The Cloud Secrets Show

Hey, welcome back to the Cloud Secrets Podcast. I'm Marcel Martens, and I'm just going to tell you how my sales meeting went after the theme song. So, talk to you in a bit.

So, I just finished my sales meeting two days ago after I sent mail merge to the fellow sponsors. I got a quick response, and so I wrote, give him a phone call. He was talking about... Well they already use Office 365 Business Premium, which is great. They were at the point of migrating all their data to SharePoint OneDrive so they could phase out their local server that's obsolete, it's old and they just want to get rid of it, so time for new things.

On that phone call he was talking about it, The only thing I did was when he told me, "Yeah, we already use Office 365, and we're at the point of moving our data to SharePoint." The only thing I said to him was, "Are you sure?" And then I shut up intentionally. Just let the man think. And after a few seconds, maybe five to 10 seconds, he asked me, "Eh, why?" I said, "Okay, did you try it?" "No."

Okay. They're in the coffee business, so before I called him, he also suggest to me perhaps it's just easier to talk over this while drinking cup of coffee. I told him well, my schedule was pretty filled up, so I rather talk to him on the phone. And that's where I check if... I don't want to spend my time on people I know for sure that they aren't going to become a customer, so I just want to go and spend my time with a one-on-one sales when I'm having a positive chance of welcoming a new customer. So, in the first stage I only do phone call and then when they are interested we can set up a sales meeting, and I'll go over it with them.

So, that's where I hooked in on the offer he made. I said, "Okay, well if you're interested, I would love to explain everything to you and I would like to use your offer to drink a cup of coffee so we've got a time to go over it." And that's what I did today. So I showed him everything. He said, "Okay, well I understand what you do." After the meeting he told me, "Okay, I understand what you do. I can see value there. So, how quickly can you make me an offer?" I said, "I'll make some time and I'll make sure you get the offer today." So he can decide if he wants to continue with his current provider or he wants to switch to us.

Hopefully he switch to us but I will keep you posted. For now I just wanted to share how the meeting went, and my opinion, it went great. Don't know for sure yet if he is going to choose our solution, but I sure as hell hope so. So that's it for now until the time... Well, by the time you hear this, I'll probably know if he signed up, yes or no. But, I will keep you posted and let you know, so. For now I wish you all the best and talk to you next time. Bye bye, Marcel Martens.

The four ingredients of successful Cloud computing strategies, and I'm going to talk all about it after the theme song.

Hi guys, welcome back. Marcel Martens with the Cloud Secrets Podcast. Today I'm going to talk about the four ingredients for successful Cloud strategies or implementing Cloud solutions for your customers.

When you go back to the basics, what is it that a business needs in essence? So back to the basics, basics, basics. It's what do they need in the current economic environment that everything is going faster and faster, and new versions or new systems are getting developed every single day. But, what is it in essence that they need? It doesn't matter what type of product it is or who the software company is or whatever, but what do they need? They all need email, right? Still it's the most effective way of communication between customer and supplier.

Second one is they all need to have their Office licenses, because especially in America and Europe, we are very much fond of Word, Excel, Outlook, etcetera.

Third, they all need to store that data somewhere safe and secure. They all need to have a proper backup in case things go wrong. Standard, any Cloud solution, there won't be any backup, so you need to take care of that yourself.

And last is that you also want to make sure that every data or system is being protected properly against current cyber crimes or Ransomwares or whatever it is because today it's Ransomware, tomorrow is going to be something else. You need to make sure that your data is protected, that your systems are safe from the big bad world out there and those hackers that would love to cripple your systems.

So, back to the basics and that's what we call the always safe and business suite. That's the foundation that every single company needs. And when you look at it as building blocks, and this is the foundation I can on top of that, I can build any system I like. I can put Azure on top of it with several hosting servers, or WVD, or whatever, Windows Virtual Desktop, for those who don't know yet. It's been going GA, general available, a few weeks ago. First customers are being migrated within one of my companies, MIT Services, and I update you regularly on the progress there.

WVD is one of possibilities if somebody uses Amazon Web Services or whatever, it can be anything, Google Cloud Services, Salesforce, CRM, ERP, all those kinds of Power BI, it's very popular these days, or Big Data. How can we get the numbers, the key performance indicators that we need to address and steer our businesses and well, that's the power of a good Cloud strategy, and that we can provide that foundation that it's ever ready for whatever the customer needs besides that, so we don't need to remove anything from that foundation. Everything can be used in any situation, so it's never an overkill or whatever, but that's always a quick thought that I would like to share with you.

I'd like to get your opinion, so if you go to cloud-secrets.com you can look for this post or this episodes and there you can leave comments. You can also comment within iTunes or on YouTube. Please do, because I would love to have the feedback of you if you like my thoughts, if you agree or disagree more so. What else would you like me to share a light upon? So I would love to hear what you would like to learn, and I'll be glad and happy to share that with you.

But I've got to go to one of my next meetings and I'll talk to you afterwards about how that went, and if I could sign up another customer, yes or no. So I'm pretty excited. I hope you guys are too, and I'll talk to you next time. Thank you very much. Bye, bye, Marcel Martens.

Part two of the Power of Partnerships. First we go through the theme song, and afterwards I'm going to tell you the second part of my meeting that I just had. Welcome back to the Cloud Secret Podcast. This is Marcel Martens, and this will be part two of the Power of Partnerships.

I was just at an office (beep) kind of like company that sells office supplies and think about desks and chairs and paper and all kinds of things that you can think of that you need in an office, but they're also selling PCs, laptops, Apple products, and, well, when it comes to services, they're more like a store. You can go in and buy stuff and leave, but they do offer a small amount of services to migrate data or to set up a new system for a customer. When it comes to the entire IT system or cloud solutions or whatever, well, that's out of their possibilities. I don't know what to say, whatever. So, that was the purpose of our meeting. If we could start a partnership and see if we can help their customers even from a background situation.

If their IT guy gets stuck, he can call us, and we help him, so they can help with their customer. They don't really need to know who is helping who as long as they got a satisfied customer because that's all that matters, in my opinion. So it's that we have that mutual interest in satisfying the customer's needs or wants and, well, over-deliver. So I ended up getting a lead, which I'm going to call later today, and I'll keep you posted on the results, but this can be the first of, well, a nice partnership, which should be working in both ways. So we're going to have a look in how we can expand his business as well.

We buy laptops at distributors or PCs or other stuff that we sell, and we're going to ask if he can sell those to us. So next time we need to make an offer, we're going to contact them as well and ask if they can, well, give us price as well. And if that matches the current distributors, we always can order it there, so he gets business back as well because that's very important in a partnership that you mutual benefit out of a deal. It's always a two-way situation.

As I told before in one of the episodes, he now gave me a lead, so based on the trust in the relationship we have right now, it's my task to over deliver because the customer is going to think they provided the solution. They don't care that it's a different company who actually makes it working or provides the effort or whatever.

He's the one who's set up the contact with me or our company to, well, help that customer, so when we over deliver, he's getting credits for it. And that's very important to understand because as long as you know that you need to over deliver so he's being in the spotlight, you end up getting more leads than you ever think possible. So that's it for now. Off to the next meeting, so that's part two and I'll keep you posted on the anymore results.

By the way, two episodes back I was talking about with the mail merge response rate of over 60%. I'm on my way to one of those sales meetings right now, so I'll keep you posted on that as well.

Still, if you would like to see what resources I'm using for, well, and tools I use for setting all this up, and I'm not telling it the way that I should or think about it. I use several tools to limit my time and to get things done as efficiently as possible. If you want to have look at those, go to cloud-secrets.com/resources, and that's again, cloud-secrets.com/resources, so take a look there. I'll put a number of links in of tools I use, and, well, even make you an offer if you would like to buy some templates or whatever so you come back getting on track fast and get start right off the bat. So thanks for listening or watching, and I'll talk to you guys next time. All right. Marcel Martens.

How to use partners to get infinite amount of leads, qualified leads without any ad costs. After the theme song, I'm going to talk all about it.

So welcome back. Marcel Martens, Cloud Secrets Show, and today I'm going to talk about the power of partnerships and why a good partnership is, well, the most valuable thing I've ever seen.

Today, I'm on my way for discussing or figuring out if we can set up a new partnership with [beep]. You know, the office center maybe. [beep] well, they supply all kinds of office supplies and for that a lot of entrepreneurs or business owners go there to buy their notebook, their desk, their whatever.

But that's only one part and they still need the migration in order to migrate all their data to set up the new system to get cloud services, to get whatever.

So last week and, and that's why, let me tell you a story about last week. With the manager of the [beep] here in the area, we were at a soccer game and he was talking about his business that's doing very, very well, which is good of course, especially those days.

Then he was having some troubles with, he's got this IT guy, but his knowledge goes to a certain extent and there's nothing good or bad or wrong about it, but it's just what it is, okay.

So I told him, okay and what do you do when he can't help your customer? Do you call somebody? Do you, I don't know, refer them, do you whatever. He said, no, no. Basically my guy spends way too many hours that I can't bill. And in the end we didn't solve the problem for the customer. So I'm really looking for like this safety net to whom we can call if he doesn't know how to solve the problem or question or whatever.

I said, okay, let's set up a meeting and let's talk about it because I think we can mutually benefit from a partnership because he can offer more services to his customers and we get more leads without any ad costs or I don't know, time and effort. And that's what I'm going to discuss today.

So I'm on my way there and afterwards I will create part two of this episode. But I want you to understand the value of a good partnership because with suppliers, they like to call themselves partners, but eventually they are just people who sell you stuff and they don't look at your customer needs and don't fully, well they don't care about your business in general.

And if I can help any partner, which I call a partnership, my definition of a good partnership is that I care so much about his goals and his or her success, that I will do anything in my power to help them succeed. One or other way you're going to get it back, and that's the power of partnership.

Because if you can help people, well usually not always, but most of them will have this, it's just a psyche game, you know? Because they owe you, if you know what I mean. And that's provided that you over deliver. So if you keep over delivering to your partner and to their customers, then you always get something in return.

And that's the power of a good partnership because a supplier to me is just somebody who just ships a box to you or provides a service without taking a further look in your business. And a partner is somebody you can partner up with and start doing things, wonderful things together.

So that's it for now for part one. After the meeting, I will let you know how it ended up and what we discussed about and agreed upon, and I'll put that in part two. So thanks for listening and I hope to see and hear you later.

Okay. Bye, bye. Marcel Martens.

Hey, what's up everybody?

Welcome back to the Cloud Secrets Podcast, this is Marcel Martens, and today I'm going to share one of the first conversations or phone calls I had with somebody who agreed to help me with the mail merge. First, we're going to go to the theme song, and then we're gonna continue about our first step of the sales call.

Within maybe 10 minutes or 15 minutes, one of the other sponsors, if you don't know what I'm talking about, please listen to episode 22 one back there I'll explain something about my mail merge and how I get 60% or more response rate on my mail merge campaigns.

This potential customer called me or he just sent an email back. "Sure, no problem, just call on this number on my cell." That's what I did, I didn't send them any invites to schedule an appointment in my, in my calendar, but just straight call with my template. On that template I've got several questions I ask, and we first start with on the small chit-chat about the network club we're part of together, or the sponsoring your doing together, or whatever the common denominator that you two have, and just talk about it.

If he, if he gets business out of it, or how long he's a member, or whenever. Just find something to talk about for a few minutes to start the conversation, and then ask what he's doing, he or she of course, and if he got any goals in mind, or particular goals that he wants to reach, and then you're going to go over to, well, that's a nice bridge to why I reached out to you, I've created this Always Save in Business suite and would like to ask you some questions about it because my mission is to get every single business, safely online, or safe in business. I'm sorry, my mission is to get every business safe. Whatever they produce, whatever they create on data is theirs and theirs alone, until they decide to share it. I made it my personal mission to get every company safe in business hence the name of the suite, "Always Safe in Business." That's a product or a suite that I developed and we put it in the market for $40 a month.

