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[00:00:06] Not that like, not like that I've been doing it wrong all of these years. You know, we're going to be our 17th year and a lot of it has been shooting from the hip. Well, and it's not just that. I'm going to give you a little more credit here. Things change so quickly in what we do. Yeah. That what you did last year is not necessarily applicable for this year.
[00:00:32] Absolutely true. Which is why in the beginning of the year I said, F it. Let's start all over. No. We, I've put like, even in the few days between the holidays that I was able to like take an hour or two away to like think about things. I did like put together some semblance of a plan for 2025, which is what I feel like most entrepreneurs should be doing. Right? Like, like, agree. Agreed.
[00:01:02] Let's try to figure out how we can make these things work or whatever it is. Um, and I'm now, cause we're not fully back yet. We don't full come back until Monday, which I've already told my staff. Cause for you all know, we record this on Fridays. This is January 3rd. I warned my staff. January 6th is going to be a show. Like it's going to be, it's going to be bad.
[00:01:33] People are like, what's, what, what is this? What is this thing with letters on it in front of me? Like, I've never seen this thing before. Like that level of like, so I'm going to talk to my team when we, when we meet next and kind of go through these plans. Cause I think one of the biggest things is to make sure that the team is on board with it.
[00:01:59] Right? Like, I don't want, I don't want to just be like, okay guys, this is what we're doing. And then all of them be like, yay. Well, let me ask you this. Cause I think this is important to kind of wrapping up 2024, starting 2025. How much time did you spend at the end of 2024 reflecting on what happened last year and creating a vision for this year? About four and a half seconds.
[00:02:28] No, it's so easy to push your buttons. There's an app for that. Uh huh. Now I, I, I did because I look, one of the big metrics for me has always been our year over year revenue, right? Which is a weird metric to track, but like with how much my business has changed from 17 years ago, it's really one of the only metrics that has, that is trackable across all this time.
[00:02:56] And the national small business average is like what? 3%. We did 11%, which like most people would be like, that's amazing. And I was like, it's our third worst year in 17 years because I'm a pessimist.
[00:03:11] Well, and I don't know where it would actually land with most MSPs, but I would imagine that MSPs probably rank pretty high over the last several years because of the need has increased. Oh, for sure. And especially with the pandemic and everything that's come of that. Right. How people are working. I think that's the other reason why I worked so much over Christmas break.
[00:03:37] Michelle and I were talking about this, that like everyone kind of got okay with being home for the holidays and working through them and not like taking a break because we were all like stuck home anyway. And we didn't, we had an excuse to not see our families. And now that we've like, I'll say come out of the pandemic. People were like, I liked that. I don't want to have to go to Toledo or wherever the hell your family is from. No offense to Toledo.
[00:04:07] But like, so they just worked. It's also why I think that we've seen a massive decrease and maybe it's just the area we live in, but we've seen like a massive decrease in like holiday stuff, lights and blow ups. And the Jews call it moshpucha, but like that's, it wouldn't translate for Christmas stuff. So like, there's been like a lot of less of that too. So the, the lack of all that, you know, allowed me to work more, which didn't give me enough time to reflect.
[00:04:37] But I did, you know, with, with the, how the industry has changed. I do, I don't try to compare myself 2024 to 2008 when I started. I try to compare myself, you know, over the last couple of years and see what that trend looks like and things like that. And what I should be happy about more than anything else is that it's always been up turn. Even 11%, while yes, it could be our third lowest year.
[00:05:07] The two lowest years for us were negative numbers. And that was back when I was on my own, when I like put too much money into one account or I screwed something up or whatever. And I haven't been on my own now for close to 13 years. So like, I can't really compare that, right? There's things that once I now can, now that the year has ended and I can look at the numbers holistically for the year, I can dive into them.
[00:05:36] I can figure out which departments are doing better than others. I can figure out which products are doing better than others and we can, you know, lean in on those things to make stuff better. This has been a weird cold opening because it's supposed to be funny and we haven't done anything funny. And we're just leading right into the episode that we were going to talk about. Except you're pushing my buttons. Where's the button that goes? Finanir, nir, nir, nir, nir.
