EP151 – BF Edition – Time to Look in The Mirror and Run Your Own Race with Ian Luckett

INTRO

In this episode of the IT Experts Podcast, we invite you to take a look in the mirror and run your own race.

Welcome to the IT Experts Podcast, the only podcast to help MSP's scale to 1,000,000. And if already there get to 5 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. Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. Hope you're all doing well today. We're actually out in Lanzarote at the moment on our location studio. Can you believe it. And I just wanted to share with you quick edition of the podcast here because there's been a few inspiring things been going on in the community and the growth hub in the last month. And I just wanted to share them with you from going to the managed service summit a couple of weeks ago and listened to Sally Gunnell, we had our two day event with our clients, which is called the intensive where they come and connect. We do some coaching. We do sort of a lot of reflection. We do some looking at their businesses and their performance and the thing that we're hearing an awful lot of people is that not necessarily the most people? Business owners are scared, but they don't know which, what’s the next step they need to take to help them grow their business, for, you know, to get more time, more money, more freedom and more choice as well.

So come on, it's time to get out of your own way and you know this podcast for everyone who knows they need to do something to grow their MSP, but they don't know where to start and they don't know what to do. So look, we have this intensive and three times a year and it lasts for two days. Everybody comes together. Last time there's about 45 people in the in the room. It's absolutely brilliant event, you know, not only the feedback, but the results were absolutely unbelievable and incredible.

And you know what, we're not talking about here is people who are just so die hard, you know, serious, serial entrepreneurs who are you know, driving business, driving business, working, working, working, they're not. They're just being deliberate, they've just been focused, they've been calm, they've been measured. They're recruiting the right people, they're operating their cells in the right way and some of the results are just mind blown.

There's one guy who actually put 41%. He put, he put over 100 grand a year in the last year on his bottom line in clear net profit. Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. Why or how, you just deliberate around closing business. Around putting his prices up properly and have and operate in a proper account management process that added value to his clients. And one of things that you know, things that we're hearing is that I should have done this years ago. Well, unfortunately, Stuart and I haven't done this years ago, so you couldn't have couldn't have done that anyway. And that's one thing. But it's always a thing to look in the mirror if you're unhappy or you're just getting stuck and you don't know where to start. Then you know that can play on your mind quite a little bit. You know marketing, we did a whole set, we did a 2 hour training on how to, you know, land more clients in your new client runway. But people are just not consistent enough. And the reason they're not consistent enough with marketing it's because they don't understand all the different bits and pieces that they need to do, and also as a techie business, it's kind of like not your happy place. So you're not going to be going out there and putting great pieces of content together and talking on technical manner and building processes together and see how because it's not. You know, it's not your happy place we had a few people that their businesses are just plateau. And I just sort of thought, oh, you know what, I'm just, I'm getting bored of this now. I either want to sell it, I want to let someone else do it, cause I've just lost interest. What am I going to do something about it. And so we hear some really inspiring stories from a couple of our clients, actually, who have been with us for about a year now, and they're just rejuvenated. They've got more energy, more buzz. Their team love coming to work. They, you know, they've got their vision out, they know exactly where they're going and it's so inspiring to hear and I've, you know, kind of almost got goosebumps on the arms just talking about this now. As I say, yeah, there's a couple of people that have that have fallen out of love with the business. The one thing that really resonated with Julie, who's one of our leadership coaches, was she was talking to someone and said, you know, I have not had a holiday since 2017.

Not had a holiday for 5-6 years. That's like crazy, you know, and it's just like, you know, you're running your own business because you want to enjoy it. You want to have the freedom, it's an amazingly profitable model that the end result is you get this nice little sell off if you if you build it correctly and build that monthly recurring up nicely, guess what happens. You get yourself a nice, nice payout at the end of it.

So what do we do then in you know in these in these sessions and what have we kind of like learned you know we talked about your why and what's the point, you know Simon said it does a great job on this but bringing it into the MSP space you know why do you do what you do? What's the point of doing what you're doing is if your family is it for your, you know your own personal income, you know, and it's really understand it we did. Stuart did a great session of why, you know, it's important to know these things and really to reconnect yourself back with your own vision. Personal vision, which will then reconnect you back into. Your business and you get. Excited about it and then have more energy. And you'll stay more focused on what you should be doing. Rather than getting distracted with every little shiny ball and every new little vendor system that comes up with the new little API and ohh wonder how this works and I wonder how that works, you know, so really understanding your why was important and we put up and this is the third time we've done this. Now we've put up on the screen some analytics more on some of the key metrics that we measure here at the growth health for our client's progress and you know putting 6 figures of profit in your business in a year. It's unbelievable, but how does he know that he did that well? Because we run an exercise called the headline numbers and it's quite in depth and it shows exactly where your profitability is and where your best clients are. And all of this kind of good stuff. And it's really important that we do that and people know. That because if you don't know your numbers and we talk about it so much time. If you don't know your numbers, how are you going to know where you need to make changes. How you going to know what you need to do and what you need to focus on but you know.