I'm got old primary question and that is, do you ever have any concerns regarding the number of ransomware or cybersecurity attacks that are in the news, or in the news daily? And then just wait for an answer and let them think a few seconds because they need to understand the question, when they understand the question you get a yes or no. Most people will tell you yes and then you already, you can directly change the call into a sales call, and just ask more questions. Okay, why do you concern or and what is your current situation? Let them talk a bit more and make notes of almost everything, or new, or at least key points of pain points, frustrations, things they are missing at the moment, because those three elements are, if you answer them in an offer, you've got the sale. 99% I guarantee that for you, you may need some practicing of that, but for sure you get the sale.

After you know a bit more about the current situation and the, the desires and the needs they can ask, okay, it sounds you're interested in solving your problem, how about I come to you, to come to your office, we take a cup of coffee, and I can show you how we could solve your problem? I'm going to send you another email if you agree? And I'll share you a link with my calendar and we can make an appointment, for one hour, or a meeting, or whatever you want to call it. If you just click the link, you can select a time place or time and date of your choosing, and if you want to invite any other people as well, make sure you do, then we'll see each other soon.

At that time I was talking to that prospect, I said, "well, it sounds rather interesting is exactly what we need, we've got, it's a media company, they create lots of videos, like the "come work with us" videos are pretty hot right now here. Otherwise, so introduction videos or company videos about what companies, companies does." He said, okay, so we've got all these separate virtual assistants or assistants and probably they are most of the time they are solo entrepreneur's and they, well, they shoot the video, they edit the video, and then they send back the end result. This business owner of the media company, he wants to have all the source files as well. So, he was looking for a practical way how we could store and grant access to, well this, storage location to who all these individuals can work together. If a contractor, number one, as created the video editor to his partner uploaded it, to the project that a contract number two can continue to do his job, and then contract number three, and so on and so forth.

So all people can access that same contract folder or project folder. Then can upload and work from anywhere and work on any workstation of their choosing and still, while for the media company to have the insurance that all data is protected, safely managed by, I don't care, two factor authentication if they want to. So you be sure that only authorized people can access those files, while I was telling you about the solution and he said, "okay, you're only putting it in the market for like 40 bucks a month, what's your earning model? How do you, how do you make money out of it?" I said,"I don't need you to worry about that.

It just that they are in desperate need for this next step in their business. So, that's what I've got to do, I'm going to take them next level so they can grow even further and even faster work at any time, at any place, with any device of their choosing. I'm looking forward to this meeting. I did send them an invite because other people that are involved as well, so I would hope, I'd love to hear back from them today so we can show them how it works and close that sale.

That is it for today, if you want to know more of these steps, I've put together a course, which I call The Cloud Secrets course. I allow only 20 people at a time at any time, so I can personally commit to your success for that we use application forms or you can apply for the course and we go over your application, and if we think we are a fit, I'm going to call you and we're going to ask you some more questions. If it stills, still is a fit, if I feel like we could work together, then I want to invite you to the course, and we can start as soon as possible. So if you're interested, go to cloud-secrets.com/cloudmind. Again, that's cloud-secrets.com/cloudmind and there can opt in for the course.

Okay, thank you very much and I see you next time. Bye, bye.

Hey, good morning. Marcel Martens, welcome back to the Cloud Secrets podcast. Did you ever get over a 60% response rate on a mail merge campaign? After the theme song, I'll tell you how I did it. Hey, I'm not sure if I talked about this before in earlier episodes, but last ... Yesterday, I sent ... Well, let's go back first. We're sponsoring a local soccer club Top Oss There are like, I don't know how many sponsors there are, but I did get the list of names and email addresses so I could write to them in person because you don't ... They didn't opt-in for anything, so you can't just put them in your email campaign, whatever you're using. We are using ActiveCampaign, but somebody used Mailchimp or Drip or whatever.

We use ActiveCampaign, and I just can't import them into ActiveCampaign because they didn't opt-in personally. So to be able to address these, well, this list individually as a person, I used the old fashioned mail merge technique. So I write a small letter, which I will insert in the blog because it's magnificent. It's just three lines, and as I said in the intro we got an over 60% response within one day. It's amazing that even email marketing is working so great these days, yet another proof that email marketing isn't dead at all and that you can still profit hugely out of email marketing.

Just by example, last year I did the same email, the same setup to another, well, a business club that I'm a member of. They didn't want to share the list due to privacy reasons, so well, we tried to figure the email addresses of the business owners, because I always want to address the business owner, not some sales or purchase guy or manager or whatever. I just want to talk to the CEO or the owner or whatever. To the entrepreneur himself. So it took us a while before we managed to get all 150 email addresses of all the members, and then I started one big mail merge campaign.

So I ended up putting all the names and email addresses in an Excel sheet, then I wrote a small letter in Word, and then I used the mail merge or the merge option to insert the first name, so you get hi, first name, comma, and then enter. Since we are both member of club number X, I'm in need of your help and I will kindly ask you to answer a few questions. It's going to only take you 15 minutes, so please let me know if you're interested, yes or no, and that's all I said. And the headline was something like "Network Club X: Member needs your help".

So I tend to choose a headline that raises curiosity and flatters their ego, because well, if another business owner asks some other entrepreneur for help, oh, it's just an ego boost so that's what I want to accomplish there. So when they see the headline they instantly open the email and there is just, okay, somebody has got a few questions about a recently developed product. Would I spend a few minutes to help them out? Sure I do, and that's the over 60% response rate. I just got an email. "Yeah, sure. Tell me when." And then I'll drop them another email with a link to my calendar, and for that I use the Calendly tool. I'll put links down below on the blog or in the podcast article. Don't worry. You can find them there.

So I don't need to call them. I don't need to schedule anything. I just provide them with a link to my schedule so they can choose a date which suits them best. And then I make sure I've got a sales script ready or call script, and call them at the exact time. Never call late. Even if they aren't there, call back later, try again. Send them another email with a link to, oh, they missed the appointment. No worries there. Hope they still want to help me out, so here's a new link and you can choose a new time and date and we can try it then. And in that call, well, it's just a two-minute chit-chat, small talk. "How are you doing? Are you getting a lot of business out of the club X or whatever club it is?"

And then, well, you ask what ... I don't know. Maybe I'll share. I'll think about it, sharing my mail merge template. Maybe later, maybe I'll sell it. I don't know yet, based on the response of you guys here, so please let me know if you're curious about my sales script. Because there, I'm going to ask a few questions based on their answers. I want to put my finger in wounds, so they'll get curious for the solution that we have. So if I press the right buttons in the right call, well, then they're going to ask, "Okay, so what you can do about it?" And I'm going to say, "Okay, let's meet up again. Let's set up a meeting. I'll come to you. We'll drink a cup of coffee and I'll explain everything about it. How about that?"

And then you have a sales conversation, so just email, phone call, sales conversation, offer contract, customer. That's my route that works every single time to get new customers. So yesterday I had over 60% response. First appointments are being made as we speak. I'll keep you posted. And oh yeah, last year with the Network Club, well, I did the mail merge to 150 persons at once, and then your calendar fills up pretty fast. So this time I decided that I would break it up in groups of 20 persons, so I sent emails to 20 persons. So I've got time in like two or three weeks for all the appointments and follow-ups, and then I'm going to send another one to keep my schedule filled up.

So I hope you like this. If you do, please rate and subscribe on iTunes or YouTube or SoundCloud or whatever you're using. Please leave a review because Apple is eager for reviews or ratings so other people can find me or us, and if you've got any questions please go to Cloud-Secrets.com and drop any comments on the post, and I will gladly answer them to you. You can also reach out on socials. Links are provided down as well, and otherwise if you would like to take it to the next level I can teach you every single step of my success formula in the Cloud Secrets course I have created there we only allow 20 people at any time so I can ensure I can provide and give you the correct attention that you need so your success will be guaranteed. Okay, if you want to opt-in or apply, because we use application, and if you're a fit and I'm going to invite you to join, for that you can go to Cloud-Secrets.com/cloudmind. Okay, that's it. I'm going to go, and I'll see you next time.

Thank you very much.

Bye bye, Marcel Martens.

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Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome back to The Cloud Secrets Podcast. And today I'm going to talk about the WVD, the Windows Virtual Desktop within Azure, and how we are going to set up our first customer. And well, first go to the theme song and then I'll let you know where we are.

So last week we started using or implementing WVD for one of our larger customers at M IT Services. And before we could start, because one of the requirements was that they get single sign-on so they can login with one user account and password, or use two-factor authentication if they want to. But for now, let's keep it simple and let's start with using their email address as login.

And so they can log in at the current private cloud, at the local desktops and all the devices and even within WVD. So for that we've set up an express route, which is a direct connection to Azure from Azure to our data center. And, well, usually when you set up a connection, it's pretty easy because, for me, it's just a cable. And you plug it into a switch, or router, or whatever and traffic goes along. But in this case with this customer, we've faced challenges every single time. And I don't know why.

Maybe Murphy's law or something, I don't know. But I accept those challenges. Don't get me wrong, but we fix them. But one of the transceivers of the fiber optics on the supplier car ... on the side of our supplier was malfunctioning. The receiver, we received the optic ... I'm sorry, the transceiver that we receive didn't pass the self-test, so we had to buy a new one. The second one was coming online, but ... well, it sent some traffic through, but they were getting a huge, huge, huge amount of packet loss at the other end of the fiber optic cable.

Finally, I put it in the OEM product just to get ahead, because we couldn't wait any longer. So yesterday we received yet again a new transceiver, so we got to try them today. So it took us a couple of, I don't know, weeks to set up the express route with all the BGP routing set up, et cetera. And afterwards it was working. And the nice part is for testing purposes we only have 100 megabits or so, but you can burst through like 500 which is really nice.

So the first peak of data you set up a connection or the transmission, you can burst up to all the way of 500 and then it flats on 100 megabytes per second. After that, we set up single sign-on. So I believe it was Monday, by the time you hear this will be a week further, but no problem there. We started setting up all the applications and yesterday we finished up all the applications that the customer needs for their proof of concept. We sold them a POC (Proof of concept) so they can actually test it before deciding if they would like to start using WVD. And today, or yesterday my colleague started with policies, the group policies.

And today I hope we ... when I arrive at the office, I'm on my way now as you can probably hear, I'm recording this in my car. When I get at the office, I hope we can start testing, make some tweaks there and I hope I can show the customer something at the end of the day. I'll keep you posted. These are going to be short episodes where I just want to document my journey since WVD is just launched, and I want to share our experiences and the difficulties we encounter and share with you how we solved them or if we implemented things in a certain way.

So if you got questions regarding WVD, please comment below, please respond on the podcast. Please review, rate and subscribe. You're doing not only me but also all the IT guys a huge favor, because the more subscriptions we get and the more reviews we get and ratings, more people are able to find us. I'm at the office now. I'm going to see how far my colleague got yesterday and I'll give you an update too. Okay. Until next time, bye bye, Marcel Martens.

Hey Marcel Martens here. Welcome back to the Cloud's Secret Podcast. Today I just wanted to quickly share with you, that it not always goes as you would have expected.

So first, we've got to go through the theme song and then I want to tell you about my recent experience with filling up the Cloud Secret Course, of course, and to that I have a nice... I made a nice comparison with some offers we made before, and how we make offers today.

So first of all, the last few weeks I've been hustling my ass off to fill up the Cloud Secrets Course that will be starting the 1st of November or around the 1st of November. I don't really care about what specific date it is, as long as, well, when we finished up and fill up the course, then we can start but it's really difficult to fill it up because, where do you get traffic? Where do you get to trust? And how do you eventually sell them on a call?

