The MSP Business Model Fallacy

Before you get started

This article is a companion to my article on how to get the most out of Conference and Industry events. While most of the concepts here will not require external explanation, some things will be linked to subsections in my article, “Ripe for the Picking: Maximize your Conference ROI” and you may benefit from skimming that piece for context or discussion.  

This article is about the importance of good notetaking including a demonstration of one of the methods I personally use. I have a lightweight template in OneNote that I’ve scrubbed for your use and you can download that here. We will also use a fair amount of genAI through ChatGPT.  

As with most things from Rising Tide, this document is not dictatorial. We feel everything evolves and the goal for this was to be an easy tool that can be implemented with little effort. If you have feedback or questions or just want to argue, feel free to find me on LinkedIn or the MSPGeek Discord community (@cinakur) and I’ll be glad to chat!

Why take notes? This isn’t school.  

I was a poor student in school, ironically driven but unmotivated. I knew I wanted to make a difference in the world, and that was it. I didn’t even plan on getting an Engineering degree. My family was lower-middle class in a rural town in the southeast United States that sprung up around an Air Force Base 80 years ago. I was the first on both sides of the family to go straight from high school to college, so I had no context or support about what it would take to be a Doctor, Lawyer, or even Engineer. I thought maybe I’d just get some vague Liberal Arts degree and become a teacher or get married and be a mom. Nothing bad about being a teacher or a mother, I still could see myself being both one day: it’s just that I had no dreams of my own, no direction or understanding. I thank all that is good in this world that college counselor looked at my SAT scores and was surprised I wasn't already pursuing something explicitly science and math focused!

While I say I was a poor student, I did receive good grades in basic classes and hands-on labs as I am a generally curious person, so talking about theory, tangible experience, and writing about it carried me a long way. However, as classes advanced from practical to theoretical, I rarely operated well under pressure and had poor time management so I would often fail homework and mid-term exams. When my Master’s Thesis was due, an advisor of mine chided me, noting I should be much further along in my research and analysis and questioning if I’d even make the deadline to defend it that year. (His talking-to was the motivation I needed to complete, even if I was doing it out of spite.)

School was miserable, sitting at a desk for hours a day was miserable: there were a million other things I could be doing and were already thinking about as I am half listening to a tenured professor drone on about whatever heady topic the syllabus offered.

Did my notes in those classes carry me through? I think back to them and I can clearly see in my mind’s eye: a doodle I made of my water chemistry professor as a lobster from 17 years ago. So, I guess you can say, yes, they carried me, but probably not for the right reason.

So why am I, an admittedly poor student, writing a blog post about note-taking? How did I even get out of college with two degrees? And why a lobster!?

Well, here’s the thing: with each exam I took, and with each hands-on lab, I finally understood the concept. Something about the adrenaline and skills that I needed to perform helped the concepts solidify in my mind, and eventually I even had enough confidence to tutor others in those courses!  

The key was, and is, action.

It’s easy to freeze after a conference. You’ve taken in so much information: new names, new faces, new products, new settings, new experiences. Hopefully, most are good, but maybe some are bad. How do you KNOW what action to take, how do you even remember?

In this article, we’re going to talk about one way to create meaningful plans of action through note-taking at conferences, using the template that I created as a guide. We’ll look at our notes according to the lifecycle of your conference attendance: choosing the event, attending, and after. For this article, I’m going to use the two examples, one of planning to attend CodeMash, Home - CodeMash., following their 2025 event, and the other with my actual notes from Right of Boom 2025.

Let’s start at the beginning.  

El’s Template Overview: A Walkthrough

Before getting into how I use the template, let’s go over what is in it and my thought process behind it.  

Did you download it yet? You can get that OneNote file here: Conference Note Template. (Contact me if you want a different type of export!)

The key thing about building with action in mind is that I bookend my trip with intentional processing and preparation so I can enjoy the event with confidence, knowing I am being responsible with my time, skill, and relationships. There are three main parts to the thought process that governed my template: 

1. Know Your Why. Expending mental energy at the beginning reduces the number of decisions and subsequent decision fatigue you'll experience on-site. Set the vision upfront and it will go a long way.
2. Keep it Simple. You want something you can return to throughout the conference, without "debt" or guilt. Giving yourself something easy to come back to as a touch point and "source of truth" will make this more attainable.
3. Be Accountable and Finish Strong. Have a dedicated time to synthesize and analyze what you've learned and what your next steps are!

I personally do this by bookending my trip with 1-hour on each side: the hour before I plan my goals, and the hour after I summarize and make an action plan. Considering a conference with travel is easily a 40-60 hour week (and longer for vendors!), 2-hours is a small investment on the success of my conference attendance from a content perspective.  

If we’re looking for direction on action at the end of this, we need to know where to find certain things we talked about, and that is all this OneNote template is. So, let's take a look! If you'd like to follow along, I have screenshots that follow as well as a video I recorded, available here: A Conference Note Survival Guide.

I like to have a Conferences Notebook shared between the team, and for each conference I add a Section Group, with the given year as a Section. So I copy parts of my template to the given location as needed.  

Within the template, you will find four main sections:  

• Conference Overview

• Session Notes

• Networking

• Vendors

Let’s talk about each section and how they’re used.  

Conference Overview  

The point of this page is to visualize what success looks like for this conference, personally and as a team. You’ll find there are a lot of questions on this first page. You don’t have to answer all of them, but asking them ahead of time will give you some clarity on the type of questions you could be asking to get the most out of this event.

Session Notes  

Session Notes are broken up into two parts: Agenda and Session Notes.  

