Clever: How MSPs can reuse marketing content

Episode 126: Clever: How MSPs can reuse marketing content

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 126: Clever: How MSPs can reuse marketing content
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Episode 126 includes:

  • How to make the most of every single piece of marketing content
  • The leadership benefit of really getting to know your team
  • Meet the MSP owner who grew to 100 staff within 18 years

Featured guest

Simon Marcil is a featured guest on Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

Thank you to Simon Marcil from Propel Your MSP for joining Paul to talk about how he was able to build his MSP from zero to over 100 staff in 18 years.

After graduating in computer engineering, Simon joined forces with university colleagues Marc and Vince to create S3 Technologies in 2003. S3 is today one of the largest Canadian-based, security focused MSPs with over 100 employees. In 2018, Simon co-founded Propel Your MSP to helps MSPs deliver vCIO services to their clients.

 In Simon’s spare time, you’ll find him challenging himself in the mountains, on remote paths or trails across the globe. As an avid sports enthusiast, Simon has backcountry skied some of the largest ranges on all seven continents. In addition, he has completed several 160 km Ultramarathons including Western States and UTMB.

Connect with Simon on LinkedIn:

https://ca.linkedin.com/in/smarcil

Show notes

Episode transcription

Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
You are very welcome to this latest episode of the show. Here’s what we got coming up for you today.

Simon Marcil:
Hi, I’m Simon Marcil. I’m the founder of Propel Your MSP. I will tell you how I was able to build our MSP from zero to over a 100 staff in 18 years.

Paul Green:
With a tease like that, you know that Simon’s interview is going to be really, really good. He’s going to join me, later on in the show. We’re also going to be talking about reusing content. When you generate a piece of original content, where else can you use it? Can you put it on your website and YouTube, and LinkedIn, and a number of other platforms? The answer is yes. How to repurpose content the best way, we’ll be talking about that later on in the podcast.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast.

Paul Green:
Now and again, I get invited to hang out with cool people. I do get quite a few invitations coming in from people just saying, “Hey, would you like to guest in our meeting? Or just come and have a talk to us for 10 minutes.” It’s all virtual, of course, so it can all be done from my house. And late last night, literally 10:00 PM last night, I guested for 30 minutes on a small informal mastermind group that happens amongst a whole bunch of MSPs. They’re about, I think it was 10, 15 MSPs on that call, and we just sat and chatted for half an hour about some of the latest marketing strategies and tactics, and things that are happening right now that are working for MSPs around the world. And it was a really, really good conversation because they were giving me as many ideas and as many things that I can go and talk about on things like this podcast, as I was giving to them of what other MSPs are doing.

Paul Green:
And one of the conversations that we had was that the most successful MSPs are focused more on people than on technology or anything else. And we talked about having conversations with prospects and when you talk to a prospect about their business and their people and themselves, that always leads to a better engagement, it leads to a better level of conversations, than if you try and talk about their technology. It’s kind of weird that, isn’t it? The thing that you sell, the very service that you deliver is not the thing that your clients want to talk about. They want to talk about themselves and their people and cool things like that.

Paul Green:
Now I couldn’t stay for the full two hours of that mastermind call because it would’ve been midnight in my time zone. It was a different time zone this call was happening. And as I was going to bed, just after that call, I was kind of lying there, reflecting on the call and people, and how it’s all about the people. And then I started thinking about how that applies, not just to our marketing for new clients and the way that you sell to your existing clients. That very much applies to you and your staff as well, and we’ve talked a little bit about this in the last couple of weeks.

Paul Green:
In fact, just four episodes ago, in episode 122, I talked about you being a leader that people will be desperate to work for, and I made a couple of book or TED Talk recommendations from an author called Simon Sinek. His books are available as TED Talks as well. Start With Why is the first one and Leaders Eat Last is the other book that he wrote.

Paul Green:
But as I was reflecting on this last night, I started thinking about how as leaders, another critical part of our job is to bring people together, and particularly our teams. Now you might have a team that’s now fully back in the office and you’re all together in one place. And if that’s the case, that’s just wonderful. Me, we have a completely remote team. We don’t have an office. Everyone works from home.

