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Welcome to Episode 285 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• To grow your MSP, scrap these pointless tasks: One of the curses of the MSP owner is the never-ending list of things that you need to do. Use the 80/20 rule to identify the things that make the biggest difference to the growth of your business.
• Don’t be scared to present that cyber security webinar: Speaking at a seminar or a webinar can be an incredibly powerful way to attract prospects, warm them up and persuade them that your business is the one they can trust.
• Why so many MSPs fail at LinkedIn ads: LinkedIn is an insane lead generation and prospecting tool for MSPs, but which things should you do? I’ve hunted down one of only 90 certified LinkedIn experts in the world to find out.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: There is a word that you must never, ever use when you’re talking to prospects or clients. It’s a word that must be banished because using it can damage your chances of a sale or your retention. Can you guess what it is?

To grow your MSP, scrap these pointless tasks

Growing an MSP can sometimes feel like a game of poker, can’t it? If each and everything you could do to grow your business was a different card in your pack, choosing which cards to play can be overwhelming. And doesn’t it seem like the hand you’re dealt, everything that’s on your to-do list, just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So how do you decide which cards to play with and which to leave? How do you make sure you can quickly identify the things your MSP can do to become a real winner?

The biggest problem with being an MSP is having a massive to-do list. Just shout back to me now as you are listening to this or watching it on YouTube. How many things do you have to do today or tomorrow? I’m guessing it’s like 20, 30, 40 things. Because that’s one of the curses of the MSP owner is there is a never ending list of things that you need to do just to look after your clients, never mind actually growing your business. And the net effect of that is that you can get to the end of another day and another, and another and another, and you’ve done the work that your business needs to do, but you haven’t grown the business at all. This is a common problem for MSPs and frankly, it’s a massive problem.

The goal is to make a little progress every single day, and it feels frustrating when you don’t, doesn’t it?

This is why I think sometimes you need to take an 80/20 approach to your list of things that you could do, and I’m sure you’ve heard of 80/20 before. It’s also known as the Pareto principle named after Vilfredo Pareto. He was an Italian economist in the 19th century, and he was busy harvesting peas in his garden when he made an interesting observation. He noticed that some pea pods had a lot more peas in them than others did. So he counted the number of peas in each pea pod. He clearly didn’t have a lot to do that day, but he found that 80% of the peas came from only 20% of the pea pods. And what was really interesting was he then later noticed the same pattern in how wealth was distributed in Italy in his home country. He found that 20% of the people in Italy owned 80% of the land, and these 20% were very wealthy. The remaining 80% of the population owned only 20% of the land.

Now, don’t get too caught up on the 80 and the 20, the actual numbers themselves, just take from this the big principle that input and output in anything rarely match. For example, if you were...

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Welcome to this EASTER SPECIAL – Episode 284 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

How one big decision changed this MSP owner’s life

Featured guest: Steve Dempsey has been a Managed IT Services owner for over 25 years and only serves small businesses in several different markets in the UJS. In addition he owns a small SEO agency for MSP’s only to help them generate local organic leads for their business.

Hello and welcome to this special for Easter. I’m joined today by MSP owner Steve Dempsey, who’s going to tell us his business owning journey. And trust me, you have never heard a story like this before. There are many highlights, one of the best being how he went from losing thousands in his business every month to making thousands, with one key decision. Steve is a unique and generous character, and you are going to love everything he has to talk about.

Hey there, I’m Steve Dempsey. I’ve been in the IT business for 25 years and my main IT company is NeoTech Networks.

And it’s so cool to finally get you here onto the podcast, Steve. We’ve got our special episode for Easter 2025, and I feel like you and I have both been in lots of the same places at the same time, but we’ve never had a quality conversation. You’re obviously highly active in The Tech Tribe, as am I. We nearly met at Scale Con, which was the big marketing conference in Vegas in October last year. I actually talked to you from the stage and we did some cool stuff where you were in the audience and I was on the stage, but we never found each other afterwards, so it’s absolutely crazy. But I’m delighted to have you here on the show. And the reason I want to have you here, well there’s two things that I want to talk about. The first of them is you are one of the most unique MSPs that I have ever come across and you have a very unique lifestyle and I want to explore today what your life is like and what you’ve had to go through to get to that life.

