EP.02 – Richard Tubb: Highly satisfied customers equals more future business

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Key takeaways

The “IT Business Growth Expert” Richard Tubb covers content marketing, customer satisfaction and his Jar of Awesome.
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Quotes

“You can be the best IT company in the world, but if nobody's heard of you, it's absolutely pointless.”

“Content marketing and customer satisfaction come down to pretty much the same thing and that is answering people's questions and then making sure that you've answered the question correctly.”

“It's not enough to be a great technician. You've got to be a good customer service technician as well.”

“We let the client see the pain, but not feel the pain. And for us that made us a lot more sticky with our clients.”

“Go out and visit your clients more often, not with a specific purpose other than walking around the office and saying to people, "Hey, is there anything I can help with?"

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Full episode transcript

[00:00:00] Cory: Richard is from Newcastle, UK and the IT business growth expert for MSPs. We’ve known each other for over 10 years, since Richard’s old company Netlink I.T, was working with a company that I co-founded with my dad, Pronto Marketing.

[00:00:16] I was just looking back today through some tickets and emails, that was in 2019 when we were working on a website and email newsletter stuff. But since then, Richard has basically gone on to grow one of the strongest personal brands that I’ve seen for it in the MSP space. And I hear that he doesn’t work on Fridays, which I’m very jealous of.

[00:00:37] But other than that, maybe if you could give us a fill us in on more intro or kind of what people should know. 

[00:00:44] Richard: sure. Cory, well, first of all, thank you both for having me on. I’m absolutely honored and it’s such a thrill I’ve been looking forward to chatting to you both. And Cory, you heard me shuffling away there while you were going through our history as well, because yeah, it makes me feel like an old man in the MSP industry to realize that I’ve been, we’ve been doing it for so long, but it’s awesome.

[00:01:02] Huge fan of Pronto Marketing and what you and Derek have done for myself personally in my business career as well, because you helped to get my MSP, a website up and running. And it was such a wonderful thing because like so many MSPs at the time I’d be really embarrassed on my website.

[00:01:21] Oh, yeah. I must get around to doing something with that. Thank you for that, but yeah.  Background then for anybody who is not familiar with my work. So as Cory said, I used to run a managed service provider business based out of Birmingham in the UK. And I sold that business 10 years ago now, and what.

[00:01:39] I did when I was running the MSP business, I was really sort of upfront and honest and open about the trials and tribulations that I had as an MSP business owner. So I used to speak at user groups and I was one of the early adopters of blogging. I used to write a blog post, just basically sharing all of the things that went right.

[00:01:58] In my business and all the things that went wrong and there were a lot more things going wrong at the time. So there was a lot of blog posts about that, but an interesting thing happened after I sold the MSP business. And I’d love to say I’d planned this, but I didn’t. But lots of my former competitors started picking up the phone to me and saying, Hey, Rick, now that you’re no longer a competitor, would you mind coming in and sharing some of the secret sauce with us?

[00:02:24] And so, yeah, that, that put me on the career that I’m on. So for the last 10 years I’ve been writing books and speaking at events and community groups. Yeah. Podcasts and videos and blogs and social media and everything about basically helping other MSP owners to avoid all the many mistakes that I made as an MSP owner.

[00:02:44] And I absolutely love it still to this day because I get to speak to people like you and Nash is brilliant. 

[00:02:51] Nash: Thanks for sharing your story, Richard curious what was the, or what was the main one motivation that you send that you decided to sell your MSP business and after selling it, like the transition from being an MSP business owner to becoming like a thought leader in that space and doing some blogs and speaking engagements and stuff, like how was the transition was in natural or.

[00:03:17] Was it just because of that conversation that you had with the other person who was asking you to share a secret sauce? 

[00:03:25] Richard: That’s a great question. And I’ll, I’ll go a little bit deep here. So, the motivation for me or the catalyst, I should say for me selling the MSP business was actually a life event.

[00:03:35] It was my dad who passed away, so he was 82 years of age. He was a rifle age. It still took us by surprise. But he had, you know, a peaceful passing. So I’m not sure. You know, laboring on that, but it was more when I was at his funeral afterwards there were people coming up and talking to me as his son and to my brother.

[00:03:55] And they were saying things like, Oh, your dad won’t remember this, but he made such an impact on my life. And he set us off in a good direction. And I just felt that, you know, What I wanted to do with perhaps the second half of my life was to live up to my dad’s legacy there. He built this incredible legacy of being able to help people.

