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Welcome to Episode 308 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…
There are many fears that MSP owners have. One of them is of course being breached, another one is running out of cash. But surely one of the greatest fears is that of losing one of your key technicians. And I’m so sorry to even bring this up, but it’s something that we do need to talk about because there are always very specific reasons why any employee leaves any business.
I want to explore the three big reasons that technicians might leave you so you can address those in your MSP before something terrible happens.
You’ve probably heard that people don’t quit businesses, they quit managers or owners… whoever’s managing them.
Well, this is absolutely true, and in fact, studies have consistently shown that 75% of voluntary exits are due to the boss and not due to the role itself. Another survey that I found on Google show that 57% of employees left their job because of frustrations with their manager or leadership.
So here are the top three specific reasons that a technician might leave your business:
The first is poor management – a lack of support, micromanagement, or even bad communication. Managers who don’t coach, who don’t listen or who don’t trust their people well they drive them away.
The second reason is no meaningful growth or opportunities. High performers crave challenge and progression, and without it they get bored or worse, they leave.
And the third reason is feelings of being undervalued or unrecognised. If your techs aren’t getting feedback, recognition or meaningful rewards, they’ll just look for a place that gives them those things.
But now for the good parts and how to flip the script and keep your top tech talent engaged, motivated, and loyal:
Number one – coach them, train them, invest in them. Make development a habit, not just lip service. Training, whether you do this yourself or whether you pay for them to have training, it boosts retention massively and tailored development plans show that you’re serious about their future. Plus, if you invest in leadership, you won’t end up with accidental managers who drive people away. And of course that’s good because as you can develop managers who work for you, it’s going to be easier for you to hand over the reins for the business at some point when you want to take life a little bit easier. And we do get there, I promise you we do.
Number two – give them room to grow and give them meaningful work to do. Don’t let them get bored because they’re doing meaningless tasks all the time. Instead, provide them with challenging work to do. There’s something called job sculpting where you give them challenges that are designed specifically to their role to push them, to encourage them to grow, to expand their brain and do new things. And if they’re doing that and they can see there’s a clear path upward, that’s a very motivational job for anyone to do.
And number three – recognise and support them. So feedback is so important, especially in an MSP. That means doing regular one-to-ones, just be 5 – 10 minutes just sitting down, chewing the fat. Or you can structure it around what’s going well and what’s not going so well. You should also do public praise wherever you can, even if it’s just in front of the rest of your team. And small rewards go a very long way as well. Just a candy bar, a chocolate bar, a beer, something like that. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but if it’s something that that person really likes, like their favourite chocolate bar, then that’s a huge thing. And I would create a culture of appreciation as well where you appreciate your team and your team are all appreciating each other. It can’t be fake, you have to just do it, you have to show appreciation to your people and you’d be surprised how quickly they will start to show appreciation to each other. And this reduces staff turnover and builds loyalty.
And then of course, the other thing that you need to do is to make sure that your business and everyone’s direct manager, if that’s not always you, offers support and support for absolutely everything, not just what’s happening in their work, but what’s happening in people’s home lives as well. This matters so much.
So let’s just recap that your best techs leave for three big reasons: poor management, lack of growth, or feeling unvalued. Actually it can be all of those things, but by investing in training, offering them opportunity and showing genuine appreciation, you can turn things around and make sure that your best techs would never, ever want to leave.
Come on, let’s face it. Compared to you, every potential client is a tech noob and you need to impress them. But then again, you don’t want to blind them with science, with technology science. If you go over their head, you’ll put them off and they’ll never buy from you, but do the opposite and they’re much more likely to sign up to come and join you.
So how does someone as knowledgeable about technology as you find that common ground between you and the prospect? Do this right and it could just win you a brand new client.
The things that MSPs routinely deal with every day are often baffling for ordinary owners and managers.
And this hit home for me a few years back when I wrote a book about email security and I gave it to my MSP Marketing Edge members to use. So the idea is they can put their name on the cover and they can give it away on their website or use it in real life as a 48 page business card. The book is called Email Hijack. In fact, we’ve just refreshed it for 2026 for our members, and it tells the fictitious story of a business owner whose email is compromised and £12,000 (or $15,000) is stolen from his business bank account. It shows how easily that can happen.
