Episode 131: MSPs: Make sure you're charging properly

Episode 131: MSPs: Make sure you’re charging properly

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 131: MSPs: Make sure you're charging properly
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Episode 131 includes:

  • Why MSPs aren’t charging properly – and why this is CRAZY
  • The pros and cons of making follow-up phone calls to clients after support
  • Plus there’s an opportunity for extra monthly recurring revenue

Featured guest

Max Pruger is a featured guest on Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

Thank you to Max Pruger, Compliance Manager at Kaseya, for joining Paul to talk about a brand new ‘compliance as a service’ revenue opportunity. This interview with Max was recorded back in February 2022, a few weeks before Kaseya announced the acquisition of Datto.

Max has been a pioneer in the managed services industry since the late 1990s. He currently serves as SVP and GM of Compliance Manager, VulScan and MyITProcess and is responsible for Kaseya’s go to market strategy for his respective business units. Max began his MSP career at USWeb as a founding member of that company’s managed service division. He has also held the position of Senior Architect at IBM. Max holds a BS in Computer Science from American University and an MBA from the University of Maryland – Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Connect with Max on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxpruger

Show notes

Episode transcription

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

Paul Green:
Hi. Hello, my name’s Paul and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we got coming up for you this week.

Max Pruger:
Secure and compliance go hand-in-hand. And from a marketing perspective, one of the beauties of compliance as a service, it is something that should be done on a recurring basis. And most MSPs are already used to billing on a recurring monthly revenue basis, so it’s a fantastic additional service to add to your stack.

Paul Green:
That’s Max Pruger from Kaseya. And they’ve been in the news quite a bit recently haven’t they? He’s going to be joining me later on to talk about a new revenue opportunity for MSPs.
We’re also going to be talking about follow-up calls to your existing clients. When you’ve done some work for them, is it worth just putting in a phone call just to see how everything’s going, to see if the fix has actually fixed the thing that was broken in the first place? Later on, we’ll talk about the pros and cons of doing that.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
You go back about 10 years and I was working with veterinarians, or vets as we call them here in the UK, people who look after animals. And I remember one of the frustrations that many of the owners of the veterinary clinics had was that their staff were very quick to give things away and not charge for it. Because of course, they were in a caring profession. No one becomes a vet or a vet nurse for any other reason than they really care about the animals. There are certainly easier ways to earn the money that they get paid. It’s a very difficult job.

Paul Green:
But if someone came in with an animal that was ill, into a private clinic, and they hadn’t got money for that treatment, then nine times out of 10 the staff would help the animal, make sure the animal wasn’t in pain, which is quite right. But they would often just let that person get away with not paying, or they would upgrade the animal onto a better treatment plan. And again, they would never actually charge the client.

Paul Green:
It wasn’t theft. It wasn’t stupidity. It wasn’t them not being aware of it. It was just almost a cultural thing. The cultural thing was, “Hey, do you know? What animal healthcare is expensive. We’ll upgrade you or just do that extra test or do whatsoever, and that’s the best thing for the animal. And don’t worry too much if you haven’t got the money for it.” Now that might not be your experience when you take your animal to a vet. But when push comes to shove, almost every day in a veterinary clinic somewhere there is a treatment being given away for free. It’s more actually that people are just not being charged. So they’re being offered extra services and extra products, but they’re never actually being charged for them.

Paul Green:
And when I left veterinary and started working in this world with MSPs, I never thought that that would be an issue I’d ever see again. And yet, do you know what? When I challenge MSP owners to look at are they charging properly, nine times out of 10 they’re not charging properly. And maybe this is an issue in your MSP as well. Now I should state that it happens for a different reason in this world. There’s very few technicians will sit there on a support desk, on a call to someone and say, “Yeah, okay. We’ll switch on email filtering for you”, or, “We’ll give you this level of extra protection,” and then think, “Oh, they can’t afford it so I won’t charge them for it.” It’s not quite the same cause. The cause of not charging properly in the MSP world is more to do with complexity.

