Episode 152: Stack fiddling stops MSPs from buying a Ferrari

Episode 152: Stack fiddling stops MSPs from buying a Ferrari

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 152: Stack fiddling stops MSPs from buying a Ferrari
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Episode 152 includes:

  • 00:00 Why stack fiddling could be wasting your MSP time and money
  • 07:04 How to cement your new client relationships during the ‘honeymoon’ period
  • 15:12 How MSPs can stop ‘revenue leakage’ and reduce risk
  • 32:14 A great book recommendation about increasing your value and growing your business

Featured guests:

Anne Hall is a featured guest on Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

Thank you to Anne Hall from ITagree for joining Paul to discuss how MSPs can stop ‘revenue leakage’ and reduce risk.

ITagree was founded by Anne Hall who has 25 years of experience as a specialist IT lawyer in New Zealand.  She is a thought leader in the MSP and Technology agreements space.

Connect with Anne on LinkedIn:
https://nz.linkedin.com/in/annehall-itagree

Extra show notes:

Episode transcription

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

Paul Green:
Hello, and welcome back. And we have got another cracker for you this week. Here’s what we’ll be talking about.

Anne Hall:
Revenue leakage. Did you know that your MSP is likely losing money that could be hitting your bottom line?

Paul Green:
That’s Anne Hall. She’s on a mission to prevent revenue leakage for MSPs. What’s revenue leakage? It’s where you lose money because of the arrangements and the contracts that you’ve got with your clients. She’s going to be here towards the end of the show, to explain exactly what it is, tell you how to check if your MSP is affected, and of course, what you can do about it. We’re also going to talk about onboarding and the critical first 90 days when a client joins your MSP, what extra can you do to make it the truly most special 90 days that they’ve ever had with any provider ever?

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
Let’s talk about a problem that far too many MSPs have. It’s called stack fiddling, AKA shiny new thing syndrome. It’s where you get your technology stack all sorted out. You got your PSA, your RMM, your marketing automation, all your other little platforms and bits and bobs that you need, and your stack is done. And then you start talking to another MSP, doesn’t matter how or where, but they mention to you that they used to use your RMM and then they moved over to this new RMM, or this newly improved one. And even though you were perfectly happy with your stack 12 seconds ago, suddenly this feeling comes into the back of your brain or really, it enters your heart. And you start to think to yourself, “Maybe, just maybe, we should look at that other RMM. Maybe that’s not the perfect one for us.”

Paul Green:
It’s an awful thing. And this is where you start to go down that process, because a few weeks later you sign yourself up for a trial. You’re kind of impressed with it, and before you realize it, you’ve just committed yourself to transitioning from your old RMM to your new RMM. Stack fiddling. You’ve just committed yourself to a 20 to 30 hour project, moving from one supplier to another. And that has a major impact on the business.

Paul Green:
Now I know, I know that there’s always new things out there. I’ve never known a sector, an industry that has so many new, shiny, cool things coming out so often. There’s literally something out every single day, which is cool, but also leads to this problem of stack fiddling. Because here’s the thing, ordinary business owners and managers do not pick you based on your stack. They didn’t even know what a stack is. They haven’t heard of all of these vendors. They’re not going to be there, rubbing their chin, saying to you, “Oh, tell me which RMM you use.” Because they don’t know what that is. And you know what? They don’t care.

Paul Green:
In fact, they are buying you and your services and the outcomes that you deliver, so that they don’t have to think about these things, because they don’t care. It’s too complicated. It’s too difficult for them. So, fiddling with your stack, I know it brings benefits when you move from platform A to platform B, but often those benefits are, if not, let’s say counter-weighed by the difficulty and the opportunity cost of you doing that switch in the first place.

Paul Green:
There are times when you have to move up to a completely different technology. If you’re on a very cheap, low-end platform, and that doesn’t allow you to, for example, automate billing, then yes, obviously switching to a more complex platform, where you can automate billing, that’s a smart and sensible thing to do. But if you’re just switching because the grass might look greener on the other side, that’s stack fiddling.

