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.

Welcome to Episode 265 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

MSP Running Shoes on. Have you ever felt that owning an MSP business is like running a marathon in more ways than one? And if you prioritise looking after your clients and their technology ahead of looking after your own body and health, then you have a very low chance of completing the marathon that is being a business owner for the next 20 years. Let’s find out why successful business owners exercise, how they do it when they have zero time, and the benefits of doing it to you, your clients and your staff.

A few months back, I had my dad come and stay with us for a couple of nights. Now he lives about 150 miles away and we don’t really see him more than a couple of times a year. So it was lovely having him stay. My daughter and I, we took him to London for a full day being tourists in our own capital city, and we went to see a theatre show and we went to some museums and it was great fun. But we walked about 20,000 steps, which is about 10 miles, and we do a lot of walking because London is a walking city. It’s so much easier to walk around and just catch the tube. You wouldn’t drive around London. No one does that.

My dad is in his early seventies, so he’s not really that old and he’s kind of fit and kind of healthy as he has been throughout his life. But he has let his fitness slip in recent years and he was really struggling. So at the end of that day, he just looked ill. He was sitting down, his back was hurting, his knee was hurting, his hip was hurting, and he won’t go and see the doctor about his dicky hip. And I got him to admit that he doesn’t really do any regular exercise. He’ll have a walk now and again. Now all the medical advice from all the doctors everywhere is that someone of his age, in fact, someone of every age should be going out for at least a 20 minute walk every day. And I told him that even last year when I couldn’t exercise much because I’d injured my knee and I needed surgery on it. I couldn’t go running or anything like that, but I still exercised every single day. I’d go for a 20, 30 minute walk or go on the treadmill for a mile, or I actually bought an exercise bike, which I’ve since sold. But you get the idea.

I was telling him how the most successful business owners and MSP owners I know, they always make time for exercise regardless of how busy they are. Do you do this? Do you make time no matter how busy you are and force yourself to do exercise on a regular basis? Maybe you prioritise looking after your clients, you prioritise your partner if you’ve got one, your kids, if you have them, your staff, you prioritise all of this stuff. And it’s very easy to forget to prioritise yourself and your health and your exercise. And yet the evidence is there, there’s an abundance of it. Just go looking for it. One of the things that’s going to make the quality of all of our lives higher is regular exercise because our bodies are amazing, but they’re even better when we use them on a regular basis.

Even a 20 minute walk every single day doesn’t just keep your body sharp, it keeps your mind sharp as well. And I know that I always make better quality decisions about my business and just actually better quality life decisions, when I take regular exercise. My mind is sharper, yours will be the same, and you can do more and your body will last longer if you do more exercise thinking about it. It’s kind of weird how that works. It should almost be the other way around, shouldn’t it? That the more you use your body, the faster you run it down and there’s nothing left at the end. But actually that’s not the case at all.

So my challenge for you at this time of year, as we approach everyone having a bit of time off and a chance to do things differently next year, ask yourself, what could you do to prioritise adding some exercise every single day? And it could be as simple as you taking something that you already do every day and adding exercise to it. So for example, do you make 30 minutes worth of phone calls each day? And I don’t mean prospecting calls, just perhaps calls to your team or just catching up with clients or business owning friends or whatever. What if you did those calls while you were walking? And I know the first couple of times you do that, you’ll be out of breath, but you will soon get used to it and your fitness levels will go up.

What if actually that walk is listening to this podcast, apparently there are other podcasts to listen to. Or maybe listening to an audio book about improving your business. Could you do that while you’re out walking so it feels like you’re still investing your time on your business, but you’re getting the exercise as well? Get a dog. Make the time to walk the dog each day. And what if actually you go for a longer walk with a dog, get one of those dogs that’s robust and can go for very long walks, not one of those small little dogs that can only manage a five minute walk. What if it’s a walk with your kids to a playground? And what if you go to a playground that’s further away?

There’s a great book called Atomic Habits by James Clear, I think I’ve mentioned it on this podcast a dozen times. And if you haven’t listened to it yet, please get the book. It will make such a difference to your productivity. And one of the things that James Clear talks about is if you want to change something, you insert it into your existing routine. Rather than saying, right, I’m going to join the gym, I’m going to go there every day, I’m going to get fit – we all know that that lasts for three days and then you never go again.

Build a daily walk, or whatever it is that you want to do, into your already normal routine that you have. You literally add a habit onto an existing habit.

So if you have an existing habit of let’s say 30 minutes a day on the phone, adding the walking to those phone calls makes it happen every day. If you ordinarily take the dog out every single day, you just have a longer route and you perhaps turn left when you leave your house to go on the longer route rather than right. And that makes it more likely to happen because you are already doing those things.

Which of these things is the easiest way for you to exercise on a daily basis?

Now, this is very sneaky. Have you ever wished you could make more from your MSP by getting other people to do all of the hard work? Well, you can. In fact, you can actually use your prospects and your clients to not only help you grow your MSP’s revenue, but also directly help you with your marketing. Let’s talk about the simple way to take everyday conversations with ordinary business owners, extract marketing content from those conversations and then use it across multiple platforms. They can help you to grow your business without them even realising.

To do great marketing for your MSP, you need great content. And there’s tons of it around. Many vendors give away content as a value add. And there are plenty of businesses that supply high quality content, such as my MSP Marketing Edge, for example. Now, I’ve always said that there is a clear hierarchy of content, where you creating your own sits at the top. So at the top you’ve got you creating your own content. In the middle, you’ve got high quality content only supplied to one MSP per area, like the MSP Marketing Edge. And then at the bottom you’ve got content supplied to thousands of MSPs, including of course, your competitors. Of course, creating your own content is a time and a resource hog.

One of the tricks when creating your own content is to repurpose ideas into different types of content for different platforms.

So what I’m talking about here has been on my blog and it was in one of my LinkedIn newsletters at some point in the past. Different words, same kind of themes. So let me give you my standard operating procedure for collecting, creating, and repurposing marketing content for your MSP. And there are three steps.

The first is to collect ideas, collecting ideas for content. It’s kind of a mindset more than anything. Once you realise that ideas are around you all the time, you just have to open yourself up to collecting them. And your goal is to create content that’s educational and entertaining for ordinary business owners and managers, which makes every communication with every client a potential content goldmine. Imagine how many ideas could come out of a sales meeting or a strategic review, which you might know as a quarterly business review. Ask lots of open questions. Not only do you get quality answers from that, which will help you to close a prospect or upsell a client, but that also generates content ideas for you.

And here are some examples of open questions: What are your plans for the next few years? What are your most urgent priorities? What are your biggest business concerns? What would you like to do that your current technology won’t allow you to do? Now, this one’s my favourite, If I could wave a magic wand and do anything to make your business life easier, what would it be? And what do you often hear your staff saying about your technology? Now, let’s say the response to the last question was, yeah, actually, I always hear them moaning about how slow everything is. Well, not only is that a hot buying signal, but it’s also a great content idea. Get into the habit of writing down every content idea you hear, whether it’s a good one or not, because the goal at this stage is to capture everything. I always have a notes page open in my browser when I’m chatting to MSPs. In fact, I just counted and currently that page has more than 200 unused ideas, and just reading them gives me other ideas.

Second step then is to create content. Let’s take that comment about slow technology and imagine you turn it into a blog on your website. That could be – Five reasons why your staff moan about slow computers and how to end the complaints for $297. The five reasons, which I’ve just made up off the top of my head, and you’d replace them with your own better reasons are: They haven’t restarted their device for three years. They have a million tabs open on their browser. They have every possible piece of software open and running. Their computer is so old, it’s on Windows 3.1 and their IT support team isn’t being proactive. And that last one gives you a chance to segway into the proactive tasks that your team would perform regularly to keep their network and devices optimised.

Talk in broad strokes and avoid techno babble. You want them sitting there feeling annoyed, wondering if their current IT people are doing anything or not. And then you offer to help the reader delight their staff by spending $297 on a speed audit. What’s a speed audit? Well, I just made that up as well, and it’s where you and your team, you do an audit. It’s just a basic technology audit, but it’s aimed at finding out why their devices network is so slow, including implementing any easy fixes. Now, we all know that this kind of audit is really just the prospect paying for a high quality sales meeting with you. They’re paying for you to tell them everything that’s wrong and how you would fix it if they joined you as a contracted client.

As a sales tool, paid audits have fallen out of favour in recent years, but I do believe used well, they can still be very powerful. And by the way, you don’t have to write all of that content I was just talking about yourself. It needs to come out of your brain. Sure, but you can create it without actually pressing laptop buttons, for example. You could dictate it. I dictate most of my content now, and then I edit it into shape. And that one habit has more than doubled my output in the last few years. You could feed your ideas into AI to write it for you. Just make sure you edit and humanise what the AI spits out. You could record a voice note and send it to a freelance writer on Upwork. There’s lots of things you could do.

Then the final step is to repurpose the content because that blog can now be turned into all sorts of different content. The blog can be copied as a LinkedIn newsletter. Each of the five reasons could become a social post. You could film a video about all of this. It could become a segment on your podcast, if you do one. You could do a webinar on it. And it’s also a great subject for a LinkedIn live. And just there, are seven different types of content all from one idea. Now, there are two tricks to get this right. The first is to reshape the content to fit the platform. So you don’t just copy and paste the blog into a social post, for example, you’d rewrite it, or at the very least, shorten it down and simplify the words you use. And the second trick is to use a content calendar to plan when and how you’ll reuse content. Spread it out across the year, across all the different platforms, and you’re looking for a variety of subjects so that your content never feels samey.

Featured guest: Dave Sutton is the founder of Wingman MSP Marketing, a firm specialising in helping MSPs grow their businesses through effective marketing strategies.

With a passion for technology and a knack for understanding the unique challenges and opportunities faced by MSPs, Dave has become a trusted advisor to countless businesses in the industry.

His expertise in lead generation, content marketing, and branding has helped MSPs increase their visibility, attract new clients, and ultimately achieve their growth goals.

If you know you should be making more outbound calls to win new business for your MSP, but you HATE picking up the phone, this is going to blow your mind. Perhaps the single most effective marketing tactic you could ever use is just to pick up the phone and call ordinary business owners and managers. Yes, it’s hard to get past the gatekeeper and engage someone in a conversation they don’t really want to have, but the quality of the conversation, even in just a few minutes, can be off the scale.

It’s one of the most reliable ways to discover who is nearly ready, willing, and able to buy the services that you sell. Most MSPs hate making these calls, and my special guest today is a real expert at making them. In fact, he’s called at least a thousand decision makers in his career. And today he’s going to spill all of his hard won secrets of how to get through, how to get them engaged, and ultimately how to get decision makers to book a sales meeting with you.

Hi, I’m Dave Sutton. I’m one of the owners of Wingman MSP Marketing.

And thank you so much Dave for making your debut on this podcast, although your business partner, Mark Copeman, has been on at least two or three times. Lots of MSPs will know Mark from speaking at events around the world and for being on podcasts and webinars and everywhere, but they probably don’t know that actually, Mark does no work at all in Wingman MSP marketing. Mark does all the pouncing around and the, ooh, look at me, pretty much like I do, and then you do all the actual work in the background. Thank you very much, we’ve pulled you out of the cave of getting things done and you’re giving us a little bit of time for this interview. So thank you.

What we’re going to talk about is something which I know you did yourself for many years, and I know you have now a team of six people doing, it’s phoning business owners. It’s the thing that MSPs hate doing, and I know you and your team do this on behalf of lots of MSPs. What I want to get out of you today are some secrets, some things that you do which helps you to get through to other businesses and get hold of decision makers. But let’s go back a step first and let’s just look at how you got started, Dave. So you started Wingman originally on your own. How long have you been going?

Yes, almost eight years now. And everything started from telemarketing really. So from lead gen, I think as the MSP market has matured and people have realised that brand and digital and all these other things are important that we brought those in to the fold over the years. But still there’s that crux of, I’m an MSP owner and I need leads like yesterday that I can turn into customers. And still even in this digitised age, picking up the phone, having a conversation with someone asking questions, it’s the only way to build that direct rapport and open a door to a conversation with a prospect.

Yeah, I agree completely 1000%. And in fact, because of the digital world, that’s why you need to have the phone aspect, and I’m sure you would agree with me on this, but when I see an MSP in a marketplace who has somebody doing outbound calls, whether it’s an agency like yours, whether it’s someone in house, whether it’s just a part-time mom making two, three hours of calls, two, three days a week, they have a distinct advantage because they’re just touching more people, having relationship building calls with more prospects. And eventually you “get lucky”. And I put getting lucky in speech marks there because it’s not really getting lucky. It’s working the numbers, it’s getting through to people.

So you originally were the one actually doing the calls for MSPs. Now, to me, that sounds like the worst job in the world. I would rather be, sweeping mud off the street in the rain. I don’t know where I’m going with that analogy, but I’d rather lose a toe than actually have to pick up the phone every day. So what was that like? Actually just calling people day in, day out.

It does feel like sweeping mud uphill sometimes. Yeah, so I could see where you were going with that one.

It’s a numbers game. You’ve got to make a hundred plus dials a day to have the chance of having 10 to 15 meaningful conversations, of which 2 or 3 might go somewhere, and repeating that process relentlessly.

But I think the mistake that most people make is they look for a salesperson in that role. Agencies, MSPs, whoever they hire, sales-based people for that role, which actually are probably the wrong person. A salesperson is great when they’re put in front of a prospect that’s lukewarm and has an appetite to move forward. But actually that dogged work upfront is better led by someone that can start a conversation. They don’t feel too salesy, they’re not too pushy, and they’re inquisitive and they ask questions because it’s all about building an audience first that you can then nurture.

Rarely are people looking for a new IT provider, and more often than not, that’s because they’re in bed with someone that they’ve been with for years. As we all know, our clients as an MSP are incredibly loyal and most MSPs are like that. So therefore it’s hard out there in the market to find people that are looking to switch. So you want to drop in some little tidbits of things that they might want to consider, have they questioned their incumbent upon, but you can only do that when you vetted the audience. You know they’re the right size, right location, right industry, they’re a good fit on the face of it. And even in this data paranoid age and heavily regulated sort of world that we live in now, people still unwittingly just share information with you on the phone when you ask questions.

More often than not, we try and gun for a decision maker. Everybody thinks about telemarketing. You need the decision maker. But often it’s the office manager, it’s the finance manager, it’s a middle manager person, perhaps that middle aged woman that runs the office. She’s the person that you need to be speaking to because she’s the one that can rattle the cages of the decision-makers. She’s the one that you need to befriend and learn when she’s taking the cat to the vet and all of that kind of good stuff. That means that there’s some power behind your follow-up when you pick up the phone again.

Yeah, exactly that. And of course, knowing that she’s taken the cat to the vet, that’s not something you have to remember, that all goes in your CRM so when you call her back three to six months later, you can say, oh, when you go into the vets with your cat, I hope everything worked out or whatever. I know you now have a team of six doing these calls for you. In my last business, I had a team of three, three full-time telesales people. Now their job was to actually call business owners in our verticals. We operated in three healthcare verticals in that old business. And I have to be honest, the best performing of them was a lady called Miranda, I think I’ve talked about her on the podcast before, because she was just natural. She would write down things like going on holiday or taking eldest daughter to university, and she would make the follow-up call a few months later about that. It’s almost like she was calling someone who was a friend. It’s like, oh, hey Steven, last time we were talking you were taking your daughter to university. And so she was having five to ten minute conversations about that and then having a two minute conversation about our business, but she got the best results, which was amazing.

So what I did find is, and a lot of MSPs find this, is those three telesales people were the noisiest and hardest people on my staff. And by noisiest, I don’t mean from talking. I mean in terms of dramas. If anyone was going to be late, it’d be one of the telesales. If anyone going to have a crisis, it’d be one of the telesales. One of them left every six to eight weeks. So we had a constant hiring thing. You have six people. Do you have a similar experience or have you figured out how to get a stable team and keep them?

A common challenge, but yes. Thankfully many years of hard work and refining the right folks, the mumsy type you mentioned at the start of the podcast, someone that’s perhaps a mum that’s looking for part-time hours, they are the ideal people because they don’t sound salesy, they’re reliable, they need to turn up to work because they’ve got bills to pay, but also they are disarming. When you hear a mumsy tone on the phone, you don’t feel threatened. You don’t feel that they’re going to immediately start pitching to you. So actually then you are disarmed and you are likely to then start sharing information with them.

Also importantly, they’ve got life experience that they can throw in. Things like taking the kids to school and talk about university as you mentioned. And the young kids that you typically get as the SDR or telemarketer type applicants that are starting their career in sales, they don’t have any of that, so they don’t have any context that they can bring to conversations with people much older than them. So it takes a real knack from a personal skill level to have the right character to bring into those phone calls.

Yeah, absolutely. And even though you are running an MSP marketing agency doing this for MSPs, this is still really relevant to MSPs themselves because the chances are, as the MSP owner, you are not going to do the calls. You’re going to get someone else to do it for you. And as you just heard there, and this is going to be boring interview, Dave, because we agree, we have exactly the same opinion about the right kind of people to hire. But for an MSP listening to this, that’s the person you want, which fits very well with my recommendation. I always say get a back to work mom, two to three days a week, two to three hours a day. It’s absolutely perfect.

Dave, let’s talk about two issues. And I’m not going to ask you to give away any secret sauce because you’ve spent years perfecting this, but what do you do to get past the gatekeeper and what do you do to grab their attention?

