Episode 226: The best (and simplest) MSP client retention idea

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Episode 226

Welcome to the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. This week’s show includes:

00:00 Is your website good enough?
07:59 The simplest way to maximize retention
15:07 How this MSP grew a million pound business…TWICE

Featured guest:

Thank you to Joe Burns, co-founder and CEO of Reformed IT, for joining me to talk about how he achieved over a million pounds in turnover in 11 years for his MSP business… then co-founded another MSP and did it all over again, this time hitting the million pound mark in just three years.

Joe Burns, a prominent figure in the Managed IT Services (MSP) industry, is the co-founder and CEO of Reformed IT, a company renowned for providing top-tier Managed IT and Cyber Security services to businesses in the East Midlands, UK. With an impressive track record, Reformed IT, under Joe’s leadership, has grown to achieve over £1.3m in annual revenue with a dedicated team of 12 professionals since its inception in October 2019.

Prior to establishing Reformed IT, Joe co-founded Pyranet in 2005, where he began his journey in the IT services sector. Through this venture, he gained invaluable experience and insights, learning from the challenges and triumphs of scaling and eventually exiting a successful MSP business through acquisition. This journey was not just about business growth but also about personal development and understanding the intricacies of the MSP world.

Having gained a comprehensive experience within the MSP industry, Joe now shares many of the mistakes he made, and lessons learned with the wider community.

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cyber-security-speaker-joe/

Extra show notes:

Listen or watch every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform, hosted by me, Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/
- https://www.paulgreensmspmarketing.com/about/
Subscribe to my YouTube channel:
- https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing
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- https://www.facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing/
Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service:
- https://www.mspmarketingedge.com
Connect with me on LinkedIn:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/
Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider:
Got a question from the show? Email me directly: hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com
Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire:
- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Buy-Back-Your-Time-Unstuck/dp/059342297X/

Transcription:

NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. Around the world, this Paul. Paul Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast to the podcast. This is episode two, two, six, and here’s what I got in store for you this week. [00:00:15] Speaker B: Hi, I’m Joe Burns and I built an MSP back in 2005 and scaled that to over a million pounds. If you want to find out how I’ve then build an MSP in three years to the same size, join us on Paul Green’s podcast. [00:00:31] Speaker A: And on top of that interview with Joe later on in the show, we’re going to be talking about customer retention. I have an idea for you. It’s the simplest idea you will ever hear, but I bet it’s one of the most powerful things you could do to improve your retention.

Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast wonderful things about the work that I do with MSPs is now and again I get to sort of be very close to some MSPs and get involved directly with their business. For example, in my MSP marketing edge service, we have a very small number of groups of what we call the MRR revolution. MRR, of course, being monthly recurring revenue. And I get to jump on some regular zooms with some MSPs that I’m working with over 18 months. And we get really into the nuts and bolts of their marketing. We make sure they’ve got a robust marketing system set up to not only win new clients, but also to retain and to upsell those clients as well. And I really do get involved in detailed stuff because I don’t get to do this with, I work with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of MSPs, so I don’t get to do it at a level of detail with everyone. So when I do work with someone closely, I like to really drill into the details. And a couple of weeks ago, me and one of the other MSPs were having a, I wouldn’t call it an argument. It was a vigorous debate about their website, because they’ve hired a website copywriter, which is a good thing to do, right, to get a professional to write your website for you. But the content that this website copywriter output was, how can I say it? It was flowery, it was waffly, it was using lots of words when small numbers of words are actually what’s needed. And the MSP in particular, who I work with, who I have a great relationship with. And that’s why I felt able to challenge them on this. I’d said to them, what was the brief? What did you tell this website copywriter? And they said, we wanted our website to be sexy. That’s actually the word they use. They wanted their website to be sexy. And we’re just talking here about the content, the words, which is what copywriters call copy. Copy is content. It’s the words. And I think the idea of having your website being sexy is great, right? You want your website to zing. You want it to stand out, you want it to be you, right? You want all of those things. But, and this is where it gets really hard. You also want it to be really, really simple because you have to understand how ordinary people use websites to be able to put the best possible website in place. And the way that people look at websites is when they’re at that very initial stage of they’re thinking of switching MSPs or picking their first MSP and they’re typing in it, support your town and they land on your website, they’re only going to spend a few seconds on your website. In fact, you’ve got literally two or 3 seconds to grab their attention, hook them in, get them interested. And the way to do that is not by talking about you, it’s by talking about them and by talking about them, but in a very simple way. You see, we don’t sit and read websites like we do books, right? We don’t read every single line and take in every single piece of information. We scan over it, literally, our eyes jump from bit to bit to bit. We’ll look at the headline, we’ll look at the image, we’ll scan through some of the text. People do go back and read things properly at later stages of research. And of course there are different personality types. You might be someone who does read all the detail all the time, but the vast majority of people tend not to do that on the initial thing, they will scan around. And here’s where the problem of having waffly, overly long, long winded content on your website. People will jump over that website content. And this has been the case for the last 25 years. And it will be the case for the next 25 years, I’m sure, right to the point where websites have been replaced by holograms or whatever replaces them. Websites have to be short and snappy. And this is the challenge. You can still be sexy with a website, but you’ve got to be simple, short and snappy. You’ve got to use short sentences. Short phrases immediately grab people’s attention. You can’t be ambiguous.

