MSP Mastery: Ctrl-Alt-Deliver

The Growth Trap with Brendan Rose: Why Hiring and Hoping is Costing Your MSP

• Jeni Clift, Nick Clift • Season 1 • Episode 37

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0:00 | 57:50

Welcome to MSP Mastery, the podcast for MSP owners and leaders who want to build a better MSP; one that actually works for them.

I’m Jeni Clift, joined by my husband and long time business partner, Nick Clift. Together, we’ve spent decades building, scaling, and eventually exiting our own MSP business.

In this episode, we sit down with Brendan Rose, a true veteran of the Adelaide MSP scene and business consultant at Morphability. Brendan brings over 20 years of experience across sales, operations, and executive leadership, offering a unique perspective on what it actually takes to scale a team without burning through cash.

Brendan shares the hard truths about the growth paradox, why simply hiring a BDM to sell more often fails, and why building the map before you hire the person is the only way to set them up to succeed. We also dive into the idea of breaking up marriages, and why your next high value client is likely sitting in your competitor’s portfolio right now.

Here is what we covered together:

✅ Why hiring a salesperson without a plan is the fastest way to waste money
✅ The breaking up marriages model and how to disrupt the bond between your competitor and your future client
✅ Why your next customer is not sitting at MSP industry events and where you should be showing up instead
✅ The lead generation trap and why you need to fix your internal sales engine before chasing volume
✅ The first sales hire and why the owner must stay close for longer than they think
✅ Sales versus operations and how to align delivery capacity so growth does not break your business

We created this podcast to share the real conversations and lessons we wish we’d had more of while running our own MSP, practical insights from people who understand the challenges, pressures, and opportunities in this industry.

👉 Connect with Brendan on LinkedIn: Brendan Rose
👉 Learn more about Morphability: morphability.au
🎧 Listen to other MSP Mastery Podcast episodes here: mspmastery.blog
📸 Follow on Instagram: instagram.com/mspmastery
▶️ Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/@mspmastery

SPEAKER_01

We're gonna utilize that resource, so don't worry about the utilization, worry about getting the resources. Theoretically, all the models and MSPs, the more people you have, the more money you should make. Because we're making gross marginal labor. That's what we're doing.

SPEAKER_03

If you are really interested in wasting a lot of money, you would hire the person first. He's sold IT before, or she's been great at a vendor. I'm gonna hire them and they'll know what to do. And they don't. They look to you. And you don't know because you haven't planned beyond just hiring someone to sell more.

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to MSP Mastery, the podcast for MSP owners and leaders who want to build a better MSP, one that actually works for them. I'm Jenny Clift, and alongside my longtime business and life partner Nick, we unpack what's really working in thriving MSPs, including insights from the trusted partners who support them. With 60 plus years of combined experience, we've seen it all from the first break fix calls to the sophisticated MSP tools of today. We've been early adopters of the tech and the strategies that shifted our industry toward recurring revenue and long-term success. Our goal with this podcast is to share the real stories and hard-won lessons that inspire and add genuine value to our industry, helping you build a business that is both profitable and fulfilling. This is MSP Mastery. Here's Nick, myself, and today's special guest. Joining us again today is a true veteran of the Adelaide MSP scene with more than 20 years of experience across sales, operations, and executive leadership. He first joined us all the way back on episode one and his returning today by popular demand. Now a business consultant at Morpheability, helping organizations build winning sales teams. Please welcome back to the show Brendan Rose. Brendan, welcome to MSP Mastery.

SPEAKER_03

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01

Good to be back. Can't wait to get into it. Well, yeah, and uh I I can't wait for your personal and professional update because it's been uh about six months.

SPEAKER_00

More than that now, yeah.

SPEAKER_03

It's been a while. I was just trying to think how long it has been, and I've seen all the episodes come out, and it's been fantastic to see all the faces and hear all the stories, so many different perspectives. Well done, guys.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you. No, we're we're loving it. We're really enjoying the the process and getting to catch up with people that we haven't spoken to in in years in some cases. And and yeah, just people reaching out and you know putting their hand up saying I'd love to be a guest. It's been great. Okay, so it must be getting on for a year, I think, since we caught up the first time on the podcast. But so yeah, give us your update. Last six months, personal best and professional best.

SPEAKER_03

Last six months, look, it's been wild. You know, we've we've gone through an amazing amount of, I guess, growth and change. You know, we've we've expanded the business beyond just consulting. We've got sales admin as a service now, which is getting some traction, which is great. We've got our you know, hot leads business, which is evolving now to breaking up marriages, which is a bit of a controversial term and it always sort of piques people's ears. But, you know, we're we are in the business of breaking up marriages, the marriage of your competitor, MSP, and your future client, right? That's that's what we're looking to do. So that change and transition and lesson learning that we've had over that time has been huge, and you know, we've brought it together to a new offering. Not this is a sales bug, of course.

SPEAKER_00

It's been pretty wild, yeah.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's been good. And personal best. Well, look, my son's turned one. My wife is pregnant with our twin girls who will be here in June. Oh my god, you're good you're straight into the fire, mate.

SPEAKER_00

And a puppy?

SPEAKER_03

And a puppy, yes. And I've I've got her in a crate so she doesn't disturb us today. So yeah, if we if we didn't have enough on, I I thought, well, screw it, let's just make a big family, hey, and and have a good time doing it.

