EP255 - Why MSP Success Can Still Leave You Stressed - and How to Beat Overwhelm
with Ian Luckett

IAN: In this episode of the IT Experts podcast, we talk about why MSP success can actually leave you stressed.

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. Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. Today's podcast was brought to you with some inspiration from our incredible clients at a recent two day intensive that we had. And it was Claire actually one of our coaches, our finance coach, and she was saying that she was talking to some MSPs or one particular MSP who was doing incredibly well. He's having the most success he possibly could. But he felt burnt out. He was absolutely overwhelmed. He was burnt out and he was busy. And we joke when we find these situations in the Growth Hub because we think, yeah, be careful what you wish for, and all of that kind of stuff. But there's success leaves clues, right? And when you leave a path of a great foundation to a business, then success will follow. But also if you just focus on some of the things that you are working on your business. One of those, you know what got you here is not going to get you there moments you carry on doing what you're doing. When you were busy, when you weren't organized, when you didn't have that structure, then all of a sudden life can just get busier and the last thing you actually need is someone going out and getting more business. So today we're going to dive into that topic. It is going to be around overwhelm and burnout even when the business is booming.

You know that feeling when everything looks great from the outside, right? You've got new clients, projects coming in, revenue's flowing. It's all on the upside, but inside you are absolutely exhausted. You're stretched. You're stretched too thin, and you're struggling to break that site. How many of you are actually feeling like that?

Who are listening on the podcast today, running your MSP? So this is what we're talking about, and we're going to break it down for you to help you understand the fears that come with the overwhelm, and then what we're going to actually do about it. So the main problem and the fears that we have with this around your MSP when you start to get busy is that, many MSP owners feel they lose control of the business as things start to speed up. Now, what that can mean in terms of your team, in terms of your clients you're inherently grown the business yourself from your heart, and at the end of the day, the clients are always the ones who kind of focusing on you, but being able to delegate correctly is the way to scale an MSP and building that team as well is most importantly.

You're going to be worrying about letting your clients down because you're too busy to give them that constant attention. And when they don't get that attention, you immediately think, oh, they're going to leave. I've got to do this. So you end up working with even more clients rather than, again, as I mentioned just delegating. When you are working in this environment of overwhelm, you can be missing some really big opportunities. We talk a lot of the time about 1,000 thousand pound task, which is like a 10 pound an hour skillset task, which most of that nowadays we want automated, a hundred pound an hour is going to be your leadership and your management team. And a thousand pound an hour is the strategic thinking that you need to be doing to grow and scale your MSP profitably.

Now, if you're stuck in the weeds, you are never ever going to get that time in your day to focus on those big tasks and those big tasks and those big thoughts, as it would be, are going to be the thing that's going to help you drive out real forwards.

Now, burnout is a real fear but unfortunately burnout, whether you want to call it burnout, whether you want to call it rock bottom, whatever you want to call it. Somebody said something the other day that made me snigger a little bit. He says, you might have a hundred problems, you might have a thousand problems, but when you've got a health problem, you've got one problem. And we are all containers in our own bodies on this earth. I'm not going to go and get all deep on you now, but. If you don't look after yourself, if you don't look after your mental health, your physical health and your wellbeing, then when you get into overwhelm, you will find that you'll actually go into a deeper place than you would've done before. If you were healthier, you were fitter, you had more energy, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a real problem and making sure that we really do focus on those, on the health side of things, we see a lot of MSP business owners and many of them could do with going down the gym, looking after themselves a little bit more. At the end of the day, what we're trying to do, we're trying to build a business that works for you rather than you for it, right? So that you can then spend more time with your family and your friends. Okay? What's the point of doing that if you can't walk very far because you may be overweight, okay? You may not be very physically fit but, you need to be in that position where you can then, go and enjoy the rest of your life. And I know that might be a little bit out of order, a little bit of a jab in the ribs, but, I'm sorry that's what this podcast's all about. Worrying about taking that proper break and worrying about going on holiday. The last thing you'll be thinking about is going on holiday. When you're in the middle of overwhelm, you're in the middle of being a busy period. When you've got a load of project work coming in and new clients to onboard, the last thing you want to do is go away. Now your husband or your wife might have already booked that holiday, and then you're going to get even more stressed. So we need to really be able to foresee these situations coming up and make sure that when you are getting that success that you are actually enjoying it. You are benefiting from it, and you are getting that time back, which is what always we need. You know when you become that or when you are stuck in that bottleneck, in your own business as it would be, everything is going to slow down because your team are not going to want to make decisions because you're not delegating to them properly. The high stress from yourselves is going to trickle down increasing staff turnover and team frustration. They're going to get fed up and do remember please that when your team members decide to hand their notice in and leave, they're not necessarily leaving the business. They're leaving the owner that they work for rerun that one in your mind for any time when you've left a job or you've left a position, you probably would've left and resigned because of the person that you're working for rather than the business. So also in this area, we want to talk a little bit about shadow with a leader as well. If you are running around overwhelmed, stressed, up to your guts in it and you can't really handle anymore, then guess what your team are going to do. They're going to do exactly the same. And if there's one of you and there's 10 of them, do you want 11 people like that? Talking to clients in a short manner, being busy, been overwhelmed, been panicked, being unhealthy. Yeah, let do what I need to go on. Having that clarity to make that decision, having that clarity, to have that think is really important. Because the revenue's going to dip your projects that they're going to get delayed and all sorts of things are going to start to slip.

