SPECIAL: How MSPs achieve a happy balance

[00:00:01] This is an MSP Marketing Podcast special. [00:00:05] So tell me this, has your MSP got a secret stash of plates anywhere you're going to need them if you're hungry. Hungry for growth. Running an MSP is like constantly spinning plates and there's a good chance that you've dropped the odd one from time to time. It's a dizzying challenge trying to keep them all spinning and in perfect balance. If you're trying to juggle your home life with everything your MSP throws at you, and it often feels impossible. Today's special episode is just for you. Come for a Christmas Eve walk with me as we find the answer to this question. How do you achieve the perfect happy Balance? Powered by mspmarketingedge.com Paul Greens and MSP Marketing Podcast well, I hope you've had an insanely good year this year and you're really ready for Christmas tomorrow. Certainly, if you're listening to this when the podcast is released. What we're doing today is kind of a bit of a new tradition, which we only started last year, but already it finished. Feels like the right thing to do every year is that you come for a walk with me. So last year and you can go back and listen to last year's special episode, we went for a walk around a lake near my home, where I live. I live just outside Milton Keynes in the uk. It's kind of in the middle of the uk and today we're just going for a walk near my house, actually. I live near some fields. I live in a little village. It's very nice around here. So it's a beautiful, beautiful, sunny, crisp December morning and I'm just taking you out for a walk to talk about the happy balance. So what is the happy balance? Well, I'm a business owner, just like you, and I've been doing this. In fact, actually, next year will be my 20th year. It was February 2005 when I first started my very first business. Not the one I have now. I sold that in 2016. But back then, you know, I started and I had all the hopes and fears and all the difficult times that everyone has when they start their first business. And it took me probably about seven years to achieve this thing called the happy balance. And the happy balance is a mixture of, or it's a combination of five things that you need to have in your life in order to achieve happiness. Because if your experience of starting your MSP was anything like my experience of starting my first business, you throw yourself into it with such gusto. That it becomes almost an unsustainable beast. And you kind of look up a year, two, three years in, and you realize that you're spending so much of your time working that you have got all the other parts of your life out of balance. So things like, well, all the things we're going to talk about today, but especially your family, your partner, your kids, if you've got them, your social life, your friends, all of these things, they take a back seat to the business. And I think that's okay for a year, maybe two years, but if it goes on any longer than that, the risk is that you are just out of balance. And we cannot live our lives out of balance for a very, very long time. You know, I do know business owners, MSP owners, in fact, who have been out of balance for years, decades in some case. And yeah, some of them are sitting on very successful businesses. Successful as in there's lots of revenue coming in and there's lots of profit going into their bank account. But I have business owning friends who are in that position and they go home to their luxury apartment in the evening where there is no partner and there's no kids because the price of them building the business and making themselves a millionaire, the price of that was losing their family. And I don't know about you, but I would rather have the family and the happy life and the balanced life and just a little bit less money in the bank. To me, it's not just about making money. You've got to have that balance as well. So let me tell you what the five elements of the happy balance are. And this is something that I was going to say I created it myself, but I haven't really created it as much as I've been influenced by hundreds of books that I've read over the years and just realize that these are the five things that you need to have. Let me tell you what they are and then we'll go into a little bit more detail with them. And should I go up there? Looks a bit muddy up there. I'm going to go up here. I'm going to go up into a field. We're going to, going to take you up to a little woodland that's near my house, which is just beautiful to go to. And there are squirrels everywhere today. I don't know why there are so many squirrels right now. Anyway, these are the five items. The five items for a happy balance are cash, time, family, fun and meaningful work. So let's start with the first one, cash. So why did you Start your business in the first place. [00:04:36] Most people don't start their business to make more money. They start their business because they want control. They want control over the kind of work they do. They want control over who they work with, how they do that work, when they do that work, where they do that work. Control is a bigger motivation for most of us starting our business than money. Now, don't get me wrong, one of the things that we want to control is the amount of money that we earn, right? We want to make sure that we have plenty of income coming in so that we can do the things that we want to do with our lives. But there's very, very few people. There are some. But there are very, very few people that start their business purely to get more money. And