Make 2026 the Year Your Business Gives You the Life You Deserve

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Your Business Exists for One Reason: To Help You Fulfill Your Dreams and Desires, and to Build the Life You Deserve

How can I made such a brash statement? Because you're running a small business (by which I mean there are only a few stakeholders and you don't tell shares on the open market). If you work at a big company with shareholders, your job exists to make money for the company, directly or indirectly. Ultimately, it is to provide profit and increased value for the shareholders.

But as a small business owner, you're the stockholder. And, yes, you want to earn money. But you can earn money doing anything, especially in tech. You don't have to deal with clients, employees, vendors, payroll, and all the other chores that come with business ownership.

So, yeah, make money. But that's not why you're self-employed. It's not why your business exists.

Sadly most people cannot tell you what their dreams and desires are. And even those who can are often at a loss to tell you how their business advances that dream.

Way back in 2011, I committed to rebuilding my life and my business so they support each other to help me do three things: write more, speak more, and travel more. And I think those who know me would agree that I did just that. 

I'm not saying it was easy - or that retooling your business to support your dreams will be easy, but it's sure worth a try! Here's something I'd like you to try in 2026: Sit down for fifteen minutes once a month and write down why your business exists and how it helps you fulfill your personal goals.

You can't say you don't have time! I'm talking about fifteen minutes per month. Make it a priority and do it. 

It's actually a trick question. In order to answer that question, you need to know what you want in your personal life. YOU. Not what society says you should want. Not what your parents or your spouse or your friends want. When you dig deep and finally figure out the goals for your life, then you can start figuring out how that can drive the mission of your business.

If you really do this, you'll find that the answer is different every month. It will take some time to dig down deep enough to find out your ultimate goals. But once you do, a whole lot of other things will begin to fall into place. 

You also need to be prepared for two things. First, you might not finish this task in twelve months. More quiet time always helps. And it's okay if you don't have "the" answer twelve months from now. You literally have the rest of your life.

Second, you might come to some startling conclusions. You might decide that some big things in your life don't really fit with the future you want to build. The same is true for operations inside your business. When you view the world from the lens of, "How does this help me fulfill my goals?" you have to be prepared to conclude that it doesn't.

For some things, you will be quite resistant to give up because they're part of who you are. Or who you were. But if they don't move you closer to personal happiness and fulfillment, then it might really be time to change your habits. 

You've probably heard the saying, the best time to fire someone is the first time the thought crosses your mind. The say is true with habits that don't contribute to your personal goals, dreams, and desires.

The best time to drop a bad habit is the first time the thought crosses your mind.

Again, this is not easy. Giving up pieces of how you see yourself - and have seen yourself for decades - is hard work. But it is absolutely worth it.

If you haven't subscribed to my monthly RFS Newsletter, please do. And if you want some guidance on how to accomplish this transformation step by step, I recommend you add Relax Focus Succeed to your reading (or listening) list today.

Have a wonderful 2026. And if you think you could use some help retooling your business to support the life you want to live, email me at karl@karlpalachuk.com.

Best of luck and Happy New Year!

:-) 

Good Owners are Not Necessarily Good Managers (or Employees)

Good Owners are Not Necessarily Good Managers (or Employees)

- Lessons Learned Episode 56

Over the years, I’ve witnessed or been involved in several incidents in which one company bought another and the seller became an employee (usually a manger of some kind) within the purchasing company. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from this is that someone can be good at owning, managing, and growing a company and not good at managing inside someone else's business. In fact, this is pretty common.

From time to time, you hear people say, “I don’t think I’d be a good employee.” I’ve said it. You may have as well. What we mean is generally that we’re used to being the ultimate decision maker and policy maker. So working on someone else’s goals and following their wishes is something we’re not used to.

In my case, I left my last real job in October of 1995 – just over thirty years ago. And maybe it’s arrogance, but I think I know how to run a business. I barely remember what it’s like to take instructions from someone else. I think that’s pretty common to people who move from owner to employee.

Here are a few more things I’ve learned from experience.

First, somehow, I believe that people who run businesses must be good at certain key activities, such as providing excellent service, managing employees, and making sure all the details are taken care of (even if that just means delegating to the right person).

Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that someone can make good money and grow a business without doing any of those things well. Many people just muddle along, somehow making it work. I think of this as a tradesman’s approach to business. By that I mean that they really love the details of actually doing the work, but they don't enjoy all the details that make a business objectively successful in others' eyes.

Second, it took me a long time (more than ten years) to separate my internal stereotypes of owners and managers. I used to think that managers were on their way up to being owners and owners were focused on all the details that would actually make a good manager. In other words. the Venn diagram had a great deal of overlap.

Over time, I began to draw some very big distinctions. Ultimately, even the greatest, most loyal manager must put the business second. They have to take care of their income, their family, and their careers. And when push comes to shove, they can leave to take another job.

Of course the owner also has to take care of their income, their family, and their career. But the owner does this through the business. In small business, the business exists to fulfill the dreams, desires, and needs of the owner. And “leaving” the business is never a straight forward thing.

All of that simply comes down to: There are certain attitudes and behaviors that will always separate the owner from the manager. Ultimately, the owner has more at stake inside the business.

And that leads us to the third point: Many owners got there without paying attention to all the details. They were never good with the books, with managing people, with being organized, or even with good service. They got by focusing on the job to be done until they grew to the point where they could have over the “details” to someone else.

In other words, they never developed the skills and behaviors you’d expect from a good manager because they didn’t need to. So when they move from owner to employee, they don’t have those skillsets to bring to the new company.

I’ve seen former-owners who had absolutely no attention to detail, no organizational skills, and no good daily habits that would make them a good manager. The result, of course, is that they are not good employees and the new owner is very frustrated with trying to manage someone who just ought to be able to manage themselves.

Oddly enough, the fix is surprisingly easy and almost never undertaken. The former-owner-now-employee needs a thorough onboarding process just the same as any employee. They need to be educated on the vision and culture of the new company. They need to know all the details of “how we do things around” here. And they need to go through a bit of the awkwardness of being the newest hire.

The one thing a former owner should understand very easily is the branding piece. That’s the “how we do things around” bit. After all, they had their way of doing business, and may even have been an attractive purchase based on their processes and procedures. So even though the new company will be different, they bring a certain understanding of why newbie employees just need to “do it our way.”

Action step: If you’re acquiring a former owner as a new employee, you need to plan for it with a serious onboarding process and some training in the skills of a manager. If you have an onboarding process for other employees, start there. If not, build a plan from scratch (and use that as a place to start building onboarding processes for other employees). And then go find some good management training.

Sink or swim is not an effective onboarding process.

Feedback always welcome.

-- -- --

 

Episode 56

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. 

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

 :-)

2000-2025: The Internet Era and the Dominance of Managed Services

A Look at the First Quarter of This Century in Technology Consulting

Lots of people are talking about the year in review. We’re closing in on the end of the first quarter of the century! Let’s look at that. Of course, in the world of IT consulting there are two clear tracks to look at: The evolution of technology and the evolution of Managed services.

Let’s look at the tech first.

The change has been astonishing. “Millennials” became adults around the turn of the century and now they’re in their 30s and bringing up the next generation. Here are some key changes that affected our industry (and the whole world, really).

In 2000, we had big cell phones but no smart phones. Tablets were just a thing on Star Trek: Next Generation re-runs. And, along those lines, “screens” were monstrous, heavy CRTs that were closer to a television than anything else. Today I have so many screens I don’t know if I can count them. They’re in my car, in my hand, on my picture frame, and on all those tablets and devices lying all over the place.

In 2000, Data storage consisted primarily of 3.5” floppies and CDs or DVDs. There was no “cloud” (although data centers did exist). Today SSD (solid state drives) are standard. We still have spinning discs, but they tend to be the second drive, not the primary. Cloud storage and cloud-based services did not really take off until the 2009-2011 recession when people didn’t want to invest in hardware. Now you have to defend your choice to put a server onsite.

In 2000, desktop computers were running Pentium III processors. With one core, of course, that topped out around 1100 MHz (1.1 GHz). Today you can buy an Intel Core 9 Ultra that has 8 cores at 3.7 GHZ – for about the same price.

Wi-Fi existed but was not common in 2000. Of course it’s everywhere today.

