DeepSpecialization_EP 104_Nate Freedman_Video_Edited_V1
===
[00:00:00] Nate Freedman: Don't get caught up in this stuff about like, I need to serve businesses that are at 3 million and that early stage businesses can't afford marketing. It's not, it's just not true. They can afford marketing. You just need to offer it in a different way. You have to think about things in a one-to-many as opposed to a one-to-one, and in a lot of ways, one to many marketing agencies.
[00:00:22] Nate Freedman: It's a lot more fulfilling. It's a lot less stressful. Like I don't have like some big whale client breathing down my neck. I did for years. It was awful. Um, now it's like, nope. First of all, nobody's breathing down my neck. If I ever get an email from a client, it's always to thank me. And if any client's cancel, I don't care.
[00:00:40] Nate Freedman: Like it doesn't do anything.
[00:00:41] Corey Quinn: Welcome to the Deep Specialization Podcast, the show where we blend focus, strategy and client intimacy in order to scale and simplify our businesses and our lives. I'm your host, Cory Quinn. Let's jump into the show. Welcome back to the Deep Specialization Podcast. Today we have a guest who embodies the concept of Scaling Through Focus.
[00:01:02] Corey Quinn: Our guest is Nate Freedman, and he's the CEO of Tech Pro Marketing, a marketing agency that works exclusively with managed service providers or MSPs. Nate and his team have built Tech Pro marketing into a significant agency. Now boasting over a hundred customers across all of North America and reaching over $3 million in revenue.
[00:01:27] Corey Quinn: All bootstrapped, I'm super excited for our conversation. Welcome Nate.
[00:01:32] Nate Freedman: Thank you so much for having me, Corey, and super excited to be here.
[00:01:36] Corey Quinn: Awesome. So would you mind just, uh, introducing yourself a little bit? Tell us about your agency and then I'd love to kind of get into your origin story.
[00:01:44] Nate Freedman: Sure. So I run an agency called Tech Pro Marketing and, um.
[00:01:50] Nate Freedman: We are a marketing company that supports IT support providers. The name of that type of business is actually called an MSP, which stands for Managed Services Providers. And for me, what I like about this particular specialty, this particular niche, is it's one of those niches where it's a massive market.
[00:02:13] Nate Freedman: There are hundreds of thousands of MSPs all across North America, but. A lot of people have never heard of that term before and I think a lot of people when they niche down, they would think about, I'm gonna go for lawyers. And like, that's a great market. But I think a lot of these really great niches are the ones that are slightly below the Sure.
[00:02:34] Nate Freedman: You know, level of knowledge out there. Like I think we were talking about my friend Peter, your friend as well, who, radon professionals. I never heard of Radon before. Peter told me I never before met.
[00:02:44] Corey Quinn: Yeah. It's a huge industry,
[00:02:46] Nate Freedman: right? Yeah. Yeah. So how long you been doing it? When did you start? I shifted and I niched down in about November of 2017.
[00:02:57] Corey Quinn: And what were you doing just before then?
[00:03:00] Nate Freedman: Generalist marketing agency. So I did have a niche. Okay. It was businesses, so I was doing like something. Yeah. I was like, I, I got the best niche now I'm gonna run some businesses. Yeah.
[00:03:12] Corey Quinn: And so tell me about that. Was it, was it called Tech Pro Marketing at the time?
[00:03:15] Corey Quinn: Was it a different agency? What? What was the nature of that business before you specialized?
[00:03:20] Nate Freedman: It's honestly embarrassing because I think when you're first starting out, and at least for me, I was so lost when it came to what I wanted to do. And even naming your business when you don't have a specialty, it makes it so challenging.
[00:03:36] Nate Freedman: So I was like, well, I think I'm gonna help people climb a mountain. And, uh, oh, Sherpa agency already taken, so I'm gonna do Sherpa 53, and that was the name of my agency. And I, you know, I was a. A little bit of a solo practitioner. I think at my peak, maybe I had two or three people helping me and I didn't have much, even naming, I didn't have much focus.
[00:03:57] Nate Freedman: And then, yeah, when I niched down into technology professionals, yeah, it became really easy and I was like, I think I know the name. Ichnology Professional Marketing,
[00:04:08] Corey Quinn: which I, to me I think that's brilliant 'cause it's absolutely clear what you do, who you work for, problems. You like that there's. There's a beauty to that.
[00:04:18] Corey Quinn: It's a very functional name, but this also, this also works. And so you're, sorry, the name of the agency was Sherpa Sherpa Marketing 53.
[00:04:26] Nate Freedman: Yeah, Sherpa 53.
[00:04:27] Corey Quinn: Shepa 50. What was the 53 about? I'm curious.
[00:04:30] Nate Freedman: That was the year that like Everest first. Okay. You know, they reached the summit of it and, but you know, that's, for me, I was just so lost and every other variation of Sherpa marketing agency was already taken.
[00:04:43] Nate Freedman: 'cause there were so many people like me that were like, I'm gonna do Sherpa Marketing Agency.
[00:04:47] Corey Quinn: So what was happening prior to November of 2017 when you specialized, what was happening in the business that you to realize like, hey, this is actually something I need to do.
[00:04:57] Nate Freedman: Yeah. I. Been on a journey of trying out different niches.
[00:05:03] Nate Freedman: And I, for me, like I'm somebody that I, I did have a job out of college. I was an accountant at like a medium sized accounting firm, and I lasted about six months and I've maybe like a lot of agency owners, I've never really kind of. Done so well in the corporate world. That's not my space. Those are not my people.
[00:05:25] Nate Freedman: And I had actually gotten kind of deep into the Salesforce consulting space where I was doing like Pardot implementations. And at that time, Salesforce had just purchased Pardot as a marketing automation tool. And I kind of viewed this opportunity in the marketplace. But what actually ended up happening to me is I was.
