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Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 267, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

This week I’m taking you for a walk near my home. And we’re going to talk about a subject that’s very important to us as business owners…

How MSPs achieve a happy balance

Running an MSP is like constantly spinning plates and there’s a good chance that you’ve dropped the odd one from time to time. It’s a dizzying challenge trying to keep them all spinning and in perfect balance. If you are trying to juggle your home life with everything your MSP throws at you and it often feels impossible, today’s special episode is just for you. Come for a Christmas Eve walk with me as we find the answer to this question – How do you achieve the perfect happy balance?

Well, I hope you’ve had an insanely good year this year and you are really ready for Christmas tomorrow. Certainly if you’re listening to this when the podcast is released, what we’re doing today is kind of a bit of a new tradition, which we only started last year, but already it feels like the right thing to do every year is that you come for a walk with me. So last year, and you can go back and listen to last year’s special episode, we went for a walk round a lake near my home where I live. I live just outside Milton Keynes in the UK. It’s kind of in the middle of the UK. And today we’re just going for a walk near my house. Actually, I live near some fields. I live in a little village. It’s very nice around here. So it’s a beautiful, beautiful, sunny crisp December morning and I’m just taking you out for a walk to talk about the happy balance.

So what is the happy balance? Well, I’m a business owner just like you, and I’ve been doing this, actually next year it will be my 20th year. It was February, 2005 when I started my very first business, not the one I have now, I sold that in 2016. But back then I started and I had all the hopes and fears and all the difficult times that everyone has when they start their first business. And it took me probably about seven years to achieve this thing called the happy balance. And the happy balance is a mixture of, or a combination of five things that you need to have in your life in order to achieve happiness. Because if your experience of starting your MSP was anything like my experience of starting my first business, you throw yourself into it with such gusto that it becomes almost an unsustainable beast. And you kind of look up a year, two, three years in, and you realise that you are spending so much of your time working that you have got all the other parts of your life out of balance.

Things like, well, all the things we’re going to talk about today, but especially your family, your partner, your kids (if you’ve got them), your social life, your friends, all of these things, they take a backseat to the business and I think that’s okay for a year, maybe two years. But if it goes on any longer than that, the risk is that you are just out of balance. We cannot live our lives out of balance for a very, very long time. I do know business owners, MSP owners, in fact, who have been out of balance for years, decades in some cases. And yeah, some of them are sitting on very successful businesses, successful as in there’s lots of revenue coming in and there’s lots of profit going into their bank accounts. But I have business owning friends who are in that position and they go home to their luxury apartment in the evening where there is no partner and there’s no kids because the price of them building the business and making themselves a millionaire, the price of that was losing their family. And I dunno about you, but I would rather have the family and the happy life and...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 266 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• 3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025: The silver bullet to getting new clients and growing your MSP lies in consistent and persistent marketing. Make it easy by prioritising these three things.
• And 3 big questions to ask yourself: Before the new year begins, take some time to answer these questions and focus yourself on your future goals, in life and in business.
• This MSP is using a clever backdoor marketing tactic: My guest this week tells us what his special marketing tactic is, how it makes finding clients easier, and how you can do a version of this in your MSP.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Graham, an MSP owner in Omaha, reflects on how little he feels his MSP has achieved in terms of lead generation this year. He wants to know why his marking projects take so long to implement.

3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025

Did your MSP sales engine feel broken in 2024? Well, here’s the fix. The best new revenue comes from lead gen that’s driven by a marketing machine, but don’t be scared. It’s dead easy and it’s built with just a few simple parts and it’s going to make 2025 your best year yet.

Right now let’s go through why your current marketing isn’t working, how to find more people to speak to and how to make all your marketing easier. I do love this time of year because everyone has a collective pause and after you’ve had a few days off to enjoy some time with your family, you move on to time to just kind of take stock of what’s happened in the last 12 months. And you figure out what it is that you want to improve next year.

Most of the MSPs that I’ve spoken to this year just want to win more new clients, and keep their existing ones and make sure those clients are happy.

