Joey Pinz Discipline Conversations

#871 NerdioCon 2026: Vadim Vladimirskiy - 🚀 Building the Future of MSP Cloud Success

• Joey Pinz • Episode 872

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🚀 What does it take to build a scalable tech business that actually runs without you?

In this episode of Joey Pinz Discipline Conversations, Joey Pinz sits down with a cloud innovator to unpack the evolution from early IT consulting to building a powerful platform helping MSPs thrive in the Microsoft ecosystem.

From crawling under desks fixing printers to pioneering cloud-based infrastructure, this conversation dives deep into the real drivers of growth—automation, standardization, and forward-thinking leadership.

💡 You’ll also hear how today’s MSPs can tackle their biggest challenges: cybersecurity risks, talent shortages, and staying competitive in a rapidly changing AI-driven world.

This episode isn’t just about technology—it’s about mindset, execution, and building systems that scale.

 

🔥 Top 3 Highlights

✅ How MSPs can simplify complex cloud environments and boost profitability

⚙️ Why automation and standardization are the keys to scalable growth

🤖 The real impact of AI on MSP security, governance, and future success

 

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Join us for enlightening discussions that spark growth and exploration. 

Hosted by Joey Pinz, this Discipline Conversations Podcast offers insights and inspiration.

 

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Discipline. How does it play a role in your life? How does it drive your decisions? Do you have too much or too little? Every profession, hobby, or passion requires a level of discipline. I have used it in weight loss (+130 lbs.), family death, and found a +25 year business. Am I an expert? Absolutely not! Please join me, as I speak to interesting people and find out how discipline affects their career, life, goals, and decisions. Join me as I talk to interesting people in: #Health, #Fitness & #Wellness: #Business, #Technology & #Science: #Art & #Culture: Website: joeypinz.com All social media @TheJoeyPinz Do you wish to Sponsor? Get the prospectus here: www.joeypinz.com/sponsor

 

 

 

 

 

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SPEAKER_00

NerdioCon 2026. What a great event. What an absolutely great event. They're in Palm Springs, California. I believe it's their fifth or their sixth. First one I've been to. I was I reached out and I was graciously invited by the entire marketing and sales team, uh PR. Just a wonderful event. The Star Wars team was there. The opening day was May 4th. So, of course, May the Fourth be with you. May the force be with you, excuse me. But just wonderful event, great theme carried through of Star Wars. I've never seen it done so well before. This is the best I've ever seen it done well, uh, really well. And the the attention to detail from the leadership team, from the marketing team was absolutely incredible. Wonderful keynotes. Um, I attended all the MSP, of course, related ones and lots of great MSPs. I had great side conversations. The vendor hall was was pumping and thriving, a lot of great vendors there, but just an absolutely wonderful event. Um, glad I was a part of it. We set up a podcast station there and we had four great conversations. The first was was with Vedeen, the CEO, an absolute pleasure. A gentleman, kind, smart, uh, first time meeting him, a walkthrough, some you know, where he was and where he is now. Uh, you know, Nerdio was nothing a mere seven years ago, in 2018, I believe, is when it started. Um, meeting his partner, partner Joseph, and wonderful conversation with Vadim, building the future of MSP cloud success. The next conversation was with Will Leminsky. I've had the great pleasure of knowing Will for six or seven years. Now we haven't talked in the last couple of years, but to see his career just skyrocket is is inspiring and makes me happy and and um really, really impressive. We were able to catch up a bit, uh, scaling smarter how MSPs when in a fast-changing tech world. Great conversation with Will. The third was with Amal Dalvey. Great conversation. Amal was really, really cool to talk about some of the older technologies in the 90s and the 2000s that we're both familiar with, that we both kind of came up with. Uh, from code to product leadership, building what matters. We a real candid conversation. He exchanges, shared some of the things that he uh asks people on interviews, and really great conversation. Smart man, uh, where he grew up in India to where he is now. Really, really great conversation with Amal. And then lastly, with Christian Brenkoff, wonderful young man, very open, very smart, author of five books, holds all of these titles and awards. He was at Microsoft for a while, and uh really smart the way he uh systematizes everything, and um, he was really candid too. At the end of the conversation, he shared something that he generally doesn't talk about, but it was a really great conversation with Christian. I really, really enjoyed it. I thank the whole team there at Nerdio, Liz, and team and marketing and PR and sales and leadership uh to have me at this wonderful wonderful event. I hope to come back to come back soon. Thank you so much for watching and listening. Hi, I'm Joey Pins. And here's my 45 second introduction. After starting my business in the 90s, I started developing poor habits of eating and my diet because of working way too much to find myself at 340 pounds. The doctor told me if I don't lose the weight, I'm not gonna see my daughter graduate. I took the next seven months, lost 130 pounds. People ask me, How'd you do it? What's the secret? I need to lose weight. How'd you do it? How did I lose the weight in just one word? Discipline. I've had other successes in life, and I attribute them all to discipline. No, I'm not thinking of discipline, but I believe that it can help all of us. Friends convinced me to start a podcast. The podcast mission. How do we better ourselves and society? I talk to interesting people in health, fitness, sport, wellness, business, technology, science, art, and culture. And I eventually asked them how discipline plays a role in their life. Podcast vision, growth through learning from others. Did you go for a run today? I understand you're a runner.