[00:04:15] And it made me realize that, yeah, I can certainly have an impact on people’s lives, running the MSP, but by that stage, I was getting so much more energy from speaking to other MSP owners and helping them to avoid. Thanks that I was making, you know, I’ve gone on to write books about regaining your life and having a good life work balance as an MSP, a business owner.

[00:04:36] So, yeah, without getting too deep about it, Nash said that that was the catalyst for me. Sort of selling the business I said I had no plans to, to, to go and be, you know, as you very kindly refer to me as like a thought leader or a coach or anything like that, I literally knew that I just wanted to, to help people avoid the mistakes that I made.

[00:04:55] But 10 years on and, you know, I’m, I’m still loving it and I guess, such a kick. Every day of doing this work and I’m part of an online community called the Tech Tribe, and we’ve got like 15 hundred paid MSPs around the world as members, every single day. Now I just see people going through the same journey that I went through and I just get a kick out.

[00:05:16] I’ve been able to, to help other people, to perhaps find a bit of a shortcut to it and not make the mistakes that I made. If that makes sense. 

[00:05:24] Nash: That makes perfect sense. Now I want to slowly transition to what our focus on in this podcast or just customer satisfaction. And I’m curious because you both do content marketing and customer satisfaction.

[00:05:38] Now I’d like to get your personal definition of both and their transition like that. The intersection between content marketing and customer satisfaction. 

[00:05:49] Richard: Oh, that is a wonderful question. So content marketing I have, I did from virtually from day one within my MSP business now Cory and I talked about how my MSP partnered with Pronto Marketing way back in the day.

[00:06:03] There was a very good reason for that because we were producing a lot of content or I was producing a lot of content for the business, I should say. And we just weren’t getting any out there in front of people. So one of the things I would say about marketing is you can be the best IT company in the world, but if nobody’s heard of you, it’s absolutely pointless.

[00:06:23] You know, so going back to content marketing, For me, it was really, really simple. Content marketing is about answering people’s questions. It is about documenting and making life easy for other people. If you provide value to other people via content marketing, they’re naturally going to want to end up working with you.

[00:06:42] And so content marketing. Wasn’t called content marketing Nash. When I started off doing this, as I said, it was just, we referred to it as blogging. But I very, very quickly realized that if the more people I was helpful to, the more value I provided for other people, the more they would want to work with me, the more they would refer me to other people and so on and so forth.

[00:07:04] And my business really grew as a result. Of content marketing. Now you ask the question about, you know, customer satisfaction or customer service, that type of thing. And the intersection with content marketing, I would say the two absolutely go hand in hand. So a great example of this would be. Content marketing might be writing a blog post or recording a video, showing somebody how to set up an office 365 user Microsoft 365 user.

[00:07:35] There’s an example. And that might be used as a piece of marketing material to put it there, to say to people, Hey, we know what we’re talking about. We are helpful. Here’s the you know, here’s how to go ahead and to do the work yourself. But if you want to. Work with, if you want to pay us to do that work, we will do it for you as well.

[00:07:53] That’s essentially what it is now. Customer service customer satisfaction is essentially the same thing, but working with the people. Who are already paying you for that service. So you might be documenting things for them. You might be picking up the phone to them or checking in with them and saying, Hey, we’ve done this work for you.

[00:08:11] Is everything working as you expected it to be? Is there anything we could do better following that same process? Essentially, I would say content marketing and customer satisfaction come down to pretty much the same thing and that is answering people’s questions and then making sure that you’ve answered the question correctly for me, that’s, you know what it’s all about.

[00:08:34] And so it’s something that I’ve naturally done throughout my career with content marketing. It’s something that I speak to MSPs about every single day. Now, you know, it’s not enough to be a great technician. You’ve got to be a good customer service technician as well. You’ve got to make sure that the work you’ve done for them has met their requirements and you’ve got to make sure that they’re happy with it. So that’s a very long answer to a short question Nash. I hope that makes sense. That customer service, customer satisfaction and content marketing just bedfellows really 

[00:09:08] Cory: well. One similarity that I was thinking, when you say both of those is it’s really, they’re both about communication.

