Episode 222: Nasty surprises employees spring on MSPs

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. Look at that. We have reached episode 222. Here’s what I got in store for you this week.

[00:00:15] Speaker B: Hi, I’m Craig Fulton with Evergreen, and we’re a holding company focused on MNA in the MSP market. If you want to hear more details on that, get tuned in.

[00:00:24] Speaker A: And on top of that interview with Craig later on in the show, we’ve got a bit of a staff special going off this week. We’re going to be talking about three ways you can help your staff feel special working for you.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. But let’s kick off this kind of mini staff special this week by talking about some nasty surprises that your staff can kind of drop on you. Now, I don’t know if you have staff yet or not, but it is inevitable, unfortunately, if you want to build a real business, that you have to have staff at some point. And my definition of a real business is a business that lets you take a four week holiday, a four week vacation, without actually having to switch on your laptop or deal with anything. No emails, no messages, no calls, nothing. Four weeks away and you come back and the business has not just survived, it has thrived without you. And you can achieve much of that through outsourcing. There are many great outsourced help desks out there, but it’s just inevitable. Any business, or the vast majority of businesses, and the vast majority of MSP businesses, you need to have some level of staff, because you can’t do all of this yourself. And anyone that has staff knows that staff are a bit of a double edged sword. I remember being a busy 80 hours a week business owner back in, like, 2006, which is when I took on my first member of staff. Right. My first year, when I did everything on my own, sat in my spare bedroom, I made like, 80 grand profit. So it’s about $95,000 profit because I had no costs. I was sat at home and I had no staff, but I was working 80 hours a week. And obviously that’s how you have a stroke. So that couldn’t continue. So my second year in business back then, I took on a member of staff, which required taking on an office. So that second year, we made virtually nothing. And I naively thought, oh, hang on, I’m buying 40 hours of someone’s time, therefore that’s going to free up 40 hours of my time. And we all know it does not work like that, because first of all, you don’t get 40 hours from your staff, do you? You get like 25 hours from them. And then, of course, you’ve got to invest every time you bring someone else on board. You’ve got to invest your own time in training them, in managing them, in sorting out their problems. We could do a whole year of podcasts on staff, but we’re not going to. We’re just going to talk about it today. So let’s talk about some of the kind of the most common staff bombs that get dropped on employers. This isn’t just within the MSP world, this is universal to all businesses. But let’s just talk about some of the most common ones and what you can do about them. The first of them is coming in late often. So a member of your team who is late now and again, it doesn’t matter. In fact, they will beat themselves up about it more. My daughter, we were late to school yesterday, so I take her to school every morning. We pick a friend up and we were late, and it was my fault because I forgot a bag. And we were halfway there when she suddenly said, did you pick up that bag? I didn’t. So we had to come back and she was more bothered about being late than I was, which I thought, this is a great attitude. She’s a teenager and there are many, many things that are wrong right now. In fact, from her point of view, everything is wrong with the world. But to see her genuinely getting annoyed and upset because she was going to be five minutes late for school, I thought that was good, because that’s a good work ethic, right? So someone being late now and again doesn’t really matter. It’s if they’re late on a regular basis, and it could be that they’re late every Monday morning. It could be because people who throw sickies are often late on a Monday morning when we’ll talk in a second about the cause of that. But you know, that’s a red flag, right? It could be that they do it two, three days in a row, or that they always just.

