Creating a Client Experience to 2X Your MSP (ScaleCon)

Hey, Steven, we gotta figure out an intro to the podcast. That works. We spent way more time on those little animations you'd even, you'd know, but like, I just love them. It's little things like that that makes me and Steven happy. So we've been talking a lot about marketing our business, selling the leads that come in. Oftentimes, the missed piece that occurs, I'm gonna show you exactly where it occurs, some of y'all might be heading there, you might be right there now or you might have already passed it, is the client experience. We get so excited about growth and the growth begins to happen that we can sometime miss the most important aspect which is keeping our clients happy and engaged. So this is called building a client experience that will to extra MSP. It was between this and 10 reasons Jujitsu is good for business. Anybody listen to the podcast? All right. I'm a total nerd. So you're welcome. I went with something that's highly much more relevant. Okay, so we are excited about growth. Growth is a good thing. I pray all of us get amazing growth after coming back from scale con and implementing everything we learn, but there is a little bit of a balancing act because growth comes at a potential risk that we have to be aware of, especially in this industry. And that's the risk of getting MRR lazy and neglecting clients because they're sticky. Instead we need to use each client as a massive opportunity for referrals, projects, and new MRR. So quick question. Who here -- this is not a trick question. Let's just answer -- who here would say they have excellent retention rate when you get a client, they stick around for years? Exactly. I would expect pretty much every hand of the room to go up. And when you get a client, they're going to stick around whether you reply immediately or you reply in 24 hours. That's just what happens. So retention rate is just not a good metric, yet that's the one that a lot of us focus on. Well, our clients never leave. It's not a good metric for us to be focusing on. Because we've literally all, as you guys have heard in the meeting and you've experienced it yourself, we've all been in the meetings where the client is not happy with their current MSP. In fact, they're infuriated with them. And you're trying to get them to move. They're like, yeah, I'm going to move. And then they don't. And it's like, are you sure you want to stay? You said a lot of bad things. Your MSP hit you and they have a bruise. They're beating you. Are you sure you want to stay with this MSP and they're like, that's just not that bad. That's kind of how retention rate works. They just don't leave. There's a lot of friction to leave. So early on, we say we never lose clients and we get lots of referrals. Then we realize, I want more than this. I'm growing from referrals. It's nice, steady growth. But I want more than this. I want to grow faster. I want to build wealth, not just a stressful job. So we get serious about growth. We come to events like this. We learn. We might hire somebody after we've learned, and it starts to work. The flywheel begins. The growth happens. We're on the ride of our life. And that growth percentage, that manageable 5% to 15% from referrals, very manageable, starts to go up a lot more, becomes a little less manageable. Many of you might be there right now. And many of you, after learning what you've learned at ScaleCon, are going to get to that point where the flywheel begins. I've experienced it twice now. It's a wonderful thing. It's incredible. Money's coming in. It starts hockey sticking. Exciting. But this is the reality. This is what happens to an MSP that's not really marketing much. We're growing primarily off of three things. Referrals from existing clients. That is fueling a lot of our growth. But there's a couple of other aspects that aren't talked about as much that also fuel that growth, and that's MRR from existing clients. So you might get a new service, you might get a new product, and you get new MRR out of your existing clients. That helps fuel this growth. You also have existing projects, which also helps fuel this growth. So this is what a lot of MSPs look like when they're growing off of referrals, as almost all of this room started at. We almost all started growing from referrals alone. This is what it looks like. Now, I know a lot of people talk shit on referrals. They're like, oh, you can't grow your business from referrals alone. That's total crap. You can totally grow your business off of referrals alone. And in fact, you're going to get a big business eventually. I know a lot of rich business owners that have grown off of nothing but referrals. So it's just a fallacy that you can't grow off of referrals alone. It's more about the time horizon. Are we OK with having a long time horizon, or do we want to find success faster? That's the discussion. It's not that you can't grow your business off of referrals alone. So hey, you know what? Nice, steady, easy growth. Clients love you. You'll get rich eventually, but it's not going to happen that fast. Then we get the next scenario. And this scenario, most of us have fallen into, have already fallen into and gotten out of. And that's what this one looks like. So we're going off of referrals, going off of referrals. We start marketing. We're going to a conference. We're learning. We're doing -- we're starting to really implement what we've learned. It's going great. Oh, my gosh, we're skyrocketing up. And then all of a sudden, when we hit that 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3 million dollar range, there's this plateau that occurs. We felt it at the MSP. I'm currently feeling it at MSP Camp. This plateau occurs. Who here has felt that plateau, or feels like they might be feeling it right now? Good. Good. So you understand what I'm talking about. And this occurs by five primary aspects. One less time with each account. Because our time is spread between more clients. Feeling that MSP camp right now. When I get back, I'm going to plan on fixing that. Onboarding is a resource hog unless segmented properly. So you get a new client. Super excited. That's