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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 Order 66. Here’s what’s coming up in this week’s show.
Brenna Loury:
By the end of the day, you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t work on this huge task that I’m supposed to work on because I was focusing on all of these other small things that are competing for my attention.”
Paul Green:
We’re going to be talking about a service that makes your marketing really easy by giving you everything you need for daily, weekly, and monthly marketing. Plus, we’ll be looking at a book, you’re going to love this book because it recommends that you as the business owner get paid first.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Back in October on this podcast, I recommended a book to you called Atomic Habits by James Clear. And if you haven’t yet read that book, please do get it. It’s available on Audible and it’s available in paper and Kindle and all of that kind of stuff. And it’s about how you can achieve the things that you want to achieve with your life by turning them into habits.
Paul Green:
So the author makes a very good point that just having a goal in itself, isn’t enough. You’ve actually got to take the actions that get you to that goal. And because our brains sometimes seem to work against us in many different ways, it’s so much easier to develop good habits. One of the examples he gives is habit stacking. So for example, you have a habit at the moment of at the end of a meal, you always put your things in the dishwasher, your plates in the dishwasher. You might stack a habit onto that. Let’s say you wanted to finish your meal and then jump on your exercise bike for five miles. You would just stack that up. So you’ve already got a habit of putting the dishes in the dishwasher. You then just create a new habit that every time I’ve put something in the dishwasher, I jump on the exercise bike for five miles. And that’s exactly what we mean by habit stacking.
Paul Green:
Now, I think habit stacking and just getting into a general rhythm of doing things and having habits to do things is not only great for us in our lives, for the goals that we want to achieve, like fitness and eating well and all of that kind of stuff, but it can also work very well for our marketing and for growing our business. You see, most MSPs that I speak to don’t do any kind of rhythmic marketing. And I define rhythmic marketing is where you’re doing something on a daily or a weekly or a monthly basis. And you keep doing it every single day, every single week, every single month. And what happens is the results of those little actions that you keep taking start to add up over time.
Paul Green:
Most MSPs do, what’s called boom and bust marketing, where there is no real concerted marketing effort because they’re busy, they’re servicing their clients, they’re doing projects, whatever it is they need to do. And then they realise that things are going to be a little bit tight ahead, that there’s not quite enough work coming in. So they go and do some marketing and that marketing of course generates some clients. And then they get so busy servicing those new clients that they don’t do any marketing. So the marketing is start, stop, start, stop, start, stop.
Paul Green:
And the problem with start-stop marketing is it gives start-stop results. And in actual fact, for most MSPs, it’s quite an inefficient way to market because your sales cycle is so slow and people are so slow to make decisions. And it can take them months, if not years, to decide to switch from their incumbent MSP over to you. That stop-start marketing doesn’t ever build up any kind of momentum.
Paul Green:
No, rhythmic marketing is what you want to get into the habit of. You want to take all the little cogs of the marketing machine that you want to build, and you want to put those cogs in place in your business. So if, for example, you are following my longterm three-step marketing strategy that I recommend for the vast majority of MSPs, and that’s to build multiple audiences, build a relationship with those audiences and then commercialise that relationship. Now let’s say that was the strategy you were going to follow, you could put in place hundreds of tiny little cogs that help you to implement that strategy.
Paul Green:
So for example, if we look at the middle one, which is about building relationships with your audiences, that’s done through educational content. And that’s typically done through social media, it’s done by sending emails out, and it’s done by sending print stuff to people. So you need to have set up some cogs in your business that every day, posts some social media content. Every week, it sends out an educational email. Every month it sends out a printed newsletter. This is what I mean by rhythmic marketing. Every day we publish some social media content. Every week we send out an educational email and every month we send out a printed newsletter.
Paul Green:
Now you might not physically do these tasks on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. You might have a marketing day once a month, where you do all of these tasks in one go because you can use scheduling tools and you can work in advance for example. But even that is an example of rhythmic marketing, where for example, the first Monday of every month is Marketing Monday and on Marketing Monday, you do the whole months’ marketing. The Monthly Marketing Monday, I just thought that’s quite a good idea, actually, that one is. But you get the idea, even that is a rhythm.
