In this week’s episode
- One of the easiest ways to get new clients is to find other businesses that have the same clients as you, but aren’t in competition with you, and form a strategic partnership. Paul tells you how to do that in today’s podcast
- Also on the show this week, we all know web traffic can be increased with better Search Engine Optimisation, but is it really something you can do yourself?
- Plus listen for a special interview with an MSP who increased the scale of his business by acquiring 10 other MSPs within the last 5 years. It’s a fascinating conversation and there could be elements that you could copy within your business
Show notes
- Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform
- Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert
- Here’s the blog post Paul mentioned on the subject of ‘Can I DIY my own SEO?’
- Try a Udemy course if you’d like to try to learn more about SEO
- Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge content service, that includes a book that you can call your own
- Paul’s special guest was Ian Maclellan from Cloudstream Technology talking about how he bought 10 MSPs in 5 years, plus the revolutionary connectivity solution Neutrino8
- Many thanks to Andrew Eardsley from MSP Easy Tools for recommending the book Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy
- On June 22nd Paul will be joined by Nate Freedman from Tech Pro Marketing talking about the new restrictions applied by LinkedIn
- Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com
Episode transcription
Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Hi there. Hello. Welcome to episode 83. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week.
Ian Maclellan:
Over the last five years, I’ve bought 10 MSPs, I’m very happy to give guidance if anyone wants to try this.
Paul Green:
That’s Ian Maclellan. An MSP owner, who’s going to be on the show later on today. We’ve also got Andrew Eardley another MSP. He’s going to be back later on towards the end of the podcast to suggest a great book suggestion for you. We’ll also be talking about how you can set up joint ventures with other companies that have exactly the same clients as you, that aren’t in competition with you. The goal is to get them to refer brand new clients to you.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Now here’s an interesting question. Should you DIY your SEO? Should you take your search engine optimisation for your MSP’s websites and do it yourself or should you hire an agency to do it for you? Now there are a number of different factors that come into play here. The first is one of my favourite phrases. You should only do what only you can do, and anytime you find yourself doing anything else, you should DOA it. You should delegate it, outsource it or automate. So if you look at it, just from that point of view, then no, you probably really shouldn’t do your own SEO. Take some cash and go and get someone else to do it, or make a member of your own team do it. I say, make, I mean, encourage a member of your own team to do it. There is another aspect with SEO though, which should also come into play, which is that SEO is an incredibly detailed and technical subject.
Paul Green:
And I only realised this about four and a half years ago, just after I’d sold a marketing agency. And I was kind of kicking around without a huge amount to do. And a friend of mine had purchased an SEO agency and he was in the middle of selling it onto another agency and his managing director left and he needed someone to just sort of babysit it for about four to six weeks. So that’s what I did. For about four to six weeks, I drove about an hour and a half every day to go and sit in this agency and just keep it ticking along really until the sale could go through. But during those six weeks, I couldn’t stop myself from learning about SEO, because I was literally sitting in an office with a whole bunch of people, technical experts at SEO who taught me all sorts of bits and bobs.
Paul Green:
Now, I don’t consider myself a technical expert at SEO in any way, because the main thing I learned, and this is the main lesson for you, is that SEO is such a detailed technical subject that you have got to be on top of so many little things. So yes, in theory, you can do your SEO yourself. But my question to you would be, why would you want to? Why would you want to do that? I mean, I’ve just Googled the phrase, “Can I DIY my own SEO?” And I’ve come up with a great blog post, which I will link to it in the show notes on my website. And it’s called DIY SEO, A Basic Four-Step Guide That Anyone Can Follow. And for a basic four-step guide, my goodness, it’s a long, long guide. There’s thing, after thing, after thing. I mean, the basic four steps are, do keyword research. That’s the first step. Then create pages that are optimised for search. Then you’ve got to fix your website’s technical issues. And the final thing is to build some links, but this is a very, very long page.
