Successful MSPs simplify EVERYTHING

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Welcome to Episode 251 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Successful MSPs simplify EVERYTHING: Focus on simplifying and removing things you don’t really need to do. This can increase profitability and ease of management while reducing unnecessary complexity.
• The link between what you do each day, and achieving goals: If you have a clear vision for where you want your life to go, you can use that to affect the actions that you take within your MSP every day.
• Why PR is a valid marketing tool for MSPs in 2024: Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases, shares insights on how MSPs can effectively generate free publicity through strategic press releases, offering tips on how to capture the attention of journalists and boost credibility and visibility in the media.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Martin, who runs an MSP in Arizona, wants to know the best way to hold a team meeting when you have some staff who are a little disruptive.

Successful MSPs simplify EVERYTHING

The business that you chose to be in, Managed Services, is already one of the most complex kinds of businesses on the planet. Just stop and think about everything that you have to support – all the different clients, the different setups, the different technologies. And yet I see loads of MSPs making their lives even harder by overcomplicating things in their business that could and should be simple. So let’s talk about how you can make your business easier to run and more profitable by simplifying everything.

I’m on a bit of a simplification mission right now. We’ve had some fairly major development projects in our business over the last 12 months, and while I was focusing on those and constantly reducing complication within those projects and just making everything simpler, I realised we could do this across the business. Because we’ve been going for eight years and what happens is when you’ve been going that long, you kind of hold onto legacy stuff. Things that we’re just doing because, or something that worked really well six years ago but there’s now a better way of doing it. And for me, it’s a really exciting thing to just go through the business like a tornado and just simplify everything. So I’ve given myself a new job title. I am Head of Simplification, and I’m using this as an opportunity to review everything we do in the business asking this big question, how can we make this simpler? Because that’s actually a very powerful question to ask. Is this a question you ask yourself in your MSP regularly?

Just because you can handle high levels of complication doesn’t mean that you should put up with high levels of complication.

In fact, I truly believe that the simpler business is, the more fun it is to run and the more profitable it can be. And I guess there are two main places where you can simplify your business. The first is your operations and what you do now. At the risk of starting you down the road of looking at your tech stack, because I’m always hesitant to suggest an MSP reviews their tech stack in case it becomes a bad case of tech stack fiddling where you’re attracted to the shiny thing. Maybe you should just be asking yourself, does my PSA allow me to run the business as simply as possible? Is my RMM easy to use but also powerful enough to do all the things we need it to do? Look at your standard operating procedures, these are the manuals for how you run your business. So what kind of business are they encouraging you to run in their complexity? Now, I’m sure you are all over automation, which surely must be the ultimate way of simplifying something because you are removing the humans from it.

But other suggestions include removing steps where you can, asking yourself why something is done and whether it’s just for heritage reasons, like I was saying earlier, rather than because it’s useful today. And I think the most useful thing to do is to talk to your team; the people who are actually running these processes, who are following your standard operating procedures, and ask them what needs to be simplified. Ask them what is surplus to requirements, what job do they hate doing every single week? And then focus your attention on reducing or removing those jobs.

So the first main place where you can simplify everything is operations, but what’s the second main place? Well, surely that’s the clients, and by that I mean can you simplify their technology setups? Now, I appreciate your immediate knee jerk reaction to this might be, no, I can’t Paul, and you are mad, but hear me out because I’ve worked with a few MSPs over the years who insist on a standard setup for a client. When a new client joins them, they must migrate all of their technology to the MSP’s preferred way doing things. For example, that might be having a standard router in every single client. Now the exact same router made by the exact same manufacturer in every single client. Can you see the huge benefits of that as a business? You and your technicians become utter experts on that specific type of router. If you pick up an error with one of the routers that you’re looking after, then you can proactively go and prevent that error or check for that error in other client’s bases, which is great. And as you know, I’m not a tech person, but this has always made sense to me as a way of reducing down the complications within an MSP.