it's just a big money thing for them. And typically, those people, they're never really satisfied with their business. They never really get to a point where they've got enough money, even though actually there is a. There is a point. I was reading this a few weeks ago. There's. What book was it? I think it was a podcast I was listening to, possibly Derren Brown's Podcast for the Brain or Podcast for Life, which you can get on audible. Very, very good pod. [00:05:37] And he was saying that there's a point where you earn enough money to pay all your bills to get yourself out of debt. And extra money after that doesn't move the happiness needle. It just is extra money for you to go and buy more things that you don't really need anyway. Cash. We absolutely have to have enough cash. And, well, exactly as we were just saying in that podcast, if you don't have enough cash, it's a position of misery, isn't it? You must have been in a position where you can't pay your bills. I've certainly been there. I was there pretty much until I was about 35, to be honest. But we couldn't pay all the bills. We had some debt. You know, there was. There was always more money going out than coming in. And when you first start your business, that gets even harder because you've suddenly got this second beast that's chewing up money. The second beast is your business. And just when you start to make enough money and you're making good money, then you need to add extra resource, and you have to go and get, you know, more people. You have to get an employee. You have to bring extra resources in. It's an absolute nightmare. So cash is definitely the right first resource to look at. And the thing that you need for your happy balance. But that goes hand in hand with the second one, which is time. [00:06:45] You know what I was saying earlier about those business owners I know who have loads of cash. They're very wealthy, very successful businesses. Often they have no time at all. They're working Saturdays routinely, they're working six hours a week, they're doing 60 hour weeks and they have absolutely no time at all. I would say it's more miserable having cash but no time to spend it than it is having time and no cash. Does that make sense? You know, lots of people in the world with plenty of time and no cash. And there are many things you can do that don't cost cash. But if you've got cash and you can't spend it on yourself or spend it doing fun things, then that's no good at all. Right? Do you agree with me on this? So I think you need a balance of those two things. You need cash and you need time. Oh, I'm out of breath. I walked up a hill. I've just got to a woodland here near my home. Wish I'd worn different shoes, my feet are freezing. [00:07:41] Anyway, so cash and time, those two things in balance. And I rebalanced my time, oh, two, three years ago, probably post Covid. And I work about 30 hours a week now. Some weeks I'll work 40, 50 hours, some weeks I'll work a little bit less. But routinely, as I'm going through, it's about 30 hours a week. And that's a pretty good balance for me. You may have heard me say on the podcast before, I'm a sole parent. So I have a, well, 14 year old daughter called Sam who's awesome and also 14, which is the opposite of awesome. And you know, but I go to every school thing, I take her everywhere, I do every club, I'm there for every little thing. She's an actor, she has an agent now, which is nuts. So she wants to be a professional actor. But all of that takes time. And we're very lucky that we've got that balance right, that I've always got time to do the things for her that are important. And of course she's been spoiled by this. She doesn't know that there are many other parents who don't have time to do everything with their kids. But to me that was an important thing. And when I started this business back in 2016, that was number one priority for me was getting those two things in balance, cash and time. And I would urge you to do the same thing. Because for me, I was learning from the mistakes I'd made with my first business. So I was able to design my second business. This business, the MSP Marketing Edge. I could design that completely differently because I'd learned from those mistakes. So the first two items then of the happy balance, cash and time, and the third one, I've just started talking about it, it's family. So Sam is my family. I have a girlfriend as well, but you know, we don't co parent. She lives separately with her own teenage children. You don't want all those teenagers getting together really. And, but you know, she's my family. And then there's my real, my, my real, my other family, you know, like parents, brother, that kind of thing. All of those things are important because it's all temporary, isn't it? All of this, really. I don't want to get too deep with this. I'm walking around in the beautiful countryside on my own, just enjoying it. I don't want to get too morose. But the reality is the important people in life don't stay in your life forever. And I think we owe it to those people and to ourselves to make the most of those people while we've got them, right? To enjoy our children's youth, to enjoy the company of people that make us laugh, that we love, that are funny. All of these things are really, really important things. I nearly slipped over then. That would have been quite amusing if I'd fallen over while recording this podcast. So we've got to have enough cash, we've got to have enough time and we've got to spend plenty of time with our family. Well, no, let's say the right amount of time with our