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Welcome to Episode 301 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…
Whatever you do, don’t pick a CRM for your MSP until you’ve heard this, and especially if you’re looking at HubSpot. The system you use to manage marketing with your prospects has to be a good match for your business, otherwise you could have a very costly waste of time on your hands. So which is the right CRM for MSPs? Have you been considering systems like MailChimp, MailerLite, Growably from the Tech Tribe or even HubSpot? Eight months ago I switched my business to HubSpot, so let’s review it eight months on and see if I’d recommend it for your MSP.
On the 14th of April 2009 I committed to my first serious CRM. It was called Infusionsoft. I know the date because I’ve still got the welcome email. Now, back then I owned a different business, actually one I sold in 2016 just before entering the channel, but even back then I knew that finding and committing to good software that sat at the heart of my marketing was critical.
At the time, Infusionsoft was the hot property. In fact, I’d say it was instrumental in our success building that business. It allowed me to build up a large audience of prospects. I had 12,000 of them in that last business and using Infusionsoft I could grow a relationship with those prospects using content marketing all sent out in that CRM. And I had a telesales team whose job was to call those prospects and book them in meetings with our salespeople, and that allowed us to convert the relationships from prospects into clients.
I look back now at that 2009 to 2016 period and realise that was kind of a golden time for Infusionsoft, because since then it really has gone off the boil. First, there was a focus on not just being a CRM and a marketing platform, but becoming a payment platform as well. And then the original founders left and then the new people that took over, the new management team, they rebranded it as Keap, and they created a second CRM, which seemed to do the same things as the first CRM but in a different way. And then the original founder took control again and then they tried to bring those two products together as one, and I’m not quite sure how successful that was. And then they were trying to turn themselves into an automation business, but there was no clear roadmap of what that meant or how they were going to do it, and they also massively hiked up the prices.
Now I’ve been using Infusionsoft (or Keap) in the MSP Marketing Edge since day one, since we opened back in 2017, and I’ve been feeling for a while up to last year that we needed to change our CRM. But our use of it was so extensive, I mean, it was weaved throughout the whole of the MSP Marketing Edge that the thought of migrating to something new made me feel sick inside because as I say, we don’t just use it for our marketing. We run all of our portal automation, all of our clever stuff gets run through the CRM. The trigger that caused me to change happened in October last year, so in 2024, when Keap was sold to a company called Thryv, and I decided that that was a fire sale just based on the sale price that was sold compared to their revenue. That was my trigger to move.
There were only really two CRMs that we took seriously. The first was GoHighLevel, which as you may know, powers Growably in the Tech Tribe and a whole load of other platforms used across the channel. So if you are with a vendor that offers you a CRM or any kind of marketing level automation, the chances are pretty high that they’ve built it on GoHighLevel because that’s what that does. It gives you something that you can white label for your agency or your platform, and we looked very seriously at this for a long time. The pricing is very good, but we found it a bit buggy and because it had been built to be white labelled to do what we wanted to do with it would’ve required a huge amount of development time, probably another full-time developer.
So instead we decided to migrate to HubSpot, and as I stand here eight months on, I am still highly impressed with the HubSpot product. It’s amazing, and I realise how much using Keap was holding us back. Using HubSpot has allowed us to do more things across more channels and connect all of our activity together in the backend so much more easily. You can automate so many more things and now we are held back by our ideas rather than functionality.
It’s very rare for us to come up with an idea and then not be able to figure out a way to do it on HubSpot.
It’s now quick and easy to spin out new marketing initiatives to generate landing pages that allow me to launch those initiatives within 24 hours of thinking of them, and I can track exactly what prospects are doing on our website and on email and some other platforms to a certain extent. We get an idea of what they’re doing on social media, you are a bit restricted by the actual social media platforms themselves rather than HubSpot, but there’s more and more things that you can put into HubSpot and integrate and it all just act together. It’s amazing.
