Full Guide: Setting Up Emails That Create MSP Clients

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi there and thanks for joining me on another podcast. Here's what I've got coming up for you today. The one email sequence that every MSP should have running. How to get your whole team involved in marketing. And if you've ever been to a massive MSP event and wondered what kind of a headache is it to organize, my special guest today is going to reveal what happens behind the scenes. Welcome to episode 358 powered by mspmarketingedge.com Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast. Most MSPs never use this, which, even though it's an oldie, is still completely valid in 2026. It's an automated email sequence which warms up a prospect who has joined your CRM. And the beauty of it is that you set it up once and then you forget about it and it's going to work for you for years and years to come. There are still far too many MSPs who connect with someone on LinkedIn or hand over a business card at a networking event, or someone comes and downloads something from their website and. And that's it. That person kind of disappears into a. Maybe the MSP remembers them, maybe they don't, and actually they're never contacted again. Today I want to fix that, because a simple automated email sequence is one of the highest return marketing assets that your MSP can build. And as I say, once it's set up, you don't really have to do anything. Let's talk about the one email sequence every MSP should have running. So we should start with looking at how people end up on your list in the first place and how if you don't have a list, you. You should have a list. So most MSPs underestimate the opportunity that having an email list presents. So of course LinkedIn connections are a massive source of leads because when you connect with a business owner or manager on LinkedIn, then not only do you have a connection on that platform, but you have the ability to then go and harvest other information about them. I'm a big fan of taking your connections on LinkedIn, finding their email address. There's a number of different ways you can do that. You can either get it off LinkedIn or you can use a plugin like Lusha or something like that, or you can just go and Google it. There are only about, what, seven or eight types of email address. [email protected]@p.green@. Don't comment on p green p dot green, p@. You get the idea. You go and Brute force. Google search those in speech marks and you will find that email address eventually. So all those LinkedIn connections, you can go and find that email address and not enough MSPs are gathering email addresses and adding them into a CRM. Are you using a CRM? Do you have a basic one set up? Please go and do that quickly. It's easy. Use Mailerlite or mailchimp. Or if you're in the tech tribe, you've already got one. It's growably which is free as part of your tech tribe membership. Go High Level is another popular one. Another one is active Campaign. The ultimate one is HubSpot, but you will be paying them in kidneys every month. HubSpot's really, really expensive. But the point is you, you can't rely just on LinkedIn or gathering business parts. You've got to have a CRM where you're gathering people's email addresses and you've got permission to email them. By the way, if you do take all of those email addresses or just business cards or any emails you gather from anywhere, as long as you're not doing this on mass and not just buying a bunch of data and shoving it in, that's bad. But if you're trickling in people you've met on LinkedIn or in real life, then what you do is you send them an email. Soon as you put their email address in and you tell them what you've done, you say, hey, we just connected on LinkedIn, I hope you don't mind, but I found your email address and I've put it into my database. I'm going to send you one email a week about growing your business with technology. If you really don't want that, there's an unsubscribe button at the bottom and like 8 out of 10 people will not unsubscribe. But you've now cleaned that email address and in theory, I realize the world's anti spam laws will not agree with me on this, but in theory you now have permission to email them. You've got to remember when all of those anti spam laws are not aimed at you and me, they're aimed at the people that are spamming a million people a day. Right? If you're adding three or four people a week to your CRM, it's not a bad thing. It really isn't. That is not legal advice, by the way. So other places where you could find email addresses mentioned LinkedIn, we mentioned networking events. So people you physically met, event attendees, if you run a webinar, or even just attend a local business event. Whether you've got a stall or not, everyone who shows up could be a legitimate prospect that you could add to your list. Then you've got website inquiries. Anyone that's ever filled in a form or got in touch via your website or a live chat or something like that. In fact, you could go back, look in your outlook and find everyone who's ever emailed into your, ever filled in a form on your website. All of that data could go onto your CRM. Then you've got referrals from existing clients. Anyone whose name gets mentioned in conversation but isn't ready to talk yet. You know, there's lots of ways of places where you can get names. The point is, every single one of these people who has had any form of contact with you, right, these are not cold people. These are your potential future clients, but only if you proactively market to them. And that's what your email sequence does. So the first step is getting their email address, shoving them into a CRM, right, and then sending that email where you tell them, tell them what you've done and you are essentially asking them permission to stay in touch with them. Now, even if you do that, in my experience, most MSPs do that and then do