Marketers Are Full of 💩? Let's Talk About It | EP106

[00:00:07] I've always had this stupid idea of wanting to name my dog Stay. Like, come here, Stay. Roll over, Stay. It's super dark to think about this. But I just saw this thing earlier that somebody wrote, they wanted to name their dog Five Miles so they could tell people they walk five miles every day. I was like, that's funny. I like dumb dad humor like that.

[00:00:32] Fun but worthless. You know? Well, the weird thing is that it was on LinkedIn. Like LinkedIn is becoming Facebook. To a degree. Yes. And people just, I don't know, like, I guess that's the problem with an open social media platform, right? People can make it whatever they want it to be. And I think at some point, it generates a life of its own. And the original owners can't really

[00:01:03] control it without constricting the growth. Yeah, but it's also owned by Microsoft. Well, I mean, the thing with LinkedIn is like, I run into a personal problem on LinkedIn, because I'm trying to I try to market to both MSPs and clients. And so like, my messaging gets a little fuzzy, you know, because like, I'll post one day, like, Hey, here's a really cool thing you can do with a Mac or like, here's the first thing you can do with a Mac or like, here's the first thing you can do with a Mac.

[00:01:36] And then like, hey, listen to the episode of it. And then like, hey, listen to the episode of it, ATMSP that I just did. You know, not for you PR firm that I take care of. But like, for the other people who are you know, because I'm not connected, I have so many connections that are in both categories. Well, right. No, that's not correct. I have so many connections that are in one of the two categories. I don't have anyone that's in both categories.

[00:02:00] Okay, I'm trying to target both of them individually. So like, I know we talked about building a personal brand. There's my like, that's my legit problem is my personal brand is for both MSPs and not MSPs. And I'm like, most people would be told like pick a lane, but like I can't.

[00:02:21] Yeah, although that is something. Okay, so it's easier said than done. When you already have established yourself.

[00:02:30] Correct. If you're starting from scratch, it's easier to pick a lane. You mean? Yes. Yeah. Which is funny. Like I'm okay playing. I'm okay playing both sides of the tennis court. You know, I'm just a little tired running back and forth. Right. That's why I play paddle ball instead. I don't play paddle ball. I get invited to like a weekly paddle ball game. And I'm like, listen, losers. No paddle balls. Your thing. I look forward to your tweets and emails.

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[00:03:53] What's up, everybody? Welcome to the All Things MSP Podcast. I'm your host, Justin Escar. With me always is my good friend, podcast producer extraordinaire, pirate, man with the plan, Eric Anthony. We're talking about fun stuff today because the next half of this show is going to be not so fun. It might be fun. I don't know. I don't know. Well, I think it's going to be fun. We might in the beginning. That's what we do here at ATMSP. It's all things fun. We might offend some people up front, but I think we'll make it better by the end.

[00:04:22] It's a lot better than offending people from behind. Just saying. That's an image I can't get rid of. It's been a fun day here, folks. You're going to tell that Eric and I are a little bit like towards the end of the week and a little bit ready for the weekend. Normally, we end the show with like Eric being like, I don't think you hear this part normally because Eric already cuts it off. He's like, I'm going to go get a whiskey. I'm like, you should get one now. I feel like you need one for this episode. It is the end of the week. Far away. Far away.

[00:04:51] I can stall if you want to like. We can edit. We'll just have the robots do the work. No. Actually, another thing I didn't share during the pre-show, sorry, is that I've been dealing with a gout flare up this week. And so alcohol, not on the list today. Not on the list.

[00:05:15] I love there was a there was a great bit by Jim Carrey when he was doing stand up where he was like, I just want to do this for the sake of doing it. He's like, I want to take a bottle of whiskey. I want to pour it all over myself, not drink a single lick. Just pour it all over myself and drive with my head out of the sunroof going. And get pulled over and then give up and then and then make them give me a breathalyzer test to be like nothing.

[00:05:45] Well, hopefully nothing because, you know, it might pick something up from the air around. Yeah, but still, I mean, it was a funny bit. All right. Those are like what's funny about this. And I'm going to tie this into our topic, I promise, is that things like that stick with you, right? Things like things like funny stories like that stick with you. And that's how you like attach yourself to a person or a brand or a thing. Great example of this recently. I don't know if anyone who's listening follows Formula One.

[00:06:14] But if you are, you know that Lewis Hamilton now wears a red jumper because he's now part of Ferrari after like a 10-year stint at Mercedes. And Ferrari had him do – he just joined TikTok. And you know I love me the Tiki-Toks. A marketing firm digitally – what's the word? Imposed him? Are you imposed? Whatever. Superimposed? Huh? Superimposed? Superimposed.

[00:06:43] Even more than imposing, you're superimposed. Into that famous Ferris Bueller scene where Ferris drops Cameron's Ferrari off in the parking lot. And they had Lewis be the parking lot attendant. And like they caught him in being like, relax. I'm a professional. And then they have the scene where they like drive away because there's that famous scene where the two parking lot attendants are like jumping a hill. And you see them being like, ah!

[00:07:13] And so it's Lewis Hamilton. And they got, for whatever reason, Edward Norton in there. And they like cut this scene together as like a thing for him coming to Ferrari. Okay. Now, the reason I'm telling this story is that is good marketing. And that's what we're going to talk about. So the story I was telling before the Lewis Hamilton one – oh, the Jim Carrey story and the Lewis Hamilton one, it's good for marketing because it builds their brand up. And building your brand up is part of marketing.

[00:07:43] So we're going to talk about marketing. See? I told you I could do it. Okay. But that's not the controversial part. No, we're not – we're not there yet. Don't ruin it. The controversial part is that there was a keynote at Adobe Summit today – or this year. Sorry, not today. And the number one slide said, marketers are full of shit.

[00:08:11] Which, like, we have – well, I don't think we've called out names on the show because that's not what we do. We don't do that here. But you know you know. But there are a lot of marketers that are successful in our industry that a lot of people complain about in terms of the effectiveness.

[00:08:40] And I think a lot of, especially technical people, don't understand marketing enough and so they all think it's shit. Do you remember the 1990s? Barely. Cool. So there used to be a dude. His name was Don LaPree, right? Don LaPree had a – what were those like half – it was like a half-hour advertisement.

[00:09:10] I forget what they called them. Infomercials? It was an infomercial. I told you guys. At the end of the week. Eric has to get the big words out of my dumb mouth. I'm just here to be Justin's thesaurus. There was like a joke. It was like – I didn't have a – it was something like – I didn't have a thesaurus and I couldn't figure out – whatever. I'll figure out that joke later. Anyway. Anyway. So Don LaPree. Okay.

[00:09:35] Don LaPree had a infomercial and he taught you how to make a lot of money by taking out little classified ads. That was the spiel. I, 12-year-old me, was like, Dad, can I buy this? And my dad said no and I got mad at him. Later in life, I learned that the only person who was making money was Don LaPree.

[00:10:02] Not that like old couple who was like, I took out colloidal classified ads and we got a boat after we paid off our mortgage. Like those people were paid actors. They didn't pay off their mortgage. They probably got paid 50 bucks to read the line and like moved on with their life, right? And I bet you the – because it was like a really old couple and I think it was only the guy who was speaking.

[00:10:24] So I'm pretty sure the woman in the relationship that I'm putting in there quotes only got $25 because she didn't have a speaking line in the commercial. But the point being is that like the person who made the money was the person selling the wares, not the people who were buying the product. Now, 12-year-old me didn't understand that, right? Current me – I'm not telling you how old I am.

[00:10:49] Current me does understand that, which is why I've always been so hesitant about working with these marketing firms, especially the ones that are like MSP marketing firms, right? Because the truth of the matter is – and I'm going to cut – like we're going to talk about this in depth and I'm going to cut it off right here by saying like the truth of the matter is no client needs you until they need you.

[00:11:17] The marketing part of it is to just keep them remembering who you are. But there are 78,000 different ways you can do that. You don't need to do or pay for the plans that some of these people are trying to sell you on. That's my opinion. And that's an opinion. And you're entitled to your opinion.

[00:11:43] Now, I'm going to counter that with most MSPs don't know where to start when it comes to marketing. Yes. And so a lot of these programs do offer a reasonable place to start with doing your marketing. But here's where the problem comes in. They think they're going to spend $2,000, $5,000 and get this plan that's magically,

[00:12:12] as soon as they get the three-ring binder in their hand, going to bring clients in the door. Yeah, like day one. Yeah. Right. And that's not the case. Well, you know, they'll put it up on the shelf. They'll look at it every once in a while and wonder why they're not getting clients. Yeah. And this is why most MSPs think that marketers are shit because the MSP puts the plan on the shelf and then never does anything with it. Right.

[00:12:41] And it's a lack of action, right? Right. It is absolutely the lack of action that usually causes the problem. You know, I used back when I was still an MSP, I used one of the most popular marketing people out there today. And as soon as I started actually doing the things that they recommended I do, huh, guess what? I started getting people calling in. And I started booking meetings.

[00:13:11] And from those meetings every once in a while, I actually got a new client. Yeah. The funny thing, though, is I know plenty of people who are doing the work and it doesn't work. Right. Like that's kind of where my thing is, is that it's not that if you do the work, it's going to work. Like you could do the work and it's still not work. Correct. So that's where I think the other problem comes in.

[00:13:38] The other problem that comes in is no marketer can develop a single plan that is going to work for everybody. Right. And this is why I always propose. In fact, there was a post in the Facebook group about this the other day. Somebody starting up an MSP and where do they start? And I'm like, and they asked specifically if they should pay for a marketing firm. Or a lead generation firm.

[00:14:06] And I was like, no, what you need to do is you need to first. And we've had Paul Green on here. We've had Steph Hilfer on here. We've had lots of other marketers on here who always talk about your ideal customer profile. Yeah. And, you know, you are the only one who can come up with that. You know, nobody else, but you can come up with that. And so you have to put in a little bit of work to figure out who you're going

[00:14:34] after where they live virtually and physically, figure out what kind of content is going to be valuable to them and just put that content out where they're going to be. Now, does that take work on your part? Yes. But I would bet that if you are just starting out as an MSP, you have more time than money. So this works. Oh, yeah. And we've had this conversation about the time versus money thing. Right.

[00:15:03] So if this is the first time you're listening to this show, maybe go back a couple of episodes. I also think that when you're first starting out, you know, there's no level of marketing work that can be done that's going to be better than you, like as a person. So like when you're first starting out, especially like you're it, right? Like you have to do the marketing. So like getting that content out there, going to the networking meetings, going to the B&Is

[00:15:31] and the things that are similar to that, like getting your name out there. Because I saw that post and that post is like, how do you get your first customer? And like, I can't answer that because I took customers with me from my old company because I didn't have a non-compete, which, you know, I mean, they're out of business now. I don't care, but like they try to slip me one during with my severance package. And I was like, no, I'm good. Thanks. But all the customers I had to get after were from networking and meeting and telling everybody

[00:16:00] I knew and like doing the marketing myself. The thing with lead generation I've been finding is that, yes, you do need your ideal client, right? But even if you have your ideal client, that doesn't mean that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be able to pull leads the right way, right? Like the big thing, and you and I actually were having an offline conversation about this.

[00:16:26] It's impossible for lead generations to find leads for Mac people, for Apple consultants, because you don't know that they have Macs or not. And there are tools that you can use to like determine if like the email hits a Mac machine because they're reading it in Mac mail or iOS mail or Safari or whatever it is. But like if they're reading it in Gmail and Chrome, it's still like a 50-50, well, it's more like an 80-20 shot that they're going to have a Mac, right? And like you could assume if it's a design company, they'd probably be a Mac.

[00:16:54] But like I'm torn about paying a leads company to go find me these leads because it's not just getting me the leads. Then I got to get them to warm the leads as well and determine that they have, you know, Macs and get me a clean lead list. That's a lot of work. And if I don't have the time to do it, it means I got to pay someone to do it. And that's very expensive. Well, and that's a great point because it is very expensive for you to pay a lead generation

[00:17:22] company to experiment for you. Yeah. You are much better off experimenting on your own for a short period of time. Learn about what your ideal client profile should look like, what the problems with identifying them are, what the questions are that you can ask to qualify them correctly. And then once you have that down, now you have something you can give to a lead generation

[00:17:51] company that is actually going to be effective. But it is the, in my opinion, one of the worst things you can do is have somebody else experiment for you because they don't know your business well enough. Yeah. A hundred percent. But like, let's go beyond, right? So like, I think one of the big things is that these marketing companies that are around, you know, they're promising you leads. They're promising you meetings. They're promising you all these things.

[00:18:20] But like, to your point, they don't really know what your business is about. And marketing is more than just leads, right? Marketing is your LinkedIn. Marketing is your website. Marketing is your blog posts. Marketing is your design of your brand. Marketing is the language that you use when you're responding to people and helping others in the community because that's, you know, we're all about that community life, right?

[00:18:50] If you are out there trying to be like, I fix computers and I'm going to help you no matter what, like, you're not going to get anywhere, right? If I land on your website and it hasn't been updated since 1998, you know, or if you have, this pisses me off so much, if you have a website and you have other company logos on your website that are in a white bounding box on a black bar, like, you know what I mean?

[00:19:16] As opposed to like a transparent PNG, like how technical I'm getting folks. Like people are going to look at that and go, you don't know how to make a website and you're in technology because whilst you may not make websites as part of your, like, as part of the thing you do for customers, customers can't separate those two things. Websites are technology. You do technology. You do websites, right? And whether you do or don't, irrelevant.

[00:19:45] If your website looks like garbage, they're not going to work with you. Well, and you made a really good point that marketing is not just lead generation, right? I consider marketing to be primarily three different things. It is brand. It is awareness. It is business and it is lead generation.

[00:20:07] Now, those three things are typically not all found in the same marketer, right? Mm-hmm. So one marketer is not going to be able to help you with all three of those things most likely. And if they say they can, they can't do a good job of owning them. Well, and they're going to be, well, if they do, it's because they're big and that means they're also going to be expensive. Right. Fair enough. So, you know, there are people who are really great at brand.

[00:20:36] I mean, and we're going to name drop some people here because we're going to name drop them in a good way. You know, Steph, Steph Hilfer, if you haven't seen the podcast episode that we did with her and branding, absolutely one of the ones you should, should think about taking a look at. She's like the branding. And then awareness is all about content. It's all about dangling pieces of content in front of your ICPs where they hang out.

[00:21:06] Yep. And then lead generation is literally just getting people to pick up the phone and do cold emails and cold phone calls to get you meetings. Yep. The other side, like the other piece of this is that, you know, you mentioned time versus money earlier, right? Like until you're big enough to hire a marketing person to like manage those three pillars, like you have to put in the time.

[00:21:35] And I feel like that's also a major part because I'm sure plenty of you that are listening are going like, well, I really just, I really, really, really don't have the time to do it. Right. I'm so busy. I'm putting out fires all the time. I'm dealing with that. That's a BS. That's a BS excuse, right? Like you could hire another tech to handle those fires and then have the time. You could work on it on the off hours. Marketing is not usually a thing that's done during work hours unless you're making phone calls.

[00:22:03] But like you can put a post on LinkedIn at two in the morning. No one's going to know it was two in the morning. Right. Like those are the things you mentioned something earlier about, you know, going where your customers are. And so, you know, I could say that 80% of the people who run an MSP who take care of businesses can find their ideal audience on something like LinkedIn. Right.

[00:22:31] And if you're only doing home users, you're going to find them on Facebook. What's interesting, though, is if you niche down to even a smaller like vertical. So this was a funny like predicament I ended up in because we do a lot of work with nonprofits. So I was like, oh, let me go find all the nonprofits on LinkedIn. Ho, ho, ho. They're not there.

[00:23:00] Like there's like even if you do find a nonprofit on LinkedIn is like very little interaction because that's not where their customers are. That's not where their donors are. Right. Like if you have a nonprofit, you have a small 10 person nonprofit and you're trying to rake in two, three, five million dollars a year. You're not getting it from other people. LinkedIn. You're you as an entrepreneur on Facebook. Right. Right. So like you do have to think about that a little bit.

[00:23:29] Most companies are on LinkedIn in some way, shape or form. And it's really easy to like connect with someone being like, hey, I see you with some mutual connections or hey, we're doing work in your area or hey, I would love to connect just because like we're both, you know, I do this one a lot. If I ever find another Justin on LinkedIn, I'm like, hey, fellow Justin, welcome to the club. And then like I use that as my intro. Most of the time those people will connect with me because they think it's funny.

[00:23:53] Um, but you can use that to find those people and then warm them up through there. Now, the problem also is you as the MSP know damn well that like there's a lot of sleaze on LinkedIn. Like I legit whilst we were having this conversation, whilst we're having this conversation, I have a, I have a person who has messaged me now Monday, Tuesday and today and two on Tuesday

[00:24:21] being like, and the last one is like, it's important to maintain a strong connection with virtual contacts. And LinkedIn is a great way to do that. Let me know when we can discuss things. Dude, I know you're a sales executive. I see it in your title and you're selling me something that I don't care about right now, but like three messages in a week. Whoa. Yeah. And have you, have you gotten any of the, where they send you a voice recording? No. Yes. That is. That's you. That's rude.

[00:24:49] That seems to be the new trend. That's only second rude to getting for, for a salesperson who finds my email address and just sends me a calendar invite and get something on my calendar. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's the worst by the way. Um, you, you had mentioned the time versus money thing and you mentioned it and then I re-mentioned it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:25:16] Um, because while yes, there's a time versus money thing, it's not just about that, right? It's not just about having the, the time because you're just starting out. Yeah. Um, it's really, it goes back to that experimentation piece that I was talking about earlier.

[00:25:41] And I think as an MSP with a very specific, you know, offering for what you're trying to do to a very specific group of, of people, you have to do that experimentation first. You have to learn at least enough to talk to a marketer or take some of these plans that marketers are giving you and adjust them slightly for your audience.

[00:26:12] Now, the other thing that I wanted to mention along with the time versus money thing is that, cause you mentioned it was you should hire somebody to do put out the fires while you're doing the marketing. And, and I, I literally heard this in the back of my head. I heard an MSP. I'll play the MSP here and say, don't, don't do it with the voice. Don't be rude.

[00:26:40] I'll say, but Justin, I, I don't have the money to pay somebody to put out those fires. Yeah. That's a good call. But that probably means you're not charging enough. Yeah. True. Done. Problem solved. You fixed it in yourself. Good job. Actually, you know, what's funny about the pricing thing? And we'll get off topic for one second. I was on a, some forum. I don't want to mention who.

[00:27:06] And the person was asking about pricing and they were like, you know, trying to figure out my pricing, blah, blah, blah. And like, is the, like, I see the average is 25 to $40, you know, per machine. Um, and I'm going to include, you know, Microsoft and backup and all these things. And I was like, bro, you are under charging. Right. So bad. But then again, I don't really know PC market. I don't know PC MSP pricing. Well, right.

[00:27:33] Like I only know the Apple pricing well, and we do charge a lot for our services, but like, I'm assuming that PC MSPs at this point are charging the same thing that, that we are. So yes, I think you, your pricing is very close to what the average, what you and I would call a real MSP, um, is charging for their services. The 25, $45 per device that cannot be for any labor.

