AI Marketing for MSP Growth (EP 778)

[Uncle Marv] (0:24 - 1:51)
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for managed service providers, IT professionals, and just about anybody. If you are supporting businesses in this space, we're here to help you grow your business better, smarter, and faster. And we are here in this month, the month of March, and it has gotten to be one of the most famous, I shouldn't say famous, favorite months of the show where this is where No Marketing Marv talks about marketing.

And this year in particular, we are doing something different. It is going to be both money and marketing. So all the things that you need to do to grow your business, get better client engagement, all of those things we are going to be talking about in the show.

And I have to say this year, it takes on a little bit of a different meaning because I, for the first time since I opened my business, I might actually have to go out and find a client or two. So hopefully I'm going to get some great ideas from the people that I have on. And let's go ahead and bring up our first money and marketing person for this year.

He has been on the show before, you know him, Dave Scott with Scott Growth Strategies, he is coming off what I think is a fantastic year. So let's welcome him to the show. Dave, how are you?

[Dave Scott] (1:52 - 1:55)
Hey, I'm doing great, Marvin, doing so good. Thanks for having me on the show.

[Uncle Marv] (1:55 - 1:57)
All right. Raising that roof there.

[Dave Scott] (1:58 - 1:59)
Raising the roof. That's right.

[Uncle Marv] (1:59 - 2:10)
All right. So I'll go ahead and get this out of the way and let the people know, yes, you've had a fantastic year, but it's really been what the last couple of months. You came away with some awards.

[Dave Scott] (2:10 - 2:31)
Yeah, we did. Yeah. We got listed in BizTech and I forget the other large publication, but yeah, both IT, B2B, channel publications and right to start off the new year.

One of them we talked with back in November. The other one was right in December and both publications got published in one in January and one in February. And here we are.

[Uncle Marv] (2:32 - 2:33)
Here we are.

[Dave Scott] (2:33 - 2:34)
Yeah, here we are.

[Uncle Marv] (2:35 - 2:50)
So you have a, and it's called for most purposes, a digital marketing firm specializing in helping IT services, technology firms, but you're not for everybody, you're kind of like me, you're boutique, right?

[Dave Scott] (2:50 - 3:25)
Very boutique. Yeah. Very white glove.

We're not the cheapest. We're not the most expensive, you know, we're very middle of the road, but yeah. I mean, if you're an IT firm that's looking to grow and you're struggling and you don't have processes in place or you don't have them following and you have people issues and you would just have growth issues all over the place, you maybe don't have a sales automated CRM system, like if you're just struggling with growth, call us, we'll get you on the right track and it'll be good.

And you'll see one and a half to two X growth. If you implement our process within an 18 to 24 month period.

[Uncle Marv] (3:27 - 3:37)
All right. And stress that 18 to 24 month period, because a lot of people that I've talked to over the years get kind of frustrated if they don't see returns after the first month or two.

[Dave Scott] (3:37 - 3:54)
Yep. Exactly. How it works.

New. If you want to sell, fill your sales pipeline fast, don't call me. Go try to figure that out on your own.

Good luck figuring it out. Cause you won't, but I mean, it's, that's a, it's an impossible thing to do. So, yeah, it's like anything, any discipline takes time, takes time.

Massaging patients.

[Uncle Marv] (3:55 - 4:16)
All right. So let's go ahead and start off our conversation. Uh, since we are at, you know, what would still be considered the beginning of 2025, let me just ask you, is there anything new, uh, either now or coming down the road and 2025 that MSP should be aware of as, you know, the next great marketing tool?

[Dave Scott] (4:17 - 5:55)
Yeah. You know, we talked about this in the green room a little bit ago. Um, yeah, I mean, I would say IT firms need to start approaching their sales and their marketing and their growth, just like they do with their clients and in terms of a tech stack.

Right. So whether you're a $600,000 MSP or a, you know, $16 million MSP, it doesn't matter if you're primarily in cloud. It doesn't matter if you're primarily on sub security, cybersecurity.

Um, it doesn't matter what your, what your ideal audience is. It doesn't matter any of those things. If you are going to grow your IT firm, you need to have a stack of AI tools and automation tools that will get you in the right direction.

And you need to stop approaching it like guerrilla marketing. You need to stop approaching it like these traditional goofy channel vendors. And you need to really start taking a look and treating your sales and marketing with a stack of tools and processes and people to put into place.

And so AI is not going away. It's getting sharper. It's getting faster.

It's getting quicker, but the struggle is how do you implement it? How do you work it? What tools do you start using and what does that look like?

And who does it for you? Cause not everybody has the time or the bandwidth to figure it out. Well, we do, but at the end of the day, yeah.

Leveraging these AI tools and having a whole tech stack of sales and marketing tools that are, are AI subscriptions is really what's going to allow you to grow. And if you don't embrace these right now, um, you're going to fall way behind and it's going to be, you'll just have a nice lifestyle business that you'll struggle with to grow. But if you really embrace some of these things going forward, the sky's the limit.

[Uncle Marv] (5:56 - 6:41)
Yeah. So let me ask you to drill down on that a little bit, because part of me, you know, in the last couple of years, we've seen these AI tools pop up and to some degree, they've only been used for creating content, but it was more templated content. Where, you know, here's this, just change out your name and throw that out there.

And in a lot of ways you end up looking and sounding just like everybody else. So let me ask you, how in the world do we evaluate these tools to find out which ones are going to be just simply more than that, and they're going to help us stand out and really dig down and, and help us find new customers.

[Dave Scott] (6:42 - 10:06)
Yeah, totally. That's an amazing question. I would first say that the AI is very, very, very in its infancy, but, you know, with the digital realm, everything is growing so fast.

