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Michael E Crean - From Army Grit to Channel Greatness · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of our partnerships and channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Channingist and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, Michael.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: How are you doing?
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: Good sir, how are you?
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I'm excited for this one.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: We're speaking about everything, I feel, from philosophy to management styles, which is some of the more meatier topics that I like to get into on this podcast.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: Maybe, for that uninitiated, you could give us a little bit of an introduction about who you are and what you do.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: My name is Michael Crean.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: I am the former CEO and founder of a company called Solutions Granted.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: I currently have the role as the General Manager and Senior Vice President of Managed Security Services for Sonic Law.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Nice.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: I feel like you've glossed over a certain major part of your background.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: You spent nine years in the Army, which I know included a couple of tours.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: I imagine that has several effects on you, some of those quite profound.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: We spoke about how some of those tough lessons really helped shape your style of leadership in this bit.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: Maybe for our audience, you can re-explain it.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: For us, sure.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: I think there's this evolution that we all go through and for years, you know, through those times of where I founded my company and was growing the company, I was raising three teenage girls and then, you know, had another daughter yes, that's four daughters and then one son.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: You know, reflecting back and giving so much credit and credence to my military service and my style of leadership and, yeah, there's a lot of influence that took place there but truly, as I've gotten older and really understanding where I think more of the foundational pieces of my leadership came from my mom and my dad, the idea of that.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: My mom and my dad both worked for General Motors in Northeast Ohio.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: My mom worked in a factory, so did my dad, but my mom was on an assembly line and we're talking about a woman who was working on a factory assembly line and started in 1967.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: You know there's no air conditioning in a factory in 1967.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: And the summers aren't mild in Ohio, in Northeast Ohio, and I never heard my mom complain, and I'm sure she did, but I never heard her complain.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: I never heard my dad complain.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: You know they worked opposite shifts so that somebody was always home for my brother and I, so my dad would go to work.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: During the day, my mom would go to work you know what they called mids, I don't know where that was two or three o'clock in the afternoon until getting home at you know 11 o'clock at night, whatever that may be, and then my dad was gone at three or four o'clock in the morning.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: You know so that he would then be home in the afternoon.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: But that's a style of leadership that I think is a lost art, or it's a lost something, whatever you want to call it.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: But we're all such whiners is what we are, and we whine publicly.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: You see it on Reddit, you see it on Instagram, you see it on Facebook, you see it wherever.
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: It's all of this complaining about the trials and tribulations of our lives, but isn't that the thing that really makes us unique and powerful?
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: We choose to accept it as to who we are, and I gave way too much credit to the military for my style of leadership, and it definitely, again, had the influence, but didn't have as much of an influence as I think about.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: So I'm not a big complainer, I'm not a big whiner.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: Yes, I've got my moments where it's like, okay, suck it up, buttercup, let's go get your head back in the game and let's get it on.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: But they've definitely influenced me far more.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: That silent acceptance maybe I don't know if that's the right way to say it, but yeah and then also you know, knowing what a really bad day looks like when you've been through a deployment and you're sleeping in the sand and you don't have a hot meal and you're eating it out of a plastic brown bag, and so everybody that's hearing this that has ever had an MRE, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: 11, 12 months, whatever it may be, those are certain challenges that I've absolutely reminded my employees or maybe not reminded but told or my customers, like hey, nobody's going to die today.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: You will go home, you will get out of your comfy, cozy car that's climate controlled and you'll spend 30 seconds walking from your car to your house that's climate controlled.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: And when you lay down tonight in your warm, comfortable bed with your squishy pillow and you pull your blankets up and you decide to set your air conditioning down to 65 because it's 80 degrees outside and you want to be chilly or it's cold outside and you pump that heat up to 75 degrees because that's what's good for you, that's not such a bad day because there's lots of people out there that aren't having that same day by choice free will so that we can have that day.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I speak a lot around sort of discipline and how you go through tough times, and I think there are two major lessons that I've learned.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: One of them is context.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: You share a great context there, right, say, what is perceived to be a bad day in the wider context is actually a brilliant bad day.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: And the other one and I think this is something I speak to my team often about how I really remind them I once heard this thing about game developers, and they're building AI into computer games at the moment and they've worked out the optimal ratio for win to loss.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: And the irony is you think, oh, if I play 10 games, well, I probably want to win eight or nine of them.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: No, you want to win three, otherwise you're going to log off.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: If you win too many, it's boring.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: Um, the trials and tribulations are the point, right, if we win too much, it's boring, it doesn't feel gratifying, it doesn't hit that lovely dopamine sensor in our brain, and so you know, I like to remind my.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: The whole point of a quarter is, yeah, 120 days.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: 80 of them are going to be really tough and we're hoping that back 40 are going to be great.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: That's the whole point, right, and I think, either providing context into what a bad day really looks like or helping people understand that running up the mountain is meant to feel uphill, and that's what people do, because that's really where the great rules come from.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, running up the mountain is meant to make sure that you're alive.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and remind you that you're alive.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the heartbeat going and the pain of breaking your teeth and pushing through.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: It's reminding you you're strong enough to do that and that's a great feeling when you get to the top.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: But it's only the very last bit that feels great, right, and I think that's the.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: That's the, the lesson I think we can all remind ourselves when we're battling with the customer or the project's not working or behind and we're stressed.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: That's actually why we're here, um, maybe pivoting.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: So you started in the military and I feel like you might have the opposite job as a military now, having five kids and running this organization in the tech world.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: How did that transition happen?