nothing else with those people. So here's where you set up the thing that we're talking about here. In this bit, you set up an email sequence that goes out to them and it's completely automated and I'm going to tell you what exactly it is, what to put in it and how to set it up and keep it going for ages. So what this sequence is trying to do, well, let me tell you what the sequence is not trying to do. It's not trying to sell, right? This is not an automated sequence of buy, bye, bye, please come and buy from me. Because if you do buy, buy, buy, they're just going to say bye, bye, right? We can't do that. Managed services is a very long sale, right? It's a very long sales process. It takes a long time. People only buy when they're ready to buy. So there's no point bombarding them with emails asking them to buy from you, because they're not going to do that. Instead, the goal is to build trust and you build that trust over a period of time. So the morning that that prospect wakes up and they are final, willing and able to consider switching IT support companies, your name is already in their head, they're already well in their heart. They feel like they know you in some way just because they've been connected to you on LinkedIn, maybe seen some of your LinkedIn stuff, maybe met you in real life. But importantly, they've opened a number of emails from you across the months or the years. So you've got to think about where people are when they very first land on your list in your CRM. Maybe some of them are actively looking for a new msp, but it's going to be a very small number. Most of them are not. They may be a thinking of switching next year, or they've just connected with another local business owner. So they might be vaguely interested, but they're nowhere near ready to have a conversation. So your automated email sequence needs to serve all of these people. For the ready ones, there should be a very easy, clear path for them to book a call with you, a discovery call. But for all of the rest of them, the ones who aren't yet ready, your automated email sequence is going to build the relationship with them and keep you top of mind until they are ready to talk. So guess what I'm saying here is you've got to play a long game. And the MSPs who play the long game consistently are the ones who very rarely have an empty pipeline. So what's a good structure? How often should you send out an automated email? I believe one email a week for around about eight weeks is perfect. And one email a week is the perfect cadence. It's frequent enough to stay present and it's not so frequent that people feel bombarded by you. Eight weeks, it's roughly two months. It's enough time to establish who you are, what you stand for, why you're worth talking to, all of that, but without overstaying your welcome before they've decided whether they even want to stay on your email list or not. Now you can do less, and of course you can do longer. I have friends who have 104 week email sequences, which is crazy, right? They send an email a week for two years, but they're more in the kind of the Internet marketing thing. I think for an MSP, 8 to 12 weeks is more than enough. But what do you do then after that sequence ends? Well, it's very simple. The prospect moves into your regular weekly broadcast list. And if you don't have this, this is something that you should start doing. So every week you send out a new edutainment email. This is a mix of education and entertainment. So you're teaching them about tech in a way which is actually quite entertaining. And of course, they don't care tech itself. They care about what tech can do for them. So you talk about business growth and enhancing their business and growing their business with technology underpinning that. Right? And, and most, most often, the right way to do this is you just load a new email every week. So this is what we do for our MSP Marketing Edge members. We give them an email every week. We actually give it to them once a month, but we give them an email that they can send every week to their prospects. And the idea is you do an automated sequence, so everyone who joins your list get first eight emails, the same eight emails in a row. And that way you make sure you cover off all the things you want them to know about. We'll talk about that in a second. But after that, when your sequence is ended, you drop them into your broadcast bucket, and it's just the email that you load every week. And that's where you can talk about timely stuff and things that are happening and all of that kind of stuff. But the idea is that you continue building the relationship indefinitely, but you're either doing it through a structured sequence that you've set at once, or you're doing it through that weekly broadcast bucket. Does that make sense? Now, the tone throughout all of your emails should be conversational, personal, useful. Think of it that you are writing to one person, even though potentially thousands of people may see this email over time. But I was taught this back in my radio days. I was a radio presenter from the mid-90s to the mid-30s, and I was taught that when you're sat in a studio, you know, talking into a microphone, you don't think about the hundred thousand people who are listening. You think about one person. You picture that person in your mind and you just talk one on one. It's what I'm doing now. I'm talking to you. Apparently lots of other people are listening to this podcast or watching it on YouTube, but I'm only talking right now to you, one person. So the less your emails feel like marketing, and the more it feels like one person is writing to another person, the more effective they're going to be. But what do you put in this email sequence? Well, there's a number of things that you can do. But remember what we're trying to do, we're trying to build trust, we're trying to build a relationship. So in your first email, you might do