MSP's Ultimate Guide To Winning Financial Services Clients

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hooray. It's time to focus on getting more clients for your MSP and growing your business. Here's what we've got coming up today. We're going to start with a deep dive into how to win more financial services clients. Then I'm going to talk about a trick called trust transfer which is where you get credibility from people who your prospects already trust. And my special guest today built an MSP to an incredible $143 million exit. He's going to tell you exactly why MSP founders get stuck. Welcome to episode 355 powered by MSP marketingedge.com Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast. If you're looking for a vertical that ticks almost every box, recurring revenue, long term loyalty, genuine willingness to pay for good IT and a compliance pressure that never goes away, then financial services might be the one. And right now I want to do a deep dive into winning wealth managers in independent financial advisors, mortgage brokers and insurance brokers as clients for your msp. Because this is a sector that is genuinely crying out for MSPs who understand their world. Let me show you how to become one of them. And let's break this down into six easy parts. The first part, why is this vertical so attractive? Well, it's pretty simple really. It's very stable, very profitable long term businesses. These kind of financial services clients don't tend to disappear overnight and they're, they also have a very high dependency on technology. You think about it, everything they do involves data, communications, client records, right? So they are genuinely willing to pay for high quality IT because for them the cost of getting it wrong is huge, just huge. It isn't just that the technology is needed by them, it is absolutely mission critical. That ticks a big box for us. But also, and this is huge as well, compliance pressure, right. For these people, they, we have no idea what the compliance pressure must be like for them because they have to operate under an increasingly complex and burdensome. Is that a word? It is now burdensome set of rules. There's always new rules coming in. It's very rare that someone comes in and says let's have fewer rules for financial services that just doesn't happen. So it's the kind of the norm for them is all this compliance. And of course a lot of the technology is, is there to make sure that they stay compliant. I've been digging around for some stats and I found that 96% of financial firms now allocate more than 5% of their total spending budget to it. And cybersecurity, and that's going up. So they take technology really, really seriously. And that means that once you're in, you're in. Because as we know, for an ordinary B2B company, switching an IT provider is highly disruptive for them. And, and for a regulated company, that's just too much risk. Right? You've got to be really bad to lose financial services clients or someone that's related to that. So retention is very, very high in this sector. And on top of this, and this just keeps getting better and better, these people talk to each other. The IFAs, the mortgage brokers, the insurance brokers, they tend to operate in very tight networks, either because they're all part of the same actual like selling network or buying network or something like that, or just because they tend to hang out with each other, they meet each other at TR and compliance sessions and stuff like that. So they are talking about the suppliers that they use. Once you're in with one and you do a good job, the good news is you're likely to pick up other clients as well. Now, let's move on to the second part of this, which is the psychology of the buyer. So for these people that we want to reach, it's almost always that the decision maker is the owner or the senior partner. And of course, there are influencers as well. In most B2B buying decisions, you got a decision maker and an influencer. So you might have the CEO is the actual decision maker, but the operations manager might be an influencer. The operations manager will pretty much tell them who to pick, but the final decision comes down to the CEO. So you've got to appeal to both of those people. And for the decision maker, their primary fear is not a kind of an IT failure in the technical sense. So it's not that their laptops are down or their, their cloud access is gone for a few hours. It's. They're more interested and more fearful of what IT failure means for their regulatory standing. Because in financial services, if there's a data breach or a compliance failure, this doesn't just cost them lost time and a bit of money, it can actually cost them the whole business. Right? They can lose their license or whatever. Their, their qualification is their ability to do business, which is potentially the end of their career, and the business that they spent decades building can be destroyed by that. So that's a completely different level of stakes, isn't it? If you think about working with a manufacturer or a printer or a veterinarian or a cpa and if they lose access for three or four hours and lose a bit of data, that's really annoying, right? And it's, obviously it's damaging to the business, but it couldn't, most of the times it couldn't kill the business. Whereas for a financial services business, it could genuinely be the end for them. So this is really important to bear in mind because the financial services buyer is not evaluating you on, on your technical capability, they are evaluating you. Not with their brain, they're evaluating you with their heart on how much they trust you with something that could end their professional life if it goes wrong. This is a massive thing to understand. The currency here in winning financial services clients is trust. And the currency of trust is bigger for this sector than almost any other sector you can work with. They are also very, very aware of third party risk because regulators across the world now are explicitly holding financial firms responsible for the security provided by you by their IT providers. So if your MSP has a breach which cascades into their business, I know we're entering the nightmare territory here, but if that happens, then often they carry the regulatory consequence of that and that's the weight that they're bringing into every kind of interaction, every conversation with you. And of course you need to address this upfront. So if they're scared that a breach that you have could affect them, that's part of the sales conversation. You talk about all of the safety protocols that you've put in place. In fact, that's a conversation you wouldn't have with an ordinary business owner, but you would have with the owner of a financial services firm. Let's look at the third part here. And we're going to deep dive a little bit more into the compliance. And I'm not going to go into territory specific stuff. We have listeners and viewers to this podcast in almost every major English speaking country around the world. So we're not going to talk about territory specific laws, because we'd be here for four hours and we'd all die of boredom. But every financial services firm, regardless of which country they're in, they operate under regulatory frameworks that require them to demonstrate that their technology is secure, that it's auditable and it's highly resilient. And of course, this is, as I say, it's getting tighter and tighter. There's more laws coming in, not fewer laws, there's more documentation, more evidence. They've got shorter and shorter breach notification windows. So this is massive. In fact, financial Services experienced a 65% ransomware hit rate in the latest Stats that I could find, which was from two years ago, 2024. And that 65% was the highest level ever recorded. And the financial services decision makers, they know about this, they read about it. I would say they have a higher level of awareness than the average business owner that you speak to. And the average data breach cost in financial services is now over five and a half million dollars, which is second only to healthcare. Again, caveat. It's a stat I found online. There are lots of different stats online. It's always very difficult to actually find the evidence for these stats, but if we go with that and we just say that these people have really big consequences, they've got really big awareness, all of this makes them very different when you're actually selling to them. Let me give you one other really important stat for your marketing. 42% of financial services decision makers say that staying current with all of the evolving, complex compliance requirements is actually their biggest challenge. And 36% of them. So a third say that they don't have the internal expertise to keep pace. Let's go back and look at that again. So nearly. Well, coming up to half of them saying that staying current with compliance is a huge challenge, and a third of them say they don't have the internal expertise to keep pace. Well, that's an opportunity, isn't it? That's an opportunity for you to keep pace of what's happening in their marketplace, particularly how technology can help them stay up to date with compliance. That's huge. And it's a gap. And whenever we see a gap between what's required and what your client can actually manage internally, and that there's a gap in between the two, that's an opportunity for your MSP to make money. Section 4. What do they need to hear from you? Well, because they're a little bit different and they're more aware, going in with the usual message of we give you proactive IT support, that's going to mean nothing to them at all. And they still don't want to see a list of your certifications or your qualifications, your accreditations, because they don't know what those mean and they don't care. But what they need, both in the noggin and in the heart, is they need to hear that you understand the environment that they operate in. So what they need to hear and understand, both in the noggin and also in the heart, is that you understand the regulatory environment that they are operating in. Right. You do need to know what regulations affect them, and particularly the ones that affect their technology, their compliance needs in technology. They're going to need to hear that you have experience with firms like theirs, which is great if you're already working with one, but if you're not, at the very least you need to be able to quote their own regulations back to them. That's really important because they need to hear that you can help them to demonstrate compliance and not just implement security. In fact, effectively, when you're working with a financial services firm, it's a greater burden for you. There's all of the usual cybersecurity stuff and then there's meeting their regulations. But the payoff for that is that you get very good, well paying clients who spend a lot and, and they'll stick with you forever and ever and ever. And by the way, that word demonstrate is really, really important because many financial firms have reasonable security in place, but perhaps they don't have the audit trail. And increasingly their auditors want written policies and risk assessments and access reviews and incident response test records and all of that kind of stuff. So a big part of what you're going to be doing with them is not just the security and the compliance, it's also the documentation. So actually in doing that, you're again, you're ticking a box. You're solving a different and actually more valuable problem than just if you like, keeping the it lights on for them. Section 5. How do you reach these people? Well, Our old friend LinkedIn is your primary tool here. The owner of a small independent financial advisor or insurance brokerage is almost 100% definitely on LinkedIn. Either proactively using it themselves to win clients, or passively just keeping in touch with their clients and just being there. Because almost everyone in business is on LinkedIn these days. So you should build audiences of them on LinkedIn. It doesn't matter if they only look at it once a month, it's still a place that you can reach them. And then of course, you should publish content on a regular basis, ideally at least once every single day. One piece of content every 24 hours works well in LinkedIn. Would you have a separate LinkedIn just for financial services? I think you would. If you were going for it as a mega sector. If it was going to be a huge vertical view, it'd be worth having a second LinkedIn. If not, then you would just build up your audience of financial people alongside your general business owner audience. But obviously the downside of doing that is it's very hard to put the right content in front of them when you've Got a specific audience of financial services people. You can put content in front of them that really talks to them, that seems relevant to them. And the kind of stuff I mean is plain English explanations of what regulations are changing and what it means for their business. And you can go and get those from their sort of blogs and news websites and interpret them using your AI friend and then, then write about those on LinkedIn and how that affects what they're doing. With technology, you could write specific stories about independent financial advisors that have had close calls with breaches or audits or anything like that. And again, you can just take case studies that are out there and rewrite them to be relevant to your marketplace. You've got to help them understand that gap between where they are and where they need to be. Now, I would advise not leading with technology. So often when you're talking to ordinary business owners and you're creating content for them, you lead with how they can use technology to grow their business and have less hassle and stress. But with these financial people, I suggest that you lead with compliance, compliance, risk and client trust, because that's their world. 