Everything is growing so quickly. Like imagine in two or three years, 50% of the podcasts that you listen to won't even be a real fricking person. It'll be me, this right here.

It'll be you. I can't touch you cause you're on a, you know, separate from me, but you, on a screen, on YouTube with a background, with all the language learning processing already done with all the AI done, it knows you back and forth, up and down, left and right, knows your mannerisms, know your facial features, knows the gnarly 47 year old wrinkles I got on my forehead, right? Like it's going to know these things.

And if you don't have to produce content and you can automate it, why would you not do that? Right. If your audience doesn't care where it comes from, they just care about the value of it because that's really what it services comes down to is value.

If you can't provide value, your customers are going to leave you. And if you, I mean, not all the time, that's not the only reason they leave you, but it's one of the big ones, right? Churn.

That's why churn happens. If you can provide value and provide content in such a way where it provides value, they don't care who it comes from. Could come from a horse's mouth and they wouldn't care.

So part of the problem, like you talked about earlier is which tools to use, right? Which tech stack, which sales and marketing stack should you be leveraging and should you be trying to use? And it's very much today in its infancy.

It's very much a combination of art and science. It's like you talked about earlier, money lending. Like if you don't have a line of credit, like a 50 to a hundred thousand dollar line of credit, it doesn't matter how big you are.

You're foolish. That would say shame on you. Get one right away.

Keep it open. Keep a line of credit, work with a local lender, credit union. Well, credit unions don't do lines of credits, but work with a big bank or a small bank or whatever, and have one for those times you want to grow or do something unique or, you know, pump money back in the business from a capital expenditure perspective.

These are just like good pragmatic business things, right? So, but lending to get approved for it might be a little tricky depending on your financial situation and your recurring revenue and project-based revenue and all these things. It's an art and a science and the best lenders will tell you banks, even though I sometimes hate banks, they will tell you it's an art and a science.

It's a combination of both and it's qualitative and quantitative. AI is the same thing. There are a handful of tools that your MSP, your sales and marketing person should absolutely unequivocally be implementing today, and if they're not, you're again, you're falling behind and you're failing, and if you're not working with a channel vendor, if you're not working with somebody who's telling you, pushing you gently, sometimes a little bit violently in the small of the back to embrace AI, you know, they're not people you want to have in your corner, in your camp, and you don't have to implement them all perfectly right away, but it's a matter of starting, right? And just start and start implementing some of these tools to help you save time and money and automate, and if you can't save that time, like Dan Martell talks about in his book, buy back your time, again, you're always going to stay stuck, and by figuring out the formula for some of these AI tools, which ones to use, how to implement, and which ones to use long-term and short-term, it's really going to help alleviate a lot of stress. You're going to be able to grow quicker. You'll be able to scale faster.

Just everything will get easier.

[Uncle Marv] (10:07 - 10:39)
Okay. So I heard that, but I also hear others that talk about, you as the MSP, don't worry about it, we have the tools, use us, set it and forget it, we'll take care of you, how much should we try to balance that in terms of how much should we be involved, or how much should we be doing versus what we're outsourcing to do? Because to some degree, some MSPs are going to think, well, AI will replace whoever I'm using for marketing.

[Dave Scott] (10:41 - 13:02)
No, that'll never be the case. People, like people still write the code for AI, like you need humans doing it. If your people don't know how to use AI, fire them.

Like if your sales and marketing person doesn't know what five or six or two or three or four or five or six tools to use, fire them, let them go find somebody who does, because you need to be somebody on the forefront that's offering the things to you to help you grow your business that you're not today. So they absolutely need to be pushing you to embrace it. Um, you know, I would say that if you are an MSP and you are struggling with how much do I do, how much don't I do, like the way that we structure our, we have a accelerator program, it's called, um, SGS AI accelerator, and we provide the tools for you, we give them to you.

We give you the DIY toolkit. We're just the ones project managing it. And then we provide content for you to put into these AI tools to start using.

So if I were to ever die in a plane crash or, you know, whatever, God forbid, like these tools and subscriptions, your business pays for them. We're just helping you implement them, getting them going and then setting it and forgetting it. And then you just pay us a retainer to do some of the, um, uh, content creation and project management.

And that's not, you know, we're not talking like five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, $15,000 a month. Like that's not even close to the realm of possibility that you should expect. Right.

It's like a bucket of hours or something of that nature. So it just matters like how sharp you want to be in it. Every CEO for every MSP is a little bit different.

Like the smaller you are, typically the more blue collar you are typically the more hands-on you are, and that's okay. But you also have to let go of the vine in order to grow. Like I'd argue that if you're a CEO of an MSP and you're going out doing and managing your graphic designer, you're doing the wrong things, you're doing the wrong things, you should be figuring out how to get on LinkedIn and start making connections and build your network and grow and sell boots on the ground, feet on the streets.

You shouldn't be managing your email marketing campaigns. You should pay somebody to do that for you. And the more that you can alleviate these things off your plate, again, that's the Dan Martell example of the book, great book called Buy Back Your Time, if you're not learning to delegate, then you're, you know, you're staying stuck.

And so that's where having that conversation with yourself is a big deal.

[Uncle Marv] (13:03 - 13:57)
All right. So you triggered a thought in my mind when you mentioned LinkedIn because I'm on the LinkedIn and I'm getting a good bit of engagement there. And I, I see LinkedIn pushing a ton of content opportunities for me asking me to provide, you know, thought leadership on this topic or answer this question.

Uh, people are saying, use the LinkedIn newsletters. Everybody should have one, blah, blah, blah. But I guess the question is how are, how are the most successful MSPs leveraging the social media platforms?