Paul Green:
And in fact, we are adding two or three new people into our team right now, and they will continue to be remote, and we’ll meet up once a year. Perhaps we’ll meet up in London, here in the UK, probably around Christmas time for a soiree and some fun. But the rest of the time, we’re all remote, and we have lots of video calls and we chat a lot using our collaboration platform, but we never really have that kind of get-together in celebration.

Paul Green:
And then I was thinking about something we did last year. We did a thing where we jumped onto a video call and we all had a drink. And in fact, what I’d done was I’d sent out bottles of wine or beer, or whatever everyone’s favourite tipple was. It didn’t have to be alcoholic, could be soft drinks as well. And I sent those out, so everyone had essentially a drink. I’d bought everyone a drink as if we were in a bar or in a pub. And we all got together at the same time at the end of play on a Friday and just chatted, and we didn’t talk about work. We talked about life.

Paul Green:
In fact, we found out some amazing stuff about our colleagues, and I’ve been working with some of these people for 10, 15 years. And even I found something out. One of my colleagues, Ben, has something like 15 guinea pigs. His wife breeds them and that was a fascinating piece of news for us. Another one of my colleagues, James, in fact, producer James, who puts this podcast together, say hello James.

James Lett:
Hello.

Paul Green:
He can actually do the Rubik’s cube…

James Lett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Paul Green:
In… what is it, James? Is it just under a couple of minutes or something?

James Lett:
Yeah, I can do this bad boy in about a minute.

Paul Green:
Yeah. So complete a Rubik’s cube, which is quite impressive. And then another one of our colleagues, Ian, he was actually… back in the 90s, he was in like a trance band and they released a song. It was in the charts and all of this came out of our zoom and slurp or whatever it was that we called it. In fact, as I’m thinking about that now, I’m thinking we should do that again in the summer. That’s a great idea to get the team together, and there’s an opportunity for you.

Paul Green:
You see, if all your team are meeting up in the office every day, well, that’s an easy thing to do, isn’t it? You just ship in a couple of drinks or maybe even pizzas. You could turn this into a pizza party and you ship that in, get it in on a Friday lunchtime or a Friday afternoon, maybe even do a barbecue or something like that. And you take a group of people who are working together and you kind of help them to socialize together a little bit as well.

Paul Green:
What I’ve found over the years is that when you take a work team and encourage them to do a little bit of socializing, they really do bond together. Well, if there are any cracks in the team, those cracks become amplified. But otherwise the team does tend to bond together just a little bit, which is a wonderful thing to watch.

Paul Green:
Now, where I think this is really clever is if you’ve got a hybrid team. What if you’ve got some people in the office and some people who are remote? Maybe there is a technician that you use for five, seven hours a week. They’re remote, perhaps even based in a different country, but they’re essentially part of your team or be only a part-time part of your team. Wouldn’t it be great for them if, while you are having your pizza party or your beer party or beer barbecue with your team, that actually, you get them involved as well?

Paul Green:
So everyone who is pulling together is there having a bit of a social event and not talking about work, just talking about themselves. It could be a little bit awkward to start with. In fact, I remember our call from last year was just a little bit awkward, but as the beer flowed and people enjoyed themselves and realized, “This is just a bit of fun. There’s no pressure on this. I’m not going to have to say anything or talk about my role or anything like that,” people relaxed and that was when the funny story started coming out.

Paul Green:
Pizza, beer, barbecue, whatever suits you and your team. It’s just a general good idea to have a little bit of a social event once or twice a year with every single member of your team, whether they’re in the office or whether they’re working remotely.

Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.

Paul Green:
One of the curses of marketing for many MSPs is having to generate your own content. It’s why these days, almost every single vendor seems to have tons of marketing content available via their partner portals. And it’s why services like my MSP Marketing Edge service exist because people want content, very high quality content that’s relevant to their audience, and they want to be able to use it in their marketing.

Paul Green:
Here’s the thing though, whether you buy-in some content or get it from a vendor, or just create it yourself, there’s actually an amazing amount of stuff that you can do with one piece of content. And this is called repurposing. In fact, smart marketers are repurposing content all the time. I do it, that’s for sure. So if I talk about something here on the podcast and this podcast tends to be the driver of all of my marketing content, then if it’s a good subject and I can see that we get some good feedback on it, then I will repurpose that into a blog article.

Paul Green:
And then from that blog article, that might be repurposed into a piece of content on LinkedIn. And we are just starting an effort to really enhance our YouTube channel. So at some point, we might repurpose that content into a YouTube video. It’s the same content, but in repurposing it, you create different ways of looking at that content.

Paul Green:
Because if you think about those different platforms I was just talking about, a YouTube video is a very different thing to a post on LinkedIn, which is a very different thing to a blog on your website, which is a very different thing to a newsletter on LinkedIn, which is different to a post on Facebook, which is different to a short tweet. All of these different platforms have their own foibles, their own little things that they absolutely love, their preferences for the way that you present the content.

Paul Green:
Some of them like lots of images and pictures and links. Some of them prefer that you don’t send traffic outside of the platform. Some of them are image-driven. Some of them are video-driven, but you can take the same idea, the same core piece of content, and you can repurpose that across a multitude of different platforms. In fact, what you might choose to do, you might choose to have a content calendar where you can actually say, “Week one, we’re going to do a blog article on…” Let’s say cyber security, let’s say ransomware, that’s your blog article. And then four weeks later, you’re going to turn that into a 60-second YouTube video. And four weeks after that, you’re going to turn it into a LinkedIn article, and four weeks after that, you’re going to turn it into something else. You get the idea here.

Paul Green:
So instead of just running the same piece of content in one week across multiple channels, you’re actually very smart with it. You have gaps and it might be four, five, six weeks. It might be random gaps, but you can take a single idea for a piece of content and you can use it many, many different ways. In fact, if you looked at that, let’s say you had a 52-week content calendar and you had four different channels that you wanted to fill, such as your blog, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook, you might look at that and say, “Wow, we need 52 pieces of content, times four channels. That means we need more than 200 pieces of content,” but of course, you don’t. You just need 52 pieces of content. You need one idea a week because you’re then going to spread that out across multiple channels. It’s a very smart thing to do.

Paul Green:
And frankly, coming up with 52 content ideas really isn’t that difficult. Easy content always comes from listening to your clients, listening to what they say during strategic reviews, looking at the most common tickets that are submitted. All the great content ideas come from listening to your existing clients and what your existing prospects actually say to you.

Paul Green:
Now, the real trick with repurposing content is not to worry that the same people are going to see it across multiple different platforms, because there are a small number of people who watch every video that you put out and read everything that you put on Facebook, and everything that goes onto LinkedIn, but they are very much, very, very much in the minority. The vast majority of people see a little bit of your content some of the time. So if you were to put the same subject out on YouTube and then four to six weeks later, talk about it on LinkedIn, it doesn’t matter. You really can overthink these things.

Paul Green:
This was one of the lessons I learned working in radio back in the 90s and early noughties because myself and all of my colleagues, when we started in radio, we were sitting, listening to the radio station all day long. We were radio nuts. That’s why we got into radio. So we would listen for huge amounts of time, 10, 12 hours a day. We all knew what was happening on the radio station at any one time. We were often listening to our shows and our colleague shows. It was very much top of mind for us, but that’s because that was what we did. It was all we did. None of us had any real lives outside of radio, and so we were completely obsessed with it.

Paul Green:
The actual listeners, well, the vast majority of them, they didn’t obsessively listen to the radio. They’d listen for maybe 20 minutes in the morning while they were doing their commute, 20 minutes on the commute home, maybe a little bit during the day in the background at work, but they weren’t listening to it obsessively. So we would talk about the same subjects again and again, and again, and again.