SPEAKER_01

I do. I I did not get a chance today. It's been uh it's been an early start and a long day, but I typically do. Typically, how long do you go? Uh I usually go for a half an hour for about a 5k. I do I try to do a 5k every day. Do you really?

SPEAKER_00

Do you have anything in your ear or are you just quiet?

SPEAKER_01

No, no, I gotta have stuff in my ear. Is that right? Is it a podcast? Is it music? Is it it's not music, it's usually some book or podcast or something. I'm trying to keep my mind occupied.

SPEAKER_00

But you feel so much better after.

SPEAKER_01

I do, I do. It gives you gives you a boost, clears my mind, helps me solve problems that have been percolating. So really, really good, good way to spend the time, especially when there's a problem trying to solve, just stepping away and going for some exercise helps.

SPEAKER_00

I found that I would join peer groups at a certain point in my career, and I found when I got away from the business, oftentimes it's easier to work on it instead of when you're in it.

SPEAKER_01

For sure.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it helps a lot.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. I've uh I've probably learned that lesson a long time ago. So I've been working towards that for many years now. That's you know, I I remember when uh when I was starting my first company with uh with Adar, my MSP, uh I couldn't be away from the business for probably more than a day. Really? I had kids and we would go on vacation. I was always on the phone, there's always something breaking, customer needing something. So I remember deciding that, hey, my measure of success is going to be how long I can step away from the business without something breaking. So like every year I would say, okay, how long can I be without my phone? So it was a day at first, then two days, then a week, then two weeks, and uh, you know, eventually got to the point where I'm not a single point of failure in the business that can run without me for at least some period of time. Uh, and that's that's really one of the ways, uh one of the KPIs that I have for myself as far as being a successful CEO and a leader, where uh I'm not in the middle of everything that that makes me a single point of failure.

SPEAKER_00

You started making money in IT in high school.

SPEAKER_01

Yes. How I was doing IT consulting, I was uh running around, crawling under desks, setting up people's Windows 95 and network printing. That's uh that was a big workload back then, is getting printers to work. So you could, if you have two computers in your house, be able to print from one to the other, eventually setting up DSL lines and firewalls and things like that. So I charge $25 per hour. For you, which for a uh for 11th grader or 10th grader, whenever I started, was really good money. Not bad. I ended up getting a cell phone with before anybody had a cell phone because I knew what year run? So this is like 97, 97, 98. Uh so yeah, that was that's that's how I knew technology was a way to make a decent, you know, decent amount of money. And I thought that that was gonna be certainly part of my future. I like the combination of you know both being very technical, but also having that that business lens on how to monetize things and how to find ways that can deliver value and capture some of that value that I'm delivering. So that that's been my first experience.

SPEAKER_00

And another uh rarity in the industry perhaps is having those two factors and also being personable.

SPEAKER_01

Some would argue now, okay.

