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Voiceover:
Fresh, every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s, MSP marketing podcast.
Paul Green:
Hello and welcome to the first podcast for February and back to our normal format. Here’s what’s coming up in this week show.
Manuel Bruschi:
This is how the idea was come up with, not just becoming aware of how you’re spending your time, but actually, how can I improve it?
Paul Green:
That’s Manuel Bruschi, the founder of Timeular.com. He’s the first of four productivity experts that I’m going to be interviewing throughout February. And you can hear his interview later on in the show.
Paul Green:
We’re also going to be talking today about a free marketing resource. It’s an amazing Facebook group with more than 1000 MSPs already inside. I’ll tell you how to join that group later on.
Paul Green:
We’re going to talk about why you should be doing one-to-ones with most of your staff, and I’ll give you a format for those one-to-ones to make it really productive for you. And we’re going to get a book recommendation from Andrew Wallace of Smileback.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast.
Paul Green:
If you go back about seven years or so, and back then I had a different business. And around about seven years ago, I had about 15 staff as well, which was quite interesting. I didn’t go into the business very often. I used to go in just on Thursdays, but I was still running the business, so I was running it from a separate office, so I could hide away from my staff and get things done. But on Thursdays or Angry Thursdays as I came to know them, I’d go into the office where all the staff were. And I’d typically do one-to-ones and I talked to my team and just generally made sure that the ship was going in the right direction and look for ways to make the ship go faster.
Paul Green:
And I remember distinctly one particular Thursday, it was a roundabout four, maybe six months, before I decided to put the business up for sale. The business was doing very well. It was almost completely systemised at that point. So I wasn’t needed to be there. I was an addition I had the choice to, to go in there and keep things going, but there were no actual specific jobs that I had to do in order for the business to thrive on a daily basis.
Paul Green:
But that particular Thursday I went in. It sticks in my mind because I was just annoyed all day. I remember being annoyed on the drive in because it was about an hour from my home. I remember being annoyed when I got there. I was just generally annoyed all day. And the reason that I was annoyed was because I had a series of things that I had to do. Now you have to understand that I am an incredibly organised person. I use a piece of software called Todoist, which keeps me on track for all the things that I need to do every day. And that’s seven days a week, by the way. If I need to do a job in my house, it’s there in the Sunday folder. And it sat there in Todoist waiting for me to look at it. It’s literally the first piece of software that I look at every single day on my phone.
Paul Green:
I’ve been like that for years. And one of the downsides of being very highly organised and knowing exactly what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by is that know when you’re going to have some busy days. And this particular week, my week had been hijacked by a couple of other events. And I got to that Thursday and I knew I had essentially three days worth of work to do, but only one day to do it. Because the Thursday would be taken up talking to our team and doing the things that frankly make the difference in the business. But I knew I had these three days of work to do, and I think that’s why I was annoyed.
Paul Green:
So what I decided to do was in between my meetings with my staff, I’d sort of lock myself away in the office and I would try and get some of those things done so that it wouldn’t impact too much on my Friday. And the thing that sticks in my mind most about that very angry Thursday is just how much I got done. I mean, I was like a machine that day. I was just doing thing after thing, after thing. If I had a meeting and we did the meeting in 15 minutes and I had 15 minutes spare, I would get an hour’s worth of stuff done in that 15 minutes. In fact, as I’m talking about it, I’m thinking that maybe I had some kind of immovable deadline, maybe there was a holiday coming up on Saturday or something like that. There was something that was driving me. I mean really, really driving me that day.
Paul Green:
And you must’ve had days like this as well if you think back about your days at work. And in fact, when a holiday coming up that can be an incredibly, incredibly productive time to drive you forward.
