Episode 187 - Persuade clients about MFA

Episode 187: Persuade clients about MFA

Paul Green

Episode 187 - Persuade clients about MFA
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 187: Persuade clients about MFA
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Episode 187

Welcome to the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. This week’s show includes:
  • 00:00 Persuading clients to accept MFA
  • 05:23 The benefits of posting real photos on your MSP website
  • 12:43 The value of public speaking to your business

Featured guest:

Grant Baldwin

Thank you to Grant Baldwin, Founder and CEO at The Speaker Lab, for joining me to talk about how people can promote themselves and their businesses by making speaking appearances at conferences or business events.

As founder and CEO of The Speaker Lab, Grant Baldwin has helped thousands of people build successful and sustainable speaking businesses. Over the last 15 years Grant has become a sought after speaker, podcaster, author, and accomplished entrepreneur.

Featured on the Inc. 5000 list, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and the Huffington Post, he has committed his expertise and insight to equipping others to share their meaningful message with the masses.

With a mission to motivate other leaders and entrepreneurs, The Speaker Lab has worked with students in all 50 US states and in over 45 countries around the world.

Connect with Grant on LinkedIn:

Extra show notes:

Transcription:

Voiceover:

Fresh every Tuesday.

Voiceover:

For MSPs around the world. Around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:

Oh, my goodness. We are back with another podcast for you. This is Episode 187 and here’s what’s coming up.

Grant Baldwin:

Hey, this is Grant Baldwin, founder of The Speaker Lab, and we’re going to be talking about how you can find and book paid speaking engagements, how you can use speaking to build and grow your business. And even if you were someone who’s like, “I hate the idea of speaking and it traumatizes me.”, that’s all right. We’re going to talk through how you can make sure that you can minimize those nerves, those anxieties, those fears, and still use speaking to the best of your ability.

Paul Green:

And on top of that interview with Grant, we are going to talk about the thorny issue of putting photographs of you and your team on your website. What are the dangers and how can you overcome them?

Voiceover:

Paul Green’s…

Voiceover:

… MSP Marketing…

Voiceover:

… Podcast.

Paul Green:

To kick off this week’s show, we’re actually going to try something brand new, something I haven’t really done before. You see, I have crowdsourced the answer to a question that I wanted to pose on the podcast. I have this Facebook group. You may indeed be a member of it, and if you’re not, please come and join us in this group. It’s called the MSP Marketing Group. It’s within Facebook. You just go into Facebook, search MSP Marketing, tap on groups on your phone, you’ll see my little face on there, plunk your finger onto my face, and that’s the group. Now, it’s only for MSPs. We don’t allow vendors or anyone else in there. So you do have to ask a few questions. And yes, we will check that you are genuinely an MSP.

But when you’re in, we have conversations every single day about all the subjects. Marketing your MSP, growing your MSP, maximizing profit. We talk about staff, we talk about clients, we talk about anything that helps you to get where you want to go. And a few weeks ago, I posed this question, “What’s the one thing that you said to a client to persuade them that they really need MFA?” Now, I don’t know about you, but I really want to know the answer to that question. And luckily, we had 24 really good comments from the MSPs that took part in this poll. So I’m just going to read some of the best answers out to you. Not all of them because some of them I don’t think are quite valid. But here are some great answers. And by the way, if you have a better answer that we don’t cover off in the next two or three minutes, please do email it to me and I’ll give you my email address at the end.

So Chad says, “Ask your insurance provider if it’s required.” That’s got to be one of the most ultimate answers, unless of course the insurance provider comes back with, “No.” Neil says, “You’ve been hacked.” That’s a rough one to throw out there. Now, Jason’s got an interesting approach here. Jason says, “Do it or find a new IT company.” Did I start to sound a bit like Starsky & Hutch there? Have you ever seen the Ben Stiller Starsky & Hutch film from about 15 years ago? You probably haven’t, have you? Because not many people did. But there was a character in there who said, “Do it, do it, do it.” It’s one of my favorite YouTube clips, that. Anyway, so do it or find a new IT company. That’s quite an approach. But do you know what? If that’s what we want, we want clients or you want clients who are going to do the things that you want them to do because it’s the safe thing to do, then maybe that’s the approach to look at.