a warm human welcome. Well, let's assume you've done that one that's asked, well, essentially asked Permission for adding them to the list in the first place. The next email might be just about you, just a welcome of who you are, what you do while you're started in msp. And it's not a pitch, don't pitch slap them. That was a pitch with a P. Don't pitch slap them. Just tell them your story, right? Give them a shortened version of of your story. Because if they're a business owner like you, then they're going to connect with your story. Because business owners love hearing other business owner stories. If you're connecting with an IT director because you're selling co managed it, you know, an IT director is always interested in other IT people stories. You see how you can hit both of those things. So you want to make them feel like they've met a real person and not subscribed to a newsletter. And then the next email could be something genuinely useful. It might be a timeless piece of advice or an insight or a common mistake that you see businesses make with their it. Something that actually makes them think that's helpful and that should be something ideally that's based on your experience. The next email might be a piece of social proof. So you might have a case study. In fact, we were talking in last week's podcast about building a great case study. It could be a specific example of a problem that one of your clients have and how you solved it and what changed as a result. And remember to keep this human and specific and tell a really good story. Take them on a journey. And then the next email might address a common fear or frustration that your ideal prospect has. I mean, it could be cyber attacks, could be data loss, could be where the IT slows the business down rather than helping them get stuff done and show them that you understand their world without making it a sales pitch. Side note, if you are building a vertical specific audience as well as a general audience, you might have two email sequences. And that email I was just talking about, in fact, actually the last couple of emails I was talking about the case study and then that, that fear that you were just talking about, those should be specific to their vertical. So the smart thing to do is to have two sequences within your CRM. One is one that general business owners come into and then you've got a vertical specific one where all of the examples are specific to that vertical. The content otherwise can be exactly the same in both of those sequences. Right. Side note, over back to the main structure and we're talking about the next email. And here you might share something slightly personal so it might be a behind the scenes look at how you work. You could do like a video of you and your team, you could introduce the team, you could just do a piece to camera and send them an embedded video about what you believe about it support that other MSPs don't. And this is almost like a likability email. It shows that you're human and it shows the real people behind the business because that's what people care about the most. Another email is another useful piece of content. So you might send them out a checklist or a guide or a question that's worth them asking their current IT provider something practical they can actually use. And then another email. Now what are we on? Now we're on probably about email 6, 7, 8, something like that. It might be a piece of forward looking insight. You might talk about what's changing in it, you might talk about what's happening in cybersecurity right now. But don't look at it from the channel point of view, from your point of view, look at it from their point of view. And this is about positioning you as a tech authority and someone worth listening to on an ongoing basis. And then the final email should be, I guess, a gentle, low pressure invitation, maybe saying to them, if you're at the point where you're thinking about whether or not your current IT setup is really worth working for your business, then I'd love to have a quick conversation with you. There's no pressure, there's no pitch. Let's just have a 15 minute call to see if there's anything useful that we can explore together with a simple link to book. And you could just put that call to action just in that final email. There's a couple of different ways of doing it. Me, I like a call to action in every single email. So that last email is just the call to action. But all of the other emails, you'd perhaps just have a link at the bottom saying, P.S. if you ever want to talk about your business's technology, here's my live calendar. And that link goes through to your page and you know a page on your website with your live calendar. Simple as that. Right? So there's about what were 7, 8, 9 emails, something like that that you could set up as your sequence. As I say, you set it up once, you do it once and you go and forget about it. I would advise every six months you just go back and reread those emails. That's what I do. We have a, I think it's a 12 step email sequence. So if you get the wall planner that I'm just in the next couple of minutes, I'm just going to offer to you, you go into my standard sequence. In fact, this would be a good way for you to see what I do in my sequence. And, and the first 8, 10, 12 emails, something like that, I set those up a couple of years ago. But I have a recurring task that pops up every six months for me to just go and read them. And there's always some tiny little thing that I can improve or something that's gone out of date. So I highly recommend you do that on a regular basis. So I recommended earlier that after the email sequence has ended, you drop them into your weekly email list, your broadcast bucket. And these emails should be edutainment emails, so educational and entertaining at the same time. And you send one out every week to everyone on your list. So it should be the same kind of