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Case studies are the single most powerful piece of marketing in an MSP’s toolbelt, here’s how to get started. Also this week, is it ever a good idea to rebrand your MSP? And, you can’t grow your MSP until you’ve got solid leadership (even if it’s just you and a tech).
Welcome to Episode 357 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.
If a prospect said to you right now, “Go on, send me a case study about your MSP,” what would you send them? Do you have just a simple paragraph on your website that’s actually a testimonial wrapped up as a case study that’s just a client logo and a quote saying, “Great service would recommend?” That’s not a case study.
A case study is a proper story that takes a prospect on a journey. When they’re reading it or watching it they’re feeling and thinking, “That’s exactly my situation. This is the IT support company that I should be talking to and hiring.” Well, today I want to show you how to write that second kind, because done properly, a case study is one of the most powerful sales tools your MSP will ever have.
Let’s start by looking at why most MSP case studies are useless. And most MSPs either don’t have case studies at all, or if they do have something it’s so vague and generic it could have been written by anyone about anyone. If yours looks something like this, “We helped a local business to improve their IT infrastructure and reduce downtime”, well, that tells the prospect nothing at all. And the problem you’ve got there is you’ve written that case study from your own perspective. It’s about what you did technically rather than looking at everything from the client’s perspective. And the client cares about the problem they had, how it felt when the solution came in, and what changed, what got better, what the results were.
A case study is not a description of services, and it’s not a boast of how clever you are technically. A good case study tells a story.
Stories only work when they make the person who’s reading it, or watching it if it’s a video, it only works if it makes them feel something. You think about every book that you’ve ever loved, every movie that you left the cinema thinking, “Oh, that was just amazing.” None of those started with a list of features of things they were going to do in the film. They started with a character that you could relate to, and that character was in a situation that you recognised and they’ve got a problem that made you feel something.
The best stories move us emotionally. And do you know what? Case studies work exactly the same way, which is kind of weird when you think about it because it’s only marketing. But when you’re talking to ordinary business owners and managers, even when you’re talking to IT directors for co-managed IT, you’re looking to move them emotionally. The MSP who can emotionally move the prospect is dramatically more likely to win that prospect.
Let’s first of all address a big problem that a lot of MSPs throw up to me, and that is the issue of confidentiality. “But Paul, what if I lay out all of the details about my client and bad actors out there can use those details to attack our client, to pretend to be us?” I get this, I understand it, and I think this is a unique thing within managed services within the channel. It is a real fear, but it is your fear and not your client’s fear. The most common reason that MSPs don’t have proper case studies is that they’re too worried about naming clients publicly and giving details that will be out there. The reality is that that worry almost always belongs to you and not the client. And most happy clients are not just doing case studies with you, they are doing them with lots of other suppliers as well. Most clients are genuinely proud to be associated with someone they trust, that’s you. And of course they’ll say yes if you ask them properly.
Your fear that naming the client reveals something about their security setup and makes them a target, it is kind of unfounded. I understand where it comes from and I know that sometimes these details are leveraged, but a case study doesn’t really reveal anything about your security architecture or your tech stack or anything about the details of what they are using. It just tells a business story. And if you look on their website, the kind of details that they’re revealing in a case study, they’re already putting all of that on their website, on their LinkedIn, in their other socials? A lot of businesses are already revealing a lot about themselves because actually people like to do business with people. They don’t like to do business with people that they don’t know who they are. So more and more these days, businesses and the people behind the businesses are putting themselves out there.
Anonymous case studies have almost zero value. If you are talking about a professional services firm and not naming them and saying who it is and what the business is and what they do, then that tells the prospect nothing that they can relate to. The power of a case study comes from specificity and recognition. It’s a prospect seeing a named business and a human at that business and they can relate to them. They can think that’s a business like mine, that’s another business owner or business manager like me. So please don’t be too scared of the security risk. Just obviously be very aware of what details you’re putting in there.
How do you get started with your case study? Well, you just go to your three happiest clients. You could do it today, you could do it this week. You say, “Hey, we’re just improving our marketing right now and we would love to write up the story of how we’ve helped your business and just share it on our website and in our marketing.” This is the question to ask, “How would you feel about that?” Don’t ask them directly, “Would you like to do this?” Because that’s a yes or a no. Just ask them, “How would you feel about that?” And if it is a “No way”, then you haven’t directly asked them. You haven’t got the embarrassment for them and for you of them saying no. Whereas someone that’s happy will absolutely go, “Yeah, I’d be really up for that.” And the reality is that most people, like 9 out of 10, when you ask them this, because of the relationship you’ve got with them, they’re going to say yes. If a client genuinely can’t be named for contractual reasons or whatever reasons, then focus your energy on the clients who can be named. Please don’t dilute your case studies with anonymous versions because as I said earlier, they just don’t work.
