Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Episode 258 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

One of the hard facts that you soon learn as a business owner is if you want to grow your business, you have to find and protect substantial chunks of time in order for you to work on your business. It’s this time where you make the forward progress because you are implementing things that will generate new clients, retain existing clients, and encourage your existing clients to buy more services from you. But there’s a problem, you see, I believe you have to spend this time in the zone completely focused on the task in hand. And this is especially true if you’re an MSP doing marketing activities, and that’s not a natural skillset for you. Yet the vast majority of MSPs, they never get into this state of full focus. And there’s a specific reason why.

Many, many years ago, I used to do one-on-one consults with MSPs here in the UK. We’d hire a business meeting room and we’d spend the day exploring their business goals, their marketing, what was going well and what was not going well. And I probably did about, I don’t know, 20 or 30 of these over about 18 months. And it’s not something I do anymore, but it was a great way for me to learn about MSPs and of course for me to help them with their marketing. That was before we had our MSP Marketing Edge service.

But I’ll never forget one of the meetings I had, which was almost like a comedy situation, like it could have been in a sitcom. So let’s just take the context of this meeting. The MSP that I’m meeting with has paid a few thousand pounds for my time and attention. And the whole purpose of the day is to examine their marketing and make it better so that they can win new clients and ultimately grow their business, which is the way that of course, they’ll grow their own personal income and ultimately have a better lifestyle. So to me, that makes the meeting a very big deal indeed. And in fact, most of the MSPs that I met with, they took their meeting very seriously. But one of them didn’t. And it wasn’t that he didn’t want to, he was desperate to grow his business and I knew that he valued my advice.

The trouble was he was caught up in the notifications of what was happening in his business at that exact moment. The first hour or so, I could barely drag him away from his laptop. He was looking at Teams messages, he was looking at his PSA, and he was just generally distracted. And I challenged him on this when we had our coffee break and I said, look, I don’t believe that you can spend quality time working on your business while your brain is trapped on notifications about things that are happening in the business. Oh, and I’ve got to say, it wasn’t like there was a big incident going off, there was no cyber attack or anything like that. It was just the regular day-to-day stuff between him and his techs.

As you can imagine, this MSP was trapped working in his business on a day-to-day basis. And even though he wasn’t there in his office, he was sat in a meeting room with me. He was still mentally in his office with his techs. You know what I mean by that? So after that first coffee break, I did manage to persuade him to log out of his PSA, to shut down Teams and to spend more time focused on what we were doing, what him and I were doing in the room. And that’s when his phone started pinging. Ping a text message. I could see his eyes jumped down to the phone and he was desperate to read it and see if it was from his team.

And when he didn’t read it and didn’t respond, they WhatsApped him, ping. And he almost started sweating as he could see the name of one of his staff on his phone. And he wasn’t reading the message because he’d promised to pay attention to me. And then the phone started ringing and both of us could see the word office on the screen. So I let him answer that, and I kind of mentally gave up on that session because I realised he was never going to spend quality time thinking about the growth of his own business.

Now let me be clear, I’m not in any way being critical of this business owner, although he did waste a couple of thousand pounds on me and the meeting room that day. The point that I’m trying to make is that if you’re going to do important work, you’ve got to get into the zone. You’ve got to get into that deep mode where you are implementing important things that are going to grow your business in the years ahead. And you cannot do that if every five seconds there’s a ping, ping, ping of something somewhere going off. In this respect, Teams is evil, your PSA is evil, your phone is evil, your children are evil. I’m just joking about the children, one, I’m not really joking, but it’s true. You cannot do quality work on your business if you are constantly being interrupted.

Let me tell you something that you and I might disagree with. Multitasking is a myth. I genuinely believe it is. I know that you think you can multitask because you can set up a new user while you are resetting someone else’s password and you can be on the phone to a third person. You can do this all at the same time, and you might think that you’re one of those really clever people whose brain is set up that way and you can genuinely multitask. And yes, indeed, that may be the case.

But when you are doing important jobs that you are not good at, things like marketing and especially when they’re really important, they’re not just a trivial thing like a password reset. They need your full brain capacity.

Every single time a notification grabs your attention, you are pushing your progress backwards.

And this is why I actually have very few notifications on my phone. I have a couple of select people on WhatsApp who I’m notified about, and a couple of select apps which don’t abuse the notifications, but there’s very little else that gets through on my phone. And if I’m doing really important work, I enable do not disturb on my phone and on my laptop. It feels like the whole world’s going to explode and you won’t know about it if you’re on do not disturb for an hour or 90 minutes, doesn’t it? But I promise you that is not the case. What will happen is that you’ll spend quality time working on things that grow your MSP.

The MSP owners who are growing their businesses do this on a regular basis, I promise you. So the next time you see a car that you’d love to own or a house that you would love to move into, but you can’t yet afford it, ask yourself if the blame lies with the ping, ping, ping.

A Super MSP that has hundreds of employees buys a local competitor of yours and suddenly they’re in your town. Has this happened to you or do you fear coming up against a super MSP?

I don’t think you have anything to worry about from Super MSPs. In fact, I believe they create lots of opportunities for you.

Super MSPs are huge companies that buy MSPs and merge them together. And here are three reasons why I believe they create marketing opportunities for other MSPs like yours.

Here’s the first one – At your old competitor, the clients, once the acquisition has gone through, watch the service levels go down and the prices go up. And all of the people that they’ve known for years just seem to vanish. And this makes them sometimes reluctant to sign another contract. So here are some ideas to capitalise on this. Look at an archived copy of your old competitor’s website to get names from testimonials and call them. Run paid ads with a headline – Does your business miss old competitor’s name?

Number two – Some of the technicians who were transferred to the Super MSP will hate working for a big company, so reach out to all of them on LinkedIn and meet for a coffee, just to connect. Bingo. You now have a pipeline of potential new technicians. Hire the one who can remember the contact names of all of the clients of your old competitor.

And number three – Sure, the Super MSP will always be better resourced than you with more marketing and salespeople, but none of them will have your passion or your speed. The bigger a business, the slower it is to react. You are a speedboat. They are a super tanker. You can adapt to the winds on a whim and they take three miles to change course. Never be scared when you’re up against a super MSP.

Featured guest: Jim Pietruszynski is the CEO of Soulsight, a brand design agency with 30+ years of experience in building emotive brands that move. Jim’s work spans iconic brands and channels, driven by creativity and a deep understanding of human needs.

Jim has fostered breakthrough innovation through collaboration and honesty. He draws inspiration from human truths and an empathetic approach, offering compelling creative thinking. He’s worked with global giants like Kraft Heinz, Coca-Cola, and Pfizer, earning recognition from prestigious awards.

Your MSP’s brand is so much more than your logo. Your brand is actually how people feel about you based on everything they see or hear about you. My guest expert today is going to tell us why your brand tone must be consistent across everywhere you communicate with everyone, including on live chat in PSA tickets and when technicians pick up the phone.

Today’s guest believes so strongly in the power of a good brand. He says it helps you truly differentiate from all the other MSPs.

Hi, I am Jim Pietruszynski. I am the CEO of Soulsite. We are a full service brand design agency. I’ve been with the company since the inception, three of us now up to 80, and just as of the last month acquired another agency on the east coast. So brand agency and growing.

Amazing congratulations on your recent acquisition, but 80 staff. Oh my goodness, you must have either a very good management team in place or a very busy schedule. But we’re not here to talk about staff. We are here to talk about branding and in fact, I’m going to challenge you in the next couple of minutes, Jim, about how important branding really is for an MSP that’s looking to grow. I suspect that you and I may have conflicting opinions on this, we will find out in the next few minutes. But first of all, tell us a little bit about you. So how did you come to be a branding expert sitting in a fast growing business like you are now?

Yeah, so I have a background in Design, bachelor of Fine Arts and Graphic Design actually, and started in the industry working with consumer packaged goods and branding in B2B and working at a small agency. Then moved on to a very large agency which was global worldwide, and realised that neither of those places were right for me and that I needed to find something in the centre. So Soulsite was born in 1997, focused on more mid-size companies, working with their brand and helping develop their brand and grow their brand and help add value to business by maintaining those brands.

We are on a pretty fast growth trajectory through I would say the last 20 years and in the last 10 have really grown quite considerably, especially as I talk about the acquisition that we’ve made on the east coast. I think what’s next is really to look for other opportunities for us to engage in partnerships in the UK so that we do actually have a global presence because we do work on iconic brands that are global in the marketplace.

I wouldn’t bother with the UK, it’s a terrible place, really is very downbeat. I wouldn’t bother with that at all. In your whole career, what’s the most famous brand you’ve ever worked on?

Coca-Cola probably comes to the top of my head. And then if you’re into beer, Molson Coors, which is Miller and Coors products and Molson project projects in Canada. They’ve been a client of ours over 20 years. So that’s been kind of our pride and joy as we’ve grown the business.

Yeah, that’s pretty impressive. There’s some good brands there, but let’s talk about MSPs and B2B. So obviously most MSPs are business to business. I know some MSPs do still do domestic work, consumer work, but that’s not the majority of the audience who listen to this podcast and watch these YouTube videos. From a B2B point of view, I don’t see a great deal of investment into branding from MSPs. So your average MSP, even up to a million, maybe a couple of million turnover will look at their brand as being that logo that was done, which can either be done by someone on the cheap, maybe on Fiverr, on Upwork, or it was just done by their website people. And for most MSPs, they see that as their brand. I guess when you hear something like that, that just makes your heart go cold inside.

Yeah, we’ve had this conversation a lot and talking to companies that are B2B and companies that we work with that are B2B, there’s always a C, there’s always a C. There’s always someone that is reciprocating that brand or feeling that brand or using that brand. So there is nuanced differences in how MSPs work in a B2B space, but in general, the value of the brand becomes more important, especially as technology has grown and as these MSPs are, and again, I don’t run an MSP, but work with a lot of MSPs that are mostly virtual or remote. So it’s a voice on a phone. That’s all part of the brand.

It is the way that you present yourselves, your response times, how well you are equipped to intellectually lead someone to help them with whatever problem or nuance might exist for them.

We are a service company, MSPs are service companies, and that service component becomes a very important piece when we talk about the brand and when we work with MSPs, we really try to strike the balance of helping them understand that there is a purpose that they need to have. There is a vision, there is a mission, and there have to be values that are formed so that characteristics can really start to build the company. I mean the brand in most MSPs is really not a logo. It is the experience that you feel working with an MSP.

Now that’s really interesting because most MSPs really struggle with differentiation with explaining in any way what makes them different from, well explaining in a non-technical way, what makes them different from their competitors. Because the MSPs will know, Hey, my tech stack is better, we’re better at security, we outsource, we have an outsourced help desk overseas overnight. So they know all of those things. But translating those features into benefits and use them as a point of differentiation is really hard for most MSPs because they’re not marketers.

If we were to look at something like, let’s take Coca-Cola for example, so we all know and there’s Pepsi and call me a heathen, but they taste similar, right? I know everyone has their preference, but let’s be honest, that preference is probably more built up over marketing to us our entire lives because all of us who are alive now have been marketed to our entire lives by those colas, and our preference is probably dictated by our parents’ preference by what happened to us when we were children, all of that kind of stuff.

So I think it’s really easy for a business owner, an MSP owner to look at Coke and Pepsi and say, Hey, obviously marketing and branding is really important to those because ultimately they’re just the same product. They’re the same product with slightly different chemicals in slightly different tastes, but it’s the brand that makes the difference. How does that translate to my MSP? So you were saying that it gives good branding is a point of differentiation to look at all of those things. Practically, how do you do that if it’s not about the logo? How do you help ordinary business owners and managers to feel something about the MSP that they’re thinking of choosing?

Yeah, it’s a great question. I think one of them is to have a story. I think that as we look at MSPs and we talk to them, you look for a point of difference, everyone started in a different place. So where is it that you began? And as an MSP, it could mean the service that you provide is very vast, but what do you really specialise in? I think that it’s important to understand where do you shine and what is shining best for you and looking at that service and then understanding what characteristics then are built from that service that become important to how people feel and how you’re expressing yourself.

So I think to build a vision and to build a system, values is something that has to be almost an internal playbook for an MSP on how their team or their teammates or their partners or whatever you want to call your co-workers, are all embodying that same vision and they understand the service and when someone is calling you, for the most part, they’re usually in some sort of state of distress or in need of help.

There is a personality type that needs to be looked at to fulfill roles in management and in service for them. So again, that still builds from the story. You want to make sure that the characters that are part of your brand also relate to the story that is being built, so that there is a relationship that’s happening even internally within the company. If you need to be transferred to a specialist to work on a specific assignment or someone’s not well equipped to handle the issue that you have at hand. So for us, MSPs have really been looking at, what are average response times for your clients, what are all the things that you’re familiar with, and how often are teams reaching out to you? How often do you feel that problems are being resolved? And then what did that interaction feel like? There’s a little bit of research that we can do it in understanding and doing some interviewing to understand what is the playback that you’re getting from your current partners or your clients, and then use that to develop a, I wouldn’t say a total script, but a personality profile and kind of the do’s and don’ts of how to manage a wide array of different types of businesses. They don’t all think the same as a creative agency like ours.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I guess what you’re talking about here is a coherence. So the brand of the business is based on the values of the people that work within their business and the reactions of the clients. If the values are, you’re reliable, you’re trusted, and people feel safe with you, and that’s what your entire brand is built on, but then a user picks up the phone for support and a 12-year-old technician answers saying, Hello, no, I can’t help you with that. I’m too busy. Or, Yeah, that’s not important. I’ll log a ticket, it is the complete opposite experience of what you’re trying. I get what you’re saying there. The brand isn’t just what’s on the website, the brand is everything. It’s the way the company acts, it’s the way it feels. Would that be a correct thing to say?

Correct. We call it brand world or brand experience, and I think a lot of that’s connected to the user experience and what that user experience is, not just in a conversation on the phone or directions on the phone, but how easy is it to reach you? What does the interface look like when we’re working together? And we see a lot of really great ones and we see a lot of really bad ones. So how you appear in the communication platform that you’re using is also just as important as your brand. I think you said a logo, a brand is more than just what your logo is. Your logo hopefully would be something that someday for many people would become memorable based on positive experiences that they’ve had with you over time and have recommended you to multiple other people in the business industry. But yeah, you’re correct. Brand is very holistic, and it also involves pretty much all of our senses, except for taste, I guess you’re, you’re not going to be licking your MSP provider hopefully.

But you might be licking the screen of your computer, I’m sure Steve Jobs said that once about one of the Macs that they designed. It was so lovely you wanted to lick it.

Final question for you, Jim, because what you just said there makes a lot of sense and it is difficult. I think we can all see, particularly for small MSPs to get a consistency across live chat in the ticketing system, the PSA on the phone, on the website, in emails that are sent out, particularly for a small business, there’s lots of different channels there to get a coherence, and I can see the difficulty in that For bigger MSPs, it’s kind of easy. They just pull out their, not a checkbook anymore, you pull out your credit card and you go and talk to someone like yourself. But for smaller MSPs, what would you recommend is a good first step or something that they could do themselves to start going down that route of getting some kind of brand coherence?

That’s a great question, and it’s kind of how we began our company here too, is really through empathy. I mean, I think thinking about what does it feel like to be in someone else’s shoes when you’re working with them and really understand what is the need or the problem to be solved is a great starting place. And when you try to take yourself out of your own world and put yourself into someone else’s shoes, you start to understand where those needs are and ask yourself, are we really fulfilling these needs or not? And those are the things that are going to be remembered by that brand, and those are the things that emotionally are going to start to make connections that keep your brand growing, but also keep your brand healthy.

Yeah, I completely agree. And I read in a book somewhere, I can’t remember which book, but it was to influence what John Smith buys. You must look through John Smith’s eyes, and I think that applies not just to brand, but to all marketing as well. Jim, an amazing interview. Thank you so much. You’ve made big high level brand concepts, very simple for us there, which I appreciate. Just tell us a little bit more about your business and what you do for MSPs and how can we get in touch with you?

Yeah, so we are a full service brand design agency, which includes the strategy. We can help MSPs uncover what their secret sauce is or how they should position themselves in the marketplace, by doing audits and we have tools that help us understand how to help individual MSPs stand out from one another. We can actually do the design work, we can help with that user experience and help define really what that holistic brand experience is across many of the touch points that I would need, even when it comes to digital advertising or if they’re doing any social work or thought leadership in the marketplace, we can help them prepare what visually, what that might feel like. We can’t write it, but we can help visually articulate what that would feel like for someone and does it feel helpful? Does it feel simple? Does it feel succinct? And making sure it’s communications are coming over in a way that people can absorb quickly. So that’s a lot of what we focus on. We also do a lot of CPG along with MSP, and there is a lot of overlap. I think that MSPs, they need to think of themselves as, like I said, I know it is B2B, but there’s always the C and thinking about there as a consumer on the other end of who you’re working with.

The best way to get in touch with me is [email protected]. It’s S-O-U-L-S-I-G-H-T. I’m also on LinkedIn. You can look up my name James Pietruszynski, or our website is soulsite.com is another way to see some of our work.

This week there is an interesting question from Terry, who’s based in Pennsylvania and he’s got a concern about the risk of forgetting the things that might help him grow his MSP. His question is… I’ve listened to some great business books and loved them, but what’s the best way to keep them alive for me in the long-term?

