Creating a Culture That Performs: Stress Management for MSPs

Welcome everybody. Welcome to this month's MSPs in Conversation. Today we are talking about creating a culture that performs: stress management for MSPs. We've all been there, so there'll be plenty of stories, I'm sure.

And as always, a little bit of housekeeping though before we get started. Today will be recorded. This gets cut up into a podcast. The videos get posted online onto YouTube and Vimeo, and the podcast is available on Spotify, Apple, and a few other places as well. We also have our dedicated MSPs in Conversation website, so if you do want to refer back to it or you want to share it around, please feel free. It's always appreciated.

Very quickly, as always, touching on who we are, who Hosted Network is. If you don't already know, Hosted Network is a wholesale cloud and service provider for MSPs. We originally were an MSP 15-odd years ago, but today we are 100% wholesale and we support over 300 MSPs across Australia, delivering cloud and telco solutions the way it should be: simple, easy, and no margin burn. That's enough about us. We're not here to talk about Hosted Network. We are here to learn and hear from our amazing panelists.

Patrick, Nick, thank you for joining us. Guys, I'll get you to do a quick introduction. Tell us what you do day-to-day, a little bit of your history, as short or as long as you like. Patrick, I'll let you start. Over to you.

Thank you very much, Ben. My name is Patrick. I'm from Specialist IT Services. We're an MSP just based out of Southeast Melbourne. We've had this business going since January of 2020, which was a really great time to jump into a new business. So yeah, we've just been growing our team in that time. We're a small team still, we're about seven people, but just coming along nicely and enjoying the ride and trying to do it the right way.

Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us. And Nick.

Yeah, thanks, Ben. My name's Nick Moran. I've got the best title, being I'm an evangelist over at ConnectWise and with IT Nation. And I'm like the older and weathered version of Patrick. I had my own MSP for 29 years, underwent quite a number of changes, and I sold it a few years ago and now work on the vendor side in the community, which is fantastic.

Amazing. 29 years, so I'm sure you've had lots of highs and lows in that, Nick. I'm sure you can throw a few pearls of wisdom at us.

Guys, if you do have any questions for our amazing panelists or a story that you want to share, feel free to drop it into the chat and we will try and answer them and read them out as we go. All right, I'll stop sharing and we will get into it.

What Stress Really Looks Like Inside an MSP

So to set the stage, my first question is for you, Patrick, and Nick, I'll get you to follow on afterwards as well. To start us off, when we talk about stress within an MSP, what does that actually look like day-to-day?

Yeah, absolutely. I think it can look like a lot of things. It can be just one person having a really off day, or it can be the whole team really struggling with something. It can come from places like, you know, maybe there's 500 calls coming in at once and the team's just drowning and trying to get to it. Or it could be someone's just had a spray from a bad client, or there's some tension going on within the team internally. And that's where it's, you know, as the leaders of the organization, our job to really be on the lookout for these things and seeing in the room: is the tension high? Is the mood down? Are people struggling here? And to step in and try and course correct on that and get everyone back on the track that we want to have them on.

Yeah, cool. Okay. Nick, in your experience, what do you think stress looks like day-to-day?

I think it's hard because, somewhat in the MSP industry, I think we normalize stress and we consider it just part and parcel of our day-to-day working lives. And that's dangerous. It's when you start to normalize something like that, it's not until you really have a breakdown or really just have one too many things that just overflow. I mean, your cup can only be so full. And the challenge with being a leader and being an owner in an MSP is that your team feed off you and feed off your energy. So if you've normalized it and, you know, "oh no, this is just this industry, it's just what they do, people only bring us in when things go wrong," you've normalized that for you, you're normalizing it for your staff, and then it feels like there's no trust to be able to talk about it and be able to set those disciplines through your company.

I think we lost you there.

I'm on mute, sorry. There was a jet ski going past my house or a lawn mower or something. Yes, Luke, I was on mute.

David just touched on that some people are really good at looking great and looking okay, and that stress is one of those things that can often hide under the surface, right?

Internal Versus External Stress Triggers

So where do you see the biggest stress? And Nick, I'll stay with you if that's okay. Where do you see the biggest stress triggers in MSPs? Is it internal, or are they external factors?

