Episode 145 includes:
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00:00 How to become an expert at standard operating procedures
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08:20 Why your MSP could benefit from creating an 'authority site'
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15:45 A backup expert predicts what the future could look like
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28:41 A book recommendation to help you tackle the most constrained part of your business
Featured guest:
Thank you to Mike Andrews from NovaBACKUP for joining Paul to discuss the future of cloud back-up as solution for MSPs.
Mike is a data protection industry veteran and Software as a Service pioneer. As CEO at NovaStor Corporation, he helped introduce the first windows-based cloud backup solution and has since worked with thousands of Managed Service Provider (MSP) partners to launch successful recurring incremental revenue generating businesses. Mike holds several industry awards and is credited with inventing patents on file restoration. Prior to NovaStor Corporation, Mike founded a Managed Service Provider business and held various executive roles in the data protection and security software space.
Connect with Mike on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeandrews
Show notes:
Episode transcription
Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday. For MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast.
Paul Green:
Hello, and welcome to episode 145 of the show. Here's what we've got coming up for you this week.
Mike Andrews:
Cloud backup is very important, but there's a lot of companies out there that lead with, "We're cloud first," or, "We're cloud backup." And it's like, no, we're all in the business for data recovery first.
Paul Green:
That's Mike Andrews from NovaBACKUP. He'll be joining me later to talk about the history of backups and some predictions for where he thinks it's going in the future. We'll also be talking about special websites called authority sites. You set these up to give yourself a perceived expertise. I'll tell you why you do that and how to do it later on.
Voiceover:
Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast.
Paul Green:
So let's start this week's podcast by talking about SOPs, standard operating procedures. I think most MSPs recognise that you need standardised ways of doing things for clients. And this is partly about documentation, and this is partly about reducing down your stack so that you've only got a certain number of things that you do in a certain number of ways. I mean, documentation, most MSPs, once they've been bitten by lack of client documentation, that becomes a major driving factor. And you can look at the rise of documentation software over the last, I don't know, 10 years or so. IT Glue perhaps being the most famous example of that, but there's plenty of other software packages available.
Paul Green:
Once you've had a problem with a client setup that you didn't document properly when you set it up, once you've had that, you get bitten by it and you learn to document all of your clients properly. And a lot of the MSPs that I work very closely with in my MSP Marketing Edge program, they are obsessive about documenting everything. Absolutely every little thing with a client, quite rightly too. And in fact, when they onboard a new client, much of their onboarding is about documenting everything. Because, of course, if they know everything, then that just takes out a lot of the stresses and time sucks in the future. That's that kind of first part of a documentation.
Paul Green:
The other part is reducing your stack. I know of some MSPs for example, that when they start with a new client, the first thing they do is they rip out old solutions. Let's take something like wifi. They don't want to be supporting eight or nine different types of wifi setup. So they will rip out the client's wifi and they will put in their standard kit, their kit configured their way. Instantly anyone on the team can support that because you only have to train the team to support one kind of setup. That kind of makes sense.
Paul Green:
So there's all of this talk around this and lots of action around doing this for the clients and for their setups. And yes, that saves you stress, time, energy, and money. But what about documentation and what about systems for your own business? Because there are a number of books that look at why you need to systemise and document your own business. In fact, if we look at the original of those books, which is called The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, the original is written back in the 1980s. And that talks about why we as business owners kind of fall out of love with our businesses. And often it's because we've set up the business in order to do things our way.
Paul Green:
So yeah, we set it up in a way for money, but we really set it up for control. And when it's just us in the business, we have that control. We get to do everything exactly the way we want it to be done until we become too tired from working 100-hour weeks. So we go and hire staff, and then the staff go off and do things their own way because we don't tell them how we want things to be done. And we don't tell them the way we want them to do it. So, of course, they just, they fill in the gaps themselves. And you multiply this by two or three members of staff and eventually you've created chaos in the business.
Paul Green:
And Michael Gerber was pretty much the first author to identify this and suggest the solution and the solution he recommends is to just basically systemise everything. He recommends, you put together an operations manual and you treat the business as if you were going to franchise it. Now you're never going to do that. But if you were to sell it as a franchise, what you'd be selling is the brand and the marketing, but also an operations manual. We have done all the hard work, figuring out what works so you don't have to, Mr. New Franchisee. And that's what The E-Myth Revisited is essentially about.
Paul Green:
And then John Warrillow came along a number of years ago, about five, maybe years ago. And he wrote, Built to Sell, which is just a more updated, modern version of the same thing. It's still a great book. And in fact, of the two, Built to Sell is the better read. But it's the same thing again. It's about systemising and standardising the business so things are done the way that you want them done. And if you want a real deep dive into this, go and read The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. That's a great read. All of these books have one thing in common, which is, if you want to de-stress the business and still have it thrive, regardless of whether you are there or not, then you have to systemise it, standard operating procedures. This is the way to quote the Mandalorian. Yes. I just got in a Star Wars reference.
Paul Green:
So where do you get started with this? Because that's where most MSPs struggle. They know documentation's important, you're doing it for your clients, but you never quite get round to doing it for yourself. Well, the worst thing you can do I believe is to try and just sit down and do it as a project. That's too hard. It's just too much of a big time suck. It's too large a project. I think the answer to this is actually to do it one documentation piece at a time as you're doing something. And in fact, there's even a tool I can tell you about in a second, which I will tell you about, which can help you document things as you're doing them, without you ever feeling like you are documenting stuff.
Paul Green:
We've built systems here in our business. We're not on MSP, but we have tons and tons of different processes now run by, got around about seven, eight people on my team, a mix of part-time and full-time, and there are obviously sometimes numerous people touching the same process and I want it done the same way. So we've been through exactly this process and the way that we did it was over a six-month stretch, every time we did that process, we documented it the first time, and then we checked it sort of two or three times after to make sure that the documentation was correct. And often that documentation would have a video run-through of what we were doing, and then we'd break that video down into a series of steps and/or a checklist as needed.
Paul Green:
And we have lodged all of those in some productivity software called Basecamp, which I can highly recommend. It's an awesome piece of software. It's just $99 a month, regardless of how many users or projects you have. But, of course, you probably already have a platform for this. You'll probably use, I don't know, Trello or Asana, is it, Adana, Asana, I think, or monday.com. Or, I don't know, can you do this in Teams or SharePoint? You've got the software sorted, I'm sure. It's not about the software. It's about the systems.
Paul Green:
Although there is something I can recommend to you, this thing that will make your documentation easy. It's called tango.us. And I've got a small handful of my MSPs I work with who are using this. The beauty of tango.us is it's a screen recorder that just records you while you're doing something, and then sort of allows you to break it down into steps later. So rather than you sitting down and saying, right, I'm going to document something and you do a process and you have to kind of keep stopping and writing it down and documenting it and taking screenshots, with tango.us, you just do it. And then afterwards you go and break it up into a documented system. And the whole point of Tango is it is designed to do that. So it's there to make it easy. I'm sure there are alternatives to this, if you go and Google them. But to me, that sounds like a pretty smart way to get started on just documenting one simple thing, perhaps just doing one a day or one a week for the next few months.
Voiceover:
Here's this week's clever idea.
Paul Green:
Most of the time on this podcast, I try and talk about marketing stuff that's applicable to the vast majority of MSPs. Now this next bit is only really applicable to perhaps about 20% of MSPs because it's a very specialised marketing tactic, perhaps even a marketing strategy that you can use to really dominate a niche or a vertical, but it's not something that the average MSP would use. Let me explain what it is, because you might see an opportunity for this. So it's called an authority site and it is a website that is deliberately set up to be a specific authority on a specific subject. So, for example, let me give you an example from my world. And then I'll give you an example from your world.
Paul Green:
Let's say I went mad tomorrow and I decided to start selling, what did I start selling? Let's say I wanted to start selling SEO, search engine optimisation for MSPs. I say mad because I have done 'done for you' services. I did that in my previous business, which I sold in 2016 and having done that, I basically said, I'll never do 'done for you' marketing services again. It's a stroke waiting to happen. You think your world is bad enough. Imagine doing 'done for you' for clients where actually they don't just say, let's go with your stack, which is what happens to you. It's kind of the opposite that everyone wants something different.
