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Welcome back to the Evolved Radio Podcast! Today, I've got a really fun and insightful episode lined up for you. Dustin Puryear and I are diving into the "Peter Principle." that all-too-familiar scenario where someone keeps getting promoted for being good at your job, but eventually land in a role where you're suddenly feeling out of your depth.
We chat about the common traps people fall into on the career ladder, why owners and managers struggle to let go, and how the difference between delegation, abdication, and micromanagement shapes the success of your team.
Plus, we'll dig into practical advice around KPIs (you know I love talking dashboards), the most common mistake managers make when promoting team members, and even some hard-won lessons from the front lines—including what happens when someone has the courage to step down from a role that isn't the right fit.
Whether you're thinking about your own career path, building a team, or just love some good management strategy, this episode is packed with practical takeaways you can start using today.
Let's jump in!
Evolved Radio Podcast: Interviews with technology experts, industry thought leaders, business leaders and other interesting minds. Exploring the evolution of business and technology.
Dustin, welcome to the Evolved radio podcast. Hey, how you doing?
I'm excellent. And you? I am good. I'm super excited to do the show
with you. Yeah, this will be great. So we're going to be talking
about general career ladders and, and I
think we'll kick off. I'll give you kind of a question
to lead into the first topic that we wanted to connect on, which
is the Peter Principle. For those not familiar,
the Peter Principle is someone who has been promoted into
the level of incompetence. Basically, you continue to
good at your job and everyone's like, hey, great job, here's the next level. Hey,
great job, here's the next level. And at some point you kind of look around
and go, I don't know what I'm doing here. Right.
So that's the Peter Principle. For anyone who is not
familiar with this, I'm curious from your perspective,
if you have ever sort of like, what's the story of you seeing
this happen to someone, either yourself or someone else, where you
recognize like, oh my God, like this person or. I am in a bit of
a world of hurt because I did great. I got here, but now
I'm really over my head. Yeah. I mean, there's actually three
scenarios that I've personally been through. The first scenario is when I found
myself promoting myself to my level of incompetence.
I'd say the second scenario is when somebody was promoted and they didn't
recognize the risk or the dangers they were in. And
the third was where I promoted somebody, they recognized the
problem and they self demoted. Which I thought was probably
the most mature response I've ever seen to the Peter
principal. I can dig into all three or any one of those.
Let's start with the personal story. I suppose I want to come back to the
one that, that demoted himself because I think there's there's some, a lot of really
important lessons around that I think would be worth touching on.
Yeah. So we'll talk about where I've stepped into a role where
I'm not very strong. And I remember actually I wrote an article about
this for this peer mentoring group years ago. And it was the
concept that you should always be firing yourself. Now as
an owner, you get,
you do get yourself into trouble because sometimes you have nobody else to put into
a role other than yourself, so you have no choice. I don't know that the
Peter principle applies there. I will say
that the Peter principle definitely applies when there's
hubris where you think you can do something as the owner, but you can't.
Or where there's somebody that could be better at it in the company than
you. But in particular, I know
I am strong visionary. I am a weak
integrator, if you're familiar with that concept. Right.
And so I can keep the threads together.
Right. I can keep the. The ball moving forward, and I can. I can come
up as many as analogies as needed for this story, But
I definitely struggle with details because they
emotionally beat me down. I just get it mentally
exhausted when I'm doing detail work. And so what I
find is when I grow a company, this is my fourth company. When I grow
a company to a certain size, I reach
my incompetence because I have enough people working under
me that I'm no longer suitable. And
what happens is the company will stall out.
And it's because. Not because of the vision of the company. It's because
I've become a huge bottleneck. And. And if you're in operations,
your whole job is creating multiple
communication channels in the company. That's literally like your function as
operations manager is connecting all the pieces of the company.
Whereas I will stall out because I struggle to put
all those pieces together as an integrator, even though that is the almost
entire purpose of the integrator. And so that's when I say that I
tend to, um, push
myself into the Peter principle, usually because the company's
new, usually because I have no choice. But then I don't
exit fast enough from that role. Yeah, I think that's
like, I. I see what you're saying. The. But I think it's. It's also like,
from an entrepreneurial standpoint, like, you kind of have to figure all of these
things out. And then to the. To your point, like, promoting
yourself into a relevance is. Is, I think, a sign
of success and for two reasons. One, that you've actually built a
team that's competent enough to take things over for you. But also, I would
say one of the major limiting factors that I think exists in small business is
people are just so careful about removing
themselves, thinking like they have some special expertise or knowledge or
some capability in order to do those things, and they tend to hang on to
them for far too long. And maybe it's because they
promoted someone into a level that they weren't really prepared for, and
they got burned by that in some past. Or that they, you know, they.
