Episode 139: A genius idea to free your technicians' time

Episode 139: A genius idea to free your technicians’ time

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 139: A genius idea to free your technicians' time
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Episode 139 includes:

  • How to get the most out of your techs’ time
  • The importance of thinking like a prospect, not like an MSP
  • Plus on the show this week why you should write your own book and how to do it

Featured guest:

Cassandra Morgan is a featured guest on Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

Thank you to Cassandra Morgan from White Whisker Publications for joining Paul to talk about how MSPs can write their own book.

Cassandra Morgan is an award-winning author, writing coach and speaker residing in Toledo, Ohio. Her works span several genres including Fantasy, Paranormal Cozy Mystery, Sweet Romance, and Gothic Fairytale Horror.

She lives with her husband, six cats, and any number of foster kittens where she thrives on coffee, courage, and kitten cuddles.

Connect with Cassandra on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassandra-morgan-09b7b9126

Show notes:

Episode transcription

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

Paul Green:
Oh, hi there, and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we’ve got in store for you this week.

Cassandra Morgan:
They’re like, “Well, I don’t know what to write. What am I supposed to write?” And they kind of get overwhelmed with the entire big picture of the book.

Paul Green:
That’s Cassandra Morgan. She’s a published author and expert at helping other authors, but she also works for an MSP. So, she understands our world. And we’ll be talking later in the show about how to use books as important marketing tools for your business. We’ll also be talking about the concept of getting your clients and their staff to actually schedule time with your technicians when something’s wrong, which should remove a whole load of frustrations not just for them, but also for you and your team as well.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast.

Paul Green:
As I’m sure you do, a lot of my friends are also business owners. They’re just people I’ve met over the years or perhaps they’re school dads that as I’ve got chatting to them at the sports day or the cake bake or whatever, I’ve realised that they’re people just like me. They’re business owners. They might not necessarily work in the same world, but there’s a certain series of things that us, as business owners, have in common. Things like worrying about our staff, cash flow, the nightmare of winning new clients, retention, all of those kind of things. And so I don’t know about you, but I do tend to find myself socialising more with other business owners, rather than wage slaves, people who are employed.

Paul Green:
And a couple of weeks ago, I was out with a couple of business owner buddies of mine. And we were talking about our accountants, our CPAs. And each of us had various things that we had to complain about with our accountant. My accountant Rob is actually fantastic. Well, he’s a really good strategic accountant, because you’ve got two types of accountant. You’ve got strategic accountants and you’ve got compliant accountants or compliance C accountants. Strategic accountants are giving you good advice. So they’re laying out things that you could do, strategies you could take. They’re laying out options for you. There’s a bit of tax planning going in there and they’re very good at that. And that’s when they come alive and they get really excited. And that’s Rob, my accountant. He’s really good at that.

Paul Green:
What Rob is not so good at is the compliancy side. And I’m sure Rob wouldn’t be too offended if he heard me talking about this. In fact, he probably will because I know he listens to this podcast now and again. But getting the actual forms filed at the times they need to be done is not Rob’s superpower. So actually, he’s built a team around him to try and take that away from him, which is the right thing to do. And we were discussing this, me and my business owning buddies, a couple of weeks ago and really getting ourselves caught up in knots because what you’ve just heard there, me describing the two types of accountants you can get, well, that’s the end of my accountancy knowledge.

Paul Green:
I’m not particularly good with figures. I know how to read a profit and loss statement thing. What do you call it? A balance sheet? I know how to read all of those things. Although, I’ll be honest, Rob does a lot more of that than I do. So I know how to read these things, but accountancy and numbers and all of that kind of stuff, it bores me. I don’t get excited by that at all. I get excited by this stuff, by marketing stuff. And my two buddies had similar blocks. They didn’t really understand. In fact, actually one of them said to me, this is the exact phrase, he said, “I don’t really understand what my accountant does.” Now, listen to his phrase there because there’s a marketing lesson in this. “I don’t really understand what my accountant does.”

