SPECIAL: Transform from MSP owner to entrepreneur

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Welcome to this SPECIAL EDITION marking 250 episodes of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

This week I have a very special guest – Brad Martineau. Brad helps people transform from being a business owner to truly being an entrepreneur. And as you can imagine, it’s about the way that you think and the action that you take. I think you are going to find him a huge inspiration.  

Here are three big ideas from him:

• Make it easy: Business is easy but we make it hard for ourselves. Brad uses the acronym, ELF – Easy, Lucrative, Fun.
• Remember the business is there to feed your life (not the other way round): Don’t let the business dictate how you live your life.
• We have 3 currencies in life: Time, energy and money. Be careful where you invest these. A great business returns these currencies to you.

Hi, I’m Brad Martineau and I help entrepreneurs build businesses that they actually want rather than the ones that they just wake up one day and accidentally have.

And what a great positioning statement that is. Brad, thank you so much for joining us, not just on the podcast, but on this very special episode as well. 250 episodes has taken quite a long time to get here, nearly five years, and I’m going to admit I’m a little bit of a fanboy of yours. You’ve been in my marketing journey and my entrepreneurial journey for getting on for about 18 years or so, and we’re going to talk a little bit about that in this podcast. When the opportunity came up to have you on, I had to jump on it and get you on and with this amazing episode coming up, this seemed the right thing to do. So what we’re going to do over the next 20 minutes or so is we’re going to explore what you’ve done in your entrepreneurial journey. You were involved really heavily with a popular CRM, which is still around today, which is actually the one that I use.

We’re going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about different business things you’ve done, but where we’re getting to and the bulk of the interview is exactly as you just said, is about helping people have the business and the life that they really want because far too many MSPs, as we know, are completely driven by the business rather than the other way around. And obviously I know that as well that the MSP market very well. You’ve worked with quite a lot of the big players in this market and I’m sure you’re going to deliver a ton of value and drop some value bombs within this. Could I sound any more American as I’m doing this podcast? I don’t think I could. So Brad, tell us about your early career and what you got into it and the thing that got you onto this amazing entrepreneurial journey in the first place.

Oh, that’s a really interesting question. So I was what I would call either an unwilling or an unknowing entrepreneur. So my working career started, I went and got a job, got married, got a job, and I was working as an admissions counsellor for an online university. And I didn’t recognise that I had entrepreneurial blood in me. And anyway, I was there. Everyone should have a job they hate, right? That’s like one of the best things you can do because you realise what you don’t want. I was there for two and a half years, it was two and a half years, two long, and then my brothers and my brother-in-law were like, yo, we’re doing this thing over here. We need some help. And it was the beginning of the company now called Keap, at that point it wasn’t even called that, it was called Infusionsoft before. And then before that it was even called something else, like Hey, we’re doing this thing.

It was called managed Pro CRM and Mortgage Pro CRM, and there were six of us, but our support rep just left and we need somebody to come help. And I’m like, C R who? What are you talking about? But I knew I didn’t want to be where I was, and so I walked away from, I dunno, I think I was making I 35 grand a year with benefits and I was married and had a kid at the time and I left to make 25 or 28 or something with no benefit. So it didn’t actually make sense financially, but I came over and I got introduced to the world of entrepreneurship, to the world of automation, to the world of strategies that get people to convert. And I fell in love with it. So that was my introduction into this whole world of client journey and entrepreneurship.

And as I was there, I got to work with a lot of entrepreneurs. I was in the middle of the support and dealing with clients that they’re trying to figure out this tool and they’re trying to make it work so they can get more clients and do all those things. So I was there for probably about six years or so, and that’s really where I cut my teeth. But even then I was an employee, so I hadn’t unlocked entrepreneur. I didn’t even really know what that meant. Looking back, I’m like, oh bro, you should never have spent your time doing that. You should have been an entrepreneur. And then probably, so I was the sixth employee there. They grew to about 150 and then they had to do a round of layoffs. Every business has ebbs and flows. They did around to layoffs and I was in, they laid off 10% of the company and I was in it. I like to make it more dramatic and say that they fired me. It was my two brothers that had to come over at two 30 in the morning and tell me that I was fired.

And then at that point, so by the time that happened, I had, it was six weeks after my fifth kid was born, my fifth child. So I have two girls, three boys. So I’ve got five kids under the age of eight at my house. I just got laid off. I’m looking at jobs thinking, oh, I’m going to go get jobs and there’s no job that’s like, well, this is going to work for what I’m trying to do with my family. I’m like, I guess I’m just going to start a company helping people with this tool in Infusionsoft that I’ve been working at. And so I started a company and it was interesting because at first I didn’t want to do it. I did it because it was the only thing that I had, but I was actively trying to figure out how to get out of it.

