Episode 212: Is it worth MSPs doing Google ads in 2024?

NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. Around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Hello, my friend, and welcome back to the show. How is it December already? Here’s what we got coming up for you this week.

[00:00:17] Speaker B: Hi, this is Damien Stevens, and I grew my MSP from four full time employees to 17 in one year, and it was utter chaos. If you want to learn how to do that and how to not do most of the things that I did, join us on the show.

[00:00:33] Speaker A: And you are going to love that interview with Damien later on in the show. We’re also going to be talking about the power of stopping and thinking about what you really want to do with your business.

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Now, let’s start this week with a question I’m going to answer, which is inevitably going to create a little bit of controversy on LinkedIn. And I know I’ll get some emails about it as well. The question is this, should your MSP be doing pay per click Ads on Google in 2024? So let’s just establish exactly what we mean there. You know what, pay per click adverts. Aren’t you not pay per click with a piece of paper. I have heard people think it’s that even today, but it’s pay per click. So you have an advert on Google that comes up when someone searches for something like it, support your town, and you click on that advert, or they click on that advert. And that’s the point. You pay. And of course, pay per click is what makes Google one of the world’s most valuable companies. Yeah, they’re very innovative and they’ve got lots of different revenue streams. But let’s be honest, Google at its heart, its core business, is it is a very, very good advertising agency that puts people who have something to sell in front of people who are looking to buy that thing. And that is what makes Google the big, rich, dominant company that it is. And it’s the same for all the other pay per click on Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, all of the rest of it. It’s all essentially based on that Google model. I don’t know if they invented it or whether they just adapted it, but they’ve certainly done it better than anyone else. So the question then is, should you advertise your MSP on Google? Should you buy Google Ads in 2024? Now, my general recommendation for this to most MSPs is no.

And let me qualify, that’s no. The reason I say it should probably be no is for a number of different reasons. First of all, most MSPs don’t have the time or the resources or the patience to get really good at Google Pay per click. Now, I must qualify my responses and my answers to this by saying I am not a technical expert at pay per click. I could probably get an advert set up. In fact, I’m sure I’ve done it in the past, but I’m not an expert at that specific function. I’m kind of okay at the overall strategy of Google Ads. But I couldn’t set you up an advert. I couldn’t optimize it. I certainly couldn’t sit and do all the little adjustments you need to do every day. Don’t get me wrong, I could put myself through a course for it. Of course I could. And there are some amazing courses on Udemy which I know a few MSPs have done. But I tell you this, and the reason I don’t have those skills is because I believe for the vast majority of MSPs, it’s not something you need to do. So as I say, most MSPs, they don’t have the time or the effort to do this. To be really good at pay per click, any pay per click, but especially something as hotly competed as managed services, you need to be on it every day. You have to be looking at your performance every day. You have to be tweaking your keywords, things like your negative keywords. So keywords are the things that if, for example, your keyword was it support your town, that’s something your advert would show up. But you might have a negative keyword of iPad, for example, because you don’t want someone typing in iPad screen repair your town and seeing your advert and clicking on it and wasting your 40, $50 or however much you pay for that click and wasting your money when actually they’re not a real qualified customer for you. Someone with a broken iPad is not what you want, right? You want a business with ten plus staff who are looking for someone to give them a strategic it direction. So you have those keywords, you have those negative keywords, you have all sorts of other little things. The amount of money that you’ll bid, the reach, the geographical reach, different placements for adverts. Then of course you’ve got to test the adverts themselves, the actual creative that’s in the adverts. Then you’ve got to look at what your competitors are doing. And there’s a lot of work. There’s an awful lot of work. And there are a few MSPs around the world who are very good at this. You can go into almost any group or any forum and there’ll be someone there who will say, yes, you should be doing pay per click. It’s actually quite easy once you’ve done a 20 hours course on it. And if you just put 30 minutes in a day, and I think for those people who get really, really good at pay per click, absolutely, that’s the right thing to do. So this is my caveat with any marketing. If you’re good at that marketing thing and it works for you, then don’t change it. Why would you ever change that? You wouldn’t. But for the vast majority of MSPs, what they want to do is they want to set something at once and then they want to not have to think about it for the next two years. And that’s normal human behavior, right? So if that’s you, pay per click is probably not for you. Now, you could hire someone to do this on your behalf, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Always find other people that you can get to do something so that you don’t have to. But again, you’ve got to find someone who’s going to do that for you every single day. And it really is a daily task. And where someone’s got to do something every day and it’s 20 to 30 to 60 minutes a day, I guess the optimization comes down over time, but that’s going to cost you money. And that’s sort of another reason why really pay per click isn’t right for most MSPs. It’s a lot of money out before you have money in. Now the MSP business model is brilliant. It’s actually kind of perfect for pay per click because you might be spending, I don’t know how much, $50 a day, $60 a day, maybe more. I don’t really know how much a cost per click is. I guess it depends on the marketplace and how hotly it’s an auction at its basis. So if lots of people want it, it’s going to be a lot more expensive. But Google did put the prices up a few years ago and they did limit the amount of advertising, which again drives the prices up. So the MSP model makes it okay to spend 50, $60 a day on marketing on pay per click, because eventually you could and should win a client that will come and spend 1000 or $2,000 a month every month for the next ten years. So from a pure cash replacement point of view, that can work. And actually if you sell them a $10,000 or pound project up front, right, that $10,000 project upfront project that could replace the cash you’ve just spent on pay per click and then you get the bonus of the monthly recurring revenue down the line. So in theory, the MSP model makes it potentially highly profitable for you to do pay per click. The reality is that a lot of MSPs just haven’t got that spare cash. If I said to you, hey, it could take 60 to 90 days where you’re paying for clicks every day for clicks from the wrong people every 60 to 90 days, or time wasters or tire kickers, and it takes some time to get to that point of actually getting in front of real people. Would you have the cash to fund that? And if the answer is no, that’s another reason why you shouldn’t be doing pay per click. I think that the final no, the final reason why you shouldn’t do it is exactly that is noise. So I know two or three MSPs quite closely and I followed their journey of setting up their pay per click. And what they’ve all told me is there’s a lot of noise, you get a lot of clicks, even as much as you disqualify people as much as possible, you get a lot of noise, get a lot of clicks from the wrong people. You get inquiries from the wrong people.

