New Year, New Topics

Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2NHRRDl
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3AyHCUd

The new year is coming and we are starting it off with new content! In the new year, we really want to focus our attention on MSPs because some people don’t even know what MSPs do and how they can help a business grow. We’re going to provide tons of MSP-related content — here’s a sneak peek into what 2022 will bring!

Who MSPs are and what they do

We will dive into who came up with the term Managed Service Provider and how the position has developed into what it is today. Managed Service Providers developed due to a need for businesses to see how critical technology is for their business and needing a better way to manage it all and provide stability. We will also discuss how MSPs can help businesses, no matter what type of products or services you offer. 

How to choose a good MSP

This ones for you, business owners! If you’ve been wondering how to actually go about finding the right MSP for your business, we will help you figure out the necessary steps to finding the perfect solution for technology management. 

How does an MSP find good clients

Not all business is good business. With that in mind, we’ll show you how to have the best experience with your clients. You definitely don’t want to work with difficult clients, so we’ll point out red flags to stay away from and how to attract the people and companies that you really want to work with. 

How to match up what is actually important to a business

Every business is a snowflake — completely unique from the next. As an MSP, you have to be aware of that fact and run your services accordingly. We’ll give you tips and tricks to gage what your client needs in order to best align with them and provide as much value as possible. 

These are just a few of our topics that we will be diving into in 2022 — get excited about everything that is to come! Our main goal is to be a resource for you, whether you’re an MSP or a business professional. The businesses that have ended up on top have learned to use technology in new and exciting ways so they are able to outperform their competitors and provide an amazing product — we’ll help businesses get there!

We’ve got something for everyone! If you’re a business professional, we’ll help you align with your MSP. If you’re an MSP, we’ll help you learn to align with your clients to get them to stick around and have the best possible relationship with them. We’re excited for 2022!

Holidays

Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2NHRRDl
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3AyHCUd

The holidays are here and that means that you might be figuring out who has to work over this time and who gets time off. If you’re an IT professional, you might be hoping to get a moment of peace and quiet in an empty office over the holidays. 

As IT professionals, we want to celebrate the holidays, but there are always projects that can only be done over a day off. Take Thanksgiving for instance. You can eat with your family on Thursday but then come in on Friday to do a major rollout on things like phones or swap out a couple of servers. This is sometimes the ideal situation for IT professionals. You can still celebrate with your loved ones, but you also get to really get stuff done without interruption or calls coming in. A quiet office is also a great break from those loved ones after a holiday spent together.

Say you came in on the Friday following Thanksgiving and got lots of stuff done. This allows you to monitor that progress over the weekend and fix any bugs or problems that might take place without interruption still. 

These holidays can become like custody battles. While many professionals are trying to get time off for the holidays, IT professionals are typically debating over who gets to work certain holidays or periods of time following the holidays in order to get done with everything they’re hoping to. 

This is called change management, which is super important in the IT world. The holidays are generally where we center this change management. Weekends work alright, but holidays are the best time to make big changes and implement new technologies.

Holidays can be a conflicting time as well. The personal side also comes into play. Family is very important, and spending time together is what the holidays are all about. Balancing this family time and also getting stuff done for work can be a complicated game to play. If you absolutely love your job, this becomes even more difficult. But, if you can learn to balance these two things, the holidays will be both a special time of togetherness and a time of solitude work. 

There is another aspect to holidays that most people don’t think about, and that is the fact that, worldwide, we all celebrate different holidays. Some holidays are universal while others are very specific to a region and it is important to keep these in mind when deciding when to work and when to take a break. You might also be able to let another take care of what you’re trying to accomplish if they are in another region and working when the United States is celebrating a holiday.

If you’re a business professional, it could be beneficial to have a conversation with your IT staff and figure out if they actually want the time off over the holiday season or if they would benefit from working one or two days in order to work in a quiet office, uninterrupted.

Drinks with IT -  August: For the Love of Coffee

Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2NHRRDl
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3uooSUX

Drinks with IT is our series of episodes where IT professionals guest star on the podcast, we crack open a cold one and let the conversation flow naturally. Our goal with these chats is to let you be a fly on the wall during our conversations so you can get an idea of the types of things IT professionals talk and care about. 

Here are some things we talked about!

• Types of Coffee ⇨ Whether your go-to drink includes a pot of coffee, french press or a trip to Starbucks, most people drink some form of coffee to start their day. Adam has always loved plain, black coffee, but Skip introduced him to a whole new world of coffee possibilities. 
• Community ⇨ Having a coffee pot or machine creates community in your office or work space. It’s not just coffee, though! Having a stocked fridge with red bull, gatorade, tea or soda can be a great way to build up your office. 
• Show You Care ⇨ As an employer, you have the amazing opportunity to treat your employees with the utmost care by doing small, simple things to make their days better. This might include keeping a fridge stocked with their favorite drinks or getting a good coffee pot. Bring in donuts every so often and create a space where people feel excited to come to work and do their job.
• Litmus Test ⇨ Try this exercise at your next job interview to see if the work environment is healthy and if the employer or company takes care of its employees. Just ask for a cup of coffee and see what the response is. If you are handed a bitter cup of cheap coffee, it might not be the best place to work. If you are handed a hot cup of creamy coffee, maybe the employer has put a little extra money into taking care of the employees in the building. 

We loved chatting about these topics and more! Listen to this week’s episode of Humanize IT to get the full conversation. 

Why Growing an MSP is so hard?