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[00:07:04] I am your host, Justin Escar. And with me for yet another year is my podcast producer, Man With A Plan, and the guy you hear the most from in the All Things MSP Facebook channel, Mr. Eric Anthony. What's up, buddy? You know, we're coming out of the holidays. By the time this airs, we'll be... It'll be February. No, we'll be a couple weeks into January at least. And, you know, I think everybody has a really good outlook for 2025.
[00:07:34] So I'm encouraged with what's going to happen in the industry this year. I find New Year's to be such a weird thing. I listen to this comedian that now... Pete Holmes. I was blanking on his name for a second. Pete Holmes, where he's just like... I don't know why New Year's is January 1st. Every year is a new year compared to the year before. Like, I'll go around to people on August 3rd being like, Happy New Year. It's one year since August 3rd of last year. You know what? But it's a good optimistic view of things.
[00:08:03] It's a good optimistic view of things because you always can start fresh. Yes. And I think that's the point, right? And I think because, you know, this is obviously what we're going to talk about today is we're going to talk about some goal setting and things like that for the beginning of the year. But that's an excellent point is that every day of the year can be that new starting point. Yeah. If, you know, if something happens and you start with good intentions now,
[00:08:31] but you don't get things set up, it's okay. You can start in February or March or April. It's the same thing with that diet. I'm going to sleep more. I'm going to read more. I'm going to invest more. If you don't do it today, do it tomorrow. Actually, the funniest thing I've ever seen about goals was like, set yourself a really hard goal. And when you've accomplished that goal every day, tell yourself it's been a good day and start your day over.
[00:09:00] So if your goal is to get up at five in the morning every day, wake up at five in the morning and then immediately say, hey, I did that and go right back to sleep till tomorrow. I don't know if that's the intended purpose of that. However, it's a good point. I will say that that kind of comes down to the habit tracking portion of what I like to do. Everybody knows I have the daily cards, I think.
[00:09:30] Hold on. Yep. Makes for great. Makes for great radio. Obviously, I'm not going to show you all the secrets on today's card. But these cards have, you know, blocks of time, hourly broken into quarters, and then lots of places for me to track everything. And what I do is on the back of them, I have a separate little grid where I can track the specific habits that I'm trying to work on
[00:09:59] right now. And funny enough, one of those is waking up at 530. However, I'm actually moving it to 430. Ugh. That sounds horrible. I know, but I'm waking up already by five. So, and I need to get more done. So on the new All Things Try to Go to Bed podcast, Eric wakes up at crack-ass at dawn. He does go to bed at seven. I do text Eric at like 7 p.m. And he's like, I'm in bed.
[00:10:28] Not quite, but close. Okay, Grandpa. You know I love you. I do. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about some strategies and such for this coming year, which is like obviously the thing that everyone talks about right now, right? Like what are my strategies? What are my goals for 2020? And so as we were talking about in the pre-show there for a little bit, you know, I did take a little bit of time to reflect. I did think about the things that we're going to do.
[00:10:54] Actually, the things that I thought about most actually were ideals that I got from the rest of my team. So sometime in the beginning of December during one of our staff calls, I said to my team, hey, what's something we should do internally to provide a better customer experience? Right? This wasn't like what new product should we sell or like, you know, who do we need to hit up for more money or whatever. It's like what could we do? And I was like off the cuff, come up with something. I don't care how big, how small, whatever.
[00:11:25] And one of the things that we don't have at Virtua is like a, is a official quote unquote account manager, because I never really felt like we're at the right size for an account manager. Plus account managers, in my opinion, are just people to keep people happy, not necessarily bringing in more money. And if we know anything about me, I'm all about making money. So I'm thinking, I've been thinking about that. And I'm going to promote our friend Paul Green for a second.
[00:11:52] Paul is doing a thing in the beginning of the year to increase your leads. Right? So I was like, oh, you know, I'll check up. I like Paul. I'll check out his thing. And his response was like, do you have a CRM? And I was like, no. Because we've talked about this before. Like I tried HubSpot once and like no shade, but like I opened it up and it looked like I got hit in the face with like the Big Apple circus with all the lights. I opened the page. Like I signed up.
