Run The Play: The Mindset Reset to Fuel Your MRR Growth! 🚀

My mindset changed for you guys this week. And my keynote is how to fuel your MRR growth with mindset play. Now, one of the big challenges that we have, and my job here is to change your brain. Execution is so key in everything that we're working on and being a leader. How many CEOs do we have in the room? Owners, CEOs, founders? So almost everyone in this room. I'd say three quarters of this room. Also online. I can't see your hands, but put a 1 in the chat, right? Almost all of us in this room are leaders. So I want you to think about how important it is that you are putting a stake in the ground and saying, I have to be the one that leads my ship. Now, it's a lonely journey. Sometimes those same people, how many of you feel really alone and on an island at times, right? It's hard. Like, this is hard stuff to do. So you have to be the one. And I'm going to try and help you with that. That's part of my job and part of my role here is to help you guys go down the next step. And the MSP industry right now, it's going through a lot of changes. We've definitely seen. If we go back, I'm going to go back to probably the first seismic shift that we saw. Kevin's yelling at me to stay in the middle. You can't give me the damn stage if I got to stay in the fucking middle, bro. Come on. I don't know what the point is. If we have it. If we do that. Give me a second. I don't even know what to say about that. But think about all the changes that we saw. If we go back to 2000. We kind of saw our first seismic shift. We went from a traditional MSP straight out to. We got hit with COVID Kind of overnight it happened. And we had to completely transition over to being remote first MSP. So that was seismic shift number one. Then over the next two to three years, we saw cybersecurity hit us pretty hard. MSPs were not ready for that. Even though I'm a firm believer. And this, I get a lot of flack for this. But I'm a firm believer that MSPs were kind of responsible for the cybersecurity problems we have now. Cause we kind of let the clients dictate the path for a long time based on a lot of different variables. And I get a lot of heat for it. But if you really think about it, it's kind of true, but that was seismic shift number two and now we're watching seismic shift number three, which is a combination of the election, the economy and AI are kind of all together right now changing this entire industry because we have the end user consumer, I think, almost believing that it's going to be easier to do it because of AI. Right. Do you think that's accurate? They think that it's easier to do your job because of AI. We can replace our staff, we can replace our techs, we can do all these things. We can save money by doing all these things a different way. And I've seen more hardship in the MSP world right now than I've ever seen, even though it is the best time ever to own an msp. So let's talk about what that means. Why is it the best time ever? Those seismic shifts create opportunity. Now you have to be executing on the backside, the consistent, regular things, the discipline pieces, in order to see that opportunity become realized. And when you run into struggle instead of running from the potential hardship. Because what most people do, when they run into struggle, what do they do? Anyone want to say when they run into struggle, what do most people do? They go to a place that they're comfortable with. They go to something that's familiar. They want to fall back on what they used to do that already worked for them. Even if it didn't work 100%, if they saw 1% success. Most people try and fall back on that versus and I'll just take I'm a sports guy, Cindy's a sports guy. Lindsey's trying to be a sports guy. She took up golf recently and it's kind of, she's trying, she's working on it, but most people, and I'll just take it, take a look at golf. And I'm a pretty avid golfer. When I struggle and I look at my game, I'm very good short game, I'd say pretty decent off the tee. Middle irons are my worst. How much better would my golf game get if all I focused on was putting? Where I struggle is middle irons. I need to focus on what I'm not good at to improve my game versus think about business, think about when people run into adversity. Almost every single time we fall back on things we're comfortable with and familiar with. So we have to take that. I'm going to talk a lot about that as we go here today, but we have to take that and we have to put that in our back pocket and say this is what we need to be doing when we run into adversity. Because like I will say, like I said, I have seen more MSP hardship this year in 2025 than I've ever seen. And yes, even through Covid. Because the thing that happened with COVID what's funny is, even though there was hardship there, MSPs were actually really needed a lot because people were forced to change overnight almost. And what did they have to do that was different? They had to work from home. Exactly. So they were like, okay, I don't know how to run my. So the phone worked versus every other industry. There's entire industries that got shut down during COVID time. Whereas MSP actually, even even though we had to pivot, we saw a blossom and we felt needed. So it's really important to understand that all of this that we're seeing right now is driven by multiple market changes. Clients actively wanting cheap it. Now, I want you to think about most of your clients that you have. Most of the prospects you talk to, they have in their brain. And this is all the crux of the run the play mindset, mind you. So most of the clients and the prospects you have, their mindset around IT technology, msp, computers is the very first day they bought a computer or got a tech or got any type of technology at all. This is how it was run in their brain. It hasn't evolved much. So it is. The whole point of run the play is we have to change their brain to think differently. What does Cindy say? Times have what? Times have changed. We