Many MSPs already have the technical talent to deliver strong cybersecurity services, and the market demand is clearly there. But turning that expertise into meaningful recurring revenue is a different challenge, especially when vCISO offers lack clear positioning, a repeatable sales process, or the right delivery model. In this episode, we'll explore what separates MSPs that successfully scale vCISO services from those that struggle to gain traction and where AI is creating both opportunities and costly mistakes. You will walk away with a clear picture of how to build a cybersecurity offering that clients understand, value,and are willing to buy.
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What It Really Takes to Scale vCISO Services
Tim Fitzpatrick
Many MSPs already have the technical talent to deliver strong cybersecurity services, and the market demand is clearly there. But turning that expertise into meaningful recurring revenue is a different challenge, especially when vCISO offers lack clear positioning, a repeatable sales process, or the right delivery model. In this episode, we'll explore what separates MSPs that successfully scale vCISO services from those that struggle to gain traction and where AI is creating both opportunities and costly mistakes. You will walk away with a clear picture of how to build a cybersecurity offering that clients understand, value,and are willing to buy. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we help companies turn client acquisition from their biggest challenge into their biggest advantage. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Jesse Miller, the founder of PowerPSA Consulting with me today. Jesse, welcome and thank you for being here, man.
Jesse Miller
Hey, Tim, man. It's great to be here. We've known each other for quite some time now. It feels like a lifetime in the MSP space.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, exactly.
Jesse Miller
Yeah, I'm excited to dig into this today. So glad we finally got a chance to get together and talk through some of this. It's a very interesting time in the broader industry as a whole. So, yeah, a lot to digest here.
Tim Fitzpatrick
A lot to digest, a lot to unpack. And I know you and I can talk forever. So we'll jump into it. I'm going to ask you some rapid fire questions. I hope folks get to know you, and then we'll dig into our vCISO. So when you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?
Jesse Miller
Well, I run a farm. So that is pretty much all the time. If you do follow me on LinkedIn, you know that I'm pretty adamant about regenerative agriculture, knowing where your food comes from, eating healthy and the benefits of that. I like to tell people that I don't really care how much food costs because if you look at it as an investment in your health, there's really... What are we even talking about here?
Tim Fitzpatrick
You're going to pay one way or the other, right?
Jesse Miller
Right. Yeah. What are we talking about paying $10 for a chicken or $20 for a chicken when you're looking at the side benefits of longer life and better health and all that stuff? So all that to say, several years ago, we dove real deep into that. Bought a farm. We run cattle, chicken, eggs. And so in terms of my free time, that is all my free time.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So when you're not helping folks figure out how they're going to offer vCISO services, you run a farm.
Jesse Miller
Yeah. I had Jason Slagle, who recently I was chatting with him. He goes, oh, so a V-C-I-E-I-O.
Tim Fitzpatrick
That's classic, man. You have four kids?
Jesse Miller
Four kids, yeah. We just had our fourth. I need more farm help, so we just-
Tim Fitzpatrick
I was going to say, you got some help coming into the ranks, right? I love it, man. So what's your hidden talent? Does it have anything to do with farming?
Jesse Miller
I mean, I think so. It's interesting. Again, on LinkedIn, I like to compare systems in farming to systems in cybersecurity, because really, my secret talent, to get to my secret talent, is I'm an ultimate first principles thinker. So I always want to boil things down to their most irreducible truths. And when you do that, you find out that almost all of life is about systems. So a system in farming or a system in cybersecurity really have the same first principles approach to them and in many ways. Of course, the outworkings are different, but I would say that's my hidden talent is to be able to boil everything down to its brass tacks.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, cool. I love it, man. You're speaking my language. You got to keep it simple. So easy to overcomplicate things. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
Jesse Miller
I don't know if it was advice or somebody that was said to me, My dad, years ago, I forget what we're even talking about. And he said, I know you and you'll I'll never be satisfied with being ordinary. And it just sticks in my head to this day. And not ordinary, like I need to be some superstar in the limelight, but in terms of ordinary, I am a contrarian by nature. I live in the fringes. In a lot of ways. I see the group doing this, I want to do that. That's actually helped me a lot in my career and in my life. It's a double-edged sword, of course, so you got to be careful there. But I would say that that's the advice that is really... It condenses who I am as a person.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, cool. What's one thing about you that surprises people?
