Ep.166- The Art of Discovery Calls: Stories from Military Negotiation with JP Panzica
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh LaPresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. And this is next level biz tech.
Everybody welcome back. We are wrapping up a track today called the art of discovery calls stories from military intelligence style negotiation. And I’m not saying that just because JP’s from the East Coast and that’s how they do things. But I think he’s got some good insight here. JP Panzeca, Accelerate Partners. Welcome on buddy. Thank you, Josh. Great to be here with you. Appreciate the time. I’m excited, man. You’ve got a pile of experience in this.
You know how to sell to customers. You know how to go up market. You know how to do the hard stuff. let’s kick this off. Let’s just hear a little bit about your story, your background, how you got into this space. Has it been a winding path, crazy stories? What do you got? Oh, boy. We’re gonna have to rewind the tape for a long time, because I’ve been doing this way longer than I care to admit, but I think I’ll tell you.
, I started my career. So that might be four decades worth of experience. That is frightening to think about because I am still a juvenile, know, the way I conduct myself and behave and my wife will tell you that as well. So my career, I started in . I was starting customer service.
didn’t have any skills, wasn’t an engineer, wasn’t a, you know, an accountant or finance person. It’s just a, you know, kid out of college and like, all right, I’m going to conquer the world. And my first job, I was actually selling back in the day. Actually, I’m going to test you here. Did you? Did you ever read anything about technology service called telex back in the days? That is a no. Okay.
Okay, I thought that might be the case. So Teletype, Telex, Twix. Oh, now Teletype, now I do know Teletype. Love me a Teletype. Baud, punch tapes, Wall Street back then, all the confirmations and bank money transfers, everything was sent via Telex. And it took forever to get these communications between the companies.
One of my accounts also was the United Nations back then. And, you know, the UN used to send these massive messages, you know, to countries that, you know, nobody even had heard of. And the UN had put them on the map. So I started there. I was in, let’s see, I started in customer service. So actually I got to correct myself. So that was was the…
customer service day. I’ll get to in a second. So that makes the years, the math, tied together. So just testing to make sure you’re paying attention. I told there’d be no math, but go ahead. right. All right. So essentially working in customer service, dealing with banks, dealing with, you know, customers issues and the VP of sales came in and he had this great idea. So cause
Back then, these big Telex machines were tied into telephone lines. And they found out is if you could bypass these Telex networks and dial directly into the phone line, you can actually not pay the settlement charges between the carriers. It’s kind of like long distance, you know, back in the day and local. So they put a program together.
Um, they gave, asked so many customer service if they wanted to make the outbound calls and they were going to give you $ per, you know, per telephone number you got for clients. I raised my hand. I was like, okay, let’s go. I’ll totally do it over the course of several months. Um, I literally got , , , a hundred different telephone numbers. And, know, I made a lot of money and the, uh, VP of sales is like,
You are a great sales person. have initiative. You’re a personal young man. How would you like to go have a career in sales and technology? It’s like, can I make a lot of money? He’s like, yeah. He goes, all right, let’s give it a shot. So that was my very first start in . And I kind had never looked back since then. I worked in downtown Manhattan on Wall Street, selling to the banks.
I was living in Manhattan at age . company, the company’s not around anymore. It was called Graft at the time, but the company had about hundred employees total. And a couple of years into my sales job, I became the number one salesperson in the company at age . So here we are, late eighties. I’m making six figures in the late eighties. I’m in my you know, my young twenties.
I’m like, this is great, it’s gonna last forever. Yes. But it did last for a few years and it was absolutely awesome. obviously Sales is an up and down kind of game. But I love the thrill of being in Sales. I loved the ability to meet with clients. I love the ability to like now…
practice a skill, like selling is a skill. it’s something you need to practice. need to use it on game day and it needs to become like muscle memory kind of stuff. So, and I’d love that because I was an athlete a lot during my school years and still to a degree M as an old man, like to jump on bikes and go do crazy things. So it was a great kind of identity for me in sales.
