EP281 - Stop Working IN Your MSP - Make It Work For You - with Mit Patel, Darren Strong, Paul Green and Ian Luckett

IAN: In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, we have got a power panel for you to help you stop working in your MSP and start getting it working for you.

 INTRO: 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 faster. 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. We have got an incredible treat for you today. We've got three of the best heavyweight experts in the MSP space as I pull myself out of that one. Good morning, Paul Green, Mit Patel, and Darren Strong. How are we all doing today?

PAUL: Good. Thank you.

IAN: Excellent stuff. Thank you very much for coming on today's show. Today we've got a real treat. We are going to be talking about a subject that many MSPs get stuck around. It's how to get that business working for you rather than you for it. This is a precursor to the event that we are going to be running and the power panel at, on the 13th of May, in London at the MSP Show, as I said. So you've got, if you want more of what we've got coming up in this show, then then you need to be there on the date. It's going to be absolutely great. So before any further ado, let's introduce our super panel here. Paul Green, who are you? what do you do, and who would you help if people have been living under a rock?

PAUL: Thank you. I'm Paul Green. I'm the founder of the MSP Marketing Edge, and for 10 years now I've been helping MSPs to generate leads, turn those leads into sales meetings and those sales meetings into clients. Marketing is my superpower. I love it. And I live and breathe marketing for MSPs. That's me.

IAN: Fantastic. Thank you Paul, Darren?

DARREN: Hi, Ian. Yeah, I'm Darren Strong, founder of scalable MSP. We build the MSP You Deserve with strategies and systems to grow profit. So we work with leaders and owners to really build a business operating system that they can rely on trust.

IAN: Excellent stuff. And last but not least, Mit?

MIT: I'm Mit Patel. I'm the CEO and founder of Assurix. Assurix is a live trustmark for MSPs and it independently proves the MSPs are secure and well run, not once, but continuously. My background's in the MSP space. I run an MSP for 20 years, grew it to just under 8 million revenue. And I've pretty much broken everything there is to be broken in an MSP and tried to fix it along the way.

IAN: Excellent stuff. Absolutely love that. Mit I'm going to come to you first. I'm going to talk about growth planning, which, I can hear the people on the podcast yawning already, oh my God, a growth plan if I get fed up with people talking about this all the time. As you say you've pretty much broken every single processing system that could be, and got a great result with the MSP that you run and then exited from. Talk to me about growth planning. Why is it that MSPs don't focus so much on actually putting a plan together? What's the thing that stops them?

MIT: I think like the first thing is probably most MSP founders are technical, right? So they end up not spending the time in their business doing planning and doing the things that are actually the highest and best use of their time. So the first thing I see is that people aren't dedicating enough time to thinking about planning in their business. The second thing that you normally see is people just don't know where to start when it comes to planning.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: It could be something as simple as intentionally knowing where you are now and where you need to get to in 12 months time. So let's say you're doing a million pound revenue now, you may want to get to 1.2 million pound next year. And that planning process can be as simple of how am I going to get 20% growth? In that year, how's that going to happen? And then breaking that down into sort of month to month, how are you going to move that needle so you get to that end target.

So I think that the biggest problem I see is people not spending time planning, people not knowing where to start when it comes to planning, and then not chunking down that big annual plan into month to month or quarter to quarter objectives.

IAN: Brilliant stuff. Thanks for that. Thanks for that kickoff about, a bit of personal accountability straight off the bat there. Darren, I'm going to come to you next because Mitch's just given us a, this is what kind of, what you need to do and you are working with many MSPs, not only in the UK but globally around. Getting their plans together. I know you've got some, I know you've got some really great phrases around, working the plan, which I'm sure we're going to hear in a moment. How do MSPs get started with this, if they just think that, yeah, I've done a little bit of thinking around this, but I don't really know, you know, what are some of the things that they can get off that first rung of the ladder and really start to get something moving with it?

DARREN: You're stealing my phrases already and...

IAN: I didn't, I only did the end of it.

DARREN: But yeah, the biggest thing is your PSA should if it doesn't hold all the content and all the data you need for planning, because first of all, as Mit said, you need to know where you are today. So where are you today with all your services and your revenue split, and your costs and delivery, and percentages, et cetera. And then just literally go from there to call mixed phase of 20% growth. Where's that 20% growth going to come from and how are you going to staff that 20% growth? And I'm sure Paul's going to talk about how are you going to actually create that 20% growth? Because the problem is without that plan, if you don't create the plan and work the plan, what that actually means is you answer the questions wrong. Every day you get a bed or a different way, or a different behaviour or something hits you in the face. And so then when that question comes that you had yesterday, you answer it differently and that's what we see. So in the operational world of your business, you are not answering the same questions in the same way to create the right behaviour, in the right trajectory forward, to equal that 20% growth because you just answer it however you feel. There's no actual direction that's coming from you as a leader.

