Harnessing the Power of Diversity: Ethical Marketing for MSPs by Megan Killion

Hey, y'all. I'm Megan Killian, the chief consultant here at MKC Agency, and I'm prepping for a speaking engagement that I have coming up, and I wanted to just run through it dry with y'all, all my favorite followers. So this is specifically about harnessing the power of diversity for ethical marketing for MSPs. But a lot of these principles can be used in any company. First things first, I'm Megan. I'm autistic, ADHD, bisexual. I'm a female leader, and I own a successful marketing agency. I'm gonna talk about harnessing the power of diversity, ethical marketing for the next generation of MSPs. Why should you listen to me? I've done $500 million in new pipeline, and I don't think I've ever lied to a client to close a deal. So what's ethical marketing? It's an honest and transparent approach to the promotion of goods or services. So that means that like you're gonna tell the truth about your product. I call it radical transparency. You're aware of the impact. So you're conscious of the effect the words, designs, and campaigns that you promote have on diverse groups, not just people who are like you, but people who are different than you as well. You believe in building consumer trust. It's built on authenticity and shared values. Later on in this presentation, we're gonna talk about kind of like getting people in and getting people out, and how that it can actually be a good thing to disqualify people. Social responsibility. We understand and consider the broader societal well-being, and we contribute positively to our community. We're focused on long-term success. We're prioritizing sustainable and ethical practices for lasting business growth. I cannot tell you the number of times clients have come to me and been like, I just wanna build revenue quick and exit. That's not what I do. I mean, there are ways to do that ethically, but the majority of the time when that is your goal, you're not gonna be interested in the ethical marketing practices of my agency and what I really recommend for a healthy and lasting business. Diversity in marketing. This is so important. It enriches creativity. It expands audience reach. It reflects the market, it drives business growth, and it increases trust and authenticity. If everyone at your company looks like you and thinks like you, you have a big problem, and you probably don't even know that yet. So what does that look like at MKC, at my agency? We celebrate uniqueness and diversity. We are 100% female right now. In our full-time staff. I'm not necessarily like proud of that. We have plenty of male freelancers and consultants that work for us, but our core salary team is all female right now. But across the tech industry, you'll see that there's major underrepresentation of women. So my agency's kind of making up for that a little bit. We're cross-cultural. Our part-time and freelance staff members are from all over the world. We have like little magnet offices in Brazil and the Philippines. In terms of our US employees, we have people across from East to West Coast. We have a couple of people that work from Europe, and then we have 2 people out of India. Neurodiversity. So in terms of our full-time permanent staff, 100% of us identify as being neurodivergent. That means ADHD, autistic, might have some type of mental health diagnosis like BPD or personality disorder. So we advocate for inclusivity and understanding of all cognitive styles. LGBTQIA representation— 80% of our team identifies as LGBTQIA. So we want everyone to feel seen, heard, valued. In terms of culturally supporting ethics and diversity, we embrace remote work. We're 100% remote, so we really believe in work-life balance. People can invest in like a remote workspace, or they can build their space at home, and we will reimburse them for that. We encourage time off. We've got an unlimited PTO policy. I really encourage people to plan their PTO in advance so that other people can take on their projects and make sure that deadlines are met, because we are a service-based company. However, people can take off as much time off as they want. The bare minimum that's mandated is 2 weeks a year. If you have not taken a full 2 weeks by December, I will make you take December off. I don't think anybody really hates being forced to take December off, especially it's a very slow month for us. But the reality is a lot of unlimited PTO policies don't mandate time off and can end up being a no-time-off policy. Prioritizing autonomy— work where and how you want. Our policy empowers individuals, their choice in terms of how they're going to be the most productive. Generally speaking, our business hours are 9 to 5. If someone's in a customer-facing role, if they're an account manager, They have to work 9 to 5 EST. If they are a project manager, or they're working a specific role underneath that, so say they're a graphic designer, social media strategist, or they're doing web development, they may occasionally have meetings scheduled well in advance that they have to attend to be customer-facing, to report in on something. But other than that, I don't care how many hours they work. I don't, don't care when they work. I care that their projects are done on time, and that if they can't be done on time, that they're proactively communicated, and I know what their roadblocks