9 Jan 24

MSP Evolution: My Journey, Your Guide – Practical Insights & Exercises for Growth – Part 3 (Finding New Superstars)

2024-01-09T10:35:32+00:00January 9th, 2024|

In our last post, we talked about how to attract employees who are already superstars. In this post, we’re going to talk about how to find and attract those potential superstar employees from scratch. The people you are looking for here may never have been in a technical role but have the potential to grow into something spectacular. How [...]

5 Jan 24

MSP Evolution: My Journey, Your Guide – Practical Insights & Exercises for Growth – Part 2 (Staff – Attracting)

2024-01-05T13:17:01+00:00January 5th, 2024|

Attracting the right candidates to your role  This starts with you first, the MSP owner or the person responsible for hiring. You likely have a good idea of the kind of person that you would like to hire already. For this section, I’m going to ask you to temporarily put those ideas to one side. The type of person [...]

3 Jan 24

MSP Evolution: My Journey, Your Guide – Practical Insights & Exercises for Growth – Part 1 (Staff)

2024-01-03T12:55:20+00:00January 3rd, 2024|

This post is going to be the first in a series of blog posts where I go through the challenges, pitfalls and wins that I experienced in my 15 years as a CTO growing and maintaining an MSP. My hope is that you take something away from the lessons I have learned during that time. I worked very closely [...]

18 Sep 23

Ninja PowerShell Script – Add Monitors to Custom Field

2023-09-18T11:02:42+01:00September 18th, 2023|

Note: If you're interested in Ninja scripts, you will find another blog here with helpful scripts too for NinjaOne at https://mspp.io/ - by my friend and fellow Product Manager Luke Whitelock. This one was slightly harder than I initially anticipated because of how the data is stored, but here's how to achieve this: Creating the Custom Field Go to [...]

17 May 23

Using signed scripts in NinjaOne

2023-05-17T23:46:02+01:00May 17th, 2023|

Hello friends! It has been an embarrassingly long time since I last posted. For those of you who don't know, I'm now a Product Lead at NinjaOne on their RMM side. I've been super busy over the past 10 months helping to outline and build the RMM of my dreams! As IT service providers transition in to the new [...]

24 Aug 22

Important qualities needed for leading technology in a growing MSP

2022-08-24T23:58:18+01:00August 24th, 2022|

This post is going to be subjective. It won't apply to all companies, and it won’t apply to all people. It’s based on my own experience, and I’d be interested to hear about other people’s experiences too! If you were to ask me seven or eight years ago what I believe a CTO did in a company, I’d have [...]

22 Dec 21

Diagnosing broken/misbehaving role definitions in ConnectWise Automate; come for a trip in the mystery machine

2021-12-22T01:44:13+00:00December 22nd, 2021|

Hey Gang! We're approaching Christmas, and what do people want at Christmas? They want to diagnose broken/misbehaving Automate role definitions! Firstly - if you're building your own role definition, know that you cannot use a { or } in a role definition. You may need to get creative in PowerShell if you want to do an if statement. Here is an [...]

17 Dec 21

Why I think we need a different, human-centric approach to honest security discussions

2021-12-17T15:14:44+00:00December 17th, 2021|

I'm sure we can all agree that there is a massive knowledge and skill gap when it comes to security, probably across most engineers and MSPs in the world. The threats and risks are evolving so quickly that keeping on top of all of them is next to impossible for most standard MSPs. It's even exceptionally difficult even where [...]

23 Nov 21

Why creating fake people to market to your existing partners is a profoundly bad idea

2021-11-23T13:25:24+00:00November 23rd, 2021|

MSP Vendors - learn a valuable lesson from this mistake made by ConnectWise recently. Take a look at this e-mail they sent out recently to existing partners, as posted in the v-connectwise Slack channel: This drew peoples attention, primarily because this person shares a name with Ashley Cooper (a good friend of mine and a huge presence in the [...]

25 Oct 21

Secure Application Model – For the Layman and Step by Step

2022-02-02T19:29:21+00:00October 25th, 2021|

Hello Everyone, You've seen me banging on about GitHub - KelvinTegelaar/CIPP recently. I know a lot of people want to get involved and running on this but I know a number of people have struggled with the Secure Application Model setup of this - and honestly, it's a particularly difficult process to follow, so I am going to walk [...]

16 Oct 21

I’ve been hard at work contributing to CIPP (an Open Source Improved Partner Portal)

2021-10-16T12:41:58+01:00October 16th, 2021|

If you've not heard about CIPP yet, it is an improved partner portal and is available here https://github.com/KelvinTegelaar/CIPP - have a look at the documentation at the bottom for screenshots and an explanation of what it is. I'd actually been developing something similar using Azure Functions for a couple of months so thought it was well worth the effort to [...]

13 Oct 21

Detect non-standard Antivirus (Like Defender for Endpoint) using Automate AV Detection

2021-11-03T21:31:08+00:00October 13th, 2021|

Manual AV Magic This post is aimed at people who are looking to detect anti-virus in a none standard way or are looking to detect Microsoft Defender for Endpoint using Automate. Firstly, this is not as simple as just importing a virus definition for Automate. Because Defender for Endpoint is essentially an extension for Windows Defender, there doesn't appear [...]

29 Sep 21

Why you’ll no longer be able to purchase ConnectWise Premium Reports on my site

2021-09-29T00:56:27+01:00September 29th, 2021|

For the astute among you, you may have noticed that I've recently removed all premium reports for sale from gavsto.com. There are a number of reasons I have made this decision, and I think it's only fair that I give people a 'heads up' on why I chose to do so. I really do believe that the Report Center [...]

29 Jul 21

What I learned from helping to Judge a Sysadmin CTF with hundreds of people

2021-09-28T23:56:58+01:00July 29th, 2021|

I recently finished helping to judge and moderate the CyberDrain CTF challenge, a free capture the flag event organised and written by my good friend Kelvin Tegelaar - and what an event it has been. I thought it would be interesting to blog about some of the things that surprised me when judging, including a few things that happened [...]

3 Jul 21

How secure is your RMM, and what can you do to better secure it?

2021-09-28T23:59:48+01:00July 3rd, 2021|

My MSP does not use Kaseya VSA. That doesn't mean though that I didn't have a sleepless night this Friday 2nd July. I was ready to help, and offered my assistance to impacted MSPs for free. It felt like the right thing to do. Whenever any event like this occurs, it threatens and damages all of us. It erodes [...]

26 May 21

Deploying the ConnectWise Automate Agent through Intune, or how to deploy a PowerShell script as an application in Intune

2021-09-29T00:00:06+01:00May 26th, 2021|

Happy May, everyone! I've seen this question popping up quite a bit recently and thought it would make a worthwhile blog post. There are certainly a number of different ways to approach this, but I have what I think is the most convenient long term solution. Instead of putting the agent installer, in the form of EXE or MSI [...]

8 Mar 21

Monitoring with PowerShell – Deploy the Microsoft Safety Scanner (MSERT)

2021-09-29T00:01:00+01:00March 8th, 2021|

After seeing that the MSERT tool by Microsoft (The Microsoft Safety Scanner) detected recent Exchange threats https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsofts-msert-tool-now-finds-web-shells-from-exchange-server-attacks/, I thought it would be prudent as a secondary measure to deploy the tool, scan, and make sure everything across our estate was clean. Although I didn't have that problem in my environment, I thought it acted as a good tool [...]

27 Feb 21

RMM providers – it’s time to pivot, or your product will die

2021-09-29T00:02:07+01:00February 27th, 2021|

What actually drives the features needed in an RMM? MSPs and their staff certainly have a vested interested in what those features are, but ultimately an RMM is a tool used to service a client's IT estate. It might sound obvious, but it's important to re-iterate that as the client's IT changes, so do the needs of the MSP, [...]

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