SPEAKER_01

Well, congratulations. That's that's fantastic. And having having twins is based on yeah, your model, Brennan, as a consultant, and all about efficiency and progress. Having twins is a great idea. Get it all done at once, mate. You might as well sign up two new clients at the same time that rather than one at a time. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03

It will pinch cash flow for a little bit when they go to daycare, but it will also release at the same time. So instead of dragging it out over a longer period, we'll we'll be able to get a bit of a. Yeah, absolutely. So that's another massive thing. It's been a big year, personally. We've we've built a house down south of Adelaide and near the beach, which is great. And no, it's brand new home, Fairmont home. It's couldn't couldn't be happier. Of course, there's still bits and pieces we still need to do, but we've got some grass, we've got a letterbox out the front, there's a driveway, so we're okay. Somewhere for those bills to go, mate.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_00

Alright. Now, for anybody who doesn't know you or hasn't listened to your first episode, I'll just get you to give a just a brief intro who you are, where you came from, how you got into the industry, and then we'll jump into our questions for the day.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, sure. So I, you know, obviously at Morphability as a consultant. Before that, I was myriad of roles at Blackbird IT, working with the great leadership team there. So everything from service management, ops, general, sales manager, COO, CEO, the full gamut. And so that's given me quite a unique perspective as that business grew from five stuff when I started to 60 when I when I left. So you can imagine all the challenges that sort of come with that. S time. I learned so much and so many amazing people that I worked with, and uh, you know, very forever grateful. Before that, I was still in the technology. So I was, you know, worked at Apple Reseller as a sales admin person. And that was really where I made that decision to not go into sales as a sales person, rather sort of take that leadership route and you know, offered an account manager role and I turned it down. I said, I don't want to do that, I want to do what that guy does. And I brought it across the room to the general manager. So that was the that was a very deliberate decision as a a young 20-something. But yeah, so that's a bit of my background.

SPEAKER_01

That's all that's awesome. And and the fact that you had the maturity to say no to an opportunity that probably looked pretty shiny, but you had your eyes set on something else over here, and that that's amazing, man. And you know, so many young people are confused about what they want to do. And yeah, whenever I get into that kind of discussion, I always say, Well, yeah, tell me I had this with you know, our sons grew up through the industry as well, and they were kind of a bit, where do I do? What do I want to do? Sometimes deciding what you don't want to do is the best thing because sometimes it's it is really hard to know where you want to go and what you want to, you know, what you want to do when you grow up. You know, I didn't know that I was going to be a podcaster in my 60s when I was growing up, but yeah, now I am officially a podcaster, you know, nearly a thousand episodes downloaded. So yeah, it's I love it. It's so good and it's so it's such a good way to be able to share some experiences. And yeah, just it just reminded me of that then. Yeah, having being able to say no is sometimes the key to to unlocking a blocker and moving forward. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

A thousand percent. I'm almost certain there's a bunch of business books that touch on this. If there's there's more power in saying no, right? What are you saying no to matters way more than what you say yes to. And, you know, I didn't have that fully formed in my mind at the time, but I did turn down what would have been a lot of money at that age, you know, and commissions and bonuses in a successful sales business that I was working in. But, you know, having that clarity matters. And then ironically, I'm going in and leading sales things now. I've never actually been a salesperson on the ground, right? But I've I've worked with a lot of them, I've gone out with them, I've helped strategize with them, and we've been successful together, but I haven't actually been that guy. So that's that's always been interesting, but I love it. And I love being in front of a client, and every opportunity I get to play salesman is a good day. I love that day.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, it's it's interesting you say that because we were at a Jack Daly kind of seminar. He was doing a tour of Australia a couple of years ago, and his big lesson was never put your best salesperson in the sales manager, they're different beasts. Yeah, like our two sons are the opposite side of the coin, right? One's the BDM hunter, he's he loves the chase, he signs the deals, he's money-driven, focused. The other guy's he's the coach, he wants to help other people succeed. That's a really important segue. And I think a lot of MSPs make that that mistake they get us. And I made it, we made it in our business. You take a salesperson and make them the sales manager, and it's just yeah, it kind of works, but it's not really there, and your sales kind of limp along, and you know, yeah, yeah, it's a good good distinction.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, let's jump into some questions. So the first one, I guess it's what I've termed the growth paradox. And you've seen, I think, this from every angle. When an MSP is ready to scale, what comes first? The sales process or hiring a BDM? So do you, I guess, build the map first, or do you hire a person to draw the map?

SPEAKER_03

Look, if you are really interested in wasting a lot of money, you would hire the person first. So if that's what you're about, all good, go for it. And I think most people probably instinctively know this, but they don't have the time. And so, like, look, he's sold IT before, or she's, you know, been great at a vendor, HP, or whoever, you know, I'm gonna hire them and they'll know what to do. And they don't. Right? They look to you and you don't know because you haven't planned beyond just hiring someone to sell more. So no, definitely map first. And you just need to really deliberately set some time aside in advance. Don't think, oh, I've got to really do something and start doing it. Stop. Monday next week, I'm not going to go to work. I'm gonna go to wherever, your favorite brewery. Happy place, beach somewhere. You're gonna go and camp somewhere or do something and just get away and have clear, you know, clear time for your thoughts and plan that out. Now, you might not know where to start, but try that first. Right? People have a tendency to go, I just want a quick fix, I just want a quick fix, I just want a quick fix. And they haven't even thought about it before they reached out to someone to talk to them, whether that's I'm just gonna hire a sales manager, or I'm gonna talk to a consultant, or I'm gonna do this. Right? Take a moment to think about what you actually want.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And I've got a kind of follow-up comment question. I've seen this a couple of times, and it's the decision ultimately to hire a salesperson seems to be based on the amount of either profit that we are generating now to afford the salesperson versus an investment plan with an actual growth strategy with money attached to that role that the salesperson should be paying for themselves. And and yeah, that that we all I'd love to hear your view on that because the the good this growth plan I think is super important. And I stuffed this up a number of times because you know, if you s in my view, a good BDM should be pulling in one one and a half mil of non-recurring revenue, right? That's just project work, product, sales. I mean, it's going back a few years, so maybe it's a little bit different now. I'd like to get your take on it. But that if you if you do that and you bolt it on top of what you're doing now, can the rest of your business cope? So it's not just the sales plan and growth plan, it's the operational plan to support that. And I think a lot of people don't think that right through. And I suppose that's why we're where we are today is helping people kind of share these stories, because you've got to think of the whole business. And the sales is an important piece that we we tend to have these accidental sales. The owner led knows somebody gets a phone call, goes out, and we, you know, I used to close 99% of the quotes I did. Because I never did quotes to people I knew I wasn't gonna get the I didn't have marketing, I didn't have a pipeline, I just knew the people I knew, and they were kind of referring me to other people, and that's how organically we grew. But then we got stuck and we didn't have that strategy to grow properly.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, no. And you know, the the the numbers throwing out, this is the other thing. They don't know. They just think they need to film something, right? And how long will that take? Depends on a lot of things, right? How good is your product defined? What do you sell? Is that clear? Do you have is it easy to produce a quote or does it take a long time? How long does it take to produce a managed services quote? Hot tip. If you can't do it while you're standing in front of the customer, it's wrong. So the other one is having the understanding that they're probably gonna at best, at best, cover their cost in their first year. At best. But it depends. Depends on lots of things, and I think we'll get into this later in the conversation, but you know, what are they doing? Are they managing existing clients? Are they going out and drumming up new business? Is it a combination of both? You know, are they selling managed services entirely or are they targeting product? Right? What's the lead? Is the leading project, then product, then managed service? Or is it managed service and I won't do anything until that's happened? Like you need to be clear on those decisions before you even think about hiring a salesperson.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and I don't think any of those options are wrong. It's just being clear and not creating confusion for the salesperson because if they come in and it's not clear, they're gonna sell anything because that's it's in their blood, right?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, they want to win, they want to sell, get those commissions.