The Managed Service Provider business model is a complex one and comes loaded with all sorts of challenges. One of the biggest issues is being able to drive predictable growth for the company and to build an operational maturity that can manage that growth at the same time. You’re beset from both sides: MSPs will suffer from their growth being slow and all effort will go into desperate tactical marketing and sales efforts. They’ll also struggle if growth is too fast and all efforts are spent on a tactical fix of their service delivery. 

Progressive MSPs have deserved a strategic answer to move from the reactive firefighting mode to a proactive business building model. Let’s review how to solve this problem once and for all.

STRUCTURE, MANAGE AND AUTOMATE YOUR ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND VCIO PROCESESS

Flow

A fellow Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi recognized and named the psychological concept of flow, a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity. He wrote an amazing book on the subject called “Flow: The Psychology of Happiness”. His studies revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is 'flow' - a state of concentration so focused that it amounts to complete absorption in an activity and results in the achievement of a perfect state of happiness. Flow has become the classic work on happiness and a major contribution to contemporary psychology.

The foundational idea is that if you personally face a challenge too big for your skills you feel anxiety as you are overwhelmed by the task in your hands. However, if your skills are developing and you are not facing challenges you feel boredom and lack of motivation. What he pointed out was that the challenge and skills have to be in balance to be able to be happy and grow as an individual.

We’re sure you can see how this idea can translate to growing an MSP…

Your MSP’s Flow state

If you make the analogy apply to growing your managed services you can envision a strategy. 

MSP’s Flow state is needed to grow your MSP in a sustainable way. Imagine how it would feel to:

• grow your business by differentiation and win new businesses in a predictable way
• grow by developing, releasing and adopting new services such as cyber security, Cloud or IT Consultation
• grow a happy, motivated and developing team and provide them efficient processes and automation to deliver amazing services
• grow your existing client base by staying relevant, making their businesses more competitive with technology

Flow State

Your MSP’s Flow state is when Operational Maturity Development is balanced with Growth. This is the state where your growth is sustainable, people are motivated, issues are minor, it’s fun to go to work and an exciting journey to run the company. The owner can make enough money to set aside profit for personal reasons but invest back to the company as well. There is a satisfying sense of balance between working “in” the company and working “on” the company.

Cash-Flow Issues State

On the horizontal axis, you see your MSP skills as Operation Maturity which means more professional people, organization, leadership, processes, and automation. This usually leads to higher expenses, salaries, and overall cost increases. If sales aren’t sustainable to match, growth leads to cash-flow issues as expenses overtake revenues.

Service Delivery Issues State

On the vertical axis, you see the growth challenges your MSP is facing which means releasing new services, selling more projects or landing more new clients. This usually leads to service delivery issues such as new client onboarding issues, piling up projects or dropping the ball on day-to-day operations.

Apathy State

This is the state when the MSP is too small to be able to work enough IN the business to generate quality delivery and too small to be able to work enough ON the business to be able to overcome issues and grow. This is not where an MSP should start, but it’s where MANY MSPs find themselves after a successful start, by servicing too many not ideal clients, generating too many services, growing without any structure and entering unprofitable agreements This becomes a constant battle to make ends meet, and a struggle to escape the vicious cycle. This is not what bankrupts and MSP, but is where they get stuck for a long period of time without realizing it. 

Reactive vs. Proactive Business Building

The reason for being in any of the yellow - not ideal states is the lack of balance between Customer Development (Win New Businesses and Expand Existing Client Base) and Internal Development (Operation Development and Service Development). 

The operational pains (like service delivery issues) force the leadership to focus on fixing problems and pay less attention to winning new businesses or expanding the current client base. They hire new people and buy new tools to let people work on internal projects (which reduces the billable hours overall) which leads to cash-flow issues.

The cash-flow issues force the leadership to shift focus and start generating demand, go after existing clients, do QBRs and close more projects. As the pressure is high they likely close deals with less ideal clients or promise services the team cannot deliver in a sustainable way. They close more projects with clients who need more development, consuming disproportionate resources and so on. The operational pains start to arise again.

This vicious cycle pushes the company from one yellow state to another without staying in the middle for any valuable period of time.

On the contrary, proactive business building is when the organization stays in the “flow state” most of the time. They might take on a new client who is not ideal, they release a new service half baked or simply not paying attention to high-value clients for a while. These are natural imbalances but none of them alone pushes the organization out of balance to force the leadership to shift gears rapidly. Internal Development and the Customer Development is balanced which results in less turmoil, issues, problems and needed damage control.

This might lead to an obvious question: how to actually grow in a proactive way? What is the solution for that? What are the blueprints? Can I follow a 10 step formula?

The bad news: there is no solution…. you have to figure it out by yourself...

The good news: there is no solution… your competition has to figure it out themselves too.

The bottom line… if you excel in this, you can leave your competition behind and wondering how you do it!

Sneak Peek - The Model of Proactive Business Building

I do not want to leave you hanging without giving you a chance to start solving the problem. This is the first article of many we produced on Proactive Business Building. Let’s take a sneak peek of the model we are going to introduce to give you a competitive edge over your competition. The model is not going to solve your problems but will give you a reliable process for you to see negative trends, causes and potential fixes to get this done quickly.

Your growth potential depends on the four different elements we have covered before:

Internal Development:

• New Service Development
• Operation Development

Customer Development:

• Win New Businesses
• Expand Existing Client Base

As you see we can put those elements into an easy thinking framework and call it Growth Potential. This helps you to wrap your head around the concept of Development-type activities for new services and new clients and Operation-type activities for Operation Maturity and Client Engagement.

It might be obvious that these quadrants are highly interdependent. You cannot be great in one without being great with the other three.

There are key activities you can execute better to unlock your growth potential. Here are the 20% activities which will lead you to the 80% result.

