RejectionCon-a-Thon

Oh, I don't hear Wes.

That's probably a problem.

Nope, nobody can hear Wes. That's the way you start a livestream, right?

That's literally what I was saying. I was like, man, you hit go live and you're like, wait a second, I don't think I even got my audio set up right. Oh, what's going on everybody?

Is there an IT guy in the house somewhere, man?

There— it'd be good if there was. We could sure use one, man. Uh, this is going to be so much fun. We've got a multi-hour kickoff right now for RejectionCon. I got 3 people waiting in the wings that are just stellar people that I cannot wait to bring up. Uh, and we're gonna be talking about, uh, what's going on here and the mission behind this thing and all the amazing things happening. So Alex, how are you today?

I'm good, man. I'm good. We're kind of recovering, still in the process of recovering from some sinus stuff, so So if I sound like a different human, there's some stuff going on, but living the dream, man.

Yeah, I love it.

I love it.

I love it. Well, I'm glad— I'm not glad that you're not feeling well. Did I say that right? I'm sad that you don't feel great, but I'm super glad you're with us. And we need to get you back to health. Maybe we need to switch some RejectionCon funding over to Find Alex's Mystery Illness Fund.

Moving from one state to another and finding new doctors is a regrettable experience.

Yeah, no doubt.

No doubt.

All right, so I wanna bring a few folks up. We have got first of all, the one, the only, the Empire and Lord of CompTIA, Rain Selk himself. How do you like that, my friend?

Nice, thank you. That was very gracious.

Oh, I love it. I love it. Next up is my good friend Megan Killian. Megan, who's also a speaker at RejectionCon with the coolest headshot. And one of the best titles I've ever seen. How are you, Megan?

I'm good, how are you?

I'm good, I'm good. We're gonna go beyond for the very first time, beyond 4 people. We're gonna see if it breaks Crowdcast or at 3, it didn't. Awesome, we got the one and only Louis from Scalepad. Louis, my friend, how are you?

Doing really well, good to see everybody.

Yeah, it's great to see you too, man. Such a fun podcast with you the other day. I think you are one of the best podcast interviewers that I've ever been around, Louis. So maybe we ought to just switch to you leading this whole thing today.

I think you do a fine job, Wes.

I love it.

I love it. So we're gonna get started. RejectionCon is right here around the corner. It starts next Tuesday, December 12th, 13th, 14th. It's all virtual for those of you that have not been aware and hiding under a rock. And there's a bunch of cool things that are going on with it. First of all, the charity, right? Where everything goes over, all your conference proceeds, 100% go to Rural Tech Fund, which we're gonna talk about that in a second. But I think we're also gonna talk just too about just the awesome content. And because we've got a speaker here, Megan, I'm gonna have you in a minute kind of tease out what you're going to be talking about today, which, or next week, which is going to be great. So Wayne, I'm going to go to you, right? Just starting out, you know, as a nonprofit to a nonprofit, um, what resonates to you about the MSP community, their ability to give, and just how we can band together to pick someone like Rural Tech Fund and just blow this thing up? Give us some thoughts on that.

Yeah, uh, honestly, a lot of folks probably that are watching probably don't even realize that CompTIA is a not-for-profit, but we also have a nonprofit entity inside of the organization. And from a whole philanthropy side, right, so individuals that are members, um, we, we use funding that we— because we're self-funded nonprofit, but we use some of the, some of those revenues that are generated. I think last year we donated over $130,000, uh, to various charities, uh, around the world, uh, on behalf of the membership. So I think it's amazing. You know, this community is great, right? Everybody loves to give. Not only do they give up their time, they give up their talent, but they also give a lot of their treasure, which is awesome, right? Because that helps other organizations deliver and do good for the community, their communities too, around the world.

I completely agree. And I just, I've loved seeing, just to flip it back to CompTIA for a minute, Boy, I think in the past 3 to 4 years since MJ's leadership and your leadership and others, I've loved seeing where CompTIA has gone as an organization and really truly put their name and mission behind being community first, MSP first, and, you know, in what they've been doing with us. And you guys have really represented the community well. So thanks to you guys.

Thank you for those kind words. That's really what it is for us, right? MJ included. As the chief community officer. You know, one of the things I wanted to bring into Contia a couple years ago after coming from ConnectWise was that whole community concept, which we had there too, right? And so making sure that we're doing right by the community first and foremost to help everybody be, in my role, be more secure, right, around the world.

So love it.

Um, I love that. So talk to us about RejectionCon. Let me switch over, Louis, to you. Um, talk to us about what gets scaled. You guys are Wes Spencer, thank you. Um, what gets you guys excited when you saw, uh, RejectionCon come up? What kind of resonated to you, Louis?

Uh, well, first of all, I think there's, uh, just so much opportunity for learning. And, uh, I, I believe I've been following the Stoics lately, and, uh, there's this philosophy around just being a student of life and just being a learner your entire life. And I think if we stop learning, I think we we rot and die. And so I think one of the key things that I— that was really motivating for Scalepad to be involved was really just this idea that, can we contribute somehow to the learning environment to continue for people? Uh, MSPs need to continue evolving, and there's so much changing all the time. So it's just a great opportunity to just be involved in, uh, helping people continue on that journey a little bit.

That's awesome, man. We're so glad to have you guys here. Um, you know, coming from Scalepad and now following on my next venture, you know, at When we were building Lifecycle, I used to joke that we were an education company that happened to sell a product. And it really was kind of how we built our community. So it's just awesome to have you guys here. Super happy to have Scalepad as part of this.

Yeah, it's a real pleasure. And listen, I'll sort of jump in with just one more small comment. And I think it's that one of the things we talk a lot about internally at Scalepad is just how much transformation is required, I think, in MSPs, generally speaking, you know, from that early stage, 1-person, 3-person shop, to get to sort of wherever you want to go. It could be that you want to stay small but, but be profitable and do some great work. And there's a ton of stuff that you have to learn over time and continue transforming your business. And some of these things are big lifts. It's not like an overnight success. You're going to spend a year or more working on some of these things, building consistency into your process and your business. And so education, I think, is one of the key things that keeps you motivated to continue learning, continue adapting those processes, and letting your MSP Evolve. And so glad to be part of it. Thank you for involving us and letting us participate. I'm looking forward to seeing all the sessions and what we can learn there from everybody that's contributing their time so freely. And it's an awesome community effort for sure.

Luis, you are awesome. And that's a perfect segue over to Megan. So Megan, I think when we first did this whole call for papers, I mean, I got to admit, one of the things that's scary is going from— we all have ideas of things we want to try and do. And then you think through like, oh man, there's risk in these ideas and there's a lot of hard work in it. And I remember pushing out the call for papers. I think you were the very first to submit a talk. And I mean, you were within— I feel like it was an hour. I'd have to go back and look, but you just, you just—

It was like live on Slack. We were, we were evolving the idea live on Slack. And you were like, look at all these people that have been rejected by other conferences for no good reason. And then you threw something together and I was like, I'll submit. It's here. Here you go. You can have it.

And you did. And your talk was killer. Like, I'm blown away that it didn't get accepted anywhere. I'd love for you just to share a little bit about, first of all, the name of your talk and talk to us about the talk itself and what all you're going to be covering.

Yeah. So my session is about ethical marketing for next-gen MSPs, and it's split between really two fundamental pieces of ethical marketing for me, one being like DEI initiatives and the other half being just transparency, authenticity, honesty. And I've— I launched my agency, uh, 3-ish years ago, and at the time our initial, uh, mission was to prove that ethical marketing is as scalable as traditional marketing methods. And we niched down into the MSP space. It's a big part of like where I come from, um, and through my consulting I really learned that Uh, MSPs are behind the ball on, uh, diversity and inclusion internally. And that's not every MSP, but I mean, if we look at the 5 of us— or yeah, 5 of us sitting here, I'm the only woman. And that's not unusual in this space at all. And I don't think that women are any less capable of being tech of sitting in executive roles, but it tends to be a little bit older of a space. Like most MSPs were started by, you know, one tech guy who was the IT director somewhere, and he left there and he started his own business, and it was just him. And then, you know, maybe he brought on a friend, and then it grew very organically. And when you grow things organically that way, it frequently— everybody kind of looks like you. And I don't think that there inherently is something wrong with that, But there's a stage of business growth when you have to sit down, look around and say, why in a 20, 25, 30-person team does everyone look exactly like me? And that's, that's when we have to reflect and, and make hard choices and sit with ourselves and figure out what the next step looks like. And in my time in this space and in B2B tech in general, I have seen the power of ethics and diversity in being a revenue driver, and it's not just feel-good stuff. Like, you know, honestly, like, you should behave ethically because it'll help you sleep at night, but also it will drive revenue for your business, especially as we're scaling into a world where millennials are making more business decisions than boomers are, and you have more and more diversity in the overall business space. That we're all in B2B, right? None of us are selling to consumers. As businesses are adopting diversity so much, so, so must their partners, because people buy from people that they align with. And that all starts by figuring out what you stand for. And if you do that piece, the money follows, really honestly. And like, I look at, you know, watch, I've watched you, Wes, and you, Alex, and Kyle build Empath together and do that. It's very mission-driven, it's very core values-focused. And look at the following that you've generated and the people that have jumped on board really enthusiastically. They didn't do that— like, do you even have a product?

Not quite yet.

Why are we going to talk about that? Like, that is not— that's not what we're here to talk about.

But the thing is, is like, they're still—

Megan throwing shade already, right?

I can't wait for this talk.

Surrounding you supporting you and willing to jump on board before the product has even become a thing, because everybody's excited to see what you're going to do, because they know that the vision, the mission, and the core values are there, the money will follow. Um, and I mean, we just hit $10,000 raised for Rural Tech Fund, right? Yep. Yeah, so that's $10,000 that just came out of you guys having a vision, right?

It's, it's so encouraging, right? And this goes right into what you were literally just saying, and literally what you're talking about is just for folks listening that are like, I don't know what the Rural Tech Fund is, um, it's a 501, and it's run by a good friend of mine who I went to school with. It's literally about what you just said, is they go into school systems, inner city and rural, and they go in and they say, hey, this whole, like, the world of technology is changing at our fingertips, and unfortunately schools often don't have the budget, they don't have the time, the resources to be able to invest. And some of these kids have no idea their potential and no idea that technology is for them. And so giving them that exposure, that's one of the best ways we actually can get to better diversity inside of our workplaces is really letting kids come in and see for the very first time this technology stuff is exciting. And I don't have— I actually do have a pathway and I could get out of some of the trouble that I'm in. I could get out of the factory or the coal mine or the you know, maybe even the crime that's around me and like, I can do something bigger and better. And I'm passionate about that because I think that's really what this is all about. So it really kind of brings home— so I loved your talk. I really felt like it really hits the mission and mantra of what we're really all about here as a community.

When I saw we were raising money for Rural Tech Fund, I was like, yes, alignment. I love it.

So I have one thing to add, actually. So I did mention Comptia Spark, right, as our nonprofit. And so So again, you may not know, but we actually acquired TechGirls a little while ago. They're doing fabulous things over there, but SPARK is actually focused on the middle school kids, right? Getting them all engaged in technology stack. So Wes, it would be, I'd like the name of your friend that started the Rural Fund, 'cause I think if I can connect those two, or excuse me, organizations together, we might be able to help a little bit more there too.

I think we can. I think we should. And I think that'd be, that'd be super exciting. So yeah.

Yeah.

So I did literally just get an update from Chris, literally just came in a second ago. So we are not— we are at $12,000 raised. So we are now $2,000 over the limit, which is the coolest thing. And that's come in from people that have done $20, that have done $10. That have done 25, that have done like Degli 2000, which is above and beyond that anyone ever thought. And we're going to talk about Degli later just because of what an encouragement he is to me personally as a human being.

Invited him on here. I mean, here we are going to talk about him behind his back.

But you want to message him real quick, Alex, and see if he can jump in and make that happen.

Okay. Another meeting to jump to.

It's going to—

yeah.

Megan, thank you so much for joining. Yeah, thank you so much. Really appreciate that. And we're just going to leave this as squares. Luis, you're welcome to stay or jump off. Wayne, same for you. Welcome to stay or jump off. Eric has joined us. Eric Bowles, the one and only from Vosa. Eric, you and I have become good friends over the past year and a half. You've really been, um, really effective for me just as a framework and way of thinking about, um, you know, kind of what we're doing in this industry. But, um, you've also been, um, so giving of your time to all kinds of others. The people I've said you should talk to Eric, you've always made time for them. And you're producing the entire event, which is incredibly awesome. I know how much work I've put on you, my friend. So thank you. You want to just say hi?