Oh yes. I mean, this is a common problem for prolific readers. I’ve read and listened to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of business and marketing books, and I’ve probably only retained so much knowledge from them because that’s my job, but in reality, I’ve forgotten way more than I remember.

So here’s a clever idea. Go and get yourself some visual summaries of your favourite books, and you could then frame those visual summaries and hang them on the walls of your office. I don’t think they’ll ever replace the books, but they do act like an aide memoir.

I’ve got a few sites for you to look at. One’s called Visual Synopsis – these are very beautiful and quite clever summaries of books. There’s another one called Reading Graphics, which has got book summaries as infographics. And also it’s kind of surprising what you can just find on Pinterest. Just put the book title into Pinterest.

Welcome to Episode 257 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

You must often have conversations with ordinary business owners or managers and be gobsmacked just how little they’ve absorbed about stuff from our world, such as cyber security breaches that are in the news or critical updates that need to happen. Have you ever wondered why that is? It’s not just that they don’t care, it’s actually more that their brain has been trained not to tell them about it. You see, the brain has a kind of bodyguard that stops information from getting in and it actually explains why most people don’t perceive your MSP’s marketing.  Good news – there is a way around this bodyguard, and the easiest way for me to explain that is to tell you about the yellow car game.

Every time we travel in the car together, my 14-year-old child and I play a really cool game, when we see a yellow car, we have to punch the other person on the arm and the first one to land a punch wins that round. I’m very pleased to tell you that I am the current yellow car champion. Now, this game makes long journeys just whiz by, believe me. And what’s really fun is playing the game with other passengers in the car because my daughter and I absolutely slaughter them. And no wonder because our brains have been trained to actively look for yellow cars, whereas of course our passengers are seeing yellow cars but not perceiving them.

This is because the bodyguard that stops information getting into their brain has not yet been trained to look for yellow cars. Now, this bodyguard has a name, it’s called the reticular activating system, and it has lots of functions, but the most important thing from a marketing point of view is that it acts as a sensory filter. If you had to consciously deal with all of the information coming in from your five senses, you would very quickly go insane. So instead that information goes through the Reticular Activating System, which acts as a relevance filter.

For the small number of things that are relevant to you, it allows you to perceive them. Everything else you might see it or hear it, but you don’t perceive it. And this is why when you go to, let’s say a new town, you see the break/fix shops, you see the vans belonging to other MSPs, because as far as your reticular activating system is concerned they are relevant to you. But you don’t see the dentists and you don’t see the lawyers, unless of course you are marketing to those kind of people, because they are not relevant you. When you understand that everything you do and say to anyone goes through their reticular activating system, and especially your marketing, then you get a blinding realisation why people just don’t seem to take in the things you’re trying to say to them.

And in understanding how the reticular activating system works, there is the clue of how to beat it. Because if the filter is based on relevance, then you have to make the marketing seem more relevant to them.

This is super easy if you operate in a niche and you want to, let’s say, sell to lawyers – you just put the word lawyer in your marketing. Yeah, it really is as simple as that.

It’s a little bit harder with a general audience, but even here you can make your marketing seem more relevant to them. Use your town or city name or use the phrase business owner. As many business owners relate to that.

Anytime you’re doing any marketing at all, writing any words or creating any images, even down to a simple post on LinkedIn, you must be asking yourself this – How do I beat their brain’s bodyguard? How do I wave a massive flag at the reticular activated system to say, Hey, look at me, this is really relevant to your owner’s brain, so please let them perceive this. I think the secret to this is being very, very clear on who your audience is and being very clear what interests them and what doesn’t.

One of the ways to make marketing easy for your MSP is to turn it into a regular system where marketing tasks happen on a specific cadence. Essentially, instead of your marketing being haphazard and relying on you remembering to do it, you turn it into a habit. Let me tell you a really robust cadence that will work for any MSP.

So what is a cadence? Well, it’s a rhythm that you get into, critical if you want to make sure that something happens on a regular basis like your marketing. Far too many MSPs, focus their marketing around one-off campaigns. These can be great, but only if you run them regularly.

You’ve heard that you need seven to 10 touchpoints with a prospect before they’re ready to talk to you, right? Well, you also need to be in front of them at the right time, the exact moment they are ready to think about leaving their incumbent MSP.

That’s really hard to do with one-off campaigns, especially since there’s a ton of work to get the campaign off the ground and then it’s over and it’s too easy to delay the next ton of work to get the next campaign running.

This is why I recommend most MSPs focus on setting up a marketing system. In fact, our MSP Marketing Edge is based around a powerful three-step lead generation system. So here’s a simple marketing cadence you can use in your MSP. It’s based around a series of repeatable tasks that can help you to build multiple audiences, grow a relationship with them, and find a moment they are most open to talking to you, to convert that relationship.

These tasks can be implemented by your team or marketing freelancers working for you. So this starts off with some daily tasks. Daily you’d build your audience by making a number of connection requests on LinkedIn, say 10 of those, and then you’d collect the email address of new connections to add to your email database. Another daily job will be to build relationships by adding content to LinkedIn and commenting on other people’s posts. And another daily task will be to make follow-up phone calls to all of these new people that you are meeting.

Let’s do some weekly tasks. Weekly, I believe you should be sending a LinkedIn newsletter and send it on the same day each week. Also weekly, send an educational email to your database. That’s why you are building up those email connections that we were talking about earlier.

Then let’s go to some monthly tasks. I believe monthly you should run a marketing campaign, but do one every month aimed at your hottest prospects. Don’t send a campaign to a prospect every month. They might get two or three a year, but every month you can target some prospects with a campaign. And monthly you can ship a printed newsletter to your hottest prospects. That you can do every single month if you wanted to. Which of these repeatable marketing tasks do you think would work best for your MSP?

Featured guest: George Toursoulopoulos is a CEO and technology leader with over 20 years of experience in the software development industry. As the founder and CEO of Synetec, George has built a reputation for delivering innovative software solutions that drive business growth and operational efficiency.

George’s expertise spans across strategic leadership, digital transformation, and fostering high-performing teams. Passionate about helping businesses leverage technology to solve complex challenges, George is dedicated to ensuring that Synetec’s clients achieve measurable success through tailored software solutions. 

The idea of offering custom software development to your clients might be the worst thing you’ve ever heard, because that means managing expectations, crazy complicated development plans, and of course developers. But my special guest today believes you have to, and not just as a profit centre, but as a client retention strategy.

Today’s guest believes your clients see software development just like they see websites. To them, it’s all just technology and they would rather buy it from you, but if they can’t, maybe they’ll go somewhere else for it.

Hi, I’m George Toursoulopoulos, CEO of Synetec.

George, thanks for coming onto the podcast. You are perhaps the best example of why I always ask our guests to introduce themselves so I never have to learn how to pronounce difficult surnames. It’s a delight to have you on here. You were recommended by two or three separate people to come on and talk about a very interesting subject – why MSPs should offer software development.

We’re going to be exploring that in just a few minutes time, and I know that you believe very strongly that for client retention reasons, every MSP should be offering software development. Let’s first of all, just go back a few steps and let’s learn a little bit about you. So tell us what you do now, but more importantly, how did you get into software development?

That’s a great question. I mean, I’ve always been in software development, I studied it, so my background is in that. But I suppose what’s been interesting is I’ve worked for clients and then found what was being done in terms of how they could get it right, how they could get it wrong. So it was always a natural progression to start my own company and help them get it right, so to speak.

And obviously you’re running your own software development company now. Is this something you’ve always done or have you worked for other people doing the same thing?

When I first got out of uni, I was working for quite a big outsourcing company from the states, EDS, for quite a few years. Sort of learned my trade there, so to speak. And then I founded a company actually over in South Africa, which I sold and came over to the UK. And after a couple of years consulting, I started up Synetec in 2009. So we’ve been running for about 15 years now.

And over those 15 years, of course, the whole concept of software development is completely different, isn’t it?

Absolutely. I mean, it’s changed. It’s been huge. I mean, the way development is done and how companies are comfortable doing development themselves and not to mention Covid, Covid made a massive difference in terms of working remotely and how comfortable people were with that. So we’ve had a couple of little industrial revolutions within the software development business over the last 15 years.

I bet you have. And just before we talk about how MSP should be using software development, as you look at the rise of the AI models and things like no-code coding, both of which are concepts I don’t really understand a huge amount about, but I do read about them as I’m sure lots of ordinary business owners do. How do you see software development changing over the next 15 years or so?

Everyone’s talking about AI, right? I mean that’s almost, I wouldn’t say a given, but it’s obviously very exciting. The precursor is the data though. So the interesting thing is there’s a ton of work that has to be done structuring and cleaning up that data. And one of the interesting things is everyone wants clean data, but no one wants to pay for it. So I think that’s a massive blocker. We’ve got to figure out how to be able to do that properly before then the AI adoption is really going to grow and pick up pace.

Yes, I think that’s a fair thing to say. So let’s look now at MSPs and software development. And they’re not really two things that a number of years ago I would’ve put together. But in fact, you are not just the first person, you’re one of a growing number of people that have said to me, actually these days, we believe that software development is a service that MSPs should be offering. Can you give us some examples of why it’s so important for MSPs to at least be able to have those conversations with their clients?

It’s definitely something that’s changing and becoming more intense over the last year, certainly. I mean, for us, we work closely with quite a number of MSPs. And we’ve had a couple of times where clients have left their MSP, even though the MSP is doing really well in different ways and really giving them great service, but they’re leaving them because the need that they have, that crosses over to where they see the MSP should be offering those services, their MSP is saying, no, we don’t do that. And then what happens is the client then says, well, I’m going to go somewhere where I’m going to be serviced.

So I think that as a business owner, I’d say that’s the number one reason for us to do anything, isn’t it? Client retention. How much more easy is it to retain a client than to get a new one?

So we’ve got to be able to look after our clients. I think that’s something that’s really on the increase. I understand why that is, but the point is it’s definitely on the increase.

So I imagine from the ordinary business owner or manager’s point of view, they see software development as an IT thing, and I’m putting that in kind of little speech marks in the same way that they probably see their website as an IT thing. We of course know that websites and tech support and cyber security and software development are all completely different areas. And from the MSPs that you’re working with when they first start talking to you about offering software development, are they nervous because they don’t see it something within their skillset?

Yeah, very much so. And I think the challenge with software development is it often gets a bad rap because it can be badly done. And I think anything that’s service orientated, I mean look at the building industry, how many people actually say – I’ve got a great builder, everything was on time and on budget and was wonderful? I think software development falls into that because the requirements aren’t static and clear upfront. So I think MSPs generally have two main concerns. Number one is, we don’t want a happy customer turning into an unhappy customer and there’s potential risk there, and two, we don’t really know how to do it, it’s a completely different business line.

I think that kind of sums it up for me, but I think the bigger challenge that almost overrides those is that the crossover between development infrastructure is so big that you cannot properly support a client if you don’t know what they’re going to do with that infrastructure when it comes to the development. And I think fundamentally for companies that are perhaps under-skilled with not just plain software development, but with the sort of the DevOps roles around the development team, what then happens is something that an MSP is provisioned for a customer is now sort of bundled under them. They go, well, we got this stuff off you, but we’re not using it well, we’re wasting money, this is your fault. Or we need this and now you can’t do it for us. If that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. And when we’re talking about development, are we talking about you as the MSP, whether you do it in-house or whether you outsource it to a company such as yours? Are we talking about taking bespoke development that they’ve had done elsewhere, perhaps some kind of legacy application they’ve had built, or are we talking about brand new development or is it a bit of a mix of both?

I think it’s a mix of both. When MSPs get new clients by a client turning around and saying, okay, we’re going to move from on-prem, let’s say to public cloud. That’s a typical entry point from my conversations with the companies we work with. And at that point, if there’s any bespoke applications, one of the key parts of that migration or concerns is going to be how are we going to migrate this onto the public cloud from our on-prem service? Typically speaking, the MSP will say, well, we’ll give you the infrastructure and you sort that out. So it’s a differentiator when winning completely new clients, that’s the one side. When they’re an existing client, you have a position of trust, almost a trusted advisor, which is fantastic. That’s the position you want to be in, so you can really help look after them.

So when they need something brand new that you just mentioned, they want to know, who do you recommend for this? You want to be able to give a good recommendation if you can’t do it yourself or you want to have a good partner. So you keep that in your ecosystem. Alternatively, if they have something internally and they perhaps have their own development function. Typically speaking, I’m not talking about the very large institutions. I’m, let’s say, talking about a company that has, let’s say less than 50 developers. So a medium size to small size enterprise, they’re going to be missing key skill sets. And specifically if they’re giving the MSP the infrastructure support role, they will be missing those roles that stereotypically used to work within the development team to help them give the development team what they have. So that gap is there now.

And that’s obviously an opportunity there to fill that gap. George, final question for you. Tell us about either the biggest headache or the worst project or the oldest legacy code you’ve worked on or some kind of funny story from your career or something that you looked at initially and thought, we’re never going to be able to cope with this

Funny, this will reduce you to tears or laughter, you have to pick one or the other. I think typically speaking, we’ve actually got a client that has undergone quite a large project transformation where they used to have four or five different PCs all connecting to this main server, all running these separate applications that were then pumping data into the main database. And these guys were running an absolute fortune in terms of it was a hedge fund that was running a huge amount of money. And if one of these PCs were ever switched off, the whole thing would just break. And one day, apparently the cleaner came in and one of the PCs was unplugged, so everything didn’t work the next day. I mean funny, but also really concerning. Anyway, we helped them transform and get away from that kind of environment. But the stories you see like that and how much sometimes sticky tape and wires holding everything together is quite amusing,

And it does make you wonder how many more of those situations are still out there just waiting for someone to come along and take it, fix it, and do it before the cleaner switches everything off. Tell us a little bit about Synetec. What do you do for MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you, George?

So we work with MSPs to help them fill that gap in infrastructure. We help them service their clients when they have a development function. We help them procure the infrastructure that they need, but also set it up correctly and make it part of their internal processes. So we fill that gap between the MSPs and the internal development teams. We also help them when it comes to data management and structuring of data, putting data links and databases together. So we have quite a good relationship with multiple MSPs that we can help in that way. And the best way to get hold of me is just email me [email protected], or you can go on to our website, www.synetec.co.uk or just message me on LinkedIn.

This week’s question comes from Dale, who is based in the northeast of England, and is soon going to change the name of his MSP. His question is – Should I buy a website domain ending in .io?

Ideally, no, because on the whole people like us are more comfortable with io or other unusual top level domains because we see them all the time. The question to ask – Is your target audience, i.e. ordinary people, comfortable with .io or will it confuse them? Because confusion kills sales. Where you can, stick to .com or one specific to your country, such as .co.uk.

Welcome to Episode 256 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

As an MSP, you’re hardly inundated with calls from people who want to buy from you. Well, that’s my experience of the MSPs that I work with, certainly. So when you do have someone making contact with you, your job is to make sure you’ve removed every single piece of friction from the sales process. Let me tell you about my experience of the exact opposite of this, where I was desperate to buy something and the friction in doing so was so great, it drove me into the arms of a competitor.

So I’m not going to name the company that I was trying to buy from as that’s not really fair on a podcast and YouTube video like this, just know that it’s not an MSP and it’s not a company in the channel, but it is a supplier of marketing services based in the US. I’ve been doing some research recently into a new marketing initiative that we are doing to promote the MSP Marketing Edge and this service was the perfect solution.

I’d managed to answer all of my questions online, on their website, which is actually the first piece of friction that you and I need to talk about. If an ordinary business owner or manager goes onto your website, will you answer as many of their questions as you can? I’ll be honest, for most MSPs, the answer to this is sadly no.

Most MSPs don’t have the basics in place, such as explaining what you do, how you do it, what makes you different from the other IT companies they’re looking at. And most importantly, you probably don’t have an indicative idea of pricing on your website.

Now, I know that this is a very emotive subject because the price depends upon how long the string is. But when it comes to websites, I very much follow the advice of Marcus Sheridan. In his book, They Ask, You Answer, which definitively says you should put prices on your website because it’s one of the most basic things that people are looking at.

Anyway, I digress. So I answered all of my own questions on this potential supplier’s website and I was ready to buy, and that was where I ran into real trouble because it really wasn’t obvious how to buy from them. There was a call to action button, so the thing that they wanted me to do, and that took me through to a page, which did actually talk about their pricing and their packaging or their packages, but you couldn’t actually select one of the packages and go through with the purchase, which was really weird.

So I thought perhaps the website was having some kind of blip. I refreshed it, I left it for 24 hours and I came back the next day, but nothing had changed. It was exactly the same. Here’s the thing, sometimes what seems obvious to us, what seems obvious that we want them to do, is not obvious to every other human on the planet.

So I clicked on the live chat button, but it was out of hours with the time zone that they were based in, and there was no option for me to leave a message on live chat for them to reply to. So I looked up their email address and I sent them an email and 48 hours later, and yes, this was during the week, this wasn’t the weekend. 48 hours later, I still hadn’t heard anything, which was nuts. It was kind of like they didn’t want the business. So I sent another email chasing my original email, and this time I did get a reply about three hours later and you won’t believe what the reply was. They asked me to book a video call with them, a zoom with them. They sent through a live calendar and said that the only way to buy from them was to actually have a meeting.

Now, I completely understand the need to qualify buyers and check that they’re the right kind of buyers for you, but we are not talking about something like managed services here where you may only take on one or maybe two new clients a month at the most, so you want to pre-qualify them and then make sure they’re right for you. This was a service that should be taking on two to three new clients a day and then to add insult to injury. They had no availability in their live calendar for the next two weeks.

