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MSP’s should build their marketing around a personal brand rather than building it around the business, and here’s why. Also this week, hiring your first marketing person: what to look for and when to do it, and what a second generation MSP owner knows that you don’t.
Welcome to Episode 363 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.
If you’ve listened to or watched last week’s show, we were talking about the power of having a really strong opinion in your marketing. And I want to build on that right now because actually there’s a bigger idea underneath having a strong opinion but this big idea is something that makes a lot of MSP owners genuinely uncomfortable. They really resist it. The idea is about building your marketing around you personally rather than building it around your business. And I know why that makes a lot of MSPs uncomfortable. So let’s talk this through properly and see if I can convince you that it’s a good thing for you to do.
Most MSP owners push back on the idea of building their own personal brand for one of two reasons. And the first is just discomfort, because what if it feels like you’re showing off? What if it feels like you are coming across as arrogant or attention seeking? That’s the first fear and that’s a very real fear. But the second reason that they don’t want to do it is more strategic and it is a very real objection. If you build all of your marketing around yourself, doesn’t that make your business harder to sell one day? Because of course, a buyer isn’t just buying your client list, they’re buying a business. They’re buying a business that can run without you and that has marketing and has branding. It’s the whole thing, that’s what they buy. So both of those concerns are very valid.
Let me answer the second one first because I believe that changes everything. So if you build your MSP’s marketing around your own personal brand, yes of course it makes the business a little bit harder to sell. However, it makes it a lot easier for you to build something to sell along the way.
A business that’s built around a trusted, well-known personal brand grows faster, wins more clients, and commands more loyalty than a faceless business ever will.
So my advice is simple. If you build all of your marketing around you, your personal brand, assuming that you are the owner of the business, and you do that for the vast majority of your ownership, that’s a very smart thing to do. And then in your last couple of years before you plan to exit, you shift the marketing away from you and you shift it back onto the business, back onto your team.
That transition can be done in six months, but if you do it slowly over two years, it’s not going to have a negative effect because by then you’ll know what marketing works, how to have a trusted brand, how you can help prospects to know, like, and trust you. And you just shift that onto the business, onto the team just before you come to an exit. When you’re having a conversation with a potential buyer, the conversation is around the fact that you’ve got all of this great marketing, it’s helped the business to grow, and you not being there is not a problem at all. That’s exactly what a buyer wants to hear. And that transition period is actually how you get the best of both worlds. You’ve got the growth benefit of a personal brand for most of your ownership journey, but then you have a sellable independent business at the point of exit, which is brilliant.
So let’s go back to the first objection, which was, “But I don’t want it to be all about me. I don’t want people to think I’m a narcissist. I don’t want to be a show off.” What we are talking about when you build a personal brand and you build the business around your own personal brand is not really self-promotion. Let’s reframe it because I think even the phrase self-promotion is what puts a lot of MSPs off. When you build a personal brand, it’s not about boasting, it’s not about constantly talking about yourself and your own achievements. it’s not about me, me, me, blah, blah, blah, look at me. It’s not about having a klaxon and going, “Look everyone, it’s me, it’s me.” It’s not about that at all.
If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while or watching my videos or in my Facebook group or following me on LinkedIn, or even if you’re a member of my MSP Marketing Edge, you’ll know that I am the face of the business. The whole of the business is built around my own personal brand and I’m not those things. I’m not a shouter. I’m not a narcissist. If you’ve met me in real life, you’ll know that we can sit down and have a normal conversation. I’m just a normal guy that you would talk to at a bar or in a pub, but I use my personal brand and use my face and my authentic personality to be the brand of my business. It’s exactly the same strategy I’m suggesting that you do.