Paul Green:
You look at all the things that you’ve got to do, and you kind of ask yourself, “Have I got time to do these things properly?” Well, maybe that’s the question that you should be asking yourself. Have you got time to do your SEO properly? The other thing to remember is that you can actually do damage with SEO. You can do some bad links, for example, you can build bad links. Links are literally links from other people’s websites to your website. And links even these days are considered to be good. They’re good for your Google Juice or your Bing Juice if that’s a thing. Is Bing a thing still? Well, it is I think if you’re using Edge because it’s quite hard not to use Bing if you’re using Edge. Anyway, good links are links that come from sites with a good authority, but there are bad links as well. And they come from other sites. Sites that don’t have a good authority. Sites that perhaps are link farms, link farms still exist. A link farm is a bad thing. You don’t want to go anywhere near it.
Paul Green:
And that’s the problem with SEO, it’s a constantly moving target. The game is changing all the time. And I learned this sitting in that building with those people, they were on blogs every day, reading about the latest thing that Google had changed or the latest piece of advice or the latest this, or the latest that, that was what they did full time. Literally they dedicated their entire lives. And we’re talking people who dedicated their entire working lives to very small parts of SEO. None of them were real generalists. There was one guy and all he did all day was citations. I still can’t remember what citations are. I think they’re mentioned in directories all over the web or something like that. I have no idea, but you get the idea. So look, if you’re going to do your own SEO, your DIY SEO, there’s two things I think you need. The first is time because it is quite a resource-heavy thing to do. So if you’re already too busy to look at your general marketing, then maybe reconsider whether doing your own SEO is a smart thing to do.
Paul Green:
But the second thing is you really need to do some training and I recommend you go onto Udemy. That’s U-D-E-M-Y.com. It’s a great place for training courses, experts upload their courses there, and then they charge you a fairly reasonable fee to go and access those courses. Now, I don’t have a specific recommendation for you, but go and search for the best selling SEO course. If it’s a bestselling one and it’s got high ratings, then it’s likely to be a very good course indeed. Just one thing on Udemy, never buy it at the first price you see. Udemy has a very elastic pricing system. If you go back and look at the same course two or three times in the same browser, you’ll see the price starts to change. Sometimes it goes up and sometimes it goes down, go and look at it in your browser and then go and look at it incognito. At some point, you’ll discover that course for sale for, it can be as little as 20% of the original course, they’re constantly doing tests and trying dynamic pricing of what does it take to get you to buy the course?
Paul Green:
Because if you think about it, it’s a prerecorded video course. There is virtually no cost of sale in there other than what they’re going to give to the person that created the course in the first place. So, go and have a look at that, get the best price for it and throw yourself into training at a very detailed level for your SEO, or just get someone else to do it, which I think it will be my preferred plan.
Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.
Paul Green:
Now this is a very clever way to get new clients. You go and find other businesses in your area or in your vertical who have exactly the same kind of clients as you do, but aren’t in competition with you. And then you put together some kind of agreement where you refer people to them and they refer people to you. Now, this is a thing, it’s a real thing. It’s called a joint venture, a JV. It’s also known as a strategic referral partnership. And if you drive this and put together something in your town, you could put together a very, very powerful referral network between a whole bunch of noncompeting businesses. Because just think about who else has exactly the same clients as you? Well, if you’re in a geographical area and you just deal with general businesses, there’s loads of other businesses that want the same clients. You’ve got things like SEO companies, search engine optimisation, you’ve got web design agencies. You can also look at business coaches. You could say, “Well, what about lawyers? Lawyers have got lots of business clients. What about accountants?”
Paul Green:
If you stop and think about it and look at all the kinds of businesses that are dealing with the kind of clients you want, there’s loads of them. So how do you get those people to refer to you? There’s a couple of different ways that you could do this. The easiest, if you like the least committed is to do a kind of a data swap. It’s not really a data swap because you don’t give each other data, that would not be advisable. But what you do do is you mention each other to your clients. So let’s say for example, you had on your website a book that you were giving away, it was a book about, let’s say, email security or data security, and someone could fill in the form on your website and you would post them a copy of your book completely free. So essentially that’s an enhanced version of data capture. Someone’s filling in the form, you send them a book and then you’ve got their contact details.
