Products & Resources

• Clay
• Smart Leads
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Key Terms

• MSP
• QBR - Quarterly Business Review
• MMR - Monthly Recurring Revenue

James Steel [00:00:00]:

While most MSPs are out there hunting endlessly for new clients, the smart ones know their richest opportunities lie in the fields they already own. My name is James Steele and this is harvest, where MSPs and industry experts share proven ways to grow profitable revenue from your current customer base. No theory, no fluff, just field tested strategies that work. Let's grow.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:00:28]:

From, you know, top shelf Cisco equipment as an example, which took our one tier three engineer to be able to scope it because they were that high and that certified and all that other stuff like, well, let's just dumb that back down to some next gen equipment that's still equally as capable but not as fancy. 60% of their time was spent basically on administrative tasks like hand holding. The process of an opportunity from start to finish with strip your company back down to first principles and like restore some of that uniqueness. You know, MSP struggled to differentiate in the market. It's because you stripped all the differentiation out unknowingly and intentionally. If you really want them to migrate from G Suite to Office 365, but that is in complete defiance of the top three initiatives for them this year. How about we don't try to shove that down their throat, understanding their drivers first and then you're a part of the solution.

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James Steel [00:01:30]:

Welcome Harvesters. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. If you can see me in this episode, I'm talking to Jeffrey Newton now. We have got some good stuff for you today. We are talking about transforming MSP sales teams, simplifying complex processes in your MSP business and getting back to measuring the things that actually matter. Jeffrey turned an underperforming sales team into a revenue machine and he talks about how he did it, including stripping back just half unnecessary stuff and focusing on customer priorities. And also he's got a take on industry best practises being kind of snake oil, which really got me thinking.

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James Steel [00:02:06]:

He's unfiltered, honest and it was a really refreshing chat. Enjoyed this one. And there's loads of actionable takeaways, so make sure you've got some way of writing them down. Let's get into it. Hi everyone. Today we're getting down to the roots of MSP growth with Jeffrey Newton, who's cultivated success across every layer of the MSP field, from hands on field technicians to support desk manager, VCIO and ultimately sales leader and revenue architect. And in his most impressive growth season, he sprouted an MSP's recurring revenue by over $3 million in just 28 months. Please welcome Jeffrey Newton.

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James Steel [00:02:43]:

Jeffrey how you doing?

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Jeffrey Newton [00:02:44]:

Oh, spectacular. My favourite topic. I love it.

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James Steel [00:02:46]:

I'm so glad to have you on. I love what you guys are doing at Sift. I know you've got plenty to share. You've got an amazing, amazing background. So looking forward to, looking forward to getting, getting stuck in. Jeffrey, one of the reasons that I got you on the podcast is I know you've had some fantastic experience across a number of MSPs, but there's one in particular that really caught my eye and that's where you had to go into the inside sales team and you're responsible for turning around some of the sales performance of that team. So I thought maybe we could dive into that today because there's a lot to it and I think there's a lot for our audience to learn. Perhaps you could just sort of set the scene and give us a bit of background around what that scenario was and what the task was that you were set.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:03:21]:

Yeah, absolutely. So even my, my journey into sales was a bit unique in that it came off the back of 11 years of being on the tech side MSP business. And so I just made that leap because I really liked the people part so much more than the tech part. And naturally then people as well as peers turned into the next evolution. Right. So I became a sales rep, then I got the outside sales team, then they handed me the inside sales team with the intention. Sort of like the edict. Right.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:03:51]:

We were an SLI OML shop. We were heavy, heavy, heavy on growth. Headcount wise. It was about, at that time it had been about 115 employees or so, roughly somewhere in that 20ish million dollar range. And so it was a really sizable msp. That's really where you have to get really, really tight with the scalpel to sharpen every little piece of that Excel spreadsheet that's running the business. Right. From a financials perspective because you can see the larger you get, the more waste there is or at least potential for it.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:04:20]:

Right. And so there was a lot of attention placed on account management specifically because it was the largest team, thus the largest costs. And so the goal was two things. One, increase revenue right away so that we could immediately impact that ratio.

