In this week’s special episode
- As most years end we normally tend to review the last 12 months, but of course 2020 has been no normal year. So in this special show Paul has decided just to look ahead to the opportunities coming up in 2021
- In predicting what the next 12 months may bring for MSPs, Paul’s joined by two of the most respected experts in the channel, Nigel Moore and Karl Palachuk, to discuss how best to gear up for increased growth
- 2021 maybe a hard year for some. But listen for some brilliant advice on adopting a mindset that could help you secure an even stronger position in your market
Show notes
- Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform
- Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert
- For this podcast special, Paul is joined by experts Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe and Karl Palachuk from Small Biz Thoughts technology community and author of many titles including Managed Services in a Month
- On January 5th Paul hosts another podcast special where the whole show will be dedicated to the recording of an MSP marketing consultation. Paul will conduct a one-to-one with Tom Fisher from The Tech Frood and identify opportunities to improve his marketing and grow his MSP
- Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com
Episode transcription
Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world, this is an MSP Marketing Podcast special.
Paul Green:
Hello, and welcome to a very, very special edition of the podcast. Now, it’s just a few days left of, let’s be honest, what frankly has been a crazy year. I’ve asked two of the most trusted and respected experts in our world to join us, not to look back at 2020 because I think we’re all kind of glad to be at the end of the year, but instead I want them to look forward to next year. Because I think that next year is going to have probably some new challenges for you and for all the other MSPs out there, but also some really truly wonderful opportunities.
Paul Green:
So let’s explore what those opportunities might be. Let’s explore how you can grow your MSP, how you can really benefit next year. What if next year could be a massive year for you? What if you could get new clients? What if you could grow your business and grow your net profits and your monthly recurring revenue and all of that, despite all the challenges to the economy, despite all the pressures on your clients and your end users, and just the general difficulty of doing business. This is going to be a positive podcast focused on how you can make the most of 2021. Now let me introduce you to the brain trust that I’ve lined up for you.
Nigel Moore:
Hey, it’s Nigel Moore here. I am the Founder of The Tech Tribe, a community of MSPs all around the world, where we teach and coach and help them avoid all the silly mistakes that I made when I ran my own MSP.
Karl Palachuk:
Hi, this is Karl Palachuk. I am the author of a couple dozen books and I run the Small Biz Thoughts Technology Community.
Paul Green:
So gentlemen, thank you both for joining me. The challenges of getting this call together have been amazing as we’re recording this just a week before or a week so before broadcast. It’s 10:00 PM here in the UK. It’s 9:00 in the morning in Australia where you are Nigel. And I think it’s 3:00 in the afternoon for you, Karl, in Sacramento in California. So thank you for coming together. Let’s just get the little bit of negativity out of the way. Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way. I don’t want to look backwards at 2020. I want to look forward to 2021. You’d be a fool, wouldn’t you Nigel not to think that there are going to be some pretty serious business challenges next year?
Nigel Moore:
It goes without having to say it. The next year is going to be a challenge. And the challenge to me that I see most MSPs or most business owners are going to face is actually a one of focus. And there’s going to be so much distraction from the media and from people talking about stuff and the economy and all that kind of stuff that people will be unfocused on their business. And the reality is the more we can focus on our business, the better we’re going to grow. And there’s opportunity in a downturn, there’s opportunity in upturn, there’s opportunity everywhere. The hard part is going to just be focusing on it.
Paul Green:
Because actually, when there is a recession, the media loves talking about there’s a recession, it’s the great recession, what does it actually mean? It means that we’re in a slightly negative in the figures.
Nigel Moore:
A couple of points less, isn’t it?
Paul Green:
So do you think MSPs will be that easily distracted by what’s surrounding them in the media?
