The 60 hour work myth kills MSPs

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This is a transcription for episode 247 of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast: ‘The 60 hour work myth kills MSPs’.

Full show transcription

So you don’t think you can grow your MSP? I find your lack of faith disturbing. Well wait till you feel this guy’s force.

Oh, we are finally in August. So slap on the sun cream as this is what I’ve got for you this week. Why it’s a myth that working 60 hours a week will grow your MSP faster. Pop these three simple questions in your head for the holidays. And my guest expert knows all the reasons a tech wouldn’t want to work for you and how to overcome them. Welcome to episode 2 4 7.

If you get to the end of another work week and you are so tired, it’s all you can do to crack open a beer and stare vacantly at the tv. I have news this isn’t sustainable and the most successful MSP owners in the world don’t work nearly as hard or as long as you do. Let’s talk about how you can fix this. So let’s talk about the 60 hour myth. What is this? Well, it’s this myth that to be a successful business owner, we need to keep working 60 hours a week all the years that we own the business and it’s absolute nonsense. Now, don’t get me wrong when we first start the business, yeah, of course we’ve got to put more hours in. And I remember doing this myself back in 2005 when I started my first business. In fact, I was delighted to work evenings and Saturdays and Sundays because I was creating something.

And maybe you were the same when you started up. When you set up your MSP, you’re giving yourself the chance to take control of your income, of your time, of the kind of work that you do. And creating something new like that is pretty exciting, right? So it’s worth putting 60 hours in maybe even more. The problem is when that becomes a habit that goes on to year two, year three, year five, year 10, year 20. And I talk to plenty of MSPs who are working well in excess of 60 hours a week even though they’ve been in business for like 10 or 15 years, and often they’re sat on more than a million turnover, but it’s just become a habit. And the thing that they believe successful business owners do, they work long hours. Now, I think that’s completely wrong. I believe successful business owners work around half of that around 30 hours a week.

And lemme tell you why. So if you regularly work 60 hours a week and a caveat, we all now and again, pull a 60 hour week and that’s fine. But if it’s a regular thing for you and you do it more weeks than you don’t, then there are a number of risk factors. And of course the greatest of those risk factors is to you as you get older. Your body can’t really cope with that kind of level of work and you kid yourself that you can. But we do slow down a bit as we get older, don’t we? And we do find that we’re a little bit more tired at the end of each day. And what happens is as we keep working in the same manner that we did in our twenties, whereas in our twenties we can do anything in our thirties, we slow down a bit in our forties it gets worse, et cetera, et cetera.

And what happens is we have less energy for the non-workers for our hobbies. Do you remember hobbies, things used to do outside of work? Well, we also, we eat terribly. We tend to drink more alcohol. We tend to take less exercise and the chances of our team finding us kind of mortally slumped over our desk one morning kinds of go up. You know what I’m trying to say? It’s not very pleasant thought, is it? So working stupid hours is really bad for you and it’s also incredibly bad for your family. Now whether it’s just you are either half in life or whether you’ve got six kids or 12 dogs or whatever, they all miss you and they especially miss the real you where you are mentally in the room as well as physically in the room. Because the other downside of working 60 hours a week is it’s very hard to switch off.

You never really have anything other than sleep as a way of switching off well, sleep and beer. Maybe the other group of people that it’s bad for is your staff, your clients, and actually the overall business. I promise you once you are out of the first year of startup and assuming you’re not in some kind of massive crisis mode where working 60 hours a week is needed, if you’re not in those modes, then working 60 hours a week regularly is detrimental to you and to the business. And you never spend quality time thinking that’s the biggest problem. You never sit there and think, what would improve things for me? What would improve things for my team? What would improve things for my clients? What would help more people make the right decision to pick my MSP and not someone else’s MSP and all of that kind of thinking.

Well, that requires time. That requires you going for long walks that requires you to eat well, to reduce your alcohol consumption. Work 30 hours a week. And I promise you, once you get over the anxiety of letting go of the habit of a 60 hour a week working practice, you will find that you’ll make more sensible decisions about the business. You’ll find you do smarter things, you delegate more work out to the people that you’ve already got who are very capable of it, and your business will start to grow faster. I promise it because every successful MSP I’ve ever interviewed works around 20 to 30 hours a week. You’ll never hear of someone sitting on a 10 million turnover business who works 60 hour weeks. It just doesn’t happen.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast still to come…

Recruiting new techs is as much asking why they would work for you as it is asking if they’re the right fit for the vacancy that you’ve got. And my guest expert today knows how to improve your employer’s brand. She’s going to be here to share everything she knows in the next five minutes. Now that we’re in August, maybe you’ll be taking a vacation or a holiday soon in case I’ve got some simple questions for you to pop in your head and have a really good hard think about during your break. Hey, I’m Paul Green, and don’t forget, for all of the content, tools and training to market and grow your MSP, check out MSP marketing edge.com.

