Episode Summary
Right of Boom has come and gone and it was another fantastic conference, unique in the MSP world for educational content rather than sales pitches. Mac is joined by Ryan Weeks, the mastermind behind content curation for Right of Boom, to recap the con and discuss the behind-the-scenes of planning the event and the decisions that went into attendees’ learning journey. Listen as Ryan dives into the artifacts, future plans, and the main takeaway he hopes MSPs bring home.
Transcript
MacKenzie Brown: Welcome, everyone, to Return of the Mac. It has been quite a week. I took last week off, as you know, from recording and having a guest, because we were in Las Vegas and I would say three days is probably my max and I spent five days there, and I can feel the pain today.
I had the Sunday scaries. Now we are rolling into this week, and I feel like I just I feel like I’m on The Hangover, but for MSPs specifically. I mean, I was a good girl. I feel like I was a good girl. I thought I was.
So, Right of Boom. That’s what we were in Vegas for. Right of Boom 2024, it has come and gone and it was certainly one for the books, as they say.
One of the things that I love about Right of Boom is the way that it’s designed, the learning opportunities. And if you weren’t there, we’re basically going to spend this next recording doing a fun recap of the show. So whether you attended this year or not, or maybe you want to be interested in attending next year, as I had a lot of interesting discussions prior to Right of Boom—I was surprised the MSPs that weren’t there, hadn’t heard of it.
And it was a packed full house, sold out. Amazing. And I am blessed to be here right now with my guest, who is basically one of the brilliant minds behind Right of Boom, Ryan Weeks. Ryan, thank you for coming.
Ryan Weeks: Thanks. I have a fun fact for you.
MacKenzie Brown: Ooh, I love fun facts.
Ryan Weeks: Did you know that you have attended more Right of Booms live than I have?
MacKenzie Brown: Really?
Ryan Weeks: Yeah.
MacKenzie Brown: No way. How many—There’s three total.
Ryan Weeks: You were able to be at ‘23 and ‘24. I was only able to make it to ‘24 for various reasons.
MacKenzie Brown: Oh my gosh. Now I feel like we need special little badges next year. Kind of like marking down.
Ryan Weeks: Yeah, I know. It’s crazy. There are a lot of people that have been there through all three years.
But yeah, really this year was mind blowing. Since I’ve been behind the scenes with Andrew Morgan, the founder, since the very beginning, and I really was, when we were setting up on Wednesday before everybody got there, I was really blown away by the size.
MacKenzie Brown: Yeah. Well, how does it differ, too? That’s what I was curious about too.
Ryan Weeks: Well, so year one, including vendor sponsors, staff, was 250 people. This year we were close to 1250. So it’s grown over a thousand people in effectively two years. Three conferences. Two years. Pretty crazy.
MacKenzie Brown: Wow. What was the size this year, though, wasn’t it capped at like—
Ryan Weeks: 1250 total. Total attendees, including vendor sponsors.
MacKenzie Brown: Oh, no wonder you’re tired.
Ryan Weeks: Yeah. You know, managing the logistics of all that was was pretty exhausting. And it’s crazy, you know, you work for—and, you know this, because you work with the content with me. We developed this learning journey, which makes Right of Boom a little different. I’m sure we’ll talk about that in a minute, but you’re never really sure how it’s—because you’re kind of structuring it and then asking other people to lend their expertise to it. And so you get there and you know, you’ve seen the slide decks, but you haven’t seen the presentations. And so it’s kind of nerve racking to have at that point lost control and just sit back and hope for the best.
But every year the speakers do an amazing job. And it was was definitely a really special experience.
MacKenzie Brown: So I can imagine. Were you sitting in the back AV place the whole time?
Ryan Weeks: I was. I was in and out. Sometimes I was up front, sometimes I was in the AV booth, sometimes I was off dealing with other stuff. You know, it’s funny because it’s in a way, it’s like a startup. A few of us that are partners in the business do everything.
So, you know, I could be at the registration desk printing badges one minute, and next minute going and troubleshooting AV, and a minute later going into a preday room and being a presenter and a speaker. Like, you’re just all over the place. So from that regard it was really cool.
MacKenzie Brown: Yeah, you kind of were a jack of all trades at this event for sure. I could see you running around and then also I could feel the stress on you.