I would tell myself, oh, I didn’t grow up hoping that I could be this solo contractor helping people with automation and technology in their business. And then one day, and I think this, it came from Joe Polish, I don’t know anyone if they know who Joe Polish is, but if you know who Joe Polish is, really good marketing guy. He has podcasts and everything and he’s like, look, business is really easy, but people make it too hard. He’s like, I have this acronym, he’s registered trademark – ELF.

As long as your business is Easy, it’s Lucrative and it’s Fun – that’s all you need.

That’s all we’re looking for. And I was like, when I stopped, I was like, that’s actually exactly what I have. And so I stopped trying to run away from my business and I just accepted we could be really good at this and we could be really impactful and we could lead and help a lot of people.

That was probably a couple years into me being an entrepreneur. And that was when I was like, okay, I’m in. Let’s go do this. And I actually leaned into entrepreneurship. So that would be when I started as an entrepreneur I think because actually a couple of years into running my own business and that’s when things we had had some success in the business, but even then it was like, man, as soon as I can get out of this, I’m going to get out of this. It was about two and a half years in or so when I would say I actually, I would feel comfortable calling that version of me actually an entrepreneur.

Yeah, there is a big difference between being a business owner and being an entrepreneur and a lot of it is mindset and then that manifest as the things you do or don’t do, which I think we’re going to come on to later on. That’s a really interesting story, and I didn’t know that bit about Joe Polish for our listeners on the podcast and viewers on YouTube, if you’ve not heard of Joe, go and look him up. Is he particularly active anymore? Joe? I remember seeing his stuff years ago. I haven’t seen it for a while.

Yeah, he’s still running his mastermind thing and they’ve got an I love marketing podcast. They’ve got some other podcast stuff. If you go search for him, you’ll find him. He’s got good stuff. And that was just one of those, everybody has those things that people say that for whatever reason, they come at the right time and they do a whole lens perspective shift, and then they shift the future. And that one for me was important to recognise that there didn’t have to be some more big life like eternal purpose to what I was doing. It’s like, look, are you good at it? Can you make money? And do you have fun? And I was like, yes, yes, and yes. And then it just unlocked a whole bunch of opportunities moving forward and a whole bunch of what I could see because I stopped being afraid of it.

Yeah, no, I understand that. And I do love that ELF. I won’t steal it because obviously it belongs to someone else, but I’m going to work that into my pattern in some way. Let’s just go back and look at Infusionsoft, and that was where I first came across you. So I’ve been watching your videos probably for 17 years. It would’ve been some point in the middle of your time at Infusionsoft and I bought the software and back then, so we’re talking what, 2007 I say bought it, obviously you subscribe, but about 2007 I got serious about marketing. This was in a previous business. We then exited that business in 2016 as a result of a whole series of things that we put in place. The first of which was building a massive database of prospective clients, which was done in Infusionsoft. And we worked it.

We used that software every possible way. We automated what we could, we did all sorts of things. And I would say 10 years ago, that was the cutting edge. That software these days, it’s called Keap. It’s been through. They’ve had VC money coming in and I say, this is still a customer. I’m still a happy customer. I might pay my five, $600 a month. We use all the automation, we have all the APIs and stuff. And does it have the tool set of HubSpots or go high level, maybe not, but does it still do at its job a really good job? Yes, it does. Do you still use No, I know that you still use Keap yourself, because I just joined your mailing list like five minutes before our interview and it went straight to an Infusionsoft URL and then went to your thank you page. So even though they fired you about 14 years ago, you’re still a big fan of the product I presume.

That has been resolved. I mean, it wasn’t required. It got laid off and it was fine. We didn’t really have any problems, so that was totally fine. But yeah, we use it for parts of our business and we used other tools for other parts of other businesses. There’s a couple of different businesses we have going on, so we definitely use it. We have a lot of clients that use it and we have clients that use other tools. So I started there, what are we in July? It was June of 2004. That was 20 years ago. And for the first five or six years, it wasn’t that it was the best, there was no other option for the small business entrepreneur, there was nothing out there. And then inevitably is going to happen. You get competition that comes in and there are lots of really good tools and they all sort of have their pros and their cons. But yeah, so we use all sorts of different tools. Keap is still one of the ones that we use inside several of our businesses.