awesome. If things aren't, you know, properly segmented, that's going to take a lot of time for your current clients, which further strains the relationship. Your lower priority project -- all you all about the field is. The lower priority projects within your client base are not properly prioritized, which creates client frustration and team stress. Number four, in this, when I heard this, I knew, because we were feeling this pressure, we started hearing this a lot, especially as you start growing faster and faster. I feel like you guys are getting too big. Don't forget about us as you guys grow. Who here has heard either of those statements? That's right. That means you're all on a really great growth trajectory, and I hope this presentation helps us to counteract that a little bit. And the last one is operational challenges of growing at a higher rate than previously. So this is what it looks like. This is what it feels like. Most businesses go through this. It's kind of like the swamp. So my entire presentation today, the entire goal is, like, let's never get in the swamp, and if we're in the swamp, let's get out of it, because I'm going to show you what that looks like right here. When we can align our marketing with everything that was growing us before we started marketing, which was referrals from current clients, existing projects from current clients, and existing MRR that we can cross out into our clients, this is literally what it will look like. That's why this title is not clickbait. Because if done properly, if we create a client experience, it will literally 2X based on, so I should probably explain this a little bit. So now we have marketing going. That's working. That's increasing our revenue, which is great, but we never get that downward pressure because we're about to do everything we're talking about in this presentation, which still increases referrals as we're getting a growing client base, so we should be getting more referrals. We are properly cross-selling MRR to our existing clients, and we're properly selling projects. So that's how we get this exponential growth. So now let's compare the three. So hey, again, we can make money off referrals alone. This is that downward pressure. We're still in a better spot. We're still in a better spot than if we were just growing off referrals. So even with the client churn, even with that downward pressure, we're still in a better spot, but what we want is this exponential curve, which occurs with a great client experience. Everybody with me? All right, perfect. Thank you. All right, so I won't keep you waiting. What is the point? Revenue, MRR plus projects, and new referrals from current clients is just as meaningful for growth, but the first to be neglected when the flywheel starts, and you're not guilty. It just happens. We need to counteract that when we align new clients for marketing, new clients from referrals and a strong account management process, that's when exponential growth occurs. All right, let's get into it. So the positive outcomes and externalities of doing this correctly, we get more referrals from a growing list of clients. No, you have not tapped out your clients over referrals. You have not. That is a fallacy. More high-margin revenue that clients are happy to pay you, a more efficient business because your clients are in the best posture possible, allow you to raise prices 10%, whenever you feel with zero client churn, I'm literally going to show you how we added $8,000 in monthly reoccurring revenue in 10 minutes. Like I'm going to show you exactly how we did it. Not like vendor, not like marketing. This is what we did at an MSP to add $8,000 in 10 minutes. I'm going to give it to you. Does that sound good? All right, cool. Anne, and this was my favorite part. This is one of my favorite parts about having a really strong account management process. Provide a growth energy take on a client, whether through marketing referrals or acquisition, and no, you'll be able to increase revenue on that client 20% to 30% within 12 months. Okay, again, not a trick question. Let's all just participate. Do you have clients right now that need projects completed? Okay, I'm going to just wait. Do you have clients right now that need projects completed? So all of us have our Windows 10 end of life projects done? All right, perfect. Thank you all for who's participating. Appreciate it. Would these projects help the client lower the tech burden, frustration on techs, and make you more money? Okay, great. I think we all have similar answers to this last question. You don't have to answer it. I just want you to answer it in your head. What's stopping us? I don't want you to just sit on that. We know clients that need projects. We know it's going to put them in a better spot. It's going to lower the burden, and it's going to hopefully make us money. So what's stopping us? Before we can get any further, the root cause of a lot of a horrible account management is one thing and one thing alone, not charging properly. I'm going to spend some time on this slide because I got a lot of really specific examples. I'm going to sum it up with one sentence, and then we're going to get into it. You do not want to be in a spot where more work seems like a bad thing. I know new MRR is the most exciting thing, but we do not want to be in a spot where more work seems like a bad thing. Does anyone feel like they have a -- it hurts them when a project gets approved for like an existing client? Does anyone not love that? Okay. Thank you. Some head nods, right? It's true. Again, primary reason is because we're not pricing properly. We did not price properly when I was at the MSP at first. We really didn't. But by the end of it, basically how we priced, and this is kind of how I'd recommend it, but you can do more if you want. If we were selling hardware, it would be the cost of the hardware plus a 15 to 40% gross margin markup, and then an install fee. So similar to how a retail shop does it, but you also get an install fee, right? If you're selling hardware like that, then selling hardware makes a little bit more sense because you're actually going to make a little bit more