Let’s talk about the storytelling. And I’ve been talking a lot about feelings and emotions, and that’s really what we want in our storytelling because like with a movie or a book, we want to take the person who’s reading it or watching it, we want to take them on a journey. When you do a testimonial or a review, that’s a form of social proof as well, but it’s a short form opinion about the service that you have given to the client. So they tell a prospect what someone thinks, whereas a case study tells them what someone experienced and what someone feels. It’s all about the feelings and it’s a completely different and far more powerful version of social proof. And really the only stories that work are the ones that make us feel something, that move us, that take us on a journey. A prospect reading your case study needs to feel the same frustration that your client had with the problem. They need to feel the relief of you coming in with a solution. They need to feel the satisfaction of the outcome and it’s very much in that order. It’s got to be frustration, relief, and satisfaction. So if your case study doesn’t create that emotional response, it’s not really going to have any kind of power.
Now let’s get into the nuts and bolts of it, here’s a five part structure for your case study:
1) Context. Who is this client?
Don’t just give their name and their business and what they do, but paint a picture about them. How many staff have they got? What kind of worries and problems do they have day to day? Who’s running this business? What kind of business owner are they? The more context you give about your client without giving anything sensitive away, the more that the reader can connect to them. Context is everything. Relevance is everything. And you want the person watching the video or reading the story to feel like it is someone like them.
Now, this is really easy in verticals of course, because of course, if it’s a lawyer watching a case study about another lawyer, that’s really obvious that this is someone like me, but you can do that with just general business owners. Most business owners can relate to other business owners. If we see someone like us, then we recognise this is relevant to us. And if it’s relevant, we are open to being emotionally moved by it.
2) Talk about the problem.
What was going wrong before they started working with you? And be specific about this. What was the actual situation? But remember not to talk about it from a tech point of view. It’s from the client’s point of view. So it might be that they had slow response times from their previous MSP. It could be there was a breach scare, maybe a failed backup. Maybe their previous MSP just didn’t care or they’d got so big that this client was too small for them. The more specific you are about the problem, the more a prospect with the same problem will recognise, “Yes, I’ve got that same problem.”
3) Poke the pain.
And this is the most underused section, yet it’s really important emotionally. So don’t just describe the problem, I had a cut on my arm. Describe what it felt like. Poke that pain, poke the cut on the arm, describe the pain. Was the business owner laying awake at night worrying? Were the staff constantly complaining? Was the leader losing confidence in their MSP? Was there perhaps a specific moment where they though, “You know what? Something has got to change here.” This is where you poke the pain. And the more you poke, the more you make the emotional connection with the prospect who is reading or watching it. And the more they think, “That’s me,” the more they feel like you are the answer to their problems.
4) The solution. What did you actually do?
Do not deep dive into technical detail at this point. You’re writing for a business owner, even if you’re writing these case studies for IT directors, this is not the place to delve into technical stuff. Do not talk about solutions and tech stack and what you used. None of that matters. Focus on the experience, what you came in and did, what was the structured solution? How did you communicate? How did you demonstrate leadership? How was it calm? How did you prevent there from being any nasty surprises? How did that transition happen? What did you do that their previous MSP never did? That’s the kind of stuff that we’re talking about. So think overview of solutions, not the technical stuff of solutions.
5) The outcome. For that client, what is life like now?
And again, keep this human rather than technical. So don’t talk about uptime being improved by 23% because what does that really mean? But talk about how the owner or the leader never stays awake at night worrying about backups or security or anything like that. What if the team stopped complaining? What if now they all have an extra 90 minutes of work a day because everything has been sped up? Specific numbers are great if you have them, but emotional outcomes are much more powerful than specific numbers. People glaze over when they hear numbers, but when they see an owner, a person just like them sitting, looking at a camera saying, “Do you know what? Our business is growing at a rapid pace now and now the technology helps us to do that, it doesn’t stand in our way.” That’s what you want someone to say. That is the beautiful payoff of your case study. Go for that.
So let’s talk about formats. I’ve mentioned a couple of times about someone reading it or watching it. I would advise that you start all of your case studies as videos. Go hire a local videographer, that’s a hard word to say, videographer who can create these case studies for you. And ideally you want someone that used to be a journalist or has that kind of journalism training because the good journalism skills, and I’m an ex-journalist, I was a journalist for 10 years on the radio many, many years ago, but it’s given me a skillset to do things like the interviews we do in this podcast because I understand how to get to the crux of what someone else has got to say and then present that story to you who’s listening to this or watching it on YouTube.