99% of their head, apart from how do they sell more stuff is compliance, risk and client trust. That is huge for them. So something else that works very well in this sector is the referral network. I was saying earlier that IFAs talk to other IFAs. They often talk to other related people like CPAs or accountants. They'll work alongside IFAs. IFAs insurance brokers will work with each other as well because they're dealing with the same clients, but they don't sell the same things. So if you can get in with some insurance brokers, they may introduce you with financial people and vice versa. And there are also places like local financial services, networking events, you've got professional association meetings. All of these things are worth attending if you can go in as an outsider. And often they'll have people in to do talks or maybe even sell stands or something like that. They're always looking for ways to subsidize these meetings. You might be able to sponsor the event, which basically means you pay a few hundred pounds or few hundred dollars and you're paying for their lunch or their snacks or their canapes. But it gives you an opportunity to go. And don't just put a. Put a banner up and not talk to anyone. The whole point of that and the beauty of that is talking to the humans that are there, because that's where buyers gather. Their guard is down there, relaxed. They're talking to their peers and actually being able to have a good conversation with someone like you who can talk about regulations and compliance, that, that's absolutely massive. Some other things you could do, you could also consider creating a one page guide specifically for financial services firms. It could be just something simple like five questions that your financial services firm should be asking its IT provider and again have a compliance emphasis on that. And you could use that on LinkedIn as a, as a content piece. You could send it out on direct mail. You could even use it as an email outreach tool to just send it to people on email or indirect mail. And just say if you're, you're ready to move to switch IT providers to someone that understands your world and the compliance burdens you have to live with, then we're ready to have a conversation. And then part six, this is the conversation to have with them. Based on everything we've just been talking about, you won't be surprised to hear. I suggest you start by talking about compliance and not their technology. So ask them what their last audit looked like, what their regulator expects of them, what, what their data security rules are, whether they've documented all of their things, their incident response process and all of the other things. And most of the small financial services firm have, well, some of them have done it properly, but many of them haven't. They've done a lot of it, but they haven't done all of it. And what you want is you want them to sweat, right? As you're asking them about all of these things which they know they've got to do, they've either got to do now or they've got to do very soon because the rules and regulations are changing. You want them to feel that kind of back sweat, right? And that's, we're not manipulating people here. We're trying to make them realize that oh my goodness, they have a problem and you have the answer, right? That's where great sales, that's the gap. That's the gap we've just been talking about. And you're not going to get them having that back sweat by talking about servers and software and the cloud. They don't care about that stuff. You got to talk about their professional risk. And their professional risk sits in compliance and regulations and the trust they have with their clients. And if you start the conversation that way, the conversation moving to technology and IT support, you know, what you do becomes the solution to their problems rather than the sales pitch. And that is a very beautiful way to talk to a decision maker. So look Financial services is one of those verticals where the compliance pressure does most of the selling for you. So long as you're speaking the right language and saying the right words, stop talking about your technology, start talking about regulatory risk, how they need to keep and maintain their client trust and what happens if something goes wrong. And if you get that right, you'll find that financial services people are some of the most loyal, profitable, and the most referral active clients that you'll ever have. Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast. You know what's interesting about the financial services sector we were just talking about? That owner of an IFA or insurance brokerage isn't going to switch IT provider on a whim. They're going to do a ton of research. They're going to do it really carefully, they're going to build trust slowly, and they're going to make a considered decision. And that means that your marketing has to be there consistently over a long period of time before they're ready to talk. And that's exactly what the 36 actions on my first free MSP marketing wall planner are designed to help you do. It's a large physical planner that you put on your office wall, and it shows you the complete sequence of marketing actions that build that kind of trust over time with decision makers and the influencers that we were talking about. And you can go from no leads at all to winning new clients by following these 36 actions and following them consistently. Now, this will planner is completely free. It's posted to you at my expense. No catch whatsoever. And to get one, just go to mspwallplanner.com right now. Or if you're watching this on YouTube, scan the QR code that's on screen right now. One of the most underused concepts in marketing is something we call trust transfer. And the idea is very simple. Instead of spending months or years building trust with a cold prospect from scratch, and you borrow credibility from someone they already trust. Today I want to walk you through all the different ways you can do this, because some of them are so much easier than you think, and almost nobody in the channel is doing them consistently. Let's start by talking about why trust transfer matters. As I said, building trust from scratch with a cold prospect, it takes so much work, right? It's months and months of consistent content, repeated touch points, and having a high level of patience. But if someone a prospect already trusts says, hey, you should really talk to these people, then that journey just compresses dramatically because the prospect arrives warmed up, right? They're not evaluating you as a stranger. They're meeting someone who comes recommended by a person whose judgment they already respect. I mean, if you think about the most obvious trust transfer, which is a referral, when someone contacts you and says, my friend is your client and they suggested I talk to you, that's your client to lose. And what I mean is that you are at the top of their buying list. And the only reason you won't win that client is if you screw up the sales process in some way. But that is the ultimate trust trust transfer. Try saying that when you've had a few beers. The ultimate trust transfer. It's the ultimate one because they're coming in ready to buy. But there are other trust transfers as well. And every trust transfer mechanism works on the same principle. You, you are attaching your credibility to someone else's existing credibility. So let me give you some other ways of doing it. The first is building on referrals and it's actually having referral partners. So as I say, they're the most powerful form of trust transfer, the most durable when they're done well. And you can't just rely on referrals from your existing clients because that's a finite pot, but you can build a