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Will Ominky and Nerdio's Winning Approach to MSP Events Like Pax 8 Beyond

• Ian Richardson

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Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?

Serial entrepreneurs, life partners and business partners, they have successfully exited from multiple businesses (IT, call center, real estate, marketing) and they help other business owners create their own versions of success.

Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.

Carrie has helped create and execute successful outbound sales strategies for over 1200 technology-focused businesses including MSPs, manufacturers, distributors and SaaS firms.

Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com
Book time with Carrie here!


Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.

Carrie Richardson:

Good afternoon everybody. Welcome to the WIN podcast. My name is Carrie Richardson. I'm a partner at Fox and Crow. And with me today is Will Oinky, who is the VP of MSP Sales for Nerdio and a sponsor at this year's PAX 8. Beyond. How are you doing today, Will?

Will Ominksy:

I'm doing fantastic. Really excited to be here talking about, Nerdio and PAX 8 beyond. What a great event.

Carrie Richardson:

I'm excited. I didn't go last year, but I did go to the first one. And this will be our first major event sponsorship for Fox and Crow. These interviews are great for me because they're giving me tips and ideas for what Fox and Crow might do at Pax8 Beyond. Before we got started, we talked about how Nerdio is now hosting their own conference. you've chosen some interesting locations for those events. how has planning your own event changed how you approach sponsoring an event?

Will Ominksy:

It's a great question and I think it's pretty interesting'cause it's a very different perspective when you've put on your own event. There's a lot of behind the scenes things that happen. you wanna make sure everybody's comfortable having a good time and, getting something out of it. So when we now sponsor an event and at PAX 8 beyond, we're thinking about how can we ensure the people that we're engaging with or take time, to come over to our booth maybe, or one of our breakout sessions are gonna get the most out of it. being thoughtful about curating content and having conversations that are gonna help them propel their business. It's less about us telling them how great and amazing Nerdio is. it's more about starting with talking to them asking questions about their business and what are their goals and what are they looking to get out of the event, and then giving them information. Or helping them achieve those goals. that's how we think about it. A lot of learnings with putting on our own event and doing the same things, getting feedback and using that to shape our go-to market approach.

Carrie Richardson:

NerdioCon has been going well. You've got three years under your belt now where's next?

Will Ominksy:

We are still in the planning stages for next year. We will be making an announcement fairly soon about where it's gonna be. I'm very excited about it. as you know, we try and pick fun different locations, we found that, most of our, attendees are from North America and many North Americans don't have passports. So that can certainly be a struggle. For the sponsors it can be, logistically difficult, to ship stuff and get a booth down there and those types of things. we do love doing things internationally, but, this year was our first year doing it in the States, and it worked out really well.

Carrie Richardson:

So for PAX 8 beyond this year, what preparation has Nerdio done? We're a month out, what are your expectations for the event?

Will Ominksy:

Yeah, so we have two different approaches that we're taking because we've been partnered with PAX 8, and in the MSP community for a number of years now. for us it's really about a strategy to make sure we get a lot of time with our existing partners, understand where they are in their journey in terms of Microsoft adoption, where we focus, and also a separate strategy around making sure that we can get the message out about who we are, what we do and how we can help MSPs who have not started working with us yet. Everything from partner dinners to what we're gonna be showcasing at our booth or in our breakout sessions. One of the big ones is that nerdio, for example, is in the Microsoft 365 management game. For years, we've been focused on Azure infrastructure and Azure Virtual Desktop. But we also have this. great product and seen a lot of growth on the M 365 management side, which I think a lot of people don't even know that we do yet.

Carrie Richardson:

Tell us a little bit about that.

