Kaseya named Joe Smolarski President and Chief Customer Officer earlier this year. He sat down with MSP Success to discuss his new role, improvements Kaseya is making in billing and other areas, and how Kaseya is laser focused on driving partner success. This is an edited version of that interview.
MSP Success: Before we dive into your new role, let’s take a quick look back. You joined Kaseya in 2018 as COO. What were the most important accomplishments during that five-year period?
Joe Smolarski: We saw something like 800% growth in the size of the company in that period, so the company I joined is very, very different now. That happened as we made some monumental acquisitions to really build out the platform. It’s been a heck of a journey.
Bringing together Kaseya and Datto and taking the best of all worlds to create the best customer experience possible certainly has been the focus area over the last 18 months. If you go back beyond that, it’s been very similar themes. We always focus on our partners and the MSP community and how we can help them drive efficiency and top-line growth. And we’ve done that in various ways, from how we’ve transformed our support processes to better align with their expectations to how we implement our software and how we train them, and everything else across the board.
MSP Success: As president and chief customer officer, what is your primary charge?
Smolarski: In my new role, we have consolidated all the customer-facing functions under one organization—everything from account management, global support, and professional services to billing. So, it’s one cohesive organization focused on helping our customers grow their business and optimize efficiency.
MSP Success: Will you be stepping up more as the face of the company along with Fred [Voccola, CEO]?
Smolarski: Absolutely. That’s the new charter. The reason for bringing this all together is to get closer to the partner community and create a fantastic experience for all of them. In my new role as president, that’s exactly what I’ll be focused on.
MSP Success: Will you be meeting personally with MSP partners in the next few months?
Smolarski: Yes. Last year I met with over 700 MSPs, so it’s certainly not new. It’s part of Kaseya’s philosophy. Listen, we’re an imperfect company like most companies, but one thing we do very, very well is our executive team stays grounded and stays very close to the MSP community. I plan on meeting with over 1,000 MSPs this year. I spend a lot of time in the field at various events and that will continue to increase as well as daily interactions with our partners, which certainly drive our strategic agenda.
MSP Success: Are some specific areas that you or your partners haven’t been happy with that you want to address immediately?
Smolarski: Since starting my new role, we’ve had a tremendous outreach of customers reaching out to provide us feedback on what we’re doing well and areas that we need to absolutely improve. From a billing perspective, we want to turn billing from a mundane, problematic area to a great advantage for Kaseya in how we deal with billing, and that’s certainly a top focus area. It’s an area where we’ve made a lot of progress, but we have a lot of progress to make, and we plan on doing that. I think over the next 90 days, billing will become an advantage for Kaseya clients versus a painful area.
One of the key theses for the company is reducing vendor fatigue and that means making it easy to do business. We plan on innovating in that area across the board so that the trust partners put in Kaseya is reciprocated in a great way, where they’re getting a very efficient experience from end to end as they adopt more and more of the platform.
MSP Success: Can you give me some specifics on what to expect in terms of billing improvements?
Smolarski: From a billing perspective, as we put two very, very large companies together, there will always be challenges, and there were challenges certainly that we faced over the last year. We have absolutely acknowledged that and worked through that. We’re about 95% through all those challenges. Beyond that, we’ve listened to our partners as to some of the things they’re looking for to make billing even better, to automate how we bill them and how that translates to their end-user billing. We’ve built numerous integrations throughout the platform to facilitate exactly that. We’re enhancing our billing portal for better self-service capabilities so that they have more power at their fingertips from a billing administration perspective—again, not only just on how we’re billing them, but how they bill their end client. We have some great sub-plans in that area to make it a very, very efficient experience.
MSP Success: How will you measure your own success over the next 12 months?
Smolarski: I’m going to measure success in multiple ways. Number one, we have numerous customer satisfaction metrics that we’re constantly looking at and judging ourselves on, but the key metric is growth. Are our customers continuing to invest in the Kaseya platform, and is that growth picking up even through turbulent times?
