what you guys are up to? Sure.

[00:30:14.250] – Speaker 6
I am the chair of the Finance Committee. This year has been a building year, so we did a lot of work on getting things together as far as money and how it’s going to be spent, we worked a lot on the budget. We also worked on the vendor partner program a lot this year. So next year is going to look very different for this committee. We are about to go into getting budgets together for the next year. What’s our next step right now? But next year we’re going to be more involved in how money is spent. Do we have enough money? Is it being spent wisely? So we’re a great committee to join. If you are interested and you care about how money is spent. We have about eight members right now, and we have a nice mix of vendors and MSP and other non MSP owners as well. So that’s kind of what we’re about, is how money is spent. Is it spent wisely and then getting each of the other committees to get budgets to us is very important.

[00:31:21.870] – Karl Palachuk
That’s about it. Thank you. Andy Higgins. The Marketing Chair is off in the UK, but Steve is here. Can you sure. We didn’t prepare for this, but no worries.

[00:31:36.650] – Speaker 7
I’ll So he’s off on holiday, as they say. So I would point folks to the Marketing Committee mission statement that’s posted for details on what we hope to get done next year. Those things would include getting the messages out, creating appropriate messages for specific target audiences, whether that’s MSP or prospective members, or even assisting in the legislative contacts, and then branding. So making sure that the organization has a strong and vibrant brand that gets shared and understood by the market in general. We last year spent some time on having a branding contest, and that’s going on right now. So if you haven’t voted for that, get your votes over and we meet once a month. So it’s not terribly taxing, but we try to be as smart as we can to optimize the time we have to maximize our message. So are there any questions out there? I’m happy to take them either on the chat or you can contact me after the call.

[00:32:54.690] – Karl Palachuk
Very good, thank you. Brett is not here. Somebody else from the Governance Committee want to step up and give us two minutes worth. I think Amy gave a pretty good overview. Governance Committee kind of created all the other committees and sort of made the framework for everything we’re up to, and they will, going forward, help to sort of guide the whole organization. So that’s a great community. Each of the committees meets for ideally, once things are moving along, they will meet for once a month for about an hour. And I know that doesn’t sound like much, but there’s a lot of prep work, and even now, committees are sort of dividing up work and saying, hey, we need these subcommittees. Go off, do this work, and bring some stuff back to us. So that’s a very common thing that happens. Amy and I have already spoken. Heather, do you want to talk a bit about what the board does? Also not give an advance notice that we’re going to do this?

[00:34:23.310] – Speaker 8
Well, we do so much, but.

[00:34:27.730] – Kara Schoonveld
I.

[00:34:28.040] – Speaker 8
Hope my camera is working okay. But the board has been working on ethics, and we have an ethics committee that has been focusing on that and developing a code of ethics. So we’ve been working really hard on that. That’s been twice a month that we’ve been meeting to do that again.

[00:34:52.330] – Kara Schoonveld
Also, the board meets once a month.

[00:34:56.830] – Speaker 8
We have a great group right now. But we always want different thought leaders and different minds and different viewpoints. So if you have an interest in making a difference, this is a place to do it. I’ve had past year here in the board during this formation time and to see where we’ve come in the past year has been amazing. I’m really excited for the action part of it. And once comes up to serve and be part and you can sit on the chair and say, oh, somebody else will do it or you can roll up your sleeves and get to work. And that’s what this board and these committees are doing, is taking action and doing something. But we can do it together. We can’t do it if we just it on the sidelines and say, well, that looks like a really big mountain, we need to get on those hiking boots and gear up for a big climb, but we can certainly do it. We have a lot of great minds MSP were vendors and I’m excited to be able to be a vendor and also a board member. But I’ve talked to have these skills that are needed thinking about legislation.

[00:36:30.450]
And.

[00:36:30.760] – Speaker 8
Making connections, thinking maybe this isn’t for me, maybe I don’t have the skills. Yes, you are getting here and get fighting with us.

[00:36:46.170] – Karl Palachuk
Excellent. Thank you. So speaking of climbing the big, big mountain towers, perhaps there should be a regional or sub regional committee because there’s so much work to do. And I would say I point to the legislative committees. They have just an amazing and almost overwhelming amount of work to do because eventually they’re going to have to have some presence in every state and they’re looking at educating lobbyists, legislators, the media, the small businesses that talk to the legislators, so forth and so on. So there’s plenty of work to be done and I expect that that piece of the organization will grow and mature. As Amy said, start going from organizing to actually producing. And we’re actually doing that now even though it’s just the middle of the year. Amy, did you see another question?

[00:37:50.210] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, so there’s a question about if there’s a link that lists what the committees are defined as and I just asked her if to post that up. So there it is. So nsitzp. Orgcommittees. If you click that link, each of the committees this year worked on creating a charter for their committee. What their goals are, what their potential blockers for achieving that goal is, what their needs are. So we tried to make it a really nice holistic view of what the committee’s purpose is. So please go ahead and click on those and you’ll get all the details of what the committee believes their function is.

[00:38:39.890] – Karl Palachuk
Tony asks why you’re having people sign up for particular positions rather than get elected and then have the people too. So the reason that it’s organized this way is basically it’s sort of a nod to the bottom up organization that I don’t even know if we specifically discussed it. We just started doing it. That committees are in charge of their membership and also the board is in charge of Vids membership. So they get to choose who their chairs are rather than having people run for specific positions because it might be that somebody will choose not to be a chair after the first year. All of their hair has been pulled out and they’re just like done with it. But they still want to serve on a committee anyway. That’s different.

[00:39:36.740] – Kara Schoonveld
Go ahead.

[00:39:37.400] – Amy Babinchak
In the forming of this organization, we took a long time to discuss the failings of other organizations that we’ve been members of. What caused them not to be successful, some in industry, some outside the industry, just how we could best function. And our goal really is to make sure that all members have equal voice, so that if you’re a vendor or really large MSP or one person MSP, that your voice is still heard and is still equivalent to everyone else’s. And in order to do that, we decided one of the ways was that committees are going to be really in charge of themselves with the governance committee being sort of their overarching group that is going to make sure they’re completing their charter, that they’re doing the things that they said they were going to do in that. So that’s a really important piece of how this organization chose to organize itself.

[00:40:49.530] – Karl Palachuk
True. And I got a direct message from somebody who says maybe there are some jobs that you want to exclude vendors from, like chairman of the board. I believe that we agreed, and it’s up to the governance committee to verify this, but I believe we agreed that the vendors would not be a majority of any committee, but we don’t really have that many active vendors, so that it’s a concern right now. But the reality is that if the committee decides that they want to do that, they can. Now if you’ve got a committee of seven and one of them is a vendor, I don’t think that they’re going to be pushing their weight around too much. So today I would say that’s not an issue. We are fundamentally an It service provider organization, not a vendor organization. But we clearly need vendors to be successful. So again, it’s not an issue so far, but it’s something to keep in mind and there may be more guidance down the road, but right now it hasn’t been a problem. And to be honest, I have to say and I just shout out to Heather and also Ray ASCII who was on one of the committees for a while.

[00:42:07.410] – Karl Palachuk
Those are two examples of vendors who have just been tremendous contributors to this organization. So we appreciate it.

[00:42:15.870] – Amy Babinchak
I don’t see any other questions in the chat, so if you do have questions, go ahead and pop them in. There.

[00:42:21.720] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. And you can just open your mind and ask. The other thing is if you’re concerned a bit about who we are and what we do for a living, the about page@itsp.org lists our mission, vision and values, which the board, I’m just going to let my old brain try to remember worked on for about four months, I think might be longer. But it was a huge endeavor and Larry Mandelberg let us in that and did a spectacular job. So there’s that. And I think that the mission, vision and values are and actually a really good representation of who we are and what we want to be. We want to be the voice of the industry and we want to increase professionalism and the integrity of people in our industry. It’s funny. There’s questions I see. I’ve almost thought about writing a blog post called The Reddit of the Week where people say things like, I don’t know why we need standards. I don’t know why we need to have all these things that keep people out of the industry. I don’t know why we need professionalism. Who are these people? And I’m like, okay, So you might not be our ideal member, but we do need professionalism.

[00:43:39.800] – Karl Palachuk
And the people who say, well, I’ve been in the business for 20 years. You have nothing to teach me about professionalism. Okay, that might be true. You may do everything right, but you live in an environment where people are signing contracts and not delivering the services that they provided or that they promised that they would provide. So there really is a need for integrity and professionalism in this industry. And a handful of people have told me this has been one of their passions for years. And so I’m glad that those people are getting involved.

[00:44:13.570] – Amy Babinchak
One of my goals is that first, let me say I think this organization has gotten the reputation of mainly caring about legislation. But one of my goals really is truly to help the consumer decide if I have an issue with my car, I’m able to tell the difference between the guy that works at the oil change shop and a certified mechanic. If I’m a consumer of It services, I’m not able to tell the difference between different It people. I have to sort of take their word for it. I don’t have an organization that might be able to provide some input on it. I don’t have really any information as a consumer as to the reputation and the likelihood that I’m going to get good service from a particular company or individual. And so it is one of my goals for this organization that we provide the consumers with better information about who they’re doing business with and what their capabilities and their professionalism is.

[00:45:37.590] – Karl Palachuk
Very good. Other questions or comments from folks I’m hoping that you’re all going to run. So prep those statements now so you can copy and paste them when the time comes. So one of the questions was about whether if people make comments on a forum, would you be able to get an email? And Kara answered it in the chat. But yes, if you log into the forum and then you check the box that says subscribe to this forum, you will get emails at the email that you are logged in as. This is Larry.

[00:46:18.570] – Speaker 9
I just wanted to make a comment real quick. This question about why we exist is massive and I think it’s really core foundation to who we are and what we do. I think it describes everything about why I’m here. And while I’m not an MSP, obviously my life is embroiled in technology and this issue of not being able to really properly evaluate good versus bad vendors is everywhere in the world, whether you’re hiring a contractor or an It person or a lawyer or an accountant. And I just want to emphasize the vision. The Nsitv is the voice of the industry defining the standards for professionalism and It services. And that’s why I’m here. And I think that my elevator pitch for this is making the industry more professional, which is, in my way of thinking, a metaphor for better making it a better industry. And whatever we have to do to make that happen is what we want to do with the help of the industry. So I just wanted to put that out there.

[00:47:38.450] – Karl Palachuk
You’re here again. I’m not sure why this person maybe it’s accidentally sending to me directly instead of to everybody, but comment that we’re trying to do something at a time when there’s so much distrust of experts and governments and outside companies wanting to load consequences onto others. Yes, these are difficult times, but the reality is our industry certainly less than 100 years old, somewhere around 60 or 70 years old. For most of us, it really took off in the so at 20 or 30 years old. The SMB It industry is really just now mature enough to say we are going to be a profession, we are going to step up and we’re going to have some barriers. We’re going to say, look, we need you to be professional. If you want to be in this industry, you can no longer just put your name on a laser perf business card and go take care of $3 million computer systems. You need to be a professional. And that we’re not selling training, we’re not selling advertising. We’re here to set standards and it’s a long, difficult road and we will not be done next year or the year after.

[00:49:07.670] – Karl Palachuk
This is an undertaking that’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort. To be honest, I congratulate everybody on this call because you are clearly interested and I think most or all of you are willing to participate. And I think that’s huge and I think that speaks to our future success that we have so many people who are sincerely interested in the industry as an industry. So thank you for being here. Hey, Carl. Yeah.

[00:49:35.650] – Speaker 4
I understand another compelling reason this organization exists is to help influence and shape the developing regulations in our industry and try to prevent the nightmare of folks that still refer to the internet of tubes as being those that create the rules that manage or govern this space. I think that’s easily as important as the other goal. They should be related, of course, and I know that there’s a legislative committee. What I don’t know is how to actually find the right people to address and how to address them in my own particular large but small state. Do we have a group of people or anyone who has insight into that? If I was in that committee, Dennis.

[00:50:22.220] – Karl Palachuk
May or others, ted or others on the legislative committee may have something to contribute on that front, but it is one of the big, big chores of the legislative committee. Some days, like again, building this infrastructure of talking to MSPs and saying, how do you get to know people in the legislature? How do you build those relationships before an issue comes up? Because we don’t know where and when, but we do know that there will be a bill introduced somewhere and we don’t exist solely to lobby, but someday we will be called on to give our position on a piece of legislation. And the sooner people build those relationships, the easier it will be to participate in that conversation because ultimately we have not built in the 50 years or so, we have not built a seat for ourselves at the table. And so this is the beginning of that process.