money. In addition to the hardware sales, any infrastructure stuff that our client needed, and I really pushed for this, is we would sell it as hardware as a service. So if it was like a firewall, an access point, or a switch, we would take the cost of that, put it over 10 months, and that was basically the price of the service. So we didn't call it hardware as a service. We call it like managed Wi-Fi, managed switches, managed firewalls, right? So yeah, it hurt for like 10 months because we had to kind of eat the cost of that infrastructure project, but man, getting MRR every single month from that existing client that needed a new switch, a new access point, after 10 months, it's like all margin. It is like all margin, right? And they were already used to getting quotes from like spectrum and frontier or whatever for these managed Wi-Fi, that was like $45 or something crazy, so they're already used to it. So when we came in and are starting to quote it in the same way, it was like totally fine. And would you all rather have a $250 access point sale or $25 a month for 10 years, right? You don't even have to answer the question. It's obvious which one is the winner. And one of them is going to make a lot more money, and this stuff compounds over years and years, and again, that's part of that exponential growth. So when we first started doing computer installs, we were literally charging $110, right? So we had like a minor markup, and then we were charging $110. Do you guys think we were stressed? Were we stressed selling $110 computers like, or not $110 computers, but only charging $110 for install? Absolutely. So then what did we do? We moved up to 175, no pushback. We moved up to 225, no pushback. We moved up to 275, no pushback, and clients were ordering more computers from us. Why? They literally received a better experience because we were charging more. Because now that we were charging $275 plus per install, not even on the markup, we could finally hire a full-time provisioner. So when someone ordered a computer from us, they got that computer within 24, 48 hours, and in Amazon world, that's what they want to experience. They don't want the cheaper thing if it takes a week to get the thing. We're all business owners, or not all of us, many of us are business owners. We're willing to pay the premium if we get the thing faster. And so that is why charging properly incentivizes both parties. Clients are happy to pay it, and it gets them the thing quicker. Even after that lesson, even after knowing it, and feeling it, and going through it at all tech services, I went to the same thing at MSP camp recently. So we decided to roll out a website service, and I'm like, you know what, I hate these big, giant fees, like I want to enter the market with a low monthly thing, so we're going to offer it for $497, we're going to include the membership and everything else. And so what happened? We made a ton of sales, got a giant wait list, my team stressed out. The clients, longer time horizon. They're not getting their websites as fast as they expected, they're like, well, they're only paying $500 a month, you know, it might take a little bit longer, but they're not paying that much. Again, they don't care. They rather pay the premium, get it faster. So what did I do? I increased the price to $10,000, just as like a setup, and it's like $5,000 to start, and then $5,000 when we complete, and then the monthly of $250 a month. What did that do? It slowed down my onboardings. We can now put more love and attention into each website, and the clients are much happier. And for those that didn't want to pay the $10,000, there's so many other options. Probably MSB sites, there's so many low cost options. Yeah, there you go, there you go Nate, MSB sites, right? So there's so many other options that I don't have to feel bad that I'm pricing a certain thing. Like, I need to make money, and I need my people happy, and I need my clients happy. So that's why before we can do anything else with this presentation, we need to understand that oftentimes the root causes, we're just not charging enough. Can everyone agree with that? Are we going to fix our price when we get back? All right, cool. All right, last little example on this. And this might strike home too. So one of our monthly recurring revenue upsells was like an email threat protection, right? So like, advanced email protection. We were only charging a few dollars a mailbox for this, right? Which is fine. We're like, well, we want all of our clients to have security, and we'll just upsell it. The problem is, when we implemented it for a client, by the time we implemented it and supported it and everything else, it was like 10 hours of network engineer time. And at a few dollars a mailbox, it would take us literally a decade to get that money back. And it took us longer to install the thing because we weren't charging properly. Does anyone else, like, you don't have to raise your hand, but like, you probably have a feeling like that. You probably had a story like that. You're like, oh, man, I've done that too. That was silly. Before I left All-Tech Services, we were absolutely pricing things properly. We were finally making money. And that exponential curve I'm talking about today, we were on it, and it was fantastic. I remember we quoted a project for a client, and again, the client was happy to pay it, and I'm leaving. Nice, thanks. And I'm leaving, and I just, I turned to the network engineer that was with me, and I was like, hey, because I was just curious, because he's been with us since I was not charging properly. I was like, how much do you think we quoted that project? And he's like, ah, man, he's like, this is going to be a lot of work, so this is going to be tough. He's like, five grand, $42,000, $42,000, to put in perspective. All right, cool, let's move on. So now we have properly priced things. We are learning marketing. We are growing our business. So this comes one of the most important aspects of the client experience, the client relationship is the onboarding. That is, by far, the most important aspect of any client relationship is the onboarding. That moment of