Increasingly, my team and I are spending more time in HubSpot, encouraging more engagement and more marketing activity with our prospects. And our database is growing as well, our ability to see who is a good fit for our MSP Marketing Edge is getting better all the time, right down to we can even see which of the prospects in our database are in available areas. A key part of the MSP Marketing Edge is that we only sell it to one MSP per area and that’s a genuine lock. When we are working with someone, let’s say in your area, we won’t work with anyone else, so being able to narrow our prospect list down – we’ve got around about a thousand MSPs in our database who are in an available area, they could buy what we sell – this is incredibly powerful and the ability to do that is completely automated. No human has to do anything to maintain that list, which is constantly changing every single day. I love it.
So overall, I’m very happy with HubSpot. I do have, for balance, two complaints and both of them eight months on are minor complaints at this stage. But the first is that I found the onboarding to be a massive headache. The lady onboarding us was very pleasant to deal with and she knew her stuff, but standing back and taking a big picture view, it was really poorly informed. None of the info that we handed out during the very long sales process was passed on to the onboarding lady. It was really frustrating having to explain our business again and how we were going to use it. Because we were a complicated case, we weren’t just the CRM, we were going to use it to power our portal and we’re doing that migration now. It was actually very stressful during the onboarding.
They set some arbitrary deadlines for when the onboarding must be completed and those were often thrown at me almost as like a punishment because I got a little bit behind on the things that I said I do, and almost every single call started with, oh, you need to hit this deadline. You need to be off onboarding by a week on Thursday, I guess because the onboarding person had targets to hit. And at one point I said, I do feel like the tail is wagging the dog here. I’ve paid a lot of money for onboarding and I’m being beaten up during that onboarding because it was also wildly expensive. We paid a few thousand pounds or dollars for mandatory onboarding and there was no choice to skip that, which I do understand as it ensures that new clients use the software, but it was kind of useful, but it was also the worst value for money for anything I’ve bought in the last few years. We ended up hiring a HubSpot consultant who is amazing and he’s still working with us today. Side note, if you would like a referral into our HubSpot consultant, just send me a DM or just comment on this post and I’ll give you his details. He’s been invaluable in integrating HubSpot into our business, but he was an external consultant outside of HubSpot and of course he’s a cost as well. He’s cost us thousands and thousands of pounds, none of which I anticipated when I started migration, and I don’t resent that at all, but obviously the bill has been high. The overall HubSpot bill has been high.
Which leads me onto my other complaint. The cost of HubSpot. You really do pay through the nose for every single bit of functionality that you want to use and let’s not beat around the bush. What they have designed is amazing. It’s an amazing piece of software that works very well. It’s logical, it has a few bugs, but those bugs get fixed. There’s very few things in HubSpot that you cannot do. There’s very few things that you can’t figure out. It all seems to follow the same kind of flow. Someone somewhere or a whole team of people somewhere have really thought through a lot of how they’ve built it. As a SaaS piece of software it is insanely good. If all of my SaaS software was that good it would be great, but it also encourages you to use new functionality in a way which makes you want something and then realise to get that you’ve got to move up a tier or you’ve got to add on another seat or you’ve got to add another bolt on or something.
In my first few months using it, I’d get so frustrated because there’d be a piece of functionality which I really wanted, we needed it, and it meant I had to go up another new tier or buy more new credits for something or something like that. Now I’m working well within my boundaries of what we’ve got available, but I’m still spending £1500 a month, which is around about $2,000 a month. And of course I’ve got my HubSpot consultants bill on top of that, just for a few more months until we get our full migration finished.
For context, my Keap bill was around about $400 a month, so I’ve gone from $400 up to $2,000 a month. It’s a big jump, but overall I’m not unhappy. So would I recommend HubSpot to an MSP? Yes and no. I believe you’d only get the full value out of it if you really use it, and that probably means a full-time marketer. So if you’ve got a full-time marketer in your business, HubSpot is a great choice. If you don’t, and especially if you as the MSP owner or manager is doing your marketing along with the 4 million other things that you need to do, then I believe it’s probably overkill for you. And as I say, it is so expensive if you want to use all of the toys. For most MSPs, about 80% of MSPs, a basic CRM really is good enough, if you’re just using it as a place to kind of keep all of your prospects and just send emails to them and maybe do a bit of extra marketing once or twice a month. You don’t need anything more than MailChimp or MailerLite, something like that, or just join the Tech Tribe and get Growably.