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: What did it teach you?
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: So after nine years of service I was kind of at a pivotal point where, you know, I didn't really want to be gone from my daughters anymore.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: I wanted to be around, wanted to be more present.
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: But also in the military you've got this opportunity where you can retire at 20 years and so you get to 10 or over and it's this idea.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: It's like, okay, well, I might want to go ahead and just make this a thing and move it forward.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: So I made the decision okay, let's go ahead and get out, let's change, really wanted to and desire to do law enforcement and thought that was the path that I was going to go down.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: But these three retired army colonels that knew somebody that knew somebody that knew of me, knew where I was coming from and maybe what kind of clearance I had to offer, brought me in for an interview.
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: And strangest interview in my life I think we're five minutes into the interview, maybe 10, and they're asking me if I play golf.
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: And you know, yeah, well, I can play golf, but it's military golf.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: It's left, right, left, right, left, right, left, because I'm all over the place, not a good golf player, but god offered a job to get into the IT field and go do and design a messaging system for military bases and that was where my computer career really started but also found out that I was not really good at sitting in a cubicle and doing the same thing over and over and over again.
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: Again, I'll go back to my mom.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: I don't know how she did it, like that's crazy, that 20, 23, 24, 25 years, I don't remember exactly.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: But how do you do that?
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: How do you do the same thing every day and do it with a smile and you know, do it.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: Well, I couldn't do it, so transitioned from there, went on and got out of the government contracting business to go into the commercial space and then found myself on unemployment.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: I was mad at everything, mad at myself, mad at the world.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: Just, I was an ordinary angry grumpy.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: I was not a nice person.
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: That was a rough time in my life.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: And so from there we fast forward.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: You just spoke at the introduction.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: You've built and sold a very successful MSP practice.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: I'd love to hear that early career from unemployment and how you started in that road to building and owning your own MSP.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: Oh boy.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: So the devil's playground runs tough in these hands and I know that if I'm not busy that I'm probably busy doing the wrong thing.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: And so, as I find myself on unemployment, a very, very good friend of mine calls and says hey, could you design and build some computers and help us?
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: We want to get out of this dummy tube type environment.
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: Dummy tube type environment.
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: Sure, I can build some computers.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: I'm going to local computer part shows, you know, buying stuff, bringing them back to the house and building these computers, designing a network.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: One of the guys that worked for the venture capital company, for one of the dot coms that went under that I worked for, said our full-time IT guy is leaving.
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: Could you do this part-time for us because we don't want full-time, like absolutely.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: Guy is leaving, could you do this part-time for us Because we don't want full-time Absolutely?
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: Because, again, I need something to do.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: I've got three kids, I've got to make it work.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: And all the while I've got a good friend of mine who owns a construction company that says hey, I know this is right out of your wheelhouse.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: He says but I can pay you some money if you want to come do demolition work for me.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: Well, not what I want to do.
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: And if you want to talk about like dirty hard, exhausting, but man, do you feel like you've really worked hard that day?
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: Go into a commercial building and do some demolition work, like that'll wear you out and as bad as that time was.