Tony here has… It’s a similar thing again, “MFA…”, Tony says, “… is a prerequisite of working with us. If it’s not enabled and enforced, we don’t support.” That’s a real hard line and maybe actually taking that kind of hard line is exactly the right thing to do these days. Karen says, “Protect your data and applications in one easy to use affordable app with minimal user disruption.” So Karen’s going down a slightly different route of educating the client about MFA. Now, David here says, “It’s not in any way open for discussion. I carefully make it clear that they must have it. It’s like buying a car without brakes. It’s not going to happen.” I love that. He says, “Your language should never give the impression it’s in any way optional. For 365, we only allow MS App with number matching. If people don’t have a phone, the company can buy one for them or perhaps a YubiKey. Why not?”

Dave says, “Turn it on…” This is a different Dave. “Turn it on. Wait for the call. Tell them Microsoft did it due to suspicious activity on their account. And to disable it, they need to sign a disclaimer with Microsoft.” No, I’m not saying that any of these are the right or wrong approach, but isn’t this great, crowdsourcing answers like this? Because you’re getting all these different approaches, all different ways of looking at this. James says, “You’ll need to sign our disclaimer if you don’t do it.” Saggy, I think it’s how to pronounce your name, apologies if I’ve got that wrong, says, “Passwords don’t matter. MFA does.” Steam says, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you with your hacked Facebook.” And Stewart says, “We are now enforcing this across all of our clients.”

So lots of different opinions there. Definitely the most popular one is you have to do this if you want to work with us. Is this what you are doing in your MSP? Perhaps your MSP. Perhaps you’re doing something different, maybe you have a different idea. I would love to hear what that is. You can email me and it is the real me at the end. Just email, hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com.

Voiceover:

Here’s this week’s…

Voiceover:

… clever idea.

Paul Green:

Now, I don’t want you to think that I’m getting lazy with this podcast, but I’ve done it again. I’ve outsourced another question. This time, the question I asked on the Facebook group was, “Do you have a photo of you and your team on your MSP’s website? If not, why not? Let’s eliminate problems.” Now, here’s the thing, I’m a massive fan of real people on websites. When you are interacting with real people, you can see real people on a website and it is really obvious when it’s a stock photo versus an actual photo of what you look like, it just makes you, as a business, feel more friendly. It makes it easier for people to interact with you, to engage with you, to know that there are real people at the other end.

And stock images work in exactly the opposite way. They send a message of fakeness, of plasticness. It’s not real. We’ve got to do everything we can to make it real. So when I posted this a few weeks ago, I was expecting a few people just to throw up problems. And actually, we had some very, very hard and fast ‘no Paul’s, you mustn’t do this. I’m going to read out some of the comments I’ve got and then I’m going to knock them down again because I do believe from a marketing point of view, it overalls most of the problems, the concerns. And as you can imagine, there’s going to be some security concerns that come up. So Trave sort of jumped into one of the first comments, “No. For the love of God, no.”, he said. “This is insane. It gives phisher’s ammo to use against your business and against your clients. Stop, hard stop.” Which Dan replied saying, “Oh, I’d never thought of this. How are they using MSP team photos in the wild?”

So Trave explained that it’s called scraping. I’ve never heard of this myself. But he’s encountered it twice in one week and he says, “I’ve encountered it twice this week and it’s only Wednesday. They mirror your website registered domain name, slightly change what’s on it. They see your LinkedIn profile, replicate what you do there, trying to phish your other employees to get your iTunes cards, et cetera. On top of that, if they’re already monitoring your email, they start sending them to the new domain and asking for invoice payments to be redirected, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” Which is a really good insight and obviously not something that had occurred to me. Now, a couple of other people jumped in. Some people say that sounds like paranoia. Others say, “Well, we’ve had our website scraped, but how did the staff photos make it worse?”

