Webinar replay: The holy trinity of Monthly Recurring Revenue

Live 🔴 MSP Monthly Profit Booster

Have you joined me on a live webinar yet? Every month, I put on a free one with brand new content you've not seen before.

In March 2021’s webinar, we discussed how to grow your MSP's net profit by focusing intently on increasing Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

This is what you’ll discover in this replay:

• Why MRR is so important to your personal income now, and the quality of your future retirement
• How attitudes of decision makers are changing as the subscription economy matures
• The three things that make the biggest difference to your MSP's levels of MRR
• How increasing MRR actually strengthens client relationships; not weakens them. And how to make sure clients never say "you only contact me when you have something to sell me"
• Three MRR book suggestions

The replay and transcript are below.

April's webinar is
Every cog you need in your MSP's marketing machine

Tuesday 20th April 2021
4pm UK time

Full details and register here

Thank you. Thank you very much. Hello and welcome. It is 4:00 PM GMT here in the UK. We are live all across the planet, which is so exciting to say something like that, from my home here, just on the edge of Milton Keynes, which is a town here in the center of the UK. It's another one of our unique, brand-new content every single month, live MSP monthly profit booster. I'm just going to press a few buttons here and bring up my PowerPoint that I'm going to talk about today.

We are talking today about monthly recurring revenue. In fact, what I'm calling the holy trinity of monthly recurring revenue. It's going to be a slightly shorter webinar today than is normal, because a lot of the things we've got to talk about are kind of obvious and kind of common sense, but you will pick up at least one idea from this just that will help you to increase the monthly recurring revenue within your business.

So, I've just got a few people to say hello to who have already had a chat in the chat window. So we've got Sheldon, hi Sheldon, thanks for being here today. Jasmine's here, Josh is here as well. We've also got Gerard, hi Gerard. Gareth is here, good afternoon to you Gareth. Mark is here as well. If you want to swing by the chat and say hello, please do so. It proves that we're live and it proves that it's the real me. Jason has just said hi from Bristol in the UK. Bristol of course being in the news in the UK this week. Hope everything is okay with you there Jason in Bristol. So, there's something ... Yes, I am definitely live, Claire, you're absolutely right.

There's something I want to do. I want to do, this is completely off topic, before we get onto the content today I want to just test something out. I've got a new toy. I'm going to show it to you because it's so cool. It's called ... If I can get it up here without breaking the thing. It's called a Stream Deck. Can you see that? So it's like this, go and Google Stream Deck. If you do any kind of streaming, it will just be wonderful for you. It's basically a series of programmable buttons and you can set them to do anything. Sheldon says, "I see nothing." Just Google it, Sheldon, and you'll find out what it is, but essentially I can press buttons here. I can't pull it up too far because of the wires, I've wired it all in, but I've got programmable buttons and it allows me to do things like play sound effects.

Now, I've just done one sound effect, which I want to test to see if you can actually hear the sound effect. So, I'm going to play it now. Can you just give me a yes or a no in the chat if you hear it? So you should now be hearing a Klaxon. Can you hear that Klaxon? Just go into the chat and give me a yes or a no. You can, barely says Sheldon, very faintly. Okay, that's interesting. Right, I think what that's doing is it's not actually playing through the software, it's my microphone picking it up. Okay, that's cool. We can do another test on that one. That has no other reason for me doing that other than I wanted to test it. So thank you, thank you very much for that. I need to figure out a way to get it to go through the software, clearly.

So, I'm going to shut down the chat and I'm going to talk to you about what we've got coming up today. The reason I've shut down the chat is I'm quite easily distracted by chat stuff coming up. So, as we're going through, feel free to chat in the chat window. I can't see it, it's not on my screen at the moment. All I've got up is what we are broadcasting. The reason I suggest you use chat is as we go through this, please do ask questions. I'd rather you ask the question in the chat than you sort of forgot the question, because this is brand-new content. Every time I do this webinar it's brand-new content I've not done before, so I've not tested it, I've not refined it. It doesn't mean it's not good content, it's great content, but obviously there may be something that is kind of obvious to me that maybe isn't obvious to you. So I'd rather have your feedback on that. So, ask chat questions as we go along and I will stop every now and again just go and check in on the chat and see what kind of questions people are asking.

So this is what we're going to cover off today. We are going to look at first of all why monthly recurring revenue is so important. We're going to look at how attitudes are changing with decision makers. So those business owners and managers that you want to reach, their attitudes are changing towards subscriptions and there's positive and negative changes in that. We're also going to look at the three areas that can make the biggest difference. Now, if you've been following my stuff for a while, I'm not going to introduce anything brand-new to you today, but I'm going to pull together two or three different concepts and help you solidify in your mind right, okay, if I apply those three concepts to our monthly recurring revenue services, then obviously that's going to make a bigger difference.

