Hosted By
Thank you to Michael Nelson, Co-founder of Scaled, for joining me to talk about why MSP owners should embrace remote working, how he was able to successfully integrate remote staff into his team within his own MSP business, and how he found himself perfectly positioned to help other MSPs do the same.
Michael Nelson is a founder of Scaled, a staff-augmentation firm that deploys L2 & L3 Technical Talent for MSPs from South Africa and the owner of a successful & growth-oriented MSP in California
He started TLC Tech, a Sacramento based MSP in 2004 serving all types of clients. In 2008 the company made the transition to fully managed services. Averaging 20-30% year over year growth, the company consistently maintains best in class EBITDA. Currently with a staff of 28, the company has transitioned to being a fully remote MSP, with 30% of the staff working remotely from South Africa.
After recognizing the benefits and the market need, Michael started Scaled with Jason Knight (also a former MSP owner) to place L2 & L3 techs with MSPs
Connect with Michael on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelnelsonca/
NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.
Speaker 1 (00:00): Fresh every Tuesday
Speaker 2 (00:02): For MSPs around the world, around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:09): Hello and welcome to episode 2 3, 1 of the podcast. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week.
Speaker 3 (00:16): Hi, my name is Michael Nelson and I’m the founder of Scaled a staff augmentation firm that places South African talent with MSPs across the world. We’re going to help you understand how to successfully pull remote techs into your culture to make sure that they represent you, your company, and your culture well.
Speaker 1 (00:33): And on top of that interview with Michael, I’m also going to tell you about three killer offers that will make you stand out from every single other MSP out there.
Speaker 2 (00:44): Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:48): Don’t sell cybersecurity instead, sell your sleep better at night. What we’re talking about here are features versus benefits. Cybersecurity is a feature. Sleeping better at night is a benefit. And ordinary business owners and managers, they don’t really buy the services you sell. They buy what these services can do for them. Side note, the exception to this rule is when you’re selling co-managed it, and here you are selling to people who understand and know about the technology concepts that are foreign to normal decision makers. And this is why co-managed. It needs a completely different marketing and sales approach based more around building trust and credibility and a working relationship. But let’s come back to selling to ordinary people. And let’s put this another way. They, as I said, they buy the benefits and not the features. So the features are what something does the benefits describe why this matters to them.
(01:49) Now, understanding this and looking at the world from their point of view will change your marketing and sales forever and ever. And I can give you some specific examples. So for example, like I mentioned at the beginning, they don’t buy cybersecurity. They buy, you can sleep better at night knowing that your data is safe. They don’t buy password managers, they buy, you never have to think about passwords ever again. The software does everything so that you don’t have to, they don’t buy network monitoring. They buy if something goes wrong, we’ll know and fix it before it affects you. They don’t buy the cloud, they buy work anywhere on anything at any time without any hassle. They don’t buy backups they buy, you’ll never have that sick feeling of not being able to find that critical file. They don’t buy email signatures, they buy. You can promote your core message in every single email everyone sends and they don’t buy managed services. They buy someone else’s doing everything for you. So you don’t have, think about it. If there is a problem, help is seconds away and it’s a fixed cost every month. So there’s nothing to ever worry about. Look at your website, look at your marketing materials. What are the phrases you often say in sales meetings? How often are you too focused on the feature and not on the benefit?
Speaker 4 (03:21): Here’s this week’s clever idea.
Speaker 1 (03:24): Let me give you three killer offers that will make you stand out from every single other MSP out there. Now your offer is your basic business proposition and it’s one of the most important elements in your entire marketing. It’s the thing that makes you different and it makes it easy for ordinary business owners and managers to choose you. You must have heard of the USP rights, the unique selling proposition. Well, your offer is kind of the same thing. Sometimes it’s too easy to overthink your offer as business owners. We’re so close to the business that we stop seeing it as strangers see it. And you know that you are great at what you do, right? You do know that don’t. You are great at what you do and you assume that everyone else sees that you are great at what you do. But the reality is that they don’t by default.
(04:17) You have to tell them. And the offer is a great tool to do that. So I want to encourage you to think bigger because the best offers directly address the pain points of the prospects. Let’s think what those are. So they hate losing time. They hate losing productivity to tech problems. They hate their staff moaning and they’re concerned that their tech will go wrong and it will affect their whole business. So if we address those pain points, here are three killer offers that directly do that. And these are not things that you can just pick up directly and use. They’re kind of overarching themes just to push you in the right direction. And the first of those, well, I’ll tell you what all three are and then we’ll go through them. So we’ve got risk reversal is the first one. The second one is timeframes.
