How Microsoft Partners Can Grow Faster with Business Central, AI, and P2P Collaboration

Welcome to the IAMCP Profiles in Partnership, the podcast that showcases how Microsoft Partners and IAMCP members boost their business by collaborating with other members and partners. I'm your cohost Anthony Carrano and each episode I sit down with some of the most innovative and successful leaders in the Microsoft ecosystem to uncover what's actually driving growth, not just in theory, but in the real world. Today's guest is Rick McCutcheon, a longtime Microsoft MVP in business applications and the founder and host of PartnerTalks, one of the most recognized podcasts in the BizApps community, now with over 300 episodes.

Rick has spent more than two decades working across CRM, ERP, and ISV strategy, and today advises partners on growth, positioning, and navigating the rapidly evolving Microsoft landscape. Few people have had as many conversations with Microsoft partners as Rick has, which gives him a unique vantage point on where the ecosystem is headed. So in today's episode, we're gonna dive into convergence of business applications, AI deployment, and MSP services, and what it means for SMB focused Microsoft partners heading here into 2026.

Let's get into it. Rick, welcome to the podcast. Really excited to have you on today. Thanks, Anthony.

Well, let's start off. Maybe tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and PartnerTalks. Okay, so where do we start? Like, I've been in the Microsoft ecosystem for some time.

We were talking a little bit earlier that it looks like in twenty five years in this world really working with Dynamics and Microsoft. So a long, long history. I came through as a CRM guy. I'm currently a Microsoft Business Applications they call it CE MVP, customer engagement, but that's what we call CRM in this world.

So that's what I am. It's not necessarily what I do so much anymore. I do some CRM deployments specifically for ISV partners and some SI partners who sell biz apps. I've got a bunch of configurations that I've built over the years for that.

But my main, you know, main world today is PartnerTalks. For folks listening, tell us a little bit about PartnerTalks. I mean, because I know you've guys have been around. You've done hundreds of shows.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about PartnerTalks. Okay. So PartnerTalks. We started PartnerTalks back around 2019.

And as an MVP, I spoke at a lot of the conferences. And what happened was people were starting to ask me to be on their podcasts. And you know, I've been a speaker for a long time and they asked me some questions and I'm thinking, well, this is not too difficult. Maybe I'll figure it up for myself.

So I went on to YouTube and I started, you know, looking at how to do a webcast podcast sort of thing and looked pretty simple. So actually I took a copy of Zoom at the time, loaded it up, and it was even a free version of Zoom and phoned a couple of friends and said, Hey, do you want to come on my show? They said, What's your show? I said, I haven't got a name yet, but we'll figure it out.

So we just came in. We did a man on the street, well, person on the street interview about who you are and what you do, And it became PartnerTalks when I went online and partnertalks.com was available. It sort of started a brand for me.

Just completed our three hundredth show last week. It went up with Cecilia Flombaum from Microsoft, and we're very excited about its growth and what we've got coming in, 2026. Yeah. Well, congratulations.

300 shows. I can, should probably have a side conversation with you to pick your brain on us a few things just around that in and of itself. You know, it's it's hard to believe I've done 300 shows, but every successful podcaster that talked about it said you need to do show every week. No matter what, you do a show every week.

And I said, well, that's not too hard to, you know, to it's well, it's a lot of work to do, but the strategy is pretty simple. So I just started doing one every week, and it sort of worked out. That's fantastic. That that's great.

Well, kudos to you, man. Kudos to you. And we'll have, you know, right off the gate, like, we'll have a link to the show, you know, in our in our show notes. So for folks listening here who who wanna check it out, you can you can check that out at partnertalks.

com. So, you know, Rick, let me ask you from your perspective on actually 300, you know, partner talk episodes. What are you seeing as some of the biggest shifts that you're seeing right now, like in the Microsoft SMB ecosystem, you know, heading into this year? So if we're talking SMB, it's a really, really strong market.

But if we talk about the Microsoft SMB, that could be a company with $500,000,000 in revenue. Right? But theoretically, if we start to say an SMB company is someone from 20 employees to two, three, four hundred employees, I think that's what we typically think as an SMB. In the BizApps, my world of CRM and ERP, it is on fire.

Everybody I'm talking to right now is focused on growth and just getting more people working for them in order to do a couple of things. One, if we look at Business Central in particular, which is sort of the cornerstone of our SMB world. That product was once Microsoft NAV. Microsoft just announced 50,000 customers at the last Directions Conference.