They just fundamentally feel like, I don't know, I can't give this up, because what
if it goes wrong? Do you think like those two scenarios of like, I
can't give this up because it might go wrong versus, you know, I tried this
once and it really went badly. Did you. Did you see sort of either of
those scenarios? Yeah, for sure. I mean, keep in mind, my
age, I've seen it all, right? And definitely
I have delegated out task
and now I'm better about
measurables and KPIs. You know, in my mind, there's three
management models. There's delegation,
there's micromanagement, and there's abdication.
And, you know, I think the struggle for most
owners is you
at first don't realize it, but you're delegating without
measurables, which is just abdication, and
you get really burned because you just. You bring on this awesome,
awesome person as some marketing vp, whatever, and
they just completely fall down and
maybe it's your fault, maybe they should have said something, but you do that and
you're just like, oh, man. Maybe you shift into micromanagement.
But micromanagement is as destructive to the manager as is to
the managee, and it's mentally exhausting. So you just don't
end up delegating and you're stuck in this role and it's just becoming a
mess. You know, I think really, what a great
manager is somebody that learns that, that you have to delegate
with measurables. That's. That's the only way to properly manage.
But it's tough to get there. And so that's typically when I would find myself
in the Peter principle is, especially early on in my career
where I would burn myself and then I would hold on too tight
the next time and then it would blow up because I was holding on to
too much of that job role. Yeah. Yeah. So much there.
So I think like the, the one of abdication versus delegation.
I think this is a huge, huge problem. Right. Like, I'd be curious on
your feeling on this. I feel like I've been talking about this a lot where,
lately, where people feel. I think there's a.
There's sort of this, this myth in business that's perpetuated by a lot
of business books that focus on enterprise organizations
and, and it maybe holds true in certain circumstances, like at
enterprise level where you have like a VP or C
suite person. And there's this idea of like, I want to hire smart people and
get out of the way. Right. And I think this is a pervasive myth that
is misunderstood in most small and medium business where that is
not that practical. Right. Like the people that you're bringing into these roles
don't come out of, you know, graduate degrees and have MBAs and all
of those things of, you know, intern somewhere and have all this great
experience that they can draw upon. So a lot of owners are like, they put
someone new into a role and it's basically pat them on the head like, hey,
you'll be great. And then they just disappear into the woodwork and go focus on
other things. So of course everyone's going to be disappointed with the results
of that. And I still feel like a lot of
people want to hold on to this idea of I don't want to micromanage
so therefore I'm not going to tell them what to do. And I think this
is where that distinction between abdication and delegation really gets lost
because you end up in abdication zone
because you don't want to be a micromanager when realistically you should be closer
to the micromanagement side in just supporting and helping the person to get
things done. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a ramp up. I,
I think the cold hard reality is, you know, I think I'm
gonna invent numbers here. Let's say 80% of
businesses or you know, 20 people or less,
something like that. I know it's, most businesses are small. Just
I'll give you some context to add to that. Like 90% of the
MSP industry is sub $1 million, which is kind of mind
blowing. Yes. But it also means that first of all, you don't
have the budget to go hire that a player
has the experience. Now you're going to have to make a decision
generally when you hire, either you're going to hire smoked a lot of experience
or you're going to hire somebody that's young and moldable and
ready to get experience. But a lot
of the fire has been lost when you hire the older person.
But what you're getting back is just the sophistication and the experience.
You got to figure out where, what you're going to go for because you're, you're
getting really good on both sides, but they're going to have different
attributes. So rule number one is you don't have the money to hire
yourself. Right. And that's the thing. People think
they're going to go hire another business owner and that's ridiculous. Unless you bring them
own as a. Give them equity. Like that's how you bring in a.
I hate to say rock star. I think that term's dead, isn't it? Dead. I
Don't feel people say rock star anymore. I don't. Not as useful.