Go find a local videographer who can interview your clients for you and pull out that story. And don’t be scared of giving them this podcast and saying, “What this guy said, that’s what we want. We want this five-step format, we want emotions, we want to take them on a journey.” And believe me, that is beautiful. Most videographers will be so excited about doing that because they want to tell stories as well. So start with a video and then once you’ve done that video, keep all of that raw footage, make sure all of that raw footage belongs to you, make sure they get lots of B-roll. B-roll is like cutaway footage, so you might have footage of someone’s hands or them at the side or something like that. Make sure all of that owns to you, but get your videographer to cut a case study probably around a couple of minutes, something like that. But all of that footage can be used for clips on social media or just to refresh that case study in the future.
Once you’ve done a case study video once, I mean, you can use that for five to seven years. You can just keep using it, you can keep refreshing it. But although don’t forget that the average prospect is going to see that once and once only. So even if in five years time, a prospect that saw it today, they see it again. It’s not like a movie they’ve sat and watched 50 times. I don’t remember the movies I watched a few years ago. Do you? I’ve got a vague idea, but I don’t remember the details. So you can do that once. And then once you’ve done that, you can then get a writer that you can find on Fiverr or Upwork or even just get AI to do it for you, get a transcript and turn that into a written case study. So it’s the same story, but you present it differently when you write up a case study.
That written case study goes on your website, actually also goes alongside the video on your website. You put that written case study in your proposals, you might even get it printed and send it out to people. You send it to prospects before sales meetings. You might send it as part of an impact box, but you put the videos in front of them, you put the written case studies in front of them. You can use both formats and give both formats to people as part of the sales process. Some people want to watch a video, some people want to read it, so give both of them. And if you can get three of these and you’ve got three case studies of different kinds of business owners on your website, that would be beautiful. A prospect watching three clients tell their story in their own words with genuine emotion is impossible to resist.
So a great case study is not just another piece of marketing material. It’s one of the most important marketing materials that you could ever put together. It’s a story about a real person whose situation a prospect recognises, whose problem they feel, and whose outcome they want for themselves. Get two or three of these case studies absolutely right, and they will do more selling for you than any brochure, any LinkedIn post, or any email you could ever send.
Let’s talk briefly about one of the most tempting, but also one of the most potentially expensive mistakes that an MSP owner can make, and that is rebranding. I don’t just mean refreshing your logo and the colours on your website. I mean actually changing your name, your logo, your whole identity. On the surface, it feels like a really smart thing to do, it feels like a fresh start, like a chance to fix all of the perceived problems that you think have been holding you back in the past. But in my experience, it almost never works that way. Sometimes it does, but most often it really doesn’t.
So let me briefly tell you why, in my opinion, it’s rarely ever a good idea to rebrand your MSP. Let’s talk about, first of all, what is and what isn’t a rebrand. So to me, a rebrand is a full overhaul of your entire identity, it’s almost like a regeneration. So the old name and the old identity dies. If you’ve ever watched Doctor Who, which is a really cool sci-fi show here in the UK, there’s a regeneration. That’s where one actor who plays Doctor Who turns into another actor, and that’s how they’ve kept the show going for like 60 years, although it’s kind of dead now, but let’s not talk about that. But that’s what they do every now and again, and it’s what you do when you rebrand. Your old identity explodes in a burst of flame and you become a brand new identity. You’ve got a new name, a new logo, a new website, a new visual language. Everything is new.
Now, this is a massive undertaking. Refreshing your logo and your website is a big enough deal, but when you start changing the name, I mean, it’s huge. It costs so much money, it takes up so much time, it’s almost a distraction. Let’s come back to that thought, the idea that it’s a distraction, because a marketing refresh is often a very good idea. Update your website, update your messaging, get a cleaner logo. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a good idea because you’re not substantially changing the name and the feeling of your business. It’s still you, it’s still got the same name, it’s got the same history. That’s something that you can and should do at some point. Every business hits a point where it needs to get professional with its identity and its branding. That’s an evolution, right?
A complete and total new brand is a revolution, not an evolution, and it carries a huge amount of risk.
When MSP owners say to me they’re thinking of rebranding, we’re going to change our name, what often they actually just need is a marketing refresh. And as I say, those two things are completely different. I learned about the dangers of rebranding and completely refreshing everything back when I worked in radio. I said to you earlier on that I used to be a journalist and I spent 10 years working in radio. I watched this pattern play out repeatedly. So you would get a struggling radio station. This is back in the mid ’90s up to the mid noughties, and you’d have this music station and just no one listened to them, right? And they would decide that the problem was their name. So they would spend this massive fortune on a rebrand. They’d get a new name, new logo, new jingles. The jingles are things like, “It’s Paul Green in the morning,” that kind of thing. I’m never going to sing again. Anyway, they do a new absolutely everything. They would spend a fortune and they would launch with this enormous fanfare.