I'm going to look as well at why selling more to your clients can actually strengthen the relationship that you have with your clients. Also, how do we get around them saying things like, "Hey, you guys only ever get in touch when you want to sell me something." Which yes, that's not a bad thing, right? But we don't want the clients thinking that. So, we'll look at a number of different ways of how to strengthen those relationships. Then we're going to finish with three monthly recurring revenue book suggestions, at least one of them you've never heard from me before. We'll finish with just a general marketing and business growth Q&A session. So towards the end I'll tell you to put any question in there, something that isn't necessarily about this subject, and I'll happily do a Q&A. I reckon we'll be done around about a quarter to that should be, we should be completely finished by then.

Now, the other thing I'm going to mention just at the end, because I don't do these webinars just for fun. As much fun as it is creating content, I also do them because obviously I've got my own things that I want to tell you about. The only one I want to tell you about on today's webinar is something called the MSP Marketing Accelerator. So, this is our fundamental course, it's if you like the marketing fundamentals. It's deliberately priced very, very low so that you can come onboard and come on a live training program with me personally, and it's such incredible value for money. Basically, it's a way for you and I to start a relationship of some kind, a working relationship. We've had something like 180 MSPs already go through this. We only started it I think it's about five, six months ago, and we only have 20 places per month. So we start a new course every month. March's has already started unfortunately, but April's is coming up in a few weeks time. Anyway, if you go and have a look at this website address at paulgreensmspmarketing.com/accelerator and you can see all the details on there, and you sign up for either the April, or the May, or the June course on that page. I'll just tell you a little bit more about that at the end of today's webinar.

So, let's talk about then the holy trinity of monthly recurring revenue. As far as I'm concerned, monthly recurring revenue is everything. It is king, it's absolutely beautiful. I know the vast majority, and I speak to a lot of MSPs all the time, and the vast majority of MSPs they want that monthly recurring revenue. People who are stuck in a break fix relationship with a majority of their clients are trying to convert their clients to break fix. By the way, if that's you, just pop a question into the chat and it will remind me to talk later about a couple of ways to flip people from break fix into monthly contracts. It's very hard and the vast majority won't, but I have a couple of ideas. I was actually discussing last week with an expert in the States, and there's a new idea in there. So, if that's you at the moment, if you have a great deal of break fix just pop something in the chat and I'll come onto that later on. But monthly recurring revenue is everything, and I think I've worked in dozens of different sectors.

I had a business which was sold five years ago tomorrow, which is so exciting. I can't believe it's been five years already. Look how gray I've got. That was a niche healthcare marketing agency. We worked with dentists, veterinarians or vets as we call them in the UK, and opticians. Those guys don't get monthly recurring revenue in the way that you do. So they kind of got it. The vets increasingly now have what they call health plans, where you pay, it's not insurance, but you pay some money every month and that covers your vaccinations, and it covers your sort of basic health checks. The dentists have one similarly for private healthcare.

What the vets and the dentists and the opticians tried it, but what they all found was that if you have a monthly recurring revenue scheme in place, overall patients pay more. So even though let's say for example going to the vets costs you 200 pounds a year and you pay 10 pounds a month for your dog, so that's actually costing you 120 pounds a year but you get 200 pounds a year's worth of value. What they found, excuse me, quite quickly is that someone that's in a relationship with them, A, they never leave, B, they actually end up spending more because they're seeing the vet more often, so the vet can sell more stuff to them. Do not ever believe that vets are not there to sell stuff to you. Of course animal welfare is the number one priority, but they're business owners just like you. They need to sell more to their existing clients.

So it's wonderful for me to come into this sector just under five years ago and to realize that actually sort of the ethos of monthly recurring revenue is already so big within the world of IT. There's a number of reasons that it's king, that it's so wonderful. The first is of course it's incredibly, incredibly predictable. You know exactly what's coming in, and especially if you've got them on contract and there are exit terms to those contracts, unless something bad befalls the business, like they go out of business, you know exactly how much revenue is coming in. You may think that's normal for businesses, but trust me, that isn't. You have a lot of businesses, they really don't know how much money is coming in on a month by month basis.

How do you run a business like that? I have no idea. Virtually 97% of our revenue is monthly recurring revenue, is predictable revenue. So I know exactly what's coming in, I know exactly what I can spend and what I can invest back into the business. Monthly recurring revenue is scalable. It's incredibly ... You could probably take in, what? A new client every month, every other month, something like that, depending on the number of users. So it's very easy for you to scale up, your existing services will scale up. It's just software, isn't it? You're just selling more seats or more licenses, you're adding on a technician now and again or going and getting outsource help from someone somewhere, so it's just wonderful like that.