series of referral partners. So the key is, is to find other businesses whose clients are the same as yours, but whose services don't compete with you and where there's a natural reciprocal flow. So for example, marketing agencies, web design agencies, right? They are always asked by clients to sort out their email hosting because they're hosting their website, but they're not hosting their email. And you know what, web agencies hate doing email, right? But you don't mind doing email hosting and sorting out the email first. But you probably don't host websites or you certainly don't design websites. So can you see the crossover there? Right? If someone says, if a client there says to them, hey, can you help sort out our email? It's a mess, they can refer that to you. And when one of your clients says, you guys do computer stuff, could you build us a new website? And you don't want to do that, you can refer that to the web agency. So that's a nice two way flow. And that works with marketing agencies. You can do that with business coaches as well. You can sometimes do that with business brokers, you know, people who are buying or selling businesses. You can do it with shared office spaces. You could maybe do it with service office providers because their tenants need IT support, commercial insurance brokers, especially if you're in that sector like we were talking about earlier, because they're already talking to their clients about risk. You could maybe do it with CPAs, accountants as well, although it kind of depends on, on the attitude of the cpa. But the golden rule with this is that you approach every potential referral partner from their perspective and never from your perspective. What do they get from this? If you put a partnership together, how does it make their life or their service easier? And the relationship has to work for both sides or it will not last. And one final thought on this. It is more of a personal relationship than a formal arrangement, right? You're not signing a contract to send clients to each other. You're building a friendship with someone who happens to have the right kind of people. And when I say friendship, you might literally become friends. If you've got two or three referral partners and in your, you know, in your network, you've got a wave agency, you've got a cpa, you've got an insurance broker, you know, you might actually meet up, you might have your own little group that meets once a quarter just to talk, have a beer, just swap, swap stories because you're all business owners together. And guess what? You will send each other more referrals as well because you're all dealing with the same kind of clients, but you're not in competition with each other. Right? Let me do another mechanism and that is guest appearances on other people's content, such as podcasts. So every podcast has a built in audience that already trusts the host. I've been doing this since November 2019. We have a pretty loyal audience, I know, because we get lots of feedback. But we also know that we're growing this podcast over time. So that's new people coming in all the time. And we're reaching MSPS literally all over the world. So when a host of any podcast, especially if it's been going a year or more, when they invite you on as a guest, you instantly, some of that trust transfers to you instantly. We've got a guest coming up later, we've got a fantastic guest today, but we are constantly being pitched. I mean, I must get four or five guest pitches a day that arrive on email. And that's because guests see the longevity of our, of our podcast, they see the growth in it and they see that if they come on this podcast, it's trust transfer from me to them. That makes sense, right? And you want a bit of that in your market. You want to be endorsed by association by the podcast that you are on. So the right podcast to target are not podcasts like mine, right? They're not IT podcasts. They are business podcasts listened to by the kind of business owners that you want to reach. Now, you may have some of these happening in your local area. And when I say podcasts, that could be YouTube videos as well. YouTube is pretty much podcasting these days. In fact, a lot of podcast consumption happens on YouTube. So there might be someone in your area who's making regular YouTube videos about business in the local area or, or they might be doing something podcast specific. Some areas are bigger for this than others. But it doesn't have to be your local area. It could be, let's say you're trying to reach the financial services people we were talking about earlier. And it could be that there are podcasts for them and that might be one that's in their specific wider area, or it could just be a sector specific, a vertical specific one. So you could go and get yourself on those sector specific podcasts. There might be just general ones about entrepreneurship or growth podcasts. And you know what, pitching yourself as a guest is a lot easier than people think. Because as much as I'm at a stage now where I can be very picky with my guests because I get a lot of people pitching me, that's not the case. In the early days, the first two or three years of this podcast, we often got to the point where we had run out of guests and I was really shaking my tree on LinkedIn to try and find interesting guests. And if you can put together a number of, you know, really interesting subjects, like how to protect your business from cyber threats without needing to understand it, or a whole series of other things. And if you're going into a vertical specific podcast, talking to them about things that are genuinely of interest, that vertical, you will find that all it takes is a series of emails for one of those podcasts to say, yes, we'd love to get you on. And you only need one good podcast appearance. That can reach a lot of ideal prospects. But it also makes it easier for you to then get on other podcasts. Sometimes podcast podcast hosts don't want to be the first person to book a new guest. But actually, I mean, I evaluate guests by what they've got to say. But some podcasts will, you know, if you've been on three or four other podcasts, then they definitely want to talk to you, right? Next mechanism is being quoted or featured in your local media or in trade publications. Now, when a journalist talks about Your quotes, you again, they're implicitly endorsing you as an expert worth listening to. So we're talking here about the local business press or just the local general press. Radio, regional newspapers, trade magazines, if you're chosen vertical. Even though the old fashioned media has tiny audiences these days, they still carry massive credibility with their readership. In fact, it's kind of ironic, those kind of blogs and podcasts, they might have a greater reach, but they have lower levels of credibility. Something that's not professional. I mean, this is me in my home studio, right, just talking to you. This, we have a pretty good reach on this, but we probably have a lower credibility than like CRN magazine of which there's one in the uk, there's one in the US and, and they obviously have a good website as well, each of those. And that's because that's a professional publication with professional journalists working