A MESSAGE FROM OUR CHANNEL DIRECTOR - Craig Young
Why I Joined akabis
I have spent more than twenty years on the same side of the table: the small and mid-sized business owner trying to grow.
It started in advertising and media sales. First at Publicis, then through nearly two decades at Comcast Advertising, my job was to help local businesses get found, get chosen, and get bigger. I led teams, built budgets, and learned the part of this work that has stuck with me longest: the businesses I cared most about were almost always the ones run by the person whose name was on the door.
I think about owners like Joe Aurelio of Aurelio’s Pizza in Homewood, Illinois, or Len and Deb Woldarsky of Hofmann Florist in Chicago Heights. Founder-led businesses, run by the people whose names the community already trusted. They didn’t have a marketing department to lean on. They didn’t have a procurement team or a board to answer to. They had a business they built, a community they served, and a relationship with every customer they earned. When I helped one of them grow, it mattered in a way that a line on a corporate report never quite captured.
That thread ran through everything that came next. At Fullthrottle.ai I worked on first-party data and attribution, helping agencies and businesses prove that their marketing actually drove sales. When I started CY Marketing Group, the whole premise was that most small businesses don’t have a lead problem. They have a conversion problem and a positioning problem. Fix those, and growth follows.
The company that changed how I see this work
Through CY Marketing Group I have been working with Georgia Business Net, GABN.net, the founder-led MSP and IT company built by Clay and Adrienne Colvin. Helping GABN drive net new sales meant getting close to how a business like theirs runs: the discovery, the ideal customer profiles, the outbound systems, the daily grind of an owner who is the salesperson, a project manager, the engineer, and the CEO all at once.
The more time I spent with GABN, the more one thing became obvious. Owner-led MSPs are some of the best small businesses in the country. They are technical, trusted, and woven into the operations of every client they serve. But over and over, I watched them hand off the parts of their business that should have been theirs to keep.
Phone service was the clearest example. A client needs phones, so the MSP points them at a big national name and collects a small commission for the introduction. The contract gets written on someone else’s paper. The client becomes someone else’s customer. And the owner, the person who has a genuine relationship with the client and will get the call when something breaks, keeps a thin slice of revenue that never shows up where it counts.
I had spent my whole career trying to help businesses like this grow. And here was growth they were giving away.
Why akabis
That is what brought me to akabis.
Akabis understood who was most important. The MSP. akabis wants the founder-led MSP to offer phone service under its own brand. The client’s bill carries the MSP’s name. The contract is theirs. The support number is theirs. And the top line revenue and margin stays with the owner who earned the relationship in the first place, instead of walking out the door to a company that has never met the client and never will.
It is the same idea I have believed in for twenty years, applied to one of the places small businesses lose the most ground. Keep your customer. Keep your contract. Keep your revenue. Build the kind of recurring, owned business that a bank or a buyer actually values.
I am not an engineer. I have never claimed to be. What I have done my entire career is sit across from business owners and help them see the growth that was already within reach. That is the job I came here to do.
If you run an MSP and you have been handing your phone revenue to someone else, I would like to talk. Not to pitch you. To understand your business, the same way I have done it for the last two decades, and to show you what it looks like when you keep what you have built.
Craig Young | Director Channel akabis | Sales W: 762-288-1760 | M: 706-945-4728 | cyoung@akabis.com