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What’s the difference between MSPs that are standing still right now and those that are rocketing ahead? It’s a special episode today because there’s only three months left of 2026, and I’ve actually got one of my colleagues as a special guest. He’s spent 10 years talking to MSPs about how to grow their business, and he’s going to share all of his brain with you right now. Welcome to Episode 359 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Fast Growing MSPs Do Just TWO Things Differently Featured guest: Ben Smith has been part of the MSP Marketing Edge journey from Day 1, he helps MSPs build simple, repeatable marketing systems that compound over time, generating consistent leads instead of chasing the latest trend. Having spent over 15 years consulting with business owners he brings practical, real-world experience rather than marketing theory. Away from work, you’ll usually find him outdoors with his family or working on his latest renovation project. Hello, my name’s Ben Smith. I work with Paul at the MSP Marketing Edge. And how has it taken so long to get you on the podcast? We’ve been doing this podcast, what, seven years or something like that? Good question. I know, it is a good question. And you and I have actually worked together a very long time, way longer than actually the MSP Marketing Edge has been around. We’ll explore that in a second. But it’s good to have you here today, Ben, because you talk to MSPs all day, every day, and you hear the good, the bad, sometimes you hear the ugly because your job of course is to help people with their growth, with their marketing. And that means you’ve got quite a unique insight into what’s happening with MSPs around the world right now. So do you want to just start by telling us a little bit about you and your background and how we came to work together and what exactly you do for us here in the MSP Marketing Edge? Absolutely. So we’ve worked together for is it 15 years now, Paul? Yeah, scary, isn’t it? You had hair when we started. You didn’t really. For those watching on YouTube, Ben has no hair whatsoever. This is a personal choice. People often say when they find out we’ve worked together that long that I’m either good at what I do or that I’ve got some secret information on you. So they don’t know that it’s both at this stage. Thank you. But yeah, we worked together in the previous business working with healthcare sector and opticians, veterinary practices and dentists. And then of course we’ve been working together with the MSP Marketing Edge where you do the podcast and all the fun, crazy stuff. And I speak with MSP owners all over the world and find out what they’re looking to do with their business and if we can help them. Exactly that. In fact, if anything, I have the fun and you do the hard work. I enjoy it just as much. So it’s all good. I’m sure you do. Well, I know you do for a fact. And actually you are talking to our existing members as well as new members who are looking to join us because you do all the one-to-one consultations with our members, you do all of our onboarding. So essentially Ben is pretty much the only member of our team who loves being on a Zoom call all day long. I don’t like being on Zooms, I prefer doing stuff like this. And actually it was just you and me if we go back 10 years to when we first started this business. And so you and I have been here right from the beginning. And that actually leads onto my first question, which is what have you seen change since 2016 to 2026 in terms of how MSPs grow their business? So I don’t mean from a tech point of view because we’ve all seen cyber security get bigger, AI came out of what almost felt like nowhere two, three years ago. But in terms of what MSPs talk to you about and what’s important to them, what’s changed in the last decade? Yeah, good question. I think there’s not been as much change as people are probably expecting to hear. I think the stories that people tell me are quite similar in terms of when MSPs are starting out, they grow to a certain point and then something happens. So that’s been the same pretty much throughout the 10 years that we’ve worked with MSPs. Yeah. And that story, is it the common story of, “I loved what I did working for someone else, but I wanted to do it for me, so I started up.” And then it’s three, four years of frustration and cash going up and down and trying to find the right staff and trying to find the right clients. You must hear that story all the time. Yes, exactly that. People can see an opportunity to do something better, something different, so they go off and they do that themselves. And depending on when we speak to them and whether they’re still growing and looking to do that more or whether they’ve hit some kind of ceiling, whether it’s a real ceiling or when they’ve placed on themselves is typically when they would engage in a conversation to find out what else they should and could be doing with their marketing. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you obviously talk to MSPs that are literally on day one, where the owner is the MSP. And I know you also talk to the three, four million revenue where there’s an established team and senior leadership team. Is there would you say a sweet spot at which life seems to be easiest? Is it perhaps when it’s just you and two or three staff or is it when you’ve worked yourself out of the business but it hasn’t grown so big that it’s a monster or is that a really difficult question to answer? It is a difficult one because I think a lot of it will depend on the mentality of the business owner. Whether they’ve got themselves out of one job that they wanted to get out of for so many years and they’ve replaced that with another job, effectively it’s just they’re the boss this time, or whether they’ve got big plans to push it much further than just being comfortable and they want to actually build something that’s going to be bigger than them that they can step back and watch from afar. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Now we’ve done this special episode today to get you on the podcast because we’ve failed to do that in the last seven years, but also because this is coming out the last Tuesday of September in 2026. And that means somehow there’s only three months left this year, October, November, December, that’s 2026 done. As you get older, every year just seems to go faster and faster. What I thought would be interesting is to look from your perspective as someone who spent 10 years talking to MSPs at every stage, what do you see makes the difference between those who are doing well and those who are feeling stuck? And let me define my version of doing well. My version of doing well is that you are achieving what you want to achieve. So I don’t define doing well as big car, big house, kids at an expensive school. I mean, we all want those things, but often those aren’t the things that drive us. So for me doing well is you’re living the life you want to live, doing the things you want to do with the people you want to, and you’ve got enough time and money to do that. So what do you see as the big factors that affect people that are doing well versus those that are feeling stuck? Yeah. Okay. So if we look at the people who are stuck right now, typically the business owner is probably the bottleneck, that everything’s going through them. They’re slowing everything down, they’re not looking to grow much bigger than what they’ve currently got to, or they just physically can’t find the time or whatever the next lever is that they need to pull. I think a lot of the time those businesses are relying on referrals. It’s purely a reactive approach. And referrals are great, they’re obviously doing a good job that their clients are happy, their clients want their friends to be happy and they refer people in, but the long-term game is those referrals at some point will dry up. And if they don’t have a plan, of course, then that’s going to be an issue down the line. Yeah. And in your experience, and I’m going to come back to bottlenecks in a second, but in your experience, that over-reliance on referrals, is that something way too many people have and they don’t realise the referrals have dried up until it’s like, “oh, it’s been six months since we had a client?” Yes, a lot of people do that. And we talked about the typical cycle that people go through is they will win new business, they’ll find something that works and because they keep those clients for so long and they tend to bring in new business when they’re happy. That’s just what people do, if they’re happy they’re going to stay with you and they’re going to probably refer to you. But the challenge is then that businesses rely on that. The MSP gets so used to getting new business through referral that they don’t spend any time or enough time on building something outside of that to build long-term. That makes perfect sense. So in a second, we’re going to talk about what you would build and we’ll move into what successful MSPs are doing, but let’s go back to the bottleneck. When you talk about the owner being the bottleneck, what are the symptoms that you see of that? If the MSP owner were to go away for several weeks with no phone, no contact to the office, nothing at all, would any new business would arrive in the door? And if that’s the case, then all the sales are coming through the business owner, which is a bit of a concern initially, particularly as you’re looking to grow that business longer term, if all of the sales come through one person, that becomes the main breaking point of the business. That makes perfect sense. And what other areas of the business does it affect? No, let me ask this question a different way. If the owner is a bottleneck in their sales, do you normally expect to see that they are a bottleneck in operations, in senior tech decisions, in every aspect of the business really? I think quite often that could be the case and the owner wants to still be involved in everything. And again, that can come from a mindset as to where they’ve come from and how they’ve slowly grown the business. Another time it can just be if we’re talking about marketing and growing their business, sales is the main point that we tend to cover, of course, in that kind of conversation. And actually I guess in your experience, most MSPs that have a conversation with you are operationally in a good place. So they might not be 100% perfect, but it tends to be the thing that MSPs get right first, isn’t it? And then they start thinking about growth. Would you recommend for someone, let’s