Mindset of a Leader – Breaking the Cycle of Overwhelm

Welcome to MSP Mastery: Ctrl Alt Deliver Podcast, the podcast for MSP owners and leaders who want to build a better MSP, one that actually works for them.

I am Jeni Clift, joined by my husband and long time business partner, Nick Clift. Together, we unpack what is really working in thriving MSPs, including insights from the trusted partners who support them.

In this episode, we conclude our special three part series exploring the pillars that shape every successful MSP.

Part three is all about the Mindset of a Leader – Breaking the Cycle of Overwhelm.

Every MSP eventually becomes a reflection of its leadership. The culture, the energy, the growth, the standards and the performance of the team are all influenced by the mindset of the person at the top.

Nick and Jeni share honest lessons from their own MSP journey, including how a leader’s energy can affect an entire team, why owners need to protect time for deep work, and how to stop carrying every problem in the business alone.

Here is what we covered together:

• Mindset Shapes the Business: Why the way a leader thinks, feels and shows up has a direct impact on the culture, performance and direction of an MSP.

• Recognising Your Own Energy: How to become more aware of the mindset you bring into the office, client meetings and difficult conversations.

• The Impact of a Leader’s Spark: Why owners need to regularly reflect on whether they are still motivated by their business and what to do when that energy starts to fade.

• Letting Go of Expectations: Why doing your best work without expecting an immediate reward, return or specific outcome can change the way you approach opportunities.

• From Obligation to Purpose: How to start making a long term plan when you feel trapped in a business that no longer gives you energy or fulfilment.

• Discipline, Boundaries and Consequences: Why people need clear expectations, defined standards and real accountability to succeed.

• Leadership Versus Management: Why getting work done is not the same as leading people, and how mentoring and coaching help your team become the best version of themselves.

• Stop Solving Everyone Else’s Monkeys: How asking “What do you think?” helps people build confidence, make decisions and take ownership of their work.

• Protecting Deep Work: Why constant interruptions are the enemy of quality work, and how leaders can create space to focus on strategic priorities.

• Getting Out of the Weeds: Why it is impossible to make good strategic decisions when you are buried in operational demands and reacting to every urgent request.

• The Power of Saying No: How clear goals, core values and an abundance mindset can help MSP owners say no to work, clients and opportunities that do not fit.

• Finding Your Mojo: Why your motivation will change as your business evolves, and why leaders need to keep revisiting their why.

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

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

To do quality deep work, every single person needs to focus and get rid of all eliminations of it. I've learned not to expect reward and payback for every single thing I do. Once you've mastered that ability and you're able to think that way, life changes dramatically. You can't just read discipline. You've got to experience it. You've got to be in an environment where there are some rules and consequences. And this consequence thing is a big issue today.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

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. And today here's Nick, myself, with yet again no special guest. Today is part three of a special three-part MSP Mastery series where Nick and I are delving into the three pillars we believe shape every successful MSP. In part one, we explored people. In part two, we unpacked a process. In today's episode, part three, we're diving into what sits above both of them, the mindset of a leader. Because the reality is that every MSP eventually becomes a reflection of its leadership. The systems, the culture, the growth, the trust, and the performance of the team are all influenced by the mindset of the person or the people at the top. So today, Nick, we are exploring the beliefs, the behaviors, and leadership habits that separate business owners who stay stuck from those who build scalable, successful MSPs.

SPEAKER_02 2:28

Yes, mindset. It's all in the mindset. It's a little favorite saying I picked up over Christmas with a friend over in Sweden discussing the weather. I said, Oh, I'm not cold. It's only minus four. It's just a mindset. And that was the kind of thing that's stuck. And but mindset is a real thing, and you need to learn to use it. We have a lot of preconceived ideas, beliefs, all that kind of stuff that all comes from your origins, your upbringings, your environment, and it all has an impact and ultimately it affects the way you turn up and the way you do stuff.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Often a lack of insight into how we show up affects the entire organization.