Paul Green:
If we step back from this and look at this from a pure marketing lessons point of view, you’ve got here three prospects, three people who’ve got money and want to buy the service. And they’re talking about how happy or unhappy they are with their current supplier. And then, you can hear from the very words that they’re using that these are uneducated prospects. “I don’t really know what my accountant does.” That was the exact phrase that he used. We are uneducated prospects. When you sell to people who are looking to buy from a new MSP, they are uneducated prospects. Now, this is not an offensive phrase of course. This is a fact that I am uneducated about accountants. I don’t really know how to tell if an accountant is good or bad. All I can do is figure out, does my accountant make me feel good or does my accountant make me feel bad? Notice my use of the word “feel” there. Feel is very important. It’s an emotional thing. Most B2B buying decisions are made on emotions. They’re not made on thoughts. They’re very much made on emotions.

Paul Green:
So, I hijacked the conversation at this point and I told my business owner friends exactly what I’m telling you now. In fact, I think I said to them, “Oh, that would make a good podcast subject. Writing it down into the list.” And hence, it’s here today. But the concept there is sound. Anytime you are buying something that you really don’t understand, so I’m going to suggest non-technology stuff, things that you don’t really understand at a deep level, that’s a great research time for you to realise what it’s like being an ordinary business owner or manager buying from you. In fact, there are added complexities to this because really an accountant, a CPA, it’s not that difficult to purchase. As we say, we need someone to fill in the paperwork, make sure all the figures add up, do whatever they do and then give you a bit of advice. But that’s it.

Paul Green:
Whereas of course, what you do for business owners is so much more. It’s all of their technology. It’s all of their telecoms potentially. It’s certainly their cyber security. And these are all areas that are changing very quickly. Accountancy changes, but quite slowly, even though new laws are coming in. There’s no huge revolutions in accountancy every seven to 10 years. But there are in our world. Technology changes every seven to 10 years. It’s a complete revolution. It’s happening to us again right now and will always be happening. And that’s partly what your clients are paying you for. They’re paying you to keep on top of this stuff so that they don’t have to, because they’re not interested in it. They are uneducated prospects and they’re quite happy being uneducated. So the next time you are coming to buy something that you don’t really understand, stop and think, how do I feel right now? What am I thinking? What are the fears that are holding me back? What’s stopping me from going with X decision instead of Y decision versus Z decision? What are those factors?

Paul Green:
Capture that. Journal it. Write it down because one of the greatest marketing weapons that you can have at your disposal is the ability to think and feel like the people you’re trying to influence. As a marketer, I’m very lucky that I went through journalism training when I was just 19. And one of the very first things they taught me at journalism college was how to look at everything, the whole world, through the eyes of my reader, and later on when I got into radio, through the ears of my listener. And being able to put myself in someone else’s point of view I now realise is an immense superpower, but most other people don’t have that. So at a point that you’re buying something you don’t really understand, it’s a great refresher for you on how scary it is to buy something that you don’t know everything about. It’s a great marketing superpower and if you can develop it, it’s going to give you a huge marketing advantage.

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

Paul Green:
Have you ever had that thing where someone submitted a ticket and all over the ticket, it screams urgent? They’ve even written it in capital letters. “Urgent! This is broken. It’s the end of the world. We can’t do anything with this. It’s urgent. Please fix this.” And so, one of your technicians jumps on the phone and calls them back immediately because it’s urgent. We’ve got to get this fixed. And when they speak to the person who submitted the support request, that person says, “Oh yeah, I haven’t got time to talk about it now. Could you call back later?” Have you had this happen to you? How frustrating is that? What was urgent to them earlier suddenly becomes reclassified as other urgent crises take over their day.

Paul Green:
I was talking to my peer group the other day. In my MSP Marketing Edge service, we run some peer groups and I physically meet up in real life with a group here in the UK once a month. And we were talking about how do you get around that problem, because not only is that disruptive for the technician, it’s kind of disruptive for the user as well. Because if you’ve had an urgent support request, but you need more information before you can do something about it, then everyone’s just waiting around waiting to talk to people. We came up with a really good idea, and I wish I could remember specifically whose idea this was so I could give them a credit. Instead of giving your user the opportunity to just submit a ticket, what if they submitted a ticket laying out all the details of the problem and then they had the opportunity to access the live calendar of your technicians to actually book an appointment in?

