🎧 Welcome to The Winning Podcast

Real conversations. Real insights. From the people building the future of cloud & AI.

Blake shares practical insights, hard-earned lessons, and strategic advice that every CSP business owner, reseller, and managed service provider (MSP) can apply to thrive in a competitive landscape. From navigating Tier 1 vs. Tier 2 models to mastering analytics, self-service, marketing, and team development—this episode is packed with value.

🔹 Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction
01:34 – Blake's Background and Expertise
08:56 – CSP Tier 1 vs. Tier 2 Explained
14:48 – The Relationship Between CSPs and MSPs
17:41 – Differentiating as a CSP
21:43 – Key Challenges in Building a CSP Business
25:11 – The Power of Analytics
28:00 – Marketplace Strategy & Self-Service
32:20 – Lessons Learned: What Blake Wishes He Knew
33:15 – Microsoft Partner Network Overview
34:31 – Advanced Specializations Explained
39:26 – Marketing Strategies for CSPs
45:09 – Digital Media and Branding Insights
48:23 – What Drives Blake’s Motivation
50:45 – Evangelizing Your Vision
52:15 – Investing in People & Culture
52:56 – The Single Most Important Takeaway (SMIT)

👉 Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode with fellow MSP, CSP tech leaders and operators.

Let’s win together in this exciting AI era.

Transcript

The Winning CSP Podcast | Featuring Blake Thompson

Ravi: [00:00:00] Are you working with businesses to maximize the power of cloud services? And if you are a part of managed service providers, MSP or cloud solutions provider, this podcast is tailor made for you. Hi, I'm Ravi, CEO of CloudAssert. Over the past 25 years, I have been on a mission to help businesses leverage technology to its fullest potential.

From my time at Microsoft, where I helped build and launch large scale cloud solutions to leading cloud assert, I have seen firsthand what it takes to succeed and what pitfalls to avoid. That is why I created the Winning CSP. It will bring in industry experts, uncover success stories, most importantly, will help you avoid costly mistakes that can slow you down.

Whether you're starting today or looking to scale your business, this podcast will give you actionable takeaways to accelerate your journey. So [00:01:00] if you're ready to accelerate your growth and win as a CSP, You are in the right place. Welcome to the Winning CSP.

In this episode, we will talk to Blake Thompson, Global Solutions Director, Manage Services from Rapid Circle.

he helps guiding organizations through change, develop, and realize their potential. He has first hand crafted strategies for Microsoft CSP business and taking them to multi million dollar success.

Ravi: Hi, Blake. How's it going

Blake: Hello, nice to be here. Lovely, it's going great.

Blake's Background and Expertise

Ravi: Fantastic. So can you share a little bit about your background and why listeners should be, watching this podcast?

Blake: Yeah, sure, I've been working in the IT industry in multiple countries for the last twenty eight years, specifically, very much heavily within the Microsoft side of things.

My expertise is in building products. Managed solution companies and [00:02:00] organizations helping them transfer and build services MSPs stuff like that and growing through it since 2017 I've been working with CSP and I've grown several CSP organizations up In line with MSPs and have a wealth of experience in that area Hence the reason why I'm here talking with you guys today

Ravi: That's fantastic. How did you end up in this career?

Blake: Actually. I started off in business management and financial auditing, and somebody just said, you solved our problem with the finance, can you now sort out our IT? And that was about 28 years ago

led to a career of doing not helping organizations from a financial perspective, but helping them actually grow and do everything else.

So it's a thing that I've always found really nice and I've worked at almost everything within that scale. I've worked as a as I said, for doing the actual management and enterprise architecture through actually solution architecture and lots of other [00:03:00] things throughout my time. So it's funny. Yeah.

Very nice career to have today.

Ravi: Definitely. And we spoke, about this before and you have helped. transform various businesses, from the starting to several million dollars or euros in revenue. What insights you can give us in terms of the CSP, MSP trends how is it shaping going forward in 2025?

Blake: Of course the main thing is that Microsoft started off with a huge number of license programs that they had of how you could Get resources and license them and they've been trying to simplify that down and now all that's really left are the two contenders One of them is Enterprise Agreement and the other one is CSP.

They're the only ones that you're really going to see out there within a professional sphere. And the move has been from many organizations down towards the CSP level. It doesn't require that commitment. It doesn't require that up front, knowing what your [00:04:00] organization is going to be doing over the next several years.

You can have the complete flexibility and using other things within it. Your organization is capable of getting the same kind of discounts out of it by being cleverer with your stack. What we're seeing within the industry most definitely is move from Microsoft to try and use partners more for this stack and to push down into that level.

It means you're getting an explosion within the CSP market of people attempting to go into it as a lucrative business. But it's definitely one in which you can make good money, but not as just a CSP. You've got to do it together with the whole stack, which is what it was designed to do.

We're definitely seeing within that as well is, Microsoft have, of course, changed the way that their support contracts work.

And that's hitting a lot of companies that traditionally were doing CSP box shifting. Everybody's heard of the big companies which were doing that. They were discounting heavily to end customers. for smaller [00:05:00] organizations to compete against them. However, Microsoft have changed their support tactics and what that's done is it means that the larger box shifters can no longer box shift.

It means that they actually have to support the customer as well as selling licenses. Is, and that's something they're just not set up to do effectively, and especially not for that price, which gives almost everybody in the market now an edge. If you're selling something more than just licenses, you can gain that license or that Azure revenue as well, which is how Microsoft intended the CSP program to be used from the beginning.