Paul Green:
As humans, we love rhythms. We’re much better when things happen regularly. In fact, the stuff happening daily is much more likely to become a longterm permanent habit. I have weekly habits and daily habits, and sure the daily habits are easier for me to stick to. For example, I have a weekly habit of recording this podcast. I have a weekly habit of writing some content for my website, and I sometimes have to remind myself to do those habits. Whereas my daily habit, where I write new pieces of content for my clients in our service called the War Room, which you can see on my website, paulgreensmspmarketing.com, but I’m in the habit of writing new content for them every single day.
Paul Green:
And because that’s been a daily habit of mine for some time now, it’s not a habit that I forget. In fact, it’s top of mind, every day when I wake up, there’s some content ideas in my head for me to write about today because my brain overnight has been working on that problem of what the hell are we going to write about tomorrow? Thank you very much, brain. This is a great example of rhythmic marketing. It’s become a rhythm. It’s something literally I do day in, day out. And for that reason, it makes it actually very simple.
Paul Green:
So there’s the challenge to you. Break down all of the marketing that you want to do, all the longterm marketing, break it down into a series of little cogs. And then slowly over a period of time, you start to put those cogs in place and make them repeatable tasks. This is the route to putting in place consistent systematic marketing, which will deliver you great results in the longterm so long as you put enough of those cogs together, and you keep turning the handle that turns all the cogs round and ultimately attracts leads, turns those leads into prospects and turn some of those prospects into lovely clients.
Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.
Paul Green:
Over the years, I’ve read so many business and marketing books. Loads of them have been okay. They’ve had a couple of good ideas. You always get something out of a book, don’t you? At least just one idea. But now, and again, I come across books that just blow me away and they’ve got so many new ideas in or such novel thinking that I elevate them to my special bookshelf. I just had some bedroom furniture built in my bedroom, in the house that we moved into last year. And I had a big bookcase built in my bedroom and I’ve moved all of my favourite books, my top tier books into my bedroom now, so I can sit at night gazing at them and wondering when I should read them again.
Paul Green:
One of them which caught my eye just yesterday, actually was Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. I hope I’ve pronounced that right, Mike. If I have got that wrong, due drop me an email and let me know. It’s an amazing book because it talks about why we as business owners never seem to have enough money in the bank. So Mike, I’m not going to try and pronounce his surname again, Mike, the author, he built up and sold two multimillion dollar companies. And then he became an angel investor. And by his own admission in the book, got a bit cocky with his investing. I remember reading this in the book, at one point, he says to his wife, “You needn’t worry about anything. We’ve got more money than God.” And I think anytime anyone says that, I mean, you could see it in a movie, couldn’t you? And it’s exactly the same in the book. Some short time later, they actually run out of cash because they’re spending their capital that they’ve got from selling those businesses and he doesn’t have any income coming in.
Paul Green:
So the book is kind of about the lessons that he learned, having a lot of money and then losing a lot of money and running businesses along the way. And if I was to summarise this book up in kind of three parts, the three parts to it are this: The first of them, which is indicated by the title is before you pay your bills, before you pay your staff, you take your own personal income out of the business first, because quite often as business owners, we take whatever is left. Don’t we? So we get money in, we pay the bills. If there’s money left, then we take money out. I’ve been there in business ventures. You’ve been there in business ventures. You may even be there right now.
Paul Green:
And it’s not a great place to be because we are the owner. The whole point of the business is to feed our lifestyle. I know we don’t just do it for money, but when we’re doing it and there isn’t enough money, that sucks. That’s awful. So that’s his first kind of big idea is that you take your profit first and actually you arrange your accounts and you arrange your bank accounts and have lots of different bank accounts so that as money comes in, money is siphoned out of your operating account, and it goes into your profit account or your earnings account.
