
The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge
Welcome to Episode 282 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…
- Being a better technician doesn’t grow the business: Being successful has less to do with being skilled and more to do with the way you think. You personally don’t need all the technical skills in order to grow a fantastic MSP, you hire people who can do those things for you.
- Should MSPs use AI robodiallers to make prospecting calls?: Is this a valid, smart marketing tactic or could it do harm to your MSP? The results I’ve experienced and the potential opportunities out there for your MSP may just surprise you.
- How to escape the chaos of being an MSP owner: My guest is an expert at saving business owners from the chaos of their business by adopting the right relationship with time.
- Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you ever get stuck on what to write in your LinkedIn connection requests? I’ve got three examples for you to swipe and try.
Being a better technician doesn’t grow the business
If growing your MSP was like flying a plane, would you focus on building the biggest engine or just learning how to fly higher?
Most MSPs assume the answer is raw power, more technical skills, better tools, deeper expertise. But strangely, some of the most profitable MSPs aren’t even run by technicians.
So what’s really keeping some MSPs grounded while others climb higher and higher? If it’s not just technical know-how, then what is it? Stick around because once you see this, you’ll never look at your business the same way again.
I’ve made it a deep habit to follow, read, listen, and learn from as many people as I can across my business career.
In fact, I kind of wish this was a habit that I had as a teenager or in my early twenties, but there we go. And it does mean that over the last 25 years or so, I have read an insane amount of business and marketing books and blogs and courses, all sorts of other stuff. I’ve just been absorbing knowledge like a sponge. And of course, a huge amount of that knowledge has come into my head and left my head. Although I guess all the good ideas that you have, they get mashed together and they influence the way that you think and therefore the way that you act.
Anyway, there was a specific phrase that I heard, and it was quite at the beginning of my learning career about 25 years ago, but it stuck with me, and it’s been very present in my mind for a very long time. If you are under the age of 30, please don’t laugh at me. As I tell you the delivery method on which I heard this piece of advice, it was actually on a cassette tape. I used to get a cassette sent to me, I think it was every week or every two weeks, by a guy called Peter Thompson, and he was huge in the field of personal development here in the UK, sort of back at the turn of the century. He’s actually still around today, I’m guessing he must be in his eighties, something like that, late seventies, early eighties. But back then I absorbed and loved every single thing that he put out.
One day listening to one of his cassette tapes in the car, he said this sentence, and this is the thing that stayed with me all these years, this is what Peter Thompson said. He said, it’s your attitude and not your aptitude that determines your altitude. Is that insane or what? Because think what that means. It means that being successful is less to do with being skilled and more to do with the way that you think. Now, speaking as one business owner to another, what do we define as success? Well, I believe it’s in you having enough spare cash and time to be able to do the things you really want to do. And in order to achieve those things, if you believe that phrase, then it’s your attitude that determines how quickly you’ll get there and in fact, whether you will even get there at all. Do you agree with this? I think it has an enormous amount of truth in it.
Certainly I’ve had a ton of failures over the years, I’ve had some good successes as well, but it’s the failures that I’ve learned the most from. That’s because I fostered a deliberate attitude that I need to be constantly improving myself and my business and what we do and what I do and how I operate, and that’s a never ending process. There’s always something new to learn and to implement. Maybe that’s been my greatest success is actually having that attitude, that attitude of constant improvement, which means I never want to stand still with anything.
I’ll tell you one thing though. I’ve spoken to so many MSPs and other business owners in the last 25 years, and the most successful of them, using that definition of success we were just talking about, the most successful of them are not always the most skilled. They’re the ones who think the right way about their business and therefore they take the right actions. Now, please don’t think that I’m saying that skills are not important, of course they’re important, but you personally don’t need all the skills. You don’t have to be able to rewire a cabinet or configure a server in order to grow a fantastic MSP, that gives you the lifestyle you most want to live. Along the way you can hire people who can do those things for you.
So it’s your attitude and not your aptitude that determines your altitude. What do you think about this? Is it going to change the way that you approach growing your MSP?
Should MSPs use AI robodiallers to make prospecting calls?
This seems so tempting. Finding new MSP clients by using AI to make outbound calls on your behalf. Really clever stuff with no humans involved. And there are loads of really good AI robodialler solutions out there. But the big question is, should you? Is this a valid smart marketing tactic or could it do harm to your MSP? I’ve actually been using a robodialler myself and the results I’ve experienced and the potential opportunities out there for your MSP may just surprise you.