Paul Green:
So you could go out to a web design company, an SEO company, whoever, and you could say to them, “Hey, we’re giving away a book about data security. Would you tell your clients about that please? Would you tell your prospects about that? All they’ve got to do is go to our website and they can request a free copy of our book. Hey, if you do that, we’ll do exactly the same thing for you. So what giveaway have you got on your website?” And if they didn’t have a giveaway, you just say to them, “Hey, how about we just send our clients to your website too?” So you get the idea there. You’re essentially kind of endorsing each other. They’re endorsing you and your book. You’re endorsing them as a noncompeting business. And obviously you want to check it out first and check that they’re good at what they do, but in principle, that’s a very sound thing to do. The winner in that situation will always be the business that has the better data capture.
Paul Green:
And I mentioned having a book to give away and I’m going to give myself an early blatant plug here. If you go onto my service, mspmarketingedge.com, we have a book it’s called Email Hijack. And the idea behind that is you put your name on the front as if you’ve written the book and then you can use it for data capture. In fact, there are many things you can use it for, but it’s a very smart piece of data capture to use. In that situation, if someone was sending their traffic to your website to get a free copy of your book, you’re going to get a lot more data out of that, a lot more of their people joining your list than they will get of your people joining their list. So that’s the kind of the easy way to do it. I think the way to really do it is to set up a proper strategic referral partnership. Now you could choose to bring together a number of noncompeting companies in your town or in your vertical to be this partnership.
Paul Green:
So go find one accountant, go find one lawyer, one coach, one web design agency, one marketing company, one of everything where you all share the same clients. If you’re a member of something like BNI, I mean, this would be a perfect thing, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t have every member of the BNI in there because the plumbers and the electrical engineers, this isn’t relevant to them. But certainly those of you that share the same B2B clients you might outside of your BNI chapter, you might set up this strategic referral partnership. If you’re not part of that, then just work your network, who do you know who’s a really great accountant in your area? In fact, you don’t really just want the great accountant, you want the really great, well-connected accountant because of course you’re looking for people with their own big networks.
Paul Green:
The whole point of this is that when someone’s sitting with our accountant and they’re saying, “Oh God, we’ve had such IT problems the last few weeks,” that your strategic referral accountant partner says, “Well, do you know what? We work really closely with an IT support company. These are their details. Here’s a copy of their card or whatsoever. Give them a ring, tell them that I sent you.” In the same way that when you’re talking to one of your clients and they mention, “Oh, we are looking for a new accountant.” You pull the accountants card out of your pocket and you hand that over and you say, “Look, we’ve been working with this guy and we refer business to each other. It’s worth you having a chat with him.” A strategic referral partnership. It’s a very, very clever way to get business. You’re not going to get massive amounts of clients out of it, but people do like referrals, don’t they? They like asking other people they trust, who they would recommend.
Paul Green:
When someone is referred into you the proper way, the chances of them becoming a client of yours is so much higher than if they’ve just come in through your digital marketing channels. This doesn’t mean that digital marketing isn’t important, of course it’s important because there’s so many more people potentially finding you through digital marketing. But do you know if you can get someone, even if it was just one or two businesses a year, referred to you through your strategic referral partnerships, through your JV, that’s going to be a great source of new clients for your MSP.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
When I mentioned the MSP Marketing Edge just now, I forgot to mention that it’s only available to one MSP per area. We’ve got more than 470 members all across the world and when they sign up, they completely lock out their direct competitors. The first step for you is to see whether or not another MSP has beaten you to your area. Just go onto mspmarketingedge.com. You select your country and just pop in your postcode if you’re in the UK or your zip code, if you’re in the States and it’ll show you whether or not your area is free or whether or not a competing MSP has beaten you to it. That’s mspmarketingedge.com
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Ian Maclellan:
Hi there. And this is Ian Maclellan. I’m the owner of Cloudstream Technology in the UK. And over the last five years, I bought 10 MSPs.