SPEAKER_00

I remember I was doing. Yeah. Um, everybody everybody always has such nice things to say about you. I remember some of the first things I did was calling under desk, so never forget this one uh woman had like a dozen pairs of shoes. So she would come into the office with sneakers and then change her shoes depending on her outfit for her meetings. Yeah. But these are the things that you find, yeah. Yeah. So so you started the MSP, you go to Northwestern, you're in the Chicago area. Yes. And you start the MSP around 2004, 2005?

SPEAKER_01

2005. So I started my professional IT consulting career in '99. Y2K. Y2K was my first project. That's why they hired me. I was in college, I think it was my freshman, freshman year in college. Uh, they hired me as a part-time engineer, technician to go around to all of all of the customers of a specific IT consultancy in Skokie, Illinois, to uh do Y2K audits. Um if you remember those floppy discs you had to boot off of to check the BIOS. That was my very first professional IT consulting project that I did not for myself, but for someone else. Amazing. Uh, and then I started working more and more with this company. And eventually in 2005 is when I told my uh my the two bosses who were the owners of that company, I said, you know what? I'm spending 80% of my time uh dealing with people's backups, right? And verifying backups, I'm fixing broken tape drives, calling Dell to R RMA a new one, cleaning tapes. I'm like, why don't we build an online backup business? They said, you know, we don't know anything about it, but sounds like a good idea. So I said, okay, let me do it. So we went ahead and we we bought a server, we put it in our office, got a DSL line, uh, bought a piece of software that's obviously not around anymore, and started a nine-line secure backup business in 05. Wow. Which was really early in the space. Very early with DSL. With DSL. Eventually moved it into a data center in Chicago, into Uniquinix data center, and uh, you know, got the business probably up to maybe a hundred thousand ARR or so within a year, uh, which was not bad. I was doing it part-time, but um that same year, IBM bought a company and Dell bought a company. I think Dell bought, I think Mosey backup was one of the popular ones. So we started having real trouble selling it outside of our existing consulting customer base. Interesting. And uh and uh but but that's how I learned about data centers, you know, hosting. That's where it all came from. It was our initial online backup business.

SPEAKER_00

Back then, backup exec?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, backup exec, Veritas Backup Execut. Veritas, yeah. That was the app, yeah. That's what we were using. You know, you pop in your tape at night, if it pops out in the morning, you know it works. Okay. If it's stuck, you know, if it happens two days in a row, call us. That's what we used to tell customers. We tell them, you know, we can fix any IT problem except for one. If you have no backup. If you have no backup and something happens, you're out of luck. Anything else, fixable.

SPEAKER_00

Wow. So you start the firm based on this backup?