content as the sequence. So it should be useful human. There should be personal stories behind it, relevant industry insights, bits of social proof. And as I said, this is what we provide to our MSP Marketing Edge members for them to send out every week. In fact, we have a B2B version and a co managed version as well. But the idea is that this is what keeps you in people's minds, in their awareness and in their considerations. So the day they wake up, they're ready to buy, you know, you are kind of there in their head and in their heart. And just to set your expectations, it could take two or three years of them opening that before they're ever ready to get in touch. And it might be that it's not the email that's the trigger, but the email is doing all of the hard work of building the relationship with them. And then it might be that someone from your office phones them and they say, do you know what, it's really weird that you called because we've been meaning to call you guys. I've been thinking of talking to you for a while because we're thinking of switching our IT provider, which is really cool, right? Just to set your expectations, you're not going to get everyone opening every email. In fact, if you get 20% of people opening an email that's really good, a 20% open rate is good. So. And also another reason you should send them weekly is you can assume that the average person is only going to open one email in four of your emails. So if you email them every week, they will see one of your emails once a month. If you email them once a month. They're only going to see an email from you two or three times a year, which is just not enough. So most of your competitors have no email sequence at all, which means they're letting warm prospects slip away every single day because there's no follow up happening. The email sequence does the automatic follow up for you. So you should build the sequence once, switch it on, and then do your weekly broadcast email. This is one of the highest leverage things you can do for your marketing today. It runs while you sleep, it builds relationships while you're doing tech work. And when a prospect is eventually ready to talk, you are going to be the MSP they already feel like they know. Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast Let me be transparent about something. We have just spent the last few minutes talking about automating email sequences and having those for everyone who joins your list. And as I said, I use exactly this system myself, So I use HubSpot. That's how I know that there's so many kidneys coming out every month. But HubSpot is brilliant. And in fact, if you go to mspwallplanner.com and fill in your details to request a free wall planner that goes on your wall with a whole load of marketing actions to help you generate new clients, then you also join my list. And it does say that up front. But you'll start getting a series of weekly emails from you that are designed to do exactly what I've just been describing, to build a relationship, share useful ideas, and to let you get to know me and what I think about marketing your msp. There's no hard sell in these emails or on the wall planner. There's no cost to you either. It's all just genuinely useful content. Same kind of stuff I recommend that you send to your own prospects. So if you want to get one of those, go to mspwallplanner.com, do that right now. Or if you're watching on YouTube, scan the QR code that's on screen right now. Let me ask you an interesting question. If you asked every member of your team what their job is, they probably describe their role, right? They'd be the technician who answers the phone and fixes things, or the third line tech who does the really difficult problems that just baffle other people. Or they'd be the account manager who looks after the clients, or the admin person who keeps things running. And what about marketing? I mean, maybe, maybe you've got a marketing person or maybe marketing is your job as the owner or the manager of the msp. Well, today, right now, I want to make the case that that mindset is potentially costing you growth and that actually getting your whole team involved in marketing doesn't really mean asking your engineers to post on LinkedIn. But it does have a massive benefit as the whole of the business is thinking, how do we win clients, how do we keep those clients and how do we get them to buy more? So I'm talking here about a mindset shift. I believe that marketing is a whole business activity because everyone in your business wants to earn more money, right? No one ever said no to a pay rise. And also everyone in your business wants to work for a successful growing company. Everyone wants job security, they want all of the perks that come from a healthy business. But the reality is that those things don't happen without marketing and sales. And yet in most MSPs, marketing is seen as the owner's problem and no one else's concern. And that's a disconnect. And that's worth addressing directly with your team and not in a heavy handed way, but in a very straightforward way. Because the connection between the business growing and everyone's quality of life improving, well, we know that those two things are there. You want more money, the business has got to grow first, right? So if you can make that connection visible to your team, I believe that's the first step in building a culture where everyone is involved in marketing and growth within the business. And as I say, this isn't about turning technicians into writers or salespeople. You don't want to ask introverts to post videos on LinkedIn because they won't. They'll complain about it for a few months and then they'll leave. Instead, it's about helping everyone to understand that they have a role to play in growing the business. They have a role to play in marketing, even if that role is small and passive. So let's start with awareness. And the simplest thing