Most MSP owners are drowning in marketing tasks, telling themselves they’re saving money or keeping control, when in reality they’re just burning through their time. Let’s discuss how to change that. Also this week, many MSPs use AI badly for marketing, and it costs MSPs 5 figures to win a new client.

Welcome to Episode 329 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

You’d be mad to do all of your MSPs marketing yourself, and if that sentence annoys you a little, there’s a good chance that you are exactly the person who needs to hear it. Because most MSP owners are drowning in marketing tasks, telling themselves they’re saving money or keeping control, when in reality they’re burning the one resource they can never replace… their time. Right now, I want to talk about which marketing jobs you absolutely should outsource, which ones you must keep ownership of, and how to focus your limited time on the activities that deliver the biggest return.

So let’s talk about time, because for MSP owners and managers, time is the real bottleneck. You don’t have a lack of ideas, you don’t have a lack of tools, you don’t even have a lack of willingness. What you have is too many things competing for your attention. And marketing is often the thing that’s squeezed into the cracks between the tickets, the meetings, and the client fires.

The goal of marketing isn’t for you to do more, it’s for you to do less of the wrong things and more of the right things.

And here’s the core principle that I want you to adopt. You should outsource anything that someone else could be trained to do well, and you should keep ownership of anything that requires judgement, direction and deep understanding of your business. Most MSPs get this completely backwards. They clinging very tightly to low value tasks and then outsource high level thinking, which is absolute madness, right?

Let’s start with what you should almost always outsource. Anything repetitive. Anything admin heavy. Anything that’s process driven, things like loading social media posts, scheduling blogs, uploading videos, formatting newsletters, whether that’s email or print making, LinkedIn connection requests, cleaning lists, basic CRM updates, repurposing content, chasing webinar registrations, creating transcripts and pulling simple reports. None of those tasks that I was just mentioning require you. They just require instructions. They require an SOP. If someone can be trained to do it once, they can be trained to do it again and again and again.

And every hour you spend doing those things is an hour you are not spending on strategy, leadership, relationships or growth. Now let’s talk about what you absolutely should not outsource. You should never outsource ownership of your marketing direction. You should never outsource deciding who you are targeting, what you stand for, what message you want to be known for or what success looks like. You shouldn’t outsource thinking, you shouldn’t outsource high level decision making, and you definitely should not outsource responsibility. Strategy for your marketing lives with you, direction lives with you, and accountability lives with you. Even if you have a marketing agency, a virtual assistant, a marketing assistant, or even if you have a content team, they should be executing your thinking and not replacing it. Because trust me on this, no one else in the entire world understands your MSP, your clients, your ambition, your risk tolerance, the way that you do.

Many MSPs say, Oh, I haven’t got time for marketing, and what they really mean is, I don’t have time to do admin marketing tasks. But the high ROI marketing doesn’t look like admin, it looks like deciding where you want to focus. It means deciding and choosing the story you want to tell. Reviewing performance and adjusting direction. It means recording short videos, writing rough outlines, approving content, shaping campaigns, all of that stuff is founder level work. I’m a founder. I’m not doing the marketing tasks of editing my podcast or my YouTube videos or putting my blogs onto the website or LinkedIn newsletters. I shape all of that content and I do actually still write it myself because I’m a writer at heart, but I don’t do the little tasks of actually loading it. I have a much better member of my team who does that for me so I don’t have to do it. She does a much better job than I would do as well. And all of this doesn’t take hours a day, you just need a little bit of focus to decide what you’re doing and what you are not doing, and then train other people to do the rest of it for you.

Understand this, the smartest MSP owners design their marketing so that they personally spend the smallest amount of time possible on the activities that create the biggest impact. They think, decide, approve and guide and other people build, load, schedule and repeat. If you try to do everything yourself, marketing becomes a burden. If you outsource everything, marketing loses its soul. So the sweet spot is owning the brain and delegating the hands. I like that phrase.

The MSPs who grow consistently aren’t the ones that are trying to do every marketing task themselves. The ones that grow the fastest of the ones who protect their time, take ownership of the thinking, the direction of the decisions, and they let other people handle the mechanics. And that is not laziness and it’s not losing control. That… is leadership.

AI is changing the way that MSPs do their marketing forever, but not in the way most people think. This isn’t a story about tools, prompts, or automations, it’s about why the rise of AI might actually make being more human your biggest competitive advantage.

Cast your mind back for a moment to the year 2008. That was the year the first Iron Man film came out, which still feels impossible to me, to put that in context, someone who was born that year is now 17 or 18, which is nuts, right? Anyway, imagine if back then I’d said to you, Hey, in the near future there’s going to be some technology that can write your marketing for you. It can generate images, analyse your marketplace, plan campaigns, basically do almost anything you can think of and it’ll cost you about $20 a month. So you’d have thought I was mad or you’d have been bouncing off the walls with excitement, probably both. And of course, that future is now.

There’s an AI tool for almost anything, isn’t there? Writing, images, research, analysis, videos, strategy, ideas… and yes, of course it’s changed the game, but not in the way that most MSPs think it has. Because here’s what I really believe, the start of the AI revolution is also the start of a new content marketing revolution. For years, content marketing was dominated by the people who could produce the most content the old fashioned way, using humans. You either wrote it yourself or you paid someone else to do it. Output was the advantage. But now anyone, regardless of writing ability, can churn out hundreds of blog posts, emails and social posts today at the push of a button. There was already too much content online back then, and now there’s 10 times more, maybe a hundred times more, maybe a thousand times more. And we are barely at day one of our journey with AI.

So does that mean that content marketing is dead? Oh, no. No way at all. Not even close. But I do think there’s a big shift happening because when information becomes infinite, it stops being valuable. When people are overwhelmed with answers, the brain gives up trying to analyse them all and just hands the decision over to the heart. And the heart doesn’t look for more information, it looks for someone it trusts, someone it likes, someone it believes understands them. In other words, as information becomes commoditised, personality becomes the differentiator.

I think people are going to stop seeking information from content and start seeking wisdom from people.

And that’s the real marketing opportunity for you and your MSP, to put your authentic personality at the centre of everything you do. To be more human at exactly the same time that your competitors are flooding the internet with AI generated slop. Because as long as humans are making buying decisions – and in managed services that is going to be for a long time yet – trust, familiarity and personality will matter more than ever.

And this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use AI, I think quite the opposite. AI is an incredible amplifier, it’s a great assistant if you use it in the right way. You can train a GPT on you, your knowledge, your experience, your opinions, your tone, your sense of humour. You can ask AI to repurpose your content in your voice as long as you prompt it, well review it properly and correct it. You can ask AI to interview you in depth to pull ideas and insights out of your head. You can even use AI to generate images and visuals that feature you in different situations.

I like to think of this as the Iron Man approach to marketing. If you imagine Iron Man versus the Terminator, the Terminator is an agent, it has a mission and it executes that mission with no further input. It’s efficient, but soulless. Whereas Iron Man on the other hand, is Tony Stark, a very human personality surrounded by AI tools like Jarvis and Friday that enhance him, support him, and make him more effective without replacing who he actually is. Two very different approaches using AI. And I know exactly which one I would back. It’s the Tony Stark one, the Iron Man one.

The MSPs who win over the next few years won’t be the ones who automate themselves out of authenticity. They’ll be the ones who stay human, stay visible, and use AI to amplify what already makes them distinctive.

Featured guest: Shawn Walsh is the Founder and CEO of Encore Strategic and co-author (with Dave Cava) of The Pumpkin Plan for Managed Service Providers. His signature “Profit. Grow. Exit.®” methodology has helped countless MSPs increase profitability and business value.

Known for his practical, no-nonsense approach to business growth, Shawn brings together his law enforcement leadership background, real-world MSP experience, and passion for teaching to deliver actionable insights that drive results. His upcoming book, Profit. Grow. Exit. (April 2026), continues his mission of helping business owners build valuable, exit-ready businesses.

Have you ever actually sat down and worked out how much it really costs your MSP to win a brand new client? Not what you think it costs, but the true figure once you account for time, effort, marketing, sales, and wasted opportunities. Most MSPs massively underestimate this. And my guest today doesn’t guess at this number. He measures it, he sees it across the channel, and he understands exactly what the average MSP is spending to land a single new customer. And I’m going to warn you now, when you hear the real figure it’s going to change how you think about marketing and growth.

Hi, I am Shawn Walsh and I am the CEO of Encore Strategic.

And thanks so much for being here on the podcast, Shawn. You and I met very briefly at ScaleCon at the back end of last year in New Orleans, and we had literally a five minute conversation. I could barely get to your booth. You were surrounded mobbed by MSPs, which was an amazing thing to see at such a great conference. But it’s great to have you on the podcast now. And we are going to talk today about a subject where you and I agree is so difficult for most MSPs to get their heads round. And that is, how much does it actually cost you to win a brand new client? We’re going to explore that today, and I know you’ve got some advice on figuring that out, and of course, trying to adjust that price as well because it is often a scary figure when MSPs figure it out. Let’s first of all just have a look at you. So tell us about you, Shawn. What do you do with MSPs right now and what’s your kind of background?

Yeah, so what we do is we do peer groups for MSP owners. We also do COO and service manager groups, and then we also do direct consulting and coaching with MSPs to help them increase profitability, grow market share, and prepare for exit.

And how did you get into doing this, and how long have you been doing it for?

So I ran an MSP for many years, and I am the stereotypical, started it up in a spare bedroom in the house, grew to the basement and then out to an office. And we grew it to locations in four states in the US and then we were acquired by a $350 million services company and private equity backed and they bought the company. And I just wasn’t good at being retired. So too much stuff going on in my head. And I have always had a passion for teaching. I’ve taught college, I’ve taught high school. I work as a dive instructor, as a scuba instructor, as a side hustle. So I love teaching and I love sharing knowledge.

That’s really cool. I want to do scuba. That’s one of my semi-retirement plans because like you, I never intend to retire. So yeah. Whereabouts are you based in the states?

I am actually here in Aruba right now where we have an office where we run our peer groups out of Aruba occasionally. And it’s a nice, beautiful ocean here. And so anytime you want to come to Aruba and be a guest speaker, we can take you out and get you scuba shirt.

Amazing, right I’m in… my people will talk to your people, we’ll make that happen. That sounds really cool. So one of the things before we get on to talking about the cost of acquisition, the cost of acquiring a client, I would imagine, and I don’t do coaching, I work closely with MSPs but it’s always very much on practical things of improving their marketing and their websites and putting in place a lead generation system. But often conversations, I notice how much, and I’ve been doing this for just 10 years with MSPs, but 20 years overall, so like you, I’ve probably noticed how much MSPs hold themselves back through overthinking things, through emotional things, through worry, through fear. Do you see that? Because you are working with them on all of their business and obviously you’ve been there and you’ve done that and you’ve come through the other side and had the successful exit. Do you see that a lot? And is that a lot of the work that you do working on the mindset and the emotional stuff?

Absolutely. I mean, we’re taking people who are great engineers, but as many of us who come from the engineering background of things, we can sometimes hyper fixate on some of those details and not often the right ones. And looking at the business more holistically is really one of the things, the key things that we kind of focus on in our coaching and consulting and in our peer groups. Making sure that they’re not just working on one leg of the stool to take an old analogy. We have to work on the business holistically and we have to balance out all the aspects of it. And one of the areas is, as you well know, that MSPs suffer in paying attention to the sales and marketing side. And it’s because it’s the one we struggle with the most.

Technology is black and white. It’s easy. You tell a computer to do something, it does exactly what you tell it to do. Sales is not like that. Sales is very fuzzy and sometimes people aren’t comfortable in that. But really you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable because if you’re going to scale your company, you have got to be able to build a sales and marketing team, except for some very rare exceptions, owner led sales is just not going to get you to that big payday when you want to exit.

Yeah, I completely agree and I completely agree as well that it’s the most difficult thing. It’s so far away from the technical skillset, but that’s why I’ve dedicated what is left of my working career. I say that I’m only 51, but I intend to spend the rest of my working career continuing to make marketing easy for MSPs for exactly that reason, because it’s the big difficult missing piece in most MSPs businesses. They’ve got the operations, the customer service, everything is there except they just don’t know how to win clients. And that leads very nicely into our core subject, which is the cost of acquiring clients. So I know that MSPs, the vast majority of MSPs, haven’t a clue. Not a clue. I suspect that you have exactly the same experience. And when you ask MSPs to estimate how much they think they’ve spent to acquire a client, do you often find that they’re coming in way under what they’ve actually spent?

You know what, they’re not even able to come up with a number.

In most cases, MSPs really don’t think about what they’re spending on trying to get sales.

And one of the biggest things MSPs suffer from is what I refer to as random acts of marketing. They go, they spend a bunch of money on one thing, it doesn’t work. They say, oh, the heck with it. They don’t do it anymore for a while, and then they go do something else again. And we need that consistency on the sales and marketing. I mean, it’s a numbers game and it’s about consistent efforts, and they don’t really do that. And then because of the fact they’re not doing it regularly, they’re not really budgeting for things.

But one of the things that we do is we make them break down a budget, a very detailed budget. So now all of a sudden we’re getting to see, Hey, wait a second, there’s a lot of highs and lows here. We need to smooth this out. And then we start calculating it. And in our peer groups, we do a lot of financial accountability. And we finally decided we really needed to not only track the typical financial numbers that most MSPs track, like your service gross margin, your EBITDA, things like that. But we started tracking how many leads are you getting in, what do those leads cost, how many of those leads go to a first meeting, how many first meetings go to proposal, how many proposals go to close. And what about the salaries of the people who are doing that work. What does that cost you? And whatever marketing you’re doing. And we realised it’s a very significant amount of money. And honestly, I hadn’t really given it much thought since I had sold my company, and I saw an article and it had the data and it said that the average cost of an MSP client was $32,000. Yeah, so now one of my questions is how much do you think it costs you to get a new client? I checked the data and it was solid. I think the range I’m seeing right now is about $28,000 to $32,000 to get a new client in and people have no idea that it’s that high.

And take that client to 28 to 32, what kind of lifetime revenue would you expect from a client like that?

Right, and that’s one of the other things we’re calculating now is what’s the lifetime value of a client? And it’s typically three to five years. In some cases, if you’re really good, you might get longer, but that’s the average. Three to five is what you’re going to get. So that’s a pretty heavy cost and especially if you want to be bringing on about two new clients a month, which is what most MSPs are shooting for. So that’s $64,000 a month in client acquisition costs, that’s a salary every month. So you better make sure you’re doing it correctly and you better make sure, just like all the other numbers, we spend so much time monitoring service metrics, and let’s bring down our average time per endpoint. Hey, our average time per endpoint went from 40 minutes to 32 minutes. Yay. But nobody’s going, Hey, we got our client acquisition costs down from $32,000 a client down to $24,000. Yay. So we really need to be monitoring that.

And the thing that I am seeing is that as we’re monitoring this with our coaching clients and our peer groups now, people are taking it a lot more seriously than they did before. Before it was kind of like, oh, sales, that’s not me. I’m going to push that aside. Now they’re like, Hey, wait a second. This is costing me real money and I want to grow my company, so let’s pay attention to this. So that’s a good thing. Obviously people paying more attention to where their money’s going and their efforts, that’s good stuff, but you need to dial that in. One of the things that we did with some of our groups recently is we had everybody read Alex Hormozi’s book, $100M Leads. And I really like that book because he does a great job of breaking this whole concept of client acquisition costs and lifetime value down to some very, very simple metrics. And he breaks the whole process of acquiring leads down into some very simple terms that even non-sales professionals are able to completely understand and embrace. And we had a really good response with the groups on that, and I think we’re already starting to see the benefits of people paying attention to those numbers.

That makes perfect sense. And if you loved that book, then you have to read his newish book, which came out at the back end of last year, it was September or October last year, $100M Money Models, which in my opinion, is the best of the three books he’s written. There’s $100M Leads, $100M Offers, and the money models one is almost about how to make more money out of the clients you get. So it doesn’t solve the problem, well, he’s already solved the problems of how to acquire the clients and how to put the offers together, but the money models book just absolutely blew my mind. And I think he or whoever’s doing his writing with him has matured enough that they’re able to explain very complicated concepts so so simply, they’re great books and everything Alex Hormozi does on YouTube and everything written is absolutely worth looking at.

I was just going to say, I had to laugh when I was first introduced to his stuff and I thought, who’s this gym rat that I’m going to listen to? But check his background, he actually really does have the business chops to back up what he is saying. But you hit it right on the head. I mean, he does a very good job of taking very complex stuff and really boiling it down to its essence.

We had Nate Freedman on the podcast, I forget when it was a few months ago, of Tech Pro Marketing and MSP Sites, and he’s part of Alex Hormozi’s programme, and I can’t remember how much he spent to be part of it, but it was a huge amount of money. And in fact I sat with Nate at ScaleCon, which is where you and I first met last year, and he said, well, he was going to do it again because it puts so much value within his business. So yeah, there we go. That’s the big takeaway from this is Alex Hormozi, I think we talk about him every three weeks on the podcast.

Shawn, let’s wrap this up. So clients acquisition cost of up to $32,000… terrifying. Lifetime value, you’re only going to keep them for 3 to 5 years on average… terrifying. And if you were to look at that and you were a new MSP in the marketplace, you’d almost throw your hands up and say, Oh, what’s the point, I’m on a loser to get started. So what kind of advice now are you giving to the MSPs that you’re working with on either reducing down that client acquisition cost or mitigating the cost by extending the client and making sure and guaranteeing that they stay 7 to 10 years rather than that 3 to 5 years?

Well, two things. Number one, read Alex’s books upfront. Don’t wait for the last thing that you do in your company is to build a sales team like I did. You want to be consistent. You don’t have to go out and do grandiose things in your marketing and your sales, you just have to do a few things consistently. You’re going to get much better results. You’re going to drive down that client acquisition cost and monitor the cost because what gets monitored gets managed. So we want to do that.

The other thing, my self-serving plug here, go out and get my book, The Pumpkin Plan for Managed Service Providers, and use those lessons to make sure that you maximise the value and profit you get from your MSP clients so that you’re not spending a lot of money to get what we like to refer to as a cheap pain-in-the-ass client. And you actually get the client that you’re going to make money with and the one that’s going to stick with you and is going to be aligned with your core values and value what you do.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So thank you. So that book, again, The Pumpkin Plan for Managed Service Providers, and in terms of your peer groups and everything else, if we want to hang out with you and Aruba, maybe do some scuba diving on the side, how do we find out about those peer groups and get in touch with you?

Absolutely, [email protected]. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I am very active on there and on there regularly, so feel free to reach out to me on social media anytime.

People do not buy features, they buy benefits… many MSP’s know this but very few actually live it in their marketing, here’s how to change that. Also this week, is your MSP’s expertise hiding in plain sight? And how much is your MSP really worth?

Welcome to Episode 328 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

There’s a basic marketing mistake that the vast majority of MSPs make. In fact, once you know what it is, you’re going to see it everywhere. It’s going to drive you crazy, you’ll see it on your website, on your LinkedIn, on your other marketing channels. But the good news is I can help you to spot it and fix it in the next five minutes.

We are diving into one of the most fundamental principles in all of marketing. People do not buy features, they buy benefits. Now, every MSP has heard this, but very few actually live it in their marketing. And the reason this matters so much is because features and benefits land completely differently in our brains.

A feature is normally processed logically, it engages the analytical part of the mind that loves detail but really doesn’t like to make decisions. Whereas a benefit is processed emotionally and hits the part of our heart and also the brain that drives action, that imagines outcomes, that feels relief, confidence and safety. And here’s the uncomfortable truth…

All buying decisions made by ordinary business owners and managers start emotionally. People only use logic afterwards to justify what they already wanted.

So features live in the logical world. Benefits live in the emotional world. When you talk about features, you are speaking to the wrong part of the brain… you’re speaking to the part of the brain that doesn’t buy. But when you talk about benefits, you’re speaking directly to the part of the brain that says yes. And this is why when MSPs proudly list their features – 24/7 monitoring, remote support, patching, ticket automation, all of that stuff – prospects kind of nod politely, but they’re kind of glazing over and they feel nothing. It’s like listing ingredients instead of actually showing the finished meal, it’s like describing the different parts of the engine rather than describing the feeling of driving the car.

So benefits create pictures in people’s minds and they let the prospect imagine what life will be like when they’re working with you. And you do know that imagination is one of the strongest decision-making tools that humans possess, right? Let’s make this real. When you say “24/7 monitoring”, that’s just a mechanism, it doesn’t actually mean anything to a normal business owner. But if you say to them, Hey, we spot problems early which means fewer business disruptions, then suddenly that becomes something tangible that they can feel.

They can imagine a calmer working day, systems just running and fewer surprises, and that is a benefit. When you say “remote support”, again, that’s just a mechanism. But if you say, Hey, we can fix issues really quickly without downtime and you don’t even need to wait for us to arrive, that becomes a benefit because that sends a message of speed and convenience and continuity. When you say “regular patching and updates”, they’re yawning because you’re naming a process. But if you say, Hey, look, so your security stays strong with zero effort from your team, you guys don’t have to do anything, that’s a benefit and it speaks of safety and ease and peace of mind.

So features describe what something is, whereas benefits describe what something does. That’s the big difference between the two. Features force the prospect to translate what you’ve said in their brain into some kind of emotional meaning, whereas benefits you’ve already done the translation for them. Awesome, right? And that makes all the difference because prospects are not thinking, Oh yes, how does patching work? They don’t think that at all. They’re thinking, Oh, what does this mean? Am I going to get hacked? Are my staff going to be able to just work? Is this going to be a smart financial decision? Will this decision make me look good or will it make me look stupid? Will things just run smoothly? That’s all the stuff they’re thinking, but with benefits, we’re speaking to their emotional outcomes, the things that matter to them.

