Episode 134 includes:
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Why you should start using this 100 year old marketing tool
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How to create 'evergreen' content for your website
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Plus on the show this week, the benefit of being a vigilant MSP owner
Featured guest
Thank you to Len Herstein, author of Be Vigilant!, for joining Paul to talk about what complacency is, why it's so dangerous and what MSPs can do to identify and fight it.
Len has over 30 years of experience in business and brand marketing. Prior to founding his marketing and events company (ManageCamp Inc.), Len innovated, managed and grew brands for major consumer packaged goods marketers, including Campbell Soup Company, Coca-Cola, and Nabisco. Since 2015, Len has served as a reserve deputy sheriff with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado.
Connect with Len on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lenherstein
Show notes
Episode transcription
Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast.
Paul Green:
Hi. Hello, and welcome back to the show. Here's what we got coming up for you this week.
Len Herstein:
How do we build vigilance into our lives so that we don't have to be paranoid, so that we don't have to be on edge all at time and worried about losing everything.
Paul Green:
That's Len Herstein, he's the author of a book called Be Vigilant!. And he's going to be joining me later on in the show to talk about the dangers of being complacent. Any point you find yourself thinking, we're doing quite well. Maybe at that point, you are at danger of complacency. Len's going to help you to identify if your MSP's at risk of this, and what you can do about it in our interview later on in the show. We're also going to be talking about creating something called evergreen content. I love evergreen content because you create it once and it lasts forever. That's why it evergreen. I'll tell you exactly what it is and how you can use it later on in the show.
Voiceover:
Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast.
Paul Green:
I've been spending money over the last couple of months, in fact, I've been subscribing to some new stuff. And it may surprise you that the things that I've been subscribing to, despite the fact it's 2022, I've been subscribing to 1922 products, because what I've actually been subscribing to are newsletters, physical print newsletters. I've got a load here. There's only two or three subscriptions that I've taken out. But both of these subscriptions, or all of these subscriptions, what makes them distinctive is they're not digital. There is an element of digital that goes with them, a digital backer, but primarily I'm buying printed newsletters. So I've got a couple here. I've got this first one. This is a UK specific one. This sounds really boring to most people, but as business owner, your ears might be pricked up by this and you might think, ooh, that sounds good. It's called the Schmidt Tax Report.
Paul Green:
It's been going for 28 years and every month they send you out a printed newsletter. How many pages is this? It's getting off. Oh, here we go. 24 pages. So a 24 page print newsletter every month in just black and red, and it's about tax. It's about money. It's about property. And it's cost me about 80 pounds a year, which is about a hundred dollars a year. And frankly that's bargain, because every, I've only been a subscriber for about three months, but every issue that I read, there's something in there, there's some little nugget in there that makes me think, ooh, I could do that in the future, or that could save us thousands in tax. So, 80 pounds a year, a hundred dollars a year, that's nothing. So, that's that one.
Paul Green:
And then I recently subscribed to, well, I think I've possibly resubscribed to something I used to subscribe to years ago, you may have heard of a guy called Dan Kennedy. So he is the grandfather, the great-grandfather of direct response marketing. He's an American guy and he's been around for, I don't know, 30 years or so. And Dan Kennedy has a series of books. In fact, I'm sure we've talked about him on this podcast. His books are called the No B.S. Range, and you just go and type No BS, N-O B-S, into Amazon. And you'll find all of Dan Kennedy's books, and I can recommend all of them. Over a number of years, in fact, I can't remember when I finished my subscription, but we actually talking about 10 years ago, I used to subscribe to his No B.S. Magnetic Marketing Letter, which was another physical newsletter. In fact, I've got a copy of it here, because I've actually just resubscribed to it.