It's also incredibly, incredibly flexible. So it allows you to treat the business in a very flexible way. You've got a lot of flexibility with what you do and I do think that business owners with monthly recurring revenue streams have better lives. You might have to work harder because obviously the thing is you're essentially refreshing your contract with the clients on a regular basis. Unlike break fix, they turn up, there's a problem, you do the work. You have to keep selling your value to the client every month, but from a sleep better at night point of view it's so much better, it really is. Of course, it's flexible in the way that it can also go up and down. They use more of something, you can charge them more for something and vice versa, which is just wonderful. Of course, it's also durable. Monthly recurring revenue goes on, and on, and on, and on.

In fact, I believe that monthly recurring revenue has nothing but benefits for everyone. It is good for clients. They may fight it sometimes, but it is good for them. I do a great deal of work very closely with a number of MSPs and we talk a lot about the concept of partnership and how we're trying to educate the end clients that they don't want to just hire an IT support company and essentially have just a help desk, an enhanced support desk. There's so much more when they partner with someone. In fact, for you, you should be looking, if you're not doing this already, you should be looking to be the strategic partner of your end clients and not just being their IT support company. I think this is part of the transition of managed services. It's not just getting their monthly recurring revenue stream, it's actually genuinely partnering with.

I will talk later on about strategic reviews, which is a core part of that partnership, but you and I know that if you are completely embedded in their business that you know everything. You know where every single wire goes, you know every single device they've got, you know every single piece of software, you know every single member of staff, that they've told you about anyway. You know if you've got all that and it's documented, and you've done things your way and you're able to do all the stuff that ... What you call it? Not predictive, proactive stuff that stops things from going wrong. You and I know the client will have a better experience. They'll actually become a bonded client, a bonded client is where they're stuck with you and they're not going anywhere, that 10, 15, 20 year client. I think it's the partnership that creates the bonded client early on in your business, because you've probably still got client number one, number two, and number three. Early on in your business you created bonded clients by overservicing them. Obviously that's not scalable, certainly not when you have a larger team. So, I think to create bonded clients you have to embed yourself in their business as their true partner.

Now, obviously as well monthly recurring revenue is great for our personal income. If you know this much money is coming in this month and you know that your bills are this, that bit in the middle, that's what we call the margin, that's yours, assuming you're the business owner. If you're an employee, it's called theft, but as the business owner, that money is yours. You pay some tax on it, you take it out, you pay some more tax on it depending on what your tax rules are in your country, but that margin is yours. It becomes yours to either reinvest in the business or you take it as personal income, or there are a number of different things you can do with profit. Me, I like to leave the profit in the business either to invest in the business or I take a chunk out every now and again to go and invest into property, which is one of my things. I want to get to retirement whenever I want to change, I'm never going to stop, but I'll change what I want to do when I'm in my 60s or 70s and I want to have a great number of houses bringing me income streams.

So every now and again I'll take a big chunk of cash out of the business and I use that for a deposit on another buy-to-let. In fact, I completed on one just last Wednesday I think it was. That's the point. I don't take a lavish income from my business because I don't need the income, I'd just be frittering it away. I can't even go on holiday out of the country at the moment, it's insane. So the whole point is it's predictable and it's great own personal income. It's also great for your exit plans, and even if right now you're 22 and the idea of, I don't think we have many 22 year old MSP owners, but if you were 22 and you were thinking well, the exit is not going to be for some time, you've always got to have an eye on the exit.

When we talk about exiting we mean of course selling the business. The thing with selling your business right now, that the current valuation for an MSP, and I got this from Richard Tubb, who's a great guy to get to know. If you go and Google him, Richard Tubb with two Bs. He does a Tubb blog, does a great podcast and writes a lot. He knows a lot about our world, an enormous amount. We're good friends and we're both into Doctor Who as well, which is quite cool, although we've never met because of the pandemic and everything else, and the fact that he's different parts of the country, but he really knows his stuff. He shows that at the moment if you're doing less than a million pounds or a million dollars net profit, because things start to change when you start churning out a million in net profit, multiples change, but at the moment your business is worth one times annual recurring revenue.

So for example, let's say you were doing 10,000 a month of monthly recurring revenue, that obviously adds up over the year to 120,000 pounds of annual recurring revenue. We can also throw in any other 365 licenses or any annual telecoms, bits and bobs, or renewals, or whatsoever. So let's say there's another 30,000 of those. So overall you're doing 10,000 a month of monthly recurring revenue plus a lump sum of 30,000 a year of annual recurring. Overall that's 150,000 a year of annual recurring revenue, that's what your business is worth today. So you can now work out on the back of an envelope how much your business is worth if you were to sell it today.