Will Ominksy:

Obviously with being in the Microsoft ecosystem for so long and working with MSPs, they, said,"Hey, you helped us so much with Azure Virtual Desktop. But that's only a small portion of what we do day to day in the Microsoft ecosystem. We also manage. Microsoft 365, and that can be difficult. we need a multi-tenant management tool. Nerdio feels like a logical co-organization that could support us there. a couple years ago we started investigating that. in November, of 2024, we made a very large release to help with things like OneDrive Teams Intune and Autopilot, Features that you get when you buy M 365, but many MSPs are not using those features, right? They buy this license. you get your Microsoft apps in exchange but they're not able to standardize all of their customers and there aren't many tools out there that can do that very seamlessly and easily. One of the things I love about Microsoft is they have a solution for everything. Now, is the MSP industry specifically gonna see value in it, And are their SMBs, gonna see value in it or find some other product they give you a lot of flexibility and they're including more in Standard SMB flavor licenses, like business premium. look at Defender, a highly rated security product. included in business premium. And MSPs are like, well, I don't use it'cause I don't know how to, I go to these events and there's many security products that I can use. And one of our goals is giving the MSP, flexibility, right? And I'm not saying go replace one of these other amazing tools because we work with many great, partners out there. It will also be at the event. but we all know security. It's like an onion, right? You have all these different layers. So you're paying for defender. Let's make it easy to enable it, and have multiple layers in your security stack.

Carrie Richardson:

I haven't healed from our SharePoint migration 10 years ago.

Will Ominksy:

I remember selling when I was at my MSP, SBS servers and I would talk up how SharePoint, you get this with your SBS server and it's amazing. in a lot of places, SharePoint's also where things go to die. You gotta give it the care and feeding that it needs. There's limitations in, character length, number of files, number of nested folders and things like that.

Carrie Richardson:

I'm making the switch to an Apple computer this month. It'll be, my first time not using a Windows interface in my entire business career.

Will Ominksy:

My teenage daughter had to have her Mac and you know, I'm the computer guy, right?'cause I'm in the industry even though I'm in sales. anytime she needs help, I'm trying to figure out the interface and do it. I love my iPhone, don't get me wrong. but a Mac is difficult. That's a great use case for an Azure virtual desktop, right? You can stream down your business critical applications. We see that all the time.

Carrie Richardson:

I'll send it over to Ian. He's in charge of that, although I think he still got a little PTSD from, back in the tech support days. He's not a big fan of, people asking him how things work when it comes to computers these days.

Will Ominksy:

It's so funny how that happens though. Like even in my neighborhood. I'm the computer guy, right? I'm the VP of sales, but, I'm, probably better than all of them, in terms of my technical ability. But I have no formal, technical expertise or training.

Carrie Richardson:

What's the equivalent of, let me Google that for you, except for ai. Let me chat. GPT that for you It's great if you understand what you're doing already. But I don't know how great it is for creating plans for things that you've never tried to do before. I feel like you could probably troubleshoot a computer provided your computer is working at the time.

Will Ominksy:

I feel like people, salespeople, just have that kind of personality in them, we're less afraid sometimes just to try new things and see if it works out. so sometimes we fall into those things, right? Like, okay, I read the prompt. Let me try that. Oh, I just destroyed my computer. Okay, I'll go back to step one.

Carrie Richardson:

That's me, except with my Webflow website. If I have one big regret from 2024, it would be the migration over to Webflow. So we're both going to be on the floor at PAX 8 this year. Tell me a little bit about how your team prepares.

Will Ominksy:

There's a lot of things that go on behind the scenes in preparing. One of ours is a schedule of events, who's gonna be where, and mix up different individual strengths, with that. For example, we create our booth schedule, who's gonna be at the booth? We wanna make sure that there's somebody that understands sales, somebody that understands Azure, as well as M 365 now that we do that, and somebody that's technical. Somebody that can walk through a demo, answer questions, those types of things. Then we have other people preparing for, our breakout session, Walking around there, having conversations, making sure people know, when our breakout session is asking them to attend, and getting feedback. Also building in time for us to regroup. You go into an event, with a plan, this is exactly how it's gonna be and this is what we're gonna do and it's gonna be great. Then you learn some things. I've been. At other events where we do multiple breakout sessions and we go do the first one. We always leave time afterwards, right? To regroup what worked, what didn't work, what did people like, what did people not like? and then spend time to readjust. I don't think It's fair to the people that take time out of their day, they spend a lot of money, and time being able to come to these events we wanna make sure that they get the most value out of it. And it's also just for our team too, making sure that there's some built in time. We still, most of our people that are there still have a normal job, right? So being able to go and catch up on some email, make sure you don't have that customer or partner waiting on you, to respond. and then a little bit of rest. Because nobody wants to talk to Will standing in a booth who hasn't slept, at all. and is not gonna be able to have a high quality conversation or be present in the moment.

