Episode 36: Unlocking Microsoft Partner Success with Justin Slagle

Well, there's a few things. And the one thing that I love about what's happening is that Microsoft has finally gotten to this point that, you know, I was at Microsoft when they started this process and it all started with NCE, right? So the new customer experience with CSP. That was a nightmare. I know. Like I can see the fact where it's even saying it. But the idea of NCE was we're going to have a common licensing platform. So, you know, EA moving to MCA, E, online thing, and CSP all being on a common platform. So when you say 5%, it's not just 5% for CSP. It's actually, it's going to be a stable license across everything. So that you're no longer saying, okay, we're going to go sell this. And if it's a bigger customer, you know, they qualify for an EA, like it's going to be the same pricing, right? So you're not going to say, oh, well, they're giving a 20% discount because they're going to an EA and I got a compete against that. It's going to be like for life, no matter which vehicle. So if there's one positive out of it, that's it, right? [MUSIC] Hey everyone, welcome to the IT collab podcast. My name is Brendan Barnes and I am joined with my co-host Nathan Taylor. All right, today Nathan, we have a special guest, Justin Sleggle. I say that correctly. All right, perfect and just in. Venturing out in his own world, he is co-founder, CEO of the partner masters. So Justin, please help us understand what you do and a little bit about yourself. Yeah, well, thanks for having me on. Nice to see you both. So yeah, so Justin Sleggle, I've been in the Microsoft world for actually almost 20 years now. I started as a Microsoft partner. A part of Microsoft Learning Channel had a Microsoft Learning business, another minority owner in that business. We sold the business in 2012 and in 2012 after exiting, I went to Microsoft. I've been in the partner world ever since, right? So I was part of the old USS MB team with Cindy Bates and then I went to one commercial partner and then global partner solution. So I basically run the gamut on the partner side. And then about a year and a half ago, my business partner, Matt Sosman and I decided, look, as his business is getting much bigger, what was happening in Microsoft was, there's a lot of partners, 466,000 Microsoft partners. And if you look at the Americas, which is now it's not US, now it's America's, there's about 125,000 partners in the Americas. But the US GPS team covers about 500. Yeah, and so the massive amount of partners that there's no more NPN, like 1,800 NPN at all, doesn't work anymore. There's no NPN sold at Microsoft.com. So what we saw was that there's an opportunity for us to go out and work with old partners, whether they're managed or not, to build a more profitable Microsoft practice. And that's that's the, that was the goal of the business. Let's go help all Microsoft partners. So we still look, I will tell you guys, and this is not a joke. People think I'm joking when I say this. My son's name is Maverick Bink. I'm all in with Microsoft, right? You sure that wasn't like a friend's reference. No, no, it was not no, so I mean the reality is we wouldn't have my little guy for the Microsoft fertility benefits. Right? So we wanted, we wanted him to know that we, we were, we, we, we, we, we, we, we called. We actually gave up and we got a postcard in the mail that said, hey, we know that you maxed out your fertility benefits, but we're changing our plan next year. We'll pay 100% if you try again. Wow. And so we tried one more time. We got one embryo and it worked out. So we're Microsoft all the way through and my passion is around Microsoft. My business partner Matt, his passion is around Microsoft. He's on the technical side. He started with Microsoft and served with this. He was part of this security engineering team. He was an architect for GPS as well for partners. And so we just, we wanted to go out and build a business that would help partners understand there's so much potential here. And you don't even have to go outside the Microsoft world. We believe that there's the deeper we go with Microsoft and where we figure out, you're never getting to the bottom of this ocean. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, Brandon, you and I in our businesses, you know, as an, as an employee of machine logic for many years, you had uncommon solutions. We, we experienced this five years ago. Both of us were small 25, 30% of the managed partners. We had a PDM at Microsoft. We had goals. We were meeting with them monthly. You know, you, we were going to ignite, you know, there were these all these partner engagements that you could have. And I feel like for every year for the last five years, they eliminate 90% of the managed partners. And you go from one number to another number. And, you know, I think a lot of that management seem to have been pushed off to the Paxates of the world where they really want the Paxates to manage the small partners. But, you know, it's changed the, it's seen the game for us partners that are on the smaller side, but very Microsoft focused. Yeah. I mean, Nathan, sorry, Justin, I mean, we don't know each other, but I will say this. I know you know, matter Nathan, that's a really weird Casamai. I totally, it's great to meet you because we did. We bought into the Microsoft cool it will we had, you know, we had a rep, right? We were a managed partner. We had someone from Microsoft and the DC in our office every, you know, almost every week. And we were landing deals left and right. And we really went more mid-March. And that was pretty lucrative. But once you lose that, I guess, fountain, we had to refine our identity and go back to more MSP style. And you get lost because the navigating the whole Microsoft sell man, you know, now you need to build a