It's working out. It's working out really well. It's, you know, it's a fairly easy platform to navigate. It's not nearly as complicated as vMix, but the results are pretty impressive. So just talked to some of our Premier sponsors and they're pretty excited about it. And yeah, I, you know, I'm— I couldn't be more excited about this event and what it's all about and why it exists. You know, I think it's just, it's, it's no secret to anybody in the industry that big conferences, pick your flavor, are more or less, not exclusively, but essentially pay-for-play, right? Like, if you want to speak there, you're going to pay. And if I'm going to pay, it's going to be a sales pitch. So as an attendee, when you go, you are essentially buying a ticket for $1,000 to be pitched to, right? It's not like you're going— now, obviously there's some conferences emerging like MSP Community Minds and a few others that are changing that. But so we end up missing a lot of really good talks because they get rejected because they can't pay to be there. And, you know, it's not that they wouldn't be invited, but if there's a sponsoring a speaker spot, that's going to take precedent over whatever this is. So these talks that are just adding value, they're not sales pitches. They're really about what this community is all about and what it needs to be all about, which is, don't make me a better customer; make me a better business; make me a better operator. That's what these talks are all about. And that, that's what I'm, you know, getting that voice you couldn't get at a big conference. Doing it virtually, where people don't have to fly in and drink with Mark Menzies and all the other stuff, right? It's like, I think it's just, I think it's super special that it's hyper-focused on, you know, you have to have had a talk rejected somewhere in order to be part of this.

And I'll tell you, Eric, it's such a scary thing for me when we first started doing this, because, I mean, we just mentioned this right before you joined, Megan, she was the very first that pushed a talk out. And that was exciting because when they did that, it was— I was just very, very—

it was very—

you just get nervous. Like, is this— what kind of talks are you going to get? Is this going to be like, you know, really like a snooze fest? And we'll show the agenda here in a minute. But it— your litmus test was true. You were correct, Eric, in that 0% of talks that are paid for are rejected. A whole bunch of really great talks that are created for the good of the community get rejected.

And I'm not hating on anybody.

There's no—

I get it.

There's only so much space. Even at RejectionCon, we only have room for so many. We were fortunate to make this thing work, but it's hard. It's so hard to get all that said. So, so yeah, and seeing the talks come to life is exciting.

Yeah.

And at the end of the day, you know, I mean, I get it for, again, pick your flavor of big, huge conference. They have a board of directors, they have investors, they have shareholders. They want to see the profit go up, not the profit go down. When you can get people to talk, to pay to be on stage to pitch, I think that's a win. And I think we're in this super exciting time. And I think this will resonate well with, with Wayne, given what he does at CompTIA, is that your MSP, your products, the services you offer are now a commodity. I can get them anywhere. I can go direct to Microsoft. There's a— you and I talked about this, Wes Spencer. There's 40,000— thank you to CompTIA's research— there's 40,000 MSPs in the United States. 11% growth year over year is 4,500. So we'll be at 4,500 $500,000 by the end of the year 2024. If you take 83% of all businesses of 5 employees or more take up the metro areas that make up 160,000 square miles, um, there's an MSP within 2.5 miles of you. I can find somebody else to do this for me. They've got, they've got trained techs, they're all Azure certified, they're this or that, they can all sell the exact same stuff that the, that you sell, either through Ingram or through Pax8 or whatever. What this boils down to is "Care about me. Show me that you want me to be a better business, not just a better invoice." And that's where, that, that's what's so exciting about this right now is that, you know, Comptia's leading community. There's so many different entities out there now that are all really pushing community. Empath is leading with community. And then the stuff that adds on in the back, that's awesome. But it's leading with community and how we all give, how we all help each other move forward. Which is really interesting, because any of us that are old on here, that'd be me and Wayne I think you guys might qualify. I'm not real sure. Like, you think about the old days of IT and, you know, working together with somebody and you'd walk up and be like, "Hey, man, what are you working on?" It's what I call IT basketball. They would box you out and be like, "What do you mean, what am I working on?" Like, people were so defensive, even in your own company. I have a theory that IT people only know 10% of what they claim that they actually know. And they're afraid that if they get too close to somebody else, the 10% will overlap somewhere and they'll get called out on the 90% that they don't know. So they blocked everybody else out. Now we're in this world where everybody's helping each other. We're moving all together. You know, Matt Lee, rising tide raises all ships. And I think that's what's so great about this and what CompTIA is doing and what Empath is doing and everybody else is doing is that we are truly raising the tide of, of not only us that we all know about, but think about the thousands and thousands of MSPs where the guy was like, I'm a break-fix dude. I'm a break-fix girl, and I left my tech company as a break-fix person to start my own company. And nobody told me or showed me the fine print that said, now I get to be sales, HR, finance, biz dev, operations, all the other crap that comes along with a business. And you're like, oh, wait a minute, I did not sign up for this. I am not qualified for this. Those are the people that literally are like, you know, they're like, waking up the next morning and going, "So do I get a job? Am I going to lose my mortgage?" Like, it's a scary, scary place to be. And all of this together, you know, RejectionCon, Empath, all of these people together, we're going to help elevate those ones, the smaller ones that really, really need the help and make them the MSPs that can go out and change this tide and really give the bigger MSPs a run for their money.

You know, to Eric's point, like, when you're that small MSP, it is lonely going into the office every day as the sole owner with not much of a leadership team because you are a small MSP and not having that formal training and management and all those things. It is— you're right, man, it's a lonely, scary place. And it's the value of the community. And I learned this first in the ConnectWise local user groups. And, you know, the just the community that you pick up there and the friends that you make and the colleagues that, that can help support you and, you know, answer that thing that, that you don't know that's out of your films. There's just an insane amount of value in that. And the fact that we can bring people together, um, kind of lift everybody up, is just super exciting.

Yeah, it's, you know, and, and it's, you know, I, I will, I will quote John Street from Pax 8 here where he said, if you ever want to know what true manic depression is like, start a company. Because some days are freaking awesome, and some days you're like, oh God, I'm gonna throw up. I know I'm gonna throw up. Like because it just changes, right?

Yep.

Yep. I remember living those days in the early Perch days and things weren't working out well and I would hit the end of the day and I went through 8 calls in 8 hours and literally no one was interested in anything we were talking about. And I just remember ending those dark days thinking, we're going to fail. We have about a month and a half left of funding. We're going to fail. This is not working. And I can't believe I left this job and I left what I was comfortable with. To do this. Then you fast forward and, you know, that elation and dopamine that comes when you finally make this thing work is— it's like nothing else on Earth. So yeah, and you know, there's just never a guarantee. I know this is not really the topic today, but it's a fun one. There's never a guarantee that anything you do in the future is going to succeed, right? And that's the scary part. I mean, well, I guess to pull this back to RejectionCon, that's the only reason I almost didn't pull the trigger when I was— Dustin Bolander is really the true person who thought of this thing and pushed me to do this. And I remember thinking I almost didn't do it because this thing could legitimately fail and I'd become the laughingstock of everybody. Right. And that's the thing that keeps you up at night. It's really hard. But, but, you know, I guess when you trust and you see who the community is and the folks that are around you that all band together, you know, that really shows that we are becoming an industry that I think I'm proud of and I'm proud of the people that are in it and what we're doing and building together.

Well, what I can say is I know you're not that embarrassable because you made that rap video.

You made that rap video.

We all saw it.

We all saw it.

It is so bad.

It is so amazingly bad.

I'm super proud of you, by the way. I'm so proud of you for doing that.

I laughed at you for the video. I won't laugh at you for RejectionCon.

Yeah, but to your point, right? It's like I can go to one of the big conferences as a small one-man shop, MSP, whatever. And I can hear about, you know, Huntress or this or that or whatever. And they're talking about minimum seat counts. And I'm like, I don't even like, like I have like 3 customers. I have a restaurant and, you know, a Dairy Queen and something else and a hairdresser. How do I move forward? That's what some of these talks at RejectionCon are about, is that this isn't about product. This is about process. And it's not just the mechanics of it either. So like, you know, there's some of it that's mechanics, you know, how do you exit your MSP? But there's other stuff that's like, How do I look at wealth planning? How do I look at succession planning? How do I think about how I touch my customers? You know, all those kinds of things. And, you know, it was just, it just reminded me of when I was at a former company as a, in the marketing technology role, and somebody was like, you know, "Why in the hell would I join CompTIA? Like, I don't need any certifications with what I do." And I said, "Then you don't understand what CompTIA is." Right. I was like, CompTIA has A+ Security+ and all that. You're right. And I was like, but you don't understand what CompTIA does. I was like, it's way more than that. And we start talking about it and they're like, oh, I should sign up for that. And I was like, yeah, you probably should benefit.

We can talk about that a little bit more. Like, what are some of the big things that MSPs ought to know about CompTIA that they feel like they probably don't?

Well, first of all, I don't think, uh, I don't think folks— and I get this all the time when I'm at events, trade shows, whatever, right? Nobody realizes CompTIA is a trade association, 501 here in the US, right? Trade association, not-for-profit, self-funded, thankfully not-for-profit through those certifications Eric just mentioned in most cases, right? And, and, and really it's about helping to grow the technology industry as a whole, right? It's not, it's not just about cybersecurity, it's not just about information technology. There's, there's a lot of different aspects today around technology that, that, you know, we're probably on the pulse of, uh, as the trade association. So, um, the membership itself is ridiculously low for all the benefits that you get for CompTIA.

So it's, uh, anyway, yeah, it's sort of those, so tell me again why you didn't join this thing? Because it certainly wasn't money.

Exactly. Yeah.

So Wes, I need to drop, um, Eric, Caitlin, and Matt. Very, very nice to see you.

Thank you for coming, my friend.

I, uh, I have a, uh, a live production next week of a, uh, a thing where all these people are speaking that had— didn't— that got rejected elsewhere that I still got to build out. So, and I'm about halfway there, so I'm gonna go finish building out that.

Eric, thank you, my friend. I can't thank you enough for what you're doing and producing the event.

Thank you.

Absolutely, you guys. Talk to you guys soon. Enjoy the, enjoy the, the live stream.

All right, take care, guys.

I'm gonna drop too.

Wayne, thanks.

Another commitment. Hey, I appreciate you, Wes. Yeah, great seeing you, Matt.

Good seeing you too, sir.

Hi, it's nice to see you again.

All right, you all have fun. Happy holidays.

If I don't talk to you, happy holidays to you too.

Bye.

So we are also joined by the one and only Caitlin and Matt from Channel Program. Y'all want to say hi?

Hi. Hi.

Hello.

Hello, man. It's great to have you both on. Thanks for being sponsors with this event and thank you for helping promote it and getting it out there, man. It really meant a lot to us to see you guys jump in and do all the help you guys have done. So talk to us a little bit about what's going on in Channel Program right now.

Oh man, um, yeah, I mean, just kind of high level, just in case people have not heard of Channel Program. And we've built out a platform, it's, it's free to MSPs, it's a free resource, uh, the vendors pay the bills. That's the number one question we'll get asked if I say the free. Um, and so we've built a platform that allows MSPs to evaluate their technology stack, do research on emerging technologies A lot of it has to do with peer validation and product reviews. We've got over 4,200 product reviews in the platform. And then most recently we built out something called Navistack, and it's really the first ever vendor management tool, allows MSPs to visualize their stack for the first time ever, uh, identify gaps in their stack, communicate with multiple vendors in a single place, and access partner materials vendor documents again in a single place. So really kind of our, our mission statement for on the MSP side of things is just making the lives of MSPs easier because managing God knows how, I mean, 30, 40 vendors is sometimes more than that. Yeah, Alex, you're an MSP yourself. It's damn hard.

It is, it is a lot of work. And, uh, and it's, uh, we don't have a Rolodex on our desk anymore, right? But, uh, but it takes a lot. And especially in the world of, of these vendors that we deal with, right? They're just like anybody else. People come there, they work for a little while, they move on, and then we've got, hey, who's my account manager today? How do I get back in touch with my, with my vendor? So I really love that. And you and I talked briefly just this week down at the, at the GrowCon event about all the things you're doing and couldn't be more excited, especially about those, those vendor communications all in one place.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's good.

I've been known, I've been known to beat a person up about nobody needs another portal to log into. And two of those people are on this call. But, uh, if you can at least reduce the number of portals I have to touch, life is better, right?

That was my— that was what I said to you. I said if I can cut out 15 of the portals, then that's the same as not giving me a new one.

I'll give you that.

Yeah, yeah.

