83 – Optimize for Success 2021 – Embrace a $10 Billion Business with 50% Growth

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As we kick off the podcast’s fourth anniversary and leap into 2021, I’m thankful to all of the amazing thought and business leaders who come to this podcast and share principles, success strategies, and best practices that help technology organizations thrive during this age of change and transformation.

After a year like we’ve never experienced before, I am excited to be joined for this special series by some of these “Industry Thought Leaders” to help us better prepare for “What We Can Do to Optimize Success in 2021.”

My guest for this maiden episode of the series is Joseph Landes, the Chief Revenue Officer at Nerdio.

Joseph’s partner leadership experience is extensive and before joining Nerdio in 2018, Landes had a 23-year career at Microsoft and worked directly with Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Value-Added Resellers, Distributors, Enterprise partners, and other service providers in multiple geographies.

In this episode, Joseph and I discuss:

  • Nerdio unique and compelling value proposition to both MSPs and Enterprise Partners and Customers and why this is an excellent time for partners.
  • His recommendations for Microsoft Partners for 2021.
  • Observations, opportunities, and optimism going into this new year?
  • What Makes A Great Partner – Having Great Listening and Learning Skills.
  • Lessons from his career journey
  • NerdioCon, the big event he is hosting, January 26th, and 27th.

As with each of my episodes, I appreciate your support. Please tell your friends about Ultimate Guide to Partnering™ and where they can find us.

This episode of the podcast is sponsored by Ultimate Partnerships. Ultimate Partnerships helps you get the most results from your partnerships. Get Partnerships Right – Optimize for Success – Deliver Results – Ultimate Partnerships.

Transcription By Otter.AI – Please Pardon Typos Below

Vince Menzione 0:54
Welcome, or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and as we kick off the four year anniversary of this podcast, and leap into 2021. I’m thankful to all of the amazing thought and business leaders who’ve come to this podcast to share principles, success strategies, and best practices that help technology organizations thrive during this age of change and transformation. And after a year like we’ve never experienced before, I’m excited to be joined for this special series by some of those industry thought leaders to help each of us better prepare for what we can do to optimize success in this new year. My guest for this episode of this series is Joseph Landis’, the Chief Revenue Officer of NERDIO and a longtime Microsoft partner leader. In this episode Joseph and I discuss NERDIO is a unique and compelling value proposition to both MSPs and enterprise partners and customers. Why this is a great time for partners, observations, opportunities, and optimism going into the new year. Lessons from his career journey and the big virtual event that his organization is hosting later this month. NERDIOCON January 26 and 27th. I hope you enjoy my interview with Joseph Landis’. Joseph, welcome to the podcast.

Joseph Landes 2:28
Thank you so much, Vince. It’s great to be here with you.

Vince Menzione 2:31
I am so excited to have you today. You’re the Chief Revenue Officer of NERDIO and I had a chance to work with your organization and I featured your founder Vadim Vladimirskiy on this podcast a couple of years ago, so great to have you as a guest and to learn more about where NERDIO has taken the business.

Joseph Landes 2:50
Yeah, great to hear so much has changed since you had Vadim on the podcast. And I look forward to talking with you about it.

Vince Menzione 2:56
It’s been exciting. And I’ve been watching your rise and all the great work you are doing since you joined the organization. So cute. tell our listeners a little bit about NERDIO, and your market

Joseph Landes 3:07
I sure can Vince at NERDIO. Our mission is to empower managed service providers, and IT professionals to build successful cloud practices in Microsoft Azure, and specifically, Windows virtual desktop. We like to think that when it comes to hosted virtual desktops and Windows virtual desktop, specifically, we have a tremendous amount of expertise in this ecosystem. And really, a lot of that stems from our rich history as a company, and also our deep partnership with Microsoft.