More often than not, especially if you’re targeting the SME or SMB space, whatever you want to call it, which most MSPs are, you don’t know who the person is that’s answering the phone. There’s this natural assumption that the gatekeeper’s going to be a receptionist type that doesn’t know what’s going on in the business and they can’t answer anything. But more often than not, it might be one of the owners of the business that just happens to answer the inbound calls or perhaps a middle manager or office manager type. So I would say always be careful to just consider that you might be talking to the boss when the phone gets answered. So don’t sort of immediately go in with an approach that this is a useless receptionist that I need to get past very quickly, which is a common trait of anyone starting their career in sales.

So start by asking questions and very quickly someone that is perhaps quite junior in that job role, they will very quickly be out of their depth. So if they are not comfortable talking about the IT arrangements of the business, they can’t tell you the name of the provider that they use, how they rate the relationship, how many years they’ve worked together, very quickly they will become unstuck and they will either want to throw you like a hot potato over at a colleague that can answer the questions because they can’t, or they’ll dismiss you and get you off the phone. But we still find people that are in that capacity where it isn’t them. They will very quickly say, oh, it’s Sharon that you need to speak to. She’s the finance manager, she deals with that kind of thing.

And so once you’ve got through to that right person, you were saying earlier that often people aren’t ready to switch IT provider, it is very much about finding who’s ready, willing, and able to even have the conversation, let alone make the switch. What’s your sort of general approach for doing that? So do you get them talking about their business or do you just jump straight into talking about IT?

Absolutely. Always about business first. Nine times out of ten, if you’re selling to people that don’t have anyone in an IT capacity within their organisation, they’re not going to know anything about IT. They probably won’t even be able to tell you how many servers they’ve got. Maybe not even how many PCs they’ve got in the office. So they’re never going to be able to go into any depth about how they view things from a technical perspective. But people love moaning, especially us Brits. They will always happily moan about a service issue, communication problems, or that their IT is frustrating on a user workflow basis, particularly where tech has become invisible. They don’t have servers with blinking flashing lights in the corner anymore. That’s all evaporated to the cloud. So the IT that they’re using is all the apps and tools on their PC every day. And if they’re not getting an elegant experience, they feel as though they’re missing the trick on new advances in technology like AI and things like that.

A lovely bit of FOMO is a great way to start a conversation. Where perhaps the incumbent MSP is failing to help them to fully leverage technology. Are there things that are laborious red tape that they’re having to do day in, day out that tech could do for them? Perhaps even looking at things like are they hiring. Are they recruiting a part-time finance person? And just go in there with a bit of a loaded assumption on, I can help you automate that person out of a job, so you don’t need to hire that part-time finance person. We’re starting to see the market turn to people now becoming aware of, yeah, we’d like to get more from tech. Yeah, our current IT provider, they’re okay, we phone them when something’s broken and they fix it, but they’re not helping us move forward. There’s no impetus to upgrade or reinvent ourselves to digitise our workflow so rapidly. Now, more and more small to mid-size firms are waking up to, oh yeah, tech isn’t a necessary evil, it’s actually something that will help us. So we’re finding more prospects now are prepared to talk about things at that level, and that’s creating new opportunity.

Yeah, I’ll bet. And just one thing, you mentioned FOMO, just for anyone that doesn’t know that stands for Fear of Missing Out. Dave, do you see AI, is that coming up in conversations? Because obviously in our world we talk about AI all the time, everyone who’s listening to this or watching this on YouTube knows what Copilot is, right? But what about the ordinary business owners, are they aware of it?

AI, yes, thankfully, because of how mainstream has gone. When ChatGPT became this wonderful thing that everyone was aware of, and as soon as you see it online everywhere, TV news is talking about it all the time, it’s hit the masses and people maybe slightly fearful of it. They don’t know where to get started. They can’t join the dots up between what they do day to day and where technology could actually help them.

We hoped there would be this sort of impetus a few years ago when automation first became a thing, power automate power apps, all these wonderful things in 365 and Zapier and all these other tools that could hook up your CRM system with your marketing automation system or your website and all of those things. We were quite excited with that opportunity, but it fell flat because it didn’t make mainstream media. People didn’t get it. They think of automation and they think of a robot making cars in a factory, but AI has hit the mainstream. So now people have got that fear of something’s out there and we are not leveraging it. So we’re starting to see more conversations now from businesses where they’re interested in leveraging more from tech where they feel their incumbent doesn’t help them. And by the way, that’s far more exciting and interesting for a small business owner to want to spend time looking at than their cyber security, which people are still vehemently against or are ignorant or ambivalent where cyber security is concerned.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And that matches the feedback that I get from people I talk to who do do phone calls as well, MSPs in their business that cyber security is the number one issue if you run an MSP, but for business owners, it’s an annoyance, it’s a pain, it’s something on the side. And I think what MSPs have to do is use different approaches to reach people and then protect them from themselves in the actual service delivery.

Final question for you, Dave, and that’s when you are phoning people obviously you are doing so on behalf of lots of MSPs. I know you work with MSPs around the world. When you are phoning, are you phoning to book video calls directly into live calendars, or do you have a different outcome that you’re going for? And based on your answer to that, how do you get that? Do you just out and out talk about, Hey, why don’t we arrange a 15 minute chat for you and the owner of the business? What’s your kind of approach to that?

Yeah, gunning for a meeting has always got to be the right way forward. I think it’s about knowing the prospect well enough and the qualification criteria that you want to achieve. How will the meeting be helpful for the prospect? And ultimately, in the back of our mind, is there an opportunity for our MSP clients to go in there and leverage their skills and their portfolio to help that business? Sometimes we go as far as we can being outsourced, or even if it’s an internal SDR making calls within an MSP, there’s a limit to their knowledge. And often that’s a good excuse to say, I can’t help you any further with this, but I need to bring in my colleague that can help you and schedule a date and time, have that calendar open, have the availability there at hand so you can capture when someone is around and get the date in the diary, shoot them a calendar invite immediately on the back of that phone call.

Events is another, a great way for telemarketing to be able to feed perhaps lower warmth leads into a business. When you look at that grade of lead, the marketing industry talks about MQL in terms of marketing qualified lead or SQL in terms of sales qualified lead. Those face-to-face appointments really should be those SQLs opportunities where there’s budget on the table, there’s momentum to move forward. There’s a real pain right now. But given that many prospects aren’t there yet, or they maybe in the fullness of time, how can you get some face time with prospects that are not yet ready to buy, but you can feed them with education. You can build your personal brand with them as well as the brand of your MSP. And that’s through webinars, events. It’s where you can provide education, perhaps if it’s industry specific or it’s around that FOMO piece. If we know we’ve got a pool of prospects we’ve spoken to where they’re considering AI is a gap in their business right now, then host an event where you can give them top five tips that you can implement AI in your business tomorrow. That kind of thing. Even if it’s prerecorded content, it allows you to build that all important connection and start to establish trust and awareness with those prospects.

Love it. Love it. Thank you. Dave. You’ve been very generous with your secrets, with your knowledge, just tell us a little bit more about Wingman MSP Marketing. What do you do and how can we get in touch with you?

Absolutely. So as Paul mentioned, we look after MSPs around the world that are looking to perhaps target a niche or diversify their business so they can stand out from the crowd of other MSPs. If they’re looking for direct outreach, they’re looking for more leads to their website, then we can help them reach more prospects more quickly through a whole myriad of marketing sources that we do with our team of roughly 25 people that we’ve got here now based out of the UK.

And what’s the best way to get in touch with you, Dave?

Oh, sorry. The most important thing, I’m a very good marketer if I don’t address that. This is our website, wingmanmspmarketing.com. A great conversation starter for us is our free website review. So if you are not sure about your presence right now, you’re not sure how unique you are, whether your personality is cutting across with prospects, fill in that review. We’ll come back to you with a video that’s personally tailored to you, your MSP and your website, and that’s a great way to get started.

Steven, whose MSP is based in London, UK, is looking forward to 2025 with an increased focus on getting organised. His question is: Which project management software do you recommend?

Well, as you know, I’m not a tech, so I have no idea how this compares to the project management capabilities of all the PSAs that are out there. But I am very organised and I’m also very keen to see progress in my own business. And after trying lots of different pieces of project and collaboration software, I settled on something called Basecamp. Now, I believe that you can use this to drive internal projects such as your marketing and maybe even use it to deliver technical projects for clients as well.

Here’s how we use it in the MSP Marketing Edge. We use Basecamp for every single thing that we’re doing that’s not just the kind of the routine running the business every day. It’s for the big development projects as well as small changes that we are making, kind of anything really. And all of our content production is also run through Basecamp. The beauty of it is that you can have unlimited projects. So in each project you get a full context for everything. So let’s say I’m in a project that’s about some small changes that we’re making to our member portal. So I can see the context of all the discussions that have happened, the task list that have been set up, what’s already been decided, what’s already been completed. I don’t have to wonder what this is about. I don’t have to go back through an email trail and try and figure it out. Everything to do with that project is there in one place in its own little silo. It’s really, really clever what they’ve put together.

Now, as I say, we’ve tried loads of different bits of software over the years. We tried Monday.com, we tried Asana, I mean, we must have tried dozens of them, but we really liked Basecamp and we settled and married Basecamp. It’s elegant software. It looks beautiful as well, and the development of it is great. They’re continually adding new features and new things that you can do with it. I do also know a handful of MSPs who also love it. So give Basecamp a go. It might be the one for you.

Welcome to Episode 264 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

One of the dangers of doing a podcast every week and appearing in lots of YouTube videos is that at some point your friends and family stumble across your content. And every now and then I get a message from a friend saying, Hey, I just watched your latest video on YouTube, I’ve no idea what you were talking about Paul, but it seemed okay. Now, the reason that this is a risk is because I do try and put a lot of my life into my content, because as a working parent and a business owner myself, that helps you and me to relate to each other. So the story I want to tell you today is about a friend who I hope never stumbles across this recording because I know he will recognise himself immediately and no one likes to be talked about in a negative way.

Now, this friend of mine runs his own business. Don’t worry, he’s not an MSP. In fact, what he does is almost irrelevant, but times sadly are not very good for him right now. He’s lost a lot of clients over the last few years and his business is not in great shape. We do occasionally talk about marketing. Of course, I give him as much advice as I can, but he rarely takes action on it. I think the problem is that he hasn’t yet emotionally dealt with the fact that a business that he’s been building up for decades has flattened out. In fact, it’s in decline now. He needs to do things differently to rescue it and turn it around.

If you were in a situation like this where you’re actually struggling to meet payroll in some months, you’d think that your full attention would be on the rescue and the recovery, right? I mean, that would certainly be the case for me, but not for my friend because the other day when we were chatting and I asked what he was doing that day, he said he was going on a training course. Not a training course on anything that would be useful to him in terms of turning his business around or improving the service. It was a very low level training course around some minor changes to regulations regarding the service that he sells. So really, he could have just sent one of his staff or just skipped it altogether. It really wasn’t an important training course, but it was an entire day of his time.

I was utterly gobsmacked when he told me about this because just a few days before, he was telling me that he didn’t have any time to implement all of the new marketing ideas that we discussed to help him win new clients. And then I had an epiphany. Him going on a training course was a form of procrastination. My friend had confused busyness with business. To him going on a training course, was doing some work, but the reality is it wasn’t productive work. It was just him passing the time and maybe not even having to think about his problems for a few hours. Maybe that was the appeal.

People think procrastination is about doing nothing when you should be doing something. But procrastination comes in the form of us doing things that we really shouldn’t be doing at the expense of doing the things that matter.

Now, I see this in marketing implementation all the time, and of course to an MSP, marketing is hard. It’s a dark art if you are actually a technical person, anything that’s hard is at risk of being held back through procrastination. Do you have this problem?

Well, let me tell you what I’ve just agreed with my friend to see if this would help you. I took him out for a beer. I told him in a much gentler manner than I’ve told you how I thought he was procrastinating and then I agreed to be his accountability buddy. So what we’re going to do, we’re going to start this next week. We’re going to have a brief chat at the start of every week where he tells me about a couple of tasks he’s going to do to win new clients. So the tasks that he wants to implement that week. He’ll tell me about them at the start of the week and then at the end of the week, he has to give me a progress report. Now, as I say, we’re only going to start next week and I think it’s going to go well because what I think is going to happen is every time my friend catches himself procrastinating, he will remind himself that he doesn’t want to be on a phone call with me at the end of the week admitting he didn’t get those two or three tasks done. Now, I don’t care whether he gets them done or not, but internally to him, it’s very important that he gets those done.

This is one of the core psychological weapons of influence as outlined by Dr. Robert Cialdini in his classic book, which is called Influence. The weapon is called commitment and consistency. When we say we’re going to do something, we want to be very consistent with following through and doing that because to be seen to do that is an important part of our self-image. So just by getting my friend to declare what he’s going to do and then holding him to account for that, he’s getting stuff done. And I know that he’s going to start to win new clients soon by implementing new marketing and he will rescue his business, which is fantastic. What a great thing that I can do to help him for just an investment of, 10, 15 minutes a week. Would this work for you?

If you are struggling to get your marketing implemented, why not find yourself an accountability buddy? Now sadly, I can’t personally do it with you, but I bet you could find another MSP or just indeed another business owning friend, and it definitely needs to be someone who is a business owner and understands your world because then they won’t let you use the usual interruptions of, oh, we had a busy week as an excuse for not getting things done. If you do try this, will you let me know? I would love to see some examples of this being done successfully by MSPs.

Being a marketing expert is a little bit like being an IT expert. It’s a very broad canvas and just as you might be good at many things, but not blowing fluff out of an RS 232 port, I’m good at many marketing subjects, but not all of them.

You’ll rarely hear me giving detailed advice on pay per click or search engine optimisation, SEO, as they’re very technical subjects that change constantly. Another area I’ve never really been comfortable discussing is branding. But recently I’ve been interviewing some very smart branding experts for future episodes of my podcast and it’s helped me get a better grip on what branding really is.

It’s not your logo, it’s not the design of your website, it’s not your accreditations. Your brand is YOU and YOUR TEAM and the way that you COMMUNICATE.

And critically how all of that makes people feel. Because that’s really what a brand is. It’s the reflection of how people feel about something. Their feelings affect whether they buy or not. Most purchases are driven by the heart rather than by the brain, especially picking a new MSP.

So let’s take some big consumer brands. How do you feel about Microsoft, about Apple, about Coke or Pepsi? You’ll have negative or positive feelings towards these brands based on your past experiences with them. And of course, these big consumer brands, they spend millions every year to influence you. Well really a B2B brand like your MSP is no different, except you are not spending advertising dollars to try to change people’s emotional response to you and neither should you.

The way that people feel is based on every possible kind of communication you do. That includes what’s on your website, what you say on social media, the blogs and the articles you write and the videos that you make. But it’s also affected by how the phone is answered, the way your technicians talk on live chat, what’s written in tickets. You see your brand is everything you do. And so the only way to influence that brand perception is to create the right culture within your business. Because you can’t control freak everything every technician says every day, and you don’t really want to, right? That’s the route to divorce and a heart attack. But you can set out what your MSP’s mission is and constantly train and encourage your team to serve that mission with everything they do.

As an example, my MSP Marketing Edge’s mission is to make marketing and winning new clients easy for MSPs. And I have a team of 12 and a constant focus on this mission in all of our internal conversations, which allows my team to make the correct decisions every day without having to refer back to me. So whatever a member of ours asks, my team can think If I do this or if I advise this does it make marketing easy for this MSP? And when you add that up over a thousand communications, it becomes a solid, clear brand, based on how people feel.

So let me finish with three questions for you. No.1: Do you know how you want people to feel about your MSP? No.2: Is this reflected in your business’s mission? And No.3: If I asked your technicians tomorrow, would they be very clear on what that mission is?

Featured guest: Emily Schneider is a PowerPoint design specialist who helps business leaders drive measurable growth by tapping into the often overlooked and underappreciated aspect of marketing – visual storytelling and presentation design.

Emily views presentations as strategic tools, blending narratives and visuals to guide informed decisions and empower clients to present with confidence.

As a podcast guest, Emily shares insights on the power of well-designed presentations to boost sales, strengthen relationships, and enhance communication. A trusted collaborator, she helps businesses captivate and inspire with a touch of storytelling magic.

As an MSP, if you think about all of the marketing tools at your disposal, you probably wouldn’t think that PowerPoint was one of them. But of course, PowerPoint is just a way of presenting information to people. And anywhere you can communicate, you can improve that communication to influence people.

My special guest today is an expert in telling stories through PowerPoint and using it to drive sales.

Hi, I am Emily Schneider. I’m a visual storyteller specialising in PowerPoint design. I have a magical knack of simplifying complex information to help stories come to life.

And what a fantastic skill. And as you and I were just saying just before we started recording this interview, what a great world we live in that you can have a very, very, very specific talent and skillset and be able to work with people all around the world in all sorts of different industries. You certainly couldn’t have done that 20 years ago.

Emily, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. We are going to talk about how you use visual aids such as, and I know you specialise in PowerPoints, but how you use those to influence people to choose your MSP to buy more services from you, and of course, just generally to communicate better. So let’s first of all learn a little bit about you. So whereabouts are you based and what got you to this point in your life where you have this set of superpowers?

Oh, thanks Paul. I’m so happy to be here. I’d love to tell more. So I am based outside of Chicago, in the suburbs, in Arlington Heights. My journey began when I was 16 with my sweet 16 invitation which was the first thing I ever digitally created. What I remember most was about the way people responded and the smiles and the emotional connection that helped when I created something that then somebody responded to, and then in the end, they all showed up for my party. So it was fabulous. It was a win-win.

What I have learned is that my creative curiosity and my emotional intelligence or just my ability to want to help people has created this beautiful harmony with my design skills and my skillset. So I came from the agency marketing world. I was an art director. I worked on shopper marketing and more traditional below the line stuff. But what I loved was connecting with the decision makers and helping to tell the story so that they bought the product of what we were selling. Those visuals for the marketing materials.

