Salute to Harry Brelsford, Founder of the SMB IT Community!

Salute to Harry Brelsford, SMB Nation, and the SMB IT Community 

- Lessons Learned, Episode 35

Around 2000-2004, I was having success in my IT consulting business. We were growing slowly but steadily. I had figured out contracts, regularly monthly maintenance, and even flat-fee pricing. We weren't quite what you would call managed services, but we were pretty close.

Along the way, I'd read a lot of books to help me figure out how to be successful. Most were completely unrelated to technology. But in the world of tech, one book really stood out: SMB Consulting Best Practices by Harry Brelsford. This book is still a great read, and a great management book.

Then I got an invitation to Harry Brelsford's SMB Nation conference in Seattle. This was the second SMB Nation conference, and the first in Seattle. It was truly amazing, and I met dozens of people at that event that I am still connected with today. Most importantly, I met Harry Brelsford and Nancy Williams, his right-hand person and primary sales person at the time.

If you're not familiar with Harry and his awesome contributions to this industry, see the blog post I wrote in 2010: #1 Best Decision I've Made In My Business: Working With Harry Brelsford and SMB Nation. See https://blog.smallbizthoughts.com/2010/08/1-best-decision-ive-made-in-my-business.html

Harry is one of the primary reasons that our industry is based on a core collection of local leaders all over the globe. He started, or asked others to start, dozens and dozens of small, local IT "user groups" based on technicians' love of the Small Business Server product line. Everything we think of as the modern SMB IT channel owes a word to thanks to Harry and his globe trotting efforts.

In 2004, I had written the Network Documentation Workbook. With the help of Nancy Williams, who was his marketing pro at the time, Harry looked at that book and agreed to help me sell it. He was our primary distributor and we put that book in the hands of thousands of IT consultants in the years 2005-2007. 

After that, Harry engaged me to write a book for hire - The SAN Primer for SMB. We traveled around promoting that book. And then I released Service Agreements for SMB Consultants, Relax Focus Succeed, and ... away I went writing, speaking, and training IT consultants all over the world.

Lessons Learned

First, there are key people who help push an industry or a movement forward. The SMB IT channel would have come into existence without Harry. In fact, would would have thrived without him. But Harry helped our community to recognize itself and to build self-awareness much faster than it would have without him. He also built the industry around community.

Industries can grow around products and roles like technician or programmer. Communities are built around people. Communities are like extended families. Sometimes they fight, but mostly they work toward the common good. Harry's SMB Nation events - large and small - both built and maintained the SMB IT community for many years.

As the industry grew, many groups self-identified around specific interests or individuals. One group became HTG - the Hartland Technology Group. Another went to Robin Robins' events. Yet another went to the ASCII events. But all those groups, and more, started at SMB Nation and spun off from there. 

A second lesson is that things change fast. Harry once ran the only show dedicated to the SMB side of our industry. Now there are hundreds of shows and events every year. Some are as small as ten people. Others have five thousand or more attendees. Harry no longer runs major events. But he keeps pivoting to the next opportunity, and he's still in the game.

As I said was back in 2010, SMB Nation was the watering hole for our industry. It was our Mecca. Today, we are too fragmented to have a single meeting place. Ultimately, that's a good thing. But we still need the community spirit to keep us focus on the human beings that make up this industry. We cannot hold each other accountable if we don't talk to each other and share values around professionalism and ethics.

Ultimately, my commitment to the community side of the IT community is because of the world built by Harry Brelsford twenty years ago.

All comments welcome.

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Episode 35

This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. 

Leave comments and questions below. And join me next week, right here.

Subscribe to the blog so you don't miss a thing.

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The ASCII Group Unveils New Website and Member Portal to Support the Evolving MSP Community

 From my friends at ASCII ... 

The ASCII Group Unveils New Website and Member Portal to Support the Evolving MSP Community

Washington, D.C. – July 17, 2025 – The ASCII Group, North America’s original vendor-neutral community for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), has launched a redesigned corporate website and a new member portal, delivering a more connected and engaging experience for today’s MSPs.

These updates reflect a broader initiative to elevate the ASCII experience—streamlining access to programs, enhancing peer collaboration, and building on the vision of ASCII’s late founder, Alan Weinberger, who championed the power of community in the IT channel.

The new website features improved navigation, refreshed content, and a clearer representation of ASCII’s vendor-neutral position in the market. It also provides easier access to information on member benefits, industry events, and peer programs.

“The new site is a true reflection of the community we serve,” said Jerry Koutavas, CEO of The ASCII Group. “It reinforces our commitment to helping MSPs grow and stay competitive, while better showcasing the breadth and depth of what ASCII offers.”

Earlier this year, ASCII also introduced its member benefit portal—a centralized platform for real-time community engagement. Built to support meaningful peer interaction, the portal enables members to submit subcontracting requests, exchange vendor recommendations, explore acquisition opportunities, and offer or receive support during service disruptions or emergencies.