Paul Green:
So right from the start, in fact, you could start doing this tomorrow. I’d read the book first, but you could start doing this tomorrow. You have a separate bank account in your company’s name, and let’s say you have $1,000 coming into the bank, a proportion of that goes over into your earnings account or your profit first account. And actually in the book, he gives you a formula to try and work out what percentage of that should be going over. But this is such a novel idea, isn’t it? It means every single time money comes in, a little proportion of it is put aside for you. So essentially you’re protecting your own earnings.
Paul Green:
And if you have staff and the vast majority of people do, then you can do exactly the same thing with your staff. You have a bank account from which your staff get paid as well. So you’d have a staff bank account and a bank account for you. And these are all in your company name, but it’s a case of almost cutting up the pie when it comes in. The $1,000 comes in, $200 goes into your earning account, $300 goes into your staff’s wages account. That leaves you $500 to pay the bills and do whatsoever else with. So that’s kind of the first big idea.
Paul Green:
The second big idea in the book is that you run your business based on what you can afford to do today, not what you hope to be able to afford someday. So he talks about putting off capital purchases, for example, and just waiting another day and wait another week and wait a bit longer and wait a bit longer. And not buying anything on credit, but waiting until you’ve actually got the cash in the bank, bearing in mind, you’ve already paid yourself, remember. So you see that $500 or £500 in the bank, that’s money to spend, so long as you’ve paid the bills, of course. And that’s a completely different way of thinking.
Paul Green:
He quite rightly states that most business owners, we run the business based off of what money we see in the bank account, rather than actually looking at the P&L or the management accounts that our bookkeeper or our accountant has provided for us. We see a thousand bucks in the bank and we go and spend it. And we forget that there’s a bill coming in, that we’ve got to pay. I’ve done this, you’ve done this, we’ve all done it. And that’s why you need to read this book so you don’t do it.
Paul Green:
The third kind of big idea in the book is that when profit comes first, it becomes the focus of the business and it’s never forgotten. Now, this is not about making the business profit obsessed, because I don’t think any business should be profit obsessed. In fact, one of the things that bothers me about big public companies is how they make very, very short-term decisions to maximise profit for the shareholders, which I know is their legal duty to do so. But I think often they do this at the expense of the bigger picture, at the expense of the longterm picture. And you look at companies like Disney, for example, which is currently not making a great deal of money, and that’s not so much to do with COVID so much as it is they’ve gone in on Disney+ in a massive, massive way. And if you don’t have Disney+, it is a fantastic service if only for The Mandalorian alone. Oh, and the Marvel TV shows as well.
Paul Green:
Anyway, they have completely gone in and said to their shareholders, “Hey, not going to be a lot of dividends for a couple of years, but we get to dominate entertainment on TV for the next 10, 20 years and properly take on Netflix or whatsoever.” There are very few big public companies that do that. They’re far too focused on the short-term, hitting their targets and the CEO getting their great big million pound or million dollar bonus. Whereas here in small business world, we can act a little bit differently. In fact, should act a little bit differently. We should be focusing on marketing the business, growing the business, keeping our customers delighted, keeping our staff delighted and generally having a good time and having some fun and enjoying what we’re doing. And guess what the reward of all of that is, you do a good job and profit is the reward.
Paul Green:
And if you go and read Profit First, you’ll understand how to hide some of that profit away from you so that you can not only have a guaranteed income from your business, but once or maybe twice a year, you can have an unexpected cash event where suddenly you realise, hey, there’s 20,000 in the bank that I didn’t really know I’d got because I’ve been hiding it from myself. I’ll have that. Thank you very much. And you suddenly can go off and do some investing, go and buy another rental house or go and buy that Lamborghini or whatever it is that you want to do. It doesn’t really matter what you do with it. The point being you’re hiding money from yourself so you don’t spend it in the business. And it becomes a very powerful thing and a very motivating reward for you to take an unexpected bonus out of the business on an annual basis or even twice a year.
Paul Green:
So get the book Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. It’s on Amazon. It’s on Audible as well. It’s a great book. Get it, implement it, and maybe some of your cashflow problems in your business will go away and will never bother you again.
Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.
