Episode 174: Should MSPs do lunch & learns?

Episode 174 • March 14, 2023 • 00:35:40
Episode 174: Should MSPs do lunch & learns?
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 174: Should MSPs do lunch & learns?

Mar 14 2023 | 00:35:40

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Hosted By

Paul Green

Show Notes

Episode 174

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

Featured guest:

Thank you to Dan Albaum, Marketing Leader and Author of ‘The Impact Makers’, for joining me to talk about leadership and the 'servant leader mindset'. With nearly 30 years of B2B marketing experience at leading companies including Verizon Wireless, Cisco, Honeywell and Amer Sports, Dan excels in helping companies develop the right strategies, programs, metrics and processes for Go-To-Market excellence.  From integrated demand generation campaigns to new product launch planning to scalable channel marketing to generating quality market insights for fully leveraging brand power, Dan brings his highly collaborative approach in helping client companies meet their business objectives. Connect with Dan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danalbaum/

Extra show notes:

Transcription:

Voiceover: Fresh every Tuesday, for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Good day to the, and welcome back to the podcast. Here's what we got coming up for you this week. Dan Albaum: Hi, I'm Dan Albaum. I'm marketing leader and author of The Impact Makers: Voices of Leadership. And I'll be sharing with you some of the key learnings from the book about how global exceptional leaders drive improved performance based on a servant leader mindset. Paul Green: So on top of that great interview with Dan, we're also going to be talking about the value of lunch and learns. Are they still a great way to warm up prospects and turn them into clients? Voiceover: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: I thought we'd start this week by talking about an advanced marketing strategy, something that you can only really start to focus on and concentrate your efforts on if you've already got the basics in place. What do I consider to be the basics? Well, you've got your fundamentals. So things like getting your website as good as it can possibly be, getting your LinkedIn as good as it could be, those are your kind of your two basic MSP fundamentals. But then you've got some other basics to do as well. So getting a good lead generation system put into place where you've got the ability to generate leads, build audiences, build a relationship with those audiences, and ultimately commercialize them. And all of the information on how to do that, it's scattered across a whole load of podcasts. In fact, if you go back to, I think it was the end of last year, I think it was the end of last year, it might be in the beginning of this year where I actually did a whole series of specials about that, about the ultimate marketing strategy for MSPs. But you'll find that's on our podcast page. But today, what I mean by advanced marketing is putting in place new things which are going to give you sort of huge advantages going forward. But often, as is the case with a lot of advanced stuff, it takes quite a lot of resource to do and it takes quite a lot of effort and you often have to wait for the payback. Now the advanced marketing strategy method that I want to talk about today is building core partnerships within the marketplace you operate. What do I mean by a partnership? I mean you find the important people or the important organizations at the center of your audiences, at the center of the people who you most want to reach, that you most want to do business with, and you find some way, any way to form a strategic partnership with them. Now, let me give you an example. So this is a real life example from one of the MSPs I work closely with. It's within a vertical, within the niche, and I'm going to change the vertical because I don't want to give the game away of what my client, and in fact, someone who's become a friend of mine is doing with his marketing. So I'm going to give it a different niche. We'll say CPAs, accountants, chartered ... What's that? What does CPA stand for? Is it chartered professional accountants? Something like that. Here in the UK we just call them accountants, but I'm conscious they're called CPAs in many other countries. So let's say it's CPAs and let's say you are in a specific area or a state or a city and you want to get more CPAs. In fact, you've decided that CPAs are the future for your business. So you've still got your general business, but you've got two, three, four, five CPAs that you work with and you want 10, 20, 30 more. This, by the way, is a great strategy in itself, keeping your general business that got you from where you started a few years ago to sort of where you are now, but actually deciding that going forward you want to focus in just on a vertical or on a niche, on a niche. This is a very smart thing to do and what a lot of MSPs do around about 10 to 15 years in. So let's say it's CPAs. Let's say it's CPAs within 100 mile radius and let's say there's more than enough of them because you only want 20 or 30 more of them and you are happy with that. That would be a good stop point for you. What can you do to reach those people? Well, a lot of the basic marketing tactics I was talking about at the beginning you can do, so building audiences of CPAs and building a relationship with them and commercializing that relationship, which is often done by the phone. And having a website that's focused on CPAs and a LinkedIn that's focused on CPAs. All of those things are, as I say, they're basics to do. The advanced stuff comes from building partnerships then with people that they consider to be important. Who do CPAs consider to be important? Well, we could kind of have a guess at this, even if we don't really understand how CPAs work. First of all, their regulators. In fact their regulators are top of the important scale 'cause their regulators have the ability to find them, to put them out of business and they probably have to be registered with some organizations or do some CPD or something in some way. So often, even though they're a pain, regulators sort of sit at the top of the important scale. Who are the other people that are important to them? Well, there will be industry bodies, industry associations. There'll be some that they have to be a member of maybe, and then there'll be others that they choose to be a member of because they find them quite useful. Then there will be other organizations within their world. For example, there might be someone like me doing marketing for accountants. Can you imagine anything more boring? Yeah, accounting, not accounting, marketing for lawyers that would be more boring than marketing for accountants. Anyway, but there might be someone like me, like coaching accountants, helping them to grow their business. Just add up the figures. There's all sorts of people that within their sort of biosphere, because you are in the channel biosphere, in the MSP biosphere and they're in the CPA biosphere and there will be a whole series of people in there. So the challenge for you is to go and meet with those people, if you can, and slowly over time build some organic relationships and become more and more and more important to them. For example, you might, let's take one of those or let's take the guy that does marketing for accountants. What does that guy want? So what does anyone want? They want more new business. He will want more new clients. He will want to sell more to his existing clients, which is your in, and he will want to get his existing clients to buy more every single time they buy from him because those are the only three ways to grow a business. And if he's good at marketing for accountants, he'll understand that. So you could seek out this person. You could offer him something to help. For example, you could say, "Hey, I work with accountants in the same area as you. You and I have the same clients, but we're not in competition with each other. What could I do to help you? What could I do to make your life easier?" And what you're looking to do is you're looking to build some value quickly and early on for this person. So it would make sense to go with someone like this, someone that's got a more commercial offering early on and you build some value for them. Now that would be a conversation that you would have with them. For example, you might have something that they can sell to their clients or you might have information or advice or something of huge value that they can pass on to their members or something like that. You don't really know until you have the conversation. And you may have to have two or three conversations. You may have to meet up for lunch or for coffee, but that's the point. This requires an investment in time and in resource, and there's no fast way of doing it because the whole point here is to build a solid relationship with someone. But at some point there's going to be something you can help them with and that's where this really becomes quite exciting and the power comes into it from your point of view. You can do something for them. They, as part of that, expose you to the accountants, to the CPAs that they are working with. And that is what you want. Because suddenly now you have a strategic partnership with them. And you may try and do something back the other way. That's the smart play, is where they rely on you for something and you rely on them for something. This is coming towards being a real strategic partnership. And at that point they're telling their clients about you. You're telling your CPA clients about them. And that's the kind of thing that could go on for a number of years. You could speak at each other's events. You could back each other up. You could form parts of groups. It might be that if they had meetings that you go along to meetings and you talk about technology for CPAs, you don't get paid for any of this. But what you are getting to do is you get to be the authority in the room or the authority on the webinar in front of exactly the kind of people that you want to reach. And that is beautiful. Now, once you've done those sort of commercial relationships, because those are the easiest ones to start, what you're looking to move up to, you're kind of moving up to where the regulator at the top is the ultimate destination. So along the way you were trying to do the same thing with some associations or some memberships or the insurance companies that look after them. You look at everyone, their whole biosphere, who's around and who can we build a relationship with? And you won't be able to do it with everyone. Some of them will be closed