SPEAKER_01

We started the firm as an online backup service. As an online service, I see. Uh, you know, got it to a certain level, realized that there's not a lot of scale in this, but in the process, learned about virtualization of servers. This is VMware uh version two or 2.5 days. This is you know 2006, 2007. Uh, this is Terminal Server 2003 days or Windows Server 2003 days, so very early on. Yes. And uh decided to experiment with some customers who said, Hey, look, I am paying you every three to four years to do this hardware refresh for me. You're already hosting my backup. Why do why do I need to buy a new server? Why don't you put my server in your data center? And I thought that's a crazy idea. And if we would do that, how are you gonna reach it? Your DSL is slow, no way it's gonna work. But having learned of this virtualization stuff and terminal services in Citrix, I'm like, well, let's give it a try. So we had a pilot customer, it was a two-person company. It was a guy who was uh, I think doing brokering large sales of metals of some sort. I don't even know exactly what he was doing. He had an office downtown Chicago, which was not a you know cheap office, and one employee, he's like his assistant who used to come in and work with him in the office. And uh, when we set up his first uh terminal server-based you know system, he closed the office, stopped paying lease, and send the employee to work from home. And that's and he would tell everybody, anyone who would listen, he would say, you know what, my IT company set up this great thing for me. I don't have to come into the office anymore. I'm saving five thousand dollars a month on my office lease. And I said, you know what, this looks like a business that needs a little development, but uh there's something there. So that's how we got started in you know what we eventually called IT as a service, but basically virtual desktop powered and enabled delivery mechanism for the entirety of an IT system. It got to the point where our customers would basically you know pay us a per user per month fee that would include obviously all of the hosting, all of the licenses, all of the support and backup, but also any hardware that they needed. We would provide them the zero clients and the thin clients, we'd provide them on-site service if needed. Everything was included in a per user per month fee, which again nowadays seems like it's an obvious thing to do. But not this is before 2010. This is maybe 2009, 2010, early, early days of the cloud. So, did you start to move all your client base to this? We did. So, so if if you know what happened at that point is I was working for an IT consulting company, they had let's call it 150 customers, SMBs in the Chicagoland area. We started this new company, and every time one of these customers came up for a hardware refresh, we would give them a quote like we've always done, and say, here are your two options. You can go the traditional way or you can go this hosted infrastructure way. And the hosted infrastructure over three to five year period would save them quite a bit, usually 25 to 30 percent. And most of them chose to go the hosted infrastructure route. So eventually these consulting customers that we had, you know, converted to this new business, which I now was a part owner of, whereas the other business I was just an employee in. I see. And along the way, you end up meeting Joseph Roller. That was much later. Uh I would say that's that's we Joseph and I met in two uh 2018. Uh we were introduced by uh one of the board members and uh investors in our company, uh who was our our series A VC investor. He he he's he's known Joseph for a long time. Joseph was working for Microsoft at that time, and um we were at a Microsoft Inspire, which was the partner uh conference that I'm sure you're familiar with. Back in maybe 2017, 2018, I forget. Uh and Joseph came over to to the booth and you know, I sort of showed them what we had. We had this Azure provisioning and auto-scaling engine that was really simplifying uh the job of MSPs who wanted to migrate their customers into the public cloud. And he's like, Oh my gosh, we were looking for this. I was just running, you know, the this SMB business in uh in Brazil and uh we we needed a solution like this. So let me go see if I can you know do something at Microsoft to kind of partner with with you guys even closer. And I think he hit a lot of a lot of dead ends, and he said, you know, I said, Why don't you just uh partner with him and come come and work with me and uh we'll try to schedule your brand deserves to be in front of the right audience decision makers, entrepreneurs, and professionals who are ready to take action.

SPEAKER_00

That's exactly who listens to the Joey Pins podcast. Thousands of engaged business leaders and consumers tune in every week, millions of views and listens across YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Sponsors see real impact, higher engagement, brand trust, and conversations. We offer strategic partnerships tailored to your goals, including targeted ad placements, branded guest appearances, multi-episode and event sponsorships. Make your brand part of the conversation. Let's grow together. Visit JoeyPins.com slash sponsor to explore sponsorship opportunities, or email us at sales at joeypins.com, the Joey Pins Podcast, where brands and thought leaders connect. Wow.

SPEAKER_01

So that's how it all started. 2018, Microsoft Inspire uh is is where we met.

SPEAKER_00

Eight years ago.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, not that long.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Or maybe that long. I'm not sure how you work. Yeah. Yeah. So how does Nerdio help MSPs?

SPEAKER_01

So our mission is to empower MSPs to build uh successful and profitable Microsoft cloud businesses. And the way we do that is we provide them with the tooling and the knowledge and the and the advice and the and and the know-how on automating the process of provisioning their customers' environments, automating the management process, and then saving them money on you know by auto-scaling the environments and matching the size of the infrastructure to the um uh the the demand on the infrastructure. So that's how we started. We started with what we thought was gonna be one of the most difficult workloads and the one that we had the most familiarity with, which is desktop virtualization. So our very first product was all about taking RDS, which is kind of the previous generation desktop virtualization technology, and actually building an RDS environment in Azure within two hours with like zero engineering knowledge whatsoever. You connect it to your customer's environment, you fill in a few fields, and you let it go two hours later, you have a fully provisioned environment. So that's how we started, and from there it expanded obviously to new flavors of desktop virtualization, Windows Virtual Desktop, Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365. But there's a ton of Azure services that are ancillary to that, you know, whether it's backup, whether it's storage, file services, profiles, uh, then we expanded into identity management, security management, M365 tenant management. So really everything that the MSP manages on behalf of customers in the Microsoft ecosystem is within the scope of what our product helps them do in kind of this single pane of glass type of way.