Paul Green:
Anyway, I had that day, I was being very productive and I was busy, busy, busy, busy. And I remember coming out into the main office at lunchtime at a pace. I mean, I was literally physically walking fast. I was doing everything fast that day. And as I walked into the office, it was almost like I hit a brick wall because the attitude and atmosphere, the office, it was actually kind of normal, but it felt to me very, very slow. And it felt like everyone was slacking. And I kind of walked in and instantly got a bit annoyed and was like, “Wait, what’s everyone doing? What are you doing? What’s going on here? What’s happening with this project?” Basically, I was a complete idiot of a boss. I was the worst kind of boss, just for a minute or so, the worst kind of boss that you could have. I was that boss that comes in gets angry for no reason, barks out orders, issues instructions, interferes with what you’re doing. Oh, I look back now and I’m actually cringing. As much as I’m laughing. As I look back, I’m also cringing because that was just a terrible five minutes.
Paul Green:
The thing was, I was really busy and in my mind that meant that everyone was really busy. The reality is, they weren’t. They were just getting on with their work. And I had a pretty good team back then. Yeah, there was some that I’d never hire again, but I had a pretty good team and I’m working with some of them again now in this business. And I had perceived that when I was busy, they were busy too.
Paul Green:
This is what we do as business owners. We always perceive that whatever is happening to us is happening to other people as well. If you’re feeling a bit down right now, perhaps because the business isn’t doing so well, or you’re feeling elated because the business it’s doing well, or you’re frustrated or you’re angry or you’re ecstatic or whatever emotional state you’re in, it’s not fair, and it’s certainly not true, to assume that all of your staff are in the same emotional state. They don’t have the information that you have. They don’t have the same commitment to the business that you have. They are not you. Your staff are not celebrating and commiserating when you are. They don’t get the huge highs and lows that you do because it’s not their business. It’s just a job to them.
Paul Green:
Even to your closest, closest colleagues, the ones that you trust day in, day out, unless they have significant skin in the game, they are not as emotionally affected by what’s happening as you are. It’s one of the hardest things for us as business owners and managers to realise, that other people are feeling different things. In fact, it’s a key core skill: the ability to be empathetic to someone else, to what they’re thinking and what they’re feeling and realising that it’s completely different to us.
Paul Green:
We’re very focused, aren’t we? We know exactly what we want to do with the business. We know how we want to do it. We know when we want it to be done and we just want to get on with it. And that’s not them. They’re living completely different lives. They just want to get home at six o’clock tonight to go and kill lots of bad guys in Call of Duty or whatever the current big trendy video game is.
Paul Green:
It’s not just our staff that we need to empathise with. It’s the same with our leads and our prospects. Something you may have heard me say on this podcast before is that to influence what John Smith buys, you’ve got to look through John Smith’s eyes. And that counts for staff, it counts for clients and it counts for leads and prospects as well. If you want to influence them, you’ve got to look through their eyes, whatever emotional state you’re in right now, they are not in that emotional state. You’ve got to move yourself to the emotional state that they’re in.
Paul Green:
If someone’s looking at you and thinking of buying from your MSP, what are their emotions? What are they afraid of? What do they want? What do they need? What’s the worst thing that could happen to them? What’s the best thing that could happen to them? What would put them at ease? What would make them feel more comfortable? If you can answer all of these, and there’ll be slightly different for all prospects and leads. There are some similarities, but people do give away clues about how they’re thinking and feeling. If you can get yourself into that mindset with them, oh! What a difference you can make. What a tremendous difference you can make to your own marketing and the way that you just generally deal with people, be that partners, be that vendors, be that staff, be that anyone. The ability to empathise with where someone else is emotionally right now is an absolutely core skill for influencing them and ultimately getting you closer to your goals.
Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.
Paul Green:
A couple of minutes ago, I mentioned doing one-to-one with my team. And these were typically 15 to 20 minute meetings that I would have with them right about once a month for some people, once a fortnight, depending on how much they needed them. And if you’re not doing one-to+ones with your team right now, oh! Much can I recommend one-to-ones?
