Welcome to Episode 290 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Here’s something you know already, it’s just too darn hard to get new managed service clients. One of the biggest hurdles is that you are asking them to go from nothing straight to a monthly recurring revenue contract at the click of a finger. Surely convincing them it’s safe to start spending their money with you is easy. You just put a strong case forward and then dazzle them with the service that they’re going to be getting, yeah? If only it was that easy. So if the client finds signing a contract with you a bit scary, how do we fix that? Is there a way to make them feel happy committing to you and spending money with you? Absolutely there is, and let me tell you what it is.

What we’re really talking about here is building trust.

Trust is a massive currency within marketing and sales. The more trust you have, the more likely people are to sign a contract and throw themselves into your care.

But the opposite of that is also the case. If you don’t have enough trust built with your leads and with your prospects, then asking them to go from no buying relationship with you straight into a managed services contract is a big ask. I know it can be done and it is done every single day, but surely we should be trying to make our lives easier. If you look at this from the point of view of the person buying, and by the way that’s always a great way to look at any of your marketing and your sales, always, always, always look at it from the other person’s point of view. So when they start looking for a new MSP or maybe even their first MSP, we call them suspects. They have their arms folded, they are suspicious of everyone they find and they are not overly impressed with anyone at all. And even if they’ve been given a warm referral from a friend or they find an MSP online that has tons of social proof, so it looks like a safe choice, they are still suspicious asking someone to trust you with their technology. And as we said, it’s a big ask.

Now, they might not know what they don’t know about technology, but they do know that if you get it wrong their business is dead in the water. And this is one of the reasons why it takes so much time to build a relationship and warm up an arms folded suspect, turn them into a lead turn that lead into a prospect, that prospect into an opportunity. It takes time, it takes effort, and it’s exhausting because the risk is so big from their point of view. So let’s see if we can de-risk that for them.

One of the ways that you could do that is with a risk reversal guarantee. I’ve seen only a small number, actually a tiny number of MSPs do a guarantee and the ones that do it the best, they have massive guarantees. They guarantee absolute complete delight, complete satisfaction. And if the client doesn’t experience that, they can walk away, in fact they will help them migrate over to another MSP. I’ve seen one MSP even do a money back within the guarantee, if you’re not happy in the first six months, we’ll let you move somewhere else and you’ll get your money back. Now, if you’re really confident about your delivery and your ability to create and maintain relationships with clients, then that’s a smart route to go. However, for a lot of MSPs, a guarantee like that and especially a money back guarantee is a very scary thing to do.

If that’s you, maybe a better way is instead to give them an easy first purchase. What is this? It’s something that they can buy from you that’s a one-off. It allows them to essentially sample your business. They can see what your customer service is like, what your delivery is like, what the quality of your work is like before they even have to think about actually signing a contract with you. And this process affects them a little bit at a cognitive level, but it affects them massively at an emotional level.

If you can persuade someone who doesn’t know you to give you just a little bit of money to do a one-off thing for them, then they are dramatically, and I do mean 10 times more likely to enter a long-term managed services contract with you. Do you like the sound of that? Yeah, me too. So the final issue that we’ve got to fix then is what do you sell them? What is this easy first purchase that you could get them to invest in? Well, there are lots of different things that you could try. So you could start with something that’s perhaps not directly related to the technology services that you supply.

One idea for this is perhaps a lunch and learn what if you could get someone to give you 20 or 30 pounds or dollars and come and sit in a room with you for a couple of hours, eat a sandwich, sit there listening to you talking about, cyber security, productivity, something like that, the content of the lunch and learn doesn’t really matter so much, but that’s a very easy first purchase. And don’t forget, you are asking them not just for their money in this instance, you are also asking them for their time as well. And the prospect who gives you both time and money is actually a very, very high quality prospect compared to someone who perhaps just gives you a bit of money or just gives you bits of time, but not both of them.

So you could then take that lunch and learn idea further and turn it into perhaps a seminar, maybe a webinar, although I do think in-person stuff is really better for this. You could even do onsite training. I do know of an MSP that does remote training for companies on how to stop their staff clicking a bad link in the email. So it’s only like a 20 or 30 minute session. They do charge for it, it’s done on Zoom typically over lunchtime. The real power of doing that training is as part of that process, as part of the delivery, the MSP has a review booked with the decision maker at the end of the training so he can go back and report to the decision maker on who struggled with the training, who may need further training. Here’s a kind of general assessment of what I think the business’s likelihood is that you may accidentally click a link. They can talk about other issues, other protections, and all of this training and the feedback. These are just tools to get this MSP I know onto a quality call where with a decision maker where they’re talking about that person’s business. And as you can imagine, a lot of sales meetings come out of that process. So the prospect has been paying for training that ultimately gets them to trust the MSP and then they’re very happy to go on, or many of them are happy to go on and have a sales meeting.

And let’s take that onto one other idea and that’s to do some level of technology strategy consulting. So if doing seminars or training doesn’t excite you, then obviously don’t do it. You must always do things like this that get you excited, otherwise you just won’t do them or you will do them in a very lackluster way. So what about giving someone a 90 minute technology review and perhaps even pulling together a technology strategy for them. That could be a 60 or 90 minute meeting sitting with them talking about their business, their goals, everything that they want to achieve, everything that’s important to them. And then you go away and you build a technology strategy for them. And I appreciate that that’s going to be quite a light document because you’ve just had one meeting, you don’t know them very well.

But here’s the thing, if you position it and price it accordingly, for most businesses that have no technology strategy whatsoever, and isn’t that the vast majority of businesses, something that’s been built with 90 minutes of your time talking to them and then you going away and doing a bit of thinking and a bit of writing and actually committing a strategy to document. For most businesses, that’s going to be way better than having no strategy document whatsoever. And remember the big picture here, the point of the strategy document is to open bigger conversations about their business, where they’re going, what support they’re going to need on the way.

Please don’t overthink this. Don’t overthink what you can and can’t do for just a couple of hundred dollars or pounds. In fact, I suppose you’ve got to think about the bigger purpose here, which is to get them buying something from you. Something, anything, but then being delighted by the delivery. And a side note on this, if you can find businesses that will pay you a thousand pounds of dollars or more for that kind of strategy consultation that we were just talking about, as you can imagine, they will make much better managed services clients in the long run.

So what’s it like doing double the work? It’s hard work landing managed service clients and then there’s the constant hard work of making sure those clients are happy. You may be happy to bend over backwards to offer a great customer service. You’ve got a vested interest in it. But what about your staff? What if they don’t all share your passion for bending over backwards? What if that’s having a long-term impact on retention that you won’t feel until it’s too late? Good news, there is a fix.

A few months back I was standing staring at huge amounts of delicious food in a brand new cafe that I’d never been in before. It was actually inside a meeting venue in central London and I’d been meeting some really cool people there. And we were delighted to discover that the in-house cafe was serving real food, not just the usual crusty old sandwiches. And the food was subsidised and it was really cheap, like a hot meal for £5 (about six and a half dollars), something like that. That’s a bargain, right? So the only problem was the complete lack of flexibility demonstrated by the staff.

They would only sell the set meals on the menu. And here’s how my ordering experience went, and I’m going to tell you line by line, I did write it down after it happened. I started by saying, Hey, can I have a jacket potato with just cheese please? And the server said, That comes with cheese and beans. And I said, Well, I don’t want the beans, so can I just have cheese please? And the server said, You don’t want beans? And I said, No, I don’t want beans. And the server said, But it comes with beans. And I said, Well, I don’t like beans, I just want to have cheese, please. And then I kind of paused the beat and I looked down and I spotted that there was broccoli. And I said, oh actually, can I swap my beans for broccoli? Don’t judge me on having a baked potato with cheese and broccoli, I just like that. But anyway, the server said, No, I’m really sorry, but it’s only cheese and beans. And I actually stared at her at this point and I was genuinely astonished. And I said, So I can’t have broccoli? She said, No. And I said, Well, can I pay extra for the broccoli? It looks really good and now I just want some broccoli. And this is genuinely what happened, she said, No, you can only have cheese and beans. And I said, Really? And she actually said these words, she said, It’s our policy. You get some side salad, but broccoli isn’t side salad. And I said, Well, what if I don’t have beans and I don’t have the side salad, but I have some broccoli instead? And she kind of thought for a second and then she said, No, no, we can’t do that. And I said, Really? But you’ll make more money on the meal, so let me pay extra. I’d like to have broccoli. And the server said, and I know this is how bad this conversation was going, she said, Look, if you want broccoli, you’ll need to order a meal that comes with vegetables, jacket, potatoes come with cheese, they come with beans, they come with a side salad. They do not come with vegetables. And at this point I was aware that there was a long queue behind me, everyone was starting to grumble, I was that guy. So I said, Alright, I’ll just have the potato and cheese then please. And I looked really sad and I had a glum face and also made a mental note to buy broccoli on the way home, it didn’t taste as good at home because it never does.

Now, I promise you, I haven’t exaggerated that story at all. My gut feel is that the server showed this complete lack of flexibility because of the culture of that cafe. Maybe their whole day is geared around efficiently serving the hundreds of people who have meetings at that venue. So somewhere along the line, rather than do what’s best for the customer, they’ve developed a policy of never deviating off the menu. Because that makes sense, doesn’t it, for an efficient process. But surely the staff should be given initiative to do something simple that customers would like swap one dish for another.

In my business, the MSP Marketing Edge, we do have a culture of you should do whatever makes marketing easy for our members. And this drives everything that we do. And it means that my team very rarely need to check in with me. So if a member asks them to do something that’s a little bit off piste, it’s not what we would normally do, if we can help and if it makes marketing easy for that person, then my team just do it. They use their initiative so we don’t have to have conversations about should we do this? It’s our culture, it’s our mission, and we keep it alive by feeding it every day and talking every day about what can we do to make marketing easy for our members.

A culture doesn’t come from putting up a sign on office walls. It doesn’t come from telling your staff how to behave. It doesn’t come from standard operating procedures. It doesn’t come from what’s obvious to you as the owner. Because as a side note, what’s obvious to us as business owners is very, very rarely obvious to our team. If we don’t tell them exactly what we want and why we want it, they are constantly trying to guess what we want and then give it to us. And this is a huge source of stress both to you and to your staff.

A culture needs to be nurtured every day, in every conversation you have internally, every meeting, every project – you have to openly talk about your mission.

You have to remind yourself that everything you do is aimed at the thing you’re trying to do. This is what we do when we’re talking about making marketing easy for MSPs. Because we know internally here, the more that we do that, the more MSPs will join us, and therefore the more successful we will all be together, which is great and it’s no different within your MSP.

So that leads me to an interesting question for you. Do your technicians have the power to use their initiative? And more importantly, do they know that they have that power? Flexibility and initiative needs to be a culture within an MSP, not a policy or a sign that’s on a wall. And I know there’s a fine line between what the clients think you should be doing for them and what you are actually doing for them. And expectation setting is a huge thing for you, but I promise you a culture of do whatever makes technology easy for clients would be a very powerful retention weapon within your MSP. Do you agree?

Featured guest: Alan McLaren, Co-Founder of STRATA Originals, co-leads a personal branding agency specialising in working with CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, and legal professionals. With a strategic, intentional, and authentic approach, Alan has coached or trained over 600 CEOs in the past two years.

Throughout his career, Alan has recognised the pivotal role personal branding plays in leadership success—helping leaders define their identity, articulate their unique value proposition, and enhance their professional reputation.

How many of your clients actually know the name of your MSP? Or do they just refer to you as the tech guys or IT support? It’s virtually impossible to build a brand for your business name because that takes years and years and tons of cash. But there is a brand that’s very easy to build and can be incredibly profitable when you get it right. My special guest today is an expert at building this brand. He’s going to tell you what you should do, why you should do it, and how to get started.

Hi, my name is Alan McLaren. I’m a personal branding expert and I live just outside Toronto in Canada.

And from the UK to you over in Toronto, welcome onto the podcast, Alan. It’s great to have you here. And we are going to delve today into what personal branding is, and it’s really interesting I think you and I have very similar opinions about how powerful personal branding can be for MSPs and how actually it can help them to beat their competitors and win more sales just by building your personal brand.

I know there’s going to be a lot of questions from the MSPs listening to this and watching this on YouTube about wait, what’s the difference between a personal brand and the company brand? And we’re going to come onto that just down the line, but let’s first of all just delve into you and sort of set you up with some credibility and some context. So tell us briefly about your career. How do you come to be a personal branding expert?

Well it’s interesting, everything as you all know is an accident, right? Nothing actually happens intentionally with respect to your careers. I started my career at Canon in sales. So I started down the sales side of the house, became an executive after about 10 years, and then as a president of a company, and then got into IT security. So I know a little bit about that and technology. I ended up coming to personal branding after 20 years of a career in corporate. I actually started my own marketing agency. And then during that 18 last years, the last four of it, we moved into personal branding because we saw an opportunity to actually change the world, through one CEO at a time by helping people tell stories. And so I came to it through a lot of hard knocks, but a lot of experience on both the tech side and the sales side.

Oh, I love that. And what a mission statement, changing the world one CEO at the time. So how do you end up moving from something like IT security into something like marketing because they’re two completely different worlds?

Well, it’s my business partner’s fault, she was a PR person all her life. We met at a NASDAQ listed company that I was running, and then after I sold off some of the parts of the business, she came to me and says, What are we going to do now? I said, What do you mean “we”? She says, Oh, well, you’re a sales and marketing guy and I’m a PR person. Why don’t we start an agency? I said, We have no ideas, we have no money, why would we do that? So we decided to start a marketing agency. That was it. It was no more complicated than that. At the end of the day, sales and marketing with every company, that’s what’s important, right?

As an MSP owner, you know that without sales you have nothing. You could be the smartest technologist in the world, but you still need to sell.

So I understood that well, and she understood how to market. We came together, and then the pivot to personal branding really became the technology caught up to marketing. And if you didn’t have the right target audience, it would squash you. AI would squash you, and that people can learn all about marketing on Facebook and on YouTube. And so we decided to go to a place where is, which is the world of personal branding, and we’ll talk about how important that is for MSPs going forward.

Well let’s do that right now, because it’s interesting you mentioned AI and I have a feeling everything you’re about to say is going to be music to my ears. I believe AI is getting better day by day, and I believe that the better and better AI gets, the more you need to push towards your own authentic personality within the marketing. Because if your competitors are just using AI produced stuff, whether it’s good stuff or whether it’s AI sloth, it’s still AI generated. And the point is that anybody can do that, but not anybody can be you. Is that really the basis of what you mean and what you define by personal branding?

You should do the commercials for me, you’d be perfect, I love it. So what we look at is really the human to human approach, so exactly aligned with what you’re thinking about. Think about what differentiates you from another MSP. I’ve got this, I’ve got that, I’ve got four of them, I’ve got 500 technologies… it’s the same story, but YOU are the difference, the trust that you build as an owner, as a leader is the difference. So what we say is how do you build trusted authority with the people that matter?

Because think about how you started your business, the first clients were all relationships. So what we’re talking about is how do you build your personal brand to build more relationships, to drive more referrals to your business? That happens when you’re out there. Your company marketing is difficult because how do you differentiate between two? I’m bigger, I’m faster, I’m stronger. It doesn’t matter, it always comes back to the humans you’re going to deal with will differentiate you, the accounts payable people that you deal with, the technicians you deal with, the SOC you have, all those things are important, but your ability to express that is really the secret sauce.

Yeah, I completely agree. So from a practical point of view, let’s say you’re an MSP owner and you are the primary sales person within the business, which is let’s say 80% of MSPs. And maybe that person has heard me say over the years on this podcast Be the face of the business, but maybe not acted on it because they don’t want to. Maybe there’s a fear of putting themselves on the website or they want to keep the branding professional or whatever that means. What are the practical steps to actually starting to build up your personal brand and how do you make sure that your personal brand isn’t overshadowing what you’re trying to do with the business?

Well, it’s interesting you say overshadowing, it’s complimentary, isn’t it? When you think about your personal brand and the business, you are the company, unless you’re a $400 million MSP, but most of the people we’re talking to are not. So what you do, the first thing you do is look at and say, okay, you’re all technologists, do you understand LinkedIn and how to use that as a tool? We’ll talk about content in a second, but do you know how to build relationships and nurture relationships on LinkedIn? Your clients, by the way, are all there. They’re there inside your customers. So the first thing I would do if I was an MSP, I’d say, Who are my customers and am I connected with them on LinkedIn? Then I’d connect with them and I would follow them, and I would nurture them. Then I’d go see who they’re connected to. They’re all potential clients, but I would never sell a thing. I would just say, Hey, I understand you’re connected to Paul. So am I. What a great guy. Yeah, he is a great guy. Happy to be connected to you. And you say nothing else because here’s the secret sauce, in your title it says MSP, IT security, IT services. Pick something. That’s how people will recognise you, you don’t have to ever pitch them. I’ll give you a quick story… I saw a guy on WhatsApp doing a great job on a marketing app, and I went, boy, he’s interesting. And I went and connected with him, Hey, I just saw you on WhatsApp. I just wanted to connect with you. I thought you were a fascinating guy. He says, I see you’re a personal branding expert. I need some help with my personal brand. I didn’t pitch a thing. So that’s what I’m talking, build relationships and build trust. There’s another step of course that you can take, which we’ll talk about in terms of content development, but if you just start with relationship building and relationship nurturing, your prospecting is only going to be online and you’ll never have to pitch once because it’ll all come from those natural relationships.

Yeah, I love that. And we’ll come onto the content in a second in terms of bravery, of putting something on LinkedIn, and I see MSPs overthink this all the time, and I understand why it’s easy for someone like you, easy for someone like me, because we’re communicators, we’re marketing people, that’s what we do. But if you’re on the other side of the coin and you’re actually a technical genius, but not great at communications, what do I actually write in that headline? What kind of photo do I put on LinkedIn and what would your advice be on that?

Well, the first thing, we overthink everything. So think about this, I’ll make it easy for you. Let’s assume as an MSP, you have a thousand connections on LinkedIn, 500 connections on LinkedIn. They know you, right? They’ve connected with you, talk to them. They don’t care about the perfect headline or the perfect picture, they just want to know where you are, what you’re doing with your life, because they’re the first concentric circle that supports you. Those thousand connect you to 500,000 other people. So when you overproduce personal branding, it looks like marketing and marketing’s not trusted because you’re selling me something.

If we talk about content for example, and you are in IT security, what are you going to say? You’re not going to say, well, I have the best software etc. That doesn’t matter, no one cares about that. You’re helping people strategically – what they need to think about, how they need to approach it, how they need to do their training internally – you’re giving away all your secrets to people. They do that every day with customers, every single day. So do that, be like you’re in front of a customer who’s asked you a question about that, about your IT services, but not in a salesy way. If you were a consultant, you’d say, this is how I would approach it, go pick the best MSP that delivers the best culture to you, but let me help you do that. They’re already doing it, just don’t overthink it. And if you’re afraid, guess what? It’s normal to be afraid. There’s nothing wrong with being afraid.

Everyone else is afraid too. But the difference is if you can power through the fear and just change it. I love that.

Just quickly for a moment, Paul, they’ve already built a business. They’ve already had the alligators at their ankles already. You’re telling me a video is scaring you a little bit. It’s time to practice it, so let’s be practical until you get good at it, and then you’ll fly on the other side.

Yeah, I love that. And also, do you know what if you make mistakes it’s never permanent, is it? And I remember, I think it was last year, the British Prime Minister who’d only been in power for a few months, he was talking about some hostages being released, and in a live TV conference, he actually said, And they released the sausages, the hostages. And obviously the entire world picked up on that. And this is like a world leader on a world platform, but it was forgotten within weeks, and it hasn’t affected his credibility or anything like that. So if a world leader can make a stupid mistake like saying sausages instead of hostages (maybe he was thinking about his dinner that night) and get away with it, then you can certainly get away with making a video that isn’t quite as good.

Let’s take one final question about LinkedIn, then, I just want to look briefly outside of LinkedIn and other things you could do with your personal branding. So you’ve mentioned content a few times. What would your advice be to MSPs on using content on LinkedIn to increase your personal brand and to make you more authoritative and more authentic and more desirable as an MSP obviously.

I mean, the easiest question ever is what are the questions that you get from your clients? Not about the technical stuff you do, but about the strategic stuff you do. Because the MSP result is the work you do, and that’s fantastic, and people expect that you’re going to deliver on all the ways you deliver. But before they decide even to get to use an MSP, why wouldn’t they do it internally versus externally? What are the objections you get from your prospects? What are the conversations that are happening on Google right now? Go find those out and just talk about those things. That’s what you talk about every single day. It’s just your competitors aren’t because they’re all afraid.

So you’re going to get out there and you’re going to start talking about why it’s important to outsource your IT security. You’re going to say, Well, it’s really simple, you could hire people internally, but now you’ve got to manage them, HR, all the things that you go through. They got sick, they’re away today, and the virus happened to all of our networks, now we’re screwed. Well, you’ve got us. You don’t have to worry about that. Headache free. But you’re not pitching, you’re just pitching the idea of outsourcing versus insourcing, because each of them have advantages. Think of the voice of your customer and deliver that way. And if you’re afraid to do videos, take your phone and practice until you’re comfortable doing videos. We believe in video, 100% of our content is videos 100%, except, sorry, we do newsletters and other stuff, but of the personal branding content, because it’s the most authentic, and that’s what people want.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. We do a lot of videos, give a lot of videos to our MSP Marketing Edge members because you cannot beat those videos. They’re really, really powerful. Even though the LinkedIn algorithm isn’t quite as much in love with video today as it was 12 months ago, it will go full circle because what will happen is there’ll be less video on LinkedIn and some vice president somewhere at LinkedIn says, Oh no, video consumption is down, but TikTok’s getting bigger again, we’ve got to ramp it up. And all of these things that are always cyclical.

Okay, let’s move away from LinkedIn for our final subject, which is personal branding outside of LinkedIn. So other stuff on the web, but also offline. Give us some practical things that you can do. I’ll throw one out that I use in my life, which was never an intention, it just kind of became this way, which is, this podcast goes on all audio platforms, but also on YouTube. So anyone who’s watching on YouTube will see I’m wearing a blue shirt and guess what? I always wear a blue shirt. In fact, you might think it’s the same one. There’s nine years of video content, but it’s not actually the same one. I have a procession of blue shirts, but it’s now got to a point now where if I’m not wearing a light blue shirt and I’ve met people in real life when I worn to checkered shirt and they’ll say to me, Paul, you’re wearing the wrong shirt. So you see, that’s become almost a piece of my personal branding is having a light blue shirt. Now that was an accident, it was just something I fell into. But is that the kind of thing that we mean by personal branding, that kind of consistency of your appearance, of the way you present yourself? Or is that just a small component of a bigger thing?

At the end of the day, personal branding is about your authentic self. How you come across in everything you do, what hats do you wear? What roles do you play? Part of it can be a shirt if you like it. Look at politicians, they tend to have a uniform. Because you’re spending time with people, especially online, and I think you mentioned YouTube as an example, it is the most important platform surprisingly, because it’s there forever and your showcase of everything you do is there. So when you pull people over and they become a subscriber, now you own them in a positive way. And LinkedIn, even though because it’s more transitory, only 2 or 3% of the people actually see your content every day.

To continue the offline conversation outside of LinkedIn and YouTube, what you’re talking about can be important, but it doesn’t really matter that much. You’ve done it for nine years, that’s why it matters. Most people have not done it and won’t do it for nine years. I don’t care about my uniform. I’ll wear this, I’ll wear sweatshirts, I’ll wear whatever, it doesn’t matter to me. To me, it’s about my voice, the authenticity of what I’m trying to do, which is give away as much as I know with holding nothing back to everybody who wants to listen to me, that’s my brand. I will do it from my heart, not from my head. And people like that will be part of my tribe and people who don’t like that will go somewhere else.

And in marketing, repelling is not a bad thing. Because you know that you’re dealing with your target audience that matter to you. And what MSPs tend to do, in my experience, because I’ve had MSPs as part of the IT security business I have, is they’re so hung up on the technical side, they forget the end of the day, you’re solving a problem for humans. You are solving technology problems, but there’s someone in charge of that technology that is always up at night. And you can help them by saying, I know Paul’s got it. I know these guys, but Paul’s got me, he’s got my back. Wow. How do you do that at scale? You do that online, and of course all the events you go to, you show up with that same attitude. Physical events, webinars, podcasts, you show up the same way all the time, and then people go, that Paul guy, he’s like, and then the attributes start getting described. That’s what you want to be because the word I use is in an event, physical or virtual, your personal brand shows up before you do and it stays after you leave. So are they saying the right things about you? Are you delivering value at every turn? If the answer is yes, check the box and your business will start to thrive because more people will want to work with you.

What a way to end the interview. Thank you, Alan, really appreciate your time coming on, being authentic, giving us all of this amazing knowledge. Just briefly tell us what do you do? What does your business actually do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

So best way to reach for me is on LinkedIn, Alan McLaren, or at strataoriginals.com, and go check out the stuff we do. We essentially work with founders, builders, entrepreneurs to help them build their personal brand, both online and off so that they can do exactly what we’ve talked about today to differentiate their business and to humanise their business and to drive more business. And we do that through what we call a brand DNA, which is a strategy session. And then we either become their coach or we do it for them, depending on their model and their budget and the rest, we make their lives easier just like they do to their clients, we do for them. 

This week’s question comes from Christian whose MSP is in Illinois, and he asks: Why is my marketing and sales so slow?

That’s a very common question, and the short answer is because you work in a sector with a very, very, very slow sales cycle. In fact, it’s one of the slowest that I’ve ever seen. You’re working against three big things. The first is a lack of understanding. The people you’re trying to reach, they don’t get technology, so it’s easier for them not to think about something because that’s what we do when we don’t get something.

The other thing you’re working against is fear. They don’t really know how their technology’s been set up, no matter how many times they’ve been told or whatever documentation you’ve given them. And that means that they’re scared of changing something and breaking it.

And the third thing you’re working against is inertia loyalty. It seems easier for them at an emotional level to stay with an existing supplier even if they don’t like them. And that’s because of the lack of understanding and the fear.

So these three factors and loads more, they all contribute to a total lack of urgency on the part of your leads and prospects. However, there are two pieces of good news. The first is that people buy when they’re ready to buy. And that means that right now there is a hot prospect in your area who would love to talk to you. The challenge is knowing who that person is and knowing the right time to talk to them. This is why you need to be constantly increasing the amount of marketing activity that you do and speaking to more and more and more people, play the numbers game.

The other piece of good news is the insane lifetime value that you benefit from. Because you win loads of lovely monthly recurring revenue from clients, and they stay with you for years and years and years, and that really doesn’t happen much elsewhere either. So these are the good things. The answer to getting more clients, as I said, is just to do more marketing activity – do more stuff, speak to more people.

Welcome to Episode 289 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

The joys of being an MSP owner… complete control. Yeah you want to be always onboarding new clients and improving your tech stack and providing the best customer service. But if one week you don’t want to do those things, no one can stop you from not doing those things, because you’re the owner of the business. You’re the boss, right?

Well, if right now you’re not accountable to anyone, there is a huge benefit of being accountable to someone. But who is this person you should answer to? Stick around, you’re not going to believe who I’m going to suggest.

There are many reasons why someone starts their own business and I say that as someone who’s been in business for 20 years himself. People who don’t start their own business think that we do it so that we can earn more money and not have a boss. But I think those of us who’ve been doing it for more than a couple of years, which means we are going to keep doing it for a couple of decades, we know that we started our own business primarily to have control.