Vince Menzione 3:40
So tell us a little bit about the market that you serve, you focus primarily on the MSP or managed service provider market, and this 2020 has been a year like no other. What have you seen happen in your market this past year

Joseph Landes 3:54
one an incredibly difficult year for so many people in the MSP ecosystem, and certainly so many people around the world, we do spend a lot of time focused on the managed service provider market. And if you think about the MSP market MSPs have largely not embraced the cloud as fast as I think perhaps they should be doing many MSPs have taken their first step to the cloud with Office 365, about three or four years ago now called Microsoft 365. But when it comes to actually taking their customers infrastructure and moving it into the cloud with Microsoft Azure, many MSPs have hesitated to do this. You know, they don’t really have people in their practice who know much about Microsoft Azure, they find it to be a little bit complicated, and they really don’t understand the financial model around building a successful and profitable cloud practice. So it nerdo we’ve created a product NERDIO for Azure that enables MSPs to build a successful cloud practice and Azure through automation. And I think in 2020, at the beginning of the year, I was still having to do a lot of evangelizing of cloud as the preferred model for MSPs. Once the pandemic hit, and MSPs found it much more difficult to access their own offices, let alone their customers offices. The evangelizing of the cloud sort of took a little bit of a backseat. And it was much more about showing people how to do it, because I think MSPs quickly felt like wow, had I been in the cloud prior to the pandemic, I would be having a much easier time of it now. And I think we’ve really seen a massive acceleration to the cloud, from MSPs as a result of the unfortunate pandemic. Yeah, I

Vince Menzione 5:45
mean, we’ve all seen this time of rapid transformation. Satya has talked about the two years in two months, and I guess we’re, you know, month 10, or month 11 at this point. So have we seen 10? Or 11 years of transformation? What did you see these MSPs? Do once the pandemic happened? How did they? How did they start embracing the technology? I guess?

Joseph Landes 6:05
Well, I’d say Vince, that, you know, in many cases, first, they had to learn about the technology, you know, we were inundated by MSPs, who said, I need to take my customer to the cloud today. And if they didn’t have the ability to work with a company like NERDIO who makes it so easy to move to the cloud, I think they really would have struggled. So what we’re really seeing is not just MSPs, embracing the concept of moving to the cloud, but now having to learn how to re pivot their practice, and how to re pivot their thinking around how to make money in the cloud. So a lot of the learning that MSPs have had to do is not just on the technology side, but also on the money making site. And, and we’re quite good at that in order to where we’re quite good at showing MSPs how to build a profitable practice in Microsoft Azure. And that’s where quite frankly, we’ve been spending a lot of time in addition to continuing to build great technology for MSPs.

Vince Menzione 7:05
So can you do a little bit of a deep dive here on how your solution helps them? Take these Azure workloads do this optimization, if you will, and set up and deploy and manage the framework?

Joseph Landes 7:18
Yeah, sure, can Vince with NERDIO for Azure, we’ve invested in four primary areas to help msps build a successful cloud practice in Microsoft Azure. The first is deployment with our automation engine, you can deploy a complete it environment in Microsoft Azure in just a few hours. So you go to your friendly cloud distributor, you pick up your Azure and Microsoft 365 subscriptions and you plug them into our tool. And within a few hours, the entire customer environment is automatically built out for you the MSP. So you don’t need to go hire someone who’s an Azure expert, you can just let the power of automation take over. The second area of investment that we’ve made is pricing automation, we make it really easy for MSPs to understand what is it going to cost them to go to their cloud distributor and purchase Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft 365, so that they have this sort of demystified view of their costs, which is really a big problem for MSPs, who really believe that there’s no way to make money in the cloud. The third area that we’ve invested in is management. So our Nerdo admin portal is a single pane of glass multi-tenant management portal that allows an MSP to manage all of their customers. And to do it in a way where they can accomplish any task they want to accomplish in Microsoft Azure in three clicks or less. And then finally, the fourth area that we’ve invested in is optimization. We’ve built quite sophisticated but easy to use auto-scaling technology so that an MSP can turn off and on Azure resources can expand and shrink as your resources when the demand dictates. And as we know, in a consumption-based product like Azure, the more it’s on, the more you’re paying, the less it’s on, the less you’re paying typically. So this is a real benefit for MSPs. So to summarize, with nerdo, for Azure, we’ve really taken the concept of automation and applied it to Microsoft Azure and the MSP market to make it such that MSPs can build a successful and profitable cloud practice in Microsoft Azure, even without a lot of experience prior to meeting us.