“The member portal brings to light what has always existed within our community—MSPs supporting each other in practical, business-focused ways,” added Koutavas. “By formalizing that collaboration, we’ve made it easier for members to connect, share, and solve challenges together.”

Both the website and portal were developed with direct input from ASCII members and are part of the organization’s ongoing effort to remain the most accessible, trusted, and community-driven resource for MSPs in the channel.

About The ASCII Group, Inc.

Founded in 1984, The ASCII Group is the original IT community of the channel, uniting Managed Service Providers (MSPs) across North America. As a vendor-neutral organization, ASCII provides unbiased resources and a collaborative environment to support business growth. Members span the U.S. and Canada, ranging from SMB-focused MSPs to international solution providers. ASCII offers leveraged purchasing programs, education, marketing support, peer networking, and more, complemented by a vibrant ecosystem of technology vendors. Learn more at www.ascii.com.

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Absolutely Nothing is More Important than Testing Backups

Absolutely Nothing is More Important than Testing Backups

- Lessons Learned, Episode 34

Everyone in IT loves to give lip service to backups. We back up everything. We have backups of backups. And yet, MOST MSPs do a horrible job of taking care of the single most important thing you ever have to do with a client: Test the Backups!

If you've followed the series, you know that I have a long history of backing up a large variety of systems. One of my chores as an outsourced manager for HP's Roseville, CA plant was to manage the backup of all servers. This was a full backup every night - and the tapes went offsite for a year before they were used again. So, five days a week, that's 250 full backups per year.

Too much? Well, what do you think the cost of lost data would be at a plant with 5,000 technical people? If you said, "immeasurable," that's a good start.

As I moved into consulting with individual businesses, one rule has remained true for more than three decades: fifty per cent of all installed backups are not working. This is true today. This is true across all backup systems. This is true everywhere, all the time.

Why do backups fail? Well, because of three primary reasons.

1) Technicians set them up wrong

2) No one tests them

3) Stuff breaks

Let's start with "stuff breaks." You can't stop the fact that hardware fails, components fail, electricity goes out at the wrong time, Windows updates break scheduled programs, the employee who's supposed to swap media doesn't always do it, etc. Stuff happens. What you CAN do is to test the backups to see if they're working. 

You can do something about #1 by being very well trained on the most important technology you deploy. And #2 is inexcusable. Testing backups should be the first thing - the highest priority job - at every client, every month. 

Looking at a dashboard to see if the BDR self-reports a green light is NOT testing the backup. Looking at screenshots of successful automated self-tests is not testing the backups. 

A human being person who works for you needs to access a client's system, mount an image, and restore some data. If you use tape (as do Amazon, Google, and Microsoft), someone needs to restore from tape. If you backup to hard drives, someone needs to restore from hard drive. In all cases, someone needs to restore individual emails to an alternate location and verify success.

Every month.

Every client.

No exceptions.

And if you have technicians, I highly recommend that every technician be rotated through each client so that every technician has some experience restoring data from every client (or at least several clients). That way, no one is seeing something for the first time in an emergency.

I won't repeat the story here, but in the last real job I had before I became a consultant, we had a system failure that cost about $20 million for one day's downtime. See my blog post here: https://blog.smallbizthoughts.com/2024/07/one-piece-of-your-security-strategy-is.html. Given the hardware and backup systems of the day, this was the smallest possible outage. That's why companies have insurance.

Today, some clients can afford downtime of less than a day. For some, they can afford to be up within an hour. But everyone can afford to totally rebuild, because the backup systems are so much better.

For more than ten years, I have been shocked and amazed that any business ever pays for a ransomware incident. In my opinion, this is never necessary because they should have a complete backup at all times, and that system should be tested.

If you cannot restore a client from last night's backup, either you sold them the wrong thing, they failed to buy what your recommended, or you are failing to do your job. Your job does not end when the backup is installed. It does not end when the client pays their bill. The job ends when you have finished testing that backup by restoring data. And that has to be repeated every month.

Period.

The single most important thing you do as a technician is to test backups. If you're not doing this, you're not doing your job. You certainly are not providing managed services, and you should not call yourself a managed service provider.

Ultimately, backups don't fail; technicians fail.

Sales tip: Ask a prospect for a copy of the report they got this month showing that their backup was tested and is working. I have never met a small business owner who could show this to me. And it has opened many doors that led to full network assessments and new clients.

Fifty percent of all backups are failing right now. How are your clients doing? Prove it.

Feedback Welcome.

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All comments welcome.

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Episode 34

This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. 

Leave comments and questions below. And join me next week, right here.

Subscribe to the blog so you don't miss a thing.

:-)

Giant MSPs will Never Dominate Our Industry. Here's Why.