It’s an interesting thing, isn’t it? But there’s been a number of other… By the way, not criticizing Trave there. The whole point of me asking a question like that is to get a variety of different answers. Dave answered, “No, your team will get headhunted if you put their photos on.” And I replied to say, “Well, they could be headhunted off LinkedIn as well.” Stuart said, is a more positive one. He said, “Interesting responses so far. We do. It’s important to let prospective clients know who we are and how reasonable, excuse me, how personable we are.” One response is not to do this because of phishing. This is really interesting. He says, “Sorry, if my staff are stupid enough to fall for a phishing scam, we shouldn’t be in business.” Another response is not to do it because they’d get headhunted. That’s crazy. This is what Stewart says, “If your staff aren’t going to stay with you if they get headhunted, then you’re doing it wrong and you have bigger problems.” Which is really interesting. And in fact, Barry says he thinks it’s easier to headhunt from LinkedIn.

Now, I’m going to come onto the question in a second of what do you do if you’re a one person band? Because that was a common question as well. Let’s just address this security issue here. I know it’s a big deal. I know for you, the fear of being compromised, breached, hacked in any way is it’s a real fear. Because it’s worse for you than it would be for any business because obviously, through you, they can go through you to reach all of your clients. And that’s the end of the business. I get that completely. However, the number one marketing problem most MSPs have is they don’t have enough clients. And the answer or one of the answers is to be more personable. You’ve heard me talking about this on the podcast before. You have to be personal, you have to be emotional, you have to be real. And that involves photos.

So if you absolutely do not want to put photos of your team on the website, okay, that’s fair enough. I understand it. I’m now a little more educated on some more of the security risks. And let’s be honest, there is a new security risk every day. It’s very hard for you to keep up, let alone a non-tech like me. But here’s the thing, you have to, at the very least, put a photo of you, the business owner, on the website. This is a must and it does come back… In fact, a couple of people asking here, Louis’ saying, “It’s just me right now on the website, a couple of other people, one man bands, one person bands.” And Jim, in particular, saying, “How do you do this as a one man band?”

The answer is the same for whether you’ve got 20 staff, but you just want to put you on the website or whether you are just a one man band. You as that one person, as the business owner, you become the face of the business, in kind of the same way that I do. If you look at all of our marketing, it’s only my face, but there’s about 10, 11, possibly even 12 people in the team now. You lose track, don’t you, when you’re adding new people over a period of time. So there’s lots of people behind the scenes, but I am the face of the business. It’s my little face absolutely everywhere, and that works very well for us. That could work very well for you as well.

I would argue that the security risks of just putting your face on your website and on your marketing materials are less because perhaps you are slightly more security aware than some of your staff. You’re certainly, you’re not going to be headhunted because it’s your business. So if you absolutely cannot put your staff on, that’s fine. I really don’t think that matters. But you have to put yourself on your website. It’s the only way that you can connect to the prospects right now who could go on to become future clients. In fact, they’re much more likely to go on to become future clients if you can warm them up and engage with them by showing them your pretty face.

Voiceover:

Paul’s…

Voiceover:

Paul’s blatant plug.

Voiceover:

… blatant plug.

Paul Green:

Sometimes MSPs ask me, “How do you actually make money, Paul? So you’ve got this podcast, you write endlessly, you’re all over LinkedIn, doing webinars and other channels, and all that sort of stuff. How do you make money?” Well, our core service is something called the MSP Marketing Edge. We only work with one MSP per area. We provide them with a weekly marketing system. So all of the content and the tools that you need refresh every single week to go out there and build audiences and build a relationship with them and then ultimately commercialize that relationship. There’s a ton more to it than that, but it all starts with our weekly marketing system.

And of course, because we only work with one MSP per area, the question you’ve probably got right now is, “Ooh, I wonder if they’re working with my competitors or whether my area is free.” Well, you can go and check that out. Just go and have a look at mspmarketingedge.com. You can put in your zip code, your postal code, depending which country you’re in, and it will tell you instantly without you having to register or give your details or anything. It will tell you instantly if your area is available. And if it is, you can start a 30-day free trial. No contract. Cancel anytime. Mspmarketingedge.com.

Voiceover:

The big…

Voiceover:

… big interview.

Grant Baldwin:

Hey, my name is Grant Baldwin. I’m the founder and CEO of The Speaker Lab.