(05:04) And the third one is making your offer benefit driven. So let’s look at that first one, risk reversal. When someone buys from you, the risk of it going wrong is on them because if it doesn’t work out, they’re screwed, right? Because their business is so dependent upon technology, I realize it does feel like you are taking on the risk because there’s a cashflow issue if they leave you. But really from their point of view, they are the ones taking on the risk. So the smart thing to do in your offer is to reverse that risk. What if you guaranteed your work or better still you guaranteed their happiness, you’ll be 1000% happy with us or we will pay your bill until you are, that would probably scare you actually, wouldn’t it? That kind of guarantee around money like that. So you can dilute it down, it will always be.
(05:55) Or maybe something like you will always be 1000% happy with us or we’ll release you from your contract and give you a thousand dollars or a thousand pounds to say sorry. So that’s the same thing. But you’ve limited your downside for you by the way, that kind of guarantee there where you are guaranteeing utter delight and satisfaction, which is what the vast majority of your clients experience, but you are guaranteeing it and with something to back it up. So if they are not insert whatever you’re guaranteeing here, then we will. And it is either release ’em from their contract, give them money back or something like that, having a guarantee that will attract you a ton of new clients and only one of them will go on to claim on the guarantee probably because they’re an idiot and they disrespect all of their suppliers and don’t worry too much about that because karma will get them back for you.
(06:49) So the second kind of killer offer you can make is about timeframes. So what if another prospect pain point is the fear of how long it will take to switch from you? And no one enjoys that kind of switching process. The old MSP doesn’t, you really don’t. Maybe you do, but certainly the client, they just want to get back to our technology working. So in which case your offer might be something like a fully painless switch to us in 28 days or less guaranteed. And being very specific about the timeframes there within 28 days, which is four weeks, our brains understand what that means and telling them what you will achieve in that timeframe that helps to understand what they’re getting into. And not only that, it helps you to stay focused on delivering the highest quality. If you said to someone this will happen in 28 days, then it’s less likely the projects that the migration project is going to shift it internally.
(07:47) I know how it can be and I know that things shift very, very easily. Whereas if you know we’d had 16 days and with three days behind, then you are going to put greater emphasis on that internally. And I know you might be worried about meeting a deadline like 28 days or whatever it is that you do. So the answer of course to that is to only onboard one client at a time. And in fact, that in itself creates some scarcity. You can say to the clients, Hey look, if you want to join us, sign the contract. We can onboard you starting a week on Monday, but after that we can’t onboard you for two months because we’ve got other clients coming on board, they’re already booked him and we only onboard one client at a time because we have that guarantee. We guarantee it will take no more than 21 days, 28 days, whatever it takes.
(08:35) And we can’t do that for two people at a time. So if you want to start with this, we can do it a week on Monday, otherwise it’s going to be a two months time. And actually having that kind of scarcity, that can be a very powerful marketing thing. And then the final killer offer is to have something that’s benefit driven. And again, you’ve got to look at the world from their point of view. What do they most want from you? What is it? What’s the thing they want more than anything else? And then build your offer around that. The fastest support you ever enjoyed. You’ll never have to listen to your staff complaining about technology again, not just IT support a strategic partner to help you grow. When you look at everything and I mean everything through the eyes of your prospect and not through your own eyes, suddenly marketing becomes really easy.
(09:26) You can only influence what John Smith buys when you look through John Smith’s eyes. So putting an offer together is simply about looking through their eyes, understanding them, understanding their world, and then reflecting that back in your marketing. From a psychology point of view, that’s a very, very powerful thing to do, to tell people you would deliver exactly what it is that they want. They may not be able to put into words what they want, but they know deep down at an emotional level that they want it. This is such a good marketing trick to pull off if you can get this right. In fact, what we’re talking about here is world class marketing,
Speaker 4 (10:09): Blatant plug, blatant
Speaker 1 (10:10): Plug. We are constantly creating edutainment videos where I’m trying to educate you about some important MSP marketing stuff through entertainment. I have a lovely home studio at my home and every week we do some filming. It’s really cool actually, we’ll have remote direction. So my director who’s about a hundred miles away from me, he directs me over Zoom and they send props to my house and then they send me the script. And we have a lot of fun with that. It’s really cool. But it’s all there to help you improve your marketing education and ultimately get more clients for your MSP just by watching YouTube videos. Of course you’ve got to go and take action, but watching those YouTube videos is a good place to start. So you can access our channel at youtube.com/msp marketing,
Speaker 4 (10:58): The big,
Speaker 3 (10:59): Big interview. Hi, I’m Michael Nelson and I’m one of the co-founders of Scaled a staff augmentation company.
