Welcome to Episode 275 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

What is it with people like you and me running on fumes? If you’re running an MSP, I know what it’s like right now. That boost you had from time off over Christmas, all that recharging festive fuel, that was months ago. It’s all long gone. And yet we keep pushing, don’t we mile after mile after mile, hoping we can keep the business going, hoping we can keep it growing. But is this actually the best way to run an MSP? Stick around to be reminded why we do this, how to keep your energy levels up and the unexpected benefit to your life and lifestyle in the long-term.

So this is my 20th year as a business owner and my goodness that has gone so quickly. I kid you not, I was 30 when I started my first business and I was young and cool and now I’m this old man, I’m age 50, I’ve got the creaky back, I’ve got a dodgy knee. And if you’re in your twenties or thirties right now, do not get cocky kid. This is going to happen to you as well. Although by the time that you reach the age the I am now, I’ll be in a nursing home, anyway.

One of the constants of being a business owner is that it is hard work. I have a great business now with a great team at the MSP Marketing Edge and we do great work for MSPs all over the world with our service. But I still have weeks where I’m working more hours than someone with a job would. If I worked for someone else in a job, I would never do those 50, 60 week hours, rarely anyway. And if I look back over the last 20 years, there have been many of those periods of time where you throw yourself into projects or problems or whatever it is. I’m sure you do exactly the same.

The truth is only business owners can understand this…

Running a business that you own is more than just something you do. It’s more than just a job. It’s very much a way of life.

It has a unique way of sucking every single last ounce of energy and every last second of time out of you. And do you know, as I hear myself saying that, I realise that I’m not really painting it in a very good light for someone who’s actually thinking of starting their own MSP. So sorry if that’s you. But I think actually before anyone starts their own business, really they need to understand the downsides as well as the upsides. It is an all consuming thing and especially so with an MSP because running an MSP is surely running one of the most difficult kinds of businesses in the world.

There are so many details you need to be across, there’s so much that changes. And of course you have to be both proactive and reactive at the same time. You have to be proactive stopping things from going wrong, but then reactive fixing stuff that does go wrong. It’s exhausting. You have my full admiration for doing it. Sometimes I see MSPs are really struggling with this burden. I see posts in places like the tech tribe or my own free MSP marketing Facebook group and people are really struggling with the constant burden of running an MSP. And I think it’s at times like that you have to remind yourself why you are doing this. So let me ask you why you started your business in the first place. Was it to increase your personal income? Was it to take control of the work that you do and who you do it for and the way that it’s done? Was it to build a better lifestyle for you and for your family or was it just because you wanted to prove that you could do it? That you could stand on your own two feet? I mean the chances are it’s many or even all of those things.

Starting a business isn’t like taking a job. It’s something we create, something we shape ourselves, it’s our baby. And do you know, after the difficult first couple of years, you can build something amazing that thrives whether you personally are there or not. In fact, the thing that keeps many business owners going not just through 20 years but 30 years, 40 years or more, is the lifestyle that they can build out of owning a business. And by lifestyle I don’t mean a bigger house or a bigger car. And if those are things that motivate you, then great. But when I’m talking about lifestyle, what I’m really talking about is you doing the things you want to do with the people you most want to do them with.

Let me give you an example. So you may know I’m a sole parent, I have a 14-year-old, Hi Samm, that’s my child and that’s my most important job. So I am always a parent first and a business owner second, and all my other roles come after that. But there’s going to come a point in the next few years where my beloved child leaves to go to university or whatever. Actually she wants to go to drama school to be a musical theater actor, which is cool. And at that point, I’m just not going to be needed as much as I am today. I guess I’ll have to just send money all the time obviously, but I won’t need to be taxi driver, I won’t need to be organiser, chef, all of those kinds of things that you do as a parent. And at that point I want to travel.

I have a plan to travel to 50 countries in my fifties and so far I’ve only ticked off one item off that list, one country off that list, which was a visit to the US last year and I’m going to be 51 in just a few months time, so I need to get on this. But all joking aside, that goal has been a very big presence in my mind for perhaps five, maybe even 10 years or so. And I knew it was going to be some time before I could do and travel to the really cool places, the kind of places that teenagers just don’t want to go to. Places like Japan, that’s the kind of place I want to go. So as I’ve been building up my business over the years, it’s very much been in the back of my mind that whatever I build must feed my lifestyle and not hinder it. My lifestyle requirements in the future demand that I have time to go traveling and enough money to pay for that travel. And also, of course, I can’t be trapped in an office here at home. There’s no way that I could have that lifestyle if I was working for someone else. Well most jobs anyway. But as a business owner, I definitely can because I can go to Japan and I can work in a different time zone and also have some fun.

And that’s the point that I’m trying to make here. The greatest advantage of running your own MSP is that you can work towards the lifestyle you most want to live. And that might be travel, it might be doing more exciting higher strategic tech work through opportunities that are opened up to you by the people that you’re meeting running your MSP. It could be something else you might want to learn to hang glide, I don’t know. But believe me, during the difficult weeks, the ones where you are working 60, 70 hours a week or more, and that’s just to stay afloat. That’s what you’ve got to stay focused on.

Running a business is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. And yet sure, you’ve always got to be aware of the mile that you’re currently running, but you must also keep in mind the ultimate goal to live the life you most want to live doing the things you most want to do with the people you most want to do them with.

If I walked into your MSP’s office today, would my mouth drop open in shock and surprise? Would I be slapping you on the back and congratulating you or would I have my hands on my face in total horror at what I see? Let me tell you how what I’d see in your office can tell me exactly how efficient your MSP is at winning clients and serving them well.

So I’ll admit it’s been a few years since I was inside an MSP’s office, but based on several years of visiting many of them, they do tend to fall into one of two camps. They’re either a pristine, tidy space with zero mess or they’re an untidy space packed with clutter. Old hardware, keyboards, mice, cables everywhere on every shelf in every drawer, in every cupboard. You can’t move for stuff. So which one of those is your office? Personally, I try very hard to maintain a clean and tidy environment. My house is the kind of place where you could drop in on me with no notice and think I’d just been tidying for hours. My home office and video studio is exactly the same apart from one corner where a bunch of unwanted clutter is starting to building up.

Every time I clear out my office or declutter my desk, I feel great. Because your environment sets your context. It directly affects how you feel and how you think.

It’s why a refurbishment in a retail shop typically leads to an immediate boost in sales. It’s also why some people believe a broken window that doesn’t get fixed can ultimately lead to the building being burned down. Side note, this is known as broken windows theory. You can Google it. It’s where small crimes against an empty building tend to escalate. So if some kids break a window and no one notices that the windows have been broken and no one boards them up, the vandals keep returning, and they commit higher and higher levels of crime until eventually someone burns the building down.

And it explains why if you tolerate one technician being late for work twice a week every week, eventually that will spread to more of your staff until many of them are routinely late. Context is everything. So if your environment sets your context, here’s a challenge for you. Have a good look round. You’re working environment right now unless you’re driving of course, but if you’re in the office, have a good look around. What kind of context is it setting for you? Is there clutter everywhere? Are there piles of old computers waiting for… what? Are you waiting for Windows seven to come back into fashion? Could your office do with a deep clean? Are the cobwebs all over the place? What do the walls look like? Would they benefit from a lick of paint?

Another way of looking at it, what could you do in just 30 minutes at the end of work today or tomorrow that could make a dramatic difference to your working environment? Removing the physical clutter from our environment helps us to tackle the mental clutter with less stuff clogging our minds. We can operate with greater clarity and ultimately get more done. Right, I’m going to roll my sleeves up. I’m going to have to tackle my evil clutter corner.

Featured guest: Shawn Lemon is the founder of The Digital Organizer and has spent the last 17 years helping individuals and businesses get better at using their technology. A teacher at heart, Shawn believes the biggest reason people struggle with their tech is because of a lack of understanding of the tools, which isn’t surprising because they’re constantly changing as technology advances.

When not helping businesses operate more efficiently, Shawn loves making pottery, riding motorcycles, and spending time with his wife, Madeline and their 2 year old son, Nico.

Well, who knew? To do their job every good MSP help desk member needs a flashlight and a microscope as well as their mouse and keyboard. Why? Because of the clients submitting endless tickets saying they can’t find this file and they can’t find that file. It’s always urgent, of course, and it can take up a lot of technician time that you could be using to solve real problems. My guest today has an easy way to rescue your profits by improving efficiency and reducing these kind of tickets. Oh and your clients will be delighted and feel like you are proactively helping them.

Hi, I am Shawn Lemon, founder of The Digital Organizer.

And thank you so much for joining me on the show today, Shawn. We are going to explore in the next 10 minutes or so how MSPs can reduce the amount of tickets coming into their business just by getting digitally organised. Now I don’t really understand what that is, and I know you are going to explain it for us, Shawn, and of course loads about MSPs because you have been, in fact, you still are an MSP, aren’t you?

That’s right, yep.

Yeah. So tell us about your background. How did you become an MSP in the first place and how did you move into this sort of different thing of being digitally organised?

Yeah, well, I started working at the Apple Store for seven years teaching people how to use their stuff, and those clients wanted help getting organised beyond what we were able to teach or what the Genius Bar was able to help with, which was only troubleshooting. So I went into that whole field of helping out individuals and then small businesses, basically doing break/fix, then got pulled into MSP just from clients wanting it and started developing all of my SOPs and everything from there while also still running my digital organisation business at the same time.

Oh wow. So you’ve kind of one of those people who’s just good at lots and lots of different things, which is really cool. So explain to us what do you mean by digital organisation? Because when I first heard that phrase when you and I first discussed you coming on the show, I thought, well, is that something as simple as keeping your files in a good order in your computer? Is it as simple as something like that or is there sort of a bigger concept to it?

Well, I’d say there’s a bigger concept in realising that we have three primary things that every business has to do well – communication, file storage and management, and project management. And those three things go hand in hand with each other and we’re constantly flipping back between them. But if we think about communication file storage or just data storage and handling that and task management, there’s a massive amount of overlap in tools, and the lines of demarcation are not drawn because everyone’s trying to get you to use their platform more. And so what we’re trying to do is come in and say, Hey, you’ve got five different places that you’re storing your files. Let’s come up with our one source of truth and we’re still going to need to utilise other platforms to send and receive, but how do we do that? And same thing goes for the communication channels and project management so that everyone knows exactly where to go and there’s minimal amount of organisation that actually needs to happen because we’re cleaning up as we go. So we teach clients how to stay organised as well.

Got it, got it. So for MSPs that take on board that bigger strategy, how does that affect the work that they then do for their clients? So should they, for example, be taking more responsibility for helping their own clients and the end users actually be more organised?

My encouragement to MSPs would be to get into the nitty gritty with the clients to try and help them figure out how they should actually utilise the tools.

What I find is most IT companies are focusing primarily on getting them to the right platform or maybe even consolidating everything. They’re spinning up that SharePoint from a server that they’ve been managing all along and getting them upgraded. But once it gets all pulled into one place, the clients still need a lot of help figuring out how to utilise it properly, whether it’s a familiar tool or something else of figuring out what that flow is.

The encouragement is get in there, and this could be something that you charge a one-time fee for or maybe something ongoing. It doesn’t have to be that you just eat all of this cost to get in and help them organise their data. But if you do and get in, whether it’s build them separately or eat the cost and get them organised, it’s going to come back to you in the form of less tickets because everyone knows where to go and your clients are going to be a lot happier, not just about the tech solution, it’s about the data flow as well.

So I like this. So it’s a very proactive approach, and saying we know that a bulk of tickets are going to come in because of X, Y, Z problems, which are related to, I can’t find this, or this doesn’t seem to work, or where did I put that? so let’s eliminate those. And actually, what if we get the clients to pay us to eliminate those problems before they happen, which I think is beautiful. And you mentioned migration, so something like a migration to SharePoint is an obvious place to do that because it’s something new.

Obviously when you’re taking on board new clients, that would be a good time to do it as well. From a practical point of view. Shawn, how would you actually do that? So if you’re an MSP, let’s take the migration, say you are migrating the client from whatever and they’re going onto to SharePoint. I know most MSPs would just pick up the 10,000 files from the old place and just two days later pop them down in the SharePoint and go, there you go. So all they’ve done is they’ve moved from platform A to platform B practically. How would you organise those 10,000 files, which might be 10 years worth of data?

Well, the first thing that I would do is figure out or discuss with the client a good archiving strategy. Realising that the 80/20 rule applies to our data, but it’s even more skewed than that. The amount of files that we’re actually using daily and that are going to set us up for the future, are very small percentage of the data that we actually own. So we need to create some sort of a deep archive that’s maybe not part of the search function for all of your users, so that we’re not pulling up irrelevant results.

A big part is setting aside a deep archive that we have a few gatekeepers who can go find things, and really have our clients focus primarily on what’s important now, going to set them up for the future, and then what should a new folder structure be. When we’re thinking about sharing internally for different departments or even sharing externally when we’re working with other people. And realising we’ve got departmental SharePoints, maybe even projects and things that we’re working on, and really incorporating that to figure out what should the new folder structure be, that archive strategy and a good naming convention. And I’ve also got a free download, which is our process of how we do organisations. If you want to take that and run your clients through that same process or share that resource with them, go for it. It’ll be extremely helpful.

Cool. We’ll talk about that free download just at the end of the interview, and you’re welcome to give your website address out so MSPs can go and get that. I’ve got to ask, in the age of AI and in the age of all content being indexed, and we’ve got pretty good search tools almost across every platform, do we really need to force companies and force clients into that that structured folder setup and folder structure? Can’t they just rely on search or AI or are those tools just not quite good enough yet?

As of right now, they’re not nearly good enough. I mean, box AI is the one who is talking about being the most advanced, but really when I went in and had them do a demo for me of how it works on their enterprise plan, the whole thing, it was extremely clunky. Google isn’t that great either. I haven’t seen anything really outstanding from OneDrive either. So between all of them, we’re not there yet. But even still, if you think about AI and pulling all of this data together, we need to remove data that isn’t relevant anymore and we don’t want all of this archive stuff showing up in our active files.

I actually think that a separation between active files and archives is going to be even more important, but being able to say what’s in this document that is getting better and better leaps and bounds. So I think it’s going to be less, but because we’re still going to have to store it somewhere, we still need to keep it pretty clean. And a lot of the automation, I think it’s just going to be a while before it’s mature. So personally, I think it’s still really worth the investment of doing it now because who knows when it’s actually going to be good enough.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I think this is great. I’m one of those tidy people who I’m looking around my office where I’m recording this interview and I’ve got my physical drawers where everything is arranged perfectly. I know where everything is. This folders are the same on my computer. I was chatting today to a friend of mine who has just migrated from PC to Mac, which is what I use, and the spotlight search on the Mac, which he’s really good at finding stuff inside documents, and I don’t use it for that purpose because I know where everything is, but he’s completely lost. He has thousands of files. He is that nightmare client who needs an MSP to come and sort him out.

Well, that’s actually why I started this business in the first place. I saw these people switching from PCs to Mac, and then it’s like no matter where you go, there you are. Their mess just got dumped into a new location, which is the same thing that happens with SharePoint or Google Drive or Dropbox migrations. It just all gets dumped in. Now what do we do with it? And you’ve got a few people who can figure it out, but the majority just get overwhelmed with it and have a hard time functioning. And that’s how this business was created 11 years ago.

Yeah, no, I think it’s wonderful. It’s a great business idea and it’s so unique. Final question for you before we talk about your free download and how we can get in touch. You work with lots of MSPs, have you come across MSPs that are themselves highly disorganised, they haven’t got their own file structure and their own sort of internal information all sorted out?

Yeah, absolutely. It’s something that we see a lot, just because you scale fast and the most successful businesses are usually the ones who put marketing first and operations later. And so you need operations to trail that. And sometimes that trail gets a little bit too big of a gap and you spin up too many tools. So you started a Wiki and Notion, and then you’ve also got your other stuff in Google Drive and it’s spread out all over the place. And really, I mean, my biggest thing is use forms for everything. Forms for all of the clients and then templates for all of onboarding, offboarding, whether it’s your clients or your client’s new employees.

And it just makes common sense, doesn’t it when you say something like that. But as you say, it’s very difficult sometimes for operations to keep up and especially when you’re fast scaling. So Shawn, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Tell us about this free download. Where can we get it and how can MSPs get in touch with you?

Yeah, so you’re going to go to thedigitalorganizer.com/marketing edge. This is the podcast you’re listening to MSP Marketing Edge. So go there and you’re going to get my file organisation guide – the whole process of consolidating, archiving, purging – the whole thing, start to finish. We’ll give you some other emails as well that you’re welcome to share with your clients, about cleaning up email inboxes and how we like to triage things and get stuff under control with as little effort as possible. So yeah, check us out at thedigitalorganizer.com/marketing edge.

Joseph in Houston, Texas, has numerous staff and as a good boss he has asked: How can I keep track of how happy they are?

The very best way to keep track of what’s really happening with your staff is through structured one-to-ones. You can just have a 15 minute meeting with them on a regular basis once a month will be enough, and you structure the meeting around three questions. The first is: What’s going well?, followed by: What’s not going so well?, followed by: What are you going to do differently next time?

You can answer these questions with your team as well as them giving an answer. In fact, that is the ideal way to do a one-to-one. So they get some feedback from you on what they’re doing well and what they’re doing not so well. And you get to see what they believe they’re doing well and not so well. That really is a great format, which can serve you as you manage and develop your team.

However, it’s not wise, nor recommended for you personally to do more than four or five one-to-ones a month, because they’re simply too draining. And while it’s ok for managers who work for you to do one-to-ones on your behalf, you do lose that bigger picture feeling about your team that you get from doing one-to-ones yourself.

Of course there is a software solution. I spoke to an MSP, who’s got around 12 staff, who’s using something called Office Vibe to keep a track on his team’s overall engagement. It asks your team a series of questions and keeps track of how they’re feeling about their work, to give you an overall grip on your team satisfaction. And of course, it’s not a replacement for sitting down talking human to human, but it is a good way of keeping up to date with your team’s feelings without having to do dozens of hours of one-to-ones every month.

