How Borrowing from Other Industries Can Set You Apart

How Borrowing from Other Industries Can Set You Apart

Tim Fitzpatrick
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we talk to seven-figure B2B business owners and their growth-focused executives who are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in today. I am super excited to have Adam Barney with Framework IT with me today. Adam, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Adam Barney
Thanks for having me, Tim.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Absolutely. I'm excited to dig into this. We talked about a bunch of cool stuff that I think people will learn from during the pre-interview. Before we get to that, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions to kick things off. Are you ready to jump in?

Adam Barney
Go for it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. So very quickly, what do you do How long have you been doing it?

Adam Barney
I'm the President of Framework IT. We're a managed IT services provider, which may not really mean something to everyone. Essentially, we help small mid-size businesses get IT right. At the end of the day, they want to focus on running their business. Our business is providing the IT support, strategy, and cybersecurity services and consulting so they can really focus on what they're most passionate about and what's most profitable for their organization. Around that service, of course, we do a lot of other things in the technology space from cloud services, cybersecurity services, voiceover IP, or cloud communications platforms as well.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. What's the most important thing you've learned in running your business?

Adam Barney
I would say the most important thing is to let go of fear, but let go of fear, the right point. What I mean by that is fear can be an aid. Fear alerts you to potential threats. It causes you to analyze situations, see risk, and that's important as a business, right? So you can't ignore fear entirely. But I think too often, I look back at my own career or when I look at other entrepreneurs, a lot of the times I'll see them have thought through a situation or decision, say about a critical change or pivot in their business. It's a really great example of this, I think. And all their logic and rationale, maybe the data they looked at, and even their gut instinct, is all saying, Hey, this is the right decision. But there's some risk there. Maybe there's risk of change to the product or service won't be received well in the market in spite of all that thought and analysis you did. Maybe it could cause you to lose some key clients, and you're afraid of how that's going to affect the business financially, even though you think it's the right decision long term. I think there's a lot of moments in an entrepreneurial career, and as you're really growing an organization where you get to a point where you're making a decision that it does have some unknowns, it has some risks. But again, like the data that got all of it aligned and telling you to do it. But too often that fear can hold people back from doing it. A lot of the times, they really are confident it's the right long term decision, but they're afraid of the short term ramifications. It might cause a dip, so to speak, in the business, Short term to write the path long term. I just think too often too many of us get stuck on that, fail to make changes we should make in the organization because we're too focused on that near term. Let go of the fear. There's moments in a business where you do have to make a little bit of a leap of faith and step off the cliff and trust that you did all the right diligence. It's the right decision, but it's what's necessary to move forward as an organization. I think if you're unwilling to do those things, it's how a lot of companies get stale and lose their success. The world changes, markets change, clients needs change, your business changes. You're going to have to make adjustments, major changes, or full on pivots, and you can't let that fear hold you back.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, it's a great one. Well, and we know that growing a business is hard, right? If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Do you have any mantra or something motivational that you say to yourself or share with your team to push through some of those challenging times?

Adam Barney
Yeah, I think one of my favorite ones is, If we don't get it right, make it right. It's just an acknowledgement that we're not perfect. Nobody's perfect. We strive for perfection, but it's an unobtainable goal, ultimately, right? If you really strictly define it as like 100 % success rate. None of us hit that. So it also, I think, signals to the the team that that's okay. You're not in trouble when perfection wasn't obtained because we understand it's unrealistic. Let's make it right, make it right for ourselves, for the client, et cetera. So if we don't get it right, make it right.

Incentivizing IT best practices

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's a good one, man. I've never heard that. I like it. Adam, one of the things we talked about in the pre-interview was this approach you guys have to incentivizing IT best practices. I have never talked to an MSP that's doing this, so it really grabbed my attention. Can you share with us just a little bit more, one, about what you're doing with this and how you came up with it, and what it was like implementing that?