IAN: Brilliant stuff. That's great. Paul, we're going to come on to more about the kind of the whole marketing and the lead generation piece later on in the show, which is going to be a really great section, but just from a point of view of business planning tips and tricks. You're running a great business there. We've been friends for quite a long time, and I love watching the different things that you do every year. What sort of tips and tricks have you got for MSPs, again, to help them to get started with this whole planning cadence and understand the benefit of this?

PAUL: Yeah, it's a great question, Ian, and the, I'm going to sadly repeat exactly what Mit and Darren have just said because it is, it's about planning with purpose and understanding what's happening in your business. I work with about 700 MSPs around the world, so a bunch here in the UK, a ton in the US and they definitely sit in one of two camps. You've got the one, those two camps have nothing to do with technical ability or desire to help people or desire to grow the business. But you've got a bunch of MSPs who every day starts with, they're not, they don't quite know what's going to happen. It's very reactive. Oh, I hope I get some time today for marketing. I hope, there's a lot of hope hoping that goes on. I hope this doesn't happen. I hope my time isn't stolen. And then at some point, and you can do that for 10, 15, 20 years. And many people do. And that's not a criticism. It's an observation, but there comes a point where you have to say, I'm going to change what I do with purpose. So I'm going to carve out some of my time every day to work on growth activities. I'm going carve out some of my time to build marketing that other people can run for me. And hearing someone like mit who's built a successful msp, in fact, Darren's built both of these guys have built successful MSPs. This didn't happen by accident.

IAN: Yeah.

PAUL: This happened by design. And I'm sure both of them can tell us that in their early days they were running around working 60 hour weeks and just working their way up towards a stroke or a heart attack. There comes that point where you have to make that decision. So I think for any MSP that isn't quite there yet and doesn't really know where to start, it starts with actually making a decision. I'm going to build a business that thrives without me, not survives, but thrives without me, where I can take a month's holiday a few years down the line, and the business will be even better when I come back because my staff will actually be glad I'm not there messing things up. That is a proper business.

IAN: And it's interesting you say that because we've been talking to a lot of MSPs lately and it's yeah, the business runs, runs and I'm not there. That's okay. It's okay. It's better than it not running when you are there, but it's not growing when you are not there. And that's the kind of the next phase of that ladder, which is just so important. It's yeah, the business is still there. It's staying still. So if you are not there, the business is just going to, is going to like flatline. Great points there guys.

Mit, I want to talk about the connection with leadership. So you've got the plan, we've now got an idea of a plan and it's probably in the founder's head or the SLTs head to start with, communication, engagement with the team. Back in the day, probably when a lot of us cut our teeth. It was like a case of yes, we're going to manage the process and we are going to do it and we are going to tell you what to do. In the last, probably in the last 10, 15 years, there's much more of this vulnerable leader, the more engagement within your team, which is how you buy, get people's buy-in into the vision and the plan and exactly what she's doing. From your experience, how did your, leadership bubble burst. When was it, when you suddenly realised, I can't do this all on my own, and just by doing a couple of things, all of a sudden everyone's, helping me and now all boats are rising? How did that show up for you?

MIT: Yeah, I think I can tell you a bit about the past and a bit about what's happened now. So in kind of 2015 was when I really realised that I'm the bottleneck in this business. And actually I need to do something differently to get the business from where it is to where it eventually gets to where I want it to get to. But I've experienced similar things in Assurix, because I didn't work for three or four years, so I've forgotten everything that I've known and had to relearn things by sometimes making mistakes, but sometimes actually thinking, oh yeah, I know how to do that, or I should do it differently. And I think part of it comes to really, rallying people around a common mission and a common goal.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: So if you don't actually know where you need to get to in 12 months time, you can't rally anyone around that, right? You're just bumbling along day to day and month to month. Likewise, if you know that you need to get somewhere in 12 months time and you've got these quarterly things from a vision point of view, you need to hit, it's easier to make those types of things happen. So in Assurix, we're growing pretty quickly, we've got 12 people in the business now full time. And we need to work out a way of like, how are we going to get all these people aligned when we are moving so quickly to ensure that we are going to be able to get to where we need to get to in 12 months time. And some of it's breaking it down into kind of, these are the three most important things that we need to do as a company in the year. And these are the most three important things we need to do on a quarterly basis. And when everyone gets behind a plan of what you need to do in a quarter, or what you need to do in the 12 month period, and you actually achieve those, everybody gets success out of that. Whether they were a pivotal part in that that quarterly goal or not everybody can actually be part of that success and celebrate that success. And that's really a cultural thing like getting people behind winning.