impact, right? I am not going to sit here and go over the perfect onboarding with you. I feel like that would be a bit of a waste of time, because Nigel is an absolute legend, and he's going to provide it for you. So onboarding is much more important than it's given credit for. Fortunately, I have a cheat code for you. Nigel from the tech tribe, you can grab this now, don't worry, you are all going to be sent it in all the goodies that we have been announcing. It's going to be in there. But if you want to grab it now, you can. It is the perfect onboarding. It's the perfect client onboarding. We used it at RMSP to make sure we could get a really good onboarding. So instead of going through step by step how to do a great onboarding, use the cheat code and let me just show you the most important aspects of onboarding that you absolutely cannot skip. Sound good? Y'all with me? All right. We excited? All right. Now, everyone stand up. No, I'm just kidding. All right. So what are the key pieces that we did in all tech services that from my perspective were the differentiators? First thing, this is also good for the sales process. Mention that you will handle coordinating with the losing IT team. You have to do this. It is already hard enough to get someone to move to you. I remember mentioning that in the sales process, and I could literally feel the relief. Like, hey, don't worry. I'm not going to ask you a bunch of technical jargon. I'm not going to send you a paper to send the current IT company. Give me their contact information and make sure I'm authorized to reach out to them. I'll get everything I need. That's step one. That was in the sales process a game changer. Number two, hold an all-hand -- sorry -- a client all-hands meeting. Who here does a client all-hands meeting when they're onboarding a new client? Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. This should be a non-negotiable. This is one of those things that does not take a lot of time. It's just being intentional. How do they contact you? What is the security awareness training? Why do we do it? How do we do it? What does your quarantine report look like if you have that? Who is their dedicated account manager? What hours can they reach you normally? Is there an after-hours process? Go over all of this with a client's all-hands meeting, set the stage, and have a leave behind for managers and if approved, everyone. Next up, this is a huge differentiator that nobody does. Nobody does this. I mean, maybe a few people do, but pretty much nobody does this. Bring contact cards. Little physical cards. I actually stole my contact cards from Robert from SimTech, who's actually here today, like eight years ago. I was like, these are the greatest things ever. Bring contact cards, stickers with a contact and logo, and mouse pads. Yes, mouse pads. Everyone hates some mouse pads? Literally, I see it all the time in forums. They're like, mouse pads are so cliche. It's like, have you ever actually seen an MSP give out a mouse pad, though? There you go. I know. I got one of yours, Lyle. Well, it's freaking sweet. I know that. So make their desk onboarding a little billboard. Do it. And this is one of those things you ask for forgiveness, not for permission. Can we bring in contact stickers for the computers and mouse pads and stuff? Just do it. Just do it during onboarding. And if they're like, oh, maybe not, then it's like, okay, we don't have to do it for everybody. This is the other thing. Man, this took us way too long, but we figured it out and made things way easier. Have a checklist, unfortunately Nigel just gave you one, but have a checklist. If you don't have a project within your PSA that automatically assigns the items to the salesperson, the account manager, and the onboarding team, you need to fix that. That should be the first thing you do. I'm sure most of you do, but in case you don't, I need to say that. All right, brief the entire internal team. If you get nothing else from this presentation, you do not want to drop the ball on onboarding. It is the most important aspect of the client experience. You guys all know that vendor, that dropped the ball during onboarding, and then you kind of like never trust them again, right? Does everybody feel that? And then you have the opposite, where you've had that vendor that absolutely killed it and made you feel like you were like the most important company in the world. They've dropped the ball many of times and you still love them, right? Like, I don't even need to see hands for that. We all have those experiences. So that's why onboarding is so important. But it's not just the onboarding. It's not just the onboarding. It's the first 90 days. It's the first impression. So you have the onboarding. You've got to nail it there. But the next key detail is that first meeting. This is the one that sets the stage. Are you going to be IT support? Are you going to be an IT company that supports their computers and servers and stuff? Or are you going to be IT leadership? That is the key detail that I want us to understand out of this whole thing. We have pledges at MSP Camp. There's 12 of them. It's like AI. It's like marketing AI. So we have 12 pledges at MSP Camp. And number 12 is I will not sell help desk, but instead use the prospects or clients challenges and pain points to vision build a better life for themselves and their organization. That's literally our pledge. There's a lot of business owners in the room. Every single one of you have had a vision. You've all had a dream. You fought tooth and nail for that dream and it's allowed you to be here right now. That's why vision is so important. When I have a place I'm trying to go and I'm sure you're the same exact way, and I believe you can help me get there, price is not an objection. Even as a small business, we're under $2 million a year, I will drop $50,000 without batting an eye if it's going to get me a few steps closer to the vision I have in my mind. That's why this point is so important. We are not IT support. We are understanding what the owner's vision is and we're going to show them how technology can help them get there. That is the point of this first