Nigel Moore:
I think it’s, all of us can be very easily distracted. I don’t think it’s just MSPs, especially. I think it’s every human being. Our nature is to always look out for the negative because in primal times, the negative used to kill us. And so we’re always looking for the negative out there and the media feed on that and throw it out everywhere. And so I think MSPs will have the challenge of being distracted. I think all of us will, the more, as I said, we can pull away from that and focus on looking at our own business and the opportunity in front of us, which is massive in the MSP space even through all this craziness, the better we’re going to be.
Paul Green:
As a former radio presenter and journalist, I’ll have to tell you why the media focuses so much on negative stuff. It sells more news.
Nigel Moore:
And that’s quite unfortunately right.
Paul Green:
Now you’ll actually sell thousands more newspapers when you put a negative story on the front page compared to a positive story. I literally saw that for myself. Karl, what do you think the big challenges are going to be for MSPs next year?
Karl Palachuk:
Well, I love the idea of focus because that’s always a big thing for me. I think that people need to really make an effort to be focused. I will say with the recession, I think all of us are going to see it hasn’t quite reached bottom yet and it will reach bottom in the next few months. And I think most IT professionals have been very, I want to say, lucky but skilled and in the right place and tuned up to take care of our clients during this. What we’re going to see is that eventually it will affect us. Our clients’ clients will be having problems. Some of them will go out of business and then our clients will have problems and that will affect us.
Karl Palachuk:
I think people who have recurring revenue are going to be the least affected, but on the positive side, we also have an obvious opportunity that we know will happen in 2021, which is this will come to an end. And so there will be people going back to their offices, they will need consulting. They will need to know, should they make their final push to the Cloud? Should they install a Zoom room in the conference room, right? Should they be upgrading laptops? Should they be recycling old equipment? What should they be doing? And that’s an opportunity for us to go in and have business-focused conversations with our clients. And that’s literally what we should start today to do so that we are having those conversations when clients are ready to go back.
Paul Green:
And Nigel, what opportunities do you think MSPs will have next year?
Nigel Moore:
The two of the big ones that I see out there is in our industry there is this big influx of new people coming into it. Lots of people are fed up with having the job and going out looking for how can I get in control of my own destiny and the IT space is where they’ve started running to. And I am seeing a lot of new startup MSP owners starting their business. And so I see opportunity around existing MSPs going out and differentiating and focusing on growth as one of their primary areas of focus on their business rather than just the tech. Because the days of focusing on tech and worrying about patching and all that kind of stuff are well over now.
Nigel Moore:
This thing has proven that it’s now the chance for us MSPs to take that step up and focus on business and be a business consultant to our clients or a business leader to our clients or a business mentor to our clients, teaching them how to use the tech, but not focusing on the tech. I feel that whole conversation around business versus tech has taken 10 steps advanced over the last year when small businesses around the world have realised how important technology is to their business. And I see that as a huge opportunity for MSPs is that the smart MSPs that are going to go out there and skill themselves up in business consulting and technology enablement and technology adoption, and building up offerings and plans and packages around those things are going to have a huge opportunity out there.
Karl Palachuk:
When you think about when you started and were successful in all of this, do you think it’s the same people, the same personality types who are getting into it today? Because it used to be that we had to literally turn the screwdriver, we had to know a certain level of technology. Do you think people coming in today are going to be better at the business side of it?
Nigel Moore:
In the world that I am and so the ones that I’m seeing, I’m seeing the same type of personality type as you and me. The people that love technology and just love helping people and come from that side, but not the traditional business sense of the side. However, what I am seeing out of all of them… So I still think they’re the same type of us, same type of person but what I am seeing is that they are understanding that the business conversation is far more important far earlier. It took me many, many, many years to understand that. And I was stuck on being a tech for probably the first five years of my career in that space and not thinking about the business side at all. The ones that I see coming in aren’t that technical focused but they’re realising that there’s a business underneath there that has to be built from day one. And they are investing time and energy into it, which is good. I see it as a maturity of the industry.
Karl Palachuk:
Yeah. There’s also a lot more resources that used to be.
