Episode 135: Mop up old prospects with a sales week

Episode 135: Mop up old prospects with a sales week

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 135: Mop up old prospects with a sales week
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Episode 135 includes:

  • How to earn an extra 100k by running a sales week
  • Why repeating yourself in sales conversations is a good thing
  • Plus in the show this week, how will mergers & acquisitions change over the next year

Featured guest

Harry Brelsford is a featured guest on the MSP Marketing Podcast

Thank you to Harry Brelsford from SMB Nation for joining Paul to talk about what mergers and acquisitions might mean for MSPs in 2022.

Entrepreneur Harry is the founder of SMB Nation (www.smbnation.com) from Austin, Texas. He oversees the popular SMB Nation workflow including marketing analytics, content and events (webinars, workshops and multi-day conferences). He holds an MBA in Project Management from the University of Denver (and numerous certifications such as MCSE, MCT, CNE, et al) and is the author of 23 books on technology and business topics. His 20 years of SMB technology experience were supplemented by teaching 12+ years at night as an adjunct professor at Seattle Pacific University and other higher-learning institutions. Harry is a board member at Moonshot Equity Partners and an in-demand speaker at industry events. An active entrepreneur, Harry is the force behind the Pocket MBA, Telephonation, Cloud Nation and XPmigrations.com. His latest startup The CannaTech Group.

Connect with Harry on LinkedIn:

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

Show notes

Episode transcription

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

Paul Green:
Ooh, fancy seeing you here again. Here’s what we got coming up in today’s show.

Harry Brelsford:
2022. It’s still a healthy M&A environment, but these things are like windows. And sometimes the windows open and sometimes the windows close. We’re coming into a economic period where that window may start to close.

Paul Green:
That’s Harry Brelsford, he’s the founder of SMB Nation. And he’s joining me later on in the show to talk about a number of things, including murders and acquisitions. Did I say murders? I mean, mergers and acquisitions. I’m thinking a bit too much American Psycho there. He’s also going to be talking about the opportunities for MSPs in the current cannabis tech in the US. And we’ll be talking about the potential distractions of having side hustles.

Paul Green:
It’s a great interview and it’s coming up later in the show. We’re also going to be talking about why it doesn’t matter if you have the same sales conversations again and again and again with all of your prospects, because those sales conversations aren’t really for you. It’s an important part of the process for them to decide that they really need to sign your contract.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast.

Paul Green:
Right. Question for you. What are you doing next week? Have a look in your calendar right now. Have you got any big meetings planned in, any major project work, or is it just another normal week for you? If it’s just another normal week, let me suggest an activity which could actually put 100,000 in the bank. Over a period of months and years, but still 100,000 in the bank.

Paul Green:
What I’m going to suggest is that next week you declare to be sales week. Now in reality, every week should be sales week. You should be pushing sales and just generally pushing prospects and moving things forward all the time. But I know that life gets in the way of the things that you should be doing. What if you declared next week to be sales week and you focused a set of activities every single day next week on finding leads, turning those leads into prospects and turning those prospects into qualified opportunities? People who really, really could go on to buy from you.

Paul Green:
The easiest way to get started with sales week is to look back at all of your previous sales opportunities. In fact, you could do this now. It would take you, what, 20 minutes to pull together a list of people to target next week. Go back through all of your notepads. Who are all the people that you’ve spoken to, that you’ve had conversations with about their technology? And you can go back five, maybe even 10 years. In fact, if the average client stays with an MSP for three, to five, to seven years, you absolutely should be going back right now to those people that you were talking to three, to five, to seven years ago, because you never know, they might be ready to make a switch again.

Paul Green:
Look through your notepads, look through your emails, look through your sales system. Look through your CRM. Pull out all of those business cards, hiding in drawers in your desk. Any data you’ve got anywhere. Who are all the people that you have spoken to in the past, who did a bad thing? They chose someone else. They chose not to go with you. There’s bound to be a ton of them. You’ve just got to find out who they are. And then next week you could target them in a sales week.