package, you need to be part of this, be like, I mean, it was nuts. And it's still changing on a daily basis. So someone that, I mean, even someone us trying to translate licensing is insane for, you know, to a smaller business. So yeah, I'd love to learn more about what you guys do. Yeah. Well, look, the thing is, and what I'd love to get across the partners. And I think we're doing an okay job is you don't have to have a PDM, right? And Microsoft has actually set up, look, it's the same thing like, it's almost like if I said this to a technical person, like, you don't actually have to go find an integrator to do this stuff. It's there. You can go sign up online. Good luck, right? Or you could go find integrator who's going to help you do this. I oftentimes compare our business to taxes because everybody asks to pay taxes, right? You can go to the IRS website and you can download. They have a 5500 page guide. The first 50 pages are about the taxes you pay. And the next 5450 pages about how you can save money on taxes. Who's going to go read that? Right? You do as you go, you go, you go hire a CPA and a CPA says, do this, do this, do this, do this, and all of a sudden you owe less money in taxes. That's how I feel about Microsoft. Microsoft a million pages on learned on Microsoft.com. Who's going to go read all of it? Right? Co-pilot. Well, co-pilot could read it. But it's going to hallucinate as well, right? Yeah. Right. I so we know we know how those systems work. We have 20 people on the team. 18 of them came from Microsoft. Like what? So we know what it's like on the inside. And so we can translate those million pages are out on learn. We say, Brandon, hey, you look, most partners don't know that there's all these different incentive programs. We can help you go achieve your model work solution designation. We can help you achieve your security solution designation. And when you get security, there's two things that Microsoft gives you right off the bat. You can go deliver a $6500 threat protection engagement to customer. You can deliver a $6500 data security assessment to customers. And it doesn't cost them anything. They just pay you this $13,000 for every customer you can go find. And then hey, we can go help you achieve all these other things. What's been really great for me to see as we've done this and we've started to scale this out is the number of partners who are coming back. Hey, we just got $100,000. There's one partner in the first six months. They got $600,000. I mean, it's from Microsoft and right. Yeah, they in that engagement was they paid us about $30,000, $5,000 a month for six for six months. They got $600,000 in return. Now not everybody gets that right. I'm not saying that that's typical. But there's partners who get more and there's partners that, hey, maybe you pay us and you only get $50,000 back. There's there's so much opportunity out there with the and funding with Azure innovate. I don't know if you guys or anybody listening has used Azure innovate, but that's like for me money, right? The data, the age of AI that we're in right now. And you can go spend up a proof of concept. The Microsoft will pay you $15,000 to go do a proof of concepts for AI. Like who is going to turn that down? But you've got to go qualify for it. And there's a couple easy steps to help make you qualify because Microsoft doesn't want to just give it to anybody. They want to make sure that somebody who actually knows what AI is if they're going to give them money. Justin, I have one question. So I have noticed that they have shifted, right? Like so Nathan, you said something earlier where we're more aligned with Arrow. We kind of stay with them and Paxate broke off of them as their partner. And they treat us really nice because we stuck with them. Go to it. However, I've noticed they've hired a lot of Microsoft people recently that like run, it's almost like they're the new PDA. Yes. It's kind of the thing you guys see too. Like we're Paxate's more your PDA. They're not, there's somewhat PDA. I'm saying that like Paxate is helping people navigate the base level of Microsoft partnership. They're navigating some of that and they're helping sell the products. But you know, the number, the other thing that Microsoft's done is they've moved the bar for how you get a lot of these things. Are you going to be able to certain critical mass to unlock consent to us, right? And so I think, you know, when you look at a PAX 8, the majority of their partners are on the very base level where they're getting some basic incentives, but they're not hitting those specializations or advanced specializations there. They're really low level. And so they provide really good help to the broad market. But as soon as you get into a higher level of engagement, and as you said Justin, you wanna unlock that next level, I love your illustration of the text code. Like, that's a really good illustration. Trying to keep up with Microsoft changes and programs is like reading tax information. It puts me to sleep. And it changes every two weeks. I can't do it. I just don't have the time or the emotional energy to do it and having somebody like you where your team is just living and breathing it and understands it and can just take it and put it in a concise format is a game-cater. - Well, it's very similar to what you guys do, right? So as MSPs, you're going out and you've got hundreds of customers and within those hundreds of customers, if there's some security, something that happens, immediately you can go talk to all your other customers you can spread that out, right? We work with about 150 Microsoft partners right now. We'll have those 150 Microsoft partners. If something happens in one, guess what? We can deploy that to all the other partners quickly. - Yeah. - Where, there's nobody else offering that type of service. And