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: I look back on that today and some days I'd like to be able to go back and do that, where maybe I could just not have to work so hard in my head and just use my hands and you get home and you're just brutally exhausted and it just kind of kept working.
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: And then I did another referral and somebody said this about this time I've got three clients and I called my mom, like I don't think I know what I'm doing here, but I believe I'm running a company and I just kept picking it up and putting it down, not being afraid to walk through the door because of what might be on the other side or what may scare me or what may excite me.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: And I think that's the problem that we see with a lot of people that are afraid for that next step of their life.
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: They don't know what's there and the fear paralyzes them.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: So instead of being motivated, instead of saying you know what, I don't care, maybe I'm going to get destroyed on the other side of the door, maybe it's going to be the greatest victory, but because I don't know, I'm just going to do nothing.
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: That doing nothing to me like I'd rather and I tell my kids this go make a mistake, don't make one that's so big we can't recover from it, but go make a bunch of mistakes and then never do that again, because then you're going to get smarter and smarter every day, because if you don't do that again, well then you're not doing the definition of insanity.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: Doing it over and over again and hoping that there's going to be change Kept on doing.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: It became a bar, liked the bar space.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: Everybody was transitioning from being a value-added reseller to being an MSP that managed service provider, and I did it because that's what everybody was doing.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: But I didn't have passion, I didn't have purpose.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: I was I'll be honest, I was a miserable, grumpy MSP.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: I was not nice, I was not kind.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: I had the answers, like most MSPs do, technically super proficient, how's the answers can fix the problem.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: But, man, you did not want me to be your doctor because my bedside manner was.
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: It was bad.
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: It was really really bad.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: Like to the point, there's a point where you know where somebody's calling and it's 10 or 11 o'clock at night and they can't print and they're upset and they're frustrated.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: And it's like it's 10 or 11 o'clock at night.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: Like what are we doing?
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: Like why is this so urgent?
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: And you know you go through the basics, like, hey, are you sure the power's on?
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: Are you sure there's paper in there?
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: Are you sure it's got toner, the dumb things that normally fix all the problems?
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: And yes, yes, of course, don't waste my time with stupid like fix my problem.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: Come to find out it was toner.
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: And here's where you know your bedside manner is the most awful thing that exists and that you're just not a nice person.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: Because they came to you, because you said you'd be there for them, it's like, hey, I think we should box the printer up.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: Why is it really that bad?
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: No, I think we need to send you back to paper and pen because you're just not good enough to operate.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: You don't say those things to people.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: It's not nice, it's not kind.
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: It wasn't about them, it was about me.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: That was my failure, that was my inadequacies, that was just me being an unkind human being and that's how I knew I was doing the wrong thing and the MSP space was not for me Made a transition in around 2010 to become a firewall management monitoring company all in and I've got a very long history with SonicWall.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: It isn't just the last 21 months of acquisition.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: We started selling SonicWall firewalls, we started representing them, we started selling them in a really what I thought was a cool and unique way and using them as productivity tools and not security tools, because obviously they're a security tool, but if you can talk about it differently, it opens up different purse strings and I found my happy space.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: I found a place that I was passionate about.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: I found a place that I could be.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: I felt like I was where I needed to be when I needed to be, and it just kept on changing.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: You know, needed to be when I needed to be and it just kept on changing.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: We went from firewalls, we went to endpoint, we went to email security and then we completely got ourselves out of the MSP game, transitioned into being what I was calling as a master MSP, which was really a MSSP for MSPs, and that's where the world got really fun and really exciting and where I really found.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: I found my happy place.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: You know, for all of you happy Gilmore fans out there, I found my happy place and that was it for me and it is still for me today.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: I mean, I love the idea of taking care of somebody that can't take care of themselves and protecting them from somebody and something that's trying to take advantage of them.
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: And we can, truly can't stop at all.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: But, man, if we've got the right team and participation, we can stop an awful lot.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: So I'd love to just double click on that last sentence, because if I were to get someone to describe why they love working in the military, I think they'd give me a very similar answer to the answer that you just gave.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: I imagine that has radiated through your leadership style, like that language, that passion, that emphasis.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: Talk to me about some of the and you referenced your mom and dad.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: So let's, let's focus in on the military.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: What have been some of the most transferable skills that have allowed you to build and scale this high performance organization?
