[40] – Special Guest: Ian Luckett – Innovate To Success

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts Rayanne Bucianico and Chris Tim. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Bucianico. Hey, Rayanne, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great today, Chris. It's a beautiful day here in sunny Florida. How are things in the UK? It's a wonderful day here in sunny Berries and Edmonds in England. So Rayanne, with us today, we have a very special guest, somebody that's become a great friend of mine over the last sort of few months, and I'm really, you know, privileged to have him on our podcast.

So it's Mr. Ian Luckett from Innovate to Success. Hi, Chris. How are you doing? I'm very good, thanks.

Thanks very much to yourself, Chris, and Rayanne for having me on the show. Great to be here. Nice to meet you. Cheers. So, Ian, do you want to just, for our listeners, just sort of tell us a little bit about you, who you are, a little bit about Innovate to Success, and what you do?

Sure. Yeah. No, and that's great. And yeah, essentially, we, you know, we could be called a business coaching consultancy. We help build profitable IT and MSP businesses, essentially, that's what we do.

We help techie business owners to work on their business rather than in it. And what I mean by that is that, you know, I'm not technical, but it wasn't until I left corporate in 2017 that I realized that my great skill and passion and kind of energy flows towards organizing complex problems, like building businesses strategy, lining it up, working out what to do next, and, you know, keeping people on track. So the last two, about last two and a half years now, we've just been working in the IT and the MSP space, service-based tech businesses, and helping them with their, you know, the total solution, sales, marketing, strategy, leadership, which I absolutely love, you know, finance, commercial, business performance. The whole thing, it's all part of our total model. And you know, essentially, what we really do is we help, we build business owners' confidence to help them to grow and scale their businesses, because 90% of the clients and people who come in my world are techies.

And you know, they've got this whole business thing going on, and it's just uncomfortable, to be honest. It's just a bit uncomfortable. So yeah, that's what we do. So just a quick question, do you work one-on-one with these companies, or do you, you know, do some sort of peer groups, or, you know, how are you working with them? I mean, is it like, you know, you consult with one company at a time, or do you consult with many of them, or do you teach courses?

You know, what are some of your processes? So the main business is what we call our mastermind program, which does involve a peer group. However, you know, we do work one-on-one. We have private clients. We have clients who we help specifically with leadership challenges.

And this is quite interesting, because I always thought that this was going to be a thing for the larger organizations, but I even get people who've got one or two people, you know, people in their organization with leadership challenges. Leadership is a bit like being mums and dads, you've just got to make sure the kids behave themselves. And, you know, when I was 26, which was a few years ago now, I was managing 50 people working for what was then, or what is now, Virgin Media, the, you know, the main broadband company in the UK. And I cut my leadership teeth very early on. So we help people, normally it's in the group.

The power of the group coaching is incredible, because today, for example, today we've just finished a 90-day strategic planning session. We went through, there was nine of them on the call. We went through their whole, with seven key questions for the last 90 days, and the value they've got from learning from each other and how their different businesses are different levels is just so powerful. And then I mix all of that and the action points of that into their own plans. Everybody who works with us has their own plan, because everybody wants to do different things basically, scale, grow, and have different challenges.

And yes, so in answer to the question, we kind of work, we work with whatever works, but the real power is in the peer group. And the peer group that, I mean, you're based in the UK, so I'm assuming, are these all kind of face-to-face, or do you do them over Zoom, and can they be done worldwide? So that was my COVID present. Before COVID, I was meeting people, shaking their hands, signing business, helping them out like everybody else. When COVID came all of a sudden, I'd just moved office, I'd just recruited an apprentice, and the world came tumbling down.

Well, it didn't, because I very much align with people like, I align with people like Warren Buffett. That's a laugh, isn't it? I think like Warren Buffett. I think where's the opportunity, where can we help more people? We need to adapt and change in what we need to do.