I appreciate it probably reduces your options a little bit in the sense that if a client won’t change their technology, they’re never going to switch over to you. But I suspect that’s more than made up for in the increase in profit and customer service from having a single type of technology to support. Tell me, is this something you do in your MSP? If you could wave a magic wand and simplify anything tomorrow, what would that be?

The link between what you do each day, and achieving goals

Let me tell you how your vision for how you want your life to be directly affects the goals that you set for your MSP. Which directly affects the strategies that you choose. Which directly affects the tactics that you choose to deliver those strategies. Which of course directly influences what you actually do on a day-to-day basis.

Let’s start at the very top of that again. So everyone has a vision for their future life, whether they’ve written it down or not. I write mine down and I read it every morning, but I know that I’m the minority in this. If you do have a vision for your life, by the way, write it down. For most people, this vision for a future life involves spending more time doing the things they love outside of work with the people that they love. That’s probably your other half, your kids, your family. And of course the vision often is about generating more cash to make it easier to do those things or to allow you to buy back your time.

Now, some people turn that vision into hard smart goals for the business. SMART is an acronym. It stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant,and time bound. And you can use those smart goals to define the correct strategy for growth. Once you’ve got a clear strategy, the specific tactics actually become crystal clear. And the question of, let’s say for example, should I use LinkedIn, which is a common question I get from MSPs, that becomes really easy to answer when you understand the goal that the business is working towards and the strategy that’s been set to deliver that goal. The choice of tactics then leads on to your daily activities.

And this is the thing I really want to talk about the things you do every day. Because I want to help you make a mental connection here. Your ability to change your life in the future – which by the way, anybody in any situation can do – is directly affected by what you do in your business, in your life every single day. Let’s take a non MSP example.

If you want to be a muscle ripped Adonis, then you expect to have to lift weights every day and eat protein and all of that stuff, right? It’s no different within your business.

If you want an MSP that onboards a new client every month, at least every month, then you need to build a marketing machine. And just like getting ripped, that’s an ongoing process with tiny actions every day that really add up over time. You wouldn’t expect to turn into Adonis just by going to the gym once.

So how do you expect to onboard a new client every month just doing a piece of marketing once. You’ve got to build a marketing machine and then every day you need to do something within that marketing machine that either wins you more new clients, get those clients to buy from you more often, or get those clients to choose to spend more. That’s how you connect your daily activities to the amazing future life that you’re going to have.

Why PR is a valid marketing tool for MSPs in 2024

Featured guest: Mickie Kennedy, founded eReleases 25 years ago to help small businesses, authors, and startups increase their visibility and credibility through tier-1 press release distribution.

Mickie lives in Baltimore and has created a free video Master Class on how to create a winning PR strategy, based on the PR campaigns of his most successful clients.

Maybe you’ve seen a competitor featured in a local newspaper, radio station or TV station and you’ve wondered, Hey, how do I get my MSP free publicity like that? Well, my guest today is at the very heart of generating PR results, public relations free publicity, and he’s going to tell you exactly how to do it. Today’s special guest will tell you why press releases are still a valid tool for MSPs in 2024 and also how to cut through and get in front of the journalists you most want to reach.

Hi, I am Mickie Kennedy and I’m the president and founder of eReleases press release distribution. I specialise in helping people get earned media through press releases, and I’ve been doing this for a little over 25 years

And that makes you royalty in the terms of PR and media I think Mickie. I had a PR company, which I started seven years after you started yours, and I’m pretty sure we used eReleases back in the day to get some press releases out. So it’s awesome to actually be speaking to you all this time. For those people listening to the podcast on audio only, you have to check out this interview on YouTube as well because Mickie has quite frankly the wildest pair of glasses I’ve ever seen. Can you describe them Mickie.

Sort of like intense rainbow glasses? I got them for pride three years ago and I happened to get headshots then, and so every time I showed up to a podcast after June, people would be like, oh, you don’t have the glasses. So I had to start putting them back on and I just realised now it’s my thing.

