(PART 3, The Final Part) From Waiting Tables at Bubba Gump's to Co-Founding a Disruptive Technology Platform

Part 3 will conclude my journey from waiting tables at Bubba Gump's to launching a disruptive technology platform. Thank you for your patience in allowing me to share some of my origin story.

Teaser: You can check out the post Channel Pitch recap video at the bottom of the newsletter.

To catch you back up, Part 2 ended with:

At this stage, I was probably suffering from some sort of depression, I was having trouble getting out of bed to go to work and I did in fact use all of those vacation days I negotiated.??This is the part of the story where it felt like we were at rock bottom.

Kevin and I were having what seemed like a potentially company ending conversation before we decided to consider a channel play with MSPs.

Kevin: “Okay, go do some research and let me know what you find”

PART 3: OUR LIVES CHANGED OVERNIGHT

This is when upon reflection you think about how many small decisions changed the course of that company and the trajectory of what was ahead.??

Mind you, I barely knew what an MSP was, but I looked up events and came across MSPMentor and reached out to their events team.??What we were doing caught the eye of their editor at the time, Aldrin Brown.??I’ll never to this day know if they ran an article about us because they really thought it was interesting or if it was a way to get us to advertise, but nevertheless, that article changed EVERYTHING! Here is a link to the article (https://www.channelfutures.com/business-models/firm-offers-affordable-dark-web-monitoring-for-msps)

8 months of outbound calling only, turned into 20 inbound leads from MSPs.??

Me: “Kevin, they want to know if we have MSP pricing”

Kevin: “No”

Me: “Should we come up with a pricing model?”

Kevin: “Yes”

Both of us: “What does an MSP pricing model look like?”?

Thankfully David Watts an MSP owner from California, gave us incredible insights into how to structure our packages/pricing and honestly the pricing model stayed relatively the same for most of our time at ID Agent. ??

The next lucky break, we got a call from Robin Yost, of Robin Robins telling us about their Boot Camp event.??You have to understand at this time, we knew NOTHING about the MSP industry and nothing about what a Robin Robins was.??

This is where I can’t help and feel so lucky.??Robin Yost had to make that call, but then Brian, Kevin’s business partner strongly encouraged me to go check out the event for a day and just see what it was all about.??

?Fast forward a couple of weeks, I’m a guest at one of the largest MSP events in our industry and I’m being introduced to MSPs and telling them at a very high level what we are doing.??I vividly remember speaking with John Hill, Scott Beck and Kevin Gray early in the event.??For context, NO ONE had really heard of any company selling dark web monitoring, so I’m not sure anyone truly knew what to make of it.??

?I did call Kevin and told him, “I need to stay for 2 more days, everyone here is an MSP, there is so much opportunity.”??I would stay, I would eat multiple breakfasts just to get to spend time with more MSPs.??Bacon all around!

This was the start to ID Agent making huge invests in MSP events, we went from a company no one had heard of to the hottest thing in the channel outside of maybe IT Glue.??

For 2 years, the team absolutely sprinted to get as much done, we would go from 1 employee to 55 in that time, from 0 MSPs to nearly 2,000 in 34 countries.??We won 40+ industry awards and spoke on 100+ stages and at that end of that 2 year run, got acquired by Kaseya.??

There are many stories to tell in-between partner 1 and partner 4,000 (post acquisition) and I’ll sprinkle those in during future newsletter/journal posts.??

?Post acquisition, many of the core members of ID Agent took on larger roles at Kaseya and have gone onto great things.??I had the opportunity to strengthen my management skills with a larger team and got to see how things are run at a billion dollar organization.??I learned many valuable lessons and understand much better how the greater channel works because of my time there.

Fast forward, 2.5 years, I now found myself running my own Consulting company called Channel Halo, trying to figure how what the next chapter was in my life.??Did I want to go back into a start up and be their Channel Chief? Work with a veteran channel company and try and help take them to the next level???Did I want to grow my consulting company???

?After discussions with many emerging vendors and MSPs, similar challenges kept coming up.??I would speak with Kevin about them from time to time and he was hearing the same thing from his side where he was also doing consulting with vendors in the channel.??

?Eventually, we came to the conclusion, “maybe WE can help solve these issues”.??That is where Channel Program was birthed.??

This would be my 3rd time Kevin and I have worked together, the first two times I worked for him.??This time around I would get the opportunity thanks to Kevin’s loyalty, trust and him finally realizing that “I am a closer”.??For this adventure, we are partners, I finally get to put “Co-Founder” next to my name.??

Waiter at Bubba Gump Shrimp House (2004), Co-Founder of Channel Program (2021).??

?This is just the beginning of my story…

SHAMLESS PLUG: (Video recap below)

We had our first PITCH event on last Friday and here are some stats from that.

• 230+ attendees + the pitches will be highlighted on our main page for a month?post even and reside in your Explorer Profile for the entire year.?
• 32, A Level Leads on average per vendor.
• 46, the highest amount of A Level Leads a vendor received.
• 90% of the audience stuck around for the entire event.???
• We already have 85+ pre-registered attendees for the January Pitch, without even promoting it yet.

You can register for our January Pitch event here: https://channelprogram.com/register?pitch_event_id=717704186825965570?

Also HUGE shoutout to our award winning vendors from the first Pitch event.

Colin Knox, CEO of Gradient taking home Best Pitch

SaaS Alerts taking home Innovation Excellence

Armor taking home best Channel Program

You can check out our post event recap here: