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Justin Esgar:
So I sent you this graphic. This isn't really funny thing. Somebody posted Andy Kim at Andy Kim NJ on Twitter. Writes, this is a real reader program now, and at Andy Kim NJ writes, my wife wasn't thrilled when I put this Lego Millennium Falcon on our wedding registry to not seem completely, I told her I'd wait until we had kids to build it. Today after 10 patient years, the adventure begins and there's a picture of him with his two kids and this very old, that's the older Millennium Falcon. If you know your Legos, wow. But yeah, I mean that's kudos to you, Andy Kim. I bet you Andy Kim's in it.
Eric Anthony:
You think
Justin Esgar:
I'm going to go with he's in it.
Eric Anthony:
There might just be a few it people who are into Legos. Jay Tipton,
Justin Esgar:
Today's episode is brought to you by Liquid Death. New Flavors. Now they do teas. This is an armless Palmer. Now, in all fairness, I hate lemonade.
Eric Anthony:
Ooh, see? And I can probably get away with buying that one because Amy likes Arnold Palmers.
Justin Esgar:
What's up everybody? Welcome to the All Things/MSP podcast. I'm your host. Justin Esgar was always with me, is my good friend. Podcast host extraordinaire, milk lover, Mr. Eric Anthony,
Eric Anthony:
But not sparkling milk lover. Let's just
Justin Esgar:
Sparkling milk lover. How are you, dude?
Eric Anthony:
Good. I did not get sunburned on my cruise, so that's a plus because it's always a danger for me. But I wore the S P F 50 shirt long sleeve and the hat and the whole nine yards when we went to Royal Caribbean's Private Island, cocoa Key, I guess it's pronounced.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah, that's something that,
Eric Anthony:
But I mean hotter than Hades. I mean, it was the surface of the sun. And even when we got back and I went to go visit my parents, I now remember why I left Florida, right? Because I just
Justin Esgar:
Know Because of your neighbors.
Eric Anthony:
No, it's just why subject yourself to that heat and humidity on purpose.
Justin Esgar:
Why air condition? I was thinking about moving to Miami and Michelle was like, no. And I was like, they have air conditioners for those who were listening at home and wonder whether or not this banter is prescripted Because you guys all think Eric and I are friends. I just want to point out for the record that last Tuesday I texted Eric with, yo, how was your trip? And then he didn't respond. And this is the first time I'm asking him about it since he's been back. So legitimately you're hearing it first, as am I.
Eric Anthony:
Well, because I wasn't legitimately back until late yesterday, so
Justin Esgar:
That's fair.
Eric Anthony:
Sorry buddy.
Justin Esgar:
It's cool. Yeah,
Eric Anthony:
I did get back to that one person today that you reached out to me about.
Justin Esgar:
Okay, business first, party second, I want to talk to you, I went to an event this week. I want to talk about it. I'm not going to mention names, but it's pretty obvious if you know anything about marketing in the MSP space, you'll be able to figure this one out. So I went to this event, I was invited by someone who's a member of this group, and I went as a guest and it was cool. And day one was content and driven about how to do sales and how to do marketing. And day two was more of them selling you into their thing. And I walked out of there day one with granted. I walked out with probably 17 pages of ideas, but not because people were talking about things that I liked. But because when you go to an event in general like this, you hear one thing and then your brain starts scratching at all those other itches.