It is, it is. You’ll be a 95-year-old man in a care home somewhere and people will still expect you to have the rainbow glasses back from 2021. So let’s start at the beginning Mickie, and let’s talk about what are press releases, what’s a press release distribution company, what do you do? And when a business owner like an MSP is sending out a press release, what is it that they’re hoping to achieve from that?

Basically a press release is an announcement written usually in the third person, you can have a quote where you could talk in the first person and it’s an announcement that you’re sending to the media. You can actually physically send it to the media by email or mail, but predominantly to get the maximum amount of coverage you use a news wire. And here in the United States there’s two major Newswires, PR Newswire and Business Wire. They probably control like 90 something percent of the marketplace. And we partnered with PR Newswire about I think around 15 years ago. So all the releases that go out through us go out through PR Newswire nationally with PR Newswire, it’s about $1,800 approximately to move a 600 word press release. And through us it’s about 25% to 30% of that cost, mostly because our audience are smaller companies that Pure Newswire doesn’t spend time reaching out to because their budgets are too small.

But in aggregate, we were able to drive a lot of sales to them because we do like 10,000 to 12,000 releases a year. So it gives us an advantage for being able to purchase at a really good rate with them. And as far as what the goal of this is is to get earned media and that’s to get actual articles written about you based on what you’re announcing, examples of types of releases that people generally do or when you have a new product or a refresh of a product or service. Basically if you have a big milestone in your business, you’ve reached a certain milestone of number of customers or an anniversary or things along those lines. And the ultimate goal of sending this out is to see yourself in print or online and generally it results in eyeballs looking at you, potential leads, potential sales, and even more importantly, you can take that earned media that link to an article and share it with your own leads and share it with your own audience. Because the thing that happens with the earned media is it’s a huge credibility boost.

It’s like third party corroboration when a journalist writes about you. It’s a huge signal of trust and as a result, it really makes you look good and it makes people want to work with you.

That’s a really comprehensive answer and thank you. And I think you’re right. It’s the credibility these days that’s really more important certainly for an MSP. If you can get your local newspaper, your local radio, maybe even your local TV station to talk about something that your business has done, is that going to generate leads? Maybe not, but is it going to get people talking? Yes, your existing clients may see or hear it and say, Hey, we heard you on the radio. You can also take that coverage and you can use it again and again and again across all of your marketing for massive credibility because even today in 2024 where let’s be honest, anybody can get any message to any person, quite unlike how it was back in 1998, even today, the media has a certain amount of credibility and people still perceive that journalists pick the very best experts, the very best stories for people to consume.

Let’s examine that change in the media. So you started in 1998. Back at that time, I was working at a radio station in the UK, Mickie, and I remember if you go back to then there was no Google. I don’t think Google itself had even launched in 98. Certainly Google AdWords didn’t exist. There were no real social media networks. So it was, as we said, the media and what made the media rich in the 20th century was they controlled the distribution of messages. Now, obviously come forward 26 years, that’s completely changed. Distribution is easy. Everybody can reach everybody. So what value does a service like yours still have for reaching those journalists?

Right. So the thing that happened is when I launched my business, I just did email distribution to journalists that I had reached out to an established relationship when they said I could send them releases. What has changed at that time is media databases have come out and people are buying or licensing these databases, and a yearly subscription can be anywhere from $8,000 to $25,000 depending on the database and the size of your company. And as a result, when a golf club company buys access to this database and then realises only 2,700 journalists are interested in golf products, they’re like, well, there’s like tens of thousands of financial analysts and banking people and business editors, let’s send it to them. Because business owners and people in banking, they like to play golf. And as a result, there’s so many off targeted press releases and pitching going on through email, that journalists’ email are just terrible. They have a hard time wading through it.