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: um, and it'll be my whole life that transferred and it's it's the lessons of thinking about my mom and dad and how hard they worked in a factory and then thinking about some of the deployments that I was on and how hard that I had to work in those deployments and being away from my family and the physical and the mental and everything, and then bringing that forward, you know, to raising and try raising three teenage daughters at the same time.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: I'm going to tell you like there is just some violence that comes out of three teenage girls that I've never heard in my entire life.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: Like when your number two daughter and I'm going to not use names but there's people that know them but, for the sake of you know, keeping them safe when number two daughter looks at number three daughter and threatens to strangle her with the vacuum cleaner cord, like that's a level of violence that I don't know how that comes out of somebody's head and where they think they're going to execute that plan.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: But this is what I hear one day, you know, on the second floor of my house, down these two in the basement, like what is so.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: But it's that type of struggle, but then realizing that hard work always wins Like yes, you need some native intelligence.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: There's no doubt you need to be willing to learn.
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: You need to be more than anything, you need to be willing to listen.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: Listening is a lost art man.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: Can you understand a problem and come to a solution if you can really listen to what somebody's telling you?
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: But hard work.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: I think that's been it for me.
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: I was never afraid to take out the trash.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: I don't care what my title was.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: I was never afraid to go back there and sweep out the storage room or throw away cardboard boxes.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: And it's that idea of the most amazing leaders.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: What I've noticed is they all lead from the front.
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: They don't sit in the ivory tower, they don't bark the command, send the email, do as I say, not as I do.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: And that is who I always want.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: I want my kids to know that about me.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: Like, look, if I want my son to learn how to cut the grass and not look like I don't know he was drinking something, but he shouldn't be drinking at 14 years old, because it's all the everything that he's missed in cutting the grass I better go out there and show him how to do it, and if it's wrong, well then let me go out there and show them how to do it again and let me be a part of his journey and let me be a part of his success.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: And at some point in time and one of the best quotes comes from Ronald Reagan the greatest leaders aren't the ones who do the greatest things, it's the ones who get others to do the greatest things.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: And I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but I'm pretty close, so I'm not going to say I quoted it accurately.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: But we sometimes get lost in that idea of being the greatest leader because we did or I did, and it's not.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: What I want to leave behind is a legacy of oh man, look at what they did, look at how amazing they are.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: Holy cow, I'd never thought about doing that, man.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: I'm so proud of them for where they've grown and what they've done and how they've become.
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: And I think that there's a lot, of a lot, too much me, not enough.
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: We.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: No, I love it.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: I spend a lot of time mentoring young salespeople, people who, like they, set for a sales job, and very often people who are highly.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: It's their first sales job and you know very often people who are highly ambitious land themselves in sales careers.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: And they come to me.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: They're like Alex, tell me the secrets, how do you get to where you need it?
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: How do you do it as fast as you can?
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: And I always give them a really simple answer.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: This isn't easy, but it's simple Hard work works.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: I simple hard work works.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: I can almost draw a one-to-one comparison with hours in to output like it just is that simple.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: But I find so often people are afraid to say that that is the real answer.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: I hate saying you know, don't work hard, work smart.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: I'm like it's crazy.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: If you work hard, you will work smart, unless you're an idiot, and I can't.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: I can't do anything like if you're an idiot.
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but 90 of people work really hard get new information, get new data, do better um.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: And I think we do a really poor job guiding the next generation if we sit there and pretend that anything other than work hard is your baseline and from there everything else will come.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: But yeah, I think how we empower people where I think people hate to hear that answer is if the boss is blocking off at four o'clock, let's go right.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: Then it's like oh, then it really sucks to hear no, no, you should work really hard at 21 years old and you're like, well, he's here early every day, she's here late every day.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: They just kill it all the time.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: Follow their lead.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: Actually, that becomes a lot more digestible.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: I also think that, as leaders, we have to do a good job of taking care of our people, and sometimes there's this expectation when you've got this rock star and he or she is coming in every day and staying late and working seven days a week and they're so dedicated to the mission of getting it done that as a leader, you become a little too reliant on that person and you continue to push them hard and you don't stand them down.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: If you're a really good leader, you're going to tell that person I need you to take a week off.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: I need you to completely disconnect.
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: I don't want you to answer an email.
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: I don't want you to text.
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: I need you to completely disconnect.
