Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

*/ ?>

Latest Episodes:

SPECIAL: How to own an MSP doing $7m a year Jan 07, 2025

Show notes

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, S…

Full show notes at the publisher

SPECIAL: Should MSPs hire a chief growth officer? Dec 31, 2024

Show notes

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 e…

Full show notes at the publisher

SPECIAL: How MSPs achieve a happy balance Dec 24, 2024

Show notes

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.

Full show notes at the publisher

3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025 Dec 17, 2024

Show notes

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…

Full show notes at the publisher

Successful MSP owners exercise Dec 10, 2024

Show notes

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 marke…

Full show notes at the publisher

Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it) Dec 03, 2024

Show notes

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 storytelling 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 j…

Full show notes at the publisher

How to create the perfect MSP about us page Nov 26, 2024

Show notes

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 af…

Full show notes at the publisher

A mini masterclass on LinkedIn for MSPs Nov 19, 2024

Show notes

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 262 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… A mini masterclass on LinkedIn: Improve these three things on your LinkedIn profile to get people’s attention and encourage them to engage with you. The 3 tests to apply to new initiatives: The fear test, the regret test, and the comfort zone test – will these push you into taking the next big leap for your MSP? Should you start a podcast for your MSP?: Podcasts are a great way to grow relationships with an audience, but is it the right thing for your MSP? Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Stuart, from an MSP in Atlanta, has asked how much he should be paying for a content writer. Find out more on this and whether AI is a good tool to use too. A mini masterclass on LinkedIn It’s very easy to become complacent about social media and believe that it’s just a waste of time to a busy business owner like you who’s trying to build their MSP. But the reality is that social media is still incredibly important. Not all the networks, of course. I really don’t think most MSPs will get much from TikTok for some time, at least not until the generation that’s growing up with TikTok are the decision makers. For B2B marketing in 2024 and next year as well the social media network to go for is of course… LinkedIn – this is still the very best platform for MSPs looking for new clients, and I do highly recommend that you put in time on it every single day. Let’s spend a few minutes now on a mini masterclass on LinkedIn, and I’ve got three things for you to look at. The first is to improve three things in your profile. So here’s an interesting question. Based on your current profile, if you were an ordinary business owner or manager, would you want to be a client of your MSP? If not, here are three areas to spend more time on: The headline – focus on the benefit to your prospects rather than what you do. “I do IT for town businesses”, becomes “Helping town businesses grow with technology”. Then look at your headshot and don’t be cheap – pay a professional who does headshots every day and can make you look beautiful. Your about us bit – write it for your prospects, not other IT professionals. You want them to read it and think, ah, this is exactly the kind of person I want looking after my business. Next up then, is to build your personal brand. And your personal brand is what others think about you. It’s not something you control, but it is something that you can heavily influence. And it’s based on a number of factors: the number of connections you have, the recommendations that you have, what you post about, and how often you post, the value of your contributions, the speed of your responses, and whether you do something like a LinkedIn newsletter or a LinkedIn live. Because people who are perceived as experts, they do these things. Now, like much of marketing, getting better results is about doing a series of small actions on a regular basis, for years. I spend no more than about 15 to 20 minutes a day on LinkedIn. I have a virtual assistant who does functional stuff like accepting connection requests. I just do new content and commenting. In the early days, this felt like a waste of time, but today I have two sizable and engaged audiences – my connections and my LinkedIn newsletter subscribers. And these have only come from doing the work day in, day out for years whether I wanted to or not. Building your personal brand on LinkedIn is really no different to building your body at the gym. The magic happens over time, not on the day that you do the work. And of course, most people give up long before they see the results. Your opportunity is to be the only MSP in your area who does the opposite. You just keep putting in the work, the results are going to come. And then the final thing to look at is ideas for content, for posts. There’s a lot of noise on LinkedIn, the same as any digital platform, so to cut through you must be creative and not just do what everyone else is doing. Here are five post ideas for you. Take each one and ask yourself, how can I put my own spin on this?: Educate them about something – don’t be technical. Celebrate a win = this could be a new client or protecting an existing client from a nasty cyber attack. Be thankful for something. Document what’s happening in your professional life. And the fifth one, occasionally share something from