 Time here from Orange Systems. This video is not sponsored, but it is promotional. I'm going to be joined in a moment by Kyle and we're going to talk about MSP Geek. It is a free to join community for the users by the users that work in the managed service provider space. Now what we're promoting is MSP GeekCon 2024, which will be held on May 19th through the 21st in Orlando, Florida. The 2023 event was amazing. And I think some of my audience may be interested in 2024 event. So let's get started. And welcome Kyle Spooner. How you doing today? I am great. How are you? YouTube celebrity Tom Lortz? Yeah. It's funny because every time you see me in person, you've been saying that for so long. It's amusing. Mainly because it annoys your significant other. And that's always fun. Oh yeah. I think I actively encourage, you know, having people ask my wife if my way physician needs, please ask her what it's like to be married to a YouTube celebrity because she loves hearing that. And so you and everyone else have had so much fun participating in that. Oh yeah. She's, yeah. She calls me Lesser Spooner now because of... You're the... Yeah, there's more than one Kyle. You're the Lesser Spooner. Lesser Kyle. Lesser Kyle. Yeah. It's okay. I'll accept that title. Yeah. At least I'm in the discussion. You're in the discussion. And so our discussion today is about MSP Geek and you've been running this for a long time. It's a 5013C non-profit. It's a pretty amazing community. So let's talk about one. Why should we join MSP Geek? MSP Geek itself is a community of managed service providers. It's a place where you can go to ask for help, ask for assistance, ask, you know, you're stumped on this thing. We're a firm believer in plagiarism. That plagiarism is good. Plagiarism is loud and encouraged at MSP Geek. Yeah. Because... You're not the first person to encounter the problem. That's the reality. We all work in the same community working as IT professionals, especially, you know, the MSP community. And you're not the first person to have a problem with insert name of the tool that isn't working the way you would expect it to and the vendors and getting back to you in time. So much. And that's where we started with an application called Labtech. We started out as Labtech Geek and built around a group of people trying to work in that tool and make it as effective as possible. And we've just grown so fast, so quickly over the past 10 years. We're like 11,000 members now throughout Slack and Discord. But it's free. Anyone's welcome to come and hang out as long as you're a member of the MSP or IT itself. You will be asked to register just so that we can verify. Yeah. If we don't want people... We don't want clients to come in of art. Knowing people we don't want in there, so that's not part of it, is the end users. If you're one-on-one getting started, you've never touched a computer before. Sorry, like your basic end users. Those are people. Even if you're working help desk, it's for people who do work in the IT and MSP space. You've got a job. Even if it's a level one job, because we have people that are level three all the way down to level one in there. And it's, you know, there's a lot of... Really nice the way you broke it down into categories. So as you go through it, you're like, okay, here's a discussion on this particular topic, this particular RMM tool. I also love the discussions. Is it down for you too? This no longer works. Is anyone else experiencing this issue? It becomes a good community for that. It's a good discussion. And you actually have vendor participation, which is pretty amazing. You keep them under tight control, by the way. The vendors aren't there pitching. They're there. I like to say we put them in the corner. But we carve out a space of the community for them. They have their own channel. You can go and interact with them. I will say that their channel is theirs. They can do with it what they please. They want to remove newer advertised. They can't do that in other channels in our general area, but in their specific segment they can. They have that ability too. Yeah. For many of the vendors, they have a dedicated... You have a V in front of them for vendor. You let people know this is a vendor channel. I think that's an important distinction you have. It's a well-moderated place. Because having that many people in there, you think, okay, is it just chaos? No, no, no. It's actually organized. It's surprisingly well-moderated. There's a lot of self-moderation that goes on. We as administrators and moderators greatly appreciate the community for helping each other out. Because it's a ton of work as it is. The community is at a good job itself of self-moderating and making sure people stay within the code of conduct we have. Yeah. Now let's talk about why MSP GeekCon and why you might be interested in coming. Because that's the purpose of this video. I want to tell people what MSP Geek is, why you might be interested. If this has not made you stop watching this video, then you probably want to know what MSP GeekCon is. MSP GeekCon is an area of the managed services space that we felt... You know, the whole premise of the conference we felt was lacking. There are tons of great conferences that are geared towards business owners or specific products or companies themselves. And we felt that there's an area that's not benefiting, which is the technicians, the service managers, those surrounding the technicians, project engineers, security engineers, all of them that don't have a place to go to learn and to grow and adapt. So that's what we built. We built a conference that's education focused. That is primarily designed around those in attendance. So last year we had an event. We picked a specific amount and had design limits around things. And we had 300 attendees. And the feedback we got was utterly amazing. Surprisingly amazing. The game room, by the way, this is one of the things that I love about a hacker conference that you just don't see at your IT professional conference. Like the conference is over and everyone, let's go to the bar and things like that. But it's not exactly the same vibe when you have with a geek conference. Your D&D room was full. Like the games room, board games and things like that were laid out. It spilled out into the hallway. I think I was up pretty late with a group of people playing in the hallway with some games. It was just a lot of fun and a lot of good interaction because you made some new friends, you got some people there. And it was all, like you said, there's a technical people there. There was not a bunch of vendors and sales people, which are the other side. This is back to the technical people, like you said there, which was really awesome. Yeah. And having that, so we have sponsors, we have vendors. Big shout out to them