At 10 years old, Dave Sobel’s family moved to London for his father’s National Security Agency (NSA) job. His parents told him two things to remember for the time they lived there: “One, if anyone asks, your father works for the Department of Defense, and if they ask anything more, say you don’t know. Two, you’re a guest in their country and you’re always well behaved when you’re a guest.”
The latter advice “completely colored the way that I travel and the way that I interact with people because I always think I’m a guest,” says Sobel. “Guests are well behaved. They should be curious. They should ask good questions. They should find out about things.”
From MSP business owner to vendor to his current role as podcaster of The Business of Tech, Sobel has been immersed in all aspects of the channel throughout his career, and he carries that “guest” mentality with him—innate curiosity combined with the continual desire to learn more and identify trends early has been a consistent theme throughout his three major career shifts. And “well behaved” doesn’t mean he’s not outspoken about channel trends, vendor-MSP relationships, and the next great land grab for MSPs—productivity and AI policy and frameworks.
Launching An MSP With RMM Before There Were Tools
Laid off as a software developer on February 14—Valentine’s Day—2002, Sobel started his IT services business on February 15. “We landed our first major managed services client by April, and it was a $12,000 a month contract.”
From the get-go, he knew he didn’t want to chase a time-and-materials model. With his background in data center and development, plus his management skills, he put together a precursor to the managed services model. “I was doing remote monitoring and management before there were tools to do it by cobbling together open-source solutions,” he says. “We moved into Small Business Server and SharePoint and a lot of those very obvious small business solutions.” His business was a Microsoft MVP, and over the course of a decade he grew it to 15 people with $1.4 million in annual revenue.
During that time, he threw himself into the community. He was an early member of HTG peer groups and launched the group in Europe around 2008. He was also a CompTIA lecturer.
With a decade of running his business behind him, he evaluated his next 10 years. At the time, two key employees had just left, but his management overhead was low, so he deemed it a perfect time to sell his business to an MSP peer. “It was not a blockbuster deal, but I took all that money, and I invested it, and it is still working for me right now.”
A Walk On The Vendor Side Of The Street
After selling his MSP, and with his deep community involvement, Sobel says everyone expected him to become a consultant. However, he says, “I knew it wouldn’t be authentic. … I ran one MSP and I’m proud of it, but it was moderately successful; it wasn’t necessarily best-in-class performance all the time. So, what am I going to teach everybody?”
Sobel joined Level Platforms in 2012 as director of partner community. He later went to LogicNow as senior director of partner community and field marketing, and then became senior director, MSP evangelism, at SolarWinds when it acquired LogicNow.
“I knew I could take my experience as a managed services provider and help the vendors be better at getting their message out. … The value I brought was I natively spoke ‘solution provider’ so I could speak to those within the organization about what our customers needed. But then I [could] talk to our customers and be good at translating the value of what we’re working on and why we identified those problems in the market.”
Havin been on both sides of the fence, Sobel takes a bit of a contrarian view of the “vendor-partner relationship.”
“I think it works better when you realize that it’s not actually a ‘partnership,’” he says. “This is a customer relationship. The MSP is a customer and a consumer.”
He acknowledges the relationship is “complicated” and absolutely involves mutual success, but it’s not a mutual investment or co-ownership. “You’re not actually in it together,” he says.
The best metric for MSPs to evaluate their vendor relationship “is how healthy is your business,” he says. If an MSP is running a best-in-class business with healthy margins, “I want you to keep on doing what you’re doing.” But if an MSP is feeling price pressure and low margins, “you may want to take another look at the way you’re running your business and actually examine some of those core fundamentals.”
The Podcaster
After leaving SolarWinds in 2019, Sobel launched MSP Radio, where he hosts The Business of Tech, a news and commentary podcast geared toward MSPs and the channel. He aims to present a package of content, guests, and ideas “that hopefully makes them some money that day or the next day or gives them an idea to go do something … because they don’t have the time to read every analyst report and dig through all of that data and read all of the vendor releases and read everybody’s positioning statements.”
Sobel’s YouTube channel has 21K subscribers, and he’s anticipating crossing 1M downloads of the audio podcast before next summer. A Top 50 tech news podcast in the U.S. regularly, it was in the Top 10 three times in 2023.
Sobel offers a daily digest and weekly newsletter as well, and co-hosts the Killing IT podcast with industry luminaries Karl Palachuk and Ryan Morris.
The Next Big Opportunities For MSPs
For his episode preparation, Sobel spends a lot of time researching and contemplating the future of the industry. If he were to start an MSP-like business today, he would focus on the productivity layer of technology, especially how AI can enhance productivity, “and I would combine it with policy and strategy management around AI.”
“We want to give employees the tools and frameworks to be effective with it and know what the boundaries are [to] keep them from getting themselves into trouble,” he says. “And by the way, I’m absolutely convinced that smart people are going to build monthly recurring revenue versions of implementing [AI] frameworks and helping customers with that, and training.”
With this model, his team would be business analysts, and he would partner with distribution for all the other IT services. “We’d be much more focused on business challenges and identifying them and being good at translation of that to requirements, and then we would work with deep distribution partners for project delivery.”
He adds, “If you can play in that space, you’ve made a moneymaking machine. That’s the business I’d build today.”
The Channel’s Core Values Are Familiar Terrain
While that model may sound different from today’s MSP, “fundamentally, we’re still delivering exactly the same core value that we delivered 20 years ago, 30 years ago,” Sobel stresses. “Good MSPs, good analysts in the space, advise customers on the proper implementation of technology in their business. That core value has not changed.”
MSPs need to remember they are in the advice business, he says. “Our job is to be really good at identifying the trends and make sure that we’re investing in the right things and that will affect the way our services are delivered. … The more they [MSPs] focus on remembering their core value and their relationship to their customer, the more successful that they are.”
Sobel says he views his current role as pointing out those trends and opportunities. And as always, he is a humble “guest” traveling through his listeners’ day.
“I’m very, very humbled and honored that a lot of MSPs have given me their time and attention, and I think about that every day.”
