The primary structural shift examined is the move from vendor emphasis on quantity of partner recruitment toward a more nuanced focus on partner program health, accountability, and mutual business growth. This mechanism is highlighted by Dr. Backup’s acquisition by Hosvara, with the new owner, a former MSP operator, prioritizing the effectiveness and sustainability of the partner base rather than purely expanding headcount. The episode examines how explicit disclosure and management of active versus inactive partner numbers—rarely published in the sector—reflects a deeper push toward measurable outcomes and operational performance within indirect sales channels.
The standout evidence comes from Dr. Backup’s partner program, which has seen over 300 IT firms join since inception, but only 125 remain active. According to company statements, the new owner’s strategy is not product-centric but centers on leveraging the current partner base by integrating business coaching and operational support into the program. This approach is intended to drive growth through existing relationships, rather than relying on continuous recruitment or product expansion in what is described as an already saturated backup market.
Related developments reinforcing this shift include Microsoft retiring its most demanding MSP credential and ScanSource, a distributor, acquiring an MSP outright. Both actions signal that larger players are reorganizing their channel and partnership strategies, favoring authentic, measurable engagement over headline claims of partner volume. Discussion of the Pareto principle and active/inactive partner ratios further illustrates the risk of overreliance on recruitment metrics and the need for transparency and accountability regarding partner program health. The episode also critiques vendor behavior that distances itself from partner business performance, emphasizing the reputational and operational risks involved.
For operational leaders, this shift implies that evaluating vendor partnerships now requires greater attention to transparency regarding active engagement, business impact, and mutual investment in outcomes—not just product features or price. MSPs and IT service providers should probe vendors for clear data on partner program health, insist on evidence of sustained partner profitability, and treat orchestration skills and partner selection as risk mitigation strategies. The sustainability and business impact of a given vendor’s channel approach will increasingly affect operational costs, dependency risk, and go-to-market resilience.
Supported by:
NinjaOne On-Demand Webinar: https://go.businessof.tech/p/ninjaone-pod
💼 All Our Sponsors
MSP Radio is supported by our partners:
ABC Solutions · CometBackup · Firetail · Guardz · HaloPSA · LogMeIn · Mailprotector · OpenText · Pax8 · Proofpoint · Rythmz · ScalePad · TimeZest · Transit AI · USecure
Supporting the IT services community through insights, analysis, and transparency.
🚀 Join Business of Tech Plus
Get exclusive access to investigative reports, vendor analysis, leadership briefings, and more.
👉 https://businessof.tech/plus
🎧 Subscribe to the Business of Tech
Want the show on your favorite podcast app or prefer the written versions of each story?
📲 https://www.businessof.tech/subscribe
📰 Story Links & Sources
Looking for the links from today’s stories?
Every episode script — with full source links — is posted at:
🎙 Want to Be a Guest?
Pitch your story or appear on Business of Tech: Daily 10-Minute IT Services Insights:
💬 https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/businessoftech
🔗 Follow Business of Tech
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28908079
YouTube: https://youtube.com/mspradio
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/businessof.tech
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mspradio
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@businessoftech
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mspradionews
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
[00:00:15] Backup Company in Dallas has two partner numbers. More than 300 IT firms have joined its program since it started. About 125 are still active. The new owner, a former MSP operator, bought the company because of the second number. Almost nobody else in this channel publishes that second number. The big players are busy with something else. Microsoft is retiring its hardest-to-earn MSP credential. ScanSource and distributor just bought an MSP outright.
[00:00:45] So this week, can a vendor grow by making the partners it already has better? My guest has spent 25 years designing partner programs and he thinks the answer decides whether a vendor grows at all. Welcome to the Business of Tech Lounge. This is where we break down what's changing in the IT services market, what it means for providers and vendors, and what to actually do about it. If you're running or supporting an MSP, this is about making sense of the environment you're operating in, not just the headlines.
[00:01:14] Now to make this conversation possible, a message from our sponsor. If you've been watching the backup market, you know pricing has gotten complicated. Veeam feels like legacy overhead. Some of the newer platforms have gotten expensive fast.
[00:01:31] Comet Backup is what I keep seeing MSPs land on when they want modern backup without the modern price tag. Bring your own storage, control your costs, and run it your way. Comet Backup is built for MSPs who want flexibility without the vendor dependency. Check them out at CometBackup.com.
