The Challenges of Improving Your Team: Time and Money

Here's a challenge many larger MSPs have. Let me see if it rings true for you.

• 
  
  You want your entire team to understand the managed service business model.

• You want to do some team building.

• You want them to grow as a group, but also grow their understanding of their specific job, where it fits in the big picture, etc.

You want some training, but that requires requires two really big things. 1) It requires time off task. In other words, they have to take time away from their job  so they can get better at their job. That's a standard challenge everybody faces.

And, 2) It takes money. There are a lot of programs that seem to think that just because you have the "MSP" name, that you have essentially all the money in the world and you're willing to give it to them!

At Small Biz Thoughts Technology Community, we understand what it actually takes to build a managed service business.

It starts with building a great team. 

Today, I want to talk to you about the benefits of a team membership with the Small Biz Thoughts technology community. (If you want to view the video version of this, go here.)

Time - The biggest thing is we have a program that allows you to work at your pace. It's like coaching light without the big expense. Trust me, if you want to do coaching and you want to pay a bunch of money, I will be happy to help you out.

Money - But if what you need is to spend a reasonable amount of money and you want to be able to take your time. A one-year team membership right now is only $3,599. And that gets you up to 10 memberships in the Small Biz Thoughts Technology Community.

It gives you lots of access to free classes over at IT Service Provider University. And it allows you to work at your own pace. 

One of the real benefits of a team membership is that you get a little extra of my time. Several companies have gone through a program that we have where they sign up six eight or sometimes ten members of their staff to go through an entire class together at ITSPU.

And so they'll go through the class and then meet with me for an hour, have some deep dive discussion about how the class material fits within their specific job title. This is great because you have different levels of technicians, you have service managers, you have front office people, sales people. They all need to understand what's going on inside your managed service business, but they look at it from different angles, obviously.

So this allows your entire team to sit together, go through these classes together, talk to each other about it, go through that experience together.  

Best of all, you do all of this at a pace that doesn't take them out of their job for a week, or take them out of their job for three days in a row. 

This is a great price for improving your entire each. 

If you have a member who wants to go wild and take all the classes, they can do that. We had somebody do that last year. The boss bought a team membership, and one guy just said, "I'm taking everything." I think he took twenty of the twenty-five courses we offer. And he got certified in them, so he's got specialist certifications left and right.

Every once in a while, you get somebody who's super ambitious and has the time to do that, but not everybody does. So quite realistically, if you don't have time or you can't afford to have somebody out of the office for three or four days to go to a big conference in another part of the country, this is a great way to give them the education that they need and to do it together as a team, if you choose to.

You certainly don't have to do that.

It great to know that this small investment allows:

• The salesperson can go take three or four classes on sales
• The front office people can take three or four classes on front office (on finance and QuickBooks and so forth)
• The technical people can take about twenty classes regarding their job
• And the managers can take classes that are about leadership and strategy and running the service board

Everybody in your team can benefit from a team membership!

All it takes is a one-time commitment. And if you choose to renew in a year, the price is locked in for life. With this program, YOU get to manage the team memberships. For example, let's say you have twenty people in your business.

You pick the ten who you want to have access to the community and you manage that. You add people and remove them whenever you want. Six months, three months in, whatever, you can take these people out, add other people in. Then,  send the salespeople off to get training. Then you can switch them out and add in front office people go get training. Then you can focus on managers. Whatever you choose to do, you manage which people have access at any time.

We are not here to dig deep, deep, deep into your wallet, take all the money we can find, and leave you without help. Every single thing we do in the classes and at the community is designed around my motto:

Nothing happens by itself

You have to take action. 

That's why the classes have homework. That's why we are so focused on checklists, worksheets, calculators, and Excel spreadsheets. We want you to have tools that allow you to make changes today to improve your business.

It's great to have a grand scheme and a grand plan, and I want you to have those things. I want you to have a mission, vision, and values. I want you to go through that process, and I'll help you with that if you need it.

But you also need to improve every single process in your business - every day! And if every single thing works one percent better, and then one percent better, and one percent better, you literally can improve every single piece of your business, year after year after year.

I know that's a lot of grand promises, but I'm just telling you: Everybody who goes through this program has loved it. And we have people who are renewing time and again because their team still continues to improve and get value from their team's membership.

I got this note earlier this week from a Community Team member:

"Karl and his team absolutely understand how to run and scale an MSP.  The five-week classes on Service Board management and SOPs established a foundation to transform our service delivery.  Our group of technicians now function as a coherent team with everyone working from the same playbook.  We now talk about consistency of service in a way that simply wasn’t possible before we started working with Karl."

-- Greg Baker, CMA Augusta

And like everything Anything else that's out there, if you buy it and you don't use it, well, that's on you. But if you buy it and you dig in, I will help your team get absolutely amazing value from this.

The Investment - If you just had the classes, that would be 25 classes at $399 each. That's about $10,000 worth of value. Okay, great. Then you add 25 certifications at $200 each. That's almost $5,000 more. Then you add all of the books, all of the training all of the videos, everything inside the community, and the value just goes up and up and up.

I know for a fact is all of that is literally just a fire hose, and you cannot stick it in your mouth and turn it on. That is not going to work. (At least it won't have a good outcome.)

Bottom line: We've designed a program where you can take the time as you need it, as you are able to dedicate the time, and we only require a minimal amount of money because our hope is that you will get so much value out of it that you will renew again and again and again.

If you're ready to take your team to the next level, join my team membership, and I promise you, you will love it.

 If you have any questions, check out all of the Q&A at smallbizthoughts.org, or send us a note on that site. 

 I'm here to help you be as successful as possible in everything you do!

Learn More. Sign Up Today.

:-)