With that being said, I think it's— I mean, it's been enlightening for me to see because I can see the statistics coming in from a lot of the MSPs that are using Navistack, is just like some of that data that's coming back from the vendors that they are using in the space, how much overlap there truly is, how much MSPs are still experiencing gaps in their business. So it's been really powerful for us, I think. I'm excited to like see where it goes in 2024 for sure.

That's awesome. I love that.

Well, thanks for joining us both today and want you guys to stick around as we, as we chat. We also had the one and only Degli Mendez join us. Degli, how are you?

I feel so, I feel like we're being blessed by a channel celebrity at the moment, right?

We're going to call him Saint Degli from now on.

Am I getting my 15 minutes of fame or 15 seconds?

You've had that long before, my friend, and it continues now. So yeah, how are you today?

I'm doing well. You know, so Friday, end of the week.

So isn't that great? I know I'm looking forward to that. So Declan, we have a lot to thank you for. Let me just, for those that are watching that are not aware of what happened in the background. Here we are. Let me just set the stage for a minute. Here we are. I'm watching when we start. We were talking about this before. The last guest that we're on is like, doing an event is a scary thing. Matt, you know this as well as anyone. It's scary. You don't know, is this going to work? Is this going to take off? What's going to happen with it? So we've been promoting and getting RejectionCon going for quite some time, and a few folks have trickled in and put in $50 to register, but it's like $30 at the time, right? And I'm getting worried. And I mean, Alex will tell you, there are just days I'm not sleeping well just because I'm worried of this whole thing.. And, and I saw that you had registered, Degli, and I was really excited about that. And then later, the week— probably a week went by, and I don't have any insight into who is giving what in Reject— well, I do now, but I didn't initially because the Stripe integration goes directly to Rural Tech Fund.

It just—

all the money goes directly to them, bypass the middleman. So I had no idea what you had done. And, uh, I'm sitting there and all of a sudden Chris Sanders, the CEO at Rural TechCon, responds back and writes me an email. I was like, hey, Everything's picking up. I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, you just had a huge donor. I'm like, wait, what? And I'm like, who? He goes, somebody named Degli. I'm like, Degli? Degli Mendez? He was like, yeah, I saw him join. He goes, he gave $2,000 to this thing. I'm like, are you kidding me? And Degli, it made my day. And not only did it make my day, no one asked you to do that. You didn't ask for any fanfare. You weren't— you didn't ever come to me like, Wes, did you see what I did? None of that. You just went on by your day for multiple days until like That's the kind of person you are, Degli, is just someone that gives back. It's like, I'm just giving to give. And that means a lot. And Alex and I were talking, and Alex, I'd love for you just to share a little bit about how that whole like RejectionCon challenge came out of what Degli did. And then I'm going to show Degli, I don't think you've seen this yet. I'm going to share my screen and show you something that you've sort of kicked off into motion.

Yeah. So we decided to, you know, go out and challenge some of our MSP brethren to really man up and do entire MSP sponsorships and get out there. And instead of buying, you know, having a tech buy a ticket and a person buy a ticket over here and over there, to just drop $500 in the Rural Tech Fund basket and we'd let them bring their whole MSP to the conference. So, you know, we got quite a few of those after a little challenge went out, but Degli sure dropped the, you know, lit the fire for that one, I'll say. So it was really good to have, you know, somebody really step up and, and start that off. Um, it actually happened behind the scenes and we didn't even know it at the time. So, um, that was, that was what was important to me, was that, uh, you know, it happened without any of us knowing about it and in the dark. And I like to just bring those things out and kind of show it off and talk about it. So, um, this was our opportunity to say thank you to somebody who did something really amazing for our cause.

No, no, you're very welcome. And You know, one of the things that actually, you know, if I had more money, I would give lots of money.

I truly know what MSP profit margins are. You did great.

And when, you know, when you guys came about this idea and when you guys said that 100% of this the proceeds were going to go to the Rural Fund, that was a no-brainer for me. You know, even if, you know, 80%, you know, was going to the Rural Fund technology and 20% for the event, that would still be a no-brainer for me because I think I posted something along these lines last week. We have all been helped in one way or another, uh, throughout our careers, uh, throughout our journey. And, and this is a way for me to pay it forward. And what a great way— there's no greater way of helping a kid who has no access to good education or to, uh, good, uh, technology And, you know, and to create those, to carve that future, a better future for kids, it's, you know, it really drives me. And I think there's no question that we should do more whenever we can, not only for, you know, kids and other causes, but, you know, for everyone, everyone who needs help, you know, whether it's just, you know, a simple advice or a simple, you know, hand to help them with something. But anything, anything, if we can pay it forward.

It's, it's well said, brother. Um, with this season of giving coming along, you know, um, the holidays are upon us, and those are things that we think about. We think that I mean, let's be honest, all 5 of us in this livestream today and probably everyone listening would say, I'm probably more blessed than I've ever blessed others, right? Like, we all feel that and we all realize that there's been people that have blessed us in ways that, you know, have pushed us into the career and the success that we have had today. All 5 of us in the livestream, I think, would agree with that. I think you're right. We can do more and we should do more. And that's, I think, just why you're so encouraging. And I want to show you something, Degli, that we made. So on RejectionCon's website now, we have this new thing. I want you to see this. It's rejectioncon.com/challenge. And people can, folks can take a look at this and kind of what this whole thing is about. We were just talking about how, you know, people are giving, this whole thing goes to charity. It's why we're doing this mission. And of course, celebrating and giving everyone a voice too, right? And then it kind of, we just talked about something amazing happened. This guy named Degli, which that's the coolest picture ever, comes around and gives $2,000. And we were just blown away. And what happened, Degli, I want to show this to you. Here are all the other people that also took up your challenge. Challenge. Um, I want to just kind of name them on top of you, Doug. Ian Richardson, Bob Miller, Dustin Bolander, Sean Torres, Jason Slagle— oops, the names didn't show up on that one, I have to fix that one— but you got Robert Chiaffi, Adam Slutskin, David Bellini, you got Tom— and these three just came in today— David Wyatt— oh, that's why I've got a copy-pasta error, that's what's going on there. So, but Tom Wyatt and Marissa Maldonado from Prota. Those are the folks that have all said we're going to take that challenge too, we're going to do this, and we're going to give above and beyond, more than we need to, more than maybe you know, others might because we feel like we've been blessed. And so, Degli, thank you for just taking that leadership. Uh, thank you for just doing what you knew is right, and thank you for inspiring others to do the same thing. It's just what this is all about.

No, no, no, no. And thank you, thank you guys for doing this because, uh, again, uh, you're, you're doing, um, and I just posted this, uh, uh, on one of your feeds, uh, you're not only doing this to give a voice to those who have been shot, right? But, you know, more importantly, you're doing it for this amazing work that Rural Fund is doing, and that's the most important thing, and that's what we should be thankful for to you guys and the Rural Fund technology folks.

Appreciate that.

Thank you very much, my friend. Appreciate that. We're excited to see where this goes. One thing, Matt, you know, I want to chat with you about this a little bit. I mean, it's exciting, exciting to kind of see, um, you know, this is not the only charity event that the community has done. We, we saw the big beard shave last year with, um, you know, Matt Lee and Ian and a ton of other folks that put that thing together. But really, you know, Matt and Caitlin, this is, this is part of who our community is, isn't it? Bootstrap folks that are just doing awesome things together and saying, you know, we will make the world a better place around us. And there's a lot of ways that we can do it. There's a lot of room for creativity around that, isn't there?

It was funny. I think you're going to tell the same story.

Are you going to talk about—

I mean, we haven't officially launched it, but yeah, I mean, we were doing this, this— it's a giveaway for MSPs called Holidays, and it's just a bunch of vendors giving away $500 gifts and things like that to MSPs who work hard all year. And I asked the trivia question about pigs in a blanket, and, you know, traditionally a pig in a blanket is usually in like a croissant roll or some phyllo dough, something like that. And somebody wrote, well, what about putting it in cabbage? Because he's like, I love it in cabbage. And so it became this running joke because most— I don't know, there's— I'm sure there's people who like cabbage. I'm not one of them. And backstage, like after the event, after this entire conversation around cabbage happened, Caitlin decided— I mean, why don't you say— I'll, I'll hand it over to you, Caitlin, on an initiative you, you decided from this, this cabbage Yeah, so the premise of holidays is that MSPs do work hard and we've been running this campaign to like give gifts to them.

But, um, I ended up joking around with a few of the vendors that had participated and saw yesterday's live stream around the cabbage situation. And, um, I think next year we're going to do like a random cabbage day where we give away like $500 worth of cabbage, but instead of it actually being cabbage, we'll donate it to the winners charity or food bank of their choice around the holidays. So I think that'll be a fun way that some of the vendors can participate in and give back. We do have a few vendors that have participated in the campaign that have gone above the required $500 give back and have donated to, um, Toys for Tots was Cloud Radial did this year, and then last year I think one of the vendors matched $500 to a charity of their choice to. So I'm kind of glad to see that the industry is taking more of that, that give back stance. It's been, it's been fun.

That's pretty awesome because after the, the beard shave, we tried to figure out what to do next and we talked about a blood drive, but we decided that at IT Nation nobody was in any condition to have blood drawn. So we have to figure out how to do our charitable giving in a way that really works in this channel, right?

Yeah. So poor Scott though, we're going to have to put it in, in Scott's name. The Cabbage Day next year. But yeah, I hope that everybody can find a way to do this, like not just around the holidays though, too, because it is just like so important all year round.

But yep, I love it. I love it. I love the creativity and I love the— it just goes right what we were saying. There's so many ways that I think we all can get creative and have fun and make the world a better place at the same time. The two should go hand in hand, right? I think that's what humankind has been built to do. And so I love that. I love— thank you both for joining. Thank you both for promoting. Thank you both for just helping get the word out. This is what the community is all about. Just deeply thankful to all of y'all folks at Channel Program for just stepping in and seeing the mission and joining up with us.

Awesome.

For sure.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you, guys.

Bye.

Thanks.

So we're also joined by the one and only Ray Orsini. Ray, you've been a giver as much as anyone I ever know in the industry. Uh, how the heck are you, brother?

I'm doing fantastic. How are you guys doing?

Making it.

I'm a little jealous right now. I, I don't have an OIT VoIP GI Joe shirt.

Oh my gosh, that hurts me a little.

Yeah, well, you do have a Not Wes Spencer shirt.

I do, I do. I, I've been, I've been asked not to wear it as often as I'd like.

Yeah, you should never wear that.

We'll, we'll do a trade at, uh, at the next event or write a book I got you.

So, uh, cracks me up. Ray, what's been going on in your world?

Um, about to take a couple weeks off focusing on mental health and taking care of myself. And, um, and as ridiculous as this sounds, we implemented unlimited PTO a few months back, and it was brought up to me that I'm not— um, as much as we impress upon the employees, upon the staff, to take time off as much as possible, Um, if leadership doesn't show us doing the same thing, it kind of doesn't— you know, it's not— it's really just words. So I'm doing what I tell them to do. Uh, speaking of, what's up David? How you doing, dude?

Hey, I'm good.

Uh, so yeah, so I'm taking some time off and, uh, that way I can enjoy RejectionCon as like, you know, just a watcher.

And good, I love it. I love it. Just a consumer, brother.

That's—

sometimes it's good to do that, you know.

It is fun. I was looking through some of the speakers. I was just on MSP Community Live with Kyle Spooner, who was speaking with Mandy, and we were just talking about the talks and stuff coming up on RejectionCon this week or next week. And when I was doing Dispatch with Slagle, we were talking about how we didn't submit talks specifically because I want to see everybody else. Like, I've heard my own voice enough. I want to see everybody else. Speaking of Spooner, there he is.

Me?

Spooner.

And all of a sudden he shows up.

Right.

He's like Beetlejuice. Spoonie, spoonie, spoonie.

I love it.

Well, I'm glad you're taking a break for yourself, Ray, and glad you're jumping in. And just first of all, thank you for the work that Eminem has done helping us get the word out. That's been awesome. And you just— how you've jumped in and seen the mission too. Thank you very much for that. And yeah, I was just going to share quickly as we got folks joining. Hey, there you are, Kyle. Here's the actual agenda. Folks want to jump in and see this bad boy. By the way, some really great stuff. Just go to rejectioncon.com, click on agenda, and you can see all— but you can also download it too. But some really great talks that are coming in that I'm super excited about. By the way, this is a last-minute addition. I added Danielle from Cyberfox in with Chris, not because Danielle paid or anything.