Now, it took me 5,023 words to explain email security in a way that people who don’t know or frankly don’t care about it will understand it and in a way that they’ll be motivated to protect themselves and their company’s email. And that’s the challenge. When your world and their world collide. You’ve got a fundamental problem to overcome when trying to explain critical concept to ordinary people. Because even in 2025, they don’t care about all of this tech stuff anywhere near as much as you do.
When someone’s a little bit confused by something, they’re much more likely to dismiss it, to ignore it and move on than they are to take the time to understand it. We live in a very busy world, don’t we? And our brains are constantly trying to make sense of that world. So if you confuse someone with technology and acronyms, it’s more likely their brain will disengage and they’ll divert attention elsewhere.
You must see this with your own clients, right? Unless they’ve got a very specific problem that has to be fixed for a very particular reason, they’ll put up with a fudge, won’t they? Or they’ll just make do, because really they don’t understand what the problem is and their brain’s just not interested anyway. This was the challenge with writing that book to explain email security, blended layers of security, how hacks can happen, and how something as simple as one hacker getting into one email account can be disastrous for the entire business, and can see it lose thousands and thousands out of its bank account. And all of this had to be done in a way that non-technical people would understand.
That’s why it took me 5,000 words and I had to lock myself away in a luxury hotel for three nights to write it. True story. This is the personal burden that I carry. So the challenge for you is to break down what you do into the smallest possible, most easily understood chunks whenever you are talking to prospects. And equally as important, clients. The second they don’t get it, they will disengage and you won’t get the sale.
Life’s going to be harder for you. Everything needs to be explained in the easiest possible way. And by the way, this is not in any way about talking down to them, far from it. This is about you dropping down to their level and looking at things as they look at it. There’s a phrase I’ve been using for a few years that explains this concept really well, and I can’t remember which book I’ve stolen it from, but here it is, to influence what John Smith buys, you must look through John Smith’s eyes. Love that phrase. And this is exactly what we’re talking about here. In fact, within your MSP, the challenge is to be constantly interpreting the technical gobbledygook that is your world, into normal, everyday, easily understood concepts for the people that you are serving. And the clearer and more precise your business is, the easier it is for them to understand and the greater the financial rewards will be for you.
Because remember, these ordinary business owners and managers aren’t making decisions on suppliers and spend using their brains. Their brains are just rubber stamping the decisions that their hearts are making. This is why we have to create marketing that’s emotional rather than logical. So this is your heart having a conversation with their heart, with a bit of evidence to reassure their brain to rubber stamp the deal.
Featured guest: Peter Bell is an MSP owner with over 32 years of experience and has been leading TGT, the preeminent MSP offshoring provider for 13 years. As the CEO of TGT, he has helped hundreds of businesses grow by building offshore teams in the Philippines and Sri Lanka.
Under Peter’s leadership, TGT has hired more than 1,000 staff, supporting clients with reliable and skilled talent. Peter’s deep knowledge of the industry and hands-on approach have made TGT a trusted partner for many businesses around the world.
I’m a control freak, you’re probably a control freak, in fact most business owners are control freaks. And that’s not meant as a negative thing, it’s just how we are and it’s how we start and run our business in the early days. The problem is control freaks get so caught up in the details that often they struggle to grow their businesses past what they can achieve, working like 60, 70, 80 hours a week.
My special guest today has built a successful MSP and an even more successful side business, and he did it by not being a control freak. You’re going to love listening to what he’s done and how he could help you to improve your business.
G’day. I’m Peter Bell. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Techno Global Team out of the Philippines and also Techno Group MSP for 32 years here in Melbourne, Australia.
So it is an absolute delight to have you on the show, not least of all, because as we’re speaking now, you went to bed and then got up at one in the morning to do this interview, you being in Melbourne, in Australia, and me being in the UK, so thank you for that, Peter. I do appreciate that commitment to this podcast. Now, I wanted to get you on because you’ve obviously you’ve been running your own MSP for, I think you said two to three decades, and you’ve recently moved over into something different. I want to talk about what made you get out of running your MSP and then this new cool thing that you’re sort of dedicating yourself to. So tell us a little bit, let’s go right back to when you started your MSP, what got you started in the first place and tell us the story of how you grew that business.