Paul Green:
I would rather you took those 20 to 30 hours of time that you’re investing into your stack fiddling, and put it instead into marketing, marketing projects. There are a never ending series of things that you could do to improve your marketing, to build more audiences of people to listen to you, to build a relationship with those audiences. And then of course, to commercialize that relationship. And it’s only by doing marketing projects, that you actually start to move your marketing forward and start to have more people to speak to. That’s when you get luckier with your marketing. That’s when your timing seems to be right more often, because you’re creating more conversations.

Paul Green:
Now, what I’m going to suggest to you in terms of looking at your stack, is that you actually formalize, instead of stack fiddling and jumping from thing to thing to thing, you actually formalize looking at shiny new things. So, you might choose to do this once a year. You might sit down with your technicians or your management team, whatever’s relevant, and you might sit down and say, “Right, let’s review every single tool that’s in our stack. Let’s ask ourselves some key questions. Is this tool still delivering what we need it to? Is this tool holding us back in any way? Have we looked at what is out there in the marketplace, to check that we have the right tool for us right now?” There is no such thing as the right tool for everyone. There’s just the right tool for your MSP, right now.

Paul Green:
And then what you may also do is you may pull together a list throughout the year, of shiny new things that are out there. New technologies, new ideas, new ways of doing things. And you might once a year, twice a year, review this list, maybe do some trials, do some demos, and just ask yourself, “What we’ve got right now, are we going to see a dramatic,” and I mean dramatic, “a dramatic leap forward, if we switch from platform A to platform B?” AKA, is this worth the 20 to 30 hours that it’s going to take to implement this? Nevermind the cash investment as well.

Paul Green:
That is not stack fiddling. That is a strategic approach to your stack. And I applaud you if you go down that route, because that’s the smart thing to do. What that then does is that leaves a void, a void of time, time that you’ve got where you’re not running around, transitioning from one system to another or building something in your technology. A void of your own management time. That’s when you can start to invest that time into those marketing projects, which ultimately are going to get you to your goals. They’re going to get you to your business growth goals, your financial goals. And when you hit your financial goals, that’s when you tend to be closer to the kind of lifestyle that you want to live.

Paul Green:
So, no more stack fiddling. Marketing fiddling is absolutely fine, so long as it’s big, important marketing projects. But go and schedule something for once a year, make it a formal thing, make strategic decisions, and your MSP will be so much stronger because of it.

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

Paul Green:
It’s pretty universally accepted in our world that MSPs keep their clients for years and years and years. And there are a number of reasons why that happens. One of them, if I was being cynical, one of them is inertia loyalty. Inertia loyalty is where it feels easier to stay with something than it is to move to something new. Ironically, the opposite of the stack fiddling that we were just talking about.

Paul Green:
Now, inertia loyalty is kind of a double-edged sword for you, because yes it does keep some of your clients with you for years. Don’t get me wrong, most of your clients stick with you because they love you, they love the service and they love what you do. But you will have a proportion of clients who stick with you through inertia loyalty. So, it’s keeping people, it’s retaining them. That’s good, right? But it’s also making it harder for you to win new clients because inertia loyalty is keeping people with other MSPs.

Paul Green:
Every MSP I’ve ever spoken to has met a prospect who has been meaning to leave their incumbent provider for two to three years. It’s just, they haven’t got round to it, because the perceived pain of switching from their incumbent to someone new, is high, because they don’t understand technology. So, inertial loyalty is a big thing. As I say, looking after people really well is another thing.

Paul Green:
I think the third factor that affects how long someone stays with you is actually what happens to them during the honeymoon period. So, the first 90 days that someone’s with your MSP, this is the honeymoon period. We’ve all been married once or twice, at least, maybe a third in the future, maybe. Anyway, that’s a private thing, and we all know the honeymoon period. It’s that moment, you have the wedding, you go off to Hawaii and you have a great time. And regardless of how the relationship will one day end with you spitting venom at each other, in that moment, in that honeymoon period, you think you’ve made the best decision ever. Am I talking about wives now or clients? I’m a bit confused now. But you get the idea.

