Show notes
In this week’s episode Did you know one of the quickest ways for an MSP to grow… is to actually buy another MSP? But a lot of people think that buying a business is out of their league; assuming it’ll cost too much money or be overly difficult. This week on the show Paul’s joined by an MSP M&A (mergers & acquisitions) expert to dispel some myths and help you identify the opportunities, and potential pitfalls Also this week – times have changed and you can no longer rely on just one particular way of gaining new clients. Paul explains the importance of having multiple marketing pillars Plus how to properly brief a Virtual Assistant. If you’re toying with the idea of using a VA, in this episode Paul helps you get the most from them Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Find out more about marketer and business consultant Jay Abraham and his books Paul mentioned the brilliant book They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan Find out more about the brilliant physical time-tracking tool Timeular Paul mentioned the project management software Basecamp Here’s a link to the MSP Marketing Group on Facebook Paul’s special guest was MSP Commercial Solutions expert Daniel Welling talking about how best to buy or sell an MSP business in 2021 – check out his website here Many thanks to Chris Timm from Sondela Consulting for recommending the books The Ride of a Lifetime by Disney’s Bob Iger and Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks Paul’s special guest on December 1st will be Steve Taylor from RocketMSP talking about current trends in MSP marketing Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover:Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Greens MSP marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Right come on then, let’s do it most podcasts for November before we get into the final months of frankly, what’s been a crazy year. Here’s what’s coming up on today’s show. Daniel Welling:They need to be aware of your interest at the time when they’re ready to sell. Paul Green:I’ll also tell you later on about a fantastic free marketing resource that already more than 1000 MSPs are using. We’ll have Chris Timm on. He’s the PSA expert and he’s got not just one, but two books suggestions for you today. Plus, we’ll be talking about the proper way to brief a virtual assistant. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:So, I was talking to a brand new MSP clients I started working with just a few weeks ago. One of my usual opening questions is of course, how do you currently get clients for your business? And, this particular MSP had just one way of getting new clients, which was referrals. And, it wasn’t a formal referral system, it was actually a sit back and wait for clients to turn up kind of system, in that they were really good at what they do. Their clients love them. And, it seems that around about every couple of months or so, one of their existing clients refers someone new to them, which is great, except you are not in control of that in any way whatsoever. And also, that’s only one way of getting new clients into the business. And, we started talking about something that I learnt years and years ago from a marketer called Jay Abraham. Paul Green:Now, if you’ve never looked at Jay Abraham stuff, he’s worth is very much worth a Google. Jay Abraham is… He might be offended to hear me say this, but he’s very much the grandfather of marketing today, of all marketing really that’s done by businesses like ours. He taught all of the great, so any great marketer that you look at is either being taught directly by Jay Abraham, or has been taught by one of his proteges. Personally I’ve spent, Oh, it must be getting on for a 10, $20,000 on Jay Abraham stuff over the years. I’ve bought loads of his audio courses back when they used to be cassettes and CDs. I once bought his hard drive. It wasn’t one that been stolen from, it was like a thing where they were selling the unlimited contents of his laptop. And it was every single course he done, and every single recording. Paul Green:And for a couple of years, there was a lot of audio stuff. I was listening to that in the car, and I learnt so much from that. In fact, just talking about that makes me think I should get that hard drive out again and give it another listen. Because every time you listen to Jay Abraham talk, or you read his stuff, you learn something new, and it’s proper, good, direct response marketing stuff. And, one of his basic principles that he teaches is the Power Parthenon Philosophy. Now I’m never going to explain it as well as Jay Abraham does, but essentially if you think of the Parthenon, so you think of a great big, I don’t know, Greek Roman building, whatever the Parthenon is, and you imagine that the roof is being held up by one pillar. Paul Green:And, let’s imagine that pillar is referrals. Like we were just talking about with my MSP client. Well, that makes that roof rather precarious. You’ve got that one pillar in the middle, the roof could easily topple over, that’s not a particularly good way of keeping it. So at the very least, you want a second way of bringing new clients into the business, and that means you’d have a pillar either side. So now