Paul Green:
The first job then is to pull all that data together. Get all of that different data, stick it into either a spreadsheet or a basic CRM. Don’t overthink that. I mean, don’t turn that into next week’s activity. That’s just a basic thing to get yourself organised. But once you’ve got that data pulled together, next week you can target it. And there are a number of things that you could do.

Paul Green:
You could perhaps send an email to those people. And I don’t really mean a broadcast email from a CRM. I mean a one-on-one email. You could just drop them an email along the lines of, “Oh. Hi, Scott. How are you? Can you believe it’s been seven years since we spoke? Yeah, that’s right back in 2014, you were looking for a new IT support company. And we had a few meetings. You chose to go with someone else at the time, which is fine.” Would you say that as a line, does that make you sound a bit bitter? Maybe.

Paul Green:
Hey, put that into your own words. “But you went with someone else, you loser. You picked the wrong MSP and I’m just wondering, how are things right now? Are you still happy with the guys that you chose or are you entering that process? Again, of looking at someone else? Loads has changed for us in the seven years and I’m sure it has for you too. It would be great to reconnect.”

Paul Green:
Now let’s say you had 50 people that you’ve previously spoken to. You are not a stranger to them. You’re not their friend. They don’t know who you are, but you are not a complete stranger to them. Even if they sat in a room with you seven years ago, there will be a vague memory of that. If you dropped all 50 of those people more or less the same email, but you email them individually. Which is, what, half an hour’s work at tops? The numbers game alone says that a small proportion of those people will email you back. Now, even if that was one or 2%, that’s okay. Because one or 2% are 50. Well, that’s just one people, one people, one person. One person emailing you back. That’s okay. One person emailing you back is engagement.

Paul Green:
I reckon actually of 50 people you’ve had a previous engagement with, you’d get two, three, maybe even five of those people emailing you back. And one or two of them, it might be a case of, “Hey, yeah. We remember you not really interested in talking right now.” But then there might be someone else. In fact, you will ask yourself, “Why would someone email back?” Either because they’re being polite or because they are ready or nearly ready, willing, and able to have a sales conversation with you.

Paul Green:
I would definitely email those people. What you should also do and in fact, this is the most productive thing you could do next week is of course, to just pick up the phone and call those people. You could just call those 50 people off the bat, or you could take those 50 people you emailed and call the 45 who didn’t bother to reply to you. That would be potentially a good thing to do as well.

Paul Green:
The other thing you could do is send them something in the post. Perhaps send them a printed newsletter, send them some literature. You could write something and get it printed. It doesn’t have to be anything clever. You could just take a copy of something that you’ve seen, print something you’ve seen on the web and just put a little Post-it Note on the top saying, “Hey, it’s been years since we’ve spoken, but I saw this and I thought of you guys.” Anything you can send to someone to reengage them is a good thing.

Paul Green:
But don’t think you can just send an email, or just make one phone call, or just send one thing in the post during your sales week. You’re probably going to have to do a number of different things to get these people to talk to you. The goal here is to cross off those 50 people and to say, “Right. I know because I’ve spoken to 10 or 20 or 30 of them, I know that those are not my opportunities right now. Therefore, I’m going to focus all of my attention on the 20 people that I haven’t yet been able to get hold of.”

Paul Green:
You take 50 prospects who are qualified. They’re qualified in that you wanted their business a number of years ago, and we can assume that they have moved on in some ways. They could be even bigger businesses now. That’s what makes them qualified. Let’s assume they understand what it is that they’re buying because you are not their first MSP they’ve bought from at least one before. This is a really hot list for you. All you’ve got to get right in this, well, there’s two things really. The first thing is you’ve got to get the timing right. And the second thing is that you’ve got to get the engagement right.

Paul Green:
The timing is completely out of your hands. Now might be a good time to talk. Now could be the worst time to talk. They might just have picked a new IT company a couple of weeks ago and that would be awful timing, wouldn’t it. But there’s only one way to find out. And that’s just to hit all of them and attempt to have a conversation with all of them.

Paul Green:
If you could have next week, 3, 4, 5 decent conversations with old prospects, even if nothing comes out of it next week, what a week that’s going to be. What a week that sales week is going to be because you’ll have had three, four or five conversations and you don’t normally do that. That sales week can be great for your self-esteem. It can be great for your sales process.

