Everon Launches MSP Coach
Everon Technology Services LLC, one of our MSPmentor 100 companies, has launched MSP Coach. According to a teaser for the site, Everon has “taken everything we’ve learned and begun creating courses, content, and tools that you can use to help build your MSP business.”
When Everon CEO Mike Cooch mentioned the site to me in an email, I asked for more information about Everon’s goals for the site. Here are some highlights from our email conversation.
My question to Mike:
“I realize there’s room in the market for numerous perspectives. But let me ask the obvious question: How do you compare/contrast your goals for MSP Coach vs. MSP Partners, MSPAlliance, MSP University, MSPSN (and I guess to some extent, MSPmentor…).”
Mike’s response:
“Well, I guess I can’t speak for their goals. I have a great time teaching people, and I am very passionate about entrepreneurship and the power of small business. I would love to see if I can help a bunch of MSPs learn to be more successful and grow, and have a good time doing it. At this point I haven’t set more specific goals than that, but I will, and I’ll let you know when I do!
My understanding of the others you mentioned makes me believe that MSPCoach can bring something a bit different from the others. MSP Partners is vendor oriented, MSPSN comes from the perspective of a 5 person MSP business and seems to be aiming to create a consolidation platform of some sort, MSPMentor is more focused on reporting happenings in our industry. I think MSPU is probably the closest to what we are offering, but we aim to deliver more of an ongoing coaching model to really help people apply the lessons.”
Actually, it sounds like Mike at MSP Coach and Erick Simpson at MSPU have something else in common: They’re both working to grow the managed services market. It’s similar to former Novell CEO Ray Noorda’s strategy in the early 1990s, called Coopetition. Sometimes you compete with people, but more often you cooperate with them to drive an industry forward.
It’s too early to say how MSP Coach will evolve. In a blog entry, Mike writes:
“We are just getting it started and this is a “nights and weekends” gig for us, so please be patient — more content will be added as we are able to do so.”
You can check out MSP Coach at www.mspcoach.com.
Thanks for the mention Joe!
We definitely believe that growing the market and creating strong players is good for Everon as well. In order for an industry to create real wealth and opportunity for its participants, there needs to be strong competitors with strong financial results. Otherwise, continued investment for innovation and acquisitions won’t really happen.
We’re learned a lot in our 5+ years, and hopefully we can contribute to the success of others.
Mike Cooch
Mike: Keep us posted as MSP Coach evolves. And I look forward to seeing you in Orlando.
Thanks, Joe – as always, you are right on point. Mike, I would welcome a dialog to identify potential synergies between our organizations, as we really believe that partnering is the best way in which we can collectively help others. I bet we can swap war stories forever…!
Erick Simpson
MSP University
http://www.mspu.us
Erick, Mike: Keep growin’ the market and we’ll keep writing about it. Have a good weekend.
Hi Mike,
MSPSN’s (MSP Services Network) focus is to bring MSPs together as Community to help each other leverage our individual strengths to grow our businesses. We provide education and training, like we did with our MSP Revolution event last weekend where we brought a much higher level of learning and true business training to our partners than any other event to date focused on MSPs. We also provide support services to the MSPSN Community through our Virtual Service Desk. We’ve taken our own business model and through our Virtual Service Desk provide a road map to the MSP who is looking for direction and guidance in growing their business. That road map consists of education, tools, and service delivery. We put it all together to give them a foundation from which to grow, and tools and support to manage that growth.
As Erick states, we too are very focused on partnering for growth and success and would be very open to dialogue in that regard. Erick (MSPU) and I (MSPSN) have partnerd to deliver more amp; better content to both of our groups, and MSPSN brings the top tier vendors amp; manufacturer solutions to their base through partnering because it’s good for them, good for us, and good for the Channel.
I commend you for stepping out and providing content and support to the MPSs. The more good information we have in the Channel about growing profitable Managed Services practices the better the whole Channel ecosystem will be.
Amy Luby
http://www.mspsn.com
aluby at mspsn dot com
In case anyone missed it, Amy Luby and MSPSN recently hosted MSP Revolution, a well-received conference in Chicago. I was only able to attend for a few hours, but those who were there for the Friday and weekend sessions spoke highly of a “game”-based approach to training. Questions to aluby [at] mspsn dot com.
Thanks for the support and offers to connect. We agree with this philosophy, and look forward to working with you to find ways to benefit everyone.
Mike
I guess I should chime in here as well. This is exactly what we do at Do IT Smarter. We have a program designed to help VAR’s and solution providers make the transition to the Managed Services business model. We made this transition about 8 years ago and have been helping VARs do so for over three years now. This June we started piloting a community based website and are getting ready for a formal launch, take a look if you are interested: http://www.domspsmarter.com
I also work with the Education Committee for the MSP Alliance, our charter is to provide a solid educational program for MSPs attending the MSP Alliance events.
Also I do want to say that although I agree that MSPs should be partnering together, I think that perhaps it may be better for the MSP community if those of us providing training and education don’t partner up too much. If we continue to develop our own unique programs not only will there be more options for the MSP community but the content will continue to improve.
Finally Mike, I created an account on your MSP Coach site and viewed some of the content, it looks very good. Keep up the good work and thanks for your dedication.
Lane Smith
http://www.doitsmarter.com
http://www.domspsmarter.com
Hi Lane,
Interesting perspective. A friend of mine over at Trend just sent me the latest IDC Channel Report which states, “Those that do survive will do so by building strong alliances with other partners as well as having superior customer service capabilities. For these partners, the definition of a customer will have to extend well beyond just the end user because other partners, ISVs, and service providers will also be their customers.”
I do believe that we all need to be open to partnering in order to survive, but also because it’s good for the Channel.
Amy Luby
http://www.mspsn.com
aluby at mspsn dot com
Amy,
Don’t get me wrong I built my business on partnering and as such have 150 channel partners that I work with every day. What I am saying is that we need to be careful not to create a single vendor type solution when it comes to training and education.
Take this as an example, if Kaseya, Level Platforms, N-Able and Silverback had all gotten together 5 years back and decided to partner rather than compete where would their technology be today. Only guessing here but I would suspect that it would be much less powerful and robust then it is today. Not only that, MSPs would have much fewer options to choose from when selecting a platform.
Amy, Lane: We’re at a tricky time in the MSP industry. We need a healthy mix of cooperation and competition (coopetition, as former Novell CEO Ray Noorda used to put it).
Cooperation leads to open standards (Ethernet, TCP/IP, etc.) and better education. Competition (Linux vs. Windows vs. Mac OS X, for example) leads to customer choice, new innovations and lower costs.
We need to blend both in the managed services market. We need to cooperate to put in the infrastructure — the highways, if you will — so that MSPs and organizations can compete against each other on those highways.
Boy Joe you certainly said it better than me. I guess that is why you write for a living and I am lucky to manage a few comments a week.
Team;
Building healthy, professional alliances does not require the loss of individual identity or value – we’re not proposing an “all or nothing” philosophy here, and none of us have all the answers.
This is the reason we appreciate and promote partnering, rather than taking a closed system approach to building our memberships, and look forward to continuing in this effort.
Erick Simpson
MSP University
http://www.mspu.us