Episode 75: How to pick a vertical for your MSP

Episode 75: How to pick a vertical for your MSP

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 75: How to pick a vertical for your MSP
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In this week’s episode

  • If you want to make your marketing 10x easier, you need to pick a vertical or niche to target. Many MSPs have a vertical that sits alongside their general business. In today’s podcast, Paul tells you the easy way to pick a vertical, and how to dip your toe in to see if it’s the right vertical for you
  • Also on the show this week, when you should and shouldn’t hand over your marketing to an agency
  • Plus – what are your personal goals? How does your business help you get to those goals? How are your goals changing over time? Paul’s special guest this week is an MSP owner talking about stretching yourself to achieve what you really want

Show notes

Episode transcription

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

Paul Green:
Here we are then, episode 75 of the podcast. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week.

Justin Esgar:
Maybe you don’t want to be working 23 hour days. It’s very hard for a lot of people, especially business owners.

Paul Green:
We’re also going to be talking about how you can pick a vertical for your business. In fact, I’ve got three ways that you can dip your toe into a vertical to see whether it’s right for you. We’re also going to be talking about a great free marketing webinar that you can watch, it’s happening in just a few weeks time. And, a book suggestion from a guest at the end of the podcast, it’s all about how to steal clients from your competitors.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
So as much as we can all agree that this pandemic has been just awful, it’s been horrible. The human suffering and what it’s done to businesses around the world has been awful. But of course, with any bad situation there are often some good things as well, and I think we’ve all seen some of the benefits of the pandemic. Things like enjoying more time at home with our families, taking more exercise, pausing a little bit more and enjoying life, and not rushing around as much as we were back in 2019.

Paul Green:
One of the other benefits that I’ve seen quite a lot is that more MSPs are talking about and focusing on their marketing than ever before. And obviously, as someone whose entire working world is about getting MSPs to do marketing, that’s utterly delightful for me. Nothing is more pleasant for me than seeing someone improve their marketing and improve their business as a direct result.

Paul Green:
I’m starting to get a question, which I wasn’t being asked this question a couple of years ago but now I am. Let me answer it here on the podcast. Should you hire a marketing agency to do your marketing for you? Now, I don’t run a marketing agency, in case you’re not kind of aware of what I do, you just enjoy listening to the podcast. I’m more of a marketing consultant, really. So me and my team, we work with more than 450 MSPs around the world, but we don’t do their marketing for them. The closest we come to doing people’s marketing for them is we have a service called the MSP Marketing Edge, where we produce white label content that you can use in your marketing, but we don’t do it for you. I make that distinction because a business I sold five years ago was a marketing agency that did people’s marketing for them, and it was, how can we say? It was stressful. You think running an MSP is stressful, then doing people’s marketing is incredibly stressful and I swore I would never do that again.

Paul Green:
But, there many, many marketing agencies out there. There’s loads in the US. Here in the UK you’ve got Pure Channels, run by my friend Glenn Robertson. Over in the States you’ve got Marketopia, there’s all sorts of great marketing agencies out there. So, should you hire one of these agencies to do your marketing for you? Now, my answer is possibly yes, possibly no, it depends. I know, that’s not a very clear cut answer, is it? But let me explain why I’ve given you that answer.

Paul Green:
You see, when you hire a good agency, and a good agency by the way, costs money, like proper money. If you want to pay a couple of hundred dollars and have someone do all your marketing for you, then you’re going to be a bit disappointed with the results. But, you go and hire a proper agency, like one of the ones I’ve just mentioned there, and you spend a reasonable amount because you’re buying lots of other people’s time, then yes, that can be a good idea. But, only if all you’re doing is outsourcing the actual work and not the responsibility for marketing. Because here’s what I’ve seen over the years, and this happened to me in my last business loads.