for them. And it's been going for, for years and years and years. So that, that has, I'm sure it has a bigger audience than me, but you get the idea that has a higher, higher level of credibility and that will be happening in your marketplace and, and in your verticals as well. So use that credibility. And again, getting quoted by journalists and being featured in stories is so much easier than people assume. I was a journalist for the first 13 years of my career from the age of 19 to about 31 and I know that journalists, even from back then in the 90s and noughties, it was no different than how it is today. Journalists are always looking for expert sources, especially technology and cybersecurity stories. So you could just do something simple like set up a Google alert for cybersecurity or technology stories in your local area. Or you could get an AI briefing to happen every morning, just giving you an opportunity to reach out to journalists with a brief and offer useful comment when there's something in the news. That's the easiest way to start a relationship with a journalist, something security related is in the news. They're clearly going to write about it, but they need a different spin. You could be that different spin. And just like appearing on one podcast leads to other podcasts, being quoted once tends to lead to being quoted again. Journalists return to sources that they trust again and again. Right? Another mechanism is speaking at events. When you're standing on a stage, even if it's a very small stage in front of like 10 people, that instantly gives you authority. And the event organizer has already vouched for you by giving you the platform. Do you See the kind of the similarities here. When the podcast host puts you on as a guest, or the journalist talks about you, or the event organizer puts you on stage, they are transferring trust and putting you literally up on a pedestal and saying that you are worth listening to. So this is huge. And there's so many events that you can speak at. It's not just big shows, right? You can go to local business networking events, Chamber of commerce will run meetings and industry associations will run meetings for your chosen vertical. You've got bni, which is all over the world, or there are other similar networking groups. And your topic doesn't have to be complicated. You know, five things every business owner should know about protecting their data from AI, something like that that works brilliantly for a non technical audience, which is obviously what you're trying to reach. And Even just a 10 minute slot at a local networking breakfast that puts you in a fundamentally different place and, and category to every other MSP who just, you know, turns up and hands out business cards and do stuff like that. Speakers are considered to be experts, so go be a speaker. Another mechanism you can co create content alongside trusted voices. So rather than you being interviewed, how about if you interview someone, you could interview a well known local business figure for your newsletter or LinkedIn. In fact, here's a really smart thing to do. Start your own podcast aimed at business owners in the local area and interview all of the top business people in your area. Now it doesn't matter whether you have an audience or not. The very fact that you have interviewed the most respected business leaders in your area, and trust me, they are not being asked for interviews as often as you think, the very fact that you are interviewing them, that gives you instant credibility. And here's the super clever thing to do with that podcast. You then go and interview your ideal prospects. So let's say there were 10, 20, 30 businesses in your area that you would love to do business with. You contact the CEOs of those businesses and you say, I've got this podcast, it's about business owners in this area. I would love to get you on as a, as a guest. And the interview is where you get to know that CEO, right? And they will then, you know, particularly if you do the interview in your office and they will say so you guys are what, an IT company? And you start a conversation and they might say to you, well we're with this company, we've been with them for 10 years. But you know what, if I'm honest, I'm not overly happy with how things are going. Right. I don't really understand what's in it for me. You know, the service levels have come down, the price seems to have gone up. I mean, wouldn't that be just beautiful if you could have a CEO of an ideal client telling you that when they're sitting in your office? That's going to start a great conversation. Right. So other things you could do is you could ask respected CPAs or accountants or lawyers or business brokers or financial services, you could ask them to come onto your podcast or just contribute a guest piece to your email list or to your website or to your LinkedIn. And it needs to be about a topic that obviously their clients and your clients both care about. But essentially you can leverage all of these other people in your area to create content for you and in doing so, they trust transfer over to you because when their name appears alongside yours, well, they're going to promote that to their audience. Right. And their credibility with their audience kind of rubs over to you. And this also gives you a natural reason to share the content both to their audience and to your audience. So you're doubling your reach in one move. It's a really smart thing to do. Right. Another mechanism for you awards and accreditations. So if you think about your industry awards, your business awards, best employer lists, all of that kind of stuff, they all represent a third party, often a trusted third party, saying publicly that you are worth paying attention to. And most MSPs never enter awards outside of the channel. I'm not talking about channel awards, although channel awards have a value, but I'm talking about awards in your Marketplace. And most MSPs never enter them because they assume they're not going to win or it's not worth the effort. But even being shortlisted gives you a kind of a credible third party stamp on your name. So do have a look at the local business awards in your area. Have a look, look at who's entering what you know, often people. There's not as many entries as you think and the barter getting shortlisted is lower than you'd think. Sometimes these are revenue generating exercises more than anything. So do be aware that if you enter something that has an awards night, that's how the business makes the money. That's how like either the magazine or the newspaper or whatever makes money. If you enter, you'll probably be shortlisted and you'll be expected to buy like a table at £500 or dollars or whatsoever. That's just the price of business. And actually you get to have a black tie Night. It's a bit of fun. And you might win an award the second or third time that you enter. And if you do win something, display everywhere, right? Your website, your LinkedIn, your proposals, your email signature, anywhere and everywhere for a year or two after you win an award, you shout about that award. And ideally you'd win an award somewhere every year because it just builds up and you can say, imagine saying, you know, award