Community Meetings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:21:51.150] – Tim Golden
Hear me?

[00:21:51.680] – Denis Wilson
Okay.

[00:21:53.430] – Speaker 9
All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:28:22.500]
You.

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

[00:29:05.260] – Speaker 9
Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:40:17.590] – Speaker 9
All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:56:59.150]
Right.

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

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

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

[00:57:32.850]
Okay.

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

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

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

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

[00:59:31.140]
Karl?

[00:59:33.030] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[01:02:23.050] – Speaker 11
Okay.

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

[01:03:32.580]
Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note: this transcription is approximate. please excuse any spelling errors, mis-attributions, or incorrect wording.

[00:00:02.930] – Karl Palachuk

Welcome, everybody, to the February meeting of the National Society of It Service Provider Writers. We have over 330 people registered today, and we’re going to go but at least 60 minutes. And if we have a good discussion and good questions, we can go longer if we need to. We have over 100 people logged on already. I would ask you to mute yourself unless we’re at the question and discussion area encourage you to put things in chat. And Nye is in the other office and she’s going to post up some links as they are necessary or useful, including our agenda and so forth. Feel free to also have a side conversation there. It will be posted just so you know. So be careful of what you say. If you do not wish to be recorded, do not turn on your camera. If you don’t wish your audio to be recorded, don’t turn on your microphone. So this meeting will be posted on the site as usual. And we will get to some of the social media stuff that we’re doing a little bit later. But our goal here today is to give you a big update on all the massive activity that’s been going on and encourage a little bit of involvement and some steps about going forward.

[00:01:33.990] – Karl Palachuk

So with that, let me introduce Amy Babinchak, who is the chair President, I guess, President of the board of directors. And she has been working very, very hard, as have the entire board, to really push things forward. And so, Amy, take it away at your leisure.

[00:01:58.350] – Amy Babinchak

All right, let me get my screen shared. So I’m really excited to see this group growing. To double the registered attendees for this meeting shows a level of concern and commitment to the industry that you all have. And I want to thank you for being here and taking the time out from your day. It really does mean something. Many are still unsure what we’re all about. This organization has two co equal items at its core. The first is to raise the level of professionalism in our industry. And just yesterday, I read in a group where a call was received. And long story short, the potential client was found to have a critical database application running on a pie device. The business didn’t know what the pie was, and SOP they threw it out because they thought it was a broken cell phone charger. So we can’t save everyone from themselves. But we can agree that it’s not professional to install a critical application on a pie and leave it on someone’s desk. We need to raise the level of professionalism so that businesses consuming our services can tell the difference between the trunk slammer and the professional and make an informed decision on which to choose.

[00:03:09.170] – Amy Babinchak

We are not interested in making it more difficult for people to get into this business, but defining what will denote professionalism in our industry is one of our charges. At the same time, our industry is a huge looming problem at all levels of government. At this point, all 50 States have enacted data Privacy rules and several have cybercrime laws, and most are taking up cyber topics in huge numbers. On the good news front, we are now known as being critical to the functioning of the economy. During the pandemic, we were put into the essential bucket. Now more businesses know the acronym of MSP. But as Ranch has risen and organized crime has taken up arms against our clients and against us, the regulators and legislators are looking around and wondering who we really are. Is there a degree that makes us qualified? No. Is there a qualifying exam? No. So if we aren’t degree professionals, are we a trade? Is there a governing body of any sort? Not yet, but it will be the Nsitp. If we can build it fast enough, and if we can get organized enough to represent ourselves. If we don’t, then they’ll make the rules in a vacuum or worse by the advice of the largest firms, and that won’t be good for anyone representing ourselves everywhere.

[00:04:31.260] – Amy Babinchak

That legislation and regulation is being considered is the second of our main charges. Together, these two things are the reason for this organization and the big topics that everything we do is working towards supporting the board’s part. We’ve put a huge amount of time on working on professionalism this past quarter, we’ve defined the mission of this organization, the vision and the values. And these aren’t just words going on to a website or engraved onto a plaque hanging on a wall. These are the words that this organization is going to use when making decisions going forward. We are very fortunate to have Larry Mandelberg guide us through the process of creating these guiding lights. Larry is going to reveal to you shortly just what those words are, but our next challenge is to work on coming up with a code of ethics not only for ourselves, but for our industry as a whole. We’re looking for volunteers that are passionate about ethical standards to join us in that effort. All other professions have code of ethics that everyone working in that industry is held to. It’s time for us to do the same. You’ll hear more about this opportunity for you to get involved in creating that code of ethics from Karl.

[00:05:44.690] – Amy Babinchak

The development of the code of ethics is going to take much of our time for the next quarter. The rest of our job on the board has revolved around enabling productivity in the committees of which we have a bunch. Now. The committee members continue to impress me with their dedication to the task and their level of expertise. We help them in a variety of ways, which includes getting fully populated by providing Heather as a conflict resolution expert in board liaison, and by responding to and approving their request in a timely manner. Heather is going to tell us more about what each committee has been working on has accomplished since our last membership meeting. She might also have some calls for volunteers. These committees are so important to our organization because at this point, they’re not only responsible for setting the direction and building the process for the areas under their charge, but they also have to implement it, too. It’s a huge task, but many hands make light work as a committee driven organization. It is the committees that are responsible for implementing everything this organization is going to do and be for its members.

[00:06:49.910] – Amy Babinchak

That’s it for my board. Update back to you, Karl.

[00:06:57.030] – Karl Palachuk

All right. Thank you very much. I have to just say, as a side note and an apology, I was wrong. Our capacity was 100, and Kara is looking into increasing that. So with luck, she’ll be able to do that live while we’re here. So I have a few announcements that I want to go through for folks. And the first one is, if you are not receiving our newsletter, please get in touch with me and I’ll make sure that we get to it and somebody will help you figure out how to whitelist it and so forth. It comes from itsp.org, but it’s through constant contact. So just so you know, that big announcement. So we only have two days left. We’ve been posting into the newsletter, but we have an opening on the board of directors. And so we would like to fill that. And so I’m going to have Ni put the link in the chat. But it’s also if you go to our website and look at leadership, there’s a place there. So if you just go to Itsp. Orgleadership, there’s a link there. There’s also one in the news area. And I encourage people to look at that news area because that’s where we post up things like announcements for this meeting.

[00:08:22.930] – Karl Palachuk

But also when we are in the news or when we have graphics that we want to share, we have a lot of people who helped us get this meeting registration to 330. And so we want to thank all those people who did that, but also encourage more people to participate. I also want to encourage everybody to be a professional member, which means sort of stepping up. It costs $100, which the board has decided is a very low bar to let people in. And that’s $100. And then two letters of reference. And I know some people have questioned what’s the point of all of the letters of reference? And basically, you should be able, after many years in business, to find two clients who will say something nice about you. And that’s sort of a minimal standard for professionalism other announcements. I want to make sure that we all are headed in the right direction. And so one of the things the board has done is come up with vision, mission, and values. And Larry’s going to talk about what we came up with and what it means for our organization and for the industry as a whole.

[00:09:46.590] – Karl Palachuk

So I encourage you to follow the news and also to check us out on social media. I’ll repost it from time to time. But there is one of the news items. There is a list of our social media links on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, so forth. So we encourage you to share those things. And whenever you’re at a professional meeting, please share the news about us. Tell people about us. I have ordered some business cards that are basically little advertisements for the NSI, Itsp. And so if you want some of those to distribute, send me an email with your address and so forth. And I will send you some of them so that if you wish to hand them out, they basically have a QR code and they say join the organization, but it’s something that people can take home with them so that they might then check us out and join. So with that, I encourage you to spread the word. And we’ve been super busy. Heather is going to talk about the busyness of the last several months, and Larry’s going to talk about the future. So with that, let me throw it back to Amy and Heather.

[00:11:05.710] – Karl Palachuk

And they’re going to give you the report on what we’ve been doing so far.

[00:11:13.330]

Sure.

[00:11:14.070] – Heather Johnson

So I am Heather Johnson. I am the co founder and chief operating officer of Gozinta, and I’m also the vice President and committee liaison of the NSAP. What it means to be a committee liaison is that I get to I have the privilege of being able to go to all of the committee without a vote, but they do listen to me. And that’s lovely. But also I get to learn a lot from them. Currently, we have five committees that have been formed. They are the formation, legislative, finance, membership and marketing. We are a ground up organization. So these committees, we really rely on them on the board to help us and guide us in these decisions. The formation committee has been working hard in this past quarter to provide the general guidelines for our committees and have supplied guidelines on what they see each committee doing. So it’s the general guidelines for how people behave on committees, how elections are done. And then also what are those charges that they see during these formation stages of the organizations that the committees will be doing? The legislative committee has been really working this quarter on making the tools that are needed to talk to your legislature to be accessible.

[00:12:42.770] – Heather Johnson

They’ve been talking about how MSPs are in a prime position and have the skills already within them to talk to legislature. Government is approachable and we can make the changes that we need to do that. Of course, education in that is really important. So they’ve been making guides and videos to be able to guide MSPs on this process within their own state so they can take charge of what needs to be done so that we have a voice in government. For the Finance Committee, they have the difficult task of figuring out what we need as far as our finances to support the endeavors and dreams and what we want to get done. Why this is so difficult is that we have to collect all of those hopes and dreams and plans from all of the committees and figure out how much is going to make those happen and how we’re going to pay for it, which is a difficult task on its own. Membership and Marketing committee are our two newest committees and have done an excellent job, obviously getting the word out to 330 people to be here, and right now they’re planning upcoming membership drives to get more people excited and charged up about what we’re doing.

[00:13:58.770] – Heather Johnson

We have been noticing lots of overlap between the conversations within the committees and to avoid siloing because that can really be a struggle for an organization. The committee chairs will be meeting for the first time on this Friday and in the future to have conversations about some of the difficult conversations that they’re getting stuck on to see if they can work those out together. It has been an absolute pleasure working with these committees. I’ve worked with many committees in the past and had some very painful experiences on committees and I’m sure many of you can relate to that where you just couldn’t move forward or get anything done. There was an incident in particular where there was a two hour meeting deciding on whether to get sausage links or patties, and then it was continued to the next meeting decide which grocery store to go to. And obviously, this is not what is happening here. Every committee is filled with such experienced people that while they understand the urgency of what we are trying to do, is trying to examine each decision to see how it will impact the organization in the short term and the long term.

[00:15:07.610] – Heather Johnson

Not one of these committees is backed down from a complicated decision and looking at it from all angles, these beginning decisions are the most important for what this organization becomes and not one person is taking it lightly. Most committees are still working weekly because they realize they need to move at a quick pace in the beginning and take the time to not back down from a decision and make those decisions very deliberately. The dedication is so amazing and I thank each and every member. I’ve learned so much from this experience and can’t wait to see what the committees will do over the next quarter and I will send it back to Karl.

[00:15:55.010] – Karl Palachuk

Okay, sorry about that.

[00:15:56.670] – Heather Johnson

No.

[00:15:58.070] – Karl Palachuk

So I have on my list that Amy’s going to introduce Larry, but that’s okay. I will introduce Larry. So Larry Mandelberg is on the board of directors and he has helped guide us through the process of coming up with the mission, vision, and values. So with that, Larry, why don’t you go ahead and share your screen and we’ll walk through this and then we’ll have discussion at the end and we can’t hear you.

[00:16:35.230] – Larry Mandelberg

That must be what the mute button is for. Believe it or not, I went to three It companies. I bought my first computer in 1973, so I’ve been doing this for a little while. I’m the author of a book called Businesses Don’t Fail. They Commit Suicide. How to Survive Your Company’s Success and Thrive in Good Times and Bad. One of the things that my 23 years of research uncovered was that most startups and early stage organizations fail because of a lack of clarity of purpose. Clarity of purpose can mean many different things depending upon each individual’s background and experiences. To create this clarity of purpose for the NSISP, the board had to agree on some standards of meaning. Once we had alignment on what we were creating, we invested just under 40 manhours between October 12 and December 27 last year to create these purpose statements. One of the things I noticed on the announcements for the member meeting today emphasized our desire to increase professionalism in our industry. Amy also talked about professionalism and the links to legislation and regulation. There are two equally important guideposts that we as a board, wanted to adhere to transparency among leadership and that we will be a member driven organization.

[00:18:15.550] – Larry Mandelberg

That is you. And to that end, on December 27, when we approved these draft purpose statements, which I’m going to share to you momentarily, we agreed that they would be presented to the membership for review and feedback and ultimately approval. This is your organization, not ours. So to help with that process, I’m going to show you the standards we used in creating these purpose statements. Then what we created. This information will be available for your review over the next six months if you’re interested. So I want to begin with our values. So again, this is what we use to guide our development. The value statements are the bricks we use to build our culture, and that helps to clarify, but without actually putting it into action, it doesn’t really mean anything. I mean, I’m sure many of you have heard people say, you got to have a purpose statement. You got to have a mission statement.

[00:19:15.980]

Why?

[00:19:16.440] – Larry Mandelberg

Who cares? So what? It’s a bunch of soft crap that nobody really does anything with. Well, I know that doesn’t have to be true. Sop here’s how these things actually apply. First of all, our values help us make decisions. If there are two equally good choices, does one option better align with our values than another? And by having these written values, it allows us to go to the members and say we made this decision because it was in alignment with this value. It’s a very practical, on the ground way to apply value statements. Another is that it describes what it feels like to work for or with your organization. Another way to implement them is they should describe what you want your customers to say about you and why you do business with them. So our value statements represent what we want you to think about us. And we we want you to know that we’re trying to do for you and for our industry. Sop let’s look at the value statements we came up with. They often reflect the core beliefs of the founders. Sorry. Sop value statements the first one, which shouldn’t be a surprise.

[00:20:40.040] – Larry Mandelberg

The professionalism and integrity of our industry are our passion. Now, I want to reinforce I’m not going to keep doing this, but I do want to say one more time, these are for you, so don’t feel like anyone shoving these down your throat. We want you to look at these and live with them for six months, and then we’ll revisit them. The second one, communication is the cornerstone of our integrity. It supports our desire to be transparent and to provide a mechanism for member driven guidance. The third is we choose to communicate openly and honestly. Our clients and colleagues always deserve the truth. Number four, we embrace change and education as the foundation of our industry. Technology is one of the few industries where the change is so rapid and so constant that if we get bogged down in the past, we get left behind very quickly. We all know that. We all know how important education is staying on. Sop of it is we are devoted to operating a highly successful, member driven organization. Now, I’ll let those sink in for a moment when I’m finished here, we’ll have plenty of time for open discussion about this or anything else you want to talk about.

[00:22:13.260] – Larry Mandelberg

And the board is going to be keenly interested in your feedback for the next six months. We want you to be able to be comfortable with these and to embrace them. So let’s talk about what is a vision statement? A vision statement is an internally focused commitment to staff and internal stakeholders that’s each of you who are professional members that describes our long term goals and gives meaning to our existence. What is it we want to become? One of the things I tell my clients when they come to me, they say, we need to do strategic plan. And I say, what’s your vision? We don’t have a vision. Well, if you don’t have a vision, what are you strategically planning to achieve? How can you create a strategic plan to get someplace you don’t know exists? So here’s our vision statement. Here’s how we apply the vision statement. Something big that we want to accomplish, how we will be perceived by others in the future, and what is a better place that every member of the organization can emotionally embrace? And contribute to achieving and something that we want to be striving for that’s bigger than one individual, especially in tough times.

[00:23:48.130] – Larry Mandelberg

If there isn’t a better reason to be a member driven organization, I don’t know what it is. So here’s the vision statement. Nsi. Itsp is the voice of the industry defining the standards for professionalism in It services. I’m going to pause for just a moment. The voice of the industry defining the standards for professionalism. So let’s talk about the mission statement. What is a mission statement? The vision is internally focused, and the values are how we create culture and make decisions. The mission is externally focused. It’s our commitment to prospects and customers. That answers the question, what’s in it for me and in this environment? I personally believe that you, the members, not only serve as internal stakeholders, but also as external customers. We exist for you. We deliver value to you. So how do you put a mission statement into practice? It should define the value you deliver, and it should describe how that value is delivered to those markets. When you break it down like this, it’s pretty simple. Now, the mission statements I’ve been involved with, including hours in Sips, tend to be a little long. And I know people I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about whether or not there should be a limit to the number of words in a mission statement.

[00:25:29.170] – Larry Mandelberg

Personally, I don’t believe a mission statement needs to be short so that it can be memorized. I think a mission statement needs to be good and so compelling that people memorize it. No matter how long it is, it’s better to have a good mission statement that you can follow than a short one that isn’t clear. So what’s our mission statement? Nsi Tsp provides pathways to establish high standards and ethics and to improve the perception and credibility of the It profession through actions driven by member engagement. Read that again. The value we deliver is we provide pathways to develop high standards and ethics and to improve the perception and credibility of the It profession. And the way we do it is through actions driven by member engagement and the community we’re talking to, again, is the It professional. I’ll just give that about 10 seconds for you to digest. So we’re doing very good on time. And here is a summary slide with the vision, the mission, and the values. And I want to remind you that we have the rest of our time for Q and A. We can talk about anything we’ve talked about today or something we haven’t talked about.

[00:27:16.370] – Larry Mandelberg

But it’s very important to the board and me that we share these with you and that you give us your honest feedback. We will not take it personally. This is for us and you, and this is how we see the NSI. Itsp moving forward into a very successful future. And with that, I’m going to turn it back over to you, Karl.

[00:27:46.950] – Karl Palachuk

Thank you, sir. And I agree with the comments from Steve in the chat that this was great work and the basic core mission statement is already on the website under the about. But we will be posting up all the information, the slides that the slide decks that Larry had so that everybody has it and everybody shares it. Are there any comments or questions, first of all, from Amy, but after that from anybody else as we move forward.

[00:28:30.790] – Amy Babinchak

I don’t have any specific questions. I do want to say that coming up with these mission, vision and value statements, I’ve never been through that process before. It was far more involved and detailed. And we agonized over every word in trying to create this for the organization because we do view it as the standards at which we’re going to measure future decisions against. Sop Larry mentioned that we had put a six month timeline on this to look at it, to try to use it in our decision making, and to give you all a chance to give all of us a chance to sort of embrace it. And then in six months time, we’ll revisit it, refine it, do what we need to do, and at that point and make it more permanent. But it was something I feel it’s something very important that we did to our foundation of this organization and the ability to drive it forward from here.

[00:29:38.450] – Karl Palachuk

I agree. And it’s funny. When we first started out, it’s like there’s a million things to do and we’ve got to create this committee to do one thing and this community to do another thing. I was using the analogy then of it takes a whole bunch of us pushing to get one railroad car to start moving. Now I’m going to change, and I want to use the analogy of we’re building an airplane while it’s flying. So the mission statement, the vision, I think that what we have is amazing, and we’re going to live it for a while. But we’re also a living organization and a membership focused organization. So if something obviously needs to be added or changed, we’ll be happy to do that. So Jeremy asked the question, organization is good and necessary, but he’s wondering specifically what legislation prompted this. And I would say SOP. One of the things on the website is there’s a link to the nine pillars document that I wrote, kind of as a manifesto to get all of this started. And if you haven’t read that, I encourage you to read that. It is a little bit long, it’s 20 pages or something, but it lays out the problems of our industry with regard to insurance ransomware, the issues that we’re facing, including several bad actors who are just not giving our industry a good name.

[00:31:09.160] – Karl Palachuk

And so what we see is that legislation is coming. Amy mentioned every state has at least one committee in their legislature dealing with cybersecurity. Those committees don’t exist to not make legislation. So we will be regulated. And when it comes to cybersecurity, and especially it companies having contracts with their clients, that’s a state level activity in the United States that is not a federal thing. The feds basically don’t get involved with contracts between two organizations or very rarely. So it has to be a state by state movement. So part of what the legislative committee, Dennis and his, Keith and their team, what they’re doing is beginning to monitor legislation, beginning to keep our ears open at the same time trying to figure out, okay, where do we stand? What exactly would we like the government to do? Because you can’t stop the legislation from coming. That’s not the option. The option is, can we affect it as it takes form? Can we help create model legislation in the larger States which then gets copied to other States? So there’s a marketing committee that’s going to work with this. There’s legislative committee. There’s a lot of people who need to come together on this.

[00:32:40.220] – Karl Palachuk

There are many layers of volunteers that are needed.

[00:32:44.890] – Amy Babinchak

There is a question in there asking on this topic, what was the specific legislation that prompted the creation of this group and think there was one specific item. I gave a small talk on the beginning formation of our organization. We have a recording of that, and we’re going to get that posted up. And in there, I do talk about what the different States were doing. And one important thing that came out was that CISA, which is federal regulation, they started coming forward and producing documents for small business, telling them that they need to protect themselves from MSP, which means that we have a serious reputation problem out there. So it’s not just regulation. It is about the professionalism, the perception of our industry. It’s a big encompassing thing that results in our need to form an organization like this so that we can represent ourselves properly in legislation, but also just to the marketplace in general.

[00:33:56.050] – Karl Palachuk

And as Tracy noted, the state of Louisiana does have some actual legislation. Luckily for most of us, it has to do with MSPs, supporting state agencies and cities. That’s the first thing that got out there. And they define MSP and MSP, but they don’t do a very good job of it. And so I pray that it does not become model legislation in this area. Todd says, do we have actual bad actors and unethical people in this industry? And he says he hasn’t seen them in Seattle. I am grateful that you have not seen them in Seattle. I can tell you I see them all the time, not just in Sacramento, but all over. There are people who literally flat out lie to their clients about what they’re offering. And the classic example for me is, oh, you can have unlimited support for $25 a desktop. No, you can’t. We all know you can’t. So you can make those statements or there are people who put all kinds of stuff in their contracts. There are people who register client software and hardware in their own name, don’t give clients their passwords, sell used equipment is new. There’s lots of reasons why Sisa is warning people to be careful of MSP.

[00:35:25.440] – Karl Palachuk

Their specific concern is that MSPs. And the Federal Trade Commission is looking into this as well. Msps sell things that they don’t deliver. They say they’re managing everything, but they’re not they’re taking a flat fee and they’re not delivering the services. They’re not maintaining the systems. So I would consider those non professional activities. It’s really hard, and that’s why there’s a task force on ethics. It’s hard to convert that into what does that look like Day To Day? What can you say? This is the behavior we want, and this is the behavior we don’t want. That is never an easy thing to do anyway. That’s that the next question is where should new members find openings in the committees to volunteer? Should people reach out to committee chairs directly? Yes, you can reach out to the community chairs on the nsitsp. Orgleadershippage. There is a form for volunteering for committees. I apologize that not everybody has been contacted or been able to serve on a committee, but we also have a case where some committees looked and said, well, let’s take everybody who chose us as their first option. And forms are kind of a blunt instrument, because if there are people who chose something as a third option, that they would have been happy to also serve it as a first option.

[00:36:54.270] – Karl Palachuk

We’re constantly going through those forms and distributing them to the committee chairs when they’re looking for volunteers. So that would be the place to still continue to go. If you want to contact a committee specifically, you’re welcome to do that. One of the things that we’ve done in the bylaws is that eventually we hope in September we will have elections, and after that, all the committees will be filled by election. But one of the rules that we have established is that if a committee has a vacancy, the committee can fill that vacancy, and that person will serve until the next election. So in kind of the get going stage to building the airplane as we’re flying stage, committees are now filling up their membership until they have at least seven to nine committee members who will serve until the next election. And excuse me, I would say the work that’s been done by the committees is truly phenomenal. And if you go to the minutes, there’s actually a meeting minutes area on the website. You can see the minutes that are posted of the activities that all of the committees are taking place. So that’s a place to start.

[00:38:19.350] – Karl Palachuk

All right. Any other questions that popped out of you, Amy? I’m just going to kind of read through these. It’s hard for me to talk and read. At the same time.