Paul Green:
If you think about the number of users that you go up and down every month, the number of new services that are being switched on or switched off. You’re introducing new things, reshaping things, rebundling, it’s constantly changing. Change, change, change, it happens all the time. And change is good, there’s nothing wrong with change at all. I’m a massive fan of change. Because when you change things you create new revenue opportunities. The downside of change is making sure that the admin, that the paperwork, and specifically the payments, making sure that they are keeping up with all of the change.

Paul Green:
The chances are that you, as a business, you’re paying for something but you are not charging it on. You’re not making sure that the end clients are paying for it properly. And that could be something as simple as licenses, could be seats in software, it could be support tools. And even if you have a system in place, in fact, especially if you have a system in place to make sure that this is checked on a regular basis, I think at least once a month you should stop and ask yourself, “Is our system working correctly?” Go in and do some random checks and just have a look.

Paul Green:
In fact, what you could do, and this would be a sensible way to get started. If you haven’t done this regularly, I would conduct a review to be sure that you are charging correctly for everything and not accidentally paying for something that you shouldn’t be paying for. I would do a thorough review of everything. I mean, it doesn’t have to take that long. You could do it yourself. You could get one of your colleagues to help you. You could delegate it to a member of your team. But every single user, for every single client, with every single service, just go and check.

Paul Green:
And what you’re looking for is a trend. If you notice, for example with service one, that actually around about five to 10% of your clients aren’t being charged properly, then that in itself tells you it’s worth doing the review with all of the other services. Because the chances are, if you’re not recording the sales properly or you’re not charging properly for service number one, then it’s definitely going to be an issue across services two, three, four, and five.

Paul Green:
You can do that review as a one-off thing, but then on a regular basis I would definitely allocate a little of your time or a little of someone important’s time to look at this. Perhaps you could schedule it as a monthly task. It’s only a simple thing to do, but you’ve got to look at it this way. If you are supplying someone with something and not charging them for it, you’re not just losing out on the lost revenue, you’re actually losing out twice. Because you are having to pay money for something and you’re not even having that money covered, let alone the gross profit that you should be making off selling that service. So it’s actually a double whammy. It hits you twice if you’re buying something but not selling it on in some way.

Paul Green:
Now I guess this leads onto a question of should you backdate charges? If you discover that someone hasn’t been charged properly for a number of months, should you backdate them? Well, that’s a decision for you and your team to make. I guess you’ve got to look at it and say, “What’s fair here?” If you upgraded someone to a different service two, three months ago and you forgot to switch on payment back then, I would say that’s fair. Two to three months is fair to go back and say to someone, “Oops, we made a mistake. We’re just going to put a couple of payments through over the next few months, just to bring you up to speed on that.” That feels fair.

Paul Green:
What wouldn’t be fair is perhaps if you haven’t been doing it for a number of years. They’ve been receiving something for a couple of years and never paying for it. I mean, don’t get me wrong. You should absolutely make them aware of this, but you got to ask yourself. If someone turned up to you with a bill for a couple of thousand pounds or dollars for something that you’ve been receiving but you didn’t know you weren’t paying for it, would that feel fair to you? No, of course it wouldn’t. And I think being fair with your existing clients and looking at the big picture is always more important than just catching up on something and making a quick buck now.

Paul Green:
So charging properly does not have to be a difficult thing, it just requires a little bit of time. A little bit of time to get going and do a thorough review. And then a quick check once a month to check that the system is working, that all of your clients are being charged for everything that they buy from you.

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

Paul Green:
I was talking in that last bit about systems. Here’s an interesting question for you. Do you have systems in place to guarantee that your clients are utterly, utterly satisfied with you? I mean, what kind of system would you put in place for something like that?

