Can MSPs grow the business... by being idle?

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Welcome to Episode 283 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Can MSPs grow the business… by being idle?: Sometimes the fastest way to grow your MSP is to do less work, because it’s very difficult to do when your mind is constantly moving from task to task to task. That’s why you need to be idle.
• When did you last Google your MSP?: Do you know everything that’s being said about your MSP online? It’s time to discover your digital footprint.
• How to survive 30 years owning an MSP without a breakdown: My special guest has a unique insight into how MSP owners set themselves up to not just survive, but thrive over three decades of business ownership.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group:  Have you considered selling your MSP at some point in the future but don’t know where to start? I have some great book recommendations to help.

Can MSPs grow the business… by being idle?

Just a warning, this is not the MSP growth advice you were expecting. As a busy MSP it’s all about getting things done and maximising your time, right? Well, sometimes yes, but are you ready to hear about a shocking way to grow that is the exact opposite. Because sometimes the fastest way to grow your MSP is to do as little work as possible.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m a bit of a productivity junkie. Since way before I started my first business 20 years ago I’ve been reading books and listening to advice about how to get things done and constantly tweaking my productivity stack, if you’d like to call it that. I mean, the software that I use, of course. And you go back to the turn of the century when I was, obviously I’m very old now, but I was running a radio station back then and I was completely trapped in having too much work to do without enough time to do it. And that was actually what drove me to look at what are other people doing and how do they manage their time better.

What used to be called time management back then, we now call it productivity, but it’s all the same thing really. We all have exactly at the same 24 hours in every day, and yet many people get a lot more done in their 24 hours than you and I might in ours. Why is that? Why does the work week pass so quickly week after week after week?

The people who get the most things done are actually doing the smallest number of tasks, but they work on the tasks that make the biggest difference.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? And the reason they know which tasks to work on is because they make sure they spend plenty of time being idle.

You see, I said this was growth advice that you weren’t expecting… to get more done, you should do less? That doesn’t make sense, except it does. The core problem with tackling productivity with a view of I must get lots more done, is that you get trapped in being busy. And this is especially risky for an MSP because the very nature of your work is to be reactive and to be caught up with lots of details. And yes, I know they really do matter, and because of that you can easily fill your day with getting hundreds of small things done. But are they the things that move the needle? Are they the things that help you win more new clients, get those clients to buy from you more often, and get those clients to spend more every single time they buy? The chances are that they’re not. All of those little things, yes, they’re important and someone somewhere needs to do them and be across all of that detail, but that doesn’t have to be you, the business owner.

In fact, your job is to identify what the big things are that will grow the business. And then make sure you have enough personal time, and the business has allocated enough resource – that’s human people resource, time resource and cash resource – to make those things happen. And that’s very difficult to do when your mind is constantly moving from task, to task, to task, to task. In fact, it’s impossible. And that’s why you need to be idle. And when I say being idle, I don’t mean lying on the couch doing nothing, having a nap. My idea of being idle means just not doing work. I like to be idle by taking a long walk or going for a run, or perhaps even going to the cinema. How can I be idle while I’m watching an MCU film? Well, I can because I’m concentrating on the Avengers. I’m giving my brain space to think about stuff while I’m doing something else. And that’s really what I mean when I say you need to be idle.

As the leader of the business, it’s critical that you find time and protect that time on a regular basis to actively think about your business, but also to think about anything but the business. You can’t really do that when you’re with your family or socialising. So you do need time on your own. And you can think of it as processing time. You load the business’s goals and problems into your brain. In fact, they’re already probably top of your mind for most of the time anyway. And then you make sure that you have plenty of idle time to go and reflect on those problems. Let’s call those problems, opportunities. Every problem seems easier and more exciting when you reframe it as an opportunity.

So on a very regular basis, I put aside time in my schedule for this. In fact, I do it most weeks and it tends to be towards the end of the week. I’ll find a few hours to go for a long walk or go for a run and reflect on the business. What are we trying to do? What’s holding us back? What are the problems/opportunities, and what can I as the leader do to move everything forward? And if I don’t know the answers, that’s my brain telling me that I haven’t had enough idle time to focus on that. So go to the cinema. Hey, thanks brain. So tell me, is this something that you already do or should you be building into your schedule this active idle time?