your roof is more stable, but what if you put in another two, three or four more pillars like the Parthenon. You go and Google Parthenon and you see a building with lots of different pillars. And, this is what you need for your marketing. Yes, referrals are great because people turn up almost ready to buy, but you also need to do some list building. You need to have an email database. Paul Green:You need to be mining LinkedIn. You need to be doing some online advertising. You need to be doing some direct mail. You absolutely need to be doing outbound, telephoning, not telesales, but telephoning. You also need to be doing, They Ask, You Answer, which is the book on content marketing. And, it’s the right long-term strategy for your MSP to have an inbound content marketing strategy. It just takes a few years to get there. See, all of these are pillars. They’re all pillars of your marketing, because some of these things won’t work. You might have a couple of months where your online advertising isn’t working. In fact, we’ve had that recently. We switched to a new online advertising strategy, and our money has not been delivering results for the last month or so. So yeah, we’ve wasted some money on advertising, and we suddenly discovered some more ways not to do online advertising, but that hasn’t brought the business down to its knees in one month, because it’s one of just many things that we do. Paul Green:We have many, many pillars. You should do exactly the same thing, so that when one of those pillars goes away, whether that is temporarily or whether that is permanently, it doesn’t matter, you’ve got other pillars to stop the building from collapsing. I mean, just look at COVID. COVID has pretty much wiped out events. Any MSP that I’ve been working with who was overly reliant on networking, on going to their weekly BNI or whatever meeting they’re going to, has found that you cannot get the kind of referrals out of doing Zoom versions of networking, as you can from meeting people in a room. And, that was quite a wake up call for people who are overly reliant on networking. Quite understandably. You can’t have just networking as your only pillar. You’ve got to have multiple pillars for your MSP. So, the first thing for you to do is to figure out how many pillars do you have in place right now? Paul Green:And, having a website is not a pillar. A pillar is proactive action. If you have a human being picking up the phone on your behalf, that is a pillar. If you have someone sending out stuff in the post to leads into prospects, that is a pillar. If you’re directly driving traffic, and you’re spending either time or money driving traffic to your website, that is a pillar. So, just having a website in itself, isn’t a pillar, but proactively driving traffic to it is a pillar. Start by listing all of the marketing pillars that you’ve got for your MSP. And then once you’ve done that, you can see if you have enough. Someone’s inevitably at some point going to say to me, “How many pillars should I have?” And, the answer is as many strong pillars as you can maintain. We must have somewhere between six and seven strong, proactive, constantly maintained pillars going into our business. And, that’s a lot of work. Paul Green:A lot of my team and a lot of my personal time is spent on marketing our business, because that’s the right thing to do. If you’ve only got a couple of pillars right now, you’d be much better off focusing all of your attention on generating four strong pillars than having six or seven weak pillars. So, you definitely want those pillars to be strong. But wherever you do, if you’re looking at your pillars and you’re thinking, “Oh my goodness, we are very, very reliant on this and on that,” and that’s it, then as a matter of priority. And, perhaps this is a good January project for you, you should be setting up new pillars of marketing within your MSP. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Back in episode 41, which was back in August, I told you that I’d got a full-time VA, virtual assistant. Paul Green:It was the same time I was telling you about Timeular, which is the time tracker that I’d been using, and how essentially I’d completely revolutionised my time, and what I was doing within the business. Again, it’s one of those lessons that you seem to need to keep learning, or certainly I do. Well since then, I’ve hired a second VA. In fact, there are now three VAs working within my business, all doing very specific functions. And, it’s been wonderful because I’ve been able to really accelerate doing the things that really only I can do, such as this podcast. This podcast takes me hours and hours to record, and set up the interviews, and all of that kind of stuff. But really, only I can do that. Whereas anyone in the business can answer basic emails, asking for copies of invoices, and answering repeated questions, and all of that kind of stuff. And, that’s what the virtual assistants are doing. Paul Green:Now I’ve discovered since August, how to effectively brief virtual assistants. Because, the people that we’ve got on board are amazing. They really are amazing. We’ve been very, very lucky with the quality of the people that we’ve been able to attract into the business. And I did