[00:09:13] Like you say, so answering questions and kind of in your mind that customer satisfaction is. It’s really about eating, like commuting, communicating, answering, keeping the conversation going and, you know, doing a good job to keep, do have to make sure your customers know what’s going on or that the problem was resolved or that you understand them.

[00:09:32] You hear them loud and clear. 

[00:09:35] Richard: Yeah, communication. I wrote a blog post years and years and years ago. And it was a very famous blockbuster at the time. I say very famous or infamous whichever way you look at it. But it was called it’s all about communication. And to give you a, you can still find that blog post today, but it went to the front page of wordpress.com and you know, went viral.

[00:09:55] But the point I was making was that as MSPs, we need to be over communicating with clients and the analogy I made in a hurry was that running an MSP is a lot like the local police force. Now bear with me on this one. So, you know, you never ever pick up the phone to the police and say, Hey just a phone you and say, good job guys.

[00:10:19] I’ve not been broken into overnight. I really appreciate that. My house has not been burgled. Thank you. In the same way, your clients are never going to phone you and say, Hey, great job. The service is still running, or there’s been no problems with our service. Now I’ve done lots of work with West Midlands police, the local police force to me when I ran the MSP in Birmingham, and I know the work that they do every hour of every day to keep us all safe in the same way that managed service providers are proactively working to keep clients systems up and running.

[00:10:51] But I can tell you the first time that you encounter crime. If you pick up the phone to the police and you are upset, you’re probably angry about it. And you, you want to know what’s, you know, what’s going on, what are they doing to make this better for you? And for, so for the police force, I did a lot of work with them, actually on communications to help them over, communicate with the public, to say, here’s what we’re doing to keep you safe.

[00:11:16] And as an MSP, you need to do the same thing. You need to over-communicate with your clients saying, here’s what we’re doing behind the scenes. Now you probably won’t need us because everything’s just running. But here’s what we’re doing to keep it running. Here’s the reason that you’re not phoning us each and every day.

[00:11:34] And so I wrote this blog post Cory, and I’ve got it out there. And it was all about communication, which as you say, essentially comes down to the bottom line of customer service, customer satisfaction. It’s not just doing the job. It’s letting people know you’ve done the job and then asking them, are we doing the job well?

[00:11:51] And for me, so, you know, that’s a long story there, but for me being a police officer or running the police force is very much like running an MSP because you’ve got to keeppeople safe. You’ve got to keep people secure and actually you’re not going to expect very much. Thanks. So until things go wrong and ideally you don’t want them to ever go wrong.

[00:12:10] Cory: Right. It’s the peace of mind sell that both MSPs and police police officers are doing.

[00:12:17] Richard: absolutely. 

[00:12:19] Nash: I just want to add that that’s a very unique perspective of looking at customer satisfaction, because like, I would never look at it that way, but while you were seeing this and I’m just like imagining what you’re saying, actually like that makes perfect sense.

[00:12:32] Cause like the more you, the more you over-communicate, you’re actually like giving them a sense of relief that okay. They’re, they’re taking care of it. Like even if I’m not, even if I don’t know what they’re doing. Even if I’m not aware of it, the fact that they’re letting me know that they’re doing something to make sure that everything goes perfect consistently, it would make me feel like it would give me a sense of peace.

[00:12:55] Right. And I think that’s what you, you’re kind of like, you’re trying to say. 

[00:12:58] Richard: Yeah. And if I give you an example, and so for those of your community, your listeners who are managed service providers, they will probably be familiar with this question, but if they do a really good job for their clients and the clients don’t have to phone them up with any problems, unfortunately what happens after about six months is that a year the client will phone up and say, Hey, we’ve just been looking through the bills.

[00:13:22] What are we paying you for? Because nothing’s going wrong and yeah. And you’re like, ah, yeah, you’re paying us. So nothing goes wrong, but the client doesn’t see it that way. They initially had pain. You made that pain go away. You made that pain go away virtually, permanently, and then they’ve experienced so little pain that they’re saying to you.

[00:13:44] We’re not sure what it is we’re paying you for now. So for anybody listening to this and they’ve said, yes, of course I’ve had that question and it drives me bananas. You know, the one way that you can make sure that question doesn’t get asked is by showing your clients all of the things that you’re doing to help them avoid feeling that pain.

[00:14:04] So let me give you a really good example. I used to do this when I ran my MSP Nash. So we used to do daily reports. So many of your listeners will do daily reports for their clients saying, Hey, everything’s great. Don’t worry about it. We didn’t use to send the daily reports out after we’d fit, fixed things.