[00:38:29.050] – Amy Babinchak

There were quite a few examples of unethical business practices that were thrown in there for the people that haven’t seen them before. So if you’re reading through the Q and A to the chat, you’ll see those two. There was an important question from both Larry and Lynn about whether this organization is only for MSP. And the answer to that is no, it’s not only for MSPs. That’s why we didn’t put MSP in the name of the organization. It is it service provider’s. Sop however your organization provides service to businesses, it doesn’t matter. You’re part of this organization. You’re part of this industry. Msp has really sort of become that generic catch all. Now for people that are going to in this industry. I don’t tie it to a specific model of business.

[00:39:34.150] – Karl Palachuk

Yeah. And actually, one of the reasons why the name is National Society of it it, it, it, it, it service provider. There are bars and resellers, and there are people who specialize in security or signage or cameras or whatever. I actually talked to somebody the other day who is primarily a copy or business machine Reseller, but they own a managed service business as well. All of those people are welcome. And to be honest, all of the vendors who support them are welcome. I’d actually like to see more vendors serving on committees. We have a handful, but I’d like to see more. The vendors have a role that’s much larger than simply donating money to help us operate. That will happen someday. But in the meantime, our community exists because we have people who help us to be successful, whether they are distributors or vendors. They sell us tools, they sell us services. They have services we can resell, and we want them to help us figure out how to make this community as strong as possible. So there’s that. And if you run a break fixed shop and you’re professional, that’s totally fine. There’s a lot of breakfast.

[00:40:54.290] – Karl Palachuk

People people look down and say, oh, they’re trunk Slammers or whatever. But pretty much everybody on this call started out as a one person shop. One of the pillars is how do we create a way for people to enter this industry, learn about how to be professional in this industry, and move up to the point where they have employees if they wish them, and that they have a long term, strategic, successful business model. We, as a group have a lot at stake here. And if you look up I’m just putting it in the chat. Sean asked about legislation and tracking the National Conference of State Legislators, which is something that the legislative committee has been looking at. They have a way to track legislation, and you can put in keywords and so forth and track legislation in your state or in surrounding States. And there are services you can buy Nexus, Lexus, and so forth. But that’s one that NCSL is funded by the state legislators when they’re trying to work together on issues. The fact that that organization exists also tells you that once they find something they like, they find a topic that they like, they share the knowledge about that, and they share the way that they have implemented things in their individual States.

[00:42:28.430] – Karl Palachuk

My last real job, which was almost 30 years ago, I worked for a company that tracked legislation, and we were a member of NCSL and worked with many of the people who are members of that. So that old piece of my past is coming back to me. But just know that that’s a resource that’s out there. It’s free. You are paying for it no matter what state you’re in your state and federal dollars go to fund that organization. So to Larry’s question, I don’t think there needs to be a different organization for people who are not MSPs. And to Amy’s point, we want everybody to feel welcome here.

[00:43:11.560] – Amy Babinchak

I wanted to add something to Sean’s question about is it the members responsibility to track legislation? Ultimately, probably, yes. Obviously, at this point, as a new organization, we do not have staff at all, so we don’t have people to go out. I am, though, a member of Dennis Wilson’s Excellence Committee on Legislative Efforts. And what the committee and maybe you want to chime in here, Dennis, but what the committee is working on is creating and documenting a process by which we can educate our membership to go out and be those people for their local areas. So whether that in their own States and what that looks like, how you get a meeting, how you talk to them. And so we’re working towards developing that type of training. Dennis, I see you’re off mute if you want to say something toward that and what you’re working on.

[00:44:11.050] – Denis Wilson

Yeah, we’re providing a series of originally we thought manuals or white papers, but we decided that short videos, talking to specific issues would be the best thing for our members to quickly absorb and get the information so they can use it. But basically, the idea is you need to feel comfortable with the legislature when you walk in there for the very first time. And we want to provide you the answer to the questions you have in your mind of what is that they are looking for, what is it they want? They have the same kind of things that are concerns as your customers do, and we’re going to provide that as quickly as possible to all of our members.

[00:45:06.190] – Amy Babinchak

Makes sense.

[00:45:07.750] – Karl Palachuk

And another thing along those lines is that there are so many layers of volunteers needed. Each state needs somebody who wants to sort of take charge and organize things. And every state needs people who will volunteer to go meet with a legislator. And every state needs people who they don’t have time for all that but they will show up on a given day at a given time and be part of the crowd that just sits in on committees and supports things and is present on a legislative day. And luckily, we have many people and I would actually make a shout out to all the 125 present here today, but also everybody who sees this recording. If you have skills and experience in the government, whether it’s city, county, state or even federal, we would love to have you help us create educational programs. I’ve been amazed at the talent of people who have applied and served on the committee so far, wide ranging talent of all kinds. So we encourage you to participate. We’re trying to coordinate the volunteers, but again, we’re sort of building it as it’s growing. Ross asked a question about specific technologies, and I would say one of the things that’s important to know about this organization is that we are trying to fill a void that we perceive to exist.

[00:46:40.450] – Karl Palachuk

And so things like training on specific new technologies, blockchain and so forth. That is not something that we are currently paying attention to. It might be someday, but this industry changes so fast that the specific training on specific technologies is something that vendors do well. Some of the distributors do certainly CompTIA. I would encourage everybody to be a member of other organizations as well that actually focus on newer technologies and so forth. Sop I don’t see that as something we do along the same lines. This is not an organization where I think that we’re going to be putting on webinars sponsored by your favorite vendor. All right. There’s plenty of opportunities for that without this organization. We really want to be focused on service providers and helping you personally to feel like you’re part of an organization that’s moving things in the right direction, but also an industry that has some challenges that need to be addressed. And so we don’t want to get sidetracked into things that other people are doing. It’s not really a matter of competing per se, but just if there’s not a void to be filled, then we’re probably not going to be involved in things that other people are doing.

[00:48:09.010] – Amy Babinchak

Yeah, I was looking at that same one. But one of the things that we have bantered around and this is still amongst the committees is our industry does have loads of training available to it. There is no lack of training in our industry. We do have a lack of people obtaining those certifications and trainings, and that may be something that we can help encourage. But as we look forward in this organization and think about what it means to be a professional member currently, it just means you were able to come up with two references, but sometime down the line, it may mean some continuing education credits, but I don’t see us ever developing that educational material ourselves. That role is already taken we don’t want to reinvent the wheel out there. We want to fill the gaps of a membership organization and let the folks that are good at training do training.

[00:49:22.010] – Karl Palachuk

Right. And police put a note in the chat about trying to figure out how to eliminate people who are unscrupulous. And she says educating your clients, having a chat with them and saying this is what actually is going on and this is what you need to know. It allows them to have the knowledge they need to filter out bad actors to some degree. Clients are never going to know everything you know about technology. It’s not their job, and it’s why you exist. You can only go so far. And she mentions contracts also to go through the contracts with clients. And Larry says, what do you think about the idea of Itsp offering a contract review service? Again, that’s something that there are attorneys who do that.

[00:50:17.270] – Amy Babinchak

My Insurer actually offers that service. So it’s out there already. But the important part that I think that isn’t being filled, that perhaps this organization can fill in the future is to make it more clear to the consumer what it is that they’re purchasing and who they’re purchasing it from. There are different levels of expertise. And right now we’re sort of a black box when it comes to consumers deciding between two firms. There are no standards that they can set us up against. They don’t know anything about it. That’s why they’re hiring us in the first place. So to even give them some idea, for example, you could go to a CPA, you could go to an EA, you could go to a bookkeeper, but you know that you’re going to get and have different expectations from each of those different types of people in the accounting industry. We don’t have that. There’s no way for the consumer to know that about the different types of people that we have in our industry. And they should be able to it should be a way for them to make that informed decision to understand what that means.

[00:51:42.500] – Amy Babinchak

And I think that could be a role that our industry can fill. Felicia, our membership organization can fill rather.

[00:51:50.170] – Karl Palachuk

Yeah. She says that educating buyers is a key thing. So along those lines, Amy, I could totally see us educating the media and buyers because I’m finally tuned into the response of the media when there’s a ransomware attack. So the next big one that comes out, pay attention to what the media are saying about you and your industry, because they say things like, well, this must be really poorly written software. No, that’s not true. Or they question, why do you use such dangerous tools that can be abused in such a way? Why would anybody outsource their it? And so those are the kinds of questions where Dennis talked about putting together educational videos regarding legislators and their staff and people who are going to help on the legislative side, but we also can do the same thing for buyers, people who own businesses across the world who need to have it. People so far, what they know about it is they watch movies and they see that there’s one it person who knows everything. And that’s true whether you’re running Jurassic Park or a spaceship. So the world is a little more complicated than that. Larry.

[00:53:11.850] – Karl Palachuk

Go ahead.

[00:53:13.550] – Larry Mandelberg

Thanks. I wanted to make a couple of points in we wrote our first support contract, and the state of California, the Board of Equalization, came after us for taxes and penalties because, first of all, they thought it was a product and that we weren’t taxing it. And secondly, they thought that we should be reporting it as income even though we hadn’t delivered any services. They didn’t understand the concept that somebody was paying us a fee for a future service. And we went to law firms in Santa Rosa, San Francisco and Sacramento trying to get them to help us legally clarify what we were doing so that the banks would understand so that we could get the bank to support us with the IRS and the state governing agencies. So what’s your point, Larry? My point is that lawyers don’t know a damn thing about technology unless they went to law school after they left the technology industry. They don’t look at it the same way we do. Well, with all due respect, Amy, there are lawyers out there that specialize in this. The pace at which our industry changes is a pace that lawyers simply cannot keep up with.

[00:54:42.990] – Larry Mandelberg

They have all they can do just trying to watch case law and case precedent. I think this problem is much bigger than anything we can put into a short statement or a short observation, which leads me to my primary point. This is where a code of ethics can play a major role. And this is the next deliverable on our plate. And I want to remind everybody, if you have an interest in participating in our development of the code of ethics, we really want you to come on board or at least submit an application to join us, which is on the website. This is going to be a very big deal, and it’s going to be very important, and I’m really anxiously looking forward to the process. This discussion over the last 20 minutes has brought out some very valuable points that I think we’ll need to address in that code of ethics.

[00:55:44.030] – Eric Hanson

Very good.

[00:55:44.720] – Amy Babinchak

Thank you, Larry. Just a point of clarification. When I said that contract review exists, it’s through my insurance company. In fact, in order to be insured and to not suffer some of the huge price increases that a lot of others did, they actually reviewed our contract to see to make sure that we weren’t over promising and under delivering and all that kind of stuff, and that the modern day liability restrictions were in there and stuff like that. So that’s really what I was referring to. So the insurance company has a legal specialist Department that reviews our standard part of the contract.

[00:56:34.350] – Karl Palachuk

I just wanted to say that with regard to all the legal stuff, one of the things that we want to do is to make friends with the insurance industry because I think we have a lot of needs in common. In particular, if we can figure out how to address liability so that you can go in and do a job and not be worried that you’re going to get sued for $1.7 million. The famous case from last year. If you look at it, this lawsuit was over a fishing attack, and no amount of me having a good firewall is going to stop you from wiring $1.7 million to somebody. There’s a lot of education and there’s a lot of liability. And so I think that we do have a lot in common with the insurance companies, and they already have a great lobbying organization that I hope we become friends with.

[00:57:32.920] – Amy Babinchak

Karl, there’s a few people with their hands raised there. Keith, Frank, Josh.

[00:57:37.210] – Karl Palachuk

Not sure who is Joshua’s first, I think.

[00:57:39.710] – Larry Mandelberg

Can I just make one quick point?

[00:57:41.460]

Sure.

[00:57:42.450] – Larry Mandelberg

There’s an interesting relationship between the legal industry and the insurance industry. Lawyers don’t want anything that’s specific. They want to be able to argue around the edges. And insurance companies want absolute specificity. And we ran into this in the late 80s. When you integrate those two professions, there’s an inherent conflict between them, like dogs and cats, because you have one side that wants details and one side that wants vagueness. So the point is you’ve got to be very careful about this and don’t lean too much on any one resource. Thanks. Sorry.

[00:58:22.650] – Joshua Liberman

I got to run to actually, another security committee meeting. But I will say that, Karl, you talked about placing blame. And in the last month, our county and our city school district have been hammered by random somewhere. And the two TV stations that I’ve worked with before to do stuff, they both called me. They wanted to commentary. They wanted me to place blame before there was any details out about what had happened. And I begged off both times, explained to them that it’s irresponsible and it won’t be helpful. But that’s what’s happening with legislation that I can see is that they’re looking for ways to hold people culpable and place blame. And that’s where we really need to be involved, because as you pointed out, there’s no amount of technology that can protect against somebody opening the front door. And that’s what I’m seeing. That’s all I have to say. Thank you for the invitation. I’ve got to run to another show.

[00:59:15.380]

Sure.

[00:59:15.710] – Karl Palachuk

Well, and along those lines, the whole thing of training the media or having resources available so that when the media come to you, it would be great if you could go to our website, download some clips and say there’s the core background information you need to know. I will be happy to provide you with the seven second local quote from the local It service provider. Those are the kinds of resources that don’t currently exist. Essentially, when a story comes out, our voice doesn’t get hurt. And so it’d be great if it were Frank. Yeah.

[00:59:49.750] – Joshua Liberman

Hey, Carol.

[00:59:50.230] – Frank

Thanks for taking my hand. I did post in the chat. I’m with a vendor. The product is called no where it’s a vulnerability management. And we’ve been doing for six months now, once a month, every maybe sometimes twice a month, an educational webinar series very focused on educating SMBs on the ins and outs of cybersecurity, where to start, the insurance elements and all different kinds of things. I put the link on there if you’re interested to join. And actually, Josh was on one last week where we did it was more focused on the use of the tool. But we’ve had him and Dave Sobel, we’ve had folks from with all the cyber acronyms participating. So it’s an interesting thing. And MSP can send it to their customers and get them educated.

[01:00:46.910]

Right.

[01:00:47.080] – Frank

Because as you said, that’s kind of a big roadblock there. So if anybody is interested, they can follow up with me separately.

[01:00:55.470]

Good.

[01:00:56.020] – Karl Palachuk

And you might repost that just so it refreshes and folks can find it super easy.

[01:01:00.530] – Speaker 7

You bet. And the other thing that.

[01:01:04.890]

We.

[01:01:05.630] – Speaker 7

Oh, somebody just did.

[01:01:06.860]

Sean.

[01:01:07.150] – Speaker 7

Thank you, Sean. On the insurance side, we’ve been working with some Transmosis Cowbell, Travis, that are really doing an interesting service for MSP, where it’s kind of helping their customers identify what the risks are so they can apply for insurance right before you can even get to that point. And so we’re working with integrating our product into them. So it’s a service that you, as an MSP, could deliver, add the value of the insurance, get them smart before and so they can actually be accepted into a term. Sop again, there’s some other information on that you can reach out to me.

[01:01:45.020] – Karl Palachuk

Great. Thank you. Also, just a side note. In my membership community, we did a little chat one time about examining your insurance policies. I discovered in the middle of my insurance policy my insurance company offers me a whole series of educational materials and things I can go through and stuff that I can learn to make myself more secure. And your insurance policy might cover the exact same thing, and your clients insurance policies might have the same thing. The insurance industry has a real interest in how we respond to cybersecurity and how we prevent it and so forth. And I think they kind of mostly acknowledge they don’t know what to do, so they’ve outsourced a lot of this stuff. But all that education is useful.

[01:02:32.810] – Amy Babinchak

I think it’s always true that an educated customer is a good customer.

[01:02:38.730] – Keith

I’d like to say from experience, because I’m an adjunct. Stanford, for one, has programs that specialize in technology and law. I also teach one at Caltech. So there is IP attorneys. There are attorneys that specialize in technology. They are not ignorant to what we do. That’s something to be very clear about. If you look at Stanford programming, law, science and technology, there’s also the Hoover Institute. There’s people that specialize in that. As far as the media and legislation, I want to make two quick points. There’s a lot of talk in the chat that talks about how do we keep track of legislation and then act. To me, that’s too late. You need to spend the time, invest the time up front, develop the report, do the networking, and become a resource to legislature so your legislators are involved in the process, not reacting once the bill gets published. Same for media. Being a Liberal, that’s a joke. I hate profiling. Media will listen if you establish yourself as an expert with some background, and if you can speak intelligently, you can guide them from their preconceived prejudice to where they need to be educated. So let’s not broad brush that the media is our enemy.

[01:04:09.640] – Keith

We need to develop those relationships. And I think that’s just the only point I need to try to make is we need to not profile all these groups. We need to develop relationships and establish them and nurture them. They’re ongoing. So we become a resource to guide them through a tough time. And take it from the Legislature’s perspective. They’re getting businesses raising their hand and saying, I got attacked. I thought I had everything, and we’re forcing them to react by being not involved. That was my only point. And I do have to run to a security committee as well. But that was it.

[01:04:52.490]

Understood.

[01:04:53.270] – Karl Palachuk

Thank you, sir. The thing about the media, somebody had posted up that they like to create their own stuff. That’s true for some media. But when we first started out, I engaged Sharon Sobel, who is a video producer, about how do we create a whole package that’s sort of ready to go and background information and so forth. And she gave me so much information. This is a standard thing that many organizations, companies and associations do that they basically create resources so that the local news reporter can go and take well, here’s what this is. And they explain something and then they chop in some local person to quote. And so we can have influence on how the media sees us. And with some media training that we might someday be able to provide, we really could have several people who are the voice of their local networks. When something happens, if you get in somebody’s Rolodex, it goes a long way. And again, I don’t want to say that the media are enemies or anything like that. That’s not what I meant to imply. But they’ve got a void of knowledge. And SOP when they have a story there handed, they got to figure out what to say and what Josh sort of hinted at.

[01:06:21.010] – Karl Palachuk

My experience has always been the first 24 hours of the news cycle. Almost all of the information on a story is wrong because they’re like, oh, here’s something going on. This happened just the other day with the inflation report. The inflation report was out like 6 seconds and they asked somebody on Bloomberg to comment on it, and he was just trying to read and make commentary at the same time. There was no analysis there at all. So we need to be able to give people resources on the next time something happens because something is going to happen and we all know it. It’s just a matter of time. Other comments or questions.

[01:07:07.410] – Eric Hanson

I shot you an email on it. But you know this conference was full, right? I tried to get on before 09:00.

[01:07:15.570] – Karl Palachuk

It’s not full anymore.

[01:07:17.090] – Eric Hanson

Well, that’s why I’m on.

[01:07:20.290] – Karl Palachuk

Yeah. We upped the level significantly during the call.

[01:07:28.030] – Speaker 7

Thank you.

[01:07:32.650] – Karl Palachuk

Yes. I looked at the licensing and saw we had any questions.

[01:07:36.330] – Eric Hanson

Have him give me a call and I’ll be happy to explain what we’re trying to do.

[01:07:41.050] – Larry Mandelberg

Eric, I wanted to say this is Larry.

[01:07:43.270] – Eric Hanson

Okay, you’re welcome.

[01:07:46.970] – Larry Mandelberg

When we first started writing code back in the early 90s, we used to have a saying that you can’t make code foolproof because fools are ingenious. You can’t find ways to make sure problems don’t exist in technology. This is just another one of those technology experiences that we thought we had covered and didn’t.

[01:08:06.830] – Eric Hanson

Not a problem. I’ll go back and look at the recording. I’m just sorry I was not able to get on right away.

[01:08:14.150] – Karl Palachuk

Yeah, we took care of it as quick as we could, but basically I looked and saw that we had 500 licenses for the webinar, but I didn’t see that we only had 100 for the meeting. But now we have 500 for the meeting.

[01:08:28.910] – Eric Hanson

I was hoping that meant that you were at 500 on the initial call.

[01:08:33.980] – Karl Palachuk

So the last item on every checklist is update the checklist.

[01:08:43.590] – Eric Hanson

That’s why you got to check every box, Karl. Every box.

[01:08:47.450] – Karl Palachuk

Yes. First do the thing, then check the box.

[01:08:50.380] – Amy Babinchak

All right. I think our questions are dwindling. They do definitely revolve around the two main topics that we’re after in this organization right now. And there are going to be others in the future. Right. I think that continuing education is a big piece. I think customer education, giving our members tools to be able to differentiate themselves in the market. I know that has always been a problem that we’ve all struggled with. Right. If one firm that comes in and the next firm looks like it. I know when I consciously went out to grow my business a few years ago, I was met with people that knew the term MSP, which we had decided to hold the business where it was for a number of years. And so I hadn’t been out there talking to potential clients in a while. But then it’s like, okay, let’s double the size of this business. We went out and did that, and I found myself in meetings with potential clients that were like, we’ve already met with three other MSPs. We just need to see your list of things you’re providing in your price per seat. They didn’t want to have a conversation because they just assumed that we were all the same.

[01:10:09.970] – Amy Babinchak

And we are not all the same by any stretch. And so having those conversations is important. We need the marketplace to know that there are different types of providers out there. And I do see that as an important part of this mission of this organization, to educate not only the media, but to educate our business community so that they know what they’re buying.

[01:10:41.030] – Karl Palachuk

100%. Agreed. So I just want to encourage everybody who has not bought into the professional membership that you go ahead and do that. If you have questions about the letters of reference, there’s actually a post on the news section of the site answering it’s an FAQ on the letters of reference. So take a look at that. And obviously, you can email me or email Amy at any time, and we will be able to help you in any way we can. Also, if you’re interested in serving on the board, that application is open for two more days. So I guess Friday at five my time will close those out. So if you’re interested, go ahead and fill out that. And with luck, we will have lots and lots of good stuff to report, I think. Did we decide on doing unmeeting quarterly?

[01:11:36.980] – Amy Babinchak

Yes. We’re going to do these meetings quarterly to keep everybody up to date on what’s happening to your membership organization.

[01:11:44.810] – Karl Palachuk

And final note on serving, I actually talked to somebody yesterday that I sort of talked him out of applying for the board of directors. He was interested in something that would have a little prestige and would improve his career. And that’s all fine. That’s a legitimate reason to serve, but I would like it to be below your first reason. Like your first reason for serving because you want to make this industry better and stronger and a key piece of the success of all the people who are in this profession. So we would love to have you serve, but I would like service to be the first thing in your mind rather than self service. Cool. Anything else? Excellent. Thank you all for being here. Join the social media and help us keep growing and growing. And with luck, we will have more licensing issues at 1000 members next time.

[01:12:55.750] – Amy Babinchak

That’d be awesome. Karl, can you make sure we capture this chat? There’s some important things in there.

[01:13:02.230] – Karl Palachuk

Chat will be posted, and along with the recording and we put captions on the recording so that the people who are visually impaired can access it.

[01:13:17.330] – Amy Babinchak

So that will all be posted and Kara says within 24 hours we’ll get this recording out posted up to all the socials too because I know we had a lot of people registered that unfortunately couldn’t get in because of our mishap but we’ll get that out to everybody.

[01:13:37.080] – Karl Palachuk

Also, we have a YouTube channel so that’s where this recording is going to live. Even though we’re going to link to it from our site, it will actually be on our YouTube channel. So if you’re not subscribed to that, go subscribe to that as well. All right. Thank you all for being here and if you want to capture the chat before we close, just click on the three little dots to the right of the chat window and there’s an option that says save chat and you will have your local file version of this but trust me, we’ll post it. All right, with that, I will go ahead and put this to bed and with luck we will see you online. Thank you all.

[01:14:19.840] – Eric Hanson

I’ll see for you tomorrow.

[01:14:21.600] – Karl Palachuk

Yes, I’ll see many of you in the evening. All right. Thank you all. Bye.

Note: this transcription is approximate. please excuse any spelling errors, mis-attributions, or incorrect wording.

[00:00:13.550] – Karl Palachuk
Michigan.

[00:00:16.290] – Amy Babinchak
That West Michigan people are like that.

[00:00:24.910] – Kara Schoonveld
If I said where I was actually from, no one would know the town.

[00:00:30.250] – Karl Palachuk
All the people in Grand Haven would know all one person on this call.

[00:00:36.163] – Kara Schoonveld
All one person would know.

[00:00:36.730] – Amy Babinchak
All the people in Michigan would know. Like Patrick Collins and myself.