your private life – and no, not what you’re having for dinner, something that matters. The 3 tests to apply to new initiatives At the beginning of October, I was privileged to present the keynote marketing talk at the very first Scale Con in Las Vegas. Oh my goodness, that was such good fun. Because not only did I get to hang out with loads of other marketing and sales experts from around the world, but there were a couple of hundred MSPs there as well. And I spent three days meeting people I’ve known for years on forums or video calls, but never actually met in real life, as well as meeting brand new friends. And by the way, they are definitely doing a Scale Con ‘25. I will be speaking again, and you should really go to that if you can. I tried very hard to catch a little bit of each of the speakers across the three days of the event, and I think there were well over 20 different speakers in all. And I always believe that speakers are like books. When you read a book, even if it’s something that you’ve read or studied before, there’s always a new idea that comes out of it and it’s no different when you’re listening to speakers talk. And there were some pretty awesome speakers. My brain even now is still full of ideas from that event. Now, one of the biggest and best ideas was from Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe, and it’s no surprise really, Nigel is just a stunningly inspirational character. And side note, it was so cool just hanging out with him, catching up with him only very briefly, but across the three days. And then on the third day, he did the final closing keynote and it was an insanely good keynote. I’m not being very humble here, but I thought mine was good, and yet I need to up my game after seeing what Nigel did. One of the many things that he talked about is three tests that he applies to whether or not he should do something new. And these are: the fear test, the regret test, and the comfort zone test. If he’s looking at a new initiative that he’s thinking of doing, he’ll say, right, if I do this, does it scare me a little bit? Does it give me a little bit of fear? Fear is good because it shows that you’re doing something completely brand new, something you’ve never done before. If I don’t do this, will I regret that when I’m old? And then of course, the comfort zone test is will he regret not pushing himself out of his comfort zone? So if you are looking at a new initiative for your MSP, it’s the same three tests… if you do this, will it create some fear? Will it create some regret if you look back in later life and you haven’t done it? And will it push you out of your comfort zone? I’ve had so many big ideas from that event that I’m now applying those tests to them as we speak. And I think that you can do the same, don’t you? If you’re not asking those questions at least two or three times a year, maybe you’ve plateaued. Maybe you’re stuck in the comfort zone. If I look back at my career, nearly 20 years of owning a business, as much as I’ve been constantly working towards stability and a business that thrives whether I’m there or not, which is a very stable business, the big leaps have come from pushing myself out of my comfort zone. And that doesn’t always mean that the big leaps are the right things to do, but certainly they kick off new actions and new directions, which can take your business to a very exciting place. Should you start a podcast for your MSP? Featured guest: Kieran MacRae is a podcast marketing coach on a mission to help you solve the podcast marketing puzzle. He shares all the best advice for growing your podcast, without spending hundreds of hours and burning yourself out. Kieran and his wife have grown a niche Scottish History podcast to over 16,000 monthly downloads and they want to help others do the same. It seems kind of weird to discover that podcasts have been around for 21 years. The first ever podcast started in 2003 when the audio RSS feed was created. And they’re now so popular that every year more than 500 million people listen to a podcast. So perhaps it’s inevitable that at some point you’ve wondered whether you should start a podcast for your MSP. Let me tell you, a lot of work goes in behind the scenes to make our podcast happen every single week, but it is worth it. And if you have a passion for podcasting, and especially if you have a vertical that you serve, a podcast could be very powerful for you. My guest today is going to explore starting a podcast. He’ll tell you the classic mistakes first time podcasters make. And which is more important – presenting style, content or kit. Hey everyone, I am Kieran MacRae and I’m a podcast marketing coach here to help you decide if you need a podcast as an MSP. Now, we’ve got two professionals on the podcast today, Kieran. Well, we’ve got you who’s definitely a professional in doing podcasts, and I think I’ve just been winging it for enough years to say that certainly I’m a semi-professional on this. So thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today. It’s a common question that I get from MSPs – should I start a podcast? We are coming up to or just over our fifth birthday here on this podcast. Lots of people listen to it all around the world. We have massive audiences in the UK and in the US, and inevitably for any MSP that’s ever thought, oh, I’d like to reach people, at some point they thought maybe I should do a podcast as well. And I will tell you as we go through this interview, I’ll tell you why my default answer has been probably not. It’d be really interesting to hear what your default answer is. Before we get on to talking about podcasts and how you get them started and why they can be useful marketing tools for an MSP, just tell us a little bit about you, Kieran. So what makes