So I've spoken to a few people now, and they all applied. No, lets start at the beginning, the participants so far they came using Facebook marketing and I noticed that the first two runs didn't work quite that well, so we spent a few hundred bucks on ads. Maybe we've got a few participants, but not that we filled up the course with the... Well, I expected that we would get like 100 applications or so. From that 100, we will go over them, see whose a fit and it was not, and those that are a fit, I would invite to join this Cloud's Secrets Course. It's a pretty unique course, where we not only teach you how to set up Office 365 and all the technical stuff, but we also teach you how to acquire customers, how to get customers, how to set up your contracts, how to exceed expectation, and end up with a customer for life and eventually upsell them into your value ladder so you can keep selling to your current customer.

And the same goes with and one of my company's MIT services to which we apply the same methods that I'm teaching you in the Cloud Secret Course. At first, I would tend to sell the always saving business suite and for those who didn't listen before, consists of Office 365 Business Premium with the email hosting and the Office Suite. We've got a file solution in it for a no line file system that you can take all your data with you all offline and you can make sure that the right people are seeing the right files and directories. So, it's pretty secure, and it's included backup online, so all the email and data are safely backed up to our data center and last but not least. The security antivirus software with our unique ransomware protection and for the customers who we sell that suite, we first did the installation based on the number of hours we spend on the installation, and it was pretty variable because for small customers we would spend a day, for bigger customers we would spend two days, and so on and so on. You can, you can imagine, right? Good.

But that's the first phase is just the installation the customer, well they've got an empty product with no data in it, and then all their data needs to be moved or migrated to the cloud and that is also based on spent hours and how many hours we spend during the migration. So these two unknown factors for a customer, any customer were too big, they wouldn't sign the contract because the variable was too high. They would ask me, "How much time you need for the implementation?" I said, "Okay, around a day, maybe one and a half." "And what about migration?" I say, "Yeah, it depends on how many arrows we endure, how much the data you have, how much email, how many gigabytes, terabytes of email you have."

And, with that, we made a big change. And and now I can explain it easier and all, well, almost all offers we make, they sign up, and it's all based on one major change, and the major change was, okay, we, we take the average of small and big companies all together and we average the implementation, or the installation to one and a half days.

So I made a fixed price for the implementation, and that's really the major secret here because I can explain them that the implementation is for a fixed fee so they know what they get for what price. And then afterwards when it's all set up, we go to the customer and migrate all the data and email, that will be based on how many hours we spent, and as I can explain to them, "Okay, if you got, I don't know, 20 gigabytes of data and 10 gigabytes mailbox, it's probably a few hours and we're done. But if you've got like 50 users with over, I don't know, five terabytes of email and God knows how many data, it could take us two to three days, I don't know." And they would understand so they can budget their own costs. You know?

So I'm going to go, I've got to run. I'm already late to my next appointment. I just wanted to drop this with you. If you like this, please rate and subscribe on iTunes and leave any feedback or comments. If you're interested in learning all the stuff that I teach and share with you here, go to cloud-secrets.com/cloudmind again, that's cloud-secrets.com/cloudmind. Thanks again and talk to you soon. Bye bye Marcel Martens.

Are all your customers happy after you've moved their documents to SharePoint and OneDrive? Warning. The following is a message for every entrepreneur who wants to generate recurring revenue with a suite of services but can't seem to figure out to end up with customers for life. And by that I mean, that they eventually leave because the product or service doesn't provides what they expected to.

So, I'm Marcel Martens and welcome back to the Cloud Secrets Show. And today we're going to talk about how we manage to end up with happy customers or customers being happy after we move their data or documents to the cloud. And then, we don't use SharePoint and OneDrive as you might've expected.

In this episode I will, at the end, I will tell you how to get all the steps of my success formula, my MIT method, that has made me a fortune the last two years. It made me debt free. It made me do the things that I want to do. It made me run my business in three days a week. It gave me financial freedom. And more importantly, every customer that we move or migrate to the Always Safe in Business package is a happy customer. They can do more than before and we met expectation or exceed expectation. And by exceeding expectations you get up ending with customers for life.

So, that's my main focus and it's always been. I've been an entrepreneur for 12 years now, 11, 12 years, and I still can count all the customers we lost on one hand. So that's something there we're doing right because otherwise they would have left.

Let me tell you the story of a customer, and that was, I don't know, somewhere mid 2016, early '17, yeah, early '17 I think. The requests for Office 365 was raising pretty big. A lot of customers, a lot of businesses here, we're talking about moving stuff to Office 365 and it kept even growing bigger and bigger and bigger. And as I told in one or two podcasts back, They've got over 60 million users right now, active users, on the Office 365 platform. It's still... Well, it's expanded amazingly fast.

And at that time that customer wanted to move everything to Office 365. We recommended them to only move his email and start using, of course, the OfficeSuite, but be a little careful with moving the data there. And eventually, we spent up like, I don't know, way, way too much hours in moving the data to SharePoint. For him, it wasn't possible to look at his data on his phone or on his tablet. It was all complicated.

As you know, probably you've got to sign in everyday. You get some errors once in a while. It's not particularly fast. You've got to wait a long time to open your documents, and not the small 20 KB Word documents. But if you are working with serious documents like 20 megabytes or whatever, well, I can tell you it's not that fast. And user experience is, well, it's all that counts because if the user gets frustrated by using the system, the system or any system, is a tool. It's not a purpose on its own. So, Office 365 or SharePoint or whatever, it's a tool to do... well, to use for somebody to deliver what he sells or what he needs to do.

And eventually, I ended up, well, we talked about problems several times. I sent engineers to fix it. We even opened some support tickets with Microsoft, but at the end, there was really nothing we could do. And we use backup software. Maybe we use the wrong one, I don't care, but it didn't even finish. We were trying to back up all the data from Office 365 to our data center and it never, ever completed. It was running and then it was stuck for 15, 14, 15 days and we canceled the job. We restarted job.

And, I don't know, we don't have it with the way that we do it now. And when you look at other file storage solutions out there in the cloud, take Dropbox. Dropbox works great. It syncs nice. It's user-friendly, but it doesn't give you the opportunity or the ability to set an authorization level. So, well, for example, the business owner needs to be able to see and edit all files. But sales department only needs the sales files and the purchase department only need the purchase files, and support department only needs access to the support department files. And Dropbox doesn't have a solution for that. Neither does ShareFile. Neither does... what's the other one? Nomadesk. You got several of those.

And that is what we... The number one problem we solve with the Always Safe in Business suite that we sell through one of our company's MIT services. And well, one of my personal goals is to make the world a safer place and especially online. And for that, why I created the Always Safe in Business suite in 2017.

Back in the day we were, oh, we were pretty much in trouble. I've made some bad investments in, well, hardware that didn't work or didn't work as fast as it should be. So, we invested, I don't know, serious amounts of money and we expected it to be up and running in August, and in December we were still having issues and a lot of customer complaints. So, you know, can imagine what that costs at that time because we weren't focusing on new business. Oh man, if I think back, I'm glad I'm out of it.

So, at that point, there was a point that we were almost bankrupt. I was living on my parents pockets. They paid my mortgage. They paid my groceries. They paid my insurance. They paid for the whole family. I've got a wife, I've got three kids. We need food and I wanted to go to sports and all that kind of stuff. But I was glad I could buy our groceries, that I could put food on the table, and the rest didn't matter because there was no money.

And luckily, my... Well, I went to my dad and explained the whole story with... I was pretty embarrassed, to be honest, because I, as a man, couldn't provide for my own family. And how sorry is that you know?... I don't even want to think back on that. I don't... No, I don't want that to happen to anybody.

So my wife, and it was in December 2017, and we were both way, way in the mud, you know, lots of debt. Things at the office weren't running smoothly. We had wrong employees who didn't do the things that they needed to do. So, at all fronts it was almost worthless. I was literally thinking in the evening sitting behind my laptop and still trying to make money.

And I was, a lot of times, I was thinking, why again did I start my own business? Why am I doing what I'm doing? Can I stop? Can I quit? Can I sell the company? But no, we were deep down in the red, so I could sell it but nobody would pay for it. I didn't have a job besides my company so if I stopped with the company, there was no money at all. So, there was not really a way out, an easy way out. And that's where the biggest growth happened because then you need to go through it. And when you go through it, you'll always come up better at the end or come out better.

And December 2017, my wife asks me, "Okay honey, I love you very much, but this is not sustainable. We can't continue this... living on your parents' pockets. It's insane. So, what is it that we can do, and what is it?" And that's the biggest and the most important question she asked me. What is it that every business need? And that's when my epiphany, ....

Okay. Every business, as a foundation when looking to IT, they all need to have email hosting. They all need, well, especially here in Europe, they're pretty fond of using the OfficeSuite, so they like Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, et cetera.

Secondly, and that's where what the most important part is, they need to have an online file system, an online file solution, where they can easily tell who can do what. So, who can see what data, who can edit what data. It needs to be available on all devices, so Windows, Mac, laptops, PCs, tablets, smartphones, whatever you're using.

The third one is that they need to have insurance or a proper backup so that when something does go wrong or somebody makes a mistake by deleting wrong files or whatever, that they are insured with a proper backup so that they can always restore their data that went missing, corrupt, deleted, whatever.

And last but not least, they want their systems to be secure, and secure, I mean in antivirus, the firewalling, maybe even two-factor authentication, those four components. So, Office 365 for the email hosting and the Office Suite, the online file solution, backup online and the security solution. Those four components make up the Always Safe in Business suite. And by that, we supply any company, small, medium, or large, with a foundation, an IT foundation, of cloud services that they, well, can get started with.

And from there we take a look at if they need all the hosting or if, I don't know, we've got customers that got more servers running than workstations. So yeah, there's always a business need and we tend to provide the right solution for that business on top of the foundation.

So, long story about one customer that was unhappy about Office 365 and was especially not happy that we, back in the day, moved his data to SharePoint on his... Well, it was pressing pretty hard to us to move his data there while we advise otherwise. But he was also the last one so... I've done it. I didn't use SharePoint for over three or four years now and probably never will.

But that method that we've developed in the end of 2017, early 2018, that has made me or gave me the possibility to be debt free within two years. Made me a fortune. I can run my business in three days a week. Our employees are literally doing what they should be doing. They know what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and that we end up with, well, satisfied customers who are customers for life.

So, do you want to save time, money, and frustrations? And are you ready to take this to the next level? And for those who apply this week, I will share all the steps of my success formula. And if you want these, as I said, they make me a fortune, go to cloud-secrets.com/cloudmind. Again, that is cloud-secrets.com/cloudmind and you can apply there. And the ones that apply this week will receive the exact steps to generate lots and lots of monthly recurring revenue like I did.

If you like this, please rate and subscribe on iTunes. Leave any comments if you got any questions, and I'll talk to you next time. Thanks for listening.

Bye-bye. Marcel Martens.

Check out all my Secrets at: https://cloud-secrets.com

Every business needs email, data, protection and security. Here's how I like to make an impact to the world and make it a safer "online" place.

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Hi, everybody. I'm Marcel Martens and welcome back to the Cloud Secrets Podcast. First, we go to the theme song and then we're going to talk about how you can triple your acquisitions in no time.

Hey, what's up everybody? Hope you're doing well. I'm in my car at the moment. Pretty busy so I try to use my time as efficient as possible and that's why I record the podcast when I'm driving for quite some time. Today I'd like you to tell you what made a huge impact to my business and how acquisition or acquiring new customers or new leads, skyrocketed for me two or three years ago.