say, that was earlier in their journey, would you recommend that they did both of those things at once? Should they focus on the operations first, then the marketing, or should those two things be done at the same time, do you think? In an ideal world, you’d do everything at the same time, of course. But realistically for an MSP to be growing, you need to be doing something well initially because you’ve got enough clients to look after the people already in the door and that will give you some stable base. But I think the biggest challenge people have is relying on that as a long-term strategy. And as you mentioned before, people often don’t realise that it’s a problem until six months too late. Yeah, there’s always a huge lag in marketing, more so for MSPs I think than any other business because of how slow the sales cycle is. Okay, before we get on to habits and systems and behaviours of successful MSPs, tell us a few more things that you see, again, based on 10 years of conversations, things that perhaps people say to you or the conversations they start and immediately your brain says, “Oh, I know what that’s going to mean, or I know what consequence that’s going to bring.” I think another problem that people struggle with is having a clear point of difference in a busy marketplace. They will believe that they’re different because they’ve, again, broken out from maybe a previous employee to create their new MSP, and years down the line they feel that they’re offering something that they saw as an opportunity, but in reality their marketing doesn’t translate that point of difference. It will be that we’re the 24/7 reliable local support that everyone else is talking about. And the challenge of that, of course, is your prospects don’t know that you created this business purely to fill the gap that you found. They just see what you are showing them, which is we’re the same as everybody else. You and I have often said, haven’t we, that people who are technicians, almost the last business they should start is an MSP. In fact, you and I experienced this, and it’s funny when we were talking about bottlenecks, you think how many years I was the bottleneck to growth in this business, and this was my second business. My last business, I’d worked myself out, I wasn’t there day-to-day. And then when you and I started this, I then became the bottleneck for a number of years until I had that “duh”, which I think was only at Covid time when I realised, oh, hang on a second, we need a bigger team here. I’m doing too much work. This is crazy. So yeah, in a way, most MSPs should not start an MSP, they should go and buy an architect’s firm or an engineering firm or something like that. Obviously, that’s not quite how it works, but you and I do see a difference when we work with, and there’s probably a small handful of people we work with where the owner of the MSP is not an MSP. And I’m thinking there’s a couple of names in mind, and I know that you’ll be thinking exactly the same names. And it’s interesting that they have different problems. Their problems are more to do with delivery than they are to do with marketing and sales. They understand how to differentiate the business and how to position it, but for them often it’s actually getting the tech work and trusting these senior tech people because they don’t necessarily speak the same language. So I guess actually it’s just different problems in different situations. Right, let’s look at the positive stuff. So the MSPs you talk to who jump on a call and things are going well, and it could be we’ve been working with them for a number of years, it could be that things are going well and they want them to be even better. Tell me some of the trends, some of the traits that you see of common things that MSPs that are doing well, what do they do? How do they behave? Yeah, so again, some of these things of course are going to be the opposite to what we’ve just talked about. So having a sales function, and sometimes that is an entire salesperson or at least a defined role that is responsible for bringing new business in or certainly nurturing those leads to a point that, of course, the business owner may still be involved in the final sale and getting that deal over the line, but having somebody dedicated to sales. So it doesn’t become a reactive referral-based system. It’s somebody dedicated to having a clear plan that’s systemised to bring in prospects. And what’s the fear about bringing that person in the first time? Is the fear that I’m going to be spending all this money and it’s going to be taking such a long time for me to get the return, or are there other fears as well? Again, this will depend on the cycle that people are in. I think if they’re still in a honeymoon period, no matter how long that lasts for, that referrals are just coming in, there’s almost not a need, they don’t feel like there’s a need today. But of course the MSPs that do well and keep doing well are the ones who address that before it becomes urgent. Again, if they’ve got the right mindset and they’re looking at that long term, if the last three clients you brought into your MSP were referral, referral, referral, you’ve got a bigger problem than you might realise. What other things do you see from successf…
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