Episode 168: The MSP invoice that helps client retention

Episode 168: The MSP invoice that helps client retention

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 168: The MSP invoice that helps client retention
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Episode 168

Welcome to the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. This week’s show includes:
  • Why you need to stop for the sake of your MSP
  • The MSP invoice that helps client retention
  • The productivity author on how to get more important stuff done

Featured guest:

Graham Allcott is a featured guest on Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

Thank you to productivity author Graham Allcott for joining me to talk about how to get more important stuff done.

Graham is the author of the global best-seller, “How to be a Productivity Ninja”. He is the founder of Think Productive, one of the world’s leading providers of personal productivity training and consultancy. His podcast “Beyond Busy” explores the issues of productivity, work/life balance and how people define happiness in their lives. Previous roles include Chief Executive of Student Volunteering England, Head of Volunteering at the University of Birmingham and an advisor to the UK Government on youth volunteering policy.

Extra show notes:

Transcription:

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

Paul Green:
Greetings, earthlings, and welcome to the show. Here’s what we got in store for you this week.

Graham Allcott:
Hi, I’m Graham Allcott, author of How to be a Productivity Ninja, and I’m coming up to talk about busyness and how to create more space and deal with notifications and basically make your MSP much more productive.

Paul Green:
Graham’s got so much good advice for you to make you more productive and in fact, a productivity ninja. I’m looking forward to that interview later on in the show. We’re also looking at your invoices today. What can we do to your invoices to help them aid retention?

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
Let’s start this week by talking about knowing when it’s time to stop. So I think we’ve reached a really interesting part of the year, the end of January where you’ve had that bit of a refresh, a bit of a break from Christmas, and then you’ve come into the new year full of new ideas. Well, I hope you did, anyway. Full of new ideas, full of new energy. And of course, you hit that first working day of January where everyone’s got things they need you to do, the support requests or a projects, and it can be quite an overwhelming month, January, and that’s not just within IT. I think within all businesses. January can be a very overwhelming month, especially for accountants here in the UK, for CPAs, all the personal tax deadlines are the end of January. I think it’s today, the 31st of January is the… I know, trying to talk to your accountant, if you’re in the UK, in January, is not easy because they’ve got so many bits of paper to file, but everyone really struggles with January.
And the problem is you get to this time of year, and all of that energy is starting to run out. Essentially what I’m talking about here is knowing when it’s time to stop, knowing when it’s time to have another break, knowing when it’s time to just slow things down a little bit. Now don’t get me wrong, I am the most keen person on progress and pushing and constantly improving your business and making things better and just driving, driving, driving, driving. But I’m getting on a bit now, and I’m not sure how old you are, but I’ll be 49 this year, which is literally the single most terrifying thing I think I’ve ever said on this podcast, 49. I remember being 39 and thinking, “God, 40 is a bit old, isn’t it?” Well, now I’m, what, a year and six months away from being 50. That’s actually horrifying.
And one of the net effects of that is I just don’t have as much energy as I used to. Can’t even talk properly. I used to have so much. I still have got a lot of energy, don’t get me wrong. I am full on most days. But what I have noticed is that the point at which I have to stop and just pull things back a little bit, it’s getting earlier and earlier in the evenings, especially in wintertime like this. I’m better in the summer really, so I’m going to move to Portugal one day. So the point I’m trying to make is we, as business owners, are constantly running the risk of burnout because especially you, you are in the world’s most changing industry ever where everything changes every single day. There’s new horrors every single day, new things you have to be aware of and train on every single day.