[00:12:21] The sign up was easy. Put in my email, put in my password. It opened up and it like vomited all over my face. So I was like, I immediately canceled because I could not deal with it. So I was like, okay, well, we don't have an account manager and we don't have a CRM. So I was like, the first thing I need to do is either look for something that's going to work or instead of adding another tool to my list, let's build something and something we have. And so we use ClickUp. So the first thing we did was build a CRM simple enough
[00:12:51] that I can use to track things and do whatever. And I have two members on my team, Fred and Justin, who are very good at ClickUp and are able to like, I can come up with an idea for something I wanted to. I wanted to email me. I wanted to connect to Halo. I wanted to do this. I wanted to tell me how Eric likes his toast in the morning, whatever. And they're building all those parts out for me. Right? So it's like a little bit of me, a little bit of delegation. And I was like, that's our first big thing.
[00:13:21] That's our first piece. Right? So then I was like, let me take this a step further. And I was like, everybody had really good ideas during this quick exercise of what can we do to better the customer experience? Some of them were simple. Make it easier to check people in. Make it easier. You know, put better notes in our tickets. Things like that. Whatever. So then I thought to myself, okay, we already do weekly goals. Every Monday we have a huddle. We say, what's our goal for the week? And on Friday, I say, how'd you do?
[00:13:50] Well, Wednesday we say, where are you at with it? And Friday we say, how'd you do? But I was like, we got to go bigger. So ClickUp has these templates. And I was working with Justin and Fred again. And we pulled up a template. And we found they have a smart goals template that you can just implement right into ClickUp. So I was like, perfect. Let's modify this for us. And I already told my team that like on our first team call, which will be next week, everybody comes to me with your goal for the month. Not just your goal for the week.
[00:14:20] Because I feel like goals for the weeks go by really fast. And sometimes they're really, they're not moving the needle enough. But I feel like a goal for the month that can be trackable, the T in smart, is something that we can build. So we built that up. And like these are the things that I was thinking about most throughout the last two to three weeks.
[00:14:41] What simple moves can we make to better our internal processes to fit under Virtua's new banner, which is growth without expansion? It's called raising prices. That's already included. That's already in our contract. If you don't have a contract, Bradley Gross is waiting for you. But it's not just that, right? It's how can we grow the business without expanding?
[00:15:09] And, you know, I don't need everyone coming to me and going, we need more staff. We don't need more staff. We need more tools. We don't necessarily need more tools, right? We may need to get rid of a couple tools and replace with a different tool. But that's not expanding our stack, right? How do we grow based on the things we have? And so trackable things like this. Here's another great example. I have made the decision to, we say no to a lot of customers.
[00:15:35] A lot of people come to us and we say, like, you don't really fit our bill or, like, we don't do that kind of project work or whatever. We really only try to get monthly recurring customers. Right. But to hit our finance goals for next year that I've already established, I have decided, and I cleared this with my team, we're going to take on some projects. Well, we don't have a project. We have ways of tracking where we're at with a project, but we don't have a project tracker.
[00:16:00] Like, I don't have a tracker that's telling me that we did a project and we closed it and we made this much money. We do have, like, the progression because it's all in our tickets. So I just went in and built something just for myself so that way at the end of the year I can go, we did 108 projects and this is how much money we made on projects. It's separate of, like, what's in QuickBooks or, you know, Halo or whatever. So I have a quick reference guide to say, like, these are the ones that work the best. These are the ones that are most profitable.
[00:16:28] And so we can try to target more of those, you know, back half of the year or next year or whatever. Right. And the other thing that I would add to that, because that type of project or professional services work, whatever you want to call it, is a great lead into a recurring revenue contract.
[00:16:46] So you also would probably want to tie it to your marketing processes so that once you complete a project and you have this trusted history with a new client, that you are presenting them with the opportunity. Okay, we've done this one project for you. We've identified these things that we could manage for you. Let's talk about what that would look like.
