Recipe for MSP Success in 2019 Revealed

With 2019 around the corner, it’s time for every MSP to look ahead and figure out how it can turn the coming year into one that’s full of growth and continued success. The secret to growth isn’t really much of a secret at all: Sell more, spend less. The tricky part is figuring out how to do that without shortchanging your customers or overworking your staff.

Luckily, this is a golden age for MSPs, as a confluence of market conditions and technological breakthroughs have set the stage for accelerated growth. But for MSPs to fully take advantage of the situation, they must offer expanded services and additional value while simultaneously streamlining and optimizing their operations.

With that in mind, here are three key ingredients in the recipe for growth in 2019:

1. Offer more services.
2. Optimize your stack.
3. Run a leaner operation.

Give Clients (and Prospects) More of What They Want

Convincing organizations to outsource IT functions to a service provider is no longer the major hurdle MSPs face when it comes to landing new business; today’s challenge is providing a broad enough menu of services for customers that want to rely on MSPs even more.

Data security, integrity and continuity are now top concerns for SMBs, and they’re looking to their MSPs for help on these fronts, as well. MSPs prepared to offer these services are well positioned for growth among their current customer base and to increase customer loyalty while also building an additional onramp for new business.

Based on the trends we’ve observed, there are four key areas where MSPs can extend their repertoire to fuel growth in 2019:

• Security and software management
• Backup and disaster recovery
• Cloud management
• Compliance management

MSPs should tap their current customer base to see which of these will resonate most, and then rapidly build out capabilities and knowledge to deliver them in 2019.

Optimize Your Stack

As MSPs grow both their client list and their product offerings, efficiency becomes a priority. More systems to interface, combined with more endpoints under management, can quickly become a labor-intensive nightmare for MSPs seeking rapid growth.

The best way to optimize your operation is to take a holistic approach to your entire technology ecosystem. Are you able to visualize each element of your stack and understand the interdependencies and workflows? Is your staff spending more time clicking buttons and switching browser tabs than delivering value? Are the products you’re using truly integrated or merely coexisting?

There’s always room for improvement, and the architecture of your stack and the components you use to build it are instrumental in your ability to scale without ballooning headcount to tackle manual tasks that a proper integration would handle automatically.

Getting – and Staying – Lean and Mean

True growth comes only with real economies of scale, and if your revenue growth can’t outpace your hiring, you can move only so fast. To grow fast without throwing more bodies at things, MSPs must automate on daily, routine tasks so they can focus on customer onboarding, special projects and new services.

With additional customers and more work on the horizon, there’s no better time than the present to invest a little upfront effort in determining which frequently repeated tasks can be automated and setting up those routines. Every preset task frees up staff to do more and turns them into customer service rock stars. They’ll enjoy their jobs more as the drudgery of endless clicks is replaced with higher-value work while customers receive better and faster service.

You can also improve efficiency by turning documentation from an annoying chore to a wealth of prized insights that improve issue resolution turnaround time–or even prevent some issues from occurring altogether. With documentation for every customer globally available to every staff member, anyone can speak with authority and take action knowing they have a comprehensive view of each client scenario.

Invest in a Plan

Expanding your offerings, fully integrating your stack and optimizing workflow aren’t going to happen by themselves, which is why now is the right time for your management team to step back and get a little strategic. With the opportunities for 2019 in front of you, you need priorities and a plan to get you there.

First, step away from the day-to-day grind and really plot out how you’re going to accomplish some of these goals while still keeping the lights on for your current customers. Using market data and intimate knowledge of your specific customers and their requirements, you can select which initiatives should be tackled first as well as reasonable goals for the coming year.

After reaching internal alignment on strategic objectives, a high-level project plan should map out how–over the entire year–these goals can be reached and sustained. To ensure projects don’t get brushed to the side as soon as things get busy, regular checkpoints should be scheduled to avoid unseen slippage that could jeopardize the overall strategy.

Finally, there should be a commitment to invest the required resources to make things a reality. You need to spend money–and time–to make money, and seizing the growth opportunities available in 2019 are no exception.

Selecting solutions designed to plug-and-play with your existing stack and that easily facilitate automation can make a huge difference in how easily you can turn these goals into a reality. At Kaseya, we’ve created a suite of products specifically designed to take MSPs to the next level and free up staff to focus on new revenue-generating opportunities.

Are you ready to give your MSP the gift of growth this holiday season? Learn how Kaseya can help you get ready to grow in 2019.

 Joining Kaseya in 2012, Miguel Lopez brings over 20 years of experience to his role as SVP, Managed Service Providers (MSPs). In this position, he consults daily with MSPs to help them solve their clients’ business problems with technology solutions. Prior to joining Kaseya, Miguel served as the director of consulting services for All Covered, a nationwide technology services company that is a division of Konica Minolta Business Solutions USA Inc. In 2008, All Covered acquired NetCor Technologies, a leading MSP that Miguel founded and managed since 1997. NetCor specialized in serving highly regulated industries such as healthcare, CPAs, law firms and retail companies.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.