you a podcast coach? I have been growing my own podcast, which is a spooky Scottish history podcast, for four years now. That is generally spooky history. It’s been listened to all over the world. We’re coming up on, I think 8,000 downloads per episode, and that’s been going really well. And before that, I’ve been a digital marketer growing blogs and online audiences for nine years in total now. But I’ve had a lot of fun with podcasting. So I started helping people who were reaching out similar to you going, oh, should I start a podcast? Can you help me? Yeah, I can imagine. And 8,000 downloads per episode is insane. I mean, that’s like 7,900 more downloads a week than we get, which was a joke, we have a bit more than that. But obviously we’re a very niche podcast. Yours is for anyone. Just give us the pitch for that podcast for someone that thinks that might be interesting. So you say you do spooky stories, is that like ghost stories in Scotland? Yeah, we do the deep dive into Scotland’s history, focusing on its grizzly and mysterious past and ghost stories. Okay, very interesting. Very interesting. I’m going to have a listen to that after we finished our interview. Now for an MSP a podcast seems like a good way to reach people. And for me, it’s our number one marketing tool. I think it’s something like nine out of 10 new members who join our MSP Marketing Edge Service say they either found us through the podcast or they got to know me through the podcast or they found out about the service. It’s an instrumental thing, and it’s something that started as a six to 12 month experiment and is now the last thing I would give up. You couldn’t drag me kicking and screaming away from the podcast. As much as it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of hassle, and obviously it has a cost as well. In your experience with B2B, we are looking B2B here, when business owners look at doing a podcast, what are some of the mistakes or some of the wrong thinking that they jump into starting that podcast with? It’s interesting hearing your thoughts on it because the biggest mistake with podcasts for any type, especially with B2B, is a podcast won’t help you find customers. You can’t really find an audience with a podcast. What a podcast is ideally suited for is nurturing. So once people have heard of you, they’ve maybe come to your website and then they make their way onto your podcast, they can learn more about you and your service, and you really build up a lot of trust. Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, we have a three step lead generation and marketing strategy. I’ve talked about this on the podcast for four or five years, where you build audiences, you grow relationships, and you convert relationships. And that’s what the podcast does, it’s that middle step. It’s growing relationships. And I’ve met people in real life who’ve said, I’ve been listening to you for five years, and it’s nuts. And they know me because I’m there in their ears for 20 minutes, and obviously I’ve never met them, which is really cool. So I agree with you. It’s not a place to acquire clients, it is a place to build relationships. One of the things that I’ve noticed with MSPs when they jump into it, is that they think it will be a quick win that they can just get set up, put a few episodes out there, do perhaps a season of 10, and that in itself is going to generate lots and lots of interest. It really doesn’t work like that, does it? No, not at all. It is a slow burn project, but as you’re now experiencing like five years into it, you have fans. You have people who’ve really connected with you as a person, and so are connecting with you and your business, and you in their heads have become the go-to service provider for marketing. Well, that’s the plan anyway. That certainly what be nice. So when an MSP directly says to me, shall I start a podcast? I ask them questions, and the first question I ask is, who is your audience? And normally it’s just business owners, business owners in this area or anyone with a wallet, which is my least favourite answer. And my answer is, normally don’t start a podcast, primarily because I think it’s very hard to reach an audience when your audience is everybody. And I appreciate business owners is not everyone, but that’s too big. When an MSP says to me, well, we are in a vertical or a niche, so we want CPAs (which is a US term for accountants), or we want lawyers or we want veterinarians, or we want dentists or all of the above. It’s a much easier sell for a podcast, I think, to say, Hey, this is the technology podcast for dentists, particularly when you then, we wouldn’t do it here in the UK, but in the US you might say, this is the technology podcast for dentists in California, because obviously California is the size of the UK and certainly in people terms. Is that your experience as well, that the more defined and refined the audience is, the easier it is for you to reach those people and influence them? Yes, you are dead on. Whenever I’m doing coaching calls with clients, it’s always an eye roll moment for me when we have the same discussion – oh, it’s really for everyone, there’s something here for everyone. I’m like, well, you can’t reach everyone because to reach everyone, you have to spend millions of dollars on advertising to reach everyone and you just won’t manage. You’re buying a Super Bowl ad if you want to reach everyone, and realistically, your customers aren’t everyone. So yeah, absolutely. You need to nail down your audience and the more specific, the better. I think for podcasts, you could have a hundred regular listeners and build your business from that. So the more niche you can go, the better, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. So how would you r…