IAN: Absolutely. No, that's brilliant. I'll just Paul, I'm going to come to you now and ask you a question that you haven't got prepared, but it's about speed. All the businesses on this call, and, moving at speed. MSPs, can actually move quite slowly and then you can get this frustration that things aren't like moving as quick as you want. In your experience, either in your own business or what you've seen with MSPs, what's the best way to handle this delta between the speed the owner wants to go and the speed that the business is going? Because you, this is where some friction can occur, isn't it? Because it's not all rainbows and unicorns.

PAUL: No. Absolutely. And a lot of that depends on the maturity of the business. So Mit's within his first 12, much as he used as example, first 12 months of a Assurix. That's amazing to hear. You've got so many people on board.

MIT: Six.

PAUL: I can also...

MIT: Six months.

PAUL: First six months. So I see that's even worse, right? Yeah. So in the first six months you can change the whole business within a week because on a Monday you think you're doing A, and then you realise across the week, actually, if we did B, that would be a much better way of doing it. That's what you do at the beginning of a business. So to drag 12 people along with, that's huge. And obviously you've done it before, so it's going to be a lot easier for you than someone that's never done it before. But I think a lot of it, Ian comes down to exactly what the guys were talking about earlier, which was, that plan. But what Mit was saying is, where do we want to be in 12 months time? My business, so this business I have now is 10 years old. I previously had a business which I sold. I actually sold it as we're recording this, I sold it 12 months ago sorry, 10 years ago today, which is a bizarre coincidence. And that business, that we pivoted that really quickly. So the first two, three years as you do in startup, it's, let's try this. That doesn't work. Let's try this. That doesn't work. And then when I found something that worked. Then I went and built a team and built structures and SOPs. And then what I found in the last couple of years of ownership of that, it was really hard to turn the ship. So the bigger the ship, the harder it is to turn it. So when I started this business, the MSP Marketing Edge, I decided that I wanted us to stay nimble. So we have 13 in our team which took us nine years to get to Mit. So you are going to think how many staff you're going to have in 10 years time. It's going to be crazy. You're going to have a massive office blog. But I've deliberately kept it, smooth and flexible and so we, we can jump on an idea and be quick, but at the same time, we have a whole bunch of our people that are running on standard operating procedures and systems and this and that, so it's, and it's a balancing act. And I think it's harder for MSPs than anyone else because the MSP world is changing all the time.

IAN: Yeah.

PAUL: Three years ago AI was a, oh, this is new. And now AI is, no, this can change everything. And this can change everything, it's only really happened in the last 3, 4, 5 months. And of course, MSPs see their entire world changing every seven to 10 years or so. So yeah, it's a difficult thing to get right, but I think you, as you grow your business, you have to stay nimble. And the secret to that is the people you surround yourself with a couple of times we've mentioned SLT, Senior Leadership Team.

IAN: Yeah.

PAUL: Those are the absolute most important people within the business, because if they're unable to move as quickly as you want to, then it's just going to create friction.

IAN: Fantastic. Thank you very much Paul, and thanks guys for that one there, Darren, I'm going to come to you now and talk to you about the bread and butter of your life, operational maturity, you spend your day and your team as well helping MSP. I spoke to an MSP yesterday and he said we are absolutely, we have nailed our whole operations. There's nothing wrong with our service desk. We're absolutely perfect. And I thought, okay, I didn't say it obviously. I thought we'll see about that. But he was only, he is about three, 400,000 pound, but he was absolutely confident in his ability that everything was okay and I'm good technically. And as Paul said, most MSPs, many MSPs have started up technically, what's the light bulb moment when people suddenly realise that maybe the technical operations aren't as slick as they should be? And I need to get a bit of help because, generally, we're all talking about a lot of the things around the business operating system and how to do the sales and the marketing and operate the business. And technically, most MSPs are pretty good at it. But when do you start to see cracks appear in MSPs when they come towards you, and what does that kind of look like to help the audience work out when you know it might be a good idea to go, what got us here is not going to get us there.