One of the biggest things that we heard a lot people talking about just chatting is they're even having a beer or having lunch or whatever it might have been was just about how they've now built confidence to deal with poor performance in their team and there's an awful lot, and it was almost like we've opened up this can and as soon as we opened up this can the this can of worms came out of. Well, I've got some poor performers. There's one guy who's absolutely hilarious. Said I've got to go falls asleep. Everyday and it's like what you know, because this guy is just unengaged, but he does. When he's when, when he's awake, he actually does really good work and you know, we had a conversation with structured the conversation with this guy and he hadn't fallen asleep for a week now, and now you might be joking and you might be having a bit of a laugh and a giggle about this, but this was a serious issue.

You know, with this guy because he was good when he was good. But he wasn't. But you know when he wasn't, he was just lazy. And it's just around, you know, being a parent in the office and making sure that we've got the right people. But that, yeah, there's so many poor performance stories of people turning around, poor performance and how that affects the culture and the employee engagement and the morale of the team and the energy and the office and all that sort of stuff and that just ends up leaking back out, doesn't it, to your clients as well if your team are all a little bit peed off, then you know that's going to come out and you'll see SAT scores. And it's going to be harder for you to push this thing uphill rather than trying to lead and energized in a culture business and team, you know, forwards but as I mentioned earlier, we, you know, we went to managed service some and we heard Sally Gunnell speech. She was so inspiring. It was amazing. I was a bit of a runner back in the day. And she was obviously into the hurdles, and she'd had quite an interest in, you know, story and kind of in a brief 2 minute version of what she was saying. She was out there and she was in her mid 20s and people were saying we've only got to your 30 to get this right and to get into the Olympics in the Commonwealth Games or get the Commonwealth Games and then get into the ‘92 Olympics. And it was like. You know, she just didn't feel worthy. And I thought that's funny. That's most some people don't feel worthy. That's interesting. Very, very apt for the MSP community. So she was she was out there, you know, racing, racing, you know. And she just suddenly decided that or at that time in her life that she needed to get someone to help with her mindset because her body was only going so fast. So she got herself a sports psychologist involved. And, you know at that time, which would, I guess, was goanna be in the late 80s here. I thought that was like, a bit bonkers, really. Why do you need someone to sort your head out your legs, you need to leg to run faster anyway. She got her headset, she got her, she got her mindset straight and she was in the Commonwealth Games couple of years before the ‘92 Olympics and she was standing on the start line and she was standing there with these people who were just so inspiring to be next to, you know, some of the top athletes in her race as people she was trying to be and she looked across and there was her coach standing there and her sports pyschologist. And if you can do this now, this would be really good. He kind of put his 2-2 fingers. Just to his eyes and he pointed it to her eyes and point. You know that that kind of whole thing I'm looking at you sort of thing and what he said “was run your own race”.

Don't worry about the person to the left. Don't worry about person to the right., run your own race and what ended up happening was she went off on this race. It was 400 meter hurdles and in the last stretch she just lost it. She just she didn't feel worthy. She said. I just just didn't really. I didn't think I should have been there. And this this other lady and made. And I'm her name. Slipped my mind at the minute she won the race and basically Sally went into the biggest huff you could possibly imagine. Didn't talk to people for days because she let herself down because she didn't think she was worthy. She didn't have the confidence. And she was not running her own. And she's been comparing herself to everybody else. She's comparing herself to all the other runners.

Sound familiar? So two years later, she was in the Olympic Games and she was there in DalyThompson. She was talking to Daly Thompson. He'd just taken gold. And he said she said to him. Goes where. What advice have you got for me? And he said. Well, it's quite simple really got one question. Where do you want to sit on the plane? On the way home. She said what she goes, what all the winners and the gold medalists are ggoing tobe sitting at the front. So when we come down at Heathrow and we stand on that on the stairs, we can be getting all those photographs taken of us. Do you wanna be at the front of the plane? We'going to sit on the back of the plane and she said that. Absolutely spawn her on to run her own race to really get focused, and she beat that rival in that race. It was absolutely incredible story.