PR firms, which usually rely on pitching through email and phone have found that email is just hard to get through. Often they’re having to call and tell them how to find a pitch they sent via email or just pitch over the phone because their email is just out of sorts. And the great thing about the wire is that they can log in with their journalist credentials and look at their industry feed and they can actually even customise it. So if I’m someone who covers electronics, I can exclude certain keywords. I’m not interested in anything that mentions like stereos or consumer retail outlets like Best Buy and things like that. I can basically customise it so the feed I’m seeing is very targeted, so it’s becoming more and more the main place that journalists are going and looking for stories because it’s the main place that’s not crammed with spam and off targeted stuff.

So it really is great for that reason. And the fact that there’s only two in the US, it makes it very easy for journalist to just fish in two ponds. It does make it difficult for new players to come in because a journalist is like, I don’t really want to go to a third place and look, I like being able to see two. And as a result of basically being a duopoly in the US market, you do pay a premium, like I said, not unusual to pay between $1,600 and $2,000 for a national press release of 5, 6, 700 words. And so it can be very expensive as a result of that.

Yeah, I can imagine the irony that as the world has opened up and communication, as I said, from anyone to anyone, is possible that what has happened is the journalists have become completely overwhelmed and they’re focusing their attention on essentially a filtering, a relevance filtering, which is what these wire services offer. And for those of those listeners and viewers outside of the US, there are versions of this in many countries. I’m sure I’m a bit out of date with the media in the UK. I left that in 2005, but I’m sure that there’ll be a different version of this, and I’m sure there’ll be a business like Mickie’s business in the UK and in other western countries as well. Let’s turn and look at specific story suggestions that MSPs should be placing, Mickie. So you know about MSPs, obviously they’re trying to reach typically local or niche or vertical business owners, decision makers in the kind of people that they want to work with. And one of the most common questions that I get from MSPs when we’re talking about publicity and PR is what kind of story suggestions should I be sending out? You mentioned earlier a couple of good ideas like product releases and big milestones. What other kind of B2B story ideas do you see that work well?

I think ones where you have data generally work very well, for example, doing a survey or study within your industry is a great way to position yourself as a thought leader, an expert in your industry because you authored the survey. And I recommend that for clients who just feel like, I don’t know what we can do, I don’t feel important enough. And I always tell them that this is one type of press release that generally always gets earned media. You want to ask some meaningful, timely questions that people in your industry would want to know right now. What are people’s positions on AI in your industry or what are the threats to your industry? What are things around that? What are the challenges of MSP owners right now in your industry? You could look at trade publications to get a sense of that. You could also get a sense of what you would ask people if you were at a trade show or conference like, Hey, have you noticed lately that it seems like this?

That could potentially be a question to ask because the reason you’re asking it is you have seen it in print yet and you’re not sure if this is just affecting your company or if it’s something that could be industry-wide or regional. And as a result, these are all questions that are right for asking. And once you put together the survey, reach out to a smaller independent trade association in your industry, and they exist in every vertical and every fraction of verticals, even in PR. Everybody knows the big guy, but there’s 470 some last time I checked public relations, trade associations in the United States that are not the big one that everyone knows. And so you do want to see how if their membership sort of fits you, and then also you want to see what the size of them is. I usually like 700 members or more because the goal is to get a hundred people to complete the survey.

I then approach that association and say, Hey, could you send this link? I use SurveyMonkey. And I said, could you send this link to your members, in exchange I’ll mention you in a press release I’ll be issuing over the wire through PR Newswire. The smaller associations, not a lot of people know about them. They don’t get media attention. They often see this as a win-win. You incorporating them in the press release. If they seem a little hesitant sometimes you can enhance it by co-branding the survey, as long as they don’t want to get involved and start rewriting questions and all of that. And they’re usually not. They’re usually small and lean and they’re easy to work with. And I do tell them the goal is to get at least a hundred responses. So if we don’t, I go back to them and see if they could push that link on social media, maybe do another email send.

But generally, I find that a lot of people are willing to do a survey for an association they belong to when they don’t normally do surveys. And I then look at the results, figure out what the aha moments are, what’s the most shocking or surprising thing here, and I generally focus the press release on that. Maybe one other question. I do believe in building out a page on your website where you put all the questions and answers and include that link in your press release because a really good journalist will go through and see if there’s other questions that they might be able to build a story on around as well. And generally when we send that out, you have an amazing quote by you as to why you felt the numbers skewed a particular way, putting a little analysis on you. Generally, we’re looking at four articles, but sometimes as many as 14 articles from one survey.

