The “C” Word For Growth: Consistency

The “C” Word For Growth: Consistency

Tim Fitzpatrick
To the Rialto Marketing Podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we interview seven-figure B2B professional service firm owners that 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 you must remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to accelerate growth and reach your goals faster. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have George Bartice from bvoip with me today. George, thanks for joining me.

George Bardissi
Happy to. Happened to be a pretty nice day outside. Hopefully, it stays that way and we're not in Florida with any weather events, it seems.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, well, I'm in Colorado and it's super nice out the day. I don't think we've got any weather events in the forecast either. So I think you and I are going to be in good shape, at least.

George Bardissi
I think so.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So before we dig in and talk about your journey a little bit, I want to ask you a few rapid-fire questions if you're ready to jump in with both feet.

George Bardissi
Absolutely. Let's do it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Very quickly. What do you do? How long have you been doing it?

George Bardissi
I actually started off in the IT services business back in 2001. Fast forward to 2014, we started a software company out of our MSP and broke it off into a separate entity. I've been working with IT and managed services companies from the other side, from the vendor side since 2014 until present. Then beginning of 2020, I started another company, which is more of a community approach to, again, still IT and MSP land around events and marketing specific to the vendor shop. I then like integrating that to the people who are actually doing the work on the IT service provider side. It's been an interesting journey. It's a little bit of a domino story because one stems from the other, stems from the other. But more or less, I've been in the sandbox one way or another since about 2000.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What you're telling me is you have nothing going on.

George Bardissi
Nope. It's boring over here. Just TV, Netflix, and all good.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, just watching paintry. Exactly. It's a long time. Since 2000, 2001, what's the most important lesson you've learned?

George Bardissi
Consistency. No matter what you're doing, I think people, myself is no different. When you start something, you don't finish it or you have a good idea, but then you don't execute it, or you don't go all the way to the end of whatever that idea was, and then you maybe get distracted and go somewhere else. I could talk about an hour just on the word consistency, but I think that is part and parcel, probably the most important word I could say is the lessons. So many things stem from it. Business is hard, but if you don't take it to the end, then I think you don't actually see the full outcome of whatever you started.

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's a really good one. Obviously, as a marketer, I see that consistency is huge. So many people just give up because they think they're not seeing results, they're not gaining traction. You can adjust, shift course, make changes, but you got to keep doing it.

George Bardissi
I know it's cheesy, but as a guy from Philly area here, I'm sure everybody's seen a Rocky movie sometime in their journey, going the distance. I mean, it's the same thing, except people usually don't make it to the end of whatever road that is. I think that that's where you get incomplete on everything and then you think, Hey, I wish I could have, I would have, but you bailed out too quick or somewhere along the way. I know that's a bit cliché, but we definitely drink that Kool-Aid here in Philly.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You mentioned it, running a business is hard. We run into roadblocks all the time. Some we see, some we don't until we hit them. Do you have any mantra or anything motivational you say to yourself, share with people on your team to push through those times?

George Bardissi
Yeah. I mean, again, using my philly references, sorry, but we had Andy Reed here as the Coach of the Eagles for 14 years, and he would always come out in his press conferences and say, Well, it starts with me. I got to put my players in the best position to win the game. Got a little old after 10, 12, 13 years, but I digress because the message is still right. Turn off the outside noise. A lot of people, the people who judge other people tend to not want to go and do the work themselves. Start with worried about what you're responsible for. Take care of your house. Worry about what you can control. Work on the thing that's in front of you. Putting my players in the best position to win the game is about what we can control. Don't worry about the outside noise. We'll deal with that when the time comes. I think that comes back to the distractions and comes back to the people thinking that we're not going to get where we're trying to go and you got the tractors always out there, but no offense. But people are lazy and the people who say negative things on stuff that you're working on just aren't putting in the effort most of the time themselves. Let's just show them how it's done. Worry about what's in front of you.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Man, I love that. It is so easy for us as anybody, but especially as business owners, to lose sight of all the things that are happening and focus on all these things and worry about all these things that we can't control, and it's just a waste of time. Look, none of us are immune to that. We all fall into that trap at times. But I think having the self-awareness to go, You know what? No, I need to focus on the next... One of my mentors said, focus on the next measurable step. The next little thing you can do and you just start knocking things down. And for me, at least, that helps eliminate that overwhelm of looking at all this crap, really, that's out there that I can't control. So I love that. Thanks for sharing that, George.