SPEAKER_02 3:10

Yeah, it is such a powerful thing. And we've been in this kind of coaching and consulting game for a long, long time. And at the end of my work in the MSP as a strategic DCIO, if you like, a lot of my time was spent talking with my clients about issues in their business around people, process, general business stuff, nothing to do with technology whatsoever. Because I'd matured so much in our business due to my learnings with the coaches I worked with and the mentors that I was becoming their kind of mentor and coach on business process and team building and stuff because it is all about the people. And Jenny and I always say our team that we had at DWM would literally walk over hot coals and fire for us. And they literally did because we took some of them to Tony Robbins and unleashed the power within it. And I walked on hot coals, which I never believed I would. And that's when it really clicked for me, this mindset. It's about you have control over the way you feel, think, and do. You just need to be aware of what's happening around you and then make that physical, as Tony Robbins said, the physical change of state to get you out of a funky mindset into the mindset you want to be in. So it is absolutely within your power to turn up and be the best you can be. It is also in your power to not give a shit and rock out of bed with a hangover and go to the office and be a grumpy bear. And I've definitely done that in the past and have a bad influence on everybody and every outcome and every decision that's made that day is impacted negatively. Yeah, and so mindset is a super powerful tool. You've got to learn how to recognize yourself, your own behaviors. And I've come to learn even with the work I'm doing now, and it's kind of reading and studying a lot about AI, AI is a silicon neural network, and our brain is a chemical neural network, and we can affect the way we think, remember, believe things based on the chemistry in our brain. And we can do physical things to induce those chemical changes in your brain, just like you can take a drug to change that chemical in your brain as well. So once you get into this, is uh I'm not gonna go all woo-woo on you, but it's a tool. And we have the ability as sentient humans that we are conscious of ourselves and conscious that we can impact ourselves. AI is not there yet, but it probably will get there one day, but it'll be completely different to us. But this is the power we have right now. We can imagine and we can make it a conscious decision to change something that impacts us. And I challenge all you leaders out there to do some reading, work with a coach, figure out how to get your mindset where you want it to be. What do you need to be when you turn up to the office, to the client meeting, to a performance review, to a difficult conversation? What do you want the outcomes to be? And I went down a bit of a rabbit hole recently and got a bit funky and talked to one of our old coaches and he said, mate, your problem is perhaps you have too high our expectations, Nick. Perhaps you need to let go of all expectations. And I said, Well, can't do that. No, I'm not saying about give up on life, but when you're doing something, don't have any expectation of an outcome. Just be the best you can possibly be. Turn up and do whatever you're doing and be the best you can be with no expectation of return, payback, outcome, and you'll be surprised what comes back to you. And he was a hundred percent right. If we go into this thinking, oh my God, I have to get all these things out of this meeting. I need the client to agree to all this stuff, I need this to happen, I need this to happen, and when this happens, all the stuff back in the office has to happen, and I've got to do this. Oh my god, you're already in overwhelm, and you'll go into that meeting and you'll shut yourself down so you can't get that outcome because you don't want to deal with all the shit that comes afterwards. Sounds complicated, but the good news is you can absolutely have an impact on that. Go in there with the right mindset to give, give, give, and then you'll get the rewards in other areas. It's happened to me hundreds of times. You think, oh my god, this client's a pain, and we're doing all this work over here and all this stuff, and we're losing money, and then all of a sudden one of their friends rings you up and says, Hey, I've got this opportunity, can you help us out? And all of a sudden, life is good. So you never know. So I've I've learned not to expect reward and payback for every single thing I do. Once you've mastered that ability and you're able to think that way, life changes dramatically.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

It's a mindset thing. And I remember one situation we had with a member of our admin team who every day dragged herself into the office looking like she'd just lost her last dollar. But I was standing at the front of the building in my office looking down into the car park when she turned up one day with our business manager. Her and I were standing at the window, and we watched her. She got out of the car and happy as Larry, singing to herself. But when she got to the front door and put her hand on that front door, her whole body shifted and her shoulders dropped and it went into this, we used to call it Eeyore, you know, little cloud raining on her, dragged herself in. Good morning. Oh, good morning. Oh, it's not that good. I called that the fuck off strategy because she came into the office every day. She was admin, her role was to help everybody else succeed, but she came in with this attitude of, my life is not worth living, just go away and leave me alone. So our business manager, Vicki, and I came up with a plan. And Vicki's office was line of sight to that front door. So the next day I saw her come into the car park. So I went into Vicki's office and said, Here she comes, she looks fine. And same thing, puts a hand on the office door, goes to open it, and the shoulders drop, and the whole Eeyore routine came out. So Vicki leapt up from her chair and ran across the office and grabbed her by the arms and said, Oh my god, what's happened? And she said, Uh, uh, nothing's happened. Oh man, the way that you were holding yourself there, I thought something terrible must have happened. No, no, I'm fine, I'm all good. So she pulled herself together and off she went, and we had a good day. Three days in a row. The third day, she saw Vicky coming running across the office, straighten herself up. Vicki just turned around and walked away, and we never had to do it again. But calling out that behavior of that strategy that she was running of everybody just bugger off and leave me alone. I don't want to know about it. It had been working for her. When we realized what she was doing and effectively called her out, it stopped and I don't think it ever happened again. So that's part of leadership of calling that behavior out.

