Going to Distance with Rob Pope

The Vendor Blender: Myles Bray, CEO of CyberSentriqAI just handed attackers a serious upgrade. So what does that mean for MSPs and the SMEs they protect?Paul Croker sits down with Myles Bray, CEO of CyberSentriq (the merger of RedStor and TitanHQ), for a straight-talking look at where cybersecurity is heading and why trust is still the only currency that matters for an MSP.In this episode:The moment Myles realised the attackers had levelled up, and why it was a genuine wake-up callAI spear phishing with a 54% click rate, and what security awareness training has to become to keep upThe fake video call that nearly cost one company a fortune, and the small detail that saved themWhy CyberSentriq is giving MSPs a "dial" for AI instead of a black boxShadow AI: your clients' best ideas now live inside AI tools, so who's backing them up?The Entra ID blind spot almost nobody is coveringWhy enterprise security is a sledgehammer to crack a nut for SMEsPlus, Myles adds his track to the Vendor Blender playlist: an arms-in-the-air dance anthem from a CEO who found house and techno later in life (blame the kids). You'll have to listen to find out which one.Hit play. It's the complex made simple.

🎙️ New episode: The Vendor Blender's PitchIT spin-offThis week, I'm joined by Susan Nemeth of Aportio, a member of the PitchIT 2026 cohort.Canadian-born. Hungarian roots. Now based in New Zealand. And somewhere in between? A career that reads like a spy novel. 🌍In this episode, you'll hear:🚂 The Eastern European railway station where things got a little too interesting🎸 The London flat with a lease signature that stopped her in her tracks (music fans, you'll want this one)🗣️ The one question she asked her CEO after every town hall, and why every MSP leader should be asking it too📬 Why she thinks fixing your service desk emails inside the PSA is the wrong approach entirely (14 million transactions say she might be onto something)💼 How she and her co-founder took an MSP from 125 to 275 people, and what they got for it when they soldPlus, of course, her pick for the Spotify Wall of Fame. The story behind it might be the best bit.It's not rocket science. But it is a cracking listen. 🚀#MSP #PitchIT #VendorBlender #ITNation #Podcast #Aportio #Paulknows

Eight years. Nineteen vendors. Sixteen brutal weeks of workshops, back-to-back pitches, and relentless due diligence.And in this Vendor Blender PitchIT special, it all comes down to three names. I sat down with Sean Lardo to pull back the curtain on ConnectWise's "Shark Tank" for MSP startups — where applications jumped 20% this year, AI flooded the field, and only the vendors who could actually explain what they do survived the cut.Sean doesn't sugar-coat it: this isn't a charity case, it's a fight to the finish, and the hard truth running through the whole episode is that the best product doesn't win — the best pitch does.We get into the mentorship, the meltdowns, the "most improved" comeback stories, and what it really takes to stand on that stage in Orlando with over $150,000 in cash and prizes on the line.So who made it?That's the part you'll have to hear for yourself.Three finalists, three completely different journeys — a comeback story that came back swinging, a captivating returner with something to prove, and a genuine full-circle tale years in the making.Sean reveals them one by one, live, and the stories behind each name are half the magic.If you want to know who's heading to IT Nation Connect Global on November 4th, why Sean's calling this the most motivated group yet, and how you could get your own shot at the 2027 cohort — hit play.Trust me, you'll want to be in the room when these three go head-to-head.

Grab a cuppa for this one. Paul sits down with Jared Casner, co-founder of Blacksmith InfoSec, for a PitchIT conversation that quietly pulls the rug out from under a lot of things MSPs tell themselves.It starts with a line that'll stop plenty of MSPs mid-sentence: you can't own your clients' risk — no matter how much you'd like to say "leave it with me, I've got it." From there, Jared unpacks why the tools your clients log into need to be built for them, not for you, and how the smartest MSPs are quietly flipping backwards-looking ticket reviews into forward-looking business conversations that make them impossible to replace.There's also the small matter of how Blacksmith ended up in the channel in the first place — a story where the MSPs were the ones doing the chasing, phoning up practically begging them to come in. What broke to make that happen? You'll want to hear Jared tell it.We get into the real triggers that push clients toward compliance (and why "compliance" might be the wrong word entirely), what happens when you put a button on a page and let humans loose on it, and how listening — properly listening — reshaped their whole product roadmap.And then, as ever, we ask for a track for the Spotify playlist. Let's just say Jared's pick comes with a backstory involving a very unexpected support slot, a homemade remix that refuses to die, and a school drop-off conversation that had two mums talking. We're not spoiling it here. You'll have to press play — and yes, there's video evidence online if you know where to look.If you're weighing up GRC or risk tooling for your stack, or you just want to hear how a couple of self-confessed non-salespeople built something the channel actually chased, this is one to put your feet up for.🎧 The MSP Vendor Blender — PitchIT series.

A hacker logs in from abroad. So does your employee, sneaking a VPN to watch Formula One for free. How on earth do you tell them apart?That's the deceptively simple question at the heart of this episode of The Vendor Blender, where Paul sits down with Romain Basset — co-founder of Belfor.io, PitchIT 2026 cohort member, and a man who cheerfully describes launching his own cybersecurity startup as a "midlife crisis."After more than a decade on the vendor side, Romain decided to play the game on hard mode and build something different: an identity security platform for MSPs that does something clever with the data you're already sitting on. Instead of treating security awareness training as a box-tick, Belfor turns it into behavioural intelligence — using what you know about who fell for which phishing test to sort real account takeovers from the everyday noise. It's a fresh answer to nasty problems like MFA fatigue attacks, and Romain explains it all in refreshingly plain English.But this one's a proper blend. You'll hear why Romain thinks most people don't need to be Formula One drivers of cybersecurity — they just need to drive safely. Why he's giving away free awareness content to schools, journalists and worried sons who don't want their mums getting scammed. And, of course, which track he's adding to the Vendor Blender Spotify playlist (a French band with an international soul).Grab a cuppa. This is cybersecurity made simple — with a bit of rock 'n' roll on the side.