SPEAKER_00

Wow. So why shouldn't the MSP just go directly to Azure? Why should they use nerds?

SPEAKER_01

In theory, they could, uh, but it's very complex and requires a tremendous amount of knowledge and training and keeping up with all the changes. And it's very, you know, disparate portals. You know, Azure Azure Portal is used to manage, you know, thing one, two, and three, and then you go to the admin center to manage the you know X, Y, and Z, and you just you end up living in 10 different portals to do a simple job. We give you, you know, one portal, one screen, you you decide what the action is, and it goes in and orchestrates that across the entire Microsoft platform, no matter where which cloud of Microsoft it lives in.

SPEAKER_00

When an MSP is looking to partner with Azure, with Nerdio, in the cloud like this, what questions should they be asking when you're they're looking at competitive this competitive market?

SPEAKER_01

Um I mean the questions they're typically asking for, I mean, it it depends what workload they're interested in starting with. You know, for people that are interested in starting with desktop virtualization, uh, they're usually trying to understand, hey, is this going to be more efficient and and more you know inexpensive than doing it myself natively in the portal? And the truth of the matter is it's it is by far, because the the technology that we add to auto-scale the environment and to right size it in real time sort of more than pays for the cost of our license. Plus, it adds so much additional functionality. Since then, again, since the days of of just desktop virtualization, we've extended into let's call it Microsoft 365 management broadly. And that is a way to give MSPs uh kind of a unified view that can assess their tenants, can standardize their policies across tenants, can track drift uh if they apply a certain standard to their customers, you know, which customers tenants are getting out of compliance. So just give them a very standardized, templatized way of managing a large number of smaller environments.

SPEAKER_00

I'm a former MSP with him. I talk to MSPs all the time. And generally speaking, last eight or nine years, what keeps them up at night has been pretty consistent. One is cybersecurity. They're worried about their clients getting attacked. If they get attacked, they're probably gonna be fired, they may even get sued. Two is human capital, how they're gonna keep their people happy. Unemployment in IT here in the States is you know, one percent, how they're gonna and then three is just growth. Private equity has ported hundreds of millions of dollars, their friends are selling their MSPs, how are they gonna grow? How does Nerdio help in these?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say number one, let's start with with cybersecurity. You know, Microsoft offers the market and MSP specifically, SMB customers, a great suite of technologies. Now, the challenge is these technologies are enterprise focused, they're not built for multi-tenant management. The way that MSPs work, you know, I'll give you an example. Every MSP has customers that are using Microsoft 365 business premium. That suite includes Defender, it includes Intune, those are all security capabilities that are built in that the MSPs and customers are already paying for, but they're not leveraging them. They're paying for, they're buying some third-party tool or set of tools. And the reason is because it's difficult to manage, not MSP design. So Nerdio solves that problem. It allows MSPs to use the great security stack that Microsoft brings to their customers, usually at no additional cost to what they're already paying, but manage it in an MSP capable way. So I would say that's number one. Uh, number two, you know, employees and ability, you know, to kind of to find staff with Nerdio because it it leverages very modern tooling and it's it's considered a very modern way of doing cloud management. Usually employees like to work with latest and greatest technology. You know, engineers uh and technicians are are very much into kind of keeping their skills sharp. And and Nerdio helps MSPs with that. Plus, by standardizing and templatizing everything, like I mentioned earlier, it makes it much easier to onboard a new engineer. It makes it much less risky that, you know, in in a in a typical MSP, if They're not using standardized tooling, and an engineer could script a lot of things to help customers in a great way, but if they ever leave, that's not maintainable anymore. MSPs are kind of at a high risk and are often held hostage by very uh you know capable technical employees who who basically are the only ones who know how something works. I think we solve that problem for a lot of MSPs by giving them that standardization and ways to templatize their customer management. Uh and I think the final area you mentioned was growth, right? And the only way to really grow is by standardization and automation. And that's what we're all about. You know, we're all about automating what MSPs do on a day-to-day basis, standardizing it so it's reliable and less error-prone, and allowing them to apply resources more towards growth and go-to-market activities rather than just service delivery and keeping the lights on for the customers.