[00:14:23] We used to send the daily report out when things were broken. So if the backup hadn’t run, if the server was running low on memory, if the risks were running low on base, we used to sell. I’m in the morning with a big red cross. They’re saying these are the things that are going wrong. And then they would pick the phone up to us and say, Hey, we’ve had our daily reports through, did you know the servers running at a desk space?

[00:14:47] Did you know that the internet connection is running slowly and we’d say, Oh yeah, thank you. We’ve resolved all of that. And we got that done before nine o’clock this morning for you and they’d go, Oh, great, thanks. But the phone is down but you know, when some people have said to me, well, why did you do that?

[00:15:02] Why did you show them all the things that have gone wrong? The reason we showed them all the things that went wrong is to remind them of all the things that can go wrong every day and what we were doing tirelessly in the back to make sure that they didn’t feel the pain. So it would be the equivalent of if you go to your local garage for a, with your car, for, for an annual service and the, and Gary said to you by the way your front tire.

[00:15:28] Was about to explode and you’re like, what? And you go, Oh yeah, but don’t worry. We fixed it for you. The car’s ready to drive away. And you’re like, wow, that’s good. I like that. You know, there was a potential problem, but they fixed it for us. And so we let the client see the pain, but not feel the pain. And for us that made us a lot more sticky with our clients.

[00:15:49] They wanted to work with us a lot more because they saw the value of what was going on.

[00:15:59] Nash: I like what you said, make the clients see the pain, but not feel the pain either. That’s a very good point.

[00:16:10] Awesome. Did you want to, I think I’d like to, I think we prepared some questions, kind of like deeper questions specifically for MSPs that you, I think you. Shared to me. Cory, did you want to cover that as well? Let 

[00:16:24] Cory: me try a few here. Happy to, so, so you’ve, you’ve really touched on the importance of communication for customer satisfaction. And one thing I’m sure that you get from your community and from your clients all the time is how do I grow? Of course, I know at Pronto, when we surveyed MSPs, what are your top priorities? Sales and leads were always at the top of the list. So when you have new customers that are looking to basically grow and they’re looking to you to help them grow, does customer satisfaction, is, does that play a role in how you tell them to grow or.

[00:17:00] Richard: the playbook? Definitely is. And you know, I said earlier on you can be the best IT company in the world, but if nobody knows about you, what is the point? So the number one thing I would do with customer satisfaction is start recording. The ones that you’ve had.

[00:17:17] What do I mean by that? So most of us in business have got a process in place for dealing with customer complaints. If somebody says, Hey, this is not going wrong, you are all over. And you worked really, really quickly to get that problem fixed for them and to make them happy. Again, both of us have processes in place for customer satisfaction.

[00:17:40] So, you know, the time the client gets in touch with you and says, Hey, thanks Cory. I just wanted to tell you you’ve done a great job on this . And that happens to nearly all of us every single day, every single week. But what do we do with it, Cory? Well, for the most part, actually, for those of us in Britain who are a little bit conservative, we go, ah, don’t worry about it.

[00:18:02] It’s fine. It’s just what, it’s just what we’re here to do. And we brush it aside. We get a bit embarrassed and we move on. What I would encourage people to do is to start recording those wins. So when clients get in touch with you and say, I’m just wanting to give feedback. Nash went above and beyond delivering this service for us.

[00:18:20] We really appreciate it. And it’s such a pleasure to work with Simplesat. You don’t just say, Oh, shucks. That’s no problem. It’s just our job. You record that. And you make sure that you’ve got that on your website, for instance, to let other people know how you are delivering to your customers.

[00:18:38] The other thing I would say is, you know MSPs rely a lot on word of mouth on referrals for business. They do a good job. And your clients hopefully will speak to other clients, other prospective clients and say, Hey, you should be working with Cory. You should be working with Nash. The best time to ask for a referral is when a client has given you a glowing testimony or, or a bit of feedback.

[00:19:02] So when that customer gets in touch and says, Hey, Nash has done this brilliant job for me. Just want it to say thank you. Instead of saying shucks, you go, Oh, ah, that’s our pleasure. Hey, look while you’re on the phone. Can you think of anybody else? That we could help with, you know, in a similar situation to you.