Paul Green:
And do you know what? I wouldn’t put money on it. Well, no, go on I’ll bet you a Snickers. I bet you a Snickers, that if you work 50 old prospects, next week, there will be an opportunity you uncover. And it might not be an amazing opportunity, but you never know. It might be a piece of work that could lead onto some proper manage services, some proper monthly recurring revenue.

Paul Green:
If you do work that 50 and you don’t get anything out of it, genuinely, all 50 are dead, drop me an email and I will send you eight Snickers bar. Whereas if you do work those 50 and you get something out of it, yeah, you can send me a Snickers. The address is on the website if you want to send me one. Go on make next week a sales week. Target some old prospects really throw yourself into it. It only needs to be a couple of hours a day. And that could be enough to potentially when you a brand new client and hundreds of thousands of long-term lifetime revenue.

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

Paul Green:
Talking about prospects, have you ever noticed that when you’re sitting down with a company that could potentially become a client, they always seem to give you very similar stories? When you are asking them about their business in a sales meeting, you ask them open questions. Don’t you? You ask them things like, “Tell me about your business. What do you guys do? How do you do that? What are the things that make you successful? Where do you sit in the marketplace?” All of those kind of things, they tend to be unique.

Paul Green:
But when you ask them questions, like tell me about your technology. How do you keep ransomware out of your business? Talk me through how you back up all of your data. What would happen if you were to lose internet access for 24 hours? Who has access to what data within the business? How do you think your clients would react if they knew that their data had been leaked in some kind of cybersecurity incident? And all of the other questions that you ask.

Paul Green:
I suspect, if you are like most MSPs, that the answers you get back will be the same. They don’t really understand what cybersecurity is. Certainly when you probe, you realise that they don’t understand. They know that they’ve got a backup yet. They couldn’t tell you how that backup actually works. Or when the last time was someone checked it or verified it. You get the same answers again and again and again. And you know what? That’s normal, completely normal.

Paul Green:
In fact, let’s use Pareto’s Principle. Around about 80% of the answers that you get back from the prospects you’re talking to is going to be the same kind of stuff. They may not be using the exact same words, but the themes of what they are saying are exactly the same. And this is normal. In fact, it’s to be expected.

Paul Green:
Now, this doesn’t mean that you can coast your way through these sales meetings. It doesn’t mean that you can switch off mentally and stop listening to them. You’ve got to listen to them. If anything, you must listen because later on in that sales meeting, and this is a powerful tip if you don’t do it, you can repeat their language back to them.

Paul Green:
One of the quickest ways to bond with someone during a sales meeting is to take the exact words that they say, the exact words in the exact order they say them and repeat those words back to those people. That’s a very powerful concept in a sales meeting. No, the fact that they are saying the same things as all the other prospects is a good thing because that sales meeting isn’t really for you. That sales meeting is for them.

Paul Green:
It’s for them to go through an emotional process of realising that your MSP is the best choice for them. And you cannot get them to make a cognitive decision about this. Most B2B sales in most situations, the decision is not made by the brain. The decision is made by their emotions and it’s just rubber stamped by the brain. Because they don’t really know what they’re buying. They don’t understand technology. They certainly don’t understand any of the techy things that you’ve said to them, which is why it’s best not to talk about technology during a sales meeting. You talk about outcomes. You talk about safety, you talk about security, but you don’t actually talk about the details of technology. You do that and you’re dead in the water.

Paul Green:
They’re making emotional decisions and the emotions need to go through certain processes. It’s why we don’t meet our perfect partner at 9:00 PM of an evening and be on a knee, a bended knee by 9:30, asking them to marry us. We tend to wait at least a few more weeks to do that. You don’t propose to someone on the first date, unless you are in Las Vegas. You don’t propose to someone on the first date because we need to build a relationship with someone. We need to go through an emotional process of realising that they’re the right person for us.

