In this episode, we reconnect with Nick O’Donovan, who provides an overview of Huntress’ operations, particularly their growth and expansion into Europe, with a focus on enhancing relationships with MSPs. He highlights Huntress’ efforts in recruiting and maintaining a strong team, despite industry challenges, and the success of their recent roadshow series. Nick also discusses the company’s product offerings, including EDR, Microsoft 365 identity protection, security awareness, phishing solutions, and a SIEM offering. Key topics covered include the importance of affordable security solutions for small to medium businesses, the integration with Microsoft Defender, and Huntress’ innovative Neighbourhood Watch program. The episode concludes with valuable advice for MSPs on improving their closure rates for upselling security products to clients.
00:00 Introduction and Reconnection
00:26 Overview of Huntress
01:02 Huntress’ European Expansion
01:43 Roadshow Success and Community Engagement
03:14 Recruitment Challenges and Strategies
04:25 Neighbourhood Watch Program
08:15 Approaching Cybersecurity as an MSP
16:50 Security Awareness Training
20:37 Final Thoughts and Tips for MSPs
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Connect with Nick O’Donovan on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasodonovan
Connect with Daniel Welling on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-welling-54659715/
Connect with Adam Morris on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcmorris/
Visit The MSP Finance Team website, simply click here – https://www.mspfinanceteam.com/
We look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript:
Daniel: Thanks for joining us today, Nick.
Nick: thank you very much for having me delight to be here.
Daniel: So Nick, we’ve known each other for, for some years now. but, I guess we, we recently reconnected, at the MSP show, that Halo had put on at, F1 Arcade, which, anyone knows me if there’s F1 involved. I’m there and all over it. but, was really interesting to, to chat to you at that event and really, I guess, realise exactly what Huntress were doing.
So, may maybe you can give us a quick update in terms of those that aren’t familiar.
Nick: Yeah, no, absolutely. and likewise, great to, get to meet with people in person and amazing venues like the F1, F1 Arcade in London. so yeah, hunters, has been an organization that’s been around for a number of years, close to 10 years now, born outta the us. and, historically Huntress has, kind of sold globally.
to MSPs, mainly out of, out of the us. and they had a really good reputation, both technically and commercially, across the MSP community. and I’ve done a really good job in, in actually, landing into Europe and selling, [00:01:00] selling their kind of services over the last number of years.
I joined the organization in November 23. as their first kind of commercial hire, with the responsibility to, to grow out their European team. and we actually inherited, about kind of 300 odd customers, that have been transacting with customer, with hunters prior to, to, to my time and the team’s time here.
so we had a really good base layer to go off. a lot of people in Europe using hunters successfully across uk, Ireland, and mainland Europe. and yeah, the challenge or opportunity that I was given was to, was to come on board, put boots on the ground, for huntress, across the UK and Ireland, and kind of take over, the relationship that our American colleagues would’ve had with our European, MSPs that have been on our books.
Awesome.
Daniel: Of course one of the,EE evidence of, of that is your recent road roadshow series, which, which has been,been really well, well received and, and well attended as well.
Nick: Yeah. no, very much so. so Hunter’s true to their words. has invested heavily, in, obviously international markets, both [00:02:00] Europe and a NZ. interestingly enough, my a NZ colleagues, probably are 14 months ahead of us in regards to kind of putting boots in the ground there. I. which was an interesting talent dynamic for Huntress as an organization.
But, yeah, since joining, we’ve, I think we’re close to 19 staff, over a kind of a 12 month period. So we’ve hired over the, all of 2024, and, very much tried to be out front and center, with as many. kind of MSP focused events or roadshows, obviously ones that we’ve kicked off ourselves, but also been very involved in,the kind of community.
So we’ve done stuff with the ConnectWise, evolve peer group, for all of this year. and also, the network group, as well. So they’ve about, 90 to a hundred members, and where we participated in their quarterly meetings over the last, over the last 12 months.
Daniel: So that’s another way that we, our password across. Then Adam and I actually met through Network Group as, former MSP members. and, and also we have really good. good, good relationship with, with the ConnectWise community as well. Adam, formally [00:03:00] having been through the, now Adam, you can step in here and provide the correct name.
HTG IT Nation evolve that one.
Adam: you’ve got it. Yeah. Yeah. Just rolls off the plan.