[00:00:42.250] – Kara Schoonveld
I feel like most people don’t know about Grand Haven. Grand Rapids, for sure. Yeah, you might know more because you’re a boater and stuff and there’s the Grand River and the channel and all that. I don’t know.

[00:00:53.910] – Amy Babinchak
My boat doesn’t travel down that far. That’s a long ways around for me.

[00:01:01.900] – Kara Schoonveld
You’re still more aware of the waterways than most.

[00:01:02.730] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, I would think that. Maybe people would think that it’s part of Indiana or Illinois. Like so far down in that corner.

[00:01:13.810] – Kara Schoonveld
Well, it’s not quite that far down.

[00:01:16.210] – Ted Giesler
It’s the wrong side of the Lake for Illinois.

[00:01:20.290] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, but Indiana comes right up across the bottom there. Well, Chicago is on the bottom of the Lake, right.

[00:01:27.040] – Ted Giesler
But it’s on the west side, not the east side.

[00:01:30.490] – Amy Babinchak
Okay, Ted

[00:01:35.410] – Karl Palachuk
If you’re not from Chicago, you can forgive people for not knowing that.

[00:01:39.490] – Peter Frasco
I may live in rural place now, but I’m originally from Chicago. Sure. Grand Haven is right near Mickey and which has a Lough track up there that you could just go to.

[00:01:58.290] – Amy Babinchak
It’s a blast. I love your loose track. We’ve done it multiple times. It is so much fun.

[00:02:03.850] – Kara Schoonveld
I read about that last winter. I was going to take my nephews, but I didn’t with covet and everything. Maybe this winter will have to do it.

[00:02:09.670] – Amy Babinchak
Oh, definitely.

[00:02:10.910] – Karl Palachuk
What’s way fun to lose track Lough.

[00:02:16.490] – Amy Babinchak
Yes, you can do the loos. It’s also just a great state park in general. It’s right on the water. They get massive amounts of snow. They have great cross country ski tracks. Both the traditional track as well as the skate style. And a huge ice rink.

[00:02:35.190] – Peter Frasco
Yeah, you can skate through the forest there if I remember right.

[00:02:38.310] – Amy Babinchak
Yes. And they have lighted night trails. We usually make up pilgrimage to Muskegon once a year just to go to that park in the winter. And if we’re lucky, the snowy Owls will be there as well.

[00:02:51.290] – Kara Schoonveld
They should have recorded that. That would have been great marketing for them.

[00:02:55.790] – Peter Frasco
Make sure you hit Pentwater in the summer.

[00:03:04.470] – Amy Babinchak
Tinnirello. I haven’t seen you in a long time. It’s nice to see your face.

[00:03:10.830] – Vince Tinnerello
It’s nice to be seen.

[00:03:12.310] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah.

[00:03:14.730] – Vince Tinnerello
I haven’t been around and I got really sick in March. And call it three weeks before the finish line of a vaccine, which was heartbreaking. And aside from going to a couple of peer group meetings, I haven’t had the guts to go anywhere. So it’s good to be seen. Maybe next year.

[00:03:39.250] – Amy Babinchak
Alright.

[00:03:40.930] – Karl Palachuk
I hope you’re all better now.

[00:03:42.860] – Vince Tinnerello
It’s been a long road. My friends, doctors galore and an ambulance ride and three ER visits is not fun. But seven months later I’m candidly, finally feeling myself again. Which is good.

[00:04:06.010] – Amy Babinchak
Good glad to hear it.

[00:04:12.110] – Karl Palachuk
Well, I look forward to seeing all of you in the real world. Want to see anybody in the real world?

[00:04:19.790] – Vince Tinnerello
I’m ready for a beer in a lobby bar, Karl.

[00:04:22.850] – Karl Palachuk
There you go. Absolutely.

[00:04:26.690] – Vince Tinnerello
And some pictures of grumpy old man faced photos. There you go. Exactly. Just like that.

[00:04:34.730] – Amy Babinchak
Karl hopes that you owe him a beer. He hopes everyone owes him a beer. That’s his life plan.

[00:04:40.650] – Karl Palachuk
And I die. I want every one of you to owe me a beer.

[00:04:43.670] – Vince Tinnerello
He made me try Crown Royal for the first time ever, but it was incredulous that I’d never had crowned before.

[00:04:50.820] – Amy Babinchak
I’m a little incredulous myself.

[00:04:55.150] – Vince Tinnerello
In the Hilton, he made me have one with them.

[00:04:59.310] – Karl Palachuk
Loved it.

[00:05:00.140] – Vince Tinnerello
And I loved it. It was delicious.

[00:05:04.750] – Karl Palachuk
Vince is my example of a great customer service person. He got his training in the Marriott organization. And when you sit in the lobby, he can tell you things that are going on that you would never notice in a thousand years.

[00:05:21.430] – Vince Tinnerello
A blessing and a curse that worked in the hotel business for 13 years. Many travel now, so I know what to look for.

[00:05:28.810] – Amy Babinchak
Yes, I’ve noticed that you also have very high expectations where the rest of us are just kind of like the hotel.

[00:05:35.390] – Vince Tinnerello
Yes.

[00:05:38.870] – Vince Tinnerello
I do have higher expectations for what to me should just be common sense. There’s a couple of things. There’s one thing in the restaurant business, having worked in restaurants for years to stop asking me if I’m working on it. Are you still working on that? I’m not a chipmunk. Ask me if I’m still enjoying my dinner. Are you still enjoying your dinner? Right. Don’t say just one. Yeah, I’m a loser. I have no friends. I’m just one tonight at dinner.

[00:06:06.620]
Right.

[00:06:07.110] – Vince Tinnerello
Don’t do those things. I could give you a whole list of things of like do’s and don’ts.

[00:06:14.210] – Karl Palachuk
I may interview you for a book. All right. We have over 50 people, Amy. Why don’t we kick it off?

[00:06:20.050] – Amy Babinchak
Why don’t we kick it off? All right. Well, thank you all for showing up for our very first membership meeting of this great new organization. I am so excited that we finally have an organization that can represent us as MSPs out in the world and have a voice for ourselves because there’s a lot of things that are happening out there that we have no unified voice on, and it is going to cause us big problems in the near future if we can’t get our act together. So my high goals for this organization is that we do get our act together. We have a more professional industry and that we have a unified voice to go forth into the world and make ourselves known for what we actually do as opposed to what they might assume that we do, which is never a good thing. So right now, I am pleased to introduce you to somebody you might already know, but he is a very important man, Karl Palachuk. He has been appointed the executive director of this organization. And truth be told, it was mainly Karl’s idea that we launched this organization. So it’s only fitting that he is our first executive director.

[00:07:39.020] – Amy Babinchak
So please welcome Karl.

[00:07:42.470] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for being here. Just a note, this meeting is being recorded, and it will be posted. So if you don’t want your face or your voice to be recorded, then you need to mute or hide yourself. Just so you know, we respect whatever you choose to do. Everybody joins muted if you want to chat, we will have the chat open the whole time. And Kara is diligently monitoring that. I want to make sure everybody knows that we are doing a lot of work. And so part of what we wanted to do with this meeting is just let you know that we’re not doing nothing. A lot of the work that has gone on has been outside of the public view just because it takes a huge amount of effort to get something like this going. And we go back and forth with the analogy, but it’s sort of like getting the train moving. It takes a whole lot of people. So we have a board of directors and Amy is going to introduce them. We have several committees, and we actually have a committee to help us figure out which committee we should create next.

[00:08:56.330] – Karl Palachuk
Many of you have volunteered, and today you’re going to meet some of the people that you can contact. And we are continuing to improve our processes for communication and posting up information. So I want to just give you a sense of what we’ve been up to. The committees have been meeting mostly every week. There are people on this call, and I mentioned earlier, Amy and Heather, there are several people on this call that go to two or three meetings a week and sometimes more for this organization. And so there’s a huge amount of effort going out. And the board has just literally just jumped in with both feet and is meeting every week. And that can’t continue forever. But we absolutely are blessed to have so many people with so much talent. And so we’ll have more on the agenda for today. The agenda is posted in the chat, but with that, let me introduce you to the President of our board of directors, Amy Babinchak, who is, in addition to being a very long time friend of mine, is one of the most talented and successful managed service providers in the world. She’s Microsoft MVP for, I don’t know, 70 years, something like that.

[00:10:27.920] – Karl Palachuk
And Amy and I are a good combo because we do everything exactly the opposite. In one board meeting, Larry Mandelberg was going down the list of things that could be considered a profession. At the same time. Amy said it’s all of those, and I said it’s none of those okay, now you understand where we come from. It is that difference of opinion and different approaches that brings power to this group. And it’s okay to disagree with people as long as we do it respectfully. So with that, Amy, welcome and thank you for your service.

[00:11:06.650] – Amy Babinchak
Thank you. Karl the key thing about Karl and I’ve teased Karl for years that I disagree with everything he says. But the thing is we appreciate that there are many ways to be successful in this industry. And so I think it’s important to recognize that all of our membership, too, is not going to be exactly like the other. It would be a shame if to create just a whole March of the Clones. We want everybody to be successful in their own way, but have our unifying force be that we are all in the same profession together. So what I’d like to do now is to actually introduce you to who our board members are. Now, these board members were all appointed. We will have elections later in the year. When Karl said that this is a lot of work because what we are doing is setting up the infrastructure for a truly national organization. So there’s a lot of stuff to do to make that happen. So here are the folks on the board that are getting that underway. Chris Barber. Chris is the owner and self proclaimed chief nerd at Cheaper Than a Geek. They’re an MSP that is about to celebrate 22 years in business just out of DC and Baltimore and they specialize in the smaller side of the SMB space.

[00:12:26.810] – Amy Babinchak
Rayanne Buchianico is the owner of ABC Solutions and MSP accounting Expert. She’s also a PSA consultant and podcaster and M Ana expert and author, instructor and speaker. And she has won awards for her working community involvement from every organization that matters in our industry. Jeff Grenier is an expert in MHP operations and service delivery. He’s working in It for 19 years. Owning and operating MSP for 15 of those years. Has a vast knowledge of the industry and client support. Heather Johnson is the cofounder and CEO of Gozynta. She’s created successful marketing, sales and support Department in her first three years there and prior to coming to Gazette, she was an HR director and was the lead organizer for two events at the White House. Larry Mandelberg owns Mandelburg Consulting, is a fifth generation owner with a total of 13 businesses under his belt. That’s impressive. Larry. Larry mentors SMB leadership teams. His book Businesses Don’t Fail, They Commit Suicide explains why Businesses fail with his partner Nancy of 14 years. Larry has a Drexel MBA and serves as Board Chairman for Innovative Education Management. Robert Patterson recently joined our board. He is the Director of Sales and Marketing at Progressive Computing.

[00:13:57.740] – Amy Babinchak
He’s a great community guy out of New York, has been in our channel for 18 years and he is the founder of the New York Small Business server group that’s been running for many years now. Those are our board members, and these folks are extremely talented and extremely hardworking. I’m really glad to have them in our organization. So, Karl, I’m going to turn it back to you, and you can see on the agenda that we have a poll coming up.

[00:14:32.430] – Karl Palachuk
There we go. I have to unmute myself. Carol, will you launch the poll, please? So we want to know we have a few polls, and the first one is, what’s the most important thing that we can do for you? This association we started with some specific goals and things that we wanted to set up, but we want to make sure that there isn’t something else that you need that we can provide. And if you choose other, just throw it in the chat. And while that’s up, let me talk a bit about some things that are going on. So very soon we’re going to be making some big changes to the website, which will include posting up minutes from the meetings. And that’s basically going to be a resource in case people are interested. We do post up these meeting recordings. One of the committees is working on. The formation committee is working on sort of figuring out when we can set up practical elections. Speculation right now is it will probably be in September of 2022. And the way that our charter, I guess, is written is that the people serve on aboard until the next election.

[00:16:10.300] – Karl Palachuk
And so the people who we have now have been appointed, basically what we do with committees, what we have done to get things started is to try to find somebody to be a committee chair and then encourage them to go get additional people. We do need some more committee members specifically for finance. And we don’t need people who are like financial Wizards. We need people who are willing to say, I will look and help put together a profit and loss, help put together a budget of what we think we can spend money on. Some of that money needs to come from additional resources. So we have membership, which the board set at $100. And I hope everyone here is a member, a paid member. But if you’re not, I encourage you to go and convert to a paid membership on the site. And then one of the people that works for me has been contacting people and getting in the letters of rack and so forth so that you can become a full fledged paid member. To sit on a board or to vote in the elections, you have to be a paid member. So we want to make sure people have some stake in this.

[00:17:30.430] – Karl Palachuk
The board has, I mentioned, been meeting weekly, and it has been quite a struggle for some people. And I completely acknowledge that we’re adding an hour or sometimes two to people’s schedules. And that’s difficult. Eventually there’ll be a little less frequent. But the board has also taken on the chore of trying to figure out we want to come up with the vision, mission and value statements that really reflect what we want to do here. And sometimes we get pretty nitpicky about the meaning of this word and that word. But it matters in the long run because we don’t want a mission statement that gets printed out and put into a drawer and never seen again. We want a mission statement that people can look at and say, that is exactly what this industry needs to do. That’s where we need to go. And so it’s a fair amount of hard work on that front. And I think we could probably end the poll at this point and show the results. So the legislative advocacy is clearly something that needs to be done. And just yesterday, Sisa put out some more guidelines for responding to cyber securityecurity incidents, and they put out a couple of different playbooks.

[00:19:08.550] – Karl Palachuk
So it’s just another example. The people on Facebook and Reddit who say, I don’t see any legislation, I don’t know what you’re talking about. It is absolutely coming. And in some ways, it’s almost as if we may be a little bit late to the game, but we need to do that second in the poll makes perfect sense, elevate the standards of ethics across our profession, that is huge. And the education and certification piece, now the talking points. I know that seems so not a lot of people saw that as a super high priority. And it may be that it was your second. But part of what we want to do is be able to give you resources so that when there’s a news story, the next time there’s an incident that hits the media, we want to make sure that you are all empowered to have some talking points to literally say, well, here’s why people would outsource their it. Here’s why you would use these powerful tools. Here’s why you would do this. And eventually, if we have the money, I would love to see us produce some video and audio so that your local reporter can download that, make a story, and contact you for the seven second sound bite from the local It service provider who is actually serving that community.

[00:20:35.430] – Karl Palachuk
And if we can do that with a fair amount of consistency, then the voice of the small It service provider will be heard. I love Microsoft, don’t get me wrong, but Microsoft has their voice. They can be in any discussion they want to be in. And the same with Dell and HP and intel and everybody else, as well as the really big managed service providers. If you got big money, then you have a voice. Well, most of us, we have just enough money to feed our family and guarantee our retirement and a handful of people own Tesla. But we don’t have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying so it’s a step. One of the things that the board decided early on is that they want to make sure that this is a bottom up organization. So there’s a little irony in that. You start by appointing people and then creating a more Democratic process. But as Eric put in the chat, that’s the way it goes. Heather Johnson was appointed as the liaison between the board of directors and the committee. So if the board says, hey, we want to standardize on this, she makes sure that community chairs get that information.

[00:22:01.290] – Karl Palachuk
Community chairs then send requests to the board through her. And it’s just a way for those things to move. So I want to thank Heather for that. And one of the reasons we see each other all the time is that we seem to always be in meetings, sometimes two in the same day. So that’s a huge thing. Another decision that the board made is that there is one vote per company. So if you have an organization and you have, let’s say, ten employees, we would love all of those employees to be members, but only one would need to be a paid member and have a vote. So what we don’t want, again, is for large organizations to come in and say we’re going to register 50 people and we’re going to take 50 votes and we’re going to take over this organization. That was never our intention. And the board has sort of solidified that their goal is that it’s one vote per company. And that way one of the first things that people said online was that the big companies are just going to dominate. And I think that simple move takes care of that.

[00:23:26.490] – Karl Palachuk
Of course, we’re happy to discuss that as well. The board did adopt the bylaws for the organization, and if those are not yet on the website, they will be soon again. We have a resources section that we’re building, so it will show up eventually. All right. And with that, I’ll turn it back to Amy. But let’s go ahead and launch the poll. I’ll stop this. I’m going to not click anything. I’m going to let Kara do her job and let’s launch the poll on communications. Amy, take it away.

[00:24:17.730] – Amy Babinchak
All right. Thanks, Karl, for that. It was a really big, important thing for me that this be a grassroots organization and that we truly represent the small MSPs and that we don’t get taken over by vendors, even though that we may need their assistance in helping our organization. We want this to be led by the committees and what is actually needed in our community rather than to have something dictated out to us. I don’t know if you all saw the message going around from Google asking you to sign up for their new group so that they can represent our community. I do not trust Google or Microsoft or Accenture or any of these giant corporations to truly represent what we are as MSPs. And we’ve been doing a lot of work in the committees to make sure that that happens. And it’s really, I think, a critical component and something that makes us different than other organizations that are out there today. So let me introduce you to our committee chairs. We have a formation committee which is chaired by Brett Erickson of Paskey Technology. We’re going to allow each of the committee chairs to give a couple of minutes feel on what it is that they’re working on.

[00:25:46.970] – Amy Babinchak
So if we can get Brett up and unmute it to talk about his community for a moment.

[00:25:54.570]
Great.

[00:25:55.770] – Bret Erickson
Thanks, Amy. Everybody hear me? Okay?

[00:25:57.970] – Amy Babinchak
Yes.

[00:25:58.810]
Okay.

[00:25:59.220] – Bret Erickson
Awesome. Hey, Vince, that sounds like quite a journey. We’re very happy that you made it through okay.

[00:26:06.630]
Yes.

[00:26:07.030] – Bret Erickson
So I’m Bret Erickson. I’m the chair of the formation committee. I own Passkey Technology up in Minnesota. Actually, Minneapolis, we’re a first ring suburb, Golden Valley, and we’re a small ten person MSP been around since 91, and I’m very happy to be involved in this organization. Our industry’s reputation is very important to all of us, and I’m guessing we’re all believers that a rising tide lifts all boats. So right off the bat, I’d love to acknowledge the other regulars that are committee meetings, Diana Giles of Skyline It Management from Oklahoma, Jason Thomas of JTAG Solutions from Illinois, and David Yates of Geeks, R US from Florida. We’re also usually joined by board members Heather Johnson of Gozynta and Karl, and then sometimes Amy peaks on us as well. So what does the formation committee do and what are we up to? We’ve been meeting weekly, actually, mostly because there’s a lot of work to do to get the right committees in place. It’s a critical piece of getting this organization launched. So quite simply, the formation committee we’re working on what kind of committees the organization needs and in what priority order we need to create them.

[00:27:21.450] – Bret Erickson
So we basically come up with a scope and some guidelines off of an idea for a committee we need, and then we send that off to the board as recommendations. So to date, we have formed, obviously, the formation committee, the legislative committee, finance committee, marketing committee, and most likely next is a membership committee. So we also define the committee’s general rules, guidelines, and standards for the committees and then send them off to the board has recommendations and also involved in recommending the election details and process and timing and get those off to the board. So eventually we see ourselves after committees are formed as migrating or moving from a formation committee to a governance committee. And then I’m glad Karl touched on this when referencing submitting to the board, and we send this off to the board for approval. Karl does talk a lot in our meetings about the board’s preference for this to be a bottom up organization and committees having a large say in direction. So great segue to volunteering to be on a committee. What bottom up means for you is that you can have a lot of influence in the success of this organization.

[00:28:41.730] – Bret Erickson
And I will defer to Amy Karl and crew on how to best volunteer. So there’s plenty of opportunity and we would love to help. And that’s all I got unless we have questions.

[00:28:52.650] – Amy Babinchak
Great. Thank you, Brett. Yeah. It should also be noted that one of the additional decisions that we made as a board is that no board member could be a chair of the committee. So we’re really taking this bottom up thing quite seriously. And the formation committee is arguably the most important committee that we have right now. They are designing this organization. So we do need to get involved. We need you to get involved. We want as many members involved in our committees as we can possibly get. So now let me introduce you to the Legislative Committee and tell you what they’re all Dennis Wilson is the chair of that committee of DWP Information Architects out in California. And I’m going to let Dennis tell you all about what the Legislative Committee has been involved in.

[00:29:46.350] – Denis Wilson
Thank you. Amy, can you hear me?

[00:29:47.800] – Amy Babinchak
Okay, I can hear you. Great, great.

[00:29:50.850] – Denis Wilson
I really do appreciate the opportunity to outline the real work that the Legislative Committee has achieved in the last several weeks. Currently, we have the following folks on the committee Besides myself, we have the vice chair and Secretary of the committee, Keith Nelson, who said Vista Solutions in Southern California. We have Heather Johnson as the board liaison, Amy Babinchak, as I don’t know, whoever she does at the time. Karl, Paul, Chuck, of course, drops in most of the time. Brett Erickson that you all just met from Passky Technologies in Minnesota and Ted Geisler of Cyprus Consulting Group in Illinois. So we’ve got basically six of us currently. However, we could use a few more active community members and you can volunteer on the NSITSP website or just give me a call and we’ll work it out. The purpose of the Legislative Committee is to put together resources needed for our service provider members to actively knowledgeably participate in conversations with state legislators all over the US. Our goals currently are for we need to get to know who the state legislators are in the legislative committees that are driving or will drive the regulation and laws that will affect the It service providers.

[00:31:26.850] – Denis Wilson
Second is to provide educational materials to help these state legislators understand the background and the issues that are or will affect these regulations and laws. Third, to provide educational materials to help the Society members understand how to present and how to discuss the educational materials with the state legislators and what are the key points that we need to promote. And fourth, to provide assistance to the Society members to help them achieve a knowledgeable and respected position. Visa Visa The state legislators. And so far, what we’ve been able to do is we’ve established a prioritized list of goals and objectives to quickly achieve our goals so that the Society members have the tools to use in discussions with their state legislators. We’ve established a weekly schedule for the work and a procedure that the committee members are comfortable with. We’ve created a fact document that doesn’t describe who, what and why our It service providers, one of the key legislative key constituents and what their concerns are. We should have that completed by next week. Next, we created in the process of creating a guideline or an outline of the typical state legislature, a glossary of key terms who are the key players in the state, what committees should be targeted, and we should have that started next week.

[00:33:13.610] – Denis Wilson
And then we expect that after that, we will have created a battle card and a description of the personas involved in those discussions so that the Society members will understand who it is it’s playing, how it is they expect to be talked to and all that kind of stuff that we’ve gotten so used to in the sales process, when we expect to get a preview to the committee members within the next several weeks. And Additionally, we coordinate with other committees to create marketing and other types of materials. I’m very proud of this committee. We’ve started from the ground up, and we’re now actively getting our priorities knocked out. And one of the things that we are painfully aware of is that some of the legislatures and other key participants are actively working on regulations that we will have no input on. We are scrambling to try to catch up and represent the It service providers efficiently and thoroughly, and we’re going to do what we can.

[00:34:22.780] – Karl Palachuk
Thank you.

[00:34:24.530] – Amy Babinchak
Thanks, Dennis. Yeah, Dennis, in our committee, which I’m most passionately involved in this committee myself, we are focusing on building out materials that is going to empower all the members of this organization to be active in the legislation process because we’re going to need everybody. Right now, we’ve got a situation where we have politicians that have woken up to the idea of cybersecurity, and they all want to be the one that created the solution to the problem. And the legislation is coming forward fast and furious, both at the state level and the federal level. At the federal level, in the House, there were 321 bills created for cybersecurity regulations in the first half of this year. One of them has pushed forward to the Senate, which is troubling, and it has the most screwed up definition of MSP that you’ve ever seen. And if that becomes legislation, that will become the words that define who we are. And so we have to get ourselves involved really rapidly here. So we’re trying to fire up as quickly as we possibly can. So now let me introduce you to Rayne Buchanano. She is a member of the board.

[00:35:47.420] – Amy Babinchak
She is acting chair of the committee because their financing fundraising committee is brand new. And so, Rayanne Buchianico, tell us about your hopes and dreams for this committee.

