Episode 151: Why cause-related marketing works for MSPs

Episode 151: Why cause-related marketing works for MSPs

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 151: Why cause-related marketing works for MSPs
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Episode 151 includes:

  • 00:00 Why you should always question every process within your MSP
  • 06:14 What is ’cause-related marketing’… and how could it work for your MSP?
  • 14:15 How MSPs can better manage ‘software as a service’
  • 30:55 A great book recommendation about using the right words in sales conversations

Featured guests:

George Smith is a featured guest on Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

Thank you to George Smith from Augmentt for joining Paul to discuss how MSPs can tackle managing their SaaS solutions.

George is a dynamic and results-focused senior sales and marketing leader. He’s recognised for strong communication and the ability to lead the professional development of individuals and support teams. He’s also a certified canoe and climbing instructor with a passion for rugby.

Extra show notes:

Episode transcription

Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday. For MSPs around the world. It’s around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.

Paul Green:
Hello, my friend. And welcome to the show. This is episode 151, and this is what’s coming up this week.

George Smith:
An Irishman and an Englishman. We’ll talk about a Canadian company making waves across the globe with SAS management.

Paul Green:
That’s George Smith from Augmentt. He’s going to be here later in the show talking about SAS management. Maybe you didn’t even know that that was a thing, but it is. And in fact, you can turn it into a revenue stream, a new one, for your MSP. We’re also going to be talking about cause related marketing. It’s where you find some kind of charitable effort that really resonates with you, but would resonate with your ideal clients as well and you really get behind it. You leverage giving money to charity and getting involved with something as a way to get new clients. It’s not a cynical thing. In fact, everyone wins when you use cause related marketing well.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
Tell me, have you come across EOS before? Not iOS. That’s an operating system for phones. EOS is an operating system for entrepreneurs. In fact, it stands for entrepreneurial or entrepreneur operating system, and it was created by a guy called Geno Wickman, who’s written about it in a whole range of books, which aimed at different levels of your business. Now, one of my favourite books of his is called Traction and Traction… For you, if you are the business owner or manager, if you are MSP, you should start with Traction. You should read it. It talks about controlling the chaos and putting in place a growth structure for the business. So this is no good for you if it’s just you and a bit of help at this stage but once you start building up your staff, probably at about 3, 4, 5 staff onwards, you should read Traction and start to implement it.

Paul Green:
It’s not easy. There’s a lot of work involved in it, but what you end up with is a great growth structure at the end. So I’ve recently been rereading traction for some work that I’m doing with some MSPs that I meet physically in a room every month in Milton Keens here in the UK, it’s kind of like a peer group in person, we call it. And I’m reading a little bit ahead of… I’ve read this two, three times, but I’m reading a little bit ahead of what we’re doing in each session and I’ve just read something great, which is on page 156 of my particular expanded edition.

Paul Green:
And it’s this, let me read this to you. “A man was once with his wife’s family for Thanksgiving. During the preparation of the meal, he observed his wife cutting the back of a ham off before putting it in the oven. Curious, he asked her why she cut the back off the ham and she replied, “It’s tradition. It’s the way we’ve always done it in our family.” Her mother had just arrived. So he took the opportunity to go over and ask why they cut off the back of a ham. She said, “It’s tradition. It’s the way we’ve always done it.” Fortunately, his wife’s grandmother was there as well. So he went to her and asked the same question. She replied, “Once upon a time, the pan was too small and it was the only way to get the ham to fit in the pan.””

Paul Green:
I love that, don’t you? And it says, the next sentence says, “Your people are doing things because they’ve always done them that way, is not good enough. With the opportunity to build a well-oiled machine. You must now be able to show them a better way.”

Paul Green:
What a great example. And in fact, even in your MSP, how many of your people are doing something just because it’s always been done that way? Regardless of the age of your business, it’s very hard for someone new slotting in. If you’ve been running the business on your own for a year, and then you hire your first employee and they start to make decisions about how to do things because you are too busy, you’re too busy to give them the input. And then there’s another employee and another one and another one and by the time you get to employee five or six or seven, this is how we do it, it’s just done this way, is just the law. It becomes the law of the business for no reason, no one actually ever designed it that way. In fact, if you look at why most people start their business, it’s not really for the money, it’s for control.