I think, you know, I reflect back to my journey and where it really became too much was probably the external factors tipping everything over the edge. So, you know, you do very well at just flying by the seat of your pants, dealing with what sort of hits you, but when you then try to raise a family and then you have financial obligations back home, and then you start worrying about your team and ensuring everyone gets paid and everyone is happy, and trying to, I guess, be a counselor for your own team and to make sure that culture is really good. Sometimes you just put yourself last, and you certainly put your family last, and that's difficult. I think it's a combination of both, the professional and the personal life, but it's often the personal life. When it's going great, you can cope with the business life, but, you know, stuff happens and life gets in the way at times, and even the most solid foundations — no pun intended, from my experience recently — can get in the way, and it can throw a spanner in the works, and suddenly it really affects your professional life and flows down to your team and your business.

Patrick, in your experience?

Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think these two things really go hand in hand. You don't have no stress in one and all stress in the other at any given time. They sort of seesaw up and down at different points in your life. And I think it's about trying to create those systems, because if you don't have those good controls and systems internally, you're never going to stop that leaking out into those external pressures, or insulate you from those external pressures and influences. As well as obviously vice versa. And sometimes that's, you know, every day you're coming to work and you're dreading it and you're having a terrible time, and then obviously you take that home, which just compounds the issues you're having at home, and then it just goes from bad to worse and you spiral out of control. So yeah, I think, obviously we can control more internally than we can externally. We can always support externally, but, you know, as leaders, we can't necessarily control everything that happens outside of our building. And it's just trying to be there and actually help people through those when they're happening, and control what we can control, fix what we can fix, and support what we can't fix in whatever capacity we can.

And just to add to that, Ben, in the peer groups that I played a part in and I surrounded myself in for many years, we used to track spouse score, our partner score, on a quarterly basis. And it's an interesting exercise, and we spoke about it, that it was amazing how often your profitability was up but your spouse score was down for the quarter. And then on the ones where your partner score was up, your profitability was down, because you took your foot off the accelerator for the business. So it's hard to keep that balance, and you really need to be accountable. Not only yourself, but your partner and your family need to keep you accountable as well.

Yeah, you're bang on, Nick. I remember back when I ran our MSP that the most profitable months that we ever had was when we were under stress, right? But nothing was going well at home. And then you sort of put your focus well on that, and it's a constant roller coaster, right? And it's hard to maintain then. I think that just takes time, time and learning from mistakes.

Hard-Won Stories From the Front Line

I always remember — and I'm going to get you guys to share a story as well — I always remember I came into the office, and I lived about an hour, hour and a half away. For those in Sydney, it was before the M8 tunnel was built. Our office used to be in Alexandria, which is right near the airport, and I lived out in southwest Sydney. It took a good hour and a half, sometimes two hours, to get to work. And ironically, when we moved, two weeks later they opened the M8 tunnel and it would have taken about 40 minutes. But anyway, I came into the office one day and I was just in a foul mood because I'd been in traffic for two hours and I was snapping at people. And I always remember the lesson, the flow-on effect, that just because I was in traffic, I came into the office, I was snapping at people, and effectively I ruined everyone's day because I let something get to me that I couldn't control. And I actually made a few phone calls that night, and I apologized to a number of people that I was probably overly rude to, and it was a good slap in the face for me. And I always remember that, going, I can't control that. It's traffic. It is what it is. Now we all work from home, so that fixed that.

Patrick, do you have a story of a time where, maybe for you or within the business, that you're comfortable sharing, of when stress is kind of, be it a client, be it an internal thing, that you're comfortable sharing?

Oh jeez, sometimes it feels like that's a daily occurrence. But look, as you were telling that one, the one that sort of popped to mind, which was only very recent: I'm driving home, and from the city it's already, you know, 6:00 at night, and I'm trying to get home to help my partner get my daughter to bed. And all of a sudden I get the call from one of our medical clinics going, "Hey, everything's offline, we can't do anything, and we've got a room full of patients and we need to get back up and running." And all of a sudden I'm now at the point of having to call up the missus and say, "Hey, I'm not going to make it back for that." And you know, then you get the long silence of no response, when you really know you're in strife, when it's not the "oh, that's okay," it's just the "all right." And you have to go, okay, I'm going to have to just deal with this, and I'm going to have to try and make it right by everyone and support everyone as best I can while trying to keep my business operational and another organization who relies on us keeping their business operational. And going, well, I'll be doing the early morning wake-up tomorrow with bubs and letting mom have a sleep in tomorrow to try and make it right by her and set the balance back a bit. But yeah, every now and then the stress comes from the position where you don't have a win option, and you're sort of in that mitigation and damage control situation where you're just going, how do I do the best by everyone that I can without also leaving myself with nothing left in the tank? And that's the real juggle, I think. Eventually something's got to give, and it's either the internal, the external, or yourself. It's the balance of those three. So yeah.