And I have streamlined from a general creative director into niching myself into PowerPoint because that’s where my magic happens. That’s my zone of genius. I see the world in simple forms and shapes, and I love being able to bring that to other people so that they can tell their stories with more confidence and more clarity and create stronger connections. Again, I’m such an empathetic person. I love connecting with people. And so when I can empower somebody else to do that and I get to be in my zone of genius and then they get to shine bright, win-win for everybody. So it is pretty magical that I get to do what I do, I think because it definitely lights me up and I love helping other people light up too.

That’s amazing. That’s great to hear. It really is. And there’s something about PowerPoint that seems to bring out the worst in people, isn’t there? I mean, I had a corporate career up until I started my first business 20 odd years ago, and I’ve sat through more than enough bad PowerPoint sessions. But even then as a business owner, I’ve been presented to, I’ve been sold at, what is it about PowerPoint that seems to make us just make bad decisions and make bad design choices?

Well, I think it goes back to, and I think the term I always hear is like death by PowerPoint. Everybody does. It used to be like a negative word, to be honest, in my world too. It’s kind of cringey. I think that’s part of the reason I have embraced it and love it even more is the challenge to just change those expectations to flip the script for other people.

But PowerPoint is a tool, it’s a storytelling tool. It is a presentation tool. It’s not meant for us to be brainstorming and to be creating ideas and to be building things. It’s meant to house that information that we bring in from offline and bring it together. And it’s kind of that package in that wrapper.

I think death by PowerPoint comes, or as I say, the cringiness comes from a couple things. One is when we don’t know what to say or how to say it, we over communicate and so we start to share everything or we think we should tell them everything we know and we lose that kind of connection with our audience. And now we’re just cringing at these slides full of data or information that doesn’t make sense.  

Also, I think PowerPoint does a great job of trying to help us make it better, but what we lose is the simplicity, consistency and intentionality that comes with really strong stories, whether they’re verbal, whether you have the supporting presentations or just in a conversation. And when you can be intentional with how you tell your story, you create that stronger connection and you’re more seen and you’re more heard. And again, so I think sometimes we default, thinking that we’re making it easier but we’re actually making it more complex for ourselves.

And lack of training. People from the corporate world, even as a designer having to work in PowerPoint to get to my clients,

nobody ever trains you on presentations or how to use the platform. You’re just kind of thrown in and expected to use it. Some people have a way with it, where it just comes naturally but a lot of us don’t.

And so I think there’s that beautiful balance and I love helping to train and educate and do for people because it is a tool that has a lot of power if you use it right.

I’ve forgotten that phrase, death by PowerPoint. And you’re absolutely right. And what’s probably the most depressing thing in the world is where someone presents the PowerPoint. I always thought of PowerPoint as a visual aid to help you with the thing that you’re trying to say, but when someone brings it up and it’s on the screen and they say, right, second slide, third bullet down. So as you can see here in this 12 point text, and then they read the words that are in front of you. And I think that’s the death by PowerPoint.

You talked about storytelling there, do you think that part of the problem is people often don’t know how to tell a story and so therefore the PowerPoint they’re creating is trying to back up something that isn’t yet fully formed? Does that make sense?

I mean, it totally makes sense. When you say why is there this challenge, I actually want to back up to the presenter reading all the slides. I kind of described it as, and I like to empower people to be conversation conductors. So think about it, when you go to see an orchestra, you have this conductor that stands on stage. He stands up in front of the orchestra, you have all these different sections, all these musicians, and he helps the music come to life. He says, when instruments start, how loud, how soft, when they go, when they don’t go, how they harmonise together. And as this audience member, you create this emotional connection as you hear this harmonious, beautiful sound. And so when you think of your slides as that harmonious music to your voiceover, to your story, I think that changes the way you present or that changes the way you set yourself up to tell your story.

I think the other challenge like you say, is that people don’t have a plan or they don’t know what their story is. I find a lot of my clients don’t really know, they know they need something as visuals, but they don’t have to just be a picture. A visual story is highlighting and focusing on what the key topic, those key takeaways, what your main objective is, and streaming that through so that you can really lead your audience side by slide, section by section to pay attention to the story and highlight what you want. Data is visuals, copy can be visuals, pictures of course, illustrations, icons, there’s so many ways. But again, I always preach simplicity, consistency and intentionality. And when you can simplify what you’re saying, be consistent with your treatments and be intentional with your choices, you start to set yourself up for a strong visual story. There’s really no other way around it.

Yeah, no, I love that. And it is funny, back in October, I went to ScaleCon 24 in Las Vegas, and I was one of the speakers. I did the keynote marketing talk at the end of day one. And Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe did the wrap up on day three. I thought my PowerPoint was okay verging on good. And I’d have two big words on a slide and I’m thinking I’ve nailed that. And then when Nigel was doing his talk, his PowerPoint was a mix of exactly what you’ve just said, a mix of images, and he had graphics but not overly graphics. His whole thing was structured around different parts of the brain. And so he used – and I can’t remember exactly, I’m sorry, Nigel, I can’t remember the exact thing you said, but then people don’t do that, they go away from it, remember how they feel which was, that was epic – but he used the  brain and related it back to technology, and he was using the visuals to back up the story that he was telling us from the stage.

Initially I’m like, this is brilliant. And then I felt a bit depressed thinking because I’m going back next year and I’m thinking, I’ve got to up my PowerPoint game. Seriously, I’ve just given you a sales lead by the way there, Emily, just in case you weren’t completely obvious what that was. So when you, and I know you’ve worked with MSPs and you’ve worked with all sorts of different businesses around the planet, when you work with someone on their PowerPoint, and obviously you are coming at it from a design point of view, but I guess the last thing you look at is what the design should be when you are looking at a PowerPoint. I mean, let’s go back a step. When you start working with someone, do you have to look at it from a what point are you trying to get over point of view or do you even have to much earlier than that, have a conversation about here’s why the default templates in PowerPoints aren’t going to help you out and here’s why you need something bespoke. Or actually, by the time people reach you, are they ready to invest in something better?

By the time people reach me, they’re usually seeking something better. I do work within existing templates because sometimes you have to, but I’m a rule refiner, so give me a template and let’s see how we can push it, right? Because templates are built for standard information. When you’re giving keynotes, when you’re telling a new story, when you’re giving business updates, you don’t always have existing slides or existing template layouts that navigate or that will set you up for success. And so we have to be, again, intentional with what we’re saying and how we’re saying it. But I think that there’s so much power in that.

I just want to hit on a little bit more that neuroscience, as you were saying, like Nigel was talking about the brain. So we naturally will hear something and we’ll get kind of sidetracked on our own story. Again, you’re talking about his brain and I’m thinking about this neuroscience that comes with presentation and storytelling. I automatically went into my own story. So naturally as an audience member, when you’re there listening, however long that is, you do lose engagement, you lose them. And so when you can simplify that and elevate that visual story, you keep them engaged. So I wouldn’t harp too much on your few words or your simple slides because what you did is you gave your audience the key message or those key notes that you were talking about during while that slide was up. So if they heard something and they went in their own head, they could easily come back because you’ve given them those key points that are really easy to digest. Again, that slide, third bullet, 12 point font, I’m not going to be able to find that again, I’m gone for that whole slide, but when you make it really simple, you keep your audience engaged.

We’re also 65% more likely to retain information when it’s visually designed. So if you think about the power of, again, highlighting copy, visuals using colour, using really streamlined data, it helps your audience listen better. We all also are used to all this information coming at us at all the time. So when we can set ourselves up to lay out the story that follows our verbal story, it becomes so easy for people to be engaged. Think about picture books. They do a beautiful job of telling stories and you don’t always need words.

And it’s the storytelling aspect of it that I wanted to pick up on next, because I remember I’ve read hundreds of business books, and particularly the psychology of business and marketing, and I’ve read something somewhere, and it’s not coming back to me in which book, but something somewhere that we as humans respond to stories and thrive on storytelling because back in like 12,000 years ago, before we could write, that was the only way we had to pass information on from one generation to another.  We would tell stories around the campfire while the dinosaurs were roaming around us, and that’s how we passed information on. And so today, if you and I were doing a podcast interview and we just listed fact, bullet point, bullet point, fact, fact, that wouldn’t be as compelling as us talking and actually telling stories. And I just told you a story of me sitting at the back of an audience watching a master at work and feeling my soul deflate because I thought his stuff is better than my stuff. And of course, I want to be the very best I can be. And that’s a story, right? That’s not a fact. That was a story with emotions within it.

And I believe there are parts of our brain, or if you put someone inside a functional MRI machine, so that’s like an MRI where you see in real time what’s happening, and if you read someone some facts, one part of their brain lights up, you put those same facts into a story such as a fairytale, for example, which of course, they’re the classic stories, multiple parts of the brain light up, and that’s why we remember that. My question is, if you are using PowerPoint or doing a presentation, whether it’s a sales meeting, whether it’s a strategic review with a client, maybe even if you’re talking in front of a room and you don’t consider yourself to be a natural storyteller, even though all humans have that ability built in, Emily, where would you start with starting to pull out how do I get this across within a story?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I just want to be super transparent. That is not my expertise, but I do coach my clients to help craft their story better. So where I start and what I have actually on my website is a tip page with four steps, and the first one is really you have to first start with knowing who your audience is and what your key objectives are, what you want them to think, feel, and do. You have to lay that out before you get started.

And then the second phase is crafting your narrative. And I don’t think that should be done on a computer or on any kind of screen. I think I actually encourage post-it notes and a marker or a sharpie. So you can’t really erase either. Just start writing down what you want to say. And when you have those post-it notes, what you’ll start to see is a cadence of a story. You’ll start to see that set up.

So you’re going to start actually with the end in mind. You’re going to lay the groundwork of what the goal is, why you brought everybody in the room. Again, we all come from different places. So when you can get everybody on the same page, you’re going to connect with them, then you’re going to just like a traditional fairytale or story, you’re going to start from the beginning. You’re going to talk about the key updates, remind them why they’re there. That’s where your personal narrative story comes in. So you create this emotional connection.

I love how you’re saying it’s just part of our human nature and our human evolution that stories are how we share information. It’s how we know things from the past. I mean, you can get very technical with biblical and testaments and all that stuff too. That’s where it is. That’s creation, right? But once you start them, you engage them. Once you tell them what they’re going to do there and why they’re there and you connect them emotionally with some kind of story. It doesn’t have to be super personal, but something that is relevant to that audience.

You then go to the middle part, which is where you give them all the, that’s the heart of your presentation. You spend the most time there. It’s laying the details and the data and the specifics and really telling them where this tension is or what you need to update or what you’re teaching them. And then at the end, you’re going to wrap it up. You’re going to drive home that impact. You’re going to remind them why they’re there. You’re going to create a call to action and you’re going to summarise your key takeaways or your key points.

Again, we need that kind of wrapper and that information just again, like a story. You set it up, you lay all this drama and what’s happening and these character development, and then you kind of bring it all together and there’s this beautiful ending or there is an ending of some sort or that call to action that leads to the next thing that engages in the right conversation. So you drive your audience along so that you get them where you want at the end, but you got to know where you’re going before you even start.

Yeah, no, I love that. And you said that that’s on your website. We’ll give out your website address in just a few minutes. You mentioned about religion, it’s just occurred to me that all Bibles are rule books told through storytelling. If you look at it that way, if you take the faith aspect out of it, that’s what a Bible is, right? This is how you should live your life. These are the good things, these are the bad things, and it was a very, very easy way of communicating that to people who couldn’t read because obviously the vast majority of people couldn’t read, but they could go into church and enjoy stories thousands of years ago. So that’s absolutely fascinating. Final question for you, Emily, and I’m hoping this is a chuckle moment for you. What’s the worst thing that you’ve ever seen in a PowerPoint?

Oh, that is a really good question. I think it’s the death by PowerPoint. It’s the slide that has everything up there with all your voiceover and everything’s black and white. So yeah, I think it’s just that overwhelmingness of like, I’m going to shut this down and come back another day because it doesn’t make any sense. It’s just words, and I don’t want to read them. I’m a visual person. I don’t want to read all the words.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Emily, thank you so much. Thank you for your time. Let’s talk about what you do for MSPs. So tell us what you do and please give us your website address and how we can get in touch with you.

So like I said, I describe myself as a visual storyteller. My specialisation is in simplifying complex content and data and information. I think I work a lot with MSPs to help them synergise information so that they can lead their conversation so that they can present with confidence, with knowledge, they can create those authentic connections that drive impact, that create engagement, and that leave a lasting impression for your audience to do and act as you want so your business can move forward. And my website is Iamemilyschneider.com. I’m also super active. I love connecting and networking on LinkedIn as well, so you can find me there.

This week we have a question from Gordon in Arizona, who has had quite a tough week with his MSP. His question is, How do I fire a client?

Oh, nothing beats the feeling of firing a noisy idiot relieving you and your team from their crippling mental and emotional burden, and trust me on this, I promise you, 1,000000%, new revenue always, always turns up to replace their toxic cash. Life’s too short to tolerate these fools. So here are three steps to make it easy for you.

Number 1: Don’t overthink it. By the time you are considering firing a client, your team already hates them. You’ll always be slow to fire clients because you are keeping an eye on your cashflow and your profitability, the bigger picture stuff. And sometimes bad clients just do get better, but if they get rid of them. Much of the time, they’re so obnoxious that they’ve been fired by suppliers before because they’re not just horrible to you. They’re horrible to everyone. Get rid of them.

Number 2: When you do this, tell them in the most straightforward way you can pick up the phone and just tell it like it is. Our businesses are not a good fit for each other. We are releasing you from your contract in X days time. And we will work fully to hand over to your new IT support company and be very wary of introducing any ambiguity. They need to hear it a hundred percent straight and definite, and they’ll probably rant and rave, so just take it. Just take it and don’t be defensive. Don’t be drawn into their world of hate. Acknowledge their complaints, but please avoid an argument. And if they do threaten to ruin you or put this all over social media, just ignore them. People like this can do little real harm. In fact, one bad review says more about them than it does about you. But do remember to confirm the conversation, maybe even send it out tracked mail. Actually, physically send it to them in the mail so that you can prove that you delivered the news and their deadline to them.

Number 3: It’s simply to cooperate fully with their new MSP. You are a professional, so make this a textbook handover and resist the temptation to warn their new MSP. The less you’re involved with your soon to be ex client, the better.

Welcome to Episode 263 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

The two most important pages on your website are the homepage and the about us page. Why? Because those are the pages that most people are going to look at, the ones they’re most going to be influenced by because they’re most likely to land on your website on the homepage. And then of course they want to know what you’re about. They want to know who the people are behind the business, so they’ll head over to the about us page.

Let’s have a look at some of the elements that you should have on your MSPs about us page to make sure it delivers the most value to your business. Now, where a homepage is almost like a summary of the whole business, the about us page is about the people and the core values of the business. So of course you still have an attention grabbing headline, although a different one to the one that you have on the homepage. And of course you’d still have your social proof, data capture maybe, and certainly a call to action, plus of course videos and photographs of real people. It’s just that you present those in different ways than you would do on your homepage.

The most important thing on your about us page is your story. But it needs to be presented in a way that’s relevant to the reader.

And actually it’s not really about you – you can talk a little bit about you and how you are really into tech, and as a child and you are obsessed with computers, and as a teenager and you’ve been doing it now for 800 years and then 20 years ago you had an entrepreneurial seizure and you decided you’ve got to do your own things, your own way, etc, etc.

I mean, all of that is good. In fact, actually you can take that backstory, you can embellish it, you can enhance it, but you have to tell it in a way that makes it interesting to the reader. Because you being obsessed with computers, that’s not really of interest to them until they realise or you tell them that it means that you are across every technology detail in your business, and you only hire people who are incredibly attention focused, very good technology people, and they’re very good at following systems and documenting success, and all of that kind of thing.

So, you take your story and you keep flipping it round and looking at it from a different angle so that actually your story is about the reader. Even an about us page is not really an about us page, it’s about the prospect. It’s a selling page. That’s what it really is. So of course something else you’d do on there is you’d put some case studies on there. Now, if you’ve got case studies on your homepage, you can repeat those, and video case studies are absolutely fine, you can repeat those across the site. You can also repeat just sort of normal printed case studies or PDF case studies that they could download or even just webpage case studies as well.

You don’t have to have those completely separate between the homepage and the about us page, but you do need to make sure you have some kind of case studies on your about us page. People go to an about us page because they want to know about the people, they want to know who it is they might end up buying from. But also of course with the case studies, they want to see who else you are working with. And case studies are typically more influential because it’s a form of social proof. It makes you appear safe to people who are thinking of buying from you. When they can see that other people like them have trusted you and continue to trust you, that makes you a very safe pair of hands to them. That’s what we’re trying to get them to feel.

And then the next thing you need is something about what drives you and your team. How do you all jump out of bed every morning? Do you all run into the office? You can’t wait to get your hands on a keyboard and do all those proactive checks to stop things going wrong and how you actually feel honoured to protect people. You feel honoured and proud to think that a thousand people in your local area trust you every day to keep them working. They trust you and your team. That’s the kind of intent and the kind of language that we want to see on your about us page. We want drive, we want passion. We want to see and feel and smell that passion, because passion sells. And the more passion you can put actually into your overall website, but especially your about us page, the more you’re going to connect with people, the more you’re going to engage with them.

