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Welcome to Episode 275 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…
What is it with people like you and me running on fumes? If you’re running an MSP, I know what it’s like right now. That boost you had from time off over Christmas, all that recharging festive fuel, that was months ago. It’s all long gone. And yet we keep pushing, don’t we mile after mile after mile, hoping we can keep the business going, hoping we can keep it growing. But is this actually the best way to run an MSP? Stick around to be reminded why we do this, how to keep your energy levels up and the unexpected benefit to your life and lifestyle in the long-term.
So this is my 20th year as a business owner and my goodness that has gone so quickly. I kid you not, I was 30 when I started my first business and I was young and cool and now I’m this old man, I’m age 50, I’ve got the creaky back, I’ve got a dodgy knee. And if you’re in your twenties or thirties right now, do not get cocky kid. This is going to happen to you as well. Although by the time that you reach the age the I am now, I’ll be in a nursing home, anyway.
One of the constants of being a business owner is that it is hard work. I have a great business now with a great team at the MSP Marketing Edge and we do great work for MSPs all over the world with our service. But I still have weeks where I’m working more hours than someone with a job would. If I worked for someone else in a job, I would never do those 50, 60 week hours, rarely anyway. And if I look back over the last 20 years, there have been many of those periods of time where you throw yourself into projects or problems or whatever it is. I’m sure you do exactly the same.
The truth is only business owners can understand this…
Running a business that you own is more than just something you do. It’s more than just a job. It’s very much a way of life.
It has a unique way of sucking every single last ounce of energy and every last second of time out of you. And do you know, as I hear myself saying that, I realise that I’m not really painting it in a very good light for someone who’s actually thinking of starting their own MSP. So sorry if that’s you. But I think actually before anyone starts their own business, really they need to understand the downsides as well as the upsides. It is an all consuming thing and especially so with an MSP because running an MSP is surely running one of the most difficult kinds of businesses in the world.
There are so many details you need to be across, there’s so much that changes. And of course you have to be both proactive and reactive at the same time. You have to be proactive stopping things from going wrong, but then reactive fixing stuff that does go wrong. It’s exhausting. You have my full admiration for doing it. Sometimes I see MSPs are really struggling with this burden. I see posts in places like the tech tribe or my own free MSP marketing Facebook group and people are really struggling with the constant burden of running an MSP. And I think it’s at times like that you have to remind yourself why you are doing this. So let me ask you why you started your business in the first place. Was it to increase your personal income? Was it to take control of the work that you do and who you do it for and the way that it’s done? Was it to build a better lifestyle for you and for your family or was it just because you wanted to prove that you could do it? That you could stand on your own two feet? I mean the chances are it’s many or even all of those things.
Starting a business isn’t like taking a job. It’s something we create, something we shape ourselves, it’s our baby. And do you know, after the difficult first couple of years, you can build something amazing that thrives whether you personally are there or not. In fact, the thing that keeps many business owners going not just through 20 years but 30 years, 40 years or more, is the lifestyle that they can build out of owning a business. And by lifestyle I don’t mean a bigger house or a bigger car. And if those are things that motivate you, then great. But when I’m talking about lifestyle, what I’m really talking about is you doing the things you want to do with the people you most want to do them with.
Let me give you an example. So you may know I’m a sole parent, I have a 14-year-old, Hi Samm, that’s my child and that’s my most important job. So I am always a parent first and a business owner second, and all my other roles come after that. But there’s going to come a point in the next few years where my beloved child leaves to go to university or whatever. Actually she wants to go to drama school to be a musical theater actor, which is cool. And at that point, I’m just not going to be needed as much as I am today. I guess I’ll have to just send money all the time obviously, but I won’t need to be taxi driver, I won’t need to be organiser, chef, all of those kinds of things that you do as a parent. And at that point I want to travel.
I have a plan to travel to 50 countries in my fifties and so far I’ve only ticked off one item off that list, one country off that list, which was a visit to the US last year and I’m going to be 51 in just a few months time, so I need to get on this. But all joking aside, that goal has been a very big presence in my mind for perhaps five, maybe even 10 years or so. And I knew it was going to be some time before I could do and travel to the really cool places, the kind of places that teenagers just don’t want to go to. Places like Japan, that’s the kind of place I want to go. So as I’ve been building up my business over the years, it’s very much been in the back of my mind that whatever I build must feed my lifestyle and not hinder it. My lifestyle requirements in the future demand that I have time to go traveling and enough money to pay for that travel. And also, of course, I can’t be trapped in an office here at home. There’s no way that I could have that lifestyle if I was working for someone else. Well most jobs anyway. But as a business owner, I definitely can because I can go to Japan and I can work in a different time zone and also have some fun.