Speaker 1 (11:05): And thank you so much for joining me on this podcast, Michael. So we are going to talk about how you can hire people around the world and successfully embed them as part of your team regardless of where your actual team is based. And I know that from lots of MSPs that I speak to that that’s one of the hardest things for them. It’s a bit of a mind barrier for them of if I hire someone who’s based a thousand miles away, how do I actually integrate them as part of my team and not just have them as a resource outside? So we’re going to come onto that and I think we should probably answer the question of why you would do this as well. Before we do this, let’s just talk a little bit about you. So tell us about your background and for those people who are like, Hey, I know this guy, I know this guy’s name, where have I seen him before? Tell us a little bit about you.
Speaker 3 (11:49): So I own an MSP in California that I started 20 years ago. Ironically, I was adamantly against having any remote employees that changed about five years ago. And then it really escalated obviously with covid and we really learned how to navigate it well. We ended up starting another company to help people get remote staff. What we’ve learned over the years is how to integrate them really well. You talked a lot about it, that fear of bringing people in remotely and that’s whether they’re in your state and your country or overseas in another country.
Speaker 1 (12:24): Yeah. So if we go back to that trigger five years ago, what was the thing that made you, so you are based in the US and we have listeners and viewers all over the world. We have loads in the us, loads in the uk, Australia, all the sort of the main western countries. So this is a global thing. This isn’t just a US thing, but what was the trigger for you five years ago that actually made you look outside of the us?
Speaker 3 (12:48): So we were really having problems finding good qualified staff. The other thing that happened is I promoted somebody to operations manager that asked if he had hiring and firing abilities. And I said yes. And he asked if I had veto power and I had to say yes. And he said, good, I’m firing this person. I’m hiring two people from South Africa. Scared me to know him because it was absolutely against what I believed in these guys turned out to be phenomenal. And then that was about a year before Covid hit added another one. And then by the time covid hit, we kind of understood well how to work remotely and just double down. So that’s how we came to it is honestly, I came to it kicking and screaming,
Speaker 1 (13:33): But it clearly worked out for you. And what’s the fear if you were to summarize the fear that perhaps you had as the owner of MSP that other MSP owners would have? Is it that you scared that your clients are going to be on the phone with someone that they think, Hey, this isn’t someone down the road from me, this isn’t someone in California. Is it a fear of data not being as safe as it could be? What are the fears that stop MSPs hiring someone outside of the country?
Speaker 3 (14:00): For me and what I hear from a lot of our clients are the same things that they’re really afraid, how am I going to integrate them into my culture? How am I going to make sure that they represent my company the way I can’t hear what they’re saying from across the room? That’s probably one of the biggest. The other is productivity. How am I going to make sure that they stay productive? How do I guarantee that they’re working as hard as I think they should? And then pulling them into how do I pull them into my internal culture? And quite honestly in my MSP, we had tried a remote resource quite a few years earlier that was kind of back office and we did everything wrong. And that’s part of the evolution is we learn how to do this right. And by doing so, we were able to have a bench of people. It widened. I mean it’s kind of like dating. If you can only date from your own city, that pool’s a little bit smaller than if you can go farther out in another city, in another state, in another country.
Speaker 1 (15:01): Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Although with dating, there are some practical issues, aren’t there? Flying 2000 miles exactly. To go for a coffee with someone isn’t going to work. So what are some of the things that you’ve learned over the years then to help make this remote worker really be part of the team and use the same language and have the same kind of culture that’s so important?
Speaker 3 (15:23): So it’s interesting you started with using the same language. So we strongly encourage getting obviously native English speaking texts, but one of the things that we encourage is don’t shy away from a slightly different accent. It actually has turned out to be a really good thing. But probably the most important thing when you’re pulling somebody in remote, again, whether they’re overseas or just in a different state, is never having an us versus them. Back to my story of having that remote tech, I own the building that we worked out of and we would have a morning daily huddle. All of us would go into the conference room beyond one camera, and this poor tech that we had remote would be on another camera. So it was all of us and him. It’s just the little subtle things like that that really really matter. Making sure that they’re absolutely an equal part of the team.