Daniel: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, so, so nine 19 people, hired in, give or take 12 months. a lot of MSPs struggle with recruitment at the moment. I wonder what it’s like if you are a vendor trying to recruit.
Nick: I would probably say that the, a similar challenge, finding, finding good people is always a difficult thing to do. but, we’ve been lucky that huntress, again, going back to the kind of the reputation that we’ve had as a vendor, when we put out a job advert, and we’re very transparent in regards to the kind of the package, the salary, the on target earnings.
that people can, can gain in, in, in creating a career in res, that’s brought a lot of, a lot of talent to the table. so, when we do put out jobs, we do get a lot of interest. we do have internal recruiting teams and screening teams that go, kind of go through that process, for us.
But, yeah, lucky enough, the cybersecurity [00:04:00] space is a busy space, both from a product perspective but also from a career perspective. A lot of people are looking either to. To shift into it and be kind of, fully focused on cybersecurity, products and tools.
Daniel: Very good. so, we, we wanted to cover, I guess, mo mostly commercial topics today, and we’re gonna, we’re gonna have a follow up to perhaps a more sort of in-depth technical, episode, in a, in a month or so’s time. but, Perhaps, well, one of the things that struck me that was of most interest, especially at the recent roadshow event, was talking about how, you are supporting the wider MSP community with, the Neighbourhood Watch program.
perhaps you could talk a little bit about that.
Nick: Yeah, no, absolutely. So, are, I suppose probably originally best known as, kind of coming to the table with one solution. Which was around persistent foothold. So in other words, bad actors, having a grasp on a system or a network. and ultimately that’s over the years, over the kind of eight or nine years that huntress has been around, that’s [00:05:00] evolved.
And we actually now have four products that we bring to market. I. so we have a fully managed EDR, offering around, endpoint detection response. we have a product that’s similar to a certain extent, but around Microsoft 3 6 5. So identity, protection. we bring a product to the table as well around security awareness and phishing solutions.
and then most recently in October this year, we launched, a seam offering. which is around kind of telemetry data from a network, hunts, again, going back to the kind of reputation and being community led, with, any engagement that a managed service provider has with Hunts, you can, spin up your own trial, of our product from our website.
you can obviously get hands on with that product. You can run it for your own business and potentially trial it on customers that you support. but eventually at the end of that trial, if it was something that. You need a little bit more time to kind of consider or kind of stay close to? we have an ability to convert that trial account into what we call a neighbourhood watch, license, which really in essence is an NF [00:06:00] four, not for resale.
but it means that the managed service provider that’s gone through, the process of evaluating us can stay close to our product. but also that they can, they can protect their own business and their own environment and their own users. With our products. So it’s our little bit of about giving back.
so in other words, at no cost to a managed service provider, that business has an ability to be protected by hunters’ products. and the human soc, our 24 7 human soc that comes with all four of our solutions.
Adam: Yeah, that, that makes so much sense. Just makes it easier for. P owners who are struggling to make decisions, right? This is just an easy decision. it’s just, takes away a lot of the friction, doesn’t it?
Nick: Yeah, no. I think, most managed service providers would probably describe them as, kind of technical people. And they do like to get hands on with the product. They do like to feel it, they do like to break it if they can. I think that we always hear about kind of breaking it or putting it through its paces.
so either the trial or neighbourhood watch option that we provide. it’s fully featured. it’s the product as if [00:07:00] you are a paying customer, that you’ll get an experience. and sometimes evaluation processes and proof of concepts can go a little bit longer than what’s desired.
other projects that are maybe customer facing projects might come up, and take priority, so. our feeling is if we can at least leave the customer, or the partner with, with access to our products and having them protecting their own organization with us, hopefully we, it’s not needed, which is we want every managed service provider to be, well protected.
But, in the case that sometimes we do catch things that they, that they’re not aware of.
Daniel: There are of course, so many, vendors now in the space, that. For,I imagine not just MSPs, but end user businesses as well can really become baffled, overwhelmed by, by, the breadth and depth of vendors and solutions that are available. And of course, I. To be fair, it, the marketplace is fast moving.