So it, it is good news for companies, especially small and medium sized companies that want to break into a kind of managed services market. This opportunity is there now and it's extra revenue that can help your business grow. Yeah,

Ravi: I think you're saying like there are some it used to be in certain way it changed and evolved into an another

Blake: but what Microsoft did was in order to become as tier one CSP, all you had to do was have a little [00:06:00] bit of revenue and take a support contract from Microsoft. Now, what they saw was some big companies that will remain nameless, that they were taking this 20, 25, 000 euro contract and they were dumping over 20 million In support call costs to Microsoft.

So the idea of CSP cloud service provider is that you not only sell the licenses, but you're responsible for the support. However, if you can't figure it out, then you have the ability to create a support call by Microsoft. What was happening was these big box shifting companies were just dumping every single question for the, from the customer directly to Microsoft.

So Microsoft ended up with a huge cost. for delivering the CSP that was supposed to be picked up by that CSP supplier for that revenue. That meant that these box shifting companies were able very cheaply to deliver the licenses. This is going to change now and levels the playing field. No matter how big you are, you won't have to really discount the licensing [00:07:00] anymore to be effective.

This means that you can take that full 17 and a half percent margin that you get from reselling Microsoft licenses and resources and use it for providing your customers. So it makes it a much better setup for almost every single customer going there.

Ravi: Got it. So for a CSP in this, in a new way of dealing with Microsoft, what's your or what are the misconceptions that, CSPs have today, even today, knowing, what you're knowing that they have to overcome.

Blake: Anyway, we have a lot of practices. One is that you have to discount. I've come across a lot of organizations that go, yeah, but we can't earn any margins off of CSB because you have to discount it heavily. Your customer's going to be telling you that you have to discount it heavily. They'll tell every single customer and I've been working with multiple companies at once at some point that were actually going for the same contract or the same tender against a company.

And they told all of them that all the [00:08:00] other ones were discounting. You'd have to stick to your guns a bit and go. I have to earn money off it. It's a very reasonable profit. This is a reasonable thing. We're not going to go down from there. The other one is that that tier 1 against tier 2. That kind of misconception is a big one, that most people think that they would be better off with a tier 2.

The multi tier resellers are very good. At promoting themselves that they will help you find customers that they will help you find money Whereas the truth behind it is the only customers they have are you So they don't have end customers and if they did they'd have to steal them off other people which are taking the service from them Which wouldn't work either the true cost is that If you do your son's rights and you build the right organization, it becomes very much is much quicker You to come into profit in Tier 1 than Tier 2.

And Tier 1 is a much healthier fuel organization going

CSP Tier 1 and Tier 2 Explained

Ravi: could you give a little bit about Tier 1 and [00:09:00] info about Tier 1 and Tier 2

Blake: Certainly, there's three different levels. The first one is called a Multi Tier Supplier. And a Multi Tier Supplier is somebody who is licensed by Microsoft to resell

Ravi: to resell

Blake: CSP down to a kind of second tier of

Ravi: A multi tiered reseller is somebody that can

Blake: that's all they are. A multi-tier reseller is somebody that can take lots of small people, and it was designed originally that you had the SMB end of the business with CSP and the SMB level of the business with CSP.

These guys maybe had four or five customers, nothing else. That was all they were doing. And with that kind of setup, the tier two works very well for them. But if you're a professional IT company that has a good range of customers. Then you're not supposed to be a tier two. That's for the small SMB customers, which have a few customers.

There's a couple of guys doing the IT. That's it. So there's those two levels.

A tier one is an organization that has a direct selling relationship [00:10:00] with Microsoft. So you have a contract with Microsoft to resell their licenses. The tier two, you have an indirect relationship with Microsoft. You go through one of these redistributions.

Now, of course that reseller party. Takes a huge chunk of your profit away So first of all, they'll take away about seven eight percent that they take for themselves But then they charge you support contracts and subscription fees and a lot of others. So at the end of it Microsoft get about 17 and a half percent discount off the standard products some go up as high as 30 percent or more on Dynamics other things are around about 17 and a half So I think that's pretty good But you'll find with most tier twos we usually end up at around about nine and a half to ten percent over if you're lucky after dealing with them.

Whereas if you do it as tier one you get all of that seventeen and a half percent for yourself. And that's actually a very reasonable margin considering the work that you do. And it enables you to do more. That's the main [00:11:00] thing about it. This is money that enables you to deliver the real meaning of your company which should be the managed service provider.

Ravi: So when we hear from, some of the CSP partners that the margins are slim, it's mostly coming from tier two partners who have another distributor in between.

Blake: All companies which haven't run their tier one as it was meant to be run. What people forget is, if we go back to, when I started in the industry, back in the dinosaur days of IT all the way through the 90s and 2000s, people, before virtualization and cloud and all those things came along, People were selling mostly hardware and the king of hardware was actually storage, Most of the companies out there were living off of selling storage They sold compute and they sold networking but the storage deal was paid for all of that and back in those days You're getting about 6 percent margin on selling the storage But you were selling deals of 4 or 5 million and 6 percent of 4 or 5 million was [00:12:00] amazing The funny thing is you can easily get millions of revenue in CSP and you're getting 17.

5 percent which is a hell of a lot more than what we used to get. We've got used to this idea of selling services and selling ourselves where we can put higher margins in 30, 40, 50 percent but when you take away the cost to your organization and other things, your realistic profit margin in 30% Almost every single company once it's broken down is still not 40 50.