And then I suggest you put on some stuff about your family if you can, if it’s acceptable to you to do this. Put on a photo of you, your other half, maybe even your kids. I’ve seen quite a few MSPs do that. And it’s great because it makes you real. It makes you not just an IT person and the owner of the business. It makes you a wife or a husband or a mom or a dad. And this is really, really important because it makes you human. You will find a photo of me and my child on my MSP Marketing Edge website. And again, that helps us to connect because it shows you that I’m a real person. People do business with people. They don’t do business with businesses, people buy from people. This is really important to understand. So let’s show them the people.

You almost want to reflect anything which makes you connectable. Let’s say for example, you are really into a local sport, let’s say football. And you might have a piece on your about us page about how much you’re into football, perhaps even with a photo review in your local team kit or photograph with some of the players or something. If you are really into, let’s say playing golf, you’d have a photo of you with your golf sticks. I don’t do golf obviously, you can tell by that. But if you do, again, that makes you relatable to anyone that does golf. If you adore where you live, absolutely adore it, then have a photo of you next to one of the big landmarks in your town or something like that. The kind of landmark that everyone would recognise. It’s all about connections. If people buy from people, you’ve got to show them the real you.

And I’ll tell you what else you can use is a bit of business nostalgia. Nostalgia is great. So if you’ve got a photo of you in your first van or some kind of photo of you at your first desk back in the day or with an old computer, there is that famous photo floating out there of Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Sat at his first desk in his garage in Seattle in 1995 and the desk was made of an old door. And that’s still a thing that they do now at Amazon. They use desks made out of doors because it’s all part of their heritage, it’s all part of their nostalgia, which is great. Not that Amazon needs an about us page, but you get the idea. Now you can do exactly the same thing. Show us something from the past. If you’ve got, maybe it could be a photo of you as a child sat with a really vintage computer or just you without the grey hair.

Something like that would be an absolute great piece of business nostalgia. And people really do love this and they connect to it. Now of course, it’s not just about you, the owner, the leader on the about us page, you should have some profiles and pictures of your team. They only need to be like 25, 30 word profiles. They don’t need to be huge, perhaps just about what they do in their spare time or something quirky. You could even do like a mini interview with them – what’s their favourite food, what’s their favourite place to visit, what’s their favourite sport, which is the best Star Wars movie – that kind of thing. And you can just do little profiles of the team. Again, works really well with a photo of them on your about us page.

And then one final thing to go on this page, and you’re not going to be surprised by this. It is of course a call to action because we need to have that. Every single page of your website needs a call to action. And the very best one right now, it still is your live calendar so people can book in a 15 minute discovery call with you. That’s really important because that about us page is a core sales page.

It always makes me a little bit sad when I hear an MSP owner is pinning all of their growth hopes on a new marketing campaign. Because campaigns are typically one-offs, a burst of intense activity followed by a return to the default of intending to do marketing but not getting around to it.

I know that marketing campaigns are really popular. Lots of vendors give them away free as a value add. I can see how as an MSP, your brain will fill up with all this delicious dopamine when you see a campaign and you feel excited by the possibilities.

Here’s the fundamental problem that you’re fighting.

Managed Services is one of the most unusual sales on the planet, and people only buy when they are ready to buy.

There’s almost nothing you can do to speed this up. The big problem with running a campaign is that it’s a one-off burst of activity. So you do some marketing on a Monday, but they’re not ready to buy yet. So you do some more marketing on a Wednesday, but they’re not ready to buy yet. On Friday, you need a rest so you don’t bother with marketing and yet that’s the day that they wake up ready to buy, but you are not there in front of them. And don’t believe that they will remember you or your MSP’s name and brand. They really won’t unless you have a marketing message in front of them at the exact moment that their brain is ready to see it.

Trust me, a proportion of your clients don’t know what your MSP is called. So you haven’t got a hope in hell of your prospects knowing what the name of your business is. This is why my three-step marketing system is the most powerful idea in MSP marketing. It’s easy to understand, but also solid and powerful. Build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. And the idea is to build a relationship with someone months and years before they’re ready to leave their current MSP. This is where the idea of 50 plus touchpoints comes from. If you Google it, it’ll say that you need seven or eight touchpoints with a prospect. Well, not for what you sell. You need an ongoing never ending stream of touchpoints so that the morning they wake up and they’re ready to talk, boom, you are there in front of them. Whether that’s tomorrow, whether that’s May next year, whether it’s someday in 2026.

And your touch points might include daily LinkedIn posts that they see now and again. A weekly email that they open just once a month because they don’t open that many emails. A monthly printed newsletter that sits on their desk waiting to be read or gets passed onto a colleague or something like that. A regular blog and video on your website that they sometimes read. A weekly LinkedIn newsletter they see in their feed or they open in their email occasionally. A short conversation about their business that they had with your colleague on the phone. A buyer’s guide that they’ve flick through, which tells them how to pick an MSP. A LinkedIn message from you that they acknowledge but they don’t really remember. All of these are touch points and they can all be swept up into a marketing system with tasks you do daily, tasks you do weekly, and tasks you do monthly. And best of all, you personally don’t need to do these tasks. Much of the work that I’ve just talked about there can be delegated or outsourced to someone else.

Featured guest: John Horn is the CEO of StubGroup, a digital advertising agency and a premier Google ad agency. Subgroup has helped over 2000 clients, across 15k campaigns, with their paid ads and suspension issues. They have generated over half a billion dollars in revenue for their clients across many different verticals including ecommerce, lead generation, B2B, B2C, local services, and more.

John has also taught digital advertising to over 100,000 students via online courses and the videos he produces through StubGroup‘s YouTube channel have received millions of views. When he’s not marketing, John loves spending time with his wife and two little boys and exploring the Texas countryside he calls home.

Most MSPs have considered doing Google ads at some point. It kind of makes sense because the very nature of Google ads is it puts you in front of a lead at the exact moment that they’re looking for someone like you. The problem is Google ads are very expensive and they do generate a lot of noise. My guest today has a very good take on the right kind of strategy for Google ads and some suggestions how you can use it as a channel for lead generation into your MSP.

Hey, this is John Horn and I am the CEO of a StubGroup, a digital advertising agency. 

And we’re especially going to be talking about Google pay per click (PPC) today because it’s one of those things that you look at it 20 years ago and everyone seemed to be doing Google pay per click and paying pence, just pennies for their adverts. Whereas these days you can be paying $10, $20 or more. And lots of MSPs have tried it, lots of MSPs have spent a ton of cash and then burnt out within a week.

And John, I’m hoping, I know you work with a lot of MSPs doing their pay per click, and I’m hoping you can give us some insights today on how to use pay per click to generate leads for an MSP. So let’s first of all look at you and your career. So what’s your background and how did you get into this wonderful and very technical world of pay per click?

Yeah, I’ve been doing this world of pay per click for over a decade at this point. Prior to that was in just various marketing roles and then morphed into a StubGroup where I’m at now. And so I’ve been able to track that journey, like you said, of going from very inexpensive traffic to where we are today.

Yeah, I mean it’s crazy. My best friend actually, he built a business up, we’re talking 2002, 2003, and he was spending the equivalent of $120,000 a week on adverts, which is insane back then, right? I mean that would be insane today, but that was doubly insane. But what he discovered, because he was getting, he did tell me the figures a couple of years ago, he was spending let’s say three pence or four pence, he was based in the UK, so that’s let’s say 10 cents for a click and he was making a dollar in revenue for every 10 cents. And when you broke it down to you spend 10 cents and then three, four weeks later someone’s got through your sales process and you make a dollar, who wouldn’t do that, right? Who wouldn’t work up to $120,000? It was a training business that he built that up on, that same model wouldn’t work today because today of course, that same advert isn’t costing 10 cents, it’s costing $10, $20, $30, $40, but may still only bring in that $10. Is that what you see as one of the primary challenges to doing pay per click, people understanding the economics of it?

I would say that’s one of the primary challenges. Yeah, like you said, it’s become very competitive, so cost per clicks are quite high. So it becomes crucial to figure out okay, with how high the cost per clicks are, we have to be laser targeted with what searches we’re going after, what keywords do we want to target because it’s really easy to, like you mentioned, waste money and get those economics out of scale.

Although of course for an MSP, if they win a new client today and let’s say that’s a thousand dollars a month monthly recurring revenue, they will keep that client for 5, 7, 10 years. So that thousand dollars a month becomes $120,000 of what we call lifetime value. So I guess if I was to ask any MSP, would you spend a thousand bucks today to win 120,000 pounds worth of revenue, albeit you’ve got to stick around for 10 years to do the work. You’d think many MSPs would say yes to that. So is that the kind of thinking that you bring to pay per click campaigns or do you have a different way of looking at it?

Yeah, lifetime value is super important. So it’s coming to it and saying, okay, obviously there is going to be a timeframe. It’s going to take a while often to close leads, but then hopefully they’re going to stick around for a long time. And so what is the average lifetime value of your clients? What are the different kind of buckets? And then we got to factor that into, okay, what is a realistic profitable amount that we can spend or that we can put into test budgets to see if we can get the right quality of leads on the Google ads side of things. If you’re like, hey, I can only afford to spend a hundred dollars for a new client, Google ads is not going to be the right place for you.  You got to go somewhere else.

Yeah, absolutely. So Google ads is definitely something you don’t do if you haven’t got cash available. I guess is that something in your experience that makes it something just bigger MSPs do? So when they’ve got to the point where they’re experimenting with different marketing channels and they add pay per click on?

I’ve definitely seen it be a strategy for smaller ones as well. Good example, we just recently onboarded a relatively small local MSP who’s looking to Google ads as a way to generate more business. And one of the key strategy things that we’re working on with them and with some of the other MSPs we’ve worked with as well is…

Don’t try to be all things to all people. MSPs offer a lot of services, but if you advertise every service or at a high level like “IT support near me”, it’s never going to work.

Because they don’t have enough budget to test and iterate for all those different services. So we’re saying, let’s niche down. What are the things that are really working well for you right now? What’s setting you apart? What are the questions you’re solving when people come to you? And let’s hyper specifically target those things and create landing pages around that and so forth so that you can stand out from the very competitive market that they’re in.

Yeah, that makes sense. And essentially what you are saying is because cheap traffic has been gone for 15 years, you can’t muck about with pay per click, you’ve got to have a strategy for it. So let me give you a scenario. Let’s take an MSP. Say they’ve got somewhere between five, seven technicians. So you’ve got the owner, you’ve got five to seven technicians, they want 20 seat clients. So companies that have got 20 users or more, 20 devices, and they’re looking for those companies that have got an urgent need. Because they know that when someone comes in and actually the server’s been playing up for a couple of days, or they’ve had some kind of cyber security incident or there’s malware or something, it creates a level of urgency. And that urgency is obviously very good for revenue today and converting them onto being a proper managed services client. So in that instance, and let’s assume they’re in a normal, average sized town, so they’re not in LA or New York City or some crazy crazy place like that where there’s a thousand MSPs per street, it is nothing like that. It’s just a normal town, there’s perhaps 10, 20 MSPs in that town. What would you recommend as a general strategy for pay per click in a scenario like that?

First of all, like you said, identifying those urgencies. Figuring out what are the top things that are making clients right now from the other traffic sources that they’re using, convert. Be willing to make that move over. Is it like you said, is it cyber security issues? Is it, our server is down? Whatever. And then let’s identify those things and target those things very specifically. So if I’m having server issues, my server is down, I need to switch to another MSP, what am I searching on Google that indicates I have that problem and I’m looking for a solution? And then we’re going to target that very specifically, those keywords. We’re going to have ads that are very, very specifically targeted towards that and kind of capturing the urgency factor. And then super important as well, the landing pages we send people to, they have to build upon that as well.

I don’t want to just send them to my homepage that says, here’s all the things we do. I want to send them to a page that says, you have this need, we’re going to fix it today. Call us right now. We make this change. Here’s what we do. Here’s why you trust us, etc. And then go up to the races and test and see, all right, is there enough traffic for these different areas that we’re actually getting leads from it? Or if not, maybe we need to pivot and try a different service or a different need and work our way through to find the ones that are working and sticking.

Yeah, no, that sounds like a sensible strategy. I know nothing at a technical level about pay per click, but I do read sort of broad principles, and I remember reading a long time ago that if your pay per click advert, as you say, says as part of the headline, We can fix your server today, I mean, no one would promise that, but if that was the headline, then you are absolutely right, the landing page needs to repeat the same message. You are wasting your money if it just goes through to the homepage.

Actually of the pay per click I see MSPs doing, many of them immediately make that exact mistake that they’ll send this expensive paid traffic that’s just cost them $20 for a click, and they send them to their general homepage, whereas why has someone clicked this message? Because that’s the problem they’ve got, so let’s address that’s problem, let’s get them on the phone or whatever is the case. That’s really interesting.

And you mentioned about levels of traffic. I mean, if we take that normal town with 20 MSPs that we were talking about, there’s not going to be hundreds of people typing in every day server crashed or red screened or something like that. So do you have a gut feel for what’s a good level of traffic for a keyword or a key term, or do you go more on what the data tells you?

Yeah, we definitely always look at the data and we’ve got tools that we can use to forecast and see if  it looks like there’s enough traffic to justify going after this keyword. If there is a keyword where there’s so little traffic per month that Google doesn’t think it’s worth serving ads on, they’ll actually give it a label, we’ll call it low search volume. And even if somebody randomly does search that, it might not even actually show an ad because Google’s like there’s just not enough search volume.

So you’ve got to figure out that sweet spot between keywords that are still very laser focused, but that are not low search volume, and it takes some time and some work. Usually it’s a combination of using tools like Google’s keyword planner and other things to estimate traffic, and then literally just running the campaigns and seeing. That’s the beautiful thing with pay per click, if no one’s searching for something it’s not costing you money to go after it because no one’s clicking. So you can, for free, test and find out whether or not there is traffic for particular phrases or searches.

Or it’s not pay per click, it’s paperclip, as my daughter when she was about seven and she heard me talking about pay per click and she said, oh, daddy, do you want paperclips? You don’t have to pay for those. That was so sweet. Kids are like that, aren’t they?

Now let’s talk about remarketing, that kind of strategy that we just talked about there. Would you use remarketing or retargeting? And John, could you actually start by just telling us what exactly remarketing is.

Absolutely. So remarketing is basically the annoying ads that follow you around after you go look at a pair of shoes, and then you see those shoes everywhere else online. But at a bigger picture level, it’s very important and very impactful where, if I go to a website, especially if I’m researching MSP, there’s a very good chance I’m not going to reach out right away. I need to maybe talk to somebody else. I’m looking at different options, I’m thinking through things, etc. And so with the remarketing, you’re able to serve ads through Google’s display network, you can do it through Facebook and other places as well. And basically follow the people who’ve been to your website around the web and just remind them that we’re here, here’s why you should choose us. You can even get strategic and offer special incentives of, get a free demo or get something for free if you reach out today, or whatever the case may be. But you can do things to try and create urgency and bring people back who otherwise might forget about you or get distracted or go with a competitor.

Yeah. And do you recommend remarketing for people who are doing pay per click, or is it very much on a case by case basis?

95% of the time you should do remarketing. It’s very cost effective because you’re targeting a very small group of people, just people who’ve been to your website. So it’s not expensive at all to serve those ads, and it’s a very, very warm audience. So remarketing usually has the highest ROI, return on investment, of any marketing type. And now of course, you’ve already spent money get to people to your website to begin with, so you can’t just say remarketing is bringing new traffic to me. But yeah, for most businesses, for most MSPs, I strongly recommend using remarketing.

Yeah, I love it. John, let’s wrap up with one final question I’m going to ask you. Let’s assume now you’re talking to MSPs who are doing their own DIY PPC, so they’re doing it themselves, which obviously lots of people put themselves through courses on Udemy and places like that and try it out. What’s the one thing they absolutely should do, and then tell me conversely, what’s the one thing they absolutely shouldn’t do?

The one thing they should do is run search campaigns. There’s a bunch of different campaign types you can run with Google, like Google Display and different things, but search would be my number one recommendation for MSP starting out. And then I would say in most cases, the thing not to do is don’t use what they call broad match keywords, right? When you start out, that gives Google a ton of flexibility to match different types of searches to the keyword you think you’re targeting. And because of how expensive clicks are in the MSP space, like we talked about, it’s really easy to waste money. So I start with very targeted, probably what they call exact match keywords, and then work your way up from there strategically over time.

Amazing. I love it. I love when we take a strategic view to anything like this, it takes a tool, which many people will try it, spend a thousand bucks and say, this doesn’t work for me. But I think you’re right. Going in with a strategic view is a much better way of doing it. John, tell us what exactly you do to help MSPs and how can we get in touch with you?

Yeah, so we do all the advertising work for you, so we create, manage the ads, reporting, work with you on your goals, all that good stuff. We’d love to speak with any MSPs who are listening to this. You can reach out through our website, stubgroup.com for a free consultation where we can see if we’re the right fit for you.

Christine from an MSP in Portland manages all the admin, while her husband manages all the selling and the technical work. They’ve both been listening to the podcast for around six months, and she’s noticed a bit of a recurring theme in some of the content. Her question is, why are you so insistent I hire a phone person?

Yes, I am insistent. Because I believe that a really good phone person can be a secret weapon for every MSP. Like we were talking about earlier the long-term marketing strategy for all MSPs should be to build audiences and then grow a relationship with those audiences. And this gives you a huge pool of potential future clients. You just have to remember, again, like I was saying earlier, people only buy when they’re ready to buy, but if you wait for them to tell you that they’re ready, you’ll be sitting next to a very quiet phone for a very long time.

That’s why I believe that every MSP needs to get a phone person to call these audiences all the time. And this is not cold calling. This is not telesales. This is warm calling. This is telephone intervention if you like. Your telephone person is calling them to move the relationship forward on your behalf.