I’m sure being home right now feels good. And this year was in Vegas, too. Was there a reason why you guys chose Vegas this year? You know, traditionally you see the Black Hats and the DEF CONs and the Microsoft Ignites…
Ryan Weeks: At the size of the conference that we’ve grown to, with the way we structure our content, which is everybody’s in a single room for all content, and the size of the vendor expo hall, you need a hotel that can service a large crowd in two large spaces in any given time. It needs to not be prone to weather issues. It needs to be warm, and it needs to not be super expensive for MSPs to get to and to stay at. And then you’re dodging spring break, too, by the way, in there.
So like, there’s a limited number of places geographically that you can actually hold an event of this size, with the way we structure the event. So that kind of leaves you, well, like California, Florida, Texas maybe if you’re lucky and manage to dodge an ice storm, and Las Vegas. So, you know, the options are actually somewhat limited this time of year, at the size we’ve grown to.
MacKenzie Brown: I never thought about that. I feel like I’m going to use that excuse next time I’m trying to convince people to go to Vegas for a trip, and be like, look, looking at all these factors—inexpensive, the least amount of distance you have to go to. They’re like, but Vegas. Yes, a burger is going to cost you $20, but who needs to eat?
Ryan Weeks: I would love to have it in San Diego, but—
MacKenzie Brown: Like, my gosh, it’s so expensive.
Ryan Weeks: Yeah, the room prices for MSPs are going to triple or quadruple, and that’s not right, right? We want this to be you know, we want them to get their investment out, but we don’t want them to have to spend a lot to get there and enjoy the event.
So yeah, Vegas it was this year, in Vegas. It will be next year as well. The real question is, where will 2026 be? That’s what we’ll be working on now.
MacKenzie Brown: Spinning the wheel. Oh, that’s good. Well, I will say, and if anyone didn’t catch that is—part of the reason I actually like the design of this conference, and many parts of the design I enjoy. But it’s that everybody is in one room together. So you don’t have, you know, I’ve been to a lot of conferences and I feel like you have to pick and choose between what sessions you want to see and you want to go to and which rooms they’re in. And of course, you’re already walking everywhere.
So I do enjoy the fact that all of them are in this—and I mean, we’ll put up some footage and pictures for this recording, but it was a massive room fitting, of course, like you said, it has to fit almost 2000 people or so, or upwards of, and it was fantastic. It was really impressive.
But I love that design. I love it. It feels a lot more engaging, but also more communal like everyone is, everyone is attending to some degree, but they’re certainly all in the same room together.
Ryan Weeks: Every year I get the itch to…Because like, it would be awesome if we could do tracks in a normal way, where you’re breaking out and you’re like, there’s a beginner business track, an advanced business track, a beginner tech track, an advanced track. You can have more speakers, you can have more content.
But what we hear from MSPs over and over again is that there’s some sort of magic that happens when everyone’s in the same room and they actually kind of say, Don’t change it.
MacKenzie Brown: That does feel like an MSP thing to me.
Ryan Weeks: So we don’t change it. And then then the challenge becomes when you’re designing the content—and again, you know this because I work with you and your team. You can’t be too technical, but you can’t be not technical either in a technical track.
MacKenzie Brown: But I love that.
Ryan Weeks: You have to be a little bit technical in the business track, but you can’t be pure business because then you lose the service managers and the level three, the CISOs and all the other people in the in the crowd. So it’s an interesting challenge from a content perspective, which, you know, if you know me, you know, I like impossible problems and challenges.
MacKenzie Brown: But that is the perfect formula, though, in my opinion too, for even the DEF CONs of the world. As you know, I could sit in a two-hour presentation about reverse engineering one specific piece of software, but it doesn’t feel as…inclusive is probably not the right word, because you want to see these analysis broken down. But when you want to go to a presentation, the ones that people remember are a little bit more universally accepted to anybody in the audience. So they can pick up bits and pieces and it doesn’t feel like you’re just getting waterboarded by technical things or buzzwords. You know, you still have that flexibility as an attendee is really important.
Ryan Weeks: Yeah, you know, we prioritize. So every tribute that becomes a speaker…And so one of the things we do is we actually don’t want you to hear from people you’ve always heard from. So we actually work to find people inside of various different MSP technology companies that actually do the work of cybersecurity. Yeah, and we pull them out and we put them on stage.