meeting. We're not going to do any help desk tickets during this first meeting. We want to understand where you're going and we're going to use all of our tools at our disposal. We've got network engineers, we've got help desk techs, we've got the latest and greatest in tools, we've got all the certifications. If we can point all of that at your business's vision and where you're going, price is not an objection. Can everyone agree with that? Who's got a vision here? Who's got a big vision here? Who's willing to invest for that big vision? All right, if anybody put their hand down, that means you're not going to achieve the vision. Right? If you're not willing to invest in the vision, then just drop the vision. Fortunately, I think everybody kept their hand up. All right, so I got another gift from Nigel. Can we give it up for Nigel then? Oh, my God. He's making my presentation so easy. I just keep giving Nigel shit and it's like, this is amazing. So another gift from Nigel. So the first thing he's given us is the perfect onboarding checklist. We literally adapted it for all tech and it helped our onboardings. Next up is his TBR agenda, his technology business reviews because he's right, who the hell here is going to do it quarterly, almost none of us? So you can grab that. It's also going to be given to you. Don't worry. And it's the agenda or at least an agenda template you can adapt for yourself on how these meetings should go. Key points. Again, I'm not going to show you how to do a perfect technology business review. I'm just going to show you the key points that move the needle the most for us. First one, all decision makers need to be present. Then we are setting the stage in this first 30 days, in this first meeting. We are not IT support. If it's like, oh, the office manager is going to handle it, it's like, is the office manager setting the strategic goals for the next year? No, then I need to have that human in the room, right? Two, we're not just reading a list. Yeah, we're going to bring a list, a lot of really important stuff to go over, but we're not just going to sit there and read it to them. Number three, this part is pretty important, so don't miss it. This part is pretty important. We want to point out the things other IT providers, the other IT provider missed, but not in a derogatory way. We want the client to understand that they made the right decision. So we are going to point out the bad. Is there a reason you had so many admin accounts that had full access to your Office 365 accounts? Many of these people haven't logged in in six months. We're going to be cleaning up these old accounts that have massive security risks. Any objection to that? Obviously, they're not going to have any objections, that's what they hired you for. But pointing it out makes them realize, oh, crap, I'm really glad I did end up firing that IT company because there's a ton of stuff here that they've missed, and we get to point it out that, hey, you've made the right decision, and this is how we do that. Can everyone agree that that positioning would probably work in these meetings? It worked great. I love seeing the relief on the business owner's face when he's like, okay, this was a good decision. These computer names seem confusing, let's name them something that makes more sense for both of us. All right, next up, have a technical and sales liaison if you can. If you're a big enough company, you need to have both a technical person and a sales person or account manager in these meetings. You want to have both, and I'll tell you why in a second. And get the owner talking, again. If you all follow me on Instagram or if you live in a podcast or if you know me, like, I'm obsessed with my kids. I love my kids, I talk about them a lot, like, they're my pride and joy, like, wow. I'm literally like tearing up, it's been four days since I've seen them. It's like that, right? And that is how we are as owners with our businesses. It is, like, our businesses are our babies. That is literally how it is, but oftentimes we'll meet with companies and they want to talk about all their shit, they don't want to talk about our babies, right? So we need to go into that meeting with the prime objective of listening to the leadership of that company to get them to talk about their babies. Tell me all about your babies. Tell me about your kids. What were your kids like a few years ago? What are your kids going to be like a few years from now? Get them talking about their kids, because if anybody's read how to win friends and influence people, if you get someone talking about themselves and things that they love, what happens? Does that rapport? Exactly. They like you. If you're sitting there talking about yourself, you're actually, it's going to be harder for someone to like you. So that's why we got to get the business owner talking about themselves and where they're going. The other thing, you don't have to do this, but it worked really well for me. If I've got a big account, like we had one that was like 35K a month, the key person on that account is getting myself a number. I didn't do this to a lot of clients, but the bigger clients, they get myself a number. When I was leaving all tech, I made sure the current account manager gave them their cell phone number, because it's like, yeah, we don't want to get texts during the weekends and all that stuff. I get that balance and all that, but if it's worth 10, 20, 30 thousand dollars a month, I'm not willing to lose that account because they can't get into the computer. Then last up, listen again, get them talking about their baby. What happens directly after that meeting? One, we've created a roadmap in the meeting that the client's excited about. As soon as we get back in, all of the tickets from the meeting go in and the account manager sends all of the quotes out, either same day or next day, because there's going to be a shitload of quotes that come out of this. If you didn't get a lot of quotes that came out of this, you're kind of doing it wrong. It's not because you treated this like a sales meeting. It's because you've got the owner talking about where he wants to go. You got him really