that you can do is update your team on what's happening on a weekly basis, right? With your marketing and sales. Of course. I do this every week in my own business. We don't do a team call. We don't do those very often actually, because probably because there's so many of us now, but we do a written update or I do a written update every week in our project management tool. What happens is a colleague of mine, Sarah, she does all the hard work. Thank you, Sarah. So she goes and looks at all of our numbers. So how many New members, we've won, you know, what's happening on our social channels, all of that stuff. And we have a whole bunch of numbers we track every week. Sarah pulls those together, puts them into Claude, she turns them into a pretty report and she posts that. And then underneath, I sort of update on our marketing initiatives. So what we're running right now, what we're testing, what's working, what isn't working, because trust me, there's always something that isn't working. In fact, if you don't have marketing right now that isn't working, it means that you're not trying enough new marketing stuff. By the way, that report takes me 10 minutes to write because I have the same conversation with my slt, my senior leadership team. And then off the back of that meeting, I just quickly type up some notes from it and share it with the whole team. And what this does is it creates a shared awareness, right? My whole team, and most of them aren't involved in our own marketing, but my whole team knows what the business is trying to do commercially. And every week they see that we're running all of these projects and trying these new initiatives, and what happens is then they start to see their own work through the lens of what's most important to me as the owner and the leader of the business. So I talk all the time about growth projects and marketing and they start to notice things that are relevant to them in what they do. And this is the passive involvement, right? There's nothing for them to actually do. I hope that they read the report or the guide. It's not really a report, it's just an update. I hope they read that and I believe that most of them do. And the idea is that it will just help them understand what, what we're doing as a business. Every single week now, there is something that your team can do which you yourself might not be able to do so well, and that's gather intelligence. Because your technicians and your account managers are in contact with your clients every single day, which means they're hearing things that you never hear. They could potentially notice patterns that you wouldn't see because you're a little bit further removed from the day to day tech, which in itself is not a bad thing because your job is to lead the business, but you do sometimes miss out on what's happening at the kind of the edge of the business. So if there are two or three clients asking about the same thing, that is a marketing signal, right? If there's a common frustration that keeps coming up Potentially that's a content idea for your marketing, or if there's a compliance question that multiple clients are confused, then potentially that's a webinar topic that you could put on. The problem usually is that if your account manager or if your tech notices this, there's no mechanism for them to submit that intelligence to you. So it reaches whoever's doing the marketing, whether that's you or a marketing person, it gets lost in the noise of just day to day operations. So you've got to make it easy for your team to pass this on. And a simple channel in teams. For example, a teams thread or a section in your weekly huddle where anyone can just, you know, drop a note saying, do you know what? I noticed that three clients this week have asked about AI governance. I thought that might be useful to mention that's all you've got to do. I mean, the easy one there is, that is the teams channel, isn't it? Where at any point someone can just go and drop in what clients are asking about. And not in a way of saying, help me with this, but in a, in a, I've noticed this. In fact, maybe you'd even call it that, I've noticed this. And it's really important they understand you're not going to turn around and say to them, that's great, hey, could you do me a video about that? Or could you post on LinkedIn about that? If they think you're going to do that, they're never going to give you ideas, but they should understand that all you're asking them to do is to tell someone when they notice something. And most people will do that willingly. Now, something else you could ask them to do is to help you spot opportunities to create reviews and testimonials. In fact, this is probably the single most impactful marketing activity that your tech team could do for you. And it fits completely naturally into what they're already doing every day. So if you think when a technician closes a ticket or resolves a problem or has been on site and the client is happy, which is what happens like 9.9 times out of 10, right, that is the perfect moment to ask for a review because the client is at, if you like, peak satisfaction, there's goodwill right there. But of course, most technicians won't naturally do this, mainly because they haven't been asked to, and also because they don't know how to. They might be slightly uncomfortable with it. But we can fix all of these things, give them a simple line they can say, and get them to Rehearse it. Something like, well, we're really glad that we got that sorted out for you. Can I ask a favor, please? We'd really appreciate it if you've got a couple of minutes to just leave us a Google review. It makes a huge difference to us. And then they follow up with a direct link, either sent by a text or an email immediately afterwards. You know, one of my MSP Marketing Edge members took this so seriously, he incentivized his technicians to do it. So he's based here in the UK and he