Join the conversation with the ever-insightful Ryan Grimes, founder of My IT Indy, as we revist his IT business one year after our last podcast with him!
With a narrative that's bound to resonate with entrepreneurs and tech aficionados alike, Ryan shares the tactical sales and marketing maneuvers that accelerated My IT Indy from its modest 2004 roots to today's towering achievements.
He generously spills the secrets behind his consistent marketing and customer success stories, shedding light on how these elements fueled a year of unprecedented growth. If you're angling for a no-holds-barred exploration of business growth, peppered with personal trials and triumphs, you're in the right place.
Switching tracks, we delve into the art of podcasting as a masterstroke for networking and expanding businesses. Reflecting on my own podcasting escapades, Ryan and I dissect the ingenious method of inviting potential clients to guest on podcasts, a move that sparks deeper relationships and mutual promotional wins.
It's a conversation that will make you reconsider your approach to content creation, business development, and digital marketing. Sharpen your pencils and take notes; these insights are akin to striking gold in the quest for a thriving, innovative business model.
Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?
Carrie helps businesses improve their sales and marketing teams.
Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.
Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com
Book time with them here: https://randr.consulting/connect
Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.
Join the conversation with the ever-insightful Ryan Grimes, founder of My IT Indy, as we revist his IT business one year after our last podcast with him!
With a narrative that's bound to resonate with entrepreneurs and tech aficionados alike, Ryan shares the tactical sales and marketing maneuvers that accelerated My IT Indy from its modest 2004 roots to today's towering achievements.
He generously spills the secrets behind his consistent marketing and customer success stories, shedding light on how these elements fueled a year of unprecedented growth. If you're angling for a no-holds-barred exploration of business growth, peppered with personal trials and triumphs, you're in the right place.
Switching tracks, we delve into the art of podcasting as a masterstroke for networking and expanding businesses. Reflecting on my own podcasting escapades, Ryan and I dissect the ingenious method of inviting potential clients to guest on podcasts, a move that sparks deeper relationships and mutual promotional wins.
It's a conversation that will make you reconsider your approach to content creation, business development, and digital marketing. Sharpen your pencils and take notes; these insights are akin to striking gold in the quest for a thriving, innovative business model.
Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?
Carrie helps businesses improve their sales and marketing teams.
Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.
Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com
Book time with them here: https://randr.consulting/connect
Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.
[00:00:00] Carrie Richardson: My name is Carrie Richardson and with me today is Ryan Grimes
[00:00:03] Ryan Grimes: thank you for having me carrie. It's always a pleasure
[00:00:06] Carrie Richardson: I love catching up when we get the opportunity. Ryan, tell us about how you started and where you are today.
[00:00:11] Ryan Grimes: We started MyITIndy back in 2004 when we got the great idea to move to a completely different state. Neither one of us had jobs cause I was starting a company and you could get a mortgage with no job. And we survived through that chaos and have been growing steadily. My IT Indy has been around since 2004 and in the last three or four years, we decided to become serious about growing it because at some point, I'm not going to want to do this anymore and I want to grow something special to a lot of people.
[00:00:43] Ryan Grimes: So we decided to invest in marketing, sales processes, and very quickly realized that it's hard. And it takes a lot of work and I'm not very good at some of it. So we have been working through those issues in the last year and it's made a [00:01:00] gigantic difference in our company.
[00:01:01] Ryan Grimes: 2023 was our best year ever. And 2024 is shaping to beat that.
[00:01:07] Carrie Richardson: Fantastic. I'm glad to hear that. If you're interested in sales process. Marketing and strategy. That's pretty much everything we've got on offer today.
[00:01:17] Ryan Grimes: . The great thing is we started off with
[00:01:20] Ryan Grimes: marketing. We do outsource our marketing and it's not done for you. It's done with you. So we've been working with them for about three years and marketing is hard. Because like I tell people, we're not selling pizza and ice cream.
[00:01:33] Ryan Grimes: We're selling stuff that people need, but they don't necessarily want at times. So we have to get beyond that hesitation and show them how we can actually make them better. And that's part of the, marketing process. We've done a lot of work.