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: I don't want you to answer an email.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: I don't want you to text.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: I don't want you to anything but take care of you.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: Give them the work-life balance that they're having a hard time finding.
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: I think that's and I see that now that I'm in this global role for SonicWall, where I see this big difference between what happens in North America as opposed to what happens in Europe and a couple other places I think we don't do a great happens in North America as opposed to what happens in Europe and a couple other places.
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: I think we don't do a great job in North America and I mean I think Europe maybe goes a little too far.
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: You know that's probably not what they want to hear me say, but there's this as a really really good leader and I've had some like I've had my at my short time here here at SonicWell there's been a couple of these times like hey, maybe it's time for you to take some time off.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: You're going hard and we really appreciate that, but we want you to go hard long.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: We don't want this to be a.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: We're not trying to sprint the marathon, we're trying to run the ultra marathon and to run the ultra marathon you've really got to take care of yourself, because if you don't, then you're never going to take care of anything else.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: So maybe, looking at that global role, you've become the MSP to the MSP right.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: You turned into an evangelist where you're building a service model that allows MSPs to build something more nuanced out to their customer base.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: How has it been making that transition into a global evangelist?
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: It's interesting because what I've found is that you know you talk to like if I just focus on what we started in North America, in different geographies in North America, everybody tries to convince you that their customers are so different.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: And then all of a sudden, you step out of North America and you start talking to the partners that are in EMEA or APJ and they do the same exact thing.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: And the reality is it's the same exact words of concern.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: You know it's price sensitive, it's you know global disruption, it's you know inflation.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: It's all the same.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: And I think there are some areas that definitely, like you, look at some.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: You look at a Boston, you look at a Washington DC, you look at a Los Angeles, you look at a Tokyo, you look at a London certainly probably not the same price sensitive as making up a city.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: Tobacco Spit, tennessee, I don't know.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: I doubt we're going to Tobacco Spit Tennessee, but I think you get where I'm going with that.
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: It's definitely trying to help people understand that maybe their struggles aren't as unique as they think that they are, because sometimes, when you feel you're all alone and you're the only one having this struggle, you don't see a path forward.
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: You don't really believe that there is a path forward.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: But if somebody can tell you hey, I was just having this conversation with a customer and a partner just like you, same size, about the same revenue, same type of customer focus in Tucson, arizona, and they're actually having the same conversation with me that you are, that helps them understand that they're not in it alone and that maybe there's something that we can all learn together and that we can grow.
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: So trying to again, our CEO and he said that his dad said this.
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: He had said his dad.
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: His dad was a small hometown doctor and he said that one of the things his dad said was is that you know you have two ears and one mouth.
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: Use them proportionately.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: And I think that is a brilliant, simple, easy thing for us all to remember that when we're talking to anybody, whether it's talking to your teenage son, who my son is 14.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: He's just a freshman in high school right now.
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: He was really nervous his first day of school last Thursday and he's not a shy kid.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: As a matter of fact, he's a pretty chatty, obnoxious kid because dude does for shits out, but obnoxious in a good way.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: He's like he's not a bad kid, just dude talks and he has zero problems making friends.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: But this big transition in life to go from eighth grade to ninth grade he was really nervous and I could have told him all the reasons why he shouldn't be nervous.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: I could have told him all the reasons why he was gonna be okay and how he'd make new friends and all of the great things about him.
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: But what he needed to do was be heard.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: And when I'm in this role, the biggest thing that I can do is listen and if there's some advice that I can bring, bring it.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: But more than anything, I've had so much growth personally, just understanding even some of the geopolitical I was in Europe two months ago or six weeks ago the amount of conversations about what's happening in the politics here in the United States and you know how it's going to affect the rest of the world.
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: I've never thought I was ever going to have that type of conversation before.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: Obviously couldn't get too deep into it, don't want to get, don't want to cross that line, but yeah it's.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: It's definitely an interesting role that I'm very thankful for and I'm thankful at this part of my career and journey that I'm getting to grow this way.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: Now that's awesome to hear.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: Maybe some future pieces.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: I think I'm sort of fascinated and my audience knows that the MSP world.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: I find incredible that there is billions of dollars of revenue, lots of high-powered people hanging their existence on these small teams of engineers dotted around the globe.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: Maybe talk to me about what's next for SonicWall and the MSSP business.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: So I think this isn't just about us.