[00:51:29.310] – Speaker 4
So another thing that occurs to me and you know a lot about how CompTIA at one time believed that they were involved in lobbying and stepped away from it. At first when I heard of this organization, it felt like the goal of being part of this would be stepping on the toes of CompTIA until I remember that they don’t do this. But we talked about, let’s call it a mark of excellence or some sort of certification. CompTIA has a tressmark, which at least is supposed to be this concept. It’s supposed to be a demonstration of your excellence or at least your adequacy in the field. Is anybody in this group looking at what those kind of overlaps might be between that trust mark and what we want to achieve?

[00:52:19.570] – Amy Babinchak
There should be zero overlap, Josh, because this organization isn’t going to certify anybody. We’re not going to teach anybody. What we’re going to do is say, for example, the AICPA does requires a certain amount of continuing education requirements in order to be a member of that organization. And then that way, again, the consumer knows, am I dealing with the bookkeeper? Am I dealing with somebody who’s not participating at all? Am I dealing with somebody who is in EA? Am I dealing with the CPA. And those are the types of differentiations. We will not be the people that are providing that. So CompTIA continues to provide their trust marks. Great. You can add that to your profile here and check that off as some of your continuing education efforts.

[00:53:17.730] – Speaker 4
I guess my point was not that we would offer as an organization something competitive, but that we might identify that trust mark as something that would be appropriate along the lines of demonstrating your capabilities. Maybe say that you come up with some sort of framework for what would qualify as a demonstration of the professionality of our decision.

[00:53:41.910] – Karl Palachuk
So I am working with some folks at CompTIA specifically to talk about how we can work together. They are very open to working with us and in particular also looking at things where we might have some stuff in common with regard because they have stepped away from lobbying, but they may want to take a position on some things that represent the needs of their membership and so they want to partner with us in regard to those. So we are in a friendly relationship with CompTIA and working on building more of that.

[00:54:21.750] – Amy Babinchak
So, Josh, the way that I think that might work with the trust mark as your example there that you brought up is that the governance committee would assign a certain number of continuing education credits to that trust mark type thing.

[00:54:36.770] – Speaker 4
Okay, understood. I don’t know if we can get away with calling them CEUs, but I know what you mean. We can come up with some sort of metric and that might satisfy some or all of that requirement.

[00:54:48.360] – Karl Palachuk
And why would there be an issue with us calling them whatever we want?

[00:54:53.910] – Speaker 4
I think the continuing education units, there are requirements to offer something that’s called that because they are specific to certain industries. I don’t know if we call them CEOs, but we can call them qualifying points or something. Are you going to talk to the folks at Channel Con about this while you’re there?

[00:55:12.630] – Karl Palachuk
I’m talking to them weekly, so I’m sure I’ll talk to them there also.

[00:55:18.040] – Speaker 4
I’ll go up with you. Maybe we can even talk to him strongly. Thank you.

[00:55:23.250] – Amy Babinchak
There’s absolutely no lack of educational opportunities in this industry. Right. So we’re definitely not going to reinvent the wheel on that one.

[00:55:33.990] – Speaker 4
Great, thanks.

[00:55:37.810] – Karl Palachuk
I don’t know if MJ is on here. He could speak up if he is. MJ Shore is the community outreach manager at CompTIA, one of our longtime community friends. Actually, most of our longtime community friends are on the board of CompTIA, so we have plenty of connections there. Other comments, questions. I would love to everybody. Go find the reaction button and raise your hand if you think you might run. I love to see all the little hands fly up. And now people are leaving. Way to go. Just make everybody upset and have them all leave. Oh, well, it is what it is.

[00:56:33.710] – Speaker 4
Now that Jay is here, I’m going to have to call it a day. Hey, Jay.

[00:56:37.220] – Karl Palachuk
Good afternoon, brother.

[00:56:38.410] – Speaker 4
Hey, nice to hear you. So I’m going to head out for an 11:00, but this was good. I didn’t really understand this structure and I understand more. I can play around online. I’m not sure where I might fit in, but I hope to. And I’ll talk with you at channel con, if not before.

[00:56:56.570] – Karl Palachuk
Thanks. Very good. Well, you’re all welcome to email me. It’s just, you know, Karl@itsp.org or Amy or whoever boardmembers? Yeah. All the board members are on the site. So if you go to the about page and you’ll see the committee members and the board members talk to folks who are already in here and ask them what their experience is. And thank you for the links on social media. I appreciate that also. Yeah. We have 1 minute left. Our next meeting, August 10, is the all member meeting where we’re going to talk about many things, but it will include these elections. So that link will be at the top of your browser window@nsatsp.org almost immediately.

[00:57:55.210] – Speaker 9
I think that’s our six month window for vision, mission, and values as well.

[00:58:00.790] – Karl Palachuk
Oh, excellent.

[00:58:02.320] – Speaker 9
So we had talked about putting this out for feedback and if anyone has any comments that they think we need to make a changes or adjustments, we wanted to let the organization live with them for six months before we formalize them. So I think that’s what we’re scheduled for August there too.

[00:58:19.610] – Karl Palachuk
Excellent. Great. I will add that to the agenda. Very good. Well, as was noted, it’s the top of the hour, so I appreciate you all being here. Amy’s got an email in the chat as well. Let us know if you need anything and I will see you at the next member meeting. Thanks. Bye.

[00:58:45.410] – Amy Babinchak
Bye, everybody. Thank you for Kenning.

Full Transcript:

[00:00:00.010] – Karl Palachuk
Hello. Hi, this is Karl Palachuk. I am the Executive Director of the National Society of It. It It service provider held a meeting on June 15 and pushed the recording button just a little bit late. So I’m going to give you just the first couple of slides and then we’ll go to the recording of the actual meeting. So this meeting is presented by myself and Amy Babinchak, who is the President of the Board of Directors of the NSITSP. And we are here to welcome all the vendors and to describe the vendor partner program and how you can participate.

[00:00:41.390] – Karl Palachuk
So this is a picture of Amy and I in Australia a few years ago. And I was really happy when Amy picked this picture just because it so very much represents us. We are looking out over the water at Monster Huge Jellyfish and wondering what we’ve gotten ourselves into as we make our way to Morrison Island. And the reason I say this represents us. Amy and I have worked together and separately to literally just support and build the SMB It consulting community for about 20 years. And so this sort of culminated in the last year of us helping to found the National Society of IT Service Providers.

[00:01:34.780] – Karl Palachuk
You will see our goal, our mission is to increase the professionalism of this industry and in fact, to help this industry, now that it is mature, become a profession. It used to be that we could say that the clients of It firms were under attack, but we are not under attack. Sure, our staff could just as easily fall victim to a phishing email, but generally they didn’t. Tech staff generally seem to be immune from social attacks and we sat back smuggling knowing that there was no malware incident in our systems in the last couple of decades. It couldn’t happen to us because we’re the smart ones. Then It did as ransomware increased 300% in 2020 from the previous year. And it’s not like they were starting from zero. And the ransom themselves went from $300 in 2013 to millions of dollars in 2020. Suddenly our trusted unattended remote access tools got hacked and companies became household names for all the wrong reasons. Our vendors were now talked about by the media and legislators and not in a good light. At first the blame was placed upon the tool manufacturers, but that narrative was subsequently shifted to MSPs and MSP.

[00:03:03.410] – Karl Palachuk
Our entire industry was dragged through the mud. When a cyber security news story breaks, you hear some really silly things from the media because they don’t understand why would you have this tool that’s so dangerous? Why would you have this RMM thing? What is that thing and what does it mean? And why would you hire somebody else to take care of your security? Why would you outsource your It? We know the answer to all of these questions. It’s because this business is complex and hard. And so you need tools and you need experts. And the technical business can’t protect itself from anything without these tools. But we’re the only ones that know that. Our voice was literally missing from this news story, and it’s been missing from the legislatures and it’s missing from everything now. We need a seat at the table.

[00:04:03.070] – Amy Babinchak
It firms were rightly called out for not applying patches to their own systems, for using old versions of software, for not adopting multi factor authentication. Those are unforgivable sins. If you’re out there calling yourself a professional, we can do better. And the consumer deserves to be able to make a distinction between companies and individuals. Right now, we’re a black box to them, and that needs to change. The tax on the industry have continued. Errors and emissions insurance rates have doubled, tripled, even quadrupled for some tech firms. Cyber Insurance put in exclusions for paying ransoms, and many small businesses are deciding to simply take their chances instead of paying high premiums and potentially have a claim denied. The state of Louisiana was first out of the gate with MSP and MSP regulation. Many other states are now construing them, and all it will take to push that forward is another major incident. And I think it’s safe to say that incident is going to come. Since Solar wins and could say I had their good names dragged through the mud with negative press. The world has not become a safer place. That horrible treatment could happen to any of us.

[00:05:13.270] – Amy Babinchak
Now the federal government’s getting into our business too, for our clients. The IRS started applying the anti terrorism rules, saying it’s illegal to fund terrorism, which they define as paying ransom to certain known criminal organizations. And now they want reporting on everything that is spent greater than $600 so they can track ransom payments even more closely. For those firms whose best option out of a bad situation is to pay the ransom, this could be really disastrous. Has been on a publishing tear, telling everyone from enterprise to small business what they need to consider when hiring an It service firm of any stripe. And that document even addresses how to protect your business from an MSP. That is definitely not a message that is good for our industry. Sisa is not speaking for us. They are speaking out against us. Several of us wrote to sites and recently they’ve kind of changed their tone. But their overall message is still for firms to protect themselves from our industry. And that is not how we want to be viewed, now is it? But one of our goals is to change that narrative. You are up, Karl.

[00:06:29.980] – Amy Babinchak
You’re on mute, Karl.

[00:06:33.890] – Karl Palachuk
Got it. All right. So with regulations, one of the things that’s happened is that several of the states have regulated us and are looking at licensing us, and they’re talking about us. In all the states, the media are reporting about us and not in a good way. We’ve been noticed by several organizations, including businesses and governments. And there’s a great call for cybersecurity education by local business groups and a skyrocketing market for providing cybersecurity to businesses of all sizes. The good news is that we’re all making money. The bad news is that the governments and businesses are wondering who we are and kind of what we’re up to. We’re in a black box to them and they want to shed some light into that box. They want to know which firms are qualified and which might not be. Are you making solid software? Are you offering the right services? They want to know what qualifies you to do the job that you claim you’re doing or that others are saying that you’re doing. The federal government can’t reach down to the states and regulate us or license us, but state and local governments can.

[00:07:49.480] – Karl Palachuk
And those politicians have noticed who we are. I said last year, they’re talking about us and we don’t have a seat at the table. So we do have a reputation problem and basically it’s a very serious one. The business world needs to know that we care that and they need to know that we have an outstanding group of professionals and lots of reputable firms. There’s no lack of educational opportunities in our industry, but there is a lack of accountability at taking that education seriously. There’s no lack of vendors taking security quite seriously, but there is a lack of trust from the business community. So there’s no lack of It firms, but there is no way for the consumer to know which firms they should choose. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we need to have licensing or regulation or require degrees. What we are saying is that we need to do something. That’s one of the things that the National Society of It service professionals is going to do. It’s going to figure out what we need to do to get it right. We need to make sure that our ship is upright and heading in the right direction.

[00:09:08.230] – Karl Palachuk
We’re at a point in our industry where we need to hold each other accountable and to decide to let the law and government hold us accountable. So we need to hold each other accountable. We need to set high standards for what we are going to do as an industry. So we are becoming a new organization. The SMBiT community literally didn’t exist 25 years ago in any meaningful way and now we need to come together and we need to form what will be the future of this industry. So you want to go over the mission super quick?

[00:09:54.670] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah. So we took some time to figure out the mission, vision and values of this organization. And so our mission is what drives the day to day work of the organization. And that is we provide pathways to establish high standards and ethics to improve perception and creative credibility of the It profession through actions driven by member engagements. We do want this to be a member driven organization. We do view It as a grassroots movement that needs to occur for vision. We want the Nsatsp to be the voice of the industry, to define and define the standards of what it means to be a professional in It services and this Vision defines what we’re hoping to achieve together by this membership. And then we also set up a number of values that are important to the organization and I’m not going to really take time to go through those, but just know that this is a lot of what we have been thinking about as a board and building out this national organization and setting it up for success.

[00:11:09.950] – Karl Palachuk
And those are all on our website as well.