winning for seven years in a row. And it doesn't matter that they're different awards. It says it's a trust thing, right? It tells prospects that you are safe. And then another mechanism is client testimonials and case studies. These are actually a great trust transfer because this is trust transfer from your existing clients to your prospects. So a prospect reading a detailed case study from a business that works with you already, and that sounds just like them, they're not listening to you in this instance. They're listening to a peer. A peer who already trusts you and is saying to this person, trust these people. The more specific the testimonial, the more powerful the trust transfer. If you've got a named client in a specific sector or vertical and they're describing a specific problem that you solved that is worth More than 10 generic five star reviews. And obviously video testimonials take this even further because the prospect can see, see and hear a real person and not just read words on the page. So the principle that ties all of this together, cold outreach, asks a prospect to trust you based on nothing but your own word about yourself. Whereas trust transfer asks them to trust you based on someone else's word, someone they already trust. And every one of those mechanisms I've just been talking about costs you less than paid advertising and builds more durable relationships. So the question isn't which one to use, it's which one you're going to start with this week. Because you don't have to earn trust entirely from scratch with every single prospect. There are people in your marketplace who already have the trust you're trying to build and they're very often very willing to share it if you approach the relationship the right way. Pick one of those mechanisms I was just talking about and go and do something about it this week. That's all it takes to start the MSP Marketing Edge member update. If you're an MSP Marketing Edge member, I want to ask you a direct question. When did you last actually look at your own website through a prospect's eyes? So not as someone who knows what you do and why you're good at it, but as a stressed business owner who's landed on your homepage for the first time and has seconds, 2, 3, 4 seconds of patience before they click away. So if your honest answer to this is yeah, it was some time ago, Paul, or no, I've never done this, then there's something in your MSP Marketing Edge portal right now that's worth an hour of your time. It's our standout MSP website framework and it walks you through every element of your website and tells you exactly what's working, what's missing, and what's sending prospects elsewhere before they ever get in touch. So go into the portal right now and you'll find that in the training section. And if you're not yet a member, there are two memberships. We've got a B2B membership for winning more business owners as clients and then we've got a co managed membership for winning IT directors. For each of these memberships, it's only available to one MSP per area. Check if yours is available at MSP marketingedge.com membership Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast so, assuming you're the founder of your msp, do you sometimes feel stuck with your business? And by that I mean that you're really ready for growth. I mean, you want the new clients and you want to grow your monthly recurring revenue, but for some reason it's not happening. Either it's not happening at all or it's not happening at the pace at which you need it to. Well, my special guest today understands exactly why founders get stuck. And he's definitely someone that you should listen to because he built his msp to a $143 million exit. [00:36:59] Speaker B: I'm Dave Segraves. I'm currently served as the CEO and founder of the MSP Growth OS here out of Nashville, Tennessee. [00:37:07] Speaker A: And so exciting to have you on the show. Dave, you and I were introduced by one of your co founders of MSP Growth os, Robert Gillette, who's been on this show a couple of times. And I loved hanging out with Robert at Scalecon last year in New Orleans and Vegas the year before, hoping to do so in San Diego with him this year. And every time we speak he's like, you've got to get Dave on the show. You've got to get Dave on the show. You've got to get Dave on the show. So Robert, stop asking. We've done it. Dave's here on the show and I know you have so much to talk to us about today, about How MSP founders move the business on from it being just them and a bunch of people helping them. And it's you and I both know because we Both work with MSPs in different capacities who hit that, that ceiling, that wall and they don't quite know where to go. And I know you won't have all the answers today, but I know you're going to give us some of the areas that we should be looking at. So just for some context, Dave, before we jump into that, tell us what's your story because you, you achieve something pretty remarkable with your msp. [00:38:07] Speaker B: Well, first, thank you, Paul. It's great to be in the studio with you and get to know you better. So I worked at an MSP where I was a salesperson that started in a sales role. I wasn't on the cap table, I wasn't an owner. And that business grew pretty rapidly. That owner invited me to buy into that business. That business ended up scaling to 20 million in three cities in Tennessee. I would say we were a lot of lucky and a little good. I think we were really great at hiring really talented people and then we had just fanatical discipline and so that got us a great result in the scale. In 2015 we sold 77% of that business to a private equity backed regional play. And they took our sales engine and we rolled that into some basically states around the Gulf of Mexico, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and expanded that footprint. And so when that business exited, they exited for 143 million sold to a privately held strategic play. And so I've gotten to see MSPS from the very beginning days of being a seller to the ranks of sales management, building out a team and then scaling that across the region. So, and again, I would look at, we had some, I think we had better people than most and that's largely the recipe for success as well as discipline and focus over time. [00:39:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean that's an incredible story and I bet it was a wild journey. I bet you have some amazing stories to tell from it when, when the private equity sold that business and obviously you had a stake, so I would imagine you did quite well out of that. Was it almost a, was it a celebration moment or was it almost one of those, what's the word I'm looking for? Where you, where you've achieved something enormous that most people will never achieve, but it's almost like a normal day at the office. Does that, does that make sense, Paul? [00:39:54] Speaker B: It was very surreal on one day a wire transfer changed the trajectory of my life financially I met most of the goals I'd set for my life over a simple transaction and yet nothing really changed. I've heard often that financial resources just amplify the character of an individual. So if you're a difficult individual, it's just going to amplify that. If