[00:17:13] Yeah. So all of these things, like, and nothing I'm talking about here is new to anyone who's listening. Like, we've all, as MSPs, had these ideas or tried these processes. The trick is, to what you're saying earlier about, you know, your cards, is that they have to be things that can be written down and tracked and managed in that regards.
[00:17:38] But it can't be something that takes too much time out of, like, my day. If I'm spending all day managing the CRM as opposed to making the phone calls, I've lost it. Right? So one of my favorite management, I'm not going to call him a guru because he's older than that. Peter Drucker says, what gets measured gets managed. Yeah. Right? And that's absolutely true. But you're right.
[00:18:07] So many people stop measuring because it's too difficult to measure. And that's one of the most important things as we're setting goals for this year is you have to do exactly what you did. And you have to set up a methodology for measuring it that you're actually going to do. And that's, honestly, that's why I use these cards instead of a bullet journal to keep track of my daily to-dos and my habit tracking and my schedule.
[00:18:37] I mean, my calendar is in the computer, you know, because it has to be. Okay? But it's so much easier for me to carry around this little card and reference it just having it sitting on my desk for all those things that I want to measure. I do, again, going back to, like, the simplicity of things. Because so new year, new you. And I started working out again.
[00:19:03] And I started working out a couple of days before New Year's because I wanted to get my body back into the swing of things. And this actually came up in the Aces channel, which was like, what's something you all want to do better this year? And someone was like, I really want to start working out again. I have no excuse. You can't see this on camera. My gym is literally four feet to my left. Like, there's a double glass pane door and I can see my weights sitting on the floor right there. And for months, I watched those weights get collected in dust.
[00:19:28] And so I was like, you know what, I want to look a little bit better before Aces coming up in May. I want to do these things. But I was thinking about all of these things you have to track when you want to look better, get better, be more healthy, whatever. So I just signed up for MyFitnessPal. And I'm not endorsing them in any way to perform because I signed up for about an hour and a half ago. But the amount of stuff that they want you to track to figure this stuff out is so overwhelming. I'm already mad by it. Like, I don't wear my Apple Watch to sleep because the battery will die.
[00:19:58] So I need to figure out a sleep tracker so I can track my sleep. I need to log literally every meal I eat. That's a pain in the ass. I also, however, want to log the days that I'm working out. And whilst the Apple Watch does make it easier because you can turn on the fitness mode and it'll track and you can look at your calendar. Really, actually, I watched over the Christmas break, there's this guy on YouTube. His name is Mr. Who's the Boss. He's like this Southeast agent out of England. And he bought a new home.
[00:20:28] If you want to get super jealous, watch his stuff, but whatever. And he just released his new Smart Gym. Of course, it's sponsored by like Techno Gym. So he's got like $250,000 worth of like new gym equipment that he's never going to use or whatever it is. But the thing that caught my eye the most was he literally has a, I think it was a pegboard or like a little board that has stickers. Every day you work out, you just put a sticker on the board. Yep.
[00:20:56] But I got a whiteboard that's like, you can see it in my camera shot here right there that is never used because it's in a really bad position that I'm going to put once we're redoing the walls in the gym. But once those are done, I'm going to put the whiteboard up there and I'm going to make a grid and I'm going to say, did you work out today, fatty? And I'm going to put like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and I'm going to mark the days that I worked out. Because I think like a simple visual tracker, way easier to use. And it's the same thing here.
[00:21:23] Like my fear with using ClickUp is that I don't have it open all the time or it's not annoying me enough to want to do something. That's where I always fail. Knowing that will help me try to be in it more. But everybody's a little different. Some people are really regimented about having their project management software open on a second monitor always right there.
[00:21:49] Like I don't have room in my office here, despite the size, for like a TV on the wall that has it on there at all times. Right. Right. I used to – what's funny about this, now that I'm thinking about this, I used to live and breathe by monitoring systems. I don't remember what it was called. But years ago when I worked for the ISP and then I started on my own, we had this like – it was basically like an uptime tool. Like it told us when clients were going up and down. Right.