Can you see how adding more monthly recurring revenue streams as well as being good for you, obviously is very good ... Being very good for you now is great for the exit down the line. In fact, some of the times I say to my clients, "You should be willing to spend so much more to acquire a new client than your competitors because you know that client is going to be worth so much more to you." In fact, let's say that client stuck with you for 10 years and then you sold the business. So let's say that client churns out a margin of 500 pounds a month, 500 a month margin. So every year they're worth 6,000 to you in margin. That margin is potentially becomes your own personal income obviously once you've paid off your fixed costs or all of your costs. But let's say that there's the 6,000 pounds a year for 10 years, that's 60,000 pounds of profit, plus you can then sell them for again another year's worth, so that's another 6,000.

So it's just wonderful when you look at it like that, and I think that's how you have to look at clients. You have to look at, particularly in your world where the clients stay forever, you've got to look at well, they're good for income now and they're great for exit. Let's not think just about replacing the cash now, let's not just think about what they've got coming in. We've got to have a mindset that if we outspend all of our competitors to acquire a client, yes, that has a cash flow impact in the short-term, but in the long-term just beautiful, just beautiful.

So we are in right now, as we stand here in March, 2021, we are in the subscription economy. We are smack bang in the middle of it, and it is changing many business models. In fact, there are being various predictions. If you go and Google, I can't remember his name off the top of my head but there's a guy who is considered to be the guru of the subscription economy. I can't remember if it's a Japanese name, but it's completely gone out of my head. I should've put it on the slide. If you go and Google him you'll find him eventually, and he says he predicts that the subscription economy will change all business models. Certainly you can see with just this screenshot that I got off the internet you can see there are so many subscription models, not just the standard e-commerce.

I mean, we all know about things like obviously Netflix, Disney+, Sky Television in the UK, subscriptions. Your phone needs a subscription. You have things like boxes like Dollar Shave Club, or we have one in the UK called Harry's. You can get clothes, I've just ended a subscription to something called Stitch Fix. They sent me clothes once a month, and you know what? I really liked them. And I ended up spending two, 300 a month on clothes when I'm not going anywhere, just because they were sending me clothes and I was trying them on and I quite liked them, and then you return the ones that you don't like. It was only when I realized that I spent about 2,000 pounds on clothes. I would never go out and spend 2,000 pounds on clothes in a shop, and that's why I canceled the subscription, but what a great subscription. There's a subscription out there for absolutely everything.

It's not just consumers, it's starting to come into businesses as well. There is as you can see here from another screenshot, there are companies like Caterpillar, the ones that make the great big diggers, they're putting sensors into their products and turning their products into monthly recurring revenue. I read about Otis, the lift company. Obviously they install lifts but increasingly they're putting sensors on and they're charging their clients subscriptions for servicing. I have a good friend, in fact, who lives just down the road from me here who makes a lot of money installing unusual lifts. So where people like Otis can't install them, Mark comes along and does them. He did the lifts in Trafalgar Square, if you ever need to ... They're mostly disabled lifts, but if you ever need to go in them, he did those, because obviously Trafalgar Square is 150 odd years old, it wasn't built with a lift shaft in mind, so he built and installed that one there. He has flipped his business around in the last few years to being a service based business. They still install the lifts, it's your equivalent of doing a project, but what they really want is the servicing. The servicing is where the real money is because it's a subscription. That money just keeps coming in.

We can see as it says here in IT, Azure, all of the others, that kind of thing we're now renting that kind of space. I realize the economies aren't quite there yet for smaller businesses. We see it with mobiles, we see it with all sorts of things. It is absolutely everywhere, and then don't forget of course one of the world's biggest subscription schemes, which is Microsoft 365. It's absolutely the most incredible value for money. I don't know what package I'm on because it's just me and my Mac, and I think I pay about 7.90 pounds a month, which is insane, because obviously I only use Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I'm not a big Microsoft fan. Oh, actually, I tell a lie, I use OneNote as well, I like OneNote. But you look at the 365 wheel, and there are so many things in there. In fact, in our MSP Marketing Edge service we often write about Microsoft 365 services and it's sometimes surprising, it's like oh, we didn't know it would do that. There's some amazing stuff in there. They've got, what? Is it 218 million subscribers, something like that, and that's just going to keep on growing and keep on growing.

So, people are used to monthly recurring revenue. They're used to being a subscriber. It is becoming normal. Just because it's becoming normal doesn't mean that people aren't pushing back, and the reason that you've got to stick to only doing monthly recurring revenue, and if you are a break fix company predominantly, stop doing break fix right now, just decide. Not stop for the old clients, just stop, say, "We won't take on any more new clients. We only deal with people on a monthly basis." You've got to do this to protect them as much as to protect you. If you break fix look after ... Hang on, let me put that in inverted commas. If you break fix look after someone, and you've been doing so for a number of years, and they get badly hacked, which is quite possible, isn't it? Because they are not as protected as your managed service clients. What if they come back and then they sue you? They try to make out that you were looking after them, even though you're approaching on a break fix capacity because they didn't really understand the relationship.