Carrie Richardson:

Yeah, you don't know this from experience, You're just guessing.

Will Ominksy:

Correct. Exactly. I mean, I've been around Nerdio, since the very early days where it was really three of us going to every single show. Tony Kai and I did 8 weeks back to back on the road together. we saw each other more than we saw our own families. we love those times, but it's nice having a bigger team. it's also important to make sure you're training the next group that's coming up and has career goals to learn from the mistakes that maybe we made in the early days.

Carrie Richardson:

So are you more of a morning go to the breakfast person or are you late night, go to the party person?

Will Ominksy:

So it's funny, in the past probably year, year and a half, I've switched. I used to be the late night guy. Like, don't get me up early in the morning. I'll do all the late night stuff. you'll find me hanging out at the bar, talking to people, going to the parties, that type of thing. And now, I would rather be in bed by like nine o'clock, and be up having my coffee early in the morning.

Carrie Richardson:

That's how I feel every day now. I was never much of a night person anyway, because by 11 o'clock it's getting a little drunk out. And when you don't drink it wears on you.

Will Ominksy:

Exactly. And I think there is that turning point, but you hear from mSPs all the time, and I notice it as well. one of the great things about a huge event like PAX 8 beyond is you have like-minded MSPs together, but it's those side conversations, those real conversations that you have with each other. Not the Hi, I'm Will from Nerdio, and I go into my standard pitch or something like that. That's not what we're there for. tell me what we can do better. Tell me what you're struggling with. Tell me about your business. And that's, I think one of the powerful things about, an event like this, that. people get a lot out of, connecting different MSPs together, that's something that we try to do, as part of our strategy as well, I might have somebody come up saying, I'm really struggling with a VD or, Microsoft in general, or How do I price or package this? And I'm like, wait a second. I have one of my partners who has figured this out. Let me connect you two together, instead of hearing from me, right? You don't wanna hear from the vendor. You wanna hear from an MSP who's experienced this. Because I have a siloed view of the world. I'm not worrying about how you're, automating your QuickBooks to send invoices. I'm just worrying about the execution of Microsoft. And I think that's, really powerful here. and then they can also talk about, well, I use PAX 8 and these five other vendors on their line card, and they can talk about the integration of all of that and really make their MSP better.

Carrie Richardson:

What's your conversion rate like from, initial conversation at the booth to signed partner? And do you attribute first point of contact or last point of contact, or do you have some complicated way to measure?

Will Ominksy:

We have a complicated way. We've tried all of the above. What we do is spread out all the points of contact and, evenly balance it, in terms of, acquisition costs We find we end up having multiple conversations and meeting people at multiple events. Sometimes they come to our events or our training, camps that we run as well. We found that the best way to do that. Our average sales cycle is usually around three months, but how you count that? One of the things that Nerdio does is we provide free internal use licenses, to MSPs. a lot of times we start at the booth, and especially if somebody's never looked at Nerdio, or maybe they're looking at virtual desktops and they've never done this before. They're not just gonna roll this out to their 50 employee company, or customer. They're gonna want to try this out, make sure they understand how to manage it. usually, we're looking to book conversations coming out of that how can we help you? What are your desires? What are your goals? the next step very often is, let's either get you some training or let's do hands-on training with those free internal use licenses we provide. And throughout that we're trying to plan, well how can we help you with your customer, either bring them to a VD or managing Microsoft 365 more efficiently? so that's really what we're looking to do is have those conversations and open up the door. I don't know if others, take the same approach. If you come up to our booth and talk to us or in the hallways and have a conversation, we're not gonna push a meeting if you don't wanna talk to us. You don't see value. Great. that's fine. let us tell you what we do, and let's not book a meeting. If that doesn't make sense. we'll ask your permission, can we put you on our mailing list and, send you updates once a month just so you know what's going on. if not, then we won't put you on our mailing list. And maybe we'll find some value down the road.

Carrie Richardson:

Favorite swag or swag that people seem to like the most? what have you done that people really liked?