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James Steel [00:04:35]:

And that's however you can. So it's not necessarily going into existing customers or is that just the. That's the typical way you would handle.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:04:42]:

It with account managers, just the internal net? Yeah, basically expansion revenue from current clients.

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James Steel [00:04:47]:

Got it.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:04:48]:

Team of five was responsible for, but it was sort of like the human band aid role. For MSPs, right. When I did a time audit, when I first inherited that team for a full month, each one of the team members basically audited what they were spending their time on. And what we found was 60% of their time. And this was uniform across all five of them. 60% of their time was spent basically on administrative tasks like handholding. The process of an opportunity from start.

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James Steel [00:05:17]:

To finish within the MSP business, within itself.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:05:20]:

Right. So it's like to the scoping team and back and babysitting that and pushing it forward to the project team, to the account technician, we called them primary engineers. Right. To get the context. And it was like always doing this crazy amount of just inertia. It took like 60% of their time was like, oh man. Now granted, all of that time is ideally tied to some revenue on the. The output of it, right.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:05:45]:

But 60% was just insane because it's just such a heavy task. The very first thing we did was broke out and created a specialised function within the Prof. Services team to handle any and all scoping functions as well as opportunity management functions. Right. And the intention there and the outcome turned into. We actually collapsed the timeframe for really like the scoping and the, the opportunity management process from about three months down to about three weeks. So we're talking like opportunity origination to proposal out the door.

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James Steel [00:06:23]:

And how are we able to actually reduce the time? So you've shifted the responsibility to a dedicated team within there, so how are you actually reducing it so much?

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Jeffrey Newton [00:06:33]:

The technical resources tend to look at the world through like a technologically idealistic viewpoint. Meaning like what does perfection look like and how does all that function, the stack, the blips and the bleeps and the blinky lights, like it's so purist and it doesn't really map to reality as it relates to one, the customer's experience or their need or their perception. And so oftentimes there was all this rework in the quotes and everything else too. Right. Project services would, would create the most expensive with the highest and the best because that's where they needed to be three years from now versus like, well, where do they need to be right now to fix 80% of the problem? So the very first thing we did is we, we met internally with the research or. Yeah, the R and D team, the people that governed the stack compliance piece. We met there and then the scoping team and we said, look, we're going to start operating by the Pareto principle, the 8020 rule, like where can we get 80% of the benefit of the solution without killing ourselves over that last 20. And so we went from you know, top shelf Cisco equipment as an example, which took our one tier three engineer to be able to scope it because they were that high and that certified and all that other stuff like well let's just dumb that back down to some next gen equipment that's still equally as capable but not as fancy and not as cool.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:08:02]:

And it doesn't need to be enterprise or mid market to be an SMB solution. Right. So we really just what I like to call like right sized through reality. What is it that we're doing and who is it that we're doing it for. And then we identified the right resources to say okay, give me the list essentially of pre vetted solutions with pre vetted time blocks. Meaning if we were going to install that one firewall, right. That type of firewall would have this professional services tied to it. And again 8020 rule.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:08:34]:

I understand that there were outliers. I know sometimes we're going to have to redesign this other thing or you're going to add some extra hours. That's okay. Like there's plenty of opportunity for contingency planning but not to the detriment of adding two and a half months to the quoting and proposal process. Right.