use an agency, so maybe luck had nothing to do with it. It’s just the agency has done a good job, and we’ve worked very closely with that agency. But, you really do get better results when you brief your virtual assistant properly. And, what I’ve discovered is that you need to almost over brief them. You see, the problem is when you and I brief someone to do something on our behalf, we, without thinking about it, assume that they have the same information that we do. So, we know in our heads that we want to get something done in a very, very specific way, and there’s a specific outcome that we would like. Paul Green:And, because we’ve had sometimes days, weeks, maybe even months to think about this, we assume that, that full and complete knowledge that’s in our head is going to be in their head as well. Because surely it’s all obvious, right. Surely everyone should think like us, but they don’t. They really don’t. In fact, if I was to ask your staff, “What’s the number one frustration in their lives?” They would say, “It’s when you get annoyed with them for not doing something you haven’t asked them to do, and you didn’t tell them how you wanted it to be done.” We all do this as business owners. We’re absolute nightmares. We’re monsters to work for. We really are. So, when you brief a virtual assistant, I believe you need to do that brief in two or three ways. And yes, this will seem like overkill, but I promise you, this gets the best outcomes. Paul Green:Well, it gets the least number of questions and it gets the best outcome. So, when I’m going to brief a virtual assistant, I will, first of all, sit down and figure out exactly what do I want them to do, and how do I want them to do it? And, I actually sit down with a piece of paper, you remember paper, and a pen, which is like an inky thing that you used to put marks on paper. And, I’ve just found it easier to sit down and kind of dump my brain onto that piece of paper and think “Right, when I do this job, or if I was going to do this job, how would I do it?” “What would I do?” “How would I set that out?” “What order would I do that?” I dump all the things down on a bit of paper, then I sort of move them around, I order them. I will number them in sequence until I’ve got a very, very clear idea of how the job should be done. Paul Green:Then I will write a specific brief, and that specific brief starts with some context. Now the context is absolutely everything. So, let’s imagine, for example, I’m briefing my virtual assistant to send a specific letter to a specific client in a specific way. Just pick that one as an example. So, I will start with a bit of context and I will say, “Hi name, this is an exercise that we do once every month in the business, because…” And, I’ll explain why we’re sending the letter. So, it could be that this is a sales tool, or it might be a follow-up piece, or it might be a customer satisfaction piece or something like that. But, I’ll tell them in quite a lot of detail. Paul Green:And remember, this is a written brief, exactly what it is we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Because I’ve discovered, in fact, this goes for any staff, when you give context and you explain why we’re doing something, and why is that critical word, they really understand the importance of it, and they understand why it needs to be done in such a specific way. So having set out the context, I then set out the outcome. And, I’ll say that the outcome for this is that this letter set out in this particular way, arrives at this specific client on this specific date. So, they now have an understanding of exactly what it is that I want, and they have an exact understanding of what I consider success to be, what the outcomes should be. This is a major achievement. If you could do this every single time you brief anyone to do anything, that would be a very, very powerful thing. Paul Green:Then I list the steps in order. And I will literally, there might be five or 10 different steps, but I will lay it out in order. It’s not quite a checklist, but it’s a numbered set of steps. And, there’s a level of detail that you don’t need to get into. So if, for example I’ll say, “Log into the CRM.” Then, if I know that they know how to log into the CRM, I don’t provide extra instructions. If it’s something that they haven’t done regularly, or they’ve never done before, then I might link that to a separate standard operating procedure which tells them how to log into the CRM. What you don’t want is to have every single step explained in every single way, because that’s just too tiring. But, I’ll make sure there’s enough detail in each of those steps that they can literally follow that through step-by-step-by-step-by-step, and they will reach the outcome that I have asked for. Paul Green:So essentially, I’m taking away the thinking work from the VA. Now I’m not doing that for any offensive reason. These are very intelligent people who are very good at what they do, but I don’t want there to be any ambiguity whatsoever. I want this job to be done in a very specific way, the way that I want it to be done. Now the next thing I’ll do, and this seems overkill, but trust me, this really makes…
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