So we had to flick the business literally on a sixpence online. And with that, by the back end of last year, you can see in the background, this is a photograph, I'm not really there at the moment, the mastermind suite, which is our office, and we created an amazing high-tech hybrid experience so that we can coach online. We've got the proper conference microphones, 4K projectors, great experience, so the guys can be online and have a great experience, hear everybody in the room, see everybody in the room. We have three or four different cameras at any one time, so they feel like they're in the room. Or if you want to be in the room and come and eat the biscuits, then you can come and do that and make more part of it.

So we've really, a lot of people go, well, you either need to be in the room or we do it all online. But I've just sort of said, look, guys, these are the results you're likely to get if you implement and you integrate what we do. You've got an option to either be in the room or be online. The experience I'm going to create for you is going to be world class. So however you want to show up, just come up, but when you show up, make sure you show up.

Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Chris. I was just going to actually translate for our American friends. When you said biscuits, you actually meant cookies, right? Sorry.

Cookies and candy. We get the whole tea and biscuits thing. Cookies and candy. Cookies and candy. Yes.

We have lots of those too. Hey, Ian, I'm just curious. Like you said, the whole world went upside down and there are plenty of businesses out there, many struggling and some trying really, really hard to change things kind of like you did. So are you seeing an uptick in people looking for consulting, coaching, that sort of thing? Or are you seeing that a downturn where people are a little bit more conservative with spending their dollars?

You know, what's the trend? That's a really that's a really interesting question and one that's a little bit difficult to answer. And so coming to somebody like me and putting your hand up, whether it be on LinkedIn, virtually in person and saying I need a hand is a big thing. And in actual fact, all my clients, strangely enough, are all men. I'd love to have some women in the in the community because there's just sometimes there's a little bit too much testosterone around and I've been in boardrooms like that before and we need some leveling and, you know, that would be great.

But, you know, putting your hand up, you know, being a man, asking for a bit of help and things like that can be tricky. And for me, the more I resonate with my target prospects and and, you know, I very much align with your amazing mentor Zig Ziglar that if you help enough other people get what they want, then you'll get what you want. And I know I kind of put them first and and that's paying off. The reason it pays off is because people, you know, I don't I don't sell to anyone. I like them to buy from me.

And if they buy from me because they align with the values and they think I can help you, then my conversion rate goes through the roof. I help more people. They love more people and I get to put the prices up. I said that's that's kind of the business model. But so, you know, it's very, very value led first.

And when people, you know, are out there looking, you know, it's really it's really strange. I am going to answer your question, but it is really strange on how long this takes to get engaged with some people. It takes years, some people it can take weeks, some people it can take, you know, months. It just depends where they're at, at their journey. And I think, you know, the a lot of MSP businesses think they all do the same thing.

So they kind of like don't really care. And also what I've learned with, you know, working with with Chris and some of the other guys in this space in the UK, you can actually run a pretty crap MSP business just by being in business and doing no marketing and not really doing anything any special. You just kind of like don't lose clients and just keep churning on. But you can run an amazing one if you put some effort into it. So there's a lot of people who are quite happy just to just plod along.

And if there's some people that have got some challenges around their people, their leadership, their strategy, normally people come to me because they lose a bit of focus and they need a bit of help and support and they need, you know, I just need a plan. But I don't sell plans. I do sell plans, but I don't sell plans because plans boring, isn't it? You know, I sell leads and then they come because they want leads and then they realize they need a plan pretty much like yourself. You know, they would experience, you know, with a PSA.

It just feels a bit clunky. It just doesn't feel right. What do I need? How can I improve this? Now, if you went out there and said I sell software integration, they're probably not going to get too excited because they deal with it all day long.

But if you said I'm going to help your business become more efficient, more profitable, more, you know, be able to scale more and the people are going to enjoy working here more, that's a different story. That's a different message. So it's very much, very much look at the messaging on on how to help them. But so I think there's always, you know, there's always different types of people when you when you're heading through, whether it be recession or depression or whatever you want to call it, there's people that will hide away and then there'll be people will be going, come on, this is the time to spend on your marketing. This is the time to spend.

And now is the time to invest. And I say to my people, you're actually not investing in your business, you're investing in yourself, because if you're learning these skills in sales, marketing, you know, I use my sales skills to buy a dog about a year ago in the middle of a pandemic when dogs were going like hotcakes. But I've got this guy on the phone and I wasn't getting off it until he'd sold me a dog. But I use my sales training that I've been taught to do that. So it kind of helps you for life, really.