excited about the technology that can help him get there or her. You have a ton of projects that come out of this. Because, going back to previous, you're pricing it properly, you're not going to delay on that quote because you're actually going to make money and you have the staff to be able to implement right away. That's why price is a root problem. All right, cool. You've got to strike while it's hot. I see a lot of people that have these meetings, they're like, "I'm going to get to the quotes. I'm going to get to the tickets and the week goes by," then they send the quotes out and it's just not hot anymore. They may not move as fast. They're not going to be in the place you want them. So congrats. If you get nothing else from this presentation today, it's understanding pricing, it's understanding onboarding, and the first 30 days are the most important aspect of the client experience, bar none. Bar none. So if we get that right, our clients are going to love us for a long time even when we screw up. Because guess what? Hey, is anyone in here not screwed up? Okay, cool. Does anyone here think they're never going to screw up again? Okay, cool, all right? So let's make sure that they love us because it allows us a ton of grace when we screw up. I have a ... Me and Steven always joke about this one. We have a vendor who, like, they were so good during onboarding, they met with us like every week for like three months before we officially went live, it was the craziest onboarding experience I ever experienced in my life, and then we went live and there was a ton of problems, and then there was a continuing to be a ton of problems, but we love them. We love them because when there's an issue, I know I can reach out to my account manager, they're on it immediately and they get it fixed. Because we had such an epic onboarding experience and such a good start, we kind of fell in love with them and they've just continued to stay with them. So by all accounts, they're horrible, but we still pay them a lot of money. All right, moving on, I'm going to get you guys ... I'm going to get maybe a couple people to interact here if we can get the catch box going here in a second. Are you all with me? All right, you learning something? All right, thank you. Let me get a applaud then. Come on. Let's get the energy out. All right. So, there's a couple myths. The myths that clients don't care. The myths that clients don't care. I hear it all the time, clients don't care about reporting. No, you just don't want to do reporting. That's it. I was in sales meetings at Altec constantly, one of the almost, at least in the last few years, I was asked constantly, "What kind of reports do you guys provide?" Even if they never look at it, it's value because they know something's happening. If the reporting is, "Look how many help desk tickets we provide," yeah, no, they don't really care about that. So I'm currently with Altec. They're my MSP. So it's a place I worked for a long time, grew it, and then they incubated, helped me incubate MSP camp. I got my own business now, Altec's now a client. When I get my hardware report every month, first thing in the month, and it shows me what computers I currently have, the age of the computers, green, yellow, red, who's named on it, which ones I'm paying for, I love getting that. I'm not technical, but I like getting that. I like seeing my hardware report, how many switches do I have, what the access points are. I just get it every month, and then that email is kind of selling me, "Hey, the ones that are over five years, you need to prepare to replace," it's great. When I get an email with a ticket that was submitted, and JR and JR, they're network security guys saying, "Hey, you have three people that need to update these apps," and then restart, or something that was detected, and they're checking in and see if this was me or not. That shit is impressive. I still don't know how they do it, even though I'm selling it. That's impressive. I'm the business owner. I'm like, "Okay, I have an IT team that's just checking to make sure all my software is updated." They're checking to see if somebody's logged in, and they're reaching out to me proactively to say, "Hey, was this you guys or not?" That's impressive. That's truly proactive. We think the client doesn't care, but that actually moves the needle quite a bit. Does anyone hear, is the catch box on by chance? Testing, testing. Oh, wait. Testing. All right, cool. The catch box on. I just want to hear at least one example, because proactive is such a buzzword. I have some of my own examples, but who here has an example of something they say that they do that's actually very proactive for their client? All right, way in the back, Ricardo. Oh, gosh. I'm just going to throw it to you guys. All right, I'll get it to Ricardo. Okay, never mind. Can you throw it? Can you chuck it back there to him? Just throw it. Spirit. Yeah, we're good. Yes! This is chaos. Good, good, good. Testing. All right, what's something you do that is truly proactive for your clients? Around this time of every year, we get the multiple audits done so that we can get the budgets in front of them so they know what they're going to spend for the following year. I almost said the F word and I can't. Beautiful. Beautiful. How many of us right now are doing that for our clients? Exactly. That's what I'm talking about. Creating a client experience is not spending a million dollars in three weeks to do something. It's about being intentional. That was extremely intentional, Ricardo. Perfect example. Does anyone else have anything that they can say is truly proactive? All right, we got another one. Is that Diana? All right. Sweet. Good catch. All right. Yeah, I'm Diana with BlueCast.it. If we have customers that have a big event, like association, maybe they have a big event they put on a couple of times a year. We have recurring tickets that will pop up a couple of weeks beforehand. We reach out. We say, "Hey, you have that event coming up? Is there anything we can help you prep for it? Do you need to just get those printers in order? Do you need these computers prepped?" Reach out. Even if most of the time