So have a look at Office Vibe, it’s a suggestion, not a recommendation. You should probably Google alternatives to it as well to see what else is out there. And if you do try this for yourself, will you drop me an email and let me know how you get on because I’d love to know. To submit your own question just go to mspmarketingedge.com and head to the contact us page.

Welcome to Episode 274 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

If a client tells you they’ve got a Trojan, your heart sinks. But what if there was a kind of Trojan that actually made you happy because it meant that you were going to make some more money and win some new clients. And don’t worry, I’m not suggesting you infect people’s computers, but let’s talk about why this sales Trojan is a good one, how it can boost your sales and ultimately have a powerful positive impact on your MSP.

We all know what a Trojan horse is, and we all know the Greek myth that gave it that name. But of course, we also know its place within cyber security, perhaps a term that was maybe used more in the past than it is today. But I believe you can use a sales Trojan horse. So what is this? It’s where you sell something small to someone to start building a relationship with them ahead of the thing you really want to sell them, which is of course, a managed services contract.

As an example, you would sell them a low level service first, with the knowledge that you’re going to overdeliver, do a great job, totally delight them. And that’s going to help you to sell them a proper monthly recurring revenue managed services contracts down the line, which is always the goal of everything we’re trying to do here. MRR first. There is only MRR, everything else is just establishing the setup of more MRR.

The beauty of a sales Trojan horse is that it’s a lot easier to sell someone something small than it is to ask them for a 12, 24 or 36 month contract.

They might not understand technology at the level you do but they do understand that if and when something goes wrong, their business is completely screwed. So by selling them something small first, it gives you the opportunity to build up a level of trust with them to build a relationship. And this actually has a term within marketing. It’s called front end backend marketing.

Maybe you’ve seen one of these people online selling something, perhaps doing something like a giveaway where they ask you to pay a little bit for postage and packing. So the thing they’re giving away, the book or whatever is free, you just pay the postage and packing. Or maybe you get a huge value item for $20, something like that. And what this person is really trying to get you to do is to buy something and feel satisfied with it, and then you’ll go on and you’ll buy something more expensive from them in the background or what’s known as the backend. They probably don’t make any money from selling you the book or the $20 item or whatever it is, but they will make money from selling you the $500 item in the background. And let’s say one in 10 people goes on to buy that item, no one would ever buy it as the first purchase, but some may buy it as the second purchase. That’s the theory of front end backend, and that works very well depending on your audience and depending on what you’re selling.

From an MSP point of view, the most obvious thing that you would sell to someone in the front end is a project. In fact, I had a thread on this in my MSP marketing Facebook group that any MSP can join. I asked the direct question: Would you sell a project just to start a relationship with a customer so that you could go on to sell them managed services?, which seemed like a very black and white answer where people were either, yes, 100% I would do that, or they were, no, I will not do that, I only want to get recurring revenue. I don’t want to sell projects. And of course, there’s no right or wrong answer. You have to go with whichever is right for you. But a project is the most obvious small thing to sell people. It’s not really a small thing, I mean, a project isn’t cheap, is it? It could be a $10,000 (or pound) project. The point is, it’s a one-off fixed thing. They know what it is they’re buying, they know when it’s been completed, they know when it’s been done successfully. And so that project allows you to build a relationship with this new client. And you and I both know that if you do a project, you’ll uncover other things that need to be addressed. Maybe even some of those things can be fixed during some kind of managed services contract. So I think a project is the ultimate sales Trojan horse.

There are smaller things that you can do, of course. One of our MSP Marketing Edge members is doing very, very well right now selling small amounts of cyber security training to prospects. So he’ll get talking to a prospect and he’ll sell them a session for no more than about £50, which is about $70, $80. And all it is is a lunchtime zoom, almost like a lunch and learn where he’ll get the prospect’s team onto a Zoom and take them through about 30, 40 minutes of cyber security training, really low level stuff. But it works well because he can then do a review with the decision maker after that training and talk them through some areas where they really should invest in their business.

There are other things that you could sell along these lines, maybe such as selling them something like backups, a basic service like this, or even selling an audit. And I know that audits have fallen out of favour as a sales tool, but a solid audit where you are looking at someone’s systems and telling them what they should improve, I still think that’s possibly the ultimate sales Trojan horse. Because it’s low cost to them, high value for you. You get to dive into their systems to have a look and do the audit, and don’t you always find something which really needs to be followed up with them, which creates an opportunity for you. So tell me, do you think this is something that you’d actually use in your MSP?

What if the secret to landing your dream clients was a key you didn’t even know you had? There’s a hidden strategy locked away that could open doors to better clients without LinkedIn, without websites, cold calls or marketing campaigns. And it’s so effective that the MSPs already using it, hope that you will never find it. Right now, let’s discover where to find that key, how to unlock new opportunities and how to transform your business.

In nature there’s a phenomenon called mutualism. Those are two very hard words to say, a phenomenon called mutualism. Now, you would know this better as a symbiotic relationship. Think of little birds called oxpeckers sitting on the back of zebras and rhinos, and those birds eat the parasites off the animal’s body, which is an easy meal for them, but it also helps the zebra to stay healthy. In fact, they’ve even been observed warning short-sighted rhinos of approaching humans. They’ve got a good symbiotic, win-win relationship there. And there’s an opportunity for you to set up a win-win relationship just like this with a local web agency near you. And the good news is there’s no need to eat worms or anything like that.

From the point of view of ordinary business owners and managers, you and a web agency both do the same thing – “computer stuff”.

Now you and I know that websites and managed services are completely different sides of “computer stuff”, but this explains why your clients sometimes ask you whether you build websites. And believe me, they are asking their website agency whether or not they can help when their computers don’t work properly. Can you see the opportunity here? When a client asks about websites or SEO (search engine optimisation), you say, well, we don’t do this, but we work very, very closely with a local web agency. Let me connect them to you. When the web agency’s client asks them about IT support, they say, well, we don’t do this ourselves, but we work very, very closely with a local IT support company. Let me connect you to them.

Long-term, you could build this into your strategic reviews or your quarterly business reviews. You could generate loads of highly qualified leads for your chosen web agency partner and they could do the same for you. But how do you find a web agency partner? You are looking for a proper agency here, not a one man band who designs websites in their spare bedroom. Nothing wrong with that, but you want a bigger business that’s going to send larger prospects your way. One person band web designers tend to attract two to three user businesses. The best agency partner is someone that you already know. Is there a local web agency that you’ve met at networking events, or are highly respected in the local area? If not, and you need to create a relationship from scratch, and this needs to be done slowly.

Pick a few target agencies and reach out to the owners on LinkedIn. Tell them you’ve had a great idea for mutual benefit, and would they like to meet for a coffee to discuss it. If they want to know what it’s about in advance, you can send them this podcast. I’m actually serious because it explains exactly what’s in it for you and for them. And hello web agency owner.

When you do meet them for coffee, don’t just jump straight into, Hey, what do you think about this great idea? Should we do a partnership? Should we pass leads to each other? I would approach this more like a sales call. Start slowly, build a relationship. Ask them open questions about their favourite subject, which is themselves and their business. You can ask them things like, How’s business right now? What’s going well and not so well? What are you struggling with right now? Where are you hoping to go in the next three to five years? And what are your biggest problems and opportunities? Remember, the more you talk about them, the more intriguing you’ll be to them. And it’s weird how that works.

Sadly, this isn’t something that can be rushed. Relationship building takes time, but it is worth it as you have the opportunity here to build a solid referral foundation with a business that has exactly the same clients as you but isn’t in competition with you.

Featured guest: Scott Robertson has 30+ years of public relations and marketing communications experience with a wide range of consumer and business-to-business organisations including: the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), the NAMM Foundation and Hewlett Packard.

Prior to founding Robertson Communications (RobertsonComm) in 2012, he most recently held the position of director of marketing & communications/PR for NAMM. During his 10+ years at NAMM, Robertson is credited with restructuring and strengthening the organisation’s branding and member communications. Before NAMM, Robertson led and grew Copithorne & Bellows/Porter Novelli Orange County office, taking it from a handful of staff and less than $500,000 in revenues to 28 staff and more than $4 million annual revenues in less than three years.

Robertson is the author of the book “Just Stop It: Your Survival Guide to Marketing Myths, Mistakes and Misgivings,” a Certified StoryBrand Guide, an accredited, active member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and holds a master of science in corporate communications degree from Lindenwood University as well as a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism. Robertson previously hosted the award-winning podcast “May the Best Brand Win” on Entertalk Media.

This is the worst marketing crime that any MSP can make, and yet I see it on almost every single MSP’s website. It’s so bad that it’s costing you money, it’s making people not want to engage with your MSP. My special guest today will tell you what it is, why it’s so bad, and how to fix it in minutes.

Hi, I am Scott Robertson and I fix bad marketing for MSPs and tech companies all around the world. I’m happy to be here today.

What a fantastic intro. And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Scott. And I think you and I have that thing in common, don’t we? That we see so much bad marketing all across the internet from MSPs all over the world, and clearly both of us have the same mission, which is to go and fix that marketing.

I must just comment, obviously most people are going to be listening to this on the podcast and what I’m about to say is a very visual thing, but you have a better blue shirt on than me. For those people watching it on YouTube, they’ll see that your blue shirt is a much better style, that it fits better. I’ve got one of my tatty blue shirts on today, whereas you’ve got a very smart blue shirt. So Paul needs to up his blue shirt game.

In fact, what I’ve just done there is I’ve just committed one of the sins that I know we’re going to talk about in this interview, which is that I’ve been talking about myself and no one cares about me. They care about how they can help their business by listening to this podcast. So we’ll come back onto that in a second. Before we do, let’s find out a little bit about you and establish some credibility. So who are you? What do you do? And give us the brief version of your working life story that’s got you to where you are today.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s easy, it’s kind of like a play, I can summarise it in three acts. In the first act of my career, I worked for PR agencies. I was recruited to do high tech PR in Los Angeles, and I was moved from Missouri out to LA to do that work. The second act of my career, I worked in-house for a large nonprofit organisation who needed a lot of help with branding and marketing in the music industry space. And that was a lot of fun, I’m a musician, so that made it fun for me. And then the last act, which I’m in now, yay, is I run my own business. And I help entrepreneurs and business owners really understand marketing at a higher level.

A lot of my clients don’t like to do marketing. They would rather do anything else but marketing, but the world forces them to do marketing or close the business. So it’s not really a choice. You’ve got to do it and you’ve got to do it in a smart way, and I help them see a better way to do marketing. I think that most marketing, I will tell you, Paul, is terrible, is awful. And I think that our profession miseducates people and I think that we settle for bad marketing all over the place when we don’t have to. We tell the wrong story, we use the wrong stuff, we’re speaking the wrong language. And I think that the marketing industry miseducates at a massive level. We don’t talk about strategy, we don’t educate business owners about why we do what we do and what we’re trying to accomplish. And I think that that is a shame, so I try to be on the side of the line that Seth Godin’s on and Donald Miller’s on and that you’re on, and try to be one of the good ones in an ocean of garbage, an absolute ocean of marketing garbage.

I love the fact that you just put me on with Seth Godin and Donald Miller there, both of whom are fantastic authors. For those people listening and watching read everything Seth Godin has ever written, he’s a prolific writer. He writes a blog a day and a book a year pretty much. And Donald Miller, we haven’t featured Donald himself but we featured StoryBrand, which is his book, on the podcast before. It’s an amazing book to read.

Let’s go back to that example I was just mentioning earlier, and you’ll remember I started talking about me. And obviously that’s completely the wrong approach with marketing. And Scott, you see MSPs doing this all the time don’t you? Talking about themselves rather than talking about the customer, the prospect.

Yeah, and Donald Miller, if he was here, he would say is it’s very simple to see why. MSP wants to build a website, they don’t know anything about marketing, they go to a website design firm, the website design firm asks them, what’s your message? They get in a room and you’ve got the blind leading the blind right there. You’ve got web designers who I wouldn’t trust to write the words, that’s not their skillset, they’re designers. There’s a step that comes before that, and that’s the brand messaging step. I’m a StoryBrand guide. You mentioned my buddy Don Miller, and what’s important about StoryBrand, is it gets the client out of the message. It gets them out of the hero role, which you can’t take anyway, it’s already been cast and you didn’t make the cut. The customer is the hero. And so it puts you in the guide role. And the guide role is so much more important because the guide role has already solved it for the hero. It is really important. 

When I talk about miseducation, people confuse an internal marketing message with an external one. And an internal one is your why, your vision, your values, your about us. And I mean, you should take that out to your next retreat and put on your matching t-shirt and just go off on all of that with your staff. But you don’t ever let that stuff creep into an external marketing message because psychologically speaking, you have eight seconds to make an impression. And if you don’t involve that customer’s brain in a story that solves their problem, their brain will shut off and they will move on from you and you will lose them.

The first goal of marketing is curiosity. How do we make people curious? We make people curious by making marketing about them. It sounds really obvious, but I’ll be damned if I don’t fix that seven times a week.

I wish I was solving different problems, but you have to solve that problem. You don’t solve that problem and the company goes nowhere and everything is a waste from there. So like I said, the biggest problem with marketing is that there’s a fundamental miss on the fact that it’s not about you. Don’t put a picture of yourself on your website, no one cares. If you need that kind of validation from your parents, call them up after when you’re done and have them tell you you were a good son or daughter, whatever you need, that kind of thing. Don’t use marketing for your own self validation and ego trip. Make it about them.

Your hero image on your website needs to be about the customer, once you solve their problem. How did you get them from the stress and pain that they’re feeling. I saw a website this week, Paul, where this coach had four pictures on the website, he just did a photo shoot, and he had four photos of himself on the website. And so I said, This is a website where you’re the target customer, right? And he said, No, I’m not the target customer. I said, Why are there four photos of you? I don’t know how we’re supposed to handle that, but it’s not about the customer, so it’s not going to work. So you have a website out there that’s going to be totally ineffective. The customer’s going to say, there’s already a hero in this story and I’m going to move on. And when you talk about MSPs, they solve some really important stuff. Lean into those problems that you solve. I mean, if the technology goes down in a business, the business goes down. If your email is down, you’re out of business. So it’s so important what they do, and they leave that on the table all the time. They talk around it and not add it.

Yeah, I completely agree with you. Well, I agree with 99% of what you just said, and I’m going to just unpack your answer and I’ll tell you what the 1% is I disagree with. You mentioned about being the hero and the guide. And again, for our MSPs, listening and watching that is completely down to StoryBrand, it is a great book. I like to talk to people about it from a Star Wars point of view, which is when you are crafting the story of your MSP, you’re not Luke Skywalker in that story, you’re Yoda. You’re the guide, you are the person who is helping to drive things along, but ultimately the story that’s happening is about your customer, who is Luke Skywalker? So let me just throw that one in.

The one thing I disagree with there is where you say about putting your photo on your website, and I say this as someone who has about 25 photos of himself on his own website, as you were saying, I saw a website this week where there was just four photos of the guy, and I’m thinking, yeah, was that mine? But I recommend to MSPs that they do put photos of themselves on their website. I’ll tell you why, Scott, because let’s say you take any size town and there’s 20 MSPs, and you go and look at all 20 of those MSPs websites, they all look the same, right? They’ve all got stock images of servers or computers or the same sort of geographical images of their town. And if there are photos of people, they’re the stock image technician image where he is always the beautiful looking guy with a beautiful beard, and he’s smiling and he’s got the headset on and they all look exactly the same. And then you come across one MSP that puts a photo on of them, of their staff, of their family. They actually talk about themselves, they name themselves, they’re like, Hey, I’m the owner. And to me, in a world where everyone looks the same, that kind of differentiation is absolutely beautiful.

So let’s turn this into a debate. I never really have debates with the guests on this podcast, so it feels like a good time to start that. I know that there’s no such thing as a right or wrong approach, but tell me what you would do instead of that. What would be a preferable way for  you of handling that situation of trying to differentiate?

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And I totally hear what you’re saying. So there is an appropriate time in the story. If Donald Miller was sitting here next to me, he would say, there is an appropriate time in the story to talk about yourself. When you are demonstrating empathy and authority as the guide in the customer’s story and you want to show yourself, then it is appropriate to show yourself at that point. What I was basically saying was sometimes it’s the first image and sometimes it’s the image after that and sometimes the human brain sees that and goes, it looks like this story already has a hero. There’s four photos of this person who looks like the hero, and that’s not me, I can’t relate to that. It looks like somebody that runs an MSP to me, you know what I mean?

You have to make sure that all of your marketing collateral, I say website, but it could be all of your marketing collateral, it has to have a controlling idea that solves the customer’s problem. If it doesn’t, your marketing is an absolute waste of time, psychologically speaking. We’ve studied the human brain for long enough now that we know that human beings have a very short attention span. We’re in the short attention span part of our species’ evolution. And as a marketer, if you don’t know that, then you will fail. You will not understand how to make people curious and build that relationship, which marketing has to do.

And like I said, I think human beings are very interested – we’re biologically wired to be interested in ourselves. And so as a marketer, ethically, we could argue it all day long, the science proves it massively by the way, but as a marketer, you have to know that, and you have to lean into that so that you understand how to speak the language or the brain is going to shut you off. The minute the brain determines that what you’re saying is irrelevant to us, it will try to conserve calories and it will shut down on you, and that’s a marketing fail.

So what you want to do to win at marketing, you have to make sure you’re speaking to the brain in language that the brain wants to hear. And the only language the brain wants to hear, Paul, the only language the brain wants to hear is, how is this relevant to me right now? Go. And you have eight seconds. And the minute you deviate from that, what we say in StoryBrand is, the minute you stop talking about the customer’s problem is the exact minute they stop paying attention to your brand. So it’s very important.

When I go to MSP’s websites, I see the same kind of buzzwords: robust solutions, no downtime, these kind of things. It’s like, show me the pain, make me feel it. What does it feel like when my systems go down? What does that feel like? Show me. Make me feel it with the words that are coming out. And if you make me feel it and you give me that emotion, then you’re actually doing branding, and you’re actually doing branding the right way. Because in the places that people don’t want to talk about Paul, that’s why they’re on the website. There is a problem, a splinter in their mind that is saying, my MSP isn’t getting it done in some way right now, and I have to pull that splinter out of my mind and this and company could be the solution to doing it. So show me. Show me that you understand what it is that you’re really doing and don’t use a bunch of marketing buzzwords that doesn’t speak to the problem.