I got a feeling it's going to grow 10%, 20%, 30% this year because we've got so many people coming over from NAB upgrading to Business Central, which moves them to the cloud. We've also got Great Plains GP, and there's still 15,000, 20,000 GP users out there. They have to move because Microsoft has given an end date to that product. They're starting to move over.

And Business Central really is in a nice position. It kind of looks at, you know, the QuickBooks Enterprise customers. When you start to outgrow that, where do you go? And we found that, you know, customers were going to things like NetSuite, Acumatica, and now Business Central.

So they're in a very, very big market, and it's growing. So when we talk about professional services, that's what's really what our partners are working on these days, building these out into complete ERP enterprise, enterprise type applications, for a mid market customer. If I can, like, piggyback on because you mentioned BC as a cornerstone, I can ask this because I know Rudy and I have clients that provide that. They're also just be curious if you're seeing also just because of just the the all the integration with the Microsoft Office, you know, suite of products as another real, you know, thing that's attractive to a lot of SMBs.

What are your thoughts on that? Absolutely. So, you know, Microsoft has taken the BizApp people that are my people, and we've moved them into modern work. Right?

So we're all sort of becoming one. So we're starting to see and I do some work with TD Synnex, one of the big distributors. We have the SMB, the AI partner show every month on MS Dynamics World. So that's another thing that I'm involved with.

But we're talking about SMB partners and how they grow their business. We're getting our SMB partners that were typically your CRM partner, your new ERP partner. Well, last couple of years everybody with a ERP practice kind of does CRM now. Not so much CRM to ERP, but that way.

So those have come together. We're starting to see the managed service providers coming into our space in a couple of ways. They're either building a practice, buying a practice, or they're doing the P2P thing. But we're starting to see them come across into our space.

So I think that has a lot to do with the growth. And yes, our BizApps partners never had a lot to do with Office. Right, never had a lot to do with Teams, never had a lot to do with Azure. Now they're starting to build that practice out.

Another thing that's in the ERP space, especially around Business Central, if you deploy a Business Central core system, there's probably going to be five to 10 ISVs attached to it. So there's going to be AP automation people. There's going to be marketing automation people. There's going to be possibly dynamic CRM or other CRMs attached to it.

There's going to be logistics software. There's going to be shipping software. Well, same thing almost. There's going to be warehouse management software.

So you start to see everything that runs a business. If you go up on the Microsoft marketplace and go ISVs, or they call them all software companies now that attach to Business Central, you'll get a list of at least 1,000 companies that build add on products. So that's what's the difference between, I think, really a biz apps company and someone who's used to manage services is all the professional services that we develop around these ISV products. So, Rick, I've got a few questions for you.

You know, Microsoft's really been pushing partners and really pushing the idea of becoming a frontier partner. So what does that actually mean for the SMB focused partners, in practical terms, versus theory? Oh, it means a lot. Right?

So we started to see this come down. Well, I I saw it really for the first time. I was at a a BizApps partner briefing put on by one of the user communities with a lot of Microsoft speakers in Redmond last July. And it really was evident that you need to become front to your partners, right?

You need to be the start of this movement of using AI. So if we look at partners using it in their own business, I've talked to a lot of partners. I use it myself. You know, how do we use these agents within our own business to make us more efficient, more effective?

And so we understand them more as well, because there's a lot of changes going on to these I hate to even call them products but into these products all the time. So we've got to learn how to deploy them. And then we've got to start to deploy them to our customers. So there's a different skill set, I think, when we look at SMB to enterprise, different set of rules.

And if we look at inside of ERP with Business Central, there's a lot of movement with Microsoft building these agents. And then over here we've got CRM, which runs the core's dataverse. We've got another kind of set of agents being developed over there. So.

2025 was really a year of let's start to figure out how we're going to do this right and we're seeing 2026 as the year we're going to start deploying them. In fact, I do a series of webinars around partner talks too, and I'm doing one with a company called Boyer and Associates coming up in a week or so where we're doing a customer case study on some Business Central agents that were deployed into the field. So I know you mentioned you've worked closely with BizApps partners and MSPs.

How does AI adoption differ between those two models today? From internal use or for customers? For both, actually. Okay.