But you have to plow through that noise. You’ve got to be highly responsive when someone’s on your website, on Live chat or they’ve filled in a form, there’s none of this we’ll get back to you in 24 hours nonsense. It’s now. You got to do it now. And that’s a drain on resources, isn’t it? That’s a drain on your own personal resource. If you’re sat at home at 930 at night and you’re having a beer and you’re watching TV and your phone pings up with a live chat request, but it’s someone who absolutely wants to talk to you now and you’ve got to pre qualify immediately. Is this an iPad repair or is this a proper lead for us? So there is a lot of noise and the few I know that do it and do it well, they’re quite happy to get through the noise because they win the clients. The beauty of pay per click let’s talk about what it’s good for. The beauty of pay per click, and especially on Google, is it puts you in front of people at the exact moment they are ready to buy. That’s what in fact, if you go back 20 years ago, I know some people who got rich, like stupidly stinking rich off cheap Google Ads, like the 2002, 2003 time, because we were talking, it was a few cents, it was a few pence per click, and they would spend thousands of pounds, thousands of dollars on adverts and were getting a huge return because there wasn’t a lot of competition, it was a few pence per click. They didn’t have to sit and optimize it every day. But that’s not how it is today, right? There’s a lot of noise, there’s a lot of hassle. So those MSPs I know that work it, they’re happy to go through it, they’re happy to go through the noise. They don’t have a huge amount of competition and it works for them because it puts you in front of the right person at exactly the right time. That was really cool 15 years ago today. There’s an awful lot of noise to get through. Listen, I’d love to know what you think about this. And seeing as I’m going to get comments anyway, comments on LinkedIn and emails, I might as well solicit them. I’d love to know, do you do pay per click? Are you an MSP who uses pay per click and it works for you? If so, I’d love to get you on this podcast and perhaps later, at some point next year, we can have the exact reverse of this. All you’ve got to do is drop me an email. Hello, Paul Green, Mspmarketing.com. Here’s this week’s clever idea.