So here’s the psychological shortcut for this. Features require effort, benefits create clarity. Features are cold, benefits are warm. Features are about you, benefits are about them, and as we know, we are more influenced by what something means to us than by what we think about it. So to help you do this automatically, here’s a simple formula that I want you to burn into your brain. In fact, you can have it tattooed on your hand. Please don’t do that…don’t write in if you do that. Whenever you hear yourself say a feature, just add the words, which means that, So I call this the “which means that” formula obviously, and it forces your brain to move from mechanism to meaning.

This beautifully simple phrase, which means that, it turns every feature in your MSP into a compelling benefit that actually influences buying decisions. And the more you practice it, the more natural it becomes.

Are you seen as the true expert by your MSP’s leads and prospects? Or do you secretly worry that from the outside you look just like every other IT company in your town? The thing about perceived expertise is that it isn’t random and it isn’t about who’s the best engineer. It’s something you can build deliberately with a few simple habits. Right now, I’m going to give you a whole stack of practical ways to dramatically increase the authority you project every time someone encounters your business.

Let’s talk about perceived expertise, because in marketing, it is absolutely everything. Prospects very rarely choose the most technically competent MSP. They choose the MSP that feels safest. The one who sounds like they know what they’re talking about, who shows up consistently with ideas and insights and clarity.

Expertise in the mind of the buyer is 90% perception and only 10% reality, and that’s wonderful news for you because it means that you can turn the dial up as much as you want.

Now in a Facebook post that I shared recently in my MSP marketing Facebook group, I shared seven ways that MSPs can grow their perceived expertise, and I want to expand on each of these and then stack a load more on top.

The first was publishing a weekly blog or video and then emailing that to your email list. Weekly is key for this, by the way, because it creates a reliable rhythm. Your prospects start to kind of expect to hear from you, and they build a habit around hearing from you. And the more often you show up with helpful insights, the more they’ll file you mentally under trustworthy expert who knows my world.

Next is posting daily on LinkedIn and doing a weekly LinkedIn newsletter. This isn’t about chasing likes, it’s about being present. When your name pops up in someone’s feed, often every day, maybe in a non-salesy helpful way, you just become familiar to them and familiarity is a huge psychological lever. People trust what becomes familiar.

Third, speak at local business events. Even tiny local events give you a huge authority boost because when you stand on a stage or even just at the front of a room with a microphone or even no microphone, you are instantly perceived as the person who knows what they’re talking about. In fact, this is borrowed authority from the room itself.

Fourth is writing an IT services buyer’s guide. Books, guides, frameworks, white papers… call them what you like, these things elevate you into the position of educator and advisor. And people love buying from someone who literally wrote the guide on how to choose an MSP because it feels safer to do that.

Fifth publishing case studies. Now, these aren’t optional. Case studies are the most important form of social proof. They tell stories, they let prospects imagine themselves getting the same outcomes, so that makes you real.

Sixth, create checklists and create cheat sheets. These tiny assets are incredibly powerful because they signal that you have systems, structure and repeatability.

And seventh, build a knowledge hub on your website. A single destination full of blogs, videos, guides, reports, checklists, FAQs, all of the stuff that we’ve just been talking about. And when prospects land on that page, they instantly think, wow, these people really know their stuff. And no, they’re not going to read it all and they don’t have to read it all, it’s the impact and the perceived expertise that’s most important from a knowledge base like that or a knowledge hub.

Now, let’s expand on this list because perceived expertise is a momentum game. The more you add, the stronger your authority becomes. So host regular webinars, they don’t need to be complicated or perfect, even a simple 20 or 30 minute session once a month positions you as the person who teaches, not the person who chases.

In fact, let’s take that a step further, run lunch and learns. They’re informal, low pressure and brilliant for demonstrating your personality as well as your knowledge.

You could interview other experts. They could be software vendors, accountants/CPAs, cyber professionals, business coaches, could be local marketing people. When you sit opposite another expert and you ask them good questions, you actually inherit some of their credibility. So you could do this on videos for LinkedIn or for your YouTube channel. You could even start a limited edition podcast. Why not?

Next, what about creating some templated tools that your prospects can download. These could be password policies, device checklists, incident response steps, onboarding templates. Tools equals structure, and structure equals competence, and competence of course equals trust.

The other thing you could do is publish your own research or surveys. Even if you only survey your own clients or just some local businesses, the fact that you are presenting data makes you look analytical and authoritative.

Get quoted in local media about cyber security or phishing trends. Journalists love experts who can give simple soundbites and being quoted just once makes you look like the go-to voice in your area.

You could start a podcast and it doesn’t need to be big or go on forever. You don’t need to do it all the time and every week like I have, I’m currently on episode 328, which is a lot of work, but just the act of having a podcast and showing up weekly, even if you did it for just like 10 weeks as a limited edition. Showing up weekly with ideas, that sends a signal that you take communication and leadership seriously. So you could just do that as a limited edition run to put it on your website and think of the podcast as a positioning tool rather than a way of actually reaching people. People are impressed if you are an MSP who’s done a 10 week podcast series, and that works especially well by the way, if you’re in a vertical.

Now, if you do do a podcast or any of this stuff, why not share some behind the scenes processes. When people see that you have documented workflows, that you have onboarding systems, that you’ve got ticket triage, logic, security frameworks, all of that stuff, and you show them you creating that in your team using that stuff, it reassures them that your business is disciplined and predictable.

Now, here’s one that may not be quite for you. How about you surprise people by publishing strong opinions, not controversial stuff, just very firm confident statements. Something simple like, “Every business should have MFA, no exceptions.” Or you could even take that further if your personality fits with that and say, “Any business leader who doesn’t use MFA is unnecessarily putting themselves at risk or putting their staff at risk.” You could even maybe say, this is risky, but you could say, “Any business leader that doesn’t use MFA is an idiot.” As I say, that’s got to fit with your personality. Personally, I wouldn’t call my audience an idiot, but if you wanted to go that far, go that far, and you’re going to get some extreme reactions to that. But people are going to love you or hate you, and that’s a good thing. People love experts with clear positions and clear opinions.

And my final idea for you is just to be consistent. Nothing builds expertise more than just showing up again and again and again, with value. Authority is cumulative. The more you teach, the more expert you seem and the more visible you are, the more trusted you become.

Featured guest: Earl Foote has led Nexus IT with a clear purpose for nearly three decades – building a company where people and partnerships grow stronger together.

What began as a small start-up has become one of the nation’s fastest-growing MSP/MSSPs, recognised by Inc. 5000, CRN, and Utah Fast 50 for its innovation and Integrity.

Earl’s leadership combines operational discipline with a deep commitment to trust, collaboration, and shared success – values that define how Nexus works with both its team and its partners. 

If you’ve ever wondered what your MSP would actually be worth if you decided to sell it, you’re about to get a very clear answer. My special guest today doesn’t just talk about valuations, he buys MSPs for a living. He’s in the market every day analysing real deals, real financials and real operational structures. And he’s going to explain exactly how MSP valuations work, what buyers really look for, and what makes your number go up or down.

Hey everybody, Earl Foote here. I am founder, CEO of Nexus IT.

It’s so cool to have you on the podcast because you and I met for the first time at the backend of last year at ScaleCon. I was actually moderating a panel that you were on, and it was about M&A (mergers and acquisitions) and very much the subject of today’s conversation, which is how much is my MSP worth? And it was so cool to meet you there. And then we bumped into each other at MSP Global, which was in Barcelona a month later. It’s so cool to actually get you on the show, Earl, thank you so much.

And that is the topic that we’re talking about is how much is my MSP worth? And one of the things that struck me about that panel was that you have some very, very clear opinions backed up with evidence of what an MSP is worth and what affects that valuation. And I’m sure it’s the number one question that you get, it’s certainly a question that comes up for me as well. So before we dive into that, let’s just have a little bit about your background. So tell us how you got into this and how you started acquiring MSPs in the first place.

Yeah, so I’m 27 years into my journey of building my MSP Paul. It’s been nearly three decades, quite some time. I started acquiring about 13 years ago. We’ve acquired today eight MSPs that we fully integrated into Nexus IT at this point. We’re one of the very few founder led, founder owned M&A platforms in the United States. In other words, we’re not PE owned, we’re not family office owned, we’re an independent organisation. And the reality is, the first three transactions that came our way were opportunistic. They were local MSPs that either wanted to get out of the business or were moving out of state, and they wanted a good safe landing spot for their people and their clients. And so it wasn’t something I was really planning at the time, just opportunities came to me and we were able to structure deals with those organisations. After we did a few of them, we made it part of the strategy. We were like, okay, this is something we know how to do, we can do it. It’s a way that we can accelerate our growth and create better value for everybody that’s part of this process. The clients, the people, the founder owners. So here we are now having raised a significant quantity of capital, kind of like a mini fund for us to execute and buy three to six MSPs per year right now. That’s kind of the game plan.

But it’s quite a jump to go from buying two or three local competitors to actually raising a ton of cash, which I’m guessing there’s an element of risk, of personal risk and I guess business risk in that as well. And to go on such a very fast and almost aggressive, if you don’t mind me using that word, aggressive acquisition journey. What was the thing that made you say, screw it, I’m going to do it.

Yeah, you’re entirely accurate, Paul. There is definitely risk to this. I have big dreams, big vision, and I believe in myself, I believe in our team, I believe in what we’re building and the value that it brings to our people and to our clients. And I wasn’t really happy or content to have a run of the mill MSP, and I don’t say that in a derogatory manner, but an average MSP of 3 million a year in revenue or 5 million a year in revenue and growing at 10% per year, which is a pretty standard MSP. In fact, a lot of MSPs don’t break a million a year or 2 million a year. I’m more ambitious than that and that’s kind of boring to me. So you’re right, I put a lot on the line here for what we’re doing. I could have taken liquidity events prior or exits prior and hedged my future with that, but I’m looking to build a brighter future for myself and for everybody else involved. Today, including myself, there are 10 total shareholders in the organisation, and of course, beyond creating a world-class experience for our people and our clients, we are focused on creating significant financial outcomes for the shareholders.

Yeah, absolutely. So it’s everyone wins kind of scenario, and I guess if you haven’t got that private equity or that family office, so if there isn’t someone else’s money sat there, then you don’t have the pressures towards that group as well, which makes perfect sense. So there’s a small diversion I want to take in terms of subject before we get onto the main subject. So the main subject is how much is my MSP worth? And that’s coming up in a second. The small diversion I want to take is, let’s say there’s an MSP listening to this podcast or watching this on YouTube and they’re thinking, I’d like to buy a local competitor or I’d like to buy another MSP. And actually I’m sure you have that conversation all the time, because I have that conversation all the time, and mostly those people never actually take action on it for whatever reason. But for someone in that scenario that’s just having that thought, what would you say is a good first step to start to explore it, see if it’s the right thing for them?

Yeah, I think most definitely find advisors or consultants that can really educate you about the process and what’s involved and the things that are going to happen in the business or can happen.

You really do have to be prepared for M&A. It’s not something that you can just do as a random act without preparing and making sure that your business is in a place where you can do this.

So it’s not easy to take your focus off of the day-to-day operations of the business to go look for other MSPs to buy, to work through the process of buying them and then integrating them. And so from the time you start looking for an MSP to the time you contract an MSP to buy it or actually execute the purchase, it’s easily oftentimes 6 to 12 months and then you’re going to take 6 to 12 months for integration as well.

And so you and your team need to be able to take focus off of day-to-day operations. You need to make sure you have the bandwidth, the cycles, you have the team, you have the expertise. Granted, you’re going to learn through the process, but having advisors around you that can really help educate you about the process and how to get your business ready for this is very important because it’s not too uncommon for founders to think that they’re ready to acquire another business to do so and to really cause some significant problems in their business and the business they’re requiring because they’re not ready for it.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I would imagine the first acquisition is the hardest one because it is a complete distraction, especially if you’re buying people as well. We all read about the culture clashes. In fact, you read a very, very big mergers, don’t you, of companies where they can never quite get the two cultures and they end up splitting that out.

Okay, let’s get back onto the main subject then. What are the things that affect the valuation of an MSP? So I’m a business owner, you’re a business owner, to be fair you are much more highly educated in what a business is worth than I am, but we all have an idea of what our business is worth. And I sold my first business back in 2016, and luckily the broker that I picked is very respectable and expensive broker here in the UK, and the first thing they did was downplay my expectations. They said, this is your revenue, this is your profit, your business is worth X. Other brokers who want a bigger fee upfront and less of a fee at the backend will tell you it’s worth this much higher so that you sign up with them. So that was really, and I’m led to believe that’s quite a unique thing that actually brokers are really bad at overvaluing businesses. So when you are looking at an MSP or advising an MSP on what it’s worth and what money they might make, what are the factors that you typically look at?

There’s a lot involved in this really, Paul, and it really does depend on the acquirer, the buyer. So you might have financial buyers, for example, like a PE firm or a family office. You might have a strategic play for example, and they’re going to look at these things a little bit different. And then you’ve got buyers like us, founder owned, founder led, M&A platform. So really we kind of acquire as a strategic buyer.

From a financial buyer standpoint, certainly they’re going to look at your revenue and your EBITDA. They want to look at your growth in recent years. They want to look at things like the quality of the client book, the quality of the talent within your organisation, how long are your contracts, how much of your revenue is recurring revenue versus one-time revenue non-recurring? How profitable are your gross margins across your products and services? And then how that gross margin translates into EBITDA, and are you achieving a world-class EBITDA or a higher end EBITDA?

On the lower side, a buyer probably isn’t really going to entertain a business until they’re about 15% EBITDA, certainly want to look for world-class, more of a 20 to 25. And those that really are excelling are 30% EBITDA in the MSP space, that’s not easy to get to, some I’ve seen as high as 35%. If they really figure out how to fine tune their operations and deliver very specialised models, 30 to 35% sometimes is achievable. Your top line revenue and your EBITDA do play a huge role. A strategic buyer like myself, we do want to look at things like what industries are you serving? Are you specialised? For example, we focus in healthcare and financial services. We want to look at do you have good cyber and compliance capabilities within the organisation and good talent on that front. What’s your client retention rate? Are you retaining 95% of your clients and your existing revenue every year or are you retaining 60%? Because if you’re retaining 60%, that’s a big problem. Are you retaining your talent? That’s another thing for us as strategic buyers. We’re going to look at leadership philosophical ideas around how you manage and what your culture looks like because we want to bring the two organisations together into one team, and we need to make sure that we can mesh those. A financial buyer may not be quite as concerned about that sometimes. So in terms of what the valuation really comes to, it does depend on that top line revenue and on that EBITDA, and then those other kind of considerations can influence, particularly like if you’re growing. Average growth rate of an MSP in United States is about 10%, so if you’re growing at 40%, 50% per year or higher than that, it can help boost your valuation up a bit. An MSP that’s somewhere in the range of 300,000 to maybe 750,000 in EBITDA, depending upon how they’re strategically positioned and the quality of the operations, the quality of the team, the client book, the revenue, it’s probably worth something around two to maybe on the high side, five x EBITDA. Once you’re reaching around a million to 2 million in EBITDA, a million a year EBITDA business on the low sides, probably very lowest, 3 x, but often worth 5 to 6 sometimes even 7 if they’re very well positioned and they’ve got a really good thriving business. A 2 million EBITDA business is going to trade for something more like 4 to 10 x, 10 x on the really high side if they’re really well positioned and have a great operation. And then the multiples start to go up, 5 million, 5 to 10 million, you could be talking about an organisation that’s worth something like 8 to 12 x EBITDA we’re seeing, for example, in recent transactions, and by the way, I’m talking in terms of United States market transactions that are happening here. I don’t pretend to know what the transactions look like in the UK or Australia or places like that, but I expect that they’re similar. Once you start getting to a business that’s something like 10 to 12 million EBITDA or some of those that have traded recently that are more like 15 to 18 million in EBITDA, that business can be worth 12 up to maybe about 18 x. We have in recent years, seen a few trade that were very hyper specialised. We’ve seen a few trade in the 20 to 22 X that were around 20 million in EBITDA. So there’s a wide range here, Paul.

Absolutely. And let me just jump in. There’s so much value there and so many figures there, I was getting a bit lost in like, wow, so much valuation. So that’s the beauty of a podcast and a transcription on our website is if you were listening to Earl there and thinking, I just got lost, you can just go back and look in the transcriptions, look at what your EBITDA is and plug into Earl’s suggestion there. And Earl, I lost track. Did you explain what EBITDA is?

I didn’t – earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation. So it’s essentially kind of a net profit number. So your accountant or if you have a CFO or a controller within your organisation, they should know how to calculate that for you. And yeah, it’s not your net profit, but it’s usually a little bit more than that because you’re adding back in any interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation in that.

The M&A world loves jargon, doesn’t it? Loves its acronyms. I mean, we thought the MSP world was full of acronyms and jargon, but the M&A world is a whole new step up. And EBITDA is what you learn on hour one of day one. That’s really helpful, Earl, and let’s just sort of bring this back for the average listener to this podcast or people who watch my videos who are typically somewhere between thinking of starting up and around about that 2, 3 million mark. Obviously we have all sorts of different people that consume our content, but that’s typically who we are looking at.

So for those people, and obviously you’ve given loads of ideas of where to start, as you said, the most important thing is top line revenue and bottom line, what’s at the top of the sheet and what’s at the bottom of the sheet. That’s going to have the biggest impact. So if you were an MSP and you were thinking, right, I do want out. I’ve had my time, or I’ve built it up, or I’m ill or a partner’s ill or one of the many reasons that people sell their businesses, how far out would you recommend starting to think about that and what would you recommend as an action plan to actually start getting that business into shape to start having conversations with people like yourself or the other buyers out there?

I would say start preparing three to five years before your planned exit because there’s a lot you want to do to be able to position your business so that it’s very marketable when you take it to market to sell it. To start, I would make sure either you build a leadership team that has been through this before, maybe it’s not in managed services, but in something similar tech enabled services of some type or some sort of tech services. And put together a game plan. Study what really influences the EBITDA multiple in your type or category of MSP or MSSP, and then strategically work on building your business towards those valuation triggers that optimise your exit. Some of those things might be things like industry focus. Focus on a specific industry vertical where you can really solve specific problems.

Focus on growing, organic growth rate, focus on client retention, focus on your operational metrics, focus on employee retention and not just client retention, but client satisfaction. NPS scores, focus on getting your gross margins into a really good place. Say, well, performing MSPs are usually going to have gross margins on their managed services of around 45 to maybe on the high end, 55% if you’re talking about cyber services, 50 to maybe 60 or 65% in cyber and compliance services. Those are pretty common call investing class gross margins there on the types of services that we all sell. And so if you’re not there, which is really common in a build stage MSP, you might be more like 25, 30, 35% gross margins, and you’re going to want to move your business towards delivering more effectively financially for your clients while not sacrificing the service. So the real thing is either find advisors or build a team that knows what you’re doing and then have a specific game plan and execute that game plan so that you can optimise the valuation of your business when it’s time to sell.

Yeah. Okay. Earl, we could talk about this for hours and in fact, having sat on stage with you, I know you could definitely talk about this for hours and you give so much value with every answer, so thank you for that. Let’s get you back on the show, it’s going to be next year, it sounds crazy at this stage of 2026 to be talking about 2027, but let’s get you back on the show in the future and we’ll explore this in more detail. For now, just tell us very briefly what exactly is Nexus IT looking for? So for MSPs listening to this or watching who are thinking, it might be worth me having a conversation with this guy. Give us an idea of what kind of MSP looks good for you and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Best way to get in touch, just hit me up on LinkedIn or Instagram, Earl Foote or Bass Slappin’ CEO. You can look me up by that too. Let’s see. What was the second part of that question? I totally just drew blank.

What kind of MSP are you looking for? What’s the ideal acquisition for you? Who do you want to talk to?

We’re usually looking for an MSP that’s somewhere in the range of 2 to about 8 million in revenue right now. Usually 1 million to maybe three or 4 million in EBITDA. We are looking for those that are strategically positioned in cyber and compliance, generally working in regulated industry like we do, like healthcare and finance, and certainly that have built a well-respected, well operating organisation. That’s the profile of what we’re looking for throughout the United States right now, we don’t have plans to try to go global in any way whatsoever, but throughout the United States, we’re looking for awesome MSPs and founders that either want to join and build with us, or they’re looking to transition their organisation onto somebody else and want to find a good home for their clients and their people. Once again, I am Earl Foote. Find me on LinkedIn or Instagram or Bass Slappin’ CEO.

Breaking into a new vertical is one of the smartest marketing decisions you can make for your MSP, here’s how to get started. Also this week, why MSPs are terrified of guarantees, and the huge AI revenue opportunity for MSPs.

Welcome to Episode 327 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

One of the smartest marketing decisions you can make for your MSP, is choosing to break into a new vertical. Because marketing to a vertical is easier, more effective, and ultimately more profitable. A lot more profitable. And a lot of MSPs want this, but they don’t know where to get started. So let’s talk right now about how to enter any vertical you like and get traction quickly and easily.

Choosing to work in a vertical is like switching from a megaphone over to a sniper rifle. Most MSPs marketing sends a pretty generic message, something like, We help businesses of all sizes, any kind of business, with their IT, which is very lovely and friendly but also utterly forgettable. Vertical focus marketing says, We help dental practices eliminate downtime, secure patient records, and keep imaging systems running smoothly, and suddenly with a message like that you are relevant, you are specific, and you sound like someone who understands that exact person that you are talking to. The thing is that humans, we respond to familiarity. Prospects respond to relevance. Marketing responds to focus.