Paul Green:
And it’s a question that I’m being asked repeatedly by lots of MSPs all over the world is how do you find another MSP for sale? And if you’ve bought five over the last 10 years, you must find it quite easy to find people who are ready to sell their business.
Ian Maclellan:
I’d been in the MSP space earlier and I’d grown a company organically like many MSPs do. And what happens is you get to a certain and size and certain scale, and then to go to the next level, you really have to think about M&A. And when I did it back 10 years ago, it was quite tricky because the market wasn’t really what it is today. So I’d been abroad for the last 10 years in Switzerland, and I was coming back to the UK and I was then thinking, “What would I do when I come back to the UK?” And it just so happened, the first few were contacts within the industry from 10 years earlier who were looking to retire, et cetera. And they were saying, “Are you still in this space? Would you be interested in having a look.”
Ian Maclellan:
And then, so from that point, I then thought, “Well, I’m going to do it. I’m going to start again from scratch.” And this is 2015 and I’ll set up Cloudstream and I’ll use it and I’ll grow through M&A based on a previous business model that was extremely customer centric and I looked to scale across that. So I did a few through word of mouth, the first few. And then I started to engage a bit wider with brokers and there’s lots of brokers that are very happy to give guidance if anyone wants to try this. And then really what happens is once you’re in the market a little bit, people come to you all the time. So I guess people are coming to me at least once a week with different ideas. So, and I look at a lot of different possibilities and think that would work or that might not work. And maybe some I’ll pursue et cetera. But like I said, after having done 10, I’m consolidating them at the moment. And I’m thinking very hard about some other opportunities, which we’ll talk about in a second.
Paul Green:
Yes, we will. We’re going to talk about that in the second half of the interview. So if you were an MSP looking to acquire a competitor or an MSP in the next city or something like that, and let’s say you were starting from scratch, what would you do today to get started?
Ian Maclellan:
So it’s actually a bit daunting. In fact, I would love to help anyone we can to do this because I’ve learned, I’ve got scars and bruises from this process as well as obviously I’ve found a way to do it well. First I would look to see what space were they in and what were they bringing to the overall proposition to the end customer that was different. So I would say my acquisitions are a straightforward that either they’re going to extend the geography of what I do into a new geography, or they’re going to cement one of my primary offerings across the UK, for example, in a vertical that I’m already strong. So I looked to look at those two things and see if they fit within that kind of broad criteria. And then I would start engaging with them, find out where they are, where the offices are, whether it’s a retirement situation or what the motivation is to sell.
Ian Maclellan:
And then you obviously start looking at the book to find out how solid it is, and how prepared it is for sale in terms of whether they’ve got formal contracts in store, who the team are, how long the team have been there. I’ve got a kind of methodology that I apply and I would say within an hour, I could figure out whether something’s going to be a decent fit or not. And then obviously you’ve got to have rapport with the sellers. You’ve got to find out how could we structure that? There’s a way you can structure the deal. You’ve got to be fair. I like to try and structure a deal that everyone wins. So obviously look to inquire, but I looked to try and understand it from their perspective and try and shape it in a way that appears compelling and comes across in a genuine, honest way. Then you move through a process to get to a deal closer. And then from there, there’s a whole bunch of stuff you really need to do to make sure that the thing goes well once it’s across the line.
Ian Maclellan:
And I’ve got loads of things that I could share with anyone at any time and with that kind of those steps that you have to really think about.
Paul Green:
And when you’re buying a business, is it all about the money or is it just as much about the psychology of the seller and them making sure that they get everything they need out of the deal?
Ian Maclellan:
The money’s an important factor, but there’s so many other dynamics to a deal. I mean, many of them have been in the market for a long time and the care for the employees is a critical aspect of it. So in the deals I’ve done, I’ve really genuinely built their employees into my structure and many of them have grown solely within their organisation. And we’ve got an extremely different culture so whenever they really have an interest I can basically make something to suit their career and aspirations. So, that’s something that’s important. Maybe they’ve got an office, they need the office to be in, because of the landlord or whatever through some pension fund, that’s an important thing to factor into.
