Adam Fadhli, founder and CEO at Discovery Information Technologies, is all about investing and return value. These are two of the primary themes throughout Fadhli’s advice — invest in something that will yield quality returns and know how to highlight value.

Discovery Information Technologies’ Adam Fadhli

Fadhli sat down with us this week to share his insights and tips on how to launch and run a successful MSP. Investing in the right tools is key, along with having a standardized technology stack and effectively highlighting your performance and accomplishments.

Sound intriguing? Read on.

1. Invest in the best. Invest in the best PSA and RMM tools available, and make sure your team gets formally trained on how to use them effectively.

Resist the urge to cheap out on these tools, or the training. Your PSA and RMM tools will make or break you, and good tools will pay for themselves many times over through automation, more efficient processes and greater visibility into your business operations.

2. Standardize your stack. Standardize the technology stack you sell to and support for your customers, and make sure the individual technologies are best-of-breed and work together.

Having a standardized technology stack (firewalls, AV, and so on) allows you to be more efficient because you only have to support a finite set of technologies, as opposed to trying to support everything under the sun. Supporting fewer technologies also means less overall training for your people, and a deeper knowledge of the technologies that you do support.

3. Track your performance. Measure the accomplishments and performance of the managed services you deliver to each customer (a good PSA tool can help here), and then present that performance to your customers with regular formal C-level business technology reviews.

If you are doing your job as a true proactive managed services provider, your customer networks will become more and more reliable as time goes on. This is both a good and a bad thing.

Because most of your work is done remotely, the customer rarely “sees” you. This will cause your customers to start to wonder why they still need you. You know, the ol’ “I know we had a lot of problems before you guys came along, but now you’ve fixed everything and it’s running so well, I don’t think we need to keep paying you to fix things.”

Don’t just show your customers the stock technical statistics reports from your RMM tool. Show them what you did and the work that went into it. Things like number of help-desk calls, number of alerts addressed, number of patches installed, list of issues which were proactively resolved, and so on. This will show your customer the value you give them for the money they spend.