Paul Green:
Now, think about this from the user’s point of view and I apologise for using the word “user.” It’s a horrible word and I have said on this podcast before that the word “user” is a terrible word to use, but you and I know what I mean by user. So, we’ll just use it in this inside podcast. You think about it from the point of view of the user. They’ve got an urgent problem. What they perceive is urgent anyway. They go and submit a support request and then instantly, up comes the live calendar of your technicians today. It might be, let’s say, nine in the morning and they can see when today or tomorrow they can talk to the technician. And in fact, booking some time into the live calendar gives them certainty that this will be dealt with in an hour’s time or something like that. I think it’s a beautiful thing to do. And you could just use calendly.com or Microsoft Bookings, which is part of 365. It’s very simple to implement this.

Paul Green:
But what a beautiful way to ensure that everyone’s time is completely maxed out. They have the certainty of knowing they’re going to be talking to the technician at a certain time. And your technicians, well, it’s so much more efficient for them to have it booked in that they’re going to call someone at this time and that’s when they’re going to deal with this problem. In fact, it’s a bit of a deadline for them. And deadlines are good because deadlines drive action. If a ticket’s opened at 9:00 AM and they know that they’re going to be speaking to that person at 10:30 AM, then they’ve got an hour and a half to look into that problem, maybe even fix it if that’s something they could do before that. And I appreciate we need to triage tickets and it’s all got to be done properly, but actually, that’s a very beautiful, very elegant way of making the most of everyone’s time.

Paul Green:
So, question for you. How can you implement this? It’s a beautiful and simple idea. Is it something you could put in place today? Could you just go in and hack your PSA in some way? What’s the simplest way to get this implemented in the next few days?

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
Understand this. The only true silver bullet in business is action. The most successful business owners are those who systemise the process of getting things done. That’s on page 39 of my book, it’s called Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business, and you can get a free paperback copy shipped to you. There’s no postage cost to pay, no shipping cost at all. You don’t have to put your credit card in. It’s nothing like that. I would like to start a business relationship with you just by sending you a free copy of my book. All you got to do is go and fill in a form at paulgreensmspmarketing.com. Click on Book in the navigation at paulgreensmspmarketing.com.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Cassandra Morgan:
I’m Cassandra Morgan. I am an award-winning self-published author and the HR manager for an MSP.

Paul Green:
And I’m so excited to have you on the podcast, Cassandra, because you understand our world because you work within an MSP, but you also bring us a subject we haven’t explored in detail before. And that is the subject of publishing your own book. I believe, and I know that you believe as well, that this can be a very powerful marketing tool for MSPs. So, we’re going to talk about that in just a few minutes. Let’s first of all explore your background and what makes you an authority on creating your own book. So, did you say you’ve published a number of different titles?

Cassandra Morgan:
Yeah. So, I have six of my own books. I’ve been in an anthology. I’ve been published in a few magazines. I was the managing editor for a local publication. I am also now the president of The Cat Writer’s Association. And long before any of that, my grandmother was writing short stories submitted to women’s publications to help support the family. My father has been published, an uncle I never met has been published. My aunt has won an Emmy award for some of her journalism. Writing is literally in my German, Belgian, English blood. We’re just not sure which one to blame.

Paul Green:
That’s absolutely great. So, no wonder you’re such a prolific author then. And what kind of stuff do you write? What kind of content do you write? Is it mostly fiction?

Cassandra Morgan:
It’s primarily fiction. I am working on a few nonfiction pieces, but yeah, I have young adult fantasy, a paranormal cozy mystery, gothic fairy tale horror. And then over the quarantine, I published a clean romance. That was kind of my quarantine book baby that helped keep me sane.

Paul Green:
I love it. What is clean romance? I realise that’s not really a question I’d ever thought I’d be asking on this podcast.

Cassandra Morgan:
Clean romance just means it’s not really very spicy, if you get my drift. For romance, it’s very dipped to black sort of thing. Very PG, PG 13. A lot of inferences about what happened from one scene to the next.

Paul Green:
Got it. So, more 10 shades of gray than 50 shades of gray then.

Cassandra Morgan:
Yes, very much so.

Paul Green:
Well, I pleased-

Cassandra Morgan:
That’s great.

Paul Green:
Myself with that little joke I did. Let’s bring this back to marketing then. So, why do you believe that for an MSP to write and create and publish their own book would be such a powerful marketing weapon for them?