If you listened to a few podcasts back, I believe it was around Episode 10, I talked about that we were about...Well, a few years ago we're struggling to get food on the table, and at that time... Ever since then, I make sure that acquisition is happening at all times. I never lay down because when you look at the teeth of a saw, you want a steady line going upwards and not, that when you hit the peak, you drop all acquisitions because you don't have time, because you are fulfilling on the sales you did before, then you get a drop in new sales, a few weeks or month from now, you'll get a huge drop in delivering on or welcoming new customers or migrating new customers into your cloud solution.

My biggest lesson then was, okay, never "the saw effect" as somebody called it and it sounded nice, but it stick. It made me look at it from a different angle. You know it when we all... I bet you know it too... When everything goes well, you're in the flow we are in, everything comes naturally. You feel like you don't need to do any acquisition because people come running to you to become a customer or to get your thing and your servers or services or whatever you do. But it isn't always the same. You get peaks and lows, and that's why I need to get a machine running, an acquisition machine, that constantly keeps providing new customers on a regular basis, and that can be daily, weekly, monthly. I don't care as much as you need, and what was a huge eyeopener for me was that if you look at your current customer base, and then I go back to Russell Brunson's value ladder, that currently you're providing one or more solutions to your current customers.

What else can you sell to them? That's the low hanging fruits. If you just give them a call, "Hey, how are you doing? I was wondering, I'm in the neighborhood next week. Do you got 15 or 30 minutes time to do a cup of coffee?" And you go over to the customer and you're talking and "okay, what are your biggest problems?", "Oh, what are you struggling with?" At this time I always get value or see potential in those conversations because it's just human interaction, it's not a sales conversation. "You're just in the neighborhoods dropping by for a cup of coffee and you're asking how he or she is doing," and if they are struggling with some things. Just an open question, and usually they tend to start raving all their struggles and maybe it's not all IT related, I can refer them to someone in my network who could help them.

And also with that, if you use your network strategically, I always ask the customer or whoever I'm talking to, "is it okay if I give your name and number or name and email address to the one that maybe can help you?" That one that can solve the problem is the initiator of the first contact, and that's gold. You never give the name and number to the person you're talking to because then the initiative is with your customer or whoever you're talking to, and they maybe never even call. That's not providing a lead to somebody in your network, but if you can give them a name and number, they can call. Do you know how valuable it is? But then you also need to make sure that to who you give that name and number, I usually tend to make a gentleman's agreement, that they over deliver because my name is attached to it. I want you to make sure that if you're going to solve that problem for my customer as well, you over deliver and you provide so much value that they come back to me.

"Oh Marcel, thank you very much. You sold this, this, this, this and also helped me with that, that and that. Over deliver, and that's the gentleman's agreement I always tend and if they don't, it's a one time deal, then I'm done. I never refer ever again. So don't screw up! That's also a bold statement, but do it right or you don't get referrals of me, and that way it goes the other way around as well. When other people in my network are doing the same, just drinking a cup of coffee with customer and asking, "okay, what? What are you struggling with or what does your current suppliers or providers leave at the table?" "What are you missing?"

It's an easy target because you know what the biggest problems are, our biggest struggles are and you can provide them with the solution or help them get to overcoming that problem. That's number one. Number two is while you're at that customer in the same conversation with the same cup of coffee and usually those conversations, I take 30 minutes for them and usually it's enough. You don't want to both of them with the one or two hours they just dropping by, keep it short. But when I'm there I also ask, "you're using my Always Safe in Business suite now for like one year, three years, five years." I don't care. "Can you give me three names of three companies who would benefit from this as well?", "And can you provide me with a name and number that I can call and when I'm calling and tell them your name that you give them their credential or their name and number." So it will be beneficial.

And I tend to close one or two out of three, that's huge. That's why we grow so fast. If you, you don't need to go to a customer. We finished the migration and the company started using your Always Safe in Business suite and a week after you go by and you know, "okay, nice. Thank you. I hope you're doing well and you feeling happy about our suite and can you give me three names?" No, it's too early. You need to give it time so they can experience the value of your solution.

But boy it's mind blowing. If you've got 50 customers and you go by them in, I don't know, one month or one and a half months, you probably end up with a hundred extra customers if you do it right. It could triple your business with leads within a month. How powerful is that? And if you're talking about scaling, after you do that, for example, you started alone and you acquired well, maybe not 50 customers, but you acquire 10 customers, and with that 10 you can make 30, and with that 30 you can make, you got 20 new ones. Let me do the math here. If you've got 10 customers at all, best odds, maybe we should be in the middle. If you ask your 10 customers, if they can provide you with a name and number, who you can contact, who would benefit from your suit as well, then you might get one and a half new customers, per current customer.

If you go do 10 visits, you get 15 new customers, and you got 25 customers from that 15 new customers, you do the same after three months, six months, and from that 15, times one and a half and 15 to seven and a half is 22, 23 new customers again and now you're at 50 you can do the math. How quickly you can expand your customer base by just drinking a cup of coffee, and that's how easy it is.

If you want to know more secrets and you're interested in making the same progress as I did in the last years, I invite you to apply for the Cloud Secrets course. It's absolutely amazing elite course. We only do 20 people at a time so I can personally commit to your success and in this podcast and vlog and blog, I will share some of the secrets, but it's just the tip of the iceberg in the Cloud Secret course, I'll dive deep into everything because I think current education is way, way less efficient as everybody's thinking and not to slap somebody in the face. But if we... I like total immersion. When I would like to learn some techniques or new skills or whatever, I go as deep as I need to go to fully understand and comprehend the stuff that I need to know. If it's office 365 I go all the way until I know everything about it, what is to know. I become the number one in my area on skills and expertise, that's what I do with the Cloud Secret course.

I'll take you as deep as you need to go to do successful migrations every single time and we leave none out of it. You get bonuses like our 127 item checklist for migrating people to the Always Safe in business suite, which will guarantee success, every single migration. I will give you installation checklist as a free bonus for installing new laptops or PC's.

You can hand them to the customer turn key, they just need to log in and they can start working. All you got to do is install a printer locally and that's it. They can take off, you can just ship the laptop out and don't need to physically go to the customer to install all his softwares or whatever he's using, and there's much more. If you would like to apply, because as I said, I only work with 20 people at a time. Expectation, no not expectations, the requirements are very high. If you like somebody who wants to go deep, who's got the time to go through all that stuff and is committed to their own success, then you need to go to cloud-secrets.com/cloudmind. Again, that's cloud-secrets.com/cloudmind.

And there you can apply for the Cloud Secrets for the elite 20 Cloud Secrets course, where I will take you all the way and show you the whole iceberg and where I personally commit to your success. Thanks for listening, thanks for your time, hope you're doing well, I wish you all the best, and if you like this, please go to iTunes and rate and review we can help more IT Guys become successful millionaires or entrepreneurs or having more time in their life to do what matters most to them. Okay. See you next time. Bye-bye Marcel Martens.

Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome back to the Cloud Secrets Podcast. Today we're going to talk about the number one mistake most CSPs or cloud service providers make. When we take a look at our customers, especially the new ones that are coming in and that we onboard with our M IT method, one thing that I started noticing, is that, most were being served by another IT company and they only provided one solution. Office 365 is the bomb. Use SharePoint for your files, use OneDrive, use I don't care, SharePoint isn't built for files. Every single customer that we pull away from there, is telling me the same thing. It's slow, it's not easy to use. It's not user friendly, it's complex. It's difficult to search your files. You got a lot of errors. It doesn't look and feel the same on all your devices. Think about your laptop your PC or tablet, your phone, your whatever you're using these days.

People need to think before they can access their files. In my opinion, they're missing the boat because they need to, well, IT in my opinion, IT is a staff function to any company. It's a facilitating thing to the business. It gets you do more in less time, gets you to automate things, gets you to work wherever you are. It's gets you to be safe in business, you know what I mean, right?

So when they focus on the features and the benefits of the cloud solution, then they don't focus on the business. And if you know where SharePoint came from, SharePoint was built somewhere between maybe 2001 or something. I started working with it in year 2003 and I didn't like it then and didn't like it now, so nothing's changed there, and I will probably never like it. Actually, I hate it. Let's make a statement here. I hate SharePoint. Even if a customer begs us to implement SharePoint, I tell him no, go somewhere else, because I don't stand behind that product or service. I can not guarantee our customer satisfaction based on SharePoint. So my answer's always no. You can use it on your own. Don't call me for support. Call somebody else. I don't care. Do whatever you want, but don't contact me for SharePoint.

Take a look at where SharePoint came from, it was more like a project tool, for teams to work together. Like in construction. You've got the architects, you've got constructors, you've got electrical people, you've got the plumbing people. All that kind of companies and agencies you need to work together, in the same building blueprints. That was SharePoint design for, so they could all look at the same files at the same time, at same version, and if you want to check it out, check out as in use, to make a revision and create a new version, that was fine. Everybody knew that the file was locked, and that some guy who was working in it and when it's finished he checks it back in. So it's available for the others, so they can see the new changes.

But boys (and girls) , but guys, it's 2019 today. That shit don't work anymore. This isn't build to last. Last time I checked there were over 60 or 80, I'm doubting a little bit now. let's make it 60 million Office 365 users. 60 million people or employees who are using Office 365. If they got like, I don't know, maybe 8 million team sites within SharePoints, in there entire Office 365 cloud. Boy, those are a lot of files and a lot of people who are not be able to work with files the way that they want to, the way that they used to and the way that they liked to, and here comes my bold claim.

I can help you learn the way, teach you the way, that you will be able to convert those companies to customers for life. Sounds good? I created the special free course for and I only allow 20 people at anytime, to join. If there are openings then, people can join but no more than 20 at a time. Because I want to be sure that I will be able to have the time to hold your hand and guide you through all steps necessary, learn you and teach every single secret and detail that I've got, which guarantees success every single time. No matter where they came from, they got an old SBS (Small Business server), fine they're still using POP3 email, fine. Last week we did a Microsoft live migration. Boy, it's not even supported anymore in Windows 10. And we bought special software to be able to migrate those emails to Office 365. I don't care.

I show you every single step of the way and make sure to convert or migrate every customer with success. Want to join or if you want to apply, go to clouds-secrets.com/cloudminds. That's again that's clouds-secrets.com/cloudminds. There You can apply for the course as I told, it's a special awesome course to who I'll allow only 20 people max, at a time and since you will be working very intensely with me. I hand pick the ones that are a good fit you know.

So if you apply, Femke, will go over the application. If she thinks it's a fit, she will call you and discuss more questions or ask more questions to see if you're a perfect fit, if you're a perfect fit, then and only then I'll get to see your application and I personally sign off if you can join, yes or no. So you want to join, you want to apply. Go to clouds-secrets.com/cloudminds. Thank you very much and talk to you next time. Bye bye. Marcel.

Hey everybody Marcel Martens here and welcome back to the Cloud Secrets podcast. First, we're going to go through the theme song and then we're going to talk about customer expectations and how you can exceed them. So I hope you doing well. Here, everything okay. Making a major progress on everything actually, because we set tight deadlines and got a pretty good momentum here so I want to hold onto it so we can then help you all get as successful as you want to be because that's my number one goal, help everybody out there in the way that I can.

Back to How to Exceed the Customer Expectations. You know when... and then I'm going to give you an example of one of my businesses, M IT Services. Lots of companies or business owners or whatever, they just buy a new PC or laptop or whatever they need and then they struggle with the setup. I bet you've heard it a lot of times. They always need to call the IT guy to fix the stuff. They need to do their work, so they never have a complete overview of the total cost of ownership. That's where we do magnificent things.