[00:11:12.690] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, there’s been a lot of questions among It providers and vendors alike about whether this organization is just another in a long list in our industry. So we have specific organizational principles that I wanted to tell you about but the answer is really that we are guided by these organization principles. It’s modeled upon others that have gone before us like professional engineering, accounting, legal trades, project managers and more. We formed an organization that is bottom up structure where individuals and corporations are equal in representation just as they are equal in their desire and need to work in a professional industry. Individuals are associated with corporation. Each corporation gets one vote. All paid members are able and encouraged to take board and committee seats. However, in keeping with our grassroots mission, none will be dominated by vendors. Instead we’re going to strike a balance on each of those committees and make sure everyone has an equal voice. No one else is focused on turning this industry into a recognized profession. That is our big overarching goal. As you can imagine, starting an organization like this is a huge task. The rotary was not built overnight. Just getting through the initialization of phase has been a huge effort and Karl and I are amazed at the breadth of experience and the talents that people have brought to this organization and thankful for all the volunteers that have gotten us from zero to a solid infrastructure that is prepared to be a thriving national trade organization.

[00:12:57.710] – Amy Babinchak
We need your help to move from the organizational phase into the action phase and we have plans and dreams to be fulfilled. Our goal is to define what it means to be an It professional and have those requirements be akin to other industries so that when businesses are evaluating firms to contract with or individuals to hire that they have some objective measurement that they understand. These might be things like continuing education requirements, the adoption of ethics statements, the ability to review recommendations from previous clients and so on. But we also know that we have a huge need to educate members of the public like media, legislators, their staff, business leaders. The more they understand our industry and can relate it to what they already know, the better it will be for everyone. We have to get out of being a black box So that to those that might control our futures and some of the ways that we intend to do that are to develop our membership into effective voices for the industry and to teach them to self advocate so that we have a voice when legislators in meeting media are talking about us and we then expect to get involved in lobbying and alliance building with other industries too.

[00:14:15.830] – Amy Babinchak
We have some challenges to overcome before we can get there though. We need this industry to be healthy and successful. We need the insurance industry not just to raise rates, but to understand us and become our partners in fighting the very things that caused the claims in the first place. We have to continue to work to overcome technical limitations that allow ransomware and other attacks on security of business to continue. We have a challenge to become viewed as a legitimate, qualified voice. One of the first questions that legislators ask is what makes you qualified? Do you have a degree? They do. That’s how they view the world. Who represents you? They ask no one. Most people in the industry do not have a degree in computer science, nor do they carry any kind of certification. There is no common banner that we all get behind that makes it very difficult to convince the power that you are legit. Seeing this. They’ll immediately put you into the semi skilled general labor category. So unless we can shift to this end of profession, the respect is never going to come and we will be done too instead of consulted about our future, our challenges are large.

[00:15:32.210] – Karl Palachuk
You know, it’s somewhat humorous that we were talking about haircuts before this. You need a license to cut your hair no matter how poorly. But you can take over a $7 million computer operation just because you have a business card that says It professional. So the world is changing significantly.

[00:15:58.910] – Amy Babinchak
Because our challenges are so large. This is why we need our vendor partners to join with us. We need each other to make this happen. Our success is interdependent.

[00:16:13.290] – Karl Palachuk
So clearly there’s a need for why the National Society of It It service Provider bottom line is no one else is doing this. And it’s not that they are falling down. It’s not their charge. If you think about Good to Great by Jim Collins, I hope everybody here has read that. If not, go read it. But we need to look and say what can we do better than anybody else? What’s the one thing that we can do? And no one has to charge. No one is focused on improving this industry and turning it into a profession, a true profession that is well respected, that has a successful business model where people who get into It can come in as newbies and learn the skills of running a business. Being in this industry, knowing who the vendors are and who the distributors are, and how you build a successful system, and then moving forward and maturing and helping the entire community rise up together. And so between ransomware and regulation and all the things that Amy talked about, we truly are at a critical moment in our history. And this is true for the vendors as well as for the It.

[00:17:37.660] – Karl Palachuk
It service provider. Vendors need us. We need them. We literally only exist as a community because together, we literally need each other to succeed. Because we need each other to succeed. We need strong vendors who provide good products, good services that are reliable, that we can depend on. They need good partners who can grow, who have a good reputation. It doesn’t make them look bad in front of either the public, their clients, business people, the government. Right? We need each other to succeed. And that’s why when we talk about the Symbiotic piece of this, it is absolutely true. We need to do this together. We could do it without vendors, I’ll be honest. It would just take a very long time because we need the other half of the community to be fully engaged. So let me give a couple of stats. So as of this morning, we have over 600 people who have registered as members on our site at some level. And so the stats, in terms of the people who filled out the form that said, hey, you’re a member, tell us about you. As a rule, the biggest bulk are making over 500,000 or $100,000 a year.

[00:19:07.000] – Karl Palachuk
I think it’s fairly representative of our industry as a whole. This may or may not be your partners today, but this is who we are now, and we think it’s fairly representative. So in terms of who we serve, most of the people here, when we ask them how many clients they serve, most of them have between 20 and 50. Right. That’s the absolute bulk, the majority of the folks who are out there. So these are true S and B It consultants. And now we want to talk about the actual vendor program. So the membership piece is only $100 a year. If you wanted to join as a member, that gets you one vote. It allows you to sit on committees and vote in elections. I encourage you to download a PDF version of this. If you want to scan the QR code or go to itsp. Comvenders. And on that site you’ll see this where it’s a little easier to read. But basically the vendor partner program is separate from the membership in that it is actually a more of a charitable membership. And we need to make sure that when you look at the program, I don’t want vendors to think of this as an advertising opportunity.

[00:20:42.620] – Karl Palachuk
And I know many of you, that’s sort of your first knee jerk reaction, because that’s the way things are done in this industry. But when you give money to something and you expect something back, there really needs to be a visible ROI in dollars. And I want folks to take a slightly different view of this and think about, this is an investment in your industry to build strong partners, so that 510, 20 years from now, we will have a powerful industry made up of massively successful partners who then help support massively successful vendors. And that’s the long term goal. You can’t think of ROI the same as you do when you say, well, I’m going to join this group, I’m going to give them $5,000, and I’m going to have a booth at the show. That’s not what we’re up to here. And some of you may just simply say, that’s it, I’m out, and it is what it is. But I believe that we have a lot of vendors who understand the bigger picture and understand that long term, we absolutely need each other. And we have so many challenges if we look ahead just to run the organization.

[00:22:05.800] – Karl Palachuk
And yesterday I met with the Legislative Committee and they were like, okay, so the first thing we do is we need at least one volunteer in every state to just keep an eye on the state legislature, right? Things like that. This undertaking is far bigger than we even realized it was when we started. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. That just means it’s going to take longer and it’s going to need some resources. One of those resources is strong vendor partners. Amy so with the vendor partner program, you will get a membership that will be included. And we really want vendors to sit on the board and sit on committees. We do have vendors on our board. We do have some very powerful vendors who are participating in our committees and have been tremendous contributors to the intellectual side of building this organization. But we want lots of vendors to be in this organization. We want them to help us guide the industry. It’s interesting, as a consultant, sometimes I’ll go into a client’s office, and I remember one guy in particular, he gave advice to a specific industry, and I would be in there working on things, and he would just have these conversations where it was clear he knew more about the technical side of their industry than they did, because he came from a certain financial perspective.

[00:23:35.530] – Karl Palachuk
And in the same way, vendors sometimes know more than the It service provider, certain aspects of our industry because they see it from a completely different perspective. We need that perspective. We need you to sit on these committees and say, well, don’t forget about this, or be aware of that. Right. That kind of diversity of viewpoint will make us all stronger and maybe I’m pie eyed, but I’ve got to say, I think this industry has an amazing future. Like, we might only be about 20 years old, but the next 100 years are going to be phenomenal. We want your voice on what we’re going to do. With luck, we will be able to put together a conference next year. We are monitoring legislation already, and with luck, we will begin building the relationships that allow us to actually have some influence when legislation is being discussed. We want to build educational programs at all levels for the media, for lobbyists, for members, for vendors. Ultimately, we would love to be able to be the first organization that people think about when they think about anything related to It. Service providers get a little irritated when they show up at a client’s office and they say, hey, we’ve got a new ISP.

[00:25:00.520] – Karl Palachuk
And they hadn’t talked to the technical consultant about that. Well, it’s the same way we don’t want people to talk about us with us unless we have a seat at the table and are in the room when we’re being discussed. So overall, I can’t promise you a lot, except that the long term goal is to have a much stronger industry and a true profession and to have partners who are very successful and are able to support you, the vendors, in everything that you need to do to be successful. All right, please download that. Go to the site. And I think unless Amy has something else to add, we’re open for questions and comments.

[00:25:51.330] – Amy Babinchak
Open for questions and comments. This is the end of our presentation, so I hope that we gave you guys some food for thought that we picked your interest in the organization and that you will consider joining us. I don’t see how an organization, a trade association, moves forward without everyone in the organization. We can’t do it with just half. We don’t want to do this with one anti behind our back. We want equal representation from the vendors and the It service providers and to really build this out into something phenomenal and desperately needed for organization, for industry to move forward. So thank you for attending today. Karl and I will take a look at the chat. Throw in any questions in there. We would love to discuss this with you. We would love to give your feedback as well. So shoot us an email. It is not difficult to find Karl’s email or my email. Just type our name into Google and there it’ll be.

[00:26:57.910] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. Well, the good thing about having a name like Babinch or Palo Chuck is 21st century. You can’t even misspell it. You’ll still find us. George has a question that maybe it was answered in the presentation about what we intend to do with the money. Well, first we have a preliminary budget, which we’ve put up into the blog post on the site we’re going to present it actually the finance Committee talked this morning about presenting our budget a little more easy for people to access. But first of all, assuming that we get some serious funds, we will need somebody to run the organization full time and organize the volunteers. We also will need to create educational materials, like I said, for example, with videos. I would love to have us be able to put some materials together for the media so that the next time that you go on vacation for the 4 July and there is a cyber attack, that the media will have a place to go to download some materials. What is an MSP? What is an RMM? What are these tools? Why do you outsource your technical support? And then they can connect with a local partner and say, okay, I’ve put together this five minute story for the 06:00 news.

[00:28:25.120] – Karl Palachuk
Now I need 30 seconds from a local MSP to finish off the story. And that partner will have been trained up a little bit on how you talk to the media and how you present yourself and have some talking points. All of that takes organization and money and resources and preparation. So that’s the kind of thing we want to do. Eventually. I would love to have us have kind of a continuing education credit program that so many industries have. We already have just an unbelievable group of people on our committees. Amy alluded to this. The talent that we have is phenomenal, and the number of people who have been involved in other organizations is just amazing. So there’s no shortage of things for us to do. And I’d be happy to discuss if you go to the site, if you go to the Itsp Combeders, you can schedule a meeting, and we will schedule a meeting on Zoom or Teams and talk to you about the details. I’ll be happy to share the budget that’s been approved by the board.

[00:29:36.310] – Amy Babinchak
So Re brings up the topic of subpar quality It providers out there. And one of the things that is very important to this organization is that we don’t prevent anyone from entering the industry. We all got here by hanging out a shingle, and we all do want to still make sure that there is a pathway for that to happen. I remember early on in our discussions, Karl, you told me about the construction industry in California, that if you are licensed, you get to build at higher rates than if you’re unlicensed. You’re restricted by the state of California as to what you’re allowed, what size of jobs you’re allowed to bill for. Right.

[00:30:28.780] – Karl Palachuk
So you can’t do a job over $600 without having a contractor’s license.

[00:30:33.910] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah. And what I think to myself is, doesn’t the consumer deserve to understand the difference between the guy that works at the oil change shop and a master mechanic? We have the same problem in our industry, but there’s no way for the consumer to make an intelligent decision and so that’s what I really see as the fundamental problem and we need to make sure that there’s a path toward getting from start to being a recognized professional. And Karl, I’m going to let you take the question from Ben about how we’re different than CompTIA. Both you and I have served on the executive committees over there and you’re currently more involved than I am.

[00:31:25.190] – Karl Palachuk
There might be well, I know Corey’s on the board and he’s the Member of the Year at CompTIA. I sit on the executive council for one of the forums for advancing Tech Talent and diversity. But it’s interesting there might be somebody else from CompTIA here. We’re working with CompTIA to see which things we have in common that we might be able to push forward. CompTIA fundamentally has removed themselves from influencing the government. They used to have an entire arm whose job was to lobby and what they found was that it was largely funded by the larger vendors, the likes of Microsoft and Amazon and Apple. They took some stands that may not necessarily be what a smaller It, It, It service provider liked. And so they have removed themselves from the lobbying side of things. Now having said that, they really have expressed a strong interest in working with us to educate members, which they’re very good at. And clearly they have some certification programs that will help members improve. And so we have a lot of things in common. But I mentioned before we need to focus on what we can do better than anybody else.