[00:28:01] There's no chance that labor is included in that. I think it was, I think it was, but like, yeah, that, that person's going to run into issues with exactly what you just said. Like, I don't have the money to pay for, um, somebody else because, you know, lo and behold, you're, you're not charging enough. I'm going to find it. We'll talk about it later. But, um, yeah, if you're not charging enough that, and that, that's the other thing is

[00:28:29] if you're not charging enough, this is actually a good loop, right? You're not charging enough to your customers. Therefore you believe you need more customers. Therefore you are going down and getting one of these marketing companies to help you to get more customers, to fill the void for the dollars you're trying to pull in. And then you're saying to us, but I don't have time to do the marketing. You also don't have the time to take on those new customers either, right? Like if you think about it, if you can't put an hour or two into marketing every day or

[00:28:58] something, even, even, even a half hour, let's say half hour to an hour every day, right? Uh, you don't have the time to bring on two, three, five new customers because you're going to like, your head will explode. And so like, if you're trying to fill the void of not enough money, therefore I need more customers, you're doing it wrong. So stop right there, raise your prices. Right.

[00:29:25] Like I'm not, I'm, I'm trying to like cut through the fat here on it, but like raise your prices, fix that. And then think about how you can get more customers because like, this is a truth. This is true. Every year we do ACEs. Every year I put out a survey going, what do you want to learn? Every year, basically everybody writes, I want to get more customers. And the same conversation happens every year. Why do you want more customers? Well, I want more money. Can you handle more customers? Uh, yeah. Do you have time right now to do marketing? No.

[00:29:55] Then you can't handle new customers. Right. Oh, I literally saw that scene from the movie. You know, you can't handle the truth. You can't handle more customers. That's actually a point that I made in my comment on that Facebook post the other day was if you do this by yourself, you should aim to get five to 10 meetings a month and that should get you one to

[00:30:22] two new clients a month, which is probably all you can handle onboarding in two months. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I found the post here. Um, it says, uh, I'm in the process of increasing our rates. I've always been concerned. My understanding of blended labor rates in the market is somewhere between 20 and $45. If it's below that, then you don't have enough techs. And if it's above this range, you're paying too much for techs.

[00:30:51] Um, oh, so maybe he's talking about paying for techs as opposed to. Yeah, that sounds like a per hour for a tech. Yeah. So I was just like, I still think you got to pay more. Like, I think you got to charge more. Um, but, but then he goes, I'm a one man band and I'm trying to build out the model. So what are you worried about paying for decks for if you're one man? Like this goes to just like what we're talking about, right?

[00:31:19] If you have time, spend the time. If you don't have the time, you have to spend the money. If you don't have the money and you don't have the time, you're doing something wrong. Yeah, absolutely. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, folks. But like, that's not a growth perspective. That's not a growth path. You know?

[00:31:48] Well, and I would also add to that. You can't just spend money and expect results because you have to understand your business enough from a marketing standpoint to be able to tell a marketer what to do for your business. And also go back to what we were just talking about.

[00:32:12] A marketer is not going to be probably interested in getting you just a handful of leads or a handful of meetings a month. Yeah. Because they don't make enough money on that. Especially when it comes to a lead generation, you know, somebody who's actually booking meetings for you. Yeah. And so you have to make sure that you have the capacity to handle what they're going to be bringing in.

[00:32:38] You probably, as an owner, if all you have is techs, are going to have to be doing sales full time if you hire an outside marketer. Yeah. And that's why I like so many people want to bring in an SDR, do all these things. Like I looked at doing an SDR and like he gave me a list of questions that I like could not answer because like I just couldn't do it. I just, I don't know why. And it was like things about my business and things about past clients and things about people that we didn't do business with.

[00:33:07] And I was like, you know what? I'm not going to do this. And I'm okay with that. Like I'm like, I'm okay with where I stand in life sometimes. I'll get off this. I'll get up. When we stop recording, Eric knows that I like cry to him for the next hour being like, I don't know what I'm doing. But like you have to put that in. And I, this always comes back to, this always comes back to like an old, I always, I hate bringing them up all the time, but like an old Vaynerchuk move.

[00:33:33] When Vaynerchuk was first doing stuff and he had his, in the first book, Crush It, back when he was cool, not, not, not current Vaynerchuk. But please, if you want to do keynote aces, Gary, well, we'd love to have you. We can't afford you, but we'd love to have you. But one of the things he said was like, if you're going to start your business, you got to put in the time. And it's like, and this is where he's talking about. If you're talking about a side hustle, which is kind of where I'm going with this.

