https://www.channelfutures.com/wp-content/themes/channelfutures_child/assets/images/logo/footer-new-logo.png
  • Home
  • Technologies
    • Back
    • SDN/SD-WAN
    • Cloud
    • RMM/PSA
    • Security
    • Telephony/UC/Collaboration
    • Cable
    • Mobility & Wireless
    • Fiber/Ethernet
    • Data Centers
    • Backup & Disaster Recovery
    • IoT
    • Desktop
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Analytics
  • Strategy
    • Back
    • Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Channel Research
    • Business Models
    • Distribution
    • Technology Solutions Brokerages
    • Sales & Marketing
    • Best Practices
    • Vertical Markets
    • Regulation & Compliance
  • MSP 501
    • Back
    • 2023 MSP 501 Application
    • 2022 MSP 501 Rankings
    • 2022 NextGen 101 Rankings
  • Intelligence
    • Back
    • Galleries
    • Podcasts
    • From the Industry
    • Reports/Digital Issues
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
  • Channel Futures TV
  • EMEA
  • Channel Chatter
    • Back
    • People on the Move
    • New/Changing Channel Programs
    • New Products & Services
    • Industry Honors
  • Resources
    • Back
    • Advisory Boards
    • Industry Organizations
    • Our Sponsors
    • Advertise
    • 2023 Editorial Calendar
  • Awards
    • Back
    • 2022 MSP 501
    • Channel Influencers
    • Circle of Excellence
    • DE&I 101
    • Technology Advisor 101 (TA 101)
    • Channel Leaders Lists
  • Events
    • Back
    • 2023 Call for Speakers
    • CP Conference & Expo
    • MSP Summit
    • Channel Partners Europe
    • Channel Partners Event Coverage
    • Webinars
    • Industry Events
  • About Us
  • DE&I
Channel Futures
  • NEWSLETTER
  • Home
  • Technologies
    • Back
    • SDN/SD-WAN
    • Cloud
    • RMM/PSA
    • Security
    • Telephony/UC/Collaboration
    • Cable
    • Mobility & Wireless
    • Fiber/Ethernet
    • Data Centers
    • Backup & Disaster Recovery
    • IoT
    • Desktop
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Analytics
  • Strategy
    • Back
    • Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Channel Research
    • Business Models
    • Distribution
    • Technology Solutions Brokerages
    • Sales & Marketing
    • Best Practices
    • Vertical Markets
    • Regulation & Compliance
  • MSP 501
    • Back
    • 2023 MSP 501 Application
    • 2022 MSP 501 Rankings
    • 2022 NextGen 101 Rankings
  • Intelligence
    • Back
    • Galleries
    • Podcasts
    • From the Industry
    • Reports/Digital Issues
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
  • Channel Futures TV
  • EMEA
  • Channel Chatter
    • Back
    • People on the Move
    • New/Changing Channel Programs
    • New Products & Services
    • Industry Honors
  • Resources
    • Back
    • Advisory Boards
    • Industry Organizations
    • Our Sponsors
    • Advertise
    • 2023 Editorial Calendar
  • Awards
    • Back
    • 2022 MSP 501
    • Channel Influencers
    • Circle of Excellence
    • DE&I 101
    • Technology Advisor 101 (TA 101)
    • Channel Leaders Lists
  • Events
    • Back
    • 2023 Call for Speakers
    • CP Conference & Expo
    • MSP Summit
    • Channel Partners Europe
    • Channel Partners Event Coverage
    • Webinars
    • Industry Events
  • About Us
  • DE&I
    • Newsletter
  • REGISTER
  • MSPs
  • VARs / SIs
  • Agents
  • Cloud Service Providers
  • Channel Partners Events
 Channel Futures

Strategy


Shutterstock

Five, 5

5 Mistakes that Mature Businesses Make

  • Written by Kevin Casey
  • August 20, 2018
You might have your own organizational framework and culture, and that’s just fine — just don’t lose focus on what’s most important.

Congratulations: You survived the trials and tribulations of your company’s startup phase. You’re growing (and hiring), you’ve got well-established revenue streams (and hopefully, profits), and you’ve got a solid, loyal customer base.

Time to kick back and count the money rolling in, right?

On the really good days, it might feel like that. But even mature businesses make mistakes, and channel partners are no exception. In a highly competitive environment – not to mention an IT landscape that’s constantly evolving – sustained success requires sustained diligence. Feeling a little too good about your company can be akin to burying your head in the sand. Before you know it, the organization is faltering while you keep assuming your continued success is all but guaranteed.

Maturing and well-established companies can make some common, critical mistakes, including several specific to partners. Proactively watching out for them can help you stay on course, so let’s unpack the big ones.

1. You become rigid and inflexible in your ways.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”  — William Bruce Cameron

This quote (which is sometimes misattributed to Albert Einstein) was suggested to us by Michael Stolarczyk, vice president, cloud managed services, at Veristor. Veristor was founded back in 2001; today, it ranks No. 35 on Channel Futures’ 2018 MSP 501 Worldwide Rankings and is also a regular on the Inc. 5000 list, which tracks the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S.