And just as a bit of a tease for the many MSPs that will be listening to this on the podcast or indeed watching this on YouTube, Steve has an enviable lifestyle and it’s nothing to do with having lots of houses, a yacht, cars, anything like that. But Steve is living his best life and also has a great business. So that’s what we’re going to explore first of all. And then secondly, you have one of the most unique approaches to SEO, search engine optimisation, that I’ve ever come across. So I want to explore that because I know you had a huge amount of success for it, and indeed you are helping a small number of other MSPs to implement that in their business. But let’s start with the lifestyle stuff. So first of all, Steve, let’s hear your story. So you said in your intro you’ve been in the tech world for 25 years, which sounds like such a long time, doesn’t it? I’m 50. How old are you right now?

I’ll be almost 52.

Okay, so we’re more or less the same age then. Talking about 25 years, it sounds a lot and when you realise, hmm, that’s half of my life actually, that’s quite sobering in some respects. Tell us about your tech career then. So how did you get into tech in the first place? How did you start your first business? What’s your journey into this MSP space?

To sum it up quickly, full disclosure, I actually never went to college. I only have a high school diploma and I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. My last full-time job was, this is probably embarrassing to admit it’s been that long, my last full-time job was probably 28 years ago. The company went out of business. I always had that just drive in me to do something on my own. And then when I was 27 years old w...

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Welcome to Episode 283 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Can MSPs grow the business… by being idle?: Sometimes the fastest way to grow your MSP is to do less work, because it’s very difficult to do when your mind is constantly moving from task to task to task. That’s why you need to be idle.
• When did you last Google your MSP?: Do you know everything that’s being said about your MSP online? It’s time to discover your digital footprint.
• How to survive 30 years owning an MSP without a breakdown: My special guest has a unique insight into how MSP owners set themselves up to not just survive, but thrive over three decades of business ownership.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Have you considered selling your MSP at some point in the future but don’t know where to start? I have some great book recommendations to help.

Can MSPs grow the business… by being idle?

Just a warning, this is not the MSP growth advice you were expecting. As a busy MSP it’s all about getting things done and maximising your time, right? Well, sometimes yes, but are you ready to hear about a shocking way to grow that is the exact opposite. Because sometimes the fastest way to grow your MSP is to do as little work as possible.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m a bit of a productivity junkie. Since way before I started my first business 20 years ago I’ve been reading books and listening to advice about how to get things done and constantly tweaking my productivity stack, if you’d like to call it that. I mean, the software that I use, of course. And you go back to the turn of the century when I was, obviously I’m very old now, but I was running a radio station back then and I was completely trapped in having too much work to do without enough time to do it. And that was actually what drove me to look at what are other people doing and how do they manage their time better.

What used to be called time management back then, we now call it productivity, but it’s all the same thing really. We all have exactly at the same 24 hours in every day, and yet many people get a lot more done in their 24 hours than you and I might in ours. Why is that? Why does the work week pass so quickly week after week after week?

The people who get the most things done are actually doing the smallest number of tasks, but they work on the tasks that make the biggest difference.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? And the reason they know which tasks to work on is because they make sure they spend plenty of time being idle.

You see, I said this was growth advice that you weren’t expecting… to get more done, you should do less? That doesn’t make sense, except it does. The core problem with tackling productivity with a view of I must get lots more done, is that you get trapped in being busy. And this is especially risky for an MSP because the very nature of your work is to be reactive and to be caught up with lots of details. And yes, I know they really do matter, and because of that you can easily fill your day with getting hundreds of small things done. But are they the things that move the needle? Are they the things that help you win more new clients, get those clients to buy from you more often, and get those clients to spend more every single time they buy? The chances are that they’re not. All of those little things, yes, they’re important and someone somewhere needs to do them and be across all of that detail, but that doesn’t have to be you, the business owner.

In...