Complexity Is Killing Your Growth

Complexity Is Killing Your Growth

Tim Fitzpatrick
Why do so many MSPs and other B2B businesses get stuck trying to grow? We'll answer this question in this episode as we unpack why adding more tools, vendors, and services often slows you down and how simplifying your business can actually fuel faster, more profitable growth. If you want your business to feel boring in a good way, this one's for you. Hi, I'm Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult and it definitely shouldn't be guesswork. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Monica Ozaruk from Mozaruk Consulting with me today. Monica, welcome. And thanks for being here.

Monica Ozaruk
Thank you so much for having me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I'm excited to dig into this with you. On the marketing side, I always default to simplicity. So this conversation is right up my alley. I'm super excited to the chat with you. So before we do that, I want to ask you some rapid fire questions if you're ready to jump in with both feet.

Monica Ozaruk
I hope so.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. So when you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Monica Ozaruk
Honestly, reading. I'm a big reader. I've recently gotten into audiobooks. I am not a huge podcast fan, which feels a little. I don't take offense. I know, I know. But yeah, I mean, other than that, I like being on them, which is nice. And then spending time with friends and family.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. Just so you know, I go through peaks and valleys with podcast listening. Sometimes I'll listen a lot, and sometimes I won't. The thing I love about audio is I'm a slow reader. What do they call it? I verbalize the things, the words in my head, which slows me down. And with audio, I don't do that, and I can listen to it. At one and a half, two X speed. So anyways, audio does help me because I read slow. So what's your hidden talent?

Monica Ozaruk
Okay, so I used to be able to do the taxi cab whistle like this, and then I saw this question come through and I went, oh, no, can I still do it? So the last two and a half days, I've been going around the house trying to relearn my taxi cab whistle. So thanks, Kim. Thanks for that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You know what? I'm not I'm not going to ask you to do it.

Monica Ozaruk
It's too strict. I don't want to blow my ears out. It'll blow the speakers. Exactly. Yeah, that's why we're not doing it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Monica Ozaruk
Yeah, so there's a lot of advice, and I think advice is interesting because I've been given advice in my past that I didn't necessarily take or I didn't think was useful at the time, and now I'm realizing it is. But my very good friend Esther, who's in this This community recently reminded me of the advice of people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And that one has been really good because we're here, we always talk about how MSPs can help their business and what they can do and all those different things. And a lot of the time that can feel like noise. So, yeah, there's a lot of the messaging in terms of understanding what it's like to be the person who's in the seat or understanding the frustration that those people are feeling.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, love it. What's one thing about you that surprises people?

Monica Ozaruk
Oh, my gosh, it's how many hobbies I have. I'm a hobby hobbyist, and it ranges from birdwatching. I'm of a certain age, so I started birdwatching. And I do crochet, knitting, watercolor, mountain biking, skiing, any hobby that you have said, I have probably tried it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love that. A hobby hobbyist. I've never thought about it like that. I had quite a few hobbies, and then when I had kids, I had to narrow them down big time.

Monica Ozaruk
That's one hobby I didn't subscribe to. That's why I'm on this time.

Tim Fitzpatrick
The older I get, the narrower my hobbies go. But the hobby hobbyist. Okay. I love it. What success mean to you?

Monica Ozaruk
I think it means peace and quiet. And I think that there is a hustle culture. We're actually going to talk about this as we go through. But to me, success is peace, calm, being able to have time to think of creative ideas and creative solutions and not feeling like you're constantly grinding.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Cool. Where's your happy place?

Monica Ozaruk
I think it's that. So I don't think it's a physical place. I think it is that place where you have the ability to do a blue sky thinking or you go on a walk and you notice the trees or whatever it is. So I think it's more of a mental state than a physical place. But yeah, it's when you're calm.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I like that. I've never had anybody answer it that way.

Monica Ozaruk
Really?

Tim Fitzpatrick
No. I love that. What qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?

Monica Ozaruk
Yes, it's decisiveness. If you are the person who takes a long time to order at a restaurant, we will not be dining together again. Unfortunately, we'll do something else or I'll pick, but that's the one. Yeah. And I think to just... I I'm very curious about people. I love people who have different skill sets than me and who know that they're very good at those. So what's interesting talking to other consultants in the space is I love when they're so different from me and they approach a problem differently and learning about that. And so I think that that's something I admire a lot.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. So tell us more about what you're doing at Mozaruk Consulting.