have to do things differently. I had someone in this room tell me today I have all these legacy clients. None of them want to listen to me. Have you talked to them? Well, no, but I don't think they want to listen to me. You got to actually have the conversations you have to execute if you're going to get people to buy from you, if they're going to trust you. So yes, they may want cheap it, but they don't. If they don't know any better, it's still McDonald's. You have to be the one that changes them. I know that the market is different right now. I know it's a heart. Like there's a lot of weird stuff going on out there. We see ups and downs constantly with everything. Financial, crypto, bitcoin, tariffs, all this other stuff is all over the place and people are not spending money because they're kind of like, I don't know what to do and I don't know what's going to happen. But we have to be the ones that control it. Execution matters. And when things are difficult, you cannot fall back into. Because I have seen this 50 times in the last six months and I've had people actively tell me I'm just going to go back to good, better, best because I can sell somebody cheap. And I will tell you cheap isn't cheap enough. I don't. If you're, if you're a price point focused company, I don't care what you're selling. Cheap is not cheap enough. And you will be. You have straight out. If you go back to good, better, best or if you go back to a single low price entry offer, you have straight out commoditized yourself. And you are, and I'll say it again, you are McDonald's, period. Now that's fine if that's the world you want to live in. But how does McDonald's make money? Purely quantity. Somebody just said it. John's like that was me. I said that McDonald's makes money purely on quantity, not because they have the best burgers. Do they serve a purpose? Absolutely. But the bottom line is it's being purchased because it's cheap. And they have to put a store on every damn street corner and every gas station to be functional. Can you afford to function that way? I want you to really think about that. And a lot of people have said to us in the last three, six, nine, 12 months, I don't need to sell in market. I just want to be a traditional msp. If you watched any of the speakers we had today, if you saw Rob McDonald's talk about how GRC, all these things are changing. We have a lot of things that are going to evolve over the next couple weeks, months and years. Keep in mind, seven figure MSP is traditionally extremely early. I was three years early to the Cybersecurity $300 per seat game. We were three years early to that. But it's still relevant today. It's actually the rest of the market's finally starting to catch up. Notice how $300 per seat's like the thing everybody says now. It's kind of the standard in the market. So understand that regulation, legislation, compliance, these things are all coming. We're just very early. So you need to get to. In a place you have a duty to deliver a best in class seat to your client. At the very least, I'll say this, you have a duty to present to them a best in class stack. How you package it and present it doesn't really matter. But you have a Duty to show them that they should have this. How they choose down the pipeline is up to them. And I'm here to remind you across this entire thing, there is no easy button on any of this. It takes time, it takes execution. And like I said, you have a duty to present all of this to your clients. And again, at the very least, you have to show them that they should be having this. Mike Semel said to me a couple weeks ago, if you don't know who Mike Semel is, it's Semel Consulting. He does compliance programming. And all of our entire compliance back end service that we have is based on the Semel system. They're at Comptia right now, but they'll be here today or tomorrow, I think. But the bottom line is Mike and I had about a three hour. You can't have less than a three hour conversation with Mike Semel for the record. But I had about a three hour conversation with Mike over various different phone calls. Two years ago, less than 20% of companies in the United States. Now I understand I'm only talking about America. We have multiple countries represented here and online. Less than two years ago, less than 20% of small businesses had any type of compliance legislation, regulation or compliance needs. As of the big beautiful bill signing on July 4th, it's 86% in America. Now is there police yet across the board? No, but they've put it in the act that there's going to be police. There's actually finally going to be teeth to hipaa. There's going to be all these things that we're going to have. Now why is. So let's go back to my question about why is it the best time ever to be an MSP owner? All of that. We finally have a smoking gun. We're finally in a place where businesses are going to start to say, holy crap, I need it at this level. Do you want to go back to my good, better, best mindset or I'm just going to be a traditional msp because you're just going to be commoditized with everybody else. So I know we're early, but continue to talk the talk, continue to walk the walk. This is absolutely critical stuff as you grow your business and you cannot price fix your way out of this entire challenge. Like there's a lot of stuff that we have to be doing here that you can't change your pricing on. And I've gotten barraged over the last, I'm going to say since Louisville, I've gotten barraged with people that said I'm just going to try and be the cheapest guy in town because I can't get them the old. I can't get new leads or work with my existing clients the traditional way. So I'm just going to go to being the cheap guy. I'll say it again, cheap isn't cheap enough. So you cannot price fix your way out of this challenge and you cannot cost cut your way to profitability. Now, I'm not going to say that you can't trim some fat at times. Absolutely. We've done it internally. You guys watched a lot of changes here at seven figure MSP over the