We haven’t written much on this blog about the MSP industry or lessons learned from our MSP practice, Compuquip Technologies, but I have to share what I thought was one of the better “advisory” posts I’ve read in a while.
On Friday David Castro, from Kaseya, wrote a great blog post titled “Removing the 3 Most Common Barriers to your MSP Success”. I encourage you to check out the entire post but let me share his three concepts here.
Directly from the post:
- Ineffective pricing. Too many leave profit on the table by charging solely by cost plus pricing; they don’t know their true cost or willingness of their customers to pay, so they are undercharging. I wrote a 3 part blog on this.
- Failure to specialize/verticalize. Too many are generalists; the most successful MSPs are gurus (w/ certs and vertical credentials) and sell by vertical (banks, such as Safe Systems) or by competency (business continuity, such as Data Balance). Read case studies about your MSP peers here.
- Failure to accelerate AWAY from break-fix. Read the BSM article here. Need I say more? If ANY of them want to exit, they will have suboptimal valuations UNTIL they move to managed services.
When I was at Compuquip with my brother we never claimed to be experts in the MSP field even with a strong track record of success (50+ employees, high average monthly contracts, yearly growth). My brother and his team continue to grow the business and much of that he attributes to learning from others in the community. I applaud David and Kaseya for writing solid, down to earth, posts to help the community. Keep them coming!