And that’s something that anybody can do. It’s a great way to position yourself. It generally always works, just making sure that you ask meaningful questions. And it is one of the ways to really stand out and grab some of that media attention and that authority so that as you put that on your website, these articles, as you share the links to these articles with your leads and your clients, it’s going to greatly increase your authority. That signal of trust that comes from being in the media is really going to get out there, and you’re going to find that your churn rate will go down because people are less likely to shop around if they realise I’m with the right company and the people that you normally don’t convert, whatever that percentage is, you’re going to find that you’re going to move some of those over into customers just because of that earned media and putting that in front of them.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. Even existing clients are happy to see you as the MSP owner or the manager appearing in the media and being a thought leader and being an expert because it reinforces that they made a smart choice to join you in the first place. I mean, even from just the idea you’ve been talking about there, my mind was racing thinking, hang on a second here. There’s just so much content we can create out of one activity. So if you take the PR stuff and put to one side just the survey, so you’ve got the survey itself, could become a blog article, could be also be something you put on LinkedIn, even though very few people will respond, it’s another piece of content. Then you’ve got the actual results. It’s another blog article, it’s another piece on LinkedIn, the actual press release. It’s another blog article, it’s another piece on LinkedIn.

And then of course, once you’ve been in, even if you’re just in one media title, you can then do a blog post and a LinkedIn article or a newsletter about how stories you’ve been featured in relevant media recently. So just what’s that four or five different pieces of content just from one piece of activity. And that I think is what makes PR really, really sexy. So thank you so much for that idea, Mickie. That’s a really cracking idea. Just tell us very briefly, again, you did mention at the beginning, but tell us briefly what’s the pitch for eReleases and also what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you?

The website’s, ereleases.com. You can contact us through chat, phone, or email. You’ll only talk to editors. We have no salespeople, no commissions. All of our social media is on the lower right. I do have a free masterclass where I go through about a video of about an hour of the strategic types of releases people should focus on, because I will be honest with you, the biggest criticism of press releases is they don’t work. And I will agree that 97% of press releases do not work. And so what I’ve done is I’ve condensed the 3% that do regularly work, and that’s in that masterclass of less than an hour long video. I know that people aren’t going to be watching 12 and 20 hour courses anymore. So it’s [e-mail]/plan. Again, completely free and a great place for someone to start because if you go through that and brainstorm half a dozen strategic ideas for a press release, you’ll be able to build a PR campaign of meaningful releases and you’ll have more hits than misses. And so you’re not with that 97% of press releases that fail, but you’re focusing on the 3% that do succeed and that you will have good outcomes as a result.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

This week we have a question from Martin who owns and runs his MSP in Arizona, and he says that his business is actually fairly successful, but the thing that’s keeping him up at night is his team. His question is, what’s the best way to hold a team meeting when you have some staff who are a little disruptive?

Yeah. Well, it’s really important in my view that you don’t use team meetings to try to change the behaviour of individuals, because typically the worst performing staff listen the least at team meetings, don’t they? So I would use one-to-ones to tackle your problem staff and to change behaviour over time. In my view, team meetings should be saved for things like just passing on information or training on new technologies or updating your team on the progress of the business, or just generating ideas and encouraging enthusiasm. The best kind of meetings really involve your team actually doing something because it is really boring for them to listen to you just droning on for half an hour or even longer. So here’s an idea, present them with a problem, break them into small groups if your team is big enough to do that and let them brainstorm ideas.

Now, you don’t have to act on those ideas, although trust me, they will come up with some brilliant ones, but it will help them feel involved and therefore just more engaged with the business. That’s a good thing.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Connect with my guest Mickie Kennedy on LinkedIn and check out the eReleases website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.