[00:32:50.650] – Karl Palachuk
And CompTIA is interested in creating generalized policies for It. It, It service provider represent all vendors and all partners of all sizes and their focus is not to educate legislators or the media, it is not to advance the legislative agenda of the It industry. So we have a good symbiosis with CompTIA and are building those partnerships as we speak. But we do have a different mission than they do. And somebody might ask the same thing of ASCII or other groups. There’s no shortage of groups, but what we found is that there’s a gap that’s not being filled and it is the gap of increasing the professionalism of the entire industry while trying to address some just monster problems that I think a lot of people couldn’t have even foreseen where we would be just ten years ago with regard to ransomware and legislation. So I hope that answers that. Other questions from vendors about specifics or concerns or anything and you’re free to open your microphone and just ask.

[00:34:10.570] – Amy Babinchak
Well, there is one there from Mendy Green. He’s asking what we’re doing to improve the MSP themselves currently and specifically about ethics and standards and whatnot. There’s a committee that is working on developing an ethics statement and the membership committee and the governance committees themselves are tackling that question now of how to raise the bar and what that means for the It service provider. Remember, this isn’t limited specifically to MSPs. We have a lot of different business models out there. We want to make sure that everyone is encompassed in the solution.

[00:35:05.310] – Karl Palachuk
And long term, I don’t expect that this organization will create classes or anything like that, but there’s so many places to get education that I think that it is appropriate for this organization to basically approve training systems to say, okay, that counts towards continuing education, and maybe someday we will even have continuing education as one of the requirements for a certain level of membership. So it’s a long term strategy. None of this is going to fix the world overnight, but I’m hoping it will help it get pointed in the right direction in surprising short order. Go ahead.

[00:35:52.460] – Mendy Greens
It’s interesting because honestly, I am at an MSP, well, it’s hard to say, but I’m also MSP geek, which is how I found myself in this call, I think, for vendors. But at MSP Geek, we’re looking to build something similar to what you described in terms of because our MSD exhibition is like a rising tide, raises all ships, right. We’re looking to build something similar from a training platform so that we can standardize tier levels, so that when someone says they’re a tier one, what does that actually mean? Right. And when there’s a tier one at one company, whether it’s a technical department or MSP or bar or whatever, and they come to another company, now they’re tier one, are they at the same level? What based on the knowledge they have? I’m actually in charge of creating a training platform, not really classes, but a certification process where we can say or test someone and say, okay, you qualified for tier one, tier two, tier three, or as an engineer, and then this is the level you’re now at. So it’s interesting because I think there are also other places that are doing similar things.

[00:37:11.000] – Mendy Greens
And if we all come together, I think that we can actually unify something that they will go faster, hopefully, and B, that everyone can agree and acknowledge on that’s. The hardest part is getting standardization means that people have to accept it across the board.

[00:37:27.450] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah, well, I appreciate that, and you’ll be getting an invitation for a podcast soon. There are two things that really stand out about this industry, which is why I literally fall in love with this industry every year. One is that anybody, anywhere, like a new social media shows up. People will show up and say, hey, I’m an It nerd and I have this question about charging something or about a technical problem or about a client issue or whatever, and people come out of the woodwork to help them. This industry literally, more than anything I’ve ever seen in other industries, people want to help each other as sort of the first reaction to problems. And there are exceptions, but for the most part that’s the rule. And the second thing is this industry has such a powerful need for education that I think we couldn’t fulfill all the educational needs if we wanted to because there are so many people who want to be educated and want to step up both on the business side and on the technical side. So that’s why I say I don’t see the NSI Tsp actually like offering classes per se, but I do see us working with all kinds of educators on technical and professional things to say how do we improve everything in the industry in order to help us all move forward?

[00:38:54.200] – Karl Palachuk
And I don’t know of another industry that works as well together as we do.

[00:39:00.330] – Amy Babinchak
There’s absolutely no lack of educational opportunities in this industry. What there is a lack of is people willing to take them, people understanding that that’s an important step for their career, for the people that hire the It folks to actually value those because we’re beginning to see a sea change in that. When I started in this industry, if you did not have a certification from Novel or Microsoft, you were not getting a job, period. And we’re seeing that change back into more of that model again where the certifications are becoming important and are going to be enforced and Microsoft is leading that charge and looks like Cisco is getting back into the game as well. So I do see that coming. But like Karl said, this organization’s place is not to provide education at all. No chance that we’re going to be competing with you. This is a membership organization, right? This is about industry building. This is about professionalism. The bits and pieces of how that works will be provided by you, not by us.

[00:40:24.930] – Speaker 4
Amy, this is can you hear me?

[00:40:27.080] – Karl Palachuk
Yes indeed.

[00:40:27.790] – Speaker 4
Hey, this is Ben Yarbo with ConnectWise Security. First and foremost, I want to applaud you guys for the effort as a lawyer turned crazy It entrepreneur. You guys are speaking truth and some of it scary and So it’s very exciting. But I think you’re moving in a very positive direction.

[00:40:50.670] – Amy Babinchak
Then you probably know the history of the legal industry and how the bar formed and we’re essentially just following the same well trodden path of an industry.

[00:41:04.410] – Speaker 4
Yes, I don’t know the history, but I certainly remember filling out my 50 page bar application for the state of North Carolina for 20 years of everything. But I was going to suggest that is actually a great model and there are a lot of things that are out there and I missed the first intro, but if I hear you right, you’re saying that the purpose of this organization is to drive the professionalism of the It services and that is about it’s going to entail education standards and quite likely the recognition you’ve got state legislation and you’re right. Karl Cosmetologist, landscape architects, people that put out chemicals on grass, lawyers, contractors, all these guys are regulated in every state. They have to have a license. And one way to approach that is with a model statute. I don’t know how, and I want to dig deeper into how you guys want to spend your budget and your money, but speaking directly to creating a prototype model for every state to consider as a state statute on how to regulate it professionals, that’s typically a way to drive a standard. And for lawyers, that’s approval by the state bar.

[00:42:34.140] – Speaker 4
The bar happens to be funded the bar is funded by the fees that lawyers pay to the state. That’s continuing education requirements, that’s ethics standards, all that’s bolted into the statute. And it’s driven down to a county by county oversight in the state of North Carolina. So there is a huge parallel opportunity, I think. Again, I applaud you. I look forward to getting involved in learning more.

[00:43:02.950] – Karl Palachuk
We would love to have you on the legislative committee.

[00:43:09.430] – Speaker 5
Amy. Amy, can I say something real quick?

[00:43:13.160] – Karl Palachuk
Sure.

[00:43:15.970] – Speaker 5
As for the vendors, I’m going to say this. I started my MSP ten years ago and it was a dream three years prior to that. I never Googled anything to start my business. My dream was to help the small business people, to have the tools that the enterprise people get. And that was my goal and that was my dream. When this came about, it was like, oh my gosh, if I had this ten years ago, I would have had an easier path and a better path to provide better service when I first started versus continually building vendors, I mean, I saw Eric Erickson on here. I remember taking several of his classes. I remember going the first thing I thought of, getting in with Microsoft, get in with HP, get in with all the big boys. But then I slowly go, what RMM am I going to use? What backup system I’m going to use with you all? When you hear somebody, hey, I’m a new MSP, this will be a great opportunity as a vendor to say, listen, here’s an organization that’s going to help you, give you some type of path and some type of guidance.

[00:44:23.600] – Speaker 5
And I think that if I had that ten years ago, I would probably be further ahead than I am today. But I really rely on the vendors that, hey, help us out. And I’m seeing more and more, like Karl said, more and more people are reaching out and helping others out and this is what it’s all about. And I appreciate Karl and Amy really putting this together and I’m part of the membership committee. And so it was Christopher Barber. We both worked together and this has been a tremendous ride and it’s roller coaster, but we really would really love to have you all help us out.

[00:45:03.170] – Amy Babinchak
So, you know, there’s a great advantage to having the independence that we have in this industry of being able to say, hey, I want to get into business and being able to just do it. There’s a tremendous disadvantage to not having that path and not having that recognition of legitimacy when you’re starting your business out and having to be every person that comes along that comes into the industry, having to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again.

[00:45:34.670] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you for that company today. When I travel around, sometimes I will meet people who don’t want to share what they consider to be their secret sauce. Right. I always remind people secret sauce ships in a clear jar that’s labeled with all the ingredients on the outside. Everybody knows what the secret sauce is, but there are people who just come together and help each other, and there are people who think that they’ve somehow figured it all out. And I think if you’ve been in business for very long, you know you always move faster when you rely on other people to make the mistakes, document them, and then turn it into a training for the rest of us. I can’t even count the number of mistakes that are on this meeting right now, but it has all resulted in massive amounts of knowledge and an ability to understand how we as an organization need to go forward to thrive so that we as individuals can go forward and thrive. I do encourage vendors, please sign up for a meeting with us if you’re interested in contributing or talking about the programs. At a minimum, join as a member.

[00:46:53.050] – Karl Palachuk
You could join as a registered or a paid member, either one. Get on our mailing list and make sure that we can contact you in our next newsletter and you can keep track of what we’re up to. Do we have any other questions?

[00:47:08.910] – Amy Babinchak
We have somebody asking about in person meetings in the future, and it’s definitely on our roadmap, but until we get the right level of sponsorship, it’s not even possible. So we are definitely still in the organization stage, and we need you guys. We can’t go it alone.

[00:47:37.930] – Joseph Brunsman
And I would just add real quick, so kind of your equivalents in other professions. If you look at the American Bar Association that came around 1800, the HIPPA for accountants that came around late, 1018 hundreds. So this is a big lift for Karl and Amy, and it’s just something I’m a former It guy now. I work on the risk management side, the insurance side. And one of the things that’s really holding you guys back as a profession, quite frankly, is that there is no licensing. There’s no standards, there’s no code of ethics or code of professionalism. There’s no enforcement mechanism. And so I think to some degree, there’s going to have to be a BDR that gets set. And I know Amy and Karl and I’ll volunteer wherever I can to do that, to help you guys. There’s going to have to be some bar that has to be set or otherwise. I’m going to say that probably 95% of people on this phone call, you effectively have three insurance options, and that’s about to be two as far as your Eno insurance goes. And so until there’s movement, I know you guys are doing that.

[00:48:49.710] – Joseph Brunsman
It’s just really going to hurt the profession. So I applaud both of you guys for jumping on this grenade because that’s quite the endeavor. But wherever I can help out, just let me know.

[00:49:01.000] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you. And we’re a little behind, but adel lovelace invented computing in the mid 1800, so you got to get a cut of some slack. I will also say that there’s been some frustration of people to say, hey, if you guys start requiring us to be competent, you’re going to raise the bar and then make it difficult for people to get in the industry. I just have to say that’s okay, to a certain degree, we don’t want to limit how people get into the industry, but we do want to say, here’s the path you want to get in the industry. Yes, go print up some business cards, but also go here and learn about a business model so you can be successful. I don’t know if Gary peeka’s on the call, but Gary’s stats say that 25% of the people in this industry are going to go out of business in the next year. And this economic challenge that we’re facing right now with interest rates and so forth might pretty much guarantee that that’s a low percentage of the people who will go out of business. You need a strong business model so that we can rely on you to be here, to be with us in the industry.

[00:50:11.890] – Karl Palachuk
That’s literally step one. So we’re not trying to keep anybody out. We just want to make sure that those who decide to get in know how to be professional, literally know how to be successful. And obviously the vendors need that. They need partners that they can rely on who are not going to disappear after selling one unit.

[00:50:32.650] – Amy Babinchak
Stuart asks if there are other countries that have tackled similar things. Our model for similar things is really what we’ve just been talking about, right? Industries that have a need for recognition as a professional industry. As far as other countries go, we have had interest from It providers in other countries in starting organizations like this in their country and wanting to have an association with us. So potentially there’s an opportunity to become an international organization. We are not ready to tackle that though. We’ve got our hands full just trying to get this thing off the ground. But there is an organization that is forming in Canada right now, will be our sister organization. There has been interest, I know from Australia in forming a similar organization. These both happen to be countries that are part of the It community in the United States. So there’s an interesting alliance between us It providers and Australian It providers, we’re pretty close. And same with Canada. So I’m not too surprised that those are the first two that have come to us and said, hey, we want to do what you’re doing. So I do believe that this is going to be a worldwide movement to professionalize the industry.