[00:05:43] Nate Freedman: In a situation where I really, it was not imposter syndrome. I was an imposter and I should not have been around these people. I should have stayed as far away from corporations as possible. I should have stayed far away from these companies that need these massive Salesforce implementations. 'cause they weren't my people.
[00:06:00] Nate Freedman: I didn't understand them. Yeah. Although I can technically do some of the work. I was just feeling internally, very overwhelmed. But then I randomly got a client on Upwork. And, um, there's a gentleman named Trent in Sacramento, California, and he said, I need help with my website. I said, sure, let's work on it.
[00:06:18] Nate Freedman: I said, what kind of website is like, I'm an MSP? I was like, oh, cool. What's that? He explained it to me. I said, that sounds really similar to when I was in high school and I worked at Baystate Computer Repair. And back then we were helping businesses fix their computers. And this is at the tail end of fax marketing.
[00:06:39] Nate Freedman: And we were sending out faxes to all the businesses in the area, and I don't know, they would call back and I would go pick up their computer from their house and I'd bring it back to the office and we'd fix the computers. But I was like, oh. I actually understand this and like these people who are like, you know, into computers and they're startup entrepreneurs, kind of like me.
[00:06:59] Nate Freedman: We really hit it off and I started working with entrepreneurs in the IT space. Everything they said I understood and from there, yeah, I kind of snowballed.
[00:07:09] Corey Quinn: And you said you were exploring niches. What was happening in at Sherpa 53 at the time that caused you to really want to start looking in this direction?
[00:07:19] Nate Freedman: It was from. I think like, like everybody, finding mentorship is very important for me. I was part of a community called You Gurus. It's um, no longer around it, it just did recently get sunsetted by the, by the ownership. And I had a really great mentor. His name is Brent Weaver. And I also do truly believe that identifying opportunities is one of the best things we can do as entrepreneurs.
[00:07:46] Nate Freedman: And I was just a general member of the program. There was an email one day and it sent out. So we're doing an early adopter program for, there's like 10 people who are able to join and with this program, you are gonna be able to work with me one-on-one, select your niche, and really do what we did at his old business and succeed through niching down.
[00:08:09] Nate Freedman: So that was the impetus for it. And then I said, okay. He said, okay, what niche do you wanna do? I said, well, I've got a client in the vending machine. Business and I went so far and I even got an article published in the Vending Times, so I'm a published article. Okay. A published author in the vending industry.
[00:08:27] Nate Freedman: Found some issues with that industry as well, where basically at least everyone I was looking out, I was reaching out to, and maybe I just didn't go deep enough, kind of couldn't afford marketing, and maybe that was just the space that I was in and I didn't dig deep enough. Then we talked about Pardot, and then my third attempt at specialization, I.
[00:08:48] Corey Quinn: So first off, Brent is a friend of mine and a friend of the show. What's up, Brent? This. Mention about, and these are my words, but that you had a level of comfort with this finally, the third, third time around that this, this is, it was a good sort of connection and a fit with your experience, your kind of people.
[00:09:08] Corey Quinn: Right. And I'm reminded, I did an interview about, uh, the, the founder of an agency called Rhino Strategic Solutions, and they are in the plumbing HVAC space and. He too was a journalist and decided to go with these folks, the, the blue collar, you know, home service folks because he really felt comfortable around them.
[00:09:33] Corey Quinn: He felt like they were his people. Right. And that is, is subtle for those listeners who are, you know, considering maybe going down this path. Have you tried one or two vertical markets and they haven't been the right fit? That this, this idea of fit and having my, what I call empathy for these people, like really like to be successful, you have to spend time in their world.
[00:09:57] Corey Quinn: You're gonna be going to their conferences and speaking to speaking from their stages and writing content. So I. It's really important that you feel, uh, kind of an intrinsic connection with this group. So it sounds like you were able to do the same. I
[00:10:10] Nate Freedman: think that's, that's so true. And I think the other thing about it is like, yes, could I have built a business in the Salesforce product consulting space?
[00:10:17] Nate Freedman: Like maybe, but it would've been, you know. It wouldn't have given me the fulfillment that I have in my life. I wouldn't have been able to get myself into the leadership position that I am in right now. I think now that I specialize so much, it's incredible speaking at conferences, being on podcasts like this, but also in my niche and being, you know, this guest expert that people wanna have on getting paid to do webinars.
[00:10:45] Nate Freedman: Then having my own group where twice a week we all come together and I've got a big group of MSPs and I'll be presenting, I'll be hosting, I'll be doing all these different things. And um, I think there are, I think one of the joys of, I think one thing that is often overlooked in business ownership is that it als.
[00:11:04] Nate Freedman: Along with the financial, you know, benefits, we all understand those. There's also the opportunity to, for experiences that are otherwise, uh, locked up to everyone else. So I'm very blessed to be in this situation where I am able to be a leader of my community, and that's something I really value. So, uh, yeah, I don't think I quite understood.
[00:11:33] Nate Freedman: How important it was to be around your people, to be around people that maybe they don't respect you and look up to you right now, but there's the opportunity for that, you know? And in the Pardot and Salesforce space, that never would've happened. And in the vending space, yeah, no, it wouldn't have happened.
[00:11:48] Nate Freedman: I'm not that level of hustler, you know, like in the vending space there really. A, a friend of mine in college, his name was Rami, he was an amazing salesperson. He worked at one of these cell phone booths in the middle of the mall, you know, and he would like just stand there like yelling at people. He would sell all these cell phone plans all day.
[00:12:05] Nate Freedman: It's like, how are you doing that? Yeah. He would be the leader of the vending industry, but that's not me. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. And, um, giving, allowing yourself to become that level of leader is so important in business. Yeah.
[00:12:20] Corey Quinn: Yeah. And it just goes back to what, what kind of business do you wanna build?
[00:12:24] Corey Quinn: What kind of life do you wanna leave? So on and so forth. So as you were transitioning through this program with you gurus away from being a generalist to being ultimately a specialist with the MSPs, how did, how did that transition go? Did you fire all your non MSP clients and it, how did, how did that evolution change?
