EP149 - Why You Shouldn’t Miss the 2023 MSP Global Event with Christian Jaeger and Soeren von Varchmin

INTRO

In this episode of the IT Experts Podcast, we talked with Christian and Soeren from the MSP Global event on why you should not miss this event in 2023.

Welcome to the IT Experts Podcast, the only podcast to help MSP's scale. To 1,000,000. And if already there get to 5 and go fast at the end of the day, isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it? I hope you enjoy the show.

IAN

So, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. We have got such a show for you today and I know it sounds a little bit clickbait, but it is if you hang on to the end, I've got thousands and thousands of pounds worth of giveaway. You will not believe on this podcast. So reason for this podcast today, absolute pleasure to be honour to ask to speak at the MSP global event, which is happening in November at the Nuremberg Ring in Germany and today we've got Christian and Zoran, on the show to explain why you just cannot miss this event. If you've got anything to do with being an MSP or any part of the channel. So welcome to the show guys.

CHRISTIAN

Thank you very much for having us

IAN

No problem whatsoever. Now, as usual, we've come scripted it and then we've thrown the script away. This is going to be a podcast about the event, about why you need to attend the event, what you get when you come to the event, and the massive opportunity to help build, grow, scale your business, connect with the right people and from everything that I've seen so far about this event, which as I said is taking place between the 14th and 16th of November. These guys aren't mucking around with this right. This is a serious event, so without any further ado, Christian, do you want to go first? Who are you? What do you do? Who you help? Why is this event such a big thing in the channel?

CHRISTIAN

Thank you very much for for having us. So I'm Christian, I'm the CEO of MSP Global. We started in the business 20 years ago actually and we had the idea of turning around event spaces and how events typically are run for particular channels and we started with the cloud channel with an event called Cloud Fest and here we took over an entire amusement park in a Roper park in the middle of nowhere. Some of our friends called it the Alcatraz of cloud computing and hosting and so what we do there is that we rent out the entire park, 6 hotels and yes, we do business through an entire festival week. We have an entire festival stage and whatnot. And the last two years after COVID, we realized that the biggest chunk of persons or the largest percentage growing was MSPs and we started to have first sessions and Soeren can talk about it a little bit later on and we learned that the needs and the desires of MSP's are so much different and we looked around about the MSP event space and of course there's many events around there, but we were missing a little bit about this extra flavor and this is when we decided we need to do something else. We need to do something huge, something new on the agenda and this is how this come came up and I'm actually playing the smallest role in this entire game because I'm only here to bring great people together into one room and make sure that the light is on and everything is functioning. And this is my role and I'm pretty very much looking forward to MSP Global, our premier and the Nova Cring.

IAN

And if anybody you can't cause it's not on video but anyone can see the smile on Christian's face right now, just explaining the energy and the emphasis and the effort, I think that the whole team are putting into this event. When I started working in the channel about four or five years ago, I wanted to like myself. I wanted to disrupt, help them disrupt some of these channel events. Because events are so powerful for connection, they're meeting people, building great relationships, building your business, and you know, knowing particularly in the MSP space that you're not alone. There's other people out there doing this as well. And a lot of the events that I saw were quite dry they were very, very technical. They weren't very exciting, they were very Sammy and you know, to be part of this event, for us at the growth hub, it's brilliant. It's massive. You know, we're super grateful to be there. I'm even dragging Stewart along as well for the ride, so we'll be there as well, but Soeren who is it? You know, so far you have been the glue that's been sticking everything together. So where Christian says he's the smallest cog in the wheel, despite the job titles, what is it that you're? You're, I think the heavy lifting is coming from your end, isn’t it?