Because.... We try to deliver the system fully functional, just like turn key ready. They just put it on, log in, and can start working. The only thing that we can't do ahead, was configure their printers or local devices they have at the office. That's the only leftover we have, is the one thing that we ask the customer to, when I unpack it, connect everything, and have it up and running, if they even want to, we can do it as well, of course. Then they give us a call, we take over the screen and we, well finalize the setup. For them it's like a major difference and it's what I always ask, "what does your current supplier leave at the table? What are you missing out on?" And it's really the biggest eye opener as well as for them, as for you to be able to know what that particular customer expects of you.

So if you are in your first sales call or meeting or whatever and you're talking about what the customer wants and what they need and you know, doing a little inventory, I cover it in the course in more detail, but for now you're having a chat about what he wants and needs and at that point you can drop in those questions "what is your current supplier leaving on the table or leving out and that you feel like you're in need of."

Basically there's the answer, all you have to do is awnser that question in your offer and you're done. You got the sale!!! And how great would it be if you can ship out stuff, and I'll get back to the stuff part because we don't do everything, it has to be in line of business, but I get to that one minute please.

How great would it be for that customer to receive it's ordered goods in a way that it's just ready, you know? You can just plug it in, start it up, and start using it without having to wait another few hours, a few days, or when you have time. And that's it.

Maybe one of the first three or five episodes I was talking to you about, focus back to one thing and become best of it. By doing so you eliminate a whole lot of stress, not only for you but also for your employee because they just have to do that one thing and if that one thing means migrating customers to your platform, then that's the one thing, and that means making contract offers then that's the one thing. The contract is always the same, may vary in numbers but basically comes down to the same one thing and if you become excellent at that one thing, you can add more value to the customer by adding offers in line with the one thing in the one thing is what I call, they always safe the business package or suite, sorry, always safe a business suite.

And in line perfectly fits delivering or selling a laptop or a PC for using that suite, so you can make extra sales, you make can make extra money of the installation and for that as well. I love Trello boards. I love Trello checklist. We've got checklists for almost everything in our business. And if you follow the course, I give you all those checklists as bonuses, but every single laptop or PC we deliver mets the same standards as all our deliveries do.

So I know for a fact that when a user opens the box and he plugs everything in he can work, he can do, he can start working wherever he is, if he's in the office, if he's at home, if he's on holiday, I don't care. He can start working with the always safe business suite. Because that's all configured before shipping out the device.

And there I draw the line. If somebody asks me, "could you sell me a mobile phone?"" No, I'm not going to do that." "Why not? I'll pay you extra for it." "No, it's not the line of my business." If there's something wrong our support team isn't built for that, it costs way, way, way, way too much time. So please let them order those on the internet or with a phone provider or whatever.

And if people ask me the same, "okay Marcel, I would like you to come to my office and move all my data from my current system to the new system" and I'm telling him "no." "Yeah, but why not, you're the guy, the face of the business." Yes I am, but I don't tell him a straight no, I give a story for them to understand why and eventually tell them no.

It's not my task in the company to run those things and to do those things. We've got people working for us to do those things. It's not to think that's too less of a job for me. No, I've done I know 20 years, whatever. I don't care. Well, my focus and my goal is to generate revenue. We need new customers, we need marketing, we need sales, we need, that's my task, not installing systems. And if the guys have problems or questions, sure, I help them out, but it's not my task to perform those tasks. You understand what I mean?

So for you, it's the same as of the start. And I know when you're starting out and you get your first customers, you're excited and of course you've got to do all those things, I've done them as well for like eight years in my business.

But the sooner you can hire someone to do it for you the sooner you've got time to... speed up the customer acquisition process. And the more customers you get, the more recurring revenue you get. And the more people you can help and the more people's lives you can change by not having all the fears doubts and anxieties, frustrations of IT that they currently have, because that's your one focus on customers that you want to transfer to you and they're unhappy of their current supplier. The current supplier doesn't use any cloud services. So they still work on their Synology NAS or when you know their POP3 email boxes, Oh man, if I even think of that, it's just way, way, way oooohhhh man I get a headache.

But we also, at our company M IT Services, we're still migrating. I don't know, maybe once, or twice, or three times a month we're migrating people out POP3 mailboxes. Guys, it's 2019 people, come on and give me a break. Why are they still using POP3? Yes, they are. So you need to get in touch with them and you can show them the benefits. But don't sell benefits. Don't sell features. Sell outcome. That's a really big lesson that I've learned. I probably believe it was Steve Larson, or Dean Graziosi, I don't know. Sell the outcome. That's when people say yes, don't sell benefits and features, you're just making them compare everybody else. So you're just comparing yourself to everybody else and below you mentioned the price. And then you compete on price. It's not what you want. That's why you need to sell the outcome. And when you sell the outcome, you get customers for life. Because when you deliver on the outcome and even exceed their expectations and it's like you're best friends, they will be happy to pay you money. They'll want to call you every time they are in need of something.

So back to over delivering on the promise. Say when you make an offer, and maybe it's way too salesy this podcast. But what I'm doing with this course is not only the technical part, I can learn you old the skills you need, but if you can't make a sale, it's no use. You're not of use. You know? You need to be able to sell, acquire customers, build your business, and then you can scale.

By scaling, I mean you go from ten accounts as customers, you don't need ten customers, you can have one customer with ten users. When I'm talking about accounts, I'm talking about the number of users who use the suite, that's how you can scale from one to ten to 100 to 1000. Then when you come above the 1000 users you're serving what do you think, you've got a recurring revenue, it's almost 40 grand a month. When you are serving 100 or 1000 users. Did you expect that to happen when you just start your business and selling laptops, selling PCs, sell antivirus software, or selling some backup software or do a little affiliate thing here and over there. No, of course not, but that's because you don't have a plan. When you have a plan and you do only one thing, you have one focus. You only focus on getting your first ten accounts. Then you focus on 100, you do what you have to do. You focus on getting your 100 users. When you have 100 you go through a thousand. And how? I'm going to teach you in the course.

It's easily because those people keep paying you every single month and when they do, they also have some questions once in a while or they need a new system once in a while. Who do you think they call? Of course, they're going to call you, so you're going to make extra money out of the same customer every single time.

I did a calculation and roughly a sole entrepreneur, this is just a business guy who was, I don't know, consulting or whatever. They all need a laptop. They all need the Always Safe in Business suite and that's the foundation for all IT in my opinion every company needs so they do like, let me go click quickly here. Roughly around 500 euros a year, for the Always Safe in Business suite. But if I calculate all the extra time on support on, I don't know help they want, that's not support.

Support is for me when something isn't working and then they need support, but if they've got a question like how can I do this? Okay, help me with that. Well, it also falls under the umbrella of support of course, and once in three years they buy a new system. So now your yearly revenue from that customer goes up from 500 euros to maybe two and half, 3000 euros. If you got 100 users, so times three thousand, go figure a lot of money. Right? That's what I want you to think about, because it's way easier set.

There's also, well it's hard work, but it's easily done. You get what I mean right? Good. If you're in for it and you're all pumped up and excited, as I am on this podcast... and you're thinking, Marcel when can I start? I want this tomorrow. Go to Cloud-Secrets.com/cloudmind and again, it's Cloud-Secrets.com/cloudmind I'll drop in a link below and there you can opt in for the course. There's a waiting list. I only work with 15 to 20 people maximum at a time because I want to guarantee your success. And you follow it step by step, I guarantee that you will be adding those 100 users in no time.

So exceed customer expectation and how we do it every single time, we over deliver. And over-delivering is easy, because when we call them, "I see you received package," you just give them a call and you ask "okay, when do you got time to set up your printer?" "Oh yeah, we can do right now, maybe tomorrow or whatever." "Okay. I'm going to call you back tomorrow at 12 o'clock," and after you set up the printer, "did you try everything? Is everything working? You got more questions? Do you need some data to be transferred?" And then they'll be like "finally somebody who gets it, they're asking questions. Am I happy? Do you want me to do other things for you?"

It's just, we're in the service business guys. We serve the customer. That's our primary job. Nothing else and that's what I'm going to stick to it today. Thank you very much for listening. If you like this, please rate and subscribe on iTunes, on YouTube, on SoundCloud, wherever you listen or watch this, and I'll love to hear some feedback, positive, critic feedback, all is welcome just to make this a better product than it already is. I hope I over delivered to you today. If not, please, please let me know because at my whole intention of all that I do here, I want to over deliver you and help you as best as I can to get you as successful as you want to be. Okay, talk to you guys next time. Bye-bye, Marcel Martens,

 Links:

Cloud-Secrets.com/cloudmind

Good morning guys, Marcel Martens here. Welcome back to the Cloud Secrets podcast. I just dropped off the kids at school and daycare. Back to work, and today I'm going to talk about making out of your comfort zone, your new comfort zone. We go to the theme song and then we're going to talk about that.

Welcome back. To be able to grow, you need to get out of your comfort zone, and that's way easier said than done. As I can speak for myself and I know a ton of examples who experienced the same. Once you've established your daily routines, and I'm talking about weekdays here, but maybe you've got even a separate routine for your weekends as well. It's really hard to break free of those because you feel comfort. It's easy, that's what time that I need to get out of bed, that's when I take a shower, that's when I go to the office, then I'm on time. I'm going to do my job and then I go home, maybe do some shopping, cook dinner, and after that you have the evening for yourself. Maybe you go do some sports, then you go to bed and the next day is the same. That's pretty easy, right? Doesn't involve a lot of thinking, no decisions need to be made. You just... Well, you've got your daily habits and your routines and it's good. It feels good, you feel comfort.

But if you keep in that comfort zone, it's going to stay the same. You understand, right? Maybe you get a raise at your job, maybe you get a career switch when it's time, and then you adjust your routine a little bit, but it's not like the major changes. To be able to succeed for yourself in your life, and in being an entrepreneur, or being a business owner, or being a professional, or whatever. Being a loving spouse, being the best friend you can be, being the best father, or mother. Every single thing it's the same, “the secret to living is giving” as Tony Robbins said. I truly believe that it's... I get goosebumps, I feel good, I feel happy, when I'm able to help people. If you listened to my last podcast about finding my why, I suggest you go back and listen to it because it's just mind blowing for me.

It's made so much clear in why I do the things I do, without expecting anything in return because as Tony says, that sharing is... For living is giving (secret of living is giving). In order to live the happiest life you ever imagined, you need to give more, and if you give more, you'll get more. Everything is in balance in the universe. Everything, is in balance. The nature, it takes care of that without... Instantly... I don't know how to explain it but, go watch or read The Secret. I know, it's maybe 20 years old, I don't know, but it's an eye opener, there are tons of books about it. Follow Bob Proctor for example, he's always talking about the Law of Attraction.

It's all coming down to the same basic principle. Share more, it's the same with the ratio between your ears to your mouth, listen twice as much as you talk. Listen to understand, as Covey is telling in his books and his stories. When you are looking for the red lining throughout history, for all the most successful people, they all understood that secret. They all give it a different name, but it's all back to the same principle. It's everywhere the same, listen to understand not to be understood. Just understand first before you get understood. Share more than you want, or want to receive. It's exactly the same as entrepreneurship, if you want your business to succeed, and become a success... You as well in person, then really the secret is, get out of your comfort zone and make that your new comfort zone.

I know what it's hard as I said before, there are a lot of things you think about, “Oh, I don't know about that”, or “how the hell am I supposed to do that?” “Oh, that's not me.” “Who do you think I am?” “For who, am I going to do this?” All one answer, for you. If you get a feeling... You could feel it in your stomach when you're out comfort, discomfort. You know it, absolutely sure, right? You know it, right? When you're in that zone. Okay, good.