[00:12:47] Nate Freedman: Yes. Yeah, I did. So I just, you did, I I burnt the, I burnt the bridge to burnt the ship, whatever. There was nothing left. Oh, okay. Yeah. For like, for me, I was saying, and I, I, I think, 'cause when I was in the Salesforce space, I was like, oh, it's imposter syndrome. But I think when I started working with the MSPs and I was like, I'm actually succeeding here.
[00:13:09] Nate Freedman: I'm actually doing a good job. Then I realized it was an imposter syndrome in it. Like straight up. I was, I know I don't wanna be hard on myself, but I was an imposter, so I was like, no, I wanna get outta this as quickly as possible. Yeah. I feel like that was one of the best things I did because then I could focus so much I.
[00:13:25] Nate Freedman: On just the MSP space and I don't know how I did it. Maybe I had a, like back then, I think you know what it really was is I was a young man and I didn't quite realize how much things cost in life. And like, maybe if I was at my age now, it would be a little different, you know? But back then I was like, yeah, okay, I can survive on, you know, $40,000 a year, $30,000 a year, like I'll be okay.
[00:13:50] Nate Freedman: And I just didn't realize how much things cost and as a you, once you have a family, how much you really need. So I think I did it at the right time in my life as well, but it also allowed me to switch things up very quickly and make up for that lost time.
[00:14:05] Corey Quinn: How did you attract some of your first MSP clients?
[00:14:10] Nate Freedman: Okay, so one of the first things I did is I made a list of every blog, every podcast, every email, newsletter, every publisher. The SP space, and I think at the time I built like a list of like 39 of these publishers. I reached out to all 39 of them. I think nine of them responded back at least. Yeah, maybe.
[00:14:34] Nate Freedman: And then three of them were like, sure, submit an article, we'll publish it. One of them was a company called Continuum. It was a software provider to MSPs. Somehow they liked my article. Then they decided to put it on the front page of their blog. Then they decided to send it out. To their email list of all their clients.
[00:14:54] Nate Freedman: And then I got three clients from that first article. And on the early days, I was just trying to publish as much as I could. I published three articles a month, not just in the Continuum blog, but any other software vendor I could find. And that really powered me through the early days.
[00:15:09] Corey Quinn: What was the article, I'm curious, that got published?
[00:15:11] Corey Quinn: The first one, like what was it about?
[00:15:13] Nate Freedman: I, yeah, that was called The Modern Buyer. How MSPs can generate leads in the digital age. And it was a talk about how in the old days, maybe you would make your deals on the golf course. Maybe you take your deals through networking. But today's buyer is using search engines to do their research online before they make a purchasing decision.
[00:15:36] Nate Freedman: I know it sounds very basic, but it's 2017, right? So Yeah.
[00:15:41] Corey Quinn: You know, it was a different world back then. It was much more simple. Yeah. Okay. So as a result of that, that first one, you got three clients, which is amazing. You continued to lean into that. How did you, so you mentioned with the, the Salesforce and the Pardot that there was a level of just.
[00:15:58] Corey Quinn: Not a fit, like a, a feeling of imposter syndrome. Maybe some truth to that. What was it like stepping into the MSP world? You mentioned that, you know, you, you, you had done some of this work yourself as an i, you know, a computer consultant fixing computers. Like was there any level of imposter syndrome or was it just very familiar?
[00:16:17] Nate Freedman: It was very familiar, but there was definitely some challenges, and I think one of the things that happened to me was one of my first clients, he loved me. Like I, I still love this guy. He was really an amazing client and he was a little bit like a mentor and a client, but one thing he said to me was, we put a lot of work into his website.
[00:16:36] Nate Freedman: We built, it was really beautiful. We built out this whole plan with all this, these downloads. I created all these eBooks and it was like a month or two after launch. He's like, this is great, but just one question, Nate, when are we gonna start generating leads? I. And I was like, oh, yeah, that, that would be nice.
[00:16:56] Nate Freedman: Right? Because I think what I had learned in the part on Salesforce space is like, that's your problem. And that's maybe how you can work with agencies that are in the mid-market and you know, that's your problem. I just do my job. Right. But when I realized in, in the MSP world, you're dealing with small businesses.
[00:17:12] Nate Freedman: Yep. And they're not looking for eBooks. They're actually looking to generate leads. They don't. They don't. They don't mql. Right. They don't know what that is. They just want like new clients. Right? They want new clients. Yes. So that was really challenging, but it was also a moment of inflection for me. Sure.
[00:17:32] Nate Freedman: I went back to some of the clients that had rejected me who had like, kind of saw through it a little bit and were like, this guy doesn't quite get it yet. And I recorded like these BombBomb videos. Yeah. And I was like, I was like, Hey Mr. Client, I can, if you want that for the show notes, I can definitely share one.
[00:17:49] Nate Freedman: And you know, it was a, again, Mr. Client, I've got a new offer for you. And instead of like charging you $20,000 for the website, like I had originally planned. I am gonna just do all of your marketing for $2,000 a. And I, these clients were like, okay, $2,000 a month I can afford. And yes, I thought $20,000 per website made no sense and I was never gonna do it.
[00:18:13] Nate Freedman: And you're, that means you're gonna build the website and you're gonna generate leads. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna do it. I was like, but you know, you're part of my early adopter group, so I need you to give me feedback and help out. And I got like these five or so like early adopters, and most of them are actually still clients with me today.
[00:18:30] Nate Freedman: And great. Four of them got their prices raised. One of them is still paying $2,000 per month. So John, if you're listening to this, your coming and I think pretty good. But they really gave me my, my break, you know? Yeah. But I did learn to generate leads and I think paying $2,000 a month, like then once I got those five, it's like, okay, now I'm making 10,000, and then add a few more here and there.
[00:18:58] Nate Freedman: And I was able to start building a business off of that base.