SPEAKER_01

They will just make it up. Absolutely. I might have been guilty of that a lot of the time, you know. Oh, we need some more money. Uh okay, I'll go sell them this then, you know.

SPEAKER_03

I I have uh uh an old friend I worked with, and more than one time I came in and he goes, Brendan, what have you sold? We can't sell that. We we actually can't sell that. We're not licensed, we're not partnered to, we can't actually sell it. I said, We'll figure it out, but we we need to sell these things.

SPEAKER_00

Irrelevant details, all those.

SPEAKER_03

It took him three weeks, and it's like, oh great, we can do this now. And that was when we first started selling Microsoft CSP. Because I sold one project SKU. Right? Now, that business, as you can imagine, with every other MSP, turned into be quite a large revenue stream, but that was how it started. We should be able to do this. Of course we can.

SPEAKER_00

Say yes and work out how. That's right, isn't it, Nick?

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely. It's like how do you eat an elephant, one bite at a time.

SPEAKER_00

And I think just sort of following on from what you were saying, Brendan, I think the other big part of this from my perspective as being general manager of our business for a long time is somebody actually has to manage the salesperson. You know, what are their KPIs? What are they doing? What's the activity? What are the outcomes? Because you can't just hire somebody and just let them loose. Somebody actually has to manage them. And for most MSPs, that is the owner. So the expectation of hiring somebody who's going to go and do stuff and magically, you know, transform the business, from my experience, that doesn't happen.

SPEAKER_03

If it's the first time hiring a salesperson, it must be the owner. You can't get your service manager to do this. You can't give them to your sales administration person to, you know, teach them, right? It must be you. The risk of it going poorly is so, so, so high. And it's going to cost you a fortune. And this is the person that's going to be going out and representing you and your company. They need to be a reflection of you and your company. And the only way to do that is to spend time with you. And when when I say time, not two hours a week on a Monday morning. I'm talking every frickin' day.

SPEAKER_00

You're going to be like Velcro.

SPEAKER_01

Yep. Every day. Couldn't agree more. That's why I and I think I just think back to the first time we actually did hire a a professional sales guy. He came from selling software into our client base, which was local government. Great guy. And I didn't have a plan. I just thought here's an opportunity. Yeah, he he knows all these customers. He'll be able to get us in and sell our managed services to these customers. And our uh we drove from I think it was a Chuca to Nil, which is like 400 kilometers.

SPEAKER_00

On the South Australian border. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

On the South Australian border. And we drove through seven local government shires. And we had cust we had two of those as customers. I said to him, mate, in a year's time, I want all these as customers. So that that was our strategy. And in 12 months' time, we had five or six of those as customers. But that was my strategy totally. And when we got to the end of the first 12 months, we we didn't have another strategy. He'd already used up his book of contacts. So we and we didn't have a product plan or a marketing lead gen or anything like that. So he we ended up he ended up leaving because there was nothing we had nothing for him to sell into because he'd already got all the clients. So yeah, so even it can be a simple strategy. And I think the reason it worked that first year is because we did go to we spent probably 400 hours in the car together. Because we would travel a lot around regional Victoria. And this today we're not doing that. And I think we need to remember how it used to be, and sometimes we need to go on trips with customers. We need to be on joint meetings with customers. It's very easy to say, oh, you can handle it, you can handle it. But I would encourage you guys to, especially if you bring someone new into sales. Technicians are a little bit easier, I'd say. Engineering, because it's kind of similar, similar, and it's a ticket's a ticket. Whereas your sales process, the way your business does it, the way you want to present your company, is is unique to you, and you need to spend the time to get that person on the same page for sure.

SPEAKER_03

Absolutely. And you're right, we don't have as many opportunities anymore. There's a lot of work from home. We aren't traveling as much. You know, it's not as important. People are preferencing tanks meetings in some cases. And as far as, you know, when when are they ready to sort of be let go? The first time you think as a business owner, all right, they've got it. I don't need to go to that meeting, you're wrong. You're almost always wrong. And then you just you need to ignore that feeling because what's happening is you're feeling like this is taking a lot of time. I've got a lot of pressure on myself. They've got it. Almost certainly that's how you're thinking. And you need to ignore that, and you need to stick with them with the same energy that you had at day one, at day 90, at day 180. Right? Now, you might not go to every meeting, that's fine, but you're going to multiple meetings per week with them. You're not just letting them go because that's at that point, as far as you think that early, that is the beginning of failure.

SPEAKER_00

Interesting. Okay. Now I want to get into the lead generation trap. And this is, we hear this so often of owners thinking their problem is not enough leads. If I just got more leads, my business would be perfect. You know, we'd be on fire. From your perspective, is it a lead problem or is it a conversion problem? I guess at what point should an MSP stop hunting for volume and start focusing more on creating or fixing their internal sales engine?

