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Welcome to Episode 265 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Successful MSP owners exercise: Our bodies are amazing, but they’re even better when we use them on a regular basis. Even just a 20 minute walk every single day keeps your body sharp – and also your mind.


• How one client question can turn into 7 pieces of content for your MSP: To do great marketing for your MSP, you need great content. There’s tons of it around and there’s a simple way to extract it from everyday conversations with clients and prospects.


• This guy phoned 1,000 decision makers… and learned these hard lessons: Making more outbound calls is essential to win new business for your MSP. If you HATE picking up the phone, this interview is going to blow your mind.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Steven, from as MSP in London, UK, is looking forward to getting organised in 2025 – his question is: Which project management software do you recommend?

Successful MSP owners exercise

MSP Running Shoes on. Have you ever felt that owning an MSP business is like running a marathon in more ways than one? And if you prioritise looking after your clients and their technology ahead of looking after your own body and health, then you have a very low chance of completing the marathon that is being a business owner for the next 20 years. Let’s find out why successful business owners exercise, how they do it when they have zero time, and the benefits of doing it to you, your clients and your staff.

A few months back, I had my dad come and stay with us for a couple of nights. Now he lives about 150 miles away and we don’t really see him more than a couple of times a year. So it was lovely having him stay. My daughter and I, we took him to London for a full day being tourists in our own capital city, and we went to see a theatre show and we went to some museums and it was great fun. But we walked about 20,000 steps, which is about 10 miles, and we do a lot of walking because London is a walking city. It’s so much easier to walk around and just catch the tube. You wouldn’t drive around London. No one does that.

My dad is in his early seventies, so he’s not really that old and he’s kind of fit and kind of healthy as he has been throughout his life. But he has let his fitness slip in recent years and he was really struggling. So at the end of that day, he just looked ill. He was sitting down, his back was hurting, his knee was hurting, his hip was hurting, and he won’t go and see the doctor about his dicky hip. And I got him to admit that he doesn’t really do any regular exercise. He’ll have a walk now and again. Now all the medical advice from all the doctors everywhere is that someone of his age, in fact, someone of every age should be going out for at least a 20 minute walk every day. And I told him that even last year when I couldn’t exercise much because I’d injured my knee and I needed surgery on it. I couldn’t go running or anything like that, but I still exercised every single day. I’d go for a 20, 30 minute walk or go on the treadmill for a mile, or I actually bought an exercise bike, which I’ve since sold. But you get the idea.

I was telling him how the most successful business owners and MSP owners I know, they always make time for exercise regardless of how busy they are. Do you do this? Do you make time no matter how busy you are and force yourself to do exercise on a regular basis? Maybe you prioritise looking after your clients, you prioritise your partner if you’ve got one, your kids, if you have them, your staff, you prioritise all of this stuff. And it’s very easy to forget to prioritise yourself and your health and your exercise. And yet the evidence is there, there’s an abundance of it. Just go looking for it. One of the things that’s going to make the quality of all of our lives higher is regular exercise because our bodies are amazing, but they’re even better when we use them on a regular basis.

Even a 20 minute walk every single day doesn’t just keep your body sharp, it keeps your mind sharp as well. And I know that I always make better quality decisions about my business and just actually better quality life decisions, when I take regular exercise. My mind is sharper, yours will be the same, and you can do more and your body will last longer if you do more exercise thinking about it. It’s kind of weird how that works. It should almost be the other way around, shouldn’t it? That the more you use your body, the faster you run it down and there’s nothing left at the end. But actually that’s not the case at all.

So my challenge for you at this time of year, as we approach everyone having a bit of time off and a chance to do things differently next year, ask yourself, what could you do to prioritise adding some exercise every single day? And it could be as simple as you taking something that you already do every day and adding exercise to it. So for example, do you make 30 minutes worth of phone calls each day? And I don’t mean prospecting calls, just perhaps calls to your team or just catching up with clients or business owning friends or whatever. What if you did those calls while you were walking? And I know the first couple of times you do that, you’ll be out of breath, but you will soon get used to it and your fitness levels will go up.

What if actually that walk is listening to this podcast, apparently there are other podcasts to listen to. Or maybe listening to an audio book about improving your business. Could you do that while you’re out walking so it feels like you’re still investing your time on your business, but you’re getting the exercise as well? Get a dog. Make the time to walk the dog each day. And what if actually you go for a longer walk with a dog, get one of those dogs that’s robust and can go for very long walks, not one of those small little dogs that can only manage a five minute walk. What if it’s a walk with your kids to a playground? And what if you go to a playground that’s further away?

There’s a great book called Atomic Habits by James Clear, I think I’ve mentioned it on this podcast a dozen times. And if you haven’t listened to it yet, please get the book. It will make such a difference to your productivity. And one of the things that James Clear talks about is if you want to change something, you insert it into your existing routine. Rather than saying, right, I’m going to join the gym, I’m going to go there every day, I’m going to get fit – we all know that that lasts for three days and then you never go again.

Build a daily walk, or whatever it is that you want to do, into your already normal routine that you have. You literally add a habit onto an existing habit.

So if you have an existing habit of let’s say 30 minutes a day on the phone, adding the walking to those phone calls makes it happen every day. If you ordinarily take the dog out every single day, you just have a longer route and you perhaps turn left when you leave your house to go on the longer route rather than right. And that makes it more likely to happen because you are already doing those things.

Which of these things is the easiest way for you to exercise on a daily basis?

How one client question can turn into 7 pieces of content for your MSP

Now, this is very sneaky. Have you ever wished you could make more from your MSP by getting other people to do all of the hard work? Well, you can. In fact, you can actually use your prospects and your clients to not only help you grow your MSP’s revenue, but also directly help you with your marketing. Let’s talk about the simple way to take everyday conversations with ordinary business owners, extract marketing content from those conversations and then use it across multiple platforms. They can help you to grow your business without them even realising.

To do great marketing for your MSP, you need great content. And there’s tons of it around. Many vendors give away content as a value add. And there are plenty of businesses that supply high quality content, such as my MSP Marketing Edge, for example. Now, I’ve always said that there is a clear hierarchy of content, where you creating your own sits at the top. So at the top you’ve got you creating your own content. In the middle, you’ve got high quality content only supplied to one MSP per area, like the MSP Marketing Edge. And then at the bottom you’ve got content supplied to thousands of MSPs, including of course, your competitors. Of course, creating your own content is a time and a resource hog.

One of the tricks when creating your own content is to repurpose ideas into different types of content for different platforms.

So what I’m talking about here has been on my blog and it was in one of my LinkedIn newsletters at some point in the past. Different words, same kind of themes. So let me give you my standard operating procedure for collecting, creating, and repurposing marketing content for your MSP. And there are three steps.

The first is to collect ideas, collecting ideas for content. It’s kind of a mindset more than anything. Once you realise that ideas are around you all the time, you just have to open yourself up to collecting them. And your goal is to create content that’s educational and entertaining for ordinary business owners and managers, which makes every communication with every client a potential content goldmine. Imagine how many ideas could come out