Small MSPs band together for comfort and guidance

Ask a small business owner when they last took a holiday and you might get a laugh.

But Linden Jackson, who runs the MSP Agile IT Solutions in Mornington, Victoria, had taken a break in the year before we spoke to him at the CRN Pipeline conference.

“I've taken a couple of holidays, luckily, in the last 12 months,” Jackson said.

He is a founding member of a close-knit community of some 460 business owners and IT professionals focused on SMB customers. It's a group he could potentially call on to help his customers while he takes time off – not that he’d needed to yet.

That group is SMBiT Professionals, which grew out of a community effort by Microsoft resellers around Small Business Server (SBS) in 2003. Although SBS is long gone, the community effort grew and evolved into a not-for-profit association with chapters around Australia. The 9th annual SMBiT Professionals National Conference takes place in Melbourne on 25th and 26th October 2024, and for the first time in years the the event is open to non-members.

This community can be a help to small business owners with limited resources.

“We can share our knowledge but, for me more importantly, we're able to gain and gather knowledge from others,” Jackson said.

“I can't do everything and I may be able to draw on other people's skills, services and ability.”

“Our businesses are quite small and so everyone wants to take a holiday every now and then. So we can draw on other people to be a support [and] that has been important." 

“And I haven't really had to use them, but I've always had someone at the end of a phone who can be a support to our clients if we ever needed it.”

Big changes for small businesses

Jackson said that the trend from reselling physical products to providing value-added services and support was ongoing.

“We've been moving from delivering … servers, products, physical solutions on-site through to subscription-based services — cloud and the like,” he said.

“So, it's been a big change for the community particularly because there's been a lot of more technical people who are used to running around with screwdrivers, [and] hardware in their cars [now asking] how do I sell a solution that I don't physically touch?”

The change from providing a big purchase every few years to an ongoing revenue stream has been an adjustment for many in the SMBiT Professionals community, he said.

There have been questions about artificial intelligence.

“I think we're in a changing time with the [IT] channel … understanding what's this AI? How does it affect us in business? Is it just about generating content — using [Microsoft] Copilot or ChatGPT — or will it … enhance our business?

“But more so then, how do we help our clients to utilise that technology? So, for me, it's as big a shift — even more so — than moving to the cloud.”

Looking to vendors & disties for help

Jackson said members of the SMBiT Professionals community increasingly want vendors that can do more than provide the right products.

“The really important discussions over the last 12 months particularly have been around what vendors to work with in as far as the way they help us to do business.

“Not just, do they have the right product or the right solution; it's about how can they help us, how can they train us?

“So with the SMBiT community, we get people to come in and do sessions to help us to learn the technology, but also help us to do business improvement and things like that.”

Outside assistance helped Agile IT Solutions to a “big year of growth”.

Over 15 years the MSP had found itself with “different clients with different products, different solutions, different outcomes, prices – all of those sort of things.”

“Through connecting with vendors and distributors who also support the SMBIT community, we've been able to learn how better to bundle our products, bundle our stack, raise our prices and improve what we do for our clients.”