New Service Development

1. Service Development Process
2. Service Development Roadmap
3. Services Productization
4. Service Catalogue
5. Service Marketing

Win New Businesses

1. Sales Readiness
2. Differentiated Message
3. Predictable Demand Generation
4. Consultative Sales Process
5. Sales Operation

Operation Development

1. Internal Development Processes
2. Service Delivery
3. Project Delivery
4. Stack Standardization
5. Process Automation

Expand Existing Client Base

1. Account Management Services (Tactical)
2. vCIO Services (Strategic)
3. Client Segmentation and Playbooks
4. Client Engagement Operation
5. Client Engagement Activities

To unlock the key activities we have been building an assessment and action plan tool to be able to quickly assess your growth potential. The result is a score over the 4 building blocks to review the health of your growth over the various categories.

The assessment gives you an idea where your company stands and what actions need to be taken to get back to a “Flow State”

Stay tuned as these items are going to be published over further blog posts and downloadable PDFs!

Debate on All In vs. Modular MSP pricing

The Managed Services business was created from the traditional suite of desktop management, backup, network and server support. Most MSPs now are offering various services outside the traditional managed infrastructure scope: application management, additional cyber security or virtual CIO services. This is the evolution of managed services, and the right way, however many MSPs have just reactively added some of these services to stay relevant to their customers and protect the core MSP services. They might call themselves "your IT department." Let's check out why it’s a problem and what to do about it.

The problems

Here’s a quick overview of the pitfall of adding more to our managed services delivery without proportional monetization.

• Application Management, IT Security, and vCIO services don’t fall into the core MSP value proposition. Mixing them into the Managed Infrastructure Services creates confusion. The current IT infrastructure expertise was not always so convertible to process, business, or security expertise. Clients may have trouble believing you’re qualified for the others.
• These additional services create confusion in your messaging as well. What makes you better than your competition if you can’t clearly differentiate ourselves? If you just mesh these services into the MSP package, they and the value perceived get lost as "features of the MSP program" rather than stand-alone products.
• As you add services, your MSP offering becomes more expensive. Your competition can still claim the same offering, though it isn’t, and at a lower price point. Clients will see no differentiation and not understand what makes you more expensive.
• If you stack all these services together, you lose flexibility. Clients may not need some of what they’re paying for, so you’ll lose the ability to deliver packages suited to the primary need/lower maturity/small client segment.

Differentiate yourself from your competition and become sales ready in 30 days

This all means if you keep doing the one-size-fits-all "we are your IT department" package, you’ll be lowering your shield to where the competition can hurt you and also dulling your sword in terms of new client acquisition.

What to do

Let's quickly cover some strategies you can apply to make this trend your friend and not your enemy.

• List out the value propositions you’re offering. Managed Infrastructure, Managed Applications, Managed NIST Cyber Security or vCIO. You can add to the list if you need, just make sure you define each as a value category that makes sense to the end client.

• List out all the services you do for your clients and try to place them into the categories. What you’ll see is your complex offering start to make more sense, with an internal consistency that’s both easier to describe and to get the client invested.

• Treat your listed services as your modular (e.g. LEGO) building blocks. Now you can start building up different service bundles based on those blocks. If you focus on the differentiation between Application Management, IT security or vCIO, you will see how you can actually have service bundles as stand-alone products rather than just added features.

Because all your services are going to be in bundles your tech people will have no difficulty knowing what each client has. Also because most of the categories are not related to their infrastructure job, you aren’t creating more complexity on the execution side.

• If you’ve crafted some bundles, you may consider create a basic and a premium offering for each product line. You can end up, for example, with four product lines, two versions each. A basic package will be good for entry level stuff like a small advisory as a vCIO and some starting IT security in the packages.
  
  

• Now you can deliver a proper service offering for each client and prospect based on their needs. For example, an accounting firm will have Premium IT Security, Managed Service and Basic vCIO and Application management, whereas an engineering firm will need Premium App management, vCIO, MSP and a basic security package.
  
  

Benefits and tradeoffs

Let's see some pros and cons for this strategy

Benefits:

1. Now you’re able to give your clients a more tailored offering, and they’ll see that it suits them best, because you could give them a choice.
2. Now you can maximize the monetization and profit for each package, because you don’t have to deal with competitive pricing.
3. Now you can keep up-selling as their maturity grows, and eventually offer them all premium offerings in years to come.
4. Now you can differentiate yourself and get into the battle where the prospect has a strong MSP but the IT Security, App management or vCIO is weak.
5. Now you can communicate online and better convert on your website, as three value propositions are not commodities (only the infrastructure component is).

Tradeoffs:

1. You have to productize the services and define each clearly (we’ve already defined 100+ services for you in high level of detail)
2. You have to keep clients in their swimming lanes with proper account management and internal service management (quarterly business review with discussion is enough in most cases)
3. You need a discipline to sell what you deliver and deliver what you sell. With production it’s not a problem, but still a new item.
   
   

Just for fun...remember… in 2008 it was only one iPhone available…. How about today? Why do you think Apple has more options in colour, size and storage today?

Conclusion

Consider the benefits and tradeoffs of moving to a different pricing model. Your managed service will be evolving in a more rapid pace as client needs evolve. It’s up to you to create a model which will manage these changes reliably. If not, you’ll have a very stiff and rigid model giving away a tremendous amount of value and sacrificing opportunity and service all at once.