In the early 2000s, we ran Windows XP and Mac OS X, although a lot of people refused to give up their Windows 98 machines!

And while web browsing evolved in the 1990s, it didn’t take off as we know it today until after the dust settled from Internet Bubble Burst.

Quantum Computing – always twenty years from being feasible – started to become a reality in the 2010s, but for specialized purposes only. General purpose QC is . . . just around the corner I’m told.

IOT: In 2000, connecting “things” to the Internet was not a thing. Today, everything is Internet-enabled even if there’s no point to it (I’m thinking about washing machines and household refrigerators). My house is lit by lightbulbs controlled over the Internet so I can read my thermostat connected to the Internet.

AI: In some form, AI has been around since the turn of the 20^th century (and was the result of an evolutionary path that goes back to automated mechanical men in China about 1000 BC). Machine learning took off in the mid 2000’s and came into its own in the 2010s. Virtual assistants (Alexa, Siri, etc.) went from toys to a part of everyday life in the 2010s. AI finally got to the point where it could consistently beat humans at games in the 2010s.

We’re now it what will come to be known as the early years of Generative AI. OpenAI’s GPT3 was announced in 2020 and kept us entertained plagiarizing everything we could think of while stuck at home in the pandemic.

Robots did become a thing! The Roomba started driving around the living room in 2002 and is just now beginning its death throes. Today we can risk our lives by getting into an “autonomous vehicle” almost everywhere in the world. And many people forget: The largest robot you can interact with on a regular basis is an airplane. While they don’t take off on autopilot, they fly around the world on it and, if necessary, land on autopilot.

For IT consultants, this century began with big monitors, “small” floppy discs, and heavy desktop machines. We made a lot of money getting people connected to the Internet, selling businesses their first server, and figuring out how to make money after the installation project was complete.

 

And THAT’s where Managed Services entered the scene.

In 2000, big (enterprise) businesses were used to doing regular maintenance, but it was primarily done in-house. Outsourced maintenance was pricey. (Trust me. I approved the invoices.) For small businesses, there was essentially no maintenance for most companies.

At the time, the small business world was dominated by projects. And, most commonly, projects consisted of installing some really cool system, cashing the check, and walking away. If something broke, and the IT consultant wasn’t in the middle of another project, they fixed it. Looking back, we call this break/fix. At the time it was just computer consulting.

But many companies, including mine, started doing regular monthly maintenance for clients in the 1990’s. So in the 2000s, it was very natural to think about how we could turn that into a flat-fee service and then a recurring revenue model. “Managed Services” evolved as the natural next step. There was a kind of simultaneous invention of the managed service business model.

By the end of the 2010s, Managed Services had become the nearly universal model for service delivery. Even people who claim to only provide service “on demand” tend to sell subscription licenses for RMM, office software, cloud services, backup, and so forth. They provide regular monthly services, billed on a flat fee basis, which includes some level of support. They just don’t call it Managed Service.

Now, in the middle of the 2020’s, as we finish the first quarter of this century, we can see the dawning of the next age. AI is already being used for simple IT “fix-it” jobs. By 2030, an entire layer of client support will simply disappear as it becomes easier and easier to simply ask AI how – followed by asking an agent to DO.

Please don’t spend one second worrying about your future. You won’t lose work unless you insist on doing a job that no longer exists. If you built an entire business on getting people connected to the internet, you would have been out of business a long time ago. The same is true if you refused to put anything in the cloud. AI will happen. It will change your clients and it will change your business. The question is not if, it’s how fast.

You can literally redefine your business right now to grab onto the opportunities brought by the emerging AI. The formula is very simple: 1) Educate yourself. Learn AI. Learn how it can be applied in your client’s businesses. 2) Educate your clients so they see a bright future, not a scary dystopia. 3) Become an AI strategist – a true provider of solutions for your clients.

The AI Solution Provider will spend time learning about the client’s business and figuring out where the problems and holes are. Then that consultant will help the client craft a solution and implement it. And, I assume, collect a monthly fee for maintaining it.

As the next quarter-century arrives, your future is as bright and positive as you are willing to work for.

You need to invest in training, educating yourself, your employees, and your clients. And you need to consciously create a business as an AI Solution Provider. As with everything that takes commitment and effort, no one else can do this for you. Because . . .