Jesse Miller
I am a massive introvert. Closet, I say I'm not an extrovert, but I play one on podcast, right?
Tim Fitzpatrick
You know what's so interesting about this? Because I think I'm very much an introvert as well. And I think so many people see folks, whatever, speaking or doing podcasts, putting themselves out there. I never really thought about it, and I read it somewhere or heard it in an interview, and somebody was like, Well, being an introvert just means that you recharge your batteries in solitude or by yourself. It doesn't mean that you don't enjoy being out there, but extroverts recharge batteries by being with people. And that definition has always resonated with me. It's like, Yeah, that is me. I don't need to be around people to recharge my battery.
Jesse Miller
Yeah. For example, we all are at conferences and things like that. But I am the one, after speaking, vendor time, everything else, I just start out of my bed for an hour before I head back out. I need that for an hour.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, you walk into your hotel room and you breathe. You're like, right. Yeah. Yes. Oh, man. So what does success mean to you?
Jesse Miller
I think success means to me... Let me think about this. I think success means having enough time for the people you care about and enough resources to help the people around you. And I think if you can live a life that does both of those things, you're a pretty successful person.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Where's your happy place?
Jesse Miller
On the farm. So it's interesting because we got into this. As originally, it was going to be a homesteading thing. We're just going to raise our own food, and more people started asking about this. And I've really found a passion for it. I really enjoy it. And it's such a good duality to pull your head up out of writing skills and prompts for and then go drive a tractor around for 2 hours. That is a massive reset. So that is my happy place is out working cattle and running the tractor.
Tim Fitzpatrick
How many acres do you have?
Jesse Miller
So it's a small farm. We have 20, we rent 15, so 35. I'm trying to buy the other 20 next to us so that I go up to 55. And then there's two other parcels that I'd like to get up to about 100. So as far as I go, that's tiny, right? But yeah, I don't need much more. If I did that, I wouldn't be able to do what my real passion is.
Tim Fitzpatrick
You're not running the Duton Ranch.
Jesse Miller
That's right. Exactly. That's 35 acres is plenty for now.
Tim Fitzpatrick
What qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?
Jesse Miller
I think I value... Yeah, no, I think. I value people who are deep thinkers and people who have a ton of integrity. I hate surface level conversation. We can't just go dive into the deepest, darkest secrets the first time you meet someone. But I really enjoy people who want to philosophically think about the the problems of life and talk deeply about that stuff. So I value those people who are philosophical and deep thinkers.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. So tell us about the power grid and what you're doing to help MSPs, other IT folks, really figure out this vCISO stuff.
Jesse Miller
Yeah. Well, so it starts from a fringe, contrarian view on this. Well, so I was I was the CISO of an MSP for many, many years. I was actually I worked... So let's take another step back and just give you a bird's-eye view of everything. So I worked in telecom right out of high school. I ended up going back while I was working for Ameritech at the time and getting my degree. But then the dot com bubble burst and then 9/11 happened. And so that really tanked that industry. So I found a job with a five person MSP. So I came out of this large scale operational blue collar type of work into five person MSP, which is like the wild West. There's no rules. And I helped them scale that up to about 75 people in a successful exit at the end of all this, but help build the managed service program. And then they asked me to build the cybersecurity program. So we did that back. This was in 2014. We were very early as a company, but it didn't go real well initially. So I did what I think a lot technical people do is built the perfect cyber security stack, picked all the controls, top of the line, SIEM, everything else, and then went to the customer and said, okay, you need to double your spend with us for cyber security. This is 2014, of course. It's still a hard conversation today. So had to go back to the drawing board, and that's when I discovered vCISO. I could barely Google the term at that time. And so relaunched the program with vCISO as actually the spear point for the program. So I think to this day, we could talk more about this. Many MSPs tack that on as an add on for only if you need it. Or we flipped it and said, this is the strategic piece, the why for cybersecurity. And so that really unlocked the cyber revenue in the business and helped us scale exponentially there. Now, fast forward to when we exited, I went and ran the vCISO program for the large several hundred person MSP. And then after that, put my head up, took a look around and said, well, what does the industry need and where can I help solve a problem? I want to provide value anywhere I go, going back to what I was talking about, the people I'm around, how can I bring value to them? And I said, well, the industry still doesn't do this properly. We're not using a strategic approach to cybersecurity and really to technology in general. So I had this idea, what if I could build a program like an EOS like or a true method? There's all these systems out there, right? What if I could build something like that for vCISO to create a vCISO offer? And so that's what I did and created Power PSA Consulting to do that and then launch the Power Grid, which is our method for delivering this the year after. And it's been about 3 years now, and it's just been a really fun ride in terms of having MSPs tell me things like, I feel like a wizard on sales calls now, or this has been like rocket fuel to my cyber business, right? That's super rewarding. And so for me, it's just I'm somewhat particular about not every MSP should join this. I want MSPs that are going to get value out of it to join it. And so we've kept it not small, but it's a nice, steady growth right now.