last three, six months. That's by design. And you need to start. And this comes back to all the way around as I talked in the beginning of my, my talk. You need to start looking at your own company. Where do I need to be more efficient? Where do I need to be better? There's better opportunities out there. There's different systems. I will start by really looking at every vendor you're partnering with. We bring the vendors here by design that we do because they have the right systems in place. So you have to start looking at your own system, your own setup. How can I be more efficient? How can I be better? And you need to start thinking that I need to think sales and marketing first. I'm not saying tech should suck ever. That's our main service. I say this a lot when I do my live broadcasts. I have a dentist across the hall from me at headquarters. Aren't they're just expected to be a good. You were just expecting them to be a good dentist, Right? Like they're a dentist. They're open for business. They're expected to be a good dentist. That's by design. If they're a good business is not based on how good of a dentist they are. It'll help for sure. It'll help because they get return clients that way. But how do we know if they're a good dentist? As a consumer, what do we see their what their marketing. We see their sales, we see their spoken word, we see their video, we see their advertisements, we see them on TV, we see them on YouTube. We see their live presentations. So when you're thinking that I need to be a great service provider, I'm never going to discount that that's expected. But you need to be a great marketer, you need to be a great salesperson because that's how they determine whether that's how they get to meet you. That's what really matters. And I understand the market's kind of weird right now, and I understand we got a lot of weird stuff going on, but people are buying million dollar homes every single day. People are splurging on cars every single day. Especially with the big beautiful bill again, people are buying five that section 174. People are like, I live in Austin and people are buying G wagons like they're going, I can't keep them in stock. That and cybertrucks, they can't keep them in stock because they're big and they're heavy and they're 100% bonus depreciation. So people are doing this. So the same people who can't afford it, according to you, they can't afford it, they don't want to spend money on it, magically have the cash to splurge on cars and other business purchases. Why can they do that? In their heads, they see it as, hey, I can do this because it's a tax advantage or it's a strategy or I want to do this because it's a necessary part of my business. So you have to think to yourself, why does this entire thing work? They are buying those purchases entirely with emotion. It's kind of funny. I had a Tesla Model S for I'm actually, I had 10 years of Teslas. Not because they're EVs, I just thought they were. I'm a former race car driver, so they were the fastest car and I didn't have to spend 300 grand on a damn Lambo. So I had a Tesla Model S plaid, and it just came off lease and I was like, I don't know what I want to do. Like, the cars haven't really evolved. I didn't know whether I wanted to get another one or not. So I just let my lease expire, I turned my car back in and I bought a Model Y cash. If you guys know the Model Y, it's a little suv. And it's kind of funny because it goes like the same speed other than, you know, it doesn't go 210 miles an hour, but you don't really go that fast. But it's got the same acceleration. It kind of feels the same, but it's pretty basic. So I'm like a month and a half into my Model Y now, and I got the itch to go buy something else. Is that itch because of anything else but what? It's emotion, right? So I'm saying to myself, I need. And I'm like looking at that new Cadillac Escalade And I'm looking at all these like cool ass cars and other stuff and it's like, and then I think to myself, do I really need a car payment? I don't really care that much. But it's like. So I want you to think about how important emotion is in the buying process. Getting in front of your prospect and making sure that they understand every single aspect of it. Now I want you to understand how critical this is. Because if you treat the sale exactly how you treated them when you first started with them, they're gonna handle working with you exactly the same way. So you have to be the one that evolves because they're not going to evolve because they're, they're like the only way they're going to evolve. I want you to think about this. How is a client going to forcefully evolve that's a client of yours? What's going to happen? Cyber attack right there. That's the only way it's really going to happen. Maybe if they sell their company, but that's not really the best evolution you want. So they're going to, they can evolve, but they're going to have to evolve from something that's forceful. What can you not do with the cybertrack? You can't control it. Anybody in this room can prevent all attacks. We know better. Right? So you got to think about that. So we have to be the one that forces our way in the door. This is what run the play is all about. You force your way in the door and you say, I'm not going to take no for an answer. You have to sit down with me, you have to run the play with me. You have to do every single part of this or I'm going to be a pain in your ass. It can't be. Well, they don't want to do this. So I'm just going to go over here and I'll work on this. Oh, by the way, they were a half a million dollars a year shit. Now they went with somebody else because some, because somebody else talked to them. You have to be the one that stands up and says, I am going to run the play on them. I'm going to do everything in my power to control this entire sales process. Because if you don't control it, you know what's going to happen. At some point you will lose them. There's no one in this room, including me, that can control all