Nothing Happens by Itself!

How bright will you make your future?

Local Partners - User Groups Everywhere - Lessons Learned

Local Partners - User Groups Everywhere

Lessons Learned - Episode 55

 

One of the turning points in my career was attending SMB Nation, a conference run by author and community builder Harry Brelsford. I got introduced to a huge group of great people from around the world. They were there to learn about technology (centered on Microsoft’s Small Business Server family) and how to improve their IT business.

At that event, I learned that there were “SBS user groups” all over the world, and that they kept in touch via an online chat-type forum called Yahoo Groups. There was an subset of those folks who were part of a user group leaders forum. It wasn’t exclusive to group leaders, but the conversations were about group management, organizing, getting speakers, and all the details of running a group.

Due to those groups, I started the Sacramento SBS User Group. The first people I collected as members were local consultants who happen to be at Harry’s conference or inside the Yahoo groups. Almost immediately, my friend Bob Nitrio became one of the group leaders. (After about ten years, I stepped aside and Bob became the group president.)

Most of those groups faded away over the years as they did not evolve from SBS to other SMB technologies. Australia had a particularly successful collection of groups in all of their major cities. It was called the SMB IT Professionals. Bob and I asked them if we could use their name for the Sacramento group. They said yes – and said we could use their logo as well. And so the Sacramento SMB IT Professionals group was born. And it still exists today, though much smaller.

The important thing was that all of these groups serendipitously grew up and grew connected to each other very quickly all over the world at the perfect time. By 2005-2006, there were IT user groups in almost every city and county in North America, Europe, and the APAC countries. Why does this matter? For many reasons, some of which were:

This community began a worldwide norm of cooperating with one another and sharing information. In many cases, people from across the country and around the world helped each other solve issues.

These groups became a natural audience for educators and vendors who wanted to reach the emerging “managed service providers.” There was a time when the best, fastest, cheapest way for a vendor to become known in the space was to speak at these groups and become known in the community.

Members of the community became an extended workforce for one another. I have lost count of the number of times we hired, or were hired by, members of the IT user groups.

Eventually, of course, larger gatherings grew up. First it was with specific vendors such as ConnectWise and Autotask (now Kaseya). Then groups formed for specific purposes, such as marketing or “buying” groups that offered members discounted purchasing from vendors. Today there are hundreds of evens per year in this community – fragmented into hundreds of groups rarely defined by geography.

Why are these local groups no longer as successful (with some big exceptions)? Well, here’s my theory. As vendors emerged as a growing force in the industry, they built and supported each other in creating larger events simply so they could meet more partners all at once. At the same time, a large segment of the industry realized that they could meet all the vendors and gain access to all the information by attending only the free events. In this case, “free” means the vendors are paying for it.

Free is a very addictive price. But it makes it very difficult to provide real value to consultants without backing from vendors. These vendors expect stage time and Lucite awards in exchange for their largess. So event organizers get addicted to the vendor sponsorships and attendees become less and less willing to pay for content. With a few exceptions.

The result of all that brings us to where we are today: It is very difficult to find an event that is not dominated by vendors pitching their products instead of providing value. I can’t think of any vendor in our industry who evaluates their sales people on helping IT consultants to be successful. All of them are evaluated on how many partners they signed up and how many licenses they sold.

Fun fact: Back in the days of newspapers, the advertising was laid out first. That determined the number of pages that would be printed and the space left over for news. That space was referred to as the “news hole.”

Events in the IT space have exactly the same thing going on. First, an organizer has to give vendors the speaking slots they paid for, large and small. And what’s left over for truly valuable content that improves consultants’ business processes shrinks each year. Some events have as little as one or two hours of actual educational content in a one or two day event!

As you can guess, I am nostalgic for the local user groups. That’s one reason I’ve taken more than a dozen trips to Australia. But my nostalgia is not just nostalgia for the good old days. It is more about community in which a sincere effort was made to educate partners and help each other to be successful.

In my opinion, vendors should do more to support actual content (rather than sales pitches) and IT Service Providers should be more willing to pay for good information that will actually help their businesses.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure how we get there from here.

 

Feedback always welcome.

