EP197 – How to Build a 7 Figure MSP On 4 Days a Week – Success Stories with Simon Dickinson

INTRO: In this episode of the IT Experts podcast, we help you work out how you can work a four day week in your MSP.
Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. The only podcast to help MSPs scale to 1 million and if already there get to five and go fast. At the end of the day, isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it? I hope you enjoy the show.

IAN: So good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. Today, we've got a cracking show for you. We have got a member success series with Simon Dickinson, one of our seven figure MSPs who has managed to make himself invaluable and not needed for one day a week. And he now works a four day week while the business is absolutely thriving.
And he's going to tell us today how on earth he's done it. So welcome to the show, Simon, how are you doing today?

SIMON: Very well. Thank you.

IAN: And I've just learned that you're literally moving house tomorrow and you're as cool as a cucumber. So this must have this must have some effect. This whole thing that's happened to you just

SIMON: under the water.

IAN: Is it? It's like everything's all moving. It's all about perception, mate. Simon, today we're talking a lot in the growth hub about O and N, owner not needed, Simon not needed, Ian not needed, running a business, building a business that works for you rather than you for it. The MSP model, as we know, is amazingly profitable one, amazingly time efficient one, if you get it right and when you get it right. And what we're going to be sharing with you today is how Simon has been working with The us at the growth hub here for many years now, and he's managed to just say, look, you know what?
I only want to work four days a week and how he's done it. And every time we tell other members of the growth hub, they sit there and they gasp, but we're going to hear how he did that today. So we're going to share that with you the listeners, which is going to be absolute cracking show. So Simon, before we get cracking who are you?
What'd you do? Who'd you help? How big's the business? What's going on? Give us a look. Give us a few metrics and how long you've been in business and all of that jazz.

SIMON: Hi I'm Simon Dickinson from cypher it we're MSP in coventry area. I've been going for 24 years it was a lifestyle business naturally. I met the growth hub in 2019 That's and that's when things really started to change for us we're 10 people currently and we're looking after about 60 clients with about 1600 endpoints

IAN: Nice. Lovely. As usual with the podcast Simon, what we do is I go for a structure of some questions and then I ask completely different questions and just throw everybody off because I've thought of things as we're moving along. So just quickly, just before we get into the subject today, in 2019, you've been running the business there for what, 20 years, something like that. What happened? What was the thing that made you think I need some help with this. What was going on in your, what was going on in the business? What was going on in your life to make you think, just hang on a minute.

SIMON: So it was a hand to mouth. Oh, okay. It was very hand to mouth all of the time leading up to 2019. It was, I didn't really have spare money to invest in business coaches. I'd like the idea of it for a number of years. Thinking I someone could help me do something a bit better, but the heck, the nuts and crutches of it is I was running around like an idiot, fixing servers, delivering PCs, doing everything. Can I employed a number of people that really just answered phones and the basics. It's quite a long story short, they could all fix printers, they could install Windows for me so I could run off to the next customer. But I was doing all the work, running around, still doing 60 weeks where it was necessary. I had got to a point where I refused to work Sundays, pretty much. Which was purely because it would be driven by the wife to say the least.

IAN: Fair enough. But
SIMON: Yeah, after many, years of just working too many hours and doing it all, and it all being on my shoulders. And I just, yeah. And, things that Stuart said at the time when he spoke to me on the phone resonated really well. I was outside a customer's site after just installing a server, believe it or not. Wondering what I'm doing with my life. And he just happened to call and the conversation was good.

IAN: You, in the business the phrase in and on the business totally in the business, totally in the technical, didn't have any confidence to let go. You employed some people to help you become probably more busy, rather than less busy. And you were working six days a week. We've gone from six all the way down to four. That's an amazing. So it's always interesting just to, to find out at the beginning of that journey what was the catalyst? And then you met up with Stuart initially and then obviously now you're in the growth hub with the whole bunch of us now helping you out. And we're going to hear about some of those results. So what was, there was two things that were going on in the last couple of years, isn't there? Number one, you wanted to work a four day week, a number two, you wanted to bust seven figures. Talk to me about the four day week to start with. Why was that a thing? Was it,