Paul Green:
And it’s no different for your prospect deciding to buy from you. At the point that you find yourself getting slightly bored with sales meetings, because it’s the same kind of thing again, and again, and again, relax. It means that you are doing a good job. If you are hearing the same answers to the questions you normally ask, this is a good thing. It means they’re going through that process. Their emotions are engaging with you. They are making the correct decision that you are the best MSP for them right now.

Paul Green:
Do not interrupt that process. It’s a process you’ve got to go through each time. And yeah, that means an hour invested of your time. But hey, it potentially means 100,000 or more of lifetime revenue. There aren’t many industries out there where you can get £100,000 or $100,000 of lifetime revenue just for sitting with someone, asking them the same questions and getting the same answers again and again and again. What a wonderful world we live in.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
Thank you for listening to this podcast. I do appreciate you giving me your time. And I also appreciate that you are actually listening for you. You’re listening to get ideas to grow your business. Nothing wrong with that. That’s the point of the podcast.

Paul Green:
There is another free resource that goes hand in hand with this podcast. And that’s a Facebook group. It’s the MSP Marketing Facebook group. How many members have we got right now? 1,581 members. And they are all MSPs, because this is a vendor-free zone. We do actually check that you’re an MSP when you apply to join.

Paul Green:
And it’s a Facebook group where you can ask me and your peers, all those other 1,500 MSPs from around the world, you can ask them questions about marketing and growing your business. If I just look at some of the things that we’ve got in here, we’ve got an article about the rise of the super MSP. That was an interesting one. We’ve got someone asking here. This is John asking, “Can anyone share any success stories of MSP, B2B marketing with Instagram?” It’s got a couple of comments on that.

Paul Green:
Now this is a good one. This has got a ton of contents on it. Sarah has asked, “Free IT security review.” Sarah says, “I’ve seen lots of IT companies advertising this on their website recently in my competitor research. But what are people using to do this? Are you using a piece of software that creates a report? That seems too techy. Or do you use an actual engineer who visits the site? That seems expensive.?

Paul Green:
And then someone’s commented below, “I’ve never seen a free review actually work.” And James has replied, “Actually it works for us all of the time. We do network detective scan, Nessus scan internal.” Have I pronounce that correctly? “Aches internal and external, Office 365, audit, dark web audit.” And there’s a whole load of other things he posts. And he says, “This quarter, we’ve done five audits and landed three deals. All of these monthly, $1,300, $5,000 and $6,000.” That’s pretty impressive. Isn’t it?

Paul Green:
There’s some really, really inspirational stuff in this group. If you’re not a member and you’re genuinely an MSP. And please don’t apply to join if you work for vendors, I love vendors. It’s just this is not your resource. This is just for MSPs to talk about marketing and business growth. Pull up a Facebook on your phone right now. Literally, go on your phone, tap on the Facebook button. Go into the search bar at the top, type in MSP marketing, but then go to groups. And you’ll see my little face.

Paul Green:
Now take your finger, poke me in the face with your finger. Oh, it did hurt a bit. It’s quite hard. You didn’t have to do it so hard. There’s the group. Now, apply to join, answer the questions and we will let you in. And I’ll love to have a chat with you in the MSP Marketing Facebook group.

Voiceover:
The big interview

Paul Green:
Towards the end of this interview you’ll hear me and Harry discussing the four big vendors and how often they buy other companies. Just to set some context to this, we recorded this interview at the start of April and before Kaseya announced its acquisition of Datto.

Harry Brelsford:
I’m Harry Brelsford. I’m the founder of SMB Nation and I do about four or five other side hustles.

Paul Green:
And you have so much going on, Harry. I know this because I actually appeared on your podcast a few months ago and I was delighted when you said that you would come and appear on this podcast. We’re going to talk about some of your side hustles later on. In particular today, I want to talk to you about M&A, mergers and acquisitions. And what’s happening in our world with M&A amongst MSPs? Before we do, just tell us a little bit more about you. Who are you? Tell us the full story, the full Harry story.

Harry Brelsford:
Okay. Well, early Microsoft vendors started in 1989. I was on the Excel 3.0 team with a Lotus macro interpreter. That led to getting involved in Windows server, Windows small business server behind the scenes in ’97. And that’s where I built my reputation.

