Episode 223: Could you buy another MSP?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Fresh every Tuesday for msps around the world. Around the world, this Paul. Paul. Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast. [00:00:10] Speaker B: And hello and welcome to another fine podcast. This is what I've got lined up for you this week. [00:00:15] Speaker C: Hi, I'm Kaia Glass. I am the copywriter and brand messaging specialist. I'm going to talk to you about how important it is for sps to build credibility on their website. And we'll talk about how to use social proof to do just that. [00:00:32] Speaker B: And on top of that interview with Kaia later in the show, we're also going to look at community engagement. Can it be a useful tool to drive new business into your Paul? [00:00:43] Speaker A: Paul Greens MSP marketing podcast. [00:00:47] Speaker B: Let's start this week by asking a really big question. Could you, should you, would you grow your business by acquiring another MSP? Now, if you listen to last week's episode, episode two, two, we had a guest, Craig Fulton, and that's exactly what he was talking about, growing an MSP through acquisition. But I figured we should follow that up this week with asking whether or not that's really something that you could or should or would do. Have you even thought about acquiring another MSP? Have you perhaps decided? Yeah, this is something I want to do this year. But you're not quite sure where to go or how to get started. Is it even the right thing for you? Now, I have a tiny, tiny bit of experience in what they call m and a mergers and acquisitions. I sold a business in 2016 and I started to try and buy a number of businesses because I'm not doing it now. But if you go back to some of the early episodes of the podcast, I talk about how I was trying to buy. Well, I think it was last year or the two years ago, I was trying to buy security companies like home burglar alarm companies, that kind of things. I'd previously looked at doing what's called a roll up. A roll up is where you buy lots of types of businesses and you put them together into one company. I was doing that with veterinary surgeries. And for one reason or another, a lot of these m and a schemes of mine have never actually come off. So I've sold one business, but I've never actually yet bought something I say yet because that's kind of my retirement plan now in 1015 years time is to buy a business and to own that business, but not to run it. I think that will be something to do in my sort of late 60s, late sixty s. Yeah, sixty s, seventy s. That'll see me through to the end, I think something like that, because I don't want to actually retire. Who wants to retire? Right. You want to keep your old noggin going. Anyway, I'm getting off subject, so it's something I have looked into. I've done a ton of training on it, I've spent a ton of money on it. We got as far with some of those deals as actually commissioning lawyers, and then all those deals fell through for a number of different reasons. But one thing I do know from friends who have bought businesses and from just talking to M A experts and people like Craig, is that one of the easier acquisitions to do is when you're buying something where the company does what you already do, so you buying another MSP is an easier purchase than me going and buying a business that I've never been in before, like veterinarians or like security companies. I was trying to do something strategic, whereas what you're potentially able to do if you buy a competitor is just double the size of your business. Now, there are huge advantages for you doing this, of course, the principal one being is that when you buy another business that does what you do, you have the opportunity for some cost savings. So you might have two psas and you can go down to one psa. You would have a number of other software stuff in your stack. Right. You could just. What's the word? Put it all down into one thing. Standardize. That's the word I'm looking for. Thank you. Standardize down into one set of things and potentially get out of some contracts, you might say. Right, well, we've got five techs and we've just bought four more techs, but we don't need nine techs across the whole business. So maybe we'd either lose a couple of texts or we'd just wait through natural wastage. We wouldn't replace a couple of texts. We've now got two account managers, we don't need two account managers, et cetera, et cetera. Right down to. You can close down offices, you can get rid of buildings and whatsoever. So there are lots of efficiencies of scale when you go and buy other msps. The process itself is difficult. Now, if you've ever sold a business, which obviously you will do one day, it's kind of like buying or selling a house, but ten times worse. And buying or selling a house is difficult. I don't know what it's like where you are, but here in the UK, it's a very fraught process with lots of legals, and we have like a chain where if you're buying a house and the person you're buying, they're buying a house, and the person they're buying from is buying a house, and everyone has to exchange on the same day, and everyone has to sort of move on the same day. It's horrendous, right. And buying a business obviously doesn't have that kind of chain, but there's a lot more effort and difficulty involved in something like that. The thing is, I don't think you should let this put