If I was doing an MSP website, I would say: You’re frustrated, if email is down, you’re down. If you’re down, you’re not making any money. You have payroll, you have other things as an MSP owner, but if your business is down because of technology, it is critical. If you have ransomware and those kind of things, those are mission critical things that just generic bullet points and words don’t really get that done. The same kind of warmed over sounds good marketing copy. Punch into that problem. In StoryBrand we always talk about, give me a problem you can feel. Show me a problem that hits me that I can feel, and now you’ve got my attention. Now you’ve got my attention in the same way movie writers and screenwriters get your attention by having something horrible happen to the character in the first few minutes of the movie. They do that to keep your attention because your brain won’t pay attention otherwise. Simply true.

Yeah, exactly. Like Luke watching his aunt and uncle be killed by storm troopers. That’s exactly it. Scott, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Let’s just wrap up very briefly. Just remind us what it is that you do to help MSPs, and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Yeah, of course. I’m a resource for MSPs, for entrepreneurs, for anyone struggling with marketing. I’m in Phoenix, Arizona, and you can always find me at my website, which is robertsoncomm.com. You can book a time to talk with me there. I make myself very available to speak with business owners about their marketing problems. I want to be on the side of the line that fixes things in marketing. I don’t think that we’re headed in a good direction with AI, I don’t think that’s the right direction. I think less but better is going to be a superior approach. The world doesn’t need more. We don’t need more emails, we don’t need more videos, we don’t need more social posts. We need better stuff that actually speaks to a problem and actually solves it. That’s the mission that I’m on.

Sean runs his MSP in Colorado, and is feeling quite hassled by his clients.  His question is: how do I stop clients from contacting me directly?

This happens to most MSP owners, and it’s the hardest thing when you used to look after these clients yourself because they feel they have some kind of special bond with you. And so they’ll email you directly, or they’ll call your mobile directly rather than actually speaking to the help desk that you’ve had in place for a few years. And this steals your personal time when you should be working on the business, not in the business doing tech support. And it also reduces your ability to sell more to them during a strategic review or a QBR because you can’t be the technology strategist and the 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. You’ll probably put together a couple of these into some kind of blended solution. Let me tell you nine ideas that I’ve got.

Number one: set clear expectations. Now, this is easy with new clients and very hard with longer standing clients. Just remember that you have to educate them constantly. What’s top of mind for you is item 1058 in their minds list of priorities.

Number two: make it easy. Put stickers with the help desk number on every device.

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 to deal with it.

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 are not working today and for any support, please call the help desk on this number. And you can then let client calls go to voicemail every single time. If you want to, follow up with them the next day or when their issue has been resolved, just so they know that you care, but you don’t have to do the work yourself.

Number six: set up an email auto reply. This is the same principle as the voicemail.

Number seven: now this is a sneaky one, but some people quite like this. Fake being your own virtual asistant. When someone emails you, send back a standard reply saying you are your VA. Give yourself a fancy name. The real you is off today and here’s how to get support. And then tell them how to contact the help desk.

Number eight: get a second mobile number. Keep your old number that clients have been calling for years and let it auto forward calls to the help desk. But then get a second private number just for friends, family, and your team. And then finally,

Number nine: just make them wait. If they contact you directly after hours, do not take the call. Do not reply to their email because you’ll just encourage more bad behaviour. And I know that that feels wrong, but I promise you that overservicing clients can be as bad for a working relationship as underservicing them, as it sets unrealistic expectations. Make them wait, explain in a warm way how using the proper channels gets them faster support.

Welcome to Episode 273 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Have you got a cold, sinking feeling because no matter what marketing you seem to attempt, none of it seems to be working? You’re not alone. Many MSPs get the chills about this. When nothing seems to be working, it’s hard to know where to begin fixing it. But here is the good news. Right now, you are going to discover how to pinpoint what’s holding your marketing back, how to turn it into a system that works, and why this approach could unlock new growth for your business.

One of the most common complaints I hear from MSPs is that their marketing just isn’t working. It doesn’t help that what you’re trying to sell has one of the most complex and longest sales cycles around. Managed services is very difficult to market and sell compared to many other things. For example, if you were running a business that sells widgets, it would be a lot easier for you to get traffic to your site, to get leads, to get inquiries and of course sales and get those widgets out the door. But you don’t. You sell managed services. And by the way, the flip side of this is that you keep your clients longer and they spend a lot more money with you. You have the kind of stats that widget manufacturers would be very, very jealous of. But why does an MSP’s marketing typically not work? And if you feel like you are doing lots of marketing, but you’re seeing little return, where do you start fixing it?

You have to break all of your marketing down into its component parts and examine each one. And ask yourself two very big questions…

The first of those is whether or not you are using the right marketing strategy? Let’s look at strategy. Sometimes I’ll be talking to an MSP who says they’re doing loads of marketing, but what they’re actually doing is creating a lot of disjointed noise. Just because you’re posting regularly on LinkedIn, that has no power unless it’s guided by a marketing strategy. Now my favourite strategy, which I talk about all the time, is very, very simple to communicate. It is just six words, but it’s the most powerful marketing strategy that any MSP can use. In fact, any B2B business, because I use this for my own marketing as well. The strategy is – build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. It’s a three step strategy, which you can also use as a three-step marketing system. In fact, we built our entire MSP Marketing Edge service around this. So you build up audiences of people to listen to you, then you grow a relationship with them using content marketing, and then you convert that relationship into them having a sales meeting with you. And that is typically done on the phone.

Let’s say you’re building an audience on LinkedIn, which I do recommend, and then you are growing relationships by posting content on LinkedIn. The difference between doing that with a strategy powering it, versus just doing it for the sake of doing something, is vast. If you know that your goal is to add connections every single day and post content several times a week, with the express goal of building a relationship with them, that makes the work you are doing on LinkedIn suddenly more powerful. Particularly when you remember that for managed services, people only buy when they’re ready to buy.

Also when you know that the strategy dictates that down the line, someone in your office is going to pick up the phone and call these people you are connected to, to talk about their business and see if they’re frustrated enough with their incumbent MSP to have a conversation with you. Does all of this make sense? When you’ve got a strategy, it makes all of the little things that you’re doing, even if they’re the same things you’re doing now, all of the little things you’re doing come together and work together to give you an outcome.

Now, I said earlier on that you need to ask yourself two big questions. The first was, do you have a marketing strategy or are you using the right marketing strategy? The second question to ask yourself is, are you using the right marketing tactics? Because the beauty of that six word strategy I was just telling you about is that you can use an almost unlimited number of tactics to implement it. So I mentioned LinkedIn because today LinkedIn is a very good place for MSPs to go farming for new leads, but that may change. We might be doing this in 2035, hello future Paul, and LinkedIn has gone off the boil because they broke it with some stupid decision somewhere. But if that happens, there’ll be a new place to go looking for leads. A good marketing strategy rarely changes, but the tactics do need to be updated now and again.

So in summary, if you’re doing a lot of marketing activity and it just doesn’t seem to be generating leads who turn into prospects, who turn into clients, then break it down into the component parts. And for everything you’re doing, check that you are A) being driven by the right marketing strategy and B) that you’re using the right marketing tactics. And by the way, I’d be delighted to help you with this. I have a free Facebook group, which is just for MSPs. It’s a vendor free zone, and it’s a place where you can ask me and 2000 other MSPs for help with your marketing. Just go onto Facebook and look for the MSP Marketing Facebook group.

Ready to rip up the rule book? When wanting to make more money for your MSP, they say you can’t take shortcuts. They say shortcuts come with downsides. They say you’ve got to do things properly.

Well, what if they are wrong… what if there are some shortcuts to finding new clients and making more money?

For the next few minutes let’s ignore them as you find out about the marketing shortcut being used right now by thousands of MSPs around the world. You’ll find out how to use this shortcut safely and why it’ll enhance your marketing and not damage it.

There are lots of different ways to get new blog content onto your MSP’s website. Let me give you the answers to the most frequent questions that I get…

Why do I need blog content? Up-to-date blog content on your website shows your MSP is active. It can also be great for demonstrating expertise and authority in technology. Blog content can also sit at the heart of a regular marketing system. For example, you can send out emails and post things on social media driving traffic back to your blogs. Another question is, how often should I post new blog content? And the best cadence for this, I believe is at least once a week, more if you can do it but never less than once a week.

What is syndicated content? This is content written by a business such as my own MSP Marketing Edge where one piece of content is used on many different websites. What you do is the producer, that’s us, we add a little bit of code onto the blog, which tells Google it’s an authorised copy of the original blog, and that means that Google doesn’t penalise you for using duplicate content. The flip side of this is that there’s very little SEO (search engine optimisation) benefit for you, but at least you get regular content going onto your website.

Which is better, syndicated blogs or original content? I see it like this, original content is always better than syndicated content, which is always better than no content.

What’s the best way to get original content written? Write it yourself of course. Or if that’s a distress activity for you, find a writer on Fiverr or Upwork and get them to interview you over Zoom about a specific subject. They can record it, they can suck the knowledge out of your head, and then they can write that for you. And of course, ChatGPT can also do the same thing. It can interview you on a specific subject. Just remember, you do need to double, triple, quadruple check and edit what it outputs before you put it anywhere near your website.

Where do I get content ideas from? The answer to this is simple. It’s your clients and prospects. Listen to the questions that they most frequently ask you and then just write answers to those questions. That’s how I write all the content for my own blog. Anytime an MSP asks me a question, I write it down in a massive file of questions I’ve been asked. And at some point it becomes a new blog article.

Featured guest: Chris Abdey is a seasoned Procrastination Coach, podcast host, and productivity strategist with over 20 years of experience helping individuals and businesses conquer procrastination and achieve their goals.

Based in Canada, Chris combines mindfulness, positive psychology, and actionable strategies to empower clients to break free from limiting beliefs, overcome burnout, and unlock their potential.

As the creator of “Procrastination Station” and host of Procrastinator’s Pitstop, Chris inspires others to transform hesitation into action and dreams into accomplishments.

Don’t you find that tech tasks are a bit like household chores? When we’re at home, why do we sometimes choose to do something else like rewiring a plug or moving a table, something that isn’t urgent, when actually the dishwasher really needs to be unloaded and dinner needs to go on? It’s the same with technicians. When there’s a big project waiting, they can suddenly find they need to focus on checking the backups or other routine tasks, which just don’t need to be done right now, they’re not urgent. Well, my special guest today is a procrastination coach here to explain why we do stuff like that, the surprising way to focus on important tasks and the positive impact on your MSP when you get company-wide procrastination under control.

Hello everybody. I’m Chris Abdey and I’m a procrastination coach.

And I can tell our audience that getting you on the show was the easiest, easiest interview I’ve ever set up because I emailed you and four seconds later you emailed me back, which you would expect from a procrastination coach. I imagine, Chris, that you have to live your life using all the techniques that you’re going to tell us about in this interview and managing your own procrastination. And I suspect we’re about to hear that your story is one of huge procrastination, which is why you’ve become a coach and you’re actually helping other people to overcome that.

Now, I know thousands of MSPs or I’ve spoken to thousands of MSPs and many of them are massive procrastinators. Some of them are aware of it, some of them aren’t. Let’s explore why that is, why people procrastinate, what we can do to stop ourselves procrastinating and the damage it does when we don’t address that problem. Let’s first of all just hear about you. So you are the first person I’ve ever met who’s called themselves a procrastination coach. Let’s hear that story. So what was it that got you to this position of actually helping people to stop procrastinating?

Actually, it’s an interesting story because it leads right into MSPs and MSP owners actually. So when I was in high school, and I’m sure we can all relate on some level to this, I just took it to an extreme. The last two years, we had two years to do 12 art projects. And guess who decided that they could do all 12 art projects in about eight hours the day before they were supposed to be not only due, they were in a mock art exhibition that was open to the public while it was being reviewed. And let me ask you, so it was 8pm on Sunday night, and I was just running around like a chicken with my head cut off in the garage. I was using bottles, I was using cans, I was using caution tape, I was using styrofoam bits that were left over and I just slapped it all together. I even used toilet paper, if you can believe that. I made a little figurine out of it and hung it on a piece of wood too. What do you think was the outcome of that?

Well, either you got a really good mark and that encouraged you to be a procrastinator throughout the rest of your adult life or you completely failed and that’s what set you down this course. So go on. Which was it?

No, you’re absolutely right on the first account. My saving grace was the proctor for the mock art exhibition came from a different school. And what happened was he came in and he said, oh wow, I love how you used all these. I love how you didn’t go over the top with your materials, but you used stuff that was untraditional. And he started explaining what it was, what he thought it was. I’m like, you’re absolutely right. And then he says, it’s very reminiscent of pathetic art. And I said, pathetic art. I’d never heard of it. It was like, okay, quick, let’s Google it… back in 2004, trying on those flip phones. And anyway, I said, you know what? You’re absolutely right. It is exactly that, pathetic art, because it is a commentary on how our society, how everybody’s looking for perfection. So does perfection, therefore become the new mediocrity. And boom A+.

And that actually gave me a better grade than the poor friend of mine who spent two years busting his hump. He had extra help from these famous stained glass artists and all that sort of thing. So fast forward a bit that did give me a little bit of a God complex. I can just leave everything to the last minute and I’ll just pull a rabbit out of my hat at the end. So what happened was, it only works as long as it works. I know that my abilities are good. Here’s a specific example with an MSP… I was working with one provider and we had a bunch of projects that were due and we had a bottleneck, I had only allowed for two weeks. So we hit the bottlenecks, now the first project is two weeks late, the second project is a week late, the third project is five days late. And it just sort of cascaded from there. That’s really why I got into being a procrastination coach.

This is an interview I’m never going to be able to show to my 14-year-old daughter who is at the start of her two year art, what we call GCSE in the UK. It’s a similar thing. And if she thinks she can leave her 10 art projects until the night before and get an A, then I’m doomed. And in fact, that’s setting her up for not such a great life. So what was the point in your adult life, Chris, where you realised that procrastination was actually more damaging and that you needed to address it? And how did you address it?

The point I really realised where it was most damaging was when I was actually at a high point in my career. My procrastination actually led to high functioning alcoholism because I would put things off and I’d get bored, I didn’t think they were important, and therefore to fill the time, I would sometimes drink at work… not a good combination. And it really hit home when I almost had an accident with my daughter because I used to work from home a lot too. And at that point, that’s when I said, okay you know what, I’m going to stop this, I’m going to start doing my projects on time. And when I actually started doing the projects the way they were supposed to be being done, I didn’t have the time to be bored. So that’s really how I dealt with it, which is not how a lot of people deal with it, but that’s how it is.

And we all procrastinate in many different ways. And obviously that’s a fairly extreme form of procrastination there where you’re using alcohol. I have people I know who use TV in a similar way,  they’ll think, oh, I’ve got that important project, but I’m just going to catch up on the latest episode of Superman or whatever. But there’s also, I find, and certainly with MSPs, there is procrastination through doing unimportant tasks. If they’ve got a big project to do and it’s scary, then they will jump on the help desk for an hour or pick up some tickets or just respond, something anyone can do is responding to unimportant emails. So do you find with the MSPs and all the other clients that you work with, that procrastination is a very personal thing, that we all have different ways in which we sort of output or create that procrastination?

Oh, for sure. I mean, everybody’s fairly unique in that sense. There are a few common denominators obviously, you mentioned a couple of them, especially in MSPs. I mean, you’re around technology all day, so you’ve got Instagram scrolling, you’ve got TVs in the background maybe, you’ve got chatting on your phone or like you said, you’re chatting to support desks about things that are more interesting than the project you’re working on. This is especially true when you have very talented team members working for you and you assign them to do very mundane things, which occasionally happens.

One of the ways around that is to, well, one, don’t assign them work that is beneath their level of interest. But the other way to really stay on track, is to get them to incorporate their ideas, ask for their feedback, even if they don’t have any. Just by the simple act of you asking for their feedback, it all of a sudden becomes a little bit more important to them. Let’s say you have to put out an application and this developer is only doing the wireframes, but he’s way above that. And so you’ve already done all this research, you’ve already done everything, but you’re throwing them a bone. You’re saying, oh, how would you do this? And then by them giving the feedback, it’s not necessarily you’re going to implement it, but you’re now giving them sort of so to speak, skin in the game.

And what’s the consequence of giving them that skin in the game?

So when you give them that skin in the game, you automatically raise that importance level. Because a lot of procrastination, especially in MSPs, can definitely come at the junior level, mid to junior level, and sometimes the senior level too, because what happens is they sometimes know a better way of doing it than maybe what production has said they should do. And so they think it’s juvenile or they think that it’s not a good way to do it, or they don’t see the importance in doing it that way, which can lead to a lot of procrastination. I mean, you were just mentioning that they might jump off into support tickets for an hour. It’s because they can see more importance in those support tickets than they can in the task that you assign.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. But honestly, as the business owner, is it easier for us to procrastinate than our team because no one’s watching what we’re doing? I’ve always said that being a business owner is a double-edged sword in that we don’t get fired, we don’t have bosses. You are a business owner, I’m a business owner, most people listening to this or watching on YouTube are MSP business owners, and no one fires us except the clients. And typically that doesn’t happen because we surround ourselves with people to do the work. So it is very easy to be an ineffectual boss once you get your business up to a certain level and never actually developing something else. Compared to when you worked for someone and you had a boss who was actually watching what you were doing or not doing. Do you find that, do a lot of your clients tend to be those business owners? And as a secondary question, if the business owner procrastinates, do you tend to find that that goes down throughout the organisation as well, because it almost becomes a cultural thing?

