Empowering ALL Microsoft Partners for Profitability and Growth

I will always remember my first day at Microsoft, November 5, 2012. I was beaming with pride and eager to get started. Microsoft was different in 2012 than it is today, but one thing has stayed consistent. Microsoft was a partner led organization, and I think it's safe to say that they are even more partner led today.

In 2014, Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft. There was a massive shift in the way Microsoft went to market starting on his first day. One of the first things he did was to change the mission of the company to "Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more." I absolutely loved how Microsoft rolled this out and how they have ingrained this in the heart and minds of every employee within the company. It's usually part of every presentation, it's on the back of every employee badge and it's brought up on just about every company call. If you asked any Microsoft employee what the mission of the company is, I would feel comfortable saying they know it well.

On the customer side it is easy to see how this mission is achieved. Microsoft provides amazing products and platforms for customers to consume that enables them to achieve more. But I spent 10+ years in the partner organization, and it is my personal opinion that Microsoft does not have the capacity internally to empower EVERY Microsoft partner. With over 400,000 Microsoft partners globally, over 100,000 transacting partners in the US, we were only able to manage less than 1% of those partners within the partner organization. And the number is decreasing every year. This created huge gaps in the partner ecosystem, but I also recognized that it created a massive opportunity for someone that wanted to fill that gap.

Matt Soseman and I became great friends and teammates while working in One Commercial Partner organization (now Global Partner Solutions). We enjoyed empowering our partners to be better business people and helping their technical teams understand the technology better. Our partners consistently performed at the top of the list of managed partners in the US. We loved what we were doing, and our partners were succeeding.

But over the last few years, there's been a shift. Microsoft has not had the manpower to continue working with every partner that wants to partner with them. They even had to remove the partner hotline and email address that gave support to the scale Microsoft partner community.

After years and years of seeing the managed partner program shrink and the number of top, quality partners without coverage increase, Matt and I came to the realization that it's our time to fill the gap… and The Partner Masters was born.

We are not deviating away from the Microsoft mission statement. We just a continuation of that mission. Our mission is, "Empowering all Microsoft partners to maximize their Microsoft partnership and improve profitability."

There is another big deviation from what we're doing today with The Partner Masters. We are not as focused on driving the Microsoft licensing. We are focused on helping partners build a profitable Microsoft practice. Sometimes that's working with existing clients on existing workloads. Sometimes that's a technical resource building and/or reviewing solution offerings. Sometimes that's looking into and fixing internal business issues. We're driven to help Microsoft partners be successful by their own terms. And we take the complexity out of the Microsoft partnership. We like to say, "…with no assembly required. "It's like buying your child a new bike and having someone hand you all of the right parts and giving you the exact right tools to help you do it easily. Or… we even have the options where we can just build it for you.

Our first three months have been incredible. We're having huge success with our partners, and we're helping them achieve more. The quotes and testimonials that we are receiving daily is what continues to drive us. There is no question that we're already on our way of achieving our mission!

Are YOU ready? Let's achieve more together!

Justin Slagle

CEO & Co-Founder, The Partner Masters