Now, I don't know if that could happen or if that would happen, and I don't want to scaremonger, that's not my area of expertise, but it strikes me that in this hyper security aware times, where there's so much out there and the chances of your clients getting hit and compromised is so high, you almost owe it to your own bank account and your own personal wellbeing, and your ability to sleep at night to make sure all of your clients that you're looking after are on contract and they are buying as many security products from you as you want them to. I would argue that if they don't do that they're not the best clients. Not all clients are equal. You should only really be working with clients that listen to you and go along with you. That's partnership, that's the real partnership.

So, I'm going to talk about three areas that make the biggest difference to your MSP's monthly recurring revenue. These are the three of the holy trinity. Let me just nip into the chat and see if anything ... No one's put anything, okay. That was easy. If you've got questions as we're going through please do put those questions in here and I'm going to shut my chat off again and I'll answer those questions towards the end. So, the holy trinity then, and the three biggest areas that make the biggest difference to your monthly recurring revenue.

The first of them is something called the profit matrix. Now, I love the profit matrix because it's so old-school but it so, so works. Let me explain the concepts and then let me tell you the thing that brings it to life. Now, the profit matrix is essentially this, this is a mock-up that I've done of it where you've got literally a matrix. You've got clients going down one side and then you've got services at the top, or flip it around, it doesn't really matter. But the point is that you in some way mark which client is buying which service. So as you can see here, client number one buys support. They also buy email antivirus and they buy encryption. Client number two buys backup on prem, they buy email backup, they have Exclaimer Signatures and they have VoIP, and you get the idea. So you can see who is buying what.

Now, the real power of the profit matrix is not in who is buying what but in who is not buying what, because you could look at client number one and you could say, "Interesting. They have no backup. They're not buying on prem from us, they're not buying cloud from us, they're not buying email backup from us. Are they buying it from anyone? Do they think that their backup solution is a hard disc, that Dave remembers to back up every now and again, because we all know that's not robust." Can you see how now that creates an opportunity, because this information is in your PSA, but it's hidden away in your PSA. Any time information is in a computer, it's all hidden away. What we want to do is we want to get it out of the computer and put it in front of us. This is why I recommend the profit matrix is not something that you do on a screen, is not something that you do in a spreadsheet somewhere, the profit matrix is something you do in real life, like this one.

So, this is a real client profit matrix and I've just cut off the side where all of their end clients are written. I can't actually remember which client of mine donated this picture to me, but you can see this is on a big whiteboard. Obviously this was perfect pre-COVID, not so perfect in the COVID world where we're not all going into the office, but you can still do and you still should do a physical profit matrix. Get an actual physical board, draw it up and then your goal is to try to fill in the dots. So, here is you can see in this one they've kind of shaded it in. Here's another example another client has given me, they've used a big roll of paper.

I know this is too small for you to see the details, but they've literally got some flip chart paper and they put it together there, and then here's another one as well. This one they've used really quite cool colored magnets on just a small board so they can put the magnets on if someone's bought it. I don't know if you can see it on your screen, but if you look in the bottom left hand corner of this one you can also see someone's toe. Not sure whose toe that is. Can't remember who sent me that one. But the profit matrix is it needs to be real, it needs to come out. Ideally, it needs to be in front of your desk or if you're not the person who account manages the clients, it needs to be in front of their desk. Even if they're only coming into the office one or two days a week, or they're completely working from home, take it to their home because the whole point of the profit matrix is you're sitting there looking at it.

As I look over here, you can't see on your camera, but I bought a poster a number of months ago called 4K weeks. I think the website is something like 4Kweeks.com and it talks about the average life expectancy being 4,000 weeks. I ordered frankly a ridiculously, something like $70, a stupid amount of money for a poster, but they pre-filled in all the weeks I've already lived and then every Friday afternoon when I clock off on a Friday and I'm done, if I work Fridays, because I've been trying not to work Fridays again, I go and shade in another box. The reason I have that up here in my work area is because I want to look at that to see how few weeks I've got left. I'm past the halfway mark because I'm 47 this year, and that's kind of terrifying.

The reason I mention that is because having that there in front of me, I'll often when I'm sitting thinking about something or if I'm procrastinating or faffing I look over to that and it'll be like this is how many few weeks you've got left. It's exactly the same with the profit matrix. You want someone sitting there, looking at it, getting thinking, why doesn't client A buy that? Or why have we got seven clients who still don't buy some kind of backup from us? That's not robust, that's not safe. Why are these clients not buying these security services? That's not safe, that's exactly what we want.