Paul Green:

And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Grant, because you are the guy who is going to tell our audience why they should do something terrifying, which is stand up in front of other business owners and managers and actually do some public speaking. Now, as I’m saying this, I know there are people listening right now going, “Public speaking, no. Don’t make me do it.” Now, Grant, you make your living out of helping people to get more public speaking gigs, but I’m sure you see loads of people holding back and not want to do it. What is it about public speaking that people are so scared of?

Grant Baldwin:

Yeah, it’s definitely one of those things that people either love or hate. It can be something that people are excited about or something that can feel traumatizing. I love speaking. I love the idea of speaking. It’s been a big part of my career. My wife is quite the opposite. She said, “Hey, you go do your song and dance and your little puppet show, but don’t you dare make me get anywhere near a stage.” And so everybody’s going to be a little bit different. So even as we kind of get into this, some people are going to immediately resonate and realize like, “Hey, this is a big thing I want to incorporate into my business.” Whether you want to be a full-time speaker or you just want to do a couple gigs here or on the side, either’s going to be totally fine.

Or maybe for you, you’re going like, “Hey, I don’t like speaking.” One thing I would encourage you to think about though is again, even if you don’t want to be a full-time speaker, speaking can be a really, really powerful tool in your arsenal as a business owner, as an MSP owner. And so we’re going to be talking a little bit about that today, about how you can incorporate speaking into your business and how actually having some of those fears, the nerves, the butterflies that you have is actually completely normal. There’s nothing wrong with you. That’s a very natural, normal thing. It’s something I personally feel all the time. And we can also talk a little bit about how to overcome some of that.

Paul Green:

Yeah, let’s do that. It’s funny, back in the day, I was a radio presenter and the wonderful thing about being a radio presenter is you sit in a room on your own talking to a microphone. And then one day, people come along and they say, “Hey, you’re a radio presenter, would you come on stage and introduce a band or do something like this?” And I remember the first time I did it, I was so scared and actually, I loved it. It turned out to be something I loved and I thrived on it and wanted to do more and more stage stuff. And I guess I was lucky being forced into that, or I may never have discovered that. Let’s talk about your career. So Grant, so how have you got to this, being in this position now where you’re a guru on public speaking and you’re helping people promote their businesses through public speaking?

Grant Baldwin:

Yeah. So if we go way back in time, when I was in high school, I was really involved in my local church and my youth pastor had a big impact on my life and I was like, “I want to do that. That seems like a really cool, fulfilling, rewarding type of career.” And I kind of felt like if I could make the kind of impact in other people’s lives that he made in my life, that seems well worth it. And so I went to Bible college, I was a youth pastor at a different church for a little while, and that gave me a lot of opportunities to speak. And speaking is one of those things that I really enjoyed. I felt like I was decent at, I wanted to do more of. I just had no idea, how does this work? How do you find gigs? And who hires speakers? And what do you speak about? And how much do you charge?

And speaking for so many people is just this mysterious black box. And so I found myself, and this was 18, 19 years ago, there was no real resources, podcasts or courses or coaching or books on this. And so I found myself just emailing other speakers, stalking other speakers, harassing other speakers, can I pick your brain type of stuff. Learned a couple things, booked some gigs. And eventually, over the next several years, got to a point where I was doing 60 to 70 paid speaking gigs a year. And it was great. I loved it. I was speaking all over the place, I had a great time.

And then I had a lot of people who were asking me saying, “Hey, I want to be a speaker. How do I do that?” And they were asking a lot of the same questions that I had. How do you find gigs? And what do you speak about? And who are your speakers? And yada yada. As we started doing some coaching and training on that, and that’s really led to The Speaker Lab. So we are a coaching and training company that works with speakers at all different levels. And we’ve worked with speakers in every US state and 49 different countries around the world. All different topics, all different stages and ages of life in their career. And so whether you want to speak again once or twice or you want to speak 100 times a year, those are the speakers that we work with.

Paul Green:

So for the average MSP, if they can get themselves some kind of speaking gig, whether that’s just speaking to a networking group or some other group of local business owners, what’s the power of that? Why does public speaking have so much authority?