Harry Brelsford:
My company, SMB Nation, was built around being a community for small business server. And it was all fine and good until 2014, when Microsoft finally permanently removed the product from the market to push you to Office 365 consumption. I’ve got on to do other things, an analytics startup and two or three other things we’ll talk about later.

Harry Brelsford:
But yeah, career in technology. Did a bunch of books along the way for Microsoft Press. And then finally started self-publishing. The last book I did was the pocket MBA. I broke away from strict technology resource kits to a crossover book about a mini MBA. That’s me.

Paul Green:
That’s good. And what an incredible career that you’ve had and how rude of Microsoft to withdraw that server and take away the very thing that you were arguably one of the leading experts on? That must have been and I guess you knew that was probably [inaudible 00:18:37] 365.

Harry Brelsford:
Yeah, we knew. Yeah.

Paul Green:
But must have still been a shock when it happened.

Harry Brelsford:
They started telegraphing about that in 2011. And did end of life and then finally end of support. And it was pretty much over at that point, but it was a heck of a run.

Paul Green:
Yes, I’ll bet. I bet it is. Let’s talk about M&A. You are involved with some mergers and some acquisitions that are happening right now in the US. Certainly I look to the US and here where I’m based in the UK, we can see that there’s a lot of M&A activity happening right now.

Paul Green:
You’ve got, you’ll tell me please, if this is what’s happening in the US, but certainly here in the UK, we’re seeing two principle things happening at the same time. One is the rise of super MSPs. These are companies that are fairly large to start with and then they’re acquiring other sizeable MSPs. Now, I’m not quite sure if they’re venture capitalist backed or whether they’re just doing it through other funding means. But that’s one thing.

Paul Green:
At a smaller level, I am seeing lots of MSPs that are 10, 15 years old, realise that actually, acquiring someone else’s clients is a faster and somewhat, I wouldn’t say easier, but it’s a faster route of growth than organic growth. And so, while they’re continuing their organic growth, they’re not afraid of acquiring a competitor or acquiring someone in the next town. And often acquiring their techs as well because in a difficult recruitment market, it’s like a double win, isn’t it? You bring on a whole lot of new clients and you bring on some new techs as well. Are you seeing similar things happening in the US?

Harry Brelsford:
Yeah. Yeah. I have. I sit on the board of Moonshot Equity Partners, a private equity firm that’s charged with acquiring MSPs, typically smaller MSPs. I concur with both of your points, but I would also add in general, over here at least, the MSPs are an aging demographic, at least the crowd I run in. And so now there’s talk about, “Well, what’s my exit?”

Harry Brelsford:
And the exits can be glorious or they can be surprisingly low, depending on how you structured your business. But an aging MSP would certainly, when I look in the mirror and talk with their family about getting acquired. Essentially, they’re going to get a payout in some form or another, an earn out, or cash, or both, and they have a job. Now, they’re not running a company, which is pretty stressful. There’s a lot of anxiety in running a company. And so now, they have a job and quite frankly, they, they can ride it out to pasture.

Harry Brelsford:
The other thing we’re seeing is with the low cost of funds. Interest rates are starting to climb here in the US, but relatively speaking, borrowing is still cheap. And so, you’ll see asset based financing. And we’ve done this over at moonshot where you come in and you pledge the assets that the MSPs are acquiring to get financing, to acquire the MSP. And so, that’s a positive trend right now, but that is changing.

Harry Brelsford:
That’s one of my talking points is 2022, it’s still a healthy M&A environment, but these things are like windows. And sometimes the windows open and sometimes the windows close. We’re coming into a economic period where that window may start to close, if that makes sense, when those rates go up.

Paul Green:
Would that window close because the valuation of the assets can’t be used to generate as much cash as people have been able to do now?

Harry Brelsford:
Well, it’s that, but it’s also mergers and acquisitions are cyclical. These things, again, I’ll use waves, they go in waves. And we’ve had a really big wave of M&A activity in the MSP markets. It’s natural that the markets are going to start to correct. And that might be because everybody has acquired everything they want to or can afford to acquire. I mean, there’s only so many acquisition opportunities. That there’s probably always opportunities, but you want to have it be a great acquisition opportunity. And those are limited. Those are finite.