And by that I mean control over what work we do, who we do it for and how it’s done. Most of us, I believe, start our own business because we have a deep desire to do something amazing and we want to control freak it all along the way. Sometimes when we work for someone else, we’ve had bad bosses. I know that I have, I’m looking at you, Terry, but also we’ve had good bosses. I’ve had some of those as well, fact loads of those. But escaping the boss is not always the reason why we start our own business.

As I say, making more money and building an asset, something that you own, that’s the side benefit I believe of running your own business. I truly believe control is the primary driving factor for doing it and keep doing it. But nevermind all of these upsides of starting your own business and not having a boss, let’s look at the downsides as well. And I don’t really mean the fact that you for many years, worked longer hours than you ever have for probably a lower salary, that does eventually go, but it’s mostly a pain in the first few years, I don’t mean that stuff. I do mean the downsides of not having a boss. Because, and this might be hard to swallow, but there really are downsides to not having a boss.

The biggest downside to not having a boss is that you are accountable to no one.

Think back to when you last had a job. Someone, somewhere was in charge of you, right? You were accountable to someone in some way and forgetting all the negative impacts of that, there were positive impacts of that as well. And the primary positive impact was that if you didn’t do your work, someone would notice and there would be a problem. But as the business owner, this is not the case, right? Let’s take a marketing project that you’ve been promising yourself, you’re going to do for ages, but there’s no one chasing you to get it done. If you choose not to do that, or if you choose not to investigate that new PSA that you’ve been thinking of switching to, no one’s ever going to raise that in a meeting. Or if they do, you’re the boss, it doesn’t really matter that you haven’t done that. It’s your business, it’s your decisions, you have the control. And sure, I really do think that’s a great thing, but I do believe it’s a bad thing as well. It’s both of these things.

I’ve been getting more heavily involved over the last few months in the development projects that we have in our business. Because we have a development team who work on our portal and our product and our website and our marketing, and they do a fantastic job. But I wanted to insert myself kind of more closely into the process so I could guide it more, try to streamline it a bit, get things happening more quickly. And I realised that as part of that team, I needed to take on board some of the tasks that come out of any project. And as a result of that, because I’m a team player, I now have tasks that I must get completed to specific deadlines. And if I don’t, there are actually people that I have to answer to – my own team.

So you might think I’m crazy for doing this, but do you know what? It’s reawakened something within me that I’m really enjoying, and that’s a desire to do a great job for the person I’m accountable to. For years really, I’ve only been accountable to myself, kind of my clients, kind of my family, but now I’m accountable to my team as well. They’re people I have to face on Zoom calls every single day. And it has changed the way that I work. I’ve always been a very deadline driven person, but with the control of owning the business, I’ve been able to play loose with deadlines and just on a whim on a Friday afternoon, extend a deadline rather than put myself through the pain of doing the work. But now I can’t. And especially if the work I’m doing is a dependency for someone else, and by that I mean they can’t do their work until I’ve completed mine.

If someone is revising a page on our website and I’ve got to write that page first, you can see how if I don’t hit the deadline on that, neither can they. Can you see why being accountable to someone somewhere is a great way to make sure you get things done. It forces you to plan ahead, be more disciplined and be a better team player. And these are all great traits for the person who runs the business – YOU. It makes you a better business owner and definitely makes you a better boss.

So here’s a question for you. Within your MSP, who should you be accountable to? Do you have a service desk manager or operations manager that you can be accountable to? Perhaps you have a business partner and you can keep each other on the straight and narrow. What about your spouse, your other half? Could you be accountable to them for getting things done? Especially when the price of not getting those things done has an impact back on the family? I’d be really interested to know who you could be accountable to within your business.

Would you risk being arrested just to win new clients for your MSP? Sometimes when you have no money to market your business it can feel like you’re never going to achieve anything. I was in exactly this situation once and the craziest thing happened as a result of it. I did nearly get arrested. Let me tell you how.

This is a lesson in lateral thinking and how powerful it is to have zero marketing budget.

So jump in the DeLorean with me, it’s 2002 and I’m running a music radio station in the city of Peterborough here in the UK. And in the years before I joined the station had taken a real battering from its competitors. So my brief was to build up the audience again, and just to test me, the large media group that owned the station gave me this budget – ZERO DOLLARS. Now I can see that that was a blessing because it taught me the power of bootstrapping, where we had to do our marketing using only the existing resources we had in the station. And I learned so many valuable business lessons from that.

The way you market a radio station is different from the way you market an MSP. You need an easy direct marketing strategy such as my three step lead generation system – build audiences, grow relationships, and convert relationships – you can learn more about that @mspmarketingedge.com. But for radio marketing 20 plus years ago, it was all about just getting the name and the address out there. The name of the station, the type of the music it played, and the FM frequency. Yes, I’m that old, I worked on an FM radio station. In fact, I started my career on a medium wave on an AM radio station, please someone get me a walking stick.

Anyway, back in the day we did car stickers, we had a couple of promotional vehicles, but I couldn’t afford billboards or any kind of paid advertising, and yet I wanted to dominate the city. And then one day someone on my team came up with the most brilliant idea ever. We were discussing how dirty the pavements (AKA the sidewalks) were in our city and how they needed a good jet wash, like a pressure wash. And one of my colleagues joked, maybe we should clean them. And then another colleague said, what if we did clean them? But we used a template so it left behind our logo in the street.

That was such a good idea at the time, and today this actually has a name, it’s called Clean Advertising. It’s very clever, isn’t it? And the internet agrees it’s legal, at least here in the UK, because all you’re doing is cleaning the pavement, cleaning the sidewalk, you just happening to leave some of the dirt behind. But when we actually did this all over the city in 2002, the local council had a different idea. In fact, they went berserk. Perhaps it was because we’d shown everyone how dirty the streets were. I got a series of daily angry phone calls. In fact, one council officer even threatened to send the police to arrest me for vandalism, which is just hilarious. And I didn’t take those threats seriously.

Unlike the time the Diplomatic Protection police in London were actually going to arrest me because of a radio publicity stunt that we did at an embassy. But that’s a story of total stupidity best saved for another day. Anyway, to complete the story loop. Yes, the audience grew and actually that stunt kickstarted the best two years of my radio career, including winning a Sony award, which is like the UK radio equivalent of an Oscar.

So how can this story help your MSP? Well, as I said at the start, this is a lesson in lateral thinking and actually how powerful it is to have zero marketing budget. You don’t need money to market your MSP, you just need a desire to get new clients, some ideas, and a little time to implement.

Featured guest: Dawn Sizer is a CEO and technologist with security, training, and policy specialisations.  She holds an MBA in IT, as well as standard certifications while still making technical information relatable for any audience. She sits on Partner Advisory Councils of the top Distributors, Security, and Cyber Insurance companies in the space, as well as The Channel Company for Xchange events.

Dawn has been married for 29 years to her husband and partner in everything. They have two young men, a fuzzy eared dog named Pilot, and a crazy pittie named Odin.

Nothing’s more inspirational than hearing how other MSPs have beaten the odds and turned their business into a success and I’ve got another great example for you right now. This MSP is sharing the warts and all story of how she grew her business, including how it really took off when she put in place a proper marketing system.

Hi, I’m Dawn Sizer, CEO of 3rd Element.

And thank you so much for joining me on this show, Dawn. You and I actually started a conversation like seven or eight months ago. We were both at ScaleCon ‘24 in Las Vegas and we were going up in Kevin Clunes sort of after conference party thing where there’s this big wheel that goes round like an observation wheel in Las Vegas. And we were having a really good conversation and then got split off into separate groups to go into separate pods. And it’s taken us seven months to jump back on and continue that conversation. I can’t even remember what we were talking about.

Yeah, it was all over the place. And I think what we probably should have realised at the time, they gave us these cool little coloured bracelets and we probably should have said, Hey, our bracelets are different colours, we should probably fix this.

And steal someone else’s bracelet. We know to do that, I know Kevin Clone listens to this podcast so Kevin, when you do your after conference stuff at ScaleCon ‘25, which I’m definitely going to when that’s announced anyway, then yeah we’ll have to do that this year.

So thank you for joining me on the podcast, Dawn. Tell us a little bit about you. We’re going to be talking about getting marketing done and how as an MSP, the hardest thing in the world sometimes is just getting started with your marketing, keeping that marketing going, and turning a series of difficult activities into a system so that you do it regularly. And I know that’s something that you’ve got pretty good at. So just tell us a little bit about you. What’s your MSP business owning story and sort of bring us from where you started up to where you are today.

So this is a 20 year tale, believe it or not, we started this business 20 years ago. I literally worked at another service provider previously to this, I was a service manager there and quit my job one day and started the company the next. So it was one of those things where I couldn’t take it anymore, was pretty sure that we can do it better, and here we are 20 years later. So that’s the history of it in a nutshell.

I love that. So 20 years ago, we’re talking 2005, I guess, did you start out doing break/fix or did you jump straight into the recurring revenue?

We jumped straight into the recurring revenue, which was not necessarily a thing at that time. More context around that, my husband and I both worked for the same service provider before that. We started this business together. So we literally had two household incomes at nothing for a year and a half. So we had no other choice then for this to work.

I mean you must’ve been one of the first MSPs I guess in terms of actually getting people onto recurring revenue contracts and taking that bigger view, which obviously everyone has today. That must’ve been so scary with both of you quitting your job. I quit my job probably about the same time actually, 2005 and started my first business and I earned very little for the first few months, but my wife at the time was still bringing in her income, so it wasn’t quite as scary for me. And we didn’t have kids or anything at that point. But yeah, for both of you, that must’ve been touch and go I guess at some points.

Yeah, I mean apparently we thought it would just be a fantastic idea to have a mortgage payment and kids and everything else. Who does that?

Yeah, exactly. So 20 years on, what kind of business do you have now? How many technicians do you have and whereabouts are you based by the way?

We’re in central Pennsylvania, right next to Amish country, the epitome of technology. But as far as we are, I believe 18 people, most of us are technical at this point. I think we only have three or four people that are not technical.

Okay. So the vast majority of the business is obviously there to deliver clients, but I know that you spend a great deal of your time bringing on board new clients or trying to find new business. So let’s talk about marketing. Now this is a recurring theme, this podcast has been going well over five years and a recurring theme is that MSPs find marketing hard. What was the point where you realised if you want to grow the business, you’ve got to get good at marketing?

Probably about three or four years ago. And it’s not like I didn’t know marketing was important before that. I think we have all lit money on fire on marketing over the last couple of years in some way, shape or form. You throw money at one thing and that doesn’t work and you throw money at another thing and that doesn’t work, and I think we’ve all had that scenario. Then I ended up talking with some folks that just do marketing for a living and really listening to what they were telling me. 

It’s very difficult to take the language that we use every day and put it into a different lens for a client to understand it.

So we hired a group to do that for us. We had our messaging that was very clear, very concise, very effective. So I think that was step one, getting that message very clear and effective.

And what difference did you see from being able to communicate to the ordinary business owners and managers that you wanted to influence? What was the difference you saw from being able to say to them, this is what we do and this is what’s in it for you, these are the benefits?

Literally, that’s what it was. So you could take all the, I don’t want to say word vomit, that we throw at people of this is what we do. And then they were able to come back and say, oh, now I understand exactly what it is that you do, and I understand how it applies to me. So I think that was a huge leap forward.

And how did that make going on and then doing other marketing or actually sort of implementing marketing easier?

So the framework that we had gotten back gave us all of the language that we needed to use on repeat over and over and over again. So I was able to take that and incorporate the language into everything from landing pages to handouts that we’re giving folks, to web pages, to social media marketing, anything around language that you’re going to use. I was able to take it, copy it, adjust it, run it through Copilot, do whatever you need to do and have it be repeatable.

Got it. And at the risk of putting words in your mouth, and please do disagree with me if this is not the case, but was it a case that once you got that messaging really clear and you’d simplified it down and knew exactly what to say and how to say, you just then kept repeating that and tried not to deviate off that? Because I think the risk is sometimes that when you’ve got something like that, you’ve got a clear message, you run it out for six months and you almost get bored of it yourself, don’t you? Because you’ve seen it 1000, 2000, 3000 times, but you forget that the people you are reaching have seen it once, maybe twice

100%, you’ll get sick of it, there’s no doubt about it. What I have found, there are some products out there that you can actually input your brand voice into. So that messaging that you have very clear and what it looks like and the words that you’re using on repeat, you can enter that into their AI function and it will repeat some of that language for you as well. So you’re not stuck writing it on your own. So you’re going to get, okay, here’s my brand voice. I need you to create a thing that looks like this, but use my brand voice and it’ll just go back through it. And then all you have to do is humanise it after that.

Yeah. I love that. So let’s talk about other practical marketing. So you’ve now got a very clear message, you know what it is you want to communicate. What did you find were some of the most effective ways to reach decision makers and what were some of the least effective ways?

Spray and pray is the least effective. I think we’ve all done that. Pay per click is something that I haven’t had success with. Some of the marketing agencies that we’ve used that have been not MSP friendly have not been as on target as well. So sometimes I thought, well, maybe if we thought outside the box, that would work better and it didn’t. Sometimes it was like, okay, well let’s go back in the box and that necessarily didn’t work either. So there’s definitely a method to the madness, and I think we have finally found the method to the madness, and it is repeatable process, not who you use, not what you use. But it’s repeatable process over and over again. You have to touch people so many different times in order for it to be effective.

Yeah, this is just music to my ears because you are absolutely right, and I’ve been preaching for years, set up a marketing system, set up small marketing actions or tasks, ideally things you can get other people to do for you. And then just make sure those things happen every day or every week or every month, however often they get repeated. And then just do that for 10 years. And you’re absolutely right, you can Google this, how many touch points does it take to turn someone from a prospect to a client. And you’ll see answers from seven up to 50, and I think the answer is like 500. It’s because actually the way that people buy these days, and especially how they buy managed services, something ordinary business owners don’t understand is it will take a number of emails that they read of yours, maybe a number of podcast episodes if you put those out, a number of videos that you watch, a number of phone calls, a number of messages on LinkedIn or emails or a number of, I mean, there’s so many other ways of touch pointing someone. What are some of the things that you are using now? So if we jump back to today and you were to pick out the top three tactics that work best for you as part of your system. Let me change that question. What are the three that you would not want me to take away from you? That’s probably the right question to ask.

Email sequencing is a big one. I do like that. I do like to be able to track and see who’s clicking on what and what that looks like. So I am still a numbers person at the end of the day, and I don’t know if that’s good or not good. I don’t know that there’s a real method to that madness, if you will. But the KPI piece to it, I want to be able to see of the, in this case, it was 2,600 emails that I sent out, how many people clicked on them, how many people opened them? What does that look like? And then when they did a thing, when I’ve sent them another email based on off of an action that they did, what was my open rate? Well, it turned out my open rate was like 98.7% or something crazy. So it was really good. So I’m getting really good traction in places, so taking away my KPIs would make me cry.

So email sequencing one, what else could I take away and make you cry?

Landing pages are another one. I think it’s really good if you have an asset, a giveaway or something along those lines to set up a landing page for somebody to go get that particular piece of content, whether, again, whether it’s an ebook or a white paper, whatever it is. But not only are you grabbing their information on that, and even if it’s just their first name and an email address so that you can send them something later, but it’s a touch point. That particular person has gone to that page, you know they’ve interacted with it, they thought it was important enough to go get it. So you know that you have somebody that’s interested at that point and you can nurture them along for a little while. So that would be another one. And then the last one I think is any type of CRM. If you don’t have a CRM to be able to do any of these things, and whether it’s put email out, do social media, get any type of reporting, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

And I’m going to have to ask you which CRM you use. I don’t particularly, I was going to say don’t care, of course I care about your answer, but I’m not that interested in the answer. But I know that every MSP listening to this would want me to ask that question. So you obviously have a successful marketing machine you’ve set up, which CRM are you using?

So we were using HubSpot for a while, and I think that works really, really well. We needed some additional capability and we switched over to Insightly at the beginning of the year. So I don’t know that there’s a good answer, right? I think everybody does things a little bit differently and there may be pieces or parts to certain CRMs that make more sense to one MSP over another.

Yeah. I always say to MSPs, pick a CRM something you like, stick with that. And then maybe a few years down the line, review it and check it. We were with Keap pretty much since I started the business in 2016. And we are currently migrating to HubSpot. And HubSpot’s like a thousand times better than Keap. But there are still some things I miss from Keap. I miss their ways of working, the way they structure data. HubSpot is obviously a whole different beast. I do miss the bill. The Keap Bill is perhaps a fifth of what the HubSpot bill is, but I can do a lot more with it. So there we go. But anyway, you’re absolutely right, whichever CRM you choose, just pick one, stick with it, review it a few years down the line, almost like treat your marketing stack like your tech stack. Don’t be constantly fiddling with it, but just pick something and stick with it.

Okay, Dawn, final question for you. You have built up a true marketing machine. I know it’s working wonders for your business. You’re bringing in new clients, you’re nurturing prospects all the time. And I know that you’ve obviously done that the hard way over a number of years, you got very clear on your brand voice, you got very clear on the messaging, but you’ve then done the hard work and you’ve put in place all of these things like the ones you were just talking about. What would you say to an MSP who’s listening to this, who desires great marketing but hasn’t really got started with it yet? What’s the motivation that they need just to get started?

There is no motivation to get started, you just have to do it. I think to be fair, as a business owner I think all of us are eat the frog people, right? There’s always a task that nobody ever wants to do, and you just have to force yourself to go do it. Marketing was one of those things for me. If anybody’s ever seen me speak, especially if they’re watching me speak about automation, I actually talk about how marketing is one of the pieces that I’ve automated in some respects because I dislike it so much. And it’s not because I truly dislike it, it’s that I find it fiddly. I find all of the nuances to it difficult because I’m a technical person. So I think it’s just more a matter of just get started, do one thing at a time, and then add something else to it and something else and something else. And eventually you create a little machine out of it. Automate as much as you can, and when in doubt, outsource what you can.

Thank you, Dawn, for your time today. And I know you have a community which is for MSPs, which helps them with their business. Do you want to tell us just a little bit about that community and how we can either join it or get in touch with you?

Absolutely. So for those of you that aren’t aware of the Tech Degenerates, by all means go take a look. We’re on the web, you’ll find us on LinkedIn, as well as Facebook and all the other normal social media things. You may have seen us at IT Nation over in the UK or in the United States, but either way, it’s a great community of other MSP owners, and we’d love to see you there. And that website to visit is thetechdegenerates.com

Luke in Connecticut where his MSP is based, has this question: Should I use WhatsApp in my marketing?

There are only a few MSPs doing this at the moment, that I’m aware of anyway, and if you’re using it please let me know. But I think using WhatsApp as a marketing channel has huge potential in the near future. And why, well, I don’t know about you, but about 80 to 90% of my own personal messaging is now done through WhatsApp. Here in the UK it’s very, very big. Although I do appreciate that’s not the case everywhere.

Here’s the thing though, it’s always sensible to try to reach people on the platforms they’re already using and very little commercial B2B messaging is currently done through WhatsApp. I know that is starting to change, and especially since a few years ago, Facebook rewrote all of the base code of all of its apps – Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads, WhatsApp – and that was so they could more easily pass information around all of the different platforms. And there is of course a WhatsApp business app, which has an API. So the tools are there to use. It’s just a case then of how are you going to use them. Let me give you three ideas of how you could use WhatsApp within your MSP.

So number one, you could use it as a call to action on your website, literally, “WhatsApp us”. And there are apps that allow easy messaging via multiple platforms. Maybe WhatsApp is a bit of a consumer call to action, but you know what, if you’re in a country like the UK where people just use WhatsApp, then for them pressing a button or picking up their phone and WhatsApping a number is an easy thing for them to do. And if it’s easy, it removes friction and more people will talk to you.

Number two, you can share content with people. And of course you’d need their mobile number and they might be a bit resistant to giving that to you. So you can of course, spam them via their favourite and currently spam free messaging platform. And I do mean sending them messages on WhatsApp. I’m starting to get a little bit of spam now, maybe you are as well, but actually if you send high value content that’s relevant to people, that’s not as spammy.

And then number three for ticket updates to end users, people you are helping right now. And I know you’d probably rather just stick to email updates or ticket updates on your PSA platform or something they’ve logged into or whatever. But remember something I said earlier, it’s always sensible to try to reach people on the platforms they’re already using. So if WhatsApp is a big part of their life and you send them updates on your ticket via WhatsApp, that actually provides a better level of customer service, there’s so much less friction in that.

Now I’m going to be keeping a close eye on the B2B applications of this, and I will update you as more and more MSPs generate more use cases.

Welcome to Episode 288 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Have no doubt, LinkedIn is the hottest place for MSPs to go prospecting right now. It’s been that way for a few years and I can’t see that changing.

Why? Because every possible prospect you could ever do business with is already there on LinkedIn. And you have access to the tools to connect with them, get your content in front of them, and ultimately build a relationship before they’re ready to switch MSPs.

The only snag with LinkedIn is that the algorithm changes and what worked a few years ago isn’t quite as powerful today.

Let me tell you three wins for MSPs on LinkedIn right now.

My team and I produce a lot of content intended for use on LinkedIn, and that’s for our MSP Marketing Edge members. Now of course, it can be used across lots of different social networks, but as I just said, LinkedIn is it. It’s the easiest and most accessible platform to access decision makers, the ordinary business owners and managers that you want to reach. And a couple of times a year, we do a bit of a deep dive on what’s going on in the algorithm at the moment. Because as you know on LinkedIn, the performance of your content is very much dependent on what the algorithm is trying to reward at that time. And you can see this change over the years if you use the platform regularly, In fact, any platform. I’ve noticed in the last few months that engagement in my Facebook groups has completely fallen off a cliff. And that’s nothing I’ve done and it’s nothing to do with the members of those groups, it’s just something that someone, somewhere, some vice president at Facebook has tweaked the algorithm and if I wait a few weeks, that engagement will come back. This has happened five or six times over the last 10 years or so. But anyway, back to LinkedIn and these are some of the wins that we’ve noticed from our research which are making a difference right now. I’ve got three of them for you.

Win number one is to upload a PDF carousel. PDFs are performing very well on LinkedIn. They actually look beautiful when you see them in your feed on LinkedIn and they’re kind of easy to use as well, you just upload a document. The trick is to have carousels with many pages, aim for around about 12 pages, but each page only has a tiny amount of information on it. I mean, I’m talking literally like one sentence, half a sentence on each page. The idea is that people tap through to see something that you’re trying to say and you just say it one sentence at a time. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap 12 pages or more on your PDF carousel.

Win number two is to write longer human comments. So that means when you are commenting on other people’s posts, you write something of substance, not just Hey, great post. In fact, if you write more than 10 words, that can have up to two times the impact of a comment with less than 10 words. But please don’t use AI for commenting. It’s kind of obvious when you’ve just written something with AI. The goal is to actually say something and use your authentic voice and your authentic personality.

And then finally win number three, and this is a weird one, you should like your own post. So you post something on LinkedIn and you like it. That does feel very weird, I’ve done it myself, feels very strange to do. But from all the research that we’ve done looking around and remember, we don’t know what LinkedIn’s algorithm is, all we’ve got is based on what people are seeing, and if you see lots of trends across the web, then the chances are that that’s the way the algorithm has worked. So we believe there is an algorithmic benefit right now of you liking your own post.

Same, same, same.

I look at lots of MSP’s websites and they all look the same.

But so what, is that a problem? Is there a link between an MSP’s samey looking website and the ability to find new clients and earn more money? And if there is a link, what can be done about it?

Let’s unpack the connection between sales and your website, find a simple solution to fix bad websites and how you can easily differentiate from the 40,000 other MSPs out there.

It’s hard to differentiate your MSP from your competitors, but one way that you can do this is by making sure there’s real personality in all of your marketing.

I got something by email a few weeks back that’s really made me smile. It’s from a UK gifting website, I think I bought something from them. And sure this is a consumer example rather than B2B, but it’s certainly different.

The subject line of the email I received said, You’ve got a message from the big boss. And then the content says Hello, I just wanted to say hi, and thank you for signing up to our newsletter. I’m Philip, I’m the boss of Firebox (that’s the name of the company) and you won’t hear loads from me because I’m super busy and important, (I thought that was nice), but I thought I’d let you know that we’ll now be sending you 48 emails a week (and then actually they’d cross that out and replaced it with) we’ll be sending you the occasional roundup of the coolest new stuff we’ve found plus exclusive offers only available to subscribers.

Okay, so that might not be to your personal liking, but it’s very consistent with the style of the Firebox website and their emails. It’s all packed with personality and we can assume it’s the personality of Philip, the boss. There are some MSP examples that I’ve come across over the years that get that personality across in exactly the same way. And the first one that jumps to mind is Christian Fleming of Northstar IT here in the UK. He’s been on the podcast in the past and his marketing is themed all around Star Trek.

His commitment to that theme is very impressive, and I know it gives him a massive advantage in a very busy marketplace because it’s really easy for business owners and managers to say, Hey, you’re the Star Trek IT guys. Does it put off some people? Well, yes, of course it will. But that’s a good thing because when you turn off some people, you automatically attract other people. You want people to have an opinion about your MSP that’s been formed through your marketing. And it’s better that they have an opinion, in fact a negative or a positive opinion about you, than no opinion at all.

Here in the UK we call this Marmite marketing. So Marmite is this delicious food spread and you either love it or hate it. It’s made from yeast extract. Well, Marmite has actually been using that “love it or hate it” as their marketing slogan since 1996. If your marketing is bland, you’re making it too hard for people to form an opinion about you. And seeing as decision makers pick a new MSP based on how they feel about them, if they can’t form an opinion on you, you’re making it too hard for them to pick you.

My final thoughts on this, if you’re going to put personality into your marketing, it must be an authentic personality, and that probably means your personality. This isn’t something that your website designer can invent for you. It’s not something your marketing agency can create. The personality in your marketing must be authentic and it must be consistent. And that’s really easy to do when it’s based on a real human, like you.

Featured guest: Matt Yesbeck is a seasoned technology professional with 28 years of experience in the Richmond, VA tech industry. Over nearly three decades, he has built a reputation for delivering strategic IT solutions, streamlining business operations, and empowering organisations through technology.

Driven by an entrepreneurial mindset, he and his son Gage founded MSPX (www.mspx.store) to provide innovative contract marketplace for managed service providers (MSPs). Recognising a growing need for dedicated Apple and Microsoft IT support for SMBs, he launched Yesteck IT Services (www.yesteck.io) in 2024. As co-founder, he leads business development, marketing, and sales, ensuring Yesteck delivers responsive, expert-level IT solutions that businesses can rely on.

Thanks to technology, everything in our lives is easier, but ironically, not so much for MSPs. Why can’t the process of finding new clients be as simple and hassle-free as ordering on Amazon or selling old clothes on Vinted? And to make matters worse, if you’ve got a client but they’re no longer a good fit, what do you do with them?

Well, would you believe it, there’s now an eBay for MSP clients, a hassle-free way to buy and sell unwanted managed service contracts. It’s a world first and you need to hear about this.

Hi, I am Matt Yesbeck. I’m the co-founder of MSPX, the internet’s first marketplace for the buying and selling of managed services contracts.

And I’ve been looking forward to this interview for weeks and weeks, Matt. You and I, we connected on LinkedIn, we were chatting about some stuff and you said to me, Hey, we’ve come up with this idea and I’d love to come and talk about it on your podcast. And we’re at a minimum viable product, but we’ve got this brand new version coming out in the summer. And I’ll be honest, I get a lot of pitches on LinkedIn, people that want to come on this podcast, but there was something about what you’ve created that made me think, do you know what, this is genuinely a brand new idea. I’ve never heard this before and I know that there’s going to be some MSPs out there that will listen to this or watch this on YouTube and think, Hang on a second, this is the answer to the problem that we’ve got.