DARREN: Yeah I think you've got two pots to go to pause analogy. You've got two pots, so you've got one pot that's fatigue. So I've been doing this for 20 years. I'm still doing 60, 70, 80 hours a week. I can't continue this. I think you mentioned an heart attack. And so something needs to change and I've been trying to change that. On a regular occurrence of every six months. So every six months I change the whole system and every six months I do it again, and we're just not getting to that outcome. Versus the second part, which is I've been building an asset and I've now worked out, or I've had some sort of private evaluation, that means this asset isn't worth what I'm promising my spouse for the last 20 years, and I've now got a period of time to change this, probably longer than I wanted, but I've got a period of time to change it and it needs to change. So I want some very fast and rapid help. Because of that period of time. So you've basically got those two pots, really and it all comes down to what I learned a long time ago, which is basically do as you're told. So that you're buying systems off the shelf, they're not bespoke. There's other frameworks around, SLI, ITIL, et cetera, that really tell you how they should be done.

IAN: Yeah.

DARREN: So just follow the plan, that's all you need to do.

IAN: And just start to measure that plan and see again, what that looks like. Mit, when you were in your MSP was there a moment when you thought, okay this technical side of this business wasn't as good as I thought it would be, we need to do something differently. And what did that look like?

MIT: Yeah, so we, like I said, I broke a lot of things along the way in. One of those things is as you are growing and going through different stages of growth, what worked then won't work as at a different size and scale. And you can't necessarily put in all the processes and all the things that you want to, to be a 10 million pound business when you're a 1 million pound business, right? It just doesn't work. You don't get economies of scale and you're not going to make any profit out of it. So I think we had quite a few stages where operationally things changed. So once we got past like a million pound revenue, then when we got to 3 million revenue, 6 million revenue. And then the last stage is we is we got near it to 8. And I think we made a lot of mistakes along the way doing that. But I think operationally you just need to bear in mind like what's going to work right now isn't necessarily going to work when you are much larger and you don't need to have all the processes in the world to get to the next step, maybe.

IAN: Yeah. So how did you adapt that measurement tool then? So the tasks and the actions that generally generate results in the KPIs from one year are different from one year to the next. And you very quickly went, yeah, 1 to 4 to 6 to 8 million, and you are going to frighten a whole lot of people here. But at the time, I'm guessing that you weren't feeling frightened, you were quite inspired by going kind of like through that thing. So let's break that down. Kind of like, you know, if you're under a million pound MSP, what would be the key things that you need to focus on?

MIT: Well I think actually if you think about I used to have this thing on my wall, and one of the things that it said was to drive service quality, because if you drive service quality in our world, it meant what type of CSAT response were you getting? What type of CSAT? It was all around the customer satisfaction. Like...

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: What levels were you getting? And it was all about working out ways of how do we drive that customer experience and quality as high as we possibly can without it being a hundred percent because a hundred percent it's going to take a lot of time, money, energy, and process to even get to a hundred percent, but 98 might be okay. And it might be a good enough experience for your customers to go around telling people about it. So that's one of the things we measured was the customer experience. And things change as your team scales and the people that you add to your team skills. And I think that's where you need to add process leadership to make sure that you can still deliver the outcomes. Which is a service experience that you want. We're living in a pretty interesting time right now. If I was starting an MSP now, I'd be doing things very differently.

IAN: Yeah.

MIT: Because of the technology around us.

STUART INTERRUPT: If scaling your MSP is your goal, but you're not sure which road to take, then you'll really want to get hold of the MSP growth guide. It's the shortcut. Most MSPs wish they had much earlier on to work out what the right support is for them. Even better, if you like meeting up in person, why not come to join us at one of our live events? See the system, meet the people, get inspired, get to kick the tires and see exactly what we get up to at the Growth Hub. So, Details are on the show notes below. Go have a look, click and come and join us and we look forward to seeing you another time, but let's get back to the show.

IAN: Thanks, Stuart.

Darren, how have you seen your clients and the way that they're approaching? Because obviously as the MSPs changing and the operational models are changing, you know, with AI automation and all of this kind of great stuff that must have meant that your offering and your support stack effectively must have changed over the last, like four to five years. What does it look like now compared with where it was then?

DARREN: So I think you've got two things there because I'm not sure whether you meant for our, customers or whether ourselves, but both of those have changed dramatically in the last six months, I would say. If you forget like the span that you said, just said six months.

PAUL: Yeah.