shops, literally their arms are folded, they don't want to know you, they're not interested. It might be some kind of old boys club or something like that. You just have to kind of see how it goes. But as I said, one of the MSPs I'm working closely with, in his vertical, he has managed to work his way up into the regulator. And it's been about three years work. He's done so much work. So he's been to all the trade shows. He's a speaker. He's an exhibitor. He writes endlessly. He markets endlessly. His job is not delivering the tech in the business. He has great staff to do that for him. His job is being the face of the business and building partnerships and all the other things that are important. And over a period of time he's worked his way into the regulator where now they're working together on a project about the future of technology in that vertical, which is beautiful. And it was a little bit of being in the right place and the right vertical at the right time. So luck, absolutely, well, luck, great timing, which is luck, great timing, played a part in that. But he was there and he was ready. And he was very open to we are going to build strategic partnerships because now he is the number one go-to technology partner in his vertical. And you could throw another 20 MSPs into that vertical and they will struggle to catch up because of the headstart that he's gotten. We are talking in three years, I would say he's done 10 years worth of work. It's very, very impressive. And if he's listening to this, I'm sure you'll know I'm talking about you and I'm genuinely not gobsmacked is the right word, but proud of what you've done because you've done an incredible amount of work in three years. But anyone can do it. It might take you more than three years. You can do it. You've got to put those strategic partnerships together. So some actions from this bit for you. Number one is if you don't have a vertical or a niche or a niche, please do think about it. The easiest place to start is who are you already working with? If you have two or three of them, you are already in a vertical. You just have to have a marketing mindset to expand that vertical. The second thing then is if you are there, what strategic partnerships can you build? Who's important to you? Who are the big authority figures that your potential future clients are already listening to? And what's in it for them to have a decent in-depth conversation with you? There's an idea that's been around for years, and years and years, and I think COVID killed it. And I'm not quite sure if it's come back or not, but if it hasn't come back, if you are not doing this, embracing this idea, then there's an opportunity for you here. What's the idea? It's the lunch and learn. It's simply getting a small number of prospects into a room. You give them some lunch and you teach them some stuff they didn't know before. Preferably you don't just teach them, you don't just educate them, you also entertain them, which is of course edutainment. The concept of getting people in a room, even if it's just for 60 to 90 minutes and embracing them, involving them into your world and positioning yourself as that authority figure, which we were just talking about, it's so, so powerful. In fact, it's one of the most powerful things that you can do. 60 minutes or 90 minutes spent with someone in a room can jump your relationship forward by a factor of X. It's such a dramatic thing to do. And yet so few MSPs are doing this. Now, so few were doing it before the lockdown in 2020 ended, all of that kind of stuff. And I don't hear people talking about it that much. I mean maybe you are doing it, maybe other MSPs are doing it. I'm not saying it isn't happening, but it doesn't seem to have rebounded in the way that big events have done and a number of other real life things have done. If you've ever done lunch and learns in the past, maybe it's time for you to think about it. If you've never done them, I would definitely think about it. In fact, you could do one, two, maybe even three just as an experiment. Give it a go. See what happens. Now what's the hardest thing with a lunch and learn? Let me tell you. It's getting people to actually attend and turn up in the room. In my last business, which I sold in 2016, which was a marketing business for optometrists, opticians, veterinarians, vets and dentists, we basically drove much of that business. We had a big telesales operation and we had a big field sales, but we did a lot of events as well. So I would go around the country with my sales people and we'd put on free seminars and we experimented with just mornings, afternoons, evenings, all days, two days lunch and learns. And I think that the one-day format was the one that we settled on, but that was because we were selling people ... Well, we were trying to paint a vision of how their business could be if they improved their marketing. And we needed that day to sort of get them into the emotional state where they realized that actually the key to fixing their business, and of course you fix your business, you fix a lot of problems, the key to fixing their business was about marketing. I think for technology, a lunch and learn, a 90-minute lunch and learn is more than enough. But when we were running those seminars, we would have 20 or 30 people say they were going to attend a seminar and then you'd get 10 turn