Monica Ozaruk
Yeah, absolutely. I come from a process improvement background, which I think is we're all relatively familiar with what that looks like. A lot of the time what I do is I come into an MSP and figure out where there's a disconnect between the people and their PSA and how they're not optimizing the system. Usually that's internal operations, especially procurement and that internal section of purchasing. And then I just help them fix and iterate it. That can be through employee training, that can be through optimizing workflows, whatever it takes to make everything run a little bit smoother, and hopefully let everyone to my happy place.

Why MSPs Get Stuck When Trying to Grow

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes. I love it. So why do you think so many MSPs, and frankly, I mean, any B2B business runs into this, why do they get stuck when they're trying to grow? And what should they be doing differently than they are?

Monica Ozaruk
I think it's saying yes. I think everyone wants to say yes and please their customers. And so as MSPs are growing organically, a customer says, Hey, Can you do this? And it's almost like that improv joke, Yes, and, Yes, and, What else do you want me to do? And they don't realize how difficult it is to add a new service. And what does that look like? How are you training your team? How are you making sure that you're delivering on that promise? What does it mean to all the promises that you already made? So I think it's saying yes, and it's trying to please everyone.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. To me, this relates back to marketing. One of the first places I start with MSPs is, what are you going to focus on? Who are your ideal clients? This is certainly not the only way to do this, but it is one of the simplest. Is focusing on specific industry verticals. Tons of MSPs are scared to do it. Most businesses are scared to do it. But gosh, it makes things so much simpler because especially on the MSP side, when you look at, well, if all I'm doing is serving attorneys, I can standardize my tech stack. I'm not having to reinvent the wheel each and every time. Tons of efficiencies to be gained from that.

Monica Ozaruk
And even, I mean, I'm on the procurement side, but standardizing your products. So instead of buying 100 different SKUs or a thousand different SKUs, you have some things that you carry all the time. You know what the best practices are for the customers in your industry. I think people... I definitely see the value in marketing of how much easier it can be when you have a niche. I don't think people realize how easy it is internally, operationally, when you have a niche. It makes it so much easier for your team to understand your product offering, understand your service offering, and understand the training materials, everything that they've been given to do their jobs.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It just flows on down the line from marketing to sales, customer service and operations. It's hard, especially when we're initially starting, we just, do you have a heartbeat? Do you have money? Cool. I want to work with you. But we have to get to a place where we know what we're good at and what we're not. And I know as we grow, we're like, oh, we need to offer more, right? But it's like when I was in distribution, I started in wholesale distribution, and we wanted to be a one-stop shop. And we initially started selling home theater equipment. And we reached a point as we started to grow where we were like, Gosh, we're working with all these alarm dealers, we should start selling alarm equipment. And it was a mistake because it wasn't our area of expertise. And a lot of our alarm clients that were buying from us were already used to buying that from somebody else and shifting that habit. And they just didn't feel like we knew what we were doing no matter what we did. And so that was a real eye opener for me through that process where it was like, Man, we probably should have stuck in our lane on that one.

Monica Ozaruk
It's true. And all MSPs are trying to get service tickets down, but then they introduce something like an alarm something they haven't sold before, and all of a sudden the service tickets go up. I don't know how much they're making that connection by saying, Hey, we look at our ticket type, subtype, all those different things, impact, urgency. But are we saying that line of business is not actually profitable to us. That's not helping our bottom line. Why don't we just do the easy stuff, the stuff that we're really good at, and carefully add, as opposed to add a whole new thing. If you're adding a new service and your service tickets are shooting up, it's time to take a look at what you're offering.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, that's a red flag, right?

Monica Ozaruk
That's a huge red flag.

How Does Narrowing Your Niche Help Growth

Tim Fitzpatrick
So we touched on this, but let's dig deeper. How can narrowing your service offerings or your niche actually help you grow faster and operate more efficiently?

Monica Ozaruk
Yeah. From an operational standpoint, it comes down to training, and it comes down to making sure that your technicians are equipped to deal with the issues and actually know what your sales team is selling. For me, when I come in, I always talk about a quote to cash, and I say, What are you quoting? How does it go through your PSA system? How are you invoicing for it? And it's so amazing to me when the sales people are selling people that the invoicing team doesn't know how to build for. It happens all the time, and it's scary. And I think that that's a huge liability. So how can you grow? How can you scale? By making sure that when you're offering something or when you're selling a product, that everyone along that whole quote to cash chain knows what that looks like. And then go deeper on those customers. So your top 20 % of customers, if they're all asking for the same thing and you add that one thing, then you'll grow, then it will make sense. But don't add something that your bottom 10 % customer asked you for.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So adding products or services to your mix should not be taken lightly. You need to think through the process before you actually choose to do it.

Monica Ozaruk
Yeah. Maybe you work backwards from invoicing. Start there.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, we touched on this. When you can simplify it, everything becomes easier. And you're not reinventing the wheel for every client. It sounds boring, right? And it may be boring, but if you want your business to be profitable and repeatable, it's okay to be boring.

Monica Ozaruk
And I think boring is lovely. In supply chain, there's something called run state, which is when everything is working exactly as it's supposed to be working. And there's no blips, nothing shows up on a radar. There's no outliers. You can think of it as an assembly line. It's just ticking along and everything's good. And that is so scary for owners. Owners, actually, when I come in and I get them to a calm state, the first month or two after they hit that, they do not like it. They think that because things are quiet, that because there's no fires, that something must be wrong. And I think that that's something that we have to unlearn as a MSP owners, you guys don't have to be so stressed out. It actually is nice to try and get there, but it takes a lot of training, a lot of support, and you always have to be looking for bottlenecks or issues in your quote to cash flow to try and just make sure that you're continually trying to improve and look at those little things. But yeah, I think MSP owners are used to fighting fires, and that's what they've always done. I have a lot of empathy for that because it's only getting more complex. And I'm sure you've seen this, too. Their environment is only getting more complex. So I think the reaction is to feel like you have to become more complex to solve the problems.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, but you don't, right? I'm trying to remember the quote about simplicity, and I think it was Leonardo da Vinci, where it's like, Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, something like that. It's not easy to boil things down to their simplest form, but when you can do that, you eliminate complexity completely, which complexity with what you're doing, with what I'm doing on the marketing side, if there's complexity there, it is very difficult to troubleshoot and fix when you run into problems. So, man, yeah, silence is not a bad thing, right? If your support tickets are going down, it's not a bad thing. It means you're doing a lot of things right.

Operational Changes MSPs Can Make to Scale Profitably

Tim Fitzpatrick
So what are some operational changes that MSPs or other service businesses can make to scale more profitably without adding more people or complexity?

Monica Ozaruk
It's removing. And I think that that's always the most shocking talking thing that my clients have when I first engage with them, we'll do an agreement audit or we'll do all their contracts and we'll say, let's take all your contracts, let's look at every single thing that you offer as a recurring revenue, and let's group them together and say, what's this line of business and this SLA offering? And they're shocked that they might have 30 different contract types, and three of them are exactly the same, but they're selling them at different prices. They are that they have some that are not profitable at all. And my suggestion is always to fire those contracts and to get rid of customers, which is not fun. But that is the fastest way to make more money immediately. And it's not necessarily you're not making more top-line revenue, but you are making more margin. And so if you want to immediately improve your margin, it's actually a subtraction and a takeaway of things that are losing you money versus doing more. And I think that's very surprising, but it's about cleaning up before you start putting anything new in.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So it's almost like I'm not a gardener, but I've heard people give the analogy of pruning things back, right? Yes. When a tree or a plant has dead branches, we got to remove that stuff first if it's really going to grow and flourish, right? Absolutely. And that's the exact process as you just described. It's like, what's broken, what's not working for us? We need to remove that, right? You touched on clients a little bit earlier, right? It's not uncommon for people to look at it and go, oh, my gosh. Our Bottom 10 % of clients are taking 80 % of our time. This is not profitable. We need to get rid of these people. Absolutely. It's not that they're bad people. They're just not good people for our business. And so we need to get rid of that, right? And like you said, that's a big mindset shift. They're like, What? I'm going to get rid of this revenue? It may be revenue, but it's not profitable. Yeah.