And literally from there, my career kind of catapulted. I was in telephony for many years working for MCI. I was in their global accounts group. I managed big, huge financial contracts for like Merrill Lynch and Reuters back in the day and a team. kind of, that was a bigger company experience. And then went into the dot-com era.
was recruited by someone from MCI and I worked for a company called internet that is was I nap and now I think it’s horizon IQ or they again doing sales, sales building organizations, building, building out offices, selling internet, advanced internet services. was the same actually time that EchoNix had started. They were the two darling companies back in the late nineties.
that had really taken off. And what I loved about internet was it’s very entrepreneurial. The company, versus being in a big company like MCI, and I made a decision at that point. like, I like to make a difference for an entrepreneurial company. It’s like, you learn more, you’re challenged more. It’s like, you’re not put into a process or a workflow. And
You know, from there, I I continued on that path. Um, you know, I finished my corporate career fast forwarding a bit and I was, um, my last entrepreneurial role. was the original chief revenue officer for thrive. Again, sales focused, very sales focused, very marketing focused, um, but very entrepreneurial too. It was a very small company back then. It had just taken on private equity money. And again, it was a chance to like sell, to build.
build organizations, build sales processes, written like sales techniques and sales methodologies, what metrics are important, what products are we selling, the channel. So they could thrive in the channel back in that day. This is now. We were really one of the first MSPs in the channel back then. Channel is selling Colo.
you know, voice and UCAS, you know, some cloud, private cloud stuff, you know, and I remember we signed, we signed agreements with Telarus back then and a couple of other TSDs and they had no idea, the partners had no idea what to really do with us, you know, because nobody was talking to managed services and IT and, you know, but from our background, cause we’ve, I’ve always been in the channel and selling on the supplier side.
I knew that it worked for the other technologies and it was going to be a bit of an evolution, but it was going to be a really fun journey. And if we could be successful, it was going to be monumental. we did, I did that for a bunch of years. And then, you know, got to a point where I wasn’t having fun anymore. It’s like, I needed to go back to my entrepreneurial roots and
Thrive was transacting with one of their PE sponsors at the time. I said, this is a young man’s game and I’m not getting any younger. So decided that Accelerate was going to be my full-time focus and journey. And it was awesome. So March of . time to start. Great time to start a business.
Sitting there, we’re all trapped in our homes. I’ve got my mobile phone. I’ve got this computer. I’ve got no revenue. I’ve got no income anymore either corporate wise. I’m like, all right, let’s figure this out. And what did I do? I went back to my roots of just selling. And I had plus years at the time in different capacities. I knew tons of people.
I had always done the right thing. Integrity and transparency are really important to me. So I just started calling people and telling them what I was doing. And one by one, I started getting opportunities. People, because of me, just because of me, like, you can help me do this and figure this out. And little by little, I landed a couple of big deals after about a year.
In the beginning, was quoting out all the DSL circuits and the internet circuits. you know, I’m doing all the work because it’s just me. And, you know, then we gravitated and started to get to the MSP space and doing some, some MSP projects. And those are the bigger dollar items. So did that for a bunch of years. And, um, you know, all of a sudden got so busy at accelerate that I couldn’t handle all the work by myself.
I couldn’t afford to pay anybody either. They’re still small. I’m still making a large corporate salary. And I didn’t want to stop selling either. So I convinced a gentleman, John, John Megan Yell, who was with us today, was like, was hankering to do something on entrepreneurial side too. Tired of corporate. He’s an MSP guy. He came out of financial services. He worked in banking. He knows hedge funds and private equity.
I said, here, I will give you these projects. I can’t afford to pay you. like, but I will give you these projects. And I’m also consulting with these PE firms and you close these technology projects. You can consult with me here. And I said, I will pay you whatever I could pay you. I’ll give you as much as I can give you. And we had a discussion and this is one of my sayings now that I said it back then and I say it now to anybody new that comes on board.