[00:01:52] My guest today is Ryan Morris, the principal analyst at Morris Management Partners and my co-host on the Killing It podcast. He spent more than 25 years across solution provider, vendor, distributor, and analyst roles designing the channel programs. A lot of this audience works inside. Ryan, welcome back to the show. Thank you very much, Dave. Glad to be here. I'm glad to have you back. This is one of your favorite topics. I know you're itching to go. Listeners, viewers, if you're watching us, you've got a question, throw it in the chat.
[00:02:21] We will put it in the Q&A section. We will bring it up and answer in real time. Now, a quick disclosure first. Right here, the buyer in this particular story, Nancy Enriquez, leads the community at MSP Unplugged, which competes with Small Biz Thoughts, which I own. You can discount my read as much as you like. All my facts are sourced. Now, the story real quick. Dr. Backup is a cloud backup company founded in 2002.
[00:02:46] This month, it was bought by Hasvara, a company Enriquez, a former MSP owner set up for the deal. She told us more than 300 IT firms have joined its partner program over the years and about 125 are active today. Now, she tells me she didn't buy it for the product. She called back up a crowded market. She bought it for the partners, and her plan is to rebuild the program through an owner's eyes with coaching built in so partners get help running their business and not just something to resell.
[00:03:16] Now, Ryan, I thought this was a story right up your alley because you've spent years arguing that a vendor grows because its partner grows. And here's a vendor owner betting everything on that premise. So I want you to make your case, make the case you've been making for years, that a vendor's growth is caused by its partner growth. Tell me what a vendor does differently when it actually knows how many partners stay.
[00:03:41] Well, it's a great topic, Dave, and it is something that I'm very passionate about. Think of it this way. A vendor has two routes to market in fundamental terms. They can sell direct or they can sell indirect. If they sell indirect to a significant portion of their total top line revenue, then their growth is by extension inextricably linked to the ability of their partner community to grow.
[00:04:10] We call it enlightened self-interest, right? If my interest is sell as much of my stuff as I possibly can and the route to market that I use to sell my stuff is through partner organizations, then logic would dictate if A equals B and B equals C, then A also equals C, right? If my growth comes from somebody else, my interest is to enable them to grow as much as possible.
[00:04:40] Think of it in three kind of fundamental buckets of growth from a vendor's program point of view. I can expand with existing active partners and make them more capable. I can recruit new partners and launch them into productivity. And I can go back and reactivate past partners that were once in my program and producing but are no longer doing so at this time. There are three. That's it.
[00:05:08] You literally cannot get growth from anywhere else. Plus, the maddening thing and the buildup to this and all the research that you've done and comments from the partner community, we say, listen, why don't more vendors disclose this number? Why don't they talk about this? Every single vendor in the industry knows exactly what both of those numbers are, how many are in and how many are actively producing.
[00:05:38] You've heard it talked about for years, Dave, in the context of the Pareto principle and the 80-20 rule. And a very few of my partners produce a very big majority of my revenue. And we take that from a practitioner's point of view as, well, that's the rule. That's the law. Of course, that's the way it's going to go. No, it's not. You can do this very, very differently and much more efficiently.
[00:06:06] But make no mistake, just because a vendor is not telling you what is their active versus inactive total share ratio, they absolutely know it. They're tracking this stuff in CRM and in their quoting software every single day. They know it intimately. And if they're not sharing it, it's just because it maybe doesn't look like a shining example of success. I mean, is it that simple?
[00:06:33] Is the reason nobody's publishing it just that it just doesn't look good enough? Because, I mean, is it that simple? Yes, it is. And quite frankly, again, there's this... It's been several generations of development in our industry where leadership has wanted to advertise the basic number of,
[00:06:57] we are big and important and you should join our program because dot, dot, dot, 50 million Elvis fans can't be wrong. Right? Like, it's not about whether it's good in here. Look at the size of the community. There are thousands of people and they like to talk about that headline number. What they don't necessarily want to advertise is of that total number, how many of them are actively producing.
[00:07:22] And by the way, we have a very strict and mathematical definition for what is an active, engaged and producing partner and what portion of those people are actually growing year over year. And further, what portion of those people are actually making a profit off of the substance of the relationship between the partner and the vendor organization. All of those things can be known.