Accelerate Your Growth with the new features just released

I am happy to introduce the sets of software features, updated templates, expert guide content and super specific programs to accelerate your growth! If your Account Management is not producing project revenues, your vCIO is not getting paid for advice, your Sales people are not getting leads or your cyber security services are not being sold then this release is for you! This is what we are going to cover:

1. New Software Features for Growth
2. Expert Guides for Growth
3. Role Specific Programs for Growth
4. Quarterly Sprints for Growth

1. New software features for Growth

One competitive advantage can be to build your MSP faster, design and communicate services better, create better client experience and become a high-value business partner.

Integrating these functions into one platform will generate momentum and even solving one bottleneck at a time keeps that momentum building. You don’t need to master everything all at once - just one at a time - then ride the momentum to reap the results as you move on to the next bottleneck.

New Features to Help Inspire High-Value Client Conversations

During the 2019 Q4 release we were focused on making you a master communicator as an Account Manager, vCIO, Technical Account Manager, Owner, Salesperson or even as a virtual Chief Information Officer.

Click on the circles!

Some of the major focus areas:

Sections: Organize your reports better into sections, open them for clients and focus on the content you are about to deliver or their decisions you want to support.

Questionnaire: Get involvement by conducting questionnaires up front. Use the results for an audit, checklist or a general progress report. More involvement leads to more commitment.

Calculators: Turning vague ideas into specific numbers, percentages or dollar amounts will facilitate communication. Use calculators with clients together for clarity and collect evidence to support their decisions.

Snapshot: Taking occasional snapshots will build a story about the problems they had, the solutions you provided and the growth they achieved with your help.

Integrations: Use more tools from your stack like BrightGauge, Office365 or SmileBack to pull out detailed data whenever you want to underline your message or show evidence.

Audience: Communicate to the right audience by selecting client side roles such as CEO, CFO, Office Manager or IT Coordinator. Log the meeting based on their seniority and collect Client Engagement Scores.

Infographics: Get your ideas across with modern visuals, interactive drawings, timelines, processes or charts. Customize your own graphics or embed auto updating partner infographics for changing content.

Scorecards: Simplify things with quick ratings. Gather user feedback, executive opinion or even the internal team's perception of scorecards. Send surveys or complete within the report and showcase scorecards.

New Features Help You Focus and Boost Productivity

The other big focus is on your execution efficiency with the 2019 Q4 release. There’s dashboards show aggregated information, a renewed Connectwise integration and many small workflow related UI enhancements to do more with less.

Click on the circles!

Standard Adoption Score Dashboard: Have a quick glance at the current rate of the adoption of your technology stack. You can set different scores for different segments and measure with attention to your diverse clientiele.

Growth Score Dashboard: Identify the amount of revenue in your deal pipeline and where revenues are stuck. Find out why you can’t move from planning to approval or why projects aren’t closed and billed.

Client Engagement Dashboard: Keep tabs on your high-value clients and be confident they all have regular meetings and are engaged. Even a substantially cheaper offer won’t undermine your value and they’ll stay.

Master Roadmap Portfolio: Forecast workload, budget and analyze projects together to be able to push certain initiatives further or close them faster to meet your resource allocation needs.

New Connectwise integration: Generate Connectwise opportunities and projects from the platform and keep those opportunities and projects synced with your PSA and your roadmap. This is a true two-way integration to sync account management with the service team.

Task Library: Simplify operations and communications by predefining tasks needed to meet the technology best practices. Connect library items to your scores and auto-generate tickets in Connectwise.

Multiple Seniorities: Assign different client-side roles to your contacts to make sure you have all types of conversations you need with the strategic, tactical and technical business roles. 

Expanded New Templates: Updated templates for the Client Engagement Excellence Program are ready for you. A brand new Quarterly Business Review with visuals, dashboards and partner content will help you get inspired and build the report that will support your goals.

2. Expert Guides for Growth

Choose a role you want to explore further and watch the short video for inspiration. Expert guides will walk you through how to grow your business with that role. 

How to grow with Account Management

Sell High-Value, standard projects with a proactive process - by Myles Olson

How to grow with vCIO

Drive Strategic Conversations and take on the execution by Adam Walter

How to grow with Technical Account Management

Develop Technology Standards and get all your clients to adopt - by Skip Ziegler

How to grow with Sales

Generate qualified leads and differentiate with client experience - by Mark Woldman

How to grow with cyber security

Make cyber security make sense to clients and offer packages they can buy - by Caleb Christopher

How to grow with Focus on Execution

Create structures for AM/vCIO, keep the team in focus and ensure accountability - by Elissa Kulczycki

3. Role Specific Programs for Growth

We are introducing role specific SMART goals for you to accelerate your growth with one role at a time.

• Account Managers: Generate $100.000 project revenues in 10 strategy driven QBRs
• How to grow with vCIO:  Upgrade 3 clients to a paid stand alone vCIO package with $3.000 MRR 
• Technical Account Management: Approve a Technology Roadmap with all key clients to adopt your Technology Standards
• Sales: Get in front of 5 high-value prospects and close 2 deals with $5.000 MRR
• Cyber security: Upgrade 10 clients to a paid stand alone cyber security package with $25/user/month
• Managers: Structure your Account Management and vCIO Operation with Client Engagement Score
  

4. Process for a Sustainable Growth

Growing your business can be done with quick high-intensity bursts. These results unsustainable growth with short peaks of results. We want to make sure you have a long term vision, break those to quarter long rocks you can deliver. Those rocks are focusing on one area, fix the bottleneck and keep it sustainable. Then you move your attention to the next goal but build on top of the previous efforts.

1. Platform Orientation Meeting - if you have no membership yet, let's start exploring your goals and discover how the platform might serve your growth
2. Growth Readiness Assessment - assess your readiness of growth and identify the bottlenecks holding you back preventing your breakthrough
3. Smart Growth Action Plan - build a SMART goal and plan your next steps to achieve those goals with an action plan
4. Execute your Rock - do it by yourself, pick an expert guide's education or engage with a 1-many or 1-1 program to make things change
5. Repeat - go back to the drawing board, choose your next goal and get started on the next quarter.... 