When did you last Google your MSP?

Tell me, are your ears burning? They could be. Well, your MSP’s ears to be exact. Do you know everything that’s being said about your MSP online? Loads of MSPs have discovered information about their business online that they had no idea was there. Are you ready to find out about yours? Let’s dive into the easy way to keep track of what your clients and prospects are saying about you.

When was the last time you Googled your MSP? And by that I mean you put your business name in speech marks so that you get exact hits on your name and then you check every single page of Google results that comes up.

Every MSP owner I’ve ever asked to do this has discovered something that they didn’t know about.

It might be a bad review that was left on some obscure review platform they didn’t know about, or it might be a mention of them somewhere. There’s always something. Just before recording today, I did it for my MSP Marketing Edge and I discovered a Reddit thread about us. Now you want to see exactly what’s being said about you until you run out of mentions of your business.

This is called your digital footprint. And the reason you must be on top of this is because some of your potential future customers will do this before they’ll sign a contract with you. Of course, your footprint is going to change all the time, which is why it’s worth repeating this on a six month basis, or you could partly automate it. Here’s the easy way to do that.

Just set up a Google alert for your business name. So every time there’s a mention of you somewhere, you get an email. Now, this isn’t perfect and it will sometimes miss mentions, but it’s a good way to set and forget the process of checking your digital footprint. Just make sure that you put your business name in speech marks.

While you are there, why don’t you do that for your name? Unless you’ve got a very Googleable name like Paul Green, there’s lots of Paul Greens around… there are Paul Green shoes, did you know that? But if you’ve got a slightly less common name, you could definitely do that. And while you’re setting that up, why not do it for your competitors as well? Pick out your top three or five competitors, put their names in speech marks in a Google alert, and every time they’re mentioned on the web, you’ll be told about it too.

How to survive 30 years owning an MSP without a breakdown

Featured guest: Melanie Curtis helps driven professionals access their massive untapped potential. A former investment banker turned stunt-woman, world-record pro skydiver, turned keynote speaker, life coach, author, activist and entrepreneur. She has jumped out of an airplane over 12,000 times, and has travelled the globe as a headlining professional athlete coaching thousands of people over the last 30 years.

Melanie co-founded the Trust the Journey podcast, where she and guests share in depth about their deep healing as a crucial part of accessing the true expanse of our human potential. Underpinning it all, Melanie deeply loves people, her family above all else (including her cat, Matil).

Running an MSP is tough, really tough. There’s so much to do and so many conflicting demands on you as the owner. And yet, if you want to last 20, maybe 30 years doing this, you can’t operate at full capacity all the time. You can see why, right?

My special guest today has a unique insight into how MSP owners set themselves up to not just survive, but thrive over three decades of business ownership.

I am Melanie Curtis and I’m a keynote speaker on untapped potential.

And that sounds like a proper job that does with real responsibility, having to actually stand on a stage in front of people. I’ve only done that once in the MSP world and it terrified the heck out of me, although I’m looking forward to doing it again. But good for you, Melanie. Thank you so much for joining us.

A proper job.

That’s what you’ve got me. I just talk nonsense on this podcast and stuff. But yes, thank you for joining us. You and I, we’re connected by a very good friend of yours and someone that I’ve known for years but never actually met yet in real life, whose name is Justin Esgar. He is based out in New York, and he’s just one of the most entrepreneurial MSPs that I’ve ever met. He’s an amazing guy and he’s always connecting me to good people. And he’s like, you have to get Melanie on the show. And having talked to you for just a few minutes, I can see why he did that.

So today we’re going to talk about the hell of being a business owner. And actually someone like Justin, as you and I were just saying, Justin is not your average business owner. He’s very entrepreneurial. He’s got 12 businesses, he’s got 50,000 ideas a day and act on 10,000 of them. And that’s not the average business owner. The average MSP owner is working in their business more than they’re working on their business. There’s a certain element of they’re trapped within the business. There’s a certain element of where is the growth going to come from, why is it so difficult to get things done? So that’s what I want to explore with you today. Let’s first of all just establish who you are, why you are able to come onto the podcast and talk about stuff like this. So you’ve been working with business owners for, is it a couple of decades now?