I’m a big fan of MSPs making outbound phone calls. In fact, it’s the entire third step of my simple MSP marketing strategy. Build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. Why? Because one of the biggest marketing problems that you have is reaching the right person at the right time with the right message. You want to be there at the very moment they are feeling negative about their incumbent MSP, and that will be very lucky timing, right? Well, actually, I don’t believe in luck. I believe in being prepared and taking action.
The easiest way to get lucky is to make 50 outbound phone calls to your audiences every day.
This is how you stack the odds in your favour, you keep picking up the phone asking open questions about the business and their technology. And at least once a week, if not twice a week, you should get lucky with someone saying, oh, it’s so weird you called because…
Finding someone to make outbound calls, well frankly it is difficult. And if you go for a telemarketing agency, often they overdeliver the first two months and then underdeliver for the rest of time. My question is this, should you use an AI robodialler to make outbound calls? As it stands today my answer is no, and maybe that will change in the years ahead, but this answer of no is based on a couple of months of my business using an AI robodialler. We were doing it this time last year. We signed up to something called Voxia after seeing it featured in a marketing newsletter, and there are of course alternatives out there. But we gave the AI agent a desired flow and outcome for the call. We gave it some specific phrases to use if possible. We loaded it with FAQs, frequently asked questions, with of course the answers. And we linked it to a Calendly to book appointments in. So its mission was to call MSPs in the US and try to book them a 15 minute zoom with my colleague Ben. And that was to talk about the MSP Marketing Edge, which is our business.
So it wasn’t really doing any selling as such. Its job was qualifying people, checking they were an MSP because we just put some cold data in that we’d bought from Apollo, and its job was to call those people, qualify them, and then actually set up an appointment with Ben. Voxia was very clever and very adaptable. In fact, one MSP, he said that his perfect clients were on Sesame Street. He’d obviously spotted it was an AI agent, and Voxia kept making humorous references to Sesame Street for the rest of the call. But I’ll be honest, it didn’t work for us. And here are three reasons why.
The first, is that the delay was slightly too long. The AI would ask a question, the human would reply, and then the gap before the AI spoke again, it was just a fraction too long and lots of humans started talking again because we kind of feel like we want to fill the gap, right? But that then fractured the conversation. And in recordings we could hear the humans losing interest. And I know that the physics of AI calling make this hard, but I do expect this problem to vanish in the years ahead. Maybe the AI will predict and pre-prepare dozens of possible answers based on the first few words that the human is saying, or maybe it’ll start talking a fraction before it anticipates the human to stop speaking so it feels more like a natural conversation.
The second reason was that the people we were calling, MSPs, very quickly spotted it was an AI. Now, maybe that was because of the delay or maybe it was something else that didn’t feel quite right. It’s very hard to pinpoint what makes for “uncanny valley”. Have you heard of that before? That feeling that this is an AI, it’s not a real human, and it is a feeling, it’s not a thought. A surprising number of MSPs did ask, are you an AI? And maybe it is just that MSPs are super smart and they’re looking out for this, whereas normal business owners and managers, they’re not necessarily so aware. I don’t know.
And then the third reason was that during our campaign, and this is the absolute clincher for us, AI robocallers were actually banned in the US. This happened about a year ago. So of course the technology is going to get better and better, and it’s probably already better now than when we tried it a year ago. And maybe a more obvious use of this is not for outbound sales calls, which obviously they’re illegal in the US and may become illegal in other parts of the country as well.
But what if you use them to handle inbound calls? What if every user who called your help desk is answered by an AI and asked a number of basic questions so that your technicians don’t have to? And those questions could be things like, Tell me what the problem is, and it could then respond with, Oh, I’m really sorry to hear you’ve got that problem. Let’s get this sorted for you. Is it just affecting you or is it affecting anyone else? And then it could ask, Is it stopping you getting on with your work or can you work around it for a bit? So essentially we’re just classifying the call. Then the AI could either transfer the caller through to their colleague, which is of course your human technician, or they could log it as a ticket and give the caller a real rough expectation of how long it could take to get this problem fixed. And that could be based on your current ticket levels, which would be really smart.
How much technician time could you save by eliminating 80% of phone calls, all of those first phone calls that you get? How easy would it be to offer this 24/7? With the AI telling callers late at night or early in the morning when humans will be in to fix the problem? Is this something you would want integrated into your PSA?