Running Multiple Companies

Tim Fitzpatrick
So I want to dig into your companies a little bit, man. You've got three companies, but you touched on this a little bit, but break them down a little bit more first because I love everything that you're doing is interconnected and related in some way. It's not like you've started completely agnostic-separate businesses, they're related. And I think there's a lot to be learned from that.

George Bardissi
Just a quick expansion on what I started on earlier, which is out of school as younger George, I think I'm still a pretty young guy, technology was something I just generally took a really strong liking to, and I self-taught, and I broke things, and I reassembled them again, and I figured out the answer. I love that problem-solving, puzzle-story and looking at the picture and finding a new path that's not necessarily predefined. In technology, there's not necessarily one road that always leads to Rome. There's a thousand ways to ultimately get to where you're going. I tend to get crafty sometimes in trying to get to that end destination, but that's part of the fun of it. Having a vision is great. Executing it, that's the really hard part. As you go through the journey, it all on paper, like you're constructing a football team, on paper, it looks good, but you got to play the game. As I was going through my journey, I'm like, Man, this whole concept of standardization, having customers with all these different pieces instead of one piece in what could be 30, 40, 50 categories pretty much creates a glass ceiling that you'll never break through. Early on in the game, everyones like, Well, you need to standardize that and keep all of the things across all of your customers the same so that even the things that are unique to those businesses are this much out of the hole. Pain generated me a path that ultimately I didn't find a really good answer to. That's what started out of my IT services company that I ran for many years and still run. That's what started our software company, which is around the unified communications and telephony and VoIP and messaging space. Because as an IT service provider, I'm like, I don't really... I got all these customers and everybody has a different thing. For me to keep track of all these manufacturers, vendors, I'm not even charging properly for that. I'm just burning time and time, you cannot get back, or at least if the time machine is out there somewhere, let me know. That being said, we're like, Well, if we didn't find the answer and we searched pretty far and wide, spent a lot of time and money to look and we're like, Square pay ground hold doesn't really fit. Why hadn't somebody paved this road? We're like, All right, let's do it. Let's build it. Let's figure out how to create the answer for our sandbox that doesn't seem to really be out there. Out of our own pain, out of our own need came up, Well, if we can figure out how to solve this problem for ourselves, everybody else has got to have the same problem that does what we do. That's what led to company two. That created a lot of different conversations and traveling and IT service providers from around the globe and airplanes and trains and boats and automobiles and everything that comes along with moving around the planet. It's fun because you really meet some clever, clever people out there that do things that you just never thought about. That's the cool part of the human condition. Then once I realized, once I crossed the aisle, I went from IT service provider, still there. Then I started vendorland, which is like this curtain that you cross over, train tracks that you switch over. I realize that, man, it looks a lot different from the other side and you really get treated pretty badly in vendor land, to be honest. Just like I said earlier, I like to look at how do I get to my end destination and come up with a crafty, creative way to get there that may not be super transparent at first? I applied that same logic to, well, we need to really break the format of how the IT industry works, the events around the IT industry, the conferences, the user groups, etc, and let's do something different. That's what really spawned the third company, which I call MSP Initiative. The first company, my MSP Bardizia enterprise, the second company, bvoip. Third company, MSP Initiative. Msp Initiative really was right time, right place. We actually went into the pandemic. Everybody remembers that. I think. Everything shut down. All of the rules, if you remember, were about inside, inside, inside. We're like, Why don't we just go outside? Why don't we get in a tour bus, go around America, have IT service providers loan us their parking lots, and we'll go tailgate edition? We'll do this outdoors. That was the beginning of MSP initiative where it was like, Hey, we can bring that community to your backyard. You don't have to really travel far, and you don't have to get on a plane, even if you couldn't. You can just drive down the street and we'll be outside in the fresh air and create that community effect that everybody loves from the events that they're really used to. That's where MSP initiatives started. Now it does a bunch of different things, but that was the right time, right place, right angle, if you would, because everybody seemed pretty comfortable going out to the fresh air. We use that to our advantage. In a nutshell, that's where these three spinning plates that Orbit, IT service provider, and MSP Land came from.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it, man. Thank you for sharing that. Now, running one company is hard enough. How do you do it with three?