Paul Green:
Yes. Yes, of course they are. Of course, they are. And certainly, and I’m not asking you in any way to talk about specific deals or numbers or anything like that, but in terms of your work on the board of a company that’s acquiring MSPs, is there a specific type of MSP that they’re looking for? For example, are they looking for lots of monthly recurring revenue or is it work within specific verticals or niches? What’s of interest to people right now?

Harry Brelsford:
Yeah, yeah, no, you hit on one of them. Yeah, recurring revenue is the gold standard. But as we’ve looked at some deals, you’d be surprised how not everybody’s 100% recurring revenue. There’s still some break fix. There’s still some project work. And that is devalued in the due diligence process. We devalue that because it’s not as assured.

Harry Brelsford:
The other thing would be if the owner’s going to come with the company. Okay. That’s huge. And if the owner says, “No, my ticker’s acting up. The doc told me I got to I got to stop working.” Well, that devalues your acquisition value. Because most times, the MSPs are what we call a key man. They’re key to that business. And if they’re not coming with the deal, not that the deal can’t get done, but we’re certainly going to devalue the deal.

Paul Green:
But I guess that’s on a larger acquisition scale. If it’s a smaller MSP just acquiring its competitor, they probably don’t want the business owner. They just want the clients and they just want the staff.

Harry Brelsford:
Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. The other thing we’re seeing in the work I’m doing is we’re focused on regional acquisitions. And other MSPs are national and possibly international, but we’re a smaller private equity firm. We’re focusing right now in the state of Florida. And the reason is, is we feel we can manage that.

Harry Brelsford:
We have an MSP in Florida and if we acquired an MSP in Minneapolis or Seattle, that’s pretty far afield for us to manage. You know what I’m saying? And part of it can be sometimes too, this hasn’t happened, but it’s certainly on the table that for example, I might step in when two MSPs are merged and I might step in as an interim CMO, chief marketing officer. Because what we consistently see, and I know this because you’re MSP marketing, but we see that’s the weakness of MSPs is the sales and marketing.

Harry Brelsford:
They’re really good at the technical work. Most are. I mean, they really enjoy that. And they’re probably pretty good at managing their business paying their bills. They’re probably pretty good at that, but I mean, I must pose the question to you, but that’s the weakness we see. And sometimes, the VC or the private equity will embed somebody in the new company to help them get going. If that makes sense.

Paul Green:
Yeah. That makes perfect sense. And I completely agree with you. For most MSPs it’s a very weak area. And marketing is the biggest opportunity for them to, well, to actually to do some marketing. And then to actually turn that into systemised marketing, which happens daily, weekly, monthly. And which actually generates or generates leads, warms them up and hands prospects over to sales people.

Paul Green:
And I can certainly see, as you are putting two or three MSPs together, there is a huge opportunity to create that system. And then just roll that out to your future acquisitions. That’s indeed what I would do if I was doing what you are.

Paul Green:
Final question for you here on this podcast, Harry, and then we’re going to move on to YouTube for our extended interview. Let’s look away from MSPs and look at vendors. Over the past five, six years or so, we’ve seen the likes of Datto, Kaseya, the big four really, acquiring lots and lots of other vendors and creating these super groups. And obviously, Datto did an IPO, an initial public offering. And what do you see next for the big vendors? They’ve already created these super groups. What do you think might happen next?

Harry Brelsford:
We are a concentrated mature industry. Let me start with that. We’re down to your point, call it the big four. And then there’s a second tier beneath them. There’s another half a dozen just below the radar screen. There’s nothing to say that they couldn’t be acquired yet again in one of the big four. For example, IBM has been known to write checks. And they’re not always, they don’t bounce. That’s the good news. The checks clear at the bank. But IBM has, quite frankly, a mixed track record on acquisitions. Did it really pay off? I think they’re going to have some success with Red Hat, but those are big boys.