said, I'll give you to each technician, I'll give you as a bunch, as a group, I'll give you £10 for every review you generate. And if a technician's name is mentioned in the review, I'll give that individual £10 as well. So £10 in the group pot for every review that they generate, which makes them work together as a team. And if your name is mentioned, which encourages you to say, could you mention my name in it? Then you get another £10 as well. Do you see how powerful that would be? And in fact, they collected over 100 testimonials in just a couple of months. That is a marketing asset worth thousands and thousands. And it was built almost entirely by the technical team doing something that took them 30 seconds. And everyone benefited. The client feels good leaving a Google review. You can grow your business faster with more Google reviews. And of course, your technicians get a bonus just for getting praise. That's beautiful, right? Because everyone wants to see praise from the clients and that praise is published in public. It's beautiful. Now, if you have a weekly huddle where you literally get together with your team, whether that's in real life or whether it's on teams, that can be used as a marketing moment as well. Just use a few minutes of it to talk about marketing and sales. I do a written update because I don't like group calls. I don't like tools at all, really, if I'm honest. But if you like calls, do yours in that call, but record it, transcribe it, get an AI summary and put that in teams or wherever. You do updates for people as well. Tell them what leads are in the pipeline, what marketing is running right now, what experiments you're trying, what opportunities you've got that the team might be able to help with. And this keeps marketing visible and they see that it's a priority for you every single day of the week and not something that's a bit woo woo, and it's happening invisibly. In the background. And it takes some time. But over time, this will shift the culture and your people will start realizing that marketing is a big part of what you're doing as a business. So you can see that I believe that marketing is not a department. In fact, if you are large enough to have marketing people, your marketing people should be working with all of your team on this. The worst thing any business can do is compartmentalize marketing into a tiny little job that someone is doing right in a small msp. In fact, even a medium and large msp. Marketing is for the whole business. It's a mindset thing. And the owner who builds that mindset into their team, even if it's just in small passive ways, has a genuine competitive advantage over the MSP that's trying to do it all by themselves. So you can start this this week. Tell your team what you're working on commercially, ask them to let you know what they're hearing from clients, and script that review request for your technicians. Those three things alone could make a huge difference to your MSP's marketing. The Ms. MSP Marketing Edge member. If you're an MSP Marketing Edge member, did you know that at any point you can jump on a one to one call with a member of my team? In fact, we're unique in the MSP marketing world for offering this at our price point. But it is a critical part of what we do because we know that marketing is hard. Sometimes it's baffling for you. It's completely the opposite of the tech world that you're comfortable with. And sometimes that means that you just need to sit down with someone just to go through things and figure out what needs to happen in what order. I mean, we have all of that. We've got every marketing task broken down step by step in our portal. But I understand that sometimes you just need one human talking to another human for 10, 15 minutes just to get it really clear in your head exactly what you're doing. So go and book your one to one call, go into the portal, go into support in the navigation, and inside there is the link to book a call. And by the way, it is genuinely unlimited. You can have as many one to one calls as you need. There's no cost at all. It's completely included in your membership. And we deliberately put a whole bunch of my team's time aside every week to talk directly to members. Now, if you're not yet a member, there are two different memberships. We've got a B2B one that's for you to win more business owners as clients and then we've got a co managed one and that's for you to win it directors as clients. Each of those is only available to one MSP per area, so check if yours is available at mspmarketingedge.com Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast Tell me this. Have you ever been to a massive MSP event and looked around at how well organized it is and thought I wonder what happens behind the scenes. How do you get thousands of MSPs to come to a single event? Well, my special guest today can answer exactly that because in four weeks time he's bringing 3,000 MSPs to his event in Barcelona. [00:31:39] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Christian Jaeger and I'm the CEO of MSP Global and I'm so [00:31:43] Speaker A: excited to finally get you on the podcast, Christian. We are four weeks out from MSP Global 2026. I was there last year, I'm going to be there speaking again this year and you are the man that makes it all happen. And today you're going to pull back the curtain and tell us a little bit about what it's like to organize such a big event. Now let's set some context, right, because obviously a lot of people listening are in the, in the US or Canada and may not have have gone to MSP Global, which of course is in Barcelona again this year. Give us an idea of the scale of the show, just how big this show is. [00:32:17] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you very much. And I see you can get, you are getting nervous already. So am I. I mean, four weeks out but we have a good team preparing. We are expecting around 3,000 