So look here. So let's get to the point. Is this podcast so far has resonated with you. I want you to take away these top tips. Number one, I want you to be consistent. And build a great. But simple plan on what you need to do next for whichever part of the business you want to improve, whether it be your sales, whether it be your marketing, whether it be your team, whether it be, you know, your account management, whatever it might be. Just build a simple plan that you can stay on track, get someone to keep you accountable, and make sure that you're focused on that plan and you know what you need to do rather than be distracted. Focus. Follow one course until success. Whatever cliche you want to use, focus being focused and deliberate is where we see our most successful clients and the most successful results is when they're deliberate. They're calm, they're focused. They've got a great team around them, but they're following a plan. Okay, so number two is about, you know, kind of a bit of, a little bit different. It's about being purposeful and deliberate every day now this is this is again, this is kind of around being focused, but if you're going out there to a client or you're going out there to, you know, Prospect meeting. Then make sure you've really, really, really prepared. Don't just treat it like another lead. You know, we're seeing conversion rates in the growth hub of between 70 and 90% on leads coming in. Why is that? Because people are going out and being deliberate, so it's not just all about farming, leads farming sales. Quick, quick, quick. Gotta get all these people ringing up, ringing up, filling in forms. It's not about that. If you get yourself into a really nice tight niche, become relevant, become professional, become the expert in that niche. Yes, leads will come towards you, but also you'll be closing your leads and then when you go out and do your sales and marketing and your awareness and your expert status, because you're the technological lead in that area. When people come towards you, you'll be closing them as well. And it's absolutely ridiculous messages is I don't know what you know. It's all about what's happening on a Friday afternoon or Friday evening. I just get messages from clients. Hey, just sold another 110 seats. Hey, just sold another 70 seats. Hey, I've just sold another 50 seats. It was a breeze in the park. He filled the form out. It was like pushing an open door. Absolutely wonderful to hear. So be purposeful and deliberate, you know every single day.

And the third thing is about building the best team that you can afford right now. Now we hear so many times as bottlenecks in businesses. We hear so many times as bottlenecks in MSPs as they, you know, move down. And it's about a level of trust and education and training. So do a skills matrix and where you want all your team to be. Where they are now, where you want to be and how you're going to get them there. Now we have also had quite a few conversations. We've got some toxic people and we need to get them out. And it's sometimes. It's quite sad because they've been left in there over the two year period, which makes it quite hard in the UK to get rid of people, but you know, your the success of your business will rely around your the quality and the expertise of your team. So build the best team you can be. Don't put up with poor performers either spend more time with them and get them performing or get rid of them. Get them out. Get rid of that toxicity. It is not going to serve you well in your business, so build the best team.

So look, this has been a bit of a longer break fix edition than I would normally have liked, but there's another couple of podcasts I wanted to listen to who just recently released, so she's quite a new one here with a guy called Matt Newton, who's an x7 figure, MSP business owner episode 150, talked about Matt story and why that's so important to connect really, really powerful go and listen to that one. And then also, you know, we had a great friend, a great friend, a tech tribe. You know Nigel Moore, episode 120. It's OK not to be. OK. Talks a lot about mental health and about some of the blockers that stops people moving forwards. Really amazing story.

But I guess what I just want to you know offer out today. On today's call is. If anybody's. Resonated with anything that we've talked about and you need a hand. You want to have a chat then. Just there's that will put a link into the show notes. Just click the link and have a chat with yourself and Stuart, you know it's not going to be a sales conversation. Not going to be pushing you in because this is about making sure that you're getting the right help for you right now and that might be that we move you on to some of our other great friends, you know Richard Tubb or Paul Green, or Mark Hoffman or any of the other guys that are out there in the channel. It's about helping the right people at the right time, so if anything has resonated one bit with what I've been talking about today, then make that change, put that step forwards, come and have a chat. Let's see what we can do to help and see if we can get you on some of our case studies and see if we can get you up there in our shining lights with the with the MSP Growth Hub, members of. You know, putting 6 figures on your bottom line. I'm going to leave that to you now. I'm going to go and enjoy my breakfast with the family sitting on a lovely veranda overlooking the beach in Lanzarote. I'm going to look forward to catching up with you guys soon. So you go and enjoy the rest of your day. And I'll see you all soon. All the best now.

OUTRO

So I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, I'd love it if you could leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. If you want to learn more about how to take your MSP to a million or if you're already there, go faster than comm and join Stuart Warwick and myself in the scale of confidence Facebook group. The link is in the show notes. You can enjoy the rest of your day and I look forward to connecting with you soon.