There's no—

there's no nothing like that. She used to be a teacher, and when I was talking to her about Rural Tech Fund, she's almost moved to tears. She's like, that is the coolest thing. She's like, I had no idea about the actual mission behind who you're supporting. She's like, I can tell you firsthand as a teacher in inner city, just how powerful that is. And like, would you like to come and join and just help interview Chris? And she's like, of course, of course, I'd love to. So yeah, you can just kind of scroll through here and see some really, really great talks that are coming up. I'm just passionate about this. We were mentioning this earlier, Ray, is just that it's a scary thing when you push one of these things out knowing that the rejected talks, it's like, are these going to be terrible? I mean, were they rejected for a reason? And then all of a sudden they come out and they're great.

I look at this and I look at like Natalie's session, a PR 101 lesson in IT crisis communications.

Yeah.

And I look at like how many tabletops have been given out from the likes of you, from Huntress, from Ninja, and how many, you know, all people supporting RejectionCon. And the comms part of it is so complex on its own, right? So I love that that's being addressed. I don't normally see that at other conferences. Conferences. Like, they say, well, how to handle the technical side, how to handle your staff, um, thanks to Robert Chaffee, uh, how to handle like the staff pressure, right? Like, he's talked about that. Um, but the actual comm side of it, I haven't seen covered anywhere. So I love to see that.

That's because it's a rejected talk.

Exactly. And who in their right mind—

everybody had the chance. Everybody had the chance. I don't know who would reject that. There's a lot of them on here though that we look at and just say, you know, this is a talk I want to I'm not sure how it wound up in this bucket. And then when you go look at all the conferences, you realize like they get 100 submissions and they have 30 spots, um, they get 50 submissions and they have 15 spots. Like, there is a real problem. Kyle's over here shaking his head because he went through this with MSP GeekCon, right? But you get a ton of submissions and you have to decide who— what makes the cut, and sometimes those are not easy decisions. Yeah, how you want to talk to us about that?

That?

Sure.

Uh, I think for MSP GeekCon last year— I'm actually looking up the numbers where we're sitting at now, by the way. MSP GeekCon's available after RejectionCon.

That's right, get in on that too.

Uh, we're sitting at 42 talks that have been submitted for our conference for May of 2024, and, uh, we only have 24 spots. Uh, like, something, something's got to give there.

We—

I think we had in up with like 60-something for 18 slots last year.

What I hear is that RejectionCon is going to be bigger next year. Uh, yeah.

Um, and it's, it's hard. It's hard because you don't have— you— a lot of these times you want to do like a blind selection. You just want to read what's given to you. You don't want to see who's given the talk. You want to just look at what's there, um, as what's provided to you and see if that fits what you're trying to do as a conference. And that is hard. Hard, uh, to, to go to, to be able to make your decision off that hardly any information. Because like, if Alex is— and if it's the same talk given by Alex and Wes, right? No offense, Alex, but I'm probably gonna pick Wes if it's the exact same abstract, right?

Yeah. You want to hear— you want to hear Wes give the QBR talk?

Uh, yeah, it's, it's, you know, that, that removes that name bias, but But it— you can't pick. Like, it— I don't envy our education team. Luckily, I'm not on that. I put that responsibility on someone else. But going back and looking through, like, my talk that I submitted, I know why it was rejected, because my abstract is garbage. My title is bad. It doesn't convey what I was trying to speak about. And Mindy and I were discussing this, and I'm like, yeah, I'm sorry, it's my fault. But, you know, having a talk rejected hurts as an individual, because, you know, you want to provide that education, you want to provide that opportunity to teach others. And when you, when you look back and you see some of these great speakers that get rejected, you feel a little bit better because you've seen them speak. And it's like, you know, okay, well, maybe, maybe it's, maybe there's another reason why I didn't get selected, right?

That's right.

That's right.

David, it's good to see you on too. I want to make sure we said hi to you.

Thanks. Hello.

Hello.

Thanks for joining.

Of course.

Thank you for having me. I've never submitted a talk. And so I think it's because I'm afraid of rejection. And the fact that you guys are doing this is just amazing to me. Maybe, you know, I'll, I'll submit something in the future. But, you know, until then, I'm still going to sit here.

MSP GeekCon. RejectionCon's, uh, request for speakers is open till January 31st.

I think I, I have a deep, deeply hidden hope, and I'm going to share it with everybody now, and it's going to change. It's going to change you. The next speech, the next talks you get are going to be amazing. I have this hope that everybody will start to submit the talks that they were sure would never get accepted anywhere, the ones that are just too spicy that nobody ever wanted to hear, so that next year at RejectionCon we have I have an example of that.

I won't name that person's name since I don't have permission, but I reached out and said, hey, do you have a talk? I'd love for you to submit one. Back when I only had maybe 5 or 6 people submitting talks, I'm like, this thing is going to be terrible and it's going to be horrible. No one's going to like this. And he said, actually, no, I don't. I've never had a talk suggested. He goes, but I can give you one. And his talk was awesome. It was sort of this idea of like deconstructing cybersecurity against sort of the zeitgeist and You know, the whole, the whole thing he has in mind is sort of like there's a way that you're being told to build cybersecurity. It's all told by the folks that are at the very top of the food chain that want you to bundle everything with them. And he said, there's a much better way I think MSPs can approach this. It's agnostic. Maybe you do select some of that. He's like, I'm not against it, but there's probably a better way to think about it. He goes, but I've never bothered to submit the talk because no one's going to ever let that talk in, ever, ever. And I'm like, hmm. He goes, so now I have ammunition to submit submit anything I want, as spicy as I want, knowing I'll have a platform elsewhere. And as long as it's in good taste, you know, the Rejection Con— that's the literal only reason we'll reject you from Rejection Con is bad taste, right? So I'm excited about that. I want to see that happen next year.

And to Alex's point, I mean, like, that's a big deal.

I—

we've all been there. I, I would think all 6 of us have been at that point of like, nobody would want to hear this, like, why would you submit? Um, it doesn't matter. Like, I'm looking at these rejected it's like all going down the agenda. I'm like, I would have sat in every one of these sessions.

Yeah, these aren't even the spicy ones, right? The ones that we got this year aren't even, uh, you know, folks, folks who were throwing something out there just to see if they could sneak it under the radar.

Yeah, I mean, there's, uh, I think my favorite one is, uh, uh, Josh Ether's F, Fault, and Blame. Uh, you know, that's fantastic. And submit what you can, submit whatever you have. Don't be afraid. Submit them to MSP GeekCon. At worst case, you'll have So, you know, you'll have your ammunition for RejectionCon next year.

I will say though, if you submit a spicy talk, because of our focus on education and our focus on information and providing that, it has a chance of getting selected. So if you go in, just be prepared that it may get selected if it's a good— if we feel like it's a good enough talk.

So don't bring in the heat.

I love it. I love it.

Dean, what's going on in your world, man?

Not much. How you doing?

Good, good. You also are a speaker. What gets you excited about RejectionCon?

So I started in the— as an MSP in the conference side of things about a decade ago. And what I noticed was as the industry grew up, the talking heads grew with them. So when I got into the industry, you know, seeing like it was a normal thing to see Paul Dippel or Gary Pica on stage and a small, you know, 50 people in the room at ConnectWise or something. And I noticed ConnectWise shifted their focus. So at that time, you'd go and you'd get middle management coaching, which really appealed to me because that's who I was. And now you go to an IT Nation or a show like that, and it's all M&A, it's exit strategy, it's, it's the other end of the maturity cycle. And they've completely cut out, you know, the, the beginning and the middle.. And, uh, so I've been submitting talks for years about the beginning and the middle that ConnectWise has kept rejecting, even though it seems like every year I end up getting up in a roundtable and talking about a basic concept. And, uh, it was actually MSP GeekCon last year that inspired me. I'm like, there's an audience for this. Like, there's a whole bunch of, like, newer, younger MSPs. They, they're not obsessed with the old talking heads. They don't know what to do. They don't know basics. And they, they need help. And so you guys had this awesome opportunity to submit, you know, really a pretty basic conversation just around accountability and, and metrics and why that'll make staff happy and efficient, which is a super basic conference, um, uh, concept. But I'm really excited. Yep, yep.

I was wondering who this anonymous octopus is. Now we know. When it was the poop.

He's gonna be the only one who hides himself when he comes on to a link that not everyone has access to, right?

He did this at CompTIA too. We, we had a shared workbook and he kept like, like putting people in.

Yeah, we were volunteering people for things and I just kept putting people's names in. Like Tony Thomas was volunteered for whatever, whatever it was. I forget what it was. Mentoring.

Yes.

Yeah. I love it. How are you, Jason?

I'm good, I'm good. Did you find my other gift in the sheet?

Uh, I saw— no, I see the arrow now.

I'm gonna go look.

I saw that. Here, let's share this out just so folks know what it is we're talking about here. Uh, what I— my, my idea was, you know what, I'll just do a, um, just an open Google spreadsheet and send out to a bunch of friends like, if you can join for today's RejectionCon-a-thon, go ahead and do so. Um, and I'm going to show out if I can find it.

There it is.

So I just made a Google Sheet right here, and, uh, of course someone starts doing little letter cell by cell by cell images, and I'm like, what are they starting to spell?

And then this week—

that's great, it's quality designs right there.

Yeah, that is the extent of my artistic skills.

Also, in fairness, I blame Spooner for of that.

So, uh, I mean, I'll take, I'll take the blame. Uh, I just want to point out that, you know, the person who did that is the president of his own company and, uh, took time out of his day in a Google worksheet.

He's really good at delegation.

Yeah, so be fair, I was, I was on the, uh, uh, CompTIA emergency response planning meeting while we were doing it, so like I was just multitasking.

That makes sense. That adds up.

Oh, that's—

yeah, you just missed Bean talking about how mature we're getting as a community.

Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, that said poop, they didn't say anything else. That was absolutely mature.

Yeah, I mean, if we take ourselves too seriously, then we become the enemy, right?

Yep.

Yeah, I, I— the only question I have about RejectionCon though is how do we have the after-event shenanigans, right? Like, how do we—

I figure we have to plan that Somehow, you know what, they're a tech bar next Thursday. Yes, will you give me the info and I'll just tag it at the end of the event? Okay, come join us at the end, that'd be great.

Actually, Megan, uh, Killian, one of your speakers in the chat right now, is on the tech bar. She's our guest.

Oh great, that's perfect.

I could throw up a Zoom room if we need, but yeah, I gotta go to the tech bar.

There we go, biggest after party ever.

Yeah, so everybody order a, uh, little at-home breathalyzer on on, and then we can all blow in our numbers.

You have a bunch of them.

Working day of the year.

We need to unpack that.

I'm just saying, that could be really bad shenanigans. Another closet situation. Speaking of Tech Bar guests, good timing, Dave.

I— what did I walk into?

Like, okay, you never know.

Question.

Yeah, clearly bad time. Clearly bad timing.

The main gist is talking RejectionCon, but it's fun to go off on lots of rabbit trails here and there for sure, including words that people add into spreadsheets. You know, as we, as luck would have it with everything being open. Dave, how are you?

Oh, good. Just finishing up today's episode, working on stuff for year-end. I've got a distributor piece coming for year-end. I've interviewed most of the major distributors about their projections for the future. So I've got some working on for later in the year.

Can you give us a bit of a hint on something without dropping too much?

Well, I— so that the— I'll tell you where the premise started is, is one of my Patreon supporters came to me and said, Dave, what do you think of the future of distribution? And so, all right, you know, I'm up for a challenge and I sit down to write the piece and think about an editorial. And man, I just stared at a blank piece of paper and I had no idea what I was going to write. And I decided I was like, you know what? I don't know enough. I clearly don't know enough, don't understand the topic. And so I interviewed I interviewed the heads of distribution, like across the channel, major ones that you know, and I sort of asked them the question, hey, what is it? And that's the piece. So it's kind of boiling down 5 or 6 interviews into a piece about talking about where they think distribution is going. And then I'm gonna bounce off of that and say, okay, based on learning from these guys, here's where I think it's going.

Got it.

Very cool.

Well, I would love to check that out when it comes out, 'cause I am interested in that, And I think we're all interested. I feel like the entire channel is on a bit of a precipice of like, what is the future going to become for us? You know, what is it looking like? I think the traditional style of what we look at as managed services is certainly going to be changing. So, oh my goodness, look who's coming in now. I had no idea that Restream could have this many people. Let's just keep the party going.

We'll see.

Wow.

What's up, everybody? Can we do a little bit of beard math though? I think the numbers are off the charts right now.