-- -- --

 

Episode 55

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.

 

:-)

Just Released! The Absolutely Unbreakable Rules of IT Service Delivery

The Absolutely Unbreakable Rules of IT Service Delivery -

Free to Community Members

Small Biz Thoughts Technology Community Members - It's finally here! Download your free copy of The Absolutely Unbreakable Rules of IT Service Delivery right now in the community. No charge.

Non-members, join at any level and you get this plus ALL of my other books, checklists, SOPs, training, etc. Or wait until 2026 and buy at fine bookshops everywhere.

Members can grab the book and the downloads here: 

https://www.smallbizthoughts.org/member-content/the-absolutely-unbreakable-rules-of-it-service-delivery/

Everyone else should head to our store and save $5 if you buy before January 1st. https://store.smallbizthoughts.com/product/the-absolutely-unbreakable-rules-of-it-service-delivery/

Why You Should Buy The Absolutely Unbreakable Rules of IT Service Delivery

• Build a culture of success based on helping your whole team to prioritize tasks with a clear understanding the company's mission.

• Learn practical ways to manage your business from the holistic perspective that everything you do is part of your branding. 

• Manage Clients more effectively by acquiring the right clients in the first place and then setting clear boundaries and establish rules for your ongoing relationships.

• Improve cash flow by getting your billing straightened out and practicing financial discipline. 

• Help your employees and client understand why you only sell the right hardware, software, and services, so clients get maximum value and it doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to support it.

• Define your rules for personal growth through continuous learning, daily habits, and building a business that provides personal fulfillment as well as profit.

-- -- -- 

Invest in your company today - or wait until January and pay $5 more.

https://store.smallbizthoughts.com/product/the-absolutely-unbreakable-rules-of-it-service-delivery/

:-)

Building Machines vs. Buying Them

Building Machines vs. Buying Them

 - Lessons Learned, Episode 54

 

When I started my first IT business in 1995, enterprise businesses (really big companies) bought pre-built machines, primarily from big companies like HP and IBM while small companies built their own machines or hired consultants who built machines. So, at the time, it was very easy to move into the business of making machines. These “IBM Clones” were everywhere and really were the standard.

This affected my business in two primary ways. First, I had to buy parts and keep an inventory. Back in the day, motherboards did not include integrated video cards, sound cards, or even network cards. So there were lots of peripherals that had to be bought, kept in inventory, and sold before the prices dropped again and we lost money on our investment.

The second affect was that almost every business we went into was filled with “homemade” machines, including the servers. Every one was unique. Very often, we came across brands we’d never heard of for all the components: Motherboards, SCSI cards, hard drives, and so forth. In many cases, this meant that we did not have drivers, instructions, warranty information, etc. In other words, if anything went wrong, it was likely that we had to sell the client a new one – the brand we carried.

Clients had every right to like something was wrong with this business model. Every tech they talked to wanted to get rid of “the other guy’s stuff” and install their own. That just felt like an unnecessary expense to the client. And in some sense it was unnecessary, except that there really weren’t a lot of options, given the way things worked.

There was a massive, worldwide industry of making and selling IBM clones. So much so that Microsoft included questions about OEM installation of their operating systems in their certification exams. In addition to the parts, you could also buy customized tags so you could easily create your brand of machines.

This model had a few big disadvantages. Inventory was one. Another was that we had to maintain a place to build and test all these machines. We frequently had tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of machines and equipment in our office, which always made me nervous. It also meant that we had to train technicians to build machines properly, which is pretty far from the calling of being a consultant.

Worst of all, the margins on these machines were quite thin and the prices were changing every day. It was extremely common for advertisements to list “CALL” as the price for many components. It was like trading Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice Futures. And if you bought the right components on the wrong day, you were guaranteed to lose money. The worst was memory modules – a circumstance that’s repeating itself today.

Finally, the big problem with these clones was that we might lose all of our profit for a machine if one component (such as a fan) went out and we had to pay a technician by the hour to replace it. Not only were we out for that job, but that tech was not doing something else that did bring in money.

Even at the beginning, I wanted to sell pre-built brand name machines. I had come from a shop full of Compaq/HP machines and that brand was extremely reliable at the time, with spectacular support. But I wasn’t an authorized reseller and they required huge quarterly sales to even consider becoming one.

