Episode 65: Why your MSP should phone every old prospect

Episode 65: Why your MSP should phone every old prospect

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 65: Why your MSP should phone every old prospect
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In this week’s episode

  • It’s the MSP equivalent of putting your hand down the back of the couch, to see what you might find! On this week’s show Paul explains how old forgotten data could uncover some brand new surprise revenue for your MSP
  • Also – starting to use the services of a part-time virtual assistant could be even easier than you think. Listen as Paul’s joined by an expert in the field to explain how you make it cheaper and hassle-free to get help
  • Plus on the show this week, why you need to create a financial forecast more than ever before. And a listener book recommendation that could even improve your business karma

Show notes

Episode transcription

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

Paul Green:
You’re very welcome to episode 65 of the podcast. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week.

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
Lots of people let the day run away from them because they’re pummelled with distractions that they haven’t planned for.

Paul Green:
We’re also going to be talking about why your MSP should phone every single old prospect, every single one, and why it’s a critical part of the numbers game. That’s so important in marketing. I’m also going to tell you later on how you can get a free copy of my book on MSP marketing, and we’ve got a great book suggestion from another marketing expert.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
I have a great accountant, his name is Rob Bowden, and he’s one of those accountants who is not just interested in the numbers, he’s interested in what’s caused the numbers. He has a real passion for business, and it’s wonderful sitting down with him talking about how figures to him they paint pictures, they give him clues, they lay out stories and tell him what’s happening within businesses. In fact, over the years as Rob has become not just my accountant but also a friend, we’ve started looking at doing some joint ventures together and even acquiring some businesses together this year. It’s fascinating to hear him talking about how you can see what’s going to happen in a business based on the historical figures and on forecasts for the future. Forecasts are what I want to talk about today because most MSPs, we very rarely talk about numbers with MSPs.

Paul Green:
Because assuming you’ve got managed services and assuming you’ve got lots of clients under contract with monthly recurring revenue, well, as long as you keep on top of your overheads and you bill for your projects correctly and you just keep an eye on what’s happening with the figures, then for most MSPs finance and cashflow is just not a big issue at all. But I’m aware that not everyone is in exactly this position. In fact, with the difficulties that we’ve seen last year and, of course, this year, it’s continuing this year, we’re at a point now where maybe, just maybe for your business, you should start thinking about doing a financial forecast.

Paul Green:
Now, what is a financial forecast? It’s a tool that you can use to maintain control of your business. So you may previously have produced financial forecasts perhaps if you were borrowing some money and your bank manager was fairly insistent about it. But I think it’s a good time now to look at producing a financial forecast just for your business. You may already have this, you may already have management accounts from your accountant or your bookkeeper on a regular basis, let’s say a weekly or a monthly basis. But a financial forecast is looking at where things are going over the next three, six, maybe even 12 months based on how things have been. So essentially if things continue the way that they have been, what is this going to mean? What are the implications of this? What are the net rebounds and the net effects on you as a business?

Paul Green:
Now I’m not an accountant, I’m not particularly friendly with numbers, I always struggle to look at balance sheets and P&L. I know how to read them and that, it’s just I have a, I don’t know, maybe I have a mild form of number dyslexia, and I rely on people like Rob to interpret figures for me and tell me what the figures actually mean in terms of the business performance. But there are certainly a very clear number of reasons why you would get a financial forecast for your MSP. The primary one is to reduce any levels of anxiety that you might feel. Now, we are in another uncertain year and in as much as we’re in a, we’re in a very good sector aren’t we? IT support is a great sector to be in. At the same time, there can be levels of anxiety, especially as some of your clients are starting to struggle.

Paul Green:
I’ve said in this podcast a number of times over the last few weeks that we’re all going to lose clients because of COVID because of the general impact on the economy and certain types of businesses. If you see a huge number of job losses from a big company because of COVID, that has a knock-on effect on lots of smaller companies. And as a lots of smaller companies lose their staff, that has a knock-on on the general effect and the general emotional wellbeing of people in a marketplace. So to reduce any level of anxiety that you feel about the future, do a financial forecast. In fact, once you’ve established a baseline for if things continue as they are, you can then do some what if scenario plannings, you can say, well, what if things get better? What if things get worse? What if we lose this whale of a client that represents 34% of our turnover? These what if scenarios can help you to feel better because they’re not going to take away the possibility of these things happening, but what they will do is allow you to plan.