Why So Many MSPs Struggle To Turn Cybersecurity Into Meaningful Recurring Revenue
Tim Fitzpatrick
I think you're going to touch on what you just talked about from a strategic standpoint in vCISO. So being the tip of the spear as we go through some of these questions I have for you. The first one I have is why are so many MSPs struggling to turn cybersecurity into meaningful recurring revenue? Because a lot of them already have the technical talent. What's the problem?
Jesse Miller
Positioning, positioning, positioning. And Tim, you and I have talked at length about this in the past. It's like the strategic approach to go to market. I just talked today with an MSP who hired a marketing firm an agency, just to execute, just outreach and do all the stuff and the things for multichannel. They told me it's been a year and they've had one conversation that led to a one-off risk assessment. So almost no sales conversations for a year of paying an agency. And when I dug in-
Tim Fitzpatrick
I have an MSP.
Jesse Miller
So when I dug in, it's like, oh, we're just broadcasting to everyone. We have no defined... We haven't really thought about where... We haven't really thought about what is our ideal client. We haven't thought about what do the people at that client care about. We haven't thought about where do they get their information? How does their decision making process work? I mean, a thing I love to take people through is once you've got that figured out, who do you want to sell to? Do you really know how they make decisions? You should go ask and find out. I put a post on LinkedIn a while back for the farm, of course, our well went out. But it's like you need to get into the habit. I need a well. So now I'm tracking my own decision making process. What did I do? I googled, found what were the buying triggers on the website that I like this one over this one? What made me like this one over that one? I'm just mentally cataloging that. And I call my neighbor. I'm like, Hey, do you know any good reputable places? Well, the one I liked, he said that they're good. So that's two meetups. That was my buying trigger. I reached out to them. They executed, came out. It was a fair price, got it done, competent work. And I'm You know how bad they would have to screw up to lose my business for anything else in the future? Now I understand my own buying process. Have you talked to what's the process your ideal client takes when they want to look? Do they Google? Maybe they don't Google. Maybe they're like, I never Google. But I go to my association and I ask these questions, or I talk to my buddy Tim, and he tells me this, right? You need to know all these things because that's going to influence the channels that you leverage for that. If you don't know any of that, you're just spraying and praying, and you end up with 12 of spent cash and nothing to show for it.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. And it's so interesting that what you're doing, on the front-end, there is a ton of crossover in what I do on the marketing and the growth side of actually building that marketing engine, positioning your ideal client. Everything starts with that ideal client. If you don't know who they are, everything downstream is just out of sequence, right? And so you're talking about using the vCISO as the tip of the spear, right? From a strategic standpoint, strategy before tactics, always. Always. And so many MSPs skip it.
Jesse Miller
Dude, yeah. I've got a post coming out tomorrow. You're really going to like this, by the way. You know what?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Tag me in the post. I will. So I can comment on it because it's... Yeah, it's... So these MSPs, they've got the technical talent, but they haven't taken the time to really think through, how do I need to position vCISO? And who are my ideal clients for that offering. Right.