We start at 09:00 a.m. I want you guys ready to go at 09:00 a.m. We have a meeting at nine, two. And they always walk in like 10 seconds, just 1 minute past nine or 10 seconds before the meeting or whatsoever. So coming in late often is a. It’s a sign of disrespect. And that may be an old fashioned attitude. I know I’m nearly 50 and I do feel old fashioned, as I’m now talking to sort of 25 and 30 year old business owners, that makes me feel old, but I try and have a young attitude. But I genuinely believe that coming in late is disrespectful. And that’s not just coming into the office. I think dialing in late to meetings is also disrespectful. I try very hard to be on time for everything all the time, technology problems aside. And by that I mean the video call not working. But when someone does that on a regular basis, and no one on my team does that, because I would address this with them, even joining a video call late regularly is disrespectful. It’s disrespectful of everyone else’s time. Your technician, who walks in at nine, two in the morning, is disrespecting you, and they are disrespecting the other people, the other members of the team. And here’s the thing. Like all the things we’re just about to talk about, the rest of your team will be aware of this problem. They will talk privately, in private chats and in the kitchen, if you’ve got an office, about that person being late. And just as with all of these things, you need to deal with this, because it’s not just a problem about that person who’s committing the crime or committing the disrespect, it’s actually about the whole team. And they have to see that you take positive action and you pick up and do something when something is not quite right. Does that make sense? Yeah. So I think with this coming in late problem, you just have to talk to someone. It’s when you spot the pattern, when it becomes regular or when you’re suddenly aware. Hang on a second. That person is always late and you have to sit them down and you have to make them realize this is a big deal without being too heavy. But often it’s about drilling down into why. Why? And in fact, that can be the opening question. Why are you always late? I’m not late. I’m here just in time for the meeting. Everyone else is here, ready to start work at 09:00 a.m. You wander in just before nine and your computer isn’t even switched on, you’re not even logged on, you haven’t even checked teams before our meeting at two and it’s past nine. That is late. Why? And you want to get down to what are the reasons? If it’s, oh, it’s traffic. Well, that’s not the reason, isn’t it? Is it that once a month or once every six month. Massive traffic jam. That’s unavoidable. But if they’re always late because of traffic, the real problem is they’re not leaving home early enough. It’s like people who are always late on a Monday or take Mondays, throw sickies on Mondays. That’s gaming, isn’t it? That’s they’re having too much fun on a Sunday or they don’t want the weekend to end. And for me, that’s a massive, massive red flag. Which again, I don’t have anything like that with my team, but if I did, I would address it, because you have to address that early on. So someone coming in late, often, the way you fix it is you sit with them, you talk with them and you say, why? And you ask them to commit to doing better. And if they commit to doing better and don’t do better, I do believe you have to escalate it. It’s the kind of what’s known as broken windows theory. Broken windows theory. And I can’t remember where I read this. I have a memory that it was used in New York in the reduce crime. But broken windows theory is where if you’ve got an empty building at some point and it’s just sat empty, it’s a perfectly good building, it’s sat empty. At some point, some kids are going to come along and be like, oh, there’s no one around, grab some stones, smash some windows, right? Cycle off quickly, come back the next day, the windows are still broken. So they’ll smash a few more windows, come back the next day, all the windows are still broken. No one is checking the building, right? And what happens is the amount of crime escalates on that building. So it goes from broken windows to the door being broken in to, I guess, people going to sleep in there, like, I guess, homeless people, drug users, and inevitably, eventually the building burns down, right?

This actually happened to an old house, an old abandoned house that’s in a village near here, about ten minutes away. And exactly that, we watched it deteriorate over a six month period and then it was burnt down one day. Anyway, the thing they did in New York with this was they cracked down on people not paying for the subway. So they had all of New York police, all of them. It was jaywalking and subway crimes, really minor crimes. And the theory was that if people see that we are all over the minor crimes, then the number of major crimes will drop. And I’m pretty sure that that’s what happened. I’d have to go and google that to check anyway. But it’s exactly the same broken windows theory on coming in late. Often it potentially will lead to other things, especially if your team see that you’re not dealing with it right. Another one. Then another problem that your staff will drop on you is too many private phone calls or these days, I guess it’s too much excessive messaging.

You know, when they’re messaging personally because they’re on their phone, unless you allow them to put like WhatsApp and the other messaging apps they use on their work computer, I guess you wouldn’t be too keen with that. But it’s one thing, isn’t it? If they’re messaging their colleagues on teams versus they’re doing their own WhatsApp. And we all talk to our people, don’t we? Our friends, our family throughout the day. That’s just how it is. It’s not like the 90s, when I started work, when you couldn’t take a phone call from your mum. When you’re at work because you’re supposed to be working these days, your mum can WhatsApp you or whatever. It’s when it becomes excessive. And I think it’s at the point that you notice it because remember, you’re the boss. And even if you sit there with them, you don’t notice things before the rest of your team do. So at the point that you notice it’s an excessive problem, it’s a massively excessive problem and you have to do something about it. And the solution for that is the same, which is talking to them. Why is it that they’ve just met someone and they’re messaging them all day? Is it that there’s a problem?

Is it that they’re just disrespecting everyone else and they’re not sort of keeping their end of it? And obviously you have different things. If there’s a problem, there’s a house move that they’re trying to arrange. That’s a short term thing, isn’t it? You can help them with that. You can say, let me give you some time during the day to go and do that. I think those one off events, you can actually be a better boss and really help them by helping them through problems, short term, temporary problems. But obviously, when it’s that long term thing, you’ve got to deal with it. Next we’ve got pilfering and theft. Now, these are two different things. Pilfering is when the postit notes accidentally go, hang on, let me put that in. Speech marks. The postit notes accidentally go home. We’ve all done it. You’ve raided the stationery cupboard. Right? When you work for someone. I did. Everyone does it. That’s probably why not having an office, because we are a completely remote business now. Not having an office is probably why our profits aren’t hit by postit note theft. But there is a massive difference between pilfering and theft. And you know where your line will be for that? I guess for you it’s around equipment.