George Bardissi
No sleep, monster energy drinks. There's a lot of truth to what I just said. But people, just like any business, organization, team, nonprofit, whatever, can't do it all by yourself. Even though I try, trust me, and I'm bald. I pulled it all out. No, I mean, people. Nobody's going to be able to AI themselves to everything. I don't care what you think. I'm sorry. You're going to need people to solve problems as part of all three lanes in my world and consistency and keeping those people in, again, the right positions to do what they need to do so that each lane is moving and not in a traffic jam. Over communication, I can't stress that enough, especially with the remote thing. There's a reason why offices have been a thing for a long, long time. The natural idea, whiteboarding, bouncing things back and forth with people being in the same space does work. I mean, it works really well. When you break people off into their own caves, you lose some of that idea, sharing communication, whiteboarding. I adopted remote work 2004 and 2005, well before the word COVID was even in the dictionary, I guess. It's a different way to do business. It does create a time problem. What do I mean? It takes longer for things to happen. It takes longer to train employees. It takes longer to get through certain ideas. It takes longer to learn about the other person's tendencies because you're not in front of them. I'm sure everybody's figured out by now, hopefully, because we are forced to go through it a little while ago. But the natural thing that happens when you're in front of people does not happen behind a computer screen, so just drags things out. That's the downside to the remote thing. This is why you need to overcommunicate. Between the messages and the text messages and the phone calls and the video and screen time, it's dozens and dozens and dozens of interactions per day in order to try and keep that flowing, if that makes sense.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. No, it makes perfect sense. As you're talking through it, I'm thinking to myself, with three companies, getting the right people in the right seats is obviously super important. As the person that's managing all of those people, have you found that because you have three companies, it forces you to trust and just give them the guidance and let them run with it because you just can't?

George Bardissi
Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Does it force you to do that?

George Bardissi
Yeah. I don't know if you follow Gary Vee. He's pretty popular in the social feeds. I definitely subscribe to the way he sees things. I don't want to babysit you. I appreciate, hey, your first job or you're an intern, definitely need a lot more supervision. But if I'm hiring you as a professional, I'm not going to just throw you out on a raft and say, Figure out how to get back to the shore. Definitely, I'm going to work with you on a regular. I'm going to give you that rope and back to the… You're either going to climb that rope or you're going to hang from that rope... I mean, not to be grotesque, but I don't and can't and don't have the bandwidth to micromanage every single person in every single position. It's an open door. I answer my phone practically at all hours to the point where sometimes my wife throws my phone out the window. But at the end of the day, I encourage people to say, if you're stuck, call me. You got an idea you're not sure? Call me. You want to make sure you're down the right path? Call me. But don't be in a position and then I come back and just say, Hey, checking in. What's happening? Give me some update and you're stuck and have been stuck for a while. That doesn't work either. You have to set that expectation upfront. Quite frankly, and there's no crystal ball to this part, but some people are not self-motivated enough, time regulated enough, and organized enough to really succeed in that scenario. People are better off in a traditional office environment, and that's where they just shine. It does take a lot of weeding through different people to figure out if you have the right person in the chair. Back to the Gary Vee isms, hire fast, fire fastest, promote fastest. I do subscribe to that. I really do. Quite frankly, I'm not trying to be mean, but it's like, hey, I'm looking for an outcome. I'm looking for the right person in the right position on my team, on my football field. If you're not the right quarterback, I need to get a different quarterback. If you're not the right offensive guard, I need to get a different offensive guard. The punter is not doing the job. Let me go find a new punter. I'm not trying to be cold about it. I'm just trying to be honest. Drag it out if we don't have to.