Cassandra Morgan:
So I learned a long time ago that the term MSP is very much an insider term, right? We as technology gurus already know that people who are not well versed in technology, they are not well versed in technology. There is a very clear black and white with that. And so, when you go into business networking circles and you go into potential client’s offices and you’re talking to them and they go, “Oh yeah, we provide MSP services,” I might as well be trying to speak Tolkien’s Elvish language to you, right? That’s what it sounds like to them.

Cassandra Morgan:
So if you can establish yourself as an expert in your field by publishing a book on something that you already know, that you don’t have to go and spend time doing a bunch of research on, and then you can present that to a client in a way that they can understand without using terms like MSP or throwing around vendors that they don’t know what that is, but presenting it to them in a way that they can understand, that is going to build your credibility, your trust with your potential clients, and then also your expertise even within your own community.

Paul Green:
Yeah. So, it’s a way of positioning yourself as the authority in your subject matter. I guess also, because it seems like a really difficult thing to do, the vast majority of MSPs just simply won’t do it.

Cassandra Morgan:
It can be easy. It truly can be as easy as uploading a Word document, throwing in a graphic and calling at the end of the day. You can do that. The print on demand industry has made things really easy, but it’s kind of all the steps in the middle that get a little bit muddy for people that don’t have experience with writing and with the publishing industry. As long as you follow those steps, they truly are just as easy as uploading a Word document, slapping on a graphic and calling it a day. Just takes a little bit longer.

Paul Green:
Yeah. Okay, so I’m going to ask you to talk us through all the different steps to publish your own book. Before I do, I have to give myself a second blatant plug in this podcast, which is we have a book, it’s called Email Hijack, which we give to the members of our MSP Marketing Edge program. And what we’ve attempted to do, well, we’ve written a book which is about the horrors of someone stealing money from your bank account through your email. So, it’s written from the point of view of the normal business owner.

Paul Green:
And the idea is that you join our program, you get the book. It’s half an hours’ worth of work to personalise it, and then you can give it to a printer and they will publish it for you. I’ve had to get in my own little, extra blatant plug for that. Cassandra, if you wanted to write your own book, let’s talk through the different stages. So I guess, the first thing is actually figuring out what is the book going to be about, because the risk is that you write something too technical that ordinary people simply aren’t interested in.

Cassandra Morgan:
Absolutely. And you can do that by going through and kind of just making a bullet point list of these are the things that I would like to cover, and then get into… This is something in the industry that we call beta readers or alpha readers. And these are people that kind of give you their input on various different things throughout the process. And you can get them involved very early on while you’re going through and just making that checklist of these are the things that I want to cover. You can hand that checklist to one of these beta readers, somebody that you trust, somebody that would be typically an ideal client for you and say, “Do these things make sense? Are these things that you want to know more about?” And then, that kind of opens the dialogue of what is it that your clients really are looking for when it comes to a knowledge base about what it is that you do, because maybe the thing that you think they want to know more about, they really don’t care.

Paul Green:
Yeah. So, the kind of things that people really care about are the things that come up when you do quarterly business reviews or strategic reviews, as I prefer to call them, or when you are sat with prospects and the things that they bring up. And very often, those things aren’t hardcore technology things. They don’t talk about servers and deeply technical things. They talk about things that worry them. They talk about, “Oh, what happens if this happens?” Or, “What happens if the internet goes down?” Or, “What happens if we can’t access that?” And I think that gives you an idea of the kind of things that ordinary people are kind of interested in.

Paul Green:
Now, I think after you’ve come up with the idea, actually doing the writing I suspect is the thing that most MSPs would be terrified of. You’re clearly a prolific writer, Cassandra. You’ve published, as you said, a whole ton of books already. What’s a good writing process for a non-writer to get into, or should they not even bother and just get it ghostwritten?

Cassandra Morgan:
Yeah. So there definitely is, pardon the term, but just “vomit it out.” That’s kind of what we say in the industry is just buckle down and get it out. But for some people, that’s not quite as easy because they’re like, “Well, I don’t know what to write. What am I supposed to write?” And they kind of get overwhelmed with the entire big picture of the book. And I think the easiest way for somebody who doesn’t have a lot of experience with writing is, remember, you cannot edit a blank page. And so, pick a specific topic that you would like to discuss in that paragraph, that chapter, whatever it is that you’re working on, and that is going to be your main focus. Set yourself a timer. 20 minutes, 30 minutes, however much time you allocate. You can work on this once a week, you can work on this once a day, three times a day, whatever it is. But just for that 20, 30 minute period, that is what you’re focusing on.