When you pick a vertical, your story becomes sharper, your audience becomes easier to find, your content becomes dramatically better, your conversion rates jump, and you instantly differentiate from every generalist MSP around you.

This is especially true in professions like accountants, lawyers, dentists (like I was just saying), medical clinics and manufacturers. These groups all share similar software compliance concerns, workflows, frustrations, and even buying psychology. This is marketing heaven, but how do you actually break into one? Let’s get into the practical stuff. There are three phases to entering a vertical. First, understand the vertical. Next, build the assets and the messaging. And then thirdly, build the audience.

So let’s do phase one, understanding the vertical. This is kind of like the homework phase and it’s also where most MSPs skip straight ahead to the marketing and you kind of miss out on all the prep work. So please do do this bit. To break into a new vertical, you must first understand the software that they use, the regulations that they’re bound by and maybe even that they fear, and the workflows that frustrate them. You’ve got to understand the downtime disasters that could ruin their day, the KPIs that they care about, the conferences they attend, the associations that they belong to, the influencers they listen to and the language they use. If you talk their language, even just 70% of it, you instantly feel to them like your one of them. And no, you don’t need decades of experience in their vertical. You just need curiosity, a bit of research, a handful of conversations, and the ability to turn what you’ve learned, your insight, into content for them and to adapt your conversations to take all of it into account.

Once you understand their world, you are ready for phase two, which is building up your assets and your messaging. And the question I always get from MSPs on this is, Paul, should I have a page on my website or should I have a whole separate website? Well, my recommendation for this is to start simple. So yes, you begin with a single vertical specific page on your main website. Don’t go building 17 new websites before you even know whether or not the vertical is going to respond to you. So your vertical page on your existing site should include a really clear headline which says something simple like, IT support for dentists in or in , but make sure you reflect the pains they feel, the outcomes they want, the software that you support, and you can name it specifically if there’s like three or four big software pieces, packages that they use, they name the two or three of them that you know can work with.

There should also be some case studies if you have them, or if you don’t have them perhaps some testimonials from other clients. Ideally it should be clients within that vertical. That’s something just to kind of go back and fill in when you start working with somebody in that sector. And then what you can do, regardless of whether you yet got vertical clients or not, is a short video of you talking directly to that vertical, and of course a very strong call to action. The call to action that works best right now is for them to book a 15 minute call with you in your live calendar. So this page becomes your home base. A separate website is the next thing that you do, but you only do that when the vertical responds, when you’re getting some traction, when you’ve got at least a couple of clients in it, because a separate website will give you the illusion of exclusivity, but of course it’s a ton of work and you don’t want to waste months and months when you could be dipping your toe into the water and seeing if that vertical is interested in what you have to offer.

Now, when you are starting out, should you have a separate LinkedIn profile? Well, probably yes. I mean, I know that LinkedIn hates duplicate profiles and it’s hard to build up a whole new LinkedIn profile from the get-go, but if you’ve got your general LinkedIn profile now, it makes sense to start a second profile that’s aimed directly at the vertical that you really want to speak to and make sure that’s got positioning content in there that talks directly to that vertical. Right down to your headline in your profile saying that you’re doing IT for dentists in , something like that. Keep it very clean, keep it very authentic. And I wouldn’t do any other social channels, maybe down the line again perhaps once you’ve set up a separate website, but just to get started you can just do a page on your existing site and a separate LinkedIn profile. Or if they’re not using LinkedIn for their own marketing, you’d use whatever social media platform they use. For example, to reach restaurant owners, hotel owners, they don’t use LinkedIn, but they use Instagram for their own marketing. So you would set up an Instagram page to go and get those people, just as an example.

Now, what you absolutely should build early on is an audience. And this is where vertical marketing becomes magic because vertical audiences are easy to find, easy to target, and super easy to warm up. So you start by building a vertical specific prospect list. You can use Google of course, obviously LinkedIn if it’s a thing that they use, if they’re a B2B company. Then you’ve got other sites like Apollo and Lusher, those will sell you data or provide you with data. You can use professional associations, often you can find lists of members, which is kind of crazy, but why wouldn’t you use that? There are online directories, there’s all sorts of places to find people. It’s really, really, really easy to find audiences and list of audiences within a specific vertical. And then you build content that speaks only to these people.

Create a vertical specific lead magnet, which is something where people give their email address to opt into your database, to your CRM. Something that has the word dentists and your area, your town or your region in it. Then you’d build out a vertical specific email sequence, a vertical newsletter, checklists that are just of interest to that vertical, mistakes to avoid, you know what mistakes they want to be avoiding because of their fears and the things they’re scared of, the regulation and the things that could go wrong for them. You could do software comparisons between the different software they use. You could do videos, you could tell funny stories that only someone in that vertical would get. When your content feels like it could only have been written for them, they’re really going to lean in. And that allows you to start to build relationships the slow and powerful way.

Pick 20 people in the vertical and start commenting on their posts. Reply to their content, send helpful for resources, ask them short questions, share insights with them. Just check in with them occasionally, you can email them, you can message them on social media, you can just be in touch with them and you start to build up a profile in their world. You’re not selling, you’re just becoming familiar to them because familiarity is the gateway to trust, and trust is the currency of high value clients.

Now let’s just go a little bit deeper into practicalities. I suggest you create what I call a vertical starter kit. So this would include a landing page, a downloadable lead magnet, a simple three email nurture sequence, a short video intro, a list of a couple of hundred to 500 prospects, a quarterly webinar topic, a few articles to go onto your website and a case study even if you have to repurpose a vendor’s case study within that specific vertical.

And then you can run a 90 day marketing sprint. And the goal of this sprint is to build awareness, generate some repeated impressions, to launch some tailored content, and create your first wins, replies, comments, conversations, all of that kind of stuff. You’re looking for engagement on email, that’s people hitting reply. You’re looking for engagement on LinkedIn or the social media platform we’re using, which can be as simple as likes or replies or comments. You’re looking for webinar signups and you’re looking for time spent by people on your vertical page or your micro website if you’ve built one. Ultimately, you’ll know from that whether you’re starting to get some traction from your vertical, starting to generate yourself some leads, some appointments, and maybe even at this stage being close to signing your first client.

And as soon as you get your first client in that vertical, go get some social proof, interview that client, interview them over a video call or better still in real person with a camera. Because once you’ve got a video interview, you can then repurpose that down into a written case study a testimonial. You can ask them permission to use it as a review, but always start with a video testimonial. You can use that in a number of different ways to help prove your credibility to other people like them. That’s the beauty of a case study, a video case study within your chosen vertical.

And finally, I recommend that you make a mental commitment to stay in that vertical long enough. So a lot of MSPs, they kind of try out a vertical and give up after three months, which is nuts, right? Because vertical marketing works, but it takes time. I mean, how long does it take you to win a new client anyway? You might meet someone today that doesn’t sign up with you for like a year or two years. So how can you judge whether or not a vertical works for you in just three months? You can’t do that. Give it six months to get traction, 12 months to get a reputation, maybe even 24 to 36 months to become the MSP for that vertical.

Most MSPs don’t fail at vertical marketing, they fail at sticking with the vertical marketing. So you need focus, relevance, patience, consistency and of course content that makes people feel understood. When you get this right, something amazing happens. You stop chasing leads and the leads start finding you. Breaking into a vertical isn’t hard, it’s just deliberate. So pick a vertical, build relevance, build assets, build an audience, and stick with it long enough to see the magic happen.

Do you guarantee what your MSP does, or is the very idea of that just crazy to you? In the last 10 years, I’ve only come across a tiny handful of MSPs who offer a guarantee, but interestingly, they seem to win clients faster and easier because they’ve de-risked it for them. Let me tell you why I believe you should guarantee your work, show you a specific guarantee that a real life MSP is using right now, and give you an easy way to get started with this. Most MSPs don’t guarantee anything, nothing at all. And I kind of get why.

There’s this fear that if you offer a guarantee, clients will abuse it or you’ll end up giving away loads of free work or you’ll somehow be on the hook for things outside of your control.

But that fear is almost always irrational because here’s the truth, a good guarantee isn’t about operational risk, it’s about psychological power. All buying decisions are emotional first and logical second. And when a prospect considers switching MSPs, their biggest barrier isn’t cost, it’s fear. Fear of downtime, fear of disruption, fear of picking the wrong partner, and fear of making a bad decision that embarrasses them. A guarantee removes all of that fear. It says, Hey, don’t worry, I’m taking the risk off your shoulders and putting it onto mine. And when you do that, something magical happens. More people say yes.

Guarantees work because they trigger three very persuasive psychological effects:

Let me give you a practical example from an MSP that I know well. They offer a very clever set of guarantees on their website. One of them is a straight, simple happiness guarantee – If the client isn’t happy in the first 90 days, they can walk away. No drama, no penalties. Another is a response time guarantee – If they don’t answer the phone in a certain timeframe, then that month’s support bill is reduced. And they even guarantee the onboarding schedule – If they miss an agreed deadline, again, the client gets compensated.

Now you’re probably a bit scared by all of that. So here’s the part I want you to really absorb. The MSP offering those guarantees will almost never have to honour them. Great MSPs don’t miss deadlines very often. They don’t leave clients unhappy and they don’t ignore ringing phones. But the existence of those guarantees, just the words on the page, do an enormous amount of heavy lifting in the sales process. They reassure, they calm, they de-risk. Ultimately, they’re helping the prospects to feel like they’re not stepping into the unknown. And that MSP looks safer than their competitors, even if the actual service seems identical to the ordinary business owner or manager.

That is the power of psychological reassurance. And here’s the clever twist – Your guarantee doesn’t need to be dramatic, it just needs to be real. You could guarantee onboarding timelines or specific response times or guarantee customer satisfaction in the first, 30, 60, 90, 180 days. You could guarantee that switching to you won’t disrupt their business. And in almost all of these cases, you are already doing these things anyway. You’re just not saying them out loud.

When you turn your high standards into guarantees prospects perceive you differently, because you stop sounding like all the other MSPs and you start sounding like a safe decision. That’s how guarantees work. They make you look more trustworthy, more confident, and more accountable. And they may cost you a little bit down the line when you have one nightmare idiot client that claims on the guarantee, but it’s going to be someone you didn’t want to work with who was going to cost you money anyway. Think about all the other clients that you win with these guarantees.

So if you don’t have a guarantee right now, just have a think about what you already do reliably every single day that you could just formalise into a guarantee. To ordinary business owners and managers all MSPs look and sound the same, so a guarantee might be your easiest way to stand out and make more people say yes.

Featured guest: Alex Bacon is the founder of BrightKeel.AI and host of the Scaling with AI podcast. He helps Business Leaders cut through the noise of AI and automation by combining real commercial leadership experience with practical, business first implementation.

Alex has spent more than 15 years in the MSP world, including helping grow a Microsoft MSP from £4m to £38m as part of the leadership team. He has also supported the launch of a legal tech company that went on to generate £22m and has led marketing and commercial functions across multiple scale-ups.

He now works with MSPs to run AI and automation workshops for their customers. These sessions help MSPs create opportunity inside their existing accounts and give them a clear route to sell more AI services in a practical, outcome focused way.

Helping businesses with AI is a massive revenue opportunity for your MSP. Of course, it’s the thing that everyone’s talking about every day, but when it comes to actually using it, the ordinary business owners and managers that you service are a little uncertain.

They might be using it as a personal productivity tool, but how do they best roll it out in a way that benefits their entire business? My special guest right now has some answers about this, and how you can help people in a way that drives growth for your MSP.

So I’m Alex Bacon and I’m the founder of BrightKeel.AI.

And it’s so cool to have you on the show, Alex. We are going to be looking today at how do you scale your MSP with AI. And as you’re about to tell us in a second, you have a really, really good marketing background within MSPs, but it’s so good that you’re now taking your brain and looking at everything that an MSP can do to make themselves more efficient and grow faster using the AI tools that we are all coming to love and trust.

So tell us a little bit about your background. You’re based in the UK like myself. In fact, I’m surprised you and I have never run into each other before. I know we’ve both been, well, I’ve been in the channel 10 years and I think you’ve been around a little bit longer. So give us the brief version of your story. Where were you and what have you achieved there?

So I’ve worked in marketing for 20 odd years, most of that in MSPs. I was in one MSP for quite a long time and then that went through a merger and acquisition. And then more recently I was the marketing director at Cloud Direct. So I joined there as the only marketer quite a few years ago. I think I was there about eight years in total. And when I joined there are about 4 million of revenue and I left that earlier this year when they’re doing around 38 million. So quite a big growth journey there both in terms of the marketing and the business as a whole.

Yeah, I bet. And I bet you went from being the only person sitting at the marketing desk to then, it must have been weird the day you got another marketing person joining you and maybe even weirder when one day you got own office or your own section of the office. When you take an MSP from, I mean four millions in itself is pretty impressive, but to take it up to that kind of size, how does the marketing change and how do the decisions change as you’re on that journey?

It’s a really interesting question and a lot to cover. So I’ll try and touch on it fairly briefly, but when I look at that journey, the first year coincided with a couple of acquisitions. So we acquired a couple of smaller MSPs. So one of the first jobs there was integrating those into the business. And of course you’ve then got your upsell and your cross-sell opportunity and looking at more of that going into the existing customer base. And I know you talk a lot around the white space mapping. And so that was one of the things that we did at that point. And then as we scaled, it was really looking at having multiple channels of our lead generation. So what I mean by that was looking at partnerships and Microsoft was a big partner of ours, but also other partnerships and looking at that as one channel, looking into the customer base as another channel and then looking into new leads and new opportunities as the other channel.

And then as we scaled and I built out a team, we were able to do more and more and look beyond just doing point campaigns where initially we might say, okay, well we’ll run an event, but actually tying all those all together into holistic multi-touch campaigns. And that’s really what helped us scale and the success of those campaigns compound ultimately, and they’re amplified through partners, they’re amplified through our existing clients and getting them involved in the campaign, so getting them to help create the content, getting them to help to speak at events, for example. And also looking at trade bodies or marketing partners as well. So that’s a really good angle to go into. A particular industry is partner with someone who already knows that industry and someone who’s already in that industry and who already has the captured attention of the audience. And they’re typically then talking the language of that customer and they’re talking at the business level so you can then go in and support from a technology side of things. And a lot of that was through SMB. And then as we grew, we went into bigger and larger customers.

I can imagine. And I guess as you become a bigger entity and there’s a lot more revenue and a lot more resources, you have that luxury of being able to look at these bigger ideas, the partnerships, the events, and multi-touch point campaigns. And there’ll be thousands of MSPs listening to this on the podcast or watching this on YouTube who are thinking, well, I’d love to be there, I’d love to be doing all of that stuff. My advice is always actually start small, get the basics right first, put in place a marketing machine first, and then as you grow and as you get bigger and you have more resources, you can start to look at those things and as you said, you actually unlock bigger and more impressive clients as you’re doing that kind of stuff. So let’s stop looking backwards, let’s start looking forwards, so at some point last year you exited that business, you’re now here doing your own thing. Obviously AI play is a smart move for anyone starting a business last year or this year. What is it exactly that you’re now doing because you are not just working with MSPs on their marketing now?

No, so I’m still doing marketing consultancy and fractional CMO work, but BrightKeel.AI is all around adoption of AI for businesses. So we’re working with businesses to really help look at how they can start using AI, and that really looks at some workshops, which I’ll touch on in a minute because that’s  where we look to partner with MSPs, but audits and assessments to look at the opportunities for using AI and automation. And I use those terms interchangeably because actually a lot of it is automation rather than AI for their processes, and ultimately how businesses can scale without necessarily always adding on headcount to scale. And so that model that we engage with really has three areas. It’s that assessment and audit that I mentioned that helps create a roadmap. We then look at enablement, which looks at the workshops and the training side of things, and then we look at implementation and that’s where we partner with businesses to actually do the technology delivery.

That makes sense. And what are we like three, three something years, maybe a little bit more since ChatGPT went mainstream. Obviously it’s been there for many years, but most people weren’t aware of it. That was the point that AI became a thing, and obviously we know it’s got so much better, it’s got incrementally better almost monthly since then, and there’s been the explosion of all the other tools. Do you see still the marketplace out there, so the ordinary business owners and managers that MSPs want to reach, do you see that they are still dipping their toe or are they separated into a small percentage of power users and other people who are scared of it? Or actually is there a more widespread adoption? What are you kind of seeing at the moment?

Yeah, I mean it is a real mixture, obviously, whoever you speak to. What I’m tending to find is a lot of people are using it quite often in their personal life more than their business life. So they are familiar with the technology and you can’t get away from it in the news. So again, they’re aware of it and you tend to get maybe one or two who are heavy individual users. But as a business, a lot of them have not really embedded it, especially the SMBs I’m talking to. They haven’t really identified quite the role that it’s going to play. They haven’t necessarily got the confidence to use it day to day.

And again, I use that term kind of AI and automation interchangeably because that whilst it has been around for a long time, has kind of come to the forefront off the back of the AI conversation that businesses are now really looking at saying, well, we can’t just keep growing by adding more and more headcount, actually we need to look at the efficiencies that we’ve got. Have we got the right processes? Are they the most efficient way? But also those people that you have got, making sure that they’re doing the valuable work. So making sure they’re doing things like strategy and speaking to customers instead of doing the heavy lifting of admin tasks that we know can be automated now.

And for the MSPs that are looking after these people, what are the biggest opportunities for them right now? So what are you advising them? Is it consultative or is it literally pulling your sleeves up and getting in and actually building things and showing them how to use AI to automate processes and grow without more people?

I think there’s huge opportunity here for MSPs. I mean, the thing that excites me about this, is it’s a technology that your customers are actually interested in, and it’s probably the biggest opportunity that MSPs have got to merge those conversations between technology and business. And so the end customers are looking at this and saying, how is this going to transform my business? How do I operate my business? How does this align to my business goals, objective, strategy? They’re not looking at it necessarily from a technology angle, but it is a technology that they’re thinking about, and I think that is absolutely transformative. We’ve seen the wave of cloud, for example, but that was still a technology conversation that wasn’t really something that was being discussed particularly in the boardrooms or in terms of business strategy. And this is, so there’s a real opportunity here to combine those two things.

And really that’s what I’m doing is going in and having those consultative conversations, looking at talking about AI, but for non-techie people, aligning it to business strategy, aligning it to opportunities, and then there’s an opportunity for the MSPs to actually look at rolling up their sleeves and delivering on some of this. Because the reality is, whilst a lot of AI and automation is painted as being really easy, some of the GenAI stuff absolutely is, but some of the automation stuff and some of the stuff you go into Copilot, for example, the customer’s still never going to really get involved in that. That’s not what they’re in the business of. So there’s still a huge opportunity there for MSPs to come in and to work on that. Not to mention then the opportunities that it creates for other things such as your cyber security that you look around, that your data migrations, the data that you’re feeding into AI, your SharePoint, as well as anything to do with the automation and the agent building.

Yeah, absolutely. I guess we can look at it that the end customer, the business owner or manager, they were never interested in configuring their SharePoint. They just don’t want to do that, they want someone else to do it for them. Why would AI be any different? And even though AI, I guess, is an easier interface, as you say, when you start actually integrating things and putting things together, there are levels of complexity in that.

Alex, this has been absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for being with us. Now, I know that you actually have your own podcast, which is about this very own subject. So do you want to tell us three things? Number one, tell us about your podcast. Number two, tell us what you can do to help MSPs, and then finally, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Perfect. Yeah, so the podcast is Scaling with AI, so you can find that on Spotify or Apple Podcast wherever you are. How I can help MSPs is really bridging that gap between customers who are hearing about this in the news, they’re interested, but a bit scared and a bit curious, and the MSPs who have all of this capability to deliver on that. And really, I sit in the middle between helping the customers understand what is possible, get them thinking in the right way, get them starting to feel comfortable with this so that the MSPs can deliver on it. And how to get in touch with me, the website is brightkeel.ai, and I’m very active on LinkedIn, add me on LinkedIn or follow me on LinkedIn, Alex Bacon.

LinkedIn is the number one place for MSPs to build relationships with potential clients, and here’s how. Also this week, how your MSP can excite ANY prospect, and the Disney lesson your MSP mustn’t ignore.

Welcome to Episode 326 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

For MSPs, LinkedIn is the number one place to go farming, never hunting, but farming. Slow, steady, reliable relationship building with the exact people that you want to do business with. And that means adding new connections, ideally on a daily basis. Let me give you five super smart LinkedIn connection request messages that you can swipe and use today.

Farming on LinkedIn is about slow, steady, reliable relationship building with the exact people that you want to do business with. And the good news is that LinkedIn makes this incredibly easy, if you approach it the right way. Most MSPs massively underuse it. They log in every now and again, maybe post something, maybe like something, and then they wonder why nothing really changes. They get nothing out of LinkedIn. But the real power of LinkedIn is in building your network, your connections.

Think of every connection as a tiny little seed. The more relevant seeds you plant, the more opportunities grow later.

Your job is simply to show up every day and plant a few more seeds. So how do you do that? Very simply, you search for the people you most want to do business with -business owners, managers, decision makers, in your target verticals and your target geographical areas. If you serve financial firms, go and look for accountants/CPAs, financial planners. If you specialise in manufacturing, look for operations managers, plant managers, supply chain directors. If you are local only and you just want local businesses, search by your town or your region.

And then, here’s the system… you send 10 personalised connection requests every day. Not 50, not 100, just 10. Because consistency beats volume every time. Doing something small every day is always more powerful than doing something big every now and again. So make it part of your daily routine, same time each day, same process, no emotion attached, it’s just a system. In fact, you can get other people to do this for you, maybe a member of your staff or a virtual assistant.