It’s a good quote and appears regularly in business and motivational speaking contexts. Problem is, according to Stolarczyk, that too many companies ignore its message.

Michael Stolarczyk

“Mature organizations forget this, or more accurately, they try to document and account for every decision,” Stolarczyk explains. “They lose their ability to think, adapt and evolve in a rapidly changing environment.”

Longstanding organizations too often become too set in their ways, forever wed to the processes and strategies that got them to where they are. In today’s age of digital transformation and disruption, that can be a killer.

“They fall into a trance-like state of just providing oversight within their organization,” Stolarczyk says. “They forget that insight, foresight and the ability to act upon [the] same, within leadership roles and down through their corporate culture, is tantamount to long-term success. We are in the middle of an intention-driven economy, and to succeed within it, an organization needs to focus on empathy and collaboration.”

2. You ignore your hiring and retention strategy.

 Anurag Agrawal, principal analyst at research firm Techaisle, sees partners commonly make several mistakes as they mature, and this tops his list: never adapting your hiring strategy as the company grows. He offers a specific example:

“They continue to focus on hiring post-sales support talent instead of pre-sales support and architects,” Agrawal says.

Anurag Agrawal

The latter become especially important for evolving from transactional sales to a solutions-oriented approach that is both scalable and repeatable for a growing customer base and also more likely to open up recurring revenue streams.

In a related vein, Agrawal also sees partners fail to optimize their compensation model as they grow and mature.

“Create a compensation model that supports growth and rewards talent [in alignment with] recurring revenue streams,” he says.

If you’re not revisiting compensation as your company grows, you’ll almost inevitably begin to lose good people — and struggle to attract new talent to the team.

3. You fall into the gap between marketing hype and technology reality.

Stolarczyk sees the majority of mistakes that MSPs and other partners make arise from a separation between how services and technologies are marketed and the actual realities of how they’re implemented and managed. When that gap is more like a chasm, problems arise, and Stolarczyk notes that this tends to happen when C-level execs lead by fiat rather than strategic focus.

“MSPs and their partners must build value through vested collaboration, not just by deploying the latest, greatest technology platform,” he says. “People and process need to be vetted, consistent, measured, and be driven by common sense, before any technology platform can be deployed to support the organization.”

4. You don’t seek out recurring revenue streams.

The IT industry has undergone significant changes and the channel is no exception. In Agrawal’s view, successful partners must evolve from a transaction focus on, say, hardware sales, to a broader services-and-solutions approach that creates steadily recurring revenues streams. Some mature companies make the mistake of ignoring this trend.

“They continue to have a transactional approach to business, which is detrimental to the organization,” Agrawal says.

5. You travel without a road map.

Some of the mistakes Agrawal sees partners make speak to a lack of long-term planning and – almost paradoxically – a lack of adaptability. These include:

  • A failure to create an ongoing go-to-market strategy, which Agrawal describes as “creating a relevant customer segmentation and building a road map of customer acquisition.”
  • An inability to strike a proper balance between selling services and products. This might be especially important for partners with a significant hardware footprint in the past who want to evolve into a services-oriented approach without cannibalizing their product resale revenues.
  • A loss of focus on optimizing and delivering tightly defined, standardized services to multiple customers.

If this all seems a bit doom-and-gloomy, rest assured that’s not the point; rather, recognizing these mistakes can help you avoid them. And we end on a positive note: Stolarczyk shares what he refers to as the “STAR process” for fostering a culture of long-term success.

  • Speed: “Exude a sense of urgency, thrive on change, desire to meet the situational requirements quickly, efficiently, accurately … every time.”
  • Trust: “Facilitate a sense of trust, reliability and security in your partner’s mind by being THE consistent, stabilizing factor in their business world. Create a quality of business life!
  • Accountability: Empower person and partner, and with that, hold them accountable to reach technology, service, support and budget targets.
  • Rapport: “Initiate, foster, expand and enrich internal and external relationships through honest, open, transparent communication.” (This is what Stolarczyk means when he says “vested collaboration” above.) “Don’t create a zero-sum game atmosphere.”

You might have your own organizational framework and culture, and that’s just fine — just don’t lose focus on what’s most important.

“To create client-aligned, client-attuned solutions, always lead with a question, and then actively listen,” Stolarczyk says. “Create an atmosphere where people feel comfortable to share new ideas and thoughts. The MSP needs to live and breathe this, and then create that vested collaboration.”

Tags: Agents Cloud Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Digital Transformation Strategy

Most Recent


  • Co-innovation Is Needed to Effect Energy Transformation
    Co-innovation Is Needed to Effect Energy Transformation
    The planet depends on greenhouse gas emissions going down and those in the ICT sector stepping up.
  • Time for Change
    HP's Head of Global Channel Strategy Talks Program Changes, Poly Opportunity
    HP’s channel strategy leader reveals how HP is tweaking its two-year old partner program, and what to expect for the rest of 2023.
  • Cybersecurity research
    ConnectWise MSP Report: Cybercriminals to Heavily Target MSPs in 2023
    MSPs will remain the target of supply chain and critical infrastructure attacks.
  • Channel Women Voices - Day 6
    National Women’s History Month: Channel Women’s Advice for Newbies
    The ladies have boiled down “been there, done that” (or “don’t do that”) to its essence.