The growth rates of Kaseya have been double that of the industry. We not only want that to continue, we want that to accelerate. We have an industry-leading platform and we’re confident that if we do our job and get better every single day for our partners—it doesn’t mean we’re perfect—they’re going to see that and continue to increase their investment in the whole IT Complete platform, not just individual components.
MSP Success: Is partner growth a measure of success as well?
Smolarski: Absolutely. And certainly, they go hand in hand. There’s two ways they’re growing. They’re obviously growing as to which areas they’re adopting from Kaseya, but we see their customer growth through the upsell, the additional license consumption. They’re adding significantly more end users as well as internal users within their respective firms. It’s a key area of the health of our partners and we’re seeing great success. Even through turbulent economic times over the last couple of years, the growth within our customer base has been tremendous.
MSP Success: For 2024, what are some of the key challenges and opportunities you see for MSP partners?
Smolarski: From a key challenge perspective, I think MSPs have been a little bit reluctant to invest in certain areas as the macroeconomic conditions have been a little bit uncertain. But things are starting to stabilize, and I think we’re seeing people double down. And the good news is, by partnering with Kaseya, there’s no reason why we can’t save you 20 to 30% of your bottom-line cost from the software perspective. And we’re seeing that accelerate with the ProfitFuel program. CEOs of our MSP partners are saying they want to adopt a platform.
We can see how that’s transformational, not just from pure software cost savings, but from an efficiency and automation standpoint. We’re there for the partner community to facilitate that and make that a seamless experience. And that’s where some of the challenges have been.
In terms of opportunities, there are still tremendous areas of growth within the end users of these MSPs. From a security perspective, from a compliance perspective, the needs in those areas are increasing, and I think the MSP community is continuing to get more sophisticated in leveraging Kaseya and our complete security offerings.
MSP Success: Recent research from several different organizations as well as an MSP Success reader survey identifies new customer acquisition as a key challenge this year as well. Can Kaseya help partners with this?
Smolarski: Absolutely. Number one, MSP partners can be very, very cost competitive utilizing the Kaseya platform. We offer a lot of services that go with that to help you grow your business. For example, we sell our Powered Services below cost to help MSPs with turnkey marketing, social media, things like that. Sometimes MSPs aren’t experts in certain areas, like security, compliance, backup, or whatever it may be. We’re giving them all the expertise and resources that they need to get into those businesses. Those are some of the ways that we’re helping customers get their brand out there and deal with customer acquisition, which is obviously a very costly part of the business.
MSP Success: Industry analysts have said AI will be more of an efficiency booster for MSPs than a revenue generator in the short term. Do you agree?
Smolarski: From my perspective, AI went from a bunch of hoopla and smoke and mirrors in 2022 to very real and game changing in 2023 with everything that developed over the last 12 months. So, it’s here for real. I think every software company needs to build that directly into the core, and Kaseya is certainly doing that, and we think we’re at the forefront across the board. So yes, I would agree with analysts in terms of driving efficiency, but there’s great revenue opportunities as well, just in terms of the sophistication of the level of service that you can provide and how it’s baked in. But I think the key driver will be that you get to grow your top line much more efficiently with bottom-line costs.
MSP Success: And AI may be a revenue booster down the road as MSPs gain experience with it?
Smolarski: That’s exactly right. Listen, this is a journey, but it is certainly increasing in pace very quickly. AI has been talked about for many years, but the generative AI that’s come out over the last 12 months has really changed the game. I think you’ll see more and more on the revenue side in the back half of the year.
MSP Success: Can you give me a sneak peek at what partners can expect at Kaseya Connect Global in April?
Smolarski: I’ll give you a very high-level sneak peek, which is we believe we’re going to have news to change the industry. We’re confident that what we’ll release in April will be talked about throughout the world. With that, you’re going to need to stay tuned.