Now let’s talk about the connection request messages, and again, here’s where a lot of MSPs go wrong. They send the same bland, boring copy and paste connection requests that screams, I’m going to pitch you something here. But we’re not pitching remember, we’re farming, we’re starting a relationship. And that’s why you want a set of smart, simple human sounding messages that you can just rotate your way through. Today I’m going to give you five of the best, and these are the same ones that I give to my MSP Marketing Edge members. So let’s go through them.

So those are your five messages. You can just use the same one because remember, everyone only sees them once or you could rotate them, use a different one each day. It doesn’t really matter. Just do what feels best to you. And remember, your job on LinkedIn is not to go out hunting and selling, it’s to farm. And you do that by planting connections, planting relationships and future opportunities. 10 connection requests a day, every day, makes it a system that’s going to grow plenty of future business for your MSP.

To win more new clients for your MSP, you must first understand what motivates your prospects. There’s a little bit about getting inside their heads and a lot more about getting inside their hearts. The more you can connect with their wants, needs and fears, the easier it’s going to be to persuade them that your MSP is the answer to all these things. Here’s exactly how to do that.

Every business owner or manager has two sides to be influenced when making big buying decisions. First, there’s the rational mind, which is the logical Vulcan part that looks at fact and figures. And then there’s the emotional mind, the human side that responds to feelings, fears, and hopes. And we all like to think that we make decisions rationally, but no, we really don’t.

When buying something that we don’t understand, and this of course is how ordinary business owners and managers buy managed services, the emotional mind makes the decision and then it passes that decision onto the rational mind for a stamp of approval. That means around 80% of your marketing needs to speak to their heart and not their head.

Help people feel that they know you, like you and trust you… and then give their brain just a little bit of evidence to prove that you are a safe choice.

So how to do this, well if you truly want to get inside your prospect’s hearts, you must go where they go and consume what they consume. Let’s say your ideal client is Dave, the accountant, a local CPA in your town. Read what Dave reads… his trade magazines, professional websites, his industry newsletters. You might not understand some of it, and in fact, if you’re reading accountancy magazines you may slip into a coma, but you’ll soon start spotting patterns – law changes, new tech or other pressures that matter to Dave.

And then go where Dave goes… maybe he attends networking events or professional meetups. Don’t go there to pitch though, go there to talk and listen. Notice what other accountants worry about. Is it deadlines, compliance changes, losing clients to cheaper firms, recruitment headaches, offshoring? These are all emotional hooks that really, really matter to these people. The more you immerse yourself in Dave’s world, the more you’ll understand what really drives him. And then you can weave all of that into your messaging and content.

Let’s take compliance changes, which are an easy topic for an MSP to leverage. If the fear of not being compliant is a big emotional driver for Dave, then a key part of your messaging must demonstrate that you understand that compliance affects him and you understand why he wants and needs to stay in line. And you know how to use technology to ensure he never makes a mistake. That’s the emotional side of compliance dealt with. And then you could just pull together a guide too, Easy Compliance for CPAs, and maybe get a video case study of an existing CPA client on your website. That then ticks the boxes for the cognitive side of things as well.

When Dave is looking for a new MSP, if he sees all of this in your marketing, this will transcend everything that all the other MSPs are saying, because it seems really, really, really relevant to him. While everyone else is talking about technology, you are talking about eliminating his fear, and you’re talking to his heart and to his brain. And I promise you, if the timing is right for Dave, that will get you a sales meeting.

Great marketing for your MSP isn’t about being clever and it’s definitely not about being technical. It’s about being human and connecting with your prospect’s emotions and giving their brain something to think about as well. So if you want more leads that engage better and convert into more sales meetings, stop focusing on what you want to say and start focusing on what they feel and how they think.

Featured guest: Vance Morris is a Former Birth Control Factory Security Guard turned Disney Leader, turned Bankrupt Out of Work Executive, turned Carpet Cleaner, turned Successful Entrepreneur. 

Vance helps business owners get, serve and keep clients for life through creating experiences and response required marketing.

Are there really customer service and operations lessons for your MSP from Walt Disney World? I believe so, and so does my special guest today. You see, Disney has completely systemised an amazing experience every time you visit one of its parks. No detail is left to chance, they have literally thought through everything in advance and then turned it into a system that their staff can implement stress free. Wouldn’t that be an amazing thing to do with your MSP’s customer service. My special guest is going to tell you right now exactly how you do this.

Hey everybody, my name is Vance Morris and I am a customer experience strategist and tactician, working with service-based businesses pretty much in most English speaking countries. So here I am.

Here you are, thank you so much for joining us Vance. And in particular, we want to talk about the things that you learned at a particular part of your career where you worked within Disney. Anyone who has ever spent time in any of the Disney parks, and I’ve spent at least 30 days of my life in Disney parks, in all of them actually, apart from Tokyo, that’s on the list, but we all know that they are a whole stepper, right? You go into a Disney park and the experience, and not just for what they’ve built, but particularly the experience with their people, compared to say a Universal or a SeaWorld or other similar things where they can buy the same rides or similar rides, but the people thing is on a completely different scale. So we want to explore how does Disney achieve that and particularly how can MSPs do that within their business. So I’ve kind of dipped into the start of your career there. Just tell us a little bit more about that career Vance. What have you been doing over the last 20, 30 years or so and how did you end up working with Disney on their leadership?

Certainly, great question. Actually, it was my second job in my lifetime, well second real job after college, and I had a very interesting application process. A buddy of mine from college was a recruiter for Disney, I got tired of living up north, I called him up and said, Hey, do you have anything for me? He said, Yes, come on down. And that was the extent of the interview process. Now I guarantee you they’re not doing that anymore, but I did spend the next 10 years working for “the Mouse” and primarily in hospitality, hotels, resorts, restaurants and things like that.

One of the first things I learned, and it wasn’t how to pick up trash or how to be nice to people or anything like that, it was that Disney runs on systems, processes and systems and they’ve got one for everything. You want to change a tyre on a bus… they got a system for it, you want to carry a tray in a restaurant… they got a system for it. And what I found is that if you follow the systems and you practice the systems, it actually gives you room in your head to do all of the nice things that Disney is known for. So it gives you some freedom so that you’re not focused on your actual job, you do the job by rote, I mean it’s muscle memory, you go through it, and now you have time to take pictures of families and do autographs and all of the little things that Disney is known for.

So I applied that in my businesses – I have three home service businesses here in the States in Maryland – and I took those systems, those customer experience systems, marketing systems, and plugged them into a carpet cleaning business and a mold remediation company, and I figured if it works in a carpet cleaning business it’ll work anywhere. And what it did for me as a business owner, is it gave me freedom from the business. So once I had all that implemented, fast forward to today, I’m spending about 90 minutes a week on those three businesses. I was able to hire general manager, he runs the day to day and I’m able to spend 60 minutes with him, 30 minutes on the banking, kissing babies, eating bon bons, that kind of thing, and away we go. But truly that first thing is systems and you have to systemise your business so that you have consistency in the experiences that you’re providing your customers.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So I guess by putting in place systems like that, and let’s just take it back to Disney because that’s obviously something that we’re all or most of us are aware of, so if you go and work for Disney in whatever job you do, and it’s completely systemised, I guess from an employer’s point of view, rather than taking away freedom from you, it actually shows you this is what success looks like. So you gave the example of changing the wheel on the bus, and we all know that changing the wheel on the bus isn’t really about changing the wheel, it’s about communicating to the people on the bus, communicating to the people who are waiting for the bus that isn’t going to arrive. I’m sure Disney doesn’t like breakdowns in its parks, it doesn’t ever want anyone to see behind the scenes. So how does the driver act, how does the mechanic act? It’s all of that kind of stuff. And obviously someone somewhere has thought that through.

I got this from, I read a book years ago, I bet you’ve read it… The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawando, I don’t know if you’ve come across that. It’s a great book and it’s a very similar thing. It’s set within the worlds of medicine and aviation and it talks about how checklists can help incredibly intelligent people – brain surgeons, airline pilots – take away all the small things that they have to think about so that they can actually focus on the things that you can’t plan and you can’t systemise. Like taking photos of families, or in their instances, stopping the plane from hitting the mountain, or saving someone from the brain thing or the heart thing or whatever. And one of the things I think it’s in that book or the E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, is where one of those authors talks about the fact that most business owners fear systems because we believe it’s going to take away our staff’s ability to think and to be creative. But I think you and I both agree that actually it’s the complete opposite.

Completely opposite. And if you’re not convinced about systems when you go to sell your company, you have anywhere between a one and a half and a two and a half multiple added on to the value of the company if you have documented systems in your business. Marketing systems, experience systems, accounting, whatever. The more documentation and systems you have in your business, the more valuable it is when it comes time to sell. So there’s an added benefit and reason why you want to have systems in the business.

And it doesn’t take away from the employees effectiveness and it doesn’t take away from their ability to ad-lib or work in a particular situation. They have that creativity, they have that freedom as long as the job’s getting done, you can react to the situation how the situation demands, but it’s the consistency. And I think that’s what Disney is also known for, that it consistently delivers an excellent product. And so there’s no swoops, ups and downs and Martha’s having a bad day today so all of Disney is in the toilet. And then oh, Martha’s happy today, it’s her birthday… no, systems equalises and delivers consistent service across the board.

Yeah, absolutely love that. So as you just said, you’ve got three businesses yourself, you run them in 90 minutes just kissing babies, eating bon bons, which sounds a bizarre thing to do as a business owner, but hey, whatever you go with that. So obviously you’ve come at that from having experienced 10 years of systems in Disney, goodness knows how many employees, there must be tens of, if not hundreds of thousands of employees across all those parks. So I can see how someone like you spending a decade in that goes to run a business that you’ve bought or started or however you got those businesses and it’s just a no brainer, Oh, well we’ll just run that on systems.

But you take the average MSP who perhaps has been running 4, 5, 6 years, might be listening to this or watching this on YouTube and where do you start? By the point, you’ve got 3, 4, 5 technicians, you’ve got some clients, there’s always a crisis, there’s always proactive work that’s not being done that should be done, every day there’s more tickets coming in than can be answered. When you are at that kind of point where you’re starting to lose control of the business that you started in the first place to get control. We all start a business to get control over what we do, who do it for and how we do it. And we all know that we gain that control when it’s just us, then we lose that control as we gain staff, that’s typically the experience. So where do you even start in a situation like that?

Yeah, it’s a great question. So it’s not a sexy answer, but what you have to do is map out your entire customer journey. So whatever the first point of contact with your business the customer has, whether it’s a website, a postcard, a phone call, whatever. That’s point number one. And then you map out every other point throughout the customer journey from the customer’s point of view, not from your point of view. So let’s say 0.1 is a phone call, great. And your next step would be to visit their place of business to do an estimate or see what they need to have done.

In between those two steps, the customer is doing something, the customer is waiting, so they’re waiting for you to come, they’re waiting for you to send something. What are you doing in that wait period that is going to help move the sale forward or create some kind of experience? Because let’s say they’re shopping around and they’ve called three MSPs to help them out. The one that does something between phone call and first appointment, 99% chance they are the winner because they’ve achieved what I call moment zero. And it’s that first seven seconds of okay, we’ve made the impact, we’ve got the customer.

And so you do that throughout the entire customer journey and then at each point you look and see, okay, how do we make this better? So say it’s answering the telephone, most places answer the phone, Thank you for calling Dave’s Insurance, how can I help you? It’s boring, it’s bland, it doesn’t stand out. So if you have a way to answer the phone that separates you from everybody else. Quick story… I had a insurance company, again very boring, bland business, but the insurance agent was a rock and roll fanatic, so he had Led Zeppelin and Who posters everywhere and autographed guitars, gold records in his office. He was true rock and roll nut. And so we’re doing the brainstorming on the customer journey with him and we realised that answering the phone was one of the key things. And also they wanted a way to sift, sort and screen out people that would not be a good client for them. So actually the receptionist came up with the way for the company to answer the phone. So as I mentioned, he’s a rock and roll guy, so she says, we’ll answer the phone like this. Thank you for calling Dave’s Insurance the agency that rocks. Now you say it 10 times, it’s a little goofy, but really nobody else owns that, you own that, right? So you can’t copy him. It’s certainly different, so it’s memorable, which is key. And it sifts sorts and screens out people that would otherwise not be a good fit for them.

And so just by answering the phone that way they’ve saved themselves time, they’re attracting the people that they want to do business with. People that are like, oh, okay, this sounds kind of like fun and it’s not the stick in the mud kind of people. And you just do that with every step of the customer journey. How do we make this particular point better? And then maybe six months, 12 months, 18 months later, you might come back to it and say, How do we make it better again?

Walt Disney had a term for this, it’s called “plussing”. He always wanted to plus the show, to make it better.

And so we have plussing teams that get together once every other month, look at areas that could have most bang for their buck, have the most impact on the customer or most impact on profitability and say, Okay, how do we make this better? How do we plus it? So you’re not just resting on, okay, I set the system and now it’s forget it. No, we’ve set the system and then you come back to it and you say, how do we get it going better?

Oh, I love that. And of course the beauty of plussing is, you can’t plus unless you’ve got a system in the first place, because if it’s not written down, answer the phone in this way, then you can’t go back and tweak that in time. I remember speaking to an MSP a couple of years ago, and he hired a dispatcher, and the dispatcher was obviously a non-tech whose job it was to answer the calls and empathise with the client. So whatever they were calling that, even if it was a minor thing like I can’t print, which obviously is the worst thing that anyone can ever say, I can’t print, so boring to hear that, but for that client in that moment, that’s the biggest problem they’ve got in their life. I cannot print and I need this print this afternoon. So whatever that problem was that dispatcher was like, I’m so sorry to hear that. That must be a real pain for you. Good news, we’re going to get you sorted out, regardless of what the problem was, Good news, I’m going to get you sorted out.

And I remember talking to that MSP and how he was going to get that phrase, because there’d be days when the dispatcher wasn’t there and he’s like, I’m going to get that phrase into every mouth. Anyone who ever speaks to a client about a new problem, I want them to say that, That’s so terrible. I’m so sorry. Good news, we’re going to get you sorted out. So it demonstrates empathy, but he didn’t have a system, so he was on a constant battle of trying to get his technicians to say this phrase, which she’d said naturally and it wasn’t. But you can see there, can’t you, if it’s a systemised thing, this is what we say to every new problem, and it doesn’t matter if they hear it from us twice a week for the next 3000 weeks, all they’re going to feel is empathy, they’re not going to hear the same words over and over again. I love that. So I love the concept of plussing, but you need the systems to do the plussing.

When you have a system, you now have something that you can measure your employees against as well. So it’s an employee review tool. So you’re not comparing Fred to Bill because that’s not fair to either one of them. You’re comparing Fred to the standards, you’re comparing Fred to the system and say, Hey, 80% of the time you’re doing it great, 20% of the time these are the points that you need to work on. So you’re no longer comparing employees to each other, you’re comparing employees to the standards in the systems that you’ve implemented.

Yeah, absolutely love that. And I will bet $5 that the single biggest defender in the business for not following the system is the business owner. Is that your experience?

Most of the time they are. They think, Oh, it doesn’t apply to me. And you’ve got to be congruent. I mean, you’ve got to have the ability to not just say, do what I say and not what I do. I mean, you’ll lose employees, you lose credibility, you lose authority. So when the system is in place, you got to do it.

Exactly. Well, those of us with kids know that the kids learn more from watching what you do than listening to what you actually say. And it’s no different at work. If you think of your team as your children in some respect, then that’s true. Vance, this has been fascinating, thank you so much. So tell us, what do you actually do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Sure. So the big thing that I work with is I will help you with the entire customer journey. And the one thing we really didn’t touch on that is extremely important, especially with MSPs, is customer retention. So you have to deliver a great experience in order to have any prayer of having customer retention. If you deliver average or bad service, your customers are not going to stick around. I also do a lot of retention strategies, both online and offline with companies so that they’re always, what have you done for me lately? Trying to stay top of mind. And people are like, Well, we’ve got the contract, we see them once a month or whatever, and I say, that may be true, but at the point they’re ready and somebody asks, Hey, who do you use? if it’s been a month since they’ve seen or heard from you, they may or may not remember you, because it is not your customer’s job to remember you. It’s your job to remind customer that you exist. And I think it’s something that many business owners, they miss that. And then as far as reaching out to me, certainly I’m on LinkedIn, I think I’m the only Vance Morris Disney guy there, and I do have a special hot sheet for everyone. So if you’re not feeling overly creative, I have something called 52 Ways to Wow your Customer without Breaking the Bank. And you can get that at wow52ways.com.

Delighting your clients is really important to retention, so it should be systemised in every single MSP. Also this week, AI prompts for MSPs to win new clients, and this is how MSPs lose revenue.

Welcome to Episode 325 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Insane retention for your MSP isn’t just about doing a great job for your clients, it’s also about making sure they feel really positive about you. Most MSPs have great retention by default. Sure, you’re looking after people properly, but you must also remember that for ordinary business owners and managers, switching MSPs is a distress activity.

In fact, the perception is that moving to another MSP is difficult and dangerous and that’s what keeps people with you. It’s called inertia loyalty. But relying on it is a really bad strategy. Instead, here’s how to systemise going the extra mile so that your clients don’t just respect what you do. They love it.

We’re really talking here about delighting your clients, but not in a haphazard way. One of the great things about owning your own business is having complete control over the experience of the customers, right? If you and I could clone ourselves, then we’d have the perfect businesses because everyone in our team would behave like us.

But the reality is that no business is like that. We need other humans and other humans behave in different ways. So unless we put in place systems and train our people on the systems and then coach them to follow those systems and thrive within them day in, day out, we get haphazard performance.

I think that customer service is absolutely one of those areas that could and should be systemised in every single MSP.

And by customer service, I mean going the extra mile, the stuff that genuinely makes clients think, wow, these tech people are different. Because when you do that consistently and not just occasionally, you create loyalty, referrals, and a reputation that’s almost impossible for your competitors to touch. So let’s get into 10 simple but practical ways that you can go the extra mile and more importantly, how to turn each one into a repeatable system inside your business.

Here’s the big idea here… none of these things are hard on their own and you probably wouldn’t do all of them, but you could pick out two or three and put them in place and turn them into a system so your technicians or your service desk manager can run them without you personally having to do them.

The real power here is when they happen consistently and automatically without ever depending on you remembering every detail. That’s how your MSP stands out. That’s how you build fans instead of just clients. And it’s how you create a reputation that makes the price you charge almost irrelevant because people have got such amazing things to say about you.

So your challenge for this week is simple. Pick out one, two or three of those 10 and just build a tiny system for it. One workflow, one reminder, one checklist. Start there. And of course, as I say, if you have an account manager or a service desk manager, get them to do this for you so that they own this process of systemising customer delight. And never forget when you stack these delight systems together, you become the MSP that clients rave about not just once, but forever.

Do you know exactly what kind of clients you want for your MSP, right down to what kind of business they are, how many staff they have, geographically where they’re based, and what kind of attitude they have towards technology?

We call this an ICP, an Ideal Client Profile. You take all of this information and you write it down so it guides all of your marketing. Well, good news. Here’s how you can use AI to make figuring out your ICP super easy.

Without an ICP, it really is difficult to do the rest of your marketing properly. You can’t create your unique sales proposition, your USP. You can’t get your website and your LinkedIn messaging right. You can’t align all of your marketing and make it super laser focused on exactly the clients you want, if you don’t know exactly who you’re targeting. I mean in that situation, how can you make your marketing relevant to someone if you don’t know who you are targeting?

At the risk of throwing acronyms at you then, do you have an ICP in your MSP? Because if your ICP is any business with up to like 200 staff that needs IT support, then I’m sorry but actually you have a problem. because that’s the marketing equivalent of saying that you’ll go on a date with anyone who has a pulse. And the reality is somewhat different, right? In fact, as someone who was single for a few years and did quite a lot of dating, the more you date, the more you form a clear vision about who you don’t want to date.

Sometimes forming a list of clients that you don’t want to work with is the easiest route to discovering who you do want to work with.

Your ICP needs to be specific, detailed, and hooked into their emotions more than their cognitive thought process. It’s not really just about size or sector. It’s about why these clients buy, what they fear, how they make decisions, and what kind of relationship they want with their technology partner, with you. And this is where your AI tool of choice can become your best brainstorming partner.

I believe that AI is most powerful and valuable when we use it as a research assistant. When we get it to question us on what we really think about things and really drill down into details. Unlike a human assistant, it never gets tired of going over the same thing again and again and again and again or looking at the same points from different angles to try to figure out the right answer.

My belief is that people who use AI for basic search are completely missing a trick. Its real power is augmenting our brains to help us reach unique conclusions that only we could have reached, but faster, and with better levels of detail. So here’s a simple three-step process that you can use to get your AI tool to help you form an ideal client profile.

Step one: Start with what you know, open your AI, and you might choose to put it into deep research mode if you’ve got that available, or maybe even switch on agent mode and give it the parameters that it can operate within. There are pros and cons to each of these, and of course these things change over time, but the best thing to do is to experiment. You want your AI to be able to spend time thinking and figuring out what it thinks is the right answer for you, rather than rushing towards the first answer.

And then you brief it on the kind of business that you run and what you’re trying to achieve. And it may know this already, but it’s always worth just running over it with the AI. So you might say something like, Hey there, I’ve got a challenge for you, (because AI likes it when it’s given a challenge, when it’s given a mission), you are a marketing strategist for a managed service provider that works with small to medium sized businesses. Help me define my ideal client profile. Are you up for that challenge?