So what we’re going to do in this interview, Matt, is we’re going to explore what you’ve come up with, how you came up with the idea, what you are working on that’s going to be released later on this year and obviously we’ll talk about the benefits to MSPs as well. I feel like we’re in the lab, we’re in the R and D lab for this one, which is brilliant. So you and I should be wearing white coats right now, we should have clipboards and stuff.

So before we talk about you and the story and how you did it, give us a 30 second overview of what you’ve built and what someone can do on it. And I appreciate that you’re in the midst of you rebuilding it and building version two, but what’s the 30 second pitch for it?

MSPX is the internet’s first marketplace for the buying and selling of managed services contracts.

It gives MSPs and technology brokers the ability to buy and sell managed services contracts or entire books of business. That’s a platform that we’ve tried to unify through an otherwise very fragmented process. So we’re trying to pull that together into a unified platform.

I love it. And what I particularly love is that like all good products or good ideas, it wasn’t just something you sat in a bar one day brainstorming ideas, it came out of a problem that you and your family came across. So tell us the story.

Well, doesn’t the saying go that necessity is the mother of all invention, and that truly is exactly how this idea was sparked in our head. So my business partner and son is also in technology. While I’ve been working in the technology industry for now 28 years, he came out of college in 2018. So he was several years into his local MSP when they had promoted him to a managed services director. And one of his first tasks was to essentially apply the pumpkin plan and prune contracts that are overworked and underperforming from a financial perspective.

He identified six or seven or so contracts that needed to be cut loose. He just could not find a way to do that cleanly where he didn’t want to leave the customer in the lurch, possibly cause bad word of mouth in the area, which we know for any MSP our word of mouth is our lifeblood so we don’t want to risk any bad feelings. And then of course, there’s no way to really monetise that contract before you let it go. I have met very few MSPs that have actually successfully put a process of their own in place that allows them to not only successfully transition or successfully offload their customer, but then to give them other options in the area.

So with that aside, we couldn’t find anything, there was no unifying internet marketplace that would allow him to be able to list these contracts for sale to be picked up by another MSP, either in our own backyard or nationally if it’s a contract that could be serviced remotely. And so he came to me and said, Hey dad, I’ve been thinking about this. What do you think? And I did my own research and I was 12 pages deep in the Google search results and saw nothing and I’m like, I think we have something here, so let’s go ahead and start developing it. So we spent six months developing it in the summer of 2023. We went live with it in January ‘24. And so what you’ll see now at www.MSPX.store is our minimally viable product and proof of concept.

I love it. And most people would have an idea like that, do some research and say, oh, this is a good idea, someone should do that. And there are very few people, and a lot of us think we’re entrepreneurial, but we’re really not because I probably have two, three good ideas a week, but I choose not to act on those ideas because I know that there’s a world of pain. I know that there’s a thousand hour investment that goes into it.

And not only that, Paul, but also if you’re anything like me in terms of ideas, I’ll come up with a couple of ideas myself and I’ll go to the web and do a search, or I’ll open my iPhone and go to the app store and lo and behold, it’s already there. So most of the ideas that I come up with are nothing new. So that’s what was so intriguing about this is that it actually really truly was something new.

And that’s what I most love about this. So let’s explore use cases for this. So when you and I were first discussing this on LinkedIn my first thought was, Who would actually do that? And then the very next day I had a conversation with an MSP who said, I’ve got this client, they’re an old break/fix client that we got onto a contract but it’s bottom dollar and they’re high hassle, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I thought there’s one use case of the client that you’re going to fire, have they got some kind of value? So I’m sure you’ve thought this through in great detail. So give us some ideas of the different use cases that you’d use MSPX for.

So let’s say you’re an MSP and now you’re three, four, five years into your business, as we all know because I have my own MSP that we just started back in June ‘24, initially you’ll take on two, three, four, five, seven seat contracts because you need to start bringing in that MRR for your business, you got to pay those expenses. Well, maybe three or four years down the road now maybe your minimum seat count is 15 or 20, but you’ve still got those initial four or five customers that are small seats and haven’t grown to hit that number yet and maybe aren’t projected to, maybe that’s just how their business is structured and they’re going to stay small.

So with that being the case, that’s a great example of where someone might go back and analyse their book of business four or five years down the road and say, These don’t make sense for us anymore. It doesn’t follow our new direction, our business model, our minimum standards. List it on the marketplace, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure to put it very layman’s term. And there are going to be solopreneurs all over the country that are one man sprint van kind of show, and they would love to take on those two and three and five seat customers. That makes sense for them. So that’s one use case.

Whole books of business, there’s several MSPs that are basically working a lifestyle business where it might be just them or them and one other person, and they’ve got 15 or so contracts. They’ve had them now for 15 or 20 years and they’re ready to exit the business. And then they realise that maybe their business isn’t actually worth as much as they thought it was. And I’ll tell you, I heard a staggering statistic the other day is that for every three businesses, MSPs that just shut their doors, there’s only one that actually gets acquired through an M and A process. So we have a three to one ratio of businesses just closing their doors versus actually getting that book of business bought. So now instead of just shutting the door and walking away, now you have the marketplace to go and either unload those contracts individually or sell that as an entire book of business.

And the same can be true for M and A brokers who might be brokering a sale and they’re representing a seller. They hired a buyer, the buyer says, we love the company, they’ve got a hundred contracts, but we only want 70 of them because these 30 are VoIP contracts, we don’t want to touch VoIP. We don’t want to be in that business. And so the seller would either have to lose that revenue or tell the broker to move on and find another potential buyer. Well, in this instance, brokers are really liking it because now they can list those unwanted contracts, they can divest them on the marketplace, let that deal go through, and then when those contracts sell, then that broker can cut a check to the seller and everyone walks away clean. So there are a lot of use cases for this and probably some I’m not even thinking of, but we’ll get there.

Yeah, I’m sure you will. I’m sure people will start to use it in ways that make you think, Oh, that’s a new thing, that’s a great idea. Let’s compare this to eBay, and I appreciate that eBay is a wholly different platform, but when I first got onto eBay in 2001, and I know that because that’s in my username on eBay, which I’m still using now in 2025, which is hilarious. And back in 2001, eBay was very basic, really. It was just a place where buyers and sellers met. And obviously fast forward 24 years, it’s 2025, eBay has a million competitors, a million other places you can sell stuff and buy stuff. And so eBay these days has a whole load of tools it talks you through. It just makes it easy, doesn’t it? Makes it, you want to sell something, it’s actually really easy because it does a lot of the work for you. So where is MSPX positioned? Is it simply a case of we’re just a marketplace where people can go, or are you advising people on pricing, are you advising them on contracts on how to make it legally binding on how not to get ripped off, all of that stuff?

Yes, excellent question. I will say our current minimally viable product does not have any of that, but version 2.0 that will be launched later this summer, actually it does have those things. We’ve taken those things into consideration. We want to instill buyer confidence, we want to instill seller confidence. We want to make the whole process as smooth as possible. So with that, we do have some AI that’s going to be driving some of these contract valuations and contract best matches versus the MSP profiles that have signed up but are in the marketplace. We’ll have access to all that data so we can leverage AI to be able to not only value the contract, but do a matchmaking process of sorts. Now, that’s not to say you can’t do your own matchmaking, you certainly can, but there will be suggestions in there for that to kind of walk you through that process. So yes, that is certainly coming in version 2.

I love it. And just finally, Matt, just give us a brief preview into other stuff that you’re working on in version two. I’m guessing you’ve taken a thousand ideas and now you’ve just got a roadmap them into what you can actually do.

We’re trying to bake them all into version 2 for sure. As I said, we’re going to have some AI driven valuation and matchmaking in terms of contracts versus the MSPs out there that would probably be best suited for that. We’re going to be bringing in a rating system. Now, it’s not going to be an open dialogue box where you can just type away, but it is going to be five very pointed questions with a five star rating, and we will send that to both the buyer and seller after the transaction. That way, although we will be doing vetting when an MSP signs up to enter the platform, we also want those MSPs to be able to start building their own reputation within the community itself. And so that’s why we really want MSPs to put their best foot forward in terms of selling and buying and being as respectful and transparent to one another as possible. So we’ll have that rating system coming.

There are a few other things that I don’t want to mention right now because I don’t know that they’re going to make it into the second revision. But in terms of what we’re looking at as far as access to the marketplace, right now it’s a subscription base solely where it’s $1,500 a year to hit the marketplace. With that, it puts really all the risk on the MSP because what if they sign up, pay that fee and get in and there aren’t any contracts or there aren’t any contracts that are likable for them. So that puts the risk on the MSP. We wanted to take that risk and shift it, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to have a very minimal subscription fee, and we’re going to be taking a percentage of the transaction. That way that puts all of the risk largely on us to make sure that the marketplace is full of available contracts. So essentially in version 2.0, we’re going to have a restructured fee access to the marketplace.

I love it. Matt, congratulations. What’s your son’s name, by the way?

My son’s name is Gage.

Well done Matt and Gage, you’ve had an idea, you’ve seen it through and now you’re actually iterating it, which is just brilliant. So I want to get you back on the podcast, let’s say the middle of next year, backend of 2026. Let’s hear about what you’re doing with version three, which I’m sure you can’t even contemplate thinking about today, but that’s just brilliant. So remind us again what it’s called, what’s the URL, and for any MSPs who’ve got questions, because there’s bound to be people who listen to this or watch this on YouTube and just want to know more, how can they get in touch with you?

Yeah, so the URL is www.mspx.store. Again, the name of the company is the Managed Services Public Exchange or MSPX for short. And what you’ll see now again, is the minimally viable product. We’re probably going to be closing that door here soon, the marketplace soon, and just putting up a blurb on the landing page to let you know to be expecting 2.0. We just don’t want any more MSPs to be logging into the original MVP because there’s a much better experience coming. If you need to get hold of me, if you have any questions in terms of buying and selling of contracts and you want to learn more about the marketplace, I can be reached at [email protected]

Steve from an MSP based in Massachusetts has a common question about social media. He asked: How often should I post on LinkedIn?

Posting regularly on social media is normal, desirable, and encouraged by the algorithms. Social media, including LinkedIn is so disposable that you need to be in front of people all the time.

A good rule of thumb is to post one thing every 24 hours. But what should you post every day? Well, when it comes to LinkedIn, the general rule of thumb for content is: your own highly personalised “real” content is better than… canned content (like you get from my MSP Marketing Edge service), is better than… nothing.

So if you can do your own content, do that. If you haven’t got that every day, then get a service in like the MSP Marketing Edge. And the alternative is to do nothing and not be as active on LinkedIn. But you want to try and post a piece of content every 24 hours.

Welcome to Episode 287 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

So you’re an MSP trying to find new clients and also increase revenue from your existing clients. Well tell me, have you heard about the hot new opportunity – Windows 10? Yeah, you heard that, right? But how could talking about an old, soon to be obsolete operating system be good for your MSP? Is this a credible way to win new clients or upsell your existing clients? Let’s find out about the Windows 10 end of life marketing opportunity.

Five months. That’s what we’ve got until Windows 10 reaches its end of life and it’s been with us a decade you know, it first launched in 2015. Will you be sad to see it go or are you already a big fan of Windows 11? Anyway, that’s kind of irrelevant to this conversation, and I know that loads of MSPs still miss XP. I’m kind of joking there, although do you?

But what we’re talking about here is using Windows 10 as a marketing opportunity, not only to win new clients but also to upsell your existing clients. You see anytime there’s a big enforced change in the marketplace, like a major operating system reaching its end of life, that creates an opportunity for you. And one of the key things in marketing is always putting yourself in the shoes of the person that you are trying to reach and influence.

For an ordinary business owner or manager, Windows 10 reaching its end of life is going to be a bit of a shock to them in October.

Not for you and me, they announced the 2025 end of life date four years ago can you believe. But what’s big in our world and surrounds us every day does not surround ordinary business owners and managers. And you and I both know that there will be many, many people running their businesses on Windows 10 with no idea that this is coming. And maybe their MSP or their break/fix outfit has told them, but they weren’t listening or they’ve ignored it and ignored it and ignored it, and then suddenly it’s October 2025 and it’s crept up on them.

So what’s the best way to tackle this for prospects and for existing clients? Well, let’s look at those separately. And the easiest way to start is with the prospects. Now, I’m guessing you as an MSP have a preferred route forward at this point, in terms of what to do after Windows 10. So many MSPs will want their clients to upgrade to Windows 11. I do know a few MSPs that are still trying to hang on to Windows 10, and let’s not get into a technical conversation about that because that’s not really what this podcast is for. But I guess for your existing clients who are still on Windows 10, their routes forward are either upgrading to Windows 11 or of course paying for the extended security updates.

I truly believe that as their MSP it’s down to you to educate them about their choice and the pros and cons of each one. Then give them a recommendation based on your relationship with them and what you think is going to be best for them. Now, this will be a great time to set up meetings with your existing clients to actually have that conversation. And there’s no point leaving it till September as suddenly everything becomes a rush and an emergency if they want to get off Windows 10 before it reaches end of life.

At this time of year with a roundabout five months to go, I would book yourself either Zooms or real life meetings with your existing clients to review how many devices they’ve got that are still running Windows 10. And obviously you’re going to know that in advance if you’re all over your asset management, but I would have that conversation with them now. And yes, that could generate some nice project work for you, but the bigger picture is that you are helping your client to stay ahead of the curve.

If they insist on staying with Windows 10 and paying for the extended security updates, as frustrating as that might be for you, that’s up to them. And I’m sure you have a very clear opinion about how that’s going to affect your relationship and the level of support that you’re able to offer to them in the next couple of years. But the key thing with any conversation like this that you are having with existing clients is about protecting the long-term relationship, and making sure that your client is happy and well protected so that they will still be with you in 10 years time. That’s the most important thing.

Let’s talk about using this change to win new clients. I believe it’s a similar opportunity in terms of educating people about the pros and cons. Although because you don’t have a working relationship yet with new clients, with people who are prospects today, you would go about it differently. So let me tell you what we’ve done in our MSP Marketing Edge service because that might give you some ideas.

We’ve put together a whole bunch of materials which we actually delivered to our members just a few days ago. And those materials are designed to help them catch the attention of leads and prospects and educate them about what’s happening and what the implications are of the end of life of Windows 10. So we put together a full educational guide. There’s a video, there’s a whole email sequence, there’s some social media content, there’s a postcard which can be sent out in the mail and a full direct mail and a multi-step follow-up sequence. That seems like a lot when you put it all together in one box like that, but my goal when putting this together with my team was to give our members the flexibility of lots and lots of different materials that they can choose from.

The important thing now is that they work their audiences that they’ve built up and get these materials in front of them, and that’s their audiences of leads and prospects as well as their existing clients. So they should be putting stuff about Windows 10 onto LinkedIn, sending out messages on LinkedIn, sending out emails, and especially shipping stuff in the mail to prospects whose addresses they have. And let’s be honest, it’s super easy to find any prospects address these days. Because if you remember the context that the average business owner or manager is not aware of this, it’s not on their radar, and therefore they’re not going to take action, this is a potentially massive opportunity for you.

This change is coming whether they like it or not. So really as the educator, as the expert, the local tech authority, you should jump on this and educate as many local business owners and managers as you can. And sure a ton of them are still going to leave their head in the sand and they’re not going to listen to you or any other MSP talking about this. But for some who suddenly notice that the technology that they run their entire business on is going to be obsolete from October, that will trigger some of them to want to do something about it. And they’re very likely to want to do that with the person that’s educated them, which should be you.

Tell me, are you in the 1% club. The 1% of MSPs who actually enjoy calling leads and prospects on the phone trying to find new business? Are you, no? Alright, well therefore I take it you’re in the 99% of MSPs that really struggle with this because for many it’s about the hell of getting past the gatekeeper. That person who seems to take enormous pleasure in stopping you getting through to the person you really want to speak to.

But yes, it is possible to fix this to get through, past the gatekeeper most of the time. And it’s all thanks to cybersecurity.

Let’s find out how one cybersecurity question can get you past the gatekeeper and start a much more productive conversation.

This is short and super simple. When you phone people and you’re trying to get past the gatekeeper to speak to the decision maker, do not say the classic old line, Who’s responsible for your IT? Don’t say that. They have heard that a hundred or a thousand times before. And when they’ve heard something many times before, it’s very easy for them to fob you off, say that person’s not in, lie and fib and ultimately end the call. So instead say this, Who’s responsible for your cybersecurity?

I can pretty much guarantee they won’t have heard that one before. And when they haven’t heard something, it’s going to make them pause and then start to think. And I reckon that you’ll stand a better chance of getting through to someone with that question. So here it is again. Write this one down, use this one whenever anybody in your MSP is calling any lead or prospect. Who’s responsible for your cybersecurity?

Do try that one out, won’t you? And let me know how you get on. Oh, and if you are in that 1% club and you already phone leads and you love doing that, will you also let me know? What do you say to get past the gatekeeper?

Featured guest: Taylor Tabusa has spent over a decade in the email space, focusing on email delivery and authentication. And while that’s the case his path to cybersecurity and MSPs was not a straight line. Originally a winemaker, he spent years in Napa and Australia before pivoting into tech. After helping build and sell a recruiting software company that relied on email, he saw firsthand how critical DMARC is for ensuring messages reach the inbox and how difficult it was to enforce.

Recognising that DMARC was still manual and complex, Taylor co-founded Palisade to simplify deployment and make email security effortless at scale. Today, Palisade helps companies streamline DMARC management, reduce overhead, and protect their clients’ domains.

What are your views on DMARC? It’s just something that has to be done, right? A little email deliverability item to check off the list for your clients, but my guest today believes it can be so much more. In fact, he believes that DMARC is not just a pain for you. It can actually generate new leads and new revenue.

Hi, this is Taylor Tabusa at Palisade, one of the co-founders. We’re focused on DMARC and outbound email security.

And the exciting thing is Taylor, and thank you by the way for joining me on the podcast, the exciting thing is we’re going to talk today about how you could use DMARC for lead generation. And I wouldn’t have thought there’s a single MSP in the world who’s had that thought of, Hmm, DMARC something we’ve got to do, I wonder if we can use it to generate leads, but I know you have some really interesting ideas on that, which we’ll come to in the next couple of minutes or so. First of all, just tell us a little bit about you. So you are now one of the founders of Palisade, and we are obviously going to talk about what your business does and how it helps MSPs with DMARC, but how have you got to this position of founding your own business?

Man, long, long story, but I’ll try to shrink it down for you. But I’ve been in emails for the past 12 years. Previously, me and one of the co-founders here who’s now the CEO, we had a recruiting software. So we would get internships for students primarily in the US and Canada and the UK, and we would send them to Singapore, Beijing, Manila, so different locations around the world. We had tons of emails going out. I think at the highest we would be sending out about two and a half million a month of email marketing emails. And then for outbound emails, which was my job to get internships for students, we’d be sending about 10 to 20,000. So smaller, but still a lot of emails going out and DMARC and DNS and email deliverability and health was a huge part of our life. We sold that company in 2022 and then started hopping back into emails. We saw Google and Yahoo’s updates and requirement changes, and that kind of gave us a little impetus to keep the ball rolling.

Sure. So I guess you were starting this current company from the knowledge of you’ve been there sending out millions of emails and just contributing to the world’s email traffic, but I guess your entire business would live or die or make money or not make money based on your ability to actually get the emails in front of the right people. So essentially you’ve learned it the hard way, which is really cool. So what was the driving factor in starting this? Was it a case of providing a tool set or was it a case of actually we’ve got some knowledge here, how can we monetise that knowledge and help people along the way?

Yeah, that’s a great question. We created our company almost as a mini MSP, but just for DMARC, so like a DMARC service provider. And we were doing DMARC for SMEs, SaaS, financial companies, law firms, things like that, and really started driving in that direction and then found that a lot of the softwares we were using didn’t have X, Y, Z or had X, Y, Z, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And we either niched down for enterprise niched up from SMB and built our software to focus everything into a nice lean package so that we could really take care of our customers quickly, easily, and efficiently. So that’s how we got into building the software. And then we were introduced to the MSP market from a large MSP here, and just kind of had the introduction to the whole channel from there.

Okay. Well, we’ll talk a little bit later in the interview about what your software does and how it helps MSPs, but let’s talk about MSP’s attitudes towards DMARC. So you talk to a lot of MSPs, obviously you are having that very narrow conversation about email deliverability. Do MSPs see it as an opportunity to help their clients? Do they see it as a duty? Do they see it as a pain, something that they have to do? It’s not something necessarily they want to do?

Yes, to all three. So some MSPs seem to bundle it in automatically when they onboard a customer or a client. Some, it’s something they’ve just set bare minimum and haven’t increased security and deliverability from there with stronger DMARC policies. It depends on a lot of how the MSP works, but a large thing we have heard is, yeah, it’s a pain to do one-to-one. So that’s kind of why we exist.

Yeah, absolutely. And right at the beginning of this interview I talked about that you had some ideas on using DMARC as a lead generation tool. Now we know that ordinary business owners and managers aren’t sitting there thinking, Oh, if only someone could help with my DMARC, because they don’t really know what that is, but how do you use something like this, which is one of those background but important things. How do you actually use this to drive new business into your MSP?

Yeah, so that’s a great point. The end user SMB company maybe has heard of DMARC, but they don’t know. What really matters to them is are my emails getting delivered? And that’s something that DMARC helps fix and prove and increase. So that’s how end users view it. How an MSP can view it is super cool too because they can solve that problem. We’ve all had kind of an issue where it’s like, oh my goodness, you have to use a different email address, you have to pick up a phone and be like, Hey, can you check your quarantine, can you check your spam folder for this email. And an MSP can hop in, fix that problem, fix the deliverability problems, and that’s a great way to start the relationship and build and start working with end companies.

Yeah. So let’s say you were working with an MSP and let’s say they hung on every word that you said, and you could wave a magic wand and just create the ultimate package, you could price it for them, you could create an offering. What would you recommend that they put together? How would they position it to business owners? What would the business owner come in and want? And I think you’ve kind of half answered the question when you said that no one wants DMARC, but they want their emails to be delivered.

Yeah, that’s a great question too. It’s really easy to package. So we have, and there’s a bunch of scanners, it’s public information, DNS settings for SPF, DMARC, DKIM, everything attributing to this email deliverability stuff. So you can scan the domain, for us we have a domain scanner that you can send directly to your customers, and that’s a great way to open a conversation, Hey, we notice that there are deficiencies, there’s a lot of red lights, there’s a lot of risk associated with your domain when it’s regards to emails. We can come in, we can help fix that, we can improve your email deliverability and improve your security at the same time.

So would you do that for new clients or would you say to MSPs, do this for your existing clients as part of that journey?

Great question. It depends on how the MSP is monetising and what they’ve done so far. But that risk analysis to use it as a lead gen tool first would be new clients. You could pop a domain in, generate report, send it to your current list of your newsletters, the people you met at your Chamber of Commerce, people we’ve met at different networking gatherings to say, Hey, there’s issues, we can fix it.

When it comes to current clients, there’s another great way too. You can generate reports, send it to them. The order of operations maybe are the same, but how you communicate it might be a little different. We noticed large scale vulnerabilities, these are the repercussions, these are the potential downsides when it comes to delivering emails, when it comes to potential liability. And this is if you’re a break fix shop, work order to fix it. If it’s a subscription and you’re doing it kind of as monthly, can just factor that in as well.

Yeah, that makes sense. And final question for you, Taylor. What would you say to an MSP listening to this or perhaps watching it on YouTube? Who says, Oh, come on, email deliverability, that’s so 2018, no one’s going to be interested in that. They just want us focus on cybersecurity. Is this still a valid thing that you can do in 2025 and a valid marketing and sales tool?

100%. Last we checked at the end of last year, the top 40 million domains, 6.5 had DMARC locked down. So that’s 94% that don’t. So you can imagine there’s a lot of meat on the bone there. There’s a lot of companies that are in need of DMARC enforcement, DMARC monitoring and email deliverability help. The recent changes last year with Google and Yahoo are driving this forward. There’s a lot of regulatory and compliance, especially when it comes to government contracts where DMARC and spoofing protection is vital to just get the contract or keep your contracts. So for end companies, they need DMARC right now, no DMARC means no delivery. So there’s a lot of work to be done.

Yeah, that’s insane. So 94% of the top 40 million domains, they don’t have DMARC. So I think that just shows how big that opportunity is. I guess the challenge is educating them because obviously they don’t know that they don’t have DMARC, otherwise they would’ve gone and fixed it by. Now. Let’s talk about your business. So tell us, obviously we heard how you got started with the business and where you came from. So what do you do to help MSPs right now?

So we create our software specifically for MSPs. And what that software is is an AI powered DMARC automation platform. So single pane of glass, you can have your 5, 10, 20, 50 clients there and manage DMARC all in one location. So typically if you have access to their DNS or their domain host, you got to log in one-to-one, copy and paste, do a little adjustment. What we do is take all that, let’s say mental load off of the technicians and put that into our platform. So you don’t need to continuously log into multiple managers. You can just copy and push updates directly through our app to really reduce the time to DMARC implementation and improve those margins.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Nice simple offering as well. It’s very clear to understand how that works. So final question for you then, Taylor is just tell us where can MSPs go and have a look at that software and obviously how can they get in touch with you?

Sure, so Palisade.email is our domain. We love emails. We’ve been in it for years, so we thought we’d just snag that. You can reach me on LinkedIn as well, Taylor Tabusa, there’s only one of me. Reach out, say hey, happy to just have a conversation and chat about emails, cybersecurity, all the good stuff.

Kenny is from an MSP in Chicago, and he wants to do more with email that really grabs the attention of the recipient by sending them personal videos. So his question is: Which software should I use to send personalised videos to prospects?

So personalised videos are great for just cutting through and encouraging engagement with your communications. And there are several software packages available that make it really easy to record videos unbelievably quickly. They’ll also create an animated GIF for you to put in the email when you send that grabs people’s attention. And these platforms also let you track when they’ve opened them and actually how many times they’ve opened them and watched them.

Personally I use Vidyard, which is great. I’ve got other bespoke platforms such as BombBomb and Bonjoro, and I have noticed in the last couple of years that some of the big sort of video hosting platforms, so things like Vimeo and I think Loom as well, they are also adding in the same functionality. So with any software, it’s personal preference really. But let me give you three times when it would be great for you to send a personalised video.

The first is to prospects. So imagine you’re going to call someone in a couple of days to book a sales meeting. You could actually send them a personalised video just a few days before to tell them that you’re going to be calling and what you’re going to be calling about. This is actually really smart marketing to preempt a call like this, as it makes it much more likely they’re going to answer your call and engage with you.

Another example, and let’s pick up something that we talked about earlier in the podcast, you could actually send a personalised video to an existing client about let’s say their Windows 10 options. You could tell them that you’re going to be sending an email or you want to book a meeting with them, and there are two routes forward that you’d like to discuss staying on Windows 10 and paying for security updates or migrating over to Windows 11. So you are almost getting the idea in their head before you have the conversation with them. Really smart.

And then one final idea, and this is if you have a bigger team, and particularly if they are remote, why not get into the habit of sending personalised videos to members of your team? And of course you can do the screen share style videos when you’re giving them instructions about stuff. But also, wouldn’t it be cool about just sending them a video to say thank you for a job well done, and just making them feel special and the fact that you’ve taken a little bit of your time out of your day to record a video and send it to them. That can mean a lot to some people, especially when they are remote. And yes, I know there are times when a quick phone call to say well done is good, but there are also times when recording a video, something more permanent to say you are amazing, is a great idea.