Paul Green:
It’s exactly the same when a client moves over to you. They sign your contract. They decide that they want to move over to you, and they want it to work really badly, because no one wants to make the wrong decision. No one at all. Do you? I don’t. And your clients certainly don’t either. They want it to work, you want it to work, because you want their monthly recurring revenue and you want the pride of doing a good job and you want to add to your client base. Of course, you do. Everyone wants it to work.

Paul Green:
But what happens in that first 90 days does dictate pretty much how long they will stay with you. If the first 90 days is an awful experience, it goes completely against their expectations, they will see out their contract, they may even sign another contract because of inertia loyalty, but you will not keep them longer than that. You really do win them forever or pretty much set them up for a future loss, in that first 90 days.

Paul Green:
Now, I know that onboarding can be a bit haphazard. And this is my challenge to you today, how can you put in place a system so that your onboarding is not haphazard? So, that actually, it is systemized. There are a series of things that happen in sequence, in the first 90 days. Now, I’m not really talking here about the technical things. I know you have to find out all the devices they’re using and what their setup is, and gather as much as you can and pop it into your information system, and all of that kind of stuff. I know you need all of that, but all of that is background stuff, in that it doesn’t directly affect the people.

Paul Green:
You see, the onboarding that I’m talking about, the honeymoon 90 day onboarding, that’s really about the people. It’s about making them feel special. I’m going to give you a couple of very simple examples. For example, what if you had a conversation with every single person who worked for your new client? Be that over Zoom, over phone, or maybe even face-to-face, maybe you choose to descend on the office for a couple of days to clear things up.

Paul Green:
What if you had a one-to-one conversation, you said, “What technical issues have been bothering you for the last couple of months, that you haven’t been able to get anything fixed? What’s bothering you right now? Let’s see if we can draw a line and give you a clean slate going forward.” Because of course, you and I know that staff do accumulate a series of tiny technology niggles, things that are annoying them. And they tend to stack them up in their heads, in their hearts, the things they whinge about on a daily basis with their colleagues. You have an opportunity right in that first 90 days, boom, come on in, proactive action, bosh, you take out all of those niggles. You take all the things that are annoying them, and you take them away.

Paul Green:
And what would be really cool is if you then got the emotional, what’s the word I’m looking for? The emotional gratitude of that. For example, if you were doing a site visit, you would put support stickers everywhere. You would put it on all their devices. You would make sure they’ve got your number. Perhaps even bring some gifts in for them. What if there was some candy or some chocolates or cakes? What if actually you’d handmade some cakes? That could go wrong. It’s like the concept of homemade, people think that homemade is a good thing. I always say, “It depends whose home it’s been made in.” But you get the idea.

Paul Green:
What if someone on your team or even you paid a nice lady somewhere, or a nice guy somewhere, to bake you 48 cupcakes, 48 little cakes, for you to take in when you’re doing a site visit, and you pretend that you guys have cooked them yourself? Even something like that, that shows that you’re willing to go the extra mile. You turn up to someone’s office, you fix the faults that have been bothering them for months and you give them a homemade cupcake, and slap your number and your support information everywhere. Guess what? You’ve just done a cracking job there. And that’s only one thing. And that one thing can easily be systemized. It’s all just part of the onboarding.

Paul Green:
We know that, let’s say within the first five days of taking over the contract, we need a scheduled day. We go en masse. We descend on this new client. They’re not going to see us very often, but we’re going to go in, we’re going to get things fixed. Right down to, what about even cleaning the computers? I mean, physically cleaning them. I realize here, I’m getting very close to things you don’t want to do. That’s like me saying, “Why don’t you give the printer a service while you’re there?” I know you don’t like this stuff, but do you know what? It makes people feel special.