Grant Baldwin:

So I think for all of us, whenever we are at some type of an event and there is a speaker, there’s a certain level of credibility that we ascribe to that person. It’s kind of like you meet someone who’s a surgeon. So even if you’re not a surgeon, you don’t know anything about surgery, there’s just in society, we just view them on somewhat of a pedestal. They know something, they’re very smart and educated. And the same thing is true for a speaker. It’s a very high status type of role. And so we oftentimes assume, okay, if I’m going to attend an event and they have… That event has brought in some type of speaker, then they’ve probably done their due diligence and vetted them. And this must be a really sharp, high caliber person that is up there on stage. And so again, if you are someone who if you are speaking to, let’s say, a group of business owners or potential customers or other MSP owners, then there’s a level of credibility that you have within that audience or within that room.

And so again, depending on the nature of who you’re speaking to there, let’s say you are speaking to a group of business owners who may be potential customers or clients of yours, then if you’re able to share, “Hey, here’s some different challenges and problems that you’re running into as a business owner, here’s what we would recommend or teach or here’s how we would prescribe that you fix those, remedied some of those.” There’s going to be people in the audience that are going, “Hey, everything you just described is exactly what we’re running into and I appreciate you sharing how that can be fixed. Can we hire you to just come in and fix it for us?” And so it’s also a great way to build not only credibility, but also for lead generation for businesses. So speaking can be used in a lot of different ways to help build and grow your business.

Paul Green:

So let’s delve into that black box that you were talking about earlier, because in the last 20 years, as you said, you’ve started to unpick how to do it well and how to maximize it. For someone who’s never done it before, how do you get someone started?

Grant Baldwin:

We teach inside The Speaker Lab a five step process that we call the SPEAK framework, and it makes the five letter acronym SPEAK, S-P-E-A-K. And so the S is select a problem to solve. Select a problem to solve. And so this means you got to answer two key questions. So number one, who do you speak to? And number two, what problem do you solve for that audience? Now, the challenging thing here for a lot of speakers. And this isn’t exclusive to just speakers, this is entrepreneurs in general, is we tend to want to spread the net as far and wide as possible. And so who do I speak to? I don’t know, man. I speak to people, I speak to humans. My message is for everybody.

And that doesn’t work. And same when I ask people, what do you speak about? And they say, “Well, what do you want me to speak about? I can speak about anything.” And again, that also doesn’t work. So you want to, again, the more narrow, the more focused you are, the easier it is to actually find and book gigs. So that’s the first part of the process. Yes, selecting a problem to solve.

The P is to prepare your talk. Be really, really clear on what’s the solution that you are providing to that audience, and also how does speaking fit into what it is that you want to do as a business owner? The E is to establish yourself as the expert. So two key marketing assets that you need is you need a website and you need a demo video. Now, what exactly is a demo video? Well, a demo video, similar to a movie trailer. So before anybody would go see a movie, they want to see what that trailer is. And so they’re going to take a two-hour movie, boil it down to two or three minutes, and within those two or three minutes, you have an idea of who’s in it, what’s the plot, what’s the theme, what’s the genre. And the goal of the demo video and the goal of a movie trailer is to make people want to see more. And so a demo video is very important, especially if you want to get paid on a consistent basis.

Next part of the process, A, acquire paid speaking gigs. Acquire paid speaking gigs. Now, this is the part we want to fast-forward to. “Man, just tell me how to find and book gigs.” But if you don’t have these other foundational pieces in place first, it’s really hard to gain some traction. And so when we talk about acquiring paid speaking gigs, this is where you want to be much more proactive than reactive, rather than just putting up a website and a video and, “All right, now I just wait for the phone to ring.” It doesn’t work like that. So having a system in place to identify event planners, decision makers reaching out to them and having a system in place to follow up with them.

And then finally, the last part of the process, K, is knowing when to scale. Meaning a lot of people who are interested in speaking are also interested in writing a book or coaching or consulting or providing some type of service based work. And so you can do all the things, but you can’t do all the things at once. So something’s going to come first, something’s going to come last. So again, you got to be clear about how speaking fits into your business. So again, that’s the speaker success roadmap, that speaker framework that we teach all speakers on how to get started.

Paul Green:

And well done for fitting that framework into the word speak. You must have been so excited the day that you figured out, “This acronym, we can make this work, we can fit this into the framework.”