DARREN: Because AI is constantly changing, and the ability that it has and the more accuracy that it has is the thing that is massively changing. So each product is overtaking each other as every month goes by. So one minute you're championing one product. The next minute you're championing another product. And operationally, especially in the PSA, that is dramatically changing the world, not only from who you are creating a journey. Because AI is assisting in that journey. And I use the word assisting very specifically because I think that's what it's doing today. It's not doing the job, it's not capable of doing the job. What it's doing is empowering your staff to do a better job in your business, but also I think there's a whole other area around data. And when you start to churn that data in different images and different ways and structure, the ability that AI has and speed is amazing. Like yesterday I did one from a sales point of view looking at white space and cross selling analysis. And I didn't even ask it, but it went and did the white space and cross analysis, then give me an output from a sales manager point of view. And then created a whole 12 months marketing campaign off the back of how it said I should then interact with that white space to close that space. I hadn't even asked it for that second piece, and the speed that it did, that was incredible. In the last six months we've dramatically gone a long way. You look at just the dispatching role within your service desk, that dispatching role has changed dramatically in the last six months.

IAN: Yeah. And as you say, things are moving at an absolute speed and in no more than, than the sales and marketing arena, Paul and we're going to go quite deep into this, I think right now. But from an AI point of view marketing has changed. Probably. Dramatically over the last couple of years. Let's start off with what are some of the mistakes that you are seeing? The fundamental mistakes, because as we know, with the MSP space, we've just got to get someone to know and trust us. Pick up the phone, have a chat. Oh, we are a right fit. It's easy, isn't it? But it's not easy because we know that there's a whole multiple of, stuff that gets in the way. And now there's all this information coming in about, yeah, just plug in AI and that will be all right. And how many of us on the call this week have had a little pitch to say, do you want more leads in your business? I can get AI to do your prospecting for you. Thank you very much. So yeah they work out really well. What are you seeing, to begin with Paul, are some of the mistakes that people are making with, oh, all I need to do is this and it'll give me leads.

PAUL: Yeah, yeah, exactly that. So loads of mistakes and we are on second one of minute one hour one of day one of AI.

IAN: Yeah.

PAUL: I think we all, we can all see that, right? And how quickly it's developing. The two biggest mistakes I see are number one is going for, you get exactly what you just said, Ian. You get a cold email and it's some guy somewhere who's sending out 10 million cold emails. Day, and it's to do outreach. Hey, we've got this amazing AI powered system, and you give them a couple of thousand dollars, and then guess what? Nothing happens. So that's the first mistake, which is shiny new distractions. And let's be honest, AI is the biggest, shiny, new distraction ever. And, I'm a not a technical person and I'm coding in Claude. I'm building apps for myself, for my phone, right? Because I rather I've built myself a time tracker a money tracker of how much I spend. So I'm replacing some subscriptions on my own phone with Claude, myself as a non coder. So what are the coders doing? What are the MSPs doing? Who have the ability to think this stuff through? But it is a distraction. I think a lot of these new shiny things are a distraction. So that's the first mistake is spending too much time on the distraction. The second mistake is thinking that AI can do your marketing for you. So, I use Claude, I use ChatGPT, I use Gemini. I think most of us now have subscriptions to two or three platforms because they're all good at different things and it changes every single day. Those tools are amazing at helping you to get to the end output, but you've still got to have the thinking and you've still got to have the humanness as part of it, I speak to an MSP at least once a week who says, oh, I've got and this is similar to what Darren just said, except I know that Darren has got people wrapped around what he's done, but they'll say, oh, I've just done a 12 month marketing plan with chat GPT. I'll say, brilliant. So what you've got is you've got an AI that's gone and looked to what all the other MSPs are doing, and then it's just a newer version of that. So you are just going to look the same as all the other MSPs, which most MSPs already look the same as all other MSPs. Because MSPs are just copying each other's marketing or talking about the same kind of things. So AI I think is a great way to, I'll give you an example, so we produce content. This is not a pitch for the MSP marketing edge, but it is. So we produce content for all of our members and we do it once and give it to all of our members, because they're not in competition with each other, because we only work with one MSP per area. And some of our members now are taking our content, putting it into AI, feeding the AI in their, what's called their ICP, which is their ideal client profile. So particularly when they've done some work thinking through what kind of clients do I actually want? And that's not just about 20 users, plus, it's about what kind of business they are, what kind of tech technology maturity do they have? What do you want and what don't you want? And there's a whole set of thinking to do around that. But if you train the AI on that and then you train the AI on your USP, is your unique selling proposition, which goes hand in hand with the ICPs. It's these are the kind of clients I want. This is why they would choose us. Now let's take a, an email or a social post or a, an infographic that Paul's created for me and get the AI to change that. To match the ICP and the USP.

IAN: Yeah.

PAUL: That is a really smart use of AI, so that's where you are using AI as an automated assistant rather than getting the AI to do the thinking for you and that's the biggest mistake I'm seeing right now is, get a tool, think you can just give the whole...