It's around a bit You're lucky if you're getting the 20 25 So 17 and a half percent for doing nothing It's actually a lot higher in a lot of cases and a lot easier. The idea is Stack your services get the profit overall from all of them

Ravi: Got it. Makes sense. I think what you're saying is I can see that in olden days, the storage is the more, how to say, like commodity that keeps, you need to keep on, updating or buying more. I remember, we keep filling up the file shares, you [00:13:00] get one terabyte, it fills up in three months and you need more storage, right?

So that was

Blake: It was the most important thing definitely

Ravi: yeah. And so even with that, what you were saying is there was only like five, 6 percent margin in those times and a lot of companies were doing it. But today with CSP, that is, really good, portion, which is 17, 17 percent or more, but if you are not doing it in the right way, that's when this the perception that the margins are not enough comes into play.

Right?

Blake: Yeah, when you try and give too much away for free or you're not effective in what you're doing. I've come across a lot of companies which have tried to build and maintain their own software for delivering and distributing CSP. Now that is a very expensive thing. As you, yourselves, you've built software.

If you were doing it just for one customer and all of your R& D that you guys have done for your products was for one customer, they would have to be earning an awful lot of money for that to [00:14:00] break free, sorry,

Ravi: Yeah.

Blake: we're going to get some light in the background now.

Ravi: Okay. So there is a glow,

Blake: Yeah, there's a light opening up. No, what is, you have to be clever.

You have to look at how you're going to deliver this service, how you're going to minimize your costs, and you're going to maximize the money you're getting out of it. Of course, 17. 5 percent is just the base value. The idea is that you create upsell. On the CSP and that's where MSP comes in and then there's a managed service provider over cloud service provider a managed service provider, which we call MSP that's all about creating cloud managed services that are able to Take all of those resources that you're going to be getting from CSP and moving it up to a higher level

CSP and MSP Relationship

Ravi: You just touched base on MSPs. So what is the relationship between CSP and MSPs are those two different kind of businesses? It was, it used to be like, [00:15:00] yeah,

Blake: shouldn't be, and they should never have been. Now with those box shifting companies, you had it for a while, all they were doing was CSP. But from the moment that Microsoft released the CSP program, if you look at how they connect in, how it works, it was designed that an MSP, a managed service provider, could get the additional revenue and control from delivering the resources as well as delivering the service.

It was never supposed to be a separate thing. It is quintessential to the running of your MSP that you're in control of the CSP. If you look at the way that the CSP breaks down even now, the person who's delivering the licenses and the resources has the responsibility for the Microsoft support calling, for the support overall for the licensing and stuff that are being taken, as well as the security and control for all of those things.

If you're not doing those things and you're, say, giving you're running a managed service for 365, and you've said to your customer, we are going to be responsible for [00:16:00] security, but you're not delivering the CSP. You've got a problem now because somebody else is capable of affecting your ability to deliver that security.

They also have access to your platform. You're not able to enact zero trust. You're not able to enact least privilege because that's not under your control. And they've made it a bit better with GDAP and the ability to split out the rules that you get.

Ravi: The responsibilities. Yep.

Blake: Exactly. But it's not designed for this. GDAP was designed so that your company who's delivering CSP and MSP are now capable of acting in a responsible way yourself going forward by limiting different areas of your organization to have access.

Only the people that need to manage SharePoint can manage SharePoint. It wasn't supposed to be so you can have two suppliers, one selling you licenses and one selling you this. You're not going to get a good supplier makeup in that way.

Ravi: So what you're saying is as a CSP, if you think yourself as just, reselling Microsoft software or for that matter, any other [00:17:00] software that doesn't cut it, like you are essentially providing a managed services already. You might as well, have a proper strategy for doing that.

Blake: Yeah, most definitely. If you're an MSP already, you should be looking at CSP because it is so important to your revenue. If you're trying to start from scratch, then start by thinking not how do I sell Microsoft products because that's not going to cut it on its own. It doesn't mark you up in the world as anything original.

Every single one of these companies are selling the same Microsoft resources. It's not about what you're selling, it's about how you do it that will make you profitable. Better make you stand out and

How do you differentiate as a CSP ?

Ravi: Yeah, that's a very good point. If everybody is selling the same thing, how do you differentiate in this market?

Blake: Yeah, by being better by doing something unique by picking a niche market that there's a hundred different ways that you can create an organization that will flourish within these conditions. The main thing [00:18:00] is being smarter and better than everybody else. Of course, be having better sales having better things, but what there isn't anymore is that whole lock in.

It does not exist anymore. So if you're going to work within this cloud managed service world, then you need to Deliver something which makes your customer want to stay with you rather than have to stay with you I mean if you look at the bad suppliers out there, then you've got the CSP suppliers which We'll roll out tenants, but say they're their tenant.

And if you want to go away from us, then you're going to have to go through a big migration. That's trying to lock the customers back in. Now, actually, according to Microsoft licensing, that's not even allowed. The tenant is owned by the end customer. The whole idea of CSP, of the tenant structure from Microsoft, was to enforce the idea that there is no such thing as a migration.

If you want to migrate, you migrate. You don't migrate to your platform. You, as a [00:19:00] customer, should not be affected by changing partners. And that's what they wanted to create. That's also one of the key ideas of cloud business strategies.

Ravi: So basically, the relationship between the customer is static or permanent with the Microsoft. You as a partner is a transient entity. So as long as you provide value, you are in the picture, or else you can be easily replaced. So in that type of kind of a dynamic environment, it becomes more and more important to find out what is that unique value that you bring.

That your competitors cannot do, right?

Blake: Exactly, yes.