Paul Green:
My car was in the garage today, in the service. I have a Tesla, and they couldn’t actually fix the fault, ironically, couldn’t fix the vault that it’s there. They need to order a new seat and replace the seat. But while it was there, they did a complimentary tire check, they topped my pressure up. They did the washer fluid, the squirty stuff that goes on the windshield, and they gave it a wash. And all of that, it obviously didn’t cost me anything. The car was cleaned inside and out. It made me feel great. I mean, it hasn’t cost me anything, but I wasn’t expecting it either. And that’s the key thing with this. What can you do that is unexpected? But don’t make it randomly unexpected, systemize it. That first 90 days, it’s so critical, how can you make your new clients feel so, so special?

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
If you enjoy listening to this podcast every week, then we have another treat for you on YouTube. You see, the last few months we’ve really been upping our game on YouTube. I’ve been to proper film studios and everything, to sit down and record short nuggets.

Paul Green:
If you’ve got two or three minutes to spare, you can nip onto youtube.com/mspmarketing, and there’s a marketing nugget from me to help you grow your business. In fact, let me show you a quick example. What if you put your face on your sales proposal? What if you put your face all over your website? What if your face was on your business card? So, if you’re looking for a ton of inspiration to grow your MSP, go and have a look now, youtube.com/mspmarketing.

Voiceover:
The Big interview.

Anne Hall:
Hi, I’m Anne Hall, the founder of ITagree, the agreement lifeguard, and as the agreement lifeguard, we’re really helping MSPs to manage business risk, to reduce revenue leakage, and also, help them with upsell opportunities.

Paul Green:
And agreements are something we haven’t really talked about on this show, Anne, and thank you very much for joining us all the way from New Zealand as well. You and I really had to do some extreme scheduling at the either ends of our day, to do this interview. When most MSPs get going, it’s simply a case of, “Right. Where can I get an agreement from? How can I do that easily?” And what you recommend is actually, you get the right agreements in place from day one. Talk to us about revenue leakage and what you mean by that concept.

Anne Hall:
Sure. Yeah. Well, for a lot of MSPs, it’s plain to see that they’re providing amazing services. What they’re doing is incredible. A lot of complexity, a lot of knowledge and experience going into the services that they provide. And indeed, so many MSPs are passionate about the services that they provide. And while on the surface things look great, underneath, what we find, is that so many MSPs are concerned about business risk and they’re concerned about revenue leakage.

Anne Hall:
And I really hate to see that, because I hate to see MSPs burdened with unnecessary risk. And the way that really shows out often, is in revenue leakage. So, a lot of partners when they first come and talk with us, they think, “Oh, I need an agreement to manage my risk.” And what they’re really thinking about is, “In case I’m sued.” But in actual fact, it’s the things that happen day to day, week to week, month to month, that eat away at their profitability, at their team’s productivity, and indeed, their enjoyment of their business. So, I love to get in there and help to identify those areas where there can be revenue leakage, and a lot of MSPs will, once they start to become aware of it, they actually put it at it often 5% or more of their revenue. So, it’s a real issue for them.

Paul Green:
Okay. So, let’s define down exactly what we mean by revenue leakage and how this relates to agreements. So, are we talking about things like, for example, I know with NCE coming in over the last year or so, that’s been a major headache for MSPs, because obviously it’s a brand new way of dealing with 365 and it’s perhaps been in conflict with previous agreements. Is that what you mean by revenue leakage or is it more than just seats and licenses?

Anne Hall:
Yeah, it’s more than seats and licenses, because you’ve got, for example, MSPs providing additional services beyond the scope of what they’re expected to provide. The whole reselling activity is one area, but it’s in the managed service, what’s in scope, what’s out of scope? When do things become additional services? And for a lot of MSPs, customers can see that they’re providing amazing services. In fact, they choose them because they look like they’re great. They’ve got all this experience and there’s a lot of trust there.

