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Welcome to this SPECIAL EDITION marking 250 episodes of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

This week I have a very special guest – Brad Martineau. Brad helps people transform from being a business owner to truly being an entrepreneur. And as you can imagine, it’s about the way that you think and the action that you take. I think you are going to find him a huge inspiration.

Here are three big ideas from him:

• Make it easy: Business is easy but we make it hard for ourselves. Brad uses the acronym, ELF – Easy, Lucrative, Fun.
• Remember the business is there to feed your life (not the other way round): Don’t let the business dictate how you live your life.
• We have 3 currencies in life: Time, energy and money. Be careful where you invest these. A great business returns these currencies to you.

Meet Brad Martineau. Brad helps entrepreneurs build Smooth Scaling businesses through coaching and software tools.

Brad has been married for 23 years, has 5 kids, 1 son-in-law and a granddaughter on the way. He loves fitted hats and playing and coaching basketball.

Hi, I’m Brad Martineau and I help entrepreneurs build businesses that they actually want rather than the ones that they just wake up one day and accidentally have.

And what a great positioning statement that is. Brad, thank you so much for joining us, not just on the podcast, but on this very special episode as well. 250 episodes has taken quite a long time to get here, nearly five years, and I’m going to admit I’m a little bit of a fanboy of yours. You’ve been in my marketing journey and my entrepreneurial journey for getting on for about 18 years or so, and we’re going to talk a little bit about that in this podcast. When the opportunity came up to have you on, I had to jump on it and get you on and with this amazing episode coming up, this seemed the right thing to do. So what we’re going to do over the next 20 minutes or so is we’re going to explore what you’ve done in your entrepreneurial journey. You were involved really heavily with a popular CRM, which is still around today, which is actually the one that I use.

We’re going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about different business things you’ve done, but where we’re getting to and the bulk of the interview is exactly as you just said, is about helping people have the business and the life that they really want because far too many MSPs, as we know, are completely driven by the business rather than the other way around. And obviously I know that as well that the MSP market very well. You’ve worked with quite a lot of the big players in this market and I’m sure you’re going to deliver a ton of value and drop some value bombs within this. Could I sound any more American as I’m doing this podcast? I don’t think I could. So Brad, tell us about your early career and what you got into it and the thing that got you onto this amazing entrepreneurial journey in the first place.

Oh, that’s a really interesting question. So I was what I would call either an unwilling or an unknowing entrepreneur. So my working career started, I went and got a job, got married, got a job, and I was working as an admissions counsellor for an online university. And I didn’t recognise that I had entrepreneurial blood in me. And anyway, I was there. Everyone should have a job they hate, right? That’s like one of the best things you can do because you realise what you