So go and find yourself a back to work mom who can work two to three hours a day, two to three days a week, making outbound calls on your behalf. And remember, she’s not doing any selling. She doesn’t need to know much about technology or your business. She just needs to be interested in talking to people and listening to their answers. If she asks the right open questions, she’ll find people who are fed up with their incumbent MSP, and then she can book them in for a 15 minute discovery call with you, which is just beautiful.

Welcome to Episode 262 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

It’s very easy to become complacent about social media and believe that it’s just a waste of time to a busy business owner like you who’s trying to build their MSP.

But the reality is that social media is still incredibly important.

Not all the networks, of course. I really don’t think most MSPs will get much from TikTok for some time, at least not until the generation that’s growing up with TikTok are the decision makers.

For B2B marketing in 2024 and next year as well the social media network to go for is of course…

LinkedIn – this is still the very best platform for MSPs looking for new clients, and I do highly recommend that you put in time on it every single day.

Let’s spend a few minutes now on a mini masterclass on LinkedIn, and I’ve got three things for you to look at.

The first is to improve three things in your profile. So here’s an interesting question. Based on your current profile, if you were an ordinary business owner or manager, would you want to be a client of your MSP? If not, here are three areas to spend more time on: The headline – focus on the benefit to your prospects rather than what you do. “I do IT for town businesses”, becomes “Helping town businesses grow with technology”. Then look at your headshot and don’t be cheap – pay a professional who does headshots every day and can make you look beautiful. Your about us bit – write it for your prospects, not other IT professionals. You want them to read it and think, ah, this is exactly the kind of person I want looking after my business.

Next up then, is to build your personal brand. And your personal brand is what others think about you. It’s not something you control, but it is something that you can heavily influence. And it’s based on a number of factors: the number of connections you have, the recommendations that you have, what you post about, and how often you post, the value of your contributions, the speed of your responses, and whether you do something like a LinkedIn newsletter or a LinkedIn live. Because people who are perceived as experts, they do these things. Now, like much of marketing, getting better results is about doing a series of small actions on a regular basis, for years. I spend no more than about 15 to 20 minutes a day on LinkedIn. I have a virtual assistant who does functional stuff like accepting connection requests. I just do new content and commenting.

In the early days, this felt like a waste of time, but today I have two sizable and engaged audiences – my connections and my LinkedIn newsletter subscribers. And these have only come from doing the work day in, day out for years whether I wanted to or not. Building your personal brand on LinkedIn is really no different to building your body at the gym. The magic happens over time, not on the day that you do the work. And of course, most people give up long before they see the results. Your opportunity is to be the only MSP in your area who does the opposite. You just keep putting in the work, the results are going to come.

And then the final thing to look at is ideas for content, for posts. There’s a lot of noise on LinkedIn, the same as any digital platform, so to cut through you must be creative and not just do what everyone else is doing. Here are five post ideas for you. Take each one and ask yourself, how can I put my own spin on this?: Educate them about something – don’t be technical. Celebrate a win = this could be a new client or protecting an existing client from a nasty cyber attack. Be thankful for something. Document what’s happening in your professional life. And the fifth one, occasionally share something from your private life – and no, not what you’re having for dinner, something that matters.

At the beginning of October, I was privileged to present the keynote marketing talk at the very first Scale Con in Las Vegas. Oh my goodness, that was such good fun. Because not only did I get to hang out with loads of other marketing and sales experts from around the world, but there were a couple of hundred MSPs there as well. And I spent three days meeting people I’ve known for years on forums or video calls, but never actually met in real life, as well as meeting brand new friends. And by the way, they are definitely doing a Scale Con ‘25. I will be speaking again, and you should really go to that if you can.

I tried very hard to catch a little bit of each of the speakers across the three days of the event, and I think there were well over 20 different speakers in all. And I always believe that speakers are like books. When you read a book, even if it’s something that you’ve read or studied before, there’s always a new idea that comes out of it and it’s no different when you’re listening to speakers talk. And there were some pretty awesome speakers. My brain even now is still full of ideas from that event.

Now, one of the biggest and best ideas was from Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe, and it’s no surprise really, Nigel is just a stunningly inspirational character. And side note, it was so cool just hanging out with him, catching up with him only very briefly, but across the three days. And then on the third day, he did the final closing keynote and it was an insanely good keynote. I’m not being very humble here, but I thought mine was good, and yet I need to up my game after seeing what Nigel did.

One of the many things that he talked about is three tests that he applies to whether or not he should do something new. And these are: the fear test, the regret test, and the comfort zone test. If he’s looking at a new initiative that he’s thinking of doing, he’ll say, right, if I do this, does it scare me a little bit? Does it give me a little bit of fear? Fear is good because it shows that you’re doing something completely brand new, something you’ve never done before. If I don’t do this, will I regret that when I’m old? And then of course, the comfort zone test is will he regret not pushing himself out of his comfort zone?

So if you are looking at a new initiative for your MSP, it’s the same three tests… if you do this, will it create some fear? Will it create some regret if you look back in later life and you haven’t done it? And will it push you out of your comfort zone? I’ve had so many big ideas from that event that I’m now applying those tests to them as we speak. And I think that you can do the same, don’t you?

If you’re not asking those questions at least two or three times a year, maybe you’ve plateaued. Maybe you’re stuck in the comfort zone.

If I look back at my career, nearly 20 years of owning a business, as much as I’ve been constantly working towards stability and a business that thrives whether I’m there or not, which is a very stable business, the big leaps have come from pushing myself out of my comfort zone. And that doesn’t always mean that the big leaps are the right things to do, but certainly they kick off new actions and new directions, which can take your business to a very exciting place.

Featured guest: Kieran MacRae is a podcast marketing coach on a mission to help you solve the podcast marketing puzzle.

He shares all the best advice for growing your podcast, without spending hundreds of hours and burning yourself out.

Kieran and his wife have grown a niche Scottish History podcast to over 16,000 monthly downloads and he wants to help you do the same.

It seems kind of weird to discover that podcasts have been around for 21 years. The first ever podcast started in 2003 when the audio RSS feed was created. And they’re now so popular that every year more than 500 million people listen to a podcast. So perhaps it’s inevitable that at some point you’ve wondered whether you should start a podcast for your MSP.

Let me tell you, a lot of work goes in behind the scenes to make our podcast happen every single week, but it is worth it. And if you have a passion for podcasting, and especially if you have a vertical that you serve, a podcast could be very powerful for you. My guest today is going to explore starting a podcast. He’ll tell you the classic mistakes first time podcasters make. And which is more important – presenting style, content or kit.

Hey everyone, I am Kieran MacRae and I’m a podcast marketing coach here to help you decide if you need a podcast as an MSP.

Now, we’ve got two professionals on the podcast today, Kieran. Well, we’ve got you who’s definitely a professional in doing podcasts, and I think I’ve just been winging it for enough years to say that certainly I’m a semi-professional on this. So thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today.

It’s a common question that I get from MSPs – should I start a podcast? We are coming up to or just over our fifth birthday here on this podcast. Lots of people listen to it all around the world. We have massive audiences in the UK and in the US, and inevitably for any MSP that’s ever thought, oh, I’d like to reach people, at some point they thought maybe I should do a podcast as well. And I will tell you as we go through this interview, I’ll tell you why my default answer has been probably not. It’d be really interesting to hear what your default answer is.

Before we get on to talking about podcasts and how you get them started and why they can be useful marketing tools for an MSP, just tell us a little bit about you, Kieran. So what makes you a podcast coach?

I have been growing my own podcast, which is a spooky Scottish history podcast, for four years now. That is generally spooky history. It’s been listened to all over the world. We’re coming up on, I think 8,000 downloads per episode, and that’s been going really well. And before that, I’ve been a digital marketer growing blogs and online audiences for nine years in total now. But I’ve had a lot of fun with podcasting. So I started helping people who were reaching out similar to you going, oh, should I start a podcast? Can you help me?

Yeah, I can imagine. And 8,000 downloads per episode is insane. I mean, that’s like 7,900 more downloads a week than we get, which was a joke, we have a bit more than that. But obviously we’re a very niche podcast. Yours is for anyone. Just give us the pitch for that podcast for someone that thinks that might be interesting. So you say you do spooky stories, is that like ghost stories in Scotland?

Yeah, we do the deep dive into Scotland’s history, focusing on its grizzly and mysterious past and ghost stories.

Okay, very interesting. Very interesting. I’m going to have a listen to that after we finished our interview. Now for an MSP a podcast seems like a good way to reach people. And for me, it’s our number one marketing tool. I think it’s something like nine out of 10 new members who join our MSP Marketing Edge Service say they either found us through the podcast or they got to know me through the podcast or they found out about the service. It’s an instrumental thing, and it’s something that started as a six to 12 month experiment and is now the last thing I would give up. You couldn’t drag me kicking and screaming away from the podcast. As much as it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of hassle, and obviously it has a cost as well. In your experience with B2B, we are looking B2B here, when business owners look at doing a podcast, what are some of the mistakes or some of the wrong thinking that they jump into starting that podcast with?

It’s interesting hearing your thoughts on it because the biggest mistake with podcasts for any type, especially with B2B, is a podcast won’t help you find customers. You can’t really find an audience with a podcast. What a podcast is ideally suited for is nurturing. So once people have heard of you, they’ve maybe come to your website and then they make their way onto your podcast, they can learn more about you and your service, and you really build up a lot of trust.

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, we have a three step lead generation and marketing strategy. I’ve talked about this on the podcast for four or five years, where you build audiences, you grow relationships, and you convert relationships. And that’s what the podcast does, it’s that middle step. It’s growing relationships. And I’ve met people in real life who’ve said, I’ve been listening to you for five years, and it’s nuts. And they know me because I’m there in their ears for 20 minutes, and obviously I’ve never met them, which is really cool. So I agree with you. It’s not a place to acquire clients, it is a place to build relationships.

One of the things that I’ve noticed with MSPs when they jump into it, is that they think it will be a quick win that they can just get set up, put a few episodes out there, do perhaps a season of 10, and that in itself is going to generate lots and lots of interest. It really doesn’t work like that, does it?

No, not at all. It is a slow burn project, but as you’re now experiencing like five years into it, you have fans. You have people who’ve really connected with you as a person, and so are connecting with you and your business, and you in their heads have become the go-to service provider for marketing.

Well, that’s the plan anyway. That certainly what be nice. So when an MSP directly says to me, shall I start a podcast? I ask them questions, and the first question I ask is, who is your audience? And normally it’s just business owners, business owners in this area or anyone with a wallet, which is my least favourite answer. And my answer is, normally don’t start a podcast, primarily because I think it’s very hard to reach an audience when your audience is everybody. And I appreciate business owners is not everyone, but that’s too big.

When an MSP says to me, well, we are in a vertical or a niche, so we want CPAs (which is a US term for accountants), or we want lawyers or we want veterinarians, or we want dentists or all of the above. It’s a much easier sell for a podcast, I think, to say, Hey, this is the technology podcast for dentists, particularly when you then, we wouldn’t do it here in the UK, but in the US you might say, this is the technology podcast for dentists in California, because obviously California is the size of the UK and certainly in people terms.

Is that your experience as well, that the more defined and refined the audience is, the easier it is for you to reach those people and influence them?

Yes, you are dead on. Whenever I’m doing coaching calls with clients, it’s always an eye roll moment for me when we have the same discussion – oh, it’s really for everyone, there’s something here for everyone. I’m like, well, you can’t reach everyone because to reach everyone, you have to spend millions of dollars on advertising to reach everyone and you just won’t manage. You’re buying a Super Bowl ad if you want to reach everyone, and realistically, your customers aren’t everyone. So yeah, absolutely. You need to nail down your audience and the more specific, the better. I think for podcasts, you could have a hundred regular listeners and build your business from that. So the more niche you can go, the better, for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. So how would you recommend an MSP get started with that niching down if they don’t have the beauty of those verticals that we were just talking about, but they’re just appealing to business owners, decision makers in a wide geographical area, is there somewhere that you would start?

Scratching your own itch is the best place to start. If you’re an MSP selling to business owners, decide which business owners you would like to talk to through your podcast because your business can still market to businesses, but for your podcast you should decide which group of people you want to talk to. If you’re going to turn up every week and have an interview with someone or provide monologue style podcasting, you have to be excited about it, because it is very easy to see people who are disingenuous when you’re listening to a podcast or watching and hearing them.

Decide what excites you, which business owners you’re excited to talk to, and then go from there.

Yeah, that’s really, really good advice. And Kieran, you won’t know this because we met briefly just before we did this interview, but I did 10 years in radio before I started my own business. So for me, this is a natural extension of a skill that I’ve had since I was a late teenager, which is really cool. But I know a lot of MSPs and in fact, this comes onto the two topics I want to talk about, which is kit and content. Well, let’s talk about three. We’ll talk about kit, content and we’ll start with presenting. A lot of MSPs when they are thinking of starting, and I know loads who have started a podcast, almost all of them have fallen by the wayside within a few episodes. The presenting is the thing that terrifies them the most. It’s no different than when they’re doing videos. So with your coaching, do you tend to do a lot of time working on presenting skills or do you focus more on content and just let that natural passion come through?

It’s more on the content side of things because primarily a marketing coach. And a lot of, or where people tend to go wrong is with the positioning of trying to reach everybody. So it’s helping my clients kind of narrow down who they’re talking to and then figuring out what their audience will want to hear. And then it usually ends up with the host getting excited about it and that passion comes through. And then for the actual delivery and the presenting, just getting in reps is about the best thing you can do. It’s hard at first, but I think I saw you’re on episode at 260 or somewhere thereabouts.

Something like that. Yeah.

After a hundred episodes, it’s going to become easier. If you just keep getting the practice in, turning up every week, it’ll start to come together.

And the reason I’m vague about which episode, is because I don’t know which episode this interview’s being played out. And that’s one of our secrets… we’ve completely systemised it and we work weeks and weeks and weeks ahead. So I’m interviewing you now, where are we, at the end of September, 2024. But this interview might not be going out till early 2025. I don’t know. I have a producer who figures all of that kind of stuff out, but we are constantly eight or nine weeks ahead of ourselves, which gets very confusing as the host, particularly when someone talks to you and says, oh, I loved your podcast this week. And I’m thinking, what was in it? What were we talking about this week?

Coming back to content, and obviously MSPs are typically very technical people, very intelligent people, very passionate about technology, and unfortunately, the audience that they want to reach, although they know technology is important to their business, it’s not a rub the thighs moment for the audience. So in an instance like that, how would you take that really techy content and not water it down, but make it relevant to the people that you want to reach?

I would say spend a lot of time thinking about specifically who you’re talking to. Although you’ll be talking to your microphone, you want to imagine a person sitting on the other side of that. It might be that your typical customer knows as much as your mom does about technology. You’re around helping her set up the sky box and everything, telling her what’s going on, and she’s sort of smiling and nodding happy it’s getting done. If you keep that in your head, you can imagine you’re sitting here telling your mom about the services you’re providing and the technology. That kind of stops you getting too in the weeds when you can imagine it doesn’t have to be your mom, but that person kind of starting to gloss over because as a self-proclaimed nerd, when you get really in the weeds talking to someone and you’ve lost them, you can see it. You see it in their eyes, they’re nodding, they’re smiling, but nothing’s going in.

Yeah, a hundred percent. I completely agree with that. And that was a tip I was taught as a radio presenter right at the beginning of my career, which is don’t talk to the a hundred thousand people that are listening. Talk to one person, picture that person. You’re having a conversation with them just as you and I are talking now. I think what’s really easy or what’s an opportunity for MSP owners is that most owners are the people out doing the selling. So they’re sitting with ordinary business owners, they’re talking to their existing clients, so they understand that glazed moment. And when ordinary people glaze, the opportunity is to take the content that you talk about with those people and the things that they’re not interested about and use that to influence your podcast as well.

Absolutely.

Okay, final subjects then Kieran, and then we’re going to talk about what you do to help MSPs.

Let’s talk about technology and kit in particular. Now, MSPs often jump straight to the kit because it’s the most exciting thing for them. We do this as an audio, but we also video it, and I’ve got a green screen set up. I’ve got a dedicated space in my home office with all the lights and the camera and the microphone. But all of that came after three and a half years. When we started, it was me sat in an industrial office unit on the edge of Milton Keynes with a £40 microphone. And then if you go back and listen to episode one, which we don’t even have videos for, it’s just audio only, you can hear the echo, you can hear my presenting style isn’t there, the format’s not quite there, all of that kind of stuff. So what do you recommend for those people who just want to dip their toe in it, try it, commit it to five or six weeks and have a go? What do you recommend that they do kit wise?

I like to keep it pretty minimalist. Although as you said, the tech is the exciting part, you don’t want to get too bogged down on it. I recommend the Samsung Q2U, it’s the microphone I’m talking to you on right now, if you like the way I sound, then you’ll enjoy it. I think it’s around $100 to $200. So it’s a little more than the basic cheapy microphone you’ll get in the supermarket, but it’s not breaking the bank either.

On top of that, your best kit is some blankets. Some blankets you can use to cover up any hard services where you decide to record. So if you’re at a desk, throw a blanket on the desk and put your microphone on top. If you’ve got a lot of empty floor without rugs, throwing some blankets around will just soften the echo. And some cushions in the corner, if you’re in a square office unit as well, that does a lot to stop the worst of the echo. Just that little bit of sound treating the room, as we call it, will do wonders and can just give you that professional sound.

