Welcome to Drop the Hype

Welcome. Let's get back to basics.

Hype is good and we need it. Let's get that out of the way first.

Hype creates awareness, unlocks budgets, builds business cases and gets people excited about what's coming next. Without it, nobody's buying and nobody's building. Every wave — Cloud, SD-WAN, Zero Trust, SASE, DEX, AI and on… started with hype, and that's exactly how it should be.

But hype doesn't standardise. It doesn't scale. And it definitely doesn't make you repeatable profit.

This blog was born out of 15 years of frustration at the disconnect between technology vendors and the managed service providers they're trying to partner with. I've spent my career at the intersection of both worlds — distribution, vendors, VARs, MSPs, MSSPs, GSIs, CSPs, ISVs — across four continents and thousands of partner conversations.

And the same pattern keeps playing out.

Vendors lead with technology. MSPs get sold a vision instead of a foundation. Services get built around hype and technology instead of customer problems and service deliverables. And somewhere between the excitement and the execution, profitability quietly disappears.

There's a specific order to how a successful managed service should be built. The customer comes first. Then the challenge. Then the service offering. Then — and only then — the technology. Almost everything that goes wrong happens when that order gets reversed.

Drop the Hype exists to cut through the noise and provide share observations of what causes pain and provide ideas about how things can be done better.

Ultimately I am on a mission to change the way vendors support the growth of the MSP market and I will focus on critical phases between hype and profitability that can be an afterthought or in some cases forgotten about entirely. That gap is the most underserved part of the entire managed services lifecycle. The approach that most vendors struggle with. The phases where the MSP is left to work it out for themselves and can create a frustration at being misunderstood (When they are treated like a reseller.)

This isn't a vendor blog. It isn't an MSP blog. It's just observations and thoughts written at the intersection of both — for practice leads, service architects, product managers, channel leaders, and anyone else responsible for building something that has to work in the real world.

I wouldn't class myself as "a blogger". I started this based on feedback over the years of people telling me the approach resonated, the observations touched on the pain and it was refreshing to having someone talk sense, mainly from LinkedIn posts and in meetings.

If it resonates, share it. If it doesn't, move on.