Growing IT Solutions Companies: How To Scale?

Take control of growth and scaling issues with ConnectWiseOn occasion, IT Solutions companies experience scaling or growth issues that are not attributable specifically to revenue growth or low utilization problems. We categorized this issue separately but recommend you closely examine Overcoming Revenue Growth Problems or Overcoming Low Utilization Problems first. Scaling problems not related to revenues or utilization are more difficult to identify, mainly because it is more of a process of elimination of other factors.

Companies with scaling issues often experience a sense of imminent chaos, as if one more employee or one more client would throw the company over the edge. These companies often have two other things in common: one is that processes by which work gets done have been developed reactively or have never been developed and managed. Second is that there is often precious little information to provide a sense of knowing which function or process problems should be tackled first. In other words, the levers for changing results and gaining control are not readily known or able to be prioritized.

ConnectWise PSA gives you everything you need to turn this problem around and to take control of your business. Frequently, just moving your company off the 5-7 applications you are likely to be currently using will give you transparency across all of your functions that is truly enlightening. And immediately, you will reduce administrative burden from the dual-entry of data your employees are now engaged in. With ConnectWise PSA, you will experience an immediate sense of control over all of your major processes necessary to deliver value to your clients.

How Do You Know If You Have Scaling Problem?
Take a look at the following list of questions. Answering as indicated on several of them may suggest a need to focus your attention on building an appropriate platform for growth:

  • If you hired a new employee, does anyone have even a few moments free to train and mentor them?
  • Do you think that your ability to grow is inhibited by your ability to hire and train new employees, either in sales, service or project functions?
  • Do you believe that even if you hired new employees, you would not see an increase in revenues and may even see decreased profitability?
  • Is the sense of barely controlled chaos increasing as you grow?
  • Could you handle several new clients if you won their business today?
  • Has your billable employee utilization gone down as you have grown?
  • Are your pipeline conversion rates lower as you have added sales and account management employees?
  • Is your client retention rate decreasing?
  • Are your clients complaining more frequently about balls being dropped or service / project work done poorly or incompletely?
  • Are you able to ‘manage by exception’, only being notified of issues outside of acceptable range of performance?
  • Is your performance against SLAs slipping or not as high as it should be?
  • Do you have advance warning BEFORE something critical falls through the cracks?
  • Are you able to go home at night certain that nothing has been missed?

Causes & Cures For Your Company Growth and Scaling Troubles
Management of your IT Solutions company can be boiled down to a need to focus on the three key areas that matter: Knowing, Doing, and Measuring. These are described in the Overview of Management & Workflow Problems.  It is important for you to create long term solutions to your challenges, and not just quick fixes. ConnectWise PSA was built on industry best practices (ITIL Standards) and is continually honed to give you a business automation solution that meets your needs now and in the future. By attending to these three key areas, ConnectWise PSA helps you set up a ‘virtuous cycle’ that permits you to continually achieve success for your business.

Key Areas Cause Cure
Knowing
  • Multiple applications on which you run your business either provide conflicting information or a partial view of operations
  • You cannot easily see into the detail of sales, service or project activity in real time, so by the time you know what is going on, it is too late to do anything about it
  • A single application for all of your business processes that is internally integrated and externally integrated with your accounting software and quoting tools
  • Real time reporting capabilities and dashboards for sales, service, project and invoicing
Doing
  • New employees have to be closely mentored because there are limited or no documented processes
  • It takes longer to train someone than to do it yourself
  • Most, if not all, managers are deeply immersed in working ‘in’ the business instead of ‘on’ the business
  • Sales opportunity management is unable to be closely monitored
  • All processes have slowed down as you have added more employees
  • Obvious service and project inefficiencies, such as not knowing to take care of all open tickets when out on a service call, multiple people working on a problem in a linear fashion, etc.
  • Workflow support including maximum automation of redundant activities
  • Documented processes
  • Business automation that can be customized to match your documented processes
  • Automation that includes functionality that helps your managers ‘manage by exception’ instead of requiring them to be involved in normal process execution
  • Automatic client satisfaction surveys triggered by completion of key events
  • Client web access to their account information in your system so they participate in their service delivery management
  • Automatic system management of SLA attainment, including real time reports and automatic escalations
Measuring
  • You do not know the value of your opportunity pipeline
  • You do not know your client satisfaction or retention ratings
  • You do not know the trend in win/loss or new customer acquisition rate
  • Pipeline management reports that let you actively manage all activities through the entire selling cycle
  • Pipeline reports that enable you to anticipate new business so you can get prepared to deliver the services or projects that were sold
  • Sales Against Forecast reports that allow you to know exactly how sales is performing
  • Utilization, Profitability, SLA Tracking, Project, Scheduling and Resources reports that show you current and historical performance of key activities


ConnectWise PSA Helps You Solve Scaling and Growth Problems
ConnectWise PSA will dramatically increase your ability to manage your business, and that will translate into your ability to grow smoothly and easily. Some of the major functionality that helps you accomplish this includes:

  • Company-wide reports that show you performance on key activities across all of your major processes.
  • Real-time views into main processes from opportunities, to service, to projects, to invoicing, at employee, group or company level.
  • Approvals and workflows that can be configured to match the way work is done at your company, enabling your managers to see only what they need to see or what is an exception to expected performance.
  • Profitability and gross margin measures by client, product, service, project, employee, group or company levels, and which also allow you to quickly drill down into problem areas.
  • Automatic client communications at key points in service or projects, to keep your clients informed.
  • Client web access to their account branded with your logo and that allows differing levels of access and activity.
  • Automatic surveys that continually monitor client satisfaction, to drive up retention and get an early warning on performance issues.
  • Total workflow support and process automation for all key IT Solution company activities, which will assure consistent performance and faster new employee learning curves.
  • Dashboards and customized entry screens for each employee, to increase efficiency and keep them informed of current, upcoming and outstanding tasks.

This list is not exhaustive, but it is representative to give you a sense that ConnectWise PSA truly can help you more effectively achieve your growth goal. Our solution moves you to a single platform with 30 modules delivering the knowing, doing and measuring functionality for all your IT Solutions company processes.

ConnectWise PSA: The Total Business Automation Solution for IT Solutions Companies
ConnectWise PSA is a complete suite of modules that automate and integrate every process in your IT business: Find & Win Opportunities; Capture, Plan & Schedule Won Deals; Manage Projects & Services; Track, Approve & Invoice; Analyze & Report; Integrate to Internal & External Applications. ConnectWise PSA is offered both as premise based or hosted (subscription based) solution.

Learn more. See all ConnectWise PSA Product Module Features.

The sole purpose of ConnectWise PSA is to give you transparency into and control over your business, a faster and higher cash flow, more revenues, greater profits and higher levels of client satisfaction.

See How ConnectWise PSA Helps You Solve Other Management Problems.
See How ConnectWise PSA Helps You Solve Your Workflow Problems.