What to do when your MSP has a quiet week

How's it going this week?

Are you busy or quiet? And if you are quiet, is it good quiet or bad quiet? 😃

• Good quiet, of course, is where all your clients are happy and there are no dramas going off, and you are relaxed
• Bad quiet is where you've started worrying where the next client is coming from

Every MSP gets those weeks where the phone isn’t ringing as much, the tickets are manageable, and you find yourself with an unusual and slightly uncomfortable thing: Spare time.

The temptation is to fill it with admin or faff around in your inbox, or just take that feeling of being unsettled and allow it to dominate you for a few days.

Me, I’ve always found that proactively taking action gives me a better sense of wellbeing and peace of mind. So here are 5 things you could do this week to make a real difference to your MSP.

1) Call a client you haven’t heard from in a while

Not because anything is wrong. Just to check in.

Pick any client you haven’t spoken to in a couple of months. It's not a support call or a billing inquiry; it's just a check-in. Ask how they’re doing. Ask how the business is going. Ask if there’s anything on the tech side that’s been on their mind.

You’ll be amazed how often that conversation turns up something useful. An upsell opportunity or an issue they’d been meaning to mention. Sometimes your client just thanks you for your call and feels warm that you thought of them.

This is proactive account management and it's delicious. It constantly reinforces your position as a trusted advisor. And reminds them that you’re there.

2) Send someone an unexpected gift

While you're welcome to send me a gold bar through the mail, I kind of mean something small and not extravagant.

If your client has been talking about their kids being into a particular board game, order it and send it to the office. If someone mentioned they love good coffee, send them a bag from a great independent roaster.

The emotional effect of a gift turning up with no notice and for no reason is enormous. Especially if it shows you were actually listening during a previous conversation.

This is the kind of thing that gets talked about. “Our IT company just sent me a....” That’s word of mouth marketing, generated by a $30 spend.

3) Do a DOA review

DOA. Most people think of this acronym as Dead On Arrival. I think of it as the thing that will stop you as an MSP owner from being dead!

Because it's a way of getting rid of all of the small tasks that you really shouldn't be doing yourself

Delegate, Outsource, Automate.

A quiet week is the perfect time to sit down and go through every small recurring task that lands on your desk. Every single one. And for each of them, ask yourself three questions:

1. Can I delegate this? Who on my team could take this on?
2. Can I outsource this? Is there someone out there I could hand this to?
3. Can I automate this away? How could you use AI to get rid of the task?

Many MSP owners are doing things today that they've been doing for years, simply because they never stopped and questioned whether they should be doing them at all. A quiet week gives you the headspace to ask that question properly.

Yay! Trust me, it feels great when you get rid of small jobs and other people are doing them for you.

You might only free up a couple of hours a week, but that's a hundred hours a year, which is significant, right?

4) Have an honest look at your website

Open your website and read it as if you’ve never seen it before.

Then ask yourself honestly: does it clearly answer these five questions that every prospect is subconsciously asking?

• Is this actually for a business like mine?
• Do these people understand my world?
• Can I trust these people?
• Roughly how much is this going to cost me?
• What do I do next?

Most MSP websites fail on at least three of those. They look professional but they don’t say anything. They’re full of technical stuff but empty of the thing prospects actually care about: outcomes.

A good-looking website without substance is just decoration. And decoration doesn’t grow MSPs.

5) Double down on your marketing

Every day, ordinary business owners wake up and decide it's time to switch their MSP. The problem is you don't know who those people are and you definitely don't have a relationship with them.

If you are having a quiet week, this is a good time to double down on implementing a 3 step lead generation system which allows you to attract hot prospects and build a relationship with them before they are ready to buy.

I did an 8-minute video on my 3 step lead generation system here: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com/3step/

Don't rely on the quiet weeks. Take action on this stuff every day

OK, so in reality, the chances are that you actually aren't having a quiet week because they don't happen that often! That's why relying on quiet weeks to have the time to work ON your business rather than in it is not robust.

The MSPs I know who are most successful carve out time every single day to work on their business. even if that's just 60 to 90 minutes a day, every single weekday, you'd be surprised what you can get done in that time.