How to Grow Your MSP

As an MSP, you understand your customers’ business challenges. However, to grow your MSP, you need to turn this understanding into profit. By realizing that customers need someone to own the responsibility for their IT infrastructure, cloud and alerting, MSPs can go quite far.  But how can MSPs turn this understanding into a way to maximize profit?

The goal of this blog is to highlight how MSPs can maximize revenue. This blog will examine profit drivers such as:

• Manage services
• Offering cloud
• Critical alerting

The Managed Services Model

While some service providers will always remain wedded to the break/fix model of business, most MSPs are seeking a way to more fully embrace managed services as a way to grow their MSP. Additionally, most MSPs are looking for a way to increase their managed services revenue goals.

Given this reality, it would make sense for MSPs to embrace a model where they could have more customers while also having less work. Managed services is able to achieve this because it embraces a system of recurring revenue stream. In the recurring revenue stream, MSPs  automate as many of the technical monitoring and management processes as they can in order to keep human intervention on basic tasks to a minimum. This in turn contains costs as well as expanding capacity to handle larger volumes of customers.

Cloud vs OnPremise

Cloud represents disruptive change for MSPs and thus a great way to grow an MSP. It changes so much of how MSPs have operated for the past 15 or so years. The question that arises is will MSPs adapt or be disrupted? Today, 79% of managed service providers believed their greatest threat comes from other cloud providers.  This statistic makes sense when it is noted that the most thriving MSPs today are those with a developed cloud offering.

Of course, cloud takes many shapes and forms. Most anyone using the Microsoft Office suite today has their work saved to the Office 365 cloud. This provides a reasonable amount of protection for everyday working documents. However, most MSPs will acknowledge that a straight cloud strategy also has serious flaws that must be addressed or MSPs will be left at the mercy of cloud providers. Instead, MSPs should consider the offerings of private or hybrid cloud to ensure security and speed for their customers.

Instead of committing all data to the cloud, it makes sense to have localized backup options as well.  Cloud can be a great revenue source for MSPs. However, it is important that in providing the option to customers, the MSP is well informed of their customers’ needs as well as the customers need for data security.  MSPs need to educate their customers on cloud connectivity, their options and effectively what it means for the business. A cloud hybrid solution is often a low cost option as it offers both secure and public cloud.

Critical alerting

Purchasing tools might seem at odds with maximizing revenue. However, if MSPs want to maximize efficiency then they need to think about purchasing the right tools. Using the right tools will not only aid the switch from break-fix to managed services, but also improve productivity.

Critical incident alert platforms, in particular, have the ability to significantly increase productivity and revenue. By using the notification capabilities of an critical alerting engine , MSPs can increase their awareness of when issues arise and work to resolve issues remotely. For example, if provisioning on a server breaks down, then a critical alert can provide the necessary notification. Similarly if a cybersecurity issue arises that encrypts files, MSPs can be immediately alerted to the issue.

Conclusion

The insights highlighted in this blog are designed to provide insights into how MSPs can improve their profitability. The points addressed in this paper are gathered from MSPs we have spoken with. By switching to a managed services model, providing cloud options and employing critical alerting MSPs will lay the foundation for growing their business.

Download our whitepaper on The MSP’s Guide To Maximizing Revenue for further tips on how MSPs can grow their business.