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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...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

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

• 9 MSP marketing ideas to break into a new vertical: 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.
• How to stand out at networking meetings: To get the most from networking meetings 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.
• How to find another MSP for sale, and start a conversation: One of the fastest ways to scale a business is to acquire competitors and absorb their clients into your business. My guest, Jonathan Jay, shares his expertise on this subject.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Fiona, from an MSP in New Hampshire, wants to know more about exit intent popups – do you use these on your website yet?

9 MSP marketing ideas to break into a new vertical

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 a...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

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

• MSP owners: Why do we make our lives so hard?: Business owners often hinder their own success by running a marathon while carrying an anchor, meaning they knowingly hold themselves back through overwork, limited thinking, or mismanagement.
• The most powerful MSP marketing question to ask any lead: Asking this is a great way to prioritise your leads and create a follow-up list for the future.
• How to do marketing within the CIS security framework: One of your challenges is making ordinary business owners and managers realise how important good security is. Find out how you can achieve this using the Center for Internet Security controls. My guest, Zach Kromkowski, explains all.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Sean, who runs as MSP in Houston, wants to learn more about AppSumo and what it has to offer.

MSP owners: Why do we make our lives so hard?

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...