And really one of the key things is when you get inconsistency, your clients are going to pick up on that and then they can start to go do you know what the service that we used to get from Bob wasn't as good as it was a few years ago? And I'm not quite sure he is really, looking after me, but, oh, do you know what? I'm going to go and have a look for another MSP. So there's all these different ways that you can catastrophize, overwhelm when you get busy because you've been really successful. But let's get onto some of the tips and let's get onto some of the key areas in today's show to help you move this one forward.

STUART'S INTERRUPT: Hey, just a quick one from me, for everybody that's listening, Stuart here. If you're serious about growing your MSP, but you're not sure what helps right for you, then just grab our ultimate MSP Growth Guide. It's a really simple way to check out what's out there for support that could really help you work. There's no fluff. There's no filler, just facts.

Or alternatively, if you want to meet us face to face and see how we do things up close, come along to one of our events. They're regularly put on, they're all in the links below. Go check them out, and now it's back to the show.

IAN: Thanks, Stuart.

So the first one is going to be to correctly delegate. There's 10 pound hour task. Look at how you can automate it, not with shiny balls, but with a process that's in place. We are having a lot of conversations with MSPs around automation and AI, Automation is amazing. Most AI these days people are talking about is actually automation, but I'm no technical expert, so don't shoot me for that one. But you need to have a really solid set of SOPs in your business. And when you've got them set into your business, then you can start to delegate. And when you get a team that's connected to your vision and your mission and what you want to try and achieve, and then you ask them to help delegate and make the business more organized, guess what's going to happen? That flow is going to get in place. You need to stop doing the low value work. It's like mic drop moment. It's about as complicated as that is the work that we need to make sure that we're stopping doing. It's those 10 pound tasks. Need to get yourself elevated up. Check in your team, have they got the capability before you delegate? Don't dump. And also then make sure that you have got a capacity to do it. So if they're already busy, and you are already busy, don't got to give more work to do, because guess what happens? None of it's going to get done and you're going to get in a right old mess.

So first of all, let's look at that delegation. You know we've said .2, time and time again. We've all got the amount, same amount of time in our lives, in our days, in our weeks, right? But it's what you do with it that absolutely matters. So I want you to block out some thinking time each week. Whether it be the end of the last week or the beginning of the next week on what you need to do and who's going to do what, how you build that leverage, how you build that systemization might only be 90 minutes to work on the business rather than getting stuck in all the weeds and the technicalities of it. If your team can help you get your productivity and your workflow to 80% of what you were doing before, how amazing is that going to be? That's good, is good enough in this situation, okay? No one's going to do the work as good as you are going to do it, or to the attention that you are going to do it. But more importantly, you are not going to find that golden gem within your organization who could do that work, if you don't give them the responsibility, you don't, lengthen the lead and let them have that responsibility so that they can make mistakes, learn, get better, make some more mistakes, learn even more, get even better. And then one day they will be better than you at your job. And that's what we want. That is exactly what we want. Okay.