Paul Green:
What's happened is that Dan Kennedy actually sold his business, well, he sold it about three times now. He's sold it to someone who sold it onto someone else who has just recently sold it to a guy called Russell Brunson. And Russell Brunson, you may have heard of him. He is the co-founder of a piece of software called ClickFunnels, which allows you to build marketing funnels. So things like up sales, down sales, those kind of things. It's not really relevant to MSPs because you don't sell a thing, you're selling us a service and it's a very considered purchase. But if you were selling, I don't know, eCommerce stuff, or you were selling the kind of service that could be commoditised, then ClickFunnels would be a very sensible piece of software to look at. And we've definitely talked about Russell Brunson on this podcast before. He has a series of books, things like Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, there's a trilogy of Russell Brunson books, which are worth reading.
Paul Green:
So he bought Dan Kennedy's company about six months ago, something like that. And he has recently relaunched Dan's No B.S. newsletter, and also launched his own, or relaunched his own, which is called Marketing Secrets newsletter. So I very happily subscribe to these because again, it's not a huge amount of money. This is a little bit more than the Schmidt Report. This is an international one and it comes from the US to my home here in the UK. I forget how much I pay, but it's worth it to me, just to get these print things in my hand, because here's the thing. I subscribe to lots of digital newsletters, lots of email stuff. I've got a constant stream of things coming into my email inbox. And I'm sure you are exactly the same, but there's not that much stuff that comes into my mailbox.
Paul Green:
So actually when the latest edition of the Schmidt Tax Report, or this behind the scenes Marketing Secrets Letter lands on my doorstep, it's actually quite exciting for me. And I rip it open and I put it to one side and I think, right, I'm going to read that maybe on the toilet later on today. And don't knock toilet reading. We all read on the toilets, but these are not huge things, even the 24 page tax one, you look at that initially and you think, oh, I'm never going to read that, but it's not written for accountants and CPAs it's written for ordinary business owners like you and me. So there is a real power in this 1922 marketing tactic, physical print newsletters. Now these are ones that I subscribe to. So I pay money to get these. And I feel that they're worth every penny I spend on them right now, but I recommend to all the MSPs I work closely with that they do a print newsletter not to charge for it, but as a way of keeping in touch with your hottest prospects.
Paul Green:
If you talk to someone today, and they're not quite ready to switch from someone else to you just yet, but you think there could be something in the future, there's something that might be there in six, 12, 18 months time. Wouldn't you want to take every single effort to keep in touch with that person? And the answer is yes, of course, you would. And of course you should put them on your email newsletter and connect them on LinkedIn, and call them every now and again, just to see how things are going. But I believe one of the greatest marketing tactics you can use to keep in touch with someone, to keep your name and your business top of their mind, is to send them a physical printed newsletter.
Paul Green:
Yes, it's difficult. Yes, it's hard work. Yes, it's expensive to get all that content together and put it into a newsletter and turn it into something you can print that actually looks high quality and doesn't look rubbish, and then to put it in an envelope and to post it out to them, it's difficult, it's expensive, and that's why 99% of MSPs don't do it. And when 99% of people aren't doing something and hear someone like me who lives and breathes MSP marketing every single day of my life, it should really move up to the top of your priority list. Now you don't want to be sending out a printed newsletter to everyone that you're in contact with. That would be an expensive exercise, but you take those very best prospects and it's absolutely worth sending them out, even if it's just a quarterly newsletter, that will be better than nothing. Obviously every other month will be even better and monthly would be even better than that. But what a powerful thing to do.
Paul Green:
And do you know what these days? You don't even need to create your own newsletter, just to give myself an early blatant plug, for example, our MSP Marketing Edge service. One of the many that we give our members is a printed newsletter. They can literally just put their MSP company name on it, tweak any articles if they want to, and then they can print it and send it out. And it's very, very simple, and we provide it in all sorts of different formats as well. So whatever you want to do with it, it's nice and. Easy and you can check that out by the way at mspmarketingedge.com.