And of course, make sure their staff are happy and service quality is important too. These are all important things to MSPs, but ultimately, if you nail it down to what’s the one thing that you would do to improve your business, if you could wave a magic wand, for most MSPs it would be to win new clients.

So let me suggest to you three marketing priorities to focus your business on next year. These are not difficult concepts to understand. In fact, I’ve deliberately made this as easy as I can, as I try to do with all the marketing that we talk about in our podcast and on the YouTube videos.

My first recommendation is to create a marketing system rather than a series of one-off activities. Now, the reason I suggest this is because the whole channel seems to be geared around helping you to do one-off activities. You get big vendors giving you marketing campaigns or social media that you can just roll out in one go. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think doing a one-off campaign or being all over social media for a couple of months is better than no marketing at all. But the very best kind of marketing is consistent and persistent, and that comes from having a marketing system.

A system means you have a series of tasks that are happening on a regular basis. Ideally, you personally as the owner of the MSP, is not doing them. You have someone doing them on your behalf, whether that’s someone who works for you or a trusted outsource person. If you’ve been listening to my podcast or watching my videos for a while, you’ll know the marketing system that I recommend. I suggest you build audiences of people to listen to you, starting with your LinkedIn and your email list. And then grow relationships with those people using education...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 265 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Successful MSP owners exercise: Our bodies are amazing, but they’re even better when we use them on a regular basis. Even just a 20 minute walk every single day keeps your body sharp – and also your mind.
• How one client question can turn into 7 pieces of content for your MSP: To do great marketing for your MSP, you need great content. There’s tons of it around and there’s a simple way to extract it from everyday conversations with clients and prospects.
• This guy phoned 1,000 decision makers… and learned these hard lessons: Making more outbound calls is essential to win new business for your MSP. If you HATE picking up the phone, this interview is going to blow your mind.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Steven, from as MSP in London, UK, is looking forward to getting organised in 2025 – his question is: Which project management software do you recommend?

Successful MSP owners exercise

MSP Running Shoes on. Have you ever felt that owning an MSP business is like running a marathon in more ways than one? And if you prioritise looking after your clients and their technology ahead of looking after your own body and health, then you have a very low chance of completing the marathon that is being a business owner for the next 20 years. Let’s find out why successful business owners exercise, how they do it when they have zero time, and the benefits of doing it to you, your clients and your staff.

A few months back, I had my dad come and stay with us for a couple of nights. Now he lives about 150 miles away and we don’t really see him more than a couple of times a year. So it was lovely having him stay. My daughter and I, we took him to London for a full day being tourists in our own capital city, and we went to see a theatre show and we went to some museums and it was great fun. But we walked about 20,000 steps, which is about 10 miles, and we do a lot of walking because London is a walking city. It’s so much easier to walk around and just catch the tube. You wouldn’t drive around London. No one does that.

My dad is in his early seventies, so he’s not really that old and he’s kind of fit and kind of healthy as he has been throughout his life. But he has let his fitness slip in recent years and he was really struggling. So at the end of that day, he just looked ill. He was sitting down, his back was hurting, his knee was hurting, his hip was hurting, and he won’t go and see the doctor about his dicky hip. And I got him to admit that he doesn’t really do any regular exercise. He’ll have a walk now and again. Now all the medical advice from all the doctors everywhere is that someone of his age, in fact, someone of every age should be going out for at least a 20 minute walk every day. And I told him that even last year when I couldn’t exercise much because I’d injured my knee and I needed surgery on it. I couldn’t go running or anything like that, but I still exercised every single day. I’d go for a 20, 30 minute walk or go on the treadmill for a mile, or I actually bought an exercise bike, which I’ve since sold. But you get the idea.

I was telling him how the most successful business owners and MSP owners I know, they always make time for exercise regardless of how busy they are. Do you do this? Do you make time no matter how busy you are and force yourself to do exercise on a regular basis? Maybe you prioritise looking after your clients, you prioritise your partner if you’ve got one, your kids, if you have them, your staff, you prioritise all of this stuff. And it’s very easy...