Paul Green:
Well, imagine if you had a client that reported a thing, something that was broken. So not something routine, but something just a little out of the ordinary. And perhaps it took a few hours to get it fixed and it caused some disruption for that client. And of course you get it fixed and you ring them and you tell them, “Hey, it’s all working now. This is all sorted out.” And I guess for most MSPs, that would to be the end of it. You’d close the ticket. Maybe there’d be some analysis or some discussion about what caused this problem in the first place, but that would be it.

Paul Green:
What if you had a customer happiness system, which said when you’ve had a ticket of a certain criteria, a certain impact, that actually a week later, someone calls up that client just to see how everything is going. Now this is not just a call for the sake of calling, because no one wants to have that phone call just for the sake of it. That’s just wasting their time and yours. But what if the purpose of that call was actually just to see how have things been with that problem. “Hey, it’s been a week since we fixed X, Y Z problem. How is it going? Have you had any repeats of this? Has there been an issue at all? Is there anything else that’s frustrating you guys right now?”

Paul Green:
Essentially it’s like a quality follow-up call a week later. But the purpose of that call is not really to uncover more technical problems, the purpose of that call is twofold. First of all, it’s to make sure that the client genuinely is happy, but second of all, it’s to help the client realize that you care. I mean, you really, really care about them and them getting it right. You care enough that you pick up the phone, and by you I mean the business of course. But you pick up the phone a week or so after they had a problem just to check in with them and see how things are going.

Paul Green:
Now in an ideal world your best technicians would just do this anyway, but the reality is we are not in an ideal world. We’re in a world where if you want your business to perform in a certain way, you have to put a system in place. Remember what system stand for? System is an anagram, and it stands for saves you stress, time, energy, money. That’s what a system does. You don’t have to hope and pray that people are calling your clients, you can systemize it.

Paul Green:
You might be in a position where you’ve got account managers within your MSP. I don’t meet that many MSPs with account managers but if you’ve got those, then great. That’s a key job of an account manager, is that kind of satisfaction discussion. If you are like most MSPs that certainly I speak to and you don’t really have account managers as such, you’ve just got your you and your senior team and some of the technicians, perhaps you’ve got a service delivery manager, people with responsibility for clients. Well, in both of these situations you would still put in place a system. Anytime you want anything to happen in the business with regularity, you do not want to leave it to chance. You want to make sure that you have a system that will pick it up because it saves you stress time, energy, and money.

Paul Green:
As we’re thinking about this, what other customer service things could you systemize? What other things could you put in place that appear to be random, that appear to your clients that it’s just you really caring for them, but actually behind the scenes it’s you operating a thorough and efficient system that’s designed to make them feel very, very positive towards you. What other things could you do? What are the quick wins within the business? What are things that perhaps you’ve done in the past that you thought, “That’s a good idea,” that really you want to make sure the business does every single day, week or month? Go and grab those things, put together a checklist for them, and turn them into a system so that they happen every single time within your business.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
This is going to be the shortest and most to-the-point blatant plug that I have ever done. If you are not happy with your MSP’s marketing, I can help you. Go to mspmarketingedge.com. That’s mspmarketingedge.com.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Paul Green:
Just to set some context, this interview with Max was recorded back in February, a few weeks before Kaseya announced the acquisition of Datto.

Max Pruger:
Hey everyone. I’m Max Pruger. I am the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Compliance Manager at Kaseya.

Paul Green:
And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Max. Now we’re going to talk today about a new potential revenue opportunity for MSPs, which is always a good subject to have on the podcast.

Paul Green:
Before we talk about that, let’s just position your authority and talk about why you know the things that you’re about to talk about. Give us an idea of your background, how long have you been in technology, where have you come from, and a little bit more about what you’re doing now.

Max Pruger:
Thanks, Paul. And first of all, I do really appreciate the opportunity to be here with you. I’ll give you the quick Reader’s Digest version. My background is IT, a graduate degree in computer science, but I haven’t slung code in about 20 years.