So let’s return back to that entrepreneurial awakening that you had. So you’re a business owner now, you’re a couple of years into that, and suddenly you’ve realised that there’s more to life than just running a business and doing this day to day. What changed next? So from that realisation, what different path did you go down?

So we stayed on the same path as far as if we say path and we’re talking in terms of what we’re selling, what were we trying to deliver, who are we trying to serve? We stayed on the same path. What changed was I wasn’t waking up every day trying to get out of it. I wasn’t waking up thinking, okay, well how do I turn this thing into something that I can just leave? Or how do I find this other thing that I want to do? And so with that change, what happened is I just started to pay attention to other ways that we could help our clients. And as clients started to come through, people would come through and it’s like, okay, I’m just running this little, we were at seven multiple seven figures, whatever, but I’m running this low multiple seven figure business. And you got clients that come through and they’re doing high seven figures, they’re doing eight figures or whatever.

It’s like, oh, they must have everything figured out and they had a lot of stuff figured out. But then I started to realise there were a lot of things that they didn’t have figured out and they were making more money, but they didn’t necessarily have the business that gave them the life necessarily that they wanted. So for me, I started to shift more to the primary thing that we sell is we’ll help you initially, we’ll help you with Keap or Infusionsoft. I love the fact before we hopped on here, you’re like, I don’t call it, I called it Infusionsoft because that’s what it was when I got it and I love that. So we were selling like, Hey, come work with us and we’ll make Infusionsoft hum and work and do all those amazing things. But then what happened is I started to put my brain on, I’m very much a systematic thinker and I look at how things relate to each other.

And so I started to put my brain on what are the elements that you have to wrap your head around in order to have a business that runs the way that you want it to? For two reasons. One, I recognise that entrepreneurs that are coming in didn’t seem to have it all figured out, and I just assumed that they did. It was like, oh, you’re running an eight figure business. Then you would know all the answers. Then you sit down and talk to ’em and they are really good at creating revenue, but they don’t necessarily have some prebuilt formula. So in my head I’m like, if other people that have bigger revenue companies don’t have it figured out, I wonder if I can go put together literally the manual of here’s how to think about a business. And by the way, I needed it for my own sanity because I had Sixth Division running, which is a coaching company, and we working with our clients and it was a multiple seven figure company.

We had spun out a software company that had grown to seven figures and eventually got to multiple seven figures. And I don’t know if you remember, but I had five kids, but now they’re all older and they’re all getting into competitive sports and I like to play basketball. And then I started coaching high school basketball.

I was like, all right, if I’m going to manage all of this, I have to have a better system and approach to how I think about the business to make sure that the business actually serves the life that I want.

And there was one specific pivotal point that I think for me, it set me on a course that would’ve either had me be a lot of people where the business controls them or what it actually is. It set me on a course, no, I’m going to be in control of my business.

And it was this. So after our first year at Sixth Division, we did seven figures in our first year and we did our annual planning at the end of the year, every good business should do, and I sat down with my business partner and we’re like, all right, what do we want to do? And obviously the answer is we want to grow. And so we had this whole plan, we spent, it was like I think two days of planning on how we were going to grow, when we were going to double or whatever we were going to do for the year. We get to the very end and it was literally in the last 15 minutes of the second day we’re about to leave. I had my backpack on and I looked at him and I was like, Dave, what if we didn’t try to do that?

Because I’m looking at it, I’m like, man, that first year we did seven figures. And a lot of people are like, oh, that’s amazing. I’m like, yeah, it also sucked. Seven figures in your first year was crazy heavy services business. I was gone all the time. My wife is talking to her family about why I’m gone, all this stuff. I’m like, what if we just didn’t? And in 15 minutes we changed our whole plan and the new goal was to make one more penny than we made the year before, but to cut our time in half. And then that set us on a course to, okay, well now how do we do that? What do we have to have in place in order to pull that off? And it completely shifted the perspective of rather than just chasing top line revenue or even just chasing profit, it expanded what I viewed as profit from just monetary profit to a thing that now I call life profit, which is more than just money.

And so that really shifted my approach to now I got to build a business that I actually care about and that I actually want to run and that I want to build a game. My buddy Dan, Dan Martel wrote a book and in it he has a line that says Smart entrepreneurs build a game that they want to play starting now, I forget the exact quote, but it’s something like regular entrepreneurs just hope that one day they’ll be able to be successful and have the life they want. Smart entrepreneurs are like, no, I’m going to start right now. I’m going to build a game and build a business that led me play the game that I want to right now. So it set us on that path, which was really pivotal and has led to a lot of the things now that I’m doing. A lot of things that I focus on with my clients is what do you actually want the outcome to be? That’s the first thing to start with.