And then you’d feed it a few details about your existing clients. So perhaps you’d tell it the ones that you love working with and why you love working with them. You’d tell it the ones that drain you, that suck the energy out of you and why they’re not a good fit. You’d tell it the industries that you have most experience in, any local focus or specialisation. And all of this gives the AI some context. You might even choose to give it actual URLs, website addresses of your favourite and your non favourite clients, and then ask it to go and visit their websites to research them and form a better understanding of who they are and what they do. You’re using it to get patterns. If it can spot patterns in why you like all of these clients and why you don’t like these clients, why you want more of these and what they have in common. Let the AI do the pattern searching for you.

Step two: Let it ask you smart questions. So a good prompt here is, Ask me 15 detailed questions to help define my ideal client profile for my MSP. And here are the kinds of questions you would hope to get. And if your AI isn’t going in the right direction, then feed it this list of sample questions and tell it this is what you want it to ask you:

And then you take your time to answer each of these questions properly. Now, personally, I favour ChatGPT. So I’m not quite sure if this exists on other AI tools, but on ChatGPT, you can put it into like a voice mode where you’re just having a two-way conversation with it. And depending on your ability to multitask, this is something you can actually do while you are driving somewhere, although it goes without saying that you should always drive safely.

Step three: Build your ideal client profile. Once you’ve fed your answers back, you can ask your AI tool, So based on my answers, help me create a detailed ICP for my MSP, including demographics, firmographics, psychographics. (I’m going to explain what those are in a second), pain points, buying triggers and the decision process.

So firmographics are like demographics, but for businesses, they describe things like a company’s size, industry, location, how it’s set up, stuff like that. And psychographics, describe what people care about, their interests, values, opinions and lifestyle… what makes them tick. You can then take the output and ask your AI to shape it into something useful for you. Now, for most MSPs, this is something that’s no more than a couple of paragraphs long, but with quite a few bullet points in there, it needs to be very easy to read, something you can just print off and just put it onto your wall. So it’s just there for you to look at anytime you’re doing any kind of marketing and you need to just check, is this being targeted at the people I most want to reach?

So you might ask your AI tool to rewrite it so it can be understood by a 12 year old or something like that. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The easier you make something to understand, the more likely it is to be used by you and your colleagues and everyone within the business. Perhaps even the information contained within a super simple graphic that you can use to educate everyone within your business. Or you might be looking for something more detailed because you do want an in-depth document to debate with your senior leadership team. I mean, that preference is all down to you, but either way, however you do this, it’s an essential start to taking your marketing seriously. Figure out who you want to sell to, and it’s going to be so much easier to go and get them.

Featured guest: Laith Pahlawan is a technology leader and entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience bridging IT infrastructure, business strategy, and AI innovation. His career spans hands-on systems engineering to founding and scaling technology-driven companies that help organisations operate smarter and faster.

As the CEO and Founder of Bloom, Laith leads the development of an AI-powered business intelligence platform that transforms how organisations access and use their internal knowledge. Bloom connects to systems like email, CRM, accounting, and VoIP to provide instant insights, performance evaluations, and client summaries — effectively serving as a company’s single source of truth. Laith’s work focuses on designing intelligent tools that empower executives to make faster, data-driven decisions.

This feels like a glimpse into the near future, because I’ve found an MSP who’s got an AI at the heart of his business with access to all of its data, helping him to make big decisions. This is the kind of thing we can imagine every business doing in the future, but this guy’s doing it right now in 2026. And yes, of course he’s addressed all of the fears that you currently have in your mind about allowing an AI to access client data, tickets, financial data, and info about your staff. Let’s explore with him how he got started with this, why he does it, and how it’s helping him to accelerate growth in his business.

Hi, my name is Laith Pahlawan. I am an MSP owner in Southern California that is very interested in innovation and expansion.

And it’s so cool to have you on the podcast, Laith. So we are going to talk today about some favourite subjects of MSPs really, which is AI automation and having a more efficient business without having to spend a great deal more money. And I know that’s something that you are particularly passionate about. Now, let’s be honest, we all know all MSPs are constantly trying new things, especially automations. Click, click, click, just automated that brilliant, that’s a job we don’t have to do, and it’s so tempting as well to go in and play with AI. So we thought we’d get you on because I know that you are constantly trying new experiments and looking at ways that you can be more efficient in your business. So I thought it would just be fun just exploring that with you. So first of all, just tell us a bit about your MSP. So you’re based in Southern California. Give us an idea what kind of size you are, how many technicians you’ve got, what kind of clients you work with.

Well, we started this in 2002 and it was just myself and grew slowly and to a point where it started to look like a business, not just a one man shop, and then the economy cracked in 2010. After that, I had to reinvent myself. So I started to look beyond just here, started to look at hiring people abroad to do some of the menial work and some of the purchasing. And that strategy helped, I ended up partnering with a couple of companies and with them we were able to grow a little bit. The partners went away. And then just having clients that grew with me, helped really grow this business to a $2.5 million company. And with that, of course, with the success, with the AI starting to become more popular, I was able to put some money in investment into developing something that would help my business and AI.

That’s such a cool story. And I guess you’ve got to a point now where when you’re doing a roundabout two and a half mil that you are able to be the R&D department of the business. So I guess you’ve got service desk manager and enough competent people to go and look after the clients and grow the business. And are you just having fun now? Just automating everything?

It is fun, definitely fun, but also looking for ways to also serve my clients. So what I’ve developed some kind of a platform. First of all, I just acquired a new company that does global dispatching, so that’s going to help me get more of a global footprint, definitely national, where really most success is in the United States. And on top of all of this, I have that AI solution, which I think will help a lot of my clients, small clients, increase efficiency, and I also think is going to give you the future of how people do business anywhere in the world.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So give us an idea of what you’re building then some of the things that you’re putting together and how it’ll help your clients.

Okay, let me tell you how it started. Started. When I first learned about AI, I thought this is amazing. I was like, imagine if my data was all in AI and I could run AI on my stuff. At the same time this happened, I had a person with me after 10 years get pregnant and she left. And when she left, a lot of knowledge went away with her. So that kind of sparked the idea. So I started working with a group of people from the Netherlands to input all my tickets, all my emails, all my phone calls, connect to QuickBooks and connect to my SharePoint, my Teams, and connect everything, put it all into one centralised database, collect some more data on it at some of the AI metadata, like the sentiment and the summaries, and whether it’s marketing, whether it’s operations, and then use that information to look for ways to manage my business and to manage my clients. So I started a draft, but now we’ve been developing now for two years and we have a pretty solid platform right now with a lot of features that is really benefiting our business to be honest with you.

That’s really cool. So I’m going to ask you about those features in a second and some of the things you’ve been able to achieve, but I first of all must address the most obvious elephant in the room, and I know there’ll be thousands of MSPs listening to this or watching it on YouTube at this point, folding their arms going, oh, hang on. So you’ve put all your data inside an AI, what rails have you put up? What are you doing to guard the data and stop that from leaking out, I guess?

Well, obviously we’re not putting it on a server here in the garage. It’s with AWS, which is a SOC 2 compliant. We have all the proper cyber security, so all the proper security implemented on the databases on the connection on two-factor. I mean, that’s just like all your emails on your servers are on the net, now this is going to be another way. Also, the data we’re getting, we’re not necessarily getting the data and inputting it raw. We’re just making it into vectors and processing it, just getting the juice out of it basically. And then we don’t really need all the raw data in there, just what makes sense out of it basically.

So give us some of the wins, some of the things you’ve been able to achieve with this.

Well definitely, I’ll give you an example one, we are a Microsoft Company, all of our clients are Microsoft, usually mostly what we do is Microsoft, and that’s where we put all our focus on. But every once in a while we get a client that’s asking us to do things that are specific to Macs for example, or Linux or something. So I do not have marketing material that is specific to that, but when I go to my Bloom, bloomchat.ai, when I go in there and I look, I create a company profile, emphasise all the work we’ve done with Linux, emphasise all the work we’ve done with MacBooks, it’ll give me a bunch of white papers and gives me all the things that we’ve done in the last, let’s say three months or six months. And that kind of creates a customised package that I can send to the client immediately without having to spend three, four days creating that package. And they get the impression right away that, Hey, these guys can actually work with the Macs. And because of that, I’ve been able to close a few deals because of that. Also, with WIFI, depending on locations.

I can customise my marketing material specifically to a client without having to go through all the creation, it’s all done within one prompt on my PC.

So essentially what you’re doing is you’re taking all the data that’s sitting within the business in every area, and you are putting it all into one place, but obviously the AI is constantly reading it, matching things up, and it’s almost like a human, a very intelligent, never stopping human, but it’s across all of just your company data.

Correct. And the other thing is because the data is being ingested in different times, I can also do comparison. How is the performance of this client today versus three months ago? Have they increased in the tickets? And this is all done because it’s reading the data, also even evaluation of employees. I can ask things like, what is Johnny working on? And it’ll find me all the tickets, all the phone calls he’s done, whatever he’s done in Teams, and give me that result. So I have an idea without having to… this is one of the things that this solved as well, by the way, during COVID when a lot of people started working from home, people are asking us to put monitoring software on each person’s laptop. I don’t know if you’ve been on this other end where the IT guy is, but it is the creepiest thing to do in the world to go and snoop somebody and oh, where are they looking at? Because you have all this access now. So this gives you the ability to know what people are doing and manage them without having to be Peeping Tom basically.

I absolutely love that. So have you created this, is this a completely bespoke solution to your MSP or have you sort of taken something off the shelf and then just adapted it to an MSP’s needs?

No, no. This is all us. We just have a database and we vectorise the data. So when we can search it and use the metadata, of course there’s a lot of technology that goes in there to create queries and pull ingest data and add some intelligence to the data. But this is all done within our platform. Of course, this is not our own AI, we are using Gemini and we can use multiple models to do the reasoning, but it goes through several processes. When you type a prompt, it goes in there and determines the best place to get the data from. It pulls the data and now it takes it and puts it into a more intelligent model, let’s say a GPT 5 or Gemini 2.5 this way to actually do the reasoning from it. And not just this, by the way, we also show you when we get a result, we show you the sources of where everything came from that you can access directly. So you have some kind of validation. And like I said, because it’s timestamp as well, you can do things where you can find out progression of things. So it’s a little bit different way of using AI, not just to look for data, but also look at patterns and progression and evaluations and things like that.

Let’s be honest, since we saw AI really bloom a couple of years ago and start to become the thing that we’ve got today, all of us at one point have thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could have a custom GPT with all of my business data in there, which is essentially what you’ve created but with those guardrails, which is pretty cool. Let me ask you an open question, the next step for you is that about the AI spotting things before you need to think to ask those things. So for example, if it spots that a client’s heading out the door because of certain behaviours or if it spots that a technician, perhaps their efficiency is off, when I say efficiency, I don’t mean, as you say, cracking the whip and making sure everyone’s at a hundred percent, but if an AI will probably notice if someone’s got trouble at home through their work faster than a human would, and wouldn’t you want the heads up on that to be able to go and have a chat with someone and say, Hey, Dave, is everything all right? So is that the next step for you or do you have even bigger plans?

Yeah, well, I’ll give you an example of how this works right now. If I go and say, have we had any interactions with negative sentiment in the last, let’s say 30 days? So it’ll find, of course there are sometimes calls where people are, I’ve called about this four times and I’ve done this seven times. But also the AI will determine and say, Hey, you know what? These guys have had this problem six times in the last 30 days, this is a high risk, you should attend to this. And it gives you an action that you need to do. I’m not saying that I wrote this logic, it is just what’s out of the box, but feeding the data into it and having that timestamp on the data is helping actually determine if something is a high risk or low risk. And even I can tell it to evaluate my relationship with a specific lines or when was the last time we talked to Alex from A, B, C company?

And I’ll say, Hey, you know what? It’s been six months since you had a call with Alex or anybody in the company. This is not, by the way, this is not just my data. This is all the company, the entire tenant, the entire Microsoft tenant. So I know what everybody in the company is doing, and like I said, without having to be a creep kind of thing. And it gives me actual information that I can use to strengthen my relationship and with the clients and with my employees to make sure I don’t miss out. Nothing gets me from left field where I thought everything was great.

Also, the other thing I can do is, for example, there’s one of the things I can do here is create a report. Every day I say, I’m the CEO of Orange Crew, tell me what I should focus on today with personnel, with clients, with problems there. And I have a bit of a management report, Hey, today do this, this, this… you haven’t looked at this email in a few days… and I can actually follow it. If I was disciplined enough, I would follow it.

Yeah, exactly. You still haven’t got enough time to follow up on that. Maybe the next step, of course is the agentic AI that will actually go and do that stuff for you and take half those actions away from you. Well, that’s to be the next step I think. So thank you so much Laith for explaining what you’ve done there. I’m not a tech, I don’t own an MSP, I’m not a technical person, and you’ve explained that brilliantly, and I want that. I want that for my own business. And I’m sure that many MSPs could develop, will go and develop their own thing. I think, let’s be honest, 15 years down the line, all businesses are going to have some kind of AI sat at the heart of it, powering it. But I know one of the reasons you came on the podcast today was you are interested in having some other MSPs test that out, so you can try that in different circumstances. So tell us a little bit about that and what’s the best way to get in touch with you.

Yeah, actually my initial, when I first started this, one of the things I can tell you about MSPs, we have a very hard time getting new income and getting new clients. So one of the things I was thinking, this is something that’s really good for us to use as MSPs, but also a lot of our clients that are small clients, and if you’re a small business owner, you’re a bit of a control freak to be honest with you. So having something like that, that gives you an idea of what’s going on, deploying it at the client space, digital deployment is done within, honestly, guys, you got to be up and running within 20 minutes. All you need is administrative password to email, and you can now look at everybody’s email and have it all ingested into our platform.

So this is something that MSPs can use to manage their clients, but also they can sell to their clients because you’re managing, they’re not just MSP, you’re managing information as well. Managed Information Services, MIS. Okay, this is not like a specific application. This is more like a general generative AI, so it’s going to have the same hallucinations like that. But I can tell you for sure if you want to do something, this will take you 85 to 90% of the way to completion as opposed to starting from scratch. So whatever that took you 10 hours before now will take you maybe an hour and a half or two hours maximum.

So this is where it’s been really useful for us and the couple of people that we’ve tested with. But again, still it’s something that’s been working for us. We are getting a lot of juice out of it. And if we’re looking for people to hopefully adopt the same thing and if they can see the vision and can help towards the vision and deploy it at a few places where we can get more feedback, that would be very beneficial for us. And hopefully it’ll take off.

Cool. So what’s the best way to get in touch with you and sort of stick your hand up and say, I’m going to have a go at this.

Honestly, the best way to go is just bloomchat.ai, and we’d love to talk to you.

Hey there, it’s Jennifer Bleam with MSP Sales Revolution. Today’s quick win… update your LinkedIn or Facebook headline to show that you are AI aware. Businesses are curious about AI and this is your opportunity to position your company as an AI thought leader. Here are a couple of options just to get the ideas flowing:

Why bother? Because when a prospect looks you up, they decide in about three seconds whether or not to reach out to you. Adding AI to your headline signals relevance, authority, and it’s a great differentiator. 60 seconds, one edit, and you position yourself as the go-to AI advisor who understands both security and the future. So go make it happen.

If you want more hot leads for your MSP, put a price estimator on your website. Marcus Sheridan is here to tell you why this works. Also this week, change your life (and MSP) with this daily habit, and why email is the #1 MSP marketing tool.

Welcome to Episode 324 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

If you want more hot leads for your MSP, put a price estimator on your website. For some reason, this is one of the most controversial things in the channel, with many MSPs saying it’s impossible to give an idea of pricing before you’ve spoken to a prospect. And yet, prospects don’t want to talk to you in order to get a price. What to do? Well, I’ve got marketing expert and bestselling author, Marcus Sheridan, here right now to give you what I believe is the definitive word on this.

I like to think of myself as a bit of a marketing sponge. I read almost every single business and marketing book that I can get my hands on, actually, I listen to them more these days, but I’m also constantly reviewing different ideas and different ways of doing things to keep my mental model of the best way to market your MSP fully up to date. And there was something that I added to this model years back when I read a book called They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Have you read this?

One of the big ideas in the book is the idea of transparent pricing. Marcus in that book talked extensively about radical price transparency, which means that you talk very openly about your price. You explain what drives the cost up and down, you discuss cheap versus expensive options, and you compare yourself to alternatives.

You’re just trying to help people who want to buy from you, who want to switch MSPs, you’re trying to help them to understand value.

And then Marcus released a book called Endless Customers last year, which was a reinvention of They Ask You Answer and kind of updated for the AI age. And he took the idea of radical price transparency and took it even further by suggesting that you put a price estimator onto your website. What’s a price estimator? It’s a tool for someone to get a rough idea of how much it costs to be a client of your MSP.

This to me was so obvious that I actually negotiated a partnership with Marcus Sheridan and his business partner, Steve Auchettl, and we launched MSP Price Guide at the backend of last year. It’s an AI-driven price estimator tool that you can put onto your website and we’ve done all the hard work for you. So we’ve built templates, we’ve added in all the standard managed services, all of that kind of stuff. So you can just start your 30 day free trial and get an estimator onto your website within 10, 20 minutes or so. You can see that at msppriceguide.com.

Anyway, I asked Marcus to pull together something to show you why all of this is so critical and so applicable to MSPs. Take it away, Marcus.

Hello MSP community, Marcus Sheridan here. Let’s have an honest conversation about whether or not you should be considering a pricing estimator for your website. First thing that we have to understand is that 75% of all buyers today say they would prefer to have what’s known as a seller-free sales experience. In other words, we don’t hate salespeople as buyers, we just don’t want to talk to them until we are good and ready. And that was a B2B study by Gartner, by the way. And I think you would agree with that. We don’t want to talk to sales until we’re confident, comfortable, and we feel like we’re not going to make a mistake. The answer to that is give the buyer more control through what is known as self-service.

Self-service are interactive tools mainly on your website that allow a visitor to take an action or get an answer that previously they would have had to have done by speaking with a human. Now, what’s so great about this is it drives a tremendous amount of trust and it also drives a tremendous amount of conversions. We know that the number one question the business has when they’re looking at potentially hiring an MSP, they are saying to themselves, All right, I need to outsource this. We can’t do it anymore in- house. Let’s find a provider for this. Whatever it is, first question, you know what it is – Roughly, how much is this going to cost? Or as they would ask you if you talk to them on the phone – Could you give me a sense as to what we’re looking at here?

This is the fundamental question that everyone has when they start the buyer journey, and it is the gateway to the buyer’s journey. If they can’t get any type of answer for this, oftentimes they’ll stop at that point, but if they do get an answer, they can continue and they’ll vet you further. They’ll stay on your website longer, and then eventually they’ll watch maybe some of those videos and finally fill out that form that says, Hey, I would like to talk to a salesperson. This is how you behave, this is how I behave, and the reality is your customers are no different. So we have to address the gateway question to making a purchase, which is roughly how much does it cost. You will increase on average a 300% lift in conversions on your website if you as an MSP have a pricing estimator on your homepage that says the phrase Get instant estimate, keyword is instant. Get instant estimate.

What you have to understand is what you’re not doing here is you’re not actually giving a quote. There’s a difference between an estimate and a quote. The quote comes after they speak to you and then you give them the quote. I can tell you right now that over 90% of the industry, as you well know, doesn’t address pricing on their website. Many of them sadly have a pricing tab in their navigation bar. And then when you go to that tab, there’s a form that the person can fill out essentially saying call for quote. It’s like someone has walked into the bar, which is your website. They sat down next to you and you immediately said, Would you like to go home with me? I mean, that’s not how it works. That’s not what you should say in that moment. There has to be a process by which you earn their trust and they say, You know what, I think this is the type of company that I would potentially like to do business with.

When someone adds an estimator to their website, they don’t take it off. Did you know the average SaaS product, software as a service, has a churn rate of 30 – 50%. What we have seen with this tool, we have a churn rate of 0.7%. Why is that? Because lo and behold, when someone puts a pricing estimator on their website, they get way more leads and your quality of sales conversations go up. So there isn’t shock at all, there isn’t big surprise when you’re having these conversations. So not only are you having more sales conversations, but they’re better sales conversations, which means you close more deals.

But there’s another benefit to this because long term you’re planting a lot more seeds. So because you’re going to get 300 – 500% more leads, you’re going to build your database. And as you build your database, you can remarket those leads. And as you remarket those leads, even if they’re not ready today, as they continue to experience pain, which we all know because of where technology is going, people are going to experience more and more pain in the future and they’re going to need to outsource these services where they’re going to be thinking about you because you’re going to be front of mind.

And that’s the idea and that’s the circle of life and that’s the power of business. That’s the power too of MSP Price Guide. It is my hope that you say, You know what, just because the industry isn’t doing this, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. In fact, because they’re not doing it, maybe we should be doing it. That’s my challenge to you. Run in the opposite direction. Give the buyer what the buyer wants. Follow the golden rule. Put a pricing estimator on your website and use it often. Watch what happens with your leads. Test it. Test it. You will immediately see the impact that it has. Obviously, it’s contingent on the traffic that you get, but again, you’re going to see 300 – 500% on average increase in leads. Hopefully that was helpful to you. If you have any questions, reach out, and give the price guide a try today.

What if there was a daily habit, which if you adopted it, would change your MSP forever?

It would allow you to do everything you need to do to win new clients, get those clients to buy more from you and get those clients to spend more.

And of course, in changing your business in this way, you change your life.

You could potentially spend more time with the people you love doing the things you enjoy and less time doing work you don’t enjoy. You fancy that?

