The best way for MSPs to delight existing clients dosen’t actually cost money… here’s 5 ways to do it. Also this week, how to turn your MSP’s success stories into 3 BIG marketing assets, and what if you sold your MSP to your employees?

Welcome to Episode 332 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

One of the easiest ways to grow your MSP is also one of the least talked about. And it’s this… delighting the clients you already have. And before your brain jumps to discounts and gifts and free stuff or doing more work for nothing, let me stop you right there.

The best ways to delight your existing clients don’t cost money. They cost attention, they cost intention, and they cost you thinking a little bit differently about how clients experience working with you.

So let me give you five examples…

The first is proactively explaining what’s happening before clients feel the need to ask. So most client frustration isn’t caused by things breaking, it’s caused by uncertainty. To them, silence creates worry and worry creates friction, not good, right? So a simple update that says something like, “Hey, here’s what we’re working on for you right now, or here’s why we’re making this change and what you might notice.” Well, that can completely change how a client feels about you. They stop wondering, stop guessing, and just feel really reassured. And reassurance is hugely underrated in the channel, it really, really is.

The second way to delight clients is to remember what matters to them beyond just their IT and their technology. Clients feel delighted when they feel known, not remembered as just an account number or a contract size, but they’re known as a business and especially as people. So referencing things like previous conversations or remembering a big business priority for them or acknowledging a stressful period that they’ve mentioned. None of that costs you money, but it really builds emotional loyalty between you and them. In fact, you can make clients feel like they’re in a very safe pair of hands.

The third way to delight clients is to remove small annoyances that they’ve quietly learned to tolerate. Delight really comes from removing friction, not adding features. So give them clearer instructions, remove the need for them to ask follow-up questions, do better handovers, send cleaner emails, make the next steps more obvious for them. When something suddenly feels easier, clients really do notice, and they might not send you a thank you email, but if they feel it, then those feelings really add up over time.

The fourth way is to tell your clients what you’ve prevented, not just what you’ve fixed. MSPs are brilliant at quietly stopping bad things from happening, but terrible at talking about it. Clients rarely know what didn’t go wrong because of you. So when you explain the risks that you’ve reduced and the issues that you’ve headed off, the problems that never really became problems, then you reinforce the immense value of what you do. You remind them why they chose you in the first place.

The fifth way to delight clients without spending a penny is to make it safe for them to bring you bad news. This one is bigger than it sounds. Clients are delighted when they’re not judged, lectured, or made to feel stupid. You understand that, right? I do. Absolutely. When they feel psychologically safe and it is all about their feelings, they’re going to come to you earlier and not later. They’re going to be more honest and tell you the stupid things that they’ve done, which is good, right? They’re going to be more collaborative. In fact, they’re going to trust you more deeply. That’s exactly what we want from them. That’s the partnership that you want with your clients.

The common theme across all five of these is that delight doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from being more intentional. The MSPs who retain clients really well and grow accounts and earn referrals are not the ones constantly piling extras on top. They’re the ones who communicate clearly, remove friction, and show that they care. They help their clients to feel safe. And do you know what the best part is, right? You can start doing every single one of these things immediately without spending a single penny.

Most MSPs completely underestimate how powerful simple client stories are. You know that your team does great work every single week, fixing problems, preventing issues, and saving clients from themselves. But when do you ever stop to tell the rest of the world about the cool stuff that you achieve every day? Rarely? Well, that’s a huge shame because each one of those stories can be turned into three big marketing assets that will help you to build trust, attract new clients, and help your existing clients feel prouder than ever to work with you. Let me explain why stories sell better than almost any other kind of marketing.

Back a very long time ago, like 10 years ago back in 2016, when I first started helping MSPs with their marketing, I noticed how many of them struggled to stand out. Their websites all said the same things. They said things like, “We’re proactive. We care about security. We’re your trusted partner.” You know that. You’ve seen all of this before, but none of it cuts through. It didn’t back then and it doesn’t today.

So I’d asked the MSP to tell me about a client that they’d recently helped, and that was the point their eyes completely lit up. They’d say things like, “Oh, one of our clients was hit by ransomware, but we had them back up and running the same day.” Or, “We migrated a whole 100 user law firm to the cloud in one weekend.” And those stories were gold because they did what all good marketing should do. They demonstrated proof, not promises.

People trust your stories far more than they trust your claims. So let’s talk about what makes stories powerful.