The, the bad actors are always, doing new things that the good people need to, defend and [00:08:00] mitigate a against. So, Per perhaps, I mean obviously the neighbourhood watch is,is a good way of, providing, the access to that tool so that MSPs can in their own time assess and understand and learn from it.
but, maybe you could talk a little bit about how. An MSP should really be approaching this topic overall. Adam and I would often recommend having, product champions, sponsors within an organization looking at particular areas. So breaking down the stack into, into its part so that you can assess and monitor and learn about the market.
but, but talk to us a little bit about. cybersecurity. if indeed that’s a category. how should an MSP approach this? How should they be assessing the market and educating themselves and learning?
Nick: Yeah. no, absolutely. I think you make a number of very valid points, vendors and, there’s a lot of us out there. there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of choice for managed service providers. I think the biggest thing that I would say when it comes to managed service providers is, Although they might want the Royal [00:09:00] Royals Royce of kind of products and services, unfortunately the end user that they might support might not be able to afford that. and there’s a ton of very well known enterprise grade kind of tools that are out there. but Hunters’ mission is to be. a security vendor for the 99% of small to medium sized businesses.
So the biggest part that we wanna bring to the table is to be affordable. to be affordable, that a managed service provider can layer it in, to their offering. that is, is something that the customer is possibly not falling off their chair on and choosing to opt out of a service. and ultimately, when it comes to some of our core products, we.
we’re AV agnostic on the, EDR product that we have. So, a lot of managed service providers will have some sort of antivirus in place, which in today’s world just isn’t enough anymore. and what interest brings to the table is that we can layer in on top of an antivirus that a, that an end user has and be the kind of EDR and 24 7 soc.
[00:10:00] outside of that, because again, when it comes to MSPs, most MSPs aren’t operating a 24 7 shop. they don’t have staff, that are working weekends, and into the wee hours of the morning. So, ultimately, We get a lot of feedback from organizations that go down the route of Huntress where we do have a human sock.
A part of all of our offerings is that they can sleep better at night, and that they feel more comfortable that there is an organization that is watching on their behalf while they’re sleeping.
Daniel: And. the, I guess the point there you make about how you don’t have to make a conscious decision to change or remove something from the existing stack. This is something that can be added in, which again, takes some of the friction and the risk out of, well, you know, we, we know and trust that antivirus vendor.
we’d like to have a SOC behind it. But then can you find a. A soc provision that would work with that antivirus product, for example. and, [00:11:00] and so, so yeah, I, I can sort of see how, how that would certainly be helpful.
Adam: and indeed is there a benefit or an advantage to having different vendors in the whole security suite? So rather than one, you know, one single vendor supplying everything, do we want the windows looked after someone else and the door by somebody else, and the guard dogs by somebody else? So what’s your kind of view on that, Nick?
Nick: Yeah, well, I, like Hunters isn’t gonna be the, isn’t gonna be the solution that covers all aspects of security. when it comes to security. It’s very much a layered approach. so we specialize within the kind of the products, that we offer. and there’s a lot of other things that are needed around security that we just, we don’t have within our portfolio.
one thing I would probably. Suggest is that, a lot of managed service providers take on a responsibility of either, selling Microsoft licenses or products and they’re potentially looking to take advantage of the Microsoft sku, and security SKU that they have in there. the other option when it comes to, people considering [00:12:00] interests is that.
One of the only, kind of antivirus, providers that we integrate with is Microsoft. and that gives an MSP an opportunity also to consider, potentially shifting some spend. So they may al already be using, Microsoft Defender, either the free version that comes with Windows operating Systems, or they might be going down the route of, Microsoft Defender for endpoint, and from a Hunter solution on our EDR side.
we connect to both of those, at no additional cost. So when an organization is trying to provide a better, overall level of security, they could consider swapping out some of the, the historic kind of third party antivirus providers and going down the route of, Huntress and Microsoft, which we’re seeing as a very common, deployment and rollout.
Nearly 50% of our. Three and a half million endpoints, is deployed with that mechanism. so we see a lot of people taking advantage of having a spend with Microsoft, getting more out of [00:13:00] Microsoft and connecting the hunters offering, to that Microsoft stack.
Daniel: And of that three and a half million endpoints, all of those are through the Managed Services channel
Nick: Yeah.
Daniel: direct clients?
Nick: So Huntress, primarily is a channel first company. So I would say, and I don’t know the exact figures, but I’d say 95% of our business is through managed service providers. we do have some element of, Of engagement in the US at the moment with, selling to, outsourced it, our, internal IT departments.
but they would be over, over a certain size. but yeah, PRI primarily, hunters is a channel first. And when we were brought in from a European perspective, our mission was to grow that MSP partner channel. So, as I said, over the last, kind of 12 months, we’ve probably grown from about.