Jesse Miller
And the thing is, it's not... We call it vCISO. You may not even call it vCISO right now, you're calling me like, V what? What the hell is that? So you have to understand. Again, you have to understand what is your target when they want these things, when you need an IR plan or when your insurance says you need a tabletop to underwrite coverage, what do you call that? Who do you reach out? Okay, now we should maybe call the service that, potentially, right? Yeah. But to your point, the mistake is positioning, and the positioning mistake is not understanding where your client's business is going and helping them understand and making sure that your packaging and the way you talk about your service is helping them get there.
Tim Fitzpatrick
You touched on this. When they do offer vCISO it's an afterthought. They're not leading with it as the tip of the spear. So they're getting the sequencing of their offers mixed up.
Jesse Miller
Correct. Yeah, that's, again, see, this is the way you think. I I love it. It's systems oriented. You're right about that because, again, having the technical people, you're doing all this technical stuff. But if that's not connected to the... You could be providing all the value in the world. And as I like to tell people, it's one thing to do a great job for your clients. I think most of us strive to do a great job for our clients. But it is a completely different thing to have the client see it that way. And that little piece is where you miss on all sorts of revenue. I mean, we're talking double revenue that you could be missing and giving away for free.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Tell me if I'm going on the right path here, but with vCISO, certainly it's about security, right? But isn't it too about getting the prospect to understand the cost of a break in business continuity?
Jesse Miller
It is. Yeah. And the idea is, and again, some people will say this, we'll hate this when I say it this way, but it's about good enough security. As a vCISO, as technical people, we always think we want to build the best, most secure system because that's the best. But the reality is there's a ton of competing priorities in the business. And so really, our goal should be what's the risk tolerance? If we don't know that, We're not like vCISO. That's what the vCISO, it's helping everyone hurt all the cats in the executive leadership team to get us all to get on the same page of what our risk tolerance is and what does that look like? And then saying, what does it cost to bring the risk tolerance down to that level? And if it's too much for the business's stomach, maybe we have to raise our risk tolerance. But now we've got everyone on the same page executing off the same playbook, and we're all rowing the same direction towards the business goals. And if you're not part of that top level conversation, you're just going to be commoditized and a line item that's looked to cut when it comes renewal time.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, to your point, this isn't about making the business impenetrable. It's about, you know what? We're okay with the level of security that we have, and you want to have enough to deter people, right? If people really want to get in, they're going to get in. But if I have a security system in my house and my neighbor doesn't, the thiefs are going to break into my neighbor's house first. Is that the premise we're thinking about here?
Jesse Miller
Yeah, I think so. It's like attackers are like water. They flow to the area of least resistance. Or you can't be the slowest on running from the lion. You don't have to be the fastest. However you want to say that, whatever works for your target market, use that.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay, I don't want to go down a rabbit hole, but you just talked about this getting away from the lion. I had a buddy who went on a first date, and then they went on a hike. And this woman was talking about they had seen mountain lions in the air, and he was like, I'm not worried about it. I can run faster than you.
Jesse Miller
No second date, I would assume.
Tim Fitzpatrick
No, there was no second date. There was no second date. Okay. So what's-
Jesse Miller
He'd make a good risk professional, though.
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What Separates MSPs That Are Successful Scaling vCISO From The Ones That Never Get Traction
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, that's right. So what's separating the MSPs that are successful scaling vCISO from the ones that never get traction?
Jesse Miller
It's the ones that are intentional about it, right? So this all comes down to accountability, intentionality. And I've said this before. I almost feel trite saying it because I've said it so much. But really, it's almost like I could give you the playbook of an MSP that comes to talk to me about the power grid. They're like, hey, yeah, we decided to offer compliance as a service or whatever. And we put it on the website. And maybe we have a partner, we have somebody internally, but we're not really getting any traction. The sales team doesn't know how to talk about it. Well, that's because you just put it out there for... And actually, I have a problem with naming it compliance as a service. That's a whole the other rabbit hole. Because the minute someone talk about positioning, the minute someone says they don't need compliance, they say, I don't need that. You're immediately qualifying out potentially good just by what you named it. But in any case. But if we're not intentional, meaning that, again, flipping it and saying, okay, well, client says, I need security. Well, what's the business reason for security? What are the risks? What are the potential outcomes? This is a lot of just good sales discovery. In a lot of ways, as a risk professional is getting everyone on the same page. What's the cost of not doing anything? Oh, well, this is the potential cost. Okay, well, so let's talk about numbers and let's make a quantified decision on, okay, this is where we need to be. And this is what our vCISO helps you do. And they help execute the program. They help with the project management, making sure everyone's on the same page, your vendors, the MSP, the IT team. Again, this is a larger discussion, but we have pitch decks for this where we talk about, here's what IT does, here's what cyber does, and showing how the vCISO bridges all these gaps for both internal and external organizations. And by the way, this all costs money. Because if we don't do this, we're doing it all for free, and we're just becoming less profitable every day. Because with AI and with everything else, each iteration of technology causes more security strategy and time spent. And if we're not capturing that through a service, we're just giving away margin at the end of the day.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So it's the ones that are successful with vCISO, they've taken the time to put together a plan and a strategy for how they're going to roll this out.