SPEAKER_03

They need to fix it today. Don't go fully on all leads and just for stake that. You kind of need to do a combination of both. Your first step, whilst you're exploring lead generation options and what you can do there, you're working on your internal processes, what you're doing with your existing clients. I'm meeting them, you know. You might say, oh, but I see them every week, but you're not having that business discussion with them. And someone goes, oh, but I do this every month. And it's like, it's actually a little bit too frequent, right? I don't want to have a full-on business discussion with you every month, right? It's more business as usual. If there's projects on the go, service desk stuff, you need to buy this license, right? Quarterly is your strategy time, right? Quarterly cadence, you know, EOS model, of course, that 90-day world, right? That that applies, right? And there's no reason why you can't hook into that. And if they don't follow EOS, that's or they're not managed, you know, in that framework, that's fine. But take that 90 days to take off you know a proper assessment. And depending on the size of the customer, and I I get this all the time. Ah, they're too small, they don't care, you know, that's fine. Tailor it to that client, still have that business discussion, but maybe don't go through 600 questions in life cycle insights, for example. Maybe don't do that, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Start with 10. Well, we actually that's interesting because we started ours with five questions. A one-page report with five questions, and there was a statistical report attached from the RMM, but no one ever read that. And the customers were happy, and then we went a more mature and we ended up doing the standard-based thing and ended up getting up to a hundred odds of questions. But yeah, you got a tailor, and I went back and surveyed all the clients, and yeah, only one of them actually wanted the patch reports and the A V reports because they had to submit it to the state government on a monthly compliance basis. Everyone else said, Well, don't you look at that? I said, Yeah, we look at it every single day. And they're like, Well, I don't need to look at it. Thanks. Let's talk about business. Yeah, what's what's going on in your world, you know?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, you want to keep it at an executive level. How's business? What's new? What challenges have you got? What are your competitors doing? How are your systems holding up to it? How are staff using it? Using the systems and processes that you've got. And you want to talk systems and processes. Processes with them because they almost inevitably dovetail into some sort of tech, right? They're they're going to be tied in. Okay, well, why is that process not working? And then you're probably going to find something, or you might be able to advise them on something that they might be able to consider, right? And especially in this world of AI and automation, which is a whole other, you know, thing. The MSP community is having various, varied levels of engagement with that. Everything from I don't have time for that, that's not me, to full-blown, I'm reshaping my entire business.

unknown

Right.

SPEAKER_03

So there's there's two very, two very different ends that people are sort of approaching this. And then a bunch of people, but anyway, so stuff like that, the AI stuff, that needs to be in your that's that's what you would talk about. Hey, this is an industry trend. And whether it's, you know, MDR or SOC or SMB 1001 or Essential 8 or, you know, whatever it is, every year there's there's one to two things that come out that are substantial. Yes, AI has created a lot of noise right now, right? And rightly so. It is disruptive, it is impacting a lot of businesses, and there's a lot of shadow AI that's happening inside organizations and they don't know what to do with it, uh, or how to control it, or are even aware of it, or even aware of the risk, right? And they've got so much IP going out of their businesses into Staff's personal free AI accounts, and they're gonna leave one day, and that's all gonna follow on. Right? It's not about the hackers or giving it away or the thing's gonna learn my secrets. It's Daryl sitting there on his laptop and pissing off with all your company's information. That's what's happening.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, I mean, we we were having this discussion with a client yesterday about AI and trying to convince the owner to off up to 20 bucks per user to use a paid AI account. Because you're right, if they're using a free one, there's no get there's no governance around the free tools, all right? They are using that data for training, it's it's it's going, it's whereas if you use a paid account, there are settings in that you can configure to protect your stuff. So uh that's an entirely another topic to talk about. But uh, I am watching a couple of MSPs that are leaning right into the AI at the moment in in internal automation processing. That will be a topic of a future future podcast for sure. Once I once we see the results of all that, it's quite exciting. The good news is it's not replacing people, it's just making them more efficient and uh a better business, which is where we are. They give us more capacity to to grow and expand and do our I don't know if we answered your question there, Jen. We might have a little bit like that.

SPEAKER_00

Somehow or another, we ended up on AI when the question was around either you know leads or conversion.

SPEAKER_03

Well, the leads or conversion and the the retention of your existing, sorry, that's where it got to. So the the tech roadmaps as part of those quarterly reviews, that's what you need to be doing. Where does AI sit? Where does SB 1001 sit? When do we need that compliance? What are your suppliers asking for? What are your customers asking for? Right. And then make sure that that tech roadmap matches their business requirement. We know that 30% of our clients are gonna require us to be certified to this standard by this time. All right. We need to do these things, right? We put in the tech roadmap. That's what the discussion is. And look, it's not always going to be sexy stuff, right? Sometimes it's just going, yep, we agree this is still the direction. Yes, these are the things we're working on, and it might be a short shut meeting, but at least you had it. Lead generation, you also need to be doing that at the same time because if you're not generating leads, when you need them, you won't have them. Okay. There are businesses out there that will operate with no leads and sign no new clients for three, four, five years, right? They've got really loyal clients, they've got really loyal staff. No one moves. The revenue keeps coming in, profitability stays reasonably consistent, although they're never up their pricing, so it does sort of drop off a little bit over time, right? That's the risk, right? When you're not finding new clients, everyone gets used to the price, and then you're afraid to increase it because what if they go?

SPEAKER_01

That is a real fear, and I've had I've run up against that. I've seen that in a number of different MSPs. This fear of putting the prices up. It took me probably four years to get that consistency, and we were we worked a lot in the local government and hospitals, so it was very transparent. Like they knew what each other was being charged, especially when you have a group of them in a in associations that talk to each other. So I was always very, very careful to keep the same pricing structure for everyone in that in that segment of the industry because they would talk. But then you go and do it, you do all the work to get an increase in, and then you'd increase across all the clients. So it is uh we never lost a client based on price. It was always a failure to communicate at some level, or a merger, an acquisition, or some key player changed and they bought their mate in or something like that. But I I don't think we've ever lost a client based on price.

