Thoughts

Have you implemented unique colors for your Ticket Statuses in HaloPSA?  

Coloring these Statuses adds a great Quality of Life to your Agents working tickets. Often, it is treated as a nice-to-have or “let’s just make it look pretty,” which are fine if it works for you. However, we invite you to imagine instead with us: what if you could leverage symbolic colors that guide an Agent through your defined ticket process. What if you could implement that in a reasonable way?

So, to help lessen that decision fatigue for you since we know you’re busy customizing every other setting in HaloPSA as well, here is the framework that Rising Tide uses to approach customizing these settings to help you quickly and sensibly label your Ticket Statuses. In a future article, we’ll tackle Ticket Action color codes; however, the concepts will generally remain the same.  

Laying out the Ticket Status Colors Framework

Before we jump into coloring statuses, let’s start by defining a ticket’s lifecycle according to how your Agents need to allocate their attention to those tickets, whether that is dictated by standard professionalism or ensuring SLAs are kept. For the sake of this conversation, we are going to address these ticket attention phases with the segments: Normal Attention, Elevated Attention, or Inert Attention.

Normal Attention

Ideally, your Agents receive a ticket and all things are “Go,” they have everything they need to start working, and then Close the ticket when they've successfully completed the task and can rest on their laurels (or move on to the next ticket!).

We recommend all Normal Attention tickets to be assigned “cool colors” like greens, blues, and purples. (And not cool because we think they’re rad, cool as opposed to warm colors, more information here on color theory) Statuses like New and In Progress generally belong here. We have the ticket, everything is going as planned. What a perfect, serene world. Peaceful, isn’t it?  

Unfortunately, that’s not the reality in most of our businesses! What happens when tickets require extra attention or action to ensure their timely completion?

Elevated Attention

‍Here in Elevated Attention is where we see statuses like Escalated, Pending Approval, or Reopened: tickets that we need to be actively thinking about and revisiting, especially ones that are keeping our SLA clock running. To inspire action and increase visibility, we’re using warm, fiery colors like Orange, Red, and Yellow.

What if there is a ticket where we cannot take immediate action, or it doesn’t warrant it? That’s our last category: Inert Attention.  

Inert Attention

‍There will be times when our tickets are active but there is literally nothing we can do but wait. The SLA clock isn’t running, so we don’t need to worry about taking action on these just yet: statuses like Waiting on Client or Waiting on Vendor. We recommend using greys to signify these statuses’ inactive character.  

In general, we recommend you set up HaloPSA to do most of the status setting and remembering to move tasks in and out of statuses, especially Inert-type statuses. Specifically, when setting up these Inert Attention statuses in HaloPSA, be sure to build those Ticket Statuses, Ticket Type Settings, and your related Workflows so when a ticket enters or exits an Inert status, it automatically puts the ticket on or removes it from SLA hold. You can see examples of these settings in the screen captures below.

Some examples of this recommendation in action could be:

• Setting a Waiting on Client ticket to Attention Required when a customer replies to an email
• Setting a Waiting on Vendor ticket to Attention Required when a Supplier updates
• Setting a ticket to Scheduled upon creating an Appointment (Ticket Type Settings: Status after user appointment booking (resource booking), or Status after Agent creates appointment)
• Automatically setting Waiting on Client tickets to Closed after a certain number of hours with no reply according to SLA rules you set.

Ticket Status Colors Framework in Action

With all of these ideas in mind, we suggest as you approach customizing each ticket status, you ask:  

What type of Attention do I expect of my team at this status: Normal, Elevated, or Inert?

When you have that answer, choose a color from the suggested family. Remember that color for other statuses you may have for other Ticket Types so it stays consistent regardless of what Area your Agent is operating from!

Here are some examples for what we specifically recommend to Rising Tide Customers. You will likely not need all of them, depending on your MSP’s needs:  

Normal Attention

• Brand New/Assigned (Waiting on You): Green — Ticket is newly created and waiting for initial action. Green indicates readiness to start and clear action needed.

• Claimed/Work in Progress: Blue — Ticket is actively being addressed towards resolution. Blue symbolizes confidence in ongoing work and progress.  
  • We’d be remiss if we didn’t specifically call out that at Rising Tide we recommend that your Agents should not be "Claiming" tickets until they're ready to work on them.  

• Closed: Black — The ticket has been fully resolved and all necessary actions are completed. Black signifies completion and closure of the ticket.

‍Elevated Attention

• Pending Approval: Yellow — Awaiting authorization or approval to proceed. Yellow is high-visibility and unique to call attention to follow up that may be necessary.  

• Escalated: Orange — Moved to a higher level of support due to complexity or urgency. Orange highlights urgency and attention required.

• Customer Updated/Vendor Updated/Approver Updated: Orange— Orange is used to indicate recent release from a paused status like Waiting on Customer or Waiting on Vendor and subsequent re-instating of the current SLA timer, if applicable.  

• Attention Required: Orange — Elevated attention needed following removal from an SLA hold.  

• Reopened: Red — Previously closed/resolved ticket is active again due to additional issues or dissatisfaction. Red indicates a critical reactivation that needs immediate reassessment.

Inert Attention

• Waiting on Client: Grey — Progress on the ticket is paused because it requires input or action from the client. Grey suggests inactivity from the MSP’s side, waiting on external action.  

• Waiting on Vendor/Waiting on Parts: Grey — Progress on the ticket is halted while waiting for action or information from an external vendor. Similar to waiting on client but specific to external vendors.

• Scheduled: Purple — Scheduled could also technically be included in the Normal category, hence the cool purple. Denotes a paused status where work is planned, but no active work is required.  

• Resolved: Teal — Similar to Scheduled, Resolved straddles the Normal category as well. The issue within the ticket has been addressed, awaiting final closure or verification from the requester. Teal is a calm yet upbeat color indicating resolution but awaiting final closure.

As with most rules, there are going to be times when items cross between phases, or you may operate differently and not define a ticket status the same way we did here.

Maybe you have some color-blind technicians on staff and decide to use completely different colors completely or none at all. (If you do want to create a color-blind friendly palette, here’s a great resource.)  

Maybe you want to choose different values (light or dark) within a certain family than what Halo provides.

Good! Break our rules. They're just here to help you decide what you do or don't actually want.

Our main recommendation is that you use your best judgement on what is right for your team and just be consistent which sometimes means keeping it simple. And let us know what you ended up doing, you may help someone else. Happy customizing!

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.

In any business where you’re not billing Time and Materials, the amount of time you spend on a project directly correlates to how profitable you are. In an MSP, this applies even more. MSP Businesses were designed years ahead of their time, bringing into practice concepts such as recurring revenue, outsourcing, efficient resources, and more; before people even realized the value. It’s the reason that today the MSP Businesses are blowing up with everyone you meet starting their own. Unfortunately, there’s a complex side to the framework of an MSP that is very often overlooked, especially by those just starting out.

Let’s discuss how the MSP business model is built. MSPs pitch to their prospective clients that they can provide the same level (or often times better) IT Services to their organization than they themselves can find if they go with someone internally. They ask for less money, and offer a bigger team with greater experience. These same MSPs then have to turn around and hire the same people that would have been hired directly, and not just one, but two or three or more depending on the size of the MSP.

MSPs have to pay the same salary with a smaller budget. How can these numbers possibly work?

This is where efficient resources come in; an MSP needs to stack multiple clients reusing the same resources for each client so that together all the clients combined pay enough money for the MSP to pay the technicians salary and make a profit. The income also needs to cover all base expenses of the MSP which includes infrastructure such as an RMM, PSA, Email, Phones, over-night team for emergencies and so on.

With an internal IT resource, that resource would be solely focused on the business they were working for and getting paid a full salary of say $52k/year, now the same resource at an MSP is getting paid $52k/year and needs to  stay on top of not one company IT needs, but actually 3 or 4 (or more depending on the contract size of each). This kind of expectation is unreasonable and when maintained results in high-stress work environments and eventual burn out for the technician. The saying “trial by fire” is very applicable to the technicians who work at an MSP. They are under constant barrage of tickets and stress, jumping from company to company each ticket wildly different from the next. This makes them unusually skilled and also rapidly exposes them to a wide range of experience they may not have received working for just one company. A good MSP technician of the lowest tier can easily go head to head in ability (if not knowledge) to a mid-tier internal IT resource.

Now keep in mind that when MSPs started we were a new phenomenon. There was no standard to follow, no existing business to copy, except for the existing internal IT department within a Company. We didn’t know what kind of pay structure was fair to offer a Tier 1 or Tier 2 technician because there was no “average pay” metric. The only thing we did know is that we are building a business with a stress on smaller dollar amounts per client, and more total clients. This means what we paid our technicians had to be less too, or that we keep the MSP as lean as possible with only the amount of technicians truly needed. Following the 80/20 rule we determined that 80% of the time with our clients running smoothly we would be fine and only 20% of the time when some kind “perfect storm” would occur we would need to motivate our technicians to put in more effort (or what was generally called “figure something out”).

What’s being described is not a sustainable long term plan. Simon Sinek likes to stress that business is an Infinite Game and that those who are not playing by those rules are doomed to failure eventually. The only way to stay in the game is by having resources, and the will to keep playing. We’ve already established that MSPs do not have the same pockets as a normal business, not without drastically imposing upon “will”, our employees, making them work in stressful environments and constantly being battered by the next broken issue.

The fix for this is easy, and its an iteration of what we already started. Efficient use of resources. Efficiency can help us spend less time per ticket, less time per client, and improve our technicians stress in the environment. There are two side to the efficient use of resources, one of which we already started (Sharing resources among companies) but the other is often overlooked “Work load management”. If we can make our work load efficient we can easily improve upon all the issues we just brought up. Here are some ideas that can be used to help facilitate the efficient workload.

Efficient resources is way more than just sharing resources. Making your workload efficient is just as important. Remember how profitable you are directly correlates to how efficient you can be

• Proactively addressing age of client equipment
• Proactively addressing ticket trends over time to help improve underlying issues
• End User technology training for better understanding of the tools they use
• Breaking Client’s business vertical into separate teams to allow for familiarity of Line of Business applications and setup
• Building an MSP supported technical standard as your “stack” to ensure familiarity with technical infrastructure
• Establishing formalized business processes for your MSP Teams so they know where to find information and how to proceed
• Building an Automation First environment allowing you to offload work from your team to your technology decreasing the amount of time spent on tickets.

Remember, in the MSP business time isn’t a loss of potential profit, its actual profit lost as your contracted rate is the same every month. Automation and bulk actions are extremely important as the less time you spend doing something the more your Per Hour amount goes up.

As a business owner, it’s important to have a good understanding of your business goals, and its operations. There are several key questions that every business owner should be able to answer in order to ensure the success and growth of their company.