Because I want my marketing to really be for lead generation brand awareness, I guess. But if it's just to throw content out there, that doesn't seem to work.

[Dave Scott] (13:57 - 14:07)
True. So totally. So which, which, which is, which part is your question?

Cause that was a, that was a good statement. So I just want to make sure I nail it.

[Uncle Marv] (14:07 - 14:15)
Well, the question is, is how are successful MSPs using social media to do the lead generation, et cetera.

[Dave Scott] (14:15 - 17:37)
Got it. Okay, perfect. So you have to follow a process or formula, right?

And if any of you guys, um, if you don't follow Mandy McEwen, you should, she's a really good friend of mine. She's from Kansas city. She owns a, um, a LinkedIn, uh, strategy agency, and it's called Luminetics and I'll send you the link afterwards so you can share it with your audience if you want.

It's spelled, uh, L-U-M-I-N-E-T-I-C-S dot IO. She's been doing it forever. She's awesome.

Super trustworthy. She's been on the Inc. 500.

She's done Ted talk. She's been on Forbes, HuffPost, like all the places, right. And she talks a lot about following a process in order to unlock high impact LinkedIn content, you have to have content to talk about.

You also have to have a story to talk about and you have to be on there and be active, right? So she talks about this five post or five touch method. So just start first of all.

And so you see me active on LinkedIn. I'm active on there a lot. I fricking love LinkedIn.

I've been using it forever. I have been using it since way before Microsoft bought it, like 20 years ago, right? It'd be, I've got like 15 or 20,000 followers and connections, but she talks about this five step strategy, like be on there post respond or comment to five things every single day.

And it, what it does is it builds a synapse or, you know, a neural pathway in your brain, a habit. That's what a neural pathway is, or that's what a habit is. It's a neural pathway.

So we got to get out of this notion that, well, I need all this great content to promote on LinkedIn. No, you don't just go search for your ideal prospect. Like if you're an it firm and I don't know, San Francisco and say you, your ideal, your ICP, according to old crusty guys, like Gary Pica is a PE firms or VC firms, right?

So find PE firms in your region and start commenting on their stuff and liking their stuff. And if they're not active on LinkedIn and send them a note and be like, Hey, my name is Dave Scott. I own scottpeitservicesfirm.com, right?

The worst URL ever, but you know what I mean? We have a story to tell. We primarily work with PE and VC firms.

Here's some content. Here's a cool landing page. Here's a whatever, just pick your poison, send them something that's nice and cool and introductory doesn't have to be flashy, like the queen's crown, right?

Full of jewels and just say, I'd love to get to know you and schedule discovery call. Let me know if you have 30 minutes next week, here's my automated Calendly or Hubley link and HubSpot or in calendly.com. And you can take a look.

If I don't hear from you, I'll follow up with you next Tuesday by 9 AM. Thanks. And just do that five times a day.

And that could be your outreach strategy, right? Now there are AI tools to do that for you as well. So that's part of the accelerator process we talked about earlier.

Like if you're not utilizing AI to do some of those things for you and automate, it's going to be easier for you not to follow, fall behind. It's going to be harder to grow and scale. But going back to what I said earlier, you have to develop a content strategy for the executive you're trying to target.

Then you have to target a monthly, you got to take a look at some analytics and reporting and you know, just make, make decisions as you pivot. And as you grow your LinkedIn process and strategy, but I would start with something simple, like respond to five people every day, post one thing every day, share a couple of things every day and find your target audience on LinkedIn. It's not hard.

[Uncle Marv] (17:38 - 18:00)
All right. So I took us off track there. Um, and we were talking about this idea of an AI tool stack.

Uh, do you have like certain categories? I know we talked about content creating. Yeah.

And I just mentioned lead generation. Um, what other parts of a stack would there be?

[Dave Scott] (18:00 - 20:17)
So you want to like, you want to target, you want to target your audience as much as you can, where they, where they see you. Right. So prospects at your website, um, you know, there's really great tools, chat GBT, you can build your own chat bot and chat GBT HubSpot has one built into their tool.

Um, you know, there's a lot of different ones you could choose from, but those are just a couple, uh, you know, chat bot.com is a great one. It's, it's cheap and you just install them on your website and you give it scripts and so you feed it scripts to make it sound like a human or make it sound like a robot from Romania, right? Like there's, there's ways you can customize it.

Now, every, every sort of customization is a cost money. Of course it does. Things cost money in this world.

Like to think that you can get shit for free. Just isn't, it just, it's not true anymore. So stop listening to your it peer groups drives me nuts.

Well, my it peer group guy said we can get this for free bullshit. You get what you pay for. You just do.

And so what I'd argue is take a look at some of these automated tools for where your ideal prospect is. So if they're hitting your website, get a chat bot. If you can drip on them in an automated email campaigns, get their email addresses, put it in some sort of automated queue, like MailChimp or a journey queue instead of HubSpot or workflow or sequence queue in front of go high level.com or whatever, just pick one of these tools that you can start leveraging, right?

And then on top of that, you have to have a really good sales and marketing automation software to use. Um, we're HubSpot fans. We use HubSpot here at SGS.

Almost all of our clients do. We have a really cool implementation plan that works great that we do for them. It's just a one-time project, but they also utilize it for keeping track of their sales processes and their leads that come through the top of their funnel, the top of their sales funnel, their pipeline.

So those are just two or three big ones that you need right away. So I'd absolutely automate as much as you can from a drip email marketing perspective. It's easy to do.

Um, I mean, it easy, but you know, you gotta have somebody write the content, get a chat bot, get a social media bot, get forms set up on your LinkedIn page, your company page, have really clear messaging. You know, if you use words like we will trance, we're transformative and synergistic gag me.