Ravi: So maybe you are, catering to EdTech, universities. Maybe you are catering to a FinTech or, healthcare. Maybe go build your expertise in a vertical, or maybe you go horizontal. What's your thought on that?

Blake: It depends entirely on where you're from and what you're doing and where

Ravi: Your background.

Blake: is the industry around you? I think it helps to [00:20:00] specialize into a particular segment of the market, to become well known in that segment. However, I also know that within some countries, they are, even within a small country, I'm in the Netherlands, and even within the Netherlands, It's a rather small country compared to others.

But if you're a company that's located in the North, good luck trying to get a contract in the South, even though it's only about an hour and a half away that they like local people. So although you could say I'm the best at healthcare and I'm going to get people at healthcare in the North, they're probably not going to employ you.

So you have to look at how your market works, how the kind of psychological build up of the people around you. There's so much to take into account when you're designing or building a company. But the main thing about it is. to know your market, know why you're doing it, know what you're aiming for and how you're going to be unique in it.

As you said, that could be a vertical, it could be horizontal, it could be down to the proposition that you're doing, it could be down to your way of working or your philosophy. There's tons of different ways that will make you unique, but you have to follow through on it. [00:21:00] There is a whole wealth of companies out there that have You know, their core values or their customer vision, and then they go and tell a customer it, but they can't explain how this idea translates into the way they deliver services.

If that's the case, then it's, it doesn't mean anything. So you have to build something unique and something that actually has purpose.

Ravi: I think very well said. Getting back to your, experiences. What biggest challenges that you faced, while building CSP, MSP practices? Because you have been doing this for a long time. And you have experiences, taking from zero to a million dollars, from million euros to, multimillion euros and, or pounds.

Biggest challenges in building CSP business

Ravi: So what are the biggest, some of the biggest challenges that you faced during this time?

Blake: Strangely enough, your own organization generally so many people have. Views on Microsoft or views on CSP or on [00:22:00] doing this kind of stuff without the experience of having done it. And so within you, the things that you bought up earlier, you can't make money off of it. The margins are too low. Why would you want to sell Microsoft stuff?

Microsoft's gonna screw you in the end anyway. All of these kind of things that you hear all the

Ravi: Preconceived notions,

Blake: Preconceived notions constantly within your own organization, usually actually not even at the engineer level because they don't care about this stuff at all, but definitely within the sales and within the management structure of an organization.

That's the first challenge that you always have to overcome. You have to show them in a business case how much money they're missing out on. And then you have to teach and train your sales organization. In this way of selling most organizations, which haven't done this before, their sales are either working based on the conception of projects and solutions with a support contract, or they're working on the idea of box shifting or something else.

They haven't got their head in the game or don't know the arguments for [00:23:00] how you sell and why you sell. CSP to customers getting that sorted in your organization is the key to growing but first of all you have to get your Organization on board facing the right direction and then you have to get yourselves in there after that happens you find it Gets in line that's more the kind of way that you want to go with it. When you're talking about that, you're getting into the cloud selling. One of the best examples are the, the NIST model with the cloud of the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS that everybody knows about. And everybody's called everything as a service since that time.

But that pizza model kind of comes in effect of, you can go and buy a pizza from the shop and make all the things yourself, or you can buy a frozen pizza, or you can get a pizza delivered. There are those kinds of gradations in it, but understanding the MSP model is much more complex than the CSP model.

And I found that Convincing people to resell Microsoft, once I've got them in order, that starts growing. But you're not going to retain [00:24:00] customers by doing that. At the same time that you're growing your CSP, you have to have managed services on top of the CSP, in order to keep that growth, because you need to retain your customers.

You can land a huge customer, By getting, by pure chance and then next month and MSP will take them off of you again So what you need to do is you need to make sure there's that reason that they're with you What value are you delivering to them that keeps them with you?

Ravi: Very true. I think sometimes I tell this, you can be successful by accident, but you have to have proper plan to continue to being successful, right? There is a saying that even broken clock shows the time correctly twice a day, right?

Blake: I haven't heard that one before but that's a very accurate one. Yes

Ravi: So having a proper strategy for not just landing the customer, but. How are you going to retain and show them value month over month? So you just land them and then forget about them for until they come back and ask hey I need ten more licenses. That's [00:25:00] not going to keep them with you because And another CSP might come and offer another five percent.

They might you know jump but that's not what Is going to help you grow the business?

Analytics is more important than you think

Blake: MSP runs more than anything on business analytics. You can deliver the best service in the world if you can't measure it, and you can't show how well it's doing, then that's not going to help you with the customer. Your retention with the customer comes in large part from being able to, show how well you're doing.

People know about SLAs and XLAs, so service level agreements and experience level agreements. But the real proof of that is being able to have proper analytics that come out of your service and show the customer in great detail what you're doing and how you're developing and how you're delivering value to them.

If you can do that within your MSP, then you'll be much more successful. It's one of the reasons why I liked Hybr and we've used Hybr for a while now, as the business analytics is one of the [00:26:00] things that sets it apart from other tools. And strangely enough, it's the most important tool to an MSP, because you can find any mechanism, hundreds of mechanisms everywhere for being able to deploy resources.

What you need is a mechanism that shows you value coming back in the opposite direction. How are we doing with our services? What are we doing with our services? All of that kind of stuff is very important.

Ravi: Yeah, looking at the metrics in looking at the metrics in real time and able to derive valuable insights, whether you know what, which customer segments are experiencing good growth or where do you want to invest your time or who's, demanding more of your time all those things.