What you want to do is you want to become known as the trusted local authority in technology, either the trusted local authority or within your vertical. Because people buy from people. And that is true in every single industry, but it is especially true in managed services because prospects are buying something that they do not fully understand from someone that they need to trust completely. Because they don’t understand it, they’re putting a thousand percent of their trust into you, right? They are hoping and praying that you do not let them down. And you and I know that you won’t let them down, but they are going to trust you only if they know you and if they like you. And that’s very difficult if it’s a faceless brand. In fact, it’s almost impossible, but it’s very easy if it’s a personal brand. So being visible as a real person that prospects can get to know, like, and trust. It’s not bragging, it’s not shouting, it’s not firing off the klaxon. You are removing the anonymity of the people behind the business, and that makes the decision to buy from you feel less risky.
The answer here is not to try to be something, it’s to be more of who you already are. You don’t need to invent a personality. You don’t need to pretend to be someone else. You don’t need to perform a version of yourself that feels false. The most robust and sustainable approach, especially if self-promotion makes you feel deeply uncomfortable, is to lean into who you already are rather than trying to become someone louder or more polished. So introverts in particular, and I’m an introvert, I’m an extroverted introvert. Introverts in particular often assume that personal branding means constant noise, constantly being on LinkedIn, being on the camera all the time, working the room at every event. And it doesn’t really have to be like that. I know I do a lot of that, but it doesn’t mean that you have to do that, but your personality can just be the overarching personality of the business.
If you go and do research on this with your AI friend, you’ll get the same answer on this, that depth and being real and being authentic is more important than volume of content that comes out. If you were to put out one piece of content a week that has your authentic personality baked into it, that is going to build more trust than anything else. And then you can use other content such as you get from the MSP Marketing Edge to fill. Because you do need to put content on LinkedIn every single day. In fact, that’s exactly what we recommend to our members. Use our content to have a presence every single day, but now and again, once a week, remove one of our pieces of content, so don’t publish it, and put out a piece of your own content that reflects your own personal, authentic personality.
Let me give you some practical ways that you can build a personal brand, but without feeling like you are promoting yourself and pushing yourself all the time. And these are approaches that work really well if this is a fearful idea for you, if you are an introvert.
The first one is to promote your work and not yourself. So instead of talking about you and your achievements and what you are doing, talk about the work that you are doing. Talk about a problem that you solved for a client or a lesson that you learned on a project or maybe a mistake that you made really early in your career and what it taught you. You’re a business owner, I’m a business owner, the people you want to reach are mostly business owners. And business owners love hearing the in the trenches stories of other business owners. So as long as you don’t get too tech with it, the stories of what you’ve done right and done wrong over the years can be very interesting to other business owners. So talking about what you’ve done and your work is much more interesting actually to other business owners than talking about yourself. And the focus stays on something useful rather than on you directly, but this does still build your authority, which is great.
Something else you can do is let other people do the talking for you. So obviously client testimonials, reviews, case studies, they’re all a form of self-promotion which doesn’t feel like bragging. But what you could do is you could film them with your clients. So you could film the client talking about the case study, but you could kind of be in the chair the other side interviewing them. It’s a great way of building your personal brand where you don’t do the work, you do the interviewing. Again, this is what I do in my podcast every single week, I get great guests on and for every five pitches we get, we reject about four of them and we just get the very best guests on. And we do that because just by interviewing those people, I get the benefit of that. Obviously it’s good content for the podcast, it’s great entertainment for you or edutainment for you, but also it builds my personal brand as an MSP marketing expert. I’m leveraging my guests for doing that. And you can do exactly the same when you share a client story.
The other thing you could do is share your successes inside stories rather than as a statement. For example, there’s a real difference between you saying, “Hey, we’ve just hit a major milestone. We’ve just taken on client number 100.” That in itself is a brag but if you tell a story and you say, “I started this business in 2005 and it’s been like this…” You talk about the setbacks, you talk about your team, you talk about the disasters and you say, “And today we took on client number 100” or “we hit a million revenue” or whatever it is that you’ve achieved. Remember, people engage with stories, not announcements.