In fact, the very first radio station that I worked at in 1996 in the town of Northampton in the middle of the United Kingdom, it did this not once, but it did it twice. It relaunched with a brand new name, a brand new identity. And do you know what? For about three years, the listeners kept calling it by the old name, which was really frustrating for all of us that worked there. So eventually they went back to the old name and they didn’t do that because the old name was better, but that was because they couldn’t persuade people. They’d listened to the first name for 10 years. And then when this new name came along, people just kept calling it by the first name. So eventually they realised they’d just got to go back to the old name, which is kind of bizarre. The two names were close, but it was a very weird thing because people just didn’t pick up the new name, even though they were hearing it every three minutes on the radio.
And the lesson that I took from that as a very young person at the very start of my career was that people’s mental associations with a brand name don’t change just because you change the name, right? The name of your business, if you’re MSP, is just a container. It’s just like a wrapper. But what’s in the container is your reputation, the experience that people have with you, the feelings that people associate with you. Those are the things that matter. Just like we were talking about with case studies, it’s all about people’s feelings. No one picks your MSP because you’ve got a sexy logo. They just don’t do that, but they pick you because of how they feel about you. And normally that’s about how they feel about the people that they’re talking to more than the logo of the business.
And yet rebranding feels attractive to us. When your business isn’t growing the way you want it to, it’s very natural to look around and look for big targets and think, “Do you know what? I’m going to make a big, big gesture here. I’m going to do something huge. I’m going to rebrand the whole business.” And it’s very easy to sit and look at your website and your logo and your brand and think, “Well, that’s our visible thing, that’s our tangible, visible thing out there.” If I change that and I spend a ton of money on that and we come up with a better name and a better logo and a cleaner look, then prospects are going to take us more seriously and the phone’s going to start ringing and we’re going to grow the business.
But I’m going to be honest with you, this is not always, but almost always wrong. And I believe it’s a distraction. That big six to nine month rebranding project is a distraction and it gets in the way of you doing things that actually do get prospects to call you. Prospects are not not calling you right now because of the name of the business. Like I was saying, it’s because you’re not doing enough outbound marketing or you don’t have big enough audiences or for whatever reason, they’re just not connecting with the humans behind the business. It’s good marketing that makes prospects call. You can have a really bad name for your MSP, and I’ve seen lots of MSPs with really bad names, but I’ve also seen a lot of MSPs with bad names who’ve got a substantial recurring revenue business, and that’s because of the good marketing they’ve done.
Having a new name with the same marketing approach pretty much produces the same results as before, but you’ve lost six to nine months and you’ve lost a ton of cash that you’ve paid to some design agency somewhere. The uncomfortable truth is we all think that our business name is far more important than real prospects and leads ever do. A prospect does not choose an MSP because of the name they choose based on trust and reputation and the people and whether or not you seem to understand their world. So unless your name is genuinely causing you a problem, and we will come onto that in a second, it’s almost certainly not the issue that you think it is.
Now, let’s talk about a situation that I’ve come across a few times, and this is often where the owner is desperate to change the name of the business because it is named after themselves or after something personal, but from 15 years ago. It’s called Dave’s IT Solutions or something that kind of made sense at the time, but now it’s doing a couple of million a year. It almost feels a little bit cringeworthy. And over time, as the business has grown and become more professional, the owner has almost developed a sense of embarrassment about the name. It doesn’t feel premium enough and it doesn’t feel like the business that they’ve become. But here’s the thing, as I said, the prospects don’t feel that embarrassment. It’s only you, if this is you in this situation, it’s only you feeling this embarrassment. Most prospects don’t think about the name.
Even if it is called something like Dave’s IT Solutions, which sounds like a guy in a van, if actually they can see that you’ve got an office and you’ve got 20 staff, that kind of immediately dissipates that. And in a way, they can actually see what the journey was. They can see that it was you in a van 15 years ago and now you’ve got 20 staff and as one business owner to another, that’s a pretty impressive story, right? That becomes part of the story that you communicate. And they’re not really thinking, “Is it just you in a van or is it 20 staff?” They’re thinking “This business, these people, can they help me? Can they solve my problem?” So when you’ve got that kind of embarrassment of the name, or maybe you called it after your ex-wife or your ex-husband or something like that, honestly, just forget about it. It’s an internal feeling, it’s not a marketing problem. And spending 50 grand to rebrand because of an old name that makes you feel a bit embarrassed, essentially to spending 50 grand to resolve an internal feeling, that is not a good return on investment.