they say, "We're good, no, we're all set," we look so good. That's awesome. Exactly. They know if they hire someone else, they're not going to do that thing. It makes them so sticky to you. Who else has got something proactive? David. Man, I'm so glad I know everyone's name so far that's needed this. This is good. David. A lot of times we end up on the client's promotional marketing. When I see that they have a special promotion or like a crazy deal, they're expecting a lot of calls. Since we managed their VoIP, we reach out to them and see if they want to set up a special call plan to handle those promotions before the heavy call come in for that promotion. They appreciate that. Why do they appreciate that? Hey, your child has her recital coming up. Do you want us to get something ready for her? That's literally what it feels like as a business owner and a manager, like, "Hey, we care about your kids. We're being proactive about your kids." I love that. Anyone else got anything proactive before we move on? I really want to hear one more. Does anyone got anything? There we go. Dan. Man, four for four. I'm on fire. Oh, that was a good throw. Uh-oh. Oh, did we break it? No. It works for everyone but me. There we go. So, quarterly, we go through their Microsoft users and then we clean up the list and make sure we can purge out any users that we're charging them for as well as reduce their Microsoft spend. We coordinate with their HR to make sure that we're not overcharging them. That's beautiful. What does that take? That does not take a ton of time. It's just being intentional. Creating a client experience is not -- we have to hire a bunch of people. It's not, we've got to spend a bunch of money. It's how do we be a little more intentional to make sure the client knows that we care? Because we do. It's worth a lot of money. But, again, they're staying whether we do this stuff or not. We get MRR lazy. But we're not going to have that exponential growth if we aren't doing things like this. Does that make sense? Thank you all so much for sharing that. Let's keep going. Was that helpful? Did you hear these proactive examples? Can I hear a yes? All right. No one said no. So, that's good. All right. Cool. I remember we would leave those meetings. Me and the network engineer. I was a salesperson. He was a network engineer on it. We'd get in the car every single time. We said, "That's gold, Jerry. Gold." I didn't get the reference. I just thought we were calling each other Jerry. It turns out it's a Seinfeld thing. Did anyone know that? Okay. So, he all knew that. He kept saying, "I agree, man. That's gold, Jerry." And then I kept saying, "It's gold, Johnny." And he's like, "No, it's Jerry." That's actually a real story. Tim Higgins. He's awesome. All right. Cool. The other thing I would say is over-communicate. Over-communicate with your clients. Man, this is probably going to strike a chord right here. So many times, the team was doing all this incredible work on a big issue for a client. That was pissed. But I'm like, "Man, they're working really hard. This is amazing. We're working on the problem." And then I found out nobody's even talked to the client. We're doing all this incredible work. No one's even told the client that we're doing all this great work. I'm like, "What is going on?" If we just told the client we're currently working on it, and this is exactly what's happening, and we'll update you in 10 minutes, the client's going to be cool. Over-communicate. How many of us had a key employee leave a client and end up referring us into the company they went to? All right. I need to say it again, because I don't think that didn't come out really good. How many of us had a key employee at one of our clients leave that client, go to another company, and then refer us into that company? Yeah, exactly. I figured. Almost all of us, right? That is a behavior that we can promote. It's a behavior we can promote by doing these types of things. Some of those things include sharing what your company is doing. Like they care. We should have a newsletter to our clients showing what certifications we got, what cool things are happening, communicate with newsletters, over-communicate to our clients. We should have webinar trainings for our clients. Who here does educational webinar trainings for your clients? Okay. I know you do, Sean. You do some sick ones. Sean helped us add three webinars to MSB camp because he keeps having these awesome ideas. I'm like, "We'll totally build that for you." Sean's the man. These are gold. Even if you don't get a single client from these webinars, and the whole point is just to train your clients on Microsoft Teams, how to use the new outlook, QuickBooks, whatever it is around technology, we can say, "Hey, you clients are worth $100,000 a monthly reoccurring revenue a month. I am willing to spend $1,000 a month to make sure you get an awesome webinar." Is that crazy to say? I remember leaving a client, or a client was leaving, excuse me, an employee was leaving one of the clients, and he asked me to get his personal email address on our newsletters because he liked those trainings so much. We can promote the behavior of getting these types of referrals. As we get to the end of this, I think one thing we need to understand is the main reason we don't raise prices is insecurity. I've been guilty of this for years. The insecurity often comes from, "Are we delivering enough value?" I think if you didn't feel that, we would all just raise our prices more. We have that little bit of insecurity saying, "If I raise my price, are they going to leave because I'm not sure if I'm providing enough value?" But if we nail the onboarding, if we nail the first 90 days, if we price properly to make sure we can constantly have these projects that need done get done, we are actually proactive. We actually educate our clients, and we create a client experience to make sure they know we care about their child, then that insecurity goes away. Does anyone want to see how I added $8,000 in monthly recurrent revenue in 10 minutes? Before I do that, I'm going to bring up another sponsor, and I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. I