Soft Skills
for Jerks
Practical communication tools for people who would rather reboot the problem than discuss feelings.
- Assertive, declarative language
- Escalations without chaos
- Better outcomes with fewer variables
SPEAKER · OPERATOR · EDUCATOR
MAKE WORK
NOT SUCK.
Dean Trempelas helps service teams, help desks, and MSP leaders do the hard operational work without pretending the human part does not exist.
- 15+
- years in IT
and MSP ops - $700K → $55M+
- MSP growth
in the trenches - 100s
- of people
hired & trained
LIVE ON STAGE01 / 04
BIG
FEELINGS
↓
FEELINGS
↓
HELP DESKS ✦ HUMAN SYSTEMS ✦ SERVICE DELIVERY ✦ IT LEADERSHIP ✦ HELP DESKS ✦ HUMAN SYSTEMS ✦ SERVICE DELIVERY ✦
WHAT I TALK ABOUT
Useful ideas.
Strong opinions.
IT humor.
Keynotes, talkshops, panels, and conversations for the people responsible for keeping technology and other people functioning.
Soft Skills
AI on the
Help Desk
AI does not fix a confused workflow. It just helps the confusion move faster.
- Human accountability in AI-assisted support
- Workflow discovery over tool worship
- Supportable client outcomes
High-Functioning
Burnout
They are not fine. They are functioning. There is a difference, and leaders need to notice it.
- Recognition before rupture
- Systems that reduce silent trades
- Making work sustainable
You Don't Need
Their Runbook
Onboarding a new client should not mean inheriting every bad decision they made before you arrived.
- Make onboarding yours
- Set a useful operational baseline
- Stop preserving chaos as documentation
Hiring and Training
Help Desk Talent
Build a support team people want to join, then give them the coaching, clarity, and room to become genuinely good at the work.
- Hiring for signal instead of résumé theater
- Training that survives the first real ticket
- Human interviews and operational expectations
SEE IT, DON'T JUST TAKE MY WORD FOR IT
Actual talks.
Actual stages.
There is an easier way to assess a speaker than reading ten adjectives written by their own marketing department.
Visit Crab Consulting on YouTube ↗
THE INTERNET LOBSTER HAS A RECURRING SEGMENT
Sharp opinions about the work we keep pretending is normal.
A popular LinkedIn conversation Dean created for IT people, MSP leaders, and anyone who has been asked to “just make it work” with no additional context, authority, or budget.
Follow the hashtag ↗THE REST OF THE INTERNET
Useful advice.
Questionable delivery.
Dean makes serious educational content, hot takes, strange little experiments, and, on occasion, a terrible music video. All of it is trying to make the industry a little more useful and a little less boring.
NOFLUFF
WHO IS THIS GUY?
Dean Trempelas is an operator with a microphone.
Dean has spent more than 15 years in IT and MSP operations, including helping grow an MSP from $700K to more than $55M. He has hired and trained hundreds of people, learned a great deal from getting things wrong, and developed a low tolerance for performative process.
His talks sit where operations, communication, training, service delivery, and the human side of technology all make the room a little uncomfortable. In a useful way.
Dean is currently Director of Partner Success at Empath. Crab Consulting is his independent speaker and education work, not an employer sales page.
WHY I SPEAK
Knowledge should not be a scavenger hunt.
My day jobs and vendor associations pay the bills, but I firmly believe in information literacy: the equity of information, knowing how to find, assess, and use it, and not gatekeeping knowledge behind paywalls. It is not a topic schools generally teach young people explicitly anymore. Why would they? A human can Google or ask anything and get an answer. Except getting an answer is not the same thing as knowing what to do with it.
My entire career, and now my public speaking, have come from struggling to find resources, training, or even knowing where to look for them. I don't want any other practitioner of the dark arts of IT support or helpdesk to ever have to go through that struggle.
This means that while I certainly can and do get on stage in my vendor persona, I prefer to get up on stage as Dean and simply teach. I don't do sales pitches, and I suck at them when asked, so if you don't want me to teach, make a room laugh, and bring some energy, I am not your guy. If you need a corporate shill, I will probably spend half the talk making fun of what I was asked to shill instead of shilling it.
As an industry, we only improve and, quite frankly, exist in the face of AI if we remember that we are humans supporting humans, and must keep it open, fair, equitable, and proudly human. I believe in human-made slop. I believe in human education.
WHERE HE HAS DONE THIS OUT LOUD
Stages, shows,
and rooms full of
IT people.
Dean has appeared at and spoken for events, podcasts, and livestreams across the MSP and IT community. The topics change. The low tolerance for vague operational thinking does not.
Conferences and events
- IT Nation
- MSP Show UK Keynote
- MSPGeek
- CanITCon
- ScaleCon
- Ninja ITX
- Kaseya Connect
- Huntress Roadshows
Podcasts and livestreams
- Moovila
- Scaling the Wall
- Cyber Insurance Hotcakes
- Blumira Briefings
- MSP Tea Room
- IT Horror Fest
- MSP Community Live
- ATMSP Live
- Backups and Bandwidth
BUILT FOR THE ROOM YOU HAVE
Keynotes, talkshops,
panels, and live troublemaking.
- 01 Conference keynotes
- 02 Interactive talkshops
- 03 Leadership offsites
- 04 Panels, podcasts, and live streams
FOR EVENT ORGANIZERS
Need the short version?
Dean can provide a conference-ready bio, session description, approved headshot, stage requirements, and live video examples without sending you through an employer sales funnel.
SPEAKER INQUIRIES
Bring a useful
troublemaker.
Tell me about your audience, the problems they are wrestling with, and how much mild discomfort the event can handle.
Email Dean ↗