Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast

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On August 20th, 1989, Lyle and Erik Menendez shot and killed their own parents. Until then, this Beverly Hills family had been a portrait of the American Dream. How did it go so wrong? To listen to all four episodes of 'The Menendez Brothers' right now and ad-free, go to IntoHistory.com . Subscribers enjoy uninterrupted listening, early releases, bonus content and more, only available at IntoHistory.com . If you or someone you know is in crisis, there is free help available at mhanational.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Welcome to Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. If you're a Managed Service Provider (MSP) and want to improve your marketing & grow your business, this is the show for you. It's out every Tuesday on your favorite podcast platform. Since launching in 2019, this has become the world's most listened to podcast about MSP marketing. Host Paul Green is the world's go to MSP marketing expert, and the founder of the MSP Marketing Edge. Every week you'll get really smart ideas to improve your marketing. Plus you'll hear from the best guests, who will help you think differently about the way you attract new clients. You can easily email and chat to the host Paul Green, who answers MSP's marketing questions every week. And there are versions of the podcast on YouTube if you want the full video experience. Paul and his team at the MSP Marketing Edge say their mission for the podcast is to give you practical insights and expert advice to boost your business performance. They provide strategies to help you get more clients, increase your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), and grow your net profit. They know that profitability is crucial, and we're here to help you succeed financially. Running an MSP can feel lonely. If you ever feel lost or overwhelmed, this podcast is for you. Each week it covers key topics for MSPs, offering specific, practical advice tailored to the channel. You will learn effective marketing techniques to attract new clients and grow your business consistently and profitably. Marketing an MSP involves many strategies, from digital marketing to traditional networking meetings. Paul's podcast explores all avenues to help you reach your target audience. The weekly episodes discuss creating compelling marketing materials, using social media effectively, and optimizing your website for search engines. Every episode features special guests, including industry veterans and successful MSP owners, who share valuable insights and real-world experiences. These interviews provide inspiration and practical tips you can apply to your business. Paul Green often talks with successful MSPs about how they are growing their businesses, sharing actionable tips and strategies. The discussions cover finding new clients, increasing revenue, and building service consistency to give you a competitive edge. They also address day-to-day business aspects like recruitment, leadership, and financial management. The goal is to equip you with the knowledge and tools to run your business efficiently and profitably. Topics include attracting and retaining top talent, creating a positive workplace culture, and motivating your team. Business growth is a central theme. In the podcast you'll hear strategies for scaling your business, expanding services, and entering new markets. Paul and his guests discuss the challenges and opportunities of growth, providing practical advice to overcome obstacles and seize opportunities. Innovation is another key topic. Discuss the latest trends in the MSP industry and how to leverage them to your advantage. Topics include digital transformation, cybersecurity, and cloud computing, helping you stay competitive. Though based in the UK, Paul's content is relevant globally. MSP challenges are similar worldwide, and his advice addresses these common issues, regardless of your location. The MSP Marketing podcast offers in-depth discussions about the channel and MSP industry, providing actionable insights and practical advice. Listen each week for expert advice, practical strategies, and insights from industry leaders. Whether you're looking to boost your client base, optimize operations, or increase profitability, the MSP Marketing Podcast supports your journey to success. About Paul Green Paul encourages listener interaction and values your feedback and suggestions. Connect with him through the website, social media, and email to share your thoughts and ideas. Paul Green is a le

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Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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No idea where to start with your MSP’s marketing? Start Here 30:35

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 277 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… No idea where to start with your MSP’s marketing? Start Here: Discover the most important marketing things that will bring new leads into your MSP in my brand new, easy to read book. People only buy managed services for one of two reasons: Most purchases are made to either fix a problem (needs), or to make the buyer feel good (wants). You should offer an almost endless supply of additional services to meet these two criteria. The MSP mindset that grows your business: Building a successful MSP isn’t just about what you do, it’s also very much about the way you think. If you and your technicians adopt this way of thinking, then you’ll achieve immense things. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Freeing up your time is a challenge but absolutely essential to the growth of your MSP. Here’s the simplest way to achieve it. No idea where to start with your MSP’s marketing? Start Here Does this sound familiar? Are you completely overwhelmed with what marketing you should be doing in the short amount of time you have to do it? Well, many MSPs are in this exact situation. There’s so much information and advice out there, the problem is actually cutting through all the noise and figuring out exactly what you should do and in what order. I spent years figuring this out and refining it. And finally, you can discover the most important marketing things that will bring new leads into your MSP. They’re all in my brand new, easy to read book. Stick around for some of the best highlights. One of the coolest things about recording a podcast or doing YouTube videos or even writing a blog every week is that it allows you to go back and see where your mind was years and years before. I’ve been working with MSPs since 2016, and the core marketing advice that I’m giving to you today is no different to the advice that I was giving nine years ago. Sure, some of the tactics have changed, but the good solid basic marketing strategy is exactly the same. Because a good strategy doesn’t change for decades, it’s just the tactics that change. What I’ve really noticed over the last four or five years is that I’ve got considerably better at explaining what you should do in an easier and easier way. And I’ve spoken to thousands of MSPs over the years and I realised that the majority of them, they don’t want highly advanced marketing tactics and clever strategies that are actually quite difficult to implement. The vast majority of MSPs I speak to just want marketing to be easy. They want clear, simple recommendations of what to do and how to do it. And that’s driven me to refine my three-step lead generation system and the tasks that I believe you most need to do are contained within that. Now, I don’t think this is a mission that’s ever really completed, but in the last year or so, I believe I have made a big jump forward. And one thing that’s helped me with that is writing a book on this subject. It’s actually just gone on sale on Amazon worldwide. You can get it on your Kindle, including in the free Kindle library thing. You can also get a paperback copy. Now I’ve written a few over the years, but I genuinely believe that this one is the most powerful book I’ve ever written, because it’s the easiest to understand. It’s called MSP marketing: Start Here . And I actually physically wrote the first version on an eight hour flight from the UK to Las Vegas when I was speaking at Scale Con in October, 2024. And then I took a few months to refine it and refine it again and just simplify everything down. Now the book is designed to be a short, 60 minute read. I want it to be super easy for you to pick it up and read it in one or two sittings and just walk away with a very clear checklist of exactly what you need to do to build audiences of people to listen to you, grow a relationship with them using content marketing, and then convert that relationship, convert them from lead to prospect to client. I’ll let you into a little secret. This is actually the first of a whole series of books that I’ve got planned. You should see my master plan word document, I already have the next five books all planned out chapter by chapter. So this one, this first book is called MSP marketing: Start Here because it’s designed as the start point. This is the one book that I wish I could get all 40,000 MSPs on the planet to read. If it could be one book, it would be this book. I try not to do really overt plugs in my videos and on the podcast, but I’ve got to be honest, if there’s one book that you should buy and read this year, please make it this book. It is just a 60 minute investment, I promise you. And I help you make the link between how important good marketing is to live the lifestyle you most want to live. I’m not joking. If you can set up a marketing system that helps you to onboard one new client a month or whatever your MSP can handle, that will change your life forever. You’ll have a great cashflow, great profits, and ultimately you’ll be able to live exactly the lifestyle that you want to live. In this book, I take you through my three step lead generation system. I tell you about the 11 tasks that are contained within it. It’s all there on the page, and as I said, you can read it as a paperback or on your Kindle. And I should have an audible version out later in the year. Did you know you have to kind of audition for Audible? Got my posh British voice on to do my best audition. Anyway, go and search Amazon now, MSP marketing: Start Here . Follow my easy plan and you really can change your life. I’ll let you into a little secret. This is actually the first of a whole series of books that I’ve got planned. You should see my master plan word document, I already have the next five books all planned out chapter by chapter. So this one, this first book is called MSP marketing: Start Here because it’s designed as the start point. This is the one book that I wish I could get all 40,000 MSPs on the planet to read. If it could be one book, it would be this book. I try not to do really overt plugs in my videos and on the podcast, but I’ve got to be honest, if there’s one book that you should buy and read this year, please make it this book. It is just a 60 minute investment, I promise you. And I help you make the link between how important good marketing is to live the lifestyle you most want to live. I’m not joking. If you can set up a marketing system that helps you to onboard one new client a month or whatever your MSP can handle, that will change your life forever. You’ll have a great cashflow, great profits, and ultimately you’ll be able to live exactly the lifestyle that you want to live. In this book, I take you through my three step lead generation system. I tell you about the 11 tasks that are contained within it. It’s all there on the page, and as I said, you can read it as a paperback or on your Kindle. And I should have an audible version out later in the year. Did you know you have to kind of audition for Audible? Got my posh British voice on to do my best audition. Anyway, go and search Amazon now, MSP marketing: Start Here . Follow my easy plan and you really can change your life. People only buy managed services for one of two reasons Did you know that people only buy managed services for one of two reasons? So if you want to make more money, you need to understand and get comfortable with these two reasons. It’s then, and only then that any marketing you do can actually be effective and not a complete and painful waste of time. Let’s take a brief dive into what these reasons are, how you can influence the way your prospects see you, and ultimately make a ton of money for your MSP. Tell me, have you read a book called Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson. It really is a great book packed with goodies, and I love the emphasis inside on taking action. I was flicking through it again just a couple of weeks ago when I re-read the section on something called frontend/backend sales. And the frontend is what new clients see and buy, so this is the core products that they see you selling and they use to compare you against other MSPs. So for you, that might be the basic support you offer, or if you’re still doing break/fix, it would be that. Now the backend is all of the other products and services that clients go on to buy once they’ve bought the frontend. That’s a recurring service contract, it might be some kind of software, maybe even hardware, particularly if they’re doing hardware rental through you and of course projects. Lots of lovely backend for you. And typically backend sales are far more profitable because you don’t have to pay the cost of acquiring the client again, they’re already your client, and B, you already know them. So the impact of delivering the extra service is less. Remember, the goal here is increasing profit, not just turnover. Anyone can grow a business at the expense of profit. The trick is to grow turnover and net profit at the same time. And for that, you need to sell a lot more in the backend. People only buy for one of only two reasons, sometimes they buy for both those reasons, but you need to feed both of these in the backend services that you sell. Most purchases are made to either fix a problem, we call these needs , or they are to make the buyer feel good, we call those wants . You should have an almost endless supply of backend services to meet both of these criteria. But focus more on the wants than you do on the needs. Michael Masterson writes in his book that 90% of all purchases are made to satisfy wants. Once someone’s a client, they will buy more from you so long as you put more of the right things in front of them. So here are three questions to ask yourself. Number one: What problems do my existing clients have? What desires do they have? Number two: What products and services can I offer to meet those wants and needs? And number three: How do I communicate those products and services in the least salesy and most efficient way? Now, this next bit’s interesting because the answer to question one will come from talking to your clients. The answer to question two will come from talking to your clients. And guess where the answer to question three will come from? Yes, it’ll come from talking to your clients. It really is as simple as that. In fact, you should systemise you or whoever is the big decision maker in the business talking to clients at least once a week. If you are the CEO of a grocery store, you’d go onto the shop floor to do this, and your equivalent to the shop floor is manning the help desk for a couple of hours. Or if you can’t do that, then make customer satisfaction follow up calls. Or if you don’t want to do that, perform some formal strategic reviews or QBRs, quarterly business reviews as they’re known. Or just pick up the phone and just call a couple of clients every week just for a chat. It’s possible to be close to clients and how they’re feeling without losing the necessary helicopter view needed to lead the business into the future. In fact, if you want to feed your backend of extra services you can sell them, it’s essential to do this. The MSP mindset that grows your business Featured guest:Patrick O’Donnell is SVP, Americas Sales, Barracuda (a cyber security solutions provider) where he is responsible for accelerating Barracuda’s sales, driving the go-to-market strategy, execution, and programs for the sale of security, data protection, and XDR offerings through the channel. Building a successful MSP isn’t just about what you do, it’s also very much about the way you think. There’s a whole movement towards a very specific way of thinking. And if you and your technicians have this way of thinking, then you’ll achieve immense things. And if you don’t, frankly, you’re probably going to be battling against the wind. My special guest today, he helps MSPs to embrace this mindset, and he’s going to explain it to you in a way that makes it so easy to understand and implement within your business. I am Patrick O’Donnell. I’m Senior Vice President for the America Sales for Barracuda Networks based in New York. Amazing. And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Patrick. So we are going to explore something today called a growth mindset, and why every owner and manager of an MSP needs to have a thing called a growth mindset. And don’t worry, in this interview, we are going to explore what exactly that is, where it’s come from, and Patrick’s going to make it really, really easy for us. Let’s learn a little bit about you first of all, Patrick. You work for Barracuda, tell us what you do at Barracuda and what’s your background. So my background really since I got out of grad school, has been in sales and in tech sales. I started with IBM, most of my career spent at IBM, both in the US and overseas in Asia and China and Japan. Worked for GE for a little bit, their GE digital division. In the last several years I was priorly at Datto, and for the last year and a couple of months, I’ve been at Barracuda. So I run the US North America sales organisation for Barracuda. We’re a fairly well-known cyber security company. I’ve been in business for 21 years, 100% channel focused, helping our customers and our partners solve challenging cyber security and helping our customers protect against threats. Whether it’s email network security, application security, or things like extended detection and response, 24/7 security operations centre. We cater to all kinds of partners, resellers, VARs, solution providers, as well as MSPs. And MSPs serve a lot of customers who may not be as sophisticated in terms of having large IT staffs or chief information security officers. They’re fairly underserved, but what they do know is they do need security and they see the evolving, expanding threat vectors, and they want to be protected against that. So we help our partners protect their end customers. Amazing. We’ll talk a little bit more about Barracuda towards the end of the interview. You sound like you’ve had one of those cool careers where you get moved abroad and you get to live in another culture and really enjoy yourself for a couple of years. Now, I’ve never done that, and I suspect the vast majority of people that are listening to us or watching this on YouTube have never had that kind of corporate, you get a week’s notice to move to Japan or something like that. Is that as cool as it sounds, or is it actually a bit of a drag when it happens? Well, anytime you move, it’s stressful, there’s always stress, and we had young children at the time, but we loved living in Japan and we loved living in China. We were there for about five years in total. So a great experience for the family, for myself, to experience other cultures and be resident in that geography is a gift. It was a gift to me and a gift to my family and my kids. It’s an experience they’ll never forget, nor will I. And so it was a lot of fun. But yeah, moving halfway around the world does introduce some stress. But it’s a great company behind us with IBM and great markets in which to sell and serve and support customers. I love living in Asia. It was a great experience. And then one day you got the phone call, you’re coming back to New York. It’s like, oh, do I have to really? Anyway, we are talking about this thing called a growth mindset today. Let’s start right at the beginning. Let’s assume that our MSPs listening and watching this have never heard of growth mindset before. So can you introduce us to the basics? What is this, where does it come from, and why is it so important? I think a large part of what we’re going to talk about with growth mindset is based on some work from a pretty renowned psychologist, a professor at Stanford University, Carol Dweck. And for anyone who’s interested and may not have read her book, she actually wrote a book about this, which is incredibly instructive, it’s very interesting. It’s called Mindset, the New Psychology of Success. A lot of things I’m going to be talking about as it relates to whether it’s MSP or end customer or any type of partner or any individual or any company, it’s based on her work. And so her research is on this concept of mindset. There’s a growth mindset and there’s a fixed mindset. And so she talks about the difference between those two sets of beliefs and how they could impact the firm in a good way and in a not so good way. And how do you recognise that and how is that translated into behaviours? And how can you get your team, whether you’re a team of two or a team of 10 or a team of 300, how can you get your employees and your management team adopting a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset? And what does that look like? That’s the basis of the growth mindset research that she’s done, to help companies and people understand where they fit, how they can adopt some of the growth mindsets. And what are some of the downsides that business owners, particularly MSP owners, need to be sensitive to recognise when it exists and what did they do about it. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. So can you give us an example of a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. And I appreciate, I might be putting you on the spot a little bit with that, but if we were to take, let’s say, take two technicians, let’s take technician A and technician B, technician A has a fixed mindset. What does that look like? Technician B has more of a growth mindset. Well, the fixed mindset, as Carol talks about, is this belief that in a fixed mindset your innate abilities and talent and intelligence is limited. And so when you have that belief system that your abilities and your intelligence and your talent are somewhat limited and can’t be impacted, that impacts and is manifested through certain types of behaviour. People with a fixed mindset tend to avoid challenges. They don’t receive feedback very well. They view actually constructive feedback as kind of a personal threat because it undermines this notion of their inherent abilities, which they think is limited. So they feel more challenged when they’re given feedback and don’t take it in the manner in which it might be intended by a manager or a team leader or even a colleague or peer. That’s not a good place if you’re an MSP business owner and you’re trying to grow. You want people who adopt a more positive growth mindset, who feel that with energy, effort, guidance and constructive feedback, they can improve, they can get better, that their abilities, talents and skills are not fixed. They can be improved, and guidance can be a pathway to growth. And so that’s kind of one of the main differences that Carol talks about in her book is for someone who does have a fixed mindset, first of all, how do you recognise it, and then how do you coach to get them to a more growth oriented mindset. Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question in itself is how do you recognise someone with a fixed mindset? As you were talking about different mindsets to different technicians, I’m sure some MSPs listening to that would think, a lot of my technicians don’t take feedback well , but that doesn’t necessarily mean that in itself is an indicator of a fixed mindset. The way I always understood it was that if you believe in the fixed mindset that you believe you can’t grow, you can’t learn, you can’t develop that you’re born with these skills and yeah, you can do some training, but you never really change and get better. Whereas of course, growth mindset is the complete opposite of that. So what would you look out for in a technician to identify someone who is potentially locked as to what they think they can do? There’s a couple of things. One we just spoke about, is someone who is hesitant or pushes back strongly on constructive feedback. That is kind of a red flag. Someone who avoids challenges, who doesn’t seek to go above and beyond or is afraid of failure. Typically, people who have a fixed mindset, fear failure and fear making mistakes because they feel it will reflect poorly on their sense of self and on their inherent abilities, which they believe are fixed. So it’s threatening to them. So they won’t go above and beyond. They will avoid challenges. They will be defensive when feedback is given, even though the feedback comes from a good place, they have a negative reaction to that. They also see effort, in some cases, as futile. And if you’re an MSP owner, and let’s say you have a small MSP, but you’re growing, you’re growing really well, you’re hiring, you’re bringing on staff, and you’re serving clients and customers, those are not characteristics you want in your frontline employees, particularly if they’re serving your most important asset, which is your clients, your customers that you’re serving in a monthly recurring revenue model. You’re trying to deliver impact for the monthly recurring services that you’re billing for. You want people who adopt a growth mindset, not a fixed mindset. Those are some of the things that I think owners should be astute for and not ignore. So when they see those signs, don’t avoid it, lean into it. Probe, ask questions, get underneath where that might be coming from, because if it’s left unchecked or employees aren’t challenged around some of those dimensions, that could be cause for concern and it needs to be addressed. Yeah. Now here’s an interesting question. I’ve met, or spoken to at least a thousand MSPs over the years, it may be even more, and the vast majority who have started their own business do have that growth mindset, because I think it’s very, very difficult to be in either the kind of high impact corporate jobs that you have or to run your own business if you don’t have that. But I have met a small proportion of MSPs who’ve got that fixed mindset, and you can see it in their business. You can see it reflected in the people that they’ve hired. And typically, those people struggle. When you’re the owner of the business you are not responsible to anybody. And I’ve always said that’s one of the double-edged swords of being a business owner, is that you are unfireable, right? The only way you get fired is if the business collapses because you’ve been so inadequate as a business owner. But there’s no boss to fire you, there’s no one to give you performance management. And we all see a lot of very, very bad, not just within the MSP world, but around the world, we see a lot of bad business owners managing to do 20, 30, 40 years in business just because they’re unfireable. So how would you, as an MSP owner recognise if you were inflicted with a fixed mindset? And how would you start to identify that and how would you start to tackle it? Most MSPs that I’ve worked with, and similar to your experience, they have a growth mindset because they want to grow their business, they’re open to how do they get better, they’re open to exploring new avenues whether it’s revenue, recurring revenue or new services or working with their teams to elevate their performance or their certification or their training or their development. But I sometimes see MSPs, MSP owners, who are just content with, I don’t want to grow my business, I’m happy the way it is , and that may be fine for them. But they still want to be profitable, even if they don’t want to grow their revenue, they want that revenue that they are and the customers that they are serving to be happy and well served. And for that, you need employees who will carry out that mission, whether your growth intentions are lower or higher, you want your employee base embracing a growth mindset every day, every week, every month. So it does require a level of self-reflection. And if you don’t recognise that in yourself or your company or your management team, that’s a problem. But it starts with one question – What are your plans for growth? Often when I talk to new MSPs I haven’t met before, I say Talk to me about your business. Where are you growing? Where are you not growing? Where do you feel unsettled and uncomfortable in terms of your business or your business plan? And if they’re like, Hey, everything’s great, everything’s fine. I’m happy with my growth. I’m not looking for aggressive growth. I’m kind of happy and content with where we are right now. That’s kind of little bit of a red flag, right? I know I’m dealing with somebody who’s a little bit different than the norm because the norm is not like that for most MSP owners. No. And let’s be honest, within the MSP world, there is no other sector where there’s so much change. I’ve only been here since 2016, and even in, what’s that, seven, eight years, nine years, I can add up, well clearly I can’t on the fly, the whole of the technical world has completely changed. Cyber security is so different today to what it was back in 2016. So I agree with you, I think for an MSP owner there’s always so many opportunities, new things, new ways of generating recurring revenue and new ways of protecting the clients from themselves. It’s the nature of the beast isn’t it, of being an MSP and the world that we live in with cyber security. It’s fast evolving, and you almost have to have a growth mindset just to keep up with the fast pace and the growing threats. Well, thank you for coming on to talk about this, Patrick. And I certainly think for everyone listening, watching this right now, you definitely should read Mindset by Carol Dweck. It’s probably on Audible because most great books like that are. It’s really funny. my daughter was taught this eight years ago at her school. She’s only 14. So at the age of six, they were teaching growth mindset. And in fact, I remember watching a Netflix show a couple of years ago, it’s called Drive to Survive, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, Patrick, it’s about Formula One. And one of the Formula One drivers had a big crash and a kid fan stopped him coming out of the pits and said to him, How are you going to use this crash to positively influence your performance going forward? And I thought, that’s just brilliant. You wouldn’t have heard kids talking that way 20 years ago. Came off as a bit precocious to be honest, but it was still great that the kid was asking a guy who’d just written off a $200 million car and he was asking him how the crash was going to help him improve his performance in the future. Because that’s how we want our kids to be thinking. So thank you for coming on talking about this. Just finish off Patrick by telling us a little bit about Barracuda. What exactly do you do? What are the benefits and how can we get in touch with someone? Yeah, sure. Before I do that, again, I would echo the same thing you just referenced with your listeners on Carol’s book, it’s just a great book. And the last piece of advice I’d give any MSP owner is lean into it, challenge directly, but professionally and where you see something that gives you some pause that somebody on your team or your management team may not be embracing fully. Talk about it, lean into it, embrace it, challenge it. As far as Barracuda, a little bit about Barracuda. We’ve been around for 21 years. This is not new to us. We have a very robust platform from email to network security, to application security to award-winning XDR services. We are a 100% channel company. We only work with the channel, whether it’s VARs or resellers or solution providers, the hyperscalers or distribution channel, but also MSPs. So we’re 100% focused on the channel and we serve for MSPs who serve the underserved market in SMB and the low end of enterprise, that’s their sweet spot. That’s a big sweet spot for Barracuda as well, for customers who recognise that they have a challenge with cyber security, but may not necessarily have the staffing or the technical staff to be able to keep up with those threats. Barracuda makes it easy for our partners to be able to serve those clients with our award-winning platform. Starting with email, which is the biggest threat vector of all the way through network and application and data protection, backup and recovery. So classic MSP managed recurring revenue services. We want to make it easy for our partners to buy, to consume, to deploy and manage our offerings. So that’s what Barracuda is all about. I would encourage anyone who’s listening to this podcast or YouTube, if they want to get in touch with me, connect with me on LinkedIn, I’d be glad to get you connected with other members of our team. Again, in service to MSPs who just do yeoman’s job protecting so much of our economy from the bad actors and cyber security threats. So we’re thrilled and honoured to work all kinds of partners and serve hundreds of thousands of organisations worldwide with our solutions. Paul’s Personal Peer Group Daniel in Michigan owns a new and quite small MSP. He only has one technician and somebody else that helps out from time to time and his question is: How do I free up my time? Oh, have no doubt. It is impossible to grow your MSP and therefore reach your life goals on your own. Success is about doing the things you most want to do in life. And no successful person ever achieve their success without a ton of help from other people. So the simplest way to do this is to pay other people to do things so that you don’t have to do them. You should develop a mindset. I know we’ve only just been talking about that with Patrick, but you should develop a mindset of you should only do what only you can do . Let me say that again because it’s so important. You should only do what only you can do . And anytime you catch yourself doing something someone else could do for you, you are literally wasting your time and you’re not making any progress towards your goals. So for every little job that’s on your plate, ask yourself, how can you DOA it away, DOA, being an acronym for Delegate, Outsource, Automate. And it’s also worth communicating to your staff on a regular basis what you need to focus your time on and help them to understand the benefits to them. For example, by working on the business and improving you are attracting new clients, you are growing your monthly recurring revenue, and this will help you pay them more if they understand that taking stuff off your plate ultimately helps you to pay them more. Everyone is happy and everyone is really focused. Plus you get loads more time to yourself. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Recommended books: Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson, and Mindset by Carol Dweck. Connect with my guest, Patrick O’Donnell , on LinkedIn, and visit the Barracuda website. Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Happy client? Ask for a testimonial NOW 33:11

13 dagen geleden33:11

33:11

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 276 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Happy client? Ask for a testimonial NOW: There is a perfect moment to ask your clients for a testimonial or review. This social proof is really important, and when you systemise collecting it, it’s going to make your life so much easier. Why MSPs should add new LinkedIn connections every day: LinkedIn is the single most important place for MSPs to go marketing right now and I’m going to tell you the best way to leverage it. How this MSP marketer grew the business: There’s no better way for you to find the right ideas to market your business than listening to other people who are doing it right now. My guest talks us through what he’s done and what you can take away and implement quickly. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you know what a vanity URL is and have you ever wondered if you need one? An MSP has asked the question which I answer in this episode. Happy client? Ask for a testimonial NOW What if I told you there was a perfect moment to ask your MSP’s clients for a testimonial or review. But you must act on it super quickly, as that moment will very fast vanish. If you struggle to collect social proof from your clients, this is going to make your life so much easier and even allow you to systemise getting testimonials and reviews from your happiest clients. So we all know that social proof is really, really important. Social proof is when people see other people like them acting in a certain way, and it gives them kind of a feeling of safety to know that other people have already tread the path that they are thinking of treading. And what I mean by that is collecting testimonials, reviews, and case studies from your existing clients, and then using that “social proof”, as it’s called, to persuade other people to pick your MSP. You’ll be perceived as a safer choice by business owners and managers if they see that other business owners and managers have already picked you and are happy to endorse you. Now, you’ve probably heard this before, but maybe there’s been something that’s been holding you back from collecting lots of social proof. Maybe it’s just been you simply haven’t had enough time, too many things to do, right? Or maybe you felt a little awkward asking your clients to give you a review or a testimonial. I mean, they’re already paying you money every month, surely you can’t ask them for something else, can you? Well, as a side note, yes you can. In fact, your best clients are often the most delighted to give you a testimonial or review because they want to see you succeed so that they can continue to enjoy your service. Whatever the reason you don’t have enough social proof yet, let me tell you the perfect moment to go asking for it. You’re looking for the point at which your client is at their happiest, and we can actually predict when this will be. There are two, maybe three times that they’re most likely to be at their happiest, and the first will be about 90 days after they very first joined you. So that first month is always a little bit manic, isn’t it? As you are onboarding them and you are migrating any services away from their previous MSP. And then the second and third months are where you work your magic and where the really good stuff happens. So they see little problems that never got sorted with the previous MSP get fixed by you. And you probably over service them a little in that first month or so, so everyone is very happy with you, they’re all glad that they switched over to you. And can you see why that would be an exceptionally good time to ask them for a review or a testimonial? Also, after 90 days, they feel as though they’ve sampled enough of your service to endorse you, and they wouldn’t do that in the first week or so. Another great time to ask them for social proof is after you’ve completed a big project for them, especially if it’s perhaps a massive, complex project with lots of moving parts. The relief from them that the project has been completed and the pleasure of the benefits that that project brings them are both things that you can leverage when you are asking for some social proof at this stage. Now, with both of these two examples I’ve just given you, can you see how you can systemise asking for social proof into the process of onboarding or completing a project? You can actually set a reminder for 90 days into a new relationship with a new client or at the point that the project has been successfully delivered, you can build it in and add it as a to-do, as a task to contact your client and ask them for social proof. And there is actually one more ideal opportunity, a great place to ask them for a testimonial or a review. And that’s when you have completed a major fix or a rescue for your clients. Now, let’s say they’ve had some kind of massive breakdown in something that was out of your control, you didn’t know and couldn’t have predicted it would’ve gone wrong, but you had to jump in and fix it. Maybe they’ve been compromised in some way and you’ve swept in, you’ve done your magic and you’ve rescued them, and now everything is fantastic again. This is the perfect moment to ask for social proof because even though technology has been a nightmare for them for the last few days, maybe even weeks, you’ve rescued them like a knight in shining armour. And you can’t systemise a moment like this because you don’t know when it’s going to happen. But can you see how really this is no different to the previous two examples, you are asking your clients for social proof at the exact moment they are emotionally overwhelmed with gratitude for you. Great social proof comes from the heart and not from the brain. You want people to be talking about how they feel about you and your team, not the logical fact about working with you. Good social proof persuades people to pick you at an emotional level. And the only way you can do this is to get emotional content from your existing clients to put in front of your leads and your prospects. So let me ask you, which of these three moments are you going to use to collect more social proof from your clients? you. But a project is the most obvious small thing to sell people. Why MSPs should add new LinkedIn connections every day If you only had 10 minutes a day to market your MSP, there’s one single place where I would recommend you invested all of that time. It’s the single most important place for MSPs to go marketing in 2025. And if you’re not there building it up every single day, you really are missing a massive marketing opportunity. Let me tell you what it is, how to leverage it, and a way to make it seem so easy that it feels like you’re doing almost no work every day yet across a year, you are going to see huge results. I made a big decision with my MSP Marketing Edge product development team at the backend of last year, and we’ve launched an exciting new project, which is now helping our members reach more decision makers on LinkedIn. And better influence them there as well. But why my obsession with LinkedIn? Well, that’s kind of easy. It is the most powerful social network for MSPs. Every prospect you could ever want is there and you can easily reach them. Do you know what kind of businesses you’d most like to work with? Well start by looking for them on LinkedIn. You want to connect with the decision makers and the influencers. And there are a few ways to do this. You could make a list of business names and run a LinkedIn search, or you could decide on several verticals you like and search for, let’s say lawyers in your town, accountants in your town, etc etc. You can also repeat this search on Google, adding the word LinkedIn of course for a shortcut. Find someone in your town who’s already connected to the people you want to reach. Connect to them and then connect to their connections. And by the way, there is a setting in LinkedIn that hides your connections to stop someone doing this to you. Every weekday I recommend you attempt to connect to 10 new people, and yes, you may need a paid LinkedIn subscription to do this. Also maybe only two of them will accept your connection request, which doesn’t sound a lot until you look at the big picture figures. Two connections a day, times five days, times 50 weeks equals 500 new connections a year, every year. And suddenly the power of a marketing system strikes again. This is why you want to turn this activity into a regular, probably even daily task. It’s 10, maybe 15 minutes of work every day, which is nothing but over a year in the grand scheme of things, it compounds and all of those tiny actions turn into something impressive. If you want to be really smart with this, then you’ll personally not do this work yourself. Go and find a virtual assistant or a member of your team to make these connection requests every day for you. All you need to do is brief this person on the kind of connections that you want to make and then give them access to your personal LinkedIn. You do it all in your LinkedIn. Now, I know that that might make you feel funny having someone else sat there in your LinkedIn, but so long as you find an assistant or a member of your team that you can trust and you put in place some checks, it will be okay. In fact, I’ve been operating this way for years on LinkedIn. If you and I have ever chatted on LinkedIn, well, if it was a very simple conversation that we had, it was probably not me, it was probably my virtual assistant Christelle. Or if it was a more complex conversation than it would’ve been me jumping in, but you wouldn’t have known. It does mean that christelle is doing 80% of the work on building up my LinkedIn and having basic conversations, and I just have to swoop in and do the 20% of stuff that really only I can do. Now, that’s a really smart way of doing any marketing, and it’s a great way of protecting your personal time while getting more solid marketing done. So let’s summarise that… building a simple system that attempts new connections every day and getting someone else to do this for you. This is very, very smart marketing that over time will give you a great big base of people to start talking to a whole ton of leads that you can start working and generating prospects from. How this MSP marketer grew the business Featured guest: Dan Grech is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former NPR and PBS journalist turned entrepreneur and educator. He’s the Founder and CEO of BizHack Academy, which is on a mission to train 1 million businesses how to use AI-powered marketing and business storytelling to grow 10x faster so their communities can thrive. Dan has worked as the head of digital marketing at two software startups and the nation’s largest Hispanic-owned energy company and has participated in accelerator programs through Entrepreneurs Organization, the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Program, and Knight Foundation. Dan is a graduate of Princeton University and has a Masters degree in storytelling from FIU and in journalism from Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Argentina. He lives with his wife and two children in Denver, CO. Heads up, here’s someone who’s there in the trenches marketing an MSP day in day out. There’s no better way for you to find the right ideas to market your business than listening to other people who have shovels in their hand and are doing it right now. Let’s explore what he’s done over the last three years and which great ideas you can take away and implement quickly. Hi, I’m Dan Grech. I’m the founder and CEO of Biz Hack Academy, and we are a marketing training and consulting company, and we provide fractional CMO services to MSPs around the world. And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Dan. You’ve got an amazing to tell about an MSP that you’ve been working with for three years, and you’ve taken them from literally zero marketing to a nice complex marketing machine that’s really delivering results for them. So we’re going to look at what you’ve done that’s worked well, what you’ve tried that didn’t work, and then let’s have a look at what you’re thinking of doing with them for the next three years. Before we tell that story, let’s find out a little bit about you. What’s your background? How did you get into this wonderful world of marketing MSPs? Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for being here and I’m really excited to tell you about this story of one MSP. We work with many different MSPs, but the story of this particular MSP, we’re not going to mention their name, is I think really illustrative of the opportunity and the challenges of marketing your MSP online – it’s a very crowded space. MSPs tend to be “me too” businesses, in other words there’s a lot of competition that looks very similar on the surface, and we’ve developed some really good lessons and best practices that we hope that all of your MSPs who are listening can share. My background actually is as a journalist, I spent 15 years in the United States working for NPR and PBS and the Miami Herald and the Washington Post, and I was a storyteller basically. I even got my master’s degree in storytelling. And then about 10 years ago, like so many other journalists, I lost my job. I had to reinvent. I reinvented myself first as a digital marketer, then as a trainer of digital marketing. I love to train people in what I want to learn. I love to learn by teaching, if you will. And then finally, as a business owner, starting my own training and consulting company, which I’ve been running now for almost 10 years – Biz Hack Academy. And one of the services that we provide is fractional CMO services. This is a part-time outsourced head of marketing. Basically providing thought partnership to the CEO and helping oversee and lead a team of marketers and agencies in support of accomplishing the CEO’s vision. Most MSP heads are technical people. They’re very operationally focused, and generally speaking they’re terrible at marketing. And so it’s really important that most MSPs that are looking to grow have someone in that seat, that head of marketing role, who can help them filter all their good ideas and then make sure that the team is executing against the best ones. Over the course of these three years, we’ve learned a lot of lessons about what works and what doesn’t. And I’m excited to share that journey. And we’re just right now as we plan for next year, we’re recording this in December, right before the new year 2025, we’re now actually creating our next three year strategy because we have had so much success over these three years building a great foundation. What kind of situation was the MSP in when you first started working with them? They must have had a website, they must have had a LinkedIn presence, but was that it? Were they doing any marketing at all? First of all, this MSP has three divisions, and I think this is really important because in one sense, I would almost say that this MSP didn’t follow necessarily marketing best practices because they had such a large Chinese menu of services. So the first service they offer is security and access control, these are cameras, access control for garages and doors like physical installations. Second, they offered unified communications, so this is like VoIP. And then third, they offer IT managed services, which includes things like cyber security, it’s a massive field. One of the biggest challenges that we faced early on was you have these three divisions and most of the products, the services, the vendors that they work with weren’t even listed on their website. I described internally, I would say it’s like you guys are a Chinese food restaurant where you don’t even list everything on your menu. So that was one big issue. As far as the website itself, this was the worst website situation I’d ever seen. They were using some old platform, I don’t even remember the name, that wasn’t indexed or indexable by Google – they were literally invisible on the internet. So though they had a 35 year history, in this case, they were invisible online. In terms of the marketing that they were doing at the time, they had one individual who was sort of like their social media video person. And then they had a couple of divisional salespeople for each of the three divisions who also oversaw marketing communications. And so the very first thing that we did with them is we ran all three of them as well as the CEO through a training program. And this served a couple of really important functions. Number one is it gave them a shared language for marketing. At Biz Hack Academy we call it the lead building system. I think it’s worth just quickly talking about what is the lead building system because it’s a really simplified form of marketing that’s very relevant to MSPs. The foundation of a lead building system is your business story. This is the founder’s reason for starting the company and the purpose of the company in the world… why you do what you do and why it matters. I’d love to dig into that a little bit and how defining the owner’s business story was an unlocking mechanism for growth for this company. That’s the foundation, ultimately, people only do business with people they like and trust, but if you’re actually looking to generate leads, there are six pillars. You need to identify what is the campaign objective? How are we going to measure success? Are you looking to get them to watch a video, click on it, click on a link, open an email, etc. Then you need to really narrowly identify your target audience and give them an irresistible offer. For most MSPs, you’re really offering them knowledge in exchange for their contact information. So you’re establishing yourself as an expert and then ultimately, ideally collecting their contact information, email and phone number so you can follow up with them. That’s the core of strategy. Who’s your audience and what are you giving them of value in exchange for their contact info? Next is thumb stopping visuals and compelling messaging. That’s the essence of tactical marketing – images, videos, audio, text, and obviously leveraging AI to the hilt to do that. Those are pillars four and five. And then pillar six is the customer journey, the buyer’s journey. How do they go from never having heard of you to a sale? And each campaign takes them on a next step in their customer journey. And so it’s an iterative process. You run an ad that leads them to click on a button and takes them to a landing page – so the objective to the ad is clicks. Then on the landing page, they fill out a form – so the objective of the landing page is form fills. And it’s iterative like that. And then now they’ve given you their email address -the objective of them is to open the email and book a call and so forth. And so you do this iterative process and this is how you market. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And it’s obviously taken you three years and I can see why it’s taken you three years, there’s a lot of stuff in there. You’ve built an entire marketing platform. So in terms of results, go back three years when they had an unindexable website, which I’ve never heard of in 2025, that’s nuts. But where were they getting their leads from? Was it just word of mouth? Was it just doing some networking locally? And then today, what kind of a difference is there? Is it a reliable amount of leads coming in? Do they have a reliable amount of discovery calls booked? What’s the difference from before to after? They’d been in business for 35 years, and so they were getting the business and they still get most of their business in ways that are going to be familiar to any MSP, through personal networking and referrals. The problem was they were losing a lot of business that would get referred to them. They would check out their online presence, they’d say this isn’t a serious company – too small, not a good risk to take. I mean, one of the things about MSPs is MSPs are basically CYAs, right? The head of IT for a company, the chief information officer of a company is looking to hire a partner for an MSP that’s going to make them not look bad, that’s going to keep things working, that’s going to largely be invisible, and then when things go wrong, we’ll be immediately accessible and available to them. So it’s a very heavy on risk vendor relationship. And if you aren’t really on point with your digital presence, they’re going to disqualify you. So this is an invisible cost to a poor digital presence. You need a good functioning website, a decently active presence on social media, good blogs, ideally some really good educational content. It’s not going to necessarily close you the business, but it won’t lose you the business. The first thing was building up that platform so that they weren’t losing the business that was already coming to them. It was all manual, it was all about them going networking. They were in three different markets, they had three different divisions, they had a pretty large sales team. It was very much of a sales driven company, and marketing was at best just kind of trickling out some email and social media. So now fast forward three years, I’m actually looking at their data right now. They have dramatically increased. They have more than 1200 back links, which are different links from other organisations sending to their site. We’re on the track now to make that 20,000 back links over the next three years. They have an authority score from nothing to 16, we’re going to have that up to 40 over the next three years. And their organic traffic, which was literally in the dozens when we first met, is now breaking 5,000 per month, on its way to 50,000 and beyond. We’re right now in the early stages of the L curve, the hockey stick of growth. Because SEO in particular is very much a long-term additive strategy. Our goal over the first three years, which we hit, was to build out a thousand articles and landing pages. We have a landing page now for every item on that Chinese menu. In other words, every product or service that they have, every vendor they work with will have pages and often multiple pages, and there’ll be localised versions of each of those pages for the geographies that they serve. Because as you know, a lot of search is best communications or best VoIP provider in Chicago . So need those geographically specific landing pages. And so this is a massive undertaking to get everything on their website listed with accuracy and length. And so a big part of those three years was just getting that Chinese menu with geographically localised pages onto the website. And then we also did a ton with email acquiring lists, generating lists through our content. And then finally, social media has primarily been just kind of showing that the company’s alive. We have the technicians sending photos before and after as part of the due diligence process, and then we post those photos and they do shockingly well. People love seeing messy cords turned into clean cords. So the before and afters do really well for us. So that’s kind of the social media. And then of course, PPC paid advertising, and that’s a challenge. It’s expensive, but it’s the primary driver to date of new business. Yeah, no, absolutely. And obviously all that work you’ve done over the last three years putting in place the basics, the solid basics is going to contribute, well, I’m sure that’s going to contribute more in the next 3, 4, 5 years ahead. Two very quick final questions for you, Dan. First of one, you mentioned earlier on about the business owner story. I just wanted to pick up on that and just close that loop if we could. And secondly, just give us a sneak preview of some of the ideas that you’re thinking about doing with this MSP over the next three years. Absolutely. So if I could give one takeaway to your MSPs, this is the single marketing tip that will make the biggest difference in the speed of your growth. And it’s almost counterintuitive, which is talk more about yourself. Everything in marketing is, it’s all about them. It’s all about solving the customer’s pain points. But you have to remember if they’re the hero, if they’re the Luke Skywalker, you as the business owner are the Jedi knight who is going to help them become the hero they’re meant to be. They don’t just hire anybody off the street. They hire someone that they like and they trust, and how do you build liking and trusting? It’s through a personal story. And so identifying why you do what you do, why you are personally committed and dedicated to being an MSP, to providing these services, to helping solve the technology challenges of your clients, while you have that sort of servant mentality describing where that came from, who taught you to value service, how you started your career, the startup story of your company, and then who you serve and why you serve them and why you love to serve them. Those are all things that will take a boutique MSP and help them stand out from the crowd because it’s a very crowded and undifferentiated space. And if you do not speak to who the owner is and why he or she does what she does, you will lose business. So that is my number one growth tip. Now in terms of what we’re going to do over the next three years, so first of all, aligned with that is we’re going to position the CEO as a thought leader in his industry. We’re going to get very noisy about that online. We’re running webinars and webinar series. We’re then cutting them up to create social video. We’re partnering with vendors. We actually, the company bought a cyber truck, and we’re actually partnering with vendors and doing cyber truck demo videos using the vendors. So we’re doing all sorts of creative campaigns like that. We’re leveraging social media like IMGUR is a platform, Reddit, Quora. So all of those platforms we’re expanding into in these first three years. We just didn’t have the resources to do that, now we have the bandwidth to do that, and we are doubling down on SEO, accelerating the content creation, doing it in the niches and the keywords that we know are winnable through our research. And then really focusing our paid on the security division, which we know is the most winnable, the least competitive, and the one that when they come in for the security division, they tend to get upsold into the IT services and the unified communications. So being really smart about where we’re spending our advertising dollars to maximise. We also are finding incredible results from Bing ads, which is a much cheaper and less competitive marketplace. And it’s all really on a foundation of content creation, being an expert, creating videos and blog posts that answer the specific questions that IT professionals have. The analogy is just like people go to YouTube to learn techniques, to fix their sink or do some home improvement. MSP clients are doing similar things except with their more advanced technologies. And so if you can be that person that they see giving that expert advice, you’re positioned to win that sale. We are getting you back on this show in 2028, so we can hear what’s happened at the end of the six years. Maybe we should just get you on every three years. Dan, just for those MSPs that want to have a chat with you, see if maybe your fractional CMO services is something that would sit well with them, what’s the best way to get in touch? Yeah, thank you. So go to BizHack.com, and they’ll see at the top that one of our services is fractional CMO services, and they should book a call with me, and I’m happy to talk to them. We have more than 80 fractional CMOs. We work with dozens of MSPs around the country. We have a deep expertise in exactly what they need and how to approach it, and we will help you grow faster. Paul’s Personal Peer Group Patrick is in Newcastle with his MSP in the northeast of England, and he has two questions in relation to his website. Firstly, What is a vanity URL? And secondly, Do I need one? There’s a quick and easy answer to this one. A vanity URL is used to hide a real URL for a promotion. It’s typically used in offline media where someone has to type something in. So for example, you might have an advert in a magazine or a billboard (which side note, it isn’t something I’d recommend, but let’s just go with the example), and let’s say the call to action on the magazine advert is to go to a special landing page at yourwebsite.com/landingpage. And the reason you’re sending them to that special page is to measure how much traffic you get from the advert. It’s really important that there’s no other way that they can get to that URL, it’s not in your website navigation or anything like that. You don’t advertise it elsewhere. It just shows you all the traffic that’s come to this page must have come from the magazine advert. The risk is as they’re typing it in that they get to the.com and they stop. That’s natural human behaviour, but that means they’ll be visiting your homepage and not the special landing page. So that skews your results. It’ll completely screw your stats up, and you’d think that the advert generated no traffic. In fact, then you’d be crying and the advertising people will be crying as well, and it would all just get horribly messy. So instead, you buy a vanity URL such as getbetterIT.com, and then you divert it to the actual URL, that one that had the slash, and that way the people responding to the advert cannot get it wrong. There’s no slashes, there’s no extensions, it’s just the base URL, and you get to know exactly what response you get. Another way of doing this, of course, would be to have a QR code, and personally, I would actually do both of these in a magazine advert, which as I said, I don’t really recommend you do anyway. But if you do, now you know how to judge whether or not you’ll get any response from it. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with my guest, Dan Grech on LinkedIn, and visit the BizHack website. Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Why the tough life of an MSP owner is worth it 26:19