Max Pruger:
My MSP background goes to around 1999, I started an MSP way back then. We didn’t even know what an MSP was, we called ourselves an ASP but it was the same general principle. And then I did that for a couple years, and then I joined Kaseya as actually one of the very first employees. I think I was employee 21, 22. And back then I was trying to convince IT companies to stop doing break/fix, block hours, and convert to recurring monthly revenue services contracts. So I really saw the early adopter phase of the RMM and PSA and backup, and a bunch of other tools.

Max Pruger:
I took a around four-year hiatus and I left Kaseya and I started a separate software company in the MSP space. And we did really well, we grew to about 3,000 servers worldwide. And then that company was eventually acquired by a Fortune 50 company, I think two years ago. But right before that, I had the opportunity to come back to Kaseya, after the RapidFire Tools acquisition, and run the compliance manager business unit.

Max Pruger:
I jumped onboard that. I returned to Keseya about two and a half years ago. I’ve been running this business unit along with a couple of others ever since. And I will say, as of last year, this was the fastest growing business unit of all the family of companies that Kaseya has.

Paul Green:
Oh, you had to get that one in. That was a good plug for yourself on that one. There’s some really fascinating things you just mentioned there, which I’m going to pick up with you on our YouTube channel. So we’ll be doing an extended version of this interview and I’ll tell you before we finish the podcast interview, the things that I want to talk to you about.

Paul Green:
But specifically today on the podcast, I want to talk about compliance. And I, as you know, Max, because I know that you are a listener to the podcast, I’m not a technical person. And when you say a word to me, something like compliance, that means … I mean, I think that can mean different things to different people. Just so we’re all coming at this from, if you like, the same attack angle. Describe to me what do you mean by compliance?

Max Pruger:
Yeah, so that’s actually a perfect question, because I used to have this really long legal definition of what compliance meant. And I came across a really short one. And so in my opinion, my definition of compliance, is you’re literally just following the rules and guidelines set by a third party.

Max Pruger:
And that third party can be a government agency. It could be a vendor. It could be a cyber insurance company. It could be an industry standard, but that’s pretty much it. Somebody else sets those requirements, and you’re just following those requirements based off of the guidelines that they’ve set up.

Paul Green:
Okay, so that’s a really, really easy way to understand it. For an MSP, if they have clients who are regulated, any compliance products or services that they use is just them helping their regulated clients comply with the laws and the rules that they have to follow.

Max Pruger:
Precisely. And in a regulated industry it’s very, very easy. I know that, again, your podcast reaches all over the world, but in the US we have HIPAA, which is our healthcare law. And it’s just a lot of what they call requirements and you have to meet those requirements. Pretty much every compliance standard has a password management requirement. And so you have to have some sort of policy and procedure associated with that password management requirement.

Max Pruger:
There’s a tremendous amount of overlap in the space. But at the end of the day, like I said, one of the nice things about compliance is that you’re not reinventing the wheel. You’re just following the guidelines and rules set by a third party.

Paul Green:
Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. Now you said we’re quite early days in compliance, and so certainly compliance as a service. Obviously the requirements of compliance have been there for decades and decades and decades. What’s changed over the last few years to create the opportunity for MSPs?

Max Pruger:
The big impetus on that was really you guys, so UK and the EU with GDPR. As you said, compliance has been around for a really long time. I mentioned HIPAA, it’s been around for, I think, 1995, 1996. It was optional so people ignored it. But at the end of the day, there’s lots of compliance standards out there. But for the most part, from an international perspective, the EU really led the way with GDPR.

Max Pruger:
Since then, if you look at the rest of the world, South Africa passed POPIA, China has their own compliance standard, LGDP believe is the one for Brazil. And in the US, we like to do things a little bit different so we don’t have a national standard yet. It is coming, it’s coming sooner than most people think. But what’s happened in the US is that the states have started passing their own laws. In the US we have California and they really used the guidelines from GDPR to come out with their standard. Virginia passed theirs, and New York passed New York SHIELD, and Texas.