Oh, for sure. Definitely. Let me break that down into a couple of parts. So in terms of business owners procrastinating, especially MSPs, it can be fairly easy as well to get lost in some of the more technical aspects. We talk about overwhelm as a big source of procrastination, which is essentially either – what I like to call not my circus, not my monkey, because they tend to try and take on way too much that isn’t even in their wheelhouse. And then there’s a knowledge aspect – they’ve not only taken on all these things, but maybe they don’t necessarily know how to do these things, and so that causes them to procrastinate and they don’t want to look bad. I mean, I’ve been in this position, I didn’t know something and I was telling my team do it. They said, oh, I’ll just do it and then it’s like, oh, well, I don’t know how to do that, and then I’ll just sit there. And rather than admit that, I’ll just sit there and say, yes, I will do that tomorrow. You’ll have that report on those KPIs and those TLSTs and those PIPs tomorrow.

Just using gobbledygook as a form of procrastination. Many of us, not everyone, but many of us have that problem. I certainly have a procrastination problem, and I’ve dealt with it over the years by setting myself deadlines using public accountability. Things like telling my team, I will get this done by Friday, and once that’s out your mouth, you’re very committed to doing it. My favourite technique is to go on a train journey. So I live about 45 minutes from London, and I have many times got on a train to go to London knowing I’ve got 45 minutes to get that job done, and then I’m at the station, then I’ll have lunch and I’ll come back and I’ll do the same thing. So those are just some of my own self-taught methods. But what do you recommend to business owners, to MSP owners? Is the first problem acknowledging that you have a procrastination problem or is that the first step? And then secondly, give us an idea of some of the techniques and strategies that you suggest to MSPs.

First and foremost, you need to understand the why you procrastinate. And you need to understand what drives you.

So from what you just explained to me, you tend to fall into what they call a crisis maker. The crisis maker is where you have those deadlines. It’s sort of not important until it’s important, or you get that extra boost of energy or extra boost of creativity knowing that you have to get it done before that train ride ends. So for crisis makers, yes, having deadlines, having urgency to things, understanding the importance of things.

There’s five different archetypes that we like to talk about: There’s the perfectionist, they need to break time, it needs to be the right place, perfect for release. There’s the worriers. They’re always, like what if…, what if this happens? What if that happens? And then you’ve got the dreamers who are the visionaries, they have these big plans, but they get lost in the details, either because the details aren’t interesting, or they hit that knowledge block again where they don’t know how to do it. And then you have the crisis makers, and then you have the defiers, I mean, that’s actually the easiest one to change because the defier is more about autonomy, about how I don’t like being told what to do. Well, that was the easiest because all you have to do is say, well, no, I don’t have to do this. Only two things in life are not a choice. You can’t choose to be born and well, you really can’t choose not to die. But everything else in the middle is a choice. We just have to live with those consequences. And when you say, instead of saying, I have to do this, I’m choosing to do this because, I’m choosing to do this report because I need it for my taxes, or I need it to do this, I need it for my bottom line. And then that gives it importance, and you’re taking your power back to actually get things done.

So just in case my daughter is watching this or listening to this, there is one third choice which you don’t have, which is doing your art projects… I just want to throw that one in there in there, Chris. Just out of interest before we wrap this up, of those five archetypes, you said that the easiest of to work with are the defiers, which are the hardest to work with?

Definitely the hardest would be a combination between the worriers and the dreamers. Because the dreamers have the compounded effect of worry. They get lost in the details because every step along the way, they worry about, oh, what’s going to be the outcome of that step.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So Chris, for those people who are listening to this or watching this and they’re nodding their head and thinking, yes, that’s me. You’ve got me in one of those five archetypes there, and they’re ready to do something about it. Tell us what you do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Well, what I do to help MSPs is I will actually sit down with you and we’ll dig a top level down. Look not only at what’s going on with you, but also what’s going on in your organisation. Because I do also have quite a strong background in business development, project management, PMP, and what it comes down to is either people or processes or a combination of both. What we do is we analyse, is it people, is it on the personal level either with yourself or with your team? Or is it in a process level, either with yourself or with your team? Then from there, we sit down and we work together.

The easiest way to get in touch with me is on LinkedIn. I am the only Chris Abdey on LinkedIn, so that’s the easiest way to get in touch with me. Or you can go to my website, www.procrastinationstation.ca, and there’s actually a tiny quiz at the top. It’s only eight questions takes you five minutes to do, and it’ll tell you which of those five types you might fall into.

Christian from an MSP in New Mexico, says when he is on the road he always notices advertising billboards. So his question is: As an MSP, should I advertise on billboards?

There’s a short version and a long version of this one. The short version is, no, don’t waste your money.

The longer version is that billboards, yeah, they look cool. And your competitors, if they see you on them, they might think that your MSP’s bigger than it actually is. But in reality, they are an expensive, old-fashioned solution to the problem of how do I get my message in front of the right people at exactly the moment they’re thinking of switching MSPs.

There’s a part of our brain called the reticular activating system, and it acts as a filter for all sensory information. It literally decides what you perceive based on whether or not it’s relevant to you. So if you’ve got toothache, then you see and perceive the big poster for emergency dental care. But if you don’t have toothache, your eyes flick over it. You see it, but you don’t perceive it because it’s not relevant to you.

Most people who see your billboard will not perceive it because it’s not relevant to them. The tiny number that do perceive it will think, ah, that’s a good idea. And then they promptly forget about it, unless of course they whip out their phone and visit your website immediately. And this is fine on something like Google where you do pay per click, because if they don’t click, you don’t pay. But the Billboard advertising companies, they want money just to put up your poster.

The other issue is that you can’t tweak your message all day every day like you can with digital stuff. You’re kind of committed to your message for the whole campaign. But if you want to go ahead anyway and you want to do billboards, here’s how to test what tiny response you would actually get from a billboard. Buy a vanity URL for the call to action… something like ITyourtown.com, and then point this URL at a hidden page on your normal website, and you only ever use this URL on billboard adverts. Therefore, you can look at how many people have visited that page to know exactly how many have responded to your advert, and it won’t be many.

Welcome to Episode 272 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Imagine doing some marketing for your MSP that’s so relevant to the person who sees it, they immediately stop what they’re doing just to listen to you. And yes, it is possible for your marketing to be this powerful. It means you can reach more people and persuade them to talk to you with much less work.

Let me tell you the surprising secret to this kind of marketing and you won’t believe what I’m going to ask you to Google. Now, I should start by admitting that this isn’t really a marketing tactic that you can use for a general audience. It only works when you use it for a vertical. Your MSP doesn’t have to only work in this vertical.

You can have lots of different clients doing lots of different things in lots of different sectors, but this specific marketing idea only works for a vertical audience, and you can’t just reuse it across different verticals. You have to do some research for each vertical that you are using this tactic to target people in. But the payoff is immense because targeting to a vertical is already a beautiful thing to do.

It’s so much easier to send a message that’s highly relevant to an audience within a vertical.

So for example, if you’re targeting lawyers and you use the phrase legal practice, the part of their brain that filters information, which is called the reticular activating system, it decides that what you are saying is relevant to them. So they ignore stuff that’s aimed at general business owners and managers, and they listen to stuff that seems to be targeted at lawyers. And that works across all verticals.

Now, this new marketing idea that I have for you right now is even more specific. Okay, enough teasing. Let me tell you what it is. So you pick a vertical that you want to win more business in, and then you do some Googling. And what you’re looking for on Google is specific regulations regarding cyber security or data retention, or in fact, anything that you touch. Specific regulations that affect that vertical. So for example, let’s say you work with healthcare, there’s going to be tons of regulations or laws specifically aimed at healthcare businesses. Lawyers will have them, CPAs/accountants will definitely have them. Manufacturers will probably have them as well. So go and find that regulation.

In an ideal world, you would then talk to someone who runs a business in that vertical to ask them what pain that regulation causes for them. Because don’t forget, these are not technical people. So some kind of regulation around data retention for example, it’s easy for you to think, oh yeah, I know how I’d fix that, I know how I deal with that. But for them it’s a pain. And that’s what we’re looking for here. We are looking for regulations that create pain and are annoying to specific verticals. Because then you are going to target that pain with your marketing.

Imagine how powerful it would be to send a message to a business owner in a very specific vertical, talking about a specific problem that’s caused by a specific law that only relates to them and exactly how they can fix it. And we’re not trying to use fear marketing here, we’re just educating them about a problem they already have and how you have got some possible solutions. Because you know that almost any technology headache can be made easier or taken away, and that’s what you want to talk about.

So how would you actually use this in practice? Well, it will definitely be content on your website. You might do a report or a guide on it, you might put that on LinkedIn. You might even just send it out to people or people who work in that vertical. You may even turn it into a piece of direct mail. Imagine how powerful it would be reaching out to someone, everyone in the vertical in your area to say, Hey, you know that headache that you’ve got, which is explained here, I know how to solve that headache. Can I send you some information about this in the post? Can I mail it to you? And I know that that sounds very old school, but old school physical stuff works very, very well in our modern digital age.

So some research for you then. What’s the vertical you most want to win new clients in? What’s the regulatory headache that they have that you can solve? And what’s going to stop you taking action on this right away?

With what I’m about to tell you in the next 60 seconds, you might think I’ve lost the plot. But what if there’s a marketing move so daring it could completely reshape your MSP’s future? Let’s talk about the surprising way top MSPs outsmart their competition and the bold strategy that could change how you grow forever.

Anyone who’s ever made a serious attempt to grow their MSP organically knows that it’s an expensive process. It’s not uncommon to find a business that’s winning loads of new clients and at the same time experiencing a cash flow crisis, because of the cash cost of attracting, winning and onboarding those new clients.

Now, typically we learn this as business owners the hard way. Normally at four in the morning lying awake in bed wondering how are we going to make payroll. And this is why when I’m advising MSPs on their growth, I teach them to get their cashflow sorted or any funding in place before they embark on a serious round of new client acquisition. I believe it’s the cost of acquiring new clients that encourages MSP owners to do it on the cheap.

Most people are always looking for ways to reduce their marketing spend, and yet that is completely the wrong approach in my opinion.

Of course, you should always look for value for money, but rather than looking at ways to reduce the amount you spend on acquiring new clients, you should be willing to spend more than your competitors to win the right kind of new clients.

And here’s the secret, don’t be distracted by the short-term costs of getting a new client. Instead, focus on the long-term revenue and profit that they are going to bring you.

Let me ask you some questions about this. When you win a new client, on average, how many users do they have and how much do they pay per user per month? And how long does a client stay with your MSP on average? Now, let’s say your average new client has 10 users, and just to keep the numbers easy, let’s say you charge them a $100 per user per month, and your retention will be excellent because of course it is for most MSPs most of the time. So let’s say you keep a client on average for three years, I realise it’s probably going to be a lot longer than that, but we’ll just go with three years. So 10 users times $100 a month equals a $1,000 a month. A 1,000 times 12 months equals $12,000 a year, and $12,000 times three years equals $36,000. You with me so far. So without doing any projects, without selling any hardware or licenses, that new client that you’ve just signed is going to be worth $36,000 to your business over the next few years – $36,000 of brand new revenue. And if you wanted to get even more excited about that figure, now work out the gross profit of that new client. Let’s say you had a 75% gross profit margin. Well, 75% of $36,000 is $27,000, so that’s 27 grand of gross profit. And you can take this a step further. What’s your net profit margin? Let’s say it’s 15%, so 15% of $27,000, and I know we’re doing lots of figures here, but 15% of $27,000 is $4,050. $4,050, you pay tax on that and that’s your personal money to spend.

Can you see the power of thinking this way? Because while most of your competitors are thinking about the $1,000 that they get from the client in the first month, you are focused on the revenue, the gross profit, and the net profit that you can collect from your client over the next few years. That $36,000 revenue figure is known as Average Lifetime Value, and it’s the value of the average client over their lifetime with your MSP. When you know this figure inside out, it allows you to make some very, very sensible spending decisions. Spend $50 a day on quality traffic, a $1,000 on a powerful piece of direct mail, $30,000 on a high quality salesperson. These are all costs your competitors will not be willing to spend because they’re not thinking the right way.

One caveat with this, and it goes back to what I was saying right at the start. To make this way of thinking work, you need to make sure you have adequate cashflow or funding in place to spend this money today, and then of course to reap the benefits down the line. Never ever do marketing that puts your business’ cashflow at any risk.

Featured guest: Cam Roberson is Vice President, Channel, at Beachhead Solutions, a provider of cloud-managed PC & mobile device encryption, security, and data access control for MSPs. He has spent 18 years in the MSP cyber security space, after launching his career as a product manager at Apple. He lives in the Bay Area, where Beachhead is headquartered.

Tell me what’s the dirtiest and most disgusting word your MSP knows? For many it’s compliance. However, while most MSP see compliance as a hassle, it could be your ticket to standing out, scaling up, and even buying a new Porsche. So let’s get into it. My special guest today is going to tell you how to turn compliance into a marketing edge, why it’s a gold mine for profit and the key to unlocking its full potential for your MSP’s growth.

Hi, my name is Cam Roberson and I’m vice president of sales and marketing with Beachhead Solutions.

And thank you so much for joining us from the beautiful San Jose, in California. Where for you it’s sunny and light and here in the UK where I’m based, it’s wet, it’s raining, it’s dark, and it’s miserable. And why don’t I live in California?

Anyway, we’re not here to talk about California and the UK. We’re here to talk about growing monthly recurring revenue through compliance. Which is something that many MSPs have looked at and maybe they’ve been put off a little bit because even just the word compliance is a horrible word, but we’re going to talk about how we do that. Before we do Cam, let’s explore your career a little bit because you have quite an impressive track record in using compliance and helping businesses with compliance and particularly helping MSPs to turn that into a profit centre. So give us a brief overview of how you’ve got to where you are today.

Okay. How much time do we have? I’ll make it brief. I started my career with Apple Computer in the early days. We were involved with imaging, so I was in product management developing products for our imaging space. I’ve had just three careers essentially. I started then an ad agency, which I grew to become one of the top agencies in the San Francisco Bay area. One of my clients was Beachhead Solutions. And just about the time I was prepared to sell the business, my colleagues then at Beachhead asked me to come and join the company to run marketing for them. And so we were already doing a lot of the collateral and the positioning and branding and so forth for the company. It was very appealing to me. And of course then coincidence had it that the business was sold successfully and I went to work for Beachhead and I’ve been there ever since.

Amazing. That’s a really great story. And this company, Apple, that you say you worked for, what do they do?

Well then we did computers, personal computers to compete with the monolith, which was IBM at that time. And now of course more known for phones and tablets.

Yeah, I’ll have to Google them later and see what they do. So let’s talk about compliance. I work in marketing, so I’m not a tech person. Obviously I work with MSPs, but marketing is the least regulated space on the planet. And you’ll know this because you used to run an ad agency. So apart from the few basic rules you must stick to, and here in the UK we have the advertising standards authority. So if I put an advert out and I put it on TV and it’s factually incorrect, I’m in trouble. But the reality is there’s so many checks and balances to stop that happening, you wouldn’t do it. But in most other marketing, there’s very few rules, and I’m sure this is exactly the same for you with your ad agency. And I know there’s talk now and again, of what if MSPs become regulated and that fear. Well, some fear that’s unwelcome and that kind of goes around now and again.

But the reality is, compared to real compliance, we as marketers and as MSPs, we don’t have that compliance burden at all. So you can understand why a lot of MSPs would see the word compliance and think, yeah, I’m not going near that, even though there are plenty of software solutions and other ways that we could do it. When you talk to MSPs about turning compliance into a revenue stream and a profit centre, how do you overcome that natural reluctance to get involved in the client’s compliance?

Yeah, that’s a great question. Fortunately, that’s becoming less of an issue over time because it’s coming from the MSP’s clients. They’re getting more and more learning that they are in fact regulated by one mandate or another, or they’re seeing it as evidenced by things like supply chain questionnaires from those that are in their space. Hey, what are you guys doing from a compliance perspective? What are you building your security stack against? Or with insurance questionnaires. Good security is good security and compliance demands good security. And as a result, the insurance companies, they’re not stupid, they’re formulating their requirements based on certain frameworks, certain security standards, much of which mirror exactly these compliance mandates. So it is in fact a fear factor. I know HIPAA was the bellwether years ago, that’s for the medical industry primarily. A lot of them didn’t want to hear about it, we’ll just push this down the road and not think about it because it is daunting. And I think that’s a backward approach.

Instead of looking at compliance as something that’s onerous and going to make it tough on you, instead look at it as an opportunity.

Yeah, I love that. I think that’s the perfect approach. And I guess we all deal with enforced change in different ways, don’t we? Some people embrace it early on, some people have to be pushed into it, but hey, let’s be honest, it’s managed services… it’s not IT support anymore, those days have gone. And so what do you do to help MSPs take that compliance and take it from being a burden to becoming a profit centre?

Well, I think that it’s incumbent upon vendors in the space to provide tools that assist the MSP with providing the service and to be able to demonstrate compliance. And so we are, I don’t mean this to be a plug, and I don’t think we’re like other vendors, but we are providing the mapping from our services, our controls to the control numbers that are required of the various mandates. I think that that is a trend that will continue to see that and provide tools that will assist the MSP with providing compliance and to be able to demonstrate compliance in the event of an audit or a breach or whatever.

So we are recognising that this is something that’s coming. It has come in some respects, but I think more and more, just like anything, it filters from large enterprise and it works its way down such that everybody is going to be held to the similar standards. And so getting ahead of things for us is to help our MSPs, but for the MSP is to start thinking about these things. Understanding where their stack stacks up, pardon the expression there, but where there might be gaps and how we fill those gaps, so that we can provide the service appropriate for the regulated client.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And we will come on to just a brief look at the exact services you offer. We’ll do that towards the end of the interview. In terms of we’ve got this compliance, then the clients need to do this compliance, let’s be honest, regulation is not getting less. There’s more and more regulation, so the need is going up. Do you recommend to MSPs to try and get ahead of the curve? To actually get to grips with it, put in place compliance solutions, and then be the one that can proactively go out to their clients and say, Hey, what regulations do you guys have to comply with because we now can help with X, Y, Z? Do you recommend that? And is that the route that most MSPs go down or do they tend to come to you when they’re already a little bit behind the curve because a client has already asked them something they don’t know how to deliver?