And that’s the point that I’m trying to make here. The greatest advantage of running your own MSP is that you can work towards the lifestyle you most want to live. And that might be travel, it might be doing more exciting higher strategic tech work through opportunities that are opened up to you by the people that you’re meeting running your MSP. It could be something else you might want to learn to hang glide, I don’t know. But believe me, during the difficult weeks, the ones where you are working 60, 70 hours a week or more, and that’s just to stay afloat. That’s what you’ve got to stay focused on.
Running a business is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. And yet sure, you’ve always got to be aware of the mile that you’re currently running, but you must also keep in mind the ultimate goal to live the life you most want to live doing the things you most want to do with the people you most want to do them with.
If I walked into your MSP’s office today, would my mouth drop open in shock and surprise? Would I be slapping you on the back and congratulating you or would I have my hands on my face in total horror at what I see? Let me tell you how what I’d see in your office can tell me exactly how efficient your MSP is at winning clients and serving them well.
So I’ll admit it’s been a few years since I was inside an MSP’s office, but based on several years of visiting many of them, they do tend to fall into one of two camps. They’re either a pristine, tidy space with zero mess or they’re an untidy space packed with clutter. Old hardware, keyboards, mice, cables everywhere on every shelf in every drawer, in every cupboard. You can’t move for stuff. So which one of those is your office? Personally, I try very hard to maintain a clean and tidy environment. My house is the kind of place where you could drop in on me with no notice and think I’d just been tidying for hours. My home office and video studio is exactly the same apart from one corner where a bunch of unwanted clutter is starting to building up.
Every time I clear out my office or declutter my desk, I feel great. Because your environment sets your context. It directly affects how you feel and how you think.
It’s why a refurbishment in a retail shop typically leads to an immediate boost in sales. It’s also why some people believe a broken window that doesn’t get fixed can ultimately lead to the building being burned down. Side note, this is known as broken windows theory. You can Google it. It’s where small crimes against an empty building tend to escalate. So if some kids break a window and no one notices that the windows have been broken and no one boards them up, the vandals keep returning, and they commit higher and higher levels of crime until eventually someone burns the building down.
And it explains why if you tolerate one technician being late for work twice a week every week, eventually that will spread to more of your staff until many of them are routinely late. Context is everything. So if your environment sets your context, here’s a challenge for you. Have a good look round. You’re working environment right now unless you’re driving of course, but if you’re in the office, have a good look around. What kind of context is it setting for you? Is there clutter everywhere? Are there piles of old computers waiting for… what? Are you waiting for Windows seven to come back into fashion? Could your office do with a deep clean? Are the cobwebs all over the place? What do the walls look like? Would they benefit from a lick of paint?
Another way of looking at it, what could you do in just 30 minutes at the end of work today or tomorrow that could make a dramatic difference to your working environment? Removing the physical clutter from our environment helps us to tackle the mental clutter with less stuff clogging our minds. We can operate with greater clarity and ultimately get more done. Right, I’m going to roll my sleeves up. I’m going to have to tackle my evil clutter corner.
Featured guest: Shawn Lemon is the founder of The Digital Organizer and has spent the last 17 years helping individuals and businesses get better at using their technology. A teacher at heart, Shawn believes the biggest reason people struggle with their tech is because of a lack of understanding of the tools, which isn’t surprising because they’re constantly changing as technology advances.
When not helping businesses operate more efficiently, Shawn loves making pottery, riding motorcycles, and spending time with his wife, Madeline and their 2 year old son, Nico.
Well, who knew? To do their job every good MSP help desk member needs a flashlight and a microscope as well as their mouse and keyboard. Why? Because of the clients submitting endless tickets saying they can’t find this file and they can’t find that file. It’s always urgent, of course, and it can take up a lot of technician time that you could be using to solve real problems. My guest today has an easy way to rescue your profits by improving efficiency and reducing these kind of tickets. Oh and your clients will be delighted and feel like you are proactively helping them.
Hi, I am Shawn Lemon, founder of The Digital Organizer.
And thank you so much for joining me on the show today, Shawn. We are going to explore in the next 10 minutes or so how MSPs can reduce the amount of tickets coming into their business just by getting digitally organised. Now I don’t really understand what that is, and I know you are going to explain it for us, Shawn, and of course loads about MSPs because you have been, in fact, you still are an MSP, aren’t you?
That’s right, yep.
Yeah. So tell us about your background. How did you become an MSP in the first place and how did you move into this sort of different thing of being digitally organised?
Yeah, well, I started working at the Apple Store for seven years teaching people how to use their stuff, and those clients wanted help getting organised beyond what we were able to teach or what the Genius Bar was able to help with, which was only troubleshooting. So I went into that whole field of helping out individuals and then small businesses, basically doing break/fix, then got pulled into MSP just from clients wanting it and started developing all of my SOPs and everything from there while also still running my digital organisation business at the same time.