Paul Green:
Ka-ching. Going to keep this one really short and sweet. If you need really high quality marketing materials, specially created just for MSPs, and you want to be the only MSP in your area to have access to these materials, then I have the solution for you. It’s called the MSP Marketing Edge. It’s my service. We have more than 330 MSPs around the world using it right now. And we give you the stuff that you need on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Just like I was talking about earlier in the podcast, we give you the materials so you can do the rhythmic marketing. It’s all explained in full, and you can see how ridiculously low priced it is at mspmarketingedge.com.
Paul Green:
Terms and conditions do not apply. Paul Green thinks you should buy the MSP Marketing Edge because it could revolutionise the way that you market your MSP. To find out more details, go to mspmarketingedge.com.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Brenna Loury:
Hi, my name is Brenna Loury. I’m the Head of Marketing at Doist, and we are a fully-remote company behind the productivity app Todoist and the team communication app Twist.
Paul Green:
And I’m beyond excited to have you on, Brenna, because Todoist is the app that I use the most. We were just chatting before the interview and I was telling you, I’ve been a client for, it must be six, seven years. Something like that. I literally must fire up that app on my phone, 15, 20, 30 times a day. It’s on my laptop. It’s absolutely beautiful. Give us a very brief overview of what Todoist is before we talk about general productivity methods.
Brenna Loury:
So Todoist is at its most essential a to-do list app or a task manager. It can be as simple or as complex as somebody would like it to be. So you go from very basic, like do my laundry today, or you can really get into significant details with projects and sub-tasks and labels and filters and all of the things.
Paul Green:
Okay. So it’s one of the more mature products on the market as well. Isn’t it? Because it’s been around for, I think you were saying about eight years or so.
Brenna Loury:
Yeah, we’ve been around since about 2009, I believe. And a lot of our competitors have gotten bought out by larger companies. For example, Wunderlist was purchased by Microsoft in 2015. So we’ve really seen the landscape change a lot over the years, but we’ve managed to stick it through. And I think we have about 25 million people who use the app now.
Paul Green:
Pretty impressive. That’s very impressive. Let’s talk about in general using apps because obviously the people listening to this are 100% software driven. Software is absolutely everything to them. Although some of the MSPs I work with do prefer to use a piece of paper and a pencil, which seems kind of crazy to me for their to-do lists. But there we go. So in general terms, what are some of the pro tips, the best ways to use this kind of software to just get more stuff done?
Brenna Loury:
One of the best selling points about Todoist that we’ve had throughout our trajectory of existence is that Todoist is available essentially anywhere you need it. So we have mobile apps, we have plugins for web browsers, we have extensions for email clients, we have integrations with 50 third-party services. So you can really use this app at any sort of touch point within your digital bubble, which makes it really easy to add tasks to your list whenever they come to your mind, whether you can turn an email into a task, or you’re going for a run and you think of something and you use your smartwatch to add a task. That’s a feature that people have really enjoyed and take advantage of. And it makes it easy to kind of do this brain dump and keep everything inside the app so that you’re not relying on your brain to remember all of the things that you have to do.
Paul Green:
I mean, this is a core idea within David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, which I think looking at to-do list over the years, I suspect it was built to the GTD methodology, right at the beginning. You dump the ideas in your head as they come out and in Todoist they go into an inbox. But I think in whatever software you use, the principle of getting it out of your head is critical. But what’s the next step? What’s then the best way to organize those tasks? Because we all have far too many thoughts and ideas in our heads and things that we should do. So how do you prioritise them?
Brenna Loury:
So what we recommend is exactly what you mentioned, Paul, is to kind of dump everything generally into one inbox, especially if you’re just getting started. Dump everything into one place, add your tasks. And then from there you can set up projects or I think in GTD they’re called buckets, these sort of general areas where you can keep similar tasks together. And then you can sort of structure those if they need a little bit more structure with sub-projects or sections or things like that. But really getting everything out of your head is the best first step. And then taking some time to intentionally categorise where those are going to go is really important.
Paul Green:
Why do you think we, as people tend to over commit ourselves to tasks? I mean, even I have days where I have so many things on my list and I know I’m not going to get them done, but some kind of overambition makes me put them on the list. Why do we do this?