Guerrilla Marketing Approach Towards Brand Awareness

Tim Fitzpatrick
I want to shift gears a little bit. I want to talk about marketing. Surprise, surprise. One of the things you talked about in the pre-interview when we connected was this guerrilla marketing approach that you've taken to brand awareness events and various collaborative efforts. Can you share some of the stuff that's working well for you?

George Bardissi
The trade show booth has been around for decades before I was born, to be totally frank. It may be the single worst investment in the business. Unfortunately, IT Amana Services, that sandbox, thrives on these trade show booths that, quite frankly, are absolutely soul-crushing when it comes to any ROI or traction or brand awareness, whatever you want to call it. I understand that everybody has Xerox that blueprint over and over to the point where you can barely read the page coming out of the copy machine. For me, it's like, I don't care about that part. I understand you need to just look the part, be in the room. But to me, if you're chained to that six by six, eight by eight, three by three space, you're in trouble. I would expect very little to come back from that. You need to have conversations with people, and that means you need to go outside of the blueprint. Quite frankly, every event organizer or conference organizer probably hates this conversation, but it's true. 50% of the people that go to any event, circle one on the calendar, I don't care which one it is, never even go to the trade show area of said event. You already lost half of that. Then depending on how many people are exhibiting or sponsoring, think about a really big one. Let's call it 120, 150, the chance that the 50% that do make it into that room get even around all of those stands one time is so low, I don't know how you actually benefit. I really don't. At the end of the day, as a guy who's doing events and planning, I understand there's a hard cost to a lot of these things and that cost is shared, and I get that. But everybody has to go outside of the blueprint in order to extract their value because the way that is designed most of the time is that the person that's throwing the conference gets the value and the person that's co-sponsoring that as an exhibitor gets almost no value. How do we hack that? Again, going outside of the situation, here are some suggestions that work for me. One, be in the same place as the attendees are. If that means going to breakout sessions, go to breakout sessions, labs, workshops. Show up in the chair next to them, ask the questions right next to them. Now all of a sudden, they begin to view you as, Oh, hey, this guy understands what I'm going through, and he's not just trying to give me a brochure and sell me something. That's number one. Number two, collaborate with other vendors in the space. Don't go at it just on your own. It's okay to say, Hey, you're trying to get to the same guy. You're trying to get to the same guy. You're trying to get to the same guy. Let's pool our efforts and let's throw maybe some money in the pot together to do something like joint dinners or happy hour bar tabs or let's take somebody out to something off-site, a group of people off-site so that we can extrapolate some one-on-one time that you're otherwise not getting. By the way, man, I can't tell you how many bar tabs and how many lobby bars have ever been created in the industry. The hallways, the bar, the curb, basically everywhere other than sometimes the actual event space is the best way that granular conversations happen. That's what you want. Some cheeky ways that we've extracted value. Hey, it gets about close to midnight and people have had dinner probably four or five hours ago. How about the 25 pizzas that show up spontaneously at the right time where people are like, Oh, my God, I was dying. I needed some food. All of a sudden, I'm not trying to sell you something, I'm trying to create a good experience. On some of the bigger stuff, like where we've said, Hey, I'm going to do a rager party and I'm going to go to every vendor and say, Hey, what's the limit on your credit card where you won't get in trouble and have to go upstairs and ask for permission? Throw that into this pot. Let's do something big and crazy so we can actually get the thing that we can never get out of the host conference, which is the attendee list. I don't know why they're guarding it like it's Fort Knox. My default is off menu. I don't know how else to say that. I'll do what I have to do so that the host event holder feels like I'm not just roguing their event and be respectful there. But I also need to make sure that I walk out with something rather than just being there handing out pens and bouncings balls and I don't know what other the hell people are thrown out there to just throw into the grab bag. So all of that to me just makes no sense.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I want to break a few things out here, and it's funny you talk about trade shows because the MSP IT space has more trade shows than... I mean, it seems like there is one at least two or three times a week.