It’s only the 20% of MSPs, probably the bigger MSPs, definitely those with a full-time marketer that will really use the advanced functionality of the more comprehensive tool. I spend 80% of my time marketing my business, and even then we’ve barely touched 50% of what’s available to us in HubSpot. We are working our way through it, but even for us where we are a marketing business that does a lot of marketing on our own business, it’s still a very big toolkit with lots and lots of things. We’ve no way maxed it out. So yes, HubSpot, amazing toolkit, and if you’ve got a big marketing operation in your MSP, I can definitely recommend it, but do be prepared to hand over a kidney to pay for it.
Windows 10 end of life is now less than two months away. And while I’m sure you’ve been all over this with your clients for some time, I know from talking to lots of MSPs that there are many, many, many businesses out there that have no idea this is even happening, and that creates a massive marketing opportunity for you. Let me tell you how to take advantage of this even at this late stage and where you can get hold of some free marketing materials that you could be using in the next 60 minutes.
You and I know that Windows 10 is now in its last few months, but ordinary business owners and managers, your clients and prospects, they might be kind of aware that something’s changing, but it is not top of mind for them at all. Even those who do know that Windows 10 is dying are not really acting with urgency to upgrade, migrate, or sign up for extended security updates. Do you agree? Do you see that lack of urgency in your clients?
This is very exciting because Windows 10 end of life could be a massive once a decade marketing opportunity for you.
It’s almost impossible to make someone buy managed services before they’re ready to buy. This is one of the reasons your sales cycle is so long. Why? Well, that’s best explained by looking at the four big marketing problems that most MSPs suffer from. The first is that decision makers don’t know what they don’t know. They know that tech is important, but they don’t understand it, certainly not at the level that you do. And because of that, number two, they make buying decisions with their hearts and not their brains. You can’t make a cognitive decision about something you don’t understand, so they delegate the decision down to their heart, which picks an MSP based on feelings and not facts.
To complicate it further, number three, inertia loyalty rules. If you don’t understand something, it feels safer to stay with a supplier you don’t like than move to someone new. This is also known as better the devil. And the final problem, four, people only buy when they’re ready to buy. Because of the other three problems, you cannot force a sale until they are 1000% ready, willing, and able to move MSPs. Side note, these four problems are a double-edged sword. They make it slow and hard for you to win a new client, but they also help you to keep that client for a decade.
So a major operating system end of life event gives you a temporary opportunity to blast through these problems for these three big reasons. First of all, it’s rare, it’s once a decade. Second, it introduces an immovable deadline. And third, there are serious consequences for inaction. It’s been known for four years that Windows 10 would expire this October, but it’s only as we get within a few months of that date that the urgency really starts to kick in. So here’s the big marketing opportunity for you between now and October the 14th, and probably actually a good few weeks after.
Alert existing clients and prospects to what’s happening and the deadline, educate them on the consequences of inaction and lay out their options. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. And you can do this by consistently putting out great marketing on this for the next couple of months. Educate enough business owners and managers and you will generate new revenue and not just in hardware upgrades or OS migrations, but in other areas as well.
Why? Because when they need help with something they perceive to be complicated, most people turn to the authority figure who’s educated them, and they go on to ask for extra help outside the original problem. Great, so let that authority figure be you.
Here’s the huge freebie that I was talking about at the beginning. If you want to do some marketing around this, my team at the MSP Marketing Edge has done much of the hard work for you. You can use the free materials I’m going to tell you how to get in a second, you can use them to educate existing clients and prospects about their options.
All you have to do is go to this page and enter your details: growth.mspmarketingedge.com/windows10.
Go there, fill in your details, and I’ll email you some Windows 10 marketing materials you can use. In there, there’s an editable eight page educational guide that’s in Canva, PDF and InDesign. There’s an editable infographic and carousel for LinkedIn. There’s some email sequences for existing clients and prospects. And there’s a video script. Plus I filmed a special video guide showing you how to use these materials.