[00:35:59.390] – Rayanne Buchianico
So thank you, everyone. And I’m Rayanne Buchianico and I’m currently acting chair for the finance committee. And so that’s because up until about a few minutes ago, I was the only one on the committee. So thanks to Kenneth Konos for volunteering and also Eric Anthony, who has offered to step up and help out. What we’re looking to do is raise funds for the organization so that the other committees can get out there and spend what they need to spend in order to do the jobs right. So the legislative committee and the marketing committee, they need dollars to do their jobs. And what we really want to do is start to meet now, build a budget for 2022, build a membership drive or some sort of forecasting for how many dollars we’re going to get in versus how many dollars we’re going to need to spend out. So as you might imagine, budgeting and the finances is kind of in my wheelhouse. But I cannot be the chairperson of this committee since I’m on the executive board already. But I’d like to hold it together until we can get a full fledged committee together. I will be filing the 501 application with the Internal Revenue Service before the end of this month so that we can be officially recognized as an organization and all of your dues will be tax deductible as business expenses.

[00:37:40.980] – Rayanne Buchianico
And so far, that’s all I really have for the committee. Anybody out there that wants to help us increase membership, increase some fundraising, maybe get some vendors to donate dollars to our cause, we could really use your help. So don’t be shy. Step right up and help us out.

[00:38:04.310] – Amy Babinchak
Thank you, Rayannne. Our next committee up is the marketing and communications committee, which is headed up by Tim Golden of the compliance.

[00:38:16.080] – Karl Palachuk
You guys, good afternoon, everybody. And thank you so much.

[00:38:19.140] – Tim Golden
Brett, Dennis, and Rayanne for those great introductions of your committees. And I’m glad to see that yours are really starting to take off and take foundation here. As a newly appointed marketing chair, I just dropped the membership application in Chat. We could use some more help. It would be beneficial if we could get a couple of more people as part of our team to try to bring forth the message of what we’re doing here to not only the MSP community at large, but the general overall community around making sure that we are staying up to our standards and we’re following what we want to believe in and we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing. I’m going to be brief because I don’t have a lot of members to introduce and a lot of outlines and goals yet as the newly appointed member. But, yeah, apply there. The link is in Chat. So looking forward to working with some of you here on bringing forth our great message and what we’re trying to do here with the society. Thanks, Tim Golden compliance to you guys.

[00:39:18.170] – Amy Babinchak
Thanks, Tim. Yeah, it’s not that Tim was newly appointed. It’s that the committee is brand new itself. So this was one of the first acts of the formation committee was to create this one. And it would be a great one to join because they are going to be developing not only the image of the organization, but also the standardization of how we communicate to the world what organization is about, what MSPs are about, what our industry is about. So they have a very critical role to play, and I look forward to seeing what they’re going to do. So, Karl, I’m going to turn it back over to you. And I think, Karl, we have a new poll. We can probably close that one and then get up the next poll.

[00:40:08.050] – Karl Palachuk
Did we share the results of the communications poll?

[00:40:12.050] – Amy Babinchak
There they are.

[00:40:13.250] – Karl Palachuk
Okay. So thank you very much. So semi monthly seems pretty good. I’m thinking that we will do a monthly newsletter, and then we have to figure out the frequency of meetings, stuff like this. This is a big one just because we have so many things to introduce you to. But I’m hoping to help work with Tim and his committee to figure out, like how can we have a regular cadence and so forth. So let’s go ahead and start the next poll, please. And while you’re looking at that, this is about education and what educational topics would be the most interest to you. I want to talk about several other things. One of them is and Amy, just jump in whenever you choose to. Not that I can stop you. Paid membership. So right now, paid membership, we only have one level which is paid. So there’s an unpaid level, I guess. But in terms of a paid membership, part of what the formation committee is going to look at. And maybe this will get handed off to a membership committee. Is should we have levels of membership and what would that look like? And so Canos and some others have been discussing in the chat about how many votes would make sense for an organization and so forth.

[00:42:02.270] – Karl Palachuk
We’re happy to have that discussion. And when we get to the Q and A section, obviously people are welcome to discuss that. But we also need to look at vendor memberships and what the role of vendors is. And part of that depends on the committees working together. The Finance Committee has got to figure out how much money we need. If you just pick a number out of the top of your head, do we need 50,000? Do we need 100,000? If we’re going to do lobbying and hire some administrative staff, do we need 250,000? Like, what do we need? And we don’t really have a handle on that yet. And so we have to come up with a budget and then figure out, okay, what’s the role there are several vendors have contacted me and said, what can we do? And so part of what the board has discussed is that it doesn’t have to be money. If a vendor says, we can give you a boost at our show, we can give you some marketing materials, we can help you with this or that. There’s many pieces of various budgets Besides spending money to get your logo on a website.

[00:43:17.090] – Karl Palachuk
So we’re very open to that. And several vendors have contacted me, and I’ve had a few conversations. Many of them the larger ones, anyway, are very interested in getting their logo out there. And part of what I’ve said from the start is I don’t see this as an opportunity for you to give us money and have another webinar that’s not filling a void in any way. And so I don’t see that as part of what this organization is going to do. And while we believe that the vendors are critical to this community, literally, there is no community without the vendors. Right. There’s no channel without the vendors. But this is an It service provider centric organization. And so I’m happy to have discussions and maybe at some point we will have a meeting of interested vendors to see what role they would like to play, because they come to me and say, well, they have to be give and get. So make a proposal. I’m like, okay, that’s not really very helpful. We do want to figure out exactly the kind of thing, what role that they can play to help us get our message out, to get this education out, to get in front of state legislators.

[00:44:39.880] – Karl Palachuk
One of the things that developed early on that Dennis was talking about was that as soon as we started talking to just casually talking to state legislators, the first question was, do you provide educational materials for small businesses? And we’re like, well, we don’t yet. But if that’s the first need that you have, we can make that happen. And that’s the kind of thing that vendors might be able to help with. So there’s that second topic is membership drive. So now that we have a membership committee or forming a membership committee, one of the first things that it’s going to do is to try to get people to help promote all of what we’re doing so that will evolve. And again, if people have input on what that would look like, we would love to have you involved. It will probably be the communications committee that will get that kicked off and be the public face of that. I hope you got a sense from the committee reports that there truly is an overwhelming amount of work to do. When Dennis was halfway through his thing, I felt like saying, enough already. You’re going to overwhelm people.

[00:45:57.530] – Karl Palachuk
So there’s that related to all of this is that we’ve set up several social media pages which are not intended to be the conversation area. Right. So we do have forums on our site, and the communications committee is going to have to figure out exactly which places we communicate with each other and have these public discussions. But the Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages are intended to be sort of broadcast areas where, with luck, we will have people who volunteer to track things going on in the association and let people know about those and use those as a way to get people to loop back and join us and participate, whether it’s in committees or other things, but spread the word about this association. And then, of course, we need to have some kind of fundraising. And again, that may be looping back to the vendors. It may also be from members themselves. Several of you and I’m extremely grateful several of you have donated money above and beyond the $100 cost of membership, and we absolutely appreciate that. And so that can continue. That will continue. Another topic that has come up is, what do we do about international communities?

[00:47:35.390] – Karl Palachuk
I at least saw Canadians on here. I don’t know if there’s anybody here from the UK, but we’ve had people contact us from Australia, New Zealand, a couple of places in Africa, a couple of places in Europe. It’s like people want to join this organization. And so right now we’re focused on making this happen in North America, but we will at some point this will spread a little further. If nothing else, part of what we have committed to is transparency. There’s some discussion about putting up documents for people to see what the committees are up to and so forth. We absolutely are going to do all of that. And as I said, some changes to the website are coming soon. That’ll be a place where you’ll be able to see exactly what’s going on here and ask questions and have them answered. We do have forums within the website already, and some people have used those. They’re not very active. One of the problems with having so many means of communication in the It industry is that there are 50 social media outlets, and everybody uses something different, and some people refuse to use one and some refuse to use another.

[00:49:04.350] – Karl Palachuk
I’m just like everybody else. I refuse to use them, and I refuse to and I always use other. So we have to figure out how to communicate with everybody across all of that. And finally, one of the next things that the board is going to do after they finalize the mission, vision and value statements is to come up with a solid code of ethics. I have a sample up on the site that just came out of my original nine pillars document. But the board wants to come up with something that we can say. This is a code of ethics that we stand for and ask members to post it on their websites and talk about it amongst themselves, talk about it with their clients and be held responsible. If you follow the news, some of what’s going on with Saisa is that somebody in that government organization is convinced that MSPs are regularly not doing what they are telling their clients they’re doing. They’re taking money and not delivering resources. And it is becoming like the focus of how we are going to be regulated. There is no question that that is where this is going.

[00:50:21.190] – Karl Palachuk
And part of what we can do to fight that is to say, well, wait a minute. There are a whole bunch of It service providers who do exactly what they say they’re going to do, who document what they’re doing, who have a transparent system, who let clients have access to their own password and their own data. But we need to make sure that we’re visible about that and we hold each other accountable. So that’s also a piece of where this goes.

[00:50:51.570] – Amy Babinchak
One of the really eye opening things was a recent document for that CISA put out as a guidance to businesses. And in there they had a checklist of things that you can do to protect yourself from your MSP. That’s how low the reputation of our industry has become. They have reputable organizations like that, putting out those sorts of materials that does not speak well for our industry. And we all know that we’ve had trouble distinguishing ourselves or being seen as distinct from the inscrutable people that are in our industry. We all know them and we have derogatory names for them, but we know that they’re out there and they are not being seen as different from those of us that are responsible. So that is an important thing that we need to address. And that is really part of what the code of ethics. And honestly, this whole list of things that is in the education poll that’s open now, that’s what that’s all about.

[00:51:59.110]
Yeah.

[00:51:59.460] – Karl Palachuk
It’s interesting. In the board discussion about mission, we go back and forth on, you know, the word professional and what that means. And while the word professional isn’t a good fit for a mission statement, we all sort of have some sense of what we think that means. And I think we have an amazing amount of agreement on it. It’s just a matter of, okay, so turn that into actions, turn that into visible activities that another person can see. What does that look like? Again, I use the word transparency. Part of what we want to do and we’re working on is to make this as transparent as possible. And I’m meeting with Kara tomorrow or Friday about several things, but one of them is I want to make sure that we know exactly what we’re doing on the website. And probably within a week we will have the minutes all up for all the meetings from now on. And then it’s a matter of just making sure those processes are in place. But everything takes time. And on one hand, I am a little frustrated that this thing doesn’t move at the speed of light. On the other hand, we have done amazing amount of work because we’ve only existed for three months.

[00:53:22.370] – Ted Giesler
All right.

[00:53:23.080] – Karl Palachuk
Anything else? Let’s go ahead and end that poll and share the results. Anything else we need to cover before we open it for Q and A?

[00:53:31.040]
Amy?

[00:53:32.450] – Amy Babinchak
No, I think that we’ve covered it and we did it in the amount of time that we wanted to, which is awesome. So what we plan to do for the next 30 minutes is to leave it open for Q and A to really hear from you guys what you’re thinking about this space and our role and accomplishments and how you can help us move this organization forward. So I think at this point, we’ll take stuff out of the chat and just have a conversation before people start leaving in droves, which I hope you won’t. Thank you for attending this first meeting as well. I think we really wanted to introduce you to the organization and appreciate that you have early jumped on and said, yes, I want to be part of this and that you’re here today. That really means a lot. And it is good to see that. I think that we’re on the right track and as a community, we know what we need to do. We just have to get busy and do it.

[00:54:40.230] – Karl Palachuk
All right. With that, I’m trying to figure out how do I remove all the pins. I guess if everybody goes to the Gallery view, then we get rid of all of the spotlights.

[00:54:49.350] – Amy Babinchak
Did we share the results for the education poll yet? Let me do that. There we go. Yeah. So the compliance and regulation piece seems to be the main thing that we need to educate on legal, insurance and risk management. That is a closely related topic in my mind. Very good to see that.

[00:55:20.190] – Ted Giesler
Very cool.

[00:55:23.130] – Amy Babinchak
All right.

[00:55:27.970] – Karl Palachuk
I guess we’re done right with the polls.

[00:55:30.290] – Amy Babinchak
We’re done with the polls. So let’s take a look at what’s in the chat, which has been very active, which I love. I love to see people participating.

[00:55:41.950] – Karl Palachuk
For future meetings. In case you guys don’t know it, you can go into your settings for Zoom and set it to be seven by seven. So I have 49 of you on the screen instead of 25, so you’re slightly smaller, but I see more of you. So who wants to talk about what? Is there anything we missed that you want to chat about?

[00:56:06.230] – Amy Babinchak
Well, if we look in the chat, Steven Faulkner says he doesn’t trust Google or the others either. And I think that’s safe to say. I hate that when an issue comes up that the legislators, if they don’t know anybody they’ll be like, hey, we’re talking about this cybersecurity stuff. Let’s get Microsoft on the line. It just doesn’t fit in with small business. They’re not going to have the same reality scope that we have. So we need to make sure that they’re contacting the right people. And the only way to do that is to tell them, hey, when you have this kind of thing coming up and you need some import or you need help on developing that legislation, or you need to know what the definitions of this or that are, please don’t Google it literally or figuratively. Come and ask us.

[00:57:01.710] – Karl Palachuk
Well, part of my job as the executive director is to make sure that that website, when people Google the definition of something, we’re on it. I would love to have a whole strategy around that just because we need to be the voice of what these things are for small business. Ultimately, that is one of the goals.

[00:57:26.610] – Peter Frasco
I think one of the things that I’d like to get out, I’m a relatively new guy in this realm, in the MSSP type realm, but 30 years of experience in the military, then Silicon Valley, then big corporate powerhouses, relatively new been doing this about nine months. And one of the things that’s hard is getting mastermind groups together. I think that we should be able to facilitate, facilitate that some from this group of professionals who are all in the same industry and want to do this ethically well.

[00:58:11.900] – Karl Palachuk
There are many mastermind groups. I think if we did something, it would really need to be very focused on the specific topics we cover in terms of general, like success, mastermind groups. There are dozens. There’s probably 20 people on here who could share the groups that they’re in. I know many people have them.

[00:58:40.030] – Peter Frasco
Yeah, I get that they’re all over the place. I’m talking about sharing experiences in the group as well, not necessarily developing a specific mastermind group by participating in one that’s kind of general business owners, but I use that term kind of broadly as a think tank for certain things and lessons learned well.

[00:59:06.770] – Karl Palachuk
Certainly discussing how we approach problems and how we respond to this legislature or that news media or whatever, I don’t know about anybody else. I’ve mentioned this several times, and they haven’t really had a lot of feedback, but I am very frustrated about how the news media cover these cybersecurity incidents without any knowledge, just waving their hand. Well, clearly they’re not very good at what they do. It’s like, clearly you’re not very informed about this topic.

[00:59:41.030] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, we can all be really good at what we do and still have one of our clients experience a cyber security incident. And I do think it’s important that they know that and that they don’t necessarily immediately assume that that’s a black Mark on our industry. There are a huge number now of international crime organizations that are developed just to thwart the good work that we’re trying to do. So we as small businesses are ourselves up against overwhelming force. And I think it would be better for us if it were put out that way. We are out there doing everything that we can do to keep our clients safe, but sometimes bad things are going to happen. One thing I wanted to call out in the chat is there was a bit of discussion about the one vote policy and the paid membership thing. I see that kind of a cool discussion. Kenneth brought it up and then there was a little back and forth and says he was kind of thinking out loud and you can sort of see the value. The thing about we don’t want large organizations to take advantage of smaller organizations to have it become a lopsided thing.

[01:01:13.730] – Amy Babinchak
If you have been in this industry for a while, you’ve seen that happen in other organizations in our industry where either the vendors end up being the leading voice or the larger MSPs end up being the larger voice. And actually, in our industry, most MSPs are small. And when I say MSP, I’m encompassing it, service provider, VAR, MSSP, whatever you want to call yourself, the organizations out there serving the community. We’re in general, all types of consulting firms and consulting firms are mostly small in any industry you go to. And so we want to make sure that the small firms have just as much a voice because they’re just as important to their customers as the big firms are. And that is a key component of who we are and who I think we’re going to be going into the future.

[01:02:14.710] – Karl Palachuk
Larry, you had a comment. You’re muted Larry, you’re muted.

[01:02:29.390] – Larry Mandelberg
The education poll had business operations low. It wasn’t one of the top two. I don’t think it was at the bottom, but it was low. And I’m just curious how many of you on this call are satisfied with your level of sales, profitability and organizational size. This kind of fits in with what Amy was talking about. There are a lot of business people who don’t want to have a large business. They want to have a small, intimate organization. And I’m just wondering if that low level of importance of business operations education is a reflection of your success or of the lack of desire to grow and become a larger organization or something else. Does anybody have any comments on that?

[01:03:27.350] – Karl Palachuk
I have to say my impression is that there’s plenty of that education provided by me, Amy, Eric, Simpson, many others. Right. And that this organization doesn’t really fill a void by providing that specific kind of education. That’s my suspicion. Patrick said I have organizations and partners for that subject. I didn’t mean to cut off conversation, but no thanks.

[01:04:05.440] – Larry Mandelberg
Like I said, we’re for some other reason. I appreciate the insight.

[01:04:10.450] – Karl Palachuk
So what do folks think about the one vote per organization.

[01:04:19.570] – Eric Hanson
That’S perfectly reasonable, not unusual in an organization like that or like this, then I have another vein we can go off on.

[01:04:38.350] – Karl Palachuk
We’re totally ready.

[01:04:44.990] – Vince Gerasolo
I’d like to hear the reasons that you would want more than one vote per organization that was advocated, because I personally think one vote for organization makes the most sense. It’s the business owners that have the stake in this whole thing, not necessarily the employees, but the employees are part of the industry and they should have a voice to some degree. I’m just curious. Again, I’m for the one vote per organization, but what is the value of having more than one vote per organization? Is there an argument there?

[01:05:22.710] – Eric Hanson
Yeah. I haven’t seen anything in the chat where anybody said any different. They thought that, well.

[01:05:32.500] – Karl Palachuk
One person had said, and I’m not going to scroll up and try to find it, but that if you got two partners who disagree on something, who gets the vote. And I guess I sort of feel like you should never have only two partners. You should have three partners, and then you get to decide definitely no.

[01:05:54.900] – Vince Gerasolo
50 50 on partnerships.

[01:05:56.630] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. Somebody should be 51%.

[01:06:00.070] – Eric Hanson
But I think that’s an internal organizational thing to figure out. You guys have one vote to figure out what it needs to be.

[01:06:07.460] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. So Larry says some large organizations might want one vote for each Department, and that’s exactly what we don’t want. I think.

[01:06:17.410] – Kenneth Iconos
There’s value in recognizing that a lot of It programs get their start working for other firms.

[01:06:27.630]
Right.

[01:06:28.430] – Kenneth Iconos
That’s how I got started. 20. Let’s not say how many years ago, too many years ago.

[01:06:34.870] – Karl Palachuk
Years ago.

[01:06:38.210] – Kenneth Iconos
Allowing those individuals to grow in their own way, in their own time and still have a voice in the industry that they plan on making a career, being part of those decisions and discussions. And I think is key. And I think having the option if you choose to. And that’s kind of where I was going later in the chat about maybe an entity based membership that doesn’t necessarily afford additional voting rights, but maybe allows the other company members to be part of committees and have a more active role than that of the designated speaker for that entity within our organization.

[01:07:28.080] – Karl Palachuk
So that’s a great idea.

[01:07:31.470] – Kenneth Iconos
But I do committee with one vote per organization because we need to make sure that we’re focused on the present here and now and making the impact that we need to make in order to continue succeeding.

[01:07:48.170] – Karl Palachuk
I think for things like elections, it would still be one vote per organization, but the membership committee might come up with some clever way of saying that your employees can serve on committees. But again, we’ve got to figure out how to make sure that this doesn’t become 100 employee organizations dominating the one employee or five employee organizations.

[01:08:15.450] – Kenneth Iconos
I know somebody mentioned pay for play, but in these early stages, I think it may be worth having a longer conversation from a finance perspective, in order to fund all of the things that we know we need to address while we vet some of the vendors that we want to associate ourselves with that vendor reputation. I know that we don’t want to be a vendor forward organization and we shouldn’t be, but it also affords us more credibility by developing partnerships with well established enterprise level organizations that are world renowned and their security practices seek less credibility.

[01:09:02.850] – Karl Palachuk
Well, it’s the chicken and the egg. At some point I would like this organization to have the membership and the stature so that a Microsoft comes to us and says, hey, for whatever $100,000, we want to be able to say that we support your organization or whatever. They get their logo on our site and we get their logo, they get our logo. Basically. Maybe that’s all they need. But if we have enough status, all those organizations will come and say, hey, we want to support you, we want to support professionalism in this industry.

[01:09:44.530] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah, we really have no desire for the vendors to advertise in the organization. That’s not where about want to flip side. We are not going to promote them and we are not going to rank them. Why they should want to participate in supporting an organization like ours is because a more professional industry is better for them too. I think the best ones out there do recognize that, that they are participating in some role, and that’s why they offer free education programs and free marketing materials. It’s not only just that, not only just that they want to make money from you, it’s that they want to make sure that it’s they’re working with partners that are going to represent their product and their industry in general in the right way. It’s not good for them if there’s people that aren’t behaving in a professional manner that are out there wagging their business name around either. So I think we have a good selling point there. That may be enough.

[01:11:00.850] – Karl Palachuk
I agree. Ed, did you have a comment? See, your hand is up and you’re muted.

[01:11:10.140] – Ed
Okay, yeah, I just want to comment on the education survey. The top two choices. I think it may make sense to pretty much integrate into the operation area because I would say the people should have the other topics, compliance and things like that, insurance built into their standard operations. So that will be part of it, not an afterthought type of thing. So I think that the standards of practice of how you operate your company and how you set it up, how you support your customers should be part of those things. To contract all these registrations and rules that coming down the pipe should be the whole thing as an integrated process.

[01:12:05.510] – Amy Babinchak
I think that’s part of what we hope to accomplish with the ethics statements that we can reach some kind of cohesive message of this. If you’re not adhering to these ethics, if you’re not willing to put these out and say this is who we are, then that may be an indication that you are not necessarily acting as a professional in your industry.

[01:12:37.410] – Karl Palachuk
Right, Rob?

[01:12:40.950] – Rob Eberhardt
Yeah, just about the one vote per organization, practically speaking. I guess I just comment it would be a heck of a lot easier to enforce one vote per membership than it would be for organization. You’re going to have some people who may feel sneaky and sign up twice with multiple organization names playing Devil’s advocate on it a little bit. But if someone wants more votes, they’re going to get more votes.

[01:13:17.410] – Karl Palachuk
Well, we’ll have to address that problem if it shows up. What we have done so far, just so you know, is that if you sign up and pay, let’s just assume you’re the owner and then three of your employees sign up and pay. We rebate their money and put them as just basic membership so they can see things and so forth. But they don’t get to vote. They don’t get to sit on committees.

[01:13:50.890] – Rob Eberhardt
I’m just saying there will be some effort to make sure that happens that way. I’m not saying the effort is not worth it. It’s absolutely worth it.

[01:13:59.970] – Amy Babinchak
Yeah. There will be some effort around that. And to me, that falls into the category of not making a policy based on an exception. We’ll have to deal with those exceptions. But in the rule, I think we can have an overall thing, and it is something that we know we’re going to have to keep an eye out for. So in the chat, there’s discussion about badges, membership logos, and that kind of thing that we could all display on our websites and signatures and such. And yes, that’s going to be on the way. That is, you may have noticed that we have a logo. I don’t think it’s as bad as Karl thinks it is. I thought he did an okay job developing it, but we will get a more professional logo. It will be badge. It will be something that you can probably display as a member of the organization and begin to use that in your marketing materials to help differentiate you.