Let me tell you about something epic that happened to me a few months ago. About the end of September, my beautiful, wonderful child Sam went off to Spain for a week with the school. So it was like a school trip. Going abroad. Signed her up for it, I don’t know, six months ago, something like that. And I’m a sole parent, so there’s just me and her in the house and I have to do all the parenting things, right? Everything. Absolutely. Every single lift, every single thing that needs to be done, it’s down on me. And I don’t mind that. I’m quite happy. I’ll go with that. It’s been a number of years it’s been like that and I don’t mind it, but it does mean that I don’t really get a great deal of time to myself. And there’s a massive downside to that, which is what we’re going to talk about, because I’m going to challenge you to do something that I got to do at the end of September. So there I was, end of September. She’d gone off to Spain. I was on my own for a week. So I did what any self respecting parent who doesn’t have a lot of time to themselves did. I book myself into a hotel. I had a crazy night out, having a few beers, I went to some shows, I went to the cinema, I met up with some friends and I basically lived like a child free adult for a week. And it was epic. It was just an epic week. Now, I’m not going to tell you everything I got up to in that week. Email me if you want the details. I’m kidding. But something really cool happened towards the end of the week and it was something that I knew would happen and it was something that, because I knew it would happen because it’s happened to me before, I didn’t push it. So don’t remind the context of I’m not away with my child going on holiday with kids, you tend to be full on, don’t you? You’re still a parent, you’re still making sure that they’re not falling off bridges and electrocuting themselves and they’re eating properly and all of that kind of stuff. So my mind was on our holiday and making sure everyone was occupied and all of that stuff. Whereas this week, when I was on my own, my mind was just on fun, right? And my mind was just on, let’s do this. I’m going to go for a 25 miles walk today, which is one of the things I did. And what happened is towards the end of the holiday, my mind delivered to me the results of some intense thinking it had been doing during the day and during the night when I wasn’t aware of it. And it was intense thinking about the business. So we have issues in our business. We have problems. Everyone does. If you don’t have issues and problems in your business, then you do. It’s just you’re not aware what the issues and the problems are. We’re ambitious. We want to grow, we want more. We want to change our own marketing and improve our product for our clients of our MSP marketing edge clients. And all of this is swirling around in the background. And I have a team that I work with and I deliberately loaded all the problems and the challenges and the issues and then I promptly forgot about them. I didn’t write them down. They were just swirling around. And I think it was the third or the fourth day I went for another long walk, really long walk. I think it was like a ten mile walk that day. And things just kept coming into my head, and I was grabbing my phone every five minutes and leaving little voice notes for myself, things I needed to look into. And I started compiling a hit list, and it was a hit list of really, really good ideas which were being delivered to me by my brain. And that was what I really bought with my week off by sending my child away on a really expensive school trip to Spain, which she did enjoy, by the way. What I’d really bought myself, apart from being a free adult for a few days, was I bought myself quality thinking on the business. And in fact, a lot of the things that came out of that week, we are now implementing ahead of like a big change session to a lot of stuff that we’re doing just in January, just in a few weeks time. And that’s really cool, because if it wasn’t for that week away, I wouldn’t have had that. Don’t get me wrong, I get a version of that on holidays when I’m not thinking about work and I’m not trapped in the daily intricacies of my business. But it is only a version.

I think we’ve only had one other weekend where I was completely on my own with no child, and you get a version of that. Anyway, the point I’m saying all of this is, I guess the challenge is for you. How can you replicate this? I mean, maybe you don’t have kids, but maybe you’ve got a partner and you’re always with your partner. Maybe there’s an opportunity for you, whether it is going away or, I don’t know, locking yourself in a cave or just switching off your computer, or maybe it’s just going for like a two, three hour walk once or having a weekend away, or even maybe you can do it in like, 30 minutes walks. My challenge to you is this.

