MSP’s should build their marketing around a personal brand rather than building it around the business, and here’s why. Also this week, hiring your first marketing person: what to look for and when to do it, and what a second generation MSP owner knows that you don’t.

Welcome to Episode 363 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Building a personal brand when you genuinely hate self-promotion

If you’ve listened to or watched last week’s show, we were talking about the power of having a really strong opinion in your marketing. And I want to build on that right now because actually there’s a bigger idea underneath having a strong opinion but this big idea is something that makes a lot of MSP owners genuinely uncomfortable. They really resist it. The idea is about building your marketing around you personally rather than building it around your business. And I know why that makes a lot of MSPs uncomfortable. So let’s talk this through properly and see if I can convince you that it’s a good thing for you to do.

Most MSP owners push back on the idea of building their own personal brand for one of two reasons. And the first is just discomfort, because what if it feels like you’re showing off? What if it feels like you are coming across as arrogant or attention seeking? That’s the first fear and that’s a very real fear. But the second reason that they don’t want to do it is more strategic and it is a very real objection. If you build all of your marketing around yourself, doesn’t that make your business harder to sell one day? Because of course, a buyer isn’t just buying your client list, they’re buying a business. They’re buying a business that can run without you and that has marketing and has branding. It’s the whole thing, that’s what they buy. So both of those concerns are very valid.

Let me answer the second one first because I believe that changes everything. So if you build your MSP’s marketing around your own personal brand, yes of course it makes the business a little bit harder to sell. However, it makes it a lot easier for you to build something to sell along the way.

A business that’s built around a trusted, well-known personal brand grows faster, wins more clients, and commands more loyalty than a faceless business ever will.

So my advice is simple. If you build all of your marketing around you, your personal brand, assuming that you are the owner of the business, and you do that for the vast majority of your ownership, that’s a very smart thing to do. And then in your last couple of years before you plan to exit, you shift the marketing away from you and you shift it back onto the business, back onto your team.

That transition can be done in six months, but if you do it slowly over two years, it’s not going to have a negative effect because by then you’ll know what marketing works, how to have a trusted brand, how you can help prospects to know, like, and trust you. And you just shift that onto the business, onto the team just before you come to an exit. When you’re having a conversation with a potential buyer, the conversation is around the fact that you’ve got all of this great marketing, it’s helped the business to grow, and you not being there is not a problem at all. That’s exactly what a buyer wants to hear. And that transition period is actually how you get the best of both worlds. You’ve got the growth benefit of a personal brand for most of your ownership journey, but then you have a sellable independent business at the point of exit, which is brilliant.

So let’s go back to the first objection, which was, “But I don’t want it to be all about me. I don’t want people to think I’m a narcissist. I don’t want to be a show off.” What we are talking about when you build a personal brand and you build...