632 Consistent MSP Marketing with Paul Green

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers to help you run your business better, smarter and faster. This is one of our audio podcasts and this show is powered by NetAlly, but this particular episode is sponsored by a good friends over at Super Ops, the future ready all-in-one PSA RMM tool that will help you supercharge your business. So be sure to head over and check them out over at superops.com.

So today's guest is going to help us in our continuing effort to understand marketing. Paul Green is a marketing expert specializing in helping managed service providers grow their business. He is the founder of MSP Marketing Edge and this program, and I don't know if the numbers are right, it's probably a lot more, but the official numbers that I have is that he has helped over 700 MSPs in 30 plus countries.

Paul, welcome to the show.

[Paul Green]
Thank you so much for having me on. It's great to be here.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. How accurate are those numbers?

[Paul Green]
Yeah, no, pretty good. So we've probably helped more than a thousand, maybe a couple of thousand MSPs that have come through the program, but right now we're around about 750. I think it's 32 countries, but our biggest client base is actually in the US.

So even though I'm a British guy and we started in the UK and we still have hundreds of members in the UK, we have more members in the US. So hi to all of our members for anyone that's listening in this evening.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Sounds great. So I don't know if you've had a chance to listen to some of the previous shows that I've had about marketing.

And of course, it all stems from the fact that I am No Marketing Marv, and I want to help everybody else in the industry by getting them some references to the people that are very good at marketing. And you certainly are one of those. So let's start off with the question that I've kind of been asking all of them from the outset, in terms of from your perspective in the fact that you've worked with so many providers.

What are some of the common mistakes that you're seeing that we do in our industry?

[Paul Green]
That's a really good question. It's a great question to start with. And as you say, my perspective is completely with managed service providers.

I've been working with MSPs since 2016. I've been doing marketing for other businesses since 2005 when I started my first business, which I sold in 2016. So I talk to a lot of people, I see them doing their marketing.

I would say the biggest... Well, there are two big mistakes. The first big mistake is not doing enough marketing.

And MSPs, I understand it. If you look at the typical MSP owner profile, it's a technician who's really good at IT, really enjoys it, working for someone else somewhere, whether that's an MSP or in-house somewhere, and gets that entrepreneurial seizure. The entrepreneurial seizure is something coined in the 1984 book, The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber.

And it's where you think, I should run my own business. And so this technician who's amazing at all these IT things starts their own MSP. Everything's great for the first 200 days because they're getting to do what they want in the way they do it, recommend the solutions they want.

And then either they get busy or they take on their first member of staff, or the natural referrals just dry up. And sometimes that happens in the first few hundred days. Sometimes they can go a few years, but eventually there comes a point where you have to start doing marketing.

And at this point, the business is not quite so much fun to run. The technicians aren't doing things quite as well as you wanted. Your customer service isn't as good as you hoped it would be.

You would happily fire everyone, clone yourself multiple times and run the business that way, but it doesn't quite work that way. So with all of that going on, and you realize the number of leads has dried up and you haven't had a new client for 100, 200, 300 days. And so you think, oh, I need to do some marketing.

And actually then you start to look into it. And exactly as your experience, Marv, is what there's so much to do. Do I do SEO?

Do I do PPC, which is pay-per-click? Do I do lead generation? Do I need a CRM?

Should I do stuff on LinkedIn? Is X or Twitter still a thing? And there's all of these questions.

And so what happens is when you've got this massive amount of stuff, things you need to learn about, the vast majority of MSPs just kind of put their head back in the sand and say, I'll do some marketing next week. And of course next week becomes next month, becomes next year or whatsoever. So that's the first big mistake is not actually getting on with it.

And I know we're going to talk about some quick wins and some easy ways to get going. I would say the second biggest mistake is doing some marketing, but doing it sporadically, kind of on off. And that might be that maybe you get a campaign.

I know all the vendors have free marketing stuff in their portals. There's loads of marketing stuff around. Some of it is good.

Some of it isn't so good. But I think one of the most damaging things you can do is pick up a campaign from a vendor and run a one-off campaign. So you'll send out 50 to 100 pieces of direct mail.

You'll send out 50 to 100 emails and then nothing comes back. And you sit there and you're depressed and you say, oh, marketing doesn't work. Or you switch on Facebook ads for three days and you get no leads and you think, oh, Facebook ads doesn't work.