Grow your enterprise one quarter at a time

Hope you are excited to get your MSP to the next level and start building your SMART goals and action plans!

Productized IT Strategy Guidance to clients and prospects

We had a great debate in our Banff Workshop about timing one’s IT Strategy correctly when meeting with new prospects. Some people were adamant the IT Strategy meeting be a requirement to even sending a proposal, while others were more inclined to implementing an IT strategy creation process after the onboarding, after we fix all the client’s technical issues. This is often the case in a workshop, when everybody was right but in conflicting ways. Let's see how to best approach this question.

Let's put this question to a higher level first. How you are going to engage your clients and lay down a plan for them to raise their maturity over time to create a sticky relationship and predictable customer success? This is the ultimate question. If you can answer this question then you have a foundation for the type of strategic guidance to give.

Generate client engagement

with five Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) in 30 days

Usually strategic guidance services are upfront projects to help you differentiate yourself, get to know the client, create momentum and foster engagement, so it is critical to manage it well. If it’s productized then most client expectations will be set right upfront, or well managed over an annual meeting.

First of all IT Strategy Planning is not a commodity, so let's first define what we mean. IT Strategy is a written document with a specific scope and depth. IT Strategy can be notes on a napkin with goals and major initiatives or dozens of pages supported by hours of research and meetings.

Another complication: your prospects/clients have varying maturity levels in terms of management and technology. A napkin plan doesn’t give so much value to a high maturity client and a 100 page IT strategy does not make sense to a twenty-person old-school local travel agency.

The right answer, of course, is nuanced: create different productized IT Strategy Guidance type services for managing these different situations.

We defined three different productized services to be able to sell to the typical small and medium enterprises. These are scalable - all have the same basics, and are more modular than LEGO bricks. If they’ve outgrown the first they can upgrade to the second just adding more bricks.

1. IT Discovery Service

2-4 hours of commitment gets the deliverable of a standard report with a standard template-based action plan focusing on their IT infrastructure. This is ideal for a low maturity prospect so we don’t take up too much time as well as out of the budget. We can still differentiate ourselves with professional results without overwhelming them with details and terms they don’t understand.

The outcome is typically a report generated by a questionnaire and some additional analysis by you. The report is more of a guidance for the conversation and helping make decisions faster.

That should be part of the Account Management process we include in our services and part of the sales process free advice.

Many of our clients use this approach for making account management more of a value-add rather than a "salesy" item, and to set a stage with any type of prospect.

2. IT Development Roadmap Service

4-8 hours of commitment and the deliverable is a customized roadmap focusing mainly on the infrastructure components and major initiatives listed. We add a bit more meat to the outcome with a structured plan outlining the initiatives and time frames. This takes more research, effort and consultation, but the basics are the same.

The outcome is typically a spreadsheet called IT Development Roadmap, with the plan items elaborating more on the report.

That can be a part of a vCIO Light / Client Advisory service and charged separately. to our existing clients every year ($1000 - $2000) as a project. The reason for this is if they have no room in the budget for that we can create this for free, but since they’ll have no money for the projects included with the plan anyway, this is a great qualification. If we have a low maturity client this can be their guide for the next steps after onboarding. It’s a good idea to charge for that, but give them a huge discount as new customers.

A client of ours uses this approach to set an 18 month roadmap with a new client, to transit them from onboarding to regular QBRs and client management.

3. IT Strategy Planning Service

8-18 hours of commitment with more detailed research for the planning, like business discovery, more in-depth research and better specification of initiatives. More time is spent on scoping the initiatives and liaising with various stakeholders to produce a decent operational plan with activities and budgets.

The outcome is usually a Strategy Plan with the report and development roadmap adding the project definitions and more business-related items.

Now we’re working on their business; we listen to different people, scope projects together and help them set projects for a variety of initiatives. That’s usually part of a basic stand-alone vCIO Package we sell for $1000 - $2000 monthly. However as a project it should be sold around $2000 - $4000, depending on your approach. In many cases this is an awesome service to throw into the sales process when dealing with a high maturity prospect. Usually their infrastructure is not in need of fixing, so it’s hard to beat the incumbent without a major price discount. But defining yourself more as a consultant and someone who understands business can pay off.

A client of ours uses this approach to actually qualify the prospects. They don’t sell to a company who won’t pay $4500 for IT Strategy. They’re looking for a few high level, high maturity and high value clients - not a lot small ones.

Conclusion

If you have multiple types of projects upfront with Strategic Guidance you have more options to engage current clients and to close new ones.

Based on maturity you’re able to apply services in different scales. In engaging prospects this gives you the flexibility to break their buying cycle and apply your sales process, and close deals faster. For existing clients you can qualify them for more advice, and politely disabuse them of the notion that your advice is free.

Service Productization has a great value this is only one place of your service offering it can be applied.

Systematic service development process

One of the hot topics in the bootcamp was a typical MSP issue - managing client agreements. The problem gets verbalized in different ways: "I have many new services I would like to sell to existing clients" or "I have to re-onboard all of our customers because the agreement is very old" or "I want to increase our prices to reflect the improvements and additional tools we introduced" or "I barely make any money and I need to renegotiate our prices". Sound familiar? We’d like to introduce a systematic approach to solve this problem for now and the future.