Will Ominksy:

Yeah. So, they really like socks. we're big into doing clothes: hoodie, things like that. Something that you're not gonna be like, oh, that's cool, and then end up in the garbage later. exactly. So, that's generally what we like to do. we'll try and mix if there's a theme of the event, you know, do something like that. we just went to Robin Robins event and that had a Willy Wonka theme. so we had, candy and, things like that. We had cotton candy we were handing out and, stuffed animals, people seemed to like that. But really I think a lot of it comes down to clothes. And actually, surprisingly enough. we all work in technology, but people love notebooks and pens. we still bring notebooks and pens everywhere. a lot of us are old school, you gotta write it down.

Carrie Richardson:

I'm a big fan.

Will Ominksy:

Yeah, we've tried all types of things. Little puzzles and playing cards. those are decent. Sometimes at events you'll see people, sitting there playing games, at the bar, late night, things like that. But, clothes are good. The other good thing about clothes, if you over order, you're able to donate them somewhere, And make good use out of'em. So we like to do that as well.

Carrie Richardson:

So at the event, you'll just find someplace to take them and drop them off instead of packing them home or shipping them

Will Ominksy:

Usually there's a donation box at a minimum somewhere, where you can drop them off.

Carrie Richardson:

Great idea. especially for socks. That's something that I think homeless shelters never have enough of.

Will Ominksy:

Yep. Exactly.

Carrie Richardson:

How many Nerdo t-shirts are there at the Goodwill in Palm Springs right now.

Will Ominksy:

Exactly. I've also thought about things like, the rest of my team's like, no, we shouldn't do that. But I was like, why not? Why not toothbrushes and toothpaste?'cause you can donate that. I just got back from vacation last week. My wife forgot toothpaste. Luckily I had plenty of toothpaste, so we got to share. But you know, those necessities that people do forget.

Carrie Richardson:

We gave out sunscreen one year. we gave it out in a little square package with our logo on the front and they ended up looking like condoms, which we weren't anticipating. Going to Miami. That'll be amazing. It was not amazing. So I think, the takeaway for me on that one was have them send you some samples before you order thousands of something, they show you the front, they show you the back and the bleed line and everything. But in this case, we had no way of knowing that when it was all put together, it was not going to have the desired outcome.

Will Ominksy:

It's important to do that too. also things like your booth or printed materials, we always like to get many, many eyes on it. it's so easy. Your head's down, in the planning committee and looking at it. you show it to somebody else and they're like, why did you do that? Do you realize what that looks like? Or, I'm glad I shared this with somebody else.

Carrie Richardson:

Yeah, a set of eyes from outside the industry is probably helpful I'll give it to my kid. Do you understand this?

Will Ominksy:

Does it make sense to you? We run a sales training like how to sell Azure and things like that. one of the things that I learned when I was at my m ms p doing sales, that I always recommend MSPs do is, take your proposal to your customers and have, your kid, your wife, your mom, your husband, whoever, look at it. Somebody that's non-technical, that's not in the industry. hand it to'em, don't say anything and say, do you understand this? half the time they're like, yeah, I have no idea what this is. It's like, all right. Time for a rewrite or redesign. I think I'm most excited about having conversations with the MSP community about all, Nerdio has to offer. combined with that, where should nerdio be looking to go next? Where are the next things we can do to help MSPs? I've been in the MSP industry for a long time, but I don't have all the answers. Nerdio is very much an outside in organization, so the feedback is invaluable to us. And also the connections with, people at PAX 8 themselves, right? They see so much, they give us a lot of feedback about what to do. Microsoft will be there, which is also exciting for us. having those types of conversations, figuring out, where we can go next, where we can add additional value. Make MSP's lives easier. We have a new enhanced support package where, we can actually do a lot of stuff that MSPs tend to struggle with in the Microsoft ecosystem when their customers are down or having emergencies and need to figure it out. We have that internal knowledge. that's really what I'm most looking forward to.

Carrie Richardson:

Great. I'm looking forward to seeing you there. Thanks for joining us today on Win, and we'll see you in Denver in June.

Will Ominksy:

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

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Carrie Richardson

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