And actually the problem is not Facebook ads. The problem is not sending out some direct mail or doing some emails. The problem is that you've got to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time.

And selling managed services is particularly difficult. It really is a tough one. Because if you think about the average business owner or manager who is looking to switch MSPs, it's going to happen like once every five years.

You think about your own clients and how well you retain your clients. Part of that is because you do a good job. Part of that is because they don't want to leave because the perception is it's really difficult to switch MSP.

So someone that you're talking to or that might be on your LinkedIn or in your email database or whatsoever, assume they're going to switch once every five years. Five years, that's nuts. So if you think about it that you put out a bit of activity today, tomorrow, the day after, and then declare that doesn't work, it's nonsense.

What you've got to do is you've got to set up a marketing system. Not a one-off piece of activity like a campaign, but a system where you're doing marketing every single day, every single week, every single month. And we can go a little more into that if you want to, Marv, but that's the only way to do it.

So that you're constantly building up people to talk to, getting messages in front of them, educating them, entertaining them about IT matters. And then the idea is that the morning they wake up and think, I've had it with my incumbent. I don't want those people looking after us anymore, for whatever reason.

And then suddenly there's an email from you, or there's a social media post on LinkedIn, or they look at their desk, they're going through a drawer and there's a letter you sent them 17 months ago, and it's still sat in their drawer. And that's the point where your marketing pays off and you win yourself potentially a client's, I don't know, a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ worth of business over the next five to 10 years. But that's why a marketing system always is better than a one-off piece of activity.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So I don't know how many points you got there but let me try to ask a couple of questions that popped in my head, because you said under the number one reason, not doing enough. One of the big things that I think a lot of us do is when we get started, it's all about referral, all about word of mouth, and in the beginning that works fantastic until it doesn't.

And then it's a matter of making that switch to, oh, I guess I've got to do some real marketing now. But to your point of number two, sporadic, a lot of times I think what happens is MSPs will do enough marketing to get the number of clients they think they need. Where if I just need one more client or if I just need two more clients, so I'm only going to do marketing to get those two clients and then I'll put it on hold.

How do you talk with people that have that mindset?

[Paul Green]
That's a really good question again. And the reality is marketing must be a 365 day a year thing because actually you had to build up a marketing momentum, like a flywheel. You know, it's hard to get the flywheel moving.

And once it's moving, you have to keep pushing it so it gets faster and faster. So one of the most common objections I get, or worries I get from MSPs I start working with is, but Paul, if all of this works as well as you say it is, we won't be able to cope, right? We can't onboard more than one new client a month or two new clients a month, depending on the size of the MSP.

And we're going to be inundated. I've literally only dealt in my life with two MSPs that have generated too many leads and had to slow it down. One of them, in fact, it's coming up, if I can plug my own podcast, Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast.

It's an interview, which is either coming up or it's just been broadcast because I do it some months in advance. And this was a guy who went into a big MSP and generated so many leads. His claim to fame is that he broke operations, that they actually had to stop, turn their marketing off, right?

That's the first person. The second person is an MSP I've been working with for about seven years. And his momentum got so great.

He was in a niche, in a very specific vertical. He was dominating that vertical. And he rang me and said, I'm really concerned that we're getting too many new inquiries coming through.

And here's the answer I gave him. And this is actually the answer, Marv. The answer is, if you're getting too many inquiries and too many potential new clients, and you just can't grow fast enough to absorb them, which is a nice problem to have, then what you do is you increase the quality bar of the kind of clients you want to work with.

So most MSPs, they say, oh, minimum 20 users, minimum spend this. And then someone comes along with 10 users and they're a bit under the minimum. And the MSP says, well, we haven't had a new client for four months.

Let's take them in anyway. Whereas if you're inundated, you raise that bar up and you say, no, it really is minimum 20 users, or you need to be paying us a minimum of a thousand bucks a month or whatever it is. You know, it's the same amount of work to account manage a 10 user client as it is a thousand user client.

The actual work goes up, but it's the same amount of account management time. And that's often where the owner's investment is, is in the account management. So yeah, I would never be worried.

There's almost no MSP I've met apart from those two people who could have too many leads. So you need to keep the flywheel going and build up your marketing momentum.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. That sounds good. So now let's go back and make sure I didn't interrupt your flow there.

You had given two reasons or two common mistakes. Did you have more?

[Paul Green]
Oh, how long have you got? Five hours? We can talk about all sorts of mistakes.