Yeah, I love that. Now in a minute, I’m going to ask you about specific things that you think the average MSP owner could do that’s coming up in just a few seconds. Let’s talk a little bit more first about life profits. So I’ve been a business owner 19 years, similar kind of time to you. And let’s be honest, most of those years, and this will be the same for all business owners, the worldwide over, you’re focused on cash, you’re focused on client retention, you are focused on net profit because if the business doesn’t make profit, it’s very hard for you to feed your kids and pay your mortgage and stuff like that. So profit becomes the thing that you’re working towards. And I know loads of business owners the same as you were back then where you are, yeah, you’re making loads of money, but you are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week to do so. And obviously that balance is out. Is the concept of life profit not just being the money, but having the money and having the balance as well? Or is it something different?

Yeah, so the concept of life profit is recognised that we have three currencies in life that we can spend – time, energy, and money.

So time, if we put it in the context of the business, I think every entrepreneur with every business they build should have a very clear documented statement that says, this is what this business’s job is to return to me. I call it the return. I’ve got a video on my YouTube channel if you want to link to it that talks about how to fill this out and it’s first time, meaning how much time can the business take and then how much time should it give me? The second is energy, meaning when I spend that time, what am I doing in the business? So energy is about what my role is in the business.

And then the third one is money. And obviously you have to make money, but to have a business that really maximises life profit, gives you all three of those. And what I found is most people start by defining money. And if you start by defining money, what ends up happening is you will compromise on time and energy because money becomes the top standard. But if you start by defining time and then energy and then you get to money, then you’re like, all right, this is what I’m willing to put in the business. And this is not about being unrealistic. Everything about this is practical real world. So this isn’t, oh, life profit means that I work for an hour a week and then I’m on the beach the whole time. No, I actually like to work. So life profit is about defining what does this business look like where I could just do it for the next 20 or 30 years or whatever the timetable is, but let’s define a business that actually gives me what I want.

Maybe it’s six hours a day, maybe it’s just not 12 hours a day, but it’s eight hours a day and that’s the first milestone and then we might progress from there, but life profit is having a very clear target across those three currencies, time, energy, and money so that when I go to make decisions in the business, I make decisions that will actually align to what I want out of the business rather than just making decisions based on whatever info I have inside the business. The business’s first and most important job is to deliver the return to the business owner that the business owner wants. The second job is to go get clients and make them happy and deliver value so that the business can do the first job, which is to deliver the return to the business owner. But most entrepreneurs are so fixated and focused on their clients, which is not a bad thing. I’m making it sound like it’s a bad thing. It’s not. It’s just secondary to the fact that the business has a job which is to return value to the business owner. And if it’s not, it’s a failing business. No matter how much money you’re making or how happy your clients are, it’s a failing business because it’s not doing its intended purpose.

Yeah, I love that. I think you and I are in complete agreement about this, and actually in my own personal situation, something I don’t talk about a lot on this podcast is that I’m a sole parent. So unfortunately my wife left the planet a few years ago, if you understand what I mean by that. And I knew it was going to happen. She was quite badly ill for a while. And so I knew for a long time I was going to be a sole parent to my daughter who’s now 14, and actually I’m a better business owner today because of that. Because I looked and it was the very early days of the business hub now and looked at it and said, right, how much money do I need to live a lifestyle I want? But how many hours do I want to work?

And I work 20 to 30 hours a week, and it’s around this week. We’re recording this in July, although it’s not going out till later in the year and this week it’s been the end of school. So I’ve been to a sports event, a concert, an award ceremony, another award ceremony for an acting class. There was something else, and the business hasn’t fallen over. I haven’t worked evenings. I’m not going to have to work weekends because actually it was designed that way from the very beginning, which is easy if you can design it that way. But here’s my next question for you, Brad. For the vast majority of people listening to this or watching this, they’re trapped. And there’s a great phrase, and I think it’s in the four hour work week, which is an interesting book to read by Tim Ferris. I say interesting because there’s some crazy stuff in there, but there’s some good stuff in there as well.

