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Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 267, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

This week I’m taking you for a walk near my home. And we’re going to talk about a subject that’s very important to us as business owners…

How MSPs achieve a happy balance

Running an MSP is like constantly spinning plates and there’s a good chance that you’ve dropped the odd one from time to time. It’s a dizzying challenge trying to keep them all spinning and in perfect balance. If you are trying to juggle your home life with everything your MSP throws at you and it often feels impossible, today’s special episode is just for you. Come for a Christmas Eve walk with me as we find the answer to this question – How do you achieve the perfect happy balance?

Well, I hope you’ve had an insanely good year this year and you are really ready for Christmas tomorrow. Certainly if you’re listening to this when the podcast is released, what we’re doing today is kind of a bit of a new tradition, which we only started last year, but already it feels like the right thing to do every year is that you come for a walk with me. So last year, and you can go back and listen to last year’s special episode, we went for a walk round a lake near my home where I live. I live just outside Milton Keynes in the UK. It’s kind of in the middle of the UK. And today we’re just going for a walk near my house. Actually, I live near some fields. I live in a little village. It’s very nice around here. So it’s a beautiful, beautiful, sunny crisp December morning and I’m just taking you out for a walk to talk about the happy balance.

So what is the happy balance? Well, I’m a business owner just like you, and I’ve been doing this, actually next year it will be my 20th year. It was February, 2005 when I started my very first business, not the one I have now, I sold that in 2016. But back then I started and I had all the hopes and fears and all the difficult times that everyone has when they start their first business. And it took me probably about seven years to achieve this thing called the happy balance. And the happy balance is a mixture of, or a combination of five things that you need to have in your life in order to achieve happiness. Because if your experience of starting your MSP was anything like my experience of starting my first business, you throw yourself into it with such gusto that it becomes almost an unsustainable beast. And you kind of look up a year, two, three years in, and you realise that you are spending so much of your time working that you have got all the other parts of your life out of balance.

Things like, well, all the things we’re going to talk about today, but especially your family, your partner, your kids (if you’ve got them), your social life, your friends, all of these things, they take a backseat to the business and I think that’s okay for a year, maybe two years. But if it goes on any longer than that, the risk is that you are just out of balance. We cannot live our lives out of balance for a very, very long time. I do know business owners, MSP owners, in fact, who have been out of balance for years, decades in some cases. And yeah, some of them are sitting on very successful businesses, successful as in there’s lots of revenue coming in and there’s lots of profit going into their bank accounts. But I have business owning friends who are in that position and they go home to their luxury apartment in the evening where there is no partner and there’s no kids because the price of them building the business and making themselves a millionaire, the price of that was losing their family. And I dunno about you, but I would rather have the family and the happy life and...