There’s No Need To Reinvent The Wheel
Tim Fitzpatrick
MSP & B2B Professional Service Firm Marketing Consultant/Advisor | Fractional CMO | Build and manage your marketing engine to get where you want to go faster. | Remove Your Revenue Roadblocks
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we talk to seven figure B2B professional service firm owners that are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience.
Join?Tim Fitzpatrick ?and?Tim Conkle ?for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!
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There’s No Need To Reinvent The Wheel
Tim Fitzpatrick
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we talk to seven figure B2B professional service firm owners that are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult and you need to remove your revenue roadblocks to accelerate revenue growth. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am really excited to have Tim Conkle with me from the 20 Group and the 20 MSP. Tim, thanks for being here, man.
Tim Conkle
Thanks for having me, Tim.
Tim Fitzpatrick
It's not very often that I get to talk to another Tim, so it's always a little weird. I don't know. Is that weird for you when you use your name with somebody else?
Tim Conkle
It's weird because when I first said it, I'm like, Oh, I probably said his name wrong, but on the screen. I was like, Wow.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, it's always a little weird for me. It takes me a minute to get used to it. Before we dig into this, I knew we were going to have a great conversation. I really enjoyed connecting with you during the pre interview. I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions to help us get rolling. Very quickly, what do you do and how long have you been doing it?
Tim Conkle
Technology, mainly. But if you drilled it down, I think IT infrastructure management is probably the line share of what we do. We manage the infrastructure of small to medium businesses. We're in essence an outsource IT department. That's really ultimately what we are. I've been doing this since 1992. A long, long, long, long time. I've made more mistakes than I've probably made good ones.
Tim Fitzpatrick
That's how we learn, right?
Tim Conkle
Yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So speaking of that, what is the most important lesson you've learned along the way?
Tim Conkle
This is going to come off weird because obviously, you're a B2B revenue accelerator, right? So some of that marketing. Probably the greatest thing that I figured out somewhere in there, would you have to market your company? And people get a little funky when you talk about marketing because they think if they spend a dollar on marketing, that it should return $10 million dollars. Then they're like, Wow, that worked great. And when it doesn't do that, most people give up and quit. It's what they do. But marketing has worked since the beginning of time. Can you imagine going back in time? You didn't have the Internet or anything. You wanted to find a hamburger. How did you find a hamburger place? A sign. Primitive marketing. So if no one knows you exist, no one's going to stop. So I think the greatest lesson probably I learned in all of my time is as much as MSPs, IT professionals hate to market. If you don't, you're not going to make it.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Thank you for serving that one up for me, Tim.
Tim Conkle
That wasn't a shameless plug for you. That is reality. And I think we'll probably delve a little bit more into that as we go along. And so people will start seeing some of the method to that in the thought process behind it.
Tim Fitzpatrick
It's one of the things that I always talk about is just?without marketing, bringing in leads, and sales converting them , you're the best kept secret. It doesn't matter how great your product or service is, you're going to go out of business. It's like you got to figure out that sales and marketing side of it first. Man, we can all figure out the rest of it. But if you don't get that first thing right, it doesn't matter.
Tim Conkle
I used to tell people when they'd come to me and ask me things about marketing and stuff, and I'd ask them real quick, Well, do you have a website? Yeah, sure. I said, Well, how many people know you have one? Don't count your mom. Your mom will tell you when you tell her you have a website. She's going to tell you how beautiful it is. My God, I'm so proud of you, son or daughter. My God, look at you. You knocked it out of part. Your mom's always going to say that. But the market really should be the indicator or what lets you know that what you are doing content wise, whether it's websites, email drips, or whatever it is, the market is what should be the barometer of whether or not it's great. And you'll make a lot of money because that is how... That KPR, that system check, that's the return you get on it. When lots of people say, Man, you have great content. That's one of the greatest compliments you can get.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So since 1992, there's been ups and downs. We all know growing a business is a lot of work and it can be hard at times. Is there any mantra or saying that you tell yourself, you share with your team that helps you through those tough times?