Adam Barney
Yeah, absolutely. It was about mid-year, 2019, we had some sales development reps that were calling on potential targeted accounts. And common question or objection they were receiving is, what makes you different? For those who don't know, the managed IT space marketplace is still a pretty fragmented market. This is not a market dominated by a Coca-Cola and a Pepsi. There are tens of thousands of IT companies out there serving small and mid-sized businesses. Because of that fragmentation, there's no dominant brand recognized player, and you have to stand out more. We're hearing this question of what makes you unique? Why should I talk to you? Two or three other IT companies called me this week alone. I get calls from you all the time. How many of there are you? A lot of times from the clients are even saying, and you all sound similar. You do IT support, you do IT strategy, you do consulting, you do cloud migrations, projects, upgrades, right? So it's very undifferentiated to maybe somebody who's new to buying this or know the It worked out really well. Hearing that led us to question that more because our answer at the time was, we have great people, happy clients, that stuff that, come on, every salesperson can say that. They have any belief in the product or service. That doesn't land really well with prospects that they know that they hear that all the time from people. A lot of times, it's a half empty promise at best. That got us thinking of, how can we be really unique? How can we have something that cuts through the noise? How can we have something that is somewhat straightforward to explain, really empowers that elevator pitch and grabs attention? As we started questioning that and mulling it over, it led us to ask ourselves if we should look into our data of serving clients and just see if it literally highlighted or drew something to our attention. And so we did a data analysis of over 10 years at the time of data managing companies' IT environments. We looked at how their technology was architected, and then we looked at a bunch of IT management key performance indicators. So we're comparing those two, how's the tech built? And What are we seeing in terms of how many issues they have, how fast their issues can be resolved, how many cybersecurity incidents they have, and again, some other key factors. What we realized from doing this data analysis, it validated something we already had a strong gut feeling about but didn't have the data at the time, or we did have it, but we weren't getting that insight yet, was that when the tech was designed and architected a certain way, which aligned to the way our team felt was best, was most streamlined, etc, it really proved to work really well in the numbers in terms of empowering that organization to get better productivity, to have less cybersecurity risk, et cetera. Specifically, we were able to see organizations that aligned to what we ultimately termed our business optimization framework, our best practices, they would have less support tickets. So the people were having less problems in the first place. Their problems could be resolved faster. So that led to pretty much an epiphany moment of, okay, the technology architecture high level actually matters a lot for how difficult it is to manage a client, and for us, therefore, how costly it is to manage a client. That's a key part of this. Seeing that, How do we relate our pricing model to this? If we're talking to a potential client, they're already highly aligned to this, we can charge them less because it costs us less to manage it. It's a more efficient client, right? So let's charge them less up front. That then led to a second level of epiphany, let's say, of, Hey, let's make it our process to go into every potential client, explain this model to them, put together a strategic roadmap to align these best practices. And the further they align as they reach key milestones, we will reduce our pricing to manage their IT environment because as they further align, our costs go down. So we term that a shared incentive pricing model because we both have incentive here. For the client, it's better productivity, lower security risk, more agility to adapt and pivot their technology and a number of other benefits on their end. For us, it means we can manage them more effectively, efficiently, and at a lower cost, and we get less noise, less fires, et cetera, from that client. So it's mutually beneficial That shared incentive pricing model puts some incentive and reward behind them, standardizing this technology stack that we know works. If you think about it, this idea, high level, is not totally This exist in other markets. This isn't all that different than the safe driver discount of saying, Hey, if you're doing the right things, and it costs us less as an insurance company to insure you, we'll offer you a lower premium. It's also similar to the health insurance company that charges a higher premium if you smoke. Hey, you're doing this behavior that's going to cost more, again, to ensure, and so we're going to price risk accordingly. We brought that similar concept to an industry that hadn't applied that yet, at least not in any formal way. I've not seen a competitor doing this on a formal level. They may take some of these factors into consideration when they set a price, but they don't incentivize or reward further alignment to their best practices via price reduction. That gave us something then truly unique that nobody else was saying. Their sales reps were calling on to accounts because people had never heard it before, and they literally, I think, liked the idea of a mutually aligned win-win partnership. That was received really well. Over time, we've built on that. We added something like 11 guarantees to our managed IT services plan in the last year. But the one I want to highlight, since it relates most closely to that pricing model, is we now actually guarantee that if they follow our strategic roadmap and align to our optimization framework for their technology, we guarantee they'll have less IT issues, and we'll prove it to them via service data after they've gone through that alignment period with us.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Interesting. I love it. So you started to... Once you put in this shared incentive pricing model, your salespeople making outgoing calls had a way to answer that question of, Well, what makes you different?

