Taking your MSP from a 1-Person Mindset to an MRR Machine!

But it is mind blowing to me how many people actually don't execute. And I want you to think about that. Think about yourself. What does your personal history look like? What is your history of execution? How much do you idea? Everybody's got ideas every day. I'm gonna talk about this in my keynote, but everybody's got these ideas that they talk about every single day. But what's the difference between actually thinking them and doing them? Right. There's a lot of work that comes with it. And if you guys have comments or anything that you want to talk about, please go up to the mic during my talk because this is going to be a little bit interactive. I got a little worksheet that I put on your table. The luck worksheet is mine. We're going to come to that and talk about it in a little bit, which is a pretty cool little worksheet. Should see it. I'm going to be able to hold that up. Somebody do that for me. Oh, they're going out now. Great job, Ryan. Okay, okay. We talked about how good the team is. Damn it. God, Ryan. I literally have a thing on my wall that says Ryan with nine exclamation points. All right, anyway, we'll talk about that in a little bit. But I remember the day that I decided to start my MSP. And this goes all the way back to 2004. How many of us started. You heard Lindsay mention some of my humble beginnings. How many of us started as a one person show? A lot. Most of us, I'd say. What do you think the percentage of the MSP industry that started as a one person show is? 90, 90% plus. I would agree with that. We all started from very humble beginnings with an idea. Lindsey talked about the lack of formal education. I barely got done with high school. Not because I'm not intelligent, but I just couldn't deal with it. It was a pain in the ass. I didn't like it. But I think about all the way back to then. And I was at one of the lowest parts of my entire life. When I started my msp, I had a computer store. It was a retail computer store. It was actually called Wisconsin PC. I added cell phones because I wanted foot traffic. So I was already marketer thought process. I had no marketing training or anything at that point. Had never done anything marketing, never done anything sales. It was just like, hey, I like talking and I like computers. I actually worked at a dial up ISP from 1996 through the end of 2000 and I started my computer company Because I literally went to the owners and I said, hey, we got all this, all these people in. And I was living in Hartford, Wisconsin, southeastern Wisconsin. So I was living in Wisconsin at 20ish years old. And I went to the owners and I said, hey, you got all this foot traffic. Why would we not capitalize on that and start a computer company? It seems like it would go really well together. And they're like, nah, screw you, you're dumb. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do it anyway. They literally said, you're an idiot. That's a stupid idea. I did a million dollars in my first year. Almost like happenstance. So I'm like, oh, this business shit is easy, man. And it kept, kept going. We had the, we had the Y2K stuff that all happened for you younger people. Lindsay's. What is that? She even, she's not even paying attention, I don't think. She's not even in the room. She's saying, look at her. I'm talking about her. She's back there. You hear me talking about you. Oh, good job. Great, good. But anyway, what happened to me is about three quarters of the way through 2004, I had my bookkeeper, who was a part time person that got referred by a family friend, take almost 200 grand. I put over $100,000 and she took almost $200,000 in an embezzlement scheme. It was damn smart. She had done it before. We had the old school triplicate checks. You guys remember the checkbook? That was like the flip over checks. Nothing was digital back then. We barely had access to bank accounts online. It was still paper, everything. And she was totaling up. And I was in Wisconsin, which if anybody has dealt with Wisconsin, the sales tax and department of workforce development in Wisconsin can kiss my. You know what? Because they are the hardest people to work with. Even still this day. We had an employee about a year ago moved from Wisconsin to Austin while she misrepresented herself as a Wisconsin resident. And Paige, how long has it taken us to get away? We've been dealing with that shit for seven months. Trying to chase. Because they're trying to come after me. And they just like estimate and estimate. Anyway, so the state of Wisconsin was like. And what the girl did was she took, she did the sales tax reports, never filed them. Went to the back of the checkbook, wrote the checks to herself for the same identical amount. And I wasn't like, how much? How many of us are numbers guys? I didn't like reconcile every frickin Check. I didn't look at everything. I trusted my bookkeeper. I was a young businessman, blah, blah, blah. About nine months later, coincidentally, I had one of these state tax people drive by. She walked in the store and she's like, why aren't you paying your sales tax? And I'm like, bro, I am like, I don't know. You want me to say? And I went and got the reports and showed her. She's like, we show you owe like 190 grand, man. I'm like, whoa. Because we were doing. That was all the sales tax. So basically the state of Wisconsin was like, that's really sad. And I made one mistake that I didn't prosecute her because I had an attorney. That long story. But I made a huge mistake on it because where I didn't prosecute her. And the state of Wisconsin basically shut me down. So I went from making pretty damn good money at like early 20s to literally, how am I going to eat next month? Because I had no idea what I'm gonna do. But the cool thing that happened is all that challenge. And I will tell you, if you ever been behind the tax man. Anybody been behind the tax man? I've been behind the tax man. There's. I don't know if there's a worse stress in life than that because it took me a long time. I had three different bank accounts. Because what they do is they just levy you. They just take your money and they take as much as in the bank account. So I'm like floating money between three different bank accounts and they'd levy one for a minimal amount. And I figured out their system. Anybody needs to know this? I should put this in a book, by the way. But I figured out their system. So they would levy one and then I would dump all the money in that one. They'd take $700 and then I'd move it around in a circle. But you think about the stress that is. But all that stress, all that challenge led me down this path of standing right here today. And it's really critical. So this is a lot of what I'm going to talk about with mindset and. And all these different things that we're gonna go through. Because it led me to this place that I'm here today, which is that path to true wealth. Anybody have any idea what defines true wealth in my mind? You guys should have a pretty good idea. Cause I talk about this a lot. Anybody have any ideas? Anybody wanna say something? Yeah, go ahead. Is that Todd?

Yeah.