Paul Green:
If you’ve got a whale of a client representing a third of your revenue and you lose that client because they go bust or something awful happens to them, then wouldn’t it be better to know in advance what your emergency action plan would be? Wouldn’t it be better to consider your staff and look at them and say, “Well, who am I going to have to let go? Who am I going to have to make redundant? What are the cutbacks that we’re going to have to make? Do we still need this big office or can we move somewhere else? When’s the break clause in this? Understanding what could happen to your business through a financial forecast allows you to do some planning.

Paul Green:
Once you’ve got that kind of planning, you can start to almost establish what level of financial support you might need to maintain the business. So if things go bad down the line, and if there are problems, what could you do to help? What are the things that you will need to do and the financial support that you’ll need to get down the line? Might you need to take on some debt? Might you need to do something to improve your cashflow? Might you personally need to put some money back into the business? The big picture with all of this is to remember what the purpose of your business is. And the only real purpose of your business is not to provide tech support, is not to employ great people, the real purpose of your business is to give you the lifestyle that you want to live. As the business owner, that’s the purpose of the business, it’s all about feeding you.

Paul Green:
Producing a net profit shouldn’t be the main goal of the business. To me, that’s a pleasant outcome of doing a great job for lots of good people, but it is ultimately the thing that you take home, that net profit is your personal income and it’s the thing that you take home. So I would do this financial forecast, I would do some what if scenario planning, I would have an action plan for all of the big, big, scary scenarios, and primarily I would look at what’s the impact or potential impact on your own personal family income. If you’re the main breadwinner and you take home 5,000, 10,000 pounds or dollars a month, and you need that because you’ve got high levels of personal debt or you’ve got big projects at home or something, you’ve got to consider the impacts, the possible impacts this year of any form of negative event and what that could do to your personal income.

Paul Green:
And I appreciate there may be a delay, a pause between a negative business effect happening and then the impact on your own personal income. But again, make that part of your action plan. What can you do to reduce costs at home? If you have got large debts that you’re paying down, what can you do to reduce the level of payments that you’re making in the short term? You may not have to do these things, I think for most MSPs, it’s actually going to be a very positive year. But wouldn’t it be better to do that exercise now? To have that in the back of your head, to have a sheet of paper somewhere or a document on your laptop with a plan for what exactly you’re going to do if any of these bad scenarios happen.

Paul Green:
The other way of looking at it is with your financial forecast, to look at what you’re going to do with the extra money if actually good things happen. If you win more new clients than you lose this year, if you add more users, if you sell more monthly recurring revenue services to your existing clients, what if you were to generate an extra 2,000 or 3,000 pounds or dollars of extra net profit every month, what would you do with that cash? Would you just leave it in the bank? Would you invest it somewhere? Would you move it to a second bank for safety? Would you withdraw it and turn it into your own personal income? Would you use that spare cash to go and invest in extra marketing or maybe even go and acquire a competitor? There’s lots of different things that you can do with extra cash. I think when you’re doing a financial forecast, you absolutely should start with, what are the worst things that could happen, but then go on to what are some of the good things that can happen.

Paul Green:
Now, this is something to do with your accountant, absolutely not something you should do on your own. A great thing to do with your accountant or your CPA is to do this financial forecast. And primarily don’t just look at it as a whole series of numbers, but what are the stories that the numbers tell us. Much better to know, six months before it happens, that there’s a major problem on the way than for it to sneak up and catch you unawares.

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

Paul Green:
My clever idea doesn’t feel so clever today because it’s actually a very simple one. Pick up the phone, call every single old prospect you ever spoke to, every single one. As I said, that’s not particularly clever, is it? It’s literally just sitting and making a series of phone calls. But here’s the thing, marketing is not a mysterious art, it’s very much a science. In fact, I would say it’s 80% science and 20% luck. It’s scientific because you can do a whole series of things and measure the performance of those things, that’s what makes it scientific. The 20% luck, is because a lot of marketing is about timing. People only buy when they’re ready to buy, and you’ve got to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time.

Paul Green:
But here’s the thing, it’s also about the numbers game. Far too many MSPs that I speak to are talking to one, maybe two people a week, and then they’re wondering why they’re just not getting decent leads and decent prospects out of it, it’s because their numbers aren’t big enough. The more marketing you do and the more people that you do it to, the more results you get, the better results you get. It really is as simple as that. It takes the same amount of effort to send an email to 10 people through your CRM like MailChimp, takes the same amount of effort to send it to 10 people as it does to send it to 10,000 people. But you send an email to 10,000 people and you’ll get much better results. Of course, you will because the numbers game says there are more likely to be some people within that 10,000 that are ready to have a conversation with you right now, whereas the numbers game on just like 100 people is just too low.

