Truly SMB, a provider already serving over 300 customers in the UK and North America, is the latest business venture led by Vicky Critchley. No stranger to the channel, with previous experience founding Bam Boom Cloud and leading partner initiatives at cloud marketplace Pax8, Critchley is now laser-focused on enabling the SMB market to join the AI movement.
Critchley shared with Channel Insider what she hopes to accomplish in her first year, how her decades of experience have already influenced Truly SMB’s mission, and where she wants the channel to change its AI messaging strategies.
New venture adds to Critchley’s experience across complex IT services
Critchley was the co-founder and CEO of Bam Boom Cloud, a Mircosoft solutions provider focused on the Dynamics 365 suite, which was acquired by Pax8 in 2023. Critchley then stayed on at Pax8 in roles focused on its global partner base until 2024, when she says she began to feel the itch to return to the provider side of the business.
“I’m just genuinely interested in the tech itself. I’m quite a geeky person, really, and I was watching the AI wave and really thinking, ‘if we had had this a few years ago, we could have done some really cool things,” Critchley said. So, she decided to pursue those “cool things” in a new venture.
Critchley says Truly MSP will be hyperfocused on the untapped potential of AI technology to transform SMBs worldwide, along with other business process advising. Her executive team features familiar faces from the Bam Boom Cloud days. The company has already completed two acquisitions, giving the upstart provider a global book of business and plenty of momentum.
Even as AI itself continues to grow and innovate into new technologies, Critchley feels confident her team will be able to stay on top of the trends and focus on what drives the greatest value for its clients.
“I think the actual knowledge we have on business processes and how automation has always helped is a huge advantage for us now coming into the AI space,” Critchley said, referencing the experience she brings from Bam Boom’s enablement offerings.
AI adoption remains challenging for SMBs
Critchley and her team believe SMBs lag far behind enterprise-level adoption and implementation for various reasons, including a lack of understanding of how AI can be used to drive value in their operations.
“There’s a real opportunity to explain what we as an industry mean when we say ‘AI,’ and further what that AI might actually mean for their business,” Critchley said. “Our job is to do the education without just selling them a product.”
Critchley notes this lack of education keeps some from seeing AI as a helpful tool and not just a new buzzword in the market.
“I would like to see vendors and partners find a different way to address the market,” Critchley said. “Just because Microsoft or Google or whoever says they have a new product, that doesn’t mean a whole lot on its own to a business owner. They need to see value and understand its use.”
Critchley will draw on decades of experience running her own business and her learnings in advising others to develop offerings and services suited for small organizations that need to see ROI quickly to buy into larger-scale implementations down the line.
“There’s a risk here that SMBs just won’t do anything with AI and totally miss out,” Critchley said. “We need to show them small use cases to start and prove value in one process automation or one departmental goal. Then, they’ll come back to us and say, ‘oh, what if we also did that over here in this department or tried this other product out, too,’ and they’ll start to understand.”
Acquisitions and customer growth top priorities list for the first year
As noted above, Truly MSP has come out of the gate swinging, with two acquisitions and customers in the UK and North American markets. Still, Critchley has ambitious growth plans that include more acquisition activity as 2025 progresses. Above all, though, she says she wants to see Truly MSP’s clients benefiting quickly and routinely.
“A year from now, I want to be able to see and say how much we’re moving our SMBs and progressing them in their AI journeys,” said Critchley. “We’re going to make sure our customer base can experiment with the new tech without committing a lot of budget or resourcing.”
Artificial intelligence tools are constantly entering the market. Read more about the latest AI technology available to partners and their customers.