I won't do, I'm famous for long answers to short questions, but yeah, I mean, you name it and MSPs make it, and this is not intended as criticism. It's just an observation. And you know, every day of my life, every hour of my work is dedicated to making marketing simple for MSPs.

Because I know, I can operate at a really high level with marketing, but the vast majority of MSPs need it to be really simple, super simple things. And the questions I get are always basic tactical things. How do I generate more leads?

How do I get more people to talk to? Right down to, should I go networking? And I mean, meeting people, not cables.

Should I do pay-per-click? Which social media platform should I use? And the simpler we can make marketing, which is what we do with our MSP marketing edge service all day, every day.

We just try and make things super simple for people.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. So let's do a shift here and talk about what MSPs do, because I think one of the common concerns that many of them have is we're all kind of doing the same marketing. We're all doing the same service.

So we kind of all look alike when clients are picking up our mailers or looking at our emails, especially if we're all using the same systems. So the question that I've been asking is what can MSPs do better to make themselves stand out in marketing if it all looks the same?

[Paul Green]
Yeah, that's again, such a, you really do prep these interviews really well, because that's such a great question. And it's a common problem. You go in whatever city you're in, right?

Go in Google, go into incognito and Google IT support town, right? Your town. And the reason you do it in incognito is to see how low down your own website is, because when you're in incognito, it doesn't take into account the fact that you're on your own website 15 times a day.

And you'll go and click on the first 10 websites that come up. And exactly as you just said, Marv, they all look the same. They visibly look a little bit different, but they're all sending the same message.

They've all got the same stock images or pictures of the town. They've got similar messages. And that's actually a strength for you.

It's an advantage for you if you do something a little bit different. So all you've got to do is look at what all of your competitors are doing and then do something a bit different. And the answer 99% of the time is to base the marketing of your business around you.

And you can actually see this is what I've done with my business. And I'm virtually all of the strategies and tactics I recommend to MSPs I use for my business. So we don't sell managed services.

We have a marketing subscription, but we're reaching people in the same way and we're using the same psychology and the same strategy and tactical stuff. So I have 10 staff within my business. I don't do any of the proper work, Marv.

I'm just the pretty face at the front of it. But the business is called Paul Green's MSP Marketing Edge. You go on the website, I'm all over it.

I'm not a narcissist. I just understand the power of personal branding, because we've got lots and lots of competitors, but none of them, they could, they don't, but they could do exactly what we do. And they could do it in exactly the way that we do it.

But the one thing they don't have is me. So we, in fact, we tripled down earlier this year on putting me everywhere. My poor staff are constantly sitting with photos of me.

We do like the podcast, we do socials, we do newsletters, blogs. I originate a lot of it, but then they do all the hard work of distributing it and editing it and putting it all out there. Imagine this, all day long, you've got your boss's face on something that you're doing.

It can't be very pleasant work for them, but we do it because it's a differentiation. And actually, any MSP can do exactly that. It doesn't matter.

You can have a hundred staff as an MSP owner, but you could and should still be the face of the business. That means I see your photo on the website when I go on. I see a video of you and a client talking about how you help that client to overcome a technology hurdle, a burden.

I go onto the There's a picture of you and your partner and your kids at your favorite ball stadium, because it shows that you're a member of the local community, or there's you with the local chamber of commerce or rotary or whatever like that. And what happens is you suddenly stand out because, Marv, you're absolutely right. From the business owner's point of view, the prospect's point of view, all IT people say the same things and do the same things.

They don't understand the difference between your tech stack and that guy's tech stack. They don't understand it and they don't care. They don't understand that you use super ops and your competitor uses insert other product here.

They don't care. They don't understand this. So what we do is we give them something nice and easy to grab a hook.

And that hook, most of the time, is you. So they're picking up the phone or they're booking an appointment and they say, hey, I want to speak to Marv, please. I saw him on the website.

I want to speak to Marv. And that's why as the owner of the business, you're the face of the business. You're also the principal salesperson.

But that becomes the last job that you ever get rid of as the owner. And that's okay, right? Because most owners will be happy to do two 15-minute zooms a week to talk to prospective clients to check that they're of a high enough quality and then take them on to the next step.

And that next step might actually be passing them on to a salesperson or whatsoever. But that is the easiest differentiation you'll ever do.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. You had talked earlier about the pay-per-clicks and Google and all of that stuff. So I've had a couple of conversations.