Paul Green:
We would get someone signing up, signing a contract, making a two or three year commitment to it, handing over a fairly large amount of money and they weren’t just delegating the marketing, they were delegating the responsibility for the marketing. Because they were business owners as well, and they didn’t really know or care about the marketing, they just wanted the outcome. But essentially, they were writing a check and handing over the problem to someone else and that was really where the stress was in my agency. Because then, we would come back three, four, five months down the line, have a conversation, we’d look at the work that we’d done, but because they’d handed over responsibility for it, in their mind it was all done, it was being handled. Why aren’t we getting better results? And of course, they weren’t really staying involved with the process, and staying involved with the system and all of that kind of stuff.

Paul Green:
If you’re going to use a marketing agency, then you’ve got to retain personal responsibility for the results. Hiring a marketing agency doesn’t just give you people to do stuff for you, you are buying in people with strategy, you’re buying in people with leadership, you’re buying people at all levels of ability. And of course, they’re being overseen by experts who know what they’re doing so in theory, it’s a great idea. But, you will be a better client for a marketing agency if you still remain involved, and you want to see what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, but you take responsibility for the results. I know that sounds weird, doesn’t it? You’re paying someone else to do something and you want to take responsibility for the results.

Paul Green:
But, is this any different to your cybersecurity, for example? When you’re doing cybersecurity for clients, sure they’re paying you to do it. But really the responsibility for cybersecurity stays with the end client, doesn’t it? You, of course, do the things that you do, you put the security packages in place, all of that kind of stuff, but the responsibility stays with the client. They’ve got to make sure that they follow your advice, do the things that you have set up for them, and ultimately if they have a problem, really it’s their responsibility. You wouldn’t be happy with your client mentally and emotionally just handing over all the cybersecurity to you, because of course that takes out the human element, and it’s no different with you handing over your marketing to an agency. If you retain responsibility for it and you know that you’re just outsourcing it to experts who are going to do it for you, that can’t be a bad thing.

Paul Green:
Of course, the opposite to use a marketing agency is still outsourcing it, but you just outsource it to individual people. You find suppliers on Fiverr, or on People Per Hour, or Upwork and you get specific people to do specific jobs for you. In fact, you might also hire a virtual assistant, to coordinate all of those people so you’re not having your personal, precious time taken up chasing people to do marketing jobs. This is pretty much the same as hiring a marketing agency, with two big differences. Number one, it will cost you less because you’re hiring specific people to do specific jobs and it’s less of an overall profit margin that needs to be built in. When an agency sells you their services, of course they need to make a profit, we want suppliers to make a profit because then they stay in business and they’re incentivised to do a great job. It will cost you less, but the downside of putting together your own supply chain is of course that there is no expert guiding it for you, there’s no one overseeing it.

Paul Green:
I think it’s very much swings and roundabouts. It’s definitely worth having conversations with marketing agencies, definitely worth looking at putting your own thing together, but remember whatever you do, however you get other people to do your marketing for you, you have got to retain full responsibility for it and be involved in it on a weekly basis. It’s the only way.

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

Paul Green:
Back in episode 24 of this podcast, around about a year ago or so, we were talking about the marketing superpower of having a vertical, of having a niche or a niche, or whatever it is that you call it. But, looking at a specific sector and providing IT support for that sector. And when you do the marketing for this well, that vertical believes that all you do is IT support for them because there are a couple of ways of doing verticals. I have MSPs I work with who do only, genuinely, work with one specific vertical. And obviously, that puts you at risk if that vertical gets into some trouble. Could you imagine if all you did was IT support for hotels or retail in the last year or so? That would be absolutely horrendous. So one sector alone can be a little bit risky. What most MSPs do is they retain their general business, and will always take general clients, but they bolt on a vertical on the side. That could represent up to a quarter or a third of your revenues.