Ian Maclellan:
There’s things about maybe they want specific customers to be looked at on a specific way so you’ve got to be able to give those kinds of assurances that you’re not someone coming into kind of asset strip and take our bits of value that suit you. I tend to try and do it that I spend probably 75% of my mindset is in their window to figure out how it feels for them and how you can make it genuinely work for them according to the parameters they need, because there’s all sorts of things you can do for structuring that helps them as well, so.
Paul Green:
And my final question for you, certainly on acquisitions Ian. How do you fund these acquisitions? Because a lot of people think when they come to sell their business, they think that someone’s going to turn up, offer them an enormous amount of money and pay all the cash on day one. And you and I know that the vast majority of business sales that do go through, they don’t work like that at all.
Ian Maclellan:
I’m going to write a book on this Paul, because again, I’ve got scars for this process as well. First of all, you’ve got to understand what the strike price is for an acquisition. And there’s a whole bunch of ways you can do that. But generally the market looks at it as a multiple of what they call the adjusted earnings. So, to get to the adjusted earnings, there’s a whole bunch of discussions that need to happen, it’s what is the real enduring earning capability for the entity, for example. And then you factor in the owner’s remuneration, et cetera. And then you’ve got to beat replacement costs and for anyone that may be doing that kind of role.
Ian Maclellan:
So somehow or another, you come at a number that seems fair, and both parties have got to be realistic at that. And then depending on the scale or the opportunity of the company selling and depending on the size as well, because the bigger the entities that’s selling, the higher the multiple is of that critical number called the adjusted earnings. The smaller the entity, it tends to be a smaller number because there’s more risk and when things go wrong there’s not so much there to fall back on and it tends to be less structured. So somehow or another, you’ve got to have a discussion about what a fair multiple looks like. And you can obviously reference other deals if you’re in that space or you’ve got people that have done deals in that space. Don’t listen to brokers because they’re mostly cool off upside and it’s not realistic. And often if you buy their own level, it can even risk your own operation if you pay too much for something.
Ian Maclellan:
So then you arrive at a number, and that number then has to be structured in a way that manages risk from both sides. So, what I would typically try and do is structure it that you say that on settlement, I’ll give you say 50% of that number and then I’ll structure the other 50% over a couple of years or over or some period that makes sense to everybody given the constraints I mentioned earlier. What I’ve typically done, but many people are different, I would tend to try and structure it that the deferred consideration doesn’t carry any performance weighting with the seller, because if the seller is looking to retire, for example, if I’m thinking in their head, I don’t really want the number to be a risk. So I try and structured it that it’s just all over the cashflow of the deal that 50% would be upfront and then 50% would be deferred.
Ian Maclellan:
And I’ve been successful with that discussion, as long as you don’t tie it and you say it’s got to do this, that, and the next thing in terms of performance. It’s difficult for the seller to be involved in that because once they walk away, they can’t really pull any levers. And if you say the business doesn’t perform, then they don’t get any money for it. It doesn’t seem very fair. So then looking at the 50% that’s paid upfront, then there’s a whole bunch of things that can be done with that. It depends on the scale of the buyout, but you could do it with some cash if you’ve got cash, you can do it if you’re able to release any property you’ve got, or you can go into the alternative market, which is not the primary banking market, because they almost certainly won’t do anything for you like the Barclays and RBSs and so on. These primary banks are far too risk adverse.
Ian Maclellan:
So there’s a whole range of people in the secondary market, which is the funding circles like Walkers and all these other guys. Then there’s a bunch of sharks amongst all of it and I’ve had dealings with more or less everybody. So up until Christmas last year, I had 20 lines of funding from primary banks all the way through to absolutely disgusting loan shark arrangements. So I would typically find a way to deliver on the 50% for on acquisition even if it’s a horrible structure with a view that the most important thing with the deal is getting across the line. And once you have crossed the line, you have all sorts of other things to sort of tidy up. Of course, it’s expensive, you’ve got fees and interest, and you’ve got some walked interests and so on, but ultimately you can move forward and the bigger the scale the bigger you can consolidate.
