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Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 267, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

This week I’m taking you for a walk near my home. And we’re going to talk about a subject that’s very important to us as business owners…

How MSPs achieve a happy balance

Running an MSP is like constantly spinning plates and there’s a good chance that you’ve dropped the odd one from time to time. It’s a dizzying challenge trying to keep them all spinning and in perfect balance. If you are trying to juggle your home life with everything your MSP throws at you and it often feels impossible, today’s special episode is just for you. Come for a Christmas Eve walk with me as we find the answer to this question – How do you achieve the perfect happy balance?

Well, I hope you’ve had an insanely good year this year and you are really ready for Christmas tomorrow. Certainly if you’re listening to this when the podcast is released, what we’re doing today is kind of a bit of a new tradition, which we only started last year, but already it feels like the right thing to do every year is that you come for a walk with me. So last year, and you can go back and listen to last year’s special episode, we went for a walk round a lake near my home where I live. I live just outside Milton Keynes in the UK. It’s kind of in the middle of the UK. And today we’re just going for a walk near my house. Actually, I live near some fields. I live in a little village. It’s very nice around here. So it’s a beautiful, beautiful, sunny crisp December morning and I’m just taking you out for a walk to talk about the happy balance.

So what is the happy balance? Well, I’m a business owner just like you, and I’ve been doing this, actually next year it will be my 20th year. It was February, 2005 when I started my very first business, not the one I have now, I sold that in 2016. But back then I started and I had all the hopes and fears and all the difficult times that everyone has when they start their first business. And it took me probably about seven years to achieve this thing called the happy balance. And the happy balance is a mixture of, or a combination of five things that you need to have in your life in order to achieve happiness. Because if your experience of starting your MSP was anything like my experience of starting my first business, you throw yourself into it with such gusto that it becomes almost an unsustainable beast. And you kind of look up a year, two, three years in, and you realise that you are spending so much of your time working that you have got all the other parts of your life out of balance.

Things like, well, all the things we’re going to talk about today, but especially your family, your partner, your kids (if you’ve got them), your social life, your friends, all of these things, they take a backseat to the business and I think that’s okay for a year, maybe two years. But if it goes on any longer than that, the risk is that you are just out of balance. We cannot live our lives out of balance for a very, very long time. I do know business owners, MSP owners, in fact, who have been out of balance for years, decades in some cases. And yeah, some of them are sitting on very successful businesses, successful as in there’s lots of revenue coming in and there’s lots of profit going into their bank accounts. But I have business owning friends who are in that position and they go home to their luxury apartment in the evening where there is no partner and there’s no kids because the price of them building the business and making themselves a millionaire, the price of that was losing their family. And I dunno about you, but I would rather have the family and the happy life and the balanced life and just a little bit less money in the bank. To me it’s not just about making money. You’ve got to have that balance as well.

Let me tell you what the five elements of the happy balance are. And this is something that I was going to say, I’ve created it myself, but I haven’t really created it as much as I’ve been influenced by hundreds of books that I’ve read over the years and just realise that these are the five things that you need to have. Let me tell you what they are and then we’ll go into a little bit more detail with them. These are the five items.

The five items for a happy balance are: cash, time, family, fun, and meaningful work.

So let’s start with the first one, CASH. So why did you start your business in the first place? Most people don’t start their business to make more money. They start their business because they want control. They want control over the kind of work they do. They want control over who they work with, how they do that work, when they do that work, where they do that work. Control, is a bigger motivation for most of us starting our business than money. Now, don’t get me wrong, one of the things that we want to control is the amount of money that we earn. We want to make sure that we have plenty of income coming in so that we can do the things that we want to do with our lives.

There’s very, very few people, there are some, but there are very, very few people that start their business purely to get more money and it’s just a big money thing for them. Typically, those people, they’re never really satisfied with their business. They never really get to a point where they’ve got enough money. Even though actually there is a point, I was reading this a few weeks ago, what book was it? I think it was a podcast I was listening to, possibly Darren Brown’s podcast for the Brain or Podcast for Life, which you can get on Audible. Very, very good podcast series. And he was saying that there’s a point where you earn enough money to pay all your bills, to get yourself out debt and extra money after that doesn’t move the happiness needle. It’s just extra money for you to go and buy more things that you don’t really need.

Cash, we absolutely have to have enough cash. And exactly as we were just saying in that podcast, if you don’t have enough cash, it’s a position of misery, isn’t it? You must have been in a position where you can’t pay your bills. I’ve certainly been there. I was there pretty much until I was about 35 to be honest, but we couldn’t pay all the bills. We had some debt. There was always more money going out than coming in. And when you first start your business, that gets even harder. Because suddenly you’ve got this second beast that’s chewing up money. The second beast is your business. And just when you start to make enough money and you’re making good money, then you need to add extra resource and you have to go and get more people. You have to get an employee, you have to bring extra resources in. It’s an absolute nightmare. So cash is definitely the right first resource to look at and the thing that you need for your happy balance.

But that goes hand in hand with the second one, which is TIME. Do you know what I was saying earlier about those business owners I know who have loads of cash? They’re very wealthy, very successful businesses, often they have no time at all. They’re working Saturdays routinely. They’re working six days a week, they’re doing 60 hour weeks and they have absolutely no time at all. I would say it’s more miserable having cash, but no time to spend it, than it is having time and no cash. Does that make sense? There are lots of people in the world with plenty of time and no cash. And there are many things you can do that don’t cost cash, but if you’ve got cash and you can’t spend it on yourself or spend it doing fun things, then that’s no good at all. Right? Do you agree with me on this?

So I think you need a balance of those two things. You need cash and you need time. Oh, I’m out of breath. I walked up a hill and I’ve just got to a woodland here near my home. Wish I’d worn different shoes, my feet are freezing. Anyway, so cash and time, those two things, in balance. And I rebalanced my time two, three years ago, probably post covid and I work about 30 hours a week now. Some weeks I’ll work 40, 50 hours. Some weeks I’ll work a little bit less, but routinely as I’m going through, it’s about 30 hours a week. And that’s a pretty good balance for me.

You may have heard me say on the podcast before, I’m a sole parent. So I have a 14-year-old daughter called Sam, who’s awesome, and also 14, which is the opposite of awesome. But I go to every school thing, I take her everywhere, I do every club. I’m there for every little thing. She’s an actor. She has an agent now, which she’s nuts. So she wants to be a professional actor. But all of that takes time. And we’re very lucky that we’ve got that balance right that I’ve always got time to do the things for her that are important. And of course she’s been spoiled by this. She doesn’t know that there are many other parents who don’t have time to do everything with their kids. But to me that was an important thing. And when I started this business back in 2016, that was number one priority for me. It was getting those two things in balance, cash and time. And I would urge you to do the same thing because for me, I was learning from the mistakes I’d made with my first business. So I was able to design my second business, this business, the MSP Marketing Edge. I could design that completely differently because I’d learned from those mistakes.

So the first two items then of the happy balance, cash and time, and the third one, I’ve just started talking about it, it’s FAMILY. Sam is my family. I have a girlfriend as well,