SOEREN

Yeah, but it's actually the fun part. I have a very fancy job title, but what I may effectively doing on a day-to-day basis is to put content and agenda together. And actually the whole strategy for that event. So basically my preparation for MSP Global already started something like five or six years ago. You know, when we saw the trend of Cloudflare. That we have had increased, you know from that specific attendee segment and on the other side seeing cloud service provider industry consolidating that means less and less people coming to the events from our core industry and MSPs getting more and more getting ready for a new event. You know seeing that there are not many vendors cultural events in Europe, like already fishing, said. Plus we have that knowledge and also when we talk to big partners or big sponsors in in a large percentage, you know the same people we are talking to, you know, despite being two different channels. And yeah, we will go into the agenda, I think in a little bit it was a lot of fun. Getting that together. So –

IAN

Yeah, we're actually we're at the time of recording. We're going to be spilling the beans on the final keynote. The final key speaker. I don't even know who it is yet so you might even hear me go a big old whoop woo or something like that. But we'll talk about the content in a moment. But for the audience and you know, we've got serial MSPs or serial, you know, events, people always go to events that you see the same people, but the magic for me is how do we share, you know, encourage welcome, I think people who don't normally go to events to come to this event. Okay. So the question is this when the people leave the event on the last day and they're walking, but they're walking back to the station, playing state, whatever it might be. What is it you want them to feel to have taken away, to be educated with, what's the outcome for the attendees, for the even, what's that thing that, that they all want?

CHRISTIAN

Talking about the evolution, I mean. We have seen some of what MSPs are going through right now. We've seen that in the cloud ecosphere in the last. Yeah, as Soeren said, last 10 years when I started. So we see a lot of consolidation, which is now hitting the MSP space we had back in the days cloud service providers offer offering a huge variety of services and then suddenly deciding to go for one specific niche and I think. We can see that at the moment as well and we are also catering that during our show. So this is really interesting to see and I think we can help getting uh, getting along these evolution track and one thing Soren said about what people should think. For us as an organizer, the most valuable thing attendees and sponsors bring to the show is their time. So we have chosen Nürburgring, which is in the middle of nowhere I have to admit, but the reason being is it's a captive audience. You're going to meet this family Soren speaks about is going to be there for 2 1/2 days and you really have time to speak to them and we really do everything possible that you have the chance to exchange views, learn what's new, talk to your competition. You know, this is something many people don't have the chance to or forget about it. And we really make that easy and we do that all the time and at our shows it's always, we do a lot of business, but it doesn't hurt if we have some fun and this is what we're doing at the race track.

IAN

That's exactly, yeah. That's absolutely brilliant. I love the whole concept, you know, and the value-led basis, particularly around the family, you call it community, other people will call it as well, which is great. And you know, seeing some of these relationships grow, it is brilliant. Now I just want to remind you there is an absolutely monster monster giveaway at the end of this show. So you need to keep listening all the way through to the end and there'sann opportunity to get some great tickets and experiences while you are at this event. Christian, talk to us about the format of the show what's how have you, how have you designed it? What does the kind of like the logistics look like in terms of, you know, exhibition stands, keynotes, breakout rooms. What will people expect when they come to the event?

CHRISTIAN

Yeah. So. Said shortly in the beginning, we believe in this captive sceneries and this is why we chose the Nurburgring race track, which is an iconic race track, it's known around Europe, if not around the world as green hell, so we will take it and turn it into the tech hell, so to say. And the reason being is that you really have nothing else to do but talking to the people, networking, listening and extending your views and at the end, of course, a little bit of racing and go karting and E-sports. Whatever you feel like, so we will cover all this. What is different to events that attendees might have attended in the past is we have those three traditional pillars, which is an exhibition, we have around 40 to 50 partners, which we will welcome from hardware providers. A lot of software vendors, of course, cyber security is one of the top topics as you can imagine. And we don't know of any particular event in Europe at least, which has this variety of vendors. So it's not going to be 1 big sales show, but it's going to be vendor independent and this is I think of the big differentiators to other shows. The second pillar is keynotes, so we will talk about the content a little bit later, but we really have some top-notch speakers. We haven't seen one of the speakers I'm particularly proud of and looking forward to and it's really important that not all of the speakers, are tech speakers, so it's really our intention that you open your thought process and think about different things like, is making money the only way how or what makes a business successful or one of the topics that really drives us crazy -- is how to make this industry more diverse? How can we make it more inclusive? How do I, as a conference organizer, what do I need to change? And I think we have the perfect speaker to learn about that. So that’s second part and the third pillar, which we will cover is networking social events and whatever you call it. So as said, we are the racetrack, so you can expect definitely some racing and you can get into the driver seats of your –

IAN

Fantastic. How do we make that happen? Stop the podcast now.