are. Prioritizing that autonomy, it gives people so much more pride in what they do. when they're in control of it. And if that doesn't work for them, they might not be a good fit for MKC. We're gonna talk later about how really defining these things helps you build the right people in the right seats. We have flexible office spending, so people can buy tools, technology, continuing education. There is a set budget for it. It's a bucket that each department shares, and the department heads kind of divvy that out however they need to, and they, they kind of report back into me about if they need that in like increased or decreased over time, because it does kind of come up against other budgets. But overall, on average, I would say the average employee gets like $1,000 to $2,000 a year to spend on whatever they need, and that's outside of the tools that are being provided for the entire team, things like Reclaim.ai. for managing their time, Notion, Basecamp, that type of stuff. We really respect boundaries and, and that comes up a lot in communication. So when we do one-on-ones, I am never going into a one-on-one to tell somebody all the ways they suck at their job. If someone sucks at their job, that's my fault. I'm the owner. I made a bad hiring decision. I didn't clearly communicate. Someone didn't get all the training they need. They're not properly motivated. That's my bad. So if, if someone is in a one-on-one with me, what's meant to be communicated is their boundaries, their limitations, what's coming up for them that's important. So for an example, like a couple of weeks ago, I had one of my senior project managers come to me and tell me that it was coming up on the anniversary of her father's death. It's a really hard day for her, unpredictably so. I lost both my parents 5 years ago, so I fully understand what that's like. I asked her if she wanted to take a week off, a month off, whatever. She said she didn't want to take time off. She wanted to focus on work, but she needed everybody to understand that she might be slower to respond. She might have bad days. So she, she took a no-meeting policy. for the entire month. And I told the team, all the, all the department heads, not sounding like out of a bulletin, that they need to keep stuff off of her that's stressful, but fill her with lots of work that's in her unique ability. And all of our unique abilities are documented in Notion. Supporting burnout and prevention. That means we, we talk about it, we talk about mental health, we talk about things that are going wrong. And the number one thing you can do as the owner is model this. There is a balance as an owner between modeling boundary setting, avoiding burnout, work-life balance. And showing up to work is a mess every day. Okay? So no one is gonna feel stoked to come to work if they're worried that the company's gonna fall apart because the owner's gonna stop showing up. So you, you have to navigate that, but they need you to model for them what it looks like to take a day off. That means popping into Slack in the morning and saying, hey, reminding everybody today, I'm out of office. My out-of-office message is on. If anything comes to you that's important for me, unless something is on fire, we're gonna turn a client today, don't contact me. These are the reasons you could contact me, and here's my cell phone number. I'm the owner. Okay, so that means that there are things that flow to me, don't flow to anybody else. The only other person at my company who should have anywhere near that level of responsibility is my integrator. Outside of that, no one else should ever be picking up the phone and responding to Slack on their day off. And it's my job as the owner to make sure that they have, they have coverage and they have backup. This is just our agency process, which is discovering, assessing, designing, and implementing. It is relevant when it comes back into ethical marketing, because this is really how we market ethically for our clients, and it's the process that you should really be doing internally, which is like Doing a whole discovery process of your ICP, your buyer personas, really understanding your core values and your unique value proposition, assessing where you're at, designing and implementing. If anybody wants to get nerdy about ethical marketing processes, happy to talk about it, but it's not really the point of this. What happens when you tell the truth? Okay, talk to your employees, you get real honest with them. You get honest with them about the outlook of the company, about your core values, about expectations, about your mission, your vision. Best case scenario, you see improved productivity, retention, and employee happiness. You see increased alignment and understanding that leads to the success of both individuals and the company as a whole. It's the worst case, okay? Employees that aren't a good fit for the company's culture or values may decide to leave. Yeah, that can be challenging, but it frees up resources for hiring people who are a better fit. That's right person, right seat. If you aren't honest about who and what your company is, people will work for you who are the wrong people, and they will ruin your company culture, and you will lose people who are right to the wrong people. You tell the truth to customers. Best case, you see increased customer trust, loyalty, and engagement. When