1. What is your why? If you know me personally, by now you know I am a follower of Simon Sinek. Simon’s consistent chasing the why is something I’ve come to admire and strive for. The reason you get out of bed every day, the reason you go to work, if you know it, it’ll sustain you and become the building block for your Company Culture and Core Values.
2. Who are your customers? It’s important to have a clear understanding of who your target customers are and what their needs and preferences are. This will help you tailor your products and services to meet their specific requirements and create a more personalized customer experience. More importantly, staying in touch with them will help you adjust to their changing needs, so you stay relevant.
3. What is your revenue model? How do you generate revenue and make a profit? This could be through the sale of products or services, subscriptions, advertising, or a combination of these methods. Understanding your revenue model will help you identify growth opportunities and make strategic business decisions.
4. What are your expenses? It’s crucial to have a good understanding of your business’s expenses, including fixed costs like rent and salaries, as well as variable costs like materials and marketing expenses. This will help you manage your cash flow and make sure your business is profitable.

As a business owner, it’s essential to have a strong and focused culture and a set of core values that guide your company’s actions and decisions.

Business culture refers to the values, beliefs, and behaviors that make up a company’s identity. It’s the “personality” of the organization and the way it operates. A strong culture is one that aligns with the company’s goals and mission, and that supports the growth and success of the business.

These values should reflect your company’s mission and goals and should be integrated into every aspect of your business operations. Once your values are established, it’s important to communicate them to your team in to help make sure they are integrated into the company’s operations and decision-making processes. While all the other points are critical for owning and operating a business, they are also all areas that can be delegated (and usually are for larger businesses). The first point, regarding company culture is something that can only come from the top.

There are several reasons why this can have a major impact on the success and growth of your business.

First, a strong and focused culture can help attract and retain top talent. Employees who share your company’s values and beliefs are more likely to be motivated and engaged in their work and are more likely to stay with the company long-term. This can improve morale and productivity and can help drive the success of your business. This can include offering opportunities for professional development and growth, providing a healthy and supportive work environment, and recognizing and rewarding outstanding performance.

Second, a consistent and focused culture can improve customer satisfaction. Customers want to do business with companies that share their values and beliefs. Simon Sinek uses the one wearing the Red Hat as an example. People gravitate to those they connect with and by having a clearly defined culture you can articulate it allows others to see what you stand for and more easily connect with you, which can help increase loyalty and repeat business, as well as establish a greater level of trust.

Third, a focused culture and set of core values can provide guidance and direction for your employees. By having a clear set of values that everyone understands and adheres to, you can create a cohesive and consistent brand and customer experience. This can help improve collaboration and communication within your team and can make it easier to make strategic business decisions.

Finally, having that strong culture and core values established gives you guiding principles when it comes time to pick which companies you start a vendor/client relationship with, being able to articulate what you stand for allows you to recognize easily those that align with you or those that do not. You can quickly identify business practices and test them against your core value. “Is this company being honest”, “Do they care about customer experience” are questions you can easily answer based on the start of the relationship and your interaction throughout.

While having a unique selling proposition (USP) is often considered an essential part of a successful business, there is some debate over whether it is still relevant in today’s competitive market. With so many businesses offering similar products and services, it can be difficult to differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd.

Additionally, many prospects may not have the time or inclination to thoroughly research and compare different vendors before making a purchasing decision. They may rely on marketing messages and other external factors to make their decision, rather than taking the time to evaluate the validity of a company’s USP.

In some cases, a company’s USP may be seen as simply a marketing tactic, rather than a genuine differentiator. This can lead prospects to view all USPs as equally valid, or to disregard them altogether.

Overall, while having a unique selling proposition is still important, it may not be as effective as it once was as a marketing strategy in a crowded and competitive market. It’s important for businesses to carefully consider their USP and whether it is a genuine differentiator, or if it is simply a generic marketing message, and in reality, aligning this with your Culture will help give you a true differentiator.

“Should my business be going to Cloud?”

This is one of the most popular questions that comes up in my conversations with clients, and like every other question I get, I like to answer it with “It depends”.

Before we can address this, we need to address the ongoing struggle between IT Professionals and Marketing Professionals. This was cleverly outlined in the classic Project Management meme

We won’t get too far into the specifics of this as Marketing can be a post all by itself, but suffice to say, the…let’s call it exuberance to sell something new, tends to make for overly aggressive messaging targeting the Stakeholders which does not generate tingly-friendly feelings on the people who actually have to implement, support, or answer questions about the technical specifics. This is true no matter if the “Expert” person is at your company or the company the marketing person is sitting at. If you need a further demonstration of what this looks like you can watch the skit on YouTube called “The Expert” which should give you an idea of what frame of mind to approach this question with

Keeping this in mind we need to immediately increase our level of skepticism when we hear about Cloud Computing (or really any new technology).

Let’s switch tracks for a moment. One of the things I always talk about is how there’s at least two sides to everything. Literally you can take a specific item, scenario, concept, etc. examine it and you’ll see two or more sides that reflect or are directly opposite to each other. In business finances for example we have Operating costs and Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). Traditionally Operating costs were made up of things like Rent for the office, Utilities, supplies and things like that. Supplies would include the cost of equipment (such as computers) Utilities would include cost of the internet and so on. COGS would be made up of how much money the business would need to spend, in order to provide the service that they offer. This is essentially two sides to the same thing (money being spent), but you track them separately because they help you break down the cost of running the business vs the cost of providing services.

In other words, Operating Expenses can be broken down to the point where you would assign a Per Dollar amount for each Employee that you have, and COGS would be broken down and assigned a Per Dollar amount for each Customer

Now let’s get back to the point of this. Cloud, like everything else, has 2 or more (way more actually) sides. There’s Infrastructure as a Service offerings, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service, and so on and so forth and all of these items get mixed up and placed into the “Cloud” category. If you dig into what Cloud actually is, you’ll find that it’s just…rented computers. Really. If you’re skeptical, you can read more on this here from one of the bigger software platforms on their reasons why they’re leaving the cloud.

The questions we’d want to answer so that we can determine if you should be moving to the cloud are as follows.

Would you be moving your Operating Expenses to the cloud or your COGS. Specifically, are you providing an online service to your clients that requires you to rapidly scale up if you were to grow, or that allows you to measure out the cost of running in the cloud against the number of users you’re servicing?

Running in almost any cloud has pricing that is broken down to the minute, generally speaking. This is one of the big things marketing likes to tout “Scale up or down as needed, so it’s very cost effective”. Cost effective compared to running them 24/7 sure, but not cost effective compared to buying hardware. Marketing is selling you on the idea that if you needed to turn down services, you can do rapidly and save money with it off, but if you never need to turn down services, and your scaling doesn’t happen rapidly, then you’re actually spending way more over the same period of time of hardware life. Up to 4 or 5 times the amount potentially.

Do you have a need either from a compliance standard or your own security policy for enhanced security, physical auditing, a requirement to be highly available or a guaranteed uptime of 4 or more 9s (99.99%)?

Here is where it starts making sense to consider, although the question of finding a datacenter that will rent you hardware or allow you to place hardware vs running in something like Google Cloud, Azure, or AWS is still debatable. In the end the level of redundancies that exist in the cloud or datacenter are harder to build (read, more costly) than using an infrastructure that is already built and essentially being shared. This isn’t a new phenomenon, if you’ve read my article on the MSP Business Fallacy, or even just paid attention in the world the idea of pooling resources to save on costs is a well-established and very successful pattern. This is something that can range on a spectrum from sharing power costs, to sharing full on hardware and running your services on segregated containerized workloads.

Are you concerned about control of your data. Specifically, does it matter to you if your data is physically on equipment that you solely own and control, or is your business okay with the data being placed onto equipment owned and controlled by a trusted Third Party

Data sovereignty is an important part of the equation, even if you do trust it to a third party, the question of which region and where it is physically located is still an issue. In the end the agreements you sign with vendors and clients state that the data you hold for them is your responsibility to protect and keep safe and you do not have the right to assign that responsibility to anyone else. These are all concerns that should be evaluated and addressed in your assessment of moving to cloud.

In the end there’s no real good right answer, as most of these questions are ones you’ll need to decide for your business. I’ve outlined a table below to help with the decision matrix, but it is still only just a suggestion.

Productivity. It's one of my most beloved and yet most hated concepts. At its core, productivity is just output over time: a metric that first rose to prominence during the Industrial Revolution as we looked for a way to measure how efficiently machines (and then people) produced goods.

But, dear reader, I propose to you that we aren't machines whose only value in what we produce, and we should be intentional about evading that trap.

It's tempting to equate productivity with worth. In a tech-driven world where the average worker is already exponentially more productive than generations before, chasing productivity for its own sake can leave us burnt out and disoriented.

Chasing productivity alone can reduce our identities to more emails, more code, more content. An endless and meaningless attempt to bend the boundaries of finite resources.

Instead, I want to reframe the conversation around efficiency: meaningful output over time. Efficiency asks better questions which will lead us to better answers. No longer are we asking, "How much did you do today?" but rather, "Was it worth doing?" It is very important to me that we can reclaim this quality as something every worker can own and take pride in, and that it isn't merely a metric for middle management to squeeze as much out of you as they possibly can.

Triple D: A Framework for Meaningful Work

It's called Triple D not just because I'm a Guy Fieri fan (Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives is peak American reality TV in my humble opinion), but because I believe every great day at work should have that same heart: a little execution, a little learning, and a little dreaming about what’s next.

Triple D in light of our conversation on meaningful, modern productivity and efficiency in the workplace is: Do, Discover, Dream.

• Do: The core of your work. The tasks you're responsible for completing.
• Discover: Feedback loops. Communicating with others. Learning from customers, coworkers, or your own process. Research, reading, and further education.
• Dream: Rest, imagine, and plan. How could you improve your work, systems, or strategy?

These three feed into each other, creating a loop of sustainable, intentional work. It honors both execution and imagination.

The Tools of Efficiency

SInce we've defined efficiency as something every worker is in command of in their own lives, it's worth noting that attaining better efficiency isn't about having expensive software or corporate resources. It's about using what you already have as well as finding new tools. Many aspects of productivity can be inexpensive, or free. With that said, I break tools into three categories:

1. Rhythm & Flow

In order to accomplish all of the Doing, Discovering, and Dreaming you are capable of, it's vital that you establish a Flow to create structure, sense, and accountability.

Your body and brain are your most important tools. Building a rhythm that supports rest, clarity, and momentum matters more than any productivity app. Ways that you can establish Flow: 

• Health, including fitness, sleep, and nutrition habits
• Therapist check-ins
• An agenda planner or a analog tool that supports weekly and monthly goal-setting, habit tracking, and reflection. I'm personally a big fan of Ink + Volt, and a huge thanks to my buddies Josh Mallard and Blake Imeson at LimeCuda for gifting me that first planner years ago!

2. Products: Hardware & Software

Start with what you already have. You might be surprised by what your existing tools can do.

• Consider using shortcuts and macros within programs, or even programming your keyboard or mouse.
  • Ditto Clipboard Manager + a programmable mouse shortcut: game-changer for copy/paste workflows
• ActivityWatch, RescueTime, or Qbserve: passive time tracking for digital self-awareness
• Logseq, Obsidian, or Notion: personal knowledge management that links your thoughts, tasks, and notes
• Calendly or other booking links through Microsoft or Hubspot to reduce scheduling fatigue
• Microsoft Scheduling or Doodle polls for easier group coordination

And if your organization already uses Microsoft or Google, explore Copilot or ‎Gemini before paying for new AI tools.