Paul Green:
True.
Karl Palachuk:
I think Harry Milford’s book on consulting was like literally the only book you could buy.
Nigel Moore:
I remember that one.
Paul Green:
But Nigel, do you really think that the majority of MSPs will be able to step up and do this? I mean, hearing you saying, I think you said the exact words, you need to be a business leader and for the vast majority of the MSPs that I speak to, they know they can see the power in that, they can see that actually yes, that’s what people want because end users end decision-makers are buying outcomes, not technology. But it’s one thing to be able to say, something like that and it’s another thing to actually be able to deliver it.
Nigel Moore:
Yeah, I agree. 100%. And it’s going to be a certain cohort of MSPs that won’t make it through because they’re not able to or they’re not willing to put the work into stepping up to the plate. But what I will say for those that are, and they see that there’s opportunity there to get to that business ladder conversation is that it’s actually not this daunting big thing that you’ve got to go and change your entire psyche and human being into, it’s just a few little layers above where you’re currently having conversations. And once you start going into your clients and you just start having a few little tweaks to the questions that you ask and things, and the approach that you take, you’ll see that you’re starting on that process already.
Nigel Moore:
And so I feel like most MSPs out there have got the capability to be able to do it. A lot are daunted by the worrying about what it is or how deep they’ve got to go, or do they have to turn into someone that can go and work at Bain & Co. or something like that, or Boston Consulting. And it’s not that, it’s literally just being a little bit more interested in the business side of things and understanding your client’s business and how you can solve their pains and their opportunities for innovation or whatever with technology. It’s not a huge leap and it just takes that little bit of intentional effort to go and do it.
Paul Green:
Do you know there’s actually a parallel here with CPAs or accountants. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of accountants out there looking after their clients and their businesses. And some of them are just transactional accountants. They’re just filling in the tax returns, doing the paperwork, but they don’t give advice. And then you have other types of accountants who actually set themselves up as business advisors. So surely still do the transactional work, but increasingly they’re more interested in having conversations with you about how are you going to grow the business? What are your plans? What can we do to support you? And I can see there’s an exact parallel from that to exactly the kind of tech work that you’re talking about.
Nigel Moore:
100%. It mirrors it.
Paul Green:
Karl, you were talking earlier about monthly recurring revenue and saying that increasingly more and more people have got it, but do you see that there are still lots and lots of, let’s call them, IT firms out there that are doing break-fix or that are hooked more on project revenue and don’t have high levels of monthly recurring revenue.
Karl Palachuk:
Oh, absolutely. In some ways it’s sad for me, but I look at the forums on various sites, Reddit and Facebook and so forth and I can’t believe how many people are… They’re even aware of recurring revenue and they say, “Well, I got into this and I read Nigel’s book and I read Karl’s book but I can’t do that. I have to feed my family today and so I’m doing break-fix.” And you’re like, “Wait a minute, stop.” It takes just as much effort to sell somebody on $1000 a month as it does to sell somebody on a $300 job that’s done and dusted.
Karl Palachuk:
It’s much easier to go ahead and get the recurring revenue. And I think some people just don’t believe it, or they think it’s too much work, or I don’t understand the barrier, but all of those new people coming into the industry that Nigel talked about, I think that’s true. All of them are going to start out break-fix and they have to learn that managed services exists and then they have to learn how to build that model. And they could come up to speed pretty quickly, because there are so many great resources today, but somebody has to grab them by the hand and say, “Don’t do this. Do that.”
Paul Green:
Could that someone be you, the author of Managed Services in a Month?
Karl Palachuk:
Well, I’m certainly available if anybody’s interested.
Paul Green:
It is a great read actually your book. I assume it’s still in print and still on Amazon, Managed Services in a Month. Because that’s got many of the answers, isn’t it?