Something else you can do is rather than posting stuff, you can just reply. This is actually a really good thing to do on LinkedIn anyway because LinkedIn is looking at everything that you’re posting everywhere and all of that is helping LinkedIn decide what you’re an expert in. Go and find other people’s posts and reply with value add content. So if you don’t know what to say on your own LinkedIn posts, go to other people’s conversations that have already started and take part in those conversations. You just need to make sure that you do add value. And please don’t use AI to write this. Use a dictation tool. I know AI makes it easy for you to do a long value add comment but LinkedIn knows it’s AI, people know it’s AI. It’s lazy. If you’ve got an opinion, use a dictation tool. I use something called Wispr Flow, I love it. I just signed up for my second year. I think I’m mentioning it almost every week in the podcast right now because it’s such a great tool. It sits on my Mac and on my iPhone and it learns from me and it corrects it all. And almost all of my writing right now is actually being done by dictation. It’s such an easy thing to do.
Let’s just dip back to producing your own content and it occurs to me that it would be helpful if I suggested some themes that you could be talking about. What you could do is almost pick a small number of recurring themes, perhaps choose two or three topics that you really care about and then just revisit those again and again with different stories in those topics. So they could be, I don’t know, common client mistakes or standards that you refuse to compromise on, your opinion about where the channel is going, AI is an easy one. What’s your opinion on where AI is going? And you can tell different stories within those themes. What we’ve found over the years with MSPs that do make their own content is it’s a lot easier to produce content if you’re constantly talking about a series of topics because then you’ve got something to start with.
If you know I’m going to talk about AI today and I need to tell a story… What’s my opinion on this? What have I seen there? What’s a new tool that I’ve just started using that I think people would benefit from? Let’s say you just go and use Wispr Flow I was just talking about, let’s say you go and use it and it changes your life in the same way it’s changed mine, it genuinely has changed my productivity dramatically, then go and do a piece of content about it. Because your audience, your business owner or your IT director audience are going to be really interested on that. So you haven’t had to start with a blank page. Your topic might be things I’ve found that are great and talk about Wispr Flow within that. And then you can go back to that topic next week, things I’ve found that are great and you may have found another tool that you want to share or something like that.
You have to then choose the format that suits you. So if you can talk to camera, you may be listening to this on an audio platform, but I’m doing this to camera because it goes on YouTube as well. And I find that relatively easy, but also I’ve been doing this podcast for seven years and I was doing video a long time before that as well. If that’s your idea of hell, then don’t do it. Do talking. You can get a microphone for 50 pounds/50 bucks. Do an audio only podcast or write stuff. Dictate stuff, write posts, write articles, write blog articles. Wherever you feel most natural, that’s the thing you need to do. Building a personal brand doesn’t require that you have to be on camera or you have to do a podcast or you have to do whatever. You find the format that works best for you. What’s more important is that you are consistent, that you show it consistently, that you either create content or do replies, but you’re consistent. We’ve been doing this podcast now for seven years. It is a hamster wheel, but it’s really important. It’s the spine of all of our marketing and all of my building expertise as an MSP marketing expert with new MSPs that are finding us every single day.
So let’s just finish off by reconnecting it back to what I was saying in last week’s show where I said you should have strong opinions in your marketing. Now we’ve talked about building a personal brand. Can you see how those two things go directly together? It’s really smart. And actually sharing an opinion, something you feel very strong about, is one of the easiest and in fact most natural ways to build a personal brand because it doesn’t feel like self-promotion. It’s like you catching up with a friend and you’re having a conversation and you’re telling that friend what you think about stuff. We do that naturally. So do it on camera or do it in an article or do it in a reply on LinkedIn.
You’re not necessarily talking about yourself to build a personal brand, you’re talking about ideas and opinions. But every time you share something that you genuinely believe, the good news is you are building your personal brand and prospects will start to associate a distinct point of view with you and with your name. So if self-promotion feels impossible to you, something you really don’t want to do, actually having opinions and sharing those opinions are often the easiest way to start building that brand without feeling uncomfortable about it.
Let’s talk about a moment that most growing MSPs eventually reach. It’s the point where you’ve grown so big that doing your own marketing or having your team implement marketing for you isn’t quite enough and you start wondering, is it time to hire a marketing person? Let’s talk about when that moment really is, who you should hire, and the mistake that almost every MSP makes when they try and hire their first marketing person.