[Uncle Marv] (20:17 - 20:19)
Let's, let's delve a little deeper.

[Dave Scott] (20:19 - 20:55)
Yes, exactly. If you've put like, it's okay to be boring. Like it just ain't sexy any way you cut it.

It's a lot like CPA services or finance services. That doesn't mean it has to be unsexy or on boring or boring. Cause it doesn't have to be, there's ways you can make it cool and compelling, but it's okay to also be, um, clever and clear right in your messaging.

So if you do, um, if you're the best it services firm that specializes in law firms, then say that and have it have that messaging all over your website, all over your LinkedIn page and use, you know, appropriate content around that core value.

[Uncle Marv] (20:59 - 21:11)
What about AI that helps with something I've heard called lead scoring? That sounds like it could be expensive.

[Dave Scott] (21:12 - 22:44)
Yeah. I mean, a lot of the AI tools are pretty cheap. Now if you get in on the ground up, I mean, lead scoring is no different than in a sales CRM tool.

Like HubSpot allows you to do that. They'll score based on a handful of metrics. Like if they've interacted with your content so many times or they came from your website after hitting it for so many times, or, um, you know, they scored lead based on a bunch of different parameters and metrics.

So every single one's different. And then it just feeds it into a pretty dashboard that you can get visibility into it with. But the lead scoring, isn't the thing to pay attention to.

What you need to pay attention to is what you do with that data. Like data is really important, but a lot of sales and marketing individuals will be like, Oh, send out this piece of aspirin in an envelope. And, uh, you know, they'll love you forever or they'll respond right away.

No, they won't. There's one campaign done once. And one of my bad-ass college marketing communication professors, many, many years ago, she's passed away now.

She used to say anything done once is a waste. You have to do it perpetually consistently over a long period of time. And if you use the right AI tool, they will help you score some of these leads.

And it's just to give you information and data on which to make decisions, right? So if you see a lead scoring and you did a campaign and the scores are really low, whatever it's measuring, that probably tells you the campaign was not super successful. That's okay.

Those things happen, but now you can take that data and that decision and pivot or make a direction change or make a change in how you communicate with them. And then just keep moving that ball forward as a part of that process.

[Uncle Marv] (22:45 - 23:07)
All right. So part of me when I hear the lead scoring and I guess the nurturing that goes along with it gives me a little bit of the heebie-jeebies because that means I've got to back people. Yeah.

I don't want to be tracked. So why would my customers or my prospects want to be tracked?

[Dave Scott] (23:07 - 25:27)
Yeah, totally. I mean, it's not about tracking them necessarily, but again, it's about using data. I know it sounds very Cambridge Analytica ish, right?

I remember that whole debacle like 10 years ago with Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and all those guys. I mean, America is still very much the wild, wild west when it comes to default settings on technology. We are, and it's because our Congress and Senate is corrupt.

It just is. They get so much money from big political action committees that give them, you know, tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars to do whatever they want with. And they pay them.

These lobby groups pay our congressmen and us senators to sell our shit out from underneath us. So for example, it was just, I was in Europe last year and I went back to Amsterdam. I was there many, many years ago and I went to Utrecht, which is a suburb of Amsterdam.

So if you open up an iPhone, this is an iPhone 15. I got it last year, last summer. If you open up an iPhone over there, you don't get ads served to you inside of apps like Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Tik TOK.

Like there's ads. That's where, I mean, how that's how a team got to be as big as they are by this thing, right? All the settings are set off or they don't allow it.

They don't allow it in Japan. They don't allow it in Amsterdam. They don't allow it in Belgium and France and Europe and England.

They don't. And so here in the U S it's very much a wild, wild west. So we can track all kinds of stuff.

Some of it is borderline illegal and unethical. Some of it'll just always be borderline until, you know, the federal communications commission gets involved or something of that nature. But it's crazy what they can track on your phones and what you could track as a part of your lead gen process.

I totally hear you on feeling creepy, but it's the world we live in and we don't necessarily have to think about it that way. It's just a way to make, again, it's all about data making decisions. So you don't want to necessarily tell them.

You're seeing, Hey, they're all, they're on a funnel on my website. I should go call them right now. No, you don't want to think about it that way, but you do want to take a look at the data from some of these AI tools in your dashboard and say, okay, gosh, we had five new prospects hit our website.

Three of them engaged with us through the chat bot. One of them scheduled a discovery call. This is really cool.

How can we leverage this?

[Uncle Marv] (25:29 - 25:53)
the one part that sticks out to me is we always talk about go where your customers are and how do you know if you don't ask them? Well, you can find out by how they're engaging and what they are doing. If they're engaging on social media, then that's where they're at.

If they're not engaging on social media, then what other tools are you using that they will engage with? So that makes sense.

[Dave Scott] (25:53 - 26:15)
Yeah, totally. And keep in mind too, like 50 to 60% of the data that you get from reverse ISP lookup tools or from chat bots is wrong. It's, it just is.

It's like buying lists. If you bought a list of 40,000 contacts today, there's a very, very, very high likely chance that 10 to 20 to 30 to 40% of it is just incorrect or nebulous or vague or whatever.

[Uncle Marv] (26:18 - 26:45)
Yeah. I know there's more about the stack, but this just got me thinking of another question in terms of trying to balance digital marketing versus what some people are actually saying. You know, the tide has turned, the circle has come back to where if you do traditional marketing, you might actually get more success because people are getting sick of the digital, digital marketing.

What do you think about that?

[Dave Scott] (26:45 - 30:13)
I mean, I think that that's a great statement. I think that it's not about, it's about going to where your audience is. Here's a really good example.

We do MDF fund management here at SGS and MDF sucks. Just is it just, it's like the weather here in the Midwest, right? We talked about that.