One of the best business habits I’ve ever adopted is working on my business for 90 minutes every weekday. And I’ve been doing this for about 20 years now.

And I’d say in fact, it’s one of my secret weapons because no matter what happens in my workday, so long as I’ve completed my 90 minutes working on the business, I can guarantee I’ll get things done. Now, when I tell MSPs about this, I’m often hit with a series of common questions. So let me answer them for you right now. The first is…

Why do you do this, Paul? Well, because like you, I’m a busy business owner with big dreams and big goals, and I know how easily your day can be lost to a problem or just life. When I started my first business back in 2005, I spent the first 90 minutes of every weekday working on the business. And apart from a short break over lockdown, six years ago now, I’ve kept that habit going for the last two decades.

Paul, how do you find and protect 90 minutes every day? That’s another question I get. Well, you can take a kind of sci-fi approach to this as you need to find and protect two things, time and space. Time to get this important work done and space or a place to do it. Now, these two have changed a lot for me over the years, but currently I get up at 6am, and I work on the business till 7:30am.

Don’t laugh. I actually do this in bed. My alarm goes off at 6am, I grab my laptop, I adjust my pillows so I can sit upright and I get working. And yes, I know that creates a kind of weird vision for you. In fact, in years gone by, I’ve done it in my home office or I’ve gone out to an external office space. I did that when my daughter was very young and sometimes disruptive. Other places that other MSPs do this are local coffee shops, restaurants or hotels, basically anywhere where you won’t be interrupted. Now this question leads onto another question…

Paul, you get up at 6am every day. Are you mad? Well, maybe. When I first started this habit in 2005, I actually got up at 5 in the morning every single workday and worked for 90 minutes. And the reason I did that was because in my previous employed existence when I had a job, I’d been a radio presenter and I used to get up at 4 every morning to do the breakfast show. That was a 10 year habit for me, so getting up at 5 in the morning kind of felt a bit like a lie in. From a practical point of view, the reason that I now get up at 6 in the morning are numerous…

It’s a time of the day where people don’t normally work. No one’s really expecting to get an email reply from you at 6 in the morning. In fact, they’re not even really expecting to get hold of you on email, on Slack or Teams or on the phone. It’s kind of a dead time. So I’ve turned that dead time into productive time. The payoff for this is by the time my working day starts about 9am, I’ve already done the most important tasks of the day, and that makes me feel great every single weekday.

Now, MSPs do sometimes struggle to do this early in the morning, but then they find they can protect time over lunch or in the afternoon. Or for some, it’s the evenings. In fact, I do know MSPs that do this in the very early hours of the morning. The specific time that you do this doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you pick a time you can repeat every single day. If you’re moving it around the calendar, it’s really hard to make sure you do it. The same time every day works best. Now, this leads on to a question of…

Paul, how do you keep this habit going? And actually, I’ve just given you the answer because it happens at the same time every day. You’ve probably read the same stuff that I have about how you have to repeat something multiple times to turn it into a habit. If you try and move your 90 minutes around the clock, it’s going to be really hard to fix it as a habit. The same time, every day is simple and it’s beautiful and I promise you it works. Now, the next question I get is…

Paul, what kind of work do you do? Well, the answer to that is anything that’s working on the business rather than in the business. So typically these are tasks that fall into one of three categories, things that win new clients, things that get those clients to buy more and things that get those clients to spend more. Almost every other task is working in the business. Now sometimes I then get the question…

Paul, could I just do 60 minutes rather than 90 minutes? And the answer is yes, you could, but you’ll find that you get almost twice the amount of work done in 90 minutes compared to 60 minutes. Why? Because it takes time to kind of build up a bit of momentum to get started and then get going. And I often find that I’m in a full flow of work by the end of the first 60 minutes. So working that extra 30 minutes just gives you a huge boost in output. And because you’re already in the flow, you really do achieve more in that final 30 minutes than you do in the first 60 minutes. I promise you, that’s how it goes most days, which leads onto a question…

Okay, Paul, could I do this as one day a week rather than doing it in small chunks every day? And you could, but I promise you you won’t get anywhere near the results you’ll get by doing a little bit of time every day. On the surface, dedicating a day a week to working on the business kind of seems like a really good idea. But in reality, by the time you get to that day and most people pick Fridays, it’ll be interrupted by all sorts of stuff from all the other days that you haven’t yet got done. The beautiful thing about doing 90 minutes every day is that even if you do have an unusual day where you lose that time, it doesn’t matter. You just get back into the habit the next day. Whereas if you’ve put it all into one day a week, such as Friday and you lose that Friday to a client emergency or something else, you’ve lost the whole week. Next question then…

How do I get started? And how about you commit to just doing this every day starting, I don’t know, like tomorrow, maybe next week, next Monday? Just do it as an experiment. You’re going to try it for a week. If at the end it works, then keep doing it. If it really doesn’t work for you, just dump it. So don’t think of this as something you’ve got to lock in for yourself. Just think of it as a trial. And how about you give yourself a reward every day that you do this? We all respond differently to different rewards. For me, the thought of a Snickers is pretty much enough to get me to do almost anything.

Now, interestingly, I just calculated that in the 20 years of doing this, I’ve worked on my business for 7,200 hours, which is more than 300 days. That’s kind of getting near a year, a year of solid work just working on my business. If I’d known that going into it 20 years ago, maybe it would’ve put me off because that does seem like an enormous amount of time and work. But of course, I’ve done this in tiny little inconsequential 90 minute chunks and the last 20 years has gone really quickly, but I’ve also achieved some pretty cool things along the way, all thanks to those 90 minutes. So are you going to try this?

Featured guest: Perry Sheraw is a marketing automation expert with over 20 years of experience turning chaotic email strategies into high-converting customer journeys. A former print journalist turned C-suite executive, Perry launched her first email campaign in 2002 and never looked back. She has since led marketing strategy for both Fortune 500 companies and scaling startups, with deep specialisation in email, SMS, CRM alignment, and marketing tech.

Now the Managing Partner of Duma Marketing, LLC, Perry helps e-commerce and med device brands eliminate communication gaps and unlock consistent revenue through personalised automation. She’s a certified Shopify and Klaviyo Partner, HubSpot Partner, and has worked extensively in highly regulated industries including HIPAA-compliant marketing.

One of the most important marketing channels any MSP can use is email marketing. Even though it’s pretty much the oldest digital channel, email marketing works in 2026. It’s a very reliable way to build an audience, grow a relationship with that audience, and then find out who the most active prospects are. But don’t take my word for it. I’ve lined up a true email marketing expert to tell you how you can make email perform better for your MSP.

Hi, I’m Perry Sheraw. I’m the owner and CEO of Duma Marketing, and I am an email marketing expert. I’ve been working in email marketing since the beginning of the 2000s, and looking forward to talking with you today.

And not as much as I’m looking forward to diving into email, because despite email having been invented in 1876, it is still a very, very valid marketing channel for MSPs today. And on this podcast and in my YouTube videos, I’m always saying to MSPs, Look, you need to work on your LinkedIn, but that’s a borrowed audience, someone else owns that, Microsoft owns that. Your second audience you need to work on is your email list because that’s an owned audience, that data’s always going to be yours and you have to do both those things.

So we’re going to do quite a rapid fire interview today. We’re going to look at how you can build your email list. We’re going to look at email list hygiene, which I know is a massive thing. We’re going to talk about the platforms that you think are hot right now and the ones that MSP should be using. We’ll look at automation as well, and we’ll talk about what you do to help MSPs. That’s a lot to do in 15 minutes, but I know that we can do it. So just give us a potted history of your history as it were. So give us the 10 second overview of how you came to be in this position as one of the leaders in email marketing.

Well, I started years ago with a mergers and acquisitions firm after my early career in print journalism. And so came to it as a writer, ultimately worked my way up into the C-suite of a mergers and acquisitions firm where I managed information technology and marketing. And so I was the executive vice president of those. And I pretty much Frankensteined a CRM that could coordinate with outbound email marketing and started to really delve into database marketing back in the day.

I love it. And of course, the tools today are so much better than the tools were back then. So I’ve been doing email marketing pretty much about 20 years. And I started off with something that was once called Infusionsoft is now called Keap. We migrated away from that last year in 2025, and we migrated over to HubSpot, which I know that you’re a gold partner of HubSpot. And we’ll talk about how beautiful, but expensive HubSpot is later in the interview.

So let’s start at the beginning, which is building an email list. So the average MSP that I speak to, they’ve kind of got a CRM, but they’re not really using it. They’ve kind of got some people in there. It’s a mix of clients and a few leads and prospects. They’re not doing a lot of segmenting and there’s no strategy. There’s no specific focus on building the email list. But where would you recommend, in a situation like that, where it’s a mature business, you’ve been going five plus years, you haven’t really ever got started with it, what would you say is the right way to get started and start to systematically build an email list?

Well, I mean, you definitely need to ensure you have a form on your website. You also, if you’re doing things like attending trade shows, anything that you’re doing where you could possibly be capturing email lists, make sure that you’re capturing them. If you’re doing any kind of advertising and you’re driving them to just an empty page without a form, rethink that and add the form, whether it’s a popup form or just a first name email form on the website. Ideally, you’re going to get a little bit more than that on the form, but starting with first name and email is a great place to begin.

Yeah, absolutely. And as you and I know, as users of HubSpot, when you’re using an advanced tool like HubSpot, you’ve got data enrichment plugins such as the HubSpot one is called Breeze. So we’ve migrated in the last year and found to our delight, we only need a business email address now and Breeze will go and enrich that and discover everything else that’s out there in various databases, which completely changes the game. Because as we all know, the more fields you ask people to fill in, the less likely they are to fill in the form. So we just get an email address now and Breeze, in most situations, it does the rest.

On the subject of getting people to fill in forms, you go back 10 years, it was really easy. You used to offer a PDF guide and people would fill it in and that’s it. And obviously that does work today. It probably works more in consumer marketing than B2B marketing, but it’s very hard. And especially for MSPs, whose subject matter is very technical and ordinary people don’t really care. So outside of PDF guides, what other kind of lead magnets are you seeing that are working well right now? And just to define what a lead magnet is for everyone listening or watching, it’s something that someone wants so they’re willing to fill in the form to get.

Absolutely. And free consultations still seem to rule the day when it comes to B2B form conversion. So you definitely want to continue to offer those, keep the forms short. Remember that you can use Breeze or you can even use just progressive profile building as you work people through the customer journey. One thing to keep in mind is that there are some ways to be helpful with PDF downloads, whether they’re a checklist for a remote worker user setup or some other things that maybe aren’t exactly germane to something that you would provide to your client, but they could help them in the same realm. They’re relevant and helpful. Just stay relevant and helpful and those are the lead magnets that are succeeding.

Yeah, I love that. And in fact, there’s something that we’ve been working on with an MSP just to trial it recently and it was a quiz to build your perfect work from home setup. And they go through like a quiz. We use tally.so, but you could use Typeform for this. And then at the end it generates a personalised PDF, which it’s the same PDF obviously because there is one great at home setup, but that’s getting so much more engagement than just having that download on its own. So I agree with you, being creative with the way that we’re looking at how do we deliver the information is the right way to do it.

So once you’ve got that email list and you start building it, and as you and I know, it’s a never ending job. You can never stop building your email list because people unsubscribe and leave that list almost as fast as you’re adding them. We talked about very briefly earlier about email hygiene. Can you explain what that is and why that’s so important?

Email hygiene is making sure you have a healthy list that wants to receive your emails. Maybe they don’t want to act on your emails every time but they want to receive the types of information that you’re sending to them.

And if they don’t, then ideally they unsubscribe. And a lot of people in email are afraid of unsubscribes. Unsubscribes are just another way to keep things healthy. The other important thing about email hygiene is occasionally running sunset automations, so you can actually remove people who just are non-responsive. I know there are still studies out there that show that even though the longevity of people retaining email addresses is improving, at one point, they were saying that people might create a new email address every six months. Of course, that’s not a business concern for the most part, but people do move businesses and you want to stay with them as long as possible, but you also don’t want those types of unanswered, unengaged email addresses, dragging down your list and sender reputation.

Yeah, I completely agree. And a lot of the MSPs I’ve been working with in the MSP Marketing Edge just recently, I’ve been recommending that they focus on getting more people to reply to those emails. So if they send a broadcast email out from their CRM, it’s like anything to hit reply, let me know you got this, hit reply with your question because obviously every reply that comes in, it’s sending a message, it’s sending a positive signal to the email client, it’s sending it to your CRM. And also it’s great for engagement because let’s be honest, the ultimate goal of emailing is not just engagement and getting in their inbox. We want to find out who’s nearly ready to talk, who’s entering the research phase of switching MSPs. So I love this, this is great advice.

Let’s talk about the tools. So we’ve mentioned HubSpot, we’ve mentioned Keap. Obviously those are the luxury end of the CRM market. I found out today that Salesforce, which has always traditionally been an enterprise solution, is now targeting small businesses. So we can now throw Salesforce in there, they have a small business package. I’m sure they’re going to end up being as expensive as HubSpot. And even for them, that’s going to be cheap, right? Because Salesforce is a $50-60,000 plus a year investment and small businesses won’t spend that. But then at the other end of the market, we’ve got, well, I suppose we’ve got ActiveCampaign in the middle, at the bottom of the market, you’ve got Mailchimp, MailerLite. We can throw HighLevel in there. I mean, there’s probably a thousand other CRMs that we haven’t mentioned. Well, what’s your recommended CRM and what are sort of the big factors to think about when you’re picking a CRM?

Yeah. Over the years, I have leaned toward either HubSpot for folks where it’s the appropriate budget. I was actually a beta user of HubSpot back in 2002 and I’ve grown with it and I really enjoy it. It offers a lot of the great things that Salesforce has always been able to do, but they make it much more intuitive than Salesforce usually. When it comes to kind of smaller budgets, I usually recommend ActiveCampaign. It has served many, many clients well and it’s scaled with them as their budget has grown even. We’ve been able to use their robust automation interface. I mean, at one point, I had a 150 store retail establishment where I was able to build out individual flows for each of the stores and layer in so much complexity there, but take it all the way back down to just trying to maintain communication with prospects and ActiveCampaign or HubSpot have been kind of my go- tos.

Okay. So that is so cool. So you were actually a beta tester on HubSpot and how was that 23 years ago, right? I remember reading a book about HubSpot called, I think it was called Disrupted, and it was one of the early employees, and it was like a warts and all expose of the culture of HubSpot. And if you ever read that, you’d think, “Yeah, this company’s not going anywhere.” And obviously it hasn’t done any damage at all because HubSpot is an amazing company and an amazing tool as well.

So let’s talk finally about automation. A lot of the CRMs we were just talking about do have automation. I know ActiveCampaign is very good for automation at its price level. Obviously HubSpot is insanely good. HighLevel is very good as well. Would you say that you’re kind of hobbling yourself if you don’t get a platform that allows you to do some serious automation, and especially for MSPs who obviously are very good at automating absolutely everything and integrating everything?

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like, especially for MSPs, your audience is expecting you to be cutting edge and they’re expecting you to perform in very many similar ways as they’re receiving from marketing in the consumer space. That is something that study after study has recently shown that B2B marketing has to evolve to mirror more of the consumer type marketing that people are used to receiving because this is just becoming a form of communication, you need to speak the language. And as an MSP, you really I believe, should be providing them the same types of responses to forms, the same types of prospecting communication that they’re used to receiving from other types of companies.

Yeah, I 100% agree. It’s so funny when an MSP says to me, But I want my marketing to be more professional. I want it to be more polished and more business-like. And it’s like, but the business people you’re reaching here are going home and they’re consumers and they’re watching YouTube and watching Netflix and they’re reading consumer emails. And I completely agree. You can be polished and professional, but we all have a very high standard of marketing that we’re used to in our consumer inboxes, as it were, in our social media marketing and the B2B marketing has to catch up with that. Perry, I could talk for literally hours with you about email marketing. Unfortunately, we don’t have the time to do that right now. So just tell us a little bit what you actually do. What do you do to help MSPs with their email and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Yeah. What we do is we start out with a discovery. We really try and learn your tone, your voice. As you said, the polished professional kinds of messaging that you might want to send to your audience. And then we dig in. And if you don’t already have a CRM, we help you build that. I usually analyse around 30 different CRMs each year and update based on the functionality that they’ve added on. And of course there’s usually a handful of new ones, so I test those out. And so I’ll help you identify the CRM that works best for you and the email marketing functionality that you require. Then we help develop things like a welcome series, abandon inquiries, try and save some of those folks who have landed on your site through advertising or other means and maybe not taking action. I help you identify ways to keep your list clean and then ultimately your overall sender reputation healthy.

The best way to get in touch with me is to visit my website, Dumacx.com. And you can visit that site and check out the form that’s available there, learn more about our business. There’s also a phone number that you can use on that website to reach out to me.

What’s up everybody, Justin here from the Virtua Consulting Group. When was the last time you took a look at your website? The amount of MSP websites I see that have old information, bad graphics, copyright dates that are way off from what they are today. Seriously, go look at your website today and make sure it looks good because that is the first thing people are going to see and you want to start off on the right foot.

Law firms are a vertical that can be incredibly profitable for MSPs. If you want more lawyers as clients for your MSP, here’s everything you need to know. Also this week, why MSPs are working so hard, and how MSPs are losing revenue.

Welcome to Episode 323 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

If you want more lawyers as clients for your MSP, here’s everything you need to know. Let’s talk about what lawyers look for in a new MSP, why they would switch, and what kind of marketing is going to grab their attention and convince them to talk to you.

So law firms are a vertical that can be incredibly profitable for MSPs. And I know that sometimes lawyers can be difficult people to deal with, but if you’re confident in your service and you know that you want more professional firms that put technology at the heart of everything they do, let’s get more lawyers. In fact, I believe they’re one of the easiest verticals to market to when you know what they care about. And spoiler alert, it’s not Windows 11 and Copilot.

Law firms buy IT differently from most other businesses. And the reason for this is simple. Everything they do revolves around risk.

Their risk, their client’s risk, the risk of regulators breathing down their necks, and the risk of missing a deadline because Outlook decided today was a fun day not to work properly. So if you want to win lawyers, you don’t sell IT support, you sell risk reduction and professional reputation protection.

Let’s talk about their biggest pain points. So first is compliance and confidentiality. Lawyers live in a world where one email sent to the wrong person can cause a catastrophe. So talk to them about secure communication systems, email encryption, MFA everywhere, data loss prevention, and of course audit trails. Second, billable time. Every minute a lawyer can’t work is literally money disappearing. So your message here is simple. We keep your fee earners earning. And then third, case management and workflow tools. Many firms still use clunky old systems or they haven’t fully adopted cloud tools yet. So show them how better tech can make caseloads smoother, faster, and more profitable.

If you want your MSP to stand out, you need to stop sounding like an IT company and start sounding like someone who understands legal practices. Use their terminology – fee earners, case files, discovery, retainers, compliance obligations, client confidentiality – all words like that. Because when they hear their own world reflected back at them by a potential IT partner, they immediately think, “Ah, yeah, this one understands us.”

You do need some specialised proof. Law firms don’t buy from generalists, they buy from specialists. So create a case study with a local legal firm, a landing page dedicated to IT for law firms with a short guide called something like, The seven biggest cyber risks facing law firms in 2026. And then just get a few testimonial quotes from partners or office managers. You don’t need dozens, one or two strong quotes will carry huge weight.

And here’s a little marketing trick. Law firms love audit. I mean audits is basically their favourite word. So offer them something like a free 20-minute legal IT risk assessment saying something like, Is your firm compliant with your regulators cyber guidance? Find out. And this positions you as a safety first expert rather than just another IT fixer.

Another smart tactic is to pick a sub niche. So don’t just market to all law firms, pick a slice. It could be family law or conveyancers or criminal defence or corporate commercial, maybe personal injury. Each of them has slightly different pressures and workflows, and the more specific you’re messaging, the more magnetic it becomes.

Finally, turn up to where lawyers are already gathering because you want to be in their world. So local law societies, legal breakfasts, CPD events, partner level networking groups, maybe conveyancing or legal tech conferences, lawyer of the year, dinner sponsorships. I mean, you could even do print newsletters for legal practices. We give a great printed newsletter every month to the members of our MSP Marketing Edge, and this is a great usage example for that. Basically, if you show up where they are, you instantly stand out because most MSPs never, ever bother to do this and certainly not within a specific vertical.

Lawyers are one of the most stable, recession-proof, time-sensitive verticals out there. And when you get one lawyer, you’ll get two, three, or four referrals because the legal community is very tightly knit. So remember, talk about risk, talk about reputation, talk about billable hours and position yourself as the specialist who understands the legal world better than any other MSP they’ve ever met. Do this and you won’t just get one law firm, you’ll become the IT provider for legal practices across your area.

MSPs, why are you working so hard? That’s a serious question because I know that you work so many hours and you barely take any vacations or holidays. And I know that you’re not scared of hard work to build your business. But have you remembered why you’re doing this, why you started the business in the first place? That’s the question I want to ask you right now. What’s your why?

But first, let’s return to why are you still working so hard? Why are you working 60 hour weeks to run and grow your MSP? Because you’re not just doing it for fun, right? I know that after about 50 hours of work in a week, it really does stop being fun. And I know that you’re not doing this to make yourself rich because there are very few MSPs motivated by having a yacht. Yeah, it would be nice, but none of us really are motivated by that.

What is it that actually drives you? Why do you do this, week after week? Do you know or are you caught in the trap of working hard just because you’ve always worked hard?