Yeah, completely agree with that. In fact, one of my very good friends who still works in radio, he does radio shows for national radio stations from his under stairs cupboard, surrounded by blankets. I mean, he literally sits with a blanket next to him. He’s got one on the door, and it’s exactly as you say, there’s no professional soundproofing and you wouldn’t know that he wasn’t in a professional radio studio in London. So Kieran, thank you. Thank you for that great advice. It’s been amazing. And by the way, if you are an MSP and you decide to start your podcast, will you drop me an email and let me know because I’ll have a little listen and subscribe to you on Apple or on Spotify or something. Our email address is [email protected], and that’s how you can reach me.

Kieran, tell us what you do to help MSPs get started with their podcasts and grow their audiences.

So I am a content creator and I am creating content at Podcast Marketing Puzzle, that’s where all my free resources are for starting and growing your podcast. I have a five day Podcast Marketing Fundamentals course, which I highly recommend that goes into the details of positioning yourself correctly, deciding who you’re talking to and how you’ll get those first listeners. I also offer consultations, so if you want some one-on-one help, then you can book an appointment and we’ll jump on a call and get you started. Get in touch with me at podcastmarketingpuzzle.com.

This week’s question is from Stuart in Atlanta. He’s feeling pretty good about the marketing he’s doing for his MSP, including getting the look of his website revamped. However, in terms of the content, his question is – how much should I pay for a writer?

Although I have a full-time writing and content creation team on the MSP Marketing Edge, we do sometimes use freelance writers to help create the ton of content that we produce every single week. So as a guide, my all-time best and most efficient freelance copywriter charges me £30 an hour, which is about $40. We don’t have a contract, although I have verbally committed to around about 13 hours of writing every month, and the bill of course varies each month based on the time that she tracks.

Now, I believe that this is the best way to keep writers on their toes. I can walk away at any point if she has a couple of average months or if I feel that she’s overbilling me in some way. You’ve got to remember, there are a million writers and only a small number of writing gigs, especially gigs that go on month after month after month. So it really is a buyer’s market.

The other thing to bear in mind is that AI has made life much more difficult for writers. Now, AI can’t produce fantastic content but it can produce good basic content that can be shaped and edited by humans. So maybe that’s a route that you go down, you get a human to put a good prompt in, AI to do the bulk of the work, and then you pay a writer to reshape that, finish it off, and make it perfect for your MSP.

Welcome to Episode 261 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

When you are the person who started the MSP, one of the hardest transitions for you is to get away from delivering first line support to that very first set of clients that you won in your first few years. But it’s something that you absolutely have to do or otherwise you get trapped in doing technical work forever.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with technical work, but you can’t grow your business while you’re doing password resets and setting up new users, right? This problem happens to most MSP owners and the reason it’s so hard is because you used to look after these clients yourself, you personally. So they feel that they have some kind of special bond with you. And even when you’ve employed first line technicians whose very job it is to sit there and help your clients, they will still email you directly or call your mobile directly rather than speak to the help desk.

Now, this steals your time when you should be working on the business, but also reduces your ability to sell more to them during a strategic review.

You can’t be the technology strategist and first line support at the same time. Clients’ minds will only let you sit in one of those boxes.

There are a number of different ways to tackle this problem without annoying your clients, and you’ll probably put a couple of the things I’m about to talk about together into a blended solution. In fact, here are nine things that I recommend.

The first is to set clear expectations. Now, this is really easy with new clients, but hard with longer standing clients. So just remember you have to educate them, constantly. What’s top of mind for you is item 1,058 in their mind’s list of priorities.

Number two, make it easy. Put stickers with the help desk number on every single device. Put them on their hands so they can’t help but see them.

Number three, have a standard operating procedure to roll out each time a client contacts you directly. Make a plan in advance so you don’t have the emotional trauma of wondering, how am I going to deal with this?

Number four, play dumb. Tell them you don’t know how to fix that as you focus on strategy these days, but you’ll ask someone on the help desk to call them immediately.

Number five, change your voicemail to say that you’re not working today and for any support, please call the help desk on this number. You can then let client calls go to voicemail forever. Perhaps just follow up with them the first couple of times it happens or when their issue is being resolved just so that they know you are there, but you are not the one doing the work.

Number six, set up an email auto reply exactly at the same principle as the voicemail.

Number seven, this is a cheeky one, fake being your own virtual assistant. When someone emails you or sends you a text, send back a standard reply saying that you are actually your VA and that you are off today and here’s how to get support with the number for the help desk.

Number eight, get a second mobile number so you keep your old number that clients have been calling for years, but let it automatically forward all of the calls to the help desk. Then you get a second private number that’s just for friends, family, and your team.

And number nine, now this one will hurt, but it is worth it. Make your clients wait if they contact you directly after hours, do not take the call, do not reply to the email. You’ll only encourage more bad behaviour. And over-servicing clients can be just as bad for a working relationship as under-servicing them as it sets unrealistic expectations. So make them wait and explain in a warm way how using the proper channels will get them faster support.

Victory loves preparation. It’s a phrase I’ve been living by for years and years, and it was only when preparing this episode that I looked up where it had come from. I thought perhaps it was from one of the hundreds of business books that I’ve read over the years, or maybe from one of the inspirational business leaders that I follow on social media. Well, how embarrassing. It turns out to be a Latin phrase written on the side of a baddies gun in a Jason Statham film that I’ve never seen.

Hey ho, it’s still a good phrase to live by because it means making sure your help desk is ready to pick up the phone five minutes before the lines open. It means never going on a sales call without having done at least 30 minutes of basic research on the company that you are visiting. It means systemising the things that have to happen in your MSP every day and having a plan when someone’s off sick. It means always having someone in the office trained and ready to speak to incoming new client inquiries because these days, speed beats size. It means locking in a trusted partner to help you with your basic prospect marketing, assuming that that’s not a core skill of your business so that you are moving prospects closer to becoming clients every single day.

Now, this is one of the reasons why I recommend that your management team meets first thing every Monday morning or as soon as it’s practical, every single week. Even if the management team is just you and a colleague and actually together, you make up two thirds of the business, you still meet every week because that meeting is about the small actions that have to be taken in order to get the better lives that you and your management team desire by being prepared.

Growing your business isn’t going to happen without preparation, and it’s not going to happen just by doing the stuff that the business does every day.

Fixing technology, strategic planning, that’s what the business does, but those activities don’t grow the business. So your weekly management meeting time, that’s all about what the business is trying to achieve right now and what must happen in the next week to move you closer to that goal. And you do it weekly to ensure you get into a rhythm, something that’s planned weekly is more likely to actually happen than something that’s a bit more ad hoc.

And actually, here’s a simple agenda for your management meeting. You start with a recap of your goals, your three year goal and this year’s goal, and then you move on to progress on the actions agreed last week. And then you talk about what’s moving you away from the goal and what can we do to kill that. And then what do we need to do this week to move closer to our goal. And then you agree, actions, who’s responsible, and the deadline for each action.

Let me give you a final quote to finish on. Now, this one’s from Bill Gates, not Jason Statham. And Bill says – Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. You could do the same with days or weeks or months. The way to guarantee that long-term achievement comes only through taking small actions every single day. And your weekly management meeting is where you plan those small actions that will make the biggest difference and make sure that they happen.

Featured guest: Dallas Amsden has honed the skills of communication for 30+ years. As a classically trained singer and actor – and even as a stand-up comedian who has performed at venues such as the Hollywood Improv and the world-famous Comedy Store – Dallas now leverages those skills he learned on stages all over the world to help business professionals use the “soft skills” of communication to more deeply connect with prospects, customers, and their teams. He has worked to create messaging with 100s of organisations, including Fortune 500 companies.

Dallas is on a mission to teach business owners, business professionals, and entrepreneurs – especially Introvert Entrepreneurs – to develop the skills necessary to become the most effective, most powerful – and even most successful – communicators in any room they enter. He is the co-founder of the Communicate2Succeed Academy, and the host of two upcoming podcasts, “The Future You Leadership Podcast” and “The Dallas Daily Show.” To learn more about Dallas, go to www.DallasAmsden.com

Perhaps at some point over the years you’ve been labeled either an introvert or an extrovert. I know that I have without really ever thinking about it. I always assumed that I was an extrovert because I don’t mind doing stuff like hosting a podcast or being on YouTube. But my guest today has challenged me on that and has really opened my eyes to how and why we define ourselves as an introvert or extrovert and how we can be more aware of the limitations of our vertness and be more successful by working around them. Most importantly, he has advice on how you can leverage the way you already are to better market your MSP.

Hey, I’m Dallas Amsden and my company is Communicate to Succeed, helping you communicate for your own success.

And thank you so much for joining me on this podcast, Dallas, you are very highly recommended to me and it’s a delight to get you on the show because we are going to talk primarily today about how introverts can better communicate. Now, I’m not an introvert myself. You can probably tell why would I do a podcast like this and so much YouTube if I was, but so it’s very hard for me to understand what it must be like as an introvert, having to pitch your business, go to networking meetings and talk about things that perhaps you’re not comfortable talking about such as cyber security solutions, all of those kinds of things. So that’s what we’re going to delve into today. And I know that you’re an absolute expert on this, and this is your sweet spot of how you are helping the world. Before we talk about that, just give us some of your background. So what got you from being a kid to being here?

Oh, well, I know we don’t have enough time to tell that whole story, so I’ll give you a very truncated version. I have basically been on stages or on screens or on microphones since I was 12 years old, so 30+ years now, I’ve been doing some form of performance or presentation. I’ve been everything from a professional mime at one point, I got my degree in musical theatre. I was an actor out in Hollywood for a little bit, a stunt performer for a little bit. And when I realised I didn’t like being told where to stand and what to say and how to say it, I started doing stand-up comedy and really kind of found my voice in that, the performative element of that. My parents were pastors when I was younger. My brother is a pastor, so talking on microphones comes very naturally, but it’s also one of those skills that I have developed over the last few years for me.

I worked inside of video production and video marketing for a long time. And what I had to do on a daily basis as the production manager was on one side, I had to talk to the writers, I had to talk to the directors, the artists, the animators and the editors and all of that. And then I had to go over here and I had to talk to all the industries that we were working with. So one day it could be I would talk with an insurance agency, a software development company, a biotech company, all in the same four hour span. So what I had to learn how to do was learn the speak, speak the speak, and figure out how to communicate to everybody. And from that, a lot of my systems and processes were born.

But I will tell you, I actually am an introvert. Nobody believes that about me. And I think this might be good for your people to hear that. Let’s get the definition of an introvert versus an extrovert. So a lot of people think an extrovert is someone who’s loud, who’s brash, who is outgoing, just loves, needs it, right? And an introvert is the shy, quiet person in the background. It’s not actually true. I know very shy extroverts and I know very loud introverts, I happen to be one.

Introversion and extroversion has to do with where you get your energy, your emotional energy.

So for an introvert, an introvert gets their energy from being alone, from having more solace. They get drained when they’re in groups and when they’re in crowds. And so for me, one of the most important things is after I’ve done a lot of output, I have to have a lot of quiet, and my wife will regularly send me away and she’ll say, honey, you need to go see a movie by yourself or go, just be alone and read.

But an extrovert needs the crowds. They need the people. I know people who got physically ill during the shelter in place and during 2020 and all of that because they couldn’t be around people and they couldn’t charge their battery. So when we talk introversion and extroversion, yes, there’s a quiet factor to it and a loudness factor, but really it’s about where do you charge your battery? And a lot of people, and I’ve listened to your pod here, and I think it’s a great show. A lot of people, I think this could benefit them because maybe they need more quiet time. They’re in this IT world. They’re in this MSP world. They might have a little more just tech in their head, and so they don’t need as much people. But I believe honestly, that introverts can actually shine the biggest, and be the most passionate experts in the room if they know how to tap into their passion in what I call the confidence formula.

So much to unpack from just one answer there, there’s so many things. So first of all, let’s deal with the showbiz one, which is you were a stunt performer in Hollywood, nevermind all the musical theater stuff, which is cool in itself, but you were a stunt performer. That’s cool. I love it when we have guests on this show who just casually drop in. We had someone several months ago who just casually dropped in. She was like a national TV producer, that’s really cool, I like that. And have you been on any shows that we might have seen you in or any movies, anything like that?

No. I would’ve been guest spotting and doing random stuff on everything from Days Of Our Lives to commercials you never would’ve seen. More of my acting experience was on stage. It didn’t take me long to realise that I didn’t like that process and I’d gone out to Hollywood and lived out there. And so the stunt performer thing was I did live shows a bunch. I did a lot of live stunt work, so I was one of the cowboys getting shot off the water towers, three times a day I’d do a 25 foot high fall off of a water tower. So it was more those in Southern California would be a little bit more familiar with it than anyone on TV.

Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. The other thing you said, by your definition, I started this interview by saying, oh I’m an extrovert, but actually by your definition, I’m an introvert because I find groups of people very tiring. I sit where we are filming here in my little home office, I’ve got a green screen and I like to sit on my own all day. That makes me happy. I love being around my child, for a couple of hours and I love being around my girlfriend, for limited amounts of time.

Does she listen to this? Is she going to hear what you just said just there?

No, not chance. Well, we hope so anyway, and I love her dearly, so that’s fine. But it’s really interesting and you are right. I think the public predictable definitions of introvert and extrovert are very much, I’m a loud person. I was on stage yesterday, I went to an MSP conference in London, which by the time this podcast comes out, it was a few months ago, it was the Managed Services Summit, and I was on stage and I have a stage persona, which you’ll know all about. You switch it on, and I’m bigger and I’m bolder and I’m louder and I do more things. And then I kind of come back down to myself, and I was the same when I was on radio. I had a persona, I’m going to have to go and have a psychological crisis now.

No, you don’t, the great thing is it’s just knowing where you charge your battery. And I think too many of us spend too much time thinking about, am I being bold enough? Am I not? It doesn’t matter. It’s like go get your battery full. Because once you are full, it comes down to a couple of things. I call it the confidence formula, and I always talk about the confidence formula when a person, especially with someone who is more introverted, when they step into a spot and they start talking about something they’re expert at, something they’re passionate about and something they can just be totally themselves. So expertise and passion and authenticity, when those things line up, the most introverted of persons can look like a superstar, and all of a sudden they’re confident, but they’re not arrogant. There’s that balance. Sometimes I think people, they try and go for confidence at the risk of coming off as too strong, too arrogant, too pompous.

What we have when someone talks about the thing they love, the thing they’re great at, and the thing that just makes them personally come alive – authenticity, plus passion, plus excellence – all of a sudden you’re like, Ooh. And you’ve seen it, right? When you’re talking to somebody and they’re kind of shy and they’re kind of looking all over the place, and then you get them talking about the thing that they love and that little fire goes off in their eyes. That’s kind of what it is. When you see that fire in someone, you go, Ooh, I need to unpack that a little bit. So you don’t have to go and do all the psychology stuff. It’s obvious you’re passionate about what you do. It’s obvious that you give massive value to your people and to your tribe. So you’re exactly in your confidence formula. You’re exactly aligned where you’re supposed to be in your purpose, in your passion, in your mission, obviously in your authority and your excellence. So man, I give you kudos, whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert.

Thank you. But listen, it’s not about me, it’s about the MSPs. And here’s an interesting thought. If we take what you just said there about anybody really coming alive and having that passion when they’re talking about something they’re passionate about, the problem that MSPs have sometimes when they’re talking to other people and when they’re doing their marketing is that the thing they’re passionate about is the thing they deliver, but it’s not necessarily what people buy.

So MSPs are obviously passionate about technology, what it can do for a business. They’re passionate about cyber security, but the average business owner or manager, they’re not necessarily passionate about those exact subjects. They’re just passionate about, I just want to get things done. I just want my business to work. I just want my business to be safe. So is that a mismatch there, or do you think actually that’s something that you learn as you become more confident talking about your passion, you learn how to adapt it to the audience you’re talking to?

That’s a great question. I think it’s one of the greatest things we can do as communicators, because as I always say, in any keynote that I give or any talk, communication equals connection. So if I’m building connection with you in any way, and I’m truly listening and I’m truly paying attention, then all of a sudden I can find the thing that’s going to help light the fire in you as well.

So, let’s say I’m the MSP in this case, I’m passionate about cyber security, I’m passionate about making sure that you’ve got email compliance and that somebody’s not clicking on the phishing scam and ruining their entire business, that’s what I’m excited about. But you’re thinking, I just need my team not to screw up, and I don’t want to be at a loss of possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars. So you’re making sure your company’s secure, but you’ve got other passions. So, when I ask you questions like, Hey, tell me what’s working. What are you looking for? I’m listening for the emotional cues.

If you’re frustrated by or if you’re telling me, oh, Dallas, I’m always frustrated. It seems like we are dealing with spam issues all the time. You just gave me a clue. And if I’m listening, I now know how to come at you with the proposition that’s going to hit a passion point for you. Now it’s going to be a pain point as well, obviously, right? So you and I know in this marketing side of things, we want to kind of sometimes push on the pain point for our prospects and for our clients.

If I discover through a question or two, what’s working, what isn’t working, what would you like to see a little different, what does an ideal thing look like for you? If I’m having that discovery conversation with you, I’m listening for two things. Is Paul going to reveal a passion point to me, or is he going to reveal a pain point to me? Because either one, I’m going to lean into because I’m an expert at MSPs. Again, I’m using myself as the example here because I’m an expert at this and because I’m passionate about it and because I’m authentically me, my bubbling confidence is going to overwhelm you in a good way that you’re going to go, oh, Dallas could hold me. I like this guy’s fire. I like this guy’s passion. I like what he’s saying. I like what he’s doing, and all I’ve done is kind of ask you a few questions that are important, and I’ve pushed on it a little bit and done that.