SIMON: Ultimately I always had the dream to retire at 55. I had no idea what that looked like. I just thought, don't want to work at 55. Sadly, as all of the other MSP type owners would know, you don't probably have the greatest pension in the world, leading up to that point, because you're pretty much self employed, aren't you? And you pay your basic amounts and so forth. And I just thought How am I going to retire at 55? Conversations at the MSP Growth Hub have come around about owner not needed. Perks my interest. How do you achieve such a thing? And cut a long story short, I thought the only way I'm going to become owner not needed in 2026 when I turned 55 was basically start to hand things off and delegate. I knew that doing the same thing on repeat wasn't going to help. As you might call it, because I was constantly being busy and I thought okay, what am I going to do? And I did have some good members of staff at that time, and they're still with me today. And, but I also had a lot of, yeah, we can, the unhelpful help desk, I called them at one stage. I love that. So I, in a nutshell. Yeah, I started to delegate some of the tasks, but I've been teaching an apprentice who would come on board with us back then quite a lot and he was going in leaps and bounds to be fair. I tried having a manager for the service desk that didn't really work out. He thought that managing was just shouting at people.
And I actually lead him by example. So he left shortly after that. I managed to get to a point during COVID where I actually downed the tools and I stopped fixing computers. And in all fairness, I can genuinely say, give it maybe once or twice, I have not fixed a computer or a server or a service in what the last four years now, isn't it, 2020.

IAN: Fantastic. So the four day week was the first little step towards owner not needed. I want, I'm thinking about my retirement. I want to make sure that I've got some energy and something going on when I'm 55 so I can enjoy my retirement. The vehicle for my retirement is going to be the MSP in whatever shape or form exit looks like there's lots of different versions of that and cutting it down to four days a week. So you went from six to five and then what was the, what was what was the process that you went through? To go to four. How did that? Okay.

SIMON: So there's a number of years between COVID and last October when I started. It hasn't happened yet. Four day weeks. And I think that the key element was to have people in the relevant departments that I could trust. So for example, my only thing I was doing in the business up until that point, that was only me was sales. So I was the sales guy. I'd like to say I'm the marketing guy, but we all know I haven't really done any marketing. That's my current project, my baby right now. But to have someone in the accounts department that's growing with the company to be. We'll, but we'll become the finance director and go on beyond that potentially from a strategic point of view. That's fabulous. I don't have to concern myself with it. I only need to have oversight of it. Then my senior tech, who's getting on a little bit. I hope he doesn't hear that.

IAN: He's ...

SIMON: working really well. He's turned his hand to being an account manager and a really good one at that. So he's a tech at heart. But from account management perspective, he can talk solutions with customers and he warms to people. He's a very personable guy. So that's really helped. That's allowed me to step back even further from the sales. So now it's not all on me for sales or technical business reviews or any of those types of things. So I have got somebody there. So when I am missing on a Monday, it's not. I'm not missed. That's the key. I don't even get disturbed anymore. My customers even know it now that I don't work Mondays. So that's fabulous.

IAN: Let's just rewind a minute. And let's just so you basically, you've got your you've just made sure you've got reliable people and teams in, in place. As we know, if you want to grow a successful business, there's three things that you need is number one understanding your numbers and knowing exactly what's going on there. Number two, is there. The ability to build a world class team and number three is to have a flow of leads and have those three things you're in a super great place. When we're at the growth hub, obviously we work with MSPs at 250 all the way up to 5 million and everyone's busy, right?Just like you're saying busy. And then they come into the growth hub and guess what? They get even more stuff to do. So it's Oh my God am I going to get overwhelmed? And you're not. Because what happens is we start organizing what you're doing and we start moving things around. And one of the things that we, promote and suggest and recommend very easily is off grid time. Now you've, you this was the, step before the full day. What's off grid time and why is it so important to you?

SIMON: That's the one opportunity you get to actually work on the business. While you're still in it, so off grids, not my turn. That's one of you, the guys. Fabulous. So cut a long story short. My off grid was based around Wednesdays, which is when my pod group met was a weekly affair. So I'll be at one o'clock. I think it was that we had. And I have two hours depending on the content. So with yourselves, so I would spend the morning doing work, working on the business, basically almost prepping myself for that, meeting. And then after that meeting, I would I'll do a little bit more, essentially skive off a bit early, maybe, or carry on, depending on if the flow was there. Got a long story short, that was really where I actually did quite a bit of development like I would plan the business the rhythm of review for all of the staff I'd have a calendar and I'll draw that out. But I also got to a point where I was bringing in Natasha and Chris account manager and finance manager if you like account manager into My home and we were sitting working on something to do with their department to try and improve things. Let's find the holes in the direct debits. Who are we missing or who are we missing with TBRs? Who do we need to focus on because they're at risk or any of those elements? But that gave me a chance to do that. But that wasn't every week. That was. Maybe a little sporadic, but it gave me an opportunity to wherever my focus was, especially my 16 week plan, I would aim in those areas to try and fix those problems or address them at least.

