The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 289 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Accountable to no-one: A blessing or curse?: There is a huge benefit of being accountable to someone, and being accountable to your team is a great way to make sure you get things done. It forces you to plan ahead, be more disciplined, and be a better team player.


• The free MSP marketing tactic that nearly got me arrested: This is a lesson in lateral thinking. You don’t need lots of money to market your MSP, you just need a desire to get new clients, some ideas, and a little time to implement.


• How this MSP built a GREAT marketing system: My guest shares the warts and all story of how she grew her MSP, and how it really took off when she put in place a proper marketing system.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Should MSPs use WhatsApp for marketing? My answer to this question might surprise you.

Accountable to no-one: A blessing or curse?

The joys of being an MSP owner… complete control. Yeah you want to be always onboarding new clients and improving your tech stack and providing the best customer service. But if one week you don’t want to do those things, no one can stop you from not doing those things, because you’re the owner of the business. You’re the boss, right?

Well, if right now you’re not accountable to anyone, there is a huge benefit of being accountable to someone. But who is this person you should answer to? Stick around, you’re not going to believe who I’m going to suggest.

There are many reasons why someone starts their own business and I say that as someone who’s been in business for 20 years himself. People who don’t start their own business think that we do it so that we can earn more money and not have a boss. But I think those of us who’ve been doing it for more than a couple of years, which means we are going to keep doing it for a couple of decades, we know that we started our own business primarily to have control.

And by that I mean control over what work we do, who we do it for and how it’s done. Most of us, I believe, start our own business because we have a deep desire to do something amazing and we want to control freak it all along the way. Sometimes when we work for someone else, we’ve had bad bosses. I know that I have, I’m looking at you, Terry, but also we’ve had good bosses. I’ve had some of those as well, fact loads of those. But escaping the boss is not always the reason why we start our own business.

As I say, making more money and building an asset, something that you own, that’s the side benefit I believe of running your own business. I truly believe control is the primary driving factor for doing it and keep doing it. But nevermind all of these upsides of starting your own business and not having a boss, let’s look at the downsides as well. And I don’t really mean the fact that you for many years, worked longer hours than you ever have for probably a lower salary, that does eventually go, but it’s mostly a pain in the first few years, I don’t mean that stuff. I do mean the downsides of not having a boss. Because, and this might be hard to swallow, but there really are downsides to not having a boss.

The biggest downside to not having a boss is that you are accountable to no one.

Think back to when you last had a job. Someone, somewhere was in charge of you, right? You were accountable to someone in some way and forgetting all the negative impacts of that, there were positive impacts of that as well. And the primary positive impact was that if you didn’t do your work, someone would notice and there would be a problem. But as the business owner, this is not the case, right? Let’s take a marketing project that you’ve been promising yourself, you’re going to do for ages, but there’s no one chasing you to get it done. If you choose not to do that, or if you choose not to investigate that new PSA that you’ve been thinking of switching to, no one’s ever going to raise that in a meeting. Or if they do, you’re the boss, it doesn’t really matter that you haven’t done that. It’s your business, it’s your decisions, you have the control. And sure, I really do think that’s a great thing, but I do believe it’s a bad thing as well. It’s both of these things.

I’ve been getting more heavily involved over the last few months in the development projects that we have in our business. Because we have a development team who work on our portal and our product and our website and our marketing, and they do a fantastic job. But I wanted to insert myself kind of more closely into the process so I could guide it more, try to streamline it a bit, get things happening more quickly. And I realised that as part of that team, I needed to take on board some of the tasks that come out of any project. And as a result of that, because I’m a team player, I now have tasks that I must get completed to specific deadlines. And if I don’t, there are actually people that I have to answer to – my own team.

So you might think I’m crazy for doing this, but do you know what? It’s reawakened something within me that I’m really enjoying, and that’s a desire to do a great job for the person I’m accountable to. For years really, I’ve only been accountable to myself, kind of my clients, kind of my family, but now I’m accountable to my team as well. They’re people I have to face on Zoom calls every single day. And it has changed the way that I work. I’ve always been a very deadline driven person, but with the control of owning the business, I’ve been able to play loose with deadlines and just on a whim on a Friday afternoon, extend a deadline rather than put myself through the pain of doing the work. But now I can’t. And especially if the work I’m doing is a dependency for someone else, and by that I mean they can’t do their work until I’ve completed mine.

If someone is revising a page on our website and I’ve got to write that page first, you can see how if I don’t hit the deadline on that, neither can they. Can you see why being accountable to someone somewhere is a great way to make sure you get things done. It forces you to plan ahead, be more disciplined and be a better team player. And these are all great traits for the person who runs the business – YOU. It makes you a better business owner and definitely makes you a better boss.

So here’s a question for you. Within your MSP, who should you be accountable to? Do you have a service desk manager or operations manager that you can be accountable to? Perhaps you have a business partner and you can keep each other on the straight and narrow. What about your spouse, your other half? Could you be accountable to them for getting things done? Especially when the price of not getting those things done has an impact back on the family? I’d be really interested to know who you could be accountable to within your business.

The free MSP marketing tactic that nearly got me arrested

Would you risk being arrested just to win new clients for your MSP? Sometimes when you have no money to market your business it can feel like you’re never going to achieve anything. I was in exactly this situation once and the craziest thing happened as a result of it. I did nearly get arrested. Let me tell you how.

This is a lesson in lateral thinking and how powerful it is to have zero marketing budget.

So jump in the DeLorean with me, it’s 2002 and I’m running a music radio station in the city of Peterborough here in the UK. And in the years before I joined the station had taken a real battering from its competitors. So my brief was to build up the audience again, and just to test me, the large media group that owned the station gave me this budget – ZERO DOLLARS. Now I can see that that was a blessing because it taught me the power of bootstrapping, where we had to do our marketing using only the existing resources we had in the station. And I learned so many valuable business lessons from that.

The way you market a radio station is different from the way you market an MSP. You need an easy direct marketing strategy such as my three step lead generation system – build audiences, grow relationships, and convert relationships – you can learn more about that @mspmarketingedge.com. But for radio marketing 20 plus years ago, it was all about just getting the name and the address out there. The name of the station, the type of the music it played, and the FM frequency. Yes, I’m that old, I worked on an FM radio station. In fact, I started my career on a medium wave on an AM radio station, please someone get me a walking stick.

Anyway, back in the day we did car stickers, we had a couple of promotional vehicles, but I couldn’t afford billboards or any kind of paid advertising, and yet I wanted to dominate the city. And then one day someone on my team came up with the most brilliant idea ever. We were discussing how dirty the pavements (AKA the sidewalks) were in our city and how they needed a good jet wash, like a pressure wash. And one of my colleagues joked, maybe we should clean them. And then another colleague said, what if we did clean them? But we used a template so it left behind our logo in the street.

That was such a good idea at the time, and today this actually has a name, it’s called Clean Advertising. It’s very clever, isn’t it? And the intern