George Bardissi
Somebody told me the other day that there was 324 events on the schedule for 23. I was like, I didn't even know that that number is real, but if it is, you're talking about 10, 20 events a week. I mean, it's crazy.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It would not surprise me because there are so many shows. It's unreal. But I love the fact that you're just talking about, look, off menu, thinking outside of the box and just touching on we need to be where the attendees are, which to me comes back to target market, understanding your ideal clients. When we talk about marketing, we talk about, look, you don't want to cast a wide net. If you're fishing for trout, you want to cast a lion in the trout pond down the street, which is exactly what you're talking about. Look, if most of the people aren't paying attention and most of us that have been to trade shows and worked booths know this, you're standing there and people are walking by doing everything they can to avoid eye contact. Yes. So it's like, why put yourself in that position? Like you said, go where they are, whether that's offsite events or workshops, trainings that are going on. And I love how you touched on having those granular conversations because when you're sitting in a workshop and there's a break or you're just starting to chat, that's how you start to get to know people. It's those one-on-one interactions that have far more power.

George Bardissi
You're the marketing specialist. But I saw on a slide at an event recently that it's now 28 touchpoints. It used to be 10, and then it was 15, 20, and now it's 28. That's a lot of touch points. But that one-on-one granular conversation cuts it down dramatically. You're hoping that the work that you're doing post-event gets those people to actually commit to a call, a demo, a trial, whatever. But the work, that's a long game. It is a really long game if you're doing it that way. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but if you can cut the football field down in half and you can get that person to a point where they're like, Yeah, I'm willing to commit to that. And there was one conversation, one beer, one slice of pizza, that just changes your situation. By the way, everybody needs to know their math. Tim, a lot of people think marketing is this, I don't know, invisible thing. But if you understand that, hey, if I can walk away from this event with 15 qualified leads, and if I can close seven of them, my event's been covered. I know I'm just using very small numbers, but I'm putting in perspective. Then all of a sudden, it's much more attainable because I think I could have 15 conversations one-on-one or more rather than the 2,000 people that show up at the event, and you're like, Five people showed up to my trade show booth. I mean, it's not exactly comforting.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You know, it's funny you say that, George, because I think you're spot on. Too many people go to things like trade shows or any marketing activity without having a clear understanding of why are we doing this? What is the end goal? And we've got to understand that first and foremost so that we can then identify, okay, what's the metric we need to track that's going to tell us this was a successful event for us? And if the goal is to get X amount of leads and we convert at X %, as long as we know what the lifetime value of that client is-

George Bardissi
There it is.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Then we can understand, okay, because it's not just the initial sale, right? Especially with something like bvoip or your IT company, there's recurring revenue there. Clients stay for a certain period of time, and we need to understand what the whole entire value of that client is, and then we can determine, okay, yeah, this was worth it or it wasn't. So I love how you brought that up because anything we do from a marketing standpoint, we got to know why we're doing it and then identify the metrics that are going to help us determine whether we've been successful.

George Bardissi
Knowing your math is maybe the most, it's in the top three most important things. Real quick. I know that by the time somebody gets to a point where they're about to onboard with bvoip end-to-end, more or less costs the company about $2,000 as a net new partner. That's from the cost of getting on the plane, the sponsorship of your six by six space, whatever giveaways you're giving, dinners, bar tabs, man hours that you're going to do after the event and follow-ups and calls. By the time you extrapolate all of the time and hard costs and labor, that's what our cost is more or less. I've actually quantified that for my team so that they understand that if they don't do their part as that water is flowing down the pipe, that's how much money gets burned by losing a prospective new partner that's come through the pipeline. It's important to understand the math.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, super important. And it doesn't have to be difficult either. I mean, look, I was a math major, so I can dig into the weeds on that stuff. But most of the important marketing metrics are not complicated. Focus on the most important ones.

Multichannel Marketing Approach

Tim Fitzpatrick

We talked a little bit about trade shows, little offline stuff. I know from a sales and marketing standpoint, you guys are taking an inbound and an outbound approach, which I think is fantastic. Multichannel, hitting people from different areas. Tell me more about that.

George Bardissi
Yeah. So content, listen, and in your space, anyone that's watching a marketing podcast, anybody that's ever like, Hey, SEO and paid ads and blogs. It's like content takes a while. But if you consistently create good content and you do it at a... There's that word again, consistency. You do it at a regular interval. Over time, we still have people hit landing pages and blog posts and videos that we created four, five, six years ago that are showing up in the front door and go, Okay, I saw this. I don't want to learn more. We're like, Sure, absolutely. You need to create not copy and paste content, legitimate, authentic things that your people that you're trying to target would care about. You need to do it and it needs to feel right. We're not trying to sell them something, we're trying to educate them. The more content you create like that, over time, it will pay dividends. But you need to stick at it for a while. What's a while? I expect content that I created 12, 14, 16 months ago to start paying off now. Just starting now. That's what I see. Between the content creation, which is largely a magnet to drag people off the internet into your space. Then the outbound marketing, which is a combination of events and webinars and email marketing and all of these other things that you're pushing things in front of people, you plug those two things together and now you have traffic coming from both sides. This is really rudimentary, but I would say that on an annual basis, we generate in our database something like 12,000 to 18,000 new contacts a year. But think about that. That didn't happen in year one. If I go back to when we started measuring that, it started off at 4,000 to 5,000 contacts a year, and then it turned into 7,000 to 9,000 contacts per year. Then it just grew and grew and grew. By the way, not all of those are going to agree to a call or a demo or anything like that. Think about if I generate 12,000-15,000 contacts, for example, single-digit percentages of that list will actually come through as a call or a demo or a trial. But on the flip side, let me give you some quantifiable things. On average, so far in 2023, contacts that we never talked to, didn't see at a trade show, didn't email, didn't call, didn't send a postcard in the mail, just showed up at the front door, knocked and said, Tell me more, are just coming off the internet. It's about 40-60 booked calls a month. But that didn't happen over time. That happened because we kept on creating content, content, content, content, content. Then maybe what happens is somebody's like, Hey, I did see you online saying you were going to that event. Then I was like, Oh, I saw them before. Then all of a sudden they're like, Yeah, I have that need now. Let me go talk to them. But we never knew them. We had never interacted with them. We had never got them through an event. They just showed up net new. That does happen. But back to the word consistency, you can't just do a little bit and then stop and say, Well, it didn't work. Let me just stop because I'm spending money and it's not working. Just keep doing it. Just keep doing it. Get better at it. Tweak your message. It does work over time.

Tim Fitzpatrick
George, you dropped so much value there. I want to pull out a few things because there was a ton of good stuff in there. One, I want to make sure people don't feel like, Hey, look, you need to be everywhere and be in every marketing channel. You don't. You need to find the ones that work for you that are going to get you in front of your ideal clients. And you've hit on multiple times, you need to do them consistently. And all of those things should be supporting one another. You've got content to generate awareness, but then you're doing some of these other things like webinars and email, social posting to continue to stay in front of those people. And you touched on this, man, there's people in our database that we've never even talked to. And then all of a sudden, they're reaching out to us. And they're reaching out to you because you have been consistent. Not everyone in our audience is ready to buy. The need or the pain is not great enough, but you're staying in front of them long enough until they get to the place where that need or pain is great enough and they think of you because you've stayed in front.

George Bardissi
To that point real quick, I just want to expand for two seconds. I'm not a negative marketing guy, right? Hey, having a problem with this company, call us. We're solving your problem. There's so many people that do that, by the way, and it's really just not tasteful at all. But sometimes people stumble and when somebody else is having a problem in VoIP land, for example, the MSP is like, Yeah, I went with this other company. It sounded good. The window shopping looked great. I bought. It was going well. Then things have been downhill and I haven't been able to not have a week without a problem for the last X number of months. Now I'm at a point where I need to reevaluate and I see you out there, people say good things, she's poking around a little bit, let's talk. It's like, right time, right place. But that whole right time, right place is because we were consistently putting things out there to the point where once the event occurred where they needed or convinced themselves, All right, I've had enough. I need to go do something else. We're there.