3. Space

Space is more than just free time. It’s about creating breathing room to connect the dots.

• Generative AI - Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and CoPpilot aren't just for doing tasks. They help you think and make YOUR VOICE STRONGER instead of being your voice. Use them to:
  • Clarify jumbled thoughts
  • Summarize or rewrite rough ideas
  • Generate alternatives or brainstorm solutions
• Transcription tools built-in options with Microsoft Teams, Zoom. Or other tools like Otter.ai or Firefly reduce cognative load during conversations
  • Combine Transcripts with GenAI and you're going to be way ahead by having GenAI create follow up summaries, emails, and work plans.
• Email agents like SaneBox, Superhuman, or Inbox Zero to help you manage unruly inboxes

Most importantly, focus on how you can build in downtime to let your mind wander. That’s where big ideas and problem-solving happen.

From Output to Impact

At the end of the day, productivity was a metric that was created for machines, and you're not a machine. You’re a human in a finite, soft body, in a world that is often very hard. Your value is not your output.

Efficiency, in contrast, helps you:

• Respect your limits
• Align your actions with your values
• Deliver meaningful work consistently

When we focus on efficiency, we create room for autonomy, insight, and innovation. That’s what helps teams thrive and businesses grow.

So: Do. Discover. Dream. And build a system that works for your actual life—not just your to-do list.

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Author's Note: I also recorded a video on this with a few anecdotes and visuals. You can view it here: Rethinking Productivity: Tools and Mindsets That Actually Work.

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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When is the last time you updated your Resume/CV?  

There was a little bit of chatter in the MSPGeek Discord last month about what actually needs to go on a resume.  (MSPGeek Website | MSPGeek Discord)

It got me curious: how many of my friends in the MSP space have an up-to-date resume, and one that they’re proud of?  

Uh-oh, have you not dusted yours off in a few years?

Let’s talk about why you might want to change that even if you’re happy where you are and some practical advice for updating yours into something you’re proud to showcase.  

What is a Resume and how is it different from a CV?  

Let’s start with the basics.  

A resume is a generally a concise document highlighting your professional experience, skills, and accomplishments. When I’m coaching others, I use the analogy that a good resume is just a firm handshake. It's what gets your foot in the door for hopefully further conversations. You’ll want your resume to be tailored to your current interests and objectives, whittled down to reflect your story and expertise.  

On the other hand, a CV, or curriculum vitae, comes from Latin words curriculum, which came from the original word currere which translates to run, as in a race; and vitae, meaning life. Curriculum has since been adapted as an educational term for what you’d be learning in a class or program, but it originally just meant “what race are you running?”  

With that in mind, a CV literally translates to course of life, and as such it’s a beefier document than a resume, reflecting a detailed account of one’s professional journey, path, and achievements, showcasing a full history of your education, research, and work. I coach my people to keep both on hand, considering the CV as the “source of truth” for everything you’ve ever done with complete timelines and full descriptions, and creating multiple child resumes depending on your specific job application or use case.  

In general, in the MSP (Managed Service Provider) space and in the employment arena, these words are often used interchangeably but I encourage you to default to providing a simpler resume, and as such we’ll be focusing on that term in this article. However, there are places and times that it makes sense to provide a full CV and we’ll address that as we go.  

The Value of Keeping a Resume on Hand

Having an up-to-date resume is a good practice to keep even if you’re not actively looking for jobs.  Some companies that bid for work include team member resumes and CVs as evidence of that company’s competence and fit to win a particular Request for Proposal (RFP).  

It’s also helpful because you never know when the random person you meet at a conference, church, or bar, likes the cut of your jib and wants your resume to see if you’re a good fit for their company!

If you’re in Sales or Marketing, knowing what your technical teams’ Resumes and CVs look like can be a wealth of data for building proposals or providing accomplishments to prospective clients. It’s worth seeing if your team has up-to-date resumes so you know the high points of their skills and accomplishments and can brag about them accordingly.  

So enough about the why of a good Resume. Let’s talk about the how.  

Building a "Good” Resume

As someone who has applied for many jobs, read a good number of applications for my own businesses, and coached others in cleaning up their own, let’s talk about what makes a resume or CV successful to me and how I applied those ideals in my own resume. As you’ve surely noticed, the word good is in quotation marks – every bit of advice in here is built on years of learning and experience, but is by no means dictatorial or the final word on the resume that will get you the job of your dreams.  

My goal is to give you inspiration on revamping and practical advice further editing your own! If you follow these ideas, hopefully, you'll take your resume from "meh" to "good" and as you build your idea of what good looks like, you can make it "great."

Here is my current resume, for reference:  

What are your first thoughts? It’s ok if you hate it, it won’t hurt my feelings. The fact that you’re thinking about what could be a resume is the exciting part for me. We’ll use my resume to tear apart some of these rules so you have practical ideas for what to do, or not!

Rules I kept in mind:  

1. You’re the Hero.  

2. Lead with action.

3. Context, context, context.  

4. Show your Work

You’re the Hero.  

For the uninitiated, Doctor Who is a BBC Family Show about a millennia-old time-traveling alien who consistently finds himself saving the human race while meeting historic people and events from the past, present, and future.  In the 2024 Christmas special, Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor finds himself trapped in a crappy hotel room by himself, for a year. “The long way ‘round” rings in the viewers’ ears as we are then escorted through the next year of the Doctor, watching his character development as he performs menial labor and often comical tasks. It’s heartwarming and tearjerking, and....

Don’t do that.  

Yeah, you heard me. Your resume is not the place for your growth or development. It’s not the place to give the ins and outs of your day-to-day. Your resume needs to be the high points. This is just the book cover, the summary, the short review enticing someone to pick you up and actually flip through the pages.  

Ways that you can do that include:  

• Use a “Summary” and/or “Objective”.
  What is your overall story? Are you a phenomenal Tier 2 Technician looking for her next role leading a team as a Tier 3? Are you hoping to transition to leadership with your people skills? Are you wanting to contribute to a team with your depth of knowledge of security infrastructures? What should the reader of your Resume see first, and how should they read your story?  

• Keep to the point.
  A rule of thumb often used is 10 years of work experience to one page of resume. IF you have more experience that requires more words, try to shorten it first. Or, include an appendix fully describing a project or situation.  

• Maybe a picture.
  Honestly, I hate having a photo on a resume, but I was applying for a job outside of my local area and industry I wanted something that showed my character. I left it on the styling because I’m lazy. Be careful with photos, they can seem unprofessional.  

We want to know that you can speak Judoon, have commandeered a TARDIS, and are adept with both psychic paper and a Sonic Screwdriver. We do not need to know that you carjacked said TARDIS, brought someone a cheese toastie and pumpkin latte, or snogged Queen Elizabeth.  If the devil is in the details, well, leave the details and the devil out of your resume, dude.

This example is a little silly, but the point remains that YOU are the hero and YOU write your own story. Make sure the readers of your resume know what that is. And regardless of what story you write, your resume should always lead with Action.  

Lead with Action

What have you done that you have control over? Your resume should show that you’re an asset to the teams that you’re on and that the work you’ve done has shown your strength.  

Instead of framing things as being a part of a project or that something was imposed on you, stretch yourself to consider the decisions you made and how they were impactful.  

Check your resume in a grammar checker for  “passive voice” and eliminate it from your resume as much as possible. Passive voice makes it seem like you are just that: a passive bystander to things that you created. This isn’t the place for modesty, it’s a place for groundedness and intentionality! Don’t be scared to show them what you’ve got! Here are some good rules of thumb for your resume:  

1. Start with action verbs: Use strong verbs such as developed, managed, increased, led, implemented, and optimized.

2. Ask 'who did what?': When reviewing your bullet points, ask yourself who is performing the action, and make that the subject of the sentence.

3. Quantify results: Adding metrics helps make the statement more assertive and shows the impact of your actions.

Here are some practical examples for how you can update passive voice with active voice.  

• Ticket System Implementation
  • ‍Passive: “A new ticketing system was implemented to streamline support requests.” ‍
  • Active: “Implemented a new ticketing system that streamlined support requests, reducing response times by 20%.”

• Customer Care ‍
  • Passive: “Client issues were resolved in a timely manner.”
  • ‍Active: “Resolved client issues within 24 hours, improving customer satisfaction ratings by 15%.”

• Report Preparation ‍
  • Passive: “Quarterly reports were prepared and presented by me for leadership review.” ‍
  • Active: “Prepared and presented quarterly reports to leadership, providing data-driven insights that influenced key decisions.”

• Training Employees ‍
  • Passive: “Training programs were created for new hires.” ‍
  • Active: “Created and led training programs for new hires, resulting in a 30% reduction in onboarding time.”

• Security Updates ‍
  • Passive: “System upgrades were performed to improve security.” ‍
  • Active: “Performed system upgrades to improve security, reducing vulnerability incidents by 40% compared to previous year.”

Of note, it is highly possible that you don’t feel like you have the numbers or the confidence to do this, today.  There is a certain amount of intentionality and care that is required to start gathering these types of Key Performance Metrics or goals. It’s possible that your management is tracking some of these things already and you can talk to your manager about their goals for your department and roll those into your own successes.  

Context, Context, Context

Know your audience and keep it relevant in all the ways possible, I’d specifically encourage you to consider context of content and context of delivery.  

Content

We allude to this in the section on being the Hero, but keep multiple versions of your resume on hand depending on the role and company you are applying for! Review the business’s website and job listing for key words, phrases, or values to show you are a good fit. Remove work experience that isn’t applicable to the role. Don’t keep things in if they dilute what you are actually seeking to present yourself as. Customize your bullet points: Swap in key accomplishments that fit the job description. If the role focuses on leadership, highlight examples of mentoring or leading a team. If it’s technical, detail relevant certifications, tools, and projects.

Formatting

Use consistent headers, bullet points, and spacing to make your resume easy to scan. Avoid excessive detail that clutters the page. Stick to clean, professional fonts and clear section breaks.  

Keep it simple, but don’t be afraid of a little personality: A pop of color, a different font, or slightly unique formatting can be memorable—but don’t overdo it. Use section dividers, subtle lines, or an (one!) accent color to guide the eye. Include icons for contact info if appropriate, but ensure they don’t distract (choose SIMPLE icons with only one color and make sure all icons are from the same family pack).  

Keep font choices professional yet modern, such as using sans-serif fonts like Calibri or Lato. In general, I recommend not using more than one typeface, and limit the times you change it. Regular, bold, italic should get you far, and try to keep font sizes to three variations: title (36pt), header (18pt), body (12pt). Keep things consistent like you would be if you were marking up a webpage or application. And please, whatever you do, don’t express yourself through clever or cartoony fonts, this is for business, not your personal art gallery.

Delivery

How are you submitting your application? In person, by email, through a digital system?  

Will the person be reading this on a mobile device or printing it out?  

If in person, don’t be afraid to print off a color copy on nice, weighted cardstock for an in-person interview, and bring copies for other people who may be in the room as well, for a peer interview.  

For digital submissions Check the format based on delivery method: Ensure your resume reads well in multiple formats—digital (PDFs), ATS-scannable text, and print. Run tests to see how it looks in each form.  Do screenreaders or convert to plain text to see (or hear) what a computer-read version of your document turns out to say. Does it make sense? If not, rework it.  