Max Pruger:
And what a lot of people don’t realize is that every single state in the United States has a breach notification law in the books. So whether you are aware of it or not, if a company has a breach, then there are certain requirements that they have to follow to notify specific authorities and their employees and users and things like that.

Max Pruger:
At the end of the day, it’s really accelerated and it is going to continue to accelerate. And the big thing that I’m seeing is that it’s not government agencies. While you hear about them and GDPR and, again, CCPA and so on, what’s really going to drive compliance to the SMB space is cyber insurance companies and larger vendors. There is a huge shift happening this year with cyber insurance, it’s getting much more difficult to get. The costs are going up and the payouts are going down. And self-attestations, so those forms that you filled out once a year and you check your boxes and you claim you were doing things, those are going away, and you’re actually going to have to provide evidence of compliance that you are following the terms and conditions in those policies. And you’re going to have to do that more than once a year, so you’re going to have to maintain that compliance. That’s number one.

Max Pruger:
And then number two, what I’m really seeing a lot of is vendors. If you want to sell something on Amazon, I just talked to an MSP, they’ve got a customer that’s a Hyatt franchise. They have to fill out Hyatt franchises’ vendor management agreement. So if you want to sell at GM, if you want, again, any manufacturing industry, so those larger organizations are saying to their down-line that they must follow those compliance requirements. And then not only do they follow those, but then it flows down to their vendors as well. Vendor management’s going to be a big compliance requirement as well.

Paul Green:
And so I guess these ordinary companies that are suddenly being hit with this requirement to comply to some obscure law that they didn’t even know was in place, are they just then picking up the phone to their IT guys and saying, “Hey, can you guys help me with this?”

Max Pruger:
Literally I had a call about 30 minutes ago with that exact conversation. An MSP calls me up, and he’s the one who told me about the Hyatt situation and said, “I support a Hyatt franchise and they just got this vendor management agreement and they want me to fill it out in 30 minutes.” And I said, “That’s just not, that’s not reality.” You can do a baseline. You can do a quick gap analysis of their situation.

Max Pruger:
But I like to say compliance is a journey, it is not a destination. You are never done with compliance. It is a process and you’ve got to start that process. The best time to start it with yesterday. But if you didn’t do it yesterday, the next best time is to start it today and then maintain that compliance over time.

Paul Green:
Yeah. That makes perfect tense. Now obviously you have … One of the divisions that you run is compliance manager, and we will talk about that towards the end of the interview. Let’s talk about compliance as a service and how you would set that up as a revenue stream. What do you see as the big challenges for an MSP getting into this and doing this properly?

Max Pruger:
The number one challenge as with any early adopter type of product, it’s not the software. Most MSPs know how to install software. They can run scans, they can answer technical questions and so on. It’s really around the marketing side, the sales side. How do I position, price, sell, deliver compliance as a service. So that’s where the majority of folks struggle, and that’s where, again, most MSPs need assistance.

Paul Green:
What would your recommendations be? You’re clearly talking to lots of MSPs about this. In terms of selling it and marketing it, is it simply about the classic marketing thing of putting yourself in the mind of the person who’s buying it? Or is it about understanding the laws, or is it just a case of saying, “Hey, you can relax. We’ve got the tools to handle this, just leave it with us.” What’s the best approach?

Max Pruger:
It really depends on the maturity of the MSP. For those more mature MSPs, they may already be doing compliance type services. Security and compliance go hand-in-hand, and security is actually delivering your IT services as a securement manner. Compliance is just proving that through the appropriate evidence of compliance documentation.

Max Pruger:
Again, from a marketing perspective, one of the beauties of compliance as a service, because I mentioned it’s a journey, not a destination, it is something that should be done on a recurring basis. And most MSPs are already used to billing on a recurring monthly revenue basis. It’s a fantastic additional service to add to your stack.