Tim Conkle
This is a weird thing for me to say. Even though there was times that I was not hitting what I would perceive as a goal, I've never had it down the year because I'm pretty progressively about going after. But sometimes, I tell most people that know me will tell you, I'm the guy that says you never make it on an island. And so if you're on an island, if you don't have some support group, if you don't have some coach or some marketing component to your company. If you don't have something that gets you from just you making decisions, you can have a hard road, man. It's going to be hard. And so I always tell people to get off the island.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. That's a good one. As you were talking about that, I'm thinking about Tom Hanks and Cast Away. Did you ever see that?
Tim Conkle
I actually went to Fiji and went and saw the island as well.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Really?
Tim Conkle
That was filmed on. It's a great movie, but it's really cool if you step back from it and think through. When you're a human being by yourself, you'll talk to anything, even a volleyball and then Wilson, right? We enable and need the interaction, but you have to have a platform for it. So if your thought was, I'm going to reach a lot of people, but you go to an uninhabited island in the middle of the South Pacific, it doesn't matter really what you want. It's not going to happen. It's the same concept. It's nuts. If you look at IT people in general, they're typically introverts and engineers. You look at all the successful ones, they either paired up with a extrovert that's sales minded or they don't do very well. I'm sales minded guy, so I line myself with very detail oriented people because I fly by the seat of my pants. But it works.
The Success Formulas Already Exist
Tim Fitzpatrick
When we first connected, you shared a turning point in your business 18 years in. I just want to make sure people understand this, 18 years in. Because one of the things you touched on was, man, a lot of people do things and when they don't immediately work, they just give up. Gosh, that's just never a path for long term success. But 18 years in, you had a turning point. Can you share that with us?
Tim Conkle
Sure. My ultimate goal when I actually bought Roland Technology, it was founded in 1986. Roland Technology was my first MSP. It wasn't MSP back then, but IT company. I bought it. My only goal was I want to get to a million dollars of revenue. If I can hit a million bucks of revenue, I thought I would have made it. I balanced so long when I bought Roland Technology, it had about maybe 225,000 in revenue in 1992. So it had just enough for me to live and I had one employee. And the goal was a million dollars. And so it wasn't that the needle didn't move at all. It was just anemically moving. So it took me 18 years for my company to hit a million dollars in revenue. And I know exactly why. I don't have to guess. I don't have to speculate. I don't have to do any of that stuff. Previous to that, the way that most companies grew from a growth thing was phone books. Of course, I was in a phone book, but there was 300 other people in there. And really, it wasn't content. It was your name and the number and things like that. So you didn't differentiate yourself or anything. And I had never been to a conference before. So everything I was doing, I was creating on my own, my own thoughts, my mind, everything. And in the 18th year, I figured out one marketing thing that pushed my company not only above a million, but I have not had a sub million dollar year in new revenue since then. One little marketing well or marketing. Previous to that, you have to understand that everything that happened in my company only happened because I had no recipe. It was trial and error. It was the basis. I'll say this to those out there that maybe you feel stupid sitting there thinking, God, why can't I get any further? Probably think to yourself, Well, here I am. I'm pushing. You got to quit pushing by yourself. IT has been around long enough now that there's lots of people with really good recipes that equal success. But all of those successes have things you have to do, which means you have to sacrifice something. If you're not spending any money on marketing right now, you have to spend money on marketing. That's the bedrock foundation. You can have the best product in the world. It reminds me of back in the day, there was an argument over AC and DC electric on how we get electricity. You had Tesla on one side, I can't remember the guy on the other side, but one won out. And it wasn't that it was better or that he had the money and the network and the platform. And so you'll never hear of someone getting electrocuted from DC. Very low voltage, right? It's always the AC, the Altern current side when people grab all of that and it cooks them and all that stuff. It's the same thing. You can be the best at what you do, but if nobody else knows, it doesn't matter. So the 18th was a turning point in the thought process of two things. One was I have to truly go after the market with everything that I have. And it means I've got to reach out and trust somebody else to help me get there. Now, that's a long story in itself, but.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love that.
