MSP 501 Profile: Contract Acquisition Pays Dividends for Managed IT Asia

Company Name: Managed IT Asia
Company MSP 501 Rank: 155
Principal Consultant: Roy Ong
Primary Services:

• Managed IT
• Managed security
• VoIP/telephony

Twitter: @ManagedITSG

Managed IT Asia enhanced its go-to-market strategy in 2019 and reaped the benefits.

The Singapore-based MSP sped up its sales process by acquiring customer contracts from other providers. This approach led Managed IT Asia to find customers that fit better with its processes, rather than those that didn’t understand the modern MSP model.

Managed IT Asia’s Roy Ong

“Previously, we had always relied on typical lead-generation activities to bring in leads before converting them into clients,” said principal consultant Roy Ong. “However, as we conducted our reviews, we noted that the overall conversion process was time- and effort-consuming.”

The firm recently landed in our MSP 501 list, which honors the top managed service providers in the world. Ong spoke to Channel Futures about how his company has grown throughout the last two years.

Channel Futures: What new opportunities and challenges came with the COVID-19 pandemic?

Roy Ong: With the pandemic, clients have been forced to work from home. This has quickened the pace in which clients require remote access to their data and line-of-business apps. As a stopgap measure, many resorted to remote-access facilities, but these tend to be unproductive and sometimes unreliable. As work-from-home requirements persist, this has allowed us to educate and in some cases coax clients into understanding that their stopgap measures are not feasible for the long run. They need to establish a strategic direction for their business and embrace the new business normal.

Working away from the office will become a norm, regardless of how we exit this pandemic. Clients need to understand that while we might find a vaccine for COVID-19, we might not be so lucky with the next virus. As such, it is imperative to be able to conduct business transactions remotely, securely and in a reliable, productive fashion.

Our turn-to solution has been a mixture of cloud and on-premises solutions. This has allowed us to maintain a fine balance between technological usage and to satisfy the incessant need for clients to have some control of their data and business processes. We have been actively migrating clients successfully to this model and we hope to be able to do the same for the others.

CF: What was the single biggest technology or business decision that drove your company’s growth in 2019? How did it do so?

RO: The single biggest business decision that drove our growth in 2019 was to focus on taking over existing client MSP contracts. From the start of the year, we were actively pursuing this by going to smaller competitors and offering to buy their existing client MSP contracts. We were successful with a number and we were able to quickly establish a rapport with the client and this allowed us to quickly upsell our stack offerings.

In our history, this was the first time we conducted an active pursuit and buyout of client contracts. Previously, we had always relied on typical lead-generation activities to bring in leads before converting them
into clients. However, as we conducted our reviews, we noted that the overall conversion process was …