Be able to do what you want, when you want. So Todd nailed it for me to be able to do whatever I want whenever I want. But there's a lot of path that goes along with a lot of things you have to do to actually hit those goals and hit those numbers and to do all the stuff that we're talking about. Because that pain that I had, and I want you guys to think about how important the mindset is around this. Because I was in a place where I had a million dollar company at 24 years old and I had literally just got wiped off the face of the planet. I now owed $200,000, which if you've ever. And this goes back to the tax man, if you've ever owed money to the tax man, they're like, oh, we'll just tack 40% interest on that. It's like the highest interest loan you've ever had. But Wisconsin back then, they wouldn't let you make payments toward the principal. So I was literally. They wouldn't even let me do it. So I couldn't even make payment. Like it was pointless to make payments because I was making payments towards the interest, which was always. And even if I made payments, if I didn't make payments towards the principal, they would still levy me. So it was like this. I was just avoiding them as all I could. And I was like, are they gonna throw me in jail? Literally I was panicking cause I didn't know what was gonna happen. And I lived on that for six years. It was hard. That's why I don't have any hair. That's the whole thing. I'm gonna, I'm going with, that's what the reason is. But all that pain led me down this evolution path and a lot of my upbringing and I kinda, some of you guys know obviously from being at Indianapolis that I have this racing background. My friend Rico, I sponsor him, just spent literally last week with Rico in Iowa. He was racing at the Knoxville Nationals in Knoxville, Iowa. It's the biggest sprint car race in the world. It was really. I was with him the whole week. It was awesome. Going to his wedding actually this Sunday. So that should be pretty cool. But I had this grow up history of solving problems and some of it. I also had a little bit of rough childhood because my dad was a little abusive. So I was always trying to figure things and solving things, solving problems. So the mindset of I'm going to get depressed in failure did not exist for me. Like, I don't. I honestly, I can't explain it to this day. Failure was never an option. And that pain that I had, that tax man pain that my business has gone, pain forced me to evolve. Now, the reason I was able to evolve is because of my mindset. And I really love some of the messaging. You heard me mention earlier when I introduced Lindsey about the mindset and the slide comparisons between Ryan and what I'm going to talk about and what Lindsey's going to talk about, and even what Will talked about, that mindset of I'm not going to quit. And there's a couple things that they all said that is so key. And it's realizing that excuses are not reasons. And it is such a big deal because think about how there's people that have killed themselves for less than a $200,000 tax debt, right? I could have easily taken myself down that super negative path. I've lost family members to suicide and other things in my history. So there's a way I definitely could have gone down that super negative path. But because I didn't believe in failure, I said, I'm not gonna let that kill me. I'm not gonna let that take me down. But in the moment, I wasn't even like, it's hard when you're in the moment because you're like, the world is crashing, all this stuff is happening. And the challenge that I had with this whole thing is that evolution that I was at, it just didn't come without a mindset shift towards continual growth. And you think about where it really took me, and it took me to this path of business. So this is what I transitioned. I said, okay. I looked at the market and it's crazy because I did this without even. I look back and I reflect now and I look back on everything that I worked on with starting Tech Squad. And it was actually, what did I call it in the beginning? I think I was trying. It was like Wisconsin PC Tech Squad or something like that. I'm like, that's too fricking long. And I just was coming up with all these names. And then I actually got sued by Best Buy when I made Tech Squad because they're like, we own everything with Squad in it. And I won that. Actually, all that evolution and all that growth and all that pain forced me to evolve. And because I didn't go into a hole, I went to a place of how do I solve this problem? So I want you guys to think about how important that is. We have the best opportunity, this industry. And this continues to add up. Things are happening. Cybersecurity, the ability to Go into the mid market. The ability to go into businesses and talk about risk. Troy and I were talking. Troy, can I disclose your little thing that you had this morning? Where's Troy Solis? Okay. Troy and I were talking. He literally was standing in the hall and he's. I just lost a really good long term client. And we started to look into all the stuff that he's doing and I really like your mindset around it. And he started to say, how can we be better? So look at the difference in that mindset. That is big. And I really think that we have something to do with that, with you. And I'm very proud of that and I think it's really important. But I want you guys to understand how critical the mental stuff is. It's literally the difference between I'm gonna succeed or I'm gonna blame everything under the sun and I'm gonna keep. And Will, you said this too. I'm gonna keep looking for things and find. I'm gonna keep. There's gotta be a different way. How'd you even say that? You said that I gotta find a way. You're looking other places or something like that. Was that related to us or what was that related to? He said he looked at another place, but it was a setback. I went to another company. Okay, so you. Yeah, so Will said. So in. In your place, you were like, and you will. And I talk all the time. Just like literally he messages me like once a week almost. I'd say, and we talk all the time and we go through some things and I refused. It's very similar to that. So I like that attitude. And it never even entered my brain to go get a job and work for somebody because how easy would that be? It enters people's brains a lot. We see messages like the amount of MSPs that we have in our program is a lot. We see a lot of comments. Ryan, you've seen this a lot. We've also had a couple of people that have actively done this. Oh, these three or four things that I'm doing don't work. So I'm just gonna wrap up shop and go get a job in the best opportunity time that you've ever had. Now what I will tell you is all the stuff that we're talking about actively works. Everything we're doing works. I'll talk to Ryan here in a minute. He has no idea what I'm going to ask him. I said, hey, you're going to be ready in my room. And he's like, what are you going to do to me? But all this stuff actively works. But what's the differentiator? It's got to be here and it's gotta be, I'm not going to quit. I am not going to make excuses, and I'm going to take myself to the next path, to the next step. And sometimes, and I look back at. I'm going to come back to what I was saying earlier. I looked at when I started, when I started tech squad, when I had that embezzlement. I sat back and reflected and made a decision, like, what path should I take? And I looked at. And because of the people I knew and the people I talked to, I had an opportunity at an orthopedic clinic. They actually tried to hire me as their internal IT guy. You guys know that I like orthopedic clinics for a long time. I still love orthopedic clinics because they're usually private practice. They got a lot of opportunity, blah, blah, blah. But they tried to hire me as their internal IT guy. So I had that, and it was 120,000 a year. And I'm like, damn, this is in 2005. It was late 2004 with no money in the bank. And I ended up saying no because of my reflection. And I said, let's do this. I'll come on site for 20 hours a week. I want to be my own entity. And it was six grand a month, flat rate. That was my first contract. It was my first deal. Now, I could have taken the job, but. But because of my reflection and because of my ways of saying, I'm not gonna quit, I'm not gonna give up, I took myself down the business path. And I started to find out mrr is pretty great. Cause that six grand a month. Now granted, I was trading that six grand a month for 20 hours a week, which was not very many, not much money at the time, but it gave me enough money. And I immediately invested, like, literally within two weeks of getting that contract, I hired a help desk guy. Now, could I afford a help desk guy at six grand a month and pay myself? No. But because of my belief, because of that mindset, I'm going to take that sacrifice and I'm going to take myself down that path. And I kept going. So we're going to talk a little bit more about scaling, a little bit more about mindset. And if you guys have any questions, please come to the mic and I will include you in the talk today. We got about an hour left, give or take. If I go all the way to my time. We'll see. I'm talking fast today. We'll see where it goes. So how does that overly relate to scaling your msp? And I want you to think about this. I asked this question already, but I want to see your show of hands again. How many of you started. And I want everybody to be honest with this. How many of you started as a true one person shop? See everybody's hands? So that's like over half the room, I'd say, right? Would you agree on that? Over half the room. How many of you are struggling with next level scale? This is not a judgment room because everybody struggles with next level scale at times. This is really important. And when I say next level scale, I specifically mean getting. And this is a really important piece because if you say that you don't struggle with next level scale, getting yourself out of the trenches is mission critical to this whole thing. So I want you to think back to 2005, my $6,000 contract. What was my first move? I hired a help desk guy. I could not afford a help desk guy and I hired a. I didn't move back in with my parents, which was good. I was on the verge of that. But I had actually inherited a house from my grandfather. I got pretty lucky on that. And I was able to somewhat survive on that whole way. But I was like eating like ramen noodles every night. It was not fun. I lived down the street from a gas station, so it was like all this stuff was going on. My immediate thought was, I am going to get myself out of the trenches. Now granted, I'm still doing 20 hours a week on site, but I'm not doing 50, 60, 70 hours a week on site. I'm only doing 20 hours a week on site because my other path is, is I have to get more clients. I really liked immediately the thought of mrr. I liked the mindset. And this is way before any of us ever thought about this, right? I realized really early that cash flow made a huge difference. Now, some of this was accidental. Some of this was because I had to evolve. I was forced to evolve in the situation that I had, right? And not always are we forced to evolve. One of the things I liked in Will's talk was that you were forced to evolve because some of your actions. And I had my whale too, right? So that was very similar. But I said to myself, if I lose this six grand a month, I'm really screwed. Now, I was a good service provider and it was a lot of break Fix. Back then, they were a growing orthopedic practice. They had, I think 12 doctors or 10 doctors, and they were growing and they really needed me. And I was pretty good. I put their first server in, all this other stuff that we did, and everything worked out pretty damn well. I didn't lose them. I did a good job servicing. I was very. And I think for the most part, and I will say this repeatedly, in the MSP industry, there's, I would say, less than 5% of shitty MSPs. Would we agree with that? Like, they're not. There's not very many. Yes. What's your thoughts on that? Anybody have any thoughts? A little higher. A little higher. Okay, let me clarify this. Actually, let me clarify this. Do they mean well? Yes, they mean well, but because they've never been charging right. Doing a lot of the stuff that we talk about here, they get forced to cut corners and do stuff dumb, right? That happens, but they really mean well. They really are in a place where they're like, okay, I'm a good person, I care about my clients and I want to do my best for them. But they, because they don't know how to sell, they do all this stuff, they go down this path towards cutting corners because they let the client dictate the path, et cetera, et cetera. So for the most part, that is a true story. So you have to be in a place. And this is what I'm going to go through the rest of my talk here. Focusing on growth should be paramount to you. Focusing on sales, focusing on cash flow, learning how to delegate and lead needs to be the highest stuff on your board. Not. I'm gonna be really good at Azure. I'm gonna be really good at Intune. Right? Okay, well, see, I don't even freaking know. I don't even have a clue. I'm gonna do a couple things in a few minutes, but I want to absolutely, right now clarify, continually clarify, because you guys are gonna leave and you're gonna go home. We got two more full days of content here, but you're gonna go home and. And stuff gets lost. Because what do we do? We get right into the damn trenches and we worry about tech constantly. Because I say this during onboarding, what do MSPs do when they get a little bit lost? They run home to mama. So if we don't have clarity and if we're not focused on our mindset, our goals, our plans, I'm going to talk about how we can scale mindset wise in a few Minutes here we run home to mama. And you gotta fight that so bad. And I want you to think about every other industry that are out there that are also similar to MSPs. Dental practices. Who's in the trenches in a dental practice? Almost every dental practice. The owner dentist and his partners. Right? They're all the damn guys working on the show. Plastic surgeons, for the most part, they're all in the trenches. What is that? Wealth managers. I agree with that. Although I focused on wealth managers a lot. And most of them that I had were actually pretty good. They were in the work, but they were like, I want a house in Arizona. And they all, like all the guys in Wisconsin had houses in Arizona. I don't know if it's like a cult thing or whatever. Yeah, maybe that. I don't know. Yeah, I love it. So that mindset piece. And I'm gonna continue every time you guys talk to me. You hear me, Hammer? Mindset. Surround yourself with strong people. Find a community. And this is. It's really hard to be an entrepreneur. And I follow a lot of entrepreneurs on Twitter and on instagram and on TikTok and all this stuff. And the overarching statement that I hear repeatedly is surrounding yourself with people that are similar is really difficult because we are on a frickin island. It's really hard. So you have to have this massive amount of discipline. What's that? What do you guys think of the shirt from today? Anybody want to hold up that shirt for me? I want to show the people online. Can somebody throw me a shirt really quick? Is there one right here? Is this a shirt? Somebody will throw me a shirt. That was the worst throw ever. I can't get to that. Ryan, we got Ryan. Oh, here we go. Here we go. For you folks that are at home or watching on the recording, you guys can zoom on that. This is our shirt. Now this comes specifically from me. If you saw my post on this a couple weeks ago, I forget who I was talking to, but I said out loud, discipline is a decision. And I think it's a lot related to weight loss and all these other things. And I don't know whose shirt that is. Sorry, I just threw it on the floor. Whatever. Is that yours to leave? Sorry, whatever. I don't know whose that even was. Okay, that was yours. But discipline without question is a decision. Now you guys heard about my weight loss journey? You heard about Ryan's weight loss journey. You guys hear about that stuff? Does that come now? Nobody knew that I was trying to lose weight at all for my team. Knew how long before it was noticeable Ryan on me? I was probably like nine months before you could even really tell. So think about that. I was going in the gym, walking 10,000 steps a day. I still don't eat the best because it's hard. It's really hard when you're on the road. I was doing that for almost a year, every day, suffering by myself. Very few people knew. That takes a lot of discipline. And I will tell you, I grew up. Lindsay and I talk about this all the time. I grew up as the late kid. I grew up as a massive procrastinator. That's why I didn't do well in high school. I didn't do bad in high school. I just didn't like to study and I didn't like to do homework, and I didn't like to do all that stuff. That takes a lot of discipline. I wasn't good at it. And I grew up as the late kid. And I made a decision about, I'm going to say 15 years ago, give or take, that I have to fight my procrastination somehow, and I'm not going to be the late kid anymore. And it took discipline, and I just made a change, and that's when I started down my execution path. So you guys think about all that stuff. Where does that come from? There's a word right in the middle of the screen.

Mindset.

It all is mindset. And it sounds hokey at times. And I get it because I get a lot of people that send me a lot of nasty stuff that are like, you're stupid. Chris Weiser sucks. Blah, blah, blah. None of your stuff matters. But one of my differentiators. I don't care what anybody thinks about me. I've gotten so far past any of that, it doesn't matter anymore. And it all comes from here. So we're gonna go through some scale stuff that we're gonna do. I also gonna talk a little bit about luck. Do we have our luck sheet out now? That thing's pretty cool. We're gonna talk about that a little bit. Let me come back to that in a second. But how many of you guys believe in luck? Truly believe in luck? Anybody believe in luck? Okay, so here's a. And I want to. Let's pick up this actually before we pick up the sheet. Ryan, come on up here on the stage for me, quick. All right, you can just go to the mic. Just go to the mic. So if you guys don't know who Ryan is, you saw him this morning if you didn't meet him today. Ryan owned an MSP in Detroit for a while. So I have a question for you, Ryan.

Shoot.

You've been around me for six years.

Six or seven.

Yeah, almost six, seven years.

Not including the time that you followed me around Facebook before I joined.

Yeah. So, you guys, that's not it. Okay. That's ads. He means ads. He means ads. That sounded really creepy. Now that you've worked here for a year and a half, do you believe that I'm lucky to be successful?

Not.

Not at all.