Monica Ozaruk
And start looking at your time as money. I think that owners need to start valuing their time at a higher dollar value. So they need to, in their head, imagine an hourly rate that's completely insane and say, Am I doing something at this hourly rate, answering tickets or selling or whatever it is? And instead, try and remove, remove, delegate, delegate until they have space to take a step back, talk to those higher accounts, find out what those higher accounts want, because they know. Your top 20% of your accounts know what they want, and they know how they want to grow with you. And we're looking at all these fractional services and things that people want to do. Msps want to be more of a solution, and they want to be more involved with leadership decisions. Those things take time. And I think the failure is that people try to start doing that without making any time for it. They just are squeezing more and more things into a package where if you remove, make some space, make some time, then you can start being more of a thought leader in your niche.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. With MSPs, specifically, Basically, they're certainly... I don't know. I'm trying to remember. I think I've heard the average MSP has 15 to 20 vendors in their tech stack, which I think it's challenging, because you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. Sometimes a great vendor shifts, and they're not so great anymore. So you have to have some redundancy, but you don't need three or four vendors in the same category, right? How do you think about that?

Monica Ozaruk
Well, it's hard because I come from a purchasing background. So when I was purchasing, we used to have RFPs, and we would put a needs requirement document together. So we would have a request for proposal, and people would have to bid on the proposal. And you have to determine what your needs are before you buy a software or before you buy a tool. And I don't think everyone does that. Also, part of determining what your needs are, Does anything you own already do that job? Because I want to see a heat map of someone with all their tools, and I want to know what % of the software they actually use. I want to know how deep they go on each of their tools. With PSAs, specifically, most of my clients, when I engage with them, are using 30 to 40 % of the functionality in their PSA. So they are paying 100 % for something that they are barely scratching the surface. And then there's another shiny tool that they bolted on that they could take away and they could use their PSA to do.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Again, simplifying. Removing. Yeah.

Monica Ozaruk
Removing.

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's your default. So if there was one big takeaway, it's remove things before you default to adding.

Monica Ozaruk
Always. 

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
So awesome. Any other last minute thoughts you want to share with us or dig into before we wrap it up?

Monica Ozaruk
No, I think that the industry is going this way. So I'm really curious to see in the next three to five years, I think all MSPs will have a vertical. I think that all the really successful ones, the ones that we're going to see that grow, have a clear message, a clear marketing message, a clear niche, and they've operationalized internally to serve that niche. So I just want to say it just in case I'm right.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I appreciate you putting it out there because, well, again, that's one of the first things that we look at when we work with clients. I have a client right now that was looking at engineering firms and financial services firms. When we initially did the research to look at competitors, to try and find competitors that specialized in one of those two verticals in our research, and I'm sure there are more than this, but we couldn't even find a handful. There were plenty of MSPs that had those verticals listed in like, these are the industries we serve page. So they had an engineering page, but it was one of eight pages of verticals they serve. Less than a handful that actually said on their homepage, We specialize in serving engineering firms. Less than a handful for both of them. So it's like when you think about that, if you have... If you're willing to go down that path, competition is almost nonexistent.

Monica Ozaruk
Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
And it becomes so much easier to market because they're like, where do engineering firms go? Well, they only go to a very narrow section of... They only go to a narrow place, right? And when you create that list of where they are, then you can go there to get right in front of them rather than being like, Hey, let me jump on a networking. Let me go to a networking event and see if maybe there's somebody there that might want to work with us.

Monica Ozaruk
And you'll be able to deliver on operations, and your team will be happier. Your internal team, we didn't even touch culture, but your internal team will be happier because they'll know what it is that they sell.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, they have clarity.

Monica Ozaruk
They have clarity.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Right? And when you have clarity, it goes back to what you touched on in the beginning, right? When you have clarity, that leads to peace.

Monica Ozaruk
Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Right? And keeping things simple eliminates the chaos, right? You can't have peace. When there's chaos.

Monica Ozaruk
Can I say it by myself? Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Love it. Awesome. Monica, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Where can people learn more about you?

Monica Ozaruk
Yeah. So my website's below, Mozarukconsulting.com. I also have a YouTube channel where I share connect wise tips, specifically, and that is Monica Ozaruk.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. I love it. Go connect with Monica. She's been great to connect with you. This is the second time I've connected with you. She obviously knows what she's doing. So if you need some process improvement, if you've got chaos, go reach out to Monica. She'll turn chaos into peace. I love it. Those of you that are watching, listening, thank you. Appreciate you. If you want to connect with us, you can do that over at rialtomarketing.com. The other resource we've got for you is over at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. When we help clients build their engine, we remove roadblocks in nine key areas. If you want to know which of those areas are slowing down your growth, that's where you can do it. Take advantage of it. And until next time, take care.