How will YOU thrive in a world of Giant MSPs?

Technology consulting is a fragmented industry. As such, it will never be dominated by a small handful of major players. In that sense, we're much closer to accountants than rental car companies. Why is it so fragmented, and why will it never be consolidated? There are three primary reasons.

First, the barriers to entry are very low. In fact, if you can spell IT, you can call yourself a computer consultant. Our industry needs higher barriers, better standards, and even some licensing. But even when that's achieved, the barriers to entry will be as low as barbers and restaurants. 

Second (following from the first), tens of thousands of people enter this business every year. They "try their hand" at computer consulting, and many stay. And with five or ten clients, they can make money, but the growing mega-MSPs have no interest in buying them out. So they stay and grow.

Third, as a service business, high quality service can only excel in smaller shops. Larger companies can't help themselves. They tend to centralize control, centralize customer "service" lines, centralize buying, and are incapable of understanding individual clients or the needs of individual local business environments.

Large MSPs, ironically, are also financially less profitable and less stable. We'll come back to this point.

Fragmentation in our industry cannot be overcome. Consider the strengths of the very small IT businesses and the weaknesses of very large businesses, especially in light of what we're seeing right now in the IT consulting space.

The "promises" of large, consolidated businesses is that they'll bring efficiency of scale. The reality is that the generic building blocks of centralization create a kind of false efficiency that demoralizes the workers, alienates the growing middle-management, and dramatically reduces service delivery to clients.

Small(ish) local businesses excel at personal service, the ability to build a strong local reputation, close control of internal operations, and controlling costs when needed. Plus, they literally live in the local market and know how to react to it.

Small businesses, especially owner-operated consulting businesses, are subject to far fewer regulations. There's a somewhat magic line that gets crossed when a company exceeds fifty employees. Massive amounts of employment law and other regulations kick in. There are some barriers at twenty-five employees, but fifty is a major transition point.

When small companies are closely managed by the owner, it's easy to improve response time or address other specific strategies that need improvement. In fact, it's easier to see these areas for improvement - without fancy KPIs that measure all kinds of meaningless variables that are not "key" and are rarely related to performance.

As companies grow, it's easy to say that they'll add efficiency by centralizing billing, for example. This virtually guarantees more client unhappiness with bills that no one can explain. Why? Well, the alienated workers get paid whether they do a mediocre job or a great job. So ticket notes are sloppy. 

The person creating the invoices has no idea whether they're accurate. The person in customer service knows nothing about the client, the technician, or the work that's being doing. All they have is the notes in front of them. Long cycles of arguing about invoices simply do not exist in small companies.

Another promise of centralized control that can never come true - especially when the company is funded by private equity - is that larger companies will lower prices due to economies of scale. But service-based businesses are not at all like manufacturing businesses. We're not making bester, faster, cheaper cell phones with more features than last year.

As companies grow and centralize operations, all the pressures are to increase costs due to internal pressures and operational realities. The largest internal pressure is simply that investors want their money back. In some cases, they've actually been promised a specific return on their investment. The easiest way to increase revenue is to charge more. The easiest way to cut costs is to fire the people who deliver service.

The investors don't care about a shortage of talent. They don't care about inflationary pressures, tariffs, or local conditions. Last year they squeezed 20% profit from the bottom line. So this year it's 21%. Next year it will be 22%. How? No one cares. The number has to be the number. Sell more, cut costs, fire people. No one cares as long as you get that extra 1%.

“If management sets quantitative goals and makes people’s work dependent on achieving them, they will probably do so – even if they have to destroy the company to do it.” – W. Edwards Deming

Operational realities increase expenses because local control is directly related to client satisfaction, employee satisfaction, client relationships, culture, and responsiveness. When these things become centralized, there are no pressures that keep prices low except an arbitrary command-and-control top-down edict that limits prices. But that can't happen when the stronger internal force is to get one more percent of profit.

Larger operations also introduce waste because the time lag between local actions and centralized response is greater. If billing is wrong, or you're being charged for the wrong number of licenses or widgets, that is very visible in a company with fewer than fifty clients under contract. 

It's nearly invisible in a centralized organization with a thousand clients under contract - especially when no one from the technician to manager to central billing has an incentive to care about how many widgets are being reported to the big, nameless, faceless corporate overlords in another state. Waste is the order of the day in large companies.

Wait. Stop! Michael Porter says that Strategic Discipline might be able to combat the forces of industry fragmentation. (See Competitive Strategy, chapter 9. https://amzn.to/43Uvr6f)

Strategic Discipline simply means focusing the organization's attention and efforts on specific areas of the business. Again, this sounds great in theory, and it does work in manufacturing. But what does it look like in the real world of service delivery?

Strategic discipline in IT service delivery means that you can get everyone on the team to agree to fix problems on the first attempt. You can get them to put in quality notes. You can get everyone to learn some soft skills and make clients feel like they're getting personalized attention. And if you have great culture, you can do all of these at once.