So some of the speakers you’ve never seen or heard from. I mean, everybody knows who you are and that you have the chops, you’re a practitioner as well. But, you know, for some other vendors, we’re actually pulling people out of the depths of the organization and putting them on stage to share the knowledge they have. Which is an important ingredient, too.
And then the other thing we do, which is really mean to speakers, is we say, Hey, you have an hour, but you really need to cap your content at 40 minutes, because the whole audience is going to pummel you—
MacKenzie Brown: I know I loved I got to push you on that. I was like, I have recorded this—
Ryan Weeks: We give you 20 minutes per speaker to allow the audience to pummel them with any question they want. And then this year we added Whova, which was an engagement app where the audience can actually ask the speakers and engage with the speakers directly through the app too.
So we had questions coming in that way. And so really the speakers basically had a part time job for the three days of the conference this year, which was, you know, every single one of them really rose to the challenge and I couldn’t be happier with how it came out.
And to add insult to injury, not only did I make you build a presentation that kind of conformed to the learning journey and then did 20 minutes of Q&A this year, I also made you create a deliverable to hand out to the audience.
MacKenzie Brown: That’s right. That’s right. Okay. So the design of the conference, tell us about the learning journey and then tell us about the artifacts that you’re mentioning as well.
Ryan Weeks: Yes, this goes back to when Andrew first called me up. He’d bought the Right of Boom.com domain, which is the first thing you do when you decide you want to start a conference, right?
MacKenzie Brown: I have a lot of business ideas, usually at parties or in bathrooms. And I’m like, let’s check out the domains right there.
Ryan Weeks: Buy the domain. And he’s like, here’s what I’m thinking, there’s all these speakers that you’ve heard before and they’re great. But I was like, No, we need to do something different. We need to teach the audience not only how to do primarily protection, which a lot of MSPs were solely focused on. But we also really need to open their mind to this stuff that’s right of boom, the respond and recover functionality and the tech stuff that falls in between. So kind of wanted to take them on this journey from left to right of boom.
So we’re like, ah, we need frameworks, we need NIST, we need CIS, we need Cyber Defense Matrix, we need MITRE Attack. Over the years, we’ve started to layer in. And then those become kind of an ingredient into the recipe for the learning journey for the for the tech track.
First year, there was no business track, second year business track, sort of. It was kind of tied the tech track and became like tech track lite. This year we said, No, we’re going to have a completely distinct framing for the business track, and we partnered with an MSP, very well-known Brian Blakley, president of GMI, a serial entrepreneur, well known in the MSP space, to actually vet the idea for the framing and ultimately execution of that.
So yeah, the learning journey is part of the secret sauce for Right of Boom in that it’s a deliberate methodology for the content. And then we find speakers that actually do the job of cybersecurity, as we said, and bring them on stage to actually help kind of form the education for the conference. So it really isn’t—
MacKenzie Brown: And not salesy. There’s nothing that’s like highlighting a special dashboard or some platform or a specific tech. I mean, it is breaking down these concepts. For people who weren’t there, on the tech tracks we had popping credentials, sploit and vulns, account takeovers and BECs, Pwned & Owned, which I talked about lateral movement and modern malware campaigns and extortion attacks. And they all feel like you’re leaving learning something and you’re not being pitched something.
How did you choose those two for the journey? Like, did you focus on the MITRE Attack kind of framework of the attack chain, or was it just high level?
Ryan Weeks: This year it was…we kind of have to go back to last year. Last year’s focus was BlackCat, the ransomware threat group that’s currently exit scamming their affiliates. And I really loved that framing, but there was some redundancy in the tech track that came from that.
And so I wanted to still stay threat-informed cyber defense, which is one of the core beliefs, we believe in structured approaches and threat-informed cyber defense. But I was like, we need to figure out how to zoom out a little bit.
And so I probably read 40 threat reports over the past year, and they’re all largely saying the same thing. But we settled on Verizon data breach report because it has the CIS Controls in it. It uses Verus, which is a really cool structured format for collecting incident response data and reporting. And it leverages MITRE Attack. So two of the core structure approaches that we use for Right of Boom already baked into the report.
So we decided that from a threat actor perspective or from a threat-informed perspective, we would pick the five attack patterns, quote unquote, or some attack patterns that had you know, categorization in these five classes to take a little bit of a broader view of the threat landscape than we did in the prior year.