Paul Green:
One-to-one can change everything, absolutely everything. I first started doing them more than 20 years ago when I was running a couple of radio stations and I found it a pretty essential way to keep in touch with my key people, the people that actually made the biggest difference to us hitting the goals that we needed to hit. Now one-to-one doesn’t have to be a formal thing. In fact, I think it’s better when it’s not formal. I’m not talking here about an appraisal where they do a bit of paperwork and you do a bit of paperwork or one of those 360 or 180 appraisals or whatever they call them, where you get your boss above you and someone below you. I’m sure all of those have value. I’m sure they do. But most of them, they feel like tools that big businesses use. In very, very big businesses, they use appraisals as kind of a control mechanism, as a way for the people at the top to know that the people at the bottom are doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
Paul Green:
I find that informal one-to-ones are a lot more useful. And let me tell you the format that I’ve been using for one-to-one for years and years and years now. It’s a very simple format. And actually, it’s a framework more than anything else. If you do this well, your people, the people that you do one-to-ones with, won’t even notice that there is a framework in place. They might feel that there’s some structure to the meeting, but they won’t necessarily look at it as a framework.
Paul Green:
So, first of all, we must talk about getting the environment right for a one-to-one. I really think that Zoom is the worst possible way to do a one-to-one. One-to-ones are so much better done face-to-face. Okay, you might need to socially distant these days and sit either ends of a room, but that is better than doing it over a video call. It really is. I’ve done only a few, only a handful of one-to-ones over Zoom and you kind of miss out on the little clues. This is the problem with Zoom overall, isn’t it? You miss out on those tiny little things that you pick up on when you’re sat face-to-face with someone.
Paul Green:
So one-to-ones over Zoom can be done, but I really don’t think you’re going to excel at them until you can do them face-to-face in some way. And when you do do them face-to-face, they need to be done somewhere where you can’t be interrupted. Maybe that would be your office right now. In normal times, I would suggest going out to a hotel or a coffee shop, or somewhere, hire a business room somewhere where you can’t be interrupted. And ideally where both you and the person that you’re doing a one-to-one with is away from their normal environment. If you normally sit in your office, that’s your normal environment. And in fact, coming into your office might be a slightly intimidating thing for the person that you’re doing a one-to-one with. So getting away from the normal environment when you can, is a very sensible thing to do.
Paul Green:
So the format for the one-to-one, the framework for your meeting, is very, very simple. It starts with a question: what’s gone well. Or if this is someone that you’ve previously met with, you might say, “Since we last met, what’s gone well?” Now, notice there. We’re not saying, “What have you done well?” Or anything like that? It’s a deliberately open question: what’s gone well?
Paul Green:
You see, you want that person to tell you what’s on their mind right now about what they’re enjoying, what’s going well within the business. Some of them will talk about their own performance. Some of them will talk about their colleagues’ performance, maybe even your performance, something to do with clients. It almost doesn’t matter what it is. They talk about. It’s a forum for them to sit down with mummy or daddy, that’s you, by the way. The boss is ways the parents, mummy, or daddy. It’s a chance for them to sit down with mummy or daddy and talk about something they are pleased with right now, what’s gone well.
Paul Green:
But here’s the thing. You need to have something as well, because this isn’t a one-way thing. A one-to-one is not a one-way conversation. It’s a two-way conversation. You need to give stuff back as well. So when they’ve told you something that they think is going well, then you tell them something that you think is going well. And in an ideal world, that would be something that relates to them, to their performance, to some improvement that they’ve made. A chance for a bit of mummy or daddy praise, because we do not praise our staff nearly enough. You cannot say thank you or, “Hey, you’ve done a good job!” You cannot say that too many times. You really can’t.
Paul Green:
So they’ve said something that’s gone well, you’ve said something that’s gone well. Now let’s get onto the things that we need to fix because the followup question is: what’s not gone so well? And again, this is a deliberately open question, leaving it for them to talk about the thing that’s on their mind.