That's not fair, I can't physically grow one.

I think Matt and Jason are still winning.

Yeah, quitter.

I think this right here is super, super glue and offcuts. Yeah, that's a lot of work.

I love that this time last year Jason and Matt both had no beard whatsoever. And so they were perfectly clean-shaven, and now they have full, you know, yeah, a little ridiculous. Now that you have professionalism and the freeze tag champion of Tech Bar on the, uh, on the scene, I'm gonna go drop off for another RejectionCon, uh, supporter, um, Scalepad, joining Luis Gerardo for his, uh, podcast.

He's a great podcast host. Enjoy that. He was here just a little bit ago.

Awesome.

See you guys.

We were just talking about diversity.

Megan, you should come back and join us again so you can help us, uh, I know I'm staring at a famous room full of white guys like, oh boy, we have a problem.

Yes, yes. Matt and John, how are you guys both?

Oh, I don't want to go first. John, how about you?

Oh man, um, I am doing great. Uh, I, I I won't take it personally that Ray had to drop as soon as I jumped on. That's okay.

I would.

Um, it's great to see you guys. I am psyched. Um, we— I'm psyched about next week, obviously. I'm also psyched about MSP GeekCon and seeing all you people, um, relatively soon.

So yeah, this time we need something spicy so we can see it in person.

I still have a whole bunch of the like now banned and like illegal, uh, one chip challenge.

It would be an uphill battle to get me to do the chip again, but if you would do it, I would probably do it.

How about like a Hot Ones or something? That'd be a blast. I'd be in for a Hot Ones.

Yeah, yeah, you can, you can lead it, Dave.

I'm a big baby when it comes to spices, so like, sure, I will lead that that one. Ask ever increasingly difficult questions while you guys eat hot sauce.

That's fair, fair.

That works.

I think you'd be perfect for that. You'd be a great moderator for that.

I'm always up for a little fun, always up for it.

Megan's back.

What's up, Megan? Matt, how are you?

What's going on with you?

I'm, uh, I'm recovering from being sick, if I'm candid. I've been, I've been fighting up and down being sick for like 2 weeks. Jason, sorry if you have a tickle in your throat, that was me.

I'm good.

Uh, good, fantastic. Just nobody else then.

Yeah, we killed that with alcohol for sure.

Yeah, we did definitely try to burn that down with alcohol in New Orleans for sure. But no, I'm recovering. I'm doing well. I actually just had probably one of the most horrifying but gratifying kind of moments. I just unleashed my working group vision for about 70 people showed up for that kickoff call of various different professional backgrounds. I mean, we had the CIO of the state of Illinois, me, uh, you know, a bunch of different people wanting to try to solve this challenge. And nobody called me more than just like idiot. Like, it didn't go above that level of, of you're stupid. So like, I think I won. Uh, no, it was a lot of people were behind it. We pointed out some of the real pragmatic challenges that will be with what we're trying to accomplish. But I do think I've got a good 30 or 40 people that are gonna join in for 6 hours each to help build a set of questions to figure out how things map to CIS. Phyllis Lee even showed up and told me how she had tried before and failed, and, uh, she'll be there to console me when I fail. So, uh, no, she—

I was about to say, words of hope do not start with Phyllis Lee tried and failed.

Yeah, no, they don't.

For me, I'm not touching it. If she can't do it, there's no way.

Yeah, 100%. It's a fool's errand. Uh, I digress.

I'm glad you're starting to feel better.

What's up here? How hard we all work on Friday and managed services companies as we're all just on a random Friday. Wes sends out an email and is like, hey guys, could you join me on a live?

Read Only Friday.

And we're just all here, like, we're working super hard.

The difference is they make up for it on Mondays, right? Yeah, when all the fires are burning.

So I am multi, multitasking. I'm, I'm kind of, while we're talking here, while we're talking, reading a stock report because it's a nail-biter.

We were multitasking over here in a Slack channel and I was sharing images with Wes Spencer of the last time we all got together for a charitable event, just like the World Tech Fund thing.

Oh God, not real.

Oh yeah, they're real. And Matt, I have a before and after of you and I hanging out.

Yeah.

Are you gonna see it? Have you been to enough therapy sessions that this—

I think I'm okay now, but there was a time I would have answered no.

I feel like I need to see the photos. I need to know.

Oh, I am desperately trying to find my Slack window.

It wasn't meant to be.

Is this when beards disappear, or is this—

oh God, yeah, yeah, it was IT Nation last year when, when I had to charge to raise a bunch of money.

Yeah, I'm just going yellow mode.

Good amount, a good amount.

See, this is my Friday no calls day, so I have a little bit more flexibility. Like, I don't, I don't book any calls on a Friday.

That beard though, I miss it so much.

That's the most facial hair I've ever had, and I will never do that again. Like, 3 days later I'd be like, oh, this is what I had for lunch on Tuesday.

Yeah, that's Chris Roberts level right there, man.

I don't know how you do that.

Yeah, actually it's very Chris Roberts.

It was. It's gonna get there again, but it was.

How about that?

Whoa, look at that!

Who's that?

Yeah, I don't know those 2 guys.

I don't know, right?

Uh, that's great. I need the beard to hide my double chin.

My dog wouldn't even kiss me, y'all. Like, I, I came home, my dog wouldn't even give me a kiss. I was like, this is bad, this is real bad.

Uh, beards are for men what makeup is for women.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

It's a true story.

Never happening again.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, you threw that back in like no time.

All it really proves is I'm a bad negotiator because I clearly made it like a Faustian bargain to get this to grow back that much. Like, I clearly sold my soul. And I didn't get the eyes fixed. I didn't get the hair back on the head. So like, it really just solidifies how bad of a negotiator— I need somebody to help me out. I need an intervention.

But yeah, that must be a look, guys.

How much, how much money did you guys raise for that? It was a lot. You guys did—

I think the total was $220,606. Freaking amazing was the total amount we raised.

That's very exact.

Yeah, I know. He thinks it's a very exact amount.

I mean, he just has to look at the tattoo he's got now.

Okay.

So to sort of like a window into my brain, it's because the last donation was $20,000 of an in-kind house that was going to sell. And that means its variance could have been $19,400. It could have been $21,000. And I don't have final data on it. So I'm saying $226,006 final answer, uh, at least as I understand it.

So that, that might be the most that has been raised in the channel. I'm pretty sure it was a big quarter million.

It was a big one.

That's pretty crazy.

It was a big one. It went quite over, but it was up there. It was close to a quarter.

Was that for like Movember?

It was stupid. It came out of nowhere. I had not to rehash this, but you know, Ian Richardson, Carrie Richardson, I think had a secret plan to like destroy beards. Yes, that was 100%. That is— yeah, this turned into charity, and they asked me how much it would take them to pay me to cut my beard. And I told him, I was like, my former boss Tony Miller has already gone down this road. And I told him there's not an amount. He said, what about charity? And then I said, well, they have to be a big number. And like, what's a big number? Well, $100 grand. And so that's how it literally was born. And then we just had this, like, I put out a post one day on Facebook and what, 1, 2, 3, 4 of the people here, uh, were part of that, right? Or I think 3, yeah, were part of responding to that instantly and going, yeah, done, we'll shave our beards. And I'm like, I didn't expect people to say yes to that. And then you get into enough names and enough publicity and enough of the right magic moments, I guess, is the best way to describe it, that came together for it to like happen. And, you know, we were— we came to the conference at $100,000, and I think we raised $120,000 at the conference. It's like literally we had people handing over $500 or, hey, I'll give away this drone if you guys will donate $1,000. Like, it was just so stupid. It was amazing.

Yeah, absolutely amazing. It was, it was cool.

And I sent that—

now y'all doing this, this year.

I sent that message to Matt and then I was like, damn, I have to make sure I can grow a beard first. Like, it was only like this long.

Yeah, but some of the best things happen is, is, uh, just out of the blue like that though.

And that's where RejectionCon came from, right? We got Dustin Bolander going, somebody should do something, Wes, about all these rejected talks that are coming through from the channel.

Hold on, we're gonna talk about screenshots in Slack of our rejections from IT Nation, and everybody was just like, my talk was badass, what happened? We were ruminating on like why it happens and how, um, the, uh, the sponsors get slots that are essentially bought and paid for and then don't talk about their topic, and how frustrating that is when you're attending a conference and you like get pumped up to go to a session because the topic seems interesting, and you show up and you're like, oh cool, it's another pitch for Kaseya. I'm not saying a name.

There's pay to play in the channel. I'm not allowed to say something.

Yeah, yeah.

But I'm not tech talk here though. If we're going to talk about Dustin, we should talk about the fact that he raised a security incident that he found a ScreenConnect instance on his parents' computer and then was later told by security that it was his own instance.

Beautiful. It was the best.

That's pretty good. I hadn't heard that one yet.

He's never told me this before.

Yeah, right?

It literally just happened today.

Oh, it was today?

Yeah.

He's like, I need to report a malicious ScreenConnect instance. Uh, I tagged, you know, the community— Nick, the community manager— and, uh, he was like, email this and I'll get every— I'll get eyes on it. And then he replied back later, turns out that was mine. Unless there's another hacker.

Not secure at all. Everyone on this call could hack it, probably.

You know, it does have a GUID in the installer, like in WMI. Just, just never mind. Yep, it's fine.

Don't go there.

Okay, that's fair.

Let's not—

not on this call.

It's fair, it's fair. I digress.

Audience too large.

Okay, touche. Uh, I digress.

Oh, that's great.

Alex, real work to do.

I'm not real work, like pretend work, but I'm gonna step away and do some pretend. But when I come back, I'm bringing back one of our RejectionCon speakers. I'm gonna go meet with him for a half hour real quick, and then I'm bringing back Teddy and we're gonna talk about his, uh, There we go.

Sweet.

So I want to come back to this. I want to ask a question to Jonathan. Um, John, you guys have been some of the best community players, especially from a large vendor that's been out there. Um, would love to just kind of hear your thoughts on RejectionCon and, and kind of what captured you guys from the Ninja. And you just did— John, perspective too, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I mean, I remember— well, first of all, yeah, like I'm a member of the Slack where I saw early ideation of this. It's just such a cool concept. It made me think about a conversation I had with Kyle Hanselman from Huntress early on when I first joined Ninja. And I reached out to Kyle and I was asking about the channel overall because it was new to me. And we were talking about the types of marketing that are effective. And what, um, really vendors could do to help out, uh, MSPs. And he said a couple of things. The first was like, the, the— an ounce of like marketing the MSPs can use themselves versus what, you know, you're trying to do is like worth a pound of other stuff. Um, so help them, give them materials that they can actually use. And then the other thing he was saying was, you know, for conferences, like, he would love to see it get to a point where events and conferences, MSPs got to the point where they could run their own, um, and they didn't need a vendor to, to put it up for it. And it's been really cool to see like MSP GeekCon come out of that, um, and even some other conferences that are vendor, you know, sponsored, um, or put together go down the path of getting out of the way basically. Like, let's make it happen, but let's get out of the way because there's so many great voices and so many, uh, so much good experience, um, with the operators, MSP operators themselves, you know. And we see all these great community spaces that have sprung up. People just want to help each other. Um, people have really valuable experiences and expertise to share. Let's get out of the way, get the agendas aside, and really put that, um, at the forefront. And so I think that that's something that Wes Spencer, you, and Alex and Kyle have really You're doing that here too, right? Like, you're, you're giving the platform for folks who are sharing talks that are fantastic but may, for whatever reasons, they may not fit into the agendas that everyone has when they're putting on a big show, right? And so seeing that that was happening, of course, definitely want to support it, get involved.

I love it.

I'd love to see MSPs learn how to do that into their own ideal audiences. Don't get me wrong, I love the MSP community behind the scenes, seeing us all network with each other. But like, if you could replicate that into your own niche, think of the revenue potential.

I've seen it, right, Megan? Like, you call out a great point. I've been on, I think, 6 different ones this year where MSPs in general just have this ad hoc— I'm gonna have an MSP event for my clients for my prospects. Uh, speaking of one of those smart folks, uh, anyways, for my MSP clients and prospects. And then what they'll do is bring in guest speakers. Now, a lot of it's been vendor sponsored. Granted, our vendor also sponsored, but I, I spoke and just got to speak about whatever I wanted to speak about, and it was fantastic. And what's cool about it is the worst attended one was one in Texas, and only 3 people, 3 different companies, about 12 people total showed up, right, of this whole thing. So he's put on all this cost. He's had lunches. He's all these things. And no, and only a few showed up. Out of that, he gained $30,000 in recurring revenue.