Plus, you’re trying to grow your business, and you’re trying to push things forwards and drive things. Can you see how that puts you at the risk of burnout? I don’t have as much change in my world, my world being marketing, but I feel that sometimes I’m at the risk of burnout. So what I’ve had to do over the years, and what I’m highly recommending you do is that you just listen to yourself. It’s kind of about listening to your mind and it’s about listening to your body and just reading the signs. We have a very good built in alarm system, a warning system, which tells us if we’ve just gone too far, we’ve done too much, we’ve piled too much on. It’s almost impossible for us to really fully burn out, but only if we actually listen to ourselves.
And often that comes out, I think that the warning signs are delivered to us at the weekends. If on a Saturday morning, if you are springing out of bed full of energy, ready to get on and do fun things, then I think you’re okay. You’re very little risk of burnout, but if you… Friday night to Saturday morning is the beer zone and you wake up on the couch at 3:00 AM on a Saturday morning and getting out of bed on a Saturday is a difficult thing to do, especially if you’ve got kids and they’ve got full of energy and they want you to do things, I think that’s a warning sign. That’s your body and your mind telling you, “Whoa, you got to slow down a bit there, son.” We have to listen to this. We have to listen to our minds and our bodies.
Because I like systems, I’m sure you like systems as well. So one of the things that I’ve done to systemize myself around this, because I go on and off for this. I have weekends where I’m exhausted and then weekends where I’m bursting with energy. What I’ve done to systemize this is I’ve built into my schedule a series of breaks, a series of holidays. I’m quite lucky to have a child who’s going to turn 13 this year. So obviously that means we have, I think it’s between 12 and 14 weeks of the year where she’s not at school. Those are the most challenging weeks of the year, as you can imagine. I do like school for the childcare if nothing else, but what I’ve done to systemize around that is I’ve just made sure that there are holidays in there. I’ve made sure there are weekends away. The holidays essentially, and this is a great thing to follow. This is a great system.
I’ve put the holidays and the weekends away and the fun into my diary and then built the work around that. In fact, I did that for this year back in September last year. As I do in every September, I sit and look at the year ahead. So our holiday for this year is locked. It’s there. There’s nothing, literally nothing in the world. In fact, we’ve booked it. We haven’t just put a couple of weeks in the calendar at the start of August, we’ve actually physically booked in, paid a deposit. That’s real now. I’m just about to book next Christmas’ or this Christmas’ holiday away, and we’ve got fun weekends assigned. We haven’t filled them all, but the point is they are in the calendar. The work stuff has to fit around them. There are some weekday things that I really want to do. They’re in the calendar, the work will have to fit around them.
So I’ve created this. It’s not a very smart system, but it’s a system of forcing myself to have downtime. And as I say, having a child makes that easy because it affects the whole family. If you’ve got children, you can do exactly the same thing. Prioritize your children and your family on a series of different things and space them out throughout the year. I think it’s harder if you don’t have family or if you don’t have particularly children because obviously children are driven by a school agenda more than anything else. This is where you need to be very strict with yourself, particularly if you’re feeling tired right now. What if you put in one weekend in three, you go away somewhere. And not just go away, you go away on Fridays. You go away, let’s say, Friday lunchtime, and you don’t come back until Sunday night or Monday lunch, whatever works for you.
The point being your entire week’s work can be driven by, woo-hoo, fun starts at lunchtime on Friday. And I’m not saying we should compress all of the fun into just our leisure time and just our time off. What I’m saying is you’ve got to look after yourself, and if you’re not able to listen to what your mind and your body is saying, then you’ve got to systemize your way around that and having scheduled holidays in your calendar is one great way of doing that.

Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s-
Clever idea.

Paul Green:
Invoices. Nobody likes invoices. You don’t like having to send them out. Well, actually, you probably don’t mind sending them out because invoices turn into cash. But no one likes getting invoices or having to pay them. It’s a horrible process really. There must be a better way for businesses to do business with each other than doing invoices.
I know payments are a little bit more automated and smarter these days, but there’s always that paper trail. Well, these days it tends to be more the PDF trail. We’ve always got these invoices, and the problem with invoices is they can create friction. The number of MSPs that I’ve spoken to who have seen some level of friction come between them and their clients because the client has come back to them, brandishing the invoice, holding the PDF in their hands saying, “Hey, what were we charged for here? What was all this for? Can you explain this?” And of course, it’s always several months on from when they got the invoice because the payment perhaps is automatic. So it’s setting up friction. We don’t want friction. We want to do everything in our power to remove friction between you and between your clients. The whole point of getting a client is to keep them for 10 years. So then we’ve got to remove friction, remove all the friction that we possibly can from that relationship.
Here’s an idea that some of the MSPs I work closely with have tried and it seems to work really well. You see, I’m always saying to you, you should be growing each client and growing their value to them by selling them more monthly recurring revenue services, doing strategic reviews, setting out technology roadmaps, using things like the profit matrix. All of these are really great tools, and you can go back and listen to a series we ran right at the beginning of this year about those exact tools and how to use them. I think it was the first three podcasts of January covers off those three items. So I’m always pushing you to sell more to your clients. However, if you just bundle all of that into the invoice and it’s just one sum, they just see one figure going up. At some point they are going to come back to you and say, “The bill seems to be going up quite a lot. What are we paying for?”
So here’s what those MSPs that I work with are doing or some of them are doing. They’re splitting the invoice down into three separate areas. These are the three separate areas. They are support, security, and telecoms. Now some of them are doing a line-by-line breakdown within those three areas. Some of them aren’t. They’re just grouping them into support, security, and telecoms. But here’s the clever thing. You see as an MSP, you actually sell, not just one service, but you do sell a broad range of services to your clients. And in breaking it down into three different areas like that, we’re making them realize that they are indeed buying three things from you, because you and I know that, well, their spend on security is only going to get bigger as the years go by.
There’s going to be more and more threats and more and more levels of protection that they’ll be able to buy. So their security spend is going to go up. What we’re doing here by listing support, security, and telecoms is we are separating the security out from the support because the support is a pretty much is a fixed cost. So I know that prices go up and you bring on board new tools, but more or less it’s a fixed cost. In fact, the more proactive stuff you do, and the more automation comes in and the more AI does stuff, I’m guessing that the actual cost of support is going down a little bit or maybe will go down a bit. So in divorcing support and security, we are giving the clients an opportunity to see where the spend is going. It’s the same with telecoms.
You are splitting out telecoms. Now I know that telecoms is a bit of a cash cow. I know there’s very, very little work for you to do once you’ve done the setup. It’s just the money just keeps rolling in. But obviously, the cost of telecom, depending on the deal that you’ve sold them on, if it’s not some kind of unlimited deal, then the cost will go up or down depending on the amount of telephony use there is. So wouldn’t that make sense to divorce and split out telecoms? What we’re trying to do here is show them where the value is. So yes, their overall bill is going up, but at the point they come to you with some friction, and they say to you, “Hey, my bill’s going up and up and up.”
You can say to them, “That’s fine. Which of these three areas do you want to reduce spend in? Do you want to reduce spend support? And which means we’ll be doing less proactive stuff, so you’ll have more problems. Oh, and of course, we’ll have to charge you more to fix those problems because it costs more to fix things that we could have stopped from going wrong in the first place. Or do you want to reduce the amount of money that you’re spending on security and here are the downsides of that? Or do you want to use your phones less?” Now, okay, you wouldn’t use those exact words, but the sentiment is there. And that’s a very, very powerful thing to be able to go back to your client and do. In fact, it removes all the friction. It shows them that they are the ones pushing the bills up because they are better supported, better protected, and they’re able to pick up the phone and call anyone that they want at any time or whatever their telephony deal is.
So if you are not doing this already, please do split those down. You may choose to do more areas than that. The MSPs that I work closely with, it tends to be just those three areas, support, security, and telecoms. And as I say, you could choose to break that down line by line. I think there are downsides to doing that. That’s when people really start to get into nitpicking and saying, “Well, what’s this line here, line 72, where we’re buying the X, Y, Z service? Do we really need that?” I think you can be too granular, and of course it can create an invoicing nightmare as well. But breaking it down into three broad areas should be a way of removing any invoicing friction between you and your client.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
You know how I said earlier that sometimes, as business owners, we fall for that Friday night beer zone thing where we’re so tired that we’re just slobbing on the couch, watching whatever. Well, I have the way for you to do that to be tired and still consume stuff on YouTube, but actually it’s good stuff, not just wasteful stuff that you won’t remember. You see, we have an entire channel called MSP Marketing, and we put new videos on that channel five days a week, and they’re all about how to grow your business, how to get more new clients, how to be the number one MSP in your area, how to generate more revenue and more monthly recurring revenue from your existing clients. It’s all there. So if you are really tired this week or if you just fancy some edutainment, some educational entertainment, head on over to youtube.com/mspmarketing.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Graham Allcott:
Yes. I’m Graham Olcott. I’m the author of five books including the global bestseller, How to be a Productivity Ninja, and I’m also the founder of Think Productive, which is a global company that works with some of the biggest and brightest and most interesting companies in the world on personal productivity in helping people to get more done.

Paul Green:
And I’m so excited to have you on the show for Authors’ Month. We’ve had some epic authors so far this month with more still to come. Yours are… I know I’ve listened to How to be a Productivity Ninja at least twice. In fact, I remember one particular car journey, and I can’t remember exactly where I was, but I remember thinking, “Oh, I’ve got 40 minutes of this book left, and I’ve only got 20 minutes of journey. How am I going to find the time to listen to the end of this book?” Because I so wanted to get to the end of it. So it’s an absolute delight to have you here on the show. Before we talk about how MSPs can be more productive and get more done in the same amount of time or even in less time, let’s talk about you. So what makes you a worldwide authority on productivity? How have you got to this point?

