Gil Pekelman, founder and CEO of Atera, a global MSP software vendor based in Israel, shares three suggestions he’d apply if he were launching an MSP from scratch today:

1. Start with the right tools – Have your platforms in place: a helpdesk, a monitoring system, a billing system, a customer management system.

Technology today allows a guy starting to think of opening an MSP and doing it as a second job to start with a full-blown RMM and PSA platform that is state of the art.

The technology enables him to do that in terms of cost and in terms of simplicity or effort.

If you are an MSP that started 10 to 20 years ago, either there wasn't anything or whatever was out there was so expensive and so complicated that when you started, you were saying to yourself – I'm not going to use those technologies, it's too expensive.

I'll start growing, I'll get some customers, and then I'll do it.

The technology today enables you to do it right out of the gate. It costs virtually nothing. And the simplicity is also such that you can start using it immediately.

The benefit is that you have a platform that enables you to be efficient, to manage your business, to give good service, to make a profit because you're efficient.

The inherent technologies that enabled this are the IoT, the big data, the cloud.

These together enable platforms that today change absolutely the whole prospect of opening an MSP. Out of the gate, you're a professional.

2. Automate – Automation technologies are actually the results of big data, cloud, and things like data learning and machine learning.

In other words, it's the capability to do all kinds of tasks that in the past were very time-consuming and manual. 

You can probably automate them, and that will give you the ability to be efficient, profitable and scalable.

We have a lot of customers to whom we tell to focus on automation, because that's where the world is going.

That's where the technology is taking us now.

If you want to be, not just an MSP but, on the cutting edge of technology in your space, then automation is my second advice.

3. Make yourself an expert in online marketing – Not in marketing in general, not in sales in general, but – and this is a personal opinion of mine – in online marketing: internet marketing, Google AdWords and Facebook marketing.

Those are the things that will give you an edge, will help you scale very quickly and will allow you to build your business at a whole different rate than if you were doing an old type of marketing.

It's a technological type of marketing.

It's a type of marketing with an essence MSPs can relate to; it's all numbers, analysis, graphs.

A lot of MSPs who come from the technical side of giving support, it's hard for them to relate to the softer type of marketing – sales, talking – those type of things.

If somebody today wants to buy something or hire somebody, the first thing they do is go to the Internet and start searching.

If you're sophisticated in your online marketing, you'll be there; you'll meet them there.

Editor’s note: Comments are edited to improve readability.

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