And I always find that recording personalised videos in this way becomes a way of life. And maybe because I use it a lot with our MSP Marketing Edge members and our prospects, I do find myself recording little personalised videos to my team and getting videos back from my team all the time. In fact, if they ask me a question, I sometimes find it’s easier to reply with a personalised video. It’s a very, very effective way to communicate. And also, if you’re going to film a video, you have to think through in advance, what is it I’m going to communicate back so they get the edited answer rather than just the answer off the top of your head.

Welcome to Episode 286 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

I’ll admit this could be a contradiction. You need to market your MSP so you can find new clients, and no doubt you want to hear about specific tactics that are going to work for you. Now, normally my advice is to ignore shiny new things because most of the time they’re just unproven ideas and a complete waste of time. But this really is different. Have you heard about the tactic that could be huge for early adopters? Are you ready to find out about GEO, the evolution of SEO? Find out about the huge potential for MSPs, what the main advantage is and why you can’t afford to ignore this day one alert.

More and more MSPs are starting to wake up to the fact that ordinary people don’t just use Google for search anymore. There are no hard stats about how many searches are being done using ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms. There are certainly lots of predictions that traditional search traffic will be down by 25% by the end of next year, but even without hard figures, there are times where a generative AI search does produce more useful results than a traditional Google search.

Google is still great for looking up something quick, but generative AI is great for doing research into something complicated that you don’t really understand.

And if we look at managed services from the point of view of ordinary decision makers, well that’s something complicated that they don’t really understand. Do we think it’s possible that business owners and managers are already using generative AI to research which MSPs they should switch to in their marketplace?

If they’re not doing that already, then they’re certainly going to do it in the very near future. And this is where you have an opportunity to get into something right at the beginning. You see, just as the rise of search engines saw the birth of SEO, search engine optimisation, so the rise of generative AI has seen the birth of GEO, generative engine optimisation. It’s designed to help your website appear in the research results output by generative AI.

Now, I’ve been reading a ton about this in the last few weeks, and there are three simple things that you can do to your website today, which will help to give the generative AI platforms answers. And if you can give them answers about your MSP, they’re much more likely to recommend you to people asking them which MSP should they look at.

The first is to make your website crystal clear about what you do, how you help, and what makes you different. But crucially, this must be written in plain English. So here’s an example: We help businesses in your city save money and be more efficient with technology. That line or your version of it, well it needs to go on your website. And the good news is that in this instance, what’s good for generative AI is good for humans as well. The more easily they can understand what you do and who you do it for, the more likely they are to start a conversation with you.

The second simple thing you can do then is kind of similar to SEO, and that’s to get your MSP business mentioned across as many trustworthy websites as possible. In SEO, you are trying to get links back to your website In GEO, you just want references to your business and obviously getting a reference and a link in one package will be fantastic. The generative AI platforms are looking for evidence that yours is a business that should be spoken to. So if you are being talked about by other people, that gives them really high levels of confidence that you are trustworthy.

And then the final thing you can do is ask for detailed positive reviews everywhere you can, but especially on YouTube. AI tools are looking everywhere for reviews and again, it’s part of them cross-referencing to see which of the best MSPs to speak to. For a long time now, YouTube has been a place where people go to find wisdom and you can help demonstrate this wisdom by having your clients talking about you on camera, on YouTube. And of course once it’s on YouTube, then again it’s helping to persuade the humans. You can embed it into your website, you can turn it into written case studies, you can do all sorts of things with it.

So there are three simple things you can do to get started with your GEO. And if you go off and do your own research, you will discover lots more things out there you could do. But let me just caveat that up, this is very much day one, well, in fact it’s hour one of day one for GEO. So a lot of those clever little tricks that you’ll see reported across the internet that might not be good long-term strategies. The three things I’ve just spoken about there, they are three good solid basics to help generative AI platforms to understand what you do, who you do it for, and why you can be trusted. And that’s why I think you should implement these three things as quickly as you can.

Alright, there’s every chance I’m going to put my foot in it.

There you are happily and hungrily trying to run and grow your MSP and there’s nothing more annoying than someone suddenly reminding you where you are in the calendar and the fact that time’s passing faster than Superman late for work.

So yeah, it’s nearly the middle of the year already and yes, it was Christmas just yesterday, but don’t get stressed. Are you ready for something that’s going to speed up your MSP’s growth?

Let’s talk MSP marketing in the month of May.

3 priorities to help you wrestle back control of your time, change your way of thinking, and grow faster for the rest of this year.

Number one, stop selling to people and start building a relationship with them instead. Everyone hates being sold to and yet we love to buy. Most buying decisions are made by the heart and not the brain. And yes, that especially means B2B decisions such as which IT support company to use. The worst way you can sell your business is to be kind of like a photocopier salesperson, and you know what I mean by that, right? No one trusts photocopier salespeople, even if they exist these days, but it’s why our hearts sink when we meet them. Instead, you should aim to become a trusted advisor.

Most people who buy managed services don’t know what they don’t know. And as they realise this and become conscious incompetents, they seek out people to educate them, guide them, and help them. If your business can provide that education, guidance and help, you stand an exceptionally good chance of picking up their business at the point that they are ready to buy.

The way to do this is through a well thought through educational lead generation system. You find out who’s in the market for buying IT support or consultancy. You get them to tell you who they are and give you their permission to market to them. And then you teach them how to buy from you. You are there in front of them at exactly the moment that they are ready to buy. And for some people this is days after they meet you, for others the most, this is years and of course there’s everything in between.

Number two, start using 80/20 thinking about prospects and clients. Clients are not made equally. You’ve probably noticed that most of your hassle and stress comes from a very small number of your clients, and it’s the same with profit, right? You get the most profit from the smallest number of clients. This is Pareto’s principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. And the rule declares that input and output are not equal. So if that’s the case, why treat all of your clients the same way? Have you got a nightmare client who your staff hate? Just fire them. It’s the best staff retention action that you can take, and I’m serious. Toxic clients kill staff and they kill profits and it’s highly cathartic to ask them to find a new supplier. Plus, trust me on this, a new client will soon turn up to replace them. In fact, I’m sure you’ve got a great client who generates loads of profit. Well, don’t ignore them just because all of your time is taken up with the worst client. Go and super serve your best client instead. Give them some love, watch them buy more and watch their profitability go up.

And then finally number three, and it’s kind of along the same themes, which is to sell more to your existing clients. One of the best retention tools you have is to increase the amount of stuff that people buy from you. And your staff may consider that the less people have to buy, the happier they’ll be but that’s slightly twisted thinking. We buy things in two ways, stuff that we need with our brains, stuff that we want with our hearts. And the challenge is to get your clients focused less on what they need and more on what they want. People who buy more of what they want are typically happier, better retained clients. So it needs to become habitual within your business to tell people everything that you can do for them in a way that’s not overwhelming. Tell them everything that could be done. Let them decide what it is they want to buy.

Featured guest: Melissa Hockenberry, owner of First Things First Training and Consulting, is passionate about improving customer and revenue retention. Her 30-year professional journey includes adventures in Fortune 500 and non-profit, as well as over 18 years with Autotask/Datto. Melissa loves engaging with MSPs to help them improve their customer experience and position them for sustainable growth. 

Guilty secret time. A lot of MSPs will admit to holding onto long-term clients, but not by design. It just kind of happens that way. If this is you, do you not feel this guilty secret is also a dangerous one? In which case you need to hear it from my special guest today. New clients are great, but if the majority of your earning potential comes from keeping and upselling your current clients, you’ve got to check this out. How do you remove the risk of losing your clients? How do you make it an easy system? And how will your MSP benefit? Let’s find out.

Hi, I’m Melissa Hockenberry, founder of First Things First training and consulting,

And it’s amazing to have you here on the podcast, Melissa, thank you so much for joining me. We are going to talk about one of the most important aspects of marketing an MSP that actually kind of gets forgotten, and that’s retention. I think most MSPs have insane retention built into their business, but I don’t think many of them realise that some of that retention is down to something called “inertia loyalty”, where it just feels too hard for the customer to leave this MSP to go over to that MSP. So while most MSPs do enjoy that retention, they perhaps don’t understand why they’ve got that retention and maybe don’t even have a system or a strategy to focus and actually bake retention into the product. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Let’s first of all look back at your career and what you’ve done because you’ve been in the channel for a very long time haven’t you?

I have, I want to say I started at 10, but that’s not true. So I’ve been in the channel since 2004. I started with Autotask, and was with Autotask that became Datto that became Kaseya, for 18 and a half years and started out on my own business in February ‘23.

Amazing. And what was it that made you, I mean, that’s a very long time to survive what was I guess a small, quite focused team right at the beginning, up to being one of the biggest vendors in the channel. Well, let’s talk about that journey before we talk about what made you leave. So what was that like staying through those amazing transformation years?

It was phenomenal. As a student of business, my undergraduate was in marketing and business, and I got my MBA in my early stages of Autotask. It was phenomenal to have that experience. I started as the first dedicated product support rep at Autotask and got the first promotion, was the first person to go remote. It was just a lot of fun in that there were nine of us when I started. I think there was a group of five that were hired on the same day. And just to watch it grow and see that and be in almost a case study as it happened, was kind of cool. What made it feasible? Honestly, when I look back on it, I’m sure there are people like, Why would you stay in one company for 18 years? Well, I had 10 different jobs. I was constantly being promoted to the new thing or in charge of the new thing, but eight of those 10 times the job didn’t exist prior to me doing it.

So that made it the type of thing I loved doing, because you were basically just forging your own step forward. And I was given a lot of leeway to, go interpret this and do this how you think it should be done. And that made it very easy. And what I liked actually is most people can’t say they like mergers and acquisitions, but it was cool for me when we would acquire a company. One of them happened to be in Denmark and I had studied there for four months. So it was fun to know the culture of that company. It was also interesting when we were merged or acquired because I was lucky enough to be in a position where I was often dumped over enemy lines. I was often one of the first people to go work with the other group, and they were always amazing people.

And so even though I was there 18 and a half years, and man, that’s a long time. It never felt like that. It felt very new all along. And when Datto and Autotask merged, that was a really cool point because I think at that point I’d been there, I guess it was about 13 years or so and probably at the point where I was getting sort of like, I should try something different. And the cultures were very different so it really did feel like I started working for a new company and within six months I didn’t work with any of the peers I had worked with before. I was totally submerged in a Datto or a new employee group. So it was really fun. It was a lot of fun.

What an amazing story. And I can completely see how, yeah, it’s not really 18 years with the same business at all. You did eight different things, eight totally different things there. What was it that made you finally decide to leave a couple of years ago and go and do your own thing?

Some people would call it a midlife crisis. I was in my late forties and sort of turned to my daughter on my birthday and said, I’m not going to be doing this same thing and not for the same company a year from now. And honestly, I’m a very faith-based person. So in prayer, I really felt like it was time for me to jump out and start to use what I had learned in a much bigger arena, be able to have impact of everything I had learned over the years and get it to more people because you’ve sort of sequestered in a company. I will say I was never a person that was like, I want to be an entrepreneur. Never. I love a W2. I love a steady paycheck, I love all those things that come with it, but I felt very much like it was time to go do that. And I’ll say, I said one last prayer on Sunday, April 10th, and if you look back in the logs of Sunday, April 10th, 2022 on Monday, April 11th, Kaseya purchased Datto. And so people say that it was that kind of that final sign for me that, okay, it’s time to go. And the people I worked with at Kaseya were wonderful people as well, and I had a great team that I was pulled into there as well. But it was definitely time to go and it was perfect. Perfect timing for me.

It was you, you did this with your prayer, you made this happen. All this consolidation. Just out of interest, how old was your daughter at the point you decided to leave Kaseya?

That’s a great question, in that something I tend to leave out was that when my daughter was four Autotask had actually eliminated my position. I was doing proactive work. I was doing retention work in all sincerity, and they’re like, we really need to do this other reactive work. And so I stayed in, because I live in the remote area of Pennsylvania and it’s hard finding another job. But my daughter at the time, at four, when I wasn’t sure if I was going to stay or go, she said, Mom, you love your customers too much. You can’t go. Well, fast forward a decade later, and I have a 14-year-old who is coming into an expensive time in her life and I decide to cut our income in half. But I think I will see that she’ll remember budgets more, she also will remember that her mom who was over 50 when I did this, took on a brand new life adventure at 50. And I think, I hope that speaks more volumes than she actually had to pay for her white leather Converse that I said were too expensive.

But yeah, she’s been great, I will sometimes have trouble thinking through an idea and I’ll just go to her and she is a great sounding board, so I’m very thankful exactly how it happened. I think it was perfect timing.

Yeah, that’s amazing. It’s amazing story. And I have a 14-year-old as well. I appreciate your daughter’s a few years on now, but the greatest thing about having a teenager is when you’ve got a business problem, of course, teenagers are always right. So any question you just ask them and they give you the perfect answer, which is fantastic. So thank you teenagers.

And if you become a little too ego driven, they will cut you down in less than 15 words.

Oh yes, yes, absolutely. I drive her to school in the mornings and it’s like a 20 minute journey and she can go through all the range of emotions and I can be the best human being at the start of the 20 minutes and the worst at the end. Anyway. Let’s not talk about our children. Let’s talk about retention. So the thing I said right at the beginning, which is maybe a slightly provocative thing, is that MSPs have great retention and assume that it’s because they offer a great service, yet I believe not all, but many of them have great retention because their customers are staying through inertia loyalty. It feels easier to stay than to move to another MSP. In fact, that inertia loyalty is a double-edged sword. It keeps your clients with you for years and years, but it’s what makes it harder for you to win new clients and wrestle them away from other MSPs. So is this your experience as well that MSPs don’t really take retention seriously?

100%. And actually I have a video on that discussion right now because people think, I have never lost a customer. And I will say, That doesn’t mean you have a retention plan. You have to be intentional about this. And even if you’ve never lost a customer, but you don’t know why they stay, that’s a great indicator that you don’t have a retention plan because you don’t know why your customers are still with you, right? Oh, they just are. That’s wonderful. I hope you don’t take the same approach to your marriage, right? Oh, they just stay. It’s a great phrase. The loyalty and your 100% correct. And to me also, I don’t think MSPs, I love this group of humans, I could have gone out and worked with a lot of other people and really kept finding my way back to the space and was just a great group of people.

However, I think they don’t always have the customer viewpoint, they just have the technology. And they want to get done and they want to deploy it and do it quickly, and that doesn’t always give the greatest experience. And so they do have trouble, they bring a lot of people in the front door and then somebody told me the other day that a lot run out the back. That’s what you’ve got to understand. So I’ve always been hyper aware of the customer view. I like to call them goggles, a swim mom. So putting on the customer goggles, which are a little uncomfortable at first if you’ve ever swam, but it’s one of those things that you need it for clarity, and that’s what I’m hoping to help MSPs build before they make a change, understanding what impact that’s going to have, understanding why people do stay with them so that they don’t make a change that is detrimental to that loyalty.

So let’s talk about putting on those customer goggles, and I love that concept. If you are working with an MSP, well, let’s take the average MSP that listens to this podcast. So it’s typically business owner or manager. They’ve got, maybe 3, 4, 5 techs. They could be a one person band, they could have some techs, it could be bigger. But if we assume that they’re not doing anything proactively for retention, so it’s something they’ve intended to get round to in 2023 and ‘24 now in ‘25, and it’s now back on their radar again, where do you even start? What are some of the practical things that you should do? Should you look at what kind of customers you’ve got? Should you be doing analysis? Should you be talking to them? What’s the best way to get started?

I think the easiest is to get your house in order first. And there’s some things that people don’t think about. So first of all is job descriptions. It seems very strange for retention, but job descriptions will let you know who’s focusing on what. And I can’t tell you the number of MSPs probably sitting right down and going, oh yeah, I never finished that person’s job description. Now you’ve hired three people and they still don’t have a solid job description. But for the purpose of the fact that if you are a one to 3, 4, 5 person shop, you need that job description so that everywhere in that description, it talks about focusing on a positive experience for the customer so that when you have somebody who doesn’t do that, you have grounds now to say you’re not meeting the job description. So solid job descriptions are a part of retention because your people are going to help you retain.

They’re your first line of defence and retaining. If it’s just you, okay, where do I get started? You get started with a concerted effort to start listening to your clients. There’s a phrase that I love and everybody knows it will go in my obituary, What questions do you have? So you’re a one person show and you have just poured out everything to a client instead of, do you have any questions? What questions do you have? You are going to find clients who never asked a question are asking six questions after you say that, because you just open up the conversation and now you’re starting to learn more about them. So as a one person shop, I’d say, go deeper and understanding the clients that you do have, and when you have a chance, go to lunch and say to them, Hey, why are you still with us? What makes us work for you? Have you figured that out? Have you ever thought about that? Having that casual relationship conversation, but two phrases, What questions do you have? And, Tell me more. They’re very powerful phrase in learning and understanding. So if you’re a one person, I go there, if you’re more than one person, I’d start with your job descriptions and I’d start with your documentation of how you interact with your clients so you have consistency. So those are the tools towards retention. If you’re beyond that, then we talk about surveys, listening posts, those kind of things.

Okay, well, let’s come back on surveys and listening posts in a second. You just said something which as a fellow business owner struck fear straight into my heart, which was, Why are you still with us? Because, I’ve got 700 MSPs that I’m working with right now, and I would be terrified to ask them that because I think as a business owner, it’s not a business, it’s a personal thing, isn’t it? It’s a baby. It’s another child. I have two children really. I have my daughter Samm, and I have the MSP Marketing Edge. Those are my two children. And as much as I would be confident asking that question, there would be a deep fear. It’d be like asking a wife or a husband or a partner, why are you still with me? Maybe we’d be a bit more confident with that because it’s a one-on-one relationship. Do you find with the MSPs that you work with, that they are also terrified to ask that question? Whether it’s those words or whether it’s slightly different words? And if that is the case, how do you help them to have the confidence to directly ask and to find out why someone is sticking with them?

I think yes, there are some people where a lot of their clients are personal connections, which I think there’s a danger in that too, which if we have time we can get back to that, but they don’t have a problem with asking that. But for those that have a problem, I think the big thing is always being able to put the business in front of yourself. Yes, it is you, you and the business are one thing, but understanding that you can only improve if you’re asking for feedback or I love the Daniel Pink statement of ask for advice. Maybe it’s easier to start with, What could we have done better in this situation for you? Even if it looks like it went well, what could have gone better or what could we have done better or give a specific thing.

I can kind of weave surveys in here a little bit because some of the things that people do with surveys, which are wrong, is they’ll take a hundred clients and send them a survey, and what if you get 15 that hate you from that? How are you going to get back to them within a business day? You need to think about what if they don’t like me? So if you’re starting surveying, I think that’s a good way because at least that gives, if you’re not doing any of that, at least that’s kind of a third party way to get in there. But remember, most people who are really upset don’t always answer a survey, there are just survey people. So you need to get to your client, you need to get in person and have that conversation. And maybe it’s just going out and having lunch or bringing donuts to their office and just being around the water cooler and just saying to them like, Hey, how are things going for you? And because every MSP should be not looking just to talk about technology, but they should be looking to talk about strategy. And then those can be bigger questions and you start to build it’s build relationship. I have a statement that says, relationships build retention and retention builds revenue. So you start with just building relationships and then the questions that are sometimes difficult come a little bit easier after that.

Yeah, I love that. So my takeaways from that, you’re right, Daniel Pink’s question of, Can I ask for some advice?, which is essentially saying, can I have some feedback? But without using the F word, the feedback word. And I see surveys as a lazy way of doing it, and I know when you’ve got thousands of clients, if you’re a big company with thousands of clients, it’s the only way. But the reason I think it’s lazy is because exactly as you, Melissa, they’re are survey people. I’m not a survey person. Whenever I get a survey, if I can press a button like a customer thermometer feedback, happy face, I’ll do that. But not the, This will only take you 15 minutes, methodology – NPS standing for net promoter score. Go and Google it if you’re listening to this and you don’t know. But to me you are only ever going to get a subsection of people. I always think the greatest value comes from talking to people.

We did a massive project two years ago to completely revolutionise and update and change how we delivered what we do for our members. And I spent not inconsiderable amount of money paying a researcher to do a hundred zoom interviews. So she interviewed a hundred of our members, more or less a hundred over Zoom, and we’re talking like 20, 20, 25 minute conversations, we’re not talking quick conversations. But the value that we got from that was a thousand times what we paid. And even today, we can run a decision past the research. What did members say two years ago that would influence how we’re doing that now? Which was just such a valuable conversation.

Melissa, I could talk for hours and hours to you about this, and you are going to be one of these perennial guests that comes back onto the show. I can feel it in my bones. Let me ask you a final question. It was something you mentioned earlier, and then we’ll talk about what you do to help MSPs. So you said you threw a little side out about how clients become personal connections and there’s a danger in that. Can you explain that to us?

Yeah, so just like a marriage that’s 25 years old, which I have one of those, you have a complacency and a comfort. And I’ve heard more MSPs in the last year or so say to me, I lost a client and they were like a personal friend, these are people I knew well. I was just on a call with some customer success managers, a peer group that I moderate, and we were talking about, what do you do when you don’t have anything to talk about with a client? I’m like, well, you still go. You take them donuts. You ask bigger questions. Because very quickly, especially when so many of these customer success people are so overwhelmed with way too many clients, you forget that it’s been four months since we’ve been there, or it’s been three QBR since I’ve been there, so we’re talking nearly a year. So I think that when you get comfortable with someone, you think, oh, they’re never going to leave, but you’ve lost attention to them. So I think you always have to take that person and say, yep, we have a good relationship, all the more reason I should want to go and hang out with them and ask them what their strategy is.

I always say, if you do not know the business goals, not the technical goals, the business goals of your top 10% of your customers, or top 10, however you want to take that, but what is that 80% revenue mark? If you don’t know the business goals, you’re at risk of losing them because you are not entwined with what they’re doing. And don’t let the technology filter come onto those business goals, but go and have that business discussion. I can guarantee you, even if you don’t have anything to talk about, they had something come up that was major in their business in the last quarter, go ask them about it and see if you could have helped. If nothing else, you can be a listening ear, and that’s going to build reputation and relationship and renew your commitment to them, even if they’ve been a 15 year fan or a 20 year friend.

Yeah, I completely agree. And in fact, this is where MSPs are putting a foot into the VCIO territory, and I think the concept of VCIO has been shaped into something else within the MSP world. It’s not strictly as it should be, but if you do strategic reviews with people, if you build technology roadmaps and you are taking a three year view, where you are looking at their business through the filter of technology, but it’s not the technology you’re looking at, you’re looking at where they’re going, how they’re going to get there, and we all know that technology plays an integral part, but it’s not the be all and end all. It’s the enabler. And I think you’re right to look at it that way. So you never stop giving value, as it were. Melissa, thank you so much for your time. Let’s just briefly talk about what do you do. So obviously we all know now that you started your own business a couple of years ago. You’re working with a load of MSPs. Tell us what you do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

When I help them I start with something as simple as a customer retention inventory, which you can actually find on my website. My website is the first letter of each one of the words in my company, which I should have thought of differently, but it’s FTFTAC.com, tried to make it short, but those all sound like the exact same thing. So if you think First Things First Training And Consulting, you’ll get there, just take the first letter and smash them together. You can also follow me, find me on LinkedIn, that’s where I post all of my information.

I’m helping managed service providers really take a look at what are their current retention efforts and where can we get them to a bonafide retention programme. And I’m all about the baby steps of it. So even if you’re like, well, I don’t even know yet, there’s portions of what I’m doing that you can still find value with. I give a free webinar every month, take a look. You find it on LinkedIn that talks about inventorying your customer retention efforts. So take a look and see how you are doing, where are you, and then we move through the process from there. So it’s all about building a retention programme, an intentional retention programme, not just a, I’ve never lost a customer retention programme.

Colin runs his MSP in Maine, and he’s considering contingency plans. One of his business owning friends recently got ill and had to take an unexpected sabbatical from his business, so his question is: How can I prepare my business so it’ll not be affected if that happens to me?

Let’s make that less about scary illness, more about being prepared for anything. Imagine that tomorrow morning I decided to swap a career in marketing for a thrilling life of crime, and I kidnapped you. And don’t worry, I’m going to look after you. I’m going to cook for you every day, I can cook quite well, and I do have all the streaming platforms; you’re going to have a great time as my kidnap victim. But ultimately, I keep you locked up for the next three months.

So put another way, your staff and your clients won’t be able to reach you at all for the next three months with no notice. So the big question is this, what happens to your MSP? Does it thrive or does it just survive? Or after three months, would you tell me to keep the door padlocked and keep you here as there’s no business to return to? And anyway, you like my pasta bake?

This is a three month stress test, and it determines how well the business will do if you are unexpectedly removed from it for a long period of time. And all businesses can do okay just fine without the owner for a week or two. It’s when it becomes long-term. That’s when the inherent flaws show up. Who would naturally take charge? How likely are they to make decisions? How well supported would they be? Would they know to reach out to your professional advisors for support? Where would they go for senior tech advice and guidance? Could they deal with an angry client? Often it’s the little things that cause the biggest problems. Can someone access the bank account to pay staff and suppliers? Can someone access your email if yours is the master email for key vendor password resets? Do they know how to contact the landlord if there’s a problem with the office?

All businesses would struggle to a certain degree with the unexpected temporary removal of the owner. So one of your key jobs as the leader is to ensure that everything you do is clearly documented and appropriate emergency access measures are put in place, such as activating the emergency kit that’s found in many password managers.

Welcome to Episode 285 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Growing an MSP can sometimes feel like a game of poker, can’t it? If each and everything you could do to grow your business was a different card in your pack, choosing which cards to play can be overwhelming. And doesn’t it seem like the hand you’re dealt, everything that’s on your to-do list, just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So how do you decide which cards to play with and which to leave? How do you make sure you can quickly identify the things your MSP can do to become a real winner?

The biggest problem with being an MSP is having a massive to-do list. Just shout back to me now as you are listening to this or watching it on YouTube. How many things do you have to do today or tomorrow? I’m guessing it’s like 20, 30, 40 things. Because that’s one of the curses of the MSP owner is there is a never ending list of things that you need to do just to look after your clients, never mind actually growing your business. And the net effect of that is that you can get to the end of another day and another, and another and another, and you’ve done the work that your business needs to do, but you haven’t grown the business at all. This is a common problem for MSPs and frankly, it’s a massive problem.

The goal is to make a little progress every single day, and it feels frustrating when you don’t, doesn’t it?

This is why I think sometimes you need to take an 80/20 approach to your list of things that you could do, and I’m sure you’ve heard of 80/20 before. It’s also known as the Pareto principle named after Vilfredo Pareto. He was an Italian economist in the 19th century, and he was busy harvesting peas in his garden when he made an interesting observation. He noticed that some pea pods had a lot more peas in them than others did. So he counted the number of peas in each pea pod. He clearly didn’t have a lot to do that day, but he found that 80% of the peas came from only 20% of the pea pods. And what was really interesting was he then later noticed the same pattern in how wealth was distributed in Italy in his home country. He found that 20% of the people in Italy owned 80% of the land, and these 20% were very wealthy. The remaining 80% of the population owned only 20% of the land.

Now, don’t get too caught up on the 80 and the 20, the actual numbers themselves, just take from this the big principle that input and output in anything rarely match. For example, if you were to look at all of your clients, I bet the vast majority of ticket noise comes from the minority of clients. Many MSPs find that most of their hassle comes from a small number of their clients.And side note, these are the clients that you should fire, but let’s have that conversation another time. In fact, you can apply that to your staff as well. 80% of your hassle will come from 20% of your staff, right? If you apply the 80/20 principle to your task list, you can assume that 20% of the work that you do as the business owner is giving you 80% of the results in growing your business. The trick is to spend 80% of your personal time on those 20% tasks. Now I have way too many things that I want to be doing at the same time, but I learned a long time ago to be utterly brutal in prioritising them. We have an MSP Marketing Edge company development roadmap, and from that, I pull out the 10 things that will make the biggest difference when completed. And I call this my 80/20 list.