Anyway, let me cut to the end of this story. I did eventually manage to book a call for the following week after I’d gone back to them and we’d done a bit of back and forthing over availability, and then I’ve realised, oh, I’ve got another week. I’ve got to sit for a week. And I started to get a bit annoyed about the lack of progress because the lack of progress in buying from this supplier was holding back the whole marketing initiative and it’s a marketing initiative that I’m driving and I try to make myself accountable to my own team for anything that I’m working on, which I think as the boss you have to do. It’s much better for productivity when you’re accountable to someone, even if that’s your own team.

I didn’t want to have to tell my team that I’d failed again and this project was going to have to be pushed back another couple of weeks. So I just started Googling and I actually just typed in alternatives to this service and guess what happened? 30 minutes later, I’d done some research, I’d found a competitor that looked similar, not as perfect a match as the one I was going to buy from, but I got my questions answered. I looked at the price, I pressed the button, I entered my card details, and I was a client.

Do you know what’s really weird… no one from the original supplier that I picked, no one followed me up when I cancelled the live meeting. And remember, we’ve had email conversations, I’ve asked them to free up some availability, and then I cancelled that meeting without giving them a reason why, and they never asked why. This is crazy.

Now, I appreciate that this is perhaps an outlier example, but the amount of friction that was there in that buying experience was nuts. And it’s a great reminder to you to figure out if there’s any friction in your buying experience. For example, can someone book a 15 minute meeting with you in the next 24 hours? Is your live calendar on the website? Do you answer all possible questions or maybe even have a live chat that’s manned 24 hours a day because you use an outsourced service? As we asked earlier, do you have prices on your website? Here’s a good one. If I phoned your MSP today, would the person who answered the phone be able to answer my sales questions immediately? Would I find myself frustrated by being passed around on the phone or being told that someone, you I guess, is going to call me back at some point?

Let me make this as clear as I can for you, so you put urgency and priority on this. Any friction in sales will put off new clients and they will go and look elsewhere. It’s a priority for you as the owner or manager of the MSP to make sure the process of vetting you and picking you is as easy for prospects as it can possibly be.

One of the hardest things about running your own MSP is that it’s too easy to feel your operating in a silo, in a little bubble cut-off from everyone else. The hell of staff, marketing, finances and everything else that we have to deal with single handedly is what can make us business owners feel really lonely. And this is weird, but it’s also perfectly normal. And actually MSPs have some of the greatest support communities I’ve ever seen, such as the tech tribe and my MSP Marketing Facebook group.

The good news is you are not alone, which means virtually every challenge that you have to deal with, there’s someone out there with guidance.

Now, let’s take your technicians. Have you ever wondered how efficient are they? Last year I interviewed the awesome Jason Kemsley from Uptime Solutions, an outsourced help desk. At that point, they had 37 help desk staff handling 3000 tickets a month on behalf of 180 MSPs, which sounds like a big headache to me, and I’m sure those numbers are much, much larger today. But it does mean that Jason and his team are able to assess what good performance looks like for all three levels of technician.

They also know what extra ticket load every extra user brings to them. And because they’re growing so fast, they need this information, it’s critical to help them recruit ahead of demand. So here are the stats that Jason told me, and you can compare them to your technicians:

First line technicians should be able to handle between 10 and 14 tickets a day, and if they’re not achieving this, it probably means that they’re not bought into your MSP’s culture, or their base knowledge just isn’t there.

Second line technicians should be able to handle eight to 12 tickets a day. Now this includes escalations that may have happened too quickly.

Third line technicians should be able to handle somewhere between none and four tickets a day. Why none? Well, third line techs can potentially deal with such complicated issues that there are days where they don’t complete a ticket. It’s taken perhaps two or three days to resolve.

Now let’s have a look at ticket burden from clients. Jason told me that the average client submits 1.4 tickets per person, or per user per month. Did you write all of those down? If you didn’t wind it back, go and write them down because you now have all the stats you need to assess the efficiency of your team and also whether your clients are creating more noise than the average client should be.

Featured guest: David Ask, a successful entrepreneur whose product, the StatGuardPlus.com, is now available in over 3700 retail stores, including giants like The Home Depot, Lowe’s and True Value Hardware.

David also leads two mastermind groups with the elite ISI Mastermind. Alongside this, he collaborates closely with Dr. Andy Garrett as the Lead Coach for the transformative True North Resiliency program. David believes that understanding ‘WHO’ you are, on a very granular level, is the key to understanding ‘WHY’ you do what you do…. It is a shift that is life-changing.  He often says, “Never start with WHY, start with WHO.”

He is currently writing a book titled, “The Guardians of Grit,” which aims to empower fathers in raising uncrushable young people. Grounded in a science-based approach that distinguishes between Grit and Resilience, David’s book explores how this knowledge can fundamentally shape one’s core identity.

Stay tuned for an engaging conversation with David as he shares his inspiring journey, insights, and the profound message behind “The Guardians of Grit.”

There’s an inherent conflict between being a successful business owner and also a supportive parent and partner. Anyone who’s ever run their own business will understand this, and it’s especially hard in your first few years when you’re working more hours than you’ve ever worked before for less money than you’ve ever earned. It’s a very traumatic and highly emotional time, and my guest today helps lead business owners just like you through these kind of problems.

Today’s guest will not only tell you how to live a great life while still achieving everything you want with your business, he’s also, a bit random, but he’s also a great singer and he’s got a little tune lined up for us at the end of today’s interview.

Hey, my name is David Ask and I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and I might be the best encourager in the world.

Oh, what a great introduction. And not only do you have a great intro, a self intro for this podcast, but as a little tease for what’s coming up in the next eight minutes or so. David, you about to become the first ever guest in nearly five years of this podcast who sings on the podcast. That’s coming up in the next eight minutes. It’s worth waiting for. It really is. So thank you very much for coming on, David. We are going to talk about an amazing subject today. How do you live an amazing life and still grow the business of your dreams? That’s what we’re going to talk about. Let’s first of all, find out who you are.

Man. Thank you so much for having me. What an honour. And yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned the music. I was actually a vocal major at Belmont University here in Nashville back in the early nineties and even now I do a lot of music along with running my main business as it were – I’m an inventor and kind of product developer, so I have a product. My mainstay is a product that’s in 3,700 retail stores and it’s a first in the world, a thermostat guard that has a combination lock. So, you prevent tampering of thermostats by just simply putting a box on it, and I solved the lost key problem.

I love that. So it stops someone else from just going in and fiddling with it and changing it.

Exactly. Yeah, it can get pretty costly. And of course, I mean it’s the old thermostat wars. People kind of understand that whether it’s your home or office, everybody kind of wants a different temperature, so it can solve that problem as well.

I love that. So just as a side note, I have a 14-year-old daughter, so if you could come up with a refrigerator lock, a food cupboard lock, an everything lock. Something that turns off the WIFI for her, but not for me at about 10 at night. That would be amazing. It really would.

So, I know you spend your days inspiring business owners as well and talking to them about how they can improve their lives and their businesses. And it is the conundrum and anyone who’s been in business for more than a couple of years reaches that point. And I remember doing this myself. I’ve been in business since 2005 and I remember about 2008, 2009, still doing 60 hour weeks. My relationship with my wife at the time was suffering and it was a really, really difficult thing. I think every business owner goes through this where you realise that these are two completely conflicting things. To grow a business requires your time and your attention and to keep a relationship healthy and especially when you’ve got kids, requires your time and your attention. But also you need to sleep and exercise and eat and not drink too much and all of that stuff. And these two things are kind of bashing completely. Is this just me and some of the business owners I talked to or is this something that most business owners go through?

I don’t think there’s any question that if you’re going to do something like start a small business, bring a product or service, to market that so people not only value but know about it, the old marketing piece, it’s going to take sacrifice. And people often use that phrase work-life balance, and I don’t like that. I think that this idea of work-life integration is really the actualisation of it. I think balance in some ways it’s desired. We think, yeah, we would like some balance. I want to have a certain number of hours at home and at work and things like that and for sleeping, like you mentioned, but guess what, on the front end of any great endeavour as it were, there’s going to be some things that are maybe wildly out of balance for a while. And I think that’s okay. I think that’s normal. It’s like if I’m going to climb a mountain, well guess what… I’m going to be preparing well in advance for that climb as it were by spending a lot of hours not only investigating the equipment that I need, getting out in the field and using it and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. And so I think that there’s definitely some wild swings on the front end for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. And I have to say, I’ve worked with lots of different businesses over my career. I’ve been working with MSPs since 2016, and I do think MSP owners have it even harder than other business owners because the very nature of being an MSP is you don’t know what’s going to happen. You can come in on a regular Tuesday morning and the whole world could have gone mad. An update could have gone wrong overnight or you could have had a ransomware attack on one of your client’s computers and suddenly everything you plan to do that day by necessity has to go. And that happens to MSPs even when they’ve got 5, 10, 15, 20 staff. So let’s talk more about what you mean by integration. So I think we’re all comfortable with work-life balance, but what do you mean by work-life integration? Is that about making sure that the two of them are coming together in the right way or does it mean something different?

I guess the way I kind of internalise that is just this idea of who’s showing up, meaning. Meaning if I’m going to participate or say that I value certain things in my life, I’ve had to have done a little bit of pre-work as it were to understand what are those things that are on that list? You can’t be everything to everybody. I mean you can’t participate in everything, all that kind of stuff. So you have to have kind of a hierarchy of these are the things that I think are really important right now and be willing to say no to some stuff even for a while. And at the same time, I think that we often, those of us who are kind of entrepreneurial minded, we get this idea that the business is everything, and I’ll show some grace here. I think in some level for a short time it might be because money, I heard somebody say money is kind of close to air, try to live without it. It’s really important.

At the same time, we’ve got our families; the people that we love, and we sure don’t want to send the message to those closest to us that you don’t matter right now. 

So I think largely it’s expectations and communication on the front end. I remember when I was starting my business about 10 years ago, I didn’t really realise that I should have communicated to Lisa and my kids for that matter, Hey, I’m going to have to spend a bit more time on this today or the next three days, or guess what, I’m having to work this weekend on something or things like that. So I think I learned maybe the hard way on the front end about even just communicating what that looks like and the communication, by the way, goes a long way.

Yeah, I think it really does. And I guess that’s when you take your life partner and your kids and your friends and everything else, and as you say, using that communication, you form a partnership with them. I have a similar thing with my daughter. So I’m a sole parent. There’s just me and her here, and as much as I joke about her raiding the refrigerator, actually we have a great partnership. So for example, you and I are recording this. I’ll just check my clock. It’s quarter past seven in the evening on a Monday evening in the school summer holidays back in August. We work a few months ahead on the podcast, but she’s really happy with me doing this because actually she’s in her room, she’s doing some stuff. This is a regular thing and she knows that the flip side of some days I work late doing podcast interviews, but the flip side of that is tomorrow we’re going to London all day. We’re seeing two shows, two theatre shows tomorrow.

So it swings and roundabouts and I get a great podcast, which is important to me and she gets a great day. Let me ask you a question about that. A lot of business owners struggle with that balance, that integration, because there’s just too much to do. So I’m in a lucky position where I’ve got a great team, they do the heavy lifting, I just talk a bit on camera. Someone else does all the other hard work, but there are many MSP owners who are not in that position because actually if they don’t do 10 hours of work today and 10 hours tomorrow, and you know what, I’ve got to get up at six on Saturday, then actually as we were saying, money’s important and the clients stop paying because the work’s not getting done. How do you advise people to break out of that trap without just throwing more hours into it?

Well, I think that like anything, you better count the cost of starting a business before you start the business. Meaning if you don’t have a bit of an exit strategy from that head down mentality and rhythm in your life, that can get really old really fast, even if the money starts pouring in, money only goes so far I think. You can’t sustain that level of effort, really. It’s not a life you become a human doing and not a human being. And so I think that largely on the front end, you need to define what are the steps necessary to build a business that I don’t have to serve it but that serves me. Again on the front end. I get it right. You might have a year or two where you’re really head down going for it, but I would say that if you are in that situation right now and you don’t know what your exit strategy is, and I’m not talking about selling your business, I’m talking about getting out of the day-to-day and into the driver’s seat working on your business and not in it, you need to surround yourself with some people who can help you manage those steps because you’re going to get burned out really, really quickly.

Yeah, I completely agree. So let me ask you this then, David. What do you do to help business owners free themselves from this trap? That’s really what it is.

I do a couple of different things. So I’m a coach, but I do it from a values based perspective, meaning we really help the person build self-awareness. What are my values, my convictions, my virtues? Those are different things. And quite often when we don’t have clarity on those things that really light us up, I’m talking everything from what gives our goosebumps goosebumps, to what do I believe is true about me and everybody around me and how can I affect the world. So that self-awareness piece is huge. I’m also a part of the Iron Sharpens Iron Mastermind and I facilitate two groups within that mastermind of business owners. And so of course as a collective, we’ve got a virtual board of directors for our business, and we talk about personal things as well. We call it a band of brothers for our personal lives, and we become like the people we spend the most time with, period. And how do we know that’s true like gravity? It’s because those of us who have children, we do not want our kids getting caught up in the wrong crowd, period. We know that instinctively, but we don’t often think about that for ourselves. So the coaching piece is one side of my life that I’m really passionate about. And then the masterminding is another that’s been life changing for me as well.

Yeah, a hundred percent. I’m a massive fan of mastermind groups. I’ve run some previously in the UK for MSPs. I don’t do that anymore. It’s not something I personally enjoy facilitating. I enjoyed it for a few years and then once it stopped being fun, I stopped doing it, which I think is a sensible way to run any kind of business. But the concept of it, of you sitting with other people with exactly the same problems as you and you figuring it out. And I love that approach of the values-based thing. If I think of my values of being a great dad, the best possible dad is a very strong value, but also being a successful business owner is also a strong value. I can see how many people would feel exactly the same way and mastermind groups help those two things integrate as we were talking about earlier. Okay. David, just briefly before you sing, and we are going to get a few notes out of you, just tell us how can we get in touch with you and learn more about what you do?

Sure. So my main business, if you go to stat guard plus.com, you can check out my thermostat guard line and as well my personal page is DavidAsk.com.

Okay. And for the first time since the 5th of November, 2019 when we launched this podcast thinking it was going to be a 10 week experiment, and here we are nearly five years later, I can do a drum roll (maybe our producer Simon can insert a drum roll at this point). There we go. David, would you like to prove to us that you are also not just a great guest, but a great singer as well?

Hey, by the way, before I do that, I recorded my last record in England. The producer is British. He has a home here in Nashville.

Hang on a second. You are in one of the greatest musical towns in the world, which is Nashville, and you came to England to record a record that doesn’t.

I know. Isn’t that funny? That’s crazy. All right. I’m going to actually sing something that I don’t think I’ve ever sung, but I heard it this morning. My daughter was playing it, so I’m going to just give it a try here. Somewhere over the rainbow up, way up high. All right, how about that?

There we go. Very good. Thank you very much. And you helped us immensely by picking an out of copyright piece of music as well. So thank you very much, David. Here we go. Thanks for being on the show.

Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

This week’s question is from Chris whose MSP is fairly new in San Francisco. He has a small but growing team and his question is in terms of meetings – What’s a good meeting rhythm to grow the business?

A meeting rhythm helps to take away the haphazard nature of growing the business. If you have a management team you work with, you need to figure out how often you should meet and why. I’ve got to be honest, less is definitely better than more. Here’s a good structure that you can start with, and of course you can take this, try it out and adapt it to suit you and your team.

So I think once a year you should have two days offsite away somewhere, stay over in a nice hotel and that’s time to bond. It’s time to think big and to set the vision for the next few years. Then once a month, you should have a formal management meeting, ideally physically meeting up and no more than a couple of hours. The agenda should be a hundred percent on subjects that grow the business. And then once a week, you should have a short video call with a progress update on the actions from the management meetings and make this the same day each week. Mondays are good as they can set up the whole week’s work. And then finally, you’ve got operations meetings, and these should be as needed perhaps to discuss technical issues and clients. If you do them once a week, make sure that they’re on a different day to those growth calls that you are doing. Otherwise, they’ll just merge into each other and the growth meeting will become less effective. A quick side note on this, if you’ve never read it, Traction is a really great book to read around this subject.

Welcome to Episode 255 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

One of the things you hear me regularly talking about is the need to invest 60 to 90 minutes every day working on your MSP rather than in it. And that means doing activities that win you new clients, encourage them to buy more from you and encourage them to spend more when they buy. Now, one of the biggest problems with this is when your staff constantly interrupt you with questions that really they could answer for themselves, do you have this problem? If so, you are going to love my solution.

Staff interrupt you all the time, often with stupid questions. Now, I’m not being rude about your staff, this is a fact, but interruptions kill progress. Why do they do it? Well, partly it’s to show that they’re working. Partly it’s because they’re too lazy to look up the answer for themselves. And partly it’s because…

Staff want your attention, as they are the child.  And as their boss, you are the parent.

Now, there is a three step fix for this, and you have to make a very long-term commitment to all three of these steps so that this becomes, if you like, a way of working and not just your current thing.

Step one – find your own space. It’s impossible to do your work on the business when you’re in the same physical space as your staff who are working in the business on your behalf. So you need a separate office at least, or maybe even an office away from your building. There’s nothing wrong with sitting in with your staff sometimes, but not all the time because it’s exhausting and frankly unproductive.