So let’s talk about when, because a huge amount of marketing can be fully systemised without a dedicated marketing person at all. For example, if you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, you already know this because we’ve broken all of the marketing you need to do down into specific tasks that a member of your existing team or a virtual assistant or our done for you team can just implement for you. And that covers off all of the basics, all of the fundamentals. It does that really brilliantly. In fact, if you go back to my 3 step system, which I recommend for all MSPs and we’ve built our membership around – build audiences, grow relationships and convert relationships – as long as you are consistently executing and implementing across those 3 steps, then you don’t really need a dedicated marketing hire.
And the reality is that can get you up to like two million in revenue. And it doesn’t matter, UK, US, it’s more or less the same thing. The point where you’ve got around about five to ten technicians, that’s great for all of that marketing because as long as you’re getting the leads coming in and the leads are turning into discovery calls and the discovery calls are turning into clients, then the marketing is doing the right job. The moment things change is where you want to go beyond that and you want to start doing different stuff and start reaching different kinds of clients and having different campaigns and different messages and start running big, big creative projects, more sophisticated stuff. Perhaps you want to do lots of different buyer personas or different ideal client profiles, get into different sectors and really expand your marketing. And that’s the point where you need someone whose actual job is to understand and own marketing rather than someone doing marketing tasks for you. Does that make sense? You almost need someone who has a more strategic overview of marketing.
The mistake that almost every MSP makes is hiring someone young, on a fairly low salary, and expecting them to have every marketing skill.
So if you’re expecting a 22-year-old on just above minimum wage to do all of your lead generation, cold outreach, positioning, strategy, defining your unique selling proposition, running paid ads, designing graphics, writing copy, analysing data, if you are expecting someone to do that, that’s not real. And actually, if you think about that in your world, you wouldn’t hire a 22-year-old first line technician and expect them to pick up the phone, manage tickets, run the help desk, architect a full server migration and manage a complex cyber security incident. You just wouldn’t expect a young, new, early on in their career person to do that. And yet MSPs expect marketing people to do that because you see marketing as just a thing, but it’s not. In the same way that managed services IT isn’t just a thing, there’s lots of different things and lots of different levels of skills. It’s exactly the same in marketing.
I could do many of those things, but actually some of them I can’t do. I’m a marketing strategist, I’ve spent 20 years doing marketing for other businesses and I operate at that high level strategy. I don’t physically do a lot of hands-on marketing myself, so I’m a little bit out of date in the nuts and bolts of some of those things, right? Obviously, especially with AI these days, I could get in and roll my sleeves up and drop my skill level back down again, that wouldn’t be too difficult, in the same way that you could jump onto a first line or a second line task, and you probably do do that, but you can’t expect someone at the beginning of their career to jump up, it’s just unfair. A lot of MSPs do that, they hire someone young, they run them for six months, and then they feel disappointed that that person isn’t delivering anything.
In fact, I sometimes believe that what you actually need when you say you need a marketing person is you need someone to run a marketing team. So you almost need a marketing project manager who can then go and hire freelancers or Upwork people to do specific jobs for you. Does that make sense? So you’re almost hiring someone to have the responsibility, but they may not actually be doing the marketing itself. And yes, that’s going to cost you a lot more money, but if you’re going to hire someone to do marketing, you need to put money into it, you need to put resources into it. I believe actually that you need a marketing coordinator. You might call them a marketing manager or a marketing project manager, but that coordinator’s job is to strategise, hire the talent, then execute and coordinate.
They are the one that takes responsibility for the marketing outcomes, working with you as the owner, but they’re not expected to be a complete strategic genius or expected to possess every specialist skill. In fact, you might hire someone like that, then you might hire someone like me to work with that person to help them figure out the right strategy, and then they go and implement it with specialists that they can find on Upwork or wherever. I think that would be a very smart thing to do. A good coordinator like that, their real skill is knowing what needs to be done and getting it done and finding the right person to do it for them. So if you need proper paid ads, they go and find a pay-per-click specialist, if you need a video, they find a videographer, if you need your website redone, then they are the one that’s coordinating with the website designer.