How to escape the chaos of being an MSP owner
Featured guest: Andrew Hartman is the founder of Time Boss, a training organisation that helps leaders and their teams take control of their time to get the results they want without overwhelm. Andrew founded Time Boss after burning out several times in early stage startups, even losing his sense of smell for a season. He has taken all he has learned over the years to build a system to help business leaders and their teams avoid the same mistakes, and instead find their Highest Sustainable Pace, making more progress on their top priorities and experiencing more peace in their day to day schedule.
Andrew has been an early stage startup COO for 10+ years supporting the launch of software and technology
platforms from $0 to 9M, including Caliber Media Group, Sevenly, Cotribute, Download Youth Ministry and BRITECITY, as well as a multi-unit franchise owner. He is a regular speaker to founders, CEOs and business leaders, including Vistage, Convene and CBMC.
How often do you get to the end of day running your MSP and there’s just too much work left to do? Sure, you’ve got the basic work done and the clients are happy, but you’ve had another day where you haven’t grown your business or worked on the big projects that matter the most. If this is you, then there’s one big change that you need to put in place, and my guest today is an expert at saving business owners from the chaos of their business. The next five minutes could change your life forever.
Hi, I’m Andrew Hartman. I am the founder of Time Boss, and we help MSPs get the results that they want without overwhelm.
I love that, great company name, Time Boss. As soon as I saw that company name, when you and I were talking about this interview, I thought, oh, I love that. And I love the pitch as well, helping MSPs to get done what they need to get done. So if I was to boil it down and sort of introduce you to someone outside of our world, are you someone who helps people be more productive or do you help them make better use of your time or is it something different?
It’s really a little of both. Everyone wants something, we all have things that we want. We can name it. We want our MSP to grow, we want higher client satisfaction, we want to have better recruitment… whatever it is, every MSP has something that they want. All of those things are on the other side of time. And so if we don’t have a right relationship with time, if we don’t know how to navigate it, if we don’t know how to break things down into manageable tasks that we can make happen, if we don’t have a good sense of our capacity, we’re not going to get those things and we’re going to end up overwhelmed.
We help people think differently about time to get the results that they want without overwhelm.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. How did you get here? What’s your backstory? I’m going to guess it’s the rags to riches story that you used to be the most disorganised, time poor person and then you have a revelation and change your life. Is it that or is it something else?
Of course it’s that. So the best products come from solving our own problems. So I spent my career in early stage software companies prior to coming to being at MSPs. I’m actually a fractional COO at an MSP now. But prior to that, I was in early stage software companies, short runways, high expectations, got to deliver, no margin for error, and I was absolutely cooking. I was so overwhelmed. And I looked around and everyone was overwhelmed. It was how people operated. Stress was fuel. It was how we made things happen. If you weren’t overwhelmed, you weren’t working hard enough. And that served me to a point, but eventually I started hitting my red line like a lot of people do, where you just realise, hey, this is taking up more than I want it to take of my health, of my relationships.
I’d come home from work, I’d be physically home, but not emotionally home. I’d be totally exhausted, didn’t have anything to bring to my family or my friends. It started impacting my sleep, and I ended up losing my sense of smell for six months because of stress. I could feel it coming on, pre covid. This is in the 2000s. I could feel it coming on from stress and really stress will do wacky things to us. It is a yellow flashing light that we need to change. Hypertension, headaches, IBS, you name it, it’ll do all kinds of things for our body.
So I knew it had to be different. I didn’t know what to do. I knew I had to keep delivering results. Probably like a lot of the MSP leaders listening, you feel like I have to keep delivering results. I can’t change. But I knew it had to be different. So for me, I was a COO at the time. I was all about how do we blend a process and people, and so I said for myself, I have got to figure out a way to get results without this overwhelm. And it started me on a journey to build out the system. Took me 10 years to build it for myself, realised it was incredibly valuable for me, it was incredibly valuable for my teams. Others started asking me to coach them on it, and it led us into this business called Time Boss now, where we help teams learn and adopt this framework to get those results they want without overwhelm.
I love this. And you talking about your experience in early stage software I think is very similar to the experience in the first few years of running your MSP. And you obviously know this because of the people you’re working with. I talk to MSPs almost every day, people I already know and new people. And some who’ve been running their MSP for let’s say 10 years, 10 years is a mature business, and normally by that point they’ve got themselves to a level of comfort in terms of the amount of work. For some of those people, that level of comfort is working 30 hours a week or 20 hours a week, and those businesses are flying. Because they’ve had to build good teams around them, they’ve had to go from the 60 hour weeks to the 20 hour weeks and put in place things to make sure the clients are even more delighted than when they were there.