Yeah, I mean, I joke but also I’m very upfront in the sense that entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. I like to think about it as I really get to do it, I think of it as a big creative project. But I’m also a person who is into doing big things and being challenged in that whole, I don’t know if you’ve heard the term “type 2 fun”, but it’s basically a term that outdoor enthusiasts use that means things that are only fun after they’re over. So it’s that idea of doing hard things like a Spartan race or climbing a mountain or writing a book. And it stinks during it, but it is so fulfilling, so rewarding because you really stretch yourself and grow. And I think entrepreneurship is a lot like that. And so I think it’s important to build skills around how do we make it less hard when we know it’s going to be hard no matter what? How do we self validate? All those skills really matter if we care about being a sustainable business owner over time.

Yeah, I like that. I like that. I’ve never heard of the phrase type 2 fun before. You throw yourself out of planes, don’t you? That’s your type two fun.

Yeah. Yeah, so outdoor enthusiasts use it most because of climbing mountains and stuff like that, but it doesn’t have to be that. It’s really just something that’s really hard that you’re happy about, proud of after. You know what I mean?

And what’s type 1 fun?

Type 1 fun is stuff that is fun while it’s happening, laughing with friends, going to a water park, dancing, stuff like that. Apparently there’s a term type 3 fun that means it’s never fun. Not fun during, not fun after. I don’t even know why that’s on the list, but apparently that’s a thing too.

Well, type 3 fun sounds like my first marriage because that wasn’t fun during it and it certainly wasn’t fun after I’d given her all of my money, but I don’t talk about that. Okay, so let’s talk about type 2 fun in the context of being a business owner. Because if you’re going to be a business owner for 10, 20 years, which for most of us is the goal, and I’m speaking to you in my 20th year as a business owner, you can’t wait till it’s over. You can’t wait till you’re 65 and you’ve sold the business and you’ve retired to have fun because that’s just a waste of our life. So the MSPs and the other kinds of business owners you work with, what are the things that stop it being fun while we’re doing it?

Yeah, I think honestly we need to validate our humanity throughout anything that we’re doing that’s challenging and anything that we care about. You know what I mean? Why do we get into entrepreneurship in the first place? I don’t know about every MSP owner’s motivations obviously, but for me…

Entrepreneurship is this avenue to achieve my goal of freedom, being my own boss, being in charge of my own destiny and in control of my own time.

That is highly, highly valuable to me. And so I consistently try to remember that that is what I’m doing it for. I get to go to my mom’s house and have birthday cake with her and do a client call in the basement and get to be there and have that quality time with her that I can never get back. So I’m still running my business. Obviously I have a remote business that’s a different animal in itself, so not everyone has that, some people have brick and mortar. But I would invite people when they’re in the struggle of real and true entrepreneurship and really being like, where’s the next client going to come? Or scarcity fear like, oh, cashflow is an issue, or man, we just lost a client. Those things are very, very real. And so I want to validate that, I don’t want to dismiss that by saying, oh, just figure out how to feel happy and build skills of validating yourself. Because like I said, it’s a very real thing. So that’s an important thing to care about, to honour it, but it’s also important to grow our skills around making that stuff not as hard and helping ourselves shift our mind to things that are actually going to help us.

One thing I talk about a lot is staying detached from the outcome. Which can feel really weird when you’re like, well, I have attachment to the outcome. I want to make money and pay my mortgage and support my family and put food on the table and whatever, live this dream experience, all that’s valid too. So it’s important to stay detached and flexible while also really shifting and thinking about what we can control. If you’re talking about marketing, where’s the next client going to come? The truth is we never know. We will never know where exactly the next client will come. We don’t know who’s going to say yes, there’s a person over there but we can’t control whether they’re going to say yes or like us or think we’re smart. We just can’t. We can learn and go, what can I do and what’s in my control such that I think it is most likely that this potential customer or this potential client, this lead, is going to feel motivated or connected to what I’m sharing and offering and feel motivated to take steps forward with me.

And yet as business owners and every single business owner on the planet that has ever been will agree that owning a business is a very personal thing. It’s a baby, isn’t it? It’s a child. And as I said to you, I’m in my 20th year and I’ve learned the lesson the hard way 50,000 times that I’ve got to slightly emotionally detach from the business, and yet I don’t, even now at the age of 50, with all this experience with a great life around me, there are evenings I catch myself sitting there feeling anxiety about a business that’s actually really successful in the grand scheme of things. But the anxieties, because it’s not quite going as fast as I want in the direction I want. And I can imagine if it was 10 times the size, I’d still feel that because I’ve felt that anxiety when it was 10 times smaller than it is now.