Jesse Miller
That's it. And they're executing against that plan, right? They have a They have a go to market plan and a service delivery plan, meaning that for MSPs that are looking to move upstream, too, and more co-managed, I think some people are doing that effectively, but a lot of MSPs know of the promise of co-managed better clients, ones that don't haggle, ones that view you as a business partner, all these things. This is a lever to get in there, and it's a lever to get into just business in general. Again, something I just posted about this week that I'm very adamant about is this is why I look at as the lever for exponential growth in so many areas of your MSP, because it's just another wedge into a client. So if you go talk to someone, they're like, Yeah, we're not super happy with our MSP. We're on contract for another year and a half. Come talk to us then. Okay, I'll put something in the CRM to follow up in a year and a half and put you on an email drip. That's what's happening.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So what you're saying is they can come in right now as a vCISO?
Jesse Miller
Right. So you could say, Oh, they Oh, that's great. We're an MSP. We also offer security consulting to help your leadership run tabletops. Have you had to do that for cyber insurance or do you have any regulatory things you got to work with? Typically, larger companies do. Oh, yeah, we do. Yeah, you know what? We have this service that does that right now. And since we're an MSP, we know how to work with MSPs. Well, we all know that we're going to come in, get paid to do discovery on the client and get paid to help them and show them, if we do this well, we show them how competent we are on the security side and the leadership side of things, because that's the relationship piece that they care about. And then when it's time, we're like, oh, yeah, we offer IT, and we're already doing that. And yeah, we're 25% more than them. But you said you didn't really like them already. We've already proven all this trust by help. You've seen what we've done with the vCISO program. Easy decision to swap the spend over to you for that, right? And so this is where it becomes a downstream revenue generator. The way I tell people, I look at vCISO, so it's like the seal teams for your MSP. Are you going to send a seal team in and win a large campaign? No. But they're going to be the linchpin that can perform strategic maneuvers, expert maneuvers that change the trajectory of that campaign, right? And so in many ways, that's why I call it the spear point for revenue, because there's downstream IT, cybersecurity, and other projects behind that.
How Is AI Changing The MSP Cybersecurity Landscape
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love it. So you touched on AI. It's hard to have any conversation at this point without talking about AI.
Jesse Miller
I was holding back until you asked the question.
Tim Fitzpatrick
How is AI changing the MSP cyber security landscape? And where are MSPs getting it wrong right now. There's a lot of thoughts about what AI is going to do in the MSP space. So I'm anxious to hear what you have to say here.
