Vijay Basani, co-founder, president and CEO of Boston-based EiQ Networks, shares three suggestions he'd apply if he were launching an MSP from scratch today.

1. Clearly understand the market and the services that are required to serve the market need – You need to focus on and say what kind of customer you want to focus on serving, what are the biggest challenges that you are trying to address and how you are going to address those challenges. Understand the market segment. Understand the verticals, the pain points for the customers and how you are going to address those pain points. Especially if you're focusing on delivering services in the security space. Security is a very complex area. It continues to evolve on a dynamic basis and is very challenging. You need deep security domain expertise to be able to advise the customer, and you also need to have a very broad domain expertise. That's the reason why my advice would be don't try to do everything under the sun. Start narrowly focused, become an expert in that area, deliver the highest quality services and then start expanding.

2. Select the right partners and develop partner networks so that you can have a broad portfolio of service products that you can take to your customers – Think about what kind of expertise you have right now, in house, and what kind of expertise you need to bring from the outside. That would include the type of technology you are going to offer as part of the portfolio and what kind of services you are going to offer around those technologies or to augment those technologies. You might decide that you want to offer certain technologies, implement them, and deploy them for your customers. In some areas, you might decide that you want to offer a service offering, a cloud-based offering, or a subscription-based service offering. You have to decide whether you have the expertise in house. If you don't have it, then you should partner with somebody who can provide that expertise. If there is an area where you'll be able to provide technologies but you need somebody else to monitor on a 24/7 basis, in that instance … you go on and partner with a company or a vendor that offers that capability, and bring that to your customers.

3. Make sure that you focus on the customer success – At the end of the day, you're starting a business from scratch. You want to make sure that your customer's problem is solved in an effective and efficient way. The customer is going to be happy and they're able to provide a word-of-mouth advertisement for you. As a small company starting from scratch in the initial days, you'll be depending on word-of-mouth a lot. Having those initial successes under your belt is going to go a long way in that process.

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