[00:34:02] It was like, do your nine to five, come home, kiss your wife, kiss the dog, have dinner. And then from seven to 10, 11, two in the morning, work on your side hustle. Right. And so it's kind of the same thing. Like if you're a one man shop or even a two man shop and you're, and you're doing the work and you're in it all day, you have to find the time to work on it. Right.

[00:34:29] And that might mean putting in those evening hours. Like what do they say about entrepreneurs? Right. Like entrepreneurs quit their 40 hour work week so they could have an 80 hour work week. Yep. Right. Like last night, point of reference. Right. Last night. I finished work officially by 530. Cool.

[00:34:57] I went upstairs and I was going to make dinner and then I did, and then the kids pissed me off. So I don't want to make dinner anymore. So Michelle was like, I'll make dinner. So Michelle's making dinner and I'm sitting at the dining table with my laptop and I went back to work. And my work was like being on LinkedIn and connecting with people and, and trying to, you know, we're pushing stuff for aces right now and like doing all those things. And she goes, and Michelle goes, dinner's ready.

[00:35:28] And I didn't move and I keep working. And then she like sets the table and then the kids showed up with their iPads. And I was like, guys, no iPads at dinner. They're like, but you're on your laptop. I'm like, but I'm working. And so they like kept doing, and it wasn't until there was food in front of my face that I closed my laptop. Right. So what is that? Let's say six to seven, put the kids eat dinner. As soon as I was done eating, open the laptop back up, went back at it for another half hour. Right.

[00:35:57] And it's not me like avoiding my kids. It's me going. I had a really busy day at work taking care of like, I had two crazy complex tickets yesterday that I had to work on. And I spent the majority of my day spinning my wheels on those two things. Guess what? I still got to put the time in for the marketing. And I have enough money, truthfully, to hire a marketing firm. I just don't want to. I don't want to spend that money. Right. So like, I got to put the time in.

[00:36:27] And that's where the time was. Six to seven, 30 or whatever, seven. And then from seven, 30 to eight. By the end of it, I was spent. Not going to lie. But like, that's what had to happen. And you know what happened? I sold an Aces ticket. And I think that, you know, you're pointing something out that's critically important because there is a division in our industry, right? Between lifestyle and growth MSPs.

[00:36:56] And I think we'll talk about that on the next episode of All Things MSP. Oh, I see what you did there. Well, stay tuned for part two. Same bat time, same bat channel. If you want to know what's happening, check us out at facebook.com slash group slash allthingsmsp. Check us in high def glory. 1080p, baby. YouTube.com slash at allthingsmsp. We're on all of your favorite podcasting tools. Leave a review. I want to see those reviews.

[00:37:23] My goal for 2025 is to get more reviews of this show. Leave a review or I will find you. Any last words before we say goodbye to the, now the very scared folks at home? Well, you know, it's a scary show. I just think that if you take one thing away from this episode, it is that number one, we love our marketing friends. Okay. So we're not really saying that marketers are shit. Okay.

[00:37:54] But they're only shit until you get your shit together. I guess that's what I want to say because you need to understand your business well enough to do the marketing yourself before you can direct somebody else to help you with it. Awesome. I was going to say something very similar. So I'm not going to say it. That's Eric. I'm Justin. Bye. Bye. I guess I should stop recording now. I got shit on my shirt.

[00:38:28] Thank you for listening or watching the All Things MSP podcast. If you liked this episode, go ahead and give us a thumbs up. Hit that like button and consider subscribing to catch all our weekly episodes. And from your host extraordinaire, Justin Escar, and myself, Eric Anthony, your humble producer and All Things MSP founder, thank you very much for spending your time with us. If you are not aware, All Things MSP started as a Facebook group and now supports over 6,000 members.

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[00:39:25] Please consider checking them out. The All Things MSP podcast is a BizPow LLC production. The views and opinions of the hosts and guests are their own and do not reflect the thoughts and opinions of any employer, vendor, sponsor, or random taxi driver in the metro DC area. Be sure to join us next week for another exciting episode. We'll be right back.