Well, Patrick, I think the audience agrees with you. You've got a few people commenting along the lines. David's actually just said — David Lewis has said — "Important to remember that as a leader, we need to take our health as the first priority. If we are not in a healthy state, then we won't be in a position to lead and help others." Very, very true.

Yeah. But yeah, any person burned out is no good to anyone.

Very true. Nick, what about you? Have you got a story that you're comfortable sharing?

Look, I probably got to a point where I simply couldn't function. And I've spoken about it publicly a couple of times. It was probably four or five years ago where I literally couldn't get out of bed for possibly months, you know, three months. And it wasn't a massive trigger for that. And that's the scary thing. It just, you know, when we talk about that cup just overflowing a little bit, it was just one too many things, and then you can achieve nothing. And I always thought stress and depression, to an extent, was made up. And that's not — sorry, maybe not made up — was used as an excuse. And I thought that, you know, you can just work your way out of it, that it was something that you just got to focus on. And, you know, I think it's used as an excuse often, so I probably did that. But when you really feel anxiety and you really feel stress and you're at the absolute bottom, you're crippled. And it's an awful position to be in. And I reflected, you know, with a lot of help and a lot of time off and a lot of support by a lot of people around me, I was able to continually work my way out of that. But you then reflect on the times that you've seen your team go through that and have, you know, probably breakdowns, you would call it. And because you hadn't had that experience yourself, it was hard to understand at the time. And you hoped that you were very supportive around it and created that culture that the whole team was supportive, but you probably didn't realize it at the time because you didn't have that lived experience.

And the MSP — I keep saying the MSP industry is one of the hardest businesses you can run. Exactly that story Patrick was telling about the medical center. I mean, you've got a million of those stories, and you really need to have strong boundaries as a company as to what you can take on, what you can't take on, who's going to take that on. Because this heightened expectation that someone's going to ring and say their stuff is down is not healthy. And it's not healthy if you're expecting it. So boundaries are the biggest thing. So, not a specific story, but it's something I didn't learn until I experienced it.

That's a challenging one, right? It's a — what do we say about, like, hindsight is an easy thing. Many things in business and in life, once you've gone through that, you can kind of reflect on it. Yeah.

Leading Your Team: What to Look Out For

So as leaders, how should we be — sorry, what should we be looking out for within our team? I want to sort of shift to that leadership piece of it, because as business owners and managers we probably recognize it a lot, and sometimes maybe we're a bit more vocal about it, like I was in my example. But how do we identify, what should we look out for, for our team as leaders? I'll start, Patrick.

I think if you can normalize the conversations amongst your team — and if you're a large enough business to have a leadership team, great, start there, and be open and vulnerable with them and encourage them to do the same with their team — that's really important. When you normalize a lot of these conversations, suddenly you will be able to pick up on when someone's not right, and it can be as simple as that. I mean, I ran a business that, right or wrong, I felt like everyone there had to be my friend and I had to be friends with everyone. And that has its challenges as you learn and you grow. But part of that is realizing that everyone's got a private life as well. Everyone's got a personal life. Everyone needs to disconnect from business, and you can pick up when things are not right. And as you grow, I mean, that's just not feasible to be able to do that with everyone, but you need to encourage your team to be able to look out for their workmates, their colleagues, and just pick up on that, and open up the conversation, be vulnerable. They've got to feel trusted, Patrick.

Yeah, absolutely. Look, totally with you, Nick, on the whole, you know, you want to be friends with everyone on your team. You see them every day, you work with them every day. It's like, why wouldn't I want that relationship to be as good as it can be? And yeah, definitely very much see myself in that comment as well.

Look, I think that there's a lot of science, and it does come with knowing the people on your team and knowing how they work and knowing what they're like. And it's looking for those moments of things that are out of character, or looking for those things that are different. And it could just be things like, all of a sudden this person's working late or turning up early or skipping their lunch break, which might just be that they're overwhelmed and overworked and they haven't said anything because they think that they're just doing their job and they're just getting on with it, and that they're thinking that that's the expectation on them. And sometimes that's where that just needs to be a conversation of going, "Hey, what's going on? Why are you — you're not in trouble — but what's happening with your work right now?" And then going, all right, well, let's help you with that. Let's divvy some of this out. Let's get you the support you need. Let's build you up and not put you down.