[00:01:50] Ryan Grimes: We've done YouTube videos. We've done a list building. I'm all over LinkedIn. Cause that's, what the, that's the social media platform where the adults hang out, I [00:02:00] say. And we've just been. Consistent. Am I consistent every single day? No. Am I consistent over a month? Yes.
[00:02:07] Ryan Grimes: So we've done all these things that we can then reference back to when we're talking to prospects Oh, Hey, do you know, I did a hundred YouTube videos on business technology. Are they going to do they compete with star Wars or like Jurassic park for special or for being amazing?
[00:02:23] Ryan Grimes: No, but they're, videos that talk about what's important in business technology. And it allows us to really showcase how we help clients and what we've done for them. Like we've got customer success stories. Those are huge. Oh, Hey you're, a law firm. Great. Here's three law firms.
[00:02:41] Ryan Grimes: We've helped out with their technology. I'm like, Oh, okay, we know them. Like we really want what they got. And it just, it's just the snowball going downhill, it just. Builds and builds and builds and builds.
[00:02:51] Ryan Grimes: So we worked at our marketing and then we realized our sales process was complete garbage too, because Oh, Hey, what do we do next?
[00:02:58] Ryan Grimes: Oh God, we got to build this. So then [00:03:00] we worked on our sales process to get that fixed up and to get that into an actual process. So that was a thing we had to do.
[00:03:11] Carrie Richardson: So tell me, are you measuring any KPIs when it comes to the marketing process that you're following now? You said you'd created a hundred YouTube videos.
[00:03:20] Carrie Richardson: What is your barometer for, Hey, this is helping our marketing. How do you know whether or not YouTube videos are helping your business?
[00:03:27] Ryan Grimes: We start every engagement with an initial conversation.
[00:03:29] Ryan Grimes: We tell them about us because they want to know about us. And then we ask them what they're looking for. And then we say, Oh yeah, we've done over a hundred YouTube videos about this very thing. And they're like, really Oh yeah, here's a link to it.
[00:03:40] Ryan Grimes: And it's part of our sales process. It falls more into sales than marketing because the marketing side is great when we're reference one or two videos. But the sales process really where we hammered in Oh yeah, we've got way more than that. Like we've literally written a book on doing this.
[00:03:55] Ryan Grimes: And here's proof, right? Because that's what you want to show them as part of the process [00:04:00] is that you not only can say things, but you can actually back them up with doing those things. So in terms of measuring KPIs, I will admit it's hard because at times I am not a process person. Let's just get that out in front here.
[00:04:16] Ryan Grimes: That's, my weak spot. But our marketing team is fantastic and they show us engagement on the emails. They show us engagement on social media. They show us engagement with the marketing platforms.
[00:04:27] Ryan Grimes: So there is some metrics in there. There are some KPIs in there. As far as I know, we're meeting them. We're growing and we are getting as much business as we can handle right now. Yes, it's working, but as part of what, we need to do is to know how to those things measure better versus when we get more mature somebody else can do that
[00:04:53] Ryan Grimes: I am not the process person. I will admit it. Once you start talking numbers and KPIs, I'm like, yeah, those are, we have them. [00:05:00] We definitely have them,.
[00:05:02] Carrie Richardson: But you're not looking at them.
[00:05:05] Ryan Grimes: I look at them when someone reads them to me. I, am very good at the sales and prospecting and the marketing side of things, getting actual looking at the numbers.
[00:05:15] Ryan Grimes: I work very hard on but my brain is not wired that way.
[00:05:20] Carrie Richardson: I think that there are people that would be very, happy to be somebody that was excited about the idea of talking to people every day, excited about the idea of sitting down in a sales meeting.
[00:05:31] Carrie Richardson: I think a lot of it providers are the exact opposite. They are very process driven. But when it comes to applying that process in the sales and marketing arena, they struggle a little bit. So you got a little bit of a leg up there having a natural enjoyment of the sales and marketing process.
[00:05:50] Ryan Grimes: Absolutely.