Grant Baldwin:

There’s a lot of work on a whiteboard there to make that work.

Paul Green:

I bet. I bet. Let’s talk about speaking gig, paid speaking gigs versus free speaking gigs. I think the average MSP listening to that would just be happy being in a room with 10 people who are willing to listen to them talking about cybersecurity or whatever it is they’re talking about. Do you think there is more power in trying to get a paid gig or is it very much about just finding the right balance of what’s right for you?

Grant Baldwin:

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it tends to be more the latter. And I think actually for this audience, it may actually be better to do free gigs. And let me explain. I’ll give you an example. There was a client that we were working with recently, and they were doing basically identity theft protection for high net worth individuals. That was kind of the main service that they offered. And so they worked with different wealth managers and attorneys and people who have done well in life and they’re trying to protect their assets, and certainly, their identity. And so we were kind of talking about she could go speak at something and might get paid a few grand here or there, and I said, “Hang on, let’s talk through what’s the lifetime value of an average customer or client?” And so she was kind of telling me about it and it was tens of thousands of dollars.

And so I said, “What if you found an event where the right type of customer client buyers would be in an audience?” And so we kind of talked that through. A month later, this was just literally a week or two ago, I was on a call with her and she said, “Hey, I took the advice, I went and I spoke at an event where I was not paid by the client, but I picked up three clients there, had some additional contact. Someone else I met there wants me to come speak at their thing.” And she’s like, “I can point to tens of thousands of dollars in revenue that was generated from this one event.” So if she was focused so much on how do I just get paid to speak and I got a couple thousand dollars from this event, 3,000 or $5,000, but I didn’t get any clients out of it or this event over here, event B, I did not get paid from it, but I generated several clients out of it that’s worth tens of thousands of dollars.

I mean, all of us as business owners would say, “I would take business or event B all day long.” And so I think sometimes there’s this misconception that speaking for free is a bad thing. And so oftentimes, we kind of shun it and say, “I just want to get paid to speak.” But the reality is there’s a lot of ways that you can get paid to speak or why speaking for free may make sense for you that go way beyond how much you got in terms of a check from an event planner.

Paul Green:

Yeah, completely agree. And to be honest, that sounds like the MSP business model anyway. A new client coming into an MSP because they stay for so long, they are worth tens of thousands of dollars. So that’s a smart thing to do. Okay, Grant, final subject area I want to look at is the practicalities of speaking when you’re not a naturally confident speaker. Maybe it’s because you’re more introverted, maybe as you were mentioning earlier, you get the butterflies, the sweaty palms, the heartbeat going, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We’ve all been in various situations and obviously, we’re at the edge of our comfort zone. And human nature is to pull back when we’re at the edge of our comfort zone and not do that. Talk us through some of the practical things that you teach to your speakers, the guys and girls who perhaps aren’t as naturally confident as some of your other speakers.

Grant Baldwin:

Yeah. First of all, I want to go back to one thing that you touched on there that oftentimes, we… There’s this kind of misconception that in order to be a speaker, I have to have some big outgoing personality, that I have to be super charismatic, that I have to be larger than life. And the reality is that you don’t. There are certainly speakers like that. And oftentimes, we think of speakers in that way, but I always remind speakers that as a speaker, you are a human talking to a collection of other humans. So act like a human, be yourself on stage. So if in normal real life that you are not some larger than life, life of the party, then don’t try to act like that on stage. And so if you are more of a quiet, reserved type of person, then you might have to dial up the personality a little bit there on stage.

But again, be yourself, because the audience identifies with you. They’re not looking for some fake version of you. Now, for the other thing that you mentioned there as far as, okay, you’re feeling some of those butterflies, you’re feeling some of those nerves, again, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I think oftentimes what happens is we can confuse butterflies, nervousness with excitement and adrenaline. So if you think about big moments in life where you felt something similar, I can think about that for when I proposed to my wife, whenever I got married, when my daughters were born, if I had some type of… I was getting ready to speak at some major event or you just landed a big client or something where you’ve had those same emotions and feelings. It wasn’t like when I felt like that with when proposing to my wife, it wasn’t like that I thought she was going to say no. It was just like, “Holy cow, this is a really important deal.”