[00:52:06.670] – Amy Babinchak
We are the first and we will be the one to lead that charge.

[00:52:11.590] – Karl Palachuk
So I put a link to the Canadian It’s, the information technology service providers of Canada. We have within Nsitp, I know we have members from at least five countries because lots of people in Europe, and I think we got one or two from Africa, one or two from South America, and I should put together the stats, but we have people from other countries who have already joined and paid to be professional members because they know that this is in their interest. And I am overwhelmed by the number of people from other countries that have come to me and said, how can we bring this to my country? And I’ve had to say, let me just do one thing at a time because we’re still trying to bring it.

[00:53:01.800] – Amy Babinchak
To our own country.

[00:53:05.090] – Karl Palachuk
My analogy has been like an ant trying to eat an elephant one bite at a time. It’s a ridiculous amount of work. On the other hand, we’re operating completely openly. So if you’re in another country and you want to look at our bylaws, they’re on the website. You want to look at our budget, it’s on the website. You want to look at how we’re formed, we’ll give you whatever we have. Again, this industry is sort of built around helping each other to be successful and this organization is no different. We’re following that long trod path within the S and Vital industry.

[00:53:48.750] – Joseph Brunsman
And if I get one more thing here because I know people are always kind of terrified, right, when we start talking about rules and regulations and standards and ethics, your peers and other similar organizations, it actually kind of swings both ways, right? So there’s times when my clients and other professions are asked to do something specifically that is very detrimental to their organization and that’s actually codified within the rules of their profession as being contrary to the code of conduct or outside their professional standards or the state bodies or national bodies to actually put that into legislation. So it’s actually a very useful tool. It’s not all necessarily scary buried entries. It’s also a very useful tool for business owners to kind of put in their back belt where they can push back against, we all know kind of what sometimes what clients want us to do versus what they should do. So I think that could be useful as well.

[00:54:48.450] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, we have an ethics task force in progress right now and there has been a lot of discussion on how what is ethics, what is code of conduct, and separating those pieces. And once the ethics Task force is done, the Code of Conduct task Force is going to be spinning up. We only have the bandwidth to do a certain amount of things at one time at this point. If we can get more of you guys on board, we can do more things at the same time and speed this up and that would be amazing. But we are making progress exactly in that direction, Joe. That’s where we’re going.

[00:55:31.260] – Karl Palachuk
And along those lines of sort of spreading the word, just heads up that we have elections coming up in the fall and so we’re working on that and we would love to have vendors to be involved and actually running for the offices to help us on various committees and boards and so forth. So the more hands, the lighter the work, right? That’s what they say. Other comments or questions?

[00:56:05.050] – Mendy Greens
Our vendor is going to be upheld to the same ethics and code of conducts that we’re going to be holding members to It service provider and whatnot or is it just like vendors can get involved no matter what and donate and send money and then only the members will be withheld to as a.

[00:56:24.600] – Speaker 4
Lawyer and a vendor, I love to comment on that as a thought. I think it’s a great idea. I think realistically, the larger corporations are going to have a really hard time adhering to the same standards, so it’s a fair ask and it’s a challenge of the small business space I think is having that transparency and integrity up and down the line. But I’ve done a little coaching with is that sometimes you have to look in the mirror first and start your work there. And so I think it’s an organization focusing on the initial focus is really important.

[00:57:13.870] – Karl Palachuk
Well, and on the vendor site, which is the itsp.org vendors at the bottom, we have some vendor guidelines. So we certainly expect as a voting member of this organization, that vendors are going to follow the same rules as everybody else. We’ve gone out of our way and he mentioned this to make sure that it’s one vote per company. So Microsoft gets one vote, Mindy gets one vote, Joe gets one vote, you know what I mean? So we do not want to be so dominated by a vendor that people see us as just somebody showing for that vendor. Right. The nicest thing I can say is there’s no gap to be filled by doing that. Cool. Thanks Steve, I appreciate the comment. Other comments or questions? Boy, Ben, I really want you to get involved here.

[00:58:17.820] – Speaker 4
Just saying, no, I’ll commit on this call, we’ll join. Okay, we’ll do it. I have no problem with that.

[00:58:27.040] – Karl Palachuk
Thanks. Excellent. Other folks.

[00:58:40.430] – Amy Babinchak
See other vendors committee to join as well.

[00:58:45.240] – Speaker 7
Sorry to cut you guys off. I left a long chat near Amy call that I kind of let me come off camera so I won’t be rude. I’m on camera.

[00:58:54.030] – Karl Palachuk
Sorry.

[00:58:55.550] – Speaker 7
Just about pushing the profession. A lot of it is going to depend on your customer base. I do have government customers, so if we’re going to push the professional compliance and ethics, we’re going to be held accountable to certification and licensing, right. We’re going to be held accountable to what every other profession is doing. And unfortunately, the world judges that off of license or certifications or compliance that meets industry standards. So we just have to be very careful. Called the Navy. If we’re going to push this as a professional concept, we have to be ready. For example, CMMC is out there, right. They could require you since you’re managing other companies information. As a managed It service provider, you’re required to be stage one CMC certified, which the first 15 requirements under this 800, 171. So if we’re going to make this push, we just have to be ready. It could go, I won’t say negative, but it’s just going to put us all in a situation that could be different. So just some concepts I’m seeing and I’m just thinking about my government, state, local customers that I have to make sure I abide by their requirements and initiatives.

[01:00:10.400] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, absolutely. That’s why we need this organization. We want to talk with the people that are going to be making these. We don’t want them to make those decisions in a vacuum. Right. That’d be the worst. We’d end up with another HIPAA law. That would be terrible.

[01:00:30.950] – Karl Palachuk
We don’t want that, right?

[01:00:33.230] – Amy Babinchak
And we don’t want that. We don’t want to be regulated in a way that could be detrimental to the industry. We need that voice. That’s why we need an organization like this. I’m 100% behind you with that CMMC stuff. I think CMC is a great thing that the government has done to bring together all the different regulations that they were starting to have in their different departments under a single banner. And there is a chance that something like that could be seen as, oh well, let’s just take that and let’s just apply it to the world, right. Even though it may not necessarily fit exactly, but we have to be in all those conversations so that our industry is represented where it needs to be so that we’re not done too, that we are leading our own and representing ourselves.

[01:01:28.190] – Karl Palachuk
Right. But the other thing is, there’s It service provider, we use that term because it’s as broad as possible, right. There might be one person whose entire business consists of installing lighting or something where they need to follow certain guidelines, but it’s not the same as somebody who needs to have an entire security stack. And to your comment, Lisa mentioned earlier, just being able to say, if you’re doing this, go consider those guidelines, and being able to help people find the guidelines will help them get a quicker step up in their own professionalism and in their own industry. And for some, CMMC is exactly what they need to be doing. And for others, it will be a different set of guidelines. But to help people figure it out, everybody starts out not knowing what and anything. And with luck, they grow to know lots and lots. Thank you.

[01:02:25.370] – Amy Babinchak
All right, well, I think we’ve gotten through all the questions, Karl, and people are understandably starting to drop off, because I think we did a good job of sticking to our 30 minutes. And I appreciate another 30 minutes of Q and A. It’s my favorite part of any presentation.

[01:02:41.050] – Karl Palachuk
I’m sorry I started the recording late. That’s all right. I only screw up one thing per meeting, so that was it. All right, well, thank you all for being here. Please send us emails, connect on the website, and make sure you’re on our mailing list. Join. If you have not joined. The basic membership is $100. So I can’t imagine there’s anybody in this industry who can’t afford that. So become part of us and help us become what we need to be. And with that, I think we will go ahead and close this up. We’ll get the recording up as soon as we can, and if you have any questions, send us an email. Thank you.

[01:03:25.040] – Amy Babinchak
All right. Hi.

[00:00:02.170] – Karl Palachuk
Recording now. And so if you do not wish to be on the recording, do not speak. If you do not wish your face to be on the recording, do not turn on your video. Sop it is being recorded. But we recognize that some people have a need for Privacy, so you are responsible for taking care of that. And I appreciate that. So to find the meeting recording, if you go to our website, one of the resources at the top is meetings. And then within that we’ll post this. The meeting is there from last time and you’ll see it becomes quite a resource. We post it up on YouTube. We have the video linked inside of our site along with the full transcript and the chat. Sop you’ve got everything here and the chat, I promise you, will be full of links. So some people are already putting them in. And Ni has the job of whenever she hears a certain keyword, she’s going to post up relevant links for that. So we’ve got really good resources there. Also note at that same place, when you look at committee minutes, if you are a professional member, you have access to the minutes of all of the meetings of the committees, finance committee, membership committee, all that.

[00:01:27.080] – Karl Palachuk
And so there’s lots and lots of resources there. And as you are involved in this, if you have questions, if you want further access or you want to be on a committee, get in touch with those committee chairs. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to browse around the website. You can find other members there. You can connect to people we’ve already had people say, hey, I’m looking for somebody to help me with a job in another state. And so they’ve used our site for that already. And so use that resource. If you want other things or you think something should be different, send us a note. All right. With that, Amy or Heather, I’m not sure who is the designated speaker. This all depends on Amy’s health.

[00:02:16.410] – Heather Johnson
So today, Amy just put it in the chat to verify that I will be doing our update from the board today as she is feeling under the weather. So when I thought about what to say to the membership, I thought about birthing and organization. Like, wow, I’ve never been involved in such a thing. But I birthed two children. So would there be relevant experience there? No, because I didn’t have to figure out what their fingers and toes look like and how they moved. I have had lots of experience in fully formed organizations, and many of you probably have as well. But did you really think about who came up with the policies, who came up with what the committees did or their code of ethics or their mission and vision? I guess I just took it all for granted. But being involved with the birth of the NSAP has been such an amazing experience to be a part of. And really, it took so many amazing volunteers. It’s those things that you take for granted in an organization that takes the most work to figure out, like how to make a fair election, how to form a budget based on just plans and dreams.

[00:03:41.220] – Heather Johnson
And then how do we pay for all that once we have that budget, how do we pay for that? Every detail has to be examined from all sides because every decision you make has ramifications that are attached to it on what the organization looks like in the future. They’re really important decisions, and they need lots of different viewpoints to give different perspectives on the ramifications of those decisions. It’s been countless hours from all the committees and the board we’ve been meeting weekly and really digging into sometimes just a sentence, just really looking at just how the essence of how we want that to form. But it’s really important because all of those decisions reflect what we want the Itsp to be. We’ve been so fortunate to have all of these perspectives and eyes on these decisions. Each and every member I’ve worked with brings a different viewpoint and questions for us to consider. And now the organization is really taking shape. Business membership levels are being introduced. Committee charters have been developed for all of our committees. We have a draft budget and a member code of ethics that is being really close to being actionable.

[00:05:08.510] – Heather Johnson
We are no longer in our birthing phase. The framework is ready for us to take action, and we really want to celebrate that because that’s a huge accomplishment. One of the most important points I like to get across when I talk about the NSI Tsp is that this is not an organization that is going to just do something for you. The NSI Tsp was formed for all of us to get together and make something happen. We need everyone to lend their skills and hands to achieve these goals. If you haven’t joined yet, join now. Don’t wait to see what happens or say that you’re going to just watch for a little while before you see if it’s worth your time. We need you to achieve these goals. Don’t sit back if you haven’t joined a committee yet, join. Listen to what our committees are working on and that will be coming up later in the meeting. Karl will be telling you other ways you can get involved and volunteer in some legislation actions and find something that resonates with you and get involved. You may say to yourself, I’ve never done anything like this before.

[00:06:21.760] – Heather Johnson
She’s probably talking to the next person in the next square. No, that is not the case. You don’t need experience in committees or nonprofits profits directly. You already have the experience and skills by building your businesses, by working with people, by achieving goals as a team. You’re all doing that every day. You will make a difference here, and we need that. We have done so much so far. And thank you to all who’ve been a part of this birthing phase. And let’s get ready for this next thing and see what we can accomplish together. So if you have enjoyed now go do that. Follow us on all our social media share posts. Do everything you can, because we can do this. That’s all I have.