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James Steel [00:08:50]:

So you've taken something that was almost completely bespoke and you basically you've standardised and you almost kind of productized even the time component. So which makes it easy to talk to customers about.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:09:00]:

Yeah, because I think the other gap that MSPs have is like there's sort of worst case scenario planners, especially when you're thinking through the lens of like scoping and stuff like well what about this and what about that? And you end up with all this bloat and all, all this senselessness trying to manage to the outliers. And the other part was we pre decided together in a room by committee how many hours does it take to deploy this firewall as an example, right. And if they needed site to site vpn, then how long does that take? And so it was really productizing to your point or creating a menu of services that standardised an 8020 rule. And from that point one we could quote stuff faster. Two we could provide budgetary numbers before we even needed to go to a quote faster because there was so much like rework and just waste clear examples like well if it took three months to go from really origination to proposal, think about deal registrations and quote timelines like by the Time we actually proposed the thing that was scoped, we had to go back to our vendors and get new pricing and then go back to our clients and give them new pricing. Like the whole thing was just so frustrating because no one had really sat over top of all of it and looked at it holistically and said, what are we trying to do? What's the most efficient way to do it? And then understanding sales psychology and process was like, now we just streamline ourselves to be efficient and effective and not constantly worrying about edge cases.

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James Steel [00:10:24]:

This is brilliant. I think you can apply it to so many things. I mean that simplification, that idea of standardisation is powerful across the board, but this is brilliant. So you've, so this is, this is step one essentially of making sure that your account managers actually have some bandwidth back. So you've got, got to this stage where the rest of the business is. So you've sort of, you've kind of moved some of that responsibility to the team and now you're going back to your account manager and saying, look guys, guess what? I freed up X percent of your time.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:10:49]:

Right? Yeah. So now that we've solved sort of the macro level time management and time blocking component and then I had a clear list of like, here's the basically the 16 functions that account managers have in the organisation. Then it was like, okay, well of the things that you're doing, are you doing this because of osmosis? Like the company is just trained behaviorally.

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James Steel [00:11:11]:

Like 16 functions sounds like an awful lot to me, I have to say. So how do you focus them back on actually revenue generating tasks? How do you go about generating the.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:11:19]:

New opportunities where it got exciting? Because that's ultimately where we started to see the crazy upside results. Right. Was okay, now that we have some of this time back, we're going to reallocate that time that we were using wastefully managing this abysmal process of opportunity management and saying like this is what a. At that time it was a quarterly business review is what they were called. We pivoted that to a strategic business review. We looked across our client base, we came up with. I designed what I ended up calling a client complexity score. Right.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:11:52]:

Because not all clients are created equal. And so we looked at our current client base. We came up with a quantifiable way to stack rank our clients based on need and by need I'm going back to communication expectations, touch points and just cadence of need. Right. And that was, it was a 10 question survey. So the very one of the first Things we did was no one knew the clients better than the account managers. So the account managers went in and answered this 10 question survey that had a weighted output. Right.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:12:24]:

To figure out basically on a scale of 0 to 100, where was our book of business because we were managing, it's probably 250 clients.

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James Steel [00:12:32]:

That's just the complexity side. That's not necessarily giving you a picture of, okay, the profitability or opportunity there. It's just kind of what is the overhead of working with this company.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:12:41]:

Yeah, because what I was trying to do was to figure out, okay, are we spending the same amount of time on all clients just because that's what the process says to do, or are we intentionally telling our time where to go so that we can peg that to the anticipated outcome? Right. There were a handful of behaviours and things that were leading indicators of revenue and a strategic business review was one of them. But then again, this is another pitfall. So maybe dropping a nugget there is like, if your account managers are going out and trying to have conversations with your clients and they had an agenda, they had everything prepped, they were ready to roll and have this amazing conversation, they show up and they have no other conversation than talking about why Sally's computer at the front desk is broken for the 17th time in three weeks. Like it's, there's so many other issues that you need to solve within the organisation because you'll never be given a seat at the table to have a business level conversation where you're going to ask for revenue if your service isn't dialled in enough that the, what I call like the good enough line or the, like the bloody hell should line, like the minimum expectation is being met on a service delivery standpoint. You can't go beyond that if you're not already delivering at that level. And so, like, wise words. Yeah, that's one thing I would say is like, don't, don't bother wasting the time forcing your account managers or whatever title you have, going out, trying to farm your clients for additional stuff if your current service delivery isn't sound? Right.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:14:17]:

And so that's really the underlying thing about this complexity score for me was saying of the other 200 counts that need to be assigned, like, how can I properly set my account manager up for success so that I know there's enough bandwidth to do the activities that are necessary to drive the revenue that I knew could be pulled out of it? And the revenue that I knew could be pulled out was between 20 and 40% of the annualised MRR. So the ARR of what their book.