Yeah, absolutely. The best case scenario, if your client comes to you, and they will come to you, is for you not to have the answers. Being compliant is not rocket science. It is a bit tedious. It requires research. What tools in my stack address these requirements of the mandate? And I don’t intend to scare MSPs, because most MSPs have a terrific stack. They have tools in place that secure data and prevent compromise. But they’re not exactly sure how those map to the specific numbers. So most will find when they go through this exercise, and my recommendation is to start with a framework 801-171, it’s a NIST publication or CSF cyber security framework. Go through that, map your products to those control numbers and get a start on this whole process. Because once you are able to identify that, you’ll know where you may have holes, you’ll know the answers for the various mandates.

The good news is it’s becoming more formalised. Most are now referring to most compliance mandates and you’re aware of them – CMMC 2.0 which goes into place in several days now, FTC safeguards, HIPAA. They’re more and more referencing frameworks so that instead of having all these different mandates and numbers, they’re sort of focusing on and getting more homogeneous. As I mentioned earlier, good security is good security. Have MFA in place, have encryption in place, have data segmentation and those sorts of things. And then you’re going to be much better prepared to answer that question when the MSP says to you, Hey, I just learned that I’m regulated by the FTC safeguards rule, are we in position yet to…? yes/no, you’ll have those answers. As I said, being embarrassed is the best case scenario, but those clients that are regulated are going to be looking for a more comprehensive service. If you’re not an expert or have no answers, chances are they may go to someone who is.

That makes perfect sense. So actually as the MSP, you can jump in and you can say, Hey, I don’t know about that specific regulation, but I do understand that most are on a framework and we are set up to help with X, Y, Z framework. I must just mention Cam, you just mentioned something which goes live in a few days. We recorded this back in December last year, and obviously we are listening to it on the podcast or seeing it on YouTube today. So whatever that regulation was you mentioned that’s been live for a few months now. But yeah, essentially what you are saying is be prepared. Understand that the regulations tend to sit on top of frameworks and then obviously know where to go to get the solution from that.

Let’s swing that round and finish this interview off by looking at what it is that you and your business specifically does to help MSPs. So let’s take that exact scenario that you’ve got an MSP. They know that their clients are regulated, they perhaps don’t know exactly what it is, what it means. They know it might be a framework. How does your business fit in there? Tell us what you do and how it helps.

Okay. Yeah. So thank you for asking. Beachhead Secure is a platform for MSPs, specifically to provide the controls. We actually provide 150 of the controls necessary of the various mandates. Manage those controls, make sure they’re in place, be able to demonstrate that you are providing those controls for your clients and then be able to document it. And so, I know this is going to air later, by the time this airs we will be able to, within the product, be able to map all those controls that we provide – encryption, MFA,  least access privilege, data sanitization – to the control numbers that are required of the various mandates. So if you have a client that is regulated by HIPAA for instance, you’ll be able to see the controls that are put in place so that you can document it for an audit or under circumstance of a breach or to provide that service to a client and say, look, we have the controls necessary in place for HIPAA in this instance. Here’s proof. Here’s what we’ll need to provide an auditor if and when we are somehow unfortunately audited.

Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. So Cam, thank you for explaining that for us. Thank you for taking us through that. I think we’re almost talking about a mind shift here, aren’t we? About a mind shift from, oh no, the clients are asking for help on something I don’t want to be involved with to hey, it’s inevitable. It’s almost like cyber security 10 years ago, isn’t it? 10 years ago people were starting to ask about what’s this cyber security thing or why has my screen gone red? What can I do about that? And not a single MSP on the planet today would not not touch cyber security. It’s a standard thing. And I think what you are saying, I think reading the subtext, is that compliance is just going to become another one of those things. We don’t want them going anywhere else. We don’t want them forming a relationship with another MSP anywhere. We want them continuing and strengthening the relationship with you, which means you have to take a proactive approach to compliance. And it certainly sounds like you guys have put together a great solution for that. Let’s just finish off then, Cam, just tell us what’s the best way to get in touch with you. So what’s your website? How can we find you on LinkedIn?

We are at www.beachheadsolutions.com There’s two Hs in Beachhead, which often is overlooked. I’m Cam Roberson on LinkedIn. I’ve been around a while, so I’ve got that. Cam Roberson is me and I would be happy to answer any questions. Just one last point, Paul. I think that a lot of our community struggles to distinguish our practice, how to differentiate our offering from the guy in the next county or the large nationwide type guy. This is a great way to distinguish your practice – compliance – as opposed to having the lowest price out there. And unfortunately, many go that direction. I think this is an opportunity for MSPs to differentiate their offering from the competition.

A teamwork issue has been sent to me from SEB in Detroit where his MSP is based. Some of his technicians are bored doing routine work, and his question is: I’ve heard of the concept of gamification. However, how do I gamify work?

Gamification or gamifying something is easy. It’s about making mundane, boring jobs fun. And you see this a lot with vendors and with SaaS apps in particular, they gamify the onboarding to encourage you to finish it. In fact, I once signed up for something called ClickFunnels and completed the onboarding on a Saturday morning just to get my free t-shirt, which they did send to me.

Good gamification is simple to understand and it has a fun reward attached to it. It’s also highly visible what needs to be done and how much there is left to do. And the brain loves to complete tasks that it started where it can see the end in sight. Think how long computer games actually take to finish but you never think of it as a 60 hour challenge. You only think about each level at the time. So in your MSP, consider how you can gamify routine and boring jobs that your team need to do.

For example, you could turn them into a daily contest with a leaderboard. How many tickets can you get completed in a day? Something like that. Think about sales calls. There’s a great way to gamify this, putting paperclips in a glass and every time you pick up the phone to make a call, you move a paperclip into the other glass. Let’s say you want to do 50 calls today. You put 50 paperclips in the first glass. Don’t do that with M&Ms because the M&Ms get eaten. Think how you could do it for big tidy ups. You could set a deadline with a countdown on a massive screen and have cold beer ready as a reward. And think what you can do for completing projects on time. This could be as simple as every time a project is finished and if it happens on time and all the checklist has been ticked off, that there is a very simple reward for everyone who’s worked together on that project. And that reward could be as simple as everyone gets pizza today.

Welcome to Episode 271 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Have you ever seen someone wrestle with a Rubik’s cube? Well, that’s how most business owners feel about technology. They’re fascinated by what it can do, but frustrated by its complexity. So here’s an exciting thought. If their mind is boggled, that creates a massive opportunity for your MSP to unboggle it. Let’s explore how the smartest MSPs build trust to ease those fears and position themselves as the go-to tech authority in their marketplace. And yes, you can do this too.

Somewhere in one of the hundreds of business and marketing books that I’ve read over the years is one of my favourite phrases, and here it is – To influence what John Smith buys, you must look through John Smith’s eyes. And in this instance, John Smith is the ordinary business owner or manager that you want to reach and influence to buy from you and not one of your competitors.

You have to really understand what it’s like to be John Smith, in order to persuade him that your MSP is the one he should choose.

Let’s do that right now. Let’s imagine John lives in your town and he’s the owner of a small CPA, a small accounting firm. Let’s ignore that old joke that all accountants are dull, although actually we do know this to be the truth, don’t we? But anyway, don’t worry about that. What is day-to-day life like for John running his business?

Well, of course technology is mission critical for an accountancy practice, and yet we can probably guess that John hasn’t invested well over the years. So he and his team, maybe they’re using older technology still – they’re definitely still on Windows 10, might even be a Windows 8 machine clunking away somewhere… maybe an XP machine, that might be pushing it too far. Their internet is okay at best, and cyber security is very much something that they just pay lip service to.

John’s mindset is that he pays Microsoft, maybe an MSP, perhaps a break/fix company somewhere. He pays the money every now and again or every month, so surely all of the security and everything should be all sorted out, right? That’s his kind of accountant’s attitude towards it. And this attitude towards technology probably means that John suffers from lots of downtime or at the very least, interruptions to his productivity. And I bet his staff complain a lot too.

The subtext of this approach to technology is that money is tight for John. And people tend to assume that accountants are great business owners, but actually that’s not the experience that well I’ve certainly had from the accountants that I’ve met. Just like with MSPs, you get some that do very, very well, some that do very badly and the bulk, they just sit in the middle doing okay.

John may have lots of clients, but that also means lots of work. And the margins and accountancy are not what they used to be. Also John doesn’t really understand technology and this is the core kind of heart of the matter that you need to understand. Because he understands that technology is mission critical and that at some point he’s going to need to buy new hardware for his team, but he doesn’t really understand even a fraction of the stuff that’s every day for you. Could he explain the cloud in a sentence that makes sense? Does he actually know what ransomware actually is? Would he know that malware stands for malicious software and what that actually looks like when it’s on the screen? Don’t even get me started on phishing. We all know that phishing is going to mean something completely different to him. The point here is that to win John’s business and to have any possibility of changing his attitude towards his technology and getting him to invest in his business properly will, you must understand all of these motivating factors. All of the stuff we’ve just talked about.

Selling managed services to the average business manager or owner is rarely about the technology. It’s about what they do with the technology and how it helps them win faster, or holds them back. When someone doesn’t understand the thing that’s really, really important to them, your job as the person influencing them is to position yourself as an authority in technology and then reassure that person that they can make brave decisions and they can make these decisions because it will all work out OK. How do you do that? Well, positioning yourself as an authority, that’s an ongoing task. Just look at what authority figures do – they write, they speak, they are published, they are interviewed, they are known for giving advice and answering questions. There’s no shortcut to being seen as an authority figure, you have to do the hard work. Whether that means buying in pre-written content and putting your name on it or actually generating your own content. There’s no other way around it.

Side note, in my MSP Marketing Edge service, we do have a number of different tools that our members can brand as their own, to help them with their positioning as a tech expert. A couple just off the top of my head, we’ve got our 2025 IT Services Buyers Guide, that’s incredibly popular. And there’s a book all about email security, you can put your name on the front of that. Have a look at mspmarketingedge.com for those. But if you want to be perceived as an authority, you certainly need to attend networking meetings, you need to go to events, you need to put on webinars, you need to run seminars, speak at events, get on the stage, all of the stuff like that. And if you do this consistently month after month after month for a number of years, you just assume the position of being an authority in technology. No one tells you you are, you just become one.

This happens a lot faster, of course, if you’re in a very specific vertical, but of course you can always just do it in your general area as well. So build that up, keep going at that, it’s a never ending thing unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to it. But once you have an authority position, how then do you reassure people that they’re doing the right thing? Well, this can only come from understanding where they are, and that can only be done by asking them open questions. Now, unlike closed questions where the response is either yes or no, open questions can have any possible answer. And I believe that open questions are one of the biggest weapons of influence that you could possibly wield in your marketing and your sales because everyone loves answering questions about themselves and their business.

And when these questions are coming from someone that they perceive to be an authority figure, they are doubly keen to take part. In fact, the more you ask them about their business, and the less you talk about you and your MSP, the easier it is to influence them, the easier it is to get the sale. Because not only will you start to really understand the world as they see it and as they perceive it, but you’ll also win their trust without actually doing any hard work. And I know that this is insane. I know that influencing someone just by asking them simple open questions rather than telling them what you know, is bizarre, that that’s an easier way to influence people. But hey, us humans are wired in a very strange way, and that’s what we have to work with.

What I’m talking about here is not a one-off tactic, it’s a strategy. No, actually it’s more than that. It’s a whole way of life. It’s you deciding that you want to be perceived and recognised as an authority in technology, and you want to influence people by being intensely interested in them and their business. You can start doing that today, and I highly recommend that you do.

Did you know your MSP is sitting on a secret gold mine?

Budgets can be tight at this time of year, so right now, you don’t need to spend a fortune to generate leads.

You just need to dig into the resources you already have.

Let’s explore how to strike gold by turning your existing assets into lead generators using simple tactics to attract new clients and unlocking hidden revenue opportunities, all without spending a penny.

On last week’s show, I gave you three bootstrap marketing ideas for your MSP and today I have three more.

First one is to get your local media talking about you. I get it, no one actually reads the local paper anymore, but the local media still has massive credibility. And free publicity is much more valuable than advertising because it has higher levels of perceived credibility. When journalists talk about you, ordinary people think that they’ve sought out the best experts. And actually most journalists these days, they just want easy content that’s put in front of them.

Here’s the easiest way to get some PR, some public relations. You send press releases to local newspapers, local radio, local bloggers, local TV stations if you have them. They should be about things that are huge in your world, but the rest of the public hasn’t really heard about yet. Now, the media coverage itself is unlikely to get you new clients, so instead you use it to enhance your credibility and your authority.  You can put a link to it on your website, don’t just copy it onto your website as there are copyright agencies looking for this, but linking to it is absolutely fine. Share it across your social media, email it out to your prospect database, add it to your About Us page, and make sure you put the logo of the media outlet in the footer of your website, kind of like a as seen in or as heard on. This way you can make one piece of coverage influence your prospects for years to come. Clever stuff that.

Let’s do the second one. This is to create videos every week. The most influential way of communicating with and persuading people in 2025 is through videos. And yes, this includes B2B marketing. Few MSPs create enough videos, which is just crazy as they’re so easy to make. I mean, you could make a video in the next five minutes, just grab your phone and film something. Perhaps it’s you just giving a quick warning about the latest email hack, something which has been all over the tech media, but it’s not widely known for the public. Do a quick video, bang it on LinkedIn, and you’re done.

The video really can be that easy because you’ve seen what’s on LinkedIn, right? You’ve seen what’s on YouTube. People don’t expect Hollywood style production from you. They’re very, very tolerant of 60 seconds of just quick shot video, very tolerant. If you want to invest in kit, then yeah, down the line focus on lighting and sound and image stability and all of that stuff. But right now, you have a perfectly good camera in your phone. Maybe you’d get some lights to make it well lit or just film yourself outside where you are just naturally well lit and maybe you’d get a microphone just to go on your shirt or something just to make the sound spot on. Down the line you can get a tripod or a gimbal to steady the phone, but you don’t need these things now, they make the videos look more professional down the line for a tiny investment. But honestly, trust me, just get started right now, holding your phone, talking to your phone.

And here’s the third one, the third of our bootstrap pretty much low cost or no cost marketing ideas for MSPs, and this third one is to obsessively collect social proof, because most people are sheep. They prefer to do what most other people are doing. And this is a behaviour that’s hardwired into most humans’ brains. It’s part of our survival instincts. So you need to show people that hundreds of other people, just like them, really trust your MSP.

This means asking for testimonials, it means soliciting reviews on Google or other platforms, and it means creating case studies for each service that you want to focus your marketing efforts on. Don’t ever be scared to ask clients for reviews and testimonials or to take part in some filming. Sure, some of them will say no, but the law of reciprocity says many will happily say yes as a thank you for the great service that they’re getting from you. And yes, this still works despite the fact that they have paid for this service. And yes, humans are strange. The key thing here is to systemise this in the business so it becomes a regular monthly task and not just a once a year social proof topper.

Featured guest: Chris Walker has spent over 20 years creating video content and strategies for IT, tech, and SaaS businesses, helping them cut through the noise and connect with their audience.

Currently, Chris is the director of Joe Mule, a B2B animation studio specialising in helping technical businesses simplify their messaging. He’s passionate about making complex ideas clear and compelling so companies can win the customers they deserve.

Crampons and carabiners at the ready. Selling managed services can feel like climbing a mountain, right? It’s steep, it’s exhausting, and every step towards new cash feels like an uphill battle. But what if there was a shortcut, a way to smooth the path, get leads flowing in and help your MSP make more money?

My special guest today is going to tell you how a simple visual tool can attract prospects. Turn your websites into a lead generation machine and make closing sales easier than ever before.

Hi, my name’s Chris Walker and I run Joe Mule Creative and I’m an expert in animated video content.

And thank you so much for joining us on the show, Chris. We were introduced by Christina Hunt, who is an MSP marketer, so thank you, Christina. Animated videos are something I’ve been meaning to talk about on the podcast for some time. And before we delve into your career, Chris, and the kind of videos you produce for MSPs right now, let’s first of all define what you mean by an animated video. Because I’m going to be honest, and this maybe is the elephant in the room, when you talk about animated videos, I see the hand holding the Sharpie that kind of moves across the screen, I think they’re called whiteboard videos, where whatever it is that the voiceover is saying, the hand is writing it on the screen. And those to me feel really, really old school. And that’s not quite what you mean by animated videos, is it?

It isn’t. No. Those things, those whiteboard videos, I’ll be honest, are the bane of my life for people who’ve ever paid money for them, for a number of reasons. That isn’t really what I mean when I say animated videos and I’ll just delve into it very quickly. The trouble with those whiteboard videos are they’re very, very generic for a start, and they’re not great at helping you spread brand awareness because of how generic they look. When I talk about animated videos, I suppose a better term, a broader term would be motion graphics. That’s anything that isn’t live shot footage. So that can include things like iconography and shape and abstract movement and things like that that can help explain what might be a somewhat complex concept or product. And really those visuals are there to help guide a narrative so that people can start to watch a video and get a better sense of what you’re talking about in that video without you having to come on camera and talk about it.

Okay, yeah, that makes perfect sense. And of course, what MSPs sell is a very complicated service anyway. Now, in a second I’m going to ask you whether or not those animated videos are better than having a human on screen. As we know people buy from people, wouldn’t it be better to see the people? But before we get onto that question, just tell us a bit about your background. So how do you get to the stage where you’re running your own company doing these animated motion graphic videos?

So my background primarily is as a designer and an animator, I used to work for a big agency. I used to run their production department as their senior creative, and I did that for about 10 years. I suppose I got a little bit disillusioned with middle management, working for another agency and started freelancing. And then essentially over the course of the last six or seven years, I’ve built a business around that and expanded the team out and decided pre pandemic to focus on things like MSPs, tech and software companies as my target audience for producing videos. And it’s gone pretty well during that time. I feel all those industries are industries that can use help because they’ve all got complex products at the end of the day, and they’re all competing usually in quite a competitive market. So being able to stand out against the competition is also something that’s usually pretty important for those businesses.

Yeah, I can imagine. And I guess half the challenge for you is taking this very complex thing that someone is selling, whoever you are working with, and actually getting your head around it enough yourself that you can then break it down into a very simple, clear to communicate message. Do you have a process to do that?