our, we do complement like what a Pax 8 or an Arrow or a Crayon or an Ingram Micro because they're really focused on helping you get to a licensing. - Yeah. - You can help a little bit with that. But the nuances of the licensing is something that we try to just, hey, let's put back to the CSP providers. Well, we're trying to help you figure out is, operationally, how do we do these things? Or we have partners who say, "But we're selling Azure, "we don't have an Azure managed service. "We don't specifically have it. "Can you help us build that?" - Right. - Hey, we're thinking about building an MSSP service. Can you help us build that? - Sure, we'll help you build that. And then we're going to build it in such a way that's repeatable, then we're going to help you go put it into the marketplace, and then you can have transactable offers in the marketplace. - Yeah. - And what people don't understand, if you're building a marketplace, that's how Microsoft knows what you do. Right? If you can have solutions in marketplace, anybody in Microsoft looks at you and says, "Have no idea what brand it does. "I have no idea what Nathan does." But if you have in there, even if it's this consulting offer, hey, we do co-pilot adopting services. Great, now we know what you do. Now, if you can take that and you can make transactable offers, you can think about the repeatable IP that you have, but you can make anything a SaaS offer, right? And SaaS is, I mean, I think, I was at a conference where, they were talking about SaaS is becoming more agents as a service, and I think that that's a whole nother opportunity for us to talk about is you go talk to all the SaaS providers, how do we turn the SaaS into agents as a service, massive opportunity around AI. But if you go put these things in marketplace, now all of a sudden, the sellers are making more money from selling your stuff. And in fact, it costs the customer half. And this is one thing I started realizing probably the last 18 months, is when you get something to IP co-sell and Mac eligible, when you're selling to a customer that has a Microsoft Azure customer commitment, let's say they have a million dollar commitment to Microsoft, your solution is $100,000. If it's Mac eligible, it comes off the million dollars, right? So they only owe it for the 900,000 in Microsoft. If it's not, they have to pay a million in Microsoft and 100,000 to you. So your $100,000 solution just costs a customer 200,000. So you have to do this. And so many partners think I'm a services partner so I can't do marketplace. And it's actually the opposite. Like, for your services partner, you have to figure out how to do this because that's how you're going to go out of market and that's how you're going to make those connections with Microsoft. - I think that's awesome, just that I think a lot of MSPs could learn from this, right? Because that is the hard transition, going from more of the, you know, a PDM or those styles to use something along those lines, right? Because it was really hard to transition to that because you can't talk to a person anymore, you have to go co-sell and go, "Oh, there's your package in here. What does that mean?" - Yeah. - Yeah. - Cool stuff. - Yeah. - And they're like, "What does that look like?" And so I guess it would be really helpful for some like you. Do you guys do like, you know, like, sort of help them, like MSPs get certified for like designations? - I feel like. - Because you feel like a lot of those, you have to have third party review to make sure that you know how to do those designations. - Well, the third party audit is more for the specializations. - Sorry. - That's what I mean, yeah. - Yeah, for the solution designations, a lot of times I hear a partner, it's too hard to figure this stuff out. The reality is if you can go really well, they're actually really easy. And they're mic stuff's actually making them easier. I mean, you take modern work as an example, like you've got to have like, you have to have at least a customer, right? And a lot of times what happens at CSP partners, forget that you should be doing C-Pore claims on your CSP, right? If you do C-Pore, you get twice as many points. So just go do C-Pore claims on your CSP customers, your numbers are gonna go up. - And for those listeners, C-Pore is a part of record. - Just claiming part of the claim. - Yeah. - Yeah. And then on the certification side, like the intermediate cert is an MS900. You can do some of the more advanced stuff, but MS900, that's like the sales person thing. If you've been selling this stuff for a while, you should at least be able to take that, right? - Yeah. - And then what really is on the advanced cert, there's one that says teams meeting assessment. That's an online quiz. You can take it as many times you need to. It's like 30 questions long. It's easy, right? So getting that, like when partners say, I can't get a solution designation down when they, we'll get. - Well, so I wanna hit this topic because this is really relevant for a lot of my peers. So we were at the, I've had the privilege for a number of years being a part of the Microsoft CSP partner council. So we get the go-to-red men's every year for a week and we just sit down and go. Go-to-market teams come and talk to us, incentive teams, all these different teams or Microsoft comments say, "Hey, you're 25 of our best partners from around the world. "We wanna run some things by you." And the partners in the room are from all over the world. Brazil and India and Europe. And we had Patrick on the podcast a couple weeks ago. He's from Sweden, Nigel from Nitech in Ireland. These are some of the best partners I've ever met. Just my respect for them and their businesses is through the roof. And at this most recent, partner, Vice-Re-Council in October, well, a couple of us asked, we said, "Who in the room raise