Karl Palachuk:
Yeah. Well, and the interesting thing is that book is now in its third edition. It’s almost in its fourth edition. That book has been around for more than 15 years and yet there’s just as many people getting into the business as break-fix as there were when that book was brand new. It’s sort of like somebody just needs to say, “You have to read this or read something.” But you can’t just go in and be break-fix. It’s too dangerous today. There’s too much ransomware and insurance companies are getting into it and legislation, and you literally just can’t be the pimply-faced nerd who decides that they’re going to go fix somebody’s computer and charge them $100.
Nigel Moore:
The way I see it with lot of people that I see coming into this space is they’ll read your book, Karl, or they’ll read my book and they’ll understand this whole MRR thing completely, but what they lack is the confidence to go and sell it. And so selling break-fix is the easiest sale. It gets them out, and they know that they’re going to sell an hour and if that hour doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter. But going and selling an ongoing MRR offering with some sort of a recurring system in there is a little bit tougher and it takes a little bit more confidence.
Nigel Moore:
And so I think one of the challenges for lots of people starting up is to work out how to get that confidence as quick as you possibly can to be able to go and sell managed services or recurring services, versus just the once-off break-fix one and done out there and working on your own inner confidence or your sales ability or your sales process to be able to get to that point where you are confident going out and selling it. And I say that to me is one of the biggest reasons why so many people get stuck in that old break-fix world without being able to elevate themselves up into some form of managed services.
Karl Palachuk:
Well, I think most people who get into this think of themselves as computer consultants or computer fixers, and that’s not… This business hasn’t been about that in a long, long time. There’s no reason for them to know the term managed services, right? In isolation, managed services doesn’t actually mean anything, but computer consulting has some meaning. They think they understand that. And so they think that’s the business they’re in. And I think it’s interesting that again, you go to the forums and you see somebody say, “Hey, I’m getting into the business. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to buy two servers and I’m going to do this and this and this.” Right?
Karl Palachuk:
They put up this business plan that they’ve thought about. They’ve thought about what they know about. And the first thing that they hear is, “Don’t buy a server. Nobody buys servers anymore. Don’t do this, don’t do that. And as long as you’re at it, go read a book and learn about this thing called managed services.” So they put the effort into what seems obvious to them. The thing about managed services, I don’t know that it’s more difficult to sell, but it’s less obvious to somebody who is just getting started and doesn’t have any reason to know that managed services exist.
Paul Green:
That’s so true, Karl. You can see that there’s a whole blend of things coming together here, isn’t there? There’s lack of confidence, there’s conflicting advice, I think. And I consider Reddit to be the wild West. Everyone’s shooting at each other from behind anonymous covers. But the problem with a lot of these forums which you don’t get in places and let’s do a blatant plug for Nigel’s Tech Tribe because it is an amazing community where you don’t get that anonymous firing at each other, you get lively debates, but you don’t get the conflict and you don’t get conflicting advice. You can see… And if I think back to when I started my first business and I’m not a tech guy, I’m a marketing guy. I started my first business 15 years ago.
Paul Green:
And I started off by doing one-off jobs, one-off marketing jobs. And I look back now and think, what a dummy? And I was working 80-hour weeks doing one-off jobs and trying desperately to sell it and then trying desperately to deliver it, which is really no different than doing tech support. But I guess you’re then driven by a need at some point to go and get that monthly recurring revenue. Karl, let’s stay with you. And if you think about the best performing MSPs that you are working with or that you know of right now, and I don’t necessarily mean the biggest and the best, I mean, the ones where the owner is working reasonable hours, is making good money, the company’s doing a good job, it’s looking after its customers, it’s looking after its staff and it’s got to that point where it’s enjoyable for everyone, it’s way past that sort of stress that you do have in the early years, what would you say are some of the ingredients that make up those well-performing MSPs?
Karl Palachuk:
I think the biggest part of it is that they have to act with intention. In other words, don’t just go in and say, “Okay, what are we going to do today?” And end up doing whatever gets thrown on your plate. But prioritise everything, have standard operating procedures. I’m a big fan of throwing away the calendar and working from highest to lowest priority whenever possible. The reason that franchises are successful, you buy a business model that somebody else has figured out. You don’t have to be a franchise, but act like a franchise, figure out the business model and a certain amount of your activity every day, every week, every month has to be on figuring out how to make the business a little bit better all the time. And in some ways today, it’s fairly straightforward. You can go to a community meeting, you can network, you can sit in on webinars.
Karl Palachuk:
I actually just recently wrote a thing for the people in my community about how to whittle through all the webinars and pick the ones you want to attend. And that means there’s a whole lot you’re not going to attend because you have to prioritise and you have to work on where your business needs it the most. And it’s okay to ignore lots of other things going on because you could waste all of your time educating and never putting any of it into action. So you got to always have that balance in order to move forward.
Paul Green:
So focus, balance and you mentioned action there. I think having an action orientated-
Karl Palachuk:
I would say, relax, focus, succeed.
Paul Green:
I really like that. That sounds like a book title. Maybe it should be. Nigel, what do you see as some of the ingredients for the best performing MSPs?
Nigel Moore:
I’d just agree with Karl. So the notes that I’d written down for that question were the exact same, going into your business with a clear intention and focus, and the ones that I’m seeing that are successful at the moment either via monetary wise or time-wise, or the impact that they’re having with their clients are very deep on their focus. They know where they’re going. They’ve got a plan for where they’re going. And one of the things I see that all the successful MSPs that I know out there have is like a computer, they’ve got an operating system to their business, whether it’s something as complicated or something as advanced as ESO attraction methodology that runs their business, or it’s just something simple where they just do some quarterly planning and monthly planning with their team.
Nigel Moore:
They’ve got some sort of system that they’re running their business by to keep themselves on track and to keep their focus on the right things. Because our industry especially is so damned full of shiny red objects, new vendors, new tools, new all sorts of different things, new ways to price your stuff, that it’s very easy to get distracted. And so I see the MSPs out there doing the best and having the best and creating the best and whatnot and got this really deep intentional focus and a system to have that focus. And one of the other things that I see as a key ingredient that unfortunately lots of MSPs are missing, is an intentional growth engine as well. And the reason I see a lot of MSPs missing it is that we’ve all, me included when I had my MSP for a long time, is that we come from the technical background and we’re very comfortable with the tech and for all of that service delivery side of things, but we’re not comfortable with sales and marketing in the earliest stages.
Nigel Moore:
And the successful MSPs out there that are growing and that are having an impact and that are adding more net profits each year to their business have got some sort of intentional growth engine in their business, whether it’s a marketing engine that they’ve built, whether it’s a little internal sales team or whether the owner of themselves, if they don’t have enough budget to hire someone else, whether the owner themselves is just blocking off time properly every single week to focus on growing and networking or prospecting or some sort of sales, they’re really the ingredients. And you’ll notice that none of that is the tools. And none of that is the technology side of things. They’re not the ingredients that make up a good MSP, it’s good customer service, a focus and an intentional focus on sales and marketing.
Karl Palachuk:
Yeah. That’s so interesting because if you look at where people put their attention, so much of it at least what they talk about publicly is on tools and the things we use to make our business go. And those things turned out to be a small percentage of your expenses. It’s like, why are you putting so much attention on something that is just a means to an end. First figure out what your end is. Where do you want to go? If you don’t know where you want to go, it’s going to be really hard to get there.
Paul Green:
And I think you and I, Karl, we probably speak from experience in that. It’s not something we read out of a textbook. You and I probably both made that mistake a million times. I know I certainly did. And I had this big, intention for this big deep focus on tools and tech stacks. And I thought that that was always going to save me and make my business and do everything. And in hindsight, when I look back on that period, when I spent all that time, it was honestly 80% wasted time. I could have had the same output in 20% of the time, I spent the other rest of the time on sales and marketing and understanding how the marketing world works and focusing on that and also focusing on how to be a good leader to my team, which is where the real ROI comes from.