Paul Green:
And in fact, often it would take talking about the same subject five, 10, 15 times for your casual listeners to actually perceive it, for it to go into their brain and for them to realize that we were talking about something. Sure, we had a very tiny proportion of listeners who were as obsessed as we were with the output, but they were not the majority. And with your marketing, just as with something like a radio station, you program it, you create content for the majority. The majority are not absorbing everything that you output, so don’t overthink it. Come up with an idea, figure out the right number of platforms to put it across, and then figure out what the different rules are for each of those platforms.

Paul Green:
And my final thoughts on this is of course, that you shouldn’t do this yourself. When I talk about repurposing content, this is not really a job that you personally should have to do, get someone else to do it for you. Now, you personally may originate that content in the first place. You might take an idea that you got from talking to a client and turn that into the original piece of content, but there are plenty of people out there on platforms like Fiverr, PeoplePerHour, Upwork, lots of different platforms where you can give someone your original piece of content and get them to repurpose it into other platforms for you.

Paul Green:
It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. It can be done incredibly cost effectively. And believe me, it’s better that you pay $10 or $20 for someone else to spend their time repurposing content, so you can go and do something more productive with your valuable management time.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
3,720 MSPs around the world now have a copy of my book, Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business. It’s completely free. You don’t even have to pay for shipping for us to send you a copy, and there is a ton of value in here. It’s only a short book. It’s a 44-page short read. It’s your quick guide to marketing your MSP. And if I just flick here, I’m just going to flick to, here we go, page 21. This is chapter four, Retain Your Clients and Increase Average Lifetime Value. And I’ve got a little box down at the bottom that says, “Understand this, the real value of a client is in the long-term, not in the first transaction. Your marketing needs to be as focused on retaining clients as it is winning new ones.”

Paul Green:
This book is full of little nuggets like that. If you want to get a free copy, we will ship you a copy free if you’re in the UK or the US. Anywhere else in the world, we’ll just send you an instant PDF. Just go to paulgreensmspmarketing.com.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Simon Marcil:
Hi, I’m Simon Marcil from S3 Technologies, and also Propel Your MSP.

Paul Green:
And Simon, you sent me a wonderful email. It was back in November last year, and it’s taken us ages to actually get this conversation sorted out, but you sent me an email saying you’d built up your MSP over, I think it was 18 years to a 100 staff doing virtually no marketing. Now that is the kind of success story that I thought has got to get onto this podcast. So tell us about your MSP? You’re based in Canada, aren’t you?

Simon Marcil:
Correct. We’re based in Montreal and we started in 2003, so it’s been a long time. We sort of built the business, really one client at a time, and also one staff member at a time. Right now we currently have about a 100 staff. What’s particular for our MSP is we actually have larger clients. So we roughly have 65 clients. So we’re part of peer groups in the US, and we really stand out with that in the sense that our clients are much larger than the typical MSPs, which has some positives and also some negatives. Positives being that the larger clients really keep you on your toes and also kind of expose you to, I’d say what’s coming next in the smaller clients a lot quickly, more quickly.

Paul Green:
Let’s return back to the larger whale clients later on in the interview. I’d first of all, like to just go back to 2003. Tell us what you were doing? So what made you… How old were you then? Because you seem quite young now, Simon.

Simon Marcil:
Yeah, I was 23 at the time.

Paul Green:
Okay. Wow. Most of us were still working in McDonald’s or something at that point. So tell us about 23-year old you and what made you decide to start an IT services firm in the first place?

Simon Marcil:
So it actually started much earlier than that. It actually started in 1997 or 1998. So I have two partners in our company now. So myself and one of our partners started a small company after high school where we just did service for sort of family members and friends of families. Mostly it was people at home, but we also had some small businesses. As the summer kind of rolled around or came to an end, we had to start university and we were enrolled in computer engineering, and that’s when we realized that yeah, we might not have enough time to take care of all these clients.

Simon Marcil:
So we found somebody to kind of give our clients to, who had basically more of a hardware sales shop at the time, in 1997/8, and I started working there part-time through university. You remember the year 2000 bug?

Paul Green:
Yeah. Y2K bug, yeah.

Simon Marcil:
Exactly, the Y2K bug. So people were buying hardware like crazy.

