Thank you to Joe Burns, co-founder and CEO of Reformed IT, for joining me to talk about how he achieved over a million pounds in turnover in 11 years for his MSP business… then co-founded another MSP and did it all over again, this time hitting the million pound mark in just three years.

Joe Burns, a prominent figure in the Managed IT Services (MSP) industry, is the co-founder and CEO of Reformed IT, a company renowned for providing top-tier Managed IT and Cyber Security services to businesses in the East Midlands, UK. With an impressive track record, Reformed IT, under Joe’s leadership, has grown to achieve over £1.3m in annual revenue with a dedicated team of 12 professionals since its inception in October 2019.

Prior to establishing Reformed IT, Joe co-founded Pyranet in 2005, where he began his journey in the IT services sector. Through this venture, he gained invaluable experience and insights, learning from the challenges and triumphs of scaling and eventually exiting a successful MSP business through acquisition. This journey was not just about business growth but also about personal development and understanding the intricacies of the MSP world.

Having gained a comprehensive experience within the MSP industry, Joe now shares many of the mistakes he made, and lessons learned with the wider community.

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cyber-security-speaker-joe/

NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.

Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast wonderful things about the work that I do with MSPs is now and again I get to sort of be very close to some MSPs and get involved directly with their business. For example, in my MSP marketing edge service, we have a very small number of groups of what we call the MRR revolution. MRR, of course, being monthly recurring revenue. And I get to jump on some regular zooms with some MSPs that I’m working with over 18 months. And we get really into the nuts and bolts of their marketing. We make sure they’ve got a robust marketing system set up to not only win new clients, but also to retain and to upsell those clients as well. And I really do get involved in detailed stuff because I don’t get to do this with, I work with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of MSPs, so I don’t get to do it at a level of detail with everyone. So when I do work with someone closely, I like to really drill into the details. And a couple of weeks ago, me and one of the other MSPs were having a, I wouldn’t call it an argument. It was a vigorous debate about their website, because they’ve hired a website copywriter, which is a good thing to do, right, to get a professional to write your website for you. But the content that this website copywriter output was, how can I say it? It was flowery, it was waffly, it was using lots of words when small numbers of words are actually what’s needed. And the MSP in particular, who I work with, who I have a great relationship with. And that’s why I felt able to challenge them on this. I’d said to them, what was the brief? What did you tell this website copywriter? And they said, we wanted our website to be sexy. That’s actually the word they use. They wanted their website to be sexy. And we’re just talking here about the content, the words, which is what copywriters call copy. Copy is content. It’s the words. And I think the idea of having your website being sexy is great, right? You want your website to zing. You want it to stand out, you want it to be you, right? You want all of those things. But, and this is where it gets really hard. You also want it to be really, really simple because you have to understand how ordinary people use websites to be able to put the best possible website in place. And the way that people look at websites is when they’re at that very initial stage of they’re thinking of switching MSPs or picking their first MSP and they’re typing in it, support your town and they land on your website, they’re only going to spend a few seconds on your website. In fact, you’ve got literally two or 3 seconds to grab their attention, hook them in, get them interested. And the way to do that is not by talking about you, it’s by talking about them and by talking about them, but in a very simple way. You see, we don’t sit and read websites like we do books, right? We don’t read every single line and take in every single piece of information. We scan over it, literally, our eyes jump from bit to bit to bit. We’ll look at the headline, we’ll look at the image, we’ll scan through some of the text. People do go back and read things properly at later stages of research. And of course there are different personality types. You might be someone who does read all the detail all the time, but the vast majority of people tend not to do that on the initial thing, they will scan around. And here’s where the problem of having waffly, overly long, long winded content on your website. People will jump over that website content. And this has been the case for the last 25 years. And it will be the case for the next 25 years, I’m sure, right to the point where websites have been replaced by holograms or whatever replaces them. Websites have to be short and snappy. And this is the challenge. You can still be sexy with a website, but you’ve got to be simple, short and snappy. You’ve got to use short sentences. Short phrases immediately grab people’s attention. You can’t be ambiguous.