CHRISTIAN

I'm gonna tell you. At at the very end. But it's it's really important that this networking is gonna be facilitated by us. We will have huge parties with great bands. We will even have our own little Christmas market party at the end of the show. Which is very is something very traditional here in Germany. And so we're really playing a lot and offering everything we can to make networking as easy as possible and all of those 3 pillars are treated equally. So none of that is like there's put, put a lot of emphasis on sponsors or only on keynotes for us, all of the three parts are equally important.

IAN

Nice playing.

CHRISTIAN

And this is what makes. It different.

IAN

Lovely. But getting even more excited about it now, there's a now there's a Christmas market because I can go home with some goodies for missus. She will love all of that stuff, I'm sure.

CHRISTIAN

You better.

IAN

Getting even more excited by the minute, in fairness, now that you've said that, we could possibly get in the driver's seat, this is we need to just crack on with this now. Soeren. And talk to us about some of the, about some of the great speakers that you've got there.

SOEREN

Yeah, our tech line is extremely simple and and very easy to remember. It's driving digital transformation. You can't do anything wrong with that kind of tech line given the location we have. But so we were thinking what are basically the topics which every MSP is thinking about you know has problems with or basically is looking into. And so we came up basically with five themes where experts and MSP experts from the industries are covering both so. We do it in a format like this. We do basically 15-minutete lightning talk about that certain subject on the main stage in the morning hours, which is followed by a 45 minutes deep dive possession on that particular subject in one of our Academy rooms in the afternoon. So let let's go quickly, there will be 5 different top topics. OK, so we have David, who works a lot on the supplier, on the ISP side, so he's training MSPs on behalf of ISPs and suppliers. And I mean what every MSP obviously needs or wants to have an effective sales and marketing field, marketing team. So this session is covering like how to create a compelling MSP value proposition, how to differentiate, how it can stand out from the others and how to develop your own MSP toolkit.

The second session, Olaf Kaiser. It's one of the things I think that just crazy if you think about that this on premise to cloud opportunity, you know where it's still such as high certain percentage you know with on premise systems running. So how do you sensibilize basically your customers, you know, vendor mutual approach, how do you sensibilize them in general to move more of the applications into the cloud. Then another session by one of your friends, Mark Copeman. Yes. Boyfriend yes. Title of the question is how to transform your MSP website into another member of your sales team. So I think that is extremely interesting, like how what are the little things you can do with your website basically so that this becoming a sales tool for your team. Then we have Michelle Coombs talking about how to optimize an efficient service delivery unit. So at one point every MSP needs to think about how to build such kind of unit. You know, in terms of growth and evolution of the company. And Michelle is particularly concentrating on that part. And then I mean, Ian, I leave that up for up to you right now, you are our fifth expert. What are you talking about?

IAN

Well, well, that's a very good question. So we're gonna be talking about how to take your your MSP from 250 and if you’re already there, moving it all the way up to 5 million. So at the growth hub we work with about 45 MSPs anywhere between 250 and 4.8 (M) I think is our largest client and there's a journey that you will go on and it's an interesting journey. And if you're an MSP like it or not, you're on that journey. And there's bumps and holes and areas in that journey that you will come across and the way to get that journey, you know, smoother, slicker, less painful is to kind of follow a bit of a protocol. We're going to be running through the five steps to help you get through that journey quicker, easier scale, you know, making this as fewer mistakes and basically kind of reduce the amount of mistakes that people make and shorten the period of time to success. So that's what we're going to be running off in our session, which will certainly get the juices flowing in the in the old brain cells providing they don't get too damaged on the on the Wednesday night at the party.

SOEREN

Right, right. I'm looking forward to this, Ian. But you know, we also need to have some good looking people on stage. So that's why we have some other external highlights as well. So on two, basically on Wednesday on the 15th, we're going to have in the morning, our son, a marine performer, Premier Minister of Finland, the youngest premier minister ever when she joined the Cabinet and her cabinet, was 14 out of 17 members were female, so that is an amazing story.

SOEREN

This is something where we as MSP industry, really need to go to. This is like if there's one person that can tell us how to change that and politics were man driven and still are. In many cases, she's the one person that can tell us why.