you off. I think as an MSP owner, you're already used to a high level of hassle. Right? You're used to complexity, you're used to a high level of hassle. And I think what you've got to look at it is say, right, we've got an opportunity here to double the size of our business in one transaction. And that transaction might be a difficult one that takes us ages to do, but it could be a complete game changer for the business. It could be a complete game changer for your life. Suddenly you can go from having 40 clients to having 80 or 100 clients. You don't have to buy an MSP the same size as you. You could buy something a bit bigger and actually go from like, 40 clients and, I don't know, 400 users and just suddenly hit 1000 endpoints or something just like that. And that might be your idea of hell, or that might be something that you really want to achieve this year or next year or the year after or whatever is the case. So I think it's something you certainly should think about. And if it's ever been there at the back of your mind, the easy way to know whether or not it's an option now is actually to just go and talk to your competitors. You could send everyone in your city and maybe the next city along, or the next area where you'd like to expand into. It'd be a lot easier to buy a business there than it would to expand. Just send them a message, send them an email, send them a letter in the post. Doesn't have to be anything difficult. It could literally be just, hi, I'm Paul. I run an MSP like yours in this city. Maybe you've heard of me. Maybe you haven't. Just wanted to let you know, if ever you were thinking of selling up, retiring, or moving on and doing something different, I'd love to buy your business. Please let me know so we can go and have a beer and just discuss it. And you might send out all those messages, you might send out 20 or 30 of those and get nothing. But then another day, like six months time, you could send out the same message again and you get something. People tend to, well, it's like marketing. I think finding a business to buy is just like marketing. And certainly when I was looking for businesses to buy, I approached it as a marketing exercise. We had no problem finding businesses where the owners were willing to sell. Our problem was actually making the deals happen. That was the problem I came across. I think it would be a lot easier for you. So this time of year is pretty good. People come back in January, a few weeks ago, and some people will have come back and thought, I can't do another year of this, or I don't want to do another year of this. Some people will be in a distressed position that they're just not making enough money from their business and they're ready to get out of it. You'd be surprised why people sell. Illness, illness and ill health is another reason. And that doesn't necessarily have to be the owner. It can be someone in the owner's family as well. And actually, you could be helping someone by buying their business and doing it without any drama and doing it quickly and maybe even employing them as part of that. So they've still got an income. There's all sorts of different reasons that people sell a business, but it all starts with just reaching out to them and saying, hey, if you're ever thinking of selling, please just give me a call. By the way, I don't think you need a business broker to do this. I don't like business brokers. My friend, who buys and sells businesses all the time, actively avoids them because what they do is they're like estate agents or real estate agents. They whisper things in people's ears and they tell them their business is worth millions, and it's not. It's worth five figures. They just mess things up. So I wouldn't use a broker yourself, and I would not bother going to look for listings of businesses for sale. I would just write a note, just message the people that are in your town or the next town that you think might one day sell their business. Remember, it's not about what you think about their business, about whether they're willing to sell or not. It's all about what's happening in their life and where they are in their stage of growth. If, by the way, you are considering doing this, I would love to hear from you just because I'd love to track your journey. You can email me anytime. And it's the realme at the end of this. [email protected]. [00:08:40] Speaker A: Here's this week's clever idea. [00:08:43] Speaker B: Here's something I don't think we've talked about in the podcast before. Could your MSP get involved with some community stuff in a way that not only benefits other people, but actually potentially brings some business into you as well? Actually generates potentially a new client for you? This has a name, it's called cause related marketing. And you kind of see, I mean, thousands, millions of companies really donate billions to charity every year. And partly they do it to do good, partly they do it to reduce their corporate tax bills, but partly as well, they do it for marketing reasons, cause related marketing. I think there are a number of activities that you can do as an MSP to really benefit your local community that will give you or could potentially give you a good return on investment. And I'm going to highlight three of them in today's podcast. The first of those is to do some mentoring. Now if you've only been in business for like twelve minutes, that's not really something you can do yet, but it's perhaps something you could aim to do in the future. But if you've been in business a little while longer, then mentoring other people could be a fantastic way of giving back. Actually thinking about it, I suppose your mentoring doesn't just have to be on being a business owner and running a business, you could mentor people on their tech career as well. So even if you have been in business for twelve years, twelve years, twelve minutes. I assume you've been in tech for longer than twelve minutes. So you could mentor other technicians, perhaps involved in charities, people who are supporting charities or something like that. Or as I say, if you've been a business owner for a while, why not mentor new people? Setting out in business, that can be an incredibly rewarding thing to do. A second activity you can do is of course to just donate. You can donate old equipment, you can donate things like cables, projectors, old, I'm sure you've got tons of old stuff just knocking around, right? I'm involved in the community, in my village, and I was talking to our local vicar the other day who runs the local church, and she was saying they desperately need a projector and a screen and just to sort of bring the technology up to date in the church. And I've been able to put her in touch with, well, hoping to put her in touch with some people to get that sorted out. But someone's three year old tech that they no longer need or want. How many old laptops do you get from your clients that you take away to dispose? And I know that there's a security element, and I'm sure you're on top of that. But what if you could then find places, homes for that old tech and donate it in that way so donations don't have to cost you a lot of money. But remember, you're touching a lot of old equipment that other people don't get a chance to get hold of. And then the final thing I think you can do as a cause related marketing activity is actually to go out and speak in the community. And it might be that you go and speak to local know. I don't know what groups you'd have in your area, but here in the mean outside of the pure business groups like BNI, which is networking, you'd have things like Rotary Club and the table. I think Rotary might be an international thing, but these are clubs that tend to be people who come together to do good. They work to raise money. They work to make projects happen. There are loads of community groups available, right? And you could go and talk to them about tech. Now, the reason that that might give you some return is that you never know who's in that room. So even though you're going to talk to a charity or an organization that's made up of people to help, you never quite know who's connected to who. And it's just a great way of expanding. Well, you're expanding your network at the same time as actually doing some good in your community. To me, that's an absolute win win. Look, if you want new clients and to create an awesome life for you and for your family, but you're feeling stuck with your marketing. I have all the answers. In fact, I have all the answers. A simple plan for you to follow with your marketing and a whole ton of white label marketing content, you can see the details of how I can help you [email protected]. That's mspmarketingedge.com. [00:12:49] Speaker A: Big interview. [00:12:51] Speaker C: Hi, I'm Kaia Glatt, and I'm a copywriter and a brand messaging specialist, which means that I help msps like you write the website copy that brings them warm leads who are really close to buying. [00:13:08] Speaker B: Come on, Kyle. We're like 5 seconds into the interview, and already you've given yourself a big, healthy plug there. We do that at the end of the know. So thank you for joining me. On the podcast, I want to talk to you about building trust because building trust with leads and with prospects is so, so essential to, well, develop those prospects, to turn them into actually really good, solid sales appointments and of course, clients that stick with you for 510 15 years. But building trust is also one of the hardest things that you can do within marketing. Tell us a little bit about your background and what you do with business owners to help them build trust. [00:13:45] Speaker C: So my background is on the messaging and the website side of things. So when you think about what your prospects are doing before they even reach out to you is they're poking around online and they're looking at your company, they're looking at your competitors and they're like, okay, I don't know what I need. I think I need it. Show me it. Sometimes your customers are not very educated. They don't even know what they're looking for. They maybe know that they have a problem that needs fixing and they're trying to figure out if your company can solve it. So I guess what I do is I bridge that great divide between what your customer is looking for and what you have to offer. [00:14:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And in terms of building trust, what are the sort of the main tools that someone like you or someone else who does exactly what you do? What are the main tools that you would use? [00:14:42] Speaker C: So one of the biggest things that you want to do is make sure you look credible because people judge a book by its cover and you're in the technology space. So if you have a website that looks like it's from 30 years ago, then that is going to