SPEAKER_02 9:45

100%. And there's a big distinction between managing and leading. Managing is making sure the work gets done and people are doing their timesheet and blah, blah, blah. Leadership is about understanding that person, working with the mentoring, coaching to make them the best version of them they can be and to help them proceed and grow and achieve the company goals, you know. Because doing tickets efficiently may not necessarily, for some people, directly relate to where the company goals are, but leadership is meaning you need to understand where the company's going and how to get the people on the same page and motivate towards going to that. That interesting story. I kind of remember that happening at the time, and I thought, oh, that's interesting. And then I realize that there are people out there that have different backgrounds and upbrings and all that kind of stuff, and a whole lot of shit going on in their world, but they are wanting to be called out for bad behavior because they've never had discipline before. We had a number of people come through our company over the years and personal life and family and bits and pieces. And discipline is one of these things that you can't just read discipline. You've got to experience it. You've got to be in an environment where there are some rules and consequences. And this consequence thing is a big issue today. Previous episode we've just recorded was about accountability. And then, yeah, a lot of reasons why KPIs and accountability don't work is because there are no consequences if we don't do it. But I've learned that people do like to have a clear boundary. And leadership is about that. It's it's setting what are the expectations? What does good look like here? And Jenny would say to me something, you're not going to work today, you're not fit for human consumption. Your attitude stinks. You whatever's going on, you stay home and mow the lawn or do whatever, but don't go to the office because your vibe was not good.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

And your standard answer to that was I'm fine.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

Yeah, piss off, get out of my way, you know. So yeah, being the adult in the room and taking accountability for your own, the way you show up yourself is key to leadership. And that's part of that. This whole topic's about mindset. So that's definitely the way you think. And and we all go down rabbit holes, we all fall off the perch, if you like. We all have bad days. It's about recognizing that and then especially for yourself, understanding what you can do to impact that or get out of that. And and for me, back in the stressful days when we had a young family and I was still working corporate job, and even when we started the MSP, Wednesday nights, 7 p.m. or whatever it was, X-Files, one hour of me time. Everybody knew that was dad was off limits, then he left me alone. I sat there and I watched X-Files. It took me to another planet and another world in another fantasy. I didn't think about anything else. And for that one hour, I got to recharge. And then later in life, it was going to the gym. Go to the gym and not thinking about all the other stuff. But you've got to figure out what it is for you that gets you out of that funky place and back into the mindset that you want to be in.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

So one of our episodes, Zorn Barner or episode 23, talked about the danger of a leader's spark dimming over time. And I see this with a friend here in Bali. She's had a business for more than 30 years. She's tried to sell it a couple of times, and in her own words, she's over it. I've been to her office, not in our industry, completely unrelated industry. But even the office shows her lack of enthusiasm about the business that she is over. But going back to Zorn, he was talking about how owners underestimate how much their energy impacts everybody else, and asked, I think, a really powerful question. Are you still waking up every morning with the same energy you had five, ten years ago whenever you started the business? Nick, if you look back through our journey, how often do you think you stopped to honestly assess whether your enthusiasm in the business and how that affected the company's growth or our lack of growth through some of those times? How often did you stop and look at that and really assess where you were at?