IAN

Yeah, looking forward to that one.

CHRISTIAN

And then one other thing about Finland is there and you told me that is that so many open source projects and IT companies actually evolve in the country with only what, 68 million inhabitants. So yeah, she will also talk a lot about tech development and and how you can foster that.

IAN

Yeah, excellent.

SOEREN

True. Then, on the same day on Wednesday in the afternoon, we're going to have Philip Wisler, which is the former Vice Chancellor of Germany. He's deeply involved actually in the tech scene. He's also invested in a couple of cyber security companies. So this will be like a former politician you know who is extremely hands on and understands very, very deeply what we are doing. So this will be very interesting. It's very near and real to what we are doing. You know in the MSP Global.

IAN

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CHRISTIAN

Believe it or not, that's two Politicians on stage.

IAN

Politics, so surely everyone will be going jazz hands and all sorts of stuff, yeah.

SOEREN

And when finishing the day, obviously we are at the Nurnberg rings, so we have to put something obviously on the agenda as part of the story. So we have an extremely nice panel with some motorsport legends. We have Novatel, performer team, principal of Mercedes, he's the guy who signed basically Lewis Hamilton back in the days to Mercedes. And with successful days or years of Mercedes began with him. We have Martin Tom. He's actually the current winner in the Dodger tumbang Microsoft TM, but actually more interesting is his grandfather is the founder of German automobile club. So it's a family, you know, related to motorsport a lot and he's very famous in Germany. He was a moderator for more than 30 years covering formula 1 like every Sunday afternoon. So like Krishna maybe kind of grew up with that, you know, yeah.

CHRISTIAN

Wow, with with him in this fabulous shirts, he always wears shirts which you have never seen before.

IAN

Yeah, look out for them then.

SOEREN

Yeah, look out for them. The next day, first day. It's kind of it's an amazing highlight day. So just after lunch, we're going to have Bob Geldoff Sir Bob Geldoff. What do you think about him Ian?

IAN

Yeah, do you know what? I mentioned this to my son, actually. And he said I don't even know who you're talking about. So do you remember Live Aid? He was going? No. What's like? Well, do you remember Live Aid, he's not old enough. But it's like it's this massive thing that we grew up with and he just stopped the music industry. Didn’t he? And bring it all together and for me, I'm really you know, when I first heard I thought ohh I'd be interested. And then you look into what he's achieved. Yeah, I can't wait for that one. I warm. I warm his act up because I'm up on the first day so I'll just make sure everyone's all excited. Ready for him. But yeah. Really excited for that one. That's a great catch guys for the Thursday, looking forward to that. Thank you.

SOEREN

Cool. Yeah. And then the last session on Thursday, also the last session basically of a conference, which is totally worth to stay is a topic which I think affects everyone, every attendee at MSP Global. So we have the whistleblower of wire, the wire card scandal with us. So you know, and the way why I think like everyone is affected you know some of us were shareholders, some of us you know be used via card actually be used via card. In the past you know and we were affected with the whole bankruptcy. At one point, a couple of months ago or an MSP had customers you know who had that kind of trouble with buyer card plus. I mean, some of us maybe, I mean everyone saw it on news on TV, but whenever you fly tour from Germany, you still see like The Wanted most wanted picture you know. So the pharmacy who is still the most wanted person in Germany, you know, so it's something still going on, you know, and a lot of people were affected by it, by it, a lot of people in our industry. And now why is everything actually affecting this versus new EU whistleblower Law? So there you have to implement the mechanisms in any company you know for employees to get a chance to visit law. So this is an effect since now so and that is something, you know which MSPs needs to educate their customers about as well. So we think that is a continual. You know, in terms of content bringing up this crazy story, you know, with everything involved.

CHRISTIAN

The only Unicorn we had in financial fintech in Germany, which was the biggest scam we ever came up with. And we have the guy who, yeah, started the entire scandal. We have him on stage and really looking forward to it. As I said, we were affected, but there even more there's a lot we can learn and there's even a potential for MSPs, you know, not only educating but also selling them solutions in order to, yeah, make your customers conform with the new regulations in terms of enabling this Whistleblowing.