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James Steel [00:14:46]:

Of business was figure, how did you.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:14:48]:

Arrive at that historical data? So I'm one of the things that was maybe not unique about me, but it was certainly a piece that I took from my, the engineering days was I'm super analytical and super logical, even though I'm also operating on the other spectrum. And so this MSP was probably 15 years old at the time and they had Connectwise for at least 10 of those. So statistically speaking and historically speaking, I had a treasure trove of information. Now I had to go make it useful, but like it was all still there and I was really able to extract it and learn how the hell pivot tables worked and just slice it and dice it and move the data that I had available. So many different ways to sort of like turn, I like to call it like turning the Rubik's Cube. Right? Like figuring out what to do and how to do it such that we could turn our organisation from a slot machine into a vending machine. Right.

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James Steel [00:15:47]:

Were you kind of, were you looking at the potential opportunity there based on the services they weren't taking? Or was it a case of, okay, I can see that customers similar to this profile perhaps have spent a certain amount over a certain duration or like, how did you sort of get to that? That's a really interesting area. Like that potential. The potential within your base.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:16:03]:

Yeah, absolutely. So there were a couple of levels and ways to like layer the lenses on top of it. Right. So one is just historical data, period. And the first place I looked was reactive work. So how much time are we spending in our organisation relative to the number of endpoints we were managing, essentially? Right, so like how much reactive time are we allocating to just basically keeping the thing at baseline. So if you looked at all of our data and essentially we're like, okay, baseline is the truth and if we're spending too much time in that environment, then that's a problem that we can fix. Because the goal isn't actually baseline at all.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:16:40]:

The goal is to be way above baseline. Meaning like we're spending so little time on the reactive means where they're spending the time on the proactive and the client's going to be receptive to our proactive conversations because it's not a dumpster fire. And so that was really kind of the first place we looked was the reactive proactive. Where is the baseline relative to size and complexity? Right. Because just because they were a 10 user shop didn't mean they were not Complex because they could have been in a highly regulated environment with a board and with other things. Well, guess what, if they have a board or even a leadership team, right? Not one decision maker, but three. The amount of time you have to spend to get that leadership team in consensus on a decision is far more than a single decision maker. Thus it impacts the complexity score.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:17:25]:

The complexity score was more or less a predictive algorithm to tell me how much time, how much soft skill time is the account manager going to have to spend to get the decisions made.

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James Steel [00:17:36]:

Ultimately, I thought this was really cool and I haven't heard this before. What struck me in this one is Jeff, approach client complexity not just from what they're doing technically, but actually from a decision making perspective. So it's not just about how big the client is, which is often where we go to when we're classifying customers. It's about understanding how they operate and how they actually make decisions. That's so important. And that really changes how you think about account management, who you're talking to and your approach. How do they approach these conversations? Because these, these are. Presumably the account managers weren't necessarily used to going in there and having a kind of seat at the C suite table, potentially.