And I know I’m not the only business owner. I’ve had many beers and many conversations with thousands and hundreds of other business owners and we all feel the same. So it’s a common thing and it reflects the care and the love and the attention that we have, because very few of us start a business for money, money is a very pleasant side effect and part of it. But you are absolutely right, we started it for freedom, we started for control. So how do we actually do that detaching without disconnecting ourselves from the business emotionally?

Yeah, that’s a great question. One of the things that I talk about relative to doing big things, untapped potential, stuff like that, is we have to talk about what gets in our way. One of the things that gets in our way is that patterned thinking, that sort of autopilot. When I talk about this, teach about it, when I think about patterned thinking, trenched neural pathways, I describe it as a big heavy truck goes into a field during a really big rainstorm and the wheels sink into the field and they create these really deep grooves in the land. Then two weeks go by and it’s sunny and beautiful and it doesn’t rain at all and those grooves where the wheels were harden, and that is basically what a trenched neural pathway is like. It’s really tough to sort of get the wheels back out of it. It’s kind of tough to grind down the edges so that it’s not as intense. So those moments of, oh man, I continue to feel anxiety or I continue to focus on this thing that always causes me stress, I would coach people to look at that as something that they can work on over time to just sand down the hard edges of that thinking.

But this is the thing is it happens over time. This is me calling people into a skill building thing of I have to, with frequency, access these ideas that are alternative to this trench. If I’m constantly in scarcity fear or I’m constantly thinking the client’s going to not say yes to my pitch or whatever thing comes up, we have to really work on what is the alternative thought that actually supports me. And again, it’s tough because I’m not just saying positive affirmations, I’m talking about we have to actually believe it, otherwise it’s not going to really help us. But one of the things is a habitual thought. You know how a person will text you and it’ll be like, “call me” and your brain will be like, somebody is dead. I don’t know about you. I’m trying to get my mom to stop texting me, call me. I’m starting to believe that no one is dead when she does that. But still, it’s a version of a thought that I want to undo a response.

And so when we go into stuff like type 2 fun – chosen challenges, skill building, iterative things – over time we know baked into that we are not going to have the outcome short term. We know that the experience of that is waiting a while for the outcome. And so that kind of buys us into the persistence of what it takes to actually make that deeper change. So an example of that at the end is like you’re faced with a challenge and then your brain automatically thinks, I know I can do that. That’s something we can prove over time and experience. Like you said, I’m a skydiver and world record holder, I’ve run the New York Marathon, I’ve done lots of things. I’m an entrepreneur for 20 years. That’s hard. So over time, and I’m not saying it takes 20 years, but over time, what I’m saying is that we can prove to ourselves these new thoughts and then we have to kind of consciously care about connecting to them.

Yeah, no, I love that. I know you help MSPs and other business owners with exactly this, and we’ll talk about what you actually do in a second, but for everybody who’s watching this on YouTube or listening to the podcast, give us a single step, a practical thing, and this is always the hardest thing, isn’t it? I mean, everything you’ve said so far I agree with, and then I’m racking my brains thinking, what’s the practical step to get started? Now, obviously you do this for a living, so you tell us, where would you get started with that? How would you identify, I’ve got an issue here, and how would you start to tackle standing down those grooves?

Yeah, so first self awareness. If we recognise a discomfort, a fear, something that we’re in resistance to, we can’t have it be unconscious to us. We have to be like, that’s a thing. And then we have to pause and take time to step back from the thing in order to reflect on it, to get more of an understanding, of a conscious awareness of the situation, in order to determine steps that might actually make it better. Usually people just think this stinks, or I’m afraid of this and I’m just going to keep doing autopilot, the same thing that I always do. We have to take that time to step back. So that’s one thing. The other thing I mean is very basic physiology. We can interrupt a trigger response with three simple breaths, really taking that inhale and then that longer exhale, that automatically interrupts our fight or flight response which gives us a little bit more space to insert our conscious choice. Now, I’m not suggesting that’s easy.