Tim Conkle
Quick short question.
Tim Fitzpatrick
There's a couple of things I want to pull out here because I think this is really easy for people to overlook. One of the things you touched on was in that 18th year, you finally stumbled upon this one marketing tactic or channel that really just shifted things completely for you. Especially today, because there's so many?different marketing channels , so many people fall into this trap of I've got to be doing all these things. And the reality is for most of us, we need?very few marketing tactics ?to actually move the needle. And we're far better off going deep in two, three and getting those to work than trying to do everything. So I want to pull that out because... And I'm sure today you're doing a lot more than that. But it's that one thing that got you going and you can start to build from there. But if we spread ourselves too thin, it never works out well. The other thing I wanted to touch on, super key, was you talked about not reinventing the wheel. I'm in marketing, you're in IT. Nothing here is revolutionary. We don't need to pave our own path. The success formulas are already there. We need to find them, like you said, and then just follow them. I think too many of us try to reinvent the wheel when we don't need to. Two really key things I want to highlight there that you said.
Tim Conkle
Now, I think with you pulling those two out, I think there's an ingredient. I agree, you can't do everything and you don't want to do everything. You want to find one well that works. In my case, it was Google pay per click. I got very good at it. Which means you have to actively involve yourself in whatever well you're doing, even if you outsource it. You have to understand it and you have to. Otherwise, you'll quit. This is the hard part. It's the hardest part for everybody. It's the only missing ingredient 99 % of the time. Patience. Now, if I would wait 18 years to hit my number one goal, what I thought was my lifetime achievement thing, which I look back now, I giggle at it because when you really do the right things, your goals typically are going to be blown past by tons. It's crazy. But patience. Rome wasn't built in a day. Great companies aren't built in a day. So it's not credit card marketing. Oh, wow. You mean I give them my credit card and it just... That's the American thought process of I want it now, I want it now, I want it now, and I don't care what the cost is. Well, in marketing, if you do the same thing, the cost is you quit and you lose faith in marketing, which in turn pretty much flattened your business. Can you make a living? Well, sure. But whoever went into business to make a living, hell, I can do that with a job without the rest, the headache, the liability, and all the other things to go with it. So it's marketing as a base fundamental. Every company should be a marketing company.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, you're a marketing company first, right?
Tim Conkle
Well, if not, what are you doing? It's not like you can hang a sign outside, which I've got a sign on my building that says The20. I've never, ever had a company stop come in and say, Oh, wow. I've seen your sign and needed IT.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah.
Tim Conkle
There's more to it. Now, if you're a hamburger shop, that works. So you do have to have a strategy that works. And then if you apply patience to it, and patience means you stick with it. But there's a couple of other ingredients that you have to have. Marketing is just the base. You got to have that.
A Three Pillars Framework for Driving Growth
Tim Fitzpatrick
So let's dig into that because I know you have a three pillars framework for driving growth. Break this down for us.
Tim Conkle
If you think about most, and I'll speak from my perspective, I've grown a company that we sold for huge multiples and all of that. When you're growing them, you have to have some framework that you're going to work off of. This has worked in every single thing that I've done. Again, I've never had a down year and life has been pretty good. But most guys spend more time on everything that does not create value and the minimum amount of time on the only things that do. So things that don't, walking through a conference trying to figure out how to save five cents on a tool that you use has no long term value. Now, you do have to have good tools. But if your thought process is to go to a conference and learn about what new products on the market from the vendors, you're missing out. There's only three things. And if every company, especially in the IT space, it doesn't matter if they're in the IT space or not, this is universal. Three things that you should major in. If you're going to be a company owner, you're going to grow a successful company. Three legged stool. All three are equally important to each other and success can't come with one missing. It's got to be all three.