IAN: Yeah.

PAUL: You know, give the tool everything. It's like hiring a 16-year-old to do all of your marketing and saying, Hey, guess what? 16-year-old, you've just left college now you are my marketing director. You are my marketing implementer. You are my marketing strategist. You are my marketing this. Get on with it. And we all know the 16-year-old will just quit a few days later because the, it just isn't going to happen. That's the equivalent of where AI tools are today. I'm sure in the years ahead they will get better and better. But yeah, use them as an assistant, not as doing the thinking for you.

IAN: So, at the top of the tree. Then from a marketing point of view, in your view, what's the absolute non-negotiables that each MSP had? You spoke about the ICP and that kind of detail of, I call that the ingredients into the cake. You're only going to bake a really high quality cake if you've got the really good information and it's around that thinking. But what's the absolute non-negotiables for you, Paul, on a marketing point of view?

PAUL: So you said something earlier, Ian, which I think you probably stole from me. Which is probably you've got to get people to like, you trust you, et cetera, et

IAN: Oh, that's not yours, how can you claim that?

PAUL: I know, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I know. You watch all my videos and that's, I hear my words in your...

IAN: Of course, I do.

PAUL: Joking. I'm joking. We do this to each other. So yeah it's the core fundamentals of marketing are this, that when you're selling to business owners and managers. They are ordinary people who are good at what they do. They're not good at technology. So if you think in your head it's the veterinarian, or sorry, the vet, the dentist, the manufacturer, the accountants, the lawyer, they're really good at chasing ambulances, extracting teeth. They're not good at technology. They can't think they understand technology because they've got a phone and they once put an iPad on their wifi, but they don't really understand technology at the level that MSPs do. So your fundamental marketing challenge, which is, has not changed in the AI age and will not change for the next 10 years, is for them picking their first MSP or switching MSPs is a massive distress activity. It's huge.

IAN: Yeah.

PAUL: And because they don't understand what they're buying, so they're, we call that an uneducated buyer and an uneducated buyer cannot tell if you are any good compared to your direct competitor. So what they do is they delegate the decision from the brain down to the heart. They're making the decisions emotionally. The only way the emotions can make a decision is, do I like this person or do I not like this person? So in any marketplace, you pull up 10 websites of competing MSPs and they all look the same. Yeah, they've got very similar stock images, similar headlines, very technical focused things. All the services look the same, and the uneducated buyer literally says, I dunno where to look. And then they come across a website, and this is going to answer your question, Ian, a website that where someone has sat down and thought through exactly the client they want, that ICP. And that's reflected in the website. They've then sat through and thought through exactly what makes them unique. That's reflected on the website. And then that website is well built. It's well designed. It's human, it's full of human stuff. There's pictures of the team, there's language that matches up the person that wants to buy. So if they want to sell to lawyers, it's slightly more lawyery language. If they want to sell to manufacturers, it talks about production lines and stuff like that. So me as the uneducated buyer. I land on a website. I see, oh, this looks, these guys deal with people like me. I see language that matches to me. I see pictures, I see social proof, which is videos testimonials, case studies of other people like me who've already bought. All of these things are the most important things, and you need to get all these things right before. They'll even book a 15 minute appointment with you. This is, and there's a ton more stuff as well. But these are some of the basics that you've got to get right first.

IAN: Absolutely. Thanks for that. Mit, Paul's already started this. Oh, it's not a pitch, but it is a pitch, but, oh dear. What did I just say then? Every podcast...

MIT: You can always, you can always cut it out Ian.

IAN: Yeah, I could do it. Yeah. But you know, Joe, he'd send the big boys round, so it's just...

MIT: Oh, right, fair enough, fair enough.

IAN: Mit, onto standing out from the crowd, right. You've built this very successful MSP. Now you've got assurance, which is, many of our clients are now part of the program now, which is great. And I see this as a really great way of grading the Paul, I'm going to use this word in, feel free to come back into it, because you used it a couple of years ago. Slop. From an MSP point of view of a good and a bad MSP, what's one that's got a good, good accreditation and this is the concept of the Assurix, is to help people to decide are you or are you not a good MSP? Where's the kind of concept for that from your point of view in terms of helping people stand out from the crowd, from the marketplace?