But then sometimes I’ve talked to people who are 10 years in and they’re still doing 50 hours and they’re crazy nuts doing things like they’re still doing help desk, not just the odd hour here or there’s cover, but they’ll be like, oh yeah, I’ve got a cover help desk this week. This week! Why would you do that? You’ve got 12 people on your team. Why would you do that? Oh, it’s because, because, because… And so they’ve never got time, and you’re right, it’s all about time. They’ve never got the time to a) think, b), reflect, c) actually look at the big picture and say, right, I’ve only got 20 more years or 30 more years left on the planet. This is the life I want to lead. This is what I need in order to live that life, and how quickly can I get there while delighting my clients, delighting my staff and delighting my family? Is that your experience of MSPs as well?
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s fascinating, I think MSPs because of the nature of them, most of them are started by founders, and founders are still involved unless they’ve exited. And when that founder started, they had to wear all the hats. So the habits that they operated on at the beginning of their business was I must do it all. This business will die unless I do it all – unless I’m on help desk, unless I do projects, unless I do sales, unless I do marketing – all the things. If an MSP founder or a leader that’s scaling within that business isn’t careful, they’re just going to continue to hold onto those things because they’re afraid if they let them go, they’re not going to be done as well as they want them to or whatever. And to your point, then they get into that avalanche of there’s too much to do, so I don’t have time to delegate. They never change. And so really our experience of time, I love what you said, delight customers, delight clients, and delight our family. Whatever you’re getting on that playing field right now is a direct function of your habits related to time. So if you don’t change your habits related to time, your experience of life won’t change. You won’t be pulling out of the help desk. You’ll be up on Saturday night on the 24/7 help desk line talking to clients. It’s just the way it is.
And so the way I say is you both have to change your habits and you have to look at it like time math. There’s so much that has to get done. There’s only so much time. Who are the right people to slot into these roles to make those things happen? And the answer isn’t always you. Dan Sullivan wrote that phenomenal book Who Not How with Ben Hardy, and it’s just the best question to ask. When a new responsibility comes in, the right question for us to ask is who should do this? Not how am I going to get it done? And just thinking differently, those slight little adjustments to how we think about time can dramatically impact our experience of both the results we get from MSP and our experience of life, which both are critical. You can’t have one without the other.
Yeah, I completely agree. And that is an insanely good book. It’s one of the books over on my big bookshelf, which is full of my favourite business books, and that has its place there. Andrew, let’s get into potential solutions. So talk to us about the Time Boss framework, and I appreciate this probably,
if you spent 10 years developing it, it is going to be a very rich and very thorough model, but can you give us an overview and what I’m really looking for as well is what can someone who’s watching this on YouTube or listening to this on the podcast, what are some takeaways that they can get from that which will just make an instant positive difference to their management and perception of how they use their time?
Yeah, I love that question, Paul. Yeah, let me start really high level and then we’ll get incredibly practical with the tool. So it’s really about a couple things. One is the big idea is your highest sustainable pace, and it’s this. If you think like a distance runner, every distance runner has a pace in mind, and an MSP is absolutely a marathon, it’s a distance run. They know that if they sprint out the gate, they’re going to end up doubled over and they probably won’t even finish the race. So just grinding is not an adequate solution for us to get the results we want from our MSP. Now, at the same time, a distance runner is not going to walk a marathon because it’s too slow. You can’t just over optimise on self-care. Hey, I’m not going to feel any stress in 2025. That’s not realistic. We can’t operate that way. We’re not going to get the results that we want.
The only rational way to operate is just like a distance runner, find that pace, that highest sustainable pace where you will get the best results possible in a way that can stay in the game and keep getting it. So we teach highest sustainable pace. The way that we get there is two simple habits. One is a weekly planning meeting and literally that’s where the name Time Boss comes from. When you plan out your week, you become the boss of your future self. You’re literally treating your future self like an employee, and you’re thinking about – How do I set up that individual to be successful? What are the highest leverage activities that they can work on that are going to make the biggest difference for my business?