Paul Green:
Sometimes your team will start to talk about the things that they’ve screwed up or not done particularly well at since you last met. Sometimes they’ll talk about other people within the business. And sometimes that will be valuable, other times it’ll just be them having a whinge. Sometimes they’ll talk about a process or a system or something like that. It’s all valuable. It’s on their mind. It’s things that you’re trying to get out of them. And in fact, the longer you do these one-to-ones, the more they’ll come to trust you and the more real things they’ll bring to the table. What’s not gone so well? “Well, I’ll tell you something I want to talk about.” That’s exactly what we’re after. We’re after that genuine feedback.
Paul Green:
And again, you need to give something that you don’t think has gone well. Now, you probably have for many of your staff a whole long list of things that they’re not doing quite as well as you’d want them to do. The challenge to you is not to hit them with those 64 items in their first one-to-one because you will essentially put them off wanting to come back to work ever again, certainly having a one-to-one ever again. If you have got a long list of things, introduce one thing per one-to-one. Their not-so-good feedback and your not-so-good feedback should ideally be just one item each.
Paul Green:
So let’s recap where we are. They’ve talked about something that’s gone well, and so have you. They’ve talked about something that hasn’t gone so well, and so have you. And you’ve had a bit of a discussion about that, and now it leads on to the final question. And the final question is, “What should you do differently before we meet next time?” Now, this is not an open question. We are now drilling this right down to them and their performance, “What should you do differently next time?” And it should be pretty obvious, based on the things that you’ve talked about in the previous 10, 15 minutes, what that thing should be.
Paul Green:
And I would highly recommend that you get them to write that down. And you say to them, “Right, when you get back to your desk, first thing you do, please, can you email that to me?” Because the biggest challenge in a one-to-one is actually making the link between them declaring something that they should be changing and them taking action. Because it’s all about action, isn’t it? If they don’t take action, there’s no point. There’s almost no point in you having had the meeting. So I would get them to email it to you. And then when you not that next meeting, just before you start that format, that framework, I would say to them, “what was it that you were working on from last time?” And do prepared to be frustrated, and I mean really frustrated, when most of your staff don’t know what it is that they’re supposed to have been working on since your last one-to-one. That will only happen a couple of times because they’ll feel a bit stupid when they can’t tell you what they were supposed to be working on, but you can, and they won’t make that mistake again.
Paul Green:
So let’s just recap that format and look at the power of it. You start by asking them what it is they were working on from last time, what’s gone well, what hasn’t gone so well and what should you do differently next time. Now, one-to-ones have an amazing effect on all sorts of staff. On your very best staff, they help them to get even better. They gives them that parental time that they’re so desperate for. They give them the feedback that they’ve been craving almost every week that they’ve been at work. Because here’s the thing, with our best staff it’s ever so easy to just leave them to it, to just ignore them because they’re doing a great job. And we do tend to focus far too much of our attention on the people who aren’t doing a great job, don’t we? It’s just human nature to do that. So this is a great opportunity to give them some of your valuable time and they will get better and better and better. I promise you, they will. Good staff take one-to-ones and they lap them up. They love every second of them.
Paul Green:
So what about not-so-good staff, your bad staff? Well, I think one-to-ones will ultimately fix them or fire them. And by “fix them,” and it may take some time, but you will slowly start to improve their performance. We cannot change someone’s mindset at all. That is impossible. The only person that can change someone’s mindset is themselves. But what we can do is work on their skills. We can identify training needs. We can identify proper coaching needs or the need for them to have a mentor or the need for them to work in a different way. And ultimately, if you keep on with these one-to-ones, your worst staff will either get better or they will opt out. They will leave. And you should never be scared of bad staff leaving. In fact, I believe that you should be scared of bad staff staying.