Now, the profit matrix feeds very nicely into the second part of the holy trinity, which is strategic reviews. Now, you can call strategic reviews anything you want. Many people, most people call them QBRs, quarterly business reviews. I don't call them that because I think quarterly is overkill for some of your clients. They are also called technology reviews, I know in the Tech Tribe they call it technology reviews. Doesn't really matter what you call them, but you do need to do them. The main reason you need to do them is this. If you want to be a true partner with your clients, you've got to take a strategic overview of their technology. The strategic overview and the strategic review is about sitting down with them at an appropriate interval, for some that will be annually, for some that will be quarterly.

If you've got a whale that you're overly reliant upon, you would probably want to do this on a four weekly or six weekly basis, depending on the size of the whale, but the strategic review is not about now, it's not about the past, it's very much about the future. It's about sitting with your clients and talking about their favorite subject, which is themselves. So, we need to talk to them about what's coming up in the future, what their plans are, where they're expected to expand, new stuff they're looking to take on, everything. We want to be their partner, literally be part of their plans for the future. In fact, what you really want to do is to be working two to three years ahead with them. So you can put together a very powerful document, a technology roadmap. In fact, every single one of your clients should have a roadmap. The reason they should have that is A, it ties them to you mentally for another two to three years and beyond, but B, it also shows you and them what they're likely to need to invest in in the future. So we're talking projects, we're talking new monthly recurring revenue services.

In essence, it's an agreement between you and your client of what they're going to buy and how they're going to develop. This is how you get around that problem of hey, you guys only ever call me or you only ever sit down with me when you've got something to sell me. When you've got a technology roadmap kind of the selling does itself, you don't need to do any selling. They're just talking about their business and what you can do to help them. There are three things that people have. They have wants, they have needs, and they have fears. You should be removing those fears, you should be delivering the things that they need, but really focusing primarily on what do they want.

I have an IFA, an independent financial advisor who looks after me very well. Graham his name is, he's a lovely guy, and he was sometime in the past was looked after by one of my clients. So, one of my MSPs was looking after my IFA. I didn't introduce them, it was just a random coincidence, and my MSP client said, "Graham was wonderful, because Graham just bought everything." Everything that is security based, because obviously being a financial advisor, it's regulated. For him being breached has 10 times the consequences of a non-regulated business being breached. So, my client would just ring him up on a regular basis and say, "Oh, we've got a new security thing, we've just taken this onboard. We've onboarded it, we've got three or four clients on it, I want to put it in place for you." Didn't even need to ask the question do you want it, it was I'll get in onboard for you. Maybe you will need more regulated clients if you'd like that kind of relationship with them.

In terms of putting together technology roadmaps, you don't have to do the hard work yourself. There is software that will do it. Now, these are not recommendations because there's no one product that my clients use that they thoroughly love. I see them using a broad mix. There's one called Managed Services Platform. There's another one called vCIO Toolkit, I think it is, vCIO meaning of course virtual chief information officer. There's another one which has just escaped my brain at the moment, so I'll try and remember that later and send that out with the recording. But you can use software which produces very beautiful looking reports and technology roadmaps that you can give to your clients.

Then the final part of the holy trinity of monthly recurring revenue is to be constantly adding new services. There's always, I mean, don't we just live in an amazing world where there's always something new to sell? And you can ask yourself in these sort of categories, if you look at security, training, backup, telecoms, kind of hosted desktops and different technology solutions, and even things like managed print. Some of these you may not want to touch, but you can look at all of these and you can say right, what are the options, what are the things that we've got in here. In fact, I have a Facebook group, if you're not already a member of it, it's called the MSP marketing Facebook group. We've got about 1,200 MSPs in there. If you're not already a member go into Facebook and type in MSP marketing and go to groups, and it should be the top one, and just apply to join. That's the kind of conversation that we'd have in that group, where someone would say, "Hey, right, I want to sell some more services. What do you recommend?" A couple 100 of the people will, well, they wouldn't all comment, but a good chunk of people would come in and comment with hey, you should look at this or look at this, or I resell this. Great for ideas for something like that.

You don't even just have to think about IT stuff. I have clients who sell websites. They don't deliver them, they've outsourced the delivery to someone else. In fact, there's a company in the UK, they're friends of mine, and in fact, you'll see a video I've done with them, which is coming out next week or the week after. They're called Plexa.co.uk and they will do websites and marketing services, white label for you to sell. They don't even talk to your clients, you retain complete ownership and complete control of your client. They're just kind of in the background doing the work for you. That's Plexa, P-L-E-X-A.co.uk. Steve and Paul are the guys there. The reason that they found it relatively easy for MSPs to sell marketing services and certainly websites, and websites tend to be the in to the end client. By that I mean once you build them a website you can then sell them SEO, you can sell them other sort of digital marketing services.