Paul Green:
Anyway. So let's say I've gone mad. I want to do SEO for MSPs. I would build an authority website and I'd probably buy the domain seoformsps.com, if that is available. And on that site, I would then produce a series of articles, some blogs, some videos, maybe some interactive tools and they would all be about SEO for MSPs. So I would essentially be aiming it at you. And I would want you to go onto that site to perhaps put in your URL, to do like an SEO check in some kind of tool. And then to read some articles about the importance of SEO. Maybe there'd be some updates. Maybe I'd want you to go through some data capture to get the 2022 SEO Guide for MSPs. Can you see where I'm going with this?
Paul Green:
So I completely immerse you in this thing that I want to sell to you. And as you're going through those articles and reading it, in your mind and in your emotions, I want you to be thinking A, wow, we've really got to get on this, but also, B, this guy knows what he's talking about. Because, of course, I have created the site for this. And you could replicate that for anything. I mean that's in my world. I'm not going to do that, by the way, just so you know.
Paul Green:
In your world, let's say, for example, you wanted to sell VoIP systems to lawyers in your area or nationally. Let's say, you're an MSP in California and you wanted to sell VoIP systems to lawyers in California. So you could do an authority site on exactly that. Don't ask me what domain name that would be, but you'd come up with something creative, but you could take exactly the same approach. So you might write comparison articles of all the different hardware out there and all the different software, the different VoIP things. You might write about how lawyers specifically use their phones. Because as you know, different types of businesses think that they are incredibly different to all of the others. Whereas actually you and I know that certainly for something like VoIP or just basic cybersecurity, 90% of businesses are the same as all businesses.
Paul Green:
So they have some differences. Like, lawyers will have probably some legal needs to record calls, or maybe even toggle off the ability to record calls if they're having a private conference with the client. There might be something to do with the IVR or maybe some kind of... I don't know. Who knows? And that's the point. You would find out those details and you would write all about that. So any lawyer, anyone who's running a legal practice in California, who is looking for a new phone system, if they get onto that site, they realise that you are the authority in that particular thing.
Paul Green:
Now there is actually a huge SEO benefit of creating an authority site in the first place, which is, if a lawyer in California is... Well, first of all, a colleague might refer them to it. So a colleague might say, "Hey, have you seen, there's an entire website about VoIP systems for lawyers in California?" That's the first thing. But also, if they're Googling in any way, VoIP systems for lawyers and they're in California, the chances of them getting onto your website are high once that authority site is established. And then, of course, because they perceive you to be the authority in that specific subject, when they come to you, nine times out of 10, they're coming to you to buy. They are ready to buy. And because you are the perceived authority, they will expect to pay a little bit more than they would a generalist, even though they're actually just buying from a generalist who has an authority website.
Paul Green:
Do you see the power of this? Isn't this sexy? So this is why I said, this is only really applicable to around about 20% of MSPs, because most MSPs, you struggle to get your general marketing done. Well, if you're in that position where you've done your general marketing, this is the next step. It's the next level for you. The question to ask yourself is, which vertical or which niche do I want to utterly dominate? And then go and build yourself an authority site. And it is all about content, content, content, content, content. Of course, you've got to drive some traffic towards it. Of course, you've got to spend some money on it. It's either time or money. There's a lot of energy that needs to go into this, but it will allow you to utterly dominate a specific vertical. It's very, very exciting.
Paul Green:
And the way to get started is just to say, right, who do I want to dominate? Which area is there a huge opportunity that I would like to go for? And from there you just go on and you build yourself an authority site. It's a very exciting thing. And you know what, if you do it, I would love to hear it from you. Will you drop me an email and let me know if this is the kind of thing you've done, or if you're going to do it off the back of this podcast. My email address is
[email protected].
Voiceover:
Paul's blatant plug.