And that's that's the kind of essence that I like to work with. Ian, you mentioned earlier on about PSAs, so I was just kind of wondering in terms of the people that you're coaching or people that you're seeing, you know, are you finding it a trend more towards, you know, more mature businesses are using PSA tools or is there a mix of both? Or do you see people kind of, you know, come to you with with no kind of tool set or no, no PSA tool specifically? I mean, what do you what is it's really interesting. There's this really big stigma around the PSA tool.

I'm not big enough for a PSA tool, you know, and how and how this kind of works. Now, you know, the reason that, you know, that you and I are friends today is because I wanted to learn a little bit more about what you do and how you can help my clients because they're your clients as well. So we'll help them in different ways. Before I met you, I had a client who was what I would call a small MSP. All of a sudden, he's announced to the group he's deploying connect wise and to a gasp to to many businesses, two or three times his size.

And and I was really interested in what this how this was going to pan out and what was going to work. And I said, can you afford it? And he said, yes. And so he says, I've just increased the profitability of my business by 40 percent. And I went, wow.

At that time, I met yourself, Chris, and we'd had a few chats about it was the news or said, look, guys, the reason I do this is because so many people have got these tools and they just don't know how to use them. So what then happened was another client in the mastermind group got his little brain going because he was about two or three times the size of the guy just installed connect wise. And his view was, I'm not big enough for a PSA tool. So he went he's he's what I call one of my implementers. And he went down a rabbit hole and he didn't go all the way down because we pulled him back out again.

And he's just implemented a PSA tool. Can't remember which one it was. Changed his life. He said, wow, we can just operate more. We can operate more effectively, efficiently, productively, profitable, profitably, you know, more profit.

Forget the words out. Right. And and I think there's this there's this stigma that a PSA tools for the big boys. However, having said that. I will I'll rewind back to another covid present, which was a 20 million dollar MSP in Australia connected me last year because you helped me out and we had a look at some of their systems in their processes and 45 staff, as I say, 20 minutes, 20 million Aussie dollar.

We were helping them with some pretty fundamental stuff in their business. It's going to help them take them to the next level that I was not expecting to find. So it's really, really interesting that you can go into different levels of business from a couple of hundred thousand pound up to a couple of million pounds. And it's never all done and dusted. Bolton braces, everything's tickety boo and working really well.

So, you know, we've just changed our CRM. OK, so we're you know, we're a relatively small company. It's very it's a very simple model as such. But this new CRM is going to help us on board more clients, help us deliver great coaching, help us to keep a track on what people are doing, to remind them to attend the events and everything like this. And literally, it's just the automations have blown my mind what we can do because it's just easy and it's there.

So. So, yeah, I always now it's kind of a standard question. What PSA tools you use? We don't. Why not?

Which one? Talk to Chris. You know, those those sorts of conversations and just learn about what it what it what it is that they do and how they can help you, because it's not just a tool for the sake of having a tool, it's going to help you grow and scale. And and I think kind of just moving on to that, you know, kind of back into my world, you can't grow a business unless it's systemized. OK, you know, McDonald's is the largest small business in the world because you can go anywhere in the world and have the same burger and the same experience there or thereabouts because they do everything the same.

Now, OK, we don't sell ourselves. It's the same with MSPs. We look at different things to make a stand out from the crowd. But the way you operate should be standardized. And that's what the PSA does.

And if you've got someone who's got standardized procedures for their operations, they're also going to have standardized procedures for sales, marketing, client onboarding, strategy, you know, appraisal systems for their staff and all of these foundations of a great business. So it's a really good practice to have. And that's why I'm a big, a big fan of the whole thing, really, just to make sure that people have got that, you know, that that mentality really in business. Here in the United States, we have a ton of, you know, business coaches, MSP coaches, peer groups. I can think of three or four separate peer groups here in the United States.