So every day, just like you, I have to battle noise and complications to spend more of my time on those things, my 80/20 things and kind of ignore all the other things that are vying for my attention. And I’ll be honest, it’s not easy, it is a daily struggle every day, but it’s really worthwhile. My best evenings are where I’ve spent the day focusing on tasks that will grow my business and not just run my business. So how can you do this in your MSP? Well, I believe it starts with being very, very organised about what it is that you want to achieve. Do you have a long list of things that will help you to win your clients, retain them, and upsell them more services? Can you split that list down into a series of tasks, even if that means that there are dozens and dozens of tasks to be done? And can you then prioritise that list? So if let’s say tomorrow you had 60, maybe 90 minutes to work on growing your business, you would know exactly what you needed to do.

That I think is at the heart of making progress in growing your business. Once you are very clear on what you need to do, in what order, and you can find time every day to work on those tasks, you get the important things done. And does that mean that you have to dump some tasks and they never get done? Yes, a hundred percent it does. And is that scary? Yes, it is a hundred percent, but the reality is that you are never going to get all of those tasks done anyway. You only have 24 hours in the day the same as everyone else, and you need to spend at least six of those sleeping, ideally, seven, maybe eight.

But in terms of getting things done, it’s better you focus on getting done the things that move the business forward rather than the small things that don’t move the business forward. So let me ask you a big question. Something you should just pop in your brain, perhaps sleep on it, reflect on it in the days ahead. What is the noise and complication in your MSP that stops you from focusing on the tasks that make the biggest difference? We all know it’s important to service the clients, well, that’s absolutely critical, but it’s also really important that you grow your business at the same time. If your business isn’t growing, then it’s going the opposite way. And actually that’s a very dangerous place to be. What are the things that are stopping you from doing this and how can you remove them?

That I think is at the heart of making progress in growing your business. Once you are very clear on what you need to do, in what order, and you can find time every day to work on those tasks, you get the important things done. And does that mean that you have to dump some tasks and they never get done? Yes, 100% it does. And is that scary? Yes, it is 100%, but the reality is that you are never going to get all of those tasks done anyway. You only have 24 hours in the day the same as everyone else, and you need to spend at least six of those sleeping, ideally, seven, maybe eight.

But in terms of getting things done, it’s better you focus on getting done the things that move the business forward rather than the small things that don’t move the business forward. So let me ask you a big question. Something you should just pop in your brain, perhaps sleep on it, reflect on it in the days ahead. What is the noise and complication in your MSP that stops you from focusing on the tasks that make the biggest difference? We all know it’s important to service the clients, well, that’s absolutely critical, but it’s also really important that you grow your business at the same time. If your business isn’t growing, then it’s going the opposite way. And actually that’s a very dangerous place to be. What are the things that are stopping you from doing this and how can you remove them?

Up to three quarters of MSPs would rather lose a toe than have to speak in public. But did you know that speaking at a seminar or a webinar can be an incredibly powerful way to attract prospects, warm them up and persuade them that your business is the one they can trust? So using a cybersecurity webinar as an example, how can you be relaxed, confident, and even enjoy presenting? Oh, and keep all of your toes intact?

One of the MSPs I work closely with has made the smart decision to aggressively pursue a vertical, in their case, lawyers. They’ve changed their website and their social media to be more relevant to the owners of law practices in their city. They’ve built up a database, they’re sending emails, LinkedIn messages, and direct mail, and they have someone making follow up phone calls. All of this is great that all the correct things to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time, as people only buy when they are ready to buy.

Recently, I suggested they start to put on regular webinars about cybersecurity for lawyers, and that’s when we hit a wall. The owner, who would have to present these webinars, is pretty reluctant to do them. Why? Because of one word – fear. Or put another way – what if – as in, What if no one turns up? What if they’re bored by my content? What if they ask a question that I can’t answer? What if I make a mistake and every lawyer in my city laughs at me forever? etc.

Now the reality is here that none of these things will happen. And if they did happen, no one will remember, no one will really care, it’s just a webinar. But I do understand where my client’s mental block is coming from.

Fear is a horrible emotion and it can push otherwise highly competent people into inaction.

Reality check here. The reality is if you’ve been an MSP for three years or more, you know more about cybersecurity than any ordinary person, like a lawyer or a business owner, meaning there’s almost no question they could ask you that you couldn’t handle. And they will turn up and they will be engaged so long as the content seems relevant to them. And really the only way to get better at presenting is to do more presenting, do more webinars.

So I believe you should just do the cybersecurity webinar because, big picture, it’s an insanely cool and powerful way to show that you are THE local technology expert while engaging with hot prospects. My final thoughts on this, never forget that fear is an acronym standing for Fictional Events Appearing Real.

Featured guest: Joshua Stout is a distinguished digital marketing strategist with over seven years of experience, specialising in LinkedIn advertising. In his previous role, he played a pivotal part in building a LinkedIn-centred agency from the ground up, leading the Ads Service from its inception and transforming it into a multimillion-dollar operation. During this time, he oversaw the operations of the team while acting as lead strategist, managing over 1,000 ad accounts. Currently, as the Director of Advertising at Influent Social, Joshua continues to leverage his extensive expertise to drive impactful LinkedIn campaigns for a diverse range of clients.

His expertise has earned him the title of LinkedIn Certified Marketing Expert, a recognition held by fewer than 90 professionals worldwide. Additionally, Joshua has been honoured as a LinkedIn Top Voice and featured in Marquis Who’s Who, acknowledging his significant contributions to the field of digital marketing.

LinkedIn is an insane lead generation and prospecting tool for MSPs, and yet I know many people who really don’t know where to start with it. There’s a lot of noise out there and lots of things you can do, but which things should you do? I’ve hunted down one of only 90 certified LinkedIn experts in the world. In the next few minutes, he’s going to tell you how to use LinkedIn ads, how to achieve more with less work, and how to leverage advanced strategies to get better results.

Hi, I’m Josh Stout. I am one of less than 90 LinkedIn certified marketing experts in the world. I helped grow an agency from the ground up and I’ve overseen a thousand different ad accounts in my time on LinkedIn.

And thanks so much for joining us on the show, Josh, because we are going to talk about LinkedIn ads today and it’s possibly one of the hardest aspects of LinkedIn to get right. I’m going to be honest with you here, I’ve been doing full-time marketing, getting on for 20 years, I’ve never really cracked LinkedIn ads, I’ve worked with dozens of MSPs who’ve tried LinkedIn ads and we’ve never really cracked it. And my definition of cracked it is, we’ve got something that’s generated leads that has turned into prospects, that have turned into clients that have turned into revenue and profit. And I know it can be done, but I’ve always struggled with that and that’s why we’ve got you on the show to try and answer that question. Let’s just delve a little bit into your credibility and your background. So you said you were one of 90 LinkedIn certified marketing experts?

Yeah, so last year I was selected as part of the class. They flew me out to London, I went to their headquarters there where I received my official certification. We had to go through a series of workshops, but it’s also quite rigorous to get in. You have to submit an application, you have to record a video of yourself saying why you should be in, you need to find three references, and then you have to do an interview where they put you on the spot and you have to do a presentation.

Oh, that’s really cool. There only being 90 of you in the world. Do you all kind of have to agree not to fly on the same plane or something like that in the same way that there’s only about 10 people who know the recipe for Coca-Cola and they’re not allowed to go on the same plane. Is it a similar thing to that or maybe I’m just making it up.

It’s so diverse, people are coming in from all over the place, so no, it’s not really like that. That’s probably why they don’t get us all to go to the same events at the same time though, maybe they want to make sure that they keep us safe, right?

Yeah, maybe it is that. So before we go on to talk about LinkedIn ads, let’s just talk about LinkedIn in general. So I was looking at some stats the other day, and I forget the numbers, but essentially if you were to look at a chart from let’s say about 2015/2016, up until today, so over about eight or nine years, it was just solid growth for LinkedIn, solid growth in user numbers, in engagement, in the amount of content that’s been posted. It’s like LinkedIn is the one social network that has just really solidly grown and grown and grown. Facebook went much higher, but has drip dipped down. Instagram obviously has done a similar kind of thing. We don’t talk about X these days, but there’s all these other social platforms that have their ups and downs, and yet LinkedIn seems to have just been a very solid growth over a number of years. Is that what you see? You are obviously more on the inside of LinkedIn than the rest of us. Is that what you see from the inside as well?

Yeah, absolutely. And I would say the biggest pop of new members and engagement that happened on LinkedIn was during Covid. Because LinkedIn was gradually growing, except I think a lot of people saw it as a job site. You are looking for a job looking to get a higher promotion at another company, something like that. Everyone used LinkedIn. But when Covid hit and everybody had to go home and you couldn’t go to conferences and you couldn’t go to meetings and you couldn’t go door knocking anymore, people had to figure out a way to continue networking their business. And I feel that LinkedIn was just waiting for everybody. They’re like, come my children, we’ve been a business networking platform this whole time, we have these capabilities for you. And immediately LinkedIn started seeing, I mean, initially it was a huge growth, but then a steady 20% growth year over year to where they have over a billion active users now, hundreds of millions of decision makers. So it solidified itself as the professional platform to be on and really elevated itself over just being some type of job recruitment platform.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. And a lot of the MSPs that I speak to when we talk about LinkedIn, because a massive fan, I think it’s a great place for people with small amounts of marketing time to go do marketing. It’s like everyone you could ever do business with is there. A lot of the MSPs I say that to, they say, oh, well, if there’s so many people there, if there are so many other MSPs there, surely we are just part of the noise, or surely people are just going on to sell and no one’s going on to buy. What kind of stuff do you see in terms of how people are using LinkedIn? Are they just going to sell, or actually, are they using it just as a communication tool?

Yeah. Well, first of all, I want to say it is very active on LinkedIn for MSPs. During my time at my previous agency where I helped grow over a thousand head accounts that I saw on LinkedIn, the second largest vertical was MSPs. So obviously the audience is active on LinkedIn and MSPs can reach out to them, but it is very competitive. So in 90 to 95% of the accounts that I’ve audited, and that’s a realistic number, 90 to 95% of the accounts, there are just nuances in the settings and configurations that people don’t know that tend to lead to wasted budget or strategies that are going to be ineffective. Because it is a communication platform, but what makes it so powerful is the ability to specifically target decision makers on LinkedIn, having the most up-to-date professional data out of any other platform in the world, and then the mindset of the user. When people are on LinkedIn, they’re considering their business, they’re considering their roles, their jobs, professions, so being able to get your message in front of them is going to be most effective. And I’ve pretty consistently heard it from LinkedIn called the “middle of funnel hero” because people want to consume content on it. So it’s all about how you’re structuring your strategy, how you’re appealing to the people that you want to show your message to, and ultimately how you’re converting them.

Yeah, I mean, that fits perfectly with the three-step marketing strategy that we recommend. In fact, it’s part of our MSP marketing Edge service. So the first step is to build audiences, and LinkedIn is the first audience I always suggest you build. The second step is to grow relationships, which from what you’ve just said there, the middle of the funnel hero, and that’s done through content. You put content in front of people until the day they’re ready to have a conversation about switching, which is of course the third step. And that is to convert relationships, that’s what you have to come offline, you have to pick up the phone, you have to talk to people, and obviously go and meet with them.

Let’s look Josh specifically at LinkedIn ads because I know that is your particular specialty. So as we know MSPs, it’s a B2B advertising proposition. We’re trying to reach decision makers, other business owners, and a lot of us see ads on LinkedIn that we just scroll past really quickly. And certainly if you’re an MSP, MSPs see the same ads as I see, we see all the big vendors, all the big names, I mean they must be spending thousands of dollars a day on these adverts, and we all just kind of seem to skip over them. Is that the biggest problem with LinkedIn ads or is it, as you say, it’s not understanding the nuances of it and the little settings and things you can adjust?

Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of noise on the platform. Creative is one of the essential components of having a successful campaign on LinkedIn, because you need to know how to put designs in front of people that are going to stop them from scrolling and get them to read your message. That’s really important aspect of advertising on LinkedIn. But I wouldn’t say that that’s the most critical downfall of using the platform is the noise and all the competition. I would say typically it’s the structure. It’s the way that people are setting up their campaigns and they’re lacking that nurturing component. Or what I see all the time is people trying to activate leads on top of the funnel. They’re using lead gen forum using book a call, call to actions already, and they’re trying to target cold audiences to do that. That by far is the largest error on LinkedIn.

When you’re able to really figure out tests and optimise based on what you’re serving your audience, what’s driving the volume, continue reiterating those practices to figure out what’s resonating with them. And then like you said, build out that middle of funnel effort to nurture and educate and ultimately convert. I mean, MSPs have a long sales cycle, so if you’re not staying in front of the people that you know are relevant and the people that are going to make the decision on conversion, then you’re losing out and you’re spending a lot of money that’s not going to be effective for you. And that’s tended to be the biggest area of opportunity.

Okay, that makes sense. So bearing in mind the fact that, as you say, it’s a long sales cycle and we know it can take 6, 12, 18, 24 months from the point someone says hello to you to the point they actually sign a contract, what would you focus an MSP’s LinkedIn ads on? Would you focus it on trying to get people into their CRM? Would you focus them trying to sign up for their LinkedIn newsletter? Would it be something else? What would you go for?

It would be a mixture of those tactics. One thing that I’d probably say way more than I should, is use variation. And one of the biggest attributes of being able to advertise on LinkedIn is content. So absolutely, I would be running news that are focused, ads that are focused on newsletter. I would be using blogs, I would be using white papers, I would be using content. And more than anything, if you want to stay ahead of the curve right now and you really want to capitalise on the best assets that LinkedIn has, have people or experts at your company be posting about their expertise. Don’t do it for likes, don’t do it for engagement. Just post your expertise. Because we can include that in an ad campaign and we can run thought leader alongside your company. Every company is going to say that they’re the best at what they do. So a lot of people are going to hear that, and you need to say that, and you need to show the content that proves that. But if you can also elevate the voices of the company explaining why they’re experts at what they do, people trust people, and that builds brand equity. So using a combination of those in your funnel and in your strategy is going to yield much higher results, and you need to stay in front of these people long-term. So it’s not just using that content, not just using the newsletter, yes, use all those things, but it’s also realising that you need to stay in front of these people so you’re top of mind when they’re ready to convert. And that’s a big missed opportunity I typically see.

Yeah, so essentially you’re saying stamp your authority and keep stamping your authority until the day that they’re ready to have that conversation. And of course, on that day, if they’ve seen 15, 20, 30 things from you on LinkedIn, even if they’re not top of mind, they’re lurking there in the background. And if you then add that into they’ve opened some of your emails that maybe you’ve had some direct messages on LinkedIn, maybe you’ve even spoken to them on the phone or you’ve sent them a letter or a postcard in the mail, all of these things come together and with the LinkedIn ads and the LinkedIn content, and they all help you seem like you’re everywhere. So for the person who’s ready to buy or ready to think about buying or switching, there’s certainly the first conversation you want to have is the person who seems to be everywhere. I love that.

Final question for you, Josh, and that’s about kind of ad spend. So what we’ve just been talking about there is potentially running ads, constantly running ads to people that aren’t going to buy until 2026, 2027, 2028, and there’s a lot of cash going into that. What’s the right mindset do you believe for an MSP who’s looking at ads? Should they be looking at spending a little bit of money on a regular basis, or should they do a big splurge and a big campaign and then pull back and then repeat it? What do you think is the best strategy?

A general rule of thumb in marketing is you should spend about 7-15% of your annual revenue on your marketing efforts. It’s an investment, not an expense. And I don’t say that in a way to say like, take 10% of your annual revenue and dump that all on LinkedIn. From something that you just said, marketing works best in an ecosystem. It really builds your brand to make sure you have those elements of demand generation, demand capture, direct touches, all those things influence conversions. Now on LinkedIn specifically, you can run a pretty healthy budget, maybe somewhere around $5,000 to $10,000 a month on LinkedIn, and that’s going to help you drive a lot of volume and build a lot of frequency. Now, you don’t have to spend that much. I’ve managed campaigns all the way down to $500 a month. You can still put a fundamental structure in place to engage your top of funnel audience and build trust and credibility in your brand.

That long-term play on LinkedIn, you can segment your audience, people that maybe have not visited your website or company page in the last three months, so it’s been over three months now. You can use low cost ad types such as text ads or follower ads, dynamic ads to put really low cost touches to stay in the subconscious of your interested prospects. So yes, obviously the more budget you put behind it, the more volume you can drive, the more low hanging fruit you’re going to find, and the more frequency you can build. But you don’t have to have an enterprise budget to still run a campaign on LinkedIn and make it effective for you.

Which is music to everyone ears, I think. And obviously we’ve got to remember the lifetime value as well. So an MSP, it might take you a very long time to win a client, but you keep them for 5 to 10 to 15 years paying monthly recurring revenue. So to the average MSP, a new client is worth a $100,000, $200,000, maybe even a quarter of a million, would you spend $2,000 to $3,000 to win a quarter of a million pound client? I mean, everyone would say yes until the point they actually come to put in the LinkedIn adverts on, I guess. But there we go.

And again, rule of thumb, probably around 10%, right? You know that that’s what a client is worth, be investing that in finding them and bringing them in.

Yeah, no, I like that. And actually, if you do that consistently, I’ve always said this to MSPs, if you know can onboard a new client every month, wouldn’t you spend that money to onboard that client? And the answer is yes, but of course it takes time. You can’t just switch it on Monday and you get the new client on Wednesday. If it was that simple, then everyone would be doing it.

Josh, you’ve been amazing. Thank you so much for sharing an insight. So tell us what you do to help MSPs with their LinkedIn ads and how can we get in touch with you?

Yeah, absolutely. So again, I am extremely familiar in the MSP space. It was the second largest vertical at my previous agency. I’ve overseen hundreds of accounts on LinkedIn, so what I can really do is come in and fundamentally help you build a strategy that’s going to not just yield results, but try to exponentially grow them over time, by having the right structure in place. If people want to learn more about that and how I can help them, all you have to do, you can either DM me on LinkedIn, it’s linkedin.com/Joshua Stout, or you can go to influence.co, go to the advertising page and book a call. I’d be happy to talk.

Michael in Texas is making a concerted effort with marketing for his MSP.  He’s watched some previous podcasts on YouTube and found a video me getting upset by an MSP using a particular word in their marketing. He’s asked: Why shouldn’t I use the word “user”?

Oh, I got upset did I, well, sometimes I do like to wear my heart on my sleeve.

The thing is, I get frustrated when I see an MSP using the word “user” in their marketing, or even perhaps when they talk to clients or prospects, because user is a horrible word to ordinary people. A user is someone on drugs or someone who exploits other people.

The word “user” must be banned from your marketing, from your sales, from any conversation you have outside of your business. And instead, use these words – people and person. Companies don’t have users, they have people. It’s such a simple thing to change, and yet it’s going to make such a big difference.

Welcome to this EASTER SPECIAL – Episode 284 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

Featured guest: Steve Dempsey has been a Managed IT Services owner for over 25 years and only serves small businesses in several different markets in the UJS. In addition he owns a small SEO agency for MSP’s only to help them generate local organic leads for their business.

Hello and welcome to this special for Easter. I’m joined today by MSP owner Steve Dempsey, who’s going to tell us his business owning journey. And trust me, you have never heard a story like this before. There are many highlights, one of the best being how he went from losing thousands in his business every month to making thousands, with one key decision. Steve is a unique and generous character, and you are going to love everything he has to talk about.

Hey there, I’m Steve Dempsey. I’ve been in the IT business for 25 years and my main IT company is NeoTech Networks.

And it’s so cool to finally get you here onto the podcast, Steve. We’ve got our special episode for Easter 2025, and I feel like you and I have both been in lots of the same places at the same time, but we’ve never had a quality conversation. You’re obviously highly active in The Tech Tribe, as am I. We nearly met at Scale Con, which was the big marketing conference in Vegas in October last year. I actually talked to you from the stage and we did some cool stuff where you were in the audience and I was on the stage, but we never found each other afterwards, so it’s absolutely crazy. But I’m delighted to have you here on the show. And the reason I want to have you here, well there’s two things that I want to talk about. The first of them is you are one of the most unique MSPs that I have ever come across and you have a very unique lifestyle and I want to explore today what your life is like and what you’ve had to go through to get to that life.

And just as a bit of a tease for the many MSPs that will be listening to this on the podcast or indeed watching this on YouTube, Steve has an enviable lifestyle and it’s nothing to do with having lots of houses, a yacht, cars, anything like that. But Steve is living his best life and also has a great business. So that’s what we’re going to explore first of all. And then secondly, you have one of the most unique approaches to SEO, search engine optimisation, that I’ve ever come across. So I want to explore that because I know you had a huge amount of success for it, and indeed you are helping a small number of other MSPs to implement that in their business. But let’s start with the lifestyle stuff. So first of all, Steve, let’s hear your story. So you said in your intro you’ve been in the tech world for 25 years, which sounds like such a long time, doesn’t it? I’m 50. How old are you right now?

I’ll be almost 52.

Okay, so we’re more or less the same age then. Talking about 25 years, it sounds a lot and when you realise, hmm, that’s half of my life actually, that’s quite sobering in some respects. Tell us about your tech career then. So how did you get into tech in the first place? How did you start your first business? What’s your journey into this MSP space?

To sum it up quickly, full disclosure, I actually never went to college. I only have a high school diploma and I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. My last full-time job was, this is probably embarrassing to admit it’s been that long, my last full-time job was probably 28 years ago. The company went out of business. I always had that just drive in me to do something on my own. And then when I was 27 years old when I was on my own, I started a quote on quote computer company. Let’s just say that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and absolutely no direction whatsoever. But on the second year I actually did start to get the clients and I actually went to people’s homes and repaired computers and all that good stuff.

Yeah, the real old fashioned way of doing it. And when did you make the leap over into managed services?

You’re going to love my brutal honesty, Paul, on everything because I am a New Yorker and I think you know me well enough from The Tribe, I don’t hold back and I don’t mince words. Truth be told, a number of years later, 15 years about, I admit I was getting burned out and I did have, and I fully admit this, I had an attitude problem. I had an attitude problem for years. I think just over the work and just dealing with everything, I really let my business slide and it was pretty bad. And then when I turned 40, it’s that whole midlife crisis thing, I got burned by another IT owner in New York City that I was subcontracting for, and then that’s when I had the final aha moment of I need to make a decision. I either need to get serious about my business, or get out. And I’m 40 years old, I’m like, you need to grow up or get out. And it was at that moment that I went full swing into my IT business virtually overnight reinvented my perspective, I got rid of my attitude problem, I saw everything as brand new and I hired my first employee probably about a year later.

Amazing. When you talk about that attitude problem, what was that? Was that you being arrogant or was that just being a bit of an arms folded New York IT guy, everyone else is an idiot, that my way is the only way? Or was it something different?

Nope, actually the attitude problem was actually I just didn’t want to be bothered. And I did get fired by a couple of clients, and looking back on it I’m very embarrassed by it. I’m sure people picked up on it. I just didn’t want to be bothered, to lift a finger. I think part of it came from just the repetitive work. I mean when you fix someone’s Outlook or printer or whatever for the 500th time, you’re just like, yeah, I just don’t want to be bothered anymore. And it showed, I admit it.

Yeah, I think that’s very brave of you to admit that because I’m not a psychologist, but this feels like a therapy session for you, to go back and even to look at an aged fault of something that you are 10, 12 years on from. None of us like to admit our faults and when our behaviour didn’t match up to our values. So thank you for doing that. I think at least one person listening to this will realise that, oh my goodness, that’s me. I’m trapped in that because I’m dealing with the same things and I’m trapped in something I actively dislike. In fact, we have a phrase for it, which is where MSP owners create a prison of their own design and lock themselves inside, and I think it manifests itself in different ways, and that was clearly how that manifested for you.

So you got to that point, you had that incident, you made the decision to do it properly or get out of it. Obviously you went in a specific direction. What then happened to the business and take us through the story of how you grew that business. I assume you got more staff, you got more clients. Is it your traditional growth story?

It is traditional growth. I did get more. I elevated each year. I got a small office in Manhattan, for the first time in my life I actually had an office and then things grew from there. A couple years later I needed to hire a second tech and get a bigger office. And like I said, I was just on full swing looking back on what held me back at that time. I’m sure other solo IT guys would appreciate this, even for me to hire my first employee, it probably took me, and I’m not kidding, a year to mentally get over the fact that I was paying somebody a full-time salary for work that I could do myself. And the reason why is because I was not a business owner, I was a tech. I was 90% tech and I was not a business owner. So for years, even five years, I was more of a tech than a business owner. And then I finally started to slip over to the other side and realise I needed to get other people to do things for me and do the work, so that I can move on to bigger and better things.

That mindset shift from being a tech who happens to be working within their own business, to being the business owner who is working on almost a different level, you’re working on growing this thing and that means having to get people in to do things that even though you can do them. Is that a mindset shift that you could have done earlier or do you think you had to go through that process to get to that point?

I think it probably depends on the person. You really need to think big. And I kind of do think big now, but I just wasn’t mature enough or did not have the business sense to think big. But I honestly can say 100% what changed all that was The Tech Tribe, which we knew was going to come up sooner rather than later. Once I joined The Tech Tribe brand new and I started to absorb all that knowledge and then be around not only other business owners, but also other business owners that had 5, 10, 20 staff. Jamie Warner for example comes to mind, who’s a friend of mine now, hearing like wow, he actually has people that work for him and he’s not dealing with his low level stuff. And once that started to rub off on me, it took years, but yeah, that definitely started my transition of thinking like a business owner and not a tech.

I love that. And Jamie Warner has been on this podcast a couple of times. He’s such good value because as you say, he’s built an enormous MSP and he’s built Invarosoft as a side project and it’s huge. And Jamie’s just one of the most inspirational people you can speak to, which is great.

He is an awesome guy. Jamie’s just a super nice guy too.

I don’t know him personally, I only know him professionally, but yeah I bet he is. So what, take us through then to the point at which something changed now, I don’t know what changed for you, I don’t know your story that in depth, but I know that the lifestyle you live today, which we are obviously coming on to talk about, is much different to the classic MSP owning lifestyle that most people live. So talk us through the growth then, whatever it was that caused this change to happen.

Yeah, I’ll put it on the table so everybody hears it, right. I was in a cramped Manhattan office, you can imagine how much rent I was paying and I had three other full-time people. I probably had seven or eight people’s worth of work. And we were all just juggling work from one to another and honestly just being a glorified help desk. And I was not doing anything proactively. I was barely working on sales because I was always answering tickets myself and all that good stuff.

In the past seven years, I purchased three other IT companies because my road for expansion was absorbing other IT companies. So the first one was a huge financial success and I bought it in Long Island, New York. The second one I bought in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and it was like a so-so success. And then I ended up buying a printer repair company in New York City, and I should’ve had my head examined for buying that, but I can’t take it back. It sounded like a good idea at the time. And that’s that.

When Covid hit, and I’ll just fully disclose this, I was a quarter million in debt from the acquisitions and my appetite far exceeded my business sense, and I should never have purchased a printer repair company because I already had debt from the second acquisition, and it was just too much for me to take on. I was just too ambitious. Covid hit, I lost my biggest client in New York City, which was like a 20 chain restaurant client, and that was also 30% of my business. So I was probably, thinking back now, I was probably in the red about $20,000 a month. So in other words, by the time covid hit, I was already losing $20,000 a month. The only thing I was doing was just not paying my credit card. I was paying probably almost $3,000 a month in credit card interest alone. And a couple of months after Manhattan shut down American Express actually shut off my credit card and they wouldn’t let me charge anything else. I was actually in serious financial trouble.