Paul Green:
Now there’s a finite number of one-to-ones that any one person can do. And that’s around about six to seven. At one point I was trying to do one-to-ones with all 15 of my staff and I ended up hating the one-to-ones and we ended up stopping them for several months because of it. So when I started again, I actually just then did the core three or four people that made the biggest difference. Well, the core three or four people and the trouble child. Those were the people that I did my monthly one-to-ones with. I would get started, if I was you, with one or two people. Pick out your best person and your worst person. And just say to your team, come up with some excuse of why it’s just those people perhaps. Say it’s just a random thing, you just like to experiment. You can’t do the four or five a month that you’d like to right now just because it is time consuming and it is wearing. It’s energy-sapping, in a way, but just start with your best person and your worst person. Have a go, start those monthly one-to-ones and see what happens. You don’t get results in month one, you get results in month, three, four, five, and six.
Paul Green:
In fact, some people do one-to-ones weekly. Personally, I find that to be quite overkill, but some people do them weekly or every two weeks. You could do that if you’ve got the time and space to do that. If not, a monthly commitment can work very, very well.
Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.
Paul Green:
You’re looking to grow your business this year to get more new clients, to improve your monthly recurring revenue? And of course, to improve the amount of take-home profit you have, the amount of profit that’s yours to take out of the business? We cover all these topics and more in a free Facebook group which you are invited to join. It’s the MSP Marketing Facebook Group. And already more than 1,100 MSPs are members. If you just go into your Facebook app, go into the search bar at the top, type in MSP Marketing, and then go onto groups. And all being well, you should see my photo right at the top of the page. Tap on my photo. We ask you for just a few details to join so we can check you are an MSP. You see, this is a vendor-free zone. Vendors are not welcome here at all. It’s only for MSPs.
Paul Green:
I’m in the group every single day of the week. And I’d love to chat to you in that forum, come and join the MSP Marketing Facebook Group. It’s becoming one of the biggest free resources online for MSPs to talk about their marketing and their business growth.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Manuel Bruschi:
Hi, I’m Manuel Bruschi and I’m the founder and CEO of Timeular.
Paul Green:
And let me say how excited I am to have you on the podcast, Manuel, because if you can hear, and this is a sound that you will be personally very familiar with, but have a listen to this sound.
Manuel Bruschi:
Oh yeah, I know that.
Paul Green:
You know that sound. So that sound is the sound of me moving my Timeular. And it’s something that I’ve talked about in the podcast before. I’ve recommended it to virtually every MSP that I’ve spoken to since I discovered it last year, just after the beginning of the first lockdown. Manuel, tell us what Timeular is.
Manuel Bruschi:
Timeular is a tool which helps you to become aware of how you’re spending your time, to understand where it’s going, to find opportunities to improve and then monitoring your improvement. And how we do that is we have two simple ways to track your time. One is the one that you have just here, which is our physical tracker. It’s an eight-sided dice, which you can assign an activity to every side connected by a Bluetooth to your computer or mobile phone. You just flip it to what you’re currently working on, getting a call for this client. You flip it to this side, getting emails for that client, you flip it to the other. And so in a very playful and fun way, you can track your time very accurately. And if you don’t like physical devices and nice gadgets and prefer to have something digital or if you are moving around a lot, you have our global shortcut, command-E or control-E on windows, Linux, where you can start tracking out from any app with just one shortcut.
Manuel Bruschi:
So with those two very simple methods, you can track your time in real time, which is much, much more reliable than actually guessing what you have done at the end of the week. So what we have seen is on average people, when they’re guessing, they are kind of guessing four or five entries per day, but with the timer, they have 12 to 20 entries per day, which actually is what reality feels like because just in the first hour in the day you have already done four different things.