family because for me, spending an extra day with my brother doesn't bring me any extra joy. Does that make sense? Right, so having a short period of time and enjoying him and his wife and his kids and their company and that's a great thing in moderation, but spending an extra day with them and that doesn't really make, add any enjoyment to me again, it's all part of the balance. And then we move on to the fourth one, which is fun. You've got to have some fun in your life. And what, what is fun to you? We all have different things that are fun. So what I'm doing now is fun for me. I'm walking around my village. I'm now I've come out onto a little one sort of single track road just at the back of the village and I'm going to now Walk back to my house because it's so cold. But this is fun for me. And running, I love running. That's fun. I love going to the cinema, that's fun. I like photography. I love nothing more than going around London here in the UK with my camera. There's so many things to photograph. If you just stop and look, there's an amazing abundance of that. And to me all of that is fun. And going to the theater and all sorts of stuff like that. So what's your idea of fun? Don't say computers. You can do better than computers. Computers are the day job and I appreciate that. Computers might have been fun for you once, but maybe they're not fun anymore because it's the job. Right, so what are the other things? And I would massively encourage your fun to include exercise as part of that if you can. It's so important that we even with just a 20 minute walk each day, right? Or just, just taking the dog for a walk or something just to get our heart rate up, 20 minutes every day, it makes such a massive difference to life quality. It really does. So I would encourage you to add in that fun. And it's so easy as a business owner as well to just forget fun or to just to put fun in at weekends. It's like, oh yeah, I'm really busy during the week, got my 50, 60 hours on and then at the weekends that's when I'm going to sleep. I'll have some beers, I'll have some fun then. But actually I think you've got to get that balance every day, right? It's got to be a little bit of fun every day, a little bit of family every day. [00:12:06] These are good things. Okay, the final thing we come onto then with the happy balance is meaningful work. And I put this in because for some people meaningful work is not important at all. Some people really don't want to work. And you know, I've got a few friends, I'm 50 now, that's scary. And I've got a few friends that they don't want to work anymore. They want to retire now. Well, not retire. They just don't want to work, right? They want to be a full time parent or just be, you know, go out and be people who lunch or whatever. That's fine for them, but for me, I get so bored if I don't have work. I need work, right? That 30 hours a week that I work, that's intense work. That's not me slacking, doing stuff. I'm really intensely Doing that work, because that's so important to me, really important. [00:12:50] Without meaningful work, I don't think. I don't know. If I couldn't work, I think I'd be a very different person. You, are you the same? Do you need to work or are you actually one of those people that you would like not to work? I think the vast majority of business owners, we need to work, but there's a reason I put that word meaningful in there. It's got to be meaningful work. Not just doing password resets, not just doing new users. That's not meaningful, is it? It's not meaningful at all. But actually helping a customer do more, helping a client do more with their business because of your technology strategy, that is the most meaningful work there is. And in fact, isn't that the greatest contribution that you could make to a client is to help them do things with their business that they could not have done without your help? That is an amazing, meaningful work. And it's one of the reasons why you personally, as the owner of the msp, should be doing as little sort of everyday work as possible. You shouldn't be doing tickets, you shouldn't be doing help desk stuff. If you catch yourself doing, you know, password resets, new users, all that kind of stuff, that's not fun, that's not meaningful. You can hire other people to do that. And I appreciate we all have to do work like that at some point, but there's always someone else you can find to do that. So you can do what only you can do. And there's a ton of stuff that only you can do. And most of it is to do with strategy and the big things of technology. That's really important, that kind of stuff. So there we go, the happy balance. All those five things. Enough cash, enough time, time with our family, time, having fun and meaningful work as well. And if any of those are out of whack for you right now, then just as we are here on the cusp of Christmas, you've got an opportunity to look at 2025 and say, how can I do things differently next year? Coming up, coming up next week. We're going to be back in the studio next week, and I'm joined by a guest who was last on the show in October 2023. His name is Jake Gregorich and he's part of a company that's acquiring MSPs around the US. But the cool thing is they're running each of them as independent units and they've managed to make each one grow by employing a Chief Growth Officer at each each one of those MSPs. He's going to explain what that concept is next week, and I'm wondering if it's something that you could copy in your MSP for MSPs around the world. Around the world? The MSP Marketing Podcast with Paul Green.