Eventually, HP brought out a series of pre-configured but customizable machines that we could buy if our distributor was willing to work with us on that relationship. So we started offering these pre-built machines. Yes, they cost more. But nothing ever went wrong. Nothing. When we bought and sold business class computers with a three-year warranty, nothing ever broke. It was like a whole new world.

We made up for the increased cost by not having to carry inventory, not having to train technicians to build machines, and not paying technicians to build machines. And the “nothing ever broke” piece of the equation really allowed us to focus our business back where it belonged: solving client problems rather than selling them stuff.

From time to time, I also sold Lenovo, Toshiba, and other brands. But we really had great experiences with HP and stuck to that, especially for servers.

I honestly believe that the decision to buy rather than build helped us take on bigger clients and bigger projects because we could put a strong focus on client problems and solutions. Our technicians had to learn to dig a little an find the “real” problem when I client said they had a problem. Our technicians became better consultants because they could focus on the problems and the solutions rather than on replacing parts.

Other people have had other experiences, but that was ours.

One time, I had a big (for us) installation of about fifty machines. I certainly didn’t have the staff to do this in a reasonable time frame, so I engaged members of my local SMB IT Professionals group. I gave them machines and checklists and they helped us install dozens of computers. One of these IT Pros was a good friend of mine who had always built his own machines. But that day he saw that installing lots of high quality pre-built machines was incredibly fast and straight forward – primarily because the experience was predictably identical from desktop to desktop.

When that job was over, he told me he’d decided to sell prebuilt machines from then on.

Today, almost no one builds their own machines. The parts are still often a hassle to buy, store, and try to make a profit on. Parts makers (including big names like Intel and Western Digital) change their policies, promotions, and partner programs on a regular basis. Some of them actually swing back and forth between wanting to engage partners and not wanting to engage them. The result is that finding good quality parts that are consistently available at a reasonable prices is just plain difficult. It’s a layer of expense most consultants don’t want to deal with.

Advocates of building their own machines always go on in great detail about how easy it is and how much money they make. But this always sounds like when people start talking about their gambling. Gamblers often tell you that they never lose (an actual impossibility) or that they are ahead for life (a virtual impossibility). In other words, they remember and report the wins. They don’t remember and don’t report the downside.

I’m glad we made the switch pretty early on and I firmly believe that it made our technicians better consultants.

 

What’s your experience?

 

Feedback always welcome.

-- -- --

 

Episode 54

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.

:-)

M&A plus Strategic Exit Planning - Register for Both and Save $100 right now

Over at IT Service Provider University, we have a GREAT year-end special right now.

Our newest and hottest courses for 2025 are

Mergers & Acquisitions for MSPs - taught by James Kernan

and

Strategic Exit Planning for MSPs - taught by Rayanne Buchianico

Now through the end of the year, you save $100 instantly when you register for both.

That's Ten Hours of education for business owners! Whether you're ready to sell (or buy) now, or you think you might in the next few years, these classes are 100% focused on helping you understand the process - and what you need to do to prepare.

Mergers and Acquisitions for MSPs provides a comprehensive overview of the M&A process, covering strategic planning, valuation, legal frameworks, due diligence, and post-merger integration. It equips participants with the skills and knowledge needed to navigate and execute successful M&A transactions in a dynamic business environment.

Strategic Exit Planning for MSPs is designed to help you build a business buyers want to acquire! Whether you’re looking to sell your MSP in the next year or just want to prepare for long-term options, this five-hour course will walk you through a proven framework to assess, strengthen, and position your business for a high-value exit.

All the details at https://itspu.com

No Coupon Needed

To grab your discount, just head to IT Service Provider University - https://itspu.com - and add both courses to your cart. Then view the cart and you'll see that the discount has been applied. It's that easy.

Register today and save.

OR join the Small Biz Thoughts Technology Community to find out how you can get these courses at no additional charge. Check out the details at https://smallbizthoughts.org. (Community members can log into the Community now to get your discount codes.)