IAN: So you've organized your, team. So you've now got your pillars, your structures, you've got the right people in the right roles as we call it. And now you're involving them in your new strategic thinking on blocking timeout to go on to time to focus on a certain task. And then you're inviting them in and you're doing that thing. How did you find that whole going from being busy to getting I think the only term is like uber structured in it because, I don't think we're too far alike with our kind of mindsets. And sometimes it's yeah, let's just go and do some stuff and create some stuff and build some stuff for the sake of it, we can get structure, we can get organized, but it requires us to dial up energy as we know. How did you do that to get into that structure?

SIMON: I think the first biggest step is having someone who can do the technical work because that's where our business is in it. All of us MSP owners, we probably started as on the tools. I think if you can put the tools down all of a sudden, it's a scary moment. It is really scary. It's what am I going to do myself? But if you've got some guidance from yourself or Stuart, for example, Then all of a sudden there's a lot of things to do, as you say, it's still uber busy and it becomes structured and I think that's really important. What I did in the very early start as well as I started to try and build strategy meetings with the team and I think the very first one was called the strategy meeting. Big speech and that was because I was just pissed off with everybody at the time and I thought I'm going to give everyone a bit of a roasting and tell them all about themselves and how we're going to do this properly. Yeah, and it started off as a big speech and it then changed into a strategy alignment review, which all sounds a little bit more professional and to be fair. I'd had my rant. I think everyone understood my frustrations at that point, but then we started to talk about what we want to do in the future and how we're going to grow as a team and what the road map looks like for the next six months, sometimes to a year. It's a lot more structured than that now. I think we've got three years now, but That was the first sort of step, and I've done that monthly since then.

IAN: And you've, and we advocate what you do with that assignment in the growth hub. And one of the biggest things, and we talk about it a lot. And I can't even remember when I talked about it last, I think I talked about it on a keynote yesterday on an on an online event, but the whole thing about these sitting down and having structured one to ones, sitting down and what you've done with the, your monthly roundup, your monthly town hall meeting, tell us about the impact of it. Just doing that because you've now got this structure in place, haven't you? Where you're magnifying in the pots.

SIMON: It's massive. It's unbelievably massive as well. It's, I take some of the slides from the MSP intensives and the alignments that we have how to get people or work in an alignment. Discussing A, B and C players and I've put a big red X through the C players. We don't employ these guys just trying to, it sounds all a little bit weird, but it's just trying to get everyone to understand what we're trying to do if you like as a business. I also have, I've been asked questions. During those meetings why does such and such a client call us so often we should get rid of them. So then I showed that in the following meeting by showing a bar graph of all of the customers revenue. It doesn't show the numbers, but you could see that client is, pays this much, whereas the little client pays this much. That's why this guy calls so much, because he pays your wages mate, and everybody else's. To explain stuff that The guys enjoy or get benefit from that. Statistics as well, metrics for SLA's mayor type of tickets, how busy we are. I had to go through a phase of time sheets because they weren't being completed properly. So I was showing every month. People's not their individual timesheets, but overall hours that I'm losing that aren't utilised. We're generous with it. We're, we get now over 80 percent utilisation on a timesheet. That can, that will consist of training and meetings and ticket work. We're getting that regular and we pull them up if it doesn't. And that's really good.

IAN: When we talk about we talk about the vision and the mission and the value and the direction and all this. And by this time, half the listeners now are going, Oh, my God, isn't that for big corporates? What a load of our boring waffle you lot keep cracking on about all the time. This is exact application of that where you've embedded, you've engaged, you've educated, you've shared your vision with them and what you want to do. And they've responded well. So what's the impact on the team been? Throughout this journey of you working less,

SIMON: it's a strange one because the team has changed a little as well. As you may know, I've had a bit of a churn rate. I have removed some people from the team and I did new people and recreated new people. And I think that's all for the positive because some people didn't, they weren't part of the new journey. They were really great at doing those simple tasks in the early days. And that was. The old journey. I think the new journey is very different and sadly it does require higher skill people. Yeah, and that's the only way that I can see it growing and growing because and everybody needs to work the same way. We've become ISO 9001 as well. We're following process with that, which is really good. Guys all understand that process. That's also helped increase, improve documentation. There's been a few bumps along the road where I've had to give the team a bollock in in those strategy meetings, especially when your new users have not been created in the same way that they were created last time. Different people doing things, so they're not following documents. And we've had some conversation, but they understand now, because what they're getting from those meetings normally is all positivity. And that occasional thing that has to be thrown in there, I think. Yeah, they take it on board and yeah, I have a great relationship with them all have one to one coffee catch ups with them Not as regular as I'd like but I do and the rhythm review is working and I've even got to a point where I'm not doing every review anymore You know, I'm only doing the 12 month one where we set targets, expectations for the year and salary incentives. Then it's broken down between the other managers.