Graham Allcott:
Well, I guess the backstory for me was not being good at productivity and realizing that and wanting to fix it. So I was originally working in the charity world, and then I went freelance, and I was in leadership positions at quite a young age. And then when I went freelance, I suddenly was having all these ideas at my desk one day and I looked round for the team of people that were going to help me implement stuff and there was no one there. And I was sat at my desk in my spare room in East London. And so it, for me, was just this realization that I’d become really good at leadership and really good ideas but not actually good at being a complete a finisher, and someone that could actually hold staff, be organized, have control over stuff. And so I was quite, and I think generally my brain works in quite a strategic big picture, quite flaky way.
And so for me the question became how can I get the structures? How can I get the sense of control and organization so that I can deliver the stuff that I wanted to deliver, but also to have the right kind of impact that I want to have? So it was really about how to fix me was how I got into it. And then from there, eBay became one of our biggest clients quite early on and British Airways, and it just snowballed from there, and we’ve now got offices in three or four different continents around the world and people around the world just doing this work. So yeah, that was back in 2009 we started and, as you can imagine, a lot of things have changed since then and actually a lot of the fundamentals are actually pretty similar too.

Paul Green:
Yes. I can imagine. And which was your first book and what led you to write that?

Graham Allcott:
So the first book was How to be a Productivity Ninja. And I then I’ve done other book since, but also did a five-year anniversary edition, and that was definitely the one that has had the most resonance, the highest sales, the one that had the most translations around the world and just seems to have had the biggest impact.
And essentially, I wrote it because I noticed that a lot of the books that I’d read around productivity tended to start with this mindset of superheroes, and this mindset of perfection, and this mindset of, “Hey, here’s all the stuff we need to do and let’s do all of it.” And I just find some of that stuff, in a way, it’s too ambitious because if you set the bar that high and then you fail, then you feel bad about it. So the first words of How to be a Productivity Ninja are “dear human being”. And the whole purpose of it is to say there’s mindsets that you can adopt here, there’s structures that you can do. It’s a very practical book. But at the same time, just don’t be surprised if sometimes things fall over, or you have a bad day, or it doesn’t quite get to plan. And I think that’s really missing from a lot of business books that I come across. It’s just the sense of recognizing that we all have limits, and we all screw stuff up sometimes and life isn’t perfect.

Paul Green:
Yeah. No. I completely agree. In fact, in my mind I classify How to be a Productivity Ninja with Atomic Habits, which I’m sure you have read by James Clear, it’s another worldwide bestseller. And what I like about both of those books is, as you say, you operate in the real world. In fact, Atomic Habits starts with James Clear talking about how he could never get good habits and how he had to create a system that was built on how we actually are as humans, not what the productivity books of the 70s and 80s told us about.

Graham Allcott:
Yeah, for sure.

Paul Green:
Now let’s talk about MSPs, because MSPs are the most wonderful set of people I’ve ever known, and I’ve been in this world for about seven years now, and they get more done than the average person, the average business owner. However, when I talk about them getting more done, the things that they get done are typically the technology things that their clients need them to get done because their very nature is to do the projects that bring in the revenue, to set up the services that bring in the monthly recurring revenue. And of course, to fix the things that have gone wrong. That’s what the clients are ultimately paying for. But the price that MSPs pay for that is very often. The owner or the manager of the business has very little time left to actually work on their own business. And I think the vast majority of MSPs, regardless of turnover, regardless of staff, they have this problem. Do you see this with business owners everywhere, or do you think that that’s a very specific thing to people working on if you like the cutting edge of technology?

Graham Allcott:
Yeah. That’s a good question. So I love that phrase from The E-Myth, “Work on your business, not in your business.” And I do think there’s, generally, in every industry that I come across is a real need to take a step back and to do some quality thinking and also to think about our thinking. And so what I mean by that is setting the right ground rules for how we think, creating the space for good thinking. To have really good ideas, you don’t generally need time, you need space. And so to be able to really take a step back, create the space, do different things, add creativity into the mix, all of that stuff takes a little bit of effort to design how you’re going to think. Most ideas and great ideas don’t happen by accident. They happen because people lay the groundwork and create the space first.
So I think that’s just a general thing that happens across all businesses. But as you say with MSPs, I think there’s something really interesting there around so much of what the clients need you to do is react as quickly as possible. And that creates a different problem, which I see in other industries too, but I think for MSPs, this is going to be a really significant one, which is that often we confuse busyness with productivity and almost addicted to the idea of being busy. And when we solve a problem in that state of busyness, then we get that little dopamine hit, we’re looking for the next one. So busy becomes addictive.
And I think that’s a real problem. If you’re trying to grow an MSP, then ultimately you need to be able to take a step back, get away from busy, and really look at that bigger picture of how am I going to grow? What do I need to build to do that? Rather than just fighting the fires as they arrive and dealing with all the notifications as they pop up. You need to create that space and quiet landscape to be able to do that work.