Anne Hall:
But do you know, that trust is also the cause of problems? Because what’s obvious to the MSP is not necessarily obvious to the customer. So, in terms of NCE, of course, yes, there’s been a flurry of activity around, how do we manage those sorts of risks? And really, if you look at it, we’ve got to break down the barrier, what I call the barrier of expertise, we’ve got to find ways to overcome that barrier of expertise. Because on the one hand you’ve got these MSPs who have so much knowledge and experience. On the other hand, you’ve got customers with relative to the MSP, a lot less knowledge and experience.

Anne Hall:
So, what’s needed is really a simple translation by the MSP, that the customers can understand, in a way that’s meaningful to them, that the customers can see, and so that they learn what they can actually expect. And maybe I could give you an example of that, so we can put something tangible there.

Paul Green:
Yeah, please do.

Anne Hall:
When I first met Nick, he had a problem. He’d been in MSP. A lot of these guys they’ve come, it’s been their lifetime career. By the time they’re in MSP, they’ve gone through a lot of different services. A lot of them have come from break/fix or other parts of the industry, and they come in and be a managed service provider.

Anne Hall:
So, Nick was one of these guys and he’d been bringing in great customers for about 20 years. But what he found is, sure, they sign an agreement. But in actual fact, he said, “He doesn’t have any problems with agreements, they just sign it.” And he said, “In fact, a lot of them don’t even read the agreement.” Now, that might seem good, but for Nick and the same is true for a lot of other MSPs, what happened is that soon after, those same sort of problems were coming up over and over and again. So, that’s really what we want to address.

Anne Hall:
And in terms of Nick, he’d brought on the great customer, they’d mapped out the services that they expected to be providing, but the customers didn’t really connect with that. It didn’t really seem meaningful to them. So, they took away from that a different understanding than what Nick intended. So, Nick’s team, they find customers logging support requests, which were really what they considered to be out of scope. And yet, Nick’s team was dealing with those requests.

Anne Hall:
Now, straight away there, you’ve got a revenue leakage kind of issue. And I think that most MSPs will relate to that as being something that is really difficult to manage. How do I help the customer to understand what’s really involved in my managed service and what is not? Because, going back to what I said earlier, there’s that level of trust, “We’re going to provide this managed service. We’ll look after you.” And what does that really mean for the customer?

Paul Green:
Yeah. So, we’re so busy marketing and selling and just trying to get the new clients on board, because that’s not a common event for many MSPs. It’s something that a lot of work has to go into. So, then there’s almost a bit of missing work at the point that we get the agreement and agree-

Anne Hall:
Exactly.

Paul Green:
… with non-technical experts, what’s in scope and what isn’t in scope.

Anne Hall:
Exactly.

Paul Green:
And what percentage of MSPs do you think have some kind of revenue leakage problem, whether it’s them doing work that’s out of scope and not billing for it, or not billing properly, or perhaps paying for licenses that they’re not billing for? How big a problem do you think this is, in your experience?

Anne Hall:
It’s a huge problem. I mean, I was just on a call earlier with an MSP in the States and he said, “Any MSP that says they don’t have a revenue leakage problem, they’re not being straight up.” Some partners, of course, they’re not so conscious of it. It’s like something that it’s part and parcel of being an MSP. Of course, we have these areas of revenue leakage and the bottom line doesn’t look as good as what it perhaps should, as was the case with Nick.

Anne Hall:
So, I would say it’s a very universal problem. One MSP I was talking to in the UK recently, at first, quite defensive, “We don’t have a revenue leakage problem. Our business is running totally smoothly.” But within a very short time, I would say within seven minutes, between five and 10 minutes of me raising that point with them, he said, “Actually, you have got a point there. I put our revenue leakage at £11,000 a month.”

Paul Green:
Whoa.

Anne Hall:
Five minutes later, the £11,000 a month was £200,000 a year.

Paul Green:
Wow. Wow.

Anne Hall:
And of course, it’s always going to be relative to their revenue, but most MSPs when I raise it with them and they start to think about it, that number grows during the conversation. It grows from 5% of revenue, upwards from there.