Sometimes we need to get away from our business and get away from our family and our life in order to let our brain really, really deep process the things that are bothering us, the problems that we’ve got, the things that just don’t work in our business, and actually sometimes in our personal lives as well. This exact same process can be used for everything that’s affecting you, whether it’s positively or negatively. So my challenge to you is this, how can you get away? How can you buy yourself some quality time and let your brain do the hard processing work of figuring out potential answers so it can then deliver those to you at the end of that time? Away. I know it might be hassle to leave your other half and your kids for a few days. It might be hassle to just go and lock yourself in a hotel and not work and divorce yourself not from your other half, but divorce yourself from your laptop. That could be a hard thing to do, but my goodness, it’s worth it. And you know what? Not only did my child enjoy her trip so much to Spain, but I enjoy that time away that we’ve already booked the next one, which is coming up in a few months. I can’t wait. Primarily because I’m going to get more business answers, but also because I’m going to get to drink more beer.

That MSP marketing edge that I just mentioned there, that’s how I make my money. I know that sounds like a stupid thing to say, but people quite often say to me, Paul, we listen to your podcast. We read your blog, we’re in your Facebook group. How do you make money? My team and I? Because I have ten on my team. It’s not just me. Here we are utterly focused on making marketing easy and giving all the marketing answers to the members, our members of the MSP Marketing Edge. And that’s what we do to make money. Now, we only work with one per area, because what we do wouldn’t work if we worked with you and a direct competitor. So the very first thing for you to do to go to see if this is available for you is to head over MSP Marketing Edge. You can put in your postal code or your Zip code if you’re in the UK, the US, Canada, or Australia, and we will tell you instantly if your area is available or not. And we do this without you even having to put your name or your email address in. If you’re in one of the other 191 countries in the world, I think it’s 195 countries in the world. I think I’ve got that right. But if you are, you can just email us and we’ll tell you if your area is available. We’re in about 1516 different countries already. But it all just starts with seeing if we can even work with you. Is your area available? Can you get the marketing answers? Go and find MSP Marketing Edge.

[00:16:39] Speaker B: Hi, I’m Damien Stevens, founder and CEO of Servosity and host of MSP Mindset.

[00:16:44] Speaker A: And it’s an exceptionally good podcast. You had a guest a few months ago, some bloke to do with marketing. I can’t remember what it was to do with. He was a good guest. Anyway, you should get more on, like him. Thank you for joining me, Damien, on my podcast. After I appeared on your podcast, there aren’t many podcasts that I go on where I think the host has so much to say. I’ve got to get them on mine. But you are one of those people. So thank you for joining us. Now we’ll find out a little bit more about your podcast and what you actually do to make money. Towards the end of the interview, let’s first of all look back a little bit, because we’re going to be talking about processes today and how every MSP needs to set up a whole series of processes and essentially systemize every aspect of the business, which most people know they should be doing, but for some reason, they never get round to it. Let’s look at your background. Tell us a little bit about you and the MSP that you used to own.

[00:17:35] Speaker B: Yeah, so I had an MSP. I made all the classic MSP mistakes. I feel like being a technical, not marketing or sales or business first. So being tech first, I thought I would find the ultimate tech tool, the silver bullet that would solve especially things like process or sales or marketing. Surely if I just get the right CRM tool or the right social media posting tool, marketing, I won’t have to spend any more time on it or something like that. Leads will just flow in. So, yeah, I made the classic mistakes. And then, of note, we were particularly blessed. In one year, I grew from four to 17 full time employees, which was both exhilarating and utter chaos, if anybody’s ever experienced growth anywhere near that.

[00:18:22] Speaker A: So tell us how that growth came about. What were the circumstances? Did you just get exceptionally good at winning new clients or did you win a whale client?

[00:18:29] Speaker B: No, it was mostly right time, right place. We were at just a particular boom. And one of those is we were really at the beginning of managed services. When I see the beginning, when we started, it was kind of like PC anywhere, dial up or dial into. And then it was early, like Team viewer. So this was not your connectwise or your auto tasks or the sophisticated RMMs.

It wasn’t Synchro. This was just basic. We’ll do remote. And so what resonated was this recurring revenue. We now call it managed services. Like later, somebody was like, you were a managed service provider? I was like, really?