Measure what matters, really important. So scorecards, dashboards, whatever it is you want to do so that when you start to delegate and when you start to get this structure in place and your SOPs are starting to then, delegate down, you've just got a dashboard that you're looking at, and if it's a sea of green, go and play golf. Go and go on holiday, take some time out, go for a walk around the park. Whatever you need to do. That's when you can spend that time on your health and your wellbeing. Okay. I always, even since I started my, so it's business development journey, whatever it was, when I was in corporate, I used to have this vision of sitting on a sunbed, with a one piece of paper and knowing how are the departments going? How's operations going? How's sales going? How's the team going? How's clients going? All of that kind of great stuff. And what that, those are the dashboards that you've got access to through so many systems with your PSAs and all of the other systems that you guys have got together. And this touch out, this cuts out a thinking time on where do I need to focus? So if you've got a dashboard that starts all of a sudden starting to turn amber and red because tickets are not being picked up, or sales are not coming in, or whatever it might be, that's where you then go and spend your time and your focus, because you know that's where you are going to have the biggest impact is absolutely massive.

Sharing the load is a really key one. This is the next one. This isn't just about delegating. This is about getting the right people in the right roles. Can you see now how all of this revolves thinking time. At the beginning I said, you need to make sure that to get yourself out of overwhelm, you need to get your time organized and all this kind, but how are you going to work out whether you've got the right people in the right roles, if you are in overwhelm, if you are in a place of stress and you're not going to be making those right decisions. So your ticket out of your MSP is in your team. Sorry to say it, it's exactly true. So look at the people that we've got, but we call them A's B's and C players A's are ones going to help you lift up. B'S are pretty good, what we call a steady Eddy and C's are the ones you just need to get them out to be quite frank. Trust is the key. This is where the culture comes in. This is where the organizational culture, the vision, the mission, the values and everything like that, all connect together to help you build that incredible team, because the right people in the right roles means you are getting yourself out of overwhelm. And finally, when you break down the plans and your downtime as serious as you can. Then you can plan the client projects. You can plan your innovations. Maybe you've got that AI project you want to build in, and maybe that's when you want to start to think a little bit more strategically with the team and spend more time. You could measure yourself on how much time in meetings that I spend this week where I was working on the business rather than firefighting in the business. Because rested leaders and leaders that have got more head space. They make much better decisions.

So look, once you've got this in place, you start to tackle the overwhelm, you'll regain that clarity, and you'll make sharper, confident and quicker decisions that are going to tilt your business upwards, they're going to tilt your business in a much more of a sharper trajectory in terms of growth. Your team's going to become stronger, they're going to be more motivated, they're going to be more, energetic. And that's because you are not micromanaging them in every single detail. If they don't burn out, okay, people don't leave. The last thing you need right now to get you even more busy is your key people leaving because you've just like peed them off for want of a better phrase because you haven't taken notice on them. So it's going to remove all the stalling, it's going to help you get some really steady and great progress. Your client relationships are going to improve because you're going to, basically, you're just going to shave off all the bumpy bits, all the bits that the clients don't like, and make a really slick SOP for delivery service and quality.

But the most important reason and the most important thing that why I put this podcast episode today together is to help you win back the freedom so that you can take that time off and spend time relaxing on holiday, not thinking about work, spending that time with your family, enjoying the business that you've built, enjoying the profits, enjoying the choices that you've got from, all of the hard work that you are doing.

So that wraps up today's episode in Managing Overwhelm. Once your MSP's really started to take off and you've got that success. Success and growth should be exciting, it doesn't need to be exhausting. And just by delegating those low value tasks, carving out that time to think empowering your team and building a business that works for you and not for you is exactly the way you're doing it now. If you start feeling in the weeds and you're ready to step into the leadership goal, break this down and get yourself back on track.

That is it for me today. I hope you thoroughly enjoyed this show, bit of a short, sharp, jabbing, the ribs, but it's just something that came up with one of the clients, as we were saying that we were talking to at our event last week, and I just thought you all needed to hear about it and just put together our tips and tricks to help you get out of overwhelm so that you can enjoy the success rather than get stressed by it. Now you crack on. Go and enjoy the rest of your day and I look forward to catching up with you soon. All the best now.