Tim Fitzpatrick
They got to be in alignment.
Tim Conkle
They got to be in alignment. First is lead gen. If you have a product or you have something, a service or anything that you want other people to say, I would like to look at that and possibly buy it. They have to know you exist. Lead Gen is just good old fashioned marketing.
Tim Fitzpatrick
领英推荐
Yup.
Tim Conkle
That's all it is. If no one can find you or you rely on, Well, I've got a couple of customers and they refer me every now and then. Attrition will outrun you.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, it's not scalable or predictable.
Tim Conkle
Not scalable and you can't count on it. You put on a piece of paper your goal for the year and say, Okay, I'm going to add $100,000 a month in new business and it's going to come from referrals because you can't control it.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah.
Tim Conkle
Cool thing about marketing that most people don't understand is you literally control the spicket. I tell people all the time, in order for any pipeline to drip, you have to continually put pressure on the back end of it. It's like the Keystone pipeline that they built. Can you imagine if this was the scenario? They build the pipeline, they're going to turn the oil on, they've got walkie talkies at each end, which it's a long pipeline, it wouldn't work. But let's just say in this cool world we live in, they each had walkie talkies. And the guy at the fossil and says, Turn it on. So the guy down there, he turns his valve on. This guy down here, he opens his spicket and he waits for 10 minutes and nothing drips out. He's like, Oh, my God. Turn it off. It's broke. They think they have a leak somewhere in the middle. Why? They don't know process. You have to understand process. That's why you need to understand your marketing. But once it does, they figure out somebody, smart enough says, Well, my God. It's got to come down the pipe. There's got to be pressure. You got to keep pushing it in. Well, guess what? It starts dripping and everybody's like, Yes. Then a business owner says, Oh, my God. It's dripping too much. I have a different problem. He turns this pick it off. Well, guess what happens? It starts to drain back. So all the pressure of all these leads coming in is gone. So the first leg of the stool is lead gen. You have to market. You have to understand pipeline. If you want consistent growth, second is sales. This is the basic principle that everybody should adhere to. There is no such thing as a no. Noes are only timing issues. So in other words, you've got this pipeline and it's dripped, and one of the drips, you go out and they say, No, I'm not interested in your service right now. What do you do with it? Well, most IT owners or MSPs in my space just, Oh, they said no. Never mind. Forget it. It's over. It should go back and be put back in the drip to keep the pressure on all the other leads that are coming through. Because if you don't have leads pushing them through or pressure pushing them through, it's not a matter anyway. Then you have to have a sales process. Your sales process has to be better than I'm the best. I tell a story to a lot of people that come to Dallas to listen to me. When there is no differentiation between you and your competition, in other words, if three IT companies went in and did the exact same thing, there's only one way to buy.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Price.