300 odd kind of MSPs to, to over 650 in the last 12 months. So there’s been a huge appetite, I think ultimately us rocking up and at various kind of roadshows and, events [00:14:00] and SP kind of, community led initiatives, has given us, a lot of exposure to, to, to the market, and having boots on the ground shows, that we’re invested in this market and, we’re willing to put the money where our mouth is.
Daniel: and, very interesting. You talked about, the antivirus, and. Integrating with the, the Microsoft Defender, o Options. so if I am, a relatively young new MSP, I’m going out there, to, to, and to be honest, I’m probably quite tentative about it because I’m, I’ve not got the confidence.
I’ve not got. not got years of experience behind me. I guess I’m gonna be wanting to go with, a core set of vendors of, of, stack items. if I’ve got, if I’ve got hundreds there and I’ve got, and I’ve got Microsoft, are there some other technology areas that I should be bringing along?
Like you mentioned, hunts won’t do ev everything. So what else should I have in my portfolio if I’m designing something from scratch?
Nick: so yeah, pro, probably a slightly more kind of technical que question for one of our kind of technical [00:15:00] guys, but like, the, obviously there’s a whole element of patching. So, most organizations are gonna look down the route of some RMM tool, possibly some ticketing tool that they can obviously have that kind of service desk aspect, with their customers.
but yeah, I would say that there’s, there’s a hu huge opportunity for managed service providers to think how they’re packaging and how they’re bundling their products. I. and in essence the idea is that they will want to try to sell some sort of package that’s made up of other tools and applications that might be, white listing.
It might be, security awareness and phishing solutions, as well. So, there, there’s a wide approach on how far they kind of want to go, with the kind of customers that they
Adam: this probably shows how out date I am now with what I’m about to say. But the things that instantly came to my mind was some sort of email hygiene solution. some sort of premises security solution and so some sort of, well, either firewall and or DNS solution really. and then I thought, hang on a minute.
What else is there? There must be loads of other stuff [00:16:00] out there, but I’m not sure what it is right now.
Daniel: and phishing now has a pH as well. yeah, no, in. Interesting. And, and I guess, I guess some of the technology areas you mentioned there, have also been, supporting your roadshow series. So, R-M-M-P-S-A and doc documentation. so, so yeah, I guess I was thinking more and. And you probably touched on it there, things like security awareness training, having a password, ma managers, o offering, you know, the sort of what are like the absolute basics that an MSP should be, talking to.
To their end, end clients about. and I guess, Cy Cyber Essentials ultimately has been the benchmark for, for them to be, to be working to. So anything that supports, supports that, that makeup.
Nick: Yeah. No, absolutely. and I think even if you think about, just how busy people’s lives are, how much they’re on the go at the moment. security awareness training is a huge one. humans are probably the weakest point, for an organisation. So educating them on, The various things that they need to be [00:17:00] aware of and actually testing them on a regular basis is a huge thing. So, hunter?
Adam: answer this question. Sorry Nick. Do we have British voices on the training videos
Well, I’d much prefer that Irish voices, but, or are.
Nick: they? no. So we have, so our security awareness training has an animation team. So it’s everything that we do is around an animation and storytelling. all of our episodes kind of tie in with, repeatable characters. so, we made an acquisition of a company called Cur Curricula, about, I would say just over two years ago.
and it was actually a product that we used ourselves. To, to train the Huntress employees. And we liked it so much, that we decided to acquire them, and make it entirely MSP friendly. So it’s a multi-tenant. solution, that allows, MSPs roll out, what we call managed learning and managed phishing.
So we can do that on behalf of the MSP and their customers, so they don’t have to go in and create campaigns. Our soc. that [00:18:00] supports all four of our products, have a regular cadence of a learning campaign that’s being executed and we execute that on behalf of our customers on a monthly basis.
And then we do, two phishing campaigns. a month as well. So a variety of one or the other will hit the inbox. and the good part of that is it’s real time. ultimately you’ll see, who is performing well within those kind of learning episodes, from a compliance perspective, from an insurance perspective, and I.
There’s built in kind of notification and alerts that kind of reminders to, to tell people to, you’ve missed this episode, or you’ve got three days to complete it. So, we take care of all of that, on behalf of the MSP. and there’s also actually, an embedded, learning management system within it.
