Local Partners - User Groups Everywhere Lessons Learned - Episode 55 One of the turning points in my career was attending SMB Nation, a conference run by author and community builder Harry Brelsford. I got introduced to a huge group of great people from around the world. They were there to learn about technology (centered on Microsoft’s Small Business Server family) and how to improve their IT business. At that event, I learned that there were “SBS user groups” all over the world, and that they kept in touch via an online chat-type forum called Yahoo Groups. There was an subset of those folks who were part of a user group leaders forum. It wasn’t exclusive to group leaders, but the conversations were about group management, organizing, getting speakers, and all the details of running a group. Due to those groups, I started the Sacramento SBS User Group. The first people I collected as members were local consultants who happen to be at Harry’s conference or inside the Yahoo groups. Almost immediately, my friend Bob Nitrio became one of the group leaders. (After about ten years, I stepped aside and Bob became the group president.) Most of those groups faded away over the years as they did not evolve from SBS to other SMB technologies. Australia had a particularly successful collection of groups in all of their major cities. It was called the SMB IT Professionals. Bob and I asked them if we could use their name for the Sacramento group. They said yes – and said we could use their logo as well. And so the Sacramento SMB IT Professionals group was born. And it still exists today, though much smaller. The important thing was that all of these groups serendipitously grew up and grew connected to each other very quickly all over the world at the perfect time. By 2005-2006, there were IT user groups in almost every city and county in North America, Europe, and the APAC countries. Why does this matter? For many reasons, some of which were: This community began a worldwide norm of cooperating with one another and sharing information. In many cases, people from across the country and around the world helped each other solve issues. These groups became a natural audience for educators and vendors who wanted to reach the emerging “managed service providers.” There was a time when the best, fastest, cheapest way for a vendor to become known in the space was to speak at these groups and become known in the community. Members of the community became an extended workforce for one another. I have lost count of the number of times we hired, or were hired by, members of the IT user groups. Eventually, of course, larger gatherings grew up. First it was with specific vendors such as ConnectWise and Autotask (now Kaseya). Then groups formed for specific purposes, such as marketing or “buying” groups that offered members discounted purchasing from vendors. Today there are hundreds of evens per year in this community – fragmented into hundreds of groups rarely defined by geography. Why are these local groups no longer as successful (with some big exceptions)? Well, here’s my theory. As vendors emerged as a growing force in the industry, they built and supported each other in creating larger events simply so they could meet more partners all at once. At the same time, a large segment of the industry realized that they could meet all the vendors and gain access to all the information by attending only the free events. In this case, “free” means the vendors are paying for it. Free is a very addictive price. But it makes it very difficult to provide real value to consultants without backing from vendors. These vendors expect stage time and Lucite awards in exchange for their largess. So event organizers get addicted to the vendor sponsorships and attendees become less and less willing to pay for content. With a few exceptions. The result of all that brings us to where we are today: It is very difficult to find an event that is not dominated by vendors pitching their products instead of providing value. I can’t think of any vendor in our industry who evaluates their sales people on helping IT consultants to be successful. All of them are evaluated on how many partners they signed up and how many licenses they sold. Fun fact: Back in the days of newspapers, the advertising was laid out first. That determined the number of pages that would be printed and the space left over for news. That space was referred to as the “news hole.” Events in the IT space have exactly the same thing going on. First, an organizer has to give vendors the speaking slots they paid for, large and small. And what’s left over for truly valuable content that improves consultants’ business processes shrinks each year. Some events have as little as one or two hours of actual educational content in a one or two day event! As you can guess, I am nostalgic for the local user groups. That’s one reason I’ve taken more than a dozen trips to Australia. But my nostalgia is not just nostalgia for the good old days. It is more about community in which a sincere effort was made to educate partners and help each other to be successful. In my opinion, vendors should do more to support actual content (rather than sales pitches) and IT Service Providers should be more willing to pay for good information that will actually help their businesses. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how we get there from here. Feedback always welcome. -- -- -- Episode 55 This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. Leave comments and questions below. And join me next week, right here. 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