So the coordinator becomes the hub and not the sole doer. This, I believe, is the right approach for most MSPs when they need a marketing person. But it’s really important that you work with them on a weekly, maybe even a daily basis in the same way that you might have a service desk manager, but you don’t interfere with their job, but you also talk to them every day or at least every week. It’s exactly the same with marketing. Just because you’ve hired a marketing person doesn’t mean that you can just let go of marketing and let them go off and do it. You’ve got to stay in touch with them, you’ve got to guide them. You’ve got to, yourself as owner of the business, retain the overall ownership for the marketing in the same way that you retain the overall ownership for the technical delivery.
If we assume that it’s this coordinator role that you’re going to hire for, who do you hire? Well, you can start on Upwork or you could look for someone locally if you wanted them in the office. You want someone highly organised, someone who’s obviously got a few years of marketing background, you don’t want to be teaching them marketing. They need to be curious. They need to be comfortable with experiments because a lot of marketing is experimenting. There’s no one way that works for you. There are 10 or 15 different little versions that could work for you. So you need someone who’s going to be constantly experimenting and trying a lot of things and failing at those things fast. Obviously, they’ve also got to be a people person and they’ve got to be comfortable managing other people.
Hiring, firing and managing people on Upwork – freelancers, outsource people – there’s a certain skill that you need for that. There’s a lot of things we’re looking for in this person, but these people do exist. Bit of marketing background, the ability to manage other people remotely, and the ability to try lots of things, be really excited about things, but fail fast at stuff until they find the things that work for you. And this kind of hire, as I say, they work brilliantly when they are supported as well. Supported by you, but also supported by someone like me. We have a ton of marketing managers who are members of our MSP Marketing Edge, and we are working with them at an enhanced level so we can help them do a better job on behalf of the MSP owner, if that makes sense.
In fact, a lot of our members get to a point where they bring someone on board, they add an extra user in to our portal, and we start working with them at an enhanced level, and it’s really great for the coordinator and it’s really great for the owner because the coordinator is doing a better and better and better job with our support. And of course, the owner gets better and better and better marketing, which is brilliant. And of course, they can also do other creative projects, things that we don’t do, like refreshing the website, changing the identity, and doing a lot of those marketing experiments.
So your first marketing hire is not about finding a brilliant all-rounder who can do everything. It’s about finding a good project manager who can own the coordination, the execution, and bring in all of the outside help that you need. Get that right, and I believe it could be one of the most valuable hires that you’ll ever make.
If you’re an MSP Marketing Edge member, I want to make sure that you’re using something that’s right there in the portal already because it’s one of the most powerful positioning tools that we give you, and I don’t think enough members are taking full advantage of it. It is our refreshed buyer’s guide for 2027. Back at the start of September we released the 2027 edition. We do it every single year. We have the IT services buyer’s guide for our B2B members, and we have the Co-managed IT buyer’s guide for our co-managed members. And if you haven’t yet downloaded that, then it’s a job to do this week.
As a reminder, your buyer’s guide is not a lead magnet. You should never gate it behind an email address because it’s a positioning tool. The whole point is that anyone can just go onto your website or your LinkedIn and just get that buyer’s guide freely and easily without having to enter their details, because the only reason that someone would read a guide on how to buy IT support is because they’re already thinking about buying it. So we want to get the guide into their hands and get them to read it because then they are going to book an appointment with you, that’s your discovery call. Bang, you’re on the road to getting another client.
So download the buyer’s guide, put your name on the front. There’s a few things that you go through, we’ve highlighted them in yellow where you just need to put in your MSP’s name, update your details, then print some copies for your office, for your car, for sales meetings, for networking, put it on your website, put it on your email signature, put it on your LinkedIn. The moment that a hot prospect who is nearly ready, willing, and able to switch MSP sees that you have written the definitive guide on how to buy managed services, then you’ve positioned yourself as the local expert and you haven’t even had a conversation with them yet. Isn’t that awesome! Go into your portal. It’s in the tools section and just look for buyer’s guide.