there's humility and consistency and discipline, it's going to amplify those things. So it was a bit of a almost false positive if I could say in that it was a great event and yet we just continued grinding through the day to day life. We were raising young kids at the time and so it gave some great margin in my life in terms of decision making. [00:40:44] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. And obviously you've then decided to dedicate a proportion of your working time to helping other MSPs, perhaps not in exactly the same situation, but to help those owners who've created this business. They've got it to a certain level and they've got stuck. What drove you to do that? Because I guess you could have semi retired or you could have gone and bought another MSP or you could have bought an architects firm or you know, you could, you could have done I guess a lot of different things. What was it that drove you to, to help people in, in that sector that you'd spent so many years in? [00:41:16] Speaker B: Yeah, Paul, it's a great question. I took about three years and I really slowed my pace down and I had a commitment to my kids at the time, coaching sports, being involved in their day to day life. I'm a firm believer we just don't get that time back. We get one shot at parenting and that was a heavy focus for me as I started consulting. It just started with a friend that called me and said hey, I want to grow my business, can you help me? And I said I don't know, I, I can try. I did it for myself but I don't know if I can transfer these skills. And that began a six year thesis with that company on can we transfer the skills of a growth operating system into another msp? I'm happy to report six and a half years later that company doubled. They started at 18 million and they just finished last year at 40 million. And so I think we've got a recipe for that that was incredibly not only valuable to my friend and client, but very satisfying for me. And so I got to transfer what I got to live as my dream which was building a business to scale and getting to exit. And I built that environment for a friend who's going to get to realize that in whatever form he chooses. So I did that seven times for seven different MSPs and realized, hey, I think we're onto something here. And that's when Robert and I got together and we began to, to architect what we now call the Growth os. And really we have a mission here at the Growth os. It's to give MSP owners the revenue growth they want in their business. It's very simple. They define it, they outline it, we show them the path and the operating system to do that and help them execute that growth trajectory that they desire. And so as we do that and we see clients winning, Paul, I just, that fills my cup every day. And so that brings meaning and really a deep level of satisfaction in being able to give back and serve the community that I gained so much from. [00:43:14] Speaker A: And that's just wonderful to hear. Now you and I know that 80%, and that's just a made up figure, but it's probably a good guess. 80% of MSPs are stuck. You know, they're very competent, what they do. They've got, you know, sometimes good people, sometimes not good people, but, but there's that level of stock. And almost every MSP I speak to has frustrations that they can't get the right people or they can't get the right clients or they just can't grow, that they're hitting a ceiling, they're hitting a barrier, they're, you know, they're not being a great parent, they're not being a great husband or a great wife or whatever is the case. So you've done this a number of times and I know you're working with a number of MSPs right now. Why, why do so many MSPs get stuck? [00:43:53] Speaker B: Great question, Paul. First of all, I would say there is a natural barrier for revenue growth for MSPs between one and a half million and eight million where attrition, the natural percentage of attrition that would be a mean or average in our industry, begins to clip at the heels of their ability to generate revenue. Largely these MSPs start as a founder led or principal led sales model where the owner operator runs operations, runs finance, runs everything else and they're out doing all the sales calls. Largely those owner operators are focused on marketing generated leads which are great and provide so much in that desire to scale. What I find is if you don't combine a good marketing engine, right, consistent, repeatable, with results, focused on your target client, with a direct sales engine, you're not going to grow in sales velocity, I often say, Paul, we have to build a manufacturing process for new meetings or new FTAs. A lot of times early on, we can do that through marketing and do it consistently. It becomes difficult as you begin to scale. So if you want six to eight meetings every single week, that's difficult to do just with marketing alone, unless you're investing substantial dollars into it. And I want to say again, marketing is the thing that gets us all where we need to go. It's like the foundation, the framework, but then as you mature, you grow into a sales engine or a sales operations company, and that's a completely different beast. So that's the first thing I would say. The second thing, Paul, is there's a natural inclination of every owner operator. Think about these owners of these business, they largely are technicians and they think, oh, if I hire a salesperson that has strengths that are different than me, they'll just sell and do everything. And the reality is, is they don't have the training or the environment or the KPIs or the ability to equip that seller to actually be successful. So there's a diagram that we use all the time, which are that there's three concentric circles. If you think of a Venn diagram, there's a sales process, there's a technical acumen, and there's an executive presence. The owner of that MSP poll can do all three of those in spades. It can do it in their sleep. But when you get a salesperson, all they bring is sales prowess or process. They don't have a lot of the technical depth and they don't have the executive presence to carry a conversation like an executive would, which is really just comfort and the ability to ask difficult questions and challenge a buyer that may have wrong thoughts. So as I look at the combination of those, those are some of the hurdles that owners tend to deal with. And what they want is they just want to hit an easy button. They want the silver bullet or the easy boat. Oh, if I just do this plan, I'll grow sales. And the reality is, is you've got to fix a couple things. You've got to fix and build a manufacturing process for new meetings that you can count on every week. Now, once you've got those meetings, Paul, you've got to consider, how do I make those meetings ones that I can win at the highest percentage possible? And that's where a lot of technicians are just not that good at the actual process of building client trust, which is what our clients buy. From us. When they buy our MSP services, they are saying, I trust you more than my current solution and the other options I have. So really what we are is brokers for trust. And as you well know, in your marriage or your partnership, you didn't just