Paul Green:
If you are not subscribed to any print newsletters, go and subscribe to one. In fact, go and have a look at that Russell Brunson one, just look up the Russell Brunson Marketing Secrets letter. I'm sure there'll be a link to it on ClickFunnels.com. Go and have a look at that. Subscribe for a few months just so you can experience the excitement of a physical print newsletter landing on what doorstep and then ask yourself, wouldn't it be cool to have that kind of effects on your prospects?
Voiceover:
Here's this week's clever idea.
Paul Green:
I think it's time for me to admit something that I've never admitted on this podcast before. And that admission is that I'm really, really bad at gardening. In fact, as I stand here recording this episode, I have a home office, and where my home office is, I can look out on the back garden of my house, and we have a lovely garden. It's reasonably big. It's very mature. It's very beautiful. I bought this house years ago and the couple that lived here before spent about 15 years making the house and the garden perfect for them anyways, certainly deco wise, we need to do some work in here, but the garden is beautiful. It's very mature and there's always something beautiful to look at pretty much all around the year.
Paul Green:
Now I don't have either the skill nor frankly, the inclination to keep the garden looking beautiful. So I have Warren and Mick who come every Thursday for a couple of hours. They mow the lawn, they put stripes in the lawn, so it looks nice, and they just keep the garden looking nice. And they have learned over the two odd years that we've been working together, they've learned not to ask me too many questions, because early on, they were saying things like, oh, do you want us to tie back your clematis or whatever it was? And I'm like, oh thanks, but don't know what that is. So you just do what you think is best. And in fact, the other day we were talking about a patch of the garden that needs just a bit of enhancing. And they said to me, oh, we thought we could put in some evergreens. I was so excited and said, oh right evergreens, like in marketing. And they looked at me like I was slightly deranged, which is why I just left them to it.
Paul Green:
Evergreen to me, yeah, apparently it's a gardening term, it's got something to do with plants. But evergreen to me is a marketing thing. An evergreen piece of marketing is something that you do once and it lasts forever. And these days when we talk about evergreen content, we really means something that can go on your website. So if you think about your website blog right now, you might have two different types of content. You might have an evergreen piece of content and you might have an up-to-date, almost news type of content that will go out-of-date. So let me give you an example of each of those pieces of content.
Paul Green:
So if we take, say cyber security, an evergreen piece of cyber security content would be, these are the, or this is a good habit to get into when looking at your email. And that general habit might not be to do with specific scams, but just in general, looking out for phishing emails or things that just don't look or feel right. Now, we don't know what kind of scams are coming up in the next five to 10 years, but it's fair for us to assume that phishing and gem really trying to get people to click on things and download things that they didn't really want to, is going to be a continuing trend going forward. So that would be a good piece of evergreen, because although when we say evergreen lasts forever, it last forever, forever, but five to 10 years is good enough. I think in a thousand years that's not going to be relevant to anyone, but we evergreen five, 10 years that will do us.
Paul Green:
So, that would be a good piece of evergreen cybersecurity content, whereas a piece of topical content would be something like this is the big scam that's tricking people on their email right now. And that would be a specific tactic that's being used by cyber criminals right now. Now because it's a specific tactic, we might want to date that, or in fact, it might be something pertain to something in the news. As I'm recording this on the top 22nd of April, the Ukraine war is still going on, Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So a piece of content related to that, a cyber security piece of content related to that would be very topical, but obviously jumping forward a year or so, and hoping that conflict will be completely finished, then that wouldn't be a relevant piece of content, that wouldn't be evergreen content.
Paul Green:
So it's okay to have both of these on your website, both evergreen and topical. You just have to make a decision when you are creating a piece of content. Do you want some evergreen or do you want something that's for the now? I think myself, you have to have a balance. And a good balance would be the majority being evergreen, let's say three quarters of it being evergreen, with a sprinkling of topical stuff as well. Now the reason you'd want to focus on evergreen is because there isn't a power, a power of having a website, which has got tons and tons of content, original content, that's good for Google, it's good for SEO, search engine optimisation, but it's also good for the humans who are coming onto your website. And if they can see that you've got two, three, 400 original pieces of content in your blog, even though they're never going to read it all, then it will have a certain influence on them. It will help to stamp your authority in technology matters, and that's an important thing.
Paul Green:
The reason for having the topical content is to show that you are up-to-date as well. So what would a good piece of evergreen content look like? Well, you have to talk in broad terms. You have to ask yourself, how can I write this in a way where it would still be relevant in 10 years time? So let's go back to that cybersecurity one. We don't know what the specific tactics will be in five to 10 years, but we'll still be pretty sure that email will be a target that cyber criminals will be using email to get to people and to infect their systems, of course, they will because email is such an obvious entry point into virtually all businesses, and sure there's bound to be threats and tools in five to 10 years time that we couldn't even start to imagine today, but we can write about the general principles, because the general principle of acting on a gut feel that something isn't right, not ignoring it, but acting on it. That's a general principle. That's not going to change in the next five to 10 years.
Paul Green:
The general principle of training your staff and making sure they do regular cyber security training, that's not going to change in the next five to 10 years. So those are the kind of evergreen things that you can put in your evergreen content. One final point on evergreen content, and that's the just because you are designing it to last for a decade, or more, doesn't mean that you can't revisit it in the future. In fact, there is a massive SEO, search engine optimisation benefit, in revisiting old content on your website and updating it for this year. And in fact, this is a tactic that's talked about in the book, They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan, which is a highly recommended read if you're looking at content marketing. He recommends you go back to old articles that you've written and you update them, and you put in the headline brackets updated for 2022, or whatever year you update it.
Paul Green:
And what that can actually do is that almost resubmit old content to Google, because Google knows that content is there, but the older that content gets, unless it's ranked really highly from the beginning, it just falls down in Google's index. But when you go back and you revisit something and you change your proportion of that page and you put update it for 2022 in the title, then that gives it a boost within Google. And you could actually have a schedule every year to go back and review all of your evergreen content all year, every year and just update it for that year, in effect, giving yourself an SEO boost and also giving yourself a boost to the people that are reading it, because if they can see it's a two or three year old article, and you've updated it this year, again, that seems more current than just an old piece of evergreen content.
Paul Green:
Now, when I say you updating this, as always, I don't mean you, I mean you finding someone to do this for you. In the spirit of DOA, which should stand for delegate, outsource, automate, rather than dead on arrival, because that's what you'll be if you try to do everything yourself, go and find yourself a writer on Fiverr or Upwork, someone who can edit this stuff, update it, write it for you in the first place if it comes to that, get someone else to do this stuff for you, because you should only do what only you can do. And I'm sure there are many other people that can be much better at writing and updating content than you.
Voiceover:
Paul's blatant plug.
Paul Green:
So I gave myself a blatant plug a little bit earlier when we were talking about printed newsletters, but I'm just going to finish it off again, because our MSP Marketing Edge service is literally your life saver. If you know you need to do marketing for your MSP, but it just seems hard and you just don't know where to start, that's what the MSP Marketing Edge does. We tell you what to do. We give you all the tools that you need to do it, and we hold your hand while you're doing it. It is as simple as that. And we only sell it to one MSP per area, that really is a strict and genuine lockout. And you can see if your area is still available at mspmarketingedge.com.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Len Herstein:
Hey, I'm Len Herstein, and I'm the author of Be Vigilant!: Strategies to Stop Complacency, Improve Performance and Safeguard Success.
Paul Green:
And that's never really a subject that we've tackled on the podcast before Len, which is when you are successful, maintaining that success. And that's why when I heard about your new book coming out, I wanted to get you straight onto the podcast to talk about it. So before we talk about the book, let's talk about your career, because you've worked with some pretty impressive companies in your time.