20 dagen geleden26:19

26:19

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 275 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Why the tough life of an MSP owner is worth it: Running a business can feel like it’s sucking all your time and energy, but the big picture is that you can work towards the lifestyle you most want to live. How a messy office damages your MSP’s sales: Is your office a pristine, tidy space with zero mess or an untidy space packed with clutter? Find out why your environment impacts your effectiveness. EXCLUSIVE: How to reduce tickets while delighting clients: My guest explains why digital organisation is vital for business health and how you can help clients consolidate, archive and purge their data for a more effecient work flow. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you ever wonder how happy your staff are? I have the questions to help you find out the answer. Why the tough life of an MSP owner is worth it What is it with people like you and me running on fumes? If you’re running an MSP, I know what it’s like right now. That boost you had from time off over Christmas, all that recharging festive fuel, that was months ago. It’s all long gone. And yet we keep pushing, don’t we mile after mile after mile, hoping we can keep the business going, hoping we can keep it growing. But is this actually the best way to run an MSP? Stick around to be reminded why we do this, how to keep your energy levels up and the unexpected benefit to your life and lifestyle in the long-term. So this is my 20th year as a business owner and my goodness that has gone so quickly. I kid you not, I was 30 when I started my first business and I was young and cool and now I’m this old man, I’m age 50, I’ve got the creaky back, I’ve got a dodgy knee. And if you’re in your twenties or thirties right now, do not get cocky kid. This is going to happen to you as well. Although by the time that you reach the age the I am now, I’ll be in a nursing home, anyway. One of the constants of being a business owner is that it is hard work. I have a great business now with a great team at the MSP Marketing Edge and we do great work for MSPs all over the world with our service. But I still have weeks where I’m working more hours than someone with a job would. If I worked for someone else in a job, I would never do those 50, 60 week hours, rarely anyway. And if I look back over the last 20 years, there have been many of those periods of time where you throw yourself into projects or problems or whatever it is. I’m sure you do exactly the same. The truth is only business owners can understand this… Running a business that you own is more than just something you do. It’s more than just a job. It’s very much a way of life. It has a unique way of sucking every single last ounce of energy and every last second of time out of you. And do you know, as I hear myself saying that, I realise that I’m not really painting it in a very good light for someone who’s actually thinking of starting their own MSP. So sorry if that’s you. But I think actually before anyone starts their own business, really they need to understand the downsides as well as the upsides. It is an all consuming thing and especially so with an MSP because running an MSP is surely running one of the most difficult kinds of businesses in the world. There are so many details you need to be across, there’s so much that changes. And of course you have to be both proactive and reactive at the same time. You have to be proactive stopping things from going wrong, but then reactive fixing stuff that does go wrong. It’s exhausting. You have my full admiration for doing it. Sometimes I see MSPs are really struggling with this burden. I see posts in places like the tech tribe or my own free MSP marketing Facebook group and people are really struggling with the constant burden of running an MSP. And I think it’s at times like that you have to remind yourself why you are doing this. So let me ask you why you started your business in the first place. Was it to increase your personal income? Was it to take control of the work that you do and who you do it for and the way that it’s done? Was it to build a better lifestyle for you and for your family or was it just because you wanted to prove that you could do it? That you could stand on your own two feet? I mean the chances are it’s many or even all of those things. Starting a business isn’t like taking a job. It’s something we create, something we shape ourselves, it’s our baby. And do you know, after the difficult first couple of years, you can build something amazing that thrives whether you personally are there or not. In fact, the thing that keeps many business owners going not just through 20 years but 30 years, 40 years or more, is the lifestyle that they can build out of owning a business. And by lifestyle I don’t mean a bigger house or a bigger car. And if those are things that motivate you, then great. But when I’m talking about lifestyle, what I’m really talking about is you doing the things you want to do with the people you most want to do them with. Let me give you an example. So you may know I’m a sole parent, I have a 14-year-old, Hi Samm, that’s my child and that’s my most important job. So I am always a parent first and a business owner second, and all my other roles come after that. But there’s going to come a point in the next few years where my beloved child leaves to go to university or whatever. Actually she wants to go to drama school to be a musical theater actor, which is cool. And at that point, I’m just not going to be needed as much as I am today. I guess I’ll have to just send money all the time obviously, but I won’t need to be taxi driver, I won’t need to be organiser, chef, all of those kinds of things that you do as a parent. And at that point I want to travel. I have a plan to travel to 50 countries in my fifties and so far I’ve only ticked off one item off that list, one country off that list, which was a visit to the US last year and I’m going to be 51 in just a few months time, so I need to get on this. But all joking aside, that goal has been a very big presence in my mind for perhaps five, maybe even 10 years or so. And I knew it was going to be some time before I could do and travel to the really cool places, the kind of places that teenagers just don’t want to go to. Places like Japan, that’s the kind of place I want to go. So as I’ve been building up my business over the years, it’s very much been in the back of my mind that whatever I build must feed my lifestyle and not hinder it. My lifestyle requirements in the future demand that I have time to go traveling and enough money to pay for that travel. And also, of course, I can’t be trapped in an office here at home. There’s no way that I could have that lifestyle if I was working for someone else. Well most jobs anyway. But as a business owner, I definitely can because I can go to Japan and I can work in a different time zone and also have some fun. And that’s the point that I’m trying to make here. The greatest advantage of running your own MSP is that you can work towards the lifestyle you most want to live. And that might be travel, it might be doing more exciting higher strategic tech work through opportunities that are opened up to you by the people that you’re meeting running your MSP. It could be something else you might want to learn to hang glide, I don’t know. But believe me, during the difficult weeks, the ones where you are working 60, 70 hours a week or more, and that’s just to stay afloat. That’s what you’ve got to stay focused on. Running a business is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. And yet sure, you’ve always got to be aware of the mile that you’re currently running, but you must also keep in mind the ultimate goal to live the life you most want to live doing the things you most want to do with the people you most want to do them with. How a messy office damages your MSP’s sales If I walked into your MSP’s office today, would my mouth drop open in shock and surprise? Would I be slapping you on the back and congratulating you or would I have my hands on my face in total horror at what I see? Let me tell you how what I’d see in your office can tell me exactly how efficient your MSP is at winning clients and serving them well. So I’ll admit it’s been a few years since I was inside an MSP’s office, but based on several years of visiting many of them, they do tend to fall into one of two camps. They’re either a pristine, tidy space with zero mess or they’re an untidy space packed with clutter. Old hardware, keyboards, mice, cables everywhere on every shelf in every drawer, in every cupboard. You can’t move for stuff. So which one of those is your office? Personally, I try very hard to maintain a clean and tidy environment. My house is the kind of place where you could drop in on me with no notice and think I’d just been tidying for hours. My home office and video studio is exactly the same apart from one corner where a bunch of unwanted clutter is starting to building up. Every time I clear out my office or declutter my desk, I feel great. Because your environment sets your context. It directly affects how you feel and how you think. It’s why a refurbishment in a retail shop typically leads to an immediate boost in sales. It’s also why some people believe a broken window that doesn’t get fixed can ultimately lead to the building being burned down. Side note, this is known as broken windows theory. You can Google it. It’s where small crimes against an empty building tend to escalate. So if some kids break a window and no one notices that the windows have been broken and no one boards them up, the vandals keep returning, and they commit higher and higher levels of crime until eventually someone burns the building down. And it explains why if you tolerate one technician being late for work twice a week every week, eventually that will spread to more of your staff until many of them are routinely late. Context is everything. So if your environment sets your context, here’s a challenge for you. Have a good look round. You’re working environment right now unless you’re driving of course, but if you’re in the office, have a good look around. What kind of context is it setting for you? Is there clutter everywhere? Are there piles of old computers waiting for… what? Are you waiting for Windows seven to come back into fashion? Could your office do with a deep clean? Are the cobwebs all over the place? What do the walls look like? Would they benefit from a lick of paint? Another way of looking at it, what could you do in just 30 minutes at the end of work today or tomorrow that could make a dramatic difference to your working environment? Removing the physical clutter from our environment helps us to tackle the mental clutter with less stuff clogging our minds. We can operate with greater clarity and ultimately get more done. Right, I’m going to roll my sleeves up. I’m going to have to tackle my evil clutter corner. EXCLUSIVE: How to reduce tickets while delighting clients Featured guest: Shawn Lemon is the founder of The Digital Organizer and has spent the last 17 years helping individuals and businesses get better at using their technology. A teacher at heart, Shawn believes the biggest reason people struggle with their tech is because of a lack of understanding of the tools, which isn’t surprising because they’re constantly changing as technology advances. When not helping businesses operate more efficiently, Shawn loves making pottery, riding motorcycles, and spending time with his wife, Madeline and their 2 year old son, Nico. Well, who knew? To do their job every good MSP help desk member needs a flashlight and a microscope as well as their mouse and keyboard. Why? Because of the clients submitting endless tickets saying they can’t find this file and they can’t find that file. It’s always urgent, of course, and it can take up a lot of technician time that you could be using to solve real problems. My guest today has an easy way to rescue your profits by improving efficiency and reducing these kind of tickets. Oh and your clients will be delighted and feel like you are proactively helping them. Hi, I am Shawn Lemon, founder of The Digital Organizer. And thank you so much for joining me on the show today, Shawn. We are going to explore in the next 10 minutes or so how MSPs can reduce the amount of tickets coming into their business just by getting digitally organised. Now I don’t really understand what that is, and I know you are going to explain it for us, Shawn, and of course loads about MSPs because you have been, in fact, you still are an MSP, aren’t you? That’s right, yep. Yeah. So tell us about your background. How did you become an MSP in the first place and how did you move into this sort of different thing of being digitally organised? Yeah, well, I started working at the Apple Store for seven years teaching people how to use their stuff, and those clients wanted help getting organised beyond what we were able to teach or what the Genius Bar was able to help with, which was only troubleshooting. So I went into that whole field of helping out individuals and then small businesses, basically doing break/fix, then got pulled into MSP just from clients wanting it and started developing all of my SOPs and everything from there while also still running my digital organisation business at the same time. Oh wow. So you’ve kind of one of those people who’s just good at lots and lots of different things, which is really cool. So explain to us what do you mean by digital organisation? Because when I first heard that phrase when you and I first discussed you coming on the show, I thought, well, is that something as simple as keeping your files in a good order in your computer? Is it as simple as something like that or is there sort of a bigger concept to it? Well, I’d say there’s a bigger concept in realising that we have three primary things that every business has to do well – communication, file storage and management, and project management. And those three things go hand in hand with each other and we’re constantly flipping back between them. But if we think about communication file storage or just data storage and handling that and task management, there’s a massive amount of overlap in tools, and the lines of demarcation are not drawn because everyone’s trying to get you to use their platform more. And so what we’re trying to do is come in and say, Hey, you’ve got five different places that you’re storing your files. Let’s come up with our one source of truth and we’re still going to need to utilise other platforms to send and receive, but how do we do that? And same thing goes for the communication channels and project management so that everyone knows exactly where to go and there’s minimal amount of organisation that actually needs to happen because we’re cleaning up as we go. So we teach clients how to stay organised as well. Got it, got it. So for MSPs that take on board that bigger strategy, how does that affect the work that they then do for their clients? So should they, for example, be taking more responsibility for helping their own clients and the end users actually be more organised? My encouragement to MSPs would be to get into the nitty gritty with the clients to try and help them figure out how they should actually utilise the tools. What I find is most IT companies are focusing primarily on getting them to the right platform or maybe even consolidating everything. They’re spinning up that SharePoint from a server that they’ve been managing all along and getting them upgraded. But once it gets all pulled into one place, the clients still need a lot of help figuring out how to utilise it properly, whether it’s a familiar tool or something else of figuring out what that flow is. The encouragement is get in there, and this could be something that you charge a one-time fee for or maybe something ongoing. It doesn’t have to be that you just eat all of this cost to get in and help them organise their data. But if you do and get in, whether it’s build them separately or eat the cost and get them organised, it’s going to come back to you in the form of less tickets because everyone knows where to go and your clients are going to be a lot happier, not just about the tech solution, it’s about the data flow as well. So I like this. So it’s a very proactive approach, and saying we know that a bulk of tickets are going to come in because of X, Y, Z problems, which are related to, I can’t find this, or this doesn’t seem to work, or where did I put that? so let’s eliminate those. And actually, what if we get the clients to pay us to eliminate those problems before they happen, which I think is beautiful. And you mentioned migration, so something like a migration to SharePoint is an obvious place to do that because it’s something new. Obviously when you’re taking on board new clients, that would be a good time to do it as well. From a practical point of view. Shawn, how would you actually do that? So if you’re an MSP, let’s take the migration, say you are migrating the client from whatever and they’re going onto to SharePoint. I know most MSPs would just pick up the 10,000 files from the old place and just two days later pop them down in the SharePoint and go, there you go . So all they’ve done is they’ve moved from platform A to platform B practically. How would you organise those 10,000 files, which might be 10 years worth of data? Well, the first thing that I would do is figure out or discuss with the client a good archiving strategy. Realising that the 80/20 rule applies to our data, but it’s even more skewed than that. The amount of files that we’re actually using daily and that are going to set us up for the future, are very small percentage of the data that we actually own. So we need to create some sort of a deep archive that’s maybe not part of the search function for all of your users, so that we’re not pulling up irrelevant results. A big part is setting aside a deep archive that we have a few gatekeepers who can go find things, and really have our clients focus primarily on what’s important now, going to set them up for the future, and then what should a new folder structure be. When we’re thinking about sharing internally for different departments or even sharing externally when we’re working with other people. And realising we’ve got departmental SharePoints, maybe even projects and things that we’re working on, and really incorporating that to figure out what should the new folder structure be, that archive strategy and a good naming convention. And I’ve also got a free download, which is our process of how we do organisations. If you want to take that and run your clients through that same process or share that resource with them, go for it. It’ll be extremely helpful. Cool. We’ll talk about that free download just at the end of the interview, and you’re welcome to give your website address out so MSPs can go and get that. I’ve got to ask, in the age of AI and in the age of all content being indexed, and we’ve got pretty good search tools almost across every platform, do we really need to force companies and force clients into that that structured folder setup and folder structure? Can’t they just rely on search or AI or are those tools just not quite good enough yet? As of right now, they’re not nearly good enough. I mean, box AI is the one who is talking about being the most advanced, but really when I went in and had them do a demo for me of how it works on their enterprise plan, the whole thing, it was extremely clunky. Google isn’t that great either. I haven’t seen anything really outstanding from OneDrive either. So between all of them, we’re not there yet. But even still, if you think about AI and pulling all of this data together, we need to remove data that isn’t relevant anymore and we don’t want all of this archive stuff showing up in our active files. I actually think that a separation between active files and archives is going to be even more important, but being able to say what’s in this document that is getting better and better leaps and bounds. So I think it’s going to be less, but because we’re still going to have to store it somewhere, we still need to keep it pretty clean. And a lot of the automation, I think it’s just going to be a while before it’s mature. So personally, I think it’s still really worth the investment of doing it now because who knows when it’s actually going to be good enough. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I think this is great. I’m one of those tidy people who I’m looking around my office where I’m recording this interview and I’ve got my physical drawers where everything is arranged perfectly. I know where everything is. This folders are the same on my computer. I was chatting today to a friend of mine who has just migrated from PC to Mac, which is what I use, and the spotlight search on the Mac, which he’s really good at finding stuff inside documents, and I don’t use it for that purpose because I know where everything is, but he’s completely lost. He has thousands of files. He is that nightmare client who needs an MSP to come and sort him out. Well, that’s actually why I started this business in the first place. I saw these people switching from PCs to Mac, and then it’s like no matter where you go, there you are. Their mess just got dumped into a new location, which is the same thing that happens with SharePoint or Google Drive or Dropbox migrations. It just all gets dumped in. Now what do we do with it? And you’ve got a few people who can figure it out, but the majority just get overwhelmed with it and have a hard time functioning. And that’s how this business was created 11 years ago. Yeah, no, I think it’s wonderful. It’s a great business idea and it’s so unique. Final question for you before we talk about your free download and how we can get in touch. You work with lots of MSPs, have you come across MSPs that are themselves highly disorganised, they haven’t got their own file structure and their own sort of internal information all sorted out? Yeah, absolutely. It’s something that we see a lot, just because you scale fast and the most successful businesses are usually the ones who put marketing first and operations later. And so you need operations to trail that. And sometimes that trail gets a little bit too big of a gap and you spin up too many tools. So you started a Wiki and Notion, and then you’ve also got your other stuff in Google Drive and it’s spread out all over the place. And really, I mean, my biggest thing is use forms for everything. Forms for all of the clients and then templates for all of onboarding, offboarding, whether it’s your clients or your client’s new employees. And it just makes common sense, doesn’t it when you say something like that. But as you say, it’s very difficult sometimes for operations to keep up and especially when you’re fast scaling. So Shawn, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Tell us about this free download. Where can we get it and how can MSPs get in touch with you? Yeah, so you’re going to go to thedigitalorganizer.com/marketing edge. This is the podcast you’re listening to MSP Marketing Edge. So go there and you’re going to get my file organisation guide – the whole process of consolidating, archiving, purging – the whole thing, start to finish. We’ll give you some other emails as well that you’re welcome to share with your clients, about cleaning up email inboxes and how we like to triage things and get stuff under control with as little effort as possible. So yeah, check us out at thedigitalorganizer.com/marketing edge. Paul’s Personal Peer Group Joseph in Houston, Texas, has numerous staff and as a good boss he has asked: How can I keep track of how happy they are? The very best way to keep track of what’s really happening with your staff is through structured one-to-ones. You can just have a 15 minute meeting with them on a regular basis once a month will be enough, and you structure the meeting around three questions. The first is: What’s going well?, followed by: What’s not going so well?, followed by: What are you going to do differently next time? You can answer these questions with your team as well as them giving an answer. In fact, that is the ideal way to do a one-to-one. So they get some feedback from you on what they’re doing well and what they’re doing not so well. And you get to see what they believe they’re doing well and not so well. That really is a great format, which can serve you as you manage and develop your team. However, it’s not wise, nor recommended for you personally to do more than four or five one-to-ones a month, because they’re simply too draining. And while it’s ok for managers who work for you to do one-to-ones on your behalf, you do lose that bigger picture feeling about your team that you get from doing one-to-ones yourself. Of course there is a software solution. I spoke to an MSP, who’s got around 12 staff, who’s using something called Office Vibe to keep a track on his team’s overall engagement. It asks your team a series of questions and keeps track of how they’re feeling about their work, to give you an overall grip on your team satisfaction. And of course, it’s not a replacement for sitting down talking human to human, but it is a good way of keeping up to date with your team’s feelings without having to do dozens of hours of one-to-ones every month. So have a look at Office Vibe, it’s a suggestion, not a recommendation. You should probably Google alternatives to it as well to see what else is out there. And if you do try this for yourself, will you drop me an email and let me know how you get on because I’d love to know. To submit your own question just go to mspmarketingedge.com and head to the contact us page. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with my guest, Shawn Lemon , on LinkedIn, and visit the The Digital Organizer website. Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Are audits still a good sales tool for MSPs? 31:44

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 274 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Are audits still a good sales tool for MSPs?: Sell something small to start building a relationship before selling the thing you really want, which is of course, a managed services contract. Every MSP needs this strategic referral deal: There could be an opportunity for you to set up a win-win relationship with a local web agency near you, and it could get you more clients. Why your marketing must be about the prospect, not you: Your potential clients don’t care about you… they care about how you can help their business, so your marketing must be about them. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: How can you stop clients from contacting you directly? I have 9 suggestions for you to try. Are audits still a good sales tool for MSPs? If a client tells you they’ve got a Trojan, your heart sinks. But what if there was a kind of Trojan that actually made you happy because it meant that you were going to make some more money and win some new clients. And don’t worry, I’m not suggesting you infect people’s computers, but let’s talk about why this sales Trojan is a good one, how it can boost your sales and ultimately have a powerful positive impact on your MSP. We all know what a Trojan horse is, and we all know the Greek myth that gave it that name. But of course, we also know its place within cyber security, perhaps a term that was maybe used more in the past than it is today. But I believe you can use a sales Trojan horse. So what is this? It’s where you sell something small to someone to start building a relationship with them ahead of the thing you really want to sell them, which is of course, a managed services contract. As an example, you would sell them a low level service first, with the knowledge that you’re going to overdeliver, do a great job, totally delight them. And that’s going to help you to sell them a proper monthly recurring revenue managed services contracts down the line, which is always the goal of everything we’re trying to do here. MRR first. There is only MRR, everything else is just establishing the setup of more MRR. The beauty of a sales Trojan horse is that it’s a lot easier to sell someone something small than it is to ask them for a 12, 24 or 36 month contract. They might not understand technology at the level you do but they do understand that if and when something goes wrong, their business is completely screwed. So by selling them something small first, it gives you the opportunity to build up a level of trust with them to build a relationship. And this actually has a term within marketing. It’s called front end backend marketing. Maybe you’ve seen one of these people online selling something, perhaps doing something like a giveaway where they ask you to pay a little bit for postage and packing. So the thing they’re giving away, the book or whatever is free, you just pay the postage and packing. Or maybe you get a huge value item for $20, something like that. And what this person is really trying to get you to do is to buy something and feel satisfied with it, and then you’ll go on and you’ll buy something more expensive from them in the background or what’s known as the backend. They probably don’t make any money from selling you the book or the $20 item or whatever it is, but they will make money from selling you the $500 item in the background. And let’s say one in 10 people goes on to buy that item, no one would ever buy it as the first purchase, but some may buy it as the second purchase. That’s the theory of front end backend, and that works very well depending on your audience and depending on what you’re selling. From an MSP point of view, the most obvious thing that you would sell to someone in the front end is a project. In fact, I had a thread on this in my MSP marketing Facebook group that any MSP can join. I asked the direct question: Would you sell a project just to start a relationship with a customer so that you could go on to sell them managed services?, which seemed like a very black and white answer where people were either, yes, 100% I would do that , or they were, no, I will not do that , I only want to get recurring revenue. I don’t want to sell projects. And of course, there’s no right or wrong answer. You have to go with whichever is right for you. But a project is the most obvious small thing to sell people. It’s not really a small thing, I mean, a project isn’t cheap, is it? It could be a $10,000 (or pound) project. The point is, it’s a one-off fixed thing. They know what it is they’re buying, they know when it’s been completed, they know when it’s been done successfully. And so that project allows you to build a relationship with this new client. And you and I both know that if you do a project, you’ll uncover other things that need to be addressed. Maybe even some of those things can be fixed during some kind of managed services contract. So I think a project is the ultimate sales Trojan horse. There are smaller things that you can do, of course. One of our MSP Marketing Edge members is doing very, very well right now selling small amounts of cyber security training to prospects. So he’ll get talking to a prospect and he’ll sell them a session for no more than about £50, which is about $70, $80. And all it is is a lunchtime zoom, almost like a lunch and learn where he’ll get the prospect’s team onto a Zoom and take them through about 30, 40 minutes of cyber security training, really low level stuff. But it works well because he can then do a review with the decision maker after that training and talk them through some areas where they really should invest in their business. There are other things that you could sell along these lines, maybe such as selling them something like backups, a basic service like this, or even selling an audit. And I know that audits have fallen out of favour as a sales tool, but a solid audit where you are looking at someone’s systems and telling them what they should improve, I still think that’s possibly the ultimate sales Trojan horse. Because it’s low cost to them, high value for you. You get to dive into their systems to have a look and do the audit, and don’t you always find something which really needs to be followed up with them, which creates an opportunity for you. So tell me, do you think this is something that you’d actually use in your MSP? Every MSP needs this strategic referral deal What if the secret to landing your dream clients was a key you didn’t even know you had? There’s a hidden strategy locked away that could open doors to better clients without LinkedIn, without websites, cold calls or marketing campaigns. And it’s so effective that the MSPs already using it, hope that you will never find it. Right now, let’s discover where to find that key, how to unlock new opportunities and how to transform your business. In nature there’s a phenomenon called mutualism. Those are two very hard words to say, a phenomenon called mutualism. Now, you would know this better as a symbiotic relationship. Think of little birds called oxpeckers sitting on the back of zebras and rhinos, and those birds eat the parasites off the animal’s body, which is an easy meal for them, but it also helps the zebra to stay healthy. In fact, they’ve even been observed warning short-sighted rhinos of approaching humans. They’ve got a good symbiotic, win-win relationship there. And there’s an opportunity for you to set up a win-win relationship just like this with a local web agency near you. And the good news is there’s no need to eat worms or anything like that. From the point of view of ordinary business owners and managers, you and a web agency both do the same thing – “computer stuff”. Now you and I know that websites and managed services are completely different sides of “computer stuff”, but this explains why your clients sometimes ask you whether you build websites. And believe me, they are asking their website agency whether or not they can help when their computers don’t work properly. Can you see the opportunity here? When a client asks about websites or SEO (search engine optimisation), you say, well, we don’t do this, but we work very, very closely with a local web agency. Let me connect them to you . When the web agency’s client asks them about IT support, they say, well, we don’t do this ourselves, but we work very, very closely with a local IT support company. Let me connect you to them. Long-term, you could build this into your strategic reviews or your quarterly business reviews. You could generate loads of highly qualified leads for your chosen web agency partner and they could do the same for you. But how do you find a web agency partner? You are looking for a proper agency here, not a one man band who designs websites in their spare bedroom. Nothing wrong with that, but you want a bigger business that’s going to send larger prospects your way. One person band web designers tend to attract two to three user businesses. The best agency partner is someone that you already know. Is there a local web agency that you’ve met at networking events, or are highly respected in the local area? If not, and you need to create a relationship from scratch, and this needs to be done slowly. Pick a few target agencies and reach out to the owners on LinkedIn. Tell them you’ve had a great idea for mutual benefit, and would they like to meet for a coffee to discuss it. If they want to know what it’s about in advance, you can send them this podcast. I’m actually serious because it explains exactly what’s in it for you and for them. And hello web agency owner. When you do meet them for coffee, don’t just jump straight into, Hey, what do you think about this great idea? Should we do a partnership? Should we pass leads to each other? I would approach this more like a sales call. Start slowly, build a relationship. Ask them open questions about their favourite subject, which is themselves and their business. You can ask them things like, How’s business right now? What’s going well and not so well? What are you struggling with right now? Where are you hoping to go in the next three to five years? And what are your biggest problems and opportunities? Remember, the more you talk about them, the more intriguing you’ll be to them. And it’s weird how that works. Sadly, this isn’t something that can be rushed. Relationship building takes time, but it is worth it as you have the opportunity here to build a solid referral foundation with a business that has exactly the same clients as you but isn’t in competition with you. Why your marketing must be about the prospect, not you Featured guest: Scott Robertson has 30+ years of public relations and marketing communications experience with a wide range of consumer and business-to-business organisations including: the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), the NAMM Foundation and Hewlett Packard. Prior to founding Robertson Communications (RobertsonComm) in 2012, he most recently held the position of director of marketing & communications/PR for NAMM. During his 10+ years at NAMM, Robertson is credited with restructuring and strengthening the organisation’s branding and member communications. Before NAMM, Robertson led and grew Copithorne & Bellows/Porter Novelli Orange County office, taking it from a handful of staff and less than $500,000 in revenues to 28 staff and more than $4 million annual revenues in less than three years. Robertson is the author of the book “Just Stop It: Your Survival Guide to Marketing Myths, Mistakes and Misgivings,” a Certified StoryBrand Guide, an accredited, active member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and holds a master of science in corporate communications degree from Lindenwood University as well as a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism. Robertson previously hosted the award-winning podcast “May the Best Brand Win” on Entertalk Media. This is the worst marketing crime that any MSP can make, and yet I see it on almost every single MSP’s website. It’s so bad that it’s costing you money, it’s making people not want to engage with your MSP. My special guest today will tell you what it is, why it’s so bad, and how to fix it in minutes. Hi, I am Scott Robertson and I fix bad marketing for MSPs and tech companies all around the world. I’m happy to be here today. What a fantastic intro. And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Scott. And I think you and I have that thing in common, don’t we? That we see so much bad marketing all across the internet from MSPs all over the world, and clearly both of us have the same mission, which is to go and fix that marketing. I must just comment, obviously most people are going to be listening to this on the podcast and what I’m about to say is a very visual thing, but you have a better blue shirt on than me. For those people watching it on YouTube, they’ll see that your blue shirt is a much better style, that it fits better. I’ve got one of my tatty blue shirts on today, whereas you’ve got a very smart blue shirt. So Paul needs to up his blue shirt game. In fact, what I’ve just done there is I’ve just committed one of the sins that I know we’re going to talk about in this interview, which is that I’ve been talking about myself and no one cares about me. They care about how they can help their business by listening to this podcast. So we’ll come back onto that in a second. Before we do, let’s find out a little bit about you and establish some credibility. So who are you? What do you do? And give us the brief version of your working life story that’s got you to where you are today. Yeah, absolutely. That’s easy, it’s kind of like a play, I can summarise it in three acts. In the first act of my career, I worked for PR agencies. I was recruited to do high tech PR in Los Angeles, and I was moved from Missouri out to LA to do that work. The second act of my career, I worked in-house for a large nonprofit organisation who needed a lot of help with branding and marketing in the music industry space. And that was a lot of fun, I’m a musician, so that made it fun for me. And then the last act, which I’m in now, yay, is I run my own business. And I help entrepreneurs and business owners really understand marketing at a higher level. A lot of my clients don’t like to do marketing. They would rather do anything else but marketing, but the world forces them to do marketing or close the business. So it’s not really a choice. You’ve got to do it and you’ve got to do it in a smart way, and I help them see a better way to do marketing. I think that most marketing, I will tell you, Paul, is terrible, is awful. And I think that our profession miseducates people and I think that we settle for bad marketing all over the place when we don’t have to. We tell the wrong story, we use the wrong stuff, we’re speaking the wrong language. And I think that the marketing industry miseducates at a massive level. We don’t talk about strategy, we don’t educate business owners about why we do what we do and what we’re trying to accomplish. And I think that that is a shame, so I try to be on the side of the line that Seth Godin’s on and Donald Miller’s on and that you’re on, and try to be one of the good ones in an ocean of garbage, an absolute ocean of marketing garbage. I love the fact that you just put me on with Seth Godin and Donald Miller there, both of whom are fantastic authors. For those people listening and watching read everything Seth Godin has ever written, he’s a prolific writer. He writes a blog a day and a book a year pretty much. And Donald Miller, we haven’t featured Donald himself but we featured StoryBrand, which is his book, on the podcast before. It’s an amazing book to read. Let’s go back to that example I was just mentioning earlier, and you’ll remember I started talking about me. And obviously that’s completely the wrong approach with marketing. And Scott, you see MSPs doing this all the time don’t you? Talking about themselves rather than talking about the customer, the prospect. Yeah, and Donald Miller, if he was here, he would say is it’s very simple to see why. MSP wants to build a website, they don’t know anything about marketing, they go to a website design firm, the website design firm asks them, what’s your message? They get in a room and you’ve got the blind leading the blind right there. You’ve got web designers who I wouldn’t trust to write the words, that’s not their skillset, they’re designers. There’s a step that comes before that, and that’s the brand messaging step. I’m a StoryBrand guide. You mentioned my buddy Don Miller, and what’s important about StoryBrand, is it gets the client out of the message. It gets them out of the hero role, which you can’t take anyway, it’s already been cast and you didn’t make the cut. The customer is the hero. And so it puts you in the guide role. And the guide role is so much more important because the guide role has already solved it for the hero. It is really important. When I talk about miseducation, people confuse an internal marketing message with an external one. And an internal one is your why, your vision, your values, your about us. And I mean, you should take that out to your next retreat and put on your matching t-shirt and just go off on all of that with your staff. But you don’t ever let that stuff creep into an external marketing message because psychologically speaking, you have eight seconds to make an impression. And if you don’t involve that customer’s brain in a story that solves their problem, their brain will shut off and they will move on from you and you will lose them. The first goal of marketing is curiosity. How do we make people curious? We make people curious by making marketing about them. It sounds really obvious, but I’ll be damned if I don’t fix that seven times a week. I wish I was solving different problems, but you have to solve that problem. You don’t solve that problem and the company goes nowhere and everything is a waste from there. So like I said, the biggest problem with marketing is that there’s a fundamental miss on the fact that it’s not about you. Don’t put a picture of yourself on your website, no one cares. If you need that kind of validation from your parents, call them up after when you’re done and have them tell you you were a good son or daughter, whatever you need, that kind of thing. Don’t use marketing for your own self validation and ego trip. Make it about them. Your hero image on your website needs to be about the customer, once you solve their problem. How did you get them from the stress and pain that they’re feeling. I saw a website this week, Paul, where this coach had four pictures on the website, he just did a photo shoot, and he had four photos of himself on the website. And so I said, This is a website where you’re the target customer, right? And he said, No, I’m not the target customer. I said, Why are there four photos of you? I don’t know how we’re supposed to handle that, but it’s not about the customer, so it’s not going to work. So you have a website out there that’s going to be totally ineffective. The customer’s going to say, there’s already a hero in this story and I’m going to move on. And when you talk about MSPs, they solve some really important stuff. Lean into those problems that you solve. I mean, if the technology goes down in a business, the business goes down. If your email is down, you’re out of business. So it’s so important what they do, and they leave that on the table all the time. They talk around it and not add it. Yeah, I completely agree with you. Well, I agree with 99% of what you just said, and I’m going to just unpack your answer and I’ll tell you what the 1% is I disagree with. You mentioned about being the hero and the guide. And again, for our MSPs, listening and watching that is completely down to StoryBrand, it is a great book. I like to talk to people about it from a Star Wars point of view, which is when you are crafting the story of your MSP, you’re not Luke Skywalker in that story, you’re Yoda. You’re the guide, you are the person who is helping to drive things along, but ultimately the story that’s happening is about your customer, who is Luke Skywalker? So let me just throw that one in. The one thing I disagree with there is where you say about putting your photo on your website, and I say this as someone who has about 25 photos of himself on his own website, as you were saying, I saw a website this week where there was just four photos of the guy, and I’m thinking, yeah, was that mine? But I recommend to MSPs that they do put photos of themselves on their website. I’ll tell you why, Scott, because let’s say you take any size town and there’s 20 MSPs, and you go and look at all 20 of those MSPs websites, they all look the same, right? They’ve all got stock images of servers or computers or the same sort of geographical images of their town. And if there are photos of people, they’re the stock image technician image where he is always the beautiful looking guy with a beautiful beard, and he’s smiling and he’s got the headset on and they all look exactly the same. And then you come across one MSP that puts a photo on of them, of their staff, of their family. They actually talk about themselves, they name themselves, they’re like, Hey, I’m the owner. And to me, in a world where everyone looks the same, that kind of differentiation is absolutely beautiful. So let’s turn this into a debate. I never really have debates with the guests on this podcast, so it feels like a good time to start that. I know that there’s no such thing as a right or wrong approach, but tell me what you would do instead of that. What would be a preferable way for you of handling that situation of trying to differentiate? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And I totally hear what you’re saying. So there is an appropriate time in the story. If Donald Miller was sitting here next to me, he would say, there is an appropriate time in the story to talk about yourself. When you are demonstrating empathy and authority as the guide in the customer’s story and you want to show yourself, then it is appropriate to show yourself at that point. What I was basically saying was sometimes it’s the first image and sometimes it’s the image after that and sometimes the human brain sees that and goes, it looks like this story already has a hero. There’s four photos of this person who looks like the hero, and that’s not me, I can’t relate to that. It looks like somebody that runs an MSP to me, you know what I mean? You have to make sure that all of your marketing collateral, I say website, but it could be all of your marketing collateral, it has to have a controlling idea that solves the customer’s problem. If it doesn’t, your marketing is an absolute waste of time, psychologically speaking. We’ve studied the human brain for long enough now that we know that human beings have a very short attention span. We’re in the short attention span part of our species’ evolution. And as a marketer, if you don’t know that, then you will fail. You will not understand how to make people curious and build that relationship, which marketing has to do. And like I said, I think human beings are very interested – we’re biologically wired to be interested in ourselves. And so as a marketer, ethically, we could argue it all day long, the science proves it massively by the way, but as a marketer, you have to know that, and you have to lean into that so that you understand how to speak the language or the brain is going to shut you off. The minute the brain determines that what you’re saying is irrelevant to us, it will try to conserve calories and it will shut down on you, and that’s a marketing fail. So what you want to do to win at marketing, you have to make sure you’re speaking to the brain in language that the brain wants to hear. And the only language the brain wants to hear, Paul, the only language the brain wants to hear is, how is this relevant to me right now? Go. And you have eight seconds. And the minute you deviate from that, what we say in StoryBrand is, the minute you stop talking about the customer’s problem is the exact minute they stop paying attention to your brand. So it’s very important. When I go to MSP’s websites, I see the same kind of buzzwords: robust solutions, no downtime, these kind of things. It’s like, show me the pain, make me feel it. What does it feel like when my systems go down? What does that feel like? Show me. Make me feel it with the words that are coming out. And if you make me feel it and you give me that emotion, then you’re actually doing branding, and you’re actually doing branding the right way. Because in the places that people don’t want to talk about Paul, that’s why they’re on the website. There is a problem, a splinter in their mind that is saying, my MSP isn’t getting it done in some way right now, and I have to pull that splinter out of my mind and this and company could be the solution to doing it. So show me. Show me that you understand what it is that you’re really doing and don’t use a bunch of marketing buzzwords that doesn’t speak to the problem. If I was doing an MSP website, I would say: You’re frustrated, if email is down, you’re down. If you’re down, you’re not making any money. You have payroll, you have other things as an MSP owner, but if your business is down because of technology, it is critical. If you have ransomware and those kind of things, those are mission critical things that just generic bullet points and words don’t really get that done. The same kind of warmed over sounds good marketing copy. Punch into that problem. In StoryBrand we always talk about, give me a problem you can feel. Show me a problem that hits me that I can feel, and now you’ve got my attention. Now you’ve got my attention in the same way movie writers and screenwriters get your attention by having something horrible happen to the character in the first few minutes of the movie. They do that to keep your attention because your brain won’t pay attention otherwise. Simply true. Yeah, exactly. Like Luke watching his aunt and uncle be killed by storm troopers. That’s exactly it. Scott, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Let’s just wrap up very briefly. Just remind us what it is that you do to help MSPs, and what’s the best way to get in touch with you? Yeah, of course. I’m a resource for MSPs, for entrepreneurs, for anyone struggling with marketing. I’m in Phoenix, Arizona, and you can always find me at my website, which is robertsoncomm.com. You can book a time to talk with me there. I make myself very available to speak with business owners about their marketing problems. I want to be on the side of the line that fixes things in marketing. I don’t think that we’re headed in a good direction with AI, I don’t think that’s the right direction. I think less but better is going to be a superior approach. The world doesn’t need more. We don’t need more emails, we don’t need more videos, we don’t need more social posts. We need better stuff that actually speaks to a problem and actually solves it. That’s the mission that I’m on. Paul’s Personal Peer Group Sean runs his MSP in Colorado, and is feeling quite hassled by his clients. His question is: how do I stop clients from contacting me directly ? This happens to most MSP owners, and it’s the hardest thing when you used to look after these clients yourself because they feel they have some kind of special bond with you. And so they’ll email you directly, or they’ll call your mobile directly rather than actually speaking to the help desk that you’ve had in place for a few years. And this steals your personal time when you should be working on the business, not in the business doing tech support. And it also reduces your ability to sell more to them during a strategic review or a QBR because you can’t be the technology strategist and the first line support at the same time. Clients’ minds will only let you sit in one of those boxes. There are a number of different ways to tackle this. You’ll probably put together a couple of these into some kind of blended solution. Let me tell you nine ideas that I’ve got. Number one: set clear expectations. Now, this is easy with new clients and very hard with longer standing clients. Just remember that you have to educate them constantly. What’s top of mind for you is item 1058 in their minds list of priorities. Number two: make it easy. Put stickers with the help desk number on every device. Number three: have a standard operating procedure to roll out each time a client contacts you directly. Make a plan in advance so you don’t have the emotional trauma of wondering how to deal with it. Number four: play dumb. Tell them you don’t know how to fix that as you focus on strategy these days, but you’ll ask someone on the help desk to call them immediately. Number five: change your voicemail to say that you are not working today and for any support, please call the help desk on this number. And you can then let client calls go to voicemail every single time. If you want to, follow up with them the next day or when their issue has been resolved, just so they know that you care, but you don’t have to do the work yourself. Number six: set up an email auto reply. This is the same principle as the voicemail. Number seven: now this is a sneaky one, but some people quite like this. Fake being your own virtual asistant. When someone emails you, send back a standard reply saying you are your VA. Give yourself a fancy name. The real you is off today and here’s how to get support. And then tell them how to contact the help desk. Number eight: get a second mobile number. Keep your old number that clients have been calling for years and let it auto forward calls to the help desk. But then get a second private number just for friends, family, and your team. And then finally, Number nine: just make them wait. If they contact you directly after hours, do not take the call. Do not reply to their email because you’ll just encourage more bad behaviour. And I know that that feels wrong, but I promise you that overservicing clients can be as bad for a working relationship as underservicing them, as it sets unrealistic expectations. Make them wait, explain in a warm way how using the proper channels gets them faster support. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with my guest, Scott Robertson on LinkedIn, and visit the RobertsonComm website. Recommended authors: Seth Godin and Donald Miller Mentioned book: StoryBrand by Donald Miller Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Why does my MSP's marketing NEVER work? 28:38