I was just gonna say.

One giant, giant deal.

3 companies and one of them is actually your target.

Yeah. I've done those too. Like the guys out at my tech partners in Minnesota do a really significant one for their customers. And it's grown over the past sort of decade. And stuff where it's, I mean, it's an actual like huge thing and they bring in several other competitors and they all work together. And I've spoken there a couple of times and it's all to customer-facing versions of that, Megan. So it's, you know, to their customers leveraging all of that expertise, but to drive business to the MSPs themselves. And I would second that and counsel like, hey, some MSPs, you want to make sure you're spending a lot of that marketing time outward-facing to your communities. To your local community, to the people that buy from you. That's where you want to spend more of your time, everyone. Focus there.

Yeah, I mean, I've often wondered, looking for examples of this too, like, you know, having— are there any MSPs that are doing like vertical-specific, you know, like podcasts or shows or streams that like aren't focused on tech so much, but also like Like, yeah, yeah. Um, oh yes, looking for more stuff like that.

A couple that, that do since we got involved and we're like, listen, it's great that you can talk tech, but your clients don't care. Like, they want you to, they want you to know tech well enough so that they feel safe with you, that you know better than they do. But when you get lost down in the weeds with them, they just get confused. You have to pick up the other subjects that they care about and I can speak to that. We've had a lot of success supporting a local company here in niching down into legal and doing events for legal that aren't just focused on the tech. Like, yes, the tech is there, but they're talking, you know, more specifically about like DMS systems and how to pick the right one for you and not, not just like shoving cybersecurity down everybody's throat because I think small business owners are sick of hearing about it, to be honest.

I just did a show last week on Friday with— or maybe it was too— I don't remember, at some point Friday ago, um, about this, about verticalization. And it was because I went to this thing called TitleCon. It was down in Miami. It's an MSP called Premier One, and they bring in only title companies and closing agents. Like, that's their jam.

They work with—

that's it. And that's predominantly who they work with. And it was really cool because they brought in, like, things that mattered to them, to your exact point, right, uh, Megan? Is it stuff that mattered to them that drove their business? And it was stuff like at some point they had on the stage a guy from, uh, or two of the people from this one insurer saying, hey, if companies don't have a good cyber posture in the closing agent business, we're going to go from 30% revenue to 20% revenue, and we're going to cut that. Like, how more powerful to get people to move action is their revenue source going, you're going to get 20% commission instead of 30% commission 2 years from now? Like, all right, let's get moving. So anyways, to your point, it drives that by that verticalization.

Yeah, and vertical specialization is not a requirement for best-in-class performance, but it is correlated that we oftentimes, we often see higher performers have gone deep in a particular specialty.

Or multiple.

Yeah, exactly.

Or multiple.

But oftentimes it starts with one, right? Because you've got to build a practice area around it. So when people ask me, like, you know, I'll point out the data tells me that if I find a provider that has engaged in that, they are much more likely to be getting getting best-in-class performance.

Oh, 100%. It's not so much like the back end is that different. You're giving them the same cybersecurity standards regardless of the compliance issues you're facing, right? But when you're speaking to them, whether it's through sales or through marketing, you're speaking to the things that matter to them and you're speaking their language. And that makes them so much more likely to want to buy from you. Like, if I go into like a civil engineering company and I talk to them about cybersecurity, they're literally just like, it's never happened to me, it's never happened to anyone I know or care about. I'm not paying you that money for that. But if I come in and I'm like, listen, this is what's happening with the compliance in your space. CMMC is being pushed out to subcontractors through ISO 27001. Are you prepared for that? When was the last time someone looked over your cyber liability insurance? Like, that conversation results in selling cybersecurity, and I didn't talk about cybersecurity.

Interestingly, I've started talking to providers that that are not even doing the traditional managed services at all, are only focusing on like line of business applications and specializations. A couple of weeks ago, I had on the pod an MSP that positions themselves as insurance technology and only focuses on what he calls InsurTech. And those are the business layer technologies that help drive the insurance business. And he outsources all of the general managed services security stuff to another provider because he looks at it as a commodity. Commodity. And I just, I've not interviewed for the show yet, but was just talking to a provider who specializes entirely in AR/VR implementations and calls themselves the first managed services provider for XR implementations. And again, just focusing on that particular set of use cases. And it's not just arcades. The second major use case was businesses that need lots of desktop space but have limited physical space that their people are working or they need to be able to do, you know, they have office spaces that are not very large but need to be able to provide lots of desktop space. XR and AR-type solutions do really interesting there, and they don't do any of the general managed services kind of stuff, just specialize in the technology. So it's interesting to see providers appearing that are now only that verticalized, uh, MSP versus the, the generalist.

I think with remote work happening too, like, and being able to do so much of your support remotely, if a company doesn't need a, a local person, if you niche, you can go a lot farther than just being like, I specialize in small businesses nationwide. Okay, that's— no, you don't. You can't— the term specialized actually means something. You're misusing the word.

This isn't literal. No, no, no, that's fine. That's not a good play, everybody.

I'm always like, don't just niche again.

Niche again. You know, like, I was in B2B tech for a long time, and then I was like, okay, I'm gonna niche deeper into that. And, uh, the more you niche down, the more, the more money comes, especially for MSPs, because what you do, it's not that different. And I think, um, it's great that we have so many vendors in the channel and that they're, they're all, you know, talking about the vendor being the differentiator between MSPs, but for the actual end user, it's really not. Because they don't, they don't care what your cybersecurity tech stack is. They just care that like you know what you're doing and they can trust you to handle it for them. Uh, so the differentiator really becomes like how well do you know their space and how good are your people. Who do I, who do I have to talk— when I put in a ticket, is there some grumpy asshole that yells at me or no? I don't want anybody to yell at me because I'm stupid.

Oh man, I'm totally making Grumpy Asshole as a Service, right?

As long as it starts with $99.

You know, they're—

that's how you know they know their stuff.

There's a market for everything.

Certainly. I mean, if you're in Massachusetts, I think it's expected. What would we do if my IT guy was nice to me?

Yeah, that's suspicious.

I think the other thing, you know, that you're speaking towards in general, Dave, you kind of touched on it and said it once or twice, but there is a general commoditization of the MSP and what we do from a tech perspective. Like if you fire up Angry Birds, how many— I love that Bob's just seen the messages we're having here— but like, how many, how many times have you fired up Angry Birds out of 100 does Angry Birds not fire up? Is it zero? It's going to be zero.

Yeah.

Like, as we move down this very high SaaS consumption, identity-centric model of what companies are starting tomorrow, and most of you are consuming SMB, you're in a world where most of what we do is a scriptable commodity. We can make it work way with this kind of predictable results and deal with it in the same way. And even your point on help desk, Megan, there aren't stupid questions because the help desk's taking the same exact answer on how Okta is having problems or how Microsoft ADJ or AAD is having issues or Entra, whatever they want to call it next Thursday. But like at the end of the day, you get to this world where that commoditization means MSPs have to find other ways to add value.

Well, you're even, you're saying it even nicer than that. I mean, Microsoft and Apple will both sell you a perfectly perfectly acceptable version of managed services. And I don't know, running Windows through Microsoft, that seems pretty logical to me.

I will certainly recuse from that part of the story, David, because that's where I come from.

But I can say that's why I'm happy saying it is I'll observe.

I love you for that.

There's offerings from Microsoft where you can add it on to your Windows 365, M365 offering. It's a perfectly acceptable market solution. And that tells me there's commoditization in those businesses.

That's correct.

Exactly.

That's the point.

And so the answer is, how do you go forward in the, you know, you and I both agree on a statement of like, how do you move forward in that ultimate commoditization? I think it has to be in getting deeper into their business and being able to actually help move the needle with technology solutions, like knowing how they make money and how they move concrete trucks and what their challenges are and how they're going to you need to upgrade. And in some cases, if you take that vision forward, it means— and this is where some people could disagree with me— but if you take that vision forward and someone was to say, if I start a company tomorrow, I have none of the brownfield burden that you do. I get to start with this now, this way, the way I want to do it. And MSP, yeah, we have— and MSPs, your job is to now convert them and educate them to survive with their existing mass and inertia with those changes that are necessary. And so I think what we're all speaking towards is this ultimate shift of what our value statement is to much more consultative, much more deep and ingrained in understanding. And some of the answers are verticalization. Some of the answers are better processes and things that need to exist in our world. But yeah, anyways, I'll end because I'm going to drop here in a second.

But I'll actually sort of sum this up, because I actually don't think the core value of what IT solution providers is, has changed at all in 20 years, because I'll describe it as helping customers with their technology decisions and being effective in business. And so I kind of push back when everybody goes, oh, we're changing business models, oh, we're changing value shop. No, for if you've been really focused on that core statement for 20 years and, you know, right here to show it, like I've been selling the same stuff for 20 years. But if you focus on helping a customer with their technology decisions, that core value has not changed. How we do that has changed. What the technology we're using has changed.

How much plate spinning is involved in that.

Yeah.

And all to Megan's point of like, people don't care about speeds and feeds. They care about like, hey, what does this technology do for my business? And if you're good at that advice, you will always have a job.

There's a quote from Jeb Blount's People Buy You that is, people don't buy from people they like, but they don't buy from people they don't like. Just because someone likes you, it doesn't mean someone's— they're going to buy from you. But if they don't like you, they certainly aren't. And so just being likable is kind of like the very baseline. And likability is different to everybody. So if you truly nail your ideal audience and you understand like what, what do they think likable looks like. To, to Bob's point, and like grumpy asshole as a service absolutely could sell.

Hey, that's what somebody wants.

And there's, there's, I think there's the proof is in the pudding in the number of MSPs that are out there, that there is plenty of need to go around and differentiation to go around. And I think to your point, Dave, like the industry hasn't, the core of it has not changed, but the way people make decisions has a little bit. And so we just kind of have to, we have to shift with them and understand what their priorities are instead of focusing so much on what ours are. And like, I see the backend of the technology a lot all day, every day. And like, you guys are awesome when you nerd out Slack in the back channels, and I'm just like, you're so technical and you're so smart, but you have to be able to kind of dumb that down to your, to your client and their actual like knowledge base, because otherwise you're really gonna lose them in the weeds of what you're saying. Like, I, I trust that you're good. And the other thing I think that's changed so much in the technology space is that the bare minimum is good enough now. Like Everything is so far above what we actually need. Like, my computer that's sitting in front of me is more than I will ever actually use, both for business and personal. Um, and that's kind of the evolution of technology. So, so trying to sell people things they don't need can backfire a lot of the time.

Yeah, I will say that. Excuse me, you guys have to be—

I will say the technology will, uh, or the use of resources will expand to consume all of the available way overkill over time because developers get like— not lazy, lazier is the wrong word, but they use ambitious— they use languages that provide them shortcuts, but those shortcuts come with efficiency. I mean, there's a reason, like, by all means, Office should start in a fraction of a second because it actually takes longer to start now than it did in like 1995 on a Pentium 233, right? Like like that doesn't necessarily make any sense. But the, uh, what over time what happens is, uh, we, we change paradigms, we change language models and all sorts of other things that in theory make things safer, but they come at the cost of efficiency.

And Megan, I was going to say, it sounds like you don't have enough tabs open.

Yeah, I can share screen. Yeah, hold on.

The OPSEC, the OPSEC.

Yeah, you, you want to see your CPU, just Open up about 700 little tabs with all URLs under those tabs. Watch Chrome suck the actual life out of your device.

The number of pages, it's insane.

That's nothing.

That's amateur hour.

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

Open each of which has more tabs than that.

Don't show that. Don't show that to anybody, Megan. That's embarrassing. I wouldn't show it.

Not that many tabs.

All right.

Yeah, yeah, I know. That's, that's kind of a rounding error is what that is.

Well, I have multiple Chrome instances open with that many tabs because they're segmented by the client I'm working on.

Different.

Yeah, different.

You gotta use one and you gotta max it out.

We're all like tab hoarders. Some people— this guy bought another 16 gigs of RAM just for all the Brave tabs.

Is there a limit?

Oh, there's no— there's no physical limit. There's a, there's a practical limit. There's no physical limit. The tabs aren't the problem. It's the 7 million URLs under each tab.

Yeah, no, the tabs aren't the problem. If any of them are Outlook, Facebook, or LinkedIn, that's the problem, because that will eventually consume all of the RAM on your computer. Or Gmail.

Yes, yes, they're like my ex-wife. They'll expand to meet all available space. That's exactly right.

Is there a session on how Kevin makes the jerky? There should be.

You know, I don't like a whole session, you guys, uh, just on jerky making.