Tim Conkle
And then I use an analogy to show them that every consumer is just like you when they make the decisions exactly the way you do. If you walked into a grocery store right now and for whatever reason, they had three rows of 16 ounce Coke, Coca Colas in the plastic. In one row, they're a dollar. The second row, there were two. In the third row, there were three dollars. I always ask, which one would you buy? Well, without fail, we're smart, right? Well, yeah. Why would I pay three dollars when I can get one for a dollar? Same thing with a business owner. So if you go in and just polypair what everybody else does, you've not only disadvantaged the potential client, they're in a worse position than they were to begin with because now the only way they can buy is based on price. And value never comes at the dollar, not in a service. In a product, it does. But in a service, value is never equal to the dollar. It's what you ultimately get. In the IT space, I've said this for a long time, this is not a scientific number, but I would say over 90 % are bad business decisions. They just are. So if you're a bad business decision, you go in and you pitch and the business on the other side gets that, he's never going to say yes to you. So we have a very unique sales proposition that we have that differentiates us from all our competitors. Instead of talking about IT for an hour, we talk about the business side because let's be honest, when the phone rings and you answer it in our case, it'd be the 20 MSP, can we help you? We're looking for IT support. Oh, great. That's what we do. So why are you going to go spend an hour telling him what you do when he already knows what you do? 15 minutes should be banner back and forth. What's happening? What's going on? He reciprocates. Then you tell him a little bit about the company. The rest of it should be an education on the business side of IT. My sales process talks about there's three types of IT companies from a business perspective. We could argue all day who's better at servicing you, but we all come from engineering backgrounds. We all know how to make two computers talk to each other. We know how to... What we don't do is we're not very good at business. So we bowl it down to the business side. So that's the sales process. Third leg, you've got to be able to scale at parity. So think about this for a minute. If I'm an IT guy and I go in and I've got me and one other guy. I'm going into a 100 seat customer and I walk in and I pitch them, and then 150 employee company comes in and talks about we have 24 7 help desk. It's all internal, it's all US based. I can't compete at parity. It's an impossibility. So either I have a client that says, well, I don't want to pay for all that high end stuff, which means I've got to take the scraps off the table if I'm this other guy, or I've got to do something different. Scale for me, I love anything that scales at the moment of need or at consumption. So the 20 was really built around this idea of, okay, you've got thousands of little small MSPs that are just scattered everywhere. No upside to their companies, except maybe 1, 2, 3, 4 employees. Wouldn't it be a novel idea if 10 of us got together and just said, hey, let's pull our resources. And what we're going to do is we're going to build a 24 7 healthcare all US based, and it's only going to be ours. We're not going to share it with just anybody. You've got to be inside the box. That's what we did. All of a sudden, instead of having Think, all 10 would have a PSA, which means you got to manage it 10 times. You have an RMM, you got to manage it 10 times. Would it be a novel idea to say, Hey, let's come together and let's do it one time. I just squeezed 90 % of the cost out of doing business. I also put them in a position, if those 10 companies were spread across the US, that if a customer came in and said, Hey, we need an IT company because we're in LA, Boston, New York, and Dallas, I could say, Oh, wow, that's awesome because we have offices in all four. Why? Because you standardize and you do all your business exactly the same way. Then if you do that, the next iteration of this quickly comes to the place of, Why are we doing this with 10 different brands? Let's single brand this thing. I could go on and on about this.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, you're speaking my language.
Tim Conkle
Lead gen, sales, and scale. Any business owner that will lay his groundwork on those three things and not care about anything else, everything else gets easy commodity to get a piece of. If you need a help desk, commodity. If you need extra labor, commodity. It's the business side that makes all the difference. The twinning was built really around this idea of how do we create a space where the smaller IT companies can compete at parity, scale at parity, and consume labor at consumption, not have it sitting on your bench, sitting waiting for something to happen because that's very expensive. So claim to fine.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, I'm assuming... I love this story and with what you're doing with The 20. Because the first business that I was a partner in was a wholesale distribution company, and we sold consumer electronics. We were selling in Northern California, and we ended up partnering with other distributors across the country. So there was a distributor in each market. And when we did that, our business is completely shifted. Business was good before, but we were able to leverage the power of not just one but many. We also were able to go to manufacturers and say, Hey, we can offer you instant nationwide distribution into this market. It's very fractured. It's hard to call on. We started doing business with vendors that we never would have been able to do business with individually. And it's exactly what you're doing, right? You're taking these smaller players, they may have a hard time working with some of these IT vendors or getting really good pricing to be competitive. Now, you're taking all that off the table and it's not something that they need to worry about.
Tim Conkle
Here's what's wild. A guy asked me once, he said, so what's the downside? I said, there is none. It is probably one of the first things I've ever seen that everything is an upside. Because if you do the consumption, it means it doesn't cost you until you consume. Where else can you get that? What vendor says, Oh, just wait till you need me.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, exactly.