Step two – answer every stupid question with a question of your own. So let’s say you are asked – Boss, we’re out of milk. What should we do? – which of course makes you want to pull out your sword and with one swift chop end their miserable life, but this isn’t Game of Thrones. So instead you ask this question back – If I wasn’t here, what would you do? – And then you repeat that question or variations of it for each of the follow-up stupid questions until they realise that they had the answer inside them all along. Yeah, I know this is the slow way to tackle the problem because the fastest thing to do is just tell them the answer, that’s quicker and easier, but it also reinforces their need for you. And we want your staff to thrive without you.

And then step three – make yourself available at fixed times of the day because not all staff questions are stupid. Some will be totally valid, especially the technical ones. So make yourself available to your team once, twice, or three times a day at fixed times. And ideally these will be the same times every day to turn them into a positive habit. Have a Teams call where they ask the questions they need answering. You might even ask them to document these questions in advance of the call, which forces preparation and that can remove time wasting. Now, stupid questions get the same question as number two. I was just talking about that whole thing of what would you do if I wasn’t available, but valid questions can be explored and answered, and here are some ways to explore problems that will teach your staff to look after themselves.

So you could say, for example, what does the standard operating procedure say about this? How do you think you’d find that information? What did the Google machine say about this? What’s your gut feel for how this could be fixed? And the best one, what ideas did your colleagues suggest? We’re just trying to train them here to answer all of their questions themselves so they only bring to you the one or two questions a week that genuinely only you can answer.

Often when I start talking to an MSP about improving their marketing, the first thing I have to do is wipe out some common marketing myths from their head. So let’s look at five of the most common of these and see which ones are stopping you from doing effective marketing.

Here are five myths about MSP marketing that I want to scrub from your head so that you can improve your marketing, with vigour. Big bristly myth busting brush ready? Here we go…

Myth number one – marketing is a dark art and not at all logical. Now, I’m not a technical person. If you explain the ins and outs of something technical to me, I would glaze over and possibly slip into a coma and you’d be baffled because to you, tech stuff is logical and delicious and systemisable and you love it. Well, marketing is to me what tech stuff is to you and you might see as baffling and maybe even boring and a bit of a dark art. But to me it’s logical and delicious and systemisable and I love it.

The best marketing for any MSP is a series of small, easy to implement actions that you can repeat daily, weekly, and monthly, so that you end up with marketing that never ends. It’s the perfect way to get the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right time.

Myth number two – you need lots of cash to do good marketing. Sure, having cash helps because cash lets you buy other people’s time or invest in marketing services, but any MSP can set up a really, really good marketing system with almost zero cash outlay. Take my simple three-step marketing strategy. Build multiple audiences, such as your LinkedIn and your email list. Grow a relationship with them through content marketing, so daily social posts and a weekly email. And commercialise the relationship. Get them to book a 15 minute zoom with you at the point that they’re thinking of switching MSPs. Now, you can set all of this up by spending just a tiny amount of cash. And by the way, my MSP Marketing Edge would be an excellent investment as a) it’s built around that exact strategy, and b) there’s no contract so you can cancel anytime.

Onto myth number three – you need to hire a marketing agency and there are lots of great marketing agencies in the channel, and of course a few ropey ones. A great agency can save you a lot of time and effort building a spectacular website and putting smart digital marketing strategies in place, but you will pay for this and through the nose. And if you’re not paying an eye watering price to an agency, then they’re probably not that good at what they do. So hiring an agency is what you do when you have an abundance of spare cash and you want to invest in the long-term growth of your business. Reality check, you want one new client of about 10 to 20 users every month, right? And that would change your life if you could achieve that every month, agreed? To get that new client you just need two, maybe three highly qualified leads a month, assuming that you have a 50% close rate. At this stage of your growth a marketing agency might be overkill.

Myth number four – marketing is all about the digital stuff. And digital stuff is great as it’s low cost and relatively easy. The downside is that everyone does digital stuff and that makes it very hard to stand out from your competitors. Never underestimate the ongoing power of physical stuff in our digital world – members of my MSP Marketing Edge have an IT Services Buyers Guide that they can print, a book on Business Email Compromise with their name on the cover, a monthly printed newsletter, marketing campaigns with lumpy mailers – because all of these physical items speed up their marketing and their lead generation and they will stand out in a way that their competitors can never hope to match.

Which leads me onto our final myth. Number five – you have to beat all of your competitors in order to win. Simply not true. There’s plenty of business for plenty of MSPs, but you don’t have to be at the very top of the pile to win. You just need to be a little bit better than some of your local competitors. Remember what I said earlier about just wanting one new client a month? Well, that’s a great mindset and it’s a great context with which to approach all of your marketing. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic to dominate a marketplace, and I know a few MSPs who are doing that right now that can change your business and your life in ways you can almost never dream of. But for most MSPs, it’s just not what they want. Winning one new client every month would make them the happiest business owners on the planet. Would it for you?

Featured guest: Ian Luckett is a Business Growth Consultant who specialises in helping business owners in the IT & MSP space.  His purpose is to help others out, be that in business or in their personal lives, and he has always had a passion for personal development that has spread over the years into the business world.

Aged 27, he discovered his love for leadership, managing and building a team of 65 people in what is now the Virgin Media Network in the South East.  In 2016 he founded Innovate to Success with one mission – to help others in business experience the success he’d had over his 20-year career in senior positions.

In 2022 The MSP Growth Hub was born, designed to help give MSP business owners the clarity and confidence to harness the ambition of their business that may have felt out of reach, and help them build a business that truly works for them, rather than them for it.

We have about three months left, which doesn’t seem a lot, does it? I’m sure it was January just a few seconds ago. My guest this week is an expert at growing MSPs and I asked him what three activities you should be focused on for the remainder of this year. He will tell you the three most important growth things you can do in the final months of 2024.

Hey there, it’s Ian Luckett from The MSP Growth Hub.

Hey, Ian, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. You’re one of our regulars. I think it’s every year or so we just get you back on because you are so full of value and you always bring something amazing. So I’ve invited you on for this special episode, which is not really a special episode, but it’s a very special date because as of the day of this episode being released, the 1st of October, 2024, you, me and the thousands of MSPs who are going to watch this and listen to this have got exactly three months left till the end of the year. We’re kind of fudging over Thanksgiving there and Christmas and pretending there are no holidays or vacations. But theoretically, we’ve got three months exactly till the next year. And what I wanted to get you on to talk about was three activities or three things that every MSP should be doing to max out the next three months. Before we get onto those, let’s just hear a little bit about you. Let’s do the credibility thing, Ian. Who are you? Where do you come from? And why should we listen to you?

Crikey, what a great three questions to start off. So yes, as I said, I’m Ian Luckett from The MSP Growth Hub here in the UK. Myself and my business partner, Stuart Warwick, help MSPs get to a million. And if you’re already there profitably, then we help you get to five and faster helping you build a business that works for you rather than you for it. So we help MSPs work on the business, on the non-technical side of things. Well, they can faff around with all the technology, but we help them with their leadership, sales and marketing and all of that kind of great stuff, knowing your numbers and everything, and it’s absolutely brilliant. We love being part of the channel. Super grateful for helping so many MSPs out, and this is a really great idea. Three months left. Because everyone goes on holiday in December, don’t they? No, they don’t. And this is where the opportunities lie.

I think this is a great, great opportunity for every MSP just to buckle down and really get a good push to the last three months of the year.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. I should just add as a side note that Ian and I are very good mates. We live about 45 minutes apart, although we don’t meet up nearly enough. But what happens is Ian will often call me when he knows I’m in a long car journey with my daughter. And my daughter, bless her, she has to sit and listen to us rambling on for 20 or 30 minutes, lots of swearing, lots of ideas, energy. And then almost every single time we have one of those calls, I nearly crash my car, don’t I? Or I miss a junction and I’ve just added 20 minutes to my journey. So anyway, we need to sort that – we need to have proper calls when one of us isn’t driving.

We do.

I also have a better car than Ian, which he hates.

Well, we’ve got a petrol head versus an electric car chap. I don’t think we go there on this episode because I think we have a 50/50 blend in our client base – 50% are electric and 50% are pure petrol head, so we always have a bit of banter. It’s a bit like the Apple vs PC thing, isn’t it?

It is, yes. And I’m the EV one. Just to clarify that.

Yes, I wanted to clarify that as well.

Because I care about the planet. So, let’s get on with what we’re supposed to be talking about, which is three things that you could be focusing on for the next three months to really end the year as a maximum. What’s your first thing, Ian?

First one’s around maximising the relationship and revenue with your existing clients, account management. Every single time we get a client coming into The Growth Hub, we know, we almost guarantee there is between £50,000 – £150,000 of untapped revenue because of a non-connected account management process. Poor QBRs, TBRs, you are not going back in. This is a gift that keeps on giving, every single year you can do the same thing over again. As long as you are providing value, you’re selling value, you’re demonstrating value to your clients every year, you’ll be able to increase your stack to keep you secure, and you’ll also be able to increase the revenue and the relationship with your clients. The first one’s all around account management – great relationships, great opportunity, great processes as well. You don’t all have to do this yourself as your business owner. You’ve got a whole team amongst you, build the process and then leverage it amongst the team and it just makes them even slicker and you even more profitable. Absolutely guaranteed. That’s the first one.

Thank you. I love that. And as we know there is money on the table, let me ask you a follow up question to that, which is the question I get most often on that subject, which is where do I start? So if you’re like a three, four person business, the owner’s still doing a lot of second line, all of the third line support. They’ve got all these clients, they’re trying to grow the business, and they can see that, as you say, there’s that a hundred, £150,000 sat on the table, but it seems like a lot of work to go and get that money. So where would you start? What are the first steps?

What a great question. And the first question is, to start off by understanding, is every client that you’re working with making you money? I guarantee there will be a handful that aren’t. And if they’re not making you money and they’re not going to move because you’ve worked with them for many, many years and they want a simple stack, get rid of them. Otherwise, you’re giving your profits, yes all those ice creams and holidays and cars and everything like that, that you could be spending with your friends and family, to your clients. Because if they’re not making money, what are you doing it for? So the first thing is start off by analysing your clients and work out your A, B, and C grade clients.

From the point of view of profitability, you’re going to be looking to move the ones that are not profitable into profitable. But also it is quite a daunting process – putting you’re prices up, you’ve got to talk to someone, Oh my God, I don’t want to do that. Just get a handful of clients who you know damn well are going to go, No problem at all. I’m going to do this. And that’ll help you build your confidence as you go through the process. And yeah, you’re going to get some who are going to go, This is too expensive. No, I’m not doing it. And then you need to go and sell the value. So, grade your clients, work out your profitable ones, work out your non-profitable ones, and get a plan of attack to get yourself in a position where this whole process works. It’s some of the frameworks we use here at The Growth Hub.

Did you just plug your podcast on my podcast?

Yes, I did. Yeah, we’ve got a podcast. It’s called The IT Experts podcast also here to help MSPs grow and scale.

I don’t know if I like that. Let’s move on to the second one. So what’s the second thing we should be focusing on in the next three months?

You did that on my podcast last year.

I did. I did.

Yeah you did. Absolutely, right. Second one, you’re going to love this. It’s start filling your funnel now.  Paul talks about it all the time. We talk about it all the time. Sales and marketing is the one way to accelerate your business growth in your MSP. But, where do you start? It’s clunky. It’s hard. It takes a long time. It costs a lot of money. No, it doesn’t. But if you don’t get started and you don’t start building connections, then it will take a long time and it will cost you a lot of money and you will get bored of it, and you’ll probably find another vendor tool that you’ll go and tinkle with instead. So find out who your ideal customer is, who are the ones we just talked about that need account management? Who are the ones who are most profitable? Let’s go and find them. Let’s go and hunt them down. Are they in LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups? Your Chamber of Commerce, the different associations you might be in? Also, go and find those people and build a network of those people and become the technical expert with those people. So they know you are the go-to tech IT MSP, whatever you want to call it, in that space so you are seeing credibility. Deliver some value, go and do some lunch and learns, go and do some keynotes. Go and explain to them. But the most important thing, please, and this is a plug back for you, Paul, just take Paul’s IT Services Buyer’s Guide. It’s brilliant as your middle of funnel and educate, educate, educate in what poor IT looks like and what good IT looks like. And literally our clients are just using it all the time and they are pulling clients off the shelves because they’re going, I don’t get that. I don’t get that. I don’t get that. Is that what you do? I want what you do. So have that middle of funnel. The middle of funnel is the bit that everybody misses out. People aren’t interested in white papers anymore, but they want to come to a lunch and learn. They want to understand where their vulnerabilities are. So do what Paul says – build the audiences, educate, build a connection with them, and just do that. But start the funnel now because it takes a long time to come through. And then by the time you started doing that investigation and know who you are trying to connect with and get out on LinkedIn and all of this kind of great stuff, beginning of next year, you’ll have some traction and you’ll have a bit of motivation around that.

Yeah, I love that. And thank you for plugging my IT Services Buyers Guide. We actually only give that to members of the MSP Marketing Edge, and a lot of our members, of course work with you vice versa. Any MSP can do a buyer’s guide. The concept is really simple. You write a guide of how to buy what you sell because managed services is difficult. Ordinary business owners and managers don’t really understand it. If you want to sort of gem up on this and understand exactly what are you going to write, go and look at, They Ask You Answer, which is a book by Marcus Sheridan. He talks about buyer’s guides in there. It’s an incredible tool. And in fact, it was off the back of reading that book a few years ago that I wrote that for our members and we update it every year. So right now we’re just about to deliver the 2025 version.

I also interviewed Marcus on this show. I think it was like two Christmases ago. But if you go onto our podcast page on the website, you’ll see it’s our most listened to episode. So it’s right up there at the top for you to go in, and it’s an interview about an hour with Marcus, but he knows MSPs inside out because he’s worked with hundreds of them. So we take all of his concepts and we make those, what’s the word I’m looking for? Valid.

Okay. What’s your third and final thing you think we should do before the end of this year?

Okay, number three, really simple. If I didn’t mention it before, we do have our IT Experts podcast and we’ve just recorded this show yesterday. So there’s a plug. And it’s called Stepping Up and Out of Your Own Way. What we mean by this is that many MSP’s business owners, you might have a handful of people, and you are the bottleneck. Everybody’s getting in your way, you don’t trust anybody. Everything needs to be happening because of your say. So we always talk about getting out your own way, which sometimes can be a bit of a forward term for do something different. But what we’re saying about here is step up as a leader and understand that you are leading the business rather than managing it and managing the processes and let people come up and flourish amongst you. Let them come up and let you hand over some of the tasks, let you delegate with authority and start helping them understand what you’re trying to achieve with the culture of the business, the team working even maybe just give them a little project or something like that because people wake up in the morning, they want to win, they want to have a great day, they want to go to bed and go, that was a great day. They don’t wake up in the morning going, oh, I can’t wait to earn £237.60. It doesn’t work like that, right? We need to succeed. And if you are just pushing people down and you’re suppressing people all the time, then they’re going to leave. But if you involve them, you include them, get them involved in your culture, your vision, your mission, where you want the business to go. So step up a little bit as a leader. Look at the shadow that you are casting. Look how people are behaving. And it’s probably in relation to you. One of the things we just mentioned was if you’re not careful, you’ve got a family at home and you also have a family of kids that work as well, and they’re going to play around a load of kittens and have load of fun if you let them. If you educate them and you give them the responsibility and give them the tools, then blow the business to pieces. Love it in a positive way, by the way. Not a negative.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, and you were quite right saying no one wakes up to think hoping for a bad day. We all want to have amazing days. And the more we are growing our business and systemising it and making that business stand on its own two feet without us, I think that’s more fun.

Absolutely.

A lot of business owners, I think get trapped in that routine of, Oh, well, I’ve spent the last 20 years doing tech problems every day, and that’s what I do. And actually, there are many more fun things you can do with your life. You can go and learn to fly, spend time with your other half, hang out with your kids, play golf, do whatever your thing is, and still have a business that runs without you. But you’re absolutely right, Ian. It requires that leadership.

Exactly. Yeah. Perfect.

Thank you very much. Before you go. I might give you one more plug, maybe don’t tell us about your podcast because we’re bored of hearing about that, but tell us about what The Growth Hub does. Tell us what you do and who you do it for. Do you work with MSPs outside of the UK as well, and how do we get in touch with you?

So at The MSP Growth Hub, we work with MSPs mainly over the UK. Well, no, not mainly, only in the UK at the moment, but we do want to change that as part of our vision. But if you’re an MSP in the UK and you want to get in contact and you’re finding, yesterday we kind of defined it as how many eurgh moments do you have in your MSP where something’s hard, either people or your finances or you’re not making money. We talked to lots of MSPs who have been in business a lot of time and they’re still not turning a profit because they just keep adding people and things to the businesses. So we help them streamline, get an efficient business. And I say build a business that works for you profitably rather than you working for it, right? So that you can do the things that Paul’s just mentioned about. You might even want to do an experience like driving an electric car maybe, if you’re a bit strange.