SPEAKER_03

No, you usually don't. And if you do, it's probably for the wrong reason. You're not charging too much. You know, potentially the competitors charging way too little, or they are buying not what you're already delivering to them. Right. So they've gone for an inferior service to save money, which is fine. And sometimes businesses have to do that and we just roll with it. But we make sure we keep looking for those businesses that do want our service to our standard at our price. And the only way to do that is to be out there.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. So if there was three, three things you would recommend an MSP to do if they don't have an active lead gen system at the moment, is there kind of three basic things that you would want to tick off the box straight away? Or is it does it vary dramatically based on the diff the geography and the and the type of customers that an MSP looking for?

SPEAKER_03

There's heaps that they can do before going out and doing Google ads or getting telemarketing or paying for leads, you know? Or even even before going to like a B and I or a networking group, which isn't a bad thing to do depending on the group. That can actually be quite lucrative. Go to where your customers are. And when I say your customers, I mean your customers. Where are your customers going? What events do they go to? Look at the customer that you have that 30, 30% of your clients or more are represented by this type, right? Whether they're, you know, 20-seat real estate officers or they're 50-seat law firms, or they're, you know, actually it's all 10-seat accountancies. Where do they go? Go there. Because that's where your next customer is, right? Don't try and think, oh, we're gonna try and break into this new industry. No, you're not. You don't know anything about it. You don't have any customers. You haven't done any lead gen before. You can barely service the existing client to the stand you want now because we're talking about, you know, retention and and doing things properly there. Why are you now gonna go tackle another industry you know nothing about? Right? So get good at servicing your existing clients. Get that QBR business relationship in place. Make sure you're doing everything that you should be for them and you've got the share of royalty you should have. Go to where they do their business, what conferences, because there you get to hear about their problems, what hasn't been working, and get cozy with the presenters and the event organizers and the customers there. Offer value, teach them something, share something with them, give something away for free that they're gonna go that's actually worth something, not just crap. Right. And before you know it, you're in front of a crowd and you're talking about something that matters to them that solves a problem that they've all got, which you know about because you've been there for the last six months. Right? You kept rocking up, right? And they get used to seeing you wear a loud obnoxious shirt that has a man sitting on the toilet as morphability does. Right? So when they see you, it's like, ah, there's that guy again, right? These these shirts that we wear are not an accident, right? To anyone that's seen a morphability of staff member rolling around a conference, you know that they're there.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's kind of hard to meet seen purple with a guy on a toilet. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

But yes, you're so right, Brendan. And and that's that's yeah, I'm really glad you put that as your number one because I I 100% agree. And I'd thinking back to yeah, local government, lots of people, lots of MSPs don't like dealing with government or governments, but once you understand how it works, it's like any customer base. You just got to understand how it works and how to work it. And I would go to local government conferences as an aid attendee originally, and then you'd go and suss it out and you'd see, oh, okay, they've got a they've always got a sponsor hall, and there's always vendors there, and you go and talk to all those guys. And then some of the tech vendors were there, like you know, SophOS and Microsoft and that kind of you go talk to those guys, and you go back to your Sophos account manager and go, Hey, how do I get a spot in your booth at this next event? And no one did this with data, and yeah, then you can get in there. Then the next step after that is you have your own booth, you know, maybe a year or two down the track once you've you understand the process. But yeah, 100% go to going to pipeline and ARN events and SMBIT conferences, your customers are not there, your peers are there. That that's everyone, I'm gonna go to conferences. No, you don't. You go to have a good time and learn something about the industry, but you can need to find the industry events for your customers. I 100% agree with that. And so many people don't do that. It's weird because that's where they are.

SPEAKER_03

It's it's it's funny you say it's weird. It is it is weird, and you'd think, oh yeah, naturally that makes sense. The light bulb moment that happens when I speak to people the first time and I say that to them almost every time. Oh yeah, that's a really good idea. Like, you know, what would seem seem immediately obvious, but they don't think about it because most of the MSP owners they start off as engineers, right? They work their USB thing network, some people join, they work their network, and that sort of organic growth happens until they sort of hit about one mil, right? And then it sort of drops off. You know, sometimes it might get them to two if they're lucky, but really on average it's to one, the ones that are really sort of going for it. Each of them are sitting around that 700,000 sort of revenue marker. And those people, the people that are at$700,000 where money's tight, profit's limited, even if it is a higher percentage, it's still on a smaller amount, right? Bringing in someone like me or Lee Gen or something like that can be really insurmountable, right? Can feel like it. You just do one thing. Go to where your clients are every time, every event, everywhere. Always, and you will grow because your clients will literally be there.

SPEAKER_01

You will talk to them, they will have other people around them, they will introduce you. Yeah, go with your existing clients. Yeah, I I did that as well. I went as as a staff member of a council. That's how I went to the very first one, because they wouldn't, they wouldn't let just non-councils register for this event. So I said, Well, I'm your IT manager, effectively. Oh yeah, good idea. I'll buy you a ticket. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03

So so Jenny, if you did one thing, that would be it.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and even geographically, like, you know, your local chamber of commerce, your local, often your local councils, they have their business awards and they have their business, you know, monthly networking meetings. It's actually quite easy to go to these things and often you'll be the only one there. You know, the there's not going to be a dozen IT companies there that you're competing with. So, you know, put yourself out there. So okay, let's jump into our next question around the owner-led, which I call this question breaking the owner-led ceiling. So most MSPs are built on, as we were just talking about, the owner's personal reputation. When you want to make that leap, you are looking to hand over the sales key to a new hire without accidentally sabotaging them. So, what's the biggest hurdle? As an owner, what's the biggest mistake that you see people make?

SPEAKER_03

Biggest mistake. There is more than one, Jenny. Thinking that people understand you when you speak, I would say would be the number one. You think you are conveying what it is that you do and how you sell it, and you probably aren't doing it very well. Now, of course, there's exceptions to that rule, and there's plenty of very, you know, good people at, you know, communicating. But I even catch myself out sometimes. I'll explain a concept and I'll look at them and I'm like, that didn't land, right? So you need to see, is it landing? Pressure test it on other people, talk to your friends and family. If they can't understand it, your salesperson's not going to understand it. These salespeople aren't text, usually. There is a niche little group of unicorns that are roaming around the uh the community, but most of them are not able to think at the same like they don't think the same way as you, as a technical business owner who's growing their business organically. So if you can't explain, Nick, you called me out on this the other day. If you can't explain it clearly so that I can understand it right now in one minute, it's too complicated, right? So you need to go, right, you can have a complicated thing. We all sell complex stuff, right? But you need to be able to explain it at that first level to get them interested enough and understand at that high level.