Tim Conkle
But the power, the power. So some of our core values, we win together, better together. One dream, one team. All kinds of things like this. To some, they'd be like, It's a hokey. It doesn't matter. It'll keep the wrong players out. I want the people that really get it and see it because the power of this thing is unbelievable.
Key Factors for Building a Successful Business
Tim Fitzpatrick
So many benefits. I love it. So looking back at your experience, Tim, with the 20 MSP, the 20 group, what are the top three to five things that instantly stand out for you?
Tim Conkle
People. Right people, right seats. I cannot emphasize this enough. I know when you first start building a business, I need to find the cheapest people I can find because that's all I can afford. The reality is you can afford to right people, you just don't need as many. You get A players and they just make it happen. People's the reason. I know the company that we sold, every employee that worked for us got a part of the sale. Not because we had to, we just did. We had an employee, not an owner, walk out with three and a half million dollars. People are important. The people that build, not the people that dream. See, I'm a dreamer. That's what I do. I dream big. I am a visionary purist, just about. Not an execution guy, but the people that execute is supremely as important. You have to take care of them. You just do. People is a big one. I'll tell you, I grew up and I grew up very religious nd what was really hammered into me more than anything in life was honesty and loyalty. There is no substitute, especially when you're growing a business. The people being honest and loyal and then caring about the customer. I honestly take it personal if a client is not 100 % satisfied with us. That is something that painfully goes through me. I tell people all the time, we can lose a customer, but never because of service. They can go out of business. They can be bought by somebody else. They can merge. They can do a lot of things. They can say they can't afford us, but do not let them tell me that you just don't do a good job because that's just neglect. We got people, we got... And in our space, the IT space, it's got a little bumps in it anyway. You don't need to add to it by yourself.
Tim Fitzpatrick
No.
Tim Conkle
We have enough to deal with. And so I think service delivery, the people, and just being real and honest goes a long way. I don't think there's mystery in building a company.
Tim Fitzpatrick
It's not as complicated as we sometimes make it out to be.
Tim Conkle
It's complicated because we don't do it by ourselves, which is the dumbest thing in the world. I don't have time today, but I tell a motorcycle story. I've already mentioned it to you. The whole premise behind it is understanding how to get from point A to point B, and you're not getting there without people. It'd be like going into a grocery store right now and somebody stops you at the front door and they said, I'll tell you what I'll do. If you want to make me a chocolate cake, I'll give you $1,000. And you're like, Okay. And then you walk out six hours, you think, We're going to have to have some chocolate. We need some sugar, I bet. We're going to need some flour. What else do we need? Hell, let's throw some butter in it. Butter makes everything better, right?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, exactly.
Tim Conkle
Butter makes everything better. And so you grab this big load of ingredients, you take it home, you throw it all in a bowl, you stir it up, you cook it. What do you really have when you're done? Excuse my French, but it's probably going to be shit pie. It's not going to taste good, right? It's much easier to walk to probably aisle 4 if you shop at Tom Thumb, which has the chocolate cake mix and all the icing. You pick those up. You look at the back, you're going to need cooking oil, you're going to need one egg, and you're going to need water. Perfect chocolate cake. Now, if you want it really moist, you can throw a couple of deals of mayonnaise in there, which is a weird little hidden secret that makes it super moist. But why make life harder building a business hard? All the ingredients and recipes for what most people need are out there unless it's some technology that doesn't exist. I would even venture to say even the technology that doesn't exist uses the basic fundamental principles that every other business does.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love that analogy. It's such a great analogy, Tim, because the chocolate cake mix, man, it's easier and it helps us get to the end product much faster. And it's probably going to be a hell of a lot more consistent.
Tim Conkle
Always going to be the same.
Conclusion: There's No Need To Reinvent The Wheel
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So. That's a great analogy for people to really hammer the point home. I have one last question for you before we wrap things up. You've shared a ton of really valuable information, Tim, and I appreciate it. Knowing what you know now, is there anything you'd do differently?