IAN: I love this because we don't, you and I don't get to talk at depth like this. And the thing that I'm hearing now and getting goosebumps on my arms is, How you've applied all the different frameworks that we use around the scale with confidence model, with your one to ones, with your account management, with the vision and values and how you've actually done that, which is, which I know is what we wanted to get out of this show. But it was like, it's this is really cool. This is, it's actually not actually listening because I know, but it's just you've just taken on board and you've just applied the process, which is which is incredible. And and here's to the success. So what's happened what's happened with the business side of the business, what's the impact on the business in the last three years?

SIMON: We so we've over doubled in turnover and profit is shot up as well. Naturally, it's a, as part of that. So that's a very positive. We've reduced our client countdown. We've reduced our staff countdown and still achieve those things. And yeah. I don't know. What else can we say we've done?

IAN: What else do you want? You've got time back. You've got more profit. You've got more turnover. You've got a happier team. Hey, anybody want to buy an MSP? Not for sale. Not for sale. Having

SIMON: too much fun, Ian.

IAN: You're having too much fun. No that's absolutely right. That's an absolutely amazing journey that you've that you've taken us on there, Simon. Thanks very much for your time preparing and also sharing today in the show. I absolutely love the way that you've applied the process. You've applied the learning and not only the business development, but the personal development side of things, which has got you these great results now for every MSP. Who this is resonated with, who wants a little bit of what you've got. What are some of the top tips or the top what's the top two or three things for them to do straight off to listen to this podcast today?

SIMON: 100 percent get the right people in the right roles within your business, especially the technical side that will allow you to put your tools down basically. And I think that's really important because that'll give you headspace to focus on the other parts of the business, e. g. running your business. Make time, definitely make some time to work on the business, even if it is half a day, one day a week, whatever it might be, it's invaluable. That's where you'll come up with the best ideas. I'd have a bit of a plan. And to be totally honest, just join the MSP growth. You can ask us loads of questions and in the intensive when you actually meet us or however you want to play it. But it's worth his weight in gold.

SIMON: You should pay me for that.

IAN: There's no sponsorship for that, but you might notice I didn't interrupt you As always, if there's anything anybody. Wants to have a conversation about where they are today, where they want to go. What's in the gap, then Stuart and I are always available. Hit the website, hit LinkedIn, whatever you need to do. Simon, if somebody wants to have a chat with you and have a conversation, not about buying your MSP, but about what you've done and continue the conversation with you, what's the best way for them to get in contact with you?

SIMON: Through LinkedIn. Definitely. Yeah. Give me a shout on LinkedIn. Connect with me. It's absolutely fine. I'm happy to grab a coffee with some people as well. If I haven't got to travel too far, we are based in Coventry. So we're mid Midlands.

IAN: Brilliant. What a great offer. Go and have a coffee, learn a load of stuff. And yeah, so here's to your continued success. Thanks again for today's show. Really enjoyed it. It was a good crack. If you actually realize how many outtakes we had in the back end of this it's a lot longer than these 30 minutes or whatever it's turned into. But anyway, it's been a long day...

SIMON: A long day. I'm not going to lie.

IAN: It's only 10 o'clock in the morning. Lovely stuff. Thanks again, mate. And I look forward to seeing you soon. Take care now.

OUTRO
Just before you go. And if you're curious about how this episode links with the ability to scale your MSP to a million or, if you're already there, accelerate to five, then we want to invite you to come and take the MSP mastery quiz. And in just three minutes, you're going to get a 360 degree scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time engaging along your people and help generate more leads in your MSP. It's really simple. Just click on the link in the show notes. And if you have enjoyed this episode, we'd love to get some feedback from you by means of a rating review on Spotify your podcast platform of choice. We really appreciate every single one of them. Now you can go and enjoy the rest of your day and we look forward to catching up and connecting with you soon. All the best.