SPEAKER_01

It's such a interesting topic, and I was 100% guilty of this for a long time. And uh, you know, I was challenged and blessed to have a personal development coach in my life and my business, and external coaches being Jenny, my wife, and our whole family said, Oh my god, mum's going coachy on us again. That but we'd learnt how to communicate because it was that that assumption that someone is picking up what you're putting down causes so much grief in relationships, in in everything, in everything in life. And that I agree with you 100%. That is the number one thing. And yeah, I was at a rotary meeting in Bali the other day, and the president got really motivated by uh, she went to a district conference and she got really motivated by one of the speakers, and she wants to run her own fundraising event, which is traditionally how Rotary would would raise funds to give to their community projects. Yeah. And she's very excited, she goes, Yeah, we're gonna raise uh 200 million repair, which is$20,000, and we're gonna do this. And around the table, there was a German software engineer developer who's moved from Germany, and he literally turned white and stuff and he could not speak because she wanted to give people tasks to do right then and there in that meeting. And he literally said, I can't do this. I need to see the plan, I need to see the strategy, I need to see the documentation. I go, Well, I can do this because I just need to know where we're going and what you want me to do and what I have to bring. Where and it's just different. But my point was different people hear messages differently, and you need to understand your people, and especially in the sales role, and and teaching the salesperson to understand his client or the prospect. You know, that whole disc profiling about the the D I S C that was a game changer for me. Because then we go through and say, Oh, that client's a C. He needs to have all the details. He needs a three-time convincer, he needs to have the brochure, he needs to have the take-home stuff. He's never gonna make a decision in three months. So whereas the other guy, like the D guy, he goes, Yeah, well, does it come in that colour? Yeah, good. Can I have it tomorrow? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, great point. Yeah, I said that is the biggest mistake, yeah. And you know, lots of tools out there to help you with that, yeah.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And have it documented. So something that you know we put in every business that we work with is a Thales hub, right? And that sales hub has got a collection of all of the artifacts and all of the decisions and all of the descriptions and sales process, Jenny. To your point, the sales process that an owner has is in their head. It is absolutely never written down.

SPEAKER_00

And probably don't actually know what he does. He just does he or she just does stuff. And if you said map it out for me, then I don't know.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, my number one closing technique was really, really simple. We agree this is a problem. We agree you want to solve it. So when do you want this pain to go away? The sooner you give me the order, the sooner I make the pain go away. And you have to rephrase it because most customers will say if it's logical and it's within their budget, they're gonna agree, yeah, we should do this. But it's helping them make the decision to do it, and you've got to give them something by taking some pain away. And that that pain, because what is it, Jen? You talk taught us this, the pain of staying the same has to be more than the pain of changing, or nothing will ever change. So you've got to help them realize that not doing anything is more painful than doing something different, yeah. Pain gains. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

If that's what it is, then you you take that time and you explain it to them, this is how I sell, this is what I do. Now, they're not gonna be able to sell the same way that you do. You're the business owner. They can sell in a particular way, they can be blunt. You can't be blunt. You, you know, as a salesperson, especially new in a business, you've got no clout. None. You can't say, I've been doing this for 15 years, you've been doing this for two months, right? So your approach is gonna be very different. And yeah, so getting that process down, like, all right, this is how I want you to have the conversation, these are the things that I want you to talk about, but you need to sit down and think about it again, or get someone in to pull that information out of you, right? And and write that process and train that salesperson with you. Get the salesperson to interview you. If you're hiring an experienced salesperson, right? If you've got someone in, you can see that they've got the experience, particularly if they've worked in MSPs before, but you almost never get that, right? But let's say you had that, get them to interview you, right? Get them to ask you questions about what it is. Don't try and tell them, right? Assume they know more than you and they're learning, get them to ask the questions. Or if they don't know, then come up with a list of questions that you would want them to ask you to learn about it, and then get them to ask you, and then you can just talk, make sure you're in a meeting, make sure it's being recorded, and then that way Chat GPT, co-pilot, Claude, whoever can then just fill that down and create your sales process for you based on what you've said and the questions that they've asked.

SPEAKER_00

And I think going back to what you started off with around, you know, the new salesperson shadowing you, joining you in all the sales meetings, you know, preferably in person, and on the way back to the office or after the teams call, whatever it may be, jumping on a call with the two of you and the salesperson basically talking through what their observations were from that. And and as you said, record that because that's the start of the the, I guess, documenting the process, but really making sure that that person is watching what you're doing and learning from that rather than just sitting in there and you know thinking about shoes, as I say, and walking out and going, you know, great job, we got the deal, but not actually picking up anything from uh what just happened.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, and that's that time in the car, Nick, right? You were talking about before. So it's it's I speak, right? You speak, we speak. I speak, you speak, we speak, and you just cycle that when you're in the meetings, and so they get to see you, you get to see them, and then you get to see how you work together, right? But the hardest thing, and I watched a sale crumble to the ground before my very eyes because it was during a you speak, and I'm just like, this is going terribly. We are never having an opportunity to sell to this person ever again. But I sat down and I shut up, right? Because you've got to respect it. Otherwise, they will always be second guessing and waiting for you to jump in. That is part of the cost of bringing in a salesperson, is watching a sale you might have closed, die. So be really sure about the person you're hiring.

SPEAKER_01

And that's such a good point, Brendan, because we have this, especially as owner, owner-led sales like I was, if you can see it going sideways, naturally, every fiber of your being is gonna jump in and rescue the situation. And if you do that, you are disempowering that salesperson, and yeah, you're creating a bigger problem for yourself. Yeah. That's that's gold, no. That's gold. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And and again, in in that, in that situation, then asking the person, do you know what happened? Then did do did you see when you lost it? Again, learning, you know, teaching them. And I think that's a big part of the owner in this process of bringing somebody in is making sure that they are learning from what you're doing, learning from mistakes, you know, improving the process. You know, ultimately you come out of here with a a much better process than maybe what you follow that others can then follow and scale.