So I think for your people to understand when they are having these conversations, they’re not just giving their proposition. They’re not just saying, here’s my unique sales problem, my USP. They’re not just saying that because then they sound like everyone else. Instead, they want to get to the passion points and the pain points of their ideal client, whether it’s I work with legal companies, or I work in manufacturing, or whatever they’re helping as a service provider, whatever that looks like. If they know the passion and the pain points of their ideal audience, then they can push on them and they can get really excited about that. And then all of a sudden that connection, that communication connection builds, and you as the prospect are leaning into me because now I’m magnetic, now I’m exciting, now I’m persuasive whether I’m an introvert or not.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Dallas, I could speak to you for hours and hours about this, and maybe we should put an entire special together around this next year, but for now, let’s wrap up. I’ve got one final question for you before we learn what you do to help MSPs. If you could wave a magic wand and give a single short piece of advice to every introvert business owner out there who is desperate and so keen to grow their business, but perhaps scared of some of the things that they have to do because of the fact that they’re an introvert, what’s that one piece of advice you would give them?

It’s kind of been the keyword for this whole thing. I would say lean into what you love. Lean into what you love, lean into that passion point. That would be my short truncated answer, because again, once you get passionate about something, you draw people toward, you come alive in a way, and then all of a sudden life is more fun. So lean into what you love would be my answer.

That’s a great answer. It really is. Dallas, thank you so much for being on the show. Just tell us what you do to help people and how can we get in touch with you?

Sure, absolutely. So I’m a keynote speaker as well. People can reach out to me through my website, dallasamston.com. I know you’ll have all that in the show notes and everything. I speak on leadership a lot of times, obviously I speak on communication skills and I speak on this confidence formula. And specifically for introverts who are wanting to get better about presenting or get better about differentiating themselves in their market, I have a great resource if people want that. It’s actually called the Introvert Speakers Guide. And if you go to introvertspeakerguide.com, it’s just a short little video series that kind of gives you the training and unpacks those three points I talked about in the confidence formula. But connect with me on the socials as well. I’m active on LinkedIn at Dallas Amsden. I’d love to connect with you, find out what your passion points are, your pain points, and help you discover how you can communicate for your own success.

Greg from an MSP in South Carolina is feeling quite confused. He writes that someone has told him it’s dangerous just having one way of getting new clients, and said he needs to adopt the Parthenon principle of marketing channels. But what is that?

The Parthenon principle was invented by a guy called Jay Abraham, who is easily the granddaddy of marketing small businesses. In fact, I’ve spent thousands of dollars on Jay’s stuff over the years, and do highly recommend you acquire his books, read them all, listen to them, and then implement them in your MSP. Now, one of the most valuable marketing lessons that I learned early on from Jay was the principle of having multiple marketing channels to win new clients.

Go and Google the Parthenon, you know, the ancient temple in Greece, and you’ll see that it’s got many pillars holding up the roof. So if you think of the roof as your business, and think of the pillars as marketing channels, how many pillars do you have holding up your business? If it’s one, let’s say it’s referrals from clients, then your roof is at severe risk of falling down.

In fact, let’s take one very specific example. I hear people saying that they rely just on SEO on search engine optimisation to get new clients, and I think that’s nuts, because Google can change one rule tomorrow and suddenly all of your traffic just stops. If it’s two, let’s say referrals and LinkedIn, well that’s more stable, but nowhere near as stable as multiple pillars.

For example, and here’s a non-exhaustive list. You might be growing your email database and sending out a weekly email. You might be growing your LinkedIn connections and posting new content daily. You might be physically sending out a printed newsletter and mailing that out once a month. You might be using impact boxes, which are boxes containing merchandise and case studies and goodies that you send out to hot prospects, and it’s called an impact box because you want to stand out from your competitors. You might be building audiences on YouTube, you might have a podcast, you might use SEO (search engine optimisation) or PPC (pay per click). You might put on webinars or even seminars or lunch and learns on cyber security, and you might have a telephone person constantly calling all of your contacts.

Loads of pillars there. And those are just a few. But even if you implemented just a handful of them, you would have multiple pillars holding up your roof. And that is a very robust way to market your MSP.

Welcome to a very SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 260, celebrating 5 years of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

This episode’s been released five years to the day since we launched the podcast on the 5th of November, 2019. It’s a birthday! Amazing. Well back then, producer James and I figured it would run for a few months when we launched the first episode.

“Hello, this is Paul Green and welcome to the first ever MSP marketing podcast. Now, my aim every single week is to give you some motivation, some ideas, some clever stuff that you can take that other MSPs are doing around the world and you can bring it into your business and really make a difference to your business quite quickly and quite dramatically.”

Five years on, I’ve talked to some of the guests who’ve appeared over the years and asked them a big question – What’s the best idea you have to help MSPs make more money? We’ve split their answers into four different sections, starting of course with Marketing and Sales.

Hi guys, it’s Jamie Warner here, CEO of eNerds and Invarosoft. And here’s my tip for how your MSP can make more money. Well, the good news is I’ve got two tips and as an MSP owner, this is coming from experience. I’m actually in the saddle selling at the moment. So my first tip is that you must learn how to increase your percentage success rate of converting new customers. Your only goal is to essentially convince that new client opportunity that your MSP is going to be a step up from where they went before. That is why clients look to change. They don’t look to change for technical reasons. They only look to change for a step up in the service experience. So that’s your job, to figure out what are the things that you can say in your IT services presentation that will demonstrate that your service methodology is a step up from where they’ve gone before.

Now, obviously in the Invarosoft world, we use our customer experience technology to demonstrate to that customer how visually they’re going to get a step up in their service experience. And interestingly, we also use our QBR or our roadmap, TBR, whatever you want to call it. We use the methodology and the software that we use to do that and we demonstrate that to the customer as well, so they can see how our methodology and how our roadmapping and our gap analysis and our reporting is going to be a step up, and we show them examples of that when we are presenting our services. So that’s tip number one and that’s going to help you sign up more clients and grow your MSP.

The other thing that doesn’t get spoken about, so tip number two, is that you absolutely have to treat your clients as a pipeline of opportunity from a QBR perspective. So every client essentially has a huge amount of things that you need to help them improve. It might be new switches, routers, firewalls, a project to go to the cloud with Office 365, whatever it happens to be. Put all your clients in a list, down the left hand side of an Excel spreadsheet, look at how much you think you could possibly sell them. Workstations and desktops tends to be a big part of that. And then look at the enormous pipeline you’ve got. Now, these are things that clients actually need. These are not things that they don’t need, and so the best MSPs that grow faster, there’s this concept of sales compression. It’s understanding you have a pipeline as it relates to the QBR side of things, going out and actually having a conversation with the customer to get them to make decisions.

Which is what we do, the buying psychology of good, better, best when we present those recommendations to get buyers to make decisions faster. And if you can squeeze your pipeline down into a shorter period of time, lo and behold, you sell more faster and you grow faster. And let me tell you, as someone that speaks to a lot of MSPs, it’s the ones that are more sales efficient and the ones that with my first point are focusing on how they can convert those customers that grow faster. And in the last year, eNerds grew a million dollars in revenue and we signed up $70,000 in new MRR support, so just support in that last year alone, so it works. I wish you well. Good luck.

Hey, this is Nate Freedman from Tech Pro Marketing and I was the guest on episode 84. My tip for making your MSP more profitable is to have a live chat agent on your website. In my own study, 20% of leads prefer to engage through chat rather than a form or call, and 100% prefer speaking to a real person. Plus websites with live chat have been shown to have a 35% higher conversion rate compared to those without. So by offering a live chat option, you’re not just meeting expectations of your customers, but you’re actively increasing engagement and lead conversion rates by providing immediate personalised responses.

Hey there, this is Adrian Savage from EmailSmart. I was the guest in episode 99. My idea is to make sure you keep in regular contact by email with your customers and prospects, ideally at least once a week using a reputable email marketing platform. Send them a quick tip that will help them, something they can do quickly and easily. And in the same email, always mention one of your services along with a call to action, because if you don’t keep at the front of their mind, they won’t come back to you.

Bonus tip, make sure you regularly remove the people who haven’t engaged recently from your email list. Remove the people who haven’t opened anything in the last three months, and ideally the people who haven’t clicked anything in the last six months. Otherwise, you’ll be hurting your email reputation and your emails might not get through.

Hey, this is Megan Killion from MKC Agency and I was a guest on episode 238. My tip is to regularly ask your clients for referrals. In particular, I highly recommend getting a CSAT system in place that’s going to automatically ask your clients when you finish a ticket, if you did a good job. Then have your service delivery manager review those and see who’s doing well and pass it over to sales account management, or whoever’s going to be in charge of reaching out to clients to get referrals, that they should be touched in with and asked for referrals.

Then use your outreach to those clients, and be super specific -say something like, “Hey, it’s Megan from MKC, I know that you love when Tammy helps you guys out with your scheduling. She’s been so great and helpful for you and I know that we’ve delivered you about $1.5 million in new revenue this year. I’m just wondering, do you have any MSP friends that could benefit from a million and a half dollars in revenue in the pipeline?”. That’s it. Just ask for the referral and get out there and kick some butt.

I am loving these and this next bunch of ideas is all about looking after your clients.

What’s up everybody, Justin Escar from the Virtua Consulting Group. You may have heard me on episode 75, 100, 181, there may be another one who knows. Congratulations to Paul Green for celebrating five years of the Paul Green MSP Marketing podcast. Big shout outs to you, Paul and your entire team. Can’t wait to see what you do over the next five years.

Now, what’s my hot tip for MSPs to make more money? It’s not getting new customers, it’s about selling to your existing ones. The things that are really important today. So as we end 2024 and get into 2025, I’m talking about three things – security, identity and compliance. Sell not just the licences, but the services to your existing customers to make them more secure, help them with their identity and get them more compliant. I guarantee you, you’ll have a leg up on your competition if you take advantage of those things. Want to start small? Look at email security. There are great tools out there right now beyond spam protection that will help you and help your customers be more secure. So take advantage of what’s out there now. Look at your existing customer base. It’s not always about the new shiny, it’s about what you have now and how you can maximise your profit from it. Again, I’m Justin Escar from Virtua Consulting. Can’t wait to see you all soon.

Hi, this is Tony Capewell from Your Cloud Works and MSP Dark Web and I was the guest on episode 125 of Paul Green’s podcast almost three years ago. First of all, congratulations on five years of providing outstanding advice to the MSP world. It’s been an incredible resource.

My idea is the cost of acquiring a new customer is far higher than the cost of keeping an existing one happy. It’s easy to get caught up chasing new clients, but in reality, focusing on your long-term customers brings more consistent, sustainable profit. We do follow our structured regular marketing plan, but we’ve made it a priority to nurture our existing relationships, ensuring our clients are satisfied and feel valued. Our regular client check-ins and proactive support also allows us to upsell cyber security services with ease. So yes, continue with a structured marketing plan, but focus on client retention and you’ll save money while increasing loyalty and lifetime value.

Hey, this is Richard Tubb, The IT Business Growth Expert, and I was a guest back in episode 21. Now my idea is to do client floor walks. This is where you or one of your engineers visits your client site, not to fix an issue or close a ticket, but just to pop by to see how your client is doing. Stroll around, speak to your client’s team and ask if there’s anything you can help with. Not only will this increase your visibility with a client, but don’t be surprised if you end up with a few new projects or up sales opportunities as a result. Pro tip, take some cakes with you when you go to site. No client in history has ever turned away an engineer bearing cakes.

These are so good, aren’t they? Next up, we have other ideas for you to make money.

Hey, Greg Jones here from Kaseya. I was included in a few of Paul Green’s podcasts and I just want to say a massive congratulations to Paul and the team at MSP Marketing Edge for reaching their five year anniversary of delivering fantastic content to help MSPs across the globe. This week, I want to share my little tip on how your MSP business can make more money in the market at the moment.

My idea is focus on compliance. Most recent surveys out from the likes of Canalys, IDC and Gartner are saying that that market is going to be worth about 75 billion by 2028. That’s a huge piece of pie, and we want to make sure you get your slice of it. So focus on it not only to upsell and cross-sell your existing partner base, but also as well, it’s a great draw to attract net new logos, net new business into your MSP. The SMBs, SMEs, or even some of the smaller enterprises who are struggling with compliance with the likes of NIST 2 and DORA, a lot of them have got to be compliant with certain things by the likes of January, February of next year. A huge opportunity for you to make a little bit of extra cash. I hope that adds some value and again, a huge congratulations to Paul and the team. Take care.

I’m Ben Specter from Zomentum, and I was a guest on episode 137. Now, imagine a proposal that not only targets every single one of your client’s pain points, but also does a really good job showcasing your unique value. Here are my tips for a really compelling proposal template that should win more business. First up, make sure we understand your client’s needs. Start by thoroughly assessing their needs and their goals and ensure that your proposal aligns with these.

Next up, we want a clear and concise executive summary. Provide a brief overview of your services and highlight how those services are going to solve the client’s pain points. Then we want a detailed scope of work, clearly outline the services that you’re going to be providing, including timelines, deliverables, and any milestones. This is going to help ensure that there’s no confusion and dispute later on.

We want to then really highlight the value proposition and how your unique values that your MSP delivers are going to solve their problems the best. We then want to move on to the pricing structure. No proposals complete without some pricing. Ideally, we want to provide some case studies and social proof. Try to make these as relevant as possible to your client. This might be by way of their vertical or their geography or something else that makes that case study particularly relevant.

We then need a clear call to action. A lot of people forget to make sure that they’re highlighting what are the next steps. Do you need a signature? Is there another meeting? What is the call to action from the proposal? And last up, professional design. Make sure it looks great.

Hey, I’m Anne Hall from IT Agree. I was the guest on episode 152. My idea is that the everyday business risks faced by MSPs can be effectively managed to reduce your revenue leakage so that you can make more money. You can do this by using the right sorts of contracts, including service specific contracts and using them properly.

Don’t think about contracts as being there only for the worst case scenario, if you face litigation. Your contracts should also help you with other risks, everyday business risks. Things like responsibilities for reselling cloud services, including Microsoft 365, and cyber security services, the age old in scope / out of scope issue, and responsibility for cyber attacks, and more. So your contracts can and should help you to reduce revenue leakage so that you can make more money.

Hi, this is Jane Matthews from Wild Cat Careers, and I was a guest in episode 247. My idea is for you to ensure you create an attractive employee value proposition. This will help you attract and retain the best talent to grow your MSP. Think of a tap that you turn on that allows you to choose the best talent. That talent provides the best service to your clients, and in return grows your profits.

We’re nearly done for this special fifth birthday show, and let’s finish with three big ideas you really should listen to.

Hey Paul, it’s Henry Duncan from LanWare. I was a guest on episode 194. So my idea on how your MSP can make more money is really simple. You need to take your profit first. What I mean by that is the standard way that we’re taught to run our businesses is wrong. We take our sales, we minus our expenses, and then we see what’s left over in the end for profit. This model is crazy. As profit is given the lowest priority and plays second fiddle to everything else in your MSP. Then we wonder why we don’t make any money.

It’s time to give your profit a promotion. You need to take your profit after your revenue and then manage your expenses accordingly. Unless you do it this way round as you grow your business, your costs will get out of control and your profit will erode. If you want more information on this, there’s a whole methodology that sits behind it and it’s from a guy called Mike Michalowicz, so check it out online.

Hi, my name’s Andy Edwards. I was on episode 2, many, many moons ago. That is actually quite a while ago. And in episode 2, I spoke about relationships, business relationships, how to get on with people and why sometimes we don’t. But Paul’s asked me to give tips to help MSPs make more money. Well, here’s what I would normally say for business development, business growth, four things.

First of all, more successful businesses tend to have more customers, so get more customers. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But to get money into a business, more customers is a good idea. However, there are three other elements.

Second element would be, when you get a customer get them buying as much as possible, as much as possible, whatever it’s that you do, make sure that they’re aware of whatever it is that you’ve got so that they can buy it. If they buy something you do from something or somewhere else, then that’s a failure on your part. Make sure they are fully versed with what you are able to provide for them.

The third one is to get them back more often. Now, quite often you can tie people in pleasantly through monthly subscriptions, even annual if you want, but get them coming back more often, and that is a component for increasing your revenue.

And the final one is, well, don’t lose them, to be honest, if you do the first three right, then the last one, don’t lose them to a competitor is almost guaranteed, but not completely. So that’s it. Get more people buying more often for longer.

If your business development activities increase in each of those areas by just 10% – 10% more people than last year, buying 10% more, 10% higher price than last year, coming back 10% more often and staying for 10% longer, you’ve just increased your turnover by 46%. So I can think of nothing better than the perfect strategy of getting more people through the door, getting them to buy more when they walk through the door. Get them back more often and make sure you don’t lose them. That’s my tip.

Hey, this is Brian Gillette from Feel-Good MSP. I was the guest on episode 133. My idea to make more money in your MSP is to stop looking for more advice. Go to the last piece of advice that you got that was good advice, but you haven’t yet executed. And ask yourself, did I not execute it because it was impractical, because it was intimidating, because I was afraid because it seemed too hard, because I have an excuse for why I can’t do it yet. Whatever the case is. And do it afraid, as they say in therapy. Take that idea and execute it all the way wrong, but get to the end of that task then see what happens, rather than looking for another piece of advice to throw onto the pile of things you should get to, but that you might not ever do.

Welcome to Episode 259 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

One of the best things about working in the channel is just how collaborative MSPs are, and I see this in communities all the time. I’m sure you do too. In fact, I’ve watched people who are in direct competition with each other – they literally lose clients to each other – I’ve watched them collaborate and help each other in times of need. Recently, I asked a bunch of MSPs who are in my Facebook group what their golden rules of sales and marketing would be, and I’ve got the highlights for you right here.