So you watch what we do, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So this is my question that I had for you because you've been here watching from for six, seven years. You've probably been the longest around that. I can actually just talk to actively that I knew was gonna be here. But I want you guys to understand. A lot of people think that their life is a blessing. And I'm not a non religious person. I'm a spiritual person. But I don't believe that if I just have thoughts and prayers, magic things are gonna happen to me or I'm going to get blessed. I believe it takes work. I believe it takes execution. And Ryan's been here for six and seven years. How purposeful is this? Very purposeful. Insanely purposeful. Right. Everything that I do, everything that we do as a team, and I'm a pain in the ass to work for because of all this stuff at times, but we have fun.

Also a true story.

Thanks, Ryan. Get the hell out of here. You're done. Done with you. Done with you.

Can I add to that, though?

You can add. You go ahead. Go ahead. Yes, sir. Go ahead. One of the.

One of the biggest, like, cores, and I said this during my session, one of my biggest core beliefs is control what you can control. And I think that's a trait that you and I share very much. It's something that I saw as a member.

Thank you.

Part of what made me want to make that change and sell my MSP and come here, because that's what I see. So when you ask, is all this purposeful? Absolutely. And it also goes back to not caring what other people think. Because if you can't control it, it doesn't bother you. It's not something that even enters into the equation. You work on the things that you have that control over and you make your own destiny.

Yeah, I feel that way about almost everything in my life. My mindset around that is I'm gonna control the things I can control. And then if I have to deal with an anomaly. I'll deal with it. But actually, you got a really good dose of this yesterday. Because they were like, hey, let's put the registration stuff and let's put Kevin stuff on the pop up. WI Fi. I'm like, nope, hardline. Hardline. Because it's a controllable variable, right? I can control that. And was that a smart play?

Oh, absolutely.

Because it's just hard to control all that stuff. Thank you, Ryan. So the thing is with all this is you can control your luck. Now, there's different variables on this. And I want to bring up this worksheet here a little bit. Let's take a look at my handout that we have here. So I want you to think about this. And I'm just going to come over here on the right side, left side, whatever. I want you to think about the four different types of luck that we have. We get blind luck, which is. Okay, Think about that. It's like winning the lottery. It's like random stuff that you can't control, you can't predict. Then we have luck from motion. Now what do I talk? What is luck from motion? Execution. Right? That is moving forward. And I'm gonna give you guys a great example of this. This actually happened to me. You heard me mention that I went to rico's event. Every year I go to that event. I've been going to that event. This was my 35th straight year going there. My dad took me when I was 12. I've been going every year since then to Knoxville, Iowa, to go watch the races with my father and my brother. My brother and I still go every week. I screwed up this year. I didn't delegate getting my tickets renewed, and they expired. They basically expired. And they went back into the pool. So my really good tickets that I've had for years expired. Now, I could have been like, oh, this sucks. Blah, blah, blah. And I was really bummed out about it. I was talking with Lindsey about it. We were actively. I was, like, pissed off at myself because it was like this happened. But the next morning, I got over myself with that. It was a big deal to me because I had those tickets with my dad. So that was like a big thing to me. I called the ticket office. Motion execution. I called the ticket office and I'm like, hey, told him the story. He's, oh, you know what? I got this guy that lives down behind the Hy Vee over here. He's got two tickets that he wants to sell. You can have them all Four of them. I'll give you his number. I went and met a nice dude last week, Monday, picked up his tickets, paid him $400, and moved on. So think about how mindset played into that. Now, I know it's not a big deal, and it's like, trivial, and it's just tickets. But look about how luck. Was it a little bit lucky to call the ticket office, and he had a guy with four tickets that were basically better tickets than I had that he's, oh, if you want these from now on, you can have them. I'll transfer the reservation. So look, that luck from doing nothing because I executed, because I did something, created that opportunity for me. If I would have sat there and wallowed in my sorrows, in my bad luck or my stupidity, look where I would have ended up. So that luck from motion is a big deal. Now, we also have luck from preparation. There's a lot of things that happen that we can control. So when we talk about live events. So, and I'm gonna give you a great example with this. When I sold from my room at my MSP tech squad, we always wanted to. And you think about controlling variables and all the things that we always did. My sales mindset was I always want the people to come to my office as much as I can get them. Our plan is we're gonna bring them to the office. Now, this is pre Covid. I understand times have changed. Cindy. Right. This was pre Covid. So our goal was to get the decision makers to come to our office. We always planned for that. We'd cater in lunch. We had everything there. And we controlled every single variable. You know, what a home field advantage does? Closes deals. Guys, we controlled all those variables. So you think about that scenario in your luck from preparation mindset, that makes a difference versus if I'm at the mercy of every single client. Also, the seven figure MSP sales process, prepared minds, closed deals. You do the same stuff over and over and over. And I know it sucks to go back to some of your existing clients. Some of your initial no's that we have you go to when we work with you and you sign onto our program. We have you go through three to four existing clients. We have our onboarding process that's anywhere from 30 to 120 days, depending on it. And we handhold you through your first set of deals. This is to get your mindset shifting to. You have to control the variables. You have to control as many things as you can. And I will tell you, and even if the clients Said, oh, we don't want you to come on site. And this happened so minimally. For the record, I'd say probably 10% of the time, would the client say, nope, we don't want you. We don't want to come to your office. They actually liked getting out of the office. They liked coming to a free lunch. They liked shooting the shit with our staff and seeing our whole team. Had pretty decent office, put a bunch of money into it over the period of time, and it made a huge difference in closing deals. But occasionally, we'd have to go present to a board. I refused to present. Troy, this goes back to you. I refused to present to a company that wouldn't let me present to all their board members. Nope, I'm good. They were like, what do you mean you won't present? A lot that happened a lot where they were like, okay, I guess we'll make time for you on the board meeting agenda. So embracing your no goes a long way, especially when you're dealing with things like that and not taking no for an answer, not tolerating their shit honestly makes a big difference. So all of that comes back to not blind luck, maybe some luck from motion, but that luck from preparation, and it makes a big difference. And then there's also. And this is where this plays into massively in today's world, luck from being unique. Lindsey talked about niching down. Now, I don't. We're never gonna say only. I'm never gonna tell you this. Lindsey's never gonna tell you this. Only focus on one niche. It's hard to do unless you really scale up, almost like regionally or nationally. It's very difficult to focus on. But your marketing can speak to one niche. So when she's act. When she's talking about that, she is saying, do one. Focus on reaching out to putting your name in their mouths for three months, six months, nine months. My mindset is focus on one thing. I got this in my little steps that I'm gonna have you guys do. But my mindset is focus on this and do it for not a month, but do it the same exact way with the same niche, the same vertical for a year. And I'll tell you what, if you actively approach the same vertical, growing 1%, 2%, 3%, a day, a week, a month, whatever, you almost can't fail because you become an expert at it. It's really important. Is there anybody in this room that was at my very first show in Austin after Covid Fred. You were there. Yeah, you were there. How different is it? He's laughing. I love it. Because, yeah, you guys notice consistency. Consistently doing the same things over and over. Now, I'm not saying the definition of an insanity scenario right, but we are improving every single time. We're leveling up every single time because we're getting better, and we're getting better. And I empower my team to succeed. I empower my team to have fun and grow and evolve. But we create our own luck with the entire thing. We're also unique in the industry. I came in, when I come back to when I created seven figure msp, the mindset around it was, I'm gonna fill a hole. I see a hole. I came out of Robin Robbins marketing stuff, and there was almost zero focus on sales. Cause the marketing was fine. Bunch of us know each other from then. Fred, we know each other. Matt Weaver, you and I know from that back in the day. Some of the rest of us have met back there as well. And the marketing stuff was fine. I executed back then, but there was no sales training. So I said, okay, there's this giant hole that I can go into and fill. And it was all, what can I do that's different and better? Yeah. Stu, you and I were there too, back in the day, right? Yep. The moral of that story, you guys like that worksheet, by the way, that's for yours to take home. I got it digitally if you want to use it. It's pretty cool stuff. So when you get down, or if you're, like, worried about consistency or any of these things, look at this. And I want you to focus on creating your own luck, not just falling on luck. So the moral of that horse story, you can really increase your odds exponentially, I would say, by moving, by executing, by doing stuff. I preach constantly. I'm a pain in the ass about it. I know that about execution discipline. These things are all choices that you control. That mindset stuff that we're talking about today are all things that you can actively control. And I know entrepreneurship is hard. I know it's easy to get down. It's really easy to get down when we're supporting a family or, like, stuff's tough, I understand. But fall back on your peers. Fall back on us. There's never been a time that somebody has DMed me and I've said, piss off. You're always welcome to talk to me. Baron, you asked for a call a couple weeks ago. I called you on your cell phone, Right. We had a conversation. That's the stuff that matters, right? So with all this in mind, we have a pretty big room of successful 7 figure MSP clients who here's added at least 10k of new MRR since you've been in the program. A lot of people. I love it. I love it. We got a lot more online. I love that as well. Also. That being said, the same group of very successful MSP owners are mostly struggling with the same problem. It's part of the reason that I see Mr. Tim Conkle over here and Crystal, part of the reason that we formed the partnership with the 20 because they are a really good scaling opportunity for you guys. There's a huge opportunity for you guys to scale. That scaling mindset is what's going to take you to the next level. And I want you to think about how important all the things in my baseline discussion, how important that is, how big mindset is in this, how big. Staying on top of your issues, controlling your variables. Cindy and I talk about this all the time because I tell her a lot. We have to always respond, not react. So I want you to think about what happened to me when I had my issue with my embezzlement. Think about what a reaction would have meant for me. I lost my entire livelihood. I lost everything. In reality, it took me 10 years to pay off the tax man. It was hard. I cried a lot. I had a lot of sleepless nights. But what would have a reaction done? Where could I have gone? I could have gotten a job. I could have gone down all these paths that were potentially. And look where I'm sitting, right? So I could have done that. I could have done things that are far worse than that. Could have been in jail, could have fell to drugs and alcohol. Could have done all kinds of different things. We all have people in our life that are like that, right? That have made the choice to react to to some type of a situation versus I sat back and I did this cause of my childhood. This is not some brilliance that I had. It was just like what I had learned over time. And I responded to it. Now I see it as I look back on my life. I see that I responded to that. I also see that when I sold my msp I looked at a hole in the marketplace. I didn't react to something, I responded to it and I created some things. Let's go through my top things to do to scale to your next level. First one, this is really important. You have to set goals. Now Lindsey talked a little bit about this in her presentation. How important setting goals are maybe going if you're at 10k, maybe going to 25k. Hey, if you get, if you set a goal for 25k and say, I'm going to hold myself accountable, keeping in mind mindset, keeping in mind discipline, and I hold myself accountable and you get halfway there, we're still at what, 17, 5. That's pretty damn good. I want you guys to think difference and this is what's really important here because at times we set goals that are like pie in the sky. I know people talk about the bhag, right? The big, hairy, audacious goal. I'm not against a bhag. I definitely am for it. But if a bhag with nothing behind it is what a fantasy, a dream, right? But goal setting without planning, without execution, without discipline, without mindset is going to turn into probably not much. So I want you to be mindful of that and set yourself maybe in the beginning, if you're not a goal setter at all, maybe set some realistic goals now. I said to myself, when I started the weight loss journey, I didn't really have a goal. I said, I look terrible in the mirror. And part of this was, I'm 45 years old, I'm 47 now. I'm 45 years old. I have high blood pressure. That's what it was. That's what kind of was like, okay, I need to change some stuff because I have high blood pressure in my genome and I need to change. And there's a lot of people. What's their wake up call on that? Is it like a heart attack or a stroke or something? That's like insane. Mine was like, okay, I got a little bit of high blood pressure. My bmi. BMI is a joke, for the record, but I'm considered overweight right now on the bmi, just so you guys know that. So it's not real accurate, but still, all that stuff propelled me. I made a decision, I set a goal to. Honestly, my goal was I want to be proud of myself when I look in the mirror. So the difference on that is your discipline, your mindset, but most importantly, you have to execute right? It is mission critical that you execute. And I'm going to go take that right into my second thing. You absolutely have to hold yourself accountable. Times are tough. It is really difficult to be an entrepreneur. I'm not going to debate that at all. But I'm also going to tell you this. Would you rather be doing this in hard times or working for the man? Which one? I'd rather be doing this all day. Even when I had the choice to go work for the man, I chose to work for me because I believe in myself, and I believe that I can do different, and I believe that I can. So that mindset is key. So setting those goals. I said this earlier. Setting those goals and actually working towards them is so mission critical. It's crazy because there's a lot of people that set goals, and then you come back to them a month later, a quarter later, a year later, and what do their goals look like? So you got. What was that? They look exactly the same. They look exactly the same. So this is your differentiator, guys. This is how you separate yourself. So step three, you absolutely have to take risks. Now. This is hard. This is really hard. Especially when we don't have a lot of cash in the beginning days. It's a hard thing to do. Be careful. Make sure they're calculated, but that doesn't mean we sit back and do nothing. I take a lot of risks still to this day. Usually they're calculated because I can usually back them up. But there's a lot of times where I'm like, lindsey did this on stage. Sometimes it's that way. I go fast and I execute with abandon. Poor Maria. I execute with abandon and go fast. Right. She's laughing. She's. Yeah. She worked for a big company before she came here, and she's. This is like a whirlwind, man. But a lot of the time, it works out because. Let's go back to the worksheet. I control my own luck a lot. Most successful entrepreneurs would agree with that because we take calculated risks and we control our own luck. So your next one, surround yourself with a players. Now, I don't have any, but that's all I got, guys. It's taken a while. You've watched our team evolve. Fred. You think back to when we were in Austin at those shows, right? Those after Covid. Look at the team now. It's a completely different set of people. Every one of these people is a superstar. They're great. They are way better at everything they do than me. Yeah. Let's give them a hand. Surrounding yourself with people. And I will tell you what. If you are in a room and you believe you're the smartest and best person there, you're probably in the wrong room. And you need to start surrounding yourself with better people, because I don't care how great you are, you can't do any of this stuff alone. This is really challenging, running a business, being an entrepreneur in today's world working in cybersecurity, which is one of the best opportunities. But this is probably the biggest challenge. This vertical is changing constantly. We talked about dentists before. People's teeth don't change much. They probably get worse because of sugar, but that's it. Pretty static environment. Eye doctors, pretty static environment. Plastic surgeons, like, all this stuff's pretty static. This world is flipping on its end every fricking month, Right? So build yourself a really solid hiring process. This is also really key. Lead with confidence and humility, which means you're not better than your staff. There's nothing on your team that you want, nothing in your company that you won't do. I went today and picked up copies at office max, 20 minutes away. Like, it's stuff you gotta do sometimes. Like, it's part of the deal. I'm not above anybody on my team. You have to do that same, have that same mindset. Okay. This is a really. Next one is really important. Hire slow. Not necessarily too slow. But my point is the hiring process. There's a lot of people that they're like, oh, interview you. Sound cool. Good. Got the job. So when I say hire slow, have a process behind it. We have a hiring machine inside of the elite dashboard. Follow that. There's a lot of stuff in there. Take your time. Lindsay talked about your dialers hiring. I have a very specific rule. I do not hire family, and I do not hire friends. That is a rule in my world. Because I made those mistakes, I hired my brother. My brother's a good kid. I had to find him a job to get rid of him. It's just we clashed constantly. He. It was miserable. It basically almost ruined our relationship because he's like, you're my brother. I don't have to listen to you. I know what to do differently. And he's actually really smart and really good. He went back to school at 38 and got his mechanical engineering degree, and now he's somebody else's problem. This goes all the way back to literally working at the computer store. He was my first employee at the computer store, and we had a lot of fun, but he didn't respect authority from me because he's my brother. Right? So that's the biggest challenge, is your friends and your family see you as a friend. Now if you become friends. My staff and I, we're all friends, but we know how we work. And it's after we worked together, we've all become very close. We've all have a great relationship. Hire slow, fire fast. And I Know it sucks to fire people, but you have to sometimes because I'm going to tell you what a bad egg in your environment. It's like throwing acid on your business. It's terrible, right? I think what we all know is like employees put you up on this pedestal and think you have all this money and they don't understand the stress a lot. Like, it's hard. Like the money stuff. I've been through every money problem you guys have ever had. Especially like with the tax man. Shit, it's hard. It's really hard. There's many nights where I didn't know, like I legit thought I was going to go to jail. Like, how did they not put me in jail? I owed like $150,000 for 10 years. I don't understand. I think, whatever. So here's my next one. I say this a lot. This is a active 7 figure MSP statement. Cash flow solves all problems. I cannot state that enough. And I don't mean project work. Regular, consistent. You heard me say earlier that I fell in love with mrr. I am so addicted to MRR and sales now. That's what I live and breathe for. I love it so much. It is awesome to have. But it also means you have to be massively growth focused. So think about all the stuff you do when you go back. And you know what? When I get up in the morning, I don't look at tickets. I haven't looked at our ticket board. I don't even know. I don't even know how to log into it anymore. What do we use? Ryan? What's our ticketing help scout? I don't even know. For some reason MSPs have this mindset even maybe small business owners that if I focus on growth and cash flow and revenue, oh, I'm a shitty company. I'm bad at being an msp. If you guys look at Reddit for five minutes at the Chris Weiser Sucks channel, that's where that came from, by the way. Because there's a whole damn thing on Reddit called Chris Weiser Sucks. Profit is not a crime. I talked about this on our webinar a couple weeks ago. What's the largest, most profitable business in the world? Anybody know? It's the Catholic Church. It's the Vatican. Right? That's the largest, most profitable company in the world. So profit is not a crime. I agree with that. Profit is not against. I get this a lot. I'm a religious person. I think it is a bad thing to charge people a profit it is fine. You need to live. We go for an 80% gross profit margin in our program. That is really key. But that whole thing means growth focused sales first. That doesn't mean you're a crappy company. That should be a default. So just because we focus on sales and revenue here at 7 figure MSP doesn't mean we're a bad service provider. I have my team to do that. Which also means generating leads. I'm gonna say this is. These are in no specific order. They were as they came to my brain. But those two things should probably be 1 and 2. Sales first, cash flow first. And generating leads is really critical to your business. If you think that you are going to grow your business now, can you grow your business with referrals only? Sure. Fine. Growth by accident. That's what I call that. Can you control referrals? Yes, to a certain point. But can you say I'm gonna double my business this year on referrals only? No, nobody can. I can't say that. And I have sec. Out of all the channel companies, I think we have the second most reviews on channel program. And I can't control. I can't double my company. It only gets you so far. So I know you guys hate marketing. Lindsay brought up some massive points with how you learn to be a tech. We have less than a quarter of this room is formally educated on it. But somehow we figured it out and we're good at it. Good enough at it that we have pretty large businesses. Some of us are $10 million businesses in this. So somehow we've stumbled onto that with it. But we can't learn marketing. Marketing sucks. I don't want to do it. I just want to take this whole marketing crap and dump it on some other company because I don't want to do. I'm a tech guy. Suck it up and learn. That's a real. That's directly from me because I was a tech guy when I started my computer company. I was a tech guy when I started WPC IT squad, which turned into tech squad, which turned into all this other shit. I was a tech guy first. But I learned how to market, I learned how to sell. And I will promise you this, you will not grow your business to the point you want at least. And I have people that tell me we go to a decent amount of shows. We're gonna be at Vision in a couple weeks. We're gonna be at IT Nation, we're gonna be at some channel pro shows. I have MSPs tell me I'm very content where I'm at. I just want to make 100 grand a year. Go do whatever. Okay, that's fine. That's what you. But we are all in a room. We're trying to grow, we're trying to evolve. Our whole community is trying to grow. We're trying to evolve. And I'm also going to tell you this. This is a really important statement that I want you to take and be very heartful on. The MSP moving forward will stop. I think we're already there, but we still have guys that are still bootstrapping their company with project work and all this other stuff. The MSP of 2025 and beyond will be a general contractor of solutions, not a doer of work. There's some of you guys in this room that are doing that and I want you to be very conscious of this. This is very important. Because right now, how much of your tech could you realistically outsource to other vendors in the channel? If it was me, I'll tell you that right now, I would outsource probably, what, 95% of it. SOC, fully managed. Help desk, fully managed. You could do all. You could take your whole operation and put it on a scaling operations firm, which means you should be focusing on what sales and revenue and cash flow. That's your job. That is how you make the money that stuff makes. And I'm gonna get a lot of flack for this because there's like channel article writers. What do they call those guys? Authors in the room. What do they call those guys? Writers in the channel? Journalists. That's the word I was looking for. So it's really important. I'm gonna need a lot of flack for that because the old school msp, the trunk slammer. What do they want to do? Don't tell me I can't go, hey, have fun. But what are you gonna do when you. When your client gets hacked? And Troy, I told you this morning, make sure you exit them really well. Be amazingly nice. Do cross every T, dot every I. Close that door as kindly as you can. Buy them a parting gift. Do everything you can to say, let me know when you're coming back because. And we've seen this with our whales in this program. We're watching this because they're realizing that times are changing. It's just gonna take a while because we're on the front side of it. The insurance industry has been around for 150 years or whatever. They're not. They don't. They know that is a Factor. But cyber security, risk management, they don't understand, but they're starting to get there. Because times are changing, things are evolving. Oh, hold on. Forgot to say that simple closes deals. You heard me say earlier, one deal, one offer. You need to be absolutely an expert at your craft. Which doesn't mean I'm going to have 19 certifications. This means you need to be so good at handling objections. Doing your sales play. What does the back of that T shirt say? Run the play. For you guys that are guests with us, that means going through the entire seven figure MSP sales process. You run the play to a T. We do not skip steps. Because when you skip steps, you lose deals. Simple is key. The confused mind does not act. Usually says no. Perfect your sales message. Sell a single solution for a minimum of a year. Now I would say sell that forever. Now, when I say the single solution, let's think about the good, better, best offering in the MSP industry. Get rid of the good, get rid of the better. If I ask any MSP in the world, if you had unlimited budget at every client, what would you sell? We'd all sell the best. Why don't we. Excuses, not reasons. Sell the best. We know that it works actively push on it and go. Also keep in mind your mileage may vary. Common sense applies. I don't want to see you standing in front of a client. Be like wiser told me I can only do this so I'm screwed. Can't sell that. They want to do co managed and I'm screwed. No, you can all but plan for the standard and deal with the anomaly when it happens. How many people? Ryan, we get this all the time. Lindsay, Cindy, we get this all the time. I got this client that wants to do this and this. Actually, they say before that, what if this happens? What do I do? Okay, do you actually have a scenario? No, but it's probably gonna stop worrying about shit that you can't control. Factor on it simple. Keep it simple and be easy. Next up. We're almost there, guys. I promise. Number nine. I hope I didn't accidentally slip like four more in here. You need opm. I mean, OPM means other people's money. This is some real CEO to CEO stuff here. This is hard. I fully believe this. There's a lot of people coming in. We're getting startups coming into this MSP industry every day now, like constantly, because they're like, oh, cyber security. This is a gold mine. There's a lot of money. But what are they trying to do? They're trying to start it like it guys and bootstrap their way with project work to success. So I'm not saying this is impossible, but I'll tell you what, it's slow, it is hard, it is miserable. But if you want a successful MSP as quickly as possible and this should be our goal. Money loves speed, right, Michelle? Money loves speed. So you have to go fast, you have to execute with abandon. You can't worry about this. It is extremely difficult to run an MSP the right way today. Couple keywords I said there the right way today without some money. Now I will tell you. I get loans, I get lines of credit, I run my mind, I take risks, I do it around that. I go to OPM all day. The SBA right now, the Small Business Administration in the States is giving out money like fricking hotcakes right now. Now I'm not saying be a spending moron because there's definitely people that go out there and get loans and go buy Lambos, right? There's definitely people that do that. Common sense, use your brain. Focus on good credit. I've spent the last 15 years building my credit to. I'm like 810 credit scores right now and it hasn't dropped below that in a long time. And I own a multimillion dollar home. I'm not saying that to brag. I'm saying that this is all real achievable stuff. Guys. Utilize credit cards. I'm on credit card a lot. Like we use credit cards like crazy. I think we have 15 business credit cards. I am the biggest points whore you've ever met. Ryan, do you know how many points I have? How many points you guys think I have? 17 million. That's across all cards. But I'm just like I told you points were. It's what it is. Focus on these things. Don't be afraid to take out a loan. Now none of this happens if you don't have good payment histories. It is mind blowing to me how bad small business owners are at managing money. You need to become really good at managing money. And it's. I had to learn the hard way. I struggled with this a lot. I had a bookkeeper that I really trusted take 200 grand from me and I got. It cost me 10 years of being of having good credit. Actually that was back in the day when tax liens were on your credit too. By the way, they're not on your credit anymore. That was hard. So that is really important stuff. I'm going to go Back to this one more time. You can no longer bootstrap an MSP to success. Cash flow will get you there, though. This is why sales is key, guys. This is so important. And finally, number 10, contract out your tech. I'm not saying everything. I'm not saying set it and forget it. Every time I say this stuff, certain people are like, oh, let me go dump this and I'll never look at it again. Doesn't work that way. You still got to manage it. You still got to run it. But do not contract out sales and marketing. Think about what this industry has done forever. What did we keep right here? Help desk. Who ran their own help desk? I did. You're your own help desk if you're doing tickets. Guys, your help desk. We keep our help desk right here. We keep our on site labor right here. We keep our sock and our sim right here. The amount of MSPs that post on Reddit every week. I'm spinning up this edr. Okay, and why, like, why are you doing this on your own? I don't understand what are you doing? But you have to learn sales and marketing. You have to learn how to grow. Would you guys consider me a tech guy anymore? Absolutely not. Right? Maria's having all these tech problems this morning. I'm like, I don't know. Good example. I had Maria outsource the registration. Empower your team and let them fail. It's fine. We're all you guys. Anybody have any handwritten badges from today? Anybody have any handwritten badges? She got it to work. Whatever. It is what it is. So you have to learn how to sell. You have to learn how to market. Times have changed. Stop trying to build your own tech. This is something The Reddit community, LinkedIn, Facebook, they hate me for this. Focus on sales and cash flow. Control your revenue because you know how to manage the tech. Keep that stuff here. Why are we trying to outsource our lead gen? Lindsey mentioned this morning or this afternoon, a couple hours ago, that she had a client that she's working with in Leads Mastery. They're trying to. They're switching from having an SDR company to bringing it in house. They wanted to take their lead lists and all the work that they paid for with them. And what were they told? Lindsey, I did just get an update that they are okay, but they had to fight for it. She said that they. She just got an update that they're going to give them the stuff, but they had to fight for it. So I want you to think about how important that is run the management, outsource all the busy and expensive parts. Now I know we gotta have feet on the ground sometime. I understand that you can control almost all of that with your SLA. The amount of MSPs that roll a truck the second a client breathes on their server is mind blowing. I put in some rules with our SLA back in 2010, I think it may be in 2009. And it was guaranteed response times across the board. Can we control a response time? 100%. We didn't miss that for six years straight. We did not miss it. So I think it was like 2008 or 2009 that I put. Because we had a six year running, we never missed our response time because it was during business hours. We guarantee a 15 minute response. You know what our response was? Autoresponder on a ticket. That's it. I can control it. And we only had one time where the email failed and we caught it and we sent it and we actually called them. So we can guarantee our response time. We can also determine severity and we can decide whether we roll a truck. It's that simple. You can control all of your response times to the point where if they're paying you enough money, you should be outsourcing all of your tech and all of your engineers and doing the right things. Stop trying to keep it here, get it out here. Keep your lead gen and your sales here. That matters massively. And surround yourself with your peers and really, that's supposed to say thought. Can't type apparently. And good thought leadership. You guys are all in this room. We got a lot of people watching. Now I want to ask you guys that are here with us live, who's watched virtually actually? Okay, not many. How important is it to be here live? It's huge. Right? Can we get a hand on that so the people on TV can hear you? Okay. Anybody have any questions on my top 10? Yes or Josh?