SPEAKER_03

100%. And, you know, I've had that in even doing the sales process at Morphability and teaching other people do it and realizing, oh, I could actually do that a lot better. And then spending a bit more time. You know, we do that given the organization we are, we do that regularly. We reflect back what worked, what didn't, what do we need to change? What's right about the product, what's wrong, what do we need to change? And that reflection, you it will it will catch you off guard. You won't expect it. But when you see it, don't ignore it, write it down.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. Okay, let's jump into the first hire. So you've decided you're gonna buy the bullet, you are making that first sales hire. Do you hire a technical solutions architect, a pure hunter, a sales admin, which you start said at the start that you're now offering that as a service? And the sales admin from my experience, what that happened it's they I guess clear the owner's plate so that they can sell more. But you know, what would you do as your first hire?

SPEAKER_03

Most most MSPs that I come across at the time when they reach out to me. They've got a sales admin, right? They've figured that out. If you are, if you don't have one yet and you're doing all your sales administration, you are your own assistant and you are effectively paying$500 an hour for some that should cost you maybe$40 or$30, even$25, depending where you get it from. Right. So it is something that you need to realize that your time is valuable. Okay. And that's when you get that sales admin. So if you don't have one, that's the first time. Get sales admin because you are the opportunity cost is massive in you doing that extra work. And some people think, oh yeah, but I could do it. You know, there'll be situations where the money's just not there. Fine. You know, make adjustments for your business to allow the money to be there.

SPEAKER_00

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

SPEAKER_03

Thousand percent. Aaron still tells me this all the time. Brendan, why the fuck are you doing that? I'm interested in it. Yeah, stop doing that. Okay.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and it's interesting because like, yeah, Jenny and I obviously run the companies that we've had over the years and we've always had a team around us. But when we when we kind of sold out of our last MSP and we moved to Bali, it was just the two of us for a long time. And you do find yourself doing all this stuff, and then eventually you go, hang on a second. That's the opportunity cost. I can do this 100% I can do it. But I I choose not to work six days a week. You know, I choose to live in Bali in a place where I can take the dogs down the beach in the afternoon. Happy to get up early and do some work, but I don't want to be doing that six days a week. I only want to be doing that three or four days a week. So we hired a local guy over here and he helps us out. Yeah, and once you've got a resource, I suppose the message I want to leave people with is if you don't think you're gonna utilize that resource well enough, you're kidding yourself. Being the natural-born sales entrepreneurs that we are when we start a business, if we've got a resource, we're gonna utilize that resource, right? I've never ever come into an MSP and found a group of people sitting around waiting for something to do. It just doesn't happen. Like, and if you hire somebody, you're gonna utilize that person, right? It's an innate thing built into us. So we're either gonna sign a new client, start a new project, develop some new products, maybe, heaven forbid, you know, get more, modernize our business. We're gonna utilize that resource. So don't worry about the utilization, worry about getting the resources and you know, theoretically, you know, all the models and MSPs, the more people you have, the more money you should make. Because we're making gross marginal labor. That's what we're doing, and and tools. So you know, people say I've got to cut head counts. No, you don't. You need to do more, do it smarter. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, get off my soapbox now.

SPEAKER_03

And no, that's right. So the sales MM person, so that is the beginning of you realizing that I need to be doing things that are is the highest and best use of my time, always and only, exclusively, and you know, and if I can't, I'm figuring out how I can get someone else to do that thing. Right. So that you are doing the thing that gets the client is the technical solution while you're smaller, right? But then you've got to give that up as well, right? At some point you're just gonna be a businessman, not actually an engineer anymore. You're not you're not running a small MSP. You will get to the point where you're a businessman and you're thinking about acquisitions and you're thinking about strategies to increase revenue. Who should I partner with? You're meeting with vendors at a higher level than just the account manager flocking you extra licenses, you know? It will get to that. So that's where you're going to be headed. Now, after you've got your sales admin, the next hire really depends on you. Right? Are you the natural-born salesperson? Because they're out there and they're really good at it and they just don't have enough time, right? So if you're that natural salesperson and you go close bring bring in new business at that early stage, you keep doing that, you don't stop. It's too early to outsource that. You go get an account manager, right? Hire that account manager, you don't divorce yourself from your clients, right? Initially, you'll still go there. You know, at least you call them, you know, once a week in those early stages, make it once a fortnight. Once you know they're happy, switch to once a month, but you never break away from them if they've been brought in by you, still check in on them at least once a quarter. Go eyeball them, see them, talk to them about their business. That matters. And it costs you an hour, a quarter, right? If you were to, you know, once you've got that account manager really sort of ticking along. Then when you've won more business, go hire another account manager. When you're sick of being a BDM and you've got other, you can feel the pressures of other areas of the business coming in, that's when we would look at getting that BDM, right? Now, on the other side, if you hate sales, the thought of going out there and generating new business makes you want to, you know, fill up in the feeder not do this anymore. I don't know. Don't do it. Don't force yourself. You don't follow your, you know, then that's when you hire that BDM. And I've got different businesses that I'm working with. Some are going the account manager route, some are going the BDM route. And they're both their first hires. So if you're not a natural BDM and the thought of it, you just can't bring yourself to do it, don't. Because that's not the highest and best use of your time.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And again, from an EOS perspective, it's always about us as owners and and leadership team, you know, delegating the tasks that we either don't like or we're not good at, or both, and elevating us to a higher level in the business where, you know, we are expensive resources as owners and do our best work and do what we love.

SPEAKER_03

I could rant about that all day. There's lots of different things and variables, but yeah, listen to yourself. If once you've got that sales admin, do I love selling or do I not? And then that's your choice.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Last question for today: sales versus operations. This is something that I think we kind of struggled with as we built out our businesses was the leads are flowing, the BDM's bringing in the sales. How do you stop the sales team from kind of becoming, I guess, an island and make sure that sales and service delivery are aligned in sync so that the business scales without breaking that culture and getting into the them and us type of scenario?