MSP representatives coming from pretty much all over the place. We last year we welcomed 65 different nations and there's no sign why it should be less this time. We rent out a theme park near Barcelona in Spain. So in October it's actually quite a good time to go there and it's a nice combination of getting to know what is actually happening in talks but also meeting, I think we have around a little bit over 100 different vendors showing their recent products. But also we make sure that you guys have a good time doing so because I mean ultimately we are in the theme park and we make use of it. [00:33:06] Speaker A: Exactly, yes. And you really do. My experience from last year, I love theme parks. I'm an absolute adrenaline junkie for theme parks and my experience last year was it was it's a great combination of fun and working on your business and, and what I Want to dive into is, is the logistics of how you do this because I'm conscious that you guys do two big shows a year and you know, when, when, when do you start organizing? So MSP Global last year was in, it was the same kind of dates, wasn't it? Sort of back end of October. When do you start organizing the next event? [00:33:39] Speaker B: Yeah. So I would say for, for an event of this scale, you need at least nine months to prepare properly. From an organizational point of view, sales wise, you need even more. So the guys are now already selling the vision for 2027, so that's even starting earlier. But you need nine months. I'm saying that with all the confidence because in 2022, which was basically the last year within Covid and we were launching our system and CloudFest at Europa park and we only got green light from the authorities to run it six weeks out. So we were of course in the backhand organizing it, but we were a little bit shy. But I would say we had like eight, maybe three months, eight weeks, ten months. Ten weeks, something like that. And that was, you could notice it also quite frankly in the way how we had to pull things together. So it is also possible. Super crazy extreme. But to do it properly and think everything through, think about the content, the strategy, workflows, whom to invite, whom to speak, how to party, then I would say nine months is the very least. [00:34:53] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I mean that's, that's crazy to have done that within six weeks. I'm sure you don't ever want that ever to happen ever again. [00:34:58] Speaker B: Never again. [00:34:59] Speaker A: No, no. But there's so many things you have to think about. And if I think last year, you know, I flew into Barcelona, there was a shuttle bus which, because it's an hour away, the theme park's an hour away from the airport. And then obviously there's your team then greeting, greeting people. You've then got all of that accommodation, you've got, as you say, the theme park. And there's always a number of events happening in the theme park as well, which, which is fun. And then you've got, is it about 15, 20 different rooms that you're putting events on and different talks. You've got entire calendars, you've got all the, you have about 40 different speakers coming in. How many people at your end actually organize all of this? [00:35:34] Speaker B: You would be surprised. We, we are around 22 people that work on both of the, of the conferences. Not all of them are full time, some of them are part time, but I'm Saying that knowing that we also have a very strong team that is sitting behind us, like for instance, the AV technical guys, we are working with them for 15, 20 years already. So we are almost like a event tribe, like a big family putting things off and that they also have their own ideas how to improve the event, how they know what we are expecting from a show. So that's very much needed. And as you were saying, that starts, and this is, I think, really important for us and how we do events differently. We try to think about the entire customer journey. And in our case that means, to quote your example, the moment you disembark your aircraft. I mean, I cannot have a host waiting for you at the gate, but as soon as I'm legally allowed to, there should be somebody waiting for and guiding you towards the bus. And it's not only a shuttle bus, it's almost a transit system because we also have to. The party shuttles to. We had, I think 35 side events running in parallel that could be anything from a small dinner of maybe 20 people to a side gathering of 200 people. So it's, it's a lot to think through and luckily enough, we have strong partners we're doing that with and an even better team who's, who's thinking about all the things that I constantly forget. [00:37:15] Speaker A: Yes, yes, absolutely. Because of course, as the leader, even with a, with a relatively small team, I mean, 22 is a small team for the size of that event. And to do it twice, twice a year is, is crazy. As, as the CEO, then what's your. When, when you get to, I guess you get there a few days earlier, what's your sort of favorite? A week earlier. Okay, so what's your favorite part of, of the, the whole process and what's your least favorite part? [00:37:42] Speaker B: Well, the most favorite one is actually the day prior to opening because by then, hopefully we should be in a position like, okay, this is how we envisioned it and this is how it now looks. And when you have this feeling like, yeah, we are ready, we are ready now, the only thing missing is the attendees. That's a highly rewarding feeling. And then also the tension. Usually my brother in crime, Zurin, who's our chief evangelist and curating all the agenda and the speakers, we usually open our events in the morning of the first day and right before going on stage and seeing people outside waiting, and I keep on saying, like, we are really trying to build a community. So, like, I am nervous when I get on stage, the guys sitting in the audience are Nervous that it's