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James Steel [00:18:15]:

Or how did they, how do they go about increasing revenue? Where do they look, what do they, what do they go to sell? Or any. Yes, any approaches.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:18:22]:

The initial thing, like the core deliverable was intentionally having strategic business reviews. Now one of the reasons we changed quarterly business review to strategic business Review was the complexity score showed us that time is an illusion and things shouldn't be as time bound because not all things are equal. Right. The highest complexity, a high growth company, big or small, is operating on a time schedule that doesn't match a low growth or a declining company. Right. And quarterly is not good enough for high growth. And so there were clients on those lists where we were having in person meetings almost at a board level, on a bi weekly basis, like normal. Right.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:19:07]:

And so, but also we were in a constant state of, here's a quote, here's a project, you're moving offices, you're expanding, this one you're doing. Right. So the nature of the work was so much more fast paced. And here was kind of the unlock. And this is the same for outside sales. But since we're talking about inside sales, we'll drive it that way. There's a difference between your sales process and the buyer's buying process. And if you ignore the fact that a buying process even exists and you just try to shove your sales process down their throat.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:19:39]:

You will be more frustrated maybe than the client, but the client's going to feel that too. But you're also going to jeopardise the results out of that.

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James Steel [00:19:54]:

This episode is sponsored by Sales Builder where I work. I really wanted to tell you about us because I see so many MSB sales team buried in admin. Instead of talking to customers and building relationships, we help you automate your sales process with standardised product catalogues and professional proposals. Our service matrix or the white space module. That's the bit that shows you visually where the opportunities are in your customer base. From service gaps to upcoming renewals. Everything links directly with your PSA and of course your distribution. If you'd like to free up your sales team's time and spot more revenue opportunities, simply connect with me on LinkedIn or head to salesbuilder.com let's get back to it.

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James Steel [00:20:37]:

Any advice around Best practises when you're doing or having those conversations?

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Jeffrey Newton [00:20:41]:

Yeah, I mean, one of the most effective questions that we had was going in generally there was a whiteboard in the room, right? And they never expected this, which is one of the reasons we did it for a pattern interrupt. But it was hand them the marker to the whiteboard and ask them to get up and go write down what are the top three initiatives for your business this year in 2024 as it sits right, and write them there. Because one, if what you're going to try to offer them doesn't align with those things anyway, then you don't have a priority and you don't have executive buy in and you won't have a sale. And it also is just going to be frustrating as hell for your client and so understanding their drivers first and then you're a part of the solution. Like you don't have to convince them that achieving goal number two, either faster or more effectively or more efficiently or earlier or cheaper is like a better thing for their business. They're already bought into it because themselves or their executive team is already aligning their whole organisation towards those three goals on the whiteboard. And so if you really want them to migrate from G Suite to Office 365, but that is in complete defiance of the top three initiatives for them this year. How about we don't try to shove that down their throat? Instead figure out, okay, of the items 1, 2 and 3, maybe replacing their entire infrastructure aligns with numbers 1 and 2 right away.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:22:02]:

And now you position the conversation that way.

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James Steel [00:22:06]:

I mean this could well be the most simple to implement change in your business that you're going to hear on this show. I don't know. I can imagine there are customers everywhere that have to sit through QBRs where it's technical updates and project status practises that they probably don't understand in its entirety. Possibly don't care about that much. And honestly, Jeff's approach of having the client write their priorities on this board, so simple, just completely flips the dynamic. I love it. And it immediately makes a conversation about their business and not your services. Can I, can I ask you.

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James Steel [00:22:40]:

That's interesting. So it makes total sense to me and I love the way you set the tone in those meetings in terms of things like cybersecurity, which is not one of those topics that I love to half on about. But I do think it's important here. So there's opportunities there where perhaps that wouldn't be linked to the top three or it's kind of quite a distant relation to what they will have put on the board. Do you go in there and there's a section where you're sort of talking about, okay, well we do think there's some basics there you need to be doing or how do you approach those other things you know about that you really think they should be using but that perhaps they haven't mentioned?