What is the real underlying problem

The original problem is nothing more complex than the ad-hoc and un-managed service development process period. As a service company you spend a whole lot of time developing your services. All internal processes are service development, all tool deployments are service development, all new vendors are service development...meaning everything you do that isn’t providing a service to a client is you developing your services. If you do that without any control mechanisms the result will be misalignment with clients.

We all know that service development doesn’t happen without reason. The technology is always changing, the market needs new services, old services become obsolete, clients come and go, and new opportunities arise. As a managed service provider, a plethora of moving parts to deal with can result in less profitability, under-utilized services and obsolete agreements. The usual solution is to spend more facetime with clients and explain, negotiate, present, and discuss with the owners or account management team why you need to re-align. Sometimes, however, we need to manipulate prices, introduce new services or otherwise change the set agreements.

Solving these symptoms requires identifying the root problem: make the service development, deployment and communication a conscious effort.

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Service Development and Deployment Process

Without going deep into details, let's go through the process quickly. It’s surprisingly simpler than we’ve found most people fear. This is because of the closely related industry with which we face this challenge: software companies. We don’t have to do much more than understand how they’re solving this problem, and apply the practices.

1. Roadmap: Software developers have an internal bible called The Roadmap. This document lists out all the changes they have to make in their tool - new features, updates, fixes, internal processes, and everything else. That roadmap is a central element of their efforts, and the majority of their team is guided by that document.
2. Agile development: the gist of being agile is not to execute long term plans, but get the most important items from the roadmap and ship a version of them early. That helps get to the endpoint step by step, while giving the customers tangible value along the way. It also helps focus the development effort with (typically) understaffed teams.
3. Beta: Sometimes developers will ask you to participate in beta programs, where you get access to improved features faster (and take on the risk of reliability), and they can test out the user experience and further develop the product, validate their ideas, fine tune processes and the optimize the user experience.
4. Release: As a software user, and even more so, a cloud application user, you know that applications are changing all the time...not minute by minute while you’re using them, but by release cycles. The development team develops new features, new modules, enhance the UI, etc, and you get it as a package in the new release.
5. Upgrade: Sometimes it turns out that the function you just started to use is going to be an add-on or in a higher-priced tier. You still can use the product in the beta period, but you might have a decision to make whether you want to upgrade to enjoy the new features.

To summarize:

• They have a conscious effort to develop their products and services
• There is a guiding document for everyone to be in focus
• There is a mechanism (releases) to deploy and communicate changes with customers
• There is a mechanism (beta) to engage users with the new experience
• There is a mechanism to redefine the offering, giving the customer the option to stay on the current plan or upgrade

So let's put these basic principles into play as an MSP

1. Roadmap: as an MSP you need to have a guiding document listing out all the changes you want to make with your services. Internal process fixes, new tools, new processes, new services - everything related to your services. As you plan your development activities the roadmap helps your team to stay flexible while keeping priorities clear.
2. Agile development: based on your roadmap you pick the most important developments, selecting what matters most, instead of scrambling to deal with everything on the board. Every week you can have a development meeting and focus your efforts on specific internal processes, your customer interfacing or implementing certain features of vendor applications. That gives your team focus and a sense of accomplishment as opposed to the futility of firefighting on internal projects.
3. Beta: you might pick specific clients to enjoy the benefits of new services. You can introduce vCIO, Technical Account Management, Application management or even security services to your clients as a beta program. The process helps you to get their consent of the experiment (and also lets them know development is progressing) and you can offer these new services or updated experiences for free for a while.
4. Release: the main thing to consider in release cycles is to minimize internal stress and enhance communication. You can batch many items together and send a quarterly email, letter or a complete webinar to let all clients know about changes being made, and how they affect them. If you provide Account Management, the Quarterly Business Review (QBRs) are perfectly suited to presenting innovations to customers.
5. Upgrade: let's assume you made four quarterly updates on your services during the year. You communicated well what’s beta, what’s sustainable fixes, upgrades (which will be part of their current plan) and what are going to be new service line items (extra charge). Typically once a year you can repackage your offering to include all new services to the current packages and also display the add-ons and features they can access if they upgrade. This method of repackaging means only those clients will enjoy the new features and benefits who upgrade. This will be their decision.

Benefits

• proactive process gives you control over your services to make sure clients are seeing the value of your developments and progress
• the roadmap can give you peace of mind, clarifying where to develop, and helping allocate the necessary resources to streamline development
• agile development gives the team clarity - a process for working on your company instead of for your company - crucial to your ability to scale
• the beta can help you develop services with clients without incurring the pitfalls of nascent services
• releases help you communicate changes very effectively without creating confusion
• upgrades help you restate your value proposition every year, set expectations and give your clients a sense of progress and choice

My 7 Ah-ha! moments on the first MSP 2.0 boot-camp

We just finished our first ever live 3 day Managed Service Productization boot-camp in Banff, Canada. With 25 participants we worked to crack the code in scaling up the managed services. Jam-packed with real work, the workshop groups created amazing content and generated ideas that have been sparkling. I wanted to capture some of the more intriguing ideas the MSPs came up with.

I’ll be elaborating on these topics in upcoming weeks, since I see each topic as worthy of more than a blog post, but here are the main ideas. These are my personal Ah-ha! moments.

1. The main confusion and misalignment is within the service catalogue

Traditionally, the ad-hoc organic development of services and service catalogues creates major confusion for clients and employees. This has limited the scalability of MSPs. It doesn’t define your services nor categorize services into service categories and service bundles. The problem is the failure of proper categorization, service definition and articulated value propositions leaving too much room for interpretation of services. Luckily, we’ve experienced the power of service wireframing exercises which can lead to a well defined service catalogue.

