The inside story of a major business transformation project

Most of my blog posts are focused on you and ways you can improve your MSP.

Today I want to focus on my business, the MSP Marketing Edge. You see, we're near the end of a major business transformation project - one that started as a simple question and turned into thousands of hours of difficult work.

I enjoy reading these kind of stories and figured you might too.

Let's start at the beginning.

The background

I started the MSP Marketing Edge in 2017 after repeatedly hearing MSPs telling me they had the same marketing problems.

The year before I'd sold my healthcare marketing agency. I was going to take six months off, but was terminally bored after just 6 weeks... and started a new business 🤣

The company that bought my last business insisted on a crazy 5 year non-compete agreement. I couldn't work in the healthcare sectors I'd spent years building a reputation in. Instead I looked at other kinds of businesses I'd enjoyed working with in the past. And remembered that "IT support people seem fun to work with".

The beauty of starting a business with money in the bank is that you can take your time and do things properly. It was the opposite experience of starting my first business in 2005, when it was a mad rush to replace my income.

This time round I built some amazing marketing funnels and focused on growing audiences of MSPs. Soon that was monetised, as I started running events and in-person mastermind groups here in the UK.

They were always intended as a stop gap while I figured out what the long-term business was going to be. And I remember the day the answer appeared.

During a mastermind session we'd been talking about a simple but powerful 3 step marketing strategy. It's the one that the MSP Marketing Edge is still built around today:

• Build audiences of people to listen to you

• Grow relationships so they get to know you a little

• Convert relationships getting the right message in front of the right person, at the right time

The middle step requires content - lots of it. You need content for your website, LinkedIn, emails, videos, guides, books - and more.

Almost the whole room agreed "that's too difficult for us to do... if you did that Paul, we'd buy it from you". A different group the next day validated this. And so I set to work.

When the MSP Marketing Edge first launched it was an instant hit, but was also laughably simple. I would email new content to members once a month!

That turned into a very simple membership website, which over the years evolved into what we now call the portal.

The problem

Unfortunately the portal hasn't been fit for purpose for some time.

As the MSP Marketing Edge has grown it has evolved. Over the years we have refined our thinking and advice on MSP marketing.

A few years back I realised my driving purpose for the next decade is to make marketing easy for MSPs.

The vast majority of MSP owners don't want clever cutting edge multi-step marketing.

They want simple, high quality marketing that is effective, can be systemised, and implemented by their team or outsourced help (so the owner doesn't have to do anything).

We've continuously evolved our product along these lines. Today we're a team of 12, and we:

• Deliver powerful new weekly marketing content every Thursday structured around the 3 step system. It's designed to give members the biggest impact for the smallest amount of work

• Manage a team of implementers doing marketing for some of our members

• Deliver a new service-based marketing campaign every month

• Inspire and advise our members on their marketing, in a vibrant community and on 121 calls

• Constantly create simple new tools, training and marketing challenges

The side effect of this evolution is that our portal has struggled to keep up. There's so much powerful content and tools in there. But it's really difficult for members to find what they want.

So sometime last year, I was chatting with my team about what development projects we should work on. And we asked "how could we give the portal a simple refresh to make it easier for members?"

That innocent question cascaded into thousands of hours of work. Which is about to pay off 😃

The solution

First of all, we needed to know exactly what our portal problems were.

We hired a UX consultant (user experience) who did dozens of research interviews with members, and installed tools into the portal to see what people were actually doing in there.

I remember feeling sick when I saw the results.

Our 700+ members:

• Couldn't find what they were looking for

• Didn't inherently know about our core 3 step system, as it wasn't constantly reinforced

• Were still struggling with the most basic marketing tasks, despite all the answers being available

I'll be honest with you, for a week I moped about and felt like a failure. It felt like all the work I'd been doing for years had been for nothing.

The majority of our members were happy, but I wasn't. I knew we had to do better. I wasn't fulfilling my driving purpose.

I spent hours talking it through with my colleague James, who leads special projects in the business.

And we decided to go deep. To research exactly how MSPs are doing marketing, the role our service plays, and how we could make everything 10x easier for them.

At the time we had no idea that we were embarking on the most complex transformation of not just the portal, but our entire business. We:

• Spoke to dozens more members through an independent researcher

• Invested in research and project management tools to collate data and shape plans

• Looked at and revised our growth strategy for the next 3-5 years

• Tested whether the underlying technology we run the business on could deliver that strategy

• Hired a full-time designer and a project manager

• Invested in serious UX (user experience) consulting

• Used a brand consultant to reshape how our own marketing reflects what we do

It's been an exhausting and emotional process. James has done all the heavy lifting. And has had to put up with me constantly pushing him to speed up the reinvention of a complex machine, which has hundreds of moving parts and is travelling at 100mph!

But it's also been FUN 😃

And I don't use the word transformation lightly.

Already hundreds of improvements and changes have happened in the background. Everything we do has been examined, validated and changed where there's been a potential improvement.

Now we're about to unveil the front end changes to our members.

The formal redesign of our portal started on 12th February. It's a complete rethinking that's designed around helping our members build audiences, grow relationships and convert relationships.

And making their marketing easy.

Next week we go into final internal snagging and responsiveness testing. All being well we'll launch the portal the week after.

I am having a very big glass of wine after launch, let me tell you 😃

Growing a business is fun. Most of the time it's about tiny little improvements that get caught up in the day to day flurry of normal work.

And then sometimes you have big massive leaps. I've learnt so much in the last year about how we work as a team and what we can do to best serve our members.

This project might be coming to a close, but it has helped us clarify our driving purpose and exactly how we're going to deliver that in the next 3-5 years.

If you're already a member: Thank you, thank you, thank you for joining me on the journey. I can't wait to show you what we've done. And I look forward to your feedback on the new portal.

If you're not yet a member: We only work with one MSP per area so your marketing never clashes with a competitor. See if yours is available