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Welcome to Episode 283 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Can MSPs grow the business… by being idle?: Sometimes the fastest way to grow your MSP is to do less work, because it’s very difficult to do when your mind is constantly moving from task to task to task. That’s why you need to be idle.


• When did you last Google your MSP?: Do you know everything that’s being said about your MSP online? It’s time to discover your digital footprint.


• How to survive 30 years owning an MSP without a breakdown: My special guest has a unique insight into how MSP owners set themselves up to not just survive, but thrive over three decades of business ownership.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group:  Have you considered selling your MSP at some point in the future but don’t know where to start? I have some great book recommendations to help.

Can MSPs grow the business… by being idle?

Just a warning, this is not the MSP growth advice you were expecting. As a busy MSP it’s all about getting things done and maximising your time, right? Well, sometimes yes, but are you ready to hear about a shocking way to grow that is the exact opposite. Because sometimes the fastest way to grow your MSP is to do as little work as possible.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m a bit of a productivity junkie. Since way before I started my first business 20 years ago I’ve been reading books and listening to advice about how to get things done and constantly tweaking my productivity stack, if you’d like to call it that. I mean, the software that I use, of course. And you go back to the turn of the century when I was, obviously I’m very old now, but I was running a radio station back then and I was completely trapped in having too much work to do without enough time to do it. And that was actually what drove me to look at what are other people doing and how do they manage their time better.

What used to be called time management back then, we now call it productivity, but it’s all the same thing really. We all have exactly at the same 24 hours in every day, and yet many people get a lot more done in their 24 hours than you and I might in ours. Why is that? Why does the work week pass so quickly week after week after week?

The people who get the most things done are actually doing the smallest number of tasks, but they work on the tasks that make the biggest difference.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? And the reason they know which tasks to work on is because they make sure they spend plenty of time being idle.

You see, I said this was growth advice that you weren’t expecting… to get more done, you should do less? That doesn’t make sense, except it does. The core problem with tackling productivity with a view of I must get lots more done, is that you get trapped in being busy. And this is especially risky for an MSP because the very nature of your work is to be reactive and to be caught up with lots of details. And yes, I know they really do matter, and because of that you can easily fill your day with getting hundreds of small things done. But are they the things that move the needle? Are they the things that help you win more new clients, get those clients to buy from you more often, and get those clients to spend more every single time they buy? The chances are that they’re not. All of those little things, yes, they’re important and someone somewhere needs to do them and be across all of that detail, but that doesn’t have to be you, the business owner.

In fact, your job is to identify what the big things are that will grow the business. And then make sure you have enough personal time, and the business has allocated enough resource – that’s human people resource, time resource and cash resource – to make those things happen. And that’s very difficult to do when your mind is constantly moving from task, to task, to task, to task. In fact, it’s impossible. And that’s why you need to be idle. And when I say being idle, I don’t mean lying on the couch doing nothing, having a nap. My idea of being idle means just not doing work. I like to be idle by taking a long walk or going for a run, or perhaps even going to the cinema. How can I be idle while I’m watching an MCU film? Well, I can because I’m concentrating on the Avengers. I’m giving my brain space to think about stuff while I’m doing something else. And that’s really what I mean when I say you need to be idle.

As the leader of the business, it’s critical that you find time and protect that time on a regular basis to actively think about your business, but also to think about anything but the business. You can’t really do that when you’re with your family or socialising. So you do need time on your own. And you can think of it as processing time. You load the business’s goals and problems into your brain. In fact, they’re already probably top of your mind for most of the time anyway. And then you make sure that you have plenty of idle time to go and reflect on those problems. Let’s call those problems, opportunities. Every problem seems easier and more exciting when you reframe it as an opportunity.

So on a very regular basis, I put aside time in my schedule for this. In fact, I do it most weeks and it tends to be towards the end of the week. I’ll find a few hours to go for a long walk or go for a run and reflect on the business. What are we trying to do? What’s holding us back? What are the problems/opportunities, and what can I as the leader do to move everything forward? And if I don’t know the answers, that’s my brain telling me that I haven’t had enough idle time to focus on that. So go to the cinema. Hey, thanks brain. So tell me, is this something that you already do or should you be building into your schedule this active idle time?

When did you last Google your MSP?

Tell me, are your ears burning? They could be. Well, your MSP’s ears to be exact. Do you know everything that’s being said about your MSP online? Loads of MSPs have discovered information about their business online that they had no idea was there. Are you ready to find out about yours? Let’s dive into the easy way to keep track of what your clients and prospects are saying about you.

When was the last time you Googled your MSP? And by that I mean you put your business name in speech marks so that you get exact hits on your name and then you check every single page of Google results that comes up.

Every MSP owner I’ve ever asked to do this has discovered something that they didn’t know about.

It might be a bad review that was left on some obscure review platform they didn’t know about, or it might be a mention of them somewhere. There’s always something. Just before recording today, I did it for my MSP Marketing Edge and I discovered a Reddit thread about us. Now you want to see exactly what’s being said about you until you run out of mentions of your business.

This is called your digital footprint. And the reason you must be on top of this is because some of your potential future customers will do this before they’ll sign a contract with you. Of course, your footprint is going to change all the time, which is why it’s worth repeating this on a six month basis, or you could partly automate it. Here’s the easy way to do that.

Just set up a Google alert for your business name. So every time there’s a mention of you somewhere, you get an email. Now, this isn’t perfect and it will sometimes miss mentions, but it’s a good way to set and forget the process of checking your digital footprint. Just make sure that you put your business name in speech marks.

While you are there, why don’t you do that for your name? Unless you’ve got a very Googleable name like Paul Green, there’s lots of Paul Greens around… there are Paul Green shoes, did you know that? But if you’ve got a slightly less common name, you could definitely do that. And while you’re setting that up, why not do it for your competitors as well? Pick out your top three or five competitors, put their names in speech marks in a Google alert, and every time they’re mentioned on the web, you’ll be told about it too.

How to survive 30 years owning an MSP without a breakdown

Featured guest: Melanie Curtis helps driven professionals access their massive untapped potential. A former investment banker turned stunt-woman, world-record pro skydiver, turned keynote speaker, life coach, author, activist and entrepreneur. She has jumped out of an airplane over 12,000 times, and has travelled the globe as a headlining professional athlete coaching thousands of people over the last 30 years.

Melanie co-founded the Trust the Journey podcast, where she and guests share in depth about their deep healing as a crucial part of accessing the true expanse of our human potential. Underpinning it all, Melanie deeply loves people, her family above all else (including her cat, Matil).

Running an MSP is tough, really tough. There’s so much to do and so many conflicting demands on you as the owner. And yet, if you want to last 20, maybe 30 years doing this, you can’t operate at full capacity all the time. You can see why, right?

My special guest today has a unique insight into how MSP owners set themselves up to not just survive, but thrive over three decades of business