Have you read the book Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl? It’s a really powerful book. It’s basically his insights from being in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. And one of the quotes that’s in that book is really well-known and powerful, and it’s about this, between stimulus and response, there is a space, in that space is our power to choose our response, in that choice lies our growth and freedom. It’s not exactly the quote, but the point is we have to open up that space and insert conscious choice. If we don’t know what to do, we have to figure out what to do. If we can’t access a bigger thought or a thought outside of our consciousness, we have to get new thoughts into our consciousness.

I say this a lot, but I believe thinking bigger is a skill. It’s not just some thing that’s cool and some life coachy thing to suggest. It’s like I can’t access potential and I can’t access new ideas and breakthrough solutions for myself entrepreneurially or in my life in any way if I’m not opening my mind to things I don’t know about. Google something random. Listen to an audible book about a business owner and hear his humanity and her humanity and their stories, and see yourself in those stories so that you start to believe you’re capable. That is a big thing I recommend to clients all the time. Go see some art, do something creative. There’s a million things that I could suggest that starts to bring new ideas into our brains. Honestly, you have to start somewhere, this podcast is a good place to start, and more business podcasts, more entrepreneur podcasts, get those stories, which will most likely spark an idea for you.

That’s amazing, thank you. And that’s a great book suggestion there – Man’s Search for Meaning. I’m going to get that on Audible as soon as our interview is finished, and then take it out on a five mile run so I can have some type 2 fun and sweat a lot as well. Melanie, thank you so much. You’ve been an absolutely fantastic guest. Just briefly tell us what do you do to help MSPs who own their own business and what’s the best way for us to get in touch with you?

Yeah, thank you so much. Yes, my website is melaniecurtis.com. You can email me directly if you like that most. It’s mel@melaniecurtis.com. So yeah, I’ve been a coach, executive coach, business coach for about 20 years. I also facilitate mastermind groups for people that are interested in that, and I’m a speaker, so I can come in and be a professional development facilitator talking about untapped potential like I mentioned before. But really it’s about helping actual humans do the things and really feel connected to what we get to do, that freedom of being an entrepreneur and really enjoying that.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Andrew owns an MSP in Utah, and by the sound of his question he’s in a lovely position and obviously thinking ahead to the future. His question is: What can I read to prepare myself for exit?

Great question. I started my first business in 2005, and I did actually sell that in 2016, and I’m going to be honest with you, the sales process, it was a bit of a nightmare. And I don’t think I was fully prepared for it at all, in fact, I know I wasn’t fully prepared for it. So when I’m involved in my next sale, which is many years away at this point, I know I’ll be a lot more prepared for that process, partly because I’ve been through it, but also because I will do a lot of research. I’ll read a lot of books, and if you are thinking of selling up in the next two to three years, I suggest you start the work now, preparing yourself for that.

There are some books that I recommend that you read, and they will help you to make your business more valuable to a prospective buyer, but also help you understand how selling a business is actually more of a marketing and sales exercise than it is a financial exercise. That’s not what your CPA/accountant will say. He or she will see it as a financial exercise, but actually you’ve got to attract a potential buyer and present your business in a way which makes it seem something they really, really want. And of course, business brokers, they don’t think that way either, which is a real pity.

So here are the books I recommend you read. These are great books to get the right mindset and start to think which things you need to improve in your business before you actually put it up to sale. The first is Built to Sell by John Warrillow. In fact, this is the best book on this subject. It focuses on the work that you need to do now and over the next couple of years in order for a successful exit down the line. And what’s wonderful is that it’s all about systemising, standardising, and simplifying your business. And if you get those three things right across the whole business, that actually makes the business more enjoyable to own. In fact, one of the things that I’ve come to realise after reading that book is if you can get a business that runs by itself and thrives by itself without you needing to be there, why would you want to sell that business?

Also, look at John Warrillow’s follow-up book that’s called The Art of Selling Your Business. And then there’s another one I can recommend, it’s called Finish Big by Bo Burlingham. It’s less practical, but I have to say it’s a really enjoyable read.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Melanie Curtis on LinkedIn, and visit her website.
• Recommended books: Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, Built to Sell by John Warrillow, The Art of Selling Your Business by John Warrillow, Finish Big by Bo Burlingham
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.