Oh wow. So you’ve kind of one of those people who’s just good at lots and lots of different things, which is really cool. So explain to us what do you mean by digital organisation? Because when I first heard that phrase when you and I first discussed you coming on the show, I thought, well, is that something as simple as keeping your files in a good order in your computer? Is it as simple as something like that or is there sort of a bigger concept to it?
Well, I’d say there’s a bigger concept in realising that we have three primary things that every business has to do well – communication, file storage and management, and project management. And those three things go hand in hand with each other and we’re constantly flipping back between them. But if we think about communication file storage or just data storage and handling that and task management, there’s a massive amount of overlap in tools, and the lines of demarcation are not drawn because everyone’s trying to get you to use their platform more. And so what we’re trying to do is come in and say, Hey, you’ve got five different places that you’re storing your files. Let’s come up with our one source of truth and we’re still going to need to utilise other platforms to send and receive, but how do we do that? And same thing goes for the communication channels and project management so that everyone knows exactly where to go and there’s minimal amount of organisation that actually needs to happen because we’re cleaning up as we go. So we teach clients how to stay organised as well.
Got it, got it. So for MSPs that take on board that bigger strategy, how does that affect the work that they then do for their clients? So should they, for example, be taking more responsibility for helping their own clients and the end users actually be more organised?
My encouragement to MSPs would be to get into the nitty gritty with the clients to try and help them figure out how they should actually utilise the tools.
What I find is most IT companies are focusing primarily on getting them to the right platform or maybe even consolidating everything. They’re spinning up that SharePoint from a server that they’ve been managing all along and getting them upgraded. But once it gets all pulled into one place, the clients still need a lot of help figuring out how to utilise it properly, whether it’s a familiar tool or something else of figuring out what that flow is.
The encouragement is get in there, and this could be something that you charge a one-time fee for or maybe something ongoing. It doesn’t have to be that you just eat all of this cost to get in and help them organise their data. But if you do and get in, whether it’s build them separately or eat the cost and get them organised, it’s going to come back to you in the form of less tickets because everyone knows where to go and your clients are going to be a lot happier, not just about the tech solution, it’s about the data flow as well.
So I like this. So it’s a very proactive approach, and saying we know that a bulk of tickets are going to come in because of X, Y, Z problems, which are related to, I can’t find this, or this doesn’t seem to work, or where did I put that? so let’s eliminate those. And actually, what if we get the clients to pay us to eliminate those problems before they happen, which I think is beautiful. And you mentioned migration, so something like a migration to SharePoint is an obvious place to do that because it’s something new.
Obviously when you’re taking on board new clients, that would be a good time to do it as well. From a practical point of view. Shawn, how would you actually do that? So if you’re an MSP, let’s take the migration, say you are migrating the client from whatever and they’re going onto to SharePoint. I know most MSPs would just pick up the 10,000 files from the old place and just two days later pop them down in the SharePoint and go, there you go. So all they’ve done is they’ve moved from platform A to platform B practically. How would you organise those 10,000 files, which might be 10 years worth of data?
Well, the first thing that I would do is figure out or discuss with the client a good archiving strategy. Realising that the 80/20 rule applies to our data, but it’s even more skewed than that. The amount of files that we’re actually using daily and that are going to set us up for the future, are very small percentage of the data that we actually own. So we need to create some sort of a deep archive that’s maybe not part of the search function for all of your users, so that we’re not pulling up irrelevant results.
A big part is setting aside a deep archive that we have a few gatekeepers who can go find things, and really have our clients focus primarily on what’s important now, going to set them up for the future, and then what should a new folder structure be. When we’re thinking about sharing internally for different departments or even sharing externally when we’re working with other people. And realising we’ve got departmental SharePoints, maybe even projects and things that we’re working on, and really incorporating that to figure out what should the new folder structure be, that archive strategy and a good naming convention. And I’ve also got a free download, which is our process of how we do organisations. If you want to take that and run your clients through that same process or share that resource with them, go for it. It’ll be extremely helpful.
Cool. We’ll talk about that free download just at the end of the interview, and you’re welcome to give your website address out so MSPs can go and get that. I’ve got to ask, in the age of AI and in the age of all content being indexed, and we’ve got pretty good search tools almost across every platform, do we really need to force companies and force clients into that that structured folder setup and folder structure? Can’t they just rely on search or AI or are those tools just not quite good enough yet?