Max Pruger:
Again, if an MSP is not familiar with compliance, not to push our product, but we do provide a lot of assistance and training and education and support and so on too. We like to say you don’t have to be an expert. It can take 25 years to be an expert in compliance, but we can make you an authority relatively quickly. And at the end of the day, you may not even be capable of doing a full assessment or certification, and that’s fine. But what you can do is you can help your end customers get ready for a third party assessment. You can identify those gaps, and then you can put together a plan of action and milestones to start addressing the gaps that they have in order to meet some particular compliance requirement.

Paul Green:
How big a market do you think this is going to become, Max, in terms of … Clearly, as you say, that there are lots of … Different states are bringing in different regulations, the UK and the EU led it with GDPR. I think we can all agree that there’s going to be more legislation coming in the years and decades ahead. Do you see this becoming a bigger and bigger thing, or do you think there’s going to be a finite pot to this?

Max Pruger:
Every single company in the world is going to have some sort of compliance requirement that they’re going to have to adhere to. And like I said, there’s government requirements, and then it’s going to be the cyber insurance companies and the vendors and their vendor relationships that are going to force compliance down to the SMB and ME level.

Max Pruger:
And we’ve already seen this in the United States. We had Enron. If you’re not familiar, hopefully everybody’s familiar with Enron.

Paul Green:
Oh, yeah.

Max Pruger:
But yeah, during the dotcom bubble, you had Enron. And then when they collapsed, what ended up happening was that the US passed a whole bunch of laws. And everything starts at the enterprise level and then it starts flowing its way down. So that’s why you see these massive enterprise GRC type of platforms and they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And again, enterprise organizations all have a compliance officer or governance officer, they’re doing risk management.

Max Pruger:
And so again, at the end of the day, whether it happens this year or next year or in a couple of years, that’s going to flow down because we’re already seeing that to the mid-market, and eventually down to the SMB space. And you’re not going to have a choice. MSPs are going to have to deliver their IT services leveraging some sort of industry best practice, whether that’s an SDSF or ISO 27001 or CIS controls. Whatever it is, they’re going to have to prove that they’re delivering their IT services using some compliance requirement.

Paul Green:
Final question then, tell us a little bit about Compliance Manager. What is it, how does it help, and what’s the best way to get in touch with your team about Compliance Manager?

Max Pruger:
Yeah, we’re actually, it’s an opportune moment right now. We’re really, really excited, so we are releasing the next generation of Compliance Manager GRC. And so the initial version was a data auditing and validation platform with a report generation engine. And effectively what that means is that there’s lots and lots of checklist products out there. Everybody knows what the right answers are, they check all their boxes and so on.

Max Pruger:
But part of the challenge and part of my language here is that it’s garbage in, garbage out. If you put all the right answers, you’re going to get a great looking evidence of compliance documentation. But when the auditors come in, they want to actually validate that what you put in your documentation matches what’s on your environment. And a large portion of the time, those things don’t match. That’s the number one enforced violation pretty much across all of the different compliance auditors.

Max Pruger:
What we’ve done with Compliance Manager is that we also ask all of the same questions, but we’ve coupled that with software scans and audits that automatically audit an environment, making the MSPs much more efficient, because there’s a lot of manual labour in that process and we get rid of a lot of that manual labour and automate it. Then we map it to a step-by-step task list so you don’t have to be a compliance expert, you don’t have to be an expert in HIPAA or GDPR. You literally follow those tasks. As you complete the tasks, you’re getting closer and closer to adhering to those compliance guidelines. When you’re done, then we do generate the required evidence of compliance documentation. And we back it up with the automated scans to prove that what you say you have is actually what you have.

Max Pruger:
And with the new release of a Compliance Manager GRC, we’ve really expanded that out. We’ve made it extremely extensible. So we ship with a lot of compliance standards in the product, but you can go and create your own. Again, yesterday I was talking to one of our existing customers, and he literally built the 1 60 plus controls for CIS V8 over the weekend once we launched the product.

Max Pruger:
And then of course, finally we are adding additional features. Things like employee tracking and training and management, vendor management and so on into the product. So that’s kind of my 50,000 foot view of the new Compliance Manager GRC platform.