Paul Green:
We want the control over what we’re doing and what happens as we start to hire staff is we start to feel out of control. We feel out of control of our own business. In fact, if you feel that way, you need to read this book Traction, because it is aimed directly at you, getting a grip on that situation and putting in place that growth structure to change it. So what is being done in your MSP today that’s being done because people perceive it’s always been done that way? What’s the best way that you could challenge that with your team? In fact, you yourself, how often do you do things just because it’s always been done that way even though the business today is completely different to how it was many years ago, when you started it up yourself?

Paul Green:
Rereading this book… And I read it on a vacation a few weeks ago, rereading this book has made me look at almost everything within our business and asked myself, why do we do it that way? We have… Just as with any business, we have all sorts of horrendous, complicated, stupid little things that we… We log a piece of information on this system, and we copy it to that system and we copy it to… And it’s… And humans are doing this.

Paul Green:
I know, right? I know at the very least I should automate that, but it’s actually made me look at it and say, why are we doing that? Why do we need all of this information? Because actually, often it becomes something historical that back in the day, we needed the information for XYZ, XYZZ, but now we don’t really need that information because we’ve moved on or we’ve replaced it. In fact, I’ve had a great couple of weeks, stripping out jobs, taking things away from my team, stuff that people have been doing for years, but we can’t really think of a reason why we are doing it anymore. Simplification, if you like. KISS, keep it simple sunshine. Maybe there’s an opportunity to do that within your MSP. I mean, come on, haven’t you got a complicated enough business as it is. Wouldn’t it be lovely just to simplify everything down, simply by reviewing everything you do and asking, do we really need to do that?

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

Paul Green:
Something else I’ve been thinking about since my vacation ended is cause related marketing. Now the basis of cause related marketing is where you throw yourself behind a charitable cause of some kind in a way which will resonate with you. So it matches up with your own values. It will resonate with your staff and it will resonate with your clients and particularly your prospects. So there are lots of things that we can do with our businesses to help charities. I mean the most obvious thing is we can give money to charities or we can donate goods. And I don’t know how it works in your neck of the woods, but certainly here in the UK, if your business makes a charitable donation, then that comes off your tax bill. That’s… Let’s say you give 10,000 pounds away then that’s 10,000 pounds off of profit that you don’t have to pay tax on.

Paul Green:
And obviously you don’t get the profit, but if you are making good money in your business and you wanted to support something that was important to you, much better that money goes to a charity than it goes to the tax man. That’s the way that I see it. I think charities do… They’re much better with, to have that cash. The real thing with cause related marketing though is not just to make it as simple as let’s give some money. I think if you’re going to do it properly, you need to find a cause and commit to that cause, and as I said, it should ideally be something that really resonates with all of, if you like, the groups of interest with your business. So let me give you an example. It’s not a real life example, but let’s say in your town, there was a particular charity that was very focused on… Let’s say it was an animal charity.

Paul Green:
So let’s assume… Or a charity that works with children. But the point is it’s very specific to your city or your area. And let’s say you built up a connection, you met some of the people that are involved with that. In fact, maybe you met them at a networking event or you got involved with them in a personal capacity. You could and should sort of build a deal with them almost where you become an official partner of theirs. In fact, you may support them in a number of different ways. You might give them some cash, you might give them some technology support and I appreciate you’ve got to be very cautious. You don’t want every charity coming to you, asking you to do work for free. In fact, one of the beauties of having a cause that you support is that you can say to everyone else who asks for money or support or something, “I’m ever so sorry, but we are a hundred percent committed to this cause to this charity.”

Paul Green:
So you might give them some cash. You might give them some technology assistance. Even if it’s just some strategic assistance, you might commit your and your staff’s time once a year to go and help them with something. Let’s say they did a big fundraising event once a year, you commit you and your team to go and help. So can you see how that’s kind of all in? And that let’s say was like a local children’s or animal charity, that would be something which would resonate with you. Particularly, if you love animals or love children, animals are easier to love, I find. But if that would resonate with you… It’s more likely to resonate with your staff if it’s a local charity and of course, that will resonate with your clients and with your prospects because again, they’re local people. This is why it’s really important to pick your cause or your charity carefully.