Show your Work

As mentioned multiple times in this article, your resume is a tool for opening doors, so don’t let it be a dead end for the reader. Where do you keep your portfolio or where should they go to find more information about you if this resume piqued their interest? Don’t keep them guessing, give them access! Some things you may want to include on a modern resume:  

• Links  
  • Github
  • LinkedIn Profile  
  • Blog or Portfolio

• Personal Projects or Achievements section
  • Speaking engagements
  • Community Volunteerism
  • Open Source Projects you contribute to

• References or Testimonials
  • While your references should be separate from your resume, don’t be afraid to list quotes from people about your work or link to reviews

Now, it’s your turn!  

What do you think? If you look at your resume, does it follow my suggestions of making yourself the Hero. leading with action, considering appropriate context, and showing your Work?  Where did I deviate from the rules, do you think it works for me, or not?  

On the flip side, what rules do you think I am missing?

I hope I’ve inspired you to update your resume and/or CV this month and to encourage your friends and colleagues to do the same! If you need help cleaning up your resume, you can find me on any of the social channels listed on my resume, or through Rising Tide if you want to pay me to just do it for you.  

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The butterfly effect is a term used to reference a scenario where, if you were to go back in time 1000 years and step on a butterfly and then return to your current time, you would find that everything has been changed. Potentially even you would no longer exist. This is explained as being caused by the fact that everything in the world is connected (as being part of the same ecosystem) and therefore given enough time the effects of a tiny butterfly being squashed can exponentially grow into an event where the Germans won World War II, or your parents never met.

In a world today where we are too busy to look beyond the face value, the lesson is pretty clear. If you go back in time, make sure you don’t step on any butterflies. If we were to stop and look beyond the face value, the lesson hits far closer to home. Scientists use this to explain that even a small change in a complex system can have a huge impact, but even they distill the true lesson down to its practical use for themselves.

Have you ever watched a Wave roll through the stadium audience, proud to join the hundreds raising their hands but jealous you weren’t the one who started it? What did the other person have that you don’t? Why couldn’t you be the source of this impressive movement visible throughout the entire stadium? The answer is honestly, nothing. Just the courage to go first, and be the leader, influencing others around you and creating an impact that spreads.

You have been created in order that you might make a difference. You have within you the power to change the world. – Andy Anderson

The Rising Tide Consulting Group is movement looking to start the waves, creating the tide, that will subsequently create larger waves, and larger waves, eventually rising higher and elevating everyone within the ecosystem. Let’s go back to the Wave in the stadium, can you imagine if the first person lifted their hands to create the Wave and the person next to them watched, acknowledged it was cool, and did nothing? The only reason why the Wave works is because the second person who follows, then the third, and the fourth and so-on. This is why at Rising Tide we are hyper-focused not on your business, but on your people. If we do your work for you, there is no impact, and we are left deciding if we should keep raising our hands to make up for the effort of those who aren’t joining or give up! If we can influence you doing your work, we can be the start of a massive wave that will spread not only throughout your entire business, but to your clients, and your vendors, raising the level of partnerships and quality of service being delivered to you, and by you.

The Rising Tide LevelUp Challenge is our ‘Audience in the Stadium Wave’. A movement started by our mentor Mendy Green on LinkedIn, where you take three stories, or analogies, and you pull out a lesson learned from each one (similar to how we did it with The Butterfly Effect mentioned above). After your three lessons you call out three new people to partake in the challenge and post their own. The lessons can be repeated, but the analogies or stories must be different.

In every situation, scenario, or story, there’s always a lesson to be learned. The scientists knew that when they framed the Butterfly Effect to teach their lesson, but each person will look at these stories and lessons through a colored lens filtered for their specific use case! It’s up to each individual as they hear these to take a lesson that relates to them. In fact, it is with Elizabeth Copeland’s lesson from the challenge (“Sometimes you need to stop and take in the view”) that we can examine analogies and situations and pull out a lesson from each one relevant to us to help us grow; the difference between taking something at face value or looking for that deeper meaning.

You can find her lesson and more by looking for the tags #RisingTideChallenge or #RisingTide on LinkedIn.

Welcome to The Care and Feeding of Meat Computers

The article you've stumbled across is the first in a collection of five blog posts meant to be an extension of The Care and Feeding of Meat Computers series which I’m releasing on the Rising Tide YouTube channel, born from a talk I shared at MSPGeekCon 2023. These companion guides are intended to help provide links to resources, research, and books that informed parts of this collection. The goal is to give you enough information and connections so you can dig into these concepts, including things that I cut from the talks for time or other organizational, boring reasons. I am also going to include some questions at the end of each guide to help you facilitate conversation with your team or to further deepen it!

Before we go much further, it's important to me to also extend my gratitude to the people who helped me make sure this talk happened in the first place. Heather and Brian at Gozynta encouraged me as I wrote and honed this concept the first time and generously sponsored me to attend MSPGeekCon and give this talk. Matt Fox, for the reliable perspective, fresh jokes, and tots. Alicia Gregory for academic and psychological insight, a cache of useful journal articles, and listening to me cry basically bi-weekly for nearly a decade.

Of course, last but not least, my business partner, Mendy Green, for believing in me and that this concept needed to see the light of day at all instead of just our five-minute-long WhatsApp voice notes.

Who this talk is for? You.

If you’re here, there’s a good chance you’re involved in technology, whether you follow Rising Tide, are a part of the MSPGeek community, or otherwise found this series while searching the depths of the internet. Regardless of who you are or where you’re from, come on in, make a cup of something warm, and have a seat. I hope that you will find each word expressing my sincere love to the tech community, specifically to those often-unsung heroes, the nerds whose daily, Sisyphean job is to balance the science behind tech with the increasingly important art of human understanding.  

This series is for those of you who may feel (or those of you who manage and collaborate with those who feel) more at home with your hard skills compared to soft skills. It’s completely understandable: in our society, and especially in tech, we tend to believe hard skills are the “real” skills, while soft skills are secondary or nice-to-have. But don’t let your imposter syndrome about the places you feel weak dictate what is real or true! Just because something can easily be expressed through certifications doesn’t mean they are more valuable or will help you live a more fulfilling life. In fact, you may have even been called “gifted” when it comes to technology, and as such, choose to feed that part of you, first. If we consider some of the theories about giftedness, specifically Renzulli’s three-ring conception of it, giftedness for any skill comes from ability, creativity, and commitment.  

My goal with this series is to challenge the view that hard skills are respected and most prized; and to encourage us to reframe “soft skills” not as something separate or less-than, but as essential, accessible, and attainable, intertwined with our technical expertise. We may not come by it naturally, as in an above-average-ability, but with creativity and commitment, we can develop these skills as well!

I specifically want us to look at soft skills in a way that outright refuses the notion that as you are, you are bad, undesirable, or unacceptable. While there are certain social standards that you may have been trained to adhere to, I want you to put those rules aside for these conversations. If you’ve ever felt like you’re expected to fit a mold to be successful—whether to be more charismatic, more structured, or even more proper—this series is for you.  

Being you is a good thing to be.

I’ve held a ton of jobs in a wide variety of industries and tiers of responsibilities. Despite my breadth and depth of experience and knowledge, I’m not interested in being revered as an expert. Experts tell you what you’re supposed to do and exactly how you’re supposed to do it to guarantee success. I’m sure my disdain for this snake-oily social power dynamic shows consistently in things I say and my approach in this series. Why the sass regarding experts? I want you to know and truly embrace the fact that your value as a tech professional goes beyond fitting into the boxes people want to put you in. Your value as a tech professional goes beyond fitting into the boxes you want to put yourself in! I’m not an expert, experts want you to be like them. I want you to be like you.  

You have these skills: you have social skills, you have people skills, you have soft skills. Regardless of if they fit into what some expert tells you is “correct,” if you’re a little bit weird, I want you to embrace it.

You’re here because you’re passionate about technical solutions, and you’re here because you’re looking for ways to develop further yourself and your community. I propose to you that your passion for technology is actually a powerful tool, if not the most powerful tool, in developing your soft skills. You can use your technical intelligence to boost your Emotional Intelligence.

It’s time to stop kidding ourselves that hard skills are technical and measurable while that soft skills are just a “personality trait” exemplified by gentle people like women and mothers. This belief implies two terrible, not-true things:  

1. some people just “have it” and are naturally good team players while there are others who are destined to never expand beyond their personal hangups.  

2. people with only hard skills and no soft skills are the only ones who make good business people and leaders.  

This is a disservice to you and those who you work with. You have soft skills, and developing and enhancing them is vital to your personal and professional growth. Here’s the thing: soft skills are hard. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth shaping or that they’re out of your reach as a technical, linear-minded person. Soft skills are hard-won through life experiences, loss, pain, and PRACTICE.

These concepts fold neatly into coding ideologies like Human-Centered Design and Human-Computer Interaction. You are technical, you are practical. Humans are hard. Let’s reframe this to help ourselves be more successful. I propose that soft skills aren’t the opposite of hard skills, but an evolution of them, and if you find them hard, perhaps you just need to look at humans as what they are: complex meat computers that really just want to do what they can to survive and thrive in the world they’ve inherited, just like you.  

So together, let’s flip the script and let’s start with reframing a questions we often ask, to see how we can better harness our natural penchant for hard skills and alchemize them into above average soft skills.  

Join me as we elevate the question, “Why aren’t people more like computers?” to “Why might people be too much like computers?” Instead of following a set of rules, I want you to ask yourself, “what if I treat people with just as much care and curiosity as I treat computers? What would my life, my job, and my relationships look like, instead?”

Video Chapters

• Soft Skills are Hard It’s ok to admit that soft skills are harder to you than hard skills. It’s not ok to never develop them further. Know your limits. And then dare to go further.  

• Nuance rules over Rules Life is complicated. You don’t need a list of rules to know what right looks like. What is the heart of the laws you’ve been given? Mindlessly following rules will rarely get you the results you dream of.  

• People over Tech Services work is rarely about the technical part and more about being curious and care-full about the people in our care!

• People over Stack Success comes from bringing your entire self to the table. No two people, no two MSPs are alike.

• People are Puzzles worth solving How do we, as technical people who love to solve puzzles, look as humans as solvable puzzles instead of pain points?

• People are Tech It’s not that humans are not like computers, it’s perhaps that they are too much like them.

Additional Resources and Recommended Reading

To deepen the concepts discussed in this series, here are several resources for further exploration:

Terms and Concepts

• MSP (Managed Service Provider) - Companies that remotely manage a customer’s IT infrastructure and systems

• Sisyphean - A task that feels endless and difficult, based on the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who had to roll a boulder up a hill forever

• Hard skills - Skills that involve specific knowledge or abilities, often technical, that can be measured or certified

• Soft skills - Personal skills like communication, empathy, and teamwork that help you work well with others

• Imposter syndrome - A feeling that you’re not as capable or skilled as others believe, even if you are

• Snake-oil - Something that is falsely advertised or exaggerated, originally referring to fake medicine

• Social power dynamic - How power and influence are distributed in social interactions or society

• Human-Centered Design - An approach to creating products that considers people’s needs, wants, and limitations.