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 273 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… “Why does my MSP’s marketing NEVER work?”: Discover how to pinpoint what’s holding your marketing back, how to turn it into a system that works, and why this approach could unlock new growth for your business. Which is better for MSPs: Syndicated blogs or original content?: Up-to-date blog content on your website shows your MSP is active and it’s also great for demonstrating expertise and authority in technology. Aim to post a blog article at least once a week. Why technicians procrastinate… and what to do about it: Have you ever wondered why we sometimes choose to do something easy rather than something that’s urgent? My guest shares some great insights on combatting procrastination. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: This week’s question is about billboard advertising – is this a good idea for MSPs? “Why does my MSP’s marketing NEVER work?” Have you got a cold, sinking feeling because no matter what marketing you seem to attempt, none of it seems to be working? You’re not alone. Many MSPs get the chills about this. When nothing seems to be working, it’s hard to know where to begin fixing it. But here is the good news. Right now, you are going to discover how to pinpoint what’s holding your marketing back, how to turn it into a system that works, and why this approach could unlock new growth for your business. One of the most common complaints I hear from MSPs is that their marketing just isn’t working. It doesn’t help that what you’re trying to sell has one of the most complex and longest sales cycles around. Managed services is very difficult to market and sell compared to many other things. For example, if you were running a business that sells widgets, it would be a lot easier for you to get traffic to your site, to get leads, to get inquiries and of course sales and get those widgets out the door. But you don’t. You sell managed services. And by the way, the flip side of this is that you keep your clients longer and they spend a lot more money with you. You have the kind of stats that widget manufacturers would be very, very jealous of. But why does an MSP’s marketing typically not work? And if you feel like you are doing lots of marketing, but you’re seeing little return, where do you start fixing it? You have to break all of your marketing down into its component parts and examine each one. And ask yourself two very big questions… The first of those is whether or not you are using the right marketing strategy? Let’s look at strategy. Sometimes I’ll be talking to an MSP who says they’re doing loads of marketing, but what they’re actually doing is creating a lot of disjointed noise. Just because you’re posting regularly on LinkedIn, that has no power unless it’s guided by a marketing strategy. Now my favourite strategy, which I talk about all the time, is very, very simple to communicate. It is just six words, but it’s the most powerful marketing strategy that any MSP can use. In fact, any B2B business, because I use this for my own marketing as well. The strategy is – build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. It’s a three step strategy, which you can also use as a three-step marketing system. In fact, we built our entire MSP Marketing Edge service around this. So you build up audiences of people to listen to you, then you grow a relationship with them using content marketing, and then you convert that relationship into them having a sales meeting with you. And that is typically done on the phone. Let’s say you’re building an audience on LinkedIn, which I do recommend, and then you are growing relationships by posting content on LinkedIn. The difference between doing that with a strategy powering it, versus just doing it for the sake of doing something, is vast. If you know that your goal is to add connections every single day and post content several times a week, with the express goal of building a relationship with them, that makes the work you are doing on LinkedIn suddenly more powerful. Particularly when you remember that for managed services, people only buy when they’re ready to buy. Also when you know that the strategy dictates that down the line, someone in your office is going to pick up the phone and call these people you are connected to, to talk about their business and see if they’re frustrated enough with their incumbent MSP to have a conversation with you. Does all of this make sense? When you’ve got a strategy, it makes all of the little things that you’re doing, even if they’re the same things you’re doing now, all of the little things you’re doing come together and work together to give you an outcome. Now, I said earlier on that you need to ask yourself two big questions. The first was, do you have a marketing strategy or are you using the right marketing strategy? The second question to ask yourself is, are you using the right marketing tactics? Because the beauty of that six word strategy I was just telling you about is that you can use an almost unlimited number of tactics to implement it. So I mentioned LinkedIn because today LinkedIn is a very good place for MSPs to go farming for new leads, but that may change. We might be doing this in 2035, hello future Paul, and LinkedIn has gone off the boil because they broke it with some stupid decision somewhere. But if that happens, there’ll be a new place to go looking for leads. A good marketing strategy rarely changes, but the tactics do need to be updated now and again. So in summary, if you’re doing a lot of marketing activity and it just doesn’t seem to be generating leads who turn into prospects, who turn into clients, then break it down into the component parts. And for everything you’re doing, check that you are A) being driven by the right marketing strategy and B) that you’re using the right marketing tactics. And by the way, I’d be delighted to help you with this. I have a free Facebook group, which is just for MSPs. It’s a vendor free zone, and it’s a place where you can ask me and 2000 other MSPs for help with your marketing. Just go onto Facebook and look for the MSP Marketing Facebook group. Which is better for MSPs: Syndicated blogs or original content? Ready to rip up the rule book? When wanting to make more money for your MSP, they say you can’t take shortcuts. They say shortcuts come with downsides. They say you’ve got to do things properly. Well, what if they are wrong… what if there are some shortcuts to finding new clients and making more money? For the next few minutes let’s ignore them as you find out about the marketing shortcut being used right now by thousands of MSPs around the world. You’ll find out how to use this shortcut safely and why it’ll enhance your marketing and not damage it. There are lots of different ways to get new blog content onto your MSP’s website. Let me give you the answers to the most frequent questions that I get… Why do I need blog content? Up-to-date blog content on your website shows your MSP is active. It can also be great for demonstrating expertise and authority in technology. Blog content can also sit at the heart of a regular marketing system. For example, you can send out emails and post things on social media driving traffic back to your blogs. Another question is, how often should I post new blog content? And the best cadence for this, I believe is at least once a week, more if you can do it but never less than once a week. What is syndicated content? This is content written by a business such as my own MSP Marketing Edge where one piece of content is used on many different websites. What you do is the producer, that’s us, we add a little bit of code onto the blog, which tells Google it’s an authorised copy of the original blog, and that means that Google doesn’t penalise you for using duplicate content. The flip side of this is that there’s very little SEO (search engine optimisation) benefit for you, but at least you get regular content going onto your website. Which is better, syndicated blogs or original content? I see it like this, original content is always better than syndicated content, which is always better than no content. What’s the best way to get original content written? Write it yourself of course. Or if that’s a distress activity for you, find a writer on Fiverr or Upwork and get them to interview you over Zoom about a specific subject. They can record it, they can suck the knowledge out of your head, and then they can write that for you. And of course, ChatGPT can also do the same thing. It can interview you on a specific subject. Just remember, you do need to double, triple, quadruple check and edit what it outputs before you put it anywhere near your website. Where do I get content ideas from? The answer to this is simple. It’s your clients and prospects. Listen to the questions that they most frequently ask you and then just write answers to those questions. That’s how I write all the content for my own blog. Anytime an MSP asks me a question, I write it down in a massive file of questions I’ve been asked. And at some point it becomes a new blog article. Why technicians procrastinate… and what to do about it Featured guest: Chris Abdey is a seasoned Procrastination Coach, podcast host, and productivity strategist with over 20 years of experience helping individuals and businesses conquer procrastination and achieve their goals. Based in Canada, Chris combines mindfulness, positive psychology, and actionable strategies to empower clients to break free from limiting beliefs, overcome burnout, and unlock their potential. As the creator of “Procrastination Station” and host of Procrastinator’s Pitstop, Chris inspires others to transform hesitation into action and dreams into accomplishments. Don’t you find that tech tasks are a bit like household chores? When we’re at home, why do we sometimes choose to do something else like rewiring a plug or moving a table, something that isn’t urgent, when actually the dishwasher really needs to be unloaded and dinner needs to go on? It’s the same with technicians. When there’s a big project waiting, they can suddenly find they need to focus on checking the backups or other routine tasks, which just don’t need to be done right now, they’re not urgent. Well, my special guest today is a procrastination coach here to explain why we do stuff like that, the surprising way to focus on important tasks and the positive impact on your MSP when you get company-wide procrastination under control. Hello everybody. I’m Chris Abdey and I’m a procrastination coach. And I can tell our audience that getting you on the show was the easiest, easiest interview I’ve ever set up because I emailed you and four seconds later you emailed me back, which you would expect from a procrastination coach. I imagine, Chris, that you have to live your life using all the techniques that you’re going to tell us about in this interview and managing your own procrastination. And I suspect we’re about to hear that your story is one of huge procrastination, which is why you’ve become a coach and you’re actually helping other people to overcome that. Now, I know thousands of MSPs or I’ve spoken to thousands of MSPs and many of them are massive procrastinators. Some of them are aware of it, some of them aren’t. Let’s explore why that is, why people procrastinate, what we can do to stop ourselves procrastinating and the damage it does when we don’t address that problem. Let’s first of all just hear about you. So you are the first person I’ve ever met who’s called themselves a procrastination coach. Let’s hear that story. So what was it that got you to this position of actually helping people to stop procrastinating? Actually, it’s an interesting story because it leads right into MSPs and MSP owners actually. So when I was in high school, and I’m sure we can all relate on some level to this, I just took it to an extreme. The last two years, we had two years to do 12 art projects. And guess who decided that they could do all 12 art projects in about eight hours the day before they were supposed to be not only due, they were in a mock art exhibition that was open to the public while it was being reviewed. And let me ask you, so it was 8pm on Sunday night, and I was just running around like a chicken with my head cut off in the garage. I was using bottles, I was using cans, I was using caution tape, I was using styrofoam bits that were left over and I just slapped it all together. I even used toilet paper, if you can believe that. I made a little figurine out of it and hung it on a piece of wood too. What do you think was the outcome of that? Well, either you got a really good mark and that encouraged you to be a procrastinator throughout the rest of your adult life or you completely failed and that’s what set you down this course. So go on. Which was it? No, you’re absolutely right on the first account. My saving grace was the proctor for the mock art exhibition came from a different school. And what happened was he came in and he said, oh wow, I love how you used all these. I love how you didn’t go over the top with your materials, but you used stuff that was untraditional. And he started explaining what it was, what he thought it was. I’m like, you’re absolutely right. And then he says, it’s very reminiscent of pathetic art. And I said, pathetic art. I’d never heard of it. It was like, okay, quick, let’s Google it… back in 2004, trying on those flip phones. And anyway, I said, you know what? You’re absolutely right. It is exactly that, pathetic art, because it is a commentary on how our society, how everybody’s looking for perfection. So does perfection, therefore become the new mediocrity. And boom A+. And that actually gave me a better grade than the poor friend of mine who spent two years busting his hump. He had extra help from these famous stained glass artists and all that sort of thing. So fast forward a bit that did give me a little bit of a God complex. I can just leave everything to the last minute and I’ll just pull a rabbit out of my hat at the end. So what happened was, it only works as long as it works. I know that my abilities are good. Here’s a specific example with an MSP… I was working with one provider and we had a bunch of projects that were due and we had a bottleneck, I had only allowed for two weeks. So we hit the bottlenecks, now the first project is two weeks late, the second project is a week late, the third project is five days late. And it just sort of cascaded from there. That’s really why I got into being a procrastination coach. This is an interview I’m never going to be able to show to my 14-year-old daughter who is at the start of her two year art, what we call GCSE in the UK. It’s a similar thing. And if she thinks she can leave her 10 art projects until the night before and get an A, then I’m doomed. And in fact, that’s setting her up for not such a great life. So what was the point in your adult life, Chris, where you realised that procrastination was actually more damaging and that you needed to address it? And how did you address it? The point I really realised where it was most damaging was when I was actually at a high point in my career. My procrastination actually led to high functioning alcoholism because I would put things off and I’d get bored, I didn’t think they were important, and therefore to fill the time, I would sometimes drink at work… not a good combination. And it really hit home when I almost had an accident with my daughter because I used to work from home a lot too. And at that point, that’s when I said, okay you know what, I’m going to stop this, I’m going to start doing my projects on time . And when I actually started doing the projects the way they were supposed to be being done, I didn’t have the time to be bored. So that’s really how I dealt with it, which is not how a lot of people deal with it, but that’s how it is. And we all procrastinate in many different ways. And obviously that’s a fairly extreme form of procrastination there where you’re using alcohol. I have people I know who use TV in a similar way, they’ll think, oh, I’ve got that important project, but I’m just going to catch up on the latest episode of Superman or whatever. But there’s also, I find, and certainly with MSPs, there is procrastination through doing unimportant tasks. If they’ve got a big project to do and it’s scary, then they will jump on the help desk for an hour or pick up some tickets or just respond, something anyone can do is responding to unimportant emails. So do you find with the MSPs and all the other clients that you work with, that procrastination is a very personal thing, that we all have different ways in which we sort of output or create that procrastination? Oh, for sure. I mean, everybody’s fairly unique in that sense. There are a few common denominators obviously, you mentioned a couple of them, especially in MSPs. I mean, you’re around technology all day, so you’ve got Instagram scrolling, you’ve got TVs in the background maybe, you’ve got chatting on your phone or like you said, you’re chatting to support desks about things that are more interesting than the project you’re working on. This is especially true when you have very talented team members working for you and you assign them to do very mundane things, which occasionally happens. One of the ways around that is to, well, one, don’t assign them work that is beneath their level of interest. But the other way to really stay on track, is to get them to incorporate their ideas, ask for their feedback, even if they don’t have any. Just by the simple act of you asking for their feedback, it all of a sudden becomes a little bit more important to them. Let’s say you have to put out an application and this developer is only doing the wireframes, but he’s way above that. And so you’ve already done all this research, you’ve already done everything, but you’re throwing them a bone. You’re saying, oh, how would you do this? And then by them giving the feedback, it’s not necessarily you’re going to implement it, but you’re now giving them sort of so to speak, skin in the game. And what’s the consequence of giving them that skin in the game? So when you give them that skin in the game, you automatically raise that importance level. Because a lot of procrastination, especially in MSPs, can definitely come at the junior level, mid to junior level, and sometimes the senior level too, because what happens is they sometimes know a better way of doing it than maybe what production has said they should do. And so they think it’s juvenile or they think that it’s not a good way to do it, or they don’t see the importance in doing it that way, which can lead to a lot of procrastination. I mean, you were just mentioning that they might jump off into support tickets for an hour. It’s because they can see more importance in those support tickets than they can in the task that you assign. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. But honestly, as the business owner, is it easier for us to procrastinate than our team because no one’s watching what we’re doing? I’ve always said that being a business owner is a double-edged sword in that we don’t get fired, we don’t have bosses. You are a business owner, I’m a business owner, most people listening to this or watching on YouTube are MSP business owners, and no one fires us except the clients. And typically that doesn’t happen because we surround ourselves with people to do the work. So it is very easy to be an ineffectual boss once you get your business up to a certain level and never actually developing something else. Compared to when you worked for someone and you had a boss who was actually watching what you were doing or not doing. Do you find that, do a lot of your clients tend to be those business owners? And as a secondary question, if the business owner procrastinates, do you tend to find that that goes down throughout the organisation as well, because it almost becomes a cultural thing? Oh, for sure. Definitely. Let me break that down into a couple of parts. So in terms of business owners procrastinating, especially MSPs, it can be fairly easy as well to get lost in some of the more technical aspects. We talk about overwhelm as a big source of procrastination, which is essentially either – what I like to call not my circus, not my monkey , because they tend to try and take on way too much that isn’t even in their wheelhouse. And then there’s a knowledge aspect – they’ve not only taken on all these things, but maybe they don’t necessarily know how to do these things, and so that causes them to procrastinate and they don’t want to look bad. I mean, I’ve been in this position, I didn’t know something and I was telling my team do it. They said, oh, I’ll just do it and then it’s like, oh, well, I don’t know how to do that, and then I’ll just sit there. And rather than admit that, I’ll just sit there and say, yes, I will do that tomorrow. You’ll have that report on those KPIs and those TLSTs and those PIPs tomorrow. Just using gobbledygook as a form of procrastination. Many of us, not everyone, but many of us have that problem. I certainly have a procrastination problem, and I’ve dealt with it over the years by setting myself deadlines using public accountability. Things like telling my team, I will get this done by Friday, and once that’s out your mouth, you’re very committed to doing it. My favourite technique is to go on a train journey. So I live about 45 minutes from London, and I have many times got on a train to go to London knowing I’ve got 45 minutes to get that job done, and then I’m at the station, then I’ll have lunch and I’ll come back and I’ll do the same thing. So those are just some of my own self-taught methods. But what do you recommend to business owners, to MSP owners? Is the first problem acknowledging that you have a procrastination problem or is that the first step? And then secondly, give us an idea of some of the techniques and strategies that you suggest to MSPs. First and foremost, you need to understand the why you procrastinate. And you need to understand what drives you. So from what you just explained to me, you tend to fall into what they call a crisis maker. The crisis maker is where you have those deadlines. It’s sort of not important until it’s important, or you get that extra boost of energy or extra boost of creativity knowing that you have to get it done before that train ride ends. So for crisis makers, yes, having deadlines, having urgency to things, understanding the importance of things. There’s five different archetypes that we like to talk about: There’s the perfectionist , they need to break time, it needs to be the right place, perfect for release. There’s the worriers . They’re always, like what if…, what if this happens? What if that happens? And then you’ve got the dreamers who are the visionaries, they have these big plans, but they get lost in the details, either because the details aren’t interesting, or they hit that knowledge block again where they don’t know how to do it. And then you have the crisis makers , and then you have the defiers , I mean, that’s actually the easiest one to change because the defier is more about autonomy, about how I don’t like being told what to do. Well, that was the easiest because all you have to do is say, well, no, I don’t have to do this. Only two things in life are not a choice. You can’t choose to be born and well, you really can’t choose not to die. But everything else in the middle is a choice. We just have to live with those consequences. And when you say, instead of saying, I have to do this, I’m choosing to do this because, I’m choosing to do this report because I need it for my taxes, or I need it to do this, I need it for my bottom line. And then that gives it importance, and you’re taking your power back to actually get things done. So just in case my daughter is watching this or listening to this, there is one third choice which you don’t have, which is doing your art projects… I just want to throw that one in there in there, Chris. Just out of interest before we wrap this up, of those five archetypes, you said that the easiest of to work with are the defiers, which are the hardest to work with? Definitely the hardest would be a combination between the worriers and the dreamers. Because the dreamers have the compounded effect of worry. They get lost in the details because every step along the way, they worry about, oh, what’s going to be the outcome of that step. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So Chris, for those people who are listening to this or watching this and they’re nodding their head and thinking, yes, that’s me. You’ve got me in one of those five archetypes there, and they’re ready to do something about it. Tell us what you do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you? Well, what I do to help MSPs is I will actually sit down with you and we’ll dig a top level down. Look not only at what’s going on with you, but also what’s going on in your organisation. Because I do also have quite a strong background in business development, project management, PMP, and what it comes down to is either people or processes or a combination of both. What we do is we analyse, is it people, is it on the personal level either with yourself or with your team? Or is it in a process level, either with yourself or with your team? Then from there, we sit down and we work together. The easiest way to get in touch with me is on LinkedIn. I am the only Chris Abdey on LinkedIn, so that’s the easiest way to get in touch with me. Or you can go to my website, www.procrastinationstation.ca, and there’s actually a tiny quiz at the top. It’s only eight questions takes you five minutes to do, and it’ll tell you which of those five types you might fall into. Paul’s Personal Peer Group Christian from an MSP in New Mexico, says when he is on the road he always notices advertising billboards. So his question is: As an MSP, should I advertise on billboards? There’s a short version and a long version of this one. The short version is, no, don’t waste your money. The longer version is that billboards, yeah, they look cool. And your competitors, if they see you on them, they might think that your MSP’s bigger than it actually is. But in reality, they are an expensive, old-fashioned solution to the problem of how do I get my message in front of the right people at exactly the moment they’re thinking of switching MSPs . There’s a part of our brain called the reticular activating system, and it acts as a filter for all sensory information. It literally decides what you perceive based on whether or not it’s relevant to you. So if you’ve got toothache, then you see and perceive the big poster for emergency dental care. But if you don’t have toothache, your eyes flick over it. You see it, but you don’t perceive it because it’s not relevant to you. Most people who see your billboard will not perceive it because it’s not relevant to them. The tiny number that do perceive it will think, ah, that’s a good idea . And then they promptly forget about it, unless of course they whip out their phone and visit your website immediately. And this is fine on something like Google where you do pay per click, because if they don’t click, you don’t pay. But the Billboard advertising companies, they want money just to put up your poster. The other issue is that you can’t tweak your message all day every day like you can with digital stuff. You’re kind of committed to your message for the whole campaign. But if you want to go ahead anyway and you want to do billboards, here’s how to test what tiny response you would actually get from a billboard. Buy a vanity URL for the call to action… something like ITyourtown.com, and then point this URL at a hidden page on your normal website, and you only ever use this URL on billboard adverts. Therefore, you can look at how many people have visited that page to know exactly how many have responded to your advert, and it won’t be many. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with my guest, Chris Abdey , on LinkedIn, and visit the Procrastination Station website. Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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An MSP marketing tactic guaranteed to grab attention 28:47