Full show notes at the publisher

Stop clients calling you personally for first line support Nov 12, 2024

Show notes

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 261 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Stop clients calling you personally for first line support: You can’t grow your business while you’re delivering first line support. Find out how you can free yourself from these burdens whilst retaining great relationships with your clients. Why victory loves preparation: Planning small actions regularly will make the biggest difference to your business. How introverts can communicate more confidently – and feel better about it: Learn how to tap into your passion using this confidence formula, whatever your “vertness”. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Greg from South Carolina wants to know what the Parthenon Principle of marketing is and how to apply it to his MSP. Stop clients calling you personally for first line support When you are the person who started the MSP, one of the hardest transitions for you is to get away from delivering first line support to that very first set of clients that you won in your first few years. But it’s something that you absolutely have to do or otherwise you get trapped in doing technical work forever. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with technical work, but you can’t grow your business while you’re doing password resets and setting up new users, right? This problem happens to most MSP owners and the reason it’s so hard is because you used to look after these clients yourself, you personally. So they feel that they have some kind of special bond with you. And even when you’ve employed first line technicians whose very job it is to sit there and help your clients, they will still email you directly or call your mobile directly rather than speak to the help desk. Now, this steals your time when you should be working on the business, but also reduces your ability to sell more to them during a strategic review. You can’t be the technology strategist and 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 problem without annoying your clients, and you’ll probably put a couple of the things I’m about to talk about together into a blended solution. In fact, here are nine things that I recommend. The first is to set clear expectations. Now, this is really easy with new clients, but hard with longer standing clients. So just remember you have to educate them, constantly. What’s top of mind for you is item 1,058 in their mind’s list of priorities. Number two, make it easy. Put stickers with the help desk number on every single device. Put them on their hands so they can’t help but see them. 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 am I going to deal with this? 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’re not working today and for any support, please call the help desk on this number. You can then let client calls go to voicemail forever. Perhaps just follow up with them the first couple of times it happens or when their issue is being resolved just so that they know you are there, but you are not the one doing the work. Number six, set up an email auto reply exactly at the same principle as the voicemail. Number seven, this is a cheeky one, fake being your own virtual assistant. When someone emails you or sends you a text, send back a standard reply saying that you are actually your VA and that you are off today and here’s how to get support with the number for the help desk. Number eight, get a second mobile number so you keep your old number that clients have been calling for years, but let it automatically forward all of the calls to the help desk. Then you get a second private number that’s just for friends, family, and your team. And number nine, now this one will hurt, but it is worth it. Make your clients wait if they contact you directly after hours, do not take the call, do not reply to the email. You’ll only encourage more bad behaviour. And over-servicing clients can be just as bad for a working relationship as under-servicing them as it sets unrealistic expectations. So make them wait and explain in a warm way how using the proper channels will get them faster support. Why victory loves preparation Victory loves preparation. It’s a phrase I’ve been living by for years and years, and it was only when preparing this episode that I looked up where it had come from. I thought perhaps it was from one of the hundreds of business books that I’ve read over the years, or maybe from one of the inspirational business leaders that I follow on social media. Well, how embarrassing. It turns out to be a Latin phrase written on the side of a baddies gun in a Jason Statham film that I’ve never seen. Hey ho, it’s still a good phrase to live by because it means making sure your help desk is ready to pick up the phone five minutes before the lines open. It means never going on a sales call without having done at least 30 minutes of basic research on the company that you are visiting. It means systemising the things that have to happen in your MSP every day and having a plan when someone’s off sick. It means always having someone in the office trained and ready to speak to incoming new client inquiries because these days, speed beats size. It means locking in a trusted partner to help you with your basic prospect marketing, assuming that that’s not a core skill of your business so that you are moving prospects closer to becoming clients every single day. Now, this is one of the reasons why I recommend that your management team meets first thing every Monday morning or as soon as it’s practical, every single week. Even if the management team is just you and a colleague and actually together, you make up two thirds of the business, you still meet every week because that meeting is about the small actions that have to be taken in order to get the better lives that you and your management team desire by being prepared. Growing your business isn’t going to happen without preparation, and it’s not going to happen just by doing the stuff that the business does every day. Fixing technology, strategic planning, that’s what the business does, but those activities don’t grow the business. So your weekly management meeting time, that’s all about what the business is trying to achieve right now and what must happen in the next week to move you closer to that goal. And you do it weekly to ensure you get into a rhythm, something that’s planned weekly is more likely to actually happen than something that’s a bit more ad hoc. And actually, here’s a simple agenda for your management meeting. You start with a recap of your goals, your three year goal and this year’s goal, and then you move on to progress on the actions agreed last week. And then you talk about what’s moving you away from the goal and what can we do to kill that. And then what do we need to do this week to move closer to our goal. And then you agree, actions, who’s responsible, and the deadline for each action. Let me give you a final quote to finish on. Now, this one’s from Bill Gates, not Jason Statham. And Bill says – Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. You could do the same with days or weeks or months. The way to guarantee that long-term achievement comes only through taking small actions every single day. And your weekly management meeting is where you plan those small actions that will make the biggest difference and make sure that they happen. How introverts can communicate more confidently – and feel better about it Featured guest: Dallas Amsden has honed the skills of communication for 30+ years. As a classically trained singer and actor – and even as a stand-up comedian who has performed at venues such as the Hollywood Improv