And we do the work to really map out a realistic week, and there’s all kinds of things that happen within that. That’s what we teach. But when we do that, not everything’s going to fit. There’s only so much time. We are finite human beings. It’s time math again, there’s so much that has to get done and I only have so much time. Then we encourage people to go through a really disciplined process to deal with the items that don’t fit. And most of the time that involves getting others involved in those tasks, really running a high quality delegation process so it’s not just about you working help desk to your analogy, Paul, I love that analogy.
But again, what we often do instead of being our time boss, instead of doing that weekly planning meeting, we just kind of throw ourselves into the week. We open up help desk, we open up our email inbox, we open up Teams, and we just start grinding. And really we’re working other people’s priorities. We’re not working on the things that are actually important to us, and we’re task switching so rapidly we’re wasting so much time, we end up exhausted and we don’t even know what we got done at the end of the day. So by having a weekly planning meeting, again, being that time boss, you’re freeing up your future self to just make the plan happen. You’re creating a great plan for them that they can carry out.
And then we teach another habit called a daily review meeting. If you’ve read Deep Work by Cal Newport, he talks about a daily closedown, and I think that’s so critical at the end of your day, closing down your day where you’re getting everything out of your head back into the system so that you can be fully free to the rest of your life, to be fully present to your family, to your community, to your church, whatever it is you do after work. Having a way to really close down so those things don’t just haunt you all night or all weekend, like these emotional anchors that we can’t get away from.
So those are the habits, and there’s just three simple tools that we use within those habits that we can certainly talk more about. The one very practical thing that I think will instantly reduce overwhelm for an MSP leader that’s listening is this… In the midst of your day, you have two things happening. You have your priorities – the things you actually want to be working on, and you have the chaos that is coming at you – emails, phone calls, systems breaks, clients are mad, spouse needs you, kid gets sick, flat tire, I mean you name it. the things that we can’t stop. That chaos is here to stay, we cannot solve it. And so all of that is happening on top of each other and that chaos makes it so hard for us to focus on our priorities.
So what I suggest when people are planning out their day is they literally plan 20 to 40% of their day for the chaos. And the more control they have over their time, the less of that buffer they need, but literally adding buffer to their calendar that they don’t schedule over, simply to contend with those last second items that are going to come up that they absolutely have to handle. The urgent and important that leader’s responsible to handle. What it does, Paul, it has this magic trick where when we know that there’s time available for us to handle those things, we are so much more likely to try to divert those last second requests coming in into that buffer time so that we can stay focused on our actual priorities.
And it doesn’t always happen that way. System goes down, you’re responsible for it, you just got to handle it. But that is the rare exception and we build our time management habits on the exceptions instead of the average. And so the average leader listening, if you put that buffer in your calendar and you do your best to stay focused on your priorities, and then when those buffer times come up, you could do an hour in the morning, an hour, midday hour at the end of the day, you architect it the way you want, but I promise it will increase your commitment to your actual priorities knowing you have time later to deal with these last second items that are going to come up. So you don’t just switch over to them and work on, you don’t know when you’re going to work on them, but you can actually be confident that I can stay focused on my priorities right now.
Yeah, I absolutely love that. In fact, there’s an MSP I know who does exactly that, and this is a very structured way that you can give your time to your technicians in a way which doesn’t impact on your plan time. So he doesn’t work in his office with his technicians, but they have two specific times of the day, I think it’s like 9.30 in the morning and say 2.30 in the afternoon, where he will jump on a Team’s call and he’ll say to them, if you’ve got any questions about any tickets or any projects or anything, that’s when you do the questions. So don’t send me messages, don’t WhatsApp me, don’t message me on Teams, don’t send me emails, don’t call me. If you call me, I’m not going to answer you. I’m not being an a-hole here, I’m being very, very organised. Because my job is to bring in new clients so I can pay you more, but you’ve got me for an hour a day split into two 30 minute chunks. And guess what happened. When he introduced that first time everyone was on the call and then the second day a few people dropped out of that call because they didn’t really have questions, and the third day there were fewer people and now he probably has one or two questions that come a week out of those sessions. So he’ll dial in and if no one’s there, he’ll just dial out again. Because what it’s done is it’s forced his technicians to ask, can I solve this now or can I talk to a colleague and solve this now or does this need to go to the boss? So he’s eliminated a whole series of things that would’ve been escalated to him if he was more available. So I agree and love everything that you’ve just said there.