And then it was at that moment that I had made a decision just to turn everything upside down within one week. So within one week I closed both my Manhattan offices, I laid off all three of my salaried employees in Manhattan. And then I went full swing into virtual, which I still have many of them today, which was freelance Latin America in Venezuela. And then I hired full-time employees down there for a fraction of the cost. And I would say within one month I went from $20,000 negative to like $10,000 positive within a matter a matter of weeks.

That’s incredible. What a story. And there’s so many things to unpack from that. Let’s start with, we’re going to delve a little bit into all of that I think, and then we’ll talk about what you’ve done subsequently. I now understand how the lifestyle you live today is possible. So let’s talk about that that week. I’ve never personally been in a position where I was that deep into debt. So I’ve had bad years, I’ve had good years, I’ve been in business for 20 years myself and especially, I can imagine if you’re that much in debt and then this pandemic comes along and shuts down the city and takes your biggest clients away and then the credit card company say ring and say, cut your cards up, that’s as low as you can go, right? You must’ve been weeks away from personal bankruptcy, nevermind just losing the business. So, talk us through the mindset, and I appreciate we’re talking about something five years on, so a lot of those emotions that are now memories, but what was the thinking and the mindset? Did you become more clear? Did you go out and just try and drown your sorrows? What was your way of dealing with that and reaching that decision of I’ve got to do something so extreme? It could be the end of everything, but actually I’ve got no option.

I knew I was in trouble, and the credit cards obviously were the debt and the interest and everything was racking up. So I knew I was on a bad road. My position at the time was actually to work my way out of it. So my day started at 5:00am, I was working until whenever, seven, eight o’clock at night. I was working six or seven days a week trying to get out of this, doing the work of 10 other people and all that other good stuff.

So the end result is Covid and Manhattan shutting down and me losing my biggest client was actually the best thing that could’ve happened to me, to be honest with you, because if it did not happen, I did not have, for lack of a better word that I want to use, I did not have the guts to do what needed to be done, which was close the go full swing into a virtual staff. I just do not have the guts. If covid did not happen, if those events did not happen, what I would have done is I probably would have borrowed a ton more money from family, friends, whoever I can get it from, and pretty much pay that off and just move debt from one to another. But looking back on it, it was the best thing that happened to me because it forced my hand and it forced me to do all those things virtually overnight, which has led to my lifestyle here, here and now present day. I don’t think that would’ve happened if those events didn’t happen.

Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned freelance Latin America, it’s a company I’m familiar with, I did a webinar with them actually a few months ago. Really good people, very passionate about what they do. This is now going to end up as a free little advert for them, but then they’re the key thing to you doing what you did. If we actually, let’s not talk about them, let’s talk about the concept of what they do. So you have essentially outsourced your tech work to people not in the US. Is that correct? That’s essentially what you’ve done there.

Yeah, that is correct, but almost, I understand what you’re saying about outsource, but they work for me full time and my first couple employees from freelance are actually now with me going on year five.

Got it. So let’s take the word outsource then. So you’ve shifted the work from people who sit in an office, sweating in a city, and I say sweating because they’re sitting with no air conditioning inside an office building in Manhattan, to people who are elsewhere but they’re still doing it, a hundred percent of their working time is for you. But because of the economics of the world in different geographical locations, the cost of that person, they’re earning a good salary, but you’re obviously paying them a lot less than you would be paying someone to sit in an office in Manhattan, and your overall overheads are lower. What was your fear shifting that over? I’ve had that conversation with lots of MSPs about, there’s so much good talent available in lots of different places and everything can be done remotely, but there’s a lot of emotions and a lot of fear that holds people back. Now obviously you were in quite an extreme case position, but talk us through almost like what was the feeling you had of what’s the worst thing that could have happened at that point?

All the above. I mean, speaking of freelance Latin America, Randy who’s the owner, he’s a personal friend of mine, and I did meet him in person. He was actually sitting next to me at the Scale Con convention, just so you know. He was sitting next to me when you gave me that shout out on the stage, Randy leaned into me and he’s like, see, you’re an influencer. I can’t believe this. He was very impressed. But back on track, it was all fears. I couldn’t wrap my head around actually entrusting any kind of work, clients, bookkeeping, support anything to somebody overseas. It took me, and Randy will tell you this, from the first conversation of me hiring an admin, it took him three months of chasing me for me to finally say yes because of the trust and everything. And then once I did it, it was like a snowball effect and six months later I had six full-time people.

That’s just insane. And obviously it’s working for you because that’s obviously still what you’re doing now. So talk us through what your lifestyle is like now. And the only reason I know about your lifestyle is because you do post stuff in The Tech Tribe, and I follow you in terms of following what you write because I always find value in what you write. Give us an example of what you’ve been doing the last few weeks, and I think that will show us the lifestyle you’ve been able to achieve as a result of this change.

So yeah, so before I speak about that, I’m just going to say as part of that, this goes with the transition of being a business owner or going from a tech to a business owner. And then more importantly is that it comes with trust. You have to trust the people that you’re working with and let go. And that also to back that up, you need processes in place and you need people to make the right decisions, but they’re not going to make the right decisions if you don’t trust them.

Post covid, when I created my virtual team, I sketched out an entire business model with roles like service manager, procurement, sales, calibration, admin, and list goes on. I had created a business model for my virtual workforce, and I just started filling those roles. So if anybody was thinking about doing it, the biggest issue I see even to this day when Tech Tribers approach me privately, is they think they’re going to hire a full-time guy overseas and he’s going to be like five people in one. And they show me their job descriptions, and I’m like, yeah, well good luck with that. I see it time and time again. You want to hire somebody, you give him a dedicated role, dedicated responsibilities, that’s the way I did it. And then they know what they’re doing and it grew from there.

Now once that happened, my workload became less, even though I’m still a workaholic and I had people making decisions, and then now it’s to the point where most of the things that come to me are usually yes or no answers from my team. Just, yes, can we do this? Or something like that. It’s nowhere near my involvement even up to until two years ago.

So to answer your question this last month I actually, I went to Uruguay, so I went to Montevideo, Uruguay for two weeks as well as Buenos Aries for two weeks. I worked on my laptop for a couple hours in the morning and then went on my day to do whatever. And then just with my phone and Microsoft Teams, I was just keeping tabs on everything. And every once in a while, my service manager or my experience liaison would message me, or even my admin, Hey, can you give me a thumbs up this or approve this or approve that? And then just was a tourist for two weeks. And last year I lived in Columbia, South America for six months in different cities running my business. None of my clients knew I was there and ran my staff, but my company runs itself, I would say probably 90% at this point.

I absolutely love it. So essentially you’ve become a digital nomad where you can run your business from absolutely anywhere in the world. And the only thing I guess you have to worry about is time difference and have a got WIFI and have a got electricity. And I know you’ve are into mountains, aren’t you? Mountain climbing is your thing.

Oh, very much. Absolutely.

Yeah. So I mean, I love the sound of all of your lifestyle except the mountain climbing. Me, I’d just like to stay somewhere flat where they’ve got coffee shops, and sun, that’s something that a part of that lifestyle I’d most like to live. Final question on this and then we’re going to move on to the subject of SEO, which is the clients. So we’ve talked over a five year period or very quickly, you went from staff sitting in an office to virtual staff. Did the clients notice, did you tell the clients and what’s their experience today? And did you lose any clients as a result of this?

That’s a very good question. So when I went full swing into virtual, and I did not gracefully do it, I mean I literally just turned into it in a matter of a week, I hired techs and then threw them on the front lines without any training whatsoever. It was like, just here’s the ticket system and do it. I was just in over my head. I did have a handful of clients that the business owners that I knew, reach out to me or maybe mention like, Hey, Steve, I noticed a lot of these people you have working for, you have Spanish accents or accents of some kind. And they noticed it right away that when I got rid of my three full-time staff in Manhattan, and I just put them at ease. And while I didn’t say they were from another country or anything like that, I assured them, I said, you’re going to have to trust me. That was my position. I’ve been in this business for a very long time. I said, each one of them has been hired by me personally, vetted by me personally. They worked for me full time, and that was enough to put their minds at ease, and I did not lose a single client as a result of the shift at all.

Oh, amazing. I just love that. And I guess for any MSP listening to this or watching this, who’s thinking, could I do that, is that something we could transition to? Would your advice be to, if you did it again, if you were doing it today and you had the luxury of time and slowing everything down, would you be more communicative with the clients or would you just ease in and just see what happens?

I would just ease in, because when you announce something like that, it’s more like a drop. You know what I’m saying? You’re announcing, Hey, this is going to happen. And that’s why I didn’t do it, because in my opinion, you are kind of maybe forcing someone to make a decision like, well do I want to stay with them or do I not want to stay with them? If you say something like that versus, Hey, if the work’s done, what do you care? And your bill’s not going up, what do you care? And that was pretty much my position, and they were okay with that.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Okay, let’s change subjects. I just want to do a few minutes on the subject of SEO, search engine optimisation. So caveat with this, I’m not an SEO expert, I’ve never claimed to be.  I understand the basics of it, but it’s a very technical subject, and I’ll be honest, it bores the pants off me. And I think for the vast majority of MSPs, SEO or traditional SEO is not an option, but you have a very distinctive and unique approach to SEO, which seems a lot more grounded in the realities of being an MSP. So talk us through what your approach is, and again, how did you stumble across this approach?

So I was never a marketer. I hated marketing. And I think this maybe came with age and experience, and you know what, Paul, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know what the hell changed myself, but all of a sudden, almost three years ago, I started to fall in love with marketing, and I still, I don’t even know how that happened, to me.

Honest. Marketing is sexy. Everyone knows this.

I mean, I hated it. I didn’t want to touch it ever. I just wanted to do IT work. But just like all other small IT business owners like me, and even smaller, everything comes up. You want leads, you want to grow. And I tried it all and I spent a lot of money over the years with cold calling and I hired a consultant on Google ads. I was paying a lot of money to him, and I tried LinkedIn stuff and tried this and tried that. My biggest problem, which was me personally, is I would kind of jump on, like everyone does, you jump on something, you give it three or four months, you don’t put any work into it, you don’t pay attention, and you are expecting a return. It does not happen like that.

What kind of changed my mind is three years ago, I restarted my Google ad campaigns and I realised when I started to learn Google ads for myself, I realised just how bad they were when the consultant did them. I mean, I’m sorry to throw them someone under the bus, but they were bad because the consultant did not understand IT. And this is what I tell everybody else, right? To an outsider, VoIP, security, cybersecurity… for them, it’s just a buzzword and they know nothing besides that, and they’re just like, okay, let’s just spend money on that. Cybersecurity. You do cybersecurity, right? You do VoIP. Yes, I do. Let’s spend money on that. And to them, it’s just plain vanilla and you’re not going to go anywhere. So when I saw that, I realised just how bad it was. I realised also as the and outsider can never understand the IT industry. And then I started to, I got so disgusted with Google ads because it was not working, I decided to learn SEO myself, and I started to actually fall in love with it. I got passionate about it, the metrics and data. And then once again, my unique approach is because I’m an active IT business owner, I’m not guessing at somebody’s business model. I’m not guessing at the terminology, I’m not guessing at what you do. My answer is, okay, just tell me what industries you serve and everything, and we can have a very natural conversation of what kind of leads you’re looking to attract and local market pretty much only without somebody or without a business owner holding my hand explaining IT terminology to me. So nobody else can really do that or let’s just say most can’t. How about that?

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So what do you do? Because obviously SEO, there’s lots of things you can do, and I know you’ve got a mix of things you do onsite, which is on your website and things you do offsite, but you’ve taken a more Google business profile approach towards that. Is that correct?

No, that’s not correct. Listen, SEO makes my brain hurt sometimes too, Paul, because there is so much, you know what I’m saying? And everybody supposedly has the golden goose you know, go on YouTube, okay, a hundred people are going to make you a million dollars with SEO tomorrow. And even I’m exhausted of watching those videos, but I watch to learn, my approach actually is to take everything, which means Google Business Listing, obviously Google SEO or the SERP searches, your website, and then now what I’m doing is also social media and then putting it all together and crossing all the boxes. What I’ve really learned actually in the last six months myself, is that Google, YouTube, whatever, they’re not human. They’re just an algorithm and if you give it what it wants, if you just check the boxes and just give it the math that it wants and the quantities that it wants, you’re going to get results.

I mean, that in itself, there is a great strategy, is just give the platforms what they want. You could actually apply this across all the marketing. You could apply that to LinkedIn, you could apply it to any other social media network. You could apply it to anything. Give the algorithm what it wants, what it’s set up to reward, and of course you’re going to see better results for it. But that’s amazing. So has SEO become your number one source of new leads now? And are you, and just to put some context on that, are you generating leads in Manhattan or are you now looking at a much wider area?

You know what, Paul, I’ll be honest with you, I am so spread thin sometimes as a business owner, I don’t even work on my own SEO half the times. Okay, so yeah, I’m serious, right? I go at my website and I’m like, God, I’m like, I need to do a hundred things here. And I don’t pay attention to my own website. I’m having difficulty in Manhattan because I’m up against some serious IT companies with serious budgets, and that’s a fact. So I’m always refining my processes, Google business listing, Bing even. So full disclosure, I’ll give you two examples of what I have going on. I have a Triber in Asheville, North Carolina, who’s one of my first clients, and he was not getting any leads, his only business was referrals. And now he gets probably a local lead a week from the work that I do, both Google Business listing and Google searches. He just got a brewery that was looking for a new IT company last week. And I’m like, Hey, listen, I told him if that was me, I’m like, I would just go back to them and say, listen, you can pay me in beer and then we’ll call it a day. But I say, you do what you want to do.

On the flip side, I had a Triber, he stopped paying me and he was right to do so. I had a Triber in California and he was with me for six months. I did not get him a single lead because I’m always refining my processes, whatever. And I was very frustrated. So I’m actually working for him now for free, which I offered because I just feel like I have a moral obligation. And if the situation were reversed, I’m like, I get it. You just pay me a lot of money and you have nothing to show for it. I understand.  So I’m hoping the more I learn, I even brought in some outside help to engage with my team in-house that I’m working for him to get leads. So listen, it’s not a golden road. It could be very difficult. It could take months, six months, whatever, and hopefully it’ll pay off. For me, I’m not reliant on the SEO business to pay my rent. That’s why I don’t mind that when I fail, which I do like, okay, let me work for free for a few months and let me see what I can do.

Yeah, no, I love that. And that’s again, you’ve been brutally honest throughout this entire interview, and you’ll never hear someone who sells SEO saying it doesn’t work for some people because that goes against their model. But what Steve has said there is the truth. In fact, you could apply that to all marketing tactics. What works very well in North Carolina might not work well in California, and it’s about finding the right fix for each of those.

And let me just say this at Scale Con, I don’t remember the speaker’s name, but he did SEO or does SEO and he was on stage speaking, and then when he mentioned the website in New York, he goes, I got this website, and I’m like, you’re the one, because I knew the website and I was like, man, I’m like, this guy must’ve spent some serious money because I was reading and I’m looking through the back links and everything, and I’m like, he’s on number one position. I’m like, this guy must’ve spent some serious money, and there’s the guy responsible for it. I thought that was hilarious.

I love that. And I hope you did the decent thing, I hope you stole his laptop and deleted his website, because that’s the right thing to do? Steve, you’ve been just so open and just been a delight to have as a guest. I’d love to get you back on in the future. Let’s just finish off by obviously some MSPs listening to this, watching this may want to have a chat with you about SEO. We’ve already said, obviously it is almost like a fun side project for you, more than a highly commercial service. But what’s the best way to get hold of you? And obviously, Tech Tribe is a great place and anyone that’s in Tech Tribe knows you’re there, but for someone who’s not in Tech Tribe, because apparently there are some MSPs who haven’t yet joined Tech Tribe, what’s the best way to get hold of you?

So you can visit theSEOITguy.com, it’s very fitting. I only work with IT companies. I only work with IT companies on a local level. And just like my IT business where I only work with small business clients, it’s kind of the same thing on the IT side, I have no problem working with a sole practitioner, which I have. The guy in Asheville closed something like four new clients two months ago as a result of organic searches. So yes, it does work, but it takes a lot of work to get there, and as I learned from him and other Tribers that I’m helping getting more leads, I kind of put that all together. So that’s how you can get in touch with me. Just go there and fill out the form or email me. Amazing. I have, and I’ll just say one other thing. 

This is turning into a full-time business and a real business, and it’s a totally separate business from my IT business. I know you want to go, Paul, but given my age and experience, I have no problem working with other IT business being neutral. I’m not looking to get anything out of or steal any ideas or anything because to be honest with you, I am just so indifferent at this point of being in the business for 25 years. So yeah, I do have an in-house team that I trained, and we do a lot of work. It’s not a pet project, it is something real, that’s all.

Okay. My apologies. I made an assumption there.

No, no problem.

When you assume you make something of you and me, we all know that. So thank you, Steve. Thanks again for coming on the show. And listen, if on your travels, if you ever make your way over to the UK, please let me know so that we can go and have a beer together. The only downside of that is we don’t really have mountains in the UK. We’ve got small hills. That’s all we’ve got.

Ah, man. Okay. Well, I’ve climbed, there’s 58 Fourteeners, which is 14,000 ft mountains in Colorado, which is where I live now, I moved, and I have climbed 26 of them, and I’m way behind on my schedule. But this summer, I’m probably going to get to maybe 35, and I’m hoping to climb all 58, probably within the next few years. So side goal.

And a small English hill should be added onto that as a goal. Definitely.

Sure, man. Do you guys drink warm beer or is that just a rumour out there?

It’s just a rumour. Just a rumour.

Okay. Okay.

Welcome to Episode 283 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Just a warning, this is not the MSP growth advice you were expecting. As a busy MSP it’s all about getting things done and maximising your time, right? Well, sometimes yes, but are you ready to hear about a shocking way to grow that is the exact opposite. Because sometimes the fastest way to grow your MSP is to do as little work as possible.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m a bit of a productivity junkie. Since way before I started my first business 20 years ago I’ve been reading books and listening to advice about how to get things done and constantly tweaking my productivity stack, if you’d like to call it that. I mean, the software that I use, of course. And you go back to the turn of the century when I was, obviously I’m very old now, but I was running a radio station back then and I was completely trapped in having too much work to do without enough time to do it. And that was actually what drove me to look at what are other people doing and how do they manage their time better.

What used to be called time management back then, we now call it productivity, but it’s all the same thing really. We all have exactly at the same 24 hours in every day, and yet many people get a lot more done in their 24 hours than you and I might in ours. Why is that? Why does the work week pass so quickly week after week after week?

The people who get the most things done are actually doing the smallest number of tasks, but they work on the tasks that make the biggest difference.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? And the reason they know which tasks to work on is because they make sure they spend plenty of time being idle.

You see, I said this was growth advice that you weren’t expecting… to get more done, you should do less? That doesn’t make sense, except it does. The core problem with tackling productivity with a view of I must get lots more done, is that you get trapped in being busy. And this is especially risky for an MSP because the very nature of your work is to be reactive and to be caught up with lots of details. And yes, I know they really do matter, and because of that you can easily fill your day with getting hundreds of small things done. But are they the things that move the needle? Are they the things that help you win more new clients, get those clients to buy from you more often, and get those clients to spend more every single time they buy? The chances are that they’re not. All of those little things, yes, they’re important and someone somewhere needs to do them and be across all of that detail, but that doesn’t have to be you, the business owner.

In fact, your job is to identify what the big things are that will grow the business. And then make sure you have enough personal time, and the business has allocated enough resource – that’s human people resource, time resource and cash resource – to make those things happen. And that’s very difficult to do when your mind is constantly moving from task, to task, to task, to task. In fact, it’s impossible. And that’s why you need to be idle. And when I say being idle, I don’t mean lying on the couch doing nothing, having a nap. My idea of being idle means just not doing work. I like to be idle by taking a long walk or going for a run, or perhaps even going to the cinema. How can I be idle while I’m watching an MCU film? Well, I can because I’m concentrating on the Avengers. I’m giving my brain space to think about stuff while I’m doing something else. And that’s really what I mean when I say you need to be idle.

As the leader of the business, it’s critical that you find time and protect that time on a regular basis to actively think about your business, but also to think about anything but the business. You can’t really do that when you’re with your family or socialising. So you do need time on your own. And you can think of it as processing time. You load the business’s goals and problems into your brain. In fact, they’re already probably top of your mind for most of the time anyway. And then you make sure that you have plenty of idle time to go and reflect on those problems. Let’s call those problems, opportunities. Every problem seems easier and more exciting when you reframe it as an opportunity.

So on a very regular basis, I put aside time in my schedule for this. In fact, I do it most weeks and it tends to be towards the end of the week. I’ll find a few hours to go for a long walk or go for a run and reflect on the business. What are we trying to do? What’s holding us back? What are the problems/opportunities, and what can I as the leader do to move everything forward? And if I don’t know the answers, that’s my brain telling me that I haven’t had enough idle time to focus on that. So go to the cinema. Hey, thanks brain. So tell me, is this something that you already do or should you be building into your schedule this active idle time?

Tell me, are your ears burning? They could be. Well, your MSP’s ears to be exact. Do you know everything that’s being said about your MSP online? Loads of MSPs have discovered information about their business online that they had no idea was there. Are you ready to find out about yours? Let’s dive into the easy way to keep track of what your clients and prospects are saying about you.

When was the last time you Googled your MSP? And by that I mean you put your business name in speech marks so that you get exact hits on your name and then you check every single page of Google results that comes up.

Every MSP owner I’ve ever asked to do this has discovered something that they didn’t know about.

It might be a bad review that was left on some obscure review platform they didn’t know about, or it might be a mention of them somewhere. There’s always something. Just before recording today, I did it for my MSP Marketing Edge and I discovered a Reddit thread about us. Now you want to see exactly what’s being said about you until you run out of mentions of your business.

This is called your digital footprint. And the reason you must be on top of this is because some of your potential future customers will do this before they’ll sign a contract with you. Of course, your footprint is going to change all the time, which is why it’s worth repeating this on a six month basis, or you could partly automate it. Here’s the easy way to do that.

Just set up a Google alert for your business name. So every time there’s a mention of you somewhere, you get an email. Now, this isn’t perfect and it will sometimes miss mentions, but it’s a good way to set and forget the process of checking your digital footprint. Just make sure that you put your business name in speech marks.

While you are there, why don’t you do that for your name? Unless you’ve got a very Googleable name like Paul Green, there’s lots of Paul Greens around… there are Paul Green shoes, did you know that? But if you’ve got a slightly less common name, you could definitely do that. And while you’re setting that up, why not do it for your competitors as well? Pick out your top three or five competitors, put their names in speech marks in a Google alert, and every time they’re mentioned on the web, you’ll be told about it too.

Featured guest: Melanie Curtis helps driven professionals access their massive untapped potential. A former investment banker turned stunt-woman, world-record pro skydiver, turned keynote speaker, life coach, author, activist and entrepreneur. She has jumped out of an airplane over 12,000 times, and has travelled the globe as a headlining professional athlete coaching thousands of people over the last 30 years.

Melanie co-founded the Trust the Journey podcast, where she and guests share in depth about their deep healing as a crucial part of accessing the true expanse of our human potential. Underpinning it all, Melanie deeply loves people, her family above all else (including her cat, Matil).

Running an MSP is tough, really tough. There’s so much to do and so many conflicting demands on you as the owner. And yet, if you want to last 20, maybe 30 years doing this, you can’t operate at full capacity all the time. You can see why, right?

My special guest today has a unique insight into how MSP owners set themselves up to not just survive, but thrive over three decades of business ownership.

I am Melanie Curtis and I’m a keynote speaker on untapped potential.

And that sounds like a proper job that does with real responsibility, having to actually stand on a stage in front of people. I’ve only done that once in the MSP world and it terrified the heck out of me, although I’m looking forward to doing it again. But good for you, Melanie. Thank you so much for joining us.

A proper job.

That’s what you’ve got me. I just talk nonsense on this podcast and stuff. But yes, thank you for joining us. You and I, we’re connected by a very good friend of yours and someone that I’ve known for years but never actually met yet in real life, whose name is Justin Esgar. He is based out in New York, and he’s just one of the most entrepreneurial MSPs that I’ve ever met. He’s an amazing guy and he’s always connecting me to good people. And he’s like, you have to get Melanie on the show. And having talked to you for just a few minutes, I can see why he did that.

So today we’re going to talk about the hell of being a business owner. And actually someone like Justin, as you and I were just saying, Justin is not your average business owner. He’s very entrepreneurial. He’s got 12 businesses, he’s got 50,000 ideas a day and act on 10,000 of them. And that’s not the average business owner. The average MSP owner is working in their business more than they’re working on their business. There’s a certain element of they’re trapped within the business. There’s a certain element of where is the growth going to come from, why is it so difficult to get things done? So that’s what I want to explore with you today. Let’s first of all just establish who you are, why you are able to come onto the podcast and talk about stuff like this. So you’ve been working with business owners for, is it a couple of decades now?

Yeah, I mean, I joke but also I’m very upfront in the sense that entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. I like to think about it as I really get to do it, I think of it as a big creative project. But I’m also a person who is into doing big things and being challenged in that whole, I don’t know if you’ve heard the term “type 2 fun”, but it’s basically a term that outdoor enthusiasts use that means things that are only fun after they’re over. So it’s that idea of doing hard things like a Spartan race or climbing a mountain or writing a book. And it stinks during it, but it is so fulfilling, so rewarding because you really stretch yourself and grow. And I think entrepreneurship is a lot like that. And so I think it’s important to build skills around how do we make it less hard when we know it’s going to be hard no matter what? How do we self validate? All those skills really matter if we care about being a sustainable business owner over time.

Yeah, I like that. I like that. I’ve never heard of the phrase type 2 fun before. You throw yourself out of planes, don’t you? That’s your type two fun.

Yeah. Yeah, so outdoor enthusiasts use it most because of climbing mountains and stuff like that, but it doesn’t have to be that. It’s really just something that’s really hard that you’re happy about, proud of after. You know what I mean?

And what’s type 1 fun?

Type 1 fun is stuff that is fun while it’s happening, laughing with friends, going to a water park, dancing, stuff like that. Apparently there’s a term type 3 fun that means it’s never fun. Not fun during, not fun after. I don’t even know why that’s on the list, but apparently that’s a thing too.

Well, type 3 fun sounds like my first marriage because that wasn’t fun during it and it certainly wasn’t fun after I’d given her all of my money, but I don’t talk about that. Okay, so let’s talk about type 2 fun in the context of being a business owner. Because if you’re going to be a business owner for 10, 20 years, which for most of us is the goal, and I’m speaking to you in my 20th year as a business owner, you can’t wait till it’s over. You can’t wait till you’re 65 and you’ve sold the business and you’ve retired to have fun because that’s just a waste of our life. So the MSPs and the other kinds of business owners you work with, what are the things that stop it being fun while we’re doing it?

Yeah, I think honestly we need to validate our humanity throughout anything that we’re doing that’s challenging and anything that we care about. You know what I mean? Why do we get into entrepreneurship in the first place? I don’t know about every MSP owner’s motivations obviously, but for me…

Entrepreneurship is this avenue to achieve my goal of freedom, being my own boss, being in charge of my own destiny and in control of my own time.

That is highly, highly valuable to me. And so I consistently try to remember that that is what I’m doing it for. I get to go to my mom’s house and have birthday cake with her and do a client call in the basement and get to be there and have that quality time with her that I can never get back. So I’m still running my business. Obviously I have a remote business that’s a different animal in itself, so not everyone has that, some people have brick and mortar. But I would invite people when they’re in the struggle of real and true entrepreneurship and really being like, where’s the next client going to come? Or scarcity fear like, oh, cashflow is an issue, or man, we just lost a client. Those things are very, very real. And so I want to validate that, I don’t want to dismiss that by saying, oh, just figure out how to feel happy and build skills of validating yourself. Because like I said, it’s a very real thing. So that’s an important thing to care about, to honour it, but it’s also important to grow our skills around making that stuff not as hard and helping ourselves shift our mind to things that are actually going to help us.

One thing I talk about a lot is staying detached from the outcome. Which can feel really weird when you’re like, well, I have attachment to the outcome. I want to make money and pay my mortgage and support my family and put food on the table and whatever, live this dream experience, all that’s valid too. So it’s important to stay detached and flexible while also really shifting and thinking about what we can control. If you’re talking about marketing, where’s the next client going to come? The truth is we never know. We will never know where exactly the next client will come. We don’t know who’s going to say yes, there’s a person over there but we can’t control whether they’re going to say yes or like us or think we’re smart. We just can’t. We can learn and go, what can I do and what’s in my control such that I think it is most likely that this potential customer or this potential client, this lead, is going to feel motivated or connected to what I’m sharing and offering and feel motivated to take steps forward with me.

And yet as business owners and every single business owner on the planet that has ever been will agree that owning a business is a very personal thing. It’s a baby, isn’t it? It’s a child. And as I said to you, I’m in my 20th year and I’ve learned the lesson the hard way 50,000 times that I’ve got to slightly emotionally detach from the business, and yet I don’t, even now at the age of 50, with all this experience with a great life around me, there are evenings I catch myself sitting there feeling anxiety about a business that’s actually really successful in the grand scheme of things. But the anxieties, because it’s not quite going as fast as I want in the direction I want. And I can imagine if it was 10 times the size, I’d still feel that because I’ve felt that anxiety when it was 10 times smaller than it is now.

And I know I’m not the only business owner. I’ve had many beers and many conversations with thousands and hundreds of other business owners and we all feel the same. So it’s a common thing and it reflects the care and the love and the attention that we have, because very few of us start a business for money, money is a very pleasant side effect and part of it. But you are absolutely right, we started it for freedom, we started for control. So how do we actually do that detaching without disconnecting ourselves from the business emotionally?

Yeah, that’s a great question. One of the things that I talk about relative to doing big things, untapped potential, stuff like that, is we have to talk about what gets in our way. One of the things that gets in our way is that patterned thinking, that sort of autopilot. When I talk about this, teach about it, when I think about patterned thinking, trenched neural pathways, I describe it as a big heavy truck goes into a field during a really big rainstorm and the wheels sink into the field and they create these really deep grooves in the land. Then two weeks go by and it’s sunny and beautiful and it doesn’t rain at all and those grooves where the wheels were harden, and that is basically what a trenched neural pathway is like. It’s really tough to sort of get the wheels back out of it. It’s kind of tough to grind down the edges so that it’s not as intense. So those moments of, oh man, I continue to feel anxiety or I continue to focus on this thing that always causes me stress, I would coach people to look at that as something that they can work on over time to just sand down the hard edges of that thinking.

But this is the thing is it happens over time. This is me calling people into a skill building thing of I have to, with frequency, access these ideas that are alternative to this trench. If I’m constantly in scarcity fear or I’m constantly thinking the client’s going to not say yes to my pitch or whatever thing comes up, we have to really work on what is the alternative thought that actually supports me. And again, it’s tough because I’m not just saying positive affirmations, I’m talking about we have to actually believe it, otherwise it’s not going to really help us. But one of the things is a habitual thought. You know how a person will text you and it’ll be like, “call me” and your brain will be like, somebody is dead. I don’t know about you. I’m trying to get my mom to stop texting me, call me. I’m starting to believe that no one is dead when she does that. But still, it’s a version of a thought that I want to undo a response.

And so when we go into stuff like type 2 fun – chosen challenges, skill building, iterative things – over time we know baked into that we are not going to have the outcome short term. We know that the experience of that is waiting a while for the outcome. And so that kind of buys us into the persistence of what it takes to actually make that deeper change. So an example of that at the end is like you’re faced with a challenge and then your brain automatically thinks, I know I can do that. That’s something we can prove over time and experience. Like you said, I’m a skydiver and world record holder, I’ve run the New York Marathon, I’ve done lots of things. I’m an entrepreneur for 20 years. That’s hard. So over time, and I’m not saying it takes 20 years, but over time, what I’m saying is that we can prove to ourselves these new thoughts and then we have to kind of consciously care about connecting to them.

Yeah, no, I love that. I know you help MSPs and other business owners with exactly this, and we’ll talk about what you actually do in a second, but for everybody who’s watching this on YouTube or listening to the podcast, give us a single step, a practical thing, and this is always the hardest thing, isn’t it? I mean, everything you’ve said so far I agree with, and then I’m racking my brains thinking, what’s the practical step to get started? Now, obviously you do this for a living, so you tell us, where would you get started with that? How would you identify, I’ve got an issue here, and how would you start to tackle standing down those grooves?

Yeah, so first self awareness. If we recognise a discomfort, a fear, something that we’re in resistance to, we can’t have it be unconscious to us. We have to be like, that’s a thing. And then we have to pause and take time to step back from the thing in order to reflect on it, to get more of an understanding, of a conscious awareness of the situation, in order to determine steps that might actually make it better. Usually people just think this stinks, or I’m afraid of this and I’m just going to keep doing autopilot, the same thing that I always do. We have to take that time to step back. So that’s one thing. The other thing I mean is very basic physiology. We can interrupt a trigger response with three simple breaths, really taking that inhale and then that longer exhale, that automatically interrupts our fight or flight response which gives us a little bit more space to insert our conscious choice. Now, I’m not suggesting that’s easy.

Have you read the book Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl? It’s a really powerful book. It’s basically his insights from being in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. And one of the quotes that’s in that book is really well-known and powerful, and it’s about this, between stimulus and response, there is a space, in that space is our power to choose our response, in that choice lies our growth and freedom. It’s not exactly the quote, but the point is we have to open up that space and insert conscious choice. If we don’t know what to do, we have to figure out what to do. If we can’t access a bigger thought or a thought outside of our consciousness, we have to get new thoughts into our consciousness.

I say this a lot, but I believe thinking bigger is a skill. It’s not just some thing that’s cool and some life coachy thing to suggest. It’s like I can’t access potential and I can’t access new ideas and breakthrough solutions for myself entrepreneurially or in my life in any way if I’m not opening my mind to things I don’t know about. Google something random. Listen to an audible book about a business owner and hear his humanity and her humanity and their stories, and see yourself in those stories so that you start to believe you’re capable. That is a big thing I recommend to clients all the time. Go see some art, do something creative. There’s a million things that I could suggest that starts to bring new ideas into our brains. Honestly, you have to start somewhere, this podcast is a good place to start, and more business podcasts, more entrepreneur podcasts, get those stories, which will most likely spark an idea for you.

That’s amazing, thank you. And that’s a great book suggestion there – Man’s Search for Meaning. I’m going to get that on Audible as soon as our interview is finished, and then take it out on a five mile run so I can have some type 2 fun and sweat a lot as well. Melanie, thank you so much. You’ve been an absolutely fantastic guest. Just briefly tell us what do you do to help MSPs who own their own business and what’s the best way for us to get in touch with you?

Yeah, thank you so much. Yes, my website is melaniecurtis.com. You can email me directly if you like that most. It’s [email protected]. So yeah, I’ve been a coach, executive coach, business coach for about 20 years. I also facilitate mastermind groups for people that are interested in that, and I’m a speaker, so I can come in and be a professional development facilitator talking about untapped potential like I mentioned before. But really it’s about helping actual humans do the things and really feel connected to what we get to do, that freedom of being an entrepreneur and really enjoying that.

Andrew owns an MSP in Utah, and by the sound of his question he’s in a lovely position and obviously thinking ahead to the future. His question is: What can I read to prepare myself for exit?

Great question. I started my first business in 2005, and I did actually sell that in 2016, and I’m going to be honest with you, the sales process, it was a bit of a nightmare. And I don’t think I was fully prepared for it at all, in fact, I know I wasn’t fully prepared for it. So when I’m involved in my next sale, which is many years away at this point, I know I’ll be a lot more prepared for that process, partly because I’ve been through it, but also because I will do a lot of research. I’ll read a lot of books, and if you are thinking of selling up in the next two to three years, I suggest you start the work now, preparing yourself for that.

There are some books that I recommend that you read, and they will help you to make your business more valuable to a prospective buyer, but also help you understand how selling a business is actually more of a marketing and sales exercise than it is a financial exercise. That’s not what your CPA/accountant will say. He or she will see it as a financial exercise, but actually you’ve got to attract a potential buyer and present your business in a way which makes it seem something they really, really want. And of course, business brokers, they don’t think that way either, which is a real pity.

So here are the books I recommend you read. These are great books to get the right mindset and start to think which things you need to improve in your business before you actually put it up to sale. The first is Built to Sell by John Warrillow. In fact, this is the best book on this subject. It focuses on the work that you need to do now and over the next couple of years in order for a successful exit down the line. And what’s wonderful is that it’s all about systemising, standardising, and simplifying your business. And if you get those three things right across the whole business, that actually makes the business more enjoyable to own. In fact, one of the things that I’ve come to realise after reading that book is if you can get a business that runs by itself and thrives by itself without you needing to be there, why would you want to sell that business?

Also, look at John Warrillow’s follow-up book that’s called The Art of Selling Your Business. And then there’s another one I can recommend, it’s called Finish Big by Bo Burlingham. It’s less practical, but I have to say it’s a really enjoyable read.

Welcome to Episode 282 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

If growing your MSP was like flying a plane, would you focus on building the biggest engine or just learning how to fly higher?

Most MSPs assume the answer is raw power, more technical skills, better tools, deeper expertise. But strangely, some of the most profitable MSPs aren’t even run by technicians.

So what’s really keeping some MSPs grounded while others climb higher and higher? If it’s not just technical know-how, then what is it? Stick around because once you see this, you’ll never look at your business the same way again.

I’ve made it a deep habit to follow, read, listen, and learn from as many people as I can across my business career.

In fact, I kind of wish this was a habit that I had as a teenager or in my early twenties, but there we go. And it does mean that over the last 25 years or so, I have read an insane amount of business and marketing books and blogs and courses, all sorts of other stuff. I’ve just been absorbing knowledge like a sponge. And of course, a huge amount of that knowledge has come into my head and left my head. Although I guess all the good ideas that you have, they get mashed together and they influence the way that you think and therefore the way that you act.

Anyway, there was a specific phrase that I heard, and it was quite at the beginning of my learning career about 25 years ago, but it stuck with me, and it’s been very present in my mind for a very long time. If you are under the age of 30, please don’t laugh at me. As I tell you the delivery method on which I heard this piece of advice, it was actually on a cassette tape. I used to get a cassette sent to me, I think it was every week or every two weeks, by a guy called Peter Thompson, and he was huge in the field of personal development here in the UK, sort of back at the turn of the century. He’s actually still around today, I’m guessing he must be in his eighties, something like that, late seventies, early eighties. But back then I absorbed and loved every single thing that he put out.

One day listening to one of his cassette tapes in the car, he said this sentence, and this is the thing that stayed with me all these years, this is what Peter Thompson said. He said, it’s your attitude and not your aptitude that determines your altitude. Is that insane or what? Because think what that means. It means that being successful is less to do with being skilled and more to do with the way that you think. Now, speaking as one business owner to another, what do we define as success? Well, I believe it’s in you having enough spare cash and time to be able to do the things you really want to do. And in order to achieve those things, if you believe that phrase, then it’s your attitude that determines how quickly you’ll get there and in fact, whether you will even get there at all. Do you agree with this? I think it has an enormous amount of truth in it.

Certainly I’ve had a ton of failures over the years, I’ve had some good successes as well, but it’s the failures that I’ve learned the most from. That’s because I fostered a deliberate attitude that I need to be constantly improving myself and my business and what we do and what I do and how I operate, and that’s a never ending process. There’s always something new to learn and to implement. Maybe that’s been my greatest success is actually having that attitude, that attitude of constant improvement, which means I never want to stand still with anything.

I’ll tell you one thing though. I’ve spoken to so many MSPs and other business owners in the last 25 years, and the most successful of them, using that definition of success we were just talking about, the most successful of them are not always the most skilled. They’re the ones who think the right way about their business and therefore they take the right actions. Now, please don’t think that I’m saying that skills are not important, of course they’re important, but you personally don’t need all the skills. You don’t have to be able to rewire a cabinet or configure a server in order to grow a fantastic MSP, that gives you the lifestyle you most want to live. Along the way you can hire people who can do those things for you.

So it’s your attitude and not your aptitude that determines your altitude. What do you think about this? Is it going to change the way that you approach growing your MSP?

This seems so tempting. Finding new MSP clients by using AI to make outbound calls on your behalf. Really clever stuff with no humans involved. And there are loads of really good AI robodialler solutions out there. But the big question is, should you? Is this a valid smart marketing tactic or could it do harm to your MSP? I’ve actually been using a robodialler myself and the results I’ve experienced and the potential opportunities out there for your MSP may just surprise you.

I’m a big fan of MSPs making outbound phone calls. In fact, it’s the entire third step of my simple MSP marketing strategy. Build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. Why? Because one of the biggest marketing problems that you have is reaching the right person at the right time with the right message. You want to be there at the very moment they are feeling negative about their incumbent MSP, and that will be very lucky timing, right? Well, actually, I don’t believe in luck. I believe in being prepared and taking action.

The easiest way to get lucky is to make 50 outbound phone calls to your audiences every day.

This is how you stack the odds in your favour, you keep picking up the phone asking open questions about the business and their technology. And at least once a week, if not twice a week, you should get lucky with someone saying, oh, it’s so weird you called because…

Finding someone to make outbound calls, well frankly it is difficult. And if you go for a telemarketing agency, often they overdeliver the first two months and then underdeliver for the rest of time. My question is this, should you use an AI robodialler to make outbound calls? As it stands today my answer is no, and maybe that will change in the years ahead, but this answer of no is based on a couple of months of my business using an AI robodialler. We were doing it this time last year. We signed up to something called Voxia after seeing it featured in a marketing newsletter, and there are of course alternatives out there. But we gave the AI agent a desired flow and outcome for the call. We gave it some specific phrases to use if possible. We loaded it with FAQs, frequently asked questions, with of course the answers. And we linked it to a Calendly to book appointments in. So its mission was to call MSPs in the US and try to book them a 15 minute zoom with my colleague Ben. And that was to talk about the MSP Marketing Edge, which is our business.

So it wasn’t really doing any selling as such. Its job was qualifying people, checking they were an MSP because we just put some cold data in that we’d bought from Apollo, and its job was to call those people, qualify them, and then actually set up an appointment with Ben. Voxia was very clever and very adaptable. In fact, one MSP, he said that his perfect clients were on Sesame Street. He’d obviously spotted it was an AI agent, and Voxia kept making humorous references to Sesame Street for the rest of the call. But I’ll be honest, it didn’t work for us. And here are three reasons why.

The first, is that the delay was slightly too long. The AI would ask a question, the human would reply, and then the gap before the AI spoke again, it was just a fraction too long and lots of humans started talking again because we kind of feel like we want to fill the gap, right? But that then fractured the conversation. And in recordings we could hear the humans losing interest. And I know that the physics of AI calling make this hard, but I do expect this problem to vanish in the years ahead. Maybe the AI will predict and pre-prepare dozens of possible answers based on the first few words that the human is saying, or maybe it’ll start talking a fraction before it anticipates the human to stop speaking so it feels more like a natural conversation.

The second reason was that the people we were calling, MSPs, very quickly spotted it was an AI. Now, maybe that was because of the delay or maybe it was something else that didn’t feel quite right. It’s very hard to pinpoint what makes for “uncanny valley”. Have you heard of that before? That feeling that this is an AI, it’s not a real human, and it is a feeling, it’s not a thought. A surprising number of MSPs did ask, are you an AI? And maybe it is just that MSPs are super smart and they’re looking out for this, whereas normal business owners and managers, they’re not necessarily so aware. I don’t know.

And then the third reason was that during our campaign, and this is the absolute clincher for us, AI robocallers were actually banned in the US. This happened about a year ago. So of course the technology is going to get better and better, and it’s probably already better now than when we tried it a year ago. And maybe a more obvious use of this is not for outbound sales calls, which obviously they’re illegal in the US and may become illegal in other parts of the country as well.

But what if you use them to handle inbound calls? What if every user who called your help desk is answered by an AI and asked a number of basic questions so that your technicians don’t have to? And those questions could be things like, Tell me what the problem is, and it could then respond with, Oh, I’m really sorry to hear you’ve got that problem. Let’s get this sorted for you. Is it just affecting you or is it affecting anyone else? And then it could ask, Is it stopping you getting on with your work or can you work around it for a bit? So essentially we’re just classifying the call. Then the AI could either transfer the caller through to their colleague, which is of course your human technician, or they could log it as a ticket and give the caller a real rough expectation of how long it could take to get this problem fixed. And that could be based on your current ticket levels, which would be really smart.

How much technician time could you save by eliminating 80% of phone calls, all of those first phone calls that you get? How easy would it be to offer this 24/7? With the AI telling callers late at night or early in the morning when humans will be in to fix the problem? Is this something you would want integrated into your PSA?

Featured guest: Andrew Hartman is the founder of Time Boss, a training organisation that helps leaders and their teams take control of their time to get the results they want without overwhelm. Andrew founded Time Boss after burning out several times in early stage startups, even losing his sense of smell for a season. He has taken all he has learned over the years to build a system to help business leaders and their teams avoid the same mistakes, and instead find their Highest Sustainable Pace, making more progress on their top priorities and experiencing more peace in their day to day schedule.

Andrew has been an early stage startup COO for 10+ years supporting the launch of software and technology

How often do you get to the end of day running your MSP and there’s just too much work left to do? Sure, you’ve got the basic work done and the clients are happy, but you’ve had another day where you haven’t grown your business or worked on the big projects that matter the most. If this is you, then there’s one big change that you need to put in place, and my guest today is an expert at saving business owners from the chaos of their business. The next five minutes could change your life forever.

Hi, I’m Andrew Hartman. I am the founder of Time Boss, and we help MSPs get the results that they want without overwhelm.

I love that, great company name, Time Boss. As soon as I saw that company name, when you and I were talking about this interview, I thought, oh, I love that. And I love the pitch as well, helping MSPs to get done what they need to get done. So if I was to boil it down and sort of introduce you to someone outside of our world, are you someone who helps people be more productive or do you help them make better use of your time or is it something different?

It’s really a little of both. Everyone wants something, we all have things that we want. We can name it. We want our MSP to grow, we want higher client satisfaction, we want to have better recruitment… whatever it is, every MSP has something that they want. All of those things are on the other side of time. And so if we don’t have a right relationship with time, if we don’t know how to navigate it, if we don’t know how to break things down into manageable tasks that we can make happen, if we don’t have a good sense of our capacity, we’re not going to get those things and we’re going to end up overwhelmed.

We help people think differently about time to get the results that they want without overwhelm.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. How did you get here? What’s your backstory? I’m going to guess it’s the rags to riches story that you used to be the most disorganised, time poor person and then you have a revelation and change your life. Is it that or is it something else?

Of course it’s that. So the best products come from solving our own problems. So I spent my career in early stage software companies prior to coming to being at MSPs. I’m actually a fractional COO at an MSP now. But prior to that, I was in early stage software companies, short runways, high expectations, got to deliver, no margin for error, and I was absolutely cooking. I was so overwhelmed. And I looked around and everyone was overwhelmed. It was how people operated. Stress was fuel. It was how we made things happen. If you weren’t overwhelmed, you weren’t working hard enough. And that served me to a point, but eventually I started hitting my red line like a lot of people do, where you just realise, hey, this is taking up more than I want it to take of my health, of my relationships.

I’d come home from work, I’d be physically home, but not emotionally home. I’d be totally exhausted, didn’t have anything to bring to my family or my friends. It started impacting my sleep, and I ended up losing my sense of smell for six months because of stress. I could feel it coming on, pre covid. This is in the 2000s. I could feel it coming on from stress and really stress will do wacky things to us. It is a yellow flashing light that we need to change. Hypertension, headaches, IBS, you name it, it’ll do all kinds of things for our body.

So I knew it had to be different. I didn’t know what to do. I knew I had to keep delivering results. Probably like a lot of the MSP leaders listening, you feel like I have to keep delivering results. I can’t change. But I knew it had to be different. So for me, I was a COO at the time. I was all about how do we blend a process and people, and so I said for myself, I have got to figure out a way to get results without this overwhelm. And it started me on a journey to build out the system. Took me 10 years to build it for myself, realised it was incredibly valuable for me, it was incredibly valuable for my teams. Others started asking me to coach them on it, and it led us into this business called Time Boss now, where we help teams learn and adopt this framework to get those results they want without overwhelm.

I love this. And you talking about your experience in early stage software I think is very similar to the experience in the first few years of running your MSP. And you obviously know this because of the people you’re working with. I talk to MSPs almost every day, people I already know and new people. And some who’ve been running their MSP for let’s say 10 years, 10 years is a mature business, and normally by that point they’ve got themselves to a level of comfort in terms of the amount of work. For some of those people, that level of comfort is working 30 hours a week or 20 hours a week, and those businesses are flying. Because they’ve had to build good teams around them, they’ve had to go from the 60 hour weeks to the 20 hour weeks and put in place things to make sure the clients are even more delighted than when they were there.

But then sometimes I’ve talked to people who are 10 years in and they’re still doing 50 hours and they’re crazy nuts doing things like they’re still doing help desk, not just the odd hour here or there’s cover, but they’ll be like, oh yeah, I’ve got a cover help desk this week. This week! Why would you do that? You’ve got 12 people on your team. Why would you do that? Oh, it’s because, because, because… And so they’ve never got time, and you’re right, it’s all about time. They’ve never got the time to a) think, b), reflect, c) actually look at the big picture and say, right, I’ve only got 20 more years or 30 more years left on the planet. This is the life I want to lead. This is what I need in order to live that life, and how quickly can I get there while delighting my clients, delighting my staff and delighting my family? Is that your experience of MSPs as well?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s fascinating, I think MSPs because of the nature of them, most of them are started by founders, and founders are still involved unless they’ve exited. And when that founder started, they had to wear all the hats. So the habits that they operated on at the beginning of their business was I must do it all. This business will die unless I do it all – unless I’m on help desk, unless I do projects, unless I do sales, unless I do marketing – all the things. If an MSP founder or a leader that’s scaling within that business isn’t careful, they’re just going to continue to hold onto those things because they’re afraid if they let them go, they’re not going to be done as well as they want them to or whatever. And to your point, then they get into that avalanche of there’s too much to do, so I don’t have time to delegate. They never change. And so really our experience of time, I love what you said, delight customers, delight clients, and delight our family. Whatever you’re getting on that playing field right now is a direct function of your habits related to time. So if you don’t change your habits related to time, your experience of life won’t change. You won’t be pulling out of the help desk. You’ll be up on Saturday night on the 24/7 help desk line talking to clients. It’s just the way it is.

And so the way I say is you both have to change your habits and you have to look at it like time math. There’s so much that has to get done. There’s only so much time. Who are the right people to slot into these roles to make those things happen? And the answer isn’t always you. Dan Sullivan wrote that phenomenal book Who Not How with Ben Hardy, and it’s just the best question to ask. When a new responsibility comes in, the right question for us to ask is who should do this? Not how am I going to get it done? And just thinking differently, those slight little adjustments to how we think about time can dramatically impact our experience of both the results we get from MSP and our experience of life, which both are critical. You can’t have one without the other.

Yeah, I completely agree. And that is an insanely good book. It’s one of the books over on my big bookshelf, which is full of my favourite business books, and that has its place there. Andrew, let’s get into potential solutions. So talk to us about the Time Boss framework, and I appreciate this probably,

if you spent 10 years developing it, it is going to be a very rich and very thorough model, but can you give us an overview and what I’m really looking for as well is what can someone who’s watching this on YouTube or listening to this on the podcast, what are some takeaways that they can get from that which will just make an instant positive difference to their management and perception of how they use their time?

Yeah, I love that question, Paul. Yeah, let me start really high level and then we’ll get incredibly practical with the tool. So it’s really about a couple things. One is the big idea is your highest sustainable pace, and it’s this. If you think like a distance runner, every distance runner has a pace in mind, and an MSP is absolutely a marathon, it’s a distance run. They know that if they sprint out the gate, they’re going to end up doubled over and they probably won’t even finish the race. So just grinding is not an adequate solution for us to get the results we want from our MSP. Now, at the same time, a distance runner is not going to walk a marathon because it’s too slow. You can’t just over optimise on self-care. Hey, I’m not going to feel any stress in 2025. That’s not realistic. We can’t operate that way. We’re not going to get the results that we want.

The only rational way to operate is just like a distance runner, find that pace, that highest sustainable pace where you will get the best results possible in a way that can stay in the game and keep getting it. So we teach highest sustainable pace. The way that we get there is two simple habits. One is a weekly planning meeting and literally that’s where the name Time Boss comes from. When you plan out your week, you become the boss of your future self. You’re literally treating your future self like an employee, and you’re thinking about – How do I set up that individual to be successful? What are the highest leverage activities that they can work on that are going to make the biggest difference for my business?

And we do the work to really map out a realistic week, and there’s all kinds of things that happen within that. That’s what we teach. But when we do that, not everything’s going to fit. There’s only so much time. We are finite human beings. It’s time math again, there’s so much that has to get done and I only have so much time. Then we encourage people to go through a really disciplined process to deal with the items that don’t fit. And most of the time that involves getting others involved in those tasks, really running a high quality delegation process so it’s not just about you working help desk to your analogy, Paul, I love that analogy.

But again, what we often do instead of being our time boss, instead of doing that weekly planning meeting, we just kind of throw ourselves into the week. We open up help desk, we open up our email inbox, we open up Teams, and we just start grinding. And really we’re working other people’s priorities. We’re not working on the things that are actually important to us, and we’re task switching so rapidly we’re wasting so much time, we end up exhausted and we don’t even know what we got done at the end of the day. So by having a weekly planning meeting, again, being that time boss, you’re freeing up your future self to just make the plan happen. You’re creating a great plan for them that they can carry out.

And then we teach another habit called a daily review meeting. If you’ve read Deep Work by Cal Newport, he talks about a daily closedown, and I think that’s so critical at the end of your day, closing down your day where you’re getting everything out of your head back into the system so that you can be fully free to the rest of your life, to be fully present to your family, to your community, to your church, whatever it is you do after work. Having a way to really close down so those things don’t just haunt you all night or all weekend, like these emotional anchors that we can’t get away from.

So those are the habits, and there’s just three simple tools that we use within those habits that we can certainly talk more about. The one very practical thing that I think will instantly reduce overwhelm for an MSP leader that’s listening is this… In the midst of your day, you have two things happening. You have your priorities – the things you actually want to be working on, and you have the chaos that is coming at you – emails, phone calls, systems breaks, clients are mad, spouse needs you, kid gets sick, flat tire, I mean you name it. the things that we can’t stop. That chaos is here to stay, we cannot solve it. And so all of that is happening on top of each other and that chaos makes it so hard for us to focus on our priorities.