and the world-famous Comedy Store – Dallas now leverages those skills he learned on stages all over the world to help business professionals use the “soft skills” of communication to more deeply connect with prospects, customers, and their teams. He has worked to create messaging with 100s of organisations, including Fortune 500 companies. Dallas is on a mission to teach business owners, business professionals, and entrepreneurs – especially Introvert Entrepreneurs – to develop the skills necessary to become the most effective, most powerful – and even most successful – communicators in any room they enter. He is the co-founder of the Communicate2Succeed Academy, and the host of two upcoming podcasts, “The Future You Leadership Podcast” and “The Dallas Daily Show.” To learn more about Dallas, go to www.DallasAmsden.com Perhaps at some point over the years you’ve been labeled either an introvert or an extrovert. I know that I have without really ever thinking about it. I always assumed that I was an extrovert because I don’t mind doing stuff like hosting a podcast or being on YouTube. But my guest today has challenged me on that and has really opened my eyes to how and why we define ourselves as an introvert or extrovert and how we can be more aware of the limitations of our vertness and be more successful by working around them. Most importantly, he has advice on how you can leverage the way you already are to better market your MSP. Hey, I’m Dallas Amsden and my company is Communicate to Succeed, helping you communicate for your own success. And thank you so much for joining me on this podcast, Dallas, you are very highly recommended to me and it’s a delight to get you on the show because we are going to talk primarily today about how introverts can better communicate. Now, I’m not an introvert myself. You can probably tell why would I do a podcast like this and so much YouTube if I was, but so it’s very hard for me to understand what it must be like as an introvert, having to pitch your business, go to networking meetings and talk about things that perhaps you’re not comfortable talking about such as cyber security solutions, all of those kinds of things. So that’s what we’re going to delve into today. And I know that you’re an absolute expert on this, and this is your sweet spot of how you are helping the world. Before we talk about that, just give us some of your background. So what got you from being a kid to being here? Oh, well, I know we don’t have enough time to tell that whole story, so I’ll give you a very truncated version. I have basically been on stages or on screens or on microphones since I was 12 years old, so 30+ years now, I’ve been doing some form of performance or presentation. I’ve been everything from a professional mime at one point, I got my degree in musical theatre. I was an actor out in Hollywood for a little bit, a stunt performer for a little bit. And when I realised I didn’t like being told where to stand and what to say and how to say it, I started doing stand-up comedy and really kind of found my voice in that, the performative element of that. My parents were pastors when I was younger. My brother is a pastor, so talking on microphones comes very naturally, but it’s also one of those skills that I have developed over the last few years for me. I worked inside of video production and video marketing for a long time. And what I had to do on a daily basis as the production manager was on one side, I had to talk to the writers, I had to talk to the directors, the artists, the animators and the editors and all of that. And then I had to go over here and I had to talk to all the industries that we were working with. So one day it could be I would talk with an insurance agency, a software development company, a biotech company, all in the same four hour span. So what I had to learn how to do was learn the speak, speak the speak, and figure out how to communicate to everybody. And from that, a lot of my systems and processes were born. But I will tell you, I actually am an introvert. Nobody believes that about me. And I think this might be good for your people to hear that. Let’s get the definition of an introvert versus an extrovert. So a lot of people think an extrovert is someone who’s loud, who’s brash, who is outgoing, just loves, needs it, right? And an introvert is the shy, quiet person in the background. It’s not actually true. I know very shy extroverts and I know very loud introverts, I happen to be one. Introversion and extroversion has to do with where you get your energy, your emotional energy. So for an introvert, an introvert gets their energy from being alone, from having more solace. They get drained when they’re in groups and when they’re in crowds. And so for me, one of the most important things is after I’ve done a lot of output, I have to have a lot of quiet, and my wife will regularly send me away and she’ll say, honey, you need to go see a movie by yourself or go, just be alone and read. But an extrovert needs the crowds. They need the people. I know people who got physically ill during the shelter in place and during 2020 and all of that because they couldn’t be around people and they couldn’t charge their battery. So when we talk introversion and extroversion, yes, there’s a quiet factor to it and a loudness factor, but really it’s about where do you charge your battery? And a lot of people, and I’ve listened to your pod here, and I think it’s a great show. A lot of people, I think this could benefit them because maybe they need more quiet time. They’re in this IT world. They’re in this MSP world. They might have a little more just tech in their head, and so they don’t need as much people. But I believe honestly, that introverts can actually shine the biggest, and be the most passionate experts in the room if they know how to tap into their passion in what I call the confidence formula. So much to unpack from just one answer there, there’s so many things. So first of all, let’s deal with the showbiz one, which is you were a stunt performer in Hollywood, nevermind all the musical theater stuff, which is cool in itself, but you were a stunt performer. That’s cool. I love it when we have guests on this show who just casually drop in. We had someone several months ago who just casually dropped in. She was like a national TV producer, that’s really cool, I like that. And have you been on any shows that we might have seen you in or any movies, anything like that? No. I would’ve been guest spotting and doing random stuff on everything from Days Of Our Lives to commercials you never would’ve seen. More of my acting experience was on stage. It didn’t take me long to realise that I didn’t like that process and I’d gone out to Hollywood and lived out there. And so the stunt performer thing was I did live shows a bunch. I did a lot of live stunt work, so I was one of the cowboys getting shot off the water towers, three times a day I’d do a 25 foot high fall off of a water tower. So it was more those in Southern California would be a little bit more familiar with it than anyone on TV. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. The other thing you said, by your definition, I started this interview by saying, oh I’m an extrovert, but actually by your definition, I’m an introvert because I find groups of people very tiring. I sit where we are filming here in my little home office, I’ve got a green screen and I like to sit on my own all day. That makes me happy. I love being around my child, for a couple of hours and I love being around my girlfriend, for limited amounts of time. Does she listen to this? Is she going to hear what you just said just there? No, not chance. Well, we hope so anyway, and I love her dearly, so that’s fine. But it’s really interestin…