Featured guests: Brian Hoppe has been part of the Managed Services industry since the early 2000s. For over 20 years, Brian has worked in multiple MSPs and has bought and sold multiple MSPs. He’s been everything from a technician to Ops Manager to CFO to CEO. He has grown multiple MSPs to over $5 million in revenue and managed MSPs in excess of $15 million in revenue. Brian has a thorough understanding of all the ins and outs of running a highly successful MSP. But more importantly, he understands how to help MSP leaders get the most from their business. His expertise in leadership and coaching can help any MSP owner or CEO achieve the results they want in both business and life. He is passionate about finding the right clients for his coaching practice to help take their business and leadership to the next level.
Here’s a provocative question. If I asked you about the most important marketing and growth numbers in your MSP, would you a) know what those numbers should be? And b) know what the specific numbers are right now? Well, this is really important because the MSPs who know where they’re going can track their progress on the way. And my special guest today is an expert at this. He works with loads of MSPs, helping them understand which marketing numbers they should be tracking, and then focusing on the things that move the needle. Trust me, you are going to get so much out of this interview.
Hi, I’m Brian Hoppe and I am a strategic coach for MSPs.
And it’s so cool to have you back on the show. Thank you so much for coming back on, Brian. You and I actually met in real life, it was nearly a year ago in September last year. We were both at ScaleCon in Las Vegas, and obviously you’re like two foot taller than me. I’m only five seven, and everyone the first thing they say to me as they’re looking down at me is, wow, you’re a lot shorter than you look on video. But it was really cool to meet you, and we had a really good in-depth conversation. There was you, me and some of the other speakers sort of locked away in one of the rooms, and that was one of my favourite parts, just having those in-depth conversations with people I’ve admired from afar who I’ve never had the chance to sit and talk with.
That’s why I wanted to get you back on the show, and particularly today, I want to talk about running your MSP by the numbers. And we’re going to talk today about what those numbers are, how you collect that information, how you use that information. Particularly as well, I want to talk about what numbers you should ignore. I’m conscious that MSPs by the very fact that they can collect a thousand numbers, will collect a thousand numbers, and I think you and I would be in agreement that that’s not necessarily the right route to go. So first of all, before we talk about the numbers, let’s hear about you. So just for those who’ve never come across you before or they’re not familiar with your work, just tell us what you do with MSPs. I know you are working with a growing number of MSPs every single year. So tell us what do you do to help these MSPs?
I do three main things and they kind of go back to the three things that I felt were the things that made me the most successful in my MSP. The first thing that I think about is peer groups. Joining a peer group was a huge thing for me and for my business, and so I actually facilitate and lead a few different peer groups in the space. The second thing that I thought was just a huge thing for our growth was implementing a business operating system. And so I do that as well. I work with some MSPs implementing business operating systems, think something like EOS or Scaling Up, those kind of things. And then third thing, a huge, huge, huge thing just for my personal growth as well as the growth of our business was that we hired an executive coach. And for me, it was so life-changing that even when I first started doing it, I was like, Hey, I’m going to do this one day and 10 years plus later, here I am. And that’s probably the majority of the work that I do is working one-on-one with MSP owners, just really help grow themselves and grow their business because one of the things that I believe that your business can’t grow past your level of growth as an individual and as a leader. So yeah, those are the three big things that I do in the space. And at any given time, I’m working with 50 to 60 MSPs in those different capacities, and it’s just a blast. It’s living the dream I like to say.
Yeah, I love that. I’m such a big fan of peer groups and one-to-one coaching. I think every MSP should be in a peer group or be coached, I genuinely mean that. There are so many great peer groups around. You run some, here in the UK Ian Luckett and Stuart Warwick run the MSP Growth hub, which is very highly respected. There’s lots of vendors aren’t there that have peer groups. There’s so many peer groups around. Do you know what percentage of MSPs are coached or in peer groups? It’s got to be like a single digit, right?