(16:20) One of our clients has 30 out employees. Most all of them are in the office. Every single employee has a camera on their desk and for their morning huddle, everybody is at their desk on camera even though 90% of them are in the office because it’s that important to make sure that they remain part of the team. That’s just a little sample. Having a mentor, all of us have people that our techs are reporting to and that’s great, that’s necessary, but give them a mentor, give them somebody that really represents your culture. So many times we give the person that has the time, not necessarily that has the best skills. It’s critically important that one person that just represents your culture the way you want with your techs and your clients. Have that person be the mentor that’s not their supervisor so that they have somebody that they can go to ask what they might have or they might call the stupid questions, how do I deal with this? They don’t want to look bad in front of the supervisor, but they really want to be able to do it right. So have that cultural mentor available to them as well.
Speaker 1 (17:35): And obviously since covid and remote working has become a more normal thing, I mean I love the separate camera thing that seems so obvious and yet I can see that you had to go through some pain to actually figure that one out. Absolutely, everyone is equal if they’re all on their own individual camera, regardless of the fact they’re all in the building or not. But then some of your techs who may be working from home or they’ve got a doctor’s appointment so they can do a few hours at home, do the doctor’s appointments and come in, it doesn’t really matter, does it Suddenly everyone’s equal. What are some of the ways that you keep track of the quality of the work that your remote techs are doing? And is it a case that actually the answer is Paul exactly the same way as you keep track of how your other techs are doing?
Speaker 3 (18:17): It is, and this is one of the things, the same guy who’s running the MSP now put in real time ticket entry. You have to account for what you’re doing. You have to do the tickets, you have to enter them, you have to update them well, and you have to do it in real time. When you have that built in and you have that expectation, that makes it super easy to be able to track what the tech is doing. Also, quite frankly, it’s on your csat, making sure that you have a way on every ticket that gets closed. In my MSP, we have a CSAT that goes out and it’s a simple little, how did we do? That’s a really easy way. What we hear anecdotally from our clients is that our guys are getting really, really high CSAT scores. Another, before I lose the thought also about how to integrate them well into your team, one of the things that happened during Covid that was completely accidental, we set up a Netflix room in teams that every Friday we’d watch part of a movie over lunch.
(19:20) So that we just kind of had that comradery. And what happened was our lead tech said, Hey, I’m going to pop into the flix room. He was the escalation engineer on Monday. He said, I’m going to be in the flix room for a couple of hours if anybody has any questions. And he just got in there and he kept his camera on and he just hung out. He was working, doing his day. Well, the tech would just pop in with a quick question and then more and more this room became its own thing that it is utilized all throughout the day so that it’s not just you have a meeting and you’re on video, but in between clients or when you’re working on a project that you just want to hang out with others and you’re not even necessarily talking. It became this really awesome place that the techs could go into eventually they kicked me out of it because apparently owners can change the way that it feels, but I’ll go into the office sometimes we’ve got one or two guys that still work in the office. There’ll be 10 guys on the channel and nobody’s talking. But the biggest thing that came out of that besides the cultural alignment was that the lower texts could pop in and say, Hey, I got a quick question. This is the issue. This is how I’m trying to solve it. Any other advice? So what we found is we had techs stop going down rabbit holes because it was super easy to just pop in and ask a question and not feel like you were bugging anybody while you were doing it.
Speaker 1 (20:53): I think that alone is possibly the coolest idea that has come out of the podcast today. The idea of just having a place for the technicians to hang out without the owner being there, as you say, it just encourages them to ask questions. The kind of questions that I guess when everyone was in the office that they would interrupt each other with those questions. But yeah, remotely that’s kind of gone
Speaker 3 (21:13): And having your escalation engineer in there and also having people that really get your culture, have a couple of your people really buy into that and kind of feed that. Because let’s face it, techs don’t necessarily like being on video. It’s a little challenging. We’ve all got that tech that leave me in a dark room, slide a pizza under the door once a day and I’m good. Get the people that are open to this and really represent your culture and the others will follow.