Can everyone hear me? I'm going to challenge you a little bit.

Yep.

I started reading Never split the Difference and I also finished reading Profit First.

Yep.

From your recommendation, you violated one of the propositions of profit first, saying cash flow solves all problems. I would like to say yes, that's maybe true. However, not all cash is good cash. Chasing big clients that cost you money can cost you money. It's very simple.

Yeah, I've been agree with that. Yeah.

So to get to that higher level of understanding behind that idea, because I do agree, fundamentally, obviously, cash flows, it's like oxygen, right? We can't breathe without the cash.

Yep, a hundred percent.

What metrics do you use when you're determining whether the business you're chasing is good business or if it's going to end up costing you in the end?

Very good question. I love it. My business now is a little bit different but we have a tier and it's called 10K MRR. So we put everybody that's below 10K MRR now that's our standard. But there's some allowances if somebody's willing to come in and willing to commit, to execute. Because we've seen and I think for the most part Ryan and Cindy and I built this mindset that if you're under 10k MRR, you're going to struggle to work in this program, you're going to struggle to pay your bills. So that's my threshold and we said okay, we're going to work that from 10k Mrr2.10 million Mrr is our window that we operate in. So that was my choice in my company. Now in MSP land it's a little bit different of an animal. So you have to look at what your core principles are like. Why do you and I agree with what Mike is saying. That's Mike Michalowicz. That's profit first guys. I agree with what Mike's saying specifically. We know the like. We know when there's a company that we're going after. So you got to stop taking every deal that walks in.

I know now thanks to you.

Yeah, that's how we teach it and we talk about it. So for the most part you have to look at what your principles are to what type of client do I want? I need to shift my mindset from I'm going to take every frickin deal that walks in my door or maybe every single prospect. And the amount of MSPs that embrace their no is very minimal now in this room. It's pretty high actually. That's my short answer. I only got a few minutes left.

But real quick follow up. Is it because you had the system in place all already to prevent the bad business from growing into a monster and that's why you can just push.

More and more cash flow in now. Yes, I've learned over time but my risk taking enabled me to make mistakes faster. So you think about that and we think about that move fast mindset that money loves speed mindset if you're sitting around not moving it's going to take you way longer to figure things out. So I took a Lot of risk. I've always taken a lot of risks. Even though I had no money, I took a lot of risks. Think about my first contract with the $6,000 and I hire the help desk guy right away. How many people are like, oh, I can't hire a help desk guy because I don't have any money because I only make 8k mrr, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. They got every reason in the world. But that's also why I say now you pretty much can't start a bootstrapped MSP and not you're nephilim. I'll say this and I'll concrete this one. If you start a bootstrapped MSP right now, you're not going to do it the right way. I don't care who you are. If like you're trying to bootstrap it, there's no way you can do it. So that's my answer on that. Okay, thanks, Josh. It's nice to meet you in person, by the way. We know each other on Zoom. Only on teams, actually. John Zara, he's the Hawaii Connection.

All right.

So.

So first off, I have to tell you Aloha. I ran across, I was doing a search one day and I ran across some post on Edit Reddit where some guy was arguing with you about MRR and break fix. And you recommended this book, Ready, Fire, Aim.

Yeah, a little while ago.

Yeah. A little while ago you were talking about sales being our number one job.

Yep.

And that's for me. I read that book after I saw that post and it's insane mindset change. Can you talk a little bit about how you went from tech minded? I got to fix everything and I got to be the guy doing all the stuff to sales minded. And how does that. How did you come about that and how did that change?

Okay, so good, Great question, Don. So I just for the record, I was never hyper controlling tech guy. That's probably the first piece because most tech guys. What do they want to do? They want to. They want to. Don't tell me what to do. I'm in here, I got it. And they want to be the engineer. They want to be in it. They want to be in the trenches. I didn't want to. I like money more than I like any of that stuff. And I'm lazy. Which enabled me to say, okay, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do that, I don't want to do that. I'll outsource this, I'll outsource blah Blah, blah. So that was actually the driving factor for me. I read Ready, fire, aim well after that. So I already had the personality type to drive it and I just enabled that along with the risk taking mindset and I just went. But I made all the mistakes that went along with it and moving fast propelled me along. So that's really the key of it. Okay, we can talk more on that too. Okay? Yes, sir.

What's up, Chris?

Hey, buddy.

Question for you. What do you think is the role of social when it comes to MSPs? I feel like you guys have transformed from being managed service provider to now marketing to msps. And I've seen you guys try to grow out your social. But what do you think is the role of social for MSP providers?

I think it's a critical part. I think you can't leave it do I think you're going to. Now I see people trying to. You're not going to book an FTA on social media, but you can brand. Maybe, but I'm not gonna say it shouldn't be your goal. How about that? Your goal should be to get them in a room. Can you fill a. Can you brand? Can you fill a webinar? If I was to try, if I was exclusively gonna try and get people in this room just from social, probably wouldn't work just even with talking to you guys. So I think it's a critical part, but I think you have to do a lot around that. Namely, I still fully believe in warm calling, cold calling, webinars, like all that stuff we do live events, we do all these different things and it makes a big impact. So social is a critical part of that, especially retargeting. And you heard somebody say that, I've been chasing them around the Internet forever. Retargeting is a huge factor, but also retargeting the right way.

Absolutely. In content as far as a webinar, right, you're just creating content out there for people to engage with, to have a live audience. How do you drive people to the things that you're creating?

First thing is you actually have to solve a problem that they're having. This is why you want to focus on a niche as much as you can, because you can actually address a problem. You can talk about a general contractor and a specific issue that they're having. And this webinar is going to be this. You can talk about CPAs and the FTC safeguards so you can talk about things, but your title is so key. Most MSPs are like hey, cybersecurity webinar. There's nobody going to give a shit about cybersecurity webinar. I don't care how great your social is. And then you retarget them with things to get them there and social comes to play. But you still should be reaching out to specific people, not trying to book an appointment, but literally to say, hey, we have a webinar that's going to be here that solves this specific problem for you. Would you like to attend? Then when they register, then you surround them with all your stuff. That's more educational, that reinforces what you do, but not trying to actually sell them. And maybe a better statement is maybe you'll book an FTA on social, but you're surely not going to close the managed services deal on social, right? You want to try and keep it simple and solve problems they have. Thanks, guys. Have a great day. Thank you.