[00:07:51] And if they're not advertising and shouting loudly about those numbers, it's because they aren't flattering. Okay. So, the other thing I wanted to then talk about, I want to get into a little bit of the mechanics of this. You do a lot of work with vendors 100 times the size, right? But there are a lot of smaller vendors in this space. And I think it's useful for the MSPs to understand the mechanics of the programs. What happens when you're designing a program for 125 partners?
[00:08:21] Like, what breaks and what gets easier when the scale is smaller? You know, it's a great question. And it is quite literally what we spend our time doing every day because we very intentionally engage very, very large global vendors with extensive tens or hundreds of thousands of partner ecosystems. We engage with midsize and growing vendor organizations that are going from 250 towards 1,000 partners.
[00:08:51] But we also spend a lot of time advising companies that are just now getting into the partner community. And they are launching a program for the sake of their first 5, 10, etc. partners going on. There are architectural differences between those things, right? There are not just headcount and overhead operational capabilities that exist in the larger programs that don't exist in the smaller programs.
[00:09:18] But there are also software platforms and operational automation that make the programs capable of running more efficiently, more smoothly. But they also have the inevitable side effect of becoming a name in a phone book kind of a dynamic where when there are that many partners inside of a program, you lose the intimacy of that one-to-one connection.
[00:09:43] And what we would argue is the actual dictionary definition of a partnership between two separate organizations, right? We like to say this. And you say it. I say it. Everybody that has ever worked in our field has said this sincerely. They've meant it honestly. We're not in the channel business. We are in the partner business, right? We don't have resellers. We have partners. And we are invested.
[00:10:12] We love our partners. And we engage with them. We have members of programs in go-to-market strategy. We have resellers of our product. And then we have members of a larger ecosystem or a program population. But if you want to go so far as to say we are partners together, that has far more in-depth and meaningful implications, right?
[00:10:41] My contention is that the vast majority of vendors in our industry have members and resellers. They do not have partners because they don't take them seriously enough to invest in them deeply enough to actually cause mutual success. Notice the word that I said there. Notice the word that I said there. It's not just mutual success or opportunity that indicates that we are in business together.
[00:11:06] It is that we are investing in the outcome of mutual success, right? A partnership fails when one thrives and the other one does not thrive. That's not a partnership. That's a relationship, but not a partnership, right? So we have to be willing to take a step back and say, are we really partners with these third-party entities? Are we in business with them?
[00:11:33] Are we suppliers and they are downstream members of our value chain to the end user? Or are we being sincere when we say we are partners together? Because if that's what you say and you expect the community to take you seriously, we have some expectations about mutual success and about the investments that might actually cause that outcome. Okay.
[00:12:00] Now, I want to talk a little bit about an area where I've got – I come up from a very classic kind of partner channel model when I – my vendor time. Land, expand, retain was like the mantra of the way that I was raised through my eight years through two different – and Nancy's plan here for Dr. Backup centers around partners she already has, right?
[00:12:23] And I would argue that in a crowded category, make them better could be retention. And growth requires new logos plus expansion plus investment. So I wanted to ask you, like, can 125 partners expanding outrun the churn that took 300 down to 125? Like, what's your take on the math of these programs? Yeah. You know what?
[00:12:51] Yes, it absolutely positively can outrun if you are managing it correctly and making the attendant investments that are required to achieve that success. Not only can it, but it should, right? Right? Think of it this way. If my principal lever for growth – remember, I said there are three levers for growth. I can recruit new. I can expand with current. I can reactivate dormant partners in my community.
[00:13:18] If you are getting more growth from your recruit than you are from your expand, then by definition, it's not a very lucrative business model for people who are already in business with you. Which begs the question of why would a new guy want to get into business with you? The evidence at hand says, you know, the people that are in it, they're good at it. They're trained. They're certified.
[00:13:44] They have been in this program and they are not growing.
[00:14:17] Okay. And 0% of the existing partners are experiencing significant growth. Why in the world would I want to get into that pool, right? Like that does not suggest a thriving environment to me. So not only can expansion exceed the new recruit growth, but it should. That's kind of the mentality that we should have. Why doesn't it actually work that way?