If a Bluetooth keyboard goes missing, and that’s 40 pounds, $40, is that pilfering or is that theft? To me, that’s theft, because that’s a piece of hardware that could be sold to a client, obviously. Computer, that’s theft. A cable, if they take a. I nearly said an RS two three two cable there. Why would that even pop in my head? How do I even know what an RS two three two cable is anyway? If they take a USB cable home, is that pilfering? Probably, yes, because it’s like a $3 item. But what’s the difference between the two?

[00:11:32] Speaker B: Pilfering?

[00:11:32] Speaker A: I think happens in every business. But again, you’ve just got to keep a check on it. And that, to me, is where you talk to the group and you make light of it. You say, postit notes consumption in this business has gone up by 247% this year, and yet I never see postits around the office. So please, can you just all just bring it down a little bit with the random stealing of things? Make it funny, make it a joke. But you get the message across. Theft, of course, has to be dealt with one on one. And I genuinely believe if someone pinches a $40 item, you give them a warning.

Again, this is all about setting boundaries, isn’t it? Isn’t this.

It’s the same with children as it is with your life partner, as it is with your staff. It’s people. You have to set boundaries with people. And I think people need to understand where they are. If someone nicks a computer, then that’s a police matter. I do believe that. But obviously you’ll have your own line for that. Just remember, what’s the phrase I’m looking for here? The behavior you tolerate is the behavior that will be returned to you. If someone nicks a computer and you find out, even six months down the line and you do nothing about it, guess what? You’re tolerating theft from your business. And they’re not just stealing a computer, they’re stealing money from you. If they put their hand in a till, if you had a cash register and they put their hand in it and took out $1,000 and took that home. You wouldn’t accept that, right? Because that’s cash. Well, a computer is cash as well. It’s just cash that’s been turned into plastic and metal and stuff. Final one, then. Final common problem that employees will drop on you. Body odor. And this is a horrendous one. I’ve talked to so many MSPs about this, where they have a technician with a body odor problem. It’s a really hard one to tackle, and I don’t have a definitive answer on that. I think there are lots of different ways you can do it, and it depends on the dynamic in your business. Sometimes a trusted person talking to them can be the best way to do it. Like, a lot of MSPs I know have an office mom. So it’s an older woman who comes in to do like an admin role or some kind of marketing role, but they are a bit older, so they take on that kind of mom role. They’re just looking out for some of the younger staff. And that kind of person can very, very easily just take someone aside, just kind of in the kitchen, they’re making a coffee together and just say to them, have a little chat and say, well, this thing, I wouldn’t even know the words they would use because that’s not me. That’s not the thing I’m comfortable with. But a business mom, an office mom, would know how to do something like that. Or maybe you can have a word, but you just need to be really careful not to offend someone because no one wants to be told you stink, which, by the way, are the words you wouldn’t use. But no one wants to hear that, right? Because we don’t know. We smell.

So having a sniff there just to check, but I wouldn’t know, right? Because I’m smelling my own body odor all the time. And this is the problem. The other thing I think is you can just use peer pressure. I mean, you read things, don’t you? Like, let’s leave cans of deodorant on their desk. I think that’s horrendous. I think, however it’s dealt with, whether it is just colleagues mentioning it, or having a business mum mention it, or even doing a health drive and talking to everyone about exercise and personal hygiene and stuff, you’ve got to do it in a way where the person who’s got that problem has an opportunity to go and fix that problem personally and privately. Nothing is worse than being publicly identified and shamed for something you weren’t even aware of. Here’s this week’s clever idea.

Right now we’ve done the bad things that staff will drop on you. Let’s do three ways to help your staff feel special working for you. And there’s no gimmicks in this. I’m not going to talk about you giving them free stuff or having a slide to go from the second floor down to the first floor. Nothing like that. Because I think those things are just gimmicks. I really do. I’m talking about the things that actually make a difference to them. And it starts with looking at your staff and understanding, why do they work for you? They do not work for you just for money. That is an important part of it. Don’t pay them for three months and see how many of them turn up. Tip. It won’t be many. So money is an important thing, but very, very few staff just work for you just for the money alone. What they’re actually looking for is development. They’re looking for their skills to grow. They’re looking to have fun, right? So I think the three things that you can do to make them feel special working for you are these. And I’ll go into them in more detail in a second. But it’s. Number one is some form of appraisal, and I don’t mean a formal appraisal, but appraisals. Number two is training, and number three is to celebrate stuff. So let’s look at appraisals. So by appraisals, I don’t mean those horrendous formal sitting down. There’s all sorts of formats, aren’t there? There’s the 360 degree appraisals where someone above you and someone below you and colleagues at the same level of you, appraise you horrendous. There’s the formal appraisals that are done, where you sit down with someone and you talk about things. Those are all tools used by corporations where someone, a vice president of something, somewhere, needs 200 scores to present to the board to show that they’ve improved their staff, whatever level, by 17.4% this year. It’s all nonsense. It’s not real. When I say real, I mean real for businesses like ours, where it’s you and me and a bunch of people and we work with. Right. For that kind of stuff, formal appraisals are pointless. They really are. No one enjoys them.