Well, I was 17 at the time and I was at university, and I got kicked out of university because I didn’t agree with the syllabus. And living at home with mom and dad, I was given two choices, go and get a job or study a new course. And I remember as a cocky little 17-year-old saying to my mom and dad, I’m going to go with option C. And they go, there is no option C. I said, yes, there is… I’ll start my own business. So I went to register a business, an IT business, and in Australia you have to be 18. So I grabbed my brother at the time who was older, and he come down and helped me register a business. We registered together, he was an accountant or starting accountancy. And the MSP was born. I’ve never worked for anyone but myself since the age of 17. And so that’s how the MSP was born 32 years ago.
And now of course you’re completely unemployable because once you’ve done about five years working yourself, you can never ever have a job. And certainly after 32 years.
I wouldn’t hire me, I’ll tell you that. So basically we had the MSP for 32 years and 14, nearly 15 years ago, we were struggling to find staff in Australia. A friend of mine’s a humanitarian lawyer, and she worked in the Philippines with street kids and invited us over there for a weekend. We were in Hong Kong at the time doing some business, and we opened up an office and next thing we know that business has grown from where it started 14 years ago with two people. We’re over a thousand people there now in the Philippines. And this year the business has got so large and so busy, we had to make the decision. So I decided to leave the MSP this year after 32 years and dedicate all my time and energy now on our business Techno Global Team in the Philippines. 32 years compacted very shortly.
Yeah, no, that’s a really good summary. Thank you. I want to talk about entrepreneurship and making big difficult decisions, that’s what interests me with this. Before we do that, can you just explain what that business is in the Philippines. So just briefly what it does and how you’ve got to a thousand people there.
Absolutely. So we started with two technicians that were doing back of house for our MSP. Server, patching, rebooting at night, things that I couldn’t pay overtime for staff in Australia to do. And then one of our direct competitors, another MSP here in Melbourne said, can you hire some staff for me? And we said No. And we said, you’re our competitor. Why would we do that? And then they said, well, if you don’t, we’ll hire them with somebody else and we’ll still be competitors. So we thought, great, there’s an opportunity here to make our competitors, our customers. So we hired two technicians for them and so on and so on.
So we now help about 300 MSPs around the world, hire not only technicians, but sales administrators, marketing, bookkeepers. We realised that inside MSP, having one for 32 years, there’s lots of different positions and sometimes you can’t find staff, sometimes you can’t find the right staff, the right skillsets, the right price. There’s varying reasons why you need additional help, and that’s how TGT was born, just basically by helping MSPs around the world fulfill positions they can’t do locally for different reasons. It’s not always just about money. So that’s essentially what we do. We help MSPs grow.
And you’ve clearly locked into something if it’s grown that much in just over a decade. So we’ll come back and talk about that business towards the end, we’ll come back and talk about that. Let’s just talk about you stepping away from the MSP. So you haven’t sold the MSP, you’ve kept that, but you’ve handed over the reins to someone else?
Yeah, absolutely. So we’re very lucky in that our MSP in Australia is 14 people, but there’s 22 people in Manila that work in that MSP here in Australia. So just under 40 people all up in the MSP. We’re lucky in that the average tenure of staff here in Australia and MSP is 17 years. So the staff that are with us have been with us for a very, very long time. And so naturally we’re able to hand over a lot of the control to those senior staff members to run the MSP for us. Darren, my brother’s still actively involved in that. And so just handing the reins over, obviously I’m living here in Melbourne, so I’m still popping into the office and seeing some of the clients from time to time. But the day-to-day running of the MSPs now handed over, I sit on a board meeting and so I go in and sit on the board meeting and give advice and direction, but the day-to-day running of the business I’m not involved in at the moment.
If you’re not involved in it day-to-day, I’m curious, and I’m looking again at this from an entrepreneur’s point of view, where you’re in a lovely position, you’ve got two successful businesses, and even though you’re not running one day-to-day, I guess you’re still involved in that business. So what was the trigger that made you think, do you know what, I’m going to walk away from that and focus all my time on this other business?
I guess I’ll take it back a step. The reason why we have the TGT business that’s grown so well, is the mistakes that we made out of the MSP. Darren and I, my brother and I, one of us would always be in the business. We’d always be there, because we thought one of us had to, as an owner, always be inside the business. Then one day our mother came to us and said, right, we’re having a family holiday, you both have to come. And we said, okay, which son are you going to choose on the holiday? And she goes, no, you’re both coming, and if there’s one thing you know, never argue with your mum.
We both went on holiday and that changed the way we operate… it was our realisation that you didn’t always have to be inside the business.