You know, I don't— you guys have been talking about this, but that's, uh, Chinese.

I can give that away.

Kevin, your, uh, tin can and string needs some work.

Yeah, it does.

I'm outside.

Yeah, we spent the last 2 hours working out.

Yeah, I don't—

I'll move closer to the house.

I don't know, um, you know, I mean, you guys are all on top of this, but I mean, the bottom line is our industry is no different than any industry out there when it comes to commoditization innovation. This is nothing new, right? I mean, this happens to every— absolutely every industry out there, and it's certainly always been the case.

Yeah, it's on the maturity curve, right?

You know, I mean, when you get as old as I have, you've seen waves upon waves upon waves of these different technologies that have come into play, right? Which all had to be adopted or adjusted to be able to be something practical for end users to get some value out of it. But that's our life from the get-go, right? I mean, that is what we do. We take all that really hard technical crap that nobody cares about but us nerds, and we try to convert that into energy for regular companies to use to create value. I mean, that is what we do.

I love that term, energy to help them create value.

Yeah, because that—

Right?

Like, this is the blood sugar you need to survive.

Yeah, I mean, the sooner you embrace the fact that that is what we are, And you know, all these technology shifts, cybersecurity is just another wave of technologies, right? And we're already seeing commoditization in that ecosystem, right? I mean, we already see EDR.

Well, it's not hard to commoditize, like make your bed and brush your teeth. At some point we need to do the basics and then we'll be a lot better off in cybersecurity ultimately. All right.

Well, you can see that that's going to happen, right? I mean, we can all feel that that's going to happen. We can see it moving that way, you know, to where it's, you know, those lower end things are all going to get commoditized. They're not going to be something you're going to be able differentiate yourself with. So you better have an eye toward innovation and an innovation process to continually be looking for the kinds of things that help build value for your organization. It doesn't matter what industry you're in, but certainly in our industry, you got to do that.

So, you know, I mean, I love that Kevin has mastered that, like, that CSI Miami kind of look of pulling off the sunglasses and being like, I'm Kevin, and I'm here to talk about rejection.

Oh, which is what we're supposed to be talking about. —right, right. That's what—

that's right, bringing us back to the point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's—

oh, Alex is back. We have to behave now. He really meant it.

He was coming back, right? Because I'm the one around here that keeps people in line.

Is there someone who does that? Because if so, I have not met them yet.

That was my old business partner.

Yeah, Megan, you still haven't— you still haven't met anybody yet.

I thought you were gonna bring someone on. Oh, it looks like you are. There we are. Teddy, what's going on? What's up?

Hey everyone.

Hey, hey, hey Teddy. We've been very above board, very polite, and very on topic today, Teddy. Yeah, so beers are allowed in the call. Oh, someone— no, not at all. Zero. I don't know who it was.

I want a beer.

What are you drinking?

How's it going?

Good, good.

Yeah, what are you drinking?

What is that? Honestly, I don't know. It seems a bit like an Oktoberfest, maybe a Christmas ale. Just take one of the random drinks someone gives you.

Nothing can go wrong. Oh yes, works out well.

This is, this is how I know there's a major difference between women and men, because women would never—

well, come on, he's in his office. It's like somebody—

I don't know, it's a random pint.

Just trying to get from point A to point B, you know, from point A to point B.

So Wes, you'll be excited about this. I, uh, I may have shifted the topic of my talk slightly, so sorry.

After all those votes, I mean, isn't that what every vendor does? Like, we lured you in with one topic and then we talked to you about another.

Just to get those votes, and now you're switching it up.

Arguably this topic's a little bit more— it's, it's probably would have gotten— it's the old one was very like boring, and I'm hoping that this is going to be just one big metaphor.

Oh, so now you gotta tell us what, what you got for—

yeah, I like the sound of this.

I, I can, I can get into it if you want me to. Might as well. So essentially, I'm— I try to, like, just living with my family and stuff like that, and my background is in penetration testing, so trying to explain what that is has always been very difficult. So I always have to explain everything in metaphor to just about everyone. Um, so my metaphor is, um, you know, penetration testing is not something that everyone should have done all the time. Right? Like, it's, it's something that— it's like a health checkup. It shouldn't be used to drive risk and— or to drive risk management or anything like that. It's something that should be done to, um, you know, just once a year. It's like, hey, is my program holding up, right? Or what gaps have I had? How— it's a benchmark that you're trying to continue to improve upon. So I am correlating it to going to the doctor's— going to the doctor's office, right? Like your yearly checkup. That, you know, assuming that you're doing exercise, you're exercising, eating right, you know, taking care of your mental health and sleeping properly, you're doing those things throughout the year. And then you move that over into, um, uh, actually like going to the doctor and seeing, are those things working right? Where, where are we missing on that? So, um, same basic topic, but just changing, changing how I'm presenting it, which is probably why I got rejected. At all those places.

So that's— while you're talking, I don't know if I can find this quickly, but I did a talk on this a while back. Um, the National Academies had done this research with like the, what they call the diagnostic process. Um, and if I can find it quickly, I'll show you. Um, because what they did is they sort of mapped like what's the journey, what's the health journey journey of a patient. And they even started with like before they come in. So things like talking to— like, oh, my knee hurts. And they talk to their mom, or they talk to their buddy, or they whatever. Oh, you should go and see a healthcare professional. So they kind of map the entire journey from that stage all the way through the ultimate goal, which is expected positive outcomes. They kind of track the whole thing. And when you watch it, it's exactly what you said. It's like, this is exactly how we should be mapping our processes with clients and potential clients? What are we doing in the very beginning when they're saying things like, man, I hate my IT, I hate my whatever, to where they start to think about maybe you should go see a, like, someone, a professional actually does this kind of stuff, into what's the assessment process look like? How do we actually turn that into treatment plans, you know, and get to positive outcomes? But even coming back again into, hey, this outcome didn't quite realize and hit where we want, let's go and look at the plan again and look at the testing that we had in place and redo this diagnosis. It's really powerful and it really brings this whole thing to life.

Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I think I like the healthcare field comparisons because it's cyber health, health, health. I think it's something that everyone can relate to.

So yeah, here it is. I found it. I'll share this real quick. Share this. Yeah, look at this bad boy right here. It's really, really cool.

Um, this was a good one.

Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a neat way to sort of like— I really think you can take this and map everything you do at your MSP to this and begin to understand, you know, where the gaps are.

You need to full screen that and get rid of our ugly mugs here.

Uh, do I know how to do that?

I don't know. I feel like you can click around. Is there some buttons?

Maybe this. I bet this will do. There you go. There it is. Bingo.

Now we can read words. Woo-hoo.

Yeah, Bob, you guys, you were in on that when I talked about it. What'd you think about it? Absolutely.

No, I mean, I think this is really, you know, when you speak of analogies and how to really look at how to, you know, view these processes or the process of going through evaluating these things, this was great, right? I mean, these medical analogies work really well because in reality, that what we do a lot. We're, we're working on the health of an organization from, you know, from our angle. So yeah, I thought it was a really great way to kind of break these things down and, and be able to compare, you know, what the practical— what the practical tactics are when you're working with a company to figure out their health, and then what the health practitioners do, which is follow the same basic flow, right? I mean, it's diagnostics, it's all those things.

Yeah, I thought it I think the only, the only downside, if I could be Debbie Downer on this one, is that it doesn't actually talk about the rest of the life cycle, right? It talks about I'm injured, I need to heal, and I'm back. It doesn't speak towards the growth, the remainder of it. This would be as if after you exit this treatment plan, you're now meeting with a health counselor, you're now meeting with someone to continue your growth and somebody to help you talk about what your future goals are. And right, and I think that's one piece that has missing. But you're right on that response and, and healing aspect of it. I would agree completely.

Uh, well, Burger King's here, so yeah, yeah, I was like, this is the buying process, just healthcare. Yeah, fair.

Yeah, yeah, it's— I mean, you know, that's the entry point on this is after you experience a health problem, right? So theoretically, you have all the right prevention mechanisms in place and you're doing all your hygiene all of that are there. This is after you actually experience something that— how do you break that down and figure out what's going on?

It's classic American healthcare though, right? It's like, let me just go fix this thing in front of you, and then let's not worry about anything else because I'm going to drug you up, then come back again later when this isn't working for you. And honestly, how many MSPs operate that way too?

I just want to say how legendary it is that not only do we have, uh, you know, the greatest man alive wish us congratulations on getting all Empath and Burger King. The Burger King shows up for this. Like, we, we have, uh, we have, we have straight up royalty here helping us fire up. Dave Seville.

Did Dave come back? Is that him?

Dave is— I appreciate it.

No, it's me. Oh, well, thanks, man, because I actually like— I like— I actually like Whoppers, and that was like making me re-evaluate.

Dude, it's scary, right? It was very whopper on asses.

What I understand is your head is so round, how did you make that thing not look round? I don't understand.

My wife came home from a conference yesterday and she went, we did white elephant gift exchange and this is what I got. And I was like, that's awesome, wearing that on a call.

My, my wife too came home from a white elephant thing and she came back with, uh, Snoop Dogg's cookbook and Oh yeah, I saw that.

Things look awesome.

Yeah, man, have you seen Snoop's, uh, wine bottles that have the, the AR?

Yeah, so you can use 99 Crimes.

He makes children's music now. I don't know how many of you have kids, but he's got this song called the Affirmation Song and we listen to it on the way to school every single day. That's awesome.

So my question about the Burger King mask though, there was like something— what happened to the eye? Did you have to like rip that open?

It looked especially Put it back on. Yeah, remask yourself.

Yeah. Will, how did you mess that mask up? That's what the man's asking.

Oh, I could put it back on. Yeah, hold on, I'm gonna turn my camera off because it's gonna be scary to put it back on.

That's scary. No, let me— yeah, it's not a problem, Will, go right ahead.

TBK.

I thought we were done.

TBK. Hey, Will is a genius. He is.

Oh, see, look at that.

Like, oh yeah, you can see it's like creased.

You gotta kind of— it's so rough.

Yeah, your eyeballs hanging off, buddy.

Yeah, the holes in the mask don't line up with the actual image on it. That's what's going on.

It looks better in real life.

No, it does. No, I think you're lying to yourself. No. Yeah, no, you're fooling yourself.

It's actually super uncomfortable. Um, also it's, it's like creased in the middle, like they had it in their suitcase and it's just totally folded right down the center. It's great. Time out.

Someone just scanned the, uh, RejectionCon pass out of all this. Like, wow, you know, we're listening to these guys you guys talk about, uh, Burger King.

That's what I'm talking about.

I think that goes back— wasn't it Megan? Megan, it wasn't you said it was a shoot the shit con? I think that was what she was saying.

So there you go, a little cybersecurity, a little bit of pen testing, Burger King. The Burger King gets a scan.

Yeah, well, I was just looking at LinkedIn, Wes, and I saw something about what may have put you over the 10,000 goal, which— amazing, 10,000 $1,000. Awesome, congrats. You guys are the best. Um, but what put you over was a rap video of some kind? Oh yes.

Oh yeah, last night.

Oh my God, there's no proof that was me. I think we should play it.

I think it's so, so lucky we can't just run that live right here right now because that would be happening.

It's a good thing that we can't happen.

Yeah, I think Alex did—

I think Alex did an AI video for that.

I feel like we have the technology to replay that.

I think you stole my name, image, and likeness, Alex. Again, it's not cool.

So I think the tonality of that video was just too on point to be fake.

It was great. Tonality.

Thank you, Megan. That was well stated. Yeah, it was very, very delicate there. The tonality on that, uh, song was, was too real to fake.

It was pretty terrible.

Actually brilliant.

It's a very polite way of saying, Wes, that was god-awful. Don't ever do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Was starting your LinkedIn influencer career? I thought it was awesome right there.

I can't wait for rejection time. I gotta drop it.

I'm calling it now, 2024 is the year Wes Spencer becomes a LinkedIn top voice.

Well, I don't know about that, but what I do know about is I mentioned this on Slagle people's posts. And he mentioned this a little bit when he was on, but, um, sometimes you just— it's important to embarrass yourself to prove to people that, like, you don't— like, to— and to yourself that you don't take yourself too seriously. Like, and, you know, when he was— when ThreatLocker dressed him up as basically a ThreatLocker cheerleader for, for the beard shave and then gave a bunch of money and everyone made fun of him, like, that's what it's about right there. Like, yeah, no one should be above being made fun of and, and being, you know, sort of the picture of joke, you know, especially when it's going to charity, right? So that's where I had the stupid idea of like, I want to make a rap video and I don't know what I'm doing, it's gonna be awful. And my wife was like, that's a bad idea. I'm like, all the more reason to do it.