Adam Barney
It creates curiosity right from the get-go.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Like you said, it's different. If everybody sees you as the same, the only thing they're going to do is compete on price, which is a horrible place to be.

Adam Barney
Especially in a service business, right? You do not want to compete on price.

Tim Fitzpatrick
No. Do you find that once you did that, were you seeing better results with your outbound calling efforts?

Adam Barney
Yeah, it did increase those results a little bit. It also increased our win rates. Some of our other funnel metrics improved from that as well. So it definitely helped from a sales and marketing standpoint, get us more at the top of the funnel and then more that would move from further into the funnel.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Do you have any idea how many of your new clients go with that higher-end option because that incentive is there? Do you have any idea how many clients-

Adam Barney
Really, we're hyper-focused at this point. We don't offer a menu of options. You don't? We really have this is our managed services plan. It's a limited support. There's the strategic consulting, and there's a whole host of baseline cybersecurity that goes into that. And the analogy I use as to why we are that way. We weren't always. Once upon a time, we had four plan options that built on one another. And that experience didn't really work well in terms of creating great repeatable outcomes for both the client and us, which I believe is necessary to have a long term win-win partnership, right? The really simple analogy I could use is, our mission is to deliver predictable IT outcomes for businesses. If I want to say I'm going to deliver predictable IT outcomes, I need to follow my recipe for success. This a la carte, pick and choose option, I don't think is conducive to that. It's like your grandma, let's say, had a famous brownie recipe. Would you go to her and tell her, I want your famous brownies. I want that predictable outcome. I want you to make it without eggs and sugar this time and substitute this in with something else. Your grandma would say, You're crazy. Those aren't my brownies. I can't guarantee you're going to like them. That's a cheesy analogy, maybe, but I think it just highlights why we... It's like, Hey, we're the experts here in IT management. We do this on a wide scale. We got to follow our process. There's a reason we built this this way, and we know it works. Deviations from that compromise, delivering that predictable good outcome you're seeking. I don't want to be a party to that relationship because it's no longer win-win. We're no longer delivering great outcomes for each party in this partnership. I don't see that sustaining long term as a partnership anyway. This is not a transactional industry. We value long term relationships and partnerships. We're not coming in and doing a one-off service and saying goodbye forever. It's really critical that we are aligned and both in a position to get the good outcomes from that partnership.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, interesting. Do you guys start with an assessment of any kind with clients? How does that work?

Adam Barney
Yeah. The adoption of that unique pricing model did lead to some revisions to our sales process because to go in and understand where they're aligned and not aligned to best practices required more thorough diligence and discovery and assessment during our sales process. In fact, we later realized it's giving us a secondary unique that we didn't intend in that by the end of our sales process, a lot of people, whether they choose us or not, were actually telling us, You spent the most time getting to know us. You were the most thorough. You were really disciplined and diligent in your process. It impressed them. They said, Hey, you look like a mature organization because of that. It enhanced our credibility. That wasn't actually an initial intent in the unique. It was just a byproduct that gives us an additional selling point. Now, currently, after some major change and then minor iterations, our process is to do a quick initial consultation and just understand high level, what are they looking for, what brought them to that conversation, and explain our process. After that very quick initial call, we actually do a very low-level penetration test, cybersecurity assessment and penetration test. We do in a way that's not super invasive. They don't have to alert their current IT vendor or team or anything like that. We always find things that can be improved from a cybersecurity standpoint. We go through a readout report, summary of key findings, and highlight the critical ones and explain why this matters, tell them relevant stories of how this impacted other firms, for an example. At that point, we illustrate that, Hey, to move forward, we want to put together this strategic roadmap that's going to do these things for you, align to these best practices, address these gaps that we discovered here, et cetera. In order to do so, we need a really thorough understanding of your technology. The next step after that is a paid assessment for us to do the strategic roadmap as the ultimate deliverable. In that engagement, we send in some of our virtual chief information officer resources. These are the people that do the strategic consulting for clients. They go in and they identify more information about the technology. We go on site, virtual dig into some of their key systems. We get a pretty in-depth look at their technology. Then we come back together, we go over the proposed strategic roadmap, the proposal for our services, of course, go over the whole scope of work, et cetera. And go from there.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Got it. Okay, cool. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, I was curious whether you were doing... You're doing this combination of... You're doing an initial free assessment that lays the foundation for some recommendations, but to really give them the exact plan that's going to be the best fit for them, you need to dig deeper, and that is going to be a paid assessment.

