The moves include the reabsorption of the Relyenz division within CharTec, and the repurchase of the major investment ConnectWise had in CharTec, although the latter does not impact CharTec’s strong partnership with ConnectWise.

ORLANDO – CharTec, whose core business is providing training to MSPs, is rolling out a completely revamped online training program, CORE. It modernizes the curriculum, making it current with today’s pedagogical emphasis on short chunks as optimal for learning. It comes on the heels of the relaunch of their Operations Lab, and coincides with CharTech’s repurchase of the majority investment that ConnectWise had in the company.

CharTec’s training has been available in two formats – hosted academies in Bakersfield CA,  as well as copies of the recorded videos of those sessions on their Connect Site.

“We hosted academies in Bakersfield for years and those will continue,” said Emalee Sugano, CharTec’s Director of Marketing. “However, people don’t learn best in longer sessions but in shorter bite-sized chunks of two minutes and up. We also wanted to give more power over the process to MSP owners. This new system now gives them the ability to assign staff courses for a specific person at a specific time, and that wasn’t an option before. The Connect Site gave them an option to get their training online, but it was a straight recording of the training sessions, so was the longer length, and included everything, including things like aimless questions, regardless of whether they were useful or not.”

CORE is in beta now, and scheduled to roll out at the end of this month, although it could be as late as the beginning of January.

The Sales Lab content in the CharTec programs is updated about eight times a year, and these all funnel into Core.

“Following the sales process is a lot easier, and much easier than diving into the Connect Site,” Sugano said. “You can shift more into demo mode. There is now a sales crystal ball specifically for sales managers, that have done a discovery with potential managed services customer. It includes a predictive component on the likelihood of closing a deal, based off algorithms of past behaviour, and the idea of the five prerequisites of sales.”

The Operations Lab has also been revamped, to deal with the fact while members typically do well in Sales and Marketing, Operations seemed to still be a major challenge.

“Operations in managed services are all about efficiency and KPI,” Sugano said. “We have completely revised our curriculum to make sure everything they did in the Operations Program matched what we did in the Lab. The workshops have been expanded as well at customer request. They have been two days long but the next ones will be three days.” Sugano indicated that the operations workshops have similar demand as the sales ones, which they are now able to meet because of an expansion of capabilities with new partnerships.”

Sugano noted that Relyenz, a SaaS distribution which CharTec had created in 2015 to distribute the products it had been recommending and selling through the education sessions, and broaden that out to a larger MSP audience, had recently been wound up as a separate unit and reabsorbed within CharTec.

“The idea was that Relyenz could hit a broader target market and also address a perception that we had too many brands,” Sugano said. “However, we found that it created more confusion for our current customers, and didn’t have the success that we had hoped, so we brought it all back home.”

Finally, while ConnectWise remains a strong partner of CharTec, they are no longer its effective owner.

“For years, they were in investor in CharTec, and actually owned a majority of the shares,” Sugano said. “Their interest came from the company’s original focus in HaaS [Hardware-as-a-Service]. However, when we were focused on HaaS, we found that people didn’t know how to sell it, so we added a sales training component, which grew to become the focus of the business. CharTec has just purchased back the investment from ConnectWise. We still work with them closely, and use it ourselves, but we are now wholly separate again in terms of ownership.”