And so I was the last to know. But recurring revenue was amazing. It was way better than just your break fix. I love that. And it resonated with the business owners and it resonated with me because I never been one of those guys that could just promise the moon. And so it’s like, look, here’s a flat fee, it fits within your budget, we’ll look after you proactively. And that really resonated with both my team and the clients, especially if they refused it, inevitably, give it two, three, four months and they’d have a massive bill, five times what they’re. If we’d say $1,000 a month for your managed services bill, give it three months and they’ll have a $5,000 bill from us when something would break. And so if they didn’t buy it at first, then they bought it, because then they said, oh, here’s my big bill, and now I get it. And so we were just at the very beginning of that, and as far as I know, the first in our city to offer essentially a flat rate, if you will, recurring. We didn’t know it was managed services, but it was managed services way back then, and that’s what got us going. And we just were signing people up. A lot of it was referral based. It was not anything to do with great sales or marketing. And so the most prospecting I did was either a networking event or the occasional cold call. And I used to make cold calls on the phone, but when I say cold call, I mean dropping by in person. So if anybody can relate to dropping by in person, that’s a different kind of cold call.

[00:20:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I bet. And actually you say it wasn’t down to any great marketing or sales. Sometimes all you need is that lucky break of getting the timing right. Right. So you caught the wave of, and it’s weird, I was thinking about this the other day, how ideas and concepts, they just have their time. And we’ve had many, many people on this show who, because we have loads of MSP owners on this show, or former MSP owners, which is great, they’re my favorite kind of guests to get on because you get the real how I did it. And we had people on the show who were essentially delivering managed services on a monthly recurring revenue basis, like years before it became a thing.

And they didn’t struggle with it, but it didn’t spread like a virus. It wasn’t its time where it sounds like you were there at that exact moment and people could instantly see, oh, I like this, this is for me, I see the benefit here, budgeting, et cetera, et cetera. And now we’re so many more years into the subscription economies, who knows what the next thing is going to be? Okay, so I forget the numbers now. So you went from how many staff to how many staff?

[00:21:47] Speaker B: One year? We went from four to 17.

[00:21:50] Speaker A: Okay, so tell me. That is insane. Tell me, what chaos did that create within the business?

[00:21:57] Speaker B: It was all sorts of chaos because the business was. It was old enough that it was a computer.

This is going to make me sound old, but this is where we built computers, right? Like, you could come in and we would build you a computer. And then it evolved to a lot of breakfast and more and more business. And so we had residential, we had business. We would build either an individual or a know, a whole set of computers because we weren’t really like, Dell was just the beginning or not a thing quite yet. And so we weren’t ordering them, we were building them. And then we layered on kind of this flat rate because people didn’t like the unpredictability.

And technology was so new then, and so it was great, but it was literally utter chaos because we didn’t have a lot of processes, we had a lot of people, and we kept finding smart people. And towards the end of the 17, it got like, you know how to spell it? That’s awesome. Come on in and we’ll find a place for you. If anybody’s been in that kind of hiring crunch, it’s a real challenge. And so we didn’t have a hiring process, we didn’t have an onboarding process, we didn’t have a technical support process.

We barely documented the logins to remote into things. So we literally, a couple of times it was easier to drive across town than find the credentials sometimes. So we would just have people driving around. So fast growth, loose documentation at best. And then we had different businesses again. We had some folks like building computers. We had some folks troubleshooting and fixing computers. We had others doing some residential, we had others doing business. And that’s one of the times I learned that people and process and also lack of focus, that is a bad combination to be in.

[00:23:44] Speaker A: Yeah, I can imagine. And I bet as the owner of the business and driving that business, I bet your personal workload went up as you gained more staff. It’s never supposed to be this way, but actually, most of us find it is this way. The more people you take on, especially when you don’t have those systems and processes in places, you end up fighting more fires. You become the glue, the glue that sits at the middle of it. And actually, I always, always can forget where I know where most things have come from, but I read this concept in a book once, and I can never remember the book and I mention it in interviews about five times a year, and every single time the same people email me and say it was this book. So thank you. For those of you that are about to email me, it’s the concept that the business owner builds a prison of their own design and then locks themselves inside, which is what you did. And isn’t it fascinating that it’s the growth and the success of the business that creates that prison cell?