Yeah, certainly. And that is one of the big challenges really, is us being able to understand it. I suppose the advantage of using an outside agency like ourselves has always been that we feel like if we can understand what a client’s product is, what their business model is, and what their service offering is, then there’s a good chance that we’ll be able to transfer that to their customers. Because quite often you’re not selling into a particularly technical audience.

We look at the top and high level offer that MSPs try to get across. Those are the things that help you open doors and start sales conversations, rather than getting into the real detail.

I always say our kind of mantra is, the more complex a product is, the simpler the video needs to be. Because you need to be looking at what are the core things, what are the two or three things that you want a viewer to take away from watching that video? And the best way to do that is to really strip away all the detail, don’t get stuck in the weeds and concentrate on those kind of the core benefits of what you try to get across in the video.

Yeah, a thousand percent. I think you and I are in completely agreements on that. We are saying the same things, albeit we’re coming at it from different angles. I think with any MSP, and this is one of the things that makes marketing an MSP so hard, is when you are inside and you’re looking at all of the things that an MSP must do, all of the cyber security, all of the systems, the safety, all of the work and the remote working, the flexibility, everything, it’s enormous. And then trying to pull all of that over to people who aren’t technical and who are making decisions with their hearts, and with their feelings, not with their brains. That’s one of the hardest things for any MSP to do when they’re working on their marketing.

So let’s come back to the thing I mentioned earlier about having a human on screen versus having a motion graphic video. My perception is that you’d always be better having a human on screen because as I said earlier, people buy from people and it’s easier for us to relate to seeing people on the screen. Do you find that it’s easier not to have people on screen because you haven’t got to get actors involved, or you haven’t got to try and persuade the client to go on screen?

That’s a couple of really good points actually, because I’m in agreement with you, people do buy from people. I think that the place to make a video really is probably earlier in that kind of sales and marketing funnel though, because if people don’t really understand your product offering or the service that you’re offering, you may not get that opportunity to get in front of them in the first place. And really the power of a kind of animated video is that the visuals are helping to guide and explain the narrative that’s coming across probably in a voiceover or something like that, because it’s a lot easier for people to take that information in because really what they’re taking in is the voiceover and the kind of narrative, and those visuals are there to help make that transition a little bit easier for them, I suppose. The trouble with getting somebody on screen to do that is you are only listening to the narrative and you’re concentrating on that person as opposed to being able to take that information in an individual way. So the animated videos, I suppose, are hitting you from two directions. Visually, you’re able to understand that information, and you’re also taking in the audio as well, as opposed to somebody talking on camera.

The second side to that is actually the length of time it takes somebody to talk about a product or a service. If it’s just somebody talking on camera, that might take you 2, 3, 4 minutes to explain the kind of intricacies of what a product is. By using an animated video, you’re able to strip away a lot of that because the visuals are doing half the work for you, so you’re not having to dig into quite as much detail verbally because the visual elements are doing that for you. So I think I’m a big fan of including onscreen, especially if it’s the company owner, the founder, the CTO or something like that. I think it’s important to be able to get a face behind that product, but I just think that usually comes a little bit further down the line in that kind of sales and marketing funnel.

That makes perfect sense. So if we took an average managed service provider, and what I’m attempting to do with the question I’m about to ask you is to sort of break down what could go in a video. So for those MSPs listening to this or watching this on YouTube who think, oh, I’m going to go off and do my own video, which obviously some will, we are sort of giving them a steer, a direction with which to go. So if you took an average MSP, and let’s just say they’re serving a local audience, so they’re looking after businesses locally, and it is all the standard offerings, is it cyber security, 365, all of that standard stuff. Where would you start with putting together an explainer video for something like that?

Where we usually start is looking at the problems that that client is solving with those kind of products and service offerings and really digging into those. There’s a basic structure for a video, what we call an explainer video, top of the funnel kind of video that’s really going to be a door opener for them to be able to put in front of prospective clients so that they can watch a 60 second video and go, I understand what these guys are offering because those are problems that I’m currently having with my business.

Really focus on painting the picture of what your client is facing in terms of the world that they live in and the business that they operate, some of the headaches that they’re probably experiencing with either their existing services or services that they may not be aware of. Introducing your company and your solution as a way of solving some of those problems. I think the most important thing that a lot of people miss out in those kind of videos is what are the real benefits in terms of the impact that it could have on your business. Not just, oh, we can help you solve A, B and C, but what will that mean for your business in terms of the resources it might save you, the time it might save you, is it going to help your bottom line by making you more efficient and those things.

So there’s a basic structure, that’s how we always approach things – problem, solution, impact. And then obviously if you can back that up with things like social proof and little clips from existing clients that have proven and backup the claims that you’re supposed to be making, that’s usually where we’d start with something like that. And that’s applicable for a lot of businesses, but I think it’s particularly pertinent to MSPs and technical companies because they will find, as we do when we deal with them, a lot of the problems that their clients are facing are the same across a lot of businesses. So you can get into a nice rhythm where you can produce a piece of video content that’s speaking directly to your audience, and they can find it very relatable towards their business.

Yeah, I absolutely love that. Thank you for that framework, that’s exactly what I was looking for. Someone can obviously pick up that framework now and go away and create their own version of a video, which is absolutely spot on. I think you’re right, the key thing here, and this all comes back to what we were saying right at the start about people buying from people. You can use that video, even if they only watch it for 20, 30 seconds and they think – this is it, these people understand, they understand the fear I’ve got – because we know that ordinary business owners and managers, they are picking MSPs with the heart, they’re not doing it with their brain. So I think we’re just using video here as a different medium to talk to their feelings and to almost give them a feeling of reassurance that, oh, these people get it, they understand what it’s like and why I’m worried about that. And there’s an assumption then that if you can communicate that fear to someone, the assumption is that you are a good provider, you’re a provider of substance, which I think is absolutely wonderful.

So Chris, thank you so much for that. It’s been absolutely fascinating. Tell us about your website and how we can connect to you on LinkedIn so we can go and see some of these amazing videos that you’ve been creating.

Oh, great. Yeah, so the website is joemulecreative.com, which is a bit of a mouthful. You can find me on LinkedIn, Chris Walker, I’m pretty active on there most days talking about creating video content, best practices and kind of how-tos and things like that. So yeah, it’d be great to connect with anybody out in the MSP world who wants to know more about creating video.

Elliot and his MSP in Manchester, UK, are in dire need of unblocking writer’s block. He says he has loads of ideas for new content but struggles to get started. His question is: How can I force myself to write these articles?

Well, forcing yourself is actually completely the wrong approach. If you’re sitting in front of a blank document watching that cursor flash and flash, and you just can’t be inspired to get started, then try one of these three things instead.

The first is to dictate it, transcribe it, and edit it. Grab your phone, start audio recording and just talk. And don’t worry too much about the structure of what you’re talking about or how long it is. Just talk. Get what’s in your head out of your head and get it onto an audio recording. Then get it transcribed, which is so easy these days. You’ve got transcription built into 365, or you can use a service like rev.com, which combines automated transcription with a human check, and that dramatically increases accuracy. I’m sure you have a transcription service somewhere that you love. And then the final part of that is to find an editor who can turn your transcript into a proper structured article.

The second technique I have is for you to get yourself interviewed, and this is an easier and ultimately quicker way to get the content out of your head. You get a writer to interview you, so you tell them what the article should be about, and then you get them to interview you over the phone or a video call and make sure they record it so they don’t miss any details. I mean, you could be interviewed about several subjects in one call, which is very efficient, and a writer with journalism experience will deliver the best results. It strikes me that you could also use ChatGPT or your other AI tool of choice to interview you in exactly the same manner. Just don’t forget to get a human to look at whatever it is that gets spat out, because I always think humans should just do the final edit and the final check on any content that’s produced by AI.

And then the final thing I have to suggest for you is to record yourself talking to clients. So the next time you’re chatting with a client, whether it’s remotely or in person, just record the call. And of course, that’s easy on remote, but for an in-person visit, you could just leave an audio recorder running on your phone. And you don’t need their permission to do this as you are only interested in what it is that you have to say. Sometimes you explain concepts to clients in a way that’s really easy for everyone to understand, and you can get that part of your recording transcribed and edited. And boom, you’ve got another article for your website.

Welcome to Episode 270 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Your MSP’s bank balance might look great and you might be impressed with your other KPIs. But there’s a hidden one that I bet you $5 you never look at. Yet it could flip things completely. Most MSPs have never heard of this key performance indicator, and yet it’s the ultimate quality check for any recurring revenue business.

In just a few minutes, you’ll find out what this secret KPI is, how to calculate it in under 10 minutes and exactly what score proves that you are running a truly outstanding MSP.

One of the things I love about working in the channel is that every day is a school day and you never ever feel like you have finally learned everything. This, in 2025, is my ninth year working with MSPs and honestly, I feel like I learn so much every single day. And as someone who has a passion, and a need in fact, for constant learning, I do find this exciting and not at all tiring.

In fact, just a few months back I was chatting to an MSP and we were talking about how much progress their business has made over the last couple of years. It’s been actually astonishing. And then he said to me how delighted he was with the performance of his NRR, and that’s N, as in N for November, not MRR, which is M for mother. And of course we know what MRR is. It’s monthly recurring revenue.

What is NRR? It stands for Net Revenue Retention – essentially, which clients that we had last year are still here this year.

It’s a quality score. It’s something that is used a lot by SaaS businesses (subscription as a service businesses) and all subscription businesses typically use it, just not normally MSPs.

But if you are looking for more ways to measure how good a job you’re doing, this could be it. So let me tell you how you’d measure this and what good performance looks like. This will be a great time of year to measure it because you could kind of look back to the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024 and look at the clients you had then and ask how many of those clients do we still have today? What was the value of their monthly recurring revenue a year ago? And has that grown today? That MSP that I was speaking to has an NRRR of 105%, which means that he’s kept all of his clients over the year, which is not unusual for an MSP, but it’s still nice to measure and know for a fact, and it means that he’s also grown their monthly recurring revenue – got the same clients, they’re spending more.

And I would say for an MSP that anything under a score of a hundred percent needs some investigating because you do expect to hang on to all of your clients year to year, don’t you? And you should definitely be growing their MRR and you can do this by increasing prices or selling them extra services. If you do lose a client during the year, it should only really be for natural reasons such as they’ve gone out of business or better still they’ve been acquired. And you may have the odd year where you lose a client for bad reasons. Maybe they’ve fallen out with you or they’ve moved over to another MSP, but those should be exceptions rather than the norm. And the net recurring revenue retention score allows you to measure that. And hey, if you do measure this for your business, will you let me know what score you get because I’d like to kind of figure that out across a whole number of different MSPs. My email address is [email protected].

Stop digging down the back of the couch for spare change to fund your MSP’s growth. January might mean tightening your belt a bit, but that doesn’t have to stop you from finding new clients and driving revenue.

Let me tell you about three clever no cost marketing ideas that any MSP can use to generate leads and unlock hidden opportunities, all without spending a penny.

You’ve heard of bootstrapping a business, right? It’s when a new venture is built up using limited funds and a lot of goodwill, and you hear stories of founders sleeping in their office so they don’t have to waste money renting an apartment. Now, your business is more liquid than that, but there’s still a place for bootstrapping when it comes to marketing.

Marketing doesn’t have to just cost cash. You can invest a different resource into it instead… TIME.

And this doesn’t have to be your personal time. If your staff have a few hours spare every week, you can always invest their time into the business. Everyone benefits when that happens. So here are three low cost or no cost marketing ideas for MSPs…

The first is to do 15 minutes every weekday on LinkedIn. The most robust way to market in 2024 is to build an audience, then grow a relationship with that audience. And at the point they’re ready to switch from one MSP to another, they are dramatically more likely to switch to the MSP that they know. And one way to build this audience is simply to grow your LinkedIn network. For 15 minutes every day, make connection requests to business owners and managers in your town or your vertical (niche). Make 10 connection requests every day and one or two of them will accept. Now, that doesn’t sound a lot until you compound it. Let’s say two connections, times five days a week, times 50 weeks a year, that adds up into 500 new connections every year. How cool is that?

Number two, ask every user this one simple feedback question. The most robust way to grow net profits is to get your existing clients to buy more from you. New clients are nice, yeah, but they’re very expensive. Whereas someone who is already paying you every month contributes a lot more to the bottom line if they go on to buy something else. And this is why businesses like McDonald’s have fully systemised the upsell – Would you like to go large? or Would you like to add fries to that? Of course, we all know how difficult it can be to get technicians to upsell. Even people who are passionate about talking about extra services will sometimes fall back into their comfort zone, which is to go for the easy fix and not mention X, Y, Z new service. So how about you get your team into the habit of asking this one simple question of every person, every user that they speak to. What else could we have done for you today?

Now, most clients will say, oh, nothing thanks because they’re in a hurry to put the phone down and this probably means that you’ve checked that they are happy. All is good. Some will use it as an opportunity to talk about something that they’d meant to bring up, but perhaps they hadn’t felt that they’d had chance to. And this means that you’ve uncovered some money on the table, profit that you would otherwise have lost. And a handful will tell you about a service or a product that they’d like to buy from you, if only you sold it. And this is invaluable market research. With this one, look out for the trends. What are several people asking for? Because if you don’t give it to them, they are just going to go elsewhere to get it.

And then the third and the final one is to run a free to enter prize draw. People love competitions. Yes, even business owners and managers, they never expect to win, but just the act of entering brightens their day for a second. I used to be a radio presenter a very long time ago, and it was weird how many people would phone up just to win like a Backstreet Boys CD, because this was back in the 1990s. And there are two types of prize draw that you can do. Either offer up any old prize that you can find just for the sake of running a competition, and make sure the prize is really attractive. It can be as simple as a laptop that you acquired for a client that they didn’t actually buy for whatever reason, and it’s just sat on a shelf gathering dust. The other way to do it is to give away a sample of something specific that you are promoting. For example, if you are launching a new monthly recurring revenue service to existing clients, then you’d give away a year’s free membership.

If none of those three grabbed your attention, don’t worry. In next week’s podcast, I’ve got another three bootstrap, low cost/no cost marketing ideas for your MSP.

Featured guest: Ori Elraviv is a multicultural turnaround executive with a passion for driving sustainable growth in small to medium-sized businesses. 

Ori spent the majority of his career in leadership positions in a variety of digital media ventures, managing teams and growing businesses in a diverse set of countries and cultures. 

Having relocated multiple times over the past 20 years, Ori is now settled in New Jersey with his wife and 3 children, enjoying some stability in an increasingly chaotic world.

Is your MSP’s story ready for a plot twist? 2025 could be the start of your most exciting chapter yet. Whatever challenges have filled your journey so far, now’s the time to rewrite the narrative and set up your business for real growth. In today’s interview, our special guest, a turnaround expert, will show you how to open the next chapter with clarity, focus, and fresh momentum.

Coming up, you’ll discover how to organise your priorities, craft a winning growth strategy, and create a story for 2025 that’s really worth celebrating.

Hi, I’m Ori Elraviv. I am a business turnaround specialist. Really, I’m helping companies and business owners solve problems with revenue, profit, and product.

I think those are the core problems in any business, aren’t they? We haven’t got enough revenue, what do we say, revenue, profit and products. We haven’t got enough revenue. We definitely don’t have enough profits, but actually often for MSPs, the product is the one thing that’s actually looking pretty sound. So good to have you on the show. Thank you very much for joining us because we are going to be looking ahead at this year and things you can do with your business this year.

I always think this time of year is an amazing time to be a business owner. You can look at what went well and what didn’t go so well last year, and we all do it naturally. Whether you believe in New Year’s resolutions or just the natural energy of a brand new year, we all look ahead at this time and it feels fresh new and we can do all these really cool things.

That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Before we do, let’s just explore your background a little bit. You said you were a business turnaround expert. Let’s assume there’s some people listening to us and watching us right now that don’t know what that is. Could you explain what that is and how you got into it?

Yeah, so I think it’s basically a multicultural turn on executive. What I mean by that is I’m coming to companies that already exist. I’m entrepreneur in spirit, less in practice, so it’s less about me starting my own businesses, but I’m a fascinated person about going to existing businesses. I believe in sustainable growth. I deal specifically with small to medium sized companies, and I’ve been around the industry more about digital and stuff for over 20 years. I’ve worked in places like China and India and Belgrade and Latin America. So I’m really a very multicultural person and I’d like to think that every business is very simplistic and has very basic things inside of it, and my approach to it is really on the fundamentals.

Got it. So when you do a business turnaround, what exactly do you do? Let’s assume that it’s a business that’s in some kind of distress, do you go in and you look at that business and you kind of take that, it’s a cliche, but that helicopter view and you look at the big things that are going right, or do you get your sleeves dirty and jump in and start to fix all the problems that have been mounting up?

Well, I’m absolutely a sleeves dirty type of person, which is why I like small businesses. Big businesses have a very different type of problems, in small businesses it’s pretty much always the fundamentals. I like going into the financials and P and Ls. I like to understand everything around the business. And I think part of the qualities that I have is very quickly understanding the landscape. And I would go into the business models, I would go into the financials, I would go into the people and the operations. I would talk to the owners. And I think that would be the first steps is just to get, alright, this is just a holistic view of what’s going on, where do we stand? And then we go and hit the next phase of it.

And from your experience, for the small businesses that you’ve worked with, and most of the people listening to this and watching this, they own their business. They own their MSP. We typically aim this podcast at smaller businesses that’s sort of up to 25, 30 staff, which I think is the vast majority of MSPs anyway. In your experience, where do most small businesses go wrong? Are there trends or does it tend to be a unique problem for each business that you look at?

I do think there are unique problems, but I think they stem from fairly common problems.

I think most small business owners of MSPs tend to just fall into the day-to-day. We get used to our own problems and our own way of doing and seeing things, and then we get a little bit trapped.