What we found is that the end clients, they tend to look at a website and say, "Well, that's computers, and you guys do computers, so could you build us a website?" And I realized that's ... In fact, I came up with a great analogy for this the other day. That's like saying to the people who print newspapers ... People do still print newspapers, do they? It's a bit like saying to the people who print newspapers, "You can write the words, you can take the photos in the newspaper." You wouldn't do that, but end clients they ask you for websites. I'm sure you've been asked for websites, so why not sell them to them? All the websites that Plexa sell are done on a monthly recurring revenue basis, because why would you do it as a project when you can turn it into an ongoing revenue stream?

Same with WordPress maintenance. You just Google white label WordPress maintenance. There's absolutely loads and loads of things out there. There's always something more that you can sell people, that the limit is more how many services can you remember to sell. Don't think about having a menu done, or don't think about having a booklet or a brochure. That's going to be just a complete waste of time and money. It's down to you and your account management skills and using something like the profit matrix to keep track of it to remember which of your services you can offer to your clients.

I mentioned earlier needs, wants and fears. The beauty of doing strategic reviews and sitting down with your clients talking about the future is they actually sell themselves. You don't need to sit there and pitch. Pitching is awful. You can wait for them to tell you that they have a need, or that they have a want, or that something is scaring them, and then you've just got to remember how you can take that away. Literally it's a case of we can sort that out for you. Would you just like us to get that sorted for you? I'll get you a quote by the end of the day. Why not? Why not? Because you got to remember that people hate to be sold to but they love to buy, and they do not want you making the buying decisions for them. I said to you earlier how I used to work with opticians.

We would regularly have instances where in the opticians that the people doing the eye tests, there'd be a lovely old lady would come in and she'd have her eye test done, and the optician was thinking, "Her prescription hasn't changed much. I'm going to save her some money." And they would say to it was typically more toward the older people, and they'd say to her, "It's all right. You don't need to buy any new glasses this time, we'll see you in a year's time." And I can think of at least five or six instances that I was told about where that person, that patient would come back. Would either come back into the store a year later wearing new glasses that she'd bought from somewhere else or there was one instance where she came back into the store three days later, demanded to see the owner, and asked for permission to buy new glasses.

Her exact words to the owner were, "Your optician told me I couldn't buy any, and actually I wanted to treat myself, I'm 86, I wanted to treat myself." So I know that's a bizarre example outside of our world, but people don't want you making the buying decisions for them. They want to decide when they're ready to buy. Your job is to uncover needs, or wants, or fears and then have something that they could buy to satiate their need, or their want, or to remove their fear. Some of those people will buy those things, some of them won't, it doesn't matter. If they buy it, great, if they don't buy it, great, as long as you've told them about it.

Now, I've got three book suggestions for you and then we'll just go into a Q&A. So if you've got any questions at all, please do pop those questions into the chat and I'll come to them in a second. First book to recommend to you is by the wonderful John Warrillow and it's called The Automatic Customer. Now, John actually wrote a book called Built to Sell, and he positions this book as the missing chapter of Built to Sell, and it's all about monthly recurring revenue. So go and get Built to Sell, which if you haven't read it, it's amazing. Built to Sell is itself sort of the 21st century edition of The E-Myth Revisited. These are all great books, by the way. These are really, really good books, and The E-Myth Revisited is about the hell of being a business owner and it helps you to understand what it's like to be a business owner. Built to Sell is, as I say, is the more up-to-date version of that, and The Automatic Customer bolts very nicely with that. Now, I don't think you'll have any epiphanies from The Automatic Customer, but it's a good thorough grounding in monthly recurring revenue.

The next book that I recommend is called The Membership Economy. I've read this one and this one didn't make it onto my special bookshelf. So I have a ... Whenever I read, I read a lot of business books, around about one a week or I listen to, listening more than reading these days, but when a book is really good it moves onto my special bookshelf, which is now in my bedroom. There's a whole bunch of them. In fact, in next month's webinar I'm going to show you a photo of my special bookshelf. This one is okay, didn't quite make it on there, but as with any books, you only have to have one idea from a book, one idea, and it's worth the $10 or whatever you paid for that book.

The third one, which did make it on, in fact, it's here. I've got it here. I've got it on my pile of books. Oh, hang on, I've got Automatic Customer as well. How funny. There we go. So these, I have a big pile on my desk of books that I'm sort of rereading. There we go, Automatic Customer and Retention Point. Retention Point by Robert Skrob, just love that book. The reason I love is it's given me so many ideas. I run a membership scheme, I have our MSP Marketing Edge and I have something called The War Room. These are monthly recurring revenue programs for me and I'm always looking obviously to make it better for my members, and it talks in that book about keeping your clients. Now, you don't really have members, you have clients, but I promise you will get something of great value out of Retention Points. It really is a good book.