Full show notes at the publisher

SPECIAL: How MSPs can make more money Nov 05, 2024

Show notes

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to a very SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 260, celebrating 5 years of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This episode’s been released five years to the day since we launched the podcast on the 5th of November, 2019. It’s a birthday! Amazing. Well back then, producer James and I figured it would run for a few months when we launched the first episode. “Hello, this is Paul Green and welcome to the first ever MSP marketing podcast. Now, my aim every single week is to give you some motivation, some ideas, some clever stuff that you can take that other MSPs are doing around the world and you can bring it into your business and really make a difference to your business quite quickly and quite dramatically.” Five years on, I’ve talked to some of the guests who’ve appeared over the years and asked them a big question – What’s the best idea you have to help MSPs make more money? We’ve split their answers into four different sections, starting of course with Marketing and Sales. Hi guys, it’s Jamie Warner here, CEO of eNerds and Invarosoft. And here’s my tip for how your MSP can make more money. Well, the good news is I’ve got two tips and as an MSP owner, this is coming from experience. I’m actually in the saddle selling at the moment. So my first tip is that you must learn how to increase your percentage success rate of converting new customers. Your only goal is to essentially convince that new client opportunity that your MSP is going to be a step up from where they went before. That is why clients look to change. They don’t look to change for technical reasons. They only look to change for a step up in the service experience. So that’s your job, to figure out what are the things that you can say in your IT services presentation that will demonstrate that your service methodology is a step up from where they’ve gone before. Now, obviously in the Invarosoft world, we use our customer experience technology to demonstrate to that customer how visually they’re going to get a step up in their service experience. And interestingly, we also use our QBR or our roadmap, TBR, whatever you want to call it. We use the methodology and the software that we use to do that and we demonstrate that to the customer as well, so they can see how our methodology and how our roadmapping and our gap analysis and our reporting is going to be a step up, and we show them examples of that when we are presenting our services. So that’s tip number one and that’s going to help you sign up more clients and grow your MSP. The other thing that doesn’t get spoken about, so tip number two, is that you absolutely have to treat your clients as a pipeline of opportunity from a QBR perspective. So every client essentially has a huge amount of things that you need to help them improve. It might be new switches, routers, firewalls, a project to go to the cloud with Office 365, whatever it happens to be. Put all your clients in a list, down the left hand side of an Excel spreadsheet, look at how much you think you could possibly sell them. Workstations and desktops tends to be a big part of that. And then look at the enormous pipeline you’ve got. Now, these are things that clients actually need. These are not things that they don’t need, and so the best MSPs that grow faster, there’s this concept of sales compression. It’s understanding you have a pipeline as it relates to the QBR side of things, going out and actually having a conversation with the customer to get them to make decisions. Which is what we do, the buying psychology of good, better, best when we present those recommendations to get buyers to make decisions faster. And if you can squeeze your pipeline down into a shorter period of time, lo and behold, you sell more faster and you grow faster. And let me tell you, as someone that speaks to a lot of MSPs, it’s the ones that are more sales efficient and the ones that with my first point are focusing on how they can convert those customers that grow faster. And in the last year, eNerds grew a million dollars in revenue and we signed up $70,000 in new MRR support, so just support in that last year alone, so it works. I wish you well. Good luck. Hey, this is Nate Freedman from Tech Pro Marketing and I was the guest on episode 84. My tip for making your MSP more profitable is to have a live chat agent on your website. In my own study, 20% of leads prefer to engage through chat rather than a form or call, and 100% prefer speaking to a real person. Plus websites with live chat have been shown to have a 35% higher conversion rate compared to those without. So by offering a live chat option, you’re not just meeting expectations of your customers, but you’re actively increasing engagement and lead conversion rates by providing immediate personalised responses. Hey there, this is Adrian Savage from EmailSmart. I was the guest in episode 99. My idea is to make sure you keep in regular contact by email with your customers and prospects, ideally at least once a week using a reputable email marketing platform. Send them a quick tip that will help them, something they can do quickly and easily. And in the same email, always mention one of your services along with a call to