Paul Green:
Now, if you can make that kind of commitment and you might make like a three year commitment to them, what you ask of them in return is, can we be a partner, please? Can you put our logo on your website? On all of your marketing materials? In fact, can we be your official technology partner? So we’re not just a partner, but we are essentially getting married. Your charity brand and our MSP brand, coming together. We’re getting married and we will make a 3, 4, 5 year commitment. The one thing you want to be careful committing on that is the cash. You might have that cash today, but you might not have that cash in three years time. So just be very cautious and make sure the charity understands that the time you’ll throw in, the technology support, you’re throwing the cash is a bonus on top.

Paul Green:
And just be honest with them and explain that, “Hey, if there’s a massive downturn in our business in a couple of years time, we may struggle with that cash, but we will try our best to give you this amount of money.” I think that’s just a fair thing to do. And I do believe in protecting yourself from any kind of long-term cash commitment in that way.

Paul Green:
Now, that would work very well in a local area, in a niche, a vertical you could do exactly the same thing. If you worked with accountants, CPAs, what’s an accountancy charity or cause that’s important. Maybe there’s an… And I say this, not meaning to make it sound tongue and cheek, but maybe there’s an accountants hardship fund, or I’m just trying to think if you work with lawyers, would you want to give money to a lawyer’s hardship?

Paul Green:
Probably not. I belong in the UK to something called the Chartered Institute of PR. Sounds really posh and lush and it took me a number of years to get into that and that’s the only reason I maintain my membership is because it was hard to get in. And really I should try and get into the Chartered Institute of Marketing, but I have to do an exam, a conversion exam, and I can’t be bothered. So I didn’t use this qualification in… Is it qualifications? It’s just a membership. I don’t use this membership in any way, but it was hard to get, it’s 80 pounds a year. I might as well keep going with it. But one of the bonuses of that is there is a hardship fund. So if PR, public relations people here in the UK who are members fall into some kind of hardship situation down the line, this fund is sat there with a ton of cash to help them out if they really reached rock bottom.

Paul Green:
Now again, there are probably better causes and charities for your specific vertical, but you can take exactly the same thing. Just remember though, for this cause related marketing to work really well. You can’t just give money. Giving money in itself is the lazy way out. The really powerful way and the way to form a true partnership is to go all in, find a cause, marry that cause and you will benefit from prospects and clients seeing that you are supporting either your local community or the vertical that you are in. And that’s a very, very powerful, emotional piece of marketing.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

James Lett:
Hello, producer James here. We interrupt this episode of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast to pre-warn our audio only listeners about what’s coming next. Here follows a short sketch performed by Paul and his child. The concept of which created by his child and in Paul’s eagerness to encourage creativity and to take an interest in daddy’s business, agreed to the idea without considering that the sketch is very visual and would only really make sense if you were to be watching the video version of this podcast on YouTube. In this sketch, Paul is playing himself and his child, for some reason, is out of shot holding a fluffy toy dog in view and using personification techniques to suggest that it can talk in a high-pitched human voice. And his name is Dave. Here you go.

Paul Green:
Oh, hi, Dave, how are you?

“Dave”:
Oh, I’m feeling really down.

Paul Green:
Oh no. How come?

“Dave”:
It’s my MSP. It’s doing OK, but I just need more revenue. I don’t know how to get new clients.

Paul Green:
Wait, have you tried the MSP marketing edge.

“Dave”:
The what [inaudible 00:13:32]?

Paul Green:
The MSP marketing edge. It’s all the marketing content and tools that you need to get new clients for your MSP.

“Dave”:
Sounds great, but I don’t want to use the same marketing stuff as my competitors.

Paul Green:
But that’s the beauty, Dave. It’s only sold to one MSP per area and then that area is locked. Plus you get a month’s free trial and then it’s only 99 pounds or 129 US dollars per month. No contract, cancel any time.

“Dave”:
Wow. That’s really cheered me up. What’s the website address? Check my area’s still available.