Let me share a little bit of my backstory to see if it’s anything like yours. So I started my first business 21 years ago after finishing a 13 year career as a journalist and a radio presenter. And at first, I didn’t mind the 80 hour weeks to get the business going and I really was working 80 hours a week on average. But as I added staff and as I fought for every little bit of revenue, I began to resent working so hard all the time for so little personal income. Does this sound familiar?

Everything changed with the birth of Samm, my only child. She’s now 15, she’s going to be 16 later this year. But back in 2010 when she was born, I quickly realised that I was trapped in my business and I couldn’t keep working at that pace while also being a present partner and present parent. So I made a decision. I was going to get good at marketing to get the business to give me the lifestyle I wanted. And of course, it didn’t happen overnight. I just found 90 minutes every day to start learning and experimenting.

My goal was an easy system to generate leads, qualify them as prospects, and get them into a sales meeting. My marketing got better and better, and I reinvented the business, turning it from being a struggling PR firm into a successful healthcare marketing agency. And actually I built that up and eventually sold it in 2016, which is when I entered the channel and started working with MSPs.

So back to today. Today I have a great work-life balance, but that’s by design. I work around 30 hours a week, which keeps me challenged, involved in my business, and able to drive growth. But I also spend plenty of time with Samm and with my partner. So my why is to spend plenty of quality time with the people that I love doing the things that we all enjoy doing. And that’s why I work every day. And of course I do it for fun and for the challenge as well. But the real driving factor for me is to give me a specific lifestyle.

I want to make sure that Samm can do all the things that she wants to do as she gets closer to being an adult and entering professional training. I have the time and cash now to do some serious travelling when that happens, when she’s a bit more independent, but I can also continue to be a present partner and a present parent every single day. I mean, that’s really important to me. It’s a core value right inside me. So let me ask you again. Having reflected on all of that, what’s your why?

Featured guest: Kim Simmonds is a dual-qualified lawyer in the US and UK and the founder of Cloud Contracts 365 and Law 365. With a passion for simplifying legal complexities and driving innovation, Kim has built a career at the intersection of law and technology. Through Cloud Contracts 365, she has developed a cutting-edge SaaS platform that enables technology businesses to manage their contracts effortlessly, offering AI-powered tools for contract creation, risk analysis, and management. At Law 365, Kim leads a team of legal experts dedicated to providing tailored legal services that help businesses grow with confidence.

I wonder if you have the problem of leaky revenue in your MSP. This is the money your business should be earning, but it isn’t because it’s quietly slipping away through avoidable gaps. For an MSP, leaky revenue usually shows up in places like unbilled work, perhaps engineers doing quick favours that never make it onto an invoice, scope creep in fixed fee contracts, under price services that haven’t been reviewed in years, and missed renewals for licenses, support, or security tools.

My special guest today is an expert at spotting everywhere that your business is losing money and making sure you stop every leak.

My name is Kim Simmonds. I’m the CEO and founder of Cloud Contracts 365.

And it’s so lovely to have you on the show, Kim. Now, you are obviously a lawyer based in the UK, but I know that you’re going to give us plenty of advice today that MSPs all over the world can use. So it’s not going to be specific legal advice, but it is going to be talking about how MSPs can stop something called leaky revenue. What is leaky revenue? You and I are going to dive into that in a couple of seconds.

Let’s just, first of all, find out a little bit about you. So have you always worked as a lawyer within tech or is this something you’ve only been in recent years?

Yeah. So for my sins, I have only worked in tech pretty much the longevity of my career as a lawyer. I say that, it’s been an absolute fantastic journey. So I’ve been a lawyer for over 20 years. 15 years has been dedicated to the MSP community, the MSSP community. So I know this community like the back of my hand, safe to say.

That’s awesome. That’s great. In fact, you know this community better than I do because I’ve only ratcheted up nine years. It’s almost like a comparison thing here. Who’s done the most number of years? Maybe it’s kind of like being an MSP jail or something like that. So the kind of work you do with MSPs, it is around this concept, I know you do lots of different things, but a lot of it is around this concept of “leaky revenue”. This was a term that you actually introduced me to, and I thought it was such a cool term. When we talk about leaky revenue, what do you mean by that?

Yeah, it’s such a great question, Paul. So as a lawyer, I’m always looking at the contracts that these MSPs have in place for their customers. And ultimately, as a lawyer, we have to always think about how are we going to protect the business? And when you’re thinking about protecting the businesses, not just looking at things like data protection and liability, these are really important things in a contract, but it’s looking at the everyday issues that MSPs face and how can you mitigate their risk. So looking at that, what are the everyday kind of leaks as I put them in their revenue? And it’s really interesting because when you start to look at it from that side and not just the legal side, but the commercial side, the lawyers actually can do a fantastic job at making sure those contracts are far more watertight than sort of generic templates out there.

So are we talking about loopholes that allow clients to walk away from contracts or can you sort of dive more into where the revenue would leak out through a bad contract?

Yeah, absolutely. So it spans across multiple things. Let’s look at things like the term. A lot of MSPs they come to me and they say, No, we’re used to doing 30 day rolling terms, right? And I’m like, Okay, but how does that coordinate when you’re selling NCE licensing? Because you’re going to have to commit them and you have to provide support with their licensing. So if they can then leave your services, but you have to keep them onto the licensing, how’s that going to reflect in your contracts? But also from a valuation point of view, if you’ve got a 30 day rolling terms, already that’s revenue, sort of that’s valuation out of the business because someone who wants to go and buy or take over the business later on wants to have a more steady income stream. So that’s number one.

Looking at the termination rights, let’s say some MSPs are willing to do the 12 month minimum term with automatic renewals, that’s great, but have you paid attention to when you’re giving them the clients the right to terminate that contract? It shouldn’t be 90 days at any time. It should be 90 days, for example, to terminate at the end of the term or the renewal term.

So it’s looking at terms, it’s looking at termination rights, it’s looking at price increases as well, because this happens all the time, especially on a renewal.

MSPs, firstly, they don’t pay attention to renewals. So our tool actually helps them to pay attention to the renewals. It reminds them when they’re coming up, but on top of that, they can then do a price increase. I have so many MSPs who come to me and say, I’ve had a customer for 10 years who’s never had a price increase. And I’ve just swallowed up the profitability of that. I’ve taken the hit myself. And I’m like, why would you do that? Well, we haven’t bothered to put the right terms in the contracts. I don’t want to rock the boat. You absolutely have to rock the boat.

These are not the customers you need to keep on and your contracts have got to show your way of doing things. So price increases such as RPI or CPI, being able to give third party increases at any point that that third party increases to you, and of course then getting consent if you’re increasing above RPI, but always having that inflationary rate in your contracts, you don’t have to get consent, you just lift up the price every year. So there’s a lot more, by the way Paul, I just don’t want to keep on talking, but I love this subject so much.

No, absolutely. Please keep talking, Kim, because one of the many interesting things that you talked about there was price increases. And you and I, I’m sure both know MSPs, some of whom are on top of price increases and do them every year religiously. But it was really interesting for me to hear about the MSPs that don’t do price increases religiously, and therefore they are losing out on that profitability. So tell us some of the other ways that you can lose revenue out of your MSP without realising it.

Yeah, that’s a great question, Paul, thank you so much. In other senses, price increase is one thing. NCE terms, they neglect to put the right NCE terms, which is committing the client to that 12 monthly term. That’s something that happens quite often, and so there’s no contract right to keep them in. There’s another thing here that’s really important, and it’s a bit of a sensitive one. It’s around the termination suspension of the services right. Here’s why.

Often you’ll get a client who’s missed a payment, or they’re about to miss a payment, or they’ve been bad payers all the way through. And the accounts team kind of know it, but there isn’t really a contract term to support an MSP to say, Hey guys, you know what? This is getting too much now. We need to suspend the services. We need to terminate the services. This is too much for us now. And the problem is this, if it’s found that that particular customer goes insolvent, what the MSP is not understanding is that they are considered in the central supply of services under the Insolvency Act here in the UK, which means they can’t turn them off at the point of insolvency, but they can turn them off before they are aware of the Insolvency Act.

I cannot tell you this past year, how many people have been subjected to insolvent businesses is terrible right now. And this is them having to take the hit of those licenses themselves and have to pay their distributor or Microsoft if they’re going direct because their distributor doesn’t care. They’re committed to 12 months, they have to pay for those licenses. So it’s really things like that. You’ve got to get that right in your contracts, but also in your processes.

I mean, that sounds like a nightmare scenario, having to pay for licenses on the behalf of a customer that isn’t even paying you anymore. But let’s broaden this back out to all MSPs around the world. Do you typically see when you’re working with MSPs that at the point they get serious about contract and getting all the legal terms and all of that right, that’s the point that really rapid growth happens within the business because they’re just sort of taking away the winging it approach, they’re making it up as we go a long approach and they’re getting serious about every aspect of their business. Is that what you see?

Absolutely. When MSPs understand that their operational excellence includes fantastic contracts that protect the business, that’s when they start to see the growth trajectory, 100%. Because they have cottoned on to a few things. Number one, the client base that they have and the type of clients that they need, and that’s really important. And when they start to professionalise like that, when they start to, and I hate to use the word, but grow up a little bit in that sense, they’re realising that the people that they’re now selling into are far more operationally aware of business than what they’re used to. And when their clients are needing that operational excellence from them, having poor contracts to put in front of the customer is like losing one of your three halos.

I call this the halo effect, the losing the halo effect. I don’t know if you know about this, Paul, but typically people have three halos when they start a new relationship with a customer. And if you lose three halos, so three things that you do wrong, that’s when people start to really question whether they’ve got the right supplier in place. Why lose your halo on poor contracts when you probably need to save that halo for poor delivery if something like that happens or a missed P1 ticket? Save it for those things that really matter in your business and get the basics right.

I love that. And no, I hadn’t heard of that three halos concept before, but that’s an idea I’m going to pinch. So thank you very much for that. Kim, you’ve been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much. Just tell us a little bit about what you do to help MSPs. You mentioned earlier that you have a tool. So tell us about that tool and what’s the best way to get in touch with you.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Paul. And yeah, that three halo, I absolutely love it. I do a lot of customer journey workshops with my MSPs to kind of teach them how to get the client on board and onboarded really smoothly with great contracts and processes. So it’s a good one to use for sure.

My tool is called Cloud Contracts 365. It’s designed just for MSPs and allows MSPs to go and create those fit for purpose templates. It’s got all the things that I just mentioned, NCE, all the termination rights, everything to protect their business. It’s a lot cheaper than going to a law firm and to lawyers, and they can create it. They can also review contracts. So if they’ve got vendor contracts, they can review. There’s an AI tool in the platform that will basically show them what legal risk there is and what to do about it.

And they can manage the contracts, e-signatures through to automatic renewal reminders. And we have an integration to Halo PSA as well. So really helps them to kind of manage the quotation to contract link as well there. So my address is www.cloudcontracts365.com. And my email is [email protected].

Hey, this is Brian Gillette from the FeelGood MSP, and here is my marketing idea. You should go and pull the transcripts or call recordings of your last 10 sales presentations. If you’re using an AI tool this should be very simple. What you’re going to do is you’re going to use the AI tool or your transcript to find every objection that your prospects listed, whatever reasons that they might not want to hire an MSP or concerns about hiring an MSP, whether or not you won that deal.

Make a bulleted list of them and then you’re going to start writing a weekly blog post where the title of the blog post includes that objection, but reversing it. For example, if the objection was, “Well, we’re worried about losing control by outsourcing IT instead of having it in- house.” You might have a blog post that says, “Why having an outsourced IT company will give you way more control than an employee.”

Just go through that list. You can use AI to help you support it, or you can even use those talk tracks from the transcripts of how you handle it in the sales call, and that’s going to make your marketing much more visceral, much more relevant to your audience.

Let’s explore whether giving away something for free is a good marketing tactic for your MSP. Also this week, why you must put your personality in your MSP’s marketing, and the MSP that grew from $0 to $36m in 12 years.

Welcome to Episode 322 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Free. It’s a big, shiny word that always draws the attention of MSPs. No matter how much cash you’ve got, free is always an appealing proposition because if something’s free, there’s zero risk, right? So here’s a question, can you use giving away something free as a marketing tactic for your MSP? And more to the point, if you can, should you? Or does it risk devaluing what you do for people?

Giving away something for free is one of the oldest playbooks in marketing. I mean, right back in the 19th century, Coca Cola was giving away free samples to promote itself. In fact, that was one of the ways that that brand became so dominant across the US. Free has always been a magic word, hasn’t it? It grabs attention, it lowers barriers, and it makes people feel like they’re getting something for nothing.

In the world of B2B, and especially for MSPs, is free still a smart tactic? Or does it actually make people value you less?

Before we decide, let’s be clear on something. Free doesn’t automatically mean bad. There are good kinds of free, and there are bad kinds as well. So let’s start with the good ones. When you offer free value, say a helpful guide, a webinar, a checklist, or even a 15 minute consultation, that’s a smart kind of free. It gives potential clients a taste of what you’re like to work with. They see your expertise, your communication style, and the way that you think, and that builds trust. People buy from people they trust, and small, risk-free experiences like that are a great way to earn it.

But then there’s the other kind of free, the kind that feels desperate, like giving away months of support, doing unpaid audits, or fixing little things just to prove yourself. And that’s where free starts to devalue what you do. Because if you make it seem like your time, your skill, and your expertise aren’t worth paying for, why would anyone believe that they are? And here’s the tough truth. Once someone sees you as the free guy, it’s very hard to change that perception later. You’ve anchored your value at zero.

So how do you walk that line? How do you use free strategically without shooting yourself in the foot? Here’s the test that I like to use. If it gives value but doesn’t cost you much time or money, then it’s “good free”. But if it costs you significant effort or replaces something you should be charging for, it’s “bad free”. So a downloadable guide that explains how to protect a business from phishing attacks, great free. But a two-hour deep dive audit of someone’s network, that’s not free, that’s a service. No pay, no play.

Here’s one more thing to keep in mind. In 2026, attention is the new currency. So giving something away for free can be a brilliant marketing exchange as long as it earns you attention or trust. Thank you very much for those. But if it earns you nothing but extra work and frustration, it’s not marketing, it’s martyrdom. So is free still a good marketing tactic for an MSP? Yes, it is, but only when it’s intentional, limited, and built to lead somewhere valuable.

Don’t give your time away, give away your thinking. That’s what positions you as the local IT expert and gets local business owners saying, wow, if this is what this person gives away for free, imagine what I get if I paid for it.

Have you ever wondered what it’s like being an ordinary business owner or manager searching for a new MSP? The channel has made it much harder than it needs to be for them to research the available providers and pick the right IT support business for them. And that’s because of a massive error that many MSPs are making with their marketing. Let’s explore what that error is, whether or not you’re making it and how you can fix it to give yourself an unfair advantage.

So just for a few moments, put yourself inside the brain of an ordinary business owner or manager in your town. Let’s say you’ve had this MSP that’s looked after you for a number of years, but just lately you’ve kind of had this feeling deep inside that things just aren’t as good as they used to be. The service levels seem to have gone down. Things just seem to take longer to get fixed and the prices have kind of crept up at the same time. And you’re not desperately unhappy, but you do feel as though maybe you’ve outgrown your IT support company or maybe even they’ve outgrown you. And so perhaps it’s time for change at the end of your current contract.

This by the way, is how real business owners and managers feel. It’s not like they wake up one morning and they suddenly decide, right, I’m going to switch over from A MSP to B MSP. It’s kind of a gradual feeling that comes in and often it’s their perception. It can’t always be based on reality or isn’t always based on reality. It is sometimes just a perception and a feeling. You lose the client slowly over a number of years without you realising it. That’s why you have to have regular meetings with your clients.

Anyway, that was a side note. Let’s go back to you being that ordinary business owner or manager. You’ve decided it’s time for a change, and so you enter the research phase and you start to look at who else could help you. Now let’s assume you’re doing this the old fashioned way. So you’re not asking AI to do the research for you, but instead you start by Googling, IT support in your town, and people still do this. Just because you and I are using AI to do the research, a majority of people today are actually still just Googling it. I do think that’s going to shift over time, but let’s just go with this.

So they Google it and the results just bring up, of course, website after website, after website of the same. And as an ordinary business owner or manager, your heart sinks because you don’t know a great deal about IT support. you know roughly what IT support is, roughly what these MSPs do, and you have a vague idea of how they do it, but you don’t really care about the ins and outs of technical stuff.

Your clients just want someone they feel they can trust who’s going to look after their staff, watch their back, and just help their business to grow.

And when you’re looking at all of these websites and they all have very similar images and the words are all very much the same and the branding is all very much the same, it feels really difficult to pick out someone from lots and lots of the same. And then you stumble across a website that’s really different from all the rest. So this MSP doesn’t have those same tired stock images. It doesn’t have the same impersonal text. Its website is packed with personality and specifically it’s the personality of the owner. And as you look through the pages of this MSP’s website, you see photos, you see videos, you see stories about this person, their staff, their family, their clients, and their life. And in fact, what you don’t see is a lot of talk about technology, but you do see their live calendar and you book yourself in a 15 minute video call with that person, with the owner of the business who you’ve just been reading about and watching videos about. And this seems like a really smart move.

Okay, story over… right now as an MSP, as we stand here in early 2026, you have a massive opportunity. Because I see very, very few MSPs put their authentic personality into their marketing. Instead, most just look at what other MSPs are doing. They look at what their competitors are doing and for their own website, they do a version of their competitor’s website. Sometimes it’s not even a conscious choice to do that. You do that because it feels safe. If everyone’s doing this, then you should do this. And that kind of behaviour is built into us. It’s what drives social proof like reviews and testimonials, but it doesn’t work in marketing.

In marketing, you have to do something different to what everyone else is doing. And maybe in the years ahead, that kind of mentality of just copy your competitors will change. But as things stand today, you have a unique opportunity to stand out in your marketplace by being different. And the easiest way to be different is to base your marketing around you. Now, this is what I’ve done with the MSP Marketing Edge, and it’s working very well for me. I’m not a narcissist. I’m not an attention seeker. I’m actually an extroverted introvert. I much prefer being on my own, working on my own, sitting in a quiet room. I don’t get energy from big crowds of people. Big crowds of people suck energy out of me. That’s why I know that I’m an extroverted introvert.

But I understand the power of using your authentic personality as a differentiation tool, because of course the MSP Marketing Edge has competitors, but no one has me. No one else can be me or compete with me. That’s why I’m the face of the business and everything about my business has me at every single touchpoint because no one else can ever touch that. Could you do this? Should you do this? Absolutely you should.

What’s the very first thing for you to do? It’s to look at your website and say, how can I put me into that website? In fact, go and have a look at my site, mspmarketingedge.com. You’ll see photos, you’ll see videos. You go on the About Us page, you’ll see my story. There’s a picture of my dad on there. There’s a picture of my child on there. I tell you about my life and what I do. All of this has been done slowly over time. But the more of me I put into my marketing, the more benefit I get back. The more that MSPs feel like they know me, therefore they can like me, they can trust me.

You can do exactly the same. So look at your website, ask yourself what’s something small that I could get started with. Could you put a photo of you onto your website? Could you have a video of you on your homepage? Could you just do a bit of videoing with you and your staff, maybe even a couple of clients, put that on the website? Could you interview your clients? Could you tell more of your story? Could we see a photo of you with your family, with your team in the local area? All of these things and more can help to put you and your authentic personality onto your website. Which of these things is the right thing for you to get started with?

Featured guest: Ephraim Ebstein is not just another cyber security guy, he’s a $30M entrepreneur who built two national companies from the ground up, and now helps business leaders turn tech headaches into growth engines.

Ephraim brings real-world stories, explanations, and tactical advice that’s perfect for business-minded audiences. From stopping multi-million-dollar data breaches to deploying Al employees that actually replace headcount (and boost revenue), he breaks down complex systems in a way listeners can use today.

Tell me, why did you start your MSP? Were you trying to get control over the work you do, who you do it for and how it’s done? Were you just looking for freedom where you could generate lots of time and cash to enjoy a certain lifestyle? Or were you looking to build something massive, a true business that’s going to continue thriving long after you walk away from it? Well, if it’s that one, you’re going to love my special guest today. In just 12 years, he’s built a business, an MSP from nothing up to $36 million in annual revenue. And in this interview, he’s going to reveal what he did, how he did it, and what he would do if he was in your situation today.

Hi, my name is Ephraim Epstein. I’m the CEO of FIT Solutions, and we’re based in San Diego and Chicago.

Amazing, so thank you for joining me on the podcast because we’re going to explore today how you build an MSP from nothing up to seven figures. We’re going to find out all the mistakes you made on the way, all the disasters, all the catastrophes, all the things that went wrong, and in doing so, perhaps we’ll find some of the things that went right as well. So give us a brief overview of your story. How long have you had your MSP and what made you get started in the first place?

Yeah, so we started, or I started with a business partner at the very end of 2012. So it was October 2012 was the first month of business, but I had been working on maybe … I knew I wanted to get this started for about 11 months prior. So for about 11 months, I was working on creating contracts, building pricing, setting up relationships with contractors that I could utilise, all that kind of thing. And then when opportunity finally came, I was ready to strike and quit my job.

But I had been in the MSP space for several years prior to that. I had come from internal IT and then I worked for a company called the IT Pros that was in San Diego. And I was with them from the time they were about two million until the time they grew about five million. And I really loved it. I enjoyed that business. I enjoyed working with the owner and his ethics and integrity, core values, all of that I really enjoyed. I loved the team. They sold in around 2009, 2010. And at that time when they sold, they sold to Konica Minolta All Covered. And I went with that acquisition. I hung around for about two years, and then I had made the decision I wanted to start my own company.