Blake: Exactly. And next to that as well, of course, there's the analogy from also going back to my dinosaur days before virtualization came along. If you need to make it easier in an MSP for the customer to take your services, what we had was going way back. We started with this thing that we used to call hosting.

And we were doing [00:27:00] hosting providing. And that was long before cloud came along. We'd build these platforms, and we'd deliver desktops. We'd deliver compute services. It was basically what you'd nowadays call a public cloud, but without all the fancy bells and whistles. And in the beginning it worked by people they'd have to order a physical server and we'd install a physical server for them.

That happened also on site. And then one day some smart guy thought up virtualization. And all of a sudden the entire world changed. And when you were installing what's now called private clouds, but was then just, installing virtualization by the customer, everyone The whole world changed rather than every single time they wanted to order something and having to go through their own purchasing department to get that resource.

What happened was all of a sudden, I want a new virtual machine, I just roll one out. I want a new virtual machine, I just roll one out. And they saw this massive explosion in Sprawl, and the funny thing Purchasing desperately tried to keep up by allowing them to buy the servers to keep this going because they needed it And it was the new technology cloud is that on steroids [00:28:00] cloud?

Marketplace and Self-Service

Blake: Enables you to order whatever you want whenever you want it however you want it your service your MSP needs to be that So you have to make it easier even from a only a CSP perspective if you're CSP Business cases I'm going to install You And order every single license for every single customer that I have That's not going to Make it Make you rich if you give customer a way to order stuff themselves whenever they want it However, they want it and offer value on top of that automatically That's going to change the way everything works.

That's going to make it 10 times better for You're going to make it easy for people to take your you to give you money. Basically

Ravi: So instead of you being, following the old school model of get a ticket, for 10 more license, and then you go and crank up the system and then, put the order in and then deliver the license. That's not going to make you efficient or [00:29:00] get the customer purchase more often or when they need.

I am with you because that's the reason we built Hybr marketplace to provide that type of an independence as well as a self service mechanism

Blake: and when you think of it, when you start down that road, there's no end to what you can do. You and I have brainstormed before funny ideas like the idea of merch stores for customers on these kind of platforms, where you can give your customer the ability to get hold of your own internal merch.

Everybody likes something free and that gives you free publicity outside. There's no end to how there's tons of different ways that you can think up new ways of delivering an MSP or adding value onto the MSP that you're already delivering. There really is no end to those kinds of things. And but that's the most important part of running an MSP is constantly looking for that upsell on top of what I'm already delivering.

Ravi: Makes sense. I think having your own branded marketplace gives you that ability to Kind of bundle things [00:30:00] together or sell your additional value added services like, training or, whatnot in from the same single pane of glass experience that's one of the ways, I think you and me, we talked about having this place where the customer comes and they're able to not just discover Microsoft services and products, but they are able to discover what you bring uniquely to the, to this ecosystem.

Blake: Yeah, you want customers to see your complete portfolio out of the box. As soon as they become your customer, as an MSP, you want them to see a massive portfolio. And especially if you're doing stuff on multi cloud or you're doing stuff even wider than Microsoft. There's no reason why you'd have to stop with just MSP.

Reselling Microsoft if you're doing multi cloud solutions, you want to sell all of those multi cloud solutions as well You want to expand bigger and further than that and all the clouds have their own reseller program So it's possible to do that. But the main takeaway is to concentrate. The sale of the resources will come naturally If you grow your MSP because [00:31:00] that's where your customers are coming to you for the main thing to focus on then is How do I grow an MSP if I want to grow CSP?

So as long as you've made the decision to do those first two things, CSP and MSP, now you concentrate on growing my MSP and my CSP revenue will come along with it.

Ravi: Will automatically grow with your MSP portfolio because you now have a diverse MSP, ecosystem where, whether it is Microsoft or Google or AWS, you have experts who can, help the customer.

Blake: Yeah, if you're selling managed 365 services, say, and so you will install, configure, patch, update, maintain, everything else to do with Office 365, then You ensure, as part of that, that you're selling the 365 licenses. Get mid range customer, they've got 2, 000 licenses a month. 30 Euros a month, that kicks up really quickly.

But you're also maybe charging, I don't know, 15, 20 Euros per month for doing that fully [00:32:00] management of all their managed services. And your revenue grows on both sides. But the customer's not coming to you just to buy licenses off you. They're coming to you, To get you to manage their stack and that's the business that you grow.

It just so happens that you have that extra bit from the CSP in your pocket.

What you wish you had known earlier ?

Ravi: I think continuing our conversation about, we talked about the biggest challenges that you had in your career. what are the things that you wish that you had known earlier in your career?

Blake: To pay much more attention to networking would have been one of those things I think. Still even now I'm terrible at social media. However, the entire world and our ability to do stuff is based on our visibility. So marketing and sales and that stuff are much more important than especially in the IT industry we want to give credit to.

But from a CSP perspective, I think it would be very much down to [00:33:00] don't underestimate the importance of the MPN network. That would be a very side of it. We concentrate on talking about CSP, and we talk about the MSP, so the cloud service provider, and the managed service provider. But there's a third point in that triangle.

Microsoft Partner Network

Blake: And that third point is the Microsoft Partner Network. Which fuels your ability to be An MSP because without paying attention to it, you're not going to be taken seriously You're not going to win the contracts And on the other side of it if you don't pay attention to it You're not going to get all the extra money that you can get back from Microsoft based on incentives based on Marketing and lots of other stuff that you can get by being a partner So it's important if you want to go down the world of Microsoft and you want to be really good at It's doing all three together CSP MSP MPN. You In this kind of triangle that they're all important and feed each other up to the next level.

