When you book a table at GTIA's Genius Café, valuable business insights and actionable advice are always on the menu. The Genius Café has long been a popular feature at GTIA ChannelCon and regional community events around the world, providing IT service provider (ITSP) members with the opportunity to speak 1:1 with industry experts in sales and marketing, cybersecurity, AI, business operations and other areas.
We spoke recently with Chris Cooke, founder of Ethikai Consulting, a UK-based firm that helps ITSPs and channel businesses across the UK and United States with operational strategy and building stronger foundations for growth, about what he saw serving as a genius at a recent GTIA event and where ITSPs see both challenges and opportunities in 2026. Here's what he had to say.
What is the No. 1 challenge ITSPs face or biggest problem they struggle with today?
Honestly? It's that feeling of being stuck on a hamster wheel. The burnout, the frustration, trying the same things and getting nowhere. Maybe you've launched initiatives that haven't landed, or the team's stopped getting behind new ideas because they've seen too many fizzle out. You're firefighting constantly and can't seem to get out of that mode.
Here's how I think about it: When was the last time you got in the passenger seat with someone else driving, and 45 minutes down the road you asked, "Where are we going?", and they said, "I don't know, I've not worked it out yet." That doesn't happen, does it? But this is how we run businesses all the time. We just start driving.
Fundamentally, if we don't know where we're trying to end up, how do we know what we should be focused on right now? That's where we start with ITSPs, understanding why you built this business in the first place, what you stand for and what the actual goal is. Once those three things are clear, everything else starts to make more sense.
Is it a case of ITSPs spending too much time in the business, as opposed to on the business, or they don't have a 30,000-foot view of their own business?
Yes and no. I am a certified facilitator in the Six Types of Working Genius, which is a Patrick Lencioni model, which helps you understand your areas of genius. And by that it means what you enjoy spending your time in. A lot of the people in MSP land, not all people but a lot of people, started a business because they enjoy technology. They like fixing things, and they've done a very good job at fixing things, so they built a business out of it.
Now, if we ask that person who's designed a business around break/fix or professional services, or creating solutions, to then go and always work on the business, they're not going to enjoy their job anymore. But they need to be intentional about spending time on the business, and they need to understand that area of the business.
As business leaders, what areas of the business do we want to work in, do we enjoy working in, and what other areas do we need other people to do it? Understanding where you want to spend your time is key. Being intentional with spending time on the business, and spending time in the business, is very important.
What is your typical advice to those ITSPs, what kind of plan or strategy or journey can help them?
There's a lot of frameworks out there, and they're great frameworks. But we read these books and we try and implement what they say, and we don't often do a very good job. So the advice here is really understand if you want to deploy a framework, it needs to be tailored to you. It needs to work for you. And I think the key really is understanding what it is that you want to try and achieve as an individual.
What's worked for you isn't necessarily going to work for somebody else because their goal might be very different. If you want to build a lifestyle business where you only want to work two days a week, that's great. If you want to build a business that is scaling and you want to create a legacy, great. If you want to sell your business, great. Build the goal around yourself and what connects with you personally rather than trying to replicate somebody else's level of success.
How did you approach being a Genius in the Genius Café, what was your approach to helping others?
I was in the marketing and sales Genius Café track. A lot of the sales and marketing challenges ITSPs face are actually symptoms of deeper operational issues, so I wanted to approach this as I would with any discovery call, getting to the root cause rather than just the surface problem.
So, I took an initial question, and I sent an intro to each of the people I was talking to. I put together a list of about 20 questions and said I want you to answer them really, really honestly. We then had a conversation and from that conversation, which is about managing expectations and what we're here to do, I really wanted to make it a valuable time for those guys to sit down and get something out of at the end. Then I created almost a playbook for them that broached their very specific issues and the things that they're struggling with and gave them some ideas and a recommended approach that they could take. That's how we approached it.
Did anything surprise you from your Genius Café sessions?
You can almost position it as being constantly pleasantly surprised by and reaffirmed by the openness of our industry and the people in it. Ultimately, we all over the years have understood that we can be open at events like GTIA and talk to people because it's an environment where there's trust that's been built. There's a lot of target audience out there and not that many MSPs, so it's created this platform where we're open to share. So, when I sit down with people and they talk, they're very open. You know, they're very honest on the large part. I guess I am constantly pleasantly surprised by people's openness.
Would you serve as a Genius again and what advice would you have for first timers?
Yeah, definitely. I'd be happy to kind of come and help. I like helping people. It's a big part of what we do, you know, we give more than we take. It's one of our foundational values. So, yeah, absolutely. Getting one on one time with people at events is tough without lots of distractions and really focused on.
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