up. Now, I mean 10 is not a bad number, but when you've got seven people saying they'll be there and two turn up, that's not a seminar. That's an awkward conversation between someone who's paid a lot of money to hire a room for a day and two people who are sitting there with their arms folded saying, "Come on, entertain me," or, "Educate me," especially when one of them leaves at lunchtime. So that's a difficult thing to do. So that was our constant battle with our events, was getting people to turn up. Now you may have exactly the same thing, 'cause when we're talking here about is not getting existing clients to turn up for lunch and learn. In fact, you could mix your clients and your prospects. That's actually a pretty smart thing to do. You have a couple of clients mixing with four or five prospects because of course over lunch the clients talk and they say that, "Oh yeah, actually these guys look after our IT and they're amazing." Obviously you don't put unhappy clients in the room, you only have happy clients, satisfied clients. But the hardest thing is getting people in the room. So how do you do that? I'll tell you how. You make the value ... Well, there's a number of things you do. The first thing is you make the value of what you're going to give them on the day so huge that they really wouldn't want to miss it. For example, you might do something about cybersecurity. Now ordinary people on the whole don't really understand cybersecurity. They can't describe ransomware. They've never really, most of them haven't actually seen it. It's not as real a thing to them as it is to you and to me. You see ransomware and cyber crime on a regular basis. I obviously do a lot of marketing around it and I have seen a ton of videos about it as well. So it's very real and it's a big thing to us. To them it's not. So you have to position cyber crime in a very specific way or cybersecurity because if you say to them, "Please come to a lunch and learn about cybersecurity and ransomware," that doesn't tick the box. That doesn't float the boat. You've got to make it more interesting to them. So it might be that you perhaps do some dark web scanning. Literally they're in the room, they're in the room. We will, completely free of charge, we'll do a $500 dark web scan on your domain. It's confidential. It'll stay within the realms of the room and obviously nothing confidential will get out, but you'll know whether or not any personal information from your business has been leaked or is for sale on the dark web. So something like that might be more intriguing to people than just a lecture about cybersecurity. So you have to make the value proposition really high because when you ask someone for 90 minutes and you're not asking them for cash, but I would argue 90 minutes of their time is more valuable than asking them for say, a couple of hundred dollars because that time is finite. Money really is infinite. I know it doesn't feel like that when you're trying to meet payroll, but money is infinite. There's tons of money out there. Your job is just to go and get more of it and collect it in and put it into your bank account instead of one of your competitor's bank accounts. But time is finite. When the time is gone, there is no more of it. So you have to focus really hard on painting that value. This is why a lunch and learn is kind of a value add because hey, it's only lunch. You get a free lunch and it's 90 minutes and you might learn something while you're at it. So that actually ticks the box as well. The other thing is you need to follow these people up well. So if they register for something three, four weeks out, you need to make sure that you're following them up a week before. "Just checking that you're still attending. We've got you down for this. We've only got 10 places and we currently have 13 people registered. So please can you let me know will you definitely be there." When someone books, you send them an email, you send them a calendar invitation, you actually send them something in the post. You literally mail or ship them a letter confirming their appointment. We did that and our attending rate went up in the last business. The other thing that you do is you only ever do one of each event. We learned this the hard way. If you do 10 events, people book in for the first event and then they all cancel the day before because you know what it's like. We all commit to things, and then we get to the day and we think, "Ah, I can't be bothered." But actually if there's a glimmer of interest in the back of their head and there is no other event to book onto, then that will force some people to attend. And there's kind of another clever little things that you can do giving them gifts. That could be merch or it could be a book. You could say, in fact, this worked really well, on the day we'll give you a $20 Amazon gift voucher and 10 of the best business growth books that we've ever read as a recommendation. So like a list of a recommendation. So they could take that $20 home and spend it on cat food or they could ... Do they sell cat food on Amazon? Of course they do. They sell everything on Amazon. Or they could send it on the business book recommendations. You get the idea. So you kind of have to over oversell and over egg the pudding on the lunch and learn. But I do believe it's worth it because you will get people in the room and you've got their