Now, we concentrated on CSP years ago, [00:34:00] and we concentrated on other things. A lot of organizations I've found are now getting themselves a Microsoft Partner Manager or an Alliance Director or something like this. That kind of stuff doesn't interest me so much. I don't think, I don't think Microsoft care.

I don't care how big you are as a company. I don't care what you're doing as a company. Microsoft doesn't care because they've got so many suppliers. They're all so big. You're not going to get special treatment from Microsoft. You're not going to get their whole setup is to ensure that every partner gets the same treatment.

Microsoft Advanced Specializations

Blake: The only way you get better treatment from Microsoft is by getting those advanced specializations, by getting the partner solution status, by going for the training. by pushing your CSP revenue up.

These are the things that make you important to Microsoft. It means that they want to trade with you. So if you want to get sales referrals from Microsoft, or you want Microsoft to pay attention to you, then the only way to do that, as I said, is certification, advanced specializations, solution provider [00:35:00] position, and the of course, working with them on getting your revenue up.

And of course. All of that comes together in the Jumpstart program. So by ensuring that you're part of a Jumpstart program from whatever it is that Microsoft is interested in this year or this month or we've always said that Microsoft seems to be, like a kid with ADHD is his concentrations going everywhere.

One month they're saying security is the most important thing and then they've got some new buzz at the moment is artificial intelligence. It's copilot got to be involved in that. Yeah, it's very important. Goodness knows what next year is going to be, quantum computing or something else. They constantly change your ideas, but there's jumpstart programs and being in that race with them is what gets you traction.

And being an MSP means paying attention to what's going on in Microsoft's brain and what kind of stuff they're doing.

Ravi: I think that's fantastic input because this is something when we build the business, we put this in the back burner, or this is a [00:36:00] side thing that that goes. Like you said, when we get to talk to Microsoft regional director or, then we are like, Hey, we are already in, partnership with Microsoft, but the real partnership or the real benefit starts.

When you go through these programs and

Blake: Yes, that's how you get their attention. Then they look up at you and they'll see you. And of course, Microsoft is one of the only companies that can help you. build your business because they have a lot of direct contact with larger customers. They have a lot of direct contact with other customers and people which contact Microsoft looking for partners.

Now they've got that partner network. You have to shine on that partner network to stand out, which means you have to be on the jumpstart program. So if some customers heard a buzz about CoPilot, Who are they going to tell you to partner with? They're going to tell you to partner with the people which have the copilot advanced specializations which have the on their jumpstart programs which have shown interest in Microsoft and their abilities and they're the ones which will land in an area.

It's another way to grow your [00:37:00] MSP if you're the first to do something So say you were the first in your country to have done a successful, I'm not on about just the consultancies that they tried to do in the Jumpstart program, but you were the first one to come up with some use for Copilot. If you were the one that said, Hey, we've done this with Copilot.

We've set up a new LLM and it does this. And it's amazing. Then you'd land by Microsoft. They'd use you as a business case. Your company would be seen everywhere and other

Ravi: Then you become the go to go to partner from Microsoft. I have seen that happening. Yeah.

Blake: But that's how you grow your MSP from a Microsoft perspective. You have to cuddle up to them in that way. But an Alliance Manager doesn't help you with that. That's just a glorified person that says, Hey, I went to Microsoft again this month, or I went off to one of their conferences this month.

It doesn't achieve anything. You're much better off having somebody in your organization. That is a fastidious kind of person that pays lots of attention to the MPN network on incentives [00:38:00] and all of that kind of stuff. Ensures you get your all the, All of your advanced specializations and an auditor or a quality manager that would do that kind of concentrates on crossing the T's and dotting the I's much more than some kind of flamboyant director that spends all his time thinking that he's building a relationship with Microsoft.

I've never seen that happen in that respect.

There is enough room out there in the world for more people doing MSP work and CSP work. It's not like it's a closed in little market. Even if you're building software, doing something else, you're doing ISP work, then, we're all coexisting in this same kind of place and it's not like we used to think the world was.

You used to see your competitor as your enemy, whereas what we've seen, especially where I work now is, Our traditional competitors have in a lot of cases become our partners. We found things that's unique about each other and we try and coexist and cooperate together in order to present stuff because there is no single company which will be capable [00:39:00] of doing all of that work.

So also alignment in, it's not a war. These are not potential things. They can be partners. You just have to work out how to coexist. And as I said, I can tell you everything about how I know to do stuff. It would still come down at the end of it to learning how to do it. Your idea is not worth that much. It's how you do it, how you implement it, how you set the whole thing up, and how good you are at doing it that will make the difference.

About Marketing Strategies

Ravi: Can you share some of the marketing, tactics or strategies that work exceptionally for you?

Blake: one thing that I always do is I always visualize what we're selling inside a service catalog. So I create a comprehensive thing when your organization is run by sales. Then they come up with ideas. Terry Pratchett, the novelist, called it, you've got the sizzle, but eventually you have to have the sausage.

He was there talking about you can have the best salesman in the world that can think up this grand idea, but at some point it actually has to exist. MSPs [00:40:00] are not selling ideas. MSPs are selling a fully structured, normally ITIL based So you have to know, you have to have defined what am I delivering?

What am I actually making for the customer? What value am I delivering? And that has to be clear because even if you manage to sell it a couple of times, after about half a year, the customer is going to go what am I paying you for? Because if you don't know it, they don't know it. And you can have the best salespeople ever.