Matter of I said it today during, cause I was interviewing somebody. I was like, back then, you know, it was pretty scary. It’s like, had a major corporate career and I’m like, now you go back to starting from scratch. It’s like, I have all this experience, I have all this knowledge, I had the desire. If I can’t bet on myself to be successful, why would anybody else want to bet on me? It’s like, whether it’s a job or whether it’s, you know,
just some contract things. Like you have to believe in yourself and you have to be confident that you can succeed if you have the right structure. And I believe that in myself and it wasn’t easy. It was a rocky road for the first two years, as they always say in the channel, right? It takes two years across the chasm. Took me to those two years, you know, and that’s the conversation I had with John. It’s like, you willing to bet on yourself? He goes, and his response was, there’s nobody better. He goes,
I will absolutely bet on myself. I am very confident that could do. So the way he went, understanding the organization, understanding the landscape of the channel, working the projects I gave him, he’s here now. We fast forward to current day, two and a half years later, he is successfully crossed the chasm and the checks are now coming in.
I love it. I love the story. I’m going to come back to a couple things from that story here in a second. Before I do, guess part of that, a lot of lessons learned, right? A lot of self discovery, a lot of mentors, a lot of maybe good decisions, maybe some not so good decisions that you learned from. Look, think of all that. What is one of your favorite lessons learned? You know, either one that you learned on your own or mentor. So.
One of the biggest lessons for me, so I’m big on mentoring by the way. I have several mentors in my life. I’ve been actually the VP of sales from when I was in customer service years ago, still a mentor to me. I still talk to him all the time. But one of the biggest things I had to learn is about patience. Patience and maturity. Just growing up in New York and being,
in the Northeast and being in business, you have to be aggressive. Sometimes you have to be ruthless. And lots of times you lack patience. Patience in people, whether it’s coworkers, patience in opportunities, being able to be patient. when you step back and take a deep breath and be patient, you’re able to then to use reflection. Why is the situation this way?
You know, what are the possibilities that are going on? And just to do some critical thinking around those that is able to then hopefully give you perspective on a situation, give your perspective on a person, right? And early on I was not successful very early in my career and I’m like invincible and I’m like, let’s just go. you know, I didn’t have to be patient.
And now as my older self today, that’s probably one of my strongest assets is patience, understanding, using empathy, appreciation for where people have come and where they have gone. Everybody has a story, whether they’re telling it to you or not. And every opportunity has dynamics that don’t meet the eye. And you really need to step back and be patient.
with those situations and try and understand them. Awesome. Okay, so let’s talk about, I mean, this is about complex discovery calls and skill sets and sales methodologies and things like that. So let’s first look back. Let’s think of early JP. What was an early discovery call like with JP? What worked? What didn’t work? And then we’ll move, we’ll fast forward.
So early discovery calls for me, and I was always taught this, because we grew up with sales methodologies back in my twenties. I used listen to Tom Hopkins and Zig Ziglar and all those sales methodologies back in the day. And so I became a student of sales skills. I still am actually. I love sales skills, sales technique. And early on I was very much
a pragmatic person when it came to sales skills. And it was very rigid, know, especially when you’re young and you don’t have the experience with them, you know, if he says this, then you say that. And this is how you overcome the objection. Yeah. So I was very young and very idealistic with sales skills back in that day. Although lots of times I still worked as a, you know, as a believer in them. But I always, always.
used sal skills. And one of the biggest sal skills that I was not very good at early on was listening. Listening or using active listening. know, when you actually, when somebody says something and you actually repeat it back to them with some perspective, right? So lots of times if you’re not listening, you’re not going to make the sal. So that early on,
Those are my kind of couple of snags and weaknesses. the other big thing I would say, and you know, this is common across all sales and not just, not just myself and my experience. And by the way, I, I made this full pile last week. I’m telling you that, you know, all these great things, you always have to ask questions. You always got to like, you know, you think, uh, you know, think of a client, think of yourself sitting, sitting here. It’s like.
What do salespeople try and do? They’re pitching like crazy. They’re always talking. They’re like trying to drag the customer into their world. This is great. We’re great. This is why we do this. Why we do that. You know, where the opposite should be true % of the time. And this is part of listening is you should, as a salesperson, should step into the client’s world. It’s like, let’s talk about business. Let me understand your business.
