3 steps to unlocking the MSP growth code

To achieve and sustain growth, many MSPs believe adding more customers means adding more staff, but more staff requires more customers — quite the chicken-or-egg conundrum.

By reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) for their most common services, MSPs can unlock growth potential and expand their total addressable market (TAM) without the need for additional headcount. Here are 3 steps to get you started:

Step 1: Service selection

Take a look at the services your clients need most. Those most-wanted options will have the biggest impact on your business growth. For example, every business needs a business continuity plan. This includes backup and disaster recovery (BDR), basic outer and inner-perimeter security services, and a remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform so work can be done remotely. Review the table below to see how a highly sought-after option like BDR can be segmented:

Fig 1. BDR in relation to TCO and TAM

Interestingly, according to DC-based research firm Clutch, a staggering 58% of SMBs are still not prepared for data loss, let alone downtime events. With the cyber-criminal market making no secret about shifting their focus to SMBs, BDR has become more important and valuable, making this a great place to start for growth.

Additionally, by making BDR part of your baseline package, you’ll simplify recovery by removing a large part of the discovery process involved in downtime and data loss. This protects you from redundant man-hours and potential losses, as well as ensuring your customers will have a clear path back to operations in any event.

Step 2: Use PSA/RMM integration to lower TCO

Having your services integrate with your PSA and/or RMM is critical to lowering your TCO. The goal should be to have the common tasks done through your PSA—provisioning, ticketing, reporting, and monitoring.

When it comes to lowering your TCO for growth, it’s not enough to simply have tickets created in a general queue—you’ll be losing precious time. A complete integration means ticketing and monitoring systems can be customized into workflows that make sense for you.

Step 3: Package your newly optimized baseline services

Now that we’ve identified a baseline service package for business continuity, and we’ve ensured it’s well integrated with your business operations, it is time to package them together to simplify the buying and selling process.

Start by contacting your customers with a new assessment that shows the gaps in services they have and begins them on the road to true business continuity.

In the pursuit of growth, we often ignore looking internally and identifying optimization as a strategy. It’s common for these activities to be neglected while we’re off running our business and taking care of customers, but they can lead to the easiest and most timely opportunities for growth.

• We’ve identified critical, common services that your customers need and that your team will need when something goes wrong, a win-win.
• We’ve selected these services based on the completeness of their integration with your PSA/RMM platform to minimize your TCO.
• We’ve begun an upsell campaign, so all customers are protected and using the same services.

You now have a model to review your business operations, including the services you provide, to optimize TCO and maximize TAM. The result - you will now see room to expand to more customers without needing to first expand your team.

Working in backup and DR since 2008, Derek Wood is the Vice President of Product Marketing for Infrascale, an industry-leading provider of cloud backup and disaster-recovery-as-a-service solutions.