Paul Green:
A recap of why marketing to a vertical is so powerful, it’s just because it’s so much easier to reach people. If you are the IT support company for CPAs say, for accountants in your specific region, you know who all the future clients could be, you know who all the accountants are. You can see where they hang out, you can reach them really easily. And, most importantly, you can put a message in front of them that’s highly relevant. We know in marketing that relevance increases results. The more relevant your message appears to be to someone the more relevant they perceive it to be, the better the chance that they will become a client of yours. If a CPA is looking at a website and it says, “We do IT support for CPAs in this region,” that’s a highly relevant message to them. When someone sees that you’re a specialist as well, and a specialist in their area, they also expect to pay more. People are always happy … Well, the right clients are always happy to pay more for experts, for specialists.

Paul Green:
Here are three ways that you can dip your toe into a vertical and just have a go at this. The first way you can do it is actually to examine your existing client base and say, “Well, which vertical are we already in?” Now, when I do one-to-ones with new clients and we go through their marketing strategy, it’s one of the questions I always ask them. I ask them to list out all of their clients and which sector they’re in. And very often, you’ll find that someone has got three or four of the same kinds of business on their books, and often that’s because they started with one of them, who referred someone else, who referred someone else. And before you know it, they’ve actually already got a foot in a vertical, but they’ve never done any marketing with it.

Paul Green:
So what you can do with that is you can go back to those people and you can ask them for referrals, literally, perhaps at your next quarterly business review, or strategic review as I prefer to call them, or maybe you just pick up the phone and speak to your clients. But you say, “Hey look, we look after a growing number of,” insert sector here, “and we’re looking for more clients. In fact, we’re looking for more clients like you. Do you know anyone that I should speak to?” Now, referrals are very difficult to get, and of course there’s a great book on this. It’s called Unstoppable Referrals by Steve Gordon, where he actually recommends you don’t ask directly for business but you put together a referral kit, such as a book, a book about something. It might be about cybersecurity or something like that, and you ask your clients and your contacts to refer people to your book rather than directly refer some business. That would be a great approach to do it. In fact, that would be a great approach with your existing clients as well.

Paul Green:
But don’t forget, that people who love you, who love what you do, and that’s the vast majority of your clients, sometimes the reason you don’t get referrals from them is because you don’t ask. If you’ve got something that you’re already in, just ask. You don’t even need to set up any marketing for that. They themselves could push you to their friends, to their contacts. They may also, actually, set up some opportunities for you. They might be part of an organisation that’s looking for speakers, or people to come on and do Zoom things, or to write an article for their newsletter or their blog, or something like that. I think when you tell your clients that you’re specialising in their sector and you want more like them, some of those clients will just help you because most of us, we really want our suppliers to succeed. That’s a good thing.

Paul Green:
The second thing you could do is you could just put together a very, very simple one-page website. You don’t have to have a full website to dip your toe into a vertical, a one-page website is more than enough these days. Now, I don’t mean having an extra page on your existing website, I mean setting up a brand new website from scratch. And of course, you can reuse some elements. You could copy the design from your existing website, you could certainly reuse some of the words and some of the pictures. But the beauty of having a one-page website specifically aimed at this vertical that you want to do more business with is that it makes it very easy for people to see that you are indeed relevant to them. You can put the name of the sector in the headline, you can put a picture of them or of their world, if their world is particularly visually impactful.

Paul Green:
I have a client who targets people that sell great big machinery. You know, those massive, massive yellow trucks that you see on building sites. And, he’s targeting those kind of companies so he’s put a picture of one of those trucks on his vertical website. It makes obvious sense, doesn’t it? The beauty of a one-page website is you can do it reasonably quickly. And you know what? You can then copy that approach, you could do this for two, or three, or maybe even four different vertical at the same time.

Paul Green:
In fact, this was a trick I pulled off in my last business, the marketing agency I was telling you about earlier. We had three verticals. We worked with veterinarians, dentists and opticians, and we had a website for each one and each one had its own brand. So you had one company, one team, but we had three different brands. The vets didn’t really know about the opticians and they didn’t know about the dentists. That worked very, very well because they perceived we were experts, and I suppose we were in a way, because we did build up a huge amount of knowledge about those specific verticals, but actually we were working with all three of them at exactly the same time.

