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Welcome to Episode 258 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• How notifications stop you from buying a better car: Your job as the business owner is to find quality time to work ON the business and make sure you’re operating in “the zone” where nothing distracts you. Your biggest threat to this is notifications… turn them off, all of them.


• Are you up against a Super MSP? This is why you have nothing to fear: Super MSPs are huge companies that buy MSPs and merge them together. But fear not, these present three opportunities for you.


• Why your brand is so much more than your logo: Your brand is actually how people feel about you based on everything they see or hear about you. This is why your brand tone must be consistent across every way you communicate with everyone.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Terry, from an MSP in Pennsylvania, is concerned about the risk of forgetting the things that might help him grow his MSP. He wants to know the best way to keep great business books alive in the long-term.

How notifications stop you from buying a better car

One of the hard facts that you soon learn as a business owner is if you want to grow your business, you have to find and protect substantial chunks of time in order for you to work on your business. It’s this time where you make the forward progress because you are implementing things that will generate new clients, retain existing clients, and encourage your existing clients to buy more services from you. But there’s a problem, you see, I believe you have to spend this time in the zone completely focused on the task in hand. And this is especially true if you’re an MSP doing marketing activities, and that’s not a natural skillset for you. Yet the vast majority of MSPs, they never get into this state of full focus. And there’s a specific reason why.

Many, many years ago, I used to do one-on-one consults with MSPs here in the UK. We’d hire a business meeting room and we’d spend the day exploring their business goals, their marketing, what was going well and what was not going well. And I probably did about, I don’t know, 20 or 30 of these over about 18 months. And it’s not something I do anymore, but it was a great way for me to learn about MSPs and of course for me to help them with their marketing. That was before we had our MSP Marketing Edge service.

But I’ll never forget one of the meetings I had, which was almost like a comedy situation, like it could have been in a sitcom. So let’s just take the context of this meeting. The MSP that I’m meeting with has paid a few thousand pounds for my time and attention. And the whole purpose of the day is to examine their marketing and make it better so that they can win new clients and ultimately grow their business, which is the way that of course, they’ll grow their own personal income and ultimately have a better lifestyle. So to me, that makes the meeting a very big deal indeed. And in fact, most of the MSPs that I met with, they took their meeting very seriously. But one of them didn’t. And it wasn’t that he didn’t want to, he was desperate to grow his business and I knew that he valued my advice.

The trouble was he was caught up in the notifications of what was happening in his business at that exact moment. The first hour or so, I could barely drag him away from his laptop. He was looking at Teams messages, he was looking at his PSA, and he was just generally distracted. And I challenged him on this when we had our coffee break and I said, look, I don’t believe that you can spend quality time working on your business while your brain is trapped on notifications about things that are happening in the business. Oh, and I’ve got to say, it wasn’t like there was a big incident going off, there was no cyber attack or anything like that. It was just the regular day-to-day stuff between him and his techs.

As you can imagine, this MSP was trapped working in his business on a day-to-day basis. And even though he wasn’t there in his office, he was sat in a meeting room with me. He was still mentally in his office with his techs. You know what I mean by that? So after that first coffee break, I did manage to persuade him to log out of his PSA, to shut down Teams and to spend more time focused on what we were doing, what him and I were doing in the room. And that’s when his phone started pinging. Ping a text message. I could see his eyes jumped down to the phone and he was desperate to read it and see if it was from his team.

And when he didn’t read it and didn’t respond, they WhatsApped him, ping. And he almost started sweating as he could see the name of one of his staff on his phone. And he wasn’t reading the message because he’d promised to pay attention to me. And then the phone started ringing and both of us could see the word office on the screen. So I let him answer that, and I kind of mentally gave up on that session because I realised he was never going to spend quality time thinking about the growth of his own business.

Now let me be clear, I’m not in any way being critical of this business owner, although he did waste a couple of thousand pounds on me and the meeting room that day. The point that I’m trying to make is that if you’re going to do important work, you’ve got to get into the zone. You’ve got to get into that deep mode where you are implementing important things that are going to grow your business in the years ahead. And you cannot do that if every five seconds there’s a ping, ping, ping of something somewhere going off. In this respect, Teams is evil, your PSA is evil, your phone is evil, your children are evil. I’m just joking about the children, one, I’m not really joking, but it’s true. You cannot do quality work on your business if you are constantly being interrupted.

Let me tell you something that you and I might disagree with. Multitasking is a myth. I genuinely believe it is. I know that you think you can multitask because you can set up a new user while you are resetting someone else’s password and you can be on the phone to a third person. You can do this all at the same time, and you might think that you’re one of those really clever people whose brain is set up that way and you can genuinely multitask. And yes, indeed, that may be the case.

But when you are doing important jobs that you are not good at, things like marketing and especially when they’re really important, they’re not just a trivial thing like a password reset. They need your full brain capacity.

Every single time a notification grabs your attention, you are pushing your progress backwards.

And this is why I actually have very few notifications on my phone. I have a couple of select people on WhatsApp who I’m notified about, and a couple of select apps which don’t abuse the notifications, but there’s very little else that gets through on my phone. And if I’m doing really important work, I enable do not disturb on my phone and on my laptop. It feels like the whole world’s going to explode and you won’t know about it if you’re on do not disturb for an hour or 90 minutes, doesn’t it? But I promise you that is not the case. What will happen is that you’ll spend quality time working on things that grow your MSP.

The MSP owners who are growing their businesses do this on a regular basis, I promise you. So the next time you see a car that you’d love to own or a house that you would love to move into, but you can’t yet afford it, ask yourself if the blame lies with the ping, ping, ping.

Are you up against a Super MSP? This is why you have nothing to fear

A Super MSP that has hundreds of employees buys a local competitor of yours and suddenly they’re in your town. Has this happened to you or do you fear coming up against a super MSP?

I don’t think you have anything to worry about from Super MSPs. In fact, I believe they create lots of opportunities for you.

Super MSPs are huge companies that buy MSPs and merge them together. And here are three reasons why I believe they create marketing opportunities for other MSPs like yours.

Here’s the first one – At your old competitor, the clients, once the acquisition has gone through, watch the service levels go down and the prices go up. And all of the people that they’ve known for years just seem to vanish. And this makes them sometimes reluctant to sign another contract. So here are some ideas to capitalise on this. Look at an archived copy of your old competitor’s website to get names from testimonials and call them. Run paid ads with a headline – Does your business miss old competitor’s name?

Number two – Some of the technicians who were transferred to the Super MSP will hate working for a big company, so reach out to all of them on LinkedIn and meet for a coffee, just to connect. Bingo. You now have a pipeline of potential new technicians. Hire the one who can remember the contact names of all of the clients of your old competitor.

And number three – Sure, the Super MSP will always be better resourced than you with more marketing and salespeople, but none of them will have your passion or your speed. The bigger a business, the slower it is to react. You are a speedboat. They are a super tanker. You can adapt to the winds on a whim and they take three miles to change course. Never be scared when you’re up against a su