Let me understand your challenges. Ask questions in the beginning to understand, you know, the dynamics of what they’re going through. Cause that perspective nine times out of is going to help you tell your story better or give you the ability to create rapport and value for yourself with that particular client. Is the universal golden
skill that we don’t talk about enough then, is it empathy? Is that just universally translated in any different recipe that you want? Just apply the crap out of it? that a secret? Absolutely. It’s using empathy. It’s absolutely using empathy. Another big thing, you won’t see this in the sales books. I’ve written about it a bunch of times, but you know, a big believer in karma and the universe. So everything happens for a reason.
And if you go into a situation, and empathy is part of that too in a lot of cases, right? Understanding integrity, doing the right thing by, whether it’s the client, whether it’s your coworker or your dog or your wife, right? That will come back and manifest itself to you a thousand ways that will impact you. And I have always operated that way as well as like,
You the universe has got you back. And you you try and give more than you get and you’re trying to, you know, invest in people. try and teach people. I’m big mentor now to a lot of younger folks as well. And, you know, there’s just a lot of things you could do around that in sales and sales calls where, and we do that at Accelerate, integrity and reputation are
the two biggest, most important things for us, because you can’t let that get tarnished. And when you sit in front of a client and you want to use karma in the universe, you could actually break, have a conversation that may not benefit your company, but it’s the right thing to do. It takes a lifetime to build a brand, five minutes to ruin it. I mean, I’m with you on that whole.
universe thing. It’s funny how this all works, you know, cosmically, karmically, whatever, whatever the case is. I think if you set out to help other people, I mean, look, I know we’ve got targets, everybody’s got comp plans, we’ve got all of those things, like those are what, what, what have to get done so that people, people make the payments they need to make. And we have the roofs that we have. But if you, if you seek to help other people as your kind of fundamental empathetic skill set, I’m with you. It will.
always come back to you. That will show me a place that that screws you. It doesn’t, it doesn’t and it never will because the world will just be a better place in some varying capacity. Absolutely. Absolutely. % agree with you. Take the labor. Let’s let’s okay. So, so that’s early JP. So you’ve now kind of grown this business. You, you, you, ran successfully the MSP at thrive.
So now you’re into these more complex deals. You’ve moved even into larger customers, right? Customers of all sizes. How does that, how does later negotiation and tactic and strategy change for you? So it changes now because my role is different. I’m the founder, I’m the CEO. I have really talented sellers underneath me. And when we go into situations,
It’s more now about what we’ve done, who we are and how we can help them, you know, at a very strategic level. We have a lot of conversations. Everything starts in the C-suite with us. Everything starts in the C-suite. CEO, CFO, CRO, you name it, CMO, COO.
having conversations about business is universal, right? So you need to be very comfortable when you step into that client’s world and you’re talking to the CFO. It’s like, what do your investments look like for this year and the growth of the business? How are you protecting your business this year? It’s like, are you going after any new segments, verticals, what’s your hiring strategy for the year?
Business is universal. All companies have the same kinds of conversations that way. And they have to grow their business. Do they use technology to grow your business or are you using a human capital or you using both? How are you using technology? Right? How do you acquire customers? How do you train your sales force? What are the technology tools that they use? Is technology a growth enabler for you there? How do you protect your brand and your assets?
you know, what’s your insurance look like, what things you do there. So having those kinds of conversations will ultimately boil down to technology at some point. So be very, very comfortable, which I, you know, I am and my team is talking to the C level about business. You know, don’t go in there and want to talk about AI because it’s hot. It’s like, let’s talk, talk about, you know,
what their projects are for the year. Cause you know what, AI is probably on that roadmap somewhere, right? You know, how are they going to grow revenue? Can they use AI to grow revenue? know, employee productivity, that’s another big thing. Like, let’s talk about employee productivity. And one of the things that’s going to happen is you’re going to get into technology and AI has got some really good use cases there. So I would say that’s the biggest difference for me today is, you know, I’m talking CEO to CEO.
