Conquer Your Shortcomings For Personal and Professional MSP Success

We all have our quirks and eccentricities. Some are harmless, others not so much. But they define us and keep us human. Overcoming the ones that negatively impact your MSP business or your team members is a terrific way to bolster your chances at personal and professional success.

A textbook example is Michael Einbinder-Schatz, the President of Jobecca Technology Group, a very successful cybersecurity and managed IT services provider in the Philadelphia region. In a recent “Sunny’s Silver Linings” podcast, he shared his MSP journey that included – believe it or not –graduating college with a degree in film and no computer or business background!

He effectively overcame a lack of computer and business knowledge by learning from the school of hard knocks. But what really caught my attention were the personal shortcomings that Michael had to overcome to grow personally and professionally. He laid them out in three key lessons:

1. Get out of your comfort zone – Michael learned that he could grow by taking forays outside of his comfort zone. There are three zones – your comfort zone (where you feel most happy and secure), your uncomfortable zone (places where you really don’t want to go), and your fear zone (places where you never want to go). He suggested that MSP owners take forays into their fear zones, then assess the result and they’ll find “that it didn’t kill you”. The result: Your comfort zone expands, opening up new opportunities for your business and helping you overcome your fears.

2. Candor – In his MSP business, complete candor is a core value. They aren’t afraid to deliver straight talk to clients and employees, including delivering bad news. But, he warned, candor without responsibility, accountability, creativity, and a team spirit can be fatal. Why? Because then it’s just criticizing. In one moment of candor, his team deemed him too defensive regarding some of his opinions. He recognized this to be true and effectively addressed it, improving himself personally in this area.

3. Embrace “Wrongness” – Welcome the fact that you could be dead wrong about something which you passionately believe in. By owning being wrong and then releasing it, he said that it opened up other possibilities for his team to resolve issues, to allow greater creativity to flow from them, and the opportunity to put into practice his organization’s core value of candor.

Click here to listen to the complete “Sunny’s Silver Linings” podcast with Michael Einbinder-Schatz

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Kam Kaila

Kam Attwal-Kaila is a Partner and President of IT By Design. Having been with the company since 2005, Kam is ITBD’s Brand Ambassador and responsible for building the brand worldwide. She leads the company’s Community initiatives and is the engine behind Build IT; a channel event that facilitates sharing of knowledge by channel educators through templates, tools, and scorecards that help MSPs grow. Along with being a Partner of ITBD, she is the recipient of numerous accolades for channel excellence, including multiple Woman of the Channel and Power 70 accolades, and Influencer of the Year. She is a leader in providing educational content to the IT Channel at other events, webinars, and channel publications.

Kam has a double master’s degree from Rutgers University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She has been a professor at Rutgers University and Hudson County College. A mother of three, she is actively involved with her family and community work.

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