So what I suggest when people are planning out their day is they literally plan 20 to 40% of their day for the chaos. And the more control they have over their time, the less of that buffer they need, but literally adding buffer to their calendar that they don’t schedule over, simply to contend with those last second items that are going to come up that they absolutely have to handle. The urgent and important that leader’s responsible to handle. What it does, Paul, it has this magic trick where when we know that there’s time available for us to handle those things, we are so much more likely to try to divert those last second requests coming in into that buffer time so that we can stay focused on our actual priorities.

And it doesn’t always happen that way. System goes down, you’re responsible for it, you just got to handle it. But that is the rare exception and we build our time management habits on the exceptions instead of the average. And so the average leader listening, if you put that buffer in your calendar and you do your best to stay focused on your priorities, and then when those buffer times come up, you could do an hour in the morning, an hour, midday hour at the end of the day, you architect it the way you want, but I promise it will increase your commitment to your actual priorities knowing you have time later to deal with these last second items that are going to come up. So you don’t just switch over to them and work on, you don’t know when you’re going to work on them, but you can actually be confident that I can stay focused on my priorities right now.

Yeah, I absolutely love that. In fact, there’s an MSP I know who does exactly that, and this is a very structured way that you can give your time to your technicians in a way which doesn’t impact on your plan time. So he doesn’t work in his office with his technicians, but they have two specific times of the day, I think it’s like 9.30 in the morning and say 2.30 in the afternoon, where he will jump on a Team’s call and he’ll say to them, if you’ve got any questions about any tickets or any projects or anything, that’s when you do the questions. So don’t send me messages, don’t WhatsApp me, don’t message me on Teams, don’t send me emails, don’t call me. If you call me, I’m not going to answer you. I’m not being an a-hole here, I’m being very, very organised. Because my job is to bring in new clients so I can pay you more, but you’ve got me for an hour a day split into two 30 minute chunks. And guess what happened. When he introduced that first time everyone was on the call and then the second day a few people dropped out of that call because they didn’t really have questions, and the third day there were fewer people and now he probably has one or two questions that come a week out of those sessions. So he’ll dial in and if no one’s there, he’ll just dial out again. Because what it’s done is it’s forced his technicians to ask, can I solve this now or can I talk to a colleague and solve this now or does this need to go to the boss? So he’s eliminated a whole series of things that would’ve been escalated to him if he was more available. So I agree and love everything that you’ve just said there.

My final question for you – Is this ever finished? Now, this is my 20th year in business, and I remember when I started, I was very disorganised, very chaotic. I was a radio presenter, but in the corporate world and you had your day planned for you by the meetings other people were having and all of that stuff. And then suddenly I’m my own boss and I wanted to get things done. I remember working through different systems. I used to use something called RememberTheMilk.com, if you ever remember that, it was an amazing system. Then I was an early adopter of Todoist, which I still use now, and I know that that’s the tool and the tool doesn’t make it, but Todoist has just got better and better over the years. But what I’ve found is I’m 50 now and my priorities have changed, I have a teenage child, I have a girlfriend, I don’t want to work more than the hours I want to work, but I also want to achieve a lot more. And I’ve found that my personal system for getting things done, to quote David Allen, for my productivity system has changed dramatically as my role within the business has changed. Do you see that happening with MSPs and is that a natural, healthy thing?

Absolutely, yes. And you have to constantly evaluate that. Unfortunately what everyone is looking for, I love your comment about the app, the number one question I get asked is what app should I use? And it’s unfortunate that that’s not the solve. We all are looking for that switch to flip and that’s where it never changes. And that’s where with Time Boss, we teach these reflexive habits where you are always on this continuum between making the progress you want and experiencing the peace you want. And you have to be evaluating those systems week over week, month over month, year over year to make the changes necessary so that you stay in that zone, that productive zone you want to be in, where you get the results you want without overwhelm. But unfortunately it’s not a switch you flip. It’s got to evolve over time, because your time’s going to change, your requirements are going to change, your stakeholders are going to change. All of those things influence how we show up and make things happen, and so you just got to be ready to make adjustments.

That makes perfect sense. I am off to see if Remember The Milk still exists because I want a 20-year-old nostalgia hit and I really hope it does exist. While I go and do that, Andrew, just tell us, what do you actually physically do to help MSPs? So you’ve obviously got this incredible framework, but how do you help them implement it and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Yeah, absolutely love it and appreciate the question. So we do a course called Master Your Week for leadership teams and management teams where we take those individuals through the process to learn the Time Boss weekly framework and help them make the structural adjustments to their internal systems, their communication workflows to help them get those results they want without overwhelm.

From there, those leadership and management teams can take it into their teams if they like, or they can bring Time Boss in to lead workshops to train the entire team and then bring them up to speed on it. And then we simply come back monthly or quarterly, and the language I use is de-weed the garden, just help people stay committed to the system. Once they get the results, they don’t want to go back. We essentially become an outsourced accountability partner to help them work through the friction so they don’t backslide. Best thing to do is find me on LinkedIn, Andrew Hartman, or Time Boss, or you can find our website www.timeboss.us and all the details are there as well.

Joyce from an MSP in Dallas is really trying to do loads more marketing on LinkedIn. Her question is: What should I write in my LinkedIn connection request?

Connecting to new people on LinkedIn is a critical way to build your audience, but what should you write in the connection request? There are schools of thought that say you should just use the default message, which actually these days there’s no message at all. Personally, I believe you’re better taking a little time to personalise it, to stand out to the person that you’re trying to reach. And the goal isn’t just adding people, it’s adding people who will engage with you. So here are three LinkedIn connection request examples that you can swipe and try and experiment with.

The first I call a common ground approach. So you say, Hi name, it looks like we both… and then you insert something that you have in common. So just look at their profile, find something that you’ve got in common. It could be that you both live in the same town. It could be that you’re in the same organisation, you both enjoy the same sport. So, I see we both insert something you have in common and then you just say, I want to add you to my professional network or add you to my network.

Approach number two is about connecting to other local business owners because it’s all about what do we identify as, and people who are a business owner in an area tend to identify as a local business owner, Hi name. It looks like we’re both local business owners in town. Shall we connect to see if there’s anything we can do to help each other?

And then the third approach is where you’ve got a mutual connection. This is kind of how LinkedIn used to be back in the day where you’d look to see who else you are connected to or you knew each other in real life, but these days you don’t have to. But it does help if you’ve got that mutual connection because it’s something you can leverage. You say something like, Hi name. It looks like we are both connected to mutual connection name. And then you could, if you actually know this person, you could add a line about how you know them. If you don’t really know them, they’re just one of your other connections, then don’t do that, just finish it by saying, I want to add you to my professional network.

Welcome to Episode 281 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Happy April Fools’ Day. Have you ever wondered if you’re missing out by not doing marketing for your MSP themed around today? I mean, loads of big companies do April Fools’ jokes, that makes it an opportunity right? In my opinion, no. I believe your MSP should avoid April Fools’ Day like the plague, the same with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and any big national or international event. And let me tell you why.

This podcast episode and YouTube video has been released on the 1st of April, 2025, and when I was younger, I always used to really look forward to April Fools’ Day. As a child, it was to play jokes on my family who never found the jokes funny, but then as a young adult, I really used to enjoy the big April Fools’ jokes that companies would try and pull and they would do full page adverts in newspapers.

If you were around in the nineties and naughties, you might remember this.Things like Taco Bell in the US, they announced that they bought the Liberty Bell and they were renaming it, the Taco Liberty Bell, it’s Genius. Or Burger King, they actually launched a left handed burger, so clever. The big tech companies have done this very well in recent years. Samsung said it was going to launch the Galaxy Blade Edge, a phone that’s so thin and sharp that you can also use it as a kitchen knife. And then Tinder, the dating app, they launched a fake height verification tool on April Fools’ Day, although as a former Tinder user, a nutter spotting tool would actually be much more useful.

You might look at all of these gags put together by marketing departments of these big companies and ask yourself, I wonder what we should do to promote our MSP on April Fools’ Day? And there is an easy answer to this. Nothing. And it’s the same answer I would give you if you asked Paul, what should I do to promote my MSP around Thanksgiving… Valentine’s Day… Christmas… the Super Bowl? In fact, any big event that millions of people celebrate at the same time.

The reality is when you do something at the same time that everyone else is doing that thing, then you’re just adding to the noise.

It’s very hard to cut through when everyone is doing the same thing at the same time. And that’s why I never recommend that MSPs jump onto awareness weeks around cyber security, stuff like that, because you have exactly the same problem. If many MSPs are doing the same thing at the same time. It’s impossible to stand out unless you have a massive budget or a massive marketing department, massive marketing resource, something like that. And you don’t have that to what’s the answer?

I believe you should ignore big things that are happening and instead focus your small amount of marketing time and resource into setting up a good solid marketing system for your MSP. If you are constantly building audiences, growing relationships and converting relationships, then you will generate more leads, prospects, and clients in the long term, than if you were to do the odd marketing stunt now and again. And I know that that’s not the sexy, exciting answer that you were hoping to hear, but this is the reality of marketing an MSP in 2025. You can only do exciting, wow, standout things once you have the basics in place. And the vast majority of MSPs simply do not have those basics covered.

Having said that, there is one thing that you could do which can be fun and it can also really make you stand out, and that’s to celebrate a big event many, many months before it happens. So for example, if you send a Christmas card to your clients or your prospects at Christmas, you’re just part the noise. But if you send a Christmas card to them in March and the whole message of the Christmas card is, Hey, we are so on top of tasks that need to be done, that this is the first Christmas card you’ll get this year. Imagine if we were applying our approach to your technology. I mean, that would be a really cool card to send out, right? You could do a Valentine’s card in September because love for technology or good technology exists all year round. You can have some real fun with that, but caveat, that is just a gimmick and something like that will never be as powerful as getting that marketing system set up, so you’re constantly generating new leads for your MSP. That’s the thing to do first. That’s where you should get started.

Perhaps one of the hardest questions that I could ask you is what makes your MSP different from all of your competitors? And I don’t mean in terms of operations or tech stack, I mean from the point of view of the prospect, what makes you a better choice than all your competitors?

Let me share with you three key differences that you can turn into a competitive weapon to make sure you are never scared by this question ever again.

MSP Alliance estimates there are 150,000 MSPs in the world, and as you and I know, an MSP can support any business anywhere in the world, in theory anyway. Which means that when an ordinary business owner or manager has finally given up on their incumbent and they’re ready, willing and able to switch, with so much choice, why would they pick you? This is really a question about differentiation. What makes you a better choice than the other MSPs that they could look at? The problem with differentiation is that you must look at it from the prospect’s point of view and not your point of view. You know that you offer very good strategic advice that your team’s technical superpowers are better and that you have a superior tech stack, but the prospects don’t care about these things.

Instead, they want to know stuff like, Will everything just work? Will my staff stop complaining that their computer is slow? Can I get support if I’m working late at eight at night? Ordinary decision makers pick an MSP based on how they feel about them, and they do this because their brain cannot judge which MSP is better just by fact alone.

Non-technical people find it very hard to assess the competency of a technology company. Make their life easy by giving them a clear, emotional reason why they should pick you.

Here are three ideas to help you do that:

Idea number one is to be the face of the business. Now we know that people buy from people, so give them an authentic person to buy from. This is what I do with my MSP Marketing Edge. There are actually 13 of us on the team, but I’m the pretty face of the business. I’m all over the website. I do the podcast, I do the YouTube videos, I write all of our content so it’s in my voice. And you can do exactly the same in your MSP. And it’s more than just putting your photo everywhere. You want every little bit of communication and content that comes out of the business to reflect your own authentic personality.

When you use your personality to guide your marketing, something special happens. First, your marketing becomes utterly unique. There’s no one else like you and never will be. And another MSP using their personality to guide their marketing will always get a different end result. When prospects consume personality driven marketing, they very quickly decide that either you’re not for them, which is okay, or better, they form a bond with you before they’ve even met you, which is insanely powerful. They get to know you, to like you and to start to trust you months or even years before they consider buying from you. This, just off the back of authentic personality marketing. In fact, their business becomes yours by default and there’s nothing any of your competitors can do to beat that.

Idea number two is to pick a vertical or a niche. Now the power of a vertical can be summarised in three beautiful words, PURE MARKETING FOCUS. When you market to a specific niche, you reach more people and you can have more influence with less effort. Let’s say your MSP’s marketing positions you as an expert in technology for CPAs – accountants, and you show this with a website that’s just about technology for accountants. You’ve got testimonials and case studies from accountants. You’ve got downloadable guides about the software they use every day, a LinkedIn profile that’s only connected to other accountants and only posts about technology for accountants and regular blog content and LinkedIn newsletters, again about technology for accountants.

Any accountant looking at a new MSP would have to check you out if they were aware of you, right? In addition, you’ll find closing the sale easier. Most B2B buying decisions are not made on price alone. Sure, price is a factor, but it’s not the factor. Instead, buyers are looking for the right mix of factors in their IT support partners and one of those is the perceived quality of what you do. And remember, people perceive specialists to be of a higher quality. In fact, they expect to pay more for this.

Quick side note on this, the vast majority of MSPs with a vertical run it alongside their general business, and this is highly recommended as it allows you to dip your toe into the vertical to see if that works for you. Do consider setting up a separate website for your vertical because a page on your general website is okay, but an entire website really sends a message of perceived specialism. If you want to go all in, this method is to marry your market. You stop looking for new general business and just go for the vertical. Now, this is very brave and should only be attempted when you know 110% that you have a good vertical and that they will buy from you. Side note over.

Idea number three, go further than anyone else on the small things that matter the most. Earlier I mentioned that ordinary business owners, ordinary decision makers say things like, Can I get support if I’m working late at eight at night? And that’s an example of a small thing that makes a massive difference to people’s lives. What are the small things that matter to your prospects and how can you go further than anyone else? Can you offer spread out payment terms on hardware by perhaps picking a different distributor that allows you to do that? Can you partner with a business like Uptime Solutions to give you 24 7 help desk while you sleep? Can you send a technician to your client’s site once a month just routinely and they mop up all of those little small tech problems that clients don’t report but they still get annoyed about? And printers, I’m looking at you.

Oh, and on that last one, I know that you don’t want to send a technician to site to find problems because that’s a profit suck. Most MSPs feel that way, and that’s exactly why it would be a smart marketing differentiator. Imagine writing this on your website. We are the only IT support business in your town who will visit your office every month to fix all the small but annoying tech problems before they can interrupt your staff, and we bring cookies.

So tell me which of those three differentiators would work best for your MSP?

Featured guest: Devin Sizemore is the author of Connection Expansion: You Are One Connection Away From Massive Success In Your Life And Business.

Devin is driven by a passion for meaningful experiences, both personally and professionally, he has spent his career building and growing businesses that align with his values. From launching his first marketing agency right out of college to creating innovative consulting practices and a cat cafe, his journey has been defined by a commitment to “adding value” and making a positive impact.

As a firm believer in the power of connections, he is dedicated to helping others succeed through the art of building relationships. The next chapter of his life is focused on fostering a community where one million connections can create lasting, transformative change.

What if there was a marketing strategy that very few MSPs use but could make you unbeatable? What if the strategy could be implemented in just a few hours a week and not only brings you in new business, but makes hundreds of people genuinely think that you are the nicest person in IT?

My special guest today has a unique way of looking at marketing and how you can use human relationships as a powerful marketing weapon.

I’m Devin Sizemore. I am the super connector who helps you become a super connector.

Oh, what a great intro. Welcome to the show, Devin. It’s great to have you here. And we are going to talk about building super connections for your MSP. And I’m going to have to start by asking you, Devin, what is a super connection?

In the world of networking, we’re always so focused on chasing prospects. We have to generate revenue, and so often that’s where we focus. I like to flip that on its head and go, let’s build strategic connections that open up opportunities to lots of prospects. So we go about networking different. It actually makes it easier for you. You’ll get more out of your current network, you’ll build a much bigger and successful future network, and at some point you in your own network will become the connector. And the connector is the person who knows everybody. And so a great outcome of the whole system and process not only is revenue generation, filling meetings, all these other things, but is you become the go-to for everyone in your network.

Yeah, I love that. Well, we’re going to park that for just two minutes and we’re going to come back to that idea in a second and look at what the benefits are of being a super connector and then how you actually do it.

Let’s just delve a little bit more into your background. So in the past, what have you done that’s got you to this position of advising MSPs and other kinds of businesses, how they can be super connectors?

I’m a serial entrepreneur, as some of your listeners may be too. I had a marketing agency straight out of college, bought some agencies and sold, had a cat cafe, a manufacturing company, a coworking space. And in all of these spaces, what I found is I kept finding myself in crowded marketplaces where I was presented with a bunch of traditional marketing strategies – that do work, right when fully optimised and tracked correctly, they work – but I wanted to find a way to be unique and I wanted to be the authority in rooms where none of my competition was playing. And that led me down the path 15 years ago to start building the foundation for the connection expansion system, which exists today. How do we strategically get into these rooms so that you’re not competing?

What’s a cat cafe?

Great question. Yeah, so a cat cafe, I like to relate it to trampoline parks. People can usually think about that. So the cat cafe, you pay per hour to come hang out with the cats. It’s great for people who have allergy issues with their spouse, but they still want to be around animals, senior citizens who can’t have cats, college kids who can’t have animals so they can come and hang out with them. There’s no pressure to adopt, although that’s part of it. So it’s a business my wife and I launched and then we sold it to an employee after six months. So super fun project, very random, but a cool business.

Well, I’ve had a number of cats over the years and my experience of cats is that they’re quite aloof and if you are sitting giving them attention, then they’ll turn their back on you. So I can imagine your cat is full of cats ignoring the humans, which is the main reason the humans are there. But hey, there we go. Maybe someone should open a dog cafe one day and you just have all these dogs just adoring you waiting for food. That could be your next venture there, Devin.

Now you said something really smart about 40, 50 seconds ago you said, you said something about rooms. I want to be the only person in the room talking to someone. Can you say it again?

Yeah, so I want to be the authority in a room where none of my competition’s playing.

I love that. I want to be the authority in a room where none of my competition is. So what does that actually mean? I can grasp the concept of that, but in a real world, what does that mean? Does that mean being in a networking group where there’s no other MSPs or does that mean dominating?… no, okay, you’re shaking your head. So tell me what that kind thing means.

Yeah, let’s do it. And let’s go real specific for your listeners, right? So in the MSP world, let’s say that you want to go after accounting firms. Let’s say that that’s a great niche for you. There’s a lot of data there, typically a lot of machines. So maybe that’s a world you want to play and you just want to go after accounting. You can do the same thing in medical, pick a vertical, it doesn’t matter. But let’s say accounting. The traditional method is you ask for, Hey, I’m looking for accounting firms, CPA firms, bookkeepers, whatever it is. Ideally they’ve got half a dozen employees because we want enough machines for it to make sense. Great. That’s the go after the client method.

That’s not going to get you in a room. What will get you in a room is looking at where do accounting firms gather. Where do they seek education? What kind of continuing education do they have to get? Well, they have to have credentials that are renewed. So now we can start looking at associations. We can look at consultants that coach accounting firms. We can look at software providers that only service those people. We can look at vendors that sell to them. Now, if we could find one consultant who coaches accounting firms on how to scale and grow their practice, and we could become the partner with them where now we’re at their event, we’re the only MSP in the room, and they’re saying like, man, these are the best, they’re the most responsive, the most uptime, the most up-to-date on current industry trends. And now you’re at this event being advocated and edified by the event host with no competition in the room. You are literally in a room full of ideal clients being edified and positioned to succeed. But you can’t just fall into the room. You want to network your way into that room so that the edification is very real and this is a very organic promotion.

I love that. That is one of the smartest things that I’ve heard today. I absolutely adore that and it makes perfect sense. And of course, if you are in that situation and you are an expert or you’re a perceived expert at managed services for that particular industry or whoever you’re talking to, you can expect to charge more as well. Because that’s one of the side benefits of being perceived as an expert and a specialist is the ability to charge more.

You have run something called the connection expansion system. Tell us how what you’ve just been talking about there fits into that system and what else is part of that?

So the connection expansion system is the full system. So it will serve you from a very first touch networking meeting all the way through how you nurture your database and relationships long term, and everything in between. So the email scripts you send after meeting someone, how we book meetings, how you run a meeting – a connection meeting, not a sales meeting – how we follow up from that, how we add value, and then how we nurture the network to generate the results we’re looking for, which is more connections.

If you are listening and you’re going, man, you know what I love word of mouth business and I love referrals, great – check the first box. Second, if you’re going, man, that’s unpredictable though, and I would like to bring some predictability to that side of my business – okay, check that box. The next thing is, are you willing to nurture relationships long term so we can get ongoing connections to unlock those bigger rooms? That’s the system. It’s all the language, it’s how we shift our ask, and then it’s how we follow up others focused and drive value to our network so that our network can then provide the value we’re looking for.

That makes perfect sense. There’s a ton of work there. I mean, what you’ve reeled off in a couple of sentences sounds like years worth of work. So for any MSP, watching this on YouTube, listening to this on the podcast, where’s a good place to get started and give us some small things that you can do to start going down that route.

So a quick action exercise. There’s two, I’m going to give you both.

The first exercise is to change your ask – this will dramatically get more results out of your current network in the meetings you’re already doing.

Most of the time the ask is your ideal client profiles, what you’re asking for. we want to switch that to the things that have access to our ideal clients, just like in the accounting example, but if we go to medical, it’d be the same thing, right? I’m looking for coaches and consultants who help medical practices scale and grow. That becomes your ask. Now, what happens is instead of someone having a hard time referring you, because when I refer you, I’m teeing you up to sell someone which creates friction, I’m now looking at my database going, man, you know what, I know two or three people who play in this medical world as consultants or service providers, let me connect you to them and now you guys can have a strategic conversation. The ability to book a meeting super easy, the leverage way more impactful, and you’re going to get way more out of that. So that’s the first thing, shift your ask. Stop asking for just clients and focus on these bigger asks.

Hey, I’d love to schedule time to catch up with you so that I can realign on what kind of connections and value I can add to your world. Here’s a link to my calendar. I look forward to catching up. We then are driving our network back into these conversations. And in those meetings we’re focused on looking for ways to add value and re-engage this person, not sell this person. Build real relationships because when we’re in that room building real relationships, that’s where we find all these opportunities that right now you don’t know exist in your network.

Can I do a cynical British thing? And maybe this is just a British thing and I’m conscious we have listeners and viewers all over the world, but if I got an email like that from someone that says, Hey, let’s reconnect, jump on a call to talk about again, whatever it was you just said, much more succinctly than I can. My arms fold at that point and my cynicism thinks, ah, you’re just trying to sell me something. It seems like even though everything you’ve talked about here is about being authentic and authentically helping people, and the more you help them, the more help they give you, that comes across as an inauthentic thing. So tell me I’m wrong and tell me that actually it works and it works because you do it and you get results from it.

So when you’re first starting, there will be tension in your network because it’s going to feel new to your network. That’s very normal. We don’t need everyone to engage. And in fact, even if they respond with some sort of thing saying, well, what are you trying to sell? Or what’s your real motive? You’ve done what you’re trying to do, which is create a conversation. Now how you handle that conversation for sure, and this happens, I still get it in my own network sometimes where people will be like, Hey, why are we getting together? What are you trying to sell? What’s your motive? And then I just reiterate, my motive is literally just to catch up, figure out what your priority is right now because I’m doing a ton of networking and I want to make sure that I refer the right people to you.

And that typically will get someone to be like, okay, fine, I’ll get on a 30 minute call and we can chat. And then when you get on that call, you cannot sell. You have to get on the call and ask genuine questions. And what happens over time is your network wants to get on your calendar because you are adding value, you’re making connections, you’re focused on them. And so for me, 36 inbound connections last month, that’s 36 new people that are positioned to me, edified to me just because of my own network in the meetings I’m doing. I also know I’m going to get a 30% response rate. So when I send those check-in emails, 30% of people in any check-in are going to reply. Some will take meetings, some will just say, Hey, Devin, yeah, thanks for checking in. Hey, here’s a link to what I’m promoting right now. And that’s all they have time for. Great. Again, at least we’re top of mind in this dead network that we have is starting to do something.

I mean a 30% response rate, that’s crazy as in crazy good. surely. Let me turn this into a question. Is it overwhelming for you? So if you’ve got 36 people and you managed to book 12 meetings, so suddenly you’ve just filled six hours of your life, plus the prep, plus the notes, and then you’ve suddenly got all of these connections and all of these things that people are looking to do, is that overwhelming or is it very much part of your system just to file that away until you get opportunities to connect people and help them add value?

So you can do this system on a spreadsheet and it can work and you can do it at a small volume that way. Obviously the volume I do it at is another level, right? So 52 new meetings last month, 120 ish connections sent out last month. Again, the 30 plus inbound. So obviously I’m doing it at a rate that’s much bigger, but my system’s built to support that. And so I recommend connection meetings, if you’re doing virtual can be 30 minutes, they don’t need to be an hour. If you’re doing them in person, they need to be an hour. You need the time for ordering the coffee, finding the table, doing the stuff. The follow-up I buffer the time right after, you need about 15 minutes of follow-up after a meeting to send two to three connections and send a recap email. And then you need a task management system where you can assign a task that says, Hey, I’m going to check in with you in three weeks to see how those connections were. I’m going to check in with you six weeks after that to nurture the relationship and send the check-in. Really, that’s all of your time commitment. The rest is on your network opening doors for you and you just putting them on your calendar. So yes, right, your time will be a constraint in this process, but if you want the outcome, this is a great marketing strategy to shift how you’re building your network and to tap into again, that untapped value that I know exists in your network.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And look, Devin, I need to give you kind of an apology because in five years of doing this podcast, I think those are the most cynical follow up questions that I’ve ever asked anyone that I’ve ever had on the show, but you handled them brilliantly. So thank you very much. Let’s finish off with one final question. What do you actually do to help MSPs implement a system like this and how can we get in touch with you?

Yeah, first, thank you. I love the challenging questions because this is not the normal conversation. And so you should be skeptical and you should be asking those questions and I would expect nothing less. I love that and hopefully I was able to provide some value there. Two ways to connect with me, first one, grab a copy of the book – Connection Expansion – the whole system is in here. All the scripts, I don’t hold anything back, it’s value packed, it’s on Amazon, and no matter what country you’re in, you can grab it. Paperback, hardcover or audiobook. And visit devinsizemore.com, all my stuff’s on there. Ton more value in content. My biggest way that I’m helping people right now is I run a connection group. And if anything we said today, you said, you know what, I want to lean in a little and I want to build my network, especially outside my market – I want to go after some verticals or some new markets – just come hang out with us and let’s build our networks together. And over time, you’ll start to learn all the different pieces for the system and then you can really capitalise on it.

George from Los Angeles, where his MSP is based, asks: I’m getting a small amount of traffic to my website but I’ve no idea where it’s coming from. What kind of traffic tracking should I be doing?

Well, there are many, many different ways to track where your traffic is coming from. Let me tell you about three that could work for you.

So one of the best ways, but also one of the most expensive is to invest in a CRM called HubSpot. Now, this will over time allow you to see the ROI, the return on investment from traffic sources and also see which specific pieces of content on your website generate the most revenue. So, which get the most traffic coming in that then go on to become clients.

Another way to do this is to set up different data capture pages for each lead source you’re using. And this will tell you exactly which methods have generated the most leads. You’ll need a CRM that’s capable of lead source tracking. Most of them can actually do this.

And then finally, the simplest way to track traffic is to use something called UTMs. And this is some code that’s added to the end of your URL, which passes its information onto Google Analytics, and you’ll have seen URMs. It’s like your domain.com/utm source equals something like that. The good news is there is a free tool provided by Google to help you build these UTMs. Just go and Google this phrase, Google Campaign URL builder, that’ll take you to the tool and it’ll link into your Google Analytics.