Challenge was now—because with BlackCat we could literally go left to right of boom, starting with reconnaissance and research development all the way to impact, and we split the conference up so we moved you left to right a boom over two days. This year, you move left to right of boom in-session, which is an interesting and different challenge.
So every year our framing changes a little bit, which I think is, you know, part of the fun component of it, too. But we always use those frameworks to help you orient yourselves and help you gain some competency in how to use them, how to think through them, how to apply them to your business.
MacKenzie Brown: Yeah. I do feel like you’ve curated, like you said, kind of the top trends, but also I don’t like the word trends, but it’s like, what should you give a sh* about when you go to a conference? You can hear about many of things in a security realm, but I like that you base it off of—Everyone loves a good Verizon data breach report too. But what should you give a sh* about based on what we’ve been seeing for the past few years?
Ryan Weeks: Yeah, I mean, because everybody’s chasing the next, you know, what AI-powered blobbety-blah should I be buying? And it’s like, well.
MacKenzie Brown: We’re still not patching, people.
Ryan Weeks: Yeah, exactly, right?! I literally have the quote up on my monitor above me. Verizon Data Breach Report: The three primary ways in which attackers access an organization are stolen credentials, phishing, and exploitation of vulnerabilities.
MacKenzie Brown: Oh my gosh. Everyone loves a good sitcom, though. We still watch sitcoms when the story doesn’t really change. We just enjoy the characters.
Ryan Weeks: So kind of the premise of the whole tech track framing is like, let’s get really good at understanding how bad guys do what they do. And once we understand that, we realize that the things that are getting us compromised are the same things that have been getting us compromised for the last decade. And we largely just need more discipline when it comes to pursuing basic cyber hygiene.
And we use the frameworks to show you what those things are through the lens of what the bad guys are doing. And this year, we used multiple different types of attacks. But ultimately it all comes back to the same three things: stolen creds, phishing and exploitation of vulnerabilities. If you get really good at those three things, you mitigate a lot of your risk, right?
MacKenzie Brown: And so, I mean, as an outcome that you would desire for MSPs that are attending this conference, it’s to be educated and to understand, to some aspect. But what are the other sort of objectives you hope they take away after hearing some of these tech tracks, more so than the business?
Ryan Weeks: I mean, my goal is always that people walk away with this overwhelming desire to go back and reassess their current security program state against essential cyber hygiene, which is CIS Implementation Group One. I’ve been looking at MSP cybersecurity programs for close to a decade now. I’ve never looked at one program that has CIS IG1 implemented fully without gaps or without operational excellence. There’s always something to improve.
Part of that is because being a MSP is challenging. You’re not just like—when I’m a CISO, I’m securing one organization that may have multiple products. When you’re an MSP, you’re securing dozens and dozens of organizations that have different threat profiles and different technology needs. And, you know, it’s a very unique problem that they have.
But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a large enterprise or you’re servicing SMBs. All of us are getting hacked the same way. And it’s the basic stuff. Yeah, over and over and over again. So I want them to go back and think, rethink through, you know…The call to action I had on stage when I was I outlining the learning journey was, I want to go back and think through, do you have your house in order before you go and do something else?
And you know, I hope they took that away. And if not, there’s always next year, we can try to hammer that home next year.
MacKenzie Brown: So you mentioned the CIS, and I feel like that was one of the pre-days too…I feel like there was a CIS pre-day…
Ryan Weeks: Yeah, CIS did a pre-day with Pax8.
MacKenzie Brown: Right. But was this the first year we had pre-days too, pre-day workshops?
Ryan Weeks: No, we have pre-days last year too. Most of the attendees that attend the main event actually attend a pre-day.
MacKenzie Brown: I noticed that, yeah. We did our Capture the Flag challenge, and you know, just so everyone knows, from what I recall all these pre-days were pretty much sold out by the time we got there. And so that’s also something I’ve never really seen at conferences before, is where the workshops almost have as much driving of engagement as the conference itself.
And people are willing to come into Vegas early to do that, right? It was the day before, and I’m not willing to come into Vegas early for anything nowadays, but I think that that shows a lot. And we had a pretty good waiting list because we knew people were going to drop off, and we still managed to fill our room pretty close to full, which was terrifying.