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Jeffrey Newton [00:23:10]:

Yeah, that's a great question. I think. I haven't really thought about it this way, but this is the way the answer is coming to me because of the way we framed the interactions was probably extracted from my project management days was when evaluating a priority, one of the most important things that you have to figure out is where are the risks? Right. And what are the risks that will take us off track or prevent us from doing this thing? So in this scenario, the way that we would kind of do that is. Okay, here's the marker. Go write these three things on the whiteboard. Great, we've got them there. They're right there.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:23:40]:

We can touch them together. Okay. We kind of navigated that well. Now you can draw one big circle around all three and write the word risk on the outside of that circle and say, now we'll have a risk conversation. Like what is and are the real time, real world risks that will derail any one of these three priorities. Sometimes it was all of them. Right, sometimes it was none of them. Doubtful.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:24:03]:

Like in most cases, generally the only time you'd have that is where it really was. Like a regulated healthcare as an example. Right. HIPAA is the toothless beast, meaning it's a trust and never verify for the most part. And so like they were more about checking boxes and pencil whipping stuff than actually reducing risk in their business, right? Wrong or indifferent. You could at least have the conversation and offer the solutions and try to help them understand that if you really want to get 1, 2 or 3 done, like here is a real world risk that you need to account for. And when you started doing it like that again, they saw the addition or introduction of net new security solutions into their environment through a different lens. All we did was change the frame, right? It's like, this isn't about me selling you MFA or whatever, right? Dark web monitoring, any of that stuff.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:24:55]:

That's just the solution. It's the tool, it's the flashy widget, it's the thing that I care about as an msp. And you don't care about as your business because you're trying to figure out how to open the new clinic or add an operatory or something. But when you instead say, well, what would happen if you don't get these three operatories opened in 2024? Like, what financial impact does that have for you on 2025? Okay, get that answer. So let me ask you this question. What would happen if all 15 operatories were down for 43 hours due to a compromise, right? Like, what's the impact there? Well, how would that happen? Now you've opened the door to like them trying to ensure they're protecting their own interests and you deliver a solution that says, look, this is the best case scenario to try to keep that situation, that version of reality to not exist. And it was just a totally different conversation at that point because it wasn't about, well, my stack has 17 pretty little things in it and you're only using two because I haven't actually talked to you about the other 14 and I need you to buy the other 14 because someone upstairs told me that I had to. Like, that's how most MSPs in my experience approach sales and certainly cross sell upsell because there's so much less time.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:26:09]:

Which is also a lie. But it's a lie we tell ourselves to focus on our current clients because we're so busy either reacting to the stuff in their environments or chasing down net new logos. And so you just neglect the gold mine that sits in your backyard.

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James Steel [00:26:23]:

Yeah, I think that's some absolutely great advice. It's almost like turning on its head, isn't it? I think that information is useful. You need to know what's in your stack for sure, you need to know where it fits. But starting with the customer conversation, framing it in that way is great. So that's been really good. So what I'm hearing is we've managed to simplify, productize, free up the bandwidth of the account managers, enable them to have better conversations. Is there anything else to this piece? Because it sounds like you've made quite a transformation there on the team already. Is there anything else that goes into that?

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Jeffrey Newton [00:26:51]:

Yeah. Well, then it's visibility. It's visibility, measurability and accountability. Right? So, like, we created the space to do the things, we defined what the things were that needed to be done, and then it's all about visibility, measurability, accountability. Are we doing the things that we know we need to do? When we do the things we know that we're. We're. We need to do, then are we getting the desired result that we expect out of that? If not, we adjust, we fix it, we work there. And then in the end, it's just the accountability.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:27:18]:

Like, we're not going to not hit the goal. That's not an option. We only operate in a winning reality where we hit the goal and we know that the leading indicators will produce the result that we're looking for. And so understanding supreme clarity in activity points is really how we ran that team. Just like an outside sales team, Right? Like, you have to have 100 activity points a day, and here's how you get them. Not all activity points are created equal. Right. A proposal meeting is worth a lot more than an email to my client trying to book one.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:27:48]:

And so. But at the same time, you may have two proposal meetings this week. Right. And that's the lion's share of your points as an example. But, you know, getting there, you have to do a bunch of other things in order to get to the point where you can actually have a proposal.