You’ve got to give them immediate context. It’s got to make sense. If 100 strangers who don’t know you and don’t know what you do. If 100 strangers go and look at your website, do they instantly understand what you do and more importantly, why you should do it for them? And if they don’t, then your website content isn’t simple enough. There’s a really good test for this, which I’m pretty sure we put on the podcast a couple of years ago, but it’s worth repeating again now. Go to a networking meeting, not one that you regularly go to. Go to a new networking meeting where no one really knows you, and you’re going there not to generate leads. You’re going there to get a bit of market research. Go along with your website on your phone, and you go up to strangers and you introduce yourself, but don’t say what you do. You just say, hi, my name’s Paul. How are you? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Terrible coffee. Yeah, isn’t it? Et cetera, et cetera. And then you say to them, can I ask you a huge favor either? I’m really curious to know what real decision makers people like you make of our website. If you kind of understand what we do. Can I just show you my website? Would you just sort of tell me what we do as a business and what the benefits are of working with us just from our website? And you just hand them your phone. And the average reasonable person is going to do this because this is cool, isn’t it? Who gets to do this? So they’ll grab your phone, they’ll have a look at it, and you’re kind of looking here for the opinions of, I don’t know, four, five, six different people, but not in a group, just literally doing it on an individual basis. Only give them ten or 15 seconds to look at your website. Don’t let them look at it. And keep scrolling and keep scrolling and keep thinking about it and tell you sort of iterate what they think about you and your business because that’s not normal, right? People don’t do that in a real environment. They go to your website, they’re either hooked into it and they stay for a bit and they do something, or they just hit the back button, which is called a bounce. So you want to kind of replicate that. Give them five to 10 seconds and then just say to them, what do we do? What’s the benefit of working with us? And if they hit you with, oh, you’re an IT support company. The benefits are you’re in our town, you’ve got a personal service, and you are the face of the business. So I know that I’m dealing with you, that’s the kind of thing you want. Whereas if they say, oh, you do something security wise and they’re all a bit vague and you can tell from their body language and the way they’re speaking that they don’t know the answer. If this is the case, don’t get depressed, don’t be miserable, don’t smash your phone in anger, don’t go home with your head in your hands and think it’s all over. It’s not at all. This is actually the response that you would get to the vast majority of MSP’s websites, because the vast majority are really bad and that’s good for you, because that kind of feedback gives you the opportunity to go and improve your website and to make it zing, to make it super, super simple, short and snappy, so that strangers who are looking at your website know exactly what you do and know exactly why they would buy from you, it’s actually a huge opportunity. Isn’t that exciting?

Here’s this week’s clever idea.