It can also just be people withdrawing socially within the team, or within group work or anything like that, because they're just feeling either that pressure or that disinterest due to stress and burnout, and they're just not wanting to engage, or they just don't physically have the energy to give back into the company. And I know I've been there in the past where it's, I can see the mountain of work that needs to be done and I just go, I just can't do it, I just don't have it in me today. And you pull back as a result. But I think that's where it's really good if you have the capacity to have those one-on-one check-ins with your team and give them that private space to have that conversation with you without pressure, without, you know, feeling like, "Hey, you owe me an answer." But to go, "Hey, I'm here to support you. I'm here to even just talk to you about it. If you need some sort of help here, or if you need a solution, or you just need someone to hear you, you know, spill your guts for 20 minutes, let's do it, let's have a chat." And I'm sure I've done that with every single member of our team. And it's just having that chat never goes badly, because worst case someone will say, "Oh, I'm just having an off day, you know."

He touched upon the word disinterest. You know, that's a massive thing, and when you're at your worst, it's really hard to show interest in anything, let alone be the support person for someone else that might be going through their own challenges. You know, you can't deal with it yourself, let alone help others. And if you've come from a place of trying to help others and trying to support others all the time, you come across as just looking completely disinterested in everything. And that's hard, because you feel a lot of guilt about that, and then there's this whole cycle of guilt, and it's a vicious, hard cycle to break.

Yeah. I think as leaders we always want the best for the people around us, right? And whether it's, you know, you can consider yourself a friend or not — I think I'm certainly guilty of that as well, and trying to find that balance is always difficult. What we found was quite successful — we run, and we've talked about it before, we run EOS as a business framework, and one of the things in that is doing one-on-ones. Because something I was always guilty for was that I'd forget to ask the question, right? So the structure helped me. And I don't always get it right, and I know that, you know, when I miss things I kind of hate on myself a bit, and I think that's just human nature, the ebbs and flows. But I know that that structure, particularly as you grow — my COO Luke will often say it's lonely at the top as well, because as you grow, it's a downside of growth, but you get further away from people that you used to be closer to, so you don't get to be able to monitor that as much. We also say internally, a little bit crudely, but, you know, just ask the effing question, like, don't be afraid, right, in that sort of sense. But yeah, one-on-ones and that regular cadence has really helped from our side.

Balancing Performance Against Burnout

Guys, my next question, on the same topic of leadership and culture: how do we balance pushing for performance versus ensuring people don't burn out? Like, how do we balance that? Nick, what have you done in your experience?

It's hard, you know, and especially that shift from, I guess, a good culture to good profit and culture. There's a shift there, and that's hard for some people to be able to handle. And in a lot of cases, the people that got you to where you are today may not be the same people that get you to where you need to go as a business. And that's okay. And when you realize that's okay, it's okay from both sides. It's okay from an employee side and also an owner side, I think. Because there's definitely a culture shift in, I guess, maximizing efficiency and doing all that type of stuff, but it's people, and it's making sure that the people are healthy, they're focused, they're on the same page, they're working as a team, they've got each other's back. But that shift is sometimes really difficult.

Yeah. I think that one thing that really does help is providing people a space to do meaningful work and things that they enjoy or that matter to them as well. If you're sitting there doing password resets for eight hours a day, I imagine you're just going to go mad, and you're going to be, as I say, completely disinterested and not really engaged in what you're doing at any given stage, because there's no value there for you. You're not learning, you're not improving, you're not engaging. Well, unless you particularly love doing password resets, but I haven't met that person yet, so we'll see.

They're out there, I'm sure.

Yeah, look, hey, more power to them. But yeah, I think it's giving your team the support and enablement to do that. And obviously it's called work for a reason, right? It's work. But it's putting in those supports so that those things that can be automated, those things that can be documented, those things that can be consistent should be, so that it's not just an unnecessary area of stress and work and busy work for your team. So it enables them to do work that they can be proud of and they can be excited about and that they can be passionate for. And I think we all have that, right? It's like, you can do what you love, you can do for ages, and then the things that come with it, they're the things that just drag, and they're the things that typically fall behind, and then it's just this thing that's dragging you the whole time because you don't want to do it but you need to do it, and it's there and it won't go away until you do it. So I think it's trying to build that balance in and making sure that we've got stuff here that we still love doing. We got into this because we love it. Let's make sure we've still got stuff that we love doing as part of it.

I think having your whole team having a financial understanding of what the business needs as well is really important. I used to personally feel like that if the business was making too much money, or we spoke about profit, that that was doing the wrong thing by the team, when in effect it's completely the opposite. You know, you want your team understanding how important it is for the business to make money, because that will help everyone including themselves be able to achieve their goals, be it career-wise, be it financially. So it's really important to explain to your leaders in the business that strong margins equal that job security and the growth within the business.