[01:15:07.230] – Karl Palachuk
I intentionally didn’t go to a graphics person and say design a logo for us because I wanted to have that be a thing that evolved from the organization. So I created something that I consider a placeholder. But I really would love to have this be something where paid members are allowed to and are eager to put the code of ethics on their website, with the logo, in their email signature, and on their website and talk to their clients. In fact, part of your big bundle that you give prospective clients is a page that says, here’s our code of ethics, and we’re a supporting member of the National Society of It Service Providers. And here’s why. It really will differentiate you from the people who are just selling licenses and walking away from clients and not providing the services that they’ve been paid for.

[01:16:15.830] – Amy Babinchak
Earlier, I think I was remiss in not properly introducing Heather Johnson, who’s on our board. I did introduce her as a board member, but I did not really introduce her as the important role that she’s playing on our board as liaison to the committees. So part of our ground up grassroots, if you will, organization here is that the committees are the power center, and they will funnel things that they need the board to take action on through Heather and Heather’s expertise in her previous life before it goes into is in HR and organizational problem resolution. And so she is the perfect person to do that job, and we’re very lucky to have her. So thank you, Heather, for taking that on your rock.

[01:17:10.440] – Heather Johnson
Thank you.

[01:17:11.320] – Rayanne Buchianico
Thank you.

[01:17:11.700] – Heather Johnson
And it’s funny, I started going to some of those committee meetings, and everybody should sign up for a committee after I say this, if you haven’t already. I was only supposed to kind of attend for the first five or ten minutes and just kind of see what the temperature is. And I love these committees and they are really doing things and they know what they’re doing and they’re respectful to each other and each other’s opinions. And it’s just so exciting that now it’s like, when are other people meeting? I want to be on all of these committees because they are fun. They are actually fun and they’re doing amazing things. And I’m learning so much from them, and I hope I contribute as well. So I’m thrilled that my fellow board members put me in this position because I’m having a great time. Lots of hours, but fun hours. So everyone should be in a committee because let’s do great things together, right?

[01:18:08.870] – Amy Babinchak
Yes, absolutely. On your second page of your agenda that we handed out at the beginning, if you don’t see it, scroll away up in the chat at the top on that second page is a link to the social media locations that we have set up. They are all brand new, so they’re waiting to be populated. So please jump out there and do that. And some of you may also know of the Facebook group that I run, which is called MSP Legislation and Regulation. It is a group off of third tiers. So if you search for third tiers page and list groups, you can join it over there. We have about I think we’re like two people, maybe short of 700 over there that are talking about those topics. So although not an official part of this group, I think we did play a little bit of a push to make this group form and happen. So you can join us over there for discussion on that particular topic.

[01:19:14.250] – Karl Palachuk
Also, I’ll be posting up some graphics to those places so that you can grab those graphics and share them on your social media. We have to create one square one for Instagram, but everything else is the standard wide format. And so even though there’s literally one Pixel difference between what Facebook wants and what LinkedIn wants, it’s like, okay, whatever you guys figured out. So we have one graphic for everything. Steve asked the question, I think it was, Steve, about whether we might consider having an annual get together. Well, you know, when the Pandemic is over and we have enough money to put on an event because a national conference is a boatload of money and it takes massive amounts of coordination. But if we get the right person who has some skills around putting on something like that, I do four hour events. I do eight hour events. After seeing what goes into national conferences, I wouldn’t take that on without a staff member who knew what the hell they were doing. But that is also a thing that it would be easy to engage vendors. We just need to make sure that it stays. It service provider centric and the vendors are there to support and not dominate because again, we’ve all seen many organizations that are just gobbled up by the vendors who want to support them.

[01:21:06.010] – Karl Palachuk
So Ken, did you have a comment or question.

[01:21:11.090] – Kenneth Iconos
More of a suggestion on the get together? Because I’m a huge proponent of that from a community perspective, but also from getting to like, getting to know the people that you’re working with on such big things. Maybe we could conduct a poll just initially on conferences, events that our membership base largely attends in Mass already, like Ignite is something that I go to every year or was before the Pandemic, and we could easily tack on to one of those events and just do something informal to start up with. Funding is obviously a huge issue when it comes to these annual get togethers. So standing on our own 2ft I think it’ll be a bit before we can get there financially. However, having tickets for sale to attend the in person event is a great way to help offset that cost. Another way is to in source some of that. I’ve got contacts for venues where we can host large groups of people that has connectivity that wouldn’t charge a high rate if a rate at all. Other folks may have family connections and hotels and gosh no spot. So I think that a larger conversation around that is something that would definitely fit easily within the committee.

[01:22:42.350] – Karl Palachuk
So I do like the idea of sort of piggybacking on a bigger event because they will already have set aside meeting rooms and space and they can add two days or one day to the conference or whatever. But it’s almost like how some organizations like, oh, we’re going to go to Florida one year and then we’re going to go to California and then we’re going to go to Seattle and then we’re going to go to Chicago, New York. Right. You got to move it around. I would not want us to necessarily be sponsored by the same very large vendor organization every year. Right. And be seen as because ultimately that’s what they would want. If they would want us to be associated only with them and not with their competition.

[01:23:23.970] – Kenneth Iconos
I would say more of an informal association. So if a large portion of our base goes to Ignite every year, just because that’s off the top of my head, it wouldn’t have to be advertised with Microsoft stuff. And we’d be hosting a session. Sure, we could host a session. Sure, we could associate with them if we chose to at the time. But there’s nothing that prevents us from getting together outside the context of Ignite while at Ignite.

[01:23:54.570] – Karl Palachuk
That’s true. That is absolutely true. And another thing which we didn’t really talk about here specifically is that eventually the Communications Committee is going to want to gather up people who are able to speak at all of these events. If we could have five minutes on the stage at every one of the 300 events in this community, that would go a long ways. And so part of that is we need to provide you with materials and handouts. If somebody volunteers to give us a booth, we need to get people to be in the booth and to hand out those materials and to be able to talk knowledgeably about what we’re doing.

[01:24:39.730]
Right.

[01:24:40.520] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. And we would give you talking points. Amy’s already put together an amazing PowerPoint, and that will go up in the resources section as well. But eventually we want the Communications Committee to help produce some of these materials. I think you see that every committee has just an overwhelming amount of work to do. So please be patient with us that it will take time to actually get these things done because any one of us could pop up a seven bullet point handout. But that doesn’t mean that we could say that it actually represents what this organization is for. So these things do need to be discussed and voted on and approved. And in many ways, we’re moving forward while at the same time assuming that what we’re doing is going to be in line with the mission, vision, and values that we’re also moving forward on. So at some point, those things need to come together and mesh well. So it will happen. It will happen, and we are getting there. So I appreciate that. I have a question. When and how frequently or whatever? When should we meet again like this in two months? In three months?

[01:25:58.920] – Karl Palachuk
I think monthly is too much, unless you’re going to give me a bunch of money.

[01:26:06.590] – Amy Babinchak
And we haven’t really talked about this. But as a whole organization, quarterly seems to be the thing. I mean, it could even be quarterly or even twice a year. Right. I think that there may be times when the committees want to get specific input, and we need to make that happen as well Well.

[01:26:31.520] – Karl Palachuk
I mean, we could have a quarter where it’s literally I don’t know how many committees we’ll have, but let’s say there are six committees. Each committee gets one 6th of the agenda and get some feedback, talk about what they’re doing and so forth. That could be a whole meeting in itself definitely.

[01:26:53.070] – Eric Hanson
I think that one of the things we need to consider is being able to focus a little bit more effort on those States. I believe that I live in one. This is not self serving by any stretch of imagination, but the reality is one or two States take this on and provide some legislation, and then everybody follows suit because, okay, somebody has written here’s what needs to be happening. And I’ll use the cliche as California goes, so goes the nation. But it’s the reality. I think that Louisiana, much to everyone’s amazement, kind of took the first swipe at this. But the reality is I think some States are going to be more progressive and more motivated to get something done quickly, and we need to perhaps be a little more aggressive in those States where we believe that we’re going to see something happen sooner than later to help our other members have good stuff show up when they basically go, oh, yeah, we like California’s legislation. We’re just going to swipe that, change California to Colorado. And here’s your legislation.

[01:28:25.180] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. And that’s exactly how it works. New York, Florida, Texas and California, whatever we do, it literally has to start in one of those four States. Luckily, Dennis is in charge of the legislative committee, and he has a good friend who’s the chair of the cybersecurity committee in the state legislature. And so we already have some ins there. And early on, we were joking about how there’s a lot of Michigan representation sometimes in our meetings, but there’s a lot of California representation on that legislative committee. And I think it makes sense early on and will probably be the first day where we’re able to move simply because those connections already exist. And Dennis has opened some conversations already well.

[01:29:22.850] – Amy Babinchak
It’S the case I represent Michigan, while it’s the case that it is true that they’re often lead States in new areas of legislation. We do know that every single state, all 50 States, have cyber security items on their docket this season. So this is something that seems to be happening simultaneously everywhere well.

[01:29:53.750] – Karl Palachuk
One of the things is for anybody who’s familiar with the legislative process, there is an organization called the National Conference of State Legislators in CSL. And I used to work for a legislative tracking organization, and we were a member of NCSL. That is literally a conference of state legislators and all of their staff, and they have not gotten together in person in the pandemic. But they normally meet. They’re kind of like CompTIA. They meet in July in the hottest city they can find, where the rooms are cheap, and they exchange like, hey, what are you doing on legislating driverless cars? What are you doing on this? What are you doing on that? And they have a massive website where they exchange with each other. But the text of the bills that they are trying to lead the nation in. In many ways, we should be grateful that Louisiana was a swing and a miss. Kyle Ardouin was the Secretary of state. He asked the legislature to put together a bill. It only applies to people who are doing business with state agencies, but it’s that close to applying to everybody who does business in the state.

[01:31:15.630] – Karl Palachuk
And it has a definition of MSP and MSP again, so that you would recognize that as your business, but it does exist in law. Anyway, once again, it’s just one of these things where it’s going to take more time than any of us wants it to, but we have to do it right.

[01:31:44.650] – Amy Babinchak
Well, I want to thank everybody for attending today. We’re at the 90 minutes that we scheduled. And as I mentioned in the chat, I think a few of us are willing to stay and hang out. And I appreciate everyone who’s participated. It’s been great conversation, and we’re really happy to be hearing from the membership. That’s really important to the organization, that we know what’s on everybody’s mind.

[01:32:15.830] – Karl Palachuk
And I’ll put it in the chat just for fun. But I think everybody knows that you can find me at Rlp@smallbusports.com. I’ll be happy to take your feedback and comments and questions and suggestions. And if you feel like you’ve been banging on my door to get appointed to some committee or this or that, I’ll be happy to see what I can do to help you. I can’t appoint 100 people to 100 things, but I can ask committee chairs to give you a consideration. Yeah. So the question about insurers and policyholders insurance is a massive area that we also need to address, and we need to make friends with the insurance industry. Otherwise we might get painted as the enemy.

[01:33:17.460] – Amy Babinchak
I did see something recently. Well, we did all get painted as the enemy, and we saw our rates double, triple, quadruple. Some folks didn’t even get insured big, huge mess in the last couple of years. But I also saw something recently from the insurance industry saying that they think they screwed up, that they were putting that in the wrong place. They thought that if they put their regulations and requirements on us, that it would make an impact on the business. And it turns out it didn’t. Where they were still losing their money was on the cyber insurance plans that they’re providing to businesses, and they didn’t make changes to those. So we may see a little rebalancing of the scale where more of that responsibility to bear the cost of that insurance is going to fall on our fall on our clients.

[01:34:17.630] – Karl Palachuk
Well, somebody mentioned in the chat that some of these insurance companies pay off too quickly, and they may flip the other direction and say, all right, everything is denied first, kind of like workers comp, and then if you’re serious, then just continue to prove it.

[01:34:34.800] – Amy Babinchak
Well, part of what’s happening there is the first blows from legislation coming down is that you can’t pay the ransom anymore. You might be dealing with an International Criminal Organization, which would make that illegal from the IRS point of view.

[01:34:55.750] – Karl Palachuk
Right.

[01:34:56.440] – Amy Babinchak
And the insurance agencies are getting the same pushback of we don’t want you you guys should not be out there paying these ransoms, and we don’t want that to be part of your cyber insurance policy changes.

[01:35:12.370] – Eric Hanson
Even the FBI will say that’s great in theory, but in reality, when the bad guys have your kids, you might still pay the ransom.

[01:35:25.020] – Karl Palachuk
Yeah. Part of my approach in the original nine pillars was I think that we should be obligated to if you offer back up and disaster recovery, you should be obligated to offer that to your clients. And if they choose not to pay for that or choose not to buy that, I think you should be able to opt out of being held liable for that network. The only way to do that is through legislation. You can’t sign a deal on a card with your client and say, oh, yeah, I’ll never sue you or hold you responsible clients, literally. I just had a meeting earlier this week with I call her a former client, except that she pays me to do work, so she must be a client. But I did a training for them, and I had her fill out this form of what kind of data they manage and how they handle it. And does it have personally identifiable information? Then it follows these rules. And does it have Social Security numbers? It follows these rules. And is it personnel related? It follows these rules. And is it related to the board of directors? It follows these rules.

[01:36:33.770] – Karl Palachuk
And she literally had no idea what I was talking about. She was like, you understand this, and I don’t. And I’m like, how can you not understand this? If you have the minutes of your association and they’re private, then you should not send them in a public email on Gmail to your cousin. Right. But just getting her to fill out the most basic matrix, she doesn’t understand it. And so we’re kind of caught in this position where we have to educate the clients and then educate the legislators and get the insurance companies to understand somebody has to get these people to do the things that are on that checklist in order to get the cyber security insurance. Because right now, part of why the insurance companies have been screwed for the last couple of years is they sold that system to everybody, and you could check. No, I don’t have a firewall. No, I don’t have my virus. No, I don’t do training. No, they would still sell you the insurance. Then you get compromised. They have to pay off. They were selling them, like extended warranties, and now they’re getting bit in the butt and increasing their rates.

[01:37:43.200] – Karl Palachuk
That’s not your fault. Right? That’s that company wanted the insurance so they could check a box, and they did nothing to actually secure their networks.

[01:37:53.690] – Eric Hanson
Well, where I was going to go with that was maybe we need to think about having an insurance committee. I’m not quite sure how we’d go about getting the attention of these insurance companies and the underwriters, because it’s all very convoluted who can talk to who in the insurance industry, but to have a you know, this is a minimum baseline guidance for the insurers so that you have a mechanism that says, hey, Mr. Insurance Company, you should probably have on your list. And this is a little self serving for us, admittedly. But you should require, if you’re offering insurance to this size organization, that whoever your It technology partner is should be a member of this group, right?

[01:38:54.650] – Karl Palachuk
Absolutely.

[01:38:55.660] – Eric Hanson
Or that that has some bearing on the risk tolerance that it gets really close to what I want to call professional licensure. That is where we’re headed, I think, anyway.

[01:39:11.500] – Kenneth Iconos
Yeah. And it gets really hard when you start getting into that space. But in order to get in with those insurers and have those conversations, you almost need to be licensed in order to influence them with some authority.

[01:39:30.850] – Karl Palachuk
That’s why I say we need to work with the insurance companies. And as was pointed out, Dennis and Keith and the group in the legislative committee have been talking about this with insurance companies. They haven’t been talking with the insurance companies, been talking about working with the insurance lobbyists and so forth. The good news is once we get into the state legislature, once we start walking the hallways, we will be introduced to the people we need to talk to with regard to insurance. It’s funny, because insurance is one of these odd industries where it’s so tiered. There are ultimately like three insurers in the world, and everybody is a broker and a vendor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, layers and layers of it. So everybody you talk to just say, hey, that sounds great. Let me sell you a plan you’re like, no, I don’t want to talk to you about you selling me a plan. I want to talk to somebody at the level that we can discuss lobbying at the national level, and finding those people is a little harder. Anyway, it’s all about building ourselves a seat at the table. Right. Cool.

[01:40:40.060] – Karl Palachuk
All right. Well, I think we’re now about ten minutes overdue. So anything else? Any super important stuff before we go. Thank you all for being here. I appreciate you taking the time. And I know everybody on this call is incredibly busy. So we appreciate you being here.

[01:41:04.170] – Amy Babinchak
Have a great day. Everybody.

Note: this transcription is approximate. please excuse any spelling errors, mis-attributions, or incorrect wording.

[00:00:03.170] – Karl Palachuck
So welcome, everybody. I’d say we have about half as many people registered for this, which is kind of what I expected. Once it looks like work, the numbers drop off. But I also know that many people can’t make it just because of scheduling, and we sort of randomly picked a day. So towards the end, I want to talk about scheduling for the future. But in the meantime, today I want to talk just giving you a couple of notes to get started and let you know what we’re doing. And of course, call for some volunteers. I will note for the record, this meeting is being recorded, so if you don’t want to be seen, turn off your camera. If you don’t want to be heard, turn off your microphone. Otherwise it will be recorded and posted publicly on the NSI Tsp site. So I encourage you to use the chat for links of things that are coming up or to share things. Also note, we’ve moved the draft code of ethics to the about page. And I say draft because I just made shit up. And at some point I’m hoping that there will be a committee who will look at that and some other things and sort of give us guidance with regard to clarity on mission, vision and actions.

[00:01:28.290] – Karl Palachuck
So just a note. The last week I was the only real surprise I had from the last meeting was how overwhelmed I was trying to clear out all the messaging systems on Earth. After that meeting, the way to get a hold of me is email, period. End of story. I have employees who might occasionally see activity on some of these other channels, but I don’t follow them, I don’t watch them, I don’t respond on them. And if you need me, email is the way to go. Oddly enough, I may be the only person who cares about this, but we’re in this world where there’s this diaspora of how we can communicate, and I think everybody needs to control how they want to be communicated with. For me, it’s email. So if you send me an AOL instant message, I will not receive it. One time, a friend of mine, I popped into some chat room by accident and he literally instantly popped up and said, Are you lost? Because he knows that’s not what I do. So the site continues to grow. Anyone who is on this call who has not registered as a member, please go register.

[00:02:48.630] – Karl Palachuck
And so we have that growing list. I think we have close to 300, or maybe it’s over 300 by now. And that’s an area where we’re going to post up recordings and resources and so forth. The nine pillars. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s not any kind of a Constitution or anything. These are my thoughts on where we’re getting started and why we started, why I started doing this in the first place. And it is my goal to grow a group who does a lot of stuff. And it’s more than lobbying. It’s interesting. I’ve had just a handful of people who have been visible on social media who have resisted this. And one very common thread is people who say that we are naive and that if you go down this road, ultimately what’s going to happen is there will be some kind of official certification, and then there will be training, and then there will be continuing education, and you’ll continually raise the bar of what constitutes entry into this profession. And my only response is, yes, I don’t think I’m naive at all. I think that’s where we need to go.

[00:04:14.660] – Karl Palachuck
And we have too many people in this industry who are amateurs and wish to stay amateurs forever. We also have some bad actors who want to stay bad actors, and I think we need to make that more difficult. So I am very much interested in professionalism within this industry. And I think a lot of the response from people who were here last time is that’s exactly what appealed to them. And the legislation is sort of a thing that sort of time down because of where we are with regards to certain issues. But it’s not the big picture. A second kind of, I guess, opposition that’s out there is that people are saying, well, I’m already professional. You can’t make me any more professional. And I have to just say, that’s not the point. The people who are here who are very professional and take pride in that live in a community where there are people who register their client software in their own name and don’t give their clients their passwords and sell the same piece of hardware three times and sell used stuff as new. Many of the people on this call started out like me.

[00:05:34.980] – Karl Palachuck
I think the first 20 jobs I did constituted cleaning up systems that had been set up by people who didn’t know what they were doing. And that unfortunately, still happens. And 25, 30 years later, there’s absolutely no excuse for our industry to still have so many people operating that way. Some people think that we’re trying to unionize. I’m not sure where that came from. Again, one of the things that happens is we start moving down a certain road, and a lot of the people who come in at the second wave haven’t read any of the stuff, haven’t seen any webinars, didn’t attend the first meeting. So they’re responding to a simple blog post or a simple note on Facebook or LinkedIn, and they are not responding to the bigger picture. So obviously part of what we need to do is to have a community to help get the message out. One of the big things I want to talk about today is the next steps, and that includes forming committee. So I created a form that I would appreciate if everybody could fill out what I want to do is try to gather up a list of people who actually want to serve on a board of directors, on a committee chairmanship or as a committee member, a state chair, a state member, and try to begin to put that together.

[00:07:02.670] – Karl Palachuck
Movements like this frequently start with whoever raises their hand first gets in, and then we put together a temporary structure and begin moving towards elections and having a more permanent structure. But we have to start somewhere. So it always starts out a little less Democratic than it will end up in the end. So we have a small group of, I guess, steering committee board of directors that includes Eric Simpson, Amy Babichek and Rhian Buccianiko. And we want to grow that, but we need to be deliberate and we need to make sure that we involve you in this process. And again, there’s always kind of that balance of how you do something like that with the membership association. But if you’ll fill out that form, we’ll get a definitive list of people who actually want to serve, and then there will be some kind of process to say, okay, here’s an application and we will contact the people who have stepped up. Some people want to serve, but they don’t have an interest in being on a board. They don’t have an interest of being a committee chair. That’s totally cool. At this point, we need all kinds of stuff.

[00:08:26.870] – Karl Palachuck
Last time I was thoroughly impressed with how many people offered services of legal services and financial services and lobbying advice and organizational advice and so forth. And so we have a huge amount of talent, and it’s funny, we don’t have to go an extra layer out to find all the talent we need. Between this call and the last call, I think we have it all. So please help me with that next step, which is the committees. I think what we probably want to do is to take a little time and do some organizing and then set up the next meeting. So I think what you should keep an eye out for is I just set my doodle so that I can get a thousand people to fill out a form and request a day. It’s impossible to choose a day when everybody can be here, and me just randomly picking a date is obviously not the best choice. So we’ll figure out some kind of process for choosing when and when the next meeting will be. But again, for people who actually want to get involved and are willing to dedicate some time, if you fill out that form, I will greatly appreciate it.

[00:09:48.210] – Karl Palachuck
And it’s a very simple form and we don’t ask for address and all that kind of stuff. It’s just the information we need. Again, I am currently running all that through my company. So if you have permanently removed yourself from my weekly newsletter, that’s cool. Just know that if you removed yourself from receiving communications from me. You won’t get the emails from that as well. So you need to add yourself to that list. I cannot add you back on, but I can help walk you through it if you get in touch with me by email. So with that, we had a lot of content that came into the forums, and I want to make sure that people have an opportunity to talk about the things that they want to do, one of the other things that we need to talk about. And it’s again, too early to get too deep into the weeds. But is funding. And as one of the people that I’ve been talking with mentioned, you can’t get too deep into funding until you tell people what the money is going forward. So we need to develop a preliminary kind of budget.

[00:11:02.500] – Karl Palachuck
But clearly, there are expenses related to even the basics of keeping this going, having some communication tools. There’s fairly minor expenses, and I’m finding that right now through my business. But obviously, there’s a limit to that. I’m happy to do what I can. And eventually, if we’re going to have nationwide and international organizations and meetings and so forth, there will be some expenses. I don’t think it’ll be very expensive. I can’t see us ever having a hired director who gets $400,000 a year. That’s certainly not my vision of where we’re going. I think the focus is on the community and on professionalism, but deciding what that means and where it goes does take some organization and take some administrative skills. I wish I had an extra 20 hours employee in the last week just for that. So anyway, that’s what I had, and I am happy to see that there’s some chat activity. I haven’t really looked at it yet, but I am open to your discussions about next steps and committee organization and so forth. So with that, I’ll take my screen down. But if people have links, put them in the chat. Anybody, feel free to open your microphone.

[00:12:49.670] – Rayanne
Hi, Carl. Can you guys hear me?

[00:12:54.680] – Karl Palachuck
We can. I was looking through I have 49 faces on my screen.

[00:13:01.270] – Rayanne
In the chat where questions are, do we have a list of committees that people can volunteer for?