One of the best things about the MSP business model is the insane amount of retention that you just benefit from all the time. It’s baked in for a number of different reasons. Partly it’s just you looking after your customers well, but partly, of course, it’s something called inertia loyalty, where it feels safer and easier to stay with you than to move over to someone new that they don’t know. This is also known as better the devil you know. The other thing that keeps customers with you is that they just don’t understand technology when they actually start to think about switching to someone else. And there’s server things and cloud things and security things. All of these things are quite scary for them. And again, that feeds into that inertia loyalty. So retention for the average MSP is really good. Most MSPs only lose a client if the client goes bust or the client is bought out by another company that consolidates its it. And obviously, now and again, you do lose a client to another MSP or a different solution. Don’t you just love it when someone says, oh, we’ve got a friend of a friend who’s going to look after us. You kind of wash your hands of that one, don’t you? I believe that even when you have excellent retention, you should still have a process in place to just guarantee that that retention is as good as it possibly could be. And there’s something that one of those MSPs I was just talking about the ones that I work with on the calls. There’s something that one of those has started doing over the last few months. And I think this is beautiful. In fact, it’s beautiful and it’s simple and it’s something that you could easily take on board. Put it in place in your MSP and just try it out for a few months. Do it as an experiment, see what happens. Here’s what they do. They have a service desk manager. Now, you may not have one of these yourself, in which case you would do this or you would get one of your senior techs to do it. But the point is that the person who does this needs to be someone who a is able to have a good, in depth conversation with humans and also someone who has the ability and the motivation to take feedback and to go and change, improve things or report back to someone. So there’s no point you getting one of your texts to do this if they’re just going to do the phone call. Put the phone down and that’s the end of it. Nothing ever happens. It needs to be you or really, you’re a service desk manager, and what you do is every week you just call two clients for a chat. It’s as simple as that. And it’s an impromptu chat, it’s just a quick phone call through to the decision maker. It doesn’t have to be off the back of a ticket, doesn’t have to be off the back of an issue. It’s genuinely just random. And obviously you don’t call every client on a regular basis. It’s maybe once a year, once every six months, and then you just ask them some very simple questions. So you just say, hi, this is Matt, whoever, I’m the services manager here at so and so business. And just calling really just to just have a chat with you and see how things are going. So could you sort of tell me, if you think about what we’ve done for you for the last few weeks, what have we done? Well, and then there’s a follow up question to that is, what have we done that’s not been so good? And you could say, you put this in your own words, don’t you? So what have we done that’s good? What have we done that’s not so good? Or what’s not gone so well in the last couple of weeks or last couple of months? And that’s kind of setting a. Well, that’s partly setting context, but also partly getting good feedback out of them. When you ask people for feedback and you literally say, hey, can I have some feedback? They give you the wrong feedback. They don’t tell you what you really need to know. So the best kind of feedback is actually structured feedback. What have we done well? What have we not done so well? That’s great feedback. And it pulls off stuff off the top of their mind. And as they’re talking, they may think of other stuff that’s a little bit deeper, which is great feedback. Now, the third and final part of this is the most important question because this is the opportunities question. This could actually not only improve the retention, but could also actually set up an upsell opportunity as well. Here is the third and final question.

What can we do to make your life easier? Let me say that again, because it’s such an important question. What can we do to make your life easier? Now, notice there, we’re not talking about what can we do to improve your technology. We’re not saying what can we do to help your productivity or anything like that. What can we do to make your life easier? And remember, you’re talking to the decision maker, the person who is ultimately the one who signs off the next contract or doesn’t. Obviously, they’re going to take on feedback from their staff and from influencers in their business. But isn’t that the best possible question you could ever ask a decision maker? What can we do to make your life easier? But it’s really critical that whatever they say, you act on it. And it could be them asking you to communicate in a different way or to pick something up and help them with something or to solve a problem for them. Or they might say, actually, there’s nothing. We love what you do. We’re really happy with you. Thank you so much for the call. And actually, that call in itself, even though there’s no actions from it, there’s nothing that you could do. Wasn’t that an amazing call? They’re going to feel really good about you putting the phone down and for a number of weeks after that. And it’s all about the feelings. Good customer retention is not what they think. It’s not really about service levels, it’s about how people feel about you. The more you can do to influence how they feel, the even better your retention will be. Paul’s. Paul’s blatant plug. Blatant plug. Sometimes of an evening, I miss out on another 30 or 40 minutes worth of sleep because of YouTube. Do you do this? So I’ll watch something on Netflix or Prime or Disney, and it gets to about 10:00 and I think, right, I should really go to bed because I get up quite early ish and instead I think I’ll just come to YouTube just for five minutes and then 40 minutes later I’ve gone down the rabbit hole. I’ve missed out on sleep. I’m a bit grumpy the next day and what have I been watching? It’s just nonsense. Well, we are on a mission to make sure that you don’t ever waste any of your YouTube time however you use YouTube. So we are pumping out some really high quality edutainment videos about MSP marketing. I want you to be able to learn and discover how to improve your MSP’s marketing while having fun at the same time. So go and check out our channel. It’s YouTube.com slash MSP marketing. And while you’re there, please do subscribe and do the little Bell notification thing. I know everyone says that on YouTube. The reason is it’s really good for the algorithm. If YouTube can see that you’ve subscribed to my channel and you’ve allowed notifications which only really come up on YouTube anyway, then that actually helps me, which helps us to produce more content and I really do appreciate it. So go and have a look now and subscribe@YouTube.com. Slash MSP Marketing.