In fact, if you’re the rare person who enjoys them, maybe you should be in HR instead of it. That was a joke. But most people don’t enjoy them. They’re a pain for you, they’re a pain for the staff member versus having a chat. But a structured chat, a structured chat with three questions, such as, what’s going well right now, what’s not going so well? What should you do differently? Imagine taking all of your team out for a beer. Like you and them go out for a beer, depending how many people you’ve got, this could be bad for your liver. But you and them go out for a beer once every two, three months, or a coffee or somewhere out of the building. You just go for a walk, right? Go for a walk together. That’s cool. And it’s not a formal appraisal. You don’t call it that at all. It’s just a chat. But the chat is very much structured. Let me say those three things again, because this is the world’s most effective structure for finding out what’s happening with your team. What’s going well right now, what’s not going so well, what should you be doing differently? That’s it. And obviously, you don’t have to use those same words all the time, but what an amazing framework for you talking to a member of your team, because it gets them talking about what they’re proud about, gets them talking about things that aren’t so good, and then you kind of set a bit of an action. What should you do differently? Well, actually, I’d like to do this and this. Great. Why don’t you do it? Come back to me, email me in the next two days to tell me how that’s going to happen. Something like that would be great. So appraisals are great, training is definitely great. And now we’re talking primarily about your techs here. But this does apply to all of your team. Everyone should have an opportunity for training. And training has lots of different kind of formats, doesn’t it? So we don’t do a lot of formal training here in our business, but we do educate ourselves and learn and develop on things. For example, at the beginning of last year, at the beginning of 2023, I was saying we, as a business, we want to get better at YouTube. And we spent, I think it was about $4,000 on a YouTube training course. And me and Simon and James, the three of us, we work on our podcasts and all of our videos and our YouTube, and we did this training together. And I’ll be honest, they did the work. I just kind of jumped in and reviewed the notes on it. But then we had some meetings and we’d sit into discussions and it has led to us changing what we do with our YouTube. And it’s early days and we’ve got to get better at it, because everything is a constant school lesson, isn’t it? Everything you’ve got to get better at. But that wasn’t formal training, that was a really fun course that we did, which then triggered us off down a different direction. And we’re still learning. Every single time we do a video we learn something new off it. It’s brilliant. But that’s training. That’s actually fun training. People think of training as sitting doing an online course or sitting in a classroom. I can’t think of anything worse. Maybe that’s a personality thing. I don’t like sitting in formal education settings. I like interesting training that engages me. I like going to seminars and I like big raw stuff, or working in a group and watching some videos and discussing it. That works for me. You’ve got to find what works best for your team. And of course each individual person is going to have a different thing. One of the really cool ideas, an MSP I was working with years ago and I can’t remember if this was, I think this was either Ben Schneider or Ollie Denhard. I think that’s your surname, Ollie. I just know you as Ollie.

And if it was one of you guys, just reach out to me and let me know. Or if I’m talking about something here and you gave me the idea and I haven’t mentioned you, reach out to me and I’ll give you the credit in the podcast because you deserve it. They did a really cool thing where they set a budget for their staff every year, and the budget was, they might say to them, right, you’ve got $1,000 for training this year. So you can choose, you get to choose what technical training you do, up to the value of $1,000.

But you must spend that money and do that training this year. And if you don’t, you don’t get a pay rise next year. So let’s think about that. So you give someone a budget, you let them pick the training, so they’re picking the things they’re most interested in and they must spend the money or they don’t get the pay rise, so they must do the training because you want all your techs to be regularly doing training, right? If they choose that training and then don’t do it, that’s a problem. So they’ve got to get sign off from you on the training skills they pick. And the reason for that is you don’t want them going and training on a skill that you would never use in the MSP, but would allow them to get a new, better job elsewhere next year. Right? So you might not touch servers. They want to train on servers and do some server skills course. Obviously you would put a kibosh on that. You would say no to that. But you get the idea. And I think it’s such a wonderful thing. Essentially this creates a culture of training within the business where they have to tell you, this is where I’m going to invest my cash, your cash. This is where I’m going to invest into the training and this is the training I did. And they have to give you kind of a summary afterwards. Maybe they have to make a five minute presentation back to the team when they’ve done some training.