client churn. You can't do it. You can't control all market conditions. They will eventually leave. Over time, everyone in this room, everyone watching online, everyone watching on the recording, you know what to do. We all know the process. You're just not consistently doing it. So if you are stuck at all, and almost, I'd say almost everyone in this room is stuck in some capacity, right? Myself included. We're stuck in some capacity in life and business. We got things that we deal with, that we struggle with. So I want you to think about why you're personally stuck. Most MSPs are extremely comfortable now. They're not comfortable because they're rich. They're comfortable because it's very, very pretty. Easy to have a decent living at 10, 20, 30, 40, 50K of MRR. That's. You think about your average worker, B person. I got a good friend of mine, his name's Kyle, he used to work for Wayfair and he got let go. Wayfair shut. You know Kyle, right? They shut down the entire Wayfair office in Austin. And just like everybody's done, they gave him three months of severance and he was very comfortable, very comfortable making 175 grand a year, whatever. Now he's kind of faced with I don't know what to do. And I'm talking to him all the time. Like he comes, hangs out at the office once in a while, brings me, brings me a coffee and we shoot the shit. And he's talking and his mindset and I just want you guys to understand this. I talked to him about, let's build your own thing up, let's get you to 10k mrr. And he's like, man, if I had 10k mrr, I don't even know what to do because I wouldn't even need to work anymore. Now think about it. What's 10k mrr to a normal worker? Be human being. That's 120 grand a year. But, but he's like, oh, that's tax free. I'm like, bro, that's not how this works. But out of the box, he's like, because my, you know, your first thing when you're trying to work with somebody that's a brand new entrepreneur is let's get you to 10k, let's get you started. Let's get you to 10k, let's got you moving along the train track. We got train tracks here, so let's move it around with train tracks, right? So he's getting somewhat comfortable, but his brain around 10k or 20k MRR is like, oh my God. Like I could just run this little business that's more money than he's 20k a month is 240 grand a year. That's more money than he was making working for corporate America. And dude's got three master's degrees. So I want you to think about how easy it is with 10 to 20 to 30 grand of MRR to become pretty comfortable. And MSPs are extremely, as a group, very reactive and very addicted to busy work. Right? This isn't a knock on you guys, it's just the reality. I had to break myself of this. I loved. Literally, one of my favorite things. I go Back to like 2007, my. What was that? The Action Pack, Remember the Microsoft Action Pack? That shit would come in the mail and I'd be like, ooh, I'd go load up new servers. And then VMware came out and it was a whole different animal because I wouldn't have to boot new servers up. I could just go on a VM and start playing. That was fun, right? It's fun to get addicted to all that work, but how much money do you make tinkering with loading new servers and working on clouds and building AI agents and workflows? There's no money there. So it gets very easy to get addicted to that because it's very comfortable. So you have to think about and side note on this. We solve all of this problem in this program, but it gets very easy to get comfortable. We have to constantly be challenging and working on ourselves. And the real problem in your life, in your business, especially as founders, owners, CEOs, we have to constantly push ourselves to have repeatable execution. Because you know what? It's not. It's not fun. It's kind of boring. It's hard to be consistent. And what comes because of that? We miss mrr. We lose whales, we lose deals, we lose chaos. We don't know how to manage people. Anybody in this room struggle with managing people. I was a shitty manager for a long. I'm still not the best. I struggle every day with this because we're all a remote team. So I don't see. I see my people once a quarter, sometimes a little bit more during the summer because we hang out and do some stuff, but it's once a quarter. We see each other on video, on teams, but it's not a whole lot. And you're talking over text and you're chatting and you're moving around. I struggle with my Filipino team. By the way, let's give it up for Leah, who's here from the Philippines. She actually had to she had to corral me last week. And she's like, hey, you really need to talk to the team because they're discouraged because you're an asshole. On short text, I'm like, okay, is that a lie? No. She's like, no, that's the truth. That's 100% true story. So we had a meeting last week, Monday morning, and we got the whole ops team together, which is all Filipinos. And they're like, wow, you're actually not a jerk. I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm really not. I really try. It's just hard. Cause I'm on my phone all the time and I'm doing 15 things at a time and I'm driving around and I'm working on shit and I'm on my phone all the time. So it's very brevity. I'm the king of brevity, for the record. So please understand that that's the world that your clients live in and your staff lives in. It is on us to change that now. What I am really good at suck at managing. But I am really good at consistent, repeatable execution. I'm very good at that. If you look at any of our socials, I put systems in place. I also am kind of a master delegator now, so I've gotten really good at those things. And when I ask any MSP owner what the problem is, every single MSP owner tells me I need more leads. Every single frickin time. I can't grow. Had literally five people today come up to me, I can't grow by running the play. I need more leads. Okay, I'm never gonna say that more leads aren't great, but what do the rest of your client base look like? Well, I don't really know. And I'm losing clients.