So I'm hearing something about marketing and I'm thinking about things for the ACEs conference, or I'm thinking about what are we doing with our halo setup, or I'm thinking about why is the phone ringing in the wrong direction when it has nothing to do with? But it could just be because someone was like, when you're doing marketing, you have to have someone pick up the phone. And I was like, oh, phone, right? But I walked out at day one and the person who had invited me, actually he was staying with me for the night here in Jersey. And so he's like, what'd you think? And I was like, do you remember in 1992 when Don Lare told us all we can make rich by putting out little tiny classified ads? And he is like, yeah. And I was like, that's this. I get it. And I think a good amount of the audience were MSPs doing sub 300, which as we know Dave,
Eric Anthony:
And we're not talking 300 million,
Justin Esgar:
No, we're talking about, yeah, 300,000. I think a lot of the people that were in that room were probably doing sub one 50 to be honest. And we have the numbers to back this up because Dave Sobel on episode has told us that 85% of all MSPs make under 500,000. And the guests that were coming up were guests who were star players in this group. And this one person comes up and they were like, I run a $100 million MSP and it's all thanks to the group. And you're like, oh, well how did you do that? How did the group get you so far? And it's like, well, the stuff that you're learning in the group got you from 150,000 to 600,000 maybe to a million. And then you met other people who also did that, and then they forces and became one bigger company and then grew to 40 million and then combined forces with someone else and got PE funding. So legitimately speaking, you're a $100 million MSP, but at the same time, it's not really the stuff that they're teaching that got you there. And so I honestly believe, and I apologize to anyone who's in the group or likes this kind of stuff, but you have to read in between the lines with this particular content really badly and a lot of the stuff that was there with stuff we've talked about, have a process, have a C R M, have leads, get a list, clean your list, do whatever. But the amount of people who I saw that were zombie eyed at this whole thing, holy Nikes.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah. Yeah. So obviously behind the scenes you've shared with me who this is, and if people will go back and listen to enough podcasts or enough stuff that I've done in the past, they'll probably figure this out because I used this system in the past and parts of it worked really well for me. But here's the problem with any of these, right? They don't so much depend on the content. They depend on the person actually fricking doing it.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah,
Eric Anthony:
That's the thing. In fact, you sent me something else over the last week, you sent me this report, this MSP Sales and Marketing report.
Justin Esgar:
Oh yeah, I want to talk about that.
Eric Anthony:
Well, this dovetails perfectly because if you look at, they had a question around sales and marketing experiences, and it was what was your highest return on investment related to sales and marketing and what didn't work for you related to sales and marketing? Here's the funny part. The top three answers for both are internal salespeople, cold calling and marketing agency. The same exact things are the top three on both lists. So what's the difference? The difference is not in what they did, it's in how they did it
Justin Esgar:
Or if they did it at all raw, right? So this report, just so that we share this report, this gentleman VO had reached out to me. He has a friend who runs an MSP, who's pretty successful, according to him. I don't know who the friend is. And he found me on LinkedIn and wanted to know, Hey, would I be interested in feeding information to this report of his? And I said, sure. And I told him that we would be talking about it, right? So he's got 34 participants across the United States. Annual revenue lowest was 720,000, highest was 3.7 million. So we're talking about the higher echelon of people. We talk about how 85% of all MSPs or under 500, we're already talking above that shortest time in business. Two years average time, longest time, 52 years, which doesn't make any sense. Average is 19 years because you couldn't have been anm S P for 52 years because 52 years ago, computers didn't exist unless you weren't an MSP for typewriters.
You know what really got me? This was the big one. How many hours do you work per week? Lowest was under 30. High was 90 hours because I've made this joke before, only an entrepreneur will work 80 hours a week to not work 40 hours a week, which I thought. And so the whole thing, this report, it's pretty short, but what has been your highest R O I? What hasn't been working? And it's literally the same information on both. Not only just the top results, but both sides had podcasting. Both sides had pr, both sides had social or web or whatever.
It really comes down, and this is what the observation is, this is the observation from the report. I'm going to read it so I apologize. My YouTube view is, I'm looking down for a second. It comes down to the skill level of the person in charge of the sales and marketing execution. Someone who is strong sales or marketing background is more likely to make an execution r o I positive than someone who has more of a technical background. The people who have more technical backgrounds, who still have a well-run sales operation, learn sales and marketing themselves, or hired a team that is good at it. It's also important to note that just because someone says they're good at sales or marketing doesn't mean that they actually are i e hiring salespeople and marketing agencies? And that's a hundred percent true.
I'm really good at selling. I'm not great at marketing. I can talk to someone I'm really good at. I'm really good at the schmoozey stuff here. I'm really good at convincing someone to buy something from me. Sign up@acesconference.com for your ACEs conference tickets right now, I've made this joke that I could sell a dead horse to a vegetarian, apologies to all the dead horses. But from a marketing standpoint and the process of doing sales, making those phone calls, having that process, getting your list, figuring out where you're going to take those Google ads, that is outside of my realm, and I'm very clear about that. I have ideas and I have ways of learning and things like that. And we've talked about stuff on the show and you're more of the marketing person than I am. But this was a really interesting report because 34 companies submitted data, and this is the same stuff we've been talking about for weeks, and it nailed it on the head. So congratulations to you falling forgiveness stuff.