The only exception to this is if the name is genuinely embarrassing in a way that would make someone wince. So if it sounds unprofessional or juvenile or something that 20 years ago was okay, but maybe it’s a word that the latest generation of teenagers has adopted and it now means something different. I’m not going to give an example because obviously I’m like 51, I don’t know what the generation today is saying, but you get the idea. If it’s a word that no longer means the same thing or it is embarrassing or something like that, of course, then you’ve got to change it, but that very rarely happens. That’s a very, very high bar and most names don’t come anywhere near that bar.
So let’s look finally at when rebranding is actually the right thing to do. And it is like a one in a hundred situation, but those situations do exist. And the clearest case for this is when your business has fundamentally changed direction. It might even be that you started as something else and you’re no longer in that market, you’re now an MSP. In fact, there is an example of this near me. I live in Milton Keynes in the UK and we are near a town called Bedford. And there’s a company there called Bedford Battery. They’ve been going like a hundred years. And in the old days, all they did was they supplied batteries for cars. They brought batteries around to garages and they gave you batteries for the cars to the mechanics. And now they are a motor factors company, so that means they carry all the parts. So you take your car to a mechanic, the mechanic needs a splonge. I don’t know anything about engines. He needs a splonge. He calls Bedford Battery and they bring out the splonge. So they don’t just do batteries, they do everything.
And actually their strap line, their company name is Bedford Batteries. We don’t just do batteries. Now you could argue that they should have changed their name years ago. Here’s the thing though, they’ve been around for a hundred years. They’ve got a hundred years of reputation. That mechanic’s dad’s dad’s dad was buying from Bedford Batteries. And I’m not a mechanic, but I’ve seen the vans around and I’m now telling you MSPs all over the world about Bedford Battery, right? That’s kind of crazy, but if they change their name to something generic and motor factory, it wouldn’t stand out as much as Bedford Battery do, right? So even when you no longer do what you set up as doing and the old business name sounds a bit weird, it doesn’t really matter. You might’ve built your reputation as a service specialist and it’s all in the cloud now, and you might have the word server in your MSP’s name, and you might think that everyone in the area thinks that, “Oh, they only do on-prem infrastructure”, but actually that’s very unlikely that they think that because ordinary people don’t think that way. But I do get it if you’re in that situation.
So definitely change it if it’s something rude or it’s changed. You can think about changing it if it doesn’t really reflect what you’re doing. But the general rule of thumb is if business is all right, if you’re doing well, and it’s not like people are saying to you, “Oh no, we didn’t want to talk to you because we thought you only did this,” it’s probably not worth the rebrand. The other trigger that changes the name or that makes it legitimate to change the name is when there’s some kind of merger and acquisition. So two businesses combining under one roof, and often they need a new identity. If it’s like an equal merger, it’s sometimes easier to have a new identity that represents both businesses, although sometimes the right answer is just to take the stronger brand and wrap the other company up into the stronger brand.
Again, you can overthink these kind of things. You really can. You haven’t got to worry about it. There is also, I guess, a case for geographic expansion. If you are like the Bedford Battery example, but Bedford and Milton Keynes are two towns like 10 miles apart, 15 miles apart, and Bedford Battery is all over here. They’re all over Milton Keynes, and that doesn’t hold them back. It’s not like anyone would think these days, “I’m not going to hire them because they’re 15 miles down the road.” So can you see how even with all of these kind of could be genuine examples, I’m thinking it’s not worth it. It’s not worth the five figure investment for the rebrand.
The case as far as I see it, the case for rebranding is almost never as strong as you think it is. So here’s what you should do instead if you’re unhappy with how your brand feels. In most instances where you’re unhappy, the case is to just go and invest in your marketing and get a rebrand done and that will make you feel better. So get your logo redesigned if you must, get your website redesigned that’s certainly worth spending money, work with a marketing agency to get stronger positioning, get a very clear USP, that’s a unique selling proposition, make sure your messaging is as compelling as it can be. These are the things that change how prospects perceive you and they work whether your name is Apex Technology Solutions or Dave’s IT.
So to summarise, I believe your name is almost certainly not the problem. It’s your marketing that is the problem. Before you spend a penny on rebranding, spend that money on better messaging, a better website, and more consistent marketing. And once you’ve got that right, you might feel that the name you’ve currently got will be perfectly adequate, because a great brand isn’t built in a designer’s studio. It’s built in the mind and the heart of every client and prospect who’s ever had a good experience with you.
If you’re an MSP Marketing Edge member, I want to make sure you know about something that a lot of members tell me is one of their favourite parts of the membership. Now, we only started it earlier this year, but already it’s become huge. It’s called Tactical Tuesdays. And every week on a Tuesday, we run a live session on a specific marketing topic. So we’ve done things like how an outbound caller can turn your leads into meetings. We’ve talked about building relationships on LinkedIn in 20 minutes a day. We’ve talked about the best lead magnet working right now in 2026. And also how to put 80% of your attention on something called your dream 100 prospects, like your hottest prospects. Also, how to break into a vertical as your marketing secret weapon.