they feel that a company is honest and transparent with them, they are more likely to remain loyal and become advocates for the brand. What's the worst case? Some customers might not agree with you. They, they may leave, right? What happens when customers leave? You free up resources for good customers, and you get to refocus on client acquisition to go get good, good customers. For those of you that don't know, a bad customer can absolutely ruin your business. We are both in service-based industries. If a customer is a pain in the butt, If they do not align with you, if they don't value what they do, if they don't see you as an extension of their team, they can absolutely ruin your business model. What about with prospects? Clear, honest messaging attracts prospects that align with your company's values. Oops, literally. So this is why we do dry runs. Y'all can give me feedback and I can make a fool of myself. Best case scenario is that clear, honest messaging attracts prospects that align with your company's values. Improves the quality of your leads and increases the likelihood of conversion. In the worst case, here's what happens. Okay? Your company's radically transparent approach scares people away early. If you have ethical, authentic, transparent marketing, you will not have bad prospects that waste your sales team's time. You won't. If you tell people what the price is up. run, people who can't afford it aren't gonna talk to you. If you tell people what's included and what's not included, people who want all this stuff that isn't included in what you do, they're not gonna engage with you. If you tell people what your core values are, what you really care about, if you— and here's my, like, this is my checkmate favorite thing to do. In my agency contract, is a sentence that just says, I have read and agreed to the code of conduct. I understand that repeated violation of this code of conduct can and will result in a cease and desist of all services without refund. And in that code of conduct, it tells them they can't abuse my employees. It tells them, you know, they have business hours, there's no marketing emergencies, you can't swear at my people, those types of things. And everybody, everybody initials it, signs off on it in the contract. Why do I, why do I make people do that? Because if they're gonna be those people, I don't want them to be my customer. And customers who align with me, you know what one of the first things they ask us to do when they onboard is? Can you create me a code of conduct like that? I wanna protect my people. We're aligned on our values. They understand our values. That's why they wanna do business with us. They want to do business with an agency that protects its people. They want to do business with an agency that will not lie. Those are things they care about. Alright, so let's talk, let's talk about the actual power of diversity, okay? 2.3 times higher cash flow per employee of companies that have substantial diversity, 35% better performance, 87% better decisions, 19% higher revenue. So it's not just BS. I'm not just over here saying like, oh, DEI initiatives are important because fluffy bunnies and happiness, and we all want to feel good about not being bigots. That's what we care about. That's all well and good. Like, I care about ethics. I care about being able to sleep at night. That's important to me. But there's actually a business use case for diversity. and what it does. Here's the, the real secret underneath it, right, is if I'm in a room with a whole bunch of people who are just exactly like me, they don't, they don't question my decisions. And here's a really good example of that. Okay, Max. Max is my SEO guy. He's a very, very tech-driven mind. Okay, he's definitely not ADHD. He's a cis hetero white man. And he and I go head to head almost every single time we have to work on a project together. We argue, not in a bad way. Like, he and I, we love each other. He attests that him and his wife have a better marriage because of the things that I make him think about. He attests that my agency has helped him buy a new house. We have a great partnership. Okay, he's a consultant freelancer, right? He's not an internal employee. And part of the reason he's not an internal employee is because he, he doesn't strictly match our core values. But that's beside the point. Max is excellent at SEO, at technical SEO. He understands how to get behind the backend of a website, optimize the CDN, optimize for mobile, improve SEO ranking by tricking the algorithm with technical magic. Okay? I don't understand a single piece of that. And so sometimes we'll argue a little bit. We'll argue about the ethics of how we use technology. We'll argue about the types of content that I wanna produce for a client. He'll be like, that's not, it's not gonna rank, Megan. It's not gonna help. There's not enough search terms in there. And I believe the new SEO is content that converts, content that's engaging and interesting that people wanna, they wanna read, they wanna engage with. And he'll argue old school tech SEO is better. And you know what happens for my client? They get the benefit of both our worldviews, of both our views on SEO. And the best idea on a case-by-case basis is what rises to the top. We move forward with the choice that's best for the client and with the choice that's the best because we're both