You’ve got to give them immediate context. It’s got to make sense. If 100 strangers who don’t know you and don’t know what you do. If 100 strangers go and look at your website, do they instantly understand what you do and more importantly, why you should do it for them? And if they don’t, then your website content isn’t simple enough. There’s a really good test for this, which I’m pretty sure we put on the podcast a couple of years ago, but it’s worth repeating again now. Go to a networking meeting, not one that you regularly go to. Go to a new networking meeting where no one really knows you, and you’re going there not to generate leads. You’re going there to get a bit of market research. Go along with your website on your phone, and you go up to strangers and you introduce yourself, but don’t say what you do. You just say, hi, my name’s Paul. How are you? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Terrible coffee. Yeah, isn’t it? Et cetera, et cetera. And then you say to them, can I ask you a huge favor either? I’m really curious to know what real decision makers people like you make of our website. If you kind of understand what we do. Can I just show you my website? Would you just sort of tell me what we do as a business and what the benefits are of working with us just from our website? And you just hand them your phone. And the average reasonable person is going to do this because this is cool, isn’t it? Who gets to do this? So they’ll grab your phone, they’ll have a look at it, and you’re kind of looking here for the opinions of, I don’t know, four, five, six different people, but not in a group, just literally doing it on an individual basis. Only give them ten or 15 seconds to look at your website. Don’t let them look at it. And keep scrolling and keep scrolling and keep thinking about it and tell you sort of iterate what they think about you and your business because that’s not normal, right? People don’t do that in a real environment. They go to your website, they’re either hooked into it and they stay for a bit and they do something, or they just hit the back button, which is called a bounce. So you want to kind of replicate that. Give them five to 10 seconds and then just say to them, what do we do? What’s the benefit of working with us? And if they hit you with, oh, you’re an IT support company. The benefits are you’re in our town, you’ve got a personal service, and you are the face of the business. So I know that I’m dealing with you, that’s the kind of thing you want. Whereas if they say, oh, you do something security wise and they’re all a bit vague and you can tell from their body language and the way they’re speaking that they don’t know the answer. If this is the case, don’t get depressed, don’t be miserable, don’t smash your phone in anger, don’t go home with your head in your hands and think it’s all over. It’s not at all. This is actually the response that you would get to the vast majority of MSP’s websites, because the vast majority are really bad and that’s good for you, because that kind of feedback gives you the opportunity to go and improve your website and to make it zing, to make it super, super simple, short and snappy, so that strangers who are looking at your website know exactly what you do and know exactly why they would buy from you, it’s actually a huge opportunity. Isn’t that exciting?

Here’s this week’s clever idea.

One of the best things about the MSP business model is the insane amount of retention that you just benefit from all the time. It’s baked in for a number of different reasons. Partly it’s just you looking after your customers well, but partly, of course, it’s something called inertia loyalty, where it feels safer and easier to stay with you than to move over to someone new that they don’t know. This is also known as better the devil you know. The other thing that keeps customers with you is that they just don’t understand technology when they actually start to think about switching to someone else. And there’s server things and cloud things and security things. All of these things are quite scary for them. And again, that feeds into that inertia loyalty. So retention for the average MSP is really good. Most MSPs only lose a client if the client goes bust or the client is bought out by another company that consolidates its it. And obviously, now and again, you do lose a client to another MSP or a different solution. Don’t you just love it when someone says, oh, we’ve got a friend of a friend who’s going to look after us. You kind of wash your hands of that one, don’t you? I believe that even when you have excellent retention, you should still have a process in place to just guarantee that that retention is as good as it possibly could be. And there’s something that one of those MSPs I was just talking about the ones that I work with on the calls. There’s something that one of those has started doing over the last few months. And I think this is beautiful. In fact, it’s beautiful and it’s simple and it’s something that you could easily take on board. Put it in place in your MSP and just try it out for a few months. Do it as an experiment, see what happens. Here’s what they do. They have a service desk manager. Now, you may not have one of these yourself, in which case you would do this or you would get one of your senior techs to do it. But the point is that the person who does this needs to be someone who a is able to have a good, in depth conversation with humans and also someone who has the ability and the motivation to take feedback and to go and change, improve things or report back to someone. So there’s no point you getting one of your texts to do this if they’re just going to do the phone call. Put the phone down and that’s the end of it. Nothing ever happens. It needs to be you or really, you’re a service desk manager, and what you do is every week you just call two clients for a chat. It’s as simple as that. And it’s an impromptu chat, it’s just a quick phone call through to the decision maker. It doesn’t have to be off the back of a ticket, doesn’t have to be off the back of an issue. It’s genuinely just random. And obviously you don’t call every client on a regular basis. It’s maybe once a year, once every six months, and then you just ask them some very simple questions. So you just say, hi, this is Matt, whoever, I’m the services manager here at so and so business. And just calling really just to just have a chat with you and see how things are going. So could you sort of tell me, if you think about what we’ve done for you for the last few weeks, what have we done? Well, and then there’s a follow up question to that is, what have we done that’s not been so good? And you could say, you put this in your own words, don’t you? So what have we done that’s good? What have we done that’s not so good? Or what’s not gone so well in the last couple of weeks or last couple of months? And that’s kind of setting a. Well, that’s partly setting context, but also partly getting good feedback out of them. When you ask people for feedback and you literally say, hey, can I have some feedback? They give you the wrong feedback. They don’t tell you what you really need to know. So the best kind of feedback is actually structured feedback. What have we done well? What have we not done so well? That’s great feedback. And it pulls off stuff off the top of their mind. And as they’re talking, they may think of other stuff that’s a little bit deeper, which is great feedback. Now, the third and final part of this is the most important question because this is the opportunities question. This could actually not only improve the retention, but could also actually set up an upsell opportunity as well. Here is the third and final question.