Paul Green:
Www.MSPmarketingedge.com.

“Dave”:
I forgot already. What was the website address again?

Paul Green:
MSPmarketingedge.com.

George Smith:
The big thing, big interview.

George Smith:
Hi everyone. My name’s George Smith. I’m the senior business development manager here at Augmentt and I’m here joining Paul today to talk about SAS management and security.

Paul Green:
And just when you thought it was safe to listen to a podcast about growing your MSP, someone like George comes along and tells you there’s a new thing that you need to buy. So just briefly tell us what SAS management is and we’ll talk obviously specifically about your product towards the end of the interview. What is SAS management?

George Smith:
For sure. Well, maybe we can start by defining what SaaS is, which is many people, but maybe not everyone knows is software as a service. And you could also use the term cloud application and really what SaaS is, Paul, is it’s one of the new main pillars of modern businesses, Facebook, QuickBooks, Salesforce, N365. These are all examples of SaaS applications. And so when we talk about SaaS management, what we’re really looking at is how people more specifically through the lens of Augmentt MSPs are managing, securing, auditing and monitoring the variety of applications that people are using to run their businesses today.

Paul Green:
Got it, got it. So I know that there’s a revenue opportunity and a positioning opportunity for MSPs, which we’ll come to talk about down the line. So remind me, what was your role at Augmentt, George?

George Smith:
I’m the senior business development manager, Paul. So I’m responsible really for promoting Augmentt. I do a lot of events. I look after our technical integrations and our strategic alliances and really just working with our current MSP partners to better understand what their needs are as well as integrating with other vendors and really enhancing the product and our scope.

Paul Green:
So where did the idea for Augmentt come from, this idea of managing the SaaS applications that ultimately end users and clients are signing up for?

Voiceover:
Yeah. It’s a great question. I can kind of tell a little bit of the story about that around our co-founders Gavin Garba and Derek Bellair, who were actually the two guys that originally started Enable way back in early 2000s. And it’s funny how things in business can be quite cyclical. So back in 2000, a lot of MSPs weren’t even called manage service providers then. It was very much quick fix. You go out in the van, you see what’s wrong, you go to the site and to speed up the story a little bit Gavin at that time realized that there must be a better way to do things. And so they were responsible Adam label for creating the first remote monitoring and management system. At that time, people didn’t really know what that was. 10 years later, 15 years later, every MSP uses an RMM.

Voiceover:
So as we kind of approached the 2015 year mark, SaaS is increasing. Gavin and Derek also realized that more and more people are using SaaS but if we look at the channel, MSPs still have a great bunch of tools in terms of PSAs, RMMs, backup, et cetera, but there’s nothing actually really helping them understand, monitor, manage, and secure the vastly increasing number of applications that their customers are using. And interestingly enough, when speaking to some of the other senior vendors in the channel, there wasn’t really any appetite to create something. And so that’s when they founded Augmentt at the very end of 2019 with the sole focus of being a channel centric, MSP focused platform that allows MSPs to focus on SaaS and really kind of unlock what we’re calling SaaS services. It’s a completely new menu item that they can offer, in addition to their traditional managed services.

Paul Green:
I love this. True serial entrepreneurs who… Lots of people start lots of businesses and call themselves a serial entrepreneur but your founders here have actually spotted, genuine, massive, great, big glaring holes in the market. I always think when you create… You know someone’s a true entrepreneur, when they create something, which when it’s been launched, everyone looks back at it and says, well, that was obvious. Remote management and monitoring… Remote monitoring and management, whichever way around it is. That’s an obvious thing, you can say this side of it. I guess the hope for you is that SaaS management becomes the next thing that all MSPs have to add into their stack.

George Smith:
Yeah. And that’s certainly what the numbers are saying. We know that IT is moving towards the cloud. And with that, that’s part of the reason why we’re seeing such an increase in breaches all over the world, because that’s where the hackers are going and they’re not targeting these big companies anymore. They have that shotgun approach where it’s just spray, see what comes back and it’s often that the smaller businesses that are affected because they don’t have the same security protocols and postures in place.