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 272 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… An MSP marketing tactic guaranteed to grab attention: Doing this means you can reach more people and persuade them to talk to you with much less work. Want a new client? You can afford to spend this much: Don’t be distracted by the short-term costs of getting a new client. Instead, focus on the long-term revenue and profit they will bring you. Compliance isn’t a headache. For MSPs it should be a profit centre: It’s very powerful to send a message to a business owner talking about a specific problem they have because of a regulation, and exactly how they can fix it. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Could gamification be what you need to motivate your team? An MSP marketing tactic guaranteed to grab attention Imagine doing some marketing for your MSP that’s so relevant to the person who sees it, they immediately stop what they’re doing just to listen to you. And yes, it is possible for your marketing to be this powerful. It means you can reach more people and persuade them to talk to you with much less work. Let me tell you the surprising secret to this kind of marketing and you won’t believe what I’m going to ask you to Google. Now, I should start by admitting that this isn’t really a marketing tactic that you can use for a general audience. It only works when you use it for a vertical. Your MSP doesn’t have to only work in this vertical. You can have lots of different clients doing lots of different things in lots of different sectors, but this specific marketing idea only works for a vertical audience, and you can’t just reuse it across different verticals. You have to do some research for each vertical that you are using this tactic to target people in. But the payoff is immense because targeting to a vertical is already a beautiful thing to do. It’s so much easier to send a message that’s highly relevant to an audience within a vertical. So for example, if you’re targeting lawyers and you use the phrase legal practice, the part of their brain that filters information, which is called the reticular activating system, it decides that what you are saying is relevant to them. So they ignore stuff that’s aimed at general business owners and managers, and they listen to stuff that seems to be targeted at lawyers. And that works across all verticals. Now, this new marketing idea that I have for you right now is even more specific. Okay, enough teasing. Let me tell you what it is. So you pick a vertical that you want to win more business in, and then you do some Googling. And what you’re looking for on Google is specific regulations regarding cyber security or data retention, or in fact, anything that you touch. Specific regulations that affect that vertical. So for example, let’s say you work with healthcare, there’s going to be tons of regulations or laws specifically aimed at healthcare businesses. Lawyers will have them, CPAs/accountants will definitely have them. Manufacturers will probably have them as well. So go and find that regulation. In an ideal world, you would then talk to someone who runs a business in that vertical to ask them what pain that regulation causes for them. Because don’t forget, these are not technical people. So some kind of regulation around data retention for example, it’s easy for you to think, oh yeah, I know how I’d fix that, I know how I deal with that . But for them it’s a pain. And that’s what we’re looking for here. We are looking for regulations that create pain and are annoying to specific verticals. Because then you are going to target that pain with your marketing. Imagine how powerful it would be to send a message to a business owner in a very specific vertical, talking about a specific problem that’s caused by a specific law that only relates to them and exactly how they can fix it. And we’re not trying to use fear marketing here, we’re just educating them about a problem they already have and how you have got some possible solutions. Because you know that almost any technology headache can be made easier or taken away, and that’s what you want to talk about. So how would you actually use this in practice? Well, it will definitely be content on your website. You might do a report or a guide on it, you might put that on LinkedIn. You might even just send it out to people or people who work in that vertical. You may even turn it into a piece of direct mail. Imagine how powerful it would be reaching out to someone, everyone in the vertical in your area to say, Hey, you know that headache that you’ve got, which is explained here, I know how to solve that headache. Can I send you some information about this in the post? Can I mail it to you? And I know that that sounds very old school, but old school physical stuff works very, very well in our modern digital age. So some research for you then. What’s the vertical you most want to win new clients in? What’s the regulatory headache that they have that you can solve? And what’s going to stop you taking action on this right away? Want a new client? You can afford to spend this much With what I’m about to tell you in the next 60 seconds, you might think I’ve lost the plot. But what if there’s a marketing move so daring it could completely reshape your MSP’s future? Let’s talk about the surprising way top MSPs outsmart their competition and the bold strategy that could change how you grow forever. Anyone who’s ever made a serious attempt to grow their MSP organically knows that it’s an expensive process. It’s not uncommon to find a business that’s winning loads of new clients and at the same time experiencing a cash flow crisis, because of the cash cost of attracting, winning and onboarding those new clients. Now, typically we learn this as business owners the hard way. Normally at four in the morning lying awake in bed wondering how are we going to make payroll. And this is why when I’m advising MSPs on their growth, I teach them to get their cashflow sorted or any funding in place before they embark on a serious round of new client acquisition. I believe it’s the cost of acquiring new clients that encourages MSP owners to do it on the cheap. Most people are always looking for ways to reduce their marketing spend, and yet that is completely the wrong approach in my opinion. Of course, you should always look for value for money, but rather than looking at ways to reduce the amount you spend on acquiring new clients, you should be willing to spend more than your competitors to win the right kind of new clients. And here’s the secret, don’t be distracted by the short-term costs of getting a new client. Instead, focus on the long-term revenue and profit that they are going to bring you. Let me ask you some questions about this. When you win a new client, on average, how many users do they have and how much do they pay per user per month? And how long does a client stay with your MSP on average? Now, let’s say your average new client has 10 users, and just to keep the numbers easy, let’s say you charge them a $100 per user per month, and your retention will be excellent because of course it is for most MSPs most of the time. So let’s say you keep a client on average for three years, I realise it’s probably going to be a lot longer than that, but we’ll just go with three years. So 10 users times $100 a month equals a $1,000 a month. A 1,000 times 12 months equals $12,000 a year, and $12,000 times three years equals $36,000. You with me so far. So without doing any projects, without selling any hardware or licenses, that new client that you’ve just signed is going to be worth $36,000 to your business over the next few years – $36,000 of brand new revenue. And if you wanted to get even more excited about that figure, now work out the gross profit of that new client. Let’s say you had a 75% gross profit margin. Well, 75% of $36,000 is $27,000, so that’s 27 grand of gross profit. And you can take this a step further. What’s your net profit margin? Let’s say it’s 15%, so 15% of $27,000, and I know we’re doing lots of figures here, but 15% of $27,000 is $4,050. $4,050, you pay tax on that and that’s your personal money to spend. Can you see the power of thinking this way? Because while most of your competitors are thinking about the $1,000 that they get from the client in the first month, you are focused on the revenue, the gross profit, and the net profit that you can collect from your client over the next few years. That $36,000 revenue figure is known as Average Lifetime Value, and it’s the value of the average client over their lifetime with your MSP. When you know this figure inside out, it allows you to make some very, very sensible spending decisions. Spend $50 a day on quality traffic, a $1,000 on a powerful piece of direct mail, $30,000 on a high quality salesperson. These are all costs your competitors will not be willing to spend because they’re not thinking the right way. One caveat with this, and it goes back to what I was saying right at the start. To make this way of thinking work, you need to make sure you have adequate cashflow or funding in place to spend this money today, and then of course to reap the benefits down the line. Never ever do marketing that puts your business’ cashflow at any risk. Compliance isn’t a headache. For MSPs it should be a profit centre Featured guest: Cam Roberson is Vice President, Channel, at Beachhead Solutions, a provider of cloud-managed PC & mobile device encryption, security, and data access control for MSPs. He has spent 18 years in the MSP cyber security space, after launching his career as a product manager at Apple. He lives in the Bay Area, where Beachhead is headquartered. Tell me what’s the dirtiest and most disgusting word your MSP knows? For many it’s compliance. However, while most MSP see compliance as a hassle, it could be your ticket to standing out, scaling up, and even buying a new Porsche. So let’s get into it. My special guest today is going to tell you how to turn compliance into a marketing edge, why it’s a gold mine for profit and the key to unlocking its full potential for your MSP’s growth. Hi, my name is Cam Roberson and I’m vice president of sales and marketing with Beachhead Solutions. And thank you so much for joining us from the beautiful San Jose, in California. Where for you it’s sunny and light and here in the UK where I’m based, it’s wet, it’s raining, it’s dark, and it’s miserable. And why don’t I live in California? Anyway, we’re not here to talk about California and the UK. We’re here to talk about growing monthly recurring revenue through compliance. Which is something that many MSPs have looked at and maybe they’ve been put off a little bit because even just the word compliance is a horrible word, but we’re going to talk about how we do that. Before we do Cam, let’s explore your career a little bit because you have quite an impressive track record in using compliance and helping businesses with compliance and particularly helping MSPs to turn that into a profit centre. So give us a brief overview of how you’ve got to where you are today. Okay. How much time do we have? I’ll make it brief. I started my career with Apple Computer in the early days. We were involved with imaging, so I was in product management developing products for our imaging space. I’ve had just three careers essentially. I started then an ad agency, which I grew to become one of the top agencies in the San Francisco Bay area. One of my clients was Beachhead Solutions. And just about the time I was prepared to sell the business, my colleagues then at Beachhead asked me to come and join the company to run marketing for them. And so we were already doing a lot of the collateral and the positioning and branding and so forth for the company. It was very appealing to me. And of course then coincidence had it that the business was sold successfully and I went to work for Beachhead and I’ve been there ever since. Amazing. That’s a really great story. And this company, Apple, that you say you worked for, what do they do? Well then we did computers, personal computers to compete with the monolith, which was IBM at that time. And now of course more known for phones and tablets. Yeah, I’ll have to Google them later and see what they do. So let’s talk about compliance. I work in marketing, so I’m not a tech person. Obviously I work with MSPs, but marketing is the least regulated space on the planet. And you’ll know this because you used to run an ad agency. So apart from the few basic rules you must stick to, and here in the UK we have the advertising standards authority. So if I put an advert out and I put it on TV and it’s factually incorrect, I’m in trouble. But the reality is there’s so many checks and balances to stop that happening, you wouldn’t do it. But in most other marketing, there’s very few rules, and I’m sure this is exactly the same for you with your ad agency. And I know there’s talk now and again, of what if MSPs become regulated and that fear. Well, some fear that’s unwelcome and that kind of goes around now and again. But the reality is, compared to real compliance, we as marketers and as MSPs, we don’t have that compliance burden at all. So you can understand why a lot of MSPs would see the word compliance and think, yeah, I’m not going near that, even though there are plenty of software solutions and other ways that we could do it. When you talk to MSPs about turning compliance into a revenue stream and a profit centre, how do you overcome that natural reluctance to get involved in the client’s compliance? Yeah, that’s a great question. Fortunately, that’s becoming less of an issue over time because it’s coming from the MSP’s clients. They’re getting more and more learning that they are in fact regulated by one mandate or another, or they’re seeing it as evidenced by things like supply chain questionnaires from those that are in their space. Hey, what are you guys doing from a compliance perspective? What are you building your security stack against? Or with insurance questionnaires. Good security is good security and compliance demands good security. And as a result, the insurance companies, they’re not stupid, they’re formulating their requirements based on certain frameworks, certain security standards, much of which mirror exactly these compliance mandates. So it is in fact a fear factor. I know HIPAA was the bellwether years ago, that’s for the medical industry primarily. A lot of them didn’t want to hear about it, we’ll just push this down the road and not think about it because it is daunting. And I think that’s a backward approach. Instead of looking at compliance as something that’s onerous and going to make it tough on you, instead look at it as an opportunity. Yeah, I love that. I think that’s the perfect approach. And I guess we all deal with enforced change in different ways, don’t we? Some people embrace it early on, some people have to be pushed into it, but hey, let’s be honest, it’s managed services… it’s not IT support anymore, those days have gone. And so what do you do to help MSPs take that compliance and take it from being a burden to becoming a profit centre? Well, I think that it’s incumbent upon vendors in the space to provide tools that assist the MSP with providing the service and to be able to demonstrate compliance. And so we are, I don’t mean this to be a plug, and I don’t think we’re like other vendors, but we are providing the mapping from our services, our controls to the control numbers that are required of the various mandates. I think that that is a trend that will continue to see that and provide tools that will assist the MSP with providing compliance and to be able to demonstrate compliance in the event of an audit or a breach or whatever. So we are recognising that this is something that’s coming. It has come in some respects, but I think more and more, just like anything, it filters from large enterprise and it works its way down such that everybody is going to be held to the similar standards. And so getting ahead of things for us is to help our MSPs, but for the MSP is to start thinking about these things. Understanding where their stack stacks up, pardon the expression there, but where there might be gaps and how we fill those gaps, so that we can provide the service appropriate for the regulated client. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And we will come on to just a brief look at the exact services you offer. We’ll do that towards the end of the interview. In terms of we’ve got this compliance, then the clients need to do this compliance, let’s be honest, regulation is not getting less. There’s more and more regulation, so the need is going up. Do you recommend to MSPs to try and get ahead of the curve? To actually get to grips with it, put in place compliance solutions, and then be the one that can proactively go out to their clients and say, Hey, what regulations do you guys have to comply with because we now can help with X, Y, Z? Do you recommend that? And is that the route that most MSPs go down or do they tend to come to you when they’re already a little bit behind the curve because a client has already asked them something they don’t know how to deliver? Yeah, absolutely. The best case scenario, if your client comes to you, and they will come to you, is for you not to have the answers. Being compliant is not rocket science. It is a bit tedious. It requires research. What tools in my stack address these requirements of the mandate? And I don’t intend to scare MSPs, because most MSPs have a terrific stack. They have tools in place that secure data and prevent compromise. But they’re not exactly sure how those map to the specific numbers. So most will find when they go through this exercise, and my recommendation is to start with a framework 801-171, it’s a NIST publication or CSF cyber security framework. Go through that, map your products to those control numbers and get a start on this whole process. Because once you are able to identify that, you’ll know where you may have holes, you’ll know the answers for the various mandates. The good news is it’s becoming more formalised. Most are now referring to most compliance mandates and you’re aware of them – CMMC 2.0 which goes into place in several days now , FTC safeguards, HIPAA. They’re more and more referencing frameworks so that instead of having all these different mandates and numbers, they’re sort of focusing on and getting more homogeneous. As I mentioned earlier, good security is good security. Have MFA in place, have encryption in place, have data segmentation and those sorts of things. And then you’re going to be much better prepared to answer that question when the MSP says to you , Hey, I just learned that I’m regulated by the FTC safeguards rule, are we in position yet to…? yes/no, you’ll have those answers. As I said, being embarrassed is the best case scenario, but those clients that are regulated are going to be looking for a more comprehensive service. If you’re not an expert or have no answers, chances are they may go to someone who is. That makes perfect sense. So actually as the MSP, you can jump in and you can say, Hey, I don’t know about that specific regulation, but I do understand that most are on a framework and we are set up to help with X, Y, Z framework . I must just mention Cam, you just mentioned something which goes live in a few days. We recorded this back in December last year, and obviously we are listening to it on the podcast or seeing it on YouTube today. So whatever that regulation was you mentioned that’s been live for a few months now. But yeah, essentially what you are saying is be prepared. Understand that the regulations tend to sit on top of frameworks and then obviously know where to go to get the solution from that. Let’s swing that round and finish this interview off by looking at what it is that you and your business specifically does to help MSPs. So let’s take that exact scenario that you’ve got an MSP. They know that their clients are regulated, they perhaps don’t know exactly what it is, what it means. They know it might be a framework. How does your business fit in there? Tell us what you do and how it helps. Okay. Yeah. So thank you for asking. Beachhead Secure is a platform for MSPs, specifically to provide the controls. We actually provide 150 of the controls necessary of the various mandates. Manage those controls, make sure they’re in place, be able to demonstrate that you are providing those controls for your clients and then be able to document it. And so, I know this is going to air later, by the time this airs we will be able to, within the product, be able to map all those controls that we provide – encryption, MFA, least access privilege, data sanitization – to the control numbers that are required of the various mandates. So if you have a client that is regulated by HIPAA for instance, you’ll be able to see the controls that are put in place so that you can document it for an audit or under circumstance of a breach or to provide that service to a client and say, look, we have the controls necessary in place for HIPAA in this instance. Here’s proof. Here’s what we’ll need to provide an auditor if and when we are somehow unfortunately audited. Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. So Cam, thank you for explaining that for us. Thank you for taking us through that. I think we’re almost talking about a mind shift here, aren’t we? About a mind shift from, oh no, the clients are asking for help on something I don’t want to be involved with to hey, it’s inevitable. It’s almost like cyber security 10 years ago, isn’t it? 10 years ago people were starting to ask about what’s this cyber security thing or why has my screen gone red? What can I do about that? And not a single MSP on the planet today would not not touch cyber security. It’s a standard thing. And I think what you are saying, I think reading the subtext, is that compliance is just going to become another one of those things. We don’t want them going anywhere else. We don’t want them forming a relationship with another MSP anywhere. We want them continuing and strengthening the relationship with you, which means you have to take a proactive approach to compliance. And it certainly sounds like you guys have put together a great solution for that. Let’s just finish off then, Cam, just tell us what’s the best way to get in touch with you. So what’s your website? How can we find you on LinkedIn? We are at www.beachheadsolutions.com There’s two Hs in Beachhead, which often is overlooked. I’m Cam Roberson on LinkedIn. I’ve been around a while, so I’ve got that. Cam Roberson is me and I would be happy to answer any questions. Just one last point, Paul. I think that a lot of our community struggles to distinguish our practice, how to differentiate our offering from the guy in the next county or the large nationwide type guy. This is a great way to distinguish your practice – compliance – as opposed to having the lowest price out there. And unfortunately, many go that direction. I think this is an opportunity for MSPs to differentiate their offering from the competition. Paul’s Personal Peer Group A teamwork issue has been sent to me from SEB in Detroit where his MSP is based. Some of his technicians are bored doing routine work, and his question is: I’ve heard of the concept of gamification. However, how do I gamify work? Gamification or gamifying something is easy. It’s about making mundane, boring jobs fun. And you see this a lot with vendors and with SaaS apps in particular, they gamify the onboarding to encourage you to finish it. In fact, I once signed up for something called ClickFunnels and completed the onboarding on a Saturday morning just to get my free t-shirt, which they did send to me. Good gamification is simple to understand and it has a fun reward attached to it. It’s also highly visible what needs to be done and how much there is left to do. And the brain loves to complete tasks that it started where it can see the end in sight. Think how long computer games actually take to finish but you never think of it as a 60 hour challenge. You only think about each level at the time. So in your MSP, consider how you can gamify routine and boring jobs that your team need to do. For example, you could turn them into a daily contest with a leaderboard. How many tickets can you get completed in a day? Something like that. Think about sales calls. There’s a great way to gamify this, putting paperclips in a glass and every time you pick up the phone to make a call, you move a paperclip into the other glass. Let’s say you want to do 50 calls today. You put 50 paperclips in the first glass. Don’t do that with M&Ms because the M&Ms get eaten. Think how you could do it for big tidy ups. You could set a deadline with a countdown on a massive screen and have cold beer ready as a reward. And think what you can do for completing projects on time. This could be as simple as every time a project is finished and if it happens on time and all the checklist has been ticked off, that there is a very simple reward for everyone who’s worked together on that project. And that reward could be as simple as everyone gets pizza today. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with my guest, Cam Roberson , on LinkedIn, and visit the Beachhead Solutions website. Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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As the tech authority, your job is to reassure 29:46

7 weeks geleden29:46

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 271 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… How to influence what John Smith buys: Your prospects don’t really understand technology and that can create fear. The smartest MSPs build trust and ease those fears by positioning themselves as the go-to tech authority in their marketplace. Find out how… 3 more bootstrap marketing ideas for MSPs: Let’s explore how to strike gold by turning your existing assets into lead generators, using simple tactics to attract new clients and unlock hidden revenue opportunities… without spending a penny. How motion graphics make complex sales easier: Simple visual tools, like animated videos, can attract prospects by helping to explain complex concepts and products. Could this be what your MSP needs to turn your website into a lead generation machine? Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Are you struggling with writer’s block? Elliot from an MSP in Manchester (UK) is too. I have 3 suggestions to help. How to influence what John Smith buys Have you ever seen someone wrestle with a Rubik’s cube? Well, that’s how most business owners feel about technology. They’re fascinated by what it can do, but frustrated by its complexity. So here’s an exciting thought. If their mind is boggled, that creates a massive opportunity for your MSP to unboggle it. Let’s explore how the smartest MSPs build trust to ease those fears and position themselves as the go-to tech authority in their marketplace. And yes, you can do this too. Somewhere in one of the hundreds of business and marketing books that I’ve read over the years is one of my favourite phrases, and here it is – To influence what John Smith buys, you must look through John Smith’s eyes. And in this instance, John Smith is the ordinary business owner or manager that you want to reach and influence to buy from you and not one of your competitors. You have to really understand what it’s like to be John Smith, in order to persuade him that your MSP is the one he should choose. Let’s do that right now. Let’s imagine John lives in your town and he’s the owner of a small CPA, a small accounting firm. Let’s ignore that old joke that all accountants are dull, although actually we do know this to be the truth, don’t we? But anyway, don’t worry about that. What is day-to-day life like for John running his business? Well, of course technology is mission critical for an accountancy practice, and yet we can probably guess that John hasn’t invested well over the years. So he and his team, maybe they’re using older technology still – they’re definitely still on Windows 10, might even be a Windows 8 machine clunking away somewhere… maybe an XP machine, that might be pushing it too far. Their internet is okay at best, and cyber security is very much something that they just pay lip service to. John’s mindset is that he pays Microsoft, maybe an MSP, perhaps a break/fix company somewhere. He pays the money every now and again or every month, so surely all of the security and everything should be all sorted out, right? That’s his kind of accountant’s attitude towards it. And this attitude towards technology probably means that John suffers from lots of downtime or at the very least, interruptions to his productivity. And I bet his staff complain a lot too. The subtext of this approach to technology is that money is tight for John. And people tend to assume that accountants are great business owners, but actually that’s not the experience that well I’ve certainly had from the accountants that I’ve met. Just like with MSPs, you get some that do very, very well, some that do very badly and the bulk, they just sit in the middle doing okay. John may have lots of clients, but that also means lots of work. And the margins and accountancy are not what they used to be. Also John doesn’t really understand technology and this is the core kind of heart of the matter that you need to understand. Because he understands that technology is mission critical and that at some point he’s going to need to buy new hardware for his team, but he doesn’t really understand even a fraction of the stuff that’s every day for you. Could he explain the cloud in a sentence that makes sense? Does he actually know what ransomware actually is? Would he know that malware stands for malicious software and what that actually looks like when it’s on the screen? Don’t even get me started on phishing. We all know that phishing is going to mean something completely different to him. The point here is that to win John’s business and to have any possibility of changing his attitude towards his technology and getting him to invest in his business properly will, you must understand all of these motivating factors. All of the stuff we’ve just talked about. Selling managed services to the average business manager or owner is rarely about the technology. It’s about what they do with the technology and how it helps them win faster, or holds them back. When someone doesn’t understand the thing that’s really, really important to them, your job as the person influencing them is to position yourself as an authority in technology and then reassure that person that they can make brave decisions and they can make these decisions because it will all work out OK. How do you do that? Well, positioning yourself as an authority, that’s an ongoing task. Just look at what authority figures do – they write, they speak, they are published, they are interviewed, they are known for giving advice and answering questions. There’s no shortcut to being seen as an authority figure, you have to do the hard work. Whether that means buying in pre-written content and putting your name on it or actually generating your own content. There’s no other way around it. Side note, in my MSP Marketing Edge service, we do have a number of different tools that our members can brand as their own, to help them with their positioning as a tech expert. A couple just off the top of my head, we’ve got our 2025 IT Services Buyers Guide, that’s incredibly popular. And there’s a book all about email security, you can put your name on the front of that. Have a look at mspmarketingedge.com for those. But if you want to be perceived as an authority, you certainly need to attend networking meetings, you need to go to events, you need to put on webinars, you need to run seminars, speak at events, get on the stage, all of the stuff like that. And if you do this consistently month after month after month for a number of years, you just assume the position of being an authority in technology. No one tells you you are, you just become one. This happens a lot faster, of course, if you’re in a very specific vertical, but of course you can always just do it in your general area as well. So build that up, keep going at that, it’s a never ending thing unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to it. But once you have an authority position, how then do you reassure people that they’re doing the right thing? Well, this can only come from understanding where they are, and that can only be done by asking them open questions. Now, unlike closed questions where the response is either yes or no, open questions can have any possible answer. And I believe that open questions are one of the biggest weapons of influence that you could possibly wield in your marketing and your sales because everyone loves answering questions about themselves and their business. And when these questions are coming from someone that they perceive to be an authority figure, they are doubly keen to take part. In fact, the more you ask them about their business, and the less you talk about you and your MSP, the easier it is to influence them, the easier it is to get the sale. Because not only will you start to really understand the world as they see it and as they perceive it, but you’ll also win their trust without actually doing any hard work. And I know that this is insane. I know that influencing someone just by asking them simple open questions rather than telling them what you know, is bizarre, that that’s an easier way to influence people. But hey, us humans are wired in a very strange way, and that’s what we have to work with. What I’m talking about here is not a one-off tactic, it’s a strategy. No, actually it’s more than that. It’s a whole way of life. It’s you deciding that you want to be perceived and recognised as an authority in technology, and you want to influence people by being intensely interested in them and their business. You can start doing that today, and I highly recommend that you do. 3 more bootstrap marketing ideas for MSPs Did you know your MSP is sitting on a secret gold mine? Budgets can be tight at this time of year, so right now, you don’t need to spend a fortune to generate leads. You just need to dig into the resources you already have. Let’s explore how to strike gold by turning your existing assets into lead generators using simple tactics to attract new clients and unlocking hidden revenue opportunities, all without spending a penny. On last week’s show, I gave you three bootstrap marketing ideas for your MSP and today I have three more. First one is to get your local media talking about you. I get it, no one actually reads the local paper anymore, but the local media still has massive credibility. And free publicity is much more valuable than advertising because it has higher levels of perceived credibility. When journalists talk about you, ordinary people think that they’ve sought out the best experts. And actually most journalists these days, they just want easy content that’s put in front of them. Here’s the easiest way to get some PR, some public relations. You send press releases to local newspapers, local radio, local bloggers, local TV stations if you have them. They should be about things that are huge in your world, but the rest of the public hasn’t really heard about yet. Now, the media coverage itself is unlikely to get you new clients, so instead you use it to enhance your credibility and your authority. You can put a link to it on your website, don’t just copy it onto your website as there are copyright agencies looking for this, but linking to it is absolutely fine. Share it across your social media, email it out to your prospect database, add it to your About Us page, and make sure you put the logo of the media outlet in the footer of your website, kind of like a as seen in or as heard on. This way you can make one piece of coverage influence your prospects for years to come. Clever stuff that. Let’s do the second one. This is to create videos every week. The most influential way of communicating with and persuading people in 2025 is through videos. And yes, this includes B2B marketing. Few MSPs create enough videos, which is just crazy as they’re so easy to make. I mean, you could make a video in the next five minutes, just grab your phone and film something. Perhaps it’s you just giving a quick warning about the latest email hack, something which has been all over the tech media, but it’s not widely known for the public. Do a quick video, bang it on LinkedIn, and you’re done. The video really can be that easy because you’ve seen what’s on LinkedIn, right? You’ve seen what’s on YouTube. People don’t expect Hollywood style production from you. They’re very, very tolerant of 60 seconds of just quick shot video, very tolerant. If you want to invest in kit, then yeah, down the line focus on lighting and sound and image stability and all of that stuff. But right now, you have a perfectly good camera in your phone. Maybe you’d get some lights to make it well lit or just film yourself outside where you are just naturally well lit and maybe you’d get a microphone just to go on your shirt or something just to make the sound spot on. Down the line you can get a tripod or a gimbal to steady the phone, but you don’t need these things now, they make the videos look more professional down the line for a tiny investment. But honestly, trust me, just get started right now, holding your phone, talking to your phone. And here’s the third one, the third of our bootstrap pretty much low cost or no cost marketing ideas for MSPs, and this third one is to obsessively collect social proof, because most people are sheep. They prefer to do what most other people are doing. And this is a behaviour that’s hardwired into most humans’ brains. It’s part of our survival instincts. So you need to show people that hundreds of other people, just like them, really trust your MSP. This means asking for testimonials, it means soliciting reviews on Google or other platforms, and it means creating case studies for each service that you want to focus your marketing efforts on. Don’t ever be scared to ask clients for reviews and testimonials or to take part in some filming. Sure, some of them will say no, but the law of reciprocity says many will happily say yes as a thank you for the great service that they’re getting from you. And yes, this still works despite the fact that they have paid for this service. And yes, humans are strange. The key thing here is to systemise this in the business so it becomes a regular monthly task and not just a once a year social proof topper. How motion graphics make complex sales easier Featured guest: Chris Walker has spent over 20 years creating video content and strategies for IT, tech, and SaaS businesses, helping them cut through the noise and connect with their audience. Currently, Chris is the director of Joe Mule, a B2B animation studio specialising in helping technical businesses simplify their messaging. He’s passionate about making complex ideas clear and compelling so companies can win the customers they deserve. Crampons and carabiners at the ready. Selling managed services can feel like climbing a mountain, right? It’s steep, it’s exhausting, and every step towards new cash feels like an uphill battle. But what if there was a shortcut, a way to smooth the path, get leads flowing in and help your MSP make more money? My special guest today is going to tell you how a simple visual tool can attract prospects. Turn your websites into a lead generation machine and make closing sales easier than ever before. Hi, my name’s Chris Walker and I run Joe Mule Creative and I’m an expert in animated video content. And thank you so much for joining us on the show, Chris. We were introduced by Christina Hunt, who is an MSP marketer, so thank you, Christina. Animated videos are something I’ve been meaning to talk about on the podcast for some time. And before we delve into your career, Chris, and the kind of videos you produce for MSPs right now, let’s first of all define what you mean by an animated video. Because I’m going to be honest, and this maybe is the elephant in the room, when you talk about animated videos, I see the hand holding the Sharpie that kind of moves across the screen, I think they’re called whiteboard videos, where whatever it is that the voiceover is saying, the hand is writing it on the screen. And those to me feel really, really old school. And that’s not quite what you mean by animated videos, is it? It isn’t. No. Those things, those whiteboard videos, I’ll be honest, are the bane of my life for people who’ve ever paid money for them, for a number of reasons. That isn’t really what I mean when I say animated videos and I’ll just delve into it very quickly. The trouble with those whiteboard videos are they’re very, very generic for a start, and they’re not great at helping you spread brand awareness because of how generic they look. When I talk about animated videos, I suppose a better term, a broader term would be motion graphics. That’s anything that isn’t live shot footage. So that can include things like iconography and shape and abstract movement and things like that that can help explain what might be a somewhat complex concept or product. And really those visuals are there to help guide a narrative so that people can start to watch a video and get a better sense of what you’re talking about in that video without you having to come on camera and talk about it. Okay, yeah, that makes perfect sense. And of course, what MSPs sell is a very complicated service anyway. Now, in a second I’m going to ask you whether or not those animated videos are better than having a human on screen. As we know people buy from people, wouldn’t it be better to see the people? But before we get onto that question, just tell us a bit about your background. So how do you get to the stage where you’re running your own company doing these animated motion graphic videos? So my background primarily is as a designer and an animator, I used to work for a big agency. I used to run their production department as their senior creative, and I did that for about 10 years. I suppose I got a little bit disillusioned with middle management, working for another agency and started freelancing. And then essentially over the course of the last six or seven years, I’ve built a business around that and expanded the team out and decided pre pandemic to focus on things like MSPs, tech and software companies as my target audience for producing videos. And it’s gone pretty well during that time. I feel all those industries are industries that can use help because they’ve all got complex products at the end of the day, and they’re all competing usually in quite a competitive market. So being able to stand out against the competition is also something that’s usually pretty important for those businesses. Yeah, I can imagine. And I guess half the challenge for you is taking this very complex thing that someone is selling, whoever you are working with, and actually getting your head around it enough yourself that you can then break it down into a very simple, clear to communicate message. Do you have a process to do that? Yeah, certainly. And that is one of the big challenges really, is us being able to understand it. I suppose the advantage of using an outside agency like ourselves has always been that we feel like if we can understand what a client’s product is, what their business model is, and what their service offering is, then there’s a good chance that we’ll be able to transfer that to their customers. Because quite often you’re not selling into a particularly technical audience. We look at the top and high level offer that MSPs try to get across. Those are the things that help you open doors and start sales conversations, rather than getting into the real detail. I always say our kind of mantra is, the more complex a product is, the simpler the video needs to be. Because you need to be looking at what are the core things, what are the two or three things that you want a viewer to take away from watching that video? And the best way to do that is to really strip away all the detail, don’t get stuck in the weeds and concentrate on those kind of the core benefits of what you try to get across in the video. Yeah, a thousand percent. I think you and I are in completely agreements on that. We are saying the same things, albeit we’re coming at it from different angles. I think with any MSP, and this is one of the things that makes marketing an MSP so hard, is when you are inside and you’re looking at all of the things that an MSP must do, all of the cyber security, all of the systems, the safety, all of the work and the remote working, the flexibility, everything, it’s enormous. And then trying to pull all of that over to people who aren’t technical and who are making decisions with their hearts, and with their feelings, not with their brains. That’s one of the hardest things for any MSP to do when they’re working on their marketing. So let’s come back to the thing I mentioned earlier about having a human on screen versus having a motion graphic video. My perception is that you’d always be better having a human on screen because as I said earlier, people buy from people and it’s easier for us to relate to seeing people on the screen. Do you find that it’s easier not to have people on screen because you haven’t got to get actors involved, or you haven’t got to try and persuade the client to go on screen? That’s a couple of really good points actually, because I’m in agreement with you, people do buy from people. I think that the place to make a video really is probably earlier in that kind of sales and marketing funnel though, because if people don’t really understand your product offering or the service that you’re offering, you may not get that opportunity to get in front of them in the first place. And really the power of a kind of animated video is that the visuals are helping to guide and explain the narrative that’s coming across probably in a voiceover or something like that, because it’s a lot easier for people to take that information in because really what they’re taking in is the voiceover and the kind of narrative, and those visuals are there to help make that transition a little bit easier for them, I suppose. The trouble with getting somebody on screen to do that is you are only listening to the narrative and you’re concentrating on that person as opposed to being able to take that information in an individual way. So the animated videos, I suppose, are hitting you from two directions. Visually, you’re able to understand that information, and you’re also taking in the audio as well, as opposed to somebody talking on camera. The second side to that is actually the length of time it takes somebody to talk about a product or a service. If it’s just somebody talking on camera, that might take you 2, 3, 4 minutes to explain the kind of intricacies of what a product is. By using an animated video, you’re able to strip away a lot of that because the visuals are doing half the work for you, so you’re not having to dig into quite as much detail verbally because the visual elements are doing that for you. So I think I’m a big fan of including onscreen, especially if it’s the company owner, the founder, the CTO or something like that. I think it’s important to be able to get a face behind that product, but I just think that usually comes a little bit further down the line in that kind of sales and marketing funnel. That makes perfect sense. So if we took an average managed service provider, and what I’m attempting to do with the question I’m about to ask you is to sort of break down what could go in a video. So for those MSPs listening to this or watching this on YouTube who think, oh, I’m going to go off and do my own video, which obviously some will, we are sort of giving them a steer, a direction with which to go. So if you took an average MSP, and let’s just say they’re serving a local audience, so they’re looking after businesses locally, and it is all the standard offerings, is it cyber security, 365, all of that standard stuff. Where would you start with putting together an explainer video for something like that? Where we usually start is looking at the problems that that client is solving with those kind of products and service offerings and really digging into those. There’s a basic structure for a video, what we call an explainer video, top of the funnel kind of video that’s really going to be a door opener for them to be able to put in front of prospective clients so that they can watch a 60 second video and go, I understand what these guys are offering because those are problems that I’m currently having with my business. Really focus on painting the picture of what your client is facing in terms of the world that they live in and the business that they operate, some of the headaches that they’re probably experiencing with either their existing services or services that they may not be aware of. Introducing your company and your solution as a way of solving some of those problems. I think the most important thing that a lot of people miss out in those kind of videos is what are the real benefits in terms of the impact that it could have on your business. Not just, oh, we can help you solve A, B and C, but what will that mean for your business in terms of the resources it might save you, the time it might save you, is it going to help your bottom line by making you more efficient and those things. So there’s a basic structure, that’s how we always approach things – problem, solution, impact. And then obviously if you can back that up with things like social proof and little clips from existing clients that have proven and backup the claims that you’re supposed to be making, that’s usually where we’d start with something like that. And that’s applicable for a lot of businesses, but I think it’s particularly pertinent to MSPs and technical companies because they will find, as we do when we deal with them, a lot of the problems that their clients are facing are the same across a lot of businesses. So you can get into a nice rhythm where you can produce a piece of video content that’s speaking directly to your audience, and they can find it very relatable towards their business. Yeah, I absolutely love that. Thank you for that framework, that’s exactly what I was looking for. Someone can obviously pick up that framework now and go away and create their own version of a video, which is absolutely spot on. I think you’re right, the key thing here, and this all comes back to what we were saying right at the start about people buying from people. You can use that video, even if they only watch it for 20, 30 seconds and they think – this is it, these people understand, they understand the fear I’ve got – because we know that ordinary business owners and managers, they are picking MSPs with the heart, they’re not doing it with their brain. So I think we’re just using video here as a different medium to talk to their feelings and to almost give them a feeling of reassurance that, oh, these people get it, they understand what it’s like and why I’m worried about that. And there’s an assumption then that if you can communicate that fear to someone, the assumption is that you are a good provider, you’re a provider of substance, which I think is absolutely wonderful. So Chris, thank you so much for that. It’s been absolutely fascinating. Tell us about your website and how we can connect to you on LinkedIn so we can go and see some of these amazing videos that you’ve been creating. Oh, great. Yeah, so the website is joemulecreative.com, which is a bit of a mouthful. You can find me on LinkedIn, Chris Walker, I’m pretty active on there most days talking about creating video content, best practices and kind of how-tos and things like that. So yeah, it’d be great to connect with anybody out in the MSP world who wants to know more about creating video. Paul’s Personal Peer Group Elliot and his MSP in Manchester, UK, are in dire need of unblocking writer’s block. He says he has loads of ideas for new content but struggles to get started. His question is: How can I force myself to write these articles? Well, forcing yourself is actually completely the wrong approach. If you’re sitting in front of a blank document watching that cursor flash and flash, and you just can’t be inspired to get started, then try one of these three things instead. The first is to dictate it, transcribe it, and edit it. Grab your phone, start audio recording and just talk. And don’t worry too much about the structure of what you’re talking about or how long it is. Just talk. Get what’s in your head out of your head and get it onto an audio recording. Then get it transcribed, which is so easy these days. You’ve got transcription built into 365, or you can use a service like rev.com, which combines automated transcription with a human check, and that dramatically increases accuracy. I’m sure you have a transcription service somewhere that you love. And then the final part of that is to find an editor who can turn your transcript into a proper structured article. The second technique I have is for you to get yourself interviewed, and this is an easier and ultimately quicker way to get the content out of your head. You get a writer to interview you, so you tell them what the article should be about, and then you get them to interview you over the phone or a video call and make sure they record it so they don’t miss any details. I mean, you could be interviewed about several subjects in one call, which is very efficient, and a writer with journalism experience will deliver the best results. It strikes me that you could also use ChatGPT or your other AI tool of choice to interview you in exactly the same manner. Just don’t forget to get a human to look at whatever it is that gets spat out, because I always think humans should just do the final edit and the final check on any content that’s produced by AI. And then the final thing I have to suggest for you is to record yourself talking to clients. So the next time you’re chatting with a client, whether it’s remotely or in person, just record the call. And of course, that’s easy on remote, but for an in-person visit, you could just leave an audio recorder running on your phone. And you don’t need their permission to do this as you are only interested in what it is that you have to say. Sometimes you explain concepts to clients in a way that’s really easy for everyone to understand, and you can get that part of your recording transcribed and edited. And boom, you’ve got another article for your website. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with my guest, Chris Walker , on LinkedIn, and visit the Joe Mule website. Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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If your clients are happy, this KPI will be high 29:03