Imagine this, I give you a back... and I'll give you an example, my family life back at home. I did a whole podcast about it, how I run my business in three days and why I need to. But, for me to be able to get there, to do the things that I do now, I needed to be out of my comfort zone for a really long time, to make it my new comfort zone. It's a magical principle my coach teach me, give 100% despite what the other provides. If my wife is ill and she can't provide at this time, so 0%, I fill her 100% as well. Without yagging about it, without me feeling irritated about it, without just... You just man the fuck up. Oh sorry, beep, man up. You just do the things you need to do, and that makes you feel better, if you look at it in the right way.

I truly believe that many relationships break up because of this, because they don't know this principle or this secret. As well as I said, in entrepreneurship as well as in your personal life. Also, here the secret is giving. Our relationship has never been better because she can has... Take the rest that she needs to heal. She doesn't need to worry that I forgot things because my family's priority number one, they're on top of everything. To be able to do that, I needed to go way, way out of my comfort zone because if I may say so myself, I'm pretty lazy, and that's why I become and IT professional, so I can automate things. But in relations, you can't automate anything. Well, maybe an email, but I couldn't advise that because it's going to break your relationships. You understand, right? Okay, good.

But, for me to go way out of my comfort zone and be creating and making that my new comfort zone. When I look back, it's been a beautiful transition. If you ask me five years ago, Marcel, can you do the things you do today? "Hell no." I wouldn't say... I would say, it wasn't possible. Where there isn't a way, make away. You don't know the way, you find the way. It's with everything, all good, and of all successful entrepreneurs, make their out of comfort zone, their new comfort zone. And that's the biggest secret to success, and stick with it. Never gave up. As I said with the light bulb, I don't recall his name, he didn't have a thousand failures, or 999 no, it took him a thousand steps to invent the light bulb. With this it's the same, don't give up, just lean in. Lean in when you feel that you're in your out of comfort zone and that's where the magic happens.

You need to push through that wall. You don't go around it, you don't go above it, or over it. Just go through it, and I guarantee you at the other end of the wall, the sun is always shining. Remember that and that's where the gold pot is, that's where success is. I dare you to... I challenge you to get out of your comfort zone. That's where the magic happens and where you can truly live on the edge, and experience most beautiful things, and get extraordinary life, and/or money, or happiness, or everything you want, is on the other side of that wall. You just need to find a way through it. That means keep going and keep going, and keep going, until you're there, and never give up.

So that's it for today. Talk to you next time. If you liked this, please rate and subscribe on iTunes because other people are only going to find this podcast if we get lots of reviews or lots of ratings. Please take a minute and then go to iTunes and rate this with the four or five star if you like it. If you don't like it, comment as well and let me know why you don't like it so I can do anything about it.

Thank you for watching and listening and I'll talk to you guys next time. See ya. Bye bye. Marcel.

Today. I found my core values with the help with my coach and I'm going to share them with you, after the theme song.

Boom. Oh, guys. What's up? Good day everybody. Good morning here. It's morning at least. Today's a very valuable day for me. Have you been struggling with your why? Why do you get up in the morning? Why you do the things you do? Why you're in IT? Why you love working with cloud systems and customers? Who always have problems with the systems they use?

I hope you know your why and otherwise. I've been struggling with it for a while now. I think it's two or three years that I've been wondering on almost a daily basis why I do the things I do. Work-related and private life, as well. But for here, we focus on the working part, on the business part. Do you know Simon Sinek? Buy his book. Find your why or Why. He's got two books. I read them both very, very valuable, but it didn't get me to my core why. And if you look at it like an onion and you can peel off all the layers, layer by layer, by layer. Let me ask you the question. What is the most ... Why is it important to be successful in your life?

For me, it could be to leave a legacy. Okay. A good answer. And why it's important to you to leave a legacy? Okay, good question. For me, it's important to leave a legacy because I want to make a contribution to the world. In my case that would be to let every business run their IT safely, or I'll get to that in a little bit, I don't want to spoil my answers here. But I'll just giving another example here, right. Why is it important to make the world a safer place, especially online? Okay, so it's good question, again.

To me, it's important to make the world a safe place because I think all the things you worked hard for, all your data, all your knowledge should be kept safe and only for you to share if you want to, or not any kind of hackers to just steal your data or resources and make them publicly available. Okay, and why it's important that hackers can't access your data. Well, you get the point, right? You go layer by layer, by layer until you get to your core. My core is ... well, let me tell you in a different story, another story.

When I design a solution for a business, it can be a small business, a large business. I don't care. The feeling is the same. You know? Every single time that when I meet with a customer or a prospect in that phase, they're having issues or they can't do the things they want to do. They are limited by the system, the solution, the cloud services, whatever it is, the IT solution as a whole. They are limited by its capabilities to do what they want to do. And that's where my core value comes in. I get goosebumps when I can help the customer so that they can do what they want. That sounds nice. I think most entrepreneurs want that. Why do you want that, or why does that give you a good feeling?

And today, I found out and it's a very valuable day for me again, that my why is, it makes me feel happy, I get goosebumps. It's about getting out of your head and into your feeling, when you know, you feel that something is good, right? When you feel that you're happy, that you help the customer covert or you start using the system that does what the business needs. My core thing is: "I leave businesses in a better state than when I first met them." And that's as basic as it's going to get. That's the transformation I'm giving to companies, to entrepreneurs, IT guys. I say it again, "I'll leave them in a better state than when I first met them", and that's so powerful to me. Those few words are like spot on why I get goosebumps every single time that I've helped the customer transition from the current solution, current situation into the new situation. And even if they wouldn't pay me money, I still would have gotten those goosebumps.

It makes me feel good, it makes me feel happy. That's my core why, I just want to be happy. I want that happy feeling , you know? That I've been able to help somebody to do more, or whatever, just leave them in a better state than they were when I met them. That's the most powerful thing I realized the last few years. And that's also the reason that I want to share it with you because I know it's been nagging at me for years and I wanted to be able to spell this out, to share this with other people. Why do you do things you do? A lot of people got those questions. I think you've got them, too. So I hope I inspired you with this to help you find your why. There are great books on it. As I mentioned, Simon Sinek. Tony Robbins is and also a great mentor for me. I watch a lot of his stuff. I read a lot of his books, as well. Follow him online and doing trainings and all things, just to get to your core so you can share your message and share what you stand for.

It's the same with Cloud Secrets, guys. I want to help you become a millionaire. I'll help you with setting up your business, getting the customers, getting the sales done, doing the migrations, end up with happy customers and that's why I focus so much on the happy customer. A happy customer is a customer for life. If you help your customer transition from the state he's in to the new state where he wants to be, you're his friend for life and they keep paying you for it. That's the greatest part.

How beautiful is that? And it's all based on listening to where their needs are. I don't know if I did an episode before, or otherwise there will be shortly. "Listen to understand before you got understood". Very powerful. And it's made me tons of money. You always deliver on the promise. You always deliver what they expect you to. It isn't hard, it's difficult. No, it isn't difficult, but it's hard. You need to discipline yourself to learn this stuff and apply it in the right way. And then it works every single time. And that, I will guarantee you.

I hope you can feel my enthusiasm here. Wow, I'm going to make a little party tonight, I think. I'm going to make a lot of messages using this core value now that I know what it is and I'll talk to you guys next time. Okay. Bye, bye. If you like this, please rate, subscribe, and post any comments. Please do. I want to share this with as much IT guys out there and together, we're going to make the world a safer place. How about that? Okay. See you next time. Bye, bye. Marcel Martens.

Hey everybody. Marcel Martens. Welcome back to the Cloud Secrets podcast.

Today I want to talk about what your brain does with pain and joy and gratefulness from others or your own.

Yesterday evening ... in bed, I was watching a Discovery, I don't know, sci fi or whatever. And there was this show or documentary, I don't know. And there was a study about that the human brain processes the pain of other people the same way as when they have actual pain themselves. So they would hook somebody up with a lot of wires and put them in some MRI machine or something. And when they showed the person the images and the pain somebody was going through and they made a detailed map of the areas in the brain that were activated.

And afterwards they would, I don't know, like hit the person with some wood. I don't know, or give him a slap on the hands. And that same spots in the brain lighted up. So for human physiology and the human brain, the brain doesn't know where it's coming from. If you're seeing it, you're dreaming it or you actually experience it yourself.

And the same goes for joy, success or well, all the things you like. If you, I don't know, maybe 10 15 years ago, around that time yeah... 10, 12 years ago. And do you know the movie The Secret or did you read the book, The Secret? At that time, well, I thought it was a nice read. It was nice to watch. In some cases I always had luck, like finding a parking space in a parking. I always have them near the entry, near the exit. They're what I visualize, where I visualized that the free spot was for me or just when you come driving in and then on that spot, somebody's leaving when you're arriving you know?

Same with stoplight, headlight, traffic lights. It always turns green when I'm arriving. In the Secret they explain this as the law of attraction. Go watch it. It's fun. Just spend an hour and a half or whatever it is, or read the book if you're rather read than watch a movie. But you have a good time and you can pick up a few things there.

On the other hand, the law of attraction is the same with your success. If you're always thinking, I'm not made for this, can I do this or I can't do that. If you don't know you can, why are you assuming that you can't? You might as well assume that you can. It's the same thing. For your brain it doesn't matter. It's all, yeah only what you put in there that's going to be your beliefs.

If you feed your brain with that, if you don't know if you can, you assume you can instead of, I don't know if I can. I assume I can't. For the brain it makes no difference. It's the same wires only they have a different belief for you. And while we were watching that documentary yesterday on Discovery, well, it was a confirmation for me that all this time, well 11 years now an entrepreneur and doing very well if I may say so myself. Not to brag. I don't care about money. I don't know if I told you before, but my dream is not to become a millionaire or whatever. I don't care about money at all. It's nice that I can pay all my bills and don't have to watch my bank account to see if I can do my groceries, but I don't care about money at all.

I heard a nice saying once, I don't know who quoted it, but I give credit to this guy because it's a brilliant quote. I don't need to be, I don't like or want to become a millionaire. I just like the things millionaires like to do and that's exactly the same with me. I like nice stuff. I like fancy dinners. I like whatever, luxury traveling. All these things that millionaires do on a maybe daily or weekly basis. Those are the things I like, but I don't actually care about how much money I have in the bank, you know?

So with that said, if you can feed your brain the right information and right beliefs, the humankind is capable of doing anything. It doesn't matter. So that's what I wanted to share with you today. I hope it inspires you. If you like this, please rate it on the iTunes or Spotify or SoundCloud or whatever you're listening on so other people can find it as well. And if you have any feedback, please leave me a comment and I'll respond there. And if you would like me to talk about anything else or certain subjects, just post it in the comments, or go to cloud-secrets.com and leave a comment over there and all that. I'll see what I can do.

Okay. Have a nice one today and talk to you next time.

Bye-bye. Marcel Martens.

Good morning everyone Marcel Martens and welcome back to the Cloud Secrets podcast.

On the earlier episode, we talked about me getting to my three day work week and how I've created the time that I need for my family to be able to provide. The most important ingredient of that solution was to systematize all processes that are involved in migrating or how to install the "Always Safe In Business Suite" for companies so we literally documented and made checklists for every single item that is possible that you need to do in order to migrate customers successfully. So none is left out, not even our administration tasks, our financial tasks, our planning tasks, our project manager tasks, every single step is documented and we used Trello for it. I'll put a link down below. If you like it you can use it and it saves us a ton of time, a ton of mistakes because it...

In the Netherlands, we have a saying that's literally 'monks work' because people don't like to just follow a checklist because it makes them feel stupid or I don't know, but we focus on every single employee for most of his job, not the support tasks of course because those are usually a bit variable. We document them in our knowledge base, but we don't create a Trello checklist for every single support call, it's insane. But for all our projects and migrations we have these Trello checklists. Even for installing new PCs or laptops or whatever it is, we use checklists and every single time we can guarantee that the outcome will be the same because none is forgotten, none is left out, everything is checked and if it's more complex, we assign a project manager who can manage the project of course, but also make sure certain deadlines are met at certain times and then milestones are finished on time so we can go on further with the next step.