Agenda

Make an Agenda page for each team member attending so you can compare sessions, notes, and ask questions!

Session Notes

Session Notes are for the actual Session Notes. Even if you don't take notes or even attend the session, you can fill in things you hear other people mention about it down the road!

Yes, more questions for you to ask.  These are helpful when you do some AI analysis at the end.

Networking  

Networking should be lightweight! You're going to meet a ton of people, quickly. Keep it at a high level as much as possible.

Vendors

Vendors should generally be separate from your Networking so can have a place for notes about their product that aren't related to them personally.

Before you go: Know your Why.

Now that we have the lay of the land for the template, let's set up our example of attending Codemash 2025 (CodeMash).

We create the new Section for this event and copy in the template pages.

Now, the work starts. For me, I like to give myself one-hour to work this through. It’s enough time to do research and not too much time that I feel like I’m getting in the weeds.  

Set the Course: What's your Why? 

If you read the article this is a companion to, you know I think setting your intentions for a conference is the foremost important thing to accomplish once you decide you’re going.  

So, tell me, why do you want to attend CodeMash?

• My friends are all going and I’d like to see them.  

• There is a certain topic on the schedule I want to learn about.  

• [Semi-famous Person] will be speaking.

• Networking with new people or people in a specific industry.  

• Some other secret reason.  

Do you have clear reasons you want to attend? Take a look at the Agenda from a high level or ask around. Maybe it’s worth asking a generative AI to help frame this. Perhaps ask, “Why should I, as an MSP (or individual, or business, depending on the data you’ve fed your AI!), want to attend Codemash?”

It’ll likely give you a bunch of reason, and while these are all probably valid to some degree, limit it to 1-2 main reasons and let the rest be a bonus. Review the website for vendors and key speakers that are meaningful to you. Fill out this section on the Conference Overview page.  

Fully Review the Agenda.

Now, it's time to review the conference agenda a little more thoroughly. Which sessions do you want to attend? Here is their 2025 Agenda for context: 2025 CodeMash Conference

Fill those in on the Agenda page. Each team-member attending can have their own Agenda page so you can see what courses everyone else is taking and divide and conquer the session topics, or take joint notes on the same document and fill in each others’ blanks.  

And add the Description and key notes to a new page in that section. Read the questions in the Session Notes section and write out your OWN questions of what you'd like to learn in this session based on your understanding of the Summary.

Rinse and Repeat until you have a full schedule. Be sure to put breaks in there occasionally for client calls or for serendipitous hallway meetings!

Some of these sessions, I won’t be taking active notes in (like the soldering course) but may want to have somewhere to dump resources or other notes afterwards! There may be a few different days that I jump into lightning talks, so I group them all together, they don’t need separate pages!  

Got it? 

The main things to remember here echo the blog post on conferences.  

• Determine your why by seriously evaluating the agenda, determining your goals, and talking with your team about their own.  

• Pre-prep what you can so you don’t have to make too many live decisions.  

• Don’t overcrowd it. Make sure you’re not overcommitting!  

One more thing I pre-prep to help keep my focus: I travel with my work laptop but I do not take it to the sessions. Instead, I take a lightweight tablet. This allows me to focus on what I’m here for: networking and learning and not answering emails or surreptitiously working on projects.  

Boots on the ground: Capture Insights, be Present.

Time to actually take notes. At this point, we'll transition from planning the CodeMash trip to looking at my actual experience at Right of Boom this past year. Depending on your situation, you may or may not have the time or space to take “good” notes. I generally find myself in one of two situations:  

• Session Notes: Sitting in a session with a tablet in front of me, able to take thoughtful notes

• Conversation Notes: Standing in a hallway, at a meal, or in other fast-paced Conversations, where I’m unable to take good notes, if any. Sometimes I have half notes on a Notes app or something because I don’t want to forget.  

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In general, focus on the main things and let noise drift to the side. Here is some advice I have for handling each of these situations, and examples of how I handled them while at Right of Boom this past February.  

Session Notes

In general, any live note-taking completed by you should be about action, not mindless transcription. There are AI transcribers like Otter.ai or Plaud.ai for that. Your goal should be three-fold: 

1. gathering the big points and the nuance of the conversation
2. collecting data points and future research opportunities and
3. identifying how those fit in with your goals or understanding.

Keep your notes high-level; focus on engaging in the sessions and ask questions. Write just enough to help jog your memory or find the source information later. If you wrote out your own questions in the planning phase, those can help guide your notes as well, or give you questions to ask when they open up the mic.

Here is a snippet from my notes I took in Brent Adamson’s session on the Framemaking Sale.  

As you see in my notes here, yes, take photos, but where do those go when you’re done? Do you review them? Really?  

Put that information somewhere useful, friend. Here are few things you can do to help shape your notes:  

• Use OCR. The notes under Dimensions of Customer Decision Confidence, I did not type. I took a photo and then grabbed the text from that image. Your device may have OCR built into the camera app.   ‍
• Use Reverse Image Search. Find Images online that speakers referenced, through reverse image search. They will be better quality AND will often bring you to the source material the speaker used.  
• Capture concepts that will be hard to track down later. Did they mention a data point or statistic? What was the source for that? What was the exact number? 
• What do you think? What concepts do you agree with? What do you disagree with? What makes you feel uncomfortable? What do you want to learn more about? ‍
• Review before you leave your seat. Before getting up from a session, take 5 minutes and catch up on your notes. Don’t make a big deal of it, it doesn’t have to be perfect, just scrub through them to make sure they’ll make sense for “future you” when it’s time to review them.