• Human-Computer Interaction - The study of how people interact with computers and design technology that is easy and enjoyable to use.

• Emotional Intelligence (EQ) - The ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions in yourself and others.

Books and Research

• Emotional Intelligence ‍
  • How to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence - Professional & Executive Development | Harvard DCE

• Human Centered Design ‍
  • What Is Human-Centered Design? | HBS Online  ‍
  • Full article: Knowledge is not everything

• Giftedness
  • The Renzulli Model: Three-Ring Conception of Giftedness | Renzulli Center for Creativity, Gifted Education, and Talent Development
  • Giftedness + ADHD + Autism - Tending Paths

Questions for Team Reflection

If you’re watching this series with a team, here are some questions to guide your discussion and help you make the most of these ideas:

1. Favorite Tech: What is your favorite piece of tech? What is the best device or tool you’ve used or owned? Why is it your favorite? How much time did you spend configuring its settings and developing your own abilities to use it?  

2. Self-Assessment: Which soft skills come naturally to you, and which feel more challenging to develop? How do these impact your day-to-day work with clients or teammates?

3. Curiosity as a Tool: Have there been times when a “difficult” user or teammate surprised you with their insights or perspective? How might approaching people with curiosity change your interactions?

4. Rule Reflection: Are there any industry “rules” you follow that don’t serve you or your team well? Where did they come from? How can you find the “why” behind those rules and adapt them to fit your context? If there isn’t a good “why”...why are you still doing it?  

5. Growth Areas: What soft skill do you most want to develop? Consider using the resources linked above as a starting point to dive deeper into that area.

That’s it for Episode 1! Tune in for our next Episode: The most expensive piece of technology you’ll ever see.  

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Over the years of training and assisting various technicians, I've formed a set of guidelines that I've been known to drill constantly. The other day while talking to a newer technician and working with them I realized that I now have the time I didn't have before to actually write down what I've been ranting about for 14 years. I've dubbed them as the Laws for the Practical Technician.

‍

1. Keep an open mind when approaching the problem and avoid falling back into the "End User" mindset
2. Read and explore everything on the screen! Pay attention to what's being done and what its telling you
3. Understand the problem at least as well as the person asking you for help
4. Be intentional in your troubleshooting, closing your eyes and throwing darts at the wall is not helpful
5. Question everything you think you know and are being told
6. Always have a way out, make sure you can undo anything you do

‍

There's a lot of nuance in each "law" so now that we got the TLDR version out of the way let's dive into the specifics. Note for the purposes of this post, each law has been given a title.

1. The "Technician" Mindset

Keep an open mind when approaching the problem and avoid falling back into the "End User" mindset

If you run around with your eyes closed expecting nothing to get in your way, you're bound to smack into a wall (or something) and fall down.  If you keep your eyes open and aware of your surroundings you can navigate the obstacles and overcome them.

End users typically expect systems to work seamlessly and view issues as problems needing external help. Technicians, on the other hand, approach systems with the expectation that things might not work and are prepared to "figure it out" each time.

Key Points:

• ‍Expect Issues: Approach every situation with the mindset that things might not work as expected. This keeps it fresh in your mind and allows you to figure out what should or should not be happening each time, and usually during that process you'll identify the disconnect that's causing the issue.
• Problem-Solving Approach: View issues as challenges to be solved rather than insurmountable problems. This proactive mindset helps in finding creative solutions.
• Context Matters: The difference in mindset is less about the person and more about the context! Everyone (for the most part) handles their own problems for their personal lives daily. The moment it becomes a work or tech issue suddenly its hands-off. Be aware of the context you're in, this affects Clients escalating to IT and IT escalating to a higher tier! Don't fall into the trap.

Example: When dealing with a software bug, an end user might see it as "broken" and wait for a fix. A technician, however, will explore various angles—checking logs, considering recent changes, and testing different scenarios to identify the root cause, or find a viable workaround

2. Read the Entire Screen

Read and explore everything on the screen! Pay attention to what's being done and what its telling you

Computers and software are designed to be used, (it's actually the only way they make money!). Therefore, the information needed to operate or troubleshoot them is generally available on the screen or in logs, (although the language can be context-specific for the industry). To effectively identify and solve issues, it's crucial to explore the interface and ask questions. Thoroughly reading on-screen messages and prompts can provide insights into what might be wrong and how to address it.

When encountering an error message or unexpected behavior, don’t rush to conclusions, AND DO NOT SKIP IT! 

Instead, read all the details provided. Error codes, system messages, and even seemingly minor details can offer significant clues. For instance, a message that seems obscure at first glance might make sense when considered within the context of the application or system you're working on. Even comparing against a computer that is working, looking for differences in behavior, or order of operations, screen activity, and so on, can provide clues (for example an error that takes a while to appear is likely caused by a timeout, vs an error that appears immediately is likely caused by an immediate rejection).

Example: If a user reports an issue with a software application crashing, instead of just noting "application crashes," you should read any error messages, logs, or system prompts that appear when the crash occurs. These details can guide you towards understanding the root cause and potential fixes.

3. Understand the Problem

Understand the problem at least as well as the person asking you for help

To effectively troubleshoot, ensure you can recreate the problem and understand its significance. Start by asking the person reporting the issue why it's a problem and why it's important to solve it. Gather as much information as possible to understand all sides of the issue. You should be able to understand the problem at least as well as the person reporting it to you, otherwise how do you expect to fix it? Or even explain it to the next escalation point if you have to reach out for help?

Here are some ways you can work to understand the problem.

• ‍Recreate the Problem: Attempt to replicate the issue in your environment. This step is the best option because it allows you to see the problem firsthand and understand its nuances, at the same time as testing to see if its a problem with their computer only or a wider issue. You can also choose to recreate the problem on a different system, if it requires specific applications or files you don't have on your computer directly.
• ‍Understand the Impact: Determine why the issue is significant. Is it causing data loss, preventing critical operations, or just a minor inconvenience? Understanding the impact helps prioritize the issue and communicate its importance to others.
• Gather Detailed Information: Ask the user detailed questions about the problem. When did it start? What were they doing when it occurred? Has anything changed recently (e.g., new software, updates, hardware changes)? What's normally supposed to happen?
• Prepare for Escalation: If you cannot resolve the issue, you might need to escalate it to a vendor or higher-level support. Having detailed information and a clear understanding of the problem will make this process smoother and more effective.

Example: If a user cannot access a shared network drive, ask them about any recent changes to their system, any specific error messages they receive, and how critical this access is to their work. Look at what the shared drive is mapped to, and if other people have access to it that are working. Identify the network the user who is complaining about is on and if it has connectivity to the shared drive host. This comprehensive understanding allows you to troubleshoot more effectively and escalate if needed.

4. Be Intentional

Be intentional in your troubleshooting, closing your eyes and throwing darts at the wall is not helpful

Being intentional in your actions means making deliberate, thoughtful decisions rather than taking random stabs at fixing an issue. This approach prevents exacerbating the problem and leads to more efficient troubleshooting. Most technicians below Tier 3 will perform troubleshooting by way of "trying different thing to see what works", this is essentially closing your eyes and trying to pin the tail on the donkey, make sure you understand what is going on, and the logical reason why what you're attempting will affect (either negatively or positively) the current outcome so that you can make progress with every step.

Expand on This:

• Map out the "Attack" Chain: Before diving into fixing an issue, outline the Chain that exists to allow the system you're troubleshooting to work during normal behavior. What are the potential areas for disconnect? What steps will you take to test that the chain is working throughout?
• Progress is Progress (both good and bad): Any change in outcome is desired, as it'll help provide information about the underlying behavior that we don't have visibility into. Look for error messages, success messages, timers, lags and so on. No detail is too small.
• Evaluate and Adjust: After each step, evaluate whether it has brought you closer to resolving the issue. Adjust your approach based on these evaluations.

Example: If a printer isn’t working, don’t randomly try different fixes like restarting the printer, reinstalling drivers, or changing settings. Instead, follow a logical sequence—check for error messages to help point you towards a connection issue or a driver issue.

5. Question Assumptions

Question everything you think you know and are being told.

Always be prepared to reassess what you know. Technology and systems evolve, and what was true yesterday might not hold today. Keeping an open mind and questioning assumptions can lead to discovering the true cause of an issue.

Expand on This:

• Expect to be wrong all the time: When you're right about something there's no reason to go back and check because you know you're right. If you're wrong about something then you'll be looking to validate that you are wrong, or what the right answer is. This mindset helps keep your knowledge fresh and reminds you to double check everything you think you know or are being told.
• ‍Seek Out Information: Be proactive in seeking out new information and learning from others. Forums, user groups, and official documentation can offer insights you might not have considered. Often times all it takes to help find the answer is asking the question, not to the person next to you, but even to yourself! Use the Rubber Duck method if you need to.

Example: If a network issue arises, don’t assume it’s due to the same cause as last time. Reevaluate the situation - start the troubleshooting process from scratch everytime until you've identified the root cause to the be the same as last time.

6. Never Do Something You Can't Undo

Always have a way out, make sure you can undo anything you do

Always have a contingency plan before making changes. Ensure that any action you take can be reversed if it doesn’t resolve the issue or causes new problems.

Expand on This:

• Backup First: Before making destructive changes, find a way to keep a good copy of what you're changing. This ensures that you can revert back if needed.
• Test Changes: Where possible, test changes in a controlled environment before applying them to the live system.
• Document Reversible Steps: Ensure that every action you take can be undone. Document the steps if necessary so you can revert configurations and settings.

Example: Before modifying a system registry, backup the registry or export the key in question. Rename something instead of deleting it, or cut/paste it somewhere else. This way, if the change has unintended consequences, you can easily revert to the previous state.

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Edit 2024/11/13 | This article has been presented and recorded at The IT Nation Connect 2024 in Orlando, Florida! You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/ZJqhT48pnLU

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Critical thinking is an essential skill for success in both personal and professional life. It involves the ability to think independently and objectively, to analyze and evaluate information and arguments, and to make sound and logical decisions.

Learning critical thinking is not always easy, but it is a skill that can be developed and improved with practice. Here are some tips for how to learn critical thinking:

1. Practice asking questions: Critical thinking involves questioning assumptions and looking at situations from different perspectives. Practice asking questions about the information you encounter, such as “Why is this true?” or “What evidence supports this claim?”. Feel free to start with this one right here 😉
2. Seek out diverse perspectives: To think critically, it’s important to consider multiple viewpoints and perspectives. Seek out diverse sources of information and listen to others with different backgrounds and experiences.
3. Evaluate sources of information: In today’s information-rich world, it’s important to be able to evaluate the credibility and reliability of sources. Consider factors such as the author’s expertise and credentials, the date and source of the information, and any potential biases or conflicts of interest.
4. Take your time: Critical thinking takes time and effort. Don’t be afraid to take a step back and reflect on a situation before making a decision. Consider the potential consequences of your actions and be open to changing your mind based on new information.
5. Practice regularly: Like any skill, critical thinking improves with practice. Take opportunities to apply critical thinking in your everyday life, and in some cases, you’ll find that you’ve already been doing it subconsciously!

