MSP owners: Why do we make our lives so hard?

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Welcome to Episode 253 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• MSP owners: Why do we make our lives so hard?: Business owners often hinder their own success by running a marathon while carrying an anchor, meaning they knowingly hold themselves back through overwork, limited thinking, or mismanagement.
• The most powerful MSP marketing question to ask any lead: Asking this is a great way to prioritise your leads and create a follow-up list for the future.
• How to do marketing within the CIS security framework: One of your challenges is making ordinary business owners and managers realise how important good security is. Find out how you can achieve this using the Center for Internet Security controls. My guest, Zach Kromkowski, explains all.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Sean, who runs as MSP in Houston, wants to learn more about AppSumo and what it has to offer.

MSP owners: Why do we make our lives so hard?

You and I as business owners, we are in this for the long run, right? Whether this is your first year in business or your 30th, you know that owning a business is a marathon and not a sprint. So that being said, why do we constantly make life hard for ourselves? Far too many MSPs decide to run the marathon while carrying an anchor. It’s nuts. Let’s talk about why we do this and how to give ourselves a much easier life, yet still achieving the things that we want from our business.

So I was listening to this book a few months back. It was written by the guy who built up the Burger King chain back in the 1950s and 60s if you’re interested. It’s called The Burger King. It was, okay, not the most instructive business book in the world, but I do believe you can get huge value from any book as long as you get one big idea from it. Do you agree with me on that? Anyway, my big takeaway from this book was a phrase I’ve never heard before, but I instantly understood what it meant.

Business owners make life hard for themselves by running a marathon while carrying an anchor.

And I completely relate to this, do you? It means that even though we know it’s not a sprint race and we know we have to keep going for years and years and years, we seem to noble ourselves in as many ways as we can. Perhaps it’s by continuing to work 60 hours a week despite being surrounded by very competent staff who are actually looking for more things to do. Or perhaps it’s by not taking enough vacation, enough holiday time each year, which means that when we do take a break, we are utterly exhausted. Or perhaps it’s by thinking too small.

There are many ways that we hold ourselves back and don’t think this is just an MSP thing. All business owners everywhere in all sectors do exactly the same thing. But the thing is, the clues to long-term success are there if you go looking for them. Just listen back to any of the fantastic interviews that I’ve done in the MSP Marketing Podcast over the last five years, and you’ll hear very, very successful people talking about how they broke out of the “hell phase” of running a business, where you’re trapped doing 60 hours a week, and they entered a new phase where they’re working primarily on the business rather than in it. And often the massive growth of their business starts to happen at exactly that moment. And this is not really a surprise – there is a direct correlation.

So let me ask you – maybe it’s worth you pausing this podcast or this YouTube video to ask yourself this question – what do you do to hold yourself back? What’s the anchor that you are carrying during your marathon? The first step is to identify it, label it as what it is, and th