George Smith:
And what’s something we’ve coined as well, Paul, is that sort of SaaS assumption gap that we see developing between MSPs and their clients, which is where, I’m a client. I’m signing up for all this SaaS. This is my business, but I pay my MSP every month. They’re my IT guide, they take care of it. Whereas on the MSP side, they’re like, well, actually, no, Mr. Customer, we have a very clearly legal worded master services agreement that outlines exactly what I do for you. And it doesn’t involve me looking after your QuickBooks or your HubSpot or any of this other stuff but in the event that a breach occurs and bad things happen, that’s not a position you want to find yourself in, either as a client or an MSP, because it’s going to be an awkward conversation about whose fault it is or having those difficult conversations.

Paul Green:
And something you mentioned earlier happens in my business all the time, which is a member of my team… They always claim that we’ve had a conversation about it, but I don’t sometimes remember all the details, but I’ll suddenly see, I’m just reviewing new things that have turned up on the credit card. I’m like, what’s this? And it’s always… It’s some kind of SaaS service and they’re like, ah, we need that to do this. Don’t you remember you agreed that three weeks ago? And it does seem that… And we are a fairly small business. I think it’s eight or nine of us in the team now, but we seem to be signing up to all sorts of services all over the shop.

Paul Green:
And I guess if that’s happening in a small business and a small micro business, can’t keep track of that. By the time you start getting up to someone with 30, 40, 50, 60 staff users, then it becomes a completely unmanageable thing. But the MSP, as you were saying, is the one that could ultimately be blamed for not knowing that the business had signed up for something that even the management didn’t know they’d signed up for. Is that a correct assumption to make?

George Smith:
I think so in a lot of cases, I mean, you’ve hit the nail on the head, Paul. It’s so easy to sign up for these applications, right? Gone are the days where you go to a store and pick up a sort of shell of a box, I’m buying this piece of software, you just need a browser and a credit card and away you go. And so with that ease of transaction also comes the method whereby any employee can navigate or bypass around their IT, whether it’s internal or an MSP and sign up for what they want. We like to pick on data sharing or file sharing applications like your Dropbox. I mean, they’re great tools, but I, myself, I’ve done it… I’m trying to share something with someone, SharePoint isn’t working, there’s too many information. You know what? I’m just going to make a Dropbox account, leave this in here for you. Paul, you go pick it up. Great, problem solved.

George Smith:
But what’s happened is now we’re sharing our corporate data into this massive ethernet of online and it kind of just sits there and it’s the same story for people signing up to the shiny new tool, whether it’s sales and marketing. I want to try this, I’m going to sign up with my corporate email, probably use the same corporate passwords because I want to remember and keep it easy. Two weeks later, I don’t really like it so I’m moving on, but now your information is still up there and it can be possibly accessed by bad actors who then get those credentials, same credentials for your Microsoft and all of a sudden you’ve got a Microsoft breach and that’s what your main business runs on. So you can see how easily it can snowball that this risk.

Paul Green:
And actually that’s such a credible situation you’ve put together there because you could imagine, let’s say you signed up with, I don’t know, Pencil Lee. They always seem to be called Lee, don’t they? Pencil Lee is a new piece of software. You’ve used exactly the same credentials as your 365, as you say, and then it’s not for you so you cancel your subscription. And a year later Pencil Lee gets hacked and breached and as an employee, you might vaguely see that, but you just don’t remember that you once did a trial of it and you certainly don’t remember that your Core 365 login details were what you used for that. And we all know users, employees do exactly this so I can see the use case for this. So without getting technical, because this isn’t a technical podcast and there is the danger I’ll slip into a coma if you get too technical. How does Augmentt keep track of this? So is it a case… Is there manual intervention? Is it done automatically? How does it work?

George Smith:
So Augmentt is the platform and I think that’s important for MSPs to understand. We’re not just a simple tool where we’re a full suite of tools of modules specifically that when triangulated together provide a comprehensive SaaS management service. So the first thing is what’s called Discover. And again, without putting you into a coma, I’m going to spend just about maybe 30 seconds on each module. So Discover is just that. Using a very lightweight agent, which can be deployed silently via your RMM or other Partial, whatever you like to use as an MSP. Discover gives you the full list of all the SaaS applications being used across your entire IT estate, because we’re multi tenant, then you can drill in to see exactly which company that you’re servicing uses which, and again, because we have that agent, you can get right down to the tattle tale user level. So if there’s a particular offender, you can generate reports on Simon from sales, who’s constantly signing up to SaaS and actually generate a report showing these are the applications he’s using.