Eric Anthony:
So a couple of things. And number one, I'm probably going to have to mess with some dials here, but I apologize for anybody in the beginning who couldn't hear me. Well, actually no, who overheard me because somebody messed with the settings on my audio input. I don't know. What am I supposed supposed to
Justin Esgar:
Do? The ghost of AT/MSP passed.
Eric Anthony:
Either that or it's because I was gone for a week in
Justin Esgar:
The cat. Cats. Yeah, cats.
Eric Anthony:
That's all I got.
Justin Esgar:
I know we're off tangent for a quick second. My favorite clip, if you ever watch Robot Chicken, there's this, I love this clip. There's a clip of a cat sitting on a stair and a man walking down the stairs and he just falls down the stairs and they rewind it and they put it in slowmo. And you see, as the guy walks past the cat, the cat sticks. Its arm out, and it trips the dude to go down the stairs and it just ends with cats are a-holes and yeah, that's right.
Eric Anthony:
They absolutely can be for certain. Anyway, yeah. So there's some interesting things about this report. Number one, I want to say there were only 34 respondents to this report. So it's a little bit of cowboy math. I'm not going to lie, right? Because 34 is not a statistically relevant sample. Sorry, but it's still interesting. Still interesting. Their average annual revenue was 3.7 million, which I thought was interesting with a high of 10 and a low of seven 20, which means that's way skewed over what we know to be more of the average, and then the average years in business 19.
Justin Esgar:
This, I just said all this. Were you not listening to me? Were you playing with your dials? Literally just, this is why I just made the joke about the guy being in business for 52 years before computers were invented. I know. Are you just filling for time, ladies and gentlemen? Liquid Death is not yet our sponsor, but if you want to send some liquid dust to us, Eric will put our PO box that we don't have yet in the show notes,
Eric Anthony:
And I promise I'll stop messing with my dials.
Justin Esgar:
Stop with yours. Look, the report, even though the report might be Cowboy Math and the report is skewed towards the higher end because yes, 34 is not a significant sample. When you're doing sample sizes based between that and what I saw at this event, there were, I want to say 150 people there, both owners of MSPs, people who work in marketing at an MSP. It comes down to execution. There's that. Ideas without execution are hallucinations. I think it's Thomas Edison, also another famous quote. Don't believe everything you see on the internet that was said by Abraham Lincoln.
The fact is that you need that process. So the question comes down to is what is that process? How are you going to do that? So the thing that this group was talking about and what was inferred from it was you have to start with that list. Do you have that list? Right? And so last week, full transparency, Eric and I were having a conversation before he went away and we were talking and I was being a negative nilly because that's just who I am, and I don't have that list. I never bothered to get that list. And the problem is also obviously for Apple people, because I went to the person who runs the show and I was like, hi, I'm an Apple consultant, and acquiring a list is not really something we can do. Like buy a list and clean the list and work the list and massage the list and get that list to do. Make it your daddy. And I'm like, the list doesn't break down who has Mac and who has PCs. So that's a harder thing for Apple consultants to do.
But for the majority of the listeners who are listening, you could just go buy a list. If you're in with, I don't know about Sandler and Partners, but if you're a agent, a partner agent, and if you're not, reach out to me. I'll get you hooked up. But if you're a RIS agent, they have a marketing department. I did this a couple of years ago, so I'm hoping it's still true by the time this goes out, they have a marketing department that if you're doing deals with them and you're getting tolos points, you can use those points to buy a list from tolos.
You can go online and buy lists anywhere you can. You don't want to pay for it. You can go to your local library, whatever those things are. And they have books. What's a book? Is that like the paper version of a movie? Okay. Yeah, except better. Oh, really? Okay. You can go to your local library and you can pull this information from, I forget what the website is, some government website for your town or whatever, and it'll pull you all the N A I C S codes with the businesses that you're looking for. And you can print that out for $4 a page at the library and then convert that and work that list. But you have to do something. That's what I think the report is the takeaway. I think that's what the people who have actually succeeded in this program, what the takeaway was is you have to do something and you can't do the same thing everyone else is doing.