Paul Green:
Then, the third thing you can do just to dip your toe into a vertical is to do a direct campaign. And, what I mean by this is sending a letter to people within the vertical you want to target, following up perhaps with an email, and then following up with a phone call. This is a small, multi-step marketing campaign, but you can do something like this simply to get conversations going with the kind of people that you want to talk to. Now obviously, having a one-page website will make that marketing campaign even easier for you. You might even consider setting up a LinkedIn, a vertical specific LinkedIn because again, if you’ve got the LinkedIn, a website, a letter and an email that all seemed to be about the same thing, and seem to be specifically about that vertical, you’re much more likely to end up having a conversation with the kind of people that you want to talk to.

Paul Green:
And remember, when someone says to you, “No, we’re not looking right now,” that doesn’t mean no forever. People only buy when they’re ready to buy. And sometimes, you need to get all sorts of conversations going with people so that you have a relationship with them at the point that they are actually ready to think about switching from their incumbent.

Paul Green:
So lots of difference ideas there, for you to dip your toe into the vertical. Hey, if you want to discuss this, by the way, do you know we have a Facebook group which is free, and it’s only for MSPs? This is exactly the kind of thing that we talk about. You can find it if you go into your Facebook app, go up at the top, type in MSP Marketing, hit groups and you’ll see my little face up there. Go and apply to join that group, and this is exactly the kind of thing that you can ask about and get advice from more than 1000 other MSPs from around the world. And me as well, I’m in there every single day.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
Every month, I put on a new MSP Marketing webinar with brand new content that you have never heard before. It’s called the Live MSP Monthly Profit Booster, and it’s completely free for you to attend. You can see all the details, what’s coming up in the next webinar and when it is, at paulgreensmspmarketing.com/webinar.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Justin Esgar:
Hi, I’m Justin Esgar, I am the owner of the Virtua Consulting Group. One of the things that I’m super fascinated about is how MSPs run their business. I am a business person first and a technologist second, and growing people’s businesses has been always a great pastime of mine. Helping them with their technology, helping them with their business process, all of those things all come together for us at the Virtua Consulting Group.

Paul Green:
I think you and I share that passion, because I love working with people, helping them grow their business as well. Thank you for being on the show, Justin. I want to talk to you today about how people’s goals directly relate to the actions that they take every day. So with some of your consulting clients that you’ve been working with, do you go through a goal setting process with them?

Justin Esgar:
One of the main questions I ask when I start with any consulting for any IT company is, “What is your goal of this phone call? What is your goal for your business? What is your goal five years from now?” And then, we can break that down into easier targets to hit. And, you take those ostentatious goals, “I want to be a multi-millionaire.” Well, what’s the first step in becoming that, and how do we set targets and those micro goals to be able to get to that big macro goal?

Paul Green:
I completely agree with you, that you need those targets. In fact, when I’m working with MSPs, we have similar conversations, perhaps not as in-depth as you seem to be having with them. Here’s the thing, though. I believe it’s not just about having that goal, it’s more about the action that you take on a day-to-day basis to get you towards that goal. Do you see that MSPs link those two things? That the things that they do or don’t do on a daily basis gets them further towards or further away from their desired goal.

Justin Esgar:
It 100% should, but I find that a lot of people don’t. In fact, I was just listening to an interview with Sir Richard Branson and he actually said, “10 micro steps is better than one giant step.” That rings so true to what we’re talking about here.

Justin Esgar:
Sometimes you think, “Oh, we’re just going to add this new tool, or we’re going to deploy this new piece of software.” You don’t look at the longterm effects of how that’s going to catalyst down. What’s the domino effect of that? And, will that effect your target, will that help you achieve your goal? It’s one thing to, “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep the clients happy,” but maybe you don’t want to be working 23 hour days. You have to think about what your goals are, how does that play, and what are the steps it’s going to take to get there, work backwards. It’s very hard for a lot of people, especially business owners.