Paul Green:
Okay. So, you’re essentially turning it into a small task. I mean, that’s really the secret of achieving anything big, isn’t it? It’s breaking down a great, big, huge project that seems too much, it seems insurmountable. It’s about breaking it down into tiny, little steps.

Cassandra Morgan:
Absolutely. And when you start talking about story structure even in the sense of fiction, there are very specific arcs. I don’t know about you, but there are some movies that I’ll go and see in the theater, never seen it before a day in my life, brand new characters, and I can predict what it is that they’re going to say almost to the word at the exact moment. And that’s because they follow a specific formula. They follow very specific steps. Certain things happen at specific times.

Cassandra Morgan:
And you can look at that and apply that even just to your own self when it comes to managing, right? This is the specific time of day that I have my coffee. This is the specific time of week that I have this business meeting. So, just apply that to your writing. And then, you break that specific task into even smaller ones. This is my writing time. This is the chapter I’m working on today. This is my writing day. This is the topic that I’m covering in this chapter today. Set the timer for 20 minutes, 30 minutes. There you go.

Paul Green:
Brilliant. Let’s circle back to ghost writing. So, what about finding a ghost writer? Is that something you would recommend to people who absolutely have this fear of writing, or do you think that ghost writing is actually just a way of making a difficult job even more difficult?

Cassandra Morgan:
If you have no experience with working with a ghost writer, I would tell you to go out and find somebody who does. Ghost writing is very popular for a lot of these very prolific authors. So think like James Patterson, Nora Roberts. What they’re doing is they’re giving their basic core outline to somebody, and then the ghost writer is writing it, giving it back to them, and now all they have to do is edit it from that point.

Paul Green:
Wait, hang on. Are you saying James Patterson doesn’t write the books? He just comes up with the ideas, someone else writes it, and then he just tweaks the content?

Cassandra Morgan:
Maybe. Did I just drop some tea? I’m sorry.

Paul Green:
Yes, possibly.

Cassandra Morgan:
So the problem is for people that are just starting out in this industry, if you don’t have other more experienced people that you can go to with questions, you are going to get scammed so fast and so easy. So you have to read a ghost writer’s reviews, have your business attorneys check over the contracts. If they don’t send you a contract, that’s a red flag right there. So, just make sure that you’re doing your homework like you would for any vendor that you’re potentially going to use within your own business. You want to make sure that if this company is trying to sell you that they have really great data security tools and then you find out that two years ago, they had a major security breach, that might not be a person or a company you want to work with. Same thing applies to ghost writers. Ghost writers can be very helpful if you are busy or just don’t have the skills for writing, that’s okay too, but you have to do your research or you are really going to get taken advantage of.

Paul Green:
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So, you’ve got your manuscript. I guess the next step then is actually getting your book designed. Is that a lot harder than people think it is?

Cassandra Morgan:
Yes and no. There are a lot of tools out there, even free tools that can help you design it. It’s just how much time do you have to dedicating to learning that platform, as well as what are the industry standards. Can I poke fun at you for a minute on something?

Paul Green:
Yeah, sure. Go for it.

Cassandra Morgan:
Because I have one of your books.

Paul Green:
Oh, no. Really?

Cassandra Morgan:
Yeah, I’m sorry. If you were to look inside, I have the Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business book that you had written, and the content in this is fantastic. It’s straight to the point.

Paul Green:
Thank you.

Cassandra Morgan:
I like that the test is a little bit bigger. That’s great for business owners that are maybe a little bit older. In this industry, we typically don’t run into a lot of clients that are going to be young guns needing our services too much. But the one thing that I noticed is if you look on the left gutter and the right gutter, or right margin, those are the spaces around, you can see there’s kind of raggedy edges on both sides. So, I can tell by looking at this that the formatter used left justification or left align. What they should’ve done is they should’ve used justification because that would’ve made the outside edges of each of these pages a nice, clean, straight line. And those are things that unless you’ve been in the industry like me, where I look at that and I can see that, you’re probably going to want to get a professional involved to design your interior and design your cover for you.

