Mohammed Yusuf, director at Burhani Managed IT Services, based in Dubai, UAE, shares three suggestions he’d apply if he were launching an MSP from scratch today:

1. Focus on sales – When I first launched my MSP more than thirteen years ago, I made the grave mistake of spending all my time and effort on technical service delivery, relying solely on referrals as a marketing strategy.

It’s important for MSP owners and CEOs to set those big hairy audacious goals early on and develop a consistent marketing and sales strategy to achieve those goals.

A sales-first approach allows an MSP to scale its client base, develop its service portfolio and add additional revenue streams, which in turn allows one to re-invest strategically into service delivery improvement and business growth.

It’s really a no-brainer – unless you have sales and good paying customers, you don’t have a business.

2. Hire slow and fire fast – As an MSP, you primarily “sell” your team’s expertise to deliver a business outcome for the client.

You need to ensure that you take the time and effort to carefully select the best people to make up your core customer service delivery team.

At the same time, it’s equally important to let go of nonperformers quickly.

Prolonging their services usually causes them to further lose motivation due to not being able to meet your performance expectations and this negatively affects the client experience.

3. Price your services at a premium – Delivering quality managed IT Services is not cheap.

A professional MSP invests substantial capital in hiring and retaining experienced technicians, ticketing tools (PSA), monitoring systems (RMM), data center infrastructure and so on.

I have found it fruitful to conduct quarterly internal client-profitability reviews to help understand our most and least valuable clients.

You then need to be decisive and let go of the unprofitable or overly demanding clients, since they engage your limited resources and hinder your ability to serve your profitable clients better.

Lastly, we need to understand that while we may be extremely passionate about technology, the client only cares about business outcomes delivered via that technology.

Technology is all about capability; tools to help the client achieve “their” business goals. An MSP must never lose sight of this fact.

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

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