What can we do to make your life easier? Let me say that again, because it’s such an important question. What can we do to make your life easier? Now, notice there, we’re not talking about what can we do to improve your technology. We’re not saying what can we do to help your productivity or anything like that. What can we do to make your life easier? And remember, you’re talking to the decision maker, the person who is ultimately the one who signs off the next contract or doesn’t. Obviously, they’re going to take on feedback from their staff and from influencers in their business. But isn’t that the best possible question you could ever ask a decision maker? What can we do to make your life easier? But it’s really critical that whatever they say, you act on it. And it could be them asking you to communicate in a different way or to pick something up and help them with something or to solve a problem for them. Or they might say, actually, there’s nothing. We love what you do. We’re really happy with you. Thank you so much for the call. And actually, that call in itself, even though there’s no actions from it, there’s nothing that you could do. Wasn’t that an amazing call? They’re going to feel really good about you putting the phone down and for a number of weeks after that. And it’s all about the feelings. Good customer retention is not what they think. It’s not really about service levels, it’s about how people feel about you. The more you can do to influence how they feel, the even better your retention will be. Paul’s. Paul’s blatant plug. Blatant plug. Sometimes of an evening, I miss out on another 30 or 40 minutes worth of sleep because of YouTube. Do you do this? So I’ll watch something on Netflix or Prime or Disney, and it gets to about 10:00 and I think, right, I should really go to bed because I get up quite early ish and instead I think I’ll just come to YouTube just for five minutes and then 40 minutes later I’ve gone down the rabbit hole. I’ve missed out on sleep. I’m a bit grumpy the next day and what have I been watching? It’s just nonsense. Well, we are on a mission to make sure that you don’t ever waste any of your YouTube time however you use YouTube. So we are pumping out some really high quality edutainment videos about MSP marketing. I want you to be able to learn and discover how to improve your MSP’s marketing while having fun at the same time. So go and check out our channel. It’s YouTube.com slash MSP marketing. And while you’re there, please do subscribe and do the little Bell notification thing. I know everyone says that on YouTube. The reason is it’s really good for the algorithm. If YouTube can see that you’ve subscribed to my channel and you’ve allowed notifications which only really come up on YouTube anyway, then that actually helps me, which helps us to produce more content and I really do appreciate it. So go and have a look now and [email protected]. Slash MSP Marketing.

So I went down to the careers advisor and said, I want to become a systems analyst, knowing absolutely nothing about that as a career. So that’s what was the seed, ironically, the seed of the idea that got me into the idea of getting into IT services in general, and that weirdly carried on. So when I left school, I thought, well, what am I going to do? And I went to do an IT course in college. My whole vision was then starting a job in it as an IT technician. Essentially. I got my first break working for a company called Pendragon Motor Group, quite one of the largest dealers, motor dealers in the UK.

That started me off, and then subsequently that then led to me co founding a business with one of my colleagues in the IT department from Pendragon, a guy called Rory, Rory Perkins. That was a business called Pyrenet, which was established back in 2005, so predates the terminology MSP even. That was our first IT services business.

You’re juggling a lot of balls. You’re trying to pick up skills that you don’t really know how to do, and you’re kind of having to learn on your feet, pretty fast paced. So my memories back for 2005, 2006 was constant learning, constantly trying to pick up things that I didn’t know how to do and trying to become better at those things. So that’s what I remember from that. So moving that journey forwards all the way to the point where we’d done quite well out of that business in terms of from 2005 to 2016, it was growing every year. We always saw growth year on year all the way through. And we got to a point in 2016 where prior to 2016, where myself and my business partner, who’d been doing so well at running this business and growing this business together, had got to a point where we realized that our growth ambitions and what we wanted out of the business differed. So we were a bit of a crossroads, and we had different opinion on what we wanted out of the business. And that ultimately was what led us to the position where we wanted to exit the business and sell the business, which happened in 2016. But it took us eleven years to get to a million pound turnover in that business, which is just a relevant metric for anyone that’s listening.

Every business journey tends to go through the same challenges that every other business goes through. Particularly we talk about sales marketing all the time, which is a very big challenge for a lot of businesses, particularly in the MSP sector, where people are going, we need clients, but how do we get them? How do we get seen those kind of things? So I think a lot of businesses have very similar challenges. Having been through those challenges once before, it makes it so much easier to know how to deal with them next time around.