That's the main aspect of how I was able to create my three day work week because we systematized all of the processes and that just gives us a ton of time. In the early days...I'm laughing about it now, but if you think back of it, it was not that professional at all. For me, it was all clear because all the steps were in my head and I could even do them in my sleep if I have to, you know?

For our engineers, to me, it feels like they don't have the complete overview of all the tasks that are at hand so I've struggled a lot with coaching, training, to learn and delegate all the tasks so that I can have my time off. It's not just off but to be able to take care of our family. This way, it was a long route, a long journey towards the result, but now it's finally there and everybody is using them and everybody is eager and happy to use them because it gives good feeling when every single time a migration succeeds without any failures or things forgotten or left out or without any mistakes. That's good and even now every single migration we do an evaluation with the engineer who migrates the new customer and I always asked him if you are doing any steps that aren't in the checklist, please write them down in the notes so I can add them to the checklist if they're important. Better have something in there and not needed than left out and forgotten during the migration.

Back in the old days, maybe five years ago, you can understand that a lot of tasks on those migrations, were actually forgotten or skipped and now we have a fixed prize for the set up of the suite and the migration we just charge by the hour. If the project is finished and we send all the invoices to the customer, if we, for example, forgot two things to set up during the implementation process, you can't send an invoice afterwards because it just looks stupid to me. If you spend like eight hours on setting up everything, you can't send an invoice for a half an hour or an hour afterwards because you forgot two or three things. That's also financially and cash flow technically speaking, it's better because you have everything finished up in one run. You don't have to need go back and make adjustments and, "Oh shit, I need to revisit an order. I need to do that. Oh crap I forgot this one," and that saves not only a ton of time, but it's..., every single customer we also ask for a case study. If we can create a case study. I wouldn't say we use them all, but it gives me feedback on how the migration went and, from the customer's perspective, if there were things that we could do better. Every single migration we learn, and we learn, and we keep learning, and keep making it better, but don't wait until it's perfect. Just get started and improve it on the go, you know? Nothing is perfect the first time even Edison with his light bulb. I think you know the story. His teachers told him he wasn't be able to do anything and here he is, the inventor of the light bulb.The experience... It Took him a thousand times before he figured it out, how to create the light bulb. The electric light bulb. But he didn't see his nine hundred ninty-nine trials as a failure. He looked at it as, "I just needed a thousand steps to get to the results I was looking for".

That's what I try to teach my employees, coach my employees with. I don't see mistakes or whatever as a failure. You'll always have an opportunity to correct them, but if you just see them as steps of the process it gives ease of mind, less stress, more satisfaction because if everything goes well, you'll always have a good feeling about it. You have a feeling that you actually contributed to the project or the business or whatever. That's what makes people run for you. If you can give them a good feeling every single day they are most loyal employees you'll veer get.

That's it for now. I'm back at the office and going to start today. Just dropped off the kids. School started again this week so back to a normal. We've got a lot of tasks at hand today. Yesterday I setup the YouTube channel. I'll uploaded the first videos and added them to the blog.

I'm also looking for an SEO. engineer who can optimize all my blogs and that's why I posted a UpWork job last night. I'm going to have a look at the reaction and hopefully there are some good ones in there so I can pick one and get started today. Yesterday also I had a meeting with my web developer and he started on the members area on the training site to set up the framework for our course. Lots of stuff done yesterday. We're gonna kill it day today as well. Pretty busy day so maybe I'll get back to you tonight or otherwise tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye-bye.

If you like this podcast, please rate and subscribe. Rating is very important not only to me, but in general. If you like it, rate it with a three to a five star on iTunes so we'll be found more and I can help more IT guys to become an entrepreneur or just give the last push they need to start their own business. It's what everybody needs. Most of us don't just throw in the towels at our job and start your own business, but this way you can start alongside your current business and set up everything, learn all the steps you need, and then when its ready and when your first euros are coming in, then you can leave your job and go at it full time or three days like I am. Please rate, subscribe, and leave any feedback if you got any questions or things we need to talk about, just drop them in the comments and I'll have a look at them.

Thank you very much. Have a nice one. Bye-bye.

Hey everybody, Marcel Martens again, Welcome back to the Cloud Secrets podcast. First, we get the theme song, and then I'll talk about why you need to stop trading your time for money.

So today's episode is all about why you need to stop trading your time for money. Back in 2008 when I started my business, it was my first assignment for myself to be able to stop trading my time for money. And it took me a while, because first I needed to build all kinds of services. But as you can understand, you can only make so much money as you have time available and you can't divide yourself in two to be able to serve two customers at the same time, especially with a complex project, it's, well un-doable and I don't even think you should want it.

So when I started in 2008, it was my first failure as an entrepreneur. And let me share you with that story because I think you can all learn from it. At that time I was working for a big company doing international projects and migrating all kinds of big companies, enterprise companies to Citrix and to the cloud. I don't know what came before cloud. We used Citrix at the time to, well, give all the employees server based computing so they could work on any station, anywhere on the planet, on any device.

And at that time my challenges were gone at the company. So I ask, okay, can you give me a new challenge or can you move me to a different division? But no, every time they told me no, no possibilities, no options, no nothing. So I told to my boss, okay, then I'll eventually I will start looking for something else because I need a challenge, I'm not here to do the same thing for the rest of my life. So after, I don't know, maybe a half a year, a year, I run into my old boss, and I had a conversation with him and he was asking me, are you ready for a new challenge?

I was looking at him like, okay, what do you have in mind because I left your company because also the challenges were too small or well, we eventually could take over the company, but it was in the middle of a crisis. So I didn't. And I bought my first apartment, so I didn't want to have any financial risks. I just wanted to be able to pay my mortgage and stuff and so I didn't have to worry about money and all that things.

And he asked me, okay, are you ready for a new adventure? And I said, okay, but I don't know what do you have in mind, because I didn't leave your company for nothing. He said, no, it's with my companion and he's a cloud service provider and we could use your skills. So full with faith, as naive as I was back in the day, I went to the chamber of commerce, I got a number and get my tax set up. And I start working for this guy, who screwed me over big time, by the way. So I built an international cloud platform for his company to sell in entire Europe. So this completely multi-lingual, all features and all everything you could think of were included.

So at the end of the... I built it, a half a year on it to make the designs and make all the preparations and installations. And I also had a team with IT guys, who helped me install and set up all solutions that were... No, not solutions. Think of Exchange, think of Citrix, think of file servers, think of database servers, think of application services, NetScalers, load balancers, everything you can think of, we had it totally set up and scripted so we could automatically roll out of users. Which was pretty far fetched that at that time. It was, well, I think we were the first one in 2008 who were doing it that way.

But that said, I said, okay. He was going to give me stocks of his company, of shares of his company, in trade for my time. So at the end of the year, I said, okay, let's go to the ... I don't know what you call it in English. Here you call it "Notaris", where you can exchange your shares and make it all legal and effective. And he said, shares? Shares? What are you talking about? Well, I see beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, a lot of words I can't say here. And it was also one of my last days there. I sent him my last invoice for some hours I worked for a customer of his. I took my loses and well, stated working further on my own.

But at that time, I was living off my wife's salary, who was paying my apartment, who was paying our groceries, who was paying my insurances, everything, because I didn't have anything left. Al my money was gone in the half a year. And I was working for this guy. Learned a lot though, but it was a pretty expensive lesson.

And so I need to do what I was good at. And that was start working as a freelancer to make quick cash, you know? We always had our minds and our vision on services so we could stop trading time for money.

So the first year, 2009, I did a lot of consult working, a lot of design work, all freelance. So I would make a ton of money and all that money, well I pay my mortgage of course, but the rest of the money we all put it back into hard and software. And since then I really never traded my time for money again. It was also always combined with services. And if you have the focus on services, like for example, we were selling these remote desktops, which included office their files, exchange for their email. So basically a workplace in the cloud.

And we would sell it for 75 euros a month, excluding VAT, excluding taxes. But if I could set up a customer with 50 employees, well the first time project migration, that's project based on time, which we can send them an invoice for. But afterwards, the 50 users times 75 euros a month, they just keep coming in and coming in every single month. And yes, of course, I need to do some support. But that's what I mean with stop trading time for money. And then that way if you can scale your business pretty rapidly, if you have a good sales team or are good at sales yourself.

At that time we had 800 users or something, I don't know. So we were scaling pretty big. And that's when you get time and resources available to do other things, because you're not longer trading your time for money. In doing so you can hire your staff, your service desk, your engineers, everything you need to get yourself out of the day to day, so you can focus on new projects, new revenue generating items, bringing in new customers, doing marketing, doing whatever you want to do, because the recurring revenue keeps coming in.

And it has been my focus from day one that I started as a business owner or an entrepreneur, to eliminate my time in the equation. If a business depends on your time or the availability of your time, I think is the biggest mistake an entrepreneur can make. Because then you can only make so much money as you have time available. And yes, of course, you can increase your hour rates, but at the end, you still need to work every single hour to get paid. And while, if you go into services or cloud service in this case, you even keep earning money while you're at sleep or on holiday, or sometimes you're ill for a week or sick or end up in hospital, I don't know. The revenue keeps coming in so you can pay your bills at any time.

And when you set up your support team, even when you are on a three week holiday, no problem. The business continuity is never, ever a problem because you've got your employees who take care of the customer at that time.

So that's what I wanted to share with you. For me, it's always been a focus, as I told. I hope I inspire you to make it your focus as well, especially if you join the cloud secrets program. It's all based on providing services and not... Well, the first time migration is a project. Of course it's nice to have some quick cash but in there end, to me, the only thing that matters is that I will end up with a customer that will stick with me for at least ten years. And I can earn money every single month without having to do anything after the initial setup.

Okay. If you like this, please leave a review and rate this on iTunes. I would like all IT guys in the world to start following me, or at least would like to start for themselves or become an entrepreneur. And on iTunes you can only get a high probability that you'll be found if you've got high rating. So please rate and subscribe and I hope to see you next time.

Thanks for joining. Bye bye. Marcel Martens.

Hey everybody, Marcel Martens here, Cloud Secrets. Welcome back. Good to be here. I was just walking the dogs and thinking about if I had the opportunity, like 11 years ago and somebody asked me, How would it be if I could learn you all the ways of the Cloud, all best strategies, all things that are working straight from the gecko. If you have some troubles you can dial me anytime or contact support and we'll have a look with you to fix whatever problem you are at hand and I can offer you this course. With that course you will learn in 14 days how to sell the Cloud solution, how do you acquire customers, how to make all the preparations, so do an inventory of everything they have right now, and where they need to go, where they want to go.

With that set that when you do the inventory and there will be potential problems that you need to tackle before you can start the migration to the Cloud or from one Cloud to another Cloud or from the server to Cloud or from whatever current situation the customers in through the new Cloud solution.

You have done the inventory, you know what problems lie ahead so you can tackle them, you can start a discussion with the customer or start a conversation. That's what I mean. From there you can maybe even upsell because they've got old systems like I don't know, Windows Vista, Windows 7. We recommend that everything will be updated to Windows 10 Pro. If they've got old systems, we even got the chance to sell some new systems and make your money over there as well.

Finally, when all preparations are in place and in order, you can set up the new Cloud environment. We create all the users, all the shared mailboxes, migrate all the data and everything on ... not migrating but synchronizing so everything will be prepared for the actual migration. Then finally we ask the customer or make a proposal for a migration date. Then when we do the migration, we make sure that the customer, oh, big truck coming through or moment. You make a... one moment, please.