As of right now, they’re not nearly good enough. I mean, box AI is the one who is talking about being the most advanced, but really when I went in and had them do a demo for me of how it works on their enterprise plan, the whole thing, it was extremely clunky. Google isn’t that great either. I haven’t seen anything really outstanding from OneDrive either. So between all of them, we’re not there yet. But even still, if you think about AI and pulling all of this data together, we need to remove data that isn’t relevant anymore and we don’t want all of this archive stuff showing up in our active files.
I actually think that a separation between active files and archives is going to be even more important, but being able to say what’s in this document that is getting better and better leaps and bounds. So I think it’s going to be less, but because we’re still going to have to store it somewhere, we still need to keep it pretty clean. And a lot of the automation, I think it’s just going to be a while before it’s mature. So personally, I think it’s still really worth the investment of doing it now because who knows when it’s actually going to be good enough.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I think this is great. I’m one of those tidy people who I’m looking around my office where I’m recording this interview and I’ve got my physical drawers where everything is arranged perfectly. I know where everything is. This folders are the same on my computer. I was chatting today to a friend of mine who has just migrated from PC to Mac, which is what I use, and the spotlight search on the Mac, which he’s really good at finding stuff inside documents, and I don’t use it for that purpose because I know where everything is, but he’s completely lost. He has thousands of files. He is that nightmare client who needs an MSP to come and sort him out.
Well, that’s actually why I started this business in the first place. I saw these people switching from PCs to Mac, and then it’s like no matter where you go, there you are. Their mess just got dumped into a new location, which is the same thing that happens with SharePoint or Google Drive or Dropbox migrations. It just all gets dumped in. Now what do we do with it? And you’ve got a few people who can figure it out, but the majority just get overwhelmed with it and have a hard time functioning. And that’s how this business was created 11 years ago.
Yeah, no, I think it’s wonderful. It’s a great business idea and it’s so unique. Final question for you before we talk about your free download and how we can get in touch. You work with lots of MSPs, have you come across MSPs that are themselves highly disorganised, they haven’t got their own file structure and their own sort of internal information all sorted out?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s something that we see a lot, just because you scale fast and the most successful businesses are usually the ones who put marketing first and operations later. And so you need operations to trail that. And sometimes that trail gets a little bit too big of a gap and you spin up too many tools. So you started a Wiki and Notion, and then you’ve also got your other stuff in Google Drive and it’s spread out all over the place. And really, I mean, my biggest thing is use forms for everything. Forms for all of the clients and then templates for all of onboarding, offboarding, whether it’s your clients or your client’s new employees.
And it just makes common sense, doesn’t it when you say something like that. But as you say, it’s very difficult sometimes for operations to keep up and especially when you’re fast scaling. So Shawn, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Tell us about this free download. Where can we get it and how can MSPs get in touch with you?
Yeah, so you’re going to go to thedigitalorganizer.com/marketing edge. This is the podcast you’re listening to MSP Marketing Edge. So go there and you’re going to get my file organisation guide – the whole process of consolidating, archiving, purging – the whole thing, start to finish. We’ll give you some other emails as well that you’re welcome to share with your clients, about cleaning up email inboxes and how we like to triage things and get stuff under control with as little effort as possible. So yeah, check us out at thedigitalorganizer.com/marketing edge.
Joseph in Houston, Texas, has numerous staff and as a good boss he has asked: How can I keep track of how happy they are?
The very best way to keep track of what’s really happening with your staff is through structured one-to-ones. You can just have a 15 minute meeting with them on a regular basis once a month will be enough, and you structure the meeting around three questions. The first is: What’s going well?, followed by: What’s not going so well?, followed by: What are you going to do differently next time?
You can answer these questions with your team as well as them giving an answer. In fact, that is the ideal way to do a one-to-one. So they get some feedback from you on what they’re doing well and what they’re doing not so well. And you get to see what they believe they’re doing well and not so well. That really is a great format, which can serve you as you manage and develop your team.
However, it’s not wise, nor recommended for you personally to do more than four or five one-to-ones a month, because they’re simply too draining. And while it’s ok for managers who work for you to do one-to-ones on your behalf, you do lose that bigger picture feeling about your team that you get from doing one-to-ones yourself.
Of course there is a software solution. I spoke to an MSP, who’s got around 12 staff, who’s using something called Office Vibe to keep a track on his team’s overall engagement. It asks your team a series of questions and keeps track of how they’re feeling about their work, to give you an overall grip on your team satisfaction. And of course, it’s not a replacement for sitting down talking human to human, but it is a good way of keeping up to date with your team’s feelings without having to do dozens of hours of one-to-ones every month.
So have a look at Office Vibe, it’s a suggestion, not a recommendation. You should probably Google alternatives to it as well to see what else is out there. And if you do try this for yourself, will you drop me an email and let me know how you get on because I’d love to know. To submit your own question just go to mspmarketingedge.com and head to the contact us page.
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