The magic ingredient isn’t just the result, it’s the emotions created by the result. A great client story answers questions from their point of view, such as: what was at stake, what did it feel like before you fixed it, how much better is your life now. When your prospect can see themselves in that story, you’ve already won half the marketing battle. Their emotions will want you to look after their business, and emotions are pretty good at influencing the brain. I believe there are three assets hiding in every success story. And once you’ve got a great story, here’s how to make the most of it…

Number one, create a written case study. This is the easiest win. A simple one-page story with three sections… the problem your client had, what you did to solve it, and the result and the benefit that they enjoyed. You don’t need marketing fluff, just real details, quotes if possible, and maybe a photo, or if you have to a logo with their permission of course. And this then is perfect for your website, you can put it in proposals and definitely in onboarding packs as well. You need to keep selling in that first 90 days that you’re working with a client.

Number two, create a social media post. Take the most dramatic or emotional part of this story and turn it into a post. It might be something like, “When a ransomware attack hit one of our clients at 6pm on a Friday, they thought their weekend was ruined. Here’s how we had them fully operational again by 9pm that night.” It’s very short, it’s very visual, you can understand that, it’s very relatable. Posts like these build credibility faster than anything else that you can do.

Number three, create a video story. Now, this is the golden ticket. Grab your phone and record yourself or your client if they’re up for it, telling the story in their own words. It doesn’t need to be highly polished. For this kind of video, authenticity beats high production value every single time. And then you can reuse that clip on your website, on LinkedIn, in email newsletters, even in your proposals.

So here’s your challenge… go and find one story, just one. Ask your team, what’s something amazing that we’ve done for a client recently? Ask your clients, what have we done in the last few months that’s impressed you the most? And ask yourself, what was the biggest scare you had recently, but the resolution was a lot easier than you thought. Then write it up, post it, or record it. You’ve already done the hard tech work. Now made that hard work, work hard for you.

Featured guest: Eric Brotman is Chairman of the Board and Chief Growth Officer of BFG Financial Advisors and Managing Principal of Brotman Consulting Group, LLC. He started in the financial planning industry in 1994 and launched a start-up in 2003 which has grown to over 20 employees and $900,000,000 in assets under management.

Eric is the author of three books including the award-winning “Don’t Retire…Graduate!” and hosts a podcast by that same name.

You might think this is the craziest idea that you’ve ever heard, but what if you sold your MSP to your employees really slowly over a number of years? In fact, what if that was your exit plan? So instead of selling out to one of the big consolidators or a local competitor or a venture capitalist group, instead you pass it over to your employees, but you do it really slowly.

You get the key people to buy into the business and you lock them into your business long before you’re ready to go. Maybe you think that’s a sensible idea, maybe you think it’s a crazy idea, but it’s something that my special guest today is doing. And I’m delighted to welcome him onto the podcast to explain to you why it’s something you should consider.

Hi, I’m Eric Brotman. I’m the chairman and chief growth officer of BFG Financial Advisors. And I’m here to educate MSPs on how to get money out of your business and into your personal pockets and do it in a tax-friendly way.

Oh, I love that. I mean, that in itself, we could just spend the whole podcast talking about how to get more money out of your business. And just as a heads up, because we do have listeners and viewers all around the world, we’re not going to be talking about specific US or UK tax laws, and no one wants to hear about specific tax regulations. We’re doing big picture items here of how you can get money out.

Do you know what, Eric, I think would be cool as well is if we can start to look towards the end of an MSP’s career. And I don’t mean their business, something horrible happening to it. I mean retirement, that happy day when you sell the business, you dance off into the sunset, go and buy a yacht, whatever it is that people do. I think it’d be really cool to talk about how us as business owners, because we’re all business owners here, how can we maximise our business while we’ve got it and how can we maximise our retirement. That’d be really cool to talk about.

So thank you for joining us on the show today. Just give us a sort of a brief overview of you. I mean, what is it that makes a man wake up in the morning and think, “Hmm, I want to be a financial advisor.”

It was a complete accident. I got into this business over 30 years ago. I was planning to go to law school, I enjoyed estate planning and wealth transfer and thought that was my path and I fell in love with the financial business and the rest is history. So now I’m building an organisation. We’re teaching individuals, business owners, families about financial literacy. I’m writing books and podcasting and doing as much as I can to get the word out that financial independence is attainable and that it’s mostly based on behaviour, not circumstance. So we’re just trying to change the narrative. And for business owners that there are a lot of particulars that we can take advantage of. It’s worth doing.

