The short version
I got into the MSP trade the usual way, by running one. Fixing things was the easy bit. Finding the next customer was the bit that kept me up at night, and nothing in the marketing books was written for a small IT company with no marketing department and a founder who'd rather be configuring a firewall.
So I worked it out the slow way, with my own money. Websites, SEO, email, video, ads, webinars, cold calls, referral programmes. Some of it worked far better than it had any right to. Some of it I'd rather not discuss. By 2017 other MSP owners were asking how I was getting leads, and IT Rockstars became the answer: first a membership, then a podcast, then books, then more videos than is probably healthy, then hundreds of MSPs I've worked with one to one or in groups.
These days the business has two halves, and they pay for each other. For MSP owners, everything on this site is free: the guides, the weekly email, the community, the webinar radar, the videos. For vendors who sell to MSPs, I run webinars to that audience, four vendors at a time, and I'm choosy about which four. That side pays for the free side, which is why there's no paywall and no PDF ransom note between you and anything here.
The company is IT Rockstars Ltd, registered in Banff on the north-east coast of Scotland. Most of the audience is in the US, so I know more about American time zones than any Scotsman should.
Opinions I've put in writing
- Stop making PDFs. A webinar is the only lead magnet an MSP needs.
- Build a power audience before you build a funnel.
- Most MSPs are burning cash on Google and LinkedIn ads when the cheaper channel is right there.
- Cold calling still works if you stop reading from a script written in 2004.
- The webinar that flopped taught me more than the ones that filled.
- AI is the biggest new revenue line MSPs have had in a decade, and most are ignoring it.