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James Steel [00:28:04]:

What did a typical day look like for an account manager? I'm just. I'm curious to know at that level of MSP on a daily basis. Obviously, it depends on day of the week and so on, but generally, what are they spending their time on? What should they be spending their time on, in your opinion?

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Jeffrey Newton [00:28:18]:

Yeah, no, great question, because it's. There was still a fair amount of, you know, the therapy's still there.

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James Steel [00:28:25]:

Right.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:28:25]:

Administrative work. Right. And I think that's one of the real flaws that we have as msps is like the guys or the illusion of activity being mistaken for progress. Because we live in a reactive world. Right. And a reactive business. And like, there's so many problems that we are solving in a day, day to day basis. But it's, it's a bit too safe to give ourselves so much room to allow the excuse of why something didn't get done.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:28:59]:

Because we did all these other things, right? And there's actual tactical, practical things, like we just did this massive migration and you can see it and touch it and feel it compared to the work that we didn't do. And then we give ourselves this, like, free pass because we got the technical stuff done, but we didn't get the sales stuff done. But, like, yay, right? No one's there to hold the people accountable generally at an msp, that's one of the biggest things I see as a problem is that I don't want to call it like, smaller, as in. Yeah, the smaller ones do this. It was, it was in the big ones too. But accountability, accountability is everything. And generally in the 5 to 15 employee style or size, MSPs, like, accountability goes all the way up to the top, except for where the invincibility blanket is. Right.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:29:43]:

The owner could say they want this thing all year long and then when you don't hit the thing, there's those excuses that are tolerable and as a result, like, that's not how accountability works and it's not how teams work and it's not how people work. Because you're going to get what you tolerate. And so if you tolerate that at the highest level, you may not see it overtly, but it's happening at every level of the organisation the whole time.

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James Steel [00:30:06]:

That's an excellent, that's an excellent lesson. And I don't think that's MSP specific for a moment. I think that's probably across most organisations, really. Accountability is totally key. This is, as you say, it's been. It's quite a simple framework that you've described, but it's the, it's the executing on that really is where the power is. It's been an enlightening chat,Jeffrey, thank you so much for this. Listen, I want to change tack completely and ask you a little bit.

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James Steel [00:30:27]:

Let's get back to the MSP space, the MSP industry. In our segment we call industry manure, what is the biggest crock of you hear from industry experts that really grinds your gears? Is there anything you hear in our delightful echo chamber of MSP land that you think, actually, that's just terrible advice and there's a lot of people taking it.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:30:49]:

Yeah. As ironic as it might sound, the industry best Practises that exist out there are incredibly frustrating. And I, speaking from a person who worked at MSPS at each size all the way up to the big one, right, where we were so focused on what, in that case, SLI OML needed to tell us was the delusion and the illusion that they don't tell you when you're inside the echo chamber of best practises is that you're like actively and consciously stripping everything that makes you unique out of your company because you're conforming to the standard. And then you don't even realise you're doing it because you're just following this playbook until you get several years down the line of that evolution and you kind of look back and you're like, you don't quite recognise yourself anymore. Or worse yet, your clients don't quite recognise your service or your support or who you are as a business. Right? They've been with you for 10 years, you're now this new thing. You didn't bring them along for the ride on that particular journey into where you were going, but they don't really prep you for that, nor do they even acknowledge that that's the case. Like in some ways, even though industry best practise is supposed to be like the pinnacle of our industry, my experience was always that it was in many more ways a race to the bottom.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:32:10]:

Right. Maybe not in Price Point, but in a lot of other areas of the business.

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James Steel [00:32:15]:

And so one that stands out for you because obviously we've talked about frameworks today and that's kind of like what you've talked about there could be applied to another business, but still you could create, you could still retain the culture and so on. So after kind of grill you a little bit on that, then, was there one, one example you can think of?