Tim Fitzpatrick
By being consistent, you're giving yourself more opportunities to be at the right place at the right time. I love the fact that you brought that up. The other thing that I think you touch on that is super important, you talked about creating content that is relevant to the audience. And one of the benefits that you have, and we don't all have this, but we can do the work to make this happen. When you started BVoIP, it was because of a problem you had as an MSP. And so you have a deep understanding of your MSP ideal clients for BVoIP and the problems that they have. You know how they speak about things, all of that. And that is a key to marketing success, period. So huge advantage is what you have, but we all have that information at our fingertips. We just need to do the work. Frankly, that's one of the things that we help people do is go through those steps so that you can enter the conversation that your MSPs are having in their head because you are one.

George Bardissi
Yeah, 100%. I've been in the trench. I've been underneath the desks. I've worked on the holidays and weekends I didn't have. I've met with the customers that just were like, Oh, yeah, I did that when they absolutely lied to you and didn't do anything. I feel the pain. I went through the pain. I understand the pain. Remember, no hairball, pulled it all out. When I'm having that conversation, I don't have to manufacture something to be in the know. I'm just like, Hey, tell me what's happened and tell me about your business. Have you run into this before? They're like, Oh, my God, I don't even know what to do anymore with these people. Then interesting conversations spawned from that, It's okay to fire your customers. If they're not going to work and you're negative because they won't do what you ask them to do, then maybe it's time to cut the cord.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. This has been a great conversation, George. I want to ask you one more thing before we wrap things up, which is knowing what you know now, anything you'd do differently?

George Bardissi
Yeah. I did a lot of things earlier on in the journey the hard way, right? I just had this castle and moat mentality, like everybody was my competitor. I can't share the secret sauce. I made a major shift halfway through where I'm like, There is a lot of people out there doing what I'm doing in this effectively community I didn't realize existed. I'd rather learn from other people so that I don't have to run into every pothole and speed bump on the planet for me to get to where I'm trying to go. Man, that would have saved me years, literally years of pain and suffering because I was literally just trying to do everything on my own. You have peers, they're willing to share if you're willing to share. Break out of your basement, your car, your office, whatever, and reach out and actually start to have those conversations and you will be absolutely amazed in what short period of time you will learn from the people doing what you do. I encourage it. The more, the merrier, there's a lot of more formal ways to do that, like peer groups and accountability groups and all this other stuff. But man, don't be afraid that you're worried about some dude that might be on the other side of town that's going to compete with you because you went somewhere and you just didn't want to share. Take some time out of your business. I'm not saying every day, just thousands of events. I feel like we talked about earlier. Take some time out of your business. Go talk to other people. Not trying to sell you something, they're you, just somewhere else. And have the conversation. I wish I did that earlier. It... Or maybe I still have hair.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, that's a shift from scarcity to abundance, right? And I think that if you can get to that place, you will get where you want to go so much faster because our peers can help us avoid the missteps we haven't made that they've already made and vice versa. And so whatever you feel like you might lose by sharing this information, you will gain so much more from it. So thank you for sharing that. Honestly, that is one of the best answers that anybody has said since I've been asking that question. So thank you, George. I appreciate you, man. Where can people learn more about you?

George Bardissi
Yeah, I'm on all the platforms. There's only one George Bardice to my knowledge, B-A-R-D-I-S-S-I. So bvoip.com, mspinitiative.com, or just google me, put me on LinkedIn, George Bardissi. I like to communicate. If I'm not in person and digitally, not hard to find. I'm always doing something somewhere.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. We'll make sure those links are in the show notes. If you find multiple George Bardissi, he's the one from Philly. So just easy to remember. George, thank you, man. Those of you that are watching, listening, thank you. I appreciate you. George shared a bunch of great stuff on marketing. What's worked for him. What's helping him grow. If you want to know which of the nine revenue roadblocks are slowing down your growth, you can do that over at RevenueRoadblockScorecard.com. You can also always connect with me over at rialtomarketing.com. I'd be happy to chat with you. So reach out there. Thank you. Till next time. Take care.