What’s Your SMaC Business Recipe for Success?
Best-selling author Jim Collins and ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini spent much of last week's IT Nation conference talking ab
Best-selling author Jim Collins and ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini spent much of last week's IT Nation conference talking about SMaC: A specific, methodical and consistent (SMaC) recipe for success. Bellini even shared his SMaC recipe for success as an IT service provider in Tampa, Fla. Here it is.
The SMaC recipe includes:
- Service clients within 50 mile radius of our office.
- System engineers must be 80% billable.
- Hire ONLY fast, smart people. They must pass our testing.
- Make our colleagues happy; achieve super-low employee turnover.
- Create accountability for servicing clients; establish an owner of an issue — hand-offs cause fumbles.
- We will sell hardware with a 20 percent margin target.
- We should get recurring revenue from EVERY client.
- Customers must leverage more than one of our offerings: Service, hardware, agreement, development.
- Avoid lawyers and doctors as clientele.
- Don't take on clients that have their own IT departments — though that changed when ConnectWise introduced a co-managed IT tool.
Then Bellini quipped that many IT service providers typically have the following SMaC recipe:
- Don't know.
- Not sure.
- Still thinking.
- Uhh…
- Give me a second.
- Probably something with the cloud.
- Dude, why are you asking me this stupid question?
- I'm too busy right now.
- I know Joe knows; hey Joe!
- We'll figure it out later.
Bottom line: You'll notice that a SMaC recipe for success is pretty boring and straightforward. There's no need to chase shiny new technologies. Instead with the mundane but do it with fanatical focus.
JP….guess I would have to strongly disagree with point 9. Doctors have turned out OK for us.
Always good reading and thanks for your coverage of the space. Mike
Hey there Mike! Jeannine, Director of Community for ConnectWise here. Quick clarification on our #9. In the context of Arnie sharing the SMaC, the no Dr's and lawyers was more about ConnectWise not having the expertise for those verticals, and deciding those verticals weren't the best fit for the practice at the time. Arnie was sharing the ConnectWise IT Services SMaC, not suggesting it was the only SMaC that works – but that it worked for us. Hope that clarifies!
j. 🙂
Mike@1: Reinforcing Jeannine's point… the key theme was to only go into verticals where you've gor deep expertise. And certainly you qualify in the health care market.
-jp