There are many kinds of communities in the channel. Some are really, truly just about people helping people, like Central Mafia User Group. Juan Mack, who is technology and business operations manager at Jasper, Ind.-based MSP Matrix Integration, has been an enthusiastic member since he first came across it 15 years ago.
“It was very eye-opening when I first started going how the MSP community is so open to share their success and how they achieved that success,” he says. “It’s amazing when you get in a room and you get them talking what they will share.”
Manny Rivelo had nearly the exact same reaction when he became ConnectWise CEO, and it’s not Central Mafia User Group’s only tie to ConnectWise. The group originated as a ConnectWise partner community until ConnectWise launched its IT Nation community and CMUG became an independent, vendor-neutral organization dedicated to member education and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. It kept the moniker ConnectWise gave it back in the day, for reasons lost to time, though.
“Central Mafia is a super cool name, so we always call ourselves the Central Mafia,” Mack (pictured) says.
That was possibly the easiest choice the group made after going out on its own. The harder ones involved determining how to turn what started out as a peer group that met once or twice a year into a full-fledged, year-round, member-led community. Mack and fellow member Sean Lardo, a ConnectWise exec who leaves his corporate ID badge at home when engaged with CMUG, leaned into the challenge.
“We just got a group of MSPs, a group of friends that we’ve made there, together and we just started talking,” Mack recalls. We need a newsletter, they decided. We need to livestream meetings every month and create a Slack channel to keep people engaged between livestreams.
And yes, they agreed, we need in-person meetings. These days, they host several of them regionally, like the one coming up in southern California early next month. Attendance is free for MSPs thanks to fees paid by sponsoring vendors, who speak onstage but not about themselves.
“They’re not promoting their product,” Mack says. “That’s something that we specifically ask the vendors: If you’re going to present, please do not pitch your product.”
Not because members don’t use or care about products, of course, so much as that they participate in CMUG in the hope of learning very specific lessons about very specific issues, like going to market with AI.
“MSPs are struggling on how to resell and package AI services to their clients,” Mack observes. “How am I going to provide a solution that is flexible for them and make it repeatable, which is the secret of the MSP?”
People appear to be satisfied with the answers they’re getting to such questions through CMUG, because what started out as a roughly 120-member organization currently distributes its newsletters to nearly 10,000 MSPs.