But anyway, that’s the one thing. But we help them. We have frameworks that we work with, we have programs, we have coaching, we’ve got leadership coaches. We’ve got some really amazing tools that are powerful, and it’s not uncommon for us to double an MSP’s turnover and profitability in between 24 and 36 months. And we’re doing it. And it’s putting hairs on my arms now just saying that because that’s what we’re here for. Stuart and I put this together to create a legacy of helping people. If you’re helping enough other people get what they want, guess what? You get what you want. And we absolutely love doing it. And it isn’t like work, a bit like yourself, Paul. So yeah, if you want to get in contact with us, either hunt us down on LinkedIn, hit the website TheMSPGrowthHub.com, there’s a great little quiz there, scale your MSP quiz, get in touch, have a chat. Just see if there’s anything we can help you with.

This week’s question comes from Francis whose MSP is in Washington. His question is – How can I motivate myself to do work I don’t enjoy?

Well, one clever way is to gamify the job that you need to do. By that I mean turn it into a game. So for example, let’s say you’ve got to make a series of phone calls to hot leads. You could play the paperclips game. You get two glasses and you put a number of paperclips into one glass, and that number should represent the number of calls that you have to make. And every time you dial the number, you move a paperclip into the other glass and you just keep going until all of the paperclips are in the other glass, and then you stop and you do a different activity.

Now, this simple game triggers off a number of powerful psychological factors. You can see that progress is being made. Once you’ve started, your brain will really want you to finish. And filling the other glass will give your brain a really nice burst of dopamine, the reward chemical. Just don’t make the mistake that I once made of using M&Ms instead of paperclips, because you soon end up with two very empty glasses.

Welcome to Episode 254 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

One of the easiest ways to grow your MSP is to target a vertical. Marketing to a vertical is so much easier than marketing to a general audience because you know exactly who you are marketing to, exactly where they are, exactly what their problems are, and how you can solve those problems. So you can make your marketing message sound so much more relevant to them. A lawyer, for example, is much more likely to listen to you if you are using the word lawyer than if you are just talking about business owners.

Let me give you nine, rapid fire marketing ideas to break into a new vertical. So there are many benefits of marketing to a vertical. You can do it alongside your general business, and once you’ve picked a vertical, there are a number of actions that you should take to get your marketing properly set up.

Here are the first nine actions that I recommend, in the order that you should do them.

Number one: Build a website just for that vertical. Not just a new page on your existing site, do it properly. Put together a four to five page website just for that vertical. The goal is to appear to be a true specialist to your target prospects, and a proper website is a basic MSP marketing fundamental.

Number two: Set up a vertical specific LinkedIn or Facebook, depending which platform most decision makers in your vertical use.

Number three: Start posting regular content so that you have a presence. Make sure to put the name of the vertical into the headline and/or the intro paragraph. Now, sometimes making content seem relevant to a vertical is as simple as mentioning that vertical and also look for how they refer to themselves and their business. So for example, accountants have a practice, not a business.

Number four: Start networking and meet as many decision makers as you can. Look for relevant vertical business shows or other events that you can attend, as nothing beats pressing the flesh when you’re just getting started in a vertical. I promise you’ll have a marketing revelation at every event.

Number five: Build your email list. It’s easy to get started with a vertical because you can just buy targeted data. You can also scrape Google or get a virtual assistant to just go through Google searches and make a database up for you.

Number six: Get your marketing machine working, generating prospects that you can speak to doing all the things we’ve just been talking about, and then pick up the phone and call them. Phone calls will always get you to a new client faster.

Number seven: Once you have a vertical client, turn them into a case study or a testimonial as quickly as you can, and this will give others the faith to buy from you.

Number eight: Look for other forums where your vertical decision makers hang out. Do they have Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, chat forums… can you become a member of these? Best to do this properly and above board rather than try to sneak in. And don’t try to sell; add value by answering relevant questions. Just make sure there is a link to your vertical website in your profile.

And then finally number nine: Get to know the movers and shakers in your vertical associations. You are ultimately serving the same people, so be persistent in getting to know them, but do play a long game. The key question to ask is – what do these influencers want or need and how can I help them get it? If you help them, of course at some point they’re going to help you.

Let’s talk about networking. And I don’t mean the enjoyable networking with cables and that lovely sound it makes when the plug goes into the socket, that *bink*. No, I mean the networking that’s less enjoyable where you’re getting up early, overpaying for an unhealthy breakfast and getting stuck in a corner, being bored by strangers in order to get the most from the networking meetings that you go to. You have to stand out but in the right way, in the most authentic way. And I’m going to tell you exactly how to do that.

Now I haven’t been networking for a while, but I did once go to a networking meeting where there was a guy dressed in a bright gold, lamé jacket so that he could stand out. I’m not kidding at all. No one took him at all seriously because he just looked like an out of work magician.

The best way to stand out at a networking meeting is not to wear a gold, sparkling jacket – it’s to be INTERESTED, not INTERESTING.

Essentially what I mean is you shouldn’t try to stand out by standing out, by going, woo-hoo, look at me.

Instead, work the room. Make every person feel like they are the most important person there. Give them your full attention with no distractions. Have a poker face if they’re boring, and just ask them lots of open questions about their favourite subject, which is of course, themselves and their business. If they ask any questions back about yours, just give them a one line answer and then flip it around and ask another open question.

Here’s the thing about talking to relative strangers. The less you talk about you, the more fascinating you will be to them. I promise you that’s true. After 10 minutes or so, when you are kind of in that zone where you’re starting to get bored of each other, suggest that you swap business cards and say, Hey, we should go meet some other people, or you and I are going to be chatting all day, as you’re such a fascinating person. Maybe that last line doesn’t quite sound so authentic, but just make sure that the business card you give them has your most recent photo on it, because in reality that’s all they’re going to remember about you, your face. They’ll remember your face, they’ll remember how your face made them feel, and they’ll keep your card. The ideal thing then is, once they’ve got your card, they’re pulling it out three or four weeks later and they’re looking at it like, oh, I remember that person, they were fascinating. And of course, your business card says exactly what you do. Tell me, what’s your advice to really max out a networking event?

Featured guest: Jonathan Jay fell into mergers and acquisitions (M&A) by accident in 1999 with the sale of his publishing business. Fast forward a few years and he’d bought out a large competitor in another sector, merged it with his existing business, and sold it on to a London-based private equity firm in 2007 in a life-changing deal.

Jonathan bought a group of insolvent businesses from a Private Equity firm for £1, turned them around, and sold them 11 months later for £1.25m, and during the pandemic he bought another 48 businesses.

After being asked to share his business buying knowledge, Jonathan founded The Dealmaker’s Academy in 2016.  Since then, Dealmakers.co.uk has become the leading M&A educator in the UK, and Jonathan has taught more than 13,500 people worldwide how to buy their first business.

There are very few shortcuts to growing your business, but one of them is to acquire another MSP. In a single transaction, you can double your revenue and down the line dramatically increase your profits as well. But of course, doing this kind of acquisition is not easy. Never mind the hassles of integrating two businesses. Most MSPs fail at the very first hurdle, which is how to know which MSPs could be for sale and how to start a conversation about that.

My guest has bought and sold so many businesses, he’s going to make it really easy for you. Today’s guest will tell you how to find another MSP for sale and start a conversation about acquiring them.

Hi, I’m Jonathan Jay from Dealmakers.co.uk

And thanks so much for coming back onto the podcast. Jonathan, I think it’s about to get on for three, maybe four years since you were last on. And I know that you’ve been very busy. You’ve been teaching thousands of business owners around the world, including many MSPs, how to find and buy a competitor or another MSP and add it into their own business. And we’re going to talk about exactly that on this interview.

Now, before we jump into that, and I know everyone who’s thinking of buying an MSP always has the same questions which you’re going to answer for us. First of all, tell us a little bit about you. So what’s your background and how did you get into buying and selling businesses?

Sure. So, 2024 is actually my dealiversary, so 25 years ago, I first sold a business. It was a publishing business, someone approached me. I made more money the day I sold it than I had in the previous two and a half years of turning up to the office six days a week. My eyes were open to what was possible, but it takes me a while to learn a lesson.

I actually started another business from scratch, which we all know is a lot of hard work. But then I bought out my major competitor, put the two businesses together, and then sold that to private equity in 2007, and that was a life-changing deal. And even now, 18 years later, that deal is paying for my holidays, it’s paying for my lifestyle. So I always say to people, one deal can change your life. And over the last 25 years, I’ve bought and sold more than 75 different businesses and I’ve learned a lot along the way and I’ve made all the mistakes so that you don’t have to.

It’s so amazing to hear a story like that where you are still living off that one deal from 18 years ago. But is that what every MSP owner can expect when they start to do mergers and acquisitions? Or do most people start off with something a bit simpler like just buying a competitor?

Well, I tell you the mistake that most people make – they buy another business, but they buy a business that’s way too small. They buy someone who’s smaller than they are because it’s inside their comfort zone, instead of buying a business that’s actually bigger than theirs. Now, when you buy a business that’s bigger, it’s actually easier to do the deal. It’s easier, interestingly, to negotiate a deal with a larger business, it’s easier to finance the acquisition, and they typically have more professionalised accounts and financial functions. So it’s actually easier to understand the business that you are buying.

The number one mistake that people make is buying too small, getting frustrated, and therefore not doing it again.

But what are the common objections that you hear from people when you suggest that? A few off the top of my head that I can imagine people saying, but Jonathan, I’ll never be able to afford a bigger business, but Jonathan, they’ve got a management team and we haven’t, but Jonathan, that’s just ridiculous. I’m guessing you hear these and more.

Yeah, so let me tell you the mindset shift that needs to take place. The mistake that people make is they start thinking, how can I afford this business? I want to buy it, but how can I afford it? And they start thinking about their savings and their pensions, and they start thinking about friends and family who could lend them money. They don’t really want to go to the bank because the bank turned them down for a £10,000 overdraft, so they don’t think the bank’s going to be much help. So they give up because they’re actually asking themselves the wrong question. You see, when you ask yourself the question, how can I afford it? You go down a certain thought pattern of how much cash have I got at the bank and how much money can I borrow? The question you should be asking yourself is, how can I fund it?

So if I was to buy this business, how can I fund it? Now, what we want to do, we want to fund the acquisition of this business without putting in any of our personal money. And that’s a very important rule that I live by. You never put in your personal money. Now, if you take yourself out of the equation and you start saying to yourself, how can I fund this? You take the knowledge that you’ve acquired about funding businesses, and all of this is learnable. You take all that information, learn about funding businesses, and you create what we call a deal jigsaw where we take all these different elements of funding, we fit them together, and we create the ability to buy that business without putting in any of our own cash.

And do you see, if we take MSPs as a specific example, because I know you work with all sectors everywhere across the world. Do you see that actually someone buying another business like theirs, whether it’s a bigger one or a smaller one, are they more likely to succeed with that because they already understand the business and therefore they know where the costs can be cut and where corners can be cut and where corners can’t be cut?

Yeah, 100%. The mistake that I see people make is they buy a business that they don’t understand, and then when they’ve got it, they don’t know what to do with it. They don’t know what’s good about it, what’s bad about it. And it is a really easy trap to fall into. But if you are buying a business that’s similar to yours in a different location, maybe even in a different country, you understand what you are buying. You know what to look for. You can look at their accounts and you can understand whether you think they’re spending too much money on staff, their overheads are too high, they’re spending too much on their office, and as a result, you can see savings, but you can also see synergies. You can say, well, if we buy that business that’s in the next town, do we need their office as well? Do we need all of their staff? Could we merge the two together? And those cost savings just drop straight to the bottom line to create more profit and more money in your pocket.

Yeah. So I guess theoretically you could use the increased profits from that to help you fund the deal. So it’s almost like you’re taking the profits that you’re going to realise down the line and you are using those to pay off the owner down the line. Is that the kind of thing that you’d put together in your deal jigsaw?

I don’t believe that you should ever agree a fixed price for a business. And the reason I say that, and it’s very different to what you will hear from anyone else, is because businesses go through ups and downs. They go through cycles of high performing, moderately performing and having a tough time and then back having an amazing time. So I think that you should always agree a price for a business that is related to the results, there is a connection between the two. And that means that if the business performs, the seller gets more. But if they’ve sold you something that’s about to fall off a cliff and isn’t going to perform and they kind of know that they just can’t wait to offload it onto you, then they get less because the business isn’t performing. And what that does, it completely de-risks the acquisition. And I’m all about de-risking the acquisition so that you are not left with a problem.

Yeah, I love this. And actually, I’ve been watching your YouTube channel and you have some fascinating videos on there where you are talking to people that you’ve taught how to go and acquire a business. And a lot of the things you’ve just said there, it’s great to hear your clients, your students I guess, it’s hard to call someone who’s in their forties or fifties a student when they’re running a successful business, but to hear them saying that they’ve done exactly that, which is really cool.

Okay, one final question for you, and it’s kind of a get started question. So let’s assume we’ve got an MSP who’s watching this on YouTube or listening to this on the podcast thinking, oh yes, this is it. I want to do this. Where do they start? Because I know that’s the question that I most commonly get about M&A is, where do I find other MSPs for sale?

So the simplest thing to do is to go to the people already in your contacts, people that you already know, and you don’t ask them if they would like to sell to you and you don’t say, I want to buy your business, because that’s just sending completely the wrong message. This is what you say, and you say this word for word. You say, if you were ever thinking about selling your business, would you let me know? Okay. An alternative to that is to say, do you know anyone who’s selling their MSP? And in both cases, what we’re doing in a very soft way is we’re saying we are interested, but we are allowing them to contact us, maybe not immediately. But maybe a few days later, they might say, look, you asked me that the other day and I’ve been thinking about it. I think I might be interested. It’s a very, very gentle, polite, and professional way of starting the conversation without the bluntness of, do you want to sell your business? Which I think probably won’t get you the response that you’re looking for.

Yeah. That’s fantastic. Thank you, Jonathan. So tell us more about what Dealmakers does and how can you help MSPs to acquire another MSP, and what’s the best way for us to get started with you?

We help people in over 56 countries around the world buy businesses, whether it’s their first business or they’ve already bought some businesses, but they want to do it bigger and better. And I’ve got lots and lots of free resources to give away, and you can find them on Dealmakers.co.uk. All you have to do is download the free resources, and if you need any help at all, just send us a message.

This week Fiona, who heads up the marketing for an MSP in New Hampshire, asks – In terms of websites, I’ve heard about exit intent popups… what is it and should I have one on our website?

One of the most important ingredients you need in your website is a strong call to action, also known as a CTA. This is the thing you most want them to do after visiting your site. Your main CTAs are likely to be in order of priority: number one, book a 15 minute appointment with you through your live calendar. If they don’t do this, you want them to, number two, go through your data capture. And if they don’t do this, then you want them to, number three, connect with you on LinkedIn.

An exit intent popup spots when someone’s intending to leave your webpage and displays a popup. Is it annoying? Well, yes, a little bit, but does it get conversions? And the answer to that is also, yes. We used to use one on our website some time ago, and we got probably around two or three people a week joining our mailing list. Now, that’s not huge, but over the years, it does add up. We custom built ours. Popular tools available, include Hello Bar, Wise Pops and OptiMonk. And of course there are dozens of WordPress plugins that will do exactly the same thing.

Welcome to Episode 253 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

You and I as business owners, we are in this for the long run, right? Whether this is your first year in business or your 30th, you know that owning a business is a marathon and not a sprint. So that being said, why do we constantly make life hard for ourselves? Far too many MSPs decide to run the marathon while carrying an anchor. It’s nuts. Let’s talk about why we do this and how to give ourselves a much easier life, yet still achieving the things that we want from our business.

So I was listening to this book a few months back. It was written by the guy who built up the Burger King chain back in the 1950s and 60s if you’re interested. It’s called The Burger King. It was, okay, not the most instructive business book in the world, but I do believe you can get huge value from any book as long as you get one big idea from it. Do you agree with me on that? Anyway, my big takeaway from this book was a phrase I’ve never heard before, but I instantly understood what it meant.

Business owners make life hard for themselves by running a marathon while carrying an anchor.

And I completely relate to this, do you? It means that even though we know it’s not a sprint race and we know we have to keep going for years and years and years, we seem to noble ourselves in as many ways as we can. Perhaps it’s by continuing to work 60 hours a week despite being surrounded by very competent staff who are actually looking for more things to do. Or perhaps it’s by not taking enough vacation, enough holiday time each year, which means that when we do take a break, we are utterly exhausted. Or perhaps it’s by thinking too small.

There are many ways that we hold ourselves back and don’t think this is just an MSP thing. All business owners everywhere in all sectors do exactly the same thing. But the thing is, the clues to long-term success are there if you go looking for them. Just listen back to any of the fantastic interviews that I’ve done in the MSP Marketing Podcast over the last five years, and you’ll hear very, very successful people talking about how they broke out of the “hell phase” of running a business, where you’re trapped doing 60 hours a week, and they entered a new phase where they’re working primarily on the business rather than in it. And often the massive growth of their business starts to happen at exactly that moment. And this is not really a surprise – there is a direct correlation.

So let me ask you – maybe it’s worth you pausing this podcast or this YouTube video to ask yourself this question – what do you do to hold yourself back? What’s the anchor that you are carrying during your marathon? The first step is to identify it, label it as what it is, and then dedicate yourself to finding ways to eliminate it. Maybe it’s a mindset issue. Maybe it’s a workload issue, maybe it’s a resourcing issue. You can’t fix these things until you know what the problem is. Then you can take proactive action to eliminate the problem. Let me finish with one more quote from that book, and I’m paraphrasing here, but this is the right sentiment. The greatest gift we can give ourselves as business owners is positivity, and that comes out of taking action against our problems. I love that. Don’t you? Come on then. Let’s do it. You and me. Let’s take some action.

