From Rejected to Respected: How to Create Your First Conference Talk | MSP Speaking Tips

Speaker A: I'd say we're going scriptless, but we did at least define kind of an agenda, so let's dive in. Uh, I just realized how monotone and probably, I don't know, sad or Eeyore I sound. My wife always calls me Eeyore.

Speaker B: You didn't sound like Eeyore. You sound like you're auditioning to host, uh, afternoon NPR radio show.

Speaker A: I don't know how to feel about that.

Speaker B: He'd be like. Welcome to All Things Considered with Steve Taylor. Today on All Things Considered, we'll be talking about the American history of knitting.

Speaker A: Oh, boy. Wow. The American history of knitting. That just sounds depressing.

Speaker B: Um, I bet you'd have a good yarn to spin.

Speaker A: Uh, oh, but. All right. So, uh, welcome, everybody. That is a minute and nine seconds that you will never get back. Uh, today I am joined by Dean. Dean, pronounce your last name. I assume it's Trampolas.

Speaker B: Trampelas. Uh, but, uh, if I can look it up quickly. Jason Slagle permanently mispronounced it, and so it's different now. Uh, it's crap. What do they say it was, uh, like, Dean Trampoline or something. So that's Dean. That's my name going forward.

Speaker A: I like it. You know, Jason is a character. Uh, he's.

Speaker B: Well, and importantly, he has a badge printer, so if he changes your name, he can make that so.

Speaker A: So that is hilarious. I don't know anyone with a badge printer. Well, could you make me a fake I.D.

Speaker B: he, uh, could certainly make you a fake badge at a conference.

Speaker A: Sold. He's getting me into all the conferences. All right, uh, Dean

Speaker B: get you into rejection con.

Speaker A: This is. Oh, yes, yes, I will. I will see you there in person.

Speaker B: Perfect.

Speaker A: Perfect. All right, Dean, speaking of rejection con, before we dive into rejection con, tell us a little bit about Dean Trampoline.

Speaker B: Um, I'm just some guy.

Speaker A: Just, uh, some guy.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, I've been in the MSP space for a very long time, uh, the entirety of which in a service and operations management role. And a couple years ago, I got bored of being an MSP and went over to being a vendor like you. And now we're both on the dark side. And, well, we have cookies over here. It's pretty great.

Speaker A: I don't have cookies.

Speaker B: You're supposed to get those when you. When you became a vendor. That's part of your vendor darkside kit. They give you some cookies.

Speaker A: Well, the problem is my kids keep eating the cookies. Like, true story. I bought, uh, a package of. Of Chips Ahoy. Not the regular size, not the family size, the party size. All right, the one that comes with, ah, an excessive amount of Chips Ahoy cookies. And uh, the following day I went to what I thought was open the pack of cookies and there were 6 cookies left in the package. I'm pretty sure that's supposed to have like a hundred or some obscene number of cookies. My kids ate all the cookies. I was very sad.

Speaker B: Well, maybe they thought it was a single serving.

Speaker A: Oh my goodness.

Speaker B: I think to establish dominance you need to go into their rooms and you need to eat one thing of theirs.

Speaker A: I'm uh, going to eat my son's Legos.

Speaker B: Imagine the power on display if you marched in there, woke him up and just started eating his Legos right in front of him.

Speaker A: Yeah, I don't, I don't feel like that would go well for me. So Dean, so Dean, tell me about Empath. Because you're, I don't know if you're relatively new there. I think you've been working behind the scenes for a little while and now you've recently accepted like an official role.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I've been working behind the scenes uh, there since, I don't know, last maybe, uh, officially. I've been a member of the team since December. And Empath is a learning management system and accountability platform for MSPs, which surprisingly enough did not already exist in our space. There are certainly LMSs, there's certainly content libraries, ITProTV, CBT, Nuggets, CompTIA. Nobody brought it all together and Mspified it. So we're doing that. And um, we're trying to do this for all areas of the MSP so that no matter who you are, what role you're in, you have an opportunity to learn, develop, progress, grow your career. And your MSP has a way to both hold you accountable for that but also reward you for that, which solves the other big problem that all of us have experienced, which is, you know, basically right now you have to jump jobs to move up in this industry in most cases. And that kind of stinks. Like what if you like where you are? So that's the long term goal, is to provide more of a solution to that for MSPs and employees to just have a better sense of what they can do, what they know, be able to prove it and be able to grow and develop in a way that's fair and equitable.

Speaker A: I really like that and I like the thought of, I really like the MSP that I'm at how do I grow? How do I grow the msp? So that way I have something I can grow into, like a new role, a new department, whatever that is. So that's a really cool. I never thought of what you guys were doing in that. In that light.

Speaker B: That's sort of the problem we're solving for.

Speaker A: So tell me about Rejection Con, because this sounds like the perfect name to a conference for all of us introverted, nerdy IT guys to attend, because we've all been rejected before.

Speaker B: So, uh, that's exactly what it was born out of. So a couple of years ago, originally, uh, Wes Spencer was talking to, uh, another vendor in the channel, and we're talking about. This was maybe like two or three years ago at, uh, around IT Nation time, when the wave of rejections go out. And to give some people context in the past, It Nation will have like 3, 400 submissions for It Nation Connect. And obviously they don't accept that many. They take like 60. So it's a lot of people who

Speaker A: aren't getting to talk submissions for what?