overnight have a meeting and sign an agreement to get married. And so I know mine was a long process of years getting to know my wife and then we committed and got to know each other, met each other's families. That's what an MSP sales process should be like. It's the cultivation of a deep relationship that's going to move us towards trust and then broker into a long term relationship. There's so many transactional MSPs that just want to get you as a client, but then a year to two years later, maybe three, you're going to come out the other side because they have inconsistent service. So while we're building sales, we have to build the operational engine as well to ensure that we can serve and support those clients consistently and repeatedly. [00:48:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that because we do know that MSPs have great retention because the business owner clients don't really want to move on to another msp. [00:48:19] Speaker B: Right. [00:48:19] Speaker A: But I believe you can't rely upon that. You have to be very intentional with that retention. And I love the idea of the sales marriage that you're going into it saying, well, we want to do, we want to do 10, 15 years out of this. We're not interested in just doing a couple of years. Yeah, very interesting. So interesting that you talked about the easy button, that a lot of MSPs want to hit the easy button. And that's human nature. I don't think that's just an MSP thing. And I'm sure you agree it's a human thing. And especially when we've done something, if we've run a business for 10 years already and then, then someone like you comes along and says, oh, you need to build this and build this and build this and build that and a little piece of your soul dies, doesn't it? Because you say, but I've already done 10 years on this, I'll just. Where's the easy button? What, what are the frictions do you tend to come up against from, from MSP owners? [00:49:04] Speaker B: Yeah. So when I think about this easy button concept, it really is an abdication of the role of sales in your business. So every other functional area of the business for a good MSP owner or operator, they understand the tech stack, they understand service delivery, they understand finance, they understand security, they understand HR and hiring people and they focus different discipline in those areas and they have a well functioning engine and then they hire a salesperson. And culturally you're hiring somebody that doesn't fit in that culture and you expect them to have raving results. So one of the first things that's a friction point is an MSP owner has got to realize you have to build a subculture in your MSP that will allow a seller to want to be there and live their life there and hang their hat there for a long time. I often equate salespeople in the MSP field because of the infusion of private equity as they are free agents, they can go to any job they want. If they're good at what they do, they can go get three to five jobs at any moment. And by the way, they have recruiters knocking on their door almost every day trying to get them to go take another job. And so as the owner of the msp, I've got to build a culture that tells that seller, come work with me. You'll make good money, you'll succeed and grow your skill set. Here's your career path and you're going to have a blast while you do it as you're earning at a high level. And I think that friction is something a lot of owner operators don't see when they think about expanding their sales footprint. [00:50:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a, that's a, that's a very valid way of looking at it. So let's just finish off by talking about MSP Growth os, which by the way is a fantastic business name. And I think everyone immediately understands, you know, a growth operating system for msps. You can see that instantly. In fact, I remember when Robert told me what, what the, you were, you guys were going to call the business and I went, oh, that's amazing. I wish I'd thought of that. You, you build it around a structure. Now I don't want you to go into every detail of that structure, but, but obviously you've talked about some of those things already, but what are some of the other elements of the structure that you attempt to help the MSPS build out? [00:51:21] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. The first thing, we start with a learning management system. And so as you think about, one of the greatest risks to hiring a salesperson is can you train them and onboard them effectively? To our industry we have very light technical training and then we have tons of coursework for a salesperson that all they do every day is hunt for new clients. So we've created an environment where they can go and continuously learn every day and get sharpened and practice their craft through learning. So that's the first thing. The second thing, Paul, would be accountability. And so we have to be accountable to setting new meetings every single week. And so we're going to help the owner do that, we're going to help the salesperson do that. The next thing that we're going to do is we're going to provide a context for them to practice their craft. And so we want sellers and Robert's business was the MSP Dojo. The MSP Dojo is now a part of our curriculum where every Wednesday a seller gets to practice role play or role practice to get better at the areas where they might be weak. But really what we're trying to do is build the confidence in muscle memory that when they get front of a client that's a good potential client that they can win at a higher percentage. So that's really what our system is built off. So we call it the Growth os because we are a co managed solution. You don't outsource or hit the easy button to the Growth os. We are partnering with an owner operator to help them with an operating system for how they can consistently and repeatably and organically grow their recurring revenue. [00:52:56] Speaker A: I love it. I love it. So tell us what kind of MSP this is ideally suited for and that might be in terms of employee numbers or maybe revenue. And what's the best way to get in touch with you and Robert and all the team at MSP Growth OS? [00:53:10] Speaker B: Yeah, so 80% of our clients are in the 1 million to 8 million range. And so the first thing is if attrition is clipping at your heels, if you're frustrated because you have inconsistency in the number of new meetings you have every week, that's what we help owner operators solve. The next thing is where to find us. Very simple. Mspgrowthos.com and if we can serve in any way, we do a call with you just to help you if it's not a fit for our program. So if there's any way we can serve the community, we'd love for you to reach out. [00:53:44] Speaker A: Coming up, coming up next week. Thanks for listening or watching this week. Next week we're going to talk about discovery calls. You know, where you have your first interaction with a really hot prospect. And this is typically a 15 minute video call. In fact, I've got a format for you for the perfect discovery call. And we're going to run through it step by step next week. See you then for MSPs around the world. Around the World, the MSP Marketing podcast with Paul Green.