“Our front-line technicians now have easy buttons to start remediating security concerns, while our second tier does further investigation and consultation with the customer,” said Hennesy.
“We have grown our business 10-15% with SM/Security revenue by charging just $3-$4 per user per month…and customers are loving it,” said Gay.
For 17 years, CHAPtech has been thriving by providing consulting and ISP solutions to their customers. Like many MSPs, they recently identified an opportunity to expand their services, and ultimately their bottom line.
Today, cybersecurity has become one of the most lucrative primary offerings for CHAPtech. With offices in Brisbane and Mackay, Crew Chief Neil Hennessy and Engineer Ross Gay
quickly turned their vision into reality: to revolutionize their services and unlock an entirely new revenue stream for CHAPtech.
Overcoming Security Challenges with M365 Licensing
CHAPtech consultants were already making M365 licensing a big part of their offering, and it became clear that there was huge opportunity to help customers get the most out of their M365 licensing, particularly in security.
But like all MSPs, it’s one thing to identify a business opportunity, it’s another thing to make it a reality.
The challenges are plentiful in security. How can customer-facing personnel to close the deal? How do they become experts in identifying security opportunities? What time frame can the provide a customer interested in increasing their security? How do these front-line agents generate customer-facing materials to show the opportunity and value they can deliver…especially when those materials should be customized for each customer?
And how can security improvements and incident response be delivered with the existing team, so that ultimately pricing is appealing to the customer and profitable for the business?
Building a Comprehensive Security Offering
When Hennessy joined the team a few years ago, he and Gay began the conversation about building their security offering, but quickly realized the complexity of security.
They began to outline all the different areas of security that they want to deliver, what customers want, and what the government wants: MFA, at-risk user management, data loss prevention, anti-phishing, incident response, and compliance standards…and what else?
It was difficult to establish a comprehensive framework for the range of services they’d need to build…and from there, would need to establish customer-facing materials to show their value.
CHAPtech began shopping for tools which might provide a comprehensive solution to enable their team to sell and deliver security services. Most of the tools they explored were not the right fit because they were either not customizable, or they were merely designed for huge enterprise customers.
“Fortunately we found ConnectWise SaaS SecurityTM and it allows us to make customizations to everything, manage scripts, generate customer-facing reports, and has everything we need in one spot,” said Gay.
Hennessy and Gay chose ConnectWise SaaS Security because, unlike other tools they evaluated, it is designed for MSPs like them who want to get started building their security practice. When logging in, the immediate visibility provided in the dashboards provides the framework to have the right focus against their entire customer base.
“The way we think about security today is completely different than how we approached this 12 months ago. And a big part of that is the Secure Score,” said Hennessy.
Empowering Sales with Security Insights
Being able to identify which customers are most in need to security improvements allows the team to approach customers with empirical data that increases the velocity of the sales conversation. The natural follow-up question from a customer is what action can be taken to address where each customer’s security really is. With this one single piece of automation, they empowered their front-line employees with an on-demand, customized, action-oriented game plan for each customer.
This not only closes the customer on investing in security, but demonstrates the power, agility, and expertise at CHAPtech’s fingertips. Returning to their M365 license-oriented model, CHAPtech further uses this visibility to give their customers security-centric perspective with respect to M365 licensing.
It becomes clear to a customer how secure their tenant can become with standard M365 licensing, versus E5.
Another key aspect of ConnectWise SaaS Security that CHAPtech leveraged was the customizable nature of the product’s automation. Hennessy invested some time to super-charge his team to enable them to deliver unique and advanced CHAPtech solutions.
“Our front-line technicians now have easy buttons to start remediating security concerns, while our second tier does further investigation and consultation with the customer,” said Hennesy.
CHAPtech's Rapid Transformation in Cloud Security
In under 18 months, CHAPtech went from having a minimal cloud security practice to having a presentable, customized, and profitable security solution. By enabling their front line to have security-oriented M365 licensing conversations was so effective that CHAPtech established 2 onboarding models based on M365 licenses.
They now have tangible, customized information they can put in front of customers at an early stage to bring security to life for the customer. When they get a new customer, their immediate step is to get them into the ConnectWise SaaS Security portal so they can begin to assess where they currently are with respect to CHAPtech’s baselines, and where the customer can go.
Using out-of-the-box automation from ConnectWise SaaS Security, along with custom workflows they’ve added to their account, their second tier of engineers are delivering high-caliber security solutions. And as they gain more customers, they are delivering value without needing to add the proportional team members to support the demand.
Within months, CHAPtech was able to super charge both of their teams by using visibility and tools from ConnectWise SaaS Security. They established 2 security offering tiers, which are backed up by their M365 licensing experience as well as the automation at their fingertips. And in doing so, security has become one of their major revenue streams.
“We have grown our business 10-15% with SM/Security revenue by charging just $3-$4 per user per month…and customers are loving it,” said Gay.