Yeah. And I think it also shows that sense of accomplishment as well. You know, if you've got something that you're working towards, be it a financial goal or a project goal or whatnot, that always definitely helps that motivation piece of it.

David Lewis — David, I've shouted you out twice now, I might have to get you on here — but you've thrown a comment in there that you often don't know how far to go to get the right balance until it's out of balance and you have to adjust accordingly. And I think that's a pretty good example. I know Fuzzy's on here, Ryan's on there, and he often talks about the triangle. You know, you can only ever focus — if you think of the business as three different areas, it's always very hard to get your focus right in that middle. Something is always being skewed. You're always being pulled and getting something wrong. Something's always going to break. And being able to adjust accordingly for that.

And Ben, to David's point, it's so important to have those accountability partners. Be it your partner at home, be it your partner in business, be it your leadership team, be it your key staff. Everyone should be comfortable enough to say, "Hey, we're really pushing the boundaries here, we need to get back into alignment." And to be able to trust other people's opinions and to be able to check yourself.

Yeah, 100%.

Practical Strategies: Boundaries and Client Expectations

All right. So we've touched on a little bit of the leadership piece of it, but let's talk around some strategies, some things that you find that you've done in your business or you've seen that have been successful. And I'd love those of you that are on the call to throw ideas in as well, if you wouldn't mind sharing any tidbits of wisdom. But what are some practical things that as leaders we can do within our MSPs tomorrow that will help reduce stress in our teams? Patrick?

Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think the easiest thing that just about everyone can and probably should do is give yourself and your team the opportunity to disconnect when they're not at work and they're not working. You know, the Outlook app, the Teams app, they have an option to go on do not disturb, right? You can set those so that you're not constantly there at 8:00. I mean, we've all done it. We've been sitting on the couch at 10:00 at night flicking through an email, flicking through a Teams chat, you know, doing — we should be spending that time with our family, and instead we're looking at, "I've got to do all this stuff tomorrow, I've got to do all this," or whatever else. And you know, it'll be there tomorrow. It'll keep. You can be just spending that time disconnecting, recovering, so that you are more effective on the next day. And all of your team should be doing that. I know even when I haven't been a leader, in different organizations, I used to do that, and that expectation was only ever put on me by me. It was just me feeling like I'm doing the right thing and I'm doing a good job, not knowing that I'm just sending myself face first into burnout, which is what eventually did happen. So I think it's really just making sure the team know what the expectations are to them, and that you don't expect them to be, you know, at Teams on a 24/7 basis. You don't expect them answering emails at 10:00 at night, or 5 in the morning. I mean, if they're on a call or whatever, it's a different case. But no one should be on call 24/7, 365. So yeah.

Nick, any thoughts?

Oh, look, exactly that. You know, a lot of it comes down to expectations, and it's not only expectations with your team, it's expectations with your clients. There are so many bad clients that I brought on that are only bad clients because we didn't set the expectations at the start properly. And it's really hard to unwind some of that stuff. And I was the catalyst for a lot of those clients coming on board. You know, the "bring in revenue any way you can at any cost" type of approach — I was the king of that. And that creates a challenge. But if a client knows that they only get, you know, P1 after hours — what does P1 mean? And what does after-hours support mean for them? Is it included in their contract? Is it not included? What do they do? They don't normally contact their rep. They need to contact this one number here. And that should be clear within the business so that you know that this person is on P1 jobs and they're only going to escalate it to yourself as the business owner if this, this, and this have been tried already. So to be able to publish all those things and have a clear understanding — and I probably didn't feel like that was achievable until I moved outside of the industry, or sorry, outside of running my own MSP and moving to ConnectWise.

Now, for me, at ConnectWise, there's zero expectation that you're going to answer a message outside of hours, because there is a whole team that does that. There's a whole team that's on support. And if you're on leave, you're on leave. And so you've got to be disciplined about it, and you've got to set those expectations. You've got to make sure you've got the contingency on it as well. But yeah, just publish it, you know, and make sure everyone's on the same page, that's in especially your clients.

I think that's a great point with the client pressure too, Nick. Like, there's been so many times where we have received something after hours and felt that pressure or obligation to jump on it, when really the response should have been something to the effect of, "Are you telling me this at 8:00 p.m. at night because it's convenient for you? Or are you telling me at 8:00 p.m. at night because you're asking me to do it right now?" And there's so many times where we just jump — you know, we're problem solvers, we jump into problem-solving mode and go, "I've got to fix this, 'cause it's coming to me at 8, and if it came in at 8, it must be important," instead of taking that step back and going, "Well, maybe they've just had a really busy day and this was the first five minutes they've had to send that out." And so I think, yeah, rebuilding that expectation, as you say, and having those conversations with, "Hey, are you expecting me to do this right now? And do you understand the implications of asking me to do this right now?"