Anne Hall:
But the good news is that there are things that can be done about this. As I said earlier, I hate to see partners feeling like they’re burdened with unnecessary risk. And it’s a common thing that people come in and say, “I feel like I’m carrying too much business risk.” And that is something that we can help them with. And it’s really, they might come in thinking they want contracts, but of course, they don’t want a contract for the sake of having that in place, and that old view or common view, perhaps, that that is there for the worst case scenario.

Anne Hall:
In 25 years, I’ve been doing this for a long, long time with the IT industry, I’ve had three clients that have faced legal proceedings, and I’m working with IT contracts day in and day out. So, just three and none of those actually went to court. But of course, what does happen is the ups and downs of providing these services, and indeed, the revenue leakage is part of that.

Paul Green:
Yes. Now, you mentioned legal action. In fact, earlier you talked about MSPs being scared of being sued. And I would say that’s a much higher, please tell me if you disagree, Anne, but I would say that that’s a much higher thing on most MSP’s mind than actually revenue leakage. Because of course, everyone’s getting hacked, left, right, and center. There are MSPs that have been breached. There are examples of that. Is that something that, as part of reviewing agreements, that MSPs should be concerned about? Are you a lawyer, Anne? Can I just double check that?

Anne Hall:
Yes. I’ve been a lawyer for 30 years, and of those, 28 years as an IT lawyer.

Paul Green:
Okay. Okay. Hang on a second. We made a mistake, we let a lawyer on the show. How did this happen? I need to talk to the team. I’m joking.

Anne Hall:
I just want to clarify though, that whilst I am a lawyer, ITagree itself is not a law firm. We’re providing services in an innovative way, to bring to MSPs the agreements and the guidance that they need.

Paul Green:
Okay. Hang on. I’ll just stand down my team. Stand down, everyone. It’s all okay. It’s all sorted. But no, so in your experience, and you said that a tiny proportion of MSPs you’ve worked with have had legal issues, none of which have gone to court, should MSPs be more concerned about getting those agreements to be watertight, regarding risk going forward? Or, do you believe that most agreements actually take care of that?

Anne Hall:
Most agreements are very focused on what I call reactive protection. So, what that means is, the MSP thinks, “Great, I’ve got a contract. If I’m sued, if I face legal proceedings, I’ve got my contract there. And fingers crossed, that’ll protect me.” But that’s kind of a bottom of the cliff approach to things. Of course, we need that reactive protection piece there, we need that limitation of liability and all of that there, which I often call the lawyer’s part of the agreement.

Anne Hall:
But let’s turn to the top of the cliff and see what’s going on there. Let’s look at how we can proactively reduce risk, proactively reduce the sorts of risks that are involved in reselling cloud services, including the Microsoft Cloud services, of course, in providing managed services, in doing project work. All of these areas that managed service providers work in, have large degrees of business risk associated with them. And that is an increasing concern to MSPs with cyber attacks and so on, and data outages and feeling responsible for the services that they are reselling. Even though, of course, it’s not their service, they’re reselling that.

Paul Green:
Yeah, absolutely. They’re just reselling it. So, I guess the overall message here is, if you get the agreements right from the beginning, you’re just removing the risk to a certain extent, but also that revenue leakage, that £200,000 that you mentioned earlier, that that MSP is essentially losing a year, that’s a Ferrari, that’s like a really good Ferrari every year.

Anne Hall:
Yeah. And that is the bottom line impact. And going back to Nick, that I was telling you about, they had the out of scope issues being logged as support requests, that their team was dealing with, which chips away at their profitability. They had taken care, they thought, to map out what their service offering involved. But in actual fact, customers took away from that something different than what was intended, so there were gray areas, and it’s those gray areas that often give rise to the revenue leakage.

Anne Hall:
So, this poor guy, Nick, which is not uncommon, waking up thinking, “What’s going to happen next? What do I need to be looking at and concerned about and cover off on?” Meanwhile, his team’s working long hours and the business is not necessarily progressing as quickly and growing as quickly as what they would want. Remember, these guys are passionate about their services, so they do tend to go above and beyond.