LinkedIn. Only then, only then let's say only thing. But I
don't know what the replacement term is for that. Hashtag awesome
owner. But that, that's one problem. I, I think,
I think that people need to
spend a lot more time learning and
understanding the measurables in their company so that they can
better manage. I think people spend too much time
developing, trying to develop the people skills
and they want to have good relationships and they want to lead
and then in that way they think, well, if I have a strong
relationship that where there's open communication I can then
abdicate my management role. Going back to what you were saying
and I'm gonna let this, this, this shining
store shine brightly. Alpha marketing. I'll just say marketing
is the easy one. You know how hard it is to find that
person. Like you just don't have the budget for it. Unless
you're a ten million dollar organization, you don't have the budget to
hire that person. And so you really need to lean more
into. And I think you were saying micromanagement, but I suspect what you meant
was more tracking of progress.
Right? More task management. And
are the numbers trending in the right direction? If the numbers on your
KPI dashboard are green, you need to leave that person alone.
100% agree. Right. If they're yellow, then there's
mentoring, coaching. If they're red, you need to determine did I
miss hire? Do I have the wrong KPIs? Does this person not
have the money, budget, tools they need or, or you know, is
there some unknown out there that need to look at? The red is just tell
you something's wrong. It doesn't tell you what's wrong. The yellow tells you you
probably just need to do some mentoring and the greens tell you
you're doing a good job or unfortunately you're still measuring the wrong
things. Right. And I can have a, I can have a 10 hour
conversation. KPIs. Oh, me too. Yeah, yeah. And I agree, like
this is a big factor that I really try to coach people on and in
their businesses is measure outputs, not inputs. Right. Like I don't care how
busy people are, I want to know how much they've produced. Right. Because like busy
is a very, you know, BS and squishy term. Right. You can be busy all
day and accomplish nothing. So like what are we actually producing results
from? And I think that gives you a lot more to measure. And I
think like if you can use service based leadership approach
of like, I'm curious, what do you need? How can I help you? Like, like
just falling all over the person looking to provide some level of support. As long
as you're not smothering them. Right. But it's not critical feedback and trying to
correct every single tiny mistake that they make in order to help them
to step up because that will just infuriate and frustrate people.
But I think like to your point, that works at all the levels, at
all the colors of that KPI, right? If it's green, you don't need to tell
them what to do. They're probably doing well. It's, you know, what
can, what can we work on? What can we improve? What insights do you have?
Right? Like, like teasing that information out of them and looking
for ways that you can provide additional support. Yellow is,
let's understand this, let's work on this together. What do we not see?
What do you think some of the problems are? Let's have some dialogue and go
back and forth on this. And red is, do you understand this?
And maybe is the number correct? We set this target as this
number. Is it simply impossible? Let's have this discussion. So you're
always at that service level of not telling them you're doing
poorly. You need to do better because you know, no one ever responds to that
type of criticism well and says, oh sure, I'll just, I'll just work harder. Those
60 hour weeks are apparently not enough. Right. So I think there's always a
way to engage with people that is, comes from a place of
support and gives people a clear picture that I'm here to help
you. I'm not here to, you know, discipline you until you get better. You know
that expression whippings will continue until morale. Yes,
I like the beatings, but if I give you, if I were to kind of
put a bow on that as a sound bite, I would say
around that as well as
one thing is, if your KPIs, the KPIs you're
measuring don't change as your company grows and shrinks,
that right there is a red flag. I think
people that have static KPIs that they measure,
they get themselves in a pickle because that green KPI that worked
for you two years ago will destroy you in
the future because as you grow it becomes, it's going to become a problem because
there's some KPIs that could become bad at certain sizes. The other thing is, and
I think people struggle with this is my
strategy is My manager's. Wait,
how is it my strategy I delegate as my
tactics to my manager and that becomes their
strategy. What becomes the they delegate down as their tactics that
become a strategy under them. And so the bigger your
organization, the more like contained the KPI is going to
be. Like, I might if I'm a $10 million MSP,
the only KPI I might want from a help desk is my CSAT.
But if I'm a sub $1 million MSP,
I probably want to see time to close
and I want to see first time close like I want.
I'm going to be closer to the KPIs coming out of the help desk because
I don't have the layers between me and my technicians.