Paul Green:
Yeah.

Simon Marcil:
But the margins were going down. So all these guys, most IT firms were selling hardware and they’d buy servers and sell them at a 100% markup. It was crazy, and that was their business, but that was coming to an end in those years, as it was getting more and more competitive. And that’s something I actually saw while working there, still in university. And so we used to sell these servers, these small businesses, and they’d almost give the service away. It was kind of like if you bought your hardware from the shop, we’d install it for free. And I realized this was nuts. I’m like, “Well, the service actually has good margin on it and that’s what we should focus on.”

Simon Marcil:
And I actually wrote a whole, call it program or business offer around kind of what is an MSP today, meaning proactive service to these clients. And this is in like 1998-99, maybe by then. And I went out and I sold it to a bunch of clients and we sort of started what was a mini MSP. When I finished university, I guess I was a bit naive, I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I thought I’d get a crazy offer, maybe become a partner or something nuts, but I was just a young kid, maybe a little cocky, and realized that basically that wasn’t going to happen. So decided to pretty much start it on our own.

Paul Green:
Yeah. It’s pretty impressive to have… I’ve only been in this world six, seven years, but for you to have that kind of foresight back then was pretty impressive. So how quickly did the company grow at first? Did you have big ambitions for it or was it a case of just, as you said earlier, when a client take on a member of staff, when a client take someone on?

Simon Marcil:
We definitely had a lot of ambition, maybe a little too much actually at the time, but we were 23 years old. We started out of our apartments. We didn’t have any money really, to start. So it was really, one client at a time, and I think my partner, [inaudible 00:20:47], we were really, really good with our money, meaning saving up our money, not taking on debt, but it’s funny. I think in those years it almost gave us credibility, and the fact that we only sort of did service and we did have sort of an all-you-can-eat price at that time was completely different.

Paul Green:
And at what point did you realize that, “We’re building something special here?” Because I don’t speak to many MSPs that are at the size and the level at which you guys are at. Was there a point at which you got there and you thought, “Wow, we could really take this somewhere?” Or did you get it to a certain point and you were considering an exit? Talk us through, if you like, the middle age of the business?

Simon Marcil:
So we realized that we were doing something that was different in the sense that we were really focused on recurring revenue. Any client that wasn’t going to take sort of the full package with us wasn’t the right client for us, but I think when it clicked in is… so we got invited to… at the time we were dealing with Ingram Micro and they had their VTN group. And they invited us to a conference in San Francisco and we met Gary Pica, who’d actually just sold his company.

Paul Green:
Yeah.

Simon Marcil:
So I don’t remember which year that was, and he was giving a talk about this new MSP model. So we’re sitting there and he is kind of talking about it. We’re like, “Oh, he is describing our business. We’ve been doing this forever.” At the end of his talk yes room, we’re like, “How many people here have recurring revenues?” So he says, I think, “Lift up your hand if you have $10,000 in recurring revenues?” Of course, we’ve got our hand up.

Simon Marcil:
Then he says, “Okay, keep your hand up if you have $20,000, 30,000, $40,000.” So by, I don’t know, I want to say $50,000, I think everybody’s hands down, and we had over $200,000 of RMR at that time.

Paul Green:
Wow.

Simon Marcil:
And he came to see us at the end. He was like, “Okay…” Basically he was like, “Who the hell are you guys? How come I’ve never heard of you?” It’s kind of funny because we’d been doing our thing in our little island-

Paul Green:
Yeah.

Simon Marcil:
Until then.

Paul Green:
How did you find these people? Because a lot of the MSPs I speak to would love to have… as much as they’re scared of whales, as quite rightly you should be, anything that’s over 20% of your revenue is a threat, a massive threat to the continuity of the business on its own, but everyone would love a 5,000 user business. So you guys, you’ve already admitted you didn’t do much marketing. Where do you get these from? Was it from referrals?

Simon Marcil:
So we do AdWords. So we’ve done a lot of AdWords. So people definitely find our website. So some people will call us, they find us online. And then obviously, we have some partners we work with, either who are different consultants or yeah, so referrals. My partner, Marc, he’s in charge of sales. He would actually do… He’s even done some cold calls at the time at some larger clients.