Len Herstein:
Well, I've had a long and winding career. So I started out in consulting, working for Andersen Consulting, which is Accenture now. And then after business school, I got into brand marketing with consumer package goods company. So I worked for Nabisco and Coca-Cola and Campbell Soup Company, base business and innovation, both domestic here in the US and international. And then I started my own company. I started a company called ManageCamp, where for the last 19 years we've produced the annual Brand ManageCamp conference, which was built to be the conference I actually wanted to go to after a lot of bad experiences with conferences in my past.
Len Herstein:
And then for the last seven years, I've actually been a reserve Sheriff's deputy. So I'm a law enforcement officer. I'm a police officer. I do it for free. So people think I'm a little crazy, but I've done that for seven years. And it was something that I just wanted to give back to the community and be part of a solution as opposed to whining about problems. And that experience combined with my previous experience in marketing and entrepreneurship and business in general led to the insights that led me to write this book.
Paul Green:
Okay. So we have an extended interview, which we'll be putting on YouTube after this podcast. And you know I'm going to ask you about being a sheriff's deputy and how your business experience has flowed into that. I think you're the first serving law enforcement officer that we've actually had on the podcast. So, that's that's pretty cool.
Len Herstein:
All right.
Paul Green:
After work I'm someone from the FBI next year. That would be even better.
Len Herstein:
There you go.
Paul Green:
Let's talk about.
Len Herstein:
I don't know if it's better, I don't know if its better, but whatever, it's just.
Paul Green:
It kind of a, hey, I'm British. So we just see FBI up there at the top, and small town sheriff's deputy, I'm sorry. It's not quite Mulder and Scully, is it? It's not quite getting there. Hey. So, let's talk about the book then. So tell us what the book's called and what's it about? Because you say it's about success and not losing success.
Len Herstein:
Yes.
Paul Green:
Now I know lots of successful people, and actually I can relate to the theme of there is an underlying fear of when you've got nothing and you're throwing yourself into a business, you've got nothing to lose. And then once you've got something and you've built up assets and you've got a business that works well, I've also detected, not in all of them, but in some of the people I know who've been quite successful, that underlying fear that it could all be lost in some way.
Len Herstein:
Yeah. Absolutely. Here's the thing about success. Until you have it, you don't have much to lose. So, you don't find a lot of bootstrapping startups working in their mother's garage, maxing out their credit cards that are complacent. Complacency comes with past success. And so the book as you ask is called, Be Vigilant!: Strategies to Stop Complacency, Improve Performance and Safeguard Success. Like I said, is born from my most recent experience in law enforcement where one of the first things we learned was this idea that complacency kills. And as I started thinking about it from my 30 plus previous years of business, I started thinking, you know what? Complacency kills businesses. It kills brands. It kills relationships, both professional and personal. And so I really got deep into what is complacency? Why is it so dangerous? Why are we so vulnerable to it, especially when we experience success? And most importantly, what can we do to identify it and fight it?
Paul Green:
So, I guess for those of us who aren't law enforcement officers, it would be very easy for us to understand how in law enforcement, of course, complacency can kill, because I imagine every single situation you're going into, you don't know the circumstances and you don't know when something could go horrendously wrong very, very quickly. But how does that really relate back to business? Because surely within law enforcement, the very nature of that job is every situation is new and things go wrong fast. Does that really transfer back to business?
Len Herstein:
Yeah. Absolutely. I was surprised. I was surprised. I went into that experience thinking it was going to be a hundred percent different from anything I'd done before. And in some ways it was, but there's a lot of similarities, and it all gets to the root cause of what complacency is. So the reason why complacency is so dangerous in law enforcement, you were mentioning watching TV shows and stuff. In TV shows you only see the exciting stuff, the vast majority of things that happen in law enforcement each day, we're successful at things that happen, and we just, we do a traffic stop and we do another traffic stop, we do another traffic stop and they all turn out fine. The reality is that every now and then something goes wrong. And if you have lulled yourself into a sense of overconfidence, a sense of self-satisfaction, or even smugness that goes along with that success, you put yourself in danger of complacency.
