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Welcome to Episode 285 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• To grow your MSP, scrap these pointless tasks: One of the curses of the MSP owner is the never-ending list of things that you need to do. Use the 80/20 rule to identify the things that make the biggest difference to the growth of your business.


• Don’t be scared to present that cyber security webinar: Speaking at a seminar or a webinar can be an incredibly powerful way to attract prospects, warm them up and persuade them that your business is the one they can trust.


• Why so many MSPs fail at LinkedIn ads: LinkedIn is an insane lead generation and prospecting tool for MSPs, but which things should you do? I’ve hunted down one of only 90 certified LinkedIn experts in the world to find out.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: There is a word that you must never, ever use when you’re talking to prospects or clients. It’s a word that must be banished because using it can damage your chances of a sale or your retention. Can you guess what it is?

To grow your MSP, scrap these pointless tasks

Growing an MSP can sometimes feel like a game of poker, can’t it? If each and everything you could do to grow your business was a different card in your pack, choosing which cards to play can be overwhelming. And doesn’t it seem like the hand you’re dealt, everything that’s on your to-do list, just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So how do you decide which cards to play with and which to leave? How do you make sure you can quickly identify the things your MSP can do to become a real winner?

The biggest problem with being an MSP is having a massive to-do list. Just shout back to me now as you are listening to this or watching it on YouTube. How many things do you have to do today or tomorrow? I’m guessing it’s like 20, 30, 40 things. Because that’s one of the curses of the MSP owner is there is a never ending list of things that you need to do just to look after your clients, never mind actually growing your business. And the net effect of that is that you can get to the end of another day and another, and another and another, and you’ve done the work that your business needs to do, but you haven’t grown the business at all. This is a common problem for MSPs and frankly, it’s a massive problem.

The goal is to make a little progress every single day, and it feels frustrating when you don’t, doesn’t it?

This is why I think sometimes you need to take an 80/20 approach to your list of things that you could do, and I’m sure you’ve heard of 80/20 before. It’s also known as the Pareto principle named after Vilfredo Pareto. He was an Italian economist in the 19th century, and he was busy harvesting peas in his garden when he made an interesting observation. He noticed that some pea pods had a lot more peas in them than others did. So he counted the number of peas in each pea pod. He clearly didn’t have a lot to do that day, but he found that 80% of the peas came from only 20% of the pea pods. And what was really interesting was he then later noticed the same pattern in how wealth was distributed in Italy in his home country. He found that 20% of the people in Italy owned 80% of the land, and these 20% were very wealthy. The remaining 80% of the population owned only 20% of the land.

Now, don’t get too caught up on the 80 and the 20, the actual numbers themselves, just take from this the big principle that input and output in anything rarely match. For example, if you were to look at all of your clients, I bet the vast majority of ticket noise comes from the minority of clients. Many MSPs find that most of their hassle comes from a small number of their clients.And side note, these are the clients that you should fire, but let’s have that conversation another time. In fact, you can apply that to your staff as well. 80% of your hassle will come from 20% of your staff, right? If you apply the 80/20 principle to your task list, you can assume that 20% of the work that you do as the business owner is giving you 80% of the results in growing your business. The trick is to spend 80% of your personal time on those 20% tasks. Now I have way too many things that I want to be doing at the same time, but I learned a long time ago to be utterly brutal in prioritising them. We have an MSP Marketing Edge company development roadmap, and from that, I pull out the 10 things that will make the biggest difference when completed. And I call this my 80/20 list.

So every day, just like you, I have to battle noise and complications to spend more of my time on those things, my 80/20 things and kind of ignore all the other things that are vying for my attention. And I’ll be honest, it’s not easy, it is a daily struggle every day, but it’s really worthwhile. My best evenings are where I’ve spent the day focusing on tasks that will grow my business and not just run my business. So how can you do this in your MSP? Well, I believe it starts with being very, very organised about what it is that you want to achieve. Do you have a long list of things that will help you to win your clients, retain them, and upsell them more services? Can you split that list down into a series of tasks, even if that means that there are dozens and dozens of tasks to be done? And can you then prioritise that list? So if let’s say tomorrow you had 60, maybe 90 minutes to work on growing your business, you would know exactly what you needed to do.

That I think is at the heart of making progress in growing your business. Once you are very clear on what you need to do, in what order, and you can find time every day to work on those tasks, you get the important things done. And does that mean that you have to dump some tasks and they never get done? Yes, a hundred percent it does. And is that scary? Yes, it is a hundred percent, but the reality is that you are never going to get all of those tasks done anyway. You only have 24 hours in the day the same as everyone else, and you need to spend at least six of those sleeping, ideally, seven, maybe eight.

But in terms of getting things done, it’s better you focus on getting done the things that move the business forward rather than the small things that don’t move the business forward. So let me ask you a big question. Something you should just pop in your brain, perhaps sleep on it, reflect on it in the days ahead. What is the noise and complication in your MSP that stops you from focusing on the tasks that make the biggest difference? We all know it’s important to service the clients, well, that’s absolutely critical, but it’s also really important that you grow your business at the same time. If your business isn’t growing, then it’s going the opposite way. And actually that’s a very dangerous place to be. What are the things that are stopping you from doing this and how can you remove them?

That I think is at the heart of making progress in growing your business. Once you are very clear on what you need to do, in what order, and you can find time every day to work on those tasks, you get the important things done. And does that mean that you have to dump some tasks and they never get done? Yes, 100% it does. And is that scary? Yes, it is 100%, but the reality is that you are never going to get all of those tasks done anyway. You only have 24 hours in the day the same as everyone else, and you need to spend at least six of those sleeping, ideally, seven, maybe eight.

But in terms of getting things done, it’s better you focus on getting done the things that move the business forward rather than the small things that don’t move the business forward. So let me ask you a big question. Something you should just pop in your brain, perhaps sleep on it, reflect on it in the days ahead. What is the noise and complication in your MSP that stops you from focusing on the tasks that make the biggest difference? We all know it’s important to service the clients, well, that’s absolutely critical, but it’s also really important that you grow your business at the same time. If your business isn’t growing, then it’s going the opposite way. And actually that’s a very dangerous place to be. What are the things that are stopping you from doing this and how can you remove them?

Don’t be scared to present that cyber security webinar

Up to three quarters of MSPs would rather lose a toe than have to speak in public. But did you know that speaking at a seminar or a webinar can be an incredibly powerful way to attract prospects, warm them up and persuade them that your business is the one they can trust? So using a cybersecurity webinar as an example, how can you be relaxed, confident, and even enjoy presenting? Oh, and keep all of your toes intact?

One of the MSPs I work closely with has made the smart decision to aggressively pursue a vertical, in their case, lawyers. They’ve changed their website and their social media to be more relevant to the owners of law practices in their city. They’ve built up a database, they’re sending emails, LinkedIn messages, and direct mail, and they have someone making follow up phone calls. All of this is great that all the correct things to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time, as people only buy when they are ready to buy.

Recently, I suggested they start to put on regular webinars about cybersecurity for lawyers, and that’s when we hit a wall. The o