[00:05:51] Ryan Grimes: You are 100 percent accurate because every MSP I talk to that's struggling thinks that the tools make the man and it [00:06:00] doesn't. It's, literally not that. It's the results and it's, getting out there because you could be the smartest IT guy in the known universe. You could know everything about Microsoft 365 by like the back of your hand and nobody's going to care because they don't know you're out there.
[00:06:17] Carrie Richardson: Yeah, nobody wants to work with the number two managed services provider in Indianapolis.
[00:06:23] Ryan Grimes: So that is correct. Yes, that is very correct. And I'm just, I'm one of those. I call it a battery run extrovert, which means like I'm great for doing a lot of these things. I would go out on meet people then I'm like I'm done.
[00:06:35] Ryan Grimes: My battery's done and I got to recharge and then I'll I'll be the introvert for a little bit, but then I'll go back out and I'll just go meet people we'll do networking in person. We'll talk about that. We'll do podcasts. We'll do LinkedIn lives. We'll talk about all these things and we'll definitely network, which is very hard for a lot of it providers to do because we're so tied up in the tools.
[00:06:55] Ryan Grimes: And the, support process but we're not, [00:07:00] they're not building the business side of it. So that they need the tools in the process.. I
[00:07:06] Carrie Richardson: don't see a lot of people replacing systems. Do you?
[00:07:11] Ryan Grimes: So we, migrated to Syncro , and it probably took us three months of daily labor to get things moved over and built and to get things done. And honestly, Synchro was fantastic. Like Hannah our, rep was fantastic.
[00:07:26] Ryan Grimes: Like she walked me through everything. She was available. If I had any questions, I'm like, Hey, how do I'm an idiot. Where did this go? I'm very happy with them. It would take a lot for me to do it again.
[00:07:37] It works it's, a great product. Is it perfect? No, but nothing is, but it does a lot of things very well that help my company out.
[00:07:46] Carrie Richardson: All right. So you're good there. Let's talk about strategy.
[00:07:48] Carrie Richardson: What are your options?
[00:07:50] Ryan Grimes: Oh my goodness. Like I said before, I am not a process person. In fact, my, I had a personality test run and it basically was like, I think that process is [00:08:00] great.
[00:08:00] Ryan Grimes: Just for other people, it's just not for me. We really need, we've got great process. Don't get me wrong. We've got things in line. But as our clients grow and get bigger, we need to rise to meet their needs. And as things become more complicated in our industry, because nothing ever gets simpler we need to rise to the occasion as well.
[00:08:20] Ryan Grimes: So we need better ways of doing things. In terms of process. Yeah, we. Continually review everything we do internally as well as externally. So we constantly do vendor reviews internal process reviews, documentation reviews which is very important because if you don't know what you're doing and don't know what you're doing poorly, how can you get better?
[00:08:40] Ryan Grimes: So we do that, but now it's time to put to bring somebody on staff that does that for us or to helps us with that, because as I get more and more into sales and marketing, which I enjoy doing, and I'm really good at, I want someone else to move into that gap. That's being formed as we grow and expand and really run with [00:09:00] it.
[00:09:00] Ryan Grimes: Project management utilization, all those things that give me the hives to think about it, to manage somebody's good at that stuff. So we need to find someone who's good at that and have them run with it. And we got some pretty solid prospects that we're talking to you about that. So yes, process strategy. I'm the visionary of the company. Like I know where I want us to go. I'm the bus driver.
[00:09:21] Ryan Grimes: I want people that can change the tires, put gas in it make sure everything's great all while we're driving forward.
[00:09:29] Carrie Richardson: We all, we used to compare it to like flying the airplane while you're building the landing gear. He's got to hurry up. It's going to land eventually whether you're ready or not.
[00:09:41] Ryan Grimes: Exactly. Exactly. And that's, this is that's, our industry, right? It's hard. Like it is not an industry for everybody. Like a lot of when we've interviewed, we interviewed internal it people and they're just like, wait, you do what, like how many things are you responsible? No, I can't do that.