Your Instructors

James Kernan - Instructor, Consultant, Author

For the past 12 years, James has served as a Principal Consultant for Kernan Consulting and provides Coaching, Advising and Mentoring programs to entrepreneurs and leaders. Kernan Consulting offers One on One Coaching, CEO Peer Groups, M&A Consulting and online training programs.

Rayanne Buchianico - Accountant & MSP Business Consultant

Rayanne is a managed service provider and also an accountant and an Intuit certified ProAdvisor. In addition to her MSP business, Rayanne helps I.T. consultants to take control of their finances and understand their own business at a deeper level.

Don't Miss Out! Offer Ends December 31st - end of day.

:-)

The Absolute Best of My Free Stuff for IT Consultants!

The Best Free Stuff for MSPs and ITSPs – from Small Biz Thoughts

Over the years, we’ve done a number of promotions. Only a few were sales, but lots of them have been free giveaways.

From a marketing perspective, why do we give things away? After all, one of my pieces of advice for successful business owners is, “Never discount or give away you primary product.” So, for example, I don’t think you should give away free months or free hours of service.

For promotional purposes, the best use of promotional giveaways is to gather leads and gain new customers. The second-best use is to reward current clients. These giveaways are good for both of those purposes.

Between Small Biz Thoughts and IT Service Provider University, we have LOTS of giveaways. Feel free to try them all. No matter what’s going on in your business, I am sure you’ll find something useful in these.

Here are the places you can find our freebies right now.

Let’s start with my newsletters:

The Small Biz Thoughts newsletter is a weekly industry resource that is read by over 10,000 MSPs, consultants, ITSPs, VARs, etc. https://smallbizthoughts.com/newsletter/

The Relax Focus Succeed newsletter is a monthly communique focusing on business and personal success based on my RFS philosophy of success without stress. https://relaxfocussucceed.com/newsletter

 

MSPWebinar.com – https://mspwebinar.com is a site dedicated to webinars (live and recorded) that are 100% focused on IT Service Consulting.

• End of Year checklist webinar. Includes a three-page checklist of EOY tasks along with some notes on what to shred and what to keep.

• Client-Facing Training: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. This is a presentation that you can give to clients and prospects on AI. Includes the slide deck in PPTX format so you can edit for your company.

• Client-Facing Sample Security Training. Another presentation you can give to clients and prospects, this one on security and avoiding ransomware. Includes PPTX file to customize.

… While you’re there, be sure to sign up for my 17^th annual State of the Nation Address for SMB IT Consultants – https://mspwebinar.com.

 

IT Service Provider University

• The Free One-Hour Foundations course is perfect for introducing your entire staff to the Managed Services business model. It’s also a great introduction to the ITSPU site. Free to everyone. https://itspu.com

 

The Small Biz Thoughts Store – https://store.smallbizthoughts.com

– We even have a whole category call “Free” on the main menu. Here are the highlights.

• Karl's FAMOUS 68-Point Checklist - Version 3.0. (simpler version worth keeping)

• Karl’s FAMOUS 68-Point Checklist – Version 4.0. (newer, more robust version with a LOT more detail)

• Business Plan Worksheets

• Karl's Cloud Readiness Checklist - v3.0

• Audio Program: Process Control for the IT Industry. By Manuel Palachuk.

• Audio Program: Taking Your Business to Version 3.0 and Beyond. By Manuel Palachuk.

• Audio Program: Relax Focus Succeed. An Audio Introduction.

• Relax Focus Succeed Sample Chapter – Workaholism.

… and more!

 

And of course all the regular channels of information:

• I will schedule a 20 minute zoom call with any business owner who asks. Just ping me and we’ll set it up.

• The Small Biz Thoughts Blog is just a couple months short of its 20^th Anniversary. It’s chock full of information and opinions. The original blog posts that became Managed Services in a Month are here along with our current series, Lessons Learned.

• YouTube/smallbizthoughts includes over 1,000 videos for IT Service Providers and business owners of all kinds.

• YouTube/RelaxFocusSucceed is the channel for all things “Relax Focus Succeed,” my approach to personal and professional success. After all: a business can’t flourish if the leader is broken.

Of course there’s more free stuff throughout our various web sites. But these resources should keep you busy from now to 2026!

If you want to discuss any of these, or anything else, just contact me at karlpalachuk.com.

 :-)