And if you’re not yet a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, as I say, we have two memberships – B2B helps you to win more business owners, co-managed helps you to win IT directors, and each of them is only available to one MSP per area. See if your area is available at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.
Featured guest: Adam Burke is Vice President of Sales & Partnerships at Quest Technology Management, a managed IT and cyber security services provider. With over 16 years at Quest and prior service as a U.S. Army Captain, Adam brings a background in enterprise software, strategic partnerships, and channel development to his role leading Quest’s sales operation and MSP growth strategy.
Well, this is something new for me. I don’t think I’ve yet before spoken to a second generation MSP owner, but guess what? I’ve got one right now as my special guest, and he’s dedicating all of his work to helping other MSPs to solve complex problems.
My name is Adam Burke. I am the Vice President of Partnerships and Sales at Quest Technology Management.
And it’s so cool to have you on the show, Adam, because you are possibly one of the most unique people I’ve ever met. You are a second generation running your MSP or certainly working within your MSP, and that’s really unheard of. I think there’s a lot of MSPs listening to this right now or watching it on YouTube, kind of wondering, “Would my kids want to run this business in 10, 15 years time?” And the kids are looking up to them and going, “Nope, I’m not interested in that, thank you very much.” But you are doing it. You are in a business that was started by your parents, so let’s delve into that story. So tell us the background. What’s the business and when was it started by your parents?
Yeah, so the firm’s name is Quest Technology Management. We’re headquartered in Northern California. My parents started it in our garage in 1982, and I was born in 83, so I’ve been a part of the organisation my entire life in one way or another. My father started as a supply company. He used to do battle with IBM and those sorts in the mainframe business. He used to work for a company called Sperry Univac, and he found an opportunity to sell supplies and assets to organisations that had mainframe investments. That’s where we started and then he just kind of kept moving with the market. So went through the PC revolution, went through the networking expansion. We were a very, very early partner with Cisco in the 90s, built out our data centre capacity in the early 2000s, as well as started our managed services practice in 1999 with our first regional bank client that needed help.
Anyone knows the wayback machine with Cisco Mars assets for logging network events on the banking industry. There were some rules and some compliance that came down there. So we just kept moving with the market. Today, we are a MSP, MSSP. We run a 24/7 network operations facility, security operations facility, as well as application development and full system integration. So started out in the garage. Today we have about a little over 200 direct employees and about a thousand contractors out in the market.
That’s a crazy story, it really is. And I love the fact that the business is your older sister being one year older than you, it’s an absolute crazy thing. So, you were telling me before the interview your father is still the president of the business.
Yeah. So president and CEO runs the day-to-day, still actively involved and loves it. This is his hobby and his passion. He loves business, loves helping folks with problems. And our go-to-market is, we’re an IT company and how can we help? So we don’t tend to over complicate it too much. We try to keep it pretty simple. And yeah, I’ve been working with him as the VP of sales and partnerships for about 16 years now.
I love that. And how did you get into the business in the first place? Because I guess at a very early age, were you playing under your father’s desk in his office? Was it one of those things that you’ve always been in the building or was it a conscious choice, I’m going to go and do this and I’m going to maybe one day take this on?
Yeah, I’ve always been helping out. When you’re a kid and stuff, you always go in and hang out and have a good time in the office and that type of thing. But when I seriously came on board in 2010, I always wanted to be part of the family business, but wanted to go out and do my own thing for a little bit first. So after college, I went into the United States Army for about six years, left as a captain in the infantry. So I got to serve with the 101st Airborne and spent some time in the Army and then came back and actually driving across the country with my father, got to decide what type of role after I finished in the Army, he came and picked me up in Georgia. And to my wife and my mother’s great fear, we made it all the way from Atlanta to New Mexico in about 18 hours before they told us we had to stop to take a quick nap before making it all the way home to California.