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Jeffrey Newton [00:32:31]:

Yeah, again, I was fortunate. 5, 5 msps 7 different times. So I experienced a lot of different kinds of MSP at different MSPS at different levels. I was on leadership teams for probably, you know, 13 of those 18 years. And so I got to see a lot of the whole, hey, we got to solve this problem stuff. So I experienced SLI OML multiple times, different MSPs I experienced. It's not really MSP related, but like traction, right. Eos as an operating system, done well and done terribly.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:33:00]:

I experienced C level operations, their methodology and best practises and also true methods. So, like, of the core, right, the different names that are out there, I kind of went through, had experience with them all. There's others probably too, but those were the big ones.

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James Steel [00:33:16]:

Okay, so at this point in the episode, Jeffrey what we'll do is ask you the question from our last guest who was the illustrious Nigel Moore from the tech tribe. And his question to the the next guest was if you're getting an MSP up and running and you're small, maybe it's just you one to three people and you can invest $1,000 a month only into finding new clients for a period of six months. You got 6,000 total budget. What would you spend that money on? What's the strategy?

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Jeffrey Newton [00:33:43]:

Oh wow, that's a, that's a brilliant question which I should expect coming from Nigel. My answer is actually going to be informed from sitting on the other side of the fence now as a, a vendor because I wish that I had our go to market strategy even known if I was aware of it when I was still on an MSP doing things a little bit more old fashioned. And granted I had a tonne of success in the sales side doing the old fashioned things consistently. But what I would do is I would abandon the process that I was using as far as like buying lead lists and figuring out the who's and the what's and I would invest, which you could probably do for less than the thousand dollars into the, the new tech stack that exists inside of go to market today tools like clay for actually figuring out who, where, what and why and how. And then the integrations that you can play off of clay. Right. So I would have clay because then I could source the, the right leads within my geographical area. Right.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:34:47]:

I'm small, those kinds of things. So you can drop a Google Map pen as an example, put a radius around it and then search for those types of businesses that you want. Maybe it's dental. Great. It'll extract anyone who has a Google Maps record that's a dentist within whatever zone you put. And now you have the beginnings of your, let's call it Dream 100. Right. And then from there now we're going to enrich the data and then we're going to leverage better email tools like smart lead instead of active campaign or Hootsuite or something along those lines.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:35:19]:

Right. You know the monkey one, I can't even think of it. Right. Like those things are dead.

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James Steel [00:35:23]:

Mailchimp.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:35:24]:

Yeah. Most MSPs are so far behind on sales and marketing that they don't even have things like mailchimp in their world. And so they go out to what the market tells you and it's like hey, you need this thing for autoresponding or whatever. Well, you're so far behind and don't even waste your time there. Like skip a level and go straight to real world Next generation. Go to Market Strategies and you could pick up Clay Smart Lead, Panda Match and a couple of these other tools inside this tech stack for under a thousand dollars and have businesses outside your back door that you can jump in the car and go to. But be informed with the right context and the right messaging to actually have a meaningful conversation with them that has them leaning into wanting your services versus you trying to convince them to buy it.

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James Steel [00:36:13]:

That's brilliant. I've got so many more questions for you about that stack. I'm very familiar with Clay Smart Leads and Panda Match. Not so much. We'll put those links in the show notes anyway. I can go and explore them and so can you as the listeners. Listen, there's one more thing to do before I let you go, and that is can you please leave a question for our next guest, who will also be an industry expert. It can be anything of your choosing.

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James Steel [00:36:32]:

If you'd like to tap into their expertise. Let me have a question. I'll put it to them when we start.

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Jeffrey Newton [00:36:39]:

Yeah, considering we're coming up on the beginning of a new year, I would say if there was only one thing that you could accomplish within your business next year to exceed the financial performance that you have the goal, what would that one thing be and how would you go about doing it?

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James Steel [00:37:01]:

Excellent. I like that. Okay, that is it for this episode of Harvest. If you found this useful, all the links we mentioned are in the show notes. And of course, if you enjoyed it, please do leave us a review and share it with a friend. Or even better, someone else in the industry who you know would get value from it. Until next time, Happy harvesting.

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