Harry Brelsford:
And so, there’s nothing to say that ServiceNow might acquire one of the big MSPs or IBM. I think you’ll see that. But the downside and I do feel strongly about this, is the fidelity of the solution offering from these concentrated big four MSPs. I don’t know if you hear it, but I hear, “Dog garn it, they went and acquired everybody and they just lost their mojo. And the product support’s not what it was,” and that kind of thing. That weighs heavy on me.

Paul Green:
However, I think that creates opportunity. And certainly, if you listen back to some of the episodes of this podcast where we’ve had on MSP owners, who’ve started something. We had Tony Capewell who started a dark web scanning tool of his own and built that from scratch because he was unhappy with a previous solution, which was previously acquired by one of the big vendors.

Paul Green:
I completely agree that the… And you don’t see it with all of the big vendors, but you do hear MSP owners say, “Oh, I can’t believe they’ve been acquired by so and so service, so and so vendor.” And losing the mojo is exactly right. But we are in a very fast changing world and I think that, yeah, I see nothing but opportunity in that.

Paul Green:
Harry, this has been a fantastic conversation. We’re going to continue talking on YouTube. I’ll tell you what I want to ask you about in a second. Just before we do, tell us how can people get in touch with you?

Harry Brelsford:
Well, the easiest way is LinkedIn. Just my name, Harry Brelsford, on LinkedIn. Let’s start there. And then that usually leads to an exchange of emails and heck, maybe I’ll even do a podcast with some of your listeners who reach out. But yeah, let’s start with LinkedIn. That’s simple.

Paul Green:
Okay, nice and easy way to find you. And we’ll, of course, put a connection to your LinkedIn, a link to your LinkedIn on the show notes of this podcast on my website. We’re going to hop over to YouTube right now, Harry. We’re going to continue this conversation. I want to ask you about the changes that you’ve seen in technology since you first got involved in it. Because you’ve been through four or five revolutions of technology.

Paul Green:
I want to talk to you about side hustles as well. You and I have spoken a couple of times and every time you tell me about something else that you’re doing. And my brain can’t cope with the side hustles. Now, I don’t have to do them. You actually have to do them. I want to talk about those and how you keep focus on so many big projects in one go.

Paul Green:
And then, I think we’ll finish off by just looking at your pocket MBA and what you created there and lessons from that. We will continue this conversation right now at youtube.com/msp marketing.

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

Simon Marcil:
Hi. I’m Simon from Propel Your MSP. The book I recommend is They Ask, You Answer because I think it’s an amazing marketing book. And I can tell you, we have to start doing a lot more marketing and applying the principles of the book. And I think you should as well.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Al Alper:
Hi my name’s Al Alper with Absolute Logic and CyberGuard360, I’m looking forward to being on next week’s show, I’ll tell you my journey to becoming and MSP and to eventually also be in the channel. I’ve got a ton of business stories I’m going to share with you – look forward to talking to you.

Paul Green:
We’ll also be talking about where you can find a phone person. Now, I don’t mean telesales. I don’t mean telemarketing, but I’m a huge fan of you having someone sitting within your business, picking up the phone and calling people. Making outbound calls to the kind of prospects that we were talking about earlier in the show. It’s a really powerful thing to do.

Paul Green:
We’ve also got for you three rules to maximise your personal time. We’ve only got a finite amount of time here on this big, lovely lump of rocks spinning around the sun. We might as well make the most of it. And for you as the business owner, that means absolutely maxing out everything you do within the business. I’ve got three suggested rules for you, and I’ll tell you what they are in next week’s show.

Paul Green:
Now don’t forget, we’ve got a ton of extra stuff on YouTube for you. We’ve got the extended interview with Harry Brelsford. And on Thursday, we’ll publish the latest edition of Another Bite. It’s our show about the show. And host, Sophie Law, will be quizzing me and sometimes our guest who joins us as well to talk about some of the themes that are mentioned in the podcast.

Paul Green:
That will be there on Thursday. You can access all of our content at youtube.com/msp marketing. And of course, don’t forget to subscribe to wherever you listen to this podcast as well. 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.