The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

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

• How to minimise interruptions and stupid questions from staff: It’s important to invest time every day on growing your MSP without interruptions and I’ve got a 3 step fix to help you do just that.
• 5 big ugly MSP marketing myths: BUSTED: Improving your marketing becomes much easier when you wipe these common myths from your head. Just like IT, marketing should be logical and systemisable.
• The 3 most important growth things you can do in the final 3 months of the year: My guest this week, Ian Luckett, unveils his expert advice as a Business Growth Consultant, to achieve the most from the rest of 2024.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Francis from an MSP in Washington wants to know how to find the motivation to do work he doesn’t enjoy.

How to minimise interruptions and stupid questions from staff

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 t...