And I think it was Tim Ferris who came up with the phrase that most business owners create a prison of their own design and lock themselves inside. And it is just an interesting way of saying the exact same concept you were talking about there. If you are in that position right now, so you are working 60, 70, 80 hour weeks, and this will be lots of MSPs because it’s a very reactive type of business and your job is to be there and fix other people’s problems. So if you’re working all those hours and there’s not quite enough money for you to hire even more resource, and you might have maybe a couple of technicians, but we all know that you hire someone for 40 hours, you don’t get 40 hours, you get 30 hours and you have to spend some time on that. And if it just feels like everything is difficult and hearing you talking about what you do with your business and I do with mine, seems like something cool for the future, but how would I do that now? What are the first steps that you would take to get going on that right path?

Yeah, I think that’s a great question. So the very first thing is you have to get really clear on the baseline currencies that you actually need. The reason why we feel trapped is because we look at okay, time. I’m already putting in X amount of time and I have to have this much money, and so if I go hire somebody else, I’m not going to have this much money, which I’m telling myself I have to have. And that might be the case. A lot of times it’s not the case. You’re actually making more money than you need, and so you can make an investment. And then the other thing that we don’t consider is, well, if I went and got somebody else, we don’t consider the investment that’s going to become available because I’m actually going to free up my time to be able to go do something more.

So the fact of the matter is at the end of the day, what nobody can escape is the only currencies we have are time, energy, and money. And so if I’m in a position where I’ve got a 70 or 80 hour work week and I’m barely making enough money for things to go along and I’m doing things in the business, I don’t want the first thing I’m going to do, so I’m clear on what the problem is, is I’m going to make a list of all the things that I’m doing that I don’t want to do, that I don’t need to do, that I could probably find somebody else to do so that I have a target, I have a target of target of the problem of what I’m trying to get rid of. I’m going to look at those things and the first thing I’m going to ask is, do I even need to be doing them?

Because a lot of times there’s stuff that’s like, Hey, I’m doing this, but if it’s not moving the needle for then you can just stop doing it. Kind of like when me and my business partner are like, what if we just didn’t try to double our business? There will inevitably be things that you are spending time on that are not actually moving you toward what your goal is. You got to stop those. And so that should give you some time back. The next thing that I’m going to be looking at is what are things not that I’m just going to stop doing, but what are things that I can give to either somebody else on my team or I can actually hire an outsourced assistant or I can hire somebody because if I take some of that money and I give it to somebody else to do these things and take it off my plate, it gives me back time.

It doesn’t mean now that I’m not working, it means that I’m going to work that time in a way that it produces a greater investment of income and revenue so that I can pay for the people, I can do higher value activities inside the business. So I’m going to look at activities that are taking on my time and I’m going to figure out which ones just need to be cut, period, which ones can I start to shift over so that my time starts to balance out on the money side, if your entire team is so strapped and you’re so strapped that you can barely get by based on the things that you’re selling, then we might need to look at some pricing or we might need to upgrade some sales skills so that we can close more. Either your capacity is tapped. So I’m just going through what are the elements that are going to free up time, energy, or money?

And at the end of the day, if you’ve created a business model, so this is where we start to get into the business, but if you’ve created a business model where there is literally no extra time and there’s no way you can charge more money for the thing that you do and you’re tapped out in terms of everything, then your business model is broken. You have chosen to sell something at a price point that you can’t actually staff to deliver in a way that that business will give you the life that you want. Other people have figured out how to do your same business differently. So we’ve got to go look at the different elements of the different pieces. So as I start to look at it, it would be first, what’s the target of what I want to get to That would be an acceptable next step.

Time, energy, money. I want a clear target and I want to make sure that I’m being realistic in those so that I’m not telling myself I need to make $250,000 where if I need to step back to rearrange this business, I could actually trim down to a hundred grand so that I could reorganise my business. And it might mean that temporarily I changed some of my living conditions or I changed some of my lifestyle because I went down a path and that path is a dead end, so I’ve got to come back so that I can go down a path that I want. Quick story to illustrate this, I’ve done this by the way multiple times in my businesses, but one of them, we got to a point where we were doing about $3 million in our coaching business a year and it sucked. I hated it because I was traveling two or three times a week to speak.

I wasn’t around for my family. When I went to travel, I would get people to sign up and buy stuff from us. I didn’t make any more money of that. It was just going to cover the cost of the team. I’m literally spending crazy amounts of time doing all this stuff. How do we shift this? I got a team of, I dunno, probably 12 or 15, and essentially the P and L’s like, Hey, we made 3 million and then we spent 3 million. That’s basically what it ended up being. And I had this epiphany, which was I think I was driving to or from work at this epiphany was like, you know what I’m doing right now? It’s like I’m wearing a large T-shirt, actually like an extra large T-shirt, but really I should be wearing a medium sized t-shirt, and my solution is I’m going to go to the gym and I’m going to work out four times a day and I’m going to pound a bunch of calories so I can get swell to fit into this extra large and what I actually needed to do, just click like, or you could just go buy a medium sized another option and then it immediately fits.