Paul Green:
And where’s the best place to go to get some information and have a chat to someone about this?

Max Pruger:
Obviously you can contact one of your Kaseya family of company sales reps. If you have anyone at the Kaseya products, whether it’s VSA or BMS or Glue or RapidFure Tools or ID agent, and there’s so many of them right now. You’re welcome to reach out to them and then they’ll be happy to schedule a follow-up call, a webinar, a demo.

Max Pruger:
You can go to kaseya.com and click on Products and hit Compliance Manager. And then we will be rolling out a brand new website called Compliance Manager GRC in the next couple of weeks.

Paul Green:
Brilliant. Max, thank you so much for being here on the podcast. Now you and I are going to continue our interview. It’s an extended interview over on YouTube, and we’ve got lots of things to talk about. I want to talk to you about cyber insurance. You said earlier that it’s getting harder to buy cyber insurance. And yet, what I’m seeing from the MSPs that I talked to, is that more people are asking to buy it. So we’re going to have a look, we’ll explore how those two things are going to come together and clash in some way.

Paul Green:
Also, you’ve worked for Kaseya twice. You worked there, I think you said you were employee number 21 back in the day. And I imagine your employee 2021 today. So I want to just explore what it was like in Kaseya back then, compared to what it’s like now. And what it’s actually like to work within a very acquisitive, big vendor such as that.

Paul Green:
I think we’ll also have a little bit of a look at the early adopter phase as well. You’ve been through … You’ve been around, I think you were saying earlier, since break/fix days. In fact, you were running … You called it an ASP earlier. What does ASP stand for?

Max Pruger:
What we called ourselves was an application service provider, but the theory was exactly the same. It was a recurring monthly revenue contract where you effectively outsourced your IT department to us. Again, that was very early on and our theory was it’s just like electricity, you plug it in and it should work. So IT should work exactly the same way. But yeah, we call ourselves an ASP instead of an MSP.

Paul Green:
I love that. I love that. But essentially you had exactly the same model.

Paul Green:
So we’re going to explore that a little bit more as well. Max, thank you for being here on the podcast. We’ll continue that conversation now at youtube.com/mspmarketing.

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

Nicholas Ashford:
I’m Nicholas Ashford, Partner at investment firm, Fordhouse. And my book recommendation is Extreme Ownership. It gives you a lens on how you should lead both personally, but also how you need to delegate control as well. And those two things, getting the balance to those two things is very hard. Often people are one or the other, so it helps you to achieve that balance.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Luis Giraldo:
Hey everybody, this is Luis Giraldo from ScalePad. And I’m looking forward to being on the podcast next week with Paul, as we take stock of where we’re at in the business now that it’s almost the middle of the year. What’s going on.

Paul Green:
I’ve also got an idea for you next week about your ticketing system. No, it doesn’t involve switching your PSA. It’s always a crazy thing to do. No, I’m talking here about putting aside some time every single day for you and your technicians to do something called a ticket frenzy. Make the business so much more efficient in just, I don’t know, 40, 50, 60 minutes once a day.

Paul Green:
We’re also going to be talking about cashflow. Yeah, it’s the one thing that keeps you awake at four in the morning, that worry that there isn’t quite enough money to meet all of your bills. We’ve got at least three clever cash flow tricks for you, which we’ll talk about on next week’s show.

Paul Green:
Now don’t forget, we’ve got tons of great content for you on YouTube. The extended interview with Max from this week, with Max Pruger, that’s on YouTube right now. Plus on Thursday, we’ll release the next episode of Another Bite. It’s a show about the show. Host Sophie Law has me and sometimes some of our guests as well to discuss what we’ve talked about in this issue of the podcast. You can access both of those at youtube.com/mspmarketing. Please do subscribe to me on YouTube and wherever you listen to this podcast. Join me next Tuesday, and have a very profitable week in your MSP.

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