Paul Green:
Talking of immersing yourself in a subject, we have so much content available to help you with your MSP's marketing. One of the things we've recently started putting a lot of our own time and energy and money into is our YouTube channel. I've been in a professional studio, a couple of times filming videos. I had like a makeup artist and a clapper board and everything. It's ever so exciting. But we also are now the podcast. If you're listening to this on one of the audio platforms, it is actually available on YouTube, not just as an audio, but with me on camera as well. Because apparently we discovered a couple of months ago that YouTube is one of the most used podcast platforms. So we figured it's time to do a proper video version of this podcast as well. There's so much content and help for you to grow your MSP and you'll find it all at youtube.com/mspmarketing.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Mike Andrews:
Hi, I'm Mike Andrews from NovaBACKUP. We are a backup solution for both on-premise and cloud, and we focus mainly on MSPs globally.
Paul Green:
And I'm delighted to have you here on the podcast, Mike, because I know that you've been in the channel for an exceedingly long time, and it's kind of rare to meet and to interview people who've been in the channel for, I was about to say multiple decades, which makes you sound like you're very old, which obviously you're not, but for someone who's been in the channel and hasn't sort of left it and been burned out by it. How long have you been working in the channel?
Mike Andrews:
I've been in the, I guess you can call it MSP channel for 25 years. I mean, I earned this gray hair. I was the young guy at one time, and then all of a sudden I'm not. But it's been a great progression. Again, like I said, this industry has given a lot to us. We were around before the term managed service provider existed. It was called application service providers back in the day. And so we've worked with some pretty major companies during that time and lot of success from that.
Paul Green:
Some of those major companies, I want to talk about a little later in the interview. Let's go back then to the mid '90s. Obviously the technology world is completely different. I mean, it couldn't be any more different to the world of technology that we're in today. You try giving an 11 year old a Windows 95 machine, and I don't think they would know what to do with it. It's so completely different. So take us back to the start of your career and just sort of tell us what you were doing, how you got started, and what were the big milestones as you moved forward from there?
Mike Andrews:
Yeah. Well, I started out in data protection software in the mid '90s, I guess you could say, and it was all based around encryption and antivirus at the time. Then I was acquired actually by NovaStor, which is the company that owns NovaBACKUP and is all part of that family. So I came on there and at the same time they were bringing out a technology that focused on cloud-based backup, or at that time it wasn't called cloud. It was just backing up to a server offsite.
Mike Andrews:
You talked about the evolution. So from the 1990s to today, I mean, we took that entire journey with our partners. And you've gone from the original partners who were more the, I guess you could say bleeding edge kind of people. So you got people who are maybe retiring from companies, major corporations that wanted to start something new and exciting, or maybe fresh graduates that were coming on. And they were adopting this odd, strange technology of offsite backup. And when you're talking like 14.4 modems or 56k even in the good days, the speeds that they're working with taking a large amount of data and putting it offsite was just unheard of and untimely. It was like, it took forever for the data to go offsite. So we had to find ways to build technology that allowed you to take your data down to the smallest fragments to be able to put it over the wire, pretty much. So, it was quite a difficult business model to start with.
Paul Green:
But that must have been such a hard sell to the people that ultimately bought from you because, as you say, it would've been easier back then just to have backed it all up onto tape or some kind of external drive or something, and just take that drive away from the office.
Mike Andrews:
Yeah. True. And as I said, the people that we were attracting back then were kind of dreamers. They were sort of saying, "I see this vision." And we were a little bit ahead of our time as well. And so they see this vision of taking data offsite. What's better than that? If you have a natural disaster locally, you can recover your information from offsite. So we were in with that, we had to develop ways to be able to do what they call block-level differencing or binary, like bit-level differencing that allowed us to get information over the line quickly. The biggest problem always was the initial backup is when someone wants to take in those days, say, gigabytes of information and put it over the line, it would take forever.
Mike Andrews:
So we had to find ways to do what we call seeding, and that was being able to put it to a device and be able to send us that device, and then we can put it in the cloud. We also had a lot of people host their own clouds at that time. Through the evolution from the 1990s to today, now we focus on MSPs, which are a much more intelligent market, as far as what was first starting there. They were the trailblazers in the early days. And now you've got people who understand what backup is. They understand services. They understand the cloud. And that just makes it all the more exciting and easier to move a solution like this.