SPEAKER_02 13:58

Definitely not enough, that's for sure. I'd probably say it was for us or for me, it was definitely in the earlier days having a goal of trying to achieve something. And that revolved around the big one was building our house, our family home in Miami that we built. That was a massive goal because we started with zero and three, three years later we built our dream house. But you get to a plateau and you've got to reassess what is the next goal. I remember we had a sales guy who would join us and we drove for a client meeting, and we drove for four hours across regional Victoria, and we went through seven councils, and we had well, maybe two of those as clients. And I said, that's my goal. I want business with all of these councils, all seven. And took another two years, but we got it. And so you've got to find it can be that, it can be a Spark peer groups, as a member of a couple of different peer groups. I definitely got motivated by that. Didn't necessarily need to be the best one in the group, but I was not going to be in the bottom three, I can assure you. And that was a motivator to do that. Going to conferences and learning about new technology and then figuring out how to best implement that. Getting recognized by your industry peers was is another sort of motivator, if you like. But you've got to find out what's motivating you. Just having a job. And a lot of my mentors said to me, Yeah, well, starting your own business, you work twice as hard for half as much money, and you can't leave. People think running your own business is the ultimate flexibility. It's the ultimate trap. You literally cannot leave. You have 10 staff and a business loan or a contract with clients. You can't crack up, crack it with the boss, hand in your resignation, and go and do something else. Like it's legally, physically, you can't do that. That's not a good place to be in. Was there once or twice, and that's not a good place to be in. So you've got to constantly find what helps you motivate you. And for me, it was about learning more about myself, surrounding yourself with people that inspire you, coaches, mentors, people that you work with can be the youngest, juniorest person, and all of a sudden, they're the one that's motivating you because you can see the spark in them and you get the passion to help them grow and become. And the proudest thing for me is that my two sons are grown up and they're working in the industry and they've got great jobs and they're doing a great thing and contributing. But the second part of that is the other people. We had a reunion recently for the old DWM staff, and to hear the stories of guys that I haven't seen for 12 years and how the time they spent with us at DWM helped them find their mojo and what they wanted to be do and establish a career and moving forward, and that is just amazing. It can be that. And for us, that was probably the primary driver for us. Is we always said we wanted to make a great place to work where people can achieve their full potential and be proud of what we've achieved. It was never to be the biggest, most profitable MSP in the world. That was never our desire or goal. We just was all for us, it was all about the people. But you've got to find your mojo. What is your mojo?

SPEAKER_01 16:55

And I wanted to just touch on, I guess, my journey because for me it was about obligation. And I, as you know, Nick got really, really sick in 2014. And as I do, rather than taking pills and and that sort of things, looked at myself and said, Why am I here? Why do I need this illness? And I was suicidal. Had they not been able to diagnose and treat it, I think I would have taken my own life because of the pain that I was in. If I was as awake, I was in 11 out of 10 pain. Because I was in a place of building a business with you in an industry that I had no passion in. And it really was in a place of obligation. So what I did at that point was I guess started my sort of slow exit out of the business. And it really didn't happen until 22 when we sold the business. I was still involved up until that point and, or maybe 21, but it was a real look inside, figure out what I needed to do, what I wanted to do, and then make a plan, a long-term plan to achieve that. So I think if people are in that place, as you said, you can't just quit and walk out when you own the business, but you can start putting other things in place. I trained as a coach and then I became an EOS implementer a couple of years later because I decided that that's where my passion was. But I still worked in the business for the next however many years, seven years. And in that time, because I had that plan, I was able to manage my energy and manage my enthusiasm for what I was still doing within DWM and then Otto because I was meeting the more intrinsic needs and outside of that. But the mindset for me changed from obligation to doing what I love in the business and then doing more of what I love outside of the business.