Karl Palachuk:
The most beneficial things I ever did in my business was to switch all of my tools in one month. It was very big, big, big decision and all this kind of stuff but when it was over, I had learned, wait a minute, I could use any tools because I have the right processes. And then 10 years after that, I realised that the way I was running my business, I literally didn’t care which anti-virus I used, I used whatever shipped with the RMM because they’re kind of sort of pretty much the same. It’s the way we use them and implement them that makes us successful.
Paul Green:
This is really good stuff. Let’s start to wrap things up now. Nigel, I’m going to ask you this and then Karl the same question. Nigel, let’s say you had some kind of seizure and you thought I need to run an MSP again. Nigel, I realise that’s probably would be the last thing you would ever want to do. But if you owned an MSP right now, and you were sitting here as we are in the middle of the holidays, and you’ve got another week or so until you need to go back to work, what’s something that you will be doing today, tomorrow, on Thursday to help you prepare your business for making the most of 2021?
Nigel Moore:
Marketing. Simple as that. I’ll Just be focusing on what growth I need or how I can get more growth into the business or a pipeline of growth into the business. So that 2021 is in a more comfortable spot for me because money solves a lot of things. If you’ve got money coming into your business via new clients, via new projects, via new whatever it is, you can solve a lot of other things. You can hire people, you can add new tools, even though we’re talking about not worrying about tools, but to me, I’d just be using this time. It’s the time when people go, “Oh, I’m going to slow down for the year and I’m going to do this.” For me, I’d take those opportunities to go and speed up and figure out where I can go and take some ground and go out and build more of a growth engine in whatever I’m doing.
Paul Green:
And the opportunity is massively there, isn’t it? When we were talking about the default setting for someone who runs an MSP is to worry about the technology stack and needs to worry about the tools and whatsoever, no matter how many MSPs you’re in a marketplace with, you’re not actually in competition with all of those MSPs, are you? You’re actually only in competition with one or two MSPs that are doing some marketing that are proactively doing stuff. And that tends to be the minority, not the majority.
Nigel Moore:
Correct. Honestly, to me, most of our competition is in our heads. And that goes for me included. We’re always out there looking like lots of MSPs are out there looking at their competition and worrying about what they’re doing and trying to mimic what they’re doing, which is very dangerous. When in reality, the competition is our confidence levels inside our heads and what we can do and our skill sets and whatnot. And so to me, the more you focus on our own personal growth journey and focusing on our own stuff and making sure that we’ve got an amazing offering that clients are turning to raving fans and talk to us about it, the better. Don’t worry about competition and don’t worry about all that other stuff out there. Go and focus on building an amazing level of service and an amazing business with amazing SLPs and an amazing experience for your clients and that trumps all that other worry about competition and whatever happens to be out there.
Karl Palachuk:
That’s certainly true. In my most recent book, The Absolutely Unbreakable Rules of Service Delivery, there’s an entire chapter called the competition is irrelevant.
Nigel Moore:
That’s true.
Paul Green:
I have to say you two are world-class at getting your book titles and getting your services mentioned. It’s very impressive. It really is. Karl, if you ended MSP, what would you be doing in the next week to set yourself up for success?
Karl Palachuk:
Well, of course, I agree with Nigel. It’s funny, the second time I started an MSP, it was with a fit. Literally the person that I’d sold my MSP to sold it again a few years later. And so all these former clients came to me and said, “You’ll have to start another business.” And I said, “Okay.” So if I were doing it right now today, I would say, it’s pretty straightforward. I would get out in front of as many people as possible and start the early parts of the marketing and the sales cycle. And I would tell you, we have a tool available today that is unique to this environment and that is Zoom.