SPEAKER_03

Good sales. Talking about hiring, you know, which salesperson are we going to hire? If it's an account manager or a BDM, you know they're good when they make friends with the engineers. They know I can only be successful if they like me, if we work together on things and I'm not doing things that they don't like. Okay. That's that's that's a number one sort of green flag, as it were, in your salesperson. You intertwine their processes, right? So when you've got big deals and and big proposals that are being worked on, take that engineer out, right? Take that lead engineer out. Who's the smart cookie? Who's the one who does the scoping, right? Get them to come out. Now, we might not do a full-on scope before we do an initial estimate or proposal or something to sort of kick it off, but at least that engineer's met the prospect. They know that you respect them enough to involve them at that early stage. And it might just be an hour meeting. But then when it comes to actually, hey, they actually find off on the full discovery and recommendations, you know, proposal, or hey, they actually find off on an estimate, we need to go and do a full proper scope now for a final price, they're going to be way more engaged, right? And that relationship's going to be a lot stronger. And it's not just sales winning shit and kicking it over the fence, right? Which does happen. Right. And and have I done that? Yes. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, I might I might have done a few of those. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Now, does that impact relationships? Well, if you've got a really good one, you can get away with one every now and again, right? But, you know, you don't want to make it a habit. Right. So yeah, I would say intertwining them into the process, make part of the sales process be for for certain deals, not everything. You don't want to waste their time. Bring them out as part of the sales process.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. The other topic I want to bring up on this one was the ability of the operations to deliver the solution. Because I've had this come up a lot in the last 12 months. That the the sales guys out, they've got an opportunity, they come back in, talk to engineering, and they go, Oh, we can't even start looking at that for four or five months to do the work and say, Well, hang on, that is that there's no the customers in today's world are not going to wait around for five months, especially if it's a new prospect, right? Or it's a it's a new kind of yeah, like you've got a client on board, but now we're doing a massive migration project. And you say five to six, I've seen places say six months. So you you're dead right. We've got to get the communication between engineering and sales so they're in sync, so that the sales guys are aware of what the bottleneck or the pipeline or the the capacity to do a scoping job, even versus do the final delivery, because they're nothing worse than having a hot lead. You go out and meet with the client, you've got them all, and they come and you go back to the final credit say, Oh, but by the way, we can't start doing the work for six months' time. Like, come on. Yeah, you just got to be in sync with that guy.

SPEAKER_03

So going EOS and scorecards and all those fun things, right? So something that we would put in early in the piece is what is our project pipeline currently? So how many hours have we sold the Rudon queue to be delivered? And when we first go into businesses, almost always there is no opportunity pipeline, so I don't know what's coming, right? So step one is we put that in place so that we know what's coming. So we've we know what we've got, we know what's coming in with some sort of percentage likelihood with some sort of expected day. Right. So now we've we know. Then there's the gap, which is what can we deliver at what rate? So if we've got 600 hours in the uh, you know, sold, right, but we can only deliver a hundred hours a month, right, in project work, well, we've got six months. Problem, good problem, back. We've got a problem. Now, the solution to that problem might be, you know, prioritization of work depending on resource, whether we're allocating someone to projects, whether it's permanent or burst or or whatever. And then on the other side, sales need to be aware of that and go, right, I'm prospecting at this pace. I'm not rushing to close a project. I'm generating interest and building my pipeline so that I can tell things. Hey, you know, we're in a really early stage. Would you like me to pre-book you in for July to get this done? Now I know we're not quite there yet, but would you want to do that around that time? And then you start to lock in that time early. And then we give them proposal sign-off dates. If you sign this by this day, we'll do it by this date. Okay, so then that's how we start to plan when we've got a choked project queue. Now, the other one is, okay, well, if we know what our forecast is and we know what we've got, do we need to hire another engineer?

unknown

Right.

SPEAKER_03

So we go through and have that discussion. Right, okay, now we can do maybe we can now do 300 hours in in a month. Great. That 600, now we're down to two months. All right, sales go, punch, let's go sell. So yeah, getting those scorecards are really important. Project hours in queue, project forecast in, and knowing what that deliver, like, you know, how many hours we can deliver per month. They're they're the important ones. You've got that, then you can make decisions and do something about it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and there's there's another whole big discussion around resource planning and yeah. The the the summary of the whole discussion will be visibility and accountability. Like you, once you've got that, everything starts moving quicker because people understand. They're not fearful, they're not guessing what's going on. You're surprised how many people don't even know how many hours they spend on their last project. Like, how could you not know that? Or the engineer doing the work doesn't know how much time he's got allocated to do the actual work. Yeah, there's all these little tips and tricks. So that's a that's another topic for another day.

SPEAKER_00

But yeah, absolutely. And I think the big underlying message for all of this today is training, making sure that as we bring people into a sales team, we don't fall into the they are a, you know, that they're an experienced salesperson, they've worked in the industry before, sign them up, give them a laptop, and send them on their way.

SPEAKER_03

Yep. You can take the best salesperson in the world and put into an environment where there's doubt, they're undermined, they don't know what they're meant to be selling, they don't know what they can sell at what pace, and then they're terrible, right? It's not their fault.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely, it's not their fault. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

So going back right to the beginning, take a step back. Where do you want to take this business? What does that look like? If you were to hire a salesperson, how would that work? How much time would you have? How much would you invest? How much how long are you willing to, you know, not have that revenue coming in? Make those decisions at the start, then you can execute this properly. Because if you go, oh, I haven't sold anything after two months, and then you let them go, maybe they were rubbish, but maybe they weren't, but you don't know because you don't have a proper strategy for this.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. Okay, as always, we have run out of time. So let's wrap. Brendan, as always, thank you. Thanks for your time. We really appreciate your time and having a chat.

SPEAKER_03

Pleasure. Thank you for having me again. I really enjoy these. It's great.

SPEAKER_00

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