Paul Green:
So that’s why I’m challenging you to call every old prospect. Go through your emails, go through every business card that you’ve ever had, look at every inquiry that’s ever been sent through a web form on your website, every single one, every single person you ever spoke to you know that guy that rang up about two new laptops four years ago, call him because four years ago it was just two laptops for the two members of staff he had. What if today he’s got 15 staff and he would be an ideal client for you? Call him, get back in touch with him. “Hey, I’m just calling to see how thing are going. How have you guys been doing over the last year with corona? What’s happening in your business?”

Paul Green:
Now, they’re not going to remember you, a lot of these old prospects, but it really is just worth a call. And you would absolutely go in with, “Hey, sorry I haven’t been in touch for a while. It’s been three, four years since we last spoke. We talked about a couple of laptops. I’m just wondering how’s business for you guys right now.” As I say, this is a numbers game. If you can find 200, 300, 400 old prospects to call, you’re not telling me that some of those people aren’t going to be ready to have a conversation with you. Sure, some of them will have gone out of business, some of them will be dead, some of them, most of them actually not really interested talking to you. But some of those people, oh my goodness, there’s some money and some clients and some business just waiting for you to turn up and take it from them. And that’s a very, very beautiful thing.

Paul Green:
So the first step for this is to find all the old prospects, pull together, all the old data, search your email, search every single Excel sheet, everything, anywhere you may have squirreled data. I’ve just cleared out an office that I’ve had for eight years and I’ve had it across a couple of different businesses. I don’t need it anymore because I work completely from home now. And it was only ever me in the office anyway, it wasn’t for my staff, it was a place to hide more than anything else. I have found eight years worth of stuff, business cards, boxes of things, flyers, brochures, all sorts of stuff that people have given me over the years. Now, a lot of that is irrelevant to me in this current business, but certainly if I still had my old business, the one I sold back in 2016, I’ve got a whole bunch of data in there of people that could be called, that maybe we haven’t even been speaking to over the last few years or so.

Paul Green:
So pull together all that data, that’s the first thing. And then the next thing is to try and get yourself into some kind of rhythmic calling. So rhythmic calling is where let’s say every day, you attempted to call 10 people. If you’ve got a couple of hundred prospects and you do 10 a day, or you attempt to call 10 a day, that’s brilliant because you’ll get through it in two to three weeks. Turning a job like this, which you could look at it as a pretty nasty job to do, having to pick up the phone and call people, call them up and see how they are. It’s much more likely that you’ll get that done if you turn it into a daily task than if you just try and do it all in one go. Because one go is a very big job, especially if you’ve got a few hundred to do. Whereas 10 a day is really, really easy, especially if you tackle it earlier on in the day. I wouldn’t try calling people at nine o’clock in the morning, but 10:30 onwards is definitely a great time to start calling people.

Paul Green:
You could even use the paperclips method, and I’ve talked about this before on the podcast. You get two glasses and you get… In this instance, let’s say you wanted to make 10 calls, in this instance, you’d put 10 paper clips in one of the glasses. Every time you pick up the phone and you dial some numbers, you move one of the paper clips over to the other glass. The beauty of this is within three or four calls, you can see how well you’re doing, you can see how many paper clips you’ve got left, you can see how many paperclips you’ve achieved, and it actually sets up a target for our brain. Our brain hates, hates leaving a job unfinished. So your brain is going to get to seven or eight paper clips, and it’s going to want to finish that task and get those 10 paperclips done.

Paul Green:
This is also setting for yourself a boundary. I’ve only got to do 10 calls today, haven’t got to be 10 and then maybe stretch to 15 or 20, if you want to do that, you can. But for most people doing the minimum, doing what we need to do each day, absolutely makes us happy. So once you’ve done your calls, the other thing that I recommend that you do is that you never let your business fall out of touch with these people ever again. So that means shoving them into your email database, it means attempting to connect to them on LinkedIn, it means keeping in touch with them if it is relevant, if they’re still an appropriate business for you to get in touch with. Then once, of course, they’re in your email database, they’re going to be getting your educational emails each week, maybe you’d even send them out your physical print newsletter, you would certainly of course put your content on LinkedIn so they could see it there.