attention for 90 minutes. You are the authority for 90 minutes. And it doesn't matter whether or not you are a confident public speaker, it really doesn't matter, as long as your content is interesting. And in fact, if you are not a confident public speaker, the worst thing you could do is over PowerPoint it. "Hello everyone. Welcome. We've got a 612 slide PowerPoint for you in the next 90 minutes." That may make you feel a little more confident because there's content there ready. But the reality is if you're not a confident public speaker, the passion for technology and protecting people that you have deep in your heart is way, way better than 500 slides of PowerPoint. You might want a few bullet points, so you know the areas to go to, but live dark web scanning someone is a great thing to do, live looking at someone's security or examining them or questioning them or doing a Q&A session, all of those things are much more interesting than death by PowerPoint. So if this is something you've ever thought about doing or you just want to try something new, please do try a lunch and learn. Do you know what? I'd be fascinated to hear how you get on and to hear how ordinary people are responding to lunch and learns right now about subjects like cybersecurity. Why don't you let me know how you got on? You can drop me an email. My email is [email protected]. If you love being inspired with new ideas to improve the marketing of your MSP, which ultimately gets you more new clients and more money in through the door, then you will love our YouTube channel. We are adding new videos all the time, sparking you off with clever ideas, clever marketing strategies and tactics that you can use to make more money from your MSP. Go and have a look now. We're at youtube.com/mspmarketing. Dan Albaum: Hello, I'm Dan Albaum. I'm a marketing leader and author of The Impact Makers and I'm fully passionate and committed to the idea of exceptional leadership built on a servant leader mindset. Paul Green: And we're going to explore exactly what a servant leader mindset is later on in this interview. Dan, it's an absolute pleasure to have you here on the podcast. I think I was on your podcast around about a couple of years ago, so it's wonderful to finally be able to turn the tables and get you onto this show. And we're going to talk about your book. It's called The Impact Makers. Tell us what this book is about, why every MSP should get a copy. Dan Albaum: Well, Paul, this book, The Impact Makers: Voices of Leadership is all about sharing best practices and sharing the passion and the learning of more than 75 successful global leaders around the world in their journey towards delivering exceptional leadership. And the common thread behind this exceptional journey is a servant leader mindset, which is really focusing on the growth and the wellbeing of team members and their communities and not putting yourself as the leader first, but really thinking first about empowering your teams to achieve everything that they can. Paul Green: And leadership is one of those things that so many MSPs really, really struggle with. Take us through the themes of the book and what the big picture messages are. Dan Albaum: What we do in the book is really break down this idea of exceptional leadership into six guiding principles. And I think this is something that every leader within an MSP can really take to heart and apply to their organization. The first is around developing and nurturing a culture of innovation, to think differently, to think outside the box. And I think in today's disruptive environment, we can all relate to the benefits of really differentiating through an innovative culture. The second principle is around the importance of developing healthy, trusted, and aligned relationships. Whether it's one-to-one peer-to-peer or we think about teams within an organization or we think about ecosystems, MSPs can probably relate to this of organization to organization, the power of that trusted, authentic relationship will win over time and it's another key source of delivering exceptional leadership. The third principle is around valuing diversity, diversity in thought, diversity of experience when you look at the composition of your organization. And that can take on a lot of different forms in terms of levels of experience from mature to entry level, in terms of industry experience. It certainly has in terms of being diverse, in terms of just socioeconomic representation. A lot of different ways to define diversity, but the one common thread of success is that organizations that do value diversity, and there have been studies on this, Paul, do outperform those that are not. So a really critical concept to remember. The next principle is around data and leveraging data to make improved decisions over time. How to establish a consistent and a disciplined process to know what is truly important and not to get overwhelmed in a sea of data, but rather be selective in really leveraging the data that will lead to the most important decisions. So that's the next principle. And then from that, as any leader in an organization, your behaviors in terms of exceptional leadership is a model for others in the organization. And so what are the things you need to think about? Again, beginning with the servant leader mindset, but what are the things that you exhibit that are observed and