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Welcome to this SPECIAL EDITION marking 250 episodes of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

This week I have a very special guest – Brad Martineau. Brad helps people transform from being a business owner to truly being an entrepreneur. And as you can imagine, it’s about the way that you think and the action that you take. I think you are going to find him a huge inspiration.  

Here are three big ideas from him:

• Make it easy: Business is easy but we make it hard for ourselves. Brad uses the acronym, ELF – Easy, Lucrative, Fun.


• Remember the business is there to feed your life (not the other way round): Don’t let the business dictate how you live your life.


• We have 3 currencies in life: Time, energy and money. Be careful where you invest these. A great business returns these currencies to you.

Meet Brad Martineau.  Brad helps entrepreneurs build Smooth Scaling businesses through coaching and software tools.

Brad has been married for 23 years, has 5 kids, 1 son-in-law and a granddaughter on the way. He loves fitted hats and playing and coaching basketball.

Hi, I’m Brad Martineau and I help entrepreneurs build businesses that they actually want rather than the ones that they just wake up one day and accidentally have.

And what a great positioning statement that is. Brad, thank you so much for joining us, not just on the podcast, but on this very special episode as well. 250 episodes has taken quite a long time to get here, nearly five years, and I’m going to admit I’m a little bit of a fanboy of yours. You’ve been in my marketing journey and my entrepreneurial journey for getting on for about 18 years or so, and we’re going to talk a little bit about that in this podcast. When the opportunity came up to have you on, I had to jump on it and get you on and with this amazing episode coming up, this seemed the right thing to do. So what we’re going to do over the next 20 minutes or so is we’re going to explore what you’ve done in your entrepreneurial journey. You were involved really heavily with a popular CRM, which is still around today, which is actually the one that I use.

We’re going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about different business things you’ve done, but where we’re getting to and the bulk of the interview is exactly as you just said, is about helping people have the business and the life that they really want because far too many MSPs, as we know, are completely driven by the business rather than the other way around. And obviously I know that as well that the MSP market very well. You’ve worked with quite a lot of the big players in this market and I’m sure you’re going to deliver a ton of value and drop some value bombs within this. Could I sound any more American as I’m doing this podcast? I don’t think I could. So Brad, tell us about your early career and what you got into it and the thing that got you onto this amazing entrepreneurial journey in the first place.

Oh, that’s a really interesting question. So I was what I would call either an unwilling or an unknowing entrepreneur. So my working career started, I went and got a job, got married, got a job, and I was working as an admissions counsellor for an online university. And I didn’t recognise that I had entrepreneurial blood in me. And anyway, I was there. Everyone should have a job they hate, right? That’s like one of the best things you can do because you realise what you don’t want. I was there for two and a half years, it was two and a half years, two long, and then my brothers and my brother-in-law were like, yo, we’re doing this thing over here. We need some help. And it was the beginning of the company now called Keap, at that point it wasn’t even called that, it was called Infusionsoft before. And then before that it was even called something else, like Hey, we’re doing this thing.

It was called managed Pro CRM and Mortgage Pro CRM, and there were six of us, but our support rep just left and we need somebody to come help. And I’m like, C R who? What are you talking about? But I knew I didn’t want to be where I was, and so I walked away from, I dunno, I think I was making I 35 grand a year with benefits and I was married and had a kid at the time and I left to make 25 or 28 or something with no benefit. So it didn’t actually make sense financially, but I came over and I got introduced to the world of entrepreneurship, to the world of automation, to the world of strategies that get people to convert. And I fell in love with it. So that was my introduction into this whole world of client journey and entrepreneurship.

And as I was there, I got to work with a lot of entrepreneurs. I was in the middle of the support and dealing with clients that they’re trying to figure out this tool and they’re trying to make it work so they can get more clients and do all those things. So I was there for probably about six years or so, and that’s really where I cut my teeth. But even then I was an employee, so I hadn’t unlocked entrepreneur. I didn’t even really know what that meant. Looking back, I’m like, oh bro, you should never have spent your time doing that. You should have been an entrepreneur. And then probably, so I was the sixth employee there. They grew to about 150 and then they had to do a round of layoffs. Every business has ebbs and flows. They did around to layoffs and I was in, they laid off 10% of the company and I was in it. I like to make it more dramatic and say that they fired me. It was my two brothers that had to come over at two 30 in the morning and tell me that I was fired.

And then at that point, so by the time that happened, I had, it was six weeks after my fifth kid was born, my fifth child. So I have two girls, three boys. So I’ve got five kids under the age of eight at my house. I just got laid off. I’m looking at jobs thinking, oh, I’m going to go get jobs and there’s no job that’s like, well, this is going to work for what I’m trying to do with my family. I’m like, I guess I’m just going to start a company helping people with this tool in Infusionsoft that I’ve been working at. And so I started a company and it was interesting because at first I didn’t want to do it. I did it because it was the only thing that I had, but I was actively trying to figure out how to get out of it.

I would tell myself, oh, I didn’t grow up hoping that I could be this solo contractor helping people with automation and technology in their business. And then one day, and I think this, it came from Joe Polish, I don’t know anyone if they know who Joe Polish is, but if you know who Joe Polish is, really good marketing guy. He has podcasts and everything and he’s like, look, business is really easy, but people make it too hard. He’s like, I have this acronym, he’s registered trademark – ELF.

As long as your business is Easy, it’s Lucrative and it’s Fun – that’s all you need.

That’s all we’re looking for. And I was like, when I stopped, I was like, that’s actually exactly what I have. And so I stopped trying to run away from my business and I just accepted we could be really good at this and we could be really impactful and we could lead and help a lot of people.

That was probably a couple years into me being an entrepreneur. And that was when I was like, okay, I’m in. Let’s go do this. And I actually leaned into entrepreneurship. So that would be when I started as an entrepreneur I think because actually a couple of years into running my own business and that’s when things we had had some success in the business, but even then it was like, man, as soon as I can get out of this, I’m going to get out of this. It was about two and a half years in or so when I would say I actually, I would feel comfortable calling that version of me actually an entrepreneur.

Yeah, there is a big difference between being a business owner and being an entrepreneur and a lot of it is mindset and then that manifest as the things you do or don’t do, which I think we’re going to come on to later on. That’s a really interesting story, and I didn’t know that bit about Joe Polish for our listeners on the podcast and viewers on YouTube, if you’ve not heard of Joe, go and look him up. Is he particularly active anymore? Joe? I remember seeing his stuff years ago. I haven’t seen it for a while.

Yeah, he’s still running his mastermind thing and they’ve got an I love marketing podcast. They’ve got some other podcast stuff. If you go search for him, you’ll find him. He’s got good stuff. And that was just one of those, everybody has those things that people say that for whatever reason, they come at the right time and they do a whole lens perspective shift, and then they shift the future. And that one for me was important to recognise that there didn’t have to be some more big life like eternal purpose to what I was doing. It’s like, look, are you good at it? Can you make money? And do you have fun? And I was like, yes, yes, and yes. And then it just unlocked a whole bunch of opportunities moving forward and a whole bunch of what I could see because I stopped being afraid of it.

Yeah, no, I understand that. And I do love that ELF. I won’t steal it because obviously it belongs to someone else, but I’m going to work that into my pattern in some way. Let’s just go back and look at Infusionsoft, and that was where I first came across you. So I’ve b