action, because if you don’t keep at the front of their mind, they won’t come back to you. Bonus tip, make sure you regularly remove the people who haven’t engaged recently from your email list. Remove the people who haven’t opened anything in the last three months, and ideally the people who haven’t clicked anything in the last six months. Otherwise, you’ll be hurting your email reputation and your emails might not get through. Hey, this is Megan Killion from MKC Agency and I was a guest on episode 238. My tip is to regularly ask your clients for referrals. In particular, I highly recommend getting a CSAT system in place that’s going to automatically ask your clients when you finish a ticket, if you did a good job. Then have your service delivery manager review those and see who’s doing well and pass it over to sales account management, or whoever’s going to be in charge of reaching out to clients to get referrals, that they should be touched in with and asked for referrals. Then use your outreach to those clients, and be super specific -say something like, “Hey, it’s Megan from MKC, I know that you love when Tammy helps you guys out with your scheduling. She’s been so great and helpful for you and I know that we’ve delivered you about $1.5 million in new revenue this year. I’m just wondering, do you have any MSP friends that could benefit from a million and a half dollars in revenue in the pipeline?”. That’s it. Just ask for the referral and get out there and kick some butt. I am loving these and this next bunch of ideas is all about looking after your clients. What’s up everybody, Justin Escar from the Virtua Consulting Group. You may have heard me on episode 75, 100, 181, there may be another one who knows. Congratulations to Paul Green for celebrating five years of the Paul Green MSP Marketing podcast. Big shout outs to you, Paul and your entire team. Can’t wait to see what you do over the next five years. Now, what’s my hot tip for MSPs to make more money? It’s not getting new customers, it’s about selling to your existing ones. The things that are really important today. So as we end 2024 and get into 2025, I’m talking about three things – security, identity and compliance. Sell not just the licences, but the services to your existing customers to make them more secure, help them with their identity and get them more compliant. I guarantee you, you’ll have a leg up on your competition if you take advantage of those things. Want to start small? Look at email security. There are great tools out there right now beyond spam protection that will help you and help your customers be more secure. So take advantage of what’s out there now. Look at your existing customer base. It’s not always about the new shiny, it’s about what you have now and how you can maximise your profit from it. Again, I’m Justin Escar from Virtua Consulting. Can’t wait to see you all soon. Hi, this is Tony Capewell from Your Cloud Works and MSP Dark Web and I was the guest on episode 125 of Paul Green’s podcast almost three years ago. First of all, congratulations on five years of providing outstanding advice to the MSP world. It’s been an incredible resource. My idea is the cost of acquiring a new customer is far higher than the cost of keeping an existing one happy. It’s easy to get caught up chasing new clients, but in reality, focusing on your long-term customers brings more consistent, sustainable profit. We do follow our structured regular marketing plan, but we’ve made it a priority to nurture our existing relationships, ensuring our clients are satisfied and feel valued. Our regular client check-ins and proactive support also allows us to upsell cyber security services with ease. So yes, continue with a structured marketing plan, but focus on client retention and you’ll save money while increasing loyalty and lifetime value. Hey, this is Richard Tubb, The IT Business Growth Expert, and I was a guest back in episode 21. Now my idea is to do client floor walks. This is where you or one of your engineers visits your client site, not to fix an issue or close a ticket, but just to pop by to see how your client is doing. Stroll around, speak to your client’s team and ask if there’s anything you can help with. Not only will this increase your visibility with a client, but don’t be surprised if you end up with a few new projects or up sales opportunities as a result. Pro tip, take some cakes with you when you go to site. No client in history has ever turned away an engineer bearing cakes. These are so good, aren’t they? Next up, we have other ideas for you to make money. Hey, Greg Jones here from Kaseya. I was included in a few of Paul Green’s podcasts and I just want to say a massive congratulations to Paul and the team at MSP Marketing Edge for reaching their five year anniversary of delivering fantastic content to help MSPs across the globe. This week, I want to share my little tip on how your MSP business can make more money in the market at the moment. My idea is focus on compliance. Most recent surveys out from the likes of Canalys, IDC and Gartner are saying that that market is going to be worth about 75 billion by 2028. That’s a huge piece of pie, and we want to make sure you get your slice of it. So focus on it not only to upsell and cross-sell your existing partner base, but also as well, it’s a great draw to attract net new logos, net