Adam Barney
We did that for two reasons, that free portion. That is because it's somewhat a newer addition to our process, I will say. We did it for two reasons. One, we wanted to put forward more value up front before we ask them to pay for an assessment, before we start talking about estimates for our ongoing Because before you pay for an assessment, you want maybe some budgetary numbers to know we're in the same ballpark here, of course, as a client. I would want that as well. What we realized is, previously, we were getting right into those conversations in initial qualification meetings, but we hadn't fully been able to demonstrate the value we can provide. We can go over who we are, why we're different, what makes us unique, quality of service type of thing. We can go over some things that instill that additional trust and credibility that we're worth exploring partnership with and paying for this next step in the assessment. We did that cybersecurity risk assessment and penetration test to when we are, have them in a funnel and in a meeting at this point, to give them something up front, demonstrate the value we can find. It also creates, helps find pain they aren't aware of quite often. A lot of things we hear in IT is we're in a pretty good place. Well, they think they are. Because this is IT. They're not IT professionals. They've outsourced this function to someone else in many cases. As far as they know, they're good. This helps them understand where they really are good and where they're not good, at least on risk and cybersecurity. The other reason we did it was actually more of a marketing angle. We wanted to have a free offer of real value to use in our material that we're providing across various mediums to those target's accounts to say, Hey, you get something out of talking to us. You don't have to pay for it. There's value in it. If they get the readout report and they don't want to proceed to further steps with us at that moment in time because timings are not right, we're not the right fit, that's fine. For us, it's a numbers game. We're absolutely fine with that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love that. I always refer to that. It's a try before you buy offer, which is really important. How long have you been doing that?

Adam Barney
A couple of months now. It's been very successful. I think of it as hook from a marketing standpoint. It's some hook to convert them. Because just sending some info about yourself or whatever, they get bombarded with that. It's like, why they can't take all those meetings or calls? There's really got to be something that I think that piques interest quickly. For us, we're using this because it's very relevant for our industry.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Do you have enough data at this point to know or at least have indications? Is it helping your conversion rate?

Adam Barney
Being so new, I wouldn't say we have high confidence data yet. There is a lot of data in our industry that those paid assessments, that once people do those, the close rates skyrocket. Because if you think about it, they've already made some commitment, demonstrated some level of trust in you if they're paying you for the assessment. Now the assessment also allows you to get in there, build more credibility, learn more about them, and then your proposal is better informed than a lot of your competitors. That totally makes sense and it's very logical. In terms of that free upfront cybersecurity risk assessment and penetration test, I'd like to see more data before I absolutely confirm. I would say empirical type of evidence gut feeling is that this is going to work well. But I need a little longer for the full sales cycles to run and enough quantity to be able to say, Yeah, there's material data here that supports that this has increased the conversion rate.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So are you... And so that penetration test, cybersecurity test, that's something you were already doing in your larger paid assessment, right?

Adam Barney
Yes, to a degree, we're using a different tool now that is a little less invasive, less burden on the client of what we need to run it. Before, and still in the paid assessment, we are running a slightly different version of that type of assessment. It required a lot more information from clients to get administrator credentials to keep parts of their environment that a lot of times they don't know without alerting their IT. It's challenging at that point. Early in a sales process, they may not know if they want to rock the boat with a current IT vendor. They're asking for that information when they aren't really to a point of highly piqued interest or commitment of the interest and framework. It's another reason we introduced that first. It gives us some any info, discovers more pains on their end, gives them some free value up front, and then they can decide on that next step that is going to require more info and a little bit of investment on their part.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You're leading with that as, Hey, let us do this free assessment for you. We may uncover some things that you don't know about at this point. Either way, there's going to be some value in it for you. If it makes sense to continue this conversation, then cool.

Adam Barney
Yeah, absolutely.

Transitioning From Operations to Marketing and Sales

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it. I love it. Let's talk a little bit about marketing. I mean, we have to. In the MSP space, it's very common, wrong key engineering backgrounds, but tend to face a lot of challenges with marketing, sales. Because I know initially you were focused heavily on the operations side of the business, and you've transitioned to spending a lot of time on the sales and marketing side. What key lessons did you learn in that transition?

Adam Barney
Yeah, I think the first one, and I'll admit, actually, for the audience' sake, that we excelled at sales most of our history as an organization, a very classic sales. We did not excel at marketing. It makes sense. None of our partners came from a marketing background or anything like that. There's maybe also just a strategic leadership gap there. Totally understandable how we ended up in that place. But the first nine years of the organization, our marketing was, I would say, almost very bare minimum. We had a website, we were updating it. We were putting out a little bit of content sporadically and inconsistently that wasn't really having an impact. We weren't really driving organic lead conversions or anything like that. So fortunately, we were decent at the sales part of it, and we're able to really, once we were in front of people, had a lot of success. So that allowed us to grow still. But that can get you from under a million in revenue to millions in revenue, but it's never going to get you to maybe go close that 10 to 20 million gap and go beyond. At some point, you really have to figure out a marketing engine. We started to realize that and started to take some steps in that direction, brought in in-house marketing people, et cetera. But we still had a lot of starts and stops at that point, a lot of falling on our face, figuring out that didn't really work. Let's back up the train and pivot here. I think as I reflect on that period, probably the biggest reason for it was we weren't strategic enough in our approach. We were just like, Hey, there's these different marketing activities you could Let's go out and do these different things. Let's get drip emails going out. Let's be better about content. Let's write some ebook. Let's revise the website, whatever. It was a very sporadic approach. It wasn't cohesive. I guess one of the lessons I think I've learned at this point, still trying to master because I still would not describe myself as CMO material or anything like that. But one of the things I realized is you really need to start top down with the strategic plan. I think from what I can tell, you should really start by understanding who's our target account, who are the buyers in those organizations, what do they look like, what's their persona, what are their pains they want alleviated, what are their gains they want created, et cetera? And once you start there and you want to be focused there, really focus with who you're best fit for on the target account, and then make sure you've identified the people that weigh in on that decision process. Until you understand that really well, you can't make the rest of the marketing strategy in my mind. Because after that, the question becomes, how do I get in front of those people with a compelling message that will drive conversion and interest in the talking to us or buying our service or whatever your process is for your product or service at that point. But that's going to create enough interest to create that conversion. You got to start with the really high level understanding of who you're fit for, who your buyers are, and what they look like. Then you can start tailoring a marketing strategy around that, and then you can get into the specifics of what mediums and channels are we using, what specific language, and what type of content, all that. That's more tactical. You got to start with the strategy. Our mistake was, I'm focusing on a bunch of tactics without any cohesive strategy in the past.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I want to preface what I'm about to say by saying, I did not pay Adam to say that. But the challenge that you just described is the most common marketing mistake I see businesses making because it is so... Strategy is not tangible for most people. The tactics are very tangible, right? Most people feel like, oh, I build my website or I post up content. They feel like they're making progress because it's easy to understand that. But when we look at the three critical elements of building a marketing engine, there's strategy, there's planning, and then there's leadership. Strategy is the fuel for the engine. Planning is the tactics, right? We're picking the parts and we're assembling that engine. And then leadership is we've got to have a mechanic that's overseeing that engine, right? And optimizing it and making sure that it continues to run smoothly and efficiently. Well, if you just jump into picking parts and tactics, you're trying to assemble the engine, but you have no fuel for it. And what you describe with, we've got to understand our target market and our ideal clients within that market. That's the first part of strategy. Everything from marketing is driven by that. Because how do you answer the question you touched on this, Adam? Where do we go to get in front of the right people? Well, who are the right people? Once you understand who the right people are, then you can determine where you need to go, and then you can determine what you need to say to those people to engage them and attract them and be different than everybody else. So many people just skip strategy and go right to the tactics.

Adam Barney
Especially small business owner, entrepreneur types that don't have marketing backgrounds, right? They see what others are doing. They're seeing only the end result tactic. They don't see all that stuff that a really intelligent marketing organization did behind the scenes.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So super, super important. So I appreciate you sharing that. And that is a key insight that a lot of business owners just don't... They don't get to that place.

Adam Barney
I learned it the hard way, Tim.

How Borrowing from Other Industries Can Set You Apart

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I have most do, unfortunately. It takes time and it takes money, right? I like to figure these things out sometimes. One of the things that we talked about a little bit in the pre-interview that I want to talk about before we get done today is you had talked about Insight, gaining insights from other MSPs through peer groups and through industry benchmarks. One of the first businesses that I was involved in that I was a partner in, we grew because because we got connected with other peers, right? So I love the fact that you talked about this. And I just want to better understand and have you share with the audience, how has collaboration and shared learning influenced your growth strategies?

Adam Barney
The way I would describe it, we were not in these formal industry peer groups until several years ago. That was a mistake. Should have done this 10 years ago. It's terrifying to think where we might be as a business had we done this sooner. But we are where we are. We aren't going to lose sleep over that. That's right. Getting into these peer groups gives you an advisory board of people in your industry, they have similar... We all have the same problems, or we had them, and they resolved them successfully. I think prior to having that Sounding Board, a lot of the way we learned was take two steps forward, fall in your face, get back up, take a step back, figure out your little change in direction, two steps forward. Just constantly. I feel like we were stumbling through the dark and learning through mistakes. We were persistent. We still grew and made it through that. But that's a hard way to learn. You get beat up along the way. It is. And you miss a lot of opportunity. Or you undersees the opportunities that were there for you. Getting into the peer group, one, it's that sounding Two, this is maybe not true of every peer group out there, but one of the things that's really neat in ours is that there's a lot of data sharing on key performance indicators in our businesses, key ratios across every part of the business. You're able to get really detailed benchmarking reports of where do you stand relative to the industry and the industry even broken down by the region you're in, by your predominant line of business by the size of your organization, by your profitability. That one's a very helpful one. One of the benchmarks you want to compare yourself to is the top quarter of companies in your industry in terms of earnings. How do you stack up against them? And not just purely at the earnings or bottom line level, right? But all these key ratios and metrics. Seeing those numbers and being able to peel back deeper starts unearthing, sometimes, a very clear and compelling story of where your strengths and weaknesses are and what you need to adjust. And now you also have this advisory board to say, I'm weak here. I know I need to make a change. This is one of those things that will move them really massively for our business, but it's not something I can flip a switch on, of course. This is probably something that's going to require a major way to how we operate, how we price our service, sell service, deliver service, whatever it is. Having that peer group then to discuss, we follow the EOS system. Identify those issues, discuss solve them. You do that within your business, but having the peer group allows you to take it to people that have a different purview, different experiences, and may have already solved some of those same problems, or may not have, but it can at least tell you what they've tried and hasn't worked for them and why it didn't work. It shortcuts that experience I described of two steps forward, fall on your face, wipe the blood off your nose, and get back up. It can avoid some of those situations. Not all of it, but it helps alleviate a lot of that. So it's really helped us set a clear course, I think, as a business. So less of this is what we think we need to do and more of, hey, we get to see what the most successful in our business do. This is how they operate Here's, again, where we need to work on and improve. This is the 80/20. This is that one thing that's going to move the needle 80% towards where we want to be with a small amount of the effort. Let's do that. Let That allowed us to focus, too. Instead of setting a bunch of goals based on instincts, gut data, experience, whatever, we can really drive around proven practices in the industry that are delivered to us in these peer groups. Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I appreciate you sharing that because we found the same thing in our experience with it. And it's like, why make the same mistakes that somebody else has already learned from? It just It shortens the path to where you want to go, and it makes things a whole lot simpler. And the other thing that I also found interesting, too, as part of this process was that we learned just as much from our peers that were further along as we did the ones that were behind us. You can learn from anybody, no matter where they are in their journey. I think it definitely takes an open mind. You have to come from a place of abundance here and be like, Hey, sharing this is not going to hurt my business. It's only going to help. But so much to be gained from that. So I appreciate you sharing that because these opportunities, there's plenty of them in the MSP space, but they're abundant in every industry. Frankly, if-