hopefully copied by others within an organization to deliver on that? And then the last principle, and this was one Paul, you talk about in the book, which is the power of an optimistic mindset. So we're not talking about process, we're not talking necessarily even about behaviors, but here it's a mindset and a perspective that is optimistic, that is energetic and that brings that in a contagious way into the organization and driving future strategy. Paul Green: Yes, I remember you and me talking about that some point in the past, and it's so cool to see yourself in a book, by the way. So thank you so much for including my little contribution into that. I mean you've done all the work here. You've done a great deal of work to look at those six big principles of great leadership. And what do you say to your everyday business owner who is just busy, busy, busy and doesn't really have a lot of time to think about this kind of stuff? Dan Albaum: We all deal with that in our busy professional lives, Paul, where sometimes it just feels like there's just more things to do than we can possibly have enough hours in the day to do. But at the end of the day, if you accept and understand, and the track record proves this out on the importance of that servant leader mindset and the focus on people and on empowering people, if you start there and you start engaging with your teams before just being focused on what are the outputs of your organization. Look a little inward, start engaging with your team, really do an honest assessment. Are you really maximizing the performance and the capabilities of the teams, of the people you've got in your organization? And what are their inputs? What do they feel is working well? What do they feel they're falling short in? And then build from the inside out an approach and a process that ultimately will optimize your team's contributions. And that's probably going to involve some discomfort for some of your leaders that are maybe used to managing in a more hierarchical, traditional way that's focused more about their objectives, and then translating those objectives into the outputs of their teams. But turning it around to say, how do I remove the barriers and how do I better empower my teams to accomplish more? And by starting on the inside, Paul, my experience certainly in working with a lot of tech companies, and I think this would be the case for your MSP clients as well, you'll see amazing results over time because you should be able to more passionately engage with your clients. And clients can see that. That's transparent. When you are aligned in your organization and you're empowering your teams, there's an aura about that. When you go out and you engage with your clients, that is a positive reflection of your commitment as a leader in your organization. So from a competitive standpoint, you're doing it. Some of your competitors are probably not doing it. And it's going to give you a leg up. So inside, focus inside, and then take that to the outside for competitive advantage. Paul Green: You mentioned earlier discomfort, when you're going through a process like that. I think sometimes the discomfort is, it's almost, it's an internal notification from us that we are doing something brand new because as humans, we don't like being uncomfortable. We are driven to be comfortable. Dan Albaum: That's right. Paul Green: But that was when we were cave dwellers. And now we have the ability to think bigger and to imagine going places that we've never been before. Something else that you mentioned, Dan was, and you've mentioned it a couple of times, was the servant leadership. Can you explain exactly what that is? Dan Albaum: It really flips the script in terms of traditional models of leadership where you think about myself as a leader of an organization or a team. Typically, I've got more experience, I've got more seniority. So the temptation might be to rely on that title and that authority structure to impose my will and to pose my view. And then it's really about, oh, well, my team just needs to execute on my vision and my objectives, and this is about what I've laid out and they're helping me be successful. It flips the script on that to really say, as a leader, it really says, set your ego aside and think about being an enabler. Your biggest gift to the organization, I found this to be the case in my experience, maybe how will you develop your people and get them to elevate their performance and contribute more to the organization that could have ever been thought possible before. What this means is what are those blockers? What is the trust that you're willing to place in your next line of leadership? Sure, you've got to agree on overall objectives and there's accountability around overall team achieving its goal. But at the end of the day, knowing when to step out of the way and let them be fully empowered, help remove those obstacles to their success, give them the resources they need, and you'll be amazed at what happens in terms of morale, in terms of the passion, in terms of the confidence, and then ultimately just watching people grow, be able to be promoted, be able to contribute more in new and different ways. That's the telltale sign of a leader. If you can generate that, that's the long-term test. Not just the imposition of your specific view of what the team should be doing. Paul Green: Yeah, I love