Paul Green:
And I think that’s the inherent power of Timeular. I mean, I got it, as I say, it was around about March, maybe April, May time last year. And I was busy. I felt busier than I’d been for a long time because I was working from home, I was sort of trapped in the house with lockdown, but like I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. And it was only when I got the Timeular that I was able to figure out that I was spending more time doing menial work, emails, messaging, stuff that really didn’t grow the business. And it directly led on me hiring a couple of virtual assistants to do that stuff for me. So thank you, Manuel. Your device helped me to get back some of my life.
Paul Green:
I think the thing that has made the biggest difference is the fact that it’s got a physical element to it. It was my friend Ed who sent me a video of him using his Timeular. And I’ve done exactly the same thing of me showing other people. How did you come up with the idea of having the physical tracker?
Manuel Bruschi:
Oh yeah. That’s was a long time ago. So, five years ago, I was freelancing and I was billing every minute, basically. And every Friday, the same story, I was like, Oh crap. I didn’t fill in my time sheet immediately. Now, what have I done this week? You go to email, you go to your calendar, you try to reconstruct your week, but obviously you know you can’t recall everything. And then you end up not being able to bill every minute and it’s kind of losing money. And I was always very time efficient and managing my time a lot. So I tried looking at everything. Why are in those very simple apps, where you just click one button, not enough? Thinking about that, I kind of realised, “Okay, I need either a big red button where I can hammer on it or maybe something slightly smarter, a cube that I can turn. And this is how the idea came up with.
Manuel Bruschi:
What I didn’t realise back then is that there is a much bigger need, not just becoming aware of how you’re spending your time, but actually, how can I improve it? And this is something that we are working a lot on Timeular right now.
Paul Green:
Well, it’s interesting you say that because most of the MSPs that I work with have a real issue with the proactive things that they want to be working on, being interrupted by the reactive stuff. I mean, it’s the very nature of running an IT support company. That problems come in and you have to deal with those. So is that something that an app and a device like Timeular would help you to manage, to be aware of when you’re being interrupted and what kind of analysis would you provide for them?
Manuel Bruschi:
Exactly. And you make a really good point there, Paul. You have to deal with this reality. Sometimes you can change it, but just becoming aware how reality actually is, huge step forward. Because our perception of time is distorted by our emotions. So one hour of something fun can feel like 10 minutes and one hour of something boring can feel like an eternity. And therefore, it’s very important to measure your time. But we at Timeular enable you by giving you this very simple method to track your time. You actually see how much reactive time is there for real. And just getting a number for that will help you to realise, “Oh, actually it’s worse or better than I thought.” Usually worst, Unfortunately, but just having this number can enable a conversation. So with our analytics, you see, okay, what is this reactive work? When is it? At certain time of the day? Is it a certain day of the week? Or is it a certain activity which is always reactive? Is it a certain person? And having this data can allow you to start a conversation based on facts, not just your thoughts, which usually leads them to a potential outcome and improvement.
Paul Green:
As you were speaking there, I’ve just opened the time of the app on my iPhone. And already this week, I’ve worked 19 hours and 48 minutes. I’ve got 49 time entries, an average logging of two hours and 15 minutes a day. That’s 53 short, 53% is short entries, 14% long entries and 33% medium entries. So I can see, for example, I’ve spent 10 hours and 13 minutes on tasks, which to me is an activity I want to reduce. I spent two hours and 35 minutes on email and messaging. Two hours, 31 minutes on creating content, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Paul Green:
Here’s the interesting question, Manuel, because there’s some awesome stats in there and it’s fun to look at them, but how would I now use that to improve what I do with my working day, to do more of the things that I want to do.
Manuel Bruschi:
It all starts with the main question, what are you trying to achieve? What are you trying to get more out of? Are you trying to work less? Are you trying to bill more time? Are you trying to have more proactive time? And then it goes on like for what? And then it’s kind of like, okay, looking at this is where can I get this time from? So this is a lot about improving what you do. If you want to improve how you work, then you should be looking at those tests that you just mentioned. Like, are there many short entries? Your short entries is everything below 15 minutes? You should try to block maybe time for projects, so you can get more medium entries and long entries, which means you have some time to focus on get something done. It takes us 23 minutes to actually be fully focused on something and be in the flow. So you kind of know that just working 10 minutes on something doesn’t really allow us to produce quality work.