Leave a comment Cancel reply

-or-

Log in with your Channel Futures account

Alternatively, post a comment by completing the form below:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Content

  • Woman with questions
    Should We Just Call Master Agents Distributors?
  • Stressed young people
    More Partner Pain Points: MSPs On Lack of End-to-End Security, 'New Normal'
  • Partner programs
    Commvault Adds New MSP Partner Program with Specific Pricing
  • Benefit, Plus Sign
    TBI, Avant Add New Cloud, Security Suppliers to Lineups

Upcoming Events

View all

Channel Partners Conference & Expo

May 1, 2023 - May 4, 2023

Channel Partners Europe

June 13, 2023 - June 14, 2023

Channel Futures Leadership Summit

October 30, 2023 - November 2, 2023

Galleries

View all

HP’s Head of Global Channel Strategy Talks Program Changes, Poly Opportunity

March 31, 2023

National Women’s History Month: Channel Women’s Advice for Newbies

March 31, 2023

Is the Gap Widening Between Superagents and Mom-and-Pop Shops?

March 31, 2023

Industry Perspectives

View all

Co-innovation Is Needed to Effect Energy Transformation

March 31, 2023

AI Spells the End of End User Security

March 30, 2023

Why You Should Include Audiovisual Solutions in Your UC Services

March 28, 2023

Webinars

View all

Give Customers the Power: How MSPs Can Leverage Cloud Choice

April 4, 2023

DE&I Dialogue: How the Right DE&I Initiatives Can Propel Your Business

April 5, 2023

Meet the 2023 Channel Futures Channel Influencers

April 13, 2023

White Papers

View all

6 UCaaS Reseller Challenges and How Real World Businesses Solved Them

February 1, 2023

Frost Radar: North American UCaaS Market, 2022

February 1, 2023

The Complete Guide to White-Label UCaaS for Reseller Success

February 1, 2023

Channel Futures TV

View all

Kaseya, Post-Acquisition, Expanding ‘Well-Regarded’ Datto Partner Program

Aryaka ‘Driving Value to the Channel Community’ with Throttle

March 24, 2023

Coffee with Craig and James Episode 121: Hewlett Packard Enterprise

March 23, 2023

Real-Life M&A: Advice for a Successful Channel Deal

March 13, 2023

Twitter

ChannelFutures

Learn about @comcastbusiness and some of the trends partners are seeing with #SMB customers. @craigschlagbaum… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 31, 2023
ChannelFutures

🤔 Interested in expanding on your brand or building a business from square one? @SkySwitchSays explains everythin… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 31, 2023
ChannelFutures

Energy transformation and climate change calls for innovation now @VMware #channelpartners #energycrisis #technews… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 31, 2023
ChannelFutures

Predictions are important when shaping your 2023 expectations & goals. #ChannelFutures is here to help out. We aske… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 31, 2023
ChannelFutures

Mary Beth Walker on @HP adapting its partner program in response to partner feedback, and what latest launches mean… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 31, 2023
ChannelFutures

.@ConnectWise report shows cybercriminals will continue heavily targeting #MSPs in 2023. dlvr.it/Slnlrj https://t.co/eEY0pMLJaQ

March 31, 2023
ChannelFutures

CP Expo preview: The "State of the Agent Market" panel will feature four rockstar partner speakers. Read a preview… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 31, 2023
ChannelFutures

.@Dell launches #DellLatitude and OptiPlex PCs, and Precision #workstations, adds Apex Managed Device Service.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 30, 2023

MSP 501

The industry's largest and most comprehensive partner awards program.

Newsletters and Updates

Sign up for The Channel Report, Channel Futures Update, MSP 501 Newsletter and more.

Live Channel Events

Get the latest information on the next industry-leading Channel Partners event.

Galleries

Educational slide shows and images from live events.

Media Kit And Advertising

Want to reach our audience? Access our media kit.

DISCOVER MORE FROM INFORMA TECH

  • Channel Partners Events
  • Telecoms.com
  • MSP 501
  • Black Hat
  • IoT World Today
  • Omdia

WORKING WITH US

  • Contact
  • About Us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter

FOLLOW Channel Futures ON SOCIAL

  • Privacy
  • CCPA: “Do Not Sell My Data”
  • Cookie Policy
  • Terms
Copyright © 2023 Informa PLC. Informa PLC is registered in England and Wales with company number 8860726 whose registered and Head office is 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG.
This website uses cookies, including third party ones, to allow for analysis of how people use our website in order to improve your experience and our services. By continuing to use our website, you agree to the use of such cookies. Click here for more information on our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.
X