So I have this Facebook group, which you really should join if you’re determined to improve your marketing and get new clients for your MSP. Just go into Facebook, search for MSP marketing, but do make sure you’re looking in the group search and not in the pages search, and it is free to join. It’s also a vendor free zone, something we did about five years ago, kicking all the vendors out. The quality as you can imagine, has been much higher since because there’s no one there doing any selling. There’s just people adding value.

I asked the two and a half thousand members of my MSP Marketing Facebook group what their golden rules would be for marketing and sales, and here are some of the many replies that we received…

So I kicked off with my own, which is to never discount. I think that you should add value when you need to do a deal, but never cut your prices. Cutting prices is such a dangerous thing to do. Now, sticking with pricing, Dan Baird said it’s better to over-price rather than under-price. I agree with you there, thank you, Dan.  And Don Mangiarelli said, never disclose pricing in an email – you should always be at a sit down meeting.

Keith Nelson said, never price on commodity sales. Good, better, or best packages. Keith also dropped some more value bombs. He said, never think that you are too small for a big contract; never sell technology, sell business outcomes, enhanced with secure technical solutions; and never do a QBR on how great you are, only report on business outcomes and measurable business results. I love these, thank you very much, Keith.

Aaron Weir then dropped a comment, and Aaron always brings value to the conversation. He said, never send a contract over email, always present in person.  I completely agree with you on that, Aaron. It is a lot harder to get the meeting and to sit down with someone, but you’re much more likely to get the sale if you do it.

Okay, a few more. Rob Williams said, never over promise. Jonathan Scofield said, wherever your prospect is, there thou shall also be – it’s quite hard to talk in kind of biblical text like that. And Jeff Weight said, have a yearly price increase called out in your contract.

Now there were loads more comments with more great advice in that thread. And if I didn’t mention you this time, apologies, it really was a great thread. Do you know, I’d be interested to know though, what your golden rules would be for marketing or selling your MSP. Will you drop me an email and let me know? My email is [email protected]

Most MSPs want new clients and yet most scupper themselves in several ways. Mostly it’s through a complete lack of having a marketing system, and the keyword there is “system”. You can’t do marketing haphazardly now and again and expect to build a solid pipeline of leads and prospects.

Good marketing requires consistently implementing a small number of actions that identifies potential future clients, qualifies them so you know you want to work with them, engages with them, builds a relationship with them and puts you in front of them at the exact moment they are ready to consider buying what it is that you do.

There are many mistakes MSPs make that stop them from winning new clients. Here are three sales killers that I see holding back MSPs everywhere.

Sales killer number one is an IVR, you know what an IVR is, don’t you – when you ring up and you press one for this, press two for that. And you do know that people hate IVRs, don’t you? Rather than making your business stand out as bigger than it actually is, it just comes across as impersonal. There’s one MSP that I ring every now and again and they’ve got five options on their IVR. I’ve pressed all five buttons and each time I get through to the same first line support guy and I wonder how many potential clients just put down the phone when they hear an IVR menu. People buy from people, they hate automation that they perceive gets in their way. And just because you have a clever IVR solution in your VoIP toolkit, doesn’t really mean that you should use it.

Sales killer number two is marketing from your point of view. Most MSP’s website and marketing materials are bland and lack impact and far too often they’re created from the business’s point of view. We do this, we do that. Who cares? Now you might, but your prospects don’t. They don’t care about you. They only care about what you can do for them. So put yourself in their shoes, be them, work out their buyer persona. What do they need? What do they want? Most importantly, what do they fear?

I once helped an MSP to rewrite his homepage and his company was an education specialist here in the UK. And so we were asking the questions of what’s the average head teacher scared of? They’re scared of lost learning time, they’re scared of a bad Ofsted, which is the regulator here in the UK, and they’re scared of the school screwing up from the head teacher’s point of view. An MSP that already specialises in education and already supports, let’s say 1500 teachers is so much safer than one that doesn’t.

And we don’t need to talk about the business. We just need to look at it from the head teacher’s point of view and demonstrate that they can mitigate most of their fears with one no-brainer decision. Interestingly, by the way, thinking this way makes price just a factor in the buying decision and not the factor in the buying decision, even in the price sensitive education market.

Sales killer number three is being samey. If you go and Google IT support in your town and click on the first 10 websites that come up, regardless of whether they’re in the adverts, in the map listing or the organic listing, that doesn’t matter. You’ll notice they’re all really similar, different words, different pictures, but the same themes, the same offerings, no real clear differentiation.

And now look at your website and compare it to those other 10 websites. It’s probably the same problem. Your website probably says more of the same things that all the other guys are saying. But samey kills sales, because the people you want to talk to are an uneducated audience. They don’t know what they don’t know, so they make buying decisions at an emotional level and not using their brains. They pick an MSP that feels good to them. If your marketing is the same as everyone else’s, you’ll just be compared to everyone else and you don’t want that because then you have a one in 10 or even worse chance of engaging with them. Always better to stand out and to be different. Standing out and being different is the key to having more conversations with more of the right people.

Featured guest: Joe Travaglione is the Founder and CEO of Future State Cyber, a forward-thinking cyber security and management consulting firm. With over twenty five years of experience in the IT and cyber security sectors, Joe specialises in helping businesses strengthen their IT infrastructures through innovative solutions that prioritise security, efficiency, and scalability. His expertise extends across leadership, managed services, and virtual CIO (vCIO) strategies, empowering clients to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of technology with confidence.

Joe is a trusted advisor for businesses looking to streamline operations, enhance cyber security measures, and implement proactive IT strategies. He has a proven track record of optimising performance for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and internal IT teams, using frameworks that emphasise efficiency and risk management. His leadership philosophy centres on collaboration, innovation, and the power of positivity, ensuring that his clients not only meet their IT goals but also exceed their long-term business objectives.

Beyond his technical expertise, Joe is passionate about empowering teams, fostering growth, and delivering transformative solutions that drive measurable success. His thought leadership extends to LinkedIn, where he regularly shares insights on IT leadership, cyber security best practices, and the future of technology.

I once read something in a business book that you don’t really have a business until it’s completely self-sustaining without you. If it can continue to win, service and delight clients, regardless of whether you are physically there or not, then yes, that’s a proper business. But if you have to turn up every day in order for the business to function, then you’re just in a job. And yes, sure, that might be a job that pays you more money and where you have more control. Although I do appreciate your job may not pay you more money, but it’s still just a job.

My guest today believes that the only route from you working yourself to death in the business, to a business that thrives without you is to pay special attention to your team and start developing them on a one-to-one basis.

Today’s guest believes growing. Your MSP is always, always, always about getting the balance of working on the business and in it, right? He says, no matter how busy you are, you must spend one-to-one time with your team. And you can start with one person for one hour a week. Soon they’ll be taking work off your desk and helping you to fix the problems in your business.

Hey, my name is Joe Travaglione. I’m the owner of Future State Cyber and I help build self-managing teams.

And Joe, it’s so good to have you here on the podcast because building self-managing teams, what that really means is creating a business that thrives without you, the owner having to be there, which I would say is the dream for most MSPs, if not all MSPs. Wouldn’t it be great to make money and have a business that you are so proud of, where the quality is really high without you having to turn up every single day. It gives you the choice, the choice of whether to go in or not. So that’s what we’re going to talk about in our interview today, but you have a fascinating history. Tell us about what you’ve done and all of the MSPs that you’ve scaled over your career.

Well, it’s been pretty amazing. I’ve been lucky. I started out when I was very young and got into the MSP industry probably when I was 20. And along my journey I got lucky enough to work for a printer company who gave me and one gentleman the keys to build the company. We started with one engineer and two clients and we were able to scale it in six years up to about 60 clients and about 6 million in revenue. It was a great journey too because we were able to focus more on working on the business and thinking to scale big. So right off the bat they’re like, we’re making a $10 million company and you need to think that way right off the beginning.

So it was really amazing to go through and think about those things and learn about it and really start to think about melding the managing and the business and the leadership portions with all the technical things that I’ve learned over all the years.

So in a way, you kind of got lucky from the start there, and I say lucky not because you were given that opportunity, but because that printing company said to you essentially you didn’t have to get caught up in the minutiae, the small details and the cashflow difficulties that the owner operator has to deal with. So you were able to go in and from day one you were able to think, right, it’s not going to be a case of we will be $10 million, maybe one day this has to be a $10 million business or I’m going to get fired. So how do we need to think and how do we need to act in order to get that way?

Was that a difficult thing for you to do? I mean, were you an employee at the time when you went into that or did you already have some entrepreneurial spirit, whether you’re employed or whether you do that for yourself – you still need that kind of big entrepreneur thinking, don’t you?

Yeah, no, I’ve always wanted to run my own business, but I was employed. So I was taken under their wing and we were able to operate it in its own segmented environment where we had to think of it as its own business and run it scrappily in its own ways of we weren’t getting any extra resources. But you’re right, we did have the added benefits of the marketing and the inside sales and the aspect of – Hey, we are a printer company, so we see all these printer people every day, so we were able to cherry pick that very easily. But I did get a lot of training and learning and development on how to manage a team and how to build a team from scratch and really how do you leverage what you have and slowly build it over time.

Yeah, I can imagine. I know you’ve done this a couple of times, haven’t you? So that experience presumably set you up to go into the next experience thinking the right way.

Yeah. The other thing they always thought about too is a lot of places I worked at, a lot of entrepreneurs work in isolation. They don’t leverage other business leaders to help themselves or they don’t have business coaches. They don’t leverage people like you to help them with marketing. So why don’t you find the industry experts to help you? So the other thing was we were a part of a lot of masterminds, we leveraged a lot of other mastermind groups to help. And they believed in a lot of peer groups and the peer groups led us into what are the best operations and delivery methods. And it made you always focus on working in the business and on the business at the same time. You have to do both. It’s like how do we divide and conquer and make sure every day I’m working on something to improve the business?

So it’s really interesting. This is a subject we talk about a lot in the podcast, and it’s kind of strange that as a marketing podcast, we talk a lot about productivity and where to partition your time, but I agree with you, it’s so important. And you and I know that the vast majority of MSPs are so trapped or so focused on working in the business, so delivering, looking after the clients’, account management, which is all really working in the business, that they never take quality time out to work on the business. Over the MSPs that you worked at, and as you did that again and again, how did you make sure that you were spending enough time or maybe more of your time working on than you were working in?

Yeah, it’s really a tough balance. A lot of self-discipline and as a team working through it. I fool around and say the videos on YouTube where they do the golf balls and the pebbles and the sand, we really always go through that – what one big golf ball are we putting in the bucket today? What is the one major task every day we’re doing towards our initiative for this quarter? And then what are the couple rocks that we’re going to do that are customer service, that we’re going to make sure everything’s going. And then we can waste the rest of our time on the sand and the tactical items.

If we could focus every day on doing one thing and getting people to be 1% better, at the end of 90 days it’s crazy how much work you’ll have succeeded at doing.

Yeah, no, I bet. And I’m going to ask you to explain the rock, pebble, sand thing. I know exactly what you’re talking about, but it’s not something that I regularly talk about. So whereas clearly you’ve seen it and lived it, can you just briefly explain what that’s about, about getting those big rocks in before you pour the sand in.

Yeah, there’s a video on YouTube and ultimately it’s a professor and he is talking to his class and he puts the rocks, all these golf balls in a bucket. And he is like, is it full? And everybody looks at it, the balls are to the top and they’re like, yes, it’s full. And then he puts in the little rocks right after and he is like, well, is it full now? And they’re like, yes, it’s full. And he is like, no. So then he puts in sand and that fills in all the gaps. And what he says is the big golf balls are the most important moments in your life. They’re like getting married and having kids and things like that. And then the little rocks are the next important things, like going on trips and vacations and things like that. And the sand is the every day minutiae. It’s like everything, it’s going to work, it’s maybe working out. It’s just the little things. And what I found so valuable out of that, it’s like we always spend our time doing the little things every day in the MSP, what’s broken, what service issues going on, and we’re never working on fixing our team or building that self-managing team so the owner could be out of the business.

Yeah, I completely agree. And it is so easy to be overwhelmed by that minutiae. We all do it. I was just telling you before this recording, I’ve just been away on a vacation and I’ve come back and my life has been filled with minutiae for two days – my computer’s logged me out of everything and my AV equipment stopped working. And actually that means that I’ve spent two days not focusing on big things within my business, which can be frustrating. I guess the difference is I’m very self-aware of that, and I can draw a line in the sand as it were, the minutiae sand and do something about that.

Let’s talk about what MSP owners can do quickly to start to make a difference with this. I know that you work with a growing number of MSPs, helping them on exactly the subject, how they can create teams that thrive without them. And we will talk about exactly what you do in a second, but let’s assume I’m your typical MSP owner. So let’s say I’m heading up to somewhere near a million in revenue, I’ve got 5, 6, 7 techs, I’ve probably got an admin person, I might have a little part-time marketing person. And I’ve got all of these people and they’re all supposed to be doing their functions. And yet even though I’m paying all of this money, I’m still working 60, 70 hours a week. I’m still talking to all the key clients myself. I’m still the third line tech. And there seems to be so much stuff that gets escalated to third line. I’m sure this is a very common scenario that you hear what’s some of the first things that I can do to get a grip on this massive 60 hour a week monster that I’ve created and start to spend some time developing the big things and focusing on the big things?

Yeah, I think we have to set aside time for quarterly planning and pick three initiatives. But besides the quarterly planning, that’s the easy part, I think the really big thing that we miss at the $1 million MSP, is how we develop our team. What are we doing to one-on-one develop everybody. And I really say one-on-one development and spending that time is necessary. I hate to say that, but if you have five engineers, I know it’s five hours of your time a week, but if you immediately spend time doing one-on-one development with your team and giving them feedback loops, you can slowly start to build and move initiatives forward.

The biggest thing is you have to cut out that time and make it mandatory. It’s the rock, or the golf ball, we have to put the golf ball in and it’s one on one development. And I really think we don’t do developmental plans. If you want to fix X, Y, Z in your business, let’s get your team to fix X, Y, Z. How do you get them to do it? I really think it’s in one-on-one management and making development really easy. And there’s a million other management tips and techniques, but simple one right off the bat is let’s get one-on-one development and start clearly defining to our team what we want good to look like and measure it.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. And would you agree that if you’re in that 60 hour a week work pattern, and you’re taking three days vacation a year, even if you just get started with one person and spend one hour a week with one person, perhaps your most important right-hand person, that in itself can be a massive jump forward.

Yeah, always, I love saying that. I was listening to a book recently and they were talking about a guy who would go to the gym for one minute, or he would go for five minutes, because he was building the habit you just said, I think it might’ve been in Atomic Habits, but he’s building the habit to go to the gym every day. So he is like, I’m going to go in, I’m going to do one exercise for five minutes and I’m leaving. And slowly over time, it was longer. So I agree. Let’s just do one person – the most important person that can help you move that initiative, that one rock, and then two people and then three people. You’re right, I agree. Let’s build that tribe.

Yeah, exactly that. And actually I found this. I ran a marketing agency which I sold in 2016, and that was the classic hell business where, in the first few years I had no time. Every time I employed someone, it added to my workload rather than reduced it. And actually it was when I got a right-hand person, a lady called Claire, that I started spending time with her in developing her. Then over a period of time she actually started saying – What can I do to take stuff off your plate? How can I help you with that? I’ve noticed there’s a problem here. I would like to do this to fix it. Is that the right thing? And I had that. I didn’t have someone smart like you to suggest that to me. I had this amazing realisation that Claire was part of the answer.

And then I started doing one-to-ones with someone else and someone else and someone else. And I think, exactly as you’re saying, I think it is Atomic Habits where the guy goes to the gym for five minutes to form the habit. Once you’ve got that habit and you realise that good people want to do more stuff, they want to take your work away from you, they want to do more, they want more responsibility, they want to fix all the problems – once you realise that, it’s an awesome thing.

Joe, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Just tell us a little bit more about what you do with MSPs right now and how can we get in touch with you?

My name’s Joe Travaglione. I’m with Future State Cyber. My LinkedIn is Joe Travaglione. I like to help leaders build self-managing teams. And my real goal is how do we help you to work on the business and not in the business.

It’s a website question this week, from Jonah in California. He is about to revamp his MSP’s website. There are some associations and partnerships that he’s very proud of, but he’s not sure whether he should put them online for prospects and clients to see. His question is, should I put the Microsoft and Cisco logos on my website?

These are called trust badges. And a trust badge is any logo or any other kind of image on your website that makes you seem more trustworthy. It’s kind of a way of sucking up credibility from businesses and organisations that you are associated with. Now, many MSPs put vendor logos on their websites, but I don’t think you should do that. In fact, don’t do that. Trust badges only work when the person looking at them has heard of the company, and ordinary people don’t know what Kaseya is. Of course, they’ve heard of Microsoft, but every MSP works with Microsoft, so there’s no differentiation there.

A better form of trust badge is to put media logos on. The mainstream media might not have big audiences anymore, but they do still have huge credibility. So if you’ve been featured in a relevant newspaper or a blog, a radio station or TV station in the last five years or so, you can justifiably get a badge made up that says, as heard on or as featured in, and then you have the media title name. Of course as long as your appearance was in editorial and not the consumer complaints section. That was a joke. Oh, and no, by the way, you don’t need to ask them if you can use their logo this way. This isn’t legal advice, but often it’s better to seek forgiveness than it is to ask permission.

If you don’t have any media appearances, then you can use client logos. And of course, if you have a specific vertical, then any clients will do because in a vertical, all of the clients are in the same kind of business, so they recognise they’re in the same kind of business, but for general business in a geographical area, pick your best known clients who are the prolific networkers or the infamous businesses around town… every town has infamous businesses within business circles.