Speaker B: To speak. To speak at the show. Sorry, I'm glad you. Glad you clarified. Uh, and so that started the conversation on, like, well, what about everybody else who didn't get a chance, you know, and like, politics aside, Polish competency, all of that aside, what about them? And so Wes originally had the idea to make some sort of an event that would allow all the people who weren't getting accepted to these larger shows to have a place to bring their excellence. He connected it to the Rural Tech Fund, which is a really cool 501C3 nonprofit, which we could talk more about in a second. And that created the original Rejection Con. And then since Wes started Empath, we needed to use someone's resources. So Empath sort of runs it, but it's not really Empath's show. It's not our thing. We're just using our resources to help facilitate it. We've got a bunch of volunteers that make it run, and all of the proceeds go directly. We don't touch any of it. It goes directly to the Rural Tech Fund. Just super cool. Last year, I pulled up the stats. We, uh, we raised $25,000 for the Rural Tech Fund. Uh, we had 464 attendees, 30 sessions, and 26 vendors that sponsored, which was pretty cool. And we're hoping to beat that this year.

Speaker A: All right, so, uh, you've got a goal in mind, I bet. Are you trying to double it? You going big?

Speaker B: So we'd love to get. We'd love to get a thousand attendees. Um, and we'd really like to, if not double it, like at least 40k. So if we did 25k last time, let's see if we can get to 40k that we can donate to the Rural Tech Fund. They, um, and if we get Wes on here at some point, he could explain it in more detail. They're really cool charity. They go out and find rural classrooms all over the place that either due to their location, budget, curriculum, maybe they're literally there is not a Best Buy or Amazon Depot within four miles of them. Like just classrooms that don't have access to a lot of the technology that many of us who live closer to cities take for granted. You know, maybe it's a classroom, still doesn't have like a 3D printer lab, or uh, maybe it doesn't have like a Raspberry PI, you know, lab, like anything like that. And they, they meet those classrooms and they place technology in those classrooms so that young learners have the same chance all we did to develop a passion for technology and maybe someday even work in our industry. So it's a really, really cool, uh, idea to kind of just bring like, equitability of technology access to all of these classrooms that were just kind of located in an area that makes it inconvenient for them to have that technology.

Speaker A: Okay, I really like that. And I didn't realize that all of the proceeds went to that. I assumed you guys were keeping, I don't know, a portion. I, I'm sure you're, you're at least using it to pay, uh, for some of the software costs and that type of stuff. Right?

Speaker B: The, uh, vendor sponsorship tiers. So the vendor sponsorship tiers, uh, are paying for the back end of this and to give them a shout out. For those that don't know, Eric Bowles Avosa, uh, uh, two years in a row, has very graciously, uh, been volun told, uh, that it's completely on his shoulders to build out the virtual platform. So all of the back end is being completely run by Eric. He's been spending months building this out, has put a ton of work into this. Uh, we have a better platform this year. So the vendor sponsorship pays for all that stuff. Um, but all the ticket sales and donations and everything, like, all the actual like revenue directly over to the Rural Tech Fund.

Speaker A: That's awesome, man. So Eric is a fantastic individual. I've, I've known him for a little over a year now. Um, really, really excited to hear that he's continuing to volunteer and help you guys out on the back end with this because he, he really knows his stuff when it comes to production. I wish I had his production. Know how I've, I've, I've done live production, uh, like on site, like with churches, using video switchers and cameras and mixers and all that. But to do it all online, that's like a completely different skill set. And you know, big, big shout out to Eric. Huge, uh, huge task.

Speaker B: We dumped more on him this year. Um, so.

Speaker A: Because as you would with another year

Speaker B: of doing in advance, so this summer when we were talking about Rejection Con, one of the challenges we ran into last year was we had more submissions than we actually had space during the initial three days to present this. And that led to us basically having to reject people, which completely defeats the mission of giving everybody an opportunity. So we had the idea this summer to basically create rejection con TV which is going to be like a 24 hour live channel where all of the talks, whether they go on the, on the stages or simply submitted any talk that's submitted that's viable. So if you submit nonsense that you actually can't present, I'm sorry, but otherwise like any talk that's, that's viable, someone could actually speak about it. We will help you record it and then we will have it on RejectionCon TV to be seen. So this year we don't have to say no to anybody who submits. Everybody will get a chance whether that's on the screen or not. And what's kind of neat about that is we saw this year just to bring it up again at IT Nation, they did the exact same thing. Uh, everybody this year at IT Nation who submitted a talk that met their minimum standards, if they weren't selected to speak at the conference, they had the same opportunity they got to record a short version, in their case like a 15 minute version that went as a series of pre recorded videos and totally uncoordinated, unplanned with us, just coincidence. But it was cool to see that because that gave a lot of people who had never had the chance to present in that audience an opportunity. And that excites me because it shows that there's a desire there and a need in our industry to just provide a stage where people that have something to say can say it. And importantly, we have other volunteers like Mr. Jonathan Crow from Ninja and Mr. Bob Miller from IR Games that besides helping with a lot of the back end, have both positioned themselves to be available as a coach. So if you are submitting to speak. And um, you're going to get to that point where you need to record a session or you're selected to go on stage and you're having a panic attack because you just, you need to practice. You've never done this before. They're both available as pretty experienced, very approachable, friendly people to hop on a call with you and just help talk you through that. So multiple ways this year that uh, if you submit you can uh, get in front of an audience.