[00:14:46] Well, I'll give you a little bit of a clue in terminology here. Every time a vendor or somebody in our community says long tail of partners, what they mean is people that are already in who are not producing very much individually at all. And we wonder if we can exercise that reactivate strategy, the third of the levers that I've mentioned. That's what they're referring to.
[00:15:14] But if they say I have a very small, big producing partner community and I have a very long tail of very many who produce very, very little. That is a company that is focused on like splashy headlines. We recruited 550, 500 new partners and not wanting to be accountable for whether or not that thing actually performs and works.
[00:15:42] And let me tell you from personal experience, I have sat across the table with leaders of vendor organizations who say, well, their business performance is not my problem. That's not my responsibility. Their performance is their responsibility. My performance is my responsibility. If I bring you in and you fail to thrive, that's on you. And I'm not responsible for that.
[00:16:08] My answer to that question is, A, did you think that they weren't including your brand in their go-to-market messaging? And does that not attach to your brand image in the marketplace? And number two, do you think that other people don't talk to each other, that the channel is not in touch with each other? Right? Like we all know that we are connected and we are a chatty bunch.
[00:16:37] And I'm not going to sign up for any new vendor program until I talk to you or a trusted friend in the industry and say, you ever heard of these guys? Do you do business with them? If yes, why? And what's good about that? If no, why not? I will insist that there is evidence of success.
[00:16:56] And to your original question in this section, Dave, that's the fundamental thing that's different between an established vendor program and a nascent partner program. The single most meaningful difference is you do not have case studies of success that you can point to to justify and accelerate the acquisition of new partners. Okay. So what does the coaching look like when she isn't able to personally know every partner?
[00:17:26] Right there at some point, I mean, 125 is a lot, but you can probably keep those in your brain well enough. 250, 500, like at some point there would be growth. What is the program? Like, what is the coaching look like when she can't personally know all those partners? Yep. Agile, intense sprints, right? Like literally it has to be that way. We got this question one time we were working with one of the vendors, very well established, and a name you would recognize that has thousands of partners.
[00:17:55] And what they were saying to us was the Pareto principle, that 80-20 breakdown was aspirational in their world because they had been doing the recruit and put them in the pool and hope they can swim strategy for so long that they were actually more accurately described as a 595 type of a program, right? They had 5% of their partners producing 95% of their revenue, and the inverse of that was also true.
[00:18:23] And they said, okay, you enable partners because in addition to designing vendor programs, that's the other side of our business is to go across the aisle, engage the partner community intensively, and teach them how to run the business like a business and actually drive growth, right?
[00:18:44] We put ourselves out there as we'll help you build your go-to-market strategy and program, but we will also go with you intensively into that community to cause growth to happen. And they were like, okay, smart guy, what do you do? And how will you do that for my thousands of partners? And my answer was, you don't. You cannot radically improve the business performance of thousands of companies all at the same time.
[00:19:10] You must, based on your resources and the headcount and the program tools that you bring to the table, you must create a very small subset of those partners, in their case, thousands of partners. And what we suggested for them was 50 at a time, right? Put 50 of them in, run a 90-day sprint that focuses on business performance and gives them a continuing education and coaching resource that survives beyond the end of the sprint.
[00:19:40] You do 50, and then you do another 50, and then you do another 50. And as it begins to show traction and real results, then you can do two at a time, and then you can eventually do four at a time, and now we've title-waved the world and everybody is performing. The exact same principle holds in a smaller vendor environment.
[00:20:01] If she has 125, by definition, cannot afford the humans that would be in that partner business development role in quantity to deal with all of them intensively all at once. So find a subset. If it's 125, find 10.
[00:20:20] And put those 10 into a program that is not intended to make them perfect, but is intended to engage intensively, to show meaningful progress, and then continue that effort into the future. Do 10 of them at a time. Nobody bats 1,000 in these kinds of programs. You will get six that make some progress, and three that do not, and one that was like, I never really tried because I wasn't that serious about it to begin with.
[00:20:50] You do the next 10, and you do the next, and so on, right? Intensive, agile sprints, that's the only way that you make this kind of a difference. But the math is the easy part. The intensive, that's the hard part because it's not enough just to say, here's how to run a lead gen campaign featuring my products, or here's how to run a lead gen campaign to your existing install base that are already on contract,
[00:21:19] and we want expansion within your install base. It's not just a SPF program for your sales team that will drive some short-term operating effectiveness intensity with the sales organization. Business development is not just sales and marketing. There's an organizational development side, a strategy and investment side. There is a resource recruiting and onboarding side for your own internal staff.