[00:19:02] Corey Quinn: Yeah. I think that is a great testament to two things. Number one, not waiting until everything is perfect before getting started. Yeah. And then number two, being responsive to the market feedback. Right. If you're pitching and pitching and pitching and people are not buying, it's probably not them
[00:19:18] Nate Freedman: at the of the day.
[00:19:19] Nate Freedman: This is one of the things is I really believe if you're an, I'm sorry. Like I don't mind telling people I was an imposter in the Salesforce space and telling people I botched my first offer here. Because the truth is like if you can't. Make the changes as an entrepreneur in your business in yourself, you, I don't know, maybe you'll succeed, but I'm not gonna succeed.
[00:19:39] Nate Freedman: Yeah. If I don't see those mistakes and fix them. And I was a little bit following the Lean Startup methodology and I was, there's a, yeah, I think it's the Lean Startup is one of the books. The other one is, um, running Lean and these talk about this. Process of doing a customer development interview? Sure.
[00:19:59] Nate Freedman: So I was doing customer development interviews with just trying reaching out and reaching out to different people and being like, will you do a informational interview with me? But I was also telling my current clients, Hey, I need more feedback. And even though I wasn't formally doing a customer development interview, a lot of what I was doing really up until about like two years ago.
[00:20:18] Nate Freedman: Was all customer development work, and I may be focused on customer development a little bit too long, and I probably could have shifted to scaling a little faster, but that was my business.
[00:20:30] Corey Quinn: Sure. By the way, there's a great book by Rob Fitzpatrick called The Mom Test. Okay. It's one of my favorite books about customer development.
[00:20:38] Corey Quinn: It's just really well written. It's fun, it's easy to digest. I personally, uh, a very big fan of the idea of, of customer development or interviewing clients to understand buying journey, you know? Yeah. That's one of the things I teach with in my, in the work that I do, which is trying to understand from our clients what is the specific problem they're trying to solve.
[00:21:00] Corey Quinn: What have they tried before? Like that whole investment of research and, and, and time really helps to fine tune, uh, not only a product, but also marketing strategy. So.
[00:21:14] Corey Quinn: So let's fast forward a little bit. So you've been, you, you, at 2017, you focused in on the MSPs and you started writing content, you know, guest publishing, contributing these articles, and that led to some new clients. You began to iterate on your product focused now more on lead gen. And then what were the what, what sort of happened next as far as the evolution of the business?
[00:21:39] Corey Quinn: What was the next big milestone for you at that point?
[00:21:42] Nate Freedman: So learning lead gen was a, a big piece, and I think a lot of people feel like they. When that they wanna be a service based business where they're providing a service. But I truly believe it may not have to be lead gen, but you do have to find a way to get your client's results.
[00:22:04] Nate Freedman: And if you can't tie your service back to results, I think it's gonna, I know there's a way to run a business out there. I don't know how to do that. Yeah. And I think it makes your life a lot easier if you can't tie it back to results. So that was one thing was just always. My, another great mentor of mine, a guy named Jake Jovan, is an awesome entrepreneur.
[00:22:23] Nate Freedman: He said to me, he said, Nate, if you can just keep this one thing in mind. He said, your whatever it is, your goal is to help your clients win new clients. Everything you do should be towards that. Like, don't focus so much on niching down to this thing, this thing, this thing. Just keep that end goal in mind and you'll be fine.
[00:22:43] Nate Freedman: Yeah, I have always kept that in mind. And then, yeah, the guest publishing, posting on LinkedIn, connecting with different people in the space as part of the, one of the things that Brent taught was this idea of building a market map. So part of it is you do the publishers, part of it's you do your competitors.
[00:23:00] Nate Freedman: Part of it is you list all your potential clients and you list everybody out. And I started connecting with everybody and. I was growing on this package of like $2,000 a month, and I think I had grown to maybe 35, 40 clients, maybe even more, 60, 70 clients, and I had grown a nice business, definitely over a million in revenue, and I was pretty happy with everything.
[00:23:23] Nate Freedman: But around that time, I had also built a great relationship with a gentle name Stuart Crawford, who had actually started one of the first marketing agencies in my niche for MSPs. So he had started his business maybe like 2009. And he had been reading my content and he had been DMing me on LinkedIn, and we had built a little bit of a friendship about three years ago after I had been growing my business.
[00:23:46] Nate Freedman: Stuart reached out to me and he said, I'm, I'm looking to retire now. I said, okay, let's, let's do it. Let's talk about this. I was able to absorb Stewart's business into mine that about doubled us overnight. So I think that was definitely the best, the, the next big thing that happened in my business.
[00:24:03] Corey Quinn: Tell us about that, that journey.
[00:24:05] Corey Quinn: Obviously Stewart was, uh, friendly, kind of a known quantity. Yeah. How, how similar was his business besides the client overlap in the clientele? How similar or different was his business at the time?
[00:24:19] Nate Freedman: I think he had gotten to a point in his business where he really was at retirement age and um, he had done one of these things a few years earlier where it's like, you know, sometimes you wake up in the morning and you're like, I'm just gonna fire my entire team.
[00:24:33] Nate Freedman: He had actually like followed through with that on one of those days and he had piled so much work onto himself and his wife who was running the business with him, and they were really just done at that point. Yeah. So it was a short. Transition and we kind of took everybody on like overnight and it was, I don't know, about 60, 60 clients that we took on overnight.
[00:24:54] Nate Freedman: It was very disruptive. We had to do everything we could to not disrupt our current clients, give the new clients as best of an experience they could. A lot of the clients ended up being very happy with what we had. What we were providing, because I think in a lot of ways we were more results focused than Stewart and we were like, oh, we're just, we're only focusing on generating leads.