But I'd put that back on you, Patrick, that you need the discipline to be able to not see that at that time, because they haven't said it during hours and you've already set that expectation with that client.

So, completely agree, completely. And it's hard, because you're building a business and you're trying to grow and you're trying to go over and above, but from experience, the over and above creates a slippery slope.

I don't know if I take that personally. Ben, recording stopped halfway through mine.

Can't believe you said that, Nick. They're going to have to cut that out.

It's like the dump button.

Yeah, yeah.

Client Hygiene and Communicating Expectations

I always remember — you both touched on, I'm going to paraphrase, but, like, bad clients, bringing on, you know, when we're trying to grow a business, we kind of bring on anything that we can, right? And it's hard, particularly when you're growing, to sort of take that step back and go, "All right, what are the bad clients here?" And my story, this particular client that we had in our MSP — we talked about getting rid of them for years and years, to the point, and again in hindsight, they made multiple staff members cry, right? And I now look back at that and go, "No, no, no. Enough's enough." But it took me a long time to learn that lesson, you know, and you don't know until you know, in a lot of ways, right?

Client hygiene, that client hygiene is so important, you know, to go through and do that. But I now second guess myself with all what I would consider as bad clients over the years. I half think that we set them up to fail, purely by not onboarding or setting those expectations or knocking those things on the head at the very start. And because, you know, you let a learned behavior go for a long time, are you encouraging it? Suddenly you're not calling it out.

Well, we often say expectations fail without communication. You expect them to do something else, but you don't tell them, or you don't tell them more than once. You know, it's human nature that you need repetition, right? So it might be that you need to actually remind them of that: "Hey, sorry I didn't respond to that outside of hours, it wasn't urgent." I don't know, whatever that looks like. But sometimes it's easier to do that than not.

Part of the challenge, right? I just want to shout out there, if for those of you that aren't looking at the chat, there is heaps of different comments in there. Heaps and heaps and heaps. We've got Luke talking about taking clarity breaks. Definitely recommend that. Jana says that she saw some great email signatures about if you are a person that sends emails after hours, you know, they're putting a notice in there: "Hey, I work best after hours, you don't have to respond to it." Again, maybe that's a good way of setting some expectations for people that you're communicating with. Simply asking the question, it's like we talked about before. Yeah, lots and lots. I won't go through them all, because it will take me ages and I won't get to my next question, but thank you, and keep them coming.

And always, as the technical resource for a lot of these people when they are doing those late-night emails, let them know about the delayed send feature. They may just not know, and, you know, we're their technical resource. If we say to them, "Hey, instead of having to do that all the time, just send it at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning," that may be enough to help them as well.

I try and do that as a manager, scheduled sending, and actually just go, "Hey, this can wait till tomorrow, I want to get it out of my head," rather than — yeah, that's always a good tip.

Automation and Tooling to Reduce Reactive Work

The next area I want to talk around is sort of almost tools and processes, right? About making our lives — you, Patrick, you touched on earlier about password resets and things like that. We don't need to go into specific tools as such, but how do you think that automation and better tooling can help reduce that, I don't know, reactive work, that mundane work, that can improve that mental space for our teams?

Yeah, again, I think it comes down to providing the space for meaningful work to happen. And when you have that automation that's dealing with the noise as much as possible, and you've got those consistent expectations and outcomes and, you know, templates and policies set up so that things are going to be a certain way or things will be handled in a certain way, it just makes it a lot easier for your team to follow a process and a procedure and do things consistently, instead of having to, every time a new ticket pops up, going, "All right, well, let me reinvent the wheel again," and just creating that burden of stress and obligation on them every single time. So it's setting your team up to succeed. Don't make their job harder. We've got clients to make jobs hard, you know. We don't need help.

So, Nick, any thoughts?

Yeah, I think automation is one of those things that not everyone's ready for, and everyone's skeptical about it within businesses as well. So there's a couple of areas to consider, that you need to get across to people that what we're trying to do is to elevate their role and not replace it. Because some people will be still very skeptical. You know, that password reset guy that we're all looking for — he might be very happy to do that in the dark corner of the office, but he or she needs to understand that by automating that process, we can elevate that person to be able to achieve their goals and to be able to grow their skill set.