Paul Green:
Of course.

Anne Hall:
But of course, if you said, “Well, would you rather have a Ferrari?” If you could manage all of this just a little bit more tightly, in a way that brings it to the customer in a simple, structured way. I don’t think customers expect to have free services. I don’t expect that customers expect their IT company to take on all of the risk to do with their business, but some of that is indeed what’s happening. And that’s where these guys are concerned about business risk, and of course, the reality is the revenue leakage.

Paul Green:
Yes, completely agree. I think it’s a balance. Customer service is really important and customer service is not providing technical services. Customer service is great communication. It’s empathy. It’s good follow up. All of those things. That’s what customers want and what they’ll judge you on. But you’re absolutely right, virtually every MSP I’ve ever spoken to does things for free for the client, thinking that it’s emotionally enriching them, and it’s not. The client doesn’t know, doesn’t realize, doesn’t even know they’re getting something free.

Anne Hall:
Doesn’t know.

Paul Green:
Yeah.

Anne Hall:
The customer comes to think that everything is easy. And what I find is that guys like Nick, once they take on the new approach and understand, yes, they can deal with risk, they can manage the risk, they can have ways to reduce revenue and indeed, nice upsell opportunities along the way. They start to see that the relationships become more balanced as opposed to one-way. They start to get their teams responding with confidence, “Yes, we can do that. We’ll send you out the work order for that.” Or, “How we are going to manage that outside of your managed service?” Rather than the uncertainty of, “I suppose we just have to do this.”

Anne Hall:
And shifting from customers perhaps coming in with demands and expectations of things, “I need this now.” Not appreciating, “Well, actually, what you’ve asked for is quite complex, it’s going to take a little bit of time and we need to look at the basis on which we’re going to be doing that work for you.” So, it does even up things for them. It does put them more in control of the situation. And of course, there’s that nice bottom line impact.

Paul Green:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much. Briefly, tell us a little bit about you, what you do for MSPs, and how we can get in touch with you.

Anne Hall:
All right. So, for MSPs, we are the agreement lifeguard. We’re looking out for MSPs, the issues that are impacting them. There’s a great checklist. I’m not here to say that you need to use ITagree. You can go to your local lawyer. You might find it’s more expensive than the plans that we have available.

Anne Hall:
And indeed, it’s really important that whoever you go to, understands the IT industry, because it’s a pretty complex industry and certainly not everyone has an understanding of that. So, for any MSPs wanting to get in contact with us and indeed to get our checklist, of course they can go to our website at itagree.com. We have prepared a nice eight point checklist, that your audience can go and get. And that is at itagree.com/checklist.

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

Nate Freedman:
Hi, my name’s Nate Freedman from Tech Pro Marketing. The book I recommend is $100 Million Offers by Alex Hormozi. I recommend this book because this is one of the few books where he really tells the truth about how you can have success in business, and that is by providing an overwhelming amount of value. Once he explains that, he’ll actually go into some ways you can do it and creative thought processes for going beyond selling services and actually becoming a value-focused entrepreneur.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Alton Johnson:
Hey, everyone. My name is Alton Johnson, the founder of Vonahi Security. And next week, I want to talk to you about how you can use VPN tests to generate additional revenue for your customers, by performing automated network penetration testing engagements.

Paul Green:
Do subscribe wherever you listen to this podcast, so you never miss an episode, because we’ll also be talking next week about LinkedIn Messaging. It’s actually a very powerful communication tool, that’s vastly underutilized by most MSPs. So, I’ll tell you why it’s so powerful next week, and how you can make the most of it.

Paul Green:
We’re also going to be talking about the 2% mindset. It’s a way of thinking that the world’s most successful people have and you can nurture it, not just in your own mind, but in your partner’s mind, in your kid’s mind as well. It could completely change your life forever. Now, don’t forget, we do have that YouTube channel, a ton of extra content and inspiration for you in your marketing. It’s all at youtube.com/mspmarketing. 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.