[00:15:10] Speaker B: Hi, I’m Joe Burns. I’m the co founder and CEO of reformed it, based in Nottinghamshire in East. [00:15:18] Speaker A: Midlands, which of course is here in the UK. We do have a very international audience for this podcast. Now, I had the delight, Joe, of sitting next to you at a tech tribe dinner that Nigel Moore hosted in London back in, I think it was back in October last year. And it was fascinating sitting, talking to you and learning all about your business because you’ve not just built up one MSP, you’ve kind of built up one, sold it and then you’re doing it again. And there are a number of really fascinating lessons for me from the things that you were talking about, which I’d like to explore on the podcast today. So let’s go back, first of all, right, back to the very beginning of your story. So how did you get into it and how did you get that first MSP started? [00:16:00] Speaker B: Oh, wow. So right back to the start. And getting into it goes back to my school days and sitting in a classroom where the careers advisor comes into school and asks everybody what they want to do in the future. And of course, as a 14 year old, you have no idea what you want to do as a future career. The irony is that someone was sat in front of me in class, I was in an re class, and he turned to me and says, I’m going to become a systems analyst. And I said to him, what does a systems analyst do? And he says, you just play with computers all day and get paid lots of money for it.

So I went down to the careers advisor and said, I want to become a systems analyst, knowing absolutely nothing about that as a career. So that’s what was the seed, ironically, the seed of the idea that got me into the idea of getting into IT services in general, and that weirdly carried on. So when I left school, I thought, well, what am I going to do? And I went to do an IT course in college. My whole vision was then starting a job in it as an IT technician. Essentially. I got my first break working for a company called Pendragon Motor Group, quite one of the largest dealers, motor dealers in the UK.

That started me off, and then subsequently that then led to me co founding a business with one of my colleagues in the IT department from Pendragon, a guy called Rory, Rory Perkins. That was a business called Pyrenet, which was established back in 2005, so predates the terminology MSP even. That was our first IT services business.

[00:17:35] Speaker A: And presumably you started out doing break fix like everyone did back in 2005. [00:17:39] Speaker B: Strangely, no. We did it as a per device back then, a per device, fixed price kind of contract. So it wasn’t necessarily a break fix. We had a support contract, in essence, and that was what we started with. Obviously, back then, the blend of services was different to how it is now, but we did start with a routine IT services contract even back then. [00:18:03] Speaker A: Okay, so 2005, you started that business. What year did you sell it? [00:18:07] Speaker B: It was sold in 2016. [00:18:10] Speaker A: 2016. So that’s. What’s that? Eleven years? Yes. Actually, your original business journey dates match up to mine as well. So I started my very first business in 2005 and also sold that in 2016, which is fascinating. I think that was one of the things we talked about at the dinner, wasn’t it, how those are lined up? So tell us about that eleven years, because for, I would say the vast majority of MSPs listening to this or watching it on YouTube, they’re still in that first business. And it might be that that first business is two, three years in. It might be it’s 2030 years in, but you don’t often meet someone who’s done it once and then does it again. There are a handful of people that do that, but they’re very much the exception than the rule. So talk us through that original journey, how did you grow? What were the big mistakes you made? What were the breakthroughs? And what made you sell it in 2016? [00:18:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. So obviously, starting any business, I was a technician, I was an IT guy, essentially, like many of the MSPs that have come to be. It starts with that element of, you understand the tech, you understand what it is to be in it services. And that was me and my business partner, Rory, back in the day, back in 2005. And we had this idea to start this business because we knew the corporate world, we knew how to look after really critical high end systems for a public company. And we thought, well, if we’ve got the knowledge and the skills to do this, we could do it for smaller businesses and charge each of them, and that’s how we could start the business. So, very similar, I would expect, to a lot of startup journeys for it services businesses. The thing is that when you start that business, you don’t really know anything about running a business. You don’t know sales, you don’t know marketing, you don’t know negotiating, you don’t know suppliers and how to deal with a lot of that. So everything that you do once you started a business, besides the tech piece, which should be pretty comfortable to most, is that you don’t understand any of it. So you’re learning all of this as you’re going. And I think that was one of the biggest things. Is that. Yes, because it’s tough.