And I don't believe that I've seen your group, your mastermind group here in the United States yet. But, you know, so tell me, you know, are there a lot of other groups, you know, like yours? Do you have a lot of competition, you know, in the UK? Are you like if somebody says, hey, I need an I need an MSP coach. Do they always think Ian Lockett or is your name one of a few that gets handed around?

I think right now, a year ago, you wouldn't I wouldn't even have come up on the spectrum, probably because I may not have been marketing as tight in the niche and showing up in the niche and understanding. And while people are listening to this, what I want them to really take away from this is, are you now serving every business or are you serving a particular niche or a sector? And I and I am so we used about three years ago, we were very much into tech businesses, but that includes software, hardware, all sorts of different businesses. The niche wasn't tight enough. So I had to go tighter when we did that.

And we're now playing, you know, playing and enjoying, you know, collaborating with other business coaches as well. We all do things differently. We all do things differently. People buy from people. And if I go back to the kind of the doctor analogy, if people get my values, they understand how I am.

We might slip out a little swear word every now and then. And I'm going to tell him like it is, then we'll get on fire. If someone's a little bit reserved and they might not want to kind of air their dirty laundry in public and or with, you know, with the group or whatever, then then we're not going to get on. And I'm absolutely cool with that. The thing that we pride ourselves on is not focusing on one part of business.

So everybody wants sales and marketing. OK, absolutely. No, no, no doubt about it. They don't. They need a system to grow the business.

And that's what we do. And because we've been, you know, because we've come out of corporate growing multimillion pound blue chip companies in the UK, we understand that you've got to have your leadership, your team building and our profit builder system is a five step model that helps you with strategy, your sales and your marketing, your people planning, your finance, commercial and business performance reporting, because those are all the things you need. And the reason that I know this and kind of say this is because if I gave most MSPs a ton of leads, they wouldn't know what to do with them. They wouldn't be able to close them. They wouldn't know the sales.

And then the next thing is because they haven't got a proper systemized business, probably with a good PSA, they're going to overwhelm everybody. They're going to get busy, provide poor customer service and everyone's going to churn. So how, you know, how good is that? So when we work with anybody, we use a total approach to the business and we have a scoring mechanism so we can tell the maturity of your business and where you're at. So you might have a really great team, but if you've got if you're marketing out of niche and your marketing is really off point and very generic, you're just going to sound like everybody else.

So, you know, with a lot of the things I've seen, obviously, over in the UK and over here, I've met up with people who just focus on marketing. And that's great because I just don't focus on marketing. If someone says I need marketing support, I'll provide, you know, I say, go and go and work with this guy for a little while and see how you get on with that. If they've got everything else all organized, but nine times out of 10, they won't have had the rest of it organized. And that's where we help them with the whole plan.

And you see, so I honestly believe I'm going to put it out there. I believe we're providing something a bit unique right now. And it's and it's it's you know, if you said who are my competition, I'm going to struggle to say someone's doing exactly the same thing as me right now. Good for you. Yeah, that's what I thought.

But, you know, but also competition is healthy and I encourage it. And, you know, and I also like to meet up because I learn I'm actually in a peer group myself with over 100 other coaches in the UK. So when I went and got my coach, I said, well, who do I need? I need one of the most expensive coaches, coach who knows about coaching programs, how to deliver excellence, how to innovate and to continue, you know, driving excellence through tomorrow. And I wouldn't, you know, I'm a hypocrite myself if I wasn't in a peer group.

And I've got I've got officially probably two and a half coaches myself who support me in the business. Which do you ever benchmark? Do you get you know, do you do any benchmarking with your peer groups, your mastermind group, you know, like either financials or service desk metrics? Do you do any benchmarking or is that not on your radar? Is this across the clients you mean within the peer group?

Yes. Yeah. So we have our own scoring mechanism, which is called our bitrate score. And when they come in, they get a score and it's basically a percentage on how mature and how advanced their business is. It doesn't go into the specifics of the service desk, but it covers off things like vision and values and the leadership and the processes and your sales and marketing and all of those sort of things.