Well, I'm a BizApps guy, right? So I'm going to come from my lens. I think our stuff's a little more complicated. You know, we start to look at, you know, what I use in my office around AI copilot.

It's really cool. I mean, it saves me a lot of time and makes me look a lot smarter than I am. You want to write that paper? You want to write that response?

You want to write that RFP? It can be a lot of help there. So internally, I think we're kind of the same. When we deploy to a customer, I think we have more complex well, let's leave the Azure security guys out of this for a minute, right?

Because they're very complex, too. But we're dealing with large amounts of data and databases. And our greatest challenge today is getting these data models and data governance and the structure of the data, the quality of the data to a point where AI can make sense out of it. Right?

So a lot of companies when we walk in. You know we got marketing automation sitting over there doing one thing on a completely different server. We've got even CRM may not be attached all the way to the marketing automation, And then you may have ERP, you know, giving a feed to the CRM system. But there's no real two way sync between them.

So really, you're sitting there with three four five data sets that are all structured different. Lots of duplicates. We got to get them into one, right? And being a CRM guy, I personally think CRM should be the center of the universe.

But the ERP people think a little differently. So we've got to come to terms of where we're going to get this data. And maybe it's an Azure, right? So what are we going to do with this data?

Where are we going to put it? How are we going to get it structured to how we can use it? And that's the challenge for the partners. It's a much bigger challenge for our customers.

Yeah, I think I know the answer to this question, since you've been talking about this. But what are the real risks when SMB partners rush into AI without understanding data, security, and its delivery implications? And then how can they utilize P2P partnerships to help them mitigate the risk? Well, you know, how do they there's consulting groups out there.

I do some work with RightWay AI. A couple of one of them is my son, but the other one's been an AI MVP. And they're like a P2P agency that builds, works with the AI builds the agents, tests the agents. So they're working probably with, I don't know, a good dozen or so partners right now, building agents and getting them ready to go to market.

Okay, and it does take time. They have to fine tune them. They're out of the box looks easy, but getting them working in a real environment is a challenge. One of the things we've got to be aware of as we deploy them is the support.

Like we know how to support an application today because it does the same thing pretty much everywhere we put it. Once we put an agent out there, the support becomes a little bit trickier. Right, so I think we've got to get some real world experience in our own sandbox will say around these agents, and we're going to learn from that experience and be able to support them in the field. Let me ask you this, you know, as we kind of transition here, kind of this next set of questions, and it's something that I know you have a lot to talk about, where it's, you know, the high level of collaboration, you know, between with MSPs and and BizApps partners.

So historically, MSPs and BizApp partners have operated kind of like in parallel worlds. Why are those worlds converging now, and why does that matter for SMB growth? Well, when we look at the analysts out there today, they'll tell you that, you know, there's somewhere between six to eight partners in an enterprise account, Right? Doing different things.

We're going to find that, I think, in a lot of mid market types too. Maybe not so much on the SMB, but I think in the mid market you're going to find multiple types of consultants. So for years I was the CRM guy. You know, I'd let other partners deploy the CRM and then they would bring me in to redeploy it sometimes.

Just because I was an expert at CRM sales process, not even customer service process, marketing auto. I could do any type of sales process. So that's what I worked at, and partners brought me in to do that. So I think we're going to get more and more of that, even though the client saying, know what, everything's in the Microsoft cloud, we you know, we just want a partner that can manage all this.

I think partners are going to need to bring in experts because we are, you know, with agents, we are going to be more on the process side, the business side with customers understanding their business and how they run. It's not going to be. Here's how you build a workflow, right? Here's how AP automation works.

It's going to be something different. It's going to be how Rudy and Anthony work together. What do they do? What do we need the agents to be able to do to support them to make their job easier and better?

So I think we're going to be need more people that are experts in specific industries. So Rick, you've said that ERP and CRM opportunities are often avoided by MSPs when they shouldn't be. What's the right way for an MSP to pursue biz apps revenue without becoming the competition? I think they you know a lot of the you know, I've just like I said, I do some work with TD Synnex, they've built a little group of partners to support MSPs when they sell these products.

In fact, you know pre COVID Microsoft brought me in and I ran a program with TD at the time and it was to train these MSPs about the language of BizApps right? So when you're in a conversation, how do you talk about an ERP system? How do you talk about a CRM system? How do you talk about field service?

How do you talk about customer service? So we built a series of workshops based on that. Really, what's the language? How do you talk about it?