Paul Green:
Wow.

Simon Marcil:
Yeah. And worked on some of those. So I shouldn’t say that we didn’t do any sales and marketing, but we’ve done very-

Paul Green:
Minimal.

Simon Marcil:
Yeah. We have one salesperson. We have a 100 people. It doesn’t really make sense.

Paul Green:
Well, no. Actually, it does because if you’ve got a very clear idea of the kind of clients you want and it’s a minimum 100 users or whatever your minimum is, what’s the point of having three salespeople? Because there’s only a finite number of new clients that you can onboard. I’d imagine an onboarding for you is a fairly impactful…

Simon Marcil:
It’s huge, yes.

Paul Green:
Yeah. I bet it is. Yeah. I imagine it’s something to look forward to and dread at the same time. You said something earlier, you said, “We turn down clients that we don’t want.” So to put it into my words, you are very picky about the kind of clients that you take. Now today-

Simon Marcil:
Absolutely.

Paul Green:
I can imagine that’s not a difficult thing for you, especially if you personally are not involved in the selling. You haven’t got to sit there and see the whites of their eyes and turn someone down or not even bother having them meeting with them. You’ve got someone else to do that for you.

Paul Green:
Go back to, in your mind, to when that was actually a big thing because most businesses for much of their life will take on pretty much anyone who’s who’s got the money and is willing to buy the services. So how difficult was it for you to turn away the wrong kind of clients?

Simon Marcil:
Maybe it’s because we were always very responsible for money, not having any debt and kind of knowing what the kind of relationship we wanted with our clients too. We worked very hard growing the business and if we were going to basically put that much effort into our clients, we wanted somebody who would respect us and have a good relationship with.

Paul Green:
It’s funny you say, you’re going to work crazy for someone, you might as well be respected by them, but how many MSPs do you know who have clients that don’t respect them, and yet the MSPs keep them on month after month, after month? Should we make this National Fire A Client Day? That would be a great thing to achieve, or better still, don’t take them on in the first place.

Simon Marcil:
I would say that’s the better option.

Paul Green:
I was just doing a consult just before I recorded this interview with you, Simon, with one of my MSP Marketing Edge members. And he’s only been going… I think it was about seven months, and he’s deliberately reduced his price so that he’s 30% under market values. So let’s say market value is roughly what everyone else is charging.

Simon Marcil:
Mm-hmm

Paul Green:
And he’s using that as his selling point and I had an aneurysm when he told me that, because apart from… he’s got 14 years experience. It’s just, the company happens to be seven months old. What I said to him was, “Well, A, those people you’re selling cheap, it’s going to take you years to get them up to market value and by then, market value will have gone up. But B, because you are…” He’s telling them, “We are cheaper because we’ve just got started.”

Paul Green:
He’s actually starting the relationship off in completely the wrong way, and he’s making it more difficult for them to buy from him because they’re picking him on price, or the temptation is to pick him on price rather than the fact he’s been doing this for 14 years, years, and his business partner’s been doing it for 20 years or whatsoever. So I think it does… you’re right. It comes from getting it right earlier.

Paul Green:
So you have a side venture and that’s called Propel Your MSP. So what is this? And when did you get started with this?

Simon Marcil:
Yeah, so Propel, we started it three years ago. So something that we’ve done in our MSP from the beginning is we were always really, really strong on, call it the VCIO side of things, or the strategic planning with clients.

Paul Green:
Yeah.

Simon Marcil:
Every time we take on a client, we had a clear roadmap for them, usually a three-year roadmap, with a very detailed budget of where they were going, and this is something that gave us, I think huge credibility with the client. This is probably why we got a lot of referrals as well at the time, and it just showed that we were obviously proactive, but also in control of the infrastructure. There’s nothing worse than going to see a client and saying, “Hey, there’s this thing,” whatever it is, “That’s unplanned and you need to spend money right now.” So for us, that was always really, really important.