But do you see the pre-days as being another kind of driving force that differentiates Right of Boom from other conferences a little bit?
Ryan Weeks: In a way, because I don’t in any way govern the content of the pre-days. My role as the director of content for Right of Boom really only happens with what’s on the main stage. What I think is interesting to see though, is the hosts of the pre-days really embrace the spirit of the conference and they’re trying to drive the similar level of education.
It might be specific to their technology or to their control, but they are trying to help MSPs understand the fundamentals of the problem, not just, you know, here’s literally how to click through the UI. It really is hands-on training. And a lot of times you’re getting into, you know, how to detect specific attack techniques, how to develop a competence in a certain skill. And so I think it really leans more, I would say, to technical training in some regards.
And some sessions are business centric, leadership centric, other sessions are technical centric. But yeah, they’re very, very well attended.
MacKenzie Brown: This is an affordable conference, and respect to a lot of the ones that are out there right, like RSA and Black Hat. This is pretty affordable, where if you’re considering next year, which you should, and you’re sending, you know, your top people to it, your top VP’s, some of your leadership, some of your solutions engineers, this would be the ideal way to do it, because you don’t feel like you’re just sending someone to a conference as a manager, but you’re really sending someone to bring home the bacon.
And you mentioned the artifacts. Can you kind of dive into those, that bacon a little bit more?
Ryan Weeks: Yeah. So last year we created this threat brief for BlackCat to go with the structured learning journey for the entire event. It was a kind of a handout that people really got at their seat.
And then people called us after the event and they’re like, I took it back, I built tabletop exercises, I reviewed it with my team, we went back through all of our defenses and we checked against all the detection opportunities…and people really used it in unexpected ways.
And it really kind of drove home for us the value that people saw of these deliverables, that they can go back and work with their team. And so we’re like, All right, what if we like really amped that up?
And we tried to do that at the scale of, every session has a deliverable. We call those artifacts that relate to the content of that speaker. And yeah, I mean, people were—you know, what I was trying to do is drop the artifact right at the time the speaker took the stage. And there would be people like already DMing me being like, Where’s the artifact? Where is the artifact? Like people were going crazy for it.
So all the artifacts, the recordings, everything, you’re going to be up in the Cyber Nation in a couple of weeks.
MacKenzie Brown: I was just going to ask that, too. Is it going to be accessible to just people who attended the conference? Are you looking to make it accessible to everyone?
Ryan Weeks: Anybody that is in the Cyber Nation, I believe, can see past all past Right of Booms. And this one.
MacKenzie Brown: Right. I’m still amazed that you guys capped it out this year at still a total of 1200, which is insane, especially that, anyone who’s put on a conference, that keeps you up at night for sure.
But I mean, I went to a couple of events the month prior to Right of Boom week, and I’m always asking partners like, Hey, yeah, are you going to Right of Boom? Are you going to Right of Boom? And a lot of them hadn’t heard about it before. I’d probably say like one in ten MSPs.
So consider this. This was an extremely packed already conference and I feel like it’s just the tip of the iceberg, maybe at a global scale, definitely, but definitely at a U.S. level scale of the amount of MSPs that didn’t attend or didn’t know about it. Do you guys see yourself growing to that point where you’re like, Let’s let’s take over MSP security, and bababa…
Ryan Weeks: I mean, I don’t know about taking over. But I think it goes back to there’s a need, and the question is how best do we help fill that need? Is it a once-a-year conference or is there something else that we need to be doing…
MacKenzie Brown: Well, and virtual access too…
Ryan Weeks: Yeah, do we grow the conference, you know, by attendees? Or the question is, how do you grow but still keep the experience the same as it has been so it drives value. And so this year, I mean, this year over last year it was another 300 to 400 MSPs over, so almost double the amount of MSPs as last year.
So that’s always the challenge when we grow, is how do we keep a consistent experience for everyone. And the logistics of that get more complicated every year.
MacKenzie Brown: I don’t think the Gaylord Conference Center would have been able to handle this many people. It would’ve been a little crazy.
Ryan Weeks: We do have room to grow inside the MGM next year. So yeah, I think, you know, right now we’re just going to kind of see—The crazy thing is, we also don’t do really do any marketing. So it’s literally just grown organically, word of mouth.