SPEAKER_02 18:47

Yeah, and I think it's like with clients and there's the phases we go through. There's the start-up phase, then there's the lifestyle phase where you're making a good living, you've got yourself a nice car, a nice house, and all the other bits and pieces you want, keeping up with the Joneses, classic Australian trap. Then you're in growth mode, and then you've got Empire Builder at the other end. Where? Where the Empire Builder is your you're kind of really disassociated from the day-to-day stuff and the people, and typically that's a publicly listed company or something like that, where you're just constantly on the grind, just bang, bang, bang. Some people like that. We didn't really do startup because we got a good contract straight away to start our business. But the second one, DWM was a startup for sure. We're always the lifestyle business, and that that for us was what was important. But for you guys, the topic is like I said, is the mindset is you've got to understand why you're doing this. And it changes over time. Like Jenny said, it absolutely changes and it can take an external event. Like we were going through a phase at one point where we were looking to acquire a couple of other businesses or something like that, and we got an offer for someone to potentially acquire us, and I'd never even thought about that. And we went down the path and had a few couple of meetings, and I just said, I can't do this. Like I am DWMD, DWM is me. And then I had to change my mindset right then and said, hang on, I need to separate myself from the company because this company needs to go on after me, after us. And that was a change in mindset for me. Because when I started it, I had no expectation. We started the first business because I didn't like where I was working in corporate. There was no lifelong dream to run my own business. I'd always been doing things on the side and doing deals and bits and pieces, like I'd always done that. But there was no strategy. And then when we went and did the merger, that was a strategic move, right? This is we're designing this business to do X, Y, and Z. When these parameters are hit, then we're going to exit. And that's what happened. So it didn't happen in exactly the time frame we planned, but it happened. It was planned. It was strategic. There was a different mindset in that business than there was in the original business. And you go through different phases, and sometimes you can find it yourself, go on a seven-day water fast retreat in Bali, and you'll definitely change your mindset. I'm telling you. I've done two days maximum, and that was enough for me. But you've got to figure out what works for you, what you're trying to achieve with your business partner, your life partner, whoever. Stop, have the conversations. I think for Jenny and I, too many times we just made assumptions and we did things out of obligation for each other, not having the grown-up adult business owner conversation. And that caused us some rocky times during the business where we had cash flow issues, we had people issues, we had partner issues. And whenever we got to a crisis, we did. We sat down, we had the conversation. What the hell are we doing? What do we need to change? Where are we going? What are we doing? This like our move to Bali was one of those things. Like, what are we going to do? How are we going to do this? What's the pros and cons? And some stuff happened recently on the trip that's another opportunity has just changed our whole mindset or changed my mindset completely to what we're doing here because an opportunity's come up that would never have come up if we didn't happen to be in the right place at the right time, met the right people, everything just fell into place. And like, well, this is meant to happen. And these things only happen when Your mind is open for opportunities to come into. If you're so frustrated and disappointed and on with yourself or you're not happy with where you're going or what you're doing, your mind shuts down and you narrow your view to just look at problems. Problem, problem, problem, problem. I'm solving all the problems. Oh my God.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

And you just don't see the opportunities.

SPEAKER_02 22:19

Yeah, we're talking a lot about the leaders, owner's mindset here, I suppose, versus leadership mindset is a different topic, which we probably cover another day. But the world changes when you have people around you that share your view on the world. You have a proper trust and your mindset changes. You then don't own all the problems yourself. I've been very fortunate through the journey to have Jenny as my partner. And you know, we often say that thank God we both haven't had a bad week at the same week. It doesn't happen very often, but most of the time one of us has fallen off the perch and the other one's up there and drags you back up again, or the other, or you drag me up again. Yeah, yeah. And a solo owner of a business is a very, very, very lonely place to be. Not having a trusted business partner that you can intimately share your worst fears and crises are going on in your personal life, your business life, your financial life, all that stuff, you've got to find a space where you can have those conversations. And whether it's a a coach, a mentor, a therapist, a business partner, a life partner, I don't care that you need to be having those conversations. Because if you're not having them out loud with somebody else, your subconscious is having them while you're asleep and it's making poor decisions because it hasn't got all the information.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Yeah, and just dwelling on all the negatives. So I wanted to talk about episode 41, Sally Ducksfield, who we've just had the pleasure of spending a few days with, traveling around here on our scooters in Bali and having lots of in-depth conversations. But she talked about the neurobiology of leadership. And what happens when a leader gets into the office or logs onto their computer, answers that phone first phone call, and their plan for the day gets hijacked by if you've read the book One Minute Manager Meets the Monkeys or know the concept, suddenly you've got a whole bunch of urgent but low value interruptions or monkeys on your back. So what she talked about was I guess compartmentalizing your day. Give the team an hour. Don't take the monkeys, but help people to solve their own monkeys, give them a direction and send them off with their own monkeys. And then just going off grid and locking yourself away for an hour, a couple of hours, like we do when we're recording this podcast. Notifications are off, there's no interruptions. We have the fortune here in Bali of having staff. Our staff know we're recording, don't come bang on the door and ask us a question, try and keep the dogs quiet, not so easy. But just going off grid and blocking out a couple of hours to actually get some stuff done. Why is it so hard for MSP leaders to resist the urge of fixing everything immediately? Why can't they just switch off and close that office door or turn that mobile phone on to flight mode?