Adam Barney
If they're not, go form a peer group.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Exactly. Yes.

Adam Barney
That's how some of these more formal groups came to exist.

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's right.

Adam Barney
They organically built it because they were like, I need a sounding board. I'm going to go talk to my peers. We're going to meet once a month. And then it evolves to a real structured peer group.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's not difficult. Well, I mean, start connecting with folks like you on LinkedIn and see if they're interested in starting to meet, right? It's not a difficult thing. Adam, I really appreciate the time, and you shared a ton of good stuff here. Before we wrap things up, I want to ask you one last question, which is knowing what you know now, anything that you would do different?

Adam Barney
I would say, and this relates to what I was talking about in the beginning with fear, because I think fear comes into play with this. All revenue is not good. Revenue, focus on the right clients. This also touches in on that marketing strategy component. Figure out who you have the best win-win partnerships with. Really spell out that ideal a client profile, figure out who the key stakeholders are, target those people, and be disciplined and committed to that. That is easier to do when you're a more matured organization, you're stable, you're financially secure, et cetera. That is a much more fearful thing to do when you're early, because you may be burning through cash. If you lose a couple of counts, could go out of business. It's scary. That leads a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs, to take a all-revenue is good revenue approach. It is not the case. Some of that revenue is busy work, and it distracts you from providing high-quality product or service to the great clients that you make the most money off. But again, it's a frightening thing to turn away business when you really still need the revenue, right? That gets back to that concept of knowing what's a good long term and taking that leap of faith, jumping off the cliff and trusting it works out. Because the sooner, I think most organizations that have been in business a while and matured and grown, they all go get that realization I just highlighted. Not all revenue is good revenue. We need to focus on the best accounts. We need to go get more of those. We need to part way with some of our clients even that maybe don't align to that anymore and understand that that's what's best long term. I think we all get there in due time. I think the sooner you get there, the more you accelerate your trajectory as as an organization. So do that sooner. It's uncomfortable. And we were all afraid when we did it. Almost everybody I've talked to who's gone through that mindset change, nobody regrets it later.

Tim Fitzpatrick
No, I've never talked to anybody that does. Your business gets better from it. Your team gets better. Your team is happier because they're not working with clients that make them feel like they want to rip their hair out every day. It just makes business better. So thank you for sharing that, man. Where can people learn more about you?

Adam Barney
Yeah, check out our website, www.Frameworkit.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, which we'll share the URL for that on the screen as well.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I'll share that in the show notes because it's Adam Barney, but there's some numbers. There's some numbers behind it. He's not the only Adam Barney on LinkedIn. So we'll make sure that gets in the show notes. Go check out frameworkit.com. Adam, thank you so much for being generous with your time, man. I really appreciate it. I love the stuff that you shared. I think there's tons of learning lessons for folks to gather from it. So thank you. Those of you that are watching, listening, appreciate you. If you want to connect with us, you can do that at rialtomarketing.com, or you can go ahead over to revenueroadblockscorecard.com. When we look at building a marketing engine for clients, we look at nine revenue roadblock areas. If you want to know which of those nine areas are slowing down your growth, that's where you can do it. Takes less than five minutes, so go check it out. Until next time. Take care.