And the big thing lately is to have a very good website. And you mentioned how to go in and research websites. If you're doing an incognito search on yourself, I should probably do it now while we're on the podcast.

But if for some reason you do that search and you're not on page one of Google, a lot of people have been so concerned over the years of how do I increase my SEO? How do I do keywords? How do I make myself show up on that top page?

Does anything that you do in your MSP marketing edge talk about that?

[Paul Green]
So, no, we don't touch SEO, search engine optimization. SEO is a very technical subject. I'm not an SEO expert.

So I have a good grasp of the basics, but the real basics. There are many much better SEO experts out there. However, let me answer the question a slightly different way.

When people say, I Googled, I found I was on page seven, panic, stress, whatsoever, they're asking the wrong question. Because the answer might be to go and invest in SEO. And you will spend thousands and thousands of dollars getting yourself onto page one.

Or maybe you look at it from a slightly different strategic point of view. When we talk about being on page seven and why that's a problem, that's a problem because you're getting less organic traffic. And there's two things that you need to a website to generate leads.

And that number one is traffic. Number two is conversions. So you've got to get people going to the site, but you then got to convert them into being a prospect.

So when someone visits your site, they're a lead. A lead is just someone who might go on to buy from you one day or might not. But a prospect is where they start to engage with you.

And they say, hey, can we have a chat? Can we talk about my business? I've booked a 15 minute conversation or whatsoever.

So normally the answer for most MSPs is not to go out and spend thousands of dollars on SEO. It's instead to ask, number one, how can I drive more traffic? And number two, how can I get better at converting people into appointments?

So one of the things that we do in the MSP marketing edge is we try to help with traffic through different tactics because SEO is difficult and expensive. We say, right, what if you build up multiple audiences of people? So for most MSPs, that's two audiences, your LinkedIn connections and your email database.

And you can link the two, not with a widget or a thing, just in terms of when you connect to someone new on LinkedIn, you can find that email address and put that into the CRM. So what if every day you went out and you attempted to connect to 10 new people? Let's say just two of those people accept that, right?

So immediately, if you do that five days a week, you're adding 10 connections a week. Now that doesn't sound a lot, but that's 500 a year. And that means within 10 years, you've added 5,000 people.

Plus from the just basic momentum of just doing that, you attract more people as well. The more activity you do on LinkedIn, the more people seem to find you. So what if we just did that?

So we're building an audience there and we're adding those email addresses into our CRM. So we're growing our two audiences. That in itself is one thing, but then what if we then put content in front of them?

So we put a good quality post on LinkedIn every day and we put a blog and or a video onto our website. And then once a week, one of those posts on LinkedIn says, we've done this new video about XYZ subject, click here and go and have a look at this on our website. So we're driving traffic that way.

And then we send out an email to our email database. It's the same thing. We've done a new blog about XYZ subject, password manager site.

Let's say it's about which password manager you should pick or why you should use a password manager because it'll make your staff more productive and have to think less. Click here to read the full article. So just from those two audiences, that's a way of driving traffic to your website.

It's not going to be massive amounts of traffic, but it's basically traffic that you are proactively driving. So that's the first thing, is traffic. Second thing then, as I say, is conversion.

The whole point of your website, every single page should be doing one thing. It should be getting people who aren't yet clients of yours to book a 15 minute Zoom with you. So that is the best practice call to action right now.

You could have a web form. You could get them to send an email. You could get them to pick up the phone.

Most people, unless it's an emergency and the server's on fire, they don't physically like picking up the phone these days because it's 2024. So what they would rather do is they would rather book a 10 or 15 minute appointment with you on your live calendar, when it suits them and when they can see that you are free. That's the best method right now because the highest quality people will do that.

So you should be optimizing every single page of your website to push people into that. Are you ready to talk about your business? Let's have a chat about your business.

Let's look at your technology. Not a sales call. You're not talking to a salesperson.

You're talking to the founder of the business who happens to be the face of the business. And even if you got one of those a week or two of those a week, for most MSPs, that's like 10 times better results than they've actually been getting. So I wouldn't focus on SEO pay-per-click.

I would just say, how do we drive traffic is number one. And number two is how do we convert more of that traffic into actual meetings with us?

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So you answered a question I was going to ask a little bit later about some of the trends that we can look at and obviously email list is still a big thing. But the fact of using LinkedIn seems to be a really good thing now because you can kind of pre-qualify those leads through LinkedIn.

