How Chris Wiser Doubled his MSP Revenue WITHOUT Spending on Ads!

Imagine doubling your MSP's monthly recurring revenue, signing clients left and right and all of this without spending tons of money on ads, maybe even having a referral network or all these things. That's really critical and it sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it's not. Let me share with you guys how I transform my MSP's financial landscape. Today I'm going to walk you through my journey of going from a single man MSP to making roughly 10k a month when I started out to a multimillion dollar 30 person company with tons of recurring revenue. I'm going to highlight the strategies for you that worked, especially focusing on how we achieve this without having tons of ad budget. Keep in mind, when I did this, we did not have Facebook ads, Google Ads, we didn't have any of that stuff. So I had to really build systems and processes and all these different pieces to make my MSP go. Like I said, my journey began pretty much as a zero person shop. Grew to a 100 plus. I think it was 300k of MRR when I sold my business. Now back in 2015, over 30 employees. The strategic shift that I took, I was a single person. MSP built my business as a individual contractor that I know many of you can relate to that. So what you have to do in growing your business is you have to think how do I take myself from working in the business every single day as the tech, how do I move from that tech to being the owner, the operator. Now it's a very strategic shift like I mentioned and it's really critical that you do this. But this is more of a mindset shift than anything specifically because you as the MSP owner operator, what do we start out as? We like tech, we like playing with toys, we like playing with and maybe I don't say toys, but we like playing with, playing with the technical stuff. We like working on servers, computers. MSPs owners are usually people pleasers too. So we have to get ourselves out of that working in the business mindset every single day. And we have to moving move ourselves to this. I'm going to work on the business concept. A couple things that are really critical with this. First of all, you have to purposely take yourself out of tech. Now that's hard. It's uncomfortable because we like, like I said, we like to do those things. Means probably your first hire. My first hire was a help desk individual, somebody answering the phone. Think about how many of you as MSP owners, your clients still have your cell phone, right? They're calling you boom, boom, boom, boom. You got to say no to that. We have to embrace our no. So step one is we have to get ourselves out of the clients call us seat. Step two is we have to start to embrace sales. We have to start to embrace getting out into the public life, focusing on lead gen and cash flow. Now many MSPs talk to me and they say, well, I grow by referrals. I have great referrals. It's awesome. Great, great, great. Okay, that's fine. But here's the problem with referrals. Not saying I wouldn't take them every single time. But the bottom line is you cannot control how many referrals come in. Yes, you can have a referral plan, blah blah, blah, all this stuff, but you simply cannot scale and grow the way you need to. I look at my, my firm 7 figure MSP. Now if I was completely reliant on referrals, I would not be sitting here today. Guys, we definitely get referrals. We have amazing, we have only five star reviews across all these different platforms and I still can't grow my business to get to eight figures with referrals alone. So you have to embrace sales. You have to believe that sales are, it is, is a core key cornerstone of your business and that's really, really important. That starts with charging properly. That's step number three, making sure that you're actually charging the right way with a percent profit margin on top of it. Now one of the things that I'm known for is talking about $300 per seat. Now that's kind of a little bit of a pipe dream number that's out there. Here's where that number comes from. So you understand this isn't just something that we threw out there as a, as a number like oh, it's like, oh, 300 per seat. It was all about looking at gross profit margin that the typical MSP should be charging and getting, which is an 80% gross profit margin on every single client seat that you have and then attaching what that number is. So it's 80 gross profit margin over your cost of goods sold. That's what our baseline for the 300 proceed is. Now that's going to vary. The next question MSPs asked me. Oh, what's in that seat? Here's my mindset around that. And here's where you should be. In today's world, good, better, best no longer should exist. Small, medium, large, silver, gold, platinum, whatever you want to call it. But because of where the MSP Sits in cybersecurity, where the MSP sits in terms of risk, all these different scenarios. It is our job, it is our duty as MSP owners, professionals, experts, whatever you want to call yourself. It is our job to put in what the client should have. Think about going to the doctor, to the dentist, and you know, to the, to the lawyer, any professional services industry. Do you want the good, the, do you want the best? And if I ask any IT professional, if you had unlimited budget, every single client, what would you put in? Well, we'd put in the best. So we know, and you know what the best is, what should the client have to properly protect? Because keep in mind, we can't prevent any hacks anymore. We have to do our best now not to prevent hacks, not to tell our clients that we got their back, that we're guaranteeing it, because you can't guarantee