Paul Green:
Yeah. So it’s funny you talk about notifications, that was going to be my next question, which was the value of attention. That’s a large part of what you’ve written about in your book. And MSPs, I’ve had conversations with MSPs on Zoom calls, in real life, and they’ll sit there and this thing, their phone is just going off, it’s ping, ping, ping, ping. Often they’ll leave the sound on as well, which I find curious. But there’s a constant flow of messages, it’s Teams messages from their own staff. It’s emails coming in, it’s text, it’s WhatsApp, and I find it exhausting and I don’t even have to deal with it.
I operate to a completely different way, which I think I got from reading your book, which is where the vast majority of notifications don’t reach me. So any app that I put on my phone, I switch the notifications off. WhatsApp, lots of WhatsApp groups and bits and bobs like that, but the only ones that can reach me are very close friends and family. All of the rest of them, the notifications sit there for when I’m ready to do them. Is that… Well, I’ve got that from reading your book.

Graham Allcott:
Oh, yeah. That’s definitely the philosophy of the book, turn notifications off. And yeah, I think there’s a few things going on here. I love what you’re saying about some people that you work with have the sound turned on because I sometimes find I’m on a train or something or just in a public place and someone’s phone goes off, and there’s noise on the phone, and I’m just like, “People still do that.” People still have it turned on because I’ve been just working in that way for so many years. I think obviously there’s going to be days where I’m going to be checking, checking, checking email, waiting for the big contract to come in or the big thing to happen. And I’m sure as MSPs there’s a sense of there’s always going to be a crisis around the corner that’s really important and needs to be dealt with.
I think partly the trick is delegating, finding the people in your business that can almost be poised by the phone ready for that to happen. And part of that delegation can then also be sharing that load so that nobody is having to be always on for an entire workday or 24/7, God forbid. But I also think there’s like we need to deal with our own habits and our own addiction to busyness around notifications too. So there’s a couple of apps that I use that I think are really valuable. One is called Forest. So what Forest does is it takes away that temptation that when you’re working on something and you’re trying to really concentrate, and then you get a bit tired in your brain, then we have this little temptation to, “Let me go and just check my phone, let me just go and see.”
And we have that little thing of like, “There’s going to be something useful and interesting over there, so let me go and have a look at it.” And what Forest does is it just grows a tree on the screen. So you set up 30 minutes as your time period to work away on the laptop and the tree takes 30 minutes to grow. And if you then go off that screen where the tree’s growing to go and look at Twitter, or WhatsApp, or whatever, then the tree dies. So it’s just this really small little thing that says, “Hey, why don’t I just be intentional about my phone use, leave it over there, let that tree grow and build a forest, and actually while I’m doing that, just a bit more plugged into the work?” So Forest is really great. And then the other one I use a lot is one called Freedom, which is a paid for app, but there are some equivalent ones that you can get for free, or for a dollar, or whatever.
But basically, just blocks apps at different times in the day. So my morning time is what I call my proactive attention. That’s the time in my day where I have the best energy, I have the best attention, I’m most capable of doing the most difficult problem-solving work or the most creative work, and I want space in that time. So in that time, if I’m then tempted to go and check Instagram, or check LinkedIn, or whatever, then Freedom actually just blocks me. It just blocks the websites, it blocks the apps and stops me getting on there. So it’s about basically saying, “I’m going to treat myself like an absolute child once, and then once it’s set up, then I’ve removed those temptations,” rather than doing what most people do, which is a really bad idea, which is trying to just rely on your own willpower to just check the right things at the right time and not check things that are distracting. And your own willpower is a depleting resource. It’s a really bad strategy.
So finding ways to just be much more intentional, mindful around those notifications and those interruptions will actually give you increased attention and give you increased ability to focus on the right stuff.