And so it’s, in many ways, it’s kind of the body’s reaction to saying, “Hey, hey, heads up, this is really important. Lock in here.” So again, sometimes it’s easy to be confused with that, and the same way that recently, over here in the States was the Super Bowl, and I guarantee every single one of those players before they took the field are feeling the same butterflies and adrenaline. And it’s not like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m bad at football. And this is never going to work and I’m a failure and it’s going to be a disaster.” No, no. They are professionals, they are ready for this, but they still feel the adrenaline and the excitement of the moment. And so that’s okay.

Now, what do you do to make sure it doesn’t completely debilitate you and it’s completely overwhelming? Well, I think one of the best things that you can do is really spend the time to practice and prepare. The best speakers on the planet don’t just scribble a couple of ideas on a napkin and hop up on stage, and I’m just going to kind of wing it and see what comes out here. Don’t do that. Okay? That’s really, really sloppy. In the same way that with the Super Bowl, the athletes and the football players are not just like, “Yeah, we’re just going to go out there and run around and throw the football and run the football and hopefully it works out.” No, no, there’s so much planning and thought that goes into it. So by the time they get out on the field or a speaker gets out on stage, again, they may still feel the butterflies, they may still feel the adrenaline of the moment, but there’s also a level of confidence that I’ve done the work, I’ve practiced, I’ve prepared, and I’m ready for this.

I’d also say that the more you do it, the more comfortable and confident that you become. So the first time you speak is probably not going to be as good as the 100th time that you speak. And so how do you get better as a speaker? You speak. It’s no different than anything else. If you want to get better as a writer, you write. You get better as a podcaster, you podcast. You want to get better singing, you sing. You got to do the thing and put in the reps to improve at that. So again, all that to say, if you feel nerves, feel butterflies, that’s okay. Nothing wrong with that. How do you minimize that is by building confidence through practice and repetition.

Paul Green:

I love it. I love it. Grant, just remind us what you do to help MSPs who want to get more public speaking gigs and what’s the best way for us to get in touch with you?

Grant Baldwin:

Yeah, so if you listen to this podcast, you probably listen to other podcasts. So we have a podcast called The Speaker Lab Podcast, The Speaker Lab Podcast, I encourage you to check out. We’ve got over 400 free episodes there, lot of different content related to all things speaking. Also, we’ve got a book called The Successful Speaker: Five Steps for Booking Gigs, Getting Paid, and Building Your Platform. So definitely encourage you to check that out. And then everything we do is over at thespeakerlab.com, thespeakerlab.com. And so a lot of free resources over there. Anything we can help you to build and grow your business through speaking, we’d love to support you on that journey.

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Paul Green’s…

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… MSP Marketing…

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… Podcast. This week’s…

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… recommended book.

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… book.

Jon Weberg:

My name is Jon Weberg and I have the best book recommendation that you need to read right now. And I’ll be honest, it’s actually my own. I’m kind of biased. What it is called is Finally Wealthy. If you want to learn how to optimize and grow your business and see a lot higher ROI or whether you’re MSP or any other business model, go ahead and check it out on Amazon. And thank you for listening. I can’t wait talk with you.

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Coming up.

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Coming up next week.

Nicky Billou:

Hi, I’m Nicky Billou and I’m going to be talking about how you can add one to two zeros to your annual income through a little known secret called Thought Leadership.

Paul Green:

So whichever platform you are listening to or watching this on right now, please grab your finger, press the subscribe button. If there’s a little notifications bell, press that as well and you will never miss an episode of this podcast. Because on top of that interview next week, we’re going to be sort of taking the subject that Grant was just talking about and we’re going to extend it. What happens if you really want to do videos for your MSP, but you’re terrified of being in front of the camera? I’ll directly address that for you next week. And talking of the camera, I film videos for YouTube all the time. There’s a ton of YouTube content for you to go down the rabbit hole and learn more about marketing and growing your MSP. Just go to youtube.com/mspmarketing. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.

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Made in the UK.

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For MSPs around the world.

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Paul Green’s…

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… MSP Marketing Podcast.