Paul Green:
It’s very easy to keep in touch with someone when again, you’re doing it rhythmically, you’re sending out your weekly email, your monthly newsletter, your weekly email, your educational email, and your daily social media. You don’t ever want to be in that position again where you’ve lost touch with people because of lack of action or because their business card has been hidden in a drawer for five years or whatever the case is. This is a one-off job that you can do, which not only could produce some business for you now, but actually you can start to rebuild relationships with all of these prospects or certainly a large number of them. And some of them will become clients in the future.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
Right, I’m going to sound my freebie klaxon for this one, here it goes. Oh, yes, the freebie klaxon is sounding because I have something free to give to you today, and it’s something I can put into your hands if you’re in the UK or the US and it’s not going to cost you anything. I have a book, it’s called Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business, and it’s the quick guide to MSP marketing. Now, already more than 2,000 MSPs across the world have got their hands on a copy.

Paul Green:
Do you want a copy? Do you want one? All you got to do is go to my website, paulgreensmspmarketing.com, scroll down on the homepage and you’ll see a photo of the book plus a form to fill in. Fill in that form, if you are in the UK or the US, you need to fill in your address as well and we will physically post one out to you. If you’re outside the UK or the US, we’ll just send you a PDF that you can read. Get hold of the quick guide to MSP marketing and learn how to do some of the marketing basics within your business with a copy of Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business. Get it now at paulgreensmspmarketing.com.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
I’m Barnaby Lashbrooke, and I help entrepreneurs and leaders to achieve more. I do that through my virtual assistant company, Time etc, which I founded in 2007. I’ve also written a book called The Hard Work Myth, which is a manual on how to get more done in less time.

Paul Green:
It’s that book that I want to talk about, Barnaby, because I think as business owners, we do work hard and we do throw ourselves into our passion projects, which happened to be our businesses. But the argument you make in the book is that working harder doesn’t necessarily produce more.

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
Yeah, so that’s exactly it. Actually there are some really worrying stats out there, so the average small business owner works longer hours than almost any other profession that you can think of, and yet only 33% of small businesses survive to see their 10 year birthday. So when I uncovered that, as a business owner who’d worked very, very long hours, like 100 plus hours a week for many years, I was really shocked and intrigued as to why if we all work so hard, actually a huge number of our businesses don’t survive for 10 years. When I looked into that, I discovered that really the answer is about what you do with your time, not about working and working and working and doing longer, longer hours.

Paul Green:
You’ve really put in that hard work yourself, haven’t you? Because I know in your career, you’ve built up a couple of businesses. If you look back at your most successful times, were you that person putting in those 100 hour weeks?

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
This is what really inspired me into writing the book and getting the message out there. Was that I’ve done two different types of entrepreneurship, one is that I’ve worked 100 plus hours a week and I’ve ended up missing my daughter’s bedtime, and I ended up even sleeping in motorway service stations because I didn’t have time to get home before a commitment the next day. I’ve done that, I’ve put the long, long hours in and I’ve been one of those entrepreneurs working longer hours than anyone else.

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
Then I had this moment a few years ago where I just knew that I couldn’t continue to work that way. To put it into perspective, as soon as I decided I wasn’t going to do 100 hour plus weeks, as soon as I… Actually what I did was I limited the number of hours each week that I worked to just 35 hours and I strictly limited myself to that and stick to it. What happened when I did that was that I have built a business that is six or seven times larger than the business that I’d managed to build when I was working 100 plus hour weeks. So I’m really living proof it isn’t putting in those hours that gets you that business growth and leads to that success, it’s really about what you do with the time even if you’re going to work much lower hours, like I decided to do.

Paul Green:
So what did you do with your time when you dropped the 65 hours that you were doing other stuff? What did you drop and what did you focus your 35 hours on?

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
Well, the huge thing for me was distractions. Actually when I looked at the 100 hour weeks that I was working, I was being constantly pummelled by distractions during the time that I was working. Distractions are a little bit evil really because you don’t really pick up that you’re being distracted all the time. But actually if you keep a little tally of whenever you’ve been distracted throughout the day, for a lot of entrepreneurs and myself included when I was doing those long hours, actually what was happening every day was I was being distracted every few minutes. So that might be by a colleague needing something, that might be by email. Every time I was being distracted, it was taking me quite a long time to get back to the thing that I was doing.

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
So one of the key things I did when I cut my hours was I cut out distractions. So I stopped reading the news, delegated my email to someone else so that they can let me know if there’s anything important, but I don’t spend my time in my inbox, and one of the main distractions that I cut out was social media. Social media is designed to distract, it’s one of the things that’s designed to make us stop what we’re doing and pick up a phone and look at our phone. Cutting that out literally gave me hours and hours back every week.