new business into your MSP. The SMBs, SMEs, or even some of the smaller enterprises who are struggling with compliance with the likes of NIST 2 and DORA, a lot of them have got to be compliant with certain things by the likes of January, February of next year. A huge opportunity for you to make a little bit of extra cash. I hope that adds some value and again, a huge congratulations to Paul and the team. Take care. I’m Ben Specter from Zomentum, and I was a guest on episode 137. Now, imagine a proposal that not only targets every single one of your client’s pain points, but also does a really good job showcasing your unique value. Here are my tips for a really compelling proposal template that should win more business. First up, make sure we understand your client’s needs. Start by thoroughly assessing their needs and their goals and ensure that your proposal aligns with these. Next up, we want a clear and concise executive summary. Provide a brief overview of your services and highlight how those services are going to solve the client’s pain points. Then we want a detailed scope of work, clearly outline the services that you’re going to be providing, including timelines, deliverables, and any milestones. This is going to help ensure that there’s no confusion and dispute later on. We want to then really highlight the value proposition and how your unique values that your MSP delivers are going to solve their problems the best. We then want to move on to the pricing structure. No proposals complete without some pricing. Ideally, we want to provide some case studies and social proof. Try to make these as relevant as possible to your client. This might be by way of their vertical or their geography or something else that makes that case study particularly relevant. We then need a clear call to action. A lot of people forget to make sure that they’re highlighting what are the next steps. Do you need a signature? Is there another meeting? What is the call to action from the proposal? And last up, professional design. Make sure it looks great. Hey, I’m Anne Hall from IT Agree. I was the guest on episode 152. My idea is that the everyday business risks faced by MSPs can be effectively managed to reduce your revenue leakage so that you can make more money. You can do this by using the right sorts of contracts, including service specific contracts and using them properly. Don’t think about contracts as being there only for the worst case scenario, if you face litigation. Your contracts should also help you with other risks, everyday business risks. Things like responsibilities for reselling cloud services, including Microsoft 365, and cyber security services, the age old in scope / out of scope issue, and responsibility for cyber attacks, and more. So your contracts can and should help you to reduce revenue leakage so that you can make more money. Hi, this is Jane Matthews from Wild Cat Careers, and I was a guest in episode 247. My idea is for you to ensure you create an attractive employee value proposition. This will help you attract and retain the best talent to grow your MSP. Think of a tap that you turn on that allows you to choose the best talent. That talent provides the best service to your clients, and in return grows your profits. We’re nearly done for this special fifth birthday show, and let’s finish with three big ideas you really should listen to. Hey Paul, it’s Henry Duncan from LanWare. I was a guest on episode 194. So my idea on how your MSP can make more money is really simple. You need to take your profit first. What I mean by that is the standard way that we’re taught to run our businesses is wrong. We take our sales, we minus our expenses, and then we see what’s left over in the end for profit. This model is crazy. As profit is given the lowest priority and plays second fiddle to everything else in your MSP. Then we wonder why we don’t make any money. It’s time to give your profit a promotion. You need to take your profit after your revenue and then manage your expenses accordingly. Unless you do it this way round as you grow your business, your costs will get out of control and your profit will erode. If you want more information on this, there’s a whole methodology that sits behind it and it’s from a guy called Mike Michalowicz, so check it out online. Hi, my name’s Andy Edwards. I was on episode 2, many, many moons ago. That is actually quite a while ago. And in episode 2, I spoke about relationships, business relationships, how to get on with people and why sometimes we don’t. But Paul’s asked me to give tips to help MSPs make more money. Well, here’s what I would normally say for business development, business growth, four things. First of all, more successful businesses tend to have more customers, so get more customers. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But to get money into a business, more customers is a good idea. However, there are three other elements. Second element would be, when you get a customer get them buying as much as possible, as much as possible, whatever it’s that you do, make sure that they’re aware of whatever it is that you’ve got so that they can buy it. If they buy something you do from something or somewhere else, then that’s a failure on your part. Make sure…

Full show notes at the publisher

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected