Todd Thiemann, vice president of product marketing at Comodo, a Clifton, N.J.-based global cybersecurity solutions provider and digital certificate authority, shares three suggestions he’d apply if he were launching an MSP from scratch today:

1. Know your differentiation – That involves specializing in a particular vertical market.

Try to get those anchor customers that you can rely on, who can give you frank advice about what's working and what's not working so that you can adjust your services as your business progresses.

2. Hire the right people and make those people efficient – In IT in general, particularly in security (a lot of MSPs are providing security services), good people are hard to find: skilled people that have the expertise, that are diligent and reliable.

If you can get those right people on board and make them efficient with a standard tool set, that's invaluable.

By "standard, cloud-based tool set" I mean RMM, service desk, quote management, customer relationship management.

So that one person is phenomenally efficient for you and you don't have to go over-hire and over-commit in that regard.

3. Develop the right tool set that allows you to generate revenues, but also minimizes startup costs – You want to get out there and retain those anchor customers, increase revenues, but you also have to minimize costs.

For Comodo, or Comodo One, our MSPs are getting started without spending a lot of capital, and it's due to some free baseline services provided on the Comodo One platform that allows them to do that.

Then they get to leverage some of the tools that are out there, such as our advanced endpoint protection that allows them to secure and manage endpoints and generate new revenue streams from new customers as well as new revenue streams from existing customers, all while minimizing their costs.

One MSP of ours, Alfacom, found that they had existing tool sets that were not scaling and they were getting inadequate remote monitoring and management.

It was consuming a lot of cycles on their endpoints for no reason.

They basically had an inadequate tool set.

The tool vendor had been unstable.

They came to Comodo One and found a stable, multi-faceted tool set. It was a Swiss-Army knife.

It had a bunch of different pieces of functionality, including RMM, service desk, quote management, and inventory devices.

So, what they did in that movement is they were able to make their own team a lot more efficient and customers were a lot happier, because they had that standard tool set.

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

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