In other words, strategic discipline in service delivery looks exactly like what small companies do really well and large companies do very poorly.

Here's the good news/bad news of being one of the 500,000 small IT companies in a market where all the money seems to be flowing to ever-growing mega-MSPs. The bad news is that they will go after many of your clients. And, primarily, they want your larger clients.

The good news is that they love to revel in their bigness. Because of this hubris, you will win the market for clients who value excellent service in the long run. It won't be easy, and probably won't be much fun. You'll have to lure back clients who were promised better service at a lower price and got neither. 

You will need to build a strategy to compete in a world where mega-MSPs have all the marketing money but deliver substandard tech support and just plain bad customer service. 

The really, really bad news is that, if you don't like competing in that market, you need to get out now. The good news is that, if you stay and fight, you will win. You won't take all their clients and kick them out of town. But you will have all the clients who appreciate you, appreciate your level of service, and provide you with a very comfortable living. And you can make a nice profit doing that.

Comments welcome.

:-)

The ASCII Group Announces the Passing of Founder and Chairman Alan Weinberger

The ASCII Group Announces the Passing of Founder and Chairman Alan Weinberger

Washington, D.C. – July 7, 2025 – The ASCII Group is deeply saddened to announce the passing of its Founder and Chairman, Alan D. Weinberger, who died on June 29, after a courageous battle with cancer.

Alan was more than a leader—he was a visionary, a legal scholar, and a fierce advocate for the IT channel. In 1984, he founded The ASCII Group with 40 independent computer dealers and a bold idea: that the IT industry could thrive through community, collaboration, and shared purpose. Over the next four decades, he led ASCII to become the preeminent independent IT community in North America, serving thousands of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and solution providers.

A sharp and inquisitive legal mind, Alan earned his J.D. from NYU, where he was a Law Review Editor and Order of the Coif honoree, followed by an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. He was a founding professor at Vermont Law School and brought thoughtful leadership and strategic vision to every stage of ASCII’s growth.

Alan was widely respected as a thought leader in the IT industry. His editorials appeared in major publications including The Wall Street Journal, and he was named one of the Top 25 Most Influential Executives in the Computer Industry by CRN. His most recent book—The Doctor’s In: Treating America’s Greatest Cyber Security Threat—spotlights the essential role MSPs play in safeguarding organizations in today’s evolving cyber landscape. Written for the general public, the book reflects Alan’s lifelong mission to elevate IT professionals and the work they do.

“Alan was deeply committed to community and to raising the visibility of the MSP to the world. He recognized their importance long before others did and dedicated his life to championing their value,” said Jerry Koutavas, CEO of The ASCII Group. “His vision created a powerful community that changed the lives of thousands of IT professionals. We will carry his legacy forward with the same passion and purpose that he instilled in all of us.”

Alan’s unmistakable voice, sharp curiosity, and ability to form lasting connections left a profound impact on the IT channel. For more than four decades, he was a true champion of the industry—a trusted advocate, mentor, and driving force behind positive change in the IT world.

For those who wish to share condolences or memories, a memorial page has been created by Alan’s family and can be found here: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/legacyremembers/alan-weinberger-obituary?id=58760497

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In Memory of Alan Weinberger, founder of The ASCII Group

In Memory of Alan Weinberger, founder of The ASCII Group

I was sad to see that Alan Weinberger, the founder of The ASCII Group, lost his battle with cancer. Friends can leave notes of remembrance at https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/legacyremembers/alan-weinberger-obituary?id=58760497.

I met Alan about twenty years ago. He was a very smart attorney and a powerful firebrand and advocate for our industry. As the founder of ASCII, he built one of the absolute pillar organizations for our industry. I joined ASCII when it was time to buy an RMM tool and membership saved me enough money to keep my membership going for years.

Alan will be remembered for always doing whatever is in the best interest of our industry and the IT consultants that make it go. In many ways, our industry has been taken over by larger and larger interests that continue to want to squeeze out the players who are actually at the center of what makes it great. Alan was an advocate for the true IT consultant - whether they were called VARs, resellers, solution providers, managed service providers, ITSPs, or whatever else.

My fondest memories of Alan are meeting at events and talking with him and his wife, Lauren, for an hour or more on every topic under the sun. When people met him for the first time, they were always taken by his friendly, low-key manner, his vast knowledge, and the fact that he took time for them. So many "dignitaries" flit around trying to give thirty seconds to every person in the room. 

The ASCII Group is a great organization and Alan will always be remembered as the one who built one of the first and greatest organizations to serve our industry. I salute him personally. And I will miss him at the shows.

My heart goes out to the folks at ASCII who worked with Alan day after day and year after year. I know they will miss him and I know they will continue his work and make him proud.

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