Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something like that. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We do.

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

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

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

Yes, I wanted to clarify that as well.

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

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

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

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

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

Did you just plug your podcast on my podcast?

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

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

You did that on my podcast last year.

I did. I did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely.

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

Exactly. Yeah. Perfect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what was the answer that you stumbled across?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And give us your website address, Zach.

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

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

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

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

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