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 270 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… If your clients are happy, this KPI will be high: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is a quality score where you measure how well you have done at retaining revenue over the last 12 months and assessing whether it has grown. 3 bootstrap marketing ideas for MSPs: Marketing doesn’t have to cost a load of cash. If you have a member of staff with a spare few hours each week, you can invest their time into these low cost or no cost marketing tasks for your MSP. Your MSP’s growth priorities for 2025: My special guest, a turnaround expert, tells us how to plan the year ahead with clarity, focus, and fresh momentum. You’ll discover how to organise your priorities, craft a winning growth strategy, and create a story for 2025 that’s really worth celebrating. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ryan, from an MSP in San Diego, wants to know why it’s so important to fix his website as a matter of priority. If your clients are happy, this KPI will be high Your MSP’s bank balance might look great and you might be impressed with your other KPIs. But there’s a hidden one that I bet you $5 you never look at. Yet it could flip things completely. Most MSPs have never heard of this key performance indicator, and yet it’s the ultimate quality check for any recurring revenue business. In just a few minutes, you’ll find out what this secret KPI is, how to calculate it in under 10 minutes and exactly what score proves that you are running a truly outstanding MSP. One of the things I love about working in the channel is that every day is a school day and you never ever feel like you have finally learned everything. This, in 2025, is my ninth year working with MSPs and honestly, I feel like I learn so much every single day. And as someone who has a passion, and a need in fact, for constant learning, I do find this exciting and not at all tiring. In fact, just a few months back I was chatting to an MSP and we were talking about how much progress their business has made over the last couple of years. It’s been actually astonishing. And then he said to me how delighted he was with the performance of his NRR, and that’s N, as in N for November, not MRR, which is M for mother. And of course we know what MRR is. It’s monthly recurring revenue. What is NRR? It stands for Net Revenue Retention – essentially, which clients that we had last year are still here this year. It’s a quality score. It’s something that is used a lot by SaaS businesses (subscription as a service businesses) and all subscription businesses typically use it, just not normally MSPs. But if you are looking for more ways to measure how good a job you’re doing, this could be it. So let me tell you how you’d measure this and what good performance looks like. This will be a great time of year to measure it because you could kind of look back to the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024 and look at the clients you had then and ask how many of those clients do we still have today? What was the value of their monthly recurring revenue a year ago? And has that grown today? That MSP that I was speaking to has an NRRR of 105%, which means that he’s kept all of his clients over the year, which is not unusual for an MSP, but it’s still nice to measure and know for a fact, and it means that he’s also grown their monthly recurring revenue – got the same clients, they’re spending more. And I would say for an MSP that anything under a score of a hundred percent needs some investigating because you do expect to hang on to all of your clients year to year, don’t you? And you should definitely be growing their MRR and you can do this by increasing prices or selling them extra services. If you do lose a client during the year, it should only really be for natural reasons such as they’ve gone out of business or better still they’ve been acquired. And you may have the odd year where you lose a client for bad reasons. Maybe they’ve fallen out with you or they’ve moved over to another MSP, but those should be exceptions rather than the norm. And the net recurring revenue retention score allows you to measure that. And hey, if you do measure this for your business, will you let me know what score you get because I’d like to kind of figure that out across a whole number of different MSPs. My email address is hello@mspmarketingedge.com. 3 bootstrap marketing ideas for MSPs Stop digging down the back of the couch for spare change to fund your MSP’s growth. January might mean tightening your belt a bit, but that doesn’t have to stop you from finding new clients and driving revenue. Let me tell you about three clever no cost marketing ideas that any MSP can use to generate leads and unlock hidden opportunities, all without spending a penny. You’ve heard of bootstrapping a business, right? It’s when a new venture is built up using limited funds and a lot of goodwill, and you hear stories of founders sleeping in their office so they don’t have to waste money renting an apartment. Now, your business is more liquid than that, but there’s still a place for bootstrapping when it comes to marketing. Marketing doesn’t have to just cost cash. You can invest a different resource into it instead… TIME. And this doesn’t have to be your personal time. If your staff have a few hours spare every week, you can always invest their time into the business. Everyone benefits when that happens. So here are three low cost or no cost marketing ideas for MSPs… The first is to do 15 minutes every weekday on LinkedIn. The most robust way to market in 2024 is to build an audience, then grow a relationship with that audience. And at the point they’re ready to switch from one MSP to another, they are dramatically more likely to switch to the MSP that they know. And one way to build this audience is simply to grow your LinkedIn network. For 15 minutes every day, make connection requests to business owners and managers in your town or your vertical (niche). Make 10 connection requests every day and one or two of them will accept. Now, that doesn’t sound a lot until you compound it. Let’s say two connections, times five days a week, times 50 weeks a year, that adds up into 500 new connections every year. How cool is that? Number two, ask every user this one simple feedback question. The most robust way to grow net profits is to get your existing clients to buy more from you. New clients are nice, yeah, but they’re very expensive. Whereas someone who is already paying you every month contributes a lot more to the bottom line if they go on to buy something else. And this is why businesses like McDonald’s have fully systemised the upsell – Would you like to go large? or Would you like to add fries to that? Of course, we all know how difficult it can be to get technicians to upsell. Even people who are passionate about talking about extra services will sometimes fall back into their comfort zone, which is to go for the easy fix and not mention X, Y, Z new service. So how about you get your team into the habit of asking this one simple question of every person, every user that they speak to. What else could we have done for you today? Now, most clients will say, oh, nothing thanks because they’re in a hurry to put the phone down and this probably means that you’ve checked that they are happy. All is good. Some will use it as an opportunity to talk about something that they’d meant to bring up, but perhaps they hadn’t felt that they’d had chance to. And this means that you’ve uncovered some money on the table, profit that you would otherwise have lost. And a handful will tell you about a service or a product that they’d like to buy from you, if only you sold it. And this is invaluable market research. With this one, look out for the trends. What are several people asking for? Because if you don’t give it to them, they are just going to go elsewhere to get it. And then the third and the final one is to run a free to enter prize draw. People love competitions. Yes, even business owners and managers, they never expect to win, but just the act of entering brightens their day for a second. I used to be a radio presenter a very long time ago, and it was weird how many people would phone up just to win like a Backstreet Boys CD, because this was back in the 1990s. And there are two types of prize draw that you can do. Either offer up any old prize that you can find just for the sake of running a competition, and make sure the prize is really attractive. It can be as simple as a laptop that you acquired for a client that they didn’t actually buy for whatever reason, and it’s just sat on a shelf gathering dust. The other way to do it is to give away a sample of something specific that you are promoting. For example, if you are launching a new monthly recurring revenue service to existing clients, then you’d give away a year’s free membership. If none of those three grabbed your attention, don’t worry. In next week’s podcast, I’ve got another three bootstrap, low cost/no cost marketing ideas for your MSP. Your MSP’s growth priorities for 2025 Featured guest: Ori Elraviv is a multicultural turnaround executive with a passion for driving sustainable growth in small to medium-sized businesses. Ori spent the majority of his career in leadership positions in a variety of digital media ventures, managing teams and growing businesses in a diverse set of countries and cultures. Having relocated multiple times over the past 20 years, Ori is now settled in New Jersey with his wife and 3 children, enjoying some stability in an increasingly chaotic world. Is your MSP’s story ready for a plot twist? 2025 could be the start of your most exciting chapter yet. Whatever challenges have filled your journey so far, now’s the time to rewrite the narrative and set up your business for real growth. In today’s interview, our special guest, a turnaround expert, will show you how to open the next chapter with clarity, focus, and fresh momentum. Coming up, you’ll discover how to organise your priorities, craft a winning growth strategy, and create a story for 2025 that’s really worth celebrating. Hi, I’m Ori Elraviv. I am a business turnaround specialist. Really, I’m helping companies and business owners solve problems with revenue, profit, and product. I think those are the core problems in any business, aren’t they? We haven’t got enough revenue, what do we say, revenue, profit and products. We haven’t got enough revenue. We definitely don’t have enough profits, but actually often for MSPs, the product is the one thing that’s actually looking pretty sound. So good to have you on the show. Thank you very much for joining us because we are going to be looking ahead at this year and things you can do with your business this year. I always think this time of year is an amazing time to be a business owner. You can look at what went well and what didn’t go so well last year, and we all do it naturally. Whether you believe in New Year’s resolutions or just the natural energy of a brand new year, we all look ahead at this time and it feels fresh new and we can do all these really cool things. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Before we do, let’s just explore your background a little bit. You said you were a business turnaround expert. Let’s assume there’s some people listening to us and watching us right now that don’t know what that is. Could you explain what that is and how you got into it? Yeah, so I think it’s basically a multicultural turn on executive. What I mean by that is I’m coming to companies that already exist. I’m entrepreneur in spirit, less in practice, so it’s less about me starting my own businesses, but I’m a fascinated person about going to existing businesses. I believe in sustainable growth. I deal specifically with small to medium sized companies, and I’ve been around the industry more about digital and stuff for over 20 years. I’ve worked in places like China and India and Belgrade and Latin America. So I’m really a very multicultural person and I’d like to think that every business is very simplistic and has very basic things inside of it, and my approach to it is really on the fundamentals. Got it. So when you do a business turnaround, what exactly do you do? Let’s assume that it’s a business that’s in some kind of distress, do you go in and you look at that business and you kind of take that, it’s a cliche, but that helicopter view and you look at the big things that are going right, or do you get your sleeves dirty and jump in and start to fix all the problems that have been mounting up? Well, I’m absolutely a sleeves dirty type of person, which is why I like small businesses. Big businesses have a very different type of problems, in small businesses it’s pretty much always the fundamentals. I like going into the financials and P and Ls. I like to understand everything around the business. And I think part of the qualities that I have is very quickly understanding the landscape. And I would go into the business models, I would go into the financials, I would go into the people and the operations. I would talk to the owners. And I think that would be the first steps is just to get, alright, this is just a holistic view of what’s going on, where do we stand? And then we go and hit the next phase of it. And from your experience, for the small businesses that you’ve worked with, and most of the people listening to this and watching this, they own their business. They own their MSP. We typically aim this podcast at smaller businesses that’s sort of up to 25, 30 staff, which I think is the vast majority of MSPs anyway. In your experience, where do most small businesses go wrong? Are there trends or does it tend to be a unique problem for each business that you look at? I do think there are unique problems, but I think they stem from fairly common problems. I think most small business owners of MSPs tend to just fall into the day-to-day. We get used to our own problems and our own way of doing and seeing things, and then we get a little bit trapped. So sometimes it’s a business problem where the business model just doesn’t make sense and there’s something around it that doesn’t make sense. Sometimes it’s the people, for example, people is an interesting thing. People are critical to any business as everyone will agree to it. But I think sometimes the cultures don’t mesh or we just want to give people another chance or we just can’t get outside of it. There is something with regards to how a business model connects to the people and whether they are inspired and back, is something that is critical. So yeah, it is quite unique to a business, but I think they all stem from fundamental kind of problems. Yeah, I’m smiling inside because when I first started my first business back in 2005, an early mentor of mine said, anytime there’s a problem in the business and it’s a big problem, regardless of what it is, go home, go into your bathroom, look in the mirror, and there’s the cause of the problem. Which was absolutely correct, of course, I think as business owners we are kind of the biggest asset and the biggest liability to the business. We are the thing that drives it forward, and especially for MSPs, they’re often the greatest technical resource in the business. But I know I’m the greatest liability in my business because I’ve surrounded myself with staff whose job it is to stop me from doing stupid things or meddling in stuff that works, and they keep me out of the day to day because that’s just best for everyone. It really is. So I can focus on the big picture stuff. Okay, let’s start looking forwards then. So here we are, January, we’ve got a whole brand new shiny year. It’s an exciting one. It ends in a five. I think if it ends at a five or a zero, it’s a big year. What kind of thinking do you think business owners, MSP owners, should be doing at this time of year? Should they be thinking just about the next quarter or should they be thinking about the year? Is this time to start thinking longer than that? I like to think of a businesses like a book. I’m a very big believer that in businesses, there’s chapters, every year is a chapter, so I look at it as chapters. I would be hoping that companies start a little bit earlier, but let’s just say I would like to plan my year in advance, the year’s goals and objectives. And I know sometimes it sounds frightening, but I want to bring it back to earth. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. It is really, really important that you would identify what would be your priorities for the year. The priorities for the year would stem from what happened last year and the years before. How do you evaluate what happened last year? How do you even categorise, how do you name? Last year, I really like naming a year as is a name. That was the year that I was having a breakthrough. That was the year that something happened. There is a certain kind of headline to each year. You would go through that and then you would try to understand what happened not only for you as a business, but outside in the market. Where do things stand? This will give you enough guideline kind of points to say what should be the priorities inside of your business. And maybe it’s because of things that you want to work on, maybe it has to do with opportunities. It can’t be more than three, three to four. That is the priorities. From there, you set the goals. Obviously have revenue goals, set revenue goals that you are committed to. A goal is supposed to be something that you’re doing, not something that you’re hoping to happen. Don’t just throw numbers out there that you’re going to have 50% of it. There’s goals in it that you would want to achieve and focus not only on the revenue, focus on actually the things that drive the revenue. Then I would, at the beginning of the year, I would go to the Q1, a Q1 will have the similar kind of breakdown of objectives and goals and they will all stem from the same thing of the year. So that’s the Q1. What are the things that we want to be able to have and see and achieve in this quarter that will drive us, that will be part of that yearly thing. Now, of course, businesses may have a three to five year plan or they want to dream something a little bit ahead of it, which is fine. I think it’s something definitely to do. I personally find it really hard to do too long. It’s just hard for me to imagine. And I think sometimes business owners find themselves in the same kind of place. So I would not be afraid to just stick to the year. But I would definitely evaluate where I am versus the year before. That would be a Q1. And then as you move through the year, you would go to your Q2, do your Q3, do Q4, and you would do that by looking back at what happened. Yeah, no, I love that. And I’m going to paraphrase something you said halfway through your answer there, which was about a goal being something you actually want to achieve, which means you have to take action towards it. So a goal isn’t just something you think, oh, it’d be nice to double revenue this year , because without any action, without any change, obviously that’s not going to happen. Now it’s interesting you talk about Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, because to me that feels like a very corporate thing. And I had a corporate career, I was a journalist and a radio presenter from the age of 19, oh no, 18 I think, to 30, 31, and that was a big corporate environment. So even though I worked in a small radio station, it was part of a big corporate. And increasingly what was fun at the beginning became more corporate at the end of my media career, and it was one of the reasons I left. Because it was all about quarterly targets and quarterly this and quarterly that. Do you think real small business owners like you and me and the MSPs listening to this and watching this, do you think we think in terms of quarters, because often it’s quite hard for us to say, here’s some activity that’s going to happen in this quarter. If there’s just you and like three staff, it’s a case of here’s what we hope we’re going to get done, but we can’t guarantee it. Is that your experience? You know what, that’s a good thing. The last thing I want is for me or for MSPs and business owners to think of this as a corporate. That’s one of those things, I hate it every time people about processes, there’s something jittery about me that rejects even the name of a process. Even though the things that we do are really processes in their own right. The idea is not to do something that will now get you nervous or will now take you too much time. The quarterly way to look at it, you got to be able to break it down to quarters. The reason for that is if you don’t break it down, then you are very likely going to end up at the end of the year looking back into it. And I was like, oh my God, you might not even remember what you even started. So it’s not about making you good or bad. You’re not in front of a judge, you’re not in front of jury. There’s no one out there that is going to scream at you or anything. Honestly, it’s you. And if you have someone else inside of your team that you trust, I highly recommend doing it with more than one person, it gives you more perspective. So go out there and, first of all, distinguish between priorities and goals. Priorities are the areas inside of the company that is important for us to keep in mind, these are the areas. Goals are the actions that we want to do, that are stepping stones, that is what we need to be able to do. Focus on stuff that you can or focus on progress and focus on things that you can do, and don’t worry about it if it’s not big enough, maybe it’s part of something that you would want to do. At the end of the day, if you want to be able to achieve something, there is a path to get there, there are actions to be taken, and there is going to be, I guess the success rate. It’s part of the business. I want to be able to reach that, and it’s like, okay, but how are we going to be able to reach it? What is the path to it? It’s exactly that. It’s drawing yourself with a path. It’s a yellow brick road. It’s not a straight line, and nothing will happen if you’re going to have to stray away in the meantime. But I believe that instead of feeling corporate, you’ll actually feel good. Yeah, I mean, I guess the only advantage of thinking corporate is if you underperform in a corporate environment, you get fired. And it was interesting you said earlier that you’re not responsible to anyone as the business owner, which again, I think is one of the double-edged sword things of being the business owner. You don’t get fired for poor performance. You promise yourself that this year, 2025, we’re going to do this thing, whatever this thing is, this growth thing. And then you get to December and you’re like, oh, yeah, we never got round to that. You don’t get fired, which I guess is good. It means you can keep going and the marathon just keeps going year after year. The downside is the fact that you can’t take your kids to Disney or you can’t buy a new house or a better car. Because you haven’t put the growth in, you haven’t generated more profits to allow you to increase your personal income. That’s the only downside of it. But there we go. Paul, think of it as something of a reminder. It’s almost like a quarterly reminder of what is it that we wanted to do and what we thought was the right way to take it. And we may decide to change a thing, maybe our thinking was not right. It’s a reminder. It’s a constant reminder of what is important. And probably if it’s not one of those 1, 2, 3, this is not important. You know how many times we’re dealing with stuff that is unrelated to our success, but we’re still saying for some reason we’re still prioritising it. In my book, if it’s not part of those priorities and kind of goals, it doesn’t really matter. Which is the perfect thing to end on, because I think you’re absolutely right with that. And reminding yourself constantly of the things that you should be doing is a massive thing, especially for MSPs whose very job, of course is to be distracted by the people that they’re supporting and all those thousand other things. Yeah, they’re important, but they’re not important in terms of growing the business. So thank you, thank you very much for that insight. Let’s just finish off by telling us how can we get in touch with you? What’s the best way to find you on LinkedIn, and what do you do to help people? How do you make money? First of all, I’m an executive, like others, so I also do the things that I preach. It’s what I do. But I love helping businesses. I’m fascinated by businesses. I’m fascinated by MSPs. Anyone can reach me on LinkedIn, and I’m going to be very happy to be there to support exactly that kind of path and be that sounding board to it. And sometimes it’s that bell that reminds us what it is important, what is not, and just helping us settle down. Let’s just settle down, let’s relax, let’s put our path together. I would love to be a person that helps MSPs succeed and business owners to just keep the path, keep the path that they’re set off to and have their confidence in it and feel good about it. Paul’s Personal Peer Group Ryan from an MSP in San Diego is quite new to the podcast. He’s been going through past episodes and would like some clarity on some advice that he’s heard to do with his website. His question is: Why is it so important to get my website fixed first and quickly? Decision makers don’t pick an MSP logically i.e. with their brain. The brain just rubber stamps what the heart has already decided. And this happens at every stage of the sales process, especially in that early research phase when they’re Googling around finding IT support companies that might be worth speaking to. Here’s how it works… they’ll enquire because they like you, or not enquire because they don’t like you. Their decision on whether they like you or not will be made a hundred percent on the packaging of your business. And the packaging of your business is your website. The saying says, don’t judge a book by its cover, but we do, don’t we? And product companies have known for decades that the look and feel of the packaging, directly affects sales. Why is this so? Because our judgments of what’s inside are formed by what’s on the outside. Before someone can actually sample the service you have on offer as a client. The only way they have to judge you is your packaging. So let me put this in the most no nonsense way I can. If your website is old, looks awful and is hard to use, you’ll struggle to get new clients. It will scare off any decent prospects that you generate. It really is as simple as that. So fix your website. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with my guest, Ori Elraviv , on LinkedIn, and visit the Media Feed website. Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

1
SPECIAL: How to own an MSP doing $7m a year 28:30

9 weeks geleden28:30

28:30

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 269, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week I’ve got the last of my special episodes for you, where you’ll discover how my guest grew his MSP to 450 clients, 35 staff and $7m revenue. How to own an MSP doing $7m a year Featured guest: Steve McNamara is the visionary founder and CEO of DTC, Inc., an MSP that has been a cornerstone of IT support for over 25 years. Established in 1999, DTC began as a small operation focused on serving the dental community, quickly evolving into one of the largest dental IT support companies in the Mid-Atlantic region. Under Steve’s leadership, the company has expanded its reach beyond Maryland to include clients in Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, now boasting over 450 clients and a dedicated team of more than 35 employees. Steve built DTC from the ground up with his first hire, Scott Leister, who now serves as the DevSecOps engineer. Steve has remained committed to the core mission of making IT work for clients through innovative solutions and meaningful connections. His philosophy of “doing the next right thing” has guided the company through various challenges, ensuring that client needs are always prioritised. DTC has a strong emphasis on values and culture. Steve believes in hiring individuals who align with the company’s core values rather than merely filling roles. This commitment to culture is reflected in initiatives such as hiring a Chief Flourishing Officer and conducting quarterly skill-building sessions and all-hands meetings, where every team member has a voice. This focus on values not only attracts talent but also fosters a loyal and engaged workforce. How would you like to own an MSP doing $7 million a year where you personally do none of the tech work? There’s nothing more motivating than hearing how other MSP owners have built up their business. And in this week’s special episode, you are going to discover how this guy grew to 450 clients, 35 staff, and $7 million revenue. What I think you’ll love is his unique approach to his people and how he’s kept the quality of the tech work really high without having to do any of it himself. Hi, I’m Steve McNamara. I’m the CEO and founder of DTC Inc. We are an MSP here in the Maryland DC, Northern Virginia region of the United States. We’ve been incorporated for a little over 25 years now and serving primarily into the healthcare and dental space, but now moving into the CMMC space as well. And that’s the very short, skinny version of who we are. I love it. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, Steve. I think my favourite episodes of this podcast over the last five years or so have been when we’ve had real MSPs on who have shared their stories of how they did it. So you’ve been going, I think you said more than a quarter of the century, what was it that made you start your first business or start this business in the first place? Well, we had a 2 year old son and my wife told me to get a bleeping job. Were you working in it before? Part-time, I actually, I had a health food store in rural county in Maryland and it was failing, but I was more interested in the natural food industry and alternative healthcare than I was tech. I did tech on the side to try to pay the bills and my wife was tired of us not having enough money to pay the bills and to eat. So that’s why she told me to get a real job. I love it. And obviously 25 years on, you’re still here doing tech and you haven’t gone back to natural foods unless that’s some kind of side hustle. So paint the scene for us. We’re talking I guess end of the nineties early noughties. What was the tech like then and was it a break fix shop that you started or was it something different? Yeah, it was a break fix. I mean, the guy that I was doing some subcontracting work for, he did some work in the dental space for a young lady that sold dental practice management software. So we did a fair amount of dental offices and she was leaving the industry and that company was looking for a salesperson and I had a background in sales from my early twenties. That career ended due to addiction issues. So I was in recovery for addiction and didn’t want to go back into the financial planning world and the tech world was calling my name. It wasn’t really where I wanted to go, but those were the doors that were opening for me. So that’s ultimately where I landed. Now I think at this point it would be really good to set some context of what you’ve achieved in the last 25 years. So that was you back then, one man band by the sounds of it, starting out in tech, not wanting to be in tech, which is really interesting. Where are you today in terms of the size of the business, just so we can understand how far you’ve come on that journey? Sure, so we will pass 7 million in revenue this year sitting at roughly 37 employees. I don’t sell anything anymore. I don’t fix anything anymore. I spend most of my time now either mentoring some of the younger leaders in the company or a big part of what our growth looks like moving forward into the future. So most of my time here now is either implanting the future or developing talent and helping the younger generation find their way into the next phase of what we’re doing. Okay. So here’s an interesting question. You started this business because you had to rather than that you really wanted to from what you’ve said. And yet 25 years on, you’ve got a substantial enterprise and anyone who’s been in business for more than 10 minutes knows that growing a business is hard. It doesn’t happen by accident. It’s something that you really have to keep pushing to do. So was there a point at which your desire to grow the business changed or were you just constantly trying to get yourself away from having to do the work or what was it that led to the big growth in the business? It was never running away from the work. I come from a blue collar background, so the work part of it never really phased me a whole lot. Having a young family, obviously financial independence was a big deal. My wife was in the arts, so she had a ballet school. And if there’s anything about ballet schools, you know they don’t make very much money. That’s more of a work of pleasure than it is of any kind of financial reward. And what started to happen is I started to find that I was enjoying the wins, what I called Santa Claus moments. And the Santa Claus moments for me was when I could walk into an office and take them from paper and chemicals to a completely digital office and how excited they were to have made this huge quantum leap in their business. And I was really at the heart of how that was happening, and I found that I really enjoyed that part of it. And that’s really what started to drive that. I met some really good people along the way who were running successful enterprises in the same vertical in the dental space, who were kind enough to share a lot of information with me about business, about how to run a business, about how to get out of the way, how to hire people. I had a lot of good mentors along the way that were willing to share. And it’s one of the things we still continue to do here now. We mix that up with other CEOs where I’m on regular calls with other CEOs of MSPs and we leave it all open. We share everything that we’re doing because none of us really see each other as a threat or competition. It’s more a matter of like, Hey, don’t go do that because that’s a train wreck, or look at this piece of software because this is really valuable and it’s good for your clients . So that’s really what happened, Paul, is I fell in love with something I didn’t really want to do. Yeah, yeah, I love that. And you’re right, I think the Channel is one of the few, a tiny number of sectors where you’ll have direct competitors collaborating with each other and it’s a common thing amongst MSPs, which is a really cool thing to see. I’ve worked in other sectors in the past and you do not get that in many other sectors. So was there a point at which you sort of realised, actually we’re onto something here. The business is growing, I’m enjoying taking the money home, I’m enjoying those Santa Claus moments, and was there a point at which you said, actually, let’s see if we can get beyond a million dollars or $2 million, or is it simply a case that you’ve just continued to grow organically and here we are sitting talking near the end of 2024 and you’re sat on that 7 million? Yeah, it’s a combination of the two. So organically we were growing, I think I was probably three, four years as a solo single man shop. And I hired my first employee who actually is still here with me today. He’s one of my senior people. And we started to expand in little bits and pieces. The work kept coming and I kept finding good people to join the team. And the other thing that I found along the way was is that specifically to this guy Scott, who started with me at the very beginning, if I didn’t start giving him other challenging things to do, I was going to lose him. So one of the things that I learned quickly was if I didn’t want attrition, I had to continue to grow. I had to give people roles to work into and different things to do because nobody wants to fix printers and scanners their whole life. If that person exists, I think we’d be fighting over them. You’ve got to give people places to go, so you have to continue to grow your company or you’re constantly going to be hiring new people and retraining and retraining and retraining. So the growth became a little bit more of a forced component of it. And the other part was that the tech part I was good at, not great, I was good. What I was trained in was sales. So for me, selling was the easy part, which I know in a lot of MSPs is a challenge. So it was easy for me to sell. So I was selling and I started being able to hire better technical people way better than me. And I slowly and gradually moved out of the whole technical side of it. I understood it, I knew what we were doing, but I wasn’t the guy coming in there fixing your server anymore. That wasn’t happening. My job was to bring in the business and make sure that the jobs were completed well, and I think that was a very fortunate piece for us. It was. And I think you must talk to a lot of MSPs and you must see people sat on a couple of million turnover revenue and they’re still the technical person, so they’re trying to be the salesperson and they’re also the third level technician and the overall strategist. So do you think that was one of the main reasons that the fact that you got away from delivery through the process, do you think that’s one of the main reasons that the business has continued to grow and is continued to be successful? Absolutely, absolutely. Because my focus became how do we keep bringing in new business, bringing in new clients, selling more work, giving my people who’ve been here for a while, places to go to continue to grow. I will tell you right now, I think probably 50% of my company is 10 years plus or longer with the company. That’s a big number and we just continue to find ways to make it work. The other thing that we did, Paul, right out of the gate, and we still continue to do this today, is family first was always our motto. If you had a family issue, it didn’t matter what else was going on. We were like, if we lose a client because you took care of your family, so be it. It’s not what we want, but our families ultimately is why we come to work every day. We all come to get paid, but to take care of our families. And I think that culture gets thrown around a whole lot today, and I think it’s misunderstood more than understood, but clearly here it’s been something that’s been at the heart of everything that we’ve done since day one. And just to give you a quick piece of that, my youngest child is special needs minute by minute care. So he always has to have somebody with him. And when he was really sick when he was five and a half my team, I wasn’t around a whole lot. I was at the hospital more than I was working, and my whole team kept coming to work and doing the job every day. And a lot of those people are still here. So it wasn’t just me saying family first and helping them, it was them rewarding that back. So there’s always been this engagement here in our company where your individual life matters and I’ve given it and I’ve received it. So it’s a pretty fascinating piece and I think that I would be understating it to say that if I didn’t tell that story as to why I think our growth became it is because I think the people who worked here, they took that out into the field and our clients knew that this was like we were all on the same team. There wasn’t that chasm and gossip and junk that is so easy to have in your organisation. So would I be correct in saying that some of the themes of what you’ve done with the business over 25 years, perhaps more out of necessity or moving towards things you want and need more than through planning, are you’ve had this insane focus on quality people and putting family first, children first? Which I love because you really don’t get that in many businesses, but also as you say, you focusing more on the sales because that interested you more. Are there other areas where you have operated in a way that perhaps the typical MSP doesn’t operate? I would say in the last five years, yes. I think that our focus in the last five years has really become more on people and the development of people. Like I said, I think culture gets thrown around a whole lot, but we, we’ve invested pretty heavily. We have something here called a chief flourishing officer whose job is here to help people, I don’t want to say with their lives, but with communication, because internal communication was always a struggle for us. I did a poll one time in an all hands meeting and said, on a scale of one to 10, how do you feel like the communication from the top down is in the organisation? And it was like the average was like a 4.5. I mean, it was devastating to me. I thought I was doing this wonderful job of communicating through the whole company and I wasn’t. And so what I did is I brought somebody in from the outside to help us foster that communication between teams. So that, and I’ll use, I know Griffin here, he’s in the marketing team and he doesn’t have really a lot to do with the technical team, but he’s in meetings with the technical team because they all need to know each other. They all need to know what’s happening, why what they’re doing matters to this team and that team. And I think in the last five years, that’s been why we’ve been so successful in continuing our growth is that we’ve invested in places that most businesses say, you don’t spend money here, or that’s BS. Empathy is a real word in our organisation. I would’ve told you 10 years ago, you cannot run a business with kindness because people will walk all over you. What I’ve learned is that if you run a business with kindness, then you lead with that, then you can run that business that way and people will want to work for you. It was a very fascinating thing for me coming out of my generation where that was not how you did things, to seeing this change in the world that happened. It’s real. And we have people showing up at our door that want to work for us that are incredibly high quality people, and I’m listening to people having struggles, finding good help. We’re not having that problem. I consider us really fortunate. So I’m going to continue running this model the way that it is because attracting good people to us. So there’s a long wind answer. No, no, I think that was a fantastic answer. And what’s really cool is how many people have you got in your team at the moment? It’s 37 I believe, or 38, something like that. Okay. And how old are you, Steve, if you don’t mind me asking? I’ll be 63 in a few months. A spritely 63. I’m only 50 myself. It is funny, isn’t it? You get to a certain age, and if you’d said to me 20 years ago, 63, I’d have thought, well, that’s old. And now I’m 50. It doesn’t feel so old. It just feels like a few years on. What’s really cool is you’ve got 35, 36 people in your business and you are teaching them how to run a business in a very specific way. Even if they report in to someone who reports into someone who reports into you. I think you’re right, the word culture gets bandied around. And I had a client years ago, this was before I was in the MSP space, this is when I was doing PR and marketing for anyone, and he sat down and he looked at me and he said, I want you to do some posters for our walls about our culture. His name was Chris and he was an idiot. And I said to him, Chris, I don’t know anything about your company culture. I turn up for an hour a month to talk to you. And he says, well just do some posters on what the culture should be. And I was like, oh my goodness. This guy doesn’t understand that culture isn’t a poster. It’s the way you live. Well, you are doing it, you’re living it right now. But yeah, you are teaching generations of people how to run a business and we could go forward a hundred years when you and I aren’t going to be here. And we see those people and how they’ve run the businesses and their businesses that they’ll have in the future or where they work and how they’ve influenced other people. So I think this is amazing. It’s just amazing. Let’s look at the marketing. Obviously this podcast is primarily about marketing and business growth. So I would imagine a lot of your growth has come from getting the right people, keeping those right people, and not just through clever retention, but because they genuinely want to stay with you. And I would imagine the clients therefore are treated very well, are looked after because let’s not use the culture word again, but it sounds like the ethos of the business is to do the right thing to treat people with kindness. And of course that’s going to be influenced to the clients, but you need to win new clients as well. So what have you guys done over the last decade that’s worked the best for you in terms of actually attracting new leads and turning them into clients? So sadly from the marketing side, we for many years did nothing other than we would go to trade shows and we would show up there, get call-ins and leads from our existing clients. I could always gauge the quality of our service by the number of leads that we were getting from referrals. And we grew very organically through that arena. I know nothing about marketing, I don’t understand marketing. And so it was a real lift for me I guess about five or six years ago, I hired an amazing young woman to come into our organisation and help us try to build a social media platform. We had no exposure from a social media standpoint. I mean, we had a Facebook page and we had a LinkedIn page, but there was not any real activity on it. Every once in a while we would throw something out there and we would wonder why nothing ever came back, because we had no plan. And she came in and she got us organised and she helped us start to grow up. She was really more of a graphics designer than a marketing person, but what she did was amazing. She helped us grow up. She helped us start to get some exposure. But I’ll give you a case in point, about a year ago we realised we had five Google reviews. We’ve been in business for 25 years, and Griff came to me and said, Steve, we have over 500 clients. We have five Google reviews. What does that mean? Because that’s not a world I live in. And so we set some goals and we put the team up to the task. And I think over the course of the year, we’re past 75 now. It’s been amazing. We’re getting traction from it. I think I’m probably very similar to most MSP owners that we don’t get marketing. We see it as almost like when people say, if you buy a boat, you’re throwing money in the water because all you’re ever going to do is pour money into the boat. I think that’s what marketing looks like to us sometimes. And one of my fears was is I didn’t want to sign on with somebody that I was going to pay 10 or $15,000 a month for them to give me the same thing that they’re giving 50 other MSPs, and we’re all throwing the same stuff up on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and all the things. So I think if I had one piece there, there’s two pieces I would say. One is open your mind. My mind was not open when it came to marketing. And second, get educated. I’ve learned more in the last five years about marketing to the point where I even read a book. I wish I could remember the name of it. You would know it. And the guy did not start out in marketing. He had a pool company. Oh, They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Yeah. Yes. And so I read Marcus’s book and I remember saying to my wife, I didn’t know any of it. I was blind to all of this and I wished I had done this sooner. So I think that would be the piece, because I don’t want to sit here and say that we’ve made, until this year, I think we’ve had a couple of clients that have found us this year because of our exposure, because of the plan that’s been put in place to continually be in the right places and be seen. And we’re getting traction now, but it’s a long game and I will speak as a business owner and an entrepreneur, we don’t always have the most patience in the world for the long game. And I think it’s a long game. At least that’s been my experience. So I’m excited about where it’s going and again, wished we had started it sooner, but yeah, probably not have much help to your podcast. Oh no, you’d be surprised. That’s very helpful. It’s very helpful. Marketing didn’t help us get where we are, but I think it’s going to take us where we’re going. Yeah, absolutely. And this podcast, we talk about marketing and business growth. It is anything that you can do to get your MSP to improve it and already the way you talk about people, I don’t think we’ve ever had an MSP on talking about their people and the way they run their business and the way that you have. And everyone has a different story, which is insane. I’ve got two points and then I’m going to ask our final subject, which is going to be about the future of the business and where you want to take it. So the first one is you say about the long game. A hundred percent right. The challenge for any MSP of any size is selling managed services is a very complex, difficult sale. Even if you package it up really well, even if you sell a standard solution from the point of view of the prospect, the person who’s buying from you, it’s complicated to them. They don’t understand technology. They know it can ruin their business and destroy things if it goes wrong. They need to know you. They need to get to like you, they need to trust you. All of this has got to happen. There’s something called inertia loyalty, which prevents them from moving. They’d rather stay with an MSP that they don’t like because they know them. Is that better the devil, you know thing. And ultimately your goal with all of your marketing is to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time, and that very much is the long game. So I think you’re playing a great game now. It sounds like you’ve mentioned your colleague Griffin, who’s been amazing in setting up this interview. I can always judge the quality of businesses by the communication, and actually Griffin is over communicated and that’s not a bad thing Griffin, I know you’re listening in the background. He’s been brilliant at giving me everything that we need for this, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s reflected in your marketing as well, which is brilliant. You mentioned Marcus Sheridan, and you may not have heard this episode, but I think it was two years ago, Marcus came on to a special episode. I think it was like Christmas 2022 maybe, and it’s our most listened to episode ever. And he came on and spent, I think it was like 40 or 50 minutes taking They Ask You Answer and making it relevant to MSPs because Marcus Sheridan knows MSPs very well. So that’s a good episode to listen to. And my final question for you is the future. So you said you’re 63. You don’t seem like the kind of guy that would retire to me maybe do different things, but not necessarily do the same things but do different things. But do you have a plan? Do you have a goal? Do you want to stay with the business and keep pushing forward and enjoying yourself, or do you think the business is getting to that stage where it doesn’t need Steve anymore? Yeah, so where we are with all of that is right now I work about three and a half days a week. I have a lot of commitments with my youngest son and that just wipes me out. I’m 35 years old between my ears, but my body reminds me that I’m 63, so I can’t do all the things that I used to do. Our next big jaunt right now is vertically. We’re going to be doing CMMC certification and then we are going to be moving into the DOD contractor space. We just hired a COO this year that’s very knowledgeable in that arena. We’ve just brought on a true hunter salesperson that’s knowledgeable in that arena. So we’re very excited about where we’re going with that. Our goal is to grow by a million recurring revenue a year over the next three years and cross that 10 million hump. And I feel like once I can get them there, then they’ll be in good shape to keep running with this and keep a legacy piece. My wife and I decided probably two, three years ago that selling the business was not where we were going. We were going to transition it internally. Socioeconomically, we did not come from high backgrounds. I’m more of a lower middle class blue collar family. So this is amazing. We’ve had amazing success, we’ve had amazing experience, and we want to give people who wouldn’t typically have that opportunity, an opportunity to continue and have a chance to be a part owner in a business. So the goal is absolutely to transfer it internally, and I’ve got a really great team of people here that we think we’re going to be able to do that with. I probably will work for as long as I can because I don’t see myself not working. I’d like to have a little bit less responsibility here, and I’ll be pouring more of my time into a 501c3 for special needs adults, finding places to live. That’s actually where my next real passion and venture in life is going. But I like what I do. I like the people I get to work with and I have time to do other things today that I didn’t have before, and that’s a luxury. So I’ve been incredibly blessed, and it’s not the typical succession planning type of a thing which drives my accountant and my attorney crazy that I don’t do things like other people, but I think at the end of the day, they haven’t run away, so it can’t be too bad. Yeah, no, I love it. I can almost imagine you getting in a time machine and going back to whenever it was 1999 and speaking to your younger self as you were starting break fix shop back in the day and saying, look, buddy, this is where it goes. You’ve just got to buckle down. Just enjoy it. Forget all the other stuff. This is very much the future, very much. Steve, you’ve had a crazy good life. I think your story is amazing. It’s been a joy to hear your story, so thank you so much and you’ve been very generous with your time and with your advice as well, and we’ve certainly heard things there that we’ve never heard before on this podcast. Just for those MSPs that are listening and want to just reach out to you, maybe I know, ask you some questions, just connect with you, what’s the best way to find you? Would that be on LinkedIn? Yeah, LinkedIn’s the best place because if I see them there, I can at least track back where they came from. A lot of my emails don’t even make it to my desk anymore. They get filtered out long before they get to me, and if anybody tried to call here, it’s like getting through Fort Knox to find me – the team here is very, very protective of my time. So LinkedIn’s absolutely the best place to go, and then I can see who they are and then I’m happy to chat with people from there. That’s great. Thank you, Steve. So it’s Steve McNamara on LinkedIn, and of course we will link to your LinkedIn and of course to your business’s website on our show notes. Steve, thank you so much for joining us. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with my guest, Steve McNamara , on LinkedIn and visit the DTC website. Mentioned book: They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