[00:22:17] And even when I started on my own and I would roll this out at clients, I had a dedicated computer with a small monitor on it just up all the time with it in the corner. Or when I got to a much bigger monitor, I had it as like an inlay on my desktop. So I can see it all the time. I don't do that anymore. And I definitely should because I think like I would have something up in my face. I would just need to figure out how to make it happen somewhere in my space. So quick side question.
[00:22:47] That dashboard that you're talking about, did it bark at you? Only if something went down. Yeah. Okay. It was hound dog. No. Oh, do you mean like it did it physically bark? Or I thought you meant like – I thought you meant like – No, I meant actually make the part of it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, it didn't actually bark. No, it didn't bark. It was some simplistic like red green bulb. It was super – Oh. Super ghetto. It doesn't matter.
[00:23:15] I'll find – if you really care about it, I'll find it. Put it in the show notes when I find it. It's in some archive file somewhere on a computer that's probably on a shelf over there. But my point being that like I – it's weird how like over time I was like, oh, I've superseded this. But in reality, my body is like, no, you haven't, dummy. Like tone it back to what works, which always comes back down to like trusted systems. But that's another podcast.
[00:23:44] So setting goals is really important. But I feel like – and we all know that smart is the right way to do things. But that trackable part, I think more people like you need it in your face. Like your card, you said sits on your desk all the time. Yep. Right? It's right there. Well, oh, because you take it with you. Right. Yeah. It's there. You need something there.
[00:24:08] And I feel like we live in a generation now where out of sight, out of mind. Which is why we're so bombarded by notifications on our smart devices. Yeah. Well, and I think that's always been a problem. But I think that's why analog is in some cases, in a lot of cases for this, a better solution than digital. Everyone's entitled to their own opinions. I know. No matter how long they – That counts more. No matter how long they –
[00:24:38] You just went to the opposite way. Yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong. I have my – you call it a bullet journal. I call it a journal. This little, you know, buy these by the dozen. Mm-hmm. But, like, I have notes that – like, I remember we were building out this project that we were doing before New Year's. And, like, I just laid out all the things I needed to do in there. And I went to my team and I was like, this is dumb. Why am I writing it in a notebook? There's got to be a better way. And so one of my team members put it in ClickUp.
[00:25:07] And I was like, that's great. I'll never see that again. Like, it didn't – Yeah. So I don't know if it's – I don't know if it's an analog versus digital thing so much as is it something – and I go through, like, trusted systems way too often. Agreed. I'm not a trustworthy – I don't trust a lot of people very easily, nor do I trust systems.
[00:25:31] So, like, I've been through, like, Todoist or the Reminders app or ClickUp or Back to the Reminders app or Post-it Notes or Notebook. Like, I need something that's going to feed me the notifications that are important for me to be able to do things and weed out the rest. And that is not an app that exists. No.
[00:25:59] However, I think that it's probably going to come about as soon as we let AI read our email. That is not the topic of this episode. And I was really hoping we were going to go without talking about that. Let's talk about AI for a second, though. Because going back to setting goals, though, I decided to take a half a day.
[00:26:27] And I played with our friends, ChatGPT. And I wanted to help create some playbooks for us, operational playbooks for us to do over the next year. Now, the end result to these playbooks – I'm going to skip to the last page here. They weren't wonderful. They weren't mind-blowing. They weren't anything that I didn't already think about in some way, shape, or form.
[00:26:55] However, they were all of my ideas condensed into a single document. Well, and it got you from zero to 50% much faster than you would have on your own. And now that last 50% is where your value comes in. Right. The humans have to come in.
[00:27:17] So I started off with – and I want to share the way I did this with everyone because I would like everyone who is listening to try this out and see how it works for you. You can see that I opened up ChatGPT because the glow on my monitor just changed from the normal darkness. By the way, ChatGPT lets you have folders now if you're in the page. I saw that. Project folders. Project folders. Okay. So my first prompt – if I can get all the way to the top.