Vince Menzione 9:38
So it sounds like you’ve become the simple button for Azure and also for these MSPs to better build their practices. I understand that MSPs generally, you know, their smaller businesses, a lot of them tend to get stuck at a certain size. How are you helping them to get unstuck and focus in I guess, I guess the automation is really helping here. What else are you seeing and how How are you helping them along?

Joseph Landes 10:01
Well, Vince, I’ll make a bit of a provocative statement that I’ve been starting a lot of webinars with over the past month or so if you look at Microsoft’s last earnings report, they announced that they grew the Azure business, almost 50%. And if you think about that, for a second, Microsoft Azure is more than 10 years old, and it’s greater than $10 billion. So how many businesses are there out there that you and I can think of that are more than 10 years old and greater than $10 billion growing at about 50%? a year? That I mean, there’s not too many, right? I mean, we’d have to, we’d have to stop and think about it for a minute. Right. So if you’re an MSP, you know, the the provocative statement that I would make to you is, have you grown your business 50%, you know, during the same period? And if not, if so, that’s excellent. And if not, why not ride the wave of the investments that Microsoft is making in Microsoft Azure, there’s a very rich history in the MSP ecosystem of msps, making a lot of money and growing their business by betting on Microsoft and betting on the investments that Microsoft are making. And I think you and I, Vince, both know, that there’s no bigger investment Microsoft is making than Microsoft Azure. So if you’re an MSP, why not take advantage of that investment, and re pivot your business towards Azure. Now, we know it’s hard. We know, it’s not as easy as adopting, let’s say, Microsoft 365 is, but it’s possible, it’s doable. And in partnership with a company like Nerdo, we can help you get there, I would like to believe that there is no excuse anymore for an MSP saying, you know, I this is just isn’t something I want to be involved in, I’m going to put this off for a few years and see if this is real, or see if this is something that I want to do. It’s here now. And you know, if you don’t adopt it, probably the MSP down the street is going to be moving to Azure, and they’re going to be more competitive than you, they’re going to have a better offer in the market. And quite frankly, they’re going to make more money than you down the road. So we really urge MSPs, you know, whether it’s with NERDIO or not to start learning about Microsoft Azure and to start thinking about how you’re going to integrate this into your practice.

Vince Menzione 12:21
Sounds very compelling to me, Joseph. And I know you spent many, many years at Microsoft, and many leadership roles within Microsoft and quite a few of those roles included partners. I know you ran a DPE organization at one point. So you, you’ve been highly focused in this partner ecosystem, how are you helping to get the word out to these MSPs? And I know you’ve been partnering with other organizations, so So can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Joseph Landes 12:45
I sure can. Yeah, I had some very fun jobs at Microsoft. And maybe we’ll have a few minutes to talk about that. And and so many of them were focused on the partner ecosystem, because I think partners are what make Microsoft run ultimately, no matter where you are in the world. So the MSP ecosystem is very interesting as it as it turns out, there are very specific places that msps go to learn information. And those places might be thought leadership and peer groups, they might be the cloud distribution communities, they might be Industry Association. So at NERDIO, we’ve really tried hard to plug into these different places. You know, in the words of Jay McBain, the noted Forrester analyst, you need to be visible every day. And we I think, have done a good job being visible, you know, not just telling people who nerdo is, but bringing value to the different communities, teaching people how to build a successful cloud practice in Microsoft Azure. You know, if you take the thought leadership and peer groups, places like, you know, ASCII Taylor business, group it nation evolve these different peer groups and places that msps go to learn information, they’re starved for information about the cloud, I think they get a very heavy dose of security vendors who show up and tell them how to be more secure, but they don’t really get a lot of people coming and talking about how to move your infrastructure to the cloud. And that’s a unique place that we have tried to bring thought leadership to and to and to kind of own for that matter. And then of course, we have very successful partners, in particular in the distribution communities, folks like Pax eight, for example, who have really embraced the cloud in a big way and said, We are all about making it easier for MSPs to move to the cloud. So certainly, I would say over the past nine months, Vince, it’s been a little bit more difficult. Given that folks are not congregating together we’d have to we had to pivot to more virtual and online ways of doing it. But hopefully in 2021 at some point we will all get back to being together and seeing each other and being able to get on stage and and talk about what’s going on in The cloud. And that’s really the role that we have tried to play, you know, in the community and on podcasts like yours events to really get the word out about why MSP should embrace the cloud.

