Insights as a Service

MSPs that get their legal frameworks right minimise risk, drive profitability, and drive Enterprise value. Do you have the right agreements in place? How often do you review them? How are they aligned with ever changing SaaS vendor terms of use? Anne Hall from IT Agree joins Brendan this week to fill you in on how you can get your legal frameworks in order.

About 90% of start-ups fail, but what sets apart that successful 10%? Adam Ross co-founder of CloudOlive spills the beans on what it takes to build a successful start-up. Adam and his co-founder went through the Antler Venture Capital incubator in 2020. They successfully secured funding to solve a universal MSP challenge, SaaS billing management. Now CloudOlive is empowering MSPs all over the globe solving vendor on-billing and contract headaches in leaps and bounds. Welcome to episode 42 of Insights as a Service, where Brendan and Adam talk about how to get your start-up idea funded, educating your customers, the secret sauce of what really makes a business a business, and the #1 thing to do before building any product. Get yourself a drink and enjoy this episode of Insights as a Service. As always timestamps are below.

By now we have all heard about the Optus hack, with around 10 million people's data at risk, and up to 2 million sensitive records taken. This week we mark the start of Cyber Security Awareness Month by looking at what happened (based on current reporting), what could have been done to prevent it, and what best practice cyber security looks like. Darryl Turner, Head of DevOps at Lightwire, joins Brendan and Nick to go through all the details.

With the recent news of Optus being hit by a cyber attack, this is a timely episode. This week we discuss our experiences at the recent IT Nation Connect and Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo conferences.  We learned about the biggest cyber security breaches, the evolution in ransomware, mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity, and how every event kicks off with the same video.

Where is LinkedIn going wrong? LinkedIn was designed to make recruitment and social selling easy. It's the ideal platform to promote your ideas on thought leadership and your personal and business brand. But as it has grown, the platform, and the way people use it, has changed. In this episode, we are joined by Harriet Mellor from Your Sales Co to talk about why we get those hated DMs after connecting with people, whether religion or politics should show up on your feed, the features that are missing, and the content that is preferred by the LinkedIn algorithm.

The thing that makes a business great doesn't always scale. How do you hold on to your formula for success as head count and business complexity grows? This week Nick and Brendan talk through that, along with how the French do business, learning from rejection, and matching business hours to customer availability.

Greg Sharp sold Base2 to Kordia in 2021 for a 10x multiple, so he knows a thing or two about orchestrating a high value exit. He has also founded a number of other businesses, the latest of which is ZenContract, a SaaS play aimed at helping MSPs build value in their own businesses through simplifying scale. He joins Brendan this week to talk about what drives bigger multiples, where the MSP industry is going, the convergence of Telco and managed services, and what's next for ZenContract.

Swearing in the workplace is up by 60%. Is this acceptable, and if yes, by whom and in which context?  The secondary job market has always existed, and most companies were turning a blind eye. Now with the tight labour market we are experiencing, companies are actively seeking workers who can take on a second job. How do you integrate them into your work culture, are they getting enough sleep, and what are the consequences on health and safety measures? Nick and Brendan cover these questions, and a bunch of other industry talking points, in this episode.

Here's how to avoid profitability issues in your business. What's your end game? And how can you work back from that definition to create the required building blocks for success? Adrien Nisbet works with businesses under stress to turn them around and/or to help execute owner exits. In this episode, he talks through the ways to define your end game, the data to track, the need for tangible assets, value based pricing, the revenue delusion, and more...

Matt Bristow, GM of ONGC, joins Brendan and Nick to talk about starting up a security operations centre (SOC) and how his business implemented a cost effective entry into the security space. The guys also discuss whether "guys" is a gender neutral term, how fibre build times are blowing out, and why a 20 mile march matters.