MacKenzie Brown: That fits back into the community.
Ryan Weeks: So I’m kind of terrified of what would happen if we actually got out there and tried to fill the top of the funnel.
MacKenzie Brown: I mean, you would definitely sell out even faster than you did this year, I would imagine. And it does feel like, again, on that community thing, I imagine maybe you have that data, but to see who attends and is a return attendee, or even the MSP is a return attendee for representation. I think that that’s one of the biggest metrics to look at, that, hey, this was really valuable and we’ll want to keep coming back.
Ryan Weeks: I know, roughly off the top of my head, I know we had over 100 3-timers. I know we had close to 300 2-timers.
MacKenzie Brown: Ooh. Maybe you do need to give out pins or badges.
Ryan Weeks: I know, we’re thinking about it. It’s it’s on my list of things to do. What can we do from a badge perspective to kind of show, you know, who’s been there from the start.
But the interesting thing is, you talk to someone that came last year and they came just themselves. And then this year they brought three or four people. The first timers this year were like, this was awesome. I can’t wait to bring my team next year.
And so it seems to be the trend is the people that come for the first year kind of get a feel for it. They love the content, they love just the way the conference is put on, and then they want to they want to bring more of their team, which is just great because there is the mix of the business-oriented content.
You know, part of my challenge, especially like those service managers out there, is, yes, your job is primarily technical and like how are you instrumenting the controls, the process, the people, but you’re also this key cog in the wheel, figuring out how to one, reduce costs, increase margins and grow the profitability of the business.
Those service managers, to me, are really the people that need to be there, because they’re getting the technical content to try and kind of gap and assess their existing cybersecurity stack. But then they’re also getting these ideas to work with their owners about how to how to better manage the business.
And so, yeah, I wish we had a larger representation of service managers as well, but we’ll get there all in due time.
MacKenzie Brown: So for the future, do you have any predictions outside of more Vegas next year? What are some things that kind of come to mind that you would hope to see?
Ryan Weeks: So I have a few ideas. I’ll be shopping some of these ideas around with MSPs, you know, nothing final. Yeah, I think we have a few things that are happening right, that that the attack pattern ecosystem, I think, is relatively static. We’ll see some stuff coming out of AI and autonomous AI hacking. We’ll see some of that stuff over the next year, but I don’t think that’s enough to build the conference around now.
And ultimately I don’t like to go after the shiny object. I like to focus on the fundamentals. And so there is some stuff changing in the landscape from a fundamentals perspective. NIST CSF 2.0 just came out. Ultimately that’s going to flow downstream to CIS with some, you know, supplementals. And maybe by the time of the conference next year, an actual new version, we’ll see what happens and what their timeline looks like.
You’re also going to see that flow down to updates inside of the Cyber Defense Matrix. And it’s going to flow down to a bunch of other frameworks that MSPs have come to rely on. And so I could see, you know, maybe going in, there’ll be some new controls, new capabilities, which also means new revenue opportunities for MSPs. So I could see kind of leaning, you know, staying core to that structured approaches and leaning in on a controls perspective too.
Question is, is even when you try to take something like IG1 with 60 controls, how do you condense that down into five tech sessions? And that’s an interesting challenge. So we might have to narrow in even more on that. But, you know, one thought I had was we could literally do one session per framework, make it even more complex.
MacKenzie Brown: Yeah, I would definitely be interested in the MITRE Attack one, but…do you see an inclusion maybe on the more the speaker level of more enterprises too? Because we see the same people every year, like how do we kind of bridge that gap a little bit more.
And you know, I love that the person who spoke, it was the Huntress session, but they brought in the guy, Tom Millar from CISA. And I loved hearing him talk about some of his points, too, on mandates and how we can actually implement real change. Do you see us bringing in more of those, I would say authorities is the wrong word, but more of those organizations?
Ryan Weeks: Yeah. I mean, so we had Tom Miller join the sploit and vulns session. We had two former MSP owner operators, now SMB CIOs, one for the county of Santa Barbara, one for a construction contracting company, join us for the business track, and really, really high levels of engagement. The Q&A like, the audience really is saying, we would like more time with these people to ask them questions. We want more access.