So are you going to get a proper break at some point this month? Maybe just get away for a few days in the sun, no contact with the office, really recharge your batteries.

We do all need this, don’t we? And a proper break means that you can get away from the small day-to-day, things that accumulate and over time they just sort of wear you down. This is also a great time to load your brain with a few strategic questions. Let it ponder on these questions for a few days and you’ll wake up about three or four days into your break with utter clarity on what you want to achieve for the rest of this year and maybe even a fair idea of how to go about it. So let me tell you what the three questions are. Question number one, what do you want more than anything else from your MSP in the rest of 2024? Question two, to achieve that, what must you do less of? And question three, to achieve that, what must you do more of?

Now these are such simple questions, but they’re also very, very powerful, very insightful, and actually you should be asking yourself these questions during a break every three, four months or so. Once you’ve answered them and you do have some clarity, then of course you don’t just sit on the information you need to act. Give yourself the first 48 hours back in the office to clear up the clutter, catch up on everything, and then prioritize putting into action the things you’ve been talking about. Prioritize growing your business no matter how ambitious your goals for the rest of this year with enough focus and action, you can do it. Whatever it is, I absolutely promise you

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast still to come…

Have you ever wondered what the best rewards or gifts are to give to your staff another MSP has? And you can hear the advice I’m giving him in the next five minutes. When you recruit new techs, have you ever been curious why they would choose to work for you rather than any of your competitors? Or even take one of the many other jobs out there, perhaps with bigger companies with better resources and a better career path? Well, there is a way to answer this where the answer isn’t because we pay the highest salary. My special guest today knows all of the reasons that a tech wouldn’t want to work for you and how to overcome them.

I’m Jane Matthews. I’m the managing director of Wildcat Careers. We’re a specialist MSP, technical recruitment company and career consultancy. We’ve won various awards in the last two and a half years, including best IT and cybersecurity recruitment firm in 2024.

Fantastic, congratulations for those awards because it’s not like they just give them out willy nilly. I know you have to work really hard for those and Jane, you can’t have picked a harder industry to work in and a harder job as recruiting techs. We’re going to talk a little bit about how you actually recruit techs and fill vacancies that MSPs have. And obviously you’re only working with MSPs here in the uk, but the advice you’re going to give us is relevant to MSPs all over the world. What I really want to talk to you about today is something called the employee brand. Now I put a pitch out on LinkedIn a few months ago and said, who wants to come on the podcast? Who wants to come and talk about interesting things? And you had such a great pitch, you were writing there saying you wanted to talk about employee brand. Can you explain this to us? What exactly is an employee brand?

So an employee brand, so you have a employer brand, so obviously that is linked to the organization’s values, the people strategy and the policies, and then you have what we call EVP. So it stands basically for and not to bore anybody, employee value proposition. And it basically describes what the organization stands for, acquires and offers as an employer.

And so does that have an effect, a direct effect on your ability to hire techs and to retain techs and would, how would they actually figure out what that value proposition is?

Absolutely. It has got a huge impact on the quality of employee or candidates that you are going to attract and retain. And EVP is basically made up of five elements. So you’ve got compensation, so it means salary and benefits. So benefits can obviously be private medical insurance, pension schemes, bonuses, training, wellness programs, salary reviews and other perks. Then you’ve got work-life balance, which is hugely important, especially in this tech world, which is your flexible hours, your hybrid working, your remote working holidays, paid parental leave, et cetera. You then have stability, which basically means people know that their job is safe and revise an environment to grow and to develop. So that involves kind of things like mentoring, coaching, training, learning and development. Again, then you have location, so that means the work environment that you offer, so the literal, the physical as well. Then respect obviously, which means meaning your company culture. So that brings it back around to your employer brand, so your employee, your organization’s values, leadership style, teamwork and trust and so on. Really,

How interesting. So you’ve just given us there a list of all the boxes that you need to tick to make your business seem more attractive to prospective employees. And the thing is, it’s I guess for someone that’s already working for you, it’s easy for them to give you a score out of 10 on all of those areas, but someone who’s considering coming to join your business, and especially if you’re a small business and the vast majority of people listening to this podcast and watching this YouTube video will be small business owners. So how do you influence the EVP from the prospective employee?

So it is all about how you market yourself as an employer. So it ties in again with your employer brand, it’s how you showcase your career sites. If you have a career site or you use a recruiter to do this for you and making sure there are a good recruiter and there are good recruiters out there, there’s some awful ones as well, but we won’t go there today. So basically it’s about how you work alongside if you’re working a recruiter, it’s about them understanding what value you offer as an employer and then getting that out to the pool of talent that’s out there and not just the pool that is currently looking, but the passive pool as well because people who are happy in their job are quite happy to have a chat with a recruiter about perhaps something different. And if you get a recruiter who can talk through what your employer brand or your employee brand is without that potential candidate realizing what you’re doing because you’re upselling and you’re creating a picture and you’re painting a story about what it would be like to work in this environment and why it’s so great.