You’re juggling a lot of balls. You’re trying to pick up skills that you don’t really know how to do, and you’re kind of having to learn on your feet, pretty fast paced. So my memories back for 2005, 2006 was constant learning, constantly trying to pick up things that I didn’t know how to do and trying to become better at those things. So that’s what I remember from that. So moving that journey forwards all the way to the point where we’d done quite well out of that business in terms of from 2005 to 2016, it was growing every year. We always saw growth year on year all the way through. And we got to a point in 2016 where prior to 2016, where myself and my business partner, who’d been doing so well at running this business and growing this business together, had got to a point where we realized that our growth ambitions and what we wanted out of the business differed. So we were a bit of a crossroads, and we had different opinion on what we wanted out of the business. And that ultimately was what led us to the position where we wanted to exit the business and sell the business, which happened in 2016. But it took us eleven years to get to a million pound turnover in that business, which is just a relevant metric for anyone that’s listening.

[00:21:33] Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think hitting that million, I did exactly the same. This is bizarre how in different industries, you and I have a very similar story, but I did exactly the same. Eleven years. I was changing business models quite a lot and hitting that million, which for our us audience is 1.21.3 mil. Million dollars. Hitting that. It’s a psychological thing, I think. And any business owner who, once they’ve sort of realized, oh, I can run a business and I can actually make a living out of it, and, oh, I can get staff and I can be an employer. And all those things that you quite rightly said you have to make up as you’re going along. Then you suddenly realize one day that you’re sat on 600,000 of turnover and you think, hang on a second, we could do a million off this. And once that thought comes into your head, it becomes the target. And I think sometimes it becomes the target for the sake of it, because you want to almost sit around a dinner table with colleagues from old and people you used to work with and say to them, well, we’re a million pound business, because that is cool. I think that there’s very few people that wouldn’t want to do something like that. And obviously, that was gone to then be a three mil business, a five mil business, and you take it as far as you can take it if that’s something you want to do. So you sold that business in 2016, and obviously you sold it because you and Rory had these different ideas of what you wanted to do with that business. So I’m guessing that because you’ve gone to do it again, I’m guessing that you wanted to take it up to that next level and push it somewhere. How long did it take you to start your second MSP? The one that you’re running now? [00:23:04] Speaker B: Yeah. So, after the acquisition in 2016, so we was acquired by a national telecoms business, and I didn’t exit the business straight away. I stayed in that business and became essentially the group managing director to the business that had acquired us. So I was helping to grow all of the businesses within that group, not just the pyramid business that we’d established. Rory had moved on from the business because that was kind of what we wanted out of it when we sold the business was for him to have an exit strategy. And for me, I was still passionate about scaling the business. So I was still interested in growing a company. And so I stayed in that business for a further three years. One year was contracted as part of the deal. Two years was just my choice to continue within the business. But in those three years, we took it from a million to 1.51.6 million by the time I actually exited that business. So that period of time was still fast paced growth, still looking at what I was doing with that business. And then after I actually exited, which was completely amicable with the owners, the new owners of the business, it was a nice, easy exit where I made sure everything was handed over. After that, I’d been in touch with one of the senior management team within the previous business. He’d approached me and said that a guy called Scott, who’s now a co founder and reformed, he wanted to start his own it business. And he kind of said to me, would you be willing to help me to get this off the ground? So Scott, a guy called Joe Miller, who also worked for that business, and they were good friends for a long time, and me, decided to have another go at it. And I think part of the reason for wanting to have another go at it and start from scratch, even though some