Paul Green:
Do you know that’s fascinating? We had Manuel from timeular.com on last week’s show, and he was saying that it takes a certain amount of time to get into something. And if you are distracted, it can take 20 to 30 minutes to get back to that thing that you were doing before, which is how he invented timeular.com. So we have an issue, which is the vast majority of people listening to this podcast are MSPs, and the very nature of their work is to be reactive. As much as there’s a lot of proactive work that they do, they are, to a certain extent, sitting waiting for people to call up and say, “Hey, I need some IT support.” How would you manage a situation like that where the very nature of the job is to be responsive and to jump in when someone distracts you?

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
I think there’s two things around that, the first is really putting a structure in place. So if you know that there are certain hours during the day or a core period during the day in which you’re highly likely to need to be reactive, then if you structure your days knowing that and you leave that window free in the middle of your days, then you can perhaps fit some really productive activity around that. So I think accounting for the fact that you’re going to be distracted by your clients is a really powerful thing to do. Lots of people don’t do that and they let the day run away from them because they’re pummelled with distractions that they haven’t planned for. But I think you can put structure in around knowing that you’re going to be responsive.

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
The other thing really is again structure, which is making sure that you’re delegating sufficiently within your business. So how would we typically see that manifest in an MSP? Well, it will be frontline support, second line support, it would be the knowledge holder in the business maybe being a little bit distanced from that frontline support, that email coming in, letting someone else do the triage, deciding how urgent it is, categorising what kind of issue we’re dealing with, and just slightly removing yourself from being on the very front line of that distraction. If you do that, then you’ll find that you just do get more time to really focus on the other things that you want to concentrate on in your business.

Paul Green:
That’s such a good idea. I think this role is called a dispatcher’s role within our world. It’s certainly something that I’ve done within my business. And Barnaby, as you know, I hire two VAs, two virtual assistants, through your business, Time etc, every month. I had a bit of an epiphany last year when I started using Timeular to track my time and I realised I was spending far too much of my time, exactly as you said there, on emails and messaging and little things like that, which was all caused by the lockdown. Which is interesting because I learned that lesson about seven years ago in my last business and I needed to relearn it in this business, I wonder how many times you have to relearn that same lesson.

Paul Green:
We’ve now got two VA’s, one of them reads my emails for me, so I don’t have to. So I just have to deal with the five or six important emails every day and not the 40 or 50 other ones. Then we have a lady called Amy who is amazing, and she actually acts as our frontline support for our MSP Marketing Edge service. So I’m the third line, I’m not distracted by anything other than the very, very serious things that I need to help with or the most exciting things, and we have a second line guy as well. What was it that caused you to start Time etc in the first place?

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
So I started my first business many years before, started it at the age of 17 in my bedroom, grew it and managed to sell it just before the last major recession. When I was doing that, I just felt so isolated as an entrepreneur, I was on my own. Even when I eventually ended up hiring a small team, there wasn’t really anyone to take work from my plate. I would sit there thinking what I need is an assistant, but there’s absolutely no way that I could have justified in my small business going out there and hiring a full-time assistant, and I didn’t really have enough work for a full-time assistant. So the thought of finding a full-time assistant’s salary and going out and bringing someone in to sit next to me and do my tasks things wrong, I don’t think I’d have ever done it. But I knew that I needed some help.

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
So when I sold that business, I set about designing really the perfect assistant service for entrepreneurs. So just a bit of help when you need it, someone dedicated to you that you get to know and trust that you can go and delegate your time wasting tasks to, but none of that overhead that you’d normally have if you recruited an assistant for yourself. That’s where it all started, and it’s thrived from there really.

Paul Green:
If I can give you a greatly positive bit of feedback, one of the things that we loved was that we didn’t have to interview lots of people as well. Not only is it flexible hours and flexibility to get some help, but we didn’t have to sit and try and source people and put adverts out and all of that stuff, which is just quite refreshing when you do need a bit of extra help. You’re now quite big, not just here in the UK, but you’re quite big in the States as well.

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
Yes. Actually the majority of our business is now in the United States, it’s a real growth area over there. We’re helping a lot of people in your position to do things like free themselves from their email. It cannot be underestimated, the impact that can have. If you’re really focused on growing your business, if you’d like to see your business grow, doing simple things like stepping away from your email can really unlock a lot of growth in what you’re doing

Paul Green:
I completely agree because I track my time with Timeular. I know for a fact that I’m saving around about nine to 10 hours a week compared to what I was doing six, seven, eight months ago. That’s enormous because I’m investing that time with my daughter, that time’s not going into work, that time’s come back to me, that’s the whole point of life. It’s just brilliant, it really is.