[00:21:48] Then you have to have message and campaign execution effectiveness. It's growing a business, and that's literally what these small entities will need in order to create growth that they haven't been able to create so far in their own existence. All right, I got one last thing here that I want to talk on this specific. So Nancy calls you on Monday, and she says, what would be the first thing you tell her to do with this program?
[00:22:15] The first thing that I would do, again, identify, stack rank your partners by engagement and by potential, right? The productivity of today as well as the future. It's not just a single stack ranking by revenue. How significant are they today and how much future potential do I perceive based on not just gut feelings, but on an actual analysis?
[00:22:40] Stack rank them by those criteria and don't invest in your biggest partners because if they're big and performing, it's because they know how. And you don't get much more out of going to them and saying, by the way, now I'm going to teach you how to run your business. They're going to look at you and go, excuse me, I already know how to run my business. Thank you very much.
[00:23:01] You go for what, if you think of this in the terminology of like the old Bain Capital, their quadrant that they separate people into. There are MVPs, support them, let them go be MVPs. But there are also diamonds in the rough. They have big potential, but not big current production. That's where you make your investments. You identify who those people are.
[00:23:25] You invest in their capability ahead of their revenue proof and you make them more successful together. See, that's a secret right there, Dave. Everybody wants to say, well, all of my development budgets, my resources, my training and enablement, all of that is a function of my overall revenue in my channel organization.
[00:23:48] Right. If we do 100 percent of our revenue in this channel organization, I'm going to put two or three percent of that into marketing and I'm going to put two or three percent of that into enablement. And that's as much as I can possibly do because that's all the revenue I have. Well, if that were enough to cause growth on top of your existing program, it already would have. It's called return on investment, right?
[00:24:18] You it would be more accurately referred to as return after investment. You invest in them first and the J curve of business performance goes down in the beginning. You make an investment. You are not profitable. You turn it around. You get better performance and eventually you grow into growth together.
[00:24:38] But it requires the the fortitude to actually invest in partners where you see potential, even though they haven't produced a ton of revenue for you yet. OK, so let's get into some of the way we MSPs should look at this. But I want to take a quick break here from another of today's sponsors. This episode is supported by Halo. If you run a managed service provider, your PSA sits at the center of everything. Tickets, billing, contracts, workflows and reporting.
[00:25:09] Halo PSA was built as a modern PSA platform designed for how service providers operate today with flexible workflows, strong integrations and support for automation across the service desk. Many MSPs first encounter Halo when they start asking a simple question. What would a PSA built today actually look like? If that's something you're thinking about in your own business, Halo PSA is worth a look. Learn more at usehalo.com.
[00:25:39] All right, so I want to put our MSP hats on for a moment here because one of the reasons we spent some time talking about the vendor programs was to give the MSPs insights into the way they should think about it. What's going on behind the scenes that makes sense for them, right? So now they go, hey, this is the way those programs are built. Let's look at it from the MSP side then, right? Because we need to look at it.
[00:26:00] If we're looking at the way this works and you're looking at the idea that you're a small 20-person MSP thinking about where to invest in, like, how do you get to the insights, the number you wish you knew, right? The number that they aren't telling you, like, how do you get to insights to tell you how healthy that partner program really is?
[00:26:26] Well, that's a great question because it speaks to the attitude and the core posture that a vendor has to their partner community. You begin by just asking directly to your partner manager, to whatever representative of the program, however senior you can get. You ask them, I'd like to understand how does my performance in your program community compare to all of my peers?
[00:26:52] In other words, what is the best growth performance, the best revenue performance, and the best growth performance that you see inside of your community? What is the bell curve of production, right? Can you draw that out for me and show me what the performance numbers actually look like and then tell me where do I slot in?
[00:27:13] If this is an existing vendor relationship that you already have, you're signed up, you're in their program, you are or aren't producing some revenue for them, they can tell you how your performance compares to your peers across that community. If you are not already a partner, you're not asking how does my zero revenue compare there, it is help me understand how your existing partner community performs.
[00:27:42] What is the top quintile? What is the mean or the median inside of that bell curve? And what is the launch process that gets somebody from here to there? If that vendor does not know those numbers, then that's a recruit them, toss them in the pool and hope they can swim strategy. If they know those numbers and will not share those numbers with you, that is not a vendor that you want to bet your future on
[00:28:09] because they have material information that affects the partnership that they refuse to disclose to a partner in this entity. That doesn't give good feelings in the partner side of things. And if they know those numbers and they will share them with you and they are not attractive, that's also a very important indicator that says I shouldn't just be measuring.
[00:28:36] And this is a very important evolution that you and I have learned from when we got started in the managed services space a long time ago. So we're not just evaluating the performance of the tools and the products that we acquire from our vendor partners. We're not just interested in the pricing or the margin structure on the things that we either consume or that we resell to our own customers.
[00:29:03] We're not just looking at the operational dynamics of doing business with them and getting quotes and submitting invoices and getting reimbursements to the program, right? All of those things matter. Got to have a good product. There has to be some lucrative margins in there and there has to be an operating discipline. But what is the impact on overall business performance, right?
[00:29:28] If a vendor isn't thinking that way, then by definition, they are talking to you about like, this is the very best spark plug that you should put into your engine. When we talk about overall productivity of your car, the spark plug matters, but you can have the world's best spark plug and that's not actually going to change the performance of your overall business.
[00:29:52] That wider lens has to be the evaluation that MSPs expect from vendors and use it as a strict stack ranking and prioritization metric in your own business. If there are five PSA vendors and there are five backup vendors that want my business, that want me and my people to invest and pay attention in them, then I need to know beyond your product and your program margins and operations,
[00:30:21] what are you doing to have a direct material impact on my business? Because if they can't tell you that story, you just learn the most important thing. Then I think there's something else here that you wrote about that I kind of want to bring in because you wrote something about concentration risk that I think actually also fits in here, particularly as I think about that relative importance. I love your spark plug analogy because every vendor thinks their spark plug is super important and they kind of forget that you're driving a car that has all the,
[00:30:50] that I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. You wrote around orchestration because you said you don't need to own every part of what you deliver as long as the relationships are solid. And you also wrote the businesses are the size they are because that's as big as they know how to be. But that was a really nice way of saying it. An orchestration lets an MSP promise more than its head count. Now, I did want to ask a little bit about that because that's how it fits in. You're assembling all of these vendor programs to go forward.
[00:31:20] Isn't that orchestration though promising to be bigger than you know how to be? It can be, right? If you are, and see, this is where you're touching on something that I would like to drop a little firecracker in the middle of the industry and start a really big conversation. Everybody says ecosystem.
[00:31:41] And what they mean when they say that is this community of interdependent, interconnected organizations where some might do the pre-sales and some might do the sales transaction and some might do the implementation and some might do the aftermarket support. And our ecosystem enables all of those disparate organizations to collaborate together seamlessly and present a one face, one solution to the customer.
[00:32:08] Except that's not what vendor programs actually do. Some do. But that's not what 99% of them mean when they say ecosystem. When they say ecosystem, what they mean is there's a whole lot of partners that have a whole lot of different business models. We've got resellers and we've got MSPs. We've got systems integrators. That means we have an ecosystem. An ecosystem requires active interaction, right?
[00:32:33] That is the same principle when you are the MSP and you are going to market and saying, for example, I am an expert in network operations, in cybersecurity, and in data center operations. I am not an expert in data management, in business intelligence, and data analysis.
[00:32:54] But we bring those things to the table with our customers and we tell them one integrated general contractor story that says, From your network to your cyber requirements, to your application stack, to your data reserves, we can provide a solution that brings everything together in one integrated relationship. We can give you the best possible outcomes in that.
[00:33:22] And occasionally, that will be my W-2 employees who do that. And other times, they will be 1099s that I bring in as individual contract contributors. And in other times, they will be other incorporated entities, S-Corps or C-Corps, that we do business together as contractor and subcontractor. That's a really nice idea, but it's a difficult skill.