I’m talking to private equity operating executive that sits on boards of four portfolio companies, you know, and what, you know, what we see across industry and, you know, things that they could take to their, to their portfolio companies or things that, you know, conversations that we could come in and help them be successful. So let’s put, let’s put all this negotiation together. I think you’d laid some great found foundations, some fundamentals.
Walk us through a really hard negotiation, a win, how that culminated all and kind of what led to that. What’s an example here?
Alright.
I have one cell that sticks out of my mind when you just said that. I was calling on a hedge fund that has about billion of assets under management. And I called on them from three different companies over a period of time, the CTO, and started in the data center space back in the day.
you know, cause the trading aspects of it, um, didn’t do any business with them. Went to an MSP after spent three years trying to unpack what he was doing there and, telling, understanding what their, you know, what their risks and liabilities were, what their strengths were as far as technology. And went through several proposals.
even got awarded and got shot down, you know, at the executive level because they didn’t want to make any change because they got acquired. They got acquired. I’m like, so I won the deal and then they got acquired and the deal got squashed. So then.
go to accelerate. This is about relationships, right? I’m having valuable discussions with the sea level guy taking you back to the point earlier. You he knows I know what I’m doing and I can help him. So, you know, he picks up and takes my calls. So now I’m to accelerate and he’s one of the, one of the earlier ones. telling him, um, you know, what I’m doing and the goodwill. So we go through an entire years with the process with him.
Replacing his MSP, MSSP, know, users globally in Asia, Europe, North America. I’m bringing in different MSPs left and right, not using any names. And then the parent company wants to, the new parent company, the bottom wants to get involved. Kind of derails and takes the thing sideways for a few more months. They, they want to bring it all in-house. They have their own team.
Literally, I’m on year three of this cell inside of Accelerate, with five years behind it. So we’re at eight years now. This is playing the long game. talk about patience, right? Yeah. Yeah. Hey, the patience plays. finally, finally, they make a selection with the MSP.
They’re going through contract negotiations. I’m trying to help this guy figure out the budgets and like, you know, I’m from the MSP space. So I know what the margins look like. I know where they’re making money. I know where they’re not making money. I’m trying to counsel this guy. He finally gets to a point. They’re like, this is the best that we could do budget wise. We’re going over what we’re paying now. You, Mr. MSP have to figure that out.
months of that, finally they signed the contract.
As soon as he signs the contract, he’s supposed to feel like really joyous, right? Eight years. mean, is, Josh, this is $, a month in new MRR. Like we’re going places with this one. Like this is great. You you want to go celebrate? He calls me the next day. It was JP. He goes, I just quit. what? The next day. Literally the next day.
I got recruited by this other hedge fund that’s twice the size. It’s like, I don’t know what’s going to happen with his acquisition. You know, the new Perry company. They’ve been doing this for a while. I’m really sorry. I was like, okay. I was like, but you signed a contract. He’s like, yeah, they’re going to have to figure out how to honor that. He goes, they did sign the contract. So he leaves, by the way, I talked to him last week, this guy, that is a new company. And so he leaves and a consultant steps in.
And the MSP, it’s like, we’ve got a contract. It takes them another year and a half to get through the process of. How they’re going to do the migration with this guy leaving. So now now we’re nine and a half years in. So I think I just got my first commission check maybe a month or two ago. So. Oh, it was.
But it’s great. It’s a great story. mean, you know, we do see stuff like this a lot, though. This has been really cool to see how the channel has grown to your point. The staying if we follow these things, we’ve got patients do the right thing by the customer. Try to figure out if there’s a way that we can help them when they throw things at us, whether we know we can do them or not. Nobody throws us the hard the easy things. They throw us the hard things. And then inevitably you help that customer at customer A.