[00:09:55] Ryan Grimes: No, There's no way that's possible. Yeah, it is. It's literally running and gunning at all times. [00:10:00]
[00:10:01] Carrie Richardson: I think that there's a lot, you can learn a lot working at an MSP. I think that would be true of any vastly different sized organization as well. A 10 person company, everybody's doing a little bit of everything. And a 500 person company, you have a very specific subset of things that you do and you don't really venture into the other places.
[00:10:23] Ryan Grimes: Exactly. A lot of people we interviewed had enterprise level IT experience and I'm holding up air quotes there for anyone listening, but it's they were in Azure AD or Entra ID now adding and removing users and assigning them to the groups like that's all they did for their entire job 40 hours a week is yeah, that's Not what we do in any way, shape or form.
[00:10:46] Carrie Richardson: No I, could see how that would be challenging and I wish you a lot of success finding that operational person or the integrator to your visionary. So you're using EOS language or do you follow EOS?
[00:10:59] Ryan Grimes: I [00:11:00] would say I've seen the book and that's last time we talked about gap sales and I'm like, again, I'd seen the book.
[00:11:07] Ryan Grimes: I knew the concepts. I had done the things. I just didn't know the I. I didn't know I was doing it but we are looking into getting better and I'm hoping that someone can bring some of that to us because I am totally not a process person, but I understand that we need one.
[00:11:24] Carrie Richardson: ..
[00:11:24] Carrie Richardson: I can speak from experience. The only reason we survived the pandemic is EOS changed how I looked at my business, the numbers that we measured, the things that I thought were important
[00:11:36] Ryan Grimes: Hard things are hard and I get it. Like I you only grow when you're outside your comfort zone. And I've been living there for a year and a half on the sales and marketing side just building this up and making things happen.
[00:11:47] Ryan Grimes: So it's probably time to to, grow up a little bit. Was it like 88 percent of all MSPs are under a million in revenue? Just they're so small. They never get out of their own. Way [00:12:00] to grow. And I'm like, I don't want to be small anymore. Like I want us to grow at the same time. I want us to be good and do all the things that we did to get us to this point and not be the MSP that loses clients because we forget about them or we haven't taken care of them.
[00:12:16] Ryan Grimes: That's important to our core. And that's been our company culture since day one.
[00:12:21] Carrie Richardson: It's a very. different job. There aren't any telemarketing emergencies, right?
[00:12:26] Carrie Richardson: Everything's closed now on the East coast and that's it. Go home and I'll see you in the morning and don't think about it again. It's not that way for MSPs. And I finally understood why can't anymore?
[00:12:37] Carrie Richardson: Return a phone call. Why can't you guys just show up to your meetings on time? And I was like, Oh, because everything just freaking explodes every day. Great.
[00:12:46] Ryan Grimes: Fantastic. Pretty much. That's our lives. We, try to minimize that and I think that things have gotten better.
[00:12:53] Ryan Grimes: I actually like doing this stuff. Like I don't do it because I we feel the need, we've got so many things going on, [00:13:00] so many fires to put out like other MSPs, but we have a lot of things to do, quotes to get out the door, people to onboard things to improve upon in our internal processes as well, that I have the time to do now. So we can actually do the sales and marketing.
[00:13:15] Carrie Richardson: I understand that completely.
[00:13:17] Ryan Grimes: One of the things I've learned is to take opportunities and make the absolute most of them you can. So part of what we're going to do is we're going to actually, again, hire people to take the process side. I want to get our processes down, Pat.
[00:13:29] Ryan Grimes: I want our sales process is good. Our marketing is good. Our onboarding is good. Our test support stuff is good, but I want to know how to make them better, right? Because we have to continually review and improve upon all those things in our business processes for everything. Yes, I will engage in the processes.
[00:13:45] Ryan Grimes: I will do them because I know that's going to make us better. We're getting a mature business. Maturing our business overall, learning how to I, it sounds simple, but doing things better is actually a very [00:14:00] complicated thing. How, can we take more things off of my plate and how do we get the right people in the right, in front of the right tasks?
[00:14:07] Ryan Grimes: How do we do personality make, making sure that the people we're looking at hiring are the best people for the job. How can we make sure that our. Our platforms are where they need to be because like we've we were talking about earlier, like everything's changed. Like I'll log into Microsoft be like, I don't even know what this is anymore.