Conversation Notes

Taking notes on conversations is a lot harder. Who did you talk to and what did you talk about? Where were you? What actionable things can you remember, jokes, or meaningful things about that situation?  

The Networking and Vendor sections are a lot lighter because they should be. Hopefully, you are living in the moment and connecting with these thoughts and ideas you discussed over a meal and worrying less about getting notes from these experiences. The point of these notes are to remind yourself of the important stories or experiences you had with someone, to build camaraderie and sometimes wise insight that these strangers-turned-friends-and-colleagues shared with you.  

For conversation notes, I would encourage you to take notes you can, by texting or sending yourself a brief message through Teams/Slack, or recording a voice memo. Sometimes, I also just message my business partner if it’s a particularly lovely exchange.  

Also, make sure you connect with that person, by social media, email, or business card. As with the Session Notes, triage throughout the day, or at the very least at the end of the day/beginning of the next to make sure all of your notes end up in one place.  

These are my notes from a recent conference, with enough redacted so you can see what I do, but enough showing so you can see I am not perfect or 100%. I didn't fill in some of the blanks as I've mentioned in later segments, I’m not building dossiers, I’m only writing out just enough information to jog my memory. Some of the experiences were highly memorable, so the names were enough.

In the end, the most important thing for your notes is that they are here for you to return to at any time during the conference. If you’ve done the pre-work of laying it out, you don’t have to expend energy to get back on track. You just find the next session or meal and pick it back up again.  

Transition Power Hour: Prioritize and Process  

It’s the last day of the conference. You are exhausted and it’s time to pack up and hit the road.

I’d argue that THIS is the most important time in this entire document, this liminal space between education and action that will determine if you actually learn anything from this event!  

Before things get “Back to Normal,” it is vital that you take the time to review your notes, whether alone or as a team. Here’s how I do it:  

• Give yourself One Hour (or less) to Clean up.
  Before heading home or within 24 hours of landing back in reality, spend one dedicated hour to intentionally review your notes. This isn’t deep work, it’s just filling in the blanks where you forgot or didn’t have time/energy to upkeep things.  

• Fill in missing details. While things are still fresh, make sure there are enough notes to make your notes make sense. Take out things that don’t make sense or that aren’t actually actionable or useful.  

• Highlight key takeaways that actually matter. (Do this by hand before running through genAI! Don’t let a robot tell you what was important from your experience!)

• Extract action items. Do this religiously, even if it's just "Follow up with $Name from $Company." Add them to a separate, trackable document: 
  • in a project management tool like Trello or Clickup,
  • a Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS) like Logseq, or even
  • your PSA.

• Use genAI to organize and identify the big ideas. On each page of this document, I have questions. Drop the summary and your notes for each session in a genAI of your choice and have it analyze the event for you. Then, at the end, have it analyze the conference as you attended it!

Here is what I distilled the Business Track at Right of Boom into.  

I fed genAI each session with a few questions, and then fed the outputs together into genAI for the "Big Ideas" and then I edited them down and removed 2-3 points and subpoints I felt were unneccesary.

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Back to Reality: Notes into Action.

There it is, you have your nice, neat notes reflecting what you learned at a Conference! Now...what...what do you do with them?  

Share the Knowledge with your Team

• What sessions were actually valuable? (And which were a waste of time?)

• Is this a good event for you to attend again next year, or is there someone else who would be a better fit?  

• What key industry trends did you notice?

• Are there any immediate action items?

• If you can present ONE THING to implement immediately, what would it be? Make a plan to do it.  

Follow Up with Friends, new and old.  

Debrief with your friends who also attended. What did they get out of the event that you missed? Be ruthless about which product you’re going to try from which vendor following this event and stick with it. Go ahead and write up a short “sorry not interested, do not contact" template email to send to vendors, or email rules to send them to another folder/trash. (You can always come back to them, give them a clear templated no and move on!)

Share the knowledge with others.  

I mean, my notes from Right of Boom literally led to two (maybe three) blog posts on getting the most out of conferences, a video, and probably a webinar reviewing content as well. There is a depth of knowledge that comes from diverse conversations on topics, don’t be scared to have opinions or speak your mind, you never know how that can help our entire industry in the long run! Make videos, blogposts, or LinkedIn Articles. Share the wealth with others who couldn’t make it. Who knows, it may be helpful to you, to help you sort out your ideas better.  

In Closing

My goal in sharing with you how I take conferences notes, is to encourage YOU to get the most out of your conference attendance. However you do that is up to you, but hopefully this framework helps you practically implement how you can best ideate, execute, and close out your event experiences with Action in mind. Remember: 

1. Know your Why before you go and invest energy upfront to give yourself structure you can use.
2. Keep it Simple and come back to Notes whenever you stray.
3. Finish Strong and transition back to reality, prioritizing Action.

If you take nothing else, I hope you consider that a conference isn’t just about showing up. Instead, it’s about capturing insights, making connections, and turning those ideas into action. Take notes that matter, review them before they fade into oblivion, and for the love of all things good, do something with them!

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Answer a question for me, and be honest.  

When you sign up to attend a conference, what is the point?

I would guess that your answers, with a varying levels of importance, include networking with peers, expanding your knowledge, getting insights on latest trends, meeting vendors or influencers you’ve been following, and having a few nice meals or drinks in a city you don’t often visit.  

Did I get it right?

Ok, follow up question. Think back to the most recent conference you attended.  

Did you accomplish what you wanted to when you signed up in the first place?  

It’s ok, this is a safe place.  

There are a variety of reasons a conference may feel like a bust to you. Maybe the speakers had an off day (or in reality weren’t as good as you hoped). Maybe the session synopsis wasn’t an accurate reflection of the actual content provided. Maybe you were up too late the night before and accidentally slept through the sessions you were most looking forward to.  

Or maybe, maybe, you experience what I have, which is that everything went perfectly: you attended all sessions, cheered when you were supposed to, participated in meaningful conversations with peers and mentors, had an uneventful trip home, and yet, something still feels wrong.  

While exhilarating, at the end of these trips I’m exhausted, and yet the horrors, er, I mean, responsibilities wait for me. Those good ideas and clever tools quickly fade away, only to resurface in the occasional conversation, but rarely through intentional practice.  

And then, you look at the budget. Between travel, meals, the conference pass, and your time away from work, attending a conference is a true investment.  

With networking, sessions, and vendor conversations, how do you actually implement your investment into what you've learned, follow up with the people you’ve met, or pursue that tool that's going to change your life?

I have some thoughts on that. But first, let’s talk about gardens.  

On gardens, goals, and going to conferences.

When planning any event, project, or goal, I'm sure you’ve heard someone wryly cite Murphy’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”) or quote the poet Robert Burns: “The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.”  

The implication? Don’t plan too much, just go with the flow. If you don’t plan, you can’t be disappointed.  

I hate it when people say that. And not just as a driven, technical, successful person. As a practical, down-to-earth person with a garden in my front yard, it’s the quickest way to tell me that you’re out of touch with reality.  

Let me paint you a picture using tomatoes (or another delicious fruit of your choosing).  

Every tomato gardener and farmer plants with the end goal in mind: a beautiful, bumper crop of brilliant red tomatoes, sun ripened and perfect for sandwiches, sauces, and salads.

But you don't just plant the seeds and immediately get the fruit. A full growing season looks like this:  

• You choose. You choose your tomato variety according to those that suit your palate, use-case, length of growing season, and environment. In Georgia, we have a much longer growing season than my friends in Ohio, so I can easily plant larger and slower growing varieties than they can, maybe even twice in a growing season!

• You plant. You plant them at specific times depending on the maturity of the product (are you using seeds or saplings), how much time you have before average last frost in your area, and your growing situation (is it indoors, in a greenhouse, or outside in the ground?)

• You protect. As they grow, you watch them for signs of distress and you protect them from pests or problems. You smash caterpillars, prune judiciously, and trellis them early, giving them their best chance to provide good fruit. You watch for Volunteer Plants and determine if you want to keep them or weed them out to focus on your main crop.

• You actively invest. You water and feed your plants meticulously. As the fruit ripens, you wait for the color to deepen and the right time to pull them from the vine. The trellis you put up earlier has given you places to tie branches to if the fruit gets too heavy.  

• You harvest. If you’ve done it right, you have too many to eat before they go bad and will scramble to find friends, neighbors, and co-workers to gift them to, ways to preserve them through canning or drying. Otherwise, you may have to leave them to rot on the vine.  

• You do it all again. And then, at the end of the summer, when the plant is spent, you have to decide what to do with what is left on the branch. Perhaps there are ones the birds got to before you, rotting on the ground. Perhaps there is a slew of green tomatoes that you can pull and make a meal of. You also need to decide what you will plant next, and if the soil is ready for it.  

Life happens. Just because I planted tomatoes doesn't mean I harvest tomatoes.

Just because I put a trellis up for my tomatoes doesn’t mean I can dictate where each branch will weave and grow. It just means there is a structure there for it to fall back on when things literally go sideways.  

When you know what success looks like (a full, healthy tomato plant with brilliant red fruit), you can iterate from there or return to it when things inevitably go wrong, like needing to tie the branches that have gotten too heavy.

The goal is rarely perfection, but consistency and accountability so you can gain the literal benefits of the fruit of your labor. This metaphor on gardening is something I apply in both my personal and professional life (Starting Seeds: Episode 1 - Let's Grow!), but it’s especially critical at conferences. Conferences are fast-paced, exhausting, and packed with information. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment and never actually apply what you’ve learned, leaving beautiful tomatoes rotting in the sun.  

Pre-planning and setting your intentions not only help you stay focused but also gives you more flexibility. Ironically, preparation makes it easier to pivot when plans shift. It also gives you the mental clarity to clean up at the end of the season and better prepare the soil for what you want to do next.  

So join me in our figurative conference gardens and let’s look at how we can better set ourselves up for success and that bumper crop of good ideas for our businesses, communities, and personal growth.  

Visualize your success and plan accordingly.  

One of the unspoken lessons that underpins our analogy about tomatoes is that time matters. Setting small things in motion early on allows for success because there are other parts of your environment (sun, rain, pollinators) that can do the work while you’re not actively thinking about it.  

• Pick your Seeds. Set Your Intentions.  
  • Read the agenda. Look at the sponsors, look at the session summaries. Consider the Pre-Day learning opportunities or certification add-ons.
  • Determine your big goals. Are you looking for new tools, career development, networking, industry insights? What does a successful event look like to you?
  • Consider other special aspects of this event. Who do you want to meet? What do you want to learn?
  • Talk with Your Team. Sometimes knowing what your colleagues are interested in learning from a conference makes you more engaged with topics you’d otherwise overlook.

• Prepare the Soil. Pre-Prep what you can.
  • Plan out the Schedule. Drop sessions you wish to attend into your calendar or export them from the app. Plans will change—document why they did! That insight is valuable. ‍
  • Identify your Tools. What will you use for note-taking, for connecting with others, or for making your life easier during this trip? Do you need to make business cards, pack company shirts, or a battery to charge your phone and tablet after a long day of sessions? 
  • Lay out your trellises. How can you take ordered notes instead of scribbling on the back of business cards or sale sheets? I have a template in OneNote that I’m sharing, if you’d like a place to start (find it at Doodles or Data: A Conference Note Survival Guide). Maybe you use a nice AI transcription tool like PLAUD.AI or Otter.ai. Make sure your devices are charged and there aren’t rules about recording at that event or session.  

• Evaluate the Spacing. Don’t Overcrowd.
  • Make sure you’re not overcommitting. Roots need to go deep for successful plantings, in both business and the garden. Review the schedule and give yourself breathing room to meet other people, even block off hours you should be in your room sleeping!  ‍
  • Communicate with people who may need you. At Rising Tide, we expect our team members to attend at least 75% of the sessions. Therefore, it’s important to let customers and colleagues know you’ll be offline.  

Tend to your goals and protect them with vigilance.  

Watch what you’ve planted and care for it.  That means using wisdom to prune, weed, stake up and feed your garden as needed, with a careful eye for success. I had to remove the word "ruthless" at least three times in this section. While the word is gone, my sentiment remains and I encourage you to use it freely in this section where I say "careful, intentional, test, focus...": you are the protector of your business and your ideas. One of my favorite sayings is, "If everything is important, nothing is important." What is important? Be intentional about focusing on that and letting everything else go to the wayside.

• Prune ideas with precision. Don’t just mindlessly consume.
  • Take notes, but don’t try to be too thorough. Focus on engaging in the sessions, ask questions, and write just enough to help jog your memory or find the source information later.
  • Test everything that is said. Does that check out to you? Do you have further questions? Throw out the bad stuff, keep the good.  

• Squash Bugs, Pull Weeds that are leeching your time.
  • Limit Distractions. Set aside time in the morning or afternoon for minimal client work but remember—you’re here to learn and connect with the environment at the conference.
  • Sometimes the distractions are good things. Above, I mention volunteers in the garden. Sometimes the plants that grow are viable and welcome additions to your investment. Only you can determine if splitting resources between those bonus plants and your intended produce is worth chasing. Be careful about your time and energy, but be gracious and understand that sometimes it's the surprising things that come up naturally are the most hardy and equipped for your garden!
  • Tell people no. This one is really tough, but be intentional about doing so and do it kindly! You're here to learn and grow as a person AND a business. Learn how to identify what is adding to your experience and what is just a distraction.  
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• Trellis liberally. Return to the structure you created as necessary! It’s ok if you miss a session because you were talking to someone in the hallway. It’s ok if you get up and leave a session because it’s clearly not a good fit.  Again, it’s not about perfection, it’s about the end goal.  

• Add Water and Nutrients as Needed. Literally.
  • Eat a vegetable. Drink water. Sleep. It’ll help your performance.  
  • Be moderate. You know what I'm saying. Have a good time, but keep first things, first. (And if you’re going to drink heavily, as your MSP Channel Big Sister, drink a glass of water in between each drink and take some B Vitamins, ok?)

Speaking of setting goals at conferences, Tara Rummer at Immy.Bot and Immense Networks, gave her insight in a recent conversation:  

We always did a little powwow before events to discuss what sessions each of us would be attending. And during the event (and after) we would do check-ins regarding something we've learned from our morning or afternoon... Or maybe you met an awesome vendor or had a hallway conversation that stuck with you. All of that was fair game! Learning isn't limited to planned content!  
 
I always kept the maximum to three things you learned that day because the amount of information you take in at events can be overwhelming. There are so many intelligent people talking about their passions and successes / failures.  

Tara makes some great points, but specifically, this is a good place to mention the 3-3 approach, which can help you focus and fortify ideas or experiences, either by challenging you to do more or challenging you to do less! The emcee at Right of Boom 2025, Robert Cioffi, mentioned a version of this from the stage this year. At Rising Tide, I word it like this:  

• Meet 3 New People. It’s tempting to only hang out with people you know already. When else do you get to spend time with a friend who lives on the other side of the world? That said, go out of your way to sit at a different table for meals, introduce yourself to people sitting near you in the conference hall, or add the keynote speaker on LinkedIn and tell her what you enjoyed the most about her talk!  

• Find 3 “New” Products. Learn about (and limit it to) 3 new tools, services, or vendors you weren’t familiar with. How do these tools compare to other ones you’re familiar with? What do you NOT like about them?  

• Identify 3 Points of Potential. What are 3 key insights you can bring back to the team that could impact your business or industry? Was there a common theme all speakers mentioned? A valuable phrase or saying that meant a lot to you?  

Actively harvest the bounty.  

What’s the point of a good tomato if you can’t take the first one and immediately slap it between some white bread with salt and pepper and mayonnaise? (By the way, the Duke's and Hellman's argument is wrong, it should only be Kewpie)

Often in a garden, the fruit comes to maturity in waves. It is up to us to determine what we want to do with it.

Back to Tara's experience at Immense and Immy.bot: 

At the end of the event we would each come back with one or two large takeaways.... Something we'd like to try, a vendor we'd like to meet with, etc.  
 
I've seen a lot of people come back from events and try to change everything all at once, which quickly caused dumpster fires within their teams. I've tried to put guardrails up to help guide the team a bit and keep them away from shiny objects.

Oof. Your team is your wealth and overwhelming them or frustrating them is a quick way to lose not just morale but efficiency! How can you, like Tara, put up guardrails up to protect their time? 

For me, the heart of this is to take the key things you learned and actually celebrate and use them!

• Harvest, sort, and enjoy the fruit. ‍
  • Do it yourself, first. For me, I personally set one hour aside to complete this step, either on the flight home or first thing in the office with a fresh cup of something warm. It is low-dopamine and I’m often tired, but this is super vital and what all the other “steps” have led to. Just do it. Finish strong and power through, don’t get distracted. ‍
  • Analyze your Notes. Fill out the notes that you only half jotted down. Use a generative AI tool to analyze the entire event and sessions including your notes. Highlight and pull-out questions you may have asked, or tools mentioned that you’d like to research further.
  • Review with your Team. If my team is with me, we set time aside to accomplish this step before we leave the event.

• Share the bounty. Conversations that spring from teaching others often lead to better understanding of the content and also better and stronger ideas! Do so liberally!  ‍
  • Teach your team in a team meeting what the best things you learned were.  ‍
  • Share with community. Write a blog post, film a reaction video, or post insights on LinkedIn.
    

• Preserve what you cannot use and be ok letting some go. You are going to come up with so many ideas. Take the good ones that you can implement now (literal “low hanging fruit”) and be intentional about setting a timeline for returning to the other ideas.  
  • Put good ideas worth implementing later in a meaningful place, like a project board in your PSA or another collaborative note-taking tool.  
  • Not every good idea is able to be executed with your current time and resources. And that is ok. You can always grow more, and composting puts those nutrients back into your garden as soil amendments that can feed the other ideas you have!
  • Some ideas aren't good for now, or this season. Intentionally putting them aside means they can actually be ready when the time is right.

Make your plans for what is next.  

In the end, sometimes you end up harvesting something that you didn't expect, but that worked out.

Did you see my photos about tomatillos? I didn't even plant those and they kept our home fed that entire summer. What did I learn? Next time, I'll only keep two plants so they don't overtake my garden!

So, how did this harvest go? What can you do better next growing season?  

• Honestly Review the Harvest.
  • Did you pick the wrong seeds for your business needs? Which sessions were worth it? What didn’t you agree with? Should this conference be on the calendar next year? Were you the best person to attend, or should someone else on your team go next year?
  • Was this completely the wrong fruit to grow? There are so many events you could attend, within our industry and industry adjacent. How do you choose and how do you vote with your money and energy, on which ones are actually building our industry and which ones are detracting from it? A large portion are just dog-and-pony shows, built to capitalize on FOMO, with smoke and mirrors, and to send you home on a high that you may never match. Are you actually getting what you need out of these events, or are you the product?
  • What should you do differently? You know what they say: do what you've always done and get what you've always got. Expand your horizons based on your business goals. If you're looking for a good place to start, I've attended, volunteered for, and spoken at MSPGeekCon – A Conference for MSPs by MSPs since its inception in 2023. If you're looking for a conference that is going to teach you and your team as the core focus, get your tickets for their upcoming 3rd year at MSPGeekCon 2025 Registration.

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• Follow Up on things that will support your future Gardens. I hate to make this one so trite. But like, just do it. Make a plan and execute it. Connect with people you met on LinkedIn, send emails to continue conversations with vendors, implement ONE thing from the conference into your process, and turn other notes into clear action.

• Prepare the Soil for next year.
  • What can you do now? Do you need to lay a cover crop, plant a complementary plant, or turn it over and add fertilizers or amendments? (What do you need to do to invest in your business NOW so it can be more receptive next season?)
  • Should you do nothing? Do you need to let your soil lay fallow for a season to regain balance? (Maybe you’re adding too many things and you should work on maintaining what you have before adding anything else)
  • Should you change your approach? Do you need to move where you plant that crop to a different area on your property with better drainage or sunlight patterns?  (Maybe your market doesn’t even want what you have to offer and you need to rethink your focus.)
  • Should you do something completely different? Do you need to evaluate why you were planting in the first place and maybe you just want to be a goat farmer? (Is this even what you want to be doing? Should you be prepping someone else to do this or lead?)

Put your effort where it rewards you.  

At the end of the day, a garden only succeeds with the right combination of time, resources, and attention.  

And a conference is exactly the same way. It is truly only as valuable as the effort you put into it.  

Let’s face it, we’re all exhausted and it’s easy to be a consumer. It’s easy to just go to the grocery and pick up a beautiful tomato that someone else made.  

It’s easy to only meet with people or vendors you already know and like. It’s easy to just take what people give us and check a box saying we attended an event. It’s easy to mindlessly take in what you’re being fed – to not question it, to not challenge it, to not chew it up and consider if it actually serves you or not before swallowing the meat, fat, and gristle in one bite.  

I propose to you, friends and colleagues, that you can attend every session, shake every hand, and still walk away having wasted your time and money if you’re not actively tending the garden and harvesting the fruit in your personal and professional life.  It is vital that you consider your agency and power in controlling your own growth and own destiny. We must be intentional with our time and resources if we are to harvest the best fruit.  

Lastly, if this speaks to you and you attend conferences for the content, I intend to create a conference content webinar that reviews conference material and gives people a chance to ask questions and to determine what action could and should look like following conferences in our industry. Find me on LinkedIn and let’s talk about collaborating and making this happen together or come find me at MSPGeekCon!  

I look forward to continuing to tend to our industry, together.  

Love,  

El

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You have heard it said that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Often attributed to U.S. President John F. Kennedy in a speech from 1963, this aphorism, “a rising tide lifts all boats,” is regularly heard throughout the MSP Channel: many of our friends and colleagues use this phrase in some iteration during conversation, in mottos, and uh, for business names.  

The analogy, in some ways, is astute. Technology and our relationship with it are both constantly evolving, requiring a certain buoyancy and literal ability to “go with the flow” with every new development, vulnerability, and client request.  The founder of MSPGeek, Martyn Keigher, used this phrase to describe why he started the forum to answer questions about ConnectWise’s RMM platform, LabTech, and which evolved to discuss products, security, and other MSP-centric matters. It was a nice sentiment, made practical: together, we can navigate struggles that occur with every new development. Together, we can share knowledge and experience and let others who pass this way stand on our shoulders. Together, as a community, we can traverse the deep sea of change. We can learn and grow, together.

But I’ve also seen it used another way. Bear with me and hear the difference:  

“We are The Tide. We are the people and ideas who are going to solve all of your problems. We can solve your problems if you would just listen to us and agree and obey!”  

In an industry that started in garages and basements, one built on torrents and IRC and subverting systems, one that is constantly wrangling humans in all of their complexity and anxieties, why…WHY would anyone expect to be a sole authority on even one aspect of the Tide?  

Because here’s the thing: of all things we should want to mimic from nature, a rising tide isn’t the pinnacle of success you may think it is. Limited by time and natural laws, you must remember that ultimately, tides don’t rise forever.

Let’s talk about how the cycle of tides are reflected in our lives, as humans and businesses.

ELI5: What is a Tide?

As the Moon orbits Earth, its gravity pulls on our oceans, creating a bulge of water known as high tide. This high tide isn’t the only one occurring at that time — another high tide forms on the opposite side of the Earth due to the physical properties of water as it responds to the Moon’s pull.

From National Geographic. Illustration by Mary Crooks.  

High tide is a good thing for boats, giving ships more water to move through. At high tide, it is easier to navigate without hitting shallow areas that could damage your vessel, making it more practical for boating — and in many cases, more fun.

Low tide, on the other hand, is more likely to be harmful for ships than helpful. If a boat isn’t docked properly, the receding water can leave it stranded in the mud. If left unsecured, changing currents can carry the boat out to the unforgiving sea. At the same time, depending on the location, low tide is the best time for hunting for sea shells or accessing fishing holes that were inaccessible before. It depends on your needs and goals on what part of the tide you prefer.  

All of that said, what our analogies usually miss in their catchiness and simplicity is the intrinsically transient nature of the tide.  

Consistent as clockwork, the tides rise and they fall in a matter of hours. It may be more pleasant to swim in when the tide is low, but what if you’re not a strong swimmer and are unprepared for the incoming rising tide? The ships are lifted, but what happens to the boats when the tide flows out again and the ships’ captains are unprepared?  

Uh, so it sounds like the tide isn’t a great analogy for business, why are you even using the name Rising Tide?  

As someone who has always had a side gig and has helped start and run multiple small businesses, I firmly believe that Small to Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) are the future of our economy.  

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 99.9% of businesses, or 33.2 Million businesses in the States are small businesses, accounting for nearly half of their total GDP as a country, and nearly half of their employment. Worldwide, according to the World Bank, those numbers are similar, with 90% of businesses are small businesses, employing 50% of our workforce.  

The creativity, competition, and cooperation within community that small businesses exhibit beyond employment and GDP is worth celebrating. Small businesses working together create stronger products and services for both the public and private sectors: truly a demonstration of iron sharpening iron.  

Humanity will continue to diversify, solving problems and creating new things. And with it, technology will continue to be vital for growth, productivity, and efficiency.  

This diversity and evolution is what I consider the Tide. The complex social, cultural, economic situations that our communities will be inadvertently interacting with in their homes, schools, churches, government buildings, and offices.  

We (MSPs, technologists, consultants) are not the Tide. We're arguably more important. I believe MSPs are the future of SMBs and in that, we don’t own the Tide or the rights to It. We merely are custodians of the energy, ideas, and potential hidden within each wave.

What are we if we’re not the Tide?  

Imagine with me that you are standing on a beach on a perfect summer day.  

Maybe your feet are buried deep in the warm sand; there is a pleasant breeze carrying light scent of coconut and pineapple from people applying sunblock a few feet away. A clear blue sky and glorious yellow sun embrace everyone under their domain. Tiny crabs skitter back to the ocean in confusion, chasing every wave that brought them in. In the distance, you can see a pier where people set lawn chairs and coolers as they fish for the local fare. You hear kids playing, building and destroying sand castles behind you. Seagulls swoop and shout at people in line at the french fry stand, others are eating ice cream they knocked out of a small child’s hands. A local fisherman is exchanging pleasantries with a customer in the parking lot as he sells shrimp he caught this morning. The beach is abuzz with life.  

It’s almost like the tide may be what brings these people together, but it is not the most important thing on the beach. There is an entire ecosystem that was created around the tide and with the tide, that follows the tide, and that depends on the tide, at both its lowest and highest points.  

In the same way, entire ecosystems exist and are further enabled by the tide of technology, and as the Tide of technology shifts, It demands a higher bar of technical ability and tools to connect with the increasingly fast paced world around us.  

Of the businesses that have sprung up around the beach where this Tide resides—doctors' offices, accounting firms, car dealerships, grocery stores, print shops, restaurants, manufacturers, retail—some will be able to manage changing and upgrading on their own. Many others will rely on competent and experienced MSPs who can see the depths of the waters and navigate with wisdom and care.  

You’re not just a bait shop selling worms, hooks, and overpriced rods. You are seasoned navigators with maps, anecdotes, and hard-won advice on the best places to fish. In the same way, a competent MSP can step in, and beyond “managing services” or being a “value-added reseller,” they bring a wealth of experience to enhance those small businesses: advising, creating, maintaining, and protecting technical tools and skills as each SMB grows.  

The importance of the role of MSPs guiding SMBs through shifts in technology becomes clear when we examine the projected growth in IT managed services revenue: according to data from Jay McBain at Canalys, in 2025, the industry is expected to grow by 13%, reaching $595 billion globally (Canalys, 2025).  

The great thing about the ocean is the variety of occupations that exist at every season and Tide. You are an experienced ship captain; you know how to read the sky and the stars to predict the weather. You are a seasoned fisherman, who knows all of the best spots for the prized sea bass. Your purpose is not to be the Tide, but to help those around us to understand, harness, and profit from the Tide.  

Putting our resources into building our ecosystem

While SMBs need help from MSPs, here’s the catch: MSPs are also SMBs facing the same struggles of scalability, knowledge gaps, and industry-wide shifts that any small business does. MSPs, as SMBs themselves (according to McBain, the average MSP employs 8 people), need help from similar coaches, advisors, consultants, and implementors to navigate the constant influx of change and growth.  

It’s something my business partner, Mendy Green, and I talk about often. The services we provide—automations, onboardings, and business process consulting—are complicated enough that you will spend significant resources whether staffing your own team or hiring an external consultant. We have a backlog and are hiring consultants who meet our high standards as quickly as we can (if you’re looking and think you’d be a good fit, give us a shout).  

But how can we help more people with the finite amount of time we have, how can we better leverage our experience and skill for those who truly need our help but who cannot access us (or other consultants) due to time and cost?  

We could keep doing what we’re doing, throwing more people at the traditional consultant model of one-to-one, limited by scheduling and budget.

That only solves half of the problem. We’re grateful for the work, but it’s important to us to keep our services accessible to the people who need it most.  So we’re trying a few things to help fortify our ecosystem rather than just ourselves. Here are some ideas that our team and other peers in our circles are trying:

• Open-source Problem-Solving
  Our consultants regularly spend time on public forums and online spaces through Discord, Slack, and Reddit, answering questions and lending free advice to teams trying to solve problems in their businesses. We believe that the more we share, the stronger our industry becomes—not through closed-door discussions, but through open and accessible knowledge-sharing. You can find us on places like:
  • ‍MSPGeek ‍
  • the HaloPSA Community (Discord) ‍
  • Rewst (Discord) ‍
  • Hudu (Discord) ‍
  • /r/msp (Reddit) ‍
  • /r/halopsa (Reddit)

• Free Tutorials and Blogposts
  Whenever we solve an interesting problem, we record how to solve that problem and toss it up on YouTube. This way, other people with similar problems can benefit from the solutions we created. You can find our tutorials at https://www.youtube.com/@risingtidegroup/videos, but you should also check out our friends at Renada they have some truly elegant tutorials available for HaloPSA: https://www.youtube.com/@RenadaSolutions/videos. The Pivotal Crew team also has some great tutorials for the ConnectWise ecosystem in written form on their blog at https://pivotalcrew.com/blog/.  

• Group Consulting  
  To better accommodate general questions about complicated tools that can’t be answered in free forums or videos, we’ve built out Group Consulting. Formed to echo peer groups, these hour-long sessions allow for community input to see the types of questions other people are asking in their figurative boats and positions on the open seas. During each session, participants can ask questions and get them answered, live. Learn how to do the things you’ve been putting off and get a good understanding of what you need to better chart your course. This model lowers costs, fosters peer learning, and exposes businesses to real-world challenges that others in the industry are facing. We currently offer these for Rewst (every other Wednesday at 1pm ET) and HaloPSA (Thursdays at 10am ET).  

• Giving back to online and in-person Communities
  We believe that being human means giving back to our physical communities as much as possible. At Rising Tide, we encourage our consultants to specifically set aside a weekly block of hours for volunteering and community building. So often, money is the least valuable thing you can give, when you can give of your time, heart, and skill. Here are a few ways you can contribute to the world as the Tide rises: ‍
  • Attend and Volunteer at Conferences. Support technical volunteer-run Conferences like MSPGeekCon, CodeMash, and TEKnowledge Worldwide.‍
  • Volunteer at home. Your physical community needs your good brain and strong hands. Your community may have tech or non-tech nonprofits that could use your advisement or ideas. Don’t limit yourself. Some organizations need board members and event volunteers all the same. ‍
  • Participate in Open-Source Projects. Here’s a great list of projects that you can contribute to: Get Started Contributing to Open Source Projects | CodeTriage. Or perhaps you want to find a tool you directly love and use on this list here: awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted: A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own servers ‍
  • Mentor others. Perhaps this is in your company, at your church, or through a local Boys and Girls club. ‍
  • Vote. Be civically-minded about your community and technical developments to help keep technology open and available for all!

Join us.  

We’re not here to be the Tide. We don’t claim to own this industry or control the ever-changing currents that shape it. Instead, we—as MSPs, Consultants, and Advisors—are here to share the tools, wisdom, and experiences we’ve gained to help others chart their own course.

We don’t have all of the answers, but we are embracing a big experiment of open-source problem-solving, sharing knowledge freely through tutorials and blog posts, and creating community-based solutions like group consulting. Together, we can support each other as we navigate uncharted waters, fortify our fellow ships, and ensure that no one is left stranded as the tides shift again.

We believe that by pouring ourselves into community by sharing, collaborating, and creating slightly abnormal approaches to “the norm,” we’re not just surviving the Tide; we’re harnessing its energy to move forward.

We hope you’ll join us in this effort, whether by joining an online community, incorporating similar practices at your business, or participating in ours. Ride the tides with us, and let’s see how far we can travel, together.