It’s got to be small. I don’t have any data on that that I know of, but it is relatively small compared to the population. By the same token, there are like you said, tons of different peer group organisations and all of that. So it is easy to get plugged in. I just think that most people, most owners kind of have that go-it-alone mentality. It’s that entrepreneurship and all of that, but nobody ever made it all on their own, right? You’ve got to have help, you’ve got to have support, and you know that really, really well.
Exactly. I can tell when I’m talking to an MSP that’s in our MSP Marketing Edge, I can tell when they’re being externally coached or mentored or in a peer group. It’s the quality of the conversation because there’s just a certain element of jumping past the problems, the small things that hold you back or the mindset issues. And that can be MSPs everywhere, dealing with all sorts of different issues. It’s almost like you come at it from a different angle, and that’s because you’ve got the perspective of working with people to help you see it as it actually is. As you say, going it alone. I think running a business and owning a business is the loneliest thing in the world. And all of us, I’ve been doing this 20 years, you’ve been doing this a little bit longer I think, all of us think we are brilliant and think we can do it on our own, and then we forget the dark evenings or the 4ams where we’re lying awake in bed. And primarily that’s because we think we’re getting enough support from our spouse or our staff, but we’re not, we absolutely need people who understand where we are.
Anyway, massive plug for peer groups and coaching over. Let’s talk about running the business by the numbers. So when you talk about running a business by the numbers, are we talking about marketing numbers? Are we talking about financial numbers? Are we talking about ticket numbers? What kind of numbers do we mean?
Yeah, well, there’s all kinds of numbers. So you’ve got your metrics and all of those areas that you’re talking about. I mean, you’ve got your marketing metrics and operational metrics with tickets and all that kind of stuff. Mostly what I’m thinking about in the context of this conversation is the financial numbers and knowing your numbers very well is one of the key foundational pieces, in my opinion, to success. Finance is the language of business, and if you don’t know your numbers really well from a financial perspective, you’re kind of flying blind. And I have conversations with dozens of MSPs, and most of them that I talk to can’t tell me key financial metrics about their business that everybody should know. And so I’m a huge proponent of actually teaching people, Hey, here’s how to actually track your numbers, your financials correctly. Here’s how to set up your chart of accounts so that you can actually really tell what your numbers are. And learning that kind of stuff myself was a huge leap.
I can’t overemphasise how much better the business got when I really started to understand the numbers and dig into them and actually know which changes to make the business perform better.
So let’s talk about specifically which numbers you should be on top of. And then as a follow up to that, let’s talk about how. How you keep on track of those numbers, and we can get down to levels of what kind of software you should or shouldn’t be using. And I appreciate that every MSP has a different software approach to it, but let’s talk about which numbers. So sales, I’m guessing, or sales revenue or monthly recurring revenue are the two most obvious ones, but what are the figures that you would insist that every MSP knows?
Yeah, so we have to start somewhere. If you look at a financial statement, you start at the top and go to the bottom. First thing you’re going to see is revenue. What do we track as far as revenue goes? If you talk to a hundred different MSPs or look at their books, you’re going to see it a hundred different ways. How do they track what, right? So what’s key in tracking revenue is that you have to separate out your product resell type stuff, that includes hardware, that includes software, but then you’ve also got to separate out your cloud resale stuff, the stuff that you sell that’s recurring. It’s a different type of revenue than just one time hardware, software sales. But a lot of times you see that all lumped in together. It’s just we resold stuff. So actually separating out the stuff that you resell that you’d buy from somebody else and sell to your clients is really important.
And then you get down into labour. So labour should be separated into at least three key categories. So first we’re thinking about, first and foremost for MSPs is going to be what is your managed services recurring revenue? So there needs to be a bucket for that, and it needs to be separate from two other key pieces, which are going to be technical services revenue, which would be break/fix, if you have overages or emergency, just stuff you’re charging by the hour for. And then the third key category would be project or things that you’re billing that you’re quoting a fixed fee to the client, they sign a quote, you do the project, that kind of a thing. So really getting, even just your revenue line items in order can be a difficult task if you’re not used to tracking it that way. If you don’t have your PSA set up to integrate to your financial package, whether that’s QuickBooks or Xero or any of the others, that can be a big challenge for people to really understand, okay, how do I need to be able to look at my revenue in order to track the things that are most important?