Another thing is social media a hugely powerful tool, especially on LinkedIn company pages. MSPs can make a huge deal about their company culture on there, doing videos, doing pictures, doing teen days out and such like to show different vibes of what it is to work for them. And it is really looking at that package that you are giving people or you are looking to provide and making sure that you have everything in there that people are looking for. And the people who are like me or other recruiters in the recruitment space will know what techs are looking for. They’ll know what’s going on in the marketplace, so utilize them, they’ll be able to tell you what you need to pay, what the current market rate is, and then you can decide whether to stick with that or you can go a little bit higher and throw in a bit, a few more things because if you go a little bit higher and you throw in a few more benefits and excitement and everything, then that makes you a much more attractive place to work.

How interesting. And you really piqued my interest when you said that recruitment is like marketing. It is a marketing exercise from what you just said there, you’re absolutely right. It’s like taking a list of things that people are looking for in a job, in a role and making sure that you demonstrate to them, Hey, we do all of these things. We’re flexible, it’s well paid, we are going to invest in you training, development as you say that you can work from home or whatever is the case. And I think if I think about the marketing ability and the marketing maturity of the vast majority of MSPs that I speak to is very low because obviously the vast majority of MSPs are technical people who their technical skills are off the chart, their marketing skills are low. So I can see why a lot of MSPs would say to me that they also struggle to recruit tech essentially. They’re not positioning their business as being appealing to tech. Is that what you see as a recruiter when you are, I guess you are talking to techs all the time, and do you find it easier to put techs into maybe larger businesses or more mature businesses that have got their head around how to present themselves to prospective employees?

That’s an interesting question because there’s two ways to look at it. I prefer to work with a company that’s going through a growth stage whereby they’re starting to figure all these things out and I can go in and say, right, let’s have a look at what your values are. And sometimes I’ll be like, values, what are values? And so then I run through how we do that and I pull it out of them. They don’t realize that they’ve already got values, but they have. And it’s finding those and then it’s understanding and speaking to them about the marketplace, educating them because I’m an expert in what I do. They’re an expert in their tech support, that’s what they do and that’s outsourced for them. So come to me as an outsourced individual. But yeah, I prefer to work with the smaller MSPs that are growing because you can start to really help them to build their employee brand or their employer brand and to really shape it and design it for them and show them the reasons why it’s important and get them to have a fantastic outcome because of the input that you’ve given them and also it helps them grow their business.

And it’s that ripple effect for me that’s really satisfying.

Do you know something that’s just occurred to me is when we ask someone to come and work for us or work with us, we’re asking them to commit all of their work time. I mean 40 hours a week or whatever it is to working on us on our project. I’ve been an employer for 19 years and I was responsible for humans when I was a wage slave before that. And it’s funny how that hasn’t occurred to me before that It’s a big ask, isn’t it? So asking a company to join your MSP as a client is one thing. It’s almost less of a commitment than asking a tech, especially a mature third line tech who’s got 20 years of experience to come and join you and you are looking at the 60, 70,000 that you’ve got to pay them or whatever the rate is, and they’re looking at it as what if this person’s a nut?

What if they’re saying it’s flexible working and it’s not? Well, this is it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, and let’s just put a timestamp on this. This will be going out later in the summer, but we are recording this right at the end of May, 2024, and I’ve put that timestamp on. We do work far ahead, put that timestamp on because my next question is going to be what’s the market like right now? And as I say, you work primarily in the uk, but what are techs looking for right now? Are people not wanting to move? Are they wanting to move? Is the market hot? Is it cold? What kind of trends are you seeing?

It’s interesting because it’s all starting to move again. It went a bit stagnant at the beginning of the year, and I’m guessing its budgets. There’s a lot of movement going on in the tech world in the sense of some of the big players are making a lot of redundancies, which obviously then creates a ripple effect down through we’re talking the big MSPs, et cetera, that then creates this ripple effect down. But then we’re also seeing that there are MSPs that are now going through their growth stages because they’ve done all their sales at the beginning of the year and now they’re up to a point where they now need to bring in additional resource to cope with the amount of clients they’ve got, got clients that are turning business away because they haven’t actually got a team that they’re happy with yet. And I’m working with them to get that.

So they’ve got solid foundations. So with regards to what people are looking for, so techs are looking for flexibility, hybrid working, predominantly not remote anymore. People are missing having that team environment missing, having that interaction where they can be all techie with each other, so to speak. They’re looking for personal development, so they’re looking for training, et cetera. They’re looking for even things like doing charity based events and time off to do that. They’re looking for health insurance because of the way of the world at the moment. So yeah, it’s heavy perks, if that makes sense to bring up the package.