[00:13:10.030] – Karl Palachuck
We don’t yet. So the reason I want people to fill out that form is that we have a lot of committees that people have mentioned in the forums. But I want to get a full list and then have a group look at that list, the board sort of look at that list and determine which committees we need to start first and second and third and then move from there. But first, I’m going to get a list of the hive mind of what all the committees are that we should have eventually.

[00:13:55.610] – Denis Wilson
But I see, Rayanne, that you’ve already been volunteered for committee care.

[00:14:02.250] – Eric Hanson
Yeah, I think I was volun-told.

[00:14:05.610] – Karl Palachuck
Well, I’ve told many, many people, if there’s anybody that I would ever need that knows finances and managed services and how to deal with the PSA. Literally, that venn diagram, as far as I know, gets me Rayanne Buchianico. There may be another one out there, but I haven’t met her.

[00:14:28.770] – Rayanne
Neither have I. But if you do meet her or him, just introduce us so I can hire them. So the next question up on the screen seems to be the meetings. And you mentioned about not scheduling the next meeting until we get something off the ground. Is that probably right?

[00:14:53.150] – Karl Palachuck
Yeah, I’m thinking it will probably be like two weeks. Last time somebody threw out we should meet every week. And at first that sounded great, but it requires a great deal of activity in a very short period of time while we’re trying to put the structure together. So I think we need enough breathing room to come in to have the meeting. The next meeting have a much Fuller, more organized schedule with actual actual apps and people. I want to figure out what the nominating process is, figure out how we begin to build this. Any organization takes time, so we just need to figure out how much time do we need?

[00:15:36.670] – Rayanne
So Tim Golden suggests that we get the committees established with the chairs and then define the cadence. Right. And I think that’s a great plan. So as people are starting to fill out this form and suggesting different committees, how are we going to communicate that with them?

[00:15:56.710] – Karl Palachuck
Well, at some point, again, I’m going to rely on the steering committee to sort of look at that, and there might be 200 different committees proposed. So we got to figure out I mean, clearly there are some fairly obvious ones in terms of a committee to deal with the organizational structure and look at bylaws. And there’s another committee for looking at defining the actual code of ethics and the mission, vision and purpose. I know what I want the purpose to be, and it’s on the about page, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s going to be written in stone. So again, I’m trying to balance the pushing things as quickly as possible and getting input from the community.

[00:16:40.930] – Amy Babinchak
Carl, on your slide, you showed an organizational logo as well as a California logo. What’s up with that?

[00:16:50.190] – Karl Palachuck
Just when I first started out, I registered both of those names because I’m happy being in California to help organize the California contingent, to actually go start working on talking to legislators and committee members and so forth. So I’m just running them both out of my office for now.

[00:17:15.550] – Amy Babinchak
So is it your vision, then, that each state would have a similar independent organization? It looks independent from the national.

[00:17:24.950] – Karl Palachuck
So one of the things we need to look at is that I don’t want anybody to just randomly take this name and say we are that and then go do other things that are unrelated or, to be honest, less professional. So one of the comments in last week’s chat was about using subdomains so that you might have, for example, CA for California Dot, NSITSP.org, and so we can create that as a subdomain. In that way, we would say, okay, if you’ve met these criteria and you’ve pledged that these are your goals and these are what you want to do, then we will allow you to use our sub domain. That way we control that simply through DNS. But people have to pledge to actually be consistent with our goals at a larger level. But if somebody just wants to start something up and push the same goals, I’m certainly not opposed to that. I just think that the more the more we are centrally located, the easier it’s going to be.

[00:18:38.230] – Eric Hanson
Ultimately, the more power you have.

[00:18:40.990] – Karl Palachuck
Right. At some level, one of the things people talked about is, well, there should be a piece where you join the membership and some little fee goes to the state and some little fee goes to the national. And I don’t know if that’s what we’ll do, but that sort of organization makes it easy to say that the national organization is the one that sort of structurally organizes everything for everybody else.

[00:19:11.350] – Denis Wilson
I think we have to decide what we are. If we’re a non profit, you need certain committees. You need people that are familiar with forming and running 5013C’s. If we’re going to be lobby, you need people that are familiar with that on the formation. And you have to have some standard committees. They sound more dominant in structure than they really are overall, and they really don’t. You have to have some committees that are needed for 50 3C, and they may just meet a few times a year. So I think the first step is defining the structure. I would see it as a and that’s the beauty of doing it state by state. Each state has different regulations.

[00:19:59.120] – Karl Palachuck
So just so you know, we have formed a 501C6, which is a membership.

[00:20:06.730] – Eric Hanson
Yeah. I was going to point out it needed to be a c6, not a C3.

[00:20:10.520] – Karl Palachuck
And as Rayanne pointed out, part of the benefit of that is if there are dues, they’re actually better for your taxes as dues than if you were trying to take a very nonprofit donation.

[00:20:32.330] – Rayanne
We have not completed the application for the C6. We’ve just merely incorporated as a nonprofit. And we were waiting for the initial forming board before I take it to the next step and start filling out the 1023.

[00:20:53.120] – Karl Palachuck
And I don’t see Larry Mandelberg here. He might be, but last time he mentioned that he’s worked with several boards and that the sort of nine to 13 members is a good number. All I know is enough to know that it should be an odd number of members so that the majority is very clear and obvious.

[00:21:18.090] – Amy Babinchak
It’s typical that boards are usually split in terms half and half as well. So half remain half her half are elected for the next term.

[00:21:30.730] – Karl Palachuck
Right.

[00:21:31.420] – Amy Babinchak
The following year, flip it.

[00:21:33.350] – Karl Palachuck
Or even more staggered.

[00:21:35.350] – Eric Hanson
Yeah, two or three year terms.

[00:21:38.770] – Karl Palachuck
So Carl asked about Canada, and Peter was on here from South Africa last time. So other countries, we have to figure out exactly what we want to do, but we want you to be involved in this. I don’t know that I have the bandwidth to create an intergalactic organization, but if we can create a model that works in other countries, I’m happy to do that as well. I do think ultimately that there needs to be this same activity, any place where It professionals are working, which at this point is every nation on Earth except North Korea. Other comments or questions?

[00:22:34.230] – Bob Coppedge
Yeah, I have a question, and it’s more clarification on my brain when we talk about the membership or the goal I’m seeing on the about page, both talking about organizational entities as well as individual entities. So is there going to be a difference in terms of what the goal is for an employee of an MSP versus an MSP in terms of what they’re committing to, and then in terms of a person whose job It is, they work for a traditional MSP client, in other words, a network administrator and a manufacturing company?

[00:23:20.610] – Karl Palachuck
Well, so part of this is that we have a lot of education, but we don’t have a lot of standardized education. And I don’t know that at this point in the evolution of our community that that’s even possible. But I do think that it’s possible to say that there are certain levels where we would say we want somebody to have a basic understanding of what is managed services, whether they choose to do many services or not. And so I think there are ways for us to develop systems to say, these guys, all of these different training groups have something that we think is appropriate as a training. So I want to increase the number of It professionals who get training on the business side as well as technology. The technology side is kind of taken care of by manufacturers and developers. But on the business side, I think we need to have a way to say, like, many industries have lots of different organizations that are authorized to provide continuing education. And so I’d like to see something along those lines. Obviously, that needs to be figured out and mapped out and developed in terms of businesses.

[00:24:41.010] – Karl Palachuck
There are lots of ideas, and I’ve been exchanging emails with lots of people about different ways to structure the membership so that both organizations and individuals would be members. Most of the It pros that are associated here work with very small companies. And so the person is there might be five people in the company, but only one is the owner and they’re the obvious member. If you work for a much larger organization, to be honest, they have their own stuff. And I don’t anticipate having 500 engineers from intel become members of this, nor do I particularly expect intel or HP to be members of this. In many ways I want to address, at least from me and my perspective, I want to address the problems of small and medium sized It companies serving small and medium sized customers.

[00:25:46.330] – Rayanne
So, Carl, if we can just define the action steps for today’s call. Right. So step number one, complete the form and I’ve posted the link in the chat window. What are steps number two and three for the members that we are looking for?

[00:26:11.410] – Karl Palachuck
Well, the biggest thing is to fill out the form and help us identify who wants to serve so that we can start actually organizing committees. That’s the Biggie if people have ideas. I appreciate any activity in the forums on the website, just in terms of ways to structure membership or requirements. One question that nobody has brought up publicly, but I’ve gotten several emails on, and that is what is the role of vendors in this? Should we have vendors on the board? Should we invite vendors to be members or our vendors, simply folks that we would like to rely on to support us with money, but they don’t get a vote?

[00:27:08.930] – Lisa Marie Papp
Carl, I would say I think it’s a good idea to have some have vendors be a part of this because as an MSP, we rely on them. As much as I’m rocking a very fine line, we rely on them as they rely on us. And there are some of them that we rely on more heavily. And I think that if we involve them, I think they would be become a better asset to the MSP versus a liability to the MSP.

[00:27:40.790] – Rayanne
My only concern with that, Lisa, I think if we invite Microsoft, let’s face it, Microsoft is one of our largest vendors. Right. The concern I think there would be that they would take over and tell us how we should run things or what the regulations should say based on their needs and not necessarily the needs of small businesses or It professionals.

[00:28:10.940] – Lisa Marie Papp
And I agree with you on that, Rayanne. You’re going to the tip of the iceberg on that one. But I think there’s some of the other vendors down a little bit. That’s why I was saying I’m walking a fine line here. So I agree with you.

[00:28:23.600] – Amy Babinchak
Yes, Rayanne is technically a vendor and kind of so is their tier. But my concern with vendors in the group is that I think we should have them, but I think we need to carefully carve out a space for them, probably in the organizational bylaws of the group, because if we look at CompTIA, it’s really been taken over by vendors and in my opinion is not good at representing the majority of its membership at this point because the vendors are so dominant in that organization, it’s made them ineffective.

[00:29:11.150] – Karl Palachuck
Well, there are other organizations that basically they exist to collect vendors and then get enough it pros to let the vendors give them enough money so that they can fund their organization. That’s their business model. I don’t anticipate that as our business model. So I think vendors as members, if Microsoft has one vote, I’m okay with that. I wouldn’t see them having an outweighed vote simply because they outweigh everybody else in the room.

[00:29:48.200] – Amy Babinchak
Well, if you look at CompTIA’s committees, of which I’ve been on a few and I’ve been on the executive word of some of those committees, they were all dominated. The executive committees. That’s the word I’m looking for. Managing those committees were far dominated by vendors. So you would have eight people on the committee and six of them were vendors. I really think that we need to avoid that so that if vendors are going to participate and I would like them to, but I think they need to be controlled somehow through our bylaws one. Maybe vendors not as board chairs, maybe vendors not as in controlling influence, but just simply as members at large. Something like something like that.

[00:30:49.170] – Lisa Marie Papp
Yeah. And I think, too, I’ve been running across I just came out of a summit here in Atlanta, which was nice because several of the vendors were previous MSPs. They were MSPs to begin with, and they kind of went into a specialty. And I find that those people to me. And of course, I’ve not been around as long as most of you. I found that to be more of a good relationship because they now have walked the walk I’m walking versus a Microsoft or somebody huge. And I agree with you, Amy, with the vendors trampling on the comp Ti aspect.

[00:31:27.270] – Karl Palachuck
Jim Morrison, did you have a comment?

[00:31:33.670] – Jim Morrison
I did. Thank you. I’m actually driving. So participate in the chat. But the idea that vendors aren’t going to be a part or shouldn’t be a part of this organization, I think is a little naive. Correct me if I’m wrong. I mean, that the point of the organization in general is to help steer the conversation of upcoming legislation issues. And if we don’t think that Microsoft is not going to be a part of that anyway or any other major vendor might as well have them with us and not necessarily being a larger voice somewhere else.

[00:32:27.030]
Right.

[00:32:28.070] – Jim Morrison
That’s all I wanted to say.

[00:32:29.650] – Karl Palachuck
Thank you. I think that one of the best roles of vendors is that vendors need professional, successful It service providers. Right. Eventually support organizations that help them get the people who can actually distribute their products and so forth and so on. One of the things that we have is the ability early on to define different types of members so you could have free members who get certain benefits paid members who get other benefits, vendor members who get other benefits, and each of those can have different requirements eventually. I guess my dream is that someday those requirements will begin to notch up. Many of you on this call have been in the past Microsoft certified partners. And one of the best things they ever implemented, in my opinion, was getting letters of wreck from your clients and documenting projects that you’d actually completed. I don’t know that we need to do that, but it’s the kind of thing where I could see us saying, well, there is a level of membership where you’ve demonstrated this level of ability to actually do the things that we define as professional, not yet defined. So, Dan, did you have a comment?

[00:33:57.530] – Dan Tomaszewski
Yeah, I was just going to say that not to minimize us as MSPs, but the vendors will have a greater level of clout and possibly connections than most of us as MSPs have. And I think the concern that is being brought up about vendors is probably that the vendors contributions financially would provide them with advertising and it’s going to be interface and all that. And as long as that’s not the intent in that their contributions to being a member, just like MSP’s, contributions of being a member are for the greater good of our community as an MSP, it shouldn’t matter that vendor is involved. So that’s just my two cent on that part.

[00:34:48.070]
Yeah.

[00:34:48.450] – Karl Palachuck
I mean, I have to say I have no fear that vendors will dominate, take over, or do anything that we don’t want them to do.

[00:34:58.010] – Michael Menefee
If you allow them.

[00:34:58.960] – Karl Palachuck
I’ll do it well, but I mean, Microsoft, as far as I can tell, has lots of ability to affect the market that they work in without us, without being part of this or to try to dominate committees or anything like that. And at the same time, there’s a lot of smaller vendors who can we talk about not having a seat at the table? There’s a lot of small vendors who they don’t have anybody representing them. And so maybe this is a place for them to get some of that as well.

[00:35:33.230] – Amy Babinchak
Well, to be clear, since I brought up this household that I’m not talking about excluding vendors from the group. I think they’re important, but I think we should be cautious. We can look at CompTIA’s example, having gone before us to make sure that we don’t fall into the trap that they find themselves in.

[00:35:55.550] – Bob Coppedge
Well, my experience goes a lot further than that because I’m old and I was very much involved with DPMA, the Data Processing Management Association, which was a national, international It professional, whatever, extremely old. And that was essentially they had chapters all that. They actually did do certifications for It professionals. They came up with, I think, three of them that were CDP CSP. And I forget what the third one was. This is even before PCs were in existence, okay. But they tried to do it as to have some vendor free standard professional conduct. Basically, they were trying to carbon copy the CPA and all that. And I won’t say it was a disaster, but it didn’t go anywhere. And part of the reason, I think, was they did lousy PR in terms of really defining what this brought and what it brought in terms of employers or seeing value in people having these certifications. DPMA ultimately crashed and burned and then combined with another group called the AITP, did this about 15, 20 years ago, became a national organization that also crashed and burned and then was bought up, excuse me, rescued by CompTIA and CompTIA then tried to turn that I think they’ve renamed it, but they’re trying to turn that into a professional organization on the It site as well.

[00:37:42.300] – Bob Coppedge
The certification side is completely gone off. I think CompTIA has an absolute great infrastructure. I think they have great resources. They just use them very poorly. I used to participate in their annual DC flying. I did that about four or five times until they canceled that a couple of years ago. So anyway, ransoff.

[00:38:11.670] – Michael Menefee
I was going to say the vendors are going to want to donate or pay for ads because you’re going to have hopefully hundreds of MSPs at their fingertips. It’s like any other organization that they buy ad space on. This shouldn’t be much different than that. You allow them to come in and start making rules and mucking the waters. It’s going to cause issues. I think the organization needs to be formed first with the MSPs, with the MSPs actual goals in place and what we can do. Like you said, Carl, to eliminate the hacks that are out there, the one man show that crops up on Craigslist that wants to fix somebody’s computer for $50 here and there in a parking lot, versus companies like all of us that have been around for 20 plus years, or even the new guys that are starting up that actually care about the clients, that actually know what they’re doing out in the industry, the vendor piece of it. They come after the fact after all of our pockets are saying, okay, we could use a little bit of a break now. Then you utilize the vendors and you let them in sparingly to help the calls, not to drive the calls to whatever their particular motives would be, because obviously they’re going to be different than ours, right?

[00:39:41.370] – Eric Hanson
Yeah. What I was going to add was, you know, I think we should at least look and understand how an organization like AICPA exists, because you go to their site, there’s no vendor stock. I mean, there’s a little bit of here’s the industry publications, but it’s not a vendor ad space. If we’re trying to encourage having professionals, this becomes no different. You know, the trunk slammer becomes the unlicensed bookkeeper in the accounting world, the unlicensed bookkeeper or whatever other services you can hire somebody to do that are accounting related, where somebody who’s an AI CPA member is that professional that we’re trying to create here. And unfortunately, at the end of the day, you probably have in a typical CPA firm, you have people who are licensed CPAs, you have bookkeepers who are overseen no different than a contractor. Somebody has the license, and there are other people Besides that person necessarily that do the work. But the person who is licensed becomes the responsible entity for that organization. And I think that’s the kind of structure that we’re looking to build. Am I mistaken?

[00:41:23.630]
No.

[00:41:28.530] – Eric Hanson
I think we got to be real careful about vendor influence. We’ll happily take their money. I’m not sure that they should have a lot of influence over how the organization is created, because at the end of the day, they probably do have to become a member. Hp consulting organization probably needs if we’re going to be holding ourselves out as professionals, we need to be everybody’s got to have a level playing field.

[00:41:59.220] – Karl Palachuck
I would also say there are some vendors, and I’ve been happy to work with a number of them who have a sincere interest in improving the business side of the It business, that they sponsor classes and they do trainings, and they bring people from all over, and they do more than just say, here’s how to use our product. Right, right.

[00:42:25.410] – Dan Tomaszewski
And I just want to throw one thing out, too, is that when someone brought up vendors and advertising let me just, first off, apologize. I wasn’t on last week’s call because I was having my surgery. But as long as the intent of the organization is as far as what we’ve been talking about with regulations and standards and such, the vendors are more or less just helping to build the foundation and structure for us that I actually pay for that much like if you’re in a hospital and you see, like, I was in the hospital and the lobby or the waiting area had a plaque that it was donated by so and so. I think those dollars from the vendors can be recognized, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be in an advertising format. It’s just recognized that they’re contributing to help us just for the greater good of our industry.

[00:43:31.050] – Denis Wilson
I would say that one thing that bothers me is where we profile all vendors are, and we’re supposed to be professionals, and if we can’t control the direction of the organization, it’s kind of useless from the beginning. So the fact that we fear vendors causes me some reservation. Vendors are part of our toolkit, and we better communicate with them in a way that we want them to meet the same level of service delivery that we do. That’s just my opinion. Having a vendor here, I don’t find intimidating in the slightest. If they take over it’s because we were weak. That’s my opinion.

[00:44:15.870] – Karl Palachuck
I have to say. I don’t think anybody’s actually saying that we shouldn’t have vendors. I don’t think anybody is in fear of vendors from vendors who are here. What do you think of this? I think there’s a positive role for vendors.

[00:44:39.650] – Dan Tomaszewski
You could just move it.

[00:44:40.620] – Denis Wilson
Like right.

[00:44:47.710] – Amy Luby
There we go. So I’ll speak out for one vendor. A lot of good points being made here. And for those who don’t know me, I was an MSP for 16 years, so I’ve got a good deal of experience on both sides of the fence. But we’re an ecosystem. We all need each other. Vendors know that. Msps know that we’re not operating in a mutually exclusive swim Lane. Vendors need partners, and partners need tools and products to deliver services around. So I think that there are plenty of vendors out there that really understand that there are some that are predatory. I’ve experienced that too. But just like the whole purpose of this organization being formed, there are some service providers out there that are really doing a disservice because they’re not acting professionally, and then there are others that really do. So I think we have a lot of common ground, and I think it’s absolutely appropriate to lean on each other for support. Clearly, vendors have a budget, some value spending that budget to help partners grow and be better, and that’s mutually beneficial to everybody. It’s mutually beneficial for the partner, and it’s beneficial for us as vendors to have good, strong, healthy bottom line partners selling products and services.

[00:46:29.250] – Amy Luby
So I say move forward with it. Just be careful. Create a program that’s mutually beneficial. Right. Give vendors an opportunity to support this community, this ecosystem effort, but do it in a way that is mutually beneficial for the group too. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect vendors to support it. And you don’t need to let vendors take over. Frankly, Microsoft doesn’t have time to assign somebody full time to infiltrate this group and do something bad. That’s not going to happen.

[00:47:08.570] – Karl Palachuck
I also think there’s a lot of vendors who understand the small end of the market, and I love Microsoft. I own stock, blah, blah, blah. But Microsoft will always do exactly and only what is in their best interest for the next three months after the next quarter. Well, then they might just unplug everything and do something else. At the smaller end, there are vendors who understand this market and want to do what is in the very long term best interest of the SMB market. And those vendors behave very differently. They engaged long term, and they don’t just randomly change their programs. So in some ways, if we can build a resource that’s valuable to them, they can help us build a resource that’s valuable to us. So we only have about twelve minutes left, and I want to make sure that we tried to end on time. The final thing I wanted to talk about and make sure that we get it out there is that before we get membership going, we still have a few things where we could use some money to get organized. And so I think that we’re going to try to figure out a way to put up something on the website where people can basically make a donation, knowing that it’s going to a professional association will keep track of the money back, but it will not be I don’t think we’re ready to say what a membership is and how much it costs and so forth, but just a place where people can give a little something, kind of not a Patreon, since we actually have a way to collect money, but that sort of concept of being able to contribute something and sort of help kickstart things.

[00:49:06.030] – Karl Palachuck
So when that happens, I’ll send out a note as well.

[00:49:11.010] – Rayanne
Somebody had asked earlier in the chat what kind of expenses we’ve already experienced. Carl, I know that you’ve put out some personal money to get the website up and running and all of that, and I put out a couple of dollars so far just to incorporate the organization.

[00:49:38.370]
Yeah.

[00:49:38.770] – Karl Palachuck
Well, I mean, the obvious things that you can all see are we have some domain names, some communications, hosting, web development. My web developer is an outsourced employee of mine, but I think she can tell you, but I think she was three quarter time building the website for about three weeks. So there’s a significant outlay of money there, but I’m happy to do it. I allocated a significant chunk of money to help support this organization through the end of the year. And just so you know, my personal timeline is that I would hope by the end of the year that we got it all. We’ve got the structured place, and we’re ready to hit the ground running. And I know that seems like a long time to some people, but the weeks slip away very quickly and we’re not doing any advertising or anything like that. But web development and just the administrative support to be able to do this. It’s not hundreds of thousands, but it’s dozens of thousands. And I think that there’ll be no problem. The money that I have pledged from my personal business will take us through the end of the year, but beyond that, we’ll have to see.

[00:51:16.070] – Karl Palachuck
So any questions about funding and being able to support? I do thank you to the people who have pledged already, Bob and Jay, I’ve had other people contact me, and I think everybody knows it takes money to do stuff. Yeah.

[00:51:39.200] – Eric Hanson
Well, realistically, what do you think we need through that organizational phase, Carl?

[00:51:46.140] – Karl Palachuck
Financially well, so I have allocated $25,000 from my company, so I quite realistically. I think that’s what I expect it will cost between now and the end of the year. So if I get assistance with that, well, that will be okay, too.

[00:52:09.670] – Eric Hanson
I’m not sure that we get to the finish line by the end of the year. They’re creating an organization, probably, but I think the finish line is going to be in a different place.

[00:52:20.430] – Karl Palachuck
No, I hang up on this line. I mean, we’ve got a board, we’ve got committees, we’ve got some structure. We can hold elections. Basically, we move from steering committing to a membership association. Rayann is out of pocket for some stuff as well, for the filing, paperwork and all that. Anyway, we will make it happen. I think there’s enough energy in the last couple of calls and the chat. Last time it took me two days to filter through everything. The chat was over 3000 words. So you guys wrote a couple of nice articles in Channel Pro with that. By the way, we have been getting some decent press. So tell your friends and neighbors and promote the word. And if anybody has any questions anytime during the week, send me an email. And if you have ideas, if you say, hey, this is a structure that works, we’ll be happy to take it. Please fill out the form to volunteer and also give us feedback on which committees we should create.