And yeah, we we we we we benchmark against that. But the most important thing for that is, you know, people say to me, how do I know this is going to work? And I say, well, we score you on month one and then month two, we score you again and your month and your score will go up. And then guess what's going to happen month three. And then they see where they're progressing.

And it helps me to prioritize support and push content to them that's going to help them. And they're going to they can see the progression in their business. And it feels different if everyone today through the through the review we were doing was saying, I just get this whole thing that you've been talking about, specific messaging is resonating now. I'm getting more conversations on LinkedIn. I'm having more opportunities to talk to people because they're more specific.

And I say this to everybody who comes into my, you know, my funnel, for want of a better phrase, you wouldn't be talking to me if I was a standard business coach. And they say, no, I wouldn't. So I said, so why is everyone talking to you if you're a standard MSP? And they go, hmm, never thought about it like that. I say, it's really good.

How would you like to start? Yeah, I mean, and I really like, you know, what you were saying about competitors and how we can all work together. I mean, you know, in just the space that Ryan and I are in, there's, you know, there's a bunch of people that do the same thing and we all differentiate ourselves in different ways. We all do things differently, you know, and our market is really niche. But we're all, you know, on the whole, we're all pretty much working fairly well together.

So, you know, and I'll find that with MSPs, too, just in general, you know, they the good MSPs are those who don't see others as competitors. Yeah, 100 percent. We can actually work with each other. We can we can learn from each other and leverage from each other and learn best practices from each other. And those are the MSPs that tend to grow their businesses, tend to 100 percent, you know, survive more in business than those who think otherwise.

Yeah. You remember the SPS user groups? I mean, they were worldwide, you know, back in the early 2000s, you know, when SPS was all the rage, right? You know, 2003 came out and, you know, it was like and so everybody belonged to a user group. And I ran a user group here in the Tampa Bay area.

And most of the time people would join in. We would learn together. You know, somebody would bring in a server and, you know, we would build it and then we would break it and then we would fix it. And, you know, we would set up, you know, all these different services and and kind of really get in there and learn it together. And then there was always the one, you know, that one guy, I'm not going to give away my secret sauce, you know, to a bunch of my competitors.

And, you know, OK, well, you know, we'll see you another time then. But, you know, when we've built lifelong friendships as a result, and many of them, especially the smaller companies, the smaller MSPs, I think they get a lot of value out of it because, you know, they can see, hey, this neighbor of mine, you know, one, he's a good, honest person and two, he has he has an expertise in this that I don't have. And when I run into a problem, I now have somebody I can call if I need to go on holiday. I now have somebody I can call, you know, to answer the phone or pick up the tickets, you know, as they're coming in while I'm gone for a few days. Exactly.

And I, you know, the I remember I remember the first group when we started it up, which was about two and a half years ago. Now, they all sat there as if to go, what the hell are we doing here? Talking to you about that. And then before too long, I said, well, what are you really good at bank? What were you really good at?

I'm really good at this. What are you really good at? And then they sat there and went, hang on a minute. You got a point here. Yeah, because I'm really good at leadership, but I haven't got that, you know, and then they all start realizing where they're kind of working from it.

And yeah, you know, and what I kind of go back to, you know, the value match, you know, if my values don't match with the guys in Australia, they could see the values on my website. And he said, I just knew we were going to get on because your values are very similar to ours. And if I can demonstrate how we use, you know, we have the company culture, then that works. And if your values don't match with that in terms of being sharing, being collaborative, helping the other guys out, then you won't be a right fit. And I'm cool with that because I can either recommend you to someone else who works slightly differently.

But I do hear a lot of the time I'm just lonely in business. It's just a lonely place, whether you've got a big tech team or whether you're on your own or you've got, you know, it can be a lonely place, particularly if you're remote, because a lot of the guys are remote anyway before COVID. So, you know, they're working remotely and it's difficult. It's tough, you know. So we bring it all together and we're building a community.

We've got our own app and our own community, which which helps nurture and provide support. And actual fact, I have my clients the other day, it was brilliant. One of them phoned up and said, I've just had a chat with a couple of other guys and we'd like to start up a monthly tech group so we can talk about the tech stuff. And he said, could we use your Zoom link and then record it? I said, are you asking me to create content that I could then repurpose?