last year and this year because they are the ones who help basically bear the brunt of the costs for us to be able to put this on. But in advertising and saying, hey, if you're interested in sponsoring, don't bring a full suite of salespeople and account managers. That's not who's going to be here. That's not going to be rice coin you're interacting with. Bring your sales engineers, your technical staff that can talk tech with the people who will be here. And it was a huge, it was really interesting to interact with some of those who don't really get to go to conferences on the vendor side as well. And they were interacting in other places and it was really good. But yeah, we were completely education focused. That is the core premise is we don't sell speaker slots that they do at some other events. We don't care where you're from. If you're a consultant, a vendor, an MSP, an IT person, as long as you have an education that is what you want to speak about is educational and not a sales pitch, you have a chance of being selected by our education team. You guys do a lot of vetting for that. I know because I know other people that are on your team going through that. It's a tough thing. But you did a good job of having people. So each one of the talks was educational in terms of even I sat down and got to learn some, I was like, Oh, awesome, you know, watching someone go through some of the event log stuff. I love the hacking demonstration stuff that was done there. And it was done with MSP tools. So this is also familiarity with your environment. Like, Hey, this is how an attack scenario could play out. Here's the tools that were being used. It was great because it's very relatable. It wasn't a pitch of my product will solve your problem. That was not at all. Because I tell you what you get at the large enterprise IT conferences is the person up there, they're going to they're going to pitch a problem, tell you it's educational, but they're going to tell you how their product is the hero. These were much more actionable. These were even career talks, like how do I get you had a big section on how do I get from being at help desk? Because you're excited, you get an attack and you get slapped with help desk. And you're like, Okay, maybe you like it there. I'm not knocking it. If you do, but other people go, I don't know if I want to be here. And you had a whole track you did. I think that was when I participated in where we kind of talked about how to level yourself up as a technician to get ahead. How we've designed it, we've split our talks into two different types. We have what we call our breakout sessions, which are normal sessions at any other event where people submit talks. And then we have what we call our core sessions. Our core sessions are six talks that we've picked to the topic on. And we've gone and said, Hey, are you interested in speaking on this for us and selected those individuals and made sure that they can speak about the topic we want them to speak about. That's, that's what makes up our education focus because we have a specific set of information we want to provide. And we have a specific, like we, I don't want to stand up there for six hours and drone on, right? I'd like to get other perspectives and other opinions and other highly, highly influential individuals who are great in their field to come in and have a conversation. I think Kyle Hansloven was one of our core speakers last year. Yeah, this was great. I mean, these are John Hammond. The names you may have heard of. If you Google a little bit, you'll figure out how these people are. But John Hammond being someone who's a bigger YouTube celebrity than Tom. I'm not saying I'm jealous. I mean, hey, I think I crossed 1,000, 1,500 subscribers, whoop, whoop, may I speak? It's, so that's how we designed it because there's specific education we want to provide you. And then we select our breakout sessions after that. And we've divided into, last year was three tracks. This year we've added a track. So the tracks we have are people, process, and automation, the human side of technology, secure, defend, recover. And the last track for this year is based on the theme of the event, which is celebration. We want to highlight all the achievements that not only the individuals have had, but vendors have had, MSPs have had, the world has had. There's a lot of negativity and there's not a lot of adaboys in celebration. And we want to bring some of that to those who come to the conference and establish a little bit more of that positive environment because we feel like a good positive environment is a great learning environment. Yeah, and this is what the examples of some of the talks like John Hammond, many people may know him as a deep dives into a lot of cyber security topics and, you know, a lot of hack the box stuff and all the really amazing content he does in there. But he also talked about your career and things like this. And like you said, it's kind of bringing into community became very relatable and doing the Q&A on there. The panel discussion I did was with several other people. We were very interactive. So it wasn't just sitting there. It was like, Hey, who wants to step up to Mike, ask us some questions? How can we help you? Then that's what leads into what I said earlier. I know it teased with the games, but it was actually kind of fun because with so many people participating after the talks were over, I had tons of great conversations as everybody else is why we kind of spilled out into this common area of everyone talking. Kyle was there until really late. Kyle Hanselvan, CEO. I mean, he's a CEO of a pretty decent size company. I think they got like three or 400 employees. And but he made sure just out there helping people, talking to people and just carrying on. It was just great community feeling. Like he said, there's a lot of that you get you some reinforcement, especially if you're at a smaller MSP being able to come down to that event. I think come down because I'm in Detroit and events held in Florida. So it was definitely a good feeling of community, made some new friends and I'm ecstatic to go again this year. Well, we're happy to have you come back this year. Yeah. Thank you, Kyle. I will leave links to everything down below so you can sign up, talk about it and everything else. And I'm looking forward to being down there May 19th of 2024, when it all begins. You nervous? Not as much as I was last year. I because we're not a normal like the conferences I go to a vendor led generally. So we don't have a product to pitch you on for next year. So I don't know what I'm going to say. So hey, thank you for coming. Bye. Hope you had a fun time and learn something. We added two new channels. Go visit them. All right. That's awesome, Kyle. I take care of everyone in. Thanks. Thank you.