I recommend all MSPs focus their marketing efforts on building multiple audiences of people on LinkedIn and email, growing a relationship with those audiences through content marketing and then converting them from leads to clients. And the easiest way to do that is to offer them a 15 minute video call with you.

It’s a very low commitment first step that gives you the opportunity to ask them about their favourite subject, which is of course, themselves and their business. And then you can try to set up a proper, in real life, sales meeting. Now this video call is something you should offer on your website, offer it on your LinkedIn, offer it everywhere that you engage with people who are potential future prospects. And the call should consist of lots of open questions from you exploring them, their business, their needs, their wants, their fears and their desires.

The more they talk, the less you talk, then the more engaged they will be. But there’s also a very leading question that you absolutely must ask. They’ll give you a one word answer that will reveal exactly how likely they are to become a client. Here’s the question…

On a scale of 1 to 10 – where 1 is terrible and 10 is world class – how do you rank your current IT support company?

Ask this question and then go quiet. Give them space to think about it and answer it. You can colour grade this lead based on their answer because you’ll instantly know if they’re a great prospect or just a tyre kicker.

If they answer ten, nine or eight, then they’re a red lead and are very happy with their incumbent MSP, so add them to your email list, wish them well and call them back in a year to see if anything has changed.

If they answer seven or six, then they are an amber lead and there’s a high level of dissatisfaction with their incumbent MSP. Test if this is short-term and happiness, maybe a support call this week wasn’t handled very well, or whether it’s actual proper long-term dissatisfaction. If it is, then they could go on to be a super hot prospect for you.

And if they answer five or below, then they are a green lead. They are desperately unhappy and they’re very likely to take action on this unhappiness at some point. They are yours for the taking. So dedicate all of your sales attention on them.

By the way, for answers of seven or below, use this follow-up question to get some understanding – Can I ask what made you give them that score? Your lead may then tell you exactly what has created their unhappiness. And this is a very powerful thing to know in the sales process that you’re about to start with them.

Featured guest: Zach Kromkowski, co-founder of Senteon and dedicated to transforming the cyber security landscape for MSPs and enterprises by delivering unparalleled automated solutions for endpoint hardening.

His mission is to simplify and enhance security measures across workstations, servers, and browsers, ensuring top-tier protection and regulatory compliance with minimal manual intervention.

I know how important cyber security is to you and what you do on a daily basis, and I also know that one of your challenges is trying to make ordinary business owners and managers realise how important good security is and how they need to invest in it. My special guest has a fantastic approach to this, using the framework laid out by the Center for Internet Security. Let’s explore how he uses that and how you can do the same in your MSP. This interview will show you that the CIS framework is perfect to build your marketing around.

I’m Zach Kromkowski, co-founder to Senteon manage endpoint hardening and first time security entrepreneur.

And congratulations for being a first time security entrepreneur. It’s awesome, right, isn’t it, running your own business. And also congratulations for coming in here on the show and we are going to talk today about how you can use cyber security frameworks actually as a marketing tool. So not just there to keep your clients safer, but to actually attract new people and to upsell your existing clients. Now, before we talk about that, Zach, let’s have a little bit of your history. So talk us through what you’ve been doing and what made you start this business.

Yeah, I mean, this is a long answer, but I will do my best to keep it concise. So security is ultimately something that everyone talks about, but we realise no one really knows where to start. And my co-founding team is actually a team of four. And when we were in university, we were told to configure our assets and do all these traditional best practices for security posture. But when we went to the real world, we realised it wasn’t happening. So why in school were we being told you have to configure your asset, you have to set it to the correct state, but it didn’t happen. So we realised there was a gap from what we learned in school versus the workforce today. And that gap made us question, why isn’t this happening. Is school wrong? Is this not important or is corporate wrong, why aren’t they doing this? What is that challenge. And that’s ultimately what we sought to figure out, what is that challenge as to why people don’t prioritise configuring their assets.

And what was the answer that you stumbled across?

That’s probably a good leading point for me to answer. So the challenges we found were really a few things. The first and foremost, if we’re talking about Microsoft devices, it simply put that Intune group policy and PowerShell scripts are too difficult to keep up to date, let alone doing it once. But the number one challenge that we identified was simply that there’s an innate fear of changing a setting on a machine that is being used because it might break something. It could break something on the end client end, or it could break one of the workflows you have internally at your MSP. And that is the key focus that Senteon really focused on to develop a learning mode that determines is this safe or is this not safe? And the goal here is to make the optimal solution that can change settings without causing disruption.

Got it. That’s a good pitch and what we’ll do is we’ll talk about Senteon and what it does and how people can have a look at it and try it out – we’ll talk about that towards the end of the interview. It’s always a good place to pop that, but that is a great pitch. What I want to really talk about is how to use a security framework as a marketing tool. Now, I never assume that every single person listening to this podcast and we have thousands and thousands of listeners, I never want to assume that everyone understands everything because we live in a very complex and a very big world. So you are going to talk about the CIS framework. Can you explain that to me, remembering that I’m not a technical person and I think if you can explain it well in a way that I understand, then everyone who listens to this podcast or watches the YouTube videos is going to understand it as well.

Absolutely. So CIS simply stands for Center for Internet Security. It’s a global non-profit that is dedicated to increasing cyber security readiness and response. They are most famous for what’s called the CIS controls, and they have 18 of these controls. What’s interesting about this is

they’re not just lists of things that make up security – they’re a prioritised list of 18 things you can do to increase your cyber security defences.

So it’s a step-by-step playbook on how if an MSP has never done security, it gives you step one of what you should focus on. If it’s a mature MSP who’s already offering security, it gives you a roadmap of, okay, let’s actually check what am I doing today and am I meeting this 18 point list.

I’ll give an example as well. Control 1.1 is knowing your hardware asset inventory, why is this control 1 or 0.1? Well if you don’t know your hardware assets, there’s probably no way you’re going to know what you need to secure. So knowing your asset inventory is literally control 1. Control 2 is software asset inventory then control 3 is data protection and control 4, to reel it back to exactly where Senteon lives is all about configuring your assets. You can’t configure your assets if you don’t know your assets. So that’s really, in a nutshell, what CIS is at a high level.

They do go way further than just this 18 point list with things called implementation groups, which is the prioritised minimum requirements of what to do. For example, these 18 controls. Some of them might take a little bit more understanding of security. So they also have implementation groups that say, Hey, start here.

The other piece that they have that’s really cool is called the CIS benchmarks. And this is a prescriptive list of do this to this setting. Take for example, machine inactivity, timeout, take that setting and best practices set it to 1500 seconds. So they provide one-to-one recommendations on how to secure something very specifically. That, in a nutshell, is CIS.

And where it gets really exciting – and I’ll let you ask a follow-up question, Paul, you know this is something I’m very passionate about – to take this a step further – and I’ve listened to the other episodes – not everyone is going to know what CIS is, especially your end clients.  So why do you want to align to a framework that your end clients, the people you’re selling to, aren’t going to know about? And the reason is this, CIS organisation takes their recommendations and they will actually crosswalk it to the framework you do care about. So whether this is ISO, DORA or in the US CMMC, NIST, there’s all these crosswalks that they take and say here’s our recommendation and here’s the requirement it meets in this recommendation or in this framework. So that’s really in a nutshell, CIS at a high level.

Well, I think you explained that brilliantly. So thank you for that, Zach. In fact, you’ve genuinely added something to my knowledge base there. My follow up question is of course about the end clients. So the ordinary business owners and managers that MSPs are trying to reach, and I’m guessing they’re not going to know about CIS and therefore an MSP coming in saying, Hey, I’ve got these 18 things. That’s not really something that’s going to appeal to them. So how do you recommend the MSPs take that CIS information and turn it into a framework, something useful that ordinary business owners and managers will understand?

Absolutely. So there’s two ways to look at this. If you’ve not offering security today, there’s kind of one way there. But if you’re already offering security today, there’s another way, and I’m going to lean into a previous episode of yours I caught, all about content marketing. So this list, I did say 18 controls. What I didn’t mention is there’s actually sub controls, substeps within these 18, and they add up to a total of 153 different controls. If you’re an MSP just starting out and you’re looking, how can I make this resonate with the customer. Well, the first choice goes back to my initial answer. You don’t necessarily talk about CIS. You use the CIS crosswalks to talk about the regulation and the requirements they do care about. That’s the easy answer. Now, talking from a demand generation perspective and marketing and making that ROI, taking the sub controls and the main controls, so a total of 153 things, you can create content around each of these.

Why does this matter? You’re positioning your MSP as the subject matter expert on frameworks without even really doing too much additional work. So I gave the examples of controls 1 through 4, we’ll stick on control 4. So talking about needing to configure assets. Well, we can make a content or a blog post or a graphic or just a LinkedIn post saying, Hey, something we do at MSP name is we focus on configuring your assets. This aligns to step 4 of this framework. So it’s now almost like a content roadmap of areas you can begin to slowly educate your customers on and say, Hey, this is why we’re doing the things when I talk to you or when you reach out to me, you’re not only going to hear the vendors I use or the security I provide, but you’ll actually give them contextual understanding. And it’s no longer you saying you’re doing this, it’s you’re doing this because this authoritative governance body told me to do this. Talk about protecting yourself and your business because it’s not just, oh, my engineer thinks I should do this. I’m following best practices from a respected source to guide me in supporting you.

And do you think that actually is an advantage to be able to say to a prospect, Hey, we take all of the best practice that’s laid out by this world organisation, but we’ve done all the hard work, we’ve set out our own roadmap from that, and essentially this is the best level of protection that you’ll be able to get for your business because we are going to work through this framework together. Do you think that works?

Yeah. I mean, let’s put it in a different perspective – I always try to relate things, this is something I’m personally trying to be better at – let’s just talk about getting your car worked on by a mechanic. If you go to this general mechanic shop who historically only works on cars he knows, but he goes, yeah, I could probably fix your car. I work on cars like this, but I know how things work. I can look at your car and I’m going to know what to do. He’s not an expert at your exact car model. He’s not an expert on all of your internals, but he’s worked on cars and he’s like, yeah, I can fix this. I can make it work. And maybe you do drive off that day and it works fine. But going into that conversation with that mechanic, would I rather have the mechanic saying, oh yeah, I specialise on this framework or this type of car. I specialise on these internals because it’s all I do day in, day out. Or would you rather go with the person who’s kind of a catchall does whatever? So when you present as an MSP to your prospects, to your customers, you can now say, Hey, we are not the experts. I understand. I do not know everything about security. If that’s what you’re looking for, I’m not your guy and the guy who says they are, they’re definitely not your guy. What I do to differentiate myself as an MSP is I leverage the best practices from documented standards, and this is how I facilitate the accomplishment of this roadmap for your business. So now you’re leaning into something that’s already globally accepted and positioning yourself with an existing brand.

Yeah, I love this. I guess all of this is just a Google search away anyway, right? You almost want the prospect looking it up and saying, oh yes, this CIS stuff, oh, okay, it is a big deal, it’s a global standard, etc, etc. And yes, I can see the power of essentially positioning yourself as we’re always going to be up to date because we follow these standards. We don’t miss anything because we’ve got this framework. But as you said, not everyone can be experts in absolutely everything. Zach, this is really good stuff. Thank you so much for this. We are definitely going to have to have you back on the show in the future,  because I can tell you’ve got loads to talk about with using security as a marketing tool, which is just brilliant. Tell us a little bit more about Senteon, what is it, what does it do, who should get it, and what’s the best way for us to get in touch with you and try it out?

The best way to get in touch is I’m hilariously active on LinkedIn. That’s my go-to source. Obviously I have the YouTube channel and a podcast, but to really give the behind the scenes on Senteon, we have the same methodology that I just proposed you leverage from your MSP to end clients. I have the same methodology as a vendor servicing MSPs. So that methodology is – hey, we remediate, we change settings on your workstation, on your server, on your browser. We’re changing over a thousand settings – Now, a company where maybe you have heard of us, maybe you haven’t heard of us. If you haven’t heard of me, and I say, we’re going to change a thousand settings. Do you want me to do that to your business… let alone your clients? Probably not. But when I say we’re going to change these thousand settings to align to a standard that exists and is proven, now do you trust me a little bit more? So I leverage this same best practice of putting my brand with a best practice brand that I’m encouraging you to do. Why would I encourage you to do it? Because it works. That’s what we do and it’s proven successful for us. So why can’t this translate to the MSP to end client level? So that’s exactly it. And Paul, you’re going to have to repeat your four questions. I got like two of them.

That’s fine. I think you’ve done a great pitch there for what Senteon does. Tell us just what’s the best way to get in touch with you and to try the product out.

To get in touch with us, connect on LinkedIn, we do have our website. Those are always best ways. And if you do want to learn more about the settings in specific that I’m talking about, I’ve said the word thousand more settings a few times today, but if you really want to understand about this, there’s a webinar series that I host actually with CIS so you can trust it. It’s literally with the authoritative body I’ve been talking about, and we have a PowerPoint slide per setting. So I’ve actually rewritten, I think to date about 700 different settings. I’ve rewritten them myself from a security point of view, from an easier to digest point of view. If you don’t have a security background, if you’re just starting out, I’ve rewritten all of these and I hold a weekly webinar series with CIS on my YouTube channel on LinkedIn, so you can connect with us there.

If you are looking to actually test out Senteon and see where your current configuration sits, which I will note, if you’re like everyone else we work with, by default, when you get a Microsoft Box, you’ll have 20% of your machine configured correctly. 20% in quantity terms is about 70 of 500 settings. It’s not a lot done correct by default. And Paul, we can have a whole other conversation of secure by design and why people don’t distribute products with a secure by design mindset, which they should. But you are welcome to toss a website inquiry to our contact us page, mention Paul, I will happily provide a hundred free assessments to anyone who mentions Paul. That’s my gift to anyone who lets me come onto the show and share our mission to build better awareness about defensive security and making security marketable. It should be a revenue item for you. It should be generating you profits. There’s no reason it can’t and it’s a good service. So mentioned you watched us on Paul’s webinar show, and you’ll get a hundred free assessments. You’ll get a full presentation and everything you need, these reports that you can get completely free will be internal usage, external usage, and they would literally have a button to export as PDF and have a whole little marketing campaign that you can distribute to your clients.

And give us your website address, Zach.

 Yep. So that is going to be Senteon.co.

This week we have Sean from an MSP in Houston, Texas, and his question is about something he’s confused about… “What is this AppSumo thing that I keep hearing about?”

Okay, stay calm and keep your hand closely on your wallet because AppSumo is going to prise it open and extract cash from it on a regular basis. What is it? Well, think Groupon. You remember Groupon, don’t you? Groupon, but for tech-savvy entrepreneurs and business owners, so people like you and me.

AppSumo is the place where new apps and other clever new businesses go to grab a whole load of customers in one go. In return, they offer a killer deal to AppSumo’s database, which is estimated to be more than a million people. One such great offer from my goodness, I think it was late 2020, was a lifetime deal on Publer, the social media scheduling platform. Of course, that’s been sold out for years and Publer has now become a mainstream tool.

Sometimes you buy a deal and the software turns out to be not quite as good as the marketing said it was. But that’s okay because with most deals, you can get a refund. Now, I’ve bought and kept more than 40 deals since April 2013. Yes, I did check the date and the number of deals, and I do love getting their regular email with new deals. And I think you might too, just be very, very careful. AppSumo is very good at getting you to buy software that you never actually use. You think you’re going to use it, but you never actually do.

Welcome to Episode 252 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

There’s a reason that getting new clients for your MSP takes so long. It’s because of what’s happening to the ordinary business are owners and managers that you are trying to reach. And when you understand what’s going on in their heads and their hearts, you can figure out why they’re so slow switching from one MSP to another. Let’s talk about the importance of getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time.

Now, one of the most critical marketing skills that you can develop is the ability to look at your MSP and what you sell from the point of view of the people that you are trying to sell it to or put another way. If you can get in their heads and their hearts, you can better understand what’s driving them to make a decision. Or maybe more importantly, what’s holding them back from making a decision. The best phrase that I ever heard to describe this is…

To influence what John Smith buys, you must see through John Smith’s eyes.

When you really look at why a business owner or manager switches from one MSP to another, you suddenly get a startling insight into why switching MSPs is a distress activity for most people. You see, they don’t really understand technology at all. In fact, compared to you, they are literally the other end of the scale. You have such in-depth technology and abilities and that makes you an incredibly talented technology person, but the client you’re selling to, well, they’re more like me. I’m not a tech I never have been. That by the way means it’s easy for me to represent the ordinary people that you sell to. And sure, I understand a bit about technology and I love it. And actually I probably know a lot more about technology these days because of course I’ve been working with MSPs for eight years, but I can’t set up a server, I can’t configure a cloud service and I bet you a rather large amount of money that I’d be the guy that would get the setting wrong and I would take down the entire business. So please, no one ever give me the settings of anything important, I beg you.

Anyway, because they don’t understand technology, but they do know it’s incredibly important. They are less willing to muck about with it. So something major has to change at their incumbent MSP for them to want to switch to someone new. And we do see this, don’t we. We see small businesses being sold and kind of merged into super MSPs and maybe customer service goes down and maybe prices go up and the dissatisfaction creeps in very, very slowly for the clients. But there does inevitably come a day where the client wakes up and thinks, I’m not happy with my MSP anymore, and it’s time to change. Or they feel that they have outgrown their MSP or there’s just change.  Change in their business or your business is often what drives people to pick a new MSP.