And they end up either staying forever and you keep selling them more, or they go to another place and you sell to customer B also. But if you don’t follow all those basics and you don’t help and you’re not helping with these negotiations and you’re not grinding it down and doing all these things, then we’re just another person in the equation. But you’re not clearly engaged in this account, you know, trying to close this thing. That’s the longest sale cycle I’ve ever heard in my life.
But I love it. There’s a happy story there. There is. all these things work. Timing’s weird, man. Timing just, you can see what the books tell you to see how long a deal in XYZ product should take, but then life happens and reality and just business and industry and all these things happen. there’s How do you forecast that in your pipeline, by the way?
Q of what year? Doesn’t matter. just said Q. That’s all you need to know. I believe it’s gonna close. I feel good about it. feel good about it. I love that. Let’s move to, I think you’ve given a lot of this, but from an advice perspective for other partners. What we hear about folks listening to the podcast is, hey, I started out in…
CX and I want to move into security or I started out in cloud and I want to move into advanced network here or whatever, right? Pick a, pick a poison there. So for the partners kind of listening to your story, the other advisors and they want to expand, right? They want to hone in these negotiation skills and expand. What’s your advice for them to, to, to identify these ops and really position themselves the most effective way possible. So good question.
You know, just rewinded for one second. I’ll answer that question directly, but I’m now I’m amazed and impressed by the caliber of the TA firm that are in the channel. There are some really. Click, can I say bad ass on this? that will that work? Yeah, no, they said it’s fine. Yeah, good. Good. Good. I just want to check. We can do this. There are some bad.
dudes in this channel and gals. love it. So, I mean, there are some literally really talented people, big firms too. I mean, with loads of talented people and they’re gravitating up the value chain and the technology stack and selling all kinds of solutions. It’s really impressive where we are now. It’s you know, it’s got, it motivates the heck out of me. I was having a conversation with a Telarus person the other day and we’re talking about such and such a firm and he’s telling me that he has employees now. I’m like, wow. I wonder what this guy’s revenue is. was like, Josh, I have five employees. Okay. So I’m hiring three, so I’ll have eight. I don’t have employees. so I look at that and it just motivates the heck out of me. So how do I learn from that team?
grow my company like that. You know, so that’s, that’s really, really the state of the channel from that perspective. So if I look at myself and I want to like, I want to grow my business into other areas, we’re good in cyber, we’re good in MSP, we’re good in AI now, we’re good in cloud, you know, but
We’re uncomfortable in CX. We’re uncomfortable in Thames. Other solutions, mobility, it’s okay to be uncomfortable, right? And there’s two tracks that you could go. You can either partner TA to TA, which is a new thing in the channel now too. We are the cyber CISO cloud experts for a bunch of TA firms and we help them close opportunities. Conversely,
we have done the same thing back. It’s like, Thames is a massive offering. I love Thames. You could walk in a new, I was in a Fortune , $ billion a year public company meeting the president, know, a month ago in New York with my team. I like, I never would have been able to get into that door. And it like, we were talking about technology expense management.
and being able to control costs. And now it goes across licensing. So I was very uncomfortable with that in the beginning. I partnered with a TA firm and a PA, love these guys. They’ve taught us so much. They’re our experts. So we now go in and talk to Tim’s and when we get the opportunity identified, we’re bringing them in because they got a deep bench of experts. So I think TA to TA partner,
is a really, really strong thing because you can’t master everything unless you’re the person firm that’s bringing in subject matter experts and your private equity back. Then you could do those things. But for the little guys like us, or maybe people smaller than us, or maybe people that are in same size as us, but they’re selling telecom or UCAS, being able to…
engage a trusted advisor that has that discipline and working with them to just increase your wallet share. That’s an important thing I would say for some firms to do because it’s immediate reward too. It’s like, all right, we’ve got all these clients. like, who can we sell temps to? Who can we sell CX to? We have a CX relationship now as well. Like, who can we sell?
or who can we consult with and get these meetings? And let’s just see if there’s opportunities. Cause the easiest thing is you have all these existing relationships, right? Why it’s like they’ll take a meeting with you. like, have a conversation and make it a business conversation. It’s like, if you want to talk about, you want to talk about CX, let’s talk about user experience. You know, let’s talk about employee productivity. Let’s talk about hiring. Right. And how CX can
impact all of those things. So, you know, that would be a huge piece of advice that I would give. The other thing, and I mentioned the word before, I be comfortable being uncomfortable.