He said, yeah. I said, great, fill your boots. So but that's the group, the community that we're building. And it's just it doesn't feel like work really, Rayanne, to be honest with you. No, and I totally get the it's lonely at the top thing, too.

Right. I mean, I've got a fairly decent priced staff right now. And, you know, but I'm still the owner of the company. And every time I want to take a risk, sometimes I just want to bounce my ideas off of somebody. You know, what if I what if we did this or what if we moved into this direction or, you know, what if so I can have I can have a hundred employees and still I'm not going to have anybody to bounce my my concerns, you know, my ideas.

Am I being an idiot here? You know, am I doing am I about to do something colossally stupid to my business? And sometimes you just need sounding boards of others that are in your same position. Yeah, 100 percent, 100 percent. Very important.

You know, that's what I love so much about this industry in general, about the MSP industry and about the community, is that, you know, there's so many people that that that have more experience than all of us. Well, I mean, there's so many times I've bounced ideas off and, you know, I can rattle off the great names in this industry, you know, including Ryan of many times of I've bounced ideas of people and said, you know, is this a good idea? Is this a bad idea? Should we do this? Should we do this?

And, you know, without those people around, I think I don't think many of us would actually still be in business if we have anyone that we could kind of bounce ideas off and whether that be in a peer group of, you know, like you've got or whether that just be, you know, friends and peers that we've we've kind of, you know, gained over the years. Yeah. That we can bounce ideas off. So always looking to help, you know, help other people just connect with other people. Now, out of people that we know, you know, this is the thing I keep going on about with regards to the niche.

You know, people sort of say I need a hand with I need a hand in, you know, collaborating with someone who's got experience in this. And I put this into our peer group meetings and the guy said, what's this all about? I said, right. Who do you need to know to help you with your, you know, your business? I really like to get to know someone, for example, in the in the in the government or in the Department of, you know, I don't know, education or someone like that.

And I go, right, guys, who do you all know who's in the Department of Education who can get a referral to try and find the right person? But if you haven't got the specific question, then your brain's not going to find it. And we found someone. And I remember sitting in a room once it wasn't wasn't related. And someone said, I'm looking for the the the marketing manager of Manchester United.

I'm not going to get all football on you because I don't really follow it. But and they said, I said, I don't know the marketing manager for Manchester United. But someone stood up. There's a room of about 50 people, he says. But I do know the marketing manager of Spurs Tottenham Hotspur.

He says, is that all right? And it was like, yeah, that will do. But if you hadn't asked the question, you people wouldn't have asked, you know, wouldn't have answered it. So collaboration and network building is absolutely critical part of any, you know, any any of that success. So, yeah, really important stuff.

Absolutely. Well, Ian, we've come to the end of our time. We could talk, obviously, all night. But I think I guess I know I could probably ask another 20 questions. But but it was really great meeting you.

And that's good. And you know, that's really good. So, Ian, if people want to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to get in touch? Best way to best way to do it is going to hit the website, which is innovate to success dot com to success. I don't want to be a success dot com.

Find me on LinkedIn. Drop me a message. We've got always got events running. We can't. We run a couple of events a month all about business growth around our profit builder models.

I'm more than happy to come and see that. Got the IT experts app, which you can download on your app platform of choice. Just Google IT experts and we're there. Or you can just drop me an email at innovative success dot com. More than happy to have a chat and see how we can help anybody out.

Awesome. And we'll make sure we get all of those in the in the show. Great stuff. Yeah. Thanks very much.

And yeah, I mean, it's been it's been great fun. I've certainly learned a lot and had a lot of fun on this podcast. So have I. So thank you again. It was just fascinating.

And I love talking to coaches, you know, because everybody has their own their own little process or a way of doing things. And so I always learn something new. No, that's great. And thanks very much for giving me the opportunity to to help your guys out. Excellent.

So Ryan, all that's left for me to say is your PSA is the key to your MSP success. So go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Chris. Cheers, Ryan. Thanks, Ian.

Thanks, guys. Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners.