If a just-in-time supplier is late with a windshield, the entire plant shuts down, and John Penrod says the supplier can be fined $50,000 every 15 minutes. How his managed service provider (MSP) keeps customers like that running.
Show Notes
If a just-in-time supplier is late with a windshield, the entire car plant shuts down, and John Penrod says that supplier can be fined $50,000 every 15 minutes. Customers like that have to stay up. At Transcend Networks, his managed service provider (MSP), that means redundancy and monitoring built so something can fail while operations keep running, plus recovery plans that start from what the business needs. Then the same lessons go to their smaller clients.
John founded Transcend Networks, an Atlanta MSP, in 2003. He ran it solo for a number of years and brought on a partner in 2014, and today they own it 50-50: John's background is technology and information security, his partner's is operations and sales. John has also served as chief information security officer (CISO) at the Weather Channel. Automotive manufacturing is one of the firm's best core businesses. Word of mouth brought in broadcast video and state government work, and the best fit right now is companies with 25 to 75 users.
What we cover:
- How a late windshield can shut down an entire car plant, and the fine he says the supplier faces
- Redundancy and monitoring, so something can fail while operations keep running
- Why a disaster recovery plan starts with business needs, and what an outage would mean for a client with one server
- A Kaseya and Datto shop that adds open-source tools such as Zabbix where they are needed
- Cold calling, a full-time vice president of sales, and speaking at the Georgia Automotive Manufacturers Association
- Using artificial intelligence (AI) for engineering answers that once took days with a vendor, while keeping confidential data out of it
- Buyers who call about acquiring the firm, and why he treats every one of those calls as training
- Phishing emails that include an entire conversation thread, so the request looks already approved
- The good hurricane: a speaking engagement from his Weather Channel days, and why more business from fraud is still a shame
- Scam Microsoft Teams calls, money wired abroad that you will never see again, and the time Hong Kong police laughed at him
- Cyber insurance checklists that can be almost impossible to satisfy, and why you still have to have it
- Open source where necessary, rather than where possible
- Getting a busy client's time for the risks, from admin rights to bad batteries
- Co-managed information technology (IT): a client's own IT person takes tier one and Transcend covers tier three and higher
- Letting clients hear they are down from their provider before the front desk tells them
- Staff on site full-time at state agencies in Georgia and North Carolina, working at the client's pleasure
- After a larger equity-backed MSP bought the firm he worked at, the sales meeting where losing five customers and gaining 10 counted as a net win
- Lightning round: deep web monitoring as a scare tactic, and training with simulated phishing as the most underrated thing
- Cloud or on-premises in five years: VMware licensing, Azure costs and a dishwasher that has to be online for rinse mode
- The MSPs that survive the next five years, and starting out on open-source tools
John Penrod: https://www.linkedin.com/in/penrodcc
Transcend Networks: https://www.tnius.com
What is Play It Smart?
Play It Smart is the show where Alexej Pikovsky sits down with MSP operators and business owners and takes apart how they actually do it: winning clients, pricing, staying lean, using AI, and building toward an exit worth having. Season 2 is dedicated to MSP operators. Past guests include Rand Fishkin of Moz and SparkToro and the founders of Chili Piper, Flowchat and 3DLOOK.