Whereas if you're just waiting for people to come to the website, you don't know who's coming. It could be your neighbor’s aunt from down the street that wants a mouse replaced. But with LinkedIn, you're actually targeting those types of people.

Let me ask you a question beyond that. AI has become really big, especially in our channel, where we're being told, hey, why don't you leverage AI to help your customers? But at the same time, AI could be something we could use to help with our marketing.

Have you been using any of that? And are you advising MSPs to use that in their marketing?

[Paul Green]
Really great question. So we're a content creation company. That's what we do.

We create about 350 different pieces of content a month for all the MSPs that we work with. And we don't use AI. Well, we use it a little bit to aid us, but we don't originate anything with AI.

As I say, I've got 10 staff. I've got humans doing all of that because I want the highest possible quality. And I want every single mistake removed and I want every single fact checked.

And we've got proofreaders and editors and it's a whole system. It's a system. It's like any business.

We've got a really good system for it. But of course, we use AI to smooth things along a little bit. If you're not using AI to...

Things like grammar checking, right? Even a spell check is AI-driven these days, isn't it? So we use some AI tools to smooth the way.

Now, I think what you're asking is how else could we use those AI tools for our marketing? And there's lots and lots of different ways to do it. The easy answer is content creation.

And of course, we've all been into ChatGPT and said, please write me a 500-word article about this subject. And obviously, we all know it's about prompts within ChatGPT. It's getting better.

We know that ChatGPT 4.5 is coming out in the next few weeks. I think they've got an announcement event next month or next week, I think, which is about... It's going to be about their search engine or something like that.

Yes, you can use it for content generation. A lot of our members take the content that we write for them because we create something once and then give it to all of our members. So we only work with one MSP per area, so there's no clash.

But that means that, for example, the blog that we give you every week, there's no search engine optimization benefits to that blog. So a growing number of our members are now taking that blog, putting it into AI, getting it rewritten into original content, and then putting it on their website, which I applaud. And that's a great use of AI.

I think when you're generating content from scratch, you have to be very, very careful because we know that chat makes things up. We know that inaccuracies can come in. ChatGPT uses a lot of superfluous words, big words, words that normal people don't use on a day-to-day basis.

You have to watch out for that kind of stuff. You have to be constantly prompting it. I think if you're going to use ChatGPT or any other AI tool for content generation, you've got to have humans wrapped around it.

So you use it for the core boring task of writing words, but you have humans briefing it, humans editing it, humans checking it. That's the only way for quality. And by the way, there are a thousand different opinions on this.

I know that there's lots of people out there that are generating... In fact, I know of someone who's generating hundreds of AI-generated articles for their MSPs websites every day or every week. And I'm not saying that's a good or a bad thing because we don't know how Google is going to treat that in the future.

When you're doing hundreds of them, chasing keywords, is that the new link farm? You think of link farms from 10 years ago, which got shut down by Google. Can Google even notice AI-generated?

Who knows? But AI isn't just about content generation. We tested out a tele sales tool.

It's called Voxia, voxia.ai. We tried it out and it sounds like a human. We gave it a bit of a flow and a script and it was calling MSPs. And it was good, but not good enough.

The delay was slightly too long. So she would say, hi, I'm Larry. I'm calling from MSP Marketing Edge.

That's exactly what she sounded like. And you'd say, yeah, hi, how can I help? And there'd be a two second gap.

And in that gap, just as she started talking, you started talking again. And that was one of the things that stopped us from thinking this is a tool that's ready right now. I think as an inbound tool, it would be amazing.

I think it'd be great to have it manning your help desk. But every day, let's be honest, Marv, every day someone launches a new AI tool, right? So you've got to just keep on top of what's out there and not be too scared about trying things.

But the ultimate thing you've got to remember above all else is people buy from people. And this is not going to change, certainly not for what we sell. Managed services are very complicated, very difficult sell.

It's a very long sales cycle. It's not something I think that a robot is going to be able to sell, not for a number of years, but you can use that robot to man your live chat on your website 24 hours a day. Take inbound phone calls and sort them out from users with problems and create tickets and ask them questions like, is this impacting you?

Or is it just you? Or is it impacting everyone? Why are we asking a technician to say that 20 times a day when actually an AI could do it before routing the call through to a human?