SPEAKER_00

But how is AI affecting the Nerdio platform?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, AI has been part of our story and our development for years now. Uh, we have uh you know a significant number of AI capabilities built into the product. We had an initiative maybe two or three years ago that we spoke about at NerdioCon, which was infusing AI throughout our products, uh, which we've been doing for a while. Uh but I think a top-of-mind question for a lot of MSPs nowadays is how do they govern what their customers are doing? You know, who's using ChatGPT or Claude with a personal account and you know, uploading company data? And right now that's a big blind spot for probably all MSPs. Uh, and that's an area that that we we think about a lot. How can we help MSPs take advantage of the AI technologies that Microsoft is is offering in a very secure and sort of controlled way, but you know, doing so in a way that can be governed so you can ensure that employees of your customers aren't putting the the organization at risk.

SPEAKER_00

We're here at NerdioCon, uh, your big event, your annual event. I thank you so much for having me. Great keynote to the MSPs. Took we're gonna be releasing a great blog on it. What are some of your goals this week?

SPEAKER_01

So my goals this week are to have as many conversations as I can with MSPs and enterprise customers to learn what's top of mind for them. I think that informs a lot of our long-term strategy, our product strategy, which is kind of an area I spend a lot of my time thinking about. So that's uh that's certainly something I'm I'm very interested in have these conversations. Uh obviously, let the market know what it is that we already have planned, you know, announce all of the great functionality, our integrations with partners like Nutanix. Uh that's going to be a keynote coming up in just a little bit from now. Um, talk about all the new technologies from Microsoft that we are enabling the market to leverage, like AVD hybrid. So, you know, both outward communication, letting people know what we've been up to and what our roadmap looks like, as well as just getting a lot of feedback to inform what's next for Nerdio in the coming months and years.

SPEAKER_00

Vitim, is there a question you wish more people would ask you?

SPEAKER_01

I'm not sure. People ask me lots of questions, so I'm not sure there is a particular one that I'm not usually asked that I would want to know. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00

Is there something? Let's go like 10 years ago. Yeah. Uh Nerdio. Is there something that you believed firmly then that you no longer believe now?

SPEAKER_01

I I wouldn't say it was 10 years ago, but maybe longer. Uh being a an engineer and coming from an engineering background, I think there is a a common misconception that, you know, an idea and a technical delivery of a product or a vision is is a large majority of the business problem. You know, solving, you know, having a successful business uh and and being able to take it to market is sort of a given if you just have a great idea and you can deliver on that technically. And I think over the many years I've been in business, I've realized that you know the go to market and the distribution challenge is uh usually half, if not more, of the problem that needs to be solved. So I would say, you know, for a lot of my peers who are coming from a technical background, to just sort of keep that in mind. You know, ideas are are critical, you can't do anything without them. Technical delivery, again, is foundational as well. You can't sell something that you don't make, but uh it doesn't stop there. There is a lot more that needs to be done to take a concept and even a product to market and and get it to be widely available, brand awareness, you know, sales motions and everything that goes into actually collecting and monetizing an idea and a product.

SPEAKER_00

It's not enough to have a great product.

SPEAKER_01

Certainly not enough. Certainly not enough. And and the lift is, I think, greater than I've realized early in my career. I thought, you know, you sort of you build it and they will come kind of a mantra, not fully, but at least, you know, it's 80% of the challenge, and then you know, someone can go in and sell it. That's that has not been my experience. It takes it takes a lot to take something to market.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and it's a hard lesson to learn.

SPEAKER_01

It is, it is. It's it's a little counterintuitive. Right, it is, yeah. For a technical, for a technical person.

SPEAKER_00

Hey, this is great. Why do I have to sell it? Yeah, that's not the case. Exactly. Started the MSP back in the in the 90s, Vadim. I was working way too hard, not paying attention like yourself, long hours. I I started developing bad habits, I wasn't running anymore, I wasn't playing soccer. Next thing I know, I'm in front of the doctor, she tells me I'm at 340 pounds.

SPEAKER_02

Wow.