And splitting those out, is that about making sure that you’re on top of margins? You talk about reselling a cloud thing, it’s kind of easy, but maybe the margins are low, maybe there’s only a couple of dollars per user per month, whereas a project for example, might seem like it’s a lot of hassle but there’s a lot of planning, there’s a lot of work, there’s boots on the ground, but there might be $10 – $20,000 of margin in there, or it might unlock new monthly recurring revenue services, which are 100% margin. Is that kind of clarity of are we making money on every single thing here and how much money are we making? Is that the kind of level that we’re talking about?
Yeah, that’s the first step in exactly what you’re talking about, in getting that level of clarity by line of business. So if you’re not tracking those things separately, then you’re also not going to be able to track your cost for those separately, which is the next thing below revenue is your cost of goods. If you’re not tracking the cost of goods also by line of business, then you’re not going to be able to tell how much margin you’re making as a whole on your financial statement, and you’re not going to know which levers to pull to actually make things better.
Yeah, it’s as simple as that. And then presumably that goes down then to other costs. So the cost of premises, the cost of utilities, all of that kind of stuff. Do you find for many MSPs that what seems obvious is actually quite difficult to achieve because the nature of starting the business and just being in that hustle, the hustle of just going to get business, selling, selling, delivering, delivering, and you look up and it’s been five years and you’re doing $30 – $40,000 a month, but you’ve kind of got no idea of what that $30 – $40,000 a month is made up of. Is that typically what you see has happened?
It is, yeah. That is typical of what I see, and that brings me to the next thing. As we think about our revenue and then our cost of goods, we want to make sure that we understand what actually cost of goods are. This is another big thing that most MSP owners don’t understand. And when they’re thinking about this they’ll realise, okay, what’s my biggest cost as an MSP? People. And then what I usually see is that there’s one line that’s somewhere down near the bottom that’s like salaries, and it’s all the salaries that we pay everybody. Well, guess what? In the service business, your technicians, the people who actually deliver the service are a cost of goods sold. That’s one of the biggest errors that I see in MSP finances is that it’s just lumped all in one category down somewhere in the SG&A expenses. We got to move that up into cost of goods so that we can actually understand our gross margin. If you’re not doing that, you’re really flying blind because you can’t tell, okay, what is it actually costing me to deliver the service that I’m delivering? And usually that’s where most profitability problems are inside MSPs.
Yeah, so they don’t understand where the costs are, and therefore at the end of the month through the end of the year, they look at it and say, well, there’s no profit. Why? Where did that profit go? I guess what you are talking about there is making it very obvious and it’s there on the sheet. Let’s talk about tracking. Let’s talk about systems and software. So here in the UK, businesses use Xero a lot. I don’t think that’s as prevalent in the US. To be honest it’s not the best piece of software, I really struggle with it, and yet that replaced Sage. I’m sure you remember Sage, everyone, well apart from MSPs who perhaps would’ve sold huge SAGE servers in the past, every ordinary business person who’s not accountant hates Sage. I remember sitting almost in tears one night about 15 years ago just desperately trying to get basic information out of Sage, and I just couldn’t do it, because it was designed for accountants, not humans. Does it matter what software you’re using or is this simply a case of saying, right, the information is sat there somewhere, we’ve just got to organise it in the right way?
Yeah, I think it’s probably the latter. It probably doesn’t matter as much whether it’s Xero, or here in the US it’s QuickBooks online, most everybody’s using that now. We’ve still got still plenty of people who are using the desktop version, and then you’ve got other Microsoft Dynamics or larger companies might be using something like a Sage Intacct or those kinds of things. I think one of the most important things is, a) do you have your chart of accounts set up correctly to actually get the numbers that you need to get out of it? And b) how easy is it for information to flow from where you bill to your financials? Many people bill out of their PSA, so out of your ConnectWise or Halo or Autotask or that kind of a thing, and do you have it set up correctly to go into the correct places in your financial software of choice, and is there integration between those two things and all that kind of a thing? So it’s always easier the more that you can automate of that process.