So I know when, in my business, we moved to outsource some of our monitoring and help desk stuff, there was a lot of fear within the business about doing that, because people were very happy to sit behind a screen and do software updates and just check event logs and things like that. But once we were able to educate them on, "All right, instead of doing that, what we want to do is to move you into project services, we want you to do higher-level things, and we want to be able to train you in this, this, and this" — once they understand that, and what you're trying to do to the business, and the fact that they could not only earn themselves more money because the business is then being able to capitalize on that, they can get it. Again, not everyone will get it, but I think especially around automation and AI, being able to talk about it is really important.

One of the areas around not just automation but touching on the process side of it: what we realized in our MSP was that we were causing undue stress for individuals of our team because they were kind of the go-to people for certain clients. You know, we had this one guy, his name was Mark, and he was just the go-to guy. Clients would call up: "Oh yeah, is Mark there? Yeah, sure, he'll have that ticket." And then we wondered why he didn't get his timesheets in, because he was so overwhelmed with everything that he had to do. But it was a lesson for us to sort of turn around and go, "Well, actually, we needed to make sure we had that spread," and that was a triage process. And it didn't change overnight, but we had to then skill up, do that knowledge transfer, which, to your point, Nick, it's not just automation that people get afraid of. It's, "Oh, hey, no, that's my client, I'm always the one that goes to site for that." You know, being able to share that out so that, maybe reminding them that, "Hey, so you can actually go on a holiday or have a break," you know, it's always a challenge.

Building a No-Blame Culture Around Mistakes

So, are there any processes that you think MSPs can put in place to make mistakes less stressful and part of learning? What have you guys seen successful?

Yeah, I think it's important, understanding what the follow-up is and what the remediation is. You know, mistakes are made, you need to be able to learn from them. So many people in peer groups go into it thinking that they're going to be told by a bunch of other people, you know, "What your problem is, you need to do this, this, and this," where the power of being able to communicate with your peers is around, "Hey, I made this mistake and I did this wrong, and I learned by doing this, this, and this, because this went wrong." There's so much that can be gained from learning from mistakes. So if you've got a process within the business to be able to park all the mistakes to the side, if you can, and review them once a month, or pull together a team to be able to say, "All right, how can we stop this from happening again?" — that's pretty powerful in itself, and that takes away a lot of the frustration. And you're probably giving your team permission — not permission to make mistakes, but permission to own the mistake and understand that it can happen.

Yeah, permission to own the mistake, I think, is the perfect statement for it, 'cause the team need to feel confident and comfortable to come to you early in that mistake and say, "Hey, something's gone wrong." Because if they're coming to you three days later 'cause they made the mistake and they were so stressed or worried or scared or whatever about coming to you to say, "Hey, I've stuffed up," and that mistake has now compounded or manifested in something far worse, it's no good for anyone. I think, wherever you can, you have your safety nets. You know, we've got our backups, we've got our logging, we've got our tracking. We can go in and find out, "Okay, here's where it went wrong, here's the impact, here's what we're going to do to fix it." And I think it is, yeah, allowing your team to own a mistake, come to you with it, knowing that they're going to get the support, and then do that postmortem afterwards, figure out, "All right, what went wrong here? What do we need to change? What do we need to document? What do we need to educate? Is this a full team training? Is this a one-person training?" Or do we just need to literally put in a control that means, well, no one can ever do this again, we're just going to prevent that from even being an option. Obviously it's not always possible, but where you can, you know, we're not playing tournament league — put the gutters up. You know, we —

Right. Yeah. Spot on, Patrick. And it's a fine line between running a performance management, you know, I guess managing to a really high standard, and a fear culture. You don't want to create that fear culture where people are scared to make a mistake, because that notoriously will unwind and create further problems.

Yeah. In Hosted Network, we — and I'm not an F1 fan when I say this, but I know, like, way too many of my team are. Toto Wolff, for those of you that know him — there you go, Luke seeing it. Toto Wolff talks about this no-blame culture, which is what we've adopted within Hosted Network. So we actively talk about it in our all-hands meetings, that it's, "Hey, no one's ever been fired for stuffing up. If you were malicious and you don't learn from it, it's a different story." Sorry, Mark, no tickets this year, mate. But that was just a way that from leadership, you know, it was something that we saw that worked that we could apply to our team. And, you know, we even ChatGPT'd a little logo for it and things like that, that we sort of put up on the slide just to remind people that it's safe. So, you know, a safe place to go, "Hey, stuffed up," or "we stuffed up," or whatever the case might be. So yeah, sorry, I'm reading the chats going on about F1.