Paul Green:
Yeah, that’s fascinating. Thank you for that feedback. And I am now going to fire Steve, the designer, because he should have known that back in 2016-

Cassandra Morgan:
No!

Paul Green:
When we actually published that. Boy, I’m joking. We’re not going to fire him. We’ll just give him a written warning. It’ll be fine. No, seriously though. And I’ve actually self-published, I think that’s my seventh or my eighth book. And they’ve all been written by me, designed by Steve, and we’ve self-published them. I’ve been doing that since about 2010 across a number of different businesses and you’re the first person that’s ever pointed that out. And actually, that’s really obvious because I can see in my head now picking up any other book and opening it and you’ve got that justification on both sides. This is how you’ve proved your expertise on this, Cassandra. So once you’ve got that book designed, what’s the next step? Because obviously, getting books printed, that shouldn’t be too difficult because there’s lots of book printers around. Could you actually explain as well what the difference is between getting a book printed and getting a book published? Is that the same thing, or are they different things?

Cassandra Morgan:
No, those are very different things. Being published means that you are available through certain distributors. There’s kind of a catalog of books and then there’s something called an ISBN. So, that’s that little barcode that’s on the back of the books and that is unique to your book. And without that, other bookstores and publishing companies, they’re not going to be aware that your book exists. So, that’s technically publishing. Now, getting a book printed, that’s as easy as taking things to a printer, taking your files to a printer, and just having them run off like they would flyers or something like that, right? And you can do that.

Cassandra Morgan:
We can kind of get into some of that a little bit later, because that’s a really big topic to discuss. I want to jump back a little bit to your question of, “Okay, the book has been designed. Now, what?” Or, “Now, you’re going to publish it. Now, what?” So, there’s actually a step in between there. So while your book is still in progress and it can even be while you’re still writing it, before you’ve completely given it over to your editors, which we haven’t talked about yet either, you need to do some pre-marketing in there. You need to be setting up some kind of email list, preferably to clients, not just your family and friends, though they can certainly help boost the signal. But setting up an email list to say, “Hey, I’m coming out with this. If you want to learn more about this, sign up.”

Cassandra Morgan:
You can be releasing weekly or monthly updates as you’re working on things about, “Hey, here’s three paragraphs of chapter that I wrote. Are you still interested in this? Yeah, don’t worry. It’s still coming out.” Work on engaging within your local community at this point, depending on what your timeline for publication is, of getting interviews set up, getting book signing set up. Let people know that, “Hey, I’m publishing a book right now. Here’s a sample of it. Can I come in and speak to your chiropractic association?” You can use that before it’s even done to start establishing yourself as an expert. So, that’s kind of the pre-publication marketing that happens.

Paul Green:
I love this. So, it’s using the book even before you’ve finished the book and got it out there. It’s using it to stamp your authority. I can see an MSP going and speaking to networking groups, going and speaking to business associations, using their following on LinkedIn, using their following in their email newsletters as a way of actually talking about the book, because as we said right at the beginning, very few MSPs will actually ever do this. So it not only stamps your authority, it gives you a point of differentiation as well.

Cassandra Morgan:
[inaudible 00:30:45].

Paul Green:
Okay. You offered earlier to talk in detail about the printing and I’m going to say let’s not do that on this podcast because I think you can go too in detail. And I know that you are able to help MSPs who do want to write their own book and we’ll come onto that in a second. Let’s just finish with the culmination of this project, which is of course, actually getting that book printed.

Paul Green:
So once you’ve got that book printed and it’s out there, what would you recommend that MSPs do to continue to use it for the max? Would you give it away on your website? Would you give copies away to people that you meet? Would you recommend that they sell it? What’s the best thing to do with that powerful weapon once you’ve got it in your hands?