I was down in Florida the last few days. I fricking love it down there. And the older I get, I just turned 47 this last week.

It's harder for me to go back down there. I love it. And every time I do it, I go to, I'd love it even more.

I want to eventually have a place there. We got to get room. You do exactly.

There's plenty of room in Florida, but as we manage the MDF process for a lot of it firms, one of the things that is still really popular is taking a look at some of the bigger vendors that you do business with and getting them to give you money to fund in-person events. That's still normal to do. It's still normal to do.

Like we have a client down in Georgia who we got a $10,000, actually it's a $15,000 approval from Datto. Datto is their BDR. And they're, they're one of their cloud providers and they're part of their tech stack. And we said, Hey, we want to do this event for attorneys.

My IT firm is IT firm and we're an extension of them. You know, their sales and marketing consultant. And so we emailed our rep at Datto and we said, move this up the flagpole, please.

We have this huge event. It's just for attorneys. It's a little bit bougie because attorneys, most of them just are a little bit bougie.

They just are. And it's okay to say that. And we want to do this event.

It's a cybersecurity speaking event and we want to educate them on what's coming and what we are doing. Us, the tech, you know, the tech firm are doing from an AI perspective to monitor these things. And Datto said, absolutely.

We want to have a booth there. We'll sponsor it. We'll give you 10,000 bucks.

It's not going to cost us that much at all. So we'll pocket the rest of those dollars. We need to fill out a couple of forms and away we go and we get approved for that money.

Now, you know, what that looks like bringing this full circle is when we go to that event, you bet your bottom dollar that I will get email addresses for every single attendee who's there. And so you take an in-person event and then you turn it into a win-win situation because you get email addresses, cell phone numbers where we can do text message marketing or whatever. We can invite them to webinars and we can also drip email them on a regular basis.

And this client that we have happens to have only two verticals, finance firms and law firms. That's it. And they're wildly successful with it.

And we went from like six or seven different verticals down to, I know it sounds counterintuitive, but trust me, if you're an MSP and you're listening right now, don't service anybody with a plug hyper verticalized. It works every single time. And they are a part of like half a dozen different law firm associations.

So bar association groups, and these are where their ideal prospects and ideal audience hangs out. And so they're, you know, whatever bar association contact said your it firm should sponsor this upcoming event. And that's how we got into this situation.

So we take an in-person event, very old school. If you want to call that very traditional, we turn a new private event. There's only going to be like 20 or 30 law firms that show up, but these are buyers who will spend anywhere from 15 to $5,000 on recurring revenue every single month.

Why wouldn't we want to invite them there? Right? Why wouldn't we want to get their email addresses and put them in the email campaigns?

And then we just rinse and repeat.

[Uncle Marv] (30:14 - 30:25)
Now, was this an event that was already set up and you just kind of parlayed into, or was this an event that the MSP created themselves and got the MDF dollars for?

[Dave Scott] (30:25 - 31:47)
Great question. It's a part of our sales and marketing process here at SGS. So we have, we make sure our clients are doing a fair bit of outreach on LinkedIn.

We make sure they're doing a lot of email marketing strategy, a lot of email marketing execution. We make sure that their copy is really clear. People should know what they do, where they go to buy more and how it's going to benefit them.

Their ideal audience should know that. And then we do in-person events every quarter. So it's part of our process.

And that's where you said earlier, I love, and thank you for saying that. You said SGS isn't for everybody. It's not.

We have a process and I know it works. And if you don't follow it, you got to go as hard as that is to say, it's just you're not the relationship for me and we're not for you. But if you follow our process, which we, you know, we haven't lost a customer in a while.

And despite going through some personal challenges last year and the last year, year and a half, 18 months and almost losing my firm, actually, we've kept all our clients. We haven't lost one. The only one we've off-boarded recently was acquired by a huge PE firm down in Texas.

And they're a SAS firm based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. But we plan quarterly events or, you know, by, by annual events, you know, events like twice a year. And this was part of our process.

And so we told them, Hey, you need to have an in-person event. It doesn't matter. The results doesn't matter how big it is or how little it is.

We just need to have an event to get people excited about you, educating them and building brand awareness.

[Uncle Marv] (31:49 - 32:25)
All right. You, you said something that hit home with me real quick, because I did mention at the beginning here that this might be the first year that I have to actually go out and do some real marketing because I did lose two customers last year to acquisition. They were both bought by larger organizations.

So we lost them there. And I did, I had one that was kind of a trying to find the right word. We didn't fire them.

They didn't let us go. It just kind of didn't happen.

[Dave Scott] (32:26 - 32:26)
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv] (32:27 - 32:45)
It wasn't the best, you know, it wasn't a right. And we knew it. We supported that for a little while until they got to where they wanted to go.

And then I had a conversation last week with my oldest client, who's been with us 27 of the 28 years we've, we've been in business.

[Dave Scott] (32:45 - 32:45)
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv] (32:45 - 32:53)
And it's not a big account. It's, it's an, it's an attorney that was hanging on for as long as he could because he didn't want to retire.

[Dave Scott] (32:53 - 32:54)
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv] (32:54 - 33:11)
But, but you know, listen, I have enjoyed my run, I should say, of being able to get businesses by referrals. Yeah. I can't sit around anymore.

I gotta, you know, take the next step and go out. And you mentioned earlier, before we came on the air, you gotta be uncomfortable.

[Dave Scott] (33:13 - 33:18)
You do. You do. Yeah.

Do you want me to expound on that a little bit?

[Uncle Marv] (33:19 - 33:31)
I was just going to say, what do you tell people when they have to be uncomfortable? Because most, most MSPs I'm assuming don't want to get to that point. They resist it.