Vince Menzione 15:11
Yeah, some exciting times ahead in 2021. You know, I’ve been talking about the fact that during this time, like no other we’re gonna see winners and losers. And I’ve been coaching organizations on being bold during this time. What are you seeing now in your market as we head into 2021?

Joseph Landes 15:28
Well, there certainly will be winners and losers. Certainly the MSP ecosystem is quite resilient. And I think it’s been amazing to see how msps have really rallied together to help small and medium businesses during this difficult time, stay open and thrive, hopefully through it. You know, of course, I have I have a bit of a bias here, Vince, I would say that I think the winners are going to be the ones who embrace the cloud and embrace new technology. And the losers will be the ones who just sort of stay behind and don’t take this time to learn about new things. I was talking to an MSP the other day who’s considering moving a client to the cloud. And I said, well, what’s the hesitation? They said, Well, you know, my client really likes to see the flashing lights on the server when they come in, during the day, it gives them great comfort. And I said, Well, I think that’s fine. But your role as an MSP is to explain to them why that’s not such a great thing, why when the next hurricane or tornado comes through, they’re not going to be able to see the flashing lights anymore. In fact, they’re not going to have their data anymore when it tears down the office. So I think there’s a role that the msps need to play, play to provide thought leadership to small and medium businesses, just like they’ve been doing. And the winners are going to be the ones who take this moment of inflection, and learn new things, learn new ways of doing things. And embracing change. Change is hard, I think, as we all know, but change can also be exciting, because it brings with it a lot of growth opportunities.

Vince Menzione 17:04
I couldn’t agree with you more I am in so agreement with you on those who embrace the change and learn how to dance with the uncertainty we’ve all seen in our environment in our economy. Now, you talked about platforms, you talked about platforms in which to help enable these msps you’ve got a big event coming up. Can you tell our listeners what’s in store,

Joseph Landes 17:25
we sure do events. This is the first time we’ve done something like this, we have an event coming up on January 26, and 27th called NERDIOCON, it’s a first-party event. We’re actually putting it on in partnership with a number of folks at Microsoft. And the idea of the event is to really bring MSPs together to learn there’s no charge for the event, you could come and stay for as long as you want. It’s going to take place over two days. And the idea is to come and learn how and why to build a successful MSP practice in Microsoft Azure. We’re super grateful for all of the Microsoft folks who are taking part Gavriella Schuster will be our day one. keynote cam vet broad, who runs Windows virtual desktop engineering will be our day two keynote, we have some other amazing speakers that I know you’ve had on your podcasts, including Brent Comest. Speaking about how to be a great Microsoft partner, we have Matt. So Smith, who’s going to talk about security in Azure, it’s going to be a lot of fun. Again, it’s a very low-pressure fun, and interesting, and learning event whether you are a business owner or a technical person inside an MSP, there’s going to be something for you. And we are going to make a big announcement on day two, around some new technology from NERDIO that you’re not going to want to miss. So we’re excited about this event. And we hope to see all of your listeners there.

Vince Menzione 18:55
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you’ve got some amazing people coming on. Gavrielle obviously, he’s recently been on the podcast. Brent is a two time guest on this podcast and has a great message for anyone in business on how to grow their business with Microsoft. So really great content I’m seeing I can’t wait to join myself. I’m really looking forward to the event with you and NERDIO, so terrific. And we’ll post links in our show notes so people can take advantage, sign up and attend the event. Thank you. Thank

Joseph Landes 19:24
you so much. We look forward to having you there. It’s gonna be great.

Vince Menzione 19:27
So what about predictions for the channel as we begin the new year what you know we’ve had it last year we had Jay McBain come on and there were some dire times earlier on in terms of the prediction for MSPs What are your predictions for the channel for this new year?