Paul Green:
Oh, completely agree. Do you think the issue is that when we start the business, we have a goal, a set of things that we want to achieve, and then over a period of time we change? We pick up wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, we start generating children. When we started the business, we were looking for control and a bit more money, and then suddenly we wake up one day and we’re 47, and we’ve got a massive mortgage, and dependents and things like that. And we seem to be not enjoying the work as much as we were. I’m not saying for myself personally, but I see this a lot with business owners. Do you think that’s the issue, that the goals change over time? It’s just we’re not aware of those goals. Or, is it that we just don’t know what we’re working towards?

Justin Esgar:
I think for a lot of business owners, you hang onto those original goals. “I want my business to be X, Y, Z.” And, these other things become, I don’t want to say your having a family is a problem, but these other things stop you from getting to that goal. You were running a marathon and now you’re slowly getting through the quicksand because, “Oh, if I worked on this project, I’ll make an extra $5000, but my son needs dinner so I have to go not work on my project and go make him dinner,” that gets in your way. And then, all of a sudden now you’re fighting with yourself.

Justin Esgar:
Goals have to be liquid, they have to move, and you have to be constantly reiterating them. Coming up with goals is not a set and done, unless we’re talking about big, big, big goals, your far out ones. But, all the steps that are in between have to be come reiterative. Okay, what my next win is going to be to get me a step closer, and how do I adjust for that with environmental factors that are changing? I’ll tell you this. If you started a business and your original goal was, “I want to pay my rent and I put to put dinner on my plate,” and now you have a husband, a wife, a girlfriend, a boyfriend and kids, in one house, more power to you. That’s a lot of mouths to feed.

Paul Green:
That is, it is. It is. But that’s the point, isn’t it? I started my first business in 2005, and the goal was to get me out of the employer I hated working for. I absolutely detested my final job. And then of course, once I’d started it and I realised oh, running your own business is quite hard, the goal then became about not just replacing my income and giving me freedom, but about building it and getting some employees. But then, to get employees you’ve got to go and get premises, so suddenly your overhead start to rack up and rack up. And before you know, it’s three years down the line, you’ve got three employees and you’re unhappy.

Justin Esgar:
Right.

Paul Green:
I don’t think I’m the only person to have had that exact experience.

Paul Green:
You know, the answer to this is very simple, don’t you? Ditch the wife, ditch the boyfriend, sell the kids. Kidneys are worth a lot these days. And, just go and live on a yacht, but running people’s IT networks. That’s the answer.

Justin Esgar:
The rule of thumb is don’t own the boat, just have a friend who owns a boat.

Paul Green:
Yes.

Justin Esgar:
That’s how it works, that’s your goal.

Paul Green:
Yes.

Justin Esgar:
I have a goal. My goal, and I’ll share it, I don’t mind. My goal is to literally, no joke, I’ve written this down, I have a cheque written out to myself for it, for $4.6 million. That’s one of my two big ostentatious goals. Every time I think about what I’m doing, whether I’m putting money in a brokerage account or I’m closing a new deal with a client, or I’m prepping for the conference, or I’m talking to you, or whatever I’m doing, part of me has to always think, “Is this item, is what I’m working on getting me to that goal?” As an IT provider I told myself … I’m not there yet, but I said, “By the time I’m 50, I don’t want to be being like, did you restart it?” That’s a goal for me, that’s an easy goal. I don’t want to be having that email anymore, which means I need staff.

Justin Esgar:
Okay, well how much work do I need to not only have that staff, but also get me closer to my $4.6 million? How many interview do I need to go on to get me closer to my $4.6 million? How many clients do I need? All of those things have to play into that. Over time, I might bend and weave, and change with how the times are going. Certainly, nobody saw what 2020 was when we started. I started my business in 2008, I didn’t once think to myself, “Well, let me plan for a pandemic.” Being able to be fluid, being able to ride the wave, and adjust, and course correct, and do these things, my big goal is still the same, but my targets to get to that goal have changed. You have to be malleable like that.