So there's lots and lots of different things with AI. I think that my basic thing is to use them to do what you're doing, make it easier to do what you're already doing rather than replace what you're already doing, which might not be the right view, but that's how I'm seeing it today.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, I think it's a good view. Like you said, we don't know what's right or wrong yet. Google will tell us, Amazon will tell us, Microsoft will tell us at some point what's working or not.

But I think the line that you said, people buy from people, is still a big thing. And I'll just, from my own perspective, we had a prospect, I shall say, that was not really close to us. But one of my clients has an office in their area.

It's probably about an hour and a half from where I'm located. And when we finally got them on the phone, the gentleman asked me, he goes, yeah, I noticed your area code is not the same as mine. How far away are you?

And when we told him, his response was, well, our last guy was five miles from our office. So that's what we want to deal with. I mean, boom.

No AI is going to help me with that.

[Paul Green]
Yeah, exactly that. Exactly that. But what the AI could maybe do, or some AI could do, is to help to get that person to your website in the first place.

Or maybe there's an AI out there somewhere that detects what you're calling and changes your phone number on the fly. If that technology doesn't exist now, someone somewhere is going to invent that. We surely are at the greatest point ever of human ingenuity, where if anyone...

You and I could think of an idea on this podcast now, and we don't even need to be able to code, do we? To go and do a basic iteration of it, we can use the AI tools to code a basic thing. I remember talking to MSPs back in 2016 when I first got into the channel, and they were telling me about how they were using this thing called Zapier that I'd never heard of to automate one system to another system.

I remember thinking, wow, this is amazing. And now, that just seems old hat, doesn't it? Whereas now today, you'd get an AI to take something, manipulate it, change it, put it here, put it there, do that with it, and make a I'm excited.

In the next 20 years, what are we going to come up with? We are literally... It's an unlimited...

We're limited only by our imagination, and people's imaginations are getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and it's exciting.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, it is going to be interesting. Let me go back and ask. I want to give you a little time to pimp the MSP marketing edge, but I want to go back and ask, because you started marketing for other companies back in 2005, and then you, in relatively recent terms, seemed to be focused on managed service providers.

What made you make that switch, and is it true? Is it all you're doing right now is managed service? You're no longer doing those other industries?

[Paul Green]
Yeah, yeah. It's a really simple story. It's on my website.

I started a business in 2005, and that changed a number of times as you try and find your way. Eventually, I discovered the power of niching, so I worked with a vertical, which was optometrists. There was not a lot of money in optometry in the UK, so then I went into veterinary, and then we went into dentistry as well.

I had a healthcare marketing agency, and then I sold that in 2016. As part of my sale, I had a five-year non-compete. There was me sat in 2016.

I got a ton of money for doing the business, but I was bored, and I needed some income, because that ton of money you want to put into investments and capital projects, and I couldn't work until the year 2021, which seemed a long way off. I couldn't work with those sectors I'd been working with, and that's when I looked around and looked at what were all the businesses I'd worked with in the past that I enjoyed working with, and what I called then IT support was one of them. I started doing a little bit of consulting, and then I did some mastermind groups, and then we created the MSP Marketing Edge, which is my number one focus now.

That's all I do is work with MSPs. Literally, I only work 30 hours a week, but every working hour of my week is dedicated to MSPs and MSP Marketing. It's fun.

I'm never leaving the channel. I say to everyone, this is my last business. I'm only 49, but I can't imagine ever having another business, because MSPs are great to work with.

There's so much change happening in the channel all the time. This is the cutting edge, maybe not of marketing, but it's the cutting edge of where the world is going. I love it.

Even the rise of things like cybersecurity, which I know is terrifying, but also creates so many opportunities for MSPs to help their clients and protect their clients. I just can't wait to see where this is going in the next 10, 20 years.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, I would say it's an ever-changing industry. I don't know that anything's terribly scary. I mean, there's things that probably will frustrate us as rules change, as the hackers change and force us to deal with stuff a little differently, getting our clients to really understand why we're protecting them, why is it so important, why do we have to spend this money every single month when we don't see you, those types of things.

So that will never go away, but it'll be good. And the fact that you're here, and it doesn't sound like you're going anywhere, I do want to reference the fact that not only do you have the MSP Marketing edge, but you also mentioned your podcast, and you mentioned social media stuff, you do a YouTube channel as well. And what I can tell between your podcast and your YouTube channel, you give away a lot of the secrets for free.

