“Robin, I’m a small one-man-band MSP that is struggling to grow because I don’t know where to focus my time right now. Should I be focused on marketing to get more customers or on making our services better?”
Questions like this remind me of the games people post on social media where they give you two options to select from, neither of which is a good choice. Example: “Would you rather have your eyeballs gouged out with a sharp stick or your feet slowly chopped off with a butter knife?”
When asked my choice, I reply I’d rather NOT answer a dumb question.
I’m not suggesting YOUR question is dumb, but it certainly is shortsighted and reveals you don’t understand the purpose of your role in your business as the owner. It presumes that you must have a focus on one or the other, when they are both necessary.
Should you have functioning lungs or a functioning brain? What about your heart? After these two, before them, or…? A business, like a body, has more than one function that has to be working simultaneously – and success in business is the same. Simultaneous production NOT sequential.
Focus too much on marketing without a solid service delivery, and you’ll only accelerate the pace at which people find out you suck and can’t be trusted, crushing any chance of upsells, referrals and, of course, continued business. HOWEVER, the technician mindset of “build it and they will come” is as much of a fairy tale of MSP success as is the baseball stadium in the movie Field Of Dreams. Plus, your service is constantly in a state of “could be better,” so if you’re waiting to do marketing until some elusive point in time when everything is “good,” you’ll never do marketing.
My guess is that you’re not actually asking a strategic question about where to spend your time – you’re asking something else. It could be that you’re looking for a permission slip to ignore marketing right now because you don’t like selling and/or you want to keep doing the tech work you’re comfortable with. Maybe you don’t want to spend money on marketing or go through the somewhat painful learning curve of how to get it to pay off. Or you might be asking so you can take my answer back to your boss/spouse/business partner to “enlighten” them that a total lack of marketing is how dummies operate…or vice versa. Or maybe you need to solve a financial or operational problem because you’re buried doing low-money work for low-margin clients and are stuck like a gerbil on a wheel.
So, my suggestion would be to first get really, really clear on what you’re trying to accomplish in your business. What IS the ultimate outcome? With that clarity, then spend more time figuring the REAL problem you’re actually trying to solve for, because you’re always going to be pulled in many directions and never have “enough time” to do anything to the level you want. Therefore, you need clarity on your outcome, a good strategy and properly set priorities so you can navigate the never-ending pull on your time and attention.
All that said, let me give you a different way of looking at EVERYTHING you’re doing in your business.
Your #1 job as the owner is to build a business that can operate without you doing the technical work so that someday you have an asset that produces a significant financial benefit to you and, at some point, you have a very lucrative exit. However, most MSP owners do not have that as their aim. They don’t build a company – they build a JOB and, in doing so, are continually perplexed as to why they don’t grow, can’t find good people and never make money, despite the fact that they’re working their tail off.
Early on, the most important job you have as the CEO is to get new customers in the door, profitably and consistently. If you can’t do that, the best service department in the world doesn’t matter. Marketing IS the strategic matching of a competitive service offering for a specific target market that you can deliver consistently and profitably. THAT IS MARKETING. And THAT job is entirely up to you, the CEO. It is not something you can delegate or abdicate. YOU need to own it, build the engine, figure out the strategy and the economics, and hire the team.
If you’re constantly “too busy” to build your go-to-market engine, you’ll never get out of the gate – and if you do, it will take you YEARS of slow build on referrals and at high risk of being unable to replace the income of losing a big client or suffering another financially devastating event.
Based on our surveys, 79% of MSPs never break the million-dollar mark, despite the fact that there’s tremendous and ever-growing demand for managed services driven by cybersecurity, compliance and the increasing dependence small businesses have on technology.
So what you ought to focus your time on are HIGH-PAYOFF and HIGH-LEVERAGE activities. Anything you can delegate or outsource (lesser skills), you should. Naturally, this is a building process, so when you first open your business, YOU need to know how to sell. Then you learn how to hire and manage salespeople. Then you learn how to build leaders in your organization who will hire, manage and improve the performance of your sales team.
And yes, you need to focus on marketing until the day you exit the organization. It’s not an “either/or.” Ever.
If you’re ready to stop spinning your wheels and finally get clear on how to build a thriving MSP business, join us at the IT Sales & Marketing Boot Camp. You’ll leave with actionable strategies to grow profitably, build your marketing engine and delegate the right tasks to free up your time for what matters most. Stop playing the guessing game with your business—take control and secure your seat today: robinsbigseminar.com.