I'm not going to resist it.

[Dave Scott] (33:31 - 33:32)
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv] (33:32 - 33:34)
I just might take baby steps.

[Dave Scott] (33:35 - 36:13)
That's okay. Marvin, dude, so excited for you, man. And I'm stoked and not because of the pain that you went through, but I mean, sorry, not sorry.

I'm, I am stoked. You had to go through that pain because pain teaches us things, right? And if we're not growing, we're staying stuck.

And you know, anybody who knows me knows that I'm, you know, the poster child for personal growth and development. And I think that, um, and I have a faith foundation. I believe that God brings me through things to teach me things.

And sometimes they're really painful and sometimes they're really simple, right? Like, Hey, take that sliver out of your finger. Okay, no problem.

We'll get tweezers, pull it out. No problem. Some of it's like you need to cut out that fricking leg.

Cause it's like, you know, you're not going to do good things with that thing. It's like, okay, then you resist and then just, it's gotta go. Right.

And I'm using that metaphorically, not literally, but I will say that personal growth is real. Like if you're going to grow your it firm, you need to get uncomfortable with, um, comfortable with being uncomfortable. You're going to need to fire some team members who need to go away.

You're going to need to get rid of individuals who you can't grow with. You can't grow with the same people, processes, and technology that got you to one mil that are going to get you to three mil and then five mil and then seven mil and getting to one mil is insanely, insanely, insanely hard. And then when you get to one mil becomes easier to get to one mil to five mil, which is the valley of death.

According to M and a guys like, you know, read Warren and Rick Murphy and Mike Harvath. And then once you get to that point, you got to make a whole nother set of challenges like your brother-in-law who happens to be your coder and developer. He's probably going to have to leave because he's a negative Nelly.

Your service delivery guy who's been with you for since the Clinton administration probably asked to go away because he's not getting the big picture. And I'm just giving you some examples, right? So you have to be willing to do things differently in order to grow.

And you know, that's just a very normal part of part of life. And growth is really, really, really hard. So I respect guys who take the bull by the horns and who grow and who, you know, are comfortable getting uncomfortable.

I don't, I mean, I'm not trying to knock your audience or anybody's watching this, but if you're a lifestyle business, I have respect for you because it's hard. Don't get me wrong, but you haven't done, you haven't earned the bigger amount of respect. Like a guy who grows his it firm from to one mil to three mil to five mil and so on.

Like that takes a lot more. That's difficult. What you're doing prospecting after not doing it for so many years, that's, you know, that's really hard.

That's really difficult, but you're going to learn a lot from it. Doesn't matter if you take ginormous steps or little baby steps, you're, you're going to grow Marvin. And I just, I love that for you.

[Uncle Marv] (36:15 - 36:41)
I'm going to take another opportunity to just to switch the, the topic here and then see how far you're willing to go. Cause you mentioned about personal growth. You mentioned being vulnerable.

And I know that you've put some stuff out there on LinkedIn, the Facebook, you've talked about yourself. Um, it's weird sometimes to see people put personal stuff out there.

[Dave Scott] (36:41 - 36:41)
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv] (36:41 - 36:53)
But you've done that. Yeah. How comfortable are you caring to, you know, with us now what you did and how you think that's helped you with your, your clients?

[Dave Scott] (36:53 - 42:43)
Yeah. I love it. So I'll, I'll go as deep as I can.

Um, legally, there's only one sticking point that I can't mention. Uh, you know, I, um, I'm 47. I've been doing this a long time.

I've been in, uh, you know, growth mindset and the marketing and communications in my whole life. I love communications cause I think that it helps. Like if you learn to communicate clearly, there's not much you can't do.

Like even if you're an introvert in your, you know, and I tend to be, even though I might come across as really extroverted and confident and self assured on these calls, there's a camera in front of me. Like if I was in a group of front of 150,000 people or a thousand people or 15,000 people, like, of course I'm going to be nervous. I'm going to have sweaty armpits and everything else.

That's normal. That's just being human. Right.

Um, but I've always loved it. So I've been doing it for a long time. I went through a divorce about five years ago and you know, I blew it.

I got it wrong the first time. And what I would tell you guys, if you're watching this today is if your marriage is struggling, if you're going through some things, if you're, you know, you've been running your it firm for as long as you have, or I have or a professional services firm for, you know, I would, this is our seven and a half year, almost eighth year at SGS. But I've been, you know, in the channel since like the early two thousands back when WAN virtualization and hardware was a thing.

Right. And, um, picking a partner who you settle down with is a big deal. And if you get that wrong, it can make your life a living hell.

And you know, not that my partner did cause it had nothing to do with, with, with, with her, but you know, I was a bad husband for a long time. And when I got divorced, it's been five years now, uh, you know, it cost me a lot. You know, I had a fractured relationship with my kids, my two older daughters, they're in their twenties now and cost me a lot financially and almost lost my business last year, you know, and as a result of it.

And, uh, thank God, you know, just by his grace and mercy is the only reason I'm alive and I'm breathing and my bank accounts shut down because I was in business with a really bad business partner who racked up, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt that I was on the hook for. And a couple of franchises that are not it related, but you know, I grew and I wanted to invest in some different things and I made some mistakes and it cost me a lot. And, uh, there was daily phone calls from attorneys.

I spent over $150,000 on legal fees just in one year. That's not, I mean it was more long term. Uh, but I, I was on conference calls every day.

You know, I had to let go of some team members last March, which was super hard because one of my, I mean I care for all my employees, but I had to, you know, I had to let go some of them. And, and so it was, you know, it's been brutal. I had a cancer scare, have a, still do have a tumor on my thyroid gland and thank God it's benign and you know, I'm good.