[00:25:18] Nate Freedman: A lot of clients are like, finally, like you guys are only focused on generating leads. But I think a lot of us know that customer success, client success is made up of two pieces. There's results and relationships. Some of the clients. Just loved that Stewart Magic sauce. Yeah, and he, they, they weren't getting that from us, so it was challenging, but it did in the end, we ended up, did keeping a good portion of the client stayed on.
[00:25:45] Nate Freedman: Still many of them are clients right now. Still love us. And the, the service we were providing I think were very, very similar, but the way that we framed it was very different. So I think some of the clients were kind of like, this is a little bit colder, this is a little bit more transactional. But that was my goal was I was always trying to build a business that would scale, and I know that.
[00:26:09] Nate Freedman: You know, if I can't, it's gonna be easier to scale the results than it is the relationships. So when I always balanced those two things, I was like, I'm gonna put more effort into the results. I'm not gonna forget about relationships, but that's gonna be my weaker of the two.
[00:26:26] Corey Quinn: And yet you've been able to build a, an agency that's highly, very, highly reviewed.
[00:26:31] Corey Quinn: Lots of five star reviews, like, you know, many, many five star reviews. I've not counted, but uh, yeah. So maybe, maybe that was the right prioritization.
[00:26:42] Nate Freedman: I think, I think so. And then at the end, you know what I've done over the last couple years, so kind of my, my next step in the journey was I started a, a newer program.
[00:26:53] Nate Freedman: I kind of added a new program in, and this is, I. You've had John Morris on a couple times. He's someone who really helped me kind of figure this out. And you, we all know John's story. It's really incredible. Started with a $10,000 grant after, uh, business school grew it to a $50 million a year agency with 50 clients.
[00:27:15] Nate Freedman: And I thought that was so impressive. But I was like, when I talked to him about it, I was like. This reminds me of when I was so lost in the Salesforce world. I was like, I can't imagine charging a client a million dollars a year. Like how did you do that? And his response to me was like, that was my model.
[00:27:32] Nate Freedman: But there's really great ways to have 5,000 clients at thousand dollars a year. I think I'm doing the math correctly here. I decided to create an entry level offer, and my entry level offer is called MSP sites because after years and years of customer development. I learned that MSPs think that their website is gonna solve all their problems and maybe some other business owners have.
[00:28:00] Nate Freedman: Agency owners have heard this all the time. It's like, yeah, I wanna do marketing. I just need to get my website first. Oh, I need new customers. Lemme do my website. And everyone looks to their website as like this thing that's going to change. Abortion their business. I think as agency owners, we know like.
[00:28:15] Nate Freedman: You know, like let's get you a good website. But for me, I learned that lesson when I told you guys early on, where are the leads, Nate? It's not true. So I came up with this concept of art. What if I build someone a great website? I do it as inexpensive as possible, but I also give them a strategy to generate leads at the same time.
[00:28:34] Nate Freedman: And that's where I came up with Ms. P sites.
[00:28:39] Nate Freedman: Platform. It's a website and marketing platform. We built it inside of a tool called high Level, and we looked at a bunch of other tools before we did it. We're looking at like Dota Webflow, there's a something called WP Ultimo on WordPress. And basically what these are is allows you to deploy a website based off of a template.
[00:28:58] Nate Freedman: And this is one of the great things about specializing. So. A lot of times clients want a custom website and they're like, you know, I need my website to be. But when they talk to us, they realize, oh, I'd rather have the website that's working for 200 MSPs and they're actually generating leads. As much as I want a custom website, I think I'll take your offer.
[00:29:23] Nate Freedman: Right. You know, so we started, we built it based on the website, but then we started adding little things into it. Right? Like we're gonna add the CRM. That's why I love building it in. I love building, whether you use high level or you could probably do the same thing in HubSpot. I love the idea of building a website.
[00:29:38] Nate Freedman: A CRM platform. 'cause then you can put all the workflows, you can put all the automations. Yeah, you can do all of these cool things in the backend. We linked in visual visitor or visitor ID tool. We link in this other call tracking tool and we built like this awesome tech stack and we set it up for the clients.
[00:29:55] Nate Freedman: But even after I did all this and I set up this amazing tech stack and you get the website done and you have this really cool system, I actually got like similar feedback to what I got, like, you know, seven years ago and they said, Nate, like this is great, but how do I generate leads? I was like, okay, okay.
[00:30:10] Nate Freedman: So then I was like, all right, I'm gonna do coaching calls twice a week and I'm gonna coach you guys. And then I started running coaching calls twice a week. And sometimes we have guests, sometimes I'm coaching someone, some someone on my team is sharing some information. Sometimes we do it as like open office hours, but then something really fun happened where I had kind of lost the relationship part.
[00:30:36] Nate Freedman: And some of my clients had got an amazing relationship 'cause we've got some amazing account manager. We had some account managers that like, quite frankly, weren't representing us and it was hit or miss. Now I had found a way to scale the relationships. So having client webinars, having client sessions where I can control it.
[00:30:55] Nate Freedman: They still get a little bit of me that brought back, like I would just say like brought back the feeling. You know where we had, you know, when we transitioned, people like, this is kind of dry compared to the where Stewart was meeting with me every month. It's like, yeah, well, Stewart was meeting with me every month, but it got so many meetings that he actually had to like sell the business to even keep his sanity.
[00:31:17] Nate Freedman: Yeah. So I was able to do that on a one to many scale. So I know that went around and around. But I guess my main point here is like, yeah, like I do have relationships with all my clients now. It's just not in a one-to-one relationship anymore. It's now evolved into a one to many. It took me a long time and many steps to get there.
[00:31:41] Corey Quinn: So a couple clarifying questions. So MSP sites is that. In addition to your core product, or is that now your core product?
[00:31:50] Nate Freedman: Now it is an addition. It's in addition to the core product. It is an option. You can either go, it's an option
[00:31:56] Corey Quinn: premium or MSP sites. Yeah.
[00:31:59] Nate Freedman: Yeah. And if you sign, now, if you sign up through our agency, you get MSP sites included.