Simon Marcil:
And as the company grew, I built these systems to make… because it takes a long time to do, so I’d built these different systems to automate it. As we hired VCIOs, it got really difficult to have them give out the same quality of the strategic planning and of roadmaps. We started the business. The business is all about VCIOs. It’s basically a tool for them to produce roadmaps for their clients, and to ensure that basically… the most important thing is to be the trusted advisor to your clients.

Simon Marcil:
And once that starts slipping, or if you’re not the trusted advisor, somebody else is their trusted advisor. So for us, it’s really to maximize the VCIO time, to maximize the proactivity that you’re doing for the client, and Propel really comes in… It’s funny when we built it, the idea of it was how can we save time on our VCIOs? It’s taking too long to produce these things. And that was the first goal.

Simon Marcil:
But funny enough, as we started using the product more and more, I realised really, the biggest benefit was the consistency. Now we’re delivering these plans to all clients. And also, this is going to sound silly, but there’s no mistakes. The data is accurate.

Paul Green:
Do you know what? As I’m talking about this, I’m thinking you must be some kind of visionary because you were doing VCIO stuff 10, 15 years before anyone even coined the phrase, I’m sure. You seem to have set yourself up with a managed services model long before managed services was even a thing. So I am definitely asking you on our YouTube interview, what the next big trend is? And then I’m going to put money into that, because you clearly seem to know what you’re doing.

Paul Green:
You and I are going to continue on YouTube. I am going to ask you what’s next. I’m also going to ask you what it’s like to manage so many staff because a 100 staff is some people’s idea of a nightmare. And I want to talk about business partners as well because you’ve managed to keep your partners going since 2003 or keep your partnerships together, which is impressive. And maybe that’s easier in a successful business than a business that’s not so successful, but these are some of the things that I want to explore with you on YouTube.

Paul Green:
So Simon and I are going to move over now onto YouTube, and if you go looking for Paul Green’s MSP Marketing YouTube channel, you’ll see the extended interview there. Simon, just for the podcast here, if you just want to finish off by just giving us that 10 second plug for Propel Your MSP, and tell us how we can go and find more?

Simon Marcil:
So propelyourmsp.com. We have a freemium, so you can use it for free for two of your clients. All the features are available. You can also contact us obviously for a demo where biggest strength is really our product, all the details in it, how it can be customized. A lot of our MSPs are on the larger side because that’s obviously what we know best, so I think it’s a product you can also grow into.

Simon Marcil:
Of course, I’m biased. I think it’s a great product and I think you should check it out.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.

Bob Jamieson:
My name is Bob Jamieson. I’m from CSM International. Book I’ll recommend is Cyber War by Richard A. Clarke. It’s a really well written book on how cybersecurity is expanding and not only the warfare space, but also in the civilian space. And what does that look like? And what does that mean to us?

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Andra Hedden:
Now, more than ever before, MSPs are wanting to learn about how to grow when it comes to lead generation and marketing, and trying to really understand, are you running a non-profit or are you really in a position to where you’ve got evaluation that makes sense for all the hard work that you’ve done?

Paul Green:
That’s Andra Hedden from Marketopia. They’re a big MSP marketing agency based in the US, who’ve just bought a marketing agency here in London. They’re becoming a worldwide force and they know all about marketing for MSPs because they’re there in the trenches doing it. They know what works today and what doesn’t work today. They’re generating leads for MSPs, they’re following those leads up. They know what ordinary business owners and managers are responding to right now.

Paul Green:
A couple of months ago, Andra flew over to London here in the UK and sat down with me for about 40 minutes to talk about the state of MSP marketing right now. It was a fascinating conversation and I’m going to share the whole thing with you next week. We’ve got an MSP Marketing Podcast special to celebrate Easter.

Paul Green:
Now don’t forget, we’ve got the extended version of the interview I did this week with Simon Marcil, that’s on YouTube right now and our show about the show, another bite that will go live on YouTube on Thursday. You can see both of those at youtube.com/mspmarketing. Please do subscribe to us on YouTube and whichever podcast platform you use. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.

Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.