SPEAKER_02 25:18

That's a good question. The reason we don't do that is partly ego-driven and fear of things getting out of control. The ego side of his I I want to be seen as the shiny knight and solve all the problems. And I'll use an analogy here. I I've been a car guy. I think I drove my first car. Dad taught me to drive when I was like seven years old.

SPEAKER_01 25:42

In the paddock. Just a disclaimer, in the paddock, not on the road.

SPEAKER_02 25:45

It was at the local football ground, actually. But I didn't drive to the football ground. I had to sit on his knee to steer and change gears, but he did the pedal thing, so I couldn't reach them. Up until I saw my Tesla the day before we moved to Bali, so I've had 60 different cars. And I needed to have a car right, that was my thing. But I've changed my whole mindset now, now that I'm here. I don't have cars, I have drivers. So my reason for bringing it up is if you feel like you need to be in control of everything, like I would always drive. I'm in a car, I'm driving. I'm a bad passenger, I didn't like being a passenger. That was my story. I told myself. Now I'm very happy being a passenger. So go somewhere, we get Ubers, grabs, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 26:25

You make me drive in Australia now.

SPEAKER_02 26:26

Yeah, I don't, yeah, I'm I'm not I don't have a desire. So you can change a 60-year-old habit if you choose to. So that habit you have of being in control all the time, wanting to solve everybody else's problems. It is a reframing. Like I use it the analogy now, where all humans, part of our core is to be needed in the community, community and connection. So we want to give to people by helping them. We get joy from helping. A lot of times you hear people, the joy is in the giving, not in the receiving. And I used to get really anxious about us going to Christmas birthday places and am I supposed to give someone a present or not? What if they give me something to have or something to give to them? And but if I give someone a present and I see their eyes light up and they appreciate it, I'm the one that's getting the benefit out of that. If they don't give me something back, I wouldn't worry me. I'm not gonna feel worse about them. I'll probably feel more embarrassed for them because they didn't know that I was gonna give them something. So it's a mindset, right? So you don't have to give something with an expectation of return. So the whole point of this conversation is letting people come to you and ask a question and you doing the work and taking the work off them is basically stealing their work and their happiness. So you need to figure out how to coach. And he was an expert at this because she's had pretty much every single role in our business and honestly no idea how to do any of them at the start, right? So I remember you saying this. You would ask them, or what should what do you think we should do? Well, why don't you just do that then? But they wanted to come and get permission to do it. So somehow you've got to develop that language and that ability to coach people into giving them the right direction, let them make the decision. And now, whenever someone asks me a question, I say, Well, what do you think? And my thing was, what would you do if you owned the company? Um, oh well, I'm I'm the real question. I'm not tricking here. Like I don't know the answer to this problem. You've got the problem. What have you thought about? Let's work through it together. What are the top three things that you would bring to solve this problem? And if you had to pick one, which one would you pick? And I'd say 80, 90% of the time, they're picking the right one.

SPEAKER_01 28:36

And if they don't, then talk them through. Talk them through. Well, have you thought about X? Oh, no, well, I haven't. Okay, well, let's talk about a different option then. So you're teaching, that's a coaching moment in teaching them to come up to the right answer.