[00:07:18.910] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you very much. You took up about half of the announcements I was going to make, but that’s okay. Repetition never hurts. So Heather is our vice President. Amy is our President. We have a truly great board of directors. And so please go cheeky out those BIOS and so forth on the site. Again, recommend that you visit our website. Rob sent me an email that he’s a professional member, he paid and so forth, but can’t access stuff. If that’s the situation for you, send us a note. Jen’s job is to make sure that people go through the entire process and get everything done so that everybody has the access they need. So if you have paid and you don’t have access, please send us a note about that. So one of the big things that we’ve decided is that we’re going to standardize when the meetings are so the next all member meeting is going to be in August 10, and future all member meetings are going to be on the second Wednesday of the quarter. So you’ll know when we’re doing this. So please Mark your calendars and we will give you notes and schedule them in advance and so forth.

[00:08:36.400] – Karl Palachuk
But there’s that also the social media links. If you are not joining us on social media, you should please everybody. I think NA is going to put the link in the chat, but go to YouTube right now and subscribe to our channel because when we get 100 people, we can have a custom name. So we want a custom URL for our YouTube channel, and it requires members to be able to do that. Sop one of the things about the regular meeting, especially the August meeting, is that we’re going to be having some important stuff going on this fall. And August meeting will be super full of details about the elections and so forth. So do not miss that meeting. These are the values for our organization that we have put together. Again, all of these are in the about section on the website, and I encourage you to go look through them and not sure where the rest of my slide deck went. All right. Maybe I shared the wrong one.

[00:09:48.030] – Tracy Hardin
All right.

[00:09:48.540] – Karl Palachuk
So anyway, let me go through the announcements as we go along. The first thing is that the Code of Ethics Committee is currently meeting and we’ve got I can’t even remember how many members now, but it’s over ten members and they’re meeting twice a month and working on figuring out a code of ethics, which sounds simple, except that we’re super dedicated to the fact that the code of ethics needs to be something that actually represents the values that we’ve put down for our organization. And as a result, that code of ethics needs to be something that is truly clear and concise, but also needs to be something that all of you could theoretically post on your websites. And so make sure that gets done anyway. That’s working. And I know that that’s hard for people to see, like there’s no real report per se, but it is happening. And we need you to know that second big announcement is that the formation committee, which has now become the governance committee or is becoming the governance committee, has decided on elections. And so we’re going to be announcing some details as we move along with that.

[00:11:15.170] – Karl Palachuk
The elections will be held in September. And so we will put up an area on the site where if you are interested in running for an office, you’ll be able to declare your candidacy, put together a candidate statement, give us your information, and so forth. And so all of that is in the works. And all of that starts in the next few months. So keep your eyes open. Make sure that you read our newsletter. If you are a member and for whatever reason, don’t get the newsletter. You may have removed yourself or something. But anyway, get in touch with us and we will help you figure out how to get that newsletter. And so all the details on the election are coming. But I would tell you this. We need you to serve. I literally I’m looking around at all the little pictures here, and I’m saying, oh, I want her to serve. I want him to serve. I want him on a committee. I want her on a committee. We need people to serve on these committees. We have some really great committee chairs and committee members right now. So I’m hoping they will all stand for election.

[00:12:26.630] – Karl Palachuk
You can run for one office. So we need some people to run for the board. We need some people to run for each of the committees. Now, the committees will choose their own chairs. So the election will be to be on a committee, and then once on the committee, the committee will choose their own chairs. So that’s how it works in general. Right now, I think all the committees are seven members, and the goal will be that we will have some of them. I’ll have to look at the details, but either the first four, I believe, will serve for a two year term, and the next three will serve for one year term. After that, everyone serves for a two year term. I know that’s a little complicated, but all the details will be on the website. And the other really big announcement is that we now have a vendor partner program. And so it is time to begin talking to vendors about contributing to our organization at a larger level. And, of course, we want vendors to be members, I do have to say. So just a shout out to. Heather has been an incredibly valuable member of the board.

[00:13:47.770] – Karl Palachuk
And as both a vendor and just a great person, she has helped us tremendously. And if she is any indication of what we can expect from vendors, we need all of them. Vendors, when they are members, get one boat, the same as everybody else, but we need them to participate. Our entire ecosystem as a community exists in part because we are here and in part because the vendors are here. And so we really need them to participate. So if you have a contact for a vendor that you want to get in touch with, talk to me. If you would rather just give an introduction and have me call them, I will be happy to do so. But we need to begin that process as quickly as possible. So there’s some chat that we can get to, and we’ll get to an open Q and A, I promise. But I just wanted to make sure that you all know that that’s coming and that that vendor program. We’ve sort of agreed to the outline and begun discussion with vendors. So if you have people that you want us to get in touch with, please let me know with that.

[00:15:02.320] – Karl Palachuk
Heather, do you want to introduce the various chairs and we will have the quick reports for various chairs?

[00:15:11.470] – Heather Johnson
Absolutely. I would love to. And I also just wanted to add before we get into that, the board did do our mission, vision, and value, and it’s in a stage where we’re looking for feedback. This isn’t something that is permanent, and we might revise that. So we are looking to you to spend some time think about if you feel like we’re on the right track and give us your feedback as we continue along. Sop we have these amazing committees, and I am fortunate enough to be able to be the committee liaison. So I do get to go to a lot of these meetings, and I’m just shocked at how much these committees get done. So I’m going to introduce the chair of the legislative committee, Dennis Wilson first. He’s from DWP Information Architects.

[00:16:08.590] – Karl Palachuk
And he’s muted.

[00:16:10.990] – Heather Johnson
Dennis, I think you might be on mute.

[00:16:17.330] – Denis Wilson
I’m small biz thoughts. We were going to go through the whole list first. Okay, so let’s do this. One of the things I appreciate is that we have now got a fully staffed committee. We have nine members and a plus Heather as the board liaison. This is now an active community focused on providing training and marketing communications materials to society members. The legislative committee is tasked with the preparation of volunteers who would be talking to local senators and assembly people. Their job, then, is key to what our society and its success, and they deserve it to have the best tools that we can provide them, and that’s basically our job is to get those tools to them as quickly as possible and the best quality possible. The mission of our site, as we talked about earlier, is to be the voice of the industry, defining the standards for professionalism and It services. The issue that we are facing is that local state legislatures are waking to the reality and the costs of managed service and cybersecurity and all the things that are involved in it, and they are about to create regulation that defines our industry without any feedback from the industry itself.

[00:17:54.590] – Denis Wilson
We need to raise our voices and to be heard, and we will be heard. Part of the way we will make this happen is to mobilize our members in all the States to start knocking on doors and becoming the voice of the industry within the legislatures, to be the professionals representing the hundreds of small It It It service provider, thousands of small businesses that we serve. We need to answer the question, who is providing those services? Who is it that’s consuming those services, and what should those services look like? The legislative committee believes that the best way to prepare for these discussions is to create short Q and A style YouTube videos that will be how SOP video, how to deal with each question. So there’ll be a single question per video. Each video will be three to eight minutes in length, and then we expect that there will be a lot of videos on the YouTube channel. We expect to have the first of the videos done within the next couple of weeks and the rest of them done fairly quickly after that. And so one of the things that we’re feeling is the pressure that the legislature is potentially starting to get work done before we’re ready.

[00:19:29.990] – Denis Wilson
So we’re trying to get this done as quickly as possible. In support of our main effort, we will expect to provide some printed marketing materials in cooperation with marketing committee and also to blog information about the activities of the various legislatures so that the folks that will be going to talk to them will know what the heck is going on. The other thing we have achieved is to get a group of experts to staff committees and to meet our goals of diversity. Of membership members are Amy Babinchak of Michigan, Trevor Geirdorf of Colorado, Karl Paula of Northern California, Brett Erickson of Minnesota, Ted Geisler, pardon me, I forget, from Illinois, Keith Nelson of Southern California, Jeremy Kirk from Massachusetts, Jeff Granier of Ohio, Heather Johnson of Connecticut, and myself from Southern California. Within those nine voting members and one board liaison, we have a variety of experience with certainly local legislatures and politicians and lobbyists and local political party workers. It’s just amazing that we have this much expertise and we’re able to grab them and bring them into the committee and make this happen. And more importantly, the committee is professional and it’s committed and it’s talented and they are just like you.

[00:21:18.030] – Denis Wilson
They’re small business owners focused on serving small businesses. Thank you.

[00:21:25.650] – Heather Johnson
Thank you, Dennis. The next committee is just got their new name. They were the formation committee, and that’s an exciting thing because we’re no longer in formation. So now they are called the governance committee, and that is shared by Brett Erickson from Passkey Technology.

[00:21:49.050] – Speaker 4
Thank you, Heather.

[00:21:51.150] – Tim Golden
Hear me?

[00:21:51.680] – Denis Wilson
Okay.

[00:21:53.430] – Speaker 9
All right.

[00:21:54.000] – Speaker 4
Thanks for the opportunity to cover some of the goals and the tasks that we’ve accomplished. We’re honored to be a big part of the birthing of the society. Like Heather talked about. We have finished up all the new committee recommendations and all those committees are formed. We did complete that generic committee charter document that Heather mentioned for each committee to fill out, and that’s just to standardize and define and separate duties. And lastly, we assisted with the framework for last year’s elections or for next fall’s elections. As Karl mentioned and Heather just mentioned, we’re now working on a framework for the NSI Tsp governance committee. Once completed, we will be recommending to the board that formation committee or us will transition into that new governance committee. So the goal of the committee will be to ensure that the operational framework of the organization is properly engineered for the ongoing pursuit of its purpose statements, vision, the mission, the value statements, so creating and maintaining policies and procedures as needed, and then providing guidance on those policies and procedures for committees and the board. Yeah. I’d like to quickly acknowledge as well the committee members and all of their hard work, Diana Giles, David Yates, Jason Thomas, Carmine Corridor, and Doug Golio, other regular attendees, Larry Mandelberg, Heather Johnson, Karl Palachuk, and Amy Babinchak.

[00:23:28.260] – Speaker 4
So I can say we have a very fun and talented group. We have a good time, I think, during meetings and get a lot accomplished. We have a couple of spots we’re trying to fill. It’s a great way to give back to the community. Very rewarding. So please reach out if you’re interested. That’s all I got.

[00:23:44.830] – Heather Johnson
Great. Thank you, Brett. The next committee is the Finance committee, which is chaired by Tracy Hardin from Next Century Technologies.

[00:23:55.050] – Tracy Hardin
Hello. Thank you, Heather. Thank you very much. I am the chairperson for the Finance Committee. This year, our big accomplishment was setting up a budget for this calendar year as well as next calendar year. Of course, that’s going to change, but we at least have the underpinnings of it set up. We also played a huge role in setting up the vendor partner program, and we will continue to help with that. Other goals of our committee are to manage and allocate funds raised by NSI Itsp, and we oversee the monthly and annual accounting functions. Like several of the other committees here, we are looking for more volunteers. I don’t think this was said earlier, but on the committees, we must have a majority of members, must be It providers. So right now we’re at kind of an Imbalance. We need more It providers, MSP, non MSP, whoever. There are a couple of requirements. You will have to be a paid member, and you have to follow the requirements to become a paid member. Also, we meet about one time a month. We were weekly for a while, but we’re down to one time a month, and we really love to have you join us.

[00:25:13.120] – Tracy Hardin
In my opinion, we’re the best committee, so please join us. You do not have to be a math whiz to join our committee. Quite the opposite. What our requirement is is that you care. You care about how we spend our money. If you’re worried about this committee and what’s going to happen to the funds that have it that are being raised here, please join my committee and let us know how you feel. We have somebody on staff already handles the books. You don’t need to know how to do any financial reports or anything like that. You don’t have to be an accounting with you just have to care. Let me give a shout out. Our current members are right now, Brian Johnson, Heather’s husband, Eric Long, Kenny Iconos. Larry appears occasionally. And Ryan, of course, Larry Mandelberg appears occasionally to help us need it. And Ray Anne is also a member of the committee and is handling the books as well as myself. So we need some more volunteers. I will put some information in the chat so you can reach out to me directly, and I hope you get started. Thanks. Back to you, Heather.

[00:26:22.530] – Heather Johnson
Thank you, Tracy. Now we’re going to move to the marketing committee, which is chaired by Andy Higgins from IMC Collaboration. And I hear he has some really big news to talk to us about, which will be very exciting to hear.

[00:26:37.590] – Andy Higgins
All right. Greetings from Texas. Yes, I’m Texas, as you can tell. What is it about marketing? And I see people that they just don’t like. I don’t know. I got into marketing. I went to receive Robin Robinson, and I got into marketing big time. I need people who are fired up about marketing to join my marketing committee because there’s only three of us right now, and we have a lot of work to do. We have defined all our communication targets and all the communication outlets, which you can imagine must be many all the social media outlets. We need people to cover all these to take responsibility for pushing information out on the different outlets and discovering new ones as they appear. We have Marty and Tim so far and myself, and we’re totally overwhelmed with the amount of work we need to do. So we need people who are interested in marketing. You don’t need to be a marketer. You just need to know how to use Facebook. I guess the exciting news that we have, which I’ll roll right into, is that we are going to have a logo contest.