[00:33:50] And if you go in there and say, well, I've signed up six different people who will promise to share brochure space with me, that's not the same as bringing an integrated experience to the customer. That seamless interaction, that one point of contact can bring you all of those deliverables. The construction industry has been doing this for millennia, right? The manufacturing industry has been doing this literally since the dawn of the industrial age,
[00:34:19] where we stopped trying to manufacture every single component and we integrated a supply chain instead, where people would make components that I would then originally assemble into the finished equipment, right? That principle is known and it is something that we've been using at the vendor level of this industry for a very long time.
[00:34:43] One, I believe that the big unlock for growth is being able to capitalize on value that you can deliver to your customer without assuming the direct risk of fixed cost for your own operation or your own investment. You can partner with these people. You can make them a variable expense in the model and you can actually grow together. But you need to know how to orchestrate.
[00:35:09] You need to understand how to evaluate potential candidates and choose the right ones with operational and cultural compatibility. You need to understand how to work deals, how to allocate the finder's responsibility and the deliverer's responsibility. Collaboration is a skill and it's one that gets talked about an awful lot in our industry. It is not one that most of us know how to do effectively.
[00:35:38] And I will literally tell you, we're drinking our own Kool-Aid here, right? Like you know me as the proprietor of Morris Management Partners over the last 18 years now that we've been in business doing this thing. But over the last couple of years, we have recognized that while we think we know an awful lot of stuff,
[00:36:00] we do not know everything, nor do we employ the experts that are necessary in order to address every dimension of a vendor's go-to-market strategy. So we are participants in a consortium where other people who do complementary things with us are collaborating so that we can find opportunities, divide and conquer in terms of the value delivery, and maintain that single-face experience to the customer.
[00:36:30] If you want a good indication about how serious I am about the their success is your success thing, right? The entity that we have spun up, we actually call it partner success advocates. And our target audience in that consortium is the vendor community. And when we approach people and the C-level individuals go, wait a minute, aren't you talking about vendor success? And my answer is, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
[00:36:56] And the route to vendor success is partner success. I'm here to teach you why that is the indispensable part of your strategy. We're going to solve all of your problems from market segmentation to program design to training to recruiting. We can do all of those things. This human cannot do all of those things. But boy, do I know a guy who can help me do those things. And we do it in a seamless, integrated fashion.
[00:37:27] That's the type of business value proposition that I'm advocating for an MSP. You can be bigger and deliver more without having to take the five years that's required to learn and actually know what you're talking about in that new deliverable domain. Well, I think that's the action item right there is to focus on that orchestration. Ryan, I know because I have experience with this, you and I could go for several more hours if we chose to. But we don't have that much time.
[00:37:54] So if people are interested in connecting, finding your work, what's the best way for them to do that? The best way to get me is still on LinkedIn. I'm RyanMorris303. You might have to look around a little bit because LinkedIn's search feature is not necessarily the most graceful. But at RyanMorris303, that's me on LinkedIn. I publish some stuff there. But it's also the best possible way to just reach out and go, hey, I got a question. What do you think about this?
[00:38:20] Well, if you're interested in understanding the whys of vendor programs, Ryan's my go-to. Ryan, always fun to have you on the show. Thanks for joining me. Absolutely. Glad to do it. And I want to thank our vendor partners that supported today's show, Firetail, one platform to discover, assess, and protect all AI usage across an organization with a multi-tenant console built for MSPs. They're at firetail.ai.
[00:38:43] And Transit AI, an all-in-one workspace for network engineers with an investigation-only AI that reads everything and changes nothing. TransitAI.app. And ABC Solutions for accounting, bookkeeping, invoicing, and payroll built for MSPs. They're at abcsolvesit.com. And Rhythms, the channel-only temporary and backup internet connection that MSPs can deliver anywhere.
[00:39:10] They're available at rythmz.com. This show, the questions, the back and forth, the discussion, this is the closest thing on the feed to what the Small Biz Thoughts community is every day. You can join member meetings, ask real questions, and get real answers from operators running businesses just like yours, plus the resource library and courses through IT Service Pro University, now all powered with an MCP connection.
[00:39:36] If this format is the episode you look forward to, join us at smallbizthoughts.org. If you're interested in advertising, head to mspradio.com slash engage. And the Business of Tech is produced under ethics guidelines posted at businessof.tech. Thanks for listening. I will see you next time.
[00:40:16] Produced by Picture This Video. Part of the MSP Radio Network.

