I’ve seen it time and time again over the last few years: a hungry entrepreneur likes what he hears about the managed services business and decides to give it a shot. He invests in some tools, posts some flat fee pricing up on his website, and waits for the money to roll in.
But the money doesn’t roll in.
Maybe this managed services stuff doesn’t work.
The first customer he gets in front of for a sales meeting says he wants an hourly contract, and the entrepreneur decides to sell him an hourly contract.
This managed services stuff must not work.
Well, one thing I know for sure is that it doesn’t work if you don’t commit to it. It has to come from the top of the organization, and it has to be pursued with an unwavering sense of certainty that this model is better for you and for your customers. Otherwise, everyone in the company will default back to what’s easy and what habitual, which isn’t necessarily what’s best!
The first rule of success in the MSP business is to commit to the managed services model. Cut yourself off from any other options by not offering any other options for a while if that’s what it takes!
Take Everon for example. We’ve had a few rules since the beginning of our company:
- We only work with companies that pay us a recurring monthly fee.
- We only work with companies that sign up to have us manage their entire environment - not just servers or just desktops.
- We don’t let any of our employees go onsite to our customers locations.
I’m sure that 90% of people reading those three rules would say that Everon was destined to failure from the start. But to us, it showed our level of commitment to our model, and we had good reasons for each of them that our customers decided were reasonable.
Admittedly, our rules may be a bit extreme (we’ve actually relaxed #2 now that we’ve established our business), but if you want to succeed in the MSP business you need to establish some ground rules and stick to them.
Commit!
MRC