Ian Maclellan:
And so at Christmas, I consolidated 20 banking lines into one single low-cost banking arrangement. It’s like a miracle transformation, but I was only able to do that because I had the scale. And I could only get the scale because I was basically acquiring at such a pace and just using a different range of facilities to get across the line and I had good relationships with the bankers, et cetera, to get different portions of funding to enable things to happen. So I’ve learned a lot, Paul, and I could probably do it in a much more efficient way. And I’m happy to share those ideas with anyone who wants to have a chat with me.
Paul Green:
Well, thank you, Ian. I mean, there’s some amazing stories there and certainly talking to you outside of this podcast, I know you’ve got some incredible knowledge, so we’ll get you back on the show again, perhaps six, nine months down the line, and maybe we can go into a bit more detail about finding acquisitions and actually putting that funding together and the psychology and all of that kind of stuff. Now, before you go today, I just want to flip and talk about a different subject because as is always the case with busy entrepreneurs, busy entrepreneurs have lots of fingers in lots of pies, and you have a finger in a pie of something called Neutrino8. So can you explain to us what Neutrino8 is and what your involvement is with it?
Ian Maclellan:
I always believe that in any buyout situation, there’s always a golden nugget somewhere amongst all of this that you haven’t even thought about, you’re not even aware of, but it just comes out because you’re in the space of buying out and then suddenly something pops forward. I bought a company during lockdown last year in London with an office in Central London. And it just so happens that they have a very large care provider, one of the biggest in the UK, where the London company provides a digital access solution and what that really is, it’s like an enhanced Wi-Fi solution to you and I. It’s a very sophisticated end product that’s the most sophisticated in the world actually.
Ian Maclellan:
And they have it in this company because the care home provider want to use that as a backbone for what they call their digital care transformation, where they’re going to go from not just providing wireless solutions, Wi-Fi solutions for their residents to communicate to their families, which is obviously critical doing these COVID times, but they want to use it for the digital care solution where they’ll have almost 3D virtual consultations with the residents where doctors can be at one place and will be able to go in 3D to the bedsides of the various residents. There’s always that kind of level of thinking. It’s going to be super advanced and it requires a lot of data for that kind of solution to work. So anyway, I got involved just innocently because I bought a company, it was an MSP.
Ian Maclellan:
And to cut a very long story short, Neutrino8 now I’ll basically take control of that entity in the next couple of days, because there’s a long story behind it, but the company is going to be reconstituted in the UK and I’ll be the CEO of that, and I’ll use that position to drive that product across other MSPs, across the world basically, because it’s so revolutionary and it’s got such potential. It’s very heavily backed. It’s in the US backed in Palo Alto to date. But now they want the focus to be European and for that European have to also support this to go up rather than having it all done from California. But anyway, Neutrino8 what it does is it does digital access in a revolutionary way. It’s like a Cisco Meraki type product, but it’s at a fraction of the cost. It’s roughly a 10th of the cost of a Cisco solution. So if you buy an access point from Cisco, it retails at $999. You can maybe get them on bulk or on some special things down to five or $600.
Ian Maclellan:
If you buy a Neutrino8 access point, they’re $50. And Neutrino8 will work with a range of different access points so they’re not tied to one specific access point option. And the real beauty about the whole world of Wi-Fi is that all companies in the world will be driven towards what they call Wi-Fi 6. And Wi-Fi 6 is a super broadband equivalent scenario where data is going to fly across wireless networks at rates you can’t imagine because of the internet of things where lots more devices will come along. So Neutrino8 plays into that market, where it supports Wi-Fi 6 solutions, and it does it in a very low interference manner because that’s another big problem for people trying to get into the space where there’s so many devices coming along, they interfere with each other and compromises the end wireless solution that you’re trying to deliver.