We make the preparations for the migration. We do a final sync over the data. We export all emails so they can... and then the next day we usually go to the customers site so we can have hands on support and hands on migration. We do a system by system migration while, and that's the big secret, everybody can keep working on the old and new system. While the old partially because they can still print, et cetera. But we lock the old file system, whatever it is so they are forced to use a new system. With their email they can use Outlook or Web Mail or whatever and wait for our engineers to come by and migrate old email.

Back to the question, if I had the opportunity 11 years ago, if somebody would teach me, I would set this all up to do a flawless migration every single time with a guaranteed outcome of a successful migration without the customer having to do anything at all except for signing some contracts, of course, and go over some preparations with you, would you take the chance? Yes or no?

I would have grabbed it with both hands and that's why I created Cloud Secrets and that's why I... I thought a long time about it because who is going to reveal its secrets that are working every single time? It's like the Coca-Cola recipe. Nobody sells the recipe. It's not for sale. That's always Pepsi fighting against Coke and Coca-Cola doesn't really care about Pepsi.

Because they're market leader, I'm not telling you I'm market leader, but my mission is to get everyone safe in business, especially online. If I got to do it with my own company. I can't serve the whole world on my own with my company. If I teach my ways to you, then we have a broader spread of our methodologies in providing better security online and make the world a safer place.

That's why I'm offering this to you and follow me. Follow Cloud Secrets at Instagram @Cloud.Secrets. You can find me on Facebook, Marcel Martens HQ. I put a link down below and I'll see you there. If you're interested, please send me a message and we'll see what we can do. I'm looking for a starter group of 15 to 20 people with whom I can fine tune the course, get the last hurdles out of the way as a matter of speaking. Then I can launch you the course through the big audience. Our price is going to be €5,997 Euros. But for the first 15 to 20 I made a special offer and I'm going to ask a €2,997 Euro excluding taxes. If you have company a no problem, there's no tax involved. But otherwise we are inclined to add the tax on top.

If you are interested, send me a personal message or an email or whatever, just respond down below and I'll get in touch for you to be on the first 15 to maximum 20. That's the max I'll allow for the first course. Thanks so very much and I hope to see you soon.

Bye bye. Marcel Martens.

I’ll share all my secrets and all my methods that are working time after time, what the difference is between one single Cloud solution and a Suite of Cloud solutions, and why you should quit your job and live the life you want!

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Hey everybody, welcome back to the Cloud Secrets podcast. And today I'm going to talk about how I changed my business into a three day work week.

So blessed that I am, I've got three beautiful children. I am happily married, as proud as I could say it with my wife. Took us a while before we made the best out of it. It's rather personal what I'm going to tell you, but I think it's an important story, because it's what made me take a different look or approach to the whole business aspect. My main priority was to be able to provide for my family, you know? To have a roof over our head, to be able to do groceries, to pay insurance and all the taxes and all stuff, you know... and still get a holiday once in a while.

And it was a bit hard because my wife has these terrible, horrible pregnancies. The hormone thing is pfffff. And she always says having kids is nice, but the delivery time is way, way, way too long. So here in the Netherlands we got bol.com. If you order today between, I don't know, 12 o'clock PM and 0:00 AM, you will receive the package next day. So if we could change that for having children as well, that would be very nice for her. But we're blessed with three beautiful children, and they are all three healthy. So we're good, it's fine like this, and our family is complete.

But with the first child, as every father would agree, I think your whole world is upside down and you need to make adjustments. And That must been hard for me, because my focus was on the business. And it was only running for three years until we were having our first child. And after the second one, well it came even harder, because my wife was very ill even afterwards. I'm going into details here, because I don't think that's necessary for the story. But she needed a long time to recover.

So in that time we had like daycare three days in a week. So there were two days left that I needed to run the business and provide for the children. And while she was doing her best and even more so. Without her, I wouldn't been the guy that I am today, so I'm very grateful for how she pushed me and stood by me and helped me become the man that I am today.

With that said, she was doing more than the best she could ever do, and putting all her troubles aside to be able to give me the space and let me take care of our customers and provide so we have food on the table literally. Then we moved and it was December, 2014 I believe. Yes. With Christmas we moved to a different location. First we rented the house and from there we were searching for our new home, you know? And after half a year and we found it. And well all the contractors there made a beautiful house out of it. And we're still living there and I'm enjoying it every single day.

And there, she got pregnant of our third child. And although it was like not really planned, it was meant to be. And as we say here, it's a beautiful gift. No, it's wrong, let me think. It was a pleasant surprise, and then now our family feels complete and whole. So it was meant to be. But after that in her pregnancy, from 16 weeks she got ill again, sick and she still didn't overcome all of it.

So, I still have a three day work week because from... Well my working days are Monday, Tuesday and Friday. And Wednesday, Thursday, I take care of the kids and do nice stuff when they're out of school or out of daycare. And that's where the need came from to change my business. Change the people we work with, changed partnerships, change like everything to accept the fact that these were my conditions for the next time to be, until she is completely recovered. Because I wanted to be able to give her the space and rest so she could recover. While I'll still be able to provide without having all the stress, fear and doubts and anxieties about being able to provide.

And that's where we, as I talked earlier on on this podcast, we stopped serving all different kinds of services and products, and really focused down to this one thing. And by doing so, I was able to systematize the whole process from acquiring a customer until delivering on the promise that we made during the sale. And now we've changed personnel in the last couple of years, we educated our team, and it's like a really good oiled machine. So when we put in an order on top, at the end of the line, a successful migration is rolled out. And by doing this, I've always looked at it from the wrong angle, you know? When you look at the problem and that I needed to... well it's not a problem, but time was the problem. I needed to make myself available on the Wednesdays and Thursdays to take care of my family and my kids and give my wife the space and rest that she needs.

When you look at it from an angle that you... Well on those two days I can't provide for my family financially, you're always one step behind, because you always have this inside feeling that's burning and telling you, you need to work to be able to provide. And as soon as you let that go, and that's what I managed to do with coaching and help from others. I always underestimated the power of good coach and Michael is my coach.

Michael helped me in lot of ways to exponentially increase or make progress in my personal development as well as as a father, as a husband, as a business owner, as a manager, as in every form you can think of. And now I look at situations that I'm blessed to be able to make the money that I need to be able to provide for my family. You still have a good life, you know. While I have two days in the week that I can spend time with my kids. I can go to sports, I can go to swimming or horse riding, all these kinds of things. And all other fathers can't do, because they have these 40, 50 hour work week, excluding travel time.

So that's the story that I wanted to share with you. How it's very, very, very possible, very good points. It sounds wrong, but how beautiful it is to be able to grow in this way and that you can create this time for yourself, for your family. To be able to do what's most important, because at the end of the day when you're dying and you're laying on your deathbed as matter of speech, nobody's ever told anyone, "Oh, I wanted to finish that project, or I wanted to help that customer." No, it's always, "I wish I spent more time with my kids. I wish I had more time for this. I wish I'd done that." It's always family related, because at the end of the day that's the only thing that counts. So yes, business is good, business is fine, business is important, but never forget your number one place, and that's your family.

Okay. That's it for today. I think it's a pretty personal riff. I can tell it without any emotion at the moment, but as you can understand it's been hell of a roller coaster to get here. And if I may say so, I'm pretty proud that we've managed to come now to... I'm pretty proud that first of all, we've made it, because there were difficult times that we were about to end the relationship and either of us go their own way. I have a better relationship with my spouse now than I ever had before. I love her with all my heart and well she's the love of my life, and everything comes before that. So the other way around... she, sorry. She is always number one, and including the kids of course. And the rest is afterwards. So I hope you, well got some inspiration out of this.

If you have any doubts according to your relationship, the only tip I can give you, because I can't help you with conflict, I'm not a coach. But what I've learned is lean in. It's the same with your ears and your mouth. Use them accordingly. Listen more. Listen to understand. If you ever should read a book, it's from Steven R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Effective Leaders and it's... I don't know which habit it is. I believe one of the last ones, but is first understand the other person before you get understood. So you have to listen to really understand and comprehend what the other one is telling you before they get to understand you. And with doing that, and it's the same thing in sales, in support, in every goal or contact you have with your customer. If you listen to understand well, they feel blessed because they finally have someone on the other end of the table, on the other side of the phone, whatever, who knows what's important and makes real time for the other person. So that's the best tip I can give you.

It's not always easy. It's supposed to be tough, I think. And that's the same with giving and receiving. You can always share more, give more than you need to receive. So that's the way I do it. And that's the way for me. It's working as good as it is at the time. Well, it's never been better, so that's what I meant to say. So if you like this podcast, please leave a review and rating on iTunes and SoundCloud or wherever you on, Spotify. It tells me what's good content and not, and what I need to or can provide more of. So thank you very much. Marcel Martens, and I'll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.

Good morning, everybody. Marcel Martens and welcome back to the Cloud Secrets podcast.

Today we're going to make ... No, I contacted this dude, I don't know, who creates our intro video and he made me an offer last night, so I'm going to review that this morning. Then he can create the video intro for the podcast based on the intro I made. Maybe we even let him create an outro. We can put in front of the YouTube videos so we can publish our content wherever we are. For all you on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, I don’t know what all, YouTube, what platforms you use, I tried to intend ... My intention is to provide the content there where the user is so the user doesn't need to come to me or to my channels. I'll get through their channels and where they like to spend their time. If that's on Instagram, you'll see my stuff on Instagram. If it's on YouTube, you can browse my channel on YouTube and get all the information there.

Last night, I was cycling and I was listening to a podcast of Steve Larson, and he was mentioning a rather good thing. It's the same we do. When I go back 10 years in time, I was offering all kinds of different services and the hard part of that was that our employees, who are absolutely brilliant guys. They're all my friends. We have a great team, but it was rather complicated for those to be widely oriented and technically skilled with all the knowledge. They rather have a specialism. At that time we were too small to have a specialist for every single discipline.

After maybe even seven, eight years, we've decided and that was I believe also in 2016 or 17, alongside the decision that I needed to get out of operations, the day to day operations. We also decided to cut loose most of the services we offered and try to convince the customer that it was also better for them to join us with the new Always Safe in Business suite packages. I learned yesterday that package is the wrong word in English, so I changed it to suite because it's a suite of software cloud tools.

Nevertheless almost all customers went along and now we basically only sell one suite and it's ... Besides that it's super stable, so we don't get a lot of service tickets or calls that things don't work. As I told you before, many customers, especially the small entrepreneurs, like one to five employees, maybe we talk to them twice a year, that something doesn't work. We can help them and get them on their way.

With the other old services, it was so support intensive that people have questions all the time or issues and that's not what we want to sell. We want to sell a suite with tools that works every single time. Just like a car, you push the start button or turned the key and you can drive away. That's the same what we want with IT. IT is a tool. It's not a purpose on its own, right? IT makes it possible to do more in less time. IT makes it possible to work wherever you are. IT makes possible… You know, all technologically advantages that you gain are like tools. It's not a meaning, not a purpose on itself.

That's it, I think, for today. That's how I think about IT. Maybe I will do another one tonight, but I've got an appointment now, so I got to go back at the office and I will talk to you next time. See you. Bye. Bye.

I’ll share all my secrets and all my methods that are working time after time, what the difference is between one single Cloud solution and a Suite of Cloud solutions, and why you should quit your job and live the life you want!

Listen now 🎧📲 https://cloud-secrets.com/cs-8-it-is-a-tool-not-a-purpose

#cloud#business #tool #setupyourbusiness #letthebusinessworkforyou #blog #cloudsecrets #entrepreneurs #businessowners #SMB #CloudComputing #Office365 #GSuite #motivation #inspiration