IAN

Brilliant. Brilliant. And it's all about, you know, it all links in, doesn't it? With keeping people safe, building a business and keeping hold of it rather than having someone you know flush it as it would do if anything goes wrong or you know all of those other areas that we need to keep a track on. So wow, that is just some RAM packed agenda. Absolutely amazing. How do people book onto the event? We'll put a registration link into the show notes. What's the kind of like the attendance fee packages, those sort of things going on. There's two at the moment isn't there? Yeah.

CHRISTIAN

Yes. So basically with the code provided by you, attendees can actually attend for free and uh within the conference pass, there's already quite a few perks included so. We will make sure that you can concentrate on the business part, you don't have to staff, you don't have to get hungry or hangry or drinks are included or social events are included and we do have few or actually quite a few networking events like the karting and racing included. Or at least you can sign up. You can attend all the sessions, Soeren informed you about and we have academies, trainings, certifications, which are all included already in the free standard pass and the second part is the VIP ticket, which of course has the same perks which I already mentioned. But of course you will get a special VIP treatment in your own concierge. You will have special VIP restaurants and networking events only with sea level attendance. So this is something on top the standard parts and yeah, part of our discussion, I think we will talk about this a little bit.

IAN

We certainly will because we have got a bit of a giveaway which we're going to talk to you about in a couple of minutes time. Okay. So thank you ever so much guys. Number one for you know for putting on this event for the channel, it's a great way to end the year. I think it would be absolutely fantastic and to learn more and to book your tickets click on the link that we've got in the show notes here. But before we go, I said to the guys and said come on, what can we do to help the channel make this the most amazing experience. So Christian came back and said, well, why don't we run a bit of a raffle? So we're going to run a bit of a raff bit of a prize draw here. And we have got, do you want to tell everybody what we've got? Up for offer, Christian?

CHRISTIAN

Of course, with the code from you Ian, everybody can attend for free, but we will throw in five VIP treatments or VIP tickets, which you can apply for. And in addition to that, five race taxi drives. So we will have a super sports car and a professional race driver and he will take you through the green hell. And it's not going to be hell. It's going to be a lot of fun, I can tell you we've done this quite a few times in our pre visits and yeah, so we really want to be the MSP Global event for you and this is the little we can give back to you to make this event really worthwhile. And a little bit of fun.

IAN

Fantastic. So look, look, guys, let's take this serious. Now, the VIP tickets are worth €999. Those and the taxi drive, the five taxi drives, we've got worth €499 each and you can enter the prize draw for absolutely free. All you need to do is click on the link in the show notes or the post wherever you're seeing this. Enter your details and you will enter into the prize draw and we will be running this until, let me get my details correctly. Closing entries will be Friday the 6th of October, close of business Friday the 6th of October. So we will be announcing the winner on Friday the 13th will be on LinkedIn, but will be tagged to death so everybody will know. Exactly what's going on, I'm not quite sure we can promise to tag everybody who enters, but we'll have a certainly damn good go at that. So keep a keep a check out on the MSP global page, my page Christian’s page, Soeren’s page and the 10:00 o’clock I'm going to say on the 13th of October we will be announcing the winner cause we'll get that prepared in. So to win one of these Five VIP tickets or a 5 taxi ride. So if you're really lucky, you might win a VIP ticket and a taxi ride. Click on the link, enter your data. Two things we look forward to seeing you there. And second thing, we look forward to absolutely as we'd say in the UK, wowing your socks off.

Guys, hanks ever so much again for the opportunity and for coming on the show today. I look forward to meeting you in person in November, burning a bit of rubber, doing a bit of race fuel and having a whole bucket of fun. That's it from us today. I look forward to seeing you soon. Take care.

CHRISTIAN

Thank you very much. See you soon.

SOEREN

Thanks everyone. See you soon.

IAN

See you soon. Cheers guys.

OUTRO

So I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, I'd love it if you could leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. If you want to learn more about how to take your MSP to a million or if you're already there, go faster than comm and join Stuart Warwick and myself in the scale of confidence Facebook group. The link is in the show notes. You can enjoy the rest of your day and I look forward to connecting with you soon.