And so I think the question is, how do we pair more of these kind of industry-leading experts, thought leaders, whatever you want to call them, with the content folks in the in the core session, and then make them available to the audience outside of just the session? I think that’s something we’re going to be ruminating on for next year as well, to try and improve the experience, because we’re never satisfied. We’re always trying to make it harder on ourselves.
MacKenzie Brown: Yeah, well, the experience has been pretty great already and it’s super engaging, so I can only imagine it’s up from here. And I mean, you could probably put a whole session on Microsoft licensing alone, that requires a Ph.D., and I would sit in on that, weirdly enough. Look, I don’t wanna go, but I really don’t understand it. So I need to go sit down and see how they rebrand it again.
Ryan Weeks: At this point, at two decades in, if I can’t understand it, I think the chances of me figuring it out are pretty slim. I’m gonna leave that to someone else who gets a Ph.D. in that topic.
MacKenzie Brown: Definitely. Okay, so I do want to wrap it up a little bit, but like, how can everyone, now that I’ve learned that, which is exciting, how can people, what can they expect in the next couple of weeks? You know, we’ve got a recap here. So everyone’s going to start hearing as our hangovers go away and get settled more.
Ryan Weeks: We’ll get the files back from AV, we’ll eventually get those uploaded to the Cyber Nation. That’ll include speaker decks and the artifacts, which will be available there for folks, and then we’re going to start working on next year. We’re literally doing a postmortem tomorrow to gather all of our feedback while it’s still fresh in our brains.
And, you know, you’ll probably laugh at this, but literally on the flight home, I already I started the outline for next year, like we’ve already started.
MacKenzie Brown: I’m not shocked you did.
Ryan Weeks: Yeah, so it literally takes a full year to pull something like this off because there are things we need to get lined up in certain orders to be able to knock all the dominoes down. And so, yeah, we actually have to get that learning journey locked in pretty early so that we can execute on the rest of it.
So yeah, but basically right now we’re just waiting on AV files to get that the resources available to people. If you want a sneak peek as to all the sessions, Jessica Davis from MSSP Alerts was there, did a two-part series on day one and day two that you can go read about the content and all the speaker sessions. I actually sat down to read those this weekend.
MacKenzie Brown: Oh, perfect. And where can people subscribe or follow or whatever to be able to get access once you guys announced that, is it on LinkedIn? Where can they go, where can you point them?
Ryan Weeks: Andrew Morgan usually posts, we’ll probably post something as Right of Boom, which you can also follow on LinkedIn. And I’m sure if you’re if you attend the Cyber Call, we’ll talk about it there. It’ll be posted in the Cyber Nation. So you can access those resources.
MacKenzie Brown: That’s perfect. If you could leave one piece of advice for the people listening when it comes to attending or subjecting yourself to putting on a conference like this, what would your advice be?
Ryan Weeks: I don’t know. Putting on is, as you know, don’t do that alone. You definitely want someone that knows the business like Andrew, makes a lot easier. But attending, I think the challenge for an MSP is, you could literally be at an event every week, some weeks there’s three or four events.
So it’s getting really hard to choose what events to go to. I think you really need to start looking at which ones are going to help you best align your service offerings with the needs of your customers and the threats that are out there and help you grow your business. How you figure that out, I don’t know. But I think, you know, listen to your peers, go to those peer groups, talk through it. But there’s choice overload in that space, right? And that’s definitely a challenge for MSPs.
MacKenzie Brown: Well, you heard it yourself, ladies and gentlemen. I think that’s a great piece of advice, especially as we’re kicking off MSP season. And I just call it that because I learned this last year. It’s like, just never unpack my bag. Okay, good to know.
But think a little bit deeper on when you’re making that choice. It’s not all location, location, location. Even though apparently that does help choose what location you throw a conference, and I’m going to use that formula for any future endeavors in Vegas where I have to convince people to follow me.
Well I’m looking forward to next year, that’s going to be good. And yeah, I’m looking forward to some of these talk tracks too, as they get posted. So everyone takes some time to go look for Right of Boom, look for Ryan and Andrew on LinkedIn and follow them all and you’ll get access to some pretty amazing content for free, which everyone loves free content, but especially this one, you don’t want to miss it. It’s gonna be good.
So thank you so much, Ryan, for joining us. And yeah, we’ll see you on the next Return of the Mac.
Ryan Weeks: Thank you. Yeah.