Yeah, no, I completely agree with you. So this year is my 20th anniversary, no 21st anniversary actually as a business owner. And I completely agree with you. I think, and I have a little bit of wealth that I’ve built over those years. I completely agree with you, it’s based on behaviour more than anything else. What are some of the things that you see business owners doing that a) hold themselves back financially, and b) actually promote themselves and build their wealth?

Well, the things that hold business owners back a lot of times it’s a scarcity mindset, instead of an abundance mindset. It begins with attitude, and it begins with recognising that even competitors in your space can teach you something. And that we don’t have to necessarily be afraid of other providers or other folks in our space. I also think that there’s a tendency for business owners to reinvest so much in their business that they don’t actually extract assets or wealth from the business and get it into their personal world, which means you’re constantly risking almost every penny to your name on the business being successful in an ongoing way. And businesses come and go, and industries come and go. So it’s really important, just like any corporate executive who owns stock in ABC company, whatever it is, just like they need to diversify away from their own stock, so do business owners.

So we have to take some of the fruit of our labour. And of course you’re going to reinvest in the business, you’re going to grow the business, you’re going to market the business, all those things, and that’s important. But you also have to get some money out of the business and into your family’s net worth, or you’re taking an enormous amount of very focused risk. So I would say those are the two big downsides. One is attitude and the other is the behaviour of reinvesting everything and not diversifying.

The biggest determinant to creating a business that’s going to monetise and change your life to make you financially independent, is beginning your succession planning very early.

And I know that sounds strange because a lot of business owners in our 30s and 40s aren’t thinking about that. I started selling stock in my own company in my 30s. People thought I was nuts, Paul. But now there are eight other owners here. We have a large roster of folks who can’t wait to buy me out. Not that they want me gone, but that they realise that this business will go on beyond my lifetime. And that’s exciting. That’s a legacy. So that feels good emotionally, but it’s also financially, it’s a really smart move at the end of the day because I can sell gradually and that’s good for tax planning. You don’t have to take a huge lump sum and get clobbered no matter what country you’re in. And at the same time, you can set your own course, set your own pace. I don’t feel like I’ll ever be forced out. I have the opportunity to decide how much I want to do, how much do I want to work?

I don’t believe in retirement. I know that sounds crazy because I do financial planning. I think retirement’s brutal and no one should do it because I think a lot of people look at retirement as the end of something, but not the beginning of something. I think you’re retired if you’re financially independent enough that you’re working for fun. And that you’re doing something you love that brings you purpose and brings you joy. And yes, it might still make you money, but at the point where you don’t need it to make you money, you’re retired even if you’re busy and even if you’re still labouring in some capacity.

Yeah. So much to unpack from everything that you said there. I agree with everything you said. I love the idea of selling little parts of your business as you go through your career. And I own a hundred percent of my business, the MSP Marketing Edge, and I enjoy the power and the control that goes with that because I can do what I want to do. But I’m only 51, so I’m nowhere near finished yet, but I can completely see the power of bringing on people and selling small parts of the business because actually that gives that business new, renewed energy from people who care about it. They’ve got as much skin in the game as you have.

It was interesting you talking about business owners going through their lives, not taking money out. I once, and I’m not going to name the type of business, but before I worked with MSPs, I worked with some other kind of businesses. And there was this one particular business owner that I used to meet on a monthly basis, and I always used to think they weren’t doing very well. They were a bit dowdy, always looked a bit scruffy. The kind of person you’d look at and you think, “Oh, those clothes are due going to the thrift store, charity shop, as we call them here.” And then one day they dropped a little bombshell to me that they’d never really taken any money out of the business. They had a million pounds in the bank, which is about 1.3 million US dollars. And the whole room was just stunned and just stared at this person and couldn’t believe it. And this person had spent 30 years just doing business every day, taking out the minimum amount. They were driven by fear and what their CPA, their accountant had said, take as little as you can. And of course, by the time you’re in your 60s with a million pounds in the bank, which has built up over 30 years, well, you and I know that that million pounds in the bank in the business, which is doing nothing, could have been two to three to four million pounds of their own personal assets by that point.

And let’s look at that because that’s another way of looking at this. I mean, we will have people listening to this podcast and watching this on YouTube who are in all sorts of financial states. So we’ll have those that literally don’t have a dollar to pay the bill that’s coming in tomorrow. And then we’ll have those that have loads of cash in the bank and there’s a scarcity mindset or a fear and everything in between. So you talked about selling little parts of your business as you go along. If you hadn’t taken that strategy, are there other strategies that you would have taken as you grew your business and went through your 30s, 40s, 50s?