Speaker A: Well that is an excellent segue into uh, the main thing I want to talk about today. So I'm sorry guys that it took almost 15 minutes to get there. But uh, what I want to talk about is why should I make a conference talk now I'm saying I, and, and we're going to talk about why should Steve Taylor do the thing and how does Steve Taylor do the thing? But really this is, you know, just replace me and my name with you, the listener and your name. Okay? Because anyone, uh, can submit a talk to Rejection Con and you can submit a talk to anywhere else like It Nation and uh, right of Boom and all these other conferences that are out there. If you want to be a speaker, whether it's because you want some weird uh, claim to fame, you uh, have some knowledge that you're dying to uh, impart onto MSPs or any other number of reasons, uh, we are going to kind of talk about what it takes to put all of this together. So uh, why should I talk at a conference for MSPs if I'm an MSP, for example, why do I need to talk to other MSPs? Shouldn't I be targeting potential customers?

Speaker B: So there's a lot to unpack there. But it's a good question and I want to, I want to actually offer up a sort of a counterpoint to that that was brought up to me that I think is worth expressing. The channel, the industry, the community, we tend to normally be in empowerment mode because there are people who want to do things that need that encouragement. That encouragement of hey, you should submit to speak can sometimes come off like you have to or else. And I just want to be clear here that if you have no desire to talk or present or be involved in that, that's totally fine and not m trying to force anybody to do that. A lot of the language is just speaking to those people that maybe are thinking they want to do that but can't get out of their own heads. So if you are hearing this, you're like, I'm an introvert. Hell no. That's fine. Like be an introvert. We love introverts. You do not have to get on

Speaker A: stage, but if this is your first time at Fight club, you have to fight.

Speaker B: Yes. Uh, so why present? Well, there's, there's so many reasons and ways we can go down that. But I think at a high level, um, first of all, this is very selfish reason. Your own career, uh, you'll reach a point inside an industry like ours that is big, but yet small enough where many of us know each other, that to move to the upper echelons of your career, having somewhat of a reputation outside of your resume itself can be useful. And simply being able to cite that you have spoken somewhere can be very powerful if you're, you know, looking to enhance your role at some point. So there is always that element. And I start with that simply because, listen, we're all individuals, and I don't think there's anything wrong with being a tiny bit selfish and asking literally, what can this do for me? Is that something it can do for you as an individual? If you want to step, uh, beyond that a little bit, though, uh, our industry really doesn't have the benefit of standardization and decades and decades of, you know, regulation and training there, there, there are a handful of general ways to MSP that we would all agree are more or less the right way, but there's so many nuanced little differences that for most of us, it takes us years to really start to learn enough about what we're doing to, to really get our arms around it. And that sucks. Like, imagine if I said to you, steve, you're going to learn to ride a bike, and here's the bike. But it's going to take you six years, six years of falling off until you are finally able to simply stay on and pedal. Like, that sucks. And if I could say to you, well, hey, let me give you a couple of tips, or, uh, let me show you how I learned how to ride a bike and shave a bunch of time off of that for you. How awesome is that? So that's another one of the most important reasons I think, that really anybody might consider speaking. You never know what you've experienced and what you've learned, how valuable that might be from someone else because it came from you. Not every speaker is going to present a concept that resonates with everybody. And you may have a talk on something that you think is, ah, uh, everybody already knows that, or that's common knowledge. First of all it probably isn't. And secondly, what if the specific way you talk about how you learn to ride a bike, what if I'm having that problem? And what if no one else I've met has the same problem as me? And you're the first one that I've heard that. Oh, uh, so you get slapped in the shins with the pedals too? All right, so that's not just me. And what did you do to fix that? Interesting. And now I'm not suffering alone. Now I have a chance to grow and get better. That's an impact you can have by speaking. So I think that's another reason. And, um, the last reason is more selfish to the industry itself. As more of us present and engage and talk to one another, we realize that a lot of the little bits of our space that we thought were unique are not. And that also helps us as an industry start to self regulate a little bit. If you and I go to a show, Steve, and we hear five different talks on, um, cyber insurance from five different experts, yeah, they'll have some different takes, but the sort of the Venn diagram of those talks has an overlapping area. And the more and more talks we get, the more that overlap grows until suddenly that is just well understood to be the way. And our industry still needs that. So if you don't fall into those other two buckets, especially if you're a little bit more experienced or a little more confident or a little bit further along in your career, simply contributing another view of an existing topic can be really helpful to cement the industry experience that, yeah, there generally is a way this should be approached.

Speaker A: I like that. And you know, um, it sounds like it doesn't even matter if you're an MSP or a vendor or a media guy or, or whatever, going and talking at a conference for MSPs, um, can be helpful for you. Now, you, uh, and I were MSPs. We, we joined the dark side. We, we joined the, the vendor team. Right. Um, and my dungeon master would say, uh, we're the good guys. Because he's, he's the good guys. And the.

Speaker B: Anyway, I prefer the, uh, Warhammer version of that. There are no good guys, Steve. It's just pick a team.

Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. Okay. Well, anyway, so, um, the one thing that I think you and I maybe subconsciously set out to do was, um, I joined a vendor because I want to change the stigma of vendors from within. When you go to a conference and you see a vendor is speaking, your first thought is, oh, great, what are they shilling, you know, like what, what product or service are they trying to cram down our throats? Because I know this vendor is not going to teach you anything useful. Well, I, I want to change that. And that's why, you know, I, I helped start office hours with, with our company and that's why you do what you do with Spicy, uh, Monday and, and all the other initiatives that you've kind of taken on. So, um, I think it's important for everyone, not just MSPs, but vendors as well. When you submit a, uh, talk to a conference, don't just try to show a product, try to teach people something. Because if they see you are adding value to this conference, that's going to break down those barriers, right? That's going to sell the product for you. Because they're going to say, wow, Dean really knows what he's talking about. Maybe I should sign up for Empath. It just happens that way organically. It's great.