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
Absolutely, yeah.

Paul Green:
So for people who are at that point where they are a little bit too busy but perhaps they’ve got big plans for this year, what’s the first step in terms of finding a virtual assistant? Whether you use an agency, such as your own, or whether you go out and find something, how do you dip your toe in the water?

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
I think that actually you have to almost go back a step. And the first thing to do is to list all of the tasks that are either wasting your time or you don’t know how to do them or you don’t enjoy doing them. That’s really the first step that I recommend anyone takes if they’re thinking, “Look, I’m busy, I might go and get an assistant,” Is to really take a little bit of time first to define exactly what that person’s going to do. Because once you’ve got that list, it makes it a lot easier to go out there and find a virtual assistant that’s suited to you. So for example, Time etc, we offer a free trial, and that’s our way of saying to people that come in and try it, “See if it works for you, and if it does, then great.”

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
But actually there’s lots and lots of options out there. If for example you wrote down lots of tasks that were very basic things like data entry, then perhaps you’d go to a virtual assistant service based overseas somewhere because you just need some very basic things going. If you need more of an executive assistant and someone to really get to know you and to almost start thinking for you, then you want to go to of company like Time etc and they’re going to give you an assistant that’s vetted and tested and has got verified levels of experience that’s really going to get quite invested in your business.

Paul Green:
So finally then, just tell us a little bit more about Time etc. So how do you find such great staff and how can we find out more details about the business?

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
The amazing thing about our assistants is that actually all over the US and the UK, there are these phenomenal, experienced executive assistants who have previously worked for huge companies and fantastic businesses like AOL and GE and Virgin. Then what happens is often they stop in order to start a family and they find that the traditional workplace, where they were previously an executive assistant, doesn’t really welcome them back in. They struggle to find work that’s flexible, that fits in around looking after their family. So that’s where we find our assistants, we go to those people and we say, “Look, you’ve got 12 years of incredible experience as an executive assistant, we’d love to offer that to our clients. You can work from home and you can work whenever you want.”

Barnaby Lashbrooke:
That’s the incredible thing, that’s how we’ve built a really good reputation amongst the assistant community. We give lots and lots of people that have been denied the chance to re-enter the workforce the chance to do some work for some really fascinating entrepreneurial clients. If you want to find out more about Time etc, then if you Google Time etc, you’ll find lots of reviews about us, and you’ll also, as I mentioned, find a free trial on our website that anyone can sign up for. So literally today, you could delegate a task to us and we’ll do that for you absolutely free and with no obligation.

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

John Vuong:
Hi, my name is John Vuong, I’m the founder of Local SEO Search. The book I recommend is Give and Take by Adam Grant. The reason I recommend this, the more you give, the more value you bring to the table. The more you learn to give more, you’re going to eventually get more in return. As a human in business and your personal life and your business life, anyone who’s interested in business, personal relationships, to read Adam Grant’s Give and Take.

Voiceover:
How to contribute to the show.

Paul Green:
We’re now accepting guests requests to come onto these podcasts for later on this year. We record quite far ahead and we’ve got guests up to around about April. But if you would like to put yourself forward, perhaps you’re a vendor, perhaps you work for a vendor, perhaps you’re an MSP and you’d just like to come on and talk about something, then just drop me an email. It’s hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Brenna Loury:
By the end of the day, you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t work on this huge task that I was supposed to work on because I was focusing on all of these other small things that are competing for my attention.”

Paul Green:
That’s Brenna Loury from the productivity app Todoist. In another interview all about helping you improve your own personal productivity, we’ll explore how to leverage the getting things done system to get things done. Plus, we’ll look at why it’s absolute human nature to try and take on too many tasks every single day. We’re also looking next week at a book called Profit First. You’ll like this one, because it’s about making sure that you get paid before anyone else in the business. There’s some really good information in that book about hiding money from yourself so you can’t be tempted to spend it. And we’re going to look at the need for rhythmic marketing. If you want a marketing machine with hundreds of tiny cogs that work to get you new clients all the time, then you need to make sure your marketing is rhythmic, it’s consistent, it’s systematic, and it happens day in, day out. We’ll explore how to do that in next week’s podcast. See you then.

Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world, Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.