But during that time, we talked a little bit about what I did in the service when I was overseas, and that’s how we came up with the partner program and how we were going to work with organisations that maybe most people would think would be competitors of ours. But as opposed to being competitors, we were going to find areas that we could augment their business and help them deliver capacity and capabilities that maybe they didn’t have and work together to service their clients. So that’s how we came up with the partner program. And then I came on board full-time in May of 2010.
I love that. And we’re going to talk about the partner program in just a second. Before we do, so my dad, we live about a hundred miles apart, which in the UK, you were just talking about driving 18 hours and I know that’s nothing for someone in the US to just drive 15 states there and 15 states back. But here in the UK, my dad’s a hundred miles away, so we see each other twice a year because that’s a long distance in the UK. I think our roads are very narrow, that’s what it is. And a couple of weeks ago, I spent one day with my dad. We went out to a tourist attraction together and then had dinner and a few beers. And if I’m honest, I was glad I wasn’t with him the next day. So how on earth do you manage growing a business with your father as the president? I mean, I’m joking, obviously, it sounds like the two of you are quite close, but does it have its challenges?
Not so much. He’s a great coach. So having Tim as a coach and a father, I was pretty lucky in that sense. And he let me figure out my own path a little bit as far as, hey, what works, what doesn’t. He’s got a lot of experience, but isn’t going to necessarily tell you how to solve the problem. He’s going to let you noodle through it and learn from it. So he’s a great coach in helping to guide and keeps everything on the rails. I talk to people all the time like, “Man, how do you do that?” And it’s like, “Well, I don’t know, it works well, he’s a good coach.” And neither one of us has an ego where we’re trying to gain one-upmanship. It’s more along the lines of, culturally at Quest, how can we help solve a problem. Someone else succeeding does not mean you are not.
Yes, I love that. And let’s be honest, that’s what all of us are trying to achieve in our business anyway, isn’t it? Where one person in one team succeeding means actually the whole business succeeds. I think you and your father have clearly done a fantastic job. And actually, I’ve got to be honest, Adam, it’s his hard work because you are the son, you are the offspring, he’s done all the hard work, he’s clearly brought you up well. So Tim gets all the bonus points for this.
What you have done well is you’ve built this entire partner program and I was really intrigued to learn about this, which is one of the other reasons I wanted to get you on the show. So just explain for us, and we’ve got thousands of MSPs both in the US and the UK, Canada, Australia, all around the world will be listening to this and watching it on YouTube. Just explain what exactly you do, because as you mentioned earlier, theoretically you are in competition with all of the MSPs that you are already working with.
Yeah, there’s definitely overlap and the first rule of partnering is don’t compete with your partner. When we built the partner program, what we decided to do was go out and find people who had a similar strategy that we did and a similar way of supporting customers that we did. And we built out different areas. Some of it’s around cyber security practices, some of it’s around business continuity and managed backups. We own and operate a couple of data centres in Northern California, and then we provide private cloud instances in about six other locations around the US and 16 totally around the globe. We have great capabilities and some clients and some partners, they have evolving requests from their customers. Maybe they need help desk, maybe they need backup targets, maybe they need security, maybe they need a compliance audit.
Whatever that is, managed service providers want to stay engaged and they don’t want to necessarily say, “No, I can’t help you with that.” So what we’ve done is we’ve created a channel where MSPs, advisors, consultants, who’s ever out there helping the customer can engage with our team easily. Open up an opportunity. We assign resources to work with them through that, help them with the qualification, and then put together a service offering that fits those needs. Our simple go-to-market is we’re an IT company and how can we help? That doesn’t just mean end users. It means some of the largest companies you could think of in the IT space, they partner with organisations to help get things done. We’re one of those partners that helps.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And give us an example of a couple of common problems that an MSP might have or challenges they might have, which it’s an easy solution talking to you guys.