If you put the right structure, people, process in place, you can step back. And that’s what allowed us to grow TGT so rapidly and so quick. All the mistakes we made in the MSP by thinking we had to control everything went away. And we put a really good team in over there and it allowed us to concentrate on our MSP there for a while. But obviously the larger business got, it’s now five times the size of our MSP. And so as a result of that, it needed to have someone there running it full time.
I live in Melbourne, the business is in Manila and predominantly our customers are in North America. So it’s a very strange sort of business set up living in one country, the business is in another, but all your customers in third country. And as a result of things like this with time zone differences, couldn’t keep working nine hours a day in the day in Australia and then working at night in other time zones. So it led to making the choice that we had to, I had to choose one.
And obviously you chose the one which is seeing the most rapid growth and I guess which has got the most potential in it as well. I mean, what you’ve just described there sounds very much like a business of the future, doesn’t it? Like a 2025 business where you are running it from country A, the majority of the staff are in country B, the majority of the customers are in country C. It’s the kind of thing that I guess we couldn’t have done 10 years ago, but now is a relatively easy thing to do.
So when you talk to MSPs and you say to them, well just outsource some of this to us, we know what we’re doing, we’ve be doing it for some time, we’ve got a thousand people already. What are the fears that they have? And I ask that because you and your brother obviously went through that process where one of you felt you had to be present, but then you got over those fears. Do the vast majority of MSP owners still have those fears of I’ve got to be there, there’s got to be someone overseeing this. I’ve got to be across everything.
Yeah, I think if you put it just in one word… control. We see a very distinct difference with the customers that we have and the growth that they’re on as MSPs, if they are technician owned and led versus somebody who is business acumen led, or a technician based MSP, who’s brought in business management to help them run the business. And the biggest difference here is just control, where technicians like to control the environment and they like to control the outcome. You’ve got to give up some of that control to be able to grow and to be able to do the things that you want to do as you go along. So I’d say that’s the biggest one that we see is MSPs, all business owners need to give up a level of control to be able to grow the business. You can’t do everything yourself, you’re not the best at everything. Steve Jobs said, hire smarter people and get out the way. Absolutely concur.
You hire people for a reason, you’ve got to let them get on and get that job done. But as an owner and as a small business owner, it’s the hardest thing to give up, which is control. And growth, not every business has to grow, not every business has to be very large right for you at that point in time. So you have to be ready for it also. I always say, you’ve just got to be ready when opportunity knocks. And that’s what we think. We give a lot of the businesses the opportunity to do what they want, whether that’s to reeducate their team with the capacity or to grow their business. You’ve just got to be ready when opportunity knocks. And I think that’s the biggest difference between an owner and an entrepreneur is the ability to see that opportunity and take advantage of it when it comes.
But I believe anybody can go from owner to entrepreneur. It’s not something you’re born into. I believe it’s a mindset that you acquire and hearing you talk about being ready for the opportunity is exactly that. Do you believe that the MSPs that start to think of, right, I’m going to hand over control, I’m going to create some space for us to do something new. Do you think that’s an important action that you have to take in order to get the right mindset?
Oh, absolutely. Without a doubt. So we’ve had three occasions in our MSP that got us to where we are today, where customers have gone bankrupt. So very large customers have gone bankrupt and forced us to make changes in the business. There was two directions you could go, you could fold and you could be upset and you could be worried, or you could take that as a learning curve and then move on and it developed you for the next stage of where you want it to be. So I think they are afraid to give up the control, but if you have the right people around you, and it starts with exactly that, having the right people and understanding the skill sets. You know the old saying, you’ve got the right people on the bus, you’ve just got to put them in the right seats, and if you have that you can then grow the business.
We had a technician who become a service delivery manager at our MSP and did a terrible job, and we knew he was the right person for the company, we’d put him in the wrong position. I was going on holidays, I was the only sales person in the MSP, and then we put him, he said, I’ll do sales while you’re away. That was 15 years ago. Still leads our sales team today after 15 years. Right person in the company, wrong seat on the bus. And when you do find that, then things start to lighten the load. And then as an owner, I could go off and do other things because I knew that things were being taken care of.
I probably shouldn’t say this, but I have a thing called F off moments where when I go to a staff member and I go to tell them how they need to do it, and they just come straight back and tell me how it needs to be done. I know now that they’ve got it, I can leave it and I can move away. I’m comfortable and confident that they’ve got control of that situation or that question. As an owner I say to them, they look very strange to me, it’s the best part of being an owner when somebody does that because they’ve got it, you know you can move on. That’s how you get your growth.