Brenna Loury:
That’s a great question. And I’m not going to lie. I, myself, I have probably 10 overdue tasks today in my Todoist. I just think, honestly, it’s hard to get everything done in a single day. Your attention is constantly being under siege and under attack. And I think the demands of daily life are honestly really hard to keep up with. So I think people have this ideal mindset of all the things are going to get done, but in reality, it’s a lot harder. But once you have all of these tasks or items or to-dos in a system, at least you’re not trying to remember to do them yourself. At least they’re saying like, okay, maybe you can’t get to me today, but tomorrow, if you have five minutes do this thing.
Paul Green:
Now just under a year ago, obviously the world went into lockdown for the first time. And there was that massive rush for remote working. And many of the people listening to this will have known it as hell fortnight or hell two weeks. And they were trying to get all of their clients set up for remote working and working from home. What kind of trends have you seen from your end over the last year? How have people changed the way that they’re using productivity software?
Brenna Loury:
Its has been fascinating to see, because like I mentioned, at the top of the episode, Doist has been a fully-remote company for the past 10 years or so. So we’ve had 10 years to iron out our workflows and adapt to this way of working. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of people and companies just take what they were doing in the office and try and somehow smash that into a remote work environment, which I don’t think is very productive. I think when you are working remotely, you have to be very mindful about the way that you communicate with your coworkers and how you structure your day and how you get things done. So I think there has been a ton of friction for people. Actually, I think it’s giving remote work somewhat of a bad reputation because you can’t really replicate what is happening in an office environment and do that well in a remote environment.
Paul Green:
No, I think I completely agree with you there. But, I mean, the fact that you’re completely remote, I assume you have people all over the world as well. You must use your own product to stay in touch because obviously Todoist has collaborative working built in.
Brenna Loury:
Yeah. Well, we actually created a different app for this around 2015. We had grown to about 30 different people and we were all remote back then as well. And we were just finding it so hard to keep up with, even at that point was a pretty manageable amount of communication at the time considering how small we were. But we had started using Slack. Again, this was back in 2015, so it was a while ago. And it just did not work for us at all considering the breadth of time zones that we span, I think. Today we’re 90-plus people in almost 40 different countries. So me being in Pacific time in the US, like I would wake up and most of my colleagues would be done for the day and I’d have this cascade of a million different messages and GIFs. And it was impossible for me to keep up or make decisions throughout the day.
Brenna Loury:
So this was a huge inflection point for us, which is why we decided to create our app Twist, which is an app that’s more focused around a synchronous communication and allowing people to do deep work and disconnect and come back no matter what their time zone and still participate actively in conversations. So that was super eye-opening for us. I don’t know how people are dealing with this sort of barrage of messages all day. It’s very unproductive, honestly.
Paul Green:
No, I agree. I agree. And I think as much as things like Teams, you mentioned Slack, there’s some wonderful software out there. I use, as you know, Todoist, I use Basecamp as well within my business, which is project management software. These are all wonderful, but you add in then WhatsApp and you add in messaging and you add in your children, especially if your homework… if they’re homeschooled. And I think there’s going to come a point we’re going to have to look back and say, “How did we work? We were inundated with interruptions and notifications all day long. How did we work?”
Paul Green:
One of the things I always recommend to MSP owners is to get away from their staff so that they’re not interrupted all the time with silly little inquiries that don’t really contribute. We seem to replace an office full of people, interrupting each other with a remote office of people pinging each other all the time. I’m sure someone somewhere will figure that out. Well, that sounds like an opportunity for you guys to figure out the next piece of software to figure that out.
Paul Green:
Brenna, let’s finish off our interview. And I want to just circle back to productivity. You’re the Head of Marketing for a productivity app with 25 million users, what are your top three productivity hacks or tips that you’d give to busy business owners like us?
Brenna Loury:
I actually also, in addition to Todoist use a pen and paper. This is because I’m a huge fan of the time blocking productivity method. I have established sort of this special workflow that I have where I sit down every day at the end of the day and I physically draw out on paper, my schedule for the next day. And this includes specific blocks of time.