[00:53:47.830] – Eric Hanson
Right. Just because, Amy, you kind of stepped in here and took a little vendor role, do you think it’s unreasonable to expect or get vendors to throw five grand at it without knowing necessarily where it’s headed?

[00:54:12.350] – Amy Luby
I don’t think that’s unreasonable, and I’d think higher.

[00:54:15.830] – Eric Hanson
Well, I would think higher. I’m trying to be it, but I’m trying to be conservative. But you’re in that vendor space. You get ten or 20 vendors to throw a few Bucks at it.

[00:54:30.950] – Amy Luby
Yeah, you’re hitting a decent pool of money at that point. I think there’s plenty of vendors that would be willing to support this initiative. It’s something that has been needed for a very long time. I’d be hard pressed to think of a vendor who wouldn’t at least see the value now, whether they’ll actually cut a check, that’s a whole different ball game because there needs to be some kind of program. Like I mentioned, that’s mutually beneficial. But the ultimate benefit if you keep the messaging the way you’re starting to, which is we vendors need professional, profitable, well run partners. It’s in our best interest to support that however we can so kind of keep that messaging wrapped around that core value. I think you’ll attract all kinds of vendors, frankly, and I’m happy to help form a program or give my opinion. Everybody’s got opinions, but on how to make it attractive for vendors and how to deliver some benefit to them. That isn’t necessarily handing over a bunch of power to drive where this organization goes. This is MSP. Driven, like, clearly MSP. Driven, and that’s the way it should stay. I think it’s possible to get there, though.

[00:56:07.270] – Karl Palachuck
It’s funny. I had an experience with a vendor about a dozen years ago where they had spent a massive amount of money and they had accumulated about 1500 partners who over the course of six months sold one unit of their product. And so they were like, okay, how do I get vendors who are actually going to participate and sell and so on and so on. They were eagerly looking for somebody who was going to actually do what they said they were going to do. So clearly there are people in this space who are not professional and there are people who are. And we need to make it more appealing to be able to say I want to be professional instead of I don’t want to be regulated and you guys are trying to unionize me and don’t make me take an exam. There will always be those people. But I think it needs to be okay to say, hey, we’re going to step up to the next level.

[00:57:04.990] – Amy Luby
And historically, if you look at the last 1520 years, There have been a couple of entities that have tried to do this kind of tried to organize MSPs, Whether it’s through certification or trust marks or different avenues. And the one thing that they didn’t have was literally MSP leadership. It wasn’t done by MSPs. It was done by vendors and it was ultimately done to sell more licenses of whatever their product was. So this is starting from the heart of where this channel is, the MSPs. So this will be successful, I have no doubt.

[00:57:50.330] – Karl Palachuck
Well, good. I hope you are correct.

[00:57:53.990] – Bob Coppedge
Worth the risk.

[00:57:55.460] – Karl Palachuck
So. Well, I absolutely appreciate everybody being here and participating. And so the next step from my perception is we’re going to collect the committing information. We’re going to start building out that structure. Watch for some kind of email about how we’re going to pick the next date and time. My super strong bias is that I hold business meetings during business hours So it will not be Saturday at 07:00 p.m.. So I have a business meet up locally that I totally love except they need it Saturday and I’m like Saturday I’m picking weeds or painting a fence or something so I’m not available. But anyway, I think that’s it. If you have future comments, please go to the forums and make comments there. If you have questions for me, send me an email. I appreciate your time and by my watch, we have about 30 seconds left. Anybody else want to say anything? Keith, that was a slow pitch.

[00:59:06.190] – Bob Coppedge
Puppies are cool.

[00:59:08.770] – Karl Palachuck
Thanks for puppies. Puppies are cool. Okay. All right. Thank you all. I will get up the request recording as quickly as Kara can and thank you and we will see you online. I appreciate you being here. Bye.

Note: this transcription is approximate. please excuse any spelling errors, mis-attributions, or incorrect wording.

[00:00:03.350] – Karl
Good morning, everybody. I am going to go ahead and kick this off. I don’t want to punish the prompt. As my friend Yvette Steele says, we have the chat going, and I am not going to be able to follow much of the chat, at least at the beginning. So you can heckle. But just know that as somebody who’s already politically active in California, you’re on my radar. So remember, paybacks are hell. So I want to go ahead and get this started. I know many people are here because the word legislation was placed in front of their face and a handful of them, I would say some people panicked. Other people said it’s about time. And at this site that we have put up, Kara, who works for me, did an amazing job about, I don’t know, three weeks ago. I said, hey, I need you to pop up this real quick site. It’ll be easy, brain dead, no fancy stuff. Well, then I came back and said, we need a membership module. We need to be able to locate people and search by state or province or country. We need to have forums, one thing after another.

[00:01:31.120] – Karl
So we have this full featured site, which, in addition to being very useful, is also very beautiful. So kudos to Kara for doing that. And she deserves a lot of credit for putting up with my whims. But anyway, the site is a place where, if you are not familiar with the background of this, I highly encourage you to get started and look at kind of what we’ve already done. Not that that calcifies where we’re going or how we’re going to get there, but you should have that background. A little housekeeping. It is great to work with it professionals because I’m not hearing 42 people with their microphones open. And so I appreciate the fact that people mute themselves when they are not talking and not open the mic and forget to close it. This meeting is being recorded, the recording and the chat will be posted up onto the Itsp site. And so if you do not want to be seen or heard or whatever, then you need to either log on anonymously, enclose your microphone, close your camera, or whatever. That’s up to you. You got to take care of that. You have been warned.

[00:03:01.340] – Karl
I have asked Kara to put links. If people have links, she’s going to be putting some of them into the chat. If you have additional resources that might be useful and should be part of the permanent record, please put those in the chat as well. We also endorse a code of ethics. So one piece of the nine pillars document that we’re going to talk about is about having a code of ethics. And so some of that ethics is I want to be very transparent about what we’re doing. And to be very honest, this is one of these projects where I know it needs to get done. But I can only see so far into the future. So I’m going to be very transparent as we build this. And of course, we want to treat everybody with respect. So you are absolutely welcome to disagree with me.

[00:03:54.610] – Speaker 7
You will be wrong.

[00:03:55.840] – Karl
But no, I’m kidding. But you’re welcome to disagree with me. Just be respectful about it. And I don’t want this to be a political discussion. But having said that, I really believe that we’re at a point where they are coming for us and we will be legislated upon one way or another. I think we just need to get ourselves a seat at the table. So for those of you who haven’t heard of me, my name is Karl Palachuck, and I wrote a bunch of books. I wrote about 20 books for It service providers, plus a few others. And I would be happy to have you connect with me primarily on LinkedIn, but also Twitter, Facebook, and so forth, and would love to connect with everybody here and continue this conversation online. And don’t worry, I only have a handful of slides just to kick us off here. So the site is a place where I would love to have everybody register. And registering just means you want to get on the list so that, you know when we have the next meeting and when we start organizing. And that list will not be used for anything else.

[00:05:12.810] – Karl
If you want to join my personal newsletter list, you’re absolutely welcome to do so. Joining on this site does not get you that. What it does do is it allows us to begin the process of getting members and saying, look, we have numbers. And the beautiful thing about an organization that is trying to influence anything is that numbers matter. And so there will always be a free component just so we can point to all those names and say, see, we have whatever, 10,000 members or whatever it turns out to be. There are some downloads. The nine pillars white paper that I wrote as a series of blogs and then sort of retooled into one good sized document is my vision of where our industry is and where we need to go. And there’s also a webinar where I presented this. So I have no interest in repeating all of that here today. So if you want to watch the webinar, read the white paper. And then in the webinar I talked about we need some legislation. We need the next level. And so the proposed legislation is completely amateurish. Yes, I have a background in political science.

[00:06:33.070] – Karl
Yes, I have an English major, but I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a legislator. I’m not a lobbyist. So this is just common sense English language and needs to be turned into legislative gobbledygoop. The site also has forums where in particular, I put up one after some of you joined. That is, if you want to be a leader. If you want to volunteer to actually lead a local group, a state group, a provincial group, or in the case of the UK or Australia, whether it’s a state or start the national organization, we need people to step up and knowing that being a leader is going to take a little more energy. And I fully admit I am so busy, I can’t see straight. So like all of you, I don’t have time to dedicate massive amounts of time to this, but I think this is important and I think it needs to be done. I sent a note to somebody online about this. That the way that I look at it is literally that last year, when the state of Louisiana turned their focus and used the term managed service provider and created legislation and defined what that is in law.

[00:08:01.690] – Karl
The way that I look at it, the board have entered our Quadrant. They know who we are. The state legislators know who we are. They know what we call ourselves. They know what we’re doing. On top of that, you have the news media talking about solar winds and Casa and whatever the latest cybersecurity incident is. And I hope there’s nobody here from the media except to say when I hear these people talking on the radio, they sound like complete idiots. And that’s not their fault. It’s not what they do for a living. They don’t understand why somebody would have such a powerful tool at their fingertips, or why it’s valuable to have a single pane of glass, or why it’s valuable to run scripts on client computers. It’s not what they do, I don’t expect them to understand, but what I want to do. One of the things I want to do with this organization and with this site is to develop materials to educate the media on talking points. From the MSP’s perspective, we’re looking at providing those services and helping you learn how to talk to the media, how to be the whatever the seven second sound bite the next time there’s a major Earth shattering cybersecurity incident that makes all the news.

[00:09:29.270] – Karl
We not only need people to talk about this in an educated fashion, but we need our perspective to be seen in the Nine Pillars paper I talked about. There are four actors in this. There’s you, your client, the government, and the insurance companies. And right now, you and your clients have no seat at the table. The government and the insurance companies are deciding how our industry is going to be regulated. And I think that there’s a natural ally ship with the insurance companies. I think we need to partner with them to help all of us. So we need affiliates. We need other organizations. I have registered California Society of It Service Providers and National Society of It Service Providers. Both of those point to the same site, and I’m happy to take some role in California, but I need volunteers in every state. We need volunteers in every province in Canada. We need people to sign up to do this. And by this, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t know what I’m asking you to do, but we need to learn that together if you want to find other people in your state so far, right again, part of this depends on how many people have actually signed up and filled out the forms.

[00:10:57.110] – Karl
But if you go to the site, go click on Forum and then members and then search by state. Now, just a fair warning. If you search by country and then search by state, you’re not going to get any results. You have to clear the search and then search again. So do a search. Clear the search. Search again. And lots of people have stepped up. I’ve gotten emails and notes and people send me little side notes on LinkedIn and Facebook and whatever. That’s all great. But I can’t collect all of the tidbits on the Internet and put them in a shoebox. I need there to be one place where people actually step up and volunteer. So I ask you, even if you’ve sent me a note, please go to the site and go to the Forum for Leadership and say, I step up for whatever the great state of Illinois. And that will help us tremendously. Now, if you also see that people are organizing in your state and you say, I also want to help, please jump in. This is not necessarily a first come, first serve. We’re going to try to figure out how to help everybody organized.

[00:12:11.790] – Karl
I have never started an organization this big or this important before, but my last real job was running an organization that are helping to run an organization that tracks legislation in the state of California as well as New York and two other States. So we ran a multi state operation to track legislation. So I have some idea what that’s all about. Few notes on lobbying in the United States. This is a quick link. Ncsl is the National Conference of State Legislators, and they’re kind of like CompTIA in the sense that the primary thing that they do is they find the hottest city in America and they meet there in July. Usually, CompTIA meets in August. But NCSL National Conference and State Legislators has this page with basically a summary of lobbying in their state. The good news is if we’re not spending money, if we’re not pushing legislation, talking to legislators and spending money, then it’s easy to kind of stay under the radar. But at some point it will cost money. Now, I don’t expect us to ever be giving Brown bags full of $100 bills to state legislators, but it does cost money.

[00:13:47.080] – Karl
If at some point we say, look, we need to gather people. We need to put together some materials. There’s printing costs, there might be some hotel costs or whatever, I don’t know. So there’ll be some expenses. But anyway, one place to start is to find out what are the basic laws and who in your state can give you more clear information about your state. For Canada. There’s actually a lobbying agency for Canada, so you can look at the rules for lobbying there. And again, they point out provincial information that you need to know. So it’s a place to start. So today what I want to try to do is to figure out what we need to do and get your thoughts about organizing at the state and national levels, call for volunteers in particular. If people have ideas about funding, like right now, we don’t have a formal organization. We don’t have a Corporation. I’m working with Ryan Buchanano, one of the smartest people I know in the universe and trying to figure out what kind of organization we need. I thought we should not have a 501 C three since they can’t lobby. On the other hand, there is a way to say, look, if you spend less than X percent, you can still be a nonprofit.

[00:15:22.000] – Karl
There are other codes, if we were to incorporate that are allowed to lobby, but they do not allow tax deductible contributions, right. So anyway, I am learning all of this, but I don’t think that we can create one lobbying organization for the entire country or the entire world, which is why we need locals as well. So one question would be at what point do we figure out if we need to charge people for membership and how regularly should we meet? In many ways, monthly seems easy. On the other hand, it also seems like not enough. I don’t want to overwhelm you. I know you all have businesses to run and 270 people signed up for this meeting. So I know there’s a massive interests just trying to figure out where we go from here. One thing is to have different groups meet and anything I can do to help facilitate that, I am willing to do so I will throw open the doors. I ask that people be as respectful as possible with over 100 people on the line here. But basically, what do you think? And I personally would start with the question of do you think that we should have a paid level of membership early on or should we wait until we have a certain number of people who are signed up as members?

[00:17:09.650] – Karl
There would always be a free membership only because we need the numbers. And I would not expect any membership to be expensive at all. But I would much rather see 10,000 people at $100 a piece than to see a very small number at a large, expensive cost. Karl?

[00:17:31.010]
Yes?

[00:17:32.070] – Larry Mandelberg
This is Larry Mandelberg, Sacramento, California. I think it’s very important to have a fee. I agree with at least starting with two tiers–zero and cheap. But I think you have to begin very quickly with some fee. I don’t know if $100 is the right number or not, but I think it’s very important to start accumulating some money, because when we need to spend money, you want to have a pot of money to go to.

[00:18:08.490] – Eric Hanson
I agree. A couple of $100, $250 is not unreasonable. When you think about the other fees that we pay in our businesses at $100, I’m concerned that you don’t generate enough money to do what you’re going to need to do, because at some point there’s going to have to be an attorney involved and, you know, or someone that can get this a little better dialed in so that we can hand it to a legislator and say here, it’s basically done. But you also need the numbers because a big pile of letters makes a big.

[00:18:48.010] – Keith Nelson
I have some history and being involved in politics and legislation, as you know, Karl, first of all, it’s important to develop the fee. So part of it is offset as a political donation if we’re doing that. So the base fee may be extra. The political donation, which has to be voluntary, could be a minimum, plus more. And I’m willing to help you out because of my connections and legislating at the state and federal level. And also and I’ve mentioned another group I’ve been writing the criteria for the California State, UC and community colleges certification programs. So I have those. I have the curriculum since I write them. And that would give us a baseline of where the legislators in California has started to adopt community College certification program, which is part of the, as you know, the legislation. And I’m on the advisory board for those. So I can help you with that.

[00:19:54.730] – Karl
Very good. Thank you.

[00:19:57.910] – Speaker 3
It would also make sure that people are serious about being involved, too.

[00:20:03.130] – Karl
Right, Rayanne, you don’t have to raise your hand.

[00:20:05.430] – Rayanne
I know. I feel like I’m in school. Hi, everybody. I’m a member on a number of other organizations, the MAEA, the FSEA, and so on and so forth. Generally, you can be a member at the national level, or you could be a member at the state level and where part of your annual membership fees goes to your membership at the national level. Right. If the state organization wanted to charge a certain annual membership fee, perhaps a portion of that goes to the national level, because we need a national stance here in order to get anything done at a national level. Somebody in the chat window mentioned that the AICPA owned sock, and they do. And Keith was just talking about the political contributions and whatnot I was speaking to somebody last night about it. And the first thing he suggested was starting a path. And we’re going to need a political action committee if we’re going to get anything done at a political level anyway. So just some of my thoughts, and I’m going to open it up for everybody else.

[00:21:39.580] – Larry Mandelberg
Karl, I want to make a couple of comments again, if I could.

[00:21:42.060] – Karl
Sure.

[00:21:43.090] – Larry Mandelberg
First of all, with all due respect to you, Rayanne, I think it’s a huge mistake to have state level chapters. I’ve seen many organizations use that model, and they fail desperately. You end up with rogue States who simply refuse to go along with what the national entity wants and it creates splintering. I don’t think that’s a wise move. I completely agree that it needs to be national. I also think there needs to be multiple sources of revenue. And in terms of the initial fee, I’m not worried about the cost of lawyers, as in, we’re going to need $5,000 to get all the legal documents set up. If we don’t have $5,000, we got to get $250 to join. I don’t buy that. From my perspective, even if it was $10 to join, it would show a commitment and start a pool. There are many ways to create income, whether it’s a special assessment fee. One of my clients just recently had a need to do something, and they asked the members, do you want to contribute an extra 40% of your dues for one year to cover this? I don’t think the amount we get is important.

[00:22:54.490] – Larry Mandelberg
I just think it’s important that we get started with it, which really leads to my primary point. Karl, you’ve done, as always, an amazing job of organizing. I will never buy anything you say that demeans what you do or minimizes what you do, because you are absolutely amazing. I feel this organization needs to really be clear about its purpose. I think we need to have a vision statement. I think we need to have a mission statement, and I think we need to have a set of values. You’ve already started with your ethics as one of the pillars. I think we need to continue to build around your nine pillars. And as I know you realize, I’m more than happy to help with this stuff. I’ll add myself to the list. Thanks.

[00:23:42.310] – Karl
Thank you.

[00:23:43.420] – David Phillips
Karl, this is David Phillips in St. Louis. I want to just reiterate what Larry just said. I think we might be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit in talking about specific fees and what the fee structure should be in the state or the state chapter versus the national organization. I think we need to kind of take a step back and do exactly what Larry was talking about in terms of let’s get a steering committee or some sort of so that we know how we want to move forward as a group. Prior to discussing all of this, I don’t want to say minutiae, but getting bogged down in the smaller picture stuff before we have the big picture fleshed out.

[00:24:40.430] – Karl
Good points all around. One of the things about getting something moving is we’re here because I think everybody on this call wants to at least get something moving and so this is the place to start. One of the things that I want to kind of come out of this personally is to help us as an industry become more professional. And so the whole mission and vision and values, I think we need that. And 20 years ago, many people on this call have Gray hairs, as I count almost everybody. 20 years ago, we were in industry of trunk Slammers who were figuring it out as they went along. And that’s not sustainable. And it’s also the case on the political side that at some level we have time to take our time. But at another level, there will be another major cybersecurity incident that makes international news. And when lobbyists and legislators see something like that, they take action. And it’s very frequently in response to an event, it is not well thought out. And you’ve seen this pick whatever political topic you want. Their actions would not have prevented the incident that they are responding to.

[00:26:11.880] – Karl
So their actions are very frequently completely inappropriate. On the other hand, if somebody is standing there on the side ready to hand them a piece of draft legislation, they will start with that. I want to take our time. I want to do it the right way. But just also acknowledge there will be States, there will be additional States who will pass inappropriate legislation. This year, it will happen. I don’t know if the folks from Termageddon are on this call, but one of the services we subscribe to and help our community members get in part of their storefront is this service called Termageddon. That basically it looks at all of the overlapping laws on Privacy and compliance in all the States, in all the provinces, in all the countries they can grab and tries to keep you legal by putting a short code on your website that then links to an updated, up to the minute list of these compliances. And you know, it’s a necessary service only because it is impossible to keep up with this. Things are changing too fast. And again, just to say we should go at a deliberate speed, but know that the faster we go, the more likely we are to have a seat at the table.

[00:27:47.850] – Keith Nelson
Karl, you’re so right on. Because in California, Loan, which is the one I’m most active in, there is legislation being sponsored or written, which is the proper word by big players who are their goal would be to have some minimums that would make it non cost effective to be a single or two or three person. Msp.

[00:28:14.070] – Karl
Well, and that’s the other thing is the people who have influence are the IBM’s and Entails and major monster consulting agencies that have thousands of players. They can afford a $1.7 million lawsuit, they can afford the insurance, and they can afford the payout. I doubt if anybody on this call has 1.7 million sitting around with nothing else to do. So again, the people who have representation also have the money.

[00:28:53.470] – Keith Nelson
And the players you don’t want to see in our scope, the OfficeMaxes and the copier companies. So we must show some caution.

[00:29:03.500] – Alex Farling
There a big chunk of them have already proven they can’t do the job.

[00:29:09.010] – Keith Nelson
I don’t think that matters. The legislators.

[00:29:11.510] – Alex Farling
No, I get it.

[00:29:12.360] – Speaker 8
Yeah.

[00:29:12.600] – Alex Farling
They have the money to steer the ship.

[00:29:14.770] – Ben Flipelli
What about working more with the insurance companies instead of trying to go on the political route and using these large insurance companies and working with them and then maybe get them to push the thing that we want to push. So they see.

[00:29:29.100] – Karl
So that’s also a piece of the plan is to basically the proposed legislation that I put out is to work with the insurance companies because they already have a nationwide, statewide, county wide. They’ve got lobby organizations in place, but they have to be convinced that this is in their longterm best interest. There’s a lot of pieces to the puzzle. At the simplest level, I want to address reducing your liability and your insurance company’s liability. So that will reduce rates. But we also clearly, if you want to make legislators happy, you have to reduce the number of cybersecurity incidents, which means you have to have more clients actually buying these services. We can’t force them to do that. But there might be ways with the insurance companies to make it more attractive to actually do the things you’re supposed to do. One of the things again, in my membership community, we’re having a workshop tomorrow where we basically are asking everybody to dig out your insurance, your cyber security insurance policy, and find a page where they’ve got extras, they’ve got training for you, they’ve got links where you can download materials and so forth. Insurance companies are trying to do something, and it’s almost in an HMO way.

[00:30:57.340] – Karl
Right. To help you be healthy by providing preventive care. And so we have a lot in common with them on this issue.

[00:31:09.610] – Ray Orsini
If I may. I absolutely agree. I do think my goal for this year is to have a seat at the table. I think legislation, while it needs to happen, is probably going to be the last in the pieces of the puzzle to fall in line. And we’ve all spoken about this before. I think the insurance companies, since they’re the most affected by it financially and risk wise, they’re going to be the ones that have the teeth that bite. So I’m already working with a number of insurance companies to develop a set of basic standards. And I know they’d very much like to be involved in something like this because at the end of the day, they can afford to offer discounts and set the baseline for their clients that affect their premiums. And the MSPs can be the ones to affect those things. And it’s a solution for all that provides benefit for all involved to the end of. And I agree with you. We all agree something needs to be done. There’s no question about that. I definitely am very eager to see what the goals are, what the stated goals are, what the path to that is.

[00:32:09.480] – Ray Orsini
I know a lot of that needs to be resolved. That’s the whole point of the meetings and the gatherings. I will add to the point of sponsorships or membership fees. I’ve said this before, in other communities, the vendors are going to be the ones that really pay for this. At the end of the day, we’re the ones with the bigger pockets. And I’m saying this as a smaller vendor. Yes, the MSPs. And we do this with Wisp, we do this with Nanog, we do this with a ton of other communities. The MSPs, those that are part of it should have some kind of free and paid memberships to allow for voting and stuff like that. But I also think the vendors, those of us need to step up as well. I think there should be a higher cost vendors don’t hate me. There should be a higher cost vendor membership cost here too, because honestly, we can afford it. And I think that’ll go get us toward the line a little faster as well.