So, coming up then we're going to do a marketing and business growth Q&A. I'm going to have a look in the chat in a moment. Any questions at all on any marketing or business growth subject, please do ask me. Next month's Live Profit Booster is going to be around about a month from now, the 20th of April. Same time in the afternoon, however be aware that here in the UK we flip into British summertime, I think it's this coming Sunday. So it will be an hour earlier or later, I can't remember. I'll send something out anyway, and it's actually the subject is the 10 best business and marketing books I've ever read. So I'm going to take you on a little tour of my bookshelf and I'm going to recommend these books to you.

Now, just before we go onto the Q&A, I just want to tell you very briefly about the Marketing Accelerator. So you can see the full details at paulgreensmspmarketing.com/accelerator. The beautiful thing about the MSP Marketing Accelerator is it's the fast track way to get your MSP's marketing sorted. So what we do is you and me and no more than 19 other MSPs, because this is capped at 20 MSPs per month, we jump on a Zoom, an hour long Zoom once a week for five weeks. It's live, so I present this new every single month, and you're on the Zoom. It's all recorded and you get the PowerPoints and the transcriptions and all of that kind of stuff as well if you can't make any of the calls, but the beauty is really being live on that call with me because we can engage, and interact, and obviously we do talk about a great deal of stuff. We cover off the five fundamentals of getting your marketing right. This is the basics, is the fundamentals, but it's the things you have to get right. So in week one we look at websites, and I show you examples of good websites, MSP websites that I think are good. We cover off all the basics that you need to look at in there.

Week two we look at profit from LinkedIn and how to get all of the basics right there. Week three is about building audiences of people to receive your marketing, to listen to you, and then we tell you how to build a relationship with those people as well. Week four is about how to target those people to commercialize them, and we look at multi step touchpoints marketing campaigns, and then in week five we look at a success blueprint. So I have this wonderful blueprint of something called the advanced profit system. I'm going to show that to you and it's all the areas that you need to focus on to improve your MSP. I don't touch operations because I'm not an IT guy. I'm not a tech. So operations is the only thing we don't touch, but it's everything else. It's the people, it's the marketing, it's the systems, it's cash flows, everything else, and it's all the different areas. There are 24 areas in total that are important when you are looking to improve your business and grow your next profit. On top of that every week you also have direct access to me, both live on the call where we can actually chat on the call and also to me on email, you can email me in between each call to ask me anything about your MSP's marketing.

So March's program has already started. The next one that starts is April, which as you can see here on the screen starts on Wednesday the 28th of April, and then we've got one in May and in June. We'll do one every month this year. I don't know if we'll continue into 2022, it's too early to tell, but certainly for the rest of this year we will do a program. The calls tend to be in the evening UK time, because obviously I have lots and lots of MSPs from both the States, Canada, Australia, all sorts of other countries have been through this program.

So, if you go onto the website, you see where it says UK time, that's actually a hyperlink, you can click on that and you'll see a time zone converter to work out when it's going to be in your time. Now, I've made this a deliberate no-brainer for you. Five weeks of live training with me is only 49 pounds plus VAT if you're in the UK, or anywhere else in the world is 69 US dollars, and that is ridiculously cheap. There's a reason for that. This is I want to start a working relationship with you. So, we have lots and lots of things that we can do to help you, and what I've discovered over the years is if I can start a working relationship with someone, if it's right for you to go on and do something else, you will, if it's not right you won't, that's absolutely fine with me. A proportion of the people that we work with on the marketing accelerator every month go on to buy something else from us, and a larger proportion don't. I'll be completely honest about that, but at least we started a marketing relationship. Also, you get to ... Excuse me, we start a working relationship, but you get to get your marketing fundamentals sorted as well, which is the most important thing.

Now, if you're already an existing client of mine, perhaps you're a member of the MSP Marketing Edge. So, if I already have your payment details you don't even need to put payment details in on this page. If you go to this page, as I say, if you have an existing payment, ongoing payment set up with us then we can just add it to your existing account, which just makes it easier than fishing out your bank details. So it's all at paulgreensmspmarketing.com/accelerator.

Right, I'm just going to go into the chat. We're done with sort of the presentation. I'm going to go and have a look at the chat. There's nothing, no questions. That's never happened before. It's the first time in five or six webinars that we've not had any questions. Well, I hope that's been useful for you anyway, so if you have got any questions you can always hit reply to the recording of this. So, I'll be sending out the recording probably Thursday or Friday, and if you've got any questions that occur to you off the back of this, then please do come back to me with questions.

Thank you very much for your thanks. We've got thanks here from Neil, from Mark, from Agatha. Thank you Agatha. Adam as well, Gerard, Richard, Mike, Josh, Sheldon. Caesar says he missed the first part. Yeah, the recording will be out, Caesar. Clair says thanks, also Arthur, and Mark, and Gareth. Yes, and I'll see you tomorrow, Gareth. So thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of your day. I look forward to speaking to you soon. Cheers, bye-bye.