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Welcome to Episode 255 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• How to minimise interruptions and stupid questions from staff: It’s important to invest time every day on growing your MSP without interruptions and I’ve got a 3 step fix to help you do just that.


• 5 big ugly MSP marketing myths: BUSTED: Improving your marketing becomes much easier when you wipe these common myths from your head.  Just like IT, marketing should be logical and systemisable.


• The 3 most important growth things you can do in the final 3 months of the year: My guest this week, Ian Luckett, unveils his expert advice as a Business Growth Consultant, to achieve the most from the rest of 2024.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Francis from an MSP in Washington wants to know how to find the motivation to do work he doesn’t enjoy.

How to minimise interruptions and stupid questions from staff

One of the things you hear me regularly talking about is the need to invest 60 to 90 minutes every day working on your MSP rather than in it. And that means doing activities that win you new clients, encourage them to buy more from you and encourage them to spend more when they buy. Now, one of the biggest problems with this is when your staff constantly interrupt you with questions that really they could answer for themselves, do you have this problem? If so, you are going to love my solution.

Staff interrupt you all the time, often with stupid questions. Now, I’m not being rude about your staff, this is a fact, but interruptions kill progress. Why do they do it? Well, partly it’s to show that they’re working. Partly it’s because they’re too lazy to look up the answer for themselves. And partly it’s because…

Staff want your attention, as they are the child.  And as their boss, you are the parent.

Now, there is a three step fix for this, and you have to make a very long-term commitment to all three of these steps so that this becomes, if you like, a way of working and not just your current thing.

Step one – find your own space. It’s impossible to do your work on the business when you’re in the same physical space as your staff who are working in the business on your behalf. So you need a separate office at least, or maybe even an office away from your building. There’s nothing wrong with sitting in with your staff sometimes, but not all the time because it’s exhausting and frankly unproductive.

Step two – answer every stupid question with a question of your own. So let’s say you are asked – Boss, we’re out of milk. What should we do? – which of course makes you want to pull out your sword and with one swift chop end their miserable life, but this isn’t Game of Thrones. So instead you ask this question back – If I wasn’t here, what would you do? – And then you repeat that question or variations of it for each of the follow-up stupid questions until they realise that they had the answer inside them all along. Yeah, I know this is the slow way to tackle the problem because the fastest thing to do is just tell them the answer, that’s quicker and easier, but it also reinforces their need for you. And we want your staff to thrive without you.

And then step three – make yourself available at fixed times of the day because not all staff questions are stupid. Some will be totally valid, especially the technical ones. So make yourself available to your team once, twice, or three times a day at fixed times. And ideally these will be the same times every day to turn them into a positive habit. Have a Teams call where they ask the questions they need answering. You might even ask them to document these questions in advance of the call, which forces preparation and that can remove time wasting. Now, stupid questions get the same question as number two. I was just talking about that whole thing of what would you do if I wasn’t available, but valid questions can be explored and answered, and here are some ways to explore problems that will teach your staff to look after themselves.

So you could say, for example, what does the standard operating procedure say about this? How do you think you’d find that information? What did the Google machine say about this? What’s your gut feel for how this could be fixed? And the best one, what ideas did your colleagues suggest? We’re just trying to train them here to answer all of their questions themselves so they only bring to you the one or two questions a week that genuinely only you can answer.

5 big ugly MSP marketing myths: BUSTED

Often when I start talking to an MSP about improving their marketing, the first thing I have to do is wipe out some common marketing myths from their head. So let’s look at five of the most common of these and see which ones are stopping you from doing effective marketing.

Here are five myths about MSP marketing that I want to scrub from your head so that you can improve your marketing, with vigour. Big bristly myth busting brush ready? Here we go…

Myth number one – marketing is a dark art and not at all logical. Now, I’m not a technical person. If you explain the ins and outs of something technical to me, I would glaze over and possibly slip into a coma and you’d be baffled because to you, tech stuff is logical and delicious and systemisable and you love it. Well, marketing is to me what tech stuff is to you and you might see as baffling and maybe even boring and a bit of a dark art. But to me it’s logical and delicious and systemisable and I love it.

The best marketing for any MSP is a series of small, easy to implement actions that you can repeat daily, weekly, and monthly, so that you end up with marketing that never ends. It’s the perfect way to get the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right time.

Myth number two – you need lots of cash to do good marketing. Sure, having cash helps because cash lets you buy other people’s time or invest in marketing services, but any MSP can set up a really, really good marketing system with almost zero cash outlay. Take my simple three-step marketing strategy. Build multiple audiences, such as your LinkedIn and your email list. Grow a relationship with them through content marketing, so daily social posts and a weekly email. And commercialise the relationship. Get them to book a 15 minute zoom with you at the point that they’re thinking of switching MSPs. Now, you can set all of this up by spending just a tiny amount of cash. And by the way, my MSP Marketing Edge would be an excellent investment as a) it’s built around that exact strategy, and b) there’s no contract so you can cancel anytime.

Onto myth number three – you need to hire a marketing agency and there are lots of great marketing agencies in the channel, and of course a few ropey ones. A great agency can save you a lot of time and effort building a spectacular website and putting smart digital marketing strategies in place, but you will pay for this and through the nose. And if you’re not paying an eye watering price to an agency, then they’re probably not that good at what they do. So hiring an agency is what you do when you have an abundance of spare cash and you want to invest in the long-term growth of your business. Reality check, you want one new client of about 10 to 20 users every month, right? And that would change your life if you could achieve that every month, agreed? To get that new client you just need two, maybe three highly qualified leads a month, assuming that you have a 50% close rate. At this stage of your growth a marketing agency might be overkill.

Myth number four – marketing is all about the digital stuff. And digital stuff is great as it’s low cost and relatively easy. The downside is that everyone does digital stuff and that makes it very hard to stand out from your competitors. Never underestimate the ongoing power of physical stuff in our digital world – members of my MSP Marketing Edge have an IT Services Buyers Guide that they can print, a book on Business Email Compromise with their name on the cover, a monthly printed newsletter, marketing campaigns with lumpy mailers – because all of these physical items speed up their marketing and their lead generation and they will stand out in a way that their competitors can never hope to match.

Which leads me onto our final myth. Number five – you have to beat all of your competitors in order to win. Simply not true. There’s plenty of business for plenty of MSPs, but you don’t have to be at the very top of the pile to win. You just need to be a little bit better than some of your local competitors. Remember what I said earlier about just wanting one new client a month? Well, that’s a great mindset and it’s a great context with which to approach all of your marketing. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic to dominate a marketplace, and I know a few MSPs who are doing that right now that can change your business and your life in ways you can almost never dream of. But for most MSPs, it’s just not what they want. Winning one new client every month would make them the happiest business owners on the planet. Would it for you?

The 3 most important growth things you can do in the final 3 months of the year

Featured guest: Ian Luckett is a Business Gro