Each session runs for a maximum of an hour, and it’s very focused on that subject matter, but it’s also very practical. The idea is it’s a discussion, not a presentation. So I go live from my studio here in the UK and we have a whole bunch of our members and sure, I’ve got some content to talk about stuff, but it becomes a discussion, which is really cool. And it’s about practical actions. The idea is it’s things that you can act on straight away, not just have to think about. So if you can’t make it live, every one is recorded and all of the recordings are right now inside the portal waiting for you. Go into the portal and go to the navigation, look for Tactical Tuesdays, you can see the details of the next live call and watch all of the recordings.
Now, if you’re not yet a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, we have two different memberships. We’ve got a B2B one, which is for winning more business owners as clients, and then we’ve got a co-managed one for winning IT directors. And each one is only open to one MSP per area. So check if yours is available at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.
Featured guest: Chris Farr is a technology executive, author, and leadership voice in the managed services space. With more than 20 years of IT experience and over a decade in leadership, he brings a practical, trenches-built perspective on operations, accountability, communication, and performance under pressure.
He is the author of Built In The Trenches, a book focused on real-world leadership, responsibility, discipline, and the lessons learned when decisions carry consequences.
If I was to ask you to rank the leadership skills within your MSP, on a scale of 1 to 10, what score would you give yourself? Or maybe your answer to that would be, “But Paul, I’ve only got one tech. I don’t need leadership skills.” But actually my special guest today would disagree with you on that. He believes you can’t grow your MSP until you’ve got solid leadership in place and you need that even if you only have a tiny number of staff.
I’m Chris Farr. I’m the vice president of operations at Invision Technologies and also the author of Built in the Trenches.
And it’s so cool having you here on the podcast, Chris. Thank you so much for joining us because of course you are there in the trenches yourself. You’re running an MSP. You were just telling me you’ve got three locations, so I’m sure there’s a lot of staff there that you are looking after. And any of us that start our own business or whether we’re running a business, we find ourselves in a position of leadership. We don’t really realise that when we start the business, but every business needs leadership because if there is of course a vacuum of leadership, someone else will come and fill that and not necessarily give the leadership that you want within your own business. So you’re there, as you say, in your own book, in the trenches doing it. That’s what I want to explore with you today, Chris. So tell us a little bit more about the MSP. So you’re vice president of operations, you’ve got three locations. How many humans are you looking after right now?
As far as technicians, we’re sitting around roughly 25 technicians as far as the flagship product, the managed service side of the house. And total, we’re sitting at about 65 employees total. We do different types of things other than just the MSP. We’ve got cabling, security systems, access control, etc. But as far as the technical side, around 25 currently across the three locations.
So there’s more than enough people there for there to be potentially a big headache every single day?
Oh yeah, every day.
And that’s something you learn, isn’t it, the more staff that you get. So I know you’ve been doing this for some time and that’s a business that’s in growth and that’s a lot of mouths to feed, a lot of heads to look after. What have you found to be the biggest challenges in looking after that many people and guiding them and leading them towards doing all the things the business needs to do to continue growing and doing its job properly?
Well, the biggest hurdle that you see, especially as you’re growing, is trying to get that company culture pushed across multiple locations and across multiple teams within the business. Just keep that common goal and to keep everything going and keep everybody on the same page. And finding the right way to communicate what that end goal is. Just because something’s decided at the leadership table in one location, trying to make sure that you get the right direct reports that are pushing that down to everybody that is even further into the trenches that’s out there physically doing the work that the clients need done for us. So the biggest thing was just trying to get that mission, get everyone on the same mission across multiple locations. It was much easier when it was just one location, when it was just a handful of people. It was easy just to kind of look across the hall or just walk into the bullpit or whatever the case is and get that message going.
But when you look around and go, okay, we’ve got a whole other location that isn’t necessarily in the mix of the headquarters where the decisions are being made. And so that was the biggest thing is trying to figure out how to do that. And every company’s different too. What would work for us may not necessarily work for another company. So you got to kind of figure out how the people that you’re working with need to be communicated with. What’s the best way to get that message? And so trying to get everybody’s quirk, so to speak, the way they need to be communicated with and pushing that across the page, that’s the biggest part of it. But at the end of the day, it’s also fun too. As you’re going and growing, you’re growing as a leader just as the company’s growing. So the bigger the company’s going, you’re learning more day to day also. So it’s a fun ride.
Yeah, I’m sure it is. And can I ask those other locations away from head office, were they through acquisition?
Yeah, both of those were through acquisition. And then of course, once the acquisition was done and we got that book of business, then of course the organic growth came behind that as well.
Yeah. But because they were through acquisition, you’ve actually got two problems there, haven’t you? You’ve got the fact that they’re not across the hall. You can’t just wander down and have a chat with them, but also when you’ve acquired something, you’ve acquired a completely different culture built by different people with different values, different mindsets, different goals. So tell us some of the practical things that you and your leadership team have done, because you’ve obviously got an efficient ship running there. So what are the actual things that you’ve done? Maybe perhaps tell us some things that you’ve tried that didn’t work and some things that you tried, which you would do again if you were in the same scenario again.
Well, especially going back to the acquisition side of it, some of the things that we would not do is that day one, the day one that you cut over and you’re now operating as this business, to not try to upset the apple cart as much as you really want to. When you really want to go in and that day one, you’re operating identically to the home office or the other offices that you’ve got. But what we learned through the very first one doing that way back when, was that you got to baby step that because not only are you dealing with different personalities and the employees that you’ve inherited, those clients are, they’re used to being treated and handled in possibly a different way than the way that you’re handling your clients. And even though you’re delivering 100% customer service, you’re over the top, there may be one or two things that they’ve come to experience that they like. And so you have to incorporate what they’re accustomed to into the way you’re doing business.
So spending time and seek first to understand from the employees and how they handle the interactions with their clients rather than just ripping the bandaid off and saying, “Well, this is how we do it. Here’s our procedures. This is how we’re going to follow it.” And so the way we’ve kind of moved through that going forward with other ones is kind of day one, you’ve already leading up to that, of course, you’ve gotten to know the people that you’re going to be working with, but that once you physically cut it over and they’re on your system and everything is running through all of your tools, it’s best to spend at least a week or so transitioning through that and just learning how they do. And again, incorporating what they’ve got that’s good into your business because they were successful for a reason. There’s a reason that you purchased them. So there’s obviously some good that you can take away from that.
So if you could take the good that they’re doing, incorporate it maybe into what you’re already doing and then through the course of that kind of pump down the company culture and the way we expect things to be done into that. So that way it’s more or less a two-way conversation, a two-way road. But the biggest part, like I was saying, just learning what they’re doing as a business operationally and it just makes things a lot more seamless because you go in with all of your processes, all of your procedures, and you know they’re tried and true. You know they work for you and they’ve worked for you for many years, but you just got to baby step that and just, like I said, seek first to understand.
Yeah. So I guess what you’re actually doing here, if I was to take a step back, is you’re building trust. So you’re suddenly working with a whole bunch of people that you never interviewed, that you never selected for the job. You bought the business that they work in, but now you’ve got to work with those people. So would it be correct to paraphrase is you’re just going through a process of building trust with them and trust with the clients that they look after, which just makes everyone’s lives easier going forward.
Right, exactly. The trust is the biggest part of it because they’re coming into an unknown too. When you’re purchasing a company like that, they’ve gotten to know you a little bit through the acquisition process possibly, depending on how that process went down. But yeah, they’re having to build trust too because they’re used to certain boundaries and certain things within the company that they’re currently working for. And then at the flip of a switch after midnight one night, they’re now working for a whole new company. And so there’s a lot of trust building on both sides. They’ve got to prove themselves too, to show that they can deliver at the level that they need to deliver at, but you also need to show them that you’ve got their back. You’re going to help them through this transition. And if you set that up and you get off on the right foot, then it’s a great relationship. And then that business or that particular location can then go and grow from there with a little bit of guidance.
Yeah, I love that. Now let’s bring this away from multiple locations back to a single location. So the vast majority of people who listen to this or watch this on YouTube are owner operators of their own MSP. And typically they’re growing or they’re looking for growth. And sometimes say there’s one or two staff, sometimes there’s 10, 20, 30 staff. In your experience, at what point do you start to hit a leadership problem or a point where the business is growing so much that you as the owner or as the owner operator are struggling to be the leader? Is it the point where you get past 10 people or where you’ve got people under you hiring people so you’re not involved in that kind of hiring process or is it something else?
I think the 10 people scenario is a good starter, but it really depends on the type of clients that you’re handling as well. It depends on the type of vertical that you’re in or the type of business that you’re doing the services for. Some are going to be more needy than others. And so that’s really, it kind of moves that sliding scale with, is it 10 people that you hit that limit? Is it five people? Is it 20 people? It really depends on a case by case basis, but I think as that owner operator is finding himself more working in the business as they’re growing and just bringing more business in and not working so much on the business, I think that’s when the transition really needs to take place.