1
SPECIAL: Should MSPs hire a chief growth officer? 25:29

10 weeks geleden25:29

25:29

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 268, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week I’ve got another special episode for you. If your MSP isn’t growing, and you’re too busy running it to focus on growing it, this could be the answer for 2025. Should MSPs hire a chief growth officer? Featured guest: Jake Gregorich oversees revenue generation for Lyra Technology Group. He joined the team in January 2023 to help grow sales talent, increase collaboration among Lyra companies, and drive top-line revenue growth. Prior to Lyra, Jake worked with MSPs including Impact Networking, Ntiva, and Equilibrium IT. He also served as an independent consultant to private equity backed MSPs and private equity companies looking to enter the MSP market on sales & marketing, diligence, acquisitions, and integration. Outside of work, he enjoys time and good laughs with his wife Joanna, baby girl Sofia, toddler Charlie, golden retriever Bella, and large extended family. When he is not spending time with family and friends, Jake can be found outdoors hiking, biking, swimming, and playing team sports. This is an MSP Marketing podcast special. Could this be any more perfect. A fresh idea, for a fresh new year. So, you want to make more money from your MSP and you’re looking for new ways to do it. Well, as we bring on a brand new year, it doesn’t get much fresher than this. Welcome to a special episode dedicated to someone who’s found the solution to the problem of – how do you focus on growth if you are too busy with the day-to-day running of your MSP? Here’s a fresh perspective that’s definitely worth your time. Hi, I’m Jake Gregorich, SVP of Growth at Lyra Technology Group. And Jake, thank you so much for joining me for this special. It is of course your second appearance on the podcast. You were on, I think it was episode 205 back in late 2023, and ahead of having you back on the podcast again today I’ve just listened back to that, it was such a great interview and you were so very generous with the things that you shared. In our special today, we’re going to talk about what you guys are doing with this amazing MSP that you are building. And we’re also going to talk about the concepts of something called Chief Growth Officers. And not only in terms of how you’re doing that, because I think it’s really interesting how you are inspiring a large and growing number of people to grow their MSPs, but also we can look at it in terms of how the average MSP owner can take some of the concepts that you guys are proving are working right now and actually apply that within their own MSP. So let’s start right at the beginning. Let’s assume that everyone who’s listening to this or watching this on YouTube has not heard you on the podcast before. Tell us exactly who you work for, what you guys are doing, what your mission is, and what you’ve achieved over the last few years. Yeah, certainly Paul, great to be back, thanks for having me. Lyra Technology Group is a family of MSPs. We have now 77 companies across the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Our business, compared to most highly acquisitive MSPs, is a bit different. What we’re doing is we’re buying these companies (MSPs) but we’re retaining their people, their legacy, their brand. And the Warren Buffett saying, first, don’t harm the investment in the business – and then we’re thinking about how we can help grow those companies. So our businesses are decentralised. Lyra is a shared service to those 77 businesses. And what Lyra does to help is we arm them with knowledge, with talent and scale, kind of giving them some of what makes a big company great, but without the bureaucracy of top-down decision making. Yeah, I love that. I absolutely adore your business model. So from the customer’s point of view, do they even know that the MSP that they may have been in a relationship with for a number of years, do they even know that it’s changed hands? Do you tell people or do you hide it or is it a case of right, we’re part of something now, but actually it just gets better and we don’t change the name, we don’t change the people? So most private equity backed MSPs will write into a deal that they’re going to lose 30% of the customers within two years of doing the acquisition because they’re kind of chopping up the business and it causes a lot of pain for the customer. We’re not hiding the fact that we’ve made this investment into the business, but to the end user and to the end customer, they’re not noticing a whole lot of change. We’re not coming in and forcing this MSP into our way of doing things. Some of our MSPs don’t really need to talk about us. They’re local, they’re working with small businesses. Some of them find it advantageous to tell the Lyra story on how they have this network of companies that they can now provide geographical coverage, maybe to their satellite office with boots on the ground or a depth and breadth of services within compliance or cyber security or automation that they didn’t have before, and they’re now able to offer that to their client. So because we’re decentralised, some of our businesses will tell their customers that this is a strategic advantage for them and why it benefits them and others will keep kind of doing business as usual. I may have asked you this question when we spoke 18 months or so ago, but when you sort of started down this route of acquiring other businesses, was the original intention to rebrand them and bring them all together or was this always the goal from day one to operate in that way? So seven years ago is when the business started with a single acquisition in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And I’m not sure that everyone knew exactly what they were doing at the time, but the idea was really founded of, Hey, we’re going to make investments and we’re going to hold these companies forever and we’re going to make sure that we first don’t harm them. That was kind of the going model for four or five years. And then kind of recently, late 2022, Lyra started providing shared services to those businesses to give them the advantages of scale that a big company has. Before that time, we were mostly just operating, and now we’re really starting to see, as one of the biggest and fastest growing MSPs in the world, that we’re able to add quite a bit of firepower. If you imagine, we have this petri dish of MSPs, 77 of them, and we really get to see what works and what doesn’t. So we’re able to create playbooks and peer groups and conferences where we bring our companies together and roll out those things or make them an option to be adopted at our other businesses. We can attract talent because of the Lyra story. And we have scale, so just imagine buying power, we’re the biggest customer to a lot of our vendors, you can adopt that. Geographical coverage, depth and breadth of services, those are some things that you can opt into that make you a little bit better and have a bigger advantage against a sole MSP or even a private equity backed MSP that does a centralisation and rollup strategy. Yeah, I guess what you’re doing feels more like, well, we’re on the cusp of 2025 really… it’s tomorrow, so what you are doing feels more like a more authentic 2025 way of doing it. Whereas the let’s buy everything and change the name and centralise what we can and have a massive sock and a massive knock sitting in a city somewhere, serving the entire country, that feels like a more command and control kind of way of doing it. It’s interesting, I don’t know if in the US you have the concept of garden centres, I think that might be a unique British thing, but I live in a village in the UK and a garden centre used to be a place where you’d go to buy stuff for your garden. But they’ve morphed over years and now they have restaurants and anything outdoors and anything for improving your home. And we have one down the road from us called Frosts, which has been family owned since 1940 something. They used to grow the actual plants where the garden centre is, that’s how it started as two people back in the forties selling plants. And that was actually acquired earlier this year and no one knew. And the only reason we know is there’s a tiny little logo that has appeared on their sign saying they’re part of the blue diamond group or something. It’s exactly the same business model that you are talking about here, where they’ve been acquired and now they’ve got all this backend support, they’ve got incredible buying power, they’ve got access to new services and skills they wouldn’t have had before. But it’s still locally run, it’s still locally operated. And the local people who are running the business in the village, they can make the decisions, which is really cool. So I expect that business to just get even better. And I think actually locals, if they’ve seen the name change, to like a national chain, you almost expect quality to come down and prices to go up. So that’s why I say I love your business model. I have to ask, what are the downsides? Obviously you are part of the management team growing the overall business. What are the downsides of that decentralised model? So we’ve talked about a bunch of the upsides, right. But it’s the blessing and the curse. We get to align to customers and employees, like you said, and keep that local experience. When we find something that we think really works, it would be great to just pull a lever and say, everyone’s doing this now, and we can’t. And we really actively make sure that we don’t just go and start calling shots that are going to kind of have downstream effects. We might be right in some instances that this thing is going to work across all of our businesses, but as soon as we take that local ownership and autonomy away from the operators, they care a little bit less. It feels a little bit more bureaucratic. And so that spirit of entrepreneurship and decentralisation is really critical to protect. And there are cases that if we pull the lever, yes, our profit and revenue and customers would get happier probably over time, but we would also make detrimental mistakes that other businesses do and really just hurt the culture, which is not something that we’re willing to compromise on. Yeah. No, I absolutely love this. So let’s talk about the thing I really wanted to focus on in this special, which is chief revenue officers. So if I’m right, you have hired and onboarded 36 different chief growth revenue officers? We’re calling them chief growth officers, but it serves as a similar role. It’s a little bit less intimidating title to the other employees. And since you’ve gotten that information, we’ve hired quite a bit more. So we’ve hired about 50 in the last 16 months. So you’ve hired, and apologies for getting the title wrong, but you’ve hired then 50 people. Their job is chief growth officer. CGO. So you’ve hired these 50 people, you’ve given them this job title. What is a CGO? Yeah, so I think it’s important to understand where most MSPs are at. We’ve got MSPs, tens of thousands of them, and 98% of them are founder led sales. And that founder is selling in a few ways that are really critical and important to keep top of mind as we make a go forward strategy. They have executive presence because they’re an executive. They’re active in the business community, they command influence with other business owners; this high trust sale that’s really important. They’re highly incentivised and motivated. They’re more motivated than anyone else in the company because when they bring on that new customer, a significant amount of that is going straight into their pocket. And so you’ve got this will to win, these incentives aligned to really go and get the customer. You’re in the community doing community based selling, which I think most people know to work really well within MSPs. And you have executive presence because the buyer wants to talk to someone that they can trust. They look to as a business advisor, not as a sales person. And so what’s the next thing. Alright, I’m a founder led sales MSP and I’m going to go hire someone. Well again, every dollar is a dollar out of their pocket. And so they go and hire someone at $50,000 base salary and maybe a year, two, three years of experience. They don’t command influence, they don’t have executive presence. The customer’s not going to view them as a business advisor. And so we’re going to not be able to build on any momentum or what has worked in the past in the way that the owner has sold. That’s the fundamental flaw that I see within MSPs when they do hiring. And so that owner tries, doesn’t work, tries, doesn’t work, tries, doesn’t work. Maybe after three or four attempts at hiring this type of profile, they just kind of quit and they say, I guess I own sales forever. Typically when a company joins Lyra, that’s the state that they’re in is they’ve accepted, they’ve done well, they’ve been in business for 10, 15 years, they’ve got to a million dollars or around there and they’ve just thrown in the towel. And so what we’ve done is we’ve taken this approach that now the owners de-risk, we’re going to go up the pay scale. We’re going to get someone that commands influence executive presence, active in the business community, can become the trusted advisor to the client, and also has that strategic sales and business mind that they’re going to do some things to get intentional, not just work community, but maybe add in some process that’s going to really scale this thing up. And so what we’ve found is that when we place that chief growth officer to kind of take over the growth function and the sales and strategic partnerships and marketing function from the owner, is that after a ramp up their MRR is increasing by 60% across those 50 chief growth officers. So we’re kind of breaking through the glass ceiling of that owner that’s got his hand in too many different things. And we’re arming these businesses with someone that has the will to win that’s highly incentivised to go and do it and can kind of build on what the owner’s done and then really take it to the next level with some more institutional sales knowledge. So how do you make this person different from just being a sales director? Because the problem that you just described there with the owner struggling to lose sales to someone else, potentially you’ve got exactly the same problem. So what does a chief growth officer do differently? How are you sourcing them? What kind of person are you looking for? How are you motivating them? What kind of scope are you giving them to get in and roll their sleeves up and get their hands dirty? Yeah, great question. I think the answer of how we attract them is also how we set them up for success and do this differently. So when I’m going out and I’m having these conversations with potential candidates, we’re looking for people with really high attributes. Maybe they have three at the minimum to seven or 10 years of experience. But we’re giving them their first C-suite title. We are putting them on the leadership team, they’re setting the strategy, they’re building it while they fly the plane. And so you can imagine the flywheel – you give someone that leadership position and you give them decision-making power to set strategy. They’re becoming an executive. They’re gaining executive presence by doing that. And if you own that decision, just like in the decentralised business, you are really bought in and committed to making it work rather than being told, Hey, this is our sales process, this is how we drive leads. Go do this. Well that hasn’t worked in the past. And so this person comes in and they’re able to build the engine, have the seat at the leadership table, which then they carry that out into understanding how executives thinks and acts and they’re able to command influence with the end customer. That makes perfect sense. So earlier when I asked you what some of the downsides are of running a decentralised model, you said that you couldn’t roll out an initiative which might work well, you couldn’t roll it out to everyone immediately. Do you have the same potential problem with your chief growth officers that being given the keys to go and do whatever they think is best that actually they go off in the wrong direction? Or is that mitigated by the fact you’re hiring experienced people who’ve been there and done it? Yeah, it is absolutely a challenge. If my recruiting and HR team hear this, they’re cringing right now in the pain. So every time we kick off one of these searches, it is basically a consulting engagement of what does the go forward structure and strategy and set up for this person look like. We’re not really selling them yet, at that point. The way that we sell them is we put someone in front of them that blows their mind and says, wow, this person knows more about my problems and the potential solutions to my problems than I do. I want to give them the ball. And if you find the right person and you get them in front of them, we’ve hired at a hundred percent. I’ve never had them be rejected by the operating company because that person kind of takes it and blows them away. It gets easier as the reps come in because we’ve got case studies, we put our other CEOs in front of the group at our conferences that we have two or three times a year. And they hear the success stories, they see the metrics that this is driving a 60% increase in MRR. And so now it’s getting a little bit easier. But every single one of these sourcing engagements is a challenge, it’s a consulting engagement, it takes three to six months from getting their buy-in to actually finding someone, to trying to hire them, to getting them onboarded and set up for success before they’re really set free. And the CEO needs to be bought in the entire way because they ultimately have that decision making power. That makes perfect sense. So I’m just thinking how this relates to the average MSP owner who would be listening to this or watching this on YouTube. And essentially what you are saying is you can’t just hire someone off a 30 minute interview and expect that person to become a superstar within a few months. I appreciate that’s a very, very stripped back answer, but what you are doing is you’re as much selling to the candidate as you are to the person they’ll be working with, and it’s a very, very long process and you have to be prepared to commit to it long term and go quite in depth with them. Would that be a correct extrapolation of that? Yeah, you really need to increase your risk appetite. And that decision, when you do want to hire someone, you should be over the moon to give up massive responsibility and really committed to it because you will falter throughout that. And if you’re not within the Lyra family, you don’t have those metrics and case studies and other CEOs to talk to about this. So you’re going to go up the pay scale, you’re going to give really high variable compensation. You’re going to give someone a big portion of your business and probably the most important part of your business. And so you better make that decision with confidence. And I would just say hire slow and make sure it’s right and then give that person every opportunity to go and make it happen. And then in 6 to 12 months, if it doesn’t work, you’re going to have to move on. But if you don’t fully commit, I view that as one of the fastest ways to fail here. But of course that’s the scariest thing, isn’t it? I run my own business. Most people listening to this or watching this run their own business. And to ask someone to fully commit to handing over something so big, I think that’s probably easier for someone in your position where you’re shepherding and looking after a number of businesses, whereas when it’s your business and it’s your baby and you built it from scratch, literally screwdriver turn by screwdriver turn over 20 years, I think that’s a much harder thing. And in fact, actually, let’s turn that into a question – Do you have a process to help the people who are operating these MSPs that you’re buying? Are they typically the former owners or are they other people like the service desk manager or someone like that? Yeah, so maybe in 40 or 50% of our businesses, the ex CEO is still the current CEO of the business and we’ve kind of rejuvenated them. They had a plan to retire, but now they’re a part of Lyra and they’ve gotten really excited and they’ve decided they want to do this at a different kind of scale with different level of resources. And they’ve been de-risked so they can go and take some shots that maybe they always wanted to take. The other 50 to 60% are CEOs that we’re typically placing, maybe half of those people are promoted from within the company. They were the right hand man. Maybe they did do this and they already had that growth leader and now they’re being promoted up into the CEO chair. And then another half we’re going to go and find. Someone with, again, similar profile, high attributes, 5 to 10 years of career, and we’re going to give them their first CEO title and say, Hey, we know this is going to be bumpy for about 12 to 18 months , but typically what we’ll find is someone with 15, 20 years of experience, they start up here and they’re on this path, and then this person makes a bunch of mistakes and then takes off after about the 18 month period. So similar process on the CEO side that we go through hiring for about a third of our businesses. Got it. And when you’re selling the idea of a chief revenue officer into a CEO who previously was the owner, because even though they might not have a financial stake, they don’t own the business, they care for it still, it’s still their baby, especially if they’ve chosen not to retire and to stay carrying on looking after their baby for a while. Do you find it harder selling the chief revenue officer concept into them, compared to the CEOs who’ve been hired for that job? Way harder, every time. They’ve done things a certain way for 10 years versus a CEO that’s done things for 6 months or 12 months in a certain way. So change is a lot easier to enact. Those CEOs that were founders, they become the biggest champions though over time. Often, we have these internal referrals, basically it’s like, Hey, go talk to X, Y, and Z, they felt exactly the same way and the exact same setup and here’s kind of outcome and where they’re headed today . And so we use them as champions. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for exploring and explaining this concept, and it’s going to become a thing in my head now, a crutch of words I can’t say – chief revenue officer – it’s like the word phenomenon. I’ve always struggled with that word, for example. I think it’s probably the first time I’ve ever said that on the podcast, and I shall not be saying chief revenue officer again either, although it seems to be easier now. Chief growth officer. Well, exactly. It’s easy, you’ve been saying it for a long time, so it’s easy for you. Jake, before we let you go, because it’s quite rare for us to get so much time with someone like yourself who is involved with so many MSPs and you are in so many different marketplaces. Did you say you’re in four different countries? Five countries. Five. Okay. You’ve added an extra country just while we were talking. So you’re experiencing so many different types of MSPs in so many different marketplaces. And obviously we are tomorrow heading into a brand new year. If you could, and I’m not going to ask you just to cut it down to give us your top three, but let’s say tomorrow you got fired. I mean, that would suck. What an awful 1st of January that would be, to get fired. But let’s say that happened. And you said, well, screw you guys, if you’re going to fire me, I’m going to go and buy my own MSP and I’m going to run my own MSP and take everything I’ve learned here and we’re just going to do it. So let’s say tomorrow you bought an MSP and it was an average size acquisition – what would you do? And what I’m looking for here is your direct advice of what you would do if you owned an MSP, because obviously that’s something that the MSPs listening to and watching this can take away themselves. So if I took over the operation of MSP tomorrow? Yeah, so suddenly it’s your baby. You’ve shelled out, you’ve borrowed a ton of cash, you’ve put your money in, and you own that MSP. And obviously a chief revenue officer, we all know now that you would put one of those in, but that’s a long-term thing. So in the first 6 to 12 months, what would you do to start to drive growth within, let’s assume it was a stagnant business that you bought. What would you personally do to start to drive growth? I would start by only buying companies with happy customers, and then I would immediately go and I would talk to and meet with every single customer. Need to find out why your customers actually work for you. This industry is very noisy. It’s very hard to differentiate. And so you got to find that magic of how you’re going to have a compelling value prop that doesn’t just sound like every other MSP, and that usually exists within the customers and why they work with you. The other thing that I’m looking at when I’m talking to the customers is the relationships. This is a relationship business. You use circles of influence. Those are absolutely critical. So I need to know who we have our core relationships with and who’s referred us business in the past. And then I’m going to map what I call circles of influence. And I’m going to look at those people’s second degree connections. I’m going to look at where they spend their time, what circles they’re in, that could be other investments they have, that could be business associations, peer groups, charities, any number of close-knit communities. And I’m going to join those communities where I have multiple customers in the same community because this is a trust sale. And so I kind of hack gaining the trust by being with the people that already trust me and entering their circle. And so once I map those circles of influence in the secondary connections to kind of my super connectors, I put my sales plan in motion to go join the circles that they are already operating in the media that they already trust. Kind of like this conversation within the MSP community. Yeah. Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Jake, thank you so much for coming back onto the show. Now, some people listening to this will be thinking, actually 2025 is the year they’re going to get out, and maybe they’d want to have an initial conversation with you. There may also be people listening to this thinking that chief revenue officer job sounds great. How would I know more about that? So what’s the best way for people to have those conversations? Is it with you or should it be with one of your colleagues, and how should we get in touch? Yeah, you could definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can send me an email, you can link to it. I’m happy to share some of the playbooks we use in terms of scorecarding candidates and how to hire them and set them up for success. So please don’t hesitate to reach out. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with my guest, Jake Gregorich , on LinkedIn and visit the Lyra Technology Group website. Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

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SPECIAL: How MSPs achieve a happy balance 15:22

11 weeks geleden15:22

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 267, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week I’m taking you for a walk near my home. And we’re going to talk about a subject that’s very important to us as business owners… How MSPs achieve a happy balance Running an MSP is like constantly spinning plates and there’s a good chance that you’ve dropped the odd one from time to time. It’s a dizzying challenge trying to keep them all spinning and in perfect balance. If you are trying to juggle your home life with everything your MSP throws at you and it often feels impossible, today’s special episode is just for you. Come for a Christmas Eve walk with me as we find the answer to this question – How do you achieve the perfect happy balance? Well, I hope you’ve had an insanely good year this year and you are really ready for Christmas tomorrow. Certainly if you’re listening to this when the podcast is released, what we’re doing today is kind of a bit of a new tradition, which we only started last year, but already it feels like the right thing to do every year is that you come for a walk with me. So last year, and you can go back and listen to last year’s special episode, we went for a walk round a lake near my home where I live. I live just outside Milton Keynes in the UK. It’s kind of in the middle of the UK. And today we’re just going for a walk near my house. Actually, I live near some fields. I live in a little village. It’s very nice around here. So it’s a beautiful, beautiful, sunny crisp December morning and I’m just taking you out for a walk to talk about the happy balance. So what is the happy balance? Well, I’m a business owner just like you, and I’ve been doing this, actually next year it will be my 20th year. It was February, 2005 when I started my very first business, not the one I have now, I sold that in 2016. But back then I started and I had all the hopes and fears and all the difficult times that everyone has when they start their first business. And it took me probably about seven years to achieve this thing called the happy balance. And the happy balance is a mixture of, or a combination of five things that you need to have in your life in order to achieve happiness. Because if your experience of starting your MSP was anything like my experience of starting my first business, you throw yourself into it with such gusto that it becomes almost an unsustainable beast. And you kind of look up a year, two, three years in, and you realise that you are spending so much of your time working that you have got all the other parts of your life out of balance. Things like, well, all the things we’re going to talk about today, but especially your family, your partner, your kids (if you’ve got them), your social life, your friends, all of these things, they take a backseat to the business and I think that’s okay for a year, maybe two years. But if it goes on any longer than that, the risk is that you are just out of balance. We cannot live our lives out of balance for a very, very long time. I do know business owners, MSP owners, in fact, who have been out of balance for years, decades in some cases. And yeah, some of them are sitting on very successful businesses, successful as in there’s lots of revenue coming in and there’s lots of profit going into their bank accounts. But I have business owning friends who are in that position and they go home to their luxury apartment in the evening where there is no partner and there’s no kids because the price of them building the business and making themselves a millionaire, the price of that was losing their family. And I dunno about you, but I would rather have the family and the happy life and the balanced life and just a little bit less money in the bank. To me it’s not just about making money. You’ve got to have that balance as well. Let me tell you what the five elements of the happy balance are. And this is something that I was going to say, I’ve created it myself, but I haven’t really created it as much as I’ve been influenced by hundreds of books that I’ve read over the years and just realise that these are the five things that you need to have. Let me tell you what they are and then we’ll go into a little bit more detail with them. These are the five items. The five items for a happy balance are: cash, time, family, fun, and meaningful work. So let’s start with the first one, CASH . So why did you start your business in the first place? Most people don’t start their business to make more money. They start their business because they want control. They want control over the kind of work they do. They want control over who they work with, how they do that work, when they do that work, where they do that work. Control, is a bigger motivation for most of us starting our business than money. Now, don’t get me wrong, one of the things that we want to control is the amount of money that we earn. We want to make sure that we have plenty of income coming in so that we can do the things that we want to do with our lives. There’s very, very few people, there are some, but there are very, very few people that start their business purely to get more money and it’s just a big money thing for them. Typically, those people, they’re never really satisfied with their business. They never really get to a point where they’ve got enough money. Even though actually there is a point, I was reading this a few weeks ago, what book was it? I think it was a podcast I was listening to, possibly Darren Brown’s podcast for the Brain or Podcast for Life, which you can get on Audible. Very, very good podcast series. And he was saying that there’s a point where you earn enough money to pay all your bills, to get yourself out debt and extra money after that doesn’t move the happiness needle. It’s just extra money for you to go and buy more things that you don’t really need. Cash, we absolutely have to have enough cash. And exactly as we were just saying in that podcast, if you don’t have enough cash, it’s a position of misery, isn’t it? You must have been in a position where you can’t pay your bills. I’ve certainly been there. I was there pretty much until I was about 35 to be honest, but we couldn’t pay all the bills. We had some debt. There was always more money going out than coming in. And when you first start your business, that gets even harder. Because suddenly you’ve got this second beast that’s chewing up money. The second beast is your business. And just when you start to make enough money and you’re making good money, then you need to add extra resource and you have to go and get more people. You have to get an employee, you have to bring extra resources in. It’s an absolute nightmare. So cash is definitely the right first resource to look at and the thing that you need for your happy balance. But that goes hand in hand with the second one, which is TIME . Do you know what I was saying earlier about those business owners I know who have loads of cash? They’re very wealthy, very successful businesses, often they have no time at all. They’re working Saturdays routinely. They’re working six days a week, they’re doing 60 hour weeks and they have absolutely no time at all. I would say it’s more miserable having cash, but no time to spend it, than it is having time and no cash. Does that make sense? There are lots of people in the world with plenty of time and no cash. And there are many things you can do that don’t cost cash, but if you’ve got cash and you can’t spend it on yourself or spend it doing fun things, then that’s no good at all. Right? Do you agree with me on this? So I think you need a balance of those two things. You need cash and you need time. Oh, I’m out of breath. I walked up a hill and I’ve just got to a woodland here near my home. Wish I’d worn different shoes, my feet are freezing. Anyway, so cash and time, those two things, in balance. And I rebalanced my time two, three years ago, probably post covid and I work about 30 hours a week now. Some weeks I’ll work 40, 50 hours. Some weeks I’ll work a little bit less, but routinely as I’m going through, it’s about 30 hours a week. And that’s a pretty good balance for me. You may have heard me say on the podcast before, I’m a sole parent. So I have a 14-year-old daughter called Sam, who’s awesome, and also 14, which is the opposite of awesome. But I go to every school thing, I take her everywhere, I do every club. I’m there for every little thing. She’s an actor. She has an agent now, which she’s nuts. So she wants to be a professional actor. But all of that takes time. And we’re very lucky that we’ve got that balance right that I’ve always got time to do the things for her that are important. And of course she’s been spoiled by this. She doesn’t know that there are many other parents who don’t have time to do everything with their kids. But to me that was an important thing. And when I started this business back in 2016, that was number one priority for me. It was getting those two things in balance, cash and time. And I would urge you to do the same thing because for me, I was learning from the mistakes I’d made with my first business. So I was able to design my second business, this business, the MSP Marketing Edge. I could design that completely differently because I’d learned from those mistakes. So the first two items then of the happy balance, cash and time, and the third one, I’ve just started talking about it, it’s FAMILY . Sam is my family. I have a girlfriend as well, but we don’t co-parent. She lives separately with her own teenage children. You don’t want all those teenagers getting together really, but she’s my family. And then there’s my other family like parents, brother, that kind of thing. All of those things are important. It’s all temporary, isn’t it? All of this really. I don’t want to get too deep with this. I’m walking around the beautiful countryside on my own, just enjoying it. I don’t want to get too morose. But the reality is the important people in your life don’t stay in your life forever. And I think we owe it to those people and to ourselves to make the most of those people while we’ve got them right. To enjoy our children’s youth, to enjoy the company of people that make us laugh, that we love, that are funny. All of these things are really, really important things. I nearly slipped over then that would’ve been quite amusing if I’d fallen over while recording this podcast. So we’ve got to have enough cash, we’ve got to have enough time, and we’ve got to spend plenty of time with our family. Well, no, let’s say the right amount of time with our family because for me, spending an extra day with my brother doesn’t bring me any extra joy. Does that make sense? So having a short period of time and enjoying him and his wife and his kids and their company, and that’s a great thing in moderation. But spending an extra day with them that doesn’t really add any enjoyment to me. Again, it’s all part of the balance. Then we move on to the fourth one, which is FUN . You’ve got to have some fun in your life and what is fun to you? We all have different things that are fun. So what I’m doing now is fun for me. I’m walking around to my village now. I’ve come out onto a little single track road just at the back of the village and I’m going to now walk back to my house because it’s so cold. But this is fun for me, and running. I love running. That’s fun. I love going to the cinema. That’s fun. I like photography. I love nothing more than going around London here in the UK with my camera. There’s so many things to photograph if you just stop and look. There’s an amazing abundance of that. And to me, all of that is fun and going to the theater and all sorts of stuff like that. So what’s your idea of fun? Don’t say computers. You can do better than computers. Computers are the day job and I appreciate that computers might’ve been fun for you once, but maybe they’re not fun anymore because it’s the job. So what are the other things? And I would massively encourage your fun to include exercise as part of that if you can. It’s so important that we, even with just a 20 minute walk each day or just taking the dog for a walk or something, just to get a heart rate up 20 minutes every day. It makes such a massive difference to life quality. It really does. So I would encourage you to add in that fun. And it’s so easy as a business owner as well to just forget fun or just to put fun in at weekends. It’s like, oh yeah, I’m really busy during the week, got my 50, 60 hours on and then at the weekends, that’s when I’m going to sleep. I’ll have some beers, I’ll have some fun then. But actually I think you’ve got to get that balance every day. There’s got to be a little bit of fun every day, a little bit of family every day. These are good things. The final thing, we come onto them with a happy balance is MEANINGFUL WORK . And I put this in because for some people meaningful work is not important at all. Some people really don’t want to work. And I’ve got a few friends, I’m 50 now. That’s scary. And I’ve got a few friends that they don’t want to work anymore. They want to retire now. Well not retire, they just don’t want to work. They want to be a full-time parent or just go out and be people who lunch or whatever. That’s fine for them. But for me, I get so bored if I don’t have work. I need work. That 30 hours a week that I work, that’s intense work. That’s not me slacking doing stuff. I’m really intensely doing that work. That’s so important to me. Really important without meaningful work I think I’d be a very different person. You are you the same? Do you need to work or are you actually one of those people that you would like not to work? I think the vast majority of business owners, we need to work, but there’s a reason I put that word meaningful in there. It’s got to be meaningful work. Not just doing password resets, not just doing new users. That’s not meaningful, is it? It’s not meaningful at all. But actually helping a customer do more, helping a client do more with their business because of your technology strategy. That is the most meaningful work there is. In fact, isn’t that the greatest contribution that you could make to a client, is to help them do things with their business that they could not have done without your help? That is an amazing, meaningful work, and it’s one of the reasons why you personally, as the owner of the MSP should be doing as little everyday work as possible. You shouldn’t be doing tickets, you shouldn’t be doing help desk stuff. If you catch yourself doing password resets, new users, all that kind of stuff, that’s not fun, that’s not meaningful. You can hire other people to do that and I appreciate we all have to do work like that at some point. But there’s always someone else you can find to do that. So you can do what only you can do. And there’s a ton of stuff that only you can do. And most of it is to do with strategy and the big things of technology. That’s really important, that kind of stuff. So there we go the happy balance, all those five things. Enough cash, enough time, time with our family time, having fun and meaningful work as well. And if any of those are out of whack for you right now, then just as we are here on the cusp of Christmas, you’ve got an opportunity to look at 2025 and say, how can I do things differently next year? Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025 31:30

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 266 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… 3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025: The silver bullet to getting new clients and growing your MSP lies in consistent and persistent marketing. Make it easy by prioritising these three things. And 3 big questions to ask yourself: Before the new year begins, take some time to answer these questions and focus yourself on your future goals, in life and in business. This MSP is using a clever backdoor marketing tactic: My guest this week tells us what his special marketing tactic is, how it makes finding clients easier, and how you can do a version of this in your MSP. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Graham, an MSP owner in Omaha, reflects on how little he feels his MSP has achieved in terms of lead generation this year. He wants to know why his marking projects take so long to implement. 3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025 Did your MSP sales engine feel broken in 2024? Well, here’s the fix. The best new revenue comes from lead gen that’s driven by a marketing machine, but don’t be scared. It’s dead easy and it’s built with just a few simple parts and it’s going to make 2025 your best year yet. Right now let’s go through why your current marketing isn’t working, how to find more people to speak to and how to make all your marketing easier. I do love this time of year because everyone has a collective pause and after you’ve had a few days off to enjoy some time with your family, you move on to time to just kind of take stock of what’s happened in the last 12 months. And you figure out what it is that you want to improve next year. Most of the MSPs that I’ve spoken to this year just want to win more new clients, and keep their existing ones and make sure those clients are happy. And of course, make sure their staff are happy and service quality is important too. These are all important things to MSPs, but ultimately, if you nail it down to what’s the one thing that you would do to improve your business, if you could wave a magic wand, for most MSPs it would be to win new clients. So let me suggest to you three marketing priorities to focus your business on next year. These are not difficult concepts to understand. In fact, I’ve deliberately made this as easy as I can, as I try to do with all the marketing that we talk about in our podcast and on the YouTube videos. My first recommendation is to create a marketing system rather than a series of one-off activities . Now, the reason I suggest this is because the whole channel seems to be geared around helping you to do one-off activities. You get big vendors giving you marketing campaigns or social media that you can just roll out in one go. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think doing a one-off campaign or being all over social media for a couple of months is better than no marketing at all. But the very best kind of marketing is consistent and persistent, and that comes from having a marketing system. A system means you have a series of tasks that are happening on a regular basis. Ideally, you personally as the owner of the MSP, is not doing them. You have someone doing them on your behalf, whether that’s someone who works for you or a trusted outsource person. If you’ve been listening to my podcast or watching my videos for a while, you’ll know the marketing system that I recommend. I suggest you build audiences of people to listen to you, starting with your LinkedIn and your email list. And then grow relationships with those people using educational and entertaining content posted on LinkedIn and email to them. And then you convert relationships using marketing campaigns and calling people on the phone. My entire MSP Marketing Edge service is based around this 3 step system, and the beauty of it is that you are doing marketing 365 days a year. Even when you’re taking some time off, like in the weeks ahead, your marketing still happens every single day. And that’s necessary because people only buy when they are ready to buy, and you don’t know when that is. It’s only by doing marketing every day that you can get in front of them at exactly the right moment. My next recommendation is to build up the numbers of people that you’re talking to . Now, you may have heard people say that marketing is a numbers game, and yeah, that’s kind of true in that the more people you market to, the more likely you are to find someone who’s nearly ready, willing, and able to speak to you about switching to your MSP. It takes the same amount of time and costs the same amount of money to market to a hundred people on LinkedIn as it does a thousand people, or even 10,000 people. The more people you market to, the more successful your marketing will be and ultimately the more new clients you will win. And then my final recommendation is to do a little bit every day . And this seems to be the one that MSP owners find the hardest, and yet it’s one of the most critical things in marketing. This is the most important part of growing a business. You’ve probably already got too many things to do and not enough personal time, right? And yet, I highly recommend that you find 60 to 90 minutes every single weekday to work on your business rather than in it. This is what I’ve been doing for years and it’s what’s helped me to build up my last business, the one I sold in 2016. It’s what’s helped me to grow my current business, the MSP Marketing Edge. Every single weekday, I try to find a minimum of 60 to 90 minutes to get things done. And when I’m in that 60 to 90 minute window, I’m not doing email or Facebook or anything that robs my time. I’m just working on the business. You might find this easy to do at seven in the morning every day before your staff arrive at the office or maybe seven at night when they’ve left. Or you find an hour during lunch to lock your office door and put a sign on the door that says, do not enter unless the building is on fire. And I suggest that you do this at the same time every day. Don’t think that you can compile it into one day a week such as all of Friday, as a) you won’t get as much done in a day compared to five 90 minute sessions, I promise you that. And b) there’ll always be some crisis that steals your time from that day. There is a direct link between your ability to find 60 to 90 minutes every single weekday to work on the business and you getting closer to the future that you really want. Literally everything I’ve achieved in the last 19, 20 years has come in 60 to 90 minute chunks. And it’s been a real compound effect of lots and lots of small things adding up over thousands of thousands of days. It’s the only silver bullet to grow your business, spending that time every single day, making sure that you are implementing the right strategies and the right tactics. And 3 big questions to ask yourself When you are an MSP owner wanting to grow the business, vacations might as well be cancelled. There’s just no such thing as time off, but not in the way that you might think. No, this is nothing to do with being too busy with client issues to have time off. What I mean is when you do take time off, you just can’t help it, this always happens… you find yourself thinking about the business, right? So over the Christmas break, after you get your child’s new drone stuck in a tree and make them cry… Here are three big questions to ask yourself for when you inevitably start mulling over how to grow your MSP business even further in 2025. Let’s start with big question number one: What’s your personal vision for the future? This is not a question about the business. This is about real life, family and stuff that matters a hell of a lot more than the business frankly. Close your eyes right now, unless you are driving, and dream about how you’d like your life to be in the next two to three years. What kind of house would you like to own? What kind of car would you like to drive? What kind of vacations, holidays would you like to take? And where would you like to take those vacations? Who would you like to take those vacations with? How much time would you have to yourself every single week to do the things that you truly love doing? I know that you love working in your business, but I also know that you probably wish you could do more golf or hang gliding or spend more time with your kids or knitting, whatever it is that you like doing. Our brains are incredibly powerful computers and the more that we can sit and dream about the future and picture where we want to be, the more likely it is that our brains will act on that and move us in that direction. Okay, big question number two: What are the smart goals for the business? Smart, of course, is an acronym. You’ve heard this before and it stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. And a bad goal for your business is I just want to grow revenue because you never quite know when you’ve actually got there. You never know really what you are working towards. But a great and smart goal would be, I want to grow my net profit from 200,000 to 400,000 by the 31st of December, 2025, because that’s a very specific and measurable goal. And of course you’ll know exactly when you’ve achieved that. It is definitely achievable by the way to double your net profits in a year. We as people always overestimate what we can achieve in a small amount of time and underestimate what we can achieve in a long period of time. So its relevancy depends on how much this fits into your personal vision for the future. If you have a vision of spending much more time at home doing things you enjoy with your family, but your smart goal requires you to spend twice as long in the office, well that’s not a relevant goal to your personal vision. Then time bound, that’s the next thing and it needs to have a deadline, and the deadline shouldn’t really be more than 12 to 15 months away, which is why at this time of the year, it’s great to set a calendar deadline of the end of next year. Now, you may have smart goals that are just for you and then smart goals that are for your staff. I would never set a smart goal for net profit and communicate that to my team because very few employees are motivated to make the boss even richer. You might have a smart goal that’s revenue based or related to other items that you can tell your team about and perhaps even motivate them to help you achieve. But your real smart goal would definitely be around profit. Revenue goals aren’t really goals at all because of course, revenue or turnover is vanity. It’s profit that’s sanity, (you’ve heard this before) and it’s cash that’s reality. You want to be growing your net profitability this year. You can’t spend revenue on holidays. You can spend profit on holidays. And then finally, big question number three: What are the right marketing strategies and tactics to hit the goals? If you’ve got a very clear personal vision for the future and you’ve translated that into some smart goals for your business, picking the right marketing strategies and tactics are so much easier. And typically there are of course three strategies to grow any business. Number one is to get more new clients. Number two is to get those clients to buy from you more often. And number three is to get your clients to choose to spend more every single time they buy from you. Once you are clear on those three strategies, the tactics to make them happen, become very, very simple. This MSP is using a clever backdoor marketing tactic Featured guest: Omar Romero is the CEO of ROSE IT Services Limited, a +13 year old MSP headquartered in beautiful Trinidad and Tobago. Throughout his career spanning 25 years and 3 continents, Omar has helped dozens of firms to accelerate their growth by aligning technology, simplifying IT and implementing “right fit” solutions to meet their top level goals. He also heads a digital event management subsidiary called ROSE Virtual – an entity that specialises in hosting large, public, highly interactive virtual and hybrid meetings with the capacity to accommodate up to 100K attendees online. Omar is a big believer in the power of technology to solve real world problems and improve human connections. You are safe. No one’s calling the cops. This is the one time that you can be a thief and not get arrested for it. When you are an MSP business owner wanting to find new clients and make more money, new ideas that actually work for other MSPs are like gold dust. But with permission, please go ahead and steal the smart ideas you’re about to hear from my guest this week. In this interview, you’ll learn three things – what his special tactic is, how it makes finding clients easier, and how you can do a version of this in your MSP. Hi, my name is Omar Romero and I’m the owner of an MSP based in beautiful Trinidad and Toba. And congratulations because after five years of the podcast, you are the first ever person, the first ever guest from Trinidad and Tobago to appear on the podcast. So congratulations and thank you so much. You and I have actually been talking for what feels like a year, I think, and it’s taken quite a time to get our calendars together and I’m so excited to get you on the show, primarily because you are using a marketing tactic that I don’t think we’ve ever spoken about before. I’m going to give it the name of Backdoor Marketing. I don’t think you ever set out to do it when you did it. And obviously you’re going to describe what you’ve done and the results you’ve had from it, but I’m calling it backdoor marketing because you started marketing to businesses without them even realising they were being marketed to. And we’re going to explain the whole thing here in layout what you’re doing. Let’s first of all hear a little bit of your story. So how did you get into tech and how did you end up owning an MSP? Yeah, so my career started here in Trinidad and Tobago, and I think throughout the years I’ve worked in different areas of IT. So I started out working for a vendor on application support, payroll application vendor. And then I started working for the bank where I did some programming. And sometime around 2005, I actually moved to the UK. I lived in London at the time working for one of the largest IT firms there, but that was as a database analyst. And I had always had the idea of doing IT and doing things my own way and having my own thing. I never really crystallised what that would look like. When I left the UK, I moved to New York City and I was doing an MBA. And a professor in the program at the time had introduced me to someone in New York who owned an MSP. And that was my first experience of understanding what an MSP is or what an MSP does. The company was Greenhouse it, and they were very generous in sharing the time and knowledge and explaining all those things. And it just ticked so many of the boxes for me because I just saw the beauty of managed services and how you can really structure things and help so many people. And it was just a different way of doing IT traditionally to what I was accustomed to. So after I finished my MBA, I moved back to Trinidad and Tobago and started my company Rose IT Services. We’ve been here providing MSP services ever since. Amazing. You’ve lived everywhere. It’s like you’ve lived in all the cool cities, which is really cool. London, New York, Trinidad and Tobago. It doesn’t get any better than those three. I bet the weather where you are is a lot better today than the weather is here, where it’s kind of dark and horrible outside. I think that’s the one thing we can guarantee. So you’ve got your MSP, I know you’re quite successful at what you do, but you started a second business. So briefly tell us a little bit about what that business does. And this, by the way, is a critical part of the story. So one of the sectors we provide services for is credit union, in Trinidad and Tobago and the region. And we had an MSP client who we are the IT provider for, and sometime around 2013 were credit unions, and this is not just in Trinidad, but this is across the world, they have to do something called an annual general meeting once a year, which is a public event where they invite all their members or clients to attend. And part of that annual general meeting is there’s an election that happens. Years ago that used to be physical ballots by hand, and it was a process that took hours to finish. And sometime around 2013, our client, they had an electronic ballot accounting system and they asked if they could help us run the ballot accounting system. So that was a high speed scanner on a desk and we would have pre-printed ballots that people would shade, and we basically reduced the process from four hours to probably 30 minutes. What happened is that a lot of other credit unions saw us doing it and reached out to us to do that. So apart from the MSP business, this was a new service we provided, which we built out to preprinting all the ballots and managing that election process and we would give them the returning officer everything packaged for an election. Then in 2020 we had gotten pretty popular in the space doing that. And then covid happened and these events can be over a thousand people at a physical venue and it has to happen and a lot of our clients reached out to us to figure out how do we have this event that we need to have and how do we move that online? The challenge of these is they’re not regular webinars or Zoom or anything like that. These are highly, highly interactive. These are hundreds of people who need to be heard, who need to vote on motions, who need to do an election for board and committees. And we just fell in a really good space because we were, by design, technical people, but we also understood that credit union space. We developed a template of how to run those virtual meetings online that grew into hybrid meetings and it became a subsidiary side business where we have our MSP business now, but we also have a business that does large virtual and hybrid events. Got it. So you were telling me just before the interview you can have up to a thousand people taking part in essentially a massive video call? Well, we know we actually have capacity for 100,000 people on our Zoom. Oh, wow, okay. The largest we’ve registered is we probably just under 4,000 people on our live Zoom. But, and so it’s very, very involved and you have a lot of technical elements in the background. Everyone has to participate and feel like they’re accommodated. So it’s very demanding. That’s a very unique business, I have to say. That’s a very cool side business and wonderful to hear how, actually, Covid for you was the making of that business. It allowed you to pivot and change and invent something new, which is really cool. Now obviously what we’re talking about here today is backdoor marketing, which is where we are selling to people and we are influencing them to choose you as an MSP without them realising. And the reason I wanted you to explain that second business is because of course that second business is where the backdoor marketing happens. So tell us your experience of what happened as you started setting up more clients and onboarding more clients onto your video platform. How has that actually generated work for your MSP? So those events are very, very involved, there’s registration, there’s a month of work that happens before the actual day of the event. And within that month there’s a lot of technical pieces that have to happen. I mean, we have to work with the client on what goes on their website, we have to do content email marketing blast, we may have to look at what happens on the internet onsite. So there are a lot of technology pieces, and through that, we either work alongside the clients IT department or maybe they don’t have an IT department, and we have to step in. So that gave us one, a really good understanding of where these clients who were working with us on the virtual services were on the IT spectrum. And also, that gave our clients understanding of how we worked, because some of our resources from the MSP side do help out on the virtual side. Because of that, it was a good conversation if we executed really well on the virtual to say, Hey, by the way, do you know we also offer these MSP services that may be of value to you? And that has worked really well because it’s not like we are coming in cold. It’s someone we are familiar with, someone who knows us, someone we’ve executed for, and we found that there are a lot of people who would be happy to work with us on a more permanent basis as an MSP provider. Got it. So essentially, if I was to summarise that, because what I want is for everyone listening this or watching this on YouTube to not think, okay, it’s about having a unique business. It’s something extra. And we’ll talk about what any MSP could do in a second. But essentially you are building a relationship with people who have bought something else from you. And as you are building that relationship, it allows you to influence them and talk to them about the technical problems that you are finding in their business, which is obviously a natural in for you to talk about the solutions. Have I got that right? Is that correct? Yeah, and I don’t even think it’s that intentional because actually a weird thing started happening in that our MSP clients started, they knew us as technology providers, that’s what most people know us as bread and butter. But then our virtual clients know us as virtual meeting providers, and none of these people know we do the other thing. After we execute an event, I would just call and say, Hey, I’d like to pop by and share with you some of the other things we do . We know that we have a solution that can solve problems for them, and they know how we work, so it’s a natural fit. And it’s usually very, very informal. We usually just are having a chat and I would just say, Hey, did you know we provide IT services, we provide cyber security services, we can do penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, all of these things. And usually it’s like, I had no idea you guys did this because this is actually a current requirement for us. And then that’s where that conversation would start. So it’s really, really natural. Exactly. So the actual sales conversation, as you say, is natural, but you are leveraging the existing relationship, and I think that’s the key part of this. Here’s a question for you, Omar, if you ran another MSP or you were advising another MSP and they don’t have a side business, obviously I can imagine you’re a very busy person with two big businesses to run, and I’m sure you’ve got a fantastic team, but if you were advising another MSP who didn’t have a side business and didn’t want a side business, how can you take that principle of working with someone on something else before you sell them managed services? What would you recommend they do? Well, I think what I would say is that for us in this region, the concept of an MSP is not very well understood. And I don’t know if it’s like that commonly across the world, I wouldn’t be able to say. But usually people just see us as an IT company, so they would come to us for different things. And sometimes we do things on a project basis. So they may say, we want to do an office 365 implementation, and we may work with the client on that. But then sometimes you do something like that for a client and you execute it and the client has worked with you on a project basis and it becomes an easy conversation, if you can execute that really well to say, Hey, we did this for you and we can actually support you on a more permanent basis. Did you know we do these other things and this is how we work and this is what works for other clients who have done an office 365 implementation. And then that is where the conversation can become really natural. Obviously what underpins it is you have to execute on that thing you’re doing so that the client has had a good experience working with you, and then that opens the conversation for a more fixed, permanent relationship. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. To answer your question about around the world, do people understand what MSPs are? I think yes, probably there is a greater understanding of it, but still, you look at the average decision maker, so the average business owner or manager, and they don’t know what the term MSP is, they don’t know what a managed service provider is. I think a lot of people still do think of their IT company as just an IT company. Yeah, that IT company… you do the IT, you do the websites, you do the social, you do everything that involves a computer. Exactly right. And actually that in itself can be a double-edged sword. It’s good because you just mentioned websites. I’ve never understood why most MSPs don’t sell websites, because ordinary business owners see you as the technical people. And even though websites is a marketing thing, if they’re thinking, oh, well I trust you with my IT, I trust you with this, you can do my website. And I’ve always thought that most MSPs should have a website building partner that builds websites for them to sell. But anyway, that’s a whole other conversation. But yeah, so I think a lot of MSPs will treat project work as just something they do in order to onboard a new monthly recurring revenue client. And actually what you’re saying here is, go and do the project work to build a relationship, and then a more deeper engagement, a monthly commitment, monthly recurring revenue engagement will come off the back of that, which I think is absolutely spot on. So Omar, thank you so much. That’s such a great idea. It’s awesome to hear that you’ve got two very good companies going there. And there’s a little piece of me that hears that you can put a hundred thousand people onto a call. And I am thinking, right, there’s 40,000 MSPs in the world. If I could get two or three people from each of those MSPs on a call simultaneously, I want to test the limits of your system. You say you’ve done 4,000, do you reckon you’re ever going to get past four or 5,000 on a simultaneous call? Well yeah, I mean, we work closely with Zoom actually. And so that’s how they have expanded the capacity. It used to be 3000, they went up to 6,000. And I think where we want to go with that is to curate these large events. I often ask people, is there something you want to tell the world? Is there message you want to get out to the world? And you have this open online event. We do hybrid events as well, where everything is happening at a venue but it’s also open to online. Our job is really to get as many people and engage as many people to come onto your event and have a more professional experience than anything that is out there. It’s a Zoom product that they sell. So obviously there is a market for it. And this is actually a lot more fun than MSP stuff because we have ideas to do large events, we could do a music concert online. We could do really creative and crazy things, and sometimes people come to us with ideas and we just have to figure out how to make it happen. So yeah, that’s the fun side of it. I love that. I can see why that’s a lot more interesting than setting up new users and resetting passwords. Omar, thank you very much for your time. Just tell us, for those MSPs that have been listening to this or watching you on YouTube, what’s the best way for them to just find out a little bit more and perhaps even connect with you on LinkedIn? Yeah, so I am on LinkedIn. I usually post everything we do there. Just find me Omar Romero. My website is www.rose-it.com, and we are on social media. Our company is on LinkedIn. We are on Instagram, we are on Facebook – RoseITSL. Paul’s Personal Peer Group Graham in Omaha has reflected on how little he feels his MSP has achieved in terms of lead generation over the last 12 months. His question is: Why do my marketing projects take so long to implement? Okay, well, there are a couple of potential reasons for this. The first is that maybe you are overthinking marketing. So just stop overthinking it, because marketing is already difficult enough. You just need to get a piece of advice from someone you trust and then implement that advice. And I realise that that cuts off several different ways of potentially doing something. But surely the goal here is just to get it done. The other option is, or the other possibility is that you are disorganised. So you need to treat a marketing project like a technical project and use your project management software to break it down into easily digested chunks. The other possibility is that you’re trying to do it all yourself. And you know my opinion on this, that you should only do, what only you can do. So next year, find yourself a virtual assistant who can help you, or members of your team who have some capacity and are interested in helping to grow the business, and they could be your secret weapons in 2025. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with my guest, Omar Romero , on LinkedIn, and visit his website . Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Successful MSP owners exercise 35:05