So, your marketing challenge then, is to consistently get the right message in front of the right people at the right time. And that should be your core marketing driver. It’s why I’m always recommending both in this podcast here on YouTube and across everything I do, both for my MSP marketing edge members and just all MSPs out there. I recommend that you have a very easy but powerful three-step lead generation strategy. You build multiple audiences of people to listen to you. You grow your relationship with them using content marketing, and then you convert the relationship normally by sending out marketing campaigns and getting people on the phone and just chatting to them about their business.

Now you chose to start a business in the most wonderful sector in the world, but it is cursed by very, very slow sales because someone will stay with an MSP that they’re unhappy with for a number of years until that day comes when it’s time to switch. That day when they’re ready to switch, that day is perfect for you to get your marketing message in front of them. Now, based on what I’ve just said here, this is why your MSP needs a marketing machine, not just a set of random marketing activities that happen now and again when someone remembers, but a machine where marketing happens on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. And that’s the only way that you can truly drive new business into your MSP in a systematic way.

If I was a client of your MSP and I was on the phone with one of your technicians telling them about a common frustration that I’m having, it’s actually something they could help with, but it would involve me spending money – I’d have to upgrade something or buy some new software or something – in that situation, would they suggest that solution to me or would they not? Because like many technicians, they don’t ever want to be seen as doing any kind of sales. They don’t want to be seen as a salesperson despite the fact that selling me this software or this service would make my life better.

Would that happen in your MSP? I’m asking this because I’m wondering if in your business you employ any sales prevention officers, let’s find out.

An extraordinary event happened to me a few years back and it was before I upgraded to an EV, to a Tesla. So my car was low on diesel and I popped into my local petrol station on the way home. Now the woman behind the counter was acting in the most peculiar way. “You’re the last customer”, she practically spat at me and she was actually pointing at me with her finger. And then, “I need to shut the forecourt and stop selling petrol”. “Well, what’s going on?” I ask because perhaps there’d been a big fuel spillage or an accident of some kind. And I couldn’t believe her answer.

“I’ve run out of till rolls,” she replied. It was such a bizarre answer that I didn’t understand at first. So I said, “Sorry, you’re shutting the whole petrol station because you’ve run out of till rolls?” It’s the little receipt thing that comes out of the till. “It’s the law,” she screamed at me; something to do with having to give a receipt to someone when you sell them something. Some bizarre UK law.

But by this time there were other drivers standing at the pumps. They’ve got the nozzle in their car, they’re waiting for her to press the button to authorise the fuel. And she’s tapping at the window, waving at them, pulling a finger across the neck like in a classic dead motion. I tried to help her out and said to her, “Look, even if the law says you can’t sell fuel without a receipt, you could always do handwritten receipts for those who want them because most people probably aren’t bothered.” That’s what I suggested. “They just want fuel.” I said to her. But she was having none of it. And once I paid, she went outside to cone off the entrance to the petrol station. I mean, the whole thing was completely shut down. It was a nightmare. This woman was the most successful Sales Prevention Officer that I’d ever met, and I have met quite a few as you probably have as well. She took a small detail of her job quite literally, and rather than work flexibly around it, decided it would just be easier to shut the whole business down for a few hours. Can you imagine how incandescent with rage her boss would’ve been when he found out?

Now, I bumped into another sales prevention officer a few weeks ago. I was taking a long walk around one of the lovely lakes near where I live in Milton Keynes here in the UK. And it’s a habit of mine to pick up a takeaway coffee from a pub on the lake. It’s always busy with a flurry of walkers doing the same thing on a Sunday morning. This week though, as soon as I walked through the doors, a bored looking girl shouted, “No coffee, we ain’t got no takeaway cups.” and then looked down at her Instagram again, I kid you not this is exactly what happened. Her attitude and that welcome pretty much shut down the alternative of staying in for a coffee or maybe even having breakfast as a treat. And I’m sure by this point she was sick of having to tell walkers there were no coffee cups. To her, this was hassle whereas you and I would see this as an opportunity. So here’s a scary question for you, how do the sales prevention officers act in your MSP?

What makes Sales Prevention Officers terrifying is they think they’re doing the right thing. It’s rarely malicious. It’s just having the wrong thinking and the wrong behaviour.

Here are some ways it may be happening in your business. Maybe when a first line tech is talking to a client who wants an extra service, maybe they say to them, oh, you don’t really need that, which of course damages your relationship with the client because when someone wants something, they will just go elsewhere to get it. Maybe your help desk team only ever offers basic versions of new kit or services based on the absurd idea of saving the client money. Maybe when a potential new client phones in to talk to someone, that call or message doesn’t receive urgent prioritisation above all other activity because it doesn’t happen very often. What else happens in your MSP? And it probably happens without you being fully aware.

And the way to get round sales prevention officers is to systemise all aspects of sales, both for new clients and upselling existing clients. For example, if you have three versions of a package or a service, so like a good choice, a better choice, and a best choice, this allows the client to pick the option that’s best for them. And sales prevention officers can’t screw that up for you. So long as they offer all three versions in every single opportunity. If you have annual strategic reviews, you can create an opportunity to tell the client what else you can do to make their lives easier. Some will choose to buy it and some won’t. Oh, and by the way, if you think you really don’t have a sales prevention officer somewhere in your business, I’m sorry, but you’re probably wrong. In fact, sometimes you know who the worst offender can be. I’m pointing a finger at you, Mr. or Mrs. Business owner, because business owners like you and me, we have no accountability. It means that sometimes we act in ways that we just wouldn’t accept from our staff.

Featured guest: Michelle Coombs has 25+ years in service management and operations.  She’s led a 70-member service team working around the clock, managing over 10,000 tickets a month for MSPs; and heading up IT for their customers and managing the MSPs performance, so she’s seen the challenges of both sides of the fence.

Michelle is now at the point where she want to give back and has set a crazy goal: to help 350,000 MSPs and IT Teams improve their service maturity, delivery, and operations by 2032.

Michelle offers a wide range of ‘knowledge services’ (advisory, coaching, consulting, mentoring, and training) across most areas of an MSP’s business. The only things she doesn’t touch are sales, marketing, HR, and legal.

She also loves speaking at industry events and hosting peer-groups and educational sessions.

Of course, good marketing isn’t just about winning new clients, it’s also about making sure that you are doing everything you can to retain your existing clients. And one area that many MSPs ignore is how they communicate with their clients. My guest today is an expert at improving and increasing client retention through really simple communications, the kind that all your technicians can do.

Today’s interview is about the common service mistakes that can damage long-term client retention and how to stop them from happening in your MSP.

Hi, I’m Michelle Coombs from the Tech Leader Network, and I work with MSPs to improve their operational efficiency.

And thank you so much for joining me on the show, Michelle, because we’re going to talk about ways that MSPs inadvertently accidentally damage client’s retention, customer retention with their operations. It’s something that happens really easily. You see it all the time, and we are going to explore that and hopefully improve retention for lots of our listeners and lots of people watching this on YouTube. So tell us a little bit about you. How long have you been working with MSPs? What’s your background and what fun do you have on a day-to-day basis?

Oh, crikey. Good question Paul. So my background has been IT for 25 years, either in-house, IT heading up their departments, managing those MSP contracts, the relationships, the performance or on the MSP side, heading up service, delivery and operations, heading up some big teams, 70 odd people, 24 7 ops handling tens of thousands of tickets a month.

And what made you jump into working with MSPs to actually help them with their operations?

It seemed a natural progression. It was, well, when I first started out working for myself as it were, and I was looking for a way that I could make a difference for people and almost paying back what I’d learned over the years to help those that were coming into the role. And at first I was thinking it was more around the leadership aspect, but actually service ops is where my heart is. And I thought, how can I make this easier for people and help people improve what they do on a day-to-day basis. And it’s something I really enjoy is getting to the bottom and doing that root cause analysis of what’s going wrong in a service and finding ways to improve it.

And I can imagine that’s just fun because you, very nature of what you do is helping MSPs just improve essentially the quality of the service and the quality of the product they’re offering. And as we all know, it’s so much easier to look at something that someone else is doing than to look at what you’re doing yourself. So I imagine a lot of the people you work with that the faults or the problems and the issues are right there in front of them. It’s just they can’t see the woods for the trees, to use a cliche for that. So let’s talk about how with your operations you can inadvertently push your clients away and damage that all important bond with them. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see MSPs making?

If I was to pick three, the first it would be the communications, the level of communications that go out and treating people as you expect to be treated yourself. The second would be not following through on what you say you’re going to do. And the third would be not acting on feedback that you’ve been given by your customers.

So let’s look at each of those and we’ll start with the communications one. So just so we are both talking about the same thing. We are talking about an MSP, who’s got the client, they’re in a monthly contract, they’re monthly recurring revenue clients and presumably they’ve been a client for some time. What kind of communication issues do you see? Are you talking about mass communications of change or are you talking about literally technician to user communication or is it that and everything?

All. So it can be all the way down from, we’ve got things like you service desk technicians that are just not communicating in a timely manner or putting statements like “it’s done” or “resolved” or something in the text and sending that to a customer, not paying attention to the way that that communication can be received. Or it could be the hiding behind a keyboard when actually picking up the phone would be a better option. That’s a big one actually. Not picking up the phone and just hiding behind the keyboard, but it can also be from the service desk managers and the service delivery manager’s point of view where they’re facing complaints and they also don’t want to acknowledge it head on because they feel like they’re going to get a bit of a kick in. And rather than just approach it and take it as a fact finding mission and it’s not personal kind of basis, they can’t proceed without gathering that information, but they avoid it at all costs because they just don’t like the outcome that they’re going to get or the feeling that they’re going to get when they get that kick.

And that’s human nature of course, because you’d have to be some kind of masochist to put yourself deliberately in for a kicking. Where you’ve got a specific issue, let’s take the one where the technician doesn’t pick up the phone, it would be easy to just pick up the phone and call the user and talk to them, but the technician doesn’t. Do you tend to find that’s a problem across the entire business. So would you find almost like it’s the culture of the business and no one picks up the phone, maybe because the owner doesn’t like picking up the phone? Or is it more likely to be just one or two techs that have that issue?

It’s interesting because as soon as you’re starting to say that point, I was thinking it would depend on the MSP themselves and what the culture of the MSP is. So you usually find it’s an all or nothing. You will get some people though where they have transitioned or moved from one MSP to another as a technician and they’ll have a very different way of working, but they’ll soon embed themselves in that new way and whatever the behaviour is in that MSP will be how they start to behave.

Yes, absolutely. And you can almost imagine a new technician joining an MSP, it’s their first day, they’re halfway through and they’re typing something to the user and thinking, I’m just going to pick up the phone, it’d be easier. And they go to pick up the phone and someone says to them, what are you doing? We don’t phone people here. That’s not what we do. And I think we as owners, we forget how much we set the culture of the business just by our action or inaction. Let’s look at the second of those things that you mentioned and second of those was failing to follow through on what it is that you said that you would do. Can you give us an example of an MSP and obviously don’t name them, but an example of how that would manifest in an MSP?

Yes, it would be something along the lines of saying, “Customer, I will deal with that by tomorrow.” And then as you know, working in an MSP, something hits the fan and you don’t get round to doing it tomorrow.

It’s about setting those realistic expectations and saying, actually customer, I will ring you by the end of the week and I’ll have an update for you.

Because if you go sooner than that or you deliver sooner on that response, then it’s a bit of a bonus really.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we all talked, don’t we, about under-promising and over-delivering. I think it’s more about setting really clear expectations, and I’d be interested to hear what your thoughts are on when you’ve got someone who’s on the phone or has submitted a ticket and it’s actually a low priority item. Let’s say it’s my printer doesn’t work, I’m not the owner, it’s a low level thing. It’s not affecting everyone, it’s just me. So you and I know that that’s a very low level ticket and on a very busy day, it might be some time before someone gets round to that. And yet to that person who’s got that problem, they can’t work. Right? That’s the highest level of problem that they’ve got right now. How do you normally advise service desk managers and technicians to manage situations like that in terms of setting expectations?

Within SLA. So it’d be a case of first I’d be looking for that workaround. It’d be like saying, “Have you got any other printers that you can print to?” If they have, they can put a workaround in place and they’ll be fine. If not, it’d be a case of, right, “Just bear with me. We’ll need to investigate this and I can expect to get back to you within X time.” That’s how I would handle that one.

Yeah, and I put you on the spot there. You had to go straight back to your service desk days. I did.

You could see me thinking about what would I do.

Exactly. Yeah.

And how would I want, it was more about how I would want my teams to respond because like you say, it’s a burning issue for that client at the time. And the thing is, is that client or that customer is going to be potentially not in a very good place when they ring. So you need to empathise. You really need to listen to what they’re saying and empathise and put yourself in those shoes and let your customer know that you understand that it’s a big issue for them and that you are going to deal with it and you just need to get them to trust in you that you are going to do what you say you’re going to.

Yeah, absolutely. That word trust is absolutely key. And it’s so easy to forget, again, when you’re just doing this day in day, year in, year out, that of every single ticket, every single call that a technician has with a user or with a client or whoever it is, you’ve got to be building some trust. And that is done through expectation setting and through empathy. Some great advice there. Just remind us, Michelle, what was the third and final most common problem that you saw within MSPs?

Not acting on customer feedback.

Okay. And again, give us an example. How does this problem typically manifest itself?

It would be the customer provides some feedback as part of a meeting. So you’ve got some kind of delivery review. It could be through a QBR TBR service delivery review, whatever you title them, and the customer will give you some feedback that they’re not happy with something. Account manager will give them the nod of the head, yes, I’ve got it. They’ll take it away. They’ll mention it, but nothing ever changes because the ball’s rolling light, everything else is cracking on. They don’t have time to sit there and go, right, what’s the root cause of this issue and how can we prevent it from happening again to stop this annoying this customer?

Which of course would be incredibly frustrating. So Michelle, you’ve obviously have built an entire business that’s helping MSPs to avoid these kinds of problems. When you work with MSPs, do you go in and work at a cultural level or is it very much at leadership level and also down with technicians as well?

It’s that final section. So every MSP talks about people-process-technology. For me, it’s missing two pillars, which are leadership and customer. So looking at the drive and the direction that you’re going in and making sure the MSP gets its objectives covered. And then the customer side is making sure that the customer satisfaction is there and that you can retain your customers for the long haul. So I work across all of those five pillars.

Fantastic. And tell us a little bit more about your business and how anyone can get in touch with you.

Good question. In terms of getting in touch, the easiest option is either to go to the website, which is www.thetechleader.net, or you can just reach out to me on LinkedIn.

This week Alec, who has an MSP in Nashville, admits that he does have a ton of questions, but the one question that is burning the most is this – I’m so busy and have heard people say that a virtual assistant would help do admin and things for me, but how do I hire one that I can trust?

Yeah, virtual assistants or VAs are amazing because in the spirit of, you as the business owner should only do what only you can do, they represent a really easy way to get level jobs done and done well so that you can focus on the difficult things. Now, most VAs work on an hourly basis flexibly from home, and it’s important to find someone that you get on well with. Oh, and also look after them as well as any member of your team. I have monthly zooms with my VAs and sometimes send them gifts in the post whenever I do the same for my core team. Now, there are three primary ways to get a VA. The first of them is to hire a friend or a friend of a friend. My advice is to not even go there. You could get locked into working with someone you fire for the sake of offending someone else.

So the second way, and the one that I suggest you do is to hire a work-alone freelancer. Now, you’ll pay less for this person and they’ll look after you really well, but unless you are the dominant source of income for them, they will be distracted by the need to look for other clients and of course, service those other clients as well. And there’s also no backup plan if they take holidays, vacations, or become ill. And so your third option is to hire a VA through an agency. Now, a good agency will have hundreds of highly vetted VAs on its books, and they’ll take the time to match you up properly. So to find you a VA or VAs plural with the specific skill sets that you’re looking for, plus of course they can cover holidays or add more people as you need them. The other upside is if the match isn’t quite right, they will have the awkward conversation for you.

Plus the VAs aren’t distracted by the need to find more work that just sort of turns up from the agency. The big downside is the price and relationship. You will be paying more as the agency takes its cut, and it is a little bit harder to form a good solid relationship with a VA eight through an agency.

Welcome to Episode 251 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

The business that you chose to be in, Managed Services, is already one of the most complex kinds of businesses on the planet. Just stop and think about everything that you have to support – all the different clients, the different setups, the different technologies. And yet I see loads of MSPs making their lives even harder by overcomplicating things in their business that could and should be simple. So let’s talk about how you can make your business easier to run and more profitable by simplifying everything.

I’m on a bit of a simplification mission right now. We’ve had some fairly major development projects in our business over the last 12 months, and while I was focusing on those and constantly reducing complication within those projects and just making everything simpler, I realised we could do this across the business. Because we’ve been going for eight years and what happens is when you’ve been going that long, you kind of hold onto legacy stuff. Things that we’re just doing because, or something that worked really well six years ago but there’s now a better way of doing it. And for me, it’s a really exciting thing to just go through the business like a tornado and just simplify everything. So I’ve given myself a new job title. I am Head of Simplification, and I’m using this as an opportunity to review everything we do in the business asking this big question, how can we make this simpler? Because that’s actually a very powerful question to ask. Is this a question you ask yourself in your MSP regularly?