Paul Green:
That makes perfect sense. Okay, final question for you. Obviously, you literally invented this, the physical time tracker, and I assume you still use one of yourself, do you?
Manuel Bruschi:
Yes. Although recently I started to use to shortcut a lot because my background is I’m being a developer, so I love shortcuts and yeah, this global shortcut is very handy. It’s called Quick Track.
Paul Green:
And where is that global shortcut? Explain that to us.
Manuel Bruschi:
It’s command-E or control-E while you have the laptop at “open” or installed on your computer. You can track time out from any app. So for example, let’s say you’re just in your Outlook, you’re answering emails. You recall, “Oh, I forgot to start a tracking.” You just hit command-E and then comes a little Timeular window where you just can enter what you want to track. And it starts tracking. It’s kind of like the digital version of the tracker.
Paul Green:
Okay, that makes perfect sense. So give us your top advice of things that we can do to get more out of our time tracking, whether we’re using Timeular or one of its competitors. What are the things that we should be doing to absolutely max out our use of this and be more productive?
Manuel Bruschi:
So my main advice would always be, start with being clear what you’re actually trying to achieve. What is it, what you want to optimise and to get that data first. So 20% of our time is spent to create 80% of our outcomes. And 80% of our time is spent on creating those 20% results. And you see that there’s huge potential to actually improve those 80% time spent on 20% of the results. And I would look at those big brackets first.
Paul Green:
That’s great advice, thank you. How many Timeulars have you sold now, Manuel?
Manuel Bruschi:
Oh! Over 60,000.
Paul Green:
That’s very impressive. It really is. Tell us where we can go learn more about it and go and buy one for ourselves.
Manuel Bruschi:
Just head over to Timeular.com. We have all the information there and videos, different use cases, and all possible success stories, which kind of inspire you how you can use Timeular in many different ways and check it out for yourself.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. This week’s recommended book.
Andrew Wallace:
My name is Andrew Wallace and I’m the managing director and chief product officer of Smileback, which is a customer satisfaction system for managed service providers.
Andrew Wallace:
My book recommendation is The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. Josh Waitzkin is the subject of a movie called Searching for Bobby Fischer. He was the youngest Chess Grandmaster in history. Then by the time he was 30, he was also a two-time Tai Chi push hands champion. And his book is about an approach to learning that takes a much more, I would say, relaxed approach to learning. A much different approach to what you see in a lot of business and learning philosophy. I think it’s a fascinating book for anybody who is curious and creative in alternative approaches to how to learn the most efficiently, the fastest and the most effectively. And so it can be applied to business, but also to personal development and almost anything somebody wants to do.
Voiceover:
How to contribute to the show?
Paul Green:
If you’ve got a book suggestion, or you just want to talk to me about something you’ve heard on the show, why not drop me an email? And yes, it is the real me at the other end. The address is [email protected].
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Barnaby Lashbrooke:
Lots of people let the day run away from them because they’re pummelled with distractions that they have to plan for.
Paul Green:
That’s Barnaby Lashbrooke, and he’s the founder of Time Etc, an agency that will hire you a virtual assistant. He’s going to be here on the show next week as part of our continuing series, right throughout February interviewing productivity experts. We’re also going to be talking next week about why you must have a financial forecast for your business this year. In fact, we’ll be looking at all the kind of financial information that you really should be getting back from your accountant at the very least on a monthly basis.
Paul Green:
And if you are desperate for a new client right now, got a very simple thing for you to do to reactivate some old prospects. You won’t believe how simple it is. And all it requires is 10 to 20 minutes of your time, flicking through some emails and picking up the phone. I’ll reveal all to you in next week’s podcast. See you then.
Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world, Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.
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