MIT: I think it's the concept was, where I got the concept I was looking at. What I had experienced when I was an MSP and having to compete with MSPs that clearly weren't good, weren't doing what they said they were meant to do and just cutting corners everywhere. And, in terms of the things that Paul spoke about differentiation really is that there is a problem where SMEs just don't really understand the difference between one MSP and the other. Because not only do they all look the same, they all say the same things. They all say we do IT, support and security and on-site support, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But there's no real way for that SME customer to actually know are they going to do a good job or not. And that's really what we sell with the Assurix by looking at our cybersecurity framework, which basically looks at an MSP and knows they're secure aligned to the government's care, but also from an operational maturity point of view. That we know that some of the things in that operational maturity framework give good outcomes to SMEs. So stuff like, are they delivering their SLAs? Do they have a fair onboarding and offboarding process? Are they patching all the machines where they need to? And what we're trying to avoid is all the MSPs that are doing the bad things out there, like delivering crap service, charging an MSP, sorry, charging an SME 15,000 pounds to off board when there's only five of them, five users. All that stuff that shouldn't really happen in the marketplace, but somehow does. And how we prove it live is by integrating in with PSAs RM software to know that an SLA is delivered over a period of time for an MSP and they are doing it properly. So I think there's definitely a lot of challenges around different differentiation in the marketplace. And hopefully we're going to help solve that.

IAN: Excellent stuff. From when you were in your MSP, what would you say would be the most powerful thing that you did from a marketing point of view that made the biggest difference in the business?

MIT: I think back then from a marketing point of view, the biggest thing we did was we invested in SEO back in, I think 2009 was when we started investing in it consistently, and it's investing in some type of marketing journal consistently. I think what helped us get more wins, so as in our, how many our conversion rate was, we used to show like a limited version of proof back then. Like we used to do stuff like showing customers our cameras of our office that we actually existed logging into our dashboards and showing them, Hey, this is the live data that you can see our CSAT, you can see our response rates, how many tickets we have, et cetera, et cetera.

IAN: Excellent stuff. That's good. That's brilliant. Darren time for well, it's not, but I've just made it part of the show now, operational maturity, what you guys are doing there at Scalable, you know, what does success look like for the clients that you've got in terms of, what you are doing with them over the next year in terms of doing things a little bit differently just to help them stand out from the crowd.

DARREN: Yeah. So I think like the others try and point it into something that we've just talked about. As a leader of a business, people always say who did you find that opportunity? But it's not, it's risk before it becomes an opportunity. And it's whether you are willing to take on that risk. So as we talked about MSPs, all looking the same, all saying the same, all doing the same, all spending the same time in the same places. Are you willing to find that risk and turn it into an opportunity? And that's sort of where Scalable was. Scalable was born outta demand. It was born out of the community and relationships that I'd built and people asking me, can you fix this for me? Can you do this for me? Can you increase this margin over here for me? And so we basically created a brand promise, which is MSP, business outcomes, structure and accountability delivered by 15 year veterans. So that's what we saw in the consultancy space. When I was the receiver of it, I saw that not happening. So people were just reading off frameworks. They were able to step outside of that question and answer it because that was on page five. And they're currently on page one.

IAN: Yeah.

DARREN: And they don't know what page five looks like. They were apprentices and one, two year people when you spoke to the sales guy who was a veteran who you bought into, but then you got the apprentice because that's the way they've made it, more cost effective, and that's the way they're skimming the margin off it. And they didn't really bring accountability either to you or to yourself or to them, and that's really what you're looking for, biggest percentage of our consultancy is bringing accountability to, we've decided these three things on this quarter, we're staying on these three things unless you can prove to me that there's a good reason to change. That's the number one accountability that MSP struggled with. And then the second one is, you said you was going to do this for me. We're meeting for the third time, and you've still not done it.

PAUL: Yeah.

DARREN: Help me to understand why and what I need to do to put in place to help you with that, because that's the biggest things that MSP owners and leadership people need is, choosing the right thing and staying on track and then doing something about it. And that's what we've basically built. And then the bit around being able to not just read a framework was actually we'll put people in front of you that have done the same shoes as you have and got the same gray hair and they've got all these stories that align to our framework and that's why you should do it.

IAN: Absolutely. Brilliant. Thank you very much for that, Darren. Guys, absolutely brilliant show. As we just said, it could go on for much, much longer than it is, but it can't. So I want to invite everybody who is listening to this to come to the MSP show in London on the 13th of May. And you'll see this amazing power team in action in the theater having a panel discussion, which is going to be absolutely brilliant. But Paul again, thanks very much for coming on the show today. What's the one thing that MSPs need to do in the next 30 days to help them to, you know, stop working in their business, maybe get their marketing working a bit better and make that business work for themselves?