But at the time it wasn't looking great. And they were like, Hey, you have a tumor there. We should cut it out, which means you're going to lose half your thyroid.

It's like, okay, well, I'm pretty sure that's an important gland. Like why should I be, why should we be cutting this out? Like what's my quality of life going to look like?

Am I going to die? Am I going to be on synthetic pills for the rest of my life? Like it's, you know, it's a lot of shit to have to work through.

And so that's been my 18 months and uh, you know, since I got divorced, I've, I've been in a couple of serious relationships. One, I thought she was going to be the one and she didn't turn out to be. So my heart got broken really bad.

And if anybody has gone through heartbreak before, you know how terrible it can feel. And so, yeah, that's been a pretty insane 18 months, but through it all, Marv, I, you know, I just got open and honest with my clients and I told them all of them I needed to. Cause they, if they, if I wasn't in pocket, then I wasn't comfortable taking their money and their retainer every month.

I'm not that kind of guy and I don't need the money. And if this didn't work out, I'm smart enough. I'm educated enough.

I have an MBA and undergrad. Like I can go get a job somewhere else and I'll be just fine. It might sting a little bit, but I'd be okay.

Right. So I told them all, I want to keep you as my clients, but I might not be as resourceful or easily accessible as I once was. And they were like, how long, first of all, they all had empathy for me, which I love.

Second, they said, how long is this going to last? I said, I don't know, maybe six months to a year, but I don't know. Could it be shorter?

It could be longer. And they said, no problem. As long as the deliverables are being met, we love and care about you.

And we want the best for you. So go get them tiger. And I did.

And I conquered it all. I mean, it wasn't me. I believe a lot of it was, the power of the Holy spirit and God working through me.

But I also believe that God has given me insane amounts of skills and talents to be able to tackle a lot of these things. And I believe that for a lot of your audience too. Right.

But I will say that I, I got, I didn't, I didn't tell my clients like every nitty gritty, right. They weren't like on my attorney's calls with the banks. They were shutting down my bank accounts, but you know, they were like, Hey, we just need to know like high level if you're okay.

And if our work is going to get done and it did. And so I didn't lose one client. The only one, like I said earlier, I lost, which just off boarded them.

Like in the last two or three weeks was a SAS based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota that got acquired by a big Texas firm. And, and I don't even call that as churn, right. They got acquired and we used to work with them for a period of time after that.

But that's what I've gone through in the last year. And all that stress, all that trauma, you know, it can affect you a lot when you lose clients or if you have a lot of stressors in your life, or if your personal life is really messy, it's absolutely affecting your service delivery team. It's absolutely affecting your sales and marketing.

It's absolutely affecting your business partner relationship. Like all of these things, as you know, are very intertwined. And that's why growth, you know, is this is so important.

[Uncle Marv] (42:45 - 44:00)
It is. Uh, first of all, Dave, let me say thank you for sharing that. You didn't have to, but, uh, I appreciate.

And, you know, some of the things that I've tried to do with this show is to be as real as possible. Yeah. Um, you know, everybody wants to talk about the great times.

Nobody wants to talk about the bad or whatever reason, um, you've done that. And so I want to acknowledge that. Thank you.

Um, you know, I went through a little period, you know, in my time where I thought I'd be, you know, changing my life because of some personal stuff. And my mom got sick, you know, and, uh, I'll be honest. I mean, I'm probably not the best husband in the world.

My wife puts up with a lot of unprepared crap. So, um, you know, I, I get that and I understand that. So it's nice when it can be shared and people can see when people get to the other side.

Yeah. And you did not mention, you know, at the end of 24, you know, you got two of the best awards with the, uh, IT business podcast awards.

[Dave Scott] (44:01 - 46:13)
I mean, yeah. So honored to be able to get those. And you know, when you're, and I, and I told to hear you about our wives, I'm not married, but wives spouses putting up with us.

And yeah, I mean, you're, you're normal, you're human. We all are. I think if there's one thing I've learned in the last year, it's to be a lot more empathetic towards myself and extend the grace understanding to myself and other people.

I love it guys. I'm nerdy. Like if I could run, if I was, I mean, I'm not handsome enough or wealthy enough to be awesome like Tony Stark from the movie, the Avengers, but if I could run everything from this or like a suit, like, like, like Ironman, I totally would.

I love technology. I'm such a geek. Um, and if I can hire a driver, that's why I think autonomous driving is so cool, even though it scares the shit out of most people, because you can be productive.

You can spend time with your kids or grandkids or you know, your family or your wife or your spouse or whoever you're dating is your love interest in your life or your parents or whatever. Right. And so I think technology serves such a huge purpose.

I love the it channel. I love it guys. I think like second to like being in healthcare or being a, you know, military veteran, it is one of the most important jobs in the world.

And that's why we continue doing what we're doing. That's why I love working with managed service providers. That's why I love working with channel vendors and solutions vendors, cause I love them and care about them very much.

And you know, there's been a lot of lean seasons where we didn't get paid for anything we were doing. And then there were seasons, you know, of abundance like I'm experiencing now. And so that's why I think it's really important to share.

I think that commonality is, um, is driven by vulnerability and transparency. And I think it's just really, I think it's important. It teaches you how to love people and care about them and care about their businesses.

And if you're not an it guy and you don't care about your customers, then, you know, stop doing what you're doing and go get a job as a W2 somewhere. But if you fit, you know, your profile, you know, my, my core values and persona, which is you need to love and care about people and their businesses, like keep doing what you're doing. It's really hard being a business owner and self-employed business guy and it guy doesn't matter if you're $600,000 in annual revenue or $600 million.

Like it's, it's a really hard gig. It is.

[Uncle Marv] (46:13 - 46:26)
It is. Yeah. Well, I know you pimped just a little bit earlier.