Just because you can handle high levels of complication doesn’t mean that you should put up with high levels of complication.

In fact, I truly believe that the simpler business is, the more fun it is to run and the more profitable it can be. And I guess there are two main places where you can simplify your business. The first is your operations and what you do now. At the risk of starting you down the road of looking at your tech stack, because I’m always hesitant to suggest an MSP reviews their tech stack in case it becomes a bad case of tech stack fiddling where you’re attracted to the shiny thing. Maybe you should just be asking yourself, does my PSA allow me to run the business as simply as possible? Is my RMM easy to use but also powerful enough to do all the things we need it to do? Look at your standard operating procedures, these are the manuals for how you run your business. So what kind of business are they encouraging you to run in their complexity? Now, I’m sure you are all over automation, which surely must be the ultimate way of simplifying something because you are removing the humans from it.

But other suggestions include removing steps where you can, asking yourself why something is done and whether it’s just for heritage reasons, like I was saying earlier, rather than because it’s useful today. And I think the most useful thing to do is to talk to your team; the people who are actually running these processes, who are following your standard operating procedures, and ask them what needs to be simplified. Ask them what is surplus to requirements, what job do they hate doing every single week? And then focus your attention on reducing or removing those jobs.

So the first main place where you can simplify everything is operations, but what’s the second main place? Well, surely that’s the clients, and by that I mean can you simplify their technology setups? Now, I appreciate your immediate knee jerk reaction to this might be, no, I can’t Paul, and you are mad, but hear me out because I’ve worked with a few MSPs over the years who insist on a standard setup for a client. When a new client joins them, they must migrate all of their technology to the MSP’s preferred way doing things. For example, that might be having a standard router in every single client. Now the exact same router made by the exact same manufacturer in every single client. Can you see the huge benefits of that as a business?  You and your technicians become utter experts on that specific type of router. If you pick up an error with one of the routers that you’re looking after, then you can proactively go and prevent that error or check for that error in other client’s bases, which is great. And as you know, I’m not a tech person, but this has always made sense to me as a way of reducing down the complications within an MSP.

I appreciate it probably reduces your options a little bit in the sense that if a client won’t change their technology, they’re never going to switch over to you. But I suspect that’s more than made up for in the increase in profit and customer service from having a single type of technology to support. Tell me, is this something you do in your MSP? If you could wave a magic wand and simplify anything tomorrow, what would that be?

Let me tell you how your vision for how you want your life to be directly affects the goals that you set for your MSP. Which directly affects the strategies that you choose. Which directly affects the tactics that you choose to deliver those strategies. Which of course directly influences what you actually do on a day-to-day basis.

Let’s start at the very top of that again. So everyone has a vision for their future life, whether they’ve written it down or not. I write mine down and I read it every morning, but I know that I’m the minority in this. If you do have a vision for your life, by the way, write it down. For most people, this vision for a future life involves spending more time doing the things they love outside of work with the people that they love. That’s probably your other half, your kids, your family. And of course the vision often is about generating more cash to make it easier to do those things or to allow you to buy back your time.

Now, some people turn that vision into hard smart goals for the business. SMART is an acronym. It stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant,and time bound. And you can use those smart goals to define the correct strategy for growth. Once you’ve got a clear strategy, the specific tactics actually become crystal clear. And the question of, let’s say for example, should I use LinkedIn, which is a common question I get from MSPs, that becomes really easy to answer when you understand the goal that the business is working towards and the strategy that’s been set to deliver that goal. The choice of tactics then leads on to your daily activities.

And this is the thing I really want to talk about the things you do every day. Because I want to help you make a mental connection here. Your ability to change your life in the future – which by the way, anybody in any situation can do – is directly affected by what you do in your business, in your life every single day. Let’s take a non MSP example.

If you want to be a muscle ripped Adonis, then you expect to have to lift weights every day and eat protein and all of that stuff, right? It’s no different within your business.

If you want an MSP that onboards a new client every month, at least every month, then you need to build a marketing machine. And just like getting ripped, that’s an ongoing process with tiny actions every day that really add up over time. You wouldn’t expect to turn into Adonis just by going to the gym once.

So how do you expect to onboard a new client every month just doing a piece of marketing once. You’ve got to build a marketing machine and then every day you need to do something within that marketing machine that either wins you more new clients, get those clients to buy from you more often, or get those clients to choose to spend more. That’s how you connect your daily activities to the amazing future life that you’re going to have.

Featured guest: Mickie Kennedy, founded eReleases 25 years ago to help small businesses, authors, and startups increase their visibility and credibility through tier-1 press release distribution.

Mickie lives in Baltimore and has created a free video Master Class on how to create a winning PR strategy, based on the PR campaigns of his most successful clients.

Maybe you’ve seen a competitor featured in a local newspaper, radio station or TV station and you’ve wondered, Hey, how do I get my MSP free publicity like that? Well, my guest today is at the very heart of generating PR results, public relations free publicity, and he’s going to tell you exactly how to do it. Today’s special guest will tell you why press releases are still a valid tool for MSPs in 2024 and also how to cut through and get in front of the journalists you most want to reach.

Hi, I am Mickie Kennedy and I’m the president and founder of eReleases press release distribution. I specialise in helping people get earned media through press releases, and I’ve been doing this for a little over 25 years

And that makes you royalty in the terms of PR and media I think Mickie. I had a PR company, which I started seven years after you started yours, and I’m pretty sure we used eReleases back in the day to get some press releases out. So it’s awesome to actually be speaking to you all this time. For those people listening to the podcast on audio only, you have to check out this interview on YouTube as well because Mickie has quite frankly the wildest pair of glasses I’ve ever seen. Can you describe them Mickie.

Sort of like intense rainbow glasses? I got them for pride three years ago and I happened to get headshots then, and so every time I showed up to a podcast after June, people would be like, oh, you don’t have the glasses. So I had to start putting them back on and I just realised now it’s my thing.

It is, it is. You’ll be a 95-year-old man in a care home somewhere and people will still expect you to have the rainbow glasses back from 2021. So let’s start at the beginning Mickie, and let’s talk about what are press releases, what’s a press release distribution company, what do you do? And when a business owner like an MSP is sending out a press release, what is it that they’re hoping to achieve from that?

Basically a press release is an announcement written usually in the third person, you can have a quote where you could talk in the first person and it’s an announcement that you’re sending to the media. You can actually physically send it to the media by email or mail, but predominantly to get the maximum amount of coverage you use a news wire. And here in the United States there’s two major Newswires, PR Newswire and Business Wire. They probably control like 90 something percent of the marketplace. And we partnered with PR Newswire about I think around 15 years ago. So all the releases that go out through us go out through PR Newswire nationally with PR Newswire, it’s about $1,800 approximately to move a 600 word press release. And through us it’s about 25% to 30% of that cost, mostly because our audience are smaller companies that Pure Newswire doesn’t spend time reaching out to because their budgets are too small.

But in aggregate, we were able to drive a lot of sales to them because we do like 10,000 to 12,000 releases a year. So it gives us an advantage for being able to purchase at a really good rate with them. And as far as what the goal of this is is to get earned media and that’s to get actual articles written about you based on what you’re announcing, examples of types of releases that people generally do or when you have a new product or a refresh of a product or service. Basically if you have a big milestone in your business, you’ve reached a certain milestone of number of customers or an anniversary or things along those lines. And the ultimate goal of sending this out is to see yourself in print or online and generally it results in eyeballs looking at you, potential leads, potential sales, and even more importantly, you can take that earned media that link to an article and share it with your own leads and share it with your own audience. Because the thing that happens with the earned media is it’s a huge credibility boost.

It’s like third party corroboration when a journalist writes about you. It’s a huge signal of trust and as a result, it really makes you look good and it makes people want to work with you.

That’s a really comprehensive answer and thank you. And I think you’re right. It’s the credibility these days that’s really more important certainly for an MSP. If you can get your local newspaper, your local radio, maybe even your local TV station to talk about something that your business has done, is that going to generate leads? Maybe not, but is it going to get people talking? Yes, your existing clients may see or hear it and say, Hey, we heard you on the radio. You can also take that coverage and you can use it again and again and again across all of your marketing for massive credibility because even today in 2024 where let’s be honest, anybody can get any message to any person, quite unlike how it was back in 1998, even today, the media has a certain amount of credibility and people still perceive that journalists pick the very best experts, the very best stories for people to consume.

Let’s examine that change in the media. So you started in 1998. Back at that time, I was working at a radio station in the UK, Mickie, and I remember if you go back to then there was no Google. I don’t think Google itself had even launched in 98. Certainly Google AdWords didn’t exist. There were no real social media networks. So it was, as we said, the media and what made the media rich in the 20th century was they controlled the distribution of messages. Now, obviously come forward 26 years, that’s completely changed. Distribution is easy. Everybody can reach everybody. So what value does a service like yours still have for reaching those journalists?

Right. So the thing that happened is when I launched my business, I just did email distribution to journalists that I had reached out to an established relationship when they said I could send them releases. What has changed at that time is media databases have come out and people are buying or licensing these databases, and a yearly subscription can be anywhere from $8,000 to $25,000 depending on the database and the size of your company. And as a result, when a golf club company buys access to this database and then realises only 2,700 journalists are interested in golf products, they’re like, well, there’s like tens of thousands of financial analysts and banking people and business editors, let’s send it to them. Because business owners and people in banking, they like to play golf. And as a result, there’s so many off targeted press releases and pitching going on through email, that journalists’ email are just terrible. They have a hard time wading through it.

PR firms, which usually rely on pitching through email and phone have found that email is just hard to get through. Often they’re having to call and tell them how to find a pitch they sent via email or just pitch over the phone because their email is just out of sorts. And the great thing about the wire is that they can log in with their journalist credentials and look at their industry feed and they can actually even customise it. So if I’m someone who covers electronics, I can exclude certain keywords. I’m not interested in anything that mentions like stereos or consumer retail outlets like Best Buy and things like that. I can basically customise it so the feed I’m seeing is very targeted, so it’s becoming more and more the main place that journalists are going and looking for stories because it’s the main place that’s not crammed with spam and off targeted stuff.

So it really is great for that reason. And the fact that there’s only two in the US, it makes it very easy for journalist to just fish in two ponds. It does make it difficult for new players to come in because a journalist is like, I don’t really want to go to a third place and look, I like being able to see two. And as a result of basically being a duopoly in the US market, you do pay a premium, like I said, not unusual to pay between $1,600 and $2,000 for a national press release of 5, 6, 700 words. And so it can be very expensive as a result of that.

Yeah, I can imagine the irony that as the world has opened up and communication, as I said, from anyone to anyone, is possible that what has happened is the journalists have become completely overwhelmed and they’re focusing their attention on essentially a filtering, a relevance filtering, which is what these wire services offer. And for those of those listeners and viewers outside of the US, there are versions of this in many countries. I’m sure I’m a bit out of date with the media in the UK. I left that in 2005, but I’m sure that there’ll be a different version of this, and I’m sure there’ll be a business like Mickie’s business in the UK and in other western countries as well. Let’s turn and look at specific story suggestions that MSPs should be placing, Mickie. So you know about MSPs, obviously they’re trying to reach typically local or niche or vertical business owners, decision makers in the kind of people that they want to work with. And one of the most common questions that I get from MSPs when we’re talking about publicity and PR is what kind of story suggestions should I be sending out? You mentioned earlier a couple of good ideas like product releases and big milestones. What other kind of B2B story ideas do you see that work well?

I think ones where you have data generally work very well, for example, doing a survey or study within your industry is a great way to position yourself as a thought leader, an expert in your industry because you authored the survey. And I recommend that for clients who just feel like, I don’t know what we can do, I don’t feel important enough. And I always tell them that this is one type of press release that generally always gets earned media. You want to ask some meaningful, timely questions that people in your industry would want to know right now. What are people’s positions on AI in your industry or what are the threats to your industry? What are things around that? What are the challenges of MSP owners right now in your industry? You could look at trade publications to get a sense of that. You could also get a sense of what you would ask people if you were at a trade show or conference like, Hey, have you noticed lately that it seems like this?

That could potentially be a question to ask because the reason you’re asking it is you have seen it in print yet and you’re not sure if this is just affecting your company or if it’s something that could be industry-wide or regional. And as a result, these are all questions that are right for asking. And once you put together the survey, reach out to a smaller independent trade association in your industry, and they exist in every vertical and every fraction of verticals, even in PR. Everybody knows the big guy, but there’s 470 some last time I checked public relations, trade associations in the United States that are not the big one that everyone knows. And so you do want to see how if their membership sort of fits you, and then also you want to see what the size of them is. I usually like 700 members or more because the goal is to get a hundred people to complete the survey.

I then approach that association and say, Hey, could you send this link? I use SurveyMonkey. And I said, could you send this link to your members, in exchange I’ll mention you in a press release I’ll be issuing over the wire through PR Newswire. The smaller associations, not a lot of people know about them. They don’t get media attention. They often see this as a win-win. You incorporating them in the press release. If they seem a little hesitant sometimes you can enhance it by co-branding the survey, as long as they don’t want to get involved and start rewriting questions and all of that. And they’re usually not. They’re usually small and lean and they’re easy to work with. And I do tell them the goal is to get at least a hundred responses. So if we don’t, I go back to them and see if they could push that link on social media, maybe do another email send.

But generally, I find that a lot of people are willing to do a survey for an association they belong to when they don’t normally do surveys. And I then look at the results, figure out what the aha moments are, what’s the most shocking or surprising thing here, and I generally focus the press release on that. Maybe one other question. I do believe in building out a page on your website where you put all the questions and answers and include that link in your press release because a really good journalist will go through and see if there’s other questions that they might be able to build a story on around as well. And generally when we send that out, you have an amazing quote by you as to why you felt the numbers skewed a particular way, putting a little analysis on you. Generally, we’re looking at four articles, but sometimes as many as 14 articles from one survey.

And that’s something that anybody can do. It’s a great way to position yourself. It generally always works, just making sure that you ask meaningful questions. And it is one of the ways to really stand out and grab some of that media attention and that authority so that as you put that on your website, these articles, as you share the links to these articles with your leads and your clients, it’s going to greatly increase your authority. That signal of trust that comes from being in the media is really going to get out there, and you’re going to find that your churn rate will go down because people are less likely to shop around if they realise I’m with the right company and the people that you normally don’t convert, whatever that percentage is, you’re going to find that you’re going to move some of those over into customers just because of that earned media and putting that in front of them.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. Even existing clients are happy to see you as the MSP owner or the manager appearing in the media and being a thought leader and being an expert because it reinforces that they made a smart choice to join you in the first place. I mean, even from just the idea you’ve been talking about there, my mind was racing thinking, hang on a second here. There’s just so much content we can create out of one activity. So if you take the PR stuff and put to one side just the survey, so you’ve got the survey itself, could become a blog article, could be also be something you put on LinkedIn, even though very few people will respond, it’s another piece of content. Then you’ve got the actual results. It’s another blog article, it’s another piece on LinkedIn, the actual press release. It’s another blog article, it’s another piece on LinkedIn.

And then of course, once you’ve been in, even if you’re just in one media title, you can then do a blog post and a LinkedIn article or a newsletter about how stories you’ve been featured in relevant media recently. So just what’s that four or five different pieces of content just from one piece of activity. And that I think is what makes PR really, really sexy. So thank you so much for that idea, Mickie. That’s a really cracking idea. Just tell us very briefly, again, you did mention at the beginning, but tell us briefly what’s the pitch for eReleases and also what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you?

The website’s, ereleases.com. You can contact us through chat, phone, or email. You’ll only talk to editors. We have no salespeople, no commissions. All of our social media is on the lower right. I do have a free masterclass where I go through about a video of about an hour of the strategic types of releases people should focus on, because I will be honest with you, the biggest criticism of press releases is they don’t work. And I will agree that 97% of press releases do not work. And so what I’ve done is I’ve condensed the 3% that do regularly work, and that’s in that masterclass of less than an hour long video. I know that people aren’t going to be watching 12 and 20 hour courses anymore. So it’s [email protected]/plan. Again, completely free and a great place for someone to start because if you go through that and brainstorm half a dozen strategic ideas for a press release, you’ll be able to build a PR campaign of meaningful releases and you’ll have more hits than misses. And so you’re not with that 97% of press releases that fail, but you’re focusing on the 3% that do succeed and that you will have good outcomes as a result.

This week we have a question from Martin who owns and runs his MSP in Arizona, and he says that his business is actually fairly successful, but the thing that’s keeping him up at night is his team. His question is, what’s the best way to hold a team meeting when you have some staff who are a little disruptive?

Yeah. Well, it’s really important in my view that you don’t use team meetings to try to change the behaviour of individuals, because typically the worst performing staff listen the least at team meetings, don’t they? So I would use one-to-ones to tackle your problem staff and to change behaviour over time. In my view, team meetings should be saved for things like just passing on information or training on new technologies or updating your team on the progress of the business, or just generating ideas and encouraging enthusiasm. The best kind of meetings really involve your team actually doing something because it is really boring for them to listen to you just droning on for half an hour or even longer. So here’s an idea, present them with a problem, break them into small groups if your team is big enough to do that and let them brainstorm ideas.

Now, you don’t have to act on those ideas, although trust me, they will come up with some brilliant ones, but it will help them feel involved and therefore just more engaged with the business. That’s a good thing.