And then I did some coaching for some of these partners. And one of the things I said, Okay, I'm going to teach you how to talk about it. But once you get a fish swimming around the boat, don't try to pull him in yourself, right? I think you need to partner with somebody who understands what this deployment is going to be, because one of the things that not all MSPs, but a lot of them, you know their business model.

Maybe $1 of license, $1 of services. Over here on BizApps, $1 a license could mean $5.10 $15.25 dollars in services.

So you know, I've sold $20,000 portal projects that ended up being $2,000,000 in services, so it's a different business, and it's much more complex to understand. So I think you know, having trusted P2P partners is going to be a big part of what we see in the future, which is making IAMCP even more important as we start to bring your people into my people and my people are into your people. I think it's going to. We need a place where we can get together and talk to each other.

I'm glad you mentioned P2P relationships. From what you've observed, what separates partner to partner collaboration from, you know, what we see as surface level alliances that never produce results? It's a good question. I think a lot of it is, you know, finding people that you can trust.

And if you're doing CRM deals and you're working with Rick, bring Rick into all your CRM deals, right? So you understand the business, not just when your people get stuck. And I think you got to look at it long term. How can we work together?

How can we partner together? What's our strengths? And how do we how do we, you know, fit in the room together and have that mindset? Because it's funny as I work with partners, you know, there's partner loads of partners.

I would have worked one off, worked one deal and never saw them again because they watched me work and I think they figured out they knew how to do it. Right? Other partners would bring me into every project. And we had great collaboration, did a lot of, you know, co op marketing together, and we had great relationships.

And I think we grew some nice revenue for these partners. So I think if you're looking to bring somebody in one off, learn what they do and then kick them out, good luck to you. I think you really want to say, Okay, this is something I'm not going to do, right? Let's find the expert to help us.

You've mentioned trust a few times, as you talk talking about finding trusted partners, finding people that you can trust. You know, from both your hands on experience and working with partners to what you've been able to observe, you know, with through PartnerTalks and your work with MSDW and your work like observing in the partner community. What are some of the not so much maybe principles and best practices, but more of like a I'm really keen on like a maybe you can share like a framework on how people can is there is there so many, you know, different potential partners out there, Maybe a a way of, like, a framework in which people can kind of process, okay, this is a partner who, you know, I can I can, you know, trust and collaborate with?

I think it's almost like dating, right? You know, you gotta go out and have a coffee, and you might go out and buy a sandwich, You really want to start to understand who they are and what they do, how they can help each other. But it's got to be two ways, right? If I'm bringing in Rick to help with the CRM, well, Rick should be bringing you in to help with the Azure, right?

So you know, I think two way collaborations and learning to work together. You know, I've got some partners that we shared resources, right? You know, contractors and things. So it's just time proven.

And, you know, that dating scenario, you get closer and closer and closer, and then finally you get married. Then other things happen later, but at least for a while, you're happy. That's great. Okay.

Excellent. Excellent. Well, kind of on that note, so if you were advising, you know, a small and we're defining small as I don't know it's kind of a big delta, but this can give you some flexibility in answering this, but like a small, you know, 10 to a 100 person Microsoft partner right now, what's one strategic move you'd recommend they make in the next ninety days just to just to stay relevant in the midst of all the changes you know that that you're seeing? Well, we've got a Directions Conference coming up in April in Florida.

In fact, I'm doing a pre marketing day on the 26th with MSDW. So that's my commercial for this. Okay. I think that would be a great place to go.

Directions there's going to be and it's unlike any other conference in our ecosystem. So there's a European group Directions EMEA and Directions North America. Directions North America is all run by volunteers and will end up with, I don't know, around 1,200 partners in a room for three days. Most of the principals.

And there'll be lots of conversation on the SMB BizApps market. So if you want to get into BizApps, that's a that's a place to go and check out. You know, all the Microsoft keynotes, all the Microsoft presenters from the product group are going to be there. You're going to learn an awful lot about it.

Plus, the trade show floor is going to have over 100 ISVs who build add on products. If you're not having been exposed to ERP business, that's the place to go because you'll be, I say, drinking from a fire hose. I mean, it'll be loads of information, but it's going to be all in one hotel, right? And I think it's a Hyatt.

