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Welcome to Episode 275 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Why the tough life of an MSP owner is worth it: Running a business can feel like it’s sucking all your time and energy, but the big picture is that you can work towards the lifestyle you most want to live.


• How a messy office damages your MSP’s sales: Is your office a pristine, tidy space with zero mess or an untidy space packed with clutter?  Find out why your environment impacts your effectiveness.


• EXCLUSIVE: How to reduce tickets while delighting clients: My guest explains why digital organisation is vital for business health and how you can help clients consolidate, archive and purge their data for a more effecient work flow.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you ever wonder how happy your staff are?  I have the questions to help you find out the answer.

Why the tough life of an MSP owner is worth it

What is it with people like you and me running on fumes? If you’re running an MSP, I know what it’s like right now. That boost you had from time off over Christmas, all that recharging festive fuel, that was months ago. It’s all long gone. And yet we keep pushing, don’t we mile after mile after mile, hoping we can keep the business going, hoping we can keep it growing. But is this actually the best way to run an MSP? Stick around to be reminded why we do this, how to keep your energy levels up and the unexpected benefit to your life and lifestyle in the long-term.

So this is my 20th year as a business owner and my goodness that has gone so quickly. I kid you not, I was 30 when I started my first business and I was young and cool and now I’m this old man, I’m age 50, I’ve got the creaky back, I’ve got a dodgy knee. And if you’re in your twenties or thirties right now, do not get cocky kid. This is going to happen to you as well. Although by the time that you reach the age the I am now, I’ll be in a nursing home, anyway.

One of the constants of being a business owner is that it is hard work. I have a great business now with a great team at the MSP Marketing Edge and we do great work for MSPs all over the world with our service. But I still have weeks where I’m working more hours than someone with a job would. If I worked for someone else in a job, I would never do those 50, 60 week hours, rarely anyway. And if I look back over the last 20 years, there have been many of those periods of time where you throw yourself into projects or problems or whatever it is. I’m sure you do exactly the same.

The truth is only business owners can understand this…

Running a business that you own is more than just something you do. It’s more than just a job. It’s very much a way of life.

It has a unique way of sucking every single last ounce of energy and every last second of time out of you. And do you know, as I hear myself saying that, I realise that I’m not really painting it in a very good light for someone who’s actually thinking of starting their own MSP. So sorry if that’s you. But I think actually before anyone starts their own business, really they need to understand the downsides as well as the upsides. It is an all consuming thing and especially so with an MSP because running an MSP is surely running one of the most difficult kinds of businesses in the world.

There are so many details you need to be across, there’s so much that changes. And of course you have to be both proactive and reactive at the same time. You have to be proactive stopping things from going wrong, but then reactive fixing stuff that does go wrong. It’s exhausting. You have my full admiration for doing it. Sometimes I see MSPs are really struggling with this burden. I see posts in places like the tech tribe or my own free MSP marketing Facebook group and people are really struggling with the constant burden of running an MSP. And I think it’s at times like that you have to remind yourself why you are doing this. So let me ask you why you started your business in the first place. Was it to increase your personal income? Was it to take control of the work that you do and who you do it for and the way that it’s done? Was it to build a better lifestyle for you and for your family or was it just because you wanted to prove that you could do it? That you could stand on your own two feet? I mean the chances are it’s many or even all of those things.

Starting a business isn’t like taking a job. It’s something we create, something we shape ourselves, it’s our baby. And do you know, after the difficult first couple of years, you can build something amazing that thrives whether you personally are there or not. In fact, the thing that keeps many business owners going not just through 20 years but 30 years, 40 years or more, is the lifestyle that they can build out of owning a business. And by lifestyle I don’t mean a bigger house or a bigger car. And if those are things that motivate you, then great. But when I’m talking about lifestyle, what I’m really talking about is you doing the things you want to do with the people you most want to do them with.

Let me give you an example. So you may know I’m a sole parent, I have a 14-year-old, Hi Samm, that’s my child and that’s my most important job. So I am always a parent first and a business owner second, and all my other roles come after that. But there’s going to come a point in the next few years where my beloved child leaves to go to university or whatever. Actually she wants to go to drama school to be a musical theater actor, which is cool. And at that point, I’m just not going to be needed as much as I am today. I guess I’ll have to just send money all the time obviously, but I won’t need to be taxi driver, I won’t need to be organiser, chef, all of those kinds of things that you do as a parent. And at that point I want to travel.

I have a plan to travel to 50 countries in my fifties and so far I’ve only ticked off one item off that list, one country off that list, which was a visit to the US last year and I’m going to be 51 in just a few months time, so I need to get on this. But all joking aside, that goal has been a very big presence in my mind for perhaps five, maybe even 10 years or so. And I knew it was going to be some time before I could do and travel to the really cool places, the kind of places that teenagers just don’t want to go to. Places like Japan, that’s the kind of place I want to go. So as I’ve been building up my business over the years, it’s very much been in the back of my mind that whatever I build must feed my lifestyle and not hinder it. My lifestyle requirements in the future demand that I have time to go traveling and enough money to pay for that travel. And also, of course, I can’t be trapped in an office here at home. There’s no way that I could have that lifestyle if I was working for someone else. Well most jobs anyway. But as a business owner, I definitely can because I can go to Japan and I can work in a different time zone and also have some fun.

And that’s the point that I’m trying to make here. The greatest advantage of running your own MSP is that you can work towards the lifestyle you most want to live. And that might be travel, it might be doing more exciting higher strategic tech work through opportunities that are opened up to you by the people that you’re meeting running your MSP. It could be something else you might want to learn to hang glide, I don’t know. But believe me, during the difficult weeks, the ones where you are working 60, 70 hours a week or more, and that’s just to stay afloat. That’s what you’ve got to stay focused on.

Running a business is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. And yet sure, you’ve always got to be aware of the mile that you’re currently running, but you must also keep in mind the ultimate goal to live the life you most want to live doing the things you most want to do with the people you most want to do them with.

How a messy office damages your MSP’s sales

If I walked into your MSP’s office today, would my mouth drop open in shock and surprise? Would I be slapping you on the back and congratulating you or would I have my hands on my face in total horror at what I see? Let me tell you how what I’d see in your office can tell me exactly how efficient your MSP is at winning clients and serving them well.

So I’ll admit it’s been a few years since I was inside an MSP’s office, but based on several years of visiting many of them, they do tend to fall into one of two camps. They’re either a pristine, tidy space with zero mess or they’re an untidy space packed with clutter. Old hardware, keyboards, mice, cables everywhere on every shelf in every drawer, in every cupboard. You can’t move for stuff. So which one of those is your office? Personally, I try very hard to maintain a clean and tidy environment. My house is the kind of place where you could drop in on me with no notice and think I’d just been tidying for hours. My home office and video studio is exactly the same apart from one corner where a bunch of unwanted clutter is starting to building up.

Every time I clear out my office or declutter my desk, I feel great. Because your environment sets your context. It directly affects how you feel and how you think.

It’s why a refurbishment in a retail shop typically leads to an immediate boost in sales. It’s also why some people believe a broken window