Eric Anthony:
Well, that's not necessarily true. You just have to do it differently. Now, this is the big dilemma, right? Sales and marketing has forever been the dilemma of managed service providers. And by the way, it's also been the dilemma of plumbers and carpenters and anybody who does something technical.
Justin Esgar:
I thought you were going to say, of anyone who does something where we have to crawl around on the floor.
Eric Anthony:
No, that could include other industries that aren't the
Justin Esgar:
Same. Yeah, you've got to go under the desk wiring every now and then continue.
Eric Anthony:
By the way, you got a comment on that one on the YouTube video. You should go back and check that one out and we can discuss it next time. But it's really, this has been the problem for MSPs is how do I get started with sales and marketing?
In my opinion, you're not wrong about the list right now, obviously for an Apple consultant, it's different. We know that. But for pretty much any business, you have to start not buying a list. I don't subscribe to buying a list, but building your list. And it just means that you have some type of C R M that you are capturing these things in as they come through, so that as you create new content, as you come up with new things to sell, you have them in a database that you can reach out to. I mean, MailChimp is free for up to quite a few number of contacts. So if you're just getting started,
Justin Esgar:
It's
Eric Anthony:
Like 500 or something like that. And you can send, I think to that 503 times a month, which is plenty. In fact, for a nurture stream, that's probably a little too much once a month would be appropriate. But you have to have something to work with. So you have to start building your list. You have to have a C R M to do that. The C R M is going to either have some type of mail capability or you link it with MailChimp, and you can use it that way, but you have to put the work into it. And my problem with buying lists is yes, you can buy lists, but only if you have the resources to reach out to that many people.
And this is the problem with so smaller MSPs especially, is they try and go out and get large lists or advertise to a large number of people, and they simply can't handle the lead generation from that. If they do get leads from it, they're not capturing them, and they're certainly not following up on them because they don't have the resources to operate at that kind of scale. So when you're smaller, it's much more important to look for the quality prospects that you want to go out and reach and add to your C R m add to your list than getting volume. Because what you can do is you can spend time sending a personal email to a dozen people a week, right? And come on guys, it doesn't take more than one new client a month to have a significant amount of growth in your MSP, especially early on. Now, as you reach that half a million million mark, it's going to take a little bit more, but by that time, you now have the resources to do more sales and marketing at scale.
Justin Esgar:
If you're a one or two person shop, you're doing this on your own, you're not hiring somebody. And I do agree with, I mean, I think to build your, because a lot of people are going to say, how do I build my list? Ask your current clients for referrals. Because even if they refer you to somebody and you email them, they may or may not need you right then and there, but you've now added them to your list.
Eric Anthony:
Correct. And that is probably one of the best ways to create a list. And by the way, referrals are not dead. If I didn't say that loud enough.
Justin Esgar:
No, because you tweaked with your noms earlier. Referrals aren't debt. I do believe that. And people have asked me why have I not done referrals? I have not done referrals in New York City. I've done referrals in our other offices, Des Moines, Columbia, whatever. I've not done referrals in New York City because in New York City, it's such a fast-paced thing that a lot of our clients don't want to give our name away because they're afraid that we won't be there for them. Because in New York City, if you call a plumber and he's like, alright, I'll be there in four hours, you're going to call another plumber who could be here in 30 minutes. So that's been a little bit of an issue for us. Again, the negative nilly, but in our other neighborhoods where it's not as cutthroat, I think is fine. So yeah, referrals are not dead. You should definitely be asking them. But you also have to know, and maybe we'll do an entire episode about referrals on how to ask for that the right way. You can't just go to a client and go like, Hey, I need new business. Do you have any friends? That's not going to work, right? So this is the right way to do referrals. There's ways to incentivize referrals. There are ways to acquire those, but you have to do it the right way. So we'll do an episode on referrals. Yeah,
Eric Anthony:
Because a lot to talk about there.
Justin Esgar:
But you know what I think we might want to do, and I'm going to put you on the spot for this one, so this way we can keep track of this is that I think every couple of shows we should do, we should just lay out the process for people. So this will be episode one of process, which is Build your list. And the first thing I want everyone to do is make sure you have Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets accessible, and you're going to create a spreadsheet called MA List. And that's M ma L, new word, i s T.