Was there a crunch point? Let me ask you two questions. Was there a crunch point which made you think, I’ve had enough, I’ve got to do something about this? And how did you get started? Because you’ve gone from four to 17 people in a year, which is insane.

You’ve got an express train doing 200 miles an hour and trying to systemize how that express train works While it’s running and while you’re fixing all the fires, it’s just getting harder and harder. So what was the moment you decided you had to fix it, and how did you start to fix it?

[00:25:07] Speaker B: It was really before we got to 17 because it was painful. Going from four to eight was painful 910. Eleven. But just like you said, you feel like you’re doing 200 miles an hour. So now didn’t feel like the best time to start doing additional things that I’d never done, like creating process. And that’s one of the things I always wrestled with because process to me, was this thing that you had to hit pause on the business and go take a week or two and design something very deliberate and that would pay off in the long term. But how the heck do you even start, especially when you’re doing 200 miles an hour? So that was the breaking point because I just was working all the time. And then on the personal level, I just felt like I wasn’t enough. I couldn’t be enough to my staff, I couldn’t be enough to my clients.

At that point, there was not enough hiring that could be done, so there was no more sustaining growth.

And every day ended with not only emails and things like that that we’re all used to now, but just more of our staff with questions that were very reasonable questions, like when I run into this, what should I do? And sometimes I could answer them. And I don’t just mean technically, just sometimes there was enough of those. It was like when I say the end of day, like midnight or one or 02:00 a.m. And I still haven’t answered all of those and I’m doing something else. So, yeah, that led me to realize I had to start with a people process. And what I mean is hiring culture, because we’d hired too quickly. So we hired some amazing people, and we hired some amazingly painful people, and the great people didn’t really want the other people.

And what I found over time, unfortunately, was the great people left and the horrible people stayed.

And that was the worst of both. So that is what the cool part is. We went from four to 17. ThE nod as sexy part of it is we went from 17 back down to about eleven over the next about six or eight months. And that was really painful because we’re still trying to deliver. We’re dropping the ball for clients now. We have less staff.

And when it started happening, I couldn’t put my finger on why. Like I’m telling you now, the key people left. I didn’t understand why. It’s because other people weren’t putting in the same effort, didn’t care as much, and they weren’t willing to do 80% of the work when others were doing 20% of it, or similar things like that. So in hindsight, now I understand what was going on. But at that point, I had no idea. And we were just kind of throwing people at it. And the straw that broke kind of the camel’s back was as fast as we were growing. Again, we now process. So I didn’t hand off even tasks that were critical, like backup. And so that was one of the ones. I was like, I can’t hand this off to anybody, and I’m the only one that feels like I can do it. So here I am, working 100 hours a week, trying to answer their questions. And then in my spare time, check everyone’s email, see if the backups are completed or not. Go fix them. Like you said, I very much had a prison of my own design. And if you’re there now or you’ve been there, I won’t speak for you. But I felt so worthless. I felt so low. I didn’t feel successful. I felt like I’d created, literally, a prison cell. And I was like, man, these people that go and work nine to five somewhere else, they are smarter than I am. They really have it figured out. That sounds like a wonderful place to be right now.

[00:28:37] Speaker A: When you find yourself sitting there looking at wage slaves, thinking they’ve got a better life than me, you know it’s gone wrong. So you started with the process for recruitment and talk us through how that then went throughout the business, because I understand you essentially systemized the whole business from that point.

[00:28:56] Speaker B: Yeah. So I’ve always held the belief that the people are the business. The people make the business. They’re the differentiator. They’re the reason the business exists. They are what it ends with and begins with, because you’re going to interact with them, the quality of support. And while we’ve got to service the client and this and that, it’s the people, it’s who we’re going to spend most of our time with. I’m going to spend most of my time with them, most of my waking hours.

I care very much about that. So I had said that before, but none of that was put into action.