was working with a lawn care company, they were my lawn care company for about forever, and they charge me $220 a month, every month. That's a lot of money for a lawn care company, but I love my lawn. It looks beautiful. I love pulling in my driveway and seeing beautiful green, everything is trimmed. Hey, it's all good. I love them. Well, one day, because after COVID, of course, I got a letter in the mail. It was a long letter. I was like, "Oh, no, dear client, we've loved working for all these years. We have never raised our prices one time. We do not take this decision lightly," and it was like, "Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam." It was like a bunch of things. They're like, "Gas has gone up this much. We've had to hire X number of people. Your grass takes this new cool thing that we've done." It was like all this stuff. I was like, "Man, they're about to double my price." They really were hitting me hard, and they're like, "We are so sorry. We've thought about this crazy, but we're going to have to increase your price on this date, and it's going from $2.20 to $2.55." I was like, "This was masterfully done. What a great way to anchor me." They could have just called me. They could have texted me. I'm like, "Hey, you're $2.55." I'll update my thing, but then I might have been a little annoyed by it. I was like, "Man, you kind of cared a little more." In this situation, they were like, "We are so ..." There's like tear drops on the piece of paper. They cared so much. It was going up like $30, so I was like, "You updated it," and I was like, "This is so well done." So, all I did is I copied what they did, and I'm sorry for all the texts in the slide. I usually don't do this, but I'm literally just going to read you all this email, and y'all will get the slide. You'll get the presentation if you want to use something similar and go for it. Hi. To continue to improve our customer's technology and grow our team here at MSP, we will be increasing our per-device, per-user pricing for all customers. We do not take this decision lightly, and we want to outline exactly why this update is needing. MSP has made major positive changes without ever increasing, blah, blah, blah. Number one, creating a dedicated cybersecurity vision headed by Phil in the Blank, having a full-time in-house senior network engineer doing all this cool shit, purchasing new ongoing tools, blah, blah, blah. We significantly improve response and resolution time by increasing it, blah, blah, blah. We're highly advanced penetration testing on our own systems by third-party ethical hackers to ensure our network is unhackable. All these changes have provided us, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it's like this long email, I didn't even have to call a single client, because I knew we were nailing the client experience, we were already on the exponential growth, I could send this email to the clients that needed it, no problem. And again, we did that whole thing, and what were we doing? We're increasing like the per-device by like $5, per server by like $10, but when you take all those endpoints and you take all those servers and you do it per client, you make $8,000 in 10 minutes and not a single client even cares, if you get all that other stuff right. And that's what we did, we appreciate you being a long-time client, we've done our best to push off such a painful thing, I hope you understand the necessity, I'm so sorry to make this change, I'm happy to answer any questions at all. We didn't even get much of an email back, we didn't get an email back, it was fine. The next month, we were $8,000 a month, more money coming in. Who else is going to use that email now? Anybody? All right, cool, awesome. You've got to get the other stuff right, because if you don't get the other stuff right and you do that, people might leave. All right, last slide, I'm a little over, so I just want to last two things really quickly. Couple objections, but I'm a one-man show, I'm a one-woman show. Then yeah, you're going to be at a significant disadvantage. That's just the reality of it. You're going to be at a big disadvantage if you have one person. We have to grow to be able to do things like this as much as possible. You can stay small if that's what you desire, but if you're in this room, I doubt that's what you desire. So yeah, we need to grow, we need to get out of that. If I tried to grow my business and I'm the only one, I would not be on this stage today. You have to have people to help you achieve your vision. Number two, I have a salesperson, I also can't hire an account manager. So can I just use my salesperson as my account manager too? Honestly, yes, you can totally do that, that's totally fine. That was my role. I was both the salesperson and the account manager, that's totally fine. But you'll just grow faster if you bite the bullet and hire a full-time account manager to implement this whole thing for you. If you're big enough and you can stomach kind of moving that salary and that expense, it should, if you do this correctly, pay for itself extremely quickly. All right, number three objective, I don't understand you. Who here does not understand me? Anybody? Okay, good, no hands. Thank god. I almost set myself for a trap. I don't understand you. You think we should hire a marketing person, a salesperson, and an account management person? Kind of. So if you're smaller than the owner should be the salesperson, you can get away with a part-time marketing person and a full-time account management person. That's kind of like the perfect mix. And this seems like a lot of work. It is, but if you systemize it into a checklist, it makes it way easier, and it's more about being intentional than it is about a ton of work. All right, last up, let's put a bow on this whole thing. Account management is not a cost center. If done correctly, account management and creating a client experience is a profit center. Not only will it make your clients happier, not only will it make your employees happier, it will make you a ton more money. Does that sound worth it? All right, thank you all so much. I hope you enjoyed it. [MUSIC]