So sometimes it’s a business problem where the business model just doesn’t make sense and there’s something around it that doesn’t make sense. Sometimes it’s the people, for example, people is an interesting thing. People are critical to any business as everyone will agree to it. But I think sometimes the cultures don’t mesh or we just want to give people another chance or we just can’t get outside of it. There is something with regards to how a business model connects to the people and whether they are inspired and back, is something that is critical. So yeah, it is quite unique to a business, but I think they all stem from fundamental kind of problems.

Yeah, I’m smiling inside because when I first started my first business back in 2005, an early mentor of mine said, anytime there’s a problem in the business and it’s a big problem, regardless of what it is, go home, go into your bathroom, look in the mirror, and there’s the cause of the problem. Which was absolutely correct, of course, I think as business owners we are kind of the biggest asset and the biggest liability to the business. We are the thing that drives it forward, and especially for MSPs, they’re often the greatest technical resource in the business. But I know I’m the greatest liability in my business because I’ve surrounded myself with staff whose job it is to stop me from doing stupid things or meddling in stuff that works, and they keep me out of the day to day because that’s just best for everyone. It really is. So I can focus on the big picture stuff.

Okay, let’s start looking forwards then. So here we are, January, we’ve got a whole brand new shiny year. It’s an exciting one. It ends in a five. I think if it ends at a five or a zero, it’s a big year. What kind of thinking do you think business owners, MSP owners, should be doing at this time of year? Should they be thinking just about the next quarter or should they be thinking about the year? Is this time to start thinking longer than that?

I like to think of a businesses like a book. I’m a very big believer that in businesses, there’s chapters, every year is a chapter, so I look at it as chapters. I would be hoping that companies start a little bit earlier, but let’s just say I would like to plan my year in advance, the year’s goals and objectives. And I know sometimes it sounds frightening, but I want to bring it back to earth. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. It is really, really important that you would identify what would be your priorities for the year. The priorities for the year would stem from what happened last year and the years before. How do you evaluate what happened last year? How do you even categorise, how do you name? Last year, I really like naming a year as is a name. That was the year that I was having a breakthrough. That was the year that something happened. There is a certain kind of headline to each year.

You would go through that and then you would try to understand what happened not only for you as a business, but outside in the market. Where do things stand? This will give you enough guideline kind of points to say what should be the priorities inside of your business. And maybe it’s because of things that you want to work on, maybe it has to do with opportunities. It can’t be more than three, three to four. That is the priorities. From there, you set the goals. Obviously have revenue goals, set revenue goals that you are committed to. A goal is supposed to be something that you’re doing, not something that you’re hoping to happen. Don’t just throw numbers out there that you’re going to have 50% of it.

There’s goals in it that you would want to achieve and focus not only on the revenue, focus on actually the things that drive the revenue. Then I would, at the beginning of the year, I would go to the Q1, a Q1 will have the similar kind of breakdown of objectives and goals and they will all stem from the same thing of the year. So that’s the Q1. What are the things that we want to be able to have and see and achieve in this quarter that will drive us, that will be part of that yearly thing. Now, of course, businesses may have a three to five year plan or they want to dream something a little bit ahead of it, which is fine. I think it’s something definitely to do. I personally find it really hard to do too long. It’s just hard for me to imagine. And I think sometimes business owners find themselves in the same kind of place. So I would not be afraid to just stick to the year. But I would definitely evaluate where I am versus the year before. That would be a Q1. And then as you move through the year, you would go to your Q2, do your Q3, do Q4, and you would do that by looking back at what happened.

Yeah, no, I love that. And I’m going to paraphrase something you said halfway through your answer there, which was about a goal being something you actually want to achieve, which means you have to take action towards it. So a goal isn’t just something you think, oh, it’d be nice to double revenue this year, because without any action, without any change, obviously that’s not going to happen.

Now it’s interesting you talk about Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, because to me that feels like a very corporate thing. And I had a corporate career, I was a journalist and a radio presenter from the age of 19, oh no, 18 I think, to 30, 31, and that was a big corporate environment. So even though I worked in a small radio station, it was part of a big corporate. And increasingly what was fun at the beginning became more corporate at the end of my media career, and it was one of the reasons I left. Because it was all about quarterly targets and quarterly this and quarterly that. Do you think real small business owners like you and me and the MSPs listening to this and watching this, do you think we think in terms of quarters, because often it’s quite hard for us to say, here’s some activity that’s going to happen in this quarter. If there’s just you and like three staff, it’s a case of here’s what we hope we’re going to get done, but we can’t guarantee it. Is that your experience?

You know what, that’s a good thing. The last thing I want is for me or for MSPs and business owners to think of this as a corporate. That’s one of those things, I hate it every time people about processes, there’s something jittery about me that rejects even the name of a process. Even though the things that we do are really processes in their own right. The idea is not to do something that will now get you nervous or will now take you too much time. The quarterly way to look at it, you got to be able to break it down to quarters. The reason for that is if you don’t break it down, then you are very likely going to end up at the end of the year looking back into it. And I was like, oh my God, you might not even remember what you even started.

So it’s not about making you good or bad. You’re not in front of a judge, you’re not in front of jury. There’s no one out there that is going to scream at you or anything. Honestly, it’s you. And if you have someone else inside of your team that you trust, I highly recommend doing it with more than one person, it gives you more perspective. So go out there and, first of all, distinguish between priorities and goals. Priorities are the areas inside of the company that is important for us to keep in mind, these are the areas. Goals are the actions that we want to do, that are stepping stones, that is what we need to be able to do.

Focus on stuff that you can or focus on progress and focus on things that you can do, and don’t worry about it if it’s not big enough, maybe it’s part of something that you would want to do. At the end of the day, if you want to be able to achieve something, there is a path to get there, there are actions to be taken, and there is going to be, I guess the success rate. It’s part of the business. I want to be able to reach that, and it’s like, okay, but how are we going to be able to reach it? What is the path to it? It’s exactly that. It’s drawing yourself with a path. It’s a yellow brick road. It’s not a straight line, and nothing will happen if you’re going to have to stray away in the meantime. But I believe that instead of feeling corporate, you’ll actually feel good.

Yeah, I mean, I guess the only advantage of thinking corporate is if you underperform in a corporate environment, you get fired. And it was interesting you said earlier that you’re not responsible to anyone as the business owner, which again, I think is one of the double-edged sword things of being the business owner. You don’t get fired for poor performance. You promise yourself that this year, 2025, we’re going to do this thing, whatever this thing is, this growth thing. And then you get to December and you’re like, oh, yeah, we never got round to that. You don’t get fired, which I guess is good. It means you can keep going and the marathon just keeps going year after year. The downside is the fact that you can’t take your kids to Disney or you can’t buy a new house or a better car. Because you haven’t put the growth in, you haven’t generated more profits to allow you to increase your personal income. That’s the only downside of it. But there we go.

Paul, think of it as something of a reminder. It’s almost like a quarterly reminder of what is it that we wanted to do and what we thought was the right way to take it. And we may decide to change a thing, maybe our thinking was not right. It’s a reminder. It’s a constant reminder of what is important. And probably if it’s not one of those 1, 2, 3, this is not important. You know how many times we’re dealing with stuff that is unrelated to our success, but we’re still saying for some reason we’re still prioritising it. In my book, if it’s not part of those priorities and kind of goals, it doesn’t really matter.

Which is the perfect thing to end on, because I think you’re absolutely right with that. And reminding yourself constantly of the things that you should be doing is a massive thing, especially for MSPs whose very job, of course is to be distracted by the people that they’re supporting and all those thousand other things. Yeah, they’re important, but they’re not important in terms of growing the business. So thank you, thank you very much for that insight. Let’s just finish off by telling us how can we get in touch with you? What’s the best way to find you on LinkedIn, and what do you do to help people? How do you make money?

First of all, I’m an executive, like others, so I also do the things that I preach. It’s what I do. But I love helping businesses. I’m fascinated by businesses. I’m fascinated by MSPs. Anyone can reach me on LinkedIn, and I’m going to be very happy to be there to support exactly that kind of path and be that sounding board to it. And sometimes it’s that bell that reminds us what it is important, what is not, and just helping us settle down. Let’s just settle down, let’s relax, let’s put our path together. I would love to be a person that helps MSPs succeed and business owners to just keep the path, keep the path that they’re set off to and have their confidence in it and feel good about it.

Ryan from an MSP in San Diego is quite new to the podcast. He’s been going through past episodes and would like some clarity on some advice that he’s heard to do with his website. His question is: Why is it so important to get my website fixed first and quickly?

Decision makers don’t pick an MSP logically i.e. with their brain. The brain just rubber stamps what the heart has already decided. And this happens at every stage of the sales process, especially in that early research phase when they’re Googling around finding IT support companies that might be worth speaking to.

Here’s how it works… they’ll enquire because they like you, or not enquire because they don’t like you. Their decision on whether they like you or not will be made a hundred percent on the packaging of your business. And the packaging of your business is your website. The saying says, don’t judge a book by its cover, but we do, don’t we? And product companies have known for decades that the look and feel of the packaging, directly affects sales. Why is this so? Because our judgments of what’s inside are formed by what’s on the outside.

Before someone can actually sample the service you have on offer as a client. The only way they have to judge you is your packaging. So let me put this in the most no nonsense way I can. If your website is old, looks awful and is hard to use, you’ll struggle to get new clients. It will scare off any decent prospects that you generate. It really is as simple as that. So fix your website.

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.

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, Steve, if you don’t mind me asking?

I’ll be 63 in a few months.

A spritely 63. I’m only 50 myself. It is funny, isn’t it? You get to a certain age, and if you’d said to me 20 years ago, 63, I’d have thought, well, that’s old. And now I’m 50. It doesn’t feel so old. It just feels like a few years on. What’s really cool is you’ve got 35, 36 people in your business and you are teaching them how to run a business in a very specific way. Even if they report in to someone who reports into someone who reports into you.

I think you’re right, the word culture gets bandied around. And I had a client years ago, this was before I was in the MSP space, this is when I was doing PR and marketing for anyone, and he sat down and he looked at me and he said, I want you to do some posters for our walls about our culture. His name was Chris and he was an idiot. And I said to him, Chris, I don’t know anything about your company culture. I turn up for an hour a month to talk to you. And he says, well just do some posters on what the culture should be. And I was like, oh my goodness. This guy doesn’t understand that culture isn’t a poster. It’s the way you live. Well, you are doing it, you’re living it right now. But yeah, you are teaching generations of people how to run a business and we could go forward a hundred years when you and I aren’t going to be here. And we see those people and how they’ve run the businesses and their businesses that they’ll have in the future or where they work and how they’ve influenced other people. So I think this is amazing. It’s just amazing.

Let’s look at the marketing. Obviously this podcast is primarily about marketing and business growth. So I would imagine a lot of your growth has come from getting the right people, keeping those right people, and not just through clever retention, but because they genuinely want to stay with you. And I would imagine the clients therefore are treated very well, are looked after because let’s not use the culture word again, but it sounds like the ethos of the business is to do the right thing to treat people with kindness. And of course that’s going to be influenced to the clients, but you need to win new clients as well. So what have you guys done over the last decade that’s worked the best for you in terms of actually attracting new leads and turning them into clients?

So sadly from the marketing side, we for many years did nothing other than we would go to trade shows and we would show up there, get call-ins and leads from our existing clients. I could always gauge the quality of our service by the number of leads that we were getting from referrals. And we grew very organically through that arena. I know nothing about marketing, I don’t understand marketing. And so it was a real lift for me I guess about five or six years ago, I hired an amazing young woman to come into our organisation and help us try to build a social media platform. We had no exposure from a social media standpoint. I mean, we had a Facebook page and we had a LinkedIn page, but there was not any real activity on it. Every once in a while we would throw something out there and we would wonder why nothing ever came back, because we had no plan. And she came in and she got us organised and she helped us start to grow up. She was really more of a graphics designer than a marketing person, but what she did was amazing. She helped us grow up. She helped us start to get some exposure.

But I’ll give you a case in point, about a year ago we realised we had five Google reviews. We’ve been in business for 25 years, and Griff came to me and said, Steve, we have over 500 clients. We have five Google reviews. What does that mean? Because that’s not a world I live in. And so we set some goals and we put the team up to the task. And I think over the course of the year, we’re past 75 now. It’s been amazing. We’re getting traction from it.

I think I’m probably very similar to most MSP owners that we don’t get marketing. We see it as almost like when people say, if you buy a boat, you’re throwing money in the water because all you’re ever going to do is pour money into the boat. I think that’s what marketing looks like to us sometimes. And one of my fears was is I didn’t want to sign on with somebody that I was going to pay 10 or $15,000 a month for them to give me the same thing that they’re giving 50 other MSPs, and we’re all throwing the same stuff up on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and all the things. So I think if I had one piece there, there’s two pieces I would say. One is open your mind. My mind was not open when it came to marketing. And second, get educated. I’ve learned more in the last five years about marketing to the point where I even read a book. I wish I could remember the name of it. You would know it. And the guy did not start out in marketing. He had a pool company.

Oh, They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Yeah.

Yes. And so I read Marcus’s book and I remember saying to my wife, I didn’t know any of it. I was blind to all of this and I wished I had done this sooner. So I think that would be the piece, because I don’t want to sit here and say that we’ve made, until this year, I think we’ve had a couple of clients that have found us this year because of our exposure, because of the plan that’s been put in place to continually be in the right places and be seen. And we’re getting traction now, but it’s a long game and I will speak as a business owner and an entrepreneur, we don’t always have the most patience in the world for the long game. And I think it’s a long game. At least that’s been my experience. So I’m excited about where it’s going and again, wished we had started it sooner, but yeah, probably not have much help to your podcast.

Oh no, you’d be surprised. That’s very helpful. It’s very helpful.

Marketing didn’t help us get where we are, but I think it’s going to take us where we’re going.

Yeah, absolutely. And this podcast, we talk about marketing and business growth. It is anything that you can do to get your MSP to improve it and already the way you talk about people, I don’t think we’ve ever had an MSP on talking about their people and the way they run their business and the way that you have. And everyone has a different story, which is insane.

I’ve got two points and then I’m going to ask our final subject, which is going to be about the future of the business and where you want to take it.

So the first one is you say about the long game. A hundred percent right. The challenge for any MSP of any size is selling managed services is a very complex, difficult sale. Even if you package it up really well, even if you sell a standard solution from the point of view of the prospect, the person who’s buying from you, it’s complicated to them. They don’t understand technology. They know it can ruin their business and destroy things if it goes wrong. They need to know you. They need to get to like you, they need to trust you. All of this has got to happen. There’s something called inertia loyalty, which prevents them from moving. They’d rather stay with an MSP that they don’t like because they know them. Is that better the devil, you know thing. And ultimately your goal with all of your marketing is to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time, and that very much is the long game. So I think you’re playing a great game now. It sounds like you’ve mentioned your colleague Griffin, who’s been amazing in setting up this interview. I can always judge the quality of businesses by the communication, and actually Griffin is over communicated and that’s not a bad thing Griffin, I know you’re listening in the background. He’s been brilliant at giving me everything that we need for this, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s reflected in your marketing as well, which is brilliant.

You mentioned Marcus Sheridan, and you may not have heard this episode, but I think it was two years ago, Marcus came on to a special episode. I think it was like Christmas 2022 maybe, and it’s our most listened to episode ever. And he came on and spent, I think it was like 40 or 50 minutes taking They Ask You Answer and making it relevant to MSPs because Marcus Sheridan knows MSPs very well. So that’s a good episode to listen to.

And my final question for you is the future. So you said you’re 63. You don’t seem like the kind of guy that would retire to me maybe do different things, but not necessarily do the same things but do different things. But do you have a plan? Do you have a goal? Do you want to stay with the business and keep pushing forward and enjoying yourself, or do you think the business is getting to that stage where it doesn’t need Steve anymore?

Yeah, so where we are with all of that is right now I work about three and a half days a week. I have a lot of commitments with my youngest son and that just wipes me out. I’m 35 years old between my ears, but my body reminds me that I’m 63, so I can’t do all the things that I used to do.

Our next big jaunt right now is vertically. We’re going to be doing CMMC certification and then we are going to be moving into the DOD contractor space. We just hired a COO this year that’s very knowledgeable in that arena. We’ve just brought on a true hunter salesperson that’s knowledgeable in that arena. So we’re very excited about where we’re going with that. Our goal is to grow by a million recurring revenue a year over the next three years and cross that 10 million hump. And I feel like once I can get them there, then they’ll be in good shape to keep running with this and keep a legacy piece.

My wife and I decided probably two, three years ago that selling the business was not where we were going. We were going to transition it internally. Socioeconomically, we did not come from high backgrounds. I’m more of a lower middle class blue collar family. So this is amazing. We’ve had amazing success, we’ve had amazing experience, and we want to give people who wouldn’t typically have that opportunity, an opportunity to continue and have a chance to be a part owner in a business. So the goal is absolutely to transfer it internally, and I’ve got a really great team of people here that we think we’re going to be able to do that with. I probably will work for as long as I can because I don’t see myself not working.

I’d like to have a little bit less responsibility here, and I’ll be pouring more of my time into a 501c3 for special needs adults, finding places to live. That’s actually where my next real passion and venture in life is going. But I like what I do. I like the people I get to work with and I have time to do other things today that I didn’t have before, and that’s a luxury. So I’ve been incredibly blessed, and it’s not the typical succession planning type of a thing which drives my accountant and my attorney crazy that I don’t do things like other people, but I think at the end of the day, they haven’t run away, so it can’t be too bad.

Yeah, no, I love it. I can almost imagine you getting in a time machine and going back to whenever it was 1999 and speaking to your younger self as you were starting break fix shop back in the day and saying, look, buddy, this is where it goes. You’ve just got to buckle down. Just enjoy it. Forget all the other stuff. This is very much the future, very much. Steve, you’ve had a crazy good life. I think your story is amazing. It’s been a joy to hear your story, so thank you so much and you’ve been very generous with your time and with your advice as well, and we’ve certainly heard things there that we’ve never heard before on this podcast.

Just for those MSPs that are listening and want to just reach out to you, maybe I know, ask you some questions, just connect with you, what’s the best way to find you? Would that be on LinkedIn?