It kind of turns the whole culture of the place into a culture of training, which is great. Then the final one is celebration. Celebration is easy. You celebrate everything. You celebrate birthdays, you celebrate anniversaries, you celebrate wins. You commiserate losses. If a client comes on board, you celebrate. If you lose a client, you commiserate. But you turn everything into a celebration and just do a variety of different things. One day it could be pizzas, another day it could be, let’s all go to that mexican restaurant. Another day it could be, you guys get to go home at three today. I’m going to cover the help desk. It could be. Why doesn’t everyone take Monday off? There’s all sorts of different ways you can celebrate. And never forget that the tiny little things can have the biggest impact. Something as simple as Friday afternoon, 03:00 p.m. Hey guys, it’s been a great week. Phones are really quiet. Everyone go home. By the way, I bought you all a four pack of beer. Or for those of you that don’t drink, here’s some ginger beer. Whatever. Here’s some seven up. What an amazing boss you would be. What would that cost you? $20. Right? And 2 hours on the phone hoping and praying that no one calls up with a ransomware attack. But you get the idea. Yeah, that would make you the world’s best boss if you did something as simple as that. Paul’s. Paul’s blatant plug. Latent plug. You know, I just mentioned that YouTube course right there. If you want to see the latest kind of YouTube videos we’re putting out, which we are deliberately making edutainment, we’re trying to entertain you while educate you about growing your MSP. Just go on to YouTube.com slash MSP marketing.

[00:23:09] Speaker B: Hello, I’m Craig Fulton. I’m an advisor at Evergreen, and my job is to make sure that MSPs get the most value out of their business.

[00:23:17] Speaker A: Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Craig. You are on a list of people who keep getting recommended to me, and it’s been great to finally get you onto the show because you are someone with a very long reach back into the world of MSPs, and I know you’re doing some very exciting stuff going forward with the MSP. You’re currently working with Evergreen and particularly m a activity, mergers and acquisition within the sphere in the US. So we’ll talk about that in a little bit. Let’s, first of all, start by looking back at what you have done. So for those MSPs who are thinking, hey, I know this guy’s name. I remember this guy. Tell us a bit about your background and why someone would know you.

[00:23:56] Speaker B: Yeah, they probably know me from my time at Connectwise. But what people may not know is I did get my start in tech in the mid 90s, took the similar path that a lot of people took, got certifications. I called it pay my dues at a big help desk for eight years, and then landed at an MSP called Connectwise in Tampa. Was working there a couple years, met Arnie Bellini, and the fun began.

I started implementing the software, supporting it, became chief product officer at Connectwise for a few years, managing the product development and go to market. And then the last four years of the company was the chief customer officer, running support, customer success, implementation. And people may have seen me from the big stage at it nation, too.

[00:24:42] Speaker A: Well, that’s just crazy. Absolutely crazy. So you were right there at the very beginning. That must have been a hell of a ride for you.

[00:24:48] Speaker B: Yeah, it was. When I started, I think there was about 30 people at the company. And then when I switched to the software side with Arnie, we had about 400, 500 partner companies. And now when I left, I think it was probably over 20,000. So it was quite a ride. I loved it.

[00:25:07] Speaker A: That’s great. And what’s your sort of favorite thing as you look back on that journey? What’s the thing that you’re either most proud of or was the most fun for you?

[00:25:15] Speaker B: Yeah. The community. I learned a lot from working with IT service companies, helping them transition and manage services.

I owe all the success I have to all of those MSP owners and technicians and finance people that educated me while I and then gave the education back. So the community was probably my most noteworthy.

[00:25:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And do you think that’s the thing that a lot of people still remember you? And I’m talking about you as if you’re dead, which is awful because obviously you’re not.

[00:25:46] Speaker B: You’re live here on the podcast.

[00:25:48] Speaker A: But you know what I mean, though, when people look back, because sometimes when you vanish from a big name like Connectwise, and we’ll talk about why you left and what you moved on to do in a second, but when you disappear and people are like, oh, that guy’s moved on. We love dealing with him. We love seeing him on stage. And then you kind of do get forgotten, don’t you, quite quickly. People’s minds are very fickle for that kind of thing.

As you look back. Is that the thing that you think people are most likely to remember you for?

[00:26:14] Speaker B: I think a lot of people would remember me as someone that just delivered on what I said.

They could rely on me to pick up the phone, to answer the emails. My mother was a librarian growing up in the library. I just had that service oriented coaching the most influential years of my life. So when I got into tech, I’ve just always been a servant to people and want to help, and I think I’m known for that. Right. And when people see me at conferences, they’re like, that’s the guy you can go to to get things done. So I’m pretty proud of that.

[00:26:47] Speaker A: Yeah. And that’s such a cool positioning to have to be that guy.

And I’m kind of looking more for your opinions on this. And let’s label this clearly as just an opinion. As that business grew and became the force that we know it as today, how did it change? Because I’m guessing businesses like that that become something bigger than I guess anyone ever thought they would become. How does it change and how does that sort of affect you on a day to day basis?

[00:27:17] Speaker B: Yeah. The change was really around the business transformation we were doing for companies.