Joseph Landes 19:42
Wow. You know as as many people say, Vince, I might be the worst at predicting things. If I was a good predictor I’d probably be more successful than I am, I guess. And I’m certainly not of the class of a Jay McBain, but I’ll stick with what I know. And I’ll say that the cloud will continue to increase in terms of The importance and relevance to MSPs. Whereas if I was on this podcast at the beginning of 2020, not knowing what was in store, I would have said that the cloud will also continue to increase in importance, but maybe not as fast. I think 2021 could be that breakthrough year, where every MSP is going to have to ask themselves, do I have a plan for the cloud? Again, as we talked about earlier, I’d say probably 75 80% of MSPs have already embraced Microsoft 365, I think we’re starting to see more MSPs embrace the more advanced workloads of Microsoft 365 things like teams, which is obviously increasing in importance. But now the real big step is an MSP saying, Okay, I know that my customer’s server is due for a refresh, I’m not going to buy a new server, I’m going to figure out how to get to the cloud, I’m going to learn how to take that server and migrate all the workloads to the cloud. And that I think, is going to be the big breakthrough in 2021. Now, I also think that alongside that 2021, will be an even faster adoption than 2020 was of virtual desktops. Obviously, 2020 was a very fast and quite needed adoption of virtual desktops in March and April, and May when people simply had to work from home. Now that Windows Virtual Desktop has been on the market for a little bit more than a year, companies of all sizes, not just small and medium businesses, but enterprise companies have had time to evaluate the technology in a deeper way. And I think WVD is poised for a incredibly, incredibly massive breakthrough in 2021. And we’ll have to get back on the podcast at the end of 2021, to see if I was right. But if you’re an MSP and you’ve heard about Windows, virtual desktop, and you might be hosting your customers today, in the older Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, RDS technology, I would urge you to take a look at Windows Virtual Desktop, it is definitely something that will enhance your business.

Vince Menzione 22:07
Yeah, Microsoft has been making some amazing investments, right in terms of collaboration, communication, and the like. So I’m excited to see what’s going to happen. And I’m also excited to have you back again at the end of the year. So we can regroup on what what transpired this year.

Joseph Landes 22:21
I want to be a two time guest like Brent, you know, so I could catch up to him. So we’ll have to do that. Absolutely.

Vince Menzione 22:27
So you spent many years at Microsoft. And you have some extensive experiences working with partners. This is the ultimate guide to partnering. And I always love to ask our guests about their experiences and what characteristics they believe, make a great partner. So Joseph, what characteristics Do you believe make a great partner?

Joseph Landes 22:46
Well, certainly Vince Brent Combest. He has the best presentation I’ve ever heard on this. And again, if you come to an audio, you’ll hear him deliver it. I’ll go back to something that Satya, you know, says all the time. And he started to say when he became the CEO, which is having great listening and learning skills, I think this is something that every partner that we certainly admire do, can always do a better job at being learned all people, I think a lot of people approach conversations, as no at all people. And I would say that as a partner if you could really take the time to learn from others, even partners who you think are maybe competitive to you, the amount of learning and the amount of enhancement of your practice is pretty tremendous. You know the great thing about Microsoft is there are so many opportunities to learn, you know, and no matter what way you like to learn that opportunity is there for you if you want to go to, you know, a website or a blog or a podcast, and you want to learn that way, it’s there if you want to go to a YouTube channel that Microsoft has, or that another ecosystem partner has. And that’s how you want to learn, you can do that if you want to go to an industry event like ignite or inspire, or something like that, that opportunity is there for you. I think carving out time to learn every day, to enhance your skills, and to find out what others are doing that can help you be successful. That to me is the number one characteristic of a great partner when I left Microsoft after 23 years, you know to join or do I felt like that was the number one thing I had to do. I had to stop and listen and learn I had to go talk to MSPs and understand what their challenges are in terms of moving to Microsoft Azure. So as a partner myself, I try to approach every day with a learn at all mentality. And I hope that by doing that nerdo will be better for it and I’ll be better for it as an individual.

Vince Menzione 24:46
Yeah, I love what you have to say about learning and listening. And I you know, I talk about growth mindset as being a core principle and empathy. It exactly ties into that, right?

Joseph Landes 24:57
It does, it does, there’s no question about it.