And so their KPIs, the ones I'm looking at are much more raw.
And then when I get to be a large company, I'm
really just looking at the KPIs of my manager, which would be like a CSAT
score. And so just kind of really handling hammering on the KPIs. You really got
to think about the KPIs you're looking at. One is going to dictate where your
company is going to go. Two is going to dictate how your managers try to
cheat on the KPIs. And then three, it's
really going to influence how you manage the people. If you're in a 10
million dollar MSP and you're looking at time to close on
tickets, you're micromanaging. Right? I mean like the
KPIs you're looking at tells you what your management style is going to be. Yeah.
So we've gone into a wicked sidetrack because
as you said, both of us could talk KPIs. Oh yeah. What are we talking
about again? No, no, this is good because like I think this is, this is
actually helpful because it does speak to why people get lost
and they're kind of in the woods, not know what to look at or how
they find some reference for this. And I think like two ways that I typically
see this is KPIs that have been read for six months
and no one seems to really care. Like it's just become the norm. It's like,
you know, whatever. Okay, that it is, like there's always some excuse as to why
it is. And then to that point, like the opposite side of that is
it's also been green for six months. Like good. But like
should we be looking pointless? Some level of improvement here? Yeah. Or maybe you shouldn't
Be tracking it. Maybe. It's a pointless piece of paperwork. I'll share real
quick. I did fire. If I have a minute to share a
story where I fired my service manager because of a KPI
that was red that turned green does sound
an interesting story. Carry on. Yeah, so. So I, I
had this service manager for several months and he maybe actually,
let's say over a year, I think it was. And he kept telling me,
dustin, there's just, we can't get these KPIs. It was, it was the,
the SLAs, right. We can't get our resolution. We can't.
Like, I don't have the staff, I don't have the tools for it. We need
to throw bodies at this problem. Right? Yeah. And so, and so I was just
like, man, I would look at the numbers. We were doing sea level at the
time. And so we were able to compare numbers with the CLI, SLI
numbers and all that. And we were already over budget on labor. And I was
like, man, we need more labor. This is crazy. We're already over
budget. And he went on vacation for a
week. And I said, you know what, I brought the help
desk in. I said, look, guys, we're gonna, we're gonna show
ourselves. We can turn this screen. If we get
these SLAs green by the end of this week, I'm gonna give everybody a fifteen
hundred dollar check. Done. If we get, just get a
green, I'm gonna just, everybody, you'll see, you'll get an extra
deposit in your account from the payroll company. Fifteen hundred dollars
per person. Because that's how big of the problem it was.
And that service manager came back and I fired him that next Monday. Because we
were green, right. And we were legitimately
green. Okay. I was going to ask you, like. Yes. Was the name number gamed?
Yeah. Okay. No, I went through every ticket. Yeah. And I said, because
it was a lot of money, right? I think it was like $15,000 or something.
I'd like 10x. And so I went through it and every
single ticket was properly closed. It was documented.
They had found ways around the problem. They figured out what's
the big issue, what's the small issue? What's the artificial obstacle that
I'm using? Because you put that much money in front of people for just one
week of work, they're going to get it done. And so I fired him on
that Monday because I was like, you told me this was impossible. I
put money in front of them. And of course his arguments, well, what If I
wish I had had those resources, I said, but you never asked me for
anything other than hiring more staff. Like, like your role as
manager just come to me with some solutions. But you never had solutions.
You just said, I need to hire more people. And so that's why
I fired somebody when the KPI went green. So I think
that's insightful too, because I think there's a mindset
shift that, that speaks to, right? Like those people that say that are
in a defeatist attitude of like, this just isn't possible, right?
And they assume that to be true, right? So that's their
internal narrative. That person will never be able to convince the rest of
the, of the group, like the team that they lead, that like, maybe we can
fight our way through this. Let's just find some creative solutions. Or just as
you said, like dig down and understand this on a ticket by ticket basis. Like,
we're all doing Q reviews and figure out how we can close 50% of our
tickets. Right? Like, that's the type of mindset shift that I think is really
practical. And I see this all the time where those sort of grizzled,
you know, grumpy service managers are just like, oh, this
isn't possible and all these clients are jerks, blah, blah, blah. Like that
mindset shift I think is incredibly important to not
fall into this trap, right? Well, absolutely.