We never really saw ourselves as a software company. We saw ourselves as a company that does business transformation, get into it services, help them scale, help them convert to managed services if that’s their path. And we just had a tremendous trajectory. Right. The escape velocity took off. And I think one of the biggest challenges during that is growth. Right.

You’re trying to keep up with the demand that’s coming in, which is a great thing, but it does make it hard to scale when the numbers are accelerating like that. And my advice to anyone, whether they have a SaaS company or an MSP is be ahead of that. Do the best you can. I just led a session at a conference this week. It build it about operational sustainability, because I’ve lived through a lot of those pains and learned some things there. But the biggest challenge is just keeping up with that. Right. And making sure that people always feel like they’re getting a great experience.

[00:28:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I can imagine. And there aren’t many people who get to be part of something like that, so it must have been a hell of an experience for you. So tell us why you left Connectwise and what the plan was when you did that.

[00:28:34] Speaker B: Yeah. So I’m pretty open about this. It’s very personal, but mental health is something that we hear about in the news and people talk about. I had been struggling for a couple of years with, I think Covid kind of knocked me back. I had grown at Connectwise to feel that my value was in leading people and being present and in front of people. And when we all started going home, I was really challenged with, what is my purpose every day? Where am I adding value anymore? And I’d kind of slipped into a dark place. And as I evaluated that with my thought, you know, it’s probably time to take a little bit of a break. And Jason McGee, the CEO of Connectwise, phenomenal person to work with, he was always supportive of me. And when I made the decision, like, hey, I think I just need a change. 16 years is a long time. I think a lot of people agree. Like, that’s pretty admirable. And, yeah, it makes sense that to try something else. So I took some time off to figure out what that was. Yeah.

[00:29:36] Speaker A: And Bravo to you, and thank you for being so open about that on the podcast. I know you’ve spoken about it elsewhere. You’re right.

Let’s be honest. We’ve got an industry here that’s very, very heavily skewed towards men, often, sometimes sort of more middle aged men and the kind of people that don’t like to talk about mental health. And even in the seven years that I’ve been here, I’ve seen that the subject of mental health come up more and more. But I still feel there’s so much further we can go, and there’s so much more that we can all do to support all of everyone’s mental health. There’s always someone, you know, suffering. It’s just, you don’t know that they’re in trouble.

[00:30:15] Speaker B: Right. And sometimes it’s just a simple thing of just talk about it a lot of people want to hold it in, and I did because I was a little embarrassed. But then when I finally started talking about it with my team and peers and friends, like, hey, man, I just see the negative in everything anymore.

I don’t know what to do to get out of this.

So, yeah, that’s why anybody struggling right now, that’s what I’d say, is just don’t be afraid to be vulnerable.

[00:30:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. You and I need a virtual hug right now. We need to do some virtual backslapping. Right.

I would do the actual movements because I’m worried my camera focus is going to go.

There we go. Consider yourself virtual hugged. Thank you.

Post connect wise, then, you’ve had this insane 16 year journey. It’s been a hell of a joyride for you, I can see. And how do you follow that up? What do you do next?

[00:31:12] Speaker B: Right? Yeah.

I love stories. I consider myself a storyteller, and I always love hearing someone’s story. And for my story, I thought, this feels great. I got into tech. I worked on a help desk. I tried to do my own thing, found myself in an MSP, helped others become MSPs. And now it just felt like I’ve seen so many people work so hard on their business, provide great jobs for their friends and people in their community, enable businesses in their communities. I want to make sure they get the financial payout they deserve. And it just feels like the natural progression of the next thing for me was okay. I’ve met thousands of MSPs, hundreds I have very close relationships with. And I laugh because I just think of all the stories of mountain climbing with people sleeping in tents and snowboarding. And I just felt like, yeah, I want to help them get that big payout. Right. And more than just money, financial freedom, it does help.

There’s so many options out there. And I felt like I want people to know what those are.

[00:32:26] Speaker A: And so what did you do with that?

[00:32:28] Speaker B: Yeah, someone I met along the way, I was really close with. He had sold his company to Evergreen, and he said, you should check them out. And I was like, I don’t know. We’ll see. I have some ideas of Christmas tree farming, and I don’t know if I want to do tech. So I did reach out to Ramsey Sayyun at Evergreen. He’s a co founder and started talking to him. And as we talked over the months, it started to feel like a good fit and something I got excited about. And so I joined the company in May to get the word out.

[00:32:59] Speaker A: Fantastic. So tell us what Evergreen is, let’s assume that everyone listening to this hasn’t heard that name before.

[00:33:06] Speaker B: Yeah, Evergreen is a holding company. So think about the Berkshire Hathaway model of doing business right, acquiring companies to hold them forever. And I think that’s what differentiates it from a lot of the other models that are out there. And I’m not saying it’s the only one, but I think it’s a great option for MSPs. We acquire businesses, again, hold forever. Right. Long term planning, so people don’t make short term decisions that may harm the business. We retain the brand, we retain the leadership. We really get focused on the customers. We keep the tools and the processes, everything in place. But we work together to help that business grow.