Vince Menzione 24:59
So whatever partners that have failed to work with you, either at your time at Microsoft or here at NERDIO, what would you say to them? Now, if you could

Joseph Landes 25:07
well, you know, I guess I’ll talk about my time at nerdo events, I would say give us another shot. technology changes rapidly, you know, who we were at NERDIO two years ago is not who we are today. I think we had a lot of good things going on in audio when I joined two years ago. And I think we have a lot of even better things going on in audio. You know, now the two years have passed, and the market has changed and MSPs have changed, so we’re not perfect at NERDIO. We’re always trying to adopt the learn at all mindset every day. And if we’ve tried to work with you as a partner, and for whatever reason, it hasn’t worked out, I’d say, you know, let’s give it another shot together and see if maybe things have changed to the extent that it might make sense for us to work together again.

Vince Menzione 25:51
Yeah, some really great advice there for partners. I’d like to pivot for a moment here, as you might know, I love to feature and discuss how people transform their career, how they grew their career, you’ve had a pretty stellar career. And I’d love to learn a little bit more about your journey, possibly who your greatest mentors were and career advice you received during that journey?

Joseph Landes 26:14
Sure. Well, I’ll talk about two mentors that I had that I think really transformed me as an employee of Microsoft and probably a person. You know, I showed up at Microsoft as a summer intern. In the summer of 1994, a fella named Rick Thompson hired me into his group as a summer intern, he really had no business hiring me at all. I mean, I didn’t know anything. I came from a liberal arts background with no technology experience. And I did a summer internship at Microsoft. And Rick gave me a great, great opportunity. And I am incredibly grateful to him every day. When I think about it, I went back to college, and I showed back up at Microsoft, I got a full-time job at Microsoft, the first person I met who had just an incredible, incredible impact on my career, and life was a fella named Carl Gulledge. You know, Carl took me under his wing. And what he did that was so impactful to me is he didn’t treat me like a 22-year-old, that didn’t know anything, he actually made it such that his expectations of me were significantly higher than I probably could have delivered. And I was always trying to do the best job I could, for him to really show him that I could do a great job. And he kept giving me greater and greater challenges. And as the years went on incredible advice. He’s someone that I haven’t spoken to as much as I would have wanted to. And I need to get back in touch with him and spend more time with him because he really had such an incredible impact on me as a person and my career at Microsoft, there was really no business for anyone at Microsoft given me any amount of responsibility at that stage of my career. But Carl believed in me, and really helped me when I was a young Product Manager, the second person who really impacted my career and who I do keep in touch with, and my life as someone named Eric Rutter. Eric was the senior vice president of the server and tools division when I was part of the server and tools. And to be honest, it was kind of scary to go into meetings with him. He was tough. He was he is incredibly, incredibly smart, probably the smartest person I’ve ever encountered at Microsoft. And after I left server and tools, I actually did my first abroad assignment for Microsoft, I went out to manage the Eastern Europe server and tools business. And one day, Vahe Torossian, who is our area vice president, he sent me an email, he said, Joseph, we have a guest coming to visit Eastern Europe, Eric Rutter, and I wondering if you could maybe take him around to the different countries and such. And I was thinking to myself, Oh, my God, the number of meetings I went into with Eric, where it was tough, the messages were tough. I wasn’t really sure how that was going to go. But I ended up spending a week with Eric, in Bulgaria, and in the Ukraine. And then he subsequently came back. And we spent time together in the Czech Republic in Russia. And I learned more in those two weeks than I learned, you know, years at Microsoft. And Eric gave me some incredible advice. Whenever I would think of changing jobs at Microsoft, I was always too worried about, you know, what was the next level or next promotion going to be? Was it going to be viewed as a good job or not a good job? What was that job going to lead me to? And Eric said something very, very simple that that has stuck with me and that I tried to give this advice to others. What about just doing something that you’re going to wake up every day and you’re going to find is really fun. And that’s really, I think, quite incredible advice. I’ve used it when I was considering leaving Microsoft which was a very, very tough decision. To go work for nerdy Oh, I thought about that I said, You know, I gonna really enjoy waking up every day working in radio and I knew I would. And that’s one of the reasons that I decided to go on this journey as one of the leaders at Nordea. So I have a huge amount of thanks to Carl Gulledge and Eric Rutter for being mentors to me. And I guess, Vince, I’ll say one other thing I had the great fortune of encountering in my career at Microsoft, the famous author, Jim Collins, I’m sure everyone’s familiar with Jim Collins, who wrote the book with great, which I think like every person in business now has probably read. And I had a unique opportunity at Microsoft to spend 45 minutes one on one with Jim Collins. And one of the pieces of advice that he gave me is it which I think he’s given many other people is to establish for yourself, a personal board of directors that, you know, you could have mentors, and that’s great, but you need a group of people who you can call upon at any time to ask questions to in some of these people on your personal Board of Directors, you might only call upon once a year, once every few years. Others it might be every day. And I’ve really tried to do that I’ve really tried to seek out people who I felt would give me some kind of unique insights, some advice, who might be hard on me who might be able to coach me in a specific way. And I’ve gone up to them and I’ve said, Hey, you know, you know, you can really help me. Would you mind spending a little bit of time with me, you know, someone that I think about that did that later in my career, Microsoft was Terry Myerson. He was in his group. He was he’s an incredible leader, I went up to him. And I said, You know, I just need some coaching, will you spend some time with me and we took a walk around campus. And he gives, he gave me a lot of great, great advice at the time. And every now and again, I reach out to him for some more great advice. So that concept that Jim Collins has of establishing a personal Board of Directors, I think it’s something that anyone, no matter what line of work you’re in, can really benefit from.