Yeah, so we run a service called technical on-call support, and one of the biggest barriers we see with MSPs is they kind of think of themselves in a regional standpoint. They think of themselves as, “Hey, I’m going to support these businesses in this specific geography.” And that’s a belief that a lot of MSPs have. Their customers may have needs outside of that geography, but they may only feel comfortable supporting, from an MSP perspective, onsite resources or technicians in a certain geography. You come to Quest and say, “Hey, I’m servicing the Atlanta, Georgia market, but I have a client who’s just opening up an office in Chicago and I need technicians to go there a couple hours a week or help desk personnel or rack and stack or whatever it is. I need boots on the ground in Illinois. I need boots on the ground in California or Arizona or Texas or wherever.” We’ve built out programs and platforms and capabilities to manage complex projects anywhere in the globe.
So we just finished with a partner of ours who does have MSP capabilities. They needed 250 firewalls deployed around 30 different countries. And the reason we won that deal as the managed firewall provider with our partner was because the customer didn’t want to deal with the logistics of deploying firewalls in 30 countries, and the partner didn’t want to deal with managing the logistics of getting that certain technology into those 30 countries. We said, “We can handle that for you.” So we bundled the whole thing together as a managed service offering and delivered it with our partner. But we handled everything, managed it, and then shipped all the alerts back to the client who had their own security operations centre. So finding that job that the MSP doesn’t necessarily doesn’t want to deal with, they’re focused on their core capabilities, but that doesn’t mean you can’t capture revenue and help your client with things that maybe are outside your normal swim lane. So that’s what we’re constantly trying to evangelise.
Yeah, absolutely. And of course, you’re a family business as well, and you’re a big business, but you’re not one of these massive businesses, which I guess makes it easy for a partner of yours to come to you and say, “We’d like to do this because there’s an opportunity to do this, but it feels like a headache.” And actually I can imagine phoning you and handing over a problem to you is a nice thing for an MSP to do.
Final question, Adam, as the second generation owner-operator of an MSP, for those MSPs that are listening to this, and I know I made a joke about it earlier, but that actually I do know a few MSPs where their kids are working within the business and I can see there’ll be a second generation starting to take over those businesses. What advice would you give to the MSP owners in terms of the best way to bring family in and engage them? Because clearly your dad gave you a lot of freedom and allowed you to go off and explore and come up with your own ideas, and you’ve made a huge success of that. Do you think that’s the right route or do you think this should be a different way?
So the advice I would give, and I think what’s really helped me is understanding your commander’s intent. So if you’re the first generation, set out your intent for the business and set out your thesis as far as what you believe as a company and who you are. It’s really, really important to set that foundation as far as this is what we believe, this is what we’re trying to do. And then the people who follow you, whether you’re family or not, are either going to buy into that strategy and help reinforce it, or they’re going to be a problem and you got to get rid of them. It’s kind of harsh.
Every company that successfully grows has a belief structure and the people rowing the boat forward have got to buy into that.
So draft up a thesis of this is what we’re trying to do in the market, this is what we believe, why we exist, and this is how we’re going to do it. I struggled at first because I came as an infantry officer in the army and we’re given unlimited resources to do whatever we need to do in a combat situation. So conserving ammo was not something that I was necessarily concerned about. What do you mean, we’ve got all the ammo in the world, right? When you come into a private organisation, you need to deal with resources a different way. You need to manage your time, manage your expectations and manage your energy in a different way. You’re not necessarily going to capture whatever hill you point at. So understanding the belief that your organisation has, your thesis, sharing that with whoever decides to join the firm, and then that gives you the freedom to maneuver a lot as long as you stay within that left limit and that right limit of that belief structure. You can create some really, really cool things as long as you’re following the leader’s guidance.
Yeah, I love it. Thank you so much for joining us on the show, Adam. For those MSPs who have got a big challenge and they’re thinking, “This guy might be able to help me,” what’s the best way to get in touch with you?
Yeah, so [email protected] or www.questsys.com, jump on the partner tab, the entire team would be happy to talk with you. I’d be happy to chat with you if you have any questions about what we can do. And then Quests channel partner program on LinkedIn.
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