I want to give you the opportunity to do that some more here. You mentioned the AI accelerator, but what else is on tap for stock growth strategies this year?

[Dave Scott] (46:26 - 48:32)
Yeah. Oh man. I haven't shared this publicly yet.

Um, I don't know. I don't think I have, cause it's been a few months since you and I got together. So we are just in the middle tail end of developing our own software and yeah, and it's going to be a sales marketing, sales and marketing automation tool that's very AI driven.

So everything inside of it is going to allow you to get immense amounts of data to be able to tell you things about, you know, where your deficiencies lie in your sales and marketing and it will help you automate your email marketing. It'll help you automate your chat box. It'll give you an awesome dashboard where you can develop proposals from and siphon and deliverables.

There's not a payments processing component to it yet, but I'm sure there will be as time goes on. But you know, one of the things that I've seen that just, you know, irritates me to no end is when MSPs are using eight different softwares to do two things. Right.

And I hate that. And that's why we're big fans of HubSpot and we're not going to develop something that's going to compete with them, rather compliment them. And so we're just, just in the throes of it right now.

And I'm not an agile software guy, but I know enough to make myself dangerous and I've got some really good people supporting me around me. So that's one of the biggest things. It'll be an AI driven sales and marketing automation tool.

So that's the big thing that's coming in our, our AI accelerator is you can just go to scottgrowthstrategies.com forward slash AI. We normally, it's normally a thousand bucks to do the program and for your audience, we'll just do it for like, you know, four or $500. So if anybody wants to go through it, it's really low intensity.

There's nothing crazy about it. It's 90 minutes. One time and introduction orientation.

And there's a couple of 60 minute meetings. So you get my time. And if you're to break it out on an hourly rate, it's pretty low, pretty low cost.

And we teach you how to do these things and give you all the tools to get this done. And if they want to self-implement great and DIY it, you can do it. Otherwise, if you want to hire us or one of our referral partners, you can do that too.

[Uncle Marv] (48:33 - 48:41)
Right. Well, we did not time this properly. If you're not yet ready to release that.

So any idea in the timeframe is it weeks, months.

[Dave Scott] (48:42 - 49:15)
So AI accelerators live today. So anybody can sign up today. Just go to scottgrowthstrategies.com forward slash AI. It's one time it's 500 bucks. It's normally about, we actually raised the prices normally $1,500, but in the past we built about a thousand bucks for it. Normally 500 bucks.

You can sign up for that today. That's scottgrowthstrategies.com forward slash AI. You'll also, once you sign up and give us your email address, we put in an email queue.

We're going to give you some consistent, regular updates on where we're at with our sales and marketing software. So that'll be coming sometime in 2025.

[Uncle Marv] (49:16 - 49:23)
Okay. All right. So we, uh, but he watching as soon as that's released, either you reach out to me or I'm going to hunt you down.

[Dave Scott] (49:23 - 49:49)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And you've, yeah, I haven't, I mean, I haven't publicly talked about it yet.

So this is the first time I've said something publicly about it. There's a lot of people in my, um, you know, my vernacular that know a lot about it, but yeah, first time I've said anything about it outside of those small circles of conversation. So you'll be the first to know.

Absolutely. Cause there's going to be some beta testers. I'd love for you to beta test it.

I've even got some, um, if your audience is willing to beta test it, that'd be great too.

[Uncle Marv] (49:49 - 49:59)
All right. I'm not, I'm sure somebody will reach out. I'm going to make a note here and, uh, see how much, I don't know how much I can, I can beta test it, you know, but we'll see.

[Dave Scott] (49:59 - 50:06)
Just look and feel. I mean, little things, right. You'd be as critical as you want and yeah, we'll take it all into consideration.

So beta testers are really important.

[Uncle Marv] (50:07 - 50:24)
All right. Well, folks, there he is. Dave Scott, CEO of Scott growth strategies, and, uh, go to his website and check out the AI accelerator.

And I guess they just put in what uncle Marv and, uh, get that discount you mentioned.

[Dave Scott] (50:24 - 50:33)
Yeah, exactly. Just if you just, yeah, no, no reason though. No code.

Just tell me that you heard of us on this podcast and we'll get you connected with the discount. No worries.

[Uncle Marv] (50:33 - 51:03)
All right. And, um, I guess we should have done something where I could have had you hold up the mugs and stuff because, uh, Oh yeah. Hold on one sec.

Okay. The rate does that folks. We'll say that, uh, all of the links will be in the show notes, uh, to his website and the AI accelerator.

And I'm actually going to find a link to this book, uh, Dan Markel, uh, buy back your time, buy back your time.

[Dave Scott] (51:03 - 51:10)
One of the best books I've read. Here we go. I use this one on a regular basis.

That's why it's so close by. And this one is on my shelf right in front of me, but you can't see.

[Uncle Marv] (51:11 - 51:37)
All right. There they are. The first two time winner for the it business podcast awards in the same year.

So yeah, we're honored. So Dave, thank you very much for coming on and being the first guest here in our marketing and money month. And we will be looking for you again soon.

And, uh, that's, that's very good, my friend. Thanks a lot.

[Dave Scott] (51:37 - 51:40)
You're welcome. Honored. Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

[Uncle Marv] (51:40 - 52:17)
All right, folks. We'll be back with another podcast real soon. You know, we're in the midst of it.

We've got zero trust world. We've got Florida man. We've got ASCII, a lot of stuff coming up.

So tune in, uh, save your subscription or whatever it is on the YouTube, LinkedIn, the Facebook, uh, sign up for your favorite pod catcher, but check us out everywhere and I'll see you soon. And until next time, holla. Okay.