Len Herstein:
It's the same thing in business. It all relates back to this concept that's called survivorship bias, and we're all guilty of it. You might have seen a meme that says, this is more for my age group, but I survived lead paint, and I survived driving facing backwards in a station wagon with no seatbelt. And I survived my parents smoking in my face, and I survived spankings and all these things, click like if you did too. Well, here's the reality. If you did not, you are not here to click like. Only the people who survived can click like. That survivorship creates a bias. We look at things and we start saying, because we got from point A to point B, we were successful. The reality is we might have gotten there because we were lucky, because we did more things right than wrong, because our competitors did more things wrong than we did, because of a lot of different situations.
Len Herstein:
And so complacency is just as dangerous for us, both in personal and professional life, as we experience success, we get over confident. We let our guard down, we stop paying attention. We stop being aware. And that awareness is what creates the right environment for complacency to grow. And complacency is always there. It's not something you can ever eradicate. It's always waiting in the background. I don't like using this terminology anymore, given current circumstances and events, but it's like a virus that's sitting there, waiting to grow. And when you give it that, when you give it that overconfidence, when you let your guard down, that's when complacency comes to bear. And it happens in business as much as it happens anywhere else, we can point to businesses that we've all known, big names or small names, whatever it is that were once really successful, that all of a sudden were not you, and even they're gone. And you look at it and you say, well, how could they have been so dumb? How could they have been so lazy? How could they have been so cocky? We can all be that way.
Paul Green:
Yeah.
Len Herstein:
It's just whether those circumstances eventually catch up to us.
Paul Green:
I love that survivorship bias. That's such a great concept and so easy to put yourself in that shoes. And I guess it means that complacency virus, let's call it that, the complacency virus is actually built into our programming, which is strange, because you think we have the same programming today that we did when we were cave dwellers a hundred thousand years ago where actually, I guess you couldn't afford to get complacent, because something else would come along and eat you if the things that were previously eating you stopped eating you.
Len Herstein:
Yeah. The interesting thing though, is that evolution has actually created complacency. Some of the things that we do that make us complacent are actually built in to keep us sane, to keep us healthy. We are very quick to forget things that go wrong, we're very quick to forget painful experiences, and put them aside, because if we just spend all day thinking about those and wallowing in them, we would not be mentally healthy people. So there are a lot of things, we're built to be comfortable, we want to feel comfortable. And so we're fighting evolution a little bit when we think about how do we instil vigilant practices, vigilant strategies in our life? Nobody wants to be paranoid. And a lot of times people think that the opposite of complacency is paranoia. But the difference is that paranoia is based in fear. Vigilance is based in awareness.
Len Herstein:
And so this book and everything I talk about and everything I do is based around how do we build vigilance into our lives, both professionally and personally, so that we don't have to be paranoid, so that we don't have to be on edge all the time and worried about losing everything? These practices allow us to build awareness into our lives and into our businesses. And so this is what it's all about. It's all about being aware and vigilant, not paranoid and scared.
Paul Green:
Yeah. That makes perfect sense. So we can all think about big company failures over the last hundred years where it's fairly obvious to us with the benefit of hindsight that those companies have become complacent. So I'm thinking of the railroad companies in the US who were offered a chance to invest in the early airlines and scoffed at it because they'd already invested millions of dollars building an entire rail network. And they thought, oh, this air travel will never take off. You can think of more recent ones like Kodak. Kodak, of course, it was utterly married to its paper and film business, and completely missed the digital revolution, even Nokia, and there's a great book, I can't remember what it's called, it wasn't a particularly well read book, but there's a book written by the guy who was chairing Nokia at the point the iPhone came out, and he actually necessarily transformed Nokia into a supplier in the back end of telecoms rather than them being the front end handset manufacturer that it was in the late nineties and early nineties.