your hand "if you're struggling to get your solutions "partner designations renewed?" And 23 out of 25 top flight partners in the world said, "I'm at risk." And he was shocking to me because these are the best. These are people, you know Nigel at Nitech and he's a really good friend of mine. You guys helped him a time with this. But they are the best Microsoft partner, I know. There's 70 people, they live and breathe Microsoft. Every customer has sent them all deployed. They're all in business premium. They're doing conditional access. They got trusted devices and they have drank the cool aid. So, so much cool aid. They make the cool aid there. That's how much they drink. And they were at risk because they weren't growing. They were just serving, seeing highly customers incredibly well. But since they're not adding new logos, the default metric said, "You guys are at risk." Now, you guys came through and you gave them a couple recommendations and then they went and crushed those recommendations a couple days. They taled tagged every tenant. They c-port claimed every tenant. And a month later, they've got their solutions partnered asignations. And it's a big deal. You lose that designation. You lose your IURs, you lose your status with Microsoft. He was very, very worried and you guys just really helped him out a lot. But I thought that was a really important data point that in a room with the best partners in the world, they're all struggling to execute on this. And we had conversations with Microsoft and the partner team and we said, "Hey, you guys have talked about having some more SMB friendly metrics. One of those coming." And the body language was not good. They're struggling with it. There's a, Microsoft has a million things they're trying to do. And AI and security trump everything. And it's really delaying a lot of other things. And it was clear that they're not going to solve this four partners from their perspectives. So we all have to start working together to solve it. And I think you guys do an amazing job with that. - Yeah, thank you. And thank you for sending Nigel our way. And I definitely want to do a case study with Nigel because I mean, that's a perfect example, right? Somebody who thought that they were at risk, but really it just took a couple of little tweaks. They just go do a couple of little things. I mean, that's why you hire a CPA for your taxes, right? How you do a couple of little things, you save tens of thousands of dollars. Like in this case, it literally is tens of thousands of dollars. If he loses his IUR, it is. And thousands of dollars, if he doesn't qualify for the funding programs that he's leveraging. So yeah, I mean, and branded to your point about audits earlier, like the solution designations are, in my opinion, they're like the silver silver program, right? The specializations are more like the gold program. And to get to the gold program on the ad side, you have to do a third party audit. And partners freak out. You have to pay for it. You got to prepare for it. It takes months for you guys to get the teams together to do this. And again, it's not really that hard. If you understand the process, and so we've locked partners through a prep, so that, hey, let's make sure you got this. And Nathan on your team, like we even went so far to say, hey, you get it, create a transactable offer. And you create a transactable offer. Like I think the story from from from from fourth pass was the audit that's supposed to take four hours to 45 minutes. Because it's like, that all the auditors you looking for is do you have a repeatable process? Yes. Well, we have a place offer. You click this button right here and it deploys in the customer tenant. How much more repeatable can you get? Yeah. Yeah, big shout out to a few of the team members. Matthew and Mike get a few others that just worked really hard on that. But yeah, it's, you know, it's a very intimidating thing, but there are ways to really simplify. And that's that's where you guys come in. As you guys have have the answers on that, you can help us navigate all that. And it's invaluable. So. And I think it's great. Yeah. You know, honestly, Justin, I wish I had you guys a couple of years ago, especially as everything shifted, it's not easy to turn and navigate Microsoft. It's like a full-time job. - Yeah. Well, and that's the other part of the solution that Matt and I are trying to build. Is that even if you have a person, it's not enough. - No, it isn't. - Because that one person, like there was one of the partners who came to me and said, "Hey, can you, I want to go create an alliance, person role. Can you help me create a job description?" And it ended up being like a three-page thing of, "Hey, here's all the things you need to do." Well, what's nice about having a service is I've got all the people who can do all these things. 'Cause one of the big challenges they had, again, we're only a year and a half old. But one of the challenges they had in the very beginning of the business is, like, I've been doing this forever, right? Matt's been doing this forever. So for us, like, we can route this stuff off, but going and finding somebody, even the people who we hire from Microsoft, they don't know all this stuff. - Yes, yes. - So then it's like, all right, well, the challenge is, I'm gonna go give you four, five, 10 partners, however many, and you have to know this laundry list of stuff for everyone of the partners. And we had to do what we had to do in the beginning, but now that we're getting to a little bit of scale, now we can be okay, you need to know these four or five things and you need to know these four or five things and you need to know these four or five things. And we're gonna work as a team and now we can service more partners. Because having one person, it's almost a recipe for disaster, right? Hey, your