[00:33:08.050] – Keith Nelson
I would say as we’re talking about and this is to Ben and Anne Ray, my mentor. Ray, as we talk about insurance companies, remember, we do forensic audits for insurance companies already. Travelers and two other ones already have some vendors that they allow to use for remediation. So those relationships were a little bit behind, if that’s where we want to go. So we have to move forward because they are creating business relationships, not technical relationships. Alex and Ray know what I’m talking about there that they are doing business for remediation with providers that knew how to grease the palm and get in the door and we’re overseeing it. And personally, I wouldn’t let them touch my cellphone, but that’s a different subject. So if we want to start an insurance relationship, we better start moving on it now.

[00:34:07.640] – Ben Flipelli
And I was thinking, like from a technical perspective, right, that we could help the insurers draft up things because we just went with the Lloyds of London for one of our clients. And they were like, oh, everything has to be multifactor. I was like, okay, I get it. And then they were like, no, everything. Like, what do you mean everything? Like every time they open a file, they didn’t define it clearly. And I was like, well, this is great. So it’s not really clearly defined. And yet if my client hasn’t reached, they’ll be like, well, you didn’t have the MFA on opening this folder inside this share inside one drive. And so therefore you didn’t qualify for the insurance.

[00:34:42.970] – Keith Nelson
But I think that’s where Karl’s right on. I’m not politically correct. Insurance companies don’t view MSPs as a solution right now. They view us as part of the problem, because we’re disjointed, because we have Trump slammers, because we have a lot of people in this business that have no formal training. And I’m not saying that makes you better. I’m saying that’s what people in suits understand. And if Karl’s organization or our organization shows a list of standards, checklist procedures SOPs that we live up to, we could suddenly approach insurance companies as no longer the cause of breaches but a solution to breaches.

[00:35:30.050] – Lisa Marie Papp
Karl, I have something, Ray, I want to piggyback a little bit off of what you said in working with insurance companies and things. I’ve been pounding on that door for about five and a half years and everything because I felt long time ago that the insurance companies were going to be a very hard part of this picture. And the thing is, what I’m coming across is they just don’t know what they don’t know. And again, a lot of these insurance companies, they’re used to handling the PNC and things like that, but even on the commercial side, they’re not used to handling this technology aspect that we have today. And so I’m actually getting calls of, can you teach me this? Do you have this, the checklist? I mean, Hartford has a checklist. And trying to get that and putting together a training for them and show me lunches and things like that to show them, hey, this is our world. We’re here to help you, because not only are we here to protect the asset, which is the business, the client’s business, from something happening, but when it does, like a car accident, we’re here to get them through this as well as you’re there for them.

[00:36:42.700] – Lisa Marie Papp
So that’s how I’ve been able to kind of massage that. But I think, too, it comes down to not only us as MSPs, but also the insurance companies, because once this starts to fall and I know we’re seeing those repercussions of solar winds in Kaseya, this whole nut has actually started phone calls filtering to me because of the relationships I have. But again, I tend to agree that a lot of times with the insurance companies, they don’t know what they don’t know. So, yeah, they have that stop out, that hand out going, wait a minute, wait a minute. But when you start smoothing it over and putting it in their terms of a car or something, then they’re opening and going, oh, wow. And this is not technology today has come so far into the forefront. I hate to say the pandemic just kicked that door wide open. I think that’s part of it. And I think that if we could get some insurance companies to be here to listen, we might be able to get a good partnership. And like you say, they have some teeth that they can bite into this.

[00:37:56.750] – Ray Orsini
So the groups I’m speaking with are represented by Lloyds, are represented by Hartford. So there’s three aspects they’re looking at there’s initial attestation, right? I say I have this. I say I have this. They have varying degrees of questionnaires. And we’ve seen this with PCI compliance. We’ve seen this with everything else. It’s like three and a half to 20 pages, depending on the underwriter. Then they have the ongoing audits. This is a piece they’re missing. A lot of them are not doing audits at all, but they intend to in the beginning of 2022. And then the third piece is incident response. Most of the cybersecurity providers are very clear in that if something happens, you can only use their IRMS. What I’m concerned with is, I agree with you. It’s awareness and understanding what’s going on. A lot of them don’t know, and a lot of them are just throwing spaghetti at the wall. The reason I’m so concerned with having a seat at the table and being able to engage in the conversation is because I’m terrified that they’re going to say, okay, everybody needs to be ISO 27 at one. Everybody needs to be CMMC.

[00:38:59.400] – Ray Orsini
And they’re just going to say this is some kind of classification that we know says something about security. Now you have to do it, too, without any understanding what the ramifications are. And that’s why a lot of them.

[00:39:12.030] – Karl
When people have mentioned specific solutions online, I’ve tried to steer the conversation to, I don’t think we want to put that like CMNC. We don’t want that in the legislation because NIST could just say, hey, you know what? We’re going to put that to sleep in two years and replace it with something else. That’s where what the accounting business calls generally acceptable account. We rely on some organization to say, we recognize these as approved trainings, approved practices and so forth. And one current example is CMC, but it’s not the only the other thing. Ray, from your perspective, there are a lot of people who are It service providers who are not managed service providers.

[00:39:58.110] – Ray Orsini
Right.

[00:39:58.410] – Karl
They go in and put in phone systems. That’s it. They don’t offer back up and disaster recovery, and they should not be held liable simply because they touched the equipment. And so there’s like.

[00:40:10.580] – Sunny Lowe
There are people who Karl, of course they should be. Of course they should be. I’m not kidding. How many times has a thing been introduced by a company that does HVAC, like the target attack, if you’re going to touch the network, you have to be compliant for it.

[00:40:27.800] – Karl
No, I agree with that. I’m just saying that in terms of if there’s a cyber attack and you can’t get them back in business the next day, I don’t think you go after the phone company and I don’t think you go after the guy who only came in and installed a monitor. The managed service provider should be the one doing vendor management and making sure that entire picture is taken care of. So there’s kind of like there are people who are not going to be liable. There are people who should be held liable but are not being held accountable. And then there are people who do this half ass and they don’t want to be held accountable. And those are the people that we need to move out of this business. Let them have the liability.

[00:41:14.340] – Ray Orsini
That’s what I think is one of the chief priorities that need to be established upfront the categorization of the types of service providers. I’m not talking about who’s liable, who’s not liable, but we’ve talked about this a thousand times. You take two MSPs, put them in a room, they can’t decide what color the sky is. But if you look at the national electrical contractor codes, they’re very clear as to who does this, who does that. I think we need to establish the baseline of this is what’s qualified as an MSP. This is what’s qualified. I’m not trying to be derogatory toward anybody or their business model. That’s not the point. But I think there needs to be a clear definition of what an MSP is, because again, I’m going back to the group of 50 or so insurance providers I’m working with, but they’re getting to the point of saying we are going to certify MSPs, have them go according to a certain baseline by the end of 2022. And if you’re not on this approved list, we will not provide you cyber security insurance or any kind of policy unless you’re using these firms. I don’t want it to get to that.

[00:42:17.220] – Ray Orsini
I think that’s very dangerous for our industry, but if we don’t qualify ourselves, somebody else will.

[00:42:22.970] – Keith Nelson
And you have to define what back in operational is. And that’s where a lot of MSPs get it wrong. They take making all the computers work is a failover program. It’s not. So you start defining that. The backup systems that allow a company to continue functioning.

[00:42:44.450] – Ray Orsini
I think Rayanne stating it right in the chat. That initial outline of the committees that need to be established, I think is a great starting point. I would start with some committee starting with what is going to be our meeting cadence for the year, for the remainder of the year. One other one for determining how we establish voting protocols and the establishment of those committees, another one to talk about qualification categorization of MSPs. But I think those working groups probably should be the first point of order.

[00:43:20.630] – Karl
So on the forums, if you are interested in being in a working group, put a note in there for that as well, whether you want to be a leader at some level or be on a working group, and we shall do what we can. What do you all think about is monthly enough? I mean, clearly we want to get some leaders to get together as quickly as possible.

[00:43:49.290]
But.

[00:43:54.750] – Larry Mandelberg
I was afraid this is going to happen. We’ve done really good for 45 minutes, but now I feel like there’s ten people who really have something they want to say. And I’m sorry for this, but one of the things is just a couple of quick things. I have a lot of ideas, and I don’t know where to put them down. I don’t know if they’re going to be captured out of this cap this chat session. I don’t know if I need to go to the website where you have the volunteers. I don’t know if you want an email. You need to let us know where you want all these ideas. And the second thing I wanted to say is that I do think the right way to start is to find a group of people who will be the governing body. I’m thinking of this from a governance perspective. So I’m thinking of a board, and I’m thinking in the nine to 13 member range, and the board can then do all kinds of things from a committee perspective. One of the committees that often gets missed is what I call an issue management team so that any issues that come to the organization don’t go to any committee or the board until the issue management team reviews it.

[00:44:56.140] – Larry Mandelberg
And their job is to review it and make sure it’s relevant for the organization and then send it with the proper background to the group that it belongs to. And the last thing I wanted to say is I think most of the people on this call are MSPs. I don’t know that I am not an MSP. I’m not even an It guy anymore. As you know, Karl, I was in it for 50, 40 plus years, but I’m not active in it anymore. But I’m here because the name of this society of It service providers. Are you intending for this to be exclusively for managed service providers or any It service provider?

[00:45:39.060] – Karl
Well, any, because at least from my perspective, part of my goal is to say, look, there are people who we need to have a way for people to get into this industry, grow up, become more professional, and with luck, they’ll become what we currently call managed service providers. But there’s a lot of people in this industry that they don’t want to offer managed services. They don’t want to offer flat fee, they don’t want to have subscriptions, but they want to provide tech support.

[00:46:09.510] – Speaker 14
And they are poor people.

[00:46:11.210] – Karl
Well, but there’s a lot of people who are hardware focused or whatever, and they’re very, very successful. But what they do is not what we would call managed services. They’re part of this industry, and they can be very professional and very profitable. So managed service providers have been kind of my focus for 20 years, but they’re not the only people in the industry.

[00:46:36.450] – Jason
Hey, Karl, it’s Jason from North Carolina.

[00:46:40.060] – Karl
Yes, sir.

[00:46:40.910] – Jason
And I just had a couple of different things I wanted to share. One thing is focus on building membership right. I think that’s going to be the big thing because the magic is going to be in the numbers. Secondly, I think I mentioned this to you in the email that we were exchanging earlier in the week, Department of Insurance for each state. That’s central to all everything we’re talking about here. Legislative, all the insurance companies have to go through that channel. So it’s almost like a single point of attack per state. So instead of working with 50 different insurance companies plus. Right. We only have maybe 50 different entities to work with to at least start the channel. And Department of Insurance is mostly focused on consumer fairness and insurance. That’s kind of their main goal. And I think that kind of plays into some of what we’re talking about today.

[00:47:27.170]
Right.

[00:47:29.850] – Karl
So the question keeps coming up, where to volunteer. I think the site, the Nsitsp.org, is the place to go because it’s one central location. And again, if people can volunteer there, it allows us to have just one place to start looking at stuff and organizing. And I would take all commerce. Tim golden. Yes, sir.

[00:48:04.090] – Speaker 13
I have to find the mute button. Hey, thanks for taking my time and thanks for putting this all together. There’s been a lot of talk of committees and cadence and all kinds of great stuff and where and how you keep pushing the website, which I think is amazing. I think you should start a separate forum just for the committee and board discussion as outside of the hey, I want to volunteer. Right. So I see that we can’t start our own threads or own initial discussions in the forum. So it would be great if there was a topic dedicated to just committee and board building as opposed to I want to volunteer for my state. So just a sort of housekeeping organization piece. Thanks, Tim Golden.

[00:48:46.530] – Karl
Yeah, good. Part of what we wanted to do is sort of get something started and then say, okay, we don’t want this to turn into Reddit with 1000 likes to have one comment.

[00:48:59.710] – Speaker 13
Totally agreed.

[00:49:03.250] – Karl
These things always have to start at the top down, but then you have to grow them from the bottom up. Like I said, this is my first time trying to start something from scratch of this nature. That is something that we will absolutely do. So shall we meet again like this in a week? In two weeks? In a month?

[00:49:29.730] – John Rutkowski
God have it in a week. You can’t make any progress on a monthly schedule. I know this from experience. I’m a co founder of the 20 and the 20 is interested in this. I don’t speak for the 20. I speak for my MSP Boulder designs right now. But there are other fellow members on this call as well. You have to get the cadence going to get it off the ground and get it joined. And I have the ears of a huge number of MSPs out there mostly within the 20, which if you wanted a physical meet up end of September, is the 20s annual event down in Dallas. Pretty well attended, very high, powerful and established companies. I’ve been in business 35 years before and being an MSP before the term was invented.

[00:50:35.850]
Yeah.

[00:50:36.250] – Speaker 3
This early in the ballgame, I’d say weekly to get traction.

[00:50:41.610] – John Rutkowski
One last thing I threw out in the chat. People are trying to say where to measure where you are. I built a scoring card called Businessecurityscore.com. I’ve already got insurance companies using that to evaluate where somebody is. It was built on a lot of the other models. Just puts the number on, gives you a number of where your cybersecurity score is. So you know what you need to improve and what are the low hanging fruit to improve the score real quick.

[00:51:15.600] – Ray Orsini
If you don’t mind. I did start a thread for working group ideas. I put the link in the chat for people to start adding there what they think the groups could be. I wanted to ask your permission first on another thread since Rayne has done such an amazing job of taking notes on this stuff. Thank you for the foresee on that. Would it be okay to start another thread with the meeting notes from each meeting, or are you not comfortable with that being public yet?

[00:51:42.030] – Karl
I’m totally fine with it. From my perspective, I want transparency in this, right? Clearly, I kicked it off and my company has made a significant investment so far, but I don’t want to own this. This is not my retirement plan. I have no interest in being whatever, but I think it’s important and I think it needs to get done.

[00:52:10.030] – Keith Nelson
I would say for next week’s meeting, someone is asking what we should have for an agenda, form committees, form state groups and Six Sigma strategies. And that would be a full meeting, and that would get us off and running and allow us to disperse into groups that will be more productive and reporting back to the whole.

[00:52:31.090] – Speaker 11
All right.

[00:52:32.830] – Speaker 15
If I may ask a question? Laura?

[00:52:35.200] – Karl
Yeah.

[00:52:37.210] – Tony Tsao
Hi, I’m Tony. I’m a CPA in Vancouver, Canada. It’s really not much of a question. It’s really for clarification and kind of discussion. So the way I understand it is we are reactive to legislature coming to our industry, the responses to professionalize, which I could totally understand and support. That when I first heard of this group, I perceive it as being full legislation, which is we are coming up with our own draft legislation, going to the legislature and have every state legislature. But now hearing this. I think maybe that’s not the intent. The intent is to first professionalized. So we’re getting ready in case of state or provincial legislature coming to us and saying we need to legislate it. The reason why I’m thinking about this is because I think a lot of people that I met in the Facebook group and other places are not supporting legislation. They want the freedom of having an unregulated industry. I also know the fact that’s not possibly the case because now they’re coming for us. So I want to emphasize maybe the first priority is to quickly organize into a professional group to set standards. And then whether the legislature is coming to us to regulate us or not, we’re working with them.

[00:54:01.440] – Speaker 15
But we’re not proactively trying to regulate our own industry. Because I’m a CPA, I understand regulation means less freedom. Legislation also means that there’s always somebody watching over our shoulders.

[00:54:19.220] – Speaker 7
Well, I think there needs to be somebody watching over our shoulders. That’s kind of the problem. Freedom that we have is the biggest problem that we have today. This isn’t a hobby for a lot of folks. This puts people out of business when we fuck it up. Pardon my French, but this is important. And the group that’s saying I don’t want to be regulated, I’m concerned, and I don’t have anything to back it up with is the group that we have to be worried about bringing down the house for the rest of us.

[00:54:42.830] – Speaker 15
I don’t understand.

[00:54:44.470] – Speaker 7
Sorry to be the one that has to say the hard thing, but I think that’s the hard thing.

[00:54:48.140] – Speaker 15
That’s the hard thing.

[00:54:49.200] – Speaker 12
Completely agree.

[00:54:50.650] – Speaker 15
The part that I’m wondering is about.

[00:54:52.240] – Speaker 3
Absolutely agree.

[00:54:53.190] – Speaker 15
I want to emphasize that the first priority is to organize us professionally, to bring our standards up.

[00:54:59.730] – Karl
Right.

[00:55:00.110] – Speaker 15
And the regulation is hopefully going to be the part that follows.

[00:55:05.680] – Karl
Tony, I completely agree with you. And again, I don’t know if everybody on this call has read the nine pillars document.

[00:55:13.120] – Speaker 15
Not with anything.

[00:55:14.500]
Yes.

[00:55:15.340] – Karl
Had over 1000 people download that, but I don’t know how to regret it. Just a second. Let me just hear. But part of what I did in there, as I said, look, we need education. We need standards. We need a way for people to get into this business and mature up. Right. I mean, those are the elements of professionalism. And part of it is also I mean, I started that document by saying is what Alex was referring to. We’ve had a lot of people who have not been responsible in this industry. They come in, they do a job in a halfass manner, and they take the money and they run. And even if you have never had any cybersecurity incidents, you live in a profession where that person lives, where that person behaves. And then you have to go back out and try to find new clients. And they have this vision that all these It service providers are just going to hand you a three tiered price list, take your money, not do the work. Right. We have bad actors, and it is in our everyone’s professional interest to have them be set aside and basically recognized for not being the professionals that the rest of us want to be.

[00:56:30.590] – Speaker 7
I’d just like to say I have to cut for another meeting, but I’m happy to help in any way that I can. But I’ve heard more than once and read more than once, and I’m going to say dozens of times, people say if I screwed up and get sued, I’m just going to close my business. I don’t have anything they could get me for anyway. I don’t really care that much. And that’s what we have to grow this group out of. That’s what we have to grow this industry out of. One where a trunk slammer can say.

[00:56:55.260] – Speaker 6
I’ll just flee the country. I’ll just close up and roll out.

[00:56:58.480] – Speaker 7
Right. And they can’t do anything to me. Right. That attitude has to go away. And we have to be the method this has to be the method for fixing that.

[00:57:11.830] – Speaker 11
Karl, what you’re doing is you’re starting a small business. And we need to realize that this will be a non profit business. But it’s a small business. It has to be profitable eventually. It’s going to have to have staff eventually. It’s going to have to have permanently dedicated people. And we need to have some people that can put seed money in to get this started. I mean, you need to figure out what your number is, whether it’s ten K or 20K, whatever the number is that we can get founding partners in. And I think MSPs need to step forward and say, I’m willing to be a founding partner. I want to vote on the board to be able to make these things happen. And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is, and that will give you the seed money to do everything else that you want to do.

[00:57:53.490] – Karl
Thank you. Yeah. I think one of the early committees is going to be like, how do we fund this committee? Somebody else was fucking yeah.

[00:58:00.810] – Speaker 10
I was going to say, Alex, I know you’re kind of passionate and I agree with you. I think this last ransomware, I mean, when I first heard about it on July 2 and MSP was just thrown right out there and I was like, oh, my gosh, here we go again. And here comes another black Mark. We got the first black Mark about a month ago. Now we got another one. And there’s people who have asked me, Lisa, you say you’re an MSP. And I have to back. I feel almost have to be on a defense. Yes. If we step forward as a group first before these legislators and say, hey, we’re taking upon us, because I hate to say what happened before on July 2, it came through a major vendor and then it filtered out and it ends up falling on what we call the little guys us. And I agree with that. And I think if we step up and say, okay, this is what we’re trying to do, and we’re trying to say if this happens, this is how we can go about it. I agree. And I think too, we need to make sure that on the board and on the committees that there’s full inclusion.

[00:59:08.510] – Speaker 10
And what I mean by that is I think Ray had mentioned it before. We might have MSPs that are one, two, three man shops. And we’re also fighting off the big boys like Dell and Xerox and Office Depot, Office Max. I think there needs to be a big I say a good range because us small guys. And I say that small guys, we’re out here because we care and we want to be a part of it. But there’s a lot of times small guys get pushed to the side. And that’s why I think that we need to have a full inclusion. But also I think this is a great idea because we’re coming forward first before we’re pulled well.

[00:59:50.080] – Speaker 4
Inclusion is built into being a path if we’re going to be a pack of any sort. Inclusion is dictated because we can’t be exclusive and be a pack. That’s kind of dictated there if you’ve ever formed a pack. So those requirements are a little stringent, but make us a little more acceptable to the legislators. And just as we’re thinking, remember the legislative attitude now, Karl said don’t get political. I never listen. I’m not good at obeying just a political climate right now is to legislate, to fix things. And so any stand alone is not in the climate nationally or in many States. So we need to be aware of that, I think.

[01:00:43.990] – Karl
Yes, sir. Well, legislators, legislators, their job. So we are basically out of time. James, did you have one more point you wanted to make?

[01:00:51.970] – Speaker 16
Yeah, I was going to add to Alex’s point, not only is it the bad, it actors who honestly, truly believe they can put together a hockey beat closure just because they can level the water work I’ve carried up to 100 on the weekend. It’s not just those guys we have to worry about. It’s also the customers who honestly don’t care. I am managing over a dozen Windows Server 2003 machines right now because the customers will never upgrade. They honestly don’t want to put the money towards it. They want to put their efforts towards it. I’ve got a better chance of shaving off Keith Nelson’s beer through the monitor than I do getting them off when it’s advertised. Yeah, there’s a whole slew of customers out there that are also going to hurt us. These are the guys that are going to get hacked. They’re not going to spend money on backups. They’re not going to spend money on cyber security. They’re not going to see a need in it until they do get hacked. And we’re going to have to deal with not only the bad It actors, but also the bad customers who are not going to rule.

[01:01:44.910] – Speaker 16
In Microsoft’s list of rules, no one thinks anything back. And happen to them until it does.

[01:01:52.110]
Right.

[01:01:52.900] – Karl
Well, a piece of the proposal so far was about if you offer them the appropriate services and they turn you down, you can be relieved of liability and that’s the part where the state has to get involved because you can make a deal with a client and have them sign a piece of paper but that will have no effect whatsoever when their insurance company sues your insurance company.

[01:02:18.150] – Speaker 13
But that doesn’t solve the PR problem of this though. Like at some point or another we just have to stop servicing customers that are shitty customers. And until we’re willing to do that we’re always going to have customers that are going to shop around for the cheapest option that is going to drag all the rest of us down.

[01:02:33.280] – Speaker 3
Yeah, unfortunately there will always be somebody there to service the shitty customer.

[01:02:39.090] – Karl
Right.

[01:02:39.490] – Speaker 15
Somebody will always want to take and be that lowest price Kmart vendor.

[01:02:44.330] – Speaker 16
Right.

[01:02:44.760] – Speaker 4
And remember Nancy Reagan answered this decades ago. Just say no. Here’s your answer. Just say no.

[01:02:52.040] – Speaker 3
Oh yeah, but legal I don’t want to go off in the weeds here. But legal weed didn’t make underground weed go away.

[01:03:01.530] – Karl
Not at all. Especially in terms of right?

[01:03:04.060] – Speaker 4
Yeah, but off on a conversation, Eric which we could probably put in the generator. Do we care if a non member MSP is one of them that is held liable? I think that shows our members don’t do this. That’s why our little seal of approval has value.

[01:03:24.900] – Karl
I would like to go ahead and put this to sleep just so we cannot go too far off in the weeds and we’ll come back next week and one of these discussions can be a thread on the forums and if you have ideas send me an email. I think the email of concierge at smallest dots is also on that site. That goes to my team so we want to be responsive. We want to help move this forward. Stay tuned and I will try to get together another meeting and unless somebody has objections, I’ll probably do the same time. Same stations. Very good. Thank you all for being here. Sorry to cut it off but I do want to respect people’s time and I also want to be able to try to put this into a manageable of chunks as possible.

[01:04:21.750] – Speaker 12
Thank you Karl for doing all this. This is fantastic.

[01:04:25.540] – Karl
Thanks Karl.