Jesse Miller
Yeah, there is so much to unpack there. But I think a couple of things, just level setting things the way I see it. I think largely, AI is super useful. I use it every day. I just had something the other day where I had to go open up a tab and go click on something to get information. And I found myself frustrated that they didn't have an MCP integration that I couldn't just ask Claude to get me that information. So we're starting to work that way now as human. So it's becoming the status quo. It's the new interface for information, right? And what's so interesting about it is that it's a ubiquitous change. Before you had this piece of software that did this. Now it's just serving data up to you, and we're shifting the way we work. So I think In terms of efficiency, I think AI right now has a Pareto principle problem, meaning that 20% of your work creates 80% of your outcomes. And humans are really good at that 20%, whereas AI is really good at the that doesn't create all the outsized outcomes. Now, reverse the math on that. That means AI launched properly in a business is giving you probably 20 to 25% efficiency gains, which is not inconsequential. But you have to base that against what is the spend and what is the lift for that? So I think there has to be, this is why I think vCISOs are perfect for this. There has to be this risk approach to it. Now, the other thing it's doing is it is raising risk tolerances in organizations. So MSPs have to be cognizant of no more can we take the approach that you're going to get hacked and you have to have everything secured before you use AI because it's going to be too late. There's a thing called positive risk, where if we don't do something, we're actually introducing risk of falling behind or everything like that. So again, these vCSOs are helping leadership team balance all these things. Let's think about this, logically from a risk perspective. Okay, we want to do AI. What does that mean? Okay, well, we have to become business consultants now, understand what are the business processes we're using? If we have a vCISO program, we've already mapped this out. So now let's look at, okay, where do we see the best uses for AI that are lower risk but provide those outsized outcomes? Okay, let's start there. Get wins, prove ROI, and iterate and build the program. Governance and user training, all those things filter downstream into a vCISO program. And so MSPs, what I'm seeing is AI is creating a lot of conversations right now, not so much MRR just yet, but it It's coming, right? But we're still early stages. So I think the MSPs that are winning here are going to take a measured approach and are going to start creating these offers for their clients. We're working with a couple on the grid right now. I think vCISOs are perfect for this because writing skills, it's just like writing policy in a lot of ways. You're telling an agent what to do. Like I said, we're shifting how we work. So those are some basic thoughts, right? I'm just rapid-firing some of my thoughts.
Tim Fitzpatrick
No, this is great because there's a lot of people say, Hey, look, all these support tickets, all this simple stuff AI can handle for the MSP, you got to find other ways to add value to clients because they're not going to see value in lower-level support tickets being handled by a person.
Jesse Miller
It's going to become more and more commoditized, right? Now, People are saying the Tier 1 is going away. No, Tier 1 is going to help manage skills and manage the AI and the agents now. So the work is shifting. But point being is, yeah, the original, we help fix your printer, we help fix your driver issues or things like that, it's really going to become less and less. I have a buddy here locally who worked at an MSP in college. Now he owns a bunch of dermatologist practices. He's a doctor. And he has one IT guy, and he's got everything set up in Google Workspace, and he's using AI for everything. And he's like, I just don't really see a need for MSP. I know what that model is. I worked at one, but I've got everything automated. But would he see use for someone coming in and helping him plan all this AI stuff and stage this and help him do that in his business? Absolutely he would. So I think this is, again, why I see you got to be up at that strategic level conversation, talking about risk and making these decisions and understanding where the business is going.
Tim Fitzpatrick
The thing, too, that I think is for MSPs to shift from this more tactical strategic is there are two different ways of thinking. It's different skillset. If you are tactical right now and you want to get more strategic, this is not a switch. You can just flip.
Jesse Miller
There's something to be said about, I've heard plenty of MSP owners and talking with people at Evergreen and Lyra and Lyra The ones who are in the M&A space, they're like a lot of owners are saying, I've done this shift with cloud. I did this shift from break fix to MRR. I'm just too tired of keeping switching my business model. This is it for me. I want to sell. I want to get out before I have to do the AI thing. And so there are MSPs thinking that way. But I think there is a ton of... Any time you have to change is hard. But I think there are MSPs who are seeing a ton of opportunity. So it's pretty evenly split. And when I do polls on this, those two viewpoints, right? Some people are like, yeah, we're loving this opportunity. It's great. Other people are like, man, we just got it locked down and we were rolling and now this happens.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Now this. I don't want to do this.