Brenna Loury:
For example, recording this podcast gets a chunk of time. I had a meeting earlier this morning that gets a block of time. And then I go in and sort of fill out the remaining blocks of the day to make sure that I have enough time to focus on deep work throughout the day, because otherwise you just get wrapped into these conversations and you’re not responding to the next email that comes in. And by the end of the day, you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t work on this huge task that I’m supposed to work on because I was focusing on all of these other small things that are competing for my attention.” So that has been a game changer for me to block things out in my calendar and kind of check them off as I go.
Brenna Loury:
And then in terms of using Todoist, I rely on this system that I’ve set up where I divide my personal tasks and my work tasks by using a label. So if anybody’s familiar with Todoist, labels allow you to categorise similar tasks together. So any task that is work-related gets a work label, and then I can filter out those tasks. And instead of seeing my today view, which just shows me every single thing I have to do today from doing the laundry to taking my dog for a walk or all of these household chores that we have to do mixed in with work tasks, I find that super overwhelming. So I use a filter to filter out only work tasks so that I follow that view throughout the day and I’m not distracted, especially working from home on all these other household things that I have to do.
Brenna Loury:
So those things have been really, really huge for me. And also just going back to what we were discussing previously, obviously rely super heavily on Todoist. I feel like my whole life is in this app. Even tasks that are years in advance, I add them to Todoist. Making sure that I’m not relying on my brain to remember, to do all these important things, that’s a huge relief for me.
Paul Green:
I bet it is. I bet it is. As an aside, I scheduled a task the other day for seven years in the future. It sounds weird, isn’t it? And I’m not going to go into what it was. It’s just a personal sort of finance thing.
Brenna Loury:
Right.
Paul Green:
But it’s so cool to schedule something that’s going to crop up in 2028.
Brenna Loury:
Right.
Paul Green:
That’s just amazing.
Brenna Loury:
Yeah.
Paul Green:
That’s a way of guaranteeing someone’s going to keep using your software, that’s for sure.
Brenna Loury:
Well, yeah. And I think, one thing I love about Todoist is also like the recurring tasks that we have. And I’m honestly not trying to sound salesy, but I find it very sort of mentally soothing to know that I can set up a task that says, compile all of my tax documents every first and third of the month from January to March. And it will configure this task all by itself. And I just don’t have to think anymore about it. And that’s really comforting.
Paul Green:
Yes. No excuse for forgetting anything.
Brenna Loury:
Yeah.
Paul Green:
Brenna, tell us where we can find out more about Todoist and also your other app Twist.
Brenna Loury:
Todoist.com, and then Todoist Homepage. And then we have twists.com as well. If you want to learn more about the company and our remote work practices, we’re Doist.com. And we have a wealth of information about productivity and team communication and remote work on our blog as well. And you’ll be able to find that in any of those websites.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.
Martin Baulig:
Hi. My name is Martin Baulig. I’m Co-founder and Head of Sales for Cloud Console. We are active as an MSP in our home market in Philippines and cater to MSPs around the world as an outsourcing provider. The book I like to recommend is Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland. It’s a great book about project management and while it’s quite famous as a scrum framework for programming, it is really helpful for our life and emerging companies overall.
Voiceover:
How to contribute to the show.
Paul Green:
I’d love to hear from you and get your feedback on what you love about this podcast. What do you love and what would you like me to do differently? Go on drop me an email, [email protected].
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Jay McBain:
More than 23% of customers threw up their hands and said, “I can’t manage it from a security perspective, a basic infrastructure perspective.”
Paul Green:
That’s Jay McBain from Forrester Research. He’s going to join me on next week’s show to talk about what the rest of 2021 might have in store for your MSP. We’re also going to be talking about salespeople. If you’ve got one, how do you motivate your sales person? How do you keep them involved in what’s going on in the business? And how do you stop yourself from getting more and more frustrated with them? We’re also going to be talking about why your existing clients don’t send you more referrals. They love what you do, but they never seem to refer clients to you. Why is that? There’s a very, very good psychological reason why they don’t and I’ve got the secret to make them send you more referrals on a regular basis. I’ll tell you what that secret is 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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