SPEAKER_00

So I I knew I was getting heavy, but I did not know I was that. And she says to me, if you don't lose this weight, you're not gonna see your daughter graduate. My daughter was just born. Scared the life out of me. You know, I'm driving home, you know, punching the steering wheel. I can abuse myself all I must have been in my 20s. I felt I was indestructible, right? I can I can do whatever I want, but I it's much bigger than me now. Took six, seven months, lost about 120 pounds, and I kept it off. You know, you can't look at this as like a finishing line. You have your lifelong so when I tell people this, they always say, What's your secret? And I always say, There's no secret discipline, you know, motivation, routine, focus. How does discipline play a role in your life?

SPEAKER_01

Discipline is a is a core value I have. Uh, it is something that I I've I've practiced and developed, I guess, over my lifetime. And uh I apply it to very deliberately selected areas and and things. I sort of I know what my limits are and I know what I take on and not, but uh you know, I think I have a pretty robust system of you know, consistently delivering on things that I put my mind to and decide to go forward. And and discipline is just one of those tools that I use uh to uh to reinforce my identity of being a disciplined and determined and a person who can execute and deliver. Um, so it it is important in my life as well.

SPEAKER_00

Was it instilled in the household as a child? Was it talked about? Was it exemplified? Nothing. Where do you get it from?

SPEAKER_01

It was it wasn't uh uh overtly talked about, but I think I've seen that you know in my parents, I've seen that in the environment around me, and uh it's something I think I've experimented with personally in my own life, whether that was in school, whether that was at work, and I've experientially learned that it works and how it applies. So now with my kids, I'm very, very overt about it. I I teach them how to do this and I you know recognize when they do something that they've decided they're gonna do. They, you know, they they have a vision, they work out, they work a work back plan from it, they determine what is my step today. You know, don't worry about what it's tomorrow, just do the what you need to do today. I try to be very uh encouraging with my own kids, and I'm I'm happy to see them developing that skill as well.

SPEAKER_00

That's wonderful when I've I have children as well, and it's wonderful to see them kind of flourish. And I should mention you were Magna Kum Laud in your bachelor's, right? I mean yeah, so I mean you studied hard, but you were also working at the time, and so it just had this nature about you, and you saw it exempl you saw it exemplify with your parents, and you just it was built in, you would say. I guess.

SPEAKER_01

I guess, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

What motivates you?

SPEAKER_01

Um what motivates me? I mean, I I think what motivates me is is being successful at the things that I decide to you know put my mind towards and the objectives that I want to achieve. And I I like making other people successful and you know creating something that that can benefit you know many people. Uh so that that gets me up in the morning, and every day is is an exciting new day to try to deliver on that.

SPEAKER_00

That's wonderful.

SPEAKER_01

So your message to MSPs on a final note is there is a changing world of technology out there, and uh, you know, don't be left behind. Figure out what you need in order to continue evolving your business, and it's not an easy challenge, which which I know firsthand, but uh it's sort of inevitable. You can't keep doing the same things and expecting the success necessarily to continue indefinitely. Change change is real and then technology, and now with AI it's very, very rapid. So stay current and be ahead of the curve.

SPEAKER_00

So hopefully I get to see you again next year, a year from now. What's gonna change? Well, you have any forecasts?

SPEAKER_01

I don't, you know, I I try not to do that, you know. I try not to predict the future, I try to uh you know to uh to uh create it. So but I'm not sure what next year is gonna look like necessarily. But Dean, thank you so much for it. It's gonna be a lot more a lot more AI, I'm sure. Yes, I'm sure. I'm not sure what it's gonna look like. What's it gonna look like?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's yeah, that's the critical because we see so many rapidly things. It's never gonna be as dumb as it is now, right? It's just gonna continue to get smarter. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for your time. It's my pleasure. I really appreciate it. Thank you for listening and/or viewing Joey Pins Discipline Conversations. Please share this episode with one or two of your friends who you think may benefit from the episode. Our website, www.joeepins.com. There you find lots of resources, and you can join our mailing list. Please follow us on all our social media, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Podcast information, the video version of our podcast is on YouTube. Please subscribe. Audio is on all major podcasting platforms. Please follow them. And if you like it, please consider giving five star ratings. We'd really appreciate it. Thank you again for listening or watching Joey Penn's discipline conversation.