All in the Hyatt for that three days and pretty much everything you need to know about being an SMB partner, go there. And of course, listen to PartnerTalks. Listen to Partner Talks. Partnertalks.

com, right? Well, on that note, so in addition to the Directions Conference coming up and in addition to, you know, partnertalks.com, you know, for partners listening who who want to go deeper, you know, whether into biz apps, AI or P2P collaboration, what additional resources or community should they plug into and why? I know on MSDW, MS Dynamics World, they run the monthly AI partner show, which I do, but they also have some AI developer shows and things.

There's good education there. Anything that you can find that's if the stuff from Microsoft's great about working with the base product and understanding the technology, loads of information up on Learn and webinars to do that, Where you want to talk about deployment and what's happening in the field, really want to look for partner based education. So directions is one great spot, but I think up on MS Dynamics world, there's a lot of that as well. And we had we had them on our show a few episodes ago, so they're great guys at at MSDW, so for sure.

Well, Rick, this has been great. We've really enjoyed talking to you, getting your insights and your perspectives. For those listening who want to, you know, connect with you, you know, in addition to partnertalks.com.

But where can they connect with you personally? I'm a LinkedIn junkie. I've got 30,000 connections, Lots of groups, lots of content and I'm going to say 80% of my business relationships and conversations today are on a LinkedIn. Yeah, so if you're a partner and you're not using LinkedIn, you are missing one of the biggest opportunities because you know, I know I've got some email marketing friends aren't gonna like this, but I go into email three, four times a day and sort through.

I'm in LinkedIn on and off all day long. Excellent. We'll have that, we'll have your LinkedIn in the show notes, you know, as well. Well, Rick, really appreciate having you on.

Thank you, and you enjoy the rest of your day. Okay. Thank you, Anthony and Rudy. I appreciate the time.

Well, that was a great episode. I really enjoyed, you know, having Rick on just with his both with his experience in the community, you know, as well as his involvement as implementer and, you know, just quite frankly as a, you know, as a podcaster, having those over three hundred three hundred episodes. I mean, it was just really great having him on for his perspective, but also just sharing just the vast array of resources that are available to partners. I especially enjoyed his insights, you know, him being a BizApps MVP.

He has keen insights as to what's taking place in the market. And what kind of surprised me was him saying that BizApps or Business Central in particular is on fire right now. And that partners, the BizApps partners that he's working with, etcetera, are focused on growth because they're projecting up to 30% growth in 2026 in the SMB space. And that's just a really great number.

So if you're in that space, take heed to that and say, how are they doing that? He also mentioned that MSPs are moving into the BizApp space. They're acquiring companies, they're acquiring people because they're seeing opportunities there. So I think his insights into that were really, really good.

And the fact that, you know, he also stressed that the BizApp partners are building solutions. They're not just focused strictly on the technologies. And the really successful partners are attaching five plus ISV solutions to each one of their implementations. So that just tells you that this really successful biz app partners are really focused on selling a solution, a business solution, versus just the technology.

So I love that insight. And I figured you would, because I know just in our engagements that, you know, you and I have with our clients, I mean, is a big point that I know you try to drive home with a lot of, you know, like our clients. And it just really, just good just to hear it and just being validated like this is what success looks like, you know, and that, you know, to quote the often, you know, quoted thing about, you know, we're better and stronger together. What was interesting too is just on that note about, you know, just the collaboration about like, you know, with the multiple different partners, both between the biz apps and MSP and then, you know, bringing in all the ISVs to create a complete solution was one of the things that Rick hit on, and we hear this a lot in our interviews, is the importance of it's not the foundation isn't capabilities, acumen, right, experience, but it's the foundation is of trust, right?

And that, yes, it involves a lot of those things I just mentioned, but just also just the strong, the interpersonal and just the mindset and make sure that, you know, you're giving, you know, as well as, you know, as getting and just that emphasis on that two way collaboration, you know, and just being consistent, you know, over time. And so it's just, again, even in this context, you're hearing that brought up, you know, as a key ingredient to successful, you know, P2P relationship and, you know, that can lead to business growth.

Well, was a great episode, and I want to thank you for joining us on this episode of IAMCP Profiles in Partnership powered by Dunamis Marketing. We hope you enjoyed this podcast and find it useful and inspiring. If you did, please subscribe, rate, and review us on your favorite podcast platform. One of the best ways to partner for success is to join IAMCP, a community of Microsoft partners who help each other grow and thrive.

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