Jack of all trades: how to be a super successful MSP - part 3

Part 3: how to leverage your time and genius to succeed

We’ve been getting some great feedback from our Jack of all Trades series, outlining how you can become a super successful MSP with three key stages. First up, we talked about creating content that attracts rather than sells. The next instalment in the series was all about client enrolment, how to package and price your services. The last of our blogs in the series is on leveraging your time to make the most out of your business, as recommended by our marketing guru, Ari Sherbill.

You can’t get what you want until you define what you want

It might sound simple, but many people only *think* they know what they want. If you ask someone what wish they would hand over to a genie, they might ask for a million dollars. But in actual life, a financial goal of a million dollars might involve far more time and effort than they want to put in. A business owner could be perfectly happy, with all the life luxuries they could hope for with far less than that amount, and be able to check other goals off their list at the same time.

Start by defining your terms, and then you’ll be best placed to reverse engineer your plan to achieve it.

So, how do we define success? One thing’s for sure. It isn’t about outcomes. You can have an objectively ‘successful’ business that has smashed its financial targets, employs a whole lot of people, has many satisfied customers and is the envy of all of the competition, and yet you, the owner, could feel that your life is far from a success. The only measure of success, is how much you’re enjoying the process you’re in.

This is why success is a totally internal game. Only you decide whether your business is a success, and associating external outcomes to this process is only going to result in pain and challenges, as the world doesn’t follow the rules. Perhaps that’s why studies show a correlation from failure to success, because it’s an important part of the process, a step on the path to working out what you want, learning and growing from the experience, and getting stronger and more certain about what you want.

Embracing a growth mindset

Success is always going to be subjective, personal and internal. But to make the most of however you define success, it can help to develop a growth mindset, as opposed to a fixed mindset. Let’s break it down.

Those with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence is static. We know what we know, and there’s not much we can do to change that. The growth mindset thinks of intelligence as something that can grow, and adapt. As you can see in the graphic below, the fixed mindset is very negative. It encourages you to avoid challenges instead of embracing them as learning opportunities, give up easily when faced with setbacks, ignore the importance of effort, and feel threatened by both feedback, and others success. A growth mindset allows you to learn from criticism and find helpful support from feedback and others success.

The goals that a person with a growth mindset achieves are fluid and ever-changing, allowing them to continue to attain higher levels of success. In contrast, if you fix your idea of success on something external or deterministic, you’re more likely to plateau early and fail to reach your true potential.

Outlining your personal route to success

Think about how you structured your irresistible package from the previous blog post. You worked out what you wanted, and then you turned it on its head to work out how to get to that goal. Use the same logic when working out what success means to you. Think about the key areas of your life. These could be personal, family, career, fun, or more. Mapping this out means thinking about the percentage of your time you want to be able to spend on each of these areas. Time is the great equalizer, we all only have 24 hours in a day. Your ideal way to spend it is your definition of success.

In the previous blog we talked about how much money you want to make each month, the clients you want to work with, and how to build a path to creating those outcomes. Your idea of success should fit into this model. If you want to make $100k, you can achieve this with 100 clients paying you $1k each. If every client takes up an hour of your time, that’s 100 hours of work. If you have clients that value your work enough to pay you $10k each, you’re making the same revenue from just 10 hours of work. Not only is that more money for less work, it’s also freed up 90 hours of time that can be used to create the work/life balance that suits your lifestyle. The cash outcome is the same whichever scenario you have, but the amount of success? That’s where the world of difference resides.

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