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Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 294, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

I’m interviewing an ordinary business owner and he’s going to talk about why he’s unhappy with his MSP and is thinking of switching.

SPECIAL: Why this business owner will switch MSPs

For MSPs looking to find new clients, this is the holy grail. It’s taken nearly 18 months to arrange this, but boy is it going to be worth it. It’s a conversation with an ordinary business owner, the type of person who might be your dream client. It’s the number one wish I hear – I’m the owner of an awesome MSP, but it’s so hard to get new clients if only I could get in their head to find out what I could do to attract them, especially if they’re currently with another MSP who they’re thinking of leaving. Well, here we go.

Now I’ve agreed to keep his identity anonymous so he can be extremely open with answers to questions like, why he’s unhappy with his current MSP, what’s changed in the last few years, what he likes and dislikes about them, and why he’s thinking of switching. Oh, and most importantly, what could you offer him that would win him and keep him in your business?

Welcome to this very special episode of the podcast, and I have a treat for you today. This is an idea I’ve been trying to implement for years and years because I think it’s really going to help you get an insight into what happens in the head and the heart of an ordinary business owner when they may be thinking of switching MSPs. We’re going to interview today someone who’s been a friend of mine for over 25 years, but his identity is going to be kept a complete secret. In fact, I’ve given him a false name. I’ll introduce you to him in a second.

He’s with an MSP right now that was acquired sometime in the past, and as I’ve been talking to him over the last few months, I’ve realised his satisfaction levels with his incumbent MSP have been going down and down and down. They’ve done nothing wrong, it’s all just tiny little things that have chipped away and he’s now getting to that point where he might be ready to switch MSPs.

Let’s see if today we can figure out how he thinks, how he feels about his MSP and what are the things that he would go looking for from another MSP. If you can understand how ordinary people think and act, the chances of you getting them to come to your MSP goes up dramatically. So let me introduce you to my friend, we’re going to call him Jason. His real name is Sean, but we’re not going to use that, we’re going to call him Jason. That’s not his real name that was just a joke.

Jason, thank you so much for jumping onto the call. Obviously we don’t want to identify you because we don’t want any awkward conversations between you and your incumbent MSP. So without revealing what you do as a business or where you’re based, just give us an idea of your company. So how many staff have you got? Are you like a professional services company or a consumer driven company? Give us a bit of an overview.

We are I guess a professional services company. We’re a marketing business at heart, obviously based here in the UK, and we have got staff who are employed in the UK and in the Philippines. We’ve also got contractors in the UK and the Philippines as well.

Okay, so you’re spread around the globe, even if that’s just two locations, which is a pretty common setup these days I think for many businesses. Obviously this is your business, you started this, you’ve grown this over a number of years. If you go back in your mind to when you first started to take on professional help. so before we talk about the switching and the dissatisfaction you might have now, let’s talk about why you picked an IT company back in the first place. So when was the point you first realised, oh, I can’t do all of this computer stuff myself?

Well, I guess I came from a corporate business where all of IT support was organised and pretty much on hand. We were just given the phone number or the email address to get hold of somebody if we needed help with our devices. So when I started up the business nearly 10 years ago, I knew at some point I’m going to need IT support. And it was within a few months, I guess, of starting the business that I reached out to somebody. I’ll tell you where it began, who I’m with now and who I was with before they were acquired is not where I started. So I started off with somebody local, had a bit of help from them, but then I ended up in a conversation with someone through, let’s call it networking, and started to realise that these guys could offer a service.

There was a relationship there first before I made the decision to settle with my MSP, who I’ve been with eight or nine years now.

Got it. Got it. So essentially you were in the MSP space, Jason, I nearly said your real name then. We call that break fix, how you started. So you started with someone who just helped you out a bit when you ran into a problem and then you say about eight, nine years ago you met someone at networking and you got into a more formal relationship and did you sign a contract? So were you paying them money on a regular basis?

No, I don’t recall signing a contract. I may have, but it might’ve been just a very low key one if that was the case or just an arrangement over email. I’ll tell you what, the point where I went from somebody helping me out to signing up with an IT support company, was when I started employing staff so that they had a bit more structure when they had problems. Don’t talk to me, here’s the phone number, here’s the email address, they’ll sort you out.

Got it. So you were happy to invest the money into someone else fixing those problems so that you could focus on what you wanted to do and not your staff complaining about slow computers or this doesn’t work?

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I know my way around a computer, but I’m no where near as skilled as someone whose job it is to fix computers.

Yeah, absolutely. So the MSP that you were with got acquired, and again, we don’t want names or anything like that, but I want the MSPs that are listening to this to understand how ordinary business owners feel when their MSP is acquired. I always think that’s a great time to go looking for, to go and try and pick up clients from that MSP. So if you’ve got a competitor in town that’s been sold to a super MSP, I think that’s a great time to go and talk to clients because of the levels of dissatisfaction that Jason is going to be talking about. So how long ago did this acquisition happen and how did you feel about it when it first happened?

Well, I think it was about three or four years ago. There was an interesting moment actually that came about before the acquisition was announced. And what it was, was we all of a sudden had a large contract put under my nose with the incentive of some discount for signing up for the next 12 months, and it all felt a bit rushed and hurried and I ended up, it didn’t feel right that I was given a deadline to get some incentives, but I had to sign off a 25 page contract, which I would not do. I would want to read that to see what was in it. And the headlines on it were locking me in for 12 or maybe 24 months. And I didn’t realise till afterwards what was going on because it came out of the blue and that was all part of the sale of the business as they were looking to lock everybody in on firmer contracts than what they had in place for the time leading up to that point.

I guess I remember it rubbed me up the wrong way at that time and then I didn’t sign the contract.

But anyway, we ended up, within a few weeks we found out that this business had been acquired. It all made sense and I don’t think for me anything really changed other than that, we were still dealing with the same company that had just been sold. So yeah, that was kind of what happened at that point. And it’s probably more in recent years as they’ve merged the acquired business into the master business that started to notice that things have changed how they operate a bit.

That makes sense. And just one follow up question on the contracts. I think we can all look at the MSP that was selling and very quickly was scrambling to get his paperwork in place to sell that business. Had that been done perhaps 12 months earlier with less rush with less incentives, so it was a case of, oh, actually Jason, we’re formalising all of our client agreements, here’s an agreement, take your time to read it, but we would like you to sign this because it protects you and us. And this is a bit of a leading question, but do you think that would’ve been a more palatable thing for you to swallow than that sudden rush for you to sign the contract?

Yeah, it was the rush, I could feel something going on, I didn’t know what it was but it was certainly nothing that had happened previously. So I think if they had taken a bit more time with it, had a deadline of three months away rather than three weeks and then three days, I probably would’ve read it through and gone, yeah, that feels like a fair deal to sign all of that off to get an incentive. I guess the other thing that I’ve always been held back by with arrangements like this, particularly committing to 12 month subscriptions for software like Office 365 for example, is we are a growing company and we’re not alwa