And you're going to do your column headers, right? First name, last name, company, email address, phone number, how you found them, what do they do? Their LinkedIn profile. Put in a notes column to keep track, put in a first contact last contact date. So this way you can know when the last time you spoke to them. And then a column for something like which technique you want to use to reach them, whether that's phone call, email, in person, or whatever. Start there. That's your first step, right? Start there and then leave a comment below in the Facebook group, facebook.com/group/and tell people and just say, I did it. That's all I want you to do. You know what? Make it even easier. A green check mark emoji. You did it right? And then we'll talk about in another episode, we'll do your next step, which is how are you're going to ask for those referrals? And then you're going to start building your list with that. I think that's a good way to do things. If I like putting this on the spot,
Eric Anthony:
If you have a crm, use that rather than the spreadsheet. But Justin is absolutely correct. You can do this with a spreadsheet.
Justin Esgar:
Well, I'm assuming that there's a lot of people that if we're that small, if you're a one or two person and you're first starting out, you may not have a crm. So if you have a crm, user crm, if you don't have a crm, I'm going to help you build a CRM i facebook.com/groups/all things. MSP is the right one. I'm doing it fast today. Go there and leave a check mark.
Eric Anthony:
And by the way, while we're talking about this, while we're talking about the Facebook group, we are less than a hundred people away from having 5,000 members in the group. So if you have a friend that's not in the group, if you are not in the group, go join the group because we're getting really close to that 5,000 number, and it would just be great to get to there by the end of the month.
Justin Esgar:
The funny thing here is how you're asking for referrals.
Eric Anthony:
That's right. I'm asking for referrals, right? Yeah, but did I ask for a referral? No, I didn't. I asked.
Justin Esgar:
You said, tell a friend.
Eric Anthony:
Tell a friend. Which is different than asking for a referral, but it's value-based, right? Because the value that you get out of being in the group, or you get from these podcasts, or you get from the live streams, whatever it is, your friends can have that value too,
Justin Esgar:
Right? Every MSP knows another MSP. Help another MSP out and take a listen to the All Things/MSP or go to the All Things/MSP Facebook group and take a listen and have them listen to our podcast. This Armless Palmer is really making me a little tongue tied today, apparently.
Eric Anthony:
Apparently
Justin Esgar:
I got to stick to the sparkling water. If you want to send me liquid death, we'll make a PO box and you can send that to me.
Eric Anthony:
You'll have to have your own box though, because I'm not getting stuff at our PO box and then shipping it to you. So
Justin Esgar:
See, this is something we could talk about in a text message. If you actually responded to me. See, you got to bring it all the way back. Well, that's it for us at the All Things MSP podcast. Join the group. Be one of those last, we'll maybe celebrate the 5,000 person facebook.com/group/all things msp. Follow us on YouTube, youtube.com/at all things msp. That's the at sign. All things MSP listen to. I mean, you're listening to us, which is weird for me to say this, but listen to us on all the other platforms and raise our numbers. Like subscribe, leave a review, and if you want to be on the show at MSP link slash slash podcast, and you can come on and we can talk about your marketing troubles or your business troubles, or what are your thoughts on the new Liquid Death flavors? Come on, join us. That's it for us. I'm Justin. That's Eric. Bye.
I heard I was listening to a podcast. I had a podcast that I listened to that I love called Off Menu. It's British, these two British comedians, and they bring on a guest and they make 'em talk about their dream restaurant. So what's your favorite meal? Or whatever. And they always start with still or sparkling. And this particular guest was like, sparkling. You're in a restaurant and what are you in Neanderthal? I can get still at home. And one of the callers is like, well, you get sparkling at home also if you have a soda stream. And the other guest goes, he just curses, so you'll bleep me. He just goes, soda Stream. And they were like, why? He's the first cohost was like, he tried to use it and broke it, and the guest was like, did you try to put bubbles into milk? The guy was like, I don't want to talk about it. Which means he clearly did, obviously, right? Why do people try to, you get the soda stream, you screw the thing on nice, tight seal. Why they put things in there that shouldn't, that's not water. Who wants carbonated milk? That's disgusting.