That's not going to help you as a company. If you're going to create a proper MSP, then you have to very clearly, what tasks am I doing for this money? And is it a good value? Because the whole point of cloud based services, as we know, you've got the ability to scale and the ability to be flexible, but you've also got.

Transparency, which is the customer wants to see how you build your costs what actions you're taking what you're doing It's not some black box. They're buying. It's they want the integration with their company So I always start with a service catalog which explains what I'm doing how I'm doing [00:41:00] it What things we're using to do it and shows the value that we're delivering from a service catalog which explains what you're doing, how you're doing it, why you're doing it, what sets it apart, what method you're using for selling it, describes everything about how you're meeting that customer's goal. It even describes

Ravi: a, do you have an idea of do you group the service catalogs into, how do you build your service catalog?

Blake: Yeah that's part of the thing, isn't it? Cloud managed services are supposed to be dynamic and flexible. They're supposed to be pay as you go, which means the well known thing of SKUs. Same as Microsoft Use, you define a number of measurable billing points. That your service is going to use.

And that's where, of course, billing software comes in and is very important as well. Because you're going to have to gain that information and display that information. If I'm doing a modern workplace for a customer and we're charging them per user or per device. At the end of the month, that customer is going to come back and go, You say [00:42:00] it's 3, 000 users, Who are they?

You have to be able to show me this and being able to show that information is an important part of transparency. So that's how we build the services up. You've got to think in terms of, go and read up on the NIST cloud model. The delivery model, the idea of an MSP. There's a wonderful book from booklet from Microsoft called the CSP for MSP playbook from Microsoft.

And that explains as well the idea of how you build up the concept. of a cloud managed service and how you deliver it and how you use the two of them together. There's an awful lot of really cool stuff out there that will help with those things. Yeah, it's really is about having a clear idea. Once we've got a service, then marketing is very different.

Marketing is not your service. Your service is what you're going to sell and how your company is going to deliver it. Marketing campaigns are about grabbing your services together for a [00:43:00] particular audience. So if you've got a whole portfolio of multiple services and you're going to target a particular segment, you know what their needs are, you know how they see their need and their problem, then you can target that audience with a range of your services installed in a certain way and delivered in a certain way to match their needs.

And that's the difference between marketing and service based delivery.

No, you could go spend about, a six day training event in how you do all of those things. But the basics of it are is understanding that there is a difference between how you sell something and how you build it. And the two of them are related by sales campaigns, marketing campaigns and

Ravi: Very true.

Blake: Basically, if you've got a load of managed services, which can be consumed in a usage based service, then for customers, what you're doing is solution based sales, but the solutions are based upon your services.

Ravi: Very true. I think, what, [00:44:00] To quote you again you mentioned, if there are a lot of sizzle, you better back it with good sausage, right?

Blake: Yeah, exactly.

Ravi: That's very very well said in that

Blake: Don't let yourself sell something that you haven't delivered and include your whole organization when you're creating your services. Again, with managed services, you're looking more at an ITIL kind of model, but you're also getting closer towards DevOps if you're doing it correctly. What you want to do is ensure that the side of your business, which is selling to customers and quoting and working on offers, is the same part of your organization, which is maintaining and delivering the service You need to get them as close together You want to get rid of that in the Netherlands they call it throwing it over the fence The idea is sell sort something we're throwing it over to a project guys.

Oh, we've built something Now we're going to throw it over to our support guys. That doesn't build a healthy organization

Ravi: That's the easiest way to frustrate your customers, right?

Blake: Frustrate your customers and go bankrupt really quickly

It doesn't work at [00:45:00] all

Ravi: So in terms of marketing, do you see more digital marketing type of things come to help or this is just B2B sales,

About Digital Media and Branding

Blake: I think exposure is important, but exposure can come in a million different ways. You've got to be smart. Don't spend huge amounts of money on advertising. Branding is important, which is very different to marketing. Branding is, if people don't know your brand, then there's no point being there. When they hear that when they hear that CloudAssert has a new service, they first of all have to know about CloudAssert.

Otherwise, it's not going to work. So branding is important. Your image of your brand is very important. But then after that, do I think that an advert cam, advert campaign about your workplace is going to add anything? No, not really. I think the, within all it things, nobody's going to be convinced by a slick advertising campaign when you're asking them to spend 10 million over three years.

They're going to be, they're going to be convinced by. [00:46:00] Knowing somebody else which is taking your service and is happy with it. Sales networks are important. Word of mouth is important. Connecting through a social network is important. Traditional advertising doesn't do anything within the IT industry.

People aren't dumb. In fact, what they are is overexposed to advertising to the point where they're cynical. What they really need is to hear that somebody who runs an organization like them is Has had a good experience with your company doing what they're doing and that will sell much better every single time.

So get into your partner networks, get into your business networks, get into events and things like that. Don't stand there at a marketing show with some kind of podium waving your flags of your company because nobody cares and most of the time it's just your competitors looking anyway. Go to other things where you as a business leader can talk to other business leaders but make sure that your brand's out there more than your individual [00:47:00] services.

That will come through word of mouth.

Ravi: I think this also branding and positioning. I follow Rory Sutherland, British Ad Man by his own words. The positioning of your brand within the people's mind or the context is much more important than any other type of advertising, sleazy advertising that you can do.

Blake: yeah, he's very inspirational, he's got some brilliant ideas on a lot of things. Definitely worth a look. But I'm with you on that. If you've got an organization, you have to get your brand out there. And your brand has to stand for something, even if it doesn't. And what he says all the time, he takes the most vacuous companies, which are nothing but a marketing tool.