And in that business, this was a tough decision. However, in that business, we went from $250,000, like $246,000 in one month in expenses to 90 days later it was 86.6. I was like, all right, we are trimming. We are cutting this thing down because it doesn’t matter what the revenue number is if this business is not giving me the return that I want and if it’s running me ragged. So I would rather sacrifice the extra $2 million in revenue that I’m not actually getting any benefit from to come back down to our business works at a million dollars in revenue and we take out all these expenses, we get trimmed right here, and then we can rebuild it the right way. So something will have to give. If you have no time and there’s nothing else you can sell and you can’t charge more money and nobody has any more time to take out more clients, then the hard truth is your business model is broken and it needs to be re-engineered. And we have to go back and look at how do we make the math work so that we can make enough money and have enough time in order to actually have this business be something that we want.

I love the T-shirts story. I think that’s such a great thing. And what we’re talking about here is making the step and it’s not a leap. I was about to say leap, but it’s not a leap. It’s the step from being a business owner to being an entrepreneur and rolling backwards in order to go forwards is it’s something that feels wrong. And I think society and just general expectations of you and your business expect you to be constantly growing and moving forward, but actually sometimes taking that backward step is the right thing to do.

I did a whole presentation that was called How to Scale Back to Scale Up, and it was basically my story. It’s like, this is my story of when I sucked. And then I was like, all right, we’re just going to back up and then we will go at it again. And I think being comfortable with that is a huge thing. There are going to be times where it’s like, I think we’re going to go here. Nope, we’re not going to go here, but I can’t jump from here to the next growth step. I got to come back and then I got to go. Then I keep going up. It’s really, really, it’s an important skillset to develop. It’s like, all right, that’s fine, then that’s what I got to go do.

Even though it hurts. It’s the thing you have to do. Brandon, we’re going to wrap this up, which is such a shame. I could talk to you for hours and hours, but let’s talk about what you’re doing now. And obviously you’ve talked about all these things, all these problems that people have within their business, and obviously we know you’re not doing a coaching company anymore, or certainly not the straight coaching because you rolled that back and you changed it, but what do you do now to help MSPs to become entrepreneurs and not just business owners and what’s the best way for us to get in touch with you?

From a content, the thing that I’m chewing on and creating content and stuff around is this concept I call “smooth scaling”. So I’ve got a YouTube channel where I’m posting stuff and smooth scaling is about how do I manage all the pieces of business that get thrown at me and do it in an organised fashion so that I can build a business that I want rather than just a business that I wake up like, well, crap, this is the one that I have. So if you go find search for Brad Martineau on YouTube, you’ll find the YouTube channel, and then I also have an email newsletter around that, so it’s at smoothscaling.co. That’s the one that you went and signed up for. And what I anticipate will happen in the future is we’ll actually build out some coaching and services around the entire smooth scaling.

Right now, the primary thing we have at Sixth Division is we’re still helping people with one piece of the smooth scaling business, which is their client journey and getting clear on their strategy and then the technology and making their experiences good enough, they convert. So we do a lot of work on that. I imagine that over time we’ll also add in then coaching around the rest of the smooth scaling framework and then also have a software company plus this. So if you’re using any sort of automation tool or platform or CRM or whatever, that’s an add-on software that helps you do a bunch of stuff. Then we’ve started to spin out some other tools. We got one called Tag Genie for you in Infusionsoft. If you want a tool to help organise, keep your tax clean tag genius, like stupid simple tool to do that.

And then we’ve got a couple other things coming out around how to protect your email list and just some different software tools that are coming out. So easiest way to get in contact I would say is go to smoothscaling.co. If you want to get on the email newsletter. If you’re like, I don’t know if I want that yet, then go to the YouTube channel, check some of that stuff out. If you like it, then go get on the email list. And that’s like it’s my entrepreneurial journal of where I dump the things that I’m working on and then how I organise them into systems that are easy to follow is essentially what I’m working on there.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Connect with my guest Brad Martineau on LinkedIn and check out the SmoothScaling™ website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.
• Find Brad’s book recommendation here – Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell