Education is Power

Geek Speak

In today’s ever changing world businesses must capture opportunities in order to stay competitive.  Thus it is more important than ever to educate yourself on the ever changing landscape by  implementing new opportunities, and growing your knowledge.  We meet up with Aaron Garza who shares with us the ever changing landscape as well as what he is recommending to his partners to stay up to date.

pax8

 

 

Video Transcription

Harry Brelsford 

A nation nation. Harry here coming to you from the Acronis cyberfit Summit. 2021 in Miami. Great to be out live again. And I'm back with Tim Kubiak. who's a friend of the family. Tim, how you doing?

Tim Kubiak 

Great. Happy to be here.

Harry Brelsford 

All right. And we're, we're ganging up on Aaron over at PAX8. How you doing, Aaron?

Aaron Garza 

Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks.

Harry Brelsford 

All right, well, what's going on in the world of Pax8 and just just the ecosystem in general talk to us?

Aaron Garza 

It's a great question, Harry. Howdy nation. Good to see you guys. Thanks for having us. Well, there are a lot of things going on right now in the modern ecosystem of modern partners. And you know, at PAX8, we're really focused in on trying to help the SMB reseller partner, yeah, elevate their game, drive more cloud adoption, and helped them during this difficult time of digital transformation. Yeah, moving from break fix to an MRR model incorporating the right stack of technology. So today on stage, I was talking about some of the what are some of the keys to success for MSPs. One standardizing technology stacks, to focusing in on an industry a vertical that makes sense for their business. And three, taking advantage of cloud distribution, Pax8, say we've been focused in on developing our subject matter experts, which we see as a capacity, additional capacity for the MSP, who can't always afford the full time employee that specializes in all the things that you need to deploy a full stack. So we've been, we're like a supplemental resource to the MSP. And you know, you've got these hyper scalars are coming into the market, and really disrupting the economical model, the economic model for our service providers and commanding these very large salaries. And so if you want to continue to grow and scale your business, and you know, customer acquisition, marketing is a challenge, you got to focus in on bottom line revenue. So moving beyond the margin means taking advantage of resources. And so paxi We've invested heavily in providing these types of resources to our partners as part of our partner program. It makes sense. Yeah, we make you dollars. Yeah.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, that does. Well, Tim, any any thoughts on your side?

Tim Kubiak 

So you talked about sales enablement. And one of the things my perception of Pax8  is is you guys have done an amazing job throughout the history of the company of enabling the partners. Where do you see that going next?

Aaron Garza 

You know, I think sales enablement support none of it, right. That's top line, gross profit. But you know, what's even more important, if we want to move beyond the the razor thin margins of distribution, right? Yeah, is education. The way that you increase your margin, your profitability is through program management, incentives and rebates. And part of that means growing, leveling up on the outside, so we provide a couple different resources or lanes for partners, new and legacy partners that continue to raise their ED game. So we've recently announced our academy, we formalize that, it comes in a couple of different lanes, couple different flavors. These are self service resources, as well as one on one coaching, and programs. Some of these courses are four to eight weeks long. And what we do is we've assembled kind of the tracks for MSPs that are coming in and looking to increase their operational efficiency, efficiency, drive their margins up and create more value for their customers. So we've got boot camps that are focused in on onboarding, onboarding to the new cloud era club, we've got technical boot camps, and then we've got business boot camps for CEOs because not everybody's a technologist. So that in combination with Academy, you know, is really our focus on education.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, I think and I might get this wrong listeners but I thought you acquired or hired a business coach out of the Pacific Northwest as part of that to fortify that team. Is that something that okay, cuz I Yeah, absolutely.

Aaron Garza 

Yes. Yeah. Rex Spray. Yeah, that's freaking crew. That was a, an amazing collaboration there. So sealable operations is now part of Pax8. We're proud to have him on board. They've got an amazing legacy. Yeah. Even more impressive NPS track record. These guys are 95 Plus, and they've coached over 500 businesses in their in their business practice. So yeah, it's an amazing addition to the team. We're really excited about that. We're even more excited about exposing that to our partners, all the great, the coaching and the value add focusing on education. We see that as a long tail play for our partners.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, yeah. And then let's look forward. So what can we expect? Maybe you've added a new recently added another vendor. But what's what's going on forward?

Aaron Garza 

Well, I'll tell you here at this conference to be very specific. We have LG. LG is one of our newest vendor launches. They focus in on mobile device management, as well as Device Management specific to Apple in iOS. So this is unique. A lot of service providers, either sell Apple devices or have a customer who's got Apple phones. And you know, there's only a theater symbol set I thinkit takes one week, but securing those devices and and managing that there's a consolidation of the ad piece, the consumer piece and the b2b piece. And so they bring that to the table. Both their CEO and CRO worldwide CRO, are independent. So I've been spending a lot of time with them. Also, recently, we launched a call to teams call to team serves as a bridge between traditional telephony UCaaS solution and Microsoft Teams. Yeah. So you don't have to rip and replace, you can work with both solutions, just call the teams and we look forward to some vendor launches over the next four months. I can't really talk about all of them. But stay tuned. Go to our website, be a partner, because they're coming soon. And some of these are big indicators.

Harry Brelsford 

All right. Thanks, Aaron. Yeah, great. Appreciate you. Okay,