Yeah, it’s fascinating isn’t it? It’s 2025 and all of that information is there, and we’ve got relatively sophisticated software packages, and yet still we’re in a position where something as simple as if you’re billing out of your PSA, which is convenient and it’s the right thing to do because the PSA is where everything happens, but even with Zapier and those sorts of integrations, that information doesn’t necessarily make it into your QuickBooks online or whatever is the case.
Final question for you along those lines then, Brian, is do you find that MSPs struggle mostly with how do I actually do that? Or is it normally a case of once they understand the concepts of what they should be doing and why, for the reasons you’ve just told us, is the actual implementation of it quite simple?
I would say it’s simple for those who understand how it’s to be done. There’s dozens of people out there who can help you set up the integration appropriately and all of those kinds of things. What I will say is that it’s most of the time the knowledge of what to look at and what to look out for. That’s the biggest hamper for profitability for MSPs. There’s data out there. Service leadership for instance, runs benchmarking and all of that kind of stuff. And in any room of a hundred MSPs, you’re going to find that there’s the 25% top performers, there’s those 50% kind of in the middle, and there’s 25% at the bottom. The top performers generate on average, about 2.3 times as much profit as somebody right in the middle. And what’s the difference between those average performers and those high performers? It’s really just the skill and the knowledge of the owner or the management team and their ability to generate those profits. And so actually the good thing is that all of those skills are learnable. I started out not knowing any of those skills 15 years ago and went from there to building a successful business and exiting. So those skills are learnable, which is great. And so it’s all about getting that knowledge of what to look at and why, and how to actually make changes to make your business perform the way you want it to perform.
You can see why running an MSP can sometimes be so frustrating because when you start, you think it’s about support and customer service and being good at tech. And then as you become mature as a business owner, you realise everything you’ve just said there, I know that someone’s going to listen to this on the podcast or watch this on YouTube, and their brain is literally exploding, it’s squirting out their ears right now because what you’ve just said is a missing piece of the jigsaw of, why have we got so much money coming in and yet there’s nothing left? You’ve perhaps just sent someone off down a direction that they wouldn’t have thought of. And we as business owners, and it’s not just MSPs, it’s all business owners, we’ve got to get really good at finance, we’ve got to get really good at marketing, we’ve got to get really good at sales, we’ve got to get really good at all of these other areas that are never about the thing that got into it. As you say, that’s the difference between being one of the bottom or the middle MSPs and being in that 25% club, which you want to be in. Because the people who are making really good money from their business are the ones who stay business owners longer, they’re healthier, they’re wealthier, they have better lives, they have better relationships, they get divorced less, their kids still talk to them, all of that stuff, because actually there’s a balance, and you can’t be a business owner for 20, 30, 40 years without that kind of balance.
So for the MSP who’s having that epiphany right now, and then he’s going to look at QuickBooks or Xero or whatever they’re using and scratching the head, obviously you can help them, what’s the best way to get in touch with you and scream, Brian, please help me.
I’m on LinkedIn all the time, so Brian Hoppe, you can look me up. We probably have mutual connections if you’re in the MSP industry. And then my website, brianhoppe.com. You can always check me out there and get in touch that way as well.
We have a marketing acronym question that comes from Daniel, an MSP owner in San Francisco. His question is: What are UTMs and how would I use them?
So a UTM is a snippet of code that you add to the end of a URL, and it helps you to track exactly where your traffic’s coming from in Google Analytics. UTM, it’s got a weird name, stands for Urchin Tracking Module, and it was created by a company called Urchin Software before Google acquired it. You’ll have seen loads of UTMs before. So for example, if you take my URL mspmarketingedge.com, this is what it would look like with a UTM added: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com/?utm_source=googlemybusiness&utm_medium=social-media&utm_campaign=utm-social-media
The idea is that for each campaign you run and each platform you use, you create a unique URL with UTM parameters, and then in Google Analytics you’ll be able to see exactly where the traffic has come from and what conversions each campaign has created. Good news. There are free UTM builders all across the web, just Google for one.
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