Cassandra Morgan:
So I would recommend that if possible you have three different versions of your book. One is going to be a super condensed version that’s almost white paper-like, and it’s absolutely fine if you want to leave certain things out. Another one is going to be a very small copy. It’s kind of the next step up. It’s bigger than a white paper, but it doesn’t quite go into nearly as much detail. And this one is very much the layman’s terms. This is the one that you would give to your most technological illiterate persons, right? And then, your last one is going to be your big, fancy one, okay? So if you are not doing ISBNs and you’re just going through and getting these printed at a Kinko’s or wherever, then you can use the same covers for all of those as well, okay?

Cassandra Morgan:
So your white paper version, that’s going to be the one that you give away for free on your website. This is the one that entices people to want to learn more. This can also be the “sign up for my email list and get the first chapter free” kind of thing. You can do that as well. So your medium version, that’s going to be the one that you give away in your business promotion box. If you’re doing any kind of speaking engagement where they’ve asked you to provide something for every single person, you can do that. And then your big version, that’s the one that you can sell, or if you’re doing a speaking engagement and you just want to give one away to somebody, you can give that one away. And that’s the one that you would really invest in doing dust jacket if possible, hard cover if possible. But anyway, that’s the big one, that’s the fancy one, the elite one.

Paul Green:
This is all fantastic information. Thank you so much, Cassandra. Tell us what you can do to help MSPs who want to publish their own book, and how can we get in touch with you?

Cassandra Morgan:
So, you can visit me at authorcassandramorgan.com/msp. I have a little video on there for you that kind of goes into a bit more detail, maybe covering some of the publishing things that we didn’t necessarily get to. And then if you want to enlist me to help with any kind of your editing services, coaching, if you just need a cheerleader kind of along the way, you can fill out a form there. And then, I’m also going to have a webinar series that goes into very specific detail of every single step. And they are steps that you can use both for fiction and nonfiction, because maybe once you get your first nonfiction book about MSP out there, maybe you’ve decided that you finally want to write that clean romance that you’ve always been wanting to do. And this webinar can help you with that as well.

Paul Green:
I love that. Thank you. We’re going to have thousands of MSPs across the globe producing clean romance, which is it’s going to be a whole new cottage industry created from this webinar. You and I are going to continue talking in the extended interview over on YouTube. I want to ask you what project you’re working on right now, because prolific writers such as you always have something on the go, Cassandra. I also want to ask you, just pick up on a couple of things you talked about earlier, particularly famous authors not writing their own stuff, because I’m genuinely shocked by that.

Paul Green:
Also, I think we’ll have a bit of fun, which is, just over here on my bookshelf, I’ve got all of the books that I’ve published in the last decade or so. And I think it’d be quite good to get you, the expert, to just give me some critiques on my cover designs. That would be quite a fun thing to do. We’re never going to go back and republish them, so we might as well just have some fun with that. Thank you very much. We’re going to go and continue that interview right now at youtube.com/mspmarketing.

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

Andrew Moon:
Hi, I’m Andrew Moon. I run Orange Nomad. I turn hustling entrepreneurs into calm, unstoppable CEOs. My book recommendation right now would be from the two guys who run Basecamp, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work. I love this book because it really pushes against the toxic hustle and grind mindset that is so prevalent in society and running a calm business. And that’s what I’m all about these days.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Mike Barrett:
If you’re an MSP owner, you may have the greatest solution for your audience. But if they can’t perceive it, it’s not worth what you think. I’m Mike Barrett and I am going to be on air next week with Paul. We’ll jump into how you can stand out as different in your audience’s eyes.

Paul Green:
Do subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen so you never miss an episode, because also coming up next week, we’re going to talk about building a recruitment pipeline and specifically using LinkedIn to do that. If you find recruitment difficult at the moment, we can flip that around so you actually have a hot list of people who are waiting to come and work for you when you’ve got a vacancy. That will be nice. I’ll show you exactly how to do that in next week’s show.

Paul Green:
Plus, we’re going to talk about Big Mo, big momentum. I’ve noticed that the MSPs who consistently do the most marketing seem to be luckier than all the other MSPs put together. They seem to have more opportunities and more chances to convert those opportunities into clients. Let’s talk next week about putting in place Big Mo, big momentum into your business.

Paul Green:
Over on YouTube right now, we’ve got the extended interview with this week’s guest Cassandra and on Thursday, we’ll publish Another Byte. It’s our show about this podcast. Join me and host Sophie Law as we discuss some of the issues that we’ve been talking about today. Then 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.