The Mindset of You, The MSP owner: Your Role & Your Resistance
Joe Rojas
Welcome to the second episode of the Start, Grow, Manage podcast. We’re here to talk about one of our favorite topics, building businesses.
Jeff Loehr
Like you said one of our favorite topics. So, you ready for today, Joe?
Joe Rojas
We’re going to talk about you. Well, not really you – we’re going to talk about you as it relates to one of the seven elements of the business machine. You, the MSP owner.
Jeff Loehr
So why? Why do you matter? I mean, we talk a lot about the fact that business should exist independently of the person, right? It almost seems paradoxical that you are one of the most important parts of the business, if you’re defining the person and the business separately. Why is the person then so important to the business itself?
Joe Rojas
What I’ve learned is that it matters a lot.
Jeff Loehr
Okay, why?
Joe Rojas
Well, the founder, leader, the CEO sets the stage. They’re the ones that are empowering others to create and grow the machine. Their mindset ends up limiting the growth of the machine or not. They end up either being the bottleneck or the slide. And you know, when I think about that, it reminds me: I was at this talk once, and the guy was super exciting, like a motivational guy. He’s at the front of the room. He goes, “Who wants $100?” And people were like, me, I want a hundred dollars. Everybody got excited. And then one person got up, walked over there, and took the $100 out of his hand. And that’s the guy that got the $100. Because most of the time, we get stuck in our heads and we don’t act.
Jeff Loehr
We get these preconceived notions of what’s right and wrong, what’s allowed, what’s not allowed, what’s appropriate, what’s not appropriate.
Joe Rojas
And that’s the thing. That’s the thing that you have to have to break through.
Jeff Loehr
And it’s that leader, you, as the MSP owner, who makes it possible and sets the tone for the rest of the organization. And really, the problem is fear and stepping outside of one’s comfort zone for anybody with technical skills rather than business-building skills. MSP ownership means stepping into the unknown. There’s a quote from a book that Jung wrote, this concept where he was talking about standing on a cliff looking out at the primordial fog. And I feel like what we’re talking about here is standing on that cliff and behind you is all of the knowledge of the things you know to be true. It’s solid ground, and you’re standing on a cliff. And in front of you is that primordial fog, like a fog of creation where things exist, but don’t exist. And what you have to do as an MSP owner is you have to step off the cliff, out into that primordial fog, and believe that you’re going to create that next step as you do it.
Joe Rojas
As you put that imagery in my mind, I think that when I started as an MSP owner, I was terrified of the fog. Of course, I would turn around and step back every once in a while, and then something would happen. But it was always looking back at the things that gave me safety. I was afraid to let go of my technical comfort zone and turn around and consciously create the next step rather than accidentally stumble into it.
Jeff Loehr
If you think of someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, I imagine them as somebody whose comfort zone is MSP ownership. You ask them not to be MSP owners, and they will be standing at the cliff, looking at that primordial fog, terrified of what comes next. For the rest of us, we’ve got all these skills, and anytime we go forward, when we’re stepping into that primordial fog, we’re going off into the unknown, and it’s always going to be uncomfortable. And I’ve recognized in myself that it’s not necessarily that I feel scared or afraid. There is that sometimes. But sometimes, it’s also it’s subtle. It’s things that you do where you say, “Well, the right way for me to act is x.” The right way to sell is to call people on the phone all the time or every day. So if we say, “Look, there’s a different way,” then their mind says no. I’m afraid of that way. It’s that reptilian part of the brain that’s just saying no, don’t go there.
Joe Rojas
One of the lines I hear the most every time we work with somebody new or different is, “You don’t know my industry.” Yes, we do.
Jeff Loehr
“You don’t know my industry” is one of my favorite cop-outs.
Joe Rojas
Because it has nothing to do with running a business.
Jeff Loehr
It has nothing to do with running a business. And it’s funny because I’ve worked in mining, I’ve worked in technology, I run a startup, an angel investment group. I’ve worked in diamonds, premium automobiles, software as a service. And it’s a consistent thing that everybody says, “Oh, my business is special,” and it’s consistently not true. It always comes back to the same things. To organizing people, whether whether you’re selling diamonds or premium automobiles or trying to mine gold. It always comes back to how you organize people, motivate them and create that business machine.
Joe Rojas
And that’s really why today we’re talking about you. Because you is where it all starts as that MSP owner, as that person. What are the things that are limiting you? What are those mindsets? What are the things that keep you from it?
Jeff Loehr
And it’s identifying those that take you forward. We have six key elements that we’ve identified as critical to the mindset shift. We’ve seen things in our clients in the businesses that we’ve worked with that are essential to making the shift from employee to MSP owner, from technical to running a business.