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: I think it's about MSPs in general, and we haven't.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: This is not the first time we've seen this and I'll call it a revolution.
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: You know my son many, many years ago, when you talk about New Year's and you talk about your New Year's resolution.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: He was at a much younger age and he made this really cute statement.
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: He says well, this year my New Year's revolution is going to be, and I think that's where we're at right now.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: With MSPs, there's so much focus on the.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: You have to be everything to everyone and you cannot be.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: No one can, unless you've just got big, gigantic private equity venture capital backing or you've got a huge checkbook that you're willing to go out there and hire all of this amazing talent.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: But as an MSP, you're expected to know everything there is to know about the cloud.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: You're expected to know everything that there is to know about potential telephony.
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: They're expected to know everything there is to know about their business application.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: You're expected to know everything that there is about cybersecurity.
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: That's a lot of expected to knows, and no one person or one team could probably do all of that, because you're talking about some really expensive talent, our journey.
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: What we're doing at SonicWall is trying to be a force multiplier, be a natural extension of your team.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: Do you want to hire a minimum of 13 dedicated people to start your 24 7 security operation center?
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: Is that what you want to do?
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: Or do you want to go partner with somebody like us?
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: We've got it built, the people are in place, the process is in place, we've got the technologies that we can support.
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: We can onboard you today, if that's what you want, to give you immediate success and a plan of action to move it forward.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: And that's one path.
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: So you can build it.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: You can buy it or you can partner with it.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: Obviously, building can be very long and expensive.
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: Buying is not going to be cheap and that doesn't happen overnight, but partnering with it can almost be instant success.
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: So my analogy to this is very simple, with all of these pressures on MSPs today and how everybody's looking at them.
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: For all of the answers, you are the general practitioner, you're the family doc.
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: I love going to the family doc.
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: Whatever it may be, I'm going to him.
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: He's going to help me, he's going to guide me.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: Maybe I've laid in life, I'm getting diabetes and he's going to send me off to an endocrinologist.
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: Maybe I've gotten a diagnosis for cancer so he's going to send me off to somebody to help me for that diagnosis and treatment.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: But that MSP, that general practitioner doctor it is the core, essential, most of everything.
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: We get to be the subject matter experts.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: We get to be the specialists.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: I get to be the endocrinologist, I get to be the brain surgeon or the heart surgeon or the whatever it is.
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: I get to practice my craft with my team in a way that we get to be the thing that when your worst day comes, we're there.
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: We've seen this, we've done this, we've happened to live through it a couple of times and we will get you through it.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: And that's the new SonicWall today.
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: Like people think about SonicWall, this 34 year old company that's been building firewalls, it's just not who we are.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we still do it, no doubt, and we'll continue to do it.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: We're not giving up that because we're pretty good at doing that, but we're so much more and we want to be this agnostic ecosystem that they can come to.
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: It doesn't have to be about our technology.
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: It can be about something else that you like that maybe comes from SentinelOne or CrowdStrike or Windows Defender or any of the other organizations that we partner with to make this a true open ecosystem play.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: Michael, I love it.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom today.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: It's not just your voice.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: We want to hear from Sonic Ball.
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: We like to cheat and ask our current guests to recommend our next guest.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: Who do you have in?
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: mind.
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: So I've had the pleasure of working with this gentleman from the time I was a partner at Sonic Ball and now one of my peers, who's Jason Carter.
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: He's our chief revenue officer and brilliant leader, strong at what he does, understands MSPs, has been doing it for 20 years, you know, and supporting from the menu.
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: I think he's been here at SonicWall for 20 years and I might I might've shorted him a few, so I've got it wrong, Jason.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: I'm sorry.
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: So much so to the point that I recently had to apologize to him, because now that I'm sitting on the other side of the wall and I'm getting the abuse of being a manufacturer a little bit, I realized there was probably some times where I was a jerk to him and I probably used some different words when I apologized to him.
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: But I'm going to keep it clean and say I was just a jerk.
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: But you could add all kinds of words in there and they'd probably be right.
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: But yeah, he is a fantastic and he's just a good human being as well, and that's where it becomes really cool.
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, Jason Carter, the chief revenue officer at SonicWall.
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: Awesome, Mike.
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom today.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: It's been really good fun.
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: Thank you, sir, I appreciate.