SPEAKER_02 28:50

Yeah, and that interruption thing where you're getting hot disrupted, that used to annoy me so much. For me, it takes me a bit of time, because I am a bit of a distracto, shiny object type person. It takes me a bit of time to get into a zone where I can actually focus and get some good work done. And I used to constantly be barrage, and I just said to guys, like, this is not working for me. You come and ask me 10 things today, and how about you just make a list of all the questions you need to ask me and book 15 minutes with me, then you'll have my undivided attention for 15 minutes and we'll solve all those problems and probably a few more you haven't even thought about, rather than just running up and interrupting me right now. So part of you freeing up your time is teaching the other people to free up their time and batch their work. Don't just get interrupt-driven all the time. So this interrupt-driven thing is the detriment of productivity because you just can't focus. It takes time for the human mind to focus back on. You know, you look at a message on your phone, you've lost the subconscious thought process for at least five minutes. And younger people are better at it than mature people like myself. Because apparently you can have a conversation, be on a Zoom call, be texting three different people on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Insta chat, whatever it is, all at the same time and still actually paying attention to what's going on. Well, I call BS at that, but I must admit the younger generation bring probably multitask a bit better. But to do quality deep work, every single person needs to focus and get rid of all eliminations out of it. To the point, turn your email off, turn everything off. Like I reboot my laptop before I come and do a session like this or any kind of important stuff, and don't open anything, just the tool I need to do the job I'm doing right now. Because I can't things pop up on my screen and I get distracted. And you can tell when you're on a call with somebody, if you're in a Teams call with four or five people, you can tell the people are looking at their phone. Like they can tell when you're not focusing and you're not looking at what's going on, too. So be respectful, set the example, teach people. Like I used to go to the gym at 10 or 11 a.m. during the work time because I knew after that I was so much more productive. I did it on purpose rather than doing over lunch break, just to show people that A, if you want to do this, I'm happy for you to do it. But to say it's okay to block time out and be uncontactable. The world is not gonna stop. If you've set your life up to be so integral into every single part of your business that you can't take one hour off without answering the phone, you got real problems. You're not gonna have a happy wife, happy life. Absolutely. And even now, like the good old days, you get on a plane and you are disconnected. Now they've got freaking Wi-Fi on a plane. Like, how stupid is that? How stupid is that? That was the whole point of going on plane trips. So, where do you get your peace? Leave the phone at home, get a book.

SPEAKER_01 31:37

Riding motorbikes in the Himalayas.

SPEAKER_02 31:39

That's it. For me, motorsport, extreme sports, that's why people do it. When you're doing something that your life depends on you focusing, you're not thinking about shit going on at work.

SPEAKER_01 31:53

And just very briefly, the follow-on to this is as a leader, I don't believe it's possible to make strategic decisions when you are buried in operational demands. When you are so far in the weeds and everybody just throwing their monkeys at you, and you're saying yes, yes, yes. You cannot have a strategic view of the business and stick your head up above the plants and look forward when you are just getting sucked down into the weeds. It just you can't.

SPEAKER_02 32:27

100%. And like we're believers of EOS, we've implemented in all of our businesses, and I was an implementer for a few years. Jenny's still an implementer. And the clients that we have and have had that don't do two-day annuals because of the story of oh, well, I don't know, it can't take that much time out of the business. It takes a day to get all the busy shit out of your heads, and then you have that dinner that night and talk about the future and bits and pieces, and the next day, the results are amazing. Like, I can't tell you how many critical decisions have been made in the second day of an annual that just changes the trajectory of a business. And the guys that kid themselves that they can get it all done in one day, then you're just doing the quarterly, which is you're just setting up dealing with the urgent issues for the next 90 days. You're not being strategic at all, really, because of the reason it's a two-day process and you need to decompress the first day, get all the shit out of your heads, get it all documented, and then we have a break, then we come back the next morning and then really review where the hell are we going and what are we going to do strategically for the next 12 months. And yeah, it's it's crazy. The people that do it properly get 10 times the reward. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

Absolutely. So let's move now into the power of saying no. The Louis Cavellus in episode 42 said he realized that through his journey in his businesses, his instinct was to say yes to everything. But working with through or with us as EOS implementers and establishing those clear long-term goals, he somehow found the discipline to say no to opportunities that didn't fit. And he actually described it in that episode as doing the team a favor by providing focus. So I don't know if Louis was shiny object syndrome. It was probably often is the case. The business needs cash flow. We need to say yes to opportunities. But it's kind of a double-edged sword, really. And we saw this. I used to say to you, don't go to clients with a shopping cart, go to them with a menu of these are the things that you can buy, not send them through the aisles of the supermarket and picking bits and pieces and saying, make something with that. Making sure that we really narrow it down to knowing what products we sell, knowing the time frame that we can provide things, and really making it clear, putting some boundaries around what do we say yes to and what do we say no to takes the business forward and minimizes those distractions that just burns the team out. And I think you've been in that same thing of making that shift from saying yes to everything to having to say no. So talk me through that process of that change of mindset to when do I say no?