[00:32:04] Nate Freedman: Okay. So that's also helped us streamline our web design process. It's helped us streamline our CRM process with all our clients. Every new client gets one. Yeah, so it used to be like, what's your website platform? What CRM are you on? And then our team had to like figure out how to use every single client's, CRM.
[00:32:20] Nate Freedman: It was driving us crazy. Yeah. Now it's like, yep. When you sign up with us, we include the CRM. It's free. Cancel whatever you have and join us. And if you're somebody who's like, no, no, we're, we're really deep into HubSpot and we're really deep into Salesforce, like, okay, now we know you're probably not a good fit for us.
[00:32:36] Nate Freedman: And it's helped us understand our ideal customer so much better by just having that one. Line there of will you switch your CRM to ours or not? Because if you won't, it probably means you need a Salesforce consultant and you need to stay away from us. Right. But if you will, it means that you're the right fit for us.
[00:32:56] Corey Quinn: Well, being able to have that discipline is, uh, rare, I would say to the extent that. I imagine many agency founders would still say yes to the client who wants to see on Salesforce and kind of make it work, kind of the, uh, square peg in a round hole type of thing. And was it always that clear cut and dry, or was it, was there an evolution where you figured out, like as a result of saying yes to too many times that you had to stop doing that?
[00:33:24] Corey Quinn: Or what did that look like?
[00:33:25] Nate Freedman: Well, I think launching MS. P sites, which is, it was designed as to it, we originally designed to help early stage MSPs. Yep. That opened up 90% of the market to us. So you just looking at general statistics on the small business administration website, it's like 90% of businesses probably higher, are under.
[00:33:50] Nate Freedman: A million dollars in annual revenue, like 95% of businesses never reach whatever. These numbers are really low. Most businesses, no matter what industry you're in, whether you're an agency, whether an MSP, whether you're a chiropractor or whatever, all businesses, most businesses are very small. So for me, I was following this traditional agency model.
[00:34:09] Nate Freedman: I'm gonna work with businesses that have two to 5 million in annual revenue, work with businesses that have 505 million more annual revenue. Well, actually, I was ignoring most of the market when I did that. Yeah, so by start, by opening up so many more marketing opportunities, my leads have like, I don't know, five xd, 10 XD since we launched, since we opened up this market of the market and started advertising to them.
[00:34:33] Nate Freedman: So when you have more leads, it's easier to re pick here. And for me, I was able to get many more leads by accepting. Clients, they're still ideal, but they're earlier in the journey. Right,
[00:34:47] Corey Quinn: right, right. So you didn't have this scarcity where Yeah, you had to find a way to make it work. It was more that, okay, we have our pick of the litter here, let's, let's pick our lane and let's stick to it.
[00:34:59] Nate Freedman: Exactly. And or yeah, before. Yeah.
[00:35:01] Corey Quinn: How do you know which product to sell in a sales conversation?
[00:35:06] Nate Freedman: Yeah. This is, this is challenging and I've kind of got. Team are like pulling on different sides, but part of it is depends on our human resources. So. We know where we are going. We need to get really, really good at human resources.
[00:35:23] Nate Freedman: We need to become amazing at recruiting and re retaining top talent in order to get to where we wanna go as a business. But that's also one of the hardest parts of business. So for us, human resources has really been a constraint for us. So if we are feeling constrained in the human resources side at the moment.
[00:35:43] Nate Freedman: We kinda have to push people towards the lower end and then try to elevate them as they go. But I think ideally what I'd like to be doing is starting everybody in the bottom, having them have an amazing experience. I. Then go move up a tier, have them have an amazing experience, and then move up another tier because this is what's going to create a community.
[00:36:06] Nate Freedman: Everyone is a raving fan. I think we've all had clients where it's like they hate you, and it's like, well, why are you still working with us if you hate us so much? And like nobody wants to be in that situation. So for us, I want to move them up slowly in order to get the best relationship. So that's the ideal situation.
[00:36:24] Nate Freedman: But sometimes we need to. You know, Hey, you're ready. Like, just jump in. You've, you've got the funds, you need it. Let's do it.
[00:36:31] Corey Quinn: Yeah. And you were mentioning this, or you're alluding to it, but is there a community aspect to it where they're able to network with each other and be able to support each other in addition to getting access to you through the, the group calls?
[00:36:45] Nate Freedman: Yeah, it's, um, so we have a, we had our first live event just a few months ago and Cool. Um, that was, that was awesome. That was kind of like a game changer for the way that I view the business and it really opened up so many new things to me. And then we've got our coaching calls and there's kind of a crew that shows up pretty much regularly and they're starting to get to know each other, so, yeah.
[00:37:10] Nate Freedman: It's evolving, but we have it. Yeah.
[00:37:12] Corey Quinn: Yeah. I wanna ask a couple questions about your sales process. Do you have a sales team? Sure.
[00:37:18] Nate Freedman: Yep. Yeah, we have a two person sales team.
[00:37:20] Corey Quinn: Okay. And when did you start to build a sales function outside of yourself? At what point in the business did that begin to happen?
[00:37:28] Nate Freedman: Yeah, it's a, a really good question.
[00:37:30] Nate Freedman: The timing of that is so important. So for, I think I built that out. That was like one of my first hires. So I think, you know, Brent really encouraged me to do it. But I think what I didn't, what Brent didn't quite know at that time is that he had like the most amazing salesperson of all time. Diana, if anyone ever did a strategy call with you gurus back in the day, she's truly like one of the best salespeople ever.
[00:37:57] Nate Freedman: So for him, I think in his mind, he's like, yeah, you just hire a salesperson. It works perfectly. Yeah. And um, that's it. Go do it. But for me, when I hired the first salesperson, they oversold and then I had to do the delivery. And I was like, dude, like, whatcha doing? Like that's awful. You killing me. So. Yeah, I was like, why don't we switch roles?
[00:38:15] Nate Freedman: I was like, I'll do the sales. You deliver. Okay, yeah, let's do that. And then I did the sales and then he is like, I don't wanna deliver this. And then I got rid of that person. I went through like two or three more. And then eventually what happened was I had, this is where the other thing of like publishing, creating authority in your space is so important.
[00:38:36] Nate Freedman: I mentioned that one piece of it was. I was able to acquire one of my friends' businesses and it was an amazing turning point. But I guess another amazing turning point was that a salesperson at one of my clients who I'd been working with, who respected me, who loved what I was doing, he left my client's business and then he reached out and said, is there any opportunity?
[00:38:56] Nate Freedman: I really wanna work for your business. I was like, oh, that's great. Yeah. And at the same time I had, around the same time I had a job posting up. For an operations lead, someone who's gonna take over the operations, and I got one application, said, Nate, I used to work at an MSP, I did a strategy call with you a couple years ago.
[00:39:18] Nate Freedman: I've been reading your emails. I love every single article that you've written, and I want to work at your company because of everything I know about you. I was like, this is incredible. I have like these two fans that wanna work for me. I kind of brought them on around the same time, and I think bringing two people on a sales and operations person, I think that was very serendipitous for me because what I found earlier on was that like if I was doing the sales and the other person was doing the operations.
[00:39:45] Nate Freedman: If anything went wrong, didn't matter who that operations person was, they came right back to me and I was still accountable for everything. Yeah. And when I was doing the operations and the salesperson, I was like, this is so easy. You're doing nothing. And like I'm doing all the work, why are you even doing it?
[00:39:59] Nate Freedman: But when it was two people who weren't me. There was kind of no way to get back to me. Not like I didn't wanna be there for my clients, but I wanted to scale my business and eventually I'm able to get back to my clients now and the one to many, yeah, like we talked about, but bringing the two people on at the same time really kind of allowed it to happen without my involvement.
[00:40:21] Corey Quinn: Right. Yeah. Is there. A dynamic where that you have people who maybe have not bought from you. They want to, they're interested in potentially hiring your firm. They talk to your salesperson. Are you a part of, are you a part of the product that they get? Or if, if they didn't know who you were, that was fine too.
[00:40:42] Corey Quinn: Like that wasn't a part of the value proposition.
[00:40:45] Nate Freedman: I think it's fine, like if they don't know who I am. But I think also I try to do a lot to, I, I feel like our best clients come in after they've seen a webinar. Yeah. After they've seen one of my videos, after they've read some of the content. So we purposely put all that stuff in there.
[00:41:02] Nate Freedman: So I mean, a lot of our ads. Then I'm in our landing page videos, then I'm in, we've got what's called like an indoctrination video, and then I've got a video where. I introduced the salesperson and I talk about how great they are and we send that to them before the call. And then there is a train, there's a course that's included.
[00:41:23] Nate Freedman: So you get a, you get an online course, the MSP Lead Gen Playbook. I've done most of the lessons inside the MSP Lead Gen Playbook, and then I'm there for the coaching calls. And yeah, as great as my sales team is and my operations team is, nobody is able to, um. Like somehow the founder, we know how to, like, we just know exactly the right thing to say, uh, in front of the clients at all times.
[00:41:45] Nate Freedman: Like, nobody's gonna say the exact right thing. Yeah. We know exactly what little thing to turn to get them, you know what I mean? So I am, I am part of it, but it's all one to many.
[00:41:56] Corey Quinn: Yep. Well, I'm looking at the clock. Uh, we've run out of time. We're towards the end here. So I have, I have just a couple more questions.
[00:42:02] Corey Quinn: I'd love for you. To dive in a little bit more on the, on the high level or the go high level platform you've built. Yeah, I think it's super interesting. It's super scalable and I know a lot of agencies are interested in that type of thing.
[00:42:15] Nate Freedman: Yeah. Thank you. And I think that high level has a weird reputation, I would say, because it is, um, a little bit of a low barrier of entry.
[00:42:27] Nate Freedman: Tool to get into, but it's like just 'cause there are tons of freelancers out there that are really entry level offering WordPress websites doesn't mean WordPress is an amazing tool for enterprise as well. And I think it's a similar thing with high level and there's a lot of weird functionality about it, but there's one feature of high level.
[00:42:44] Nate Freedman: That, I don't know if any other tool has it, but I know that it is so powerful for what I'm doing and it is site, this ability to create what is called a snapshot. And a snapshot is you do a full CRM integration, and that means you create all of the workflows, you put all of the funnel templates, you put all the website templates, everything you would need for a mature CRM.
[00:43:07] Nate Freedman: You build that into what's called a snapshot. And then you can deploy it to your clients. So whenever a client signs up for us, they, it actually automatically deploys their snapshot and all of their backend is fully built out for them. Then we can add in custom menu links, so we can add in like our own HTML pages, our learning library.
[00:43:28] Nate Freedman: We've got a whole template library of Canva templates that they can use. So if you're niched down and you're like, Hey, I made this amazing CRM integration for one of my clients. And I would love for all of my clients to have that. That's what high level allows you to do. So maybe there's other CRMs that do it as well.
[00:43:47] Nate Freedman: I honestly don't know. You may, maybe HubSpot has a functionality, but high level allows you to do it. It also allows you to do it at amazing margins. So I think before this I was like, I was recommending my clients use ActiveCampaign and I would get like 20%. Commission sometimes. And then active campaign gets raising their prices and then the clients are like, Hey, the active campaign raised their prices.
[00:44:09] Nate Freedman: But with high level, you kind of control everything. You resell it, you don't, you don't work on a partner model. You work on resell our model.
[00:44:16] Corey Quinn: And so what impact has that had on the business? You better, you mentioned better margins. What else?
[00:44:21] Nate Freedman: It allows us to say in the old days, like if we took on like, and now even for the agency clients, if we take on like five a month, like we're stretched, you know, that's really, really challenging.
[00:44:32] Nate Freedman: We have to do so much work to get set up. We can pretty easily onboard five a week right now using the high level system of just deploying the sites, customizing it, changing the colors. We do a little bit more and extra extra than that, but it's allowed us to systematize and standardize everything so much easier.
[00:44:49] Nate Freedman: Yeah.
[00:44:49] Corey Quinn: Yeah. And I think you mentioned before we hit record that you may actually have something for the audience, maybe a plug and play for them if they're exploring doing some of this type of go high level snapshots.
[00:45:00] Nate Freedman: Yeah, absolutely. So I've got, I can, if you guys wanna just DM me on LinkedIn. My name is Nate Freedman to linkedin.com/in/nate Freedman.
[00:45:11] Nate Freedman: And just add me and then DM me. I can share our snapshot that we use with our clients, so you can kind of reverse engineer that, and I can also share our agency snapshot. So that's basically a lot of the things that like we are using. I'm happy to share it if you guys DM me. I'm not sharing it with everyone in the world, but if you guys DM me, I can definitely share it with you.
[00:45:31] Corey Quinn: That's amazing. And, uh, I, I definitely wanna get a copy of that too. Yeah. Because I'm curious now. Absolutely. So for, for that agency founder who let's say, has been in the business for a couple years, they understand the value of niching. Maybe they've tried a couple on, never really felt a fit. They kind of, they're doing a lot of things, nothing's really working.
[00:45:52] Corey Quinn: What advice would you have for them in terms of helping them to get out of the struggle when it comes to scaling?
[00:45:59] Nate Freedman: I think probably just dig deeper into the possible niches out there. And I think like ev not most of the great, the businesses that have really, really great niches that I know the business owners that I'm friends with, we're all using, we're all in a niche that it's like we didn't know even existed before.
[00:46:18] Nate Freedman: Another, you know, we talked about Peter. With radon detection. Another friend of mine does auto glass and all of these niches. It's like, whoa, I didn't realize you could do auto glass companies. I didn't even realize that was something that would like, need, like wow, how did you even think of that? And I don't know how we thought of it.
[00:46:35] Nate Freedman: I might, I might dig up an old phone book, like I, we don't have anymore. But I would like dig up an old phone book and like look through what are the different companies out there that could potentially use an agency and go there. And I think the other thing is like. Don't get caught up in this stuff about like, I need to serve businesses that are at 3 million and that early stage businesses can't afford marketing.
[00:46:57] Nate Freedman: It's just not true. They can afford marketing. You just need to offer it in a different way. You have to think about things in a one to many as opposed to a one-to-one, and in a lot of ways, one to many. Marketing agencies. It's a lot more fulfilling. It's a lot less stressful. Like I don't have like some big whale client breathing down my neck.
[00:47:17] Nate Freedman: I did for years. It was awful. Yeah. Now it's like, no, first of all, nobody's breathing down my neck. If I ever get an email from a client, it's always to thank me. And if any client's cancel, I don't care. Like it doesn't do anything. Like it's, it's, it's, it's a small amount and we keep onboarding more and more.
[00:47:35] Nate Freedman: So that's it. Those are my two pieces. Yeah.
[00:47:39] Corey Quinn: I was just talking to an agency owner who is kind of in the opposite situation where she has a client that she makes $60,000 a. Yeah, and she was sweating because they, they're up for renewal. Thankfully, they renewed for two years, but she's still in the situation that she's, which is, we're beholden to this client and it's a good relationship, but she realizes the urgency to, to.
[00:48:03] Nate Freedman: It's like we talked about John's story a little bit and he's been on twice and it's like, yes, he was smart because he's like, well, if I'm gonna have million dollar clients, I'm gonna have 50 of them. So if you wanna have a $50 million, you see like that's great. Like do it. You know what I mean? Maybe I will go there one day.
[00:48:18] Nate Freedman: But yeah, it's hard with just one or two of those. Yeah.
[00:48:21] Corey Quinn: Alright, last question. What's your motivation?
[00:48:25] Nate Freedman: You really only live once and I just believe that you need to. Enjoy life, and I believe that business ownership is really one of the great joys in life. It is one of the amazing opportunities that not many people have.
[00:48:43] Nate Freedman: You we're all working most of our life, you know what I mean? And if you're not working, like I don't know what you're doing anyway, but we have this opportunity in front of us everybody. So if you are like dreading going to work, if you're dreading like logging on in the morning as a business owner, you gotta make a major shift.
[00:49:04] Nate Freedman: And I think what drives me is just. I love, I get so much film A, but I have so much self-confidence. I get so many accolades and it's like, you know, I do have some, you know, people reaching out to me, some business brokers, private equity, they're like, Nate, are you thinking about selling? Absolutely not. No.
[00:49:23] Nate Freedman: Like, no way. I'm not giving this up. So it's really hard. Yeah, it's hard to replace what you have. Right? Why? Why? You know? Yeah, what am I gonna do? Go work on my garden? Like, no. Right. I'm gonna take leading these calls and having fun and being on podcasts like this, um, and just enjoying being in business.
[00:49:41] Corey Quinn: That's beautiful. Well, thank you Nate, so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom, your journey with us. So many great insights that you've shared. Uh, I definitely wanna have you back on so we can continue the conversation. Yeah,
[00:49:53] Nate Freedman: definitely.
[00:49:54] Corey Quinn: So you've already mentioned it, but, uh, folks can reach out to you on LinkedIn.
[00:49:57] Corey Quinn: Is there anywhere else you you wanna point them to? No, just find me on LinkedIn and we'll, uh, we'll DM there. Yeah. Beautiful. Well thanks so much for coming on. Alright, thank you Corey. Thanks for tuning in to the Deep Specialization Podcast. If you haven't checked out my bestselling book, anyone, not everyone, you can download the audiobook for free right now by going to anyonenoteveryone.com.
[00:50:22] Corey Quinn: That's anyonenoteveryone.com.