Assumptions are an important part of the critical thinking process, as they help us make sense of the world and make predictions about future events. However, assumptions can also be dangerous, as they can lead us to make false or misguided conclusions.

One of the dangers of assumptions is that they can be based on incomplete or incorrect information. For example, if we make an assumption about someone’s intentions based on limited information, we may be mistaken and draw the wrong conclusion. This can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts with otherwise could have been avoided, whereas when we properly assess a situation, it keeps us agile and allows us to adjust to meet the new circumstances (both in personal and professional lives).

Another danger of assumptions is that they can lead us to become overconfident in our beliefs and conclusions. When we make an assumption, we may be more likely to ignore or dismiss something that we see or that someone tells us that contradicts our assumption. This can lead to confirmation bias, where we only consider evidence that supports our assumption, and can prevent us from seeing the whole picture, or alternative perspectives.

Despite these dangers, assumptions are still necessary in the critical thinking process. Without assumptions, we wouldn’t have a way to continue moving forward through the process Instead, we would have to rely on raw data and facts, and we’d be stuck without being able to collect new raw data. Making an assumption is necessary for us to test the raw data and allow us to collect more (such as if the assumption is right or wrong). It’s kind of like shaking the wrapped present to see if we can guess what’s inside…we just need to be prepared for the possibility that we might break it.

With assumptions being so crucial to the Critical Thinking process, it’s important to be aware of the dangers of assumptions and to approach them cautiously. We should be open to revising or rejecting our assumptions based on new evidence, and we should strive to be as objective and unbiased as possible. By doing so, we have a greater change of avoiding the dangers of assumptions and successfully use them to our advantage.

It’s important to update and revise the things we know when presented with evidence that contradicts it, sometime even when they’re not assumptions. This is because our understanding of the world is always evolving, and new information and evidence can challenge and expand our current beliefs and knowledge.

Updating and revising our beliefs and knowledge based on new evidence is an essential part of the critical thinking process. It allows us to be more objective and unbiased, and to avoid making false or misguided conclusions. By being open to new information and evidence, we can gain a more accurate and complete understanding of the world around us.

In a rapidly changing world, it’s important to be able to adjust and update our understanding of the world in order to make informed and effective decisions. By updating and revising our beliefs and knowledge, we can remain open to new ideas and opportunities, and can continue to learn and grow.

Welcome to By the [Run]Book

HaloPSA features, field-tested.

We’re not here to sell you a perfect system. We’re here to show you what’s possible when smart, slightly feral people get curious about tools that were allegedly designed to help us.

By the [Run]Book is a new podcast collaboration between consultants from Renada and Rising Tide, where we dig into the latest HaloPSA features, challenge what’s been handed to us, and ask: What else could we do with this?

No fluff. No shiny demo decks. Just real-world testing, practical breakdowns, and a healthy disrespect for default settings.

By the [Run]Book – Episode 1 Feature Guide

By the [run]Book's first episode breaks down HaloPSA releases v2.186 and v2.188, this episode explored what’s new, what’s weird, and what’s actually worth your time. Use this guide to follow along.

Event Management | 2.186 #798529 | ▶️ 6:06‍

Create and update tickets based on webhook events—without needing Runbooks.

• Easier interface for handling alert data
• Trigger rules based on payload content
• Map fields into tickets dynamically

Chat Interface Redesign | 2.186 #764942| ▶️ 10:06

‍The new chat view makes internal and client conversations more manageable.

• Conversation list/table instead of floating popups
• MS Teams chat support improved
• Much more usable in high-volume settings

Tabbed Interface in Halo | 2.186 #446952 | ▶️ 12:03

‍Multiple tabs now open inside Halo, not your browser.

• Reduces tab clutter
• Smooth for screen sharing
• Plays well when Halo is run as a desktop app

Agent Trophy Feature | 2.186 # 831583 | ▶️ 14:28

‍Yes, agents can now earn trophies for closing tickets.

• Visual badges on agent records
• Available in assignments and dashboards
• Fun, but scoring logic is a bit suspect‍
• Custom Leaderboards via CSS. Mostly a morale booster—not reporting-grade insight

Date Filters, Forecasting Module + TimeGPT Integration | 2.186 #830461| ▶️ 19:41

‍Prevent retroactive ticket floods when new rules are applied.

• Set start dates to control retroactive logic
• Helps avoid spam from old data
• Crucial for clean automation rollouts

Enforce Unique Email Addresses | 2.186 #829650 | ▶️ 20:43

‍Avoid duplicate users and weird portal issues.

• Blocks user creation if email already exists
• Critical for integrations and self-service portals
• Best turned on early before it breaks things quietly

Opportunity Variables: Annual, Monthly, One-Off  | 2.186 #828897 | ▶️ 22:31

‍New fields help break down potential revenue at-a-glance.

• Available for ticket templates and reporting
• Auto-updates from quotes (with correct config)
• Useful for sales forecasting and quote summaries

Track Ticket Volumes logged per type and source | 2.186 #820211 | ▶️ 30:55

Added a module to track Ticket Volumes logged per type & source. Added a Forecasting module to predict future Ticket volumes using historical data (Uses Nixtla TimeGPT integration).

Runbook Sleep Steps | 2.186 #809061  | ▶️ 33:08

‍Introduce delays in automation logic—finally.

• Wait X seconds before next Runbook action
• Great for API pacing or async dependencies
• Simple but long-awaited

Dynamic SQL in Ticket Actions | 2.186 #834686 | ▶️ 33:50

‍Use SQL-powered fields in your ticket logic.

• Previously unreliable, now stable
• Can pull dynamic field values into workflows
• Adds power to advanced configurations

Xero + Avalara Sales Tax Integration | 2.186 #832023 | ▶️ 34:15

‍Auto-calculate sales tax in Halo quotes synced to Xero.

• Uses Xero’s built-in Avalara tax engine
• Requires invoice.updated webhook enabled
• Real-time, regionally compliant tax logic

Direct User-to-Client Association | 2.186 #834481 | ▶️ 37:40

‍Users can now be tied directly to clients, no site required.

• Supports more flexible org structures
• Great for shared-stock or multi-client setups
• May simplify certain workflows

10-Year Scheduling Period | ▶️ 42:24

‍Because someone, somewhere asked for it.

• Schedule things a decade out
• Useful for contract reminders or licensing renewals
• Feels deeply aspirational

Got a Feature You Want Us to Cover?

Send us a message!

HaloPSA reporting is a common stumbling block for MSP teams and it’s no wonder why. With decades-old naming conventions, SQL complexity, and inconsistent column naming, most folks give up before they get started.

But if you’ve worked the helpdesk, you already have the most important skill: troubleshooting.

At Rising Tide, we lean into that mindset. These 8 guidelines—developed by Mendy Green—are how we train team members to creatively and confidently troubleshoot their way through the HaloPSA database. This isn’t a ruleset: it’s a survival guide built from lived experience, experimentation, and a lot of Ctrl+F. The following is also available to view on a video from Mendy linked here: https://youtu.be/1h3lMqIQbXY.

Guideline 1: FAULT Is a Ticket

Halo uses the term “fault” instead of “ticket.” That’s a legacy holdover from NetHelpDesk, Halo’s predecessor. If you see “fault,” translate it in your head to “ticket.”
🛠 Real Example: When writing a report, select from the faults table to get ticket data—even if you're working with projects, opportunities, or tasks. They're all stored as faults.

Guideline 2: ACTION Is a Note or Entry on a Ticket

Every email, time entry, and status change lives in the actions table. If something happened to a ticket, it’s here.
🛠 Real Example: Time entries, incoming/outgoing emails, status changes, and internal notes all show up in actions, joined to tickets via fault ID.

Guideline 3: Understand Table Prefixes

Most tables prefix their column names based on the table itself. That prefix tells you where the data originated.
🛠 Real Example: In the site table, SArea refers to the client (Area). In the user table, USite points to the site ID. If you see a column like QHID, that’s the primary key from quotation header.

Guideline 4: Primary Keys Get Reused Across Tables

Once you know a table’s primary key, look for it in other tables to understand relationships.
🛠 Real Example: area, site number, UID, and fault ID show up across multiple tables. If you know a device’s DID, you can filter by it and join against other asset-related tables.

Guideline 5: Use the Reporting Module to Search and Learn Faster

Skip loading massive reports. Use the Fields tab to explore column names and understand structure before you ever hit preview.
🛠 Real Example: Mendy uses Fields to inspect columns like OutcomeID, ActionByUNum, or SDeliveredBy to identify their function—without ever loading a full dataset.

Guideline 6: Utilize “Open Report Data Source” to Reverse Engineer

Halo’s online report repository is a goldmine. You don’t even need to install a report—just open the data source and see how it’s built.
🛠 Real Example: When Mendy didn’t know how a report generated “Month Created,” he opened the data source and saw how CONVERT was used to format the date. Instant clarity.

Guideline 7: Use the "Database Tables & Columns" Report—But Always Filter First

This built-in schema reference report lets you search by table or column name—but don’t run it raw. Filter by table or field name first or it’ll crash your browser.
🛠 Real Example: Mendy uses this to find terms like “Azure Tenant” and locate where clients are mapped. It’s a last-resort treasure map—useful but slow.

Guideline 8: Use Real Values to Discover Field Names

If you know a real-world value (like an asset tag), pull that entity with SELECT * and search for it. That’ll reveal the column name you’re after.
🛠 Real Example: Mendy didn’t know which field stored an asset’s tag—until he filtered device by ID, Ctrl+F’d the tag, and found it was stored in INVNO (inventory number).

Conclusion
You don’t need to master SQL overnight to get value out of HaloPSA. You just need to lean into what helpdesk techs do best: problem-solve with what’s in front of you.

These 8 guidelines aren’t about perfection. They’re about being clever, resourceful, and creative with the tools you’ve got—and turning reporting from a weakness into a strength.

‍

Let’s be honest: ticket closure can be a huge mess in our MSPs.

You open a ticket and see open tasks, unlogged appointments, and missing resolution notes. But it’s marked “closed.” Now someone has to go figure out what really happened. Did those tasks get completed? Those HDMI cables delivered? Is the client still waiting for a response or an appointment?  

If you're closing tickets without making sure everything’s actually done, you’re probably dealing with

• Billing issues. Tasks or appointments didn’t get logged, so you’re not billing for all the work.

• Dispatch cleanup. Someone has to re-open the ticket or hunt down details later.

• Incomplete data. Tickets don’t have the info you need for reporting or future troubleshooting.

• Wasted time. You’re touching the same ticket multiple times just to wrap it up.

This stuff adds up. And the bigger your ticket volume, the more it costs you in time and money.

To add insult to injury, often that “someone” who ends up doing the legwork to close the gap is usually someone from dispatch or billing, and it's usually not a good use of their time especially when the technician responsible is already off-site half-completing another batch of tickets.

After 11 years in the MSP world, I’ve seen this pattern over and over again. It’s not that technicians are lazy or trying to avoid work. It’s that the system allows this to happen, and no one’s taken the time to fix it.

So let’s use HaloPSA to keep people accountable, ensure tickets are worked to completion, and eliminate the need to play catch up when it’s time to bill for the great solutions we’ve provided for this client over the last term!