Speaker 1 (21:42): Yeah, I completely get that. And actually fast forward two or three years to when everyone’s got the Apple Vision Pro or whatever is your equivalent headset, and if you saw the demo from when it came out a couple of months ago, you can really believe that technicians will in a couple of years, be able to sit in their house in whichever country put this on, and there’s their house, but there’s also their teammates and they’ll be able to look around and see their teammates, which is really cool. Although I have to say the most miraculous thing that you’ve said here is that everyone agrees on which movie that they’re going to watch. I mean, I dunno how you get a whole bunch of texts to agree on which movie it is. That’s very smart.
Speaker 3 (22:17): Oh, come on. It’s the office space. Oh
Speaker 1 (22:20): Yes, of course. Yeah, of course. So what was the trigger then that obviously you were doing this for your MSP and what was the trigger that started you doing this for other MSPs?
Speaker 3 (22:31): So I was in E Evolve. I had been in e Evolve the peer group for quite a few years. I’d been in about 14 years At that time. Everybody was struggling with finding good talent. Everybody was kind of feeling this, people showing up that’s like, Hey, I went to a technical college and I know how to troubleshoot and install windows, so I should get 70,000 a year. Getting that balance between expectations and reality. And quite frankly, once Covid hit and everybody was able to work remote, it really, I mean in the United States, the unemployment rate for techs was almost zero. It was shocking how low it was. So being able to find good talent was really, really challenging. And that’s when after hiring a couple of these guys from South Africa, we just doubled down and kept doing it. I had been slowly building myself out of the company.
(23:22) I actually retired completely out of it over a year ago that it’s now an investment. But in this Evolve peer group, I was hearing from my own group and from a lot of other people in that group that they were having the same problem. As I had gotten out of the company, I was trying to figure out am I going to retire? And then I hit upon this idea and have a business partner. He and I kind of fleshed it out and started doing it, and it’s just worked out to be an incredible new business.
Speaker 1 (23:52): That’s fantastic. So tell us, what do you do? So do you help to just source tech professionals in other countries or do you help to embed them into existing teams? What do you guys actually do?
Speaker 3 (24:04): So we do what’s called staff augmentation. We have a bench of techs that are always available that are level two, level three, and we call ’em kind of level four, but really high level three engineers that are technically vetted, culturally vetted. We go through a lot of pieces, that whole nightmare that all of us who own MSPs hated that. You have to start with that funnel of 200 people that applied and funnel it down. We take care of all of that and we have a bench of candidates that are ready to go. The final interview is always done by myself or the other founder, both of us, former MSP owners. He’s formalized alone one with a final question of would I place them in my own MSP? And that’s kind of the bellwether for us. If we cannot say a resounding yes to that, they don’t make it onto our bench. So we basically present level two and level three in staff augmentation, and at that point we truly become the HR partner. We place them, we help, we help, we coach, and we help the owners figure out how to integrate them well also.
Speaker 1 (25:10): I love it. Thank you. Michael. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast. Just tell us what’s the website address where we can go and look at the details. And for those MSPs who are listening right now who might want to just reach out to you personally, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?
Speaker 3 (25:23): Website is at www.scaleyourmsp.com out there on LinkedIn. We do a lot of things on LinkedIn and my email [email protected]. Paul
Speaker 5 (25:35): Green’s
Speaker 1 (25:36): MSP marketing podcast, this week’s recommended book.
Speaker 5 (25:41): Hi, my name is Derek Marin, president Simple Selling and the book I recommend by Mark Robert. The Sales Acceleration formula is a great story about how HubSpot went from a small startup, scrappy software company to the large multi-billion dollar public company that they are today. And all of it had to do with the sales process. So as an MSP, you’re going to get a lot of value from it. So check it out.
Speaker 6 (26:04): Coming up. Coming up next week.
Speaker 7 (26:07): Hi, my name’s Paul Franklin. I’m the guy who can tell you when companies are particularly interested in your products and services. I’m going to be talking about this and how you can tap into intent data on Paul’s show.
Speaker 1 (26:19): On top of that interview with Paul, I’ve got a smart strategy for you to get more comprehensive feedback from prospects who decide not to go with you, but to choose another MSP because sometimes the reason they give you is no use at all to improving your marketing. So this strategy will help you uncover the real reason and help you fine tune your offer and your marketing. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP
Speaker 2 (26:47): Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s marketing podcast.
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