The Griff service manager, if I remember correctly, one of
the ways they solved it was because I whiteboard it with them every morning.
We whiteboarded and I would always ask them just one question. What
obstacles are keeping you from success? And if I
remember correctly, one of the obstacles was like the Resolution
Plan 1, one of the SLAs, they said it's actually impossible
to ever get green. The way that things are configured, like
there's nothing we can do. It's just going to be green, it's going to be
red just by, by the, the formula being used.
And so we all came up with a reasonable update to the formula.
Nothing that been presented to me and we all agreed it was a fair
formula. We updated it to. And that right there increased about like 10, 10 or
11%. And then they only had to go the other halfway to get that one
green. Like sometimes you just got a whiteboard the problem and say,
is there a clerical issue that's keeping you from being
successful? And techs hate that. They hate the bureaucracy.
Yeah, I agree, they do. And I like that approach because in a lot of
cases, like I like using SLA in order
to reverse engineer the process, right? Like you do a value stream map and
understand like, how long does the ticket stay then spend in each of these stages
and why is that? Right? Like, you know, we, we can't
hit 30 minutes because this process, it requires this handoff
and this person, like it goes into this queue and gets, and it waits. Like
if we just put it into the role of this person to do this queue
and send an email to the, to, to somebody else, to the client, like,
boom. Like all of a sudden you've cut our SLA in half, right? So I
like using it as a barometer. It's usually like where I started
consulting with, with clients is like, okay, your SLA
says that it takes you 46, 46 hours
to acknowledge a ticket. And they're like, that can't be true. That's not true.
It's like, okay, well let's understand the process because the system thinks that's how long
it takes and that's what's important here. So let's understand why it thinks that's the
case. Right? Okay, well that's
KPI solved right there. We're done with that. There we go.
So, and I think like a couple of these things I think are relevant to
this, right? So let's, let's pivot to
building a bit of a career ladder for people, right? I think one of
the issues that I think a lot of MSPs make, and I'm sure
either you made this mistake or certainly have seen this happen where
they're just promoting the most senior person that's been around
to become the service manager. Classic, classic mistake. Yeah. And
it's such an error. Like I get under. I understand why
people do this because it seems, seems to make some logical
sense. And even I see people get caught up in sort of
loyalty of like, well, I would have to make this person the service manager because
they've worked here the longest. Like, no, that has no relevance to it at all.
In a lot of cases, the most senior and certainly the most technical people in
your organization have zero interest in managing people. So don't make
them manage people. Everyone's going to end up unhappy in that situation. Well, it's like
if you, if you're into NBA, you watch NBA, does
anybody actually think every player on that court would be a
fantastic coach? But they're the most incredible
basketball players in the world. You cannot find a better player
than in the NBA in the US when it comes to basketball.
So according to the logic of 99% of MSP owners.
Every NBA player is going to be a fantastic coach. Yeah.
Or like, you know, this person has been on the team for nine years, therefore,
we have to make them center. It's like, well, I don't know if that's a
good idea. Right. It's. Their time has come. Yes.
They're also like, they're probably. You bring out the sword and unite them
because they've done the work. They're ready to go. Yeah, no, I.
I definitely. Well, that actually is a good segue into
where I promoted that one person who
demoted himself afterwards. Yep. Where,
you know, let's call him Frank. He. He had
been with me for several years, and he said, hey, I want to try
being a project manager. I just want to see how this
goes. And this was a real project manager, not the project manager that's also
the only project technician in the department. Like, this person actually
would have tasks and timelines and people. And so I
said, you know what, Frank? You've been with me long enough. Let's try it.
And I said, if something doesn't work out, let's talk. And
so we tried and we tried, and he came back to me.
It was like three months, and we were having lunch. I was checking in with
him because I used to do quarterly lunches with my staff. I would do one
lunch per staff. That's how I would do my. My touch base. And
he's like, you know what? I don't like managing people. I just don't
like it. I like to just be behind my computer and get stuff done. And
I said, okay, great. What do you want to do? And so he said, I
just want to go back to my old job. And I said, done, done. It
can. It can be effective today. And I said, how do you want to communicate
this to the team? I said, you tell me how you want to communicate
this, and then we'll. That's how we're going to do it. And so he said,
I'm just. I want to be blunt. I want to just come out and say,
you know what, guys? I've decided I like just doing the work. I don't like
managing the work. And that's what we said. And to me, that was an
incredibly emotionally mature way of doing it. And I
think what's important. What's important here is also that I'm not saying
that I'm gonna. I'm not gonna own this. But as an organization, he felt comfortable
that he wouldn't be. It wouldn't be embarrassing for
him. I think that's massive. That, that, that psychological
safety. To be able to come to you and say, I don't think this is
working. Like, can I do something else? I think that's huge. So like
one of the things, like, I think this is a good segue back in,
looping back on this. But like, how did you manage the payroll situation? Like, did
he get an increase to go into that role? Like, how did you. No, I
think it was, I think we agree, like
a few months to figure it out. To figure, like to.
I don't think I had an immediate pay bump to it. Okay.
Because it was just high risk and I think we both knew
it. I think that's where you can definitely get yourself into a
trap, is giving somebody an instant.
Well, my word of advice here is if somebody
wants some type of pay raise, then you
can at least temporarily give 100 pay raise around
measurables. In other words, okay, great. If you do these things and you're
hitting these numbers, then you're going to get 100% of this amount
of money. And if they don't, they're going to know that they might not be
a fit. But, but you can definitely get yourself in a pickle. If you give
them their, you know, their base comp
goes up, then what are you going to do? Exactly. That's a problem.
No, so I, I think like you, you handled that perfectly. That's exactly what I,
What I like to see in organizations when they do this is when they're evaluating
new leaders is, look, just give them, just tell them they're going to be team
lead for a temporary period. That's right. Make them a manager.
Right. Like just, just sort of give them some ceremonial title and certainly
don't give them a raise yet and act. And I think you guys were very
smart to say like, this is a trial period, like, let's try this out. Because
in a lot of cases, especially in technical organizations, people just
look up and think, okay, if I want to make more money and have more
responsibility, well, I guess I need to go into management. And that's not
technically true, but it is true to everyone else sort of by
sentiment and feeling because they don't see other alternatives. And we
don't really do a good job in the industry about talking what is the
career ladder? Like, how can you progress in the organization both in the technical
capacity or into the operation side? So people just like, well,
yeah, I guess I want more money, so I want to be a manager. And
then in three months, like their team is Depressed and unhappy
with the lack of leadership and how critical their, their new manager
is. The manager is, all he's doing is technical work because he's,
he hates all of the management stuff and just wants to avoid it entirely. And
the owner is pissed off because the team is doing poorly and the manager is
grumpy and, and just doing technical work. So it's a disaster. Yeah.
Tie, tie the money. I, maybe long term, the
comp, the base comp goes up, but definitely tie the,
tie it into some type of deliverables.
I feel like that's the safest way. And aligning your staff
with success for the company means financial success for them.
Yep. So, yeah, I think you're right about. Don't put
yourself into a corner. Yeah. But I think just like the practical way
of having an adult conversation about it, like, let's try this for three months. And
then you check back in, you're like, how are things going? Like, do you like
this? And they're like, yeah, it's awesome. I love it. And you think you
both like. They like it. You feel like they're doing well. Great. Here's a manager
title and here's a, here's, here's a, here's a pay raise to go with that
because you're, you're, you're owning this. I think a lot of people have this,
like, again, like, it's not, it's not a counterintuitive idea
to say, like, if you're giving them more responsibility, you should probably give them
more money. Like, I get why people feel that way, but let's be realistic. Like,
you're just carving out 20% of their day and giving them administrative
duties instead of technical duties. And if they're good at that, then great. Like, we
can increase that and make them a manager. But you know, to, to just
sort of automatically pull trigger and say, well, let's give them an extra
$30,000 and, and this title and then to,
to walk that back is really difficult. Oh, you got to fire them. That's the
only thing they're gonna like. Yeah. You either, like, you can't because if you're going
to like, take away that salary, they're going to quit. Right. And I think that's
the difficult situation. And the other part that you hit on that is massive in
this is how is this perceived by the rest of the company? So what is
the narrative that you want to tell people about why that event happened? I think
is really, really important. So that was super smart of you guys to manage
that and the fact that you asked them straight up of like, how do you
want this to be communicated to the team? I think is a huge benefit
to that. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I
think that's super, like practical around sort of like ways to kind
of build that career ladder of getting people into those roles in a safer
fashion. The other thing that we wanted to touch on here,
so you've lived in the MSP world as well, and now you're on the vendor
side of the world and you kind of suggested there's a ton of things that
you've learned on the vendor side that you would have loved to have known about
marketing as an msp. So this is an area that I think a lot of
people traditionally struggle with. If you want to share some
wisdom on the things that you've learned along the way here in that transition, that
would be, I think, really valuable. Yeah. So some background. I
owned an MSP for almost 20 years and
you know, we were small and then I grew to a
pretty nice size, shrunk with COVID kind of
grew it back up, sold it, and
then it transitioned to being an MSP vendor with giant rocket ship.
And it really is amazing. I think part of it isn't just being a
vendor. It's just stepping away from the old company and leaving
that machinery behind and having to rebuild things has really helped
free my mind. The other thing is as a vendor,
I'm really in product sales. As an msp, I was in service sales.
And if MSP that's sub a million, for example,
really, if you're sub. If you're, if you're 3, 4, 5 million or less,
if you think for a second you're not selling yourself as the owner
versus the process, you're lying to yourself. Y. A 10,
15, $20 million MSP sells process,
a 5 million, a $2 million MSP sells the owner
like 100%. Again, you're insane if you don't think that's true.
And so as the vendor, a couple of things is man can
overemphasize good old KPIs. You need to be
tracking if you're going to be going hard on social media.
You need to be tracking your impressions. You need to be tracking what type of
posts work. You can't just hope it works. You right?
I don't even care if you syndicated content. Syndicated content can work great for an
MSP for social media, because it's not. It doesn't rely on
SEO, right? But you need to be tracking what works.
The other thing that I Think msps just
don't want to believe is that cold calling works. Like all
the industry numbers are clear that
it is tedious and it can be expensive either in the
owner's time or a sales exec's time. Cold calling
still works and people don't want
to put the hours into the telephone needed to increase the
size of their customer base. Even as an msp,
when we grew really quickly like before, I got a little lazy about
it. It was because I was on the phone for three hours a day. I
would put a sign on my door making calls and from 9 to 12 I
was just making, I was on a dollar making phone calls. And that's how we
get that initial bump. And so that's definitely a big deal.
The, the last thing is people you
have to make a decision if you
want cost effective and slow or fast and
expensive. Sales is fast and expensive.
Marketing is cost effective and slow.
And so for us we've been slowly but methodically
increasing our marketing presence is starting to just now really hit.
Now to get us here I had to do a bunch of active or proactive
sells. Making phone calls, going to conferences, shaking
hands. It's extremely expensive but it does work.
And over time you need to fund marketing so you
can transition into that more cost effective but slower
burn funnel which is marketing. And I just
don't think people look at marketing properly. They look at it as a three month
game. It's a one, two year game. Yep.
Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Cool. All
right, well anything we haven't covered either marketing
related or, or people in process, we can, we can dip back. We can talk
KPIs if you want. No, I'm joking. Next time
we can talk dashboards. Dashboards 2000.
Well, one thing I would say when it came to building out a,
you know, a track for your staff, something I learned in
the current company, definitely in the last company was you have a sales funnel.
You should always have a hiring funnel. You really should. What
is it? Always be selling? Abs Abi. Always be
interviewing? Yeah, you should always be interviewing. It doesn't be once a day but once
a week. You should really interview once a week somebody for some position
and then the next thing is everybody should have. Even if it's
just one step or promotion path. If somebody's a technical
resource, you're right. Have a technical lead position even
if it's unfilled. If you have a dispatcher, have
a service coordinator position available. If you have a service
coordinator, have a service manager position available. Always
have one slot available to the person
because otherwise they're going to quit when they hit the cap. Yep.
Right. So I would say that. What's next? Right? Like, what is possible?
What could. What should I be striving for? Right. Well, most
msps don't have a next. That's the problem. Like you're saying. Yeah,
exactly. No. Great advice. All right, Dustin, this is
great. Appreciate all the back and forth and. And some
insights. So appreciate your time, man. This was awesome. Thanks for inviting me. I
hope I get to do it with you again. Cool. All right, take care.