job is to be the Microsoft Alliance person, I need to do light-sisting, I need you to be on all the calls, I need to do all the referrals, I need to do all the incentive, all the, like the, it go do all the proof of execution, help our team do all the audits, make sure you're sharing the referrals, go work with the Microsoft sellers, you can't do all of that, one person can't do that, but as a service, we can make all those things easy. - Yeah, yeah. That's amazing, Justin. So I have to ask you a question. You said you've been in business for a year and a half. Can you tell us more about that? How it's been? - I will say, it was definitely something, like I've been a business owner, my nor did I start, I didn't ever start a business on my own. - Right. - I shouldn't say that, I actually did. When I was like 19, I started a Valley dry and committing business that I should have hung on. - You will now. - Again. - But so this was something that I talked about for a long time, what do we want to do? And then finally, opportunity came with Val and it was like, you know what, we're getting older, we always have to take a chance, but for me, look, I've got my wife's station, I'm with the kids, I've got a five year old and a 10 year old, who I guess they were, or a nine when we started this business. And you know, I had a really nice job with Microsoft. High paying job, most people say you're not relieving that job to go start a business and kind of rolling the dice. But I always had that entrepreneur mindset and I think that's what made me pretty good at Microsoft. But it's also what makes me so fulfilled now. Being 18 months into the business and being able to say, hey, well, that was the other thing. Man, I had to make a decision. Like Microsoft was going through layoffs and so some of my peers got laid off. I had to lay off some people at Microsoft. And that was hard, it was hard to go through. But we had to make a decision. Some of them decided, hey, I'm going to go offer a similar service like a PDM as a service type role and they wanted to have a job. And man, I could have probably made a really good job for ourselves and replace our incomes and just said, hey, we want to work with like five to 10 partners and we'll have a good income from that. But we decided we want to build a business. We want to build something that's scalable and actually solves a problem. And that's even going to be riskier because then everything that we make, we have to reinvest back into the business to be able to grow this thing to where we can achieve these goals. So it was certainly a challenge and it was certainly a tough conversations for me with my family saying, hey, we can't go on vacations for a little while. Hey, we're just going to be a little lean around here for a little bit. But now looking forward to what we've done and where we're going and it's been incredible. And I will tell you, I went up to Microsoft GPS Offsite, it was back in February, so was it eight, nine months ago. And my old DP, Jim Lee, he shook my hand. He's like, you know, the best thing that ever happened was that you left Microsoft. (laughs) Yes, yes. And what a real compliment, right? Who would ever thought, but we're helping salt. We are truly, I mean, I feel good about that every night that we're helping solve a massive issue. And I look for what's to come because there's just an unlimited amount of opportunity for all of us. Yeah. Yeah, I can speak Microsoft buying you and then you become Microsoft again. Oh, no, no, no, no. Don't you know, I'm Microsoft now. (laughs) No, here's another thing that's interesting. So there was a friend of mine in Microsoft who joined our team as a contractor for a while. We knew it was going to be a stock gap. So he was going to go back to Microsoft and he did just go back to Microsoft, which was great. And then he just sent me a message, I think it was last night or night before, because he's back in a partner role. But he was in Microsoft on and off for about 20 years. And then he came and worked with us for about a year. And now back at Microsoft, he's like, you know, working at TPM was like getting an MBA in partner. Because you don't get to see this stuff, right? When you're on the Microsoft side, you think, hey, all these cool dashboards I see is exactly what a partner is see. No, it's not. No. Oh, here's all the things like, oh, partners just have to go do these little things to go do a C-port plan, to do a pal tagging or how you talk to customers or how you get a solution designation. When you're on the, when you're out here on this side, and then you're working with all these partners, you see how hard it actually is. Then you go back to Microsoft, you can actually make change. Yeah, I give a lot of credit to Microsoft for 10 and a half years of my life. I learned a lot. The last year and a half that I've been out of Microsoft, I've more than double the amount of information that I learned and, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, I always laugh at our pack meetings 'cause you'll get some person from the Dynamics team or the Power team and they're like, hey, all UMSPs, you guys have sold off 365 in Azure. And why are you doing Power BI, ERP, CRM, automation and low code? You just look at them and go, you don't have a stinkin clue about any of the words you just said. You don't have an understanding of all of the backend processes required of an ERP firm has a stack of people that an MSP doesn't like to go to market motion is different, the customer engagement. And then, you know, like you said, there's a lot of times those teams of Microsoft, they're like, man, this Dynamics CRM is the best thing in the world. It can, you know, it can do anything you want. Just put it to work and everybody should sell it. And it can be really hard to get there to have that understanding of