[00:19:19] And while that person’s glowing and rosy towards you, they will probably say, Oh yeah, let me connect you with such and such other business owners. So most MSPs rely on referrals for growing their business, but not a lot of MSPs are proactive in asking for referrals. And so I think customer service, customer satisfaction.

[00:19:39] Glowing testimonials and feedback can be used not only as social proof on your website and in your marketing materials to let other people know, Hey, we don’t just talk about how good we are. Here’s other people demonstrating that we do the job, but it’s also the best time to ask for a referral proactively.

[00:19:59] And that’s one of the ways that you can grow your business. And if I can throw something else in there create Nash as well. So many MSPs that I come across underestimate the value of social proof. So for anybody unfamiliar, you know what we’re talking about, social proof, it is literally instead of Cory and Nash saying Simplesat do a brilliant job for your MSP.

[00:20:22] And you’re like, yeah, Okay, but what do other people say about Cory and Nash? Social proof is literally going online and having a look and seeing what other people say about a business. So many MSPs that I come across do not invest time. They don’t do not invest effort into creating social proof.

[00:20:43] And yet we all know if we’re going to go and hire a plumber. And the electrician, a builder. What’s one of the first things that we do? We go on social media or we ask our friends, we say, Hey, can you recommend anybody to me to do this job rather than just get the yellow pages out or just do a random Google search?

[00:21:04] So the 21st century equivalent of asking for referrals, recommendations is people go online and if they do a search to say it supports Newcastle, they’re going to be looking to see what your Google reviews are. What other people are saying about you, what people are saying on Twitter, on Facebook, about you.

[00:21:24] So you need to make sure. That, what you’re delivering for clients is represented in your online persona, that the social proof is there. And I think it’s just so important, Cory, that nowadays people are very aware of what their online presence says about them. So I’ll challenge anybody listening to this after this podcast is over, go online and do a Google search for your business and see what people are saying about you.

[00:21:52] If they’re saying nothing at all, That’s quite bad because I’m sure that in the past month you have had clients get in touch with you and say, thank you for a great job that you’ve done. So you should have at least one good review online there. Because when that, that client says you’ve done a really good job, you say, Oh, thank you so much.

[00:22:11] Would you mind leaving that as a Google review for us? And that is one of the ways that you can grow your business. I think it’s so, 

[00:22:20] Cory: wow. That’s amazing. Yeah. Great. 

[00:22:24] Nash: And there was, so that was a very smooth transition. I feel like you’re actually doing a disservice to those people who could have, who could have like, gotten a really good service from you.

[00:22:35] If you actually ask those, if you actually ask referrals from, for your current customers who had a really good experience with you, right. It would be a disservice to not ask a referral. 

[00:22:47] Richard: Absolutely is. And I would say flee, you know, that I’ve just said it struck a chord with them and they said, yeah, we really should record our wins a little bit more.

[00:22:55] We should have a process to ask for referrals and we should have great social proof. Everybody listening to this will probably be using Slack or Microsoft teams to, to communicate with them and their team. Do yourself a favor, set yourself up a hashtag #wins channel on Slack or a Microsoft Teams. And then anytime that anybody says anything nice, or there’s any news that you’ve had in the business, put it into that channel.

[00:23:24] It’s the single fastest way that you got capturing this great feedback. I know there’s two quite simple stats and so many others that can help capture that information. But right now, after this podcast, go away and create a #wins channel and start capturing things because you and your team are going to get so many compliments, so much good feedback each day.

[00:23:46] And I want you to be sharing that, not just with your customers, but with your internal team as well, to let them know, Hey guys, we’re doing a good job here. And here’s what people have had to say. When we get good news, we should share it with others. We shouldn’t keep it to ourselves. 

[00:24:01] Cory: I think that’s great.

[00:24:02] It’s really, it’s so positive. We get a lot of you know, Simplesat users looking to do the opposite, which of course is important as well. And get feedback, negative feedback channeling to managers to, to know what to do. But on the other side of things, just a positive spin up cycle, right. Where you just, I don’t know, it’s like this reinforcement loop, that’s just going to get better and better.

[00:24:23] Richard: Yeah, I love that. And I should say, get into about this on a personal level. I also also have a wins channel for myself. I call it my jar of awesome. I’ve literally got a physical jar here. Every time, something good happens. So I can tell you, after today’s podcast interview, I will be going and writing it and had a great time with Cory and Nash on the Simplesat podcast, I will be folding that up as a post-it note and I’ll be putting it in my jar of awesome.