finally starting and that's there's a little bit like almost a magic in the air, which I always find crazy and, and highly rewarding. What I really hate, though, is, is the Thursday or Friday, depending on which event we are talking about the next morning. Like when we are deconstructing everything. You may have a little hangover from, from the party of the night before, but still you have quite a lot to do. So getting through that Friday or Thursday evening, that's. That's actually quite tough, to be honest. [00:39:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I can imagine. I bet you have a short holiday straight after as well. [00:39:12] Speaker B: That's correct. [00:39:13] Speaker A: That would be very much needed. Let's talk about server throwing. So for those people who've not seen this, it's something really, something to behold. Where did this idea even come from? Tell us what it is and tell us where the idea came from. [00:39:26] Speaker B: Yeah, so actually it was the Greek that invented it. And discus is the old Greek word for server. No, of course it's not. But the Dutch started throwing servers in front of a data center, I think it was around 15 years ago, and they made like a little side sport out of it. And we worked together at cloudfest, our other event with the Dutch Hosting association. And one day I attended one of the events and they did the server verpen, which is the Dutch word for server throwing. And I was so fascinated. Like, this is. It's like human force against bare metal. Such a stupid, beautiful sport. Just take that thing and throw it as far as you can. And we thought, okay, this is a niche sport here in the Netherlands, but it actually needs to become Olympic. It is actually, we're trying, it's like our biggest ambition. But we have now formed or in the process of forming a proper association which is running now. This year we have five different world, different tours around the world. And then the world championship being in. In March in Germany and in Spain during MSP Global in end of October, we do the Spanish qualifier. So we expect around 40 ish female and males throwers. And basically, yeah, I think the record has been broken in Spain last year it was around 14 meters. That should be something around 32ish feet or so. So quite far. So, yeah, we were really excited about it and people come there in disguise. They have uniforms representing their country. It's a little bit like maybe the darts. Elipelli is probably the closest it comes to it. Of course, there's a few drinks involved and some sunshine. And the reason why we do it is we really Want to make sure to take people out of their usual job routine. And most of the people I talk to, including myself, are rather introverted. And it's hard to start a conversation at a trade show because you have something to eat, you run around, maybe you have a drink. And it's really hard to get to know two people. But sports is something that uniquely or unifies the people. It doesn't really matter what your position is. You just like to see servers flying around. And this is why, why we do these kind of things because we want to facilitate ultimately networking, as stupid as it sounds. [00:42:06] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I love it. I kind of stumbled across it last year and I'm like, what, what's going on here? It's such a. And then that was an hour of my life gone just watching, watching service. [00:42:16] Speaker B: Right. I mean that's, that's my whole ambition. I want to be. To become the president of that association and similar and get it as big as FIFA. And the only main difference between FIFA and us would be that we officially take bribes. So let's see where it takes us. Okay. [00:42:32] Speaker A: Right, we heard that here first then. I love that. Christian, thank you so much for, for your time. I appreciate. Just four weeks out. You must have so much on your plate every day. It's October 21st and 22nd in Barcelona. MSP global.com I'm going to be there. As I say, I'm doing a talk. I've got it written down here how MSPS can use AI to build a content engine that earns trust before someone picks up the phone. That's my talk. And I'm also hosting one of the Captain's tables for you on escaping the Commodity Trap. And I'm just going to be there for two days. I know so many people that are going this year and I'm going to try and meet up with them and I'm sure there'll be a little bit of beer and maybe some server throwing as well. Obviously, tickets are completely free for msps. So tell us how to get the free ticket. [00:43:12] Speaker B: Yeah, the idea is that if you are an MSP, the attendance, including lunch, etc. It's all included in that price and you can use the code Paul Green. If you enter, the ticket gets discounted to zero and you can attend for free. Of course, Bendors not. But if you are an MSP and you really want to mingle with a European or even international crowd and learn from other MSPs from other sectors or form partnerships, that's the place to go. And yeah, we would be pleased to host you. So in order to redeem your voucher, just go to MSP global.com, click on the Register now button and enter Paul Green as a code. [00:43:53] Speaker A: Coming up, coming up next week. Thanks for being here this week. Next week we're doing a special episode because it's going to be exactly three months till the end of the year. I mean, come on, 2026 is going so fast. Right. So I'm going to have an informal and very insightful chat with one of my colleagues here at the MSP Marketing Edge, Ben Smith. He's been with me since I started this business back in 2016. Actually. We worked together years before and he talks to MSPs all day, every day. So we're going to talk about the difference between MSPs who are plateau going right now and those who are thriving. See you then for MSPs around the world. Around the world, the MSP Marketing podcast with Paul Green.