The reality is I would have less choice now. If you don’t sell gradually, and it’s not specific to our industry, in general if you don’t sell gradually and find a large group of internal employees, coworkers, colleagues who want to take the financial risk to buy the stock, it’s never given, it’s always sold. But if you don’t do that, then you will have built an asset, if you’ve done well, that’ll be too valuable for anyone in your organisation to be able to afford, which means you are now stuck at the mercy of private equity or of an exit strategy that will eliminate the legacy you wanted to leave behind. You’ll make money, you’ll make money on the backend, maybe you’ll even make more money. Sometimes you walk away from some of the big dollars or pounds if you do it a little too soon, but I think the benefits of doing it gradually outweigh the super paycheck that could come at the end of the rainbow if you sell to that private equity firm.

I don’t want our employees, our clients, our vendors, any of our relationships to suffer because I went for the big check. That to me is, I couldn’t live with myself. I would much rather have people who are aligned. You talked about it as power… power’s not necessarily something that you give up, it’s something that you share. And a lot of times, all of us as entrepreneurs think that we have a monopoly on good ideas. And I’m here to let you know the secret that we don’t, and that sometimes it’s better to cast a wider net and to get ideas from lots of different places. And the other thing is you tend to lose some of your very best employees if they don’t have a vested interest in the success and a possibility of biting the apple of equity. You don’t want to lose your best people. You want to make sure that those folks are on the bus for the long term.

So like you, I’m 54 years old. I got a lot of gas in this tank. I’m never retiring. But I stepped down as CEO of the firm that I started January 1st of 26. This just happened and it was the best thing I ever did. I spent two years helping the new CEO transition in. I still own a large percentage of the company, not a controlling interest because no one has a controlling interest, but a meaningful interest that financially is important to me. And we’ve been able to transition the leadership here to a team that is younger than I am and that’s going to do an incredible job. And I can work as much or as little as I feel like. And if it’s not fun, I tell everybody, if it’s not fun, I’m not doing it anymore.

I absolutely agree with that. And I’m going to sidestep you calling me a power control freak or insinuating that I’m a power control freak. You’re right anyway, I’ll go with that.

So I was a micromanager and here’s the thing, Paul, I don’t know how many employees you have, but I was a horrendous boss. I think I’m a terrific mentor, coach, consultant, ally, advocate… terrible boss. I haven’t managed people in years. I love working with them. I help being a career builder. I love getting people to the next level for themselves professionally. I don’t like supervising humans. So we all have blind spots and that’s one of mine.

Yeah, no, I’m definitely not a micromanager. We’ve got 13 of us here and I don’t like managing either, but my strategy for that is to hire adults, adults with families and we’re all remote and we set clear boundaries and what we’re trying to achieve and goals and I just let them get on with it. And that’s another way. That’s the thing. We’ve all got different ways of achieving the same thing. I was only joking, by the way, when I said you called me a control freak. I am a control freak. I know that, but I’m in remission, so it’s okay.

So I completely agree with you about the big payout. And actually within the channel right now, as you know, there are all these super MSPs going around. This is a great time to sell an MSP. There’s so much corporate money, so much VC money right now, but the downside of that is legacies, the instant death of any legacy to your business. And some people, they just want the money, they want the exit, they want the reward for 20 years hard work, and maybe the extra 3, 4, 500,000 they get, and then they’re not so bothered by the end of their brand, the end of their business, and their staff going somewhere else. But there are others, and I feel this is how I feel, because I’ve sold a business 10 years ago, and that business unfortunately was closed by the new owner six months later, and that hurts. And so if and when I’m done with this business, which I’m years away from that, I’m going to want to make sure this business continues, that it has a legacy, and that to me is more important than the money side of things, which is interesting.

Let’s look at the final sort of part of this before we finish the interview. You mentioned about retirement and you don’t believe in retirement, I don’t really believe in retirement either. In fact, and I can see one of the other advantages of selling your business slowly over 10 years to your colleagues is that you always retain a role, right? You’re always going to be the chairperson or a consultant or something, because even when you’re 89 and they’re wheeling you in and speaking loudly to you, you’ve still got a role within the business because you were the founder of that business. What do you think, and again, bringing this back to all MSP owners, to all business owners, what do you think is the kind of thing that we should be working towards? Should it be something like keeping meaningful work or should we be looking to perhaps do consulting agreements at the end? Or do you see these days many people that want to do what feels like the old fashioned thing of, I’m going to take the check at 65 and I’m going to run off to the beach because that just doesn’t feel like a sensible thing anymore or a real thing anymore.