Ian Maclellan:
And then the last thing that’s come out of this is that the reason why I’m absolutely so excited about it and why I’m taking a side step from Cloudstream, which is my MSP, I’ll be a chair for that, I’ve got very good people that run it better than I even do in the day-to-day basis, so. But I’m going to focus on Neutrino8 because it’s a COVID recovering play. What I mean by that is that corporate all over the world, have gone to home working because of COVID and that means that their employees are all working from home and they’re trying to do their best amongst the chaos of the home environment. But the biggest issue they have is that there’s a lot of corporate employees at home with issues to do with connectivity. And when they phone their help desk, their help desk start getting limited in what it can do. And I’ve got a friend in RBS, there’s sort of 50,000 people across the RBS group working remotely and roughly a third of them at any given time have got IT problems, and they’re phoning their help desk and having issues, as an example.
Ian Maclellan:
And because the IT departments could only see into the laptop, assuming they can somehow VPN into a user control software and see what’s going on, but they can’t really see what’s going on in their domestic situation and therefore it’s quite limited what they can or they can’t do. With Neutrino8 what some corporates are looking to do is to give each employee a Neutrino8 access point for $50. They take it home and they plug it in at home and suddenly the corporate network is presented in the home as if that person was in the office in the next conference room. And that’s absolutely hugely powerful. So now, the IT corporate help desk can log into the access point, they can see the laptop for the user and they can say you’re having a problem because your uploading and downloading files are too big, or because you’re too far away from the access point or because there’s a device on your network that’s interfering with you in some way. All that kind of stuff.
Ian Maclellan:
It’s absolutely amazing. So some very, very big players have expressed an interest in this product. I mean, huge brands in the world. And so I’m looking to see what can happen on that. But the thing that I think is very powerful is to present that opportunity to MSPs and to allow MSPs to sell a product because the product is priced at such a spectacular base level that MSPs can make a huge margin in the gap. So if you’re looking at, let’s say for simple numbers, a thousand dollars an access point to $50, the MSP can make anything in the middle of that to make sense to them. So two or 300% or more, and still be half the price of the corporate pitch for a Cisco Meraki solution. That’s what makes it unbelievable as a game changer and a market disruptor.
Paul Green:
Ian, that sounds just amazing. Thank you very much. Tell us the website address, where we can find out more about Neutrino8.
Ian Maclellan:
So the website is Neutrino8, which is all one word, N-E-U-T-R-I-N-O-8.com. And you’ll find all about there, a lot more than I’ve talked about. They’ve AI built into it as well, they can do analytics for customers, they can do self healing networks. When networks start to get problems, they can tune themselves using AI algorithms. So it’s so much more, but the crux of what it can do is an opportunity for an MSP is absolutely there in terms of being able to make absolutely huge margins on a product to make the MSP business look very strong for the Wi-Fi component, as well as being absolutely compelling in terms of a corporate pitch. So, as a Wi-Fi 6 evolution, which is where the whole world needs to go in order to keep a pace with technology.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.
Andrew Eardley:
Hello. My name’s Andrew Eardley from MSP Easy Tools and the book that I recommend is Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy. It’s a great way to get rid of all that procrastination that keeps going on, get through the problems, get them dealt with first thing in the morning means you can crack on without having to worry about the rubbish that’s in your head.
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Nate Freedman:
Nate here from Tech Pro Marketing. If your MSP has been getting hit with some of the recent restrictions that LinkedIn is doing on how active you can be in your marketing, we are going to deep dive into exactly what restrictions have been applied, what limits you might be facing and how you can get around them to have more success than ever with using LinkedIn to leverage in your MSP marketing.
Paul Green:
We’re also going to look at how to put together the best about us page for your website. The two most trafficked pages on your website are your homepage and your about us page. Your about us page, it’s not really about you, it’s a selling page. How do we make it sell more? How do we influence more prospects and get more of an emotional engagement with them? I’ll tell you how next week. We’re also going to look at eliminating some of the small tasks that you do every day, the tasks that really someone else should be doing for you. We’ll talk about how to identify them and how to eliminate them one day at a time in next week’s podcast. See you then.
Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.