One Possible Solution

I have a video working through this solution that you can watch here.  

Basically, we need to create a system that enforces good habits without relying on people to remember every little detail.

To achieve this goal, we’re going to use HaloPSA to:

• Reduce the ability to close a ticket
  • Block ticket closure if there are open tasks, appointments, or to-dos
  • Remove “closed” or “completed” from quick status changes  

• Update your Ticket Workflow to allow for ticket closure
  • Add “Resolve” action that checks the ticket first before allowing technician to advance
  • Create Custom Fields
    • One single selection field for the lookup trigger
    • Two rich text fields; one for displaying our message, and one for controlling the HTML.
  • Use simple SQL lookups and custom fields to flag missing pieces
  • Make the process clear, so techs know what to do before they close a ticket
    • Canned Text Values should clearly explain why they cannot close the ticket.  

In addition to the video, I also shared all the custom field setups, canned text, and SQL in this GitHub gist.

In Conclusion

This isn’t about making life harder for your techs. It’s about:

• Making it easier to bill accurately

• Giving dispatch less to clean up

• Making sure the ticket tells the full story

• Creating better data for the business

It’s one small process change that takes a lot of pressure off your team, especially the people downstream from the techs who are closing tickets.

If you’re running an MSP, or trying to tighten up operations inside your PSA, this is for sure worth 15 minutes of your time.

🎥 Watch the full video here: Streamline Your MSP Ticket Closure Process with HaloPSA

📄 Get the code and setup details here:  Ticket Review & Closure Process in HaloPSA – GitHub Gist

‍

About this Series

This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Winter 2026 book club, where we’re reading Think Naked by Marco Marsan.

If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:

• Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here

Chapter Summary

“If you want to be more creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society” - Jean Piaget

In Chapter 2, You Lost Your Marbles, Marco Marsan explores how people don’t simply “grow out” of creativity — they are systematically conditioned out of it. The chapter argues that over time, fear, rigid rules, institutional norms, and social conformity slowly strip away curiosity, playfulness, and experimentation.

Marsan frames this loss through several forces:

• Fear: mistakes become costly as adults (financially, socially, professionally)
• Senseless rules: norms persist long after their original context or usefulness
• Institutionalized regurgitation: being rewarded for having the “right answer” rather than learning how to think
• Tough-it-out culture: endurance replaces reflection
• Numbness: accumulated stress and responsibility dull engagement

The chapter opens with a consulting story where a leader dismisses Marsan outright, using it as a framing device to explore how organizations often reject discomfort, challenge, and unconventional thinking — even when they claim to want innovation.

Discussion Questions

Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!

• What does “losing your marbles” mean to you — and what might you have lost that still matters?
  • 'Lose Your Marbles' Saying - Meaning & Context
  • Rather than meaning “you’ve gone crazy,” the group explored the older meaning: marbles as something valuable children possessed — and something adults may have lost, not gained, over time.
• Where have fear or consequences made curiosity feel unsafe? How do power and authority shape how you show up creatively?
• How often do you ask why a rule exists, rather than whether you’re allowed to challenge it?
• Where have institutions (school, work, industry norms) rewarded compliance over thinking?
• What would play look like in your work if you weren’t worried about being wrong?

Rising Tide Input for your Consideration

• Your brain is capable of great creativity and capacity. How you use it matters. Here is some research behind some of the concepts Marsan mentions.
  • Beyond the Myth That We Use Only 10 Percent of Our Brains | Psychology Today
  • A Healthy Brain: Use It or Lose It! | USU
  • Machismo, Marianismo, and Negative Cognitive-Emotional Factors: Findings From the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos Sociocultural Ancillary Study - PubMed
• Creativity and Learning require play — and play requires safety.
• We discussed Montessori education, language learning, or professional growth, the group emphasized that playfulness, repetition, and “looking silly” are critical to learning and are exactly what adults are trained to avoid.
• Conformity isn’t safety, it’s a creativity suppressor.
  • The group referenced classic psychology experiments (Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram Experiment) to explore how authority, group pressure, and institutional roles can override personal judgment and moral reasoning. Stanford prison experiment - Wikipedia
  • Dead Poets Society - Conformity Scene (1989) HD w/ Subtitles
  • https://youtu.be/GDWAKvQemlU?si=AVbkNGLEhC8vn7KV
  • Organizational Culture and the 5 Monkeys Experiment | Intersol
• Are rules ever useful?
  • Rules are not inherently bad, but we propose that unexamined rules are dangerous. There are rules that deliver shared value and coordination, but there are also rules that persist simply because “that’s how it’s done”
    • A recurring Rising Tide pattern emerged: looking for the rule beneath the rule (the underlying reason a rule exists) rather than accepting it at face value.
  • As Marsan suggests, “Any Rule represents, at best, the latest thinking on a subject,” but we also considered that a rule represents what was left over from an unfinished discussion, and not even the best answer. It just reflects the last time someone argued about something and not a timeless truth.
• Learning is experiential, not transactional.
  • We discussed how conformity, rote memorization, and “teaching for the test” suppress critical thinking and actual learning in many modern educational systems.
  • True learning involves play, repetition, discomfort, and curiosity, all of which feel inefficient or risky in adult systems optimized for output.

About Rising Tide and our Book Club

Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.

Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. In Winter/Spring 2026, we’re walking through Think Naked.

If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link. Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.

‍

About this Series

This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Winter 2026 book club, where we’re reading Think Naked by Marco Marsan.

If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:

• Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here

Chapter Summary

In the introduction and first chapter, Marco Marsan proposes to the readers that creativity is not lost as we age — it is trained out of us. He cites research suggesting that young children test at very high “genius” or creative problem-solving levels, and that this capacity sharply declines by adulthood.

To return to this childlike, “genius” mindset, Marsan introduces five “rules” that mirror how children naturally engage with problems:

1. Wear your cape (be fearless)
2. Blockbuster (question defaults and conventions)
3. Look at Your Neighbor’s Paper (learn by copying and remixing)
4. Show-N-Tell (learn publicly and collaboratively)
5. I’m the boss of me (take ownership and agency)

Discussion Questions

Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!

• What did you agree with in these chapters?
• What did you disagree with in these chapters?
• Do you agree that creativity declines because of conditioning rather than capability? Why or why not?
• Who or what defines a genius?
• Do any of the five lessons intrigue you more than the others? Which of the five principles feels most uncomfortable to you right now?
• Where do you avoid experimentation because the cost of being wrong feels too high?
• Where in your work do you default to “this is how it’s always been done”?
• What would “thinking more like a kid” actually look like in one small, real decision this week?

Rising Tide Input for your Consideration

• What causes us to lose our creativity?
  • The team proposed that people don’t lose creativity as they age, but rather they close off the permission rather than the capability because creativity becomes risky. As adults, mistakes have consequences: reputational, financial, professional. Most environments reward predictability over curiosity, so people adapt accordingly.
• Are children actually ‘geniuses’?
  • Evidence that children become less creative over time (and how to fix it) - Idea to Value
  • As a team, we felt that the label “genius,” isn’t particularly useful. It’s poorly defined, and even more poorly measured. What matters is not intelligence labels, but how people approach problems: curiosity, iteration, and willingness to engage with uncertainty.
    • In fact, as a team we consistently seem to pushback on: Labels (“genius,” “best practice,” or “industry standard”), Claims without sources, and Metrics without definitions.
  • Children also don’t ask if they’re allowed to participate, they assume they are. Adults often operate transactionally, constantly checking for permission. That hesitation suppresses experimentation and ownership.
• How does technology factor into creativity loss?
  • Convenience is a trade. Offloading is good if the saved energy is reinvested into higher-order problem-solving. As a result, technology can either dull skills or enable deeper thinking depending on how we use it as a tool.
  • Automation is welcomed after understanding exists. Technology should support people who know why, not replace them.

About Rising Tide and our Book Club

Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.

Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. In Winter/Spring 2026, we’re walking through Think Naked.

If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link. Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.

‍

About this Series

This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Fall 2025 book club, where we’re reading The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann.

If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:

• Chapter One – The Go-Getter for an introduction on how to use these Discussion Questions
• Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here

Chapter Summary

In the final chapter of The Go-Giver, we meet Claire, who is on her way to meet the partners behind an amazingly (even stratospherically) successful new business: Rachel’s Famous Coffee. Chapter 14 ties up the story of The Go-Giver in a neat little bow, showcasing the stratospheric success possible, and encouraging us to share the secret with others along the way.

Discussion Questions

Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!

• Joe ends the book in a completely different role than he started. Did that feel like success to you?
• How has your own definition of success changed over time?
• How do you tell the difference between quitting, failing, and evolving? Would this ending feel different if Joe were less financially secure?
• What did you learn from this book? What do you think your key takeaway will be?

Rising Tide Input for your Consideration

• Joe didn’t land the sale, he completely changed his trajectory. What does that mean for you? Sometimes success isn’t what we imagine or set out to accomplish, sometimes it’s adjacent.
• Joe isn’t keeping the secret or the process to himself, he’s actively sharing it with others and using the same framework Pindar gave him.
• As a team, we didn’t really like this book and wouldn’t recommend it to peers who already have practical experience in business or leadership.
  • The parable format wasn’t great for our team. It was a good basic overview, but it didn’t go as deep as we felt some of these concepts deserved. While we get that it’s a book with a story that needed to be simplified to get the author’s key ideas across, seven days isn’t enough time for meaningful personal or professional change, and we felt the timeline and simplicity undercut the book’s credibility. Many felt the book oversold its lesson without adequately showing how it applies in complex, real-world situations, added to the fact that since Joe doesn’t apply the lessons over time and he’s rewarded through proximity to power, it made the ending feel uncomfortably like access solves everything.
  • The main character wasn’t relatable or aspirational. The team generally struggled with Joe! He started unlikable and never quite crossed into someone the team wanted to root for or become, in fact, as a result, the story ended up feeling like it was more about “who you know.” and being in the right place at the right time. While generosity mattered, only once the right people were involved, which ignores how uneven access to networks really is.
  • There are possibly better books out there that communicate similar ideas more effectively. Here are a few of our favorites:
    • Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
    • Dare to Lead - Brené Brown
    • The Four Agreements – don Miguel Ruiz
• We hope you’ll join us in 2026 for our next book: Think Naked: Childlike Brilliance in the Rough Adult World by Peter Lloyd Marco Marsan | Goodreads. Get a copy of the book and mark your calendar for January 09, 2026 to talk through the cover and reading plan.  

About Rising Tide and our Book Club

Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.

Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. Our book for 2026 Quarter 1 is Think Naked: Childlike Brilliance in the Rough Adult World by Marco Marsan.

If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link.
Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.

‍

About this Series

This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Fall 2025 book club, where we’re reading The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann.

If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:

• Chapter One – The Go-Getter for an introduction on how to use these Discussion Questions
• Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here

Chapter Summary

In Chapter 10, Joe learns the Fourth Law of Stratospheric Success — “The Law of Authenticity” — from a now-successful saleswoman who found this truth when she was at her lowest.

Discussion Questions

Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!