It is. That makes perfect sense. Final question for you, Peter. If you imagine an MSP listening to this or watching this on YouTube, and they’re nodding along enthusiastically, but they’re at the very start of that transformation. So they’re still instrumental to the business, they’re the principle, they’re doing all the sales, they’re doing all the third line, maybe much the second line, they’re still, I use a phrase of being trapped in the business, where as a business owner, you create a prisoner of your own design and you trap yourself inside. So you and I know that the first thing is to want to free yourself from that prison. But you’ve obviously done this, in fact, you’ve probably done this a couple of times now in two businesses. What’s the first step?
The first step is the first step. And what I mean by that is if you imagine the first person that ever bungee jumped, the heart told them don’t do it, and the head said go ahead, science tells you you’ll be safe. You’ve actually just got to take that first step. People come to us and say, I’m trapped, I’m not sure what to do. I was at a conference last year and a stranger come up and just gave me a hug and I said, hello, how are you? He goes, yeah good, you’ve changed my life. And I go, that’s great. Who are you? And he goes, I’m one of your customers. And he explained to me he was a single operator, a one person show, and he said, I did something last week that I have never done since I started my business… I took my daughter to school. As a single operator, I had to be there first thing in the morning because the phone rings. So I could never take my daughter to school. But now that I’ve got somebody working with me, I know they’re there at nine o’clock, they answer the phone and I get to take my daughter to school.
And so it’s taking that first step. Work out what that first step is going to cost you. Whether that’s training, whether that’s education, whether that’s hiring somebody offshore to help you. Work out what that costs and go, right, if I was to lose $10,000, $20,000, would that end my world? If the answer is yes, well then don’t do it. But then question yourself, should you be a business owner? Where’s your business going to go if you’re not going to willing to risk that amount of money. If you’re willing to risk it, have a go. If it works then you can take on the next step or it doesn’t work, and you learn a very good valuable lesson and you can pivot your business to where you need to go.
So the first step is the first step, and you’ve just got to take it. But educated or calculated risk is what I would say.
I love it. Thank you so much, Peter. It’s time for you to go back to bed, but before you do, just tell us a very brief recap of what can you do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch? I guess it wouldn’t be with you directly, but to get in touch and explore what can you guys do to help us?
Yeah, just jump on technoglobalteam.com. We’ve got a calculator on there which allows you to work out what is the cost of hiring somebody overseas. Don’t be afraid of having staff member overseas. As we said at the start of this article, the globalness of our industry means the biggest risk to an MSP is probably not the MSP next door to them anymore, it’s an MSP in a lower cost centre somewhere around the world that can offer the skill sets, the time or the cost to compete with you. So it’s a globalisation now with MSPs, competing with somebody potentially in another country, not just in another city in your country.
Reach out to us, have a look at how we can help you from a skillset perspective. The biggest thing I learned out of this over the last 15 years is the longevity of my MSP staff onshore is 17 years. Because 14 years ago I went overseas, I put staff on, and I took all those tasks that they don’t want to do that adds no value to them or the company, but it has to get done, and we’ve all got those tasks. That’s your pot of gold, that’s your opportunity. So reach out and talk to us.
This week’s question is from Kenny, who’s MSP is based in New York, and he simply asks: Should I start a podcast?
Probably not. Because unless you have a real passion for podcasts and you’ve always itched to do your own, you’ll quickly find that a regular podcast is a total pain. However, the benefits are huge. I’ve found my podcast a key tool to reach people I would never have reached any other way. I’ve been able to set myself up as an authority figure. It opens doors for me to meet influential people through interviews. And of course, I’ve built a brand new audience. So if you do fancy it, these are the main areas to consider:
But by the way, if you do start your own podcast, will you drop me an email and let me know because I’m always fascinated to hear and see what MSPs are doing. My email address is [email protected].
Now next week, we’re doing something a bit new with this part of the show. I’ve been asking all of the marketing and business growth experts that I know within the channel to send me a voice note, and I’ve asked them to think up marketing tasks that you can do in a really short space of time. We’re talking like a minute or just a couple of minutes. So over the next few months, I’m going to play their voice notes with their suggestions for you. And that starts in next week’s podcast.
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