all the layers we're dealing with, the many, many hats and MSPS to wear between productivity and cloud and networking and security and business and automation and it's so much and sometimes you could tell, it's just they don't, they just don't, they're not able to see it just from the world they have because everything they have is the same, it was an echo chamber on the product they're focused on. So, yeah, no, it's really like they say that like there's a Redmond bubble and you know, when you live inside it, well, it is a different world. Which is, look, there's good and bad to it. I mean, the good is that they can continue to innovate and they can continue to stay focused on all their line items and make sure that their scorecard is green on every item, eight programs and do different things. So, they're good on having a diverse audience of people who are in the bubble and people who know reality and can help come together. That's what makes this whole ecosystem so special. Yeah. And to give them credit, the fact that they were at our pack partner advisor council is they're going, hey, I know I'm an echo chamber. Can you tell me what you see? And they invite people like me that give unshelpt or the responses and usually they respond well to that. So, you never know. Well, let's talk about a little bit more, a couple more current Microsoft things. So, this week, this really episode probably won't release for a couple weeks. But we're a week away from Microsoft Ignite and with Ignite coming Microsoft is announcing all kinds of things, some of which are pretty disruptive. So, lots of big news coming from Microsoft this week. There are a lot. So, where are you going? Which one you want to talk about? I think the one that's going to cause the most trouble for our world is a 5% increase across the board on every license. That's a lot. That's a little bit a lot to swallow for a lot of partner. Okay, but when you say 5% increase, it's not 5% on everything, right? It's 5% annual deals sold monthly. Correct, which is 95% of the license is sold in the MSP space. Okay. Okay. So, there's very few MSPs who have customers that will pay upfront for their licensing. We are, we built our entire industry on the monthly fee model. I charge you per user per month, Office 365 is monthly, antivirus is monthly, you name it, it's monthly per user. And so, that's how Microsoft lives in our space. So, it's a very enterprise lens decision, in my opinion, where they're like, oh, the companies that pay up front will be fine. Yeah, that's not the SMB space. Yeah. And the one thing that I love about what's happening is that Microsoft has finally gotten to this point that I was at Microsoft when they started this process and it all started with NCE, right? So, the new customer experience with CSP, that was a nightmare. I know, like I could see, I could see that it was, we've been saying it, but the idea of NCE was we're gonna have a common licensing platform. And though, you know, EA moving to MCA, EA, online thing, and CSP, all being on a common platform. So, when you say 5%, it's not just 5% for CSP, it's actually, it's gonna be a stable license across everything so that you're no longer saying, okay, we're gonna go sell this, and if it's a bigger customer, you know, they qualify for an EA, like it's gonna be the same pricing, right? So, you're not gonna say, oh, well, they're giving a 20% discount because they're going to an EA and I got a compete against that. It's gonna be like for light, no matter which vehicle. So, if there's one positive out of it, that's it, right? Well, the other thing is that, like you do have options, If you want to help the customer do financing, hey, you want to pay monthly great. Let's get a bank to come in here and do that. And you're going to save a little bit of money by paying annually. So I think there's other things that you can look at business lies. But I totally get it. But the other part you have to look at is the really positive part of the enterprise agreement being phased. Yeah. Right. I'm very excited about that. Yeah. So if you think about-- so really, it's like-- I mean, they're focused on 2,500 and less. But even under 6,000 seats, the incentives for LSP to sell these agreements are pretty much going to nothing. And so the idea is, hey, now this opens up an entire world where you'd go get some worldwide million dollar licensing agreements that has never been there before. These customers are going to have to go somewhere. And Microsoft is saying, look, you can sign an MCAE with us. Supports probably not going to be very good, because our team's not going to have the bandwidth to support you. And your technical support's not going to be that good. Or as you can go with one of our partners through CSP, they would get phenomenal support from. And if you go that direction, they'll do your licensing, they'll do your support, they'll do it all. Hopefully that offset kind of the-- OK, I don't like that they just raised the price 5%, but even raising the price 5%, I guess what you get to make more money, because you're making money off the line as well. Yeah. Now we're real excited about that EA opportunity. Like you said, opening up that used to be, if you were over 500, I wasn't sure if I could sell your licenses. And then moved to 2,500, 3,000. Now that it's going to 6,000 for those of us that thrive in that space, that's a huge opportunity. We're very excited about it. And I think a lot of the businesses are going to do better, because that three-year EA locked you into license counts with no flexibility. And on a CSP, I can give you monthly. I can give you an annual. We can mix a match. We can, you know, threw up every year. I think a lot of businesses are going to say they have a ton of money on their Microsoft licensing, because that EA was not a flexible or customer-friendly