Paul Green:
Yes, I bet. Looking back then at that late '90s, early '00s, from a marketing and sales point of view, how do you sell something to someone which A, they probably don't understand and, B, is technologically really difficult compared to all of the other solutions they could pick?
Mike Andrews:
Well, yeah, it was. But at that time, there was a lot of companies, larger companies mainly, that were looking to run a whole suite of cloud-based or offsite-based services, so services over the internet. And so a lot of the people came to us that were fairly prepared on taking this on. They just were not prepared for how to handle data offsite and we helped bridge that gap. But I came from an encryption world and back in the early days of encryption, when you're talking like the early '90s and that, that was almost impossible to sell, because nobody totally understood what encryption was or how to use encryption. It's part of life as it is today.
Mike Andrews:
So when I got to backup, it was actually quite a relief to get to that world because it was so much easier than encryption to explain. And encryption was just a small part of backup, a very important part of backup, but it's just a small part. So it was a good way to transition into that. Most of the companies we were talking with at that time, as I said, were either these young entrepreneurs or these established large organisations that were looking to add services. So to drop a name, I guess, I don't know if it's exciting to drop a name like Compact. This is acquired by HP over the years, but they came out with these Compact online services. They're one of the first ones in the industry to do this. And backup was the only successful service that they launched in there.
Mike Andrews:
So there was a need at all times to be able to have data offsite. It was just a matter of how you did it and how you were able to basically make it the most efficient way possible. And that's why we developed the bit-level differencing that we were able to do to send information in very small amounts and only do the changes in files as opposed to the entire file every time because of the slow connections.
Paul Green:
I remember Compact. In fact, my first PC, it wasn't my first computer, but my first PC was a Compact back in, oh, we must be talking 1988, '89. It was actually some kind of portable device that was this big CRT monitor and the computer and then the keyboard sort of latched onto the front. But I remember playing Elite back on that, back in the day. That was so cool. Who were some of the other big companies that you worked with? Because I'd imagine some kind of cutting-edge business like this was attracting a lot of, as you've already said, attention from entrepreneurs.
Mike Andrews:
Yeah. I mean, it's not all nostalgia, of course. I mean, we're dealing with large companies and lots of exciting companies today as well. But back then, when we broke ground, we were working with the AOLs of the world. As I mentioned, Compact earlier. Telefónica who is the largest Spanish telecommunications company. And then we had a regular OEM business. So we were one of the first in the backup world. So we were one of the first Windows backup solutions and we were definitely the first Windows cloud backup solutions. That was a big differentiator for us. We had no competition at the start because there was really no market. Our only other competitor was a DOS backup player. So being able to come into that market was quite interesting, but it did attract a lot of the bigger companies, like the ones I mentioned. But even on the OEM side, we did IBM. We were actually the OS/2 backup for IBM, Sony, Fujitsu, Toshiba, kind of the name behind the names over our history.
Paul Green:
Yeah. That's really impressive. Tell us a little bit about what are you doing today? What's the company today and what does it look like? Obviously it's a very crowded market in the backup space. So what makes you different now compared to all of your competitors?
Mike Andrews:
Okay. Well, what makes us different, I guess... I always tell this story and I hope you will have time for a story here, for a quick story, but I always have to tell the story where I go to a tire shop with my son and we're getting new tires for his car. And I go up to the counter and I know my son's only driving locally. I know he's not only just using the car to go back and forth from school and work. So I don't need the best tires. I don't need the highest performance tires. So I walk in, walk up to the counter and I say, "Give me your cheapest tires that you have." And the guy's like, "Oh no, you don't want the cheapest tires. You want to have these tires, especially when it's your child." And I said, "Are you going to sell me unsafe tires?" He's like, "No, of course not. That's not what our company does." And I said, "Give me the cheapest tires, please."