And frankly, I really found the normal recruiting process didn’t resonate with me. Frankly, I felt it was worthless because what I had been shown by others that were more knowledgeable was you really look at these resumes and all the bullet points, and at the time, are you an MCSE? Okay, well, that’s what I need. And so maybe that can help you look for certifications or whatnot. But it didn’t tell me anything about your personality, your work ethic, what drives you, your passion, any of those things.

So we started with that because we were losing people and we had no idea why. We didn’t know why the good were leaving and the bad were staying. We didn’t really know how to differentiate between those. When I say that I didn’t like that person, the person that left, I loved. And then the person that stayed, I didn’t like him as much. But there was no language to quantify that. We couldn’t identify what culture really meant. It was just a buzzword. So that’s where I said, okay, we’ve got to figure out what that means and turn this into a process that’s since evolved over so many years to a very deliberate multistep process. And so to kind of wrap this up in a vote, we’re looking for kind of the diamond in the rough, or really what we call the unicorn. And so a lot of our folks do have the normal four year degree or three to five years experience, but at least half of them do not. And so we’ve deliberately designed an interview process that we don’t even look at the resume until you’re about 75% through the recruiting process. And so we’re looking to avoid only looking in one place or building a monoculture, or just people that think the way I do or act the way I do. And so we’ve gone outside of that to ask questions about, what are you looking to do? Why are you trying to do it along the way? There’s other tests. We’ll ask them to write about this. One of the questions is write some. Tell me what you’re really passionate about, and if you can’t find anything that you’re passionate about, that tells me enough right there. If you can’t put together a coherent sentence, I don’t want you interacting with my clients. So you don’t have to be a published author in order to write great responses to the knowledge base or to a ticket, but you still need to be able to put together a coherent sentence. So a whole host of what seemed like little things at the time, but that’s what started triggering the difference. And I guess last thing on that is, again, I copied other people because I didn’t know I’m learning. And so I went and did what other people did. I looked at bigger companies and MSPs and other companies and looked at their job descriptions, and I thought, well, if it works for them, it’ll work for me, which was one of my first mistakes. So I literally copied their job description and made sure our benefits or HR or whatever said something different. But other than that, it was verbatim. And I realized I was getting what they were getting, which was just a bunch of resumes, non differentiated. And so I resisted putting in the hard work, what I felt like was hard work to write good job descriptions. And now our job descriptions are unique per role, but they also have our culture kind of shine through. And the difference is night and day. Like, we just had a whole bunch of people that had no real interest in working here. They just wanted to work somewhere. And the job description we craft today really kind of disqualifies a lot of you, because not in a four year degree way, but in a way that you’re just like, well, that doesn’t sound like where I really want to be. And it pulls in the rest. So now we’re already starting with a kind of pool of talent that is maybe underlooked, maybe not what the traditional process would yield, but exactly who we’re looking for.

[00:33:23] Speaker A: That sounds amazing. Just amazing. Okay, final question for you, Damien, and then we’ll just briefly talk about what you’re doing right now. That MSP owner that you were speaking to earlier, who is in that situation where they’re working stupid hours, holding the business together, they’re entering the prison cell, and they can see the door shutting behind them.

If you had to give them one piece of advice, what would that piece of advice be?

[00:33:47] Speaker B: Get help. Right? What I needed to hear then is you’re not alone.

Somebody listening to this needs to hear you’re not alone. And what I mean is there’s not just one MSP working stupid hours. There’s a lot of us doing it and a lot of us that did it, and you’re not alone. And so whether it’s a peer group, whether it’s a forum, whether it’s Paul Green’s group, whatever that group is, you can get help.

And I don’t just mean get better at a skill. That’s wonderful. What I mean is you can realize. And that was kind of the strain for me. I wasn’t the only one struggling. And so it not only helped me and said, well, what do you do in recruiting? What do you do to build process? And I could learn from others going through it, but what I also realized is the 50 or 100 million dollar company that I was often copying their job description or the other things, they had nothing to do with what we do, right? They had entire departments, entire full time recruiters, all my peers. And when I say that they were two or three, four times the revenue, they didn’t have recruiting departments they could understand, they could resonate. So you’re not alone. Get help is what I would say, because they will unlock things for me. I found that I could not only learn very practical things, but it was just as valuable to realize I’m not alone. I’m not the only one to take myself into this corner and have this self designed prison cell.

