I often get people posting the “I have red hair because God knew I needed a warning label” memes on my Facebook page – and it IS true about certain things, but not nearly as much as many would like to believe.
Being annoyed, aggravated, pissed off is not productive, and I’ve worked on myself over the years to be a lot more chill about the petty, everyday nonsense that gets most people’s panties in a wad – and to be more patient, instead of getting annoyed. I have a lot of systems and screening mechanisms in place to prevent such aggravations from entering my day, period.
I don’t wait to see if the new sales guy is gonna make it. They start not following protocol, they’re gone, which saves me a lot of long-term angst and aggravation, preserving my energy for a more productive outlet. The minute a vendor starts flaking out, they’re gone and replaced. So it goes for everything in my life and business. So, what DOES actually chap my arse?
Mostly non-performance toward a meaningful goal. I do NOT like to lose. Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser. Being “good” at anything requires ambition AND practice – and I’ve never seen the merit in putting my efforts toward that outcome.
But it is my experience that many small MSPs out there do not share my passionate annoyance with failing to grow their business profitably and WIN. I’m stunned at how casual they are about no growth or slow growth, failing to get a productive money team in place (sales and marketing), failing to implement an actual marketing plan and work ON the business to prepare it to scale. They tolerate low performance.
Everyone says they want to be productive but have not defined what “productive” means for an entrepreneur. I can assure you ENTREPRENEURIAL PRODUCTIVITY is entirely different than employee productivity, or how most of the people walking about think of it. The average person looks at their week and feels good if they got up on time, worked out every day, didn’t cheat on the diet and got the laundry done and the closet cleaned out.
The ENTREPRENEUR looks at their week and measures productivity in achieved OUTCOMES like revenue generated, qualified leads generated, new clients acquired, marketing plans successfully initiated and new systems implemented for scale and growth and is SERIOUSLY AGGRAVATED when those goals are not met.
That might mean you skip a workout, eat a bad meal, fail to get all the paperwork done, fail to return a call, etc. Most cannot come to terms with this because they approach work as an employee or manager, not as an entrepreneur. They are aggravated when someone like me comes along and points that out, telling them they are failing their business by NOT implementing growth plans, marketing, sales, etc. They want to INSIST they CAN’T grow or initiate a marketing plan because they’re too busy, too broke, too old, too anything. They get aggravated by that message, not their failure to grow.
Of course, this presumes you actually HAVE set goals and commitments to grow the business. If you don’t, and you’re randomly running through the weeks, months and years without such a plan, well, good luck with that. As Zig said, if you don’t have a goal, you’ll hit it every time.
NEW For Small MSPs Sub $1 Million: Our brand-new MSP Launch Academy gives you the BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT BLUEPRINT to scale your MSP to $1 million+ quickly and profitably. Discover more at www.MSPlaunchAcademy.com.