George Smith:
Why is he using a file sharing application? At a higher level, you can see there’s five apps, Mr. Customer, that you’ve signed up for that do the same thing. Or you think that everybody, you need 50 licenses of Salesforce because all 50 of your staff are using it. I can show you that only six people use it on a regular basis. So let’s save you see money on licenses. So really it’s that kind of classic cliche of you can’t protect what you can’t see. A lot of MSPs have done a great job focusing on the network, but now this hybrid remote work model is here to stay. It’s how do we get access and insight into the applications that people are using outside of the network? So that’s Discover.

George Smith:
The next module’s called Secure, which is focused on Microsoft security, posture and policies. Now we know a lot of businesses run on either Microsoft or Google and Secure will be available for Google shortly but for now, today, it’s just available for Microsoft. It’s giving MSPs the multi-tenancy that they need to go into tenant by tenant and check all the security, postures and policies of their Microsoft clients. So to kind of tell the story, Paul, a lot of MSPs think maybe that these recommendations or security settings come pre-configured out of the box with Microsoft, the problem is they don’t and it’s a very cumbersome manual process to go in for an MSP and do a tenant by tenant. I log in, the Microsoft portal’s a complex base. I have to find where these different recommendations are. I have to tweak it. I log out, I clear my cash. I go into my next tenant’s portal and repeat the same process.

George Smith:
And really, as I said, it can be quite cumbersome. So Secure is focused really on enhancing the security of Microsoft for MSPs, but presenting it in a way that actually helps them upsell their services. So you can show a threat report by saying. Mr. Customer, here’s all the stuff that’s wrong with your portal. How would you like me to uncover or deal with the risk that I’ve uncovered for you today? We can… If you sign up to this special program or X amount of dollars per seat or a month, we can fix that for you. And then I can show you this summary report, which is showing you all the things I’m doing on a monthly basis to make sure that your Microsoft 365 is secure.

George Smith:
The final one is Engage, which a lot of MSPs love, it’s our managing component. And what it’s doing is it’s increasing the speed and efficiency with which you can reduce, or I guess eliminate the tickets that come in for Microsoft and Google.

George Smith:
So again, this whole idea that there’s these big portals that you need to be quite a technical expert to use. When we know things like password resets, onboarding, off boarding are all very common requests that come through. What we’ve done at Augmentt with our Engage module is simply create a zone of lease privilege access and with a few clicks, you can resolve those tickets. So someone needs their password reset, I can do that with three clicks in Augmentt without ever going into the Microsoft portal. Specifically, what that means for the MSP is that now I, instead of having an L-3 technician do those tasks, you can have an L-1 or an intern or an office administrator, begin to resolve tickets for you, which obviously increases your bottom line because you’re being more efficient but also the time it takes to resolve these tickets is quicker, which means your margins increase as well. So instead of it taking an R and you’re charging an R to off board a client, you can still charge that fee, but it’s only going to take you 10 minutes.

Paul Green:
Yeah, that’s great. So I see the benefits of SaaS management here. We’re talking, obviously there are upsell opportunities you were talking about there. There are more efficiencies, so you can have lower skilled staff doing higher skilled work, which is great. And I guess we’re at a position as well now where talking about SaaS management gives a… It’s such a cliche, but a thought leadership benefit. Are you seeing that now? Because not all MSPs are talking about this. So is it something that can place your MSP apart?

George Smith:
Yeah, it’s a hundred percent. It’s definitely a differentiator. And that’s the key thing as well that with going back to Secure and the sales part is, even if someone’s not a client, you can still use what we call prospecting licenses to quickly show them that threat report. So even if they’re not a client, you can actually kind of sit there and say, look at all the stuff that’s… All these bad things, all this risky activity that’s happening with your Microsoft, is your current provider handling this for you? It doesn’t look. So your Secure score is only 25 out of a hundred. Your identity score is even worse. If you come over to me, I can get this all fixed for you. So not only is it a differentiator, but we’ve actually created mechanisms that actually help MSPs sell as well.