licensing agreement. Unless you really wanted to lock in your cost for three years. That was the only upside. Yeah. Well, there were a couple other upsides to it. When you go to your true up, if you had a 500 user EA, you could go to 550, you could go to 575, you could go back to 550. And then whatever you're on, annual true up, that's why you have to lock in after the next year. So there's a little bit of license flexibility, but not as nice as CSP is going to be. But the thing is going to be really nice for you. Like you were saying, you built your whole model on this month-to-month. Well, those customers coming off the EA's are used to paying annually. That's a really good call out. I appreciate that. Good point. It was kind of nice when one of my biggest, you know, one of bigger clients around in the Denver area. They called us and they said, hey, my rep from Microsoft won't even call me back. Like, we need these licenses now. And I was like, we got you. But that was pretty funny. I like what are you guys seeing as far as like the AI opportunity that's out there? I think that it's happening, but slowly, you know, I think that people are still just trying to chew down how it can help their business. At least from my perspective, the bigger, you know, bigger, more in tune people, you know, or more in tune companies want to probably build out their own system. And what does that look like? How much does it cost? So now we're digging into specialties of building their own, you know, internal systems to, you know, co-pilot their stuff. It's very different. But I think it's going to catch on pretty fast. And we're trying to, you know, stay ahead of it, for sure. You know, we're seeing a strong interest. But I think people recognize the challenge, which is data governance and the SMB space. Right? Also, and AI just accelerates your data governance risk. And I think we're going to release an episode here in the next week with Brian Becker. And he did a really good job of talking through that. And I got some great perspective. But that's what we're finding in the small business space. People love it, want to play with it. And they are very worried about it. And so it's a mixed bag of success on selling it. We have some customers who have it who drank the Kool-Aid. We love AI and co-pilot internally. It's just, it's a game changer. But it is the thing that I'm going to do. It's a game changer. But it is definitely a challenge and co-imposition because people recognize how much of a paradigm shift it is. And I'm worried about that peak. Well, just to top onto that, what I have actually been more lucrative with is that once we put this in a place, they want to use AI in their SharePoint environment or whatever to search the area. So it now becomes, can you help us organize our data properly so we can search it or do what everyone would do properly? So try to use that as more of an opportunity once we actually get them. So it's kind of turned around. Or can you move my data before we start buying into this? It's that's where it really turned into. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm seeing. Client of across the board is that the AI conversation is driving the whole rest of the Microsoft conversation. Right? So you both just nailed it, right? So you go have an AI conversation and then all of a sudden you start showing them all the security risks. It's like, OK, now we've got to go to security. Now that's security. Yeah. Now all your file structures are all wrong. Now we've got to go back and do that. And then you start getting them a co-pilot. And then all of a sudden it's like, hey, can we extend this to our third party app? OK, well, that's co-pilot studio. OK, well, now we can go to co-pilot studio. Oh, you want to ask late to a live agent? Oh, well, that's on the panel. So we got to go to Dynamics. Right? So now this whole story starts coming to you. But so Nathan, you mentioned you guys are using an internally brand. Are you using a co-pilot and other AI products internally? Oh, we're full co-pilot. We've been doing it for a year. We have a development team on our side too. So they're starting to dig into co-pilot studio. And what is that? What is that going to take on? So we're waiting for at least a couple of clients to buy into that. But now, like I said, we're more or less trying to organize their data. And then it's going to go into the next realm. Yeah, I think this is where for everybody listening, like the number one thing that we put partners on, use it. Yeah, like if you don't think you can't fill a story, right? It's like, you know, we have people who they're trying to sell Microsoft 365 and then they sell, they send us a Google meet invite. Yeah. Zoom Zoom Zoom call. And it's like really like if you want to sell this stuff, you have to go use it. And so you have to be that thought leader. Use an internal create your own case. Yeah, starts. You know that we're customers. And did you guys know about the SMB co-pilot briefings? Yes, you've helped this run a couple. Yeah. Okay, good. Do you know about Brandon? Oh, yeah. Okay. I think like 10. Okay. Awesome. So for people who are listening who don't know, yeah, it has a program that if you're a CSP reseller, you qualify. Yeah, you can go sign up and Microsoft will pay you $1,500 to do a one hour co-pilot briefing with three customers. So you've got three unique individuals in there. And one of the three has to fill out a survey at the end. Hey, just for just be clear, they have to be, you have to have the Microsoft ID and all of those stuff too. So they have to be in your CSP and there's a lot more to it. Just, you know, there's. Yeah. They don't have to be in your CSP. I do them all the time. We don't sell the CSP licensing to the partners and actually partners are customers in this scenario. So we go do CSP briefings to teach partners