So actually an MSP can create their own content, and that content might be around that MSP’s organization, the staff that’s in their business, how to raise a ticket, how to engage with that. Ms. P. So even from a, from an onboarding perspective, they can use our security awareness training module, create their own learning [00:19:00] content, and bring people through, various kind of training episodes about how they engage with that MSP.
Daniel: really interesting. I, I don’t, I dunno if,if this is something that, that gets, gets talked about, but, perhaps, if one MSP creates some content, is that, is that sh shareable between MSPs? So for example, I might wanna produce, something about promoting the reason why.
the client should, should support the Q-B-R-T-B-R process. And here’s what you’re gonna learn, here’s how it benefits your organization. or is there a library of sort of Ms p specific content that, that, that could be applied for that?
Nick: So within curricula, it’s very specific to that partner. So, we have, possibly about 60, 60 learning episodes, that are all around cybersecurity, kind of, cybersecurity topics. those episodes are six to eight minutes long. they’re bite-sized, they’re optimized for mobile as well. they’re interactive.
So there’s a number of kind of questions throughout, throughout the episodes that are being played. on the learning management system, the content is created and it’s [00:20:00] specifically to that, to that customer. It isn’t shared across community, but one thing that we do have, which is very well received, is a feedback portal.
- So a lot of the managed service providers that are using our products, all four of them, have an ability to go in, interact with our product team and make suggestions on improvements, features, enhancements, and all of those are upvoted by partners. So partners can go in if there’s content that they like or need or want, people can up vote on that.
and that’s something that our product development team, takes, a regular look at and really does influence. the direction of what we design and build.
Daniel: Super, very good. as always, time seems to, get the better of us when we are, when we’re recording these episodes, we get deep into a chat and then realize that we’re, we. We’ve, we’ve rabbited on a bit, but, we’re def definitely, definitely like to have, have you back to, to perhaps have a technical version of, of what we’ve covered.
What we’ve covered today. and it’s usually around this time in an episode that we offer our guests a shameless plug, but, I kind of feel like you’ve already done that, [00:21:00] through, through, throughout, just by talking, talking enthusiastically about, about the business and what it does and how it helps MSPs.
for me, the key takeaway here is the neighbourhood watch, the NFR. that, that feels like a natural first step in, in, in, in, in following this episode.
Adam: perhaps there’s literally a minute for one last question, Nick. how, what tips would you have for owners out there in terms of how they can improve their closure rate for upsells to their clients today on security products? What sort of conversation should they be having and how?
Nick: so, so, so one big takeaway for me is, Obviously a lot of people do their shopping online, so, I believe that no matter what vendor that you interact with, around whatever products or services that you’re kind of bundling in as part of your package, I think your website, has to have a very specific message around what.
What services that you’re selling to the customer and what options they have to be able to consume products and services from you? I think there’s some [00:22:00] partners that do that extremely well. and I think there’s some partners that, that don’t do it so well. so if I had one bit of advice for partners, I’d say lean on the vendors that you’re engaging with, that you’re spending money with.
look at what kind of, products or resources they have within, partner portals. reach out to the account manager that you have that relationship with. Talk to ’em about how you can simplify what might be a technical product and try to simplify that messaging on your website to, to describe the service
Adam: Well, and across the account management team
Nick: Yeah. Yeah.
Adam: trying to, you know, effectively upsell this, upsell the service. So, but yeah,I completely agree with that. it’s something that I learned. Not the hard way so much, but wish I’d learned a lot earlier on around how to actually engage with suppliers properly and really work, work, as a partner.
well, you know, in a partnership, relationship.
Nick: and continue to tweak it. Like, ultimately take kind of draft one of it and get it up there and, echo that kind of message that’s within your product sheets, your PowerPoints, your sales [00:23:00] enablement, anything that you’re doing with the teams that are gonna be going out, speaking to end users.
and just continue to kind of a adapt and change that as. as you kind of progress, progress down that line,
Daniel: Very good. So there’s, there’s a couple of tips to, to finish off the episode. so yeah, been a real pleasure talking to you today and, look forward to getting the next episode arranged.
Nick: no problem. And we’ll see at one of those roadshows again soon, I’m sure.
Adam: Cheers, Nick.
Nick: Sure. Thanks A.