SPEAKER_02 35:20

The mindset of saying yes versus no, I definitely remember in the early days saying yes to everything because you were growing a business, you're kind of hustling, you needed to actually be able to take on whatever you could take on and work for it, and pay the bills, etc., etc. So I think that scarcity versus mind abundance mindset where you have to take on every single deal. It's such a powerful thing when you get to the point you go, you know what, that client sounds good, could make a buck on that, but yeah, it doesn't, it's not really gonna be for us. It's gonna be more painful than it is, or it's gonna be some negative attached to that. So you don't want to do that. And I think that changed for me when I learnt through our journey that selling a because my thing was to sell projects, right? And I could sell a project hardware, project revenue, that was my jam. The many service agreements, they came along, but I didn't really actively go selling those, if you like. Then I realized that when I sold a dollar of recurring service contract, it was adding $12 value to the business versus a dollar of project labor or product added zero dollars of value to the business. That definitely changed my mindset about that. So you know it was a hard, hard transition to make because I could I could make 10 grand selling a bunch of laptops, or I could make a hundred bucks selling one laptop, and it was the same amount of work. So I would chase those bigger deals where there was lots and lots of hardware refreshers. But getting out of that mindset into the recurring revenue mindset, that was a journey that I had to discover over time, and then we started focusing on just recurring revenue, and it really did help you to make the decision as to whether I should take this deal on or not. Because the power is in saying no, that is for sure. Because once you've said yes to something, especially in our world, we never ever backed out of a deal, we never gave up, even if it cost us in blood, sweat, and tears and money, we would never ever leave a customer in the lurch to the point where I had to replace all the CPUs in a host server once because I screwed up the quote and got the wrong CPUs in there. I just had to go and cough that and pay for it. So, yeah, being able to get to a point where you're reflecting on what you're trying to achieve. And I I think part of the process that helped me with that is this concept in EOS of the core values. So core values are what you truly believe in and what it means for your business, and you apply that, those core values to your vendors, suppliers, and to your customers. So if you have a customer and the team, I actually hire fire everything based on core values, and that was a whole new concept to me. It just made so much sense. And the way that we go through that workshop to determine what they are, they're not just the shit you've got plastered on the wall that you got off Google or AI, they're actually intrinsic in the people that are in your business right now. And there's a process we go through to extract that out, and sometimes they match what you've already picked through a break. Sometimes they're quite different, and businesses are very surprised and they go, Oh, actually, I can see that. But if you use that lens on everything that all the decision making you do, it just makes it so much easier. And you've got something else to blame because it's not just me saying, No, it's this whole business process we have now. Blame the coach, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:35

And I think just touching on that, you can see the businesses that those core values are aspirational. This is what we want to be like, but we're really not. But we'd like to. And if you compare those with the you look at the core values and they just reflect every person in that business, the way things happen. It blows me away every time I go through that process with a new client. Or we set the values, they agree, they're absolutely 100% set on them. And then six or nine months later, it comes out that yeah, that's they're aspirational. And it just blows me away every time that we see that. And again, I think it comes back to the mindset. Are they real? Are you actually being honest with yourself?

SPEAKER_02 39:19

Like trust, honesty, and hard working. They're not core values. That's like the right to play. Like, you're not going to employ anybody that's not you.

SPEAKER_01 39:27

Are you trusting? No. Okay, well, come and work for us then.

SPEAKER_02 39:30

Yeah, that's not your core value.

SPEAKER_01 39:33

Depends on your business, maybe, but you know, your business model. Okay. Thanks, Nick. Thanks for sharing all of your insights, as always.

SPEAKER_02 39:46

Yeah, it's always good fun to reflect on some. That's the advantage of spending 30 years in the trenches. You've got lots of stories and lots of things to reflect on.

SPEAKER_01 39:54

Absolutely. And thanks always to our listeners. We hope you've enjoyed this three-part series exploring the pillars of people, process, and the mindset of a leader. If this conversation hit home for you or got you thinking, head to mspmastery.blog and keep the conversation going. You'll find all our episodes there and more wisdom from the peers and partners who are shaping the future of our industry. Make sure you subscribe so you do not miss future episodes. We have plenty more great guests, conversations, and insights coming your way. Until next time, this is MSP Mastery.