[00:35:17] Speaker A: Yeah. And there will be thousands of MSP owners that make the same mistakes in the future because this is what we do as business owners, but we work our way out of it. So thank you. Damien, tell us briefly, what was the conclusion of your MSP story and what are you doing right now?

[00:35:32] Speaker B: Yes. The reason I’m not an MSP today is because as I was growing, we went from four to 17 employees. I kept backup to myself because I didn’t want to burden my team with managing all of that, with all the new things they were also learning. And I felt like I needed to keep control. I felt like a tight ring. Control as I grew was the right thing. And despite fixing every backup, as soon as the green turned red, I had a client call me and all five of their. This is back when they had physical servers were down. And I thought, this will be a long night. Turned out the backups were utterly useless. And so after too much time with tech support, by the way, top tier vendor we’ve all heard of, I had to go and stand in front of my client and tell them the thing you trust me with, the thing you’ve hired me to do, to watch after you, I can’t do. I’ve lost your data.

And if anybody’s ever been there or anywhere close, that’s not why I got into this business. That’s not who I am. That’s not my values. That’s not what I stand for. And so to relate it back to the earlier point, Paul, I felt like giving up until I started talking to other MSPs and I realized I wasn’t know. That sort of thing is unfortunately more common than anybody in this business would like to admit. You’re not going to put that on your website and tell your clients that we nearly lost your data, but when you talk in pure groups, you’ll find out that’s really common. So now I have started servosity, and we do two things differently. It’s the only two things we do. One, we manage the backups so you don’t have to. You can focus on what differentiates your MSP. Spend time on that, not on the undifferentiated heavy lifting. And number two, we test your backups for you daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly. You can get any tool to do any of those things. And those are the only two things that we do that are really different at the end of the day.

[00:37:28] Speaker A: And what’s the best way to learn a little bit more about servosity and get in touch with you?

[00:37:32] Speaker B: Yeah, visit Servosity.com. You can reach out there. I’ll be happy to have a call one on one with you if you would like. If you’d like to learn more about what we do there or join me@mspmindset.com. If you’d like to join as I interview others and learn more about business.

[00:37:49] Speaker A: Oh, yes, and I forgot MSP Mindset. How could I forget when that was the very reason that brought us together. So just briefly tell us what MSP mindset is and where we can listen to it.

[00:37:58] Speaker B: Yeah, MSP Mindset is the handle YouTube and LinkedIn and wherever you social or@mspmindset.com and I get the distinct pleasure of interviewing amazing people about business. So culture, sales, operations, exit, whatever it is that’s going on. And so some of the most fascinating people, from the fastest growing MSP in the nation to the titans of the industry, to some of the best selling authors this year, I’ve gotten the pleasure, or soon, in upcoming episodes, have the pleasure of interviewing. So yeah, join me@msPmindset.com or just MSP Mindset on YouTube or LinkedIn.

[00:38:43] Speaker A: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast this week’s.

[00:38:47] Speaker C: Recommended book hi, My Name is Manuj Aggarwal, a global thought leader in AI. I recommend this book from Ray Dalio, Principles of Life and Work, which basically lays out a foundation on understanding human beings, how to become better collaborators, how to get the best from your team members, your customers, your partners. Basically, it’s a wonderful book that combines human psychology, business principles, technology and whole bunch of other learnings from an amazing person. Ray Dalio Coming up next week.

[00:39:28] Speaker B: Hi, my name is Ryan Sherrer. I’m a marketing expert and personality means everything to your business. And if you’re struggling on how to put your personality into your business, let.

[00:39:37] Speaker A: Me tell you how, on top of that fantastic interview next week, I’ve got a great way for you to get past the gatekeeper when you’re phoning up leads and prospects. And unbelievably, it’s using two words that are really exciting to you and dull for normal people to hear. Those two words are cybersecurity. Join me next Tuesday at have a very profitable week in your MSP made in the UK for MSPs around the world, Paul Green’s MS MSP Marketing podcast.