And it’s a very unique way that it’s set up. Some owners decide to leave when they sell, some decide, I’m going to stay on for a year or two, some longer. So there’s a lot of options and what we can do here. But what really resonates with me, my personality and everything I’ve done is just preservation of that business that so much effort has gone in to build. I think that’s important. And I feel like that’s what a lot of people are looking for.

[00:34:13] Speaker A: Yeah. So when the owner joins Evergreen, whether they choose to stay or leave, the business keeps its name, it keeps its staff, it keeps its premises, but it’s now part of something bigger. Is that how it works?

[00:34:24] Speaker B: That’s right.

And a lot of people ask, like, wait, how do you manage all that? Because we have over 70 MSPs now globally and growing, and we put them into regional groups and think of them as like mega peer groups. This industry is very familiar with a peer group model.

So in North America, we’ve got an eastern peer group that includes Canada. We have a southern and a western with like 20 MSPs in each group. And there’s a small operating team there with a CEO, a CFO, a growth vp, some analysts, some talent people, and they all work together. It’s an opt in kind of thing. Nothing is forced. They work together. Some examples of some things they do is build marketing engines that benefit their group work together on cross selling services from one MSP to another. It’s really fascinating to watch and I’m just thrilled to be a part of it.

[00:35:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I bet. I mean, that’s a beautifully unique model. And I sold a business, it was outside of the channel. I sold a marketing business back in 2016. And actually within six months, the name of that business had gone and the staff that I’d spent years building up and protecting had been decimated. And as a business owner, you do have more of a vested interest in the longevity of your baby than it’s nice to get the money, it’s nice to get the payday. But there’s also six months down the line. If you can’t look your old clients in the face because what you built over a decade has been taken apart in front of you, that’s actually kind of a very sad thing. So I think this is a wonderful model. So what’s your job? Obviously, your role is getting word out. Do you go and meet with MSP owners who are thinking of exiting, or do you just get to do cool stuff like appear on podcasts?

[00:36:15] Speaker B: I get to do cool stuff like, I actually love my job. They say if you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life. It really just feels like me with a good work life balance too. So what I get to do is get the brand of Evergreen out, get the word out.

I never saw myself as a networker until I got this position realizing, wait. I actually do know a lot of people and I’ve been reaching out to some long term relationships and I do my best to make sure it doesn’t come across as salesy. I really just want to present the option to people and let them know it’s there and see where they’re at on their journey. So building the brand, evangelizing what we’re doing, opening the door for the M A team into some MSPs I know are fantastic. And there’s plenty of, you know, a lot of in person. So I’m back on the road full time. Just wrapped up an event this week. I was in London last week doing some things and there’s a lot going on in October, so a lot of people are going to see me out there. And if they do, I hope they stop and say hi.

[00:37:22] Speaker A: Fantastic. I’m sure they will. Let’s just talk briefly about MNA, some mergers and acquisition. And just to make clear for you, Craig, our audience, this podcast is completely worldwide. So we have a ton of listeners in the US, we have a ton of listeners in the UK, Australia as well. And then probably about last time I looked at the stats, it was about 30 other countries. So you can assume that if English is a predominant language in that country, that there’s MSPs listening. So I realize you and I are going to have to talk mostly about the US and the UK because that’s where your experience is. But we’ve seen over the last few years, a couple of things change, haven’t we? Or certainly I have. And it’d be interesting to get your perspective. I’ve seen the rise of what is called the super MSP. So maybe it feels like Evergreen doesn’t fit into that, but the super MSP is a big company to start with. That goes and then acquires large size MSPs in different cities. So that that’s how it’s sort of growing across an entire area. And then the other thing we’re seeing is an absolute flood of private equity money. So what is essentially cheap money coming in to fund these kind of mergers, build up these large groups? Is that what you’re seeing? Is that your experience? And where does evergreen sort of fit into that?

[00:38:40] Speaker B: Yeah, that is what I’ve seen. I’d say first you saw private equity money come into the vendor space in this market, right, looking at SaaS companies, because it’s a juicy place to be, right. There’s a lot of recurring revenue in SaaS. So you see that start there, and then private equity firms are saying, wait, hold on, do the customers of these businesses have recurring revenue as well?

So you saw that about ten years ago, really start to go in before private equity got in, you just saw MSPs acquiring other MSPs and their geographic areas. But then you see private equity come in and I think where there were some mistakes made at first was acquire MSPs, and let’s put the SaaS playbook on them, right? And then that’s when you saw the erosion of customers and staff, and then you almost saw a rewind on that. And then these platform roll up. There’s a lot of different terms for it. Companies really start to emerge and start acquiring other MSPs, bring them into the fold, almost franchise them under a brand. And then you saw this third wave where, okay, we’re going to acquire the companies, but keep them the same, but they’re under our ownership. And that’s where I put Evergreen. But we do, at Evergreen, at the holding company level, we do see ourselves as one big global MSP, but the operations are still very decentralized.