🎙️ Pitch IT 2026 | Michelle Coombs, Oprising — "It works, don't change it" is quietly costing you moneyMeet the woman who compares herself to Pinky and the Brain (depending on the day) — and who's on a mission to help 350,000 people in the channel do better work.In this episode of The Vendor Blender's Pitch IT 2026 series, Paul Croker sits down with Michelle Coombs of Oprising, who started her career on a "log and flog" service desk — fixing printers on her breaks while still on the phones, back before RMM tools even existed. Doing it the hard way taught her something about great service that still holds true today… and it's the reason she's now building something to help the whole industry level up.Here's what you'll want to hear:The silent margin leak — the early warning signs your service desk is bleeding money before the complaints and escalations ever hit your inbox. Reopened tickets, bouncing agents, hidden bottlenecks… Michelle names the red flags most owners walk straight past.Why "but it works" is a trap — and why the person brave enough to ask "why do we do it this way?" gets treated like a troublemaker (when they're actually saving you).The consultancy lightbulb moment — the exact tipping point where Michelle realised she was writing the same action plan for every client, and decided to stop selling the fish and start teaching people to grow it.The department everyone forgets — why continual improvement dies in a silo, and the HR, finance and offboarding gaps that quietly bite MSPs.Plus, Michelle bravely admits her biggest challenge (the "post and run" trap so many of us fall into) and reveals the bouncy early-2000s banger she's adding to the Pitch IT Spotify playlist. 🎵Repeatable expertise sitting in your head right now? This one's for you. Grab a cuppa and hit play. ☕🤘

At just 18, Lewis Williams was already sick of the copy-paste grind — the client emails, the Excel docs, the QBRs that eat up to ten hours of a project manager's week. So he built Handover: a tool that plugs into your PSA (Halo, ConnectWise, you name it) and turns messy ticket notes into polished action logs, risk logs, summaries and client updates, ready to schedule or send in a click. In this PitchIT episode of Vendor Blender, we dig into the pain points every MSP knows too well and how a bit of clever automation can hand those hours back. Also see which track Lewis adds to our Spotify playlist that accompanies each episode.Grab a cuppa, cue the rock 'n' roll, and find out why the boring stuff might just be the best thing to automate.

"I got to live that pain." Shaun Webber spent 25 years in MSPs. Built a cloud managed service business. Exited it. Then went and built the thing he'd spent two decades wishing existed. New Pitch IT episode on The Vendor Blender ☕🎸Here's what stuck with me:The playbook. Right now, running critical cloud infrastructure means very expensive, very experienced humans — cloud ops, DevOps, architects — armed with their own tools and their own scripts. Some of it proactive. Most of it reactive. Sound familiar?Bottom-up, not top-down. Shaun's clear this isn't application performance monitoring. It's not watching the app and working backwards. It's asking whether you're consuming the infrastructure properly in the first place.The autonomy ladder. Today: here's what happened, here's why, here's the playbook. Next: here are the actions. Eventually: it just does it — if you decide you trust it. That last bit's the interesting one, isn't it?And the honest one. He's not selling AI as magic. He's selling it as margin. Because the question every MSP owner should be asking is what clients will still pay for in three years' time.He also splits MSPs into three types — traditional, native, and sprinter. Have a listen and work out which one you are. 👀Me: tea. Shaun: coffee, and refreshingly honest about the machine it comes out of.

We have a spin-off series under the Vendor Blender Podcast series.In this exciting episode, we dive deeper into what the Pitch IT program is all about.We get to know a bit more about the VP of IT Nation Communities - Sean Lardo.We will be interviewing the 2026 cohort of Pitch IT 2026. We also cover off a bit about sports and tune in to also find out which track Sean adds to our Vendor Blender Spotify playlist.PitchIT is ConnectWise's accelerator for MSP-space startups — a 16-week business transformation programme covering everything from sales and marketing to product security, fundraising and pitch-building. The top three finalists pitch live to thousands of MSPs at IT Nation Connect Global, competing for $100,000 in prize money (a prize, not an investment — no strings attached). But as past cohorts attest, the bigger payoff is the exposure: marketplace presence, co-marketing, and a credibility boost that drives real traffic, leads and demo requests. Recent themes — AI-enabled operations, automation-first workflows, security-driven delivery — show exactly where the channel is heading.These will be short 15-minute episodes where we get to know a bit about the person and the product/services they have created. All around our magic mix of getting to know the people behind the tooling.I can't wait, we have some exciting soundbites to bring your way,

Run Rob Run! 🔥I’m thrilled to announce that the real-life Forrest Gump himself, Rob Pope, is joining me on the Business Insights Podcast!This guy doesn’t just run ultra distances… he redefines them. Here are just a few of the questions I threw his way:How many miles can you squeeze out of a pair of trainers?What’s the biggest challenge he’s had to overcome?How on earth do you prepare for something this extreme?And trust me — that’s just scratching the surface. This episode is packed with incredible stories, insights, and a dose of pure inspiration.I first met Rob in person at the YorCyberSec conference in Leeds last year, and after hearing his journey, I knew instantly: he has to be on the podcast.As always, he also adds his music pick to the Spotify Playlist Wall of Fame 🎶 — and it’s a good one.Landing on your favourite podcast platform very soon. Stay tuned!