people may think I’m, like, crazy for even thinking about it, is the fact that I felt a little bit unfulfilled with the growth of the pyramid business. I thought it could be done better, faster, more ambitious. I wanted to see results which were beyond what we’d done with the pyramid business. [00:25:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Which makes perfect sense. So what were the things going into your new business? Reformed it, that you said, right, this is what we’re going to do differently on day one, based on this prior experience? Well, actually two prior experiences, that of owning the business yourself and then obviously running it as part of a larger group. [00:25:25] Speaker B: Yeah. So one of the things, the things that we were trying to do towards the end of the time at Pyramid and the things that I was putting in place after acquisition were things that became de facto in the new business. So, for example, having a very, very clear, and I’m sure you’ll love this, Paul, but having a very clear and defined target audience. Right. Who is it that we’re serving and why we’re serving that audience? What can we do to impress and have real value to that particular audience that became almost stage one in terms of our strategy for the reformed it business. The other thing that we did, not necessarily differently, but we had a more ambitious growth plan from day one when we sat down and thought, what do we want to achieve in three years time? In five years time? And we mapped out a very ambitious growth strategy for that. Rather than just starting the business and seeing how it would go, we designed what we wanted the business to become. And so because we designed the business from day one, that also means that instead of thinking, you hear this phrase all the time, and I’m listening at the moment on audible to the Emyth revisited. But the whole working on the business, not in the business. So we were strategically thinking, right, what hires do we need, when do we need them, what positions are we going to put people into? And things like that. We were thinking and mapping that out from day one when we sat with the business idea. Not like I see most businesses. You start working and then when you get too busy, you go, I need to hire somebody, and then you get too busy again, you need to hire somebody else. We mapped it all out from day one, essentially. [00:27:01] Speaker A: I love that. Let me ask you if you had the same experience I did with your second business. So I sold mine in first one in 2016, started my second one in 2016 about eight weeks apart because I got bored very quickly. And from day one, I went into it with the mindset of what you were just talking about there, which is right. I know what I want to be different. I know what I want to do that I couldn’t do in the last business because of legacy clients or legacy whatever. And within two years, that had gone completely off the ball, primarily because I didn’t really know when I started this new business what it would be. I knew I was going to work with these things called MSPs. I’d just discovered that was going to be fun, but I didn’t really know what I was going to do with them. And so it kind of took us three years to find a really good business model, which has become our MSP marketing edge, which is sort of pretty much all we do now. But along the way, I’ve found myself tackling the same problems that I had last time. The difference is this time I know what works or what has worked and what hasn’t worked in the past. And I’ve found myself overcoming big challenges a hell of a lot quicker because they just don’t seem that big, having done them once. Has that been a very similar experience for you? [00:28:16] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. It makes you way more prepared the second time around. You’re way more prepared. You’ve seen these things before. You know how a lot of them play out. So that element of experience just gives you the ability to deal with these things with more confidence, go at them with a bit more ease. So, yeah, I definitely agree that the lessons that you learned from the first one makes it easier to approach things, especially because most businesses do suffer with the same challenges.

Every business journey tends to go through the same challenges that every other business goes through. Particularly we talk about sales marketing all the time, which is a very big challenge for a lot of businesses, particularly in the MSP sector, where people are going, we need clients, but how do we get them? How do we get seen those kind of things? So I think a lot of businesses have very similar challenges. Having been through those challenges once before, it makes it so much easier to know how to deal with them next time around.