Speaker B: There is, it's, uh, an interesting topic you bring up that can get a little bit spicy. There is a, a mentality from an older style of selling that if you are in the position to be like a vendor and if you're an msp, think about the same context. If you're presenting in front of prospects, there is this older mentality that if you're given stage time, you must capitalize it to draw attention to the brand and the specific value you offer. And that's not wrong. But in an industry that is focused around delivering an intelligent professional service, in, uh, other words, literally, not just anyone could do what you do, like a doctor or a lawyer or cpa. There is a certain amount of professional expertise required. You don't have to immediately go there. You can instead stand on more of a pillar of subject matter expertise that you agnosticize from your branding. And if you're able to do that, that adds a level of authenticity and trust that a speaker who is not able to do that cannot have. And it makes sense, right? If, if you were doing a local lunch and learn session at your MSP for local businesses, are you going to get up there with your agreement and talk through all the services you provide and try and get everyone to sign? Or are you going to pick an IT topic and try and educate the room on why it's important to have MFA enabled for every app in their business? Or why it's important to have cyber insurance, or why backups are more than just something your nephew set up? All of those things might lead an attendee afterwards to come up to you and say, hey, can you help me with that? But if they didn't, they still left smarter and they don't ever have to engage with your brand. The same thing if you're a vendor. And I've noticed that a lot of our vendor friends, they struggle with this. And when I was earlier in my career, I thought it was because they were not able to talk about subjects without selling. You know, just they felt they had to sell. What I've learned more now as I moved in through the vendor space more, there's a lot of vendors that don't think that anyone would want to hear or that their content can stand on its own. And that to me was really interesting to hear because so many vendors actually do this all the time without realizing it. If I pick on your day job for a minute, think of all the content alternative payments posts up. Most of it is talking about a financial concept and how to improve. It has nothing to do with alternative payments. And other than the logo on the white paper or the document, I have no idea what alternative payments is going to do to help me with that. I just know it's subject matter expertise related to finance. And if we were to grab Baxter into the room right now, that's for those who don't know the Steve's of Steve's overlords over there, uh, if we were to say, hey baxterio, go present a session on, you know, payment processing, he might feel like, well, geez, the only way I can do that is if I talk about alternative payments. I don't know how to not do that because oftentimes vendors don't see their own forest through the trees and just don't realize that Baxter, you could get up there and talk for five hours about payment processing and not mention your company once and all of us will would learn so much from you. So if you are a vendor and you're hearing this and you think, nah, I have nothing I could talk about that isn't about my product. I think you'd be surprised if you just simply delete your product word from a normal talk track and just product category and then give the same talk. I think you realize suddenly you have a lot of education you could deliver that has nothing to do with selling, that will naturally lead interested people back to your product later.

Speaker A: So, uh, one of the, one of the things on my agenda, the next thing was going to be what do I even talk about? Um, before we dive into that for the MSP space, I've Got a free one for you guys. Okay. You ready? Uh, I just thought of it. I wish I had done it. So let's say you join a chamber of commerce and you. You go to the. The monthly luncheon, and they give you the opportunity to get up and talk about your company for a minute. Most of the time, people are going to go up. Hi, I'm M. Steve with Taylor IT Group. And we, we take the sh out of it and, well, you know, whatever, right? And, you know, you have some silly tagline and, and you try and say we. We become your outsourced IT help desk, and nobody gives a crap, right? What you do is you go up there with something you printed out that says, yeah, hi, uh, my name is Steve. I'm an IT Consultant with Taylor IT Group. This here's a list of, uh, usernames and passwords. Uh, Laura Moser from the Cuyahoga Falls Chamber of Commerce. Uh, it looks like your Facebook password is eskimokisses12. Uh, and that's all thanks to the Dark Web. You can download this information for free from have I Been Pwned? You can. You all need password managers. Come talk to me for one. Laura, I'll give you yours for free. Like, something like that, I think would land better. Now. It's polarizing. There's a lot of shock and awe to it, and you're probably going to ruffle some feathers and make some enemies if you do it to somebody who is, uh, in a position of power or widely loved. But, uh, something like that, I think would sell you better. I don't know. What do you think, Dean?

Speaker B: Well, I think you actually hit on a really interesting component of designing and submitting and presenting a talk, which is you need to understand not only your audiences, but the context you're presenting. In a case like that, where you're in front of a chamber of Commerce, they didn't go there to hear you or exclusively hear IT topics. And you have a very small amount of time. You can't sit there for 30 minutes teaching. So you do kind of have to shorten things and get a call to action out there. That's appropriate because the forum you're in would not be appropriate to just teach about password managers for that entire time. People's eyes will roll back in their heads. So when you're putting a talk together, besides just thinking about who will be in the room and who am I speaking to, which is super important and a lesson I am always relearning, you want to think about what was the agency of everybody in the room in terms of their choice to hear a topic like the one you presented, and if they don't really have a choice in listening to you. So, like, the example you gave, like, some of the smaller shows that have, like, a, uh, very, like, quick, uh, cycle of vendors that go on stage and you're stuck in the room whether you want to be there or not. Keep that in the back of your head that everybody in that room may not be there to learn from you that day. And adjusting your talk, the pacing, the content. To Steve's case, using something theatrical, entertaining, that may be important to engage people in the room that otherwise do not want to listen to that particular subject. So that's actually a really good example of aligning a speaking engagement to the audience, the context and sort of the agency of the people in the room in terms of having a choice to listen to you.

Speaker A: Gosh, you hear that, guys? I'm a natural.

Speaker B: Yeah, you're all right.

Speaker A: All right. So, uh, why do MSPs want to listen to me? And I think this is going to speak to people, uh, who maybe are suffering from imposter syndrome. Right. Uh, why do they want to hear me? You know, I'm nobody. I'm nothing. I. I barely. I barely make 100,000 a year. Like, why. Why does anyone care what I have to say? Right? Um, and. And that was me making up a number. Okay. My salary is none of your business.

Speaker B: So, um, the initial answer to that, especially if this is your first time, they don't. They don't want to hear from you, but they probably want to hear what you have to say. And there's a disassociation there. You need to have early on that, especially if it's your first or third or second. You know, you're relatively new in this. You are not the draw. I am not going to a Steve Taylor concert to hear Steve Taylor originals. Absolutely not. I might go to the bar because Steve Taylor's playing covers of songs, and I want to hear songs being covered. And so initially, the draw will be more what you have to say and less about you. And I say that up front because that should take a lot of pressure off of you. Initially, who you are has less of an impact than what you're saying will have later on in your journey. Especially if you get into this, who you are has a much bigger impact. And feel free to have all the anxiety then. But, um, it's why I tell people, like, literally, if you look at, um, a lot of the DJs that are, um, very, uh, afraid of being a public, like deadmau5, like, they literally put a mask on, like, pretend you're dude, literally do that. Have a token, a hat, a shirt or something that when you put on, you know, a bracelet, you're speaker you. And then understand that right now, speaker you isn't famous enough for anyone cares right now. They just want to hear what you have to say. Given that qualification, then why would an MSP want to hear what you have to say? Well, there's so many reasons for that. One of them is very basic. Uh, as humans, we like to be right. We like to have existing thoughts and views we have be confirmed or suspicions we have, or hypotheses we have be validated. And so some of the time, that's all you're doing. You are going on and saying something that someone else is already thinking and just hearing a different person say it. Regardless of who that person is. That listener gets a dopamine hit. They feel good for a minute. They're like, oh, okay, like, someone else agrees with me or someone else said the same thing, or I was right about that. So that's one of the reasons. Another reason we touched on earlier. The way you got to. Whatever you are talking about is probably different than the way I got to it. And that could be really important or interesting. That could give me another perspective on how to approach something. That could show me that the way we've been doing it could be optimized, could be changed, could be improved. It could open my eyes to new avenues that I could approach. It could simply expose me that there's information over here that I don't like. And as silly as that sounds, that's value from a talk. Imagine going to a talk where you hear, presenting, you're like, I hate all of this and I'm never doing it. And now I know that that's fantastic. Like, even though that sounds antithetical to giving a talk, you want everyone in the audience to be like, yeah, go, Steve. Well, what if instead I'm like, this sucks. I would never do what Steve is saying. And now that I hear Steve say that, I now know that is off my list. That's helpful. All of that is helpful. The point is not that everyone in the room is going to be in agreement with you or you're a professor teaching, you know, a math class where there's only one way to learn it. You're exposing a viewpoint and an idea from a perspective that I maybe haven't experienced before and that may have a positive impact on me. That may cause me to limit my decision making in the future, that may cause me to have more decisions. But I only get all of that by being exposed to it.

Speaker A: So I like that. And that seems to take a lot of pressure off. If I go in there with, with the thought that I have to be an expert, that, that puts a lot of pressure on me. But if I go in there as saying I'm just sharing my perspective and it's okay if they have a different perspective or if they disagree with me, um, I don't know that that hits different. So I like that.

Speaker B: If you, if you do perceive yourself to be an expert, which you will be surprised how often if you look at a Dunning Kruger, um, knowledge curve for how most people learn the upper end of it, where you reach expertise, that becomes a plateau. And if you think about it, if I'm standing on a literal plateau and Steve is standing in the canyon below me, we literally are unaware of one another. And that's the opposite side of education. So like, if you're first learning something, you don't know what you don't know, but once you know a lot, now you don't know what isn't common knowledge. So there's a lot of people who are actually experts who don't know they're experts because they're on that plateau of knowledge. They no longer can see anyone that isn't at or above them in that level of understanding. So then they lose context that they're experts anymore. And as silly as that sounds, that means there is a non zero chance. If you're working at some random MSP in the middle of nowhere and you think, what do I know? You might know a hell of a lot. And it's just you're completely unaware of how knowledgeable you actually are. So if you do fall into that side as well, don't let that inner voice get in your head that, ah, uh, this is basic. Everyone already knows this. No, it's not. And if you look at actual shows, the talks that tend to get packed are on what are often the most outwardly trivial subjects. Where you'd be like, who needs to go in there and learn what profit and loss is? Obviously they're business owners and they all know it. That'll be standing room only. And the talk itself will be around pretty basic P and L concepts, but that's how many people don't view those as basic concepts. And that applies with anything. If, if I'm Going to write a boom soon. I'm not a security guy. A lot of people are going to assume because Dean's been in MSPS for so long, he probably knows all of this. No, I don't. Like there will be talks that I'm sitting in there that I'm sure the majority of the room are bored because they're like, yeah, obviously that's how that works for me. This is like, wow, first time I've ever heard this. You never know who in your audience is going to have that experience where you are an expert to them. This is the first time they've learned this or heard this from you.

Speaker A: Uh, now, so. So it sounds like what you're saying is I could put together a. A talk about DNS and teach about the different types of records and what the time to live means and how to properly update DNS records and what websites to go to to view DNS records to see what's live. And you're saying that might be standing room only?

Speaker B: Absolutely. Let's try that right now. Um, Steve, on the computer you're on right now, if you type in Amazon.com, where is the very first place that computer checks for that information?

Speaker A: And it's DNS? I assume my ISPs DNS server.

Speaker B: So that's not correct. The very first place your computer is going to check is its local host file to see cached DNS records from the last time you queried that. Then it's going to go to what's been identified on your NIC as the gateway, and ask the gateway, what DNS server should I use? And if you haven't changed anything, that'll be the ISP right there. Super basic concept. You, an expert, did not immediately know the answer to see how even what appears to be the most basic information can still be incredibly valuable to very experienced people. And if I give a talk on specifically that idea, only not even exiting the house or your router, that how does DNS work inside the network? And what can I learn about what that means about troubleshooting and about basically DNS poisoning within a network. And what risks can I start thinking of and approaching my troubleshooting with? That's an entire talk where we're literally only covering querying a domain and it touching something inside the house. And there are going to be people in that room that have never heard that, that knew that once and forgot it, that do kind of know that, but never really connected the dots how to apply it. All of those people are going to Be nodding along and be like, holy shit, this was great. So any subject, no matter how basic you think you've, uh, broken it down, I guarantee you there are people who either don't know it as well as you think they do do know it, but forgot it in the moment, or they don't really know how to apply what they know to, to the role they're in. And you could just, anybody can come in and just fill that out with so much amazing, magical stuff. And also, yes, please submit a talk on all the record types. Because I do not know all the record types and I often confuse cname record types with other record types and then I sound like an idiot. So I would like to sit in your session.

Speaker A: I'll think about it. Um, maybe I'll do that for next year because I don't think I could put together a talk for this. When is rejection con?

Speaker B: Uh, that is a great question. That if I was more prepared for class, I'd be able to tell you right off the top of my head. It is going to be March 12th through the 14th.

Speaker A: Okay. And uh, I assume that you guys have already chosen your speakers.

Speaker B: There is still a little bit of time left to submit talks. You have until February 21st. Bob Miller, uh, we put in charge of our speaker selection committee and what we said this year because a common complaint at a lot of industry events, especially the more like tight knit ones, is people only pick their friends. And I would also be one of the people that would make that accusation. So we thought this year we would have Bob assemble a team of people from MSPs. We have no idea who's on his committee. No one knows who's on his committee other than they are all from MSPs that he found from whatever means. And that committee has a grading rubric they are using. For every talk that's submitted, they are going in and scoring them to then choose what will be selected to go on stage. The rest of us will not even know that until Bob releases that information. And Bob is also an msp. So there should be a very, very small, uh, amount here, as minimal as possible of friendship nepotism, uh, in the selection this year.

Speaker A: That is really cool. All right, so chicken or egg, right? Do, do I come up with the title and description of my talk? Do I come up with the slide deck? Do I write my talk? What, what do I do first?

Speaker B: Man, I think that depends on the person. Uh, so I don't know that there's a right answer. I, uh, would suggest Slide deck comes last though, like specifically the actual slide deck itself. Um, my opinion, if I got a couple of beers in you, or whatever your equivalent vice is, what would you excitedly talk my ear off about for 45 minutes nonstop? Uh, completely irrelevant of the fact that I have stopped looking at you and I'm looking at my phone. That's probably a good place to start. Um, and I'm a big fan. If you don't know right away how to lay the information out, don't bother. Go record an audio only session on your phone or your computer and just riff on that subject for as long as you can until you run out of steam. Save that audio file, run it through something that'll generate a transcript and throw that transcript into ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to listen to this or read the transcript and summarize what it feels are the 10 or 15 most important bullet points that you brought up. And don't bias it any way other than that and see what it sends back to you. If you read the bullets chatgpt sent, you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is what I was talking about. Then you probably have an idea that is more or less coalesced and aligned enough that you could turn it into a talk. If you start looking to that list, you're like, that's not important. And where's that other thing that I thought was really important? If those bullets don't really agree with where you thought your brain was going, you probably need to refine or narrow down what you're talking about a little bit until you basically can get an unbiased listener with no context to more or less pick up on. These are the important subjects that this person was mentioning.

Speaker A: Okay, now how deep into the weeds do I get? Um, because like you said, um, something on, on profit and loss, we might be talking about very fundamental, very basic, uh, concepts with it. So how, how deep can I get into a topic? Um, I suspect a topic at right of boom. I'm probably going to get much deeper than a topic at maybe, um, I don't know it Nation or, you know, I don't know.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a, that's actually a really good question. So that brings us back a little bit to try to have a little bit of an idea of the audience that you would expect to be there and also the audience you would want to attract. Because that's, there's a little mental marketing here. But assuming you've adjusted for that, generally it is considered that keeping, um on one. So basically Lowering the breadth in the depth is more effective than the opposite way. So if you want to think of it like digging a hole, a very narrow, very deep hole is usually better for a talk than a super, super wide pit that's very shallow. Um, and that can be hard because you won't, if you're like me, you won't always realize that you're being too wide in your topic. So if you have put something together you think is pretty narrow and pretty focused, I would run it by somebody and see if they agree with you. I, uh, have a talk I presented a few times, basically about how to say no. And I had Jonathan Crow look at it with a more critical eye. And he made the point that the first half of the talk, while it's very related to the second half, really does feel like two separate talks. And like, you know, you're right like this. This is too much information to try and cover in 30 minutes. So think about that too. Most of the talks you'd be presenting are probably going to be 30 to 45 minutes. And, um, you, if you can cover fewer subjects but in more detail in that period of time, generally an audience is more likely to follow along and be aligned than if you hit a bunch of topics really quickly.

Speaker A: Okay, um, well, how long should my talk be? So you said 30 to 45 minutes. Should I ever. Okay, so let's say I know My talk is 30 minutes. Should I, or my, I guess my, I should say my session is 30 minutes. Should I have a 20 minute or a 25 minute talk? So that way there's time for Q and A. Or should I say screw your questions, I don't trust myself to answer them and just fill the whole thing up with talk.

Speaker B: Uh, that is actually probably one of the most important questions you have asked and not necessarily at face value for the reason you asked it. So, yes, whatever the length of time you're given, it's always good to stage the talk to be about five to 10 minutes shorter than that. So you just leave yourself some room so you're not running over. But importantly, questions. Q and A interaction. A, uh, common piece of advice you're gonna get about talks is that interactive talks, Q and A's are better and more engaging. And that's true, but that is an advanced skill. If this is your very first time or you're relatively new to doing this, especially if you're a little uncomfortable being on stage, I would not try to force your talk to be interactive and I would not worry too much about at least in the talk itself. Building in pauses for Q and A, because that's not going to be your natural comfort zone and that's going to knock you off your game. I would go into professor mode instead. And if you can finish early and ask if anyone has any questions, that'll be easier. If you have a little more practice or a little more confident on stage, then I might make the talk stretch the entire time. But build into it. Natural pauses to engage with the audience and get questions as they go. Because if you've listened to somebody talk for 30 minutes, uh, unless you're writing down questions, which is a very small percentage of the room, you're not going to remember your questions till the end or you may feel uncomfortable or inappropriate asking them. So a more confident presenter is better off engaging with questions as they go so that audience members can ask things. And that presenter is also more likely to be able to adapt as they're presenting. Because they've done this a few times, they probably know their talk track well enough, where if Steve asked me an amazing question, I want to deviate and spend the next 20 minutes talking about that, I can do that. If this is your first few times speaking, I would not try to do that unless you're extremely confident in your presentations, because that's just too much to load on your brain the first time.

Speaker A: Is there somewhere I can go to practice my talk? Obviously, I can do it in front of a mirror, um, but I want to practice my talk in a way where I'm able to get some feedback. I want to get some input on if. If this talk sucks or not. You know, I need to do that before I take the main stage at Rejection Con.

Speaker B: So, uh, a couple of things I'll say. Uh, all talks suck the first few times they're presented. No matter how good the presenter is, no matter good the talk is, because everything takes practice. And if you give a talk a few times, you will start to learn. If you think of, like, a comedy routine, if you ever hear a comedian trying out jokes for the first time, where they'll say that in the set, they're not as good as if you hear that comedian giving those same jokes, you know, half, uh, a year later, once they've kind of learned the pacing a little better and what the audience responds to.

Speaker A: So I love that. This is literally the next thing that I was going to talk about is, um, you know, with, with comedy, you know, you listen, uh, to Joe Rogan. I do. Um, and with, with Joe, like, they're Always talking about how they, how they go like to the Comedy Store or they go to Joe's new comedy club and they just like work on their set. And it's, it's something where they'll, they'll spend like one or two years like, refining this, the set. And you know, they're writing new jokes, they're, they're cutting jokes, they're adding new jokes, they're changing pacing, they're changing punchlines, they're, they're removing, uh, parts because they've found that, uh, maybe they've, they've talked too long before getting to a punchline, you know, so they do so much to, to change this. Um, and, uh, and, and yeah, so the, the fact that you're right, talks will probably suck the first time around. Um, that. That's why I think we need to practice. So where do we practice?

Speaker B: Well, and, and importantly suck, meaning your, your own judgment of, of yourself. Like, it, it will not be your opinion, your best performance the first time. The audience will probably love it. Um, well, where you practice somewhat depends on you. And, uh, it depends on your presentation style. If you're talking about something you really know inside and out where you are, your slide deck is more of a visual guide and you are riffing. You may not need to rehearse so much as you may just simply want to go through the riff a bunch of times until you edit out extra words. And that may be something you can do on your own. Um, if you are someone though, that really needs a talk track, which is a lot of people, they, they do like to have more of like a speech, for lack of a better definition, that they've rehearsed, then I would start by practice it in front of somebody that has no gosh darn idea what the heck you're talking about. So a friend, a spouse, a partner, somebody that is not in the industry, and try giving them the presentation and ask them to give you that level of feedback that you're never going to get from someone else of when they got bored, when they got disengaged. What didn't make sense, what didn't they understand? Generally speaking, with most presentations that are not extremely niche and deep for an existing subject matter expert, if you cannot explain it to somebody outside of the industry and then roughly follow along, that probably is a good indication that you need a little more practice. Beyond that, there's lots of people in the space that you can grab that'll hop on a call with you and help you out. You could, you could try Recording it. I'm a big fan of that. If you have access to recording it, record the whole thing and then go back and watch yourself. We are the worst critics of our own content. And if you can't even get past, you can't even listen to your own talk. Well, there you go. I mean, that's probably. You need more practice. Other than that, in terms of practicing in front of a group, that's a little harder. So, so smaller settings like Rejection Con, virtual events, local, uh, meetups, um, running it by your teammates, maybe presenting it at work, if you're at an MSP or vendor and you have some teammates, anything like that, where you can just get a little opportunity to talk in front of a group is really helpful. But at some point, you have to rip the band aid off and understand that no amount of prep is going to get you ready to really experience this for the first time. And you just get up there and do it. And I will say this, that whether the talk goes the way you want it to go, the audience is not going to notice the mistakes the way you notice the mistakes. That is the biggest piece of advice I can give to anybody. When you're creating anything, and Steve, as a musician knows this, you are going to make mistakes when you create something that you are acutely aware of. And most humans will then try to verbally diarrhea explaining the mistakes they made because they feel guilty and they feel like if they talk about the, you know, you're playing the guitar, oh, I screwed up, sorry. You know, like that kind of thing. The audience does not necessarily know you made a mistake. So I just want to point that out. Even if you do present the first time and you think it was the most atrocious abomination that has ever exited your mouth, there's a good chance a lot of people watching did not know it didn't go well. So, not that have Confidence is going to work, but I suppose just have a little context that some of those flaws may not appear to be flaws to your audience at all, and there's no need to highlight them while you're presenting. If people aren't crying or weeping in the audience because of how terrible your guffaw was, they probably didn't notice and just keep on swimming,

Speaker A: crying and weeping. I like it. Uh, um, are there any other tips that you have for people that. That maybe we just. I didn't ask you about these things.

Speaker B: I think that having. Having good understanding of your audience context and the language and words and images that are expected in that environment can really make everything easier. Easier. If I'm giving a Talk@msp GeekCon, I can be a little bit more casually profane. I can have more memes in the same slide deck because I'm talking more to employee level people who are probably under the age of 50. So there's a better chance they're going to know those memes and be a little bit more comfortable with casual profanity. If I'm giving that same presentation at IT Nation, I might be able to keep some of those memes in, but the ones that are, you know, a little more like skippity toilet probably can't be in there. And then the language, like a little casual profanity is still fine, but maybe I dial that back a little bit because now there's going to be a slightly different blended audience there. And if I'm presenting somewhere at, like, my local EOS group or, you know, something like that, where maybe it's all people who are there strictly in a business context, well, maybe I have very few memes at all. And I probably nearly eliminate any of that casual language entirely from the same slide deck. That's a skill you'll have to learn. I'm not arguing anybody's going to master that right away, but just in the back of your head thinking a little bit about who's most likely to be in this room given what the event has told me, what the, you know, the makeup of that event is, if I've ever attended it before, and am I roughly aligned with probably what those folks would be likely to expect. That can really just make everything a little bit easier for you because that first, like, joke or slide or something where a couple people laugh or smile is such a relief. Uh, or if it's something where everybody's supposed to ask a question, like, whatever, whatever that first thing is where you expect a reaction from the audience. If you get it, that'll help your brain right away be like, oh, okay, like, I'm not an abject failure. I should keep talking. Um, and the easiest way to ensure that is just to make sure you've slightly aligned your content, the superfluous parts of your content, with the audience, if possible.

Speaker A: Well, hey, thanks so much for coming on here, guys. If you want to, uh, check out Rejection Con, which you should, you can go to rejectioncon.com and, uh, you can, you can register for the event. You can submit a talk. It is on March 12th through 4th. It is a virtual event. You don't have to fly anywhere you don't have to get sick from the airplane air, which just happens to me every time I fly. Um, you don't have to worry about any of that. Um, and uh, you can also check out Empath. Your, Your website is empathmsp.com right?

Speaker B: It is.

Speaker A: Uh, and that is uh, a fantastic learning platform for MSPs of all sizes to get their uh, technicians and you guys are eventually going to have resources for um, I'm going to call it back office staff too, right?

Speaker B: We already do have some. But yeah, any role, if you work in an MSP or in a support capacity, even if you're at a vendor, there is already content there for you. And we're working to increase that library both directly and through partnering with vendors to bring that content in. So there, there is something for everybody. I will say if you want to sit through a video that is going to update you on the latest iteration of the Ms. 900, we are not the best place for that kind of stuff. Traditional places.

Speaker A: I don't even know what that is.

Speaker B: Like a Microsoft cert, like that kind of stuff. Your traditional venues for that are prob. Still better. But Empath allows you to integrate that stuff. So look at that. See back in the platform. Uh, Steve, one other thing I want to mention really quick about Rejection Con. As an attendee we have all the proceeds go to charity, but we have sort of like a Humble Bundle model where it's, it's pay what you can. So if you can't pay anything and you just want to attend, you can attend for free. So just everybody's aware of that, that if, if you want to go and watch and learn and you can't pay for a ticket or your MSP can't pay for a ticket, that's okay. We want you there anyways. It's okay if you select the $0 option. Yeah, you're taking technology out of little kids hands somewhere and you know, whatever, you can deal with your own morality there. But uh, we really do we have that option for a reason. I'm being facetious. Like just like Humble Bundle allows you to pay what you want. Same idea here. So please attend even if you cannot afford to buy it. Second,

Speaker A: and I gotta say uh, taking technology out of the hands of children actually sounds like a good thing to me as, as a dad of kids who are maybe on technology too much throughout the day. So uh, anyway, take it, take it for what it is. Dean, thanks so much for coming on here man.

Speaker B: Thank you sir.

Speaker A: I really appreciate you. I love having these conversations. Can't wait to have another one with you in the future, man.

Speaker B: I hope that, uh, you have cookies next time.

Speaker A: I will bake some fresh. All right, take care, everybody.