2. Make the vCIO role more tangible, to lead to greater sales

Selling stand-alone vCIO services is easier by starting specific productized projects. The vCIO can be an intimidating and abstract concept for some clients: while the vCIO activities are solving their problems, they have no grasp of the how those abstract deliverables like IT Strategy, Quarterly Reviews, Monthly Reports, Budgets, Project Scoping or Stakeholder Interviews are working. It’s easier to visualize canned, productized project services solving one specific problem in demonstrating the vCIO work. In advance of developing ongoing vCIO services, therefore, it’s much easier to develop one-time vCIO projects in a productized way.

3. Misaligned agreements lead to client and profitability issues

A systematic approach is needed to realign clients annually, as a response to many changes in tech and the environment. Either the client’s expectations change and they feel under- or over-served, or our profitability drains from additional work. Every year we need a version change on the service offering. Over the course of a year the service provider is developing, changing services as part of the development process. New services are available to all clients as "beta" functions through the year, and at the end of the year all beta services go to official services and clients make decisions whether they need the new services (they pay for) or stick with the old package. Everything beyond this gets relegated into the realm of too much communication and too many agreements in the air.

4. IT strategy upfront or spare the onboarding

One company demonstrated a great use-case, to charge $4,500 per client prospect as an IT Strategy development process. It served to qualify and differentiate the prospects, as well as to release unqualified prospects from the funnel quickly. This strategy helps acquire higher maturity clients.

Another company's strategy was to push low maturity prospects through a very systematic and specific onboarding process to get their maturity to a manageable level. The final step of the onboarding was an IT strategy creation which defines the next steps once the understanding is set.

The strategies are perfect capturing the value for the different maturity prospects.

5. Fix a leaking boat before building a new one

All the promises you make to a client, all the expectations you set, even unintentionally, are potential drains in your profitability. The problem with non-productized services is their vagueness. Unlike a coffee mug where you see the shape, size and quality these services are not tangible. So make services tangible! Fix the big hole first! Create a totally new service offering by making your current services so well-defined they won’t slow you down during your company’s development period.

6. The eroded value proposition of the fully managed IT services

A lot of MSPs set their Value Proposition as a mission statement. While it is inspiring, it doesn’t give specific direction. Breaking up the big Value Proposition into smaller value propositions helps distinguish service categories. Breaking down further defines the services. Everything stems from an MSP trying to make their clients more competitive with technology, and drilling down to specifics is what’s missing. Without it the message is too general, doesn’t engage the clients and doesn’t focus direction to the service provider.

7. Headspace + Focus + Facilitated Workshops make miracles

Seeing the team slow down and merge away from the day to day operations to a higher level focus and headspace was amazing. We went through over 20 exercises over the 3 days. The impressive small group and larger group interactivity was able to dig out major issues and opportunities and create actionable items from vague ideas. The collaboration was most notable from Australia, US, UK, Germany and Canada. I think I underestimated level of wisdom, experience and knowledge in the group. This also made me aware of the need for major initiatives like implementing stand-alone vCIO services or productizing a service offering for that type of environment to make an effective change. Some things can’t be learned in days of emails, meetings and other distractions.

• Virtual CIOs in United States
• Virtual CIOs in Australia
• Virtual CIOs in Canada
• Managed Services Platform Virtual CIO report
• Managed Services Platform Account Management report 

6 strategies to make MSP services more tangible

One of the most common and largest hurdles for MSPs is difficulty expressing our value proposition properly, and hence differentiating ourselves.

There are two fundamental aspects of our industry responsible. First is the abstract nature of the proposition. The problems we solve are less tangible, like “competitive edge” or “staying ahead of the curve” rather than “keeping the lights on”. The second is the more managerial and higher level services such as solution selection, and team alignment and integration rather than executable defined processes like device management and remote monitoring. 

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Without a doubt that which is more tangible and more clearly defined is easier to explain, sell and even deliver. We try to answer the question: how we can make our vague and complex services more tangible.

The process below will first identify the different types of services you have, then set up a structure to help manage this process. Then we’re going to demonstrate the practices to enhance different types of less tangible items into a more tangible format. You’ll see how you can actually transform the most difficult to monetize services and make your service portfolio more ready to explain, sell and even deliver.

Let’s go through this short process quickly and see what is going on…

We’ve created a mapping tool to help us visualize the suite of different services we have regarding their type and degree of clarity. The service can be any activity or process you do for your clients.

You can do this easily with your team. Get out your flipchart/white board and sticky notes. If you’re more tech savvy you can use the given PPTx template.

1. Determine the type of service: Management or Execution

On the vertical axis we see a grade of services, management type or execution type. 

Managerial type activities include making plans, having meetings, brainstorming new ideas, thinking on the big picture, managing people, aligning your team, and educational initiatives. Professional Services, Account Management, Technical Account Management, and vCIO related activities are typically managerial activities. 

The execution part is where you actually implement something, fix things, solve particular IT problems, manage devices, deploy applications and so on. Level I, II, and III support, engineering and solution architect works are execution type positions.

2. Determine whether the service is more tangible or less tangible

On the Horizontal axis you see whether the service is more tangible (clear) or less tangible (less clear). 

More tangible services have more physical attributes. These may be attached to a device, an application, a specific deliverable (like an excel sheet, word document), are easy to define and explain. They also include services defined by events or processes such as regular meetings, calls, emails, feedbacks etc.

The less tangible services have no firm definitions, no real processes behind the task, instead consisting mostly of ideas, goals, and vague offerings: starting a project, brainstorming a business problem, evaluating processes and so on.