[00:29:12] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. And the growth, it took you eleven years to get to a million pounds turnover in the first business. What’s the growth been like comparatively in the second business? [00:29:21] Speaker B: This is a great example because it just shows the difference with that previous experience. So we did in three years. Well, it was actually three and a half, three financial years. We did a million pound turnover in reformed it. So we did in three what took eleven in pyramid and then subsequently. That was last year. That was last financial year. This year we’re on course to do between 1.4 and 1.5 million. So the growth is currently tracking at around 40% to 50% year on year. And after we do 1.4 million this year or 1.5, it will land somewhere between. The plan is to then do 2.1 million next year. So it’s this continual growth that is a lot would see as fairly ambitious towards. It’s just part of the plan. The strategy is there, we know exactly how to do it. It’s all mapped out and it’s just following that course, really. [00:30:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I bet. And you personally, in terms of the work that you do, I’m guessing that from day one you made sure that you were spending the vast majority of your time working on the business and not being dragged into that business. [00:30:25] Speaker B: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it was a conversation we had. There is a little bit of a disparity with the fact there’s three co founders in this business. Day one, I said, I’m not a techie, even though I can do that role, I am not going from where I am today back to day one of the pyramid days and being on a help desk and taking calls from customers as a support technician, it’s not in my plan. So, yeah, absolutely. Obviously I’m still involved with some day to day pieces of the business. My main focus is strategic. So the strategic plan of the business and seeing that through. So I get involved in business development, understanding how to. I have conversations about the marketing strategy in the business and the sales strategy in the business and the operational strategy in the business. But I then get people to do those pieces rather than me doing any of them. My main role in the business right now, still to this day, is very much a business development role. So I’m still attracting and speaking to new prospects and new opportunities. [00:31:27] Speaker A: Joe, thank you so much for joining me on this podcast. It’s already been a fascinating journey that you’ve had, and I can just imagine in the years ahead we’re going to see some amazing things from you. I would love to get you back on this podcast, maybe at the back end of this year or early next year. That would be absolutely fantastic. But for now, just tell us a little bit more about what you do to help other MSPs, because I know that you’re not just focused on growing your own business, you do help some other MSPs. So tell us a little bit about what you do there and tell us the best way to get in touch with you. [00:31:56] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that back in my previous business, I was always really guarded and competitive when it came to information. I always used to think of every other MSP as a competitor, and I wouldn’t tell them anything that we’re doing. Keep everything secret. I’ve learned a lot over the years, and I’ve realized that it’s so much easier to be collaborative and friendly with everybody in our sector. And people who already know me and have come across me either on LinkedIn or events in the past will know that I’m pretty open with these things. I also help and mentor and coach a few MSP business owners as well. I only have a limited number that I do of that, but it is something that I have been doing as well. So generally the best way to keep in touch with my journey and keep in touch with me is through my LinkedIn. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I have loads of people in the MSP community already connected to me, but I’m always willing to talk to other people in the community. [00:32:49] Speaker A: And what’s the easiest way to find you on LinkedIn, Joe? [00:32:51] Speaker B: If you can search for Joe Burns, and if you’re struggling to find me, then use reformed it or cybersecurity, and you’ll find my profile amongst those. [00:33:02] Speaker A: Paul Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast Week’s. [00:33:06] Speaker C: Recommended book hi, I’m Damian Stevens, and the book I recommend for your MSP is buy back your time by Dan Martel. And the reason I recommend it is it is super practical. To help you buy back your time. I put myself in a prison where I spent too much time working in my business and not on it and worked countless hours. This taught me, step by step how to buy back my time, exactly when to do it, when I can even afford to do it, and exactly how to do it. And lastly, as the business grows, I will have designed my business to give me more freedom of time. So if that sounds like something that’s interesting to you, check out the book buy back your time by Dan Martel. [00:33:54] Speaker A: Coming up next week. Hi, I’m Mark Hirschberg. I’m a fractional CTO and I am sick of all the sales spam I get from MSPs. Join me on Paul’s podcast to learn a better way. On top of that interview with Mark next week, we’re going to talk about LinkedIn. I put one post on LinkedIn that generated 15,000 impressions. I got over 400 comments on it and getting on for around about 100 new connections, all from that one post. It’s called a 48 Hours LinkedIn frenzy, and I’ll tell you next week exactly what it is and how you can replicate this for your MSP. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP. Made in the UK for MSPs around the world Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.

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