Justin Esgar:
But, it’s just a reiterative process and it’s always be thinking about it, whether you’re doing it monthly or quarterly, or however you need to.

Paul Green:
I love this. And before I ask you the next question about action taking, I’ve got to ask you because I know this is going to be in the mind of everyone listening to this, that’s a very specific figure, 4.6 million. Where did that figure come from?

Justin Esgar:
I get that a lot. Okay, here’s how I did my math and anyone whose in finance is going to tell me that I’m ridiculous. I need the .6 to pay off my mortgage. The four is if I put two million in the brokerage account getting 10% rate of return, I can live on $200,000 a year. And then, I would take one million for myself and one million for my wife to go spend it on whatever we want. Even though what I do want is a Pagani Huayra, which is $1.2 million, so I’ll take 1.2, I’ll give her eight, and then we’ll live on the $200,000 income.

Paul Green:
Okay. This is great.

Justin Esgar:
I’m not kidding you, that’s how I figured it out.

Paul Green:
What is that thing you said you wanted to buy?

Justin Esgar:
It’s a Pagani Huayra, it’s a hyper car made in Italy. There’s only 150 of them in the world.

Paul Green:
Wow. These are very big goals, they’re very impressive. It’s all very well having these great goals and things you’re working towards, but my experience of being at the coal-front of business, and doing business day in, day out for, what is it, 15, 16 years, is that it all comes down to the action.

Paul Green:
I had a marketing agency I built up, that was that first business I started in 2005, I did 11 years in it and we exited that in 2016, which is a posh way of saying I sold it. I found someone who was willing to give me some money. It wasn’t all up front, because you very rarely get all the money up front. But, I found someone who was willing to buy that business from me, and that was a wonderful thing. That paid off my mortgage, and bought me another rental house, and all of that kind of stuff. That business was built not through big, clever things and having grand dreams and whatsoever, it was built every single day, spending at least 90 minutes, more likely two hours some days, working on the business. Day in, day out, day in, day out.

Paul Green:
Justin, do you see that sometimes there is a bit of a disconnect between these big lofty goals and the actual you’ve got to sit down, and you’ve go to work on the business every day?

Justin Esgar:
It’s funny that you mention that, and not that I’m trying to promote my own stuff, but we literally had a topic at my conference, the ACEs Conference two years ago, called Work On Your Business Not In Your Business. And, it’s the mindset that, as the CEO … This is hard, especially if you’re a one-person shop, but if you have staff it’s a little bit easier. I don’t answer those tickets anymore, where I need to restart somebody’s computer. What I do is I spend my day thinking, and working on plans, and coming up with ideas on how we can grow our business. What other passive income sources can we add to the Virtua Consulting Group?

Justin Esgar:
A great answer to that, which you should actually know this, is I started doing funny tshirts. It’s a passive income thing, and in fact it was one of your episodes where you had a woman on from cybersecurity who said, “Don’t let a bear steal your server.” I was like, “This is genius,” and I made a t-shirt out of it. Even there are small things like that, those are things I’m thinking about to increase our exposure, to grow our business and our brand. There’s lot of people who talk about brand, I’m not going to mention any other podcast names. But, you can listen to-

Paul Green:
What, there are other podcasts?

Justin Esgar:
Well, Gary Vaynerchuk, we’ll throw him out there.

Paul Green:
He’s okay.

Justin Esgar:
Yeah, he’s okay. But, you think about building your brand and what other components can make your brand better, these are all the different things that you need to do a business owner to work on your business. That’s where I feel that I differentiate from a lot of people, and I’m not trying to say that I’m better than anyone, but I am a business person first and a technologist second. A lot of people, especially Apple consultants, and I’m sorry for the Apple consultants who are listening, you’re my friends and you know I love you guys. But, you all are technology first, business second. And, changing that order really helps.