Paul Green:
Yeah. Okay. Perfect. George, thank you very much for your time today. We’ve got two things I need to say just before we wrap up and ask for your contact details. Earlier on, I invented off the top of my head, an app or a SaaS service called Pencil Lee and I was inspired literally by the pencil on my desk. While you were just talking, I did just Google it to check that there wasn’t an app called… Or a SaaS called Pencil Lee and there’s not. If you look at… What I found when I typed in Pencil Lee was there is a store in Australia that’s a boutique wooden pencil store. Who knew that you could make a living out of selling boutique wooden pencils?

George Smith:
Well, there you go. Even improve their SEO today with this podcast.

Paul Green:
You probably have. Yes. And there’s also now a great name for someone to jump in for a new SaaS company. The other thing is, you mentioned long time back in the interview buying box software, and that instantly triggered a memory for me. And I can’t remember the year. It must be probably mid to late nineties of going into… There was a store in the UK called PC World, which doesn’t exist anymore, of course.

George Smith:
I remember it well. Where in the world PC World.

Paul Green:
That’s it. Yeah. Well, you could even sing that, couldn’t you? Go on and sing it for us.

George Smith:
Where in the world PC World.

Paul Green:
You know that’s going to end up in the trailer for the podcast, don’t you?

George Smith:
Love it. Bring it on.

Paul Green:
And all of our listeners around the rest of the world are thinking, what’s going on? What happened to the podcast? Yeah, there was this big box store. It’s now full of fridges and other stuff, but I went in to buy probably Norton Antivirus, because that was the main reason you’d go in back then. And I remember instead buying, I think it was Rollercoaster Tycoon, which is… And it was the first ever version, which was possibly one of the best strategy games ever, anyway. There we go.

George Smith:
I let… I know exactly, we’re talking about PC World and I also had Rollercoaster Tycoon on my brother’s [inaudible 00:29:59] and we’d all gather around the monitor and play it together and then cause disasters and watch our guests run around.

Paul Green:
And you know, you can get it as an app. You can get the original version as an app and there’s also an open source version of Rollercoaster Tycoon, which you can find if you just Google it and that’s just lost three hours of your life. So before we go further down that rabbit hole, George, just remind us of your company name and just tell us how we can get in touch with you.

George Smith:
Absolutely. So company name is Augmentt with two Ts, A-U-G-M-E-N-T-T. My name is George Smith. My email is just first name.last name@Augmentt.com. Our website is Augmentt.com. For more information, we have tons of resources available and of course, MSPs can sign up for a free trial and you can get some free licenses. If anyone does have any questions, please feel free to email me directly at George.smith@Augmentt.com. I love hearing from MSPs, happy to answer questions. Hop on a quick phone call, whatever, however people prefer communicating.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. This week’s recommended book.

Harold Mann:
Hi, I’m Harold with Mann Consulting in San Francisco. The book that I recommend is Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. We found it to be super helpful in picking the very best words when interacting with clients. It’s a really fascinating book. It also helps with relationships as well.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Anne Hall:
Hi, I’m Anne Hall. The founder of ITagree, the agreement lifeguard. I’ll be on the show next week, talking to you about revenue leakage. Did you know that your MSP is likely losing money that could be hitting your bottom line? I’ll see you on the show next week.

Paul Green:
Do subscribe wherever you listen to this podcast. So you never miss an episode because also next week we’ll be talking about onboarding new clients and how you can inject more positive emotions into that process. The start of a relationship with a client is a honeymoon. How can we make the honeymoon unforgettable? We’ll also be talking about shiny new thing syndrome. In fact, I’m going to invent a new term, stack fiddling. The dangers of stack fiddling are messing about with your RMM and your PSA and all the other things in your stack. It’s a very dangerous thing. We’ll talk about that next week. Now don’t forget, we have a ton of inspirational content for you at youtube.com/mspmarketing. It’ll be great to see you there and join me next Tuesday. Have a very profitable week in your MSP.

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