it. So exciting. Final thing I wanted to reflect on. You mentioned earlier as well using data. So when you talk about data, specifically what kind of data, how would you collect it, how would you best use it to improve your leadership position? Dan Albaum: We are in a time, there's never been more availability of data and information that pertains to our business. It may be transactional information in terms of our customer transactions. It could be data around our product performance from a revenue, from a profit perspective. We are literally swimming in data. But what so many organizations find out is that you can be overwhelmed, you can have too much data and not know what are the most important questions to ask. How to manage your progress using that data into translating that into specific decisions? An analogy I use in the book. I take a very personal experience. I'm a guy that is very active. I've been very fitness oriented my whole life, worked at a fitness company for several years. But to me, breaking down your goals, you may have significant big, hairy, audacious goals, BHAGs. We all have them. But that can be overwhelming if you break that goal down into more manageable small increments. It's amazing over time, the cumulative effect of time. It's like the time value equation for interest on your money. It's like the cumulative interest that builds over time. And my example was I was motivated by a friend to really take on a personal journey for a pushup challenge to raise money for veterans that are committing suicide at unbelievably high rates. And as part of that, this was a 22 pushup challenge. I did the challenge over 22 days, 22 pushups, and that sparked the next challenge working with my personal trainer, to say, "Well, where can I go next?" And I came up with a gold in eight months to max out the number of pushups I could do in 60 seconds. But we didn't just start and doing the max out at 60 seconds. What we did was we started at 20 seconds and we did a one-second increment per every Friday for 40 weeks to build up my strength over time to be able to do more pushups. And you know, Paul? At the end of the year, after completing that challenge, I look back and I ask my trainer, "How many pushups did I do in total," because we recorded everything. I did more than 17,000 pushups. Paul Green: Wow. Dan Albaum: The lesson here is that if you would've told me at the beginning of that journey, Paul, "Dan, we're going to start training and you're going to do 17,000 pushups over the next eight months," you know where I would've been? I would've run for the hills. Okay? Paul Green: Yeah. Dan Albaum: I would've run away. But the lesson of just one second per week, not that much. But then you're building your strength. You're growing and heading towards achieving that final goal. So small increment goals. Break it down. Paul Green: I love that. I love it. You're absolutely right. I mean, the thoughts for me of doing seven pushups is too much. Dan, thank you so much. You've been such a great guest. Tell us where we can get hold of your book, the Impact Makers, and also how can we get in touch with you as well? Dan Albaum: Impact Makers out available wherever you buy books, on Amazon, certainly barnesandnoble.com available in both the ebook version and printed paperback. So very easy to find. And if you have questions, feedback, want to reach out and contact me, you can find me at [email protected]. Voiceover: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. This week's recommended book. Marcus Sheridan: Hey folks, I'm Marcus Sheridan, the author of They Ask, You Answer, and the book that I got to recommend to you because it's really changed my life, changed my business in many, many ways, is Good to Great by Jim Collins. I've listened to it over and over again, and there's this one principle that has helped me so much when I was debating about what should I do, what should I do? It's called The Hedgehog Concept. And in a nutshell, what it means is understanding what can you be the best in the world at? Yes, what are you passionate about, but what can you be the best in the world at? What can you really just find your mojo with? And for me, because I understood hedgehog concept, I was able to say, "All right, I don't want to be all things to all people. I need to have a clear lane." And because we got in that lane, it completely changed our business. So Good to Great by Jim Collins. Voiceover: Coming up. Coming up next week. Jeff Felten: Hey there, I'm Jeff Felten from contentremedy.co, and I will be on the show next week to talk about email marketing, most specifically lead magnets and welcome sequences and how an effective lead magnet and welcome sequence can help you turn more prospects into leads, nurture relationships better, and obviously get more sales from email marketing. Paul Green: Wherever you are listening to or watching this podcast right now, please do subscribe so that you never miss an episode. 'Cause on top of that interview for next week, we'll also be talking about how to remove all the friction from your sales, make it easier for people to buy from you, and more people will buy. Quelle surprise. Yeah, I just did a bit of French there. Don't forget, we have loads more content at youtube.com/mspmarketing. 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.
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