Jesse Miller
Yeah. So there is some of that. And I get it. I completely get it, right? But a lot of times... But it goes back. So we're in this... We're at the height of the Dunning-Kroger Curve for AI right now. Everyone says that AI is going to be the end-all be-all like they do for every new technology, it's creating all the marketing buzz, everything. And it is a great technology. Don't get me wrong. Don't hear me. I'm not like a Luddite saying we don't use AI, but we're going to come down from that eventually. And then people are going to be like, oh, yeah, we still need security. We still need IT. We still need all these things. But if we haven't properly positioned at the leadership level to help businesses make those decisions properly and prove in our value there, we run the risk of missing out or at least being commoditized.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I think to the I mean, the MSPs are getting asked about this from their clients, and they don't know what to do. And it's not a simple answer as far as I'm concerned, because I am of the belief, and I would love to get your thoughts on this, but there's all kinds of people that are saying they're AI consultants now, right? I don't really think that MSP should shift their business model to being AI consultants. I also think that, okay, you're an AI consultant. How in the world can you appropriately implement AI across every aspect of a business? If you don't know IT, Or you don't know marketing, or you don't know operations. If you don't understand marketing or finance, how can you implement AI tools in a business in those areas of the business. And so I think the challenge for MSPs is to figure out, I'm getting these questions about AI and how my clients should be leveraging it. How do I position that and fulfill that across their business if I don't have skill sets in every one of the areas that they need support? Does that make sense?
Jesse Miller
Yeah. I think this is where the leadership thing comes down. I didn't mention this, but I do keep a couple of direct vCISO contracts just so I understand what I'm talking about. And when I say boards are asking about this, I'm actually talking from experience rather than fading into irrelevance there. So I'm seeing this in a couple of organizations I'm working with right now is that exact problem. And what's working well, I think, is from how MSPs can... I think being AI consultants, it depends. Now, there are certain MSPs who have been doing some software development or have people with those skillsets. And we're seeing some in the grid who are being successful doing this. So again, I really think it comes down to what your org DNA is and what Who your customer is and what you want to do for them, right? The skillset you have today. These are all decisions we have to make. So, yeah, I don't think every MSP should be an AI consultant, just like I don't think every MSP should have a vCISO so program, right? It might make more sense to partner. And if you're listening to this and you want to find a good vCISO, so come see me because I can refer you to one of our members because we have vCISO, so it's and MSPs. It's not just MSPs we work with. So, yeah, I'm always, like I said, trying to bring value for the people I work with. But all that to say is that I think there are ways where you can... The governance and the steering piece is, again, what I see ready made for a vCISO. So okay, I will work with your AI consultant. We will define subject matter experts or champions in each one of these departments, and I will help keep the rails on, and it will create committees around all this and start moving this forward. And again, that's where you want to be anyway, is at that strategic piece. So I think that's a very easy way to start working with your clients on it and doing an assessment. And again, as vCISO, we don't have to be experts in everything, but we do have to understand it. How does money flow through the organization? And so that's just another conversation away from, okay, well, there's some inefficiencies that I can see, right? Why don't we try and use some AI to fix that?
Conclusion
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love it, man. This has been an awesome conversation, Jesse. Any last minute thoughts, words of wisdom you want to leave with us.
Jesse Miller
Yeah, I mean, I think this, again, going back to first principles, this is not new. The technology is new, the principle is not. Understand your client's business, see ways to bring value, understand where they're going, what their goals are, and then use technology to solve those problems, right? If you can think that way and be nimble that way, you're going to create fans and raving fans in your client base. Yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Where can people connect with you? If you're an MSP or vCISO, so and you're listening to this or watching, you need to go connect with Jessie. Where can they find you?
Jesse Miller
Yeah. So I'm very active on LinkedIn. That's probably where I spend most of my time. So you can check me out on LinkedIn. My handle is secopswarrior, S-E-C-O-P-S, warrior, back from my days in the trenches as a cyber security guy. And then if you want to check out the PowerGrid, you can go to powergryd.group. And that'll give you all the information.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. We will make sure all that stuff gets in the show notes. Go connect with Jessie. Man, I don't even know. I can't even remember how we met. It might have been on LinkedIn, but I'm so grateful that we have. I just always enjoy connecting with you, man. So I appreciate you taking the time. I know folks will get a lot of value from this. So thank you. Those of you that are watching, listening, I appreciate you as well. If you feel like you're stuck in that marketing maze, right, you're not sure what's working or what to focus on next, go take advantage of our free marketing engine scorecard at marketingenginescorecard.com. Takes less than 2 minutes. We'll help you evaluate the nine areas of what we call the supercharged marketing engine so that you can get clear direction on exactly what to fix first. So, Jessie, thank you again. Till next time. Take care.