anything. We know that. So you have to do your best now to show that you were not negligent, which includes putting in the right stack. Now, at the very least, I'm not saying you're going to implement this for every client, but it's our duty to at least do an assessment and present it to them and then educate the client the proper way and let them make a decision. And your best should have pricing factored on an 80% gross profit margin. So we're seeing about what, 50, $60 per seat, ballpark cost. Most MSPs don't track their time, they don't know what their burden is, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So let's start out at $300 per seat. Keep in mind the average that comes into our discussions, our interview rooms with new MSP partners is about $68 per seat is what they're actively charging now. So even if you start at $300 per seat on a three year agreement, that's going to be a pretty damn good starting point. So that's my suggestions for how you should strategically shift. I got one more thing that I'm going to add on there. I'm going to add on top of that, on top of sales, you need to think about marketing. We need to spend money on marketing. Now the reason I put marketing at the end is because, hey, I could hand you the perfect lead right now. And how would you sell it? The same old way that you always did. So we got to learn how to sell first, we got to shift our brains, we got to learn how to sell, then we can start to spend some money on marketing and the Reason we put marketing last, not because I believe it should be last. I'm a huge marketer, I absolutely believe in it. But marketing is a slow play. It takes time. It also has a pretty low ROI in all reality of it. So, you know, you think about what your best campaigns are. Your best Campaigns are roughly 7, 8, you know, maybe 10% return rate, right? So I want you to think about how much money it costs because for every dollar we spend, we're going to maybe get 10, 10 cents back on that return. And it takes a lot of effort and it takes a lot of time and it kind of doesn't feel that great. By changing your mindset, by changing your process, by by focusing on sales, you can get some quick roi. Then we can start to invest that money into marketing. So those are my strategic changes and I think those are the things that I would absolutely recommend for you to implement them into your business. So the key moves that I made that allowed me to be successful and ultimately exit my business, first of all, I started hiring, I had to get all this load off of my shoulders and I'm kind of a natural delegator. So I don't want to be the guy that's in the trenches now. A lot of MSPs and MSP owners, they really struggle with letting go of some of that control. So I think that mindset shift for you has to be a really, really important thing that you embrace is I am going to start by hiring some people. Now I totally 100% understand people cost money. That's why we go back and we start to charge properly and we make some of that profit that we didn't have. Too many MSPs are not charging enough and it kind of puts you into this MSP wheel of death land where we're not charging enough, we don't have enough time and going around in the circle because you're having to be the person that does all the work. So you have to think, how can I get this off my plate? Even if I can't pay myself as much as I want to right now, I'm going to hire some people, make sure I delegate some responsibilities. You also have to have a sales process. That sales process I put in place was scalable. It was replicable. I could train a human being and I went and I closed a lot of stuff out of the box. Then I had something in a replica replicatable sales process that I could hand off to a salesperson and then I managed them. So hire some tech staff. My help Desk person that I hired was my very first hire. Ran my own sales for a while, then I did those things. I focused on cash flow, I focused on recurring revenue. I also made sure that I controlled how my clients paid me. And this is another really important thing, not having 30, 60, 90, 180 days of accounts receivable sitting out there because we allow clients to pay via check. So one of the things that I did was I moved everybody to a single scalable model and I moved everybody to autopay. Long term agreements, lots of recurring revenue, everybody on autopay, Chris out of the trenches. That is now something that we can hand off to another company. So even though I wasn't looking to get sold when I, when I sold my company, I wasn't active. I didn't go find them. They sent me a package and said, hey, we are looking to migrate into your market. Would you be interested in selling like, okay, maybe. And we looked at it and because I was doing all the right things. Now some of this was by accident, I'm not going to deny, but I was doing all the right things to properly grow my business, to properly scale my business, to properly get me out of the trenches. It made me also very acquirable at the same time. One last thing that I think I was very, very key about is I didn't have any single group of whales. When I talk about whales. I didn't have this one massive client that was responsible for all my stuff. I had pretty staggered revenue across about 90 clients. Had some big ones, don't get me wrong, I had one very nice large one, but if I would have lost them right then, it wouldn't have killed me kind of thing. So I want you to think about all those different things. And that is the strategic plan that I used to properly exit my business. Because once somebody came knocking, I said, okay, I didn't walk away from the cash and that's what mattered.