It was great though. I mean, I loved it. I, you know what, I love the fact that you were getting tickled while you were trying to do it. That was the part that was a blast, right? It's like you, you were, you were trying to stay on, you were trying to stay in mode, right? But you just, it was just ruptured every now and then when you— it's bad.

They just say it was bad. And so there's no—

this doesn't exist?

There's no copy of this? Of me singing along? I don't even remember what song I started singing with because we— the Clutch Global Awards just came out, which is a marketing thing. Uh, we won like 41 awards, so I'm scrolling through all the awards. Oh, it's We Are the Champions, and I'm singing. It's like, we are the champions. And I put it in my Slack channel with my team, and they were like, Megan, you have to schedule this to LinkedIn. And I was like, oh yeah, sure, let's just really announce to the community how autistic I am. This will be great. It's just like, really publish it.

I'm— yeah, I'm not kidding, Wes. I'm trying to think of something that I can top that with, but it's going to take me a while because that was really epic.

Pull down one of those guitars, start playing for us, but—

right, yeah, yeah, that might get us there quick. You're right.

Oh, it's great. Jonathan, you were going to say something. I don't know.

Oh no, I was just asking if the— there was— so there's no recording of this anywhere?

No, this is live. Definitely never, never to be found again.

I mean, is there another fundraising goal that can be hit to make you do this during RejectionCon?

Uh, oh, live during RejectionCon?

Yeah, there's— yeah, another $10,000. Yeah, another $10,000.

You just don't want to— it's not worth— it's not worth the money. It was—

how much do you have to pay for karaoke is what we're gonna ask you.

That is a great idea. We should— someone that knows how to do the technologies, like Ray or someone, should do a karaoke kind of— that would be awesome. That would be awesome. That's a great idea. You could have in like—

you could have a wish list kind of like EjectionCon, right? And have it be like like, I want this person to sing this song. Oh, but you have to put money where your mouth is. So like, donation-wise, if we could figure out how to do it like with donations, and then the people who get donations, like, what are you— you're gonna not come sing the song? That's a fantastic idea.

Oh, fantastically horrible idea.

Like the Grinch.

I'm gonna be unavailable whenever that's happening.

Me too. I too have that problem. I'm queuing Jonathan up for, uh, I Will Always Love You.

Oh, I used to voluntarily embarrass myself doing karaoke when I was younger, so I— it's not that bad. You just have to have it to a shot first and you'll be fine.

I've heard the kind of music Alex listens to, you guys. He'll happily sing for us.

I will not sing for you. That's going to happen.

Country music, I feel like it's coming.

I—

there might be a little country mixed in there.

Alex, what is your genre?

I, I, I'm all over the place, man. It's just all bad. It's, that's fair, fair. But I, I listen to some country. I listen to some like Dave Matthews Band, like some— like there's good—

Toad the Wet Sprocket. He's very stuck in the '90s.

I am. That's back when I had my youth and my good looks.

It's coming all things ahead of my youth.

Yeah, it's a Kidz Bop guy.

Kidz Bop. I gotta go.

Thanks, Megan. Well, as we're in our final last few minutes, anyone else want to say anything, uh, specifically about RejectionCon and, and, um, anything about it, why they're excited about it, or, um, a message to others that are listening today and why they should get on? For those that are still with us, for whatever for some wild reason.

Say thanks to the sponsors. That was a great sponsor list.

It was a great one. We got 2 new ones that showed up today that, um, we gotta add to the website. We've got Roost and Proficio that just joined in, and now we're done. So if anyone's asking, I'm sorry, I can't get you in, uh, we are full. Um, but yeah, that definitely is very cool to see a bunch of vendors step up and, and jump into.

Yeah, it is. You know, our vendors do very well in this space, and You know, it's good to see them give a little something back to an event that lets some folks get their voices. I just want to say, if you've been watching these shenanigans and you haven't signed up yet, I'm pretty sure there's a registration right up there somewhere above that guy. Make sure you scan the QR code, uh, follow along. You know, your donation can be a dollar, right? We're not out to, uh, it's— I mean, obviously we're trying to make some money for the Rural Tech Fund, but at the end of the day, we really just want to support these great speakers and let them have their voice is heard. So someone scanned, somebody did what I told him to do. That never happened.

I'll tell Mom thank you. Thank you, scanner.

For reals, I was just gonna say quickly, we are— just in case anyone didn't hear when we said this earlier— we are— well, Mike Bergard just jumped in. Mike, thank you. Um, $50 from him. We are now at, um, uh, 12— over $12,000. $10,000.

So $10,000 was the goal.

We have hit it and we've gone over. The two people that pushed it over the limit, uh, were Dave Bellini and Adam Slutskin from Cyberfox. Both of you, so thank you. They both went above and beyond. And I'll also show this real quick. I showed it earlier on the stream, but I just want to share it once again. This right here is kind of what we're all about. So I made a challenge page. It's rejectioncon.com/challenge. And the whole thing— Degli joined us earlier, but he really kicked it off. That guy went above and beyond. He gave $2,000. He didn't tell anybody he was doing it. He didn't ask for fanfare. I didn't even notice it for 3 or 4 days. And I think, Alex, you're the one that's like, yo dude, Degli just put in a crap ton of money. I'm like, what? So he kicked this whole thing off. And the RejectionCon challenge is basically this: if you're someone that's a giver and you have the means to do so, um, give $500. And if you give $500, I will pop your name up here. There are people in this chat right here that are— there's Bob Miller himself, um, and I'd love to see you on here. Not that you're doing this for the notoriety, but it's just an easy way for me to thank you. Um, and you can do that right here. You just go to Want to Give, click on it. Um, and the cool thing is too, if you do that, what it's going to give you is, um, it gives you the ability to have a pass to allow everyone at your MSP in. And hey, we've hit the goal. Like, I want more people in this than not. So use the code. There's a code called MSP Pass, all one word, MSP Pass, and that lets you in. No, sorry, I have that mixed up. It's important. That's not right. It's free MSP. I changed it. It's free MSP, all one word. Use free MSP. It'll let you in for free. And I'm just saying that to everybody. We've had enough people give to get anyone in. So I really want everyone in. Don't let money be a hindrance here. The conference is going to be awesome. It's really cooking up. So free MSP. I want to see you all there. So yeah, that's what I wanted to say.

Yeah, from a value proposition standpoint, it's a no-brainer for us, right? I mean, so I was happy to do it. It's going to give all of our employees a chance to pick and choose the subject matter that kind of applies to them. And there's some great— there's just some great sessions in there. And as somebody who creates sessions, you know, having the ability to actually get, you know, get the word out about subject matter that a lot of these conferences may not find exciting enough to put in there,, you know, put in their lineup. But which, those of us that are practitioners or for enterprises that are, you know, need, you know, need to, you know, need to know these kinds of things, it's valuable material. So I mean, where else would that ever get heard, right? On the kind of forum that we're talking about. So I mean, Wes Spencer will tell you, 2.5 seconds after he posted it, I was banging on the door going, hey dude, whatever I can do to help you, I'm, I'm, I'm in, right? Because it was It is the nonconformist element in me to just love the whole concept, right? I'm able to do something that is outside the scope of being manipulated— or I won't say manipulated, but being guided by commercial, you know, commercial motivations. Whereas this is really driven by, you know, by aspirations of helping people and giving other people voice. So this— what value this has for us, it has infinite it about you. So I'm looking forward— I, I know, basically I told Wes, and I, and I will— I'm going on record now saying I honestly feel like this is going to wind up being a cult classic for us as a, um, you know, as a community, because this speaks right to the spirit of what it is and why it is that we do these things. So yeah, Wes, hats off to you. The only thing I hate about it is it wasn't my idea.

Bob, it's your idea as much as anyone, and you've been ridiculously helpful getting this thing set up. For those who don't know, Bob helped me with the whole voting mechanisms, get that going, letting me, you know, throw a ton of ideas off his head and help me promote. And Bob, you've been a huge piece of this thing from the get-go and never asked for a single thing other than just let me help. So thank you. Happy to be—

you know what I think is cool too is, to your point, Bob, um, you know, a lot of times when you, when you— so something like this, right, RejectConathon, RejectionConathon, that's a lot a lot of syllables. But when you think about that, right, that's usually where these things end, where it's like, let's raise a ton of funding, we want to raise money for charity, yada yada. Like, that's awesome, and that's so good because you're helping people. And then it's like, oh, the, the Conathon's over, and thanks for all your support and your help, but now because of your support and your help, you actually get to go and benefit your own business. So it's, it's really cool that you're giving, but then you're also getting something that's going to ultimately to help you as an MSP owner. And to me, that's, that's actually a really cool benefit. You know, to your point, Bob, it's not going to— it's not going to corporate ladders, it's not going to raising a ton of, you know, just making a, a corporation larger or whatever. It's literally going to helping someone, and you're going to be able to learn how to grow your own business in return. And it's just a cool kind of play off each other kind of thing.

Oh man, I'm right there with you guys. Well said, both of you. And, and I would add to that, I mean, yeah, it's— you're donating to a great cause this time of year. Obviously we're all kind of thinking about this, how can we give back? I certainly am. And, and beyond that though, you know, Bob, you're mentioning like maybe these sessions, they weren't accepted because they weren't exciting. I don't think that's true at all. Like, these— this is a rockin' agenda. The sessions question, like, this agenda is banging. Um, there's a lot of stuff on there that's just really solid that I think would stand up against any other conference you put out there, really. Um, there's a lot of really great topics and, and, um, speakers out here. So you get to do good, but you also get to get. Um, it's gonna be a great event for sure.

Yep. Yeah. And the coolest thing about the platform we're using, when we do this in Crowdcast, these will be recorded and saved forever. So if you sign lineup, you can go back and see if there's competing sessions that you are afraid you're not going to be able to see on the agenda because two of your favorite speakers are at the same time. You can go back and catch the recording for one of them that you couldn't catch live. So just pay attention to that too.

Uh, yeah, I was going to say that non-exciting talk, I was referring to mine. That's all I was referring to.

Did I, did I miss— see, there's Voldemort joining.

Oh, sorry, I'm not supposed to say their name, but oh, you know, let's get this Kevin, or did you call Kevin Voldemort? Just for the record.

No, I was saying these had— they shall not be named on the list of, uh—

oh yeah, I, I was going back and forth on— it took me a while to arrive at the us to kind of get the last. So I can actually spoil, uh, spoil it now. So the ending kind of keynote last thing is really going to be— the last thing is a looking forward thing. So what is 2024 going to look like? For us as MSPs. And so brought a couple folks on, um, two of them that I can share. The third I'm waiting for confirmation. So one of them is, um, Matt Lee, uh, the other is, um, uh, Wayne Selk from CompTIA. So excited about both of them kind of joining us for a discussion on what is the future going to look like. I'll just say it, the third person I asked is a really good friend of mine, Mackenzie Brown from BlackPoint. So I'm hoping she can join as well. Um, have not had a confirmation back yet. I know she's been busy. So, um, no pressure, Mac. Good pressure. I'm sure the—

I'm sure the Burger King can fill in if she can't.

So Burger King's really good at giving— can we get him an eye patch? Maybe we can get him an eye patch. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, prosthesis. That's awesome. It's awesome. All right, my friends, well, thanks for joining me for the Rejection Conathon. It was super fun. Um, those of you that enjoyed and watched watched us and laughed at us. Hope you had a good time. I really do want to see everyone here at RejectionCon. Make sure you sign up. We're getting really, really close to all the numbers we want to see, and we've hit and blown out the, the, the financial numbers, which is awesome. So the last thing is let's get in on this. Don't, uh, don't hesitate. Jump in. If you haven't joined yet, you can join for free. Just use the code FREEMSB. There's been enough vendors and enough MSPs that have stepped into the and said we're going to cover the minimums, so we're there and it's time for you to jump in, and there's no, no reason not to. Awesome. All right everyone, I'm gonna cue some, uh, some awesome music back up before we hit it.

Yeah, and hit the rap song, hit the rap.

That's right baby, I like that one. Let's get a better one. Wait till we have some consensus and some good music. Oh no, that's good, that'll work.

You just want to do Wes Spencer rap. I'm just saying.

Oh yeah, I'm gonna say yeah, I'll be jamming out to that.

No evidence that ever happened.

Really excited for next week, guys.

In light of that, Alex, you're the first one I'm kicking out. Get out. See ya, have a good weekend everyone.

See y'all next week.