• “These lessons don’t apply only to business…the true bottom line is whether it improves your life’s balance sheet.” What are things that improve your own balance sheet of life? Family? Hobbies? Travel?
• Have you ever had a major blow to your self-esteem like Debra’s husband leaving her? Have you ever looked at is as a gift? What if you did?
• “Add value. I had nothing to add but myself”. Have you ever considered that you, as you are, brings value to a relationship? Yes, your perspective, your experiences, but more than that, your presence is valuable in a relationship!!
• What do you consider to be people skills? To be a person?

Rising Tide Input for your Consideration

• How does privilege (financial cushion, partner support, social safety nets) affect whether we’re able to call adversity a “gift”? As leaders or teammates, what responsibility do we have to build safety nets for our people (policies, culture, financial practices) so they don’t fall off a cliff when life hits?
• John & Julie Gottman – Fighting Right & Repair. The Gottmans’ work shows that what predicts relationship health is not whether you fight, but whether you repair effectively afterward, mirroring what we discussed about client relationships and authenticity.
  
  • Julie and John Gottman: Relationship advice from 50+ years of marriage | TED Talk
    
  • “Happily ever after simply means that both partners are known, valued, accepted for who they are and who they are becoming.” - John M. Gottman
• Brené Brown – “Marriage is Never 50/50” - Short clip where Brown explains why healthy relationships aren’t equal splits but ebb and flow based on capacity, reinforcing the idea that we bring our best available self, not a fixed quota.sometimes they're 30-70...and sometimes they're 30-30...you should only be expected to bring your best. Because we are rarely able to be 100% consistently!
  
• The Framemaking Sale - by Brent Adamson and Karl Schmidt; so often relationships aren’t just about US or what we perceive we need to be, but rather how we can make the other person feel confident and comfortable in their own decisions.

About Rising Tide and our Book Club

Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.

Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. In Fall/Winter 2025, we’re walking through The Go-Giver, chapter by chapter.

If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link.
Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.

‍

About this Series

This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Fall 2025 book club, where we’re reading The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann.

If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:

• Chapter One – The Go-Getter for an introduction on how to use these Discussion Questions
• Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here

Chapter Summary

In Chapter 13, Full Circle, Joe is finally met with the end of the quarter with nothing to show for his last-ditch efforts to learn and enact the 5 Laws of Stratospheric Success. After a conversation with Gus in which Joe resigns to the idea that perhaps it’s not about “what you accomplish…it’s who you are,” his phone rings. Perhaps the last week wasn’t a waste after all!  

Discussion Questions

Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!

• Joe doesn’t hit his sales goal by the deadline. How did that land for you? Did you expect a different outcome?
• Gus suggests that the real outcome might be who Joe became rather than what he accomplished. Do you buy that distinction? Why or why not?
• If this chapter ended without the phone call, would its message be stronger or weaker?

Rising Tide Input for your Consideration

• It’s easy to laugh at Joe for his expectations on a one-week timeline. Have you ever been in a situation where you expect immediate results and are disappointed when you don’t see them?
  • Common saying, “People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years.”
• “The point is not what you do. Not what you accomplish. It’s who you are.”
  • What did this part of the conversation make you feel?
• “The quiet felt almost as if it were alive. Motionless, but listening. It felt…receptive.”
  • Has there been a moment where you’ve felt like the world was alive and full of possibilities? Through meditation? Traveling somewhere? Having an experience you’ve never had? Have you considered that sense of awe and wonder is a skill worth fostering?

About Rising Tide and our Book Club

Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.

Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. In Fall/Winter 2025, we’re walking through The Go-Giver, chapter by chapter.

If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link.
Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.

‍

About this Series

This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Fall 2025 book club, where we’re reading The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann.

If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:

• Chapter One – The Go-Getter for an introduction on how to use these Discussion Questions
• Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here

Chapter Summary

In Chapter 12, Joe shows up for lunch at Pindar’s home, excited to meet the 5th mystery guest. Together, we learn the 5th law of stratospheric success: The Law of Receptivity, which Joe defines as “The key to effective giving is to stay open to recieving.”  

Discussion Questions

Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!

• Who did you think the fifth guest was going to be?
  • Did you also imagine Rachel would be the guest?
• How do you feel when you give? How do you feel when you receive?
  • Do you prefer one over the other? What stories or experiences shaped that preference?
• Some of our original commentary in the early chapters echoed this idea of receptivity. What if we give and get taken advantage of? Perhaps the question is, why are we giving and not allowing ourselves to also receive? Why are we giving without care for ourselves and what we should be giving ourselves?
• Why is receiving so hard for so many of us?
  • Several folks in our group said some version of, “I’ll give everything, but I’ll take nothing,” and described feeling like they were taking from someone when they receive. What about you?
  • Most of the people in our club said they like giving, and that it feels better to give! But, what if, when you refuse to receive: you are taking away that same good feeling from the potential giver?
• How might being more receptive change the way you work with clients or teammates?
  • Jason reframed the Law of Receptivity as being open to opportunity, not just gifts: being willing to say “yes” when someone offers an intro, a collaboration, or a chance you didn’t plan for. Where have you seen that play out in your own career?

Rising Tide Input for your Consideration

• The Water Analogy – “Drink as You Pour”
  • You may have heard it said, to “Drink as you pour.” Which is, as you are serving others, it is key that you also serve yourself and care for yourself so that you do not cause an imbalance.
  • Imagine you have water in a basin:
    • No input, no output = stagnation: If water just sits (no fresh water in, none out) it gets swampy and stagnant. No ideas, no giving, no creativity in or out means you can’t grow and adapt!
    • Only output = propensity to run dry: If you’re always pouring out (time, care, energy, support) but never receiving, you eventually empty the well. You must refill with intention and consistency, cycles of burnout don’t help you establish your health and business!
    • Only input = hoarding: If you only receive and never give, the “pool” can overflow or turn destructive, just like hoarded resources in a community. Cancer is a common phenomenon that consumes without thinking and without care. It destroys all.
  • Where in your life are you stagnant, over-pouring, or hoarding and what would a healthier flow look like?
• Creativity, Physics, and the Oatmeal
  • Kevin dropped a reference to an old comic from The Oatmeal about creativity being like breathing: you have to inhale (rest, experiences, inspiration) to exhale (make things, serve, create). That comic helped him accept that he has to refill if he wants to keep giving.
• Where do you notice “hyper-independence” in your life or work?
  • As a group, we talked about how modern “luxury” is often framed as not needing anyone, and how we tend to prioritize independence over connection. Noone borrows a cup of sugar from a neighbor anymore, we just use Instacart! Where do you feel pressure to handle everything alone? Where is that actually hurting you or others?

About Rising Tide and our Book Club

Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.

Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. In Fall/Winter 2025, we’re walking through The Go-Giver, chapter by chapter.

If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link.
Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.

‍

About this Series

This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Fall 2025 book club, where we’re reading The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann.

If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:

• Chapter One – The Go-Getter for an introduction on how to use these Discussion Questions
• Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here

Chapter Summary

In Chapter 11, Joe learns more about “Gus,” who he is, and why he does what he does!  

Discussion Questions

Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!

• Well, did you guess it? Did you know Gus’ role was before this chapter?
• How did your perception of Gus change when you realized he was the connector Pindar kept referencing?
• In your own life, who are the “Guses”—the quiet connectors who don’t lead with their résumé but who hold networks together?
• Does being masked or guarded in some contexts undermine your authenticity overall, or is it reasonable self-protection?

Rising Tide Input for your Consideration

• Authenticity in Context. Our group debated whether authenticity must be consistent across all areas of life. Neurodivergent masking and professional role-switching complicate the idea that “the way you do one thing is how you do everything.” Exploration angle: how do context, safety, and identity shape authentic behavior?
• Balancing Professionalism and Emotional Reality. The group also discussed how we find ourselves able to flip from personal conflict within a team or close relationship to “customer service voice”. Do you consider that skill that adaptability or self-erasure? What do you consider to be the difference between healthy role-shifting and burnout-inducing masking?
• The Hidden Connector. Gus embodies quiet influence and value created through long-term generosity, consistency, and relationships rather than status or self-promotion. What makes certain people “super-connectors,” and how does that play out in technical or remote-first industries like MSPs?

About Rising Tide and our Book Club

Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.

Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. In Fall/Winter 2025, we’re walking through The Go-Giver, chapter by chapter.

If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link.
Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.

‍

About this Series

This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Fall 2025 book club, where we’re reading The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann.

If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:

• Chapter One – The Go-Getter for an introduction on how to use these Discussion Questions
• Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here

Chapter Summary

In Chapter 9, Susan, we find Joe at home after an exhausting day at work. How will he put the Third Law of Stratospheric Success into practice when he doesn’t even feel like he’s got the energy to talk about what he’s learned?

Discussion Questions

Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!

• What are ways that you can give without keeping score in your business and personal relationships?
• Does this chapter tell us anything about Joe’s growth throughout the story?

Rising Tide Input for your Consideration

• We found it interesting that Joe is applying the laws naturally in this chapter!
• Listening openly and without expectations is often one of the best things we can give.  
• In long-term relationships, it’s important to consider emotional triggers and past experiences, sometimes old conflicts can amplify reactions at home vs. work.
• It's important to note that routines can be healthy but must be flexible.

About Rising Tide and our Book Club

Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.

Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. In Fall/Winter 2025, we’re walking through The Go-Giver, chapter by chapter.

If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link.
Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.

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About this Series

This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Fall 2025 book club, where we’re reading The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann.

If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:

• Chapter One – The Go-Getter for an introduction on how to use these Discussion Questions
• Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here

Chapter Summary

In Chapter 8, The Law of Influence, Joe meets Sam, another salesman who teaches us the Third Law: Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first.

Through this chapter, Sam shows Joe that the most powerful value you can offer is yourself, and that real success in business comes from genuine connection rather than scorekeeping.

Discussion Questions

Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!

• What do you think of what Sam had to say in this chapter? Which parts do you agree with? Which parts do you not?
• How does what Sam was describing differ from what you think of when you hear about “networking”?
• Where do you catch yourself keeping score in business or personal relationships?
• Who in your life is magnetic? What do you feel makes them that way; what are you attracted to? With that in mind, what do you think makes people truly magnetic?
• Any changes we could make with our clients based on Sam’s message?

Rising Tide Input for your Consideration

• Funny Friends sitcom scene about selfless good deeds: Friends - A Selfless Good Deed‍
• Have you experienced MSP/IT sales cycles where people over-optimize pitch tactics instead of building relationships? Where does that fail the business and the customer?
• Ways you can give
  • Absorb the cost when mistakes happen to protect customer relationships.
  • Don’t bill for trivial work (e.g., one-minute fixes).
  • Gives clients extra time on calls; they reciprocate by ending early sometimes.
• Can giving without expectation still align with business goals? What about “takers” who sour the experience for everyone else?  
  • In our group, we generally agreed that authenticity improves long-term wins.
  • It’s worth considering that “Keeping score” can be directly tied into burnout, and especially in service roles where emotional labor is high. Perhaps not keeping track is better for your mental health
  • It’s worth taking courage from open-source communities, where contribution often precedes compensation!

About Rising Tide and our Book Club

Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.

Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. In Fall/Winter 2025, we’re walking through The Go-Giver, chapter by chapter.

If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link.
Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.