3. Find the most problematic services

As you can see you’ll often find that Management type services tend toward the less tangible region of the chart while Execution type services are usually more tangible by nature. This means as your clients are pushing you to be more “strategic” or more “business savvy”, what they’re asking is that you deal in services that are inevitably less tangible. 

Let’s apply this personally. I bet if you go through your service portfolio you’ll find that the services you call “problematic”, “less profitable”, and “annoying” are on the right hand side - less tangible. It’s no surprise, less tangible services are harder to manage.

Let’s choose the services you want to improve by making them more clear and explainable. Circle them 

Now we’re going to apply one or more of the Six Strategies and see which function to move them into the more tangible side.

We’ll use an example here to go through these items. The service that probably eats most of your time is setting up projects. Taking some issues your client has mentioned from discussion to proposal is a long process that we are likely to do without being able to monetize. We’re going to take this service which we give them for free and construct a solid, tangible service with the following strategies.

Strategy 1: Apply a specific deliverable to the service

This first strategy is all about having outcomes with more tangible deliverables. It can be any type of document that demonstrates to both the client and our team member what is expected to be the end result of the service.

Example: Our service is quite intangible at first: “solve a problem”, “manage an issue”, “create a business case”. We can easily turn this into a very specific item with a template. We use the “10 point exercise” for these type of cases. It’s a quick exercise and at the end we’ll have the issues and problems spelled out and prioritized by the team, plus a list of possible next steps as action items. Showing the client such a completed template will bring substance and help them understand the value. Instead of just saying “have a meeting” we are going to deliver tangible evidence of our managerial activities so real value gets recognized.

Strategy 2: Apply specific meetings, workshops to the service

The second strategy creates clarity by applying some sort of specific “workshop” or “meeting” to the service. This is an active strategy of making a vague pursuit more tangible.

Example: We have a slick template for the “10 point exercise” and it gets completed during a “10 point exercise workshop”. We start with vague issues, problems and a misaligned team. We gather them into a workshop and ask everyone their main concerns, issues, problems and perceived opportunities about a given topic. We write it all down, then ask them to distribute 10 points across the answers on the chart. After summarizing points we see together clearly which major items are aligned or misaligned and we can expand on them. Have another round and convert those major items to specific action items. It all takes 30-45 minutes in a workshop that turns a vague input into a specific output.

Strategy 3: Apply a specific process to the service

This third strategy is to attach a very specific process to the service. We can have deliverables and we can have events, but we should also have a set of very specific steps we go through. Standardization like this creates clarity.

Example: We can put on paper the specific process of a 10 point exercise, and present the client with the plan for a workshop, with a briefing in advance. Explain what they can expect as a follow-up, like a template message with the appropriate action items. Even better we can chain together these exercises to encourage a wider vision of these esoteric processes as well. For example the first exercise will be the definition of the problem that leads to different options. We can then manage those options in other 10 point exercises which can lead to continuous solution selection process.

Strategy 4: Apply a cadence to the service

The fourth strategy is going to make the individual service item to a recurring service item. If we give a cadence to a service - such as annual, quarterly, monthly or even weekly - it will tremendously increase clarity of purpose.

Example: Clearly our clients need problems solved and business issue resolution all the time. Every company is working on their bottlenecks, so even when we do ‘fix’ something, something else will come along to keep us busy. Nobody wants to sit back and say “good enough.” In this case we can turn this “Business Issue Management” 10 point exercise of ours into a recurring service. Let’s say we have three 10 point exercises every Quarter to manage different issues with our client’s IT. We use the Quarterly Business Reviews to identify the problems we need to manage and to review the results of exercises. 

Strategy 5: Put the service into a clear context

The fifth strategy is to address the problem/solution couplings within a bigger context. This is communicating the function of a given service in context of your overall service portfolio. Ask questions and lead discussions that exhibit your other services working together with this one. If you show the services next to each other you’ll demonstrate their value when playing together nicely. It’ll be seen as a higher level service built up from smaller components designed to fit together.

Example: We have our “Business Issue Management” service now quite nicely defined with templates, workshops, process and cadence. However we do many other things as well and they need many other services too. Let’s list those services in a questionnaire and put some structure around it all. Let’s say this service will be the part of the “Business Alignment Service Type” which falls into virtual CIO services. From that perspective it becomes clear that the virtual CIO has the job of identifying issues and problems of the business and addressing issue management and resolution. Again it gives the service a higher touch and puts it to a context with other activities all critical to a successful structure.

Strategy 6: Put the service into a framework or tool

The sixth strategy is to put the service into a bigger set of services. We touched on that in Strategy 5, with the catalog discovery perspective, and now we’re going to use it as a delivery perspective. If you use tools to group your services together they will communicate more fluidly and foster aligned synergies and notable efficiency.

Example: We have our “Business Issue Management” small service defined among many other services the vCIO can do. Implement the services to a tool that lets us interact with a client for another boost in clarity. For example, use a Customer Management - Project Management tool like Basecamp.com. We can put the 10 point exercises results into it, collaborate with the client and facilitate chat and discussions, and even use it during the Annual Planning. We’re creating a supportive environment where we and our clients are executing services together.

Next Steps:

Now go through your service portfolio and pick some to focus on making more tangible. Apply the strategies one by one and see which work best.

If you can see the process make sense but want to save some time, we’ve applied the six strategies for most of the IT management type services already. It makes Technical Account Management service pretty clear and made vCIO service very sellable and executable from a $1.500 - $5.000 Monthly Recurring Revenue range (with all related vCIO Projects excluded of course). 

There are more than 30 services with all six strategies applied with templates, processes, events, cadence, and a sales questionnaire in a customer facing delivery tool.

If you’re interested in these practices, let’s have a quick chat and learn how quickly you can implement them.

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