how to do CSP briefings and we get paid for it. Man, I'm going to talk to you after this. There's, there's an exhibit me here. Hey, bro, would you like me to talk to you? I hear you like co-pilot. You want to talk about co-pilot? Yes. Oh, man. Well, and co-pilot's another topic. We finally have monthly billing for that. That's huge. That was actually, that was really a big blocker in the small business space that, you know, we talked earlier about most of my customers want to pay monthly. And the second I go to an annual on anything, the big issue is that becomes a capital outlay. Another CFO has input. If I'm just adding a license of 30 bucks a month and I add another one next month and I add another one next month, mostly IT departments can make that decision themselves and they can start to iterate in. And who's after drop 360 once, now I got to get a PO and get approval and that's really going to make a big difference on adoption in the small business space this monthly pricing. And the 5% premium just won't change much. So yeah, I agree. I think that's a big one. And the other thing that they announced was they starting gen was a January or April. I can't remember which would which it is, but 15% off of the V5. So again, going back to what we talked about the co-pilot is driving security conversations, driving E5. It's going to be a big deal. And now those customers, the E5, they have a nice discount program too. So I like those with those. I think you're right. The monthly co-pilot is a huge huge deal. Probably the biggest of that announcement. Let me throw one more plug for you guys. The other thing you guys help with is a lot of the backend figuring out your Microsoft platform. I've heard from you guys how many partners don't know that they have co-op dollars and don't know that if they don't blame those in the six months they're available, they're just gone. And that's 40% of your rebate dollars. You guys are great at helping navigate that complicated program. And we had to merge 14 different partner centers into one, which is a lot of work. A lot of details. And your guys' help on that was invaluable. We would not have survived some of that without your help. So you guys have a lot of things you can add to socially kind of the growth partners that are really trying to go deeper. So much value there. Well, I think the co-op thing, if you know everybody who's listening, like go look, if you don't think you have co-op, just go look. Because I have partners literally who have 100,000, they have $100,000 plus every six months. And then we show it to them, we're like, oh, we didn't even know that was there. And it's not like if you don't use it, it goes into a kitty where other partners can use it. It goes exactly to the Microsoft bottom line. So they don't care if you don't use it. Amy, how's it going? gets the report as profit on the quarterly earning call, right? Yes. Go. It's your money. Like you buy it. If you sell CSP, you're getting a rebate, right? And 60% of that's going to come to you and cash every month. 40% goes into a little, little big account for you. And then you have to go in. It if it goes over $10,000, you have to go in and specifically leverage those dollars. Because $110,000, we get it. We get a lot of other partners who are like, oh, we, you know, we get $1,000 in $1,200. All of a sudden, we get like $6,000. We can't figure out why and then it goes back. Well, what happens is you didn't qualify for the 10,000. So you get a one time payout. And so that's why you have that big blip. But we can help you understand what those things are. Just my ask is make sure that if you have co up, you know, that it's there and don't lose it. Yep. And claiming it, you know, it can look very complicated. You guys break it down into, hey, there's a three or four ways that are really intuitive to do it. We'll help you with the paperwork. claim it this way. We'll babysit it for you. You know, it's a game changer for us larger partners. There's a lot of cash to claim there and claiming it properly. Is it a bit of work at having somebody that a friend, a friend to someone is a really helpful thing? So, you know, just about to wrap up. So I just have a couple things. Number one, we're going to reintroduce this. Nathan, I were trying to figure out something cool. What's your favorite food? My favorite old man. I, you know, I'm a foodie. Well, actually, I guess I guess I can say this because I was just looking somebody just sent me this wine dinner thing. It came this wine with Chuck Wagner actually doing a presentation to the wine, but it has a wagyu, a Japanese A5 wagyu. So it'll be the top of the list. Most thick. All right. And number two, honestly, it's been the pleasure listening to you. And I'm probably going to reach out after this conversation because I learned a lot. Just like I'm hoping another partners have out there. How do we get a hold of you? Justin at the partner masters.com. We can reach out to me on LinkedIn. Just Justin Slagel. But yeah, I look forward to talking to you, Brandon, or talking to other partners. Again, like it's my, it's my passion to try to figure this out. We're coming out with a lot of new programs in 2025. We'll have a whole freeing you model to allow partners to get into our program to hear some of our resource and give you some of those things. So anybody who's interested to speak out and we'll get you plugged in. Awesome. And for all our listeners, you know, on the post, we'll definitely post, you know, your site and your information on there, how to get a hold of you. So really appreciate your time. And we hope to see you next time. And for our listeners, please don't forget, please make comments. Please subscribe and please participate so that we can get that big audience. Yeah, please, please do so they remind me back. Yeah. Thank you, Justin. Thanks.