drain your credibility within the first few seconds that somebody lands on your website. So one of the first things that I would say is take a look at your website right now. Does it look fresh and modern because you are in the technology space and people are judging your innovation, your ability to innovate and to move with technology by how your website looks. So if you look like you're from 30 years ago, people are going to expect your practices to be from 30 years ago. And that's not a good look. So take a look at your website, make sure it looks credible, make sure it looks modern day. And that would be number one. And then the second thing would be to look at the messaging like what you're actually saying on your website. [00:15:50] Speaker B: So let's come back to the messaging in a second. Just a note. On websites, you can go and look at 1020 30 MSP websites and they all look very, very similar. They all have. You said it yourself earlier that it's very hard for the people who are buying from you to look and to see a differentiation and to think that one, I've got to speak to that one. You talk about what's on the website and a lot of technology people make the mistake of thinking they need to put technology onto their website. So we see software screens, we see network cables, we see switching boxes, basically a lot of tech stuff. And this is completely the wrong kind of imaging and the wrong kind of message to send, isn't it? [00:16:30] Speaker C: Well, it can be. I always say that people look for other people, and images of people convert better than images of technology. So you want to look like an MSP. You don't want someone to land on your website and think, what do these guys even do? Like, what do they sell? You want that to be clear, so you want to aim for a healthy balance where there's images of technology and it's clear that you are an MSP, that this is what you do. But there should also be images that depict the benefit of that technology you want to show and tell a story with the images of these are businesses that are getting work done, that are beating their own competition, that are achieving their own goals because they have all these services in place and they have checked all those boxes and they're doing it so well. So you want to make sure that your images are telling the story of, yes, we do technology, we set up the hardware, we do everything we need to do, but here's what's going to happen because of that. This is who you guys are going to be because you've worked with us. [00:17:37] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly that. So it's almost like we're powering our clients, aren't we? We, the MSP are powering them to achieve amazing things because we're taking hold of their technology and looking after it so they don't have to. Now, if we come and look at the messaging again, a place where msps often get stuck, is that at the big picture level, they do exactly the same thing as all their direct competitors. And all msps do really do the same thing. Now, they do it in different ways and they use different text acts and they have different nuances to it. But from the prospect's point of view, from the leads point of view, they all do things the same way. How do you tackle the messaging for an MSP when you know that broadly you're doing the same thing as everyone else? [00:18:18] Speaker C: So there's two different ways that, and you should use both of them that you're going to stand out in your messaging. One is just tell the message better than everyone else is doing it and say it more clearly and say it more directly and provide that education right there on your website so that by the time the prospect comes to you, they understand exactly what they need and why they need you to do it. Right. So even if you're doing the same thing as everybody else, you can do a better job talking about it, using the language that your customer understands, using the voice of your customer, and finding those key pain points that they talk about, that they care about, that they think about, and not necessarily just jumping right into your services. Here's the things we do. Your customers might not be looking for those three big packages that you're selling because they don't know that yet. All they know is we are not doing things as efficiently as we should be or our team has grown and our technology hasn't been able to keep up. So make sure that you're addressing those pain points on your website before you start pitching those services which your customer may not yet understand. That's the telling the story better part of things. [00:19:45] Speaker B: And essentially you're taking what you do and you're finding ways to make it more relevant to people who don't understand what it is that you do. That makes perfect sense to me. Let's talk finally, Kaya, about social proof. So could you just explain for us what social proof is and what the main forms are that we demonstrate? Social proof? [00:20:03] Speaker C: Yes. Okay. Social proof is huge. Big, enormous. So social proof means here's how we prove that we can do what we promise we're going to do, right? So if we say that we can help businesses from 100 to 200 employees, you're thinking, prove it. How do I know it's true? Right? Social proof proves it. So by saying things like, we are trusted by name drop, right. This big company of 300 to 400 employees, then, now you believe me if I tell you I can help