However, they've been majorly successful because of how they've marketed their brand. And they're not marketing what they do. They're marketing their brand. And the brand is important. So I agree with you in that. Spending time and money making sure that people know what that logo means is very important.

But

Ravi: and then [00:48:00] follow it up with really delivering that value, right? Because like you said, you know what Rory says, marketing may just work for consumers, but when it comes to, it, people can, know your stuff very soon, very fast, and they can change you like, like this at any time.

So fantastic. Fantastic.

What keeps you motivated ?

Ravi: I think getting back to a little bit on the personal side of things, right? So what keeps you motivated ?

Blake: I don't know. My expertise is in working with tough times. It's what I find challenging and what I find nice. And of course, the greatest thing about tough times is winning and getting out of them. For organizations to keep motivated, especially when they're in tough times, it's about celebrating every single win that you have.

And that's about communicating and evangelizing that within your company. Keeping your company stoked on what you're doing. I don't have a problem so much motivating myself, but of course I find it important [00:49:00] to motivate a lot of people. Which I'm not so easily motivated. And in order to

Ravi: Because as a business leader you are how to say it is in you that you are self motivated, ambitious. You look for winning. But how do you spread that to to the rest of the organization that you are leading? Go

Blake: By not treating people like idiots. Not thinking that, oh, they won't understand it anyway. But Being open with them, finding the people that want to work with you, the early adopters, also Making sure that you keep the people who are trying to stop anything happening away from the people that are trying to grow.

Make sure that the feel of the company stays positive. It's a very important thing with it. And that comes down to communication and evangelization of what you're doing. You can be the best that Operational director or manager in the world, you might know exactly what you're doing. Financially, you might have everything in order.

If you can't express that to your company and you stand there at the thing going and we're up 5 percent on our GDP on [00:50:00] this and our costs have gone down 4%.

To get the people involved. You need to get out there and get them excited. You need to understand what motivates them and bring that into it.

Most people just want to be able to get the chance to grow and to enjoy their work and do these things. So that's how we do it is keeping the people going. We build a structure into it. The actual people running the company constantly, every month doing like a lunch stand up session, explaining to the people how far we've got, where our plans are going, inviting feedback next to that.

You've got the weekly sessions with the individual teams doing the same thing. Just keep the communication rolling and the people see there's some kind of feedback from that communication. Same as with your customers. Just keep communicating going.

Evangelize your vision

Ravi: I think the word that you used evangelizing rather than just communication, right? Because communicating everybody talks about it. But when you put it in such a term like evangelize, right? So you have to become evangelizing person within your organization. Then it [00:51:00] puts you in a different shoe.

You know that you are not, it's not about communicating once in a, yearly email to your customers. It's about a constant communication. Messaging to everybody involved.

Blake: are not excited and are not going to change their way of thinking based upon a logical argument. I don't think that's ever worked. If it did, people would be easier swayed. Most people are swayed more by their emotional arguments. Even if you've got the logic to back it up afterwards, you have to be part Barnum.

Big showman. You have to be out there showing the world in order to be good at what you're doing. It's not enough that you're, amazing at what you do, you have to be able to present in that. You have to be able to convince people that this is the right thing to do. Definitely agree

Ravi: Very true. Why it comes before, before what? And I think you can extrapolate that and take it to your organization or team building.

Why are we doing? Why am I, running this CSP business? Is it just to make, a 5%, 10 percent margin? Or am I doing this for [00:52:00] certain customers? So I'm going to make their life easier. So that why putting that why before comes in all these places. And it's more important. for your organization to rally behind that why before you, even think about what are we going to do,

Invest in People, Keep Them Happy

Blake: yeah, I personally believe that you get an organization that matches you, if you're a good kind of person that is paying attention to the happiness of people within your organization. If you're trying to build that sphere within it, you'll get those kinds of people attaching to your company, feeling that part of it and growing.

If you're, Not doing that, then you're going to get the other kind of people. So it's, yeah, it's, it is important to pay a lot of attention to that organization, but then we can go down a, as I said, in an entire session, just on building organization structures and those

Ravi: Yeah, you have been very good at that,

Blake: yeah,

Ravi: Blake.

Blake: that's my specialty is going down that road.

But as I said, with the CSP as well, that's a no brainer within those things,

Single Most Important Take Away (SMIT)

Ravi: Let's talk about what is the one thing the [00:53:00] single most important takeaway for the listeners listening to this podcast for the CSP business, MSP business. What is the SMIT single most important takeaway,

Blake: Yeah, that's a hard one. As I said, for me, it's paying attention to all three of those things, the CSP, MSP, and MPN, but building an intentional organization that's meant to exploit these things. Paying attention to all those three things together. If I want to do CSP, I've got to pay attention to MSP, and I've got to pay attention to the MPN, which feeds the CSP, which goes round and round.

That's the only way you're successful, but it is important. Learn about what you want to do ensure that you're the best at what you're trying to do and Build a company based on what you know is So important, so if you're going to become a managed service provider, but you think you can just do a lot of sales Sizzle as we call it rather than using some other word It's not going to work because a customer wants something that's substantial so [00:54:00] build a company real value into what you're doing and you will accumulate worth.

Ravi: Fantastic. Thanks a lot. Building an intentional organization that focuses on CSP, MSP, and MPN. That, that trio of things for success is an important takeaway. Thanks a lot Blake Thompson for, taking time among your busy schedule. I know you have been running around.

Blake: Anytime, Ravi. We'll do it again sometime.

Ravi: Yep, definitely.