Well, I mean maybe we shouldn’t call it perks because essentially what they’re looking for is exactly what business owners are looking for, which is a great life. So they want work that challenges them that they enjoy. They want to sit with good people sometimes, but work from home. Sometimes they want to be well paid, they want health insurance. And here in the UK, not everyone has private health insurance that that’s a perk. And yeah, the more you were talking there, and the more I was thinking that’s exactly what everyone wants from a job, and interestingly, a lot of those things don’t add a huge amount of cash costs. I mean, if you take private health insurance, and again, this will be different all over the world, but it’ll cost your MSP depending on the situation, a hundred pounds extra per person per month, right? That’s nothing compared to if you gave them that as cash, that’s another 1200 pounds, which is nothing to an employee and certainly a senior employee that doesn’t move the needle, but you offer them that as health insurance moves the needle because they would never go and buy that health insurance themselves.

It’s the same with the flexibility. So fascinating. Jane, that’s been a really good insight into what’s happening right now, and I think that the concept of employee branding, you’ve given us a tick list there, which is just awesome. So thank you. Thank you so much. That’s okay. I know that you make your money doing this for MSP so that they don’t have to. So tell us exactly what you do and what’s the best way to get in touch with you.

Absolutely. So I recruit for technical staff for MSPs, small to medium sized. I’d stay away from the large corporates because that’s not my bag. I work with companies who are basically people who are great communicators, who have a growth mindset and are pretty determined and decisive because that works well with my personality type. I recruit obviously for them from help desk through to project teams, through to cyber, et cetera. So everything they need, you can get in touch with me. I’m on LinkedIn under Jane Matthews. You can find your LinkedIn under Wildcat Careers as well as my company page. You can email me at jane@wildcatcareers.co.uk,

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast, Paul’s personal peer group.

Anytime you sit there thinking, I wonder what the best way is to do this, then think of this part of the show because we answer all of your marketing and business growth questions. Producer James, what have we got this week?

Well, this week Paul, Chris is in the south of England here in the UK and definitely needs some of that best practice advice to do with a member of his team who’s been with his MSP for nearly two years. Historically a high performer, but just seems to be coming off the boil a little bit and he feels he needs to reward him. So his question is, how do I reward?

Well, surprisingly, the answer to this is not always cash. Sure, cash is the most useful reward you can give to anybody, but it’s also the most forgettable. It’s like pay rises. The headline increase of another three grand a year makes people feel good for a short period of time, but the actual spend ability impact on their monthly pay soon becomes normal. So if you want to give them cash, make it a big one-off cash bonus, and perhaps you could even pay the tax on it. For example, if you wanted to give them 3000, then you actually give them more to absorb their tax impact so that they end up with 3000. They can actually spend, or to give them a small amount, you could load up an Amazon card for them. But I believe the best rewards are something personal to them. So for example, in my last business, I had a writer called Stacy, and when she first started with me in her early twenties, I would buy her an expensive bottle of vodka as a thank you.

And it was like a posh brand with a fancy bottle that she desired but would never normally be able to afford. And then once she met Gareth and they moved in together, she started nesting. You know what that is, don’t you? And vodka was less important to her than curtains and having a new sofa, a new couch. And she told me where she was buying this stuff from. So I gave her a gift card for that shop. And the best example of this that I ever heard was from a business owner I used to work with years ago, not an MSP in a different sector, and his highest performer was married with three kids. Now, this guy actually moaned one day that every time he got a bonus, his wife took the cash and spent it on something for the house, like a new washing machine, and he would say to his boss, where’s the reward for me?

So my client had a brainwave, his employee was really into Formula One. And so for his next bonus, they said to him, look, we’re going to give you two tickets to the British Grand Prix and the hotel for the night before. And the guy put in his best ever quarterly performance and then was able to go home to his wife and say, oh, my boss, he’s such an idiot. He’s changed the bonus scheme, and they’re not giving cash anymore, so we can’t have a new washing machine. Isn’t that a pain? But he did buy me tickets to the racing. Anyway, I’m going with Dave next weekend. Is that all right? Can you see how clever that is? So with your reward, really you are looking for impact. You want your employee to think, wow, this place is great, and they really know me. Does that make sense? Now, if you’ve got a question about anything in your MSP that you’d like help with, just go to the contact page at mspmarketingedge.com. And don’t forget, for help finding new clients for your MSP, we’ve created an easy to follow marketing system. Get that and all the content to go in it at mspmarketingedge.com

Coming up, coming up next week.

Thanks so much for listening this week. Next week we’re building on that great interview with Jane that you heard earlier. We are going to discuss three smart ways to recruit techs

For MSPs around the world. The MSP Marketing podcast with Paul Green.

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Full show transcription

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