That’s when you really need somebody who, not necessarily a COO at that time, but at least somebody as a lead, a team lead that can kind of be that liaison between the engineers that are out there doing the work and the owner operator. That way the owner operator is able to help kind of scale the business and keep their hands on the steering wheel of the business and make sure that it’s moving in the right direction rather than just being stagnant and just stale and kind of just treading water where they may be being successful in what they’re doing, but…
If they’re really wanting to grow, they have to step out of that mindset of working in the business and move more towards on the business.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And as you’re saying that, I’m thinking about the MSPs I know that over a number of years have grown quite considerably and in almost every single case, in fact, as I’m thinking of them, every single one I can think of, at some point there was an intentional decision that I can’t be the leader and the level three tech and the HR person and the guy/gal that cleans the toilets. And it is very much an intentional thing. And I think sometimes as business owners, we feel almost a little guilt that we’re stepping away. Here’s a client we’ve looked after for 10 years, they still call you on your cell on Sunday nights because their home printer’s not working, even though you’re so far away from that and that there is a certain level of guilt on that. And also guilt of feeling like you’re abandoning your staff in some respects. But actually those businesses grow and they become different and more robust and more mature businesses that are able to do different things, which is really interesting to watch. Obviously that’s not what everyone wants, but that’s what many people are definitely working towards. Chris, let’s talk about your book. So this was how you first came to my attention. You wrote a book which I think came out in April, which is called Built in the Trenches. So what’s the book about? I know it’s aimed at MSPs and it’s about leadership and a whole bunch of other things, but what’s the book about and what was it that inspired you to write it?
Well, the reason it came to be, I was constantly just writing down different things that had came to me over the years and people that I have learned from and different mentors just throughout my career. And what got me to put it in the book was we got to a size a while back where we had to put a middle management level in. We had to put those team leads in to kind of limit the direct reports that were reporting all the way to the top. But when we did that, we took the cream of the crop that were the engineers and they were the ones that were kind of quasi closet leading, so to speak, people on the team anyway. So it made sense to promote them into a leadership position and give them a little bit of authority. And they’re great technicians at the end of the day and they’re great people that can lead people and point people in the right direction, but that’s only one aspect of being a leader and being in management.
There’s things such as having tough conversations. There’s things you may have to say something to somebody and it’s not going to be what they want to hear, but they need to hear it anyway. And it kind of puts people in a bad position if they’re not properly trained on how to do that because they go from one day being peers with these individuals and then the next day these individuals are reporting to them. And so we got to looking around and there really wasn’t much training material that kind of fit the MSP world for the ones that were kind of up and coming into that. And so I said, well I’ve already got some of these things written down, just for my own purposes, just as I would think of them, just kind of put them on paper. And I said, it would be good if these were in a book and I wish that I had some of these little tidbits of knowledge at the time that I was originally getting promoted up to be a supervisor years ago. And so that’s where the book came to be.
I kind of did it with the mindset of the people that we had promoted up into those ranks. And then I said, well it may make sense just to kind put it out there on the market, see if anybody else could use it because if you take away one thing from it, it’s valuable. There’s plenty of books that I’ve read and it’s a thick book, but there’s two or three things in there that you take away, kind of stick with you. So that’s where it came from. I know there’s a ton of leadership books out there, but I said, Why not? I’ve been through the ranks, I’ve been in the trenches, I’ve been pretty much in multiple aspects of the IT industry, so why not try to put it in a book and see if it benefits somebody and hope that it does. And so it’s been great around here and it’s doing pretty well.
I’m glad I finally did it. It’s one of those things that I never thought I would do as far as writing a book, but it’s one thing you can check off the list. And when you do something that you normally wouldn’t do, it makes you a little bit stronger in different aspects too. So it makes you think in different ways. So it was a great process.
Yeah. In fact, one of my early mentors told me that the most robust way to learn something is to know you’ve got to teach it. And actually you’ve kind of done a version of that in order to solidify for you what you know, and I guess almost may have been a voyage of discovery for you of what you didn’t know, putting it into a book where you have to explore it and simplify it and make sure you’re communicating it clearly, it kind of helps you get your head clear on that. So fascinating. Chris, thank you so much for coming onto the show. So let’s just finish off. Tell us where can we get the book? Is it the usual channels, Amazon, or is it somewhere else? And for those people who’ve been listening to you or watching you on YouTube and think, “This is a guy I want to follow,” what’s the best way to get in touch with you? Which again, I’m guessing is just LinkedIn.
Yeah, LinkedIn is the best place to get in touch with me. There’s a lot of good content out there, so I mean, hit me up there. And the book, yeah, it’s available on Amazon where just about everything’s available. So yeah, that’s where to buy it.
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