Paul Green:
So it's very easy for us to look at those big business ones, but the vast majority of people listening to this podcast, they're MSP owners or managers, they run their own business. They're there at the coalface or very close to the coalface daily. And the technology world that we are in, Len, of course, is changing massively. I've only been in the MSP world for six years and I've almost done a cycle of innovation in that, every seven to 10 years, something major changes. And just in the six years I've done, I've seen cyber security go from something that is there in the background to now, it's actually, for many MSPs, it's the lead driving marketing factor when they're having conversations with business owners. So, in your book and in your experience, do you really see that complacency coming in with small businesses?
Len Herstein:
A hundred percent. Yeah. For sure. Everything that you're talking about, when you think about your MSPs, these are things where a lot of times things are going. You are an expert in what you're doing. If you are not able to build into your systems an ability to become threat aware, to understand where the next threats are coming from, to question your successes, to debrief them, to think about what relationships you have with your customers and where those vulnerabilities are. If you start getting power drunk and start thinking, well, I've got these great relationships, I've got these customers tied up, I've got a great technology that we're doing, you lose sight of everything around you. I call it having either tunnel vision, or I also call it the Road Runner effect.
Len Herstein:
Again, this might age me a little bit too, but when I was growing up, there was a cartoon called the Road Runner, and it was a Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. And Wile E. Coyote was very, very focused on the Road Runner. But all of the dangers that befell Wile E. Coyote never came from the Road Runner always came from somewhere else that he never saw coming, because he had that tunnel vision, because he was so confident in where he thought his threats were, that he lost sight of everything else. So those are the types of things. One of the things I talk a lot about that has a lot of reference, or relevance to MSP owners is this idea of the best type of disruption is self-disruption.
Len Herstein:
So, you were talking about companies and industries that had been afflicted by complacency. One of the ones that, and another one that most people will bring up at some point in time in this conversation would be Blockbuster, Blockbuster and Netflix. And that's a great story about how Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy out Netflix and all these things and didn't do it. My favourite part of that story though, is what comes next? Because Netflix to me is a great example of a self-disruptor. So Netflix disrupted that industry by going to mail order video discs, but then they move, they self-disrupted and went and took the whole industry to streaming. And then they self-disrupted and went to self-created content and being their own producers of content. And then they self-disrupt and go into gaming and things. So every time they're doing that, they're making sure that they are staying on the forefront and not waiting for someone else to disrupt them.
Len Herstein:
That's actually my favourite part of the Blockbuster-Netflix story. And it really is very relevant, I think to your audience with MSP owners, is how do we make sure that, that disruption is coming from the inside and not from the outside?
Paul Green:
Yes. So true. And, of course, there is a great book again, I can't remember the tittle of the book, you just google it, the Netflix-Blockbuster story. You're right. It's a fascinating story. And Blockbuster was absolutely fiddling while Rome burned. They were so caught up in delivering profits and keeping their franchisees happy. They couldn't see the entire world changing around them. Then you look at Apple. And of course, Apple it's best selling products was the iPod when it introduced the iPhone, and they introduced the iPhone knowing full well that it would kill off the iPod. And there are so few companies that would do that. It would be really interesting to see if Apple is actually capable of doing this again in the future of introducing something that, it's inconceivable of us to think of killing the iPhone, but will they pull that off and manage to reinvent themselves for another generation, another generation? I don't know [inaudible 00:31:48].
Len Herstein:
I'd argue they're already doing it. I'd argue they're already doing it by bringing their chips in house. So if we look at all the problems that are befalling every industry almost, automotive, electronics, whatever, is the ability right now to find chips, and fighting for these micro chips to be able to make all their products work. Well, one of the things that Apple has already started doing, and were already working on before all this happened was to say, you know what? We're tired of relying on other people's chips to drive our products. So maybe that's not an innovation in terms of something that's going to take over the iPhone, but it's an innovation in terms of seeing where their threats were coming from and bringing those capabilities in house so that they're not a phone manufacturer just anymore, they are a chip manufacturer.
Paul Green:
Yes. And they control absolutely every single aspect of the entire experience. Okay. There's so many more things I want to talk to you about, and we're going to do that in the extended interview, which we'll talk about in a second, but tell us more about, Be Vigilant!. So who should read this book? And what's the benefit, what's the big takeaway that we'll get from reading your book?
Len Herstein:
Yeah. So for me, the big, big takeaway for this book, and you mention it when we first started this interview, is the idea that most people spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to be successful. Most books, most how-to's are built around, how do I become successful? Not a lot of people think about how do I keep that success. And so the big idea from this book is success is not the end goal, keeping that success, whatever you call success, and your definition of success might be different than mine. And it's certainly different than say Elon Musk's, or someone like that.
Len Herstein:
So everybody has a different definition of what success is, but understanding what that is and understanding the fact that keeping that success is the most important part. If you have experienced success in life, in business, whatever level you are, you don't have to be a CEO. You don't have to be an MSP owner. You could be a leader of a team. You could be a leader of a division. You could be a member of a household, a family, whatever it is, if you've experienced success and you have any interest in keeping that success, this book is for you.
Paul Green:
Okay. And where can we get it from? Amazon, I presume.
Len Herstein:
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, wherever you buy eBooks worldwide, you can usually get it. If you want to, you can check out my website lenherstein, L-E-N-H-E-R-S-T-E-I-N, .com. And links are there, or you can, like you said, just go to Amazon.
Paul Green:
That, which of course, is disrupting everything. There's certainly no standing still at Amazon, that's for sure. Len, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast. So you and I are now going to jump over onto YouTube for our extended interview. There are four things that I want to talk to you about. The first of them relates very much back to MSPs, and whether this issue of complacency, I want to examine early symptoms of complacency. You've obviously studied this and spent a great deal of time on it. So let's see if there are some early warning signs, like a canary in the mine. And I've got an idea for MSPs in terms of their next transition to explore. Also, I want to talk about how you are self disrupting. So, you mentioned you have a business called ManageCamp, and you created your own products. No, let me say that again. You created the products you wanted to buy, and that was a few years ago.
Paul Green:
So let's talk about your own self disruption. I'm also just keen to just explore what it's like being a consultant and working in big brands like Coca-Cola, because it sounds really cool on the outside and I suspect, on the inside, these things are a little bit different. And then, of course, finally, we should explore your experiences as a Sheriff's deputy. So join me and Len for that extended interview, you can get that right now on youtube.com/mspmarketing.
Voiceover:
Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast. This week's recommended book.
Tony Capewell:
Hi, my name's Tony Capewell from MSP Dark Web. The book I recommend is Retention Point. And the reason I recommend this book is it's the secret to a subscription based business, which is exactly what MSP Dark Web is. And it gives you lots of inside knowledge and secrets in how to build a successful subscription based business and keep that growing.
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Harry Brelsford :
Hi, I'm Harry Brelsford the founder of SMB Nation, and I'll be on the podcast next week with Paul, to talk about a few topics, mergers and acquisitions, cannabis technology, and side hustles.
Paul Green:
You're going to love that interview with Harry next week. We're also going to be talking about sales next week. Two different subjects I want to talk about. The first is, I'm going to challenge you to go back and revisit old leads and old prospects. I'll explain that in full next week. We're also going to talk about the actual conversation that you have with prospects. Do you find sometimes that you seem to have the same conversation with your prospects? Well, this doesn't matter, we'll talk about that next week and how you can actually leverage those same conversations and get better and better at them over time.
Paul Green:
Now don't forget, we have a ton of extra a content on YouTube. So we've got the extended interview from Len that's on YouTube right now, and on Thursday we'll be publishing the latest edition of another byte, B-Y-T-E. Do you see what we did there? Host Sophie Law interviews me and sometimes our special guest as well, about the subjects we've talked about in this podcast. You can find all of that at youtube.com/mspmarketing. Oh, and make sure as well that you subscribe to this podcast on whichever platform you listen to it. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.
Voiceover:
Made in the UK, for MSPs around the world. Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast.