Tim Conkle
100 %. You know what I've done? I wouldn't have waited 18 years. I tell my kids this and I tell people this all the time. If I was 21 and knew what I know now, man, where would I be? But it's a cop out. Because everybody's been 21 and everybody, I'm 56 now. The moral to the story is, don't wait till tomorrow. You know what has to happen? The recipes exist everywhere in the market. Are you going to make mistakes? Absolutely. But you'll be better for it. Will you pick the wrong marketing company? Maybe. But that's why there's more than one out there.
Tim Fitzpatrick
That's right.
Tim Conkle
Why you have to be fully engaged in the three legged stool. If your sales process is not providing, if your scale doesn't give the market what it wants, you have to do something. Unfortunately, in the IT space, The20 is the only thing that exists that gives you all the pieces. You can get little pieces from places. Now, pieces mean the parts and the particles. I'm going to tell you to find a good marketing company and market with them. I'm not going to say, Let me do your marketing for you. We're not at base level marketing company. Well, at base level, we're a marketing company, but it's not our function. We have a service, so we're going to use somebody or we're going to do things. So it's not always... Sometimes it's just being in the right group where it's like, Hey, here are the pieces already built and together. Here's where you go do your marketing. Here's where you go do sales process. Here's how. And I'm telling you, if any IT company or even not an IT company, a service level company wants to get ahead, surround yourself with people that are ahead. It would blow your mind how many times I've gone to a conference and I'm listening to somebody on the front of the room tell somebody how to build an IT company that has never built one. My dad always told me, if you want to be a millionaire, you don't become a millionaire by hanging with the millionaires. I'm not talking about friends here. Now, I'm talking about business and how you get from point A to B. If you want to be a $10 million MSP, you can't hang out with $500,000 a year MSPs. You just can't do it. I like the people. I'll be their friends all day. Just not going to do business. Not down at their level. You got to be pulled up. I think the biggest thing, and then they teed, I would have found someone that had built a very successful company. Here's the cool part. Once you see their success, you add your pieces to that mix and it becomes unique and becomes special. That's really what you're trying to do. You're trying to become special. MSPs easily should be $5 to $10 million businesses.
Tim Fitzpatrick
The demand just keeps increasing, doesn't it?
Tim Conkle
You could be 100, you could be at 250 million. I surpassed my goals back then. I used to write my goals on the board when I tell stories. It was a million, then it was five million, then it was 10 million, then it was 15, then it was 20, then it was 30. Then I tell them the story that at 30 million, I just stopped worrying about the money side of things because you don't have to anymore. You get with other things. The coolest part to be is I ask people, what's your most valuable thing, money or time? If it's money, you'll work till the day you die. If it's time, you'll work hard until you can buy it all back. That's probably the best thing I can leave with people today. Let time be your priority and work your life towards making enough money where you buy the rest of it back.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome stuff, Tim. I really appreciate you taking the time. It's been great connecting with you. Where can people learn more about you?
Tim Conkle
If they're an MSP or IT company and they want to be part of the At Large Community, it's The20MSP.com. If you're an end client, you need IT support, just go to the20MSP.com. Get across to either places from either one of those. But this has been really fun, really cool, and so I've enjoyed it.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Me too, man. I really do appreciate it. Tim obviously knows what the hell he's talking about. He's got a ton of experience. Go connect with them. Go to the20.com. Or if you're an MSP, a managed service provider, check out the20MSP.com. Tim, again, I really appreciate you taking the time. For those that are watching, listening, I appreciate you as well. Tim dropped all kinds of revenue growth bombs today. Man, if you want to accelerate growth, you got to remove the roadblocks that exist there. If you want to identify which of the nine revenue roadblocks are slowing down your growth, you can do that over?revenueroadblockscorecard.com . If you want to connect with us at Rialto, you can also do that on our website at rialtomarketing.com. Thank you so much. Until next time, take care.
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About the author,?Tim Fitzpatrick
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