My final question for you – Is this ever finished? Now, this is my 20th year in business, and I remember when I started, I was very disorganised, very chaotic. I was a radio presenter, but in the corporate world and you had your day planned for you by the meetings other people were having and all of that stuff. And then suddenly I’m my own boss and I wanted to get things done. I remember working through different systems. I used to use something called RememberTheMilk.com, if you ever remember that, it was an amazing system. Then I was an early adopter of Todoist, which I still use now, and I know that that’s the tool and the tool doesn’t make it, but Todoist has just got better and better over the years. But what I’ve found is I’m 50 now and my priorities have changed, I have a teenage child, I have a girlfriend, I don’t want to work more than the hours I want to work, but I also want to achieve a lot more. And I’ve found that my personal system for getting things done, to quote David Allen, for my productivity system has changed dramatically as my role within the business has changed. Do you see that happening with MSPs and is that a natural, healthy thing?
Absolutely, yes. And you have to constantly evaluate that. Unfortunately what everyone is looking for, I love your comment about the app, the number one question I get asked is what app should I use? And it’s unfortunate that that’s not the solve. We all are looking for that switch to flip and that’s where it never changes. And that’s where with Time Boss, we teach these reflexive habits where you are always on this continuum between making the progress you want and experiencing the peace you want. And you have to be evaluating those systems week over week, month over month, year over year to make the changes necessary so that you stay in that zone, that productive zone you want to be in, where you get the results you want without overwhelm. But unfortunately it’s not a switch you flip. It’s got to evolve over time, because your time’s going to change, your requirements are going to change, your stakeholders are going to change. All of those things influence how we show up and make things happen, and so you just got to be ready to make adjustments.
That makes perfect sense. I am off to see if Remember The Milk still exists because I want a 20-year-old nostalgia hit and I really hope it does exist. While I go and do that, Andrew, just tell us, what do you actually physically do to help MSPs? So you’ve obviously got this incredible framework, but how do you help them implement it and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?
Yeah, absolutely love it and appreciate the question. So we do a course called Master Your Week for leadership teams and management teams where we take those individuals through the process to learn the Time Boss weekly framework and help them make the structural adjustments to their internal systems, their communication workflows to help them get those results they want without overwhelm.
From there, those leadership and management teams can take it into their teams if they like, or they can bring Time Boss in to lead workshops to train the entire team and then bring them up to speed on it. And then we simply come back monthly or quarterly, and the language I use is de-weed the garden, just help people stay committed to the system. Once they get the results, they don’t want to go back. We essentially become an outsourced accountability partner to help them work through the friction so they don’t backslide. Best thing to do is find me on LinkedIn, Andrew Hartman, or Time Boss, or you can find our website www.timeboss.us and all the details are there as well.
Paul’s Personal Peer Group
Joyce from an MSP in Dallas is really trying to do loads more marketing on LinkedIn. Her question is: What should I write in my LinkedIn connection request?
Connecting to new people on LinkedIn is a critical way to build your audience, but what should you write in the connection request? There are schools of thought that say you should just use the default message, which actually these days there’s no message at all. Personally, I believe you’re better taking a little time to personalise it, to stand out to the person that you’re trying to reach. And the goal isn’t just adding people, it’s adding people who will engage with you. So here are three LinkedIn connection request examples that you can swipe and try and experiment with.
The first I call a common ground approach. So you say, Hi name, it looks like we both… and then you insert something that you have in common. So just look at their profile, find something that you’ve got in common. It could be that you both live in the same town. It could be that you’re in the same organisation, you both enjoy the same sport. So, I see we both insert something you have in common and then you just say, I want to add you to my professional network or add you to my network.
Approach number two is about connecting to other local business owners because it’s all about what do we identify as, and people who are a business owner in an area tend to identify as a local business owner, Hi name. It looks like we’re both local business owners in town. Shall we connect to see if there’s anything we can do to help each other?
And then the third approach is where you’ve got a mutual connection. This is kind of how LinkedIn used to be back in the day where you’d look to see who else you are connected to or you knew each other in real life, but these days you don’t have to. But it does help if you’ve got that mutual connection because it’s something you can leverage. You say something like, Hi name. It looks like we are both connected to mutual connection name. And then you could, if you actually know this person, you could add a line about how you know them. If you don’t really know them, they’re just one of your other connections, then don’t do that, just finish it by saying, I want to add you to my professional network.
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, Andrew Hartman on LinkedIn, and visit the Time Boss website.
- Mentioned books: Who Not How by Dan Sullivan, Deep Work by Cal Newport.
- Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.