Growth happens when you’re uncomfortable because you’re going to focus, you’re going to get strategic, you’re going to start to understand yourself and your business at a different level. And when you’re uncomfortable like that, and whether it’s taking on a new technology or whether it’s hiring a salesperson for growth or one of the big things I did, we just…
We just brought on another very senior seller partner in the firm yesterday. And I had our sales meeting on Monday. like, I’m no longer going to be selling any deals. It’s like, I’m no longer going to be, you know, I did that for years and I love to sell. I think I might’ve made that a little clearer in this meeting. But I’m like, you know what? I’ve been working.
you know, in the business for the last five years. Now it’s time for me to work on the business and get into the strategic initiatives. I’m sitting there. just went, we just invested in a new commissioning system, a new CRM system. have a sales enablement program. We just got into revenue operations, understanding trends. built an AI engine into SharePoint with Co-Pilot. So we’re doing all these things now that, you know, they’re not selling and
You know, some of them make me uncomfortable. Some of them, you know, I’m quite comfortable with, but the evolution of the business is important to acknowledge and to do that. So that was a tangent, I don’t know if that. It’s a good call out. It’s perspective at all the different things that you go through as a business owner. So I love the call outs. All right. So we think of, guess, let’s go final thoughts. You know, we think about.
This industry has showed us a lot of changes. AI is our next change. Who knows what the next thing is. So you think about changes and the future. How do you want people to think about this when this next great thing comes out or this next great thing comes out? How should we be thinking about that as advisors? And where should we be paying attention to or not paying attention to? And just give us your final thoughts. sure.
I personally feel extremely fortunate to be in the position that I am the CEO of a trusted advisor firm. And just looking at what’s happened over the past five years is you couldn’t predict, I couldn’t predict. Looking over the horizon now, we are sitting as the tip of the spear in my mind as it relates to business, technology and growth.
technology is changing so rapidly. There are new technologies that are gonna come out, come into place. There are new regulations that are gonna come in. AI regulation is gonna be huge. That’s obviously, we have to figure out how compliance, AI compliance is gonna work. That’s just starting. Another huge thing is, think of a CMMC in the DoD supply chain space, right?
Now all of a sudden, it’s like manufacturing is a regulated industry and it has to comply with standards. And there’s two more levels of CMMC compliance that are going to come up this year. So those, I mean, so those are two examples that being a trusted advisor, those are opportunities for us. There are many more on the horizon. There are many more across healthcare, across legal. I just see the evolution continuing.
And for us as advisors to have the relationships with our clients, to add value in those conversations, to stay relevant on technologies, get uncomfortable and make yourself learn things. I learned AI this year. I obviously knew what it was, I told you, I spoke in Vegas on an AI breakout session. like, I crammed for…
I used AI to learn AI. was a beautiful thing. you know, well, kidding though, we put together all these great use cases that I was interviewing suppliers on best use cases, took our own use cases and put this great deck together. I learned so much about where AI could be used. You know, so just to be able to have that ability as things change, as business changes, as technology changes, as the world changes.
to sit there as the advisor. It’s a privilege to be here. I love it. And that, my friend, is where we wrap it. JP, man, a lot of good compressed knowledge in there. We probably could have gone on for a lot more, but there’s just a lot of good nuggets in there. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing it all with everybody, It is absolutely my pleasure. I love to talk about this stuff, and let me know when I can do the help, Josh.
Anytime. Love it. I love it. Well, everybody that wraps us up for today. JP Panzeca Accelerate Partners. I’m your host, Josh Lepresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. As always, wherever you’re coming to us from, Apple, Spotify, get these drops every Wednesday. Until next time, art of discovery calls. Next level BizTech has been a production of Telarus Studio . Please visit Telarus.com for more information.