PAUL: So I'm not going to talk about ICPs, USPs, AI slop, any of that kind of stuff. If the thing that will make the biggest difference and this matches up with everything we've been talking about the last 30 minutes or so, is just try and find some time every day to work on your business and on marketing.

IAN: Brilliant.

PAUL: To me, when you get your marketing right, that drives all of the rest of the growth of your business. Because when you know you're going to generate leads, turn those leads into prospects and those prospects into clients, that's the hardest, least technical part of the business sorted out. And I make it sound easy, and it's not easy. There's lots to do. But once you've done that, then you can focus on just adding in more clients, driving more revenue from those clients and systemising along the way. So even one hour a day, the people I work with if they can find 60 to 90 minutes a day and that's what we try and persuade them to do, that's the thing that makes the biggest difference, because you suddenly have this time and you're like, what should I do with that time? And actually, there's plenty of things you can do to improve your marketing, but you need that time to get started.

IAN: It's just a C word, isn't it? It's just consistency. It's just being consistent all day, on that time. Brilliant stuff. Mit, what about yourself? What's the action for the MSPs Listening from your point of view?

MIT: So if someone's listening to this right now, what I would suggest is get your phone out go into your calendar and set up a two hour recurring block every week on a day of your choice. And you're going to call it planning. And in that time, all you need to be thinking about is planning on your business and what you need to do, right? And I've seen that work pretty well for businesses where they have a consistent time every week that they don't have anything booked in there apart from the word planning. That's time to look at your plan, rework your plan, spend time working on your business, not in your business.

IAN: Great stuff. Thank you, Mit. And Darren, you just talked about accountability so, not want to tee this one up for you, but what's your tip for the next 30 days?

DARREN: I'm going to stay on the same frame, so then people have just got one thing to do, which is to be accountable for your time. So change your time to match your habit. Mit mentioned it a little bit earlier, so your highest and best use, to match your business today, what does your business need from you to be the highest and best use of it? And structure that into not doing the do so planning time with your team and correct meetings that have outcomes and agendas and actions.

IAN: Fantastic. Brilliant. Great. Thank you again everybody for your contribution. Shameless plug time. Paul, if someone wants to get a hold of you, I don't know why they'd want to bother, but if they did then how do they find that? We're going to put all these links into the show notes.

PAUL: Cool. So my website is msp marketing edge.com. I also host the world's most listened to podcast.

IAN: No you don't. No, you don't.

PAUL: On MSP marketing, I absolutely do. I've looked at the IT expert stats and I've looked at ours and let's just say there's a difference, so it's on every podcast platform. Just search for Paul Green's, MSP Marketing podcast.

IAN: Thank you Paul, and your time today. Mit, tell us about asur and how people can get in contact with you and learn a bit more.

MIT: Sure. So our website is assurix.com, A-S-S-U-R-I-X. You can find me on LinkedIn. Just search my name, Mit Patel. Feel free to message me on there, or you can email me at mit@assurix.com. So more than happy to help anybody out wherever they need it.

IAN: Brilliant. Thanks Mit. Last but not least, Darren.

DARREN: Yeah, our website is scalable msp.co uk. Also big on LinkedIn, so you can see a lot of content and reach me on LinkedIn. And another blatant plug, we also do a podcast called Scale Up. Come and see our podcast. It's way better than those twos.

IAN: Yeah I think well, well think Paul and I have both been on it. So we've been endorsed that podcast as well, which is brilliant. Great. Send me all of those links guys, and we'll drop all of those into the show notes as well for everyone to see. And don't forget, 13th of May in London. Come and see us. Meet up with us 11 o'clock. I think the session is it's going to be a good crack because we're going to try and cram even more into a shorter period of time. So thanks again, everyone. Look forward to catching up with you soon. See you on the next one. All the best now.

NEXT WEEK TEASER: And just before you shoot off, I've got to tell you about next week's show. So on the 13th and 14th of May, there's an incredible industry event called the MSP Show taking place in London at the ExCel Arena. And in next week's show I interview Aaron and Alex from the show, which is now in its third year. It sits on side, the sits show, the service desk show. It's absolutely brilliant. It's a great new fresh, place to be. If they've got loads of new things going on, they're kind of going to treat it as a bit like a festival this year. Anyway, next week I'm going to share with you all about what it is, why you need to attend, why you need to bring your teams, use it an engagement opportunity, because I know you're just going to absolutely love it. So, check it out next week. Find out how the MSP show can help you in your MSP.

OUTRO: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. 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, or if you are 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 360 degrees scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time, engage in, align 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 or iTunes, or 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 day.