forced to argue our point. And if we lose, we lose the argument. And we're gonna go with the better idea. And that is the power of diversity and innovation. Because when we just, when we just agree, like we're all just like, oh, well, we love marketing that's creative. I mean, we're a creative agency, but we have lots of technical minds that are not creative that do a great job at checking and balancing those of us who, if we could, would spend all day. Like if I, if it were to spend all day writing content and talking to people, And I would never organize my action items or get anything done. Why have an EA? Okay, so diversity is not— it's not just about being able to take pictures that have a lot of different colors in them. Okay. Real-life impact on a team. Problem solving, cultural sensitivity, increased creativity, employee engagement, ethical leadership, community impact. These are all things that happen when you have a more diverse team. Here are some common MSP challenges: talent acquisition and retention, technological advances and competition, marketing and client acquisition, scalability and growth management. Do you have those problems at your MSP? Let me know in the comments, right? How can you navigate talent acquisition and retention? You can emphasize diversity in your job descriptions. You can leverage diverse recruitment channels. Here's the thing. Most recruitment happens before a job is even listed. It's usually like friend, friend, someone gets a recommendation, somebody knows somebody. That's the only way you hire. You're not going to get a lot of diversity in your talent pool. Promise you that. You got to implement a fair selection process. You have to consciously take bias out. Of the process of hiring. You need checks and balances. You need to offer competitive benefits. Keep it like, if someone doesn't have kids, they don't care about your flexible spending account for childcare. If someone has— if they're young and they have no health problems, they probably don't care how good your insurance policy is. You have to think about what will, what will appeal to a wide variety of people. There's tons of research out there on this. Google's an amazing tool. Look at what benefits appeal to diverse audiences. You've got to promote the culture. Here's the thing, culture starts at the top. If you aren't regularly reiterating your company values, if you can't tell people what they are at the drop of a hat, Absolutely no one in your company again. Okay. Encourage open dialogue. You gotta open that door. You have to let people tell you what's up. Regular one-on-ones, quarterly reviews, and a quarterly review again. It's not an interrogation. It's not how you're doing your job bad. It's feedback for me. How can I lead you better? What could I be doing better? Where am I failing you? Recognize and celebrate diversity. During Black History Month, I exclusively post content that are African American copywriter has written. I ask for her opinions. I elevate her voice, and I don't say anything because I don't know anything about that. During Pride Month, I post a lot. I write a lot of our content. Addressing microaggressions. This can be really, really, really hard, and it's hard for me even to talk about this as a white person because I don't experience a lot of those microaggressions like I can talk about what it is like to be an employee as an autistic person. I can talk about what it's like to be an employee as a bisexual person. I can talk about what it's like to have this colorful hair and be an employee. I cannot tell you what it's like to walk in someone else's skin, and I really think the best thing you can do is ask people of color to talk to you about what microaggressions look like to them. Ask your LGBTQIA employees what it looks like to them. Like, I'm heteropassing. I'm married to a man. We have 4 kids together. People don't know I'm bisexual until I tell them, so I don't get a lot of microaggressions at work. But you should ask homosexual men what they're dealing with. You should ask African American employees what they're dealing with, Hispanic employees what they're dealing with, Asian employees what they're dealing with, everybody under the sun. Ask them how they're being aggressed upon at work and what you can do about it. Having flexible work arrangements. This is super important for neurodiversity, but really diversity of all kinds. If we weren't remote, I couldn't hire people from all over the world. If we didn't have flexible hours, I couldn't do that either. If we didn't offer personalized work arrangements, I'd be excluding a lot of people who are very good at their jobs but have different relationships in their life than I do. We have plenty of single moms. Plenty of just like working moms who want to be home with their kids during the day and want to work at night, whatever. We just, we allow people to build the arrangement that works for them. It has to be agreed to, and it can't just change on a dime. Like obviously, stuff to operate as a business, so you have to find a balance that works for you, and you may not be able to go fully remote. A lot of MSPs can't, but that doesn't mean you can't support some remote work. It doesn't mean you can't allow people to have flex time. You can absolutely have like your tier 1 guys monitoring a phone line from home, and you can absolutely have your tier 3 guy