companies of 100 to 200 employees. So that's in a nutshell what social proof is. [00:20:48] Speaker B: And that name drop, what would be the best way to do that? Would you do that as a testimonial, as a review, or perhaps as a case study? Or all three. [00:20:56] Speaker C: Oh, good one. Okay, so what people tend to think of when they hear social proof is testimonials, right? Let's just slap a couple of testimonials on the website. We'll put them all together in tiny words in a carousel that flashes across the screen so quickly that you can't even read them. That's the traditional social proof that you're seeing being used. But what really happens is that social proof is not doing anything for you because first of all, nobody's reading it. Second of all, people tend not to believe testimonials. Unfortunately, there are some companies that make them up. So what you want to do is when you use testimonials, make them credible. Include a headshot of the person who said it, include the person's name and their business name and make it readable. Keep it static on the page instead of in a carousel that's just zooming past so no one can even read it. Make it specific. Instead of having three paragraphs about how happy they were with your managed service providers, how happy they were with the services, how happy they were with everything, keep it to one to three sentences on one really specific point that you know is important to your customers. So, for example, if you know your customers are worried, what if we have a problem and how fast is someone going to come out to help us? Right? That's something that comes up all the time with your customers and you want to make sure that they see the answer to that question on your website. So what you're going to do is you're going to have a testimonial from John Hancock, from ABC company with a picture of him saying, we had a question and the team was here within 20 minutes. Right. That one to three sentence testimonial is much more powerful than a three paragraph testimonial about nothing. So you want to be strategic with how you're using those testimonials. [00:23:10] Speaker B: So this is great. And this is actually really simple. If we boil this entire interview down to something you're saying here, which is find out the people you want to sell to find out what their fears are, what their wants are, what their needs are, and then make all the messages directly. Talk to those fears, those needs and those wants. [00:23:29] Speaker C: Absolutely. In a really strong website that's focused on converting the reader into a customer, you're going to see all the messaging is layered with social proof. So every time you say something or make claim, you talk about your selling points. There's going to be social proof right afterwards, backing up that point and making it credible. And like you just said before, paul, it's not just testimonials. You can also use the name dropping, right, those logos in a trusted buy section. You can also use case studies. So telling little stories, mini case studies. It doesn't have to be like a four page document. It can be a short story about a customer. Here's what their problem was, here's why they reached out to us. Here's what we did for them, and here's the cool stuff that happened afterward. So just a short success story that helps build your credibility and also helps the customer imagine themselves in that situation. Like, hey, we can have this fixed in a week from now with these guys. Why wouldn't we do that? [00:24:38] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Look, thank you so much for your time. I know you gave yourself a cheeky little advert at the beginning, but let's do the proper plug that all our guests get at the end of their interview. So tell us again what you do for msps and what's the best way to get in touch with you. [00:24:53] Speaker C: So what I do is I actually help you figure out exactly what needs to be on your website. And I talk to your customers and I interview them. I get inside their heads. I pull out those juicy tidbits that make amazing testimonials that we can use for credibility on your website. And then I write the copy that increases those conversions. You can get in touch with me on my website. It's kayaglass.com, Paul Green's MSP marketing podcast. [00:25:22] Speaker A: This week's recommended book. [00:25:24] Speaker D: Hi everyone. I'm Jim Haney, vice president of marketing at Novatech. And the book that I recommend checking out is hack the buyer brain by Kenda McDonald. So what's really neat about this book is Kenda has a background in forensic psychology and she shows us how to apply psychology to the buyer journey so you can get very strategic about your buyer journey creation and as you map it out for your different personas, coming up next week. [00:25:51] Speaker E: Hi, my name is Ben Jones and I'm a YouTube ad expert that's created millions of dollars in sales across a wide range of industries. And I'm going to be talking on Paul's podcast, showing you how you can grow and scale your MSP with YouTube ads. [00:26:02] Speaker B: And on top of that interview with Ben, we're going to talk about fixing your follow up failure. When a prospect says no today, they absolutely do not mean no forever. Join me, meet next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP. [00:26:19] Speaker A: Made in the UK for msps around the world Paul Green's MSP marketing podcast.