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 265 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Successful MSP owners exercise: Our bodies are amazing, but they’re even better when we use them on a regular basis. Even just a 20 minute walk every single day keeps your body sharp – and also your mind. How one client question can turn into 7 pieces of content for your MSP: To do great marketing for your MSP, you need great content. There’s tons of it around and there’s a simple way to extract it from everyday conversations with clients and prospects. This guy phoned 1,000 decision makers… and learned these hard lessons: Making more outbound calls is essential to win new business for your MSP. If you HATE picking up the phone, this interview is going to blow your mind. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Steven, from as MSP in London, UK, is looking forward to getting organised in 2025 – his question is: Which project management software do you recommend? Successful MSP owners exercise MSP Running Shoes on. Have you ever felt that owning an MSP business is like running a marathon in more ways than one? And if you prioritise looking after your clients and their technology ahead of looking after your own body and health, then you have a very low chance of completing the marathon that is being a business owner for the next 20 years. Let’s find out why successful business owners exercise, how they do it when they have zero time, and the benefits of doing it to you, your clients and your staff. A few months back, I had my dad come and stay with us for a couple of nights. Now he lives about 150 miles away and we don’t really see him more than a couple of times a year. So it was lovely having him stay. My daughter and I, we took him to London for a full day being tourists in our own capital city, and we went to see a theatre show and we went to some museums and it was great fun. But we walked about 20,000 steps, which is about 10 miles, and we do a lot of walking because London is a walking city. It’s so much easier to walk around and just catch the tube. You wouldn’t drive around London. No one does that. My dad is in his early seventies, so he’s not really that old and he’s kind of fit and kind of healthy as he has been throughout his life. But he has let his fitness slip in recent years and he was really struggling. So at the end of that day, he just looked ill. He was sitting down, his back was hurting, his knee was hurting, his hip was hurting, and he won’t go and see the doctor about his dicky hip. And I got him to admit that he doesn’t really do any regular exercise. He’ll have a walk now and again. Now all the medical advice from all the doctors everywhere is that someone of his age, in fact, someone of every age should be going out for at least a 20 minute walk every day. And I told him that even last year when I couldn’t exercise much because I’d injured my knee and I needed surgery on it. I couldn’t go running or anything like that, but I still exercised every single day. I’d go for a 20, 30 minute walk or go on the treadmill for a mile, or I actually bought an exercise bike, which I’ve since sold. But you get the idea. I was telling him how the most successful business owners and MSP owners I know, they always make time for exercise regardless of how busy they are. Do you do this? Do you make time no matter how busy you are and force yourself to do exercise on a regular basis? Maybe you prioritise looking after your clients, you prioritise your partner if you’ve got one, your kids, if you have them, your staff, you prioritise all of this stuff. And it’s very easy to forget to prioritise yourself and your health and your exercise. And yet the evidence is there, there’s an abundance of it. Just go looking for it. One of the things that’s going to make the quality of all of our lives higher is regular exercise because our bodies are amazing, but they’re even better when we use them on a regular basis. Even a 20 minute walk every single day doesn’t just keep your body sharp, it keeps your mind sharp as well. And I know that I always make better quality decisions about my business and just actually better quality life decisions, when I take regular exercise. My mind is sharper, yours will be the same, and you can do more and your body will last longer if you do more exercise thinking about it. It’s kind of weird how that works. It should almost be the other way around, shouldn’t it? That the more you use your body, the faster you run it down and there’s nothing left at the end. But actually that’s not the case at all. So my challenge for you at this time of year, as we approach everyone having a bit of time off and a chance to do things differently next year, ask yourself, what could you do to prioritise adding some exercise every single day? And it could be as simple as you taking something that you already do every day and adding exercise to it. So for example, do you make 30 minutes worth of phone calls each day? And I don’t mean prospecting calls, just perhaps calls to your team or just catching up with clients or business owning friends or whatever. What if you did those calls while you were walking? And I know the first couple of times you do that, you’ll be out of breath, but you will soon get used to it and your fitness levels will go up. What if actually that walk is listening to this podcast, apparently there are other podcasts to listen to. Or maybe listening to an audio book about improving your business. Could you do that while you’re out walking so it feels like you’re still investing your time on your business, but you’re getting the exercise as well? Get a dog. Make the time to walk the dog each day. And what if actually you go for a longer walk with a dog, get one of those dogs that’s robust and can go for very long walks, not one of those small little dogs that can only manage a five minute walk. What if it’s a walk with your kids to a playground? And what if you go to a playground that’s further away? There’s a great book called Atomic Habits by James Clear, I think I’ve mentioned it on this podcast a dozen times. And if you haven’t listened to it yet, please get the book. It will make such a difference to your productivity. And one of the things that James Clear talks about is if you want to change something, you insert it into your existing routine. Rather than saying, right, I’m going to join the gym, I’m going to go there every day, I’m going to get fit – we all know that that lasts for three days and then you never go again. Build a daily walk, or whatever it is that you want to do, into your already normal routine that you have. You literally add a habit onto an existing habit. So if you have an existing habit of let’s say 30 minutes a day on the phone, adding the walking to those phone calls makes it happen every day. If you ordinarily take the dog out every single day, you just have a longer route and you perhaps turn left when you leave your house to go on the longer route rather than right. And that makes it more likely to happen because you are already doing those things. Which of these things is the easiest way for you to exercise on a daily basis? How one client question can turn into 7 pieces of content for your MSP Now, this is very sneaky. Have you ever wished you could make more from your MSP by getting other people to do all of the hard work? Well, you can. In fact, you can actually use your prospects and your clients to not only help you grow your MSP’s revenue, but also directly help you with your marketing. Let’s talk about the simple way to take everyday conversations with ordinary business owners, extract marketing content from those conversations and then use it across multiple platforms. They can help you to grow your business without them even realising. To do great marketing for your MSP, you need great content. And there’s tons of it around. Many vendors give away content as a value add. And there are plenty of businesses that supply high quality content, such as my MSP Marketing Edge, for example. Now, I’ve always said that there is a clear hierarchy of content, where you creating your own sits at the top. So at the top you’ve got you creating your own content. In the middle, you’ve got high quality content only supplied to one MSP per area, like the MSP Marketing Edge. And then at the bottom you’ve got content supplied to thousands of MSPs, including of course, your competitors. Of course, creating your own content is a time and a resource hog. One of the tricks when creating your own content is to repurpose ideas into different types of content for different platforms. So what I’m talking about here has been on my blog and it was in one of my LinkedIn newsletters at some point in the past. Different words, same kind of themes. So let me give you my standard operating procedure for collecting, creating, and repurposing marketing content for your MSP. And there are three steps. The first is to collect ideas, collecting ideas for content. It’s kind of a mindset more than anything. Once you realise that ideas are around you all the time, you just have to open yourself up to collecting them. And your goal is to create content that’s educational and entertaining for ordinary business owners and managers, which makes every communication with every client a potential content goldmine. Imagine how many ideas could come out of a sales meeting or a strategic review, which you might know as a quarterly business review. Ask lots of open questions. Not only do you get quality answers from that, which will help you to close a prospect or upsell a client, but that also generates content ideas for you. And here are some examples of open questions: What are your plans for the next few years? What are your most urgent priorities? What are your biggest business concerns? What would you like to do that your current technology won’t allow you to do? Now, this one’s my favourite , If I could wave a magic wand and do anything to make your business life easier, what would it be? And what do you often hear your staff saying about your technology? Now, let’s say the response to the last question was, yeah, actually, I always hear them moaning about how slow everything is. Well, not only is that a hot buying signal, but it’s also a great content idea. Get into the habit of writing down every content idea you hear, whether it’s a good one or not, because the goal at this stage is to capture everything. I always have a notes page open in my browser when I’m chatting to MSPs. In fact, I just counted and currently that page has more than 200 unused ideas, and just reading them gives me other ideas. Second step then is to create content. Let’s take that comment about slow technology and imagine you turn it into a blog on your website. That could be – Five reasons why your staff moan about slow computers and how to end the complaints for $297 . The five reasons, which I’ve just made up off the top of my head, and you’d replace them with your own better reasons are: They haven’t restarted their device for three years. They have a million tabs open on their browser. They have every possible piece of software open and running. Their computer is so old, it’s on Windows 3.1 and their IT support team isn’t being proactive. And that last one gives you a chance to segway into the proactive tasks that your team would perform regularly to keep their network and devices optimised. Talk in broad strokes and avoid techno babble. You want them sitting there feeling annoyed, wondering if their current IT people are doing anything or not. And then you offer to help the reader delight their staff by spending $297 on a speed audit. What’s a speed audit? Well, I just made that up as well, and it’s where you and your team, you do an audit. It’s just a basic technology audit, but it’s aimed at finding out why their devices network is so slow, including implementing any easy fixes. Now, we all know that this kind of audit is really just the prospect paying for a high quality sales meeting with you. They’re paying for you to tell them everything that’s wrong and how you would fix it if they joined you as a contracted client. As a sales tool, paid audits have fallen out of favour in recent years, but I do believe used well, they can still be very powerful. And by the way, you don’t have to write all of that content I was just talking about yourself. It needs to come out of your brain. Sure, but you can create it without actually pressing laptop buttons, for example. You could dictate it. I dictate most of my content now, and then I edit it into shape. And that one habit has more than doubled my output in the last few years. You could feed your ideas into AI to write it for you. Just make sure you edit and humanise what the AI spits out. You could record a voice note and send it to a freelance writer on Upwork. There’s lots of things you could do. Then the final step is to repurpose the content because that blog can now be turned into all sorts of different content. The blog can be copied as a LinkedIn newsletter. Each of the five reasons could become a social post. You could film a video about all of this. It could become a segment on your podcast, if you do one. You could do a webinar on it. And it’s also a great subject for a LinkedIn live. And just there, are seven different types of content all from one idea. Now, there are two tricks to get this right. The first is to reshape the content to fit the platform. So you don’t just copy and paste the blog into a social post, for example, you’d rewrite it, or at the very least, shorten it down and simplify the words you use. And the second trick is to use a content calendar to plan when and how you’ll reuse content. Spread it out across the year, across all the different platforms, and you’re looking for a variety of subjects so that your content never feels samey. This guy phoned 1,000 decision makers… and learned these hard lessons Featured guest: Dave Sutton is the founder of Wingman MSP Marketing, a firm specialising in helping MSPs grow their businesses through effective marketing strategies. With a passion for technology and a knack for understanding the unique challenges and opportunities faced by MSPs, Dave has become a trusted advisor to countless businesses in the industry. His expertise in lead generation, content marketing, and branding has helped MSPs increase their visibility, attract new clients, and ultimately achieve their growth goals. If you know you should be making more outbound calls to win new business for your MSP, but you HATE picking up the phone, this is going to blow your mind. Perhaps the single most effective marketing tactic you could ever use is just to pick up the phone and call ordinary business owners and managers. Yes, it’s hard to get past the gatekeeper and engage someone in a conversation they don’t really want to have, but the quality of the conversation, even in just a few minutes, can be off the scale. It’s one of the most reliable ways to discover who is nearly ready, willing, and able to buy the services that you sell. Most MSPs hate making these calls, and my special guest today is a real expert at making them. In fact, he’s called at least a thousand decision makers in his career. And today he’s going to spill all of his hard won secrets of how to get through, how to get them engaged, and ultimately how to get decision makers to book a sales meeting with you. Hi, I’m Dave Sutton. I’m one of the owners of Wingman MSP Marketing. And thank you so much Dave for making your debut on this podcast, although your business partner, Mark Copeman, has been on at least two or three times. Lots of MSPs will know Mark from speaking at events around the world and for being on podcasts and webinars and everywhere, but they probably don’t know that actually, Mark does no work at all in Wingman MSP marketing. Mark does all the pouncing around and the, ooh, look at me, pretty much like I do, and then you do all the actual work in the background. Thank you very much, we’ve pulled you out of the cave of getting things done and you’re giving us a little bit of time for this interview. So thank you. What we’re going to talk about is something which I know you did yourself for many years, and I know you have now a team of six people doing, it’s phoning business owners. It’s the thing that MSPs hate doing, and I know you and your team do this on behalf of lots of MSPs. What I want to get out of you today are some secrets, some things that you do which helps you to get through to other businesses and get hold of decision makers. But let’s go back a step first and let’s just look at how you got started, Dave. So you started Wingman originally on your own. How long have you been going? Yes, almost eight years now. And everything started from telemarketing really. So from lead gen, I think as the MSP market has matured and people have realised that brand and digital and all these other things are important that we brought those in to the fold over the years. But still there’s that crux of, I’m an MSP owner and I need leads like yesterday that I can turn into customers. And still even in this digitised age, picking up the phone, having a conversation with someone asking questions, it’s the only way to build that direct rapport and open a door to a conversation with a prospect. Yeah, I agree completely 1000%. And in fact, because of the digital world, that’s why you need to have the phone aspect, and I’m sure you would agree with me on this, but when I see an MSP in a marketplace who has somebody doing outbound calls, whether it’s an agency like yours, whether it’s someone in house, whether it’s just a part-time mom making two, three hours of calls, two, three days a week, they have a distinct advantage because they’re just touching more people, having relationship building calls with more prospects. And eventually you “get lucky”. And I put getting lucky in speech marks there because it’s not really getting lucky. It’s working the numbers, it’s getting through to people. So you originally were the one actually doing the calls for MSPs. Now, to me, that sounds like the worst job in the world. I would rather be, sweeping mud off the street in the rain. I don’t know where I’m going with that analogy, but I’d rather lose a toe than actually have to pick up the phone every day. So what was that like? Actually just calling people day in, day out. It does feel like sweeping mud uphill sometimes. Yeah, so I could see where you were going with that one. It’s a numbers game. You’ve got to make a hundred plus dials a day to have the chance of having 10 to 15 meaningful conversations, of which 2 or 3 might go somewhere, and repeating that process relentlessly. But I think the mistake that most people make is they look for a salesperson in that role. Agencies, MSPs, whoever they hire, sales-based people for that role, which actually are probably the wrong person. A salesperson is great when they’re put in front of a prospect that’s lukewarm and has an appetite to move forward. But actually that dogged work upfront is better led by someone that can start a conversation. They don’t feel too salesy, they’re not too pushy, and they’re inquisitive and they ask questions because it’s all about building an audience first that you can then nurture. Rarely are people looking for a new IT provider, and more often than not, that’s because they’re in bed with someone that they’ve been with for years. As we all know, our clients as an MSP are incredibly loyal and most MSPs are like that. So therefore it’s hard out there in the market to find people that are looking to switch. So you want to drop in some little tidbits of things that they might want to consider, have they questioned their incumbent upon, but you can only do that when you vetted the audience. You know they’re the right size, right location, right industry, they’re a good fit on the face of it. And even in this data paranoid age and heavily regulated sort of world that we live in now, people still unwittingly just share information with you on the phone when you ask questions. More often than not, we try and gun for a decision maker. Everybody thinks about telemarketing. You need the decision maker. But often it’s the office manager, it’s the finance manager, it’s a middle manager person, perhaps that middle aged woman that runs the office. She’s the person that you need to be speaking to because she’s the one that can rattle the cages of the decision-makers. She’s the one that you need to befriend and learn when she’s taking the cat to the vet and all of that kind of good stuff. That means that there’s some power behind your follow-up when you pick up the phone again. Yeah, exactly that. And of course, knowing that she’s taken the cat to the vet, that’s not something you have to remember, that all goes in your CRM so when you call her back three to six months later, you can say, oh, when you go into the vets with your cat, I hope everything worked out or whatever. I know you now have a team of six doing these calls for you. In my last business, I had a team of three, three full-time telesales people. Now their job was to actually call business owners in our verticals. We operated in three healthcare verticals in that old business. And I have to be honest, the best performing of them was a lady called Miranda, I think I’ve talked about her on the podcast before, because she was just natural. She would write down things like going on holiday or taking eldest daughter to university, and she would make the follow-up call a few months later about that. It’s almost like she was calling someone who was a friend. It’s like, oh, hey Steven, last time we were talking you were taking your daughter to university . And so she was having five to ten minute conversations about that and then having a two minute conversation about our business, but she got the best results, which was amazing. So what I did find is, and a lot of MSPs find this, is those three telesales people were the noisiest and hardest people on my staff. And by noisiest, I don’t mean from talking. I mean in terms of dramas. If anyone was going to be late, it’d be one of the telesales. If anyone going to have a crisis, it’d be one of the telesales. One of them left every six to eight weeks. So we had a constant hiring thing. You have six people. Do you have a similar experience or have you figured out how to get a stable team and keep them? A common challenge, but yes. Thankfully many years of hard work and refining the right folks, the mumsy type you mentioned at the start of the podcast, someone that’s perhaps a mum that’s looking for part-time hours, they are the ideal people because they don’t sound salesy, they’re reliable, they need to turn up to work because they’ve got bills to pay, but also they are disarming. When you hear a mumsy tone on the phone, you don’t feel threatened. You don’t feel that they’re going to immediately start pitching to you. So actually then you are disarmed and you are likely to then start sharing information with them. Also importantly, they’ve got life experience that they can throw in. Things like taking the kids to school and talk about university as you mentioned. And the young kids that you typically get as the SDR or telemarketer type applicants that are starting their career in sales, they don’t have any of that, so they don’t have any context that they can bring to conversations with people much older than them. So it takes a real knack from a personal skill level to have the right character to bring into those phone calls. Yeah, absolutely. And even though you are running an MSP marketing agency doing this for MSPs, this is still really relevant to MSPs themselves because the chances are, as the MSP owner, you are not going to do the calls. You’re going to get someone else to do it for you. And as you just heard there, and this is going to be boring interview, Dave, because we agree, we have exactly the same opinion about the right kind of people to hire. But for an MSP listening to this, that’s the person you want, which fits very well with my recommendation. I always say get a back to work mom, two to three days a week, two to three hours a day. It’s absolutely perfect. Dave, let’s talk about two issues. And I’m not going to ask you to give away any secret sauce because you’ve spent years perfecting this, but what do you do to get past the gatekeeper and what do you do to grab their attention? More often than not, especially if you’re targeting the SME or SMB space, whatever you want to call it, which most MSPs are, you don’t know who the person is that’s answering the phone. There’s this natural assumption that the gatekeeper’s going to be a receptionist type that doesn’t know what’s going on in the business and they can’t answer anything. But more often than not, it might be one of the owners of the business that just happens to answer the inbound calls or perhaps a middle manager or office manager type. So I would say always be careful to just consider that you might be talking to the boss when the phone gets answered. So don’t sort of immediately go in with an approach that this is a useless receptionist that I need to get past very quickly, which is a common trait of anyone starting their career in sales. So start by asking questions and very quickly someone that is perhaps quite junior in that job role, they will very quickly be out of their depth. So if they are not comfortable talking about the IT arrangements of the business, they can’t tell you the name of the provider that they use, how they rate the relationship, how many years they’ve worked together, very quickly they will become unstuck and they will either want to throw you like a hot potato over at a colleague that can answer the questions because they can’t, or they’ll dismiss you and get you off the phone. But we still find people that are in that capacity where it isn’t them. They will very quickly say, oh, it’s Sharon that you need to speak to. She’s the finance manager, she deals with that kind of thing. And so once you’ve got through to that right person, you were saying earlier that often people aren’t ready to switch IT provider, it is very much about finding who’s ready, willing, and able to even have the conversation, let alone make the switch. What’s your sort of general approach for doing that? So do you get them talking about their business or do you just jump straight into talking about IT? Absolutely. Always about business first. Nine times out of ten, if you’re selling to people that don’t have anyone in an IT capacity within their organisation, they’re not going to know anything about IT. They probably won’t even be able to tell you how many servers they’ve got. Maybe not even how many PCs they’ve got in the office. So they’re never going to be able to go into any depth about how they view things from a technical perspective. But people love moaning, especially us Brits. They will always happily moan about a service issue, communication problems, or that their IT is frustrating on a user workflow basis, particularly where tech has become invisible. They don’t have servers with blinking flashing lights in the corner anymore. That’s all evaporated to the cloud. So the IT that they’re using is all the apps and tools on their PC every day. And if they’re not getting an elegant experience, they feel as though they’re missing the trick on new advances in technology like AI and things like that. A lovely bit of FOMO is a great way to start a conversation. Where perhaps the incumbent MSP is failing to help them to fully leverage technology. Are there things that are laborious red tape that they’re having to do day in, day out that tech could do for them? Perhaps even looking at things like are they hiring. Are they recruiting a part-time finance person? And just go in there with a bit of a loaded assumption on, I can help you automate that person out of a job, so you don’t need to hire that part-time finance person. We’re starting to see the market turn to people now becoming aware of, yeah, we’d like to get more from tech. Yeah, our current IT provider, they’re okay, we phone them when something’s broken and they fix it, but they’re not helping us move forward. There’s no impetus to upgrade or reinvent ourselves to digitise our workflow so rapidly. Now, more and more small to mid-size firms are waking up to, oh yeah, tech isn’t a necessary evil, it’s actually something that will help us. So we’re finding more prospects now are prepared to talk about things at that level, and that’s creating new opportunity. Yeah, I’ll bet. And just one thing, you mentioned FOMO, just for anyone that doesn’t know that stands for Fear of Missing Out. Dave, do you see AI, is that coming up in conversations? Because obviously in our world we talk about AI all the time, everyone who’s listening to this or watching this on YouTube knows what Copilot is, right? But what about the ordinary business owners, are they aware of it? AI, yes, thankfully, because of how mainstream has gone. When ChatGPT became this wonderful thing that everyone was aware of, and as soon as you see it online everywhere, TV news is talking about it all the time, it’s hit the masses and people maybe slightly fearful of it. They don’t know where to get started. They can’t join the dots up between what they do day to day and where technology could actually help them. We hoped there would be this sort of impetus a few years ago when automation first became a thing, power automate power apps, all these wonderful things in 365 and Zapier and all these other tools that could hook up your CRM system with your marketing automation system or your website and all of those things. We were quite excited with that opportunity, but it fell flat because it didn’t make mainstream media. People didn’t get it. They think of automation and they think of a robot making cars in a factory, but AI has hit the mainstream. So now people have got that fear of something’s out there and we are not leveraging it. So we’re starting to see more conversations now from businesses where they’re interested in leveraging more from tech where they feel their incumbent doesn’t help them. And by the way, that’s far more exciting and interesting for a small business owner to want to spend time looking at than their cyber security, which people are still vehemently against or are ignorant or ambivalent where cyber security is concerned. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And that matches the feedback that I get from people I talk to who do do phone calls as well, MSPs in their business that cyber security is the number one issue if you run an MSP, but for business owners, it’s an annoyance, it’s a pain, it’s something on the side. And I think what MSPs have to do is use different approaches to reach people and then protect them from themselves in the actual service delivery. Final question for you, Dave, and that’s when you are phoning people obviously you are doing so on behalf of lots of MSPs. I know you work with MSPs around the world. When you are phoning, are you phoning to book video calls directly into live calendars, or do you have a different outcome that you’re going for? And based on your answer to that, how do you get that? Do you just out and out talk about, Hey, why don’t we arrange a 15 minute chat for you and the owner of the business? What’s your kind of approach to that? Yeah, gunning for a meeting has always got to be the right way forward. I think it’s about knowing the prospect well enough and the qualification criteria that you want to achieve. How will the meeting be helpful for the prospect? And ultimately, in the back of our mind, is there an opportunity for our MSP clients to go in there and leverage their skills and their portfolio to help that business? Sometimes we go as far as we can being outsourced, or even if it’s an internal SDR making calls within an MSP, there’s a limit to their knowledge. And often that’s a good excuse to say, I can’t help you any further with this, but I need to bring in my colleague that can help you and schedule a date and time, have that calendar open, have the availability there at hand so you can capture when someone is around and get the date in the diary, shoot them a calendar invite immediately on the back of that phone call. Events is another, a great way for telemarketing to be able to feed perhaps lower warmth leads into a business. When you look at that grade of lead, the marketing industry talks about MQL in terms of marketing qualified lead or SQL in terms of sales qualified lead. Those face-to-face appointments really should be those SQLs opportunities where there’s budget on the table, there’s momentum to move forward. There’s a real pain right now. But given that many prospects aren’t there yet, or they maybe in the fullness of time, how can you get some face time with prospects that are not yet ready to buy, but you can feed them with education. You can build your personal brand with them as well as the brand of your MSP. And that’s through webinars, events. It’s where you can provide education, perhaps if it’s industry specific or it’s around that FOMO piece. If we know we’ve got a pool of prospects we’ve spoken to where they’re considering AI is a gap in their business right now, then host an event where you can give them top five tips that you can implement AI in your business tomorrow. That kind of thing. Even if it’s prerecorded content, it allows you to build that all important connection and start to establish trust and awareness with those prospects. Love it. Love it. Thank you. Dave. You’ve been very generous with your secrets, with your knowledge, just tell us a little bit more about Wingman MSP Marketing. What do you do and how can we get in touch with you? Absolutely. So as Paul mentioned, we look after MSPs around the world that are looking to perhaps target a niche or diversify their business so they can stand out from the crowd of other MSPs. If they’re looking for direct outreach, they’re looking for more leads to their website, then we can help them reach more prospects more quickly through a whole myriad of marketing sources that we do with our team of roughly 25 people that we’ve got here now based out of the UK. And what’s the best way to get in touch with you, Dave? Oh, sorry. The most important thing, I’m a very good marketer if I don’t address that. This is our website, wingmanmspmarketing.com. A great conversation starter for us is our free website review. So if you are not sure about your presence right now, you’re not sure how unique you are, whether your personality is cutting across with prospects, fill in that review. We’ll come back to you with a video that’s personally tailored to you, your MSP and your website, and that’s a great way to get started. Paul’s Personal Peer Group Steven, whose MSP is based in London, UK, is looking forward to 2025 with an increased focus on getting organised. His question is: Which project management software do you recommend? Well, as you know, I’m not a tech, so I have no idea how this compares to the project management capabilities of all the PSAs that are out there. But I am very organised and I’m also very keen to see progress in my own business. And after trying lots of different pieces of project and collaboration software, I settled on something called Basecamp. Now, I believe that you can use this to drive internal projects such as your marketing and maybe even use it to deliver technical projects for clients as well. Here’s how we use it in the MSP Marketing Edge. We use Basecamp for every single thing that we’re doing that’s not just the kind of the routine running the business every day. It’s for the big development projects as well as small changes that we are making, kind of anything really. And all of our content production is also run through Basecamp. The beauty of it is that you can have unlimited projects. So in each project you get a full context for everything. So let’s say I’m in a project that’s about some small changes that we’re making to our member portal. So I can see the context of all the discussions that have happened, the task list that have been set up, what’s already been decided, what’s already been completed. I don’t have to wonder what this is about. I don’t have to go back through an email trail and try and figure it out. Everything to do with that project is there in one place in its own little silo. It’s really, really clever what they’ve put together. Now, as I say, we’ve tried loads of different bits of software over the years. We tried Monday.com, we tried Asana, I mean, we must have tried dozens of them, but we really liked Basecamp and we settled and married Basecamp. It’s elegant software. It looks beautiful as well, and the development of it is great. They’re continually adding new features and new things that you can do with it. I do also know a handful of MSPs who also love it. So give Basecamp a go. It might be the one for you. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with my guest, Dave Sutton , on LinkedIn, and visit his website . Recommended book: Atomic Habits by James Clear. Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it) 31:41