[00:14:24] Ryan Grimes: Like what the heck is going on? So I, again, I want to get that off my plate. I want to get better sales process, better marketing process. Because again, we're doing a good job, but we can do it better. And I want someone's professional opinion on our website. Cause I know our SEO sucks. I want to get our.
[00:14:41] Ryan Grimes: Processes done for sales is this truly doing what I think it's going to do? Because could we get more leads? Could we get a higher conversion rate? Could we get these things? Okay. I want someone to tell me, I want them to walk through our marketing and our sales process. Tell me exactly what I'm doing wrong in all those areas to maximize the effectiveness of those things.
[00:14:58] Ryan Grimes: Because. I'm [00:15:00] doing them. They're done with the marketing company for us. I did our sales process, but again, I'm one person. I'm not the expert. I don't have to like the fish. I have to, I don't have to like the bait. I have to like the fish, right? So I need to figure out what I'm doing. I want to make sure my messaging is consistent.
[00:15:14] Ryan Grimes: It's on point. I want to make sure that our, that the, marketing is effective as leading to the sales. We're closing the sales properly. We're onboarding them properly. The experience is great. How can we make that experience better? What are some, key takeaways that we can learn to improve that onboarding process to make them say, this was the best.
[00:15:33] Ryan Grimes: God bless decision we've ever made in our entire lives was going with Ryan and my IT and D and then continuing that through the support process because once you're done with the professional services side, then the support side has to take over. Okay, great. How can we make that better? How can we have a good balance between excellent customer support and getting the data we need to make sure we're doing that?
[00:15:52] Ryan Grimes: Because those aren't necessarily the same things. Like tickets suck. Nobody likes to do tickets, but tickets get you the metrics we need, but they're not providing a great experience for the [00:16:00] customer. So how do we improve that area of our business? It's all about making us all better. And that's, my focus. And we work with great, we work with great companies. We don't take on. Companies that we, don't get along with. And that's a gut thing. That's not necessarily a metrics thing, right? You get that gut feeling yeah, I don't want to work with this person. And we've actually stopped an onboarding because it just, it was going poorly.
[00:16:23] Ryan Grimes: So our clients are great. I want more of them. I want to make this thing just happen and happen. And then keep our staff happy. Know what's going on with everybody, including from our clients to our to our technicians and our support staff and everybody. And I want to know how to make all this work better.
[00:16:42] Carrie Richardson: I want to thank you for, sharing a little bit about what's going on at MyITIndy and the things that you're trying to achieve.
[00:16:48] Carrie Richardson: I will look forward to celebrating milestones with you this time next year when we do our next podcast, so maybe I'll be on yours next. Are you hosting a podcast now? [00:17:00]
[00:17:00] Ryan Grimes: That's one of the things I want to get back to because I did it. And then I ran out of time because got to juggle chainsaws.
[00:17:07] Ryan Grimes: And I, that's one of the things I want to get back to is the business podcast and the LinkedIn lives and stuff like that, because that's what I enjoy doing. I don't enjoy doing Excel spreadsheets, Gary. I don't enjoy that.
[00:17:19] Carrie Richardson: We saw a huge opportunity for podcasts in the market.
[00:17:23] Carrie Richardson: And instead of trying to get a large audience for podcasts, what we do is invite your prospects to be on your podcast. So you get an hour of conversation with them before the podcast, you get a conversation with them on the podcast, and then we enable them to promote themselves using the materials that you create for your podcast.
[00:17:42] Carrie Richardson: If you're going to start a podcast again, I would highly encourage you to use it in a way that allowed you to prospect for new business at the same time.
[00:17:51] Ryan Grimes: You have my attention.
[00:17:53] Carrie Richardson: I'll send you a marketing brochure.
[00:17:56] Ryan Grimes: Sweet.
[00:17:58] Carrie Richardson: All right. Thank you, Ryan, and [00:18:00] good luck .
[00:18:00] Ryan Grimes: Thank you very much, Carrie. Always a pleasure to talk to you.