Paul Green:
Yeah. I love that. Thank you. I’m going to look at both of those apps and anything that buys you back 10, 20, 30 minutes of your time every day, it’s got to be worth looking at that as an investment. Final question, Graham, before we just talk briefly about your books. If you were the complete opposite of a productivity ninja, indeed you have been there by your own admission earlier on in the interview, if right now you are caught between too many clients, your staff, teams, notifications and just the general noise of business, where would be a good place to get started? What would be a good first step?

Graham Allcott:
Ah, that’s a good question. I think it depends on whether your start point is, “I want new structures and strategies,” or whether it is just, “I’m just stressed out and I want to just figure something out.” I’d say if you’re stressed, a really good place to start is just put all of that to one side. And if that is too difficult to even contemplate, just pretend that you’re calling in sick that day and you’re not there, which is the productivity ninja characteristic, stealth and camouflage. Basically, just make yourself deliberately less available. And then just sit with a pen and paper and just write down all the stuff that’s on your mind but hasn’t been done and feels incomplete. And once you start to do that and just dump it onto the page, you’ll actually have a much better sense of what you actually have to complete and also a much better ability to be able to manipulate that stuff, move it around, prioritize, see it all next to each other, see the wood from the trees.
It actually gets much easier when you can see these things in front of you. So there’s a term in psychology called distributed cognition, which basically means when you can see the words on the page as objects, it’s much easier to make sense of them, move them around and make better decisions about them. So your decision making gets better when you get out of your head and you can see it in front of you. So I’d say that’s a really good place to start. And then the other thing I’d say is just having a think about what an average… If you’re just in the office or just working from home on a really typical day, just have a think about what are the things that take up time and space in your day. Number one to acknowledge them. So there’s so many people I work with who don’t have anything in their calendar that says lunch or doing email, and yet those are things that people do every day.
So just to quantify that stuff gives you a sense of what periods in the week do I really have to do that more proactive, creative, strategic, important building work. So that’s I think a really good place to start. And then just to think about what perhaps in my day are the habits that I don’t like and what can I change? And so there’s lots you can do just around… Obviously, my book, How to be a Productivity Ninja, is literally the start to finish of how to implement a lot of that stuff. But even just going onto YouTube and putting in what kind of to-do list apps are out there, you’ll find so many people out there just sharing their favorite apps and tools.
And I’m sure MSPs are not short of the magpie syndrome of, “Ooh, shiny new tool.” But I think there’s something really valuable about just taking that step back and starting from what do I want today to feel like? What do I want the habits that I have to actually produce? And just starting from there with almost like a blank page, not looking at your diary, not in the middle of everything, is really a good way to just design a better way of working for the next typical day that you’re going to have in the office or working from home or whatever.

Paul Green:
I love it. Although I’m not sure about going on to YouTube.

Graham Allcott:
Could be a distraction in itself.

Paul Green:
Exactly. Yeah. You can easily lose an hour there. Graham, thank you for being on the show. Just tell us briefly a little bit more about the book and of course, where can we get it worldwide?

Graham Allcott:
There are various different books, and you can find links to most of what I do just at grahamallcott.com/links, so you’ve got links to the book and everything in there. I do a weekly email called Rev Up for the Week, which is basically one positive or productive idea for free every Sunday. It’s at 4:05 PM UK time. I just picked that time at random. But the idea is it’s just something positive or productive for the week ahead. So you can just get that at grahamallcott.com and sign up there. Everything else that I’m up to really is also at grahamallcott.com/links. If you go there, you’ll find pretty much everything you need.

Voiceover:
This week’s recommended book.

Brian Brammeier:
Everybody, I’m Brian Brammeier, and I’d like to recommend a book for you guys today. So this is how they tell me the world ends. It’s a book about cybersecurity, but specifically focusing on some of the aspects of OT, which is the cousin to IT, operational technology. I’m on the board of a company that’s in this space. Highly recommend you look at it so you can understand how the further looking technologies might apply to things that happen in history.

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Coming up next week.

Jason Kemsley:
Hey, it’s Jason Kemsley from Uptime Solutions. I’m going to be on the show next week giving you the stats that you need to see if your help desk engineers are performing and if they’re not, where should they be and how many tickets should they be competing each and every single day.

Paul Green:
Wherever you are listening to or watching this podcast right now, please do subscribe so you never miss an episode. On top of that fantastic interview with Jason revealing those help desk stats next week. We’re also going to be asking, “Can it consulting be a good way to win new clients?” If you get a consulting gig with someone, how do you turn that into managed services? Don’t forget, we have a ton of content on youtube.com/mspmarketing. We are adding a new video every single weekday. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.

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