working from home on call. And then if there's a big issue, maybe he has to come in and come into the lab and figure out what the hell's going on. No. Ongoing learning and development. This is super, super important, because if you want to hire people out of like impoverished areas that have been perhaps not as serviced when it comes to education, you're often gonna have to provide that education. And I think when we talk about diversity, we don't talk enough about diversity of experience. Not everyone has 20 years of experience in the industry, and particularly when we're talking about the technology space, if you want someone with 20 years of experience, you are almost entirely excluding women. You are excluding a lot of POCs because this space was not open 20 years ago for those people to work here. So you need to take that bias out of what you look for in an employee. And the other thing is that like a lot of us, we get stuck in what's worked before, right? So I have 15 years of B2B tech and marketing. B2B tech sales and marketing experience, about $500 million in revenue. That means I know a lot about what's worked for me. It makes me a little bit hesitant to try stuff that I've never done before because I know that this method works. Uh, good story, hired an SDR a year and a half ago, very, very green. Um, she'd never done anything remotely like this before. She was working as a bartender, and I hired her And I don't cold call, not very much. I mean, I do, but like, that's— I don't hammer the phones for 8 hours a day. And she was like, I'm not gonna send emails. I'm not gonna LinkedIn. I'm just gonna call. And I was like, okay, I don't know how that's gonna work. You're not even gonna get people on the phone. She aggressively cold called and texted. Texting, I particularly was like, I'm definitely not texting. It seems so rude to me. She added $250,000 in pipeline to an MSP in 2 months. Brand new, had never been an SDR before. She just hammered the phones. She was good at it. She was good with people. She put people off a little bit, like she didn't sound salesy, and she, she just was really good. Um, and if I had told her not to cold call, to use LinkedIn, to use email instead. It's $250,000 in pipeline that my client never would've gotten. Marketing and client acquisition obstacles. You gotta utilize marketing strategies. You gotta focus on relationship building. You gotta leverage the power of social media and digital platforms. There's a lot of other things that you need to do, but that's just kind of basics. I'm skipping this slide. Real-world examples. So number one, my client MSG, Managed Services Group, they implemented a plan. At least this is all their plans. In fact, they include vendor management in all their plans. What they started doing was they hired junior people, no experience, to do the vendor negotiation aspect of their plan. That means like calling up Comcast, calling up Spectrum, negotiating the price plan. It's super entry-level job, but doing that job, they learned a lot about the industry. They learned about MSG, and they learned about MSG's clients, and then they would move into administrative finance and tech 1 jobs and move their way up. And these people were like, they're super grateful to have a job because you took a chance on them. So that's just, that's one, one way, right? Our client Survive You. When we came in, they just, they didn't, their website did not capture them. Their social media did not capture them. They didn't have branding. They didn't have a voice. They didn't have core values. And we came in, we consulted on all that, and we put it out there. And less than a year later, they were acquired by Service Express. Big acquisition. They made a ton of money. Scalable processes at Tailorworks. So I came in and consulted, and they had all of these little silos of people working in sales, people working in marketing. They had a lot of different vendors working for them, and I said, we're gonna have a weekly all 10, and everybody's gonna start being transparent. They weren't getting good reporting out of their vendors. Their vendors were just like, oh, we made this many calls, or we sent this many emails, you got this many responses, we set up this many meetings, whatever. But they weren't seeing like the content, the copy, the call recordings. They, they weren't able to give feedback, and they weren't being authentic in their messaging. They weren't capturing who Taylor Works was. We did a couple weeks of L10s. I made everybody talk to each other. So like they had email marketing working completely separately than cold calling, and I was like, okay, well, need to plug these 2 systems together. Email marketing needs to be generating reports so the cold callers can call up and follow up, and they need to know the messaging that was sent so they can reference it. Within 3 months, we had 30% increase in revenue added, like super fast. And that's just, you know, we got rid of a silo, replaced it with something better. So how do you implement this at your MSP, right? Identify and embrace your core values. You don't have them, you need them. The best place to start figuring out your core values is to deploy an employee survey and ask them what they think they are. What values does the team have? Ask them what they think they are, ask them what they would like them to be, then talk about it, right? That goes hand in hand with soliciting employee feedback. If you already have core values, ask them how they identify with those core values. If you have a team of 50 people and you have 4 core values, right, and you ask that team to say if they identify with the core values, and like less than 30% of your team is saying they identify with those core values, It's probably not the team that's wrong. It's probably the core values, unless your company's a mess and everybody's arguing all the time. Right? So we have to kind of identify the problems and solicit the employee feedback hand in hand, because if there's problems, the employee feedback can help you solve for them. If there's not problems, the employee feedback can help you figure out what your core values truly should be, what your mission and vision truly are. Promote diverse people into leadership. Okay, if, if you have a 100-person company and your 4-person leadership team is all cis-hetero white male, how would I feel being hired into your team and looking at leadership and being like, oh, I don't think any of those people are gonna like me? It's not gonna feel good, right? I'm not saying there's anything Wrong with being that. If you're a man, you're a white man, you're a hetero white man, there's nothing wrong with you. We're all born as we are. We are who we are. But you need to get representation into your leadership for your people that they can identify with. Because here's the thing, if I'm having an autistic meltdown, I don't want to go explain I don't want to explain that to my neurotypical boss because I'm going to feel judged. I am. I don't, I don't even have the words to explain that to him. I want to be able to talk to HR or my manager or the head of my department or the head of some department who is also neurodivergent and gets it and has been there and can support me. If I'm trans and I came in off the street and I had people throw rocks at me and call me a tranny today, I don't want to have that breakdown with my cis hetero boss who's never been treated that way. If I'm a woman and on the way to work today I was assaulted, I, I don't want to have that conversation with someone who looks like my assailant. So you just want to make sure that there are people who have clout at your company that kind of touch on all the bases. That means you have men and women, you have people of color, you have white people, you have neurodiverse and neurotypical people. You're kind of covering all the bases that someone can come in and talk to somebody who they think is going to understand what they have to say. Now, you can solve for this by doing a lot of diversity training at the leadership level and creating a lot of empathy and compassion and really pushing that there so that people do feel comfortable with you. But that— it's a lot more of an uphill battle. Okay, that's just basic behavioral psychology. Adopt your ethical marketing practices. Overcome obstacles. Timeline for this: if you care about what I've had to say in this presentation, you want to go implement this at your MSP, the first thing I want you to do is do a core values and weaknesses review. I want you to sit down as a leadership team Say, what are our core values? Are they actually our core values? Do we feel like they express not only us but our entire company and what we stand for? What are our weaknesses when it comes to ethics and diversity? Just get it all out there. Talk about it. Then go get employee feedback. Organize your thoughts. Put it into like a nice Google Doc of some kind. Send that out, get a survey, send it out, get feedback, have conversations, trickle it down, have conversations in your one-on-one, go into your quarterly reviews knowing this, go into your one-on-ones this week knowing this, collect that feedback, grab another leadership team meeting to plan, talk about the things you can address, the things you can't address, and the timeline for doing it, and then go have a company rollout, host a company-wide meeting, talk about it, make a checklist and a plan. Deploy it. It's gonna look different for everybody. 4 months is one timeline that it could be done. Some people take a year to do this. Some people take a month. Okay, it really depends on your own capacity for doing that stuff. So recapping, do you all understand what ethical marketing is? If not, let me know in the comments. Happy to answer your questions. Do you understand the power of diversity? If not, let me know in the comments. Do you understand this is gonna have a real-life impact on your team? Do you understand how to overcome some of these MSP-specific challenges? Do you think you could go implement ethical marketing and diversity in your MSP? And do you understand the importance of truth-telling? If you do, my job is done. If you don't, I need to fix this presentation badly. I think there's already some things I know that I need to fix. So leave me some comments, leave me some feedback, be brutal. I can take it. Q&A slide. And you need to get in touch with me. You can email me directly at megan@mkcagency.com. My LinkedIn is linkedin.com/in/MeganKillian. That's where you can find me. I'm posting all the time. I'm super obnoxious. Give me a follow, comment, like, whatever. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks, guys. Thanks for spending a ridiculous amount of time. With me, with me ranting at you.