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Welcome to Episode 270 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• If your clients are happy, this KPI will be high: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is a quality score where you measure how well you have done at retaining revenue over the last 12 months and assessing whether it has grown.


• 3 bootstrap marketing ideas for MSPs: Marketing doesn’t have to cost a load of cash. If you have a member of staff with a spare few hours each week, you can invest their time into these low cost or no cost marketing tasks for your MSP.


• Your MSP’s growth priorities for 2025: My special guest, a turnaround expert, tells us how to plan the year ahead with clarity, focus, and fresh momentum. You’ll discover how to organise your priorities, craft a winning growth strategy, and create a story for 2025 that’s really worth celebrating.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ryan, from an MSP in San Diego, wants to know why it’s so important to fix his website as a matter of priority.

If your clients are happy, this KPI will be high

Your MSP’s bank balance might look great and you might be impressed with your other KPIs. But there’s a hidden one that I bet you $5 you never look at. Yet it could flip things completely. Most MSPs have never heard of this key performance indicator, and yet it’s the ultimate quality check for any recurring revenue business.

In just a few minutes, you’ll find out what this secret KPI is, how to calculate it in under 10 minutes and exactly what score proves that you are running a truly outstanding MSP.

One of the things I love about working in the channel is that every day is a school day and you never ever feel like you have finally learned everything. This, in 2025, is my ninth year working with MSPs and honestly, I feel like I learn so much every single day. And as someone who has a passion, and a need in fact, for constant learning, I do find this exciting and not at all tiring.

In fact, just a few months back I was chatting to an MSP and we were talking about how much progress their business has made over the last couple of years. It’s been actually astonishing. And then he said to me how delighted he was with the performance of his NRR, and that’s N, as in N for November, not MRR, which is M for mother. And of course we know what MRR is. It’s monthly recurring revenue.

What is NRR? It stands for Net Revenue Retention – essentially, which clients that we had last year are still here this year.

It’s a quality score. It’s something that is used a lot by SaaS businesses (subscription as a service businesses) and all subscription businesses typically use it, just not normally MSPs.

But if you are looking for more ways to measure how good a job you’re doing, this could be it. So let me tell you how you’d measure this and what good performance looks like. This will be a great time of year to measure it because you could kind of look back to the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024 and look at the clients you had then and ask how many of those clients do we still have today? What was the value of their monthly recurring revenue a year ago? And has that grown today? That MSP that I was speaking to has an NRRR of 105%, which means that he’s kept all of his clients over the year, which is not unusual for an MSP, but it’s still nice to measure and know for a fact, and it means that he’s also grown their monthly recurring revenue – got the same clients, they’re spending more.

And I would say for an MSP that anything under a score of a hundred percent needs some investigating because you do expect to hang on to all of your clients year to year, don’t you? And you should definitely be growing their MRR and you can do this by increasing prices or selling them extra services. If you do lose a client during the year, it should only really be for natural reasons such as they’ve gone out of business or better still they’ve been acquired. And you may have the odd year where you lose a client for bad reasons. Maybe they’ve fallen out with you or they’ve moved over to another MSP, but those should be exceptions rather than the norm. And the net recurring revenue retention score allows you to measure that. And hey, if you do measure this for your business, will you let me know what score you get because I’d like to kind of figure that out across a whole number of different MSPs. My email address is hello@mspmarketingedge.com.

3 bootstrap marketing ideas for MSPs

Stop digging down the back of the couch for spare change to fund your MSP’s growth. January might mean tightening your belt a bit, but that doesn’t have to stop you from finding new clients and driving revenue.

Let me tell you about three clever no cost marketing ideas that any MSP can use to generate leads and unlock hidden opportunities, all without spending a penny.

You’ve heard of bootstrapping a business, right? It’s when a new venture is built up using limited funds and a lot of goodwill, and you hear stories of founders sleeping in their office so they don’t have to waste money renting an apartment. Now, your business is more liquid than that, but there’s still a place for bootstrapping when it comes to marketing.

Marketing doesn’t have to just cost cash. You can invest a different resource into it instead… TIME.

And this doesn’t have to be your personal time. If your staff have a few hours spare every week, you can always invest their time into the business. Everyone benefits when that happens. So here are three low cost or no cost marketing ideas for MSPs…

The first is to do 15 minutes every weekday on LinkedIn. The most robust way to market in 2024 is to build an audience, then grow a relationship with that audience. And at the point they’re ready to switch from one MSP to another, they are dramatically more likely to switch to the MSP that they know. And one way to build this audience is simply to grow your LinkedIn network. For 15 minutes every day, make connection requests to business owners and managers in your town or your vertical (niche). Make 10 connection requests every day and one or two of them will accept. Now, that doesn’t sound a lot until you compound it. Let’s say two connections, times five days a week, times 50 weeks a year, that adds up into 500 new connections every year. How cool is that?

Number two, ask every user this one simple feedback question. The most robust way to grow net profits is to get your existing clients to buy more from you. New clients are nice, yeah, but they’re very expensive. Whereas someone who is already paying you every month contributes a lot more to the bottom line if they go on to buy something else. And this is why businesses like McDonald’s have fully systemised the upsell – Would you like to go large? or Would you like to add fries to that? Of course, we all know how difficult it can be to get technicians to upsell. Even people who are passionate about talking about extra services will sometimes fall back into their comfort zone, which is to go for the easy fix and not mention X, Y, Z new service. So how about you get your team into the habit of asking this one simple question of every person, every user that they speak to. What else could we have done for you today?

Now, most clients will say, oh, nothing thanks because they’re in a hurry to put the phone down and this probably means that you’ve checked that they are happy. All is good. Some will use it as an opportunity to talk about something that they’d meant to bring up, but perhaps they hadn’t felt that they’d had chance to. And this means that you’ve uncovered some money on the table, profit that you would otherwise have lost. And a handful will tell you about a service or a product that they’d like to buy from you, if only you sold it. And this is invaluable market research. With this one, look out for the trends. What are several people asking for? Because if you don’t give it to them, they are just going to go elsewhere to get it.

And then the third and the final one is to run a free to enter prize draw. People love competitions. Yes, even business owners and managers, they never expect to win, but just the act of entering brightens their day for a second. I used to be a radio presenter a very long time ago, and it was weird how many people would phone up just to win like a Backstreet Boys CD, because this was back in the 1990s. And there are two types of prize draw that you can do. Either offer up any old prize that you can find just for the sake of running a competition, and make sure the prize is really attractive. It can be as simple as a laptop that you acquired for a client that they didn’t actually buy for whatever reason, and it’s just sat on a shelf gathering dust. The other way to do it is to give away a sample of something specific that you are promoting. For example, if you are launching a new monthly recurring revenue service to existing clients, then you’d give away a year’s free membership.

If none of those three grabbed your attention, don’t worry. In next week’s podcast, I’ve got another three bootstrap, low cost/no cost marketing ideas for your MSP.

Your MSP’s growth priorities for 2025

Featured guest: Ori Elraviv is a multicultural turnaround executive with a passion for driving sustainable growth in sma