Closing Advice for MSP Leaders

Um, all right, so we're nearly at time. So I'll wrap up a little bit. But for our closing — we've only got about five more minutes — but if each of you could give one piece of advice to the MSP leaders on the call today about managing stress within their culture, what would it be? Whoever wants to go first.

Look, I'll say for me, it's talk to your team, because if you wait for them to talk to you, it's probably going to be too late. And I know I've been there as the employee that got to the point where it was too late. And if someone had just come and talked to me maybe a year before that point, I probably could have changed course and corrected it. But by the time I was at the stage where I was going, "I need to talk to you about this," it was because I was at a point where I said, "I'm leaving now, because I can't do this anymore." And you can lose really good people, or, you know, worse, it can impact their personal lives and go beyond the job for something that could have probably just been hit on the head with an honest, frank, earnest conversation. So I think that's where I'd stand on it, and just say, look, just talk to your team, and that's usually enough.

Nick.

Yeah, well, apart from Patrick just stealing the absolute obvious one from my experience — you know, that openness is so important. I think a lot of the stress comes from the unknowns. And I think part of the unknowns is, I ran a business for so many years on gut feel. And gut feel did wonders for a while, and then all of a sudden things sort of unwind. And so I'm actually going to bring it back to a non — I'm going to bring it back to a financial thing, because I think that not knowing leads to a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress. Know your numbers, understand your numbers, and share that responsibility with your team, so that they can understand what the business needs to achieve, what their team needs to achieve, to be able to create a healthy business. Because I think if you can create a healthy business with some strong rules around culture and balance around it, I think you're a long way to be able to create something that's sustainable for a long time.

Yeah. Cool. Okay. Last question, and then we'll wrap up. But what's one small change that an MSP should make, or could make, that would have the biggest long-term impact on reducing stress? Whether it's the one thing that you guys did internally, or that you've seen work, and realistically it could be any business.

Well, I get back to the after hours and the always-on approach of an MSP. I think that's what led us down some really dark paths for a lot of our team, including myself, and it's a slippery slope once you start it. So if you're doing after-hours work, which I think a lot of us have to do, or certainly a lot of MSPs have to do, I think you just need really strong discipline around it. Educate your clients around it, educate your team, don't break rules, and follow a process, because that creeps into your personal life, and that's where challenges start.

Great. Thanks, Nick. Patrick.

Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think one of the things I always try to ask anytime we're doing a review or a catch-up with a staff member is ask the question: if you could change anything in this business today, what would it be? It gives you a really good indication of where they are at, and it lets you know what their pulse on your company is, and it lets you know the things you might not even see, things you don't know are happening. And it just provides them that opportunity to say, "This is the thing that drives me nuts every day that I wouldn't think to even tell you, 'cause it's just part of the job. But if I could change it, I absolutely would." And so I think that conversation can be really handy. And you can do that one in a group setting or in a one-on-one setting. Because you may find that the one thing that's annoying one person is actually the one thing annoying every person, and you go, "Well, we could have changed that a year ago, if I'd known you all hated it that much." But yeah, I think that's a big one. And yeah, just reinforcing that culture of take a break. You're no good to anyone burned out. Disconnect, take your lunch break, go home on time. You know, no one's expecting you to be a hero here. We're here to do a job and we do it well, but we do it within the parameters.

I'm going to steal — my tip is actually not my tip, a shout out to Luke, our COO again. He reminds our team to book all of their holidays a year in advance, to make sure that people — and I've found for me, the years that I've done it, I tell you what. Because when I forget to take a holiday, I never book it in, my calendar gets full, you know, that sort of piece. So that's something that I've found has worked really, really well. And it's a good reminder.

So, guys, thank you heaps. That was amazing. And thank you to everyone in the comments as well. There were lots of tidbits in there as well. Thank you to everyone for contributing. Stress in MSPs, and any business really, is a real challenge, and it's not something that we can easily solve. It's something that we learn, we have to keep on monitoring, and, you know, life is a bit of a roller coaster, right? So yeah, just take it one step at a time.

We'll be sending out this recording in the next couple of days. It will be available, like I mentioned earlier, as a podcast, and it'll be available on our MSPs in Conversation website — I'm just going to pop up now, marketing yell at me, there we go — so you can check it out there. And our next one, I think we've got one more for this year, which hasn't been scheduled yet. But Nick, Patrick, thank you heaps, it was amazing. And thanks everyone for joining in today. Really, really enjoyed it.

Thanks for the opportunity. See you.

Thank you.