[00:27:46] Welcome to Virtual Computers. You're now our chief growth officer. Help me create some playbooks to increase our profit, not just gross, numbers for 2025. Ask me what you need to provide the best solutions. Try to be concise and clear with no extra fluff. Remember, you're now part of the C-suite. You answer only to me, the CEO. What data do you need to understand your role, understand our business, and then be able to create solutions, playbooks, et cetera, to help us grow the company for the year?
[00:28:15] And so it started to ask certain things. And then it – like in the beginning, it was good, right? Hey, give me your revenue breakdown by service line. What's your profit margin? Who are your top clients? How are leads sourced? What kind of budget allocation are you using? What is your conversion rate on your sales pipeline? All of these are great questions.
[00:28:35] What are your fixed costs, variable costs, efficiency matrix, customer retention rates, competitive landscape, target audience, existing growth strategies, partnerships, new services, profit, target, key metrics, and cultural fit? All of these are wonderful things. So, of course, I said, ask me this slowly. If I – that's where I went off the rails because as soon as I got through the first grouping of business overview, it started to provide solutions for those things.
[00:29:03] It didn't continue down that list. So, by the end of it, I got observations about particular clients and who's using what. And I use client names just to feed so that way I can keep track, you know, retention risks and things like that. How do we expand out on our shop? And then it came to, like, building a YouTube channel and a CRM to which I said, I don't have a CRM. And it said, you fool on whatever. And so, it very easily went to the left. And I wish I can go back to the top and start it over again.
[00:29:33] But it did, however, in doing this, going back to your point of raising prices, help me create new business, new plan to yours. So, like, our normal plans are we have a basic, which is just MDM, and that's it. And we have a – and premium, which is, like, MDM, DNS, filtering, and hours, and a couple other pieces, right? And it was like, well, what about, like, a basic plus or a premium plus or a middle or, like, things like that? And we played out a couple scenarios to make that work.
[00:30:03] So, it did come up with some stuff, right? And at the end of it all, I have a three-page playbook here, building out a new referrals program, getting custom testimonials and advocacy, which, by the way, neither of those are rocket science ideas. These are things we've thought about but gave us some other ideas. For example, give them dark web monitoring for free as a bonus for signing somebody up or whatever it is.
[00:30:32] And it even gave me the execution steps, draft a referral announcement email, set up a tracking system using Google Sheets or ClickUp, and here are the column names. Client follow-up campaign. Gave me an upsell campaign. Gave me a targeting marketing campaign. Even gave me ideas for what to do for the repair shop. And the last one, which I liked, was long-term vertical expansion and gave some suggestions on how we can go after them.
[00:30:56] So, like I said, it did some stuff, but it comes down to the prompts, obviously. But all of these things were like, oh, we can definitely make goals out of all of these. I'll shut up now. Well, so we try not to talk about AI too much, right? Yeah.
[00:31:14] But I think this is a great way to take some nebulous ideas, brainstorm them with somebody that you can talk to at 2 a.m. because you're up worrying about this stuff, and actually get some answers back that, no, they're not the end-all be-all, right? It's not meant to be. Yeah.
[00:31:38] But you're going through iterations faster with something like ChatGPT than you would on your own. And I think that's the primary value of doing something like this, is you're iterating through it faster because you have that person, A, that's always available, and B, is very quick to respond.
[00:32:00] I actually, while you were talking about that, I'm like, you know what, you could take a list of all of your clients and their website addresses and go feed that into ChatGPT and say, tell me who my ideal clients are. Yeah, 100%. And, or give me, you know, what makes these clients similar or different?
[00:32:27] And then you can start using that information to narrow down things like marketing. Because it's really easy to take that information and then extrapolate out what makes them similar so you can write in their language, right? Which is another thing. We've talked about this when it comes to SEO. So wait, hold on. Let's bring this back to goals. So using something like ChatGPT, as much as we don't like talking about AI, you're right.