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 264 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it): Don’t confuse busyness with business. Keeping yourself busy doing things that you really shouldn’t be doing, at the expense of the things that matter is a form of procrastination. What technicians write in tickets can damage your brand: Your brand is YOU, and your team, and the way you communicate. And critically… how that makes people feel. Why successful MSPs use PowerPoint to tell stories: Eliminate death by PowerPoint using story telling to simplify complex information and help your presentations come to life. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Want to fire a problematic client but don’t know how? I have the answer… Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it) One of the dangers of doing a podcast every week and appearing in lots of YouTube videos is that at some point your friends and family stumble across your content. And every now and then I get a message from a friend saying, Hey, I just watched your latest video on YouTube, I’ve no idea what you were talking about Paul, but it seemed okay. Now, the reason that this is a risk is because I do try and put a lot of my life into my content, because as a working parent and a business owner myself, that helps you and me to relate to each other. So the story I want to tell you today is about a friend who I hope never stumbles across this recording because I know he will recognise himself immediately and no one likes to be talked about in a negative way. Now, this friend of mine runs his own business. Don’t worry, he’s not an MSP. In fact, what he does is almost irrelevant, but times sadly are not very good for him right now. He’s lost a lot of clients over the last few years and his business is not in great shape. We do occasionally talk about marketing. Of course, I give him as much advice as I can, but he rarely takes action on it. I think the problem is that he hasn’t yet emotionally dealt with the fact that a business that he’s been building up for decades has flattened out. In fact, it’s in decline now. He needs to do things differently to rescue it and turn it around. If you were in a situation like this where you’re actually struggling to meet payroll in some months, you’d think that your full attention would be on the rescue and the recovery, right? I mean, that would certainly be the case for me, but not for my friend because the other day when we were chatting and I asked what he was doing that day, he said he was going on a training course. Not a training course on anything that would be useful to him in terms of turning his business around or improving the service. It was a very low level training course around some minor changes to regulations regarding the service that he sells. So really, he could have just sent one of his staff or just skipped it altogether. It really wasn’t an important training course, but it was an entire day of his time. I was utterly gobsmacked when he told me about this because just a few days before, he was telling me that he didn’t have any time to implement all of the new marketing ideas that we discussed to help him win new clients. And then I had an epiphany. Him going on a training course was a form of procrastination. My friend had confused busyness with business. To him going on a training course, was doing some work, but the reality is it wasn’t productive work. It was just him passing the time and maybe not even having to think about his problems for a few hours. Maybe that was the appeal. People think procrastination is about doing nothing when you should be doing something. But procrastination comes in the form of us doing things that we really shouldn’t be doing at the expense of doing the things that matter. Now, I see this in marketing implementation all the time, and of course to an MSP, marketing is hard. It’s a dark art if you are actually a technical person, anything that’s hard is at risk of being held back through procrastination. Do you have this problem? Well, let me tell you what I’ve just agreed with my friend to see if this would help you. I took him out for a beer. I told him in a much gentler manner than I’ve told you how I thought he was procrastinating and then I agreed to be his accountability buddy. So what we’re going to do, we’re going to start this next week. We’re going to have a brief chat at the start of every week where he tells me about a couple of tasks he’s going to do to win new clients. So the tasks that he wants to implement that week. He’ll tell me about them at the start of the week and then at the end of the week, he has to give me a progress report. Now, as I say, we’re only going to start next week and I think it’s going to go well because what I think is going to happen is every time my friend catches himself procrastinating, he will remind himself that he doesn’t want to be on a phone call with me at the end of the week admitting he didn’t get those two or three tasks done. Now, I don’t care whether he gets them done or not, but internally to him, it’s very important that he gets those done. This is one of the core psychological weapons of influence as outlined by Dr. Robert Cialdini in his classic book, which is called Influence . The weapon is called commitment and consistency. When we say we’re going to do something, we want to be very consistent with following through and doing that because to be seen to do that is an important part of our self-image. So just by getting my friend to declare what he’s going to do and then holding him to account for that, he’s getting stuff done. And I know that he’s going to start to win new clients soon by implementing new marketing and he will rescue his business, which is fantastic. What a great thing that I can do to help him for just an investment of, 10, 15 minutes a week. Would this work for you? If you are struggling to get your marketing implemented, why not find yourself an accountability buddy? Now sadly, I can’t personally do it with you, but I bet you could find another MSP or just indeed another business owning friend, and it definitely needs to be someone who is a business owner and understands your world because then they won’t let you use the usual interruptions of, oh, we had a busy week as an excuse for not getting things done. If you do try this, will you let me know? I would love to see some examples of this being done successfully by MSPs. What technicians write in tickets can damage your brand Being a marketing expert is a little bit like being an IT expert. It’s a very broad canvas and just as you might be good at many things, but not blowing fluff out of an RS 232 port, I’m good at many marketing subjects, but not all of them. You’ll rarely hear me giving detailed advice on pay per click or search engine optimisation, SEO, as they’re very technical subjects that change constantly. Another area I’ve never really been comfortable discussing is branding. But recently I’ve been interviewing some very smart branding experts for future episodes of my podcast and it’s helped me get a better grip on what branding really is. It’s not your logo, it’s not the design of your website, it’s not your accreditations. Your brand is YOU and YOUR TEAM and the way that you COMMUNICATE. And critically how all of that makes people feel. Because that’s really what a brand is. It’s the reflection of how people feel about something. Their feelings affect whether they buy or not. Most purchases are driven by the heart rather than by the brain, especially picking a new MSP. So let’s take some big consumer brands. How do you feel about Microsoft, about Apple, about Coke or Pepsi? You’ll have negative or positive feelings towards these brands based on your past experiences with them. And of course, these big consumer brands, they spend millions every year to influence you. Well really a B2B brand like your MSP is no different, except you are not spending advertising dollars to try to change people’s emotional response to you and neither should you. The way that people feel is based on every possible kind of communication you do. That includes what’s on your website, what you say on social media, the blogs and the articles you write and the videos that you make. But it’s also affected by how the phone is answered, the way your technicians talk on live chat, what’s written in tickets. You see your brand is everything you do. And so the only way to influence that brand perception is to create the right culture within your business. Because you can’t control freak everything every technician says every day, and you don’t really want to, right? That’s the route to divorce and a heart attack. But you can set out what your MSP’s mission is and constantly train and encourage your team to serve that mission with everything they do. As an example, my MSP Marketing Edge’s mission is to make marketing and winning new clients easy for MSPs. And I have a team of 12 and a constant focus on this mission in all of our internal conversations, which allows my team to make the correct decisions every day without having to refer back to me. So whatever a member of ours asks, my team can think If I do this or if I advise this does it make marketing easy for this MSP? And when you add that up over a thousand communications, it becomes a solid, clear brand, based on how people feel. So let me finish with three questions for you. No.1: Do you know how you want people to feel about your MSP? No.2: Is this reflected in your business’s mission? And No.3: If I asked your technicians tomorrow, would they be very clear on what that mission is? Why successful MSPs use PowerPoint to tell stories Featured guest: Emily Schneider is a PowerPoint design specialist who helps business leaders drive measurable growth by tapping into the often overlooked and underappreciated aspect of marketing – visual storytelling and presentation design. Emily views presentations as strategic tools, blending narratives and visuals to guide informed decisions and empower clients to present with confidence. As a podcast guest, Emily shares insights on the power of well-designed presentations to boost sales, strengthen relationships, and enhance communication. A trusted collaborator, she helps businesses captivate and inspire with a touch of storytelling magic. As an MSP, if you think about all of the marketing tools at your disposal, you probably wouldn’t think that PowerPoint was one of them. But of course, PowerPoint is just a way of presenting information to people. And anywhere you can communicate, you can improve that communication to influence people. My special guest today is an expert in telling stories through PowerPoint and using it to drive sales. Hi, I am Emily Schneider. I’m a visual storyteller specialising in PowerPoint design. I have a magical knack of simplifying complex information to help stories come to life. And what a fantastic skill. And as you and I were just saying just before we started recording this interview, what a great world we live in that you can have a very, very, very specific talent and skillset and be able to work with people all around the world in all sorts of different industries. You certainly couldn’t have done that 20 years ago. Emily, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. We are going to talk about how you use visual aids such as, and I know you specialise in PowerPoints, but how you use those to influence people to choose your MSP to buy more services from you, and of course, just generally to communicate better. So let’s first of all learn a little bit about you. So whereabouts are you based and what got you to this point in your life where you have this set of superpowers? Oh, thanks Paul. I’m so happy to be here. I’d love to tell more. So I am based outside of Chicago, in the suburbs, in Arlington Heights. My journey began when I was 16 with my sweet 16 invitation which was the first thing I ever digitally created. What I remember most was about the way people responded and the smiles and the emotional connection that helped when I created something that then somebody responded to, and then in the end, they all showed up for my party. So it was fabulous. It was a win-win. What I have learned is that my creative curiosity and my emotional intelligence or just my ability to want to help people has created this beautiful harmony with my design skills and my skillset. So I came from the agency marketing world. I was an art director. I worked on shopper marketing and more traditional below the line stuff. But what I loved was connecting with the decision makers and helping to tell the story so that they bought the product of what we were selling. Those visuals for the marketing materials. And I have streamlined from a general creative director into niching myself into PowerPoint because that’s where my magic happens. That’s my zone of genius. I see the world in simple forms and shapes, and I love being able to bring that to other people so that they can tell their stories with more confidence and more clarity and create stronger connections. Again, I’m such an empathetic person. I love connecting with people. And so when I can empower somebody else to do that and I get to be in my zone of genius and then they get to shine bright, win-win for everybody. So it is pretty magical that I get to do what I do, I think because it definitely lights me up and I love helping other people light up too. That’s amazing. That’s great to hear. It really is. And there’s something about PowerPoint that seems to bring out the worst in people, isn’t there? I mean, I had a corporate career up until I started my first business 20 odd years ago, and I’ve sat through more than enough bad PowerPoint sessions. But even then as a business owner, I’ve been presented to, I’ve been sold at, what is it about PowerPoint that seems to make us just make bad decisions and make bad design choices? Well, I think it goes back to, and I think the term I always hear is like death by PowerPoint. Everybody does. It used to be like a negative word, to be honest, in my world too. It’s kind of cringey. I think that’s part of the reason I have embraced it and love it even more is the challenge to just change those expectations to flip the script for other people. But PowerPoint is a tool, it’s a storytelling tool. It is a presentation tool. It’s not meant for us to be brainstorming and to be creating ideas and to be building things. It’s meant to house that information that we bring in from offline and bring it together. And it’s kind of that package in that wrapper. I think death by PowerPoint comes, or as I say, the cringiness comes from a couple things. One is when we don’t know what to say or how to say it, we over communicate and so we start to share everything or we think we should tell them everything we know and we lose that kind of connection with our audience. And now we’re just cringing at these slides full of data or information that doesn’t make sense. Also, I think PowerPoint does a great job of trying to help us make it better, but what we lose is the simplicity, consistency and intentionality that comes with really strong stories, whether they’re verbal, whether you have the supporting presentations or just in a conversation. And when you can be intentional with how you tell your story, you create that stronger connection and you’re more seen and you’re more heard. And again, so I think sometimes we default, thinking that we’re making it easier but we’re actually making it more complex for ourselves. And lack of training. People from the corporate world, even as a designer having to work in PowerPoint to get to my clients, nobody ever trains you on presentations or how to use the platform. You’re just kind of thrown in and expected to use it. Some people have a way with it, where it just comes naturally but a lot of us don’t. And so I think there’s that beautiful balance and I love helping to train and educate and do for people because it is a tool that has a lot of power if you use it right. I’ve forgotten that phrase, death by PowerPoint. And you’re absolutely right. And what’s probably the most depressing thing in the world is where someone presents the PowerPoint. I always thought of PowerPoint as a visual aid to help you with the thing that you’re trying to say, but when someone brings it up and it’s on the screen and they say, right, second slide, third bullet down. So as you can see here in this 12 point text, and then they read the words that are in front of you. And I think that’s the death by PowerPoint. You talked about storytelling there, do you think that part of the problem is people often don’t know how to tell a story and so therefore the PowerPoint they’re creating is trying to back up something that isn’t yet fully formed? Does that make sense? I mean, it totally makes sense. When you say why is there this challenge, I actually want to back up to the presenter reading all the slides. I kind of described it as, and I like to empower people to be conversation conductors. So think about it, when you go to see an orchestra, you have this conductor that stands on stage. He stands up in front of the orchestra, you have all these different sections, all these musicians, and he helps the music come to life. He says, when instruments start, how loud, how soft, when they go, when they don’t go, how they harmonise together. And as this audience member, you create this emotional connection as you hear this harmonious, beautiful sound. And so when you think of your slides as that harmonious music to your voiceover, to your story, I think that changes the way you present or that changes the way you set yourself up to tell your story. I think the other challenge like you say, is that people don’t have a plan or they don’t know what their story is. I find a lot of my clients don’t really know, they know they need something as visuals, but they don’t have to just be a picture. A visual story is highlighting and focusing on what the key topic, those key takeaways, what your main objective is, and streaming that through so that you can really lead your audience side by slide, section by section to pay attention to the story and highlight what you want. Data is visuals, copy can be visuals, pictures of course, illustrations, icons, there’s so many ways. But again, I always preach simplicity, consistency and intentionality. And when you can simplify what you’re saying, be consistent with your treatments and be intentional with your choices, you start to set yourself up for a strong visual story. There’s really no other way around it. Yeah, no, I love that. And it is funny, back in October, I went to ScaleCon 24 in Las Vegas, and I was one of the speakers. I did the keynote marketing talk at the end of day one. And Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe did the wrap up on day three. I thought my PowerPoint was okay verging on good. And I’d have two big words on a slide and I’m thinking I’ve nailed that. And then when Nigel was doing his talk, his PowerPoint was a mix of exactly what you’ve just said, a mix of images, and he had graphics but not overly graphics. His whole thing was structured around different parts of the brain. And so he used – and I can’t remember exactly, I’m sorry, Nigel, I can’t remember the exact thing you said, but then people don’t do that, they go away from it, remember how they feel which was, that was epic – but he used the brain and related it back to technology, and he was using the visuals to back up the story that he was telling us from the stage. Initially I’m like, this is brilliant. And then I felt a bit depressed thinking because I’m going back next year and I’m thinking, I’ve got to up my PowerPoint game. Seriously, I’ve just given you a sales lead by the way there, Emily, just in case you weren’t completely obvious what that was. So when you, and I know you’ve worked with MSPs and you’ve worked with all sorts of different businesses around the planet, when you work with someone on their PowerPoint, and obviously you are coming at it from a design point of view, but I guess the last thing you look at is what the design should be when you are looking at a PowerPoint. I mean, let’s go back a step. When you start working with someone, do you have to look at it from a what point are you trying to get over point of view or do you even have to much earlier than that, have a conversation about here’s why the default templates in PowerPoints aren’t going to help you out and here’s why you need something bespoke. Or actually, by the time people reach you, are they ready to invest in something better? By the time people reach me, they’re usually seeking something better. I do work within existing templates because sometimes you have to, but I’m a rule refiner, so give me a template and let’s see how we can push it, right? Because templates are built for standard information. When you’re giving keynotes, when you’re telling a new story, when you’re giving business updates, you don’t always have existing slides or existing template layouts that navigate or that will set you up for success. And so we have to be, again, intentional with what we’re saying and how we’re saying it. But I think that there’s so much power in that. I just want to hit on a little bit more that neuroscience, as you were saying, like Nigel was talking about the brain. So we naturally will hear something and we’ll get kind of sidetracked on our own story. Again, you’re talking about his brain and I’m thinking about this neuroscience that comes with presentation and storytelling. I automatically went into my own story. So naturally as an audience member, when you’re there listening, however long that is, you do lose engagement, you lose them. And so when you can simplify that and elevate that visual story, you keep them engaged. So I wouldn’t harp too much on your few words or your simple slides because what you did is you gave your audience the key message or those key notes that you were talking about during while that slide was up. So if they heard something and they went in their own head, they could easily come back because you’ve given them those key points that are really easy to digest. Again, that slide, third bullet, 12 point font, I’m not going to be able to find that again, I’m gone for that whole slide, but when you make it really simple, you keep your audience engaged. We’re also 65% more likely to retain information when it’s visually designed. So if you think about the power of, again, highlighting copy, visuals using colour, using really streamlined data, it helps your audience listen better. We all also are used to all this information coming at us at all the time. So when we can set ourselves up to lay out the story that follows our verbal story, it becomes so easy for people to be engaged. Think about picture books. They do a beautiful job of telling stories and you don’t always need words. And it’s the storytelling aspect of it that I wanted to pick up on next, because I remember I’ve read hundreds of business books, and particularly the psychology of business and marketing, and I’ve read something somewhere, and it’s not coming back to me in which book, but something somewhere that we as humans respond to stories and thrive on storytelling because back in like 12,000 years ago, before we could write, that was the only way we had to pass information on from one generation to another. We would tell stories around the campfire while the dinosaurs were roaming around us, and that’s how we passed information on. And so today, if you and I were doing a podcast interview and we just listed fact, bullet point, bullet point, fact, fact, that wouldn’t be as compelling as us talking and actually telling stories. And I just told you a story of me sitting at the back of an audience watching a master at work and feeling my soul deflate because I thought his stuff is better than my stuff. And of course, I want to be the very best I can be. And that’s a story, right? That’s not a fact. That was a story with emotions within it. And I believe there are parts of our brain, or if you put someone inside a functional MRI machine, so that’s like an MRI where you see in real time what’s happening, and if you read someone some facts, one part of their brain lights up, you put those same facts into a story such as a fairytale, for example, which of course, they’re the classic stories, multiple parts of the brain light up, and that’s why we remember that. My question is, if you are using PowerPoint or doing a presentation, whether it’s a sales meeting, whether it’s a strategic review with a client, maybe even if you’re talking in front of a room and you don’t consider yourself to be a natural storyteller, even though all humans have that ability built in, Emily, where would you start with starting to pull out how do I get this across within a story? Yeah, that’s a great question. So I just want to be super transparent. That is not my expertise, but I do coach my clients to help craft their story better. So where I start and what I have actually on my website is a tip page with four steps, and the first one is really you have to first start with knowing who your audience is and what your key objectives are, what you want them to think, feel, and do. You have to lay that out before you get started. And then the second phase is crafting your narrative. And I don’t think that should be done on a computer or on any kind of screen. I think I actually encourage post-it notes and a marker or a sharpie. So you can’t really erase either. Just start writing down what you want to say. And when you have those post-it notes, what you’ll start to see is a cadence of a story. You’ll start to see that set up. So you’re going to start actually with the end in mind. You’re going to lay the groundwork of what the goal is, why you brought everybody in the room. Again, we all come from different places. So when you can get everybody on the same page, you’re going to connect with them, then you’re going to just like a traditional fairytale or story, you’re going to start from the beginning. You’re going to talk about the key updates, remind them why they’re there. That’s where your personal narrative story comes in. So you create this emotional connection. I love how you’re saying it’s just part of our human nature and our human evolution that stories are how we share information. It’s how we know things from the past. I mean, you can get very technical with biblical and testaments and all that stuff too. That’s where it is. That’s creation, right? But once you start them, you engage them. Once you tell them what they’re going to do there and why they’re there and you connect them emotionally with some kind of story. It doesn’t have to be super personal, but something that is relevant to that audience. You then go to the middle part, which is where you give them all the, that’s the heart of your presentation. You spend the most time there. It’s laying the details and the data and the specifics and really telling them where this tension is or what you need to update or what you’re teaching them. And then at the end, you’re going to wrap it up. You’re going to drive home that impact. You’re going to remind them why they’re there. You’re going to create a call to action and you’re going to summarise your key takeaways or your key points. Again, we need that kind of wrapper and that information just again, like a story. You set it up, you lay all this drama and what’s happening and these character development, and then you kind of bring it all together and there’s this beautiful ending or there is an ending of some sort or that call to action that leads to the next thing that engages in the right conversation. So you drive your audience along so that you get them where you want at the end, but you got to know where you’re going before you even start. Yeah, no, I love that. And you said that that’s on your website. We’ll give out your website address in just a few minutes. You mentioned about religion, it’s just occurred to me that all Bibles are rule books told through storytelling. If you look at it that way, if you take the faith aspect out of it, that’s what a Bible is, right? This is how you should live your life. These are the good things, these are the bad things, and it was a very, very easy way of communicating that to people who couldn’t read because obviously the vast majority of people couldn’t read, but they could go into church and enjoy stories thousands of years ago. So that’s absolutely fascinating. Final question for you, Emily, and I’m hoping this is a chuckle moment for you. What’s the worst thing that you’ve ever seen in a PowerPoint? Oh, that is a really good question. I think it’s the death by PowerPoint. It’s the slide that has everything up there with all your voiceover and everything’s black and white. So yeah, I think it’s just that overwhelmingness of like, I’m going to shut this down and come back another day because it doesn’t make any sense. It’s just words, and I don’t want to read them. I’m a visual person. I don’t want to read all the words. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Emily, thank you so much. Thank you for your time. Let’s talk about what you do for MSPs. So tell us what you do and please give us your website address and how we can get in touch with you. So like I said, I describe myself as a visual storyteller. My specialisation is in simplifying complex content and data and information. I think I work a lot with MSPs to help them synergise information so that they can lead their conversation so that they can present with confidence, with knowledge, they can create those authentic connections that drive impact, that create engagement, and that leave a lasting impression for your audience to do and act as you want so your business can move forward. And my website is Iamemilyschneider.com. I’m also super active. I love connecting and networking on LinkedIn as well, so you can find me there. Paul’s Personal Peer Group This week we have a question from Gordon in Arizona, who has had quite a tough week with his MSP. His question is, How do I fire a client? Oh, nothing beats the feeling of firing a noisy idiot relieving you and your team from their crippling mental and emotional burden, and trust me on this, I promise you, 1,000000%, new revenue always, always turns up to replace their toxic cash. Life’s too short to tolerate these fools. So here are three steps to make it easy for you. Number 1: Don’t overthink it. By the time you are considering firing a client, your team already hates them. You’ll always be slow to fire clients because you are keeping an eye on your cashflow and your profitability, the bigger picture stuff. And sometimes bad clients just do get better, but if they get rid of them. Much of the time, they’re so obnoxious that they’ve been fired by suppliers before because they’re not just horrible to you. They’re horrible to everyone. Get rid of them. Number 2: When you do this, tell them in the most straightforward way you can pick up the phone and just tell it like it is. Our businesses are not a good fit for each other. We are releasing you from your contract in X days time. And we will work fully to hand over to your new IT support company and be very wary of introducing any ambiguity. They need to hear it a hundred percent straight and definite, and they’ll probably rant and rave, so just take it. Just take it and don’t be defensive. Don’t be drawn into their world of hate. Acknowledge their complaints, but please avoid an argument. And if they do threaten to ruin you or put this all over social media, just ignore them. People like this can do little real harm. In fact, one bad review says more about them than it does about you. But do remember to confirm the conversation, maybe even send it out tracked mail. Actually, physically send it to them in the mail so that you can prove that you delivered the news and their deadline to them. Number 3: It’s simply to cooperate fully with their new MSP. You are a professional, so make this a textbook handover and resist the temptation to warn their new MSP. The less you’re involved with your soon to be ex client, the better. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with my guest Emily Schneider on LinkedIn and check out her website . Mentioned book: Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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How to create the perfect MSP about us page 27:53

15 weeks geleden27:53

27:53

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 263 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… How to create the perfect MSP about us page: An about us page must be about the people and the core values of your business. But it’s not really about us, it’s about the prospect. It’s a selling page. It takes 50+ touchpoints to get a new client for your MSP: Don’t run marketing campaigns – set up a marketing system. Long-term a system will outperform any campaign you could run, I promise you. A Google ads strategy for MSPs: If you want to try Google ads, don’t try to be all things to all people. You need to be very specific to stand out in a competitive market. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Christine from an MSP in Portland wants to know why I’m so insistent that MSPs hire a phone person to contact prospects. How to create the perfect MSP about us page The two most important pages on your website are the homepage and the about us page. Why? Because those are the pages that most people are going to look at, the ones they’re most going to be influenced by because they’re most likely to land on your website on the homepage. And then of course they want to know what you’re about. They want to know who the people are behind the business, so they’ll head over to the about us page. Let’s have a look at some of the elements that you should have on your MSPs about us page to make sure it delivers the most value to your business. Now, where a homepage is almost like a summary of the whole business, the about us page is about the people and the core values of the business. So of course you still have an attention grabbing headline, although a different one to the one that you have on the homepage. And of course you’d still have your social proof, data capture maybe, and certainly a call to action, plus of course videos and photographs of real people. It’s just that you present those in different ways than you would do on your homepage. The most important thing on your about us page is your story. But it needs to be presented in a way that’s relevant to the reader. And actually it’s not really about you – you can talk a little bit about you and how you are really into tech, and as a child and you are obsessed with computers, and as a teenager and you’ve been doing it now for 800 years and then 20 years ago you had an entrepreneurial seizure and you decided you’ve got to do your own things, your own way, etc, etc. I mean, all of that is good. In fact, actually you can take that backstory, you can embellish it, you can enhance it, but you have to tell it in a way that makes it interesting to the reader. Because you being obsessed with computers, that’s not really of interest to them until they realise or you tell them that it means that you are across every technology detail in your business, and you only hire people who are incredibly attention focused, very good technology people, and they’re very good at following systems and documenting success, and all of that kind of thing. So, you take your story and you keep flipping it round and looking at it from a different angle so that actually your story is about the reader. Even an about us page is not really an about us page, it’s about the prospect. It’s a selling page. That’s what it really is. So of course something else you’d do on there is you’d put some case studies on there. Now, if you’ve got case studies on your homepage, you can repeat those, and video case studies are absolutely fine, you can repeat those across the site. You can also repeat just sort of normal printed case studies or PDF case studies that they could download or even just webpage case studies as well. You don’t have to have those completely separate between the homepage and the about us page, but you do need to make sure you have some kind of case studies on your about us page. People go to an about us page because they want to know about the people, they want to know who it is they might end up buying from. But also of course with the case studies, they want to see who else you are working with. And case studies are typically more influential because it’s a form of social proof. It makes you appear safe to people who are thinking of buying from you. When they can see that other people like them have trusted you and continue to trust you, that makes you a very safe pair of hands to them. That’s what we’re trying to get them to feel. And then the next thing you need is something about what drives you and your team. How do you all jump out of bed every morning? Do you all run into the office? You can’t wait to get your hands on a keyboard and do all those proactive checks to stop things going wrong and how you actually feel honoured to protect people. You feel honoured and proud to think that a thousand people in your local area trust you every day to keep them working. They trust you and your team. That’s the kind of intent and the kind of language that we want to see on your about us page. We want drive, we want passion. We want to see and feel and smell that passion, because passion sells. And the more passion you can put actually into your overall website, but especially your about us page, the more you’re going to connect with people, the more you’re going to engage with them. And then I suggest you put on some stuff about your family if you can, if it’s acceptable to you to do this. Put on a photo of you, your other half, maybe even your kids. I’ve seen quite a few MSPs do that. And it’s great because it makes you real. It makes you not just an IT person and the owner of the business. It makes you a wife or a husband or a mom or a dad. And this is really, really important because it makes you human. You will find a photo of me and my child on my MSP Marketing Edge website. And again, that helps us to connect because it shows you that I’m a real person. People do business with people. They don’t do business with businesses, people buy from people. This is really important to understand. So let’s show them the people. You almost want to reflect anything which makes you connectable. Let’s say for example, you are really into a local sport, let’s say football. And you might have a piece on your about us page about how much you’re into football, perhaps even with a photo review in your local team kit or photograph with some of the players or something. If you are really into, let’s say playing golf, you’d have a photo of you with your golf sticks. I don’t do golf obviously, you can tell by that. But if you do, again, that makes you relatable to anyone that does golf. If you adore where you live, absolutely adore it, then have a photo of you next to one of the big landmarks in your town or something like that. The kind of landmark that everyone would recognise. It’s all about connections. If people buy from people, you’ve got to show them the real you. And I’ll tell you what else you can use is a bit of business nostalgia. Nostalgia is great. So if you’ve got a photo of you in your first van or some kind of photo of you at your first desk back in the day or with an old computer, there is that famous photo floating out there of Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Sat at his first desk in his garage in Seattle in 1995 and the desk was made of an old door. And that’s still a thing that they do now at Amazon. They use desks made out of doors because it’s all part of their heritage, it’s all part of their nostalgia, which is great. Not that Amazon needs an about us page, but you get the idea. Now you can do exactly the same thing. Show us something from the past. If you’ve got, maybe it could be a photo of you as a child sat with a really vintage computer or just you without the grey hair. Something like that would be an absolute great piece of business nostalgia. And people really do love this and they connect to it. Now of course, it’s not just about you, the owner, the leader on the about us page, you should have some profiles and pictures of your team. They only need to be like 25, 30 word profiles. They don’t need to be huge, perhaps just about what they do in their spare time or something quirky. You could even do like a mini interview with them – what’s their favourite food, what’s their favourite place to visit, what’s their favourite sport, which is the best Star Wars movie – that kind of thing. And you can just do little profiles of the team. Again, works really well with a photo of them on your about us page. And then one final thing to go on this page, and you’re not going to be surprised by this. It is of course a call to action because we need to have that. Every single page of your website needs a call to action. And the very best one right now, it still is your live calendar so people can book in a 15 minute discovery call with you. That’s really important because that about us page is a core sales page. It takes 50+ touchpoints to get a new client for your MSP: It always makes me a little bit sad when I hear an MSP owner is pinning all of their growth hopes on a new marketing campaign. Because campaigns are typically one-offs, a burst of intense activity followed by a return to the default of intending to do marketing but not getting around to it. I know that marketing campaigns are really popular. Lots of vendors give them away free as a value add. I can see how as an MSP, your brain will fill up with all this delicious dopamine when you see a campaign and you feel excited by the possibilities. Here’s the fundamental problem that you’re fighting. Managed Services is one of the most unusual sales on the planet, and people only buy when they are ready to buy. There’s almost nothing you can do to speed this up. The big problem with running a campaign is that it’s a one-off burst of activity. So you do some marketing on a Monday, but they’re not ready to buy yet. So you do some more marketing on a Wednesday, but they’re not ready to buy yet. On Friday, you need a rest so you don’t bother with marketing and yet that’s the day that they wake up ready to buy, but you are not there in front of them. And don’t believe that they will remember you or your MSP’s name and brand. They really won’t unless you have a marketing message in front of them at the exact moment that their brain is ready to see it. Trust me, a proportion of your clients don’t know what your MSP is called. So you haven’t got a hope in hell of your prospects knowing what the name of your business is. This is why my three-step marketing system is the most powerful idea in MSP marketing. It’s easy to understand, but also solid and powerful. Build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. And the idea is to build a relationship with someone months and years before they’re ready to leave their current MSP. This is where the idea of 50 plus touchpoints comes from. If you Google it, it’ll say that you need seven or eight touchpoints with a prospect. Well, not for what you sell. You need an ongoing never ending stream of touchpoints so that the morning they wake up and they’re ready to talk, boom, you are there in front of them. Whether that’s tomorrow, whether that’s May next year, whether it’s someday in 2026. And your touch points might include daily LinkedIn posts that they see now and again. A weekly email that they open just once a month because they don’t open that many emails. A monthly printed newsletter that sits on their desk waiting to be read or gets passed onto a colleague or something like that. A regular blog and video on your website that they sometimes read. A weekly LinkedIn newsletter they see in their feed or they open in their email occasionally. A short conversation about their business that they had with your colleague on the phone. A buyer’s guide that they’ve flick through, which tells them how to pick an MSP. A LinkedIn message from you that they acknowledge but they don’t really remember. All of these are touch points and they can all be swept up into a marketing system with tasks you do daily, tasks you do weekly, and tasks you do monthly. And best of all, you personally don’t need to do these tasks. Much of the work that I’ve just talked about there can be delegated or outsourced to someone else. A Google ads strategy for MSPs: Featured guest: John Horn is the CEO of StubGroup, a digital advertising agency and a premier Google ad agency. Subgroup has helped over 2000 clients, across 15k campaigns, with their paid ads and suspension issues. They have generated over half a billion dollars in revenue for their clients across many different verticals including ecommerce, lead generation, B2B, B2C, local services, and more. John has also taught digital advertising to over 100,000 students via online courses and the videos he produces through StubGroup‘s YouTube channel have received millions of views. When he’s not marketing, John loves spending time with his wife and two little boys and exploring the Texas countryside he calls home. Most MSPs have considered doing Google ads at some point. It kind of makes sense because the very nature of Google ads is it puts you in front of a lead at the exact moment that they’re looking for someone like you. The problem is Google ads are very expensive and they do generate a lot of noise. My guest today has a very good take on the right kind of strategy for Google ads and some suggestions how you can use it as a channel for lead generation into your MSP. Hey, this is John Horn and I am the CEO of a StubGroup, a digital advertising agency. And we’re especially going to be talking about Google pay per click (PPC) today because it’s one of those things that you look at it 20 years ago and everyone seemed to be doing Google pay per click and paying pence, just pennies for their adverts. Whereas these days you can be paying $10, $20 or more. And lots of MSPs have tried it, lots of MSPs have spent a ton of cash and then burnt out within a week. And John, I’m hoping, I know you work with a lot of MSPs doing their pay per click, and I’m hoping you can give us some insights today on how to use pay per click to generate leads for an MSP. So let’s first of all look at you and your career. So what’s your background and how did you get into this wonderful and very technical world of pay per click? Yeah, I’ve been doing this world of pay per click for over a decade at this point. Prior to that was in just various marketing roles and then morphed into a StubGroup where I’m at now. And so I’ve been able to track that journey, like you said, of going from very inexpensive traffic to where we are today. Yeah, I mean it’s crazy. My best friend actually, he built a business up, we’re talking 2002, 2003, and he was spending the equivalent of $120,000 a week on adverts, which is insane back then, right? I mean that would be insane today, but that was doubly insane. But what he discovered, because he was getting, he did tell me the figures a couple of years ago, he was spending let’s say three pence or four pence, he was based in the UK, so that’s let’s say 10 cents for a click and he was making a dollar in revenue for every 10 cents. And when you broke it down to you spend 10 cents and then three, four weeks later someone’s got through your sales process and you make a dollar, who wouldn’t do that, right? Who wouldn’t work up to $120,000? It was a training business that he built that up on, that same model wouldn’t work today because today of course, that same advert isn’t costing 10 cents, it’s costing $10, $20, $30, $40, but may still only bring in that $10. Is that what you see as one of the primary challenges to doing pay per click, people understanding the economics of it? I would say that’s one of the primary challenges. Yeah, like you said, it’s become very competitive, so cost per clicks are quite high. So it becomes crucial to figure out okay, with how high the cost per clicks are, we have to be laser targeted with what searches we’re going after, what keywords do we want to target because it’s really easy to, like you mentioned, waste money and get those economics out of scale. Although of course for an MSP, if they win a new client today and let’s say that’s a thousand dollars a month monthly recurring revenue, they will keep that client for 5, 7, 10 years. So that thousand dollars a month becomes $120,000 of what we call lifetime value. So I guess if I was to ask any MSP, would you spend a thousand bucks today to win 120,000 pounds worth of revenue, albeit you’ve got to stick around for 10 years to do the work. You’d think many MSPs would say yes to that. So is that the kind of thinking that you bring to pay per click campaigns or do you have a different way of looking at it? Yeah, lifetime value is super important. So it’s coming to it and saying, okay, obviously there is going to be a timeframe. It’s going to take a while often to close leads, but then hopefully they’re going to stick around for a long time. And so what is the average lifetime value of your clients? What are the different kind of buckets? And then we got to factor that into, okay, what is a realistic profitable amount that we can spend or that we can put into test budgets to see if we can get the right quality of leads on the Google ads side of things. If you’re like, hey, I can only afford to spend a hundred dollars for a new client, Google ads is not going to be the right place for you. You got to go somewhere else. Yeah, absolutely. So Google ads is definitely something you don’t do if you haven’t got cash available. I guess is that something in your experience that makes it something just bigger MSPs do? So when they’ve got to the point where they’re experimenting with different marketing channels and they add pay per click on? I’ve definitely seen it be a strategy for smaller ones as well. Good example, we just recently onboarded a relatively small local MSP who’s looking to Google ads as a way to generate more business. And one of the key strategy things that we’re working on with them and with some of the other MSPs we’ve worked with as well is… Don’t try to be all things to all people. MSPs offer a lot of services, but if you advertise every service or at a high level like “IT support near me”, it’s never going to work. Because they don’t have enough budget to test and iterate for all those different services. So we’re saying, let’s niche down. What are the things that are really working well for you right now? What’s setting you apart? What are the questions you’re solving when people come to you? And let’s hyper specifically target those things and create landing pages around that and so forth so that you can stand out from the very competitive market that they’re in. Yeah, that makes sense. And essentially what you are saying is because cheap traffic has been gone for 15 years, you can’t muck about with pay per click, you’ve got to have a strategy for it. So let me give you a scenario. Let’s take an MSP. Say they’ve got somewhere between five, seven technicians. So you’ve got the owner, you’ve got five to seven technicians, they want 20 seat clients. So companies that have got 20 users or more, 20 devices, and they’re looking for those companies that have got an urgent need. Because they know that when someone comes in and actually the server’s been playing up for a couple of days, or they’ve had some kind of cyber security incident or there’s malware or something, it creates a level of urgency. And that urgency is obviously very good for revenue today and converting them onto being a proper managed services client. So in that instance, and let’s assume they’re in a normal, average sized town, so they’re not in LA or New York City or some crazy crazy place like that where there’s a thousand MSPs per street, it is nothing like that. It’s just a normal town, there’s perhaps 10, 20 MSPs in that town. What would you recommend as a general strategy for pay per click in a scenario like that? First of all, like you said, identifying those urgencies. Figuring out what are the top things that are making clients right now from the other traffic sources that they’re using, convert. Be willing to make that move over. Is it like you said, is it cyber security issues? Is it, our server is down? Whatever. And then let’s identify those things and target those things very specifically. So if I’m having server issues, my server is down, I need to switch to another MSP, what am I searching on Google that indicates I have that problem and I’m looking for a solution? And then we’re going to target that very specifically, those keywords. We’re going to have ads that are very, very specifically targeted towards that and kind of capturing the urgency factor. And then super important as well, the landing pages we send people to, they have to build upon that as well. I don’t want to just send them to my homepage that says, here’s all the things we do. I want to send them to a page that says, you have this need, we’re going to fix it today. Call us right now. We make this change. Here’s what we do. Here’s why you trust us, etc. And then go up to the races and test and see, all right, is there enough traffic for these different areas that we’re actually getting leads from it? Or if not, maybe we need to pivot and try a different service or a different need and work our way through to find the ones that are working and sticking. Yeah, no, that sounds like a sensible strategy. I know nothing at a technical level about pay per click, but I do read sort of broad principles, and I remember reading a long time ago that if your pay per click advert, as you say, says as part of the headline, We can fix your server today , I mean, no one would promise that, but if that was the headline, then you are absolutely right, the landing page needs to repeat the same message. You are wasting your money if it just goes through to the homepage. Actually of the pay per click I see MSPs doing, many of them immediately make that exact mistake that they’ll send this expensive paid traffic that’s just cost them $20 for a click, and they send them to their general homepage, whereas why has someone clicked this message? Because that’s the problem they’ve got, so let’s address that’s problem, let’s get them on the phone or whatever is the case. That’s really interesting. And you mentioned about levels of traffic. I mean, if we take that normal town with 20 MSPs that we were talking about, there’s not going to be hundreds of people typing in every day server crashed or red screened or something like that. So do you have a gut feel for what’s a good level of traffic for a keyword or a key term, or do you go more on what the data tells you? Yeah, we definitely always look at the data and we’ve got tools that we can use to forecast and see if it looks like there’s enough traffic to justify going after this keyword. If there is a keyword where there’s so little traffic per month that Google doesn’t think it’s worth serving ads on, they’ll actually give it a label, we’ll call it low search volume. And even if somebody randomly does search that, it might not even actually show an ad because Google’s like there’s just not enough search volume. So you’ve got to figure out that sweet spot between keywords that are still very laser focused, but that are not low search volume, and it takes some time and some work. Usually it’s a combination of using tools like Google’s keyword planner and other things to estimate traffic, and then literally just running the campaigns and seeing. That’s the beautiful thing with pay per click, if no one’s searching for something it’s not costing you money to go after it because no one’s clicking. So you can, for free, test and find out whether or not there is traffic for particular phrases or searches. Or it’s not pay per click, it’s paperclip, as my daughter when she was about seven and she heard me talking about pay per click and she said, oh, daddy, do you want paperclips? You don’t have to pay for those. That was so sweet. Kids are like that, aren’t they? Now let’s talk about remarketing, that kind of strategy that we just talked about there. Would you use remarketing or retargeting? And John, could you actually start by just telling us what exactly remarketing is. Absolutely. So remarketing is basically the annoying ads that follow you around after you go look at a pair of shoes, and then you see those shoes everywhere else online. But at a bigger picture level, it’s very important and very impactful where, if I go to a website, especially if I’m researching MSP, there’s a very good chance I’m not going to reach out right away. I need to maybe talk to somebody else. I’m looking at different options, I’m thinking through things, etc. And so with the remarketing, you’re able to serve ads through Google’s display network, you can do it through Facebook and other places as well. And basically follow the people who’ve been to your website around the web and just remind them that we’re here, here’s why you should choose us. You can even get strategic and offer special incentives of, get a free demo or get something for free if you reach out today, or whatever the case may be. But you can do things to try and create urgency and bring people back who otherwise might forget about you or get distracted or go with a competitor. Yeah. And do you recommend remarketing for people who are doing pay per click, or is it very much on a case by case basis? 95% of the time you should do remarketing. It’s very cost effective because you’re targeting a very small group of people, just people who’ve been to your website. So it’s not expensive at all to serve those ads, and it’s a very, very warm audience. So remarketing usually has the highest ROI, return on investment, of any marketing type. And now of course, you’ve already spent money get to people to your website to begin with, so you can’t just say remarketing is bringing new traffic to me. But yeah, for most businesses, for most MSPs, I strongly recommend using remarketing. Yeah, I love it. John, let’s wrap up with one final question I’m going to ask you. Let’s assume now you’re talking to MSPs who are doing their own DIY PPC, so they’re doing it themselves, which obviously lots of people put themselves through courses on Udemy and places like that and try it out. What’s the one thing they absolutely should do, and then tell me conversely, what’s the one thing they absolutely shouldn’t do? The one thing they should do is run search campaigns. There’s a bunch of different campaign types you can run with Google, like Google Display and different things, but search would be my number one recommendation for MSP starting out. And then I would say in most cases, the thing not to do is don’t use what they call broad match keywords, right? When you start out, that gives Google a ton of flexibility to match different types of searches to the keyword you think you’re targeting. And because of how expensive clicks are in the MSP space, like we talked about, it’s really easy to waste money. So I start with very targeted, probably what they call exact match keywords, and then work your way up from there strategically over time. Amazing. I love it. I love when we take a strategic view to anything like this, it takes a tool, which many people will try it, spend a thousand bucks and say, this doesn’t work for me. But I think you’re right. Going in with a strategic view is a much better way of doing it. John, tell us what exactly you do to help MSPs and how can we get in touch with you? Yeah, so we do all the advertising work for you, so we create, manage the ads, reporting, work with you on your goals, all that good stuff. We’d love to speak with any MSPs who are listening to this. You can reach out through our website, stubgroup.com for a free consultation where we can see if we’re the right fit for you. Paul’s Personal Peer Group Christine from an MSP in Portland manages all the admin, while her husband manages all the selling and the technical work. They’ve both been listening to the podcast for around six months, and she’s noticed a bit of a recurring theme in some of the content. Her question is, why are you so insistent I hire a phone person? Yes, I am insistent. Because I believe that a really good phone person can be a secret weapon for every MSP. Like we were talking about earlier the long-term marketing strategy for all MSPs should be to build audiences and then grow a relationship with those audiences. And this gives you a huge pool of potential future clients. You just have to remember, again, like I was saying earlier, people only buy when they’re ready to buy, but if you wait for them to tell you that they’re ready, you’ll be sitting next to a very quiet phone for a very long time. That’s why I believe that every MSP needs to get a phone person to call these audiences all the time. And this is not cold calling. This is not telesales. This is warm calling. This is telephone intervention if you like. Your telephone person is calling them to move the relationship forward on your behalf. So go and find yourself a back to work mom who can work two to three hours a day, two to three days a week, making outbound calls on your behalf. And remember, she’s not doing any selling. She doesn’t need to know much about technology or your business. She just needs to be interested in talking to people and listening to their answers. If she asks the right open questions, she’ll find people who are fed up with their incumbent MSP, and then she can book them in for a 15 minute discovery call with you, which is just beautiful. Mentioned links This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge , the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription. Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Check out my guest’s website . Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.…

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