Karl Palachuk:
Think about all of the Rotaries and the Kiwanis and all of these meetings and networking organisations that have to meet every week. They’re doing it by Zoom. They still need speakers. They still need somebody to talk for 20 minutes and give them useful information, I would go to them and say, “I will be on your Zoom conference. I’ve got a canned presentation and then I’ll take questions. And then when you go back to doing things live, I want to be the first speaker that you bring live to your groups.” And they’re all going to say yes. And this is literally a unique time. In the 25 years I’ve been doing this, there’s never been such an opportunity because every one of them is going to take you up on your offer.
Paul Green:
That’s such a good idea, I’ve not heard that one before. It’s a really, really good one. Karl, let’s give you a blatant plug to say thank you for your time today. Tell us about your community and tell us how we find out more about you.
Karl Palachuk:
Alrighty, thank you. So my community is at smallbizthoughts.org. A community of people who are all MSPs, obviously are trying to grow their businesses. Core content of the community is all my books and all my presentations, every book, every webinar I’ve ever done is recorded and available for download. Everything that we create new goes immediately to all of our members at no additional charge. And we also produce additional content specifically for the members, including classes and trainings and that sort of thing. We meet every Thursday online and then once a month we have a big, big, big all community meeting. So we’re very, very active. And I’m hoping in 2021, that we will have live in-person events in different cities, including a couple of cities in the UK.
Nigel Moore:
And Australia.
Karl Palachuk:
Probably the year after. That will be 2022.
Nigel Moore:
Yeah.
Paul Green:
Karl of course is a massive doctor who finance them all. And I don’t think we have any doctor who heritage in Australia, Nigel. Sorry about that.
Nigel Moore:
And I’m hoping Cardiff is one of the cities, I’m just saying.
Paul Green:
Come on, the UK is small, you can drive to Cardiff from anywhere in about three hours, so just make it so. Nigel, tell us more about The Tech Tribe and how we can learn more and get involved.
Nigel Moore:
Similarly to Karl, The Tech Tribe is a community of MSPs around the world that I founded in a space. We do very similar. We’ve got tons of training and teaching and templates and courses and workshops along with monthly catch-ups and Q&A sessions and whatnot. The way I see communities in our spaces is Karl and I’s communities whilst on the surface may seem very similar, they’re completely different. And I see it as an and conversation, not an or conversation. If I had an MSP today, I would be a member of many MSP communities and taking different perspectives from all the different places out there. And so you can find what we do at thetechtribe.com. It’s kind of cool. I enjoy it. We get a lot of praise from people around the place and I know you’re a member, Paul, and help out in there.
Nigel Moore:
We’ve got around, at the time of recording this, we’re I think it’s about 1400 members now and growing by five to 10 a day by word of mouth alone. And to me, that’s probably our greatest strength is that we’ve built something that I’m a little bit proud of it. It’s helping all of MSPs out there grow a little bit faster, run their business a little bit better, and there’s about 120 all different bits of training and templates and tools and all sorts of different things to help you better run and grow an MSP in there.
Paul Green:
Lovely. Thank you. Thank you both of you for your time. I really appreciate that. Now, next week we kick off 2021 with another special episode of the show. You see, earlier this year, I ran a competition on LinkedIn and the first prize was a one-to-one marketing consult with me. The winner was an MSP owner called Tom Fisher, and he very graciously allowed me to record his marketing consultation. And he said that I can play it for you on the podcast. So you’re going to hear us next week deep diving into how he can generate more leads, how he can turn those leads into prospects and ultimately of course, turn those prospects into clients.
Paul Green:
And along the way, even though we’re focused on Tom’s business, there are so many ideas and things that you can do. You’ll get a whole load of ideas. You’ll get some marketing strategies and also some clever tactics all out of that one marketing consult. I can’t wait to play that for you next week on the MSP Marketing Podcast, see you then.
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Made in the UK, for MSPs around the world, Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.