[00:32:53] It is good for iteration and it is good for all of us who are up at 2 in the morning, even though you're asleep, you're going to wake up in two hours. So the ideal here is like you could ask ChatGPT, help, you know, help, you're now an entrepreneur as an MSP. Help me come up with some goals to do X, Y, Z within my business. But you, the human, have to know what that is going to be, right?
[00:33:19] If you want to double your net profit. By the way, people who tell me, like somebody posted like, what's your MSP goal? And someone's like, I want to double my top line revenue for the year. I was like, you are shooting for the moon, homie, because unless you're making $15,000 a year to get like to double your top line revenue in one year is a massive undertaking. Depends on size. I know the person who wrote.
[00:33:50] They're like a two person office. They're like, you know, like the other person who wrote that was. The ideal though here is you could use something like ChatGPT to help figure out how do you track those goals, right? Because as entrepreneurs, if you look at it from the entrepreneurial operating system, right, we're the visionaries. There's so much that we're supposed to pass down to the next person down, which is the integrator. You may not have an integrator. You're trying to play both roles. It's hard to do.
[00:34:17] So you can use ChatGPT to be your integrator and say, this is what my plan is. I want to increase our MRR by 25%. I want to lower our costs by 15%. I want to be able to, you know, market and I want to be able to get 60 new leads in a month. Whatever your goals are.
[00:34:42] But see that if you give the right prompts to ChatGPT, you can get it to at least help you figure out what some of those measurable pieces are of that SMART goal, right? What should you be tracking? How should you be tracking it? And it even gives you like, like I said, if you want to make it easy, you can say like, I'm writing it in a Google sheet. It'll give you the columns to use, right? It's super easy to be able to like bounce off of that, to be able to set those business goals and set yourself up for success for the following year. Yep.
[00:35:12] Totally agree. Cool. So that's been a good show. No, I think we've covered some really important topics, right? And, you know, you don't have to follow the SMART framework. Obviously, I'm a big proponent of it. I just this morning learned about a new one called NICE. So if SMART freaks you out, you might try NICE. I don't remember what the acronym stands for, but it seems legit to me.
[00:35:41] And one of the things that you mentioned, but we didn't really talk about, was when it comes to this reflection and vision for next year, if you have employees, which I think most of you probably do, involve them in that reflection and vision because their viewpoint is going to be different from yours. And, you know, Justin, from what I'm hearing you say, you did that and you're doing that as part of this process.
[00:36:09] And so I really just, when you're setting goals, I think about it this way. You've got to have the vision. You've got to know where you want to end up at the end of this year, right? But you also need to know where you're starting from. So if you're not measuring things now, you better start because you need to know where you're starting from.
[00:36:30] If you have your start point, your end point, now you just fill in the middle with the things that you have to do to get from A to B. And some of those might be projects that are just done one time to get ready or prepare to get you down the road. Some of them may be habits that you have to do over and over and over again and track until you get to that goal. Agreed. Agreed.
[00:37:00] We're so agreeable today. It's a very agreeable thing. I don't know what nice is, but here, let's set ourselves some goals right now for the podcast, right? My goal for this podcast is to increase our listenership by 30%, right? Which means you, the listener, need to go tell all your friends to join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash allthingsmsp. Follow us on YouTube at youtube.com slash at allthingsmsp.
[00:37:27] And tell your friends to go listen to us on your favorite podcasting app. See, there's a really nice way to buckle that up. Yeah. Nicely done. Nice little bow for the people at home. Your late Christmas gift is my sass and wit. All right, Eric, anything else before we sign off for today? No, I think that's it. However, I will say that if Facebook is not your thing, you can follow our LinkedIn company page.
[00:37:57] It's aptly named All Things MSP. So if you don't do Facebook, you can follow us over there. Yeah. You could. Or you could just go to Facebook. That's Eric. I'm Justin. Bye. 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.
[00:38:26] 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 were not aware, All Things MSP started as a Facebook group and now supports over 6,000 members. We also have a LinkedIn page for those of you who don't do Facebook and make sure to check out our YouTube channel for even more content. A special thank you to our elite sponsor, CoreView, helping you manage your Microsoft 365
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[00:39:23] 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.