Justin Esgar:
Because if you think about your business and everything you do about your business, and less about what kind of new hardware do I need, do I need the new M1 MacBook Pro, do I need the new iPhone, do I need the new HomePod? Is it going to do anything for me? No, you’re spending money when really you could be reinvesting that money on marketing, you could be reinvesting that money on website design and SEO, and swag, and staff, and all these other things that can help make your business 10 times better so you can buy iPhones for all of your staff. It’s a different mindset. Learning that mindset, I’m not going to say it’s easy in any way, shape or form, it’s taken years to figure this out with plenty of coaches and plenty of support. But, changing your mindset on it is the most important thing you can do. Work on your business, and not in your business and you will see massive changes.

Paul Green:
Great advice, really good. Now, you’ve mentioned the conference, the ACEs Conference. Obviously, this year you can physically meet up because of COVID, but you’re doing a virtual one instead.

Justin Esgar:
Last year, we were six weeks out from the conference and my cohost Tim Pearson and I … I wanted to do a Jerry Lewis style, 48 hours non-stop, here’s more content to figure out how to live in these COVID times and do your business. And my wife said, “You have two little kids at home, you need to go to sleep so you’re not doing that.” And I said, “Okay, fine.”

Justin Esgar:
This year, ACEs Conference, we’re changing it up again because we’re so tired of Zoom and everything like that. Instead of it being two full days, we’re doing two and a half hours every Thursday, and it’s all about topics about running your IT business. Now, we say it’s for Apple consultants, and the only reason I say that is because I’m an Apple consultant, but the lessons to be learned and the theories that could be there could be for non-Apple MSPs as well. And if I’m checking my roster correctly, it looks like you’ll be speaking there.

Paul Green:
Yes I will, yes. It’s one of my many bookings that day. I can’t remember what I’m talking about though, can you?

Justin Esgar:
You are going to, in live time, real, and we’re looking for volunteers so hit us up, you’re going to help rip apart somebody’s website, make them feel horrible about it. And then, build them back up so that way they can SEO the ever living hell out of it and make it super more powerful, and turbo boost it for them.

Paul Green:
That’s it, I remember now. Yeah, yeah. I do that every day Justin, it’s just a case of where am I doing it this time. Right. Tell us the website address so we can find out more about the ACEs conference and how we can attend.

Justin Esgar:
Sure. It’s www.acesconf.com, A-C-E-S-C-O-N-F.com, acesconf.com. Right there you can buy tickets, you can join our ACEs Slack work group. You’ll see Paul’s pretty face on there, in our list of speakers. We have some amazing sponsors.

Justin Esgar:
And in our content, just so you’re aware for people who are listening, we’re going to do, like I said, two and a half hours, two speakers, and then we’re going to do our roundtable sessions which are something we started a couple years ago. Where we’re going to break up everybody into groups, and we’re going to talk about the things that matter to your business. We have topics such as how do you find other opportunities in your business, how do you communicate better with your clients, things like that. Things to help you grow your business, and going back to what I said earlier, help you work on your business and not in your business.

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

Jason Kemsley:
Hi I’m Jason Kemsley from Uptime Solutions. The book that I would recommend is Eat Their Lunch by Anthony Iannarino. This book is one that I never thought I would actually read, it’s specifically around sales, and in some cases marketing. As someone in this industry, I think it’s important we all brush up on all of our skillsets. The book specifically focuses on taking business from your competitors, or making sure that you can compete with your competitors, or can elevate your sales pitch above theirs.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Luis Giraldo:
Hey everybody, this is Luis Giraldo from N-able, and next week we’ve got a great show with Paul Green, where I’m going to be telling you about the nine tricks that I use in my MSP to build a $1.2 million business with a staff of two.

Paul Green:
That is going to be an unmissable episode next Tuesday. Have a great week, whatever you’re doing, I’ll see you then.

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