Well, it exists, but those people aren’t happy for very long. Retirement in the traditional sense, and you guys in the UK, because we don’t speak English on this side of the pond, we speak American, but nonetheless, in the UK, you know as well as I do that to retire is to go to bed. Well, if retirement is the long sleep, that sounds terrible to me, I’ll pass. I think it needs to be a graduation, I think it needs to be to the next level. And I think we have to have a life of purpose. There are secrets of the happiest retirees. And we’ve worked with thousands of families in the US and abroad, many of whom were entrepreneurs, business owners, MSPs, other folks who have done this kind of work that you’re talking about. And the fact remains that the most successful retirees, the happiest retirees have three things in common, Paul.

One, they are debt free. They don’t owe anybody anything, and that is a financially liberating thing that so many never experience even in their lifetimes. And a lot of business owners are constantly updating either equipment or personnel or other things and taking new and new and new business loans. And I know it’s leverage and I know there’s tax benefits in different areas, but to not owe anyone a nickel is especially rewarding.

Second thing is they’re healthy. They’ve taken care of their health and not just their physical health, mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, whatever it is. You don’t wake up one day at 67 and say, “I think I’ll be healthy now.” It really is a lifetime journey.

And the third and most important is you have to have a reason to get out of bed every morning. You have to. It doesn’t necessarily have to be for money, but it has to be more than golf. It has to be more than the beach. I defy anybody listening to this to take a vacation for three months and not be bored out of their minds. Truly, because our sense of purpose, our identity is tied to not just who we are, but what we do and the people we talk to every day. You lose adult communication, you lose a sense of making a difference. And I think that’s a very lonely and sad way to spend what could be half your adult life. I mean, we’re living to a hundred. If you quit at 65, which is an arbitrary number and you live another 30 years, at least 20 plus of which could have been really productive, whether it was profitable or not, is a whole nother animal. But why do that to yourself? I don’t get it.

I completely agree. When I sold my business 10 years ago, I had six weeks off and I was bored after that. And okay, so I was 41, not 51, but oh my goodness, I was so bored and I cannot think of anything worse than doing golf every day. What a terrible waste of your life, right?

Well, and I don’t know about you. I don’t know if you’re a married guy or what, but my wife would not want me puttering around the house with nothing to do. I would drive her insane. It’s like, go find something to keep you busy because I would find projects for a little while and then I would be climbing the walls.

I bet. Eric, thank you so much for jumping onto this podcast and being on this video. Just tell us briefly, what do you actually do to help MSP owners with their financial planning and working towards the future? And tell us how we can get in contact with you as well.

I’m happy to do that. Thanks for allowing me to. We help MSP owners and other business owners as well with monetising their businesses, but also managing their personal and business finances in concert because they’re different balance sheets, they’re different P&L statements, but they are still both important. And especially if you own 100%, they’re completely yours. So it’s important to not only do the right business planning, but also to do the right personal financial planning. And that means the estate planning, the risk management, some of the insurance work, some of the blocking and tackling that we don’t always think about, the debt, the real estate, all the decisions that get made and the family communication as well. We’re easy to find. Website is bfgfa.com. And for those interested in the don’t retire graduate concept, you can go to dontretiregraduate.com or bfguniversity.com. And we have a ton of financial literacy resources, lots of free content, and have a lot of fun doing it.

If you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge then maybe you joined me on last week’s live Munch and Learn. This is actually something we do every month. It’s kind of like a lunch and learn, but because I’m doing it for about 22 different time zones, I call it a Munch and Learn. You grab a snack and you join me live on a call to learn about an important subject to grow your MSP.

Now last week we were talking about the perfect MSP website homepage. So we now have a very clear framework of the exact ingredients that you need to make your homepage absolutely perfect. And the next Munch and Learn, which is going to be on April 9th, that’s about tightening up your ICP, your ideal client profile. The thing which tells you exactly the kind of clients that you want to work with, and more importantly, the kind of clients that you don’t want to work with.

All of the recordings for this, for the Munch and Learns last year and this year are available right now in the member portal. Oh, and if you’re not yet a member, it’s only available to one MSP per area. We do this deliberately so that your marketing never clashes with your direct competitors. You can see if your area is available by entering your postcode or zip code at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.