The first one is scarcity. That you see the world as a zero sum game. My gain is your loss; your loss is my gain. And I think the entire MSP ownership mindset, which we’ve seen on the other side, is one of abundance. One where there’s so much opportunity that it’s not about petty competition all the time. It’s about taking advantage of all the opportunities out there. And that’s a mindset shift. Rather than protecting my own, it’s about how I get out there and embrace this idea of an abundance of opportunity.
Joe Rojas
And I see that a lot. Sometimes people think, “Oh, I gotta hold on to this thing.” No, share it, give it away. You have to operate from this place of abundance. You get so tunnel vision when operating from a place of scarcity that you miss all the opportunities coming your way.
Jeff Loehr
Our business model is not about giving everything away, to be clear. But the next one is cost versus opportunity or cost versus value. We get very focused on cost versus value. The way I think of this is by looking at the way a lot of accountants and lawyers work. They look at the amount of time they put into something and the cost of it rather than selling the value. Or you might see businesses that are reluctant to make investments because they’re worried about the cost of it. But they’re not seeing the opportunity side of it. Is it expensive to hire somebody for $100,000 a year? Well, not if they are bringing in $300,000 a year. You have to manage the opportunity rather than just the cost.
Joe Rojas |
Yeah, it’s shifting your mindset from not losing to winning.
Jeff Loehr
Yeah, that’s what it is. You move from not losing to winning. The next one is shifting from a mindset of obligation, where you feel obligated to work, to one of privilege. It’s a privilege to be doing the things that you want to be doing. This is why aligning the MSP owner to the business and the business objectives are essential so that you can operate in that space of feeling privileged to do what I’m doing rather than feeling obligated.
Joe Rojas
One of the most important things is you’ve got to get out of the technical mindset. Because when you’re in the technical mindset, you have an obligation to your client. For it to be a privilege, you need to move out of that technical mindset into the strategic mindset of the CEO and the owner so that it starts to occur to you as a privilege.
Jeff Loehr
The next one is one of our favorites. And it’s the difference between perfection and action. Moving from the perfection space into the action space. Especially if you’re going into the unknown, perfection is impossible. It’s never going to happen. One of the things we talk about is the idea of taking imperfect action, and you have to develop the muscle for imperfect action if you are going to build your business. Because you can’t wait for everything to be perfect. You have to act and improve and act and improve.
Joe Rojas
And that’s the whole thing. I have heard a whole bunch of different things. “Perfection is the enemy of progress,” but I like perfection is the enemy of profit and progress. Because it just kills profit if you can’t move, if you’re paralyzed, waiting for the perfect condition. It’s never gonna happen. You’ve got to take action. I’m not saying take crazy action. I’m not saying do stupid things. But I’m saying when you get the plan, the plan is never going to be perfect. You’ll find that even when you think it’s perfect and you move, you still have to adjust.
Jeff Loehr
And this gets to the next one, which is the idea of moving away from work being about the destination to being about the journey. Because it’s never fully baked, you’re never entirely done. If you look at these big MSP owners, they’re not sitting back and saying, Okay, well, that’s done. They’re focused on the journey rather than the destination. And the last one is just the idea of transaction versus transformation. When we start working with them, we find a lot of people were focused on the transaction. “I need to get the sale, I need to get this, I need to be transactional the whole time,” rather than focusing on the transformation that they’re delivering for their clients or their customers. If you’re clear about the transformation, and they’re getting it, then you don’t have to be so transactional. And focusing on transactional impedes your ability to deliver the transformation you’re looking for.
Joe Rojas
And you lose your focus if you get transactional. Why did you set out to do this in the first place? If you become just another transaction rather than focusing on that initial transformation that had you leap in the first place, you just become like everybody else and sink into the noise.
Jeff Loehr
So those are our six definitions or six areas of mindset focus. Scarcity to abundance, cost to opportunity, obligation to privilege, perfection to action, destination to journey, transaction to transformation. You’re going to face that comfort zone fear regardless, but I think this method of thinking allows us to deal with that fear and temper the unknown.
Joe Rojas
You must embrace the feeling that you’re going to be afraid. The whole thing is, if you can shift your mindset like this, you can be afraid and still act in the face of your fear, knowing that those actions will give you the outcome that you wish. And you’ll know that because you’ll see it. Sometimes you have that fear, and you have to act anyway.
Jeff Loehr
Next time, we will discuss another aspect of the journey: processes.
Joe Rojas
That’s going to be a fun conversation.
Jeff Loehr
We’ll explain why they’re essential, so we look forward to seeing you then.
Joe Rojas
And as usual, remember that you are loved.