Mike Andrews:
So it was more along the lines of backup is the same. You can't survive in the backup industry unless you can recover data, unless you can do it consistently. And so all the solutions out there on the market are good. And the difference is how you work with your customers, what you do, what makes you different? I would say there are some features that we have, some features that they don't have. And so it's not necessarily who is good or who is bad. They all work. It's what fits your business better. We're not the 800 pound gorilla. So in the tire situation, we're not Costco. Every tire place sells multiple brands of tires and you can get those tires at any tire place. But why do you pick the tire place that you go to and why do you stay loyal to them? Why do you keep going back to that tire place is because they have a certain quality, they mesh with you, they blend with you, they understand you.
Mike Andrews:
And so we work with these MSPs that are not the largest MSPs. We focus on MSPs that are like us. We're the fighters in the industry. We're helping them. We're all the same goal. Let's get some recurring revenue going. Let's grow our businesses. Let's increase our customer base. Let's increase the business within our existing customer base. And so we have the same goals. And so we look at things very much the same as them. What that has done is that taught us to look at the market from their perspective and say, what do they need? What they need was the ability to customise our business, to suit with how they run their business. So we're one of the only solutions out there that doesn't lock you into our cloud or our hardware. There's a lot of players out there that you've got to buy their entire system. It is easier to manage entire systems like that because everything's identical across the board.
Mike Andrews:
A lot of our customers, they run their own data centers. We host data in our data centers. So they have the option of using that. If you want to go into S3 or using like object storage or that you can do that. So we're flexible. It does make our team have to understand more technologies and be able to not have this one cookie-cutter approach to the market. But it's what makes us different and it allows us to adapt to how our customers run their business. All of our technicians have been MSPs at one time. They've worked with MSPs. So they understand that world, that that's a constantly running understaffed world that's always being challenged. And so that's kind of how they have that mindset. And so when someone's talking to them, we don't want to tell them to turn their machine on and off or wiggle the cable. We want to tell them what their problem is or at least understand what their problem is to go from there.
Mike Andrews:
And then from the business perspective, what makes us different is we're simple and transparent. We're all-inclusive licensing. You pay one price, you get everything. You can see how much you're going to pay. You don't need a calculator. You don't need an Excel spreadsheet. You don't need a whole engineering degree to figure out how much you're going to pay for this service. It's very clear upfront. And a lot of people enjoy that.
Paul Green:
Yes.
Mike Andrews:
Another thing is cloud backup is very important, but there's a lot of companies out there that lead with, "We're cloud first," or, "We're cloud backup." And it's like, no, we're all in the business for data recovery first. We're not there for the backup, we're there for the recovery. And that's where we want to put it first. So whether you're local or in the cloud, or on premise and that, we want to make sure that you can get your data back the fastest way possible and not just lock you into one silo kind of thing. So, that was one thing that we take into our thought process when we put this service together.
Paul Green:
Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Mike. Just tell us what your website address is.
Mike Andrews:
Yeah. It's www.novabackup.com.
Voiceover:
Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast. This week's recommended book.
Al Alper:
Hi, my name is Al Alper with CyberGuard360. And the book I recommend every business owner read is called The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. And it is about the application by Professor Goldratt using the theory of constraints. It's a brilliant book on how to operationalise around the most constrained part of your business to maximise efficiency.
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Fiona Challis:
Hi, there. I'm Fiona Challis. I'm an MSP sales expert, and I'm really looking forward to being on Paul Green's podcast next week, where I'm going to be sharing with you, how you can take a slice of the growth pie in the managed service market. The market spend is predicted to go to 329 billion by 2025. And in the podcast, I'm going to be sharing little tips on how you can get a slice of the growth pie, how to win, how to grow, and how to retain new clients. So really looking forward to being on the podcast with Paul.
Paul Green:
Do subscribe to the podcast, wherever you listen so you never miss an episode. Fiona's going to be a great interview next week. We'll also be talking about running the business by the numbers, what are the most important numbers, and how do you get the information out of them, and answering the question whether or not you should ever buy a client out of a contract with another MSP. Now, as I mentioned earlier, we have a ton of extra content for you at youtube.com/mspmarketing. And 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.