[00:24:52] And you know, what your jar slowly fills up. And any time as an entrepreneur, I’m feeling a little bit like, Oh, I’m not sure why I’m doing this anymore. And let’s face it. We’ve had a lot of those days in 2020 haven’t we? I would go to my jar of awesome. And it would remind me. Of the difference that I’m making not only to myself, but to other people.

[00:25:11] So there you go. It’s a little bit, we will, but it works for me. 

[00:25:16] Cory: That tip is a whole jar of awesome.

[00:25:21] Nash:] I’m writing it down just to make sure I don’t forget. 

[00:25:25] Richard: want to see photographs of your, your jar of awesome on Instagram, on Twitter over the next few days. 

[00:25:32] Nash: You shall now ask a few more questions. I want to know what are your assets from all the other things that you mentioned earlier? What do you think?

[00:25:41] Other things that this is general business owners can do to elevate their customer satisfaction game. Like what else can they do that they’re not doing or that they are not doing enough? 

[00:25:53] Richard: Yeah. That is a good question. So if you didn’t ask me this question over a year ago now, so back at the start of 2020 And we’re recording this at the start of 2021.

[00:26:03] And obviously we’ve gone through the COVID-19 pandemic and many of us are still going through it. What I used to say to MSPs was look go out and visit your clients more often, not with a specific purpose other than walking around the office and saying to people, Hey, is there anything I can help with?

[00:26:21] How’s it going? And the reason I did that, and we, we used to call them engineering floor walk. Ex, you know my engineers would, or myself would visit our client sites. And often we would turn up with a box of cakes or something because I can tell you now, no client in history has ever turned us away at the door when we’re holding a box of cakes.

[00:26:40] And so we used to give the cakes and then we used to have a wander round, you know, do a bit of tidying up and stuff. But then we used to say, Hey, how’s it going? Is there anything we can help with? And that used to be so good for us to do two things, one to uncover problems that would otherwise. Fester and become a much bigger problem.

[00:26:59] Let me give you a specific example. So I went to a client site once and I did floor work and I spoke to one of the members of staff and I said, Oh, while I’m here, is there anything I can help with? And she said, Oh yeah, sure. The printer in the corner is not working. I said, Oh, let me take a look at that while I was working on it, et cetera.

[00:27:15] How long has it been like this? And she said, Oh, about nine months. I said, sorry, nine months. I said, why did you, you know, out of interest, why did you not phone us? I didn’t want to bother you. So, but I can tell you the next time that printer went wrong. Even though they’ve not told us about it. If that’s the sort of thing that clients can go absolutely crazy about, well, this printer’s not been working for nine months and what have you done about it yet?

[00:27:42] So engineering floor walks enabled us to, to highlight some of the things that otherwise might have got overlooked. And the second reason that we did these floor walks was we used to have conversations with people and say, Oh, you know, what’s happening, exciting in your world. And they used to say things like, well, [00:28:00] You know, we’re about to take on a new customer.

[00:28:02] And I think we’re going to need, you know, more employees to do that. So we’re going to buy a new PC for them. And so my engineers would come back with this long list of work of projects, of new sales that they’d made to customers. And so again, it was all going back to what Cory said earlier on about communication.

[00:28:21] We stayed in constant communication with clients to uncover the issues that we weren’t aware of. And secondly, to get a peek into the future and to see, okay, what’s happening with their business and how can we help them. So that generated business for us. So that’s the, the answer I would have given you at the start of 2020.

[00:28:39] And of course in 2021, we’re not visiting clients’ sites so much, but we can still do that type of thing. We can pick up the phone to clients, we can drop them a zoom call. We can drop them an email. And we can say, Hey, is there anything I can help with? What will we do? Is there anything I should be aware of?

[00:28:59] As one business owner to another, you can say how the business is growing, are there any things that you’re working on at the moment? And when they say, yep, we’re going to take new stuff on you say, Oh, great. Remember to tell us so we can get their user accounts set up. We can get the new PCs bought for them.

[00:29:14] We can get good broadband in place and all of these types of things. So I think the number one thing I would say, regardless of what year we’re in, regardless of what the pandemic looks like, keep communicating with clients and keep those channels of communication open because you learn so much stuff in terms of sales, in terms of opportunities, in terms of customer service, just keep communicating with clients.

[00:29:39] Cory: And you could still get cakes delivered to your customers. 

[00:29:44] Richard: I was speaking to an MSP just this morning, who has got a deal with the local bakery and they send boxes of brownies to their customers as well. And I was the recipient of a box of these brownies not so long ago. And I’ll tell you, it made my day.

[00:29:59] So if you want to increase your CSAT, your customer satisfaction scores, send more cakes. 

[00:30:06] Nash: You can never go wrong.

[00:30:13] Do you have, do you have more questions, Cory? 

[00:30:16] Cory: Another question. So Richard, you had the blog that inspired you about the communication blog and that was like 10 years ago. You said, what was the name of that?

[00:30:24] Richard: So if you just do a search for Richard sub and it’s all about communication, all about communication right closer to 15 years ago, now I’m really shy.

[00:30:34] Cory: So other than, of course yourself, what are, I mean, what are the other books or videos or podcasts that people listening on this, if they’re looking, if they want to improve customer satisfaction and want to just do more with their customers, but don’t really know where to start. 

What kind of what would you recommend?

[00:30:52] Great question. So I’m, I’m, I’m a voracious reader. It’s, it’s not good for the podcast, but I can see Cory and Nash here on video. And in the background, I can see I’ve got loads of books here and I, you know, I read loads of them. So I’ll give some book recommendations. Now. The first one I would give is there’s a great book by authors Bob Burg and John David Mann.

[00:31:12] And it’s called the Go-Giver. Now we’re all familiar with go getters. You know, these people who go out there and they hustle and they grind and they, you know, they make things happen for them. But in my experience in life people who were go givers seem to really flourish, you know? So I talked earlier about helping people about listening and just being, you know, a valuable force in people’s lives.

[00:31:37] The Go-Giver is a very short book. It’s a business parable. So it’ll take you less than an hour to read with a cup of tea. And it just talks about putting other people’s needs first and, and listening to what they want and helping them to achieve their goals. And so I found earlier on in my career that perhaps when I went to a business networking event, instead of going in there and saying, Hey, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff.

[00:32:04] I would go in there and I would listen to people. And people would talk to me and they’d say, Oh, this is a problem that we’re having at the moment. And I might not be able to help with that problem, but I would say to them, Oh, let me connect you with so-and-so, who can help out with that? And I built value that way and I built relationships that way.

[00:32:22] And I learned in later years from the book, the go giver, you know, this is the more value you deliver to other people. The more they will look to reciprocate as human beings. So that’s one of the first books that I would highly recommend. Another book that has been life-changing for me many of your readers will be familiar with it, but it’s a book called the E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber.

[00:32:45] Very, very famous book. And again, if you’re listening to this and not reading the E-Myth for me, I call it like the MSP Bible. It’s not about managed services, but it is about building a business that is scalable. That is repeatable. That is process and systems driven and gives you. All the time that you need to be doing the things that we’ve spoken about on today’s podcast, which is to pick up the phone to your customer, to, you know, all the things that perhaps some people listening today will be like, this sounds great.

[00:33:13] I haven’t got the time though, to be doing customer satisfaction goals. You will do if you systemize your business in the right way. So the E-Myth was revisited by Michael Gerber. And the third book recommendation that I would suggest is we talked earlier on about content marketing and I said, You know, essentially just answering people’s questions.

[00:33:33] There’s a brilliant book called they ask, we answer sorry. They ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan who is the sales line on Twitter? And I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time and get to know Marcus. And I absolutely love that book because it is fundamentally about helping other people and how you can grow your business by listening.

[00:33:53] And answering questions and showing value to other people as well. So three great books, the go giver, the E-Myth revisited, and they ask you an answer highly recommended for anybody. Listening to this Cory. I could go on, as you can see from the bookshelf behind me, I can give a million books suggestions, but I’ll limit it to just three, right?

[00:34:11] Yeah, those are great. 

[00:34:13] Cory: And those are two new books on my list. So thank you. 

[00:34:17] Nash: All right. The last question after this conversation, what do you think are the three action items that our listeners should take? Yeah. 

[00:34:27] Richard: Yeah, good question. I love that. So one of my mentors is a guy called Arlin Sorenson who built a $50 million MSP and he taught me and I’ve since learned that Thomas Edison was the first person to say this, but Alan Sorenson taught me that vision without execution.

[00:34:47] Is hallucination vision without execution is hallucination. What that means is if you’ve listened to today’s podcast and it’s giving you ideas, things that you want to do. So the very first piece of advice I would give to people is. Ideas only become reality if you actually go and make something of them to take action.

[00:35:06] So if there’s anything you’ve heard in today’s podcast that you think, yeah, that’s a great idea. Don’t just write it down, go and take action on it. So that’s the very first thing I’d say Nash. The second thing would be we gave some specific actions to people and that would be go and Google yourself or Bing yourself.

[00:35:24] Find out. What your online presence looks like for your managed service provider business and find out importantly what people are saying about you. Unfortunately, you might be surprised to say, to hear, they’re not saying anything at all. That’s okay. Because the third piece of advice I’m going to give is that I want you to pick up the phone to your favorite customer and ask them, Hey, how are we doing?

[00:35:50] And how are you doing and listen to the answers that they give you. And if they say have a, what is the answer to have, are we doing? You’re doing really well. Thank you so much. Ask them for a referral and ask them for a Google review or a Facebook review or some sort of online review there. And then you can make sure that you’ve got your first review in place.

[00:36:12] And so your social proof will have already increased by 100%. 

[00:36:18] Nash: Wow. Very simple things like the based on the three action items that you’ve shared. I think these are really very simple things that we just don’t do, just because we forget about it or we just don’t think about these things.

[00:36:32] And most, especially if there’s one word that I would if there’s, if I would like to condense this episode into one word, that would be over-communicate. 

[00:36:41] Richard: Yeah, I’d absolutely agree. I think I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give a fourth, a bonus piece of advice, and that is when, if this podcast has struck a chord with you, if anything that I’ve said or Cory said, or Nash said, make sense to you, please.

[00:36:57] Don’t go straight back into the office or your home office and continue working. Don’t get overwhelmed by emails. Don’t look at tickets. Don’t check your text messages. Sit down for 15 minutes, make yourself a cup of tea and write down what actions you’re going to take. Because it’s so easy for us to have these great ideas and to hear wisdom and to hear brilliant solutions for problems, but then just to get swept away with the day-to-day business that we’re running, just to get overwhelmed with things.

[00:37:27] So please, I’m giving you full permission. Go make a cup of tea, go make a cup of coffee, get a cake. If there’s one to hand, sit down and write down the actions that you’re going to take from this podcast. I’m always telling people to eat cake. There we go. 

[00:37:43] Nash: Tea and cake. I noticed that it’s consistent. All right.

[00:37:50] Well, thank you so much, Richard, for sharing all of these wisdom and action items that like that would help our listeners to elevate their customer satisfaction game and all the other things in their business, like getting referrals and sales now I’m where can they find you? What do you do? And where can they find 

[00:38:08] Yeah. So I thought it said the number one way. If anything that I’ve said today, sort of appeals to anybody. I write a newsletter for the MSP industry every single week. It goes out every Tuesday morning called MSP insights. If anybody is interested in that newsletter, just go tohttps://www.tubblog.co.uk/nl or you can just do a search for MSP insights. But yeah, my website is the best place to find me, but really just do a search for Richard Tubb MSP. And you will find me out there on the internet. 

[00:38:41] Nash: Sounds awesome. Anything you want to add? Cory? 

[00:38:45] Cory: Now, this has been more fun and informative than I thought it would be.

[00:38:49] Not that I wasn’t expecting it to be, there’s like so many nuggets of information here. This is great. 

[00:38:55] Richard: I’m so glad. And thank you again, you know, for both of you at Cory, I gave you thanks earlier on for you and Derek, helping me with my MSP business and for all you do for the MSP community as a whole as well.

[00:39:07] And this podcast is just another example of that. So thank you for everything that both of you do. Well, thank you as 

[00:39:13] Nash: well. Thank you. Thank you for your time, Richard. We really enjoyed having this conversation with you. My pleasure. And I’ll, I’ll coordinate and communicate with you afterwards.

[00:39:23] Yeah. W when the schedule, the episode launching will be in, 

[00:39:27] Richard: let me know and we’ll make sure that we promote it from our sides. And I’ll include it in the MSP insights as well. 

[00:39:32] Nash: Sounds awesome. Thank you.

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