How much do you think you give away for free as a way to get us to engage with you?

[Paul Green]
Yep. Thank you for your compliment. And the simple answer is everything.

So, you know, you could ask me any question on any subject, and I would happily give you the same answer I'd give one of our members. The difference with our members of the MSP Marketing edge is obviously, we've got the materials to support them, I have a support staff, so we've got resources, and we can help them with implementation stuff. But I think in the same way, a good MSP would sit in a prospect meeting and tell the client what they think the solution is, even if the client takes that solution away and gets another MSP to implement it.

I honestly believe you do that, 99 times out of 100, you win the trust and you build up your credibility and your reputation. YouTube's an interesting one, Marv, because the podcast has been going four and a half years, and we call it the world's most listened to MSP Marketing podcast. I made that up, but it sounds about right, because we have something like 4,000 listens a week, something around that across all the different platforms.

But the YouTube has been fascinating for us, that we spend more money and time and resource and energy on YouTube. We do one produced video a week, which takes me two hours of filming, and then I have a staff that write it, and they buy props and send things to my house, and they make me do stupid things. I have a green screen set up.

Honestly, I think they have a competition of what's the stupidest thing we can get Paul to do. I've been a weightlifter, where they CG'd my head onto a weightlifter's body and all sorts of stuff. Then you'll do a video like that, and it will get 50 views.

You think, wow, I've spent best part of $1,000 and several hours of the business's time on this. But it's like the podcast. When we started the podcast, I know you all have exactly the same experience with this.

When we started the podcast, two people listened, me and my mum. Then week two, it was me and my mum and my mum's dog. But what happens is you jump forward a number of years, and you keep doing it consistently.

The flywheel turns, it keeps turning, and say, we knock out somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 listens a week on an episode because we've done it every single Tuesday for four and a half years. We'll continue to do it every single Tuesday. I know YouTube will be no different.

When we started, we had 200 subscribers. We're about 10 off 1,000. At 1,000, you get new analytical tools in YouTube, which is brilliant.

We'll keep doing it for another year, and it will build. There's a lesson in this, which is it's about all marketing. A lot of the things we've talked about in this podcast, you have to keep doing them.

Like I was saying, you need a system. You do LinkedIn every single day till the day you either die or you sell the business. Let's hope it's selling the business.

You send out an email, an email newsletter to your prospects every single week until you sell the business. Whatever it is you're doing, you turn it into a system. You get other people to do it for you, but you keep doing it.

The day that you stop doing it, the momentum just falls off a cliff. I'm sure, Marvin, you must have days where you can't be bothered to do the podcast. I know you've been doing this for years because I was on your last podcast.

That was about four or five years ago. You've been turning up every... I think you do two a week as well, don't you?

You just do an insane amount of it, but you'll have days where you wake up and can't be bothered, but you do it anyway because it's the right thing to do to build your audience, to build trust, et cetera. All MSPs have to do exactly the same with their marketing.

[Uncle Marv]
It's all about discipline in a lot of ways. Just do it until it works or until you pivot and find something that does. That's pretty much it.

Paul, thank you very much. I'm going to have all the links to everything, your MSP Marketing Edge website, the YouTube channel. We didn't talk about your Facebook group.

We'll put that in there as well. Let's see. There will be a guest link, folks.

You can go to the website, click on his guest page, and he'll have all of his information there and all of that. Paul sounds great. It sounds like you are a thousand times more down the road than the last time we spoke.

I commend you on that, congratulate you. Things are moving in the right direction.

[Paul Green]
Thank you. Thank you for having me back on the show. Should we book it now for five years' time?

Should we do that?

[Uncle Marv]
No, we're going to have to do this more regularly than that. Maybe in six months or a year, I'll reach back out and we'll do something.

[Paul Green]
I'd love to be back on. That'd be great.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, Paul. Thank you very much. Folks, thank you for tuning in to another episode of the IT Business Podcast.

Listen, if you can't find something valuable in today's discussion, you weren't listening. That's basically what it is. If you enjoyed it, please take a moment to share the episode.

Your support obviously helps. For show notes, links to resources, all that good stuff, head over to itbusinesspodcast.com. You can, of course, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.

I obviously need to get in a much better habit of doing stuff, like Paul said, posting every day, which I don't do. That's why I'm called No Marketing Mark, but we'll work on it. As for now, this is Uncle Marv signing off.

We'll see you next time, and until then, Holla!