That makes perfect sense. And just to give us an idea of what you’ve done in the last 13, 14 years or so. So give us an idea of what kind of size you are now. And if you don’t want to talk about revenue, then how many staff have you got, which is always a good indication.

Yeah, happy to talk about it. Last year we did 30 million in revenue, and this year we’re almost to the end of the year, we’re on track, I think we’re going to end around 36 to 38 million in revenue. So some growth and as far as team members, we have 116 team members, majority here in the United States, but we do have about 10% or about 15 people in international countries.

That’s pretty cool, so you’ve been productive then. You’ve been busy over the last few years. And just for the sake of our audience listening to this on the podcast or watching this on YouTube, we recorded this at the end of 2025, because obviously this is going out now in early 2026. So if you look back, let’s talk about the fun things first. What are the biggest mistakes you made? And it’s so much easier as a business owner at the successful end of a journey to look back and put your head in your hands and say, wow, did I really do A, B, and C? Because at the time they feel like the worst things ever. But as you look back, what were the biggest mistakes you made and the challenges that you screwed up the biggest?

Oh man, there’s been so many, but fortunately I’ve got more right than I got wrong, but you always remember the ones you got wrong so you can learn from them. I think there was a few things. So one, I think I was a little overly confident going into it and I wanted to pave my own way and do things differently than everybody else. And that led to a little bit overconfidence in doing things the hard way versus looking for mentors that had done it much larger, much more successful than me and trying to just copy them. So I could have shortened the amount of time it took me to get to the same outcome and a lot less pain had I done it that way.

The other thing is I didn’t have good financial literacy. You don’t learn that in school. And so unless you have someone teach you or you actively read books, listen to podcasts about it, you don’t learn it. So it took me a while to become a base level of financial literacy. And so that was another thing. Also, not focusing enough on the revenue and the sales skills that I needed to bring in revenue, that also took a lot of years. So those are some of them. And then there’s cultural things, just how I approach building the business and adding team members.

I used to run the company much more like friends and family, and now I run it like a professional sports team.

And what would you mean by that, you run it like a professional sports team? I mean, with the number of staff you’ve got, I guess you could just about know everyone by their first name, but you wouldn’t know their lives. So does that mean you’re running it like, Hey, we’re all a team here. We’re trying to do something.

I think it’s more of a mindset and looking at KPIs, metrics, numbers, results. And if you look at a sports team, everybody has to practice together. Everybody on the team must perform or you get cut from the team. That’s just the way it is. It’s just tough. Now, you can be friends, you can even make lifelong friends on a sports team, but just because you’re cool and your friend isn’t going to keep you on the team, your performance is going to keep you on the team. And so really changing that versus, oh, they’re a cool guy, but it’s not 100% aligned or there’s difficulties here. It just really comes down to results. And if you change your culture around the result, the outcome, not the hard work, not around the camaraderie, you can have those things, but they have to be absolutely secondary.

All the focus has to be on the metric, the results, the output and the performance, and then all the other things. But you can do that in a positive, in a fun way. It doesn’t have to be overbearing or negative, right? A lot of sports teams have fun while they’re working together, but they never lose sight of what the metrics need to be and what the wins need to be.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you don’t go from scratch to the size of business you are accidentally. Something like that has to be done with intent. Was the intent there from day one? Because I’ve interviewed a lot of successful MSPs on this podcast over the last six or so years, and often the story, not always, but often the story is first few years, they’re going along as any MSP does, growing a little bit, winning clients, going whatsoever. And then often there’s a point where the business owner gets serious and as you say, gets into KPIs, builds a sales team, builds a marketing team, systemises the business. And there’s an intent to take this to 5, 10, 15 million. Is that what happened to you or were you doing that from day one?

So one thing I wanted from day one from the very beginning is I wanted to have a life. And if you’re a small MSP owner, you do not have a life. You don’t go to a restaurant without your laptop. You don’t go on vacation anywhere without checking your email or being on the hook because you’re probably in an engineering position yourself. So you might have help, but you’re basically the star of the show and you have a few support people on your side, but it’s not like a truly mature business. And so one thing is I was like, I don’t want that life. I want to be able to go on vacation. And so I said, if I’m going to build this thing, I have to at least get built as big as the company I had worked for, the IT Pros. And even though I was only on the engineering side, I wasn’t running every aspect of the business, I had that kind of programmed in my mind and I knew I was focused there. I was on autopilot. It was programmed into me. I got to get to 25 headcount, five million, something like that.

I didn’t know it exactly, it was a little bit fuzzy, but I was fully focused on that. So every time we would get more clients, more revenue, I was hiring and adding to the team. I was just stacking those bricks to get there as fast as I could. And once we got there, then it started to change because I realised that, one, I had a lot bigger goals for myself, and if I stayed here I wouldn’t achieve them, but also I couldn’t give my team opportunity to growth. They wouldn’t get to their goals. So part of my mission is to impact lives touched by technology. That’s impacting our clients and their businesses, but it’s also impacting our employees with their personal, professional, financial goals.

I can’t do that if I can’t create opportunity. And the only way for them to get that is to leave the organisation, which is what I don’t want. So I was always forced into growth, and I think every MSP is in that same position. You must grow… People want raises, people want promotions… If you want to be the person to give that to them, you have to grow. It’s literally the only way. So that was a big driver. And then I started getting more clear on the goals where we really want to go over 100,000 in annual revenue. So we got really, really focused on those goals and making annual goals to get us towards there.

Yeah. And if you look back at the first, let’s say the first five years, because I think for the majority of MSPs listening to this or watching this on YouTube, they’re still in that sort of sub three million, that’s kind of where we aim this podcast at. So if you look back at those first couple of years, when you were building yourself up to your first three, four, five million in revenue, what were the big things that made the biggest difference? So was it getting the marketing right? Was it getting the sales process right? Was it having a great product? What were those blocks?

Yeah, so that $3 million mark, it’s a break point and it is where a lot of MSPs just cannot get through that. So that’s a position as the owner that you’re probably starting to make a little bit more money, you’re starting to be a little more comfortable. And if you’re taking that and now you’re trying to grow, you kind of hit this wall where you really have to do a couple things. One, you still need to be frugal and you need to hire more staff and you need to replace yourself. I would say the vast majority of MSP owners that I’ve met come from an engineering background and they’re actively involved in client delivery, client service. And I had to make kind of around that time a very hard decision. It was actually a pivotal moment in our business, but the decision as silly as it sounds, is that I was not going to do any more engineering. A ticket came in, I was not going to work it. There was a fire that was going to arise. One of my other team members had to do it. And unless it was the absolute last resort where we were going to lose a client, I would under no circumstance other than that, touch a ticket. And I had to prepare my team for that and we had to talk that out and I set a date and it was very difficult, but I had to do it because as long as I was engineering, I was a lid to the business. So the business could not outgrow me without me making that conscious decision that I had to raise my lid so that the business could keep growing. That’s a really hard thing. You have to let go of control.

And in doing so and removing that lid, did that explode the growth of the business? Because I know a lot of MSPs are so fearful of letting go. They keep themselves as sort of third line or third plus a bit line. So they’re just keeping an eye on it. And even if there’s a service desk manager and even if there’s an account manager and a handler and all of this, they’re all just lingering there in the background, which is natural, isn’t it? When that’s what you do and that’s why you started the business in the first place. So that must have been hard for you, but did you see the reward that, Oh wow, this business is really taking off and actually I can just focus all of my time on growing this business and not worrying about the clients.

Yeah, that was a really big thing because now I can focus more on revenue and more strategic things that I needed to do. But to be able to let go, there’s a couple things that I learned from mentors that you have to have. So one, you have to have very clear written processes that people are trained on and are expected to follow and you have to have KPIs that you can measure and you need your team to report up to you so you don’t have to micromanage them. So the expectation is that you present me the KPIs every week. I don’t go look for what they are and then come to you and ask questions. If I have to micromanage in that way, you’re not the right person for the job. So that’s a training thing. There has to be processes that they can operate in, and then you can have the information you need as a business owner to have that oversight and make decisions.

So the process really has to come even before you add people. A lot of people, what they do, they think about it this way. They think about, I’m going to add people, then I’m going to build process and then I’m going to be profitable. You have to do it the other way. You have to be profitable first. So you got to figure out how to make your product and process profitable. Then you build process and then you add people. People should be the last thing, not the first thing. So people usually add the people, then build the process and expect profitability and it doesn’t work out. You got to be profitable first, process second, now add the people. So that was really big.

That allowed me to get to the next breakpoint. And the next breakpoint came at that $7 million, $8 million, $9 million mark. And what happened then is I realised financial literacy, financial discipline, and my ability to sell was what was keeping the business going further than that. So then I had to overcome, those were the next things I had to build myself on.

Yeah, I love that. So here’s a question for you… Let’s say you sold your business tomorrow and you woke up the day after and you had this crazy idea that you’d like to start again, and you’d like to start an MSP from scratch, a whole brand new marketplace. You don’t know anyone. And let’s say you’ve decided to do it on minimal budget rather than investing a lot of that cash you’ve just made from selling your business. So what would you do? If you had to give yourself sort of a two, three, four point plan of this is what I’m going to do to get started and dominate a marketplace quickly, what would you do?

What I would do very first thing, build your contract, otherwise obviously get your LLC and all of that. Build your contract. You could probably whip it out with ChatGPT or copy another one, something like that. Figure out the pricing of how many hours will it take me to service and pricing and get your first customer. You don’t have a business until you got your first customer and they’ve transacted money. There’s nothing more important than getting that first customer and then building from there. You don’t need a website, you don’t even need freaking business cards, you don’t even need a cool logo. Everyone puts that stuff first. Yeah, it’s helpful. Get your first customer. Your first customer’s not going to come through your website anyway. They’re going to come through a relationship that you’ve built and networking you’ve done. So get your contract in line so you’re legal and freaking sell and get that first customer.

That’s by far the number one thing you need to do to be able to have revenue as fast as possible. And then deliver and don’t fail on the delivery. Do a high quality, make sure that they’re a raving fan and then you can build off of that. So in fact, what’s funny is I told you that I spent 11 months building the company and I was building contracts, doing pricing, figuring this all out because I had no one to show me. When that first customer came, we didn’t have a website and we didn’t have a logo yet. We hadn’t gotten to it. That’s usually the very first thing everybody does. It’s like, oh, let’s make our website. let’s make our logo, blah, blah, blah. So when the customer came to me, they kind of knew me from the past and they wanted to work with me because I had done right by them in the past.

And so I told them, I said, “Hey, I don’t have a website and I don’t have a logo yet, but I’ve been working on this for some time. I have my contracts. I have my LLC. I have everything in place. I have my team in place. I even have the guys that I’m going to be part of my team to give delivery. We just hadn’t gotten to the marketing piece yet. And they were like, Okay, no problem. I signed them up. And that was my very first contract, $5,000 a month. That was 2012. So that was, for me, a very, very good thing. So I would say you need a customer. Your business is worthless and nothing and just an idea until you get your first customer. Then it’s worth something.

Yeah, I think that’s great advice. And I think I’m a marketing guy, right? So I would absolutely do the website stuff first, but you’re right, get some revenue first, then figure all that out. And I think a lot of MSPs would figure out the tech stack and they would figure out how to do the service and what ticketing and all of the PSA and all of that stuff. And actually you’re right, get the customer first and then figure all of that stuff along the way. What’s cool is when you’ve won the customer, you’ve got to figure that stuff out. So it makes sense to put all of your time and attention into getting the customers and then yeah, everything else sorts itself out.

Yeah. It forces you. I’m a big fan. I’ve done it the other way. I did fortunately the first time I did it right where I sold first, delivered second. And then I’ve also done the mistake when I built my cyber company is I put all this time and money into really building it and then trying to sell it. And it was a losing proposition for many years. It ended up working out at a sheer determination. But could I go back, I could have done it so much better… Not all, doesn’t mean I’m not giving it foresight, but if you’re an ethical moral person, you are going to deliver on what you promise.

So I’m an ethical, moral person. And if I commit to doing something, I’m going to do it. So when somebody signs a contract with me, I will, at my own personal expense and detriment, if I sold it wrong, I’m going to deliver on that contract no matter what it takes because that’s my reputation and my reputation is gold. So if that’s you, there’s no problem. Don’t overanalyse the situation. A lot of people are analysers. You got to sell it and then deliver on it. And I know that sounds kind of crazy to a technical person that’s a high analyser, but you can spend years tinkering and trying to make the perfect product and then you try to go to market and you’re like, why is no one buying it? It’s just not how it works.

Yeah, I love it. Well this has been a fascinating insight into your journey. Thank you. We are out of time. The final thing I want to ask you is, I know that you are interested in acquiring other MSPs for those people that have at the end of their journey and they’re ready to make an exit. So just tell us roughly what would make a good MSP for you and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

You can get in touch with me, if you Google my name, I’m on LinkedIn, Instagram, our website fitsolutions.biz. I would love to connect on any platform that you want to connect on. And we are looking to scale. We’re not PE or private equity money or VC capital, so just me. And I have been trying to find other business owners that have similarly aligned cultures. And I found two that wanted to exit the business and I brought them on and their people on, and it was a really good experience. And so if there’s someone else out there that aligns with me in some way, I would love to have a conversation. You can find me on my LinkedIn, Ephraim Ebstein or Instagram. I’m also on Facebook and Twitter or X now and the rest of it.

Hi, I’m Nate Freedman from MSP Sites, and here’s a quick way to win more MSP clients. If a prospect doesn’t know you, like you, and trust you, they’re not buying. So that’s where proof points come in. This is the hard evidence that says, yes, we can deliver. And there are four types of proof points you need.

We are continuing a three part series based on the MSP Marketing Edge 3 step system, and in this special episode we focus on the third step: Convert relationships.

Welcome to Episode 321 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Hello and happy New Year, and welcome to our final special episode of this podcast. We’re finishing a three part series this week. Last year, I released my book, MSP marketing: Start Here, about a 3 step lead generation system, which is trusted by hundreds and hundreds of MSPs around the world.

In the first special, we looked at the first step – build audiences. Last week was the second step – grow relationships, and today, starting 2026, we’re going to do the final step – convert relationships.

Let me paint a picture. You’ve built your audience, you’ve nurtured your relationships, but now what? How do you turn all of that goodwill into actually clients without feeling pushy, desperate, or salesy? Because no MSP wants to be like that. Well, that is where step three comes in – convert relationships.

I like to think of this stage as harvesting, farming. You’ve spent months planting seeds – every post, every email, every conversation – and now it’s time to gently shake the tree and see what’s ready to fall out.

And I say gently because good sales isn’t about pressure, it’s all about timing. Remember, business owners only switch MSPs when they are ready, not when you are ready, or you need more MRR. So your job is to make sure that when that readiness appears, when they finally get fed up with their current incumbent MSP, you are the first person that they think of. And that’s why conversion is as much about staying in touch as it is about asking for the business. There are a few practical ways to do this.

The first is personal outreach, and by that I mean a phone call. But here’s the trick. It shouldn’t come from you. So I’m assuming that you are the business owner and you’ve already got a million other things to do, right? So hire someone, even if that person is part-time, to just make those calls for you. A back to work mom is great for this. Someone working two to three hours a day, two to three days a week, and you want someone warm, friendly, and curious. Their job is not to sell IT support, it’s just to have conversations on your behalf. Things like, Hey, we connected on LinkedIn a while ago, or you connected with my boss on LinkedIn a while ago. How’s business going? Something super simple like that, something human that starts and maintains and builds relationships that can turn into video calls. That’s the thing. Her job is to book a video call with you, a 10 to 15 minute video call, and then you do the hard work of turning the video call into a real sales meeting.

Now, the other way that you can do this is through marketing campaigns. And I’m not talking about the one-off hit and hope campaigns that we all get tempted by or that we get from vendors, and you think, oh, this is brilliant, and you do one piece of activity and then you’re kind of upset that nothing happens from that. I’m talking about systematic outreach marketing campaigns that build on the relationship that you’re building with your prospects. So things like sending a physical letter out to a batch of prospects and then following that up with an email the next day saying, Hey, did you get my letter? And then making a friendly follow-up call later in the week. Now, this stuff is old school, but I promise you it works because most MSPs don’t bother doing this. They rely entirely on digital marketing, and that means that prospects are drowning in digital noise, but they’re not drowning in real life marketing assets. So a well-written letter or a postcard with their name on it that really cuts through. It feels personal, it feels different, and it sparks conversations.

And then there’s one of my favourite tactics, the printed newsletter. Every month you send one to your Dream 100. These are the hundred hottest prospects that you would love to have as clients, and it doesn’t have to be glossy, it just has to be real. Write about what’s happening in your world or share short tech tips. Talk about the humans in your team. The goal isn’t to sell in this, it’s just to stay top of mind, because when they finally reach the point when they’re ready to switch MSPs, they won’t Google it. They’ll just reach for the person they already like and trust, and that should be you. Because the truth is converting relationships isn’t one big moment. It’s a series of small nudges. You build trust through consistency, you create curiosity through human contact, and you stay visible until the timing’s right, and then when the stars align, it feels effortless.

So at this exciting time of the year where it feels like there’s this huge opportunity, the whole of 2026 ahead of us, take a moment to look at your pipeline. Who are the people that already like you, who’s opened your last few emails, who comments on your posts or keeps showing up on your radar? Those are your warmest opportunities, and you don’t need a big sales campaign to move them forward. You just need to have a conversation, send a message, pick up the phone and say, Hey, how’s everything going? Anything you need help with this year? Because that’s it. Sometimes the lightest touch opens the biggest doors, because in the end marketing your MSP is just relationship building at scale, and sales is simply the next step in that relationship.

If you’ve done the first two steps well, if you’ve built your audience and nurtured your relationships, then conversion doesn’t feel awkward, it feels natural, because you’ve earned it. And that’s how you grow an MSP that wins clients every single month without chasing, spamming or shouting. You just stay human, consistent and present. That’s the system, that’s the magic, and that’s your mission for the year ahead. A reminder that if you want to go into more detail in this, it’s all in the book MSP marketing: Start Here. It’s on Amazon as a paperback and a Kindle, and also on Audible.

We are continuing a three part series based on the MSP Marketing Edge 3 step system, and in this special episode we focus on the second step: Grow relationships.

Welcome to Episode 320 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Hello and welcome to another special episode of the podcast. We are continuing a three-part series this week. Earlier this year I released my book, MSP marketing: Start Here, about a 3 step lead generation system trusted by hundreds and hundreds of MSPs around the world. Last week, we looked at the first step – build audiences. Today it’s the second step – grow relationships.

I want to tell you a secret about marketing that most MSPs miss. It’s not about technology. It’s not about your tools, your stack or your accreditations. It’s about trust. Because nobody’s buying from you until they trust you, and they can’t trust you until they like you, and they can’t like you until they know you. That’s why the second step, growing relationships, matters so much.

Think about your own buying habits. When was the last time you hired someone for your business – a supplier, a consultant, or an agency – where you knew deep down, these are my people, this is my person. That didn’t happen because they cold called you at the right moment, right? It happened because you felt like you already knew them. Maybe you’d seen their content or you’d heard their stories or maybe laughed at their bad jokes, or maybe a friend had talked about them, or maybe you just liked their energy. You trusted them before you ever met with them. And that’s what you’re trying to create for your prospects.

Growing relationships is about showing up regularly with something useful, human, consistent. And the good news is it doesn’t need to be complicated.

You don’t need to become a social media influencer or hire a full-time marketing team. You just need to keep feeding your audiences with what I call edutainment – education and entertainment combined, something that teaches and makes them smile at the same time. Now, that’s your weekly email, that’s your blog on your website, that’s your LinkedIn posts which should go out every day, it’s your videos that you make or that you get in for your business. It’s not about talking tech, it’s about talking people.

Business owners don’t care about patching, monitoring, or endpoint protection. They care about whether their team can get work done without tearing their hair out. They care about productivity, they care about growth, stress, risk. So talk about those things. Show them that you understand what it’s like to run a business because that’s what builds connection. One of my favorite ways to do this is through storytelling. Tell stories about your clients with permission of course, or at the very least, anonymise it. Tell them how a small tech change made someone’s life easier, about mistakes that you made early in your business and what you learned. Because stories stick and if you can make someone feel something – curiosity relief, even a little amusement – they will remember you.

And the magic is that over time, these people start to feel like they know you. They see your face on LinkedIn every week. They read your newsletter over their morning coffee. They might even forward one of your emails to a colleague. They’re building a relationship with you even though you’ve never met. That’s the heart of marketing today. Asynchronous relationships. You build them slowly with every piece of content that you publish. And one day out of nowhere, that quiet relationship becomes real. Someone you’ve never spoken to sends you a message saying, Hey, do you know we’ve been following your stuff for ages, can we talk? And that’s when you know that your system’s working.

The hardest part is patience. When you start, it does feel like you’re shouting into the void. You post, you email, and you get nothing back, it’s really quiet. But consistency wins, because one day you wake up and you realise that you’ve become the IT guy that everyone in your area kind of knows. And not because of ads, not because of SEO or AEO (answer engine optimisation, which is like AI’s search engine optimisation), but because you built a relationship with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people over time.

So if you want to grow faster next year, here’s my 2026 challenge to you. Keep showing up. Write one email a week, post every day on LinkedIn, record a short video ideally every week or once every month, even when you can’t be bothered and you feel like no one’s watching, someone is. They’re just not ready to talk yet, but they are warming up. And when they finally need a new MSP, you are going to be the only one who doesn’t feel so much like a stranger. That’s the power of growing relationships. It’s slow, but it’s unstoppable. And if you want to go into more detail on this, it’s all in my book. MSP marketing: Start Here. You can get it on Amazon as a paperback and Kindle, and it’s also on Audible.