[00:28:06.320] – Karl Palachuk
We’re going to decide.

[00:28:07.520] – Andy Higgins
Well, we got you guys are going to submit logos, and then we’re going to decide which one looks best. If you go to the Itsp website.

[00:28:22.500]
You.

[00:28:25.090] – Andy Higgins
Can see and then you can enter the logo competition yourself. We were tempted to give away a set of state nights as the main prize, and we still may do that, but right now it’s just cash. And please feel free to go there and get your ideas out there for a new logo. And there’s nothing wrong with our current logo, but we want something nice and fresh from our people out there, our members. And I think that’s about it. That’s all I’ve got to mention. So thank you for listening to me. And join the marketing committee.

[00:29:05.260] – Speaker 9
Thank you.

[00:29:06.730] – Heather Johnson
Thank you, Andy. And then we are moving on to our last committee. Save the Best for last. I don’t know. And that is shared for now. All of our committees are equally fabulous. Seriously. I know, but this is a membership committee, and it is chaired by Tim Golden, who is from Vital Tech Services and Compliancerisk IO.

[00:29:33.670] – Tim Golden
Good afternoon, everybody. And wow, save the Best for last. Thanks for the plug, but I don’t think I’m the best, Karl. And you all are. We’ve had a lot of great information put out here today about membership, about what all the committees are doing. There’s been a lot of really great work happening here. I can just personally speak for my team here. They really worked hard on figuring out what the member structure will look like going forward. Pretty easy. Think about parentchild relationship. Right. So professional member, one representative from your company or your business, and then an associate member, your staff, whether it’s a vendor or an MSP, It service provider, parent child relationship, one voting right per member, professional member, and then your associate members within your organization. Pretty easy to figure out. We’ve talked a lot about member benefits. I’ll go ahead and drop the link in chat so that you can see some of the member benefits. But as you know, and as it’s been said, getting us ahead of the legislation is one of the key factors that we’re trying to accomplish here. And we need to hear from you and your help and us all working together as a member organization will be invaluable to trying to get ahead of this as far as membership requirements, small $100 fee dues.

[00:31:07.160] – Tim Golden
And we are asking for two professional letters of reference. There’s an article on the website that I’ll post about why we ask for the professional letters of reference. In fact, I’ll even drop that in chat for you. So you have that. But it’s basically for us to be able to make sure you are who you say you are and your clients are who they say they are. Sop after that, lastly, I wanted to talk a little bit about we’re asking those that have been part of this to kind of leave us a little bit of a video testimonial. We’re trying to obviously raise awareness and grow out what we’re building here in our membership base. And so I’m going to put a little link in chat for you. We’d love to have you leave a one to two minute video about why you think this is important, how this can benefit you and us as it it it it it it service provider. Well, and then lastly, I think I got five to seven minutes, but I’m going to wrap it all up in less than two. For those of you that do use Slack, we have a Slack channel dedicated to national society.

[00:32:32.310] – Tim Golden
It it it service provider is in chat as well. If there are any specific membership related questions, you can email me Tim at compliancerisk. Io I guess I forgot to ask for volunteers, too. Like all the other committees, we are specifically looking for a large MSP, 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 staff to represent us, larger MSPs to help volunteer with the membership committee. And we’re looking for a few vendors as well to help with the membership to be the vendor voice as part of the membership committee. And I think that’s all I’ve got for you, Heather.

[00:33:19.670] – Heather Johnson
Great. Thank you, Tim. As you can hear, those committees are doing amazing work. You don’t have to be an expert in that. You don’t have to have legislative experience or direct marketing experience, just a passion to help out. We need everybody. So figure out a place that seems to resonate with you and reach out to the committees and get involved. Sop that’s all I have. So back to Karl.

[00:33:52.850] – Karl Palachuk
Very good. I do like the whole competition of one committee over the other. I think at the next call we’ll have competing T shirts or something. I did want to point out a couple of things Heather just mentioned. She’s always stealing my fire here. But you do not have to be a finance pro or an accountant to be on the finance committee. You just have to have an interest that we spend our money appropriately. Same thing with marketing. You don’t have to be a marketing expert. Basically, that committee’s job is to come up with ideas, and then we’ll find people who can make the artwork, create the handouts, whatever we need to do, so forth, and so on. We need you to be interested in your profession, and that gives you what you need to serve on all of these committees. So pick the one that you love the most. I do want to share the website for just a minute and show you a few things. First of all, if you haven’t been to our website, go there right now. Itsp.org you notice next to the My account. Once you’re logged in, you can click on members and find other members.

[00:35:05.250] – Karl Palachuk
But also, Kara came up with this really great idea. Click on invite new members. And there’s actually a form you can fill out with people’s name and email address and it will send them an invitation so they can join. So please do that and check it out. Invite people that you think might be welcome. And then we also have under get involved, the volunteer opportunities and so forth. But the logo contest is up. Now, here’s the deal. We might keep our current logo, but there’s been some discussion. Hey, do we need a better, more professional logo? So what we’re going to do is the marketing committee is going to choose the top three logos that are submitted, and then we’ll have people vote. The first vote is, should we keep our current logo? And then if that fails, then one of the other three will be selected. All of these things. If you haven’t seen Bodie McBoat face, go Google that. And you’ll know why? All decisions have to be approved by the board. Sop we love your input, but sometimes these things get carried away. Sop anyway, also check out the committee minutes. The committees are super active and we want to make sure that you are as involved as you would like to be.

[00:36:35.110] – Karl Palachuk
And I know many people have emailed me and volunteered sort of generically, but then when there’s a specific committee, they don’t respond. Sop I know people want to volunteer. And if you have some idea of what you specifically want to do, just send me an email. We also have a new legislative and regulation page that’s under the about section. These things are going to move around a bit as we keep reorganizing the website in preparation for the elections, but continue to check this out. There is a blog that’s very low volume. So subscribe to the blog and make sure that you are continuing to stay informed on what we’re doing and what we’re up to. Just so you know, we have about right now we have 171 professional members and we have about 478 registered members on the site. Now, we have over 1000 people on the constant contact list. So that means that at least 500 of you need to make the next step and actually join as a member. So we really need the numbers. And I know some people are saying, well, I’m waiting to see if it’s viable or whatever. Look, this is not going away.

[00:37:54.650] – Karl Palachuk
One way or another, this organization has to be successful. We have to become more professional. This industry, literally, our survival as an industry depends on us. And we are at a critical moment in history. And I know that sounds dramatic, but I’m just telling you, between ransomware and the Russians attacking your clients and the government putting in regulations left and right, often without knowledge, often without a true education of what we do or the challenges we face. The media doesn’t understand who we are or what we do. I had a lengthy conversation with a former client last week, and I could not explain to her what we do for a living. She was a client of mine for 20 years, absolutely loves our company, never questioned a bill, never question anything we asked her to do, but can’t speak in one paragraph. She can’t describe what this industry is about. So if you think your clients understand what you do, you are wrong. They don’t understand your business anymore than you understand the inner workings of a complicated client that you have. You think you know what they do, but you just know the surface level.

[00:39:11.420] – Karl Palachuk
And so we need to educate the public. We need to educate the media. We need to educate legislators. Also, our vision that we started out with, we need this industry to make itself more professional, to hold each other accountable to higher standards. And that’s why the continuing work of the committees, the code of ethics that we’re working on, these are important things. And the draft of the mission, vision and values, the statements that’s up, we sort of put that out there. The board said, let’s give this six months. So Larry sent me a note. If you have feedback on any of that, please get involved. Send an email to me or to Amy or to any of the board, any of the committee chairs, and talk about it in the forums and so forth and so on with that, I would like to see if any of the board members or committee chairs have anything else they want to add before we open it to open Q and A. I do.

[00:40:16.400] – Tracy Hardin
I got something to add to some.

[00:40:17.590] – Speaker 9
All right.

[00:40:18.340] – Tracy Hardin
And this is a great question. They wanted to know when the Finance Committee meets. Just so you know, we’re the third Wednesday of every month at 11:00 A.m.. Eastern. So our next meeting is May 18. So that’s really important if you’re looking for a meeting to join. I’ll let everyone else pitch in when their committees are joined, but I just wanted to throw that out there because somebody just asked and I’ll put it in the chat as well.

[00:40:39.860] – Karl Palachuk
And we have an events calendar module, and so we can begin to post. It used to be that the committees were all meeting every week. And trust me, Heather and I were so busy, we couldn’t see straight because we tried to attend everything. But now that things have slowed down a bit, our goal is that committees will eventually meet once or twice a month, and some of them may be once a quarter, but we will standardize that schedule. So everybody who wants to attend, can you show the vendor membership levels? Oh, I don’t really have a handout on the vendor membership levels. I was not ready for that. Other questions? Comments all right. I saw at least one. Was it Jason had his hand up. And you guys are welcome to open your microphones and just ask the questions if you wish. So Robert says part of the membership benefits. Just use our logo. Is the main homepage logo, same as the member logo? Yes, basically, that’s it. And if Kara is on, she may be able to tell me if we have another place for people to download the logos specifically. And if not, we will shortly.

[00:42:11.730] – Karl Palachuk
And also, obviously we have a contest. That logo might change, but I know some people. Tracy in particular embarrassed me by putting the logo into her email signature before I did.

[00:42:24.990] – Tracy Hardin
I do have a PNG copy of it without the background, but I sold it on the website, so it’s not really a good pirate is original.

[00:42:35.200] – Karl Palachuk
All right. What I’ve done on mine is it’s got a PNG background, but I put in a color there, which is like one dot off of white so that it shows up on the because when you go to the night mode, the clear PNG doesn’t work well. Other questions? Comments SOP Stewart asked about Canadian. Yes. So we do have an emerging Canadian sister brother organization. And with luck, we will be helping them launch very soon. And so that’s something that I would like to make some visibility on the blog post. So make sure that you follow the blog. But that will be coming in the chat. Kara says she just finished this page and it’s not live yet, but you can link to the social media kit page, which includes graphics. So if you’re interested in the Canadian version, please send me an email and I’ll put it in the chat. But Karl P@itsp.org and I will connect you up with the folks who are now forming the Canadian chapter. And it’s not really a chapter. It’s a completely separate legal organization. But they’re in the formation stages. And to be honest, I am helping them.

[00:44:24.120] – Karl Palachuk
I will help anybody from any country that wants to get something started. This organization, taking it on and making this go from zero to something is a massive undertaking. So to spread it out and take over the world is not something we are currently capable of doing. But we will show you what we did, show you all of our information, the forms that we use, whatever. I’m happy to share everything because it’s very important. And eventually we will have an international organization, but it will be a coalition of independent organizations. Comments Questions Boy, this is a very quiet crowd compared to the last several meetings.

[00:45:18.830] – Speaker 8
I have a question.

[00:45:19.980] – Karl Palachuk
Yes, sir.

[00:45:20.850] – Speaker 8
Specifically to legislation. So I’m in Ohio. Ohio has a data Privacy bill that’s being talked about quite a bit. I’m trying to get my head wrapped around it because a lot of it’s like legalese stuff that I’m not real familiar with and how do I go and talk intelligently to my legislator about what the heck is going on? Some of this is going to affect us as an industry, especially here in Ohio. And it’s more about more of a legislative committee thing. But I’m just wondering if there’s going to be a page for Q and A, or how do we get this ball rolling to actually have an intelligent conversation with our representatives?

[00:45:59.490] – Karl Palachuk
Great. And I welcome Dennis and Keith and others from the Legislative Committee to chime in. But one of the things is it depends on the state, right? I mean, in the US, in Ohio, it might be a little harder to actually sit down with the legislator than it is in Idaho. But you can begin the conversation by literally going and introducing yourself to the staff and saying who deals with technology stuff and so forth. Find out who the key staff members are, who the key legislators are. Go talk to their staff. It takes some time and it takes some effort. The legislative committee is interested in putting together, as Dennis mentioned, some videos, some trainings Keith is talking about some training videos on like, literally, how do you talk to a legislator? One of the interesting things that’s happened in California is that when Dennis went to talk to somebody in the legislature, the first question she had was, can you educate local businesses about the risks of ransomware? And of course, the answer is absolutely. But that might be the best in is to become a resource to legislators who all have local businesses as their constituents and become a resource and know them as individuals.