Vince Menzione 31:59
I love that advice. And Jim Collins book is on my bookshelf. I love that. Good to Great and his and as follow on books, Joseph, if you could have a personal billboard, what would it say on

Joseph Landes 32:12
a personal billboard advertising? Joseph Landis’? Is that what you’re saying?

Vince Menzione 32:18
What saying or advice would you give on that billboard? This is a metaphor for information you would share with the world.

Joseph Landes 32:24
I you know, I would go back to what I talked about earlier, Vince, I think the advice that Satya gave all of the employees when he came in is stop, listen, and be empathetic. You know, there’s always something you can learn from someone else. And as much as in this world of publicizing things about ourselves. And you know, posting on on LinkedIn or tweeting or things like that. There’s something to be said for stopping and listening to others, and seeing what you can learn from other people. So I’d say stop, listen, and be empathetic to other people’s points of view, stop, listen, and be empathetic to other people’s point of view.

Vince Menzione 33:06
I love that.

Joseph Landes 33:07
Yeah, there’s probably you know, it depends how many billboards you gave me. But

Vince Menzione 33:10
if I only had one, that would probably be what I would say. And now I think that’s great advice. I think that’d be a great billboard, Joseph. And you know, you have been an amazing guest. so delighted to have you on to kick off 2021 and talk about the future. Do you have any other closing advice for our partners going into this new year?

Joseph Landes 33:30
Well, you know, I think we all sit here today, Vince, not knowing precisely what 2021 is going to bring. Certainly, I think everybody at NERDIO hopes that 2021 will bring a lot less loss and a lot more gain to everyone in the world. Something that I think about from a technology perspective. And this is advice, actually, the Terry Myerson gave me once, which is you have to win somewhere before you win everywhere. I think that when you are thinking about moving to the cloud, you’re not going to build a successful and profitable cloud practice overnight, you’re not going to all of a sudden have 30 small businesses that you manage it for. And overnight, all 30 of those customers are going to be in the cloud, it’s going to start with bringing your first customer to the cloud. And being successful doing that and learning how to do it. And then once you have the model down, you’re going to move to your second customer and then your third customer and before you know it, you are going to have a successful and profitable cloud practice. So you know, winning somewhere before you win everywhere, I think is great advice. And I think is the way you start anything new. So in 2021 Let’s try to win somewhere before we win everywhere when it comes to the cloud and Microsoft Azure, and certainly, we at NERDIO are here to help you do just that.

Vince Menzione 34:48
Some great advice. Joseph, thank you so much for being a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering.

Joseph Landes 34:53
Thank you so much, Vince, and look forward to being in touch with you soon.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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