Yeah, LinkedIn’s the best place because if I see them there, I can at least track back where they came from. A lot of my emails don’t even make it to my desk anymore. They get filtered out long before they get to me, and if anybody tried to call here, it’s like getting through Fort Knox to find me – the team here is very, very protective of my time. So LinkedIn’s absolutely the best place to go, and then I can see who they are and then I’m happy to chat with people from there.

That’s great. Thank you, Steve. So it’s Steve McNamara on LinkedIn, and of course we will link to your LinkedIn and of course to your business’s website on our show notes. Steve, thank you so much for joining us.

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.

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 end customer.

That makes perfect sense. So earlier when I asked you what some of the downsides are of running a decentralised model, you said that you couldn’t roll out an initiative which might work well, you couldn’t roll it out to everyone immediately. Do you have the same potential problem with your chief growth officers that being given the keys to go and do whatever they think is best that actually they go off in the wrong direction? Or is that mitigated by the fact you’re hiring experienced people who’ve been there and done it?

Yeah, it is absolutely a challenge. If my recruiting and HR team hear this, they’re cringing right now in the pain. So every time we kick off one of these searches, it is basically a consulting engagement of what does the go forward structure and strategy and set up for this person look like. We’re not really selling them yet, at that point. The way that we sell them is we put someone in front of them that blows their mind and says, wow, this person knows more about my problems and the potential solutions to my problems than I do. I want to give them the ball. And if you find the right person and you get them in front of them, we’ve hired at a hundred percent. I’ve never had them be rejected by the operating company because that person kind of takes it and blows them away.

It gets easier as the reps come in because we’ve got case studies, we put our other CEOs in front of the group at our conferences that we have two or three times a year. And they hear the success stories, they see the metrics that this is driving a 60% increase in MRR. And so now it’s getting a little bit easier. But every single one of these sourcing engagements is a challenge, it’s a consulting engagement, it takes three to six months from getting their buy-in to actually finding someone, to trying to hire them, to getting them onboarded and set up for success before they’re really set free. And the CEO needs to be bought in the entire way because they ultimately have that decision making power.

That makes perfect sense. So I’m just thinking how this relates to the average MSP owner who would be listening to this or watching this on YouTube. And essentially what you are saying is you can’t just hire someone off a 30 minute interview and expect that person to become a superstar within a few months. I appreciate that’s a very, very stripped back answer, but what you are doing is you’re as much selling to the candidate as you are to the person they’ll be working with, and it’s a very, very long process and you have to be prepared to commit to it long term and go quite in depth with them. Would that be a correct extrapolation of that?

Yeah, you really need to increase your risk appetite. And that decision, when you do want to hire someone, you should be over the moon to give up massive responsibility and really committed to it because you will falter throughout that. And if you’re not within the Lyra family, you don’t have those metrics and case studies and other CEOs to talk to about this. So you’re going to go up the pay scale, you’re going to give really high variable compensation. You’re going to give someone a big portion of your business and probably the most important part of your business. And so you better make that decision with confidence. And I would just say hire slow and make sure it’s right and then give that person every opportunity to go and make it happen. And then in 6 to 12 months, if it doesn’t work, you’re going to have to move on. But if you don’t fully commit, I view that as one of the fastest ways to fail here.

But of course that’s the scariest thing, isn’t it? I run my own business. Most people listening to this or watching this run their own business. And to ask someone to fully commit to handing over something so big, I think that’s probably easier for someone in your position where you’re shepherding and looking after a number of businesses, whereas when it’s your business and it’s your baby and you built it from scratch, literally screwdriver turn by screwdriver turn over 20 years, I think that’s a much harder thing. And in fact, actually, let’s turn that into a question – Do you have a process to help the people who are operating these MSPs that you’re buying? Are they typically the former owners or are they other people like the service desk manager or someone like that?

Yeah, so maybe in 40 or 50% of our businesses, the ex CEO is still the current CEO of the business and we’ve kind of rejuvenated them. They had a plan to retire, but now they’re a part of Lyra and they’ve gotten really excited and they’ve decided they want to do this at a different kind of scale with different level of resources. And they’ve been de-risked so they can go and take some shots that maybe they always wanted to take. The other 50 to 60% are CEOs that we’re typically placing, maybe half of those people are promoted from within the company. They were the right hand man. Maybe they did do this and they already had that growth leader and now they’re being promoted up into the CEO chair. And then another half we’re going to go and find. Someone with, again, similar profile, high attributes, 5 to 10 years of career, and we’re going to give them their first CEO title and say, Hey, we know this is going to be bumpy for about 12 to 18 months, but typically what we’ll find is someone with 15, 20 years of experience, they start up here and they’re on this path, and then this person makes a bunch of mistakes and then takes off after about the 18 month period. So similar process on the CEO side that we go through hiring for about a third of our businesses.

Got it. And when you’re selling the idea of a chief revenue officer into a CEO who previously was the owner, because even though they might not have a financial stake, they don’t own the business, they care for it still, it’s still their baby, especially if they’ve chosen not to retire and to stay carrying on looking after their baby for a while. Do you find it harder selling the chief revenue officer concept into them, compared to the CEOs who’ve been hired for that job?

Way harder, every time. They’ve done things a certain way for 10 years versus a CEO that’s done things for 6 months or 12 months in a certain way. So change is a lot easier to enact. Those CEOs that were founders, they become the biggest champions though over time. Often, we have these internal referrals, basically it’s like, Hey, go talk to X, Y, and Z, they felt exactly the same way and the exact same setup and here’s kind of outcome and where they’re headed today. And so we use them as champions.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for exploring and explaining this concept, and it’s going to become a thing in my head now, a crutch of words I can’t say – chief revenue officer – it’s like the word phenomenon. I’ve always struggled with that word, for example. I think it’s probably the first time I’ve ever said that on the podcast, and I shall not be saying chief revenue officer again either, although it seems to be easier now.

Chief growth officer.

Well, exactly. It’s easy, you’ve been saying it for a long time, so it’s easy for you. Jake, before we let you go, because it’s quite rare for us to get so much time with someone like yourself who is involved with so many MSPs and you are in so many different marketplaces. Did you say you’re in four different countries?

Five countries.

Five. Okay. You’ve added an extra country just while we were talking. So you’re experiencing so many different types of MSPs in so many different marketplaces. And obviously we are tomorrow heading into a brand new year. If you could, and I’m not going to ask you just to cut it down to give us your top three, but let’s say tomorrow you got fired. I mean, that would suck. What an awful 1st of January that would be, to get fired. But let’s say that happened. And you said, well, screw you guys, if you’re going to fire me, I’m going to go and buy my own MSP and I’m going to run my own MSP and take everything I’ve learned here and we’re just going to do it.

So let’s say tomorrow you bought an MSP and it was an average size acquisition – what would you do? And what I’m looking for here is your direct advice of what you would do if you owned an MSP, because obviously that’s something that the MSPs listening to and watching this can take away themselves.

So if I took over the operation of MSP tomorrow?

Yeah, so suddenly it’s your baby. You’ve shelled out, you’ve borrowed a ton of cash, you’ve put your money in, and you own that MSP. And obviously a chief revenue officer, we all know now that you would put one of those in, but that’s a long-term thing. So in the first 6 to 12 months, what would you do to start to drive growth within, let’s assume it was a stagnant business that you bought. What would you personally do to start to drive growth?

I would start by only buying companies with happy customers, and then I would immediately go and I would talk to and meet with every single customer. Need to find out why your customers actually work for you. This industry is very noisy. It’s very hard to differentiate. And so you got to find that magic of how you’re going to have a compelling value prop that doesn’t just sound like every other MSP, and that usually exists within the customers and why they work with you.

The other thing that I’m looking at when I’m talking to the customers is the relationships. This is a relationship business. You use circles of influence. Those are absolutely critical. So I need to know who we have our core relationships with and who’s referred us business in the past. And then I’m going to map what I call circles of influence. And I’m going to look at those people’s second degree connections. I’m going to look at where they spend their time, what circles they’re in, that could be other investments they have, that could be business associations, peer groups, charities, any number of close-knit communities. And I’m going to join those communities where I have multiple customers in the same community because this is a trust sale. And so I kind of hack gaining the trust by being with the people that already trust me and entering their circle. And so once I map those circles of influence in the secondary connections to kind of my super connectors, I put my sales plan in motion to go join the circles that they are already operating in the media that they already trust. Kind of like this conversation within the MSP community.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Jake, thank you so much for coming back onto the show. Now, some people listening to this will be thinking, actually 2025 is the year they’re going to get out, and maybe they’d want to have an initial conversation with you. There may also be people listening to this thinking that chief revenue officer job sounds great. How would I know more about that? So what’s the best way for people to have those conversations? Is it with you or should it be with one of your colleagues, and how should we get in touch?

Yeah, you could definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can send me an email, you can link to it. I’m happy to share some of the playbooks we use in terms of scorecarding candidates and how to hire them and set them up for success. So please don’t hesitate to reach out.

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…

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?

Welcome to Episode 266 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

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.

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.

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 Tobago and the region. And we had an MSP client who we are the IT provider for, and sometime around 2013 were credit unions, and this is not just in Trinidad, but this is across the world, they have to do something called an annual general meeting once a year, which is a public event where they invite all their members or clients to attend. And part of that annual general meeting is there’s an election that happens.

Years ago that used to be physical ballots by hand, and it was a process that took hours to finish. And sometime around 2013, our client, they had an electronic ballot accounting system and they asked if they could help us run the ballot accounting system. So that was a high speed scanner on a desk and we would have pre-printed ballots that people would shade, and we basically reduced the process from four hours to probably 30 minutes. What happened is that a lot of other credit unions saw us doing it and reached out to us to do that. So apart from the MSP business, this was a new service we provided, which we built out to preprinting all the ballots and managing that election process and we would give them the returning officer everything packaged for an election.

Then in 2020 we had gotten pretty popular in the space doing that. And then covid happened and these events can be over a thousand people at a physical venue and it has to happen and a lot of our clients reached out to us to figure out how do we have this event that we need to have and how do we move that online?

The challenge of these is they’re not regular webinars or Zoom or anything like that. These are highly, highly interactive. These are hundreds of people who need to be heard, who need to vote on motions, who need to do an election for board and committees. And we just fell in a really good space because we were, by design, technical people, but we also understood that credit union space. We developed a template of how to run those virtual meetings online that grew into hybrid meetings and it became a subsidiary side business where we have our MSP business now, but we also have a business that does large virtual and hybrid events.

Got it. So you were telling me just before the interview you can have up to a thousand people taking part in essentially a massive video call?

Well, we know we actually have capacity for 100,000 people on our Zoom.

Oh, wow, okay.

The largest we’ve registered is we probably just under 4,000 people on our live Zoom. But, and so it’s very, very involved and you have a lot of technical elements in the background. Everyone has to participate and feel like they’re accommodated. So it’s very demanding.

That’s a very unique business, I have to say. That’s a very cool side business and wonderful to hear how, actually, Covid for you was the making of that business. It allowed you to pivot and change and invent something new, which is really cool. Now obviously what we’re talking about here today is backdoor marketing, which is where we are selling to people and we are influencing them to choose you as an MSP without them realising. And the reason I wanted you to explain that second business is because of course that second business is where the backdoor marketing happens.

So tell us your experience of what happened as you started setting up more clients and onboarding more clients onto your video platform. How has that actually generated work for your MSP?

So those events are very, very involved, there’s registration, there’s a month of work that happens before the actual day of the event. And within that month there’s a lot of technical pieces that have to happen. I mean, we have to work with the client on what goes on their website, we have to do content email marketing blast, we may have to look at what happens on the internet onsite. So there are a lot of technology pieces, and through that, we either work alongside the clients IT department or maybe they don’t have an IT department, and we have to step in.

So that gave us one, a really good understanding of where these clients who were working with us on the virtual services were on the IT spectrum. And also, that gave our clients understanding of how we worked, because some of our resources from the MSP side do help out on the virtual side. Because of that, it was a good conversation if we executed really well on the virtual to say, Hey, by the way, do you know we also offer these MSP services that may be of value to you? And that has worked really well because it’s not like we are coming in cold. It’s someone we are familiar with, someone who knows us, someone we’ve executed for, and we found that there are a lot of people who would be happy to work with us on a more permanent basis as an MSP provider.

Got it. So essentially, if I was to summarise that, because what I want is for everyone listening this or watching this on YouTube to not think, okay, it’s about having a unique business. It’s something extra. And we’ll talk about what any MSP could do in a second. But essentially you are building a relationship with people who have bought something else from you. And as you are building that relationship, it allows you to influence them and talk to them about the technical problems that you are finding in their business, which is obviously a natural in for you to talk about the solutions. Have I got that right? Is that correct?

Yeah, and I don’t even think it’s that intentional because actually a weird thing started happening in that our MSP clients started, they knew us as technology providers, that’s what most people know us as bread and butter. But then our virtual clients know us as virtual meeting providers, and none of these people know we do the other thing. 

After we execute an event, I would just call and say, Hey, I’d like to pop by and share with you some of the other things we do. We know that we have a solution that can solve problems for them, and they know how we work, so it’s a natural fit.

And it’s usually very, very informal. We usually just are having a chat and I would just say, Hey, did you know we provide IT services, we provide cyber security services, we can do penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, all of these things. And usually it’s like, I had no idea you guys did this because this is actually a current requirement for us. And then that’s where that conversation would start. So it’s really, really natural. 

Exactly. So the actual sales conversation, as you say, is natural, but you are leveraging the existing relationship, and I think that’s the key part of this. Here’s a question for you, Omar, if you ran another MSP or you were advising another MSP and they don’t have a side business, obviously I can imagine you’re a very busy person with two big businesses to run, and I’m sure you’ve got a fantastic team, but if you were advising another MSP who didn’t have a side business and didn’t want a side business, how can you take that principle of working with someone on something else before you sell them managed services? What would you recommend they do?

Well, I think what I would say is that for us in this region, the concept of an MSP is not very well understood. And I don’t know if it’s like that commonly across the world, I wouldn’t be able to say. But usually people just see us as an IT company, so they would come to us for different things. And sometimes we do things on a project basis. So they may say, we want to do an office 365 implementation, and we may work with the client on that. But then sometimes you do something like that for a client and you execute it and the client has worked with you on a project basis and it becomes an easy conversation, if you can execute that really well to say, Hey, we did this for you and we can actually support you on a more permanent basis. Did you know we do these other things and this is how we work and this is what works for other clients who have done an office 365 implementation. And then that is where the conversation can become really natural. Obviously what underpins it is you have to execute on that thing you’re doing so that the client has had a good experience working with you, and then that opens the conversation for a more fixed, permanent relationship.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. To answer your question about around the world, do people understand what MSPs are? I think yes, probably there is a greater understanding of it, but still, you look at the average decision maker, so the average business owner or manager, and they don’t know what the term MSP is, they don’t know what a managed service provider is. I think a lot of people still do think of their IT company as just an IT company.

Yeah, that IT company… you do the IT, you do the websites, you do the social, you do everything that involves a computer.

Exactly right. And actually that in itself can be a double-edged sword. It’s good because you just mentioned websites. I’ve never understood why most MSPs don’t sell websites, because ordinary business owners see you as the technical people. And even though websites is a marketing thing, if they’re thinking, oh, well I trust you with my IT, I trust you with this, you can do my website. And I’ve always thought that most MSPs should have a website building partner that builds websites for them to sell. But anyway, that’s a whole other conversation. But yeah, so I think a lot of MSPs will treat project work as just something they do in order to onboard a new monthly recurring revenue client. And actually what you’re saying here is, go and do the project work to build a relationship, and then a more deeper engagement, a monthly commitment, monthly recurring revenue engagement will come off the back of that, which I think is absolutely spot on.

So Omar, thank you so much. That’s such a great idea. It’s awesome to hear that you’ve got two very good companies going there. And there’s a little piece of me that hears that you can put a hundred thousand people onto a call. And I am thinking, right, there’s 40,000 MSPs in the world. If I could get two or three people from each of those MSPs on a call simultaneously, I want to test the limits of your system. You say you’ve done 4,000, do you reckon you’re ever going to get past four or 5,000 on a simultaneous call?

Well yeah, I mean, we work closely with Zoom actually. And so that’s how they have expanded the capacity. It used to be 3000, they went up to 6,000. And I think where we want to go with that is to curate these large events. I often ask people, is there something you want to tell the world? Is there message you want to get out to the world? And you have this open online event. We do hybrid events as well, where everything is happening at a venue but it’s also open to online. Our job is really to get as many people and engage as many people to come onto your event and have a more professional experience than anything that is out there. It’s a Zoom product that they sell. So obviously there is a market for it. And this is actually a lot more fun than MSP stuff because we have ideas to do large events, we could do a music concert online. We could do really creative and crazy things, and sometimes people come to us with ideas and we just have to figure out how to make it happen. So yeah, that’s the fun side of it.

I love that. I can see why that’s a lot more interesting than setting up new users and resetting passwords. Omar, thank you very much for your time. Just tell us, for those MSPs that have been listening to this or watching you on YouTube, what’s the best way for them to just find out a little bit more and perhaps even connect with you on LinkedIn?

Yeah, so I am on LinkedIn. I usually post everything we do there. Just find me Omar Romero. My website is www.rose-it.com, and we are on social media. Our company is on LinkedIn. We are on Instagram, we are on Facebook – RoseITSL.

Graham in Omaha has reflected on how little he feels his MSP has achieved in terms of lead generation over the last 12 months. His question is: Why do my marketing projects take so long to implement?

Okay, well, there are a couple of potential reasons for this. The first is that maybe you are overthinking marketing. So just stop overthinking it, because marketing is already difficult enough. You just need to get a piece of advice from someone you trust and then implement that advice. And I realise that that cuts off several different ways of potentially doing something. But surely the goal here is just to get it done.

The other option is, or the other possibility is that you are disorganised. So you need to treat a marketing project like a technical project and use your project management software to break it down into easily digested chunks.

The other possibility is that you’re trying to do it all yourself. And you know my opinion on this, that you should only do, what only you can do. So next year, find yourself a virtual assistant who can help you, or members of your team who have some capacity and are interested in helping to grow the business, and they could be your secret weapons in 2025.