[00:47:28.030] – Karl Palachuk
Every one of these legislators in the United States represents a small community that people actually live in. And in that community, they may or may not be recognized at the grocery store. That’s how local politics is in America. They are real human beings. They are friendly. They are approachable under the right circumstances. So you can get involved. But we are going to help build the resources to help people. The other thing I would say is there’s levels of involvement. Some people just want to show up for a legislative day and wear a baseball cap and be at the state capital for a day. Other people want to actually learn about lobbying and so forth. Sop we are early in the stages of this education. But that is a key piece of what we want to do.

[00:48:20.930] – Denis Wilson
If I can throw my $0.02 in.

[00:48:22.760] – Karl Palachuk
Absolutely.

[00:48:24.770] – Denis Wilson
What we’re trying to do right now, as Karl intimated, is that we’re trying to get these questions put into video format so that when it’s easily consumed and easily found and they’re not ready yet. So what I’m willing to do is if you have an issue that is coming up currently, get in touch with me. I put my email on the chat so you can pull that up there. Give me a call or give me an email and let’s talk about what needs to be done for you in your area. The great thing is that we’ve got one person in Ohio that has experience in dealing with the legislature in that area that might be able to give you a hand.

[00:49:26.850] – Karl Palachuk
And you’re welcome to join a committee like the legislative committee. And I also recognize that we have you know, it’s funny, Dennis said hundreds of It professionals and thousands of clients. It’s thousands of It professionals and millions of clients. We’ve got a lot of members. And so we don’t need each of you to get involved and commit 100 hours a month. Two, three, 4 hours a month is literally all we can expect to ask from people. And then if we get 500 volunteers, we’ll have everything covered. So there’s some chat about various things for joining. So if you are not yet a professional member, please put out the effort to do that. It will help us. Other comments, questions. We are scheduled for 60 minutes, but we can go longer if we need to. We did last time. Sop in fact, some people hung out for like an hour and a half afterwards.

[00:50:29.230] – Tracy Hardin
I had somebody else ask me a question. It was a good one to ask, how long did the Finance Committee meetings last? And it’s 1 hour for ours. I can’t speak for everybody else. We’re probably better than everybody else. We would do 1 hour and we tried to stick to it. Thanks.

[00:50:46.670] – Karl Palachuk
I might suspect the first committee to have a T shirt will be the Finance Committee. Other folks. Well, I want to know also one of the comments made in the chat is what do you want from us? What do you the members want from this organization that we haven’t yet mentioned? How can we provide you with excellent service today? All right. Well, if there are no other comments or questions, we can put this to rest. But I really would appreciate, you know, if anybody has comments or if you have a question or you’re not sure about something, now is your opportunity. You’ve got the entire board here and many, many committee members. Can we set up a committee for tools like backups? I’d be happy to chat with you about that. Re not sure exactly what you mean, what that committee would do, but if it’s appropriate to advancing our causes, we can certainly take it to the board. I’m a residential computer It service provider.

[00:52:19.500] – Andy Higgins
I qualify. Yeah.

[00:52:20.320] – Karl Palachuk
So that’s the thing. That’s a great question. So Linda says she’s a residential computer service provider. That’s exactly what we want. This organization is not called MSP it’s It service provider. If you do anything with technology, if you install signage or security systems or local whatever, in house or video, everyone is welcome. We want to have a very broad definition of what an It service provider is because ultimately the home computer, the home systems. We’ve certainly learned this in the last two years. Must be as secure as everybody else’s system, right? Everybody has to be secure. Everybody has to be backed up. Everybody does work with somebody else. And every business on Earth, what is their data? Their data is other businesses data, other people’s data. So the data that you protect from one of your clients represents their clients. And so ultimately, ransomware is spread by the fact that every computer on Earth is some way or another connected. So, yeah, we need all It service provider writers of every stripe to be involved. And that’s part of the beauty of the way that the board has put this together is that you serving home clients have one vote.

[00:53:54.040] – Karl Palachuk
Microsoft has one boat. Andy has one vote. Brett has one vote. Right? Sop, yes, we want you to join. We want you to participate as fully as you would like to.

[00:54:10.250] – Speaker 4
I got R1 quick, Karl.

[00:54:11.880] – Karl Palachuk
Yes, sir.

[00:54:12.810] – Speaker 4
So I noticed somebody talking about going to It Nation in the chat. Is it a good time to mention that we do have business cards and other things to hand out at events if you’re attending something absolutely so impossible to see here.

[00:54:26.130] – Karl Palachuk
But we do have business cards. They’ve got a nice little QR code on the back that basically goes to our Join US page. We had a presence just recently at Channel Pro in Chicago. So if somebody who was there wants to report on that, we’d be happy to have it. And we are going to begin attending as many of these events as we can. So if you would like some of these cards, send me an email and we have a few thousand of them printed up. And if we need more, we will get more. And if we change our logo, we’ll update the cards.

[00:55:08.090] – Speaker 9
Karl, since you mentioned about the Channel Pro thing in Chicago, I was one of the people that was there. We kind of had a table that one vendor didn’t show up, that we sort of appropriated and kind of stood around and grabbed people as they were walking by and just said, hey, are you in MSP and told them what we were doing and there was a lot of interest in what was going on. Everybody that was out from out of state, I passed them up, gave them a bunch of cards to hand it around to other people around. So there is a lot of interest in there out there. Don’t be scared that people are going to bite you. If you mention it. The dozens of people I’ve talked to between Channel Pro and CompTIA and Ashy, only one person said that they weren’t interested in being involved in politics and want nothing to do with it. So don’t be afraid.

[00:56:04.700] – Andy Higgins
They won’t bite you.

[00:56:05.640] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah, I don’t want to be involved in taxes either, but somehow I get managed to be pulled in every year.

[00:56:12.710] – Heather Johnson
Another great tip on events. When I went to It Nation in November, there wasn’t one time that I sat down for a meal that was a joint meal that this topic didn’t come up of legislation. So having cards is a great way to say if yes, you’re clearly concerned about it since you’re having your meal and talking about it every single time. At that point, we didn’t have the card. So I put just contact me, and I think we got a good amount of people from that. But that conversation is happening every time people are sitting down to eat. So find some new people to sit with that you don’t know and I can guarantee you it will come up naturally.

[00:56:59.150]
Right.

[00:57:00.290] – Karl Palachuk
So David had a great idea about we can put up the PDF or JPEG version of this card and folks can have them printed themselves because it is cheaper than the shipping. I have to assure you, when we first got these cards, I was like, oh, okay, maybe I’ll just have these printed in near Amy’s house and she can go pick them up. But anyway, that’s a great idea. So we’ll actually figure that out. Thank you.

[00:57:30.440] – Speaker 10
Hey there, can you hear me?

[00:57:32.100] – Karl Palachuk
Absolutely.

[00:57:32.850]
Okay.

[00:57:33.360] – Speaker 10
Stewart here again, sorry to bargain, but somebody had asked about what the association could do. It could kind of be a bit of a clearing house where you can help small businesses with some of the government programs that are now coming available. In Canada, we have what is called the Canadian Digital Adoption Program, which is the federal government’s way of kick starting. After Kobet, they’re granting $15,000 to do a digital adoption to small businesses. Sop there could be those kind of programs that members could share. I don’t know if there’s anything in the US with the Small Business Administration and that kind of stuff is that somewhat of the mandate of this organization.

[00:58:21.650] – Karl Palachuk
It could be anything where we can have a great resource that ultimately I would like to see our site evolve to the point where It service providers come to the site and find the resources they need to educate themselves, educate their local media, educate their legislators more and more and more. A lot of what we are really interested in falls under generic education. Ultimately, lobbying is education. But yes, I just made a note about that. It’s a great suggestion. Thank you, sir.

[00:58:59.210] – Speaker 10
What I’m going to do is just paste in anyone that’s interested from the Canadian side and there’s only about nine members. But having said that, it’s kind of thinking that you can avail yourself to these programs and help your small businesses meet the challenges after covet. And then perhaps there’s something on the Small Business Administration side in the US. I’m not familiar, but thanks.

[00:59:27.770] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you. Let’s see.

[00:59:31.140]
Karl?

[00:59:33.030] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah.

[00:59:33.960] – Speaker 11
Jay Fern. Long time ago. Wait. I’m doing all the channel pro events. I’m a speaker at the events. As is obviously somebody else from the board on the security stuff. Have you thought about adding some security content to it? Because I hear a lot of MSP and It providers going, I got to get up to speed on security. I don’t know enough to know what I don’t know. I’m more than willing to help with that.

[00:59:59.740] – Karl Palachuk
You mean for our site to be a resource on security? Well, generic, yeah. Here’s the problem is that ultimately what we want to do is not to provide information that’s going to change all the time, technical information or security specifics. But ultimately I’d like to be a place where folks would say, how do I find out about security? And then other members can help them find those resources. Ultimately that we without an extra billion dollars, there’s no way we could be the place to go on any one topic.

[01:00:41.410] – Speaker 11
I’m not thinking about it that way. I’m thinking more of the generic of here’s the basic things you should do. Do you know how to baseline your network? How do you know how to verify that you’ve got firewalls if you don’t here’s resources to get it, those kinds of things. Not how do you configure Windows? Forget it, but more the generics of the things. Because as licensing becomes more and more of an issue, you can guarantee security is going to become that conversation as well.

[01:01:11.560] – Karl Palachuk
Yes. Sop I encourage you to get involved in the committees and help us figure out what’s a practical way to do that. Ultimately, a lot of this education. Right now we are hoping that we will someday be asking folks to do continuing education and point to certain organizations and say, well, you can get this from CompTIA, you can get this from ASCII. You can get this from wherever and help them find places that are the best places to go to get that education. But again, it’s such a changing, evolving market that we’d have to figure out what’s a practical way to do that, because ultimately we can’t keep up with the changes that I don’t know that that would be the best use of our resources.

[01:02:04.450] – Speaker 11
Okay. I will start the group, though, at the channel Pro Events, because I’m doing all of them.

[01:02:12.180] – Karl Palachuk
Excellent. And if you have resources that you want to share with people, you’re welcome to post them in the forums and say, hey, get started here or help me build something there.

[01:02:23.050] – Speaker 11
Okay.

[01:02:29.510] – Karl Palachuk
Other Comments Questions A lot of great links in the chat since you can’t see the chat since before you got here. But I think if you click on the chat there’s a little three dots. Click on the more and save the chat. You may be able to save the chat from even before you got here, but either way, just know that the chat with all the links will be posted on our website under committee meeting, under meetings, and the recording and so forth. Oh, Amy Sisa came out with new guidance today for MSPs and their customers. Great. Can’t wait to see what the latest warning is about. Msp. It’s funny. Ted was saying that. Somebody was saying no legislation. It’s just so much not an option.

[01:03:32.580]
Right.

[01:03:32.970] – Karl Palachuk
The legislation is coming whether you like it or not. Your only option is whether or not you get a seat at the table. And our goal ultimately, is to have this industry have a seat at the table. Just so you know, we’re also working with CompTIA. Comptia no longer has a legislative arm. And so I’m in negotiation with them about what kinds of issues they think would be common between us. And we can help them promote those issues from the small business perspective. On our legislative page that I put up earlier in the about section, it lists some of the topics that we might need to look at, but clearly there are more. And if you have other suggestions of topics like right to repair, please let us know. Ultimately, if you think about what we might lobby on potentially. Someday. It’s anything that has to do with running a small it business. So that includes taxes and regulation and Privacy laws and insurance rates and cybersecurity and in our case, right to repair. But if you have other suggestions, please let us know. Hi, Kevin. Bye, Kevin. I haven’t seen Kevin in years. All right, other comments or questions?

[01:05:01.610] – Karl Palachuk
Looks like folks have taken the opportunity at the top of the hour to find other things to do.

[01:05:07.640] – Tim Golden
Just wanted to say thank you to everybody who’s been working on the committees and look forward to seeing what we do going forward.

[01:05:16.880] – Karl Palachuk
Thanks, Wayne.

[01:05:17.680] – Tim Golden
I just joined as a professional member during this meeting.

[01:05:21.450] – Karl Palachuk
Excellent. Thank you, sir. All right. Very good. Well, thank you all. If there are no more questions, we’ll go ahead and put this to rest. And with luck, we’ll see you again very soon and see you on the committees. And with luck, you’ll all run for office. That’ll be fun. So stay tuned for all of the election information.

[01:05:50.330] – Andy Higgins
All right.

[01:05:50.900] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you all. I’m going to stop the recording now. If I can find Thun.