[00:40:09] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I realize what I’m about to say here is a bit of a finger in the air answer in that. Who knows? Because it’s a crystal ball question. But you’re involved in an organization that is heavily into M A. So I’m guessing you must have seen research, you must have spoken to consultants. How do you think it’s going to change over the next few years.

[00:40:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I think what we’re seeing is just sort of a plateau in the valuations, right. They’re not climbing like they used to. And that’s pretty much being pushed by macroeconomic conditions, the rise in interest rates, a lot of companies will debt leverage businesses. So with an increase in the interest rate and what it costs to borrow money, you’re seeing the valuations kind of even out. Right. Because five years ago someone would have. Five plus years ago, you would have seen someone getting maybe three or four X EBITDA. And then as we went into 2020 and things got hot, those numbers started to double, in some cases triple. You’ve seen that kind of even out now and then, aside from the financial side of things, I think you’re going to see more movement because you have a whole generation that I would put myself in of people that got started in tech in the. They say for an entrepreneur, 17 to 20 years is that magic number where it’s like, okay, I’ve gone as far as I’m going to go and I think there’s a lot of companies in that, so we’re going to see it. Even though we’ve been saying, oh, MNA is heating up, it’s heating up. I think we’re going to see something more explosive happening, especially for know we’re going global. Our first acquisition in the UK just closed it a couple of weeks ago.

We’re pretty heavy in there and moving in there and we’re looking at other geographies as well. So I think you’re going to see more start to do that.

[00:42:02] Speaker A: Yeah, it’s exciting. And I think I’ve been in sectors before which was consolidated around me, particularly veterinary, in the UK. I was heavily into that sector when a flood of american money came in and just changed the whole sector in a number of years. And it’s kind of scary for the owners who are there at the time, but what it creates is massive opportunities. As you say, people who are done, they’ve had their business time and they want to get out. And I think having three or four different options, we could sell to the MSP down the road, or we could sell to the super MSP, or we could become part of a group and retain our identity. I think having all of those options is only good. I think, so long as the end customers end up looked after as well as they’re looked after by the individual MSPs, then maybe, just maybe, this drive of acquisitions and this drive of consolidation will be a good thing. Ok, Craig, let’s pause what we’re talking about there. Thank you so much for your time. It’ll be great to get you back on in a couple of years time, maybe even next year, certainly the year after. Let’s track what’s happening. Let’s track what’s doing. What we might even do is perhaps get on some of the MSPs who’ve been part of that group. This is something we’ve done before. We did it with a company in the UK that’s acquiring MSPs. We got on two or three of the owners that they’d acquired a few years post acquisition, and it was really interesting to hear the stories of the owners and how from memories some time ago. But one of them had left and had loved getting out immediately, and one of them had stayed in and enjoyed running the business without having to worry about all the stupid things that keep business owners up at night. So let’s get you back on the podcast again. Just finally tell us what’s the best way to get in touch with you. So obviously you’re going to be at so many events, but how can we reach you digitally as well?

[00:43:56] Speaker B: Yeah, email is wide open. I’m pretty responsive. C. Fulton@evergreensg.com you can also check out our website, evergreensg.com as well. And I’d love to hear from you if you’re tuned in and you have any questions, again, even if it’s how can I add value my business. We love to share what we’ve learned to help companies.

[00:44:19] Speaker A: Paul Paul Paul Greens, MSP Marketing podcast week’s recommended book hi, I’m Josh.

[00:44:28] Speaker B: I’m a technical recruiter from Beaumont. I’m a specialist MSP recruiter. My business book recommendation is on recruitment by Mitch Sullivan, which will help you learn some of the lessons that I have over the last nine years of my career. That breaks down some of the biases you have with recruitment.

[00:44:44] Speaker A: It also helps you sort of rethink.

[00:44:46] Speaker B: The way that you advertise your MSP to prospective hires and new candidates that.

[00:44:50] Speaker A: You would like to join your business coming up next week.

[00:44:55] Speaker C: Hi, I’m Chaya Glatt. I am a copywriter and brand messaging specialist. If you’re an MSP, you know that trust and credibility are the biggest drivers in bringing you your next customer. Building credibility with social proof on your website is going to be so important. I’m going to talk about exactly how to do that using social proof in multiple forms. So join me on Paul’s podcast and we will dive into it it.

[00:45:25] Speaker A: And on top of that interview next week, let’s follow up on what Craig was talking about just a few minutes ago. Next week, let’s ask you if you could buy another MSP. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP. Made in the UK for MSPs around the world, Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.