Ian Richardson WINs by focusing on growth

Welcome to W.I.N. (what's important now?) - the entrepreneurial podcast where we dive into business challenges, achievements, and opportunities!

Join your host, Ian Richardson, from Richardson & Richardson Consulting as he explores what entrepreneurs care about and focus on. This week, Ian dives into the types of growth every MSP should focus on.

Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?

Serial entrepreneurs, life partners and business partners, they have successfully exited from multiple businesses (IT, call center, real estate, marketing) and they help other business owners create their own versions of success.

Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.

Carrie has helped create and execute successful outbound sales strategies for over 1200 technology-focused businesses including MSPs, manufacturers, distributors and SaaS firms.

Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com

Book time with Carrie here!

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.

Transcript

Ian: 0:53

Hello and welcome to WIN. I'm your host Ian Richardson from Richardson Richardson Consulting, and this is the third of a three part introduction to the 2023 season of when this is season two of the podcast. And we're really, really, To host guests across two target segments that we'll be invited to win this year. The first segment is managed service providers. If you own and operate at MSP in North America, we would love to talk to you, figure out what your team is working on right now, what milestones and achievements you've recently accomplished and surpassed, and what you think is next for your business and IT channel at large on the other side of the equation. Those vendors that target the IT channel as their primary delivery mechanism for their products and services. We wanna talk to you too. What do you think about the MSP channel that's going on right now? What's your team focused on to make sure you broaden and widen your impact and reach? What milestones have you achieved and what do you think's coming next for the channel as a. If you're interested in appearing on WIN randr.consulting/connect, you can click the WIN icon there and that will take you to the appropriate form to get the process started. Speaking of process, I want to take a little bit of time to talk about the IT channel as a whole. Throughout last year while we were developing up the systems and processes we use internally at r and r, I was having a lot of discovery conversations with MSPs and I took copious. There's a couple of themes that I wanted to share that we'll be focusing on at r and r throughout the course of this year in everything that we do. First process as a whole, universally every MSP I spoke with, from$500,000 in revenue to upwards of 20 million in revenue, people were self identifying. That process was a weak point. There were systems and processes that were ill-defined mainly in the sales department, but there were other areas that were intriguing to me universally. People struggled with research and development. There was no formalized process on how we're gonna evaluate new systems, how we're gonna work on the business versus in the business. That's a whole, another common area that many people expressed frustration with was continuing education of their team. There might be some processes around certain parts of continuing ed, but onboarding and offboarding of staff, bringing people up and raising the knowledge level. So for example, a tier one help desk tech to a tier two, to a tier three, to a systems engineer. There were gaps in the processes around that. We are going to address that in a couple of ways. At r and r, we will be building at our blog and white papers section of the. Continual resources and documentation around processes either that we've used or that have been shared with us by our clients and partners, speakings of clients and partners. We host the Thursday process, a weekly webinar series where an entrepreneur comes on and shares a process they've used in their business. If you'd like information about the upcoming schedule on that, check out part two of this three part podcast where I run through the schedule. Suffice to say, we've got a lot of different industry leaders coming on and sharing processes they've used in their business that you can take and adopt and make your own. Another area that was intriguing to me is that a lot of people are focused on moving from referral generated growth to marketing generated growth. Everybody grows their business initially through referrals, and it should be a focus point for businesses of any size. You should have a mechanism to continually solicit referrals so you can grow through the people your clients know, but at some point, referrals aren't enough. Even with the best process and system referrals will go through a peak and valley. You'll have some, some month, and none the next. You need to have a common system that generates leads on a predictable cadence to feed to the beast of your growth engine. Once you reach a certain. A lot of people are focused on this and will be sharing resources around creating marketing engines for your MSP that you can utilize moving forward. The third interesting trend, and I don't think that this will come as a shock to anyone, is that a security. What made it interesting was the diversity in which people are pursuing this. Some people are strictly pro focused on product. They just want to be able to define their security tech stack and throw it in and throw products at the problem while others are really focused on, Hey, we need to adopt a framework. We need to be able to build compliance. We need to start having more mature conversations with our clients about security as a whole. A lot of MSPs I spoke with are leading with security as the wedge, as the differentiator when they approach a. What are you doing in your MSP about security? If you feel like you've got this figured out, I'd love to host you on win. So you could share it with the channel at large because there is more security business than any one business can handle. That's what's coming up on Win. That's what our 2023 season will have. Again, if you're interested in appearing Love to host you go ahead to the website